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The Atlantic

- The Conspiracy Theorist Advising Trump

- There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs

- What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About the Past

- To Be Happier, Stop Resisting Change

- Iran Wants to Talk

- Trump’s Tariffs Are Designed to Backfire

- How the Trump Administration Learned to Obscure the Truth in Court

- Why Trump Wants to Control Universities

- A New Force of Indian Country

- Quaker Parents Were Ahead of Their Time

- The Story of the Gilded Age Wasn’t Wealth. It Was Corruption.

- Trump’s Tariff Plan Is Going to Hurt

- Cory Booker, Endurance Athlete

- Elon Musk Lost His Big Bet

- RFK Jr. Is Out for Revenge

- The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs

- Trump’s Day of Reckoning

- A New Kart-Racing Appliance

- Introducing: The David Frum Show

- Wisconsin’s Message for Trump

- Search-and-Rescue Dogs at Work

- Trump’s Salvadoran Gulag

- Why You Should Work Like It’s the ’90s

- The New Singlehood Stigma

- No Tariff Exemptions for American Farmers

The Conspiracy Theorist Advising Trump

The chaos inside the White House national-security team persists.

by Tom Nichols

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

For a few months, the Donald Trump White House managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.

The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday. If you don’t spend a lot of time online, you probably don’t know who Loomer is, and that’s healthy. To say that she is a “conspiracy theorist” is not quite enough: She has referred to herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and has claimed that 9/11 was an “inside job”; she has charged that some school shootings were staged, accused Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis of “exaggerating” her struggle with breast cancer, and questioned whether the “deep state” might have used an atmospheric-research facility in Alaska to create a snowstorm over Des Moines. (Why? So that foul weather would suppress the turnout in the 2024 Iowa GOP caucuses and hurt Trump’s campaign.)

Loomer has even alienated her ostensible allies in the MAGA movement, to say nothing of the hostility she has engendered among various other Republicans. (Peter Schorsch, a former Republican operative who now runs the website Florida Politics, described her to The Washington Post as “what happens when you take a gadfly and inject it with that radioactive waste from Godzilla.”) Indeed, Trump’s own aides found Loomer so toxic that they tried to keep her away from the 2024 campaign, as my colleague Tim Alberta reported last year. A source close to the Trump campaign told Semafor last fall that Trump’s people were “‘100%’ concerned about her exacerbating Trump’s weaknesses,” but that attempts to put “guardrails” around her weren’t working. Trump clearly likes the 31-year-old provocateur, and in Trumpworld, there’s apparently very little anyone can do once the boss takes a shine to someone.

And so Loomer reportedly walked into the Oval Office yesterday with a list of people who should be removed from the National Security Council because of their disloyalty to Trump and the MAGA cause. (Asked for comment, Loomer declined to divulge “any details about my Oval Office meeting with President Trump.” She added, “I will continue working hard to support his agenda, and I will continue reiterating the importance of strong vetting, for the sake of protecting the President and our national security.”)

The next day, at least six staff members, including three senior officials, were fired. If Loomer had nothing to do with it, that’s a hell of a coincidence. (The NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes told The Atlantic that the NSC does not comment on personnel matters.)

Today, an unnamed U.S. official told Axios that Loomer went to the White House because she was furious that “neocons” had “slipped through” the vetting process for administration jobs. The result, according to the official, was a “bloodbath” that took down perhaps as many as 10 NSC staff members. Most reports named Brian Walsh, the senior director for intelligence, and Thomas Boodry, the senior director for legislative affairs; other reports claim that David Feith, a senior director overseeing technology and national security, and Maggie Dougherty, senior director for international organizations, are among those dismissed. Walsh formerly worked as a senior staff member for Marco Rubio on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Boodry was National Security Adviser Michael Waltz’s legislative director when Waltz was a House member, and Feith was a State Department appointee in the first Trump administration.

The firings at the NSC represent an ongoing struggle between the most extreme MAGA loyalists and what’s left of a Republican foreign-policy establishment. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, for example, has been in an online tussle with the Republican fringe—a group that makes Cotton seem almost centrist by comparison—over Alex Wong, another Trump NSC official, whom Loomer and others have, for various reasons, accused of disloyalty to Trump. Other conflicts, however, seem to center on a struggle between Waltz and the head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, Sergio Gor, who has reportedly been blocking people Waltz wants on his team because Gor and others doubt their commitment to the president’s foreign policy.

Such internal ideological and political food fights are common in Washington, but the national security adviser usually doesn’t have to stand by while his staff gets turfed on the say-so of an online troll. If these firings happened because Loomer wanted them, it’s difficult to imagine how Waltz stays in his job—or why he’d want to.

Waltz, of course, is already slogging through a mess of his own creation because of the controversy surrounding his use of the chat app Signal to have a highly sensitive national-security discussion about a strike on Houthi targets, to which he inadvertently invited a journalist—The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. (Waltz’s week wasn’t getting any better before Loomer showed up: New reports claim that the meeting about the Yemen strikes was only one of many conversations about important national-security operations that Waltz held over Signal.) Trump reportedly kept Waltz on the team purely to deny giving “a scalp” to the Democrats and what he perceives as their allies in the mainstream media.

Now Waltz’s authority as national security adviser is subject to a veto from … Laura Loomer? It’s one thing to dodge the barbs of the administration’s critics; that’s a normal part of life in the capital. It’s another entirely to have to stand there and take it when an unhinged conspiracy monger walks into the White House and then several accomplished Republican national-security staffers are fired.

The reason all of this is happening is that in his second term, Trump is free of any adult supervision. The days when a Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis or a Chief of Staff John Kelly would throw themselves in front of the door rather than let someone like Loomer anywhere near the Oval Office are long gone. Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants who are apparently so scared of being exiled from their liege’s presence that they can’t bring themselves to stop someone as far out on the fringe as Loomer from advising the president of the United States.

Meanwhile, a person close to the administration told my colleague Michael Scherer today that “Loomer has been asked to put together a list of people at State who are not MAGA loyalists.” Waltz might yet get fired, but whether he stays or goes, he doesn’t seem to be in charge of the NSC. Perhaps next we’ll see if Marco Rubio is actually running the State Department.

Related:

- Laura Loomer is where Republicans draw the line. (From September)

- The MAGA honeymoon is over. (From December)

Michael Scherer contributed reporting.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

- Trump’s tariffs are designed to backfire.

- Trump’s day of reckoning

- Why Quaker parents were ahead of their time

Today’s News

1. The president of the European Commission said that the bloc is “prepared to respond” with countermeasures to President Donald Trump’s tariffs but will attempt to negotiate with him first.

2. Hungary announced that it will pull out of the International Criminal Court. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces an ICC arrest warrant, landed in Budapest today for a visit.

3. At least seven people have died after intense flooding, tornados, and storms hit the central United States. More extreme weather is expected to continue affecting the area this week.

Dispatches

- Time-Travel Thursdays: RFK Jr.’s nostalgia for the past obscures a longer history of America’s struggle with weight-related chronic illness. The truth is, America was never healthy to begin with, Lila Shroff writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

- Cory Booker, endurance athlete

- How the Trump administration learned to obscure the truth in court

- Iran wants to talk.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

To Be Happier, Stop Resisting Change

By Arthur C. Brooks

In 1924, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel set out to learn about Zen Buddhism, which was starting to penetrate the West. He found a teaching position in Japan, where he hoped to locate someone who could instruct him in the philosophy. Rather than the sort of course he had in mind, he was informed that because he lacked proficiency in Japanese, he would be required instead to learn a skill—namely, kyūdō (the way of the bow)—and this would indirectly impart the Zen truths that he sought …

In short, Herrigel learned that the secret to archery—and the approach to life he was seeking—is to know when to stop resisting change and simply let it occur. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend half a decade studying archery in Japan to benefit from this central insight.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Bruce Davidson

Take a look. In the 1960s, Vine Deloria Jr. was a budding Native American activist. Philip J. Deloria writes about his father’s transformation—and the world he built at home.

Read. Derek Thompson interviews Richard White, the historian and author of The Republic for Which It Stands, about the real story behind the Gilded Age.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs

The policy is absurd. It’s also an extension of Trump’s chaotic personality.

by Derek Thompson

Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump celebrated America’s so-called Liberation Day by announcing a slew of tariffs on dozens of countries. His plan, if fully implemented, will return the United States to the highest tariff duty as a share of the economy since the late 1800s, before the invention of the automobile, aspirin, and the incandescent light bulb. Michael Cembalest, the widely read analyst at JP Morgan Wealth Management, wrote that the White House announcement “borders on twilight zone territory.”

The most fitting analysis for this moment, however, does not come from an economist or a financial researcher. It comes from the screenwriter William Goldman, who pithily captured his industry’s lack of foresight with one of the most famous aphorisms in Hollywood history: “Nobody knows anything.”

You’re not going to find a better three-word summary of the Trump tariffs than that. If there’s anything worse than an economic plan that attempts to revive the 19th-century protectionist U.S. economy, it’s the fact that the people responsible for explaining and implementing it don’t seem to have any idea what they’re doing, or why.

Rogé Karma: Trump’s tariffs are designed to backfire

On one side, you have the longtime Trump aide Peter Navarro, who has said that Trump’s tariffs will raise $6 trillion over the next decade, making it the largest tax increase in American history. On another, you have pro-Trump tech folks, such as Palmer Luckey, who have instead claimed that the goal is the opposite: a world of fully free trade, as countries remove their existing trade barriers in the face of the new penalties. On yet another track, there is Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, who has suggested that the tariff salvo is part of a master plan to rebalance America’s relationship with the global economy by reducing the value of the dollar and reviving manufacturing employment in the United States.

These three alleged goals—raising revenue, restoring free trade, and rejiggering the global economy—are incompatible with one another. The first and second explanations are mutually exclusive: The state can’t raise tax revenue in the long run with a levy that is designed to disappear. The second and third explanations are mutually exclusive too: You can’t reindustrialize by doubling down on the global-trade free-for-all that supposedly immiserated the Rust Belt in the first place. Either global free trade is an economic Valhalla worth fighting for, or it’s the cursed political order that we’re trying desperately to destroy.

As for Trump’s alleged devotion to bringing back manufacturing jobs, the administration has attacked the implementation of the CHIPS bill, which invested in the very same high-tech semiconductors that a strategic reindustrialization effort would seek to prioritize. There is no single coherent explanation for the tariffs, only competing hypotheses that violate one another’s internal logic because, when it comes to explaining this economic policy, nobody knows anything.

One might expect clarity from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But even he doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on. The “tariff gun will always be loaded and on the table, but rarely discharged,” he said last year. So much for that. Yesterday, a Bloomberg reporter asked Bessent if the Trump administration has plans to negotiate with America’s trading partners. “We’re just going to have to wait and see,” he said. Was the administration ready to negotiate with the European Union, China, or India? “We’ll see.” Asked why Canada and Mexico were missing from the president’s list of tariffs, he switched it up: “I’m not sure.” Nobody knows anything.

By the numbers, the tariffs are less an expression of economic theory and more a Dadaist art piece about the meaninglessness of expertise. The Trump administration slapped 10 percent tariffs on Heard Island and McDonalds Islands, which are uninhabited, and on the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose residents are mostly American and British military service members. One of the highest tariff rates, 50 percent, was imposed on the African nation of Lesotho, whose average citizen earns less than $5 a day. Why? Because the administration’s formula for supposedly “reciprocal” tariff rates apparently has nothing to do with tariffs. The Trump team seems to have calculated each penalty by dividing the U.S. trade deficit with a given country by how much the U.S. imports from it and then doing a rough adjustment. Because Lesotho’s citizens are too poor to afford most U.S. exports, while the U.S. imports $237 million in diamonds and other goods from the small landlocked nation, we have reserved close to our highest-possible tariff rate for one of the world’s poorest countries. The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence.

Read: The good news about Trump’s tariffs

If the tariffs violate their own internal logic and basic common sense, what are they? Most likely, they represent little more than the all-of-government metastasis of Trump’s personality, which sees grandiosity as a strategy to pull counterparties to the negotiating table and strike deals that benefit Trump’s ego or wallet. This personality style is clear, and it has been clearly stated, even if its application to geopolitics is confounding to observe. “My style of deal-making is pretty simple and straightforward,” Trump writes in The Art of the Deal. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”

One can see this playbook—threat, leverage, concession, repeat—playing out across all of society. It’s happening in trade. It’s happening in law. It’s happening in academia. In the first two months of his second term, Trump has already squeezed enormous concessions out of white-shoe law firms and major universities. Trump appears to care more about the process of gaining leverage over others—including other countries—than he does about any particular effective tariff rate. The endgame here is that there is no endgame, only the infinite game of power and leverage.

Trump’s defenders praise the president for using chaos to shake up broken systems. But they fail to see the downside of uncertainty. Is a textile company really supposed to open a U.S. factory when our trade policy seems likely to change every month as Trump personally negotiates with the entire planet? Are manufacturing firms really supposed to invest in expensive factory expansions when the Liberation Day tariffs caused a global sell-off that signals an international downturn? Trump’s personality is, and has always been, zero-sum and urgent, craving chaos, but economic growth is positive-sum and long-term-oriented, craving certainty for its largest investments. The scariest thing about the Trump tariffs isn’t the numbers, but the underlying message. We’re all living inside the president’s head, and nobody knows anything.

What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About the Past

America was never healthy to begin with.

by Lila Shroff

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

Last week, at an event in West Virginia, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fat-shamed the state’s governor, Patrick Morrisey. “The first time I saw him, I said you look like you ate Governor Morrisey,” Kennedy told a laughing crowd. Morrisey has apparently invited Kennedy to be his personal trainer. The health secretary plans to put Morrisey on a “really rigorous regimen” involving monthly public weigh-ins and the all-meat “carnivore diet.” Once Morrisey loses 30 pounds, Kennedy will return to West Virginia for a celebration and final weigh-in.

According to Kennedy, not so long ago, obesity was virtually unheard of. “When my uncle was president, 3 percent of Americans were obese, and today, 74 percent of Americans are obese or overweight,” Kennedy said during his confirmation hearing. This is wrong: In the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy was president, an estimated 45 percent of Americans were overweight, including 13 percent of whom had obesity. (Such classifications are determined based on body mass index, a flawed but sometimes useful metric). Although RFK Jr. is correct in suggesting that rates of obesity have surged in recent decades, his nostalgia for the past obscures a longer history of America’s struggle with weight-related chronic illness. In fact, RFK Jr. might be surprised to learn that his own uncle once waged a campaign against what he perceived as America’s deteriorating physical fitness.

Anxiety over American obesity dates back to at least the mid-20th century. In 1948—six years before RFK Jr. was born—the founder of Harvard’s nutrition department wrote an essay in The Atlantic warning that obesity was a risk factor for several health conditions including diabetes and high blood pressure. Seven years later—when RFK Jr. was an infant—the renowned nutritionist Jean Mayer declared obesity “a national obsession.” Mayer was particularly frustrated by the barrage of “mercenary lures” that filled the media, advertising ineffective and sometimes harmful “‘health foods’ or ‘thinning foods.’” (RFK Jr.’s endorsement of the carnivore diet and uncorroborated claim that seed oils are “one of the driving causes” of the obesity epidemic come to mind.) Instead, Mayer wrote in The Atlantic, exercise was key to weight loss. We now know that although exercise is crucial for good health, it’s not a silver bullet for treating obesity.

RFK Jr. often refers to his childhood as a sort of golden age for American health. “When I was a kid,” RFK Jr. said at the West Virginia event, “we were the healthiest, most robust people in the world.” But by the time he was of school age, his uncle was leading a national fitness campaign. President Kennedy feared, in particular, that American youth lagged “far behind Europeans in physical fitness.” As evidence, he pointed to a series of strength tests given to children in America, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria: More than one-third of American kids failed at least one test, compared with only 1 percent of European children.

More generally, JFK was worried that an “increasingly large number of young Americans” were “neglecting their bodies” and “getting soft.” In 1961, JFK’s warnings about America’s poor physical well-being led to an Atlantic essay titled “We May Be Sitting Ourselves to Death,” in which a spokesperson for the American Dairy Association fretted over the health of men who spent their days withering away at desk jobs instead of hiking “the dusty trail to bring home the buffalo meat.” (The writer was less concerned about women, who he suggested got plenty of exercise from washing clothes, cooking meals, and picking up after their messy family.) At the time, JFK presented America’s deteriorating health as a matter of Cold War–era national-security concern. As one Atlantic writer explained, “The basic impetus behind this Spartan movement seems to be the fear that the Russians (a vast race of tawny, muscle-bound gymnasts) will someday descend upon our shores and thrash each of us flabby capitalists individually.” America’s growing “softness,” JFK suggested, threatened to “strip and destroy the vitality” of the nation.

Much like the “Make America healthy again” campaign, the JFK-era movement looked nostalgically upon a rustic, heartier past. But even earlier, during the buffalo-hunting 19th century, Americans were anxious about the nation’s declining health. Only four months after this magazine’s first issue, in 1857, one writer complained that the ancient Greek tradition of fitness “seems to us Americans as mythical.” He insisted that a 30-mile walk, five-mile run, or one-mile swim would cost most Americans “a fit of illness, and many their lives.” Even an hour in the gym, the writer worried, would leave any man’s “enfeebled muscular apparatus” groaning “with rheumatism for a week.” One year later, a surgeon argued that busy schedules and “sedentary life” were to blame for the “limited muscular development” of “professional” men. “We live so fast that we have no time to live,” he wrote.

Obesity rates remained relatively stable for 20 years after JFK’s 1960 campaign, before doubling from 1980 to 2000 to what the U.S. surgeon general in 2001 called “epidemic” proportions. Today, 40 percent of U.S. adults meet the clinical definition for obesity. The precise reason for this surge remains unclear, although changing diets and decreased activity levels are thought to play a role. In this particular regard, RFK Jr. is right about America’s declining health. But many other American health outcomes have improved over the decades. Around the time RFK Jr. was born, cardiovascular disease killed Americans at roughly double the rate it does today. Cancer deaths, too, have fallen significantly, thanks to breakthroughs in cancer treatment and a decline in smoking. And that’s not to say anything of the progress made fighting infectious disease earlier in the 20th century.

Yet RFK Jr.’s romanticization of the past has led him to develop an anachronistic approach to health care. He is skeptical of the many advances—GLP-1s, vaccination, milk pasteurization—that have helped improve America’s health over the years. If his intention is to wind back the clock on the American public-health apparatus, he’s off to a strong start. Just this week, he led sweeping cuts across federal health agencies, eliminating thousands of jobs, including the nation’s top tobacco regulator, prominent scientists, and even staffers who focus specifically on chronic-disease prevention. The Department of Health and Human Services was established less than a year before RFK Jr. was born; now he is inviting its destruction. But his efforts to turn back time are foolish. If the golden age of American health exists, it’s in the future, not the past.

To Be Happier, Stop Resisting Change

The zen of archery is all about learning how to let go.

by Arthur C. Brooks

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In 1924, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel set out to learn about Zen Buddhism, which was starting to penetrate the West. He found a teaching position in Japan, where he hoped to locate someone who could instruct him in the philosophy. Rather than the sort of course he had in mind, he was informed that because he lacked proficiency in Japanese, he would be required instead to learn a skill—namely, kyūdō (the way of the bow)—and this would indirectly impart the Zen truths that he sought. To this end, Herrigel took up his archery studies with the master Awa Kenzō, which he later chronicled in his 1948 book, Zen in the Art of Archery.

Herrigel’s archery program was arduous and frustrating. “Drawing the bow caused my hands to start trembling after a few moments, and my breathing became more and more laboured,” he wrote. “Nor did this get any better during the weeks that followed.” Indeed, the weeks became months, and the months wound up becoming five years. At long last, Herrigel learned how to loose an arrow and hit his mark. When he finally acquired the skill, he also realized that he now understood the Zen attitude. “The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise,” he wrote—when you “let go of yourself.”

In short, Herrigel learned that the secret to archery—and the approach to life he was seeking—is to know when to stop resisting change and simply let it occur. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend half a decade studying archery in Japan to benefit from this central insight. To figure out what sources of resistance are holding you back, and discover how to find release from them and live better, read on.

From the January/February 2012 issue: Arrow envy

Unless you are a monastic, your life is probably characterized by a lot of resistance, especially to change. Even the most adventurous people are susceptible to this because change almost always means an uncertain or challenging future. Researchers have found that our resistance to change is rooted in at least four sources: routine seeking (a preference for boredom over surprise), emotional reaction to imposed change (stress aversion), a short-term focus (seeing change as a hassle of adjustment), and cognitive rigidity (a reluctance to rethink things).

Scholars have argued that change-resistance is a behavioral pattern that can be epigenetic—that is, a trait that becomes heritable because, without altering a person’s actual DNA, it modifies the way their genes are expressed at a cellular level. Change-resistance, the argument goes, gets reinforced and passed on because it provides a way to conserve energy, rather than having to learn the same routines over and over. And people almost certainly evolved a resistance to change in the first place because it leads to stability in decision making, and that makes living in social groups easier.

This helps explain why most people naturally resist change—whether that change involves becoming single even when a relationship has gone south, remaining in a job that bores you, or staying put in a city you haven’t liked for years. And that also explains why, as natural as change-resistance is, it tends not to improve your happiness. Change in life is inevitable, after all—and always resisting it is onerous. In fact, your resistance to change may well be making you unhappier, because it is positively correlated with neuroticism, a trait that personality research has found to be a driver of unhappiness.

An especially common area of change-resistance is unwillingness to think differently, which manifests as a rejection of ideas and opinions that vary from our own. In 2017, three psychologists used a series of experiments to demonstrate that most people prefer to hear the views of those who vote as they do, and that on cultural issues, most would forgo a small cash sum ($3) rather than have to hear a view opposing their own. Neuroscientists have shown that hearing political views you don’t share activates the amygdala, which is implicated in the human response to perceived threats.

Once again, this mechanism probably evolved from a time in human prehistory. In this case, what we think of today as an opposing ideological allegiance back then actually implied membership in a different, and potentially hostile, tribe or kinship group. Today, that trait persists in maladaptive ways: I find your view on climate change so disagreeable that my Pleistocene brain reacts as if you’re an unwelcome interloper who’s come along to burn my village. Aren’t we always complaining about how tribal politics has become?

Read: In praise of pointless goals

The impulse to resist is so natural, then, that it’s encoded in your genes. As that suggests, a degree of resistance can be perfectly appropriate and healthy. But your predisposition to resistance may affect your life in negative ways when it makes you rigid, like Herrigel locked in place with his arms trembling, not knowing how to take a shot. Such rigidity in the face of change will lower your happiness.

As the years passed, Herrigel finally understood that productive nonresistance means effortless effort, a phrase Herrigel used elsewhere to describe how he ceased to focus consciously on trying to hit the target and—in something akin to a “flow state”—lost himself in the process of shooting. In other words, he became indifferent to performing correctly at each stage, such as the release of the string from his finger or the business of keeping aim; rather, his self dissolved into a state of nonjudgmental absorption in the complete action of drawing the bow and shooting the arrow when the string’s time came to slip his finger.

Herrigel had thus mastered the whole “way of the bow.” One word of caution: Herrigel may sometimes have taken his own advice too far, as when, after his return from Japan to Germany in 1929, he acceded to the demand that he join the Nazi Party. Nonjudgmental absorption in the moment is not an alibi for bad judgment.

Nevertheless, from his philosophy of archery, we can infer three valuable lessons for tackling a situation in which resistance is natural but is also lowering the quality of life.

1. Focus on process, not outcome.

Some common business advice is Do things well and let the results come naturally, but this applies equally well more generally. Take the case of your job: Focusing on an involuntary change, such as the possibility of being laid off, will make you fearful and rigid, and distract you from what you’re working on from moment to moment. By all means, think about that potential problem for a few minutes when it crosses your mind, but then put it aside and refocus on doing a great job today. Be kind and generous to others who may also be worrying about their job. Live in what the self-improvement author Dale Carnegie called “day-tight compartments.” Resisting an outcome you probably have little control over will make you miserable. So, instead, allow yourself to work on the processes that you can control more, and you will feel better.

2. Practice mindful absorption.

Now that you are mentally released from obsessing over outcomes, the next step is to practice being completely absorbed in the necessary action. This will improve your performance and reduce your stress. Say, for example, that your romantic relationship is in trouble: Shelve your fear that your partner might leave you at some future date, and instead be mindful of your role in the relationship today and what you can do to make it better. This might or might not save the relationship ultimately, because it can’t make past difficulties disappear, but being fully present and attentive as a partner gives you a better chance of success—if not in this relationship, then in your next one—than trying some shortcut fix or melodramatic gesture.

3. Release the ego.

Herrigel emphasized that, as an archer, he had to learn to focus on the arrow as opposed to himself. In other words, he had to exercise a degree of ego erasure, an exclusion of self-consciousness. This is a topic I’ve touched on before, about what it means to shift from the “me-self” to the “I-self” and how that can produce greater happiness. Let’s return to the situation of being confronted by a point of view with which you strongly disagree. Given your resistance to changing your own view, your amygdala will tend to make you overreact and see this contrary argument as a threat. Instead, release your ego and tell yourself, “This opinion has nothing to do with me.” Then simply listen with detached curiosity; you may learn something interesting about why this person thinks that way and avoid an unnecessarily negative encounter. And if you do choose to engage further with this interlocutor, you will probably be more persuasive by being a listener. Not that it matters to you, O enlightened one.

From the October 2015 issue: How an 18th-century philosopher helped solve my midlife crisis

I first read Zen in the Art of Archery at the age of 20—I’ll admit, not with the purest of motives. My purpose was to become a better French-horn player for fame and fortune rather than for the zen of playing. Obviously, I was completely missing the real message. I picked up Herrigel’s book again at 55, when I was in the necessary process of changing jobs, careers, and cities, and in a state of abject terror.

Clearly, I had some resistance to overcome. Now the book made sense to me. It helped me stop thinking so much about how I was going to hit the target of my professional shift, and instead get mindfully absorbed in my daily work. That largely took my ego out of the equation and enabled me to allow the shift to occur naturally, without judgment or forcing anything. The openness to change that I learned from Herrigel’s mastery of archery has made these past five years among the happiest and most fulfilling of my life.

Iran Wants to Talk

Don’t expect a bromance—but the supreme leader has written back to Donald Trump.

by Arash Azizi

Donald Trump loves letters. We know this from his first term, when he exchanged 27 letters with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the course of 16 months and wrote a particularly memorable missive to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In his second term, he has already found an unlikely new pen pal: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Early in March, a high-ranking Emirati diplomat delivered a letter from Trump to Khamenei. Iran has now sent Khamenei’s response through its preferred mediator, the Sultanate of Oman.

Iran’s letter is detailed and leaves the door open for negotiations, a source close to the Iranian establishment told me, on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. In addition to the official response, Iranians have used multiple channels, including private business ones, to send signals to Trump and his team, the source added.

About two months ago, Khamenei said that talking with the U.S. was “neither rational, nor smart, nor honorable.” This seemed consistent with his posture during Trump’s first term: In 2018, he said Iran would “never” talk with the Trump administration in particular. In June 2019, when Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, brought a letter from Trump to Tehran, Khamenei rebuked him in front of cameras and said that the U.S. president was not “worthy” of a response. A few months later, Emmanuel Macron went out of his way to host a videoconference between Trump and his Iranian counterpart, then-President Hassan Rouhani. The logistical arrangements had been made, but in the end Rouhani didn’t take the meeting.

Read: The Axis of Resistance keeps getting smaller

Yet the supreme leader has been known to buckle under pressure and call it a strategic retreat. Decades ago, he coined the phrase heroic flexibility in praise of a Shiite imam who had made peace with a bitter enemy. He used the term in 2013 to justify Iran’s talks with the Obama administration (talks that started with an exchange of letters between Barack Obama and Khamenei.)

Khamenei is not about to give up his lifelong anti-Americanism at this late hour, at the age of almost 86. Still, Iran is in dire economic straits, and domestic pressure is mounting. Trump’s message to Iran, meanwhile, has been constant and clear: Talk with me, agree to a deal in which you stop pursuing nuclear weapons and arming regional militias, and I’ll let you prosper.

If Iran declines, Israel, flush from having battered the Iranian allies Hamas and Hezbollah, could finally strike Iran’s nuclear program. But even short of that, Trump’s policy—his previous administration called it “maximum pressure”—could fatally damage the already beleaguered Iranian economy. The U.S. has threatened to seriously crack down on Iran’s oil trade with China, which would cost Iran its most important source of foreign currency. The markets are already speaking: The U.S. dollar now trades for more than 1 million rials, an almost 75 percent increase from a few months ago, making the Iranian currency among the most worthless in the world (in 2015, when Iran last signed a deal with the U.S., the dollar was just 29,500 IRR).

This explains why Iran is coming to the table. But knowing just how weak his hand is, Khamenei has tried to appear tough. In an Eid al-Fitr speech on Monday, he affirmed that Iran’s positions had not changed, “nor has the enmity of America and the Zionist regime, which continue to threaten us with their evil doings.” He went on to threaten the U.S. and Israel with “a firm blow in response” if they attack Iran—which, he added, was “not very likely.” As per usual, he threatened Israel with destruction: “Everybody has a duty to work toward eliminating this evil and criminal entity from the region,” he said.

His is not the only bluster from Tehran. Iran’s military leaders have recently threatened American bases in the region. Ali Larijani, a centrist politician and adviser to Khamenei, said that Iran has no intention of building a nuclear weapon, but it could be forced to do so if attacked by the U.S. or Israel.

These might sound like fighting words, but what they really are is a negotiating tactic. Larijani has himself said that he hopes for “a tangible result” to come out of diplomacy with America and praised Trump as “a talented businessman.” Other Iranian officials have made similar indications, even as they complain about Trump’s “bullying” and his threats to bomb the country. Iran is “always ready to negotiate on an equal footing,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Monday. Iran is not averse to negotiations, and “the ball is in the U.S.’s court,” a top communication official in the office of President Masoud Pezeshkian said a day earlier.

If the messages seem mixed, that’s because Iran has “readied itself for both negotiations and confrontation,” Mostafa Najafi, a Tehran-based expert on the Iranian security establishment, told me. He said that the Iranian authorities had reached out to the Trump team even prior to the U.S. president’s inauguration, as diplomacy is their preferred course—but they have also prepared the country’s defenses in case this effort fails.

According to Najafi, Iran wants a two-step process, with direct talks following the current indirect contact. Tehran prefers that these talks take place in secret, and it wants Iran’s missile and drone capabilities to be off the table, he added. But it would be happy to talk about “lessening tensions in the region.” Najafi continued, “This doesn’t mean making deals over the Axis of Resistance groups, but, if Iran sees it as necessary, it can align them with a new agenda.”

This push for talks has a clear constituency in Iran. Op-eds in business and political dailies argue that the country has no choice but to come to a deal with the West. An online poll on a major news website showed a whopping 82 percent in favor of direct talks with the U.S., with 7 percent favoring indirect talks and only 11 percent opposed to all talks. Mohammad Ali Sobhani, a former Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Jordan, and Qatar, even suggested that Iran should offer business opportunities to American companies to sell the Trump administration on dealmaking.

Read: The Iranian dissident asking simple questions

If Iran and America do get to talking again, many outside forces will try to shape the result. Israel might nudge Trump away from negotiations, in favor of attacks that could keep Iran weak and destabilized. And Trump might very well prefer that outcome too. But prominent voices in the Trump camp seem to be urging a more diplomatic approach. The talk-show host Tucker Carlson, known for his close ties to the president, has strongly pushed against attacking Iran. His interview with Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, in which the latter seemed open to discussions with Iran, was watched closely in Iran. Witkoff’s apparent favorability toward negotiations was cited by regional sources speaking to an Israeli newspaper as one reason Khamenei softened up and wrote back to Trump. Then, yesterday, came the disappearing X comment heard halfway round the world: Araghchi wrote a long post urging “diplomatic engagement” while asserting that “there is—by definition—no such thing as a ‘military option’ let alone a ‘military solution.’” Witkoff responded, “Great”—then deleted the comment. Judging from the flurry of social-media posts and op-eds, however, his message appears to have been received in Tehran.

The leaders of America’s Arab allies in the Gulf are also likely to discourage Trump from further inflaming the region by attacking Iran—this is in sharp contrast to their attitude during the Obama era, when they feared that a nuclear agreement with Tehran would leave them out.

Trump’s epistolary relationship with Khamenei is unlikely to develop into the sort of bromance he experienced with Kim, and even those personal talks collapsed because they weren’t accompanied by the necessary technical negotiations. But Iran is now going out of its way to affirm that it held up its end of the old nuclear deal and forswore developing nuclear weapons. What the Iranians also seem to know is that if they want to get a new deal with America, they will have to learn Trump’s style, and that includes the president’s love of letters.

Trump’s Tariffs Are Designed to Backfire

Instead of leading to reduced trade barriers, the new global tariff plan is all but guaranteed to raise them.

by Rogé Karma

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According to President Donald Trump, April 2, 2025—the day he unveiled his executive order implementing global tariffs—will be remembered as a turning point in American history. He might be right. Unfortunately, April 2 is more likely to be remembered as a fiasco—alongside October 24, 1929 (the stock-market crash that kicked off the Great Depression), and September 15, 2008 (the collapse of Lehman Brothers)—than as the beginning of a new era of American prosperity.

The stated rationale behind Trump’s new “reciprocal tariffs” has a more coherent internal logic than Trump’s previous tariff maneuvers. (Stated, as we will see, is the key word.) The idea is that other countries have unfairly advantaged their own industries at the expense of America’s, both through tariffs and through methods such as currency manipulation and subsidies to domestic firms. To solve the problem, the U.S. will now tax imports from nearly every country on the planet, supposedly in proportion to the barriers that those countries place on American goods.

The goal, according to senior administration officials, is to pressure other countries into removing their trade barriers, at which point the U.S. will drop its own. In his Rose Garden speech announcing the tariff order, Trump demanded that foreign countries “terminate your own tariffs, drop your barriers,” and “don’t manipulate your currencies” if they hoped to get a reprieve from tariffs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has even argued that many of the new tariffs won’t ever need to go into effect, because other countries will be so quick to comply. In this telling, Trump’s reciprocal measures represent the tariff to end all tariffs, paving the road to a system of genuinely free trade and a return to American industrial dominance.

But the logical consistency, such as it is, is only internal. When the new tariffs come into contact with external reality, they are likely to produce the exact opposite of the intended outcome.

Jonathan Chait: The good news about Trump’s tariffs

Most obviously, the tariffs don’t appear to be based on actual trade barriers, which undermines their entire justification. Contrary to White House messaging, the formula for determining the new rates turns out to have been based simply on the dollar value of goods the U.S. imports from a given country relative to how much it exports. The administration took the difference between the two numbers, divided it by each country’s total exports, then divided that total in half, and slapped an import tax on countries at that rate. The theoretically reciprocal tariffs are not, in fact, reciprocal.

The result is that there is no clear or obvious path that countries could take to get those tariffs removed even if they wanted to. Countries can remove all of their trade restrictions and still run a trade surplus. South Korea, Mexico, and Canada, for example, export more to us than they import from us despite imposing virtually no trade barriers. As The New York Times reported, “Trump’s decision to put a 32 percent tariff on Switzerland stunned politicians and business leaders in the Alpine country. Switzerland has an open trade policy and recently abolished all industrial tariffs, including on goods from the United States, which is also its largest export market.”

Even if other countries did figure out ways to shrink their trade imbalances with the U.S., that still wouldn’t necessarily lead to a reprieve: Trump imposed 10 percent tariffs even on countries, like Brazil, that import more from America than they export to it. The only thing the White House has made clear is that any decision to remove or raise tariffs will be made by Trump himself. “These tariffs will remain in effect until such a time as President Trump determines that the threat posed by the trade deficit and underlying nonreciprocal treatment is satisfied, resolved, or mitigated,” read the White House’s memo on the new order. Translation: The only way you will get a tariff reprieve is by groveling at Trump’s feet.

To see the impossible choices that Trump’s tariffs impose on other countries, consider the trade restrictions that the administration accuses the European Union of maintaining against American products. These include food-safety regulations that ban certain ingredients, digital sales taxes, and the value-added tax—the European equivalent of a national sales tax that funds much of its members’ welfare programs. Calling most of these “trade barriers” in the first place is nonsensical, because they apply equally to foreign and domestic goods. The upshot is that, in order to meet Trump’s demands for tariff removal, Europe would need to overhaul not only its trade practices but much of its tax and regulatory system.

The best way to predict how countries will react to Trump’s newest tariffs is to look at how they responded to earlier ones. China and Europe quickly met past Trump tariffs with steep retaliatory measures of their own. Even in a friendly country as dependent on U.S. trade as Canada, Trump’s threats have generated a surge of anti-American nationalism that has upended the country’s domestic politics. “The idea that foreign leaders are going to commit political suicide to give Trump what he wants is crazy enough,” Scott Lincicome, the director of general economics and trade at the Cato Institute, told me. “The idea that they’d do it with basically no guaranteed upside just completely boggles the mind.”

Scott Lincicome: How Republicans learned to love high prices

Trump’s newest tariffs have already sparked widespread outrage among America’s trading partners. The head of the European Union has said that the body has a “strong plan to retaliate” against Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, and multiple individual European countries are considering their own additional retaliatory policies. France has floated the idea of expanding the trade war beyond physical goods by targeting U.S. tech companies. China vowed to take countermeasures against what it described as “self-defeating bullying.” Brazil’s president is considering retaliating, and the country’s National Congress, which includes many vocal right-wing supporters of Trump, recently approved legislation to empower him to do so.

If that pattern holds, Trump’s tariffs are likely to backfire. The result will be a one-way ratcheting up of tariffs across the globe, creating a trade wall between the U.S. and the rest of the world and indefinitely raising the cost of all imports.

Trump seems to welcome that possibility. During his Rose Garden address, which was titled “Make America Wealthy Again,” the president spoke at length about outcomes that are likely to occur only if the U.S. does not lower its tariffs, such as bringing in “trillions and trillions” of dollars of revenue and forcing companies to open factories inside the U.S. to avoid the new barriers. He sounded much more like someone who expected the tariffs to stay in place indefinitely than someone using them as a negotiating tactic.

In theory, the flip side of sustained higher prices would be a boost to American manufacturing, as consumers choose to purchase domestic goods over foreign ones. But here again, reality might laugh at the theory. About half of all U.S. imports are inputs that go into our own manufacturing production, meaning that American companies will suffer from higher prices too, even as retaliatory tariffs make it harder to sell their products abroad.

Perhaps the greatest damage will result from global uncertainty. After weeks of economic chaos, Trump’s big announcement was supposed to finally provide some clarity, allowing businesses to plan for the future. Instead, the future is more cloudy than ever. No one knows which of the tariffs will stick and which will be lifted. Countries will appeal to Trump to get their tariffs removed. Industries will lobby for carve-outs. The White House has announced no clear system for removing or reducing the tariffs, and even if it did, the ultimate choice will lie with the president himself, who is not known as a model of consistent and predictable decision making. These are the makings of an economic slowdown. “I would be shocked if we make it through next year without a recession,” Kimberly Clausing, an economist at the UCLA School of Law, told me.

Rogé Karma: The job market is frozen

What makes the new reciprocal tariffs all the more baffling is that a much less risky method exists to get other countries to agree to free trade. It is called a free-trade agreement. Trump ought to know. In his first term, his administration negotiated the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, or “New NAFTA,” which lowered trade barriers between America and its neighbors while requiring all parties to abide by higher labor and environmental standards. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration between the U.S. and 11 countries, including Vietnam, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, would have done something similar if Trump hadn’t pulled the U.S. out of the deal upon entering office in 2017. Those are some of the same countries that he is now trying to tariff into submission. He would have been better off remembering the art of the deal.

How the Trump Administration Learned to Obscure the Truth in Court

This is a litigation strategy born of the first travel ban.

by Leah Litman

The litigation over the government’s summary renditions of foreign nationals to an El Salvador prison, with no due process of law, is now at the Supreme Court’s door. The justices will soon decide whether to relieve the Trump administration from the trial court’s order halting the expulsions. Whether the government has complied with the order isn’t directly before the Supreme Court. But whether the Court can trust the government’s representations during such quickly unfolding litigation is—and the justices have every reason not to.

In this and other cases now being litigated, the government is following a playbook established during the fight over the first Trump administration’s travel ban, which barred entry into the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. From that litigation, the administration learned a strategy for implementing portions of its legally dubious agenda without the Court’s explicit blessing: go fast. Speed facilitates obfuscation. By pushing litigation to a breakneck pace—and changing the underlying details just as quickly—the administration was able to get the Supreme Court’s approval for policies without full legal scrutiny. That same approach is once again under way in the deportations case and in others now before the Court.

The story of the first Trump administration’s travel ban began on Friday, January 27, 2017, when the administration announced a prohibition on travel from seven majority-Muslim countries with no exceptions, including for people with ties to the United States, such as green-card or visa holders. It did so with no advance warning, which meant passengers boarded flights not knowing they wouldn’t be allowed to enter the United States. The policy was sloppy, cruel, and riddled with animus—so blatantly illegal that the Trump administration declined to continue defending it after lower courts invalidated it.

Tom Nichols: Trump’s authoritarian playbook

With the slapdash version dead, the administration came up with a (slightly) modified policy that appeared more legitimate, at least on a superficial level. The second ban, unlike the first, did not apply to visa and green-card holders. This one was also purportedly temporary: As written, it was set to last for 90 days, during which time the administration said it would conduct a formal review to determine what kind of permanent travel restrictions were warranted. Despite these nominal changes, it still reeked of illegal animus.

The administration asked the Supreme Court for permission to implement the temporary ban, but it did so in a strategic way that would enable the Court to give its okay without having to decide the substantive question of whether the measure was legal. Here’s how that worked: In spring 2017, the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Fourth and Ninth Circuits blocked the new ban. The government then turned to the Supreme Court, requesting emergency relief from those decisions. Curiously, the government requested expedited briefing (a rush on the papers both sides file in a case), but not expedited oral argument. In fact, it asked the Court to delay hearing the case until the fall, at which point the policy would have expired. By making its request in this way, the government was asking for an up-or-down vote on the lower court’s decision, but not a full consideration of the legal merits.

This gambit paid off. The Court allowed the administration to partially enforce the second travel ban for 90 days. By the end of that period, the administration had rolled out the third and final iteration—so that the third ban went into effect just as the second expired. The Court heard oral argument over whether the third iteration of the policy was invalid in spring 2018, and a few months later, the Court upheld it. In effect, the second version bought the administration time to put together a policy that looked more legitimate while it enforced a less legitimate version. The administration could claim that the third ban emerged from a formal process and had undergone significant revisions, rather than being fired off on a whim and on the basis of animus. But in the meantime, the administration was able to do what it wanted anyway: suspend entry from several majority-Muslim countries into the United States. And that may have made the Court more comfortable with accepting the third version, because a ban was by that point the status quo.

Part of the reason this worked is that the administration managed to get the Court to act quickly, without a careful parsing of the facts. That was a smart move, because actually defending the policy on a factual basis would have been quite a challenge. During the oral arguments over the third ban, the justices asked the Trump administration’s lawyer, Solicitor General Noel Francisco, about the waiver process—the mechanism that might allow people to show, on an individual basis, that they should be allowed to enter the United States. The solicitor general assured the Court that the process was available to people via consular officers. But after the argument, consular officials said that they had no authority or discretion to grant waivers, and that only certain officials in Washington could do so. The problem was that by then, the ban was in effect.

The new Trump administration now appears to be deploying a similar strategy in much of the litigation over its policies. For example, the recent litigation over the attempted shutdown and defunding of USAID confirmed that the administration is still trying to couple speed with factual opacity.

Read: The cruel attack on USAID

In that litigation, the administration claimed to possess the outlandish authority to cancel spending items that Congress had appropriated and approved—not just for USAID, but for other agencies, grants, and contracts. Numerous federal district judges have found several of the administration’s funding freezes unlawful. The relevant federal law, the Administrative Procedure Act, allows courts to block certain agency actions. That’s just what the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia did in the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition v. United States case—block the administration’s implementation of an across-the-board funding freeze at USAID.

The administration rushed to the Supreme Court to free itself from lower-court decisions blocking its initial version of the policies. In particular, the administration requested relief via the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket.” Again, this is right from the travel-ban playbook.

The administration’s lawyers asked the Court to act quickly while insisting that it wasn’t possible to pay out the contracts that had been subject to the initial USAID freeze, which the district court had effectively ordered it to honor. And because the case was developing so rapidly, the government’s timeline did not give the justices much chance to familiarize themselves with the details. As with the travel ban, a rushed job stood to benefit the administration by increasing the odds that the Court would take the government at its word without really looking into things deeply.

In this instance, the administration did not prevail, but it certainly tried. Before the Supreme Court, the government said that it was “not logistically or technically feasible” for it to pay the 2,000 or so invoices ordered by the district court. The justices refused to pause the district court’s ruling, instead allowing the court to determine whether a preliminary injunction was warranted, and directing it to act with “with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.” Left with time to develop and consider more facts, the district court pointed to a declaration by Peter Marocco, the acting director for USAID, acknowledging that prior to January 20, 2025, both USAID and the State Department could process several thousand payments a day. This temporary victory for the rule of law might not last, however; the litigation may yet head back to the Supreme Court, where the administration’s rush strategy could eventually win out.

If the Court accepts what the government is saying now in the summary-expulsion case, it will be risking its own credibility. In that case, the administration is asking the Court to credit, without evidence, several of its assertions. Among them is the unbelievable claim that individuals facing summary expulsion would somehow be able to challenge their prospective expulsion even though they may not know they are about to be sent to a foreign prison.

The Court should reject the government’s request to pause the lower court’s decision and recognize that its rush strategy is designed to make a mockery of the rule of law, not to mention the concept of facts. As they say, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice …

Why Trump Wants to Control Universities

They could be key to recapturing the culture.

by Hanna Rosin

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A couple of years ago, the conservative writer Christopher Rufo did a fellowship in Budapest, where, upon his arrival, János Csák, Hungary’s then–minister of culture and innovation, “greeted me with a strong handshake,” Rufo later wrote in an essay about the trip. Hungary’s population is not quite 10 million, and the country is among the poorest in the EU, yet Rufo believed that it had something to teach the U.S. The two countries, according to Rufo, were beset by the same diseases: “the fraying of national culture, entrenched left-wing institutions, and the rejection of sexual difference.” But unlike the U.S., Hungary had a plan. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was using “muscular state policy” to turn the culture back around. Among his major targets were Hungarian universities.

In this episode, Radio Atlantic host Hanna Rosin talks with the education writer Adam Harris, who believes that Rufo’s essay can help explain the Trump administration’s current attack on universities. Since Donald Trump has taken office, he has threatened to take back hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding from universities, and compiled lists of places that might not be in compliance, for various reasons: They failed to protect Jews on campus. They failed to protect women’s sports. They use “racial preferences and stereotypes” in their programs. The administration’s aim, Harris suggests, is much the same as Orbán’s—not just to dismantle the intellectual elite but also to build a new conservative one that better reflects its cultural values.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Universities are all of a sudden breaking news.

Last week, a video went around showing a man in a navy hoodie approaching a woman in a long, white down coat. It was still pretty cold when the video was shot outside Boston, right near Tufts University. The woman backs away, the guy grabs her hands, and then a few more people approach her from behind.

The woman’s name is Rümeysa Öztürk, and she’s a graduate student at Tufts University. The people approaching her are federal agents. They arrested her after the State Department revoked her student visa.

[Sound of Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest]

Rosin: Just before that, ICE arrested Palestinian activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. He’d been a leader of student protests. The administration said that amounted to supporting Hamas.

News anchor: They claim his student visa was revoked.

Rosin: Other students targeted for deportation: a fellow at Georgetown, also arrested.

News anchor: —detained a grad student from India who was teaching at Georgetown University on a student visa.

Rosin: Columbia was threatened with losing $400 million, and then they agreed to some demands. Harvard is now also under review for roughly $9 billion.

There are dozens more universities on a list, suspected of using racial preferences or of “forcing women to compete with men in sports.”

President Donald Trump: Your population doesn’t want men playing in women’s sports, so you better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.

Maine Governor Janet Mills: See you in court.

Trump: Every state—good. I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

The administration tells one story about its attack on universities: that they’re protecting students against anti-Semitism, protecting traditional women’s sports, going after unfair racial preferences.

But our guest on the show today says that is just what’s on the surface. Adam Harris, who is a senior fellow at New America and who also covered education for The Atlantic, argues that the administration has a much more ambitious, grander plan. And it starts with a pilgrimage to Hungary.

[Music]

Rosin: Adam, welcome to the show.

Adam Harris: Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Sure. So Adam, about a year before Trump is elected, a conservative activist named Christopher Rufo decamps to Budapest, writes a dispatch called, “Orbán’s War,” referring, of course, to Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán. And it turns out to be kind of a road map in a surprising way for this moment, what we’re seeing politically and particularly with universities. What is Rufo’s argument in that essay?

Harris: Yeah. He argues, effectively, that one of the more significant things and the thing that wasn’t necessarily understood broadly at the time was the way that Orbán undertook this effort to sort of reshape institutions, both publicly and privately, to create a sort of conservative elite.

Rosin: Okay. And this came, it seems like, as a revelation to conservative intellectuals—like, because Hungary is not an analogous country, but it seemed like a place that you would pilgrimage to learn things. So what was revelatory about this?

Harris: Yeah. Well, Rufo says that they’re facing some of the same issues that conservatives in the United States are, right? The sort of rejection, as he calls it, of sexual difference, the sort of liberal creep into the more general institutions. And Rufo really finds surprising the ways that Orbán was able to successfully combat that in his creation of that new sort of conservative elite in Hungary.

Rosin: It’s interesting because I think of conservatives in this moment of their ascendance as anti-intellectual. This is a slightly different view, where they’re viewing the university as a source of a lot of decline—say, decline of Western civilization. So instead of ignoring it or pushing it away, it sounds like the vision in this essay is, No. Take it back.

Harris: Yeah. It’s sort of: Take it back. Bend it to your own means. Strengthen what they believe are the sort of cultural foundations, right? He talks about family life. He talks about Christian faith. He talks about historical memory. And what a lot of conservatives feel that they’ve lost is that control of historical memory, right? When you think about some of the history curriculums that have been attacked over the last several years, it has been because those curriculums are a sort of fundamental reassessment of the position of some of our most celebrated figures in American public life.

Rosin: So it’s actually incredibly ambitious.

Harris: In a lot of ways, yes. We’re only 60-some odd years into the idea of a multicultural democracy, since the Civil Rights Act. And a lot of people feel that we lost something when we moved into that era. And so effectively, some of this is trying to reclaim that visage of that sort of pastoral past that we lost.

Rosin: Ah. Okay. Okay. I’m starting to understand how this fits more broadly into “Make America Great” and what the attack on universities is actually about. So we haven’t said yet: Who is Christopher Rufo, and how did these ideas start to spread?

Harris: Yeah, so Christopher Rufo is a conservative activist who around 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd, started looking into diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. And he started writing a bunch of blog posts and articles that really examined the DEI in several different areas.

He would pool some of the most jarring examples and sort of use those as a way to indict the entire apparatus that has grown up out of the civil-rights movement. But by September of 2020, some of those articles, some of what he said on TV gets to President Trump during the end of his first term, and that really launches this broader interrogation that we’ve seen since then into diversity principles and sort of these ideas of equity.

Rosin: Okay. So it’s diversity principles, but it’s also diversity principles as filtered through universities.

Harris: Yes.

Rosin: But it’s essentially creating an intellectual road map of all these executive orders, these things that Trump is putting together—there is a grand idea behind them.

Harris: Yes. There’s a grand idea behind them.

Rosin: And as Trump is elected and starting to pick his cabinet, you as an education expert, what did you notice? Like, what did you start to pay attention to in university news?

Harris: Yeah. Well, around December, actually, there was a piece that came out in the Washington Examiner by a conservative education scholar, Max Eden, who argued that Linda McMahon could do a couple of things upon being confirmed as the education secretary in order to overhaul higher education and to ensure that institutions sort of got into line. And one of those things, he argued, was to take a “prize scalp.”

Rosin: A “prize scalp.”

Harris: A “prize scalp,” and that’s a quote-unquote. And he said that institution would be Columbia University, that the administration should go after Columbia as hard as it can. If Columbia did not comply, it should remove its Title IV funds. If Columbia did comply, then they should find another way or they could find another way to remove funding from the institution.

And so when one of the first institutions to receive a big hit on their funding, $400 million, [was] Columbia, the first thing that came to my mind was, Oh, this is a part of the playbook that they talked about in December.

Rosin: So how did Columbia fit into the playbook?

Harris: Yeah. Well, over the last, you know, year and a half, really since October 7, when students started protesting the war in Gaza, Columbia has become the sort of poster child for the ways that higher education is doing things wrong, right?

Rosin: Out of control.

Harris: Out of control. You know, The student protestors are controlling the institution. The leadership doesn’t really have a wrangle on its faculty. There were criticisms of the curriculum—all of these things.

And Columbia and most Ivy League institutions aren’t necessarily places where people are gonna jump to defend them, right? These are places that have multibillion-dollar endowments. When people say that they don’t trust higher education, they don’t mean their local community college. They don’t mean the public regional down the road. They mean Harvard and Columbia because it seems like an unattainable place where the elites are developed anyway.

And so over the last two years, really, you’ve seen these attacks on Columbia and how they’ve handled anti-Semitism on campus. Or you’ve seen attacks on Columbia and what they’re teaching to students. And the imperfect plaintiff nature of Columbia makes it easier to say, Well, everyone has said you’re not handling this well, so let’s go ahead and remove your funding. And it would be one thing if they sort of stopped at Columbia. It would be one thing if they came into office, did a long investigation into what’s going on—because that’s typically what happens, right?

As someone who’s covered the education department for the last, you know, seven, eight years, anytime you have a Title VI investigation in cases of discrimination, those typically take months, if not years, to complete. And upon their completion, the removal of funds has never really been on the table.

Rosin: Okay, so if it didn’t go through the usual process, it didn’t seem to be about what they said it was about. So you, as someone tracking this, what do you think it was about? Like, why remove Columbia’s funding? What was that first move about?

Harris: Yeah. So in that piece that I mentioned from December, the argument was: You remove the funding from Columbia in order to scare other institutions into compliance. And if those institutions don’t immediately comply, then they also know that, Well, I can get my funding taken away too.

We have seen, now, $150 million [taken] away from Penn within days, right—at least paused at Penn within days—of launching or announcing an investigation. And so, really, these timelines just don’t necessarily comport (1) with the way things are done, but they also don’t comport with a proper or legitimate investigation, given the amount of staff they have now at the Department of Education.

Rosin: Okay. So they’re not following the rules of a proper investigation. They’re just trying to get universities to comply. But comply with what?

Harris: Yeah, so there are a couple of various—it was interesting because the administration has gone farther than just saying, Hey. You need to get everything in check. Figure it out, Columbia. They’ve actually given them a list of things that they could do in terms of disciplinary measures for students. They said that one of the academic departments needs to be put under a sort of academic receivership, meaning that someone comes in from outside of the department to serve as the chair and look over their curriculums and things like that.

So there are these sort of very specific guidelines for what can and cannot be said on campuses. And once you start restricting speech in one manner, that sort of means you can restrict speech in a lot of different spaces. So if you say, Well, you can’t have these pro-Palestinian protests in a specific area, and if you do, then we’re going to take your funding away. There are a lot of things there that are reminiscent of the ways that Southern governors used to say that students at Alabama State couldn’t have sit-ins, otherwise they were going to remove the funding from Alabama State College.

It’s adjudicating specific behaviors and speech that students are making, which is really a threat to all of the principles of an institution. When an administration can come into an institution and say, You have to do this very specific thing. These are the policies that you have to implement, the principles of shared governance, the principles of academic freedom, the principles of a sort of free system of higher education really go away—and those same principles that are sort of the bedrocks of our democracy, right? The First Amendment is literally about free speech. When those sorts of things go away, it becomes a very dangerous environment that limits what people can say and do.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: the narrowing of the American higher-education system—and who will get left out.

[Break]

Rosin: You started out by saying the ultimate vision was building a conservative elite. So is the way you put this entire picture together, is that essentially: You break down, you take away their funding? I mean, now I just sound kind of paranoid and conspiratorial, but maybe this is the plan. Like, you take away funding—in this way, it’s a little confusing, because some of the funding is for science so, you know, it’s not all completely directed. But you take away the funding. You therefore shock the university into stopping behaving the way it has, and then what? What’s the ultimate—I don’t know what happened in Hungary, so—

Harris: Yeah. So that vision that Rufo discussed sort of happened in Hungary, where they’re trying to get back to the cultural traditions, the cultural values that the nation had—those sort of ideas of Christian faith, the ideas of family life. In the same way, it sort of embodies that notion of “Make America Great Again.” And so the question has always been, Well, when exactly was America great?

And over the last several years, there has been an argument that has built up in conservative circles that America was better off in terms of these ideas of personal liberty and the freedom of association before the Civil Rights Act was signed, that this sort of administrative state that has built up to enforce the rules of the Civil Rights Act—so you think about things like race-conscious admissions, which was just voted down at the Supreme Court. You think about these reassessments of curriculums, which prior to the 1960s were legally allowed to obscure and/or omit the contributions of African Americans, of Natives, of Mexican Americans.

You consider the programs that were meant to diversify the workforce more generally—those are some of the programs and things that conservatives are trying to attack in certain ways by saying that they basically discriminate against white people, that it’s reverse discrimination to include those policies, which is why you see a part of this, alongside that $400 million from Columbia, was that broader letter, that “Dear Colleague” letter that said, Hey—if you use race in scholarships, in hiring, in your sort of faculty committees, in your student groups, in any of these things, then we are going to investigate you, and you are going to be in violation of Title VI. And when an institution hears you’re going to be in violation of Title VI, they will start thinking, We’re going to get our funding taken away in the same way that Columbia did.

And so this push to eliminate the Department of Education runs alongside this broader push to get higher education under control, right? These are sort of parallel tracks that end up forming a double helix, right? They go right together. It’s like if you’re going to say that you’re going to investigate anti-Semitism with a vigor that no one has ever investigated it with before, and you remove half of the staff at the Office for Civil Rights that actually investigates anti-Semitism, the thing to do wouldn’t be to remove people who are investigating those complaints. The thing would be to beef up that staff so that they didn’t have 20 to 25 cases on their load, so that they could have those five to 10 complaints they were really focusing on.

Rosin: Right, because they could find examples of anti-Semitism. They could find examples of other kinds of discrimination. But it’s obviously not what you’re actually after if you’re eliminating the office.

Harris: Exactly.

Rosin: You know, as you’re talking, what’s chilling about this is that I do, in fact, associate higher education with the opening of the mind and the broadening of the views. Like, that is what I think university is for. I mean, that is what education in the U.S. does. So it would be a profound shift to think of education as inculcating a very narrow or particular set of content, you know?

Harris: Yes. And you know, it’s interesting. Over the last several years, right, the last couple of decades, actually, there’s been this argument that institutions don’t teach students how to think; they teach students what to think.

Rosin: That’s what conservatives say.

Harris: That’s what conservatives say, yeah. It was one of the first things that Betsy DeVos said when she became the education secretary, was that colleges are teaching students what to think as opposed to how to think. And in some ways, this effort is actually trying to do that. It is trying to teach students, This other stuff is out of bounds, right? But this is the acceptable sort of curriculum for your class. These are the acceptable things that you can say. And even if they’re not saying it explicitly, institutions are taking it as such.

We’ve already seen some colleges, such as High Point University, when that Dear Colleague letter came out that said, Make sure you’re not using race or using discriminatory language in any of these things, they sent out a letter to their faculty, to their staff and said, Remove all of these. They gave them more than 40 words and said, Remove them from everything. Get rid of them in your PowerPoint presentations. Get rid of them in your curriculums. They ended up walking that back. But you see the sort of chill that that already starts to have when administrators are thinking, I don’t want to lose my funding, and so I’m going to go ahead and say, “Let’s just get rid of all of that in our curriculum.”

Rosin: Now, the administration created a task force, and there is this growing list of universities that are up for investigation. Is there any criteria? Do you see any pattern in the universities? Because it does seem to include both elite and less elite. You know, big-city schools, small schools. Like, can you detect anything in what they’re looking for?

Harris: So it’s difficult to detect a trend there. There is a way that you can sort of have a veil of legitimacy on any investigation. And so if you have received a complaint from a school of anti-Semitism, you can say that, Okay. That’s going to be the school that we are going to investigate. And knowing that all it took was 14, you know, 15 days for the administration to go ahead and remove all of $400 million of Columbia’s funding, those institutions may be more likely to say, Whoa. Whatever they’re saying for Columbia to do, let’s go ahead and do that—

Rosin: So that they won’t come after us.

Harris: —so that they won’t come after us.

Rosin: So merely putting a university on the list—and actually, maybe even the arbitrary nature of the list—actually spreads the fear more widely. Maybe this is what I’m realizing now. It’s a very common tactic.

Harris: Exactly.

Rosin: If you just put Harvard and Columbia on the list, then other places wouldn’t have to worry about it. But if you spread it far and wide, then everybody follows your orders. Okay. That’s obvious. So I see now very clearly putting the pieces together, putting the bigger picture together of how they’re scaring universities.

I want to know what’s happening inside the universities and how they’re responding. As someone who doesn’t follow higher education as closely, it’s not that clear to me how important this funding is or how reliant universities are on federal funding.

Harris: Yeah. So for an institution that is, say, more tuition dependent, they rely on the students paying their tuition and that tuition helping them to meet payroll. Title IV funding is incredibly important because if you are not allowed to take loans from students, if you’re not allowed to get Pell Grants from students, then a tuition-dependent institution is going to go out of business. For bigger institutions like Columbia, these are institutions that have federal grants from, you know, the NIH, that have federal grants from the Defense Department, that have USDA grants, that have grants from the, you know, Education Department, right? So it’s very varied, and their tentacles are all through the federal government.

There’s this idea that’s sort of been bubbling up that, Well, these institutions have big endowments. Why don’t you just start using that? There’s a fundamental misunderstanding about endowments. That’s not just, like, fungible money that you can say, Oh, well, that’s $50 billion. We can spend $10 billion and make up for it tomorrow, because most of that money is tied to very specific things. Say a donor made a $400 million donation to the School of Fine Arts: If you start using that for payroll generally, you can guarantee you’re never gonna receive a single dollar ever again, because people can’t trust you to be good stewards or faithful stewards of that money. They can also sue you.

And so there are some colleges that, you know, from 30 to 40 percent of their budgets really kind of come from the federal government, but that’s not to say that this is a completely foreign system. There is not a successful higher-education system in the world, really, that is not sort of subsidy driven, that doesn’t receive significant government subsidies.

Rosin: That’s interesting. I think of the United States as having a largely private university system and that other, you know—I am always jealous of overseas, how they have more public universities. But I never quite put together that, in fact, there is a strong interdependence between public institutions and universities of all kinds. So now I see why that makes them extremely vulnerable.

I’ve watched university presidents—I mean, it mostly feels like they’re scrambling. You know, Columbia was a probably terrifying example for a lot of college presidents because it does seem that even when university presidents comply or try to comply with Trump orders, they still get punished. Do you see any responses now, like, as you’ve watched, maybe since October 7 and then through Trump’s election? What kinds of discussions are they having about how to handle this situation?

Harris: So there’s been a lot of sort of internal back-and-forth at institutions. You haven’t really seen many public responses, in part because there’s a sort of “keep your head down and hope that it’s not you,” you know, some of the smaller institutions, maybe public institutions. For some of the public state institutions, they’re trying to fight things that are going on in their own states, right?

Consider a place like Ohio, where they have a bill that’s supposed to reform higher education. Florida, Texas, North Carolina, all of these states: There’s this big federal thing that’s going on, but you also have these state reforms, whether that’s to tenure, whether that’s to establish a conservative center on campus, whatever it may be. They’re also thinking about those issues, as well. And so a lot of presidents are in sort of a, Keep your head down. Try to avoid being noticed. And if it’s happening over there, then it’s not happening to us, and we’re already thinking about our budget for the next year, as opposed to a cohesive pushback to say, This is an attack on higher education more broadly rather than these singular institutions.

Rosin: And do you think that’s a realistic thing to ask of university presidents? Because it is disheartening to see them fall, one after the other—I mean, both in congressional hearings, in all sorts of ways. And then there’d just be deadly silence. But there’s also silence on the streets. There’s silence in a lot of places. And so I just wonder: Is that a realistic hope?

Harris: It should be.

Rosin: You want to hold onto it?

Harris: I do, because we’ve seen institutions in the last few years be pushed into these policies that say they won’t make public statements about political events, right? In Ohio, in that bill, it said that public colleges can’t make statements about partisan or ideological statements outside of celebrations of the United States and the flag—like, really sort of jingoistic, patriotic statements. And pushing back doesn’t have to look like a president being out in the streets, but it does look like reaffirming your institutional principles and living up to your institutional principles, right? Because a principle’s only a principle when it’s tested.

Rosin: Right.

Harris: And a belief is only, like—you only actually have a value and make public that value when that value is under attack. And so if higher education doesn’t believe in the principles that it was founded on, then institutional leaders should remain silent. But if they do, then there’s a kind of obligation there. It’s one of the reasons why they get paid so much.

Rosin: Whoa. Okay.

Harris: (Laughs.)

Rosin: No. I mean, you’re clear. I appreciate it.

Just one final thing: We started by talking about the ultimate goal of this to be the creation of a different kind of elite in the U.S. I wonder if they have a fully fleshed imagination of what a conservative elite would look like and act like and believe. Like, is the end of the vision real?

Harris: I don’t know if it’s a fully fleshed-out view, but they have pointed to certain institutions and said, This is what it could look like. Those institutions are Hillsdale College, the College of the Ozarks.

I actually went to the College of the Ozarks when Pete Hegseth was speaking, and there was this really, you know, sort of telling quote that he gave during his speech that was just like, I went to Harvard. I went to, you know, the Ivy League institution. Those places have lost their way. This is the sort of place that’s doing it right. This is the future. And you look across the student body—it’s majority white and not even, like, a slim majority. It’s students who, when I spoke to them, talked more about the idea of it being a place where they could go and not have to have a ton of loans on the back end of going to college.

But it was also a place that has—it’s the only college in the country with a vice president of patriotic activities. Every student is required to take a patriotic-education course, where it’s a mix of current events and the founding documents alongside, like, military training. And it’s not a military school. So I don’t know that there’s a fully fleshed-out idea, but I know that there are institutions that they point to as examples of what a college should be, and there are also places that they can point to, like a new college now, and how to make that happen.

Rosin: What ended up happening in Hungary, by the way? Has it broadened into a vision beyond that individual college? Do they have a conservative elite?

Harris: In a lot of ways, yes. And if it’s not a sort of fully fleshed-out one to this point, it is much further along than it was when Orbán launched his assault. I think one of the other things that was really interesting about that piece that Rufo wrote was that he talks about the ways that things seemed normal—

Rosin: And what did he mean by “normal”?

Harris: By “normal,” he talks about, Oh, people talk about it as if it’s, like, an economic backwater, but, you know, business goes on as usual. But there’s this quiet administrative, instructional war that’s going on in education, sort of reshaping things. And so it’s like, Make everything seem as normal as possible while also launching this assault that transforms the way that a country fundamentally operates.

Rosin: And feels and what young minds accept as excellence, basically.

Harris: Exactly.

Rosin: Right. Well, Adam, I think the only option after this conversation is to join you in holding out hope that some group of university presidents stand up for what a university is. Thank you so much for helping us understand that.

Harris: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/podsub. That’s theatlantic.com/podsub.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

A New Force of Indian Country

In 1969, my father gave voice to an activist generation of Native Americans.

by Philip J. Deloria

This is the living room of the 800-square-foot house in Denver that held our family of five in the mid-1960s. Every night, my father turned that tiny space into an office, sitting cross-legged in a wide armchair, hunched over the coffee table that held our most valuable possession, a new IBM Selectric typewriter. In the morning, my mom stacked paper and put things away, trying to make the living room livable again.

In 1968, the writer Stan Steiner published a book about a cohort of young Native American activists he called the “new Indians.” My dad, Vine Deloria Jr., was one of them. When he met Steiner, he was the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, founded in 1944 to organize across tribal lines, coordinate political strategy, and lobby Washington. “Ten years ago, you could have tromped on the Indians and they would have said, ‘Okay, kick me again. I’m just an Indian,’ ” he told Steiner. Those days of acquiescence were over: My father demanded instead that Americans honor their treaties and recognize the political sovereignty of tribal governments.

From the May 2021 issue: National parks should belong to Native Americans

Steiner’s book sent New York publishers chasing after the new Indians he’d identified, hoping to find the voice of this activist generation. My father was one of the few able to get a manuscript between covers, the 1969 best seller Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto.

As he transformed our living room, my father transformed his life, bringing it into line with what he imagined a writer’s looked like. The transformation wasn’t entirely smooth. At one point, my father lost confidence in the project, and tried to return his advance to his publisher. His editor waved a marked-up page of manuscript at him—Norman Mailer’s, as he recalled—and my dad realized he wasn’t in it alone. He soldiered on.

This portrait, by the Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson, accompanied an excerpt from Steiner’s book published in Vogue. The image captures the writer’s infrastructure our home hosted each night: chair, table, typewriter, scattered books and newspapers, a ream of fresh paper. And, of course, the stimulants: a cup of cold coffee, a sugar bowl, and a cigarette to keep him going.

From the September 2022 issue: How Reservation Dogs exploded the myths of Native American life

My father is wearing a new pair of Justin boots, stirrup-friendly, with the sharp toe pointing in your face. He was about a decade removed from the Marines, and a new regime of travel food and chair time is visibly filling out his frame. He’s holding forth, because my father spoke his book before he wrote it, practicing his words in meetings and interviews. My father is in the room’s corner, but not at all cornered; you can see in his face the new force of Indian Country that exploded in those years. My mom was there too, likely asking him to clean things up before the shutter clicked.

This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “A New Force of Indian Country.”

Quaker Parents Were Ahead of Their Time

The nearly 375-year-old religion’s principles line up surprisingly well with modern parenting research.

by Gail Cornwall

One morning in 1991, I prayed with the fervor that only a tween can muster for one thing above all others: cold Diet Mountain Dew. But all of the cans in my mom’s stash were warm. So I tossed one in the freezer, forgot about it, and hours later retrieved the frozen-solid mass. Then I decided to pop it in the microwave. You can imagine what ensued.

After extinguishing the flames, my mom asked us kids what we thought had happened. I stepped forward as if approaching the gallows—and she lavished me with praise. For telling the truth. For taking responsibility. Her response might seem surprising, but we’re Quakers, and avoiding judgment is pretty on-brand.

From where I stand now, I can see that her decision to use positive reinforcement aligns with research on motivating kids, something I’ve become quite familiar with as a journalist covering parenting and education. Still, for years, I didn’t recognize the connection between my faith and the child-development studies I frequently combed through at work. Then, when the coronavirus pandemic temporarily left our public school without enough adults to meet my son’s needs, we switched him to a Quaker school. The school is organized around an acronym I’d never heard before—SPICES—that stands for principles I know well: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship. Those aren’t the only pillars of Quakerism, but they’re big ones, and seeing them all together got me thinking. Sitting in the meetinghouse one Sunday morning, after nearly an hour of silent worship, I had a Queen’s Gambit moment. Whereas the chess champ saw pawns moving across a phantom board, I saw each child-rearing best practice I’d been writing about line up with a principle of Quakerism.

The Religious Society of Friends—“Quaker” being a derogatory term, reclaimed—is a hard faith to explain, because it tries to eschew dogma. It’s now possible to be a Muslim Quaker or a Hindu one, or to not believe in any god at all. That said, Quakers all over the world tend to talk about the same principles and take part in some of the same practices. For example, in place of rules, Quakers publish “advices and queries,” which prompt individuals to make good, considered choices. Attendees of Quaker meetings near me were recently asked to ponder: “Do I make my home a place of friendliness, joy, and peace, where residents and visitors feel God’s presence?” The children’s version read: “In what ways am I kind to people in my home?” Certain expectations underlie these questions—that one should try to be kind, for example—but so do curiosity and an openness to differing answers.

As it turns out, leading with questions is a great way for parents to talk to children. Encouraging kids to come up with their own solutions grants them autonomy. And as Emily Edlynn, a psychologist and the author of Autonomy-Supportive Parenting, told me, kids who feel like they have control over their life experience better emotional health, including less depression and anxiety. Fostering kids’ autonomy has also been tied to children building stronger self-regulation skills, doing better in school, and navigating social situations more effectively. Best of all, once kids get used to the self-discipline that comes with exercising autonomy, it can become habitual. Give your kids agency in one area, and they tend to “develop internal motivation even for things that they do not want to do,” Edlynn said, “because they’re integrating the understanding of the ‘why’ those things are so important.”

Read: The teen-disengagement crisis

It can be scary to trust children with independence. But kids are better problem-solvers than some people might think. When my son, at age 10, asked me if he could play laser tag with friends, I asked him how he could avoid pulling a trigger (in deference to the Quaker value of pacifism). He decided to serve as referee. I was proud of him for exercising “discernment,” another Quaker value, all on his own, for listening to his “still, small voice within” and letting it guide him to a solution that satisfied his need for belonging. He is now 13 and recently couldn’t decide whether to accept a babysitting job or relax at home. I asked him, “What do you think tomorrow-you will wish today-you had done?” He picked out stuffed animals to give his charges, spent the evening feeling needed, and had cash the next day when he wanted to buy boba for a friend.

Obviously, real damage could come from giving kids complete autonomy, and Quakerism recognizes this. Early Quaker epistles inveigh against permissiveness, and a 1939 text, Children & Quakerism, quotes William Penn, the Quaker who founded Pennsylvania, saying, “If God give you children, love them with wisdom, correct them with affection.” In other words, pacifism doesn’t mean that parents can’t set boundaries. As a 1967 book about Quaker education, Friends and Their Children, put it, “There is a difference in principle between setting an army on the march and carrying a tired and hysterical child up to bed.” So when my son used to leave toys out, I wouldn’t clean up for him. I’d prompt him to do so: “I see blocks still sitting on the floor.” That was usually enough. When it wasn’t, I would stage a mini sit-in, and we wouldn’t go on with our evening until the blocks were put away—the type of consequence that’s crucial for raising considerate kids. If he hollered, I would “bear witness” to his suffering and “be with” him, silent but unwavering.

Two children work together at Friends Select School, in Philadelphia, as part of a 1945 American Junior Red Cross program on race relations. (Bettman Archive / Getty)

In addition to sit-ins, both civic and domestic, Quakers have a tradition known as “spiritual gifts.” That involves treating individual talents as assets that belong to the community and ought to be developed in ourselves and encouraged in others. For parents, this means focusing on what our children choose to do, are good at, and enjoy. You can’t ignore your kids’ weaknesses—but you can spend less energy on them. For my youngest’s terrible handwriting, that meant aiming for legibility and saving the time that could have gone toward cursive lessons for activities that animate her, such as building boats and airplanes from the contents of the recycling bin. Research backs up this approach. According to Lea Waters, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne and the author of The Strength Switch, focusing on children’s strengths “has been shown to increase self-esteem, build resilience, decrease stress, and make kids more healthy, happy, and engaged in school.”

But perhaps the most important element of Quaker parenting is the edict to “let your life speak.” In practice, that looks like apologizing to your kids freely, saying please and thank you, and, yes, trying not to shout at them. It means acting in accordance with your values, such as when my grandma took me to pack toothbrushes and soap into “kits for Kosovo,” and when my kids make PB&Js for our unhoused neighbors or bring games to a family shelter. The idea, supported by common sense and reams of research, is that kids develop empathy by living it alongside their caregivers. What’s more, another study establishes that knowing that their parents value kindness above achievement protects kids’ well-being.

Infused in all of these practices is the conviction that children are not lesser proto-adults, but fellow beings worthy of respect and agency regardless of their behavior. The closest that Quakers come to dogma is the belief, first expressed by the religion’s founder, that there is “that of God” in every person, children very much included. That’s why, as Friends and Their Children notes, Quakers try to make children feel “welcome at the very centre of life”—a concept quite similar to the “unconditional positive regard” that psychologists today know leads to secure kids. Children who feel valued in this way, and who believe that what they do adds value, generally come to understand that they matter. And a sense of mattering makes kids more likely to be happy, resilient, academically high-achieving, and satisfied with their life, as well as less likely to struggle with perfectionism or addiction, Gordon Flett, the author of the American Psychological Association’s Mattering as a Core Need in Children and Adolescents, told me.

Read: Lighthouse parents have more confident kids

So here I am, nearly 375 years after Quakerism’s founding, asking my kids questions, giving them bounded autonomy, and nudging them to invest in their strengths and be stewards of their community—all while communicating that their worth is in no way contingent. Put together, these Quaker practices result in a parenting style considered ideal by psychologists: authoritative parenting. As Judith Smetana, a University of Rochester psychology professor whose work focuses on parent-adolescent interactions, explained to me, authoritative parenting is characterized by the effort to warmly and responsively set limits, and to support kids rather than punish them harshly when they overstep those limits.

Some people might argue that Quaker parents aren’t doing anything special. What is free-range parenting if not oodles of agency? When Quaker parents try to stay calm and acknowledge their kids’ feelings when they act out, aren’t we just doing what the so-called Millennial parenting whisperer Dr. Becky recommends? In telling my teenage son that I see the packaging from his graphing calculator lying on the table rather than in the trash, am I not just following “Say What You See” coaching?

But pop parenting philosophies can be unhelpful, especially because parents not infrequently misinterpret them. Take gentle parenting. At its best, it encourages parents to give kids the respect and empathy they need to thrive. But gentle parenting, at least as it’s presented in Instagram reels, can result in children doing as they please. “What it really leaves out,” Smetana told me, “is the importance of structure and being clear about where the boundaries are.” Many parents are left feeling helpless—a common experience among pop-parenting adherents. In the aughts, a friend of mine tried attachment parenting, an approach centered on enhancing the bond between mother and child with, among other practices, maximum physical proximity. She ended up feeling like a failure each time she put her baby down to use the restroom.

Read: This influencer says you can’t parent too gently

For new parents, sorting through the good and bad of each of these schools of thought can feel not just bewildering, but impossible. “These terms come and go so quickly,” Smetana told me, “and fads in the popular audience don’t intersect very well, necessarily, with the research.” It’s taken me more than 15 years, during which I’ve read hundreds of parenting books and academic papers, to piece together which bits of each philosophy are relevant to me. According to Smetana, even authoritative parenting can be of limited use for caregivers, because its advice is so broad. There are lots of ways to be an authoritative parent, which can leave moms and dads (but mostly moms) feeling rudderless.

That’s where Quaker parenting has stepped in for me, providing a simple way to separate the wheat from the child-development chaff. It gives me plenty to cling to, but its guiding principles are also flexible enough to allow leeway. This isn’t to say the religion is perfect. Its past is filled with failures. Many Quakers worked to abolish slavery, but many did not; some were themselves enslavers. The Society of Friends was the first religion to officially condemn that horror, but some meetinghouses—which are known for having benches arranged in egalitarian formations—featured segregated seating for Black members. Quakers also participated in forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples, including boarding schools that stripped children of dignity, culture, and health. Although not exclusively white, Quaker membership in the U.S. is still predominantly so.

But even in these shortcomings lies an essential Quaker parenting lesson. We favor queries over strictures because of a concept known as “continuing revelation,” or the idea that we cannot know all there is to know, and we will always later realize that we were wrong. The principle has helped me cultivate humility and compassion for myself after missteps. Because there can be no one best way in Quaker parenting, I’m freed from feeling like every detail of every decision will lead only to perfect success or abject defeat.

Looking back at the Diet Mountain Dew incident, I bet my mom wanted to rail at me. She’d warned again and again that metal in the microwave would spark. But Quaker values urged restraint then, just as they did decades later, when two of my daughters enrolled at schools with grade portals. With just four clicks, I can see how many points they’ve missed on each test and which assignments they haven’t turned in. Snowplow parenting tells me to lean into snooping and send emails to their teachers requesting retakes and extensions. It’s sorely tempting. But Quaker principles remind me not just about the value of autonomy, but also that kids need stillness and peace of mind, that pestering them isn’t likely to lead to the “nonviolent communications” that improve connection, and that the goal is for teens to develop a purpose-based identity rather than a performance-based one. So I resist the urge to monitor and intervene—just as research on anxiety suggests I should.

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The Story of the Gilded Age Wasn’t Wealth. It Was Corruption.

Richard White, the historian and author of <em>The Republic for Which It Stands</em>, explains what made the late 19th century gilded.

by Derek Thompson

Is the U.S. in a second Gilded Age? Many in the news media seem to think so: You’ll find the claim in The New Yorker, NPR, Politico, and these pages. The White House, for its part, seems to think that would be a good thing: “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” Donald Trump said days into his second presidential term, a period that covers—that’s right—the Gilded Age. Although the claim was factually lacking, it was politically prophetic. Trump has governed like a late-19th-century president, with his penchant for tariffs, his unusual relationship with a major industrial titan, and his bald-faced corruption.

It’s widely understood that the late 19th century was an age of technological splendor and economic consolidation, and this is true enough. Thomas Scott and Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould dominated the railroads. John D. Rockefeller dominated oil. Andrew Carnegie dominated steel. J. P. Morgan dominated finance. We can see echoes here in the titans of modern industry: Jeff Bezos and the Waltons in commerce; Tim Cook and smartphones; Mark Zuckerberg and our attention; Elon Musk in space.

But some of the most interesting echoes of the Gilded Age involve the government’s relationship to business. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family held talks to pardon a major crypto executive who had pleaded guilty to money laundering. In exchange, they would secure a stake in his company, Binance. Similarly, in the late 19th century, which was an era of unusual grift, a range of public servants—from White House Cabinet members to local deputy sheriffs—were unembarrassed about skimming fees and taking bribes.

Read: The specter of American oligarchy

To understand what made the late 19th century gilded, I spoke with Richard White, the historian and author of The Republic for Which It Stands, a mammoth history of America between the end of the Civil War and the end of the 19th century. This conversation, which originally appeared on the podcast Plain English, has been truncated and edited.

Derek Thompson: The driving of the golden spike at Promontory Point in 1869 marked the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The Gilded Age begins just after and extends into the early 1900s. How did the transcontinental rail system set the stage for the Gilded Age?

Richard White: At the end of the Civil War, the United States was a country of vast ambitions and relatively little money. What it wanted to do was build an infrastructure to connect California to the rest of the United States. It didn’t have the money to do that, so it resorted to a series of subsidies and cooperation with private capital. The railroads were the great corporations of the United States at the core of the American economy. But the railroads depended on a system of insider dealing, corruption, and stock manipulation, in which people who accrued great wealth accrued great influence over the course of the United States. This system went on to define the Gilded Age.

Thompson: In the introduction of The Republic for Which It Stands, you write: “The Gilded Age was corrupt and corruption in government and business mattered. Corruption suffused government and the economy.” How?

White: People described each other as “friends.” They weren’t friendly in any colloquial sense that we understand. Friendship in the 19th-century sense was a relationship devoid of any affection in which people pursued common ends by scratching each other’s back. The railroad businessmen were friends with politicians, friends with newspapermen, friends with bankers. It was an age of dishonest cooperation.

Thompson: There are so many incredible characters from this period of American history: Rockefeller, Carnegie, J. P. Morgan. Who was John Rockefeller, and how did his style of cooperation typify this era of corrupt monopoly?

White: Rockefeller created what became the model corporation: Standard Oil. What he wanted to do was to organize a system he saw as too competitive and wildly inefficient. Rockefeller realized that there was just too much oil. He realized that if you were going to get profit, you had to eliminate the number of refineries. So Rockefeller went to the railroads and said, “I will give you all of my oil, but you have to kick back money to me—and don’t do it for my competitors.” Competitors soon found they couldn’t compete with Rockefeller, and so he came in and bought them out. By the 1890s, he was saying, “This is a new age, an age of cooperation.” And what he called cooperation, his opponents called monopoly.

Thompson: The U.S. government protected the monopolies in several ways. Steel tariffs helped Andrew Carnegie build his business, and in exchange Carnegie fed information to politicians. The government also quashed labor when it threatened big businesses in the late 19th century. Why does the state side with the monopolies again and again in this period?

White: Very often, the people in office were corrupt. The big industrialists would tell congressmen and senators: “When this is done, you’re going to serve a term or two, then come to work for us.” Or: “I’ll loan you a few thousand dollars to invest it in this.” Or: “I got a land grant from you, and in return, I’ll use part of the land grant to kick back to you under a fake trustee.” I mean, the industrialist Cosby Huntington wrote a letter to his associates that said: “I just bought 1,000 wheels from Senator Barnum from Connecticut, because he does pretty much what I want.”

Thompson: What was it about the character of government or the rules and customs of the time that you think made the late 19th century so corrupt as far as government goes?

White: The United States was becoming a major industrial country and a continent-spanning country. At the same time, it was incredibly averse to taxes and would not fund its necessary infrastructure and services. So it came to what scholars have called “fee-based governance.” In the 19th century, to get something done, you’d subsidize a corporation to do it, and that’s one source of corruption. The other thing is you take things like collecting the tariffs: Somebody has got to collect it, and that’s why the customs house becomes one of the plum appointments you can get. The head of the customs house in New York City makes more than the president of the United States because he gets to keep a certain amount of the customs he collects. You make sheriffs and deputy marshals tax collectors, and they keep a certain proportion of the taxes. That means that there’s going to be corruption from the post office all the way up to the sheriffs, to the customs houses, to people who are appointed offices. Everywhere in this system is going to get a fee, a bounty, and opportunity, which allows private profit to perform a public service. The result is corruption that is rampant throughout the whole system.

Thompson: One paradox of this era is that it was an astonishing time for material progress and also a decrepit time for human welfare. You write that men and women in this era suffered “the decline of virtually every measure of physical well-being.”

White: By 1880, in the middle of the Gilded Age, if you lived to be 10 years old, you would die at 48, if you’re an American white male, and you would be 5 feet 5 inches tall. You would lead a briefer life and be shorter than your Revolutionary ancestor. And you were one of the lucky ones, because on average, 20 percent of infants would die before age 5. You’re living in an environment where, as America urbanizes, there’s no reliable sewage system. There’s no pure water. There’s no public health.

Thompson: What did the Gilded Age build that’s most worth remembering?

White: It began to build public infrastructure—which allowed Americans to live better and to be in better health—and transportation infrastructure. The United States, unlike Europe, is this single country without tariff barriers between states, which can use the resources of the entire country. Did we do it efficiently? No. But we did it. And in the end, it became the basic source for much of the growth that followed.

Read: The other fear of the founders

The other thing we started to do, at Edison’s lab and at the Gilded Age universities, is build a way to create useful knowledge. We’d always been a nation of tinkerers and inventors, but then we began to systematize it for the public good. The final thing, and it’s not so popular anymore, is we begin to create a set of experts and expert organizations, which begin to take that kind of knowledge and to put it to public use.

Thompson: How did the excesses of the Gilded Age set the stage for the next era of American history and government, which was the Progressive era?

White: I think that the best way to understand the Progressive era is that the Progressives saw society as a machine. You don’t let a machine evolve. You design a machine. When a machine breaks down, you repair the machine. When you can get a better machine, you build a better machine. So Progressives begin to think civil society is something which is going to have to be managed all the time.

The great advantage of Progressivism is what it did in terms of distribution and equity. But the major drawback of Progressivism, which we struggle with still today, is that in essence, it becomes undemocratic. There’s tension in a democracy between rule of experts and having a country which ostensibly is under the control of people through their votes and setting the goals. That tension appears in the Progressive era, and it has never, ever gone away.

