After Ted Hughes

Out on the moors in the late June light, I stood where the infinite hills halved the sky and saw where you first saw your horses. Were they left over from a fever dream, dropped momentarily from some other planet? But in that instant, they existed: ten of them, megaliths with draped manes and tilted hind hooves; each utterly silent, unmoving in the icy morning air. As you passed by, the big sun erupted, darkness shook open and showed you its fires. But your horses remained: patient and gray, statue-like in the iron light, enduring on the horizon. In the crowded streets of London, amid the sea of admiring faces, the scandals, the accolades, did you ever again find so peaceful a place? Or are you still out there, slipping through hills, hiding in the trees, lying in the heathers, combing the barren moors, still searching?

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On a bookshelf near my desk, I still have the souvenir United States flag that I received during my naturalization ceremony, in 1994. I remember a tenderhearted judge got emotional as the room full of immigrants swore the Oath of Allegiance and that, afterward, my family took me to Burgerville to celebrate. The next morning, my teacher asked me to explain to my classmates—all natural-born Americans—how I felt about becoming a citizen at age 13.

One girl had a question: “So Chris can never be president?”

I wasn’t worried about becoming president—I just wanted to get to the computer lab, where we were free to slaughter squirrels in The Oregon Trail. But her question revealed that even kids know there are two kinds of citizens: the ones who are born here, and the ones like me. The distinction is written into the Constitution, a one-line fissure that Donald Trump used to crack open the country: “Now we have to look at it,” Trump said, after compelling Barack Obama to release his birth certificate in 2011. “Is it real? Is it proper?”

Nearly 25 million naturalized citizens live in the U.S., and we are accustomed to extra scrutiny. I expect supplemental questions on medical forms, close inspection at border crossings, and bureaucratic requests to see my naturalization certificate. But I had never doubted that my U.S. citizenship was permanent, and that I was guaranteed the same rights of speech, assembly, and due process as natural-born Americans. Now I’m not so sure.

Last month, the Department of Justice released a civil-enforcement memo listing the denaturalization of U.S. citizens as a top-five priority and pledging to “maximally pursue” all viable cases, including people who are “a potential danger to national security” and, more vague, anyone “sufficiently important to pursue.” President Trump has suggested that targets could include citizens whom he views as his political enemies, such as Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayoral candidate who was born in Uganda and naturalized in 2018: “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” Trump said. “We’re going to look at everything.”

[Read: Why civics is about more than citizenship]

Looking at everything can be unnerving for naturalized citizens. Our document trails can span decades and continents. Thankfully, I was naturalized as a child, before I had much background to check, before the internet, before online surveillance. I was born in Brazil, in 1981, during the twilight of its military dictatorship, and transplanted to the United States as a baby through a byzantine international-adoption process. My birth mother had no way of knowing for sure what awaited me, but she understood that her child would have a better chance in the “land of the free.”

I don’t consider myself “a potential danger to national security” or “sufficiently important to pursue,” but I also don’t believe that American security is threatened by international students, campus protesters, or undocumented people selling hot dogs at Home Depot. I’m a professor who writes critically about American power, I believe in civil disobedience, and I support my students when they exercise their freedom of conscience.

Because I was naturalized as a child, I didn’t have to take the famous civics test—I was still learning that stuff in school. I just rolled my fingertips in wet ink and held still for a three-quarter-profile photograph that revealed my nose shape, ear placement, jawline, and forehead contour. My parents sat beside me for an interview with an immigration officer who asked me my name, where I lived, and who took care of me.

But these days, I wonder a lot about that civics test. It consists of 10 questions, selected from a list of 100, on the principles of democracy, our system of government, our rights and responsibilities, and milestones in American history. The test is oral; an official asks questions in deliberately slow, even tones, checking the responses against a list of sanctioned answers. Applicants need to get only six answers correct in order to pass. Democracy is messy, but this test is supposed to be easy.

However, so much has changed in the past few years that I’m not sure how a prospective citizen would answer those questions today. Are the correct answers to the test still true of the United States?

What does the Constitution do? The Constitution protects the basic rights of Americans.

One of the Constitution’s bedrock principles can be traced back to a revision that Thomas Jefferson made to an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, replacing “our fellow subjects” with “our fellow citizens.”

As with constitutional theories of executive power, theories of citizenship are subject to interpretation. Chief Justice Earl Warren distilled the concept as “the right to have rights.” His Court deemed the revocation of citizenship cruel and unusual, tantamount to banishment, “a form of punishment more primitive than torture.”

By testing the constitutional rights of citizenship on two fronts—attempting to denaturalize Americans and to strip away birthright citizenship—Trump is claiming the power of a king to banish his subjects. In the United States, citizens choose the president. The president does not choose citizens

What is the **“**rule of law”? Nobody is above the law.

Except, perhaps, the president, who is immune from criminal prosecution for official acts performed while in office. Trump is distorting that principle by directing the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and ICE to enforce his own vision of the law without regard for constitutional norms.

Civil law is more malleable than criminal law, with fewer assurances of due process and a lower burden of proof. ICE raids rely on kinetic force to fill detention cells. Denaturalization cases can rely on stealthy legal proceedings. In 2018, the Trump administration stripped a man of his citizenship. He was married to a U.S. citizen and had been naturalized for 12 years. The administration accused him of fraudulently using an alias to apply for his papers after having been ordered to leave the country. In an article for the American Bar Association, two legal scholars argued that this was more likely the result of a bureaucratic mix-up. Whatever the truth of the matter, the summons was served to an old address, and the man lost his citizenship without ever having had the chance to defend himself in a hearing.

[Read: The fragility of American citizenship]

The DOJ is signaling an aggressive pursuit of denaturalization that could lead to more cases like these. In the most extreme scenarios, Americans could be banished to a country where they have no connection or even passing familiarity with the language or culture.