Trump’s Tariff Plan Is Going to Hurt

The surprisingly expansive levies on imports will open up a future of high prices.

by Isabel Fattal

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

“We’re going to start being smart, and we’re going to start being very wealthy again,” President Donald Trump announced today as he laid out a plan that risks derailing America’s economy. At his “Liberation Day” event, he unveiled a 10 percent–minimum tariff on all imports, with no change for Canada and Mexico but significantly higher rates for other countries, such as China and India, that far exceeded what many economists had expected.

With today’s announcement, Trump is tariffing essentially all foreign goods. The administration says that the levies will bring in some $6 trillion, which would amount to the biggest tax hike in U.S. history. Some of the most perplexing updates are in countries where the United States has existing free-trade agreements, such as South Korea, my colleague Annie Lowrey, who covers economic policy, told me. The Trump administration claims that South Korea has a 50 percent tariff on the U.S., but it is basing its tariff estimations in part on currency manipulation and trade barriers. It hasn’t yet provided evidence confirming that such factors, insofar as they exist, are equivalent to a 50 percent tariff.

Such all-encompassing tariffs will cost each American family thousands of dollars, economists predict. Americans will likely feel the effects of this while standing in a grocery-store aisle, purchasing auto insurance, or undertaking home renovations. These levies have the potential to increase inflation and slow down the economy in the longer term, and the uncertainty of what happens next will also contribute to the confidence of shoppers and businesses. “The way that Trump does tariffs is he often makes these really big announcements and then rolls them back,” perpetually modifying the rules, as in a game of Calvinball, Annie explained. “That’s really hard if you’re a business. Should we wait this out? Are they actually going to do it?”

Given the sweeping nature of the new tariffs, Trump may have just essentially encouraged other countries to consider banding together to impose further tit-for-tat levies on the United States. The best-case scenario, Annie told me, is that after some countries threaten reciprocal tariffs, a negotiation is reached that allows Trump to feel like he has won but also “gives some certainty” to businesses and people; shoppers absorb high costs at first, but then the uncertainty declines. If Republicans realize after this whole ordeal that this level of chaos could affect their chances at reelection and opt for fewer surprises going forward, the economy could bounce back, she argued.

America’s economy is full of mixed signals right now—or at least it was, before Trump’s announcement. “If you knew nothing about it and you came in and looked at the main figures, you would say this is not an economy in a recession or anything close to it,” Annie said. The unemployment rate is fairly low, at 4.1 percent; GDP numbers are strong. But things start looking worrisome when you consider that consumer confidence is the lowest it’s been since early 2021, and that Trump’s new tariff plan won’t quell those fears. The solution for the kind of post-tariff downturn the economy might face is simple: Remove the tariffs. But the Trump administration is not likely to let them go easily, Annie noted: “We could be getting ourselves into a bad situation where we’ve taken options for improving the situation off the table.”

Related:

- Jonathan Chait: The good news about Trump’s tariffs

- The tariff man is coming for America’s entrepreneurs.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

- Wisconsin’s message for Trump

- Elon Musk lost his big bet.

- The question progressives refuse to answer

- Ashley Parker: Miscarriage and motherhood

Today’s News

1. Susan Crawford won a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, beating an opponent backed by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

2. A judge dismissed the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams and ruled that the charges can’t be brought again.

3. An extreme weather event brought flooding, heavy snow, and high winds to the central United States.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: alfalfa126 / Getty; MirageC / Getty.

The New Singlehood Stigma

By Faith Hill

Just to be clear: Today is, in many ways, the best time in American history to be single.

In the 18th century, bachelors paid higher taxes and faced harsher punishments for crimes than their betrothed counterparts. (“A Man without a Wife,” Benjamin Franklin said, “is but half a Man.”) Single women—more likely, naturally, to be seduced by the devil—were disproportionately executed for witchcraft …

Forgive me, then, if I sound ungrateful when I say this: Americans are still extremely weird about single people. But now the problem isn’t just that singlehood is disparaged; sometimes, it’s that singlehood is celebrated. Relentlessly, annoyingly celebrated.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

- David Frum: No tariff exemptions for American farmers

- Trump’s day of reckoning

- Trump’s Salvadoran gulag

- Why you should work like it’s the ’90s

- “Can I teach the First Amendment if I only have a green card?”

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Play. The new Nintendo Switch 2 is expensive, Ian Bogost writes. But what if you think of it as an appliance instead of a video-game console?

Ruff day? Take a look at these brave search-and-rescue dogs that help find people after disasters.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Cory Booker, Endurance Athlete

The New Jersey senator broke congressional records by speaking for more than 25 hours. How?

by Alex Hutchinson

The idea of politics as a sport is a familiar analogy. For a little more than 25 hours from Monday to Tuesday evening, politics left behind the metaphor and became a grueling, perhaps even dangerous, ultramarathon. Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking speech—an “oratorical marathon” and a “feat of political endurance,” according to reporters—was nearly an hour longer than Strom Thurmond’s 1957 attempt to filibuster the Civil Rights Act. The impact of Booker’s effort remains to be seen, but to judge it through a strictly political lens is to miss a grittier athletic drama—and overlook how sports science might help a future senator extend “filibusterthon” endurance even further.

Before he took to the lectern, clad in a dark suit and black sneakers, Booker announced his intention of pushing the limits of his 56-year-old body. “I’m going to go for as long as I’m physically able to go,” he said.

This is precisely the kind of challenge that animates amateur endurance athletes like me, as well as the professionals I write about as a journalist who specializes in the science of endurance. The open-ended nature of such boundary-pushing is particularly alluring. The current world record for “backyard ultras,” which involve running about four miles every hour until everyone else gives up, is 110 laps—that’s 458 miles over four and a half days. Research on these competitors has found that the physical demands of such a prolonged effort pale in comparison to the psychological toll.

Still, Booker’s speech presented some unique physiological challenges—most notably that he couldn’t yield the floor to go to the bathroom. That’s no trivial feat: In 2007, a woman died shortly after participating in an on-air “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest held by a radio station. Her problem was drinking too much. To forestall the call of nature, Booker stopped eating on Friday, and refrained from drinking on Sunday evening, a full 24 hours before he started speaking.

Scientists assess that, on average, humans can survive without water for about three days. Long before that, your kidneys will be stressed, your cognitive function will be impaired, and you may develop a headache as your brain—which is mostly water—shrinks. Just as well that Booker didn’t have to debate anyone.

Then there’s the effect on your muscles. “I’m a former athlete, so I know when you get dehydrated you get a lot cramps,” Booker, who played football for Stanford in the early 1990s, told reporters after his speech. “That was the biggest thing I was fighting, is that different muscles were really starting to cramp up, and every once in a while I’d have a spasm.” As a matter of scientific fact, the link between dehydration and muscle cramps is no longer as widely accepted as it was when Booker was in college. Instead of sipping water occasionally during his speech, he might have had better luck warding off cramps with pickle juice, which is thought to reset the nervous-system reflexes that go haywire when you cramp.

Fasting for more than four days also made Booker’s task considerably harder. Among Tour de France cyclists and other endurance athletes, the trend is to scarf down astonishingly large quantities of carbohydrates, as much as 120 grams—the equivalent of three plates of pasta—every hour while competing. Booker’s jaw muscles clearly didn’t need that much fuel, but letting blood-sugar levels drop is associated with mental fog, lightheadedness, and the risk of fainting. Strangely enough, you can counteract some of these symptoms simply by swishing sports drink in your mouth and then spitting the drink out. Just a whiff of glucose will trigger calorie sensors in your brain and make you feel better. It’s the perfect solution for future filibusterers, because it won’t make you need to pee.

Missing a night’s sleep is one element of Booker’s feat that most of us have replicated at some point in our life. That’s nothing compared with what those backyard-ultra competitors endure, but it has an effect: Researchers have famously found that staying awake for 24 hours makes you a worse driver than drinking alcohol to the legal limit. The standard advice among ultrarunners, backed by scientific findings, is that getting extra sleep in the week prior to your ordeal can help buffer some of the effects of sleep deprivation.

Even if the distance Booker covered during his event was zero miles, he still faced the considerable physical challenge of standing for more than 24 hours. Just a few hours into his speech, he had a Senate page remove his chair—to eliminate the temptation to sit down.

Although the evils of sitting all day are well known, standing all day is no picnic either. Research has found that people whose jobs require standing all day are twice as likely to develop heart disease as those who sit, and are vulnerable to a host of other ills, ranging from varicose veins to “spontaneous abortions.” And yes, muscle cramps: the most likely culprit for Booker’s spasms was muscle fatigue rather than dehydration. There’s no easy fix, but marching in place might help engage different muscles to spread the strain, along with a pair of highly cushioned supershoes.

The shoes of Senator Cory Booker, photographed while he spoke to reporters on Tuesday after surpassing the record for the longest Senate speech (Eric Lee / The New York Times / Redux)

Even if another senator optimized all of these details, could they break Booker’s new record? For an answer on that, I am persuaded by the great Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi. “Mind is everything: muscles—pieces of rubber,” he said. “All that I am, I am because of my mind.”

When he emerged from the Senate Chamber after his oratorical marathon, Booker pulled a slip of paper from his pocket. It was a passage from the Book of Isaiah: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” Anyone who wants to beat Booker will need to draw from a similar wellspring of belief and commitment. But they should probably also bring some pickle juice.

Elon Musk Lost His Big Bet

Grievance politics can only carry him so far.

by Charlie Warzel

Last night, X’s “For You” algorithm offered me up what felt like a dispatch from an alternate universe. It was a post from Elon Musk, originally published hours earlier. “This is the first time humans have been in orbit around the poles of the Earth!” he wrote. Underneath his post was a video shared by SpaceX—footage of craggy ice caps, taken by the company’s Dragon spacecraft during a private mission. Taken on its own, the video is genuinely captivating. Coming from Musk at that moment, it was also somewhat depressing.

X fed me that video just moments after it became clear that Susan Crawford, the Democratic judge Musk spent $25 million campaigning against, would handily win election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Given Musk’s heavy involvement—the centibillionaire not only campaigned in the state but also brazenly attempted to buy the election by offering to pay voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges”—the election was billed as a referendum of sorts on Musk’s own popularity. In that sense, it was a resounding defeat. Musk, normally a frenetic poster, had very little to say about politics last night, pecking out just a handful of terse messages to his 218.5 million followers. “The long con of the left is corruption of the judiciary,” he posted at 1:23 a.m. eastern time.

In the light of defeat, the SpaceX post feels like a glimpse into what could have been for Musk—a timeline where the world’s richest man wasn’t algorithmically radicalized by his own social-media platform. It’s possible that Musk’s temperament and personal politics would have always led him down this path. But it’s also easy to imagine a version where he mostly stayed out of politics, instead leaning into his companies and continuing to bolster his carefully cultivated brand of Elon Musk, King of Nerd Geniuses.

Read: The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government

Unfortunately, he surrendered fully to grievance politics. Like so many other prolific posters, he became the person his most vocal followers wanted him to be and, in the process, appears to have committed reputational suicide. Since joining President Donald Trump’s administration as DOGE’s figurehead—presiding over the quasi-legal gutting of the federal government—Musk has become not just polarizing but also genuinely unpopular in America. Now his political influence is waning, Tesla is the object of mass protest, and sales of his vehicles are cratering. This morning, only hours after his candidate lost, Trump reportedly told his inner circle and Cabinet members that Musk will be “stepping back” from his perch in the administration for a more “supporting role.” In Trumpworld, nothing’s over until it’s over, but Elon Musk seems to have overstayed his welcome. (Musk did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the White House referred me to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s post calling the report that Musk is stepping back “garbage”; Musk posted on X that the reporting is “fake news.”)

Musk’s appeal to Trump has always been about two things: money and optics. As the richest man in the world, Musk is both a cash cow and a kind of enforcer: His checkbook and closeness to Trump remind Republicans in Congress that they can and will be primaried if they break from the administration. But Musk’s reputation is just as important to Trump, who respects great wealth and clearly enjoys being shadowed and adored by a man of Musk’s perceived stature and technological acumen (although Trump is easily impressed—take, for example, “Everything’s Computer!”) Musk’s image in Silicon Valley was useful to the Trump campaign, bringing in new fanboy voters and sending a message that the administration would transform the government and run it like a lean start-up.

But although his money is still good, the Wisconsin election suggests that Musk himself is an electoral liability. A poll released today, conducted in Wisconsin by Marquette University Law School, showed that 60 percent of respondents view Musk unfavorably, and a recent Harvard/Harris poll shows that his national favorability dropped 10 points from February to March. (He now has a net favorability rating of –10 percent.) An aggregation of national polls shows that the approval rating of his DOGE efforts has also dipped dramatically: Just 39 percent of Americans approve of his work, nearly 10 points lower than in mid-February.

To many observers, it seemed inevitable from the outset that, over time, Musk would clash with, and alienate himself from, Trump, a man who does not like to share the spotlight. But behind Musk’s low favorability rating is a simple notion: Americans (including Trump supporters) are uncomfortable and resentful of an unelected mega-billionaire rooting through the government, dismantling programs and blithely musing about cutting benefit programs such as Social Security. Musk has long behaved in business as though laws and regulations don’t apply to him—a tactic that seems to backfire more easily when applied to politics. His posts, which use captions such as “Easy money in Wisconsin” to offer thinly veiled bribes to state residents for posing outside polling locations, aren’t just questionably legal; they’re blatant reminders that the world’s richest man was attempting to purchase an election.

There is also, perhaps, a creeping sensation that Musk’s efficiency hunt into the government has not yielded the examples of corruption that Trump supporters crave. During a Q&A at Musk’s rally in Wisconsin on Sunday, one attendee asked if DOGE had found any evidence that “radical left” Democrats have received money from USAID, and if so, whether Musk planned to share the evidence. Musk stammered, explaining only that USAID’s money flowed circuitously and that it was suspicious that members of Congress were so wealthy. Throughout the rally, Musk seemed more interested in role-playing as a politician, delivering “extended monologues about immigration policy, alleged fraud in the Social Security system and the future of artificial intelligence,” as The New York Times reported.

Read: Elon Musk looks desperate

Trump may be realizing that though tech products and services may be quite popular, their creators are often less appealing. (Two-thirds of Americans have an unfavorable view of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, even as billions of people around the world use his platforms.) To those outside of the techno-optimist bubble, plenty of the obsessions of the tech elite (artificial general intelligence, cryptocurrency) can come off as weird or inscrutable. “As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” Musk posted on X in the wee hours today, as if to prove the point.

Musk seems, at least outwardly, unable to reckon with his current position. Just days after framing this race as a hinge point for “the entire destiny of humanity,” Musk said on X that “I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for positional gain.” From the outside, though, it’s difficult to see what he’s gained. Last week, protesters demonstrated outside hundreds of Tesla locations; Musk has long been erratic, but his dalliance with DOGE has alienated environmentally conscious liberals, a major demographic for electric vehicles. And by seeming so focused on DOGE, he’s frustrated investors who worry that Tesla is losing its first-mover advantage in the United States. Foreign rivals, such as China’s BYD, are quickly gaining steam. Tesla’s stock price instantly rose 15 points on the reports that Musk would soon leave the administration.

There is a case to be made that Musk’s cozying up to Trump will ultimately benefit Musk’s empire—avoiding regulations that may help with Tesla’s self-driving plans or SpaceX and Starlink contracts, for example. But so many of the signs point to a less desirable outcome. Musk’s outsize support of Trump was always a political risk, but his decision to come aboard the administration and, at one time, position himself as a kind of shadow president is arguably the biggest bet of his career. In the short term, it does not appear to be paying off.

Musk woke up this morning less popular than he’s been in recent memory. He’s alienated himself from an American public that used to widely revere him, and his political capital seems to be fading rapidly. The only question now is whether, after getting a taste of the political spotlight, he’ll be able to give it up without a fight.

RFK Jr. Is Out for Revenge

The health secretary’s indiscriminate layoffs will undermine his own priorities.

by Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is finally getting his wish of sucker-punching the federal health agencies. This week, Kennedy began the process of firing some 10,000 employees working under the Health and Human Services umbrella. Even before he took office, Kennedy warned health officials that they should pack their bags, and on Tuesday, he defended the cuts: “What we’ve been doing isn’t working,” Kennedy posted on X. He is focused on “realigning HHS with its core mission: to stop the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.” But instead of improving how the federal health bureaucracy works, RFK Jr. is throwing his agencies into chaos.

The Trump administration hasn’t released details about which offices specifically were targeted, but the cuts seem to be so deep and indiscriminate that they are going to hamstring Kennedy’s own stated priorities. Kennedy has made clear that he’s singularly focused on reducing rates of chronic disease in America, but the health secretary has reportedly laid off officials in the CDC’s office tasked with that same goal. While cigarette smoking remains a leading cause of chronic disease, the top FDA official in charge of regulating tobacco is now on administrative leave, and everyone working for the CDC office that monitors tobacco use has been fired, according to the former CDC director Tom Frieden. Despite Kennedy’s promises to establish a culture of “radical transparency” at the federal agencies, he also appears to have fired the employees whom journalists and the greater public rely on to provide essential updates about the government’s actions. (In a statement, a spokesperson for HHS said that the personnel cuts were focused on “redundant or unnecessary administrative positions.”)

Kennedy, an anti-vaccine advocate, seems to have targeted more than just the most pro-vaccine voices in the government. During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy said he would “empower the scientists” as health secretary, but here are just a few of the M.D.s and Ph.D.s who were reportedly targeted yesterday: the head of the FDA’s Office of New Drugs, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, the head of the CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, the director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the director of the NIH’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, the director of the National Institute of Nursing Research, and the director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

No plan—not his MAHA agenda, not efficiency, nothing—can realistically explain cuts like these. Instead, the mass firings don’t seem to be a means to an end on the way to overhauling American health. They are an end in themselves.

It’ll take months, if not years, to fully appreciate the effect that the cuts will have on America’s scientific enterprise. The decimation at the FDA is particularly galling. Several of the agency’s top leaders charged with reviewing and approving innovative new treatments have been ushered to the exit. This is likely to lead to slower development of advancements in biomedical science; although the FDA doesn’t fund biomedical research, its leaders play a crucial role in advising pharmaceutical companies on how to conduct research and ultimately get their breakthroughs approved. America was just beginning to reap the benefits of these efforts. There are now gene therapies that can treat genetic blindness. Young children who previously would have been condemned to certain death at the hands of a rare disease, such as severe spinal muscular atrophy, now have a chance at life. The government invested in mRNA technology for decades before it was leveraged to create vaccines that saved us from a once-in-century pandemic.

One particularly dispiriting departure is that of Peter Marks, the longtime leader of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. I’d guess that, unlike me, you didn’t spend the early pandemic binge-watching scientific meetings where vaccine policy was debated. Marks was impossible to miss—a bespectacled man speaking from a bunkerlike basement, a painting of a polar bear serving tea behind him. He gets a hefty portion of credit for Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, the effort to turbocharge the development of COVID vaccines, and he came up with the moniker. His center also regulates gene therapies, stem cells, and the U.S. blood supply.

Marks reportedly resigned under pressure from Kennedy on Friday, just before mass firings hit the FDA. The two men—one, America’s top vaccine regulator and the other, its top vaccine conspiracy theorist—have a long history. In 2021, when Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization formerly chaired by Kennedy, petitioned the FDA to revoke authorization for COVID shots, Marks is the one who signed the letter denying the request. It’s reasonable to assume that Kennedy and Marks were never going to see eye to eye on vaccines. But Marks publicly insisted that he wanted to stay in his role, and that he was willing to work with Kennedy. In a resignation letter, Marks wrote that Kennedy demanded nothing short of “subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” (Marks declined to comment for this story.)

Of course, not all 10,000 people who were fired had this type of history with their new boss. But the cuts, in many ways, appear to be rooted in a similar antagonism. In his welcome address to HHS staff in February, Kennedy offered reassurance that he was not coming in with biases, and said that people should give him a chance. “Let’s start a relationship by letting go of any preconceptions that you may have about me, and let’s start from square one,” Kennedy told the crowd. “Let’s establish a mutual intention to work toward what we all care about, the health of the American people.” In firing a huge swath of his staff, Kennedy has made clear what he believes: Anyone with an HHS badge is complicit in the current system, whether or not they have anything to do with the country’s health problems. As Calley Means, a top adviser to Kennedy, said during a Politico health-care summit earlier today, the scientists who were laid off “have overseen, just demonstrably, a record of utter failure.”

Kennedy can argue all he wants that the focus of federal health agencies needs to shift more toward chronic disease. Means and other MAHA acolytes are right that, in some ways, America has gotten less healthy and federal bureaucrats haven’t done enough to solve the problem. But decimating the entire health bureaucracy in this country is not proving his point. Kennedy doesn’t look like he is setting the agencies on a productive new course. He looks like he’s just out for revenge.

Katherine J. Wu contributed reporting.

The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs

Authoritarian leaders are most dangerous when they’re popular. Wrecking the economy is unlikely to broaden Trump’s support.

by Jonathan Chait

All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.

But Trump couldn’t do the easy and obvious thing, apparently because he did not view his first term as a success. He considered it a failure, and blamed the failure on the coterie of aides, bureaucrats, and congressional allies who talked him out of his instincts, or ignored them. The second term has been Full Trump, as even his most delusional or abusive whims are translated immediately into policy without regard to democratic norms, the law, the Constitution, public opinion, or the hand-wringing of his party.

That is why Trump’s second term poses a far more dire threat to the republic than his first did. But it is also why his second term is at risk of catastrophic failure. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than Trump’s insistence on sabotaging the U.S. economy by imposing massive tariffs.

This afternoon, in an event the administration hyped as “Liberation Day,” Trump unveiled his long-teased plan to impose reciprocal trade restrictions on every country that puts up barriers to American exports. Although at least some economists would defend some kinds of tariff policies—such as those targeted at egregious trade-violating countries, or those designed to protect a handful of strategic industries—Trump has careened into an across-the-board version that will do little but raise prices and invite reprisal against American exports. As an indication of the mad-king dynamic at play, the new plan imposes a 20 percent tariff on the European Union, partly in retaliation against the bloc’s value-added tax system—even though the VAT applies equally to imports and domestic goods and is therefore not a trade barrier at all. U.S. stocks, which have fallen for weeks in anticipation of the tariffs, plunged even more sharply after Trump’s announcement.

Rogé Karma: The wild Trump theory making the rounds on Wall Street

Trump would not be the first president to encounter economic turbulence. But he might become the first one to kill off a healthy economy through an almost universally foreseeable unforced error. The best explanation for why Trump is intent on imposing tariffs is that he genuinely believes they are a source of free money supplied by residents of foreign countries, and nobody can tell him otherwise. (Tariffs are taxes on imports, which economists agree are paid mostly by domestic consumers in the form of higher prices.)

He has compounded the unavoidable damage to business confidence of any large tariff scheme by floating his intention for months while waffling over the details, paralyzing business investment. Even taken on its own terms, a successful version of Trump’s plan would require wrenching dislocations in the global economy. The United States would need to create new industries to replace the imports it is walling off, and this investment would require businesses to believe not only that Trump won’t reverse himself but also that the tariffs he imposes are likely to stay in place after January 20, 2029.

If businesses don’t believe that Trump will stick with his tariffs, the investment required to spur a domestic industrial revival won’t materialize. But if they do believe him, the markets will crash, because Trump’s tariff scheme will, by the estimation of the economists that investors listen to, produce substantially lower growth.

Probably the likeliest outcome is an in-between muddling through, with slower growth and higher inflation. Even Trump’s gestures toward sweeping tariffs have already made the economy wobble and lifted inflationary expectations. At this point, getting back to the steady growth and cooling inflation Trump inherited will require a great deal of luck.

Why didn’t anyone around Trump talk him out of this mistake? Because the second Trump administration has dedicated itself to filtering out the kinds of advisers who thwarted some of his most authoritarian first-term instincts, as well as his most economically dangerous ones. The current version of the national Republican Party, by contrast, is dedicated to the proposition recently articulated by one of Elon Musk’s baseball caps: Trump was right about everything.

In this atmosphere, questioning Trump’s instincts is seen as a form of disloyalty, and Trump has made painfully evident what awaits the disloyal. As The Washington Post reports, “Business leaders have been reluctant to publicly express concerns, say people familiar with discussions between the White House and leading companies, lest they lose their seats at the table or become a target for the president’s attacks.” Asked recently about the prospect of tariffs, House Speaker Mike Johnson revealingly said, “Look, you have to trust the president’s instincts on the economy”—a phrase containing the same kind of double meaning (have to) as Don Corleone’s offer he can’t refuse.

William J. Bernstein: No one wins a trade war

This dynamic allows Trump to do whatever he wants, no doubt to his delight. But the political consequences for his administration and his party could be ruinous. Public-opinion polling on Trump’s economic management, which has always been the floor that has held him up in the face of widespread public dislike for his character, has tumbled. This has happened without Americans feeling the full effects of his trade war. Once they start experiencing widespread higher prices and slower growth, the bottom could fall out.

A Fox News host recently lectured the audience that it should accept sacrifice for Trump’s tariffs just as the country would sacrifice to win a war. Hard-core Trump fanatics may subscribe to this reasoning, but the crucial bloc of persuadable voters who approved of Trump because they saw him as a business genius are unlikely to follow along. They don’t see a trade war as necessary. Two decades ago, public opinion was roughly balanced between seeing foreign trade as a threat and an opportunity. Today, more than four-fifths of Americans see foreign trade as an opportunity, against a mere 14 percent who see it, like Trump does, as a threat.

As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way point out, “Authoritarian leaders do the most damage when they enjoy broad public support.” Dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez have shown that power grabs are easier to pull off when the public is behind your agenda. Trump’s support, however, is already teetering. The more unpopular he becomes, the less his allies and his targets believe he will keep his boot on the opposition’s neck forever, and the less likely they will be to comply with his demands.

The Republican Party’s descent into an authoritarian personality cult poses a mortal threat to American democracy. But it is also the thing that might save it.

Trump’s Day of Reckoning

The president’s allies are privately acknowledging that he is in a rough stretch.

by Jonathan Lemire

Updated at 8:25 p.m. ET on April 2, 2025

President Donald Trump said he pushed his so-called Liberation Day from yesterday to today to avoid April Fool’s Day—“because then nobody would believe what I said.” Now, instead of falling on a date devoted to pranks, Trump’s announcement about a new wave of reciprocal tariffs comes at a moment when his White House is facing a sobering reality.

Last night, Republicans took a double-digit loss in a closely watched Wisconsin election—a campaign that became a referendum on top Trump adviser Elon Musk—and had to sweat out wins in a pair of deep-red Florida House districts. The first major scandal of Trump’s second term, his team’s use of Signal to discuss sensitive military attack plans, could spawn an independent investigation. Some influential MAGA luminaries and immigration hawks have begun to criticize the administration’s deportation tactics for lacking due process. Consumer prices aren’t falling, but the stock market sure is. And as Trump moves to escalate his trade war, fears of a recession are rising.

For the first time since Trump reclaimed the White House, some of his close allies and aides are privately acknowledging that a president who returned to office after a historic political comeback has been knocked off his stride. They admit that the past two weeks—particularly the Signal scandal, which has led some congressional Republicans to defy Trump and demand a probe—have been the most challenging of his term.

For months now, Trump has tried very hard to make “Liberation Day” a thing. Soon after his January swearing-in, he christened the day as the moment when he would enact reciprocal tariffs on major trading partners, particularly those that contribute the most to the $1.2 trillion U.S. trade deficit. He first eyed holding the day in February but pushed back the implementation of the levies to April 1—the date by which he ordered the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department to complete studies on what the policies might look like in practice—before nudging it one more day.

Read: Wisconsin’s message for Trump

At 7:06 eastern time this morning, Trump saluted the occasion on Truth Social: “IT’S LIBERATION DAY IN AMERICA!” But the more telling post had come six hours earlier, at nearly 1 a.m. EST. Trump advisers have long told me that the clearest revelations about the president’s frustrations and insecurities come late at night, when he is alone with his phone. In this case, his anger was directed at four fellow Republicans—Senators Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul—who he said were being “extremely difficult to deal with and unbelievably disloyal” by opposing tariffs on Canada. “What is wrong with them, other than suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, commonly known as TDS?” Trump wrote.

Trump, used to tightly controlling the GOP during partisan fights, was furious that he was not getting a united Republican front for his prized tariffs, two White House officials and a close outside ally told me, granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

While those four Republicans have gone public with their misgivings about the tariffs, many others have quietly expressed concerns to colleagues and reporters, or tried to lobby the White House for carve-outs that would spare their state’s constituents or favored industries. Business leaders who thought Trump was largely bluffing with his trade-war talk (the tariffs in his first term ended up being milder than expected) have also tried to lobby the president or Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to ease up, the White House officials told me.

Trump has vacillated on the size and targets of the tariffs—they were still being settled in the hours before the Rose Garden announcement, one of the White House officials confirmed to me—but never on whether to impose them. Trump assigns outsize weight to the stock market when judging the nation’s economy, but even tumbles on Wall Street have not dissuaded him. Trump possesses few consistent political ideologies but has promoted tariffs since the 1980s as a means to reduce trade deficits and spur U.S. manufacturing, and he has dismissed economists’ warnings that they would drive up prices for Americans and potentially stagnate the nation’s economy.

Read: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans

“Republicans are crashing the American economy in real time and driving us to a recession. This is not Liberation Day; it’s Recession Day,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters in the Capitol today.

The pushback to his tariffs has not been the only source of ire for Trump during a sudden eruption of negative headlines. Democrats seized on the results in three off-year elections yesterday, held just 70 days into Trump’s term. Although Republicans won both special elections to fill vacant Florida congressional seats, both winning candidates earned about 20 percent fewer votes than Trump did in those same districts in November. Of note: In the ruby-red Florida panhandle, Escambia County went Democratic for the first time in any national election since 1992—a result, many political observers have said, of the Trump administration’s cuts to Veterans Affairs programs in a region with many military families.

The face of those cuts, of course, is Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has chainsawed its way through the federal bureaucracy on Trump’s orders. And Musk—whose personal poll numbers have been cratering along with Tesla’s stock—received much of the blame for the outcome of yesterday’s Wisconsin state-supreme-court election. The world’s richest man threw himself into the race with his time and fortune, declaring that “humanity’s destiny rests” on the outcome. Despite the lofty stakes, Musk’s preferred candidate lost by 10 points.

Some in Trump’s orbit hope that the loss might represent the beginning of the end of Musk’s influence. For weeks, Republicans in Congress have quietly complained to the White House that Musk’s often indiscriminate cuts are making them the target of voter anger. Cabinet secretaries’ complaints also led Trump to somewhat rein in his billionaire aide. Trump has told advisers in recent days that Musk will begin winding down his time in the White House in the weeks ahead, likely when his 130-day window as a “special government employee” runs out at the end of next month, according to the two White House officials.

“Musk’s ‘sell by date’ is rapidly approaching,” the outside ally wrote to me. “He was a heat shield for a time. Now he’s a heat source.”

Read: Is DOGE losing steam?

Trump has at times chafed at Musk’s more politically incendiary comments, such as his declaration that Social Security is “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” But the president, according to the two White House officials, has told advisers that—at least for now—he plans to have Musk remain in his orbit even after he leaves the administration.

Trump has recently taken to phoning allies late at night to complain about a series of negative stories, according to the outside ally and another person who has received such calls. He remains angry at National Security Adviser Mike Waltz for inadvertently adding Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, to a Signal chat about attack plans to strike Houthi rebels in Yemen. He has resisted firing Waltz so as not to be seen as giving in to the media, though he has fumed about Waltz having Goldberg’s number in his phone. Having pledged to bring a quick end to wars in both the Middle East and Ukraine, Trump has watched as a cease-fire in Gaza has been shattered and as Vladimir Putin has refused to agree to American terms to bring a temporary halt to the fighting in Europe. And although Trump has delighted in the showy deportations of alleged gang members to a notorious El Salvador prison, he was annoyed that friendly media voices including Joe Rogan questioned a lack of due process, and that the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter openly balked at the arrest of a Columbia University graduate student who led pro-Palestine protests.

Asked whether the White House was concerned that Trump’s political momentum might be stalling, Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary, told me in a statement: “President Trump has accomplished more in 72 days than any president in four years” and that he is “just getting started—there’s more work to do to clean up the crises of the incompetent Biden-Harris Administration.”

But the administration is clearly hoping that Liberation Day will reset the political narrative.

Trump has “spent a lot of political capital in his first 100 days, but Republicans will see it as a good investment if he can ultimately deliver on tax cuts and deficit reductions,” Alex Conant, a GOP strategist who worked in President George W. Bush’s White House and on then-Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, told me. “But recessions and inflation are politically devastating for any president. Trump is risking both with his trade wars, so it’s understandably making his allies extremely nervous.”

In a tacit acknowledgment of the skepticism the tariffs are generating, the White House pushed back the Rose Garden event from early afternoon until after the markets had closed.

A New Kart-Racing Appliance

Nintendo announces the Switch 2, a device for piloting go-karts.

by Ian Bogost

If your virtual kart-racing life was missing something, you’re in luck. Nintendo, the Japanese electronics manufacturer, announced its new Mario Kart appliance today. The Switch 2, which can be used handheld or connected to a television, allows players to race go-karts piloted by characters from the company’s entertainment franchises: Mario, Yoshi, Princess Peach.

The karting games that ran on previous appliances allowed racers to compete on only a series of discrete tracks. But the updated hardware allows for something else: Mario Kart World, as the new software is called, presents its users with the tantalizing prospect of a digital commute. Racers may now convey from one track to the next through a large and continuous simulated world. This new capacity will unlock other new ways to kart, among them 1980s-style arcade racing and more contemporary, open-world kart tourism.

Longtime kart racers will surely celebrate the opportunity to kart anew. Someone who might have played Mario Kart 8—the previous fully original home release in the franchise—in 2014, when they were 12, has now graduated college. In the gaps between soul-crushing weeks at an investment bank or a management consultancy, karting sons and daughters who became karting adults might sneak in a nostalgic trip or race with their aging parents or once-baby siblings, now adolescents.

To facilitate the process, Nintendo has finally improved its online kart-racing infrastructure. Its competitors Sony and Microsoft, whose entertainment appliances mostly facilitate simulated sports or ritualistic arena murder, have allowed players to connect by voice or even video while playing, both to coordinate matches and to issue racist or homophobic taunts. The Switch 2 finally adds this capacity to kart racing, deployed via a “C” (“Cart”? No, “Chat”) button on its controllers.

Read: Video games are better without stories

All of this kart racing comes at a hefty price: $450 for the appliance itself, or $500 for the device bundled with the Mario Kart software. Those who would choose to forgo the bundle in favor of purchasing inscrutably updated rehashes of previous works, such as embarrassing fantasy-adventure games and insipid party titles, will have to hand over $80 for Mario Kart World if they choose to add it later. That might put kart-based home entertainment out of reach for many Americans. But others will surely see the value in the Switch 2, given the appeal and frequency of these karting delights.

Games such as Mario Kart World will be delivered on cartridges matching the size and shape of those from the previous appliance. Those carts may not contain software, instead acting as dummy keys that will unlock a probably time-consuming download. In exchange for this inconvenience, players will be able to “gameshare” some software titles with up to four friends, allowing the games to trickle down, Reaganomics-style, from the wealthy to the aspirant underclasses (though even these paupers will apparently still have to pay for a separate Nintendo Switch Online subscription to voice- or videochat with their game-giving overlords). But not Mario Kart World, which is ineligible for gameshare. All citizens must purchase their own access to karting.

Read: The quiet revolution of Animal Crossing

Nintendo has also updated the guts of the Switch 2 kart appliance. It will finally be capable of using the entire 4K resolution of the televisions that were being sold back when your college graduate was still 12. Note that the appliance itself features an LCD screen rather than the rich OLED displays that have been commonplace in smartphones for the past decade or so.

Nintendo has also failed to heed the lessons from its previous Mario Kart appliance. That device, the Switch, featured finicky, removable Joy-Con kart-racing controllers. Inevitably, kart-racing fanciers elected to pay exorbitant prices for traditional, add-on controllers instead. A new version of those controllers is also on offer for the Switch 2, requiring a new investment of $80 each for a racing tether that features the new “C” button.

Will this new kart chaos be worthwhile? Emphatically yes. I spent $1,600 on a new washer-dryer this year, and I use it only once a week, whereas I kart (or long to kart) far more often. Similarly, a good countertop air fryer might cost hundreds of dollars; why not a karting appliance too? And like an air fryer, which can toast and roast in addition to convection bake, the Switch 2 Mario Kart appliance is also capable of supporting other Nintendo-crafted experiences, such as an ape-oriented romp game announced today and, perhaps eventually, attempts to rehabilitate the non-karting titles from which the Mario character and his kindred had been mercifully liberated.

Introducing: <em>The David Frum Show</em>

<em>The Atlantic</em> is launching a new weekly show, hosted by staff writer David Frum.

by David Frum

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

A recent infographic published by Media Matters depicted America’s political-podcast space as dominated by extremist voices, mostly far-right, a few far-left.

Yet most of us are levelheaded people. Most of us want insights, not insults. We want to invest our time to feel smarter, not angrier. We want to renew our ideals and remember together that America’s democracy has always proved stronger than its enemies and doubters.

On April 9, The Atlantic and I will launch a new video podcast called The David Frum Show. It will post every Wednesday, on YouTube and anywhere you listen to podcasts, with eminent guests from the worlds not only of politics, but of economics, medicine, and history. I hope every viewer and listener will find that the show offers the most informed and entertaining conversations of the day—sparkled with enough humor to brighten these dark times.

In today’s media, truth is often hard to find. Lies are everywhere—and too often for free. I hope all who seek something better will feel the warmth of welcome at The David Frum Show.

Watch the teaser here:

(Video photo credits: Robert Alexander / Getty; Tami Chappell / AFP / Getty; Leonardo Munoz / AFP / Getty; Jeremy Hogan / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty; Bob Grannis / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Drew Angerer / AFP / Getty; J. Countess / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty)

Wisconsin’s Message for Trump

Elon Musk has become a political boat anchor.

by Charles Sykes

There is a temptation to overhype or read too much into the results of off-year elections. In this case, I suggest we succumb.

Yesterday, Wisconsin voters exposed, humiliated, and decisively rejected the world’s richest man. And they sent a stark message to Republicans in Washington.

On Sunday, when Elon Musk parachuted in for a rally that featured $1 million checks for voters, he described the race for state supreme court here in apocalyptic terms. Tuesday’s vote, he declared, would determine which party controlled the House of Representatives, presumably because of the court’s role in redistricting. “That is why it is so significant,” he said. “And whichever party controls the House, you know, it, to a significant degree, controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization. So it’s like, I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will. Yeah. So it’s a super big deal.”

Yesterday’s result—a decisive victory for liberal Susan Crawford over conservative Brad Schimel—was, indeed, a super big deal. Not just for Democrats, who desperately needed this kind of win, but for Musk himself. By inserting himself into the Wisconsin race, Musk, the billionaire who has become a top adviser to President Donald Trump, had hoped to cement his status as MAGA enforcer and kingmaker. Instead, he provided Republicans with graphic evidence that he has become a political boat anchor. Late last night, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board fretted: “The MAGA majority may have a shorter run than advertised.”

John Hendrickson: Musk is still paying for political influence

It was a message that jittery Republicans in Congress are not likely to miss. As for Trump himself, he notoriously hates both losing and losers.

The stakes for Wisconsin in yesterday’s election were huge. The outcome of the judicial race would affect everything including abortion rights, gerrymandering, and public-employee bargaining rights. But along the way, Musk turned the race into a referendum on himself and the president.

Conservative groups flooded the state with literature featuring Schimel cheek by jowl with Trump, whose picture was … everywhere. Musk hoped to turn out low-propensity Trump voters by convincing them that Trump was, in effect, on the ballot. Musk and his allies hammered the message over and over in mailers: “Schimel will support President Trump’s agenda!” “President Donald Trump needs your vote. Stop the radical liberal takeover.” “Together, we won the White House. Now it’s time to win the courthouse!”

In the end, it all backfired, and the election wasn’t close. In a state where many elections are decided by razor-thin margins and where Trump won only narrowly in November, Musk’s conservative candidate was shellacked. Democrats turned out in massive numbers, and Schimel failed to hit the targets he needed. The suburban vote continued a leftward shift.

Jonathan Lemire: Elon Musk is president

As she claimed victory, Crawford gave a shout-out to Musk. “Growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I would be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin,” she said. “And we won.”

The timing of Crawford’s win is important. Wisconsin’s vote came amid stories about Musk’s assault on Social Security and circulating reports about massive cuts to public-health agencies, just a week after The Atlantic’s reporting on the Signal security breach, and just before Trump’s expected announcement about huge new tariffs.

At the rally on Sunday, Musk—who has become one of the loudest voices on the right calling for the impeachment of federal judges who rule against Trump—bounced onto a stage in Green Bay wearing a cheesehead and brandishing million-dollar checks. How would this play in the swingiest of swing states? we all wondered. How popular was Musk? How did voters feel about Trump’s shock-and-awe agenda?

Wisconsin voters have given their answer. They delivered a grim verdict on Musk’s chainsawing of government and his crude attempt to buy their state’s high court.

Search-and-Rescue Dogs at Work

- Alan Taylor

- April 2, 2025

- 22 Photos

- In Focus

When search-and-rescue teams deploy to any of the numerous natural or man-made disasters around the world, they bring along their own teams of highly trained dogs to help discover victims in need. When these dogs are not in the field, they frequently take part in training sessions simulating events such as earthquakes, wildfires, and water or avalanche rescues. Gathered below are images of some of these rescue dogs and their handlers, on the job and in training, from the past several years.

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- Rescuers use a sniffer dog during a search operation at the ruins of a building collapsed after an earthquake in Mamuju, West Sulawesi, Indonesia, on January 18, 2021. #

Daeng Mansur / AP

- Lek, a golden retriever from the Thai K9 Rescue unit, is brought to comfort people waiting for news of missing loved ones at the site of an under-construction building collapse in Bangkok, Thailand, on April 1, 2025, four days after an earthquake struck central Myanmar and Thailand. #

Lillian Suwanrumpha / AFP / Getty

- A volunteer with the Italian School of Rescue Dogs (La Scuola Italiana Cani Salvataggio) jumps with a dog during a water-rescue training session at Averno Lake in Pozzuoli, Italy, on October 24, 2024. #

Vincenzo Izzo / Sipa USA / Reuters

- Rescuers deploy a sniffing dog to search for survivors, as dozens of people are believed to have been trapped in the rubble of a collapsed high-rise building that was still under construction, after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck neighboring country Myanmar, in Bangkok, Thailand, on March 29, 2025. #

Daniel Ceng / Anadolu / Getty

- Workers pull a rescue dog across a river at the site of a landslide in the village of Xinmo, Mao County, Sichuan province, China, on June 25, 2017. #

An Yuan / CNS / Reuters

- A search-and-rescue worker, looking for Camp Fire victims, carries Susie Q to safety after the sniffer dog fell through rubble at the Holly Hills Mobile Estates on November 14, 2018, in Paradise, California. #

Noah Berger / AP

- Tullla, a four-year-old Labrador, gets a bath after working in the Pacific Palisades on January 17, 2025. Search-and-rescue dogs from the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation were deployed to assist after wildfires decimated parts of California. #

Megan Smith / USA Today Network / Reuters

- A search-and-rescue dog named Maca, with the Turkish Gendarmerie General Command, takes part in skydiving training at Sivrihisar Aviation Center in the Sivrihisar district of Eskişehir, Turkey, on October 12, 2023. #

Cem Genco / Anadolu / Getty

- A closer view of search-and-rescue dog Maca, wearing protective gear and a video camera during training, at Turkey’s Sivrihisar Aviation Center on October 12, 2023 #

Cem Genco / Anadolu / Getty

- Search-and-rescue dogs take part in a training session in Ankara, Turkey, on January 9, 2024. #

Omer Taha Cetin / Anadolu / Getty

- Disaster-response workers with a sniffer dog conduct a search operation after a child reportedly fell into a stormwater drain following heavy rainfall at Jyoti Nagar in Guwahati, India, on July 5, 2024. #

Pitamber Newar / ANI / Reuters

- A monument to a rescue dog named Proteo is unveiled at Marte Military Field, in Mexico City, on September 21, 2023. Proteo, one of the search-and-rescue dogs deployed to Turkey with a team from Mexico to help to find victims of the 2023 earthquake, died while on the job, after finding at least two trapped people. #

Luis Barron / Eyepix Group / Future Publishing / Getty

- An avalanche dog takes part in a search-and-rescue exercise for avalanche victims at the French Alps ski resort of La Rosiere, France, on February 4, 2025. #

Olivier Chassignole / AFP / Getty

- A member of the Mexican navy kneels beside a rescue dog after an earthquake struck on the southern coast of Mexico in Juchitan, Mexico, on September 10, 2017. #

Edgard Garrido / Reuters

- A sniffer dog swims through mud and debris during a search for the remaining victim of a flash flood in Hildale, Utah, on September 17, 2015. #

Rick Bowmer / AP

- A rescuer with a dog inspects the rubble of a building following a Russian drone attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on March 29, 2025. #

Sergey Bobok / AFP / Getty

- A trainer pets one of the search-and-rescue dogs that are helping to train other dogs in Ankara, Turkey, on January 9, 2024. #

Omer Taha Cetin / Anadolu / Getty

- A search-and-rescue dog takes part in a water-rescue training session in Ankara, Turkey, on November 19, 2024. #

Mehmet Ali Ozcan / Anadolu / Getty

- A search-and-rescue dog works in debris left after the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, on November 16, 2018. #

John Locher / AP

- A rescue worker and his search dog prepare to be lifted in the bucket of an excavator, searching for survivors at the site of a deadly explosion that destroyed the Hotel Saratoga in Old Havana, Cuba, on May 8, 2022. #

Ismael Francisco / AP

- A member of an all-female group of canine rescuers from the Italian School of Rescue Dogs (La Scuola Italiana Cani Salvataggio) attends a training session with her dog before patrolling the beach to ensure swimmers can enjoy their time at the sea in safety, in Riva dei Tarquini, near Rome, Italy, on August 25, 2020. #

Guglielmo Mangiapane / Reuters

- A volunteer firefighter hugs a dog during the search for victims of an eruption of the Fuego Volcano in Alotenango, a municipality in Sacatepequez Department, Guatemala, on June 6, 2018. #

Orlando Estrada / AFP / Getty

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Trump’s Salvadoran Gulag

To be deported, one does not need to be a drug dealer or a terrorist; apparently, having tattoos and being Venezuelan is enough.

by Adam Serwer

One thing that could be said about many—and possibly all—of the more than 100 men removed from the United States by the Trump administration under the archaic Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is that Donald Trump has been convicted of more crimes than they have.

Trump, after all, was convicted of 34 felony counts by a jury of his peers in New York City for faking business records in order to cover up his hush-money payment to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels in 2016. His administration has acknowledged in court that many of the men deported to a gulag in El Salvador “do not have criminal records in the United States.” Many appear to not have criminal records elsewhere either.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and his advisers loudly declared that they would engage in a “mass deportation” of undocumented criminals. Many Americans heard criminals and seem to have assumed that innocent people would not be targeted. But the reality of Trump’s immigration project is that a “criminal” is anyone the administration wants to deport, regardless of whether they have committed a crime. There’s been no earnest attempt to prove that these people did anything wrong; no deference to the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees that no “person” can be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Its protections are supposed to restrain the government and do not solely apply to citizens. Even so, immigration law is extraordinarily deferential to the federal government when it comes to these kinds of deportations—so deferential that if the Trump administration had solid evidence of gang involvement, deporting these men through a more routine process could have been straightforward.

Read: An ‘administrative error’ sends a Maryland father to a Salvadorean prison

ICE rounded these men up in early March, and then put them on a plane to the Central American nation, alleging that they were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. The men were then imprisoned in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a prison infamous for reported human-rights violations including, allegedly, torture. The ACLU and Democracy Forward filed a challenge on behalf of five of the men shortly after they were apprehended, and managed to secure a judicial order preventing them from being removed from the United States, which the Trump administration seems to have defied.

So far, the Trump administration has provided only weak evidence that any of the men condemned to a foreign prison notorious for human-rights violations were guilty of anything. The administration’s defense of its actions, according to the declaration made by an ICE official, Robert Cerna, is that “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.” In other words, the lack of evidence against these men is just further proof that they’re guilty.

Relatives of several of the deportees have insisted that these men have no gang affiliation, and say some of them fled Venezuela specifically because they were threatened by the exact gang they are now supposedly a member of. One of the deportees, Andry Hernandez, is an asylum seeker and a makeup artist who was tagged by ICE as a “gang member” because of two tattoos of crowns with the words mom and dad underneath them. An expert on Tren De Aragua told The New Yorker that “Tren de Aragua does not use any tattoos as a form of gang identification; no Venezuelan gang does.” In response to public outcry over Hernandez’s deportation, the Department of Homeland Security has insisted that Hernandez’s “social media indicates he is a member of Tren de Aragua.” If the government has such evidence, it hasn’t filed it in court. According to Hernandez’s attorney, the tattoos are “the only basis of the government’s assertion, in its filing, that he is connected to Tren de Aragua.”

To be deported by Trump, one does not need to be a drug dealer or a terrorist; apparently, having tattoos and being Venezuelan is enough. Another deportee, the Miami Herald reported, is Frengel Reyes Mota, who fled political instability in Venezuela and was pursuing an asylum case when he was apprehended at his regular ICE check-in. He may have been mistaken for someone else; he seems to have followed all the rules, and still that did not spare him.

As it flouts due process, the administration is also trying to invoke the state-secrets privilege—a legal rule that allows presidents to withhold evidence whose disclosure could harm national security—to keep the courts from intervening so that it can continue to imprison men in an overseas gulag indefinitely.

Read: The ultimate Trump story

“Even if the [Alien Enemies Act] could be used against the gang during peacetime, there must be an opportunity for individuals to contest that they are, in fact, members of the gang,” Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney litigating the case, told me. If no such opportunity exists, “it means that anybody could end up at an El Salvadoran prison for the rest of their lives, citizen or a noncitizen, that’s not a member of the gang.” He added, “The stakes could not be any higher.”

Despite the absence of evidence, the administration continues to refer to these men publicly as “gang members” and “terrorists,” and they have become fodder for Trumpist propaganda. Last week, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem filmed a depraved video with the prison as her background, advertising the Trump administration’s willingness to deport people overseas to be tortured by the bureaucracy of a strongman whose own government the American authorities have said is affiliated with organized crime. (Nor is it even clearly the case that the men in the video are those recently deported. Noah Bullock, the executive director of the human-rights group Cristosal, noted in Foreign Policy that “the middle-aged faces and full-body tattoos that appear in the footage from the megaprison suggest that they are gang members who have likely been in prison since well before the state of exception began.”)

As long as the Trump administration gets to look tough, it does not seem to care if the people it is hurting are guilty of nothing more than thinking America, the land of the free, would be a good place to start over. Inherent in this propaganda effort is a grim assumption about the character of the American people—that they will not only fall for this agitprop but see the abuse of innocent people as praiseworthy.

The power the Trump administration is claiming in this matter is incredibly broad, and rooted in a distortion of the already broad Alien Enemies Act. When the act’s 18th-century writers described “war” and “invasion,” they meant these terms literally, but the Trump administration is interpreting them metaphorically to apply to illegal border crossings.

“The president has ample authority under immigration law to deport members of violent criminal gangs, so there’s absolutely no need to abuse an inapplicable wartime authority,” Liza Goitein, a legal expert with the left-leaning Brennan Center, told me. “Trump’s invocation of the law is basically an illegal power grab, because we are not at war with Venezuela. Tren de Aragua is not the government of Venezuela. There has been no armed attack on the United States, which is what the term invasion means in the law. The legislative history and, frankly, the text of the statute are very, very clear that they were referring to actual hostilities, an act of war by a political entity.”

For now, the administration is targeting only Venezuelans, but it might sweep in other groups eventually. Because the text of the Alien Enemies Act refers to any “native” of an enemy power, it could theoretically cover not just undocumented immigrants but documented ones who share the ethnicity of members of an organization Trump has decided the U.S. is “at war” with. “Every ethnic group, every religious group, in this country has been associated with some criminal organization at some point,” Gelernt pointed out.

Although the Alien Enemies Act does not apply to American citizens, without due process, a citizen could be mistakenly deported to El Salvador, held indefinitely, and reliant on the same administration that deported them to realize the error and decide to retrieve them. As my colleague Nick Miroff reported, the Trump administration has already made one grievous mistake, admitting that it sent Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man, to CECOT because of an “administrative error.” Despite that, it seems in no rush to get him back, telling a federal court that it was powerless to order him returned. In a post on X, Vice President J. D. Vance called Garcia “a convicted MS-13 gang member,” a false claim meant to justify deserting Garcia in a foreign prison based on a mistake.

Trump is seemingly intrigued by the possibility of sending American citizens to El Salvador’s gulag, having said, “If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat.” He also posted recently on his social network, Truth Social, that Tesla-dealership vandals might be sent to “the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions.”

Read: Emergency powers are about to be tested

In effect, the Trump administration has asserted the sort of broad, unreviewable power that the George W. Bush administration asserted in detaining so-called enemy combatants in the War on Terror. But the process here seems to be even more capricious; those being deported are not being given access to counsel, nor are they being tried for any offenses, and the Trump administration seems far more indifferent to whether those detained are remotely connected to any crime. Although the ACLU is fighting their deportation, according to Gelernt, their clients in El Salvador are being held entirely incommunicado.

Beyond the fact that we have more evidence that Trump is a criminal than any of the men deported, we also have more evidence that the government of El Salvador is affiliated with gangs than we do of the men deported. In 2021, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned members of El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s administration, who had been allegedly covertly meeting with gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha 13, and negotiated an agreement with “gang leadership” to “provide political support to the Nuevas Ideas political party in upcoming elections.” So the Trump administration is deporting people not only to an overseas gulag but into the custody of a government that, according to both the Justice and Treasury Departments, is allegedly affiliated with the very gangs the administration is purporting to fight. Another way of looking at this is that the Trump administration is, by its conspiracy with the government of El Salvador, itself collaborating with foreign criminal organizations.

Perhaps some Americans who thought that Trump would deport only criminals are watching the news and telling themselves that the president must know what he’s doing; the deportees must be gang members or terrorists, just as the president says. But that’s nothing more than a comforting fiction, the sort common to authoritarian regimes where admitting fallibility is forbidden. They’d say the same thing about anyone, and those false claims would be amplified to deafening volume by the same right-wing propaganda machine that helped bring Trump to power in the first place. Who these men in El Salvador actually are and what they’ve actually done is irrelevant. All that matters is that to Trump, they look the part.

Why You Should Work Like It’s the ’90s

When you leave the office for the day, really leave.

by Chris Moody

One Friday afternoon 10 years ago, Andrew Heaton, then a cable-news writer, joined his colleagues for a meeting. The show’s producer asked the staff to keep an eye on their email over the weekend in case they needed to cover a breaking news event. No one seemed to mind—working full days in person while remaining on call in the evening and on weekends has always been a standard practice in the news business—but Heaton had a simple request.

He said he would be happy to go in but asked if his boss could call him on the phone instead of emailing him. He didn’t want to spend his time off continually monitoring his inbox for a message that might not even come.

“It would have been just me, tethered to my phone all weekend, checking email for no purpose,” Heaton, who now hosts a political podcast, told me. “I think it’s a very valid request that you just call me so I don’t have to dedicate 10 percent of my brain to this job forever.”

His boss agreed. The big news never materialized.

Heaton was onto something. In the United States, employees work more hours than those in many other rich nations. As more white-collar employers require their staff to be in the office full-time again, workers have the right to demand something in exchange: a return to the norms of the 1990s, before smartphones made everyone instantly reachable. (Bosses, of course, have the right to say no to all this.)

Read: Life really is better without the internet

I’m aware that offices in that era were not perfect—satires such as Office Space and Fight Club brilliantly mined the hopelessness of cubicle life then. But at least Lumbergh couldn’t ask about your TPS reports while you were in your home bathroom. Smartphones have created a culture in which Americans are constantly at work in one form or another, even when they’re at home. And it is stressing people out. A 2016 study found that the mere expectation of unread email can cause stress and emotional exhaustion. The presumption that workers should respond to email at any time, the study’s authors concluded, “contributes to experience of work overload” because it inhibits employees’ “ability to psychologically detach from work-related issues.”

For most of my career, I measured an embarrassing level of self-worth through my job. I spent years as a political correspondent obsessing over work at all hours, even in the middle of the night, when I routinely answered emails and made story edits in the dark between bouts of sleep. Jonathan Malesic, the author of The End of Burnout, told me that work defines many people. “We just can’t imagine that a person is worth something if we aren’t working,” Malesic said. “You’re anxious about your worth. And the only way you know how to prove it is you’re working all the time. As soon as you’re not, your value is in question.”

I have recently gone to great lengths to draw a line between home and work. Two years ago, my family and I disconnected the internet from our house. I recently traded my smartphone for a flip phone. As much as possible, my work as a writer and university instructor is completed at the workplace, and my attention is on my family while I’m at home, a balance I was never able to achieve before we disconnected. I still bring some work home with me—papers to grade, books to review, articles to write—but I’m not constantly checking whether someone is trying to contact me. My employer knows my landline number and can call if needed.

Though the always-on work culture has existed in many companies and industries since the advent of BlackBerries and iPhones, the expectation to be reachable at all times was solidified during the coronavirus pandemic, when millions of Americans worked from their couches, relying on communication apps such as Zoom, Slack, and email. The pandemic era also made the workday looser, which allowed people to complete tasks while attending to home or family needs but meant that working hours could begin early in the day or extend late into the night.

For millions of people, those days of flexible work are ending. Many corporations and organizations, including the nation’s largest employer, the federal government, are winding down or ending remote work. McKinsey & Company reported that in 2024, the number of people working at least four days a week from an office had doubled to 68 percent, from 34 percent a year earlier. Disney, Amazon, and JP Morgan Chase have called employees back to their desks over the past few years. As in-person attendance again becomes the norm, workers risk having the worst of both worlds: the requirement that they give their days fully to the office and remain available to their bosses from home on nights and weekends.

You might not be able to go completely MIA after the daily 9 to 5. But you can insist that anyone who wants to reach you after-hours make a telephone call. Let your supervisor ring you at 7:45 p.m. and hear your frazzled tone as you balance your phone on your shoulder while trying to give your unruly kids a bath. Let your boss hear the clanking of silverware on dishes when he interrupts dinner with your roommates. Employers should stop pretending that doing business at all hours isn’t an imposition on employees, even if it is sometimes a necessary one. Let the person delivering the message bear some of the cost, too.

Arthur C. Brooks: How to break a phone addiction

Before smartphones, leaving the office at the end of the day and enjoying your life without the fear of interruption wasn’t radical; it was typical. And setting boundaries against after-hours intrusions has precedent today as well. In 2016, the French government adopted a “right to disconnect” law that allows workers the freedom to not respond to messages from employers outside of established working hours. Ireland, Belgium, Australia, and other nations have instituted similar restrictions. Last year, state legislators in California and New Jersey proposed their own bills.

But the U.S. federal government is unlikely to pass this sort of legislation, and many American workers may struggle to set clear boundaries on their own. Sarah Jaffe, the author of Work Won’t Love You Back, told me she was skeptical about whether our nation’s workers would ever feel comfortable enough to stand up for themselves like this. “Most employers are not going to go for it,” Jaffe said. “They like to be able to call you at any point in time to lengthen your workday indefinitely.”

As much as many Americans complain about their relationship to work, Malesic told me, we don’t do much about it when it comes to the types of leaders we elect or the labor protections we demand. “If Americans were really as upset about our working lives as we claim, I think our politics would look a lot different,” he said. “People complain about their job invading their life all the time,” but many, for instance, “show very little interest in electing pro-union politicians.”

I know that protecting evenings and weekends can be easier said than done. And doing so might be near impossible for people whose work requires them to be instantly reachable, such as first responders or others in the business of saving lives. But other workers, when they’re done for the day, should be able to power down those Slack and email notifications. When they cross the threshold of their office doors, they should feel free to exit mentally as well as physically. If companies want employees to work like it’s the ’90s, then they should work like it’s the ’90s.

The New Singlehood Stigma

Society tells us we should have a partner—but we shouldn’t <em>want</em> one.

by Faith Hill

Just to be clear: Today is, in many ways, the best time in American history to be single.

In the 18th century, bachelors paid higher taxes and faced harsher punishments for crimes than their betrothed counterparts. (“A Man without a Wife,” Benjamin Franklin said, “is but half a Man.”) Single women—more likely, naturally, to be seduced by the devil—were disproportionately executed for witchcraft. Through the 19th century and into the 20th, women had limited options for employment—and banks could refuse to let them open accounts until 1974, so the choice, for many of them, was marriage or poverty.

Forgive me, then, if I sound ungrateful when I say this: Americans are still extremely weird about single people. But now the problem isn’t just that singlehood is disparaged; sometimes, it’s that singlehood is celebrated. Relentlessly, annoyingly celebrated. Let me explain.

The assumption that partnership is a priority has not disappeared in this country. In 2019, when the Pew Research Center asked participants how necessary a committed romantic relationship is for a fulfilling life, nearly 60 percent said it’s important, and roughly 30 percent said it’s essential. Of course they did: Couples are the ones who get plus-one invites to weddings or office parties or family gatherings; they’re the ones who might be able to share health insurance, or sponsor each other for visas, or get tax benefits. Routine life—paying rent, getting groceries, reserving hotel rooms—is often far more expensive for single people (and especially single parents), who can’t as easily split costs or buy in bulk. We’re still living in a partnered person’s world.

Read: Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage

At the same time, I’ve noticed a counter-impulse, perhaps a reaction to all that injustice: a kind of public cheerleading for singlehood. Single celebrities seem pressed to make statements about how much they love solo life (and then promptly enter a relationship). People use terms like sologamy (“self-marriage”) or self-partnered (thank you, Emma Watson) or—you cannot make this stuff up—“QuirkyAlone.” Therapists advise embracing one’s single status with phrases such as “I’m focused on myself right now,” as if not having a partner automatically means you must be growing. And of course, much of this singlehood PR campaign targets women specifically. Single men have never faced quite as much scrutiny; they’ve had the luxury, more often, of being seen as full people in their own right. The 21st-century single woman is the one who has to prove her complete humanity by performing her contentment. She is empowered; she’s badass; she slays. She might also grieve—but no one really wants to talk about that.

I’ve spoken with a lot of single people, in my reporting and just in the course of life, who enjoy full, happy lives, complete with friends, family, meaningful work, and creative outlets—and who also yearn for partnership. These things are not mutually exclusive. I struggle sometimes to convey this in my own writing: Describing the absence of romantic love as a lack feels regressive. But then, so many people are telling me they feel they’re lacking something—something they want very badly. Who am I to deny that sense of loss? I’ve been single most of my adult life. I know that when you want a relationship, not having one can feel lonely; feeling like you shouldn’t want one just makes you lonelier. And all the polite cheeriness about singlehood—especially from partnered people, in a society still designed for couples—can feel disingenuous and patronizing.

Now would be a great time for some nuance. In recent years, the number of single people has been growing, in the United States as well as many other countries. Some have cast that shift as a victory, a sign that people are throwing off the shackles of compulsory coupledom and bad relationships; others have declared it an emergency, arguing that frustrated singles are giving up on romance—and that they’re going to miss out. I think both of these theories are a little bit true. Some people love being single, and some people hate it. Plenty fall somewhere in the middle. They’re happy with their life, and they won’t settle for anyone less than amazing—and they’re disappointed that someone amazing hasn’t come along.

Singlehood isn’t really unique in this sense. No one has a perfect life. Some people don’t have the career they’d like or the means to pursue their passion; others long for children, or find themselves tied to a city while they’re dreaming of living in the country. None of that, obviously, defines them as people or reduces them to objects of pity. And yet we tiptoe around the wish for love, as if recognizing it would imply that single people are all regrettably unfulfilled.

Read: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’

For the pursuit of romance to carry any shame is especially odd in 2025, when online dating, now the primary way partners meet, requires that you cop to having some desire. (Your profile isn’t going to create itself.) Instead of just acknowledging that totally commonplace aspiration, though, we romanticize serendipity: People hope that love will fall into their lap so they never need to debase themselves by seeking it, or they say they’re just poking around on the apps out of casual curiosity. The culture tells us, simultaneously, that we should be in a couple and that we should feel whole all by ourselves. We should have a partner, but we shouldn’t want one.

For a long time, I realize now, I internalized this. My friends, experiencing extended strings of bad dates and rejections and false starts, talked candidly about their sadness; all the while, I was sunny. Sure, I’ll date someone if they turn up, I insisted. But look how good our lives are! We have each other. I felt some pride being so self-actualized—such a good, friendship-loving feminist. I also felt, I’m sorry to say, a twinge of embarrassment for my friends. They wanted so openly.

I had it backwards, though: I was the one who was uncomfortable with singlehood. The idea of desiring a partner yet not having one made me itch—but trying to run away from it only put me on an optimism hamster wheel. If I could go back, I wouldn’t tell my friends that it’s all going to work out, or that they don’t need anyone. You’re perfect, I would say instead. And this is hard.

No Tariff Exemptions for American Farmers

They voted for the tariffs when they voted for Trump.

by David Frum

American farmers are pleading for exemptions from President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Republican members of Congress from farm states are working to deliver the relief farmers want. But farmers do not deserve special treatment and should not get it.

Tariffs will indeed hurt farmers badly. Farm costs will rise. Farm incomes will drop. Under Trump’s tariffs, farmers will pay more for fertilizer. They will pay more for farm equipment. They will pay more for the fuel to ship their products to market. When foreign countries retaliate, raising their own tariff barriers, American farmers will lose export markets. Their domestic sales will come under pressure too, because tariffs will shrink Americans’ disposable incomes: Consumers will have to cut back everywhere, including at the grocery store.

Farmers will share this tariff predicament of higher costs and lower incomes with almost all Americans—except the very wealthiest, who are less exposed to tariffs because they consume less of their incomes and can offset the pain of tariffs with other benefits from Trump, beginning with a dramatic reduction in tax enforcement.

Farmers are different from other Americans, however, in three ways.

First, farmers voted for Trump by huge margins. In America’s 444 most farm-dependent counties, Trump won an average of 77.7 percent of the vote—nearly two points more than Trump scored in those same counties in 2020.

Second, farmers have already pocketed windfall profits from Trump’s previous round of tariffs.

When Trump started a trade war with China in 2018, China switched its soybean purchasing from the United States to Brazil. By 2023, Brazil was exporting twice as much as the United States. Trump compensated farmers with lavish cash payouts. The leading study of these effects suggests that soybean farmers may have received twice as much from the Trump farm bailout as they lost from the 2018 round of tariffs, because the Trump administration failed to consider that U.S. soybeans not exported to China were eventually sold elsewhere, albeit at lower prices. The richest farmers collected the greatest share of the windfall. The largest 10 percent of farms received an average of $85 an acre in payouts, according to a 2019 study by the economists Eric Belasco and Vincent Smith for the American Enterprise Institute. The median-size farm received only $56 an acre. Altogether, farmers have been amply compensated in advance for the harm about to be done to them by the man most farming communities voted for.

Third, farmers can better afford to pay the price of Trump’s tariffs than many other tariff victims.

Farmers can already obtain federal insurance against depressed prices for their products. Most farmers report low incomes from farming, but they have a high net worth. The median American farm shows net assets of about $1.5 million. Commercial-farm households show median net assets of $3.6 million. The appearance of low incomes is in any case misleading. Again, according to Smith, families that own farms earn only 20 percent of their income from farming. Even the richest farmers, those with farm assets above $6 million, still earn about half their income from other sources, including a spouse’s employment in a local business or through a rural government job such as a county extension agent. On average, farm families earn higher total incomes than nonfarm families, and their debt-to-equity ratio is typically low.

Jerusalem Demsas: Trump is unleashing a chaos economy

None of this is to deny that farmers will suffer from the tariffs. They will. A lot. But so will city people. As will people in industries that use steel or aluminum or copper as components. As will people in service industries and export industries, people who rely on the trade treaties trashed by Trump to protect their copyrights and patents. And anybody with money invested in stocks. And anybody who drives a car or truck.

During the 2024 election campaign, Americans were told, in effect, that no sacrifice was too great to revive the domestic U.S. toaster-manufacturing industry. If that claim is true, then farmers should be proud to pay more and receive less, making the same sacrifice as any other American.

But if a farm family voted for Trump, believing that his policies were good, it seems strange that they would then demand that they, and only they, should be spared the full consequences of those policies. Tariffs are the dish that rural America ordered for everyone. Now the dish has arrived at the table. For some reason, they do not want to partake themselves or pay their share of the bill.

That’s not how it should work. What you serve to others you should eat yourself. And if rural America cannot choke down its portion, why must other Americans stomach theirs?

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Trump’s Tariffs Are Designed to Backfire

Instead of leading to reduced trade barriers, the new global tariff plan is all but guaranteed to raise them.

by Rogé Karma

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

According to President Donald Trump, April 2, 2025—the day he unveiled his executive order implementing global tariffs—will be remembered as a turning point in American history. He might be right. Unfortunately, April 2 is more likely to be remembered as a fiasco—alongside October 24, 1929 (the stock-market crash that kicked off the Great Depression), and September 15, 2008 (the collapse of Lehman Brothers)—than as the beginning of a new era of American prosperity.

The stated rationale behind Trump’s new “reciprocal tariffs” has a more coherent internal logic than Trump’s previous tariff maneuvers. (Stated, as we will see, is the key word.) The idea is that other countries have unfairly advantaged their own industries at the expense of America’s, both through tariffs and through methods such as currency manipulation and subsidies to domestic firms. To solve the problem, the U.S. will now tax imports from nearly every country on the planet, supposedly in proportion to the barriers that those countries place on American goods.

The goal, according to senior administration officials, is to pressure other countries into removing their trade barriers, at which point the U.S. will drop its own. In his Rose Garden speech announcing the tariff order, Trump demanded that foreign countries “terminate your own tariffs, drop your barriers,” and “don’t manipulate your currencies” if they hoped to get a reprieve from tariffs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has even argued that many of the new tariffs won’t ever need to go into effect, because other countries will be so quick to comply. In this telling, Trump’s reciprocal measures represent the tariff to end all tariffs, paving the road to a system of genuinely free trade and a return to American industrial dominance.

But the logical consistency, such as it is, is only internal. When the new tariffs come into contact with external reality, they are likely to produce the exact opposite of the intended outcome.

Jonathan Chait: The good news about Trump’s tariffs

Most obviously, the tariffs don’t appear to be based on actual trade barriers, which undermines their entire justification. Contrary to White House messaging, the formula for determining the new rates turns out to have been based simply on the dollar value of goods the U.S. imports from a given country relative to how much it exports. The administration took the difference between the two numbers, divided it by each country’s total exports, then divided that total in half, and slapped an import tax on countries at that rate. The theoretically reciprocal tariffs are not, in fact, reciprocal.

The result is that there is no clear or obvious path that countries could take to get those tariffs removed even if they wanted to. Countries can remove all of their trade restrictions and still run a trade surplus. South Korea, Mexico, and Canada, for example, export more to us than they import from us despite imposing virtually no trade barriers. As The New York Times reported, “Trump’s decision to put a 32 percent tariff on Switzerland stunned politicians and business leaders in the Alpine country. Switzerland has an open trade policy and recently abolished all industrial tariffs, including on goods from the United States, which is also its largest export market.”

Even if other countries did figure out ways to shrink their trade imbalances with the U.S., that still wouldn’t necessarily lead to a reprieve: Trump imposed 10 percent tariffs even on countries, like Brazil, that import more from America than they export to it. The only thing the White House has made clear is that any decision to remove or raise tariffs will be made by Trump himself. “These tariffs will remain in effect until such a time as President Trump determines that the threat posed by the trade deficit and underlying nonreciprocal treatment is satisfied, resolved, or mitigated,” read the White House’s memo on the new order. Translation: The only way you will get a tariff reprieve is by groveling at Trump’s feet.

To see the impossible choices that Trump’s tariffs impose on other countries, consider the trade restrictions that the administration accuses the European Union of maintaining against American products. These include food-safety regulations that ban certain ingredients, digital sales taxes, and the value-added tax—the European equivalent of a national sales tax that funds much of its members’ welfare programs. Calling most of these “trade barriers” in the first place is nonsensical, because they apply equally to foreign and domestic goods. The upshot is that, in order to meet Trump’s demands for tariff removal, Europe would need to overhaul not only its trade practices but much of its tax and regulatory system.

The best way to predict how countries will react to Trump’s newest tariffs is to look at how they responded to earlier ones. China and Europe quickly met past Trump tariffs with steep retaliatory measures of their own. Even in a friendly country as dependent on U.S. trade as Canada, Trump’s threats have generated a surge of anti-American nationalism that has upended the country’s domestic politics. “The idea that foreign leaders are going to commit political suicide to give Trump what he wants is crazy enough,” Scott Lincicome, the director of general economics and trade at the Cato Institute, told me. “The idea that they’d do it with basically no guaranteed upside just completely boggles the mind.”

Scott Lincicome: How Republicans learned to love high prices

Trump’s newest tariffs have already sparked widespread outrage among America’s trading partners. The head of the European Union has said that the body has a “strong plan to retaliate” against Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, and multiple individual European countries are considering their own additional retaliatory policies. France has floated the idea of expanding the trade war beyond physical goods by targeting U.S. tech companies. China vowed to take countermeasures against what it described as “self-defeating bullying.” Brazil’s president is considering retaliating, and the country’s National Congress, which includes many vocal right-wing supporters of Trump, recently approved legislation to empower him to do so.

If that pattern holds, Trump’s tariffs are likely to backfire. The result will be a one-way ratcheting up of tariffs across the globe, creating a trade wall between the U.S. and the rest of the world and indefinitely raising the cost of all imports.

Trump seems to welcome that possibility. During his Rose Garden address, which was titled “Make America Wealthy Again,” the president spoke at length about outcomes that are likely to occur only if the U.S. does not lower its tariffs, such as bringing in “trillions and trillions” of dollars of revenue and forcing companies to open factories inside the U.S. to avoid the new barriers. He sounded much more like someone who expected the tariffs to stay in place indefinitely than someone using them as a negotiating tactic.

In theory, the flip side of sustained higher prices would be a boost to American manufacturing, as consumers choose to purchase domestic goods over foreign ones. But here again, reality might laugh at the theory. About half of all U.S. imports are inputs that go into our own manufacturing production, meaning that American companies will suffer from higher prices too, even as retaliatory tariffs make it harder to sell their products abroad.

Perhaps the greatest damage will result from global uncertainty. After weeks of economic chaos, Trump’s big announcement was supposed to finally provide some clarity, allowing businesses to plan for the future. Instead, the future is more cloudy than ever. No one knows which of the tariffs will stick and which will be lifted. Countries will appeal to Trump to get their tariffs removed. Industries will lobby for carve-outs. The White House has announced no clear system for removing or reducing the tariffs, and even if it did, the ultimate choice will lie with the president himself, who is not known as a model of consistent and predictable decision making. These are the makings of an economic slowdown. “I would be shocked if we make it through next year without a recession,” Kimberly Clausing, an economist at the UCLA School of Law, told me.

Rogé Karma: The job market is frozen

What makes the new reciprocal tariffs all the more baffling is that a much less risky method exists to get other countries to agree to free trade. It is called a free-trade agreement. Trump ought to know. In his first term, his administration negotiated the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, or “New NAFTA,” which lowered trade barriers between America and its neighbors while requiring all parties to abide by higher labor and environmental standards. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration between the U.S. and 11 countries, including Vietnam, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, would have done something similar if Trump hadn’t pulled the U.S. out of the deal upon entering office in 2017. Those are some of the same countries that he is now trying to tariff into submission. He would have been better off remembering the art of the deal.

There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs

The policy is absurd. It’s also an extension of Trump’s chaotic personality.

by Derek Thompson

Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump celebrated America’s so-called Liberation Day by announcing a slew of tariffs on dozens of countries. His plan, if fully implemented, will return the United States to the highest tariff duty as a share of the economy since the late 1800s, before the invention of the automobile, aspirin, and the incandescent light bulb. Michael Cembalest, the widely read analyst at JP Morgan Wealth Management, wrote that the White House announcement “borders on twilight zone territory.”

The most fitting analysis for this moment, however, does not come from an economist or a financial researcher. It comes from the screenwriter William Goldman, who pithily captured his industry’s lack of foresight with one of the most famous aphorisms in Hollywood history: “Nobody knows anything.”

You’re not going to find a better three-word summary of the Trump tariffs than that. If there’s anything worse than an economic plan that attempts to revive the 19th-century protectionist U.S. economy, it’s the fact that the people responsible for explaining and implementing it don’t seem to have any idea what they’re doing, or why.

Rogé Karma: Trump’s tariffs are designed to backfire

On one side, you have the longtime Trump aide Peter Navarro, who has said that Trump’s tariffs will raise $6 trillion over the next decade, making it the largest tax increase in American history. On another, you have pro-Trump tech folks, such as Palmer Luckey, who have instead claimed that the goal is the opposite: a world of fully free trade, as countries remove their existing trade barriers in the face of the new penalties. On yet another track, there is Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, who has suggested that the tariff salvo is part of a master plan to rebalance America’s relationship with the global economy by reducing the value of the dollar and reviving manufacturing employment in the United States.

These three alleged goals—raising revenue, restoring free trade, and rejiggering the global economy—are incompatible with one another. The first and second explanations are mutually exclusive: The state can’t raise tax revenue in the long run with a levy that is designed to disappear. The second and third explanations are mutually exclusive too: You can’t reindustrialize by doubling down on the global-trade free-for-all that supposedly immiserated the Rust Belt in the first place. Either global free trade is an economic Valhalla worth fighting for, or it’s the cursed political order that we’re trying desperately to destroy.

As for Trump’s alleged devotion to bringing back manufacturing jobs, the administration has attacked the implementation of the CHIPS bill, which invested in the very same high-tech semiconductors that a strategic reindustrialization effort would seek to prioritize. There is no single coherent explanation for the tariffs, only competing hypotheses that violate one another’s internal logic because, when it comes to explaining this economic policy, nobody knows anything.

One might expect clarity from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But even he doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on. The “tariff gun will always be loaded and on the table, but rarely discharged,” he said last year. So much for that. Yesterday, a Bloomberg reporter asked Bessent if the Trump administration has plans to negotiate with America’s trading partners. “We’re just going to have to wait and see,” he said. Was the administration ready to negotiate with the European Union, China, or India? “We’ll see.” Asked why Canada and Mexico were missing from the president’s list of tariffs, he switched it up: “I’m not sure.” Nobody knows anything.

By the numbers, the tariffs are less an expression of economic theory and more a Dadaist art piece about the meaninglessness of expertise. The Trump administration slapped 10 percent tariffs on Heard Island and McDonalds Islands, which are uninhabited, and on the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose residents are mostly American and British military service members. One of the highest tariff rates, 50 percent, was imposed on the African nation of Lesotho, whose average citizen earns less than $5 a day. Why? Because the administration’s formula for supposedly “reciprocal” tariff rates apparently has nothing to do with tariffs. The Trump team seems to have calculated each penalty by dividing the U.S. trade deficit with a given country by how much the U.S. imports from it and then doing a rough adjustment. Because Lesotho’s citizens are too poor to afford most U.S. exports, while the U.S. imports $237 million in diamonds and other goods from the small landlocked nation, we have reserved close to our highest-possible tariff rate for one of the world’s poorest countries. The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence.

Read: The good news about Trump’s tariffs

If the tariffs violate their own internal logic and basic common sense, what are they? Most likely, they represent little more than the all-of-government metastasis of Trump’s personality, which sees grandiosity as a strategy to pull counterparties to the negotiating table and strike deals that benefit Trump’s ego or wallet. This personality style is clear, and it has been clearly stated, even if its application to geopolitics is confounding to observe. “My style of deal-making is pretty simple and straightforward,” Trump writes in The Art of the Deal. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”

One can see this playbook—threat, leverage, concession, repeat—playing out across all of society. It’s happening in trade. It’s happening in law. It’s happening in academia. In the first two months of his second term, Trump has already squeezed enormous concessions out of white-shoe law firms and major universities. Trump appears to care more about the process of gaining leverage over others—including other countries—than he does about any particular effective tariff rate. The endgame here is that there is no endgame, only the infinite game of power and leverage.

Trump’s defenders praise the president for using chaos to shake up broken systems. But they fail to see the downside of uncertainty. Is a textile company really supposed to open a U.S. factory when our trade policy seems likely to change every month as Trump personally negotiates with the entire planet? Are manufacturing firms really supposed to invest in expensive factory expansions when the Liberation Day tariffs caused a global sell-off that signals an international downturn? Trump’s personality is, and has always been, zero-sum and urgent, craving chaos, but economic growth is positive-sum and long-term-oriented, craving certainty for its largest investments. The scariest thing about the Trump tariffs isn’t the numbers, but the underlying message. We’re all living inside the president’s head, and nobody knows anything.

Quaker Parents Were Ahead of Their Time

The nearly 375-year-old religion’s principles line up surprisingly well with modern parenting research.

by Gail Cornwall

One morning in 1991, I prayed with the fervor that only a tween can muster for one thing above all others: cold Diet Mountain Dew. But all of the cans in my mom’s stash were warm. So I tossed one in the freezer, forgot about it, and hours later retrieved the frozen-solid mass. Then I decided to pop it in the microwave. You can imagine what ensued.

After extinguishing the flames, my mom asked us kids what we thought had happened. I stepped forward as if approaching the gallows—and she lavished me with praise. For telling the truth. For taking responsibility. Her response might seem surprising, but we’re Quakers, and avoiding judgment is pretty on-brand.

From where I stand now, I can see that her decision to use positive reinforcement aligns with research on motivating kids, something I’ve become quite familiar with as a journalist covering parenting and education. Still, for years, I didn’t recognize the connection between my faith and the child-development studies I frequently combed through at work. Then, when the coronavirus pandemic temporarily left our public school without enough adults to meet my son’s needs, we switched him to a Quaker school. The school is organized around an acronym I’d never heard before—SPICES—that stands for principles I know well: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship. Those aren’t the only pillars of Quakerism, but they’re big ones, and seeing them all together got me thinking. Sitting in the meetinghouse one Sunday morning, after nearly an hour of silent worship, I had a Queen’s Gambit moment. Whereas the chess champ saw pawns moving across a phantom board, I saw each child-rearing best practice I’d been writing about line up with a principle of Quakerism.

The Religious Society of Friends—“Quaker” being a derogatory term, reclaimed—is a hard faith to explain, because it tries to eschew dogma. It’s now possible to be a Muslim Quaker or a Hindu one, or to not believe in any god at all. That said, Quakers all over the world tend to talk about the same principles and take part in some of the same practices. For example, in place of rules, Quakers publish “advices and queries,” which prompt individuals to make good, considered choices. Attendees of Quaker meetings near me were recently asked to ponder: “Do I make my home a place of friendliness, joy, and peace, where residents and visitors feel God’s presence?” The children’s version read: “In what ways am I kind to people in my home?” Certain expectations underlie these questions—that one should try to be kind, for example—but so do curiosity and an openness to differing answers.

As it turns out, leading with questions is a great way for parents to talk to children. Encouraging kids to come up with their own solutions grants them autonomy. And as Emily Edlynn, a psychologist and the author of Autonomy-Supportive Parenting, told me, kids who feel like they have control over their life experience better emotional health, including less depression and anxiety. Fostering kids’ autonomy has also been tied to children building stronger self-regulation skills, doing better in school, and navigating social situations more effectively. Best of all, once kids get used to the self-discipline that comes with exercising autonomy, it can become habitual. Give your kids agency in one area, and they tend to “develop internal motivation even for things that they do not want to do,” Edlynn said, “because they’re integrating the understanding of the ‘why’ those things are so important.”

Read: The teen-disengagement crisis

It can be scary to trust children with independence. But kids are better problem-solvers than some people might think. When my son, at age 10, asked me if he could play laser tag with friends, I asked him how he could avoid pulling a trigger (in deference to the Quaker value of pacifism). He decided to serve as referee. I was proud of him for exercising “discernment,” another Quaker value, all on his own, for listening to his “still, small voice within” and letting it guide him to a solution that satisfied his need for belonging. He is now 13 and recently couldn’t decide whether to accept a babysitting job or relax at home. I asked him, “What do you think tomorrow-you will wish today-you had done?” He picked out stuffed animals to give his charges, spent the evening feeling needed, and had cash the next day when he wanted to buy boba for a friend.

Obviously, real damage could come from giving kids complete autonomy, and Quakerism recognizes this. Early Quaker epistles inveigh against permissiveness, and a 1939 text, Children & Quakerism, quotes William Penn, the Quaker who founded Pennsylvania, saying, “If God give you children, love them with wisdom, correct them with affection.” In other words, pacifism doesn’t mean that parents can’t set boundaries. As a 1967 book about Quaker education, Friends and Their Children, put it, “There is a difference in principle between setting an army on the march and carrying a tired and hysterical child up to bed.” So when my son used to leave toys out, I wouldn’t clean up for him. I’d prompt him to do so: “I see blocks still sitting on the floor.” That was usually enough. When it wasn’t, I would stage a mini sit-in, and we wouldn’t go on with our evening until the blocks were put away—the type of consequence that’s crucial for raising considerate kids. If he hollered, I would “bear witness” to his suffering and “be with” him, silent but unwavering.

Two children work together at Friends Select School, in Philadelphia, as part of a 1945 American Junior Red Cross program on race relations. (Bettman Archive / Getty)

In addition to sit-ins, both civic and domestic, Quakers have a tradition known as “spiritual gifts.” That involves treating individual talents as assets that belong to the community and ought to be developed in ourselves and encouraged in others. For parents, this means focusing on what our children choose to do, are good at, and enjoy. You can’t ignore your kids’ weaknesses—but you can spend less energy on them. For my youngest’s terrible handwriting, that meant aiming for legibility and saving the time that could have gone toward cursive lessons for activities that animate her, such as building boats and airplanes from the contents of the recycling bin. Research backs up this approach. According to Lea Waters, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne and the author of The Strength Switch, focusing on children’s strengths “has been shown to increase self-esteem, build resilience, decrease stress, and make kids more healthy, happy, and engaged in school.”

But perhaps the most important element of Quaker parenting is the edict to “let your life speak.” In practice, that looks like apologizing to your kids freely, saying please and thank you, and, yes, trying not to shout at them. It means acting in accordance with your values, such as when my grandma took me to pack toothbrushes and soap into “kits for Kosovo,” and when my kids make PB&Js for our unhoused neighbors or bring games to a family shelter. The idea, supported by common sense and reams of research, is that kids develop empathy by living it alongside their caregivers. What’s more, another study establishes that knowing that their parents value kindness above achievement protects kids’ well-being.

Infused in all of these practices is the conviction that children are not lesser proto-adults, but fellow beings worthy of respect and agency regardless of their behavior. The closest that Quakers come to dogma is the belief, first expressed by the religion’s founder, that there is “that of God” in every person, children very much included. That’s why, as Friends and Their Children notes, Quakers try to make children feel “welcome at the very centre of life”—a concept quite similar to the “unconditional positive regard” that psychologists today know leads to secure kids. Children who feel valued in this way, and who believe that what they do adds value, generally come to understand that they matter. And a sense of mattering makes kids more likely to be happy, resilient, academically high-achieving, and satisfied with their life, as well as less likely to struggle with perfectionism or addiction, Gordon Flett, the author of the American Psychological Association’s Mattering as a Core Need in Children and Adolescents, told me.

Read: Lighthouse parents have more confident kids

So here I am, nearly 375 years after Quakerism’s founding, asking my kids questions, giving them bounded autonomy, and nudging them to invest in their strengths and be stewards of their community—all while communicating that their worth is in no way contingent. Put together, these Quaker practices result in a parenting style considered ideal by psychologists: authoritative parenting. As Judith Smetana, a University of Rochester psychology professor whose work focuses on parent-adolescent interactions, explained to me, authoritative parenting is characterized by the effort to warmly and responsively set limits, and to support kids rather than punish them harshly when they overstep those limits.