What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful? Checks and balances.

Denaturalization efforts may fail in federal court, but the Trump administration has a habit of acting first and answering to judges later. When courts do intervene, a decision can take weeks or months, and the Supreme Court recently ruled that federal judges lack the authority to order nationwide injunctions while they review an individual case. FBI and ICE investigations, however, can be opened quickly and have been accelerated by new surveillance technologies.

How far might a Trump administration unbound by the courts go? Few people foresaw late-night deportation flights to El Salvador, the deployment of U.S. Marines to Los Angeles, a U.S. senator thrown to the ground and handcuffed by FBI agents for speaking out during a Department of Homeland Security press conference. To many Americans who have roots in countries with an authoritarian government, these events don’t seem so alien.

What is one right or freedom from the First Amendment? Speech.

And all the rights that flow from it: Assembly. Religion. Press. Petitioning the government.

During the McCarthy era, the Department of Justice targeted alleged anarchists and Communists for denaturalization, scrutinizing the years well before and after they had arrived in the U.S. for evidence of any lack of “moral character,” which could include gambling, drunkenness, or affiliation with labor unions. From 1907 to 1967, more than 22,000 Americans were denaturalized.

Even if only a handful of people are stripped of their citizenship in the coming years, it would be enough to chill the speech of countless naturalized citizens, many of whom are already cautious about exercising their First Amendment rights. The mere prospect of a lengthy, costly, traumatic legal proceeding is enough to induce silence.

What are two ways that Americans can participate in their democracy? Help with a campaign. Publicly support or oppose an issue or policy.

If, apparently, it’s the “proper” campaign, issue, or policy.

What movement tried to end racial discrimination? The civil-rights movement.

The question of who has the right to have rights is as old as our republic. Since the Constitutional Convention, white Americans have fiercely debated the citizenship rights of Indigenous Americans, Black people, and women. The Fourteenth Amendment, which established birthright citizenship, and equal protection under the law for Black Americans, was the most transformative outcome of the Civil War. Until 1940, an American woman who married a foreign-born man could be stripped of her citizenship. Only through civil unrest and civil disobedience did the long arc of the moral universe bend toward justice.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act opened the door for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended the national-origin quotas that had limited immigration from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. The act “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said as he signed the immigration bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. The possibility of multiracial democracy emerged from the civil-rights movement and the laws that followed. Turning back the clock on race and citizenship, and stoking fears about the blood of America, is a return to injustice and cruelty.

What is one promise you make when you become a United States citizen? To support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Now Americans like me have to wonder if we can hold true to that promise, or whether speaking up for the Constitution could jeopardize our citizenship.

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Late last month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a document detailing its vision for scientific integrity. Its nine tenets, first laid out in President Donald Trump’s executive order for “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” seem anodyne enough: They include calls for federal and federally supported science to be reproducible and transparent, communicative of error and uncertainty, and subject to unbiased peer review. Some of the tenets might be difficult to apply in practice—one can’t simply reproduce the results of studies on the health effects of climate disasters, for example, and funding is rarely available to replicate expensive studies. But these unremarkable principles hide a dramatic shift in the relationship between science and government.

Trump’s executive order promises to ensure that “federal decisions are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available.” In practice, however, it gives political appointees—most of whom are not scientists—the authority to define scientific integrity and then decide which evidence counts and how it should be interpreted. The president has said that these measures are necessary to restore trust in the nation’s scientific enterprise—which has indeed eroded since the last time he was in office. But these changes will likely only undermine trust further. Political officials no longer need to rigorously disprove existing findings; they can cast doubt on inconvenient evidence, or demand unattainable levels of certainty, to make those conclusions appear unsettled or unreliable.

In this way, the executive order opens the door to reshaping science to fit policy goals rather than allowing policy to be guided by the best available evidence. Its tactics echo the “doubt science” pioneered by the tobacco industry, which enabled cigarette manufacturers to market a deadly product for decades. But the tobacco industry could only have dreamed of having the immense power of the federal government. Applied to government, these tactics are ushering this country into a new era of doubt in science and enabling political appointees to block any regulatory action they want to, whether it’s approving a new drug or limiting harmful pollutants.

Historically, political appointees generally—though not always—deferred to career government scientists when assessing and reporting on the scientific evidence underlying policy decisions. But during Trump’s first term, these norms began to break down, and political officials asserted far greater control over all facets of science-intensive policy making, particularly in contentious areas such as climate science. In response, the Biden administration invested considerable effort in restoring scientific integrity and independence, building new procedures and frameworks to bolster the role of career scientists in federal decision making.

Trump’s new executive order not only rescinds these Joe Biden–era reforms but also reconceptualizes the meaning of scientific integrity. Under the Biden-era framework, for example, the definition of scientific integrity focused on “professional practices, ethical behavior, and the principles of honesty and objectivity when conducting, managing, using the results of, and communicating about science and scientific activities.” The framework also emphasized transparency, and political appointees and career staff were both required to uphold these scientific standards. Now the Trump administration has scrapped that process, and appointees enjoy full control over what scientific integrity means and how agencies review and synthesize scientific literature necessary to support and shape policy decisions.

Although not perfect, the Biden framework also included a way for scientists to appeal decisions by their supervisors. By contrast, Trump’s executive order creates a mechanism by which career scientists who publicly dissent from the pronouncements of political appointees can be charged with “scientific misconduct” and be subject to disciplinary action. The order says such misconduct does not include differences of opinion, but gives political appointees the power to determine what counts, while providing employees no route for appeal. This dovetails with other proposals by the administration to make it easier to fire career employees who express inconvenient scientific judgments.

When reached for comment, White House spokesperson Kush Desai argued that “public perception of scientific integrity completely eroded during the COVID era, when Democrats and the Biden administration consistently invoked an unimpeachable ‘the science’ to justify and shut down any reasonable questioning of unscientific lockdowns, school shutdowns, and various intrusive mandates” and that the administration is now “rectifying the American people’s complete lack of trust of this politicized scientific establishment.”

But the reality is that, armed with this new executive order, officials can now fill the administrative record with caveats, uncertainties, and methodological limitations—regardless of their relevance or significance, and often regardless of whether they could ever realistically be resolved. This strategy is especially powerful against standards enacted under a statute that takes a precautionary approach in the face of limited scientific evidence.

Some of our most important protections have been implemented while acknowledging scientific uncertainty. In 1978, although industry groups objected that uncertainty was still too high to justify regulations, several agencies banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as propellants in aerosol spray cans, based on modeling that predicted CFCs were destroying the ozone layer. The results of the modeling were eventually confirmed, and the scientists who did the work were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Elevating scientific uncertainty above other values gives political appointees a new tool to roll back public-health and environmental standards and to justify regulatory inaction. The result is a scientific record created less to inform sound decision making than to delay it—giving priority to what we don’t know over what we do. Certainly, probing weaknesses in scientific findings is central to the scientific enterprise, and good science should look squarely at ways in which accepted truths might be wrong. But manufacturing and magnifying doubt undercuts science’s ability to describe reality with precision and fealty, and undermines legislation that directs agencies to err on the side of protecting health and the environment. In this way, the Trump administration can effectively violate statutory requirements by stealth, undermining  Congress’s mandate for precaution by manipulating the scientific record to appear more uncertain than scientists believe it is.

An example helps bring these dynamics into sharper focus. In recent years, numerous studies have linked PFAS compounds—known as “forever chemicals” because they break down extremely slowly, if at all, in the environment and in human bodies—to a range of health problems, including immunologic and reproductive effects; developmental effects or delays in children, including low birth weight, accelerated puberty, and behavioral changes; and increased risk of prostate, kidney, and testicular cancers.

Yet despite promises from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to better protect the public from PFAS compounds, efforts to weaken current protections are already under way. The president has installed in a key position at the EPA a former chemical-industry executive who, in the first Trump administration, helped make regulating PFAS compounds more difficult. After industry objected to rules issued by the Biden administration, Trump’s EPA announced that it is delaying enforcement of drinking-water standards for two of the PFAS forever chemicals until 2031 and rescinding the standards for four others. But Zeldin faces a major hurdle in accomplishing this feat: The existing PFAS standards are backed by the best currently available scientific evidence linking these specific chemicals to a range of adverse health effects.

Here, the executive order provides exactly the tools needed to rewrite the scientific basis for such a decision. First, political officials can redefine what counts as valid science by establishing their own version of the “gold standard.” Appointees can instruct government scientists to comb through the revised body of evidence and highlight every disagreement or limitation—regardless of its relevance or scientific weight. They can cherry-pick the data, giving greater weight to studies that support a favored result. Emphasizing uncertainty biases the government toward inaction: The evidence no longer justifies regulating these exposures.

This “doubt science” strategy is further enabled by industry’s long-standing refusal to test many of its own PFAS compounds—of which there are more than 12,000, only a fraction of which have been tested—creating large evidence gaps. The administration can claim that regulation is premature until more “gold standard” research is conducted. But who will conduct that research? Industry has little incentive to investigate the risks of its own products, and the Trump administration has shown no interest in requiring it to do so. Furthermore, the government controls the flow of federal research funding and can restrict public science at its source. In fact, the EPA under Trump has already canceled millions of dollars in PFAS research, asserting that the work is “no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.”

In a broader context, the “gold standard” executive order is just one part of the administration’s larger effort to weaken the nation’s scientific infrastructure. Rather than restore “the scientific enterprise and institutions that create and apply scientific knowledge in service of the public good,” as the executive order promises, Elon Musk and his DOGE crew fired hundreds, if not thousands, of career scientists and abruptly terminated billions of dollars of ongoing research. To ensure that federal research support remains low, Trump’s recently proposed budget slashes the research budgets of virtually every government research agency, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the EPA.

Following the hollowing-out of the nation’s scientific infrastructure through deep funding cuts and the firing of federal scientists, the executive order is an attempt to rewrite the rules of how our expert bureaucracy operates. It marks a fundamental shift: The already weakened expert agencies will no longer be tasked with producing scientific findings that are reliable by professional standards and insulated from political pressure. Instead, political officials get to intervene at any point to elevate studies that support their agenda and, when necessary, are able to direct agency staff—under threat of insubordination—to scour the record for every conceivable uncertainty or point of disagreement. The result is a system in which science, rather than informing policy, is shaped to serve it.

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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.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Announcements of yet another book-to-film adaptation are usually met with groans by fans of the source material. But sometimes a new movie can be a chance to lift the best elements of a story. We asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors: What’s a film adaptation that’s better than the book?

Jurassic Park (streaming on Peacock)

I am not saying that the Michael Crichton novel Jurassic Parkisn’t great, because it is. The folly of man, the chaos of progress, the forking around, the finding out, the dinosaurs—God, the dinosaurs. But in 1993, Steven Spielberg took this promising genetic code, selected the fittest elements, spliced them with Hitchcock, and adapted them to the cool dark of the multiplex. The result is not just a great movie. It is a perfect movie.

The story is tighter; the characters are given foils, mirrors, and stronger arcs. On the page, Dr. Alan Grant is a widower and the paleobotanist Ellie Sattler his student; Dr. Ian Malcolm, chaos mathematician, is a balding know-it-all. On the screen, our dear Dr. Sattler feasts on Dr. Grant’s restrained, tonic masculinity and Dr. Malcolm’s camp erotic magnetism (as do we). The dialogue is punchier too. “You’re alive when they start to eat you,” “Woman inherits the Earth,” “Clever girl,” “Hold on to your butts”—none of that poetry appears in the paperback.