Some people might argue that Quaker parents aren’t doing anything special. What is free-range parenting if not oodles of agency? When Quaker parents try to stay calm and acknowledge their kids’ feelings when they act out, aren’t we just doing what the so-called Millennial parenting whisperer Dr. Becky recommends? In telling my teenage son that I see the packaging from his graphing calculator lying on the table rather than in the trash, am I not just following “Say What You See” coaching?

But pop parenting philosophies can be unhelpful, especially because parents not infrequently misinterpret them. Take gentle parenting. At its best, it encourages parents to give kids the respect and empathy they need to thrive. But gentle parenting, at least as it’s presented in Instagram reels, can result in children doing as they please. “What it really leaves out,” Smetana told me, “is the importance of structure and being clear about where the boundaries are.” Many parents are left feeling helpless—a common experience among pop-parenting adherents. In the aughts, a friend of mine tried attachment parenting, an approach centered on enhancing the bond between mother and child with, among other practices, maximum physical proximity. She ended up feeling like a failure each time she put her baby down to use the restroom.

Read: This influencer says you can’t parent too gently

For new parents, sorting through the good and bad of each of these schools of thought can feel not just bewildering, but impossible. “These terms come and go so quickly,” Smetana told me, “and fads in the popular audience don’t intersect very well, necessarily, with the research.” It’s taken me more than 15 years, during which I’ve read hundreds of parenting books and academic papers, to piece together which bits of each philosophy are relevant to me. According to Smetana, even authoritative parenting can be of limited use for caregivers, because its advice is so broad. There are lots of ways to be an authoritative parent, which can leave moms and dads (but mostly moms) feeling rudderless.

That’s where Quaker parenting has stepped in for me, providing a simple way to separate the wheat from the child-development chaff. It gives me plenty to cling to, but its guiding principles are also flexible enough to allow leeway. This isn’t to say the religion is perfect. Its past is filled with failures. Many Quakers worked to abolish slavery, but many did not; some were themselves enslavers. The Society of Friends was the first religion to officially condemn that horror, but some meetinghouses—which are known for having benches arranged in egalitarian formations—featured segregated seating for Black members. Quakers also participated in forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples, including boarding schools that stripped children of dignity, culture, and health. Although not exclusively white, Quaker membership in the U.S. is still predominantly so.

But even in these shortcomings lies an essential Quaker parenting lesson. We favor queries over strictures because of a concept known as “continuing revelation,” or the idea that we cannot know all there is to know, and we will always later realize that we were wrong. The principle has helped me cultivate humility and compassion for myself after missteps. Because there can be no one best way in Quaker parenting, I’m freed from feeling like every detail of every decision will lead only to perfect success or abject defeat.

Looking back at the Diet Mountain Dew incident, I bet my mom wanted to rail at me. She’d warned again and again that metal in the microwave would spark. But Quaker values urged restraint then, just as they did decades later, when two of my daughters enrolled at schools with grade portals. With just four clicks, I can see how many points they’ve missed on each test and which assignments they haven’t turned in. Snowplow parenting tells me to lean into snooping and send emails to their teachers requesting retakes and extensions. It’s sorely tempting. But Quaker principles remind me not just about the value of autonomy, but also that kids need stillness and peace of mind, that pestering them isn’t likely to lead to the “nonviolent communications” that improve connection, and that the goal is for teens to develop a purpose-based identity rather than a performance-based one. So I resist the urge to monitor and intervene—just as research on anxiety suggests I should.

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What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About the Past

America was never healthy to begin with.

by Lila Shroff

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

Last week, at an event in West Virginia, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fat-shamed the state’s governor, Patrick Morrisey. “The first time I saw him, I said you look like you ate Governor Morrisey,” Kennedy told a laughing crowd. Morrisey has apparently invited Kennedy to be his personal trainer. The health secretary plans to put Morrisey on a “really rigorous regimen” involving monthly public weigh-ins and the all-meat “carnivore diet.” Once Morrisey loses 30 pounds, Kennedy will return to West Virginia for a celebration and final weigh-in.

According to Kennedy, not so long ago, obesity was virtually unheard of. “When my uncle was president, 3 percent of Americans were obese, and today, 74 percent of Americans are obese or overweight,” Kennedy said during his confirmation hearing. This is wrong: In the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy was president, an estimated 45 percent of Americans were overweight, including 13 percent of whom had obesity. (Such classifications are determined based on body mass index, a flawed but sometimes useful metric). Although RFK Jr. is correct in suggesting that rates of obesity have surged in recent decades, his nostalgia for the past obscures a longer history of America’s struggle with weight-related chronic illness. In fact, RFK Jr. might be surprised to learn that his own uncle once waged a campaign against what he perceived as America’s deteriorating physical fitness.

Anxiety over American obesity dates back to at least the mid-20th century. In 1948—six years before RFK Jr. was born—the founder of Harvard’s nutrition department wrote an essay in The Atlantic warning that obesity was a risk factor for several health conditions including diabetes and high blood pressure. Seven years later—when RFK Jr. was an infant—the renowned nutritionist Jean Mayer declared obesity “a national obsession.” Mayer was particularly frustrated by the barrage of “mercenary lures” that filled the media, advertising ineffective and sometimes harmful “‘health foods’ or ‘thinning foods.’” (RFK Jr.’s endorsement of the carnivore diet and uncorroborated claim that seed oils are “one of the driving causes” of the obesity epidemic come to mind.) Instead, Mayer wrote in The Atlantic, exercise was key to weight loss. We now know that although exercise is crucial for good health, it’s not a silver bullet for treating obesity.

RFK Jr. often refers to his childhood as a sort of golden age for American health. “When I was a kid,” RFK Jr. said at the West Virginia event, “we were the healthiest, most robust people in the world.” But by the time he was of school age, his uncle was leading a national fitness campaign. President Kennedy feared, in particular, that American youth lagged “far behind Europeans in physical fitness.” As evidence, he pointed to a series of strength tests given to children in America, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria: More than one-third of American kids failed at least one test, compared with only 1 percent of European children.

More generally, JFK was worried that an “increasingly large number of young Americans” were “neglecting their bodies” and “getting soft.” In 1961, JFK’s warnings about America’s poor physical well-being led to an Atlantic essay titled “We May Be Sitting Ourselves to Death,” in which a spokesperson for the American Dairy Association fretted over the health of men who spent their days withering away at desk jobs instead of hiking “the dusty trail to bring home the buffalo meat.” (The writer was less concerned about women, who he suggested got plenty of exercise from washing clothes, cooking meals, and picking up after their messy family.) At the time, JFK presented America’s deteriorating health as a matter of Cold War–era national-security concern. As one Atlantic writer explained, “The basic impetus behind this Spartan movement seems to be the fear that the Russians (a vast race of tawny, muscle-bound gymnasts) will someday descend upon our shores and thrash each of us flabby capitalists individually.” America’s growing “softness,” JFK suggested, threatened to “strip and destroy the vitality” of the nation.

Much like the “Make America healthy again” campaign, the JFK-era movement looked nostalgically upon a rustic, heartier past. But even earlier, during the buffalo-hunting 19th century, Americans were anxious about the nation’s declining health. Only four months after this magazine’s first issue, in 1857, one writer complained that the ancient Greek tradition of fitness “seems to us Americans as mythical.” He insisted that a 30-mile walk, five-mile run, or one-mile swim would cost most Americans “a fit of illness, and many their lives.” Even an hour in the gym, the writer worried, would leave any man’s “enfeebled muscular apparatus” groaning “with rheumatism for a week.” One year later, a surgeon argued that busy schedules and “sedentary life” were to blame for the “limited muscular development” of “professional” men. “We live so fast that we have no time to live,” he wrote.

Obesity rates remained relatively stable for 20 years after JFK’s 1960 campaign, before doubling from 1980 to 2000 to what the U.S. surgeon general in 2001 called “epidemic” proportions. Today, 40 percent of U.S. adults meet the clinical definition for obesity. The precise reason for this surge remains unclear, although changing diets and decreased activity levels are thought to play a role. In this particular regard, RFK Jr. is right about America’s declining health. But many other American health outcomes have improved over the decades. Around the time RFK Jr. was born, cardiovascular disease killed Americans at roughly double the rate it does today. Cancer deaths, too, have fallen significantly, thanks to breakthroughs in cancer treatment and a decline in smoking. And that’s not to say anything of the progress made fighting infectious disease earlier in the 20th century.

Yet RFK Jr.’s romanticization of the past has led him to develop an anachronistic approach to health care. He is skeptical of the many advances—GLP-1s, vaccination, milk pasteurization—that have helped improve America’s health over the years. If his intention is to wind back the clock on the American public-health apparatus, he’s off to a strong start. Just this week, he led sweeping cuts across federal health agencies, eliminating thousands of jobs, including the nation’s top tobacco regulator, prominent scientists, and even staffers who focus specifically on chronic-disease prevention. The Department of Health and Human Services was established less than a year before RFK Jr. was born; now he is inviting its destruction. But his efforts to turn back time are foolish. If the golden age of American health exists, it’s in the future, not the past.

The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs

Authoritarian leaders are most dangerous when they’re popular. Wrecking the economy is unlikely to broaden Trump’s support.

by Jonathan Chait

All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.

But Trump couldn’t do the easy and obvious thing, apparently because he did not view his first term as a success. He considered it a failure, and blamed the failure on the coterie of aides, bureaucrats, and congressional allies who talked him out of his instincts, or ignored them. The second term has been Full Trump, as even his most delusional or abusive whims are translated immediately into policy without regard to democratic norms, the law, the Constitution, public opinion, or the hand-wringing of his party.

That is why Trump’s second term poses a far more dire threat to the republic than his first did. But it is also why his second term is at risk of catastrophic failure. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than Trump’s insistence on sabotaging the U.S. economy by imposing massive tariffs.

This afternoon, in an event the administration hyped as “Liberation Day,” Trump unveiled his long-teased plan to impose reciprocal trade restrictions on every country that puts up barriers to American exports. Although at least some economists would defend some kinds of tariff policies—such as those targeted at egregious trade-violating countries, or those designed to protect a handful of strategic industries—Trump has careened into an across-the-board version that will do little but raise prices and invite reprisal against American exports. As an indication of the mad-king dynamic at play, the new plan imposes a 20 percent tariff on the European Union, partly in retaliation against the bloc’s value-added tax system—even though the VAT applies equally to imports and domestic goods and is therefore not a trade barrier at all. U.S. stocks, which have fallen for weeks in anticipation of the tariffs, plunged even more sharply after Trump’s announcement.

Rogé Karma: The wild Trump theory making the rounds on Wall Street

Trump would not be the first president to encounter economic turbulence. But he might become the first one to kill off a healthy economy through an almost universally foreseeable unforced error. The best explanation for why Trump is intent on imposing tariffs is that he genuinely believes they are a source of free money supplied by residents of foreign countries, and nobody can tell him otherwise. (Tariffs are taxes on imports, which economists agree are paid mostly by domestic consumers in the form of higher prices.)

He has compounded the unavoidable damage to business confidence of any large tariff scheme by floating his intention for months while waffling over the details, paralyzing business investment. Even taken on its own terms, a successful version of Trump’s plan would require wrenching dislocations in the global economy. The United States would need to create new industries to replace the imports it is walling off, and this investment would require businesses to believe not only that Trump won’t reverse himself but also that the tariffs he imposes are likely to stay in place after January 20, 2029.

If businesses don’t believe that Trump will stick with his tariffs, the investment required to spur a domestic industrial revival won’t materialize. But if they do believe him, the markets will crash, because Trump’s tariff scheme will, by the estimation of the economists that investors listen to, produce substantially lower growth.

Probably the likeliest outcome is an in-between muddling through, with slower growth and higher inflation. Even Trump’s gestures toward sweeping tariffs have already made the economy wobble and lifted inflationary expectations. At this point, getting back to the steady growth and cooling inflation Trump inherited will require a great deal of luck.

Why didn’t anyone around Trump talk him out of this mistake? Because the second Trump administration has dedicated itself to filtering out the kinds of advisers who thwarted some of his most authoritarian first-term instincts, as well as his most economically dangerous ones. The current version of the national Republican Party, by contrast, is dedicated to the proposition recently articulated by one of Elon Musk’s baseball caps: Trump was right about everything.

In this atmosphere, questioning Trump’s instincts is seen as a form of disloyalty, and Trump has made painfully evident what awaits the disloyal. As The Washington Post reports, “Business leaders have been reluctant to publicly express concerns, say people familiar with discussions between the White House and leading companies, lest they lose their seats at the table or become a target for the president’s attacks.” Asked recently about the prospect of tariffs, House Speaker Mike Johnson revealingly said, “Look, you have to trust the president’s instincts on the economy”—a phrase containing the same kind of double meaning (have to) as Don Corleone’s offer he can’t refuse.

William J. Bernstein: No one wins a trade war

This dynamic allows Trump to do whatever he wants, no doubt to his delight. But the political consequences for his administration and his party could be ruinous. Public-opinion polling on Trump’s economic management, which has always been the floor that has held him up in the face of widespread public dislike for his character, has tumbled. This has happened without Americans feeling the full effects of his trade war. Once they start experiencing widespread higher prices and slower growth, the bottom could fall out.

A Fox News host recently lectured the audience that it should accept sacrifice for Trump’s tariffs just as the country would sacrifice to win a war. Hard-core Trump fanatics may subscribe to this reasoning, but the crucial bloc of persuadable voters who approved of Trump because they saw him as a business genius are unlikely to follow along. They don’t see a trade war as necessary. Two decades ago, public opinion was roughly balanced between seeing foreign trade as a threat and an opportunity. Today, more than four-fifths of Americans see foreign trade as an opportunity, against a mere 14 percent who see it, like Trump does, as a threat.

As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way point out, “Authoritarian leaders do the most damage when they enjoy broad public support.” Dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez have shown that power grabs are easier to pull off when the public is behind your agenda. Trump’s support, however, is already teetering. The more unpopular he becomes, the less his allies and his targets believe he will keep his boot on the opposition’s neck forever, and the less likely they will be to comply with his demands.

The Republican Party’s descent into an authoritarian personality cult poses a mortal threat to American democracy. But it is also the thing that might save it.

The Conspiracy Theorist Advising Trump

The chaos inside the White House national-security team persists.

by Tom Nichols

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For a few months, the Donald Trump White House managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.

The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday. If you don’t spend a lot of time online, you probably don’t know who Loomer is, and that’s healthy. To say that she is a “conspiracy theorist” is not quite enough: She has referred to herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and has claimed that 9/11 was an “inside job”; she has charged that some school shootings were staged, accused Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis of “exaggerating” her struggle with breast cancer, and questioned whether the “deep state” might have used an atmospheric-research facility in Alaska to create a snowstorm over Des Moines. (Why? So that foul weather would suppress the turnout in the 2024 Iowa GOP caucuses and hurt Trump’s campaign.)

Loomer has even alienated her ostensible allies in the MAGA movement, to say nothing of the hostility she has engendered among various other Republicans. (Peter Schorsch, a former Republican operative who now runs the website Florida Politics, described her to The Washington Post as “what happens when you take a gadfly and inject it with that radioactive waste from Godzilla.”) Indeed, Trump’s own aides found Loomer so toxic that they tried to keep her away from the 2024 campaign, as my colleague Tim Alberta reported last year. A source close to the Trump campaign told Semafor last fall that Trump’s people were “‘100%’ concerned about her exacerbating Trump’s weaknesses,” but that attempts to put “guardrails” around her weren’t working. Trump clearly likes the 31-year-old provocateur, and in Trumpworld, there’s apparently very little anyone can do once the boss takes a shine to someone.

And so Loomer reportedly walked into the Oval Office yesterday with a list of people who should be removed from the National Security Council because of their disloyalty to Trump and the MAGA cause. (Asked for comment, Loomer declined to divulge “any details about my Oval Office meeting with President Trump.” She added, “I will continue working hard to support his agenda, and I will continue reiterating the importance of strong vetting, for the sake of protecting the President and our national security.”)

The next day, at least six staff members, including three senior officials, were fired. If Loomer had nothing to do with it, that’s a hell of a coincidence. (The NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes told The Atlantic that the NSC does not comment on personnel matters.)

Today, an unnamed U.S. official told Axios that Loomer went to the White House because she was furious that “neocons” had “slipped through” the vetting process for administration jobs. The result, according to the official, was a “bloodbath” that took down perhaps as many as 10 NSC staff members. Most reports named Brian Walsh, the senior director for intelligence, and Thomas Boodry, the senior director for legislative affairs; other reports claim that David Feith, a senior director overseeing technology and national security, and Maggie Dougherty, senior director for international organizations, are among those dismissed. Walsh formerly worked as a senior staff member for Marco Rubio on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Boodry was National Security Adviser Michael Waltz’s legislative director when Waltz was a House member, and Feith was a State Department appointee in the first Trump administration.

The firings at the NSC represent an ongoing struggle between the most extreme MAGA loyalists and what’s left of a Republican foreign-policy establishment. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, for example, has been in an online tussle with the Republican fringe—a group that makes Cotton seem almost centrist by comparison—over Alex Wong, another Trump NSC official, whom Loomer and others have, for various reasons, accused of disloyalty to Trump. Other conflicts, however, seem to center on a struggle between Waltz and the head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, Sergio Gor, who has reportedly been blocking people Waltz wants on his team because Gor and others doubt their commitment to the president’s foreign policy.

Such internal ideological and political food fights are common in Washington, but the national security adviser usually doesn’t have to stand by while his staff gets turfed on the say-so of an online troll. If these firings happened because Loomer wanted them, it’s difficult to imagine how Waltz stays in his job—or why he’d want to.

Waltz, of course, is already slogging through a mess of his own creation because of the controversy surrounding his use of the chat app Signal to have a highly sensitive national-security discussion about a strike on Houthi targets, to which he inadvertently invited a journalist—The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. (Waltz’s week wasn’t getting any better before Loomer showed up: New reports claim that the meeting about the Yemen strikes was only one of many conversations about important national-security operations that Waltz held over Signal.) Trump reportedly kept Waltz on the team purely to deny giving “a scalp” to the Democrats and what he perceives as their allies in the mainstream media.

Now Waltz’s authority as national security adviser is subject to a veto from … Laura Loomer? It’s one thing to dodge the barbs of the administration’s critics; that’s a normal part of life in the capital. It’s another entirely to have to stand there and take it when an unhinged conspiracy monger walks into the White House and then several accomplished Republican national-security staffers are fired.

The reason all of this is happening is that in his second term, Trump is free of any adult supervision. The days when a Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis or a Chief of Staff John Kelly would throw themselves in front of the door rather than let someone like Loomer anywhere near the Oval Office are long gone. Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants who are apparently so scared of being exiled from their liege’s presence that they can’t bring themselves to stop someone as far out on the fringe as Loomer from advising the president of the United States.

Meanwhile, a person close to the administration told my colleague Michael Scherer today that “Loomer has been asked to put together a list of people at State who are not MAGA loyalists.” Waltz might yet get fired, but whether he stays or goes, he doesn’t seem to be in charge of the NSC. Perhaps next we’ll see if Marco Rubio is actually running the State Department.

Related:

- Laura Loomer is where Republicans draw the line. (From September)

- The MAGA honeymoon is over. (From December)

Michael Scherer contributed reporting.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

- Trump’s tariffs are designed to backfire.

- Trump’s day of reckoning

- Why Quaker parents were ahead of their time

Today’s News

1. The president of the European Commission said that the bloc is “prepared to respond” with countermeasures to President Donald Trump’s tariffs but will attempt to negotiate with him first.

2. Hungary announced that it will pull out of the International Criminal Court. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces an ICC arrest warrant, landed in Budapest today for a visit.

3. At least seven people have died after intense flooding, tornados, and storms hit the central United States. More extreme weather is expected to continue affecting the area this week.

Dispatches

- Time-Travel Thursdays: RFK Jr.’s nostalgia for the past obscures a longer history of America’s struggle with weight-related chronic illness. The truth is, America was never healthy to begin with, Lila Shroff writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

- Cory Booker, endurance athlete

- How the Trump administration learned to obscure the truth in court

- Iran wants to talk.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

To Be Happier, Stop Resisting Change

By Arthur C. Brooks

In 1924, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel set out to learn about Zen Buddhism, which was starting to penetrate the West. He found a teaching position in Japan, where he hoped to locate someone who could instruct him in the philosophy. Rather than the sort of course he had in mind, he was informed that because he lacked proficiency in Japanese, he would be required instead to learn a skill—namely, kyūdō (the way of the bow)—and this would indirectly impart the Zen truths that he sought …

In short, Herrigel learned that the secret to archery—and the approach to life he was seeking—is to know when to stop resisting change and simply let it occur. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend half a decade studying archery in Japan to benefit from this central insight.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Bruce Davidson

Take a look. In the 1960s, Vine Deloria Jr. was a budding Native American activist. Philip J. Deloria writes about his father’s transformation—and the world he built at home.

Read. Derek Thompson interviews Richard White, the historian and author of The Republic for Which It Stands, about the real story behind the Gilded Age.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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To Be Happier, Stop Resisting Change

The zen of archery is all about learning how to let go.

by Arthur C. Brooks

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In 1924, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel set out to learn about Zen Buddhism, which was starting to penetrate the West. He found a teaching position in Japan, where he hoped to locate someone who could instruct him in the philosophy. Rather than the sort of course he had in mind, he was informed that because he lacked proficiency in Japanese, he would be required instead to learn a skill—namely, kyūdō (the way of the bow)—and this would indirectly impart the Zen truths that he sought. To this end, Herrigel took up his archery studies with the master Awa Kenzō, which he later chronicled in his 1948 book, Zen in the Art of Archery.

Herrigel’s archery program was arduous and frustrating. “Drawing the bow caused my hands to start trembling after a few moments, and my breathing became more and more laboured,” he wrote. “Nor did this get any better during the weeks that followed.” Indeed, the weeks became months, and the months wound up becoming five years. At long last, Herrigel learned how to loose an arrow and hit his mark. When he finally acquired the skill, he also realized that he now understood the Zen attitude. “The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise,” he wrote—when you “let go of yourself.”

In short, Herrigel learned that the secret to archery—and the approach to life he was seeking—is to know when to stop resisting change and simply let it occur. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend half a decade studying archery in Japan to benefit from this central insight. To figure out what sources of resistance are holding you back, and discover how to find release from them and live better, read on.

From the January/February 2012 issue: Arrow envy

Unless you are a monastic, your life is probably characterized by a lot of resistance, especially to change. Even the most adventurous people are susceptible to this because change almost always means an uncertain or challenging future. Researchers have found that our resistance to change is rooted in at least four sources: routine seeking (a preference for boredom over surprise), emotional reaction to imposed change (stress aversion), a short-term focus (seeing change as a hassle of adjustment), and cognitive rigidity (a reluctance to rethink things).

Scholars have argued that change-resistance is a behavioral pattern that can be epigenetic—that is, a trait that becomes heritable because, without altering a person’s actual DNA, it modifies the way their genes are expressed at a cellular level. Change-resistance, the argument goes, gets reinforced and passed on because it provides a way to conserve energy, rather than having to learn the same routines over and over. And people almost certainly evolved a resistance to change in the first place because it leads to stability in decision making, and that makes living in social groups easier.

This helps explain why most people naturally resist change—whether that change involves becoming single even when a relationship has gone south, remaining in a job that bores you, or staying put in a city you haven’t liked for years. And that also explains why, as natural as change-resistance is, it tends not to improve your happiness. Change in life is inevitable, after all—and always resisting it is onerous. In fact, your resistance to change may well be making you unhappier, because it is positively correlated with neuroticism, a trait that personality research has found to be a driver of unhappiness.

An especially common area of change-resistance is unwillingness to think differently, which manifests as a rejection of ideas and opinions that vary from our own. In 2017, three psychologists used a series of experiments to demonstrate that most people prefer to hear the views of those who vote as they do, and that on cultural issues, most would forgo a small cash sum ($3) rather than have to hear a view opposing their own. Neuroscientists have shown that hearing political views you don’t share activates the amygdala, which is implicated in the human response to perceived threats.

Once again, this mechanism probably evolved from a time in human prehistory. In this case, what we think of today as an opposing ideological allegiance back then actually implied membership in a different, and potentially hostile, tribe or kinship group. Today, that trait persists in maladaptive ways: I find your view on climate change so disagreeable that my Pleistocene brain reacts as if you’re an unwelcome interloper who’s come along to burn my village. Aren’t we always complaining about how tribal politics has become?

Read: In praise of pointless goals

The impulse to resist is so natural, then, that it’s encoded in your genes. As that suggests, a degree of resistance can be perfectly appropriate and healthy. But your predisposition to resistance may affect your life in negative ways when it makes you rigid, like Herrigel locked in place with his arms trembling, not knowing how to take a shot. Such rigidity in the face of change will lower your happiness.

As the years passed, Herrigel finally understood that productive nonresistance means effortless effort, a phrase Herrigel used elsewhere to describe how he ceased to focus consciously on trying to hit the target and—in something akin to a “flow state”—lost himself in the process of shooting. In other words, he became indifferent to performing correctly at each stage, such as the release of the string from his finger or the business of keeping aim; rather, his self dissolved into a state of nonjudgmental absorption in the complete action of drawing the bow and shooting the arrow when the string’s time came to slip his finger.

Herrigel had thus mastered the whole “way of the bow.” One word of caution: Herrigel may sometimes have taken his own advice too far, as when, after his return from Japan to Germany in 1929, he acceded to the demand that he join the Nazi Party. Nonjudgmental absorption in the moment is not an alibi for bad judgment.

Nevertheless, from his philosophy of archery, we can infer three valuable lessons for tackling a situation in which resistance is natural but is also lowering the quality of life.

1. Focus on process, not outcome.

Some common business advice is Do things well and let the results come naturally, but this applies equally well more generally. Take the case of your job: Focusing on an involuntary change, such as the possibility of being laid off, will make you fearful and rigid, and distract you from what you’re working on from moment to moment. By all means, think about that potential problem for a few minutes when it crosses your mind, but then put it aside and refocus on doing a great job today. Be kind and generous to others who may also be worrying about their job. Live in what the self-improvement author Dale Carnegie called “day-tight compartments.” Resisting an outcome you probably have little control over will make you miserable. So, instead, allow yourself to work on the processes that you can control more, and you will feel better.

2. Practice mindful absorption.

Now that you are mentally released from obsessing over outcomes, the next step is to practice being completely absorbed in the necessary action. This will improve your performance and reduce your stress. Say, for example, that your romantic relationship is in trouble: Shelve your fear that your partner might leave you at some future date, and instead be mindful of your role in the relationship today and what you can do to make it better. This might or might not save the relationship ultimately, because it can’t make past difficulties disappear, but being fully present and attentive as a partner gives you a better chance of success—if not in this relationship, then in your next one—than trying some shortcut fix or melodramatic gesture.

3. Release the ego.

Herrigel emphasized that, as an archer, he had to learn to focus on the arrow as opposed to himself. In other words, he had to exercise a degree of ego erasure, an exclusion of self-consciousness. This is a topic I’ve touched on before, about what it means to shift from the “me-self” to the “I-self” and how that can produce greater happiness. Let’s return to the situation of being confronted by a point of view with which you strongly disagree. Given your resistance to changing your own view, your amygdala will tend to make you overreact and see this contrary argument as a threat. Instead, release your ego and tell yourself, “This opinion has nothing to do with me.” Then simply listen with detached curiosity; you may learn something interesting about why this person thinks that way and avoid an unnecessarily negative encounter. And if you do choose to engage further with this interlocutor, you will probably be more persuasive by being a listener. Not that it matters to you, O enlightened one.

From the October 2015 issue: How an 18th-century philosopher helped solve my midlife crisis

I first read Zen in the Art of Archery at the age of 20—I’ll admit, not with the purest of motives. My purpose was to become a better French-horn player for fame and fortune rather than for the zen of playing. Obviously, I was completely missing the real message. I picked up Herrigel’s book again at 55, when I was in the necessary process of changing jobs, careers, and cities, and in a state of abject terror.

Clearly, I had some resistance to overcome. Now the book made sense to me. It helped me stop thinking so much about how I was going to hit the target of my professional shift, and instead get mindfully absorbed in my daily work. That largely took my ego out of the equation and enabled me to allow the shift to occur naturally, without judgment or forcing anything. The openness to change that I learned from Herrigel’s mastery of archery has made these past five years among the happiest and most fulfilling of my life.

Iran Wants to Talk

Don’t expect a bromance—but the supreme leader has written back to Donald Trump.

by Arash Azizi

Donald Trump loves letters. We know this from his first term, when he exchanged 27 letters with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the course of 16 months and wrote a particularly memorable missive to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In his second term, he has already found an unlikely new pen pal: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Early in March, a high-ranking Emirati diplomat delivered a letter from Trump to Khamenei. Iran has now sent Khamenei’s response through its preferred mediator, the Sultanate of Oman.

Iran’s letter is detailed and leaves the door open for negotiations, a source close to the Iranian establishment told me, on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. In addition to the official response, Iranians have used multiple channels, including private business ones, to send signals to Trump and his team, the source added.

About two months ago, Khamenei said that talking with the U.S. was “neither rational, nor smart, nor honorable.” This seemed consistent with his posture during Trump’s first term: In 2018, he said Iran would “never” talk with the Trump administration in particular. In June 2019, when Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, brought a letter from Trump to Tehran, Khamenei rebuked him in front of cameras and said that the U.S. president was not “worthy” of a response. A few months later, Emmanuel Macron went out of his way to host a videoconference between Trump and his Iranian counterpart, then-President Hassan Rouhani. The logistical arrangements had been made, but in the end Rouhani didn’t take the meeting.

Read: The Axis of Resistance keeps getting smaller

Yet the supreme leader has been known to buckle under pressure and call it a strategic retreat. Decades ago, he coined the phrase heroic flexibility in praise of a Shiite imam who had made peace with a bitter enemy. He used the term in 2013 to justify Iran’s talks with the Obama administration (talks that started with an exchange of letters between Barack Obama and Khamenei.)

Khamenei is not about to give up his lifelong anti-Americanism at this late hour, at the age of almost 86. Still, Iran is in dire economic straits, and domestic pressure is mounting. Trump’s message to Iran, meanwhile, has been constant and clear: Talk with me, agree to a deal in which you stop pursuing nuclear weapons and arming regional militias, and I’ll let you prosper.

If Iran declines, Israel, flush from having battered the Iranian allies Hamas and Hezbollah, could finally strike Iran’s nuclear program. But even short of that, Trump’s policy—his previous administration called it “maximum pressure”—could fatally damage the already beleaguered Iranian economy. The U.S. has threatened to seriously crack down on Iran’s oil trade with China, which would cost Iran its most important source of foreign currency. The markets are already speaking: The U.S. dollar now trades for more than 1 million rials, an almost 75 percent increase from a few months ago, making the Iranian currency among the most worthless in the world (in 2015, when Iran last signed a deal with the U.S., the dollar was just 29,500 IRR).

This explains why Iran is coming to the table. But knowing just how weak his hand is, Khamenei has tried to appear tough. In an Eid al-Fitr speech on Monday, he affirmed that Iran’s positions had not changed, “nor has the enmity of America and the Zionist regime, which continue to threaten us with their evil doings.” He went on to threaten the U.S. and Israel with “a firm blow in response” if they attack Iran—which, he added, was “not very likely.” As per usual, he threatened Israel with destruction: “Everybody has a duty to work toward eliminating this evil and criminal entity from the region,” he said.

His is not the only bluster from Tehran. Iran’s military leaders have recently threatened American bases in the region. Ali Larijani, a centrist politician and adviser to Khamenei, said that Iran has no intention of building a nuclear weapon, but it could be forced to do so if attacked by the U.S. or Israel.

These might sound like fighting words, but what they really are is a negotiating tactic. Larijani has himself said that he hopes for “a tangible result” to come out of diplomacy with America and praised Trump as “a talented businessman.” Other Iranian officials have made similar indications, even as they complain about Trump’s “bullying” and his threats to bomb the country. Iran is “always ready to negotiate on an equal footing,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Monday. Iran is not averse to negotiations, and “the ball is in the U.S.’s court,” a top communication official in the office of President Masoud Pezeshkian said a day earlier.

If the messages seem mixed, that’s because Iran has “readied itself for both negotiations and confrontation,” Mostafa Najafi, a Tehran-based expert on the Iranian security establishment, told me. He said that the Iranian authorities had reached out to the Trump team even prior to the U.S. president’s inauguration, as diplomacy is their preferred course—but they have also prepared the country’s defenses in case this effort fails.

According to Najafi, Iran wants a two-step process, with direct talks following the current indirect contact. Tehran prefers that these talks take place in secret, and it wants Iran’s missile and drone capabilities to be off the table, he added. But it would be happy to talk about “lessening tensions in the region.” Najafi continued, “This doesn’t mean making deals over the Axis of Resistance groups, but, if Iran sees it as necessary, it can align them with a new agenda.”

This push for talks has a clear constituency in Iran. Op-eds in business and political dailies argue that the country has no choice but to come to a deal with the West. An online poll on a major news website showed a whopping 82 percent in favor of direct talks with the U.S., with 7 percent favoring indirect talks and only 11 percent opposed to all talks. Mohammad Ali Sobhani, a former Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Jordan, and Qatar, even suggested that Iran should offer business opportunities to American companies to sell the Trump administration on dealmaking.

Read: The Iranian dissident asking simple questions

If Iran and America do get to talking again, many outside forces will try to shape the result. Israel might nudge Trump away from negotiations, in favor of attacks that could keep Iran weak and destabilized. And Trump might very well prefer that outcome too. But prominent voices in the Trump camp seem to be urging a more diplomatic approach. The talk-show host Tucker Carlson, known for his close ties to the president, has strongly pushed against attacking Iran. His interview with Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, in which the latter seemed open to discussions with Iran, was watched closely in Iran. Witkoff’s apparent favorability toward negotiations was cited by regional sources speaking to an Israeli newspaper as one reason Khamenei softened up and wrote back to Trump. Then, yesterday, came the disappearing X comment heard halfway round the world: Araghchi wrote a long post urging “diplomatic engagement” while asserting that “there is—by definition—no such thing as a ‘military option’ let alone a ‘military solution.’” Witkoff responded, “Great”—then deleted the comment. Judging from the flurry of social-media posts and op-eds, however, his message appears to have been received in Tehran.

The leaders of America’s Arab allies in the Gulf are also likely to discourage Trump from further inflaming the region by attacking Iran—this is in sharp contrast to their attitude during the Obama era, when they feared that a nuclear agreement with Tehran would leave them out.

Trump’s epistolary relationship with Khamenei is unlikely to develop into the sort of bromance he experienced with Kim, and even those personal talks collapsed because they weren’t accompanied by the necessary technical negotiations. But Iran is now going out of its way to affirm that it held up its end of the old nuclear deal and forswore developing nuclear weapons. What the Iranians also seem to know is that if they want to get a new deal with America, they will have to learn Trump’s style, and that includes the president’s love of letters.

Why Trump Wants to Control Universities

They could be key to recapturing the culture.

by Hanna Rosin

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A couple of years ago, the conservative writer Christopher Rufo did a fellowship in Budapest, where, upon his arrival, János Csák, Hungary’s then–minister of culture and innovation, “greeted me with a strong handshake,” Rufo later wrote in an essay about the trip. Hungary’s population is not quite 10 million, and the country is among the poorest in the EU, yet Rufo believed that it had something to teach the U.S. The two countries, according to Rufo, were beset by the same diseases: “the fraying of national culture, entrenched left-wing institutions, and the rejection of sexual difference.” But unlike the U.S., Hungary had a plan. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was using “muscular state policy” to turn the culture back around. Among his major targets were Hungarian universities.

In this episode, Radio Atlantic host Hanna Rosin talks with the education writer Adam Harris, who believes that Rufo’s essay can help explain the Trump administration’s current attack on universities. Since Donald Trump has taken office, he has threatened to take back hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding from universities, and compiled lists of places that might not be in compliance, for various reasons: They failed to protect Jews on campus. They failed to protect women’s sports. They use “racial preferences and stereotypes” in their programs. The administration’s aim, Harris suggests, is much the same as Orbán’s—not just to dismantle the intellectual elite but also to build a new conservative one that better reflects its cultural values.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Universities are all of a sudden breaking news.

Last week, a video went around showing a man in a navy hoodie approaching a woman in a long, white down coat. It was still pretty cold when the video was shot outside Boston, right near Tufts University. The woman backs away, the guy grabs her hands, and then a few more people approach her from behind.

The woman’s name is Rümeysa Öztürk, and she’s a graduate student at Tufts University. The people approaching her are federal agents. They arrested her after the State Department revoked her student visa.

[Sound of Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest]

Rosin: Just before that, ICE arrested Palestinian activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. He’d been a leader of student protests. The administration said that amounted to supporting Hamas.

News anchor: They claim his student visa was revoked.

Rosin: Other students targeted for deportation: a fellow at Georgetown, also arrested.

News anchor: —detained a grad student from India who was teaching at Georgetown University on a student visa.

Rosin: Columbia was threatened with losing $400 million, and then they agreed to some demands. Harvard is now also under review for roughly $9 billion.

There are dozens more universities on a list, suspected of using racial preferences or of “forcing women to compete with men in sports.”

President Donald Trump: Your population doesn’t want men playing in women’s sports, so you better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.

Maine Governor Janet Mills: See you in court.

Trump: Every state—good. I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

The administration tells one story about its attack on universities: that they’re protecting students against anti-Semitism, protecting traditional women’s sports, going after unfair racial preferences.

But our guest on the show today says that is just what’s on the surface. Adam Harris, who is a senior fellow at New America and who also covered education for The Atlantic, argues that the administration has a much more ambitious, grander plan. And it starts with a pilgrimage to Hungary.

[Music]

Rosin: Adam, welcome to the show.

Adam Harris: Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Sure. So Adam, about a year before Trump is elected, a conservative activist named Christopher Rufo decamps to Budapest, writes a dispatch called, “Orbán’s War,” referring, of course, to Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán. And it turns out to be kind of a road map in a surprising way for this moment, what we’re seeing politically and particularly with universities. What is Rufo’s argument in that essay?

Harris: Yeah. He argues, effectively, that one of the more significant things and the thing that wasn’t necessarily understood broadly at the time was the way that Orbán undertook this effort to sort of reshape institutions, both publicly and privately, to create a sort of conservative elite.

Rosin: Okay. And this came, it seems like, as a revelation to conservative intellectuals—like, because Hungary is not an analogous country, but it seemed like a place that you would pilgrimage to learn things. So what was revelatory about this?

Harris: Yeah. Well, Rufo says that they’re facing some of the same issues that conservatives in the United States are, right? The sort of rejection, as he calls it, of sexual difference, the sort of liberal creep into the more general institutions. And Rufo really finds surprising the ways that Orbán was able to successfully combat that in his creation of that new sort of conservative elite in Hungary.

Rosin: It’s interesting because I think of conservatives in this moment of their ascendance as anti-intellectual. This is a slightly different view, where they’re viewing the university as a source of a lot of decline—say, decline of Western civilization. So instead of ignoring it or pushing it away, it sounds like the vision in this essay is, No. Take it back.

Harris: Yeah. It’s sort of: Take it back. Bend it to your own means. Strengthen what they believe are the sort of cultural foundations, right? He talks about family life. He talks about Christian faith. He talks about historical memory. And what a lot of conservatives feel that they’ve lost is that control of historical memory, right? When you think about some of the history curriculums that have been attacked over the last several years, it has been because those curriculums are a sort of fundamental reassessment of the position of some of our most celebrated figures in American public life.

Rosin: So it’s actually incredibly ambitious.

Harris: In a lot of ways, yes. We’re only 60-some odd years into the idea of a multicultural democracy, since the Civil Rights Act. And a lot of people feel that we lost something when we moved into that era. And so effectively, some of this is trying to reclaim that visage of that sort of pastoral past that we lost.

Rosin: Ah. Okay. Okay. I’m starting to understand how this fits more broadly into “Make America Great” and what the attack on universities is actually about. So we haven’t said yet: Who is Christopher Rufo, and how did these ideas start to spread?

Harris: Yeah, so Christopher Rufo is a conservative activist who around 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd, started looking into diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. And he started writing a bunch of blog posts and articles that really examined the DEI in several different areas.

He would pool some of the most jarring examples and sort of use those as a way to indict the entire apparatus that has grown up out of the civil-rights movement. But by September of 2020, some of those articles, some of what he said on TV gets to President Trump during the end of his first term, and that really launches this broader interrogation that we’ve seen since then into diversity principles and sort of these ideas of equity.

Rosin: Okay. So it’s diversity principles, but it’s also diversity principles as filtered through universities.

Harris: Yes.

Rosin: But it’s essentially creating an intellectual road map of all these executive orders, these things that Trump is putting together—there is a grand idea behind them.

Harris: Yes. There’s a grand idea behind them.

Rosin: And as Trump is elected and starting to pick his cabinet, you as an education expert, what did you notice? Like, what did you start to pay attention to in university news?

Harris: Yeah. Well, around December, actually, there was a piece that came out in the Washington Examiner by a conservative education scholar, Max Eden, who argued that Linda McMahon could do a couple of things upon being confirmed as the education secretary in order to overhaul higher education and to ensure that institutions sort of got into line. And one of those things, he argued, was to take a “prize scalp.”

Rosin: A “prize scalp.”

Harris: A “prize scalp,” and that’s a quote-unquote. And he said that institution would be Columbia University, that the administration should go after Columbia as hard as it can. If Columbia did not comply, it should remove its Title IV funds. If Columbia did comply, then they should find another way or they could find another way to remove funding from the institution.

And so when one of the first institutions to receive a big hit on their funding, $400 million, [was] Columbia, the first thing that came to my mind was, Oh, this is a part of the playbook that they talked about in December.

Rosin: So how did Columbia fit into the playbook?

Harris: Yeah. Well, over the last, you know, year and a half, really since October 7, when students started protesting the war in Gaza, Columbia has become the sort of poster child for the ways that higher education is doing things wrong, right?

Rosin: Out of control.

Harris: Out of control. You know, The student protestors are controlling the institution. The leadership doesn’t really have a wrangle on its faculty. There were criticisms of the curriculum—all of these things.

And Columbia and most Ivy League institutions aren’t necessarily places where people are gonna jump to defend them, right? These are places that have multibillion-dollar endowments. When people say that they don’t trust higher education, they don’t mean their local community college. They don’t mean the public regional down the road. They mean Harvard and Columbia because it seems like an unattainable place where the elites are developed anyway.

And so over the last two years, really, you’ve seen these attacks on Columbia and how they’ve handled anti-Semitism on campus. Or you’ve seen attacks on Columbia and what they’re teaching to students. And the imperfect plaintiff nature of Columbia makes it easier to say, Well, everyone has said you’re not handling this well, so let’s go ahead and remove your funding. And it would be one thing if they sort of stopped at Columbia. It would be one thing if they came into office, did a long investigation into what’s going on—because that’s typically what happens, right?

As someone who’s covered the education department for the last, you know, seven, eight years, anytime you have a Title VI investigation in cases of discrimination, those typically take months, if not years, to complete. And upon their completion, the removal of funds has never really been on the table.

Rosin: Okay, so if it didn’t go through the usual process, it didn’t seem to be about what they said it was about. So you, as someone tracking this, what do you think it was about? Like, why remove Columbia’s funding? What was that first move about?

Harris: Yeah. So in that piece that I mentioned from December, the argument was: You remove the funding from Columbia in order to scare other institutions into compliance. And if those institutions don’t immediately comply, then they also know that, Well, I can get my funding taken away too.

We have seen, now, $150 million [taken] away from Penn within days, right—at least paused at Penn within days—of launching or announcing an investigation. And so, really, these timelines just don’t necessarily comport (1) with the way things are done, but they also don’t comport with a proper or legitimate investigation, given the amount of staff they have now at the Department of Education.

Rosin: Okay. So they’re not following the rules of a proper investigation. They’re just trying to get universities to comply. But comply with what?

Harris: Yeah, so there are a couple of various—it was interesting because the administration has gone farther than just saying, Hey. You need to get everything in check. Figure it out, Columbia. They’ve actually given them a list of things that they could do in terms of disciplinary measures for students. They said that one of the academic departments needs to be put under a sort of academic receivership, meaning that someone comes in from outside of the department to serve as the chair and look over their curriculums and things like that.

So there are these sort of very specific guidelines for what can and cannot be said on campuses. And once you start restricting speech in one manner, that sort of means you can restrict speech in a lot of different spaces. So if you say, Well, you can’t have these pro-Palestinian protests in a specific area, and if you do, then we’re going to take your funding away. There are a lot of things there that are reminiscent of the ways that Southern governors used to say that students at Alabama State couldn’t have sit-ins, otherwise they were going to remove the funding from Alabama State College.

It’s adjudicating specific behaviors and speech that students are making, which is really a threat to all of the principles of an institution. When an administration can come into an institution and say, You have to do this very specific thing. These are the policies that you have to implement, the principles of shared governance, the principles of academic freedom, the principles of a sort of free system of higher education really go away—and those same principles that are sort of the bedrocks of our democracy, right? The First Amendment is literally about free speech. When those sorts of things go away, it becomes a very dangerous environment that limits what people can say and do.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: the narrowing of the American higher-education system—and who will get left out.

[Break]

Rosin: You started out by saying the ultimate vision was building a conservative elite. So is the way you put this entire picture together, is that essentially: You break down, you take away their funding? I mean, now I just sound kind of paranoid and conspiratorial, but maybe this is the plan. Like, you take away funding—in this way, it’s a little confusing, because some of the funding is for science so, you know, it’s not all completely directed. But you take away the funding. You therefore shock the university into stopping behaving the way it has, and then what? What’s the ultimate—I don’t know what happened in Hungary, so—

Harris: Yeah. So that vision that Rufo discussed sort of happened in Hungary, where they’re trying to get back to the cultural traditions, the cultural values that the nation had—those sort of ideas of Christian faith, the ideas of family life. In the same way, it sort of embodies that notion of “Make America Great Again.” And so the question has always been, Well, when exactly was America great?

And over the last several years, there has been an argument that has built up in conservative circles that America was better off in terms of these ideas of personal liberty and the freedom of association before the Civil Rights Act was signed, that this sort of administrative state that has built up to enforce the rules of the Civil Rights Act—so you think about things like race-conscious admissions, which was just voted down at the Supreme Court. You think about these reassessments of curriculums, which prior to the 1960s were legally allowed to obscure and/or omit the contributions of African Americans, of Natives, of Mexican Americans.

You consider the programs that were meant to diversify the workforce more generally—those are some of the programs and things that conservatives are trying to attack in certain ways by saying that they basically discriminate against white people, that it’s reverse discrimination to include those policies, which is why you see a part of this, alongside that $400 million from Columbia, was that broader letter, that “Dear Colleague” letter that said, Hey—if you use race in scholarships, in hiring, in your sort of faculty committees, in your student groups, in any of these things, then we are going to investigate you, and you are going to be in violation of Title VI. And when an institution hears you’re going to be in violation of Title VI, they will start thinking, We’re going to get our funding taken away in the same way that Columbia did.

And so this push to eliminate the Department of Education runs alongside this broader push to get higher education under control, right? These are sort of parallel tracks that end up forming a double helix, right? They go right together. It’s like if you’re going to say that you’re going to investigate anti-Semitism with a vigor that no one has ever investigated it with before, and you remove half of the staff at the Office for Civil Rights that actually investigates anti-Semitism, the thing to do wouldn’t be to remove people who are investigating those complaints. The thing would be to beef up that staff so that they didn’t have 20 to 25 cases on their load, so that they could have those five to 10 complaints they were really focusing on.

Rosin: Right, because they could find examples of anti-Semitism. They could find examples of other kinds of discrimination. But it’s obviously not what you’re actually after if you’re eliminating the office.

Harris: Exactly.

Rosin: You know, as you’re talking, what’s chilling about this is that I do, in fact, associate higher education with the opening of the mind and the broadening of the views. Like, that is what I think university is for. I mean, that is what education in the U.S. does. So it would be a profound shift to think of education as inculcating a very narrow or particular set of content, you know?

Harris: Yes. And you know, it’s interesting. Over the last several years, right, the last couple of decades, actually, there’s been this argument that institutions don’t teach students how to think; they teach students what to think.

Rosin: That’s what conservatives say.

Harris: That’s what conservatives say, yeah. It was one of the first things that Betsy DeVos said when she became the education secretary, was that colleges are teaching students what to think as opposed to how to think. And in some ways, this effort is actually trying to do that. It is trying to teach students, This other stuff is out of bounds, right? But this is the acceptable sort of curriculum for your class. These are the acceptable things that you can say. And even if they’re not saying it explicitly, institutions are taking it as such.

We’ve already seen some colleges, such as High Point University, when that Dear Colleague letter came out that said, Make sure you’re not using race or using discriminatory language in any of these things, they sent out a letter to their faculty, to their staff and said, Remove all of these. They gave them more than 40 words and said, Remove them from everything. Get rid of them in your PowerPoint presentations. Get rid of them in your curriculums. They ended up walking that back. But you see the sort of chill that that already starts to have when administrators are thinking, I don’t want to lose my funding, and so I’m going to go ahead and say, “Let’s just get rid of all of that in our curriculum.”

Rosin: Now, the administration created a task force, and there is this growing list of universities that are up for investigation. Is there any criteria? Do you see any pattern in the universities? Because it does seem to include both elite and less elite. You know, big-city schools, small schools. Like, can you detect anything in what they’re looking for?

Harris: So it’s difficult to detect a trend there. There is a way that you can sort of have a veil of legitimacy on any investigation. And so if you have received a complaint from a school of anti-Semitism, you can say that, Okay. That’s going to be the school that we are going to investigate. And knowing that all it took was 14, you know, 15 days for the administration to go ahead and remove all of $400 million of Columbia’s funding, those institutions may be more likely to say, Whoa. Whatever they’re saying for Columbia to do, let’s go ahead and do that—

Rosin: So that they won’t come after us.

Harris: —so that they won’t come after us.

Rosin: So merely putting a university on the list—and actually, maybe even the arbitrary nature of the list—actually spreads the fear more widely. Maybe this is what I’m realizing now. It’s a very common tactic.

Harris: Exactly.

Rosin: If you just put Harvard and Columbia on the list, then other places wouldn’t have to worry about it. But if you spread it far and wide, then everybody follows your orders. Okay. That’s obvious. So I see now very clearly putting the pieces together, putting the bigger picture together of how they’re scaring universities.

I want to know what’s happening inside the universities and how they’re responding. As someone who doesn’t follow higher education as closely, it’s not that clear to me how important this funding is or how reliant universities are on federal funding.

Harris: Yeah. So for an institution that is, say, more tuition dependent, they rely on the students paying their tuition and that tuition helping them to meet payroll. Title IV funding is incredibly important because if you are not allowed to take loans from students, if you’re not allowed to get Pell Grants from students, then a tuition-dependent institution is going to go out of business. For bigger institutions like Columbia, these are institutions that have federal grants from, you know, the NIH, that have federal grants from the Defense Department, that have USDA grants, that have grants from the, you know, Education Department, right? So it’s very varied, and their tentacles are all through the federal government.

There’s this idea that’s sort of been bubbling up that, Well, these institutions have big endowments. Why don’t you just start using that? There’s a fundamental misunderstanding about endowments. That’s not just, like, fungible money that you can say, Oh, well, that’s $50 billion. We can spend $10 billion and make up for it tomorrow, because most of that money is tied to very specific things. Say a donor made a $400 million donation to the School of Fine Arts: If you start using that for payroll generally, you can guarantee you’re never gonna receive a single dollar ever again, because people can’t trust you to be good stewards or faithful stewards of that money. They can also sue you.

And so there are some colleges that, you know, from 30 to 40 percent of their budgets really kind of come from the federal government, but that’s not to say that this is a completely foreign system. There is not a successful higher-education system in the world, really, that is not sort of subsidy driven, that doesn’t receive significant government subsidies.

Rosin: That’s interesting. I think of the United States as having a largely private university system and that other, you know—I am always jealous of overseas, how they have more public universities. But I never quite put together that, in fact, there is a strong interdependence between public institutions and universities of all kinds. So now I see why that makes them extremely vulnerable.

I’ve watched university presidents—I mean, it mostly feels like they’re scrambling. You know, Columbia was a probably terrifying example for a lot of college presidents because it does seem that even when university presidents comply or try to comply with Trump orders, they still get punished. Do you see any responses now, like, as you’ve watched, maybe since October 7 and then through Trump’s election? What kinds of discussions are they having about how to handle this situation?

Harris: So there’s been a lot of sort of internal back-and-forth at institutions. You haven’t really seen many public responses, in part because there’s a sort of “keep your head down and hope that it’s not you,” you know, some of the smaller institutions, maybe public institutions. For some of the public state institutions, they’re trying to fight things that are going on in their own states, right?

Consider a place like Ohio, where they have a bill that’s supposed to reform higher education. Florida, Texas, North Carolina, all of these states: There’s this big federal thing that’s going on, but you also have these state reforms, whether that’s to tenure, whether that’s to establish a conservative center on campus, whatever it may be. They’re also thinking about those issues, as well. And so a lot of presidents are in sort of a, Keep your head down. Try to avoid being noticed. And if it’s happening over there, then it’s not happening to us, and we’re already thinking about our budget for the next year, as opposed to a cohesive pushback to say, This is an attack on higher education more broadly rather than these singular institutions.

Rosin: And do you think that’s a realistic thing to ask of university presidents? Because it is disheartening to see them fall, one after the other—I mean, both in congressional hearings, in all sorts of ways. And then there’d just be deadly silence. But there’s also silence on the streets. There’s silence in a lot of places. And so I just wonder: Is that a realistic hope?

Harris: It should be.

Rosin: You want to hold onto it?

Harris: I do, because we’ve seen institutions in the last few years be pushed into these policies that say they won’t make public statements about political events, right? In Ohio, in that bill, it said that public colleges can’t make statements about partisan or ideological statements outside of celebrations of the United States and the flag—like, really sort of jingoistic, patriotic statements. And pushing back doesn’t have to look like a president being out in the streets, but it does look like reaffirming your institutional principles and living up to your institutional principles, right? Because a principle’s only a principle when it’s tested.

Rosin: Right.

Harris: And a belief is only, like—you only actually have a value and make public that value when that value is under attack. And so if higher education doesn’t believe in the principles that it was founded on, then institutional leaders should remain silent. But if they do, then there’s a kind of obligation there. It’s one of the reasons why they get paid so much.

Rosin: Whoa. Okay.

Harris: (Laughs.)

Rosin: No. I mean, you’re clear. I appreciate it.

Just one final thing: We started by talking about the ultimate goal of this to be the creation of a different kind of elite in the U.S. I wonder if they have a fully fleshed imagination of what a conservative elite would look like and act like and believe. Like, is the end of the vision real?

Harris: I don’t know if it’s a fully fleshed-out view, but they have pointed to certain institutions and said, This is what it could look like. Those institutions are Hillsdale College, the College of the Ozarks.

I actually went to the College of the Ozarks when Pete Hegseth was speaking, and there was this really, you know, sort of telling quote that he gave during his speech that was just like, I went to Harvard. I went to, you know, the Ivy League institution. Those places have lost their way. This is the sort of place that’s doing it right. This is the future. And you look across the student body—it’s majority white and not even, like, a slim majority. It’s students who, when I spoke to them, talked more about the idea of it being a place where they could go and not have to have a ton of loans on the back end of going to college.

But it was also a place that has—it’s the only college in the country with a vice president of patriotic activities. Every student is required to take a patriotic-education course, where it’s a mix of current events and the founding documents alongside, like, military training. And it’s not a military school. So I don’t know that there’s a fully fleshed-out idea, but I know that there are institutions that they point to as examples of what a college should be, and there are also places that they can point to, like a new college now, and how to make that happen.

Rosin: What ended up happening in Hungary, by the way? Has it broadened into a vision beyond that individual college? Do they have a conservative elite?

Harris: In a lot of ways, yes. And if it’s not a sort of fully fleshed-out one to this point, it is much further along than it was when Orbán launched his assault. I think one of the other things that was really interesting about that piece that Rufo wrote was that he talks about the ways that things seemed normal—

Rosin: And what did he mean by “normal”?

Harris: By “normal,” he talks about, Oh, people talk about it as if it’s, like, an economic backwater, but, you know, business goes on as usual. But there’s this quiet administrative, instructional war that’s going on in education, sort of reshaping things. And so it’s like, Make everything seem as normal as possible while also launching this assault that transforms the way that a country fundamentally operates.

Rosin: And feels and what young minds accept as excellence, basically.

Harris: Exactly.

Rosin: Right. Well, Adam, I think the only option after this conversation is to join you in holding out hope that some group of university presidents stand up for what a university is. Thank you so much for helping us understand that.

Harris: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/podsub. That’s theatlantic.com/podsub.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

The Story of the Gilded Age Wasn’t Wealth. It Was Corruption.

Richard White, the historian and author of <em>The Republic for Which It Stands</em>, explains what made the late 19th century gilded.

by Derek Thompson

Is the U.S. in a second Gilded Age? Many in the news media seem to think so: You’ll find the claim in The New Yorker, NPR, Politico, and these pages. The White House, for its part, seems to think that would be a good thing: “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” Donald Trump said days into his second presidential term, a period that covers—that’s right—the Gilded Age. Although the claim was factually lacking, it was politically prophetic. Trump has governed like a late-19th-century president, with his penchant for tariffs, his unusual relationship with a major industrial titan, and his bald-faced corruption.

It’s widely understood that the late 19th century was an age of technological splendor and economic consolidation, and this is true enough. Thomas Scott and Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould dominated the railroads. John D. Rockefeller dominated oil. Andrew Carnegie dominated steel. J. P. Morgan dominated finance. We can see echoes here in the titans of modern industry: Jeff Bezos and the Waltons in commerce; Tim Cook and smartphones; Mark Zuckerberg and our attention; Elon Musk in space.

But some of the most interesting echoes of the Gilded Age involve the government’s relationship to business. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family held talks to pardon a major crypto executive who had pleaded guilty to money laundering. In exchange, they would secure a stake in his company, Binance. Similarly, in the late 19th century, which was an era of unusual grift, a range of public servants—from White House Cabinet members to local deputy sheriffs—were unembarrassed about skimming fees and taking bribes.

Read: The specter of American oligarchy

To understand what made the late 19th century gilded, I spoke with Richard White, the historian and author of The Republic for Which It Stands, a mammoth history of America between the end of the Civil War and the end of the 19th century. This conversation, which originally appeared on the podcast Plain English, has been truncated and edited.

Derek Thompson: The driving of the golden spike at Promontory Point in 1869 marked the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The Gilded Age begins just after and extends into the early 1900s. How did the transcontinental rail system set the stage for the Gilded Age?

Richard White: At the end of the Civil War, the United States was a country of vast ambitions and relatively little money. What it wanted to do was build an infrastructure to connect California to the rest of the United States. It didn’t have the money to do that, so it resorted to a series of subsidies and cooperation with private capital. The railroads were the great corporations of the United States at the core of the American economy. But the railroads depended on a system of insider dealing, corruption, and stock manipulation, in which people who accrued great wealth accrued great influence over the course of the United States. This system went on to define the Gilded Age.

Thompson: In the introduction of The Republic for Which It Stands, you write: “The Gilded Age was corrupt and corruption in government and business mattered. Corruption suffused government and the economy.” How?

White: People described each other as “friends.” They weren’t friendly in any colloquial sense that we understand. Friendship in the 19th-century sense was a relationship devoid of any affection in which people pursued common ends by scratching each other’s back. The railroad businessmen were friends with politicians, friends with newspapermen, friends with bankers. It was an age of dishonest cooperation.

Thompson: There are so many incredible characters from this period of American history: Rockefeller, Carnegie, J. P. Morgan. Who was John Rockefeller, and how did his style of cooperation typify this era of corrupt monopoly?

White: Rockefeller created what became the model corporation: Standard Oil. What he wanted to do was to organize a system he saw as too competitive and wildly inefficient. Rockefeller realized that there was just too much oil. He realized that if you were going to get profit, you had to eliminate the number of refineries. So Rockefeller went to the railroads and said, “I will give you all of my oil, but you have to kick back money to me—and don’t do it for my competitors.” Competitors soon found they couldn’t compete with Rockefeller, and so he came in and bought them out. By the 1890s, he was saying, “This is a new age, an age of cooperation.” And what he called cooperation, his opponents called monopoly.

Thompson: The U.S. government protected the monopolies in several ways. Steel tariffs helped Andrew Carnegie build his business, and in exchange Carnegie fed information to politicians. The government also quashed labor when it threatened big businesses in the late 19th century. Why does the state side with the monopolies again and again in this period?

White: Very often, the people in office were corrupt. The big industrialists would tell congressmen and senators: “When this is done, you’re going to serve a term or two, then come to work for us.” Or: “I’ll loan you a few thousand dollars to invest it in this.” Or: “I got a land grant from you, and in return, I’ll use part of the land grant to kick back to you under a fake trustee.” I mean, the industrialist Cosby Huntington wrote a letter to his associates that said: “I just bought 1,000 wheels from Senator Barnum from Connecticut, because he does pretty much what I want.”

Thompson: What was it about the character of government or the rules and customs of the time that you think made the late 19th century so corrupt as far as government goes?

White: The United States was becoming a major industrial country and a continent-spanning country. At the same time, it was incredibly averse to taxes and would not fund its necessary infrastructure and services. So it came to what scholars have called “fee-based governance.” In the 19th century, to get something done, you’d subsidize a corporation to do it, and that’s one source of corruption. The other thing is you take things like collecting the tariffs: Somebody has got to collect it, and that’s why the customs house becomes one of the plum appointments you can get. The head of the customs house in New York City makes more than the president of the United States because he gets to keep a certain amount of the customs he collects. You make sheriffs and deputy marshals tax collectors, and they keep a certain proportion of the taxes. That means that there’s going to be corruption from the post office all the way up to the sheriffs, to the customs houses, to people who are appointed offices. Everywhere in this system is going to get a fee, a bounty, and opportunity, which allows private profit to perform a public service. The result is corruption that is rampant throughout the whole system.

Thompson: One paradox of this era is that it was an astonishing time for material progress and also a decrepit time for human welfare. You write that men and women in this era suffered “the decline of virtually every measure of physical well-being.”

White: By 1880, in the middle of the Gilded Age, if you lived to be 10 years old, you would die at 48, if you’re an American white male, and you would be 5 feet 5 inches tall. You would lead a briefer life and be shorter than your Revolutionary ancestor. And you were one of the lucky ones, because on average, 20 percent of infants would die before age 5. You’re living in an environment where, as America urbanizes, there’s no reliable sewage system. There’s no pure water. There’s no public health.

Thompson: What did the Gilded Age build that’s most worth remembering?

White: It began to build public infrastructure—which allowed Americans to live better and to be in better health—and transportation infrastructure. The United States, unlike Europe, is this single country without tariff barriers between states, which can use the resources of the entire country. Did we do it efficiently? No. But we did it. And in the end, it became the basic source for much of the growth that followed.

Read: The other fear of the founders

The other thing we started to do, at Edison’s lab and at the Gilded Age universities, is build a way to create useful knowledge. We’d always been a nation of tinkerers and inventors, but then we began to systematize it for the public good. The final thing, and it’s not so popular anymore, is we begin to create a set of experts and expert organizations, which begin to take that kind of knowledge and to put it to public use.

Thompson: How did the excesses of the Gilded Age set the stage for the next era of American history and government, which was the Progressive era?

White: I think that the best way to understand the Progressive era is that the Progressives saw society as a machine. You don’t let a machine evolve. You design a machine. When a machine breaks down, you repair the machine. When you can get a better machine, you build a better machine. So Progressives begin to think civil society is something which is going to have to be managed all the time.

The great advantage of Progressivism is what it did in terms of distribution and equity. But the major drawback of Progressivism, which we struggle with still today, is that in essence, it becomes undemocratic. There’s tension in a democracy between rule of experts and having a country which ostensibly is under the control of people through their votes and setting the goals. That tension appears in the Progressive era, and it has never, ever gone away.

How the Trump Administration Learned to Obscure the Truth in Court

This is a litigation strategy born of the first travel ban.

by Leah Litman

The litigation over the government’s summary renditions of foreign nationals to an El Salvador prison, with no due process of law, is now at the Supreme Court’s door. The justices will soon decide whether to relieve the Trump administration from the trial court’s order halting the expulsions. Whether the government has complied with the order isn’t directly before the Supreme Court. But whether the Court can trust the government’s representations during such quickly unfolding litigation is—and the justices have every reason not to.

In this and other cases now being litigated, the government is following a playbook established during the fight over the first Trump administration’s travel ban, which barred entry into the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. From that litigation, the administration learned a strategy for implementing portions of its legally dubious agenda without the Court’s explicit blessing: go fast. Speed facilitates obfuscation. By pushing litigation to a breakneck pace—and changing the underlying details just as quickly—the administration was able to get the Supreme Court’s approval for policies without full legal scrutiny. That same approach is once again under way in the deportations case and in others now before the Court.

The story of the first Trump administration’s travel ban began on Friday, January 27, 2017, when the administration announced a prohibition on travel from seven majority-Muslim countries with no exceptions, including for people with ties to the United States, such as green-card or visa holders. It did so with no advance warning, which meant passengers boarded flights not knowing they wouldn’t be allowed to enter the United States. The policy was sloppy, cruel, and riddled with animus—so blatantly illegal that the Trump administration declined to continue defending it after lower courts invalidated it.

Tom Nichols: Trump’s authoritarian playbook

With the slapdash version dead, the administration came up with a (slightly) modified policy that appeared more legitimate, at least on a superficial level. The second ban, unlike the first, did not apply to visa and green-card holders. This one was also purportedly temporary: As written, it was set to last for 90 days, during which time the administration said it would conduct a formal review to determine what kind of permanent travel restrictions were warranted. Despite these nominal changes, it still reeked of illegal animus.

The administration asked the Supreme Court for permission to implement the temporary ban, but it did so in a strategic way that would enable the Court to give its okay without having to decide the substantive question of whether the measure was legal. Here’s how that worked: In spring 2017, the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Fourth and Ninth Circuits blocked the new ban. The government then turned to the Supreme Court, requesting emergency relief from those decisions. Curiously, the government requested expedited briefing (a rush on the papers both sides file in a case), but not expedited oral argument. In fact, it asked the Court to delay hearing the case until the fall, at which point the policy would have expired. By making its request in this way, the government was asking for an up-or-down vote on the lower court’s decision, but not a full consideration of the legal merits.

This gambit paid off. The Court allowed the administration to partially enforce the second travel ban for 90 days. By the end of that period, the administration had rolled out the third and final iteration—so that the third ban went into effect just as the second expired. The Court heard oral argument over whether the third iteration of the policy was invalid in spring 2018, and a few months later, the Court upheld it. In effect, the second version bought the administration time to put together a policy that looked more legitimate while it enforced a less legitimate version. The administration could claim that the third ban emerged from a formal process and had undergone significant revisions, rather than being fired off on a whim and on the basis of animus. But in the meantime, the administration was able to do what it wanted anyway: suspend entry from several majority-Muslim countries into the United States. And that may have made the Court more comfortable with accepting the third version, because a ban was by that point the status quo.

Part of the reason this worked is that the administration managed to get the Court to act quickly, without a careful parsing of the facts. That was a smart move, because actually defending the policy on a factual basis would have been quite a challenge. During the oral arguments over the third ban, the justices asked the Trump administration’s lawyer, Solicitor General Noel Francisco, about the waiver process—the mechanism that might allow people to show, on an individual basis, that they should be allowed to enter the United States. The solicitor general assured the Court that the process was available to people via consular officers. But after the argument, consular officials said that they had no authority or discretion to grant waivers, and that only certain officials in Washington could do so. The problem was that by then, the ban was in effect.

The new Trump administration now appears to be deploying a similar strategy in much of the litigation over its policies. For example, the recent litigation over the attempted shutdown and defunding of USAID confirmed that the administration is still trying to couple speed with factual opacity.

Read: The cruel attack on USAID

In that litigation, the administration claimed to possess the outlandish authority to cancel spending items that Congress had appropriated and approved—not just for USAID, but for other agencies, grants, and contracts. Numerous federal district judges have found several of the administration’s funding freezes unlawful. The relevant federal law, the Administrative Procedure Act, allows courts to block certain agency actions. That’s just what the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia did in the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition v. United States case—block the administration’s implementation of an across-the-board funding freeze at USAID.

The administration rushed to the Supreme Court to free itself from lower-court decisions blocking its initial version of the policies. In particular, the administration requested relief via the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket.” Again, this is right from the travel-ban playbook.

The administration’s lawyers asked the Court to act quickly while insisting that it wasn’t possible to pay out the contracts that had been subject to the initial USAID freeze, which the district court had effectively ordered it to honor. And because the case was developing so rapidly, the government’s timeline did not give the justices much chance to familiarize themselves with the details. As with the travel ban, a rushed job stood to benefit the administration by increasing the odds that the Court would take the government at its word without really looking into things deeply.

In this instance, the administration did not prevail, but it certainly tried. Before the Supreme Court, the government said that it was “not logistically or technically feasible” for it to pay the 2,000 or so invoices ordered by the district court. The justices refused to pause the district court’s ruling, instead allowing the court to determine whether a preliminary injunction was warranted, and directing it to act with “with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.” Left with time to develop and consider more facts, the district court pointed to a declaration by Peter Marocco, the acting director for USAID, acknowledging that prior to January 20, 2025, both USAID and the State Department could process several thousand payments a day. This temporary victory for the rule of law might not last, however; the litigation may yet head back to the Supreme Court, where the administration’s rush strategy could eventually win out.

If the Court accepts what the government is saying now in the summary-expulsion case, it will be risking its own credibility. In that case, the administration is asking the Court to credit, without evidence, several of its assertions. Among them is the unbelievable claim that individuals facing summary expulsion would somehow be able to challenge their prospective expulsion even though they may not know they are about to be sent to a foreign prison.

The Court should reject the government’s request to pause the lower court’s decision and recognize that its rush strategy is designed to make a mockery of the rule of law, not to mention the concept of facts. As they say, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice …

Elon Musk Lost His Big Bet

Grievance politics can only carry him so far.

by Charlie Warzel

Last night, X’s “For You” algorithm offered me up what felt like a dispatch from an alternate universe. It was a post from Elon Musk, originally published hours earlier. “This is the first time humans have been in orbit around the poles of the Earth!” he wrote. Underneath his post was a video shared by SpaceX—footage of craggy ice caps, taken by the company’s Dragon spacecraft during a private mission. Taken on its own, the video is genuinely captivating. Coming from Musk at that moment, it was also somewhat depressing.

X fed me that video just moments after it became clear that Susan Crawford, the Democratic judge Musk spent $25 million campaigning against, would handily win election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Given Musk’s heavy involvement—the centibillionaire not only campaigned in the state but also brazenly attempted to buy the election by offering to pay voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges”—the election was billed as a referendum of sorts on Musk’s own popularity. In that sense, it was a resounding defeat. Musk, normally a frenetic poster, had very little to say about politics last night, pecking out just a handful of terse messages to his 218.5 million followers. “The long con of the left is corruption of the judiciary,” he posted at 1:23 a.m. eastern time.

In the light of defeat, the SpaceX post feels like a glimpse into what could have been for Musk—a timeline where the world’s richest man wasn’t algorithmically radicalized by his own social-media platform. It’s possible that Musk’s temperament and personal politics would have always led him down this path. But it’s also easy to imagine a version where he mostly stayed out of politics, instead leaning into his companies and continuing to bolster his carefully cultivated brand of Elon Musk, King of Nerd Geniuses.

Read: The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government

Unfortunately, he surrendered fully to grievance politics. Like so many other prolific posters, he became the person his most vocal followers wanted him to be and, in the process, appears to have committed reputational suicide. Since joining President Donald Trump’s administration as DOGE’s figurehead—presiding over the quasi-legal gutting of the federal government—Musk has become not just polarizing but also genuinely unpopular in America. Now his political influence is waning, Tesla is the object of mass protest, and sales of his vehicles are cratering. This morning, only hours after his candidate lost, Trump reportedly told his inner circle and Cabinet members that Musk will be “stepping back” from his perch in the administration for a more “supporting role.” In Trumpworld, nothing’s over until it’s over, but Elon Musk seems to have overstayed his welcome. (Musk did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the White House referred me to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s post calling the report that Musk is stepping back “garbage”; Musk posted on X that the reporting is “fake news.”)

Musk’s appeal to Trump has always been about two things: money and optics. As the richest man in the world, Musk is both a cash cow and a kind of enforcer: His checkbook and closeness to Trump remind Republicans in Congress that they can and will be primaried if they break from the administration. But Musk’s reputation is just as important to Trump, who respects great wealth and clearly enjoys being shadowed and adored by a man of Musk’s perceived stature and technological acumen (although Trump is easily impressed—take, for example, “Everything’s Computer!”) Musk’s image in Silicon Valley was useful to the Trump campaign, bringing in new fanboy voters and sending a message that the administration would transform the government and run it like a lean start-up.

But although his money is still good, the Wisconsin election suggests that Musk himself is an electoral liability. A poll released today, conducted in Wisconsin by Marquette University Law School, showed that 60 percent of respondents view Musk unfavorably, and a recent Harvard/Harris poll shows that his national favorability dropped 10 points from February to March. (He now has a net favorability rating of –10 percent.) An aggregation of national polls shows that the approval rating of his DOGE efforts has also dipped dramatically: Just 39 percent of Americans approve of his work, nearly 10 points lower than in mid-February.

To many observers, it seemed inevitable from the outset that, over time, Musk would clash with, and alienate himself from, Trump, a man who does not like to share the spotlight. But behind Musk’s low favorability rating is a simple notion: Americans (including Trump supporters) are uncomfortable and resentful of an unelected mega-billionaire rooting through the government, dismantling programs and blithely musing about cutting benefit programs such as Social Security. Musk has long behaved in business as though laws and regulations don’t apply to him—a tactic that seems to backfire more easily when applied to politics. His posts, which use captions such as “Easy money in Wisconsin” to offer thinly veiled bribes to state residents for posing outside polling locations, aren’t just questionably legal; they’re blatant reminders that the world’s richest man was attempting to purchase an election.

There is also, perhaps, a creeping sensation that Musk’s efficiency hunt into the government has not yielded the examples of corruption that Trump supporters crave. During a Q&A at Musk’s rally in Wisconsin on Sunday, one attendee asked if DOGE had found any evidence that “radical left” Democrats have received money from USAID, and if so, whether Musk planned to share the evidence. Musk stammered, explaining only that USAID’s money flowed circuitously and that it was suspicious that members of Congress were so wealthy. Throughout the rally, Musk seemed more interested in role-playing as a politician, delivering “extended monologues about immigration policy, alleged fraud in the Social Security system and the future of artificial intelligence,” as The New York Times reported.

Read: Elon Musk looks desperate

Trump may be realizing that though tech products and services may be quite popular, their creators are often less appealing. (Two-thirds of Americans have an unfavorable view of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, even as billions of people around the world use his platforms.) To those outside of the techno-optimist bubble, plenty of the obsessions of the tech elite (artificial general intelligence, cryptocurrency) can come off as weird or inscrutable. “As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” Musk posted on X in the wee hours today, as if to prove the point.

Musk seems, at least outwardly, unable to reckon with his current position. Just days after framing this race as a hinge point for “the entire destiny of humanity,” Musk said on X that “I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for positional gain.” From the outside, though, it’s difficult to see what he’s gained. Last week, protesters demonstrated outside hundreds of Tesla locations; Musk has long been erratic, but his dalliance with DOGE has alienated environmentally conscious liberals, a major demographic for electric vehicles. And by seeming so focused on DOGE, he’s frustrated investors who worry that Tesla is losing its first-mover advantage in the United States. Foreign rivals, such as China’s BYD, are quickly gaining steam. Tesla’s stock price instantly rose 15 points on the reports that Musk would soon leave the administration.

There is a case to be made that Musk’s cozying up to Trump will ultimately benefit Musk’s empire—avoiding regulations that may help with Tesla’s self-driving plans or SpaceX and Starlink contracts, for example. But so many of the signs point to a less desirable outcome. Musk’s outsize support of Trump was always a political risk, but his decision to come aboard the administration and, at one time, position himself as a kind of shadow president is arguably the biggest bet of his career. In the short term, it does not appear to be paying off.

Musk woke up this morning less popular than he’s been in recent memory. He’s alienated himself from an American public that used to widely revere him, and his political capital seems to be fading rapidly. The only question now is whether, after getting a taste of the political spotlight, he’ll be able to give it up without a fight.

No Tariff Exemptions for American Farmers

They voted for the tariffs when they voted for Trump.

by David Frum

American farmers are pleading for exemptions from President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Republican members of Congress from farm states are working to deliver the relief farmers want. But farmers do not deserve special treatment and should not get it.

Tariffs will indeed hurt farmers badly. Farm costs will rise. Farm incomes will drop. Under Trump’s tariffs, farmers will pay more for fertilizer. They will pay more for farm equipment. They will pay more for the fuel to ship their products to market. When foreign countries retaliate, raising their own tariff barriers, American farmers will lose export markets. Their domestic sales will come under pressure too, because tariffs will shrink Americans’ disposable incomes: Consumers will have to cut back everywhere, including at the grocery store.

Farmers will share this tariff predicament of higher costs and lower incomes with almost all Americans—except the very wealthiest, who are less exposed to tariffs because they consume less of their incomes and can offset the pain of tariffs with other benefits from Trump, beginning with a dramatic reduction in tax enforcement.

Farmers are different from other Americans, however, in three ways.

First, farmers voted for Trump by huge margins. In America’s 444 most farm-dependent counties, Trump won an average of 77.7 percent of the vote—nearly two points more than Trump scored in those same counties in 2020.

Second, farmers have already pocketed windfall profits from Trump’s previous round of tariffs.

When Trump started a trade war with China in 2018, China switched its soybean purchasing from the United States to Brazil. By 2023, Brazil was exporting twice as much as the United States. Trump compensated farmers with lavish cash payouts. The leading study of these effects suggests that soybean farmers may have received twice as much from the Trump farm bailout as they lost from the 2018 round of tariffs, because the Trump administration failed to consider that U.S. soybeans not exported to China were eventually sold elsewhere, albeit at lower prices. The richest farmers collected the greatest share of the windfall. The largest 10 percent of farms received an average of $85 an acre in payouts, according to a 2019 study by the economists Eric Belasco and Vincent Smith for the American Enterprise Institute. The median-size farm received only $56 an acre. Altogether, farmers have been amply compensated in advance for the harm about to be done to them by the man most farming communities voted for.

Third, farmers can better afford to pay the price of Trump’s tariffs than many other tariff victims.

Farmers can already obtain federal insurance against depressed prices for their products. Most farmers report low incomes from farming, but they have a high net worth. The median American farm shows net assets of about $1.5 million. Commercial-farm households show median net assets of $3.6 million. The appearance of low incomes is in any case misleading. Again, according to Smith, families that own farms earn only 20 percent of their income from farming. Even the richest farmers, those with farm assets above $6 million, still earn about half their income from other sources, including a spouse’s employment in a local business or through a rural government job such as a county extension agent. On average, farm families earn higher total incomes than nonfarm families, and their debt-to-equity ratio is typically low.

Jerusalem Demsas: Trump is unleashing a chaos economy

None of this is to deny that farmers will suffer from the tariffs. They will. A lot. But so will city people. As will people in industries that use steel or aluminum or copper as components. As will people in service industries and export industries, people who rely on the trade treaties trashed by Trump to protect their copyrights and patents. And anybody with money invested in stocks. And anybody who drives a car or truck.

During the 2024 election campaign, Americans were told, in effect, that no sacrifice was too great to revive the domestic U.S. toaster-manufacturing industry. If that claim is true, then farmers should be proud to pay more and receive less, making the same sacrifice as any other American.

But if a farm family voted for Trump, believing that his policies were good, it seems strange that they would then demand that they, and only they, should be spared the full consequences of those policies. Tariffs are the dish that rural America ordered for everyone. Now the dish has arrived at the table. For some reason, they do not want to partake themselves or pay their share of the bill.

That’s not how it should work. What you serve to others you should eat yourself. And if rural America cannot choke down its portion, why must other Americans stomach theirs?

Miscarriage and Motherhood

What having a baby taught me about the illusion of control

by Ashley Parker

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

I miscarried in three acts.

The first was the bad appointment: the somber technician; the clinical, straightforward news—not enough growth for eight weeks and, worse, no heartbeat. She was so sorry; the doctor would be in touch.

The second act was the D&C, short for “dilation and curettage”: the paperwork, the kind and efficient nurses, the IV and the sterile room—all stainless steel and bright lights, solid stirrups, and tissue-paper gowns—and the scraping from my uterus of what was supposed to have been my baby.

The third act was another D&C: the same as the previous time, but now even less dignified, somehow, because shouldn’t it be enough to miscarry once? There’s extra tissue, they said; sometimes this happens.

I had not ordered the upgraded version, the miscarriage with a side of miscarriage.

The day I learned my pregnancy ended was March 1, 2022, but I remember it mostly as also being the day of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. As my husband, Mike, and I left the doctor’s office, the midday sun glinting off my tears, Mike said he felt like he was going to throw up.

We walked through downtown D.C. holding hands for a few blocks. Then I went back to work, and waited for Biden’s speech. While I was waiting, the doctor called, as promised. I grabbed a reporter’s notebook and ducked into an alcove so she could walk me through my options.

You can just wait to miscarry naturally, she said, but she didn’t recommend that option. She explained that it can take days, weeks, even months before your body realizes the baby has stopped growing, and most people have trouble with the waiting.

The next option was to take a pill that starts the process of passing the blood, the cells, the tissue; she could call the prescription in, and I could begin the process at home. Her office would give me medicine to manage the anxiety, medicine to manage the nausea, medicine to manage the pain. I’d call them every few hours, to update them about my progress.

The final option was a D&C, a procedure also used to end pregnancies, though I didn’t understand this at the time. I’d have to wait for an opening in the schedule, she explained, which could take a few days, but then it would be quick and relatively painless; I’d come in, undergo deep sedation, have the tissue scraped from my uterus, and go home the same day.

Her recommendation was the pill—the D&C could occasionally lead to scarring—but the choice was mine. I felt helpless, unsure of what to do other than cry. But I did what I often do when I’m upset, and began oversharing with my friends and family.

Every Wednesday night, I have a standing Zoom with five other women, all friends from college. The tradition started as a one-off whim during the pandemic but is now in its fifth year. Sometimes we skip a week, and rarely do all six of us make it, but almost every Wednesday night at 8:30, some configuration of us meets virtually to gossip and talk about our lives.

Between us, we have been pregnant 24 times and collectively given birth to 14 kids.

This statistic—six women, 24 pregnancies, 14 kids—stops me cold every time it occurs to me, but it shouldn’t. As many as one-quarter of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, according to the National Library of Medicine, and some research suggests that the actual number may be much higher, because some women miscarry without ever knowing they were pregnant. And most of us were in our 30s—if not “geriatric” or of “advanced maternal age,” in OB-GYN parlance—when we got pregnant.

And so, in the unluckiness of others, I was lucky. Because my friends had talked openly about some of their toughest moments, I felt less alone during mine.

I sometimes think of one of these friends, the one who miscarried three times in 2019, as the human embodiment of the what-to-do-when-you’re-miscarrying options that my doctor had talked me through. Except my friend wasn’t any one of those options. She was D, all of the above. And she was a real person, who had grieved each loss.

She explained that the time she had miscarried naturally had been the best by far—finding out the bad news from the cramps and the blood—but because that wasn’t an option for me, she definitely recommended a D&C. She had taken the pill for one of her miscarriages, but she’d ended up hemorrhaging, which meant she’d been rushed to the hospital for what ultimately ended in a D&C anyhow.

Read: There are no ‘five stages’ of grief

I called another friend, a fellow journalist who had done eight rounds of IVF to have a baby on her own after a divorce. She’d also had two miscarriages—including one during the IVF process—and found the clinical precision of a D&C comforting amid all the variables she couldn’t control. “You don’t want to be dealing with that shit at home, alone,” she said.

She was right. I have a low tolerance for pain, and I freak out at the mere mention of vomit. (Perhaps my proudest parenting achievement was when I taught my then-4-year-old to get to the bathroom entirely on her own at the first ominous mention of a middle-of-the-night stomachache). I imagined myself in our upstairs bathroom, passing blood clots the size of golf balls, sweating and staving off dry heaves, and trying to suss out via telehealth if this was all “normal”—just an especially gory outtake from Scream—or if I was on the verge of bleeding out.

I called back and scheduled a D&C.

My grief was surprising, absurdist, nonlinear.

I walked back to my office and that night wrote about Biden’s speech. I remember looking around the newsroom and taking in my Washington Post colleagues, whose biggest concern seemed to be where our editors had ordered pizza from that night, and silently wondering, How do you not know what’s going on inside my body right now? But I also filed 35-odd inches, clean, quickly, on deadline.

By the time I finally arrived at my D&C appointment a few days later (the first available slot), I felt like a beach towel that had been wrung out—sand-raw, but also damp and rumpled. As I filled out the relevant paperwork affirming that, yes, I understood there was a rare risk of life-threatening complications—that would be a real doozy, I mentally noted—I couldn’t help but laugh grimly to myself as I called the nurse over. “You gave me the wrong forms,” I said. “These say I’m here for an abortion; I’m here for a miscarriage.”

A quick half-smile broke her face into a moon of empathy: This procedure is an abortion, she said. You experienced pregnancy loss, but you are technically having an abortion. Of course I understood this intellectually, but in the moment, it all seemed so backward. I didn’t want an abortion. I wanted a baby. But things hadn’t gone the way I wanted them to.

There were other misunderstandings before the actual procedure. I had brought a book with me, Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas, marketed as a “razor-sharp” debut novel about on-campus sexual politics and power in the #MeToo era; it had earned critical acclaim. The cover featured, simply, the naked torso of a faceless man slouched rakishly, and one of the nurses made a kind, throwaway joke about my “steamy” reading.

Naked but for a gown, an IV in my arm, I somehow found myself desperately trying to explain to her that this was modern literature, not some erotic paperback, and that I was a journalist, an intellectual, or at least a pseudo-intellectual; that I was someone who had done all the right things; that I’d taken prenatal vitamins and avoided all the vices you’re supposed to avoid; and that this dead pile of cells inside of me was not my fault.

After the procedure, my entire midsection achy with cramps, I just wanted to go home and lie under the covers and weep. But also, I asked Mike, weren’t we near that good soup-dumpling place? And so, on a gray and chilly Tuesday, we slurped rich, porky broth before driving home. “At least now,” I said, “I can’t tell if my stomach hurts from the procedure, or because I ate too many soup dumplings.”

What followed was not what I expected. At first, it was the compassion of others that shattered me. I had emailed my mostly male editors to tell them why I’d be missing a day of work, and they were kind in ways I hadn’t imagined. They called, repeatedly, in the following days, just to check in. My friends, too, sent flowers and cookies and soup—so much soup. I found myself standing in my kitchen late at night, chugging soup, to make sure the matzoh balls and chicken and noodles didn’t go to waste.

Several weeks later, after the chromosomal test came back, my doctor called to tell me the results and asked if I wanted to know the sex. Some people don’t, she said. But I’m a journalist and a gossip; I always want more information. Yet when she told me I would have had a baby girl, I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach. Somehow, that one detail made everything feel real.

Other details, ones that I thought would stay with me forever, faded away unexpectedly. The same day my doctor told me the gender, she also told me the specific trisomy my baby had, which was incompatible with life. I Googled it, staying up late on Reddit threads, imprinting the horrible condition onto my mind. Now, three years later, I can’t remember the name.