Spielberg and his crew used CGI techniques to make the inhabitants of Isla Nublar come to life, but the real magic came from practical effects, including a 9,000-pound, bus-size animatronic T. rex. This ferocious predator deserves to live on-screen, chomping on velociraptors and snatching a lawyer off of the toilet. Thirty years later, I am still not sure man deserves to watch.

— Annie Lowrey, staff writer

***

The Talented Mr. Ripley (streaming on Paramount+ and the Criterion Channel)

Patricia Highsmith wrote eminently filmable novels, none more so than her oft-adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley. The 1999 movie is the most famous and successful take, transforming the source material into a faster-paced and more suspenseful version of the story. The novel’s crime-to-punishment ratio is Dostoyevskian; for each misdeed Tom Ripley commits, he spends twice as long regretting it or worrying that he’ll get caught. Anthony Minghella’s adaptation diverges from this claustrophobic narration and limits viewers’ access into Ripley’s mind, making his deceitful and violent actions all the more unexpected.

The final scenes contain the largest plot deviation—a shocking twist that manages to both show Ripley at his worst and invite sympathy for him. The film also clarifies his tortured sexuality, an element of his character that remains more ambiguous in the novel. What Highsmith hints at, Minghella more boldly asks: When someone is already ostracized, even criminalized, by society, what’s to stop him from taking the leap into actual depravity?

— Dan Goff, copy editor

***

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (available to rent on YouTube and Prime Video)

I’m going to make some people mad, but the 2011 adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is even better than the superb novel. It’s a rare instance of a spy movie that transcends genre and stands on its own. Gary Oldman’s portrayal of the intelligence officer George Smiley is one of the great performances of the 21st century—and it probably paved the way for Oldman to eventually play Jackson Lamb in the addictive Slow Horses series, also an adaptation. The treatment of the field agent Ricki Tarr (played by Tom Hardy) is both more intense and to the point than in the novel. The scenery—the shots of Budapest alone—brings le Carré’s writing to life in a way that few adaptations ever do. And the film has easily one of the most gripping, poignant, and creative final scenes I’ve ever seen. (Julio Iglesias’s rendition of “La Mer” is on my dinner-party playlist. If you know, you know.)

— Shane Harris, staff writer

***

The Devil Wears Prada (streaming on Disney+)

At first glance, the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada seems to make only cosmetic changes to Lauren Weisberger’s fizzy novel about a young woman trying to break into New York’s publishing industry. In the movie, the protagonist, Andy, is a graduate of Northwestern, instead of Brown. Her boyfriend is a chef, not a teacher. And Miranda Priestly, the imposing editor of a fashion magazine—a thinly veiled version of Anna Wintour—who hires Andy as an assistant, isn’t always seen wearing a white Hermès scarf.

But the movie’s sharp screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna elevated the material past its breezy, chick-lit-y origins. Anchored by a top-notch cast (Anne Hathaway as Andy, Meryl Streep as Miranda, and a breakout Emily Blunt as Andy’s workplace rival), the film is the rare rom-com focused more on professional relationships than romantic ones: between mentors and mentees, bosses and employees, colleagues and competitors. Even amid its glossy setting, The Devil Wears Prada captured the reality of work, showing how finding career fulfillment can be a blessing and a curse. For me, the film is a modern classic, endlessly rewatchable for its insights—and, of course, its fashion. I certainly have never looked at the color cerulean the same way again.

— Shirley Li, staff writer

***

The Social Network (available to rent on Prime Video and YouTube)

Did Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend really break up with him by calling him an asshole in the middle of a date? Did he actually spend the moments after a disastrous legal deposition refreshing a Facebook page, again and again, to see if she’d accepted his friend request? Well, probably not—Erica Albright, Rooney Mara’s character in David Fincher’s film The Social Network, is admittedly fictional. But her opening scene establishes Fincher’s version of Mark Zuckerberg as a smug, patronizing jerk who can’t imagine other people’s feelings being as important as his own, and sets the movie off at a furious, thrilling pace that doesn’t slow until the very end, when Mark has alienated everyone who once cared about him.

The Social Network is a biopic that doesn’t hold itself to facts, to its absolute advantage. Ironically, this approach elevates the nonfiction book it’s based on, Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires, which was written without even an interview with Zuckerberg and panned as shoddily reported. (In a New York Times review, Janet Maslin wrote that Mezrich’s “working method” seemed to be “wild guessing.”) The truth doesn’t matter as much as telling a good story—as long as you keep control of the narrative, which Fincher’s Mark struggles to do.

— Emma Sarappo, senior associate editor

***

Clear and Present Danger (streaming on MGM+)

Clear and Present Danger the book is the size, shape, and weight of a brick; Phillip Noyce’s bureaucratic thriller slims Tom Clancy’s nearly 1,000 pages into a svelte 141 minutes (though movies could always be shorter). The action takes place on the sea, in the jungle, at a drug lord’s mansion, and in the streets of Bogotá—the latter setting the scene for an ambush sequence so memorable that the Jack Ryan series restaged it. But the film is most gripping in hallways and offices, culminating in Henry Czerny and Harrison Ford brandishing dueling memos at each other like light sabers. (“You broke the law!”) And although the character of Jack Ryan can sometimes blur into a cipher in Clancy’s novels, Ford embodies him with a Beltway Dad gravitas—never more so than when he announces to the lawbreaking president of the United States, “It is my duty to report this matter to the Senate Oversight Committee!” Such a Boy Scout.