These days, I can bring up my miscarriage in casual conversation, just another fact of my 42 years, an almost offhand detail. Oh yeah, that State of the Union was very stressful—a crazy deadline, and I happened to be miscarrying.

Mine was not a “bad” miscarriage.

Like many women, I kept on apologizing, caveating my pain. I’d only been eight weeks along, I explained. It had been touch-and-go from the beginning, I qualified. I already had two great kids—my daughter and my stepdaughter—and maybe I was being greedy, wanting too much.

After all, I knew about bad pregnancy loss. The friend who miscarried three times in a calendar year. The friend who, after an easy beginning of her pregnancy, got a devastating diagnosis at her 20-week anatomy scan, where she was told that the little boy she’d already nicknamed Baby Butterfly would have, in the absolute best-case scenario, a life consumed by pain. (She and her husband decided to seek a late-term abortion, and wrote movingly about their experience in their hometown paper, The Boston Globe.) The friend whose wife, after eight “bad” appointments, finally got pregnant, and at 24 weeks—just when they’d begun to relax—delivered a perfect stillborn girl.

Mine was none of those things. But my miscarriage was also mine, I came to realize, and no less painful than anyone else’s.

I had gotten pregnant easily with my first daughter. Mike and I bought a house, stopped using protection, got engaged, and got pregnant. It took just three months. I was four months pregnant when we got married in our Washington rowhouse—me in brown cowboy boots and a short white dress I’d bought for $80—and I started showing on our honeymoon in Japan.

Every time I had a checkup, Mike came to the appointment bearing a small gift—a onesie, a baby book, a tiny pair of socks. And despite knowing all the stories, all the risks, I waltzed into every appointment practically floating, eager to hear the heartbeat and to see the pea-size, then kiwi-size, then squash-size little being who would one day be mine. Who was already mine.

My second pregnancy was harder. I was older, so was Mike, and after a year, we finally went to a well-known Washington fertility clinic, Shady Grove Fertility. Shady Grove was so popular, in fact, that I was constantly bumping into people I knew in the waiting room. Sometimes, I felt that instead of resenting the early-morning blood draws and vaginal ultrasounds, I should be taking notes and pitching an essay about the hottest club in town.

Ultimately, the unofficial diagnosis was age. We were old, and getting pregnant is generally harder when you’re older. My doctor recommended IVF, which she said, based on our particulars, was the best way to go home with a live baby.  But she also said it was our choice, and outlined the other options.

We started with intrauterine insemination, or IUI. The recommendation was IUI with Clomid, an estrogen-receptor modulator that helps stimulate ovulation and may result in your body releasing multiple eggs. Or, put slightly more crudely: If IUI is essentially a more effective version of the turkey-baster method, then IUI with Clomid is like basting several turkeys. Already exhausted from two kids, a job, and regular fertility appointments that felt like a second job, I decided I’d rather go home with no turkey than two turkeys. So we started natural-cycle IUI.

The first time we did it, I miscarried around eight weeks—the State of the Union miscarriage. The second time—a few months later, after my body had healed and I’d gotten my period again—the procedure just didn’t take. It was, in short, like having sex and simply not getting pregnant. And the third IUI cycle, I got pregnant with my youngest daughter, now almost 2.

If I’d floated through my first pregnancy, nine months full of little gifts and high hopes, this one I muscled through like a clenched fist. I was always bracing, waiting for the long pause from the sonogram tech, the hushed whispers of the doctors, the bad news that any woman knows is always lurking, ready to make you question how you could have been better, or what you did wrong.

When the truth, almost always, is: nothing. You did nothing wrong.

When I was younger, getting pregnant felt like an inevitability, something that happened to every woman, almost effortlessly, and something to guard against at all times. (Still a virgin during my sophomore year of college, I once took a pregnancy test because a boy had ejaculated on my thigh.)

As I got older, I came to view pregnancy as something to be worked at. People were always “trying” to get pregnant. As one of my closest high-school friends explained to me: “All natural pregnancies after a certain age are just the result of prescheduled, vaguely stressful, vanilla sex.” And as I got older still, and “trying” led to not getting pregnant, I came to view pregnancy as an elusive goal, just out of reach—as grueling work, and something to “science the shit out of,” as a former colleague who had also done fertility treatments once memorably put it.

But really, the act of getting pregnant is a leap of faith. If it happens; when it happens; how it happens; and now, after the overturn of Roe v Wade, if and how you can end it—nearly everything about pregnancy entails an act of cosmic hopefulness.

Read: What happens to a woman’s brain when she becomes a mother

I learned this truth again and again, including in my first “easy” pregnancy with my now 6-year-old. When I was about seven months pregnant with her, we showed up for a routine appointment and were told that she had “fallen off the growth chart.” The measurements of her head and limbs were especially alarming. Mike, a fellow political reporter used to devouring campaign polls, asked if her growth issue could be “within the margin of error.” (It could not, came the reply).

Instead, the doctors told us there were four likely outcomes based on our daughter’s suddenly problematic measurements: She could have Down syndrome, she could have Zika, she could have dwarfism—or she could have none of the above. Maybe she was just going to be small, they said. Maybe we just had small heads. We’re sitting right here! I wanted to shout. Do we or do we not have small heads?! This feels knowable!

Instead, I asked: “Would it help if I changed my diet? Or exercised more?” (It would not, came the reply.)

And so, for two months, we waited. Then, finally, we found ourselves in the hospital, in an operating room awaiting an unplanned C-section after roughly 24 hours of labor. When the doctor pulled our baby from my uterus, I was still strapped to the steel table, and Mike shouted out his observations, answering my unasked questions. “Her head is the right size! Her arms are the right size! Her legs are the right size!”

The doctors must have just thought we were rapturous first-time parents. But they were wrong. We were overjoyed, yes. But we also already intuitively understood then what we would learn later, again and again: just how little control we had, how little control any parent has, over any part of what it means to bring a life into this world.

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.

by Jeffrey Goldberg

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining.

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The story technically begins shortly after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, in October 2023. The Houthis—an Iran-backed terrorist organization whose motto is “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”—soon launched attacks on Israel and on international shipping, creating havoc for global trade. Throughout 2024, the Biden administration was ineffective in countering these Houthi attacks; the incoming Trump administration promised a tougher response.

This is where Pete Hegseth and I come in.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.

I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”

The message continued, “Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx.”

Read: Here are the attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared on Signal

The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

One minute later, a person identified only as “MAR”—the secretary of state is Marco Antonio Rubio—wrote, “Mike Needham for State,” apparently designating the current counselor of the State Department as his representative. At that same moment, a Signal user identified as “JD Vance” wrote, “Andy baker for VP.” One minute after that, “TG” (presumably Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, or someone masquerading as her) wrote, “Joe Kent for DNI.” Nine minutes later, “Scott B”—apparently Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, or someone spoofing his identity, wrote, “Dan Katz for Treasury.” At 4:53 p.m., a user called “Pete Hegseth” wrote, “Dan Caldwell for DoD.” And at 6:34 p.m., “Brian” wrote “Brian McCormack for NSC.” One more person responded: “John Ratcliffe” wrote at 5:24 p.m. with the name of a CIA official to be included in the group. I am not publishing that name, because that person is an active intelligence officer.

The principals had apparently assembled. In all, 18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials; Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and someone identified only as “S M,” which I took to stand for Stephen Miller. I appeared on my own screen only as “JG.”

That was the end of the Thursday text chain.

After receiving the Waltz text related to the “Houthi PC small group,” I consulted a number of colleagues. We discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts to place journalists in embarrassing positions, and sometimes succeeds. I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

The next day, things got even stranger.

At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”

At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”

A person identified in Signal as “Joe Kent” (Trump’s nominee to run the National Counterterrorism Center is named Joe Kent) wrote at 8:22, “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line. We’ll have the exact same options in a month.”

Then, at 8:26 a.m., a message landed in my Signal app from the user “John Ratcliffe.” The message contained information that might be interpreted as related to actual and current intelligence operations.

At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account. “VP: I understand your concerns – and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

The Hegseth message goes on to state, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”—operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.”

A few minutes later, the “Michael Waltz” account posted a lengthy note about trade figures, and the limited capabilities of European navies. “Whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes. Per the president’s request we are working with DOD and State to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans.”

The account identified as “JD Vance” addressed a message at 8:45 to @Pete Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.” (The administration has argued that America’s European allies benefit economically from the U.S. Navy’s protection of international shipping lanes.)

The user identified as Hegseth responded three minutes later: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go; but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.”

At this point, the previously silent “S M” joined the conversation. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

A screenshot from the Signal group shows debate over the president’s views ahead of the attack.

That message from “S M”—presumably President Trump’s confidant Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, or someone playing Stephen Miller—effectively shut down the conversation. The last text of the day came from “Pete Hegseth,” who wrote at 9:46 a.m., “Agree.”

After reading this chain, I recognized that this conversation possessed a high degree of verisimilitude. The texts, in their word choice and arguments, sounded as if they were written by the people who purportedly sent them, or by a particularly adept AI text generator. I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.

It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.

The only person to reply to the update from Hegseth was the person identified as the vice president. “I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. (Two other users subsequently added prayer emoji.)

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.

I went back to the Signal channel. At 1:48, “Michael Waltz” had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an “amazing job.” A few minutes later, “John Ratcliffe” wrote, “A good start.” Not long after, Waltz responded with three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Others soon joined in, including “MAR,” who wrote, “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Susie Wiles,” who texted, “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.” “Steve Witkoff” responded with five emoji: two hands-praying, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. “TG” responded, “Great work and effects!” The after-action discussion included assessments of damage done, including the likely death of a specific individual. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.

A screenshot from the Signal group shows reactions to the strikes.

On Sunday, Waltz appeared on ABC’s This Week and contrasted the strikes with the Biden administration’s more hesitant approach. “These were not kind of pinprick, back-and-forth—what ultimately proved to be feckless attacks,” he said. “This was an overwhelming response that actually targeted multiple Houthi leaders and took them out.”

The Signal chat group, I concluded, was almost certainly real. Having come to this realization, one that seemed nearly impossible only hours before, I removed myself from the Signal group, understanding that this would trigger an automatic notification to the group’s creator, “Michael Waltz,” that I had left. No one in the chat had seemed to notice that I was there. And I received no subsequent questions about why I left—or, more to the point, who I was.

Earlier today, I emailed Waltz and sent him a message on his Signal account. I also wrote to Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe, Tulsi Gabbard, and other officials. In an email, I outlined some of my questions: Is the “Houthi PC small group” a genuine Signal thread? Did they know that I was included in this group? Was I (on the off chance) included on purpose? If not, who did they think I was? Did anyone realize who I was when I was added, or when I removed myself from the group? Do senior Trump-administration officials use Signal regularly for sensitive discussions? Do the officials believe that the use of such a channel could endanger American personnel?

Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, responded two hours later, confirming the veracity of the Signal group. “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Hughes wrote. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”

William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, said that despite the impression created by the texts, the vice president is fully aligned with the president. “The Vice President’s first priority is always making sure that the President’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” he said. “Vice President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy. The President and the Vice President have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”

I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.

Read: A conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg about his extraordinary scoop

Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred.

All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said. Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

Hegseth, Ratcliffe, and other Cabinet-level officials presumably would have the authority to declassify information, and several of the national-security lawyers noted that the hypothetical officials on the Signal chain might claim that they had declassified the information they shared. But this argument rings hollow, they cautioned, because Signal is not an authorized venue for sharing information of such a sensitive nature, regardless of whether it has been stamped “top secret” or not.

There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

“Under the records laws applicable to the White House and federal agencies, all government employees are prohibited from using electronic-messaging applications such as Signal for official business, unless those messages are promptly forwarded or copied to an official government account,” Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and the former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told Harris.

“Intentional violations of these requirements are a basis for disciplinary action. Additionally, agencies such as the Department of Defense restrict electronic messaging containing classified information to classified government networks and/or networks with government-approved encrypted features,” Baron said.

Several former U.S. officials told Harris and me that they had used Signal to share unclassified information and to discuss routine matters, particularly when traveling overseas without access to U.S. government systems. But they knew never to share classified or sensitive information on the app, because their phones could have been hacked by a foreign intelligence service, which would have been able to read the messages on the devices. It is worth noting that Donald Trump, as a candidate for president (and as president), repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for using a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state. (It is also worth noting that Trump was indicted in 2023 for mishandling classified documents, but the charges were dropped after his election.)

Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.

All along, members of the Signal group were aware of the need for secrecy and operations security. In his text detailing aspects of the forthcoming attack on Houthi targets, Hegseth wrote to the group—which, at the time, included me—“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”

Shane Harris contributed reporting.

RFK Jr. Is Out for Revenge

The health secretary’s indiscriminate layoffs will undermine his own priorities.

by Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is finally getting his wish of sucker-punching the federal health agencies. This week, Kennedy began the process of firing some 10,000 employees working under the Health and Human Services umbrella. Even before he took office, Kennedy warned health officials that they should pack their bags, and on Tuesday, he defended the cuts: “What we’ve been doing isn’t working,” Kennedy posted on X. He is focused on “realigning HHS with its core mission: to stop the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.” But instead of improving how the federal health bureaucracy works, RFK Jr. is throwing his agencies into chaos.

The Trump administration hasn’t released details about which offices specifically were targeted, but the cuts seem to be so deep and indiscriminate that they are going to hamstring Kennedy’s own stated priorities. Kennedy has made clear that he’s singularly focused on reducing rates of chronic disease in America, but the health secretary has reportedly laid off officials in the CDC’s office tasked with that same goal. While cigarette smoking remains a leading cause of chronic disease, the top FDA official in charge of regulating tobacco is now on administrative leave, and everyone working for the CDC office that monitors tobacco use has been fired, according to the former CDC director Tom Frieden. Despite Kennedy’s promises to establish a culture of “radical transparency” at the federal agencies, he also appears to have fired the employees whom journalists and the greater public rely on to provide essential updates about the government’s actions. (In a statement, a spokesperson for HHS said that the personnel cuts were focused on “redundant or unnecessary administrative positions.”)

Kennedy, an anti-vaccine advocate, seems to have targeted more than just the most pro-vaccine voices in the government. During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy said he would “empower the scientists” as health secretary, but here are just a few of the M.D.s and Ph.D.s who were reportedly targeted yesterday: the head of the FDA’s Office of New Drugs, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, the head of the CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, the director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the director of the NIH’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, the director of the National Institute of Nursing Research, and the director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

No plan—not his MAHA agenda, not efficiency, nothing—can realistically explain cuts like these. Instead, the mass firings don’t seem to be a means to an end on the way to overhauling American health. They are an end in themselves.

It’ll take months, if not years, to fully appreciate the effect that the cuts will have on America’s scientific enterprise. The decimation at the FDA is particularly galling. Several of the agency’s top leaders charged with reviewing and approving innovative new treatments have been ushered to the exit. This is likely to lead to slower development of advancements in biomedical science; although the FDA doesn’t fund biomedical research, its leaders play a crucial role in advising pharmaceutical companies on how to conduct research and ultimately get their breakthroughs approved. America was just beginning to reap the benefits of these efforts. There are now gene therapies that can treat genetic blindness. Young children who previously would have been condemned to certain death at the hands of a rare disease, such as severe spinal muscular atrophy, now have a chance at life. The government invested in mRNA technology for decades before it was leveraged to create vaccines that saved us from a once-in-century pandemic.

One particularly dispiriting departure is that of Peter Marks, the longtime leader of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. I’d guess that, unlike me, you didn’t spend the early pandemic binge-watching scientific meetings where vaccine policy was debated. Marks was impossible to miss—a bespectacled man speaking from a bunkerlike basement, a painting of a polar bear serving tea behind him. He gets a hefty portion of credit for Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, the effort to turbocharge the development of COVID vaccines, and he came up with the moniker. His center also regulates gene therapies, stem cells, and the U.S. blood supply.

Marks reportedly resigned under pressure from Kennedy on Friday, just before mass firings hit the FDA. The two men—one, America’s top vaccine regulator and the other, its top vaccine conspiracy theorist—have a long history. In 2021, when Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization formerly chaired by Kennedy, petitioned the FDA to revoke authorization for COVID shots, Marks is the one who signed the letter denying the request. It’s reasonable to assume that Kennedy and Marks were never going to see eye to eye on vaccines. But Marks publicly insisted that he wanted to stay in his role, and that he was willing to work with Kennedy. In a resignation letter, Marks wrote that Kennedy demanded nothing short of “subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” (Marks declined to comment for this story.)

Of course, not all 10,000 people who were fired had this type of history with their new boss. But the cuts, in many ways, appear to be rooted in a similar antagonism. In his welcome address to HHS staff in February, Kennedy offered reassurance that he was not coming in with biases, and said that people should give him a chance. “Let’s start a relationship by letting go of any preconceptions that you may have about me, and let’s start from square one,” Kennedy told the crowd. “Let’s establish a mutual intention to work toward what we all care about, the health of the American people.” In firing a huge swath of his staff, Kennedy has made clear what he believes: Anyone with an HHS badge is complicit in the current system, whether or not they have anything to do with the country’s health problems. As Calley Means, a top adviser to Kennedy, said during a Politico health-care summit earlier today, the scientists who were laid off “have overseen, just demonstrably, a record of utter failure.”

Kennedy can argue all he wants that the focus of federal health agencies needs to shift more toward chronic disease. Means and other MAHA acolytes are right that, in some ways, America has gotten less healthy and federal bureaucrats haven’t done enough to solve the problem. But decimating the entire health bureaucracy in this country is not proving his point. Kennedy doesn’t look like he is setting the agencies on a productive new course. He looks like he’s just out for revenge.

Katherine J. Wu contributed reporting.

The New Singlehood Stigma

Society tells us we should have a partner—but we shouldn’t <em>want</em> one.

by Faith Hill

Just to be clear: Today is, in many ways, the best time in American history to be single.

In the 18th century, bachelors paid higher taxes and faced harsher punishments for crimes than their betrothed counterparts. (“A Man without a Wife,” Benjamin Franklin said, “is but half a Man.”) Single women—more likely, naturally, to be seduced by the devil—were disproportionately executed for witchcraft. Through the 19th century and into the 20th, women had limited options for employment—and banks could refuse to let them open accounts until 1974, so the choice, for many of them, was marriage or poverty.

Forgive me, then, if I sound ungrateful when I say this: Americans are still extremely weird about single people. But now the problem isn’t just that singlehood is disparaged; sometimes, it’s that singlehood is celebrated. Relentlessly, annoyingly celebrated. Let me explain.

The assumption that partnership is a priority has not disappeared in this country. In 2019, when the Pew Research Center asked participants how necessary a committed romantic relationship is for a fulfilling life, nearly 60 percent said it’s important, and roughly 30 percent said it’s essential. Of course they did: Couples are the ones who get plus-one invites to weddings or office parties or family gatherings; they’re the ones who might be able to share health insurance, or sponsor each other for visas, or get tax benefits. Routine life—paying rent, getting groceries, reserving hotel rooms—is often far more expensive for single people (and especially single parents), who can’t as easily split costs or buy in bulk. We’re still living in a partnered person’s world.

Read: Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage

At the same time, I’ve noticed a counter-impulse, perhaps a reaction to all that injustice: a kind of public cheerleading for singlehood. Single celebrities seem pressed to make statements about how much they love solo life (and then promptly enter a relationship). People use terms like sologamy (“self-marriage”) or self-partnered (thank you, Emma Watson) or—you cannot make this stuff up—“QuirkyAlone.” Therapists advise embracing one’s single status with phrases such as “I’m focused on myself right now,” as if not having a partner automatically means you must be growing. And of course, much of this singlehood PR campaign targets women specifically. Single men have never faced quite as much scrutiny; they’ve had the luxury, more often, of being seen as full people in their own right. The 21st-century single woman is the one who has to prove her complete humanity by performing her contentment. She is empowered; she’s badass; she slays. She might also grieve—but no one really wants to talk about that.

I’ve spoken with a lot of single people, in my reporting and just in the course of life, who enjoy full, happy lives, complete with friends, family, meaningful work, and creative outlets—and who also yearn for partnership. These things are not mutually exclusive. I struggle sometimes to convey this in my own writing: Describing the absence of romantic love as a lack feels regressive. But then, so many people are telling me they feel they’re lacking something—something they want very badly. Who am I to deny that sense of loss? I’ve been single most of my adult life. I know that when you want a relationship, not having one can feel lonely; feeling like you shouldn’t want one just makes you lonelier. And all the polite cheeriness about singlehood—especially from partnered people, in a society still designed for couples—can feel disingenuous and patronizing.

Now would be a great time for some nuance. In recent years, the number of single people has been growing, in the United States as well as many other countries. Some have cast that shift as a victory, a sign that people are throwing off the shackles of compulsory coupledom and bad relationships; others have declared it an emergency, arguing that frustrated singles are giving up on romance—and that they’re going to miss out. I think both of these theories are a little bit true. Some people love being single, and some people hate it. Plenty fall somewhere in the middle. They’re happy with their life, and they won’t settle for anyone less than amazing—and they’re disappointed that someone amazing hasn’t come along.

Singlehood isn’t really unique in this sense. No one has a perfect life. Some people don’t have the career they’d like or the means to pursue their passion; others long for children, or find themselves tied to a city while they’re dreaming of living in the country. None of that, obviously, defines them as people or reduces them to objects of pity. And yet we tiptoe around the wish for love, as if recognizing it would imply that single people are all regrettably unfulfilled.

Read: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’

For the pursuit of romance to carry any shame is especially odd in 2025, when online dating, now the primary way partners meet, requires that you cop to having some desire. (Your profile isn’t going to create itself.) Instead of just acknowledging that totally commonplace aspiration, though, we romanticize serendipity: People hope that love will fall into their lap so they never need to debase themselves by seeking it, or they say they’re just poking around on the apps out of casual curiosity. The culture tells us, simultaneously, that we should be in a couple and that we should feel whole all by ourselves. We should have a partner, but we shouldn’t want one.

For a long time, I realize now, I internalized this. My friends, experiencing extended strings of bad dates and rejections and false starts, talked candidly about their sadness; all the while, I was sunny. Sure, I’ll date someone if they turn up, I insisted. But look how good our lives are! We have each other. I felt some pride being so self-actualized—such a good, friendship-loving feminist. I also felt, I’m sorry to say, a twinge of embarrassment for my friends. They wanted so openly.

I had it backwards, though: I was the one who was uncomfortable with singlehood. The idea of desiring a partner yet not having one made me itch—but trying to run away from it only put me on an optimism hamster wheel. If I could go back, I wouldn’t tell my friends that it’s all going to work out, or that they don’t need anyone. You’re perfect, I would say instead. And this is hard.

Trump’s Tariff Plan Is Going to Hurt

The surprisingly expansive levies on imports will open up a future of high prices.

by Isabel Fattal

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

“We’re going to start being smart, and we’re going to start being very wealthy again,” President Donald Trump announced today as he laid out a plan that risks derailing America’s economy. At his “Liberation Day” event, he unveiled a 10 percent–minimum tariff on all imports, with no change for Canada and Mexico but significantly higher rates for other countries, such as China and India, that far exceeded what many economists had expected.

With today’s announcement, Trump is tariffing essentially all foreign goods. The administration says that the levies will bring in some $6 trillion, which would amount to the biggest tax hike in U.S. history. Some of the most perplexing updates are in countries where the United States has existing free-trade agreements, such as South Korea, my colleague Annie Lowrey, who covers economic policy, told me. The Trump administration claims that South Korea has a 50 percent tariff on the U.S., but it is basing its tariff estimations in part on currency manipulation and trade barriers. It hasn’t yet provided evidence confirming that such factors, insofar as they exist, are equivalent to a 50 percent tariff.

Such all-encompassing tariffs will cost each American family thousands of dollars, economists predict. Americans will likely feel the effects of this while standing in a grocery-store aisle, purchasing auto insurance, or undertaking home renovations. These levies have the potential to increase inflation and slow down the economy in the longer term, and the uncertainty of what happens next will also contribute to the confidence of shoppers and businesses. “The way that Trump does tariffs is he often makes these really big announcements and then rolls them back,” perpetually modifying the rules, as in a game of Calvinball, Annie explained. “That’s really hard if you’re a business. Should we wait this out? Are they actually going to do it?”

Given the sweeping nature of the new tariffs, Trump may have just essentially encouraged other countries to consider banding together to impose further tit-for-tat levies on the United States. The best-case scenario, Annie told me, is that after some countries threaten reciprocal tariffs, a negotiation is reached that allows Trump to feel like he has won but also “gives some certainty” to businesses and people; shoppers absorb high costs at first, but then the uncertainty declines. If Republicans realize after this whole ordeal that this level of chaos could affect their chances at reelection and opt for fewer surprises going forward, the economy could bounce back, she argued.

America’s economy is full of mixed signals right now—or at least it was, before Trump’s announcement. “If you knew nothing about it and you came in and looked at the main figures, you would say this is not an economy in a recession or anything close to it,” Annie said. The unemployment rate is fairly low, at 4.1 percent; GDP numbers are strong. But things start looking worrisome when you consider that consumer confidence is the lowest it’s been since early 2021, and that Trump’s new tariff plan won’t quell those fears. The solution for the kind of post-tariff downturn the economy might face is simple: Remove the tariffs. But the Trump administration is not likely to let them go easily, Annie noted: “We could be getting ourselves into a bad situation where we’ve taken options for improving the situation off the table.”

Related:

- Jonathan Chait: The good news about Trump’s tariffs

- The tariff man is coming for America’s entrepreneurs.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

- Wisconsin’s message for Trump

- Elon Musk lost his big bet.

- The question progressives refuse to answer

- Ashley Parker: Miscarriage and motherhood

Today’s News

1. Susan Crawford won a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, beating an opponent backed by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

2. A judge dismissed the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams and ruled that the charges can’t be brought again.

3. An extreme weather event brought flooding, heavy snow, and high winds to the central United States.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: alfalfa126 / Getty; MirageC / Getty.

The New Singlehood Stigma

By Faith Hill

Just to be clear: Today is, in many ways, the best time in American history to be single.

In the 18th century, bachelors paid higher taxes and faced harsher punishments for crimes than their betrothed counterparts. (“A Man without a Wife,” Benjamin Franklin said, “is but half a Man.”) Single women—more likely, naturally, to be seduced by the devil—were disproportionately executed for witchcraft …

Forgive me, then, if I sound ungrateful when I say this: Americans are still extremely weird about single people. But now the problem isn’t just that singlehood is disparaged; sometimes, it’s that singlehood is celebrated. Relentlessly, annoyingly celebrated.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

- David Frum: No tariff exemptions for American farmers

- Trump’s day of reckoning

- Trump’s Salvadoran gulag

- Why you should work like it’s the ’90s

- “Can I teach the First Amendment if I only have a green card?”

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Play. The new Nintendo Switch 2 is expensive, Ian Bogost writes. But what if you think of it as an appliance instead of a video-game console?

Ruff day? Take a look at these brave search-and-rescue dogs that help find people after disasters.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Cory Booker, Endurance Athlete

The New Jersey senator broke congressional records by speaking for more than 25 hours. How?

by Alex Hutchinson

The idea of politics as a sport is a familiar analogy. For a little more than 25 hours from Monday to Tuesday evening, politics left behind the metaphor and became a grueling, perhaps even dangerous, ultramarathon. Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking speech—an “oratorical marathon” and a “feat of political endurance,” according to reporters—was nearly an hour longer than Strom Thurmond’s 1957 attempt to filibuster the Civil Rights Act. The impact of Booker’s effort remains to be seen, but to judge it through a strictly political lens is to miss a grittier athletic drama—and overlook how sports science might help a future senator extend “filibusterthon” endurance even further.

Before he took to the lectern, clad in a dark suit and black sneakers, Booker announced his intention of pushing the limits of his 56-year-old body. “I’m going to go for as long as I’m physically able to go,” he said.

This is precisely the kind of challenge that animates amateur endurance athletes like me, as well as the professionals I write about as a journalist who specializes in the science of endurance. The open-ended nature of such boundary-pushing is particularly alluring. The current world record for “backyard ultras,” which involve running about four miles every hour until everyone else gives up, is 110 laps—that’s 458 miles over four and a half days. Research on these competitors has found that the physical demands of such a prolonged effort pale in comparison to the psychological toll.

Still, Booker’s speech presented some unique physiological challenges—most notably that he couldn’t yield the floor to go to the bathroom. That’s no trivial feat: In 2007, a woman died shortly after participating in an on-air “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest held by a radio station. Her problem was drinking too much. To forestall the call of nature, Booker stopped eating on Friday, and refrained from drinking on Sunday evening, a full 24 hours before he started speaking.

Scientists assess that, on average, humans can survive without water for about three days. Long before that, your kidneys will be stressed, your cognitive function will be impaired, and you may develop a headache as your brain—which is mostly water—shrinks. Just as well that Booker didn’t have to debate anyone.

Then there’s the effect on your muscles. “I’m a former athlete, so I know when you get dehydrated you get a lot cramps,” Booker, who played football for Stanford in the early 1990s, told reporters after his speech. “That was the biggest thing I was fighting, is that different muscles were really starting to cramp up, and every once in a while I’d have a spasm.” As a matter of scientific fact, the link between dehydration and muscle cramps is no longer as widely accepted as it was when Booker was in college. Instead of sipping water occasionally during his speech, he might have had better luck warding off cramps with pickle juice, which is thought to reset the nervous-system reflexes that go haywire when you cramp.

Fasting for more than four days also made Booker’s task considerably harder. Among Tour de France cyclists and other endurance athletes, the trend is to scarf down astonishingly large quantities of carbohydrates, as much as 120 grams—the equivalent of three plates of pasta—every hour while competing. Booker’s jaw muscles clearly didn’t need that much fuel, but letting blood-sugar levels drop is associated with mental fog, lightheadedness, and the risk of fainting. Strangely enough, you can counteract some of these symptoms simply by swishing sports drink in your mouth and then spitting the drink out. Just a whiff of glucose will trigger calorie sensors in your brain and make you feel better. It’s the perfect solution for future filibusterers, because it won’t make you need to pee.

Missing a night’s sleep is one element of Booker’s feat that most of us have replicated at some point in our life. That’s nothing compared with what those backyard-ultra competitors endure, but it has an effect: Researchers have famously found that staying awake for 24 hours makes you a worse driver than drinking alcohol to the legal limit. The standard advice among ultrarunners, backed by scientific findings, is that getting extra sleep in the week prior to your ordeal can help buffer some of the effects of sleep deprivation.

Even if the distance Booker covered during his event was zero miles, he still faced the considerable physical challenge of standing for more than 24 hours. Just a few hours into his speech, he had a Senate page remove his chair—to eliminate the temptation to sit down.

Although the evils of sitting all day are well known, standing all day is no picnic either. Research has found that people whose jobs require standing all day are twice as likely to develop heart disease as those who sit, and are vulnerable to a host of other ills, ranging from varicose veins to “spontaneous abortions.” And yes, muscle cramps: the most likely culprit for Booker’s spasms was muscle fatigue rather than dehydration. There’s no easy fix, but marching in place might help engage different muscles to spread the strain, along with a pair of highly cushioned supershoes.

The shoes of Senator Cory Booker, photographed while he spoke to reporters on Tuesday after surpassing the record for the longest Senate speech (Eric Lee / The New York Times / Redux)

Even if another senator optimized all of these details, could they break Booker’s new record? For an answer on that, I am persuaded by the great Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi. “Mind is everything: muscles—pieces of rubber,” he said. “All that I am, I am because of my mind.”

When he emerged from the Senate Chamber after his oratorical marathon, Booker pulled a slip of paper from his pocket. It was a passage from the Book of Isaiah: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” Anyone who wants to beat Booker will need to draw from a similar wellspring of belief and commitment. But they should probably also bring some pickle juice.

A New Kart-Racing Appliance

Nintendo announces the Switch 2, a device for piloting go-karts.

by Ian Bogost

If your virtual kart-racing life was missing something, you’re in luck. Nintendo, the Japanese electronics manufacturer, announced its new Mario Kart appliance today. The Switch 2, which can be used handheld or connected to a television, allows players to race go-karts piloted by characters from the company’s entertainment franchises: Mario, Yoshi, Princess Peach.

The karting games that ran on previous appliances allowed racers to compete on only a series of discrete tracks. But the updated hardware allows for something else: Mario Kart World, as the new software is called, presents its users with the tantalizing prospect of a digital commute. Racers may now convey from one track to the next through a large and continuous simulated world. This new capacity will unlock other new ways to kart, among them 1980s-style arcade racing and more contemporary, open-world kart tourism.

Longtime kart racers will surely celebrate the opportunity to kart anew. Someone who might have played Mario Kart 8—the previous fully original home release in the franchise—in 2014, when they were 12, has now graduated college. In the gaps between soul-crushing weeks at an investment bank or a management consultancy, karting sons and daughters who became karting adults might sneak in a nostalgic trip or race with their aging parents or once-baby siblings, now adolescents.

To facilitate the process, Nintendo has finally improved its online kart-racing infrastructure. Its competitors Sony and Microsoft, whose entertainment appliances mostly facilitate simulated sports or ritualistic arena murder, have allowed players to connect by voice or even video while playing, both to coordinate matches and to issue racist or homophobic taunts. The Switch 2 finally adds this capacity to kart racing, deployed via a “C” (“Cart”? No, “Chat”) button on its controllers.

Read: Video games are better without stories

All of this kart racing comes at a hefty price: $450 for the appliance itself, or $500 for the device bundled with the Mario Kart software. Those who would choose to forgo the bundle in favor of purchasing inscrutably updated rehashes of previous works, such as embarrassing fantasy-adventure games and insipid party titles, will have to hand over $80 for Mario Kart World if they choose to add it later. That might put kart-based home entertainment out of reach for many Americans. But others will surely see the value in the Switch 2, given the appeal and frequency of these karting delights.

Games such as Mario Kart World will be delivered on cartridges matching the size and shape of those from the previous appliance. Those carts may not contain software, instead acting as dummy keys that will unlock a probably time-consuming download. In exchange for this inconvenience, players will be able to “gameshare” some software titles with up to four friends, allowing the games to trickle down, Reaganomics-style, from the wealthy to the aspirant underclasses (though even these paupers will apparently still have to pay for a separate Nintendo Switch Online subscription to voice- or videochat with their game-giving overlords). But not Mario Kart World, which is ineligible for gameshare. All citizens must purchase their own access to karting.

Read: The quiet revolution of Animal Crossing

Nintendo has also updated the guts of the Switch 2 kart appliance. It will finally be capable of using the entire 4K resolution of the televisions that were being sold back when your college graduate was still 12. Note that the appliance itself features an LCD screen rather than the rich OLED displays that have been commonplace in smartphones for the past decade or so.

Nintendo has also failed to heed the lessons from its previous Mario Kart appliance. That device, the Switch, featured finicky, removable Joy-Con kart-racing controllers. Inevitably, kart-racing fanciers elected to pay exorbitant prices for traditional, add-on controllers instead. A new version of those controllers is also on offer for the Switch 2, requiring a new investment of $80 each for a racing tether that features the new “C” button.

Will this new kart chaos be worthwhile? Emphatically yes. I spent $1,600 on a new washer-dryer this year, and I use it only once a week, whereas I kart (or long to kart) far more often. Similarly, a good countertop air fryer might cost hundreds of dollars; why not a karting appliance too? And like an air fryer, which can toast and roast in addition to convection bake, the Switch 2 Mario Kart appliance is also capable of supporting other Nintendo-crafted experiences, such as an ape-oriented romp game announced today and, perhaps eventually, attempts to rehabilitate the non-karting titles from which the Mario character and his kindred had been mercifully liberated.

Introducing: <em>The David Frum Show</em>

<em>The Atlantic</em> is launching a new weekly show, hosted by staff writer David Frum.

by David Frum

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

A recent infographic published by Media Matters depicted America’s political-podcast space as dominated by extremist voices, mostly far-right, a few far-left.

Yet most of us are levelheaded people. Most of us want insights, not insults. We want to invest our time to feel smarter, not angrier. We want to renew our ideals and remember together that America’s democracy has always proved stronger than its enemies and doubters.

On April 9, The Atlantic and I will launch a new video podcast called The David Frum Show. It will post every Wednesday, on YouTube and anywhere you listen to podcasts, with eminent guests from the worlds not only of politics, but of economics, medicine, and history. I hope every viewer and listener will find that the show offers the most informed and entertaining conversations of the day—sparkled with enough humor to brighten these dark times.

In today’s media, truth is often hard to find. Lies are everywhere—and too often for free. I hope all who seek something better will feel the warmth of welcome at The David Frum Show.

Watch the teaser here:

(Video photo credits: Robert Alexander / Getty; Tami Chappell / AFP / Getty; Leonardo Munoz / AFP / Getty; Jeremy Hogan / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty; Bob Grannis / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Drew Angerer / AFP / Getty; J. Countess / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty)

Wisconsin’s Message for Trump

Elon Musk has become a political boat anchor.

by Charles Sykes

There is a temptation to overhype or read too much into the results of off-year elections. In this case, I suggest we succumb.

Yesterday, Wisconsin voters exposed, humiliated, and decisively rejected the world’s richest man. And they sent a stark message to Republicans in Washington.

On Sunday, when Elon Musk parachuted in for a rally that featured $1 million checks for voters, he described the race for state supreme court here in apocalyptic terms. Tuesday’s vote, he declared, would determine which party controlled the House of Representatives, presumably because of the court’s role in redistricting. “That is why it is so significant,” he said. “And whichever party controls the House, you know, it, to a significant degree, controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization. So it’s like, I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will. Yeah. So it’s a super big deal.”

Yesterday’s result—a decisive victory for liberal Susan Crawford over conservative Brad Schimel—was, indeed, a super big deal. Not just for Democrats, who desperately needed this kind of win, but for Musk himself. By inserting himself into the Wisconsin race, Musk, the billionaire who has become a top adviser to President Donald Trump, had hoped to cement his status as MAGA enforcer and kingmaker. Instead, he provided Republicans with graphic evidence that he has become a political boat anchor. Late last night, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board fretted: “The MAGA majority may have a shorter run than advertised.”

John Hendrickson: Musk is still paying for political influence

It was a message that jittery Republicans in Congress are not likely to miss. As for Trump himself, he notoriously hates both losing and losers.

The stakes for Wisconsin in yesterday’s election were huge. The outcome of the judicial race would affect everything including abortion rights, gerrymandering, and public-employee bargaining rights. But along the way, Musk turned the race into a referendum on himself and the president.

Conservative groups flooded the state with literature featuring Schimel cheek by jowl with Trump, whose picture was … everywhere. Musk hoped to turn out low-propensity Trump voters by convincing them that Trump was, in effect, on the ballot. Musk and his allies hammered the message over and over in mailers: “Schimel will support President Trump’s agenda!” “President Donald Trump needs your vote. Stop the radical liberal takeover.” “Together, we won the White House. Now it’s time to win the courthouse!”

In the end, it all backfired, and the election wasn’t close. In a state where many elections are decided by razor-thin margins and where Trump won only narrowly in November, Musk’s conservative candidate was shellacked. Democrats turned out in massive numbers, and Schimel failed to hit the targets he needed. The suburban vote continued a leftward shift.

Jonathan Lemire: Elon Musk is president

As she claimed victory, Crawford gave a shout-out to Musk. “Growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I would be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin,” she said. “And we won.”

The timing of Crawford’s win is important. Wisconsin’s vote came amid stories about Musk’s assault on Social Security and circulating reports about massive cuts to public-health agencies, just a week after The Atlantic’s reporting on the Signal security breach, and just before Trump’s expected announcement about huge new tariffs.

At the rally on Sunday, Musk—who has become one of the loudest voices on the right calling for the impeachment of federal judges who rule against Trump—bounced onto a stage in Green Bay wearing a cheesehead and brandishing million-dollar checks. How would this play in the swingiest of swing states? we all wondered. How popular was Musk? How did voters feel about Trump’s shock-and-awe agenda?

Wisconsin voters have given their answer. They delivered a grim verdict on Musk’s chainsawing of government and his crude attempt to buy their state’s high court.

Search-and-Rescue Dogs at Work

- Alan Taylor

- April 2, 2025

- 22 Photos

- In Focus

When search-and-rescue teams deploy to any of the numerous natural or man-made disasters around the world, they bring along their own teams of highly trained dogs to help discover victims in need. When these dogs are not in the field, they frequently take part in training sessions simulating events such as earthquakes, wildfires, and water or avalanche rescues. Gathered below are images of some of these rescue dogs and their handlers, on the job and in training, from the past several years.

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- Rescuers use a sniffer dog during a search operation at the ruins of a building collapsed after an earthquake in Mamuju, West Sulawesi, Indonesia, on January 18, 2021. #

Daeng Mansur / AP

- Lek, a golden retriever from the Thai K9 Rescue unit, is brought to comfort people waiting for news of missing loved ones at the site of an under-construction building collapse in Bangkok, Thailand, on April 1, 2025, four days after an earthquake struck central Myanmar and Thailand. #

Lillian Suwanrumpha / AFP / Getty

- A volunteer with the Italian School of Rescue Dogs (La Scuola Italiana Cani Salvataggio) jumps with a dog during a water-rescue training session at Averno Lake in Pozzuoli, Italy, on October 24, 2024. #

Vincenzo Izzo / Sipa USA / Reuters

- Rescuers deploy a sniffing dog to search for survivors, as dozens of people are believed to have been trapped in the rubble of a collapsed high-rise building that was still under construction, after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck neighboring country Myanmar, in Bangkok, Thailand, on March 29, 2025. #

Daniel Ceng / Anadolu / Getty

- Workers pull a rescue dog across a river at the site of a landslide in the village of Xinmo, Mao County, Sichuan province, China, on June 25, 2017. #

An Yuan / CNS / Reuters

- A search-and-rescue worker, looking for Camp Fire victims, carries Susie Q to safety after the sniffer dog fell through rubble at the Holly Hills Mobile Estates on November 14, 2018, in Paradise, California. #

Noah Berger / AP

- Tullla, a four-year-old Labrador, gets a bath after working in the Pacific Palisades on January 17, 2025. Search-and-rescue dogs from the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation were deployed to assist after wildfires decimated parts of California. #

Megan Smith / USA Today Network / Reuters

- A search-and-rescue dog named Maca, with the Turkish Gendarmerie General Command, takes part in skydiving training at Sivrihisar Aviation Center in the Sivrihisar district of Eskişehir, Turkey, on October 12, 2023. #

Cem Genco / Anadolu / Getty

- A closer view of search-and-rescue dog Maca, wearing protective gear and a video camera during training, at Turkey’s Sivrihisar Aviation Center on October 12, 2023 #

Cem Genco / Anadolu / Getty

- Search-and-rescue dogs take part in a training session in Ankara, Turkey, on January 9, 2024. #

Omer Taha Cetin / Anadolu / Getty

- Disaster-response workers with a sniffer dog conduct a search operation after a child reportedly fell into a stormwater drain following heavy rainfall at Jyoti Nagar in Guwahati, India, on July 5, 2024. #

Pitamber Newar / ANI / Reuters

- A monument to a rescue dog named Proteo is unveiled at Marte Military Field, in Mexico City, on September 21, 2023. Proteo, one of the search-and-rescue dogs deployed to Turkey with a team from Mexico to help to find victims of the 2023 earthquake, died while on the job, after finding at least two trapped people. #

Luis Barron / Eyepix Group / Future Publishing / Getty

- An avalanche dog takes part in a search-and-rescue exercise for avalanche victims at the French Alps ski resort of La Rosiere, France, on February 4, 2025. #

Olivier Chassignole / AFP / Getty

- A member of the Mexican navy kneels beside a rescue dog after an earthquake struck on the southern coast of Mexico in Juchitan, Mexico, on September 10, 2017. #

Edgard Garrido / Reuters

- A sniffer dog swims through mud and debris during a search for the remaining victim of a flash flood in Hildale, Utah, on September 17, 2015. #

Rick Bowmer / AP

- A rescuer with a dog inspects the rubble of a building following a Russian drone attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on March 29, 2025. #

Sergey Bobok / AFP / Getty

- A trainer pets one of the search-and-rescue dogs that are helping to train other dogs in Ankara, Turkey, on January 9, 2024. #

Omer Taha Cetin / Anadolu / Getty

- A search-and-rescue dog takes part in a water-rescue training session in Ankara, Turkey, on November 19, 2024. #

Mehmet Ali Ozcan / Anadolu / Getty

- A search-and-rescue dog works in debris left after the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, on November 16, 2018. #

John Locher / AP

- A rescue worker and his search dog prepare to be lifted in the bucket of an excavator, searching for survivors at the site of a deadly explosion that destroyed the Hotel Saratoga in Old Havana, Cuba, on May 8, 2022. #

Ismael Francisco / AP

- A member of an all-female group of canine rescuers from the Italian School of Rescue Dogs (La Scuola Italiana Cani Salvataggio) attends a training session with her dog before patrolling the beach to ensure swimmers can enjoy their time at the sea in safety, in Riva dei Tarquini, near Rome, Italy, on August 25, 2020. #

Guglielmo Mangiapane / Reuters

- A volunteer firefighter hugs a dog during the search for victims of an eruption of the Fuego Volcano in Alotenango, a municipality in Sacatepequez Department, Guatemala, on June 6, 2018. #

Orlando Estrada / AFP / Getty

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Trump’s Salvadoran Gulag

To be deported, one does not need to be a drug dealer or a terrorist; apparently, having tattoos and being Venezuelan is enough.

by Adam Serwer

One thing that could be said about many—and possibly all—of the more than 100 men removed from the United States by the Trump administration under the archaic Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is that Donald Trump has been convicted of more crimes than they have.

Trump, after all, was convicted of 34 felony counts by a jury of his peers in New York City for faking business records in order to cover up his hush-money payment to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels in 2016. His administration has acknowledged in court that many of the men deported to a gulag in El Salvador “do not have criminal records in the United States.” Many appear to not have criminal records elsewhere either.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and his advisers loudly declared that they would engage in a “mass deportation” of undocumented criminals. Many Americans heard criminals and seem to have assumed that innocent people would not be targeted. But the reality of Trump’s immigration project is that a “criminal” is anyone the administration wants to deport, regardless of whether they have committed a crime. There’s been no earnest attempt to prove that these people did anything wrong; no deference to the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees that no “person” can be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Its protections are supposed to restrain the government and do not solely apply to citizens. Even so, immigration law is extraordinarily deferential to the federal government when it comes to these kinds of deportations—so deferential that if the Trump administration had solid evidence of gang involvement, deporting these men through a more routine process could have been straightforward.

Read: An ‘administrative error’ sends a Maryland father to a Salvadorean prison

ICE rounded these men up in early March, and then put them on a plane to the Central American nation, alleging that they were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. The men were then imprisoned in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a prison infamous for reported human-rights violations including, allegedly, torture. The ACLU and Democracy Forward filed a challenge on behalf of five of the men shortly after they were apprehended, and managed to secure a judicial order preventing them from being removed from the United States, which the Trump administration seems to have defied.

So far, the Trump administration has provided only weak evidence that any of the men condemned to a foreign prison notorious for human-rights violations were guilty of anything. The administration’s defense of its actions, according to the declaration made by an ICE official, Robert Cerna, is that “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.” In other words, the lack of evidence against these men is just further proof that they’re guilty.

Relatives of several of the deportees have insisted that these men have no gang affiliation, and say some of them fled Venezuela specifically because they were threatened by the exact gang they are now supposedly a member of. One of the deportees, Andry Hernandez, is an asylum seeker and a makeup artist who was tagged by ICE as a “gang member” because of two tattoos of crowns with the words mom and dad underneath them. An expert on Tren De Aragua told The New Yorker that “Tren de Aragua does not use any tattoos as a form of gang identification; no Venezuelan gang does.” In response to public outcry over Hernandez’s deportation, the Department of Homeland Security has insisted that Hernandez’s “social media indicates he is a member of Tren de Aragua.” If the government has such evidence, it hasn’t filed it in court. According to Hernandez’s attorney, the tattoos are “the only basis of the government’s assertion, in its filing, that he is connected to Tren de Aragua.”

To be deported by Trump, one does not need to be a drug dealer or a terrorist; apparently, having tattoos and being Venezuelan is enough. Another deportee, the Miami Herald reported, is Frengel Reyes Mota, who fled political instability in Venezuela and was pursuing an asylum case when he was apprehended at his regular ICE check-in. He may have been mistaken for someone else; he seems to have followed all the rules, and still that did not spare him.

As it flouts due process, the administration is also trying to invoke the state-secrets privilege—a legal rule that allows presidents to withhold evidence whose disclosure could harm national security—to keep the courts from intervening so that it can continue to imprison men in an overseas gulag indefinitely.

Read: The ultimate Trump story

“Even if the [Alien Enemies Act] could be used against the gang during peacetime, there must be an opportunity for individuals to contest that they are, in fact, members of the gang,” Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney litigating the case, told me. If no such opportunity exists, “it means that anybody could end up at an El Salvadoran prison for the rest of their lives, citizen or a noncitizen, that’s not a member of the gang.” He added, “The stakes could not be any higher.”

Despite the absence of evidence, the administration continues to refer to these men publicly as “gang members” and “terrorists,” and they have become fodder for Trumpist propaganda. Last week, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem filmed a depraved video with the prison as her background, advertising the Trump administration’s willingness to deport people overseas to be tortured by the bureaucracy of a strongman whose own government the American authorities have said is affiliated with organized crime. (Nor is it even clearly the case that the men in the video are those recently deported. Noah Bullock, the executive director of the human-rights group Cristosal, noted in Foreign Policy that “the middle-aged faces and full-body tattoos that appear in the footage from the megaprison suggest that they are gang members who have likely been in prison since well before the state of exception began.”)

As long as the Trump administration gets to look tough, it does not seem to care if the people it is hurting are guilty of nothing more than thinking America, the land of the free, would be a good place to start over. Inherent in this propaganda effort is a grim assumption about the character of the American people—that they will not only fall for this agitprop but see the abuse of innocent people as praiseworthy.

The power the Trump administration is claiming in this matter is incredibly broad, and rooted in a distortion of the already broad Alien Enemies Act. When the act’s 18th-century writers described “war” and “invasion,” they meant these terms literally, but the Trump administration is interpreting them metaphorically to apply to illegal border crossings.

“The president has ample authority under immigration law to deport members of violent criminal gangs, so there’s absolutely no need to abuse an inapplicable wartime authority,” Liza Goitein, a legal expert with the left-leaning Brennan Center, told me. “Trump’s invocation of the law is basically an illegal power grab, because we are not at war with Venezuela. Tren de Aragua is not the government of Venezuela. There has been no armed attack on the United States, which is what the term invasion means in the law. The legislative history and, frankly, the text of the statute are very, very clear that they were referring to actual hostilities, an act of war by a political entity.”

For now, the administration is targeting only Venezuelans, but it might sweep in other groups eventually. Because the text of the Alien Enemies Act refers to any “native” of an enemy power, it could theoretically cover not just undocumented immigrants but documented ones who share the ethnicity of members of an organization Trump has decided the U.S. is “at war” with. “Every ethnic group, every religious group, in this country has been associated with some criminal organization at some point,” Gelernt pointed out.

Although the Alien Enemies Act does not apply to American citizens, without due process, a citizen could be mistakenly deported to El Salvador, held indefinitely, and reliant on the same administration that deported them to realize the error and decide to retrieve them. As my colleague Nick Miroff reported, the Trump administration has already made one grievous mistake, admitting that it sent Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man, to CECOT because of an “administrative error.” Despite that, it seems in no rush to get him back, telling a federal court that it was powerless to order him returned. In a post on X, Vice President J. D. Vance called Garcia “a convicted MS-13 gang member,” a false claim meant to justify deserting Garcia in a foreign prison based on a mistake.

Trump is seemingly intrigued by the possibility of sending American citizens to El Salvador’s gulag, having said, “If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat.” He also posted recently on his social network, Truth Social, that Tesla-dealership vandals might be sent to “the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions.”

Read: Emergency powers are about to be tested

In effect, the Trump administration has asserted the sort of broad, unreviewable power that the George W. Bush administration asserted in detaining so-called enemy combatants in the War on Terror. But the process here seems to be even more capricious; those being deported are not being given access to counsel, nor are they being tried for any offenses, and the Trump administration seems far more indifferent to whether those detained are remotely connected to any crime. Although the ACLU is fighting their deportation, according to Gelernt, their clients in El Salvador are being held entirely incommunicado.

Beyond the fact that we have more evidence that Trump is a criminal than any of the men deported, we also have more evidence that the government of El Salvador is affiliated with gangs than we do of the men deported. In 2021, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned members of El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s administration, who had been allegedly covertly meeting with gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha 13, and negotiated an agreement with “gang leadership” to “provide political support to the Nuevas Ideas political party in upcoming elections.” So the Trump administration is deporting people not only to an overseas gulag but into the custody of a government that, according to both the Justice and Treasury Departments, is allegedly affiliated with the very gangs the administration is purporting to fight. Another way of looking at this is that the Trump administration is, by its conspiracy with the government of El Salvador, itself collaborating with foreign criminal organizations.

Perhaps some Americans who thought that Trump would deport only criminals are watching the news and telling themselves that the president must know what he’s doing; the deportees must be gang members or terrorists, just as the president says. But that’s nothing more than a comforting fiction, the sort common to authoritarian regimes where admitting fallibility is forbidden. They’d say the same thing about anyone, and those false claims would be amplified to deafening volume by the same right-wing propaganda machine that helped bring Trump to power in the first place. Who these men in El Salvador actually are and what they’ve actually done is irrelevant. All that matters is that to Trump, they look the part.

Politics | The Atlantic

- There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs

- How the Trump Administration Learned to Obscure the Truth in Court

- The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs

- Trump’s Day of Reckoning

- Wisconsin’s Message for Trump

- No Tariff Exemptions for American Farmers

- The Big Story: The Fallout From the Signal Controversy

- An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison

- Why Trump Says He’s ‘Not Joking’ About a Third Term

- Steven Cheung Is the Voice of Trump

- America’s Future Is Hungary

- The Retired J.P. Morgan Executive Tracking Trump’s Deportation Flights

- The Double Standard at the Center of the Signal Debacle

- Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal

- The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

- America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State

There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs

The policy is absurd. It’s also an extension of Trump’s chaotic personality.

by Derek Thompson

Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump celebrated America’s so-called Liberation Day by announcing a slew of tariffs on dozens of countries. His plan, if fully implemented, will return the United States to the highest tariff duty as a share of the economy since the late 1800s, before the invention of the automobile, aspirin, and the incandescent light bulb. Michael Cembalest, the widely read analyst at JP Morgan Wealth Management, wrote that the White House announcement “borders on twilight zone territory.”

The most fitting analysis for this moment, however, does not come from an economist or a financial researcher. It comes from the screenwriter William Goldman, who pithily captured his industry’s lack of foresight with one of the most famous aphorisms in Hollywood history: “Nobody knows anything.”

You’re not going to find a better three-word summary of the Trump tariffs than that. If there’s anything worse than an economic plan that attempts to revive the 19th-century protectionist U.S. economy, it’s the fact that the people responsible for explaining and implementing it don’t seem to have any idea what they’re doing, or why.

Rogé Karma: Trump’s tariffs are designed to backfire

On one side, you have the longtime Trump aide Peter Navarro, who has said that Trump’s tariffs will raise $6 trillion over the next decade, making it the largest tax increase in American history. On another, you have pro-Trump tech folks, such as Palmer Luckey, who have instead claimed that the goal is the opposite: a world of fully free trade, as countries remove their existing trade barriers in the face of the new penalties. On yet another track, there is Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, who has suggested that the tariff salvo is part of a master plan to rebalance America’s relationship with the global economy by reducing the value of the dollar and reviving manufacturing employment in the United States.

These three alleged goals—raising revenue, restoring free trade, and rejiggering the global economy—are incompatible with one another. The first and second explanations are mutually exclusive: The state can’t raise tax revenue in the long run with a levy that is designed to disappear. The second and third explanations are mutually exclusive too: You can’t reindustrialize by doubling down on the global-trade free-for-all that supposedly immiserated the Rust Belt in the first place. Either global free trade is an economic Valhalla worth fighting for, or it’s the cursed political order that we’re trying desperately to destroy.

As for Trump’s alleged devotion to bringing back manufacturing jobs, the administration has attacked the implementation of the CHIPS bill, which invested in the very same high-tech semiconductors that a strategic reindustrialization effort would seek to prioritize. There is no single coherent explanation for the tariffs, only competing hypotheses that violate one another’s internal logic because, when it comes to explaining this economic policy, nobody knows anything.

One might expect clarity from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But even he doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on. The “tariff gun will always be loaded and on the table, but rarely discharged,” he said last year. So much for that. Yesterday, a Bloomberg reporter asked Bessent if the Trump administration has plans to negotiate with America’s trading partners. “We’re just going to have to wait and see,” he said. Was the administration ready to negotiate with the European Union, China, or India? “We’ll see.” Asked why Canada and Mexico were missing from the president’s list of tariffs, he switched it up: “I’m not sure.” Nobody knows anything.

By the numbers, the tariffs are less an expression of economic theory and more a Dadaist art piece about the meaninglessness of expertise. The Trump administration slapped 10 percent tariffs on Heard Island and McDonalds Islands, which are uninhabited, and on the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose residents are mostly American and British military service members. One of the highest tariff rates, 50 percent, was imposed on the African nation of Lesotho, whose average citizen earns less than $5 a day. Why? Because the administration’s formula for supposedly “reciprocal” tariff rates apparently has nothing to do with tariffs. The Trump team seems to have calculated each penalty by dividing the U.S. trade deficit with a given country by how much the U.S. imports from it and then doing a rough adjustment. Because Lesotho’s citizens are too poor to afford most U.S. exports, while the U.S. imports $237 million in diamonds and other goods from the small landlocked nation, we have reserved close to our highest-possible tariff rate for one of the world’s poorest countries. The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence.

Read: The good news about Trump’s tariffs

If the tariffs violate their own internal logic and basic common sense, what are they? Most likely, they represent little more than the all-of-government metastasis of Trump’s personality, which sees grandiosity as a strategy to pull counterparties to the negotiating table and strike deals that benefit Trump’s ego or wallet. This personality style is clear, and it has been clearly stated, even if its application to geopolitics is confounding to observe. “My style of deal-making is pretty simple and straightforward,” Trump writes in The Art of the Deal. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”

One can see this playbook—threat, leverage, concession, repeat—playing out across all of society. It’s happening in trade. It’s happening in law. It’s happening in academia. In the first two months of his second term, Trump has already squeezed enormous concessions out of white-shoe law firms and major universities. Trump appears to care more about the process of gaining leverage over others—including other countries—than he does about any particular effective tariff rate. The endgame here is that there is no endgame, only the infinite game of power and leverage.

Trump’s defenders praise the president for using chaos to shake up broken systems. But they fail to see the downside of uncertainty. Is a textile company really supposed to open a U.S. factory when our trade policy seems likely to change every month as Trump personally negotiates with the entire planet? Are manufacturing firms really supposed to invest in expensive factory expansions when the Liberation Day tariffs caused a global sell-off that signals an international downturn? Trump’s personality is, and has always been, zero-sum and urgent, craving chaos, but economic growth is positive-sum and long-term-oriented, craving certainty for its largest investments. The scariest thing about the Trump tariffs isn’t the numbers, but the underlying message. We’re all living inside the president’s head, and nobody knows anything.

How the Trump Administration Learned to Obscure the Truth in Court

This is a litigation strategy born of the first travel ban.

by Leah Litman

The litigation over the government’s summary renditions of foreign nationals to an El Salvador prison, with no due process of law, is now at the Supreme Court’s door. The justices will soon decide whether to relieve the Trump administration from the trial court’s order halting the expulsions. Whether the government has complied with the order isn’t directly before the Supreme Court. But whether the Court can trust the government’s representations during such quickly unfolding litigation is—and the justices have every reason not to.

In this and other cases now being litigated, the government is following a playbook established during the fight over the first Trump administration’s travel ban, which barred entry into the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. From that litigation, the administration learned a strategy for implementing portions of its legally dubious agenda without the Court’s explicit blessing: go fast. Speed facilitates obfuscation. By pushing litigation to a breakneck pace—and changing the underlying details just as quickly—the administration was able to get the Supreme Court’s approval for policies without full legal scrutiny. That same approach is once again under way in the deportations case and in others now before the Court.

The story of the first Trump administration’s travel ban began on Friday, January 27, 2017, when the administration announced a prohibition on travel from seven majority-Muslim countries with no exceptions, including for people with ties to the United States, such as green-card or visa holders. It did so with no advance warning, which meant passengers boarded flights not knowing they wouldn’t be allowed to enter the United States. The policy was sloppy, cruel, and riddled with animus—so blatantly illegal that the Trump administration declined to continue defending it after lower courts invalidated it.

Tom Nichols: Trump’s authoritarian playbook

With the slapdash version dead, the administration came up with a (slightly) modified policy that appeared more legitimate, at least on a superficial level. The second ban, unlike the first, did not apply to visa and green-card holders. This one was also purportedly temporary: As written, it was set to last for 90 days, during which time the administration said it would conduct a formal review to determine what kind of permanent travel restrictions were warranted. Despite these nominal changes, it still reeked of illegal animus.

The administration asked the Supreme Court for permission to implement the temporary ban, but it did so in a strategic way that would enable the Court to give its okay without having to decide the substantive question of whether the measure was legal. Here’s how that worked: In spring 2017, the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Fourth and Ninth Circuits blocked the new ban. The government then turned to the Supreme Court, requesting emergency relief from those decisions. Curiously, the government requested expedited briefing (a rush on the papers both sides file in a case), but not expedited oral argument. In fact, it asked the Court to delay hearing the case until the fall, at which point the policy would have expired. By making its request in this way, the government was asking for an up-or-down vote on the lower court’s decision, but not a full consideration of the legal merits.

This gambit paid off. The Court allowed the administration to partially enforce the second travel ban for 90 days. By the end of that period, the administration had rolled out the third and final iteration—so that the third ban went into effect just as the second expired. The Court heard oral argument over whether the third iteration of the policy was invalid in spring 2018, and a few months later, the Court upheld it. In effect, the second version bought the administration time to put together a policy that looked more legitimate while it enforced a less legitimate version. The administration could claim that the third ban emerged from a formal process and had undergone significant revisions, rather than being fired off on a whim and on the basis of animus. But in the meantime, the administration was able to do what it wanted anyway: suspend entry from several majority-Muslim countries into the United States. And that may have made the Court more comfortable with accepting the third version, because a ban was by that point the status quo.

Part of the reason this worked is that the administration managed to get the Court to act quickly, without a careful parsing of the facts. That was a smart move, because actually defending the policy on a factual basis would have been quite a challenge. During the oral arguments over the third ban, the justices asked the Trump administration’s lawyer, Solicitor General Noel Francisco, about the waiver process—the mechanism that might allow people to show, on an individual basis, that they should be allowed to enter the United States. The solicitor general assured the Court that the process was available to people via consular officers. But after the argument, consular officials said that they had no authority or discretion to grant waivers, and that only certain officials in Washington could do so. The problem was that by then, the ban was in effect.

The new Trump administration now appears to be deploying a similar strategy in much of the litigation over its policies. For example, the recent litigation over the attempted shutdown and defunding of USAID confirmed that the administration is still trying to couple speed with factual opacity.

Read: The cruel attack on USAID

In that litigation, the administration claimed to possess the outlandish authority to cancel spending items that Congress had appropriated and approved—not just for USAID, but for other agencies, grants, and contracts. Numerous federal district judges have found several of the administration’s funding freezes unlawful. The relevant federal law, the Administrative Procedure Act, allows courts to block certain agency actions. That’s just what the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia did in the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition v. United States case—block the administration’s implementation of an across-the-board funding freeze at USAID.

The administration rushed to the Supreme Court to free itself from lower-court decisions blocking its initial version of the policies. In particular, the administration requested relief via the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket.” Again, this is right from the travel-ban playbook.

The administration’s lawyers asked the Court to act quickly while insisting that it wasn’t possible to pay out the contracts that had been subject to the initial USAID freeze, which the district court had effectively ordered it to honor. And because the case was developing so rapidly, the government’s timeline did not give the justices much chance to familiarize themselves with the details. As with the travel ban, a rushed job stood to benefit the administration by increasing the odds that the Court would take the government at its word without really looking into things deeply.

In this instance, the administration did not prevail, but it certainly tried. Before the Supreme Court, the government said that it was “not logistically or technically feasible” for it to pay the 2,000 or so invoices ordered by the district court. The justices refused to pause the district court’s ruling, instead allowing the court to determine whether a preliminary injunction was warranted, and directing it to act with “with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.” Left with time to develop and consider more facts, the district court pointed to a declaration by Peter Marocco, the acting director for USAID, acknowledging that prior to January 20, 2025, both USAID and the State Department could process several thousand payments a day. This temporary victory for the rule of law might not last, however; the litigation may yet head back to the Supreme Court, where the administration’s rush strategy could eventually win out.

If the Court accepts what the government is saying now in the summary-expulsion case, it will be risking its own credibility. In that case, the administration is asking the Court to credit, without evidence, several of its assertions. Among them is the unbelievable claim that individuals facing summary expulsion would somehow be able to challenge their prospective expulsion even though they may not know they are about to be sent to a foreign prison.

The Court should reject the government’s request to pause the lower court’s decision and recognize that its rush strategy is designed to make a mockery of the rule of law, not to mention the concept of facts. As they say, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice …

The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs

Authoritarian leaders are most dangerous when they’re popular. Wrecking the economy is unlikely to broaden Trump’s support.

by Jonathan Chait

All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.

But Trump couldn’t do the easy and obvious thing, apparently because he did not view his first term as a success. He considered it a failure, and blamed the failure on the coterie of aides, bureaucrats, and congressional allies who talked him out of his instincts, or ignored them. The second term has been Full Trump, as even his most delusional or abusive whims are translated immediately into policy without regard to democratic norms, the law, the Constitution, public opinion, or the hand-wringing of his party.

That is why Trump’s second term poses a far more dire threat to the republic than his first did. But it is also why his second term is at risk of catastrophic failure. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than Trump’s insistence on sabotaging the U.S. economy by imposing massive tariffs.

This afternoon, in an event the administration hyped as “Liberation Day,” Trump unveiled his long-teased plan to impose reciprocal trade restrictions on every country that puts up barriers to American exports. Although at least some economists would defend some kinds of tariff policies—such as those targeted at egregious trade-violating countries, or those designed to protect a handful of strategic industries—Trump has careened into an across-the-board version that will do little but raise prices and invite reprisal against American exports. As an indication of the mad-king dynamic at play, the new plan imposes a 20 percent tariff on the European Union, partly in retaliation against the bloc’s value-added tax system—even though the VAT applies equally to imports and domestic goods and is therefore not a trade barrier at all. U.S. stocks, which have fallen for weeks in anticipation of the tariffs, plunged even more sharply after Trump’s announcement.

Rogé Karma: The wild Trump theory making the rounds on Wall Street

Trump would not be the first president to encounter economic turbulence. But he might become the first one to kill off a healthy economy through an almost universally foreseeable unforced error. The best explanation for why Trump is intent on imposing tariffs is that he genuinely believes they are a source of free money supplied by residents of foreign countries, and nobody can tell him otherwise. (Tariffs are taxes on imports, which economists agree are paid mostly by domestic consumers in the form of higher prices.)

He has compounded the unavoidable damage to business confidence of any large tariff scheme by floating his intention for months while waffling over the details, paralyzing business investment. Even taken on its own terms, a successful version of Trump’s plan would require wrenching dislocations in the global economy. The United States would need to create new industries to replace the imports it is walling off, and this investment would require businesses to believe not only that Trump won’t reverse himself but also that the tariffs he imposes are likely to stay in place after January 20, 2029.

If businesses don’t believe that Trump will stick with his tariffs, the investment required to spur a domestic industrial revival won’t materialize. But if they do believe him, the markets will crash, because Trump’s tariff scheme will, by the estimation of the economists that investors listen to, produce substantially lower growth.

Probably the likeliest outcome is an in-between muddling through, with slower growth and higher inflation. Even Trump’s gestures toward sweeping tariffs have already made the economy wobble and lifted inflationary expectations. At this point, getting back to the steady growth and cooling inflation Trump inherited will require a great deal of luck.

Why didn’t anyone around Trump talk him out of this mistake? Because the second Trump administration has dedicated itself to filtering out the kinds of advisers who thwarted some of his most authoritarian first-term instincts, as well as his most economically dangerous ones. The current version of the national Republican Party, by contrast, is dedicated to the proposition recently articulated by one of Elon Musk’s baseball caps: Trump was right about everything.

In this atmosphere, questioning Trump’s instincts is seen as a form of disloyalty, and Trump has made painfully evident what awaits the disloyal. As The Washington Post reports, “Business leaders have been reluctant to publicly express concerns, say people familiar with discussions between the White House and leading companies, lest they lose their seats at the table or become a target for the president’s attacks.” Asked recently about the prospect of tariffs, House Speaker Mike Johnson revealingly said, “Look, you have to trust the president’s instincts on the economy”—a phrase containing the same kind of double meaning (have to) as Don Corleone’s offer he can’t refuse.

William J. Bernstein: No one wins a trade war

This dynamic allows Trump to do whatever he wants, no doubt to his delight. But the political consequences for his administration and his party could be ruinous. Public-opinion polling on Trump’s economic management, which has always been the floor that has held him up in the face of widespread public dislike for his character, has tumbled. This has happened without Americans feeling the full effects of his trade war. Once they start experiencing widespread higher prices and slower growth, the bottom could fall out.

A Fox News host recently lectured the audience that it should accept sacrifice for Trump’s tariffs just as the country would sacrifice to win a war. Hard-core Trump fanatics may subscribe to this reasoning, but the crucial bloc of persuadable voters who approved of Trump because they saw him as a business genius are unlikely to follow along. They don’t see a trade war as necessary. Two decades ago, public opinion was roughly balanced between seeing foreign trade as a threat and an opportunity. Today, more than four-fifths of Americans see foreign trade as an opportunity, against a mere 14 percent who see it, like Trump does, as a threat.

As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way point out, “Authoritarian leaders do the most damage when they enjoy broad public support.” Dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez have shown that power grabs are easier to pull off when the public is behind your agenda. Trump’s support, however, is already teetering. The more unpopular he becomes, the less his allies and his targets believe he will keep his boot on the opposition’s neck forever, and the less likely they will be to comply with his demands.

The Republican Party’s descent into an authoritarian personality cult poses a mortal threat to American democracy. But it is also the thing that might save it.

Trump’s Day of Reckoning

The president’s allies are privately acknowledging that he is in a rough stretch.

by Jonathan Lemire

Updated at 8:25 p.m. ET on April 2, 2025

President Donald Trump said he pushed his so-called Liberation Day from yesterday to today to avoid April Fool’s Day—“because then nobody would believe what I said.” Now, instead of falling on a date devoted to pranks, Trump’s announcement about a new wave of reciprocal tariffs comes at a moment when his White House is facing a sobering reality.

Last night, Republicans took a double-digit loss in a closely watched Wisconsin election—a campaign that became a referendum on top Trump adviser Elon Musk—and had to sweat out wins in a pair of deep-red Florida House districts. The first major scandal of Trump’s second term, his team’s use of Signal to discuss sensitive military attack plans, could spawn an independent investigation. Some influential MAGA luminaries and immigration hawks have begun to criticize the administration’s deportation tactics for lacking due process. Consumer prices aren’t falling, but the stock market sure is. And as Trump moves to escalate his trade war, fears of a recession are rising.

For the first time since Trump reclaimed the White House, some of his close allies and aides are privately acknowledging that a president who returned to office after a historic political comeback has been knocked off his stride. They admit that the past two weeks—particularly the Signal scandal, which has led some congressional Republicans to defy Trump and demand a probe—have been the most challenging of his term.

For months now, Trump has tried very hard to make “Liberation Day” a thing. Soon after his January swearing-in, he christened the day as the moment when he would enact reciprocal tariffs on major trading partners, particularly those that contribute the most to the $1.2 trillion U.S. trade deficit. He first eyed holding the day in February but pushed back the implementation of the levies to April 1—the date by which he ordered the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department to complete studies on what the policies might look like in practice—before nudging it one more day.

Read: Wisconsin’s message for Trump

At 7:06 eastern time this morning, Trump saluted the occasion on Truth Social: “IT’S LIBERATION DAY IN AMERICA!” But the more telling post had come six hours earlier, at nearly 1 a.m. EST. Trump advisers have long told me that the clearest revelations about the president’s frustrations and insecurities come late at night, when he is alone with his phone. In this case, his anger was directed at four fellow Republicans—Senators Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul—who he said were being “extremely difficult to deal with and unbelievably disloyal” by opposing tariffs on Canada. “What is wrong with them, other than suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, commonly known as TDS?” Trump wrote.

Trump, used to tightly controlling the GOP during partisan fights, was furious that he was not getting a united Republican front for his prized tariffs, two White House officials and a close outside ally told me, granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

While those four Republicans have gone public with their misgivings about the tariffs, many others have quietly expressed concerns to colleagues and reporters, or tried to lobby the White House for carve-outs that would spare their state’s constituents or favored industries. Business leaders who thought Trump was largely bluffing with his trade-war talk (the tariffs in his first term ended up being milder than expected) have also tried to lobby the president or Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to ease up, the White House officials told me.

Trump has vacillated on the size and targets of the tariffs—they were still being settled in the hours before the Rose Garden announcement, one of the White House officials confirmed to me—but never on whether to impose them. Trump assigns outsize weight to the stock market when judging the nation’s economy, but even tumbles on Wall Street have not dissuaded him. Trump possesses few consistent political ideologies but has promoted tariffs since the 1980s as a means to reduce trade deficits and spur U.S. manufacturing, and he has dismissed economists’ warnings that they would drive up prices for Americans and potentially stagnate the nation’s economy.

Read: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans

“Republicans are crashing the American economy in real time and driving us to a recession. This is not Liberation Day; it’s Recession Day,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters in the Capitol today.

The pushback to his tariffs has not been the only source of ire for Trump during a sudden eruption of negative headlines. Democrats seized on the results in three off-year elections yesterday, held just 70 days into Trump’s term. Although Republicans won both special elections to fill vacant Florida congressional seats, both winning candidates earned about 20 percent fewer votes than Trump did in those same districts in November. Of note: In the ruby-red Florida panhandle, Escambia County went Democratic for the first time in any national election since 1992—a result, many political observers have said, of the Trump administration’s cuts to Veterans Affairs programs in a region with many military families.

The face of those cuts, of course, is Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has chainsawed its way through the federal bureaucracy on Trump’s orders. And Musk—whose personal poll numbers have been cratering along with Tesla’s stock—received much of the blame for the outcome of yesterday’s Wisconsin state-supreme-court election. The world’s richest man threw himself into the race with his time and fortune, declaring that “humanity’s destiny rests” on the outcome. Despite the lofty stakes, Musk’s preferred candidate lost by 10 points.

Some in Trump’s orbit hope that the loss might represent the beginning of the end of Musk’s influence. For weeks, Republicans in Congress have quietly complained to the White House that Musk’s often indiscriminate cuts are making them the target of voter anger. Cabinet secretaries’ complaints also led Trump to somewhat rein in his billionaire aide. Trump has told advisers in recent days that Musk will begin winding down his time in the White House in the weeks ahead, likely when his 130-day window as a “special government employee” runs out at the end of next month, according to the two White House officials.

“Musk’s ‘sell by date’ is rapidly approaching,” the outside ally wrote to me. “He was a heat shield for a time. Now he’s a heat source.”

Read: Is DOGE losing steam?

Trump has at times chafed at Musk’s more politically incendiary comments, such as his declaration that Social Security is “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” But the president, according to the two White House officials, has told advisers that—at least for now—he plans to have Musk remain in his orbit even after he leaves the administration.

Trump has recently taken to phoning allies late at night to complain about a series of negative stories, according to the outside ally and another person who has received such calls. He remains angry at National Security Adviser Mike Waltz for inadvertently adding Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, to a Signal chat about attack plans to strike Houthi rebels in Yemen. He has resisted firing Waltz so as not to be seen as giving in to the media, though he has fumed about Waltz having Goldberg’s number in his phone. Having pledged to bring a quick end to wars in both the Middle East and Ukraine, Trump has watched as a cease-fire in Gaza has been shattered and as Vladimir Putin has refused to agree to American terms to bring a temporary halt to the fighting in Europe. And although Trump has delighted in the showy deportations of alleged gang members to a notorious El Salvador prison, he was annoyed that friendly media voices including Joe Rogan questioned a lack of due process, and that the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter openly balked at the arrest of a Columbia University graduate student who led pro-Palestine protests.

Asked whether the White House was concerned that Trump’s political momentum might be stalling, Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary, told me in a statement: “President Trump has accomplished more in 72 days than any president in four years” and that he is “just getting started—there’s more work to do to clean up the crises of the incompetent Biden-Harris Administration.”

But the administration is clearly hoping that Liberation Day will reset the political narrative.

Trump has “spent a lot of political capital in his first 100 days, but Republicans will see it as a good investment if he can ultimately deliver on tax cuts and deficit reductions,” Alex Conant, a GOP strategist who worked in President George W. Bush’s White House and on then-Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, told me. “But recessions and inflation are politically devastating for any president. Trump is risking both with his trade wars, so it’s understandably making his allies extremely nervous.”

In a tacit acknowledgment of the skepticism the tariffs are generating, the White House pushed back the Rose Garden event from early afternoon until after the markets had closed.

Wisconsin’s Message for Trump

Elon Musk has become a political boat anchor.

by Charles Sykes

There is a temptation to overhype or read too much into the results of off-year elections. In this case, I suggest we succumb.

Yesterday, Wisconsin voters exposed, humiliated, and decisively rejected the world’s richest man. And they sent a stark message to Republicans in Washington.

On Sunday, when Elon Musk parachuted in for a rally that featured $1 million checks for voters, he described the race for state supreme court here in apocalyptic terms. Tuesday’s vote, he declared, would determine which party controlled the House of Representatives, presumably because of the court’s role in redistricting. “That is why it is so significant,” he said. “And whichever party controls the House, you know, it, to a significant degree, controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization. So it’s like, I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will. Yeah. So it’s a super big deal.”

Yesterday’s result—a decisive victory for liberal Susan Crawford over conservative Brad Schimel—was, indeed, a super big deal. Not just for Democrats, who desperately needed this kind of win, but for Musk himself. By inserting himself into the Wisconsin race, Musk, the billionaire who has become a top adviser to President Donald Trump, had hoped to cement his status as MAGA enforcer and kingmaker. Instead, he provided Republicans with graphic evidence that he has become a political boat anchor. Late last night, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board fretted: “The MAGA majority may have a shorter run than advertised.”

John Hendrickson: Musk is still paying for political influence

It was a message that jittery Republicans in Congress are not likely to miss. As for Trump himself, he notoriously hates both losing and losers.

The stakes for Wisconsin in yesterday’s election were huge. The outcome of the judicial race would affect everything including abortion rights, gerrymandering, and public-employee bargaining rights. But along the way, Musk turned the race into a referendum on himself and the president.

Conservative groups flooded the state with literature featuring Schimel cheek by jowl with Trump, whose picture was … everywhere. Musk hoped to turn out low-propensity Trump voters by convincing them that Trump was, in effect, on the ballot. Musk and his allies hammered the message over and over in mailers: “Schimel will support President Trump’s agenda!” “President Donald Trump needs your vote. Stop the radical liberal takeover.” “Together, we won the White House. Now it’s time to win the courthouse!”

In the end, it all backfired, and the election wasn’t close. In a state where many elections are decided by razor-thin margins and where Trump won only narrowly in November, Musk’s conservative candidate was shellacked. Democrats turned out in massive numbers, and Schimel failed to hit the targets he needed. The suburban vote continued a leftward shift.

Jonathan Lemire: Elon Musk is president

As she claimed victory, Crawford gave a shout-out to Musk. “Growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I would be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin,” she said. “And we won.”

The timing of Crawford’s win is important. Wisconsin’s vote came amid stories about Musk’s assault on Social Security and circulating reports about massive cuts to public-health agencies, just a week after The Atlantic’s reporting on the Signal security breach, and just before Trump’s expected announcement about huge new tariffs.

At the rally on Sunday, Musk—who has become one of the loudest voices on the right calling for the impeachment of federal judges who rule against Trump—bounced onto a stage in Green Bay wearing a cheesehead and brandishing million-dollar checks. How would this play in the swingiest of swing states? we all wondered. How popular was Musk? How did voters feel about Trump’s shock-and-awe agenda?

Wisconsin voters have given their answer. They delivered a grim verdict on Musk’s chainsawing of government and his crude attempt to buy their state’s high court.

No Tariff Exemptions for American Farmers

They voted for the tariffs when they voted for Trump.

by David Frum

American farmers are pleading for exemptions from President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Republican members of Congress from farm states are working to deliver the relief farmers want. But farmers do not deserve special treatment and should not get it.

Tariffs will indeed hurt farmers badly. Farm costs will rise. Farm incomes will drop. Under Trump’s tariffs, farmers will pay more for fertilizer. They will pay more for farm equipment. They will pay more for the fuel to ship their products to market. When foreign countries retaliate, raising their own tariff barriers, American farmers will lose export markets. Their domestic sales will come under pressure too, because tariffs will shrink Americans’ disposable incomes: Consumers will have to cut back everywhere, including at the grocery store.

Farmers will share this tariff predicament of higher costs and lower incomes with almost all Americans—except the very wealthiest, who are less exposed to tariffs because they consume less of their incomes and can offset the pain of tariffs with other benefits from Trump, beginning with a dramatic reduction in tax enforcement.

Farmers are different from other Americans, however, in three ways.

First, farmers voted for Trump by huge margins. In America’s 444 most farm-dependent counties, Trump won an average of 77.7 percent of the vote—nearly two points more than Trump scored in those same counties in 2020.

Second, farmers have already pocketed windfall profits from Trump’s previous round of tariffs.

When Trump started a trade war with China in 2018, China switched its soybean purchasing from the United States to Brazil. By 2023, Brazil was exporting twice as much as the United States. Trump compensated farmers with lavish cash payouts. The leading study of these effects suggests that soybean farmers may have received twice as much from the Trump farm bailout as they lost from the 2018 round of tariffs, because the Trump administration failed to consider that U.S. soybeans not exported to China were eventually sold elsewhere, albeit at lower prices. The richest farmers collected the greatest share of the windfall. The largest 10 percent of farms received an average of $85 an acre in payouts, according to a 2019 study by the economists Eric Belasco and Vincent Smith for the American Enterprise Institute. The median-size farm received only $56 an acre. Altogether, farmers have been amply compensated in advance for the harm about to be done to them by the man most farming communities voted for.

Third, farmers can better afford to pay the price of Trump’s tariffs than many other tariff victims.

Farmers can already obtain federal insurance against depressed prices for their products. Most farmers report low incomes from farming, but they have a high net worth. The median American farm shows net assets of about $1.5 million. Commercial-farm households show median net assets of $3.6 million. The appearance of low incomes is in any case misleading. Again, according to Smith, families that own farms earn only 20 percent of their income from farming. Even the richest farmers, those with farm assets above $6 million, still earn about half their income from other sources, including a spouse’s employment in a local business or through a rural government job such as a county extension agent. On average, farm families earn higher total incomes than nonfarm families, and their debt-to-equity ratio is typically low.

Jerusalem Demsas: Trump is unleashing a chaos economy

None of this is to deny that farmers will suffer from the tariffs. They will. A lot. But so will city people. As will people in industries that use steel or aluminum or copper as components. As will people in service industries and export industries, people who rely on the trade treaties trashed by Trump to protect their copyrights and patents. And anybody with money invested in stocks. And anybody who drives a car or truck.

During the 2024 election campaign, Americans were told, in effect, that no sacrifice was too great to revive the domestic U.S. toaster-manufacturing industry. If that claim is true, then farmers should be proud to pay more and receive less, making the same sacrifice as any other American.

But if a farm family voted for Trump, believing that his policies were good, it seems strange that they would then demand that they, and only they, should be spared the full consequences of those policies. Tariffs are the dish that rural America ordered for everyone. Now the dish has arrived at the table. For some reason, they do not want to partake themselves or pay their share of the bill.

That’s not how it should work. What you serve to others you should eat yourself. And if rural America cannot choke down its portion, why must other Americans stomach theirs?

The Big Story: The Fallout From the Signal Controversy

Jeffrey Goldberg joins Ashley Parker to discuss breaking the Signal story, the fallout, and more. Don’t miss this subscriber-only event on Thursday, April 3, at 11:30 a.m. ET.

On Monday, March 24, The Atlantic published a story detailing how editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg had been inadvertently added to a Signal group chat of Trump-administration officials discussing attack plans on Houthi targets in Yemen. After the president and numerous officials downplayed the significance of the breach, The Atlantic published a second story with the full transcript. The fallout from “Signalgate” included congressional hearings, denials and attacks on The Atlantic from the White House, and hundreds of memes.

This week, Goldberg will discuss his reporting on the breach with Atlantic staff writer Ashley Parker in a virtual event just for subscribers. To join their conversation, return to this page on Thursday, April 3, at 11:30 a.m. ET.

An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison

The Trump administration says that it mistakenly deported an immigrant with protected status but that courts are powerless to order his return.

by Nick Miroff

Sign up for Trump’s Return, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump presidency.

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15. Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the Trump administration falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos. Trump officials have disputed those claims.

But in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring Abrego Garcia back now that he is in Salvadoran custody.

Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Abrego Garcia’s attorney, said he’s never seen a case in which the government knowingly deported someone who had already received protected legal status from an immigration judge. He is asking the court to order the Trump administration to ask for Abrego Garcia’s return and, if necessary, to withhold payment to the Salvadoran government, which says it’s charging the United States $6 million a year to jail U.S. deportees.

Trump-administration attorneys told the court to dismiss the request on multiple grounds, including that Trump’s “primacy in foreign affairs” outweighs the interests of Abrego Garcia and his family.

“They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief,’’ Sandoval-Moshenberg told me. “If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless—all of them—because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”

Court filings show that Abrego Garcia came to the United States at age 16 in 2011 after fleeing gang threats in his native El Salvador. In 2019 he received a form of protected legal status known as “withholding of removal” from a U.S. immigration judge who found he would likely be targeted by gangs if deported back.

Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has a 5-year-old disabled child who is also a U.S. citizen, has no criminal record in the United States, according to his attorney. The Trump administration does not claim he has a criminal record, but called him a “danger to the community” and an active member of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang that Trump has declared a foreign terrorist organization.

Sandoval-Moshenberg said that those charges are false, and that the gang label stems from a 2019 incident when Abrego Garcia and three other men were detained in a Home Depot parking lot by a police detective in Prince George’s County, Maryland. During questioning, one of the men told officers that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, but the man offered no proof and police said they didn’t believe him, filings show. Police did not identify him as a gang member.

Abrego Garcia was not charged with a crime, but he was handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after the arrest to face deportation. In those proceedings, the government claimed that a reliable informant had identified him as a ranking member of MS-13. Abrego Garcia and his family hired an attorney and fought the government’s attempt to deport him. He received “withholding of removal” six months later, a protected status.

Left: Abrego Garcia. Right: Garcia at CECOT according to his lawyer. (U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland)

It is not a path to permanent U.S. residency, but it means the government won’t deport him back to his home country, because he’s more likely than not to face harm there.

Abrego Garcia has had no contact with any law-enforcement agency since his release, according to his attorney. He works full time as a union sheet-metal apprentice, has complied with requirements to check in annually with ICE, and cares for his 5-year-old son, who has autism and a hearing defect, and is unable to communicate verbally.