— Evan McMurry, senior editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

What to do with the most dangerous book in AmericaAndrea Gibson refused to “battle” cancer.How to be more charismatic, but not too much more

The Week Ahead

The**Fantastic Four: First Steps, a Marvel movie about a group of superheroes who face off with Galactus and Silver Surfer (in theaters Friday)Veronica Electronica, a new remix album by Madonna (out Friday)Girl, 1983, a novel by Linn Ullmann about the power of forgetting (out Tuesday)

Essay

Pixar

What Pixar Should Learn From Its Elio Disaster

By David Sims

Early last year, Pixar appeared to be on the brink of an existential crisis. The coronavirus pandemic had thrown the business of kids’ movies into particular turmoil: Many theatrical features were pushed to streaming, and their success on those platforms left studios wondering whether the appeal of at-home convenience would be impossible to reverse … Discussing the studio’s next film, Inside Out 2, the company’s chief creative officer, Pete Docter, acknowledged the concerns: “If this doesn’t do well at the theater, I think it just means we’re going to have to think even more radically about how we run our business.”

He had nothing to worry about: Inside Out 2 was a financial sensation—by far the biggest hit of 2024. Yet here we are, one year later, and the question is bubbling back up: Is Pixar cooked?

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Romance on-screen has never been colder. Maybe that’s just truthful.Sexting with GeminiDear James: “My ex and I were horrible to each other.”Let your kid climb that tree.The reality show that captures Gen Z dating

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The Court’s liberals are trying to tell Americans something.The Trump administration is about to incinerate 500 tons of emergency food.Is Colbert’s ouster really just a “financial decision”?

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A recortador performs with a bull in the Plaza de Toros bullring during a festival in Pamplona, Spain. (Ander Gillenea / AFP / Getty)

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Can the city of New York sell groceries more cheaply than the private sector? The mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani thinks so. He wants to start five city-owned stores that will be “focused on keeping prices low” rather than making a profit—what he calls a “public option” for groceries. His proposal calls for opening stores on city land so that they can forgo paying rent or property taxes.

Skeptics have focused on economic obstacles to the plan. Grocers have industry expertise that New York City lacks; they benefit from scale; and they run on thin profit margins, estimated at just 1 to 3 percent, leaving little room for additional savings. Less discussed, though no less formidable, is a political obstacle for Mamdani: The self-described democratic socialist’s promise to lower grocery prices and, more generally, “lower the cost of living for working class New Yorkers” will be undermined by other policies that he or his coalition favors that would raise costs. No one should trust that “there’s far more efficiency to be had in our public sector,” as he says of his grocery-store proposal, until he explains how he would resolve those conflicts.

Mamdani’s desire to reduce grocery prices for New Yorkers is undercut most glaringly by the labor policies that he champions. Labor is the largest fixed cost for grocery stores. Right now grocery-store chains with lots of New York locations, such as Stop & Shop and Key Food, advertise entry-level positions at or near the city’s minimum wage of $16.50 an hour. Mamdani has proposed to almost double the minimum wage in New York City to $30 an hour by 2030; after that, additional increases would be indexed to inflation or productivity growth, whichever is higher. Perhaps existing grocery workers are underpaid; perhaps workers at city-run stores should make $30 an hour too. Yet a wage increase would all but guarantee more expensive groceries. Voters deserve to know whether he’ll prioritize cheaper groceries or better-paid workers. (I wrote to Mamdani’s campaign about this trade-off, and others noted below, but got no reply.)

[Read: New York is hungry for a big grocery experiment]

In the New York State assembly, Mamdani has co-sponsored legislation to expand family-leave benefits so that they extend to workers who have an abortion, a miscarriage, or a stillbirth. The official platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed Mamdani, calls for “a four-day, 32-hour work week with no reduction in wages or benefits” for all workers. Unions, another source of Mamdani support, regularly lobby for more generous worker benefits. Extending such benefits to grocery-store employees would raise costs that, again, usually get passed on to consumers. Perhaps Mamdani intends to break with his own past stances and members of his coalition, in keeping with his goal of focusing on low prices. But if that’s a path that he intends to take, he hasn’t said so.

City-run grocery stores would purchase massive amounts of food and other consumer goods from wholesalers. New York City already prioritizes goals other than cost-cutting when it procures food for municipal purposes; it signed a pledge in 2021 to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions associated with food that it serves, and Mayor Eric Adams signed executive orders in 2022 that committed the city to considering “local economies, environmental sustainability, valued workforce, animal welfare, and nutrition” in its food procurement. Such initiatives inevitably raise costs.

Mamdani could favor exempting city-run groceries from these kinds of obligations. But would he? Batul Hassan, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America steering committee and a supporter of Mamdani, co-authored an article arguing that city-run stores should procure food from vendors that prioritize a whole host of goods: “worker dignity and safety, animal welfare, community economic benefit and local sourcing, impacts to the environment, and health and nutrition, including emphasizing culturally appropriate, well-balanced and plant-based diets,” in addition to “suppliers from marginalized backgrounds and non-corporate supply chains, including small, diversified family farms, immigrants and people of color, new and emerging consumer brands, and farmer and employee owned cooperatives.” If one milk brand is cheaper but has much bigger environmental externalities or is owned by a large corporation, will a city-run store carry it or a pricier but greener, smaller brand?

Mamdani has said in the past that he supports the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement, which advocates for boycotting products from Israel. That probably wouldn’t raise costs much by itself. And Mamdani told Politico in April that BDS wouldn’t be his focus as mayor. But a general practice of avoiding goods because of their national origin, or a labor dispute between a supplier and its workers, or any number of other controversies, could raise costs. When asked about BDS in the Politico interview, Mamdani also said, “We have to use every tool that is at people’s disposal to ensure that equality is not simply a hope, but a reality.” Would Mamdani prioritize low prices in all cases or sometimes prioritize the power of boycotts or related pressure tactics to effect social change? Again, he should clarify how he would resolve such trade-offs.