On March 12, Abrego Garcia had picked up his son after work from the boy’s grandmother’s house when ICE officers stopped the car, saying his protected status had changed. Officers waited for Abrego Garcia’s wife to come to the scene and take care of the boy, then drove him away in handcuffs. Within two days, he had been transferred to an ICE staging facility in Texas, along with other detainees the government was preparing to send to El Salvador. Trump had invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, and the government planned to deport two planeloads of Venezuelans along with a separate group of Salvadorans.

Abrego Garcia’s family has had no contact with him since he was sent to the megaprison in El Salvador, known as CECOT. His wife spotted her husband in news photographs released by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on the morning of March 16, after a U.S. district judge had told the Trump administration to halt the flights.

“Oopsie,” Bukele wrote on social media, taunting the judge.

Abrego Garcia’s wife recognized her husband’s decorative arm tattoo and scars, according to the court filing. The image showed Salvadoran guards in black ski masks frog-marching him into the prison, with his head shoved down toward the floor. CECOT is the same prison that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited last week, recording videos for social media while standing in front of a cell packed with silent detainees.

If the government wants to deport someone with protected status, the standard course would be to reopen the case and introduce new evidence arguing for deportation. The deportation of a protected-status holder has even stunned some government attorneys I’ve been in touch with who are tracking the case, who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press. “What. The. Fuck,” one texted me.

Sandoval-Moshenberg told the court that he believes Trump officials deported his client “through extrajudicial means because they believed that going through the immigration judge process took too long, and they feared that they might not win all of their cases.’’

Officials at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. The Monday court filing by the government indicates that officials knew Abrego Garcia had legal protections shielding him from deportation to El Salvador.

“ICE was aware of this grant of withholding of removal at the time [of] Abrego Garcia’s removal from the United States. Reference was made to this status on internal forms,” the government told the court in its filing.

Abrego Garcia was not on the initial manifest of the deportation flight, but was listed “as an alternate,” the government attorneys explained. As other detainees were removed from the flight for various reasons, Abrego Garcia “moved up the list.’’

The flight manifest “did not indicate that Abrego Garcia should not be removed,’’ the attorneys said. “Through administrative error, Abrego Garcia was removed from the United States to El Salvador. This was an oversight.” But despite this, they told the court that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was carried out ‘’in good faith.’’

Why Trump Says He’s ‘Not Joking’ About a Third Term

The prospect of smashing imagined limits on his power gives him an obvious thrill.

by Jonathan Chait

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Donald Trump’s interest in seeking an unconstitutional third term as president, like many of his most dangerous or illegal ideas, began as a joke. Trump would muse on the stump that he deserved an extra term because he was robbed of his first (by Robert Mueller’s investigation) or his second (by imagined vote fraud in 2020) without quite clarifying his intent. But in an interview with NBC News this weekend, and then in remarks on Air Force One, Trump said he was completely serious about at least exploring the notion.

“A lot of people want me to do it,” he told NBC, adding, “I’m not joking.” When he was asked if the method he envisioned was to have J. D. Vance run at the top of the ticket, and then pass the baton to Trump, he said, “That’s one.” Later, on Air Force One, reporters asked him if he intended to stay on beyond the end of his current term. “I’m not looking at that,” he replied, “but I’ll tell you, I have had more people ask me to have a third term, which in a way is a fourth term because the other election, the 2020 election, was totally rigged, so it’s actually sort of a fourth term.” When a reporter mentioned the Constitution’s prohibition, Trump brushed it off. “I don’t even want to talk about it,” he said. “I’m just telling you I have had more people saying, ‘Please run again.’ We have a long way to go before we even think about that, but I’ve had a lot of people.” In Trump’s mind, the timing is an impediment to declaring for a third term—it’s too early—but the Constitution is not.

One question is, does Trump seriously mean this? Perhaps not. Trump has a long-standing habit of answering reporters’ questions about future actions in the most open-ended way, refusing to commit to any specific course of action, which means he often refuses to rule out even the most outrageous things. This can give ammunition to his political opponents, such as when he said he would “look at” cuts to Medicare and Social Security. But it is also a way to “flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon put it, by proposing an endless stream of wild ideas and reducing the shock effect of any of them.

And Trump admires dictators, and enjoys the power that comes with serving as president. Having concluded that his first term failed because his enemies in the “deep state” and the independent media stopped him, he is now carrying out an elaborate set of schemes to sideline, control, and intimidate them. To concede that he will leave office in 2029 would reduce the atmosphere of menace he has cultivated. Why forfeit the power of another term, or at least the threat of one?

Another question is whether we should take this threat seriously. The Constitution is clear that he cannot run for a third term as president, and most scholars agree that running as a vice president, and then having the elected president step down, is not a valid loophole.

But as Trump has repeatedly demonstrated, questions of the law and the Constitution ultimately reduce to power struggles. If you hear somebody say Trump is not allowed to do something, the first question to ask is What’s the enforcement mechanism? The courts may be likely to rule against permitting him to run as either president or vice president. But such cases are unlikely to be decided until after the Republican convention has locked in the party’s choice, forcing the courts to choose between effectively canceling the presidential election and enforcing the Twenty-Second Amendment.

Would five justices on the Supreme Court have the guts? Would the states follow such a ruling in a white-hot atmosphere where Republicans would accuse the judicial branch of nullifying democracy? Every apparently solid assumption about the inviolability of the two-term limit gets porous upon close inspection.

Over the past eight years, in case after case, the protections that seemed to be hard laws have turned out to be softer norms. Trump has erased a series of norms by reimagining reality, first as a joke, and eventually in earnest.

There is a pattern to the way in which transgressive ideas occupy a liminal space in MAGA discourse between troll and policy platform. Trump has often floated running for a third term as a joke, and his supporters have repeated the joke as a way to indicate their own loyalty. The Conservative Political Action Conference in February featured a Trump 2028 sign, depicting the president in Roman imperial iconography, promoting a bid to amend the Constitution. That same month, The New York Times reported that “Trump’s advisers mock those who take his comments about a third term seriously, saying he has been trolling his critics with the idea of a permanent presidency since he launched his campaign to return to the White House.”

The notion of violating Canadian sovereignty likewise circulated on the right as a joking way to imagine Trump acting out imperial fantasies. Trump himself seemed to be in on the joke, repeatedly calling Canada the “51st state” and referring to its prime minister as “governor.” But more recently, he has crossed over into something closer to earnestness. His trade policies toward Canada have a more aggressive tinge than his general support for tariffs, and appear designed to collapse the country’s economy. Canadian officials reported alarm when Trump told them he refuses to accept the legitimacy of the border between the two countries.

He has likewise floated the idea of turning the Gaza Strip into an American-owned international resort, a campaign that includes sharing overtly ridiculous memes on social media, but also giving Israel’s government the green light to carry out a military operation that may well displace the Palestinian population.

These jokes, while frequently absurd and often genuinely funny, serve a serious purpose. They allow the most committed diehards to spread edgy new ideas, expanding the boundaries of the possible for Trump. But their initial humorous quality allows traditional Republicans to keep their distance. Slowly, though, the unthinkable becomes normalized, so that when the moment finally arrives, it feels inevitable.

When Trump entertained questions on his plane about a third term, he had a faint smirk on his face, indicating that the idea hasn’t fully progressed from the joke phase into a plan of action. Trump turned the question into an opportunity to extol his alleged popularity—people are asking about another term, he says, because he is so successful and wonderful. Trump has always understood questions about his abuses of power as a kind of compliment. The prospect of smashing imagined limits on his power gives him an obvious thrill. He is probing, exploring. And when he finds softness, as he so often does when he presses against a supposed boundary, he presses on.

Steven Cheung Is the Voice of Trump

The White House communications chief has a strategy: relentless aggression.

by Elaine Godfrey

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Across the press-briefing room in the West Wing, past the lectern where the beaming blond press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, admonishes members of the meddlesome press, behind a blue sliding door, past a bored-looking security guard, and inside a small, cluttered office, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung is on X, trolling his boss’s enemies.

“The camera can’t stabilize because the watermelon head is wobbling precariously on a pencil neck,” he wrote on March 13, above a video of Representative Adam Schiff of California. Watching CNN’s Erin Burnett talk about economics, he posted on March 10, “is like watching a donkey try to solve a Rubix [sic] Cube.”

This is standard internet talk for Cheung, who, during the 2024 presidential primary, publicly referred to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as a “desperate eunuch” and asked why he would “cuck himself” before the country. But it’s a new tone for a White House communications director.

Although Cheung is more of a back-office guy, you may have caught glimpses of him last spring, escorting the would-be president in and out of Alvin Bragg’s downtown-Manhattan courtroom. Not particularly tall, he is rotund, with a shiny, egg-shaped head and a deep wrinkle etched above his brow. Observers have noted that, standing next to Donald Trump, Cheung (who is ethnically Chinese) looks a bit like Oddjob, the archvillain’s silent but menacing sidekick in the 1964 James Bond film, Goldfinger. Cheung happily made the comparison himself last week, when he reposted a photo of himself wearing a black bowler hat—Oddjob’s signature concealed weapon.

Cheung worked in communications for the Ultimate Fighting Championship before joining the 2016 Trump campaign—and he brought along an apparently boundless appetite for combat. Now 42, he has stuck with the president for close to a decade in a variety of roles that have spanned the turbulence of the Access Hollywood tape, the backbiting of the first administration, and the wilderness period that followed Trump’s 2020 election loss. For much of that time, Cheung kept a low profile. That has changed. And by all accounts, Trump loves him. The president has referred to Cheung as his “sumo wrestler,” and commented proudly on the size of Cheung’s hands. (“Look at those hands. You’re in good shape if he’s with you,” he once reportedly said.)

The paradox of Cheung is that, behind the scenes, the president’s attack dog is friendly, and peppers his conversations with generous belly laughs and the occasional “hoo boy.” In interviews, nearly a dozen reporters from outlets across the ideological spectrum described him to me as a uniquely pleasant and straightforward aide in Trump’s mostly toxic orbit. The Cheungian approach to communications leans deep into this paradox. He will engage journalists in pleasant chitchat, argue good-naturedly about the finer points of a story, and then fire off a public insult. “These sources are full of shit and have no idea what they are talking about,” Cheung said in a story by the journalist Tara Palmeri, who writes the Red Letter Substack. But Palmeri described Cheung to me as generally calm and reasonable.

In Trump’s first administration, constant warring among aides resulted in sloppy, inconsistent messaging and a steady flow of leaks. But the staffers in Trump 2.0 appear, at least for now, to be more united—in ideology as well as attitude. They have no use for norms and politesse. American political language, Cheung told me in an interview earlier this month, “was due for a supercharge.” And under his leadership, the comms team is engaged in a campaign of relentless—often performative—hostility. “He has a skill that I don’t, which is to come up with the funniest, most aggressive one-liners you’ve ever heard, in seconds,” Leavitt told me.

Trump’s incursion against American institutions is now benefiting from a communications operation that is more effective—and far more withering. Cheung has been the architect of this new messaging era, bringing all that is authentically vulgar, unflinching, and cruel about his boss to official White House statements. “In the first Trump term, Cheung was not a big player at all,” Palmeri told me. “Now he’s the voice of Trump.”

Tom Nichols: Trump’s titushky

When I met Cheung recently, I found him standing outside his office, chatting happily with a pair of reporters. That afternoon, Elon Musk would join the president as he shopped for a brand-new Tesla from a selection of vehicles arranged around the White House’s South Portico like gifts in an episode of My Super Sweet 16. One of the reporters was wondering, as reporters tend to do, about the ethics of it all. But Cheung’s excitement would not be dimmed. “You guys are in for a surprise,” he told them. “Did the White House counsel approve staff participation in the endorsement of a private product?” the reporter asked. Cheung rolled his eyes but seemed to be enjoying himself as the two went back and forth. Eventually, the reporters shuffled away with a statement from Cheung that skirted the ethical issue. Smiling, Cheung ushered me into his office.

Donald Trump and White House Communications Director Steven Cheung on board Air Force One. Source: Roberto Schmidt / Getty.

I’d heard about his reputation as a nice guy. Even so, I was surprised by Cheung’s soft-spokenness and plastic-rimmed Tina Fey glasses—a very thoughtful look for a henchman. In one corner of his office, a flatscreen TV played four news channels at once (CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and Newsmax); in another corner sat a red cap embroidered with the words TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING. On the walls, a few gold frames hung empty, because Cheung has yet to receive the enlargements of his favorite campaign-trail photos. There are no personal pictures in sight, because he has no personal life. Cheung told me he has no time for that.

Cheung grew up in Sacramento, California, where his parents settled after they emigrated from Japan and Hong Kong in the 1960s. They’re all still close, Cheung says, but his family never actually cared much about politics, conservative or liberal, until he started working for Trump. Growing up, Cheung’s older brother, Stanley, was always the gifted one. He now works as an electrical engineer. Steven spent three years at California State University at Sacramento, but did not graduate. Now he has a job in the West Wing, and a plaque signed by Trump hangs in his parents’ home. “I had no idea,” he told me, gesturing around his office, “this is where life would take me.”

During college, Cheung interned in then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speechwriting office; after dropping out of school, he worked on a string of political campaigns, including John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid. In 2009, Cheung wanted a job on the Republican underdog Steve Poizner’s campaign for California governor so much that he volunteered for two weeks before being hired as director of online messaging. “He’s an animal when it comes to hard work,” Jim Bognet, Poizner’s former campaign manager, told me. Cheung launched his own political-consulting company, Solgence, and worked on rapid response for Republican Senate candidates in Nevada and Texas.

Then, in 2013, Cheung got the job that would become Trumpworld lore. The Ultimate Fighting Championship hired Cheung as its director of communications and public affairs—bringing him on, in part, to lobby for the legalization of mixed-martial-arts fighting in New York. The UFC had recently evolved from a niche pay-per-view service into a recognized sport with mass-market appeal. This was the era of Conor McGregor and Ronda Rousey, and the franchise’s brand was all about vulgarity and social taboo. Nobody did more for the sport than CEO Dana White, whose cultivated machismo and plainspokenness had engendered trust among viewers.

Cheung left the UFC after three years, when the company was sold. He climbed aboard Trump’s chaotic train in 2016, as manager of rapid response, and continued to abide by White’s governing philosophy: “Be aggressive all the time—you can’t relent,” Cheung told me. “Bringing that mindset into politics,” he added, “I don’t think anyone’s really done that before.”

Trump still makes occasional appearances at UFC fights, and Cheung delights in showing him off. “When he walks in back of Trump in his posse,” the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon told me, “he always gets that little smile.” On St. Patrick’s Day this year, when McGregor visited the Oval Office, Cheung posted a photo of their meeting commemorating the collision of his two worlds. The caption: “Past life 🤝 Current life.”

From the July/August 2022 issue: American Rasputin

Given that Cheung was one of the few Trump staffers with experience on a presidential campaign, he became a kind of political sage on the 14th floor of Trump Tower. Other aides often sought advice from Cheung, who had demonstrated a preternatural ability to remain calm throughout a campaign defined, in large part, by scandal. “You’re hired to do a job,” he told me, by way of explanation. “And you need to execute.”

After Trump’s surprise win in November 2016, Cheung joined the White House team as a special assistant to the president and as the assistant communications director. Two factions soon formed in the West Wing: the first, a renegade MAGA coalition mostly aligned with Bannon; the second, a group of establishment GOP holdovers allied with Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. The infighting was constant and vicious, with each group trying to shiv the other in the press. The leaky mess was a reporter’s dream.

Because he’d come from the campaign, Cheung was definitely more of a Bannon guy, people told me. But the internal sniping left him largely unscathed. “He has among the broadest ranges of relationships across Trump’s orbit,” one White House reporter, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about his working relationship with Cheung, told me. “He’s the demilitarized zone of the private Trump world, which might surprise people, given his public persona.”

Early on, Bannon referred to Cheung and a few of the other younger men in the White House as his “killers” and instructed them to create a plan to “weaponize comms,” one friend of Cheung’s, who worked in the first Trump administration and requested anonymity in order to speak frankly, told me, by bringing a more aggressive posture toward critical coverage. But by early summer 2018, Chief of Staff John Kelly was cleaning house—and Cheung, whom Kelly distrusted, was swept out. But Cheung was happy to land back on the campaign side, where the action was, consulting for Trump.

Cheung helped with Trump’s debate preparation in 2020, and the Republican National Convention. But Cheung’s contract was up on the day after Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in November. So he was not involved in the “Stop the Steal” madness that followed, and he was not in the White House on January 6, 2021, when rioters broke into the U.S. Capitol. Publicly, Cheung has said that people know “who really won the election” in 2020, and he has defended Trump’s assertion that January 6 was “a day of love.” But he declined to comment about either in our interview.

During the Biden presidency, Cheung spent most of his time working on crisis communications for corporate clients, and consulting on two strikingly different political bids: Caitlyn Jenner’s campaign for California governor, and the Senate run of disgraced Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, who’d resigned from office after being accused of sexual misconduct.

Soon enough, Cheung found his way back to Trump. Just ahead of the midterms, Susie Wiles, Trump’s campaign manager, hired Cheung to work for MAGA Inc., a new political-action committee that would become the staff feeder for Trump’s third presidential campaign. This was a dark period for Trump, who had left office in disgrace and was now embroiled in several high-profile court cases. It was not exactly an ideal time to attach one’s political career to the Trump name. But Cheung joined the campaign anyway.

“You gotta finish the story,” Cheung told me when I asked what made him do it. “You ride it ’til the wheels fall off.” Wiles corporatized the campaign team, adding the structure it had previously lacked. Then she unleashed Cheung on the primary contest.

Starting in late summer 2023, Cheung sent out a series of ruthless campaign statements he called the “Kiss of Death” countdown, after a Republican consultant said that Trump’s principal rival for the GOP nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, had “60 days to beat Trump.” The emails often implied that DeSantis, who sometimes appeared to be wearing lifts, enjoyed dressing like a woman. “Ron shuffled his feet and gingerly walked across the debate set like a 10 year old girl who had just raided her mom’s closet and discovered heels for the first time,” Cheung wrote after the October debate.

Most reporters who cover Trump are familiar with the publicly rude, privately nice dynamic that many MAGA operatives employ. But the obnoxious emails were especially jarring coming from Cheung. “He’s like a giant teddy bear,” one former White House correspondent, who requested anonymity because she feared online attacks from Cheung, told me.

It was Trump’s idea, Cheung told me, to fly the Trump-campaign jet low over the fairgrounds before his arrival in Des Moines, Iowa. Giddy, Cheung gave the reporters covering DeSantis on the ground a five-minute warning. And just as DeSantis took his turn in the spotlight, flipping pork burgers in front of a crowd, Trump’s plane flew overhead and stole the moment.

By early 2024, DeSantis was out of the race, and the action had shifted to a Lower Manhattan court, where Trump was on trial for paying hush money to a porn star, and where Cheung could be found loitering on the sidelines, like some kind of bouncer-lawyer hybrid. “Make no mistake, this is election interference of the highest order,” he barked in a rare on-camera appearance. “Crooked Joe Biden and his campaign are in complete freak-out mode.”

Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point

The White House communications team has adopted the campaign’s “battle rhythm,” said Leavitt, who is close to Cheung, figuratively, but also literally, as his office neighbor in the West Wing. And this unified team is now waging war on the press.

The administration has banned the Associated Press from covering events in the Oval Office, because of the wire service’s refusal to use the administration’s preferred term “Gulf of America,” and it has wrested control of the White House press pool from the independent White House Correspondents’ Association. It has also granted White House access to many deferential outlets, including Bannon’s podcast and the sycophantic Real America’s Voice network. But Cheung prickled when I questioned whether the team’s ultimate objective is to curtail critical press coverage. “Ask any reporter who’s covered the campaign how much access we’ve given to them,” he said. “We’ve gone out of our way to expand access.” (True, Trump himself takes questions all the time, but the White House has also attacked and punished outlets for coverage it doesn’t like.)

Despite that insistence, Cheung has now realized Bannon’s dream of weaponized comms, ushering in a new era of political messaging in Washington. Gone are the mild stumbles of “covfefe” and the meme-ry of Sean Spicer retreating into the White House shrubbery. Trump has reverted to his own killer instincts, assailing his enemies with all-caps Truth Social rants. Don’t expect anyone to rein him in. “When times get tough, you don’t take a step back; you double down,” Cheung said, when I asked whether Trump ever goes too far. “And if that doesn’t work, you triple down.”

The Cheungian tactic of instant escalation is, for him and his allies, a win-win strategy: It helps quench the base’s thirst for lib-owning—and gets a ton of eyeballs. “If Cheung calls Tim Walz a cuck versus if he says, ‘Walz is incorrect because of X, Y, and Z,’ which one is going to get more attention?” a senior White House official, who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly, told me. The method is brutal but, Cheung and his allies believe, effective.

The logical end point of this mindset is the dehumanization of not only one’s opponents, but anyone who isn’t a loud loyalist. “From a broader, 35,000-foot view, is this healthy?” another friend of Cheung’s from the first Trump White House, who similarly requested anonymity, told me. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s great.”

This shock-and-awe style that has come to define communication in the second Trump era seems to draw no distinction between aggressive trolling of political opponents and outright cruelty to other human beings. In a video shared by the White House last month, immigration agents put men in shackles, and marched them up a gangway onto a waiting plane. The video, which was made by the White House’s digital team and approved by Cheung, is captioned “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” implying that the sight and sound of people being deported is pleasing.

The post received 200 million views and 886,000 engagements across X and Instagram, Cheung told me. He sounded proud.

America’s Future Is Hungary

MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.

by Anne Applebaum

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Flashy hotels and upmarket restaurants now dominate the center of Budapest, a city once better known for its shabby facades. New monuments have sprung up in the center of town too. One of them, a pastiche of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., mourns Hungary’s lost 19th-century empire. Instead of war dead, the names of formerly “Hungarian” places—cities and villages that are now in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland—are engraved in long granite walls, solemnly memorialized with an eternal flame.

But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.

Tourists in central Budapest don’t see this decline. But neither, apparently, does the American right. For although he has no critical mineral wealth to give away and not much of an army, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, plays an outsize role in the American political debate. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Orbán held multiple meetings with Donald Trump. In May 2022, a pro-Orbán think tank hosted CPAC, the right-wing conference, in Budapest, and three months later, Orbán went to Texas to speak at the CPAC Dallas conference. Last year, at the third edition of CPAC Hungary, a Republican congressman described the country as “one of the most successful models as a leader for conservative principles and governance.” In a video message, Steve Bannon called Hungary “an inspiration to the world.” Notwithstanding his own institution’s analysis of Hungarian governance, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation has also described modern Hungary “not just as a model for modern statecraft, but the model.”

What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since. He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.

From the December 2021 issue: Anne Applebaum on Autocracy Inc.

This autocratic takeover is precisely what Bannon, Roberts, and others admire, and are indeed seeking to carry out in the U.S. right now. The destruction of the civil service is already under way, pressure on the press and universities has begun, and thoughts of changing the Constitution are in the air. But proponents of these ideas rarely talk about what happened to the Hungarian economy, and to ordinary Hungarians, after they were implemented there. Nor do they explore the contradictions between Orbán’s rhetoric and the reality of his policies. Orbán talks a lot about blocking immigration, for example, but at one point his government issued visas to any non-EU citizen who bought 300,000 euros’ worth of government bonds from mysterious and mostly offshore companies.

He rhapsodizes about family values, even though his government spends among the lowest amounts per capita on health care in the EU, controls access to IVF, and notoriously decided to pardon a man who covered up sexual abuse in children’s homes.

Orbán also talks a lot about “the people” while using his near-absolute power not to build Hungarian prosperity but to enrich a small group of wealthy businessmen, some of whom are members of his family. In Budapest, these oligarchs are sometimes called NER, or NER-people, or NERistan—nicknames that come from Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere or System of National Cooperation, the Orwellian name that Orbán gave to his political system—and they benefit directly from their proximity to the leader. Direkt36, one of the few remaining investigative-journalism teams in Hungary, recently made a documentary, The Dynasty, showing, for example, how competitions for state- and EU-funded contracts, starting in about 2010, were deliberately designed so that Elios Innovatív, an energy company co-owned by Orbán’s son-in-law István Tiborcz, would win them. The EU eventually looked into 35 contracts and found serious irregularities in many of them, as well as evidence of a conflict of interest. (In a 2018 statement, Elios said that it had followed legal regulations, which is no doubt true; the whole point of this system is that it is legal.)

That story is just one of many that Hungarians recount to one another, just not in public. The Dynasty also describes the Kisfaludy Tourism Development Programme, which distributed 316 billion Hungarian forints ($860 million) in grants. Two-thirds of those grants went to 0.5 percent of the applicants; almost one-fifth of them went to projects that were, or later became, connected to Tiborcz. Not that Tiborcz is the only recipient of government largesse. Lőrinc Mészáros, at one time the richest man in Hungary, a gas fitter turned entrepreneur who is an old friend of the prime minister’s, once attributed his fortune to “God, luck, and Viktor Orbán.” Other beneficiaries come and go, depending on Orbán’s whim. One Hungarian businessman told me that “you can tell who is in, who is out by seeing whose companies begin growing. If you are in, then your company is growing. If you’re out, your company goes from this big to this small. You see it in a year or two.”

This kind of corruption is, again, mostly legal, because the laws, contracts, and procurement rules are written in such a way as to permit it. Even if this activity were illegal, party-controlled prosecutors would not investigate it. But the scale of the corruption is large enough to distort the rest of the economy. The Hungarian businessman and a Hungarian economist I spoke with—both of whom insisted on anonymity, for fear of retaliation—had separately calculated that NERistan amounts to about 20 percent of the Hungarian economy. That means, as the economist explained to me, that 20 percent of Hungary’s companies operate “not on market principles, not on merit-based principles, but basically on loyalty.” These companies don’t have normal hiring practices or use real business models, because they are designed not for efficiency and profit but for kleptocracy—passing money from the state to their owners.

Not that the regime ever acknowledges the role that the oligarchy plays in the system, or even concedes that Hungary might face a structural crisis. Another Hungarian economist told me that Orbán always predicts “very bright days in the future; success, unimaginable success.”

“Please trust us,” Orbán declared in his annual state-of-the-nation speech in early 2023. “You can bet on it: By the end of the year, we will have inflation in single digits.” In fact, annual average inflation in 2023 was more than 17 percent. In 2024, the government predicted 4 percent growth; the reality was 0.6 percent. Anyone who contradicts this messaging is unlikely to be widely heard. Independent economists are rarely invited to appear on public television, or in any media controlled by the ruling party. In February 2024, the regime created the Sovereignty Protection Office, a sinister body that harasses and smears independent Hungarian organizations. It has redoubled its efforts since the U.S. election and the assault on USAID. The office’s targets include the Hungarian branch of Transparency International, the anti-corruption investigative group, as well as an investigative-news portal, Atlatszo.hu—any entity that could tell the truth about how the country really works.

Read: Make America Hungary again

But the truth is not hard to perceive for anyone who cares to look, because the beneficiaries of this corrupt system are not shy about showing off their wealth. When I mentioned the shiny hotels in central Budapest to a Hungarian friend, he snorted. “Of course, that’s where the NER-people live,” he said. “They want it to look nice.” Also, they own quite a few of them. The Dynasty, the documentary, includes footage of the Hungarian elite partying at clubs and in palaces, and garnered more than 3 million views within a month, a large number in a country of 9.6 million. Thousands of comments underneath the video on YouTube thank the Direkt36 reporters for showing “true reality” not available anywhere else.

In many ways, Hungary is about as different from the U.S. as it is possible to be: small, poor, homogeneous. But I watched the film with a sense of foreboding. As Elon Musk, a government contractor, sets fire to our civil service and makes decisions about the departments that regulate him; as the FBI and the Justice Department are captured by partisans who will never prosecute their colleagues for corruption; as inspectors general are fired and rules about conflicts of interest are ignored, America is spinning quickly in the direction of Hungarian populism, Hungarian politics, and Hungarian justice. But that means Hungarian stagnation, Hungarian corruption, and Hungarian poverty lie in our future too.

This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “The Hungarian Model.”

The Retired J.P. Morgan Executive Tracking Trump’s Deportation Flights

A CFO turned activist has become a go-to source for understanding the administration’s immigration crackdown.

by Nick Miroff

The Trump administration’s plan to dust off the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was in the works long before March 15. But the precise timing was hazy. Immigration attorneys went to federal court that morning to try to block the government from using the extraordinary wartime authority, which allows deportations without due process. There were few signs that the White House was about to use the law to send planeloads of Venezuelans to a prison complex in El Salvador.

The first person to alert the public that the flights would actually take place was not an official or a lawyer or a journalist, but a retired J.P. Morgan executive living in Ohio named Tom Cartwright. “TWO HIGHLY UNUSUAL ICE flights showing up now from Harlingen to El Salvador,” he wrote on social media, noting that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had taken that route, flying out of a city in southern Texas, only once during the past month and a half. “Venezuelan deportation??”

Immigration attorneys raced back to court. And the events of the next several hours took the  country closer to a constitutional crisis than any other clash to date between Donald Trump and the judicial branch, as Trump officials brushed off D.C. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg’s order to halt the flights.

Cartwright’s role in the episode isn’t well known. But over the past two months, as immigrant-rights groups, congressional aides, and reporters have struggled to keep tabs on the Trump administration’s deportation push, they have relied more and more on Cartwright, a 71-year-old immigrant-rights activist who, in retirement, has become an eagle-eyed tracker of U.S. deportation flights, which the government rarely publicizes.

Every day, he compiles data on ICE flights, applying skills developed over a career managing banks with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. Using publicly available information from aviation tracking sites, he produces weekly and monthly reports detailing where ICE Air—the government’s deportation airline—is directing its planes.

Conor Friedersdorf: Trump is deporting ‘them’ in ways that threaten us

Over the past several weeks, Cartwright has become the go-to source for many people looking for details on the Trump administration’s deportation flights to Guantánamo Bay, its use of military transport planes, and the controversial flights to El Salvador. Think tanks and legal organizations cite his work. This past weekend, when The New York Times published a visual report describing how the frequency of U.S. deportation flights has not significantly increased since Trump took office, despite the president’s promises, the article cited “a New York Times review of an independent database.” The database is Cartwright’s. His work was the basis for a similar CNN story earlier this month.

Cartwright began tracking ICE flights during Trump’s first term and continued sending out monthly reports to journalists, nonprofit groups, and congressional staff through the Biden administration. But Trump’s pledge to deport “millions” in his second term—and his mobilization of federal resources and aggressive use of executive authorities—has recently put Cartwright’s data in higher demand.

“He took information that was publicly available but labor-intensive to compile, and did something nobody else was doing,” Adam Isacson, a border-security analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a rights organization in D.C., told me. “I don’t know if he expected this second career to make him basically the world’s only credible public source on U.S. deportation flights, just as they were becoming part of one of the United States’ biggest national news stories.”

“He’s indispensable,” added Robyn Barnard, an advocate for refugees with the group Human Rights First, who told me she was stunned when she first learned of Cartwright’s background in banking rather than activism.

Soft-spoken and bookish, with a graying beard, glasses, and a gentlemanly manner, Cartwright takes a more modest view of his role in the nation’s immigration furor. “I think that these people deserve the dignity of at least someone paying attention to what’s happening to them,” he told me, referring to the deportees on ICE Air. “It’s a dehumanizing process.”

ICE Air doesn’t operate like an ordinary commercial carrier. It uses private charter aircraft whose crew include security contractors and ICE officers. The flights typically carry about 125 deportees placed in shackles and leg chains. ICE says that these security measures are necessary to ensure that the badly outnumbered crewmembers can maintain order and prevent deportees from attempting to seize the cabin or rioting (both of which sometimes happen).

The U.S. immigration enforcement system is notoriously opaque; unlike in the criminal-justice system, ICE does not typically release the names of the people it arrests. ICE periodically discloses its flight activity in press releases, though it does so selectively and at its own pace. Still, the charter aircraft that ICE uses have tail numbers that show up on aviation tracking apps and sites, such as Flight Aware, Flightradar24, and ADS-B Exchange, where Cartwright can get a real-time view of the planes in the air.

Quinta Jurecic: The ultimate Trump story

The work became more difficult when Trump officials started putting deportees on military-transport planes, whose tail numbers and itineraries don’t appear on the tracking sites. Cartwright has managed to find military flights by using the apps to search more than a dozen airports where U.S. military flights originate, looking for aircraft with no tail numbers. Then he cross-references that information with other public sources, such as news reports in destination countries.

Cartwright said that he spent about 20 hours a week tracking ICE flights before Trump took office this year. That’s up to 30 or 40 hours now. “It’s literally an everyday job,” he told me, wearily. “There’s no backup.”

Cartwright grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and settled in Columbus, Ohio, as he moved up the ranks at J.P. Morgan to become the chief financial officer for one of the company’s largest divisions, covering 5,000 bank branches. He sees the immigration-advocacy work he embraced in retirement as a continuation of the ethos he practiced during his career. “I always felt in the financial world we were helping people,” he told me. “I know that’s a really bizarre thing to say for someone who’s a liberal activist, but that’s really how I got into the career in a small bank in Springfield.”

Cartwright did volunteer work during the migrant crisis in Greece in 2015, when the bodies of drowned migrants were washing ashore, including a toddler whose photograph pushed European countries to accept more refugees. During the first Trump administration, when the president escalated ICE efforts against Central American families and minors who arrived without parents, Cartwright, a practicing Catholic, began volunteering at shelters run by Catholic aid groups in South Texas. He joined the activist group Witness at the Border, which monitors ICE operations to “bear witness” to practices it considers abusive.

Cartwright told me he was inspired by a fellow volunteer he met in Texas, a woman in her 80s, who was watching deportees being loaded onto an ICE flight, counting each person out loud. He asked her if she was trying to figure out how many people were getting on the plane. “She said, ‘No,’” Cartwright told me. “‘I don’t know their names, but I want to make sure I see every individual.’”

Activist groups were struggling at the time to figure out where ICE was sending deportees. Cartwright had never used aviation tracking apps, but he had data-management and analytical skills that other activists lacked. Tracking ICE flights allowed him to ward off the despairing feeling that no one was watching and no one cared, he told me.

Cartwright’s database shows that ICE has carried out 267 deportation flights under Trump, and that the president is using military-transport planes—whose operating costs are three to five times as high as conventional passenger aircrafts’—at an unprecedented rate.

Read: ICE isn’t delivering the mass deportation Trump wants

Otherwise Cartwright’s data show that the pattern and frequency of ICE flights haven’t significantly changed under Trump 2.0—something that might come as a surprise given the controversies and court battles triggered by the administration’s aggressive attempt to ramp up immigration arrests and deportations. ICE officers—backed by other federal law-enforcement agencies that Trump has mobilized—have made about three times as many immigration arrests as they did during President Joe Biden’s final months in office. But a sharp drop in illegal crossings at the Mexico border has left ICE with fewer easy-to-deport migrants. ICE officers are trying to meet Trump’s deportation goals by going after more immigration-law violators in U.S. cities and communities than during Biden’s term.

The Department of Homeland Security has not told Cartwright to stop publishing the information he compiles, he said. In fact, he sometimes sends his reports to ICE, though he’s never received a response. The agency did not respond to a request for comment about Cartwright’s data gathering.

Cartwright takes accuracy in his reports seriously, he told me. “I spent 38 years in the financial world, and often my things would end up in SEC filings,” he said. “I don’t bend facts. It’s not in my nature.”

But after logging nearly 35,000 ICE flights, Cartwright told me that he’s worn out. He’s ready for his retirement to become a real one. He wants the work to continue, though, and has found some willing understudies among a group of activists in Seattle whom he’s started to train. He’ll share his methods with anyone, he said, then added: “There are some things you know that just aren’t teachable. You have to learn them as you go.”

What’s important to him, he said, is to make sure someone will keep watching.

The Double Standard at the Center of the Signal Debacle

As senior officials deny wrongdoing, rank-and-file national-security personnel worry about the dangers if no one is held accountable.

by Isaac Stanley-Becker, Jonathan Lemire

In the telling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, he was only executing his duties when he shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen in an unclassified group chat on the Signal messaging app. “My job,” he told reporters during a swing through Hawaii, “is to provide updates in real time.”

The implication: Nothing to see here.

The reaction inside the Pentagon to Hegseth’s communications—disclosed this week by The Atlantic after the editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently added to the chat—told a different story, as security specialists raced to reiterate rules about the proper channels for classified information.

“Incidents like this make my job significantly harder,” a Department of Defense operations security, or OPSEC, official told us this week, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. “When senior leadership disregards OPSEC and security protocols without consequences, it undermines the work we do to enforce these standards.”

Read: Trump goes after the messenger

The OPSEC official added, “Now we have to spend hours retraining and reiterating rules to personnel who see these double standards and question why they should be held accountable when leadership is not.”

In the days since The Atlantic published the contents of the group chat, a gulf has opened between the public posture adopted by senior members of the administration and the private reaction of rank-and-file national-security officials aghast at the severity of the breach and troubled by the lack of repercussions. The disparity is likely to deepen if Donald Trump continues to resist holding anyone accountable.

The president’s instructions to his team late this week remained to attack Goldberg and The Atlantic, and not “produce a scalp” by firing any members of his Cabinet, in the words of one outside adviser consulted by the White House who described the discussions to us. Senior Democrats have called on both Hegseth and the president’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who created the Signal group and added Goldberg, to resign or be fired.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to rule out the possibility of terminations but told reporters this week that Trump “continues to have confidence in his national-security team.” Trump, speaking in the Oval Office yesterday, said of his defense secretary, “Hegseth is doing a great job. He had nothing to do with this.” And the White House today confirmed plans for Waltz to join Vice President J. D. Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, on a visit to Greenland, in an apparent show of confidence in the national security adviser.

In Congress, the reactions mostly reflected partisan differences, with some exceptions.

Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, joined the panel’s top Democrat, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, in asking the Defense Department’s acting inspector general to investigate the incident. The acting inspector general, Steven A. Stebbins, was appointed principal deputy inspector general in 2023, under President Joe Biden, and took over leadership of the office on an acting basis following Trump’s dismissal of the inspector general, Robert Storch, in January—part of a broad expulsion of inspectors general.

It’s not clear whether or how quickly an investigation will take place. A spokesperson for the inspector general’s office confirmed receipt of the request and told us it was being reviewed.

It’s also not clear whether there will be other investigations. In response to questioning this week before the Senate and House intelligence panels, FBI Director Kash Patel declined to say whether he would open an investigation. At an unrelated news conference earlier today, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, dismissed the prospect of an investigation. Bondi echoed Trump-administration talking points in describing the contents of the Signal chat as “sensitive information, not classified,” and sought to shift the focus to the success of the mission in Yemen. She then blamed Hillary Clinton and Biden for mishandling classified information. Both politicians faced probes into their conduct by the Justice Department, the agency traditionally responsible for enforcing the Espionage Act and other federal laws governing national defense information.

Wicker, speaking to reporters this week, said he believed that the information shared in the chat should have been classified, contradicting senior Trump-administration officials who insisted they had heeded classification rules. But Wicker stopped short of calling for resignations. So, too, did Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who described the conduct as an “egregious security breach” that should serve as a “wake-up call.” Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska also delivered a blunt assessment, calling the Signal chat a “gross error.”

Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, told us that his Republican colleagues are more concerned about the breach than they let on publicly.

“I think they are much more concerned privately, because they saw the text messages just as I did,” he said in an interview. “They saw the unredacted messages, and they are astonishing.”

Krishnamoorthi also said that the breach has broken through to the public in a way that demands consequences. “They want to know that there’s a uniform application of the law,” the lawmaker told us. According to a YouGov poll released this week, 60 percent of Republicans view the conduct by Trump officials in the Signal chat as somewhat or very serious. Nearly 90 percent of Democrats said the same.

Some conservative influencers broke ranks to warn of public perceptions about the incident. In a lengthy video posted to his more than 3.6 million followers on X, Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, called on Trump to fire someone. “Somebody has to go down,” he said. Tomi Lahren, another popular conservative-media personality, took issue with the administration’s efforts to draw a distinction between “war plans” and “attack plans,” and to imply that the latter is less sensitive. “Trying to wordsmith the hell outta this signal debacle is making it worse,” she wrote on X. “It was bad. And I’m honestly getting sick of the whataboutisms from my own side. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Trump, for his part, has been angered by negative news coverage that he believes paints his White House as sloppy and that has distracted from his plans to implement further tariffs on American trading partners, two aides told us. Inside the White House, the episode brought back memories of the scandal surrounding Mike Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser in the early days of his first term, as the president’s aides vowed to ensure a different outcome this time around. Flynn was forced to resign in February 2017 after he was revealed to have lied to then–Vice President Mike Pence about conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Listen: Classified, or not classified?

Trump, who loathes admitting errors or issuing apologies, has expressed private regret about Flynn’s dismissal and has told advisers over the years that he thinks he gave up too easily. Some in the president’s orbit don’t want another national security adviser thrown overboard so quickly.

Still, some Trump allies believe that Waltz is more vulnerable than the secretary of defense. The bare-knuckle fight to get Hegseth narrowly confirmed reminded the president’s supporters of the push to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which became a significant victory for the MAGA movement. Hegseth is also receiving the most heat from Democrats, which may make the GOP more likely to try to rally around him. Waltz, meanwhile, is viewed with more suspicion by some of the president’s loyalists, who are directing blame at him not for initiating the Signal chat but for seeming to have the contact details of a journalist stored in his phone. (He has denied this while not explaining how he came to add Goldberg to the chat.)

Trump advisers expressed anger toward Wicker and other Republicans on the Hill who have broken ranks. As a contrast, they held up Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and longtime national-security hawk, who declared that no one should lose their job over the Signal debacle.

Graham’s reward came last night in the form of a presidential endorsement on Truth Social in his reelection race, which is more than a year away: “Lindsey has been a wonderful friend to me, and has always been there when I needed him.”

Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal

The administration has downplayed the importance of the text messages inadvertently sent to <em>The Atlantic</em>’s editor in chief.

by Jeffrey Goldberg, Shane Harris

So, about that Signal chat.

On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

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At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat—the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz—we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

Read: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.

Experts have repeatedly told us that use of a Signal chat for such sensitive discussions poses a threat to national security. As a case in point, Goldberg received information on the attacks two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing of Houthi positions. If this information—particularly the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen—had fallen into the wrong hands in that crucial two-hour period, American pilots and other American personnel could have been exposed to even greater danger than they ordinarily would face. The Trump administration is arguing that the military information contained in these texts was not classified—as it typically would be—although the president has not explained how he reached this conclusion.

Yesterday, we asked officials across the Trump administration if they objected to us publishing the full texts. In emails to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the White House, we wrote, in part: “In light of statements today from multiple administration officials, including before the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the information in the Signal chain about the Houthi strike is not classified, and that it does not contain ‘war plans,’ The Atlantic is considering publishing the entirety of the Signal chain.”

We sent our first request for comment and feedback to national-security officials shortly after noon, and followed up in the evening after most failed to answer.

Late yesterday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt emailed a response: “As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat. However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic] — yes, we object to the release.” (The Leavitt statement did not address which elements of the texts the White House considered sensitive, or how, more than a week after the initial air strikes, their publication could have bearing on national security.)

A CIA spokesperson asked us to withhold the name of John Ratcliffe’s chief of staff, which Ratcliffe had shared in the Signal chain, because CIA intelligence officers are traditionally not publicly identified. Ratcliffe had testified earlier yesterday that the officer is not undercover and said it was “completely appropriate” to share their name in the Signal conversation. We will continue to withhold the name of the officer. Otherwise, the messages are unredacted.

Listen: Jeffrey Goldberg on the group chat that broke the internet

As we wrote on Monday, much of the conversation in the “Houthi PC small group” concerned the timing and rationale of attacks on the Houthis, and contained remarks by Trump-administration officials about the alleged shortcomings of America’s European allies. But on the day of the attack—Saturday, March 15—the discussion veered toward the operational.

At 11:44 a.m. eastern time, Hegseth posted in the chat, in all caps, “TEAM UPDATE:”

The text beneath this began, “TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.” Centcom, or Central Command, is the military’s combatant command for the Middle East. The Hegseth text continues:

- “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”

- “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”

Let us pause here for a moment to underscore a point. This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg’s cellphone—at 11:44 a.m. This was 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched, and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi “Target Terrorist,” was expected to be killed by these American aircraft. If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.

The Hegseth text then continued:

- “1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”

- “1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”

- “1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”

- “MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)”

- “We are currently clean on OPSEC”—that is, operational security.

- “Godspeed to our Warriors.”

Shortly after, Vice President J. D. Vance texted the group, “I will say a prayer for victory.”

At 1:48 p.m., Waltz sent the following text, containing real-time intelligence about conditions at an attack site, apparently in Sanaa: “VP. Building collapsed. Had multiple positive ID. Pete, Kurilla, the IC, amazing job.” Waltz was referring here to Hegseth; General Michael E. Kurilla, the commander of Central Command; and the intelligence community, or IC. The reference to “multiple positive ID” suggests that U.S. intelligence had ascertained the identities of the Houthi target, or targets, using either human or technical assets.

Six minutes later, the vice president, apparently confused by Waltz’s message, wrote, “What?”

At 2 p.m., Waltz responded: “Typing too fast. The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”

Vance responded a minute later: “Excellent.” Thirty-five minutes after that, Ratcliffe, the CIA director, wrote, “A good start,” which Waltz followed with a text containing a fist emoji, an American-flag emoji, and a fire emoji. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.

Later that afternoon, Hegseth posted: “CENTCOM was/is on point.” Notably, he then told the group that attacks would be continuing. “Great job all. More strikes ongoing for hours tonight, and will provide full initial report tomorrow. But on time, on target, and good readouts so far.”

It is still unclear why a journalist was added to the text exchange. Waltz, who invited Goldberg into the Signal chat, said yesterday that he was investigating “how the heck he got into this room.”

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.

by Jeffrey Goldberg

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining.

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The story technically begins shortly after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, in October 2023. The Houthis—an Iran-backed terrorist organization whose motto is “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”—soon launched attacks on Israel and on international shipping, creating havoc for global trade. Throughout 2024, the Biden administration was ineffective in countering these Houthi attacks; the incoming Trump administration promised a tougher response.

This is where Pete Hegseth and I come in.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.

I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”

The message continued, “Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx.”

Read: Here are the attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared on Signal

The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

One minute later, a person identified only as “MAR”—the secretary of state is Marco Antonio Rubio—wrote, “Mike Needham for State,” apparently designating the current counselor of the State Department as his representative. At that same moment, a Signal user identified as “JD Vance” wrote, “Andy baker for VP.” One minute after that, “TG” (presumably Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, or someone masquerading as her) wrote, “Joe Kent for DNI.” Nine minutes later, “Scott B”—apparently Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, or someone spoofing his identity, wrote, “Dan Katz for Treasury.” At 4:53 p.m., a user called “Pete Hegseth” wrote, “Dan Caldwell for DoD.” And at 6:34 p.m., “Brian” wrote “Brian McCormack for NSC.” One more person responded: “John Ratcliffe” wrote at 5:24 p.m. with the name of a CIA official to be included in the group. I am not publishing that name, because that person is an active intelligence officer.

The principals had apparently assembled. In all, 18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials; Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and someone identified only as “S M,” which I took to stand for Stephen Miller. I appeared on my own screen only as “JG.”

That was the end of the Thursday text chain.

After receiving the Waltz text related to the “Houthi PC small group,” I consulted a number of colleagues. We discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts to place journalists in embarrassing positions, and sometimes succeeds. I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

The next day, things got even stranger.

At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”

At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”

A person identified in Signal as “Joe Kent” (Trump’s nominee to run the National Counterterrorism Center is named Joe Kent) wrote at 8:22, “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line. We’ll have the exact same options in a month.”

Then, at 8:26 a.m., a message landed in my Signal app from the user “John Ratcliffe.” The message contained information that might be interpreted as related to actual and current intelligence operations.

At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account. “VP: I understand your concerns – and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

The Hegseth message goes on to state, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”—operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.”

A few minutes later, the “Michael Waltz” account posted a lengthy note about trade figures, and the limited capabilities of European navies. “Whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes. Per the president’s request we are working with DOD and State to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans.”

The account identified as “JD Vance” addressed a message at 8:45 to @Pete Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.” (The administration has argued that America’s European allies benefit economically from the U.S. Navy’s protection of international shipping lanes.)

The user identified as Hegseth responded three minutes later: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go; but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.”

At this point, the previously silent “S M” joined the conversation. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

A screenshot from the Signal group shows debate over the president’s views ahead of the attack.

That message from “S M”—presumably President Trump’s confidant Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, or someone playing Stephen Miller—effectively shut down the conversation. The last text of the day came from “Pete Hegseth,” who wrote at 9:46 a.m., “Agree.”

After reading this chain, I recognized that this conversation possessed a high degree of verisimilitude. The texts, in their word choice and arguments, sounded as if they were written by the people who purportedly sent them, or by a particularly adept AI text generator. I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.

It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.

The only person to reply to the update from Hegseth was the person identified as the vice president. “I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. (Two other users subsequently added prayer emoji.)

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.

I went back to the Signal channel. At 1:48, “Michael Waltz” had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an “amazing job.” A few minutes later, “John Ratcliffe” wrote, “A good start.” Not long after, Waltz responded with three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Others soon joined in, including “MAR,” who wrote, “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Susie Wiles,” who texted, “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.” “Steve Witkoff” responded with five emoji: two hands-praying, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. “TG” responded, “Great work and effects!” The after-action discussion included assessments of damage done, including the likely death of a specific individual. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.

A screenshot from the Signal group shows reactions to the strikes.

On Sunday, Waltz appeared on ABC’s This Week and contrasted the strikes with the Biden administration’s more hesitant approach. “These were not kind of pinprick, back-and-forth—what ultimately proved to be feckless attacks,” he said. “This was an overwhelming response that actually targeted multiple Houthi leaders and took them out.”

The Signal chat group, I concluded, was almost certainly real. Having come to this realization, one that seemed nearly impossible only hours before, I removed myself from the Signal group, understanding that this would trigger an automatic notification to the group’s creator, “Michael Waltz,” that I had left. No one in the chat had seemed to notice that I was there. And I received no subsequent questions about why I left—or, more to the point, who I was.

Earlier today, I emailed Waltz and sent him a message on his Signal account. I also wrote to Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe, Tulsi Gabbard, and other officials. In an email, I outlined some of my questions: Is the “Houthi PC small group” a genuine Signal thread? Did they know that I was included in this group? Was I (on the off chance) included on purpose? If not, who did they think I was? Did anyone realize who I was when I was added, or when I removed myself from the group? Do senior Trump-administration officials use Signal regularly for sensitive discussions? Do the officials believe that the use of such a channel could endanger American personnel?

Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, responded two hours later, confirming the veracity of the Signal group. “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Hughes wrote. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”

William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, said that despite the impression created by the texts, the vice president is fully aligned with the president. “The Vice President’s first priority is always making sure that the President’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” he said. “Vice President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy. The President and the Vice President have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”

I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.

Read: A conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg about his extraordinary scoop

Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred.

All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said. Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

Hegseth, Ratcliffe, and other Cabinet-level officials presumably would have the authority to declassify information, and several of the national-security lawyers noted that the hypothetical officials on the Signal chain might claim that they had declassified the information they shared. But this argument rings hollow, they cautioned, because Signal is not an authorized venue for sharing information of such a sensitive nature, regardless of whether it has been stamped “top secret” or not.

There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

“Under the records laws applicable to the White House and federal agencies, all government employees are prohibited from using electronic-messaging applications such as Signal for official business, unless those messages are promptly forwarded or copied to an official government account,” Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and the former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told Harris.

“Intentional violations of these requirements are a basis for disciplinary action. Additionally, agencies such as the Department of Defense restrict electronic messaging containing classified information to classified government networks and/or networks with government-approved encrypted features,” Baron said.

Several former U.S. officials told Harris and me that they had used Signal to share unclassified information and to discuss routine matters, particularly when traveling overseas without access to U.S. government systems. But they knew never to share classified or sensitive information on the app, because their phones could have been hacked by a foreign intelligence service, which would have been able to read the messages on the devices. It is worth noting that Donald Trump, as a candidate for president (and as president), repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for using a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state. (It is also worth noting that Trump was indicted in 2023 for mishandling classified documents, but the charges were dropped after his election.)

Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.

All along, members of the Signal group were aware of the need for secrecy and operations security. In his text detailing aspects of the forthcoming attack on Houthi targets, Hegseth wrote to the group—which, at the time, included me—“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”

Shane Harris contributed reporting.

America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State

For most people, the courts will continue to operate as usual—until they don’t.

by Aziz Huq

Updated at 9:20 a.m. ET on April 3, 2025

On September 20, 1938, a man who had witnessed the rise of fascism packed his suitcases and fled his home in Berlin. He arranged to have smuggled separately a manuscript that he had drafted in secret over the previous two years. This book was a remarkable one. It clarified what was unfolding in Berlin at the time, the catalyst for its author’s flight.

The man fleeing that day was a Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel. He completed his manuscript two years later at the University of Chicago (where I teach), publishing it as The Dual State, with the modest subtitle A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. The book explains how the Nazi regime managed to keep on track a capitalist economy governed by stable laws—and maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens—while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence in order to realize its terrible vision of ethno-nationalism.

Fraenkel offered a simple, yet powerful, picture of how the constitutional and legal foundations of the Weimar Republic eroded, and were replaced by strongman-style rule in which the commands of the Nazi Party and its leader became paramount. His perspective was not grounded in abstract political theory; it grew instead from his experience as a Jewish lawyer in Nazi Berlin representing dissidents and other disfavored clients. Academic in tone, The Dual State sketches a template of emerging tyranny distilled from bloody and horrifying experience.

It was a mistake to think that even the Nazis would entirely dispense with normal laws.

As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply. (A prerogative power is one that allows a person such as a monarch to act without regard to the laws on the books; theorists from John Locke onward have offered various formulations of the idea.) In this prerogative state, judges and other legal actors deferred to the racist hierarchies and ruthless expediencies of the Nazi regime.

Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days

The key here is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state. The two states cohabit uneasily and unstably. On any given day, people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one. In July 1936, for example, Fraenkel won a case for employees of an association taken over by the Nazis. A few days later, he learned that the Gestapo had seized the money owed to his clients and deposited it in the government’s coffers. Over time, the prerogative state would distort and slowly unravel the legal procedures of the normative state, leaving a smaller and smaller domain for ordinary law.

Yet, Fraenkel insisted, it was a mistake to think that even the Nazis would entirely dispense with normal laws. After all, they had a complex, broadly capitalist economy to maintain. “A nation of 80 million people,” he noted, needs stable rules. The trick was to find a way to keep the law going for Christian Germans who supported or at least tolerated the Nazis, while ruthlessly executing the führer’s directives against the state’s enemies, real and perceived. Capitalism could jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.

Fraenkel was born in Cologne in December 1898 in the comfortable home of Georg Fraenkel, a merchant, and Therese Epstein. After his parents died, Ernst and his sister were taken in by their uncle in Frankfurt, where Ernst became interested in trade-union activism. Despite his socialist leanings, he joined the German army and was sent to Poland in April 1917, then on to the Western Front that July. He later wrote that he’d hoped “the war would mean the end of antisemitism.” Fraenkel survived the trenches, and after his discharge in 1919, he earned a law degree, eventually securing work in Berlin as a labor lawyer.

The war did not, of course, end anti-Semitism, but his military service did save his livelihood, at least for a time. On May 9, 1933—only a few months after the Reichstag burned—Fraenkel and other Jewish lawyers received an official notice prohibiting them from appearing in German courts. But Nazi law made an exception for Jewish lawyers who had served in World War I. And so, while many fled, Fraenkel remained in Berlin, representing litigants such as members of the German Freethinkers Alliance, a leader of the Young Socialist Workers, and a man arrested for insulting a National Socialist newspaper as “old cheese.”

Often, he had to resort to unorthodox strategies. In the last of those three cases, Fraenkel persuaded his client to plead guilty, limiting his arguments to the sentence’s severity. This gambit worked: The man was duly convicted, and received a light sentence, avoiding the fate of others acquitted under similar circumstances. In at least one case, a Gestapo agent appeared as soon as the judge declared a not-guilty verdict, took the defendant into custody, and said, “Kommt nach Dachau” (“Come to Dachau”). Eventually, Fraenkel’s name made it onto a Gestapo list. He and his wife fled first to London, then to Chicago.

From the February 1941 issue: A review of Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State

Today, we are witnessing the birth of a new dual state. The U.S. has long had a normative state. That system was always imperfect. Our criminal-justice system, for example, sweeps in far too many people, for far too little security in exchange. Even so, it is recognizably part of the normative state.

What the Trump administration and its allies are trying to build now, however, is not. The list of measures purpose-built to cleave off a domain in which the law does not apply grows by the day: the pardons that bless and invite insurrectionary violence; the purges of career lawyers at the Justice Department and in the Southern District of New York, inspectors general across the government, and senior FBI agents; the attorney general’s command that lawyers obey the president over their own understanding of the Constitution; the appointment of people such as Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who seem to view their loyalty to the president as more compelling than their constitutional oath; the president’s declaration that he and the attorney general are the sole authoritative interpreters of federal law for the executive branch; the transformation of ordinary spending responsibilities into discretionary tools to punish partisan foes; the stripping of security clearances from perceived enemies and opponents; the threat of criminal prosecutions for speech deemed unfavorable by the president; and the verbal attacks on judges for enforcing the law.

The peril of the dual state lies in its capacity for targeted suppression.

The singular aim of these tactics is to construct a prerogative state where cruel caprice, not law, rules. By no measure does the extent of federal law displaced in the first few months of the Trump administration compare with the huge tracts of the Weimar’s legal system eviscerated by the Nazis. But it is striking how Donald Trump’s executive orders reject some basic tenets of American constitutionalism—such as Congress’s power to impose binding rules on how spending and regulation unfold—without which the normative state cannot persist.

The CEOs who paid for and attended Trump’s second inauguration can look forward to the courts being open for the ordinary business of capitalism. So, too, can many citizens who pay little attention to politics expect to be unscarred by the prerogative state. The normal criminal-justice system, if only in nonpolitical cases, will crank on. Outside the American prerogative state, much will remain as it was. The normative state is too valuable to wholly dismantle.

For that reason, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump’s lawyers—despite running roughshod over Congress, the states, the press, and the civil service—were somewhat slower to defy the federal courts, and have fast-tracked cases to the Supreme Court, seeking a judicial imprimatur for novel presidential powers. The courts, unlike the legislature, remain useful to an autocrat in a dual state.

Building a dual state need not end in genocide: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore have followed the same model of the dual state that Fraenkel described, though neither has undertaken a mass-killing operation as the Nazis did. Their deepest similarity, rather, is that both are intolerant of political dissent and leave the overwhelming majority of citizens alone. The peril of the dual state lies precisely in this capacity for targeted suppression. Most people can ignore the construction of the prerogative state simply because it does not touch their lives. They can turn away while dissidents and scapegoats lose their political liberty. But once the prerogative state is built, as Fraenkel’s writing and experience suggest, it can swallow anyone.

This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “A Warning Out of Time.” It has been updated to clarify that Ernst Fraenkel deployed with the German army in World War I to Poland and the Western Front.

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- Iran Wants to Talk

- Search-and-Rescue Dogs at Work

- Russia’s Repression Goes South

- America’s Future Is Hungary

- Photos of the Week: Raccoon Snack, Tyrannosaurus Race, Speed Skiing

- Why Sheinbaum Can Surrender to Trump

- The Double Standard in the Human-Rights World

- Fleeing Hong Kong Wasn’t Enough

Iran Wants to Talk

Don’t expect a bromance—but the supreme leader has written back to Donald Trump.

by Arash Azizi

Donald Trump loves letters. We know this from his first term, when he exchanged 27 letters with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the course of 16 months and wrote a particularly memorable missive to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In his second term, he has already found an unlikely new pen pal: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Early in March, a high-ranking Emirati diplomat delivered a letter from Trump to Khamenei. Iran has now sent Khamenei’s response through its preferred mediator, the Sultanate of Oman.

Iran’s letter is detailed and leaves the door open for negotiations, a source close to the Iranian establishment told me, on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. In addition to the official response, Iranians have used multiple channels, including private business ones, to send signals to Trump and his team, the source added.

About two months ago, Khamenei said that talking with the U.S. was “neither rational, nor smart, nor honorable.” This seemed consistent with his posture during Trump’s first term: In 2018, he said Iran would “never” talk with the Trump administration in particular. In June 2019, when Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, brought a letter from Trump to Tehran, Khamenei rebuked him in front of cameras and said that the U.S. president was not “worthy” of a response. A few months later, Emmanuel Macron went out of his way to host a videoconference between Trump and his Iranian counterpart, then-President Hassan Rouhani. The logistical arrangements had been made, but in the end Rouhani didn’t take the meeting.

Read: The Axis of Resistance keeps getting smaller

Yet the supreme leader has been known to buckle under pressure and call it a strategic retreat. Decades ago, he coined the phrase heroic flexibility in praise of a Shiite imam who had made peace with a bitter enemy. He used the term in 2013 to justify Iran’s talks with the Obama administration (talks that started with an exchange of letters between Barack Obama and Khamenei.)

Khamenei is not about to give up his lifelong anti-Americanism at this late hour, at the age of almost 86. Still, Iran is in dire economic straits, and domestic pressure is mounting. Trump’s message to Iran, meanwhile, has been constant and clear: Talk with me, agree to a deal in which you stop pursuing nuclear weapons and arming regional militias, and I’ll let you prosper.

If Iran declines, Israel, flush from having battered the Iranian allies Hamas and Hezbollah, could finally strike Iran’s nuclear program. But even short of that, Trump’s policy—his previous administration called it “maximum pressure”—could fatally damage the already beleaguered Iranian economy. The U.S. has threatened to seriously crack down on Iran’s oil trade with China, which would cost Iran its most important source of foreign currency. The markets are already speaking: The U.S. dollar now trades for more than 1 million rials, an almost 75 percent increase from a few months ago, making the Iranian currency among the most worthless in the world (in 2015, when Iran last signed a deal with the U.S., the dollar was just 29,500 IRR).

This explains why Iran is coming to the table. But knowing just how weak his hand is, Khamenei has tried to appear tough. In an Eid al-Fitr speech on Monday, he affirmed that Iran’s positions had not changed, “nor has the enmity of America and the Zionist regime, which continue to threaten us with their evil doings.” He went on to threaten the U.S. and Israel with “a firm blow in response” if they attack Iran—which, he added, was “not very likely.” As per usual, he threatened Israel with destruction: “Everybody has a duty to work toward eliminating this evil and criminal entity from the region,” he said.

His is not the only bluster from Tehran. Iran’s military leaders have recently threatened American bases in the region. Ali Larijani, a centrist politician and adviser to Khamenei, said that Iran has no intention of building a nuclear weapon, but it could be forced to do so if attacked by the U.S. or Israel.

These might sound like fighting words, but what they really are is a negotiating tactic. Larijani has himself said that he hopes for “a tangible result” to come out of diplomacy with America and praised Trump as “a talented businessman.” Other Iranian officials have made similar indications, even as they complain about Trump’s “bullying” and his threats to bomb the country. Iran is “always ready to negotiate on an equal footing,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Monday. Iran is not averse to negotiations, and “the ball is in the U.S.’s court,” a top communication official in the office of President Masoud Pezeshkian said a day earlier.

If the messages seem mixed, that’s because Iran has “readied itself for both negotiations and confrontation,” Mostafa Najafi, a Tehran-based expert on the Iranian security establishment, told me. He said that the Iranian authorities had reached out to the Trump team even prior to the U.S. president’s inauguration, as diplomacy is their preferred course—but they have also prepared the country’s defenses in case this effort fails.

According to Najafi, Iran wants a two-step process, with direct talks following the current indirect contact. Tehran prefers that these talks take place in secret, and it wants Iran’s missile and drone capabilities to be off the table, he added. But it would be happy to talk about “lessening tensions in the region.” Najafi continued, “This doesn’t mean making deals over the Axis of Resistance groups, but, if Iran sees it as necessary, it can align them with a new agenda.”

This push for talks has a clear constituency in Iran. Op-eds in business and political dailies argue that the country has no choice but to come to a deal with the West. An online poll on a major news website showed a whopping 82 percent in favor of direct talks with the U.S., with 7 percent favoring indirect talks and only 11 percent opposed to all talks. Mohammad Ali Sobhani, a former Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Jordan, and Qatar, even suggested that Iran should offer business opportunities to American companies to sell the Trump administration on dealmaking.

Read: The Iranian dissident asking simple questions

If Iran and America do get to talking again, many outside forces will try to shape the result. Israel might nudge Trump away from negotiations, in favor of attacks that could keep Iran weak and destabilized. And Trump might very well prefer that outcome too. But prominent voices in the Trump camp seem to be urging a more diplomatic approach. The talk-show host Tucker Carlson, known for his close ties to the president, has strongly pushed against attacking Iran. His interview with Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, in which the latter seemed open to discussions with Iran, was watched closely in Iran. Witkoff’s apparent favorability toward negotiations was cited by regional sources speaking to an Israeli newspaper as one reason Khamenei softened up and wrote back to Trump. Then, yesterday, came the disappearing X comment heard halfway round the world: Araghchi wrote a long post urging “diplomatic engagement” while asserting that “there is—by definition—no such thing as a ‘military option’ let alone a ‘military solution.’” Witkoff responded, “Great”—then deleted the comment. Judging from the flurry of social-media posts and op-eds, however, his message appears to have been received in Tehran.

The leaders of America’s Arab allies in the Gulf are also likely to discourage Trump from further inflaming the region by attacking Iran—this is in sharp contrast to their attitude during the Obama era, when they feared that a nuclear agreement with Tehran would leave them out.

Trump’s epistolary relationship with Khamenei is unlikely to develop into the sort of bromance he experienced with Kim, and even those personal talks collapsed because they weren’t accompanied by the necessary technical negotiations. But Iran is now going out of its way to affirm that it held up its end of the old nuclear deal and forswore developing nuclear weapons. What the Iranians also seem to know is that if they want to get a new deal with America, they will have to learn Trump’s style, and that includes the president’s love of letters.

Search-and-Rescue Dogs at Work

- Alan Taylor

- April 2, 2025

- 22 Photos

- In Focus

When search-and-rescue teams deploy to any of the numerous natural or man-made disasters around the world, they bring along their own teams of highly trained dogs to help discover victims in need. When these dogs are not in the field, they frequently take part in training sessions simulating events such as earthquakes, wildfires, and water or avalanche rescues. Gathered below are images of some of these rescue dogs and their handlers, on the job and in training, from the past several years.

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- Rescuers use a sniffer dog during a search operation at the ruins of a building collapsed after an earthquake in Mamuju, West Sulawesi, Indonesia, on January 18, 2021. #

Daeng Mansur / AP

- Lek, a golden retriever from the Thai K9 Rescue unit, is brought to comfort people waiting for news of missing loved ones at the site of an under-construction building collapse in Bangkok, Thailand, on April 1, 2025, four days after an earthquake struck central Myanmar and Thailand. #

Lillian Suwanrumpha / AFP / Getty

- A volunteer with the Italian School of Rescue Dogs (La Scuola Italiana Cani Salvataggio) jumps with a dog during a water-rescue training session at Averno Lake in Pozzuoli, Italy, on October 24, 2024. #

Vincenzo Izzo / Sipa USA / Reuters

- Rescuers deploy a sniffing dog to search for survivors, as dozens of people are believed to have been trapped in the rubble of a collapsed high-rise building that was still under construction, after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck neighboring country Myanmar, in Bangkok, Thailand, on March 29, 2025. #

Daniel Ceng / Anadolu / Getty

- Workers pull a rescue dog across a river at the site of a landslide in the village of Xinmo, Mao County, Sichuan province, China, on June 25, 2017. #

An Yuan / CNS / Reuters

- A search-and-rescue worker, looking for Camp Fire victims, carries Susie Q to safety after the sniffer dog fell through rubble at the Holly Hills Mobile Estates on November 14, 2018, in Paradise, California. #

Noah Berger / AP

- Tullla, a four-year-old Labrador, gets a bath after working in the Pacific Palisades on January 17, 2025. Search-and-rescue dogs from the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation were deployed to assist after wildfires decimated parts of California. #

Megan Smith / USA Today Network / Reuters

- A search-and-rescue dog named Maca, with the Turkish Gendarmerie General Command, takes part in skydiving training at Sivrihisar Aviation Center in the Sivrihisar district of Eskişehir, Turkey, on October 12, 2023. #

Cem Genco / Anadolu / Getty

- A closer view of search-and-rescue dog Maca, wearing protective gear and a video camera during training, at Turkey’s Sivrihisar Aviation Center on October 12, 2023 #

Cem Genco / Anadolu / Getty

- Search-and-rescue dogs take part in a training session in Ankara, Turkey, on January 9, 2024. #

Omer Taha Cetin / Anadolu / Getty

- Disaster-response workers with a sniffer dog conduct a search operation after a child reportedly fell into a stormwater drain following heavy rainfall at Jyoti Nagar in Guwahati, India, on July 5, 2024. #

Pitamber Newar / ANI / Reuters

- A monument to a rescue dog named Proteo is unveiled at Marte Military Field, in Mexico City, on September 21, 2023. Proteo, one of the search-and-rescue dogs deployed to Turkey with a team from Mexico to help to find victims of the 2023 earthquake, died while on the job, after finding at least two trapped people. #

Luis Barron / Eyepix Group / Future Publishing / Getty

- An avalanche dog takes part in a search-and-rescue exercise for avalanche victims at the French Alps ski resort of La Rosiere, France, on February 4, 2025. #

Olivier Chassignole / AFP / Getty

- A member of the Mexican navy kneels beside a rescue dog after an earthquake struck on the southern coast of Mexico in Juchitan, Mexico, on September 10, 2017. #

Edgard Garrido / Reuters

- A sniffer dog swims through mud and debris during a search for the remaining victim of a flash flood in Hildale, Utah, on September 17, 2015. #

Rick Bowmer / AP

- A rescuer with a dog inspects the rubble of a building following a Russian drone attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on March 29, 2025. #

Sergey Bobok / AFP / Getty

- A trainer pets one of the search-and-rescue dogs that are helping to train other dogs in Ankara, Turkey, on January 9, 2024. #

Omer Taha Cetin / Anadolu / Getty

- A search-and-rescue dog takes part in a water-rescue training session in Ankara, Turkey, on November 19, 2024. #

Mehmet Ali Ozcan / Anadolu / Getty

- A search-and-rescue dog works in debris left after the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, on November 16, 2018. #

John Locher / AP

- A rescue worker and his search dog prepare to be lifted in the bucket of an excavator, searching for survivors at the site of a deadly explosion that destroyed the Hotel Saratoga in Old Havana, Cuba, on May 8, 2022. #

Ismael Francisco / AP

- A member of an all-female group of canine rescuers from the Italian School of Rescue Dogs (La Scuola Italiana Cani Salvataggio) attends a training session with her dog before patrolling the beach to ensure swimmers can enjoy their time at the sea in safety, in Riva dei Tarquini, near Rome, Italy, on August 25, 2020. #

Guglielmo Mangiapane / Reuters

- A volunteer firefighter hugs a dog during the search for victims of an eruption of the Fuego Volcano in Alotenango, a municipality in Sacatepequez Department, Guatemala, on June 6, 2018. #

Orlando Estrada / AFP / Getty

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Russia’s Repression Goes South

A group of Russian exiles thought they would find freedom in Georgia. They were wrong.

by Anna Nemtsova

Since President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago, more than 100,000 Russians have crossed the border with Georgia. While their country devolved into autocracy and spurned the West, their small southern neighbor seemed to be moving in the opposite direction—toward democracy and membership in the European Union.

Soon, however, the authoritarianism they’d tried to escape began spilling over the border. The Kremlin appeared to exert greater influence over Georgia’s leaders, and Russian refugees saw their adoptive home come to resemble their native one.

“Repressive laws that Georgia adopts are copied from the Kremlin’s,” Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, a human-rights activist who has served multiple prison sentences in Russia, told me, and Moscow’s brand of oppression is “catching up with Russian exiles.”

In 2006, Dmitriyevsky became the first activist that the Russian regime convicted under its so-called counter-extremism laws. But he didn’t decide to try to leave until the fall of 2022, when he found out that Russia’s Federal Security Service was investigating him for opposing the war in Ukraine.

Dmitriyevsky applied for asylum in Georgia, where he lived for two years awaiting a ruling. On New Year’s Eve, Georgian authorities denied his petition, explaining in a letter that “no facts of international or internal conflict or significant violations of human rights were recorded.” He was dumbfounded. “They must be blind,” Dmitriyevsky told me. He plans to appeal.

Read: Democracy in Eastern Europe faces another crisis

Dmitriyevsky is one of a growing number of asylum seekers whom Georgia has rejected. In the first days of the war, the country mostly welcomed Russian refugees, but then it started closing itself off. Authorities interrogated border crossers, arrested some, and deported others to nearby Armenia. Russians who applied for permanent residency confronted increasing rates of rejection. And some of the Russians who made it across the border haven’t been able to stay, including those who face prison time back home.

Georgia’s evolving stance toward refugees mirrors the country’s recent turn away from the West. In December 2023, the European Council granted EU-candidate status to Georgia—a goal that the country’s leaders had long pursued. But late last year the ruling party, Georgian Dream, abruptly suspended accession talks.

That decision came after several indications that repression in Georgia was deepening. Earlier in 2024, the country’s Parliament had enacted a law requiring media companies and NGOs to register as “foreign agents” if more than 20 percent of their funding came from a “foreign power,” which was generally understood to mean any Western country. And in September, lawmakers passed legislation curtailing LGBTQ rights. Some Georgians followed the Russians’ example and went into exile themselves.

Georgia was once a refuge for the Russian opposition. In the first year of the war, thousands of activists crossed the border. Some founded NGOs, such as Volunteers Tbilisi, which organized aid for Ukrainian refugees—the kind of venture that would lead to a prison sentence in Russia. Georgia welcomed them initially but has since cooled to Putin’s opponents. In December, authorities blocked the Russian founder of Volunteers Tbilisi from returning to her home in Georgia.

Even Russian visitors are having a hard time getting into Georgia. Several members of the protest group Pussy Riot tried to see their family members over the holidays, but Georgia denied them entry. The country’s border control also rebuffed Andrey Kurayev, a dissident priest whom the Kremlin has designated as a foreign agent, even though he was reportedly invited by a Georgian university.

Georgia’s realignment toward Moscow has been especially painful for Ivan Pavlov. A Russian lawyer, Pavlov moved his family to Georgia in September 2021, after the Federal Security Service opened a criminal case against him, seemingly because his firm had defended critics of Putin. Even though he’s Russian, Pavlov’s move to Georgia was a kind of homecoming: His mother was born in Tbilisi, where he spent time as a child. But in February 2023, he was forced out. “First Georgia banned entry to seven of my colleagues, and eventually canceled my residency permit on an order from counterintelligence,” Pavlov told me. “I was called a threat to national security.”

Read: A wider war has already started in Europe

“I don’t think authorities ban Russian exiles out of their love for Putin. They do it out of fear,” Pavlov said. He appealed to Georgia’s supreme court, which denied his petition to stay; his case is now pending before the European Court of Human Rights.

Georgian authorities may be shirking their duties under international law, some advocates say. “They have obligations to give people in need the opportunity to apply for asylum,” Rachel Denber, a deputy director at Human Rights Watch, told me.

Anna Rivina, a Russian women’s-rights activist, was rejected by Georgia, too. In February 2023, authorities kicked her out of the country after she had been there for eight months and registered her NGO, which provides support for women fleeing the war in Ukraine. “The reason is still classified, even after I have appealed to the supreme court,” Rivina told me. “I was told that my case fell under a law about terrorist activities. I am a threat to the nation in their view.” She was able to resettle in Western Europe, an option that many Russians don’t have.

The journalists Marfa Smirnova and Vladimir Romenskyi were able to get into Georgia, unlike Rivina, but given how quickly the country’s political situation has changed, the couple are not sure they’ll be able to stay. In Russia, they had reported on the country’s opposition movement for an independent television station. Now Smirnova regularly receives threats from anonymous users on Telegram. In 2023, somebody sent her photographs of her two children, who were visiting their grandparents in Russia during a school break. “When we travel in order to do reporting,” she told me, “we never know if we can get back home.”

Protesters and police clash on the streets of Tbilisi every night, a reminder to Dmitriyevsky, the human-rights activist, of the repressive politics he escaped in Russia. On a recent Sunday evening, he watched as law-enforcement officers beat demonstrators until they fell to the ground. He told me he felt a “powerful sense of déjà vu” as riot police dragged dozens of them away—a scene he’d witnessed in Russia many times.

When Dmitriyevsky first arrived in Georgia, he welcomed recent anti-corruption reforms in law enforcement. Now he avoids the police whenever he can. He’s worried that they’ll target him, as they have other opposition activists. Last month, Georgia detained two Russian opposition activists, who allege that police planted drugs on them. “I don’t want to run away from Georgia,” Dmitriyevsky said. “If we run from every authoritarian regime, we’d have to move to the moon soon.”

America’s Future Is Hungary

MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.

by Anne Applebaum

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Flashy hotels and upmarket restaurants now dominate the center of Budapest, a city once better known for its shabby facades. New monuments have sprung up in the center of town too. One of them, a pastiche of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., mourns Hungary’s lost 19th-century empire. Instead of war dead, the names of formerly “Hungarian” places—cities and villages that are now in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland—are engraved in long granite walls, solemnly memorialized with an eternal flame.

But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.

Tourists in central Budapest don’t see this decline. But neither, apparently, does the American right. For although he has no critical mineral wealth to give away and not much of an army, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, plays an outsize role in the American political debate. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Orbán held multiple meetings with Donald Trump. In May 2022, a pro-Orbán think tank hosted CPAC, the right-wing conference, in Budapest, and three months later, Orbán went to Texas to speak at the CPAC Dallas conference. Last year, at the third edition of CPAC Hungary, a Republican congressman described the country as “one of the most successful models as a leader for conservative principles and governance.” In a video message, Steve Bannon called Hungary “an inspiration to the world.” Notwithstanding his own institution’s analysis of Hungarian governance, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation has also described modern Hungary “not just as a model for modern statecraft, but the model.”

What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since. He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.

From the December 2021 issue: Anne Applebaum on Autocracy Inc.

This autocratic takeover is precisely what Bannon, Roberts, and others admire, and are indeed seeking to carry out in the U.S. right now. The destruction of the civil service is already under way, pressure on the press and universities has begun, and thoughts of changing the Constitution are in the air. But proponents of these ideas rarely talk about what happened to the Hungarian economy, and to ordinary Hungarians, after they were implemented there. Nor do they explore the contradictions between Orbán’s rhetoric and the reality of his policies. Orbán talks a lot about blocking immigration, for example, but at one point his government issued visas to any non-EU citizen who bought 300,000 euros’ worth of government bonds from mysterious and mostly offshore companies.

He rhapsodizes about family values, even though his government spends among the lowest amounts per capita on health care in the EU, controls access to IVF, and notoriously decided to pardon a man who covered up sexual abuse in children’s homes.

Orbán also talks a lot about “the people” while using his near-absolute power not to build Hungarian prosperity but to enrich a small group of wealthy businessmen, some of whom are members of his family. In Budapest, these oligarchs are sometimes called NER, or NER-people, or NERistan—nicknames that come from Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere or System of National Cooperation, the Orwellian name that Orbán gave to his political system—and they benefit directly from their proximity to the leader. Direkt36, one of the few remaining investigative-journalism teams in Hungary, recently made a documentary, The Dynasty, showing, for example, how competitions for state- and EU-funded contracts, starting in about 2010, were deliberately designed so that Elios Innovatív, an energy company co-owned by Orbán’s son-in-law István Tiborcz, would win them. The EU eventually looked into 35 contracts and found serious irregularities in many of them, as well as evidence of a conflict of interest. (In a 2018 statement, Elios said that it had followed legal regulations, which is no doubt true; the whole point of this system is that it is legal.)

That story is just one of many that Hungarians recount to one another, just not in public. The Dynasty also describes the Kisfaludy Tourism Development Programme, which distributed 316 billion Hungarian forints ($860 million) in grants. Two-thirds of those grants went to 0.5 percent of the applicants; almost one-fifth of them went to projects that were, or later became, connected to Tiborcz. Not that Tiborcz is the only recipient of government largesse. Lőrinc Mészáros, at one time the richest man in Hungary, a gas fitter turned entrepreneur who is an old friend of the prime minister’s, once attributed his fortune to “God, luck, and Viktor Orbán.” Other beneficiaries come and go, depending on Orbán’s whim. One Hungarian businessman told me that “you can tell who is in, who is out by seeing whose companies begin growing. If you are in, then your company is growing. If you’re out, your company goes from this big to this small. You see it in a year or two.”

This kind of corruption is, again, mostly legal, because the laws, contracts, and procurement rules are written in such a way as to permit it. Even if this activity were illegal, party-controlled prosecutors would not investigate it. But the scale of the corruption is large enough to distort the rest of the economy. The Hungarian businessman and a Hungarian economist I spoke with—both of whom insisted on anonymity, for fear of retaliation—had separately calculated that NERistan amounts to about 20 percent of the Hungarian economy. That means, as the economist explained to me, that 20 percent of Hungary’s companies operate “not on market principles, not on merit-based principles, but basically on loyalty.” These companies don’t have normal hiring practices or use real business models, because they are designed not for efficiency and profit but for kleptocracy—passing money from the state to their owners.

Not that the regime ever acknowledges the role that the oligarchy plays in the system, or even concedes that Hungary might face a structural crisis. Another Hungarian economist told me that Orbán always predicts “very bright days in the future; success, unimaginable success.”

“Please trust us,” Orbán declared in his annual state-of-the-nation speech in early 2023. “You can bet on it: By the end of the year, we will have inflation in single digits.” In fact, annual average inflation in 2023 was more than 17 percent. In 2024, the government predicted 4 percent growth; the reality was 0.6 percent. Anyone who contradicts this messaging is unlikely to be widely heard. Independent economists are rarely invited to appear on public television, or in any media controlled by the ruling party. In February 2024, the regime created the Sovereignty Protection Office, a sinister body that harasses and smears independent Hungarian organizations. It has redoubled its efforts since the U.S. election and the assault on USAID. The office’s targets include the Hungarian branch of Transparency International, the anti-corruption investigative group, as well as an investigative-news portal, Atlatszo.hu—any entity that could tell the truth about how the country really works.

Read: Make America Hungary again

But the truth is not hard to perceive for anyone who cares to look, because the beneficiaries of this corrupt system are not shy about showing off their wealth. When I mentioned the shiny hotels in central Budapest to a Hungarian friend, he snorted. “Of course, that’s where the NER-people live,” he said. “They want it to look nice.” Also, they own quite a few of them. The Dynasty, the documentary, includes footage of the Hungarian elite partying at clubs and in palaces, and garnered more than 3 million views within a month, a large number in a country of 9.6 million. Thousands of comments underneath the video on YouTube thank the Direkt36 reporters for showing “true reality” not available anywhere else.

In many ways, Hungary is about as different from the U.S. as it is possible to be: small, poor, homogeneous. But I watched the film with a sense of foreboding. As Elon Musk, a government contractor, sets fire to our civil service and makes decisions about the departments that regulate him; as the FBI and the Justice Department are captured by partisans who will never prosecute their colleagues for corruption; as inspectors general are fired and rules about conflicts of interest are ignored, America is spinning quickly in the direction of Hungarian populism, Hungarian politics, and Hungarian justice. But that means Hungarian stagnation, Hungarian corruption, and Hungarian poverty lie in our future too.

This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “The Hungarian Model.”

Photos of the Week: Raccoon Snack, Tyrannosaurus Race, Speed Skiing

- Alan Taylor

- March 28, 2025

- 28 Photos

- In Focus

A para-surfing event in Australia, an anti-Hamas protest in the Gaza Strip, Nowruz celebrations in Iraq, deadly wildfires in South Korea, a spiral in the night sky over Sweden, a sea-lion rescue in California, a rally race in Kenya, and much more.

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- Police officers use pepper spray on a demonstrator wearing dervish clothes, during a protest on the day Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu was jailed as part of a corruption investigation, in Istanbul, on March 23, 2025. #

Umit Bektas / Reuters

- A boy walks past statues of Buddhist monks at the Trapeang Thma pagoda in Cambodia’s Banteay Meanchey province on March 24, 2025. #

Tang Chhin Sothy / AFP / Getty

- People wearing T. rex costumes compete during a Tyrannosaurus Race on the track of Funabashi Racecourse in Funabashi, Japan, on March 22, 2025. The race, which originated with the T-Rex Race held at Emerald Downs in Washington State in 2017, has been gaining popularity in Japan. #

Tomohiro Ohsumi / Getty

- A female lynx named Vinegra, which was born in Andalusia, runs to protected freedom in an enclosed area before being released into the wild next month, in Astudillo, Spain, on March 25, 2025. #

Juan Medina / Reuters

- Kalle Rovanperä steers his Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 with co-driver Jonne Halttunen over a jump at Miti Mbili during the during the World Rally Championship Safari Rally Kenya Special Stage 6, on March 21, 2025. #

Tony Karumba / AFP / Getty

- Italy’s Simone Origone participates in the S1M run during a World Speed Skiing Championship and World Record Attempt at Vars La Forêt Blanche, in France, on March 25, 2025. #

Manon Cruz / Reuters

- A model presents a creation by Anurag Gupta during the Fashion Design Council of India’s Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai, on March 27, 2025. #

Rajanish Kakade / AP

- Men secure packed Buddha statues onto a trailer’s cargo bed, along with other items, to move them to safety, as a wildfire threatened Bongjeong Temple, listed as a Korean Mountain Area Temple by UNESCO, in Andong, South Korea, on March 26, 2025. #

Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP / Getty

- A sick California sea lion, with possible domoic-acid poisoning, is rescued to be evaluated by volunteers from the Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute in Santa Barbara, California, on March 25, 2025. More than 100 sea lions, dolphins, and other marine mammals, including birds, have reportedly been sickened from algal blooms in Southern California since February. #

David Swanson / AFP / Getty

- Yoko, the only known great ape in captivity in Colombia, rescued after suffering animal abuse, is transported in a container inside Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport, before being relocated to Brazil’s Sorocaba Sanctuary, on March 23, 2025. #

Luisa Gonzalez / Reuters

- In this picture taken in the countryside near Dalby-Viggeby, south of Uppsala, Sweden, on March 24, 2025, shows a blue-and-white spiral in the night sky reportedly created by frozen fuel tumbling from a SpaceX rocket. #

Bertrand Ilhe / AFP / Getty

- Lava erupts from Halema’uma’u crater within the summit caldera Kaluapele, at the Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii, on March 26, 2025. #

Marco Garcia / Reuters

- A wildfire burns through a forested area in Andong, South Korea, on March 27, 2025. One of South Korea’s worst-ever wildfire outbreaks has killed at least 24 people, officials said on March 26, with multiple raging blazes causing “unprecedented damage” and threatening two UNESCO-listed sites. #

Anthony Wallace / AFP / Getty

- Tear gas is fired by police during a protest by fishermen in Valparaíso, Chile, on March 26, 2025. About 100 fishermen clashed with police in the Chilean port of Valparaíso to demand the passage of a law increasing the catch percentage allowed for artisanal fishing. #

Cristobal Basaure / AFP / Getty

- People launch fireworks during the Parrandas de Camajuani, in Cuba, on March 22, 2025. Two neighborhoods of the city, San Jose, represented by a toad, and Santa Teresa, represented by a goat, fight with carnival shows that involve the whole town in a party with bands, huge floats, and fireworks. #

Yamil Lage / AFP / Getty

- Iraqi Kurds carry torches as they gather to celebrate Nowruz in the Akre district in Nineveh, Kurdistan region of Iraq, on March 20, 2025. #

Osama Al Maqdoni / Middle East Images / AFP / Getty

- People walk near cherry blossoms in the gardens of the Reggia of Venaria Reale near Turin on March 26, 2025. #

Marco Bertorello / AFP / Getty

- Actors rehearse the opera Sun & Sea for the press at Teatro Colón in Bogotá, Colombia, on March 20, 2025. #

Luisa Gonzalez / Reuters

- Palestinians take part in an anti-Hamas protest, calling for an end to the war with Israel, in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on March 26, 2025. #

AFP / Getty

- Women dressed as Mothers of Plaza de Mayo march to commemorate the anniversary of Argentina’s 1976 coup, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 24, 2025. #

Rodrigo Abd / AP

- Deer gather in a glade in a forest of the Taunus region near Frankfurt, Germany, on March 25, 2025. #

Michael Probst / AP

- Rows of blossoming peach trees line the fields of Aitona, in the province of Lleida, Spain, seen on March 22, 2025. #

Josep Lago / AFP / Getty

- Annie Goldsmith is assisted in the surf during the 2025 Australian Para Surfing Titles in Byron Bay, Australia, on March 25, 2025. #

Chris Hyde / Getty

- A raccoon eats peanuts on the boardwalk in Panama City on March 23, 2025. #

Matias Delacroix / AP

- A visitor rests in a hammock at Elysian Park in Los Angeles on March 25, 2025 #

Damian Dovarganes / AP

- A view of the Cobre Panama mine of Canada’s First Quantum Minerals, one of the world’s largest open-pit copper mines, in Donoso, Panama, on March 21, 2025. The mine was forced to shut down after Panama’s top court ruled that its contract was unconstitutional, following nationwide protests opposed to its continued operation. #

Enea Lebrun / Reuters

- Migrants board a smuggler’s boat in an attempt to cross the English Channel, off the beach of Gravelines, north of France, on March 26, 2025. #

Sameer Al-Doumy / AFP / Getty

- Dramatic clouds pass above the statue of the national monument to Italy’s King Vittorio Emanuele II, in Rome, on March 26, 2025. #

Filippo Monteforte / AFP / Getty

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Why Sheinbaum Can Surrender to Trump

Canadian and European leaders push back against the U.S. because they have to listen to their voters. Mexico’s leader faces no penalty for ignoring hers.

by David Frum

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In her public appearances and on social media, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has become a symbol of fearless resistance to the Trump administration’s bullying. She has delivered defiant speeches before huge crowds. When Trump trolled her nation with his “Gulf of America” stunt, she trolled right back: At a press conference, she displayed an antique map that labeled most of the present-day United States as “Mexican America.”

Her methods have appeared to gain a measure of respect. Almost alone among U.S. allies and partners, Mexico has been spared Donald Trump’s barrage of insults and threats. Canada is mocked almost daily. The administration expresses intentions to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone. The administration has also doomed hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers by shutting off vital assistance. By contrast, Trump has lavished praise on Sheinbaum, calling her “tough” and “a wonderful woman.” Vice President J. D. Vance, who urged military action against Mexico during his service in the Senate, has gone quiet.

Other American allies must be impressed and envious. What’s Sheinbaum’s secret? How is she saving her country from the Trump-Vance flex?

The answer is straightforward, but not the one that the Palacio Nacional’s social-media operation is trying to project. Contrary to appearances, the Sheinbaum secret is appeasement. The reason Mexico’s president has not been called out for her Trump-complaisance is that the country’s political opposition and independent media are too crushed to name the policy for what it is. But the evidence is in.

David Frum: The ‘Gulf of America’ is an admission of defeat

President Trump has made six big demands of Mexico. Sheinbaum has granted them all. Let’s proceed, one by one:

1. He wants much more active Mexican cooperation on immigration enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border.

2. He wants Mexico to receive people deported from the United States, including people who are not Mexican nationals.

3. He wants Mexico to adopt a more militarized approach to drug interdiction.

4. He wants a new tariff regime to shift more North American manufacturing from Mexico to the United States.

5. He wants Mexico to join U.S. trade actions against China.

6. He wants Mexico to submit politely to this shakedown, and not make too much fuss.

First, Mexico has helped Trump seal the border. In February, apprehensions at the border dropped below 9,000 for the month, the lowest level since the 1960s. Meanwhile, the  Center for Immigration Studies, an immigration-skeptic group, estimates that U.S. border authorities are catching close to 95 percent of would-be crossers; if so, this means that successful crossings have trickled down to likely the lowest level since the Great Depression.

Mexican cooperation has been indispensable to slowing the flow. From Sheinbaum’s entry into office on October 1, 2024, to the end of that year, Mexico detained almost 500,000 migrants en route to the United States. Conditions in Mexican detention centers are notoriously harsh: They are densely crowded, with insufficient food and water and scant toilet facilities; ordinary migrants are mingled with violent gang members. Mexico’s national human-rights commission has difficulty gaining access to such sites. The high likelihood of ending a thousand-mile journey in a Mexican prison exerts a powerful deterrent effect on would-be immigrants. So do the intense military operations on the Mexico-Guatemala border.

During the Mexican presidential campaign of 2024, immigrants and their advocates expressed hope for a more permissive attitude from Sheinbaum. Instead, Sheinbaum has aligned Mexican policy with Trump’s edicts.

Sheinbaum has also acceded to Trump’s second wish, creating a new program to ease the return of Mexicans deported by the United States. Deportees will be met on arrival, provided with Mexican identity documents, and enrolled in Mexico’s health-care programs. Sheinbaum has indicated willingness to accept non-Mexican deportees and share responsibility for returning them to their home countries, in Central America or elsewhere.

Trump’s third wish—the militarization of drug interdiction—must have been even more difficult for Sheinbaum to grant. For a generation, opposition to a militarized approach to drugs has been a defining issue for the Mexican left, which regarded the country’s deadly drug war as a futile effort to protect Americans from their own country’s social ills. “Hugs, not bullets” was the slogan of Sheinbaum’s predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

As president, however, Sheinbaum has yielded to American pressure. In February, she delivered 29 cartel figures from Mexican custody to U.S. authorities. Extradition was another historical pain point for the Mexican left, with its implied premise that American justice superseded Mexican sovereignty. Sheinbaum dramatically departed from past Mexican practice to surrender the wanted men. Beyond the symbolism of that surrender, bigger things are happening. Sheinbaum has granted permission for U.S. drone surveillance inside Mexico. CNN has reported that the U.S. is even flying Reapers, UAV systems that can carry a missile. For now, apparently, the Reapers fly unarmed, but the instruments for an American air war against cartels are already in place over Mexico.

Sheinbaum has also yielded to U.S. pressure on Trump’s fourth wish: Acquiescence to his tariffs. Unlike Canada, which has countered U.S. tariffs with a retaliatory regime of its own, Mexico has not yet responded in kind, even after Trump’s March 26 tariffs on Mexican auto exports. On Wednesday night, Mexico’s economy minister, Marcelo Ebrard, did hint in a social-media post that Mexican forbearance may at last be coming to an end—or it may not, because Mexican reaction to Trump tariffs has been impelled by considerations very different from Canada’s.

Although the U.S.-Canada-Mexico relationship is in theory a trilateral one, in practice it’s a pair of bilateral deals: U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico. Canada and Mexico have each often sacrificed free-trade ideals to gain national advantage at the expense of the other U.S. trading partner. In the 2020 trade round, Canada tried to score off Mexico by writing a $16-an-hour minimum wage into the regulation of North American trade in automobiles and auto parts. The Canadian scheme backfired, however, when Mexican manufacturers opted out of the free-trade structure designed to keep wages low, correctly calculating that they could out-compete Canada even without tariff-free access to the U.S. marketplace: In 2020, Mexican auto exports to the United States overtook Canadian exports. Sheinbaum seems willing to stay neutral in the U.S.-Canada trade war in hope of collecting an additional share of the U.S. spoils.

On wish five, Sheinbaum is again complying. At the end of February, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed that Mexico had offered to match U.S. tariffs on Chinese exports. Canada, struggling to preserve the remnants of a global free-trade system, has so far opposed this carve-up of the world into trading blocs.

Finally, Mexico has also granted Trump’s sixth wish. Trump cares enormously about deference to his power. Canadian politicians have retorted to Trump’s demeaning comments, most famously in then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s televised March 4 words: “Now, it’s not in my habit to agree with The Wall Street Journal. But, Donald, they point out that even though you’re a very smart guy, this is a very dumb thing to do.” Trudeau called Trump by his first name and condemned his decision as “dumb.” Trump and his vice president use rhetoric like that all the time, but they intensely resent its being returned upon them.

Sheinbaum, by contrast, never mentions Trump by name when she replies to U.S. actions against Mexico, not even with her jibe about “America Mexicana.” She is careful not to contradict him in public, and her tight-mouthed restraint earned compliments from Trump.

David Frum: The failing state next door

Sheinbaum’s Trump wish fulfillment, especially on immigration, may be good neighborliness that ought to be expected from any Mexican government. But have her methods succeeded in defending Mexico from Trump’s protectionism and aggression? Can they be emulated by others? The answers are “not really,” and “no.”

Mexico has not been exempted from Trump’s economic warfare against former partners, culminating in yesterday’s tariff attack on imports of cars, trucks, and auto components. Mexico is accepting an intrusive and growing U.S. military presence in its airspace that may yet trigger open warfare between the United States and Mexican cartels on Mexican soil. Although Mexico has gained auto-manufacturing share at Canada’s expense since the first Trump administration, Mexican hopes of nearshoring industrial capacity at China’s expense have not come to pass and may now be dashed utterly by Trump’s latest moves to reduce or stop international trade. Trump wants any nearshoring to occur in the United States itself, to benefit his voters in red states.

Things could certainly be worse for Mexico than they are. López Obrador bequeathed a great many vulnerabilities to his successor. He left Mexico with its biggest budget deficit since the catastrophic debt crisis of the early 1980s, exposing the country to exactly the kind of international financial pressure he himself so constantly denounced in speeches. But “things could be worse” is a very limited sort of success. Sheinbaum’s strategy seems to be to succeed only in the sense that others are losing even more.

Even if Sheinbaum’s appeasement approach were Mexico’s best option, her model cannot be emulated by other states, especially democratic ones. A prerequisite for her strategy is that she leads a society that is consolidating into a one-party state, with a media subject to ever more stringent restrictions and government control.

A major reason for Trudeau’s snarky comments to Trump is that Canada is confronting the Trump tariffs at a time of intense political competition. In the federal election scheduled for April 28, Conservatives and Liberals are battling to position themselves as the tougher anti-Trump alternative. Sheinbaum can afford to submit to Trump’s coercion because she commands overwhelming majorities in Congress, doesn’t face the next round of congressional elections until 2027, and has put in place mechanisms to manipulate those elections when they finally come.

Sheinbaum’s political biography is that of a cadre of the left. But today, the most important political cleft is not the fading distinction between right and left, but the rising conflict between liberal and illiberal, democratic and autocratic. As Mexico follows America into illiberality, Mexico’s leadership finds itself surprisingly favored by Trump’s Washington, along with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and El Salvador. In contrast, the formerly close U.S. ally Canada is consigned to join Ukraine, Denmark, Panama, and the democracies of Europe and East Asia on the Trump enemies list.

Sheinbaum’s policy of Trump appeasement may well be the least-bad course open to Mexico. But it should be seen for what it is, not misunderstood as the brave resistance it most definitely is not.

The Double Standard in the Human-Rights World

Organizations that explicitly valued impartiality and independence have become stridently critical of Israel.

by Michael Powell

The demonstration in London was like so many others in the past year and a half. A swell of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, tens of thousands of them, banged drums and chanted against Israel. Although this march in early October observed the one-year anniversary of the day Hamas militants broke a cease-fire by invading Israeli territory, the marchers paid no heed to the civilians who were murdered or kidnapped.

The U.K. chapter of the world’s largest human-rights organization, Amnesty International, echoed the marchers’ point of view. The official Amnesty UK account on X promoted a video of an unnamed young female protester clad in a red shirt and a keffiyeh. She peered into the camera and said: “Don’t let anyone tell you this all started on the seventh of October, 2023.”

The video showed a demonstrator’s placard: It’s been 76 years & 364 days—a reference to events that culminated in the founding of Israel in the late 1940s. The implication: Israel, a member state of the United Nations, has no right to exist. The clip, which Amnesty UK captioned “It didn’t start one year ago,” drew 9.7 million views. Amnesty employees around the world shared it.

The social-media promotion of this march marked an astonishing shift for one of the world’s most prominent human-rights organizations. Amnesty’s handbook declares that it is “independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it necessarily support the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect.”

Amnesty’s goal was to serve as an advocate for victims and prisoners of conscience, and to stand apart from the polarized politics of the Cold War. The same ethos influenced the founders of Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders. As the latter group proclaims on its website: “We are independent, impartial, and neutral.”

More recently, though, human-rights leaders have grown accustomed to looking at the complicated stew of politics and culture in Israel and Palestine and blaming Israel foremost. As the cultural and political left has come to dominate the human-rights community, young staffers with passionate ideological commitments have helped rewrite the agendas of the best-known organizations. Critical theories of social justice, built on binaries that categorize Palestinians as oppressed and Israel as the oppressor, now dominate many conversations about the Jewish state, which a constellation of groups casts as uniquely illegitimate—a regressive, racist ethnic “Western” state in an Arab sea.

Dara Horn: Why the most educated people in America fall for anti-Semitic lies

Rasha Khoury, the president of the board of Doctors Without Borders USA and a surgeon who has worked courageously in war zones, might be seen as the embodiment of this new tendency in the human-rights establishment. She was born in the occupied Palestinian territories. A month after the Hamas attack and the beginning of the Israeli counterattack, she posted an essay on the organization’s digital bulletin board, known as the Souk, the Arabic word for “market.” “We must decolonize our minds,” she wrote. “The mainstream discourse around the unhinged bombardment and massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli forces for the last 33 days continues to affirm the colonizer’s world view, one rooted in white supremacist logic.”

Not long after October 7, Khoury was among the co-authors of “Violence in Palestine Demands Immediate Resolution of Its Settler Colonial Root Causes”—an article in the journal BMJ Global Health that, subsequent commentators argued, ignored Hamas’s role in triggering the Israeli invasion and incorrectly blamed the Jewish state for a deadly missile strike. In a follow-up article, Khoury and her co-authors responded to the criticism with scorn. “Demands for ‘corrections,’” they declared, “are almost always demands to acquiesce to Israeli state propaganda.”

In a similar spirit, Doctors Without Borders seemed to minimize the egregiousness of the Hamas attack from the start, describing it on X that very day as “the escalation between Israel and Gaza.” Other human-rights groups have more forthrightly condemned the Hamas offensive but primarily faulted the Jewish state for the underlying conflict. On the day of the attack, Amnesty’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, posted on X that she was dismayed by the mounting Palestinian and Israeli civilian deaths. She also called for addressing “the root causes of these escalating cycles of violence.” Doing so, she went on, “requires upholding international law and ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians.”

Human-rights groups fairly argue that disagreeing with Israel’s actions and policies is not anti-Semitic, but they have become more and more averse even to considering Israel’s side. “There’s clearly a leftist perspective that would like to do away with Israel,” the longtime Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth told me. Roth led the group for decades before stepping down in 2022 and maintained that his former employer did not share this perspective. Some other former employees of the group disagreed. “The trend is to substitute ideology and personal belief for the principles of the human-rights movement,” Danielle Haas, who left her job as a senior editor at Human Rights Watch, told me.

Earlier this year, Amnesty International took the extraordinary step of suspending its Israel chapter, after that chapter criticized a report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. In an internal email to colleagues in Europe, Amnesty Israel deputy director Yariv Mohar suggested that the broader organization was playing into “a zero-sum victimhood game, as if any attention or acknowledgment to the victimhood of one side comes at the expense of the other.”

Major human-rights groups’ shift toward overt opposition to Israel has had the unusual effect of sidelining many of Israel’s own activists, who historically are among the sharpest critics of the Israeli government’s behavior in Gaza and the West Bank. These activists—along with many Jewish counterparts around the world—object to the reflexive condemnation of Israel and wrestle with questions they find vexing: How can the country protect itself from Hamas? What would a proportionate, defensible response to October 7 look like?

Roy Yellin is a longtime left-wing human-rights activist in Israel who has worked closely with the big international groups in Europe and the United States over the years. “Human-rights organizations earned their prestige because they described reality as it was,” he said. “But too often now I’ve seen lots of colleagues in the international community who I thought of as partners who are in complete denial about what Hamas did in Israel.”

Within human-rights organizations, anger toward Israel has been simmering for decades, particularly as the country’s politics have shifted rightward and its settlements have expanded in the West Bank. On October 7, the divide within the human-rights movement over Israel began to seem unbridgeable, in particular to many Jewish employees. That morning, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters viciously attacked Israel, slaughtering civilians before retreating back into Gaza, where they gathered their armaments and hid in tunnels, using the dense civilian population aboveground as human shields. Hospitals, schools, and universities—all became hiding spots for Hamas militants.

Israel responded with a relentless, at times brutal, invasion of Gaza, in which many thousands of Palestinian civilians, including children, were killed. This has given rise to a heated debate about whether such actions can be justified. Many critics have argued that Israel, as a democracy that professes to follow modern rules of war, has an obligation to minimize civilian casualties, and they point to abundant evidence that Israel chose to drop bombs on Hamas militants and headquarters even when aware that these sites were crowded with civilians. Even some Israelis have objected to the duration of the war and felt that it was too driven by feelings of rage and revenge. The international human-rights movement has gone further. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders have all accused Israel of crimes against humanity and acts of genocide. Some human-rights leaders have openly questioned Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

Over the past six months, I’ve reviewed internal emails and hundreds of social-media posts by leaders of prominent human-rights organizations. I’ve also spoken with more than two dozen Jewish employees of these groups, nearly all of whom described a pervasive and growing estrangement from the organizations where they had worked, in some cases, for decades. None of these staffers would pass for an apologist for Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Their politics are left of center and many are deeply critical of Israel’s invasion and of actions that they categorize as war crimes. But, they said, talk of taking a nuanced view of the conflict drew contempt from colleagues and supervisors.

These Jewish employees argued internally that Israel had waged a brutal war, but also that Israelis were badly scarred by the slaughter of October 7 and that Hamas had committed terrible war crimes and acts of terrorism. Yet to take these positions was to risk being labeled as a propagandist for a settler-colonialist regime. Many of these employees are particularly galled by the frequent claim that Israel is a white-supremacist state. More than half of Israeli Jews are descendants of those who lived in Arab countries, Iran, and Ethiopia; a great many others have ancestors who were driven from Europe by the Nazis.

A former top executive with a well-known human-rights organization noted the frustration inherent in trying to draw evenhanded distinctions that were once elementary in the human-rights world. “Hamas has an obligation under international law not to use human shields and to distinguish between military and civilian targets,” this person, who asked not to be identified to avoid further alienating former colleagues, said. “But if you bring this up internally, it’s framed as a distraction, an Israeli talking point.”

The leaders of the world’s most prominent human-rights groups have displayed little appetite for acknowledging the uncertainty and moral murk of the Gaza war. On October 17, 2023, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry reported that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital and killed close to 500 Palestinians. Amnesty and Doctors Without Borders immediately picked up on that claim: The leaders of the latter group posted about the Israeli “massacre” on their social-media feeds. And Human Rights Watch’s director of Israel and Palestine issues, Omar Shakir, amplified a post blaming Israel for the attack. He added: “Abject horror. THIS MUST END.”

Shakir backed off a few hours later, saying that his organization was investigating. And to its credit, Human Rights Watch did so judiciously. A month later, it reported that the explosion likely was caused by a misfired Palestinian missile, which hit a paved area next to a parking lot and not the hospital itself. It also faulted the Gaza Health Ministry for reporting a death toll that is “significantly higher than other estimates, displays an unusually high killed-to-injured ratio, and appears out of proportion with the damage visible on site.” (Unlike Amnesty and Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch has also released a report that researched and documented Hamas’s war crimes on October 7.)

Read: The case for Palestinian pragmatism

To this day, Doctors Without Borders has not removed its debunked claims of Israeli malfeasance from its social-media feed.

Doug Sandok worked with Doctors Without Borders in Rwanda, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka in the 1990s. He has charted the curdling of the group’s rhetoric regarding Israel. “I went to an organization-wide meeting in November 2023, and the discourse shocked me, all about anti-settler-colonialism and racism,” he told me. “A number of us asked, ‘Is it really a foregone conclusion that Israel has committed genocide?’ It feels like one more institution captured by the ideological left.”

For Dan Balson, working for Amnesty International was a longtime dream. He and his parents got out of the Soviet Union in 1988, as part of a wave of Jewish émigrés. Amnesty, he told me, played a key role in pressuring Moscow to release families like his. “It was a household name in my world,” Balson, who is 40, said.

He became Amnesty’s advocacy director for Europe and Central Asia, covering territory that stretched from Russia to Afghanistan to Ukraine. He admired the courage and creativity that his colleagues showed in documenting human-rights abuses. One used a fragment of an exploded shell that killed civilians to track down and publicly identify the armaments manufacturer; another donned a niqab and traveled through a war zone, documenting the crimes of a government and its secret police.

Slowly, however, Balson noticed a harshness creeping in whenever the subject of Israel arose. In particular, when he visited Amnesty’s global headquarters in London, he sensed an antipathy toward Israel and anyone who identified as a Zionist.

On the morning of October 7, Balson checked and rechecked his messages to see if Israeli friends had been harmed. Then he scrolled the Amnesty International website, which issued a statement that day deploring that “civilians on both sides” were “paying the price of unprecedented escalation in hostilities between Israel and Gaza.” That statement just once referred to Hamas, which controls the government of Gaza, preferring the term “Palestinian armed groups.”

Balson turned to X and saw that his colleague Rasha Abdul-Rahim, then the director of technical services for Amnesty, had claimed that although she was distressed by reports of Palestinian fighters dancing on Israeli bodies, Palestinians had suffered worse for decades. She added:“To be truly anti racist and decolonial is to recognise that resistance against oppression is sometimes ugly.”

That night Balson wrote his resignation letter. Amnesty International’s time-honored approach, he wrote to his supervisors, was to decode the motivations, anxieties, and limitations of a nation and its leaders, even when those are disagreeable. None of that seemed to apply to Israel. Amnesty’s approach, he wrote, “has shown such disdain for Israelis’ existential fears that it seems deliberately calculated to repel rather than attract and persuade.”

Even Amnesty’s sparing acknowledgment of Hamas’s role on October 7 had proved too pro-Israeli for some staffers, who insisted that Amnesty’s statement was too understanding of Israel. As debate grew within the organization, and some Jewish staffers argued for measured tones, other Amnesty employees complained that such arguments were “triggering” and accused Jewish colleagues of Islamophobia, multiple staffers told me.

I asked Amnesty International USA’s director, Paul O’Brien, about these tensions. He replied that most conversations within Amnesty USA were respectful but “not pain-free.” Might unbridled passions and angry social-media postings, I asked, interfere with Amnesty’s work? “I have seen social-media publications that I wish we had not sent,” he acknowledged.

O’Brien’s critics see his own conduct as at times emblematic of the movement’s growing opposition to Israel’s entire reason for being. In March 2022, he backhandedly endorsed the disestablishment of Israel in its current form. “We are opposed to the idea—and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate—that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people,” he said at a luncheon of the Woman’s National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C. He subsequently expressed regret for his remarks and said that Amnesty “takes no position on the legitimacy or existence of any state, including Israel.” (Israel’s 2 million Arab citizens vote and are represented in the country’s Parliament and on its supreme court.)

But making stridently anti-Israel remarks, whether in person or online, is not a barrier to gaining a prominent role at Amnesty. In April 2022, a Palestinian gunman killed three Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv. Rasha Abdel Latif, a human-rights activist in D.C., reposted a social-media statement written in Arabic that stated: “This land is our land … The occupation has no choice but to leave.”

Four days later, Amnesty USA appointed Latif to its board. Two people told me that angry Jewish employees demanded a meeting with O’Brien and management, during which O’Brien conceded that, yes, Latif’s social-media post could be read as anti-Jewish. But he said that she had learned her lesson and that the board would not censure her so as to avoid giving comfort to the organization’s critics. Latif’s critics accused Amnesty of treating her as a victim. “The only reason she was not removed from the board is that the victims of her bias were Jewish,” Balson told me.

Writing inflammatory social-media posts has become common among Amnesty officials. On the first day of 2024, Abdul-Rahim, the former technical-services director, posted on X, “Happy new year to everyone except the #israeli apartheid state.” Even Amnesty USA’s official website features dubious statements. In May, Amnesty put up a collage of footage from its “Solidarity With Gaza” conference, accompanied by music from the hip-hop artist Macklemore. “Who gets the right to defend and who gets the right of resistance has always been about dollars and the color of your pigment, but white supremacy is finally on blast,” Macklemore said in his rap about Israel.

I asked O’Brien about that post, which at a minimum seemed ignorant of Israel’s actual demographics. O’Brien said he was unfamiliar with it (though it had been on Amnesty USA’s site for half a year, even after employees had complained about it to senior managers). I sent him a link, and he replied the next day: “Thanks for flagging that post. We have removed it as it did not follow our internal guidelines.”

This past fall, on the anniversary of the October 7 attack, an extraordinary anonymous statement purporting to represent more than 40 current and former Doctors Without Borders staffers appeared on the Souk. It angrily protested how the Geneva-based organization, which has 69,000 employees and an annual budget well over $1 billion, tended to characterize the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The statement accused Doctors Without Borders of remaining silent about Hamas’s “ferocious barbarity” and sexual violence and of ignoring Israelis taken hostage, some of whom died in captivity, including infants. “This version” of the organization, the statement declared, “does not represent us. It barely represents itself.”

French physicians founded Doctors Without Borders in the aftermath of a civil war and famine in Nigeria. Its charter committed to providing medical care without regard to politics, race, or nationality. But five staffers, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of endangering their jobs, described an environment in which their colleagues refused to entertain any nuance about the Jewish state. In November, for example, Javid Abdelmoneim, the former president of Doctors Without Borders UK, endorsed a full boycott of Israel, writing on X: “Invest no other time on Israel other than to cut it out of your life.”

Michael Goldfarb, a former longtime communications director for Doctors Without Borders, had worked in desolate and dangerous corners of the world. But his patience for his former employer eventually reached an end. He posted last year on the Souk, writing of his frustration with the “blatantly hate filled and, yes, anti-Semitic responses” within the organization to the anonymous Souk statement. “Fear of retaliation, silencing, and ostracism grips many MSF colleagues,” he wrote, using the French abbreviation for Doctors Without Borders, “who nonetheless courageously endorsed the publication of the post.” (Goldfarb declined my request for further comment.)

As if to underline his statement about organizational intolerance, Doctors Without Borders employees let loose on the Souk, going after Goldfarb and all those who signed the statement. “I leave you with your hatred, your racism and your victimization (We’re used to it!),” one rank-and-file staffer wrote. Another employee, Olivier Falhun, of the press office in Paris, responded to the dissenters, “At the risk of offending your principles-based catechism, I can’t resist sharing with you a self-evident solution … ‘We’ll have to give the land back. It’s as simple as that.’”

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These and similar statements have remained on the organization-wide site for many months. (I sought to talk with senior leaders at Doctors Without Borders USA about this atmosphere and other questions regarding Israel. A press officer, Brienne Prusak, wrote back that “we are respectfully going to decline.”)

The organization’s one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes beyond incendiary sentiments on message boards and social media. The fact is that the hospitals they worked in were often home to Hamas gunmen and armaments.

In November 2023, the Israeli army announced plans to root out Hamas operatives that it said were hiding in Al-Shifa Hospital, a major medical facility in Gaza City. A large contingent of Doctors Without Borders staff worked there, and its leaders took offense at the Israeli claim. The president of its Australian chapter, Katrina Penney, told a newspaper that she had “seen no evidence that the hospital buildings or the compounds are being used by Hamas as a military base.”

I asked two Doctors Without Borders employees who had worked in East Jerusalem and Gaza about such claims. These staffers frowned. The presence of Hamas gunmen in that hospital and in others was an open secret. “You knew Hamas was there; I went to meetings where this was made very clear,” the staffer, who asked for anonymity out of a desire to continue to work in the human-rights field, told me. “Doors were hidden. There were units you did not get into, that had armed guards at the door.”

Laws of war require soldiers to act with great care when fighting around hospitals, and none of this testimony would justify Israeli brutality. Likewise, however, humanitarian groups such as Doctors Without Borders claim to observe the principle of bearing witness to abuses—an obligation that includes challenging armed groups such as Hamas that risk civilian lives by using hospitals as bases and hiding spots.

Months after that Israeli operation at Al-Shifa, Hamas’s subterfuge was exposed—as was the willful ignorance of Doctors Without Borders. A New York Times investigation strongly suggested that Hamas used Al-Shifa for cover and to store weapons. U.S. spy agencies went further, saying that Hamas used Al-Shifa as a command center and that it held hostages there. That would be a war crime.

Last June, Doctors Without Borders accused Israel of killing one of its staff physiotherapists, Fadi Al-Wadiya, as he biked to work. Organization officials portrayed this as a war crime, an innocent family man slaughtered. An official statement said, “There is no justification for this; it is unacceptable.”

Doctors Without Borders posted a photo of Al-Wadiya’s fractured bicycle. Word circulated that he had been a fighter with Islamic Jihad, a radical group that allied with Hamas on October 7. The organization vigorously denied this. Then the Israeli army released photos of Al-Wadiya, who it said was a rocket specialist, wearing an Islamic Jihad uniform. Doctors Without Borders ultimately conceded that it was “deeply concerned by these allegations” and said it would “never knowingly employ” a fighter.

A staffer involved in hiring for Doctors Without Borders spoke of great organizational pressure to expand hiring in Gaza. “We were told not to check backgrounds,” this employee told me, adding that one office in Gaza had two known Hamas militants. “Our Arab staff was greatly concerned because to be in the same room with operatives put all at risk.”

This staffer paused. “Look, I’m truly not defending Israel; there is a lot in its actions to criticize,” this person said, adding that Doctors Without Borders had been “blindly pro-Palestinian to an extent that was destructive. And if you were Jewish and questioned it, you were just waved off.”

Amid the terrible losses and savage fighting that have marked the war in Gaza, human-rights groups have demonstrated far greater urgency in documenting and denouncing Israel’s conduct than that of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In December, Amnesty International released its much anticipated and publicized report accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Amnesty, however, has yet to complete a long-promised report examining the Hamas-driven murder and rape of Israeli civilians on October 7. O’Brien said the staff is hard at work on this. “The documentation has been extraordinarily difficult,” he told me. “Investigating sexual violence in an ethical and sensitive manner can take many months.”

Amnesty has moved with far more dispatch to stamp out dissent within its ranks. Amnesty’s Israeli chapter is known for feisty independence, taking on Netanyahu’s government and at times its own international parent group. The Israeli branch has maintained that, although it was not downplaying “the many horrific atrocities made by Israel in Gaza, which, according to the information we have, seems, on the surface, to have crossed the threshold of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing,” it viewed Amnesty’s accusation of genocide as poorly reasoned. The genocide claim, the chapter argued, seemed designed to “support a popular narrative among Amnesty International’s target audience.” The Israeli branch, frustrated with the broader organization’s silence on such questions, also began what it called a “pro-human campaign” to condemn both what it saw as anti-Semitism in some worldwide protests and the Islamophobia inside Israel, and to point out that extremists on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict promote ideologies of annihilation.

Read: The left’s self-defeating Israel obsession

The campaign announcement angered top Amnesty officials in the United States and Europe. Last May, Erika Guevara-Rosas, the senior director of global research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, ordered the Israeli chapter to end its campaign. “Given the serious reputational and legitimacy risk, I am asking you to take this document down from all your platforms immediately,” she wrote in an email that I obtained.

The right-wing Israeli government and its supporters frequently clash with the country’s Amnesty chapter. For their part, Amnesty International leaders view the Israeli branch as rogue and disloyal, and in January, not long after the criticism of the genocide report, they suspended the chapter for two years. Amnesty emails suggest that this could turn into a full expulsion. Tiumalu Lauvale Peter Fa’afiu, the New Zealand–born chair of Amnesty’s international board, wrote to his team that it must decide “whether Amnesty International Israel has a future within the Amnesty Movement.”

These emails revealed that Amnesty leaders planned in advance to deflect the Israeli chapter’s criticism of their genocide report by accusing it of “endemic anti-Palestinian racism.” A Fa’afiu email underlined the real grievance: The Israeli branch had tried to “publicly discredit Amnesty’s human rights research and positions.”

After leaving Amnesty, Dan Balson has found himself adrift. He has begun, with reluctance and disappointment, to wonder about the assumptions of so many in the human-rights movement. “Within Amnesty, the phrase ‘Criticism of Israeli policy is not anti-Semitism’ has taken on a kind of mystical significance,” he told me. “It is repeated frequently and forcefully, in private and in public. Amnesty’s leadership appears to believe that, if said with the proper zeal and elocution, the phrase will magically ward off deeper scrutiny.”

Yellin, the left-wing Israeli activist who has collaborated with major international groups, is even more disillusioned. “They think if they just scream ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ maybe we will go back to Europe.”

He exhaled. “Some days I feel like I’ve just been a useful idiot.”

Fleeing Hong Kong Wasn’t Enough

China’s war on dissidents comes to the United Kingdom.

by Cora Engelbrecht

Chinese authorities have declared that Finn Lau, a Hong Kong dissident who fled to London, will be “pursued for life.”

Finn Lau thought he had escaped China’s reach when he got to London. He’d come from Hong Kong, where Chinese authorities were rapidly consolidating control. An extensive protest movement had sprung up in response, which Lau was helping to lead. But he fled after local officials arrested him at a pro-democracy demonstration in 2020. Months later, while he was walking down a quiet street in London, three masked men jumped him and beat him unconscious. Now 31, Lau still has a faint scar on his boyish face.

British authorities called the incident a hate crime, but Lau was convinced that Beijing had sent the men to silence him. He wasn’t being paranoid: Last year, Chinese authorities declared that Lau would be “pursued for life.” They froze his remaining assets in Hong Kong and offered a bounty for information leading to his arrest. Since then, fake journalists have approached Lau seeking interviews, dozens of social-media accounts have impersonated him, and he’s received death threats. A group on Telegram posted his address in London, forcing him to move multiple times. The intimidation extended to his family members in Hong Kong. Eventually they had to flee too.

Lau is one of thousands who fled Hong Kong to Britain once the protests started—and particularly since June 2020, when China passed a national-security law that led to often-violent suppression. I’ve spoken with more than 30 activists like Lau who have come to the United Kingdom, where the harassment and surveillance they tried to escape have followed them. Assailants have stalked them in public and smeared them online. Letters have shown up at their neighbors’ doors promising a reward for turning over dissidents to the Chinese embassy. Back home, government authorities have suspended their retirement savings and interrogated their families. Some have been attacked.

Their stories illustrate a campaign that China is waging against dissidents across the globe. Not all of the incidents in the U.K. can be tied directly to the Chinese government, but the tactics mirror those Beijing has used to discredit and silence critics in Europe, Canada, Australia, and the United States. Last month, Freedom House found that China was responsible for more recorded cases of repression beyond its borders than any other country over the past decade. The nonprofit had already concluded that the Chinese Communist Party’s war on exiles is “the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign” of its kind in the world. “This is the product of a top-down system, ordered by Xi Jinping,” Yaqiu Wang, a senior researcher at Freedom House, told me. “Whether this comes directly from Beijing or from Hong Kong, it’s ultimately a part of the CCP’s global, transnational campaign to silence anyone who is critical.”

Even though China’s responsibility is an open secret, Western governments have struggled to deter the country from interfering on their soil. Xi’s crusade appears so brazen and far-reaching that it suggests he has little fear of provoking the West. By the same measure, it seems to reveal that something else really does scare him: China’s exiles.

Last month, demonstrators protested plans for China to relocate and expand its embassy in London. (Photograph by Emily Garthwaite)

The United Kingdom is home to the largest Hong Kong diaspora in the world. Since relinquishing its former colony in 1997, the country has admitted hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers, who represent a growing threat to China’s leaders. Thanks to globalization and social media, dissidents can organize and inspire political opposition from abroad more easily than before. That helps explain why the Hong Kong government has steadily escalated its campaign against exiles. Last year, it enacted another national-security law, called Article 23, which carries penalties that extend to activists outside the country; authorities have used it to sanction organizers overseas and revoke their passports. Many exiles told me they no longer feel safe returning to Hong Kong because they fear interrogations, imprisonment, or the confiscation of  their passports. They worry that Hong Kong authorities have started importing elements of Xi’s surveillance state in order to track them abroad. Xi “feels threatened by any kind of collective action,” Wang told me—whether it originates at home or overseas.

Read: Hong Kong is self-destructing

Since 2019, more than 5,000 emigrants have moved to the South London borough of Sutton, where a local group organized a camp in 2023 to educate children of the Hong Kong diaspora about Chinese repression. Then the former chief executive of Hong Kong heard about it—and warned on social media that the organizers would be reported to British and Hong Kong police.

Accounts of intimidation and harassment have emerged from virtually every corner of Britain where Hong Kongers have gathered. In 2019, a group of men dragged a refugee through the gates of the Chinese consulate in Manchester and assaulted him. Similar incidents have occurred in London’s Chinatown and on college campuses, including in Southampton, where Chinese students attacked Hong Kongers during a demonstration in 2023. Videos of the incident circulated on Weibo, China’s version of X, and prompted death threats against the victims.

One of the first activists I spoke with in London was Simon Cheng. The 34-year-old exile was working for the British consulate in Hong Kong when Beijing tightened its grip on the region. In 2019, he told me, Chinese officials abducted him while he was on a business trip in southern China. He said they beat him and placed him in stress positions for 15 days before forcing him to confess to allegations that he incited unrest in Hong Kong. Britain granted him asylum months later.

“It was a relief, at first, to touch down in a place where there is rule of law—where I felt I could speak freely again,” Cheng told me. After settling into the city, he established a group called Hong Kongers in Britain to help new arrivals find housing and other resources. Chinese authorities took note: In 2023, the Hong Kong government offered rewards for information leading to the arrests of Cheng and 12 other overseas dissidents, six of whom lived in Britain. Officials in Hong Kong interrogated Cheng’s family, who became a focus of attention in Chinese media. “Watching my father dodge the news cameras on television sent me into a deep depression,” Cheng said. In an effort to protect his parents, Cheng encouraged them to sever ties with him. “If needed, criticize me and cut me off,” he wrote on X. “My hope is that my parents can enjoy a dignified, peaceful, and serene old age—until our next life.”

Simon Cheng fled Hong Kong after Chinese authorities detained him. Then they interrogated his family and offered a reward for information leading to his arrest. (Photograph by Emily Garthwaite)

On Christmas Eve, Hong Kong issued bounties on six more exiles, including Chloe Cheung, who was 19 at the time. “I came here to protect my future,” Cheung told me. She had moved to the city of Leeds with her family in 2020. “I had dreams of pursuing a career in business or finance,” she said. “The bounty has changed all of that.”

She showed me a video on her phone of a Chinese man shouting death threats at her during a protest she helped organize in November. After another demonstration, two Asian men followed her into a restaurant; she alerted the police, who opened an investigation. On Instagram and X, strangers send her sexually explicit messages written in Mandarin. Friends have asked her to stop contacting them, worried that ties to her could create problems for their relatives in Hong Kong. “It feels impossible, suddenly, to meet new people or apply for jobs,” she said. “I have no idea who I can trust.”

In October, I met another activist who’s had to cut off relationships. He asked me to use a pseudonym to protect his family, so I’ll call him Alvin. After the protests started in 2019, Alvin joined a loose network of organizers in Hong Kong who avoided direct confrontations with law enforcement but helped younger, bolder activists. Soon after he fled to London in 2020, he learned that government officials were pressing his family in China for information about him. Police had summoned some of his extended family to tea, where they unfurled printouts of Alvin’s posts on Telegram and photos of him demonstrating in London. One team of officers had traveled from mainland China to treat Alvin’s parents in Hong Kong to an extravagant dinner. The officials said he could face a lengthy prison sentence for helping “high profile” activists—a charge that could extend to his mother and father, too, unless they persuaded their son to become an informant.

Read: The fracturing of Hong Kong’s democracy movement

Alvin heard about the meeting months later when his mother visited him in London. “My blood went cold,” he told me. She pleaded with him through tears to stop his activism so his family could live in peace. Alvin started to distance himself from other organizers and Hong Kongers. “I never could have imagined my actions would attract so much attention from the CCP,” he told me. “I am not a frontline activist.” He repeated the words, as if to assure himself.

A Hong Kong activist in London says that Chinese officials have threatened his relatives back home. (Photograph by Emily Garthwaite)

In a parliamentary debate in October, Blair McDougall, a Scottish MP, said his Hong Kong constituents were frightened. Police had discovered an unauthorized Chinese outpost in the basement of a restaurant in Glasgow in 2023. British officials shut it down, along with at least three other outposts they suspected were monitoring and harassing diaspora communities.

McDougall and other lawmakers insist that similar attention should be directed toward Hong Kong’s trade office in London. Last May, U.K. authorities arrested the office’s manager along with two men he had allegedly hired to collect information for Hong Kong’s intelligence service and break into an exile’s home. The previous month, authorities had charged a British parliamentary researcher with spying. (All have pleaded not guilty except for one of the hired men, who died.) McDougall urged the British government to “review the diplomatic privileges” given to the trade office “to ensure they are not used as organs of transnational repression.”

Over the summer, I joined a group of about 30 Hong Kong demonstrators who had gathered at the trade office’s front gate in Central London. Many wore dark clothing, masks, scarves, and sunglasses. As I approached, they grew uneasy and declined to comment but pointed me to two men they had seen photographing and monitoring previous protests. The activists called them “ghosts.”

One of them, a young man who was filming the demonstration, introduced himself as a part-time journalist. He wouldn’t say who employed him, but he gave me the handle of his Instagram account, which I followed. A few hours later, my friends and family told me an account that was using my name—and a photo of me—had started following them. When I mentioned this to another organizer, he showed me his phone and scrolled through more than 30 automated accounts under his name; many of them posted lies about his activism. I thought of a conversation I had with Alberto Fittarelli, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog group, who told me China has two main goals when it targets activists online: to encourage self-censorship and to “discredit the targets in the eyes of the audience hosting them.”

That strategy nearly ruined the livelihoods of two exiled painters, who go by Lumli and Lumlong. When I visited their London apartment, which doubles as their studio, it was filled with oversize canvases depicting baroque scenes from the protests in Hong Kong. For years, mysterious accounts had posted hateful comments on the Facebook page they used to sell their artwork, which Lumli and Lumlong took with them when they fled Hong Kong in 2021. (A standard post: “You dogs and rioters will all die with your family.”) Many of the profiles showed signs of fakery; they were created recently, had few followers, rarely posted, and used simplified Chinese characters typical of mainland China. Experts at Citizen Lab told me the accounts’ features are “consistent with what has been observed over the years for pro-China networks.”

In 2022, someone hacked the artists’ page and replaced their profile photo with an image of an ISIS flag, which prompted Facebook to remove them. “That account held all our important connections from the past five years. They disappeared overnight,” Lumli and Lumlong told me. “It was like a company going bankrupt.”

In early February, I attended a demonstration outside Mint Court, a stately complex in southern London that the CCP bought in 2018. Hundreds of Chinese dissidents, including Uyghurs and Tibetans, had traveled from across the U.K. to protest Beijing’s plan to move its embassy there, which would entail a massive expansion relative to its current location in Central London. The demonstration came as the U.S. cut funding for groups that track the persecution of Chinese dissidents.

Read: America can’t just unpause USAID

British officials at the protest echoed fears among the activists that the CCP would use the new embassy to carry out surveillance. “We know that courageous activists have been silenced, others have been followed, more have been intimidated,” Tom Tugendhat, a former security minister the Chinese government has sanctioned, told the protesters. “We will not tolerate the CCP doing to you here what they tried to do in China.”

A poster painted by the Hong Kong exiles Lumli and Lumlong (Photograph by Emily Garthwaite)

A few feet from the speakers, Lumli and Lumlong displayed a hand-painted poster of Jimmy Lai, a newspaper publisher and British national who’s serving a prison sentence in Hong Kong for supporting the democracy movement. Cheng, the head of Hong Kongers in Britain, maneuvered to the front of the crowd to deliver a speech. “This proposed embassy is not just a diplomatic site,” he said. “It is a statement of abusive power over human rights—a glorified monument for the CCP’s diplomats.”

A few weeks earlier, Cheng had learned that the U.K.’s housing ministry, which had provided money for his advocacy group, had decided to scale back its support. He had spent the past weeks frantically applying for new jobs so he could avoid getting evicted from his apartment. He also told me that someone had infiltrated his group of friends and spread lies to turn them against him. For a time, several cut him off. “It felt like someone sent an invisible virus, designed to attack my sense of security—and my spirit.”

His anxiety has taken the form of recurring nightmares. In one of his dreams, he is back at his parents’ house in Hong Kong, but they aren’t home. The kitchen is in disarray. A strange woman assures Cheng that his parents left to buy groceries, but Cheng then realizes that she is an undercover officer. His parents have been taken to prison.

“When I wake up, I am relieved at first. I remember I am safe. I am worlds away. My parents are unharmed.” The feeling doesn’t last long before it’s eclipsed by a harder reality. “I am overcome with grief for those spaces and faces I may never see again.”

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- The Gleeful Cruelty of the White House X Account

Elon Musk Lost His Big Bet

Grievance politics can only carry him so far.

by Charlie Warzel

Last night, X’s “For You” algorithm offered me up what felt like a dispatch from an alternate universe. It was a post from Elon Musk, originally published hours earlier. “This is the first time humans have been in orbit around the poles of the Earth!” he wrote. Underneath his post was a video shared by SpaceX—footage of craggy ice caps, taken by the company’s Dragon spacecraft during a private mission. Taken on its own, the video is genuinely captivating. Coming from Musk at that moment, it was also somewhat depressing.

X fed me that video just moments after it became clear that Susan Crawford, the Democratic judge Musk spent $25 million campaigning against, would handily win election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Given Musk’s heavy involvement—the centibillionaire not only campaigned in the state but also brazenly attempted to buy the election by offering to pay voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges”—the election was billed as a referendum of sorts on Musk’s own popularity. In that sense, it was a resounding defeat. Musk, normally a frenetic poster, had very little to say about politics last night, pecking out just a handful of terse messages to his 218.5 million followers. “The long con of the left is corruption of the judiciary,” he posted at 1:23 a.m. eastern time.

In the light of defeat, the SpaceX post feels like a glimpse into what could have been for Musk—a timeline where the world’s richest man wasn’t algorithmically radicalized by his own social-media platform. It’s possible that Musk’s temperament and personal politics would have always led him down this path. But it’s also easy to imagine a version where he mostly stayed out of politics, instead leaning into his companies and continuing to bolster his carefully cultivated brand of Elon Musk, King of Nerd Geniuses.

Read: The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government

Unfortunately, he surrendered fully to grievance politics. Like so many other prolific posters, he became the person his most vocal followers wanted him to be and, in the process, appears to have committed reputational suicide. Since joining President Donald Trump’s administration as DOGE’s figurehead—presiding over the quasi-legal gutting of the federal government—Musk has become not just polarizing but also genuinely unpopular in America. Now his political influence is waning, Tesla is the object of mass protest, and sales of his vehicles are cratering. This morning, only hours after his candidate lost, Trump reportedly told his inner circle and Cabinet members that Musk will be “stepping back” from his perch in the administration for a more “supporting role.” In Trumpworld, nothing’s over until it’s over, but Elon Musk seems to have overstayed his welcome. (Musk did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the White House referred me to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s post calling the report that Musk is stepping back “garbage”; Musk posted on X that the reporting is “fake news.”)

Musk’s appeal to Trump has always been about two things: money and optics. As the richest man in the world, Musk is both a cash cow and a kind of enforcer: His checkbook and closeness to Trump remind Republicans in Congress that they can and will be primaried if they break from the administration. But Musk’s reputation is just as important to Trump, who respects great wealth and clearly enjoys being shadowed and adored by a man of Musk’s perceived stature and technological acumen (although Trump is easily impressed—take, for example, “Everything’s Computer!”) Musk’s image in Silicon Valley was useful to the Trump campaign, bringing in new fanboy voters and sending a message that the administration would transform the government and run it like a lean start-up.

But although his money is still good, the Wisconsin election suggests that Musk himself is an electoral liability. A poll released today, conducted in Wisconsin by Marquette University Law School, showed that 60 percent of respondents view Musk unfavorably, and a recent Harvard/Harris poll shows that his national favorability dropped 10 points from February to March. (He now has a net favorability rating of –10 percent.) An aggregation of national polls shows that the approval rating of his DOGE efforts has also dipped dramatically: Just 39 percent of Americans approve of his work, nearly 10 points lower than in mid-February.

To many observers, it seemed inevitable from the outset that, over time, Musk would clash with, and alienate himself from, Trump, a man who does not like to share the spotlight. But behind Musk’s low favorability rating is a simple notion: Americans (including Trump supporters) are uncomfortable and resentful of an unelected mega-billionaire rooting through the government, dismantling programs and blithely musing about cutting benefit programs such as Social Security. Musk has long behaved in business as though laws and regulations don’t apply to him—a tactic that seems to backfire more easily when applied to politics. His posts, which use captions such as “Easy money in Wisconsin” to offer thinly veiled bribes to state residents for posing outside polling locations, aren’t just questionably legal; they’re blatant reminders that the world’s richest man was attempting to purchase an election.

There is also, perhaps, a creeping sensation that Musk’s efficiency hunt into the government has not yielded the examples of corruption that Trump supporters crave. During a Q&A at Musk’s rally in Wisconsin on Sunday, one attendee asked if DOGE had found any evidence that “radical left” Democrats have received money from USAID, and if so, whether Musk planned to share the evidence. Musk stammered, explaining only that USAID’s money flowed circuitously and that it was suspicious that members of Congress were so wealthy. Throughout the rally, Musk seemed more interested in role-playing as a politician, delivering “extended monologues about immigration policy, alleged fraud in the Social Security system and the future of artificial intelligence,” as The New York Times reported.

Read: Elon Musk looks desperate

Trump may be realizing that though tech products and services may be quite popular, their creators are often less appealing. (Two-thirds of Americans have an unfavorable view of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, even as billions of people around the world use his platforms.) To those outside of the techno-optimist bubble, plenty of the obsessions of the tech elite (artificial general intelligence, cryptocurrency) can come off as weird or inscrutable. “As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” Musk posted on X in the wee hours today, as if to prove the point.

Musk seems, at least outwardly, unable to reckon with his current position. Just days after framing this race as a hinge point for “the entire destiny of humanity,” Musk said on X that “I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for positional gain.” From the outside, though, it’s difficult to see what he’s gained. Last week, protesters demonstrated outside hundreds of Tesla locations; Musk has long been erratic, but his dalliance with DOGE has alienated environmentally conscious liberals, a major demographic for electric vehicles. And by seeming so focused on DOGE, he’s frustrated investors who worry that Tesla is losing its first-mover advantage in the United States. Foreign rivals, such as China’s BYD, are quickly gaining steam. Tesla’s stock price instantly rose 15 points on the reports that Musk would soon leave the administration.

There is a case to be made that Musk’s cozying up to Trump will ultimately benefit Musk’s empire—avoiding regulations that may help with Tesla’s self-driving plans or SpaceX and Starlink contracts, for example. But so many of the signs point to a less desirable outcome. Musk’s outsize support of Trump was always a political risk, but his decision to come aboard the administration and, at one time, position himself as a kind of shadow president is arguably the biggest bet of his career. In the short term, it does not appear to be paying off.

Musk woke up this morning less popular than he’s been in recent memory. He’s alienated himself from an American public that used to widely revere him, and his political capital seems to be fading rapidly. The only question now is whether, after getting a taste of the political spotlight, he’ll be able to give it up without a fight.

A New Kart-Racing Appliance

Nintendo announces the Switch 2, a device for piloting go-karts.

by Ian Bogost

If your virtual kart-racing life was missing something, you’re in luck. Nintendo, the Japanese electronics manufacturer, announced its new Mario Kart appliance today. The Switch 2, which can be used handheld or connected to a television, allows players to race go-karts piloted by characters from the company’s entertainment franchises: Mario, Yoshi, Princess Peach.

The karting games that ran on previous appliances allowed racers to compete on only a series of discrete tracks. But the updated hardware allows for something else: Mario Kart World, as the new software is called, presents its users with the tantalizing prospect of a digital commute. Racers may now convey from one track to the next through a large and continuous simulated world. This new capacity will unlock other new ways to kart, among them 1980s-style arcade racing and more contemporary, open-world kart tourism.

Longtime kart racers will surely celebrate the opportunity to kart anew. Someone who might have played Mario Kart 8—the previous fully original home release in the franchise—in 2014, when they were 12, has now graduated college. In the gaps between soul-crushing weeks at an investment bank or a management consultancy, karting sons and daughters who became karting adults might sneak in a nostalgic trip or race with their aging parents or once-baby siblings, now adolescents.

To facilitate the process, Nintendo has finally improved its online kart-racing infrastructure. Its competitors Sony and Microsoft, whose entertainment appliances mostly facilitate simulated sports or ritualistic arena murder, have allowed players to connect by voice or even video while playing, both to coordinate matches and to issue racist or homophobic taunts. The Switch 2 finally adds this capacity to kart racing, deployed via a “C” (“Cart”? No, “Chat”) button on its controllers.

Read: Video games are better without stories

All of this kart racing comes at a hefty price: $450 for the appliance itself, or $500 for the device bundled with the Mario Kart software. Those who would choose to forgo the bundle in favor of purchasing inscrutably updated rehashes of previous works, such as embarrassing fantasy-adventure games and insipid party titles, will have to hand over $80 for Mario Kart World if they choose to add it later. That might put kart-based home entertainment out of reach for many Americans. But others will surely see the value in the Switch 2, given the appeal and frequency of these karting delights.

Games such as Mario Kart World will be delivered on cartridges matching the size and shape of those from the previous appliance. Those carts may not contain software, instead acting as dummy keys that will unlock a probably time-consuming download. In exchange for this inconvenience, players will be able to “gameshare” some software titles with up to four friends, allowing the games to trickle down, Reaganomics-style, from the wealthy to the aspirant underclasses (though even these paupers will apparently still have to pay for a separate Nintendo Switch Online subscription to voice- or videochat with their game-giving overlords). But not Mario Kart World, which is ineligible for gameshare. All citizens must purchase their own access to karting.

Read: The quiet revolution of Animal Crossing

Nintendo has also updated the guts of the Switch 2 kart appliance. It will finally be capable of using the entire 4K resolution of the televisions that were being sold back when your college graduate was still 12. Note that the appliance itself features an LCD screen rather than the rich OLED displays that have been commonplace in smartphones for the past decade or so.

Nintendo has also failed to heed the lessons from its previous Mario Kart appliance. That device, the Switch, featured finicky, removable Joy-Con kart-racing controllers. Inevitably, kart-racing fanciers elected to pay exorbitant prices for traditional, add-on controllers instead. A new version of those controllers is also on offer for the Switch 2, requiring a new investment of $80 each for a racing tether that features the new “C” button.

Will this new kart chaos be worthwhile? Emphatically yes. I spent $1,600 on a new washer-dryer this year, and I use it only once a week, whereas I kart (or long to kart) far more often. Similarly, a good countertop air fryer might cost hundreds of dollars; why not a karting appliance too? And like an air fryer, which can toast and roast in addition to convection bake, the Switch 2 Mario Kart appliance is also capable of supporting other Nintendo-crafted experiences, such as an ape-oriented romp game announced today and, perhaps eventually, attempts to rehabilitate the non-karting titles from which the Mario character and his kindred had been mercifully liberated.

So Much for the MAGA Divorce

The nativist right is starting to make peace with Elon Musk.

by Ali Breland

Steve Bannon seems resigned to sharing power with the “tech bros,” as he calls them. Last week, when I spoke with President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and continued ally, he was clear about his disagreements with Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley elites on the so-called tech right. “Nationalist populists,” Bannon’s self-identified political clan, “don’t trust these oligarchs,” he told me. But, he added, “we see the usefulness of working together on broad things.”

It was a noticeably different tone for Bannon. In recent months, he has taken every opportunity to bash Musk. In January, Bannon said that the billionaire is a “truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” and that he’d have Musk “run out” of Trump’s inner circle by Inauguration Day. Musk and other “techno-feudalists,” Bannon said later that month, “don’t give a flying fuck about the human being.” In February, he called Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” (Musk seemingly isn’t a fan of Bannon, either: “Bannon is a great talker, but not a great doer,” he posted on X in February. “What did he get done this week? Nothing.”)

The nationalist right and the tech right came together to elect Trump in November, but the MAGA coalition has seemed on the verge of falling apart ever since. The nationalist right sees social conservatism—such as mass deportations, heavy immigration restrictions, and a more explicitly Christian government—as paramount, even if it comes at the expense of free markets. Prominent members of the tech right, including the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, prioritize private-sector technological progress above all else. In December, during a public spat with the nationalists over highly skilled immigrants, Musk posted on X that anyone who disagreed with him should “fuck” themselves “in the face.” Billionaire cosmopolitans who want to hire immigrants don’t mix easily with vehemently nativist populists who want to ratchet up taxes on said billionaires. Last month, in a speech at a tech summit in Washington, D.C., Vice President J. D. Vance said that he would “like to speak to these tensions as a proud member of both tribes.” This is not a thing you would feel the need to say about a relationship that is running smoothly.

Read: The MAGA honeymoon is over

But to assume that a fallout is inevitable is a mistake. The two sides don’t love each other, but for now, they are still together. Musk continues to be one of the most consequential people in government, and Bannon and other nationalists continue to hold sway over a White House that is cracking down on immigrants. Rather than split up, this new MAGA coalition might persist for years to come.

What the tech right and nationalist right are going through looks like an update to how conservatism has long worked. Especially before the Trump era, being “conservative” meant a commitment to free markets and traditional social views. This alliance wasn’t always a given. During the mid-20th century, traditionalists were suspicious of the potential harms of unchecked businesses, while libertarians saw excessive government encroachment as constraining the lives of Americans. But in spite of the difference, they still managed to stay together under one coalition. “Fusionism,” as the National Review editor Frank Meyer famously called it, worked because both sides had a clear, binding tie: opposition to communism.

The current moment looks a lot like fusionism 2.0: The uniting through line of opposing communism has been replaced by an opposition to “wokeness,” as the University of Virginia historian David Austin Walsh has observed. The similarities between the political moments provide a rough model for how the new MAGA coalition might persist. In the original fusionism, communism was almost always a bigger deal than whatever libertarians and social conservatives didn’t see eye to eye on. This worked because “communism” never just meant one thing. It could be invoked to oppose the Soviet Union and the literal ideology of communism, to thwart the supposedly communist-infilitrated civil-rights and anti-war movements, or to refer to anything related to left-wing politics.

Wokeness now serves that function on the right. It’s no coincidence that wokeness is a rebranded version of the right’s previous bogeyman: “cultural Marxism.” As Musk has ripped up federal agencies in a supposed effort to reduce government waste, a lot of what DOGE has actually focused on is rooting out perceived wokeness. Musk has enthusiastically helped carry out Trump’s anti-DEI executive order by targeting related programs for cuts, sometimes taking this to an almost-comic level of absurdity: DOGE reportedly placed one government worker whose job involved managing relationships with private-equity firms on administrative leave, seemingly mistakenly believing that the employee’s work was related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Andreessen, who played an early role in staffing DOGE, has also railed against wokeness. Charlie Kirk, the right-wing podcast host and member of the conservative power elite, loves to talk about how much he hates wokeness, and has applauded DOGE for “hunting down those insane DEI departments.”

Read: Charlie Kirk is the right’s new kingmaker

In many cases, the two factions detest wokeness in the same specific ways. Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder and tech investor who is also a large donor to right-wing causes, recently posted that Columbia University “delenda est,” Latin for “must be destroyed.” Similarly, Bannon told me that he has urged Trump and other administration officials to target public universities such as the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Purge the faculties and purge the administrators,” he said. “The states have no money to back up universities, so hold federal funding until they purge.”

Wokeness is even vaguer and more malleable than communism, which makes it especially useful. DEI hiring practices and critical race theory in schools count as wokeness on the right, but depending on whom you talk to, so is something as simple as a TV show or a movie with gay people. It can be bent into a passionate opposition to anything that might have the faintest traces of being liberal, left-wing, or progressive. “As long as there are common enemies,” Walsh, the UVA historian told me, the new MAGA coalition “will remain stable.”

People within the coalition at least partially agree. To the right, wokeness “is the glue that holds the left together,” Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, told me. Carl, a self-proclaimed nationalist who worked in the first Trump administration, explained that both factions of the right sincerely don’t like the rough assemblage of things they deem to be woke, but they also lean on it because they see it as a unifying point. “My nationalist group chats are not filled with people spewing anger at Elon,” he said. “They like Elon. They think he’s doing a great job.”

None of this means that the tech right and nationalist right are destined to stay together. The groups in the original fusionism were often on a similar footing in terms of power. That’s not the case now. The tech elites hold a disproportionate amount of leverage in their ability to influence elections through massive donations. Musk is still throwing his money around, funneling millions of dollars to try to sway a Wisconsin Supreme Court race. His influence does not seem to be waning, even as he has continued to pursue an agenda at DOGE that has reportedly irritated a number of Trump’s other senior administration officials. This power imbalance gives the tech right an advantage. Even if the relationship still benefits the nationalists, they become the political equivalent of a group of suckerfish riding a whale.

When we spoke, Bannon rejected the entire idea of fusionism 2.0. “Let me say it bluntly: Fuck fusionism,” he said. At another point in the conversation, he referred to Silicon Valley as an “apartheid state” in which white-collar tech jobs are filled by immigrants instead of native-born Americans. In Bannon’s view, MAGA is not fusing together so much as begrudgingly forced to stick together—the way that the Democratic Party was once a coalition between northern liberals and southern Dixiecrats.

But even if Bannon’s view is right, it still suggests a MAGA coalition that is far more robust than it seemed just a few months ago. The Silicon Valley elite, Musk especially, has already moved closer to the nationalist right over the past several years. The nationalists, however wary of the tech right, have welcomed them. They understand that Musk and the rest of the tech right are deep-pocketed, powerful allies against wokeness in all its forms. Each faction still has every reason to keep putting its differences aside.

The Great Tesla Sell-Off

You should buy a car from Elon Musk’s company—but only if it’s used.

by Andrew Moseman

In Los Angeles, where I live, you don’t expect to be heckled while driving an electric car to the grocery store. But on a recent afternoon, a couple of men on bikes saw the Tesla logo on the front of my car and shouted, “Fuck you, Tesla guy” as I rolled by with the windows down.

I bought my Tesla Model 3 in 2019, after my wife and I moved from New York to L.A. and needed a car. Not willing to burn gasoline, we got the most practical EV we could afford. Six years later, that car carries a different connotation.

In the aftermath of Elon Musk’s MAGA embrace and his scorched-earth tactics running DOGE, Tesla has become a primary target for protests. On Saturday, demonstrators marched outside all 277 Tesla showrooms and service centers in the United States; Teslas across the country have been vandalized and even destroyed in recent weeks. Even in Los Angeles, where Teslas are as familiar as Fords and not primarily viewed as right-wing totems, this wasn’t the first time I’d been shouted at since the election. Tesla owners who don’t support Musk are playing defense. Some have begun to slap on bumper stickers such as I bought this before Elon went crazy. Others are simply done. Sheryl Crow sold her Tesla and donated the money to NPR; Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona also got rid of his, saying he couldn’t stand to own a car that is a “rolling billboard for a man dismantling our government and hurting people.” Teslas that are eight years old or newer now account for 1.4 percent of all car trade-ins, up from 0.4 percent a year ago, and EV brands such as Lucid and Polestar offer tantalizing deals to Tesla drivers looking for an out. “You’re definitely seeing a lot of people say, ‘You know what? I don’t want to be associated with the trash that’s going on right now around Elon Musk,’” Robby DeGraff, an analyst at AutoPacific, told me. “‘I’m just going to get rid of my car.’”

The Great Tesla Sell-Off is producing a glut of politically tainted pre-owned cars. Used Teslas are now shockingly cheap: One 2021 Model 3 for sale near me, which would have cost more than $50,000 new, is going for less than $20,000. Even if you resent Musk, you should consider buying one. In this moment of DOGE madness, it’s difficult to see a Tesla as anything other than an avatar of Musk. But Elon doesn’t make any money off the Model Y you get secondhand. Strip away the symbolism, and an old Tesla is just a good, affordable car.

Read: My day inside America’s most hated car

No, you shouldn’t buy a new Tesla if you’re enraged at Musk. The boycotters are correct that rejecting these vehicles directly hurts him. It drives down sales numbers, which hurts Tesla’s bottom line and saps the company’s stock price. Tesla’s remarkable valuation, buoyed as much by a cult of personality as by the company’s sales figures, has made Musk the world’s richest person: The company was worth three times more than Toyota in 2024, despite selling six times fewer vehicles. Even so, collapsing sales, not only in the U.S. but also across Europe and Australia, have wiped out billions of dollars from Tesla’s stock.

Buying a pre-owned Tesla might feel just as unseemly. But it’s not. Start with the sustainability question. Anti-Musk liberals would surely agree that more Americans should go electric to cut carbon emissions. Only about one in 10 registered vehicles in America is an EV, so it’s likely that a used-Tesla buyer will be replacing an old gas-burner. The switch might be permanent: More than 90 percent of EV owners say they won’t go back to combustion. For the most part, Tesla refugees aren’t retreating to the polluting purr of the V-6; they’re switching to electric cars from other brands, such as Chevy, Lucid, and Kia.

Used Teslas also help solve the main problem with getting Americans to go electric, which is price. Even with government tax credits, EVs tend to cost a premium compared with gas cars or hybrids. Pre-owned EVs, though, are shockingly affordable. Electric cars in general depreciate faster than gas-powered cars for a number of reasons, including fading battery life and used-car buyers’ unfamiliarity with the technology, Brian Moody, a senior staff editor at Kelley Blue Book, told me. All of this is bad for sellers but good for buyers.

Read: America finally has the answer to the biggest problem with EVs

Even before the Great Tesla Sell-Off, the bulk of used EVs were Teslas. The math doesn’t lie: Just five years ago, Tesla sold nearly 80 percent of the electric cars in America. Now that virtually every major car company offers EVs, Tesla’s dominance is waning, but most of those non-Tesla EVs have yet to reach their second owners. Used Teslas were already pretty affordable, but now they are getting even cheaper. Moody said the average transaction price for a used Tesla dipped from nearly $32,000 in November to about $30,400 in early March as more flooded the market. Tesla’s resale value is reportedly falling three times as fast as the rest of the used-car market.

Perhaps most important of all: Unless you purchase a used Tesla directly from the company, Musk isn’t getting your money. It’s possible to buy a pre-owned Tesla and avoid his other revenue streams too. Just like every carmaker, Tesla maintains a network of service centers to repair its vehicle, and because so few car mechanics specialize in electric vehicles, paying Tesla to do the work is much easier (and can feel safer) than taking a gamble on your neighborhood repair guy. However, a used car is likely to be past its four-year basic warranty, so you could take your old Model Y to an independent shop without voiding any coverage.

Then there is the question of charging. Tesla’s Supercharger network is admittedly excellent and convenient. But that is relevant for more than Tesla owners. Over the past couple of years, the rest of the industry has adopted Tesla’s plug standard, and many other brands’ EVs can now visit the company’s fast-charging stations. Musk-hating Rivian owners might still find themselves paying him for kilowatt-hours in a pinch. Still, avoiding them is easier than you might think. EV newbies tend to fret about charging, given that plugging in a car is still not as simple or quick as pulling into the nearest Shell. But the anxiety tends to be exaggerated. Something like 80 percent of EV owners primarily charge at home, which provides enough electricity for daily driving. On road trips, drivers can plan ahead to make a point of visiting charging stations that aren’t owned by Tesla.

Of course, a used Tesla may not spare you from getting shouted at while you’re getting groceries. Buying any kind of Tesla in 2025 can practically feel like an invitation to get graffitied, or at least a tacit endorsement of the brand. But set aside the optics—no simple task—and a pre-owned Tesla is just as climate-virtuous as all the Chevy Bolts and Ford Mustang Mach-Es that aren’t carrying around any MAGA baggage. Refusing an old Model 3 doesn’t hurt Elon or help the planet. But it does stop you from getting a good deal. If you’re still feeling trepidation, consider an apology bumper sticker: I bought it from someone who bought it before Elon was crazy.

My Day Inside America’s Most Hated Car

The Cybertruck is a 7,000-pound Rorschach test.

by Saahil Desai

On the first Sunday of spring, surrounded by row houses and magnolia trees, I came to a horrifying realization: My mom was right. I had been flipped off at least 17 times, called a “motherfucker” (in both English and Spanish), and a “fucking dork.” A woman in a blue sweater stared at me, sighed, and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” All of this because I was driving a Tesla Cybertruck.

I had told my mom about my plan to rent this thing and drive it around Washington, D.C., for a day—a journalistic experiment to understand what it’s like behind the wheel of America’s most hated car. “Wow. Be careful,” she texted back right away. Both of us had read the stories of Cybertrucks possibly being set on fire, bombed with a Molotov cocktail, and vandalized in every way imaginable. People have targeted the car—and Tesla as a whole—to protest Elon Musk’s role in Donald Trump’s administration. But out of sheer masochism, or stupidity, I still went ahead and spent a day driving one. As I idled with the windows down on a street in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, a woman glared at me from her front porch: “Fuck you, and this truck, and Elon,” she yelled. “You drive a Nazi truck.” She slammed her front door shut, and then opened it again. “I hope someone blows your shit up.”

Earlier that day, my first stop was the heart of the resistance: the Dupont Circle farmers’ market. The people there wanted to see the organic asparagus and lion’s-mane mushrooms. What they did not want to see was a stainless-steel, supposedly bulletproof Cybertruck. Every red light created new moments for mockery. “You fucker!” yelled a bicyclist as he pedaled past me on P Street. The diners eating brunch on the sidewalk nearby laughed and cheered. Then came the next stoplight: A woman eating outside at Le Pain Quotidien gave me the middle finger for a solid 20 seconds, all without interrupting her conversation.

The anger is understandable. This is, after all, the radioactive center of DOGE’s blast radius. On the same block where I was yelled at in Mount Pleasant, I spotted a hand-drawn sign in one window: CFPB, it read, inside of a giant red heart; and at one point, I tailed behind a black Tesla Model Y with the bumper sticker Anti Elon Tesla Club. But the Cybertruck stands out on America’s roads about as much as LeBron James in a kindergarten classroom. No matter where you live, the car is a nearly 7,000-pound Rorschach test: It has become the defining symbol of the second Trump term. If you hate Trump and Musk, it is a giant MAGA hat, Pepe the Frog on wheels, or the “Swasticar.” If you love Trump and Musk, the Cybertruck is, well, a giant MAGA hat. On Monday, FBI Director Kash Patel called Tesla vandalism “domestic terrorism” as he announced a Tesla task force to investigate such acts. Alex Jones has trolled Tesla protesters from the back of his own Cybertruck, bullhorn in hand. Kid Rock has a Cybertruck with a custom Dukes of Hazzard paint job; the far-right podcaster Tim Pool owns one and says he’ll buy another “because it will own the libs”; and Kanye West has three. Trump’s 17-year-old granddaughter was gifted one by the president, and another by Musk.

When I parked the car for lunch in Takoma Park, where I support federal workers signs were staked into the grass, I heard two women whispering at a nearby table: “Should we egg it?” (In this economy?) Over and over again, as pedestrians and drivers alike glared at me, I had to remind myself: It’s just a car. And it’s kind of a cool one, too. It can apparently outrace a Porsche 911, while simultaneously towing a Porsche 911. Or it can power a house for up to three days. My day in the Cybertruck wasn’t extremely hard-core, but the eight onboard cameras made city driving more bearable than I was expecting. Regardless of what you do with it, the car is emissions-free. “The underlying technology of the Cybertruck is amazing,” Loren McDonald, an EV analyst at the firm Paren, told me. And the exterior undersells just how ridiculous it is. Just before I returned the car on Monday morning, I took an impromptu Zoom meeting from the giant in-car touchscreen. It has a single windshield wiper that is so long—more than five feet—that Musk has compared it to a “katana.”

After 10 hours of near-constant hazing, I navigated to an underground parking lot to recharge the truck (and my battered self-image). Someone had placed a sticker just beneath the Tesla logo: Elon Musk is a parasite, it read. Still, even in D.C., I got a fair number of thumbs-ups as my Cybertruck zoomed by the areas most frequented by tourists. Near the National Mall, a man in a red bandanna and shorts yelled, “That’s awesome!” and cheered. Perhaps it was an attempt at MAGA solidarity, or maybe not. Lots of people just seemed to think it looked cool. One guy in his 20s, wearing a make money, not friends hoodie, frantically took out his phone to film me making a left turn. Even in the bluest neighborhoods of D.C.—near a restaurant named Marx Cafe and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg mural—kids could not get enough of the Cybertruck. One girl in Takoma Park saw me and started screaming, “Cybertruck! Cybertruck!” Later, a boy spotted the car and frantically rode his scooter to try to get a better look. Just before sunset, I was struggling to change lanes near George Washington University when two teens stopped to stare at me from the sidewalk. I was anxiously checking directions on my phone and clearly had no idea where to go. “Must be an Uber,” one said to the other.

Read: Admit it, the Cybertruck is awesome

By 9 p.m., I’d had enough. I valeted at my hotel, with its “Tibetan Bowl Sound Healing” classes, and got a nervous look from the attendant. I can’t blame anyone who sees the car as the stainless-steel embodiment of the modern right. This week, a county sheriff in Ohio stood in front of a green Cybertruck and derided Tesla vandals as “little fat people that live in their mom’s basement and wear their mom’s pajamas.” But it is also a tragedy that the Cybertruck has become the most partisan car in existence—more so than the Prius, or the Hummer, or any kind of Subaru. The Cybertruck, an instantly meme-able and very weird car, could have helped America fall in love with EVs. Instead, it is doing the opposite. The revolt against Tesla is not slowing down, and in some cases people are outright getting rid of their cars. Is it really a win that Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona exchanged his all-electric Tesla sedan for a gas-guzzling SUV?

Then again, Republicans aren’t buying the Cybertruck en masse. It is too expensive and too weird. Buying any Tesla might be a way to own the libs, but the right has proved maddeningly resistant to going electric. “Your average MAGA Trump supporter isn’t going to go buy a Tesla,” McDonald, the EV analyst, said. Before the car shipped in November 2023, Musk predicted that Tesla would sell 250,000 a year. He hasn’t even sold one-fifth of that in total—and sales are falling. (Neither Tesla nor Musk responded to a request for comment.)

Musk made a lot of other promises that haven’t really panned out: The Cybertruck was supposed to debut at less than $40,000. The cheapest model currently available is double that. The vehicle, Musk said, would be “really tough, not fake tough.” Instead, its stainless-steel side panels have fallen off because Tesla used the wrong glue—and that was just the most recent of the car’s eight recalls. The Cybertruck was supposed to be able to haul “near infinite mass” and “serve briefly as a boat.” Just this month alone, one Cybertruck’s rear end snapped off in a test of its towing power, and another sank off the coast of Los Angeles while trying to offload a Jet Ski from the bed.

The Cybertruck, in that sense, is a perfect metaphor for Musk himself. The world’s richest man has a bad habit of promising one thing and delivering another. X was supposed to be the “everything app”; now it is a cesspool of white supremacy. DOGE was billed as an attempt to make the government more nimble and tech-savvy. Instead, the cuts have resulted in seniors struggling to get their Social Security checks. So far, Musk has only continued to get richer and more powerful while the rest of us have had to deal with the wreckage. Let that sink in, as he likes to say. The disaster of the Cybertruck is not that it’s ugly, or unconventional, or absurdly pointy. It’s that, for most people, the car just isn’t worth driving.

The Gleeful Cruelty of the White House X Account

Welcome to the 4chan administration.

by Charlie Warzel

Sign up for Trump’s Return, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump presidency.

On March 18, the official White House account on X posted two photographs of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who was arrested earlier this month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post described her as a “previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking,” and celebrated her capture as a win for the administration. In one photograph, Basora-Gonzalez is shown handcuffed and weeping in a public parking lot.

The White House account posted about Basora-Gonzalez again yesterday—this time, rendering her capture in the animated style of the beloved Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, who co-founded the animation company Studio Ghibli. Presumably, whoever runs the account had used ChatGPT, which has been going viral this week for an update to its advanced “4o” model that enables it to transform photographs in the style of popular art, among other things. The White House did not respond directly to a request for comment, instead referring me to a post by Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr that says, in part, “The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.”

It’s worth pausing here: The internet has been flooded with AI-generated images in this exact Studio Ghibli style. Some people have used it for images of pets or family members. Others opted for a trollish register, leading ChatGPT to spit out cutesy renderings of JFK’s assassination, planes hitting the World Trade Center, and the torture at Abu Ghraib. On X, the prevalence of these images became an event unto itself, one in which the White House decided to participate by sharing a cartoon of a woman crying in handcuffs.

This is how the White House account operates now. In previous administrations (including much of Donald Trump’s first term), the account was used to post anodyne updates, highlight press releases, and share information about the administration. It was, to be fair, often painfully dull or written in the stilted language of a brand. Now the account exists to troll its political enemies and delight the MAGA faithful.

Read: The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine

On Wednesday, the account posted a picture of Vice President J. D. Vance shooting a tactical rifle, referring to the bullets he fired as “freedom seeds,” a term popular among gun YouTubers. When Google Maps adopted the “Gulf of America” language pushed by the administration, the White House account celebrated by sharing a video in which the words Gulf of Mexico are wiped off the globe. In February, it posted an AI-generated picture of Trump as an American monarch, wearing a crown. The image’s caption reads, “Long live the king.” After the disastrous Oval Office ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the account posted a photo of Vance staring at Zelensky with the caption “Have you said thank you once?” Although the account sometimes shares actual news, it’s frequently preoccupied by rapid-response engagement bait for MAGA diehards. Less information, more content. The intent is not to inform but to go viral.

Beyond the fact that this kind of shitposting is so obviously beneath the office, the posts are genuinely sinister. By adding a photo of an ICE arrest to a light-hearted viral trend, for instance, the White House account manages to perfectly capture the sociopathic, fascistic tone of ironic detachment and glee of the internet’s darkest corners and most malignant trolls. The official X account of the White House isn’t just full of low-rent 4chan musings, it’s an alarming signal of an administration that’s fluent in internet extremism and seemingly dedicated to pursuing its casual cruelty as a chief political export.

To be clear, the actions of the second Trump administration—the dismantling of the federal government via DOGE, the apprehension and detainment of immigrants and green-card holders with seemingly no due process—are of far more consequence than what it posts on social media. But White House posts are not random missives either: They’re official government communications from the executive branch, sent out to 1.4 million followers, to say nothing of whatever additional reach these posts receive via algorithmic recommendation and ad hoc sharing.

The account’s true obsession is immigration: @WhiteHouse has posted dozens of mugshots of immigrants arrested by ICE. Each one lists an offense they’ve been arrested for in big block letters, and usually the catchphrase “MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN” is appended. Earlier this month, after the Department of Homeland Security commented on the deportation of a Lebanese professor at Brown University—a violation of a court order temporarily protecting her from expulsion—the White House account responded by posting a photo of Trump waving goodbye from a McDonald’s drive-through window. (The picture was taken during a 2024 campaign stunt.) On Valentine’s Day, the account wrote, “Roses are red / Violets are blue / Come here illegally / And we’ll deport you.”

And in an infamous example, on February 18, the White House account posted a 41-second video of faceless men being shackled and marched onto planes. The post’s caption read, “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” (ASMR is short for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” or the titillating sensation caused by certain noises, such as whispering, tapping, or crinkling; videos of people making such noises are enormously popular across social media.) The subtext of the White House post is far from subtle and is reminiscent of something out of 4chan’s notoriously bigoted politics message board: Watching allegedly undocumented immigrants bound in chains is a pleasurable, even sensual experience. Like any trolling post, it’s meant to be simultaneously taken seriously and played off as a dumb online joke. Even those inside the Trump administration seemed taken aback by the audacity of the post. Even some MAGA supporters appeared uncomfortable by @WhiteHouse’s brazenness. “If you guys could stick with the grim shock and awe, and leave the edgy gloating to those of us who don’t work in the White House I think that would probably be better for optics,” one user wrote on X. The “ASMR” deportation video, as of this writing, has been viewed almost 104 million times on X.

Exactly who is running the White House X account is an object of fascination for close observers. Some accounts fantasize that Trump’s college-age son, Barron, is running it. Those outside of Trump fandom have insisted that it is being run by edgelords—one post referred to the operator as an “incel reddit user.” One Bluesky user described the account as “lowkey goebbelsmaxxing,” a reference to the Nazi propagandist. (The White House did not respond to a request to identify who writes the account’s posts.) What all the speculation suggests is that at least someone with access to the account is intimately familiar with far-right internet spaces and culture, specifically Groypers, a term for the loose online movement that has succeeded the alt-right. Earlier this year, the writer John Ganz argued that “Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right.” He and others have suggested that the culture is present in the offices of Republican representatives in Washington, D.C., including in the White House. (A Trump staffer was fired in the first administration for associating with white nationalists; he’s now back, in a role at the State Department.) Although the identities of whoever is running the account are, at present, unknown, what’s clear is that their output appears to delight prominent extremists online. The message coming from the account, to borrow language from one far-right X user, is clear: The posters are in control.

Read: X is a white-supremacist site

And the posters have goals. The first is to engage and supply their loyal audiences with constant memes and content. The second is perhaps more strategic. The account’s blatant humiliation of immigrants who it alleges have heinous criminal records is intentional. The goal is to goad their opponents into defending people accused of indefensible crimes. The primary accusation from the MAGA faithful toward people who are outraged about the White House’s Studio Ghibli post or the ASMR video is that the left is more concerned with defending fentanyl dealers and immigrants accused of rape and robbery than they are about the safety of the country. “Disappointing that folks are more upset about this meme than they are about the fentanyl crisis,” Dorr said in the same post that the White House pointed me to. But this is a false binary; in all cases, the chief objections are to the dehumanization and glee on display and the worrying lack of due process.

The White House is after something more than just shock value. It’s propaganda, and Trump’s allies are learning the playbook. This week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a video on X from a prison in El Salvador where deported immigrants are being held. Behind Noem are dozens of men in one jail cell, many shirtless with tattoos; their heads have all been shaved during intake. The prisoners are props, a backdrop for Noem’s message of intimidation to undocumented immigrants: “If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison.” Like the ASMR post or the Ghibli cartoon, the implication is that these deportees are utterly undeserving of any shred of human dignity. There are many other examples, such as FBI Director Kash Patel’s recent posts, one of which features him walking around in camouflage, set to rock music, as FBI agents blow open doors with explosives. Taken together, the posts offer a bracing but useful insight into how the administration sees itself, and the message of casual cruelty and overwhelming force it wants to project to the rest of the world.

That this administration should fully embrace the tactics and aesthetics of online far-right extremists and technological tools like generative AI to further its message makes perfect sense. These are reliable ways to increase engagement, gain attention, and illustrate a precise vision of the future they want to usher in. Even so, the account is chilling. Those who’ve spent enough time in the online spaces that have clearly influenced this administration—or at least whoever runs its social accounts—know how this goes. This is a game of accelerationism and nihilism, using tools and platforms that excel at depersonalizing, thus rendering empathy for others ever more difficult. That this sociopathic posting style is coming out of this administration—that it has been so thoroughly mainstreamed by the right—suggests that the cultural architecture of the internet has changed. There is still a fever swamp, but now the White House sits on top of it.

U.S. | The Atlantic

- The Consequences of the Signal Breach

The Consequences of the Signal Breach

Panelists joined Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss the Trump administration’s response.

by The Editors

This week, The Atlantic reported that Trump officials shared military-attack plans in a Signal group chat and inadvertently included The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined him to discuss.

In the Trump administration’s insistence that the information in the “Houthi PC small group”—including the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen—was not classified, “what these officials would have you believe is that all of this could be made public and there would be no consequence,” the Atlantic staff writer Shane Harris said. In reality, he continued, the breach was “replete with security and policy risks.”

“Had that information fallen into the hands of a U.S. adversary that had been in the group, or had [Goldberg] been a less scrupulous journalist and tweeted it, that information would then be known to the Houthis, who would be able to prepare defenses and a counterattack that absolutely would jeopardize the lives of U.S. forces,” Harris continued.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent at PBS News Hour; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; and Shane Harris, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Health | The Atlantic

- RFK Jr. Is Out for Revenge

- Long COVID Showed Me the Bottom of American Health Care

- The Evermaskers

- The Most Important Ingredient in Chewing Gum

- Texas Never Wanted RFK Jr.’s Unproven Measles Treatment

- The NIH’s Most Reckless Cuts Yet

- The Paradox of Hard Work

- An ‘Impossible’ Disease Outbreak in the Alps

RFK Jr. Is Out for Revenge

The health secretary’s indiscriminate layoffs will undermine his own priorities.

by Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is finally getting his wish of sucker-punching the federal health agencies. This week, Kennedy began the process of firing some 10,000 employees working under the Health and Human Services umbrella. Even before he took office, Kennedy warned health officials that they should pack their bags, and on Tuesday, he defended the cuts: “What we’ve been doing isn’t working,” Kennedy posted on X. He is focused on “realigning HHS with its core mission: to stop the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.” But instead of improving how the federal health bureaucracy works, RFK Jr. is throwing his agencies into chaos.

The Trump administration hasn’t released details about which offices specifically were targeted, but the cuts seem to be so deep and indiscriminate that they are going to hamstring Kennedy’s own stated priorities. Kennedy has made clear that he’s singularly focused on reducing rates of chronic disease in America, but the health secretary has reportedly laid off officials in the CDC’s office tasked with that same goal. While cigarette smoking remains a leading cause of chronic disease, the top FDA official in charge of regulating tobacco is now on administrative leave, and everyone working for the CDC office that monitors tobacco use has been fired, according to the former CDC director Tom Frieden. Despite Kennedy’s promises to establish a culture of “radical transparency” at the federal agencies, he also appears to have fired the employees whom journalists and the greater public rely on to provide essential updates about the government’s actions. (In a statement, a spokesperson for HHS said that the personnel cuts were focused on “redundant or unnecessary administrative positions.”)

Kennedy, an anti-vaccine advocate, seems to have targeted more than just the most pro-vaccine voices in the government. During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy said he would “empower the scientists” as health secretary, but here are just a few of the M.D.s and Ph.D.s who were reportedly targeted yesterday: the head of the FDA’s Office of New Drugs, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, the head of the CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, the director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the director of the NIH’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, the director of the National Institute of Nursing Research, and the director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

No plan—not his MAHA agenda, not efficiency, nothing—can realistically explain cuts like these. Instead, the mass firings don’t seem to be a means to an end on the way to overhauling American health. They are an end in themselves.

It’ll take months, if not years, to fully appreciate the effect that the cuts will have on America’s scientific enterprise. The decimation at the FDA is particularly galling. Several of the agency’s top leaders charged with reviewing and approving innovative new treatments have been ushered to the exit. This is likely to lead to slower development of advancements in biomedical science; although the FDA doesn’t fund biomedical research, its leaders play a crucial role in advising pharmaceutical companies on how to conduct research and ultimately get their breakthroughs approved. America was just beginning to reap the benefits of these efforts. There are now gene therapies that can treat genetic blindness. Young children who previously would have been condemned to certain death at the hands of a rare disease, such as severe spinal muscular atrophy, now have a chance at life. The government invested in mRNA technology for decades before it was leveraged to create vaccines that saved us from a once-in-century pandemic.