Finally, shoplifting has surged in New York in recent years. Many privately owned grocery stores hire security guards, use video surveillance, call police on shoplifters, and urge that shoplifters be prosecuted. Democratic socialists generally favor less policing and surveilling. If the security strategy that’s best for the bottom line comes into conflict with progressive values, what will Mamdani prioritize?

[Read: Shoplifters gone wild]

This problem isn’t unique to Mamdani. Officials in progressive jurisdictions across the country have added to the cost of public-sector initiatives by imposing what The New York Times’s Ezra Klein has characterized as an “avalanche of well-meaning rules and standards.” For example, many progressives say they want to fund affordable housing, but rather than focus on minimizing costs per unit to house as many people as possible, they mandate other goals, such as giving locals a lengthy process for comment, prioritizing bids from small or minority-owned businesses, requiring union labor, and instituting project reviews to meet the needs of people with disabilities. Each extra step relates to a real good. But once you add them up, affordability is no longer possible, and fewer people end up housed.

Policies that raise costs are not necessarily morally or practically inferior to policies that lower costs; low prices are one good among many. But if the whole point of city-owned grocery stores is to offer lower prices, Mamdani will likely need to jettison other goods that he and his supporters value, and be willing to withstand political pressure from allies. Voters deserve to know how Mamdani will resolve the conflicts that will inevitably arise. So far, he isn’t saying.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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.

A family vacation can seem like the solution to all of life’s tensions: You’ll spend time together, bond, and experience a new place. But travel isn’t a panacea. As Kim Brooks wrote last year about her own halting attempts at taking a successful trip with her kids: “Gradually, lounging among my own dashed hopes, I began to understand that no family vacation was going to change who I was.” Today’s newsletter explores how family trips have changed, and how to make the most of your time with loved ones without expecting too much.

On Family Vacations

On Failing the Family Vacation

By Kim Brooks

How I got dumped, went on a cruise, and embraced radical self-acceptance

Read the article.

The New Family Vacation

By Michael Waters

More and more Americans are traveling with multiple generations—and, perhaps, learning who their relatives really are.

Read the article.

Plan Ahead. Don’t Post.

By Arthur C. Brooks

And seven other rules for a happy vacation

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Summer vacation is moving indoors: Extreme heat is changing summer for kids as we know it.The rise and fall of the family-vacation road trip: The golden age of family road-tripping was a distinctly American phenomenon.

Other Diversions

How to be more charismatic, but not too much moreWhat becoming a parent really does to your happinessWeird, wonderful photos from the archives

P.S.

Courtesy of Ellen Walker

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Ellen Walker, 69, shared this photo taken on Loch Linnhe in western Scotland in 2019. “We were visiting friends who live south of Glasgow and with whom we take annual biking trips,” Ellen writes. “It had rained much of the time we were exploring the west coast (as it will do in Scotland!) but I began to see the infinite varieties of grey as spectacularly beautiful. When the sun tried to peek through the clouds I snapped this photo and was so pleased to be able to capture the richness of the scene. It no longer seemed gloomy. I was in awe.”

I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

— Isabel

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

The early aughts were the worst possible kind of golden age. Tans were inescapable—on Britney Spears’s midriff, on the flexing biceps outside of Abercrombie & Fitch stores. The Jersey Shore ethos of “gym, tan, laundry” infamously encapsulated an era in which tanning salons were after-school hangouts, and tanning stencils in the shape of the Playboy bunny were considered stylish. Self-tanning lotions, spray tans, and bronzers proliferated, but people still sought the real thing.

By the end of the decade, tanning’s appeal had faded. Americans became more aware of the health risks, and the recession shrank their indoor-tanning budgets. But now America glows once again. The president and many of his acolytes verge on orange, and parties thrown by the MAGA youth are blurs of bronze. Celebrity tans are approaching early-aughts amber, and if dermatologists’ observations and social media are any indication, teens are flocking to the beach in pursuit of scorching burns.

Tanning is back. Only this time, it’s not just about looking good—it’s about embracing an entire ideology.

Another apparent fan of tanning is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., America’s perpetually bronzed health secretary, who was spotted visiting a tanning salon last month. What tanning methods he might employ are unknown, but the secretary’s glow is undeniable. (The Department of Health and Human Services didn’t respond to a request for comment about the administration’s views on tanning or Kennedy’s own habits.)

On its face, the idea that any health secretary would embrace tanning is odd. The Obama administration levied an excise tax on tanning beds and squashed ads that marketed tanning as healthy. The Biden administration, by contrast, made sunscreen use and reducing sun exposure%20support%20patients%20and%20caregivers.) central to its Cancer Moonshot plan. The stated mission of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement is to end chronic diseases, such as cancer, by addressing their root causes. Yet the Trump administration’s MAHA report, released in May, doesn’t once mention skin cancer, which is the most common type as well as the most easily preventable. It mentions the sun only to note its connection with circadian rhythm: “Morning sun synchronizes the body’s internal clock, boosting mood and metabolism.”

In fact, there’s good reason to suspect that Kennedy and others in his orbit will encourage Americans to get even more sun. Last October, in a post on X, Kennedy warned that the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of sunlight, among other supposedly healthy interventions, was “about to end.” Casey Means, a doctor and wellness influencer whom President Donald Trump has nominated for surgeon general, is also a sun apologist. In her best-selling book, Good Energy (which she published with her brother, Calley Means, an adviser to Kennedy), she argues that America’s many ailments are symptoms of a “larger spiritual crisis” caused by separation from basic biological needs, including sunlight. “Shockingly, we rarely ever hear about how getting direct sunlight into our eyes at the right times is profoundly important for metabolic and overall health,” she writes. An earlier version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill tried to repeal the excise tax on tanning beds. (The provision was cut in the final version.)