One particularly dispiriting departure is that of Peter Marks, the longtime leader of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. I’d guess that, unlike me, you didn’t spend the early pandemic binge-watching scientific meetings where vaccine policy was debated. Marks was impossible to miss—a bespectacled man speaking from a bunkerlike basement, a painting of a polar bear serving tea behind him. He gets a hefty portion of credit for Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, the effort to turbocharge the development of COVID vaccines, and he came up with the moniker. His center also regulates gene therapies, stem cells, and the U.S. blood supply.

Marks reportedly resigned under pressure from Kennedy on Friday, just before mass firings hit the FDA. The two men—one, America’s top vaccine regulator and the other, its top vaccine conspiracy theorist—have a long history. In 2021, when Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization formerly chaired by Kennedy, petitioned the FDA to revoke authorization for COVID shots, Marks is the one who signed the letter denying the request. It’s reasonable to assume that Kennedy and Marks were never going to see eye to eye on vaccines. But Marks publicly insisted that he wanted to stay in his role, and that he was willing to work with Kennedy. In a resignation letter, Marks wrote that Kennedy demanded nothing short of “subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” (Marks declined to comment for this story.)

Of course, not all 10,000 people who were fired had this type of history with their new boss. But the cuts, in many ways, appear to be rooted in a similar antagonism. In his welcome address to HHS staff in February, Kennedy offered reassurance that he was not coming in with biases, and said that people should give him a chance. “Let’s start a relationship by letting go of any preconceptions that you may have about me, and let’s start from square one,” Kennedy told the crowd. “Let’s establish a mutual intention to work toward what we all care about, the health of the American people.” In firing a huge swath of his staff, Kennedy has made clear what he believes: Anyone with an HHS badge is complicit in the current system, whether or not they have anything to do with the country’s health problems. As Calley Means, a top adviser to Kennedy, said during a Politico health-care summit earlier today, the scientists who were laid off “have overseen, just demonstrably, a record of utter failure.”

Kennedy can argue all he wants that the focus of federal health agencies needs to shift more toward chronic disease. Means and other MAHA acolytes are right that, in some ways, America has gotten less healthy and federal bureaucrats haven’t done enough to solve the problem. But decimating the entire health bureaucracy in this country is not proving his point. Kennedy doesn’t look like he is setting the agencies on a productive new course. He looks like he’s just out for revenge.

Katherine J. Wu contributed reporting.

Long COVID Showed Me the Bottom of American Health Care

Access to clinics has only gotten patchier as attention to the disease has faded.

by Rebecca Nagle

My house was dark. Tinfoil covered the windows. The only light I could tolerate came from dimmable red bulbs. Ten weeks before, I had tested positive for COVID. On week three of my infection, I went to the emergency room with a debilitating migraine. On my third trip to the ER, I was hospitalized for seven days. I came home to a changed life. All the clichés about headaches are true—a pile of bricks on the head, a vise grip on the temples, an axe through the skull. The pain altered my consciousness. Trying to move or access a thought was like trying to see past a flashlight shining in my eyes.

It was 2024—a point at which most people in America considered the pandemic long since over.  But it wasn’t for me.

Some days, I couldn’t stop crying. It was more than despair at my circumstance: Long COVID can dysregulate mood and has been linked with depression. And the disease hijacked my stress-response system, leaving my body in a constant state of alarm. Any unexpected sound, even getting a text message, would set off a jolt of panic through my body, the same sensation as slamming on the brakes while driving. I lost my ability to cope. I broke a window in my house. I put a hole in the wall.

Researchers know more about long COVID than they once did, but it is still hard to define. The clearest consensus is that it’s a complex collection of symptoms that can affect almost every organ system in the body. Theories of why COVID can linger abound, and include ongoing inflammation, the virus never fully going away, and tissue damage. Many scientists agree that multiple factors likely contribute. Meanwhile, doctors are still struggling to treat the disease; less than half of doctors know how to diagnose long COVID and even fewer—28 percent—report knowing how to treat it, according to one 2023 survey. Long-COVID patients are still reporting that medical professionals don’t believe them, and though in some cases patients’ self-diagnosis might be off the mark, the reality is that many people living with long COVID simply aren’t getting the care they need.

In my case, that person who was in mind-numbing pain, unable to read, unable to write, unable to Google things or look at screens, unable to drive, drained by talking on the phone, spiraling in despair, and barely able to leave the house had to navigate the American health-care system. That I needed care for long COVID only made my predicament worse. From hearing chronically ill and disabled people speak about their experiences, I knew that to be sick in this country is a hell unto itself. But knowing something is true and experiencing it are different. I know that the Grand Canyon is deep, but I have never seen it with my own eyes. For our health-care system, I have been to the bottom.

According to the latest federal survey as of September 2024, more than one in 20 adults in the United States had long COVID—defined as symptoms that last longer than three months. (The survey does not ask about the severity of symptoms.) Vaccines may help protect against the disease, but getting COVID still means risking long COVID. The coronavirus can leave patients with blood clots, brain dysfunction, organ damage, immune problems, and more; about a quarter of people with the disease report that it significantly disrupts their ability to perform daily activities. There are no FDA-approved medications to treat long COVID. Many medical institutions created specialty clinics to see patients with the disease, but much of what even the best clinics can offer is symptom management. Pinning down recovery rates from long COVID has been difficult, but according to several studies, after two years, the majority of people living with long COVID had not fully recovered.

Three months into my illness, I had been treated for migraines and a concussion—COVID’s impact can mirror a traumatic brain injury—but not long COVID. The tribe that I belong to, Cherokee Nation, runs the largest outpatient facility of any tribe in the U.S., but my primary-care provider there told me she didn’t know how to treat long COVID. I was referred to my tribe’s specialty clinic for rare and infectious diseases. When I managed to get that appointment, however, the provider told me he knew how to treat only pulmonary long-COVID symptoms (which many long-COVID patients don’t have). Nowhere in Indian Health Services, the treaty-based federal program that serves 2.8 million Native Americans nationwide, is there a long-COVID clinic. (An IHS spokesperson said the Biden administration would have needed to set up such a clinic.)

I started looking outside Indian Health Services and found a long-COVID clinic an hour’s drive from my house. When I called, I learned the clinic had shut down. The state where I live, Oklahoma, does not have a long-COVID clinic. My dad found one in Arkansas. Like many long-COVID clinics, it required that patients apply to get in. But after I submitted all the paperwork, I didn’t hear back.

I realized that to access care, I would need to travel. At the time, I was unable to drive, and my symptoms limited how much time I spent outside my house. When I called the Cleveland Clinic, I was transferred four times until I was accidentally forwarded to the customer-satisfaction survey. I spoke with one receptionist who told me her clinic didn’t take patients from out of state, and another who warned that traveling to her clinic probably wouldn’t be worth the time and money. (A spokesperson for the Cleveland Clinic wrote that patients should be able to make an appointment without a referral, and that the clinic and its staff “strive to provide patients with timely access to scheduling and care.”)

In my first telehealth appointment with a nationally recognized COVID clinic, the doctor wouldn’t discuss her recommendations but said I could read them in the patient visit notes. When I explained that my symptoms made reading impossible, she asked me if someone could read the notes for me. Later, my mom read me a copied-and-pasted list of healthy-lifestyle information, such as the benefits of taking a daily probiotic and the importance of getting enough sleep. The list included the doctor’s favorite bedtime teas. I told my mom to stop reading.

A few months into the pandemic, some patients reported that their symptoms weren’t going away. Through their advocacy, long COVID got its name. By 2022, hundreds of long-COVID clinics had opened across the country. There is no standard for what kind of care these clinics provide: Some are multidisciplinary teams, but many are one specialist or one nurse practitioner. This patchwork system of care has only deteriorated as attention on the disease has dwindled.

Many of the long-COVID clinics that popped up during the pandemic have closed. As part of my reporting for this story, I compiled a list of 171 clinics, drawing from the Survivor Corps website, a patient-led resource-and-advocacy group, and from searching online for long-COVID clinics by state. I then called each clinic to verify which ones were still operating. Of those, 79 were still open and accepting new patients, five were not accepting new patients or outside referrals, 61 had closed, and 15 were unreachable after two attempts. Eleven more were advertised as long-COVID clinics but don’t have a medical doctor or nurse on staff; they provide services such as speech or occupational therapy. (My assistant Sydney Anderson and intern Cheyenne McNeil, who have been helping me work through my illness, contributed to this reporting.)

Based on the list we assembled, 22 states have no long-COVID clinics accepting new patients. Given COVID rates in those states, we estimated that almost 3 million people who currently have long COVID reside there. Because of insurance policies, licensing and telehealth laws, and the cost of travel, not having a nearby clinic can easily mean that patients won’t access care. Of the long-COVID clinics that are still open, some have wait lists, do not accept outside referrals, do not take insurance, treat only specific long-COVID symptoms, or do not take patients from outside of their geographical area.

Getting in touch with the long-COVID clinics that are still open is another barrier. I spoke with operators who had never heard of their institution’s long-COVID clinic; I got transferred to the office that schedules COVID tests; I got transferred to disconnected lines; I called numbers that rang and rang and rang and rang. One day, I spent two hours on the phone and spoke with only three people who could provide information. When I called Yale New Haven Health System’s clinic, one of the most well-known in the country, I got transferred to a disconnected line. I called back and got transferred to the customer-satisfaction survey. I called a third time and left a message. I called a fourth time, trying a different number, and spoke with a receptionist who said the clinic was closed. (The clinic is still open; in a statement, Yale New Haven Health said that the phone number for the long-COVID clinic is on its website, that the volume of calls the clinic receives is very high, and that it had not previously heard of patients having difficulty accessing the clinic.)

If you are healthy, this might all sound like the familiar nightmare of customer service to which we have all become accustomed. But for people who are sick, it is a wall that stands between them and the care they need. When you are sick, you look at that wall and think, I am not well enough to climb it.

The closure of long-COVID clinics in recent years has affected patients who need care. I talked with people who, like me, have been living with long COVID later in the pandemic. Ryan Parker lives in Portland, Oregon; is a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe; and used to work in philanthropy. Like many people with long COVID, Parker tried to work through his illness. He told me he returned from one work trip so sick that he couldn’t get out of bed for a month. Last fall, the long-COVID clinic that was treating him closed. Because of the disease, Maeve Sherry has been disabled and unable to work for three years. They found a long-COVID clinic in Great Falls, Montana, three hours from where they lived at the time, but it closed in December of 2023, they said. There are now no long-COVID clinics in Montana. When Myisha Hill was still struggling to do household chores, take care of her kids, and even talk weeks after a COVID infection, she looked up the long-COVID clinic near where she lives in Las Vegas, she told me. But it, too, had closed. There are now no long-COVID clinics in Nevada.

A spokesperson for the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada wrote that the clinic closed “amid low demand.” Other clinics echoed this response, saying they suspended operations after patient numbers dwindled. A few clinics also stated that they now refer long-COVID patients to primary care. Several spokespeople told me as a reporter that their clinics were still open, but when I called as a patient, I was told the clinic was closed. And even when clinics are open, patients still face barriers: I spoke with people with long COVID who told me they couldn’t access care because a clinic didn’t take their insurance, their doctor didn’t send a referral, or the clinic rejected them as a patient.

The alternative to enrolling in a clinic is to try to see a regular neurologist or cardiologist. But many specialists have lengthy wait times, and long-COVID patients are twice as likely as the general public to report that this is why they can’t get care. Parker, for instance, is trying to see a specialist for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, a form of debilitating fatigue that is common with long COVID. The first available appointment is nine months out.

And when patients are finally seen, the care itself might not be competent. Parker’s primary-care provider suggested that his debilitating fatigue was a product of anxiety. Several doctors have also told Kelly Rider that her problem was just anxiety—and one said it was perimenopause. Sometimes doctors prescribe things that exacerbate symptoms—such as exercise for chronic fatigue. When Diem-Han Dinh’s doctor ordered a stress test, she explained that she was unable to run. He didn’t believe her. At the stress test, she almost fainted.

Eight months into my illness, I boarded a plane and traveled with my mother to Rochester, Minnesota. The long-COVID clinic I finally got into was Mayo. The off-label medication they prescribed didn’t do much, but I learned about my illness and how to manage my symptoms, which has improved my quality of life. Other things have helped too. Thanks to an arsenal of migraine treatments, my headache—although not gone—is less severe. Thanks to eight months of vision therapy, I can now focus my eyes and am practicing reading. And, in writing this article, I have gotten back to reporting. What I had to go through to get here, I would not wish on anyone.

The resources our system of medical care can offer to those wanting to learn about, cope with, and heal from what COVID has done to their body are beyond inadequate, and are likely to get worse. In February, the Trump administration ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to dissolve its advisory committee on long COVID. In March, the department announced it would close its Office for Long COVID Research and Practice, and began canceling grants from the National Institutes of Health for COVID studies.

Sick and disabled people have been pushed to the margins of our society for a long time. There was a moment during the pandemic when I saw our collective concern focused on the ill. Living with long COVID, I sometimes wonder where that concern went. I feel like the wounded antelope picked off from the herd. Everyone else has moved on, while I am stuck in my illness. I could be angry at each individual hypocrisy—each person who preached the importance of masks only to go back to normal without me—but I am not. Instead, I am sad that what is more powerful than our concern for the sick is the indifference of our health-care system.

The Evermaskers

The isolation of people who take precautions against COVID has only gotten more intense.

by Daniel Engber

“It breaks my brain sometimes,” Dennis Rosloniec told me. For half a decade now, the 44-year-old media technician and mountain biker from Green Bay, Wisconsin, has done everything he can to understand the risks of getting COVID. He’s read the published studies. He’s looked at meta-analyses. And here’s the truth as far as he can tell: Each time he’s infected, the chances that something really bad will happen to his body ratchet up a little higher.

Dennis is not immunocompromised. He doesn’t have a chronic illness. He’s not obese or hypertensive or unvaccinated. He’s just a thoughtful autodidact, the kind of guy who references both The Simpsons and the Stoics as he talks. “I’m a fairly large, fit, white dude, for lack of a better term,” he said. But even now, in 2025, Dennis Rosloniec is afraid of COVID. Someone else might say he’s strangely so.

Dennis is still masking quite a bit. He’s wary of attending indoor social gatherings unless they seem especially important. And he’s been taking sundry extra measures to protect himself, based on fledgling research that he’s either heard about or read online, since 2020, when he bought a tube of ivermectin, the antiparasitic drug that was repurposed as a highly suspect COVID treatment, “out of anxiety” while awaiting the vaccines. Later on, he tried iota-carrageenan nasal spray, which he used as a hedge against COVID infection until “the science became sort of iffy on it.” These days, he keeps a bottle of cetylpyridinium-chloride mouthwash in his desk, so he can gargle when he thinks he might have been exposed. And he’s got a prophylactic nasal rinse, which, actually, he’s come to sort of like for reasons that don’t have much to do with COVID. “I breathe better through my nose when I use it.”

As a masker—and as a mouthwash guy and a nasal-rinser—Dennis knows he’s out of step with almost everyone he sees in person. “You feel pressure from the world,” he told me. “It makes you question, Is this really worth it?” But he also knows that certain others share his sense of caution, or even worry more than he does. He interacts with them online, on message boards for “COVID conscious” conversation. Theirs is a kind of shadow world where the fears and obligations felt by everyone in early 2020 never really went away, and lockdowns still persist in private.

Members of these groups say they’re only doing what they’ve always done since the start of the pandemic: In the parlance of the boards, they’re “still COVID-ing.” But some are also going further to protect themselves than they did in 2020, and seeking out new strategies for staying safe. They share tips online for how to fit their N95 masks, or for taping filters to the spouts of snorkels so they can safely visit indoor pools. They talk about the challenges of COVID-conscious parenting, and meet up for COVID-conscious church events on Sunday Zooms. They share lists of COVID-conscious therapists who would never try to tell you that you’re too afraid of getting sick, or that your risk perception is distorted, or that the problem here is not the world’s but your own.

The pressure that they feel from others used to be a little worse. Not so long ago, just the sight of someone in a mask was read as a reproach, a sanctimonious demand that lockdowns should continue for us all. Or maybe it was taken as “a reminder of how awful the last few years had been,” Lauren Wilde, a COVID-conscious therapist in Washington State, told me—“of how many people had died, of how much it sucked to get COVID.” But now that tension has started to subside. When people walk around in masks in 2025, or insist on having lunch outside even in the dead of winter, they find that their cautious habits earn them fewer angry looks. They’re less reviled than they used to be. They’re more often just ignored.

Amid the nation’s mass indifference, their isolation has only gotten more intense. Their epistemic bubble has been shrinking too. This used to be the group that was most attuned to what “the science” said; the ones who paid attention to the dots painted on the sidewalk, six feet apart. In the past few years, as official rules for social distancing have been revoked, they’ve had to make up new ones for themselves. As standard COVID medicines grew ever more expensive, they’ve had to scour for alternatives. And as basic research on the virus hit a wall, they’ve had no choice but to do their own. “The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said last week, as local health departments braced themselves for funding cuts.

The COVID-conscious people have not abandoned science, Dennis told me. It’s the opposite: They’ve come to think that science has abandoned them.

If the evermaskers seem a little weirder every year, that’s because, in many ways, they haven’t changed at all. At a basic level, their COVID-conscious attitudes may not be so far from the mainstream. Twenty-one percent of Americans still think of the disease as “a major threat” to public health, according to a recent poll from Pew Research Center. Thirty-nine percent say we’re not “taking it seriously enough.” But if 50 million to 100 million adults harbor such concerns, very few are doing much about them. Masking rates were once as high as 88 percent; now they’re close to nil.

For those who still maintain their masking habit—4 percent, says Pew—the whiplash in social norms has been a shock. When masking mandates went away for public transportation, in the spring of 2022, viral videos showed people cheering as they ripped the fabric off their face. Wilde told me she remembered feeling how “it was like, nothing has actually changed, apart from the fact that someone with authority has said you don’t have to do this anymore. COVID is still risky; it’s still a new disease; we don’t know what happens 10 years after you’ve had it.” Why was everyone so quick to abandon those concerns?

The coronavirus never stopped its killing rampage: Hundreds of Americans die from it every week, even now in March of 2025, when the pandemic emergency is over and the virus is theoretically offseason. Nearly 50,000 people died from COVID in the U.S. last year, too. (The disease remains among the nation’s leading causes of death, on par with traffic accidents and suicides.) Yet even those alarming figures seem to matter less to COVID-conscious people than the vaguer risk of long-term complications. “It’s less about death, because if you die that sucks but you’re dead,” said Tess, a 35-year-old public-health researcher who asked to use her first name only, so that her professional work would not be connected to her COVID advocacy. “It’s disability. It’s living through it.” Tess told me that she already has long COVID, with brain fog and some loss of function in her lungs. “I want to maintain whatever health I have, and not make it worse,” she said.

Nancy, a 69-year-old woman who runs two weekly Zooms for COVID-conscious people from her home, and who requested to be identified by only her first name out of concern for her privacy, said that she and many members of her groups were less afraid of death than of a “reduction in our quality of life.” “Some of the data shows that if you keep catching it over and over and over again, that your chances of developing long COVID increase,” she told me, “and it also gradually weakens your immune system.”

Read: Long COVID could be a ‘mass deterioration’ event

Other data tell a different story, though. Some studies do suggest an ever-growing threat of long-term symptoms with each new SARS-CoV-2 infection. But according to the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics, which did perhaps the most thorough tracking of long-COVID rates through late 2022, the risk of long-term complications had been going down with reinfection. And although the coronavirus has produced several major spikes of new infections across the past five years, the proportion of those in the U.S. who report having disabilities has been either stable or increasing at a steady pace (depending on which agency’s data and definitions you consult). That means it hasn’t tracked each COVID wave the way that deaths have. According to one sensible interpretation, the risk of long-term disability was greatest early on in the pandemic, but long COVID’s threat, like the threat of COVID overall, has been fading over time.

The truth, or its best approximation, may be, to some extent, irrelevant. How any given person will perceive a threat is “a deeply psychological phenomenon,” Steven Taylor, a clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia and the author of The New Psychology of Pandemics, told me, and one that is “influenced by values, your past history, your medical history, and your mental-health history.” (In the U.S., at least, people’s sense of risk from COVID, in particular, also has a strong connection to their politics.) Unless someone’s COVID-cautious habits have been causing major problems in their life, there’s no point in trying to discourage them, Taylor said. “I would let people choose their level of comfort with threats. That’s their decision.”

Yes, the evermaskers have assessed the costs and benefits of keeping up precautions. And yes, they say they’re happy with the trade-off, despite the many people who claim to know they’ve chosen wrong.

“There are some things that I miss,” Tess told me. “I miss a good punk-rock show where we’re all sweaty in the pit and that kind of stuff. That’s not necessarily something I’m gonna do now, but I have an approximation of it when I go to an outdoor punk show and I let everybody else go in the pit.” Nancy told me that she and her husband still have active social lives. They converse with neighbors from a distance: “We just holler and say hi to each other. It’s not like we’re living as monks or something, in total isolation.” And then she has all the people from her Zoom groups. “I think I have more friends now than I ever had in my life,” she said.

Certain challenges persist. Private or domestic disagreements over COVID-conscious choices—how to navigate the holidays, what to say to friends, which rules apply to kids—never go away. Nancy and her husband have two grown children and nine grandkids, all of whom have “gone on” from COVID, as she puts it. “There’s always a child that’s sniffling or coughing and you don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “We don’t like to make a big deal about it, so if we meet with them, we usually meet outside and do things outside together, but it’s hard.” Tess said she separated from her husband last year, in part because at one point he’d taken off his mask at work without telling her, got infected, and then passed along the illness. “Somebody who, literally, I just got married to, who I’m supposed to trust, lied to me, took away my agency, and got me sick,” she said. But moving out has not been easy: Any roommate she might find would need to share her views on COVID safety. (For now, she’s still living with her ex in a small apartment in the Bronx.)

Politics provide another potent source of conflict. Many COVID-conscious people are progressives and identify as advocates for those with disabilities. On Instagram, calls for staying COVID safe may be tethered to appeals to anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Zionism. For a set of people who feel a broader sense of crisis in America and despair at recent actions of the U.S. government, these concerns are additive. Having to accept the risk of getting COVID, Wilde told me, is just one more way “to feel like someone is trying to force something on you that you don’t want.”

A version of that complaint was once associated with people on the opposite end of COVID caution: those who resisted lockdowns and refused to wear masks. They voiced frustration, like the evermaskers do today, at a government that neglected their concerns, and at a public-health establishment that failed to meet their needs. Like the evermaskers, they felt forced to find their own approach to staying safe while other people yelled that they were wrong. I asked Wilde if she thought there might be some affinities between her own mindset and the one of parents who are opposed to vaccination, still another group of those who have come to trust their own judgment more than the government’s. “There’s a lot of overlap there. There just is,” she said. “That isn’t to say the people who are anti-vax have valid points at all. It’s just saying—and I say this a lot to the people I work with—being human is really hard.”

People tend to make it easier on themselves by remaining settled in the cultural mainstream. Those who break from that current may end up drifting past the limits of what’s agreed upon by scientists. Wilde gargles mouthwash when she feels at risk of an exposure to COVID; she also uses a nasal spray. She understands the weakness of the evidence—published trials of the cetylpyridinium-chloride mouthwash, for example, have found only the barest hints of its potential as a prophylactic—but what other tools does she have at her disposal? “Maybe these things don’t have any impact at all,” she said. Still, they’ve helped her get through some scary situations—and when it comes to scary situations, she treasures any help at all.

Dennis has a similar attitude. “Does it do anything? I’m not convinced,” he said of the mouthwash. “But, you know, it’s something that I can do.” He doesn’t trust everything he sees on COVID-conscious message boards, but at the very least, they let him know that other people in the world see risks the way he does. That’s important in itself. He said he took a recent flight to Ireland, and a small contingent of people were masking on the plane. One couple even tried to kiss each other with their masks in place. “Their faces did this high-five kind of thing … I was like, That’s really sweet. It just made me smile,” Dennis said. “We’re human beings, we want to belong to a tribe, right? We want to feel that sense of belonging.” Five years ago, it felt like everyone was in his tribe; it felt like all Americans were together in their fear of the unknown. Now that fear provides a rarer bond: togetherness in eccentricity, the communion of avoiding crowds.

The Most Important Ingredient in Chewing Gum

You’re essentially gnawing on plastic.

by Hannah Seo

Updated at 3:31 p.m. on April 1, 2025

At the turn of the 20th century, William Wrigley Jr. was bent on building an empire of gum, and as part of his extensive hustle, he managed to persuade the U.S. Department of War to include his products in soldiers’ rations. His argument—baseless at the time—was that chewing gum had miraculous abilities to quench thirst, stave off hunger, and dissipate nervous tension. But he was right: Scientists have since found that gum chewing can indeed increase concentration, reduce the impulse to snack, alleviate thirst, and improve oral health.

Perhaps that’s why people around the world have had the impulse to gnaw on tacky materials—roots, resins, twigs, blubber, tar made by burning birch bark—for at least 8,000 years. Today, gum is again being marketed as a panacea for wellness. You can buy gum designed to deliver energy, nutrition, stress relief, or joint health; scientists are even developing gums that can protect against influenza, herpes, and COVID. Ironically, this new era of chewing gum is manufactured with a distinctly modern ingredient, one not usually associated with wellness: plastic.

By the time Wrigley began his business venture, Americans had grown accustomed to chewing gum sold as candy-coated balls or packaged sticks. The base of these chewing gums was made from natural substances such as spruce resin and chicle, a natural latex that Aztecs and Mayans chewed for hundreds if not thousands of years. Unfortunately for 20th-century Americans, the chicozapote trees that exude chicle take a long time to grow, and if they are overtapped, they die. Plus, cultivated trees don’t produce nearly as much chicle as wild trees, says Jennifer Mathews, an anthropology professor at Trinity University and the author of Chicle. In the 1950s, chicle harvesters began struggling to meet demand. So gum companies turned to the newest innovations in materials science: synthetic rubbers and plastics.

Today, most companies’ gum base is a proprietary blend of synthetic and natural ingredients: If a packet lists “gum base” as an ingredient, that gum most likely contains synthetic polymers. The FDA allows gum base to contain any of dozens of approved food-grade materials—substances deemed either safe for human consumption or safe to be in contact with food. Many, though, are not substances that people would otherwise think to put in their mouth. They include polyethylene (the most common type of plastic, used in plastic bags and milk jugs), polyvinyl acetate (a plastic also found in glue), and styrene-butadiene rubber (commonly used in car tires). The typical gum base contains two to four types of synthetic plastics or rubbers, Gwendolyn Graff, a confectionery consultant, told me.

Speaking with industry experts, I began to understand that many of gum’s most appealing qualities come from synthetic polymers. Polyvinyl acetate, for example, strengthens the bubble film. “If you blow a bubble, and it starts to get holes in it and deflate, that’s usually an indicator that it doesn’t have polyvinyl acetate,” Graff said. Styrene-butadiene rubber creates a bouncy chewiness that makes gum more likely to stick to itself rather than to surfaces like your teeth. Polyethylene can be used to soften gum so it doesn’t tire out your jaw. Gums with only natural polymers “can feel like they’re going to fall apart in your mouth,” Graff said.

Plastic gum, though, also falls apart, in a way: Gum chewing has been linked to microplastic ingestion. In a study published in December, U.K. researchers had a volunteer chew on a piece of gum for an hour, spitting into test tubes as they went. After an hour of gum chewing, the saliva collected contained more than 250,000 pieces of micro and nano plastics—comparable to the level of microplastics found in a liter of bottled water. In a study presented at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society (which has not yet been peer-reviewed), a graduate student’s saliva contained elevated microplastic levels after she chewed several commercially available gums, including natural ones. The research on gum chewing and microplastics is still limited—these two papers effectively represent analysis of just two people’s post-chew saliva—but gum chewing has also been correlated with higher urine levels of phthalates, plastic-softening chemicals that are known endocrine disruptors.

Scientists are still learning about the health impacts of microplastic ingestion, too. Microplastics find their way into all kinds of foods from packaging or contamination during manufacturing, or because the plants and animals we eat absorb and ingest microplastics themselves. As a result, microplastics have been found in human livers, kidneys, brains, lungs, intestines, placentas, and breast milk, but exactly how our bodies absorb, disperse, and excrete ingested plastic is not very well studied, says Marcus Garcia, who researches the health effects of environmental contaminants at the University of New Mexico. Some research in mice and cultured cells hint that microplastics have the potential to cause damage, and epidemiological research suggests that microplastics are associated with respiratory, digestive, and reproductive issues, as well as colon and lung cancer. But scientists are still trying to understand whether or how microplastics cause disease, which microplastics are most dangerous to human health, and how much microplastic the body can take before seeing any negative effects.

The answer could affect the future of what we choose to eat—or chew. Ingesting tiny plastic particles might seem inevitable, but over the past 10 years or so, Americans have grown understandably fearful about bits of plastic making their way into our food, fretting about microwaving food in plastic containers and drinking from plastic bottles. Gum has, for the most part, not triggered those worries, but in recent years, its popularity had been dropping for other reasons. In a bid to reverse that trend, gum companies are marketing synthetic gum as a tool for wellness. Just like Wrigley, they are betting that Americans will believe in the power of gum to soothe nerves and heal ailments, and that they won’t think too hard about what modern gum really is. For anyone worried about swallowing still more plastic, after all, gum is easy enough to avoid.

This article originally misattributed to Gwendolyn Graff the idea that gum’s strengths come from synthetic polymers.

Texas Never Wanted RFK Jr.’s Unproven Measles Treatment

Kennedy made a show of shipping vitamin A to measles-stricken communities. The state’s public-health department didn’t take up the offer.

by Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., staring down his first major health crisis as the head of Health and Human Services, had a plan. After Texas experienced the first measles death in the United States in a decade, Kennedy told Fox earlier this month that the federal government was delivering vitamin A—an unproven treatment that Kennedy has promoted as an alternative to vaccines—to measles-stricken communities in West Texas “right now.” But a Texas official told me this week that no doses of vitamin A have arrived at the state health department—not because RFK Jr. broke his promise, but because Texas doctors didn’t ask for them.

The doses are available “if we need them,” Lara Anton, the senior press officer for the state public-health department, told me in a statement. But her office, she said, has not requested any, “because healthcare providers have not requested it from us.” Anton had no records of any shipments of vitamin A, budesonide, clarithromycin, or cod-liver oil—all of which Kennedy has said can help with measles—even though the state has received 1,760 additional vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella from the federal government since the middle of February.

When I asked Anton if Texas officials thought vitamin A treatment was useless, she referred me to a state website, which reads, “Vitamin A cannot prevent measles. Vitamin A may be useful as a supplemental treatment once someone has a measles infection, especially if they have a severe case of measles or low vitamin A levels and are under the care of a doctor.” The local health department for Gaines County, the epicenter of the deadly outbreak, told me that it has not received any of the alternative treatments either. (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

In just a few short weeks on the job, Kennedy has broken with decades of public-health precedent in responding to measles. In a March 2 op-ed for Fox, he acknowledged that vaccines “not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity”—only after emphasizing that “the decision to vaccinate is a personal one.” He has also endorsed vitamin A, which is not FDA-approved to treat measles, as a way to substantially decrease deaths from the disease. Vitamin A can reduce the risk of death among children under 2 who are infected, according to a 2005 meta-analysis. However, it has not been shown to effectively prevent the disease, contrary to Kennedy’s claim in his Fox interview.

It’s hardly surprising that a health department wouldn’t want shipments of unproven treatments. But Texas’s decision to deny an offer of help from the top federal health official during a deadly measles outbreak suggests that not everyone in the nation’s public-health apparatus is ready to fall in line behind Kennedy’s unfounded claims. That apparently includes some staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which falls under Kennedy’s purview. On Tuesday, the CDC’s top communications officer announced his resignation in an op-ed lambasting Kennedy’s embrace of alternative measles treatments. Public records I’ve gathered from Texas show that CDC staff are aiding at least one local health department in spreading pro-vaccine messages to the local community. In a series of emails with Texas health workers, for instance, CDC officials workshopped multiple pro-vaccine public-service announcements and helped translate them into Low German and Spanish. “The best way to protect against measles is with the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine,” one flyer read. And a letter from the local health-department executive director, Zachary Holbrooks, that was distributed to parents of unvaccinated schoolchildren stated: “I strongly encourage you to have your child vaccinated as soon as possible.” None of the materials I obtained made any mention of vitamin A.

It’s unclear if those pro-vaccine messages are convincing locals, particularly the Mennonite population at the center of Texas’s outbreak. Last school year, just under 82 percent of kindergartners in Gaines County were vaccinated against measles. Data from the state’s vaccine registry suggest that immunizations are up roughly 10 percent this year compared with the same period in 2024, although Texas has limited visibility on vaccine administration. Holbrooks recently told The Atlantic that three local Mennonite churches had refused the district health department’s request to place a measles-testing site on their property. Meanwhile, residents are clearing out local drugstores’ supplies of vitamin A and cod-liver oil, and showing up to a makeshift clinic that is giving out cod-liver oil. This week, The New York Times reported that some children in the area are taking such high doses of vitamin A that they are showing signs of liver damage.

After casting a key vote to confirm Kennedy as health secretary, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a Republican, told his colleagues that Kennedy would help with “restoring trust in our public-health institutions.” But Kennedy has already made that laudable goal even less achievable. So long as the nation’s top public-health official is propping up purported miracle cures, families in West Texas will be encouraged to believe that not vaccinating their children is a responsible choice. Public-health leaders can’t fix that problem on their own, even if they refuse to play along with Kennedy’s pseudoscientific routine.

The NIH’s Most Reckless Cuts Yet

Ending clinical trials with no warning can put patients at risk.

by Katherine J. Wu

By design, clinical trials ask their participants to take on risk. To develop new vaccines, drugs, or therapies, scientists first have to ask volunteers to try out those interventions, with no guarantee that they’ll work or be free of side effects. To minimize harm, researchers promise to care for and monitor participants through a trial’s end, long enough to collect the data necessary to determine if a therapy is effective and at what cost. End a trial too early, and researchers might not be able to figure out if it worked—or participants may be left worse off than when they started.

But that is exactly what the Trump administration has been asking scientists across the country to do. Since the end of last month, the administration has forced the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, to terminate hundreds of research awards made to scientists across the country. Among those NIH-funded projects are more than 100 clinical trials that now may be forced to halt abruptly, agency officials told me. And those officials expect further orders to cancel hundreds more. (The NIH officials I spoke with for this story requested anonymity for fear of job loss or other retaliation from the federal government.)

The Trump administration has been laying siege to science for months—just this week, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, announced that it will fire 10,000 people. But the federal government’s disregard for clinical trials is one of the most direct illustrations yet that the nation’s new leaders have abandoned people’s health.

Grinding these trials to a screeching halt is “completely reckless,” Katie M. Edwards, a social-work professor at the University of Michigan, told me. Participants might still need to be tapered off a drug regimen to avoid the symptoms of withdrawal, or monitored for reactions to a device implanted in their body; they might depend on the intervention they’re receiving for their mental or physical health. Edwards herself has had three clinical trials terminated this month, including one testing whether an online mentoring program could reduce rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm among trans teens; halting it, she told me, “could lead to a number of negative outcomes, including increasing suicidality.” The canceled trials also include studies on safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy; increasing use of PReP, the HIV preventative, among people with substance-abuse disorders; probiotics and prebiotics for infants born to mothers living with HIV; and improving adherence to breast-cancer and heart-disease drugs.

In boilerplate letters, the federal government has told scientists that their science is no longer consistent with agency priorities or a good use of taxpayer funds, and that the agency will no longer fund their work. That’s tantamount to being told to “stop work immediately,” Matthew Spinelli, an infectious-disease physician at UC San Francisco, told me: He received a termination for a study trialing an antibiotic that can prevent sexually transmitted bacterial infections but that also can cause rare but substantial side effects.

After The Atlantic reached out to NIH for comment, a spokesperson wrote over email that HHS is altering its funding practices to align with new department priorities, and that “it’s important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans while taking the protection of human participants in our supported clinical research very seriously.”

In the past, if an NIH-funded clinical trial needed to halt—in an instance of, say, misconduct or clear harm to patients—the agency could be counted on to provide money and support to ensure that the study’s participants wouldn’t take on further risk and that even prematurely ending work remained ethically intact. Now, though, the government is the one causing risks to patients, well beyond what they signed up for.

Clinical trials are usually designed with a predetermined end date so that researchers can collect the data they need and make sure participants’ efforts don’t go to waste. Generally speaking, trials are halted midway only if it’s in the participants’ best interest—if, say, the treatment being tested is clearly doing more harm than good. Even then, winding down a clinical trial safely can take months as researchers perform final check-ins with participants, collect additional data on safety, and in some cases help make arrangements for additional clinical care—work that requires time, personnel, and funds. “To stop all of a sudden, with no warning and no grace period? I’ve never seen that,” Domenico Accili, the director of the Columbia University Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center, told me.

The Trump administration has said that the projects it’s ending are unscientific or not in service of improving the health of Americans. But as I’ve previously reported, its decisions about which grants to cut have been made seemingly without regard to scientific legitimacy, according to even the NIH officials being forced to sign the cancellation letters. The cuts have variously targeted studies on LGBTQ populations, DEI, health equity, and vaccine uptake; projects in foreign countries; grants that happen to have been housed at universities the Trump administration is sanctioning for other reasons; projects that make mention of COVID-19. This blitz has also hit grants less focused on those topics: Projects on antibodies, genetics, and dementia have been cut simply because—as far as scientists and NIH officials can tell—their titles or descriptions mention words such as diversity.

All of these research grants were awarded on the basis of scientific merit, and to halt them for political reasons is “totally unethical,” Holly Fernandez Lynch, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me: “Once you have asked people to undertake the burden and risk of research participation, you don’t get to then just decide, Oh, we don’t want to do it anymore.”

But that’s the position researchers have been forced into. Without financial resources, they can’t deliver the care and monitoring they promised participants when they enrolled them in their trials—even though they’ve already collected data and personal information. “People are being left in every stage of the research pipeline,” Delivette Castor, an epidemiologist at Columbia, who received a termination for a cervical-cancer-prevention clinical trial, told me. “It is a violation of trust, and all the resources we have put in.”

Lauren Osborne, an ob-gyn at Cornell, told me that she and her colleagues had just started a trial that paired doulas with women on Medicaid, or from racial-minority backgrounds, to test whether an education-focused intervention could reduce postpartum depression and heart problems. After the NIH terminated the study’s grant, the doulas had to call mothers who had given birth days or weeks before to say they could no longer offer help, Osborne told me. Kathleen Sikkema, a clinical psychologist at Columbia, told me she was close to completing her clinical trial, which aimed to improve engagement with HIV care among women in South Africa with a history of sexual trauma, when her termination letter arrived. But halting her work now would mean skipping a final assessment for at least 20 people, to check their viral load and determine their next course of treatment. “That’s terribly needed,” she told me.

Many researchers hit by the NIH’s funding cuts are still trying to figure out ways to safely offboard people from their studies. Some have sought funds from their department or university; some are turning to private donors or pharmaceutical companies, or dipping into money they’ve made as practicing physicians. But those resources are small and spotty. Several researchers told me that, even in a best-case scenario, they likely have just weeks or months of money left. Even now, “I’m hoping at some point I can charge NIH,” Sikkema, who worked with her university to pool funds for the remainder of her study, told me. But “there isn’t an open federal fund that we can charge,” she added. “It’s not completely clear who’s going to pay for it in the end.”

During the NIH’s initial funding freeze, two officials told me, agency officials were told to alert leadership if the halt on payments to certain studies might compromise patient safety, so that exceptions might be considered. And early last month, a subset of clinical trials were among the first studies that NIH leadership said could have their grant funds unfrozen (though many payment halts continued in the weeks after). But on the whole, the NIH’s recent guidance on preserving patient safety has been murky at best, one of the officials said, and added that they were not aware of any exceptions that had ever been made. Another official described the policy on exceptions as “piecemeal permissiveness,” saying that it offered only the guise of safeguarding people in studies. And for grant terminations, scientific staff at NIH have not been allowed to petition for exceptions at all, even if participant safety is clearly on the line, officials told me. “If they are on the list, they are terminated,” one of them said.

A few researchers told me that they had received documents from the NIH saying that they “may request funds to support patient safety and orderly closeout of the project.” None of them, though, was told how exactly they might go about requesting those funds, what the budget might be, what sorts of actions would qualify, or even what counts as “patient safety” or “orderly closeout” under the agency’s new leadership. After the grant terminations began, at least one of the agency’s institutes, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, prepared more specific instructions for researchers on how to navigate closeout procedures, specifying, for instance, that all study participants should be informed of the study’s halt and that “there must be a plan” for any ongoing safety monitoring. But those documents did not accompany the first several rounds of NIH terminations, which began late last month. And although a few researchers told me they were now working with their university to try to seek additional funds from the NIH, they also said they weren’t hopeful that the government would grant their requests—or even honor any payments they did offer.

Even if researchers are able to cobble together the funds to help their participants exit trials safely, halting studies early could still nullify the contributions of the people who enrolled. Studies need a bare-minimum number of data points, and if the target number of participants fails to complete a trial, researchers might not be able to calculate anything about the interventions’ usefulness or safety. Nor can trials easily restart, if the flow of money picks back up. Many studies rely on collecting information at precise, regular intervals; miss just one data point, and an entire analysis can be thrown off. For other studies, skipping a scheduled dose of a drug, or a scheduled check-in with a patient with a progressing condition, can compromise how well an intervention works.

Many of the studies targeted by the Trump administration also focus on populations at higher risk of worse health outcomes, who have been historically neglected by science and medicine; recruiting participants to some of these trials, researchers told me, took years of establishing and maintaining trust, as well as careful partnerships with local leaders. Any betrayals to the commitments researchers made to those people could compromise the ability of scientists to work with them in the future. “Why are people going to be willing to contribute to science and enroll in these studies if they feel like the rug can be pulled out from under them at any time?” Fernandez Lynch told me.

Thiago Arzua, a neuroscientist at Columbia, told me that his research has been affected by the NIH’s recent grant cancellations. But Arzua was also enrolled as a participant in an NIH-terminated study that tracked HIV prevention and transmission among sexual and gender minorities. “It’s pretty sad,” he said, to see years of investment from underserved communities go to waste. The message coming from the government has never been clearer, he and others told me. From the start, the Trump administration has flaunted its lack of interest in advancing science or supporting the people who do it. Now its actions are declaring that it also doesn’t care about the people science is trying to help.

Shayla Love contributed reporting to this story.

The Paradox of Hard Work

Why do people enjoy doing difficult things?

by Alex Hutchinson

There are, at last count, nine different medals you can earn at the Comrades Marathon, a historic 55-mile race that runs between the South African cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg. Gold medals are awarded to the top 10 men and women. The rest depend on hitting certain time standards. To earn a silver medal, for example, you have to finish the race in less than seven and a half hours. To earn a Robert Mtshali medal, named for the first Black runner to complete the race, you have to break 10 hours. And to receive a finisher’s medal and be listed in the official results, you have to break 12 hours. Run any slower than that, and you not only lose out on a medal: After half a day grinding yourself to exhaustion, you aren’t even allowed to finish the race.

As each time threshold approaches, the stadium announcer and spectators count the seconds down. For the final 12-hour deadline, a group of race marshals gathers in the finishing chute. When the countdown reaches zero, they lock arms to block the finish line. Either you make it or you don’t. When I reported on the race for Canadian Running in 2010, the final finisher, in 11:59:59, was a runner named Frikkie Botha, from nearby Mpumalanga. He placed 14,342nd. A stride behind was 48-year-old Dudley Mawona, from the inland town of Graaff-Reinet. The din of spectators’ vuvuzelas crescendoed as he lunged forward and caromed off the race marshals’ blockade.

The tableau at the Comrades finish line evokes the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s depictions of hell, with legions of scantily clad figures (in this case, wiry runners in tiny shorts) writhing in varying degrees of distress under the darkening sky. You can almost hear the moaning and wailing—except that the actual soundtrack is surprisingly cheerful. People are thrilled to have arrived, proud of the effort they’ve put in, and brimming with inexplicable enthusiasm even if they’re massaging inflamed hamstrings or lancing gruesome blisters. This includes a number of the runners who never make it past the race marshals’ impenetrable arms. Mawona accepted his fate with good grace. “I feel disappointed,” he told me for my 2010 story. “But I am glad I was almost there.” Both he and Botha resolved to return the following year.

Read: The Summer Olympics can’t keep up this speed

To say that long-distance runners embrace difficulty is to say the obvious. When you watch many thousands of people happily push themselves through a race that they might not even be allowed to finish, though, you start to get the hint that something deeply human is going on. People like things that are really hard. In fact, the enormity of a task often is why people pursue it in the first place. This is a puzzling phenomenon, when you stop and think about it. It violates all sorts of assumptions about rational action and evolutionary selection and economic theory. Psychologists call it the Effort Paradox.

The term was introduced in 2018 by a University of Toronto social psychologist named Michael Inzlicht, along with colleagues at Brown and Carnegie Mellon. As Outside magazine’s endurance-sports columnist—not to mention a lifelong runner—I was immediately fascinated by the idea. As I wrote at the time, the usual assumption is that effort is a negative. “Toil and trouble,” as Adam Smith called it in The Wealth of Nations back in 1776, subtracts from the value you assign to things. When you buy a coffee table from IKEA, you have to wrestle with a bag of seemingly mismatched screws and some inscrutable pictographic instructions. If you can simply buy the same thing preassembled, Smith and his intellectual heirs predict that you’ll be willing to pay more to avoid the hassle. And it’s not just about money. The law of less work, as formulated by the American psychologist Clark Hull in the 1940s, dictates that given two choices with similar outcomes, any person—or any living organism, for that matter—will choose the option requiring the least effort.

Bizarrely, though, studies have found that we actually value the coffee table we’ve had to painstakingly construct more highly than the identical preassembled version, a phenomenon now known as the IKEA effect. As I wrote for Outside, something like this dynamic applies across all kinds of human behavior. The mountaineer George Mallory famously declared that he wanted to climb Mount Everest “because it’s there.” You can speculate about his other motivations: reaching the highest point in the world, eternal fame, and so on. But the fact remains that many of us head to the mountains with no expectation of celebrity, run marathons in the middle of the pack, and do sudoku puzzles—all activities that, like purchasing Swedish furniture, involve considerable unnecessary effort. The first marathon you run may be motivated by a desire to improve your health or by a Mallory-esque desire to find out what’s on the other side. But the second one is likely fueled by something else.

Inzlicht and his colleagues posed the Effort Paradox to make sense of this odd tendency: Sometimes we value experiences and outcomes (and coffee tables) precisely because they require effort, not in spite of that fact. Inzlicht’s aim was not just to name the phenomenon, but to offer some explanations for why we find both physical and cognitive effort so satisfying.

Broadly, the possibilities he suggests fall into two different buckets: whether the satisfaction comes more from the rewards of hard effort or more from the hard effort itself. In the former camp, one explanation is that rewards obtained from difficult tasks seem extra sweet because of the sharp contrast between the unpleasantness of working hard and the joy of achievement. Another is, basically, self-delusion: If you do something hard without a commensurate payoff, you experience an unpleasant disconnect that you resolve by persuading yourself that the outcome was valuable after all. If I worked so hard to get this, I must really like it, you tell yourself. (Self-delusion might make sense in humans, but is less convincing in other species. Researchers have trained starlings to fly various distances to obtain identical color-coded treats, and found that the birds end up liking the color of treats they had to fly farthest for. A similar effect even shows up in locusts, which aren’t known for their powers of introspection.)

Alternatively, a third theory assumes that people learn over time that working hard leads to desirable outcomes, and so—like Pavlov’s dogs drooling at the sound of his bell—you eventually begin to value effort itself. Beyond the explanations in Inzlicht’s paper, there are other reasons that effort might function as its own reward. For example, an emerging cognitive theory called predictive processing suggests that doing hard things gives us access to new information about both ourselves and the world, an experience that our brains are wired to find pleasurable. The theory remains speculative and its implications are still being debated, but one takeaway when it comes to effort is that if you buy a coffee table, you’ve got a coffee table; if you assemble one, you also gain knowledge not only about how coffee tables are put together, but about your own capabilities.

Read: The myth of ‘I’m bad at math’

Whatever the mechanism, studies of children at play suggest that the Effort Paradox isn’t limited to a subset of masochistic grinders. One preprint study that hasn’t been published yet in a scientific journal has found that, to maximize their fun, kids will opt for harder challenges even if it means they’ll fail more, living up to the philosopher Bernard Suits’s famous definition of games as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” The play literature offers numerous overlapping reasons that kids and adults alike might prefer hard mode, according to Harvard’s Elizabeth Bonawitz: exploration, mastery, autonomy, social connection, aesthetic experience—and even meaning, famously tricky though it is to define.

Inzlicht’s latest experiments support this idea that exerting effort increases feelings of meaning and purpose—a finding that undoubtedly rings true to the non-finishers at Comrades. Fortunately, a precise articulation of the meaning of life isn’t required to explore whether effort contributes to it. “If you ask people whether something is meaningful, they can answer,” Inzlicht says, “but they use their own internal rubric to figure out what that means.” As I’ve reported in The New York Times, Inzlicht and two of his colleagues, Aidan Campbell and Joanne Chung, developed a 10-item Meaningfulness-of-Effort scale that asks people how strongly they agree with statements such as “When I push myself, what I’m doing feels important” and “Doing my best gives me a clear purpose in life.” The scale, which the researchers introduced in a preprint study in 2022, captures differences not in whether people exert effort, but in how they view that effort. “You can imagine that some people are willing to work hard, but go about it from a sense of duty and responsibility,” Inzlicht told me for my Times story. “But other people—call them ‘joyful workers’—this is what they live for. This is what gives them purpose. This is what makes them feel important. This is what helps them make the world make sense.”

The existence of “joyful workers” suggests that, even if the Effort Paradox applies to everyone, it doesn’t apply equally. Where you sit on the Meaningfulness-of-Effort scale probably reflects a changeable mix of nature and nurture. Some people will naturally be drawn to hard effort more than others, the research implies, but people also seemingly can learn to value effort more.  Inzlicht and his colleagues found that people who score highly tend to report greater levels of job and life satisfaction; they make more money and have higher-status jobs; they’re happier (or in more technical terms, have greater subjective well-being). Those findings remain true even when you control for other constructs, such as conscientiousness, which is one of the “Big Five” personality traits that psychologists use to classify people. There has been lots of debate in recent years over whether popular concepts such as “grit” are just new names for old ideas. Meaningfulness of effort is a subcomponent of conscientiousness, Inzlicht says, but it has distinct explanatory power. Willingness to exert effort is important, but how you feel about that effort also seems to matter.

The magazine story I was reporting at the Comrades Marathon was about the ultimate limits of endurance, and what struck me then was how finishing runners, no matter how tired they seemed, would accelerate as soon as the crowd began counting down—evidence, I figured, of the mind’s role in determining physical limits. But my other lasting impression was of the stark delineation between success and failure, and the importance that runners and spectators alike attached to it. The woman next to me turned away rather than watch the final countdown. “I cried last year,” she explained. “It’s just too much to watch.” When you line up at the start of Comrades, you know there’s a very real chance that you won’t finish, despite the months or years of training that you’ve put in. On that day in 2010, as is the case pretty much every year, more than 1,000 runners who started the race didn’t make it to the finish within 12 hours.

It’s not that people love failure. But without the possibility of failing, success is stripped of its meaning and sweetness. The pioneering 19th-century German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt posited an “upside-down U” relationship between stimulus and subjective response: the more intense a stimulus, the more you like it … until, beyond a certain point, you start liking it less. This Wundt curve is invoked to explain why we like art and music that’s complex but not too complex, why video games are most engaging if they deliver an “optimal challenge” that’s neither too easy nor too hard, and why flow states require a task that’s just within your capabilities. The most satisfying challenge, in other words, is neither the hardest nor the easiest.

That’s why Comrades has so many different medals, each with its own time threshold: Everyone needs a goal that’s attainable but not a slam dunk. The Effort Paradox and the allure of optimal challenge don’t mean that you need to turn life into a constant and never-ending struggle, dialing up the difficulty every time you’re in danger of mastering something. But neither should you shy away from toil and trouble, Adam Smith’s reservations notwithstanding. As Inzlicht told me previously, exerting effort “seems to be the key route, maybe the only route, by which you can fulfill certain needs, like the needs for competence and mastery and maybe even self-understanding. You can’t get those without pushing yourself.”

This article has been adapted from Alex Hutchinson’s forthcoming book, The Explorer’s Gene.

An ‘Impossible’ Disease Outbreak in the Alps

In one tiny town, more than a dozen people were diagnosed with the rare neurodegenerative disease ALS. Why?

by Shayla Love

Montchavin

In March 2009, after a long night on duty at the hospital, Emmeline Lagrange took a deep breath and prepared to place a devastating phone call. Lagrange, a neurologist, had diagnosed a 42-year-old woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The woman lived in a small village in the French Alps, an hour and a half drive away from Lagrange’s office in Grenoble Alpes University Hospital. Because ALS is rare, Lagrange expected that the patient’s general practitioner, Valerie Foucault, had never seen a case before.

Snow fell outside Lagrange’s window as she got ready to describe how ALS inevitably paralyzes and kills its victims. But to her surprise, as soon as she shared the diagnosis, Foucault responded, “I know this disease very well, because she is the fourth in my village.”

ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, occurs in roughly two to three people out of every 100,000 in Europe. (The rate is slightly higher in the United States.) But every so often, hot spots emerge. Elevated ALS rates have been observed around a lagoon in France, surrounding a lake in New Hampshire, within a single apartment building in Montreal, and on the eastern—but not western—flank of Italy’s Mount Etna. Such patterns have confounded scientists, who have spent 150 years searching for what causes the disease. Much of the recent research has focused on the genetics of ALS, but clusters provocatively suggest that environmental factors have a leading role. And each new cluster offers scientists a rare chance to clarify what those environmental influences may be—if they can study it fast enough. Many clusters fade away as mysteriously as they once appeared.

After the call, Lagrange was uneasy; she had a hunch about how much work lay ahead of her. For the next decade, she and a team of scientists investigated the cluster in the Alps, which eventually grew to include 16 people—a total 10 times higher than the area’s small population should have produced. Even during that first call, when Lagrange knew about only four cases of ALS, she felt dazed by the implications, and by Foucault’s desperate plea for help. If something in the village was behind the disturbing numbers, Foucault had no idea what it was. “She was really upset,” Lagrange remembers. “She said to me, ‘This is impossible; you must stop this.’”

For some people, the trouble begins in the throat. As their muscles waste, swallowing liquids becomes a strenuous activity. Others may first notice difficulty moving an arm or a leg. “Every day, we see that they lose something,” Foucault said of her patients. “You lose a finger, or you lose your laugh.” Eventually, enough motor neurons in the brain or spinal cord die that people simply cannot breathe. Lou Gehrig died two years after his diagnosis, when he was just 37. Stephen Hawking, an anomaly, lived with ALS until he was 76.

Five to 10 percent of people with ALS have a family member with the disease. In the 2000s, advancements in DNA sequencing led to a swell of genetic research that found that about two-thirds of those familial cases are connected to a handful of genetic mutations. But only one in 10 cases of ALS in which patients have no family history of the disease can be connected to genetic abnormalities. “What we have to then explain is how, in the absence of genetic mutation, you get to the same destination,” Neil Shneider, the director of Columbia’s Eleanor and Lou Gehrig ALS Center, told me.

Scientists have come up with several hypotheses for how ALS develops, each more complicated and harder to study than genetics alone. One suggests that ALS is caused by a combination of genetic disposition and environmental exposures throughout a lifetime. Another suggests that the disease develops after one person receives six cumulative “hits,” which can be genetic mutations, exposures to toxins, and perhaps even lifestyle factors such as smoking.

Elliott Verdier for The Atlantic

Emmeline Lagrange stands in her office at Grenoble University Hospital.

Each time a cluster appears, researchers have tried to pin down the exact environmental hazards, professions, and activities that might be linked to it. After World War II, a neurodegenerative disease that looked just like ALS—though some patients also showed features of Parkinson’s and dementia—surged in Guam, predominantly among the native Chamorro people. “Imagine walking into a village where 25 percent of the people are dying from ALS,” says Paul Alan Cox, an ethnobotanist who studied the outbreak. “It was like an Agatha Christie novel: Who’s the murderer?”

Early research tried to pin the deaths on an unlikely culprit: the highly toxic cycad plant and its seeds, which locals ground into flour to make tortillas. Cox and his colleagues hypothesize that human cells mistake a compound called BMAA found in the plant for another amino acid, leading to misfolded proteins in the brain. Peter Spencer, an environmental neuroscientist at Oregon Health & Science University, has argued for a different explanation: The body converts cycasin, a compound also found in the plant’s seeds, into a toxic chemical that can cause DNA damage and, eventually, neurodegeneration. Each theory faced its own criticism, and a consensus was never reached—except for perhaps an overarching tacit agreement that the environment was somehow integral to the story. By the end of the 20th century, the Guam cluster had all but vanished.

Genetic mutations are precise; the world is messy. This is partly why ALS research still focuses on genes, Evelyn Talbott, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told me. It’s also why clusters, muddled as they might be, are so valuable: They give scientists the chance to find what’s lurking in the mess.

Montchavin was a mining town until 1886, when the mine closed, leaving the village largely deserted. In 1973, it was connected to a larger network of winter-tourism destinations in the Alps. On a sunny December afternoon, the week before ski season officially began, I met Foucault outside of the church in the center of Bellentre, a town of 900 whose borders include Montchavin and neighboring villages. The mountains loomed over us, not yet capped with much snow, as she greeted me in a puffer coat. She led me briskly up a steep hill, chatting in a mix of French and English, until we arrived at her home, which she occasionally uses as an office to see patients.

Foucault made us a pot of black tea, then set down a notepad of scrawled diagnoses and death dates on the table beside her. The first person Foucault knew with ALS lived a stone’s throw from where we were sitting, in a house down the hill; he had been diagnosed in 1991. The second case was a ski instructor, Daniel, who lived in Montchavin and had a chalet near Les Coches, a ski village five minutes up a switchback road by car. Daniel, whose family requested that I use only his first name for medical privacy, had told Foucault in 2000 that he was having trouble speaking, so she’d sent him to a larynx specialist. When the specialist found nothing wrong with his throat, Daniel was referred to a neurologist in Grenoble, who diagnosed him with ALS.

In 2005, after Foucault heard that the husband of one of her general-medicine patients had been diagnosed with ALS, she called her father, a heart doctor in Normandy. “It’s not normal,” he told her. A few years later, she saw one of her patients, the 42-year-old woman, in the village center with her arm hanging limp from her body. Even before the woman received her ALS diagnosis from Lagrange, Foucault suspected the worst.

Elliott Verdier for The Atlantic

Valerie Foucault stands in her backyard in Bellentre.

After her call with Foucault, Lagrange assembled a team of neurologists and collaborators from the French government to search for an environmental spark that might have set off the cluster in Montchavin. They tested for heavy metals in the drinking water, toxins in the soil, and pollutants in the air. When the village was turned into a ski destination in the 1970s, builders had repurposed wood from old train cars to build garden beds—so the team checked the environment for creosote, a chemical used in the manufacture of those train cars. They screened for compounds from an artificial snow used in the ’80s. They checked gardens, wells, and even the brain of one deceased ALS patient. Years passed, and nothing significant was found.

The day after I had tea with Foucault, I visited Lagrange at the hospital. Her voice faltered as she ruffled through the piles of papers from their investigation on her desk. She’d cared for most of Montchavin’s ALS patients from their diagnosis to death. She worked in Montchavin on the weekends and took her family vacations there. “I felt responsible for them,” she said. “People were telling me, This is genetic. They all live together; they must be cousins. I knew it was not so.” Lagrange’s team had tested the genomes of 12 people in the Montchavin cluster, and none had mutations that were associated with ALS. Nor did any of the patients have parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents with ALS.

But their lives did overlap in other meaningful ways. The first Montchavin cases worked together as ski instructors and had chalets in a wooded patch of land called L’Orgère, up the mountain. Many of them hiked together; others simply enjoyed spending time in nature. “We thought they must have something in common, something that they would eat or drink,” Lagrange told me, sitting in her desk chair in a white lab coat and thick brown-framed glasses. She handed me a daunting packet: a questionnaire she’d developed for the ALS patients, their families, and hundreds of people without the disease who lived in the area. The survey, which took about three hours to complete, asked about lifestyle, eating habits, hobbies, jobs, everywhere they had lived, and more. It revealed that the ALS patients consistently ate three foods that the controls didn’t: game, dandelion greens, and wild mushrooms.

Lagrange’s team didn’t immediately suspect the mushrooms. But Spencer, the environmental neuroscientist in Oregon, did after he saw one of Lagrange’s colleagues present on the Montchavin cluster at a 2017 conference. Having researched the role of the cycad seed in the Guam cluster, Spencer knew that some mushrooms contain toxins that can powerfully affect the nervous system.

Spencer joined the research group, and in 2018, he accompanied Lagrange to Montchavin to distribute more surveys and conduct in-person interviews about the victims’ and other locals’ diets—the pair had particular interest in people’s mushroom consumption. From the responses, the team learned that the ALS patients were not the only mushroom foragers in town, but they shared an affinity for a particular species that local interviewees without ALS said they never touched: the false morel.

Elliott Verdier for The Atlantic

The streets of Montchavin are quiet before ski season begins.

A false morel looks like a brain that has been left out in the sun. Its cap is a shriveled mass of brown folds, darker than the caramel hue of the true morel. One species, Gyromitra esculenta, grew around Montchavin and was especially abundant near the ski chalets in spring if enough snow had fallen the preceding winter. France has a rich foraging culture, and the false morel was just one of many species mushroom enthusiasts in Montchavin might pick up to sauté with butter and herbs. The false morel contains gyromitrin, a toxin that sickens some number of foragers around the world every year; half of the ALS victims in Montchavin reported a time when they had acute mushroom poisoning. And according to Spencer, the human body may also metabolize gyromitrin into a compound that, over time, might lead to similar DNA damage as cycad seeds.

No one can yet say that the false morel caused ALS in Montchavin; Lagrange plans to test the mushroom or its toxin in animal models to help establish whether it leads to neurodegeneration. Nevertheless, Spencer feels that the connection between Montchavin and Guam is profound—that the cluster in the Alps is another indication that environmental triggers can be strongly associated with neurodegenerative disease.

Once you start looking, the sheer variety of potential environmental catalysts for ALS becomes overwhelming: pesticides, heavy metals, air pollution, bodies of water with cyanobacteria blooms. Military service is associated with higher ALS risk, as is being a professional football player, a painter, a farmer, or a mechanic. Because of how wide-ranging these findings are, some researchers doubt the utility of environmental research for people with ALS. Maybe the causes are too varied to add up to a meaningful story about ALS, and each leads to clusters in a different way. Or perhaps, Jeffrey Rothstein, a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine neurologist, told me, a cluster means nothing; it’s simply a rare statistical aberration. “Patients are always looking for some reason why they have such a terrible disease,” he said. “There’s been plenty of blips like this over time in ALS, and each one has its own little thought of what’s causing it, and they’ve all gone nowhere.”

“A lot of people look askew to the idea that there are clusters,” Eva Feldman, a neurologist at the University of Michigan, told me. But she sees evidence of clusters all the time in her practice. Once, she saw three women with ALS who’d grown up within blocks of one another in the Grand Rapids area. Her research has shown an association between ALS and organic pollutants, particularly pesticides. Feldman thinks that the importance and scope of environmental triggers for ALS can be pinpointed only by investigating clusters more thoroughly. To start, she told me, doctors should be required to disclose every case of ALS to state officials. Feldman is also planning what she says is the first-ever prospective study on ALS in the U.S., following 4,000 healthy production workers in Michigan. She believes that clusters have significance and that because doctors can’t do much to stop ALS once it starts, “we would be naive to throw out any new ideas” about how to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

Even for the people whose lives were upended by the Montchavin cluster, the idea that mushrooms could be linked to such suffering can be difficult to accept. Those who ate them knew the mushrooms could cause unpleasant side effects, but they believed that cooking them removed most of the danger. When I asked Claude Houbart, whose father, Gilles, died in 2019, about his mushroom habits, she called her mother and put her on speakerphone. Claude’s mother said she knew Gilles ate false morels, but she never cooked them for herself or the family—simply because she didn’t want to risk upset stomachs.

Daniel, Foucault’s second ALS patient, also kept his foraging hobby out of the home. He never ate false morels in front of his wife, Brigitte, though she knew he picked wild mushrooms with friends. “I am a bit reluctant when it comes to mushrooms; I would have never cooked them,” Brigitte told me, sitting at her kitchen table in Montchavin, surrounded by photos of Daniel and their now-adult children. After Daniel died in 2008, Brigitte and her family spread his ashes in the woods where he’d spent so much of his time. “He didn’t want a tomb like everyone else,” she said. “When we walk in the forest, we think about him.”

Elliott Verdier for The Atlantic

Brigitte sits in her home in Montchavin.

Hervé Fino, a retired vacation-company manager who has lived in the Alps for 41 years, learned to forage in Montchavin. Bundled in a plaid overcoat inside a wood-paneled rental chalet, Fino recalled local foragers telling him that false morels were edible as long as they were well cooked, but he never ate the mushrooms himself, fearing their digestive effects. Fino told me about one of his friends who regularly gathered false morels, and once made himself a false-morel omelet when his wife was out of town. “He was sick for two days, very ill,” Fino said. Later, that same friend was diagnosed with ALS. He died by suicide.

In a gruff voice, Fino speculated about what besides the mushroom might have caused the disease. His friend fell into an icy-cold brook two days before he was diagnosed—“Perhaps the shock triggered the disease?” Another woman owned a failing restaurant next to the cable car—maybe the stress had something to do with it. He shrugged his shoulders. Those events didn’t seem right either, not momentous enough to so dramatically alter someone’s fate. Maybe no single explanation ever will. Claude told me she understands why people are skeptical. “Eating a mushroom and then dying in that way?” she said. “Come on.”

Before leaving Montchavin, I walked through L’Orgère, the area where the first ALS patients had their ski cabins. The windows were dark, and below, the village of Montchavin was mostly empty before the tourist season began. Clumps of snow started to fall, hopefully enough to satisfy the skiers. Recent winters in the French Alps have been warm and dry—not the right conditions for false morels. “There are no more Gyromitra in Montchavin,” Lagrange said. In her view, Montchavin has joined the ranks of ALS clusters come and gone; no one has been diagnosed there since 2019, and it’s been longer since Lagrange’s team has turned up a fresh false-morel specimen.

Even so, on my walk, I couldn’t help but scan for mushrooms, nor could I shake the feeling that my surroundings were not as benign as I’d once believed. Fino said he still keeps an eye out for false morels too. He would never pluck them from the ground to bring home, and yet, he hasn’t stopped looking. One day in 2023, after he parked his car near a ski lift, his gaze caught on a lumpy spot near his feet. Two dark-brown mushrooms stuck out of the damp soil.

Elliott Verdier for The Atlantic

Hervé Fino walks in the snow near Montchavin.

Video | The Atlantic

Sexes | The Atlantic

Education | The Atlantic

Science | The Atlantic

- The End of College Life

- The Truth About Trump’s Greenland Campaign

- Texas Never Wanted RFK Jr.’s Unproven Measles Treatment

- The NIH’s Most Reckless Cuts Yet

- The Paradox of Hard Work

The End of College Life

If they persist, Donald Trump’s attacks on universities will destroy a cornerstone of American life.

by Ian Bogost

The start of spring semester is a hopeful time on college campuses. Students fill the quads and walkways, wearing salmon shorts or strappy tank tops. Music plays; Frisbees fly. As a career academic, I have been a party to this catalog-cover scene for more than 30 years running. It looks made-up, but it is real. Every year in the United States, almost 20 million people go to college, representing every race, ethnicity, and social class. This is college in America—or it has been for a long time.

But college life as we know it may soon come to an end. Since January, the Trump administration has frozen, canceled, or substantially cut billions of dollars in federal grants to universities. Johns Hopkins has had to fire more than 2,000 workers. The University of California has frozen staff hiring across all 10 of its campuses. Many other schools have cut back on graduate admissions. And international students and faculty have been placed at such high risk of detainment, deportation, or imprisonment that Brown University advised its own to avoid any travel outside the country for the foreseeable future.

Higher education is in chaos, and professors and administrators are sounding the alarm. The targeting of Columbia University, where $400 million in federal grants and contracts have been canceled in retribution for its failure to address campus anti-Semitism and unruly protests against the war in Gaza, has inspired particular distress. Such blunt coercion, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, amounts to “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare.” In The New York Times, the Yale English professor Meghan O’Rourke called it and related policies “an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist.”

Those assessments are correct, but they’re also incomplete. So are the many paeans to the social and economic benefits of university research that schools have posted in the past two months. Yes, academic freedom is at stake, along with scientific progress. But the government’s attacks also threaten something far more tangible to future college students and their parents. The entire undergraduate experience at residential four-year schools—the brochure-ready college life that you may once have experienced yourself, and to which your children may aspire—is itself at risk of ruination.

Read: A new kind of crisis for American universities

Few administrators have talked about this risk in public, but they take a different tone in private as they try to figure out how broken budgets can be fixed. I’ve spent the past month discussing the government’s campaign to weaken higher learning with current and former college presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, and staff. And in the course of these informal, sometimes panicked text exchanges, emails, and phone calls, I’ve come to understand that the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends—and that calamity could arrive sooner than people expect.

Any one of the Trump administration’s attacks on research universities, let alone all of them together, could upend the college experience for millions of Americans. What’s at stake is far from trivial: Forget the Frisbees on the quad; think of what it means to go to college in this country. Think of the middle-class ideal that has persisted for most of a century: earning a degree and starting a career, yes, but also moving away from home, testing limits, joining new communities, becoming an adult.

This might all be changing for fancy private schools and giant public universities alike. If you, or your son, or your daughter, are in college now, or are planning to enroll in the years ahead, you should be worried.

The familiar image of campus life was well established by the early 20th century. Whether a student was enrolled at Yale or Ohio State, they could expect to find the same mix of fraternities, coursework, and college sports; the same commingling of parties and protests.

At first that experience was limited to the wealthy. The American approach to higher ed had arisen from a melting pot of influences, some homegrown and others pulled from overseas. U.S. schools combined the practicality of land-grant institutions with the research focus of German universities. They borrowed also from British residential colleges, adopting both pastoral campuses and an aristocratic temperament. But after World War II, U.S. higher education was transformed. It quickly spread into the middle class, and helped expand it. The GI Bill, among many other efforts by the government, made college more accessible. Federal funding for research turned the college campus into a source of valuable expertise, and the locus for its own, growing set of jobs. And the rise of the knowledge economy made the skills one learned in college more desirable for all. In 1940, only 5 percent of American adults had earned a bachelor’s degree. By 1960, 45 percent of high-school graduates were enrolled in college; by 1997, that figure reached 67 percent.

All of this seems natural to Americans, but it was, and is, an unusual way to handle higher learning. Elsewhere in the world, colleges are not defined as mediators between childhood and adulthood. They may not be specific places where a student “goes” (as in the common formulation “I went to college”) but rather sets of nondescript buildings interwoven with cities. Only in America could “college” refer to the amalgamation of a coming-of-age experience and a credentialing service, based in a planned community that was mainly built to facilitate scientific research but also provides diversion, dining, and professional-quality sporting events.

As this peculiar form of college life expanded, Americans became attached to it. Many meet their future spouses while in college, then settle down not far away from where they went to school. Many cheer for their alma mater’s teams on television. Many send their alma mater money every year. College life stretches far beyond the years they spend on campus. In a way, it even stretches beyond the people who take part in it directly. It imbues the culture.

But creating this experience has always been just one of many, varied roles that schools must play. Tens of thousands of people—undergraduates, but also faculty researchers, administrative staff, and residential-life personnel—might go about their business on a given campus unaware of the purposes of those with whom they cross paths. Amid this web of private factions and concerns, the day-to-day routines of students—their “college experience”—can be a fragile thing. One part of that experience is learning: going to class, pursuing a major, studying, doing research, and completing a thesis. But for the schools, the cost of providing these activities doesn’t balance with tuition revenue. In 2024, Columbia spent about $3 billion on instructional expenses, facilities costs, and operations. It took in about $1.75 billion in tuition and fees (such as room and board). The balance is made up by combining revenue from all across the campus, including money that comes in from its investments, for example, or from taking care of patients at its hospital.

That’s why even just the Trump administration’s first strike against its targets—a mass curtailment of science-research funding—could end up being felt by students right away. At research universities, federal grant dollars may represent 15 to 25 percent of overall budgets. Even schools with huge endowments—Columbia’s is about $15 billion, for example—lack an easy way to fill the gaps, because that money may be spread across thousands of accounts, each of which may have rules for how it can be spent. Cutting grant dollars so substantially and unexpectedly cannot be addressed in a way that limits the impacts of those cuts to research alone. Something else will have to give.

Read: America will sacrifice anything for the college experience

If a school’s athletics program is unable to cover its own costs, it may need to scale back spending on its sports teams. I’ve also heard from colleagues at schools across the country that construction projects have been scrapped, that study-abroad programs are getting canceled, and that career services face cuts. In the meantime, faculty hiring freezes such as those adopted at Harvard, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Vermont could mean that fewer classes will be taught next year.

And all of that could be just the beginning. About one-third of U.S. college students rely on federal Pell grants, a financial-aid program for low-income families. That program was already facing a shortfall, and now the Trump administration is dismantling the Department of Education and its Office of Federal Student Aid. The White House claims that financial-aid programs will be unaffected, but personnel who manage those grants, other loans, and federal work-study programs now say they are unable to carry out their duties effectively. For students who rely on these funds, even short disruptions could end their college aspirations.

In the meantime, the need-blind admissions and no-loan financial-aid packages that many elite private universities have adopted over the past decade may start to seem untenable amid a budget crunch; top schools could focus on enrolling students whose families can pay top dollar, at the expense of everybody else. Public universities could respond to their duress by bringing in more, higher-paying students from out of state. (That trend is preexisting, but it could get much worse.) And those who can’t afford the rising costs would be relegated to community colleges and online degrees—useful options, but far removed from the cherished image of American higher education.

The point is this: It’s not just research; all of the trappings of college life are potentially at risk, and soon. If the campus experience is able to survive, it may revert to a more elitist, century-old version of itself, where the sons and daughters of oligarchs are among the only students on its lawns.

Those who plan to study the humanities may have the most to lose. The speed and scale of funding cuts demand immediate action, one top administrator at a state flagship university told me, and that could put programs in English, natural languages, art history, and the like into the crosshairs.

Doctoral students in such fields are mostly paid out of general university funds, which means that their salaries could easily be reclaimed and used as filler for any budgetary holes. (In contrast, money tied to research grants must be spent in certain ways.) But these same grad students also teach large numbers of undergraduates, so losing them might cause a university’s course catalog to shrink. When fewer people are on campus to teach humanities classes, fewer humanities classes will be taught on campus.

It doesn’t help that the programs the White House seems most interested in targeting are found in the humanities. At Columbia, for example, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies has been stripped of its independence in accordance with one of the Trump administration’s specific demands. Another, related problem is that the humanities faculty are already alienated from the grant-funded research mission of the postwar university. Professors of cultural studies, or history, or the arts, have long seen themselves as critics of institutions, including the universities that employ them. At Columbia and elsewhere, the attack on research funding is only worsening intrafaculty resentments that have been felt for decades.

The present crisis also carries existential risks for general education, the part of college that requires students to take courses from across the curriculum. Some humanities departments with shrinking majors have been able to persevere in part by fostering humanistic education and scholarship on campus. But the state-flagship-university administrator said that just this sort of work may start to seem expendable, at a time when STEM investments are imperiled.

Read: The first year of AI college ends in ruin

For the coming crop of undergraduates, cuts to the humanities, paired with the collapse of general education, would alter the foundations of their college experience. The long-standing idea that you go to college to discover your interests and abilities—to “find yourself”—would be replaced by a full embrace of professional training. Admittedly, this change has already been in the works for years, even at prestigious schools: The rising cost of college makes experimentation more difficult to justify, and students have grown more market-focused over time. Up until this point, even the most practical-minded among our undergraduates could still balance their vocational majors with breadth-giving minors, or see the benefits of merely a passing exposure to other fields and forms of inquiry. But now the university—a home for all knowledge, universally—could be forced to downsize its ambition.

“Our problem in part is a failure of imagination,” Lee Bollinger, a former Columbia president, told The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month. “We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions.” Now the most frightening versions are taking shape, as specters in the hallways of the ivory tower. Jobs are being cut, labs closed, building projects canceled. Faculty members may decide that their devotion to the pursuit of knowledge may not be worth the occupational risk. Those in science, medicine, and engineering whose grants have been withheld may start exiting for jobs abroad or in industry while they still can.

The college experience could very soon be one that bears little semblance to the classic picture. Your kid could end up on a campus with reduced student services and activities, aging rec centers, shrunken-down humanities departments, less prestigious faculty, and a class cohort that has been stripped of foreign students, and also thinned of anyone who happens not to be well-off. It could be a dreary and degraded version of the life at school that you may have once enjoyed yourself.

College students’ prospects would have been slightly better if the schools had seen this coming. Attacks on higher education are not new, but they have never been waged at this level and this speed. The government has at other times threatened to withhold funds from universities in order to enforce federal law, but such examples have been “rare and marginal,” David Labaree, a Stanford historian who studies higher education, told me. That may be why no university in America was prepared for this assault, and none seems ready to respond.

Neither the White House nor the Department of Education responded to a request for comment for this story. But even the most enthusiastic advocates for going after higher ed may have been surprised by the intensity of the Trump administration’s actions. Max Eden, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, suggested in an essay for the Washington Examiner in December that the new regime, and its then-presumptive education secretary, Linda McMahon, should increase the endowment tax on universities and threaten to withhold federal funds to bring them into line on matters of DEI and anti-Semitism. “To scare universities straight, McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp,” he wrote. “She should simply destroy Columbia University.”

Eden, who did not respond to a request to comment for this story, seemed to expect at least some kind of formal process for this scalping. In the bloodthirsty scenario laid out in his op-ed, McMahon would threaten Columbia before cutting off its funds. In fact, the Trump administration cut off those funds just days after McMahon had been confirmed, and before demands were even made. Then it pressed for multiple concessions before the school would have any opportunity at all to negotiate for the funding to restart. The Justice Department attorney Leo Terrell insisted that the school was still “not even close” to having its funds unfrozen; the next day, Columbia gave in.

For two months now, universities have had no idea what, if anything, might stave off further punishments. The state-flagship-university official I spoke with admitted to hoping that the problem will just go away. Perhaps one scalp will be enough, a message sent. For the moment, though, the demands themselves (whatever those might be for different schools) seem less destructive than the sudden, chaotic application of extreme financial leverage: “It’s all arson and no architecture,” the official said. Universities might be amenable to adjusting the terms of their relationship with the federal government, but they cannot do so quickly and under such duress. The Trump administration appears to want them not to talk, but to die.

As for future college students and their parents, the campus experience they expect—the one that generations of Americans took for granted—is no longer guaranteed. Here on campus, the undergraduates seem unaware of this alarming fact. The crisis for universities may be existential, but another spring is blooming on the quad. College has persisted for a whole lifetime in its present form, in a pastoral setting, underwritten by federally funded research, with football crowds cheering in the distance. Last week, a student in my course on artificial intelligence bounded into the lecture hall, full of energy and optimism. “How was your break?” she asked. I’d designed the class to give undergraduates from across the university insights into the changes AI might wreak on their future professions, but just then I found myself wondering more about the future of my own. Not because technology may disrupt it, but because my own government seems intent on destroying it. “It was good,” I said, faking a smile, unsure of what to say. “It was good.”

The Truth About Trump’s Greenland Campaign

When the president talks about security in the Arctic, he’s talking about climate change.

by Brett Simpson

President Donald Trump has made his fixation on Greenland abundantly clear—enough so to unnerve many of the people who live there. “I think Greenland is going to be something that maybe is in our future,” he told reporters this week, once again teasing the notion of annexation. Vice President J. D. Vance is traveling there today, after what he called the “excitement” around his wife’s plan to attend a famous dogsledding race. As part of the trip, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright were scheduled to visit a U.S. military base; Greenland’s prime minister, Mute B. Egede, called the visit a “provocation.” Now dogsledding is out, and the entire delegation will together travel to the base.

Their aim, the vice president said in a video on X, is to check up on Greenland’s security, because unnamed other countries could “use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States.” And these are real concerns for the United States, rooted in climate change: As polar ice melts away, superpowers are vying for newly open shipping routes in the Arctic Ocean and largely unexplored mineral and fossil-fuel reserves. Arctic warming could pose a direct threat to America’s security interests too: Alaska could have new vulnerabilities to both China and Russia; changes in ocean salinity and temperature might interfere with submarine detection systems; the extremes of climate change, including permafrost thaw in Russia, could drive economic instability, social unrest, and territorial claims.

During the Biden administration, the U.S. military and NATO had both started to treat global warming in the Arctic as a matter of real military concern. Whether that will continue under Trump is an open question. Even as the president has tried to erase U.S.-government action on climate change, when he talks about Greenland, he’s tacitly acknowledging that rising temperatures are rapidly changing that part of the world—and U.S. interests there.

“This is a threat environment we haven’t encountered in living history,” Marisol Maddox, a climate-security specialist at Dartmouth’s Institute of Arctic Studies, told me. For decades, the world’s response to climate change has been one of prevention, driven by scientists and diplomats. The Trump administration is openly rejecting that approach. But as the more dramatic impacts of climate change become reality, even a president who wants to ignore its risks may have no choice in the matter.

In recent years, the world’s largest military apparatuses—the U.S. Department of Defense and NATO—have added climate change to their war games. Both DOD and NATO have started regularly assessing how climate risks could affect both military and civilian security, and NATO opened the Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence in Montreal. In the U.S., national intelligence agencies “are thinking about strategic surprise” from climate change, Julie Pullen, a climate scientist who’s part of a congressionally mandated advisory group of climate-security experts, told me. Just as, for instance, the Defense Intelligence Agency might have to weigh the possibility that Iran might one day have nuclear weapons, intelligence officials should consider the nonzero chance of the Eastern Seaboard going underwater, she said.

A handful of other countries—Germany, Australia, Japan, and several small island states—also have a policy for climate security, and many NATO states refer to such aims in their security agenda. But the U.S. has been leading the world in thinking seriously and systematically about these realities. Although this shift happened during the Biden administration, Sherri Goodman, who served as the deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security, told me that in the U.S., this push had been a nonpartisan effort and that for the military, “it’s all about risk.” She’s seen four-star generals go from treating climate change with skepticism to facing it like any challenge the military must prepare for.

The second Trump administration doesn’t exactly see it that way. After CNN reported on DOD plans to cut climate programs earlier this month, for instance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth affirmed on X, quite bluntly, that the department “does not do climate change crap.” References to climate change have been fast disappearing from major agency websites—including the entire Department of Defense Climate Resilience Portal. In response to a request for comment, a DOD spokesperson told me that the department “is eliminating climate-change programs and initiatives” and that “climate change is not part of the department’s warfighting mission nor the president’s priorities.”

But the logic of climate security still holds. As the region’s ice-covered buffer zone opens up, “we need to be very mindful of the changes that are taking place, and posture to respond,” Iris Ferguson, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Arctic and global resilience, told me. Until now, the world has opted to respond to such changes by trying to reduce emissions through climate diplomacy. But those reductions aren’t happening as climate diplomacy promised. In fact, in October 2024, a United Nations report found that atmospheric carbon dioxide was increasing “faster than any time experienced during human existence.” At some point, the U.S. military might start to consider its own, more direct options for responding.

Assuming that greenhouse-gas emissions keep rising, scientists predict that climate change will have abrupt, irreversible effects on the planet—the only question is when. For instance, they’ve been tracking the potential slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, an ocean-circulation mechanism that regulates global temperatures. If the AMOC eventually collapses, sea levels along parts of the East Coast could rise by up to a meter, and temperatures across Europe could drop dramatically, disrupting the global food supply. (Agriculture in Great Britain, for instance, could be largely wiped out.) Scientists are still debating if and how quickly the AMOC’s collapse might occur, but recently some have begun to warn that it could happen within just a few decades.

If the world is heading that rapidly toward an irreversible tipping point, “that’s where climate interventions start to make a lot of sense” for the U.S. government, Pullen told me. Sandia National Laboratories, the Albuquerque lab dedicated to national security, is investigating technologies that could slow down or reverse the rise of global temperatures. Scientists and engineers from the lab have, for instance, simulated the effects of releasing several million metric tons of sulfur dioxide from planes circling above the Arctic. Those chemicals would reflect sunlight, casting a cooling shade over the planet’s surface and dropping temperatures over several decades. Eventually, some Arctic sea ice might be restored too. (The Department of Energy, which oversees Sandia, did not comment on whether these efforts would continue in the Trump administration.)

To date, the scientific community has largely rejected geoengineering as an overly risky gamble. And injecting chemicals into the stratosphere does present serious ethical and governance challenges. This plan is impossible to test at scale before deploying, rendering most consequences both unknown and possibly irreversible. Any kind of responsible management would require unprecedented international cooperation, potentially including a new multinational body to govern geoengineering. As President Trump casts doubt on NATO, that level of global cooperation seems less likely all the time. And if injections stopped (whether because governance or the technology itself failed), many models suggest that the world could plunge into “termination shock”—rapid global heating with consequences potentially worse than if we’d never used this strategy at all.

Sandia’s simulations are just that: simulations. But Maddox believes that the U.S. government should continue exploring even the most drastic options. Failing to mitigate climate change increases the odds “that we’ll have to rely on a technology that’s pretty extreme,” she said. “When multiple catastrophic events converge at the same time and public outcry reaches a panic level, the government must be ready with options.”

So far this term, Trump has acted as if climate change does not matter: He has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, announced plans to reopen the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas drilling, and paused new offshore-wind development and Inflation Reduction Act clean-energy funding. But if the president’s bid for Greenland—or the U.S. military’s quiet cooperation with Canada to boost Arctic defenses—is any indication, the U.S. is weighing its options for a warmer future. “We live in the real world,” Evan Bloom, a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute and former State Department official, told me. “The military and other agencies will continue to take climate change into account, because they have to.” When he hears Trump talk about Greenland, he hears the president speaking about the geopolitics of climate change—“whether he’s willing to call it that or not.”

Texas Never Wanted RFK Jr.’s Unproven Measles Treatment

Kennedy made a show of shipping vitamin A to measles-stricken communities. The state’s public-health department didn’t take up the offer.

by Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., staring down his first major health crisis as the head of Health and Human Services, had a plan. After Texas experienced the first measles death in the United States in a decade, Kennedy told Fox earlier this month that the federal government was delivering vitamin A—an unproven treatment that Kennedy has promoted as an alternative to vaccines—to measles-stricken communities in West Texas “right now.” But a Texas official told me this week that no doses of vitamin A have arrived at the state health department—not because RFK Jr. broke his promise, but because Texas doctors didn’t ask for them.

The doses are available “if we need them,” Lara Anton, the senior press officer for the state public-health department, told me in a statement. But her office, she said, has not requested any, “because healthcare providers have not requested it from us.” Anton had no records of any shipments of vitamin A, budesonide, clarithromycin, or cod-liver oil—all of which Kennedy has said can help with measles—even though the state has received 1,760 additional vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella from the federal government since the middle of February.