The alternative-health circles that tend to attract the MAHA crowd are likewise skeptical of sun avoidance. “They don’t want you to know this. But your body was made for the sun,” says a “somatic energy healer” with 600,000 followers who promotes staring directly into the sun to boost mood and regulate the body’s circadian rhythm. (Please, don’t do this.) On social media, some influencers tout the sun’s supposedly uncelebrated power to increase serotonin and vitamin D, the latter of which some erroneously view as a cure-all. Some promote tanning-bed use as a way to relieve stress; others, such as the alternative-health influencer Carnivore Aurelius, promote genital tanning to boost testosterone. Another popular conspiracy theory is that sunscreen causes cancer and is promoted by Big Pharma to keep people sick; a 2024 survey found that 14 percent of young adults think using sunscreen every day is worse for the skin than going without it.

These claims range from partly true to patently false. The sun can boost serotonin and vitamin D, plus regulate circadian rhythm—but these facts have long been a part of public-health messaging, and there’s no evidence that these benefits require eschewing sunscreen or staring directly at our star. Tanning beds emit little of the UVB necessary to produce vitamin D. Some research suggests that the chemicals in sunscreen can enter the bloodstream, but only if it’s applied to most of the body multiple times a day; plus, the effects of those chemicals in the body haven’t been established to be harmful, whereas skin cancer has. And, if I really have to say it: No solid research supports testicle tanning. Nor does any of this negate the sun’s less salutary effects: premature aging, eye damage, and greatly increased risk of skin cancer, including potentially fatal melanomas.

The specific questions raised in alternative-health spaces matter less than the conspiracist spirit in which they are asked: What haven’t the American people been told about the sun? What lies have we been fed? Their inherent skepticism aligns with Kennedy’s reflexive mistrust of the health establishment. In the MAHA world, milk is better when it’s raw, beef fat is healthier than processed oils, and the immune system is strongest when unvaccinated. This philosophy, however flawed, appeals to the many Americans who feel that they’ve been failed by the institutions meant to protect them. It offers the possibility that regaining one’s health can be as simple as rejecting science and returning to nature. And what is more natural than the sun?

[Read: You’re not allowed to have the best sunscreens in the world]

Now is an apt moment for American politics to become more sun-friendly. Tanning is making a comeback across pop culture, even as “anti-aging” skin care and cosmetic procedures boom. Young people are lying outside when the sun is at its peak—new apps such as Sunglow and Rayz AI Tanning tell them when UV rays are strongest—to achieve social-media-ready tan lines. Last year, Kim Kardashian showed off a tanning bed in her office (in response to backlash, she claimed that it treated her psoriasis). Deep tans are glorified in ads for luxury goods, and makeup is used in fashion shows to mimic painful-looking burns. Off the runway, “sunburned makeup,” inspired by the perpetually red-cheeked pop star Sabrina Carpenter, is trending.

Veena Vanchinathan, a board-certified dermatologist in the Bay Area, told me that she’s noticed more patients seeking out self-tanning products and tanning, whether in beds or outdoors. Angela Lamb, a board-certified dermatologist who practices on New York’s well-to-do Upper West Side, told me her patients are curious about tanning too. “It’s actually quite scary,” she said. A recent survey by the American Academy of Dermatology found that a quarter of Americans, and an even greater proportion of adults ages 18 to 26, are unaware of the risks of tanning, and many believe in tanning myths, such as the idea that a base tan protects against a burn, or that tanning with protection is safe. (“There is no such thing as a safe tan,” Deborah S. Sarnoff, the president of the Skin Cancer Foundation, told me.)

Recently, some experts have called for a more moderate approach to sun safety, one that takes into account the benefits of some sun exposure and the harms of too much shade. “I actually think we do ourselves a bit of a disservice and open ourselves up to criticism if the advice of someone for skin-cancer prevention is ‘Don’t go outside,’” Jerod Stapleton, a professor at the University of Kentucky who studies tanning behaviors, told me. But the popular rejection of sun safety goes much further. Advances in skin-cancer treatment, for example, may have lulled some Americans into thinking that melanoma just isn’t that serious, Carolyn Heckman, a medical professor at Rutgers University’s Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, told me. Skin-cancer treatment and mortality rates have indeed improved, but melanomas that metastasize widely are still fatal most of the time.

[From the June 2024 issue: Against sunscreen absolutism]

In previous decades, tans were popular because they conveyed youth, vitality, and wealth. They still do. (At least among the fairer-skinned; their connotations among people of color can be less positive.) But the difference now is that tanning persists in spite of the known consequences. Lamb likened tanning to smoking: At this point, most people who take it up are actively looking past the well-established risks. (Indeed, smoking is also making a pop-culture comeback.) A tan has become a symbol of defiance—of health guidance, of the scientific establishment, of aging itself.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

This week, Congress passed Donald Trump’s request to claw back $9 billion in approved federal spending, including funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss the president’s rescissions request—and what its approval may signal about future appropriations.

“What I think will be remembered of this vote is it was a test case in whether” Republicans in Congress “could change the way the government appropriates money,” Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night.

Historically, Scherer explained, even when one party controls both chambers of Congress, 60 votes are still required to pass a budget through the Senate. “That means you need a bipartisan process,” he continued. But this differs from a rescissions request, which can pass with only 51 votes. The Trump administration’s goal, Scherer argued, is to break away from a bipartisan budgeting process “by making it a purely partisan” one. This, Scherer said, could “change dramatically the whole way the federal government’s been budgeted for years.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch, Meridith McGraw, a White House reporter at The Wall Street Journal; and Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

In a court document filed earlier this month, the Internal Revenue Service quietly revealed a significant break with long-standing practice: Churches will no longer risk their nonprofit status if clergy endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The change stemmed from a lawsuit brought against the agency by evangelical groups that argued that the prior ban on church involvement in political campaigns infringed upon their First Amendment rights. Their victory, though, may turn out to be a Faustian bargain: Churches can now openly involve themselves in elections, but in doing so, they risk becoming de facto political organizations. What may appear to be a triumph over liberalism could in fact be a loss, the supersession of heavenly concerns by earthly ones.

Churches have long been divided over the proper role for religion in American politics. One approach has been to militate against the separation of church and state, insofar as that distinction limits what churches can do to exercise power in society. The IRS change, along with several others by the Trump administration, will soften that barrier, allowing churches to take on a much more pronounced role in electoral politics. Another approach has been to operate within the confines of that separation—which has produced some very noble results: a norm of discouraging churches from turning into mere organs of political parties, and an emphasis on forming the conscience of believers rather than providing direct instructions about political participation.

A conservative 30 years ago might have preferred that latter approach, or at least said so. Back then, members of the right complained that Black churches frequently gave political endorsements or raised funds for electoral campaigns, and that the IRS neglected to enforce its now-eliminated ban, known as the Johnson Amendment. Yet by 2016, that dynamic had reversed, leading Donald Trump, then still a presidential candidate, to court the coveted right-wing evangelical vote by vowing to destroy the amendment once in office. A number of religious leaders took the implications of that promise and ran with them—an investigation by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica published in 2022 found that plenty of evangelical churches were offering endorsement despite the rule. The hope in paring down the Johnson Amendment is apparently that church endorsements will influence the outcome of elections in the right’s favor.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Progressive Christianity’s bleak future]

But there’s little reason to believe that church endorsements will do much in the way of persuasion. American churches have already undergone so much liberal attrition that, in practice, many right-wing evangelical pastors will be instructing their congregations to vote for candidates most members already intend to vote for. To the degree that broadly conservative churches retain some liberal members, endorsing right-wing candidates seems like just the thing to alienate them, which is a loss for those congregations as well as for the faith as a whole. Church intervention in particular electoral races is an efficient polarization machine.

For that and other reasons, this policy shift doesn’t really offer any benefits to Christians quaChristians. Providing political endorsements makes churches susceptible to powerful campaign tactics: PACs, for example, will have incentives to fund churches that reflect their agendas, meaning that pastors’ livelihoods could come to depend on contorting their religious beliefs to suit political interests. Politically active congregants will also have good reason to lobby their pastors for certain endorsements, another source of pressure for church leaders to say that supporting a particular candidate is the will of God. And the practice of offering endorsements prioritizes accepting specific instructions from church leaders over cultivating Christian values and methods of reasoning that allow the faithful to determine which candidates to support for themselves. (Indeed, the Christian religion itself seeks to cultivate those very things for that very reason, rather than providing an itemized list of every behavior to perform and every behavior to avoid.) This is apparently why the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement that Catholic clergy will still decline to make political endorsements. “The Church seeks to help Catholics form their conscience in the Gospel,” the release read, “so they might discern which candidates and policies would advance the common good.”

That is a much more logical way for church leaders to proceed. Dictating which candidates to vote for is at once presumptuous, assuming much more about God’s judgment than can rightly be accounted for, and also nihilistic, assuming that churchgoers are so ill-formed in their faith that they can’t be trusted to figure out the right answers to these earthly, prudential questions. Granting the imprimatur of the faith to ordinary charlatans—the most common breed of politician—is ill-begotten, and borders on sacrilegious.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Defending mainstream journalism these days is about as appealing as doing PR for syphilis. Nonetheless, here I am. Back in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi invited a group of MAGA influencers to the White House to receive what was billed as “Phase 1” of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy sex offender who died in jail in 2019. The 15 handpicked newshounds included Jack Posobiec, promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory; Chaya Raichik, whose Libs of TikTok social-media account itemizes every single American schoolteacher with blue hair and wacky pronouns; and the comedian Chad Prather, performer of the parody song “Beat That Ass,” about the secret to good parenting. Also present was DC_Draino, whose name is a promise to unclog the sewers of the nation’s capital.

The chosen ones duly emerged bearing ring binders and smug expressions—only to discover that most of the information that the government had fed them had already been made public. Several of the influencers have since complained that the Trump administration had given them recycled information. They couldn’t seem to understand why White House officials treated them like idiots. I can help with this one. That’s because they think you are idiots.

[Read: Trump’s Epstein answers are getting worse]

The harsh but simple truth is that powerful people, including President Donald Trump, do not freely hand out information that will make them look bad. If a politician, PR flak, or government official is telling you something, assume that they’re lying to you or spinning or—at best—coincidentally telling you the truth because it will damage their enemies. “We were told that more was coming,” Posobiec complained, but professional commentators should be embarrassed about waiting for the authorities to bless them with scoops. That’s not how things work. You have to go and find things out. Reporters do not content themselves with “just asking questions”—the internet conspiracist’s favored formulation. They gather evidence, check facts, and then decide what they are confident is true. They don’t just blast out everything that lands on their desk, in a “kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out” kind of way.

That’s because some conspiracy theories turn out to involve actual conspiracies, and the skill is separating the imagined schemes from the real ones. Cover-ups do happen. In Britain, where I live, the public has recently learned for certain that a military source accidentally leaked an email list of hundreds of Afghans who cooperated with Western forces, possibly exposing them to blackmail or reprisals. The leak prompted our government to start spending billions to secretly relocate some of the affected Afghans and their families. All the while, British media outlets—which are subject to far greater legal restrictions on publication than their American counterparts—were barred from reporting not only the contents of the leaked list, but its very existence. Several news organizations expended significant time and money getting that judgment overturned in court.

Earlier this month, the government released a memo declaring that the Department of Justice and the FBI had determined that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted” in