When I asked Anton if Texas officials thought vitamin A treatment was useless, she referred me to a state website, which reads, “Vitamin A cannot prevent measles. Vitamin A may be useful as a supplemental treatment once someone has a measles infection, especially if they have a severe case of measles or low vitamin A levels and are under the care of a doctor.” The local health department for Gaines County, the epicenter of the deadly outbreak, told me that it has not received any of the alternative treatments either. (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

In just a few short weeks on the job, Kennedy has broken with decades of public-health precedent in responding to measles. In a March 2 op-ed for Fox, he acknowledged that vaccines “not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity”—only after emphasizing that “the decision to vaccinate is a personal one.” He has also endorsed vitamin A, which is not FDA-approved to treat measles, as a way to substantially decrease deaths from the disease. Vitamin A can reduce the risk of death among children under 2 who are infected, according to a 2005 meta-analysis. However, it has not been shown to effectively prevent the disease, contrary to Kennedy’s claim in his Fox interview.

It’s hardly surprising that a health department wouldn’t want shipments of unproven treatments. But Texas’s decision to deny an offer of help from the top federal health official during a deadly measles outbreak suggests that not everyone in the nation’s public-health apparatus is ready to fall in line behind Kennedy’s unfounded claims. That apparently includes some staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which falls under Kennedy’s purview. On Tuesday, the CDC’s top communications officer announced his resignation in an op-ed lambasting Kennedy’s embrace of alternative measles treatments. Public records I’ve gathered from Texas show that CDC staff are aiding at least one local health department in spreading pro-vaccine messages to the local community. In a series of emails with Texas health workers, for instance, CDC officials workshopped multiple pro-vaccine public-service announcements and helped translate them into Low German and Spanish. “The best way to protect against measles is with the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine,” one flyer read. And a letter from the local health-department executive director, Zachary Holbrooks, that was distributed to parents of unvaccinated schoolchildren stated: “I strongly encourage you to have your child vaccinated as soon as possible.” None of the materials I obtained made any mention of vitamin A.

It’s unclear if those pro-vaccine messages are convincing locals, particularly the Mennonite population at the center of Texas’s outbreak. Last school year, just under 82 percent of kindergartners in Gaines County were vaccinated against measles. Data from the state’s vaccine registry suggest that immunizations are up roughly 10 percent this year compared with the same period in 2024, although Texas has limited visibility on vaccine administration. Holbrooks recently told The Atlantic that three local Mennonite churches had refused the district health department’s request to place a measles-testing site on their property. Meanwhile, residents are clearing out local drugstores’ supplies of vitamin A and cod-liver oil, and showing up to a makeshift clinic that is giving out cod-liver oil. This week, The New York Times reported that some children in the area are taking such high doses of vitamin A that they are showing signs of liver damage.

After casting a key vote to confirm Kennedy as health secretary, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a Republican, told his colleagues that Kennedy would help with “restoring trust in our public-health institutions.” But Kennedy has already made that laudable goal even less achievable. So long as the nation’s top public-health official is propping up purported miracle cures, families in West Texas will be encouraged to believe that not vaccinating their children is a responsible choice. Public-health leaders can’t fix that problem on their own, even if they refuse to play along with Kennedy’s pseudoscientific routine.

The NIH’s Most Reckless Cuts Yet

Ending clinical trials with no warning can put patients at risk.

by Katherine J. Wu

By design, clinical trials ask their participants to take on risk. To develop new vaccines, drugs, or therapies, scientists first have to ask volunteers to try out those interventions, with no guarantee that they’ll work or be free of side effects. To minimize harm, researchers promise to care for and monitor participants through a trial’s end, long enough to collect the data necessary to determine if a therapy is effective and at what cost. End a trial too early, and researchers might not be able to figure out if it worked—or participants may be left worse off than when they started.

But that is exactly what the Trump administration has been asking scientists across the country to do. Since the end of last month, the administration has forced the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, to terminate hundreds of research awards made to scientists across the country. Among those NIH-funded projects are more than 100 clinical trials that now may be forced to halt abruptly, agency officials told me. And those officials expect further orders to cancel hundreds more. (The NIH officials I spoke with for this story requested anonymity for fear of job loss or other retaliation from the federal government.)

The Trump administration has been laying siege to science for months—just this week, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, announced that it will fire 10,000 people. But the federal government’s disregard for clinical trials is one of the most direct illustrations yet that the nation’s new leaders have abandoned people’s health.

Grinding these trials to a screeching halt is “completely reckless,” Katie M. Edwards, a social-work professor at the University of Michigan, told me. Participants might still need to be tapered off a drug regimen to avoid the symptoms of withdrawal, or monitored for reactions to a device implanted in their body; they might depend on the intervention they’re receiving for their mental or physical health. Edwards herself has had three clinical trials terminated this month, including one testing whether an online mentoring program could reduce rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm among trans teens; halting it, she told me, “could lead to a number of negative outcomes, including increasing suicidality.” The canceled trials also include studies on safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy; increasing use of PReP, the HIV preventative, among people with substance-abuse disorders; probiotics and prebiotics for infants born to mothers living with HIV; and improving adherence to breast-cancer and heart-disease drugs.

In boilerplate letters, the federal government has told scientists that their science is no longer consistent with agency priorities or a good use of taxpayer funds, and that the agency will no longer fund their work. That’s tantamount to being told to “stop work immediately,” Matthew Spinelli, an infectious-disease physician at UC San Francisco, told me: He received a termination for a study trialing an antibiotic that can prevent sexually transmitted bacterial infections but that also can cause rare but substantial side effects.

After The Atlantic reached out to NIH for comment, a spokesperson wrote over email that HHS is altering its funding practices to align with new department priorities, and that “it’s important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans while taking the protection of human participants in our supported clinical research very seriously.”

In the past, if an NIH-funded clinical trial needed to halt—in an instance of, say, misconduct or clear harm to patients—the agency could be counted on to provide money and support to ensure that the study’s participants wouldn’t take on further risk and that even prematurely ending work remained ethically intact. Now, though, the government is the one causing risks to patients, well beyond what they signed up for.

Clinical trials are usually designed with a predetermined end date so that researchers can collect the data they need and make sure participants’ efforts don’t go to waste. Generally speaking, trials are halted midway only if it’s in the participants’ best interest—if, say, the treatment being tested is clearly doing more harm than good. Even then, winding down a clinical trial safely can take months as researchers perform final check-ins with participants, collect additional data on safety, and in some cases help make arrangements for additional clinical care—work that requires time, personnel, and funds. “To stop all of a sudden, with no warning and no grace period? I’ve never seen that,” Domenico Accili, the director of the Columbia University Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center, told me.

The Trump administration has said that the projects it’s ending are unscientific or not in service of improving the health of Americans. But as I’ve previously reported, its decisions about which grants to cut have been made seemingly without regard to scientific legitimacy, according to even the NIH officials being forced to sign the cancellation letters. The cuts have variously targeted studies on LGBTQ populations, DEI, health equity, and vaccine uptake; projects in foreign countries; grants that happen to have been housed at universities the Trump administration is sanctioning for other reasons; projects that make mention of COVID-19. This blitz has also hit grants less focused on those topics: Projects on antibodies, genetics, and dementia have been cut simply because—as far as scientists and NIH officials can tell—their titles or descriptions mention words such as diversity.

All of these research grants were awarded on the basis of scientific merit, and to halt them for political reasons is “totally unethical,” Holly Fernandez Lynch, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me: “Once you have asked people to undertake the burden and risk of research participation, you don’t get to then just decide, Oh, we don’t want to do it anymore.”

But that’s the position researchers have been forced into. Without financial resources, they can’t deliver the care and monitoring they promised participants when they enrolled them in their trials—even though they’ve already collected data and personal information. “People are being left in every stage of the research pipeline,” Delivette Castor, an epidemiologist at Columbia, who received a termination for a cervical-cancer-prevention clinical trial, told me. “It is a violation of trust, and all the resources we have put in.”

Lauren Osborne, an ob-gyn at Cornell, told me that she and her colleagues had just started a trial that paired doulas with women on Medicaid, or from racial-minority backgrounds, to test whether an education-focused intervention could reduce postpartum depression and heart problems. After the NIH terminated the study’s grant, the doulas had to call mothers who had given birth days or weeks before to say they could no longer offer help, Osborne told me. Kathleen Sikkema, a clinical psychologist at Columbia, told me she was close to completing her clinical trial, which aimed to improve engagement with HIV care among women in South Africa with a history of sexual trauma, when her termination letter arrived. But halting her work now would mean skipping a final assessment for at least 20 people, to check their viral load and determine their next course of treatment. “That’s terribly needed,” she told me.

Many researchers hit by the NIH’s funding cuts are still trying to figure out ways to safely offboard people from their studies. Some have sought funds from their department or university; some are turning to private donors or pharmaceutical companies, or dipping into money they’ve made as practicing physicians. But those resources are small and spotty. Several researchers told me that, even in a best-case scenario, they likely have just weeks or months of money left. Even now, “I’m hoping at some point I can charge NIH,” Sikkema, who worked with her university to pool funds for the remainder of her study, told me. But “there isn’t an open federal fund that we can charge,” she added. “It’s not completely clear who’s going to pay for it in the end.”

During the NIH’s initial funding freeze, two officials told me, agency officials were told to alert leadership if the halt on payments to certain studies might compromise patient safety, so that exceptions might be considered. And early last month, a subset of clinical trials were among the first studies that NIH leadership said could have their grant funds unfrozen (though many payment halts continued in the weeks after). But on the whole, the NIH’s recent guidance on preserving patient safety has been murky at best, one of the officials said, and added that they were not aware of any exceptions that had ever been made. Another official described the policy on exceptions as “piecemeal permissiveness,” saying that it offered only the guise of safeguarding people in studies. And for grant terminations, scientific staff at NIH have not been allowed to petition for exceptions at all, even if participant safety is clearly on the line, officials told me. “If they are on the list, they are terminated,” one of them said.

A few researchers told me that they had received documents from the NIH saying that they “may request funds to support patient safety and orderly closeout of the project.” None of them, though, was told how exactly they might go about requesting those funds, what the budget might be, what sorts of actions would qualify, or even what counts as “patient safety” or “orderly closeout” under the agency’s new leadership. After the grant terminations began, at least one of the agency’s institutes, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, prepared more specific instructions for researchers on how to navigate closeout procedures, specifying, for instance, that all study participants should be informed of the study’s halt and that “there must be a plan” for any ongoing safety monitoring. But those documents did not accompany the first several rounds of NIH terminations, which began late last month. And although a few researchers told me they were now working with their university to try to seek additional funds from the NIH, they also said they weren’t hopeful that the government would grant their requests—or even honor any payments they did offer.

Even if researchers are able to cobble together the funds to help their participants exit trials safely, halting studies early could still nullify the contributions of the people who enrolled. Studies need a bare-minimum number of data points, and if the target number of participants fails to complete a trial, researchers might not be able to calculate anything about the interventions’ usefulness or safety. Nor can trials easily restart, if the flow of money picks back up. Many studies rely on collecting information at precise, regular intervals; miss just one data point, and an entire analysis can be thrown off. For other studies, skipping a scheduled dose of a drug, or a scheduled check-in with a patient with a progressing condition, can compromise how well an intervention works.

Many of the studies targeted by the Trump administration also focus on populations at higher risk of worse health outcomes, who have been historically neglected by science and medicine; recruiting participants to some of these trials, researchers told me, took years of establishing and maintaining trust, as well as careful partnerships with local leaders. Any betrayals to the commitments researchers made to those people could compromise the ability of scientists to work with them in the future. “Why are people going to be willing to contribute to science and enroll in these studies if they feel like the rug can be pulled out from under them at any time?” Fernandez Lynch told me.

Thiago Arzua, a neuroscientist at Columbia, told me that his research has been affected by the NIH’s recent grant cancellations. But Arzua was also enrolled as a participant in an NIH-terminated study that tracked HIV prevention and transmission among sexual and gender minorities. “It’s pretty sad,” he said, to see years of investment from underserved communities go to waste. The message coming from the government has never been clearer, he and others told me. From the start, the Trump administration has flaunted its lack of interest in advancing science or supporting the people who do it. Now its actions are declaring that it also doesn’t care about the people science is trying to help.

Shayla Love contributed reporting to this story.

The Paradox of Hard Work

Why do people enjoy doing difficult things?

by Alex Hutchinson

There are, at last count, nine different medals you can earn at the Comrades Marathon, a historic 55-mile race that runs between the South African cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg. Gold medals are awarded to the top 10 men and women. The rest depend on hitting certain time standards. To earn a silver medal, for example, you have to finish the race in less than seven and a half hours. To earn a Robert Mtshali medal, named for the first Black runner to complete the race, you have to break 10 hours. And to receive a finisher’s medal and be listed in the official results, you have to break 12 hours. Run any slower than that, and you not only lose out on a medal: After half a day grinding yourself to exhaustion, you aren’t even allowed to finish the race.

As each time threshold approaches, the stadium announcer and spectators count the seconds down. For the final 12-hour deadline, a group of race marshals gathers in the finishing chute. When the countdown reaches zero, they lock arms to block the finish line. Either you make it or you don’t. When I reported on the race for Canadian Running in 2010, the final finisher, in 11:59:59, was a runner named Frikkie Botha, from nearby Mpumalanga. He placed 14,342nd. A stride behind was 48-year-old Dudley Mawona, from the inland town of Graaff-Reinet. The din of spectators’ vuvuzelas crescendoed as he lunged forward and caromed off the race marshals’ blockade.

The tableau at the Comrades finish line evokes the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s depictions of hell, with legions of scantily clad figures (in this case, wiry runners in tiny shorts) writhing in varying degrees of distress under the darkening sky. You can almost hear the moaning and wailing—except that the actual soundtrack is surprisingly cheerful. People are thrilled to have arrived, proud of the effort they’ve put in, and brimming with inexplicable enthusiasm even if they’re massaging inflamed hamstrings or lancing gruesome blisters. This includes a number of the runners who never make it past the race marshals’ impenetrable arms. Mawona accepted his fate with good grace. “I feel disappointed,” he told me for my 2010 story. “But I am glad I was almost there.” Both he and Botha resolved to return the following year.

Read: The Summer Olympics can’t keep up this speed

To say that long-distance runners embrace difficulty is to say the obvious. When you watch many thousands of people happily push themselves through a race that they might not even be allowed to finish, though, you start to get the hint that something deeply human is going on. People like things that are really hard. In fact, the enormity of a task often is why people pursue it in the first place. This is a puzzling phenomenon, when you stop and think about it. It violates all sorts of assumptions about rational action and evolutionary selection and economic theory. Psychologists call it the Effort Paradox.

The term was introduced in 2018 by a University of Toronto social psychologist named Michael Inzlicht, along with colleagues at Brown and Carnegie Mellon. As Outside magazine’s endurance-sports columnist—not to mention a lifelong runner—I was immediately fascinated by the idea. As I wrote at the time, the usual assumption is that effort is a negative. “Toil and trouble,” as Adam Smith called it in The Wealth of Nations back in 1776, subtracts from the value you assign to things. When you buy a coffee table from IKEA, you have to wrestle with a bag of seemingly mismatched screws and some inscrutable pictographic instructions. If you can simply buy the same thing preassembled, Smith and his intellectual heirs predict that you’ll be willing to pay more to avoid the hassle. And it’s not just about money. The law of less work, as formulated by the American psychologist Clark Hull in the 1940s, dictates that given two choices with similar outcomes, any person—or any living organism, for that matter—will choose the option requiring the least effort.

Bizarrely, though, studies have found that we actually value the coffee table we’ve had to painstakingly construct more highly than the identical preassembled version, a phenomenon now known as the IKEA effect. As I wrote for Outside, something like this dynamic applies across all kinds of human behavior. The mountaineer George Mallory famously declared that he wanted to climb Mount Everest “because it’s there.” You can speculate about his other motivations: reaching the highest point in the world, eternal fame, and so on. But the fact remains that many of us head to the mountains with no expectation of celebrity, run marathons in the middle of the pack, and do sudoku puzzles—all activities that, like purchasing Swedish furniture, involve considerable unnecessary effort. The first marathon you run may be motivated by a desire to improve your health or by a Mallory-esque desire to find out what’s on the other side. But the second one is likely fueled by something else.

Inzlicht and his colleagues posed the Effort Paradox to make sense of this odd tendency: Sometimes we value experiences and outcomes (and coffee tables) precisely because they require effort, not in spite of that fact. Inzlicht’s aim was not just to name the phenomenon, but to offer some explanations for why we find both physical and cognitive effort so satisfying.

Broadly, the possibilities he suggests fall into two different buckets: whether the satisfaction comes more from the rewards of hard effort or more from the hard effort itself. In the former camp, one explanation is that rewards obtained from difficult tasks seem extra sweet because of the sharp contrast between the unpleasantness of working hard and the joy of achievement. Another is, basically, self-delusion: If you do something hard without a commensurate payoff, you experience an unpleasant disconnect that you resolve by persuading yourself that the outcome was valuable after all. If I worked so hard to get this, I must really like it, you tell yourself. (Self-delusion might make sense in humans, but is less convincing in other species. Researchers have trained starlings to fly various distances to obtain identical color-coded treats, and found that the birds end up liking the color of treats they had to fly farthest for. A similar effect even shows up in locusts, which aren’t known for their powers of introspection.)

Alternatively, a third theory assumes that people learn over time that working hard leads to desirable outcomes, and so—like Pavlov’s dogs drooling at the sound of his bell—you eventually begin to value effort itself. Beyond the explanations in Inzlicht’s paper, there are other reasons that effort might function as its own reward. For example, an emerging cognitive theory called predictive processing suggests that doing hard things gives us access to new information about both ourselves and the world, an experience that our brains are wired to find pleasurable. The theory remains speculative and its implications are still being debated, but one takeaway when it comes to effort is that if you buy a coffee table, you’ve got a coffee table; if you assemble one, you also gain knowledge not only about how coffee tables are put together, but about your own capabilities.

Read: The myth of ‘I’m bad at math’

Whatever the mechanism, studies of children at play suggest that the Effort Paradox isn’t limited to a subset of masochistic grinders. One preprint study that hasn’t been published yet in a scientific journal has found that, to maximize their fun, kids will opt for harder challenges even if it means they’ll fail more, living up to the philosopher Bernard Suits’s famous definition of games as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” The play literature offers numerous overlapping reasons that kids and adults alike might prefer hard mode, according to Harvard’s Elizabeth Bonawitz: exploration, mastery, autonomy, social connection, aesthetic experience—and even meaning, famously tricky though it is to define.

Inzlicht’s latest experiments support this idea that exerting effort increases feelings of meaning and purpose—a finding that undoubtedly rings true to the non-finishers at Comrades. Fortunately, a precise articulation of the meaning of life isn’t required to explore whether effort contributes to it. “If you ask people whether something is meaningful, they can answer,” Inzlicht says, “but they use their own internal rubric to figure out what that means.” As I’ve reported in The New York Times, Inzlicht and two of his colleagues, Aidan Campbell and Joanne Chung, developed a 10-item Meaningfulness-of-Effort scale that asks people how strongly they agree with statements such as “When I push myself, what I’m doing feels important” and “Doing my best gives me a clear purpose in life.” The scale, which the researchers introduced in a preprint study in 2022, captures differences not in whether people exert effort, but in how they view that effort. “You can imagine that some people are willing to work hard, but go about it from a sense of duty and responsibility,” Inzlicht told me for my Times story. “But other people—call them ‘joyful workers’—this is what they live for. This is what gives them purpose. This is what makes them feel important. This is what helps them make the world make sense.”

The existence of “joyful workers” suggests that, even if the Effort Paradox applies to everyone, it doesn’t apply equally. Where you sit on the Meaningfulness-of-Effort scale probably reflects a changeable mix of nature and nurture. Some people will naturally be drawn to hard effort more than others, the research implies, but people also seemingly can learn to value effort more.  Inzlicht and his colleagues found that people who score highly tend to report greater levels of job and life satisfaction; they make more money and have higher-status jobs; they’re happier (or in more technical terms, have greater subjective well-being). Those findings remain true even when you control for other constructs, such as conscientiousness, which is one of the “Big Five” personality traits that psychologists use to classify people. There has been lots of debate in recent years over whether popular concepts such as “grit” are just new names for old ideas. Meaningfulness of effort is a subcomponent of conscientiousness, Inzlicht says, but it has distinct explanatory power. Willingness to exert effort is important, but how you feel about that effort also seems to matter.

The magazine story I was reporting at the Comrades Marathon was about the ultimate limits of endurance, and what struck me then was how finishing runners, no matter how tired they seemed, would accelerate as soon as the crowd began counting down—evidence, I figured, of the mind’s role in determining physical limits. But my other lasting impression was of the stark delineation between success and failure, and the importance that runners and spectators alike attached to it. The woman next to me turned away rather than watch the final countdown. “I cried last year,” she explained. “It’s just too much to watch.” When you line up at the start of Comrades, you know there’s a very real chance that you won’t finish, despite the months or years of training that you’ve put in. On that day in 2010, as is the case pretty much every year, more than 1,000 runners who started the race didn’t make it to the finish within 12 hours.

It’s not that people love failure. But without the possibility of failing, success is stripped of its meaning and sweetness. The pioneering 19th-century German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt posited an “upside-down U” relationship between stimulus and subjective response: the more intense a stimulus, the more you like it … until, beyond a certain point, you start liking it less. This Wundt curve is invoked to explain why we like art and music that’s complex but not too complex, why video games are most engaging if they deliver an “optimal challenge” that’s neither too easy nor too hard, and why flow states require a task that’s just within your capabilities. The most satisfying challenge, in other words, is neither the hardest nor the easiest.

That’s why Comrades has so many different medals, each with its own time threshold: Everyone needs a goal that’s attainable but not a slam dunk. The Effort Paradox and the allure of optimal challenge don’t mean that you need to turn life into a constant and never-ending struggle, dialing up the difficulty every time you’re in danger of mastering something. But neither should you shy away from toil and trouble, Adam Smith’s reservations notwithstanding. As Inzlicht told me previously, exerting effort “seems to be the key route, maybe the only route, by which you can fulfill certain needs, like the needs for competence and mastery and maybe even self-understanding. You can’t get those without pushing yourself.”

This article has been adapted from Alex Hutchinson’s forthcoming book, The Explorer’s Gene.

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The Conspiracy Theorist Advising Trump

The chaos inside the White House national-security team persists.

by Tom Nichols

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

For a few months, the Donald Trump White House managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.

The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday. If you don’t spend a lot of time online, you probably don’t know who Loomer is, and that’s healthy. To say that she is a “conspiracy theorist” is not quite enough: She has referred to herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and has claimed that 9/11 was an “inside job”; she has charged that some school shootings were staged, accused Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis of “exaggerating” her struggle with breast cancer, and questioned whether the “deep state” might have used an atmospheric-research facility in Alaska to create a snowstorm over Des Moines. (Why? So that foul weather would suppress the turnout in the 2024 Iowa GOP caucuses and hurt Trump’s campaign.)

Loomer has even alienated her ostensible allies in the MAGA movement, to say nothing of the hostility she has engendered among various other Republicans. (Peter Schorsch, a former Republican operative who now runs the website Florida Politics, described her to The Washington Post as “what happens when you take a gadfly and inject it with that radioactive waste from Godzilla.”) Indeed, Trump’s own aides found Loomer so toxic that they tried to keep her away from the 2024 campaign, as my colleague Tim Alberta reported last year. A source close to the Trump campaign told Semafor last fall that Trump’s people were “‘100%’ concerned about her exacerbating Trump’s weaknesses,” but that attempts to put “guardrails” around her weren’t working. Trump clearly likes the 31-year-old provocateur, and in Trumpworld, there’s apparently very little anyone can do once the boss takes a shine to someone.

And so Loomer reportedly walked into the Oval Office yesterday with a list of people who should be removed from the National Security Council because of their disloyalty to Trump and the MAGA cause. (Asked for comment, Loomer declined to divulge “any details about my Oval Office meeting with President Trump.” She added, “I will continue working hard to support his agenda, and I will continue reiterating the importance of strong vetting, for the sake of protecting the President and our national security.”)

The next day, at least six staff members, including three senior officials, were fired. If Loomer had nothing to do with it, that’s a hell of a coincidence. (The NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes told The Atlantic that the NSC does not comment on personnel matters.)

Today, an unnamed U.S. official told Axios that Loomer went to the White House because she was furious that “neocons” had “slipped through” the vetting process for administration jobs. The result, according to the official, was a “bloodbath” that took down perhaps as many as 10 NSC staff members. Most reports named Brian Walsh, the senior director for intelligence, and Thomas Boodry, the senior director for legislative affairs; other reports claim that David Feith, a senior director overseeing technology and national security, and Maggie Dougherty, senior director for international organizations, are among those dismissed. Walsh formerly worked as a senior staff member for Marco Rubio on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Boodry was National Security Adviser Michael Waltz’s legislative director when Waltz was a House member, and Feith was a State Department appointee in the first Trump administration.

The firings at the NSC represent an ongoing struggle between the most extreme MAGA loyalists and what’s left of a Republican foreign-policy establishment. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, for example, has been in an online tussle with the Republican fringe—a group that makes Cotton seem almost centrist by comparison—over Alex Wong, another Trump NSC official, whom Loomer and others have, for various reasons, accused of disloyalty to Trump. Other conflicts, however, seem to center on a struggle between Waltz and the head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, Sergio Gor, who has reportedly been blocking people Waltz wants on his team because Gor and others doubt their commitment to the president’s foreign policy.

Such internal ideological and political food fights are common in Washington, but the national security adviser usually doesn’t have to stand by while his staff gets turfed on the say-so of an online troll. If these firings happened because Loomer wanted them, it’s difficult to imagine how Waltz stays in his job—or why he’d want to.

Waltz, of course, is already slogging through a mess of his own creation because of the controversy surrounding his use of the chat app Signal to have a highly sensitive national-security discussion about a strike on Houthi targets, to which he inadvertently invited a journalist—The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. (Waltz’s week wasn’t getting any better before Loomer showed up: New reports claim that the meeting about the Yemen strikes was only one of many conversations about important national-security operations that Waltz held over Signal.) Trump reportedly kept Waltz on the team purely to deny giving “a scalp” to the Democrats and what he perceives as their allies in the mainstream media.

Now Waltz’s authority as national security adviser is subject to a veto from … Laura Loomer? It’s one thing to dodge the barbs of the administration’s critics; that’s a normal part of life in the capital. It’s another entirely to have to stand there and take it when an unhinged conspiracy monger walks into the White House and then several accomplished Republican national-security staffers are fired.

The reason all of this is happening is that in his second term, Trump is free of any adult supervision. The days when a Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis or a Chief of Staff John Kelly would throw themselves in front of the door rather than let someone like Loomer anywhere near the Oval Office are long gone. Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants who are apparently so scared of being exiled from their liege’s presence that they can’t bring themselves to stop someone as far out on the fringe as Loomer from advising the president of the United States.

Meanwhile, a person close to the administration told my colleague Michael Scherer today that “Loomer has been asked to put together a list of people at State who are not MAGA loyalists.” Waltz might yet get fired, but whether he stays or goes, he doesn’t seem to be in charge of the NSC. Perhaps next we’ll see if Marco Rubio is actually running the State Department.

Related:

- Laura Loomer is where Republicans draw the line. (From September)

- The MAGA honeymoon is over. (From December)

Michael Scherer contributed reporting.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

- Trump’s tariffs are designed to backfire.

- Trump’s day of reckoning

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Today’s News

1. The president of the European Commission said that the bloc is “prepared to respond” with countermeasures to President Donald Trump’s tariffs but will attempt to negotiate with him first.

2. Hungary announced that it will pull out of the International Criminal Court. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces an ICC arrest warrant, landed in Budapest today for a visit.

3. At least seven people have died after intense flooding, tornados, and storms hit the central United States. More extreme weather is expected to continue affecting the area this week.

Dispatches

- Time-Travel Thursdays: RFK Jr.’s nostalgia for the past obscures a longer history of America’s struggle with weight-related chronic illness. The truth is, America was never healthy to begin with, Lila Shroff writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

To Be Happier, Stop Resisting Change

By Arthur C. Brooks

In 1924, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel set out to learn about Zen Buddhism, which was starting to penetrate the West. He found a teaching position in Japan, where he hoped to locate someone who could instruct him in the philosophy. Rather than the sort of course he had in mind, he was informed that because he lacked proficiency in Japanese, he would be required instead to learn a skill—namely, kyūdō (the way of the bow)—and this would indirectly impart the Zen truths that he sought …

In short, Herrigel learned that the secret to archery—and the approach to life he was seeking—is to know when to stop resisting change and simply let it occur. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend half a decade studying archery in Japan to benefit from this central insight.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Bruce Davidson

Take a look. In the 1960s, Vine Deloria Jr. was a budding Native American activist. Philip J. Deloria writes about his father’s transformation—and the world he built at home.

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What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About the Past

America was never healthy to begin with.

by Lila Shroff

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

Last week, at an event in West Virginia, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fat-shamed the state’s governor, Patrick Morrisey. “The first time I saw him, I said you look like you ate Governor Morrisey,” Kennedy told a laughing crowd. Morrisey has apparently invited Kennedy to be his personal trainer. The health secretary plans to put Morrisey on a “really rigorous regimen” involving monthly public weigh-ins and the all-meat “carnivore diet.” Once Morrisey loses 30 pounds, Kennedy will return to West Virginia for a celebration and final weigh-in.

According to Kennedy, not so long ago, obesity was virtually unheard of. “When my uncle was president, 3 percent of Americans were obese, and today, 74 percent of Americans are obese or overweight,” Kennedy said during his confirmation hearing. This is wrong: In the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy was president, an estimated 45 percent of Americans were overweight, including 13 percent of whom had obesity. (Such classifications are determined based on body mass index, a flawed but sometimes useful metric). Although RFK Jr. is correct in suggesting that rates of obesity have surged in recent decades, his nostalgia for the past obscures a longer history of America’s struggle with weight-related chronic illness. In fact, RFK Jr. might be surprised to learn that his own uncle once waged a campaign against what he perceived as America’s deteriorating physical fitness.

Anxiety over American obesity dates back to at least the mid-20th century. In 1948—six years before RFK Jr. was born—the founder of Harvard’s nutrition department wrote an essay in The Atlantic warning that obesity was a risk factor for several health conditions including diabetes and high blood pressure. Seven years later—when RFK Jr. was an infant—the renowned nutritionist Jean Mayer declared obesity “a national obsession.” Mayer was particularly frustrated by the barrage of “mercenary lures” that filled the media, advertising ineffective and sometimes harmful “‘health foods’ or ‘thinning foods.’” (RFK Jr.’s endorsement of the carnivore diet and uncorroborated claim that seed oils are “one of the driving causes” of the obesity epidemic come to mind.) Instead, Mayer wrote in The Atlantic, exercise was key to weight loss. We now know that although exercise is crucial for good health, it’s not a silver bullet for treating obesity.

RFK Jr. often refers to his childhood as a sort of golden age for American health. “When I was a kid,” RFK Jr. said at the West Virginia event, “we were the healthiest, most robust people in the world.” But by the time he was of school age, his uncle was leading a national fitness campaign. President Kennedy feared, in particular, that American youth lagged “far behind Europeans in physical fitness.” As evidence, he pointed to a series of strength tests given to children in America, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria: More than one-third of American kids failed at least one test, compared with only 1 percent of European children.

More generally, JFK was worried that an “increasingly large number of young Americans” were “neglecting their bodies” and “getting soft.” In 1961, JFK’s warnings about America’s poor physical well-being led to an Atlantic essay titled “We May Be Sitting Ourselves to Death,” in which a spokesperson for the American Dairy Association fretted over the health of men who spent their days withering away at desk jobs instead of hiking “the dusty trail to bring home the buffalo meat.” (The writer was less concerned about women, who he suggested got plenty of exercise from washing clothes, cooking meals, and picking up after their messy family.) At the time, JFK presented America’s deteriorating health as a matter of Cold War–era national-security concern. As one Atlantic writer explained, “The basic impetus behind this Spartan movement seems to be the fear that the Russians (a vast race of tawny, muscle-bound gymnasts) will someday descend upon our shores and thrash each of us flabby capitalists individually.” America’s growing “softness,” JFK suggested, threatened to “strip and destroy the vitality” of the nation.

Much like the “Make America healthy again” campaign, the JFK-era movement looked nostalgically upon a rustic, heartier past. But even earlier, during the buffalo-hunting 19th century, Americans were anxious about the nation’s declining health. Only four months after this magazine’s first issue, in 1857, one writer complained that the ancient Greek tradition of fitness “seems to us Americans as mythical.” He insisted that a 30-mile walk, five-mile run, or one-mile swim would cost most Americans “a fit of illness, and many their lives.” Even an hour in the gym, the writer worried, would leave any man’s “enfeebled muscular apparatus” groaning “with rheumatism for a week.” One year later, a surgeon argued that busy schedules and “sedentary life” were to blame for the “limited muscular development” of “professional” men. “We live so fast that we have no time to live,” he wrote.

Obesity rates remained relatively stable for 20 years after JFK’s 1960 campaign, before doubling from 1980 to 2000 to what the U.S. surgeon general in 2001 called “epidemic” proportions. Today, 40 percent of U.S. adults meet the clinical definition for obesity. The precise reason for this surge remains unclear, although changing diets and decreased activity levels are thought to play a role. In this particular regard, RFK Jr. is right about America’s declining health. But many other American health outcomes have improved over the decades. Around the time RFK Jr. was born, cardiovascular disease killed Americans at roughly double the rate it does today. Cancer deaths, too, have fallen significantly, thanks to breakthroughs in cancer treatment and a decline in smoking. And that’s not to say anything of the progress made fighting infectious disease earlier in the 20th century.

Yet RFK Jr.’s romanticization of the past has led him to develop an anachronistic approach to health care. He is skeptical of the many advances—GLP-1s, vaccination, milk pasteurization—that have helped improve America’s health over the years. If his intention is to wind back the clock on the American public-health apparatus, he’s off to a strong start. Just this week, he led sweeping cuts across federal health agencies, eliminating thousands of jobs, including the nation’s top tobacco regulator, prominent scientists, and even staffers who focus specifically on chronic-disease prevention. The Department of Health and Human Services was established less than a year before RFK Jr. was born; now he is inviting its destruction. But his efforts to turn back time are foolish. If the golden age of American health exists, it’s in the future, not the past.

Trump’s Tariff Plan Is Going to Hurt

The surprisingly expansive levies on imports will open up a future of high prices.

by Isabel Fattal

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

“We’re going to start being smart, and we’re going to start being very wealthy again,” President Donald Trump announced today as he laid out a plan that risks derailing America’s economy. At his “Liberation Day” event, he unveiled a 10 percent–minimum tariff on all imports, with no change for Canada and Mexico but significantly higher rates for other countries, such as China and India, that far exceeded what many economists had expected.

With today’s announcement, Trump is tariffing essentially all foreign goods. The administration says that the levies will bring in some $6 trillion, which would amount to the biggest tax hike in U.S. history. Some of the most perplexing updates are in countries where the United States has existing free-trade agreements, such as South Korea, my colleague Annie Lowrey, who covers economic policy, told me. The Trump administration claims that South Korea has a 50 percent tariff on the U.S., but it is basing its tariff estimations in part on currency manipulation and trade barriers. It hasn’t yet provided evidence confirming that such factors, insofar as they exist, are equivalent to a 50 percent tariff.

Such all-encompassing tariffs will cost each American family thousands of dollars, economists predict. Americans will likely feel the effects of this while standing in a grocery-store aisle, purchasing auto insurance, or undertaking home renovations. These levies have the potential to increase inflation and slow down the economy in the longer term, and the uncertainty of what happens next will also contribute to the confidence of shoppers and businesses. “The way that Trump does tariffs is he often makes these really big announcements and then rolls them back,” perpetually modifying the rules, as in a game of Calvinball, Annie explained. “That’s really hard if you’re a business. Should we wait this out? Are they actually going to do it?”

Given the sweeping nature of the new tariffs, Trump may have just essentially encouraged other countries to consider banding together to impose further tit-for-tat levies on the United States. The best-case scenario, Annie told me, is that after some countries threaten reciprocal tariffs, a negotiation is reached that allows Trump to feel like he has won but also “gives some certainty” to businesses and people; shoppers absorb high costs at first, but then the uncertainty declines. If Republicans realize after this whole ordeal that this level of chaos could affect their chances at reelection and opt for fewer surprises going forward, the economy could bounce back, she argued.

America’s economy is full of mixed signals right now—or at least it was, before Trump’s announcement. “If you knew nothing about it and you came in and looked at the main figures, you would say this is not an economy in a recession or anything close to it,” Annie said. The unemployment rate is fairly low, at 4.1 percent; GDP numbers are strong. But things start looking worrisome when you consider that consumer confidence is the lowest it’s been since early 2021, and that Trump’s new tariff plan won’t quell those fears. The solution for the kind of post-tariff downturn the economy might face is simple: Remove the tariffs. But the Trump administration is not likely to let them go easily, Annie noted: “We could be getting ourselves into a bad situation where we’ve taken options for improving the situation off the table.”

Related:

- Jonathan Chait: The good news about Trump’s tariffs

- The tariff man is coming for America’s entrepreneurs.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

- Wisconsin’s message for Trump

- Elon Musk lost his big bet.

- The question progressives refuse to answer

- Ashley Parker: Miscarriage and motherhood

Today’s News

1. Susan Crawford won a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, beating an opponent backed by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

2. A judge dismissed the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams and ruled that the charges can’t be brought again.

3. An extreme weather event brought flooding, heavy snow, and high winds to the central United States.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: alfalfa126 / Getty; MirageC / Getty.

The New Singlehood Stigma

By Faith Hill

Just to be clear: Today is, in many ways, the best time in American history to be single.

In the 18th century, bachelors paid higher taxes and faced harsher punishments for crimes than their betrothed counterparts. (“A Man without a Wife,” Benjamin Franklin said, “is but half a Man.”) Single women—more likely, naturally, to be seduced by the devil—were disproportionately executed for witchcraft …

Forgive me, then, if I sound ungrateful when I say this: Americans are still extremely weird about single people. But now the problem isn’t just that singlehood is disparaged; sometimes, it’s that singlehood is celebrated. Relentlessly, annoyingly celebrated.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

- David Frum: No tariff exemptions for American farmers

- Trump’s day of reckoning

- Trump’s Salvadoran gulag

- Why you should work like it’s the ’90s

- “Can I teach the First Amendment if I only have a green card?”

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Play. The new Nintendo Switch 2 is expensive, Ian Bogost writes. But what if you think of it as an appliance instead of a video-game console?

Ruff day? Take a look at these brave search-and-rescue dogs that help find people after disasters.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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The DOGE Plan That Endangers U.S. Revenue

Recent history provides clues about how IRS cuts may lose America money.

by Lora Kelley

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Tax season is always a busy time at the IRS. This year has been especially eventful. In February, the agency was told to start firing up to 7,000 workers—before judges ordered that such firings needed to be paused. Some 5,000 more workers have signed up for the government’s deferred-resignation offer, and various departments have been slashed or targeted for cuts. About 50 IT workers were put on administrative leave Friday. Overall, The Washington Post reported, the agency will end May with about 18 percent fewer employees than it had at the start of this year. And people familiar with the matter told The New York Times that the Trump administration’s ultimate goal is to cut the agency’s staffing by half.

The stated purpose of these firings, and of DOGE’s other cuts across federal agencies, is to save money. But the cuts may actually translate to a meaningful dip in taxpayer revenue. The IRS is effectively the government’s accounts-receivable department. Staffing cuts set up the IRS to lose money in two ways, Natasha Sarin, a Yale law professor and former Treasury counselor, told me: A reduced IRS has less capacity to collect and enforce taxation, and taxpayers who think they won’t be audited may be more inclined to start cheating. Sarin expects that the agency’s losses will far outweigh the $140 billion DOGE says it has saved (DOGE’s self-reported data is opaque and has been full of errors). She and her colleagues at the Budget Lab at Yale forecast that the plan to cut half of the agency’s workforce alone would conservatively translate to $395 billion in lost revenue in the next decade, and possibly up to $2 trillion.

Other expectations have been bleak, too—and have considered factors beyond reductions in force. Amid the chaos of this filing season, the agency is on track to see a more than 10 percent drop in tax receipts by the tax-filing deadline this month, according to predictions from Treasury and IRS officials who spoke anonymously with The Washington Post last month; if that happens, it would translate into more than $500 billion in lost revenue this year. Such changes could be because some people are skirting their duties and hoping that an understaffed IRS will lead to less enforcement, but other people’s filing may just happen later this year. Victims of natural disasters, including the 2025 California wildfires, have received deadline extensions—and, in general, corporate tax receipts may decline if businesses are facing challenges. (A spokesperson for the Treasury department denied that a $500 billion tax-revenue drop is plausible, adding that “baseless claims from those who have promoted wasteful spending for years at the IRS should be dismissed out right.” Representatives of DOGE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Recent history provides a case study in what happens when the IRS is diminished: In the 2010s, the IRS’s budget was depleted over several years. The number of agents declined by a third from 2010 to 2017, and the audit rate went down by about 40 percent (and down by about 50 percent for people earning more than $1 million) in that period. The number of agency investigations of people who didn’t file returns went from 2.4 million in 2011 to 362,000 in 2017. The total amount of money lost through weak enforcement during those years amounted to some $95 billion, ProPublica estimated.

One theme of the late 2010s and early 2020s was general sloppiness in filing, especially from corporations, Michael Kaercher, the deputy director of the NYU Tax Law Center and a former IRS lawyer, told me. That period, Sarin argued, demonstrates the “direct relationship” between reduced capacity for enforcement and loss of revenue—though the cuts then were much smaller and more spread out than DOGE’s current plan. Of course, even if the public starts to get the impression that there won’t be consequences for evasion, many will continue to do their civic duty and make good on their obligations. But if the IRS doesn’t have enough staff to help people with the (often confusing) process of filing, some people may just make mistakes, too, and start accidentally underpaying.

The exact amount the IRS may lose in the years to come will depend on a few factors, including which functions and staff end up ultimately being cut. Since January, the IRS has lost nearly 40 percent of the staff of the Global High Wealth unit, which focuses on audits of very wealthy individuals. Those audits have an extremely high return on investment, Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, reminded me—a single audit can lead to millions or tens of millions in revenue. In the 2010s, she noted, the “tax gap”—the amount of taxes that were owed but not paid—rose, which was primarily attributable to high earners underreporting their income. In 2021, the top 1 percent of earners were responsible for more than a third of unpaid taxes, which cost the government nearly $200 billion.

As some of the agency’s functions are diminishing, it is being tasked with a new role. The IRS, which holds information about every taxpayer, is close to signing an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in which it would share addresses and names about migrants. Sending sensitive taxpayer information to authorities would cut against a fairly core aspect of the IRS’s culture, Kaercher told me: The agency has always taken data privacy very seriously. For decades, the IRS has told undocumented people that they need to pay taxes, and that it would not share information with immigration authorities. Now that the agency is reneging on that promise, the changes may deter immigrants from paying taxes, leading to further dips in the revenue the agency can collect.

In recent decades, Williamson noted, even through lean IRS eras, what’s called “tax morale,” or a willingness to pay taxes, has remained high in the United States. “Americans are traditionally good taxpayers by international standards,” she said. But trust in the system is predictive of compliance. As that trust diminishes, compliance may go with it too.

Related:

- Why DOGE could actually increase the deficit

- Tax season just got more confusing.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

- An “administrative error” sends a Maryland father to a Salvadoran prison.

- The top goal of Project 2025 is still to come.

- So much for the MAGA divorce.

- Xochitl Gonzalez: “Students yelled at me. I’m fine.”

Today’s News

1. Voters are heading to the polls in the contentious Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Elon Musk has handed out $1 million checks to two people who signed a petition against judicial activism.

2. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey is delivering a speech on the Senate floor that has gone on for more than 23 hours.

3. The U.S. Health and Human Services Department started issuing notices of dismissal to employees; layoffs are expected to total approximately 10,000 people.

Evening Read

Illustration by Anna Kliewer

The New Marriage of Unequals

By Stephanie H. Murray

Once upon a time, it was fairly common for highly educated men in the United States to marry less-educated women. But beginning in the mid-20th century, as more women started to attend college, marriages seemed to move in a more egalitarian direction, at least in one respect: A greater number of men and women started partnering up with their educational equals. That trend, however, appears to have stalled and even reversed in recent years. Gaps in educational experience among heterosexual couples are growing again. And this time? It’s women who are “marrying down.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

- Long-COVID care is disintegrating.

- The evermaskers

- Why we’re still talking about the “trauma plot”

- “Dear James”: Make the whistling stop.

Culture Break

Illustration by Liz Hart. Source: Alamy.

Read. In a new book, Elaine Pagels searches for the narrative origins of Jesus’s miracles.

Listen. In 1966, the conductor Leonard Bernstein arrived in Vienna with a mission: to restore Gustav Mahler’s place in 20th-century music.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I have some personal news to share: This is my last edition of The Daily. I am moving on to pursue other career opportunities.

Thank you so much for reading! Whether you have been here for years, or whether you just subscribed this week, I truly appreciate your interest in our work. The Daily is in wonderful hands with David and the team—and now I look forward to joining you among the ranks of The Daily’s loyal readers.

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Musk Is Still Paying for Political Influence

Wisconsin’s contentious state-supreme-court election will put his theory of power to the test.

by John Hendrickson

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Elon Musk is averse to understatement. Last night, at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the world’s richest man bounded onstage in a cheesehead and handed out a pair of oversize checks worth $1 million apiece. The payouts went to two signatories of a petition against “activist judges,” though it’s clear that Musk’s aim was to support a judge who might tip the balance of Wisconsin’s state supreme court. The billionaire knows that his fortune helped propel Donald Trump to the White House last fall, and now he’s seeing what else money can buy.

Musk and Trump are supporting Brad Schimel, a conservative judge from Waukesha County who trails in the polls behind his liberal opponent, Judge Susan Crawford of Dane County. So far, Musk has personally donated $3 million to the Wisconsin Republican Party, and two Musk-linked PACs have spent much more. The state court’s makeup is 4–3 in the liberals’ favor, and the judges are poised to issue rulings on a variety of topics, including voting regulations, abortion rights, and the redrawing of congressional maps to combat Republican gerrymandering, which could chip away at Republicans’ narrow House majority. Democrats tried and failed to block Musk’s million-dollar gambit, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court allowed Musk to proceed. This morning, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler warned that the race could determine “whether Elon Musk can buy courts.”

In the pre-Trump era, tomorrow’s contest may have been something of a run-of-the-mill state election. Instead, this race has exploded into a national spectacle. Wisconsin has significantly loosened its campaign-finance restrictions in recent years, and with a reported $90 million pouring in from both sides, it’s the most expensive judicial election ever. But as Musk knows, the whole ordeal is bigger than deciding the composition of one state court. In many ways, tomorrow’s election is also a potential validation—or referendum—on the profound upheaval that Trump and Musk have wrought on the United States over the past nine weeks.

Last night, Musk tried to convey the gravitas of the situation. As he often does, the billionaire went a bit hyperbolic. “What’s happening on Tuesday is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives,” Musk told the room, in reference to the redistricting. “Whichever party controls the House to a significant degree controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization.” No pressure!

Musk was occasionally interrupted by protesters, whom he scoffed were operatives hired by the left-leaning billionaire George Soros to disrupt his event. Soros and another billionaire, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, are among those who have donated to the Democrats as a means of helping Crawford, but no one has been as audacious as Musk in wooing potential voters using the reliable lever of cold hard cash. Beyond awarding two attendees the million-dollar checks, Musk’s PAC also promised $100 to anyone who signs the same petition, and $20 to anyone who posts a photo of someone holding a picture of Schimel and flashing a thumbs-up (in addition to various payouts for those who “recruit” Wisconsin voters to do the same, even people, such as himself, who live outside of the state). If Musk and his PAC’s collective efforts prove successful tomorrow, he’ll likely keep seeing what else he can buy as he seeks to expand his sphere of influence.

Until about a decade ago, dark money was the most apt phrase to discuss a range of shady, financially motivated political tactics. But Musk is carrying out his plans in broad daylight. His bold flouting of norms is a point of pride for him, not a secret. His PAC ran similar lotteries in swing states, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, last year, and so far, state courts have yet to rule that he’s breaking election law. And in Wisconsin’s case, by helping mold the court, he also seems to be ensuring his own future success. As CNN noted, Musk’s beleaguered electric-vehicle company Tesla happens to be fighting a Wisconsin law that would keep car manufacturers from running company-owned dealerships in the state.

“It’s a super big deal,” Musk said last night. “I’m not phoning it in.” Standing in front of a giant American flag, he whipped out a magic marker and appeared to autograph his cheesehead before flinging it out into the crowd like a Frisbee. So far, Musk’s move-fast-and-break-things approach to navigating the contours of the American government has created chaos in federal agencies and diminished his personal fortune. But his very simple election strategy—give people money—has worked. Musk may be failing at some things, but having a lot of money is not one of them.

Related:

- Elon Musk looks desperate.

- Elon Musk’s soap operas for conspiracy buffs

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

- America’s future is Hungary, Anne Applebaum writes.

- The new marriage of unequals

- The world still needs Ringo Starr.

Today’s News

1. Donald Trump said that he is weighing running for a third term, which is banned by the Constitution.

2. The U.S. military has recovered the bodies of three soldiers who died in Lithuania after their vehicle was trapped in a bog. Search-and-rescue efforts are still ongoing for the fourth soldier.

3. Marine Le Pen, the leader of a far-right French political party, was found guilty of embezzlement and barred from seeking public office for five years.

Dispatches

- The Wonder Reader: Working to get relaxation right might seem counterintuitive, but it matters, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

My Day Inside America’s Most Hated Car

By Saahil Desai

On the first Sunday of spring, surrounded by row houses and magnolia trees, I came to a horrifying realization: My mom was right. I had been flipped off at least 17 times, called a “motherfucker” (in both English and Spanish), and a “fucking dork.” A woman in a blue sweater stared at me, sighed, and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” All of this because I was driving a Tesla Cybertruck.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

- You should still buy a Tesla—but only if it’s used.

- Why Trump says he’s “not joking” about a third term

- Steven Cheung is the voice of Trump.

- A knapsack’s worth of courage

- Russia’s repression goes south.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Watch. Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke (streaming on Hulu) shows the consequences of telling modern women that they can become stars by turning the camera onto their home life, Hannah Giorgis writes.

Examine. Mike White’s latest season of The White Lotus (streaming on Max) is the first great work of art in the post-“woke” era, Helen Lewis argues.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Seven Sunday Reads

Spend time with stories about what ketamine does to the human brain, the political fight of the century, and more.

by Isabel Fattal

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

For your weekend reading list, our editors compiled seven stories. Spend time with articles about what ketamine does to the human brain, the political fight of the century, and more.

One Word Describes Trump

A century ago, a German sociologist explained precisely how the president thinks about the world.

By Jonathan Rauch

His Daughter Was America’s First Measles Death in a Decade

A visit with a family in mourning

By Tom Bartlett

What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain

Excessive use of the drug can make anyone feel like they rule the world.

By Shayla Love

The ‘Exciting Business Opportunity’ That Ruined Our Lives

Amway sold my family a life built on delusion.

By Andrea Pitzer

Where Jeff Bezos Went Wrong With The Washington Post

The billionaire handled his ownership admirably for more than a decade. But his courage failed him when he needed it most.

By Martin Baron

The Political Fight of the Century

For the first time in decades, America has a chance to define its next political order. Trump offers fear, retribution, and scarcity. Liberals can stand for abundance.

By Derek Thompson

Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene

Elite schools breed entitlement, entrench inequality—and then pretend to be engines of social change.

By Caitlin Flanagan (From 2021)

Catch Up on The Atlantic

This week, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that the Trump administration inadvertently added him to a discussion of a military strike on Houthi militias in Yemen, conducted over the encrypted messaging app Signal. Catch up on the story and some of our writers’ analysis here:

- Here are the attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared on Signal.

- Jeffrey Goldberg: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans.

- The double standard at the center of the Signal debacle

- Tom Nichols: The Trump team’s denials are laughable.

- Jonathan Chait: The worst thing a MAGA warrior can do

The Week Ahead

1. A Minecraft Movie, a live-action film based on the best-selling video game (in theaters Friday)

2. The Bondsman, a horror-action show starring Kevin Bacon as a resurrected bounty hunter who must find the demons that escaped hell (premieres Thursday on Prime Video)

3. Pathemata, or, the Story of My Mouth, a book by Maggie Nelson detailing her diaries about a decade of dreams and jaw pain (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Ben Hickey

The Paradox of Hard Work

By Alex Hutchinson

To say that long-distance runners embrace difficulty is to say the obvious. When you watch many thousands of people happily push themselves through a race that they might not even be allowed to finish, though, you start to get the hint that something deeply human is going on. People like things that are really hard. In fact, the enormity of a task often is why people pursue it in the first place.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

- Jake and Logan Paul hit the limits of the manosphere.

- The best American poetry of the 21st century (so far)

- The lesson Snow White should teach Disney

- “Dear James”: Is this sexless marriage over?

- A much-needed course correction for Marvel

- Sophie Gilbert: “The Severance twist I can’t forgive”

- Comedy’s most erudite buffoon

Photo Album

An aircraft sits on the flooded tarmac at Porto Alegre–Salgado Filho International Airport, in Brazil. (Anselmo Cunha / Agence France-Presse)

Take a look at some of the global and regional winning entries of this year’s World Press Photo Contest.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

How to Really Rest

Working to get relaxation right might seem counterintuitive, but it matters.

by Isabel Fattal

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

Trying to get better at relaxing might sound silly. Isn’t the point of relaxing to not work at all? But as Arthur C. Brooks points out in a recent article, “doing leisure well will generate the sort of growth in our well-being that work cannot provide.” In order to get to that place of growth, “we must treat it with every bit as much seriousness as we do our careers,” he argues. Part of that process is redefining what rest and relaxation look like. When you hear the word rest, you might think of idleness, or just sleep. But experts on rest (yes, they exist) have highlighted the importance of more active types of relaxation, too, such as exercise or pursuing hobbies. Today’s newsletter explores how to rest.

On Rest and Leisure

You Can Do Leisure Better, Seriously

By Arthur C. Brooks

If you think of personal time only as “not work,” you could be missing out on truly enriching experiences.

Read the article.

Aristotle’s 10 Rules for a Good Life

By Arthur C. Brooks

An ancient Greek recipe for happiness

Read the article.

What Is Rest, Anyway?

By Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost

There’s a difference between leisure and laziness.

Listen.

Still Curious?

- How to have your most fulfilling vacation ever: Turning your leisure into learning offers the happiest holiday experience of all, Arthur C. Brooks wrote in 2023.

- The free-time paradox in America: The rich were meant to have the most leisure time. The working poor were meant to have the least. The opposite is happening, Derek Thompson wrote in 2016. Why?

Other Diversions

- The drink Americans can’t quit

- Susan Sontag’s vision

- Winners of the 2025 World Press Photo Contest

The Risk of Financing Your Errands

Deferred-payment apps are a fact of life for many Americans, yet the future of the agency responsible for protecting those who use them is murky.

by Lora Kelley

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Americans are feeling anxious about the economy. Amid all the questions—is a recession looming? Will President Trump’s tariffs cause a spike in prices?—one not-so-reassuring prospect exists: You can pay for sandwiches in installments.

Last week, the financial-services start-up Klarna announced that it was partnering with the delivery company DoorDash to allow customers to pay off orders in four parts. Deferred-payment services, once used largely to finance major purchases such as couches or Pelotons, have been expanding into the realm of the day-to-day in recent years, as the companies grow (and in Klarna’s case, eye an IPO). On an internet attuned to #recessionindicators, the memes began to flow, as many noted the absurdity of financing, say, a burrito. (Klarna clarified in a blog post that the feature could be used for purchases of at least $35, and a spokesperson told me that the partnership was intended more for purchasing bigger-ticket items such as home goods and electronics than for use on food delivery. DoorDash has emphasized the same.)

Some 14 percent of Americans had used buy-now, pay-later services (known as BNPL), such as Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay, in the year leading up to fall 2023, one estimate found. The services effectively offer interest-free loans and do not generally require a credit check. In 2019, people bought about $2 billion worth of goods with the apps, and in 2023, it was closer to $34 billion. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that the bulk of BNPL transactions in 2022 were for purchases of less than $100. These arrangements, tempting as they are, come with risks: They run parallel to the traditional credit-card system but lack all of the same protections.

Credit cards are required to follow the Truth in Lending Act, which provides consumer protections such as notices on rate increases and the right to dispute charges—and they allow users to build up their credit when they pay off batches of purchases at once. The idea of paying off a single deferred-payment loan may, on its face, seem simpler than opening a credit card. But what often ends up happening with these services, Ed deHaan, a professor at Stanford’s business school, told me, is that users (many of them young people) who are not in the habit of paying off debt take out several of these loans at once. Keeping track of eight or 10 smaller loans with different deadlines can quickly become overwhelming.

On average, deHaan has found, people using BNPL services are more likely to overdraft their bank account than nonusers (suggesting they are spending beyond their means). And another study found that using the services causes spending to rise by $60 a week. Many regular users of the services are those who have already racked up credit-card debt, and turn to deferred payments as a last resort. As Mac Schwerin wrote in The Atlantic in 2023, “What companies like Klarna once characterized as paradigm-busting behavior—young people rejecting stodgy banks in favor of more freeing forms of finance—now looks like the crest of yet another credit cycle, a familiar note in the motif of American consumption.” Klarna told me that it has “a number of safeguards to ensure responsible lending and consumer protection,” and in a follow-up statement noted that it welcomes “proportionate” rules, arguing that “the CFPB’s previous attempts at this were a step in the right direction but they ultimately failed to recognise what BNPL is.”

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has only just started to scrutinize the young BNPL sector. Last May, the agency announced that deferred-payment programs would be treated like credit cards in some key ways: Borrowers would be able to dispute charges and be more easily able to get refunds, among other protections (some but not all aspects of the Truth in Lending Act applied). Rather than issuing new regulations for the BNPL sector, the CFPB ruled that the spirit of existing credit-card laws covered the newer industry—a bold move, deHaan argued when we talked earlier this week, and one that was challenged in court. On Wednesday, a court filing suggested that the CFPB would revoke the rule. (The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Although the big BNPL lenders such as Klarna have signaled that they are open to some regulation, the U.S. lags behind Europe in its regulations on the services. The major players face public pressure to operate scrupulously, deHaan noted. The bigger risk to consumers may now come from the smaller, less popular loan companies that can crop up and take advantage of reduced scrutiny.

The deferred-payments sector seems, on paper, like just the kind of issue the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was set up to handle: The agency, which was formed after the 2008 financial crisis, has the mandate to monitor new financial products that may confuse consumers. But in recent months, the agency has been gutted. In February, the entire 1,700-person workforce was sent home (Elon Musk posted “CFPB RIP” on X), and the agency was ordered to pause rule making. A judge is set to decide soon whether firings of probationary workers are legal; in the meantime, some workers have been brought back. And earlier today, another judge issued an injunction to temporarily stop the Trump administration from dismantling the agency, saying that the court “can and must act” to preserve it.

The judge’s ruling brings the agency back from the brink for now. The BNPL industry is one that, in another political era, the CFPB may have been eager to address. And if the agency survives, it still could. But the chaos—and the fact that the administration has attacked it—may ultimately render it less equipped to protect the public.

Related:

- The “Buy now, pay later” bubble is about to burst.

- Why is there financing for everything now? (From 2020)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

- The double standard at the center of the Signal debacle

- David Frum: Why Sheinbaum can surrender to Trump

- The truth about Trump’s Greenland campaign

Today’s News

1. More than 150 people were killed, and more than 730 were injured, after a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar. Buildings collapsed in Thailand from the quake, killing at least 10 people in Bangkok.

2. During Vice President J. D. Vance’s Greenland visit, he said that the country’s people would be better off under America’s security umbrella than Denmark’s.

3. The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, seeking approval for President Donald Trump to deport people under the Alien Enemies Act.

Dispatches

- Atlantic Intelligence: Damon Beres interviews Ian Bogost about the AI-generated Studio Ghibli images that have taken the internet by storm.

- The Books Briefing: We surveyed more than 400 writers, readers, and editors to assemble a rich array of works. Here is the best American poetry of the 21st century (so far).

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Warrick Page / Max

The Pitt Has Revolutionized the Medical Drama

By David Sims

Medical dramas are like the old aphorism about pizza and sex: Even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good. Since the glory days of ER faded in the late ’90s, there have been plenty of TV series of varying quality set in hospitals … I had been longing for something more meat-and-potatoes—and then along came The Pitt, Max’s hit new show starring ER’s Noah Wyle. The first season is still airing, yet it’s already without question the finest example of the genre in more than a generation.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

- Texas never wanted RFK Jr.’s unproven measles treatment.

- The NIH’s most reckless cuts yet

- The retired J.P. Morgan executive tracking Trump’s deportation flights

- Why DOGE could actually increase the deficit

- Job loss is a kind of grief.

- Canada’s military has a Trump problem.

Culture Break

Tomohiro Ohsumi / Getty

Take a look. These photos of the week show a Tyrannosaurus race, a raccoon snack, anti-Hamas protests in Gaza, Nowruz celebrations in Iraq, and more.

Read. Michelle de Kretser’s intellectual coming-of-age novel explores the fissures between one’s ideals and reality.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Hayao Miyazaki’s AI Nightmare

People are using ChatGPT to create Studio Ghibli–style images. And the backlash is huge.

by Damon Beres

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

This week, OpenAI released an update to GPT-4o, one of the models powering ChatGPT, that allows the program to create high-quality images. I’ve been surprised by how effective the tool is: It follows directions precisely, renders people with the right number of fingers, and is even capable of replacing text in an image with different words.

Almost immediately—and with the direct encouragement of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—people started using GPT-4o to transform photographs into illustrations that emulate the style of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films at Studio Ghibli. (Think Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away.) The program was excellent at this task, generating images of happy couples on the beach (cute) and lush illustrations of the Kennedy assassination (not cute).

Unsurprisingly, backlash soon followed: People raised concerns about OpenAI profiting off of another company’s intellectual property, pointed to a documentary clip of Miyazaki calling AI an “insult to life itself,” and mused about the technology’s threats to human creativity. All of these conversations are valid, yet they didn’t feel altogether satisfying—complaining about a (frankly, quite impressive!) thing doesn’t make that thing go away, after all. I asked my colleague Ian Bogost, also the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, for his take.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Damon Beres: Let’s start with the very basic question. Are the Studio Ghibli images evil?

Ian Bogost: I don’t think they’re evil. They might be stupid. You could construe them as ugly, although they’re also beautiful. You could construe them as immoral or unseemly.

If they are evil, why are they evil? Where does that get us in our understanding of contemporary technology and culture? We have backed ourselves into this corner where fandom is so important and so celebrated, and has been for so long. Adopting the universe and aesthetics of popular culture—whether it’s Studio Ghibli or Marvel or Harry Potter or Taylor Swift—that’s not just permissible, but good and even righteous in contemporary culture.

Damon: So the idea is that fan art is okay, so long as a human hand literally drew it with markers. But if any person is able to type a very simple command into a chatbot and render what appears at first glance to be a professional-grade Studio Ghibli illustration, then that’s a problem.

Ian: It’s not different in nature to have a machine do a copy of a style of an artist than to have a person do a copy of a style of an artist. But there is a difference in scale: With AI, you can make them fast and you can make lots of them. That’s changed people’s feelings about the matter.

I read an article about copyright and style—you can’t copyright a style, it argued—that made me realize that people conflate many different things in this conversation about AI art. People who otherwise might hate copyright seem to love it now: If they’re posting their own fan art and get a takedown request, then they’re like, Screw you, I’m just trying to spread the gospel of your creativity. But those same people might support a copyright claim against a generative-AI tool, even though it’s doing the same thing.

Damon: As I’ve experimented with these tools, I’ve realized that the purpose isn’t to make art at all; a Ghibli image coming out of ChatGPT is about as artistic as a photo with an Instagram filter on it. It feels more like a toy to me, or a video game. I’m putting a dumb thought into a program and seeing what comes out. There’s a low-effort delight and playfulness.

But some people have made this point that it’s insulting because it’s violating Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki’s beliefs about AI. Then there are these memes—the White House tweeted a Ghiblified image of an immigrant being detained, which is extremely distasteful. But the image is not distasteful because of the technology: It’s distasteful because it’s the White House tweeting a cruel meme about a person’s life.

Ian: You brought up something important, this embrace of the intentional fallacy—the idea that a work’s meaning is derived from what the creator of that work intended that meaning to be. These days, people express an almost total respect for the intentions of the artist. It’s perfectly fine for Miyazaki to hate AI or anything else, of course, but the idea that his opinion would somehow influence what I think about making AI images in his visual style is fascinating to me.

Damon: Maybe some of the frustration that people are expressing is that it makes Studio Ghibli feel less special. Studio Ghibli movies are rare—there aren’t that many of them, and they have a very high-touch execution. Even if we’re not making movies, the aesthetic being everywhere and the aesthetic being cheap cuts against that.

Ian: That’s a credible theory. But you’re still in intentional-fallacy territory, right? Studio Ghibli has made a deliberate effort to tend and curate their output, and they don’t just make a movie every year, and I want to respect that as someone influenced by that work. And that’s weird to me.

Damon: What we haven’t talked about is the Ghibli image as a kind of meme. They’re not just spreading because they’re Ghibli images: They’re spreading because they’re AI-generated Ghibli images.

Ian: This is a distinctive style of meme based less on the composition of the image itself or the text you put on it, but the application of an AI-generated style to a subject. I feel like this does represent some sort of evolutionary branch of internet meme. You need generative AI to make that happen, you need it to be widespread and good enough and fast enough and cheap enough. And you need X and Bluesky in a way as well.

Damon: You can’t really imagine image generators in a paradigm where there’s no social media.

Ian: What would you do with them, show them to your mom? These are things that are made to be posted, and that’s where their life ends.

Damon: Maybe that’s what people don’t like, too—that it’s nakedly transactional.

Ian: Exactly—you’re engagement baiting. These days, that accusation is equivalent to selling out.

Damon: It’s this generation’s poser.

Ian: Engagement baiter.

Damon: Leave me with a concluding thought about how people should react to these images.

Ian: They ought to be more curious. This is deeply interesting, and if we refuse to give ourselves the opportunity to even start engaging with why, and instead jump to the most convenient or in-crowd conclusion, that’s a real shame.

The Danger of a Too-Open Mind

Perhaps being persuadable is overrated—at least if it means “coming to accept the unacceptable.”

by Boris Kachka

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

At a moment when just asking questions can feel synonymous with bad-faith arguments or conspiratorial thinking, one of the hardest things to hold on to might be an open mind. As Kieran Setiya wrote this week in The Atlantic on the subject of Julian Barnes’s new book, Changing My Mind, “If a functioning democracy is one in which people share a common pool of information and disagree in moderate, conciliatory ways, there are grounds for pessimism about its prospects.” But what should the civic-minded citizen do with that pessimism? Knowing about our tendency toward rationalization and confirmation bias, alongside the prevalence of misinformation, how do we know when, or whether, to change our minds?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

- What Shakespeare got right about PTSD

- The life of the mind can only get you so far

- The last great Yiddish novel

- “Coalescence,” a poem by Cameron Allan

Another article published this week presents a possible test case. The Yale law professor Justin Driver examines a new book, Integrated—and, more broadly, a surge of skepticism over the effects of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that ordered the racial integration of American public schools. The book’s author, Noliwe Rooks, was “firmly in the traditional pro-Brown camp” as recently as five years ago, Driver writes. But America’s failure to accommodate Black children in predominantly white schools, combined with the continuing lack of resources in largely Black schools, led Rooks to conclude in her book that Brown was in fact “an attack on the pillars of Black life”: that integration, as carried out, has failed many Black children, while undermining the old system of strong Black schools.

Should this case of intellectual flexibility be celebrated? It certainly makes for a lively debate. Driver calls Rooks’s “disenchantment” with the ruling “entirely understandable,” but he sticks to his own belief that Brown has done more good than harm, and he makes a case for it. For example, Rooks portrays Washington, D.C.’s prestigious all-Black Dunbar High School as a hub of the community, staffed by proud and dedicated educators. Driver complicates the history of those “glory days” by quoting its most prominent graduates: “Much as they valued having talented, caring teachers, these men understood racial segregation intimately, and they detested it.” And he notes that, beyond changing education, “Brown fomented a broad-gauge racial revolution throughout American public life.” He demonstrates that we can absorb new information—in this case, evidence of the many shortcomings of American school integration—without forgetting the lessons of the past.

Barnes makes a similar case in Changing My Mind, a book that is, in fact, mostly about why the novelist hasn’t altered his opinions and ultimately doubts that trying to is worth it. To adopt new beliefs, he writes, we would have “to forget what we believed before, or at least forget with what passion and certainty we believed it.” Setiya chides Barnes for his view that, given our hardwired biases, we might want to give up on being swayed at all. But he concludes that such stubbornness is “not all bad.” Perhaps keeping an open mind is overrated—at least if it means “coming to accept the unacceptable,” as Setiya puts it. And how should a person determine what’s unacceptable? “When we fear that our environment will degrade,” Setiya writes, “we can record our fundamental values and beliefs so as not to forsake them later.” Once we know what our principles are, we can more easily weigh new information against our existing convictions. Without them, it would be easier to change our minds—but impossible to know when we’re right.

Illustration by The Atlantic*

It’s Hard to Change Your Mind. A New Book Asks If You Should Even Try.

By Kieran Setiya

The novelist Julian Barnes doubts that we can ever really overcome our fixed beliefs. He should keep an open mind.

Read the full article.

What to Read

Witness, by Whittaker Chambers

This 1952 memoir is still thrust in the hands of budding young conservatives, as a means of inculcating them into the movement. Published during an annus mirabilis for conservative treatises, just as the American right was beginning to emerge in its modern incarnation, Witness is draped in apocalyptic rhetoric about the battle for the future of mankind—a style that helped establish the Manichaean mentality of postwar conservatism. But the book is more than an example of an outlook: It tells a series of epic stories. Chambers narrates his time as an underground Communist activist in the ’30s, a fascinating tale of subterfuge. An even larger stretch of the book is devoted to one of the great spectacles in modern American politics, the Alger Hiss affair. In 1948, after defecting from his sect, Chambers delivered devastating testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee accusing Hiss, a former State Department official and a paragon of the liberal establishment, of being a Soviet spy. History vindicates Chambers’s version of events, and his propulsive storytelling withstands the test of time.  — Franklin Foer

From our list: Six political memoirs worth reading

Out Next Week

📚 Free: My Search for Meaning, by Amanda Knox

📚 Sister Europe, by Nell Zink

📚 Twist, by Colum McCann

Your Weekend Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Jake Rosenberg / Netflix.

What Impossibly Wealthy Women Do for Love and Fulfillment

By Sophie Gilbert

Watching the show, I found myself stuck on one question: Whom is this for? Is there an underserved niche of Santa Barbara moms with their own pristine vegetable gardens who have previously been too intimidated to attempt baking focaccia? And yet, as With Love, Meghan went on, it started to hit a few of the classic pleasure points. A beautiful woman with a wardrobe of stealth-wealth beige separates and floral dresses? Check. A fixation, both nutritional and aesthetic, on how best to feed one’s family, down to fruit platters arranged like rainbows and jars of chia seeds and hemp hearts to sneak into pancakes? Check. A strange aside where she details what it meant for her to take her husband’s name? Ding ding ding: We’re in tradwife territory now. This is absurd, of course. Meghan isn’t a tradwife; if anything, she’s a girlboss, a savvy, mediagenic entrepreneur with a new podcast dedicated to businesswomen and a nascent retail brand. So why does she seem to be trying so hard to rebrand as one, offering up this wistful performance of femininity and old-fashioned domestic arts that feels staged—and pretty familiar?

Read the full article.

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The Atlantic Photo

- Search-and-Rescue Dogs at Work (22 photos)

- Photos of the Week: Raccoon Snack, Tyrannosaurus Race, Speed Skiing (28 photos)

Search-and-Rescue Dogs at Work

- Alan Taylor

- April 2, 2025

- 22 Photos

- In Focus

When search-and-rescue teams deploy to any of the numerous natural or man-made disasters around the world, they bring along their own teams of highly trained dogs to help discover victims in need. When these dogs are not in the field, they frequently take part in training sessions simulating events such as earthquakes, wildfires, and water or avalanche rescues. Gathered below are images of some of these rescue dogs and their handlers, on the job and in training, from the past several years.

To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.

- Rescuers use a sniffer dog during a search operation at the ruins of a building collapsed after an earthquake in Mamuju, West Sulawesi, Indonesia, on January 18, 2021. #

Daeng Mansur / AP

- Lek, a golden retriever from the Thai K9 Rescue unit, is brought to comfort people waiting for news of missing loved ones at the site of an under-construction building collapse in Bangkok, Thailand, on April 1, 2025, four days after an earthquake struck central Myanmar and Thailand. #

Lillian Suwanrumpha / AFP / Getty

- A volunteer with the Italian School of Rescue Dogs (La Scuola Italiana Cani Salvataggio) jumps with a dog during a water-rescue training session at Averno Lake in Pozzuoli, Italy, on October 24, 2024. #

Vincenzo Izzo / Sipa USA / Reuters

- Rescuers deploy a sniffing dog to search for survivors, as dozens of people are believed to have been trapped in the rubble of a collapsed high-rise building that was still under construction, after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck neighboring country Myanmar, in Bangkok, Thailand, on March 29, 2025. #

Daniel Ceng / Anadolu / Getty

- Workers pull a rescue dog across a river at the site of a landslide in the village of Xinmo, Mao County, Sichuan province, China, on June 25, 2017. #

An Yuan / CNS / Reuters

- A search-and-rescue worker, looking for Camp Fire victims, carries Susie Q to safety after the sniffer dog fell through rubble at the Holly Hills Mobile Estates on November 14, 2018, in Paradise, California. #

Noah Berger / AP

- Tullla, a four-year-old Labrador, gets a bath after working in the Pacific Palisades on January 17, 2025. Search-and-rescue dogs from the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation were deployed to assist after wildfires decimated parts of California. #

Megan Smith / USA Today Network / Reuters

- A search-and-rescue dog named Maca, with the Turkish Gendarmerie General Command, takes part in skydiving training at Sivrihisar Aviation Center in the Sivrihisar district of Eskişehir, Turkey, on October 12, 2023. #

Cem Genco / Anadolu / Getty

- A closer view of search-and-rescue dog Maca, wearing protective gear and a video camera during training, at Turkey’s Sivrihisar Aviation Center on October 12, 2023 #

Cem Genco / Anadolu / Getty

- Search-and-rescue dogs take part in a training session in Ankara, Turkey, on January 9, 2024. #

Omer Taha Cetin / Anadolu / Getty

- Disaster-response workers with a sniffer dog conduct a search operation after a child reportedly fell into a stormwater drain following heavy rainfall at Jyoti Nagar in Guwahati, India, on July 5, 2024. #

Pitamber Newar / ANI / Reuters

- A monument to a rescue dog named Proteo is unveiled at Marte Military Field, in Mexico City, on September 21, 2023. Proteo, one of the search-and-rescue dogs deployed to Turkey with a team from Mexico to help to find victims of the 2023 earthquake, died while on the job, after finding at least two trapped people. #

Luis Barron / Eyepix Group / Future Publishing / Getty

- An avalanche dog takes part in a search-and-rescue exercise for avalanche victims at the French Alps ski resort of La Rosiere, France, on February 4, 2025. #

Olivier Chassignole / AFP / Getty

- A member of the Mexican navy kneels beside a rescue dog after an earthquake struck on the southern coast of Mexico in Juchitan, Mexico, on September 10, 2017. #

Edgard Garrido / Reuters

- A sniffer dog swims through mud and debris during a search for the remaining victim of a flash flood in Hildale, Utah, on September 17, 2015. #

Rick Bowmer / AP

- A rescuer with a dog inspects the rubble of a building following a Russian drone attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on March 29, 2025. #

Sergey Bobok / AFP / Getty

- A trainer pets one of the search-and-rescue dogs that are helping to train other dogs in Ankara, Turkey, on January 9, 2024. #

Omer Taha Cetin / Anadolu / Getty

- A search-and-rescue dog takes part in a water-rescue training session in Ankara, Turkey, on November 19, 2024. #

Mehmet Ali Ozcan / Anadolu / Getty

- A search-and-rescue dog works in debris left after the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, on November 16, 2018. #

John Locher / AP

- A rescue worker and his search dog prepare to be lifted in the bucket of an excavator, searching for survivors at the site of a deadly explosion that destroyed the Hotel Saratoga in Old Havana, Cuba, on May 8, 2022. #

Ismael Francisco / AP

- A member of an all-female group of canine rescuers from the Italian School of Rescue Dogs (La Scuola Italiana Cani Salvataggio) attends a training session with her dog before patrolling the beach to ensure swimmers can enjoy their time at the sea in safety, in Riva dei Tarquini, near Rome, Italy, on August 25, 2020. #

Guglielmo Mangiapane / Reuters

- A volunteer firefighter hugs a dog during the search for victims of an eruption of the Fuego Volcano in Alotenango, a municipality in Sacatepequez Department, Guatemala, on June 6, 2018. #

Orlando Estrada / AFP / Getty

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Photos of the Week: Raccoon Snack, Tyrannosaurus Race, Speed Skiing

- Alan Taylor

- March 28, 2025

- 28 Photos

- In Focus

A para-surfing event in Australia, an anti-Hamas protest in the Gaza Strip, Nowruz celebrations in Iraq, deadly wildfires in South Korea, a spiral in the night sky over Sweden, a sea-lion rescue in California, a rally race in Kenya, and much more.

To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.

- Police officers use pepper spray on a demonstrator wearing dervish clothes, during a protest on the day Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu was jailed as part of a corruption investigation, in Istanbul, on March 23, 2025. #

Umit Bektas / Reuters

- A boy walks past statues of Buddhist monks at the Trapeang Thma pagoda in Cambodia’s Banteay Meanchey province on March 24, 2025. #

Tang Chhin Sothy / AFP / Getty

- People wearing T. rex costumes compete during a Tyrannosaurus Race on the track of Funabashi Racecourse in Funabashi, Japan, on March 22, 2025. The race, which originated with the T-Rex Race held at Emerald Downs in Washington State in 2017, has been gaining popularity in Japan. #

Tomohiro Ohsumi / Getty

- A female lynx named Vinegra, which was born in Andalusia, runs to protected freedom in an enclosed area before being released into the wild next month, in Astudillo, Spain, on March 25, 2025. #

Juan Medina / Reuters

- Kalle Rovanperä steers his Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 with co-driver Jonne Halttunen over a jump at Miti Mbili during the during the World Rally Championship Safari Rally Kenya Special Stage 6, on March 21, 2025. #

Tony Karumba / AFP / Getty

- Italy’s Simone Origone participates in the S1M run during a World Speed Skiing Championship and World Record Attempt at Vars La Forêt Blanche, in France, on March 25, 2025. #

Manon Cruz / Reuters

- A model presents a creation by Anurag Gupta during the Fashion Design Council of India’s Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai, on March 27, 2025. #

Rajanish Kakade / AP

- Men secure packed Buddha statues onto a trailer’s cargo bed, along with other items, to move them to safety, as a wildfire threatened Bongjeong Temple, listed as a Korean Mountain Area Temple by UNESCO, in Andong, South Korea, on March 26, 2025. #

Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP / Getty

- A sick California sea lion, with possible domoic-acid poisoning, is rescued to be evaluated by volunteers from the Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute in Santa Barbara, California, on March 25, 2025. More than 100 sea lions, dolphins, and other marine mammals, including birds, have reportedly been sickened from algal blooms in Southern California since February. #

David Swanson / AFP / Getty

- Yoko, the only known great ape in captivity in Colombia, rescued after suffering animal abuse, is transported in a container inside Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport, before being relocated to Brazil’s Sorocaba Sanctuary, on March 23, 2025. #

Luisa Gonzalez / Reuters

- In this picture taken in the countryside near Dalby-Viggeby, south of Uppsala, Sweden, on March 24, 2025, shows a blue-and-white spiral in the night sky reportedly created by frozen fuel tumbling from a SpaceX rocket. #

Bertrand Ilhe / AFP / Getty

- Lava erupts from Halema’uma’u crater within the summit caldera Kaluapele, at the Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii, on March 26, 2025. #

Marco Garcia / Reuters

- A wildfire burns through a forested area in Andong, South Korea, on March 27, 2025. One of South Korea’s worst-ever wildfire outbreaks has killed at least 24 people, officials said on March 26, with multiple raging blazes causing “unprecedented damage” and threatening two UNESCO-listed sites. #

Anthony Wallace / AFP / Getty

- Tear gas is fired by police during a protest by fishermen in Valparaíso, Chile, on March 26, 2025. About 100 fishermen clashed with police in the Chilean port of Valparaíso to demand the passage of a law increasing the catch percentage allowed for artisanal fishing. #

Cristobal Basaure / AFP / Getty

- People launch fireworks during the Parrandas de Camajuani, in Cuba, on March 22, 2025. Two neighborhoods of the city, San Jose, represented by a toad, and Santa Teresa, represented by a goat, fight with carnival shows that involve the whole town in a party with bands, huge floats, and fireworks. #

Yamil Lage / AFP / Getty

- Iraqi Kurds carry torches as they gather to celebrate Nowruz in the Akre district in Nineveh, Kurdistan region of Iraq, on March 20, 2025. #

Osama Al Maqdoni / Middle East Images / AFP / Getty

- People walk near cherry blossoms in the gardens of the Reggia of Venaria Reale near Turin on March 26, 2025. #

Marco Bertorello / AFP / Getty

- Actors rehearse the opera Sun & Sea for the press at Teatro Colón in Bogotá, Colombia, on March 20, 2025. #

Luisa Gonzalez / Reuters

- Palestinians take part in an anti-Hamas protest, calling for an end to the war with Israel, in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on March 26, 2025. #

AFP / Getty

- Women dressed as Mothers of Plaza de Mayo march to commemorate the anniversary of Argentina’s 1976 coup, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 24, 2025. #

Rodrigo Abd / AP

- Deer gather in a glade in a forest of the Taunus region near Frankfurt, Germany, on March 25, 2025. #

Michael Probst / AP

- Rows of blossoming peach trees line the fields of Aitona, in the province of Lleida, Spain, seen on March 22, 2025. #

Josep Lago / AFP / Getty

- Annie Goldsmith is assisted in the surf during the 2025 Australian Para Surfing Titles in Byron Bay, Australia, on March 25, 2025. #

Chris Hyde / Getty

- A raccoon eats peanuts on the boardwalk in Panama City on March 23, 2025. #

Matias Delacroix / AP

- A visitor rests in a hammock at Elysian Park in Los Angeles on March 25, 2025 #

Damian Dovarganes / AP

- A view of the Cobre Panama mine of Canada’s First Quantum Minerals, one of the world’s largest open-pit copper mines, in Donoso, Panama, on March 21, 2025. The mine was forced to shut down after Panama’s top court ruled that its contract was unconstitutional, following nationwide protests opposed to its continued operation. #

Enea Lebrun / Reuters

- Migrants board a smuggler’s boat in an attempt to cross the English Channel, off the beach of Gravelines, north of France, on March 26, 2025. #

Sameer Al-Doumy / AFP / Getty

- Dramatic clouds pass above the statue of the national monument to Italy’s King Vittorio Emanuele II, in Rome, on March 26, 2025. #

Filippo Monteforte / AFP / Getty

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Notes | The Atlantic

Table of Contents

TheAtlantic.com [Fri, 04 Apr 2025]

The Atlantic

The Conspiracy Theorist Advising Trump

There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs

What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About the Past

To Be Happier, Stop Resisting Change

Iran Wants to Talk

Trump’s Tariffs Are Designed to Backfire

How the Trump Administration Learned to Obscure the Truth in Court

Why Trump Wants to Control Universities

A New Force of Indian Country

Quaker Parents Were Ahead of Their Time

The Story of the Gilded Age Wasn’t Wealth. It Was Corruption.

Trump’s Tariff Plan Is Going to Hurt

Cory Booker, Endurance Athlete

Elon Musk Lost His Big Bet

RFK Jr. Is Out for Revenge

The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs

Trump’s Day of Reckoning

A New Kart-Racing Appliance

Introducing: <em>The David Frum Show</em>

Wisconsin’s Message for Trump

Search-and-Rescue Dogs at Work

Trump’s Salvadoran Gulag

Why You Should Work Like It’s the ’90s

The New Singlehood Stigma

No Tariff Exemptions for American Farmers

Best of The Atlantic

Trump’s Tariffs Are Designed to Backfire

There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs

Quaker Parents Were Ahead of Their Time

What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About the Past

The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs

The Conspiracy Theorist Advising Trump

To Be Happier, Stop Resisting Change

Iran Wants to Talk

Why Trump Wants to Control Universities

The Story of the Gilded Age Wasn’t Wealth. It Was Corruption.

How the Trump Administration Learned to Obscure the Truth in Court

Elon Musk Lost His Big Bet

No Tariff Exemptions for American Farmers

Miscarriage and Motherhood

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

RFK Jr. Is Out for Revenge

The New Singlehood Stigma

Trump’s Tariff Plan Is Going to Hurt

Cory Booker, Endurance Athlete

A New Kart-Racing Appliance

Introducing: <em>The David Frum Show</em>

Wisconsin’s Message for Trump

Search-and-Rescue Dogs at Work

Trump’s Salvadoran Gulag

Politics | The Atlantic

There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs

How the Trump Administration Learned to Obscure the Truth in Court

The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs

Trump’s Day of Reckoning

Wisconsin’s Message for Trump

No Tariff Exemptions for American Farmers

The Big Story: The Fallout From the Signal Controversy

An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison

Why Trump Says He’s ‘Not Joking’ About a Third Term

Steven Cheung Is the Voice of Trump

America’s Future Is Hungary

The Retired J.P. Morgan Executive Tracking Trump’s Deportation Flights

The Double Standard at the Center of the Signal Debacle

Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State

Global | The Atlantic

Iran Wants to Talk

Search-and-Rescue Dogs at Work

Russia’s Repression Goes South

America’s Future Is Hungary

Photos of the Week: Raccoon Snack, Tyrannosaurus Race, Speed Skiing

Why Sheinbaum Can Surrender to Trump

The Double Standard in the Human-Rights World

Fleeing Hong Kong Wasn’t Enough

Technology | The Atlantic

Elon Musk Lost His Big Bet

A New Kart-Racing Appliance

So Much for the MAGA Divorce

The Great Tesla Sell-Off

My Day Inside America’s Most Hated Car

The Gleeful Cruelty of the White House X Account

U.S. | The Atlantic

The Consequences of the Signal Breach

Health | The Atlantic

RFK Jr. Is Out for Revenge

Long COVID Showed Me the Bottom of American Health Care

The Evermaskers

The Most Important Ingredient in Chewing Gum

Texas Never Wanted RFK Jr.’s Unproven Measles Treatment

The NIH’s Most Reckless Cuts Yet

The Paradox of Hard Work

An ‘Impossible’ Disease Outbreak in the Alps

Science | The Atlantic

The End of College Life

The Truth About Trump’s Greenland Campaign

Texas Never Wanted RFK Jr.’s Unproven Measles Treatment

The NIH’s Most Reckless Cuts Yet

The Paradox of Hard Work

Newsletters | The Atlantic

The Conspiracy Theorist Advising Trump

What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About the Past

Trump’s Tariff Plan Is Going to Hurt

The DOGE Plan That Endangers U.S. Revenue

Musk Is Still Paying for Political Influence

Seven Sunday Reads

How to Really Rest

The Risk of Financing Your Errands

Hayao Miyazaki’s AI Nightmare

The Danger of a Too-Open Mind

The Atlantic Photo

Search-and-Rescue Dogs at Work (22 photos)

Photos of the Week: Raccoon Snack, Tyrannosaurus Race, Speed Skiing (28 photos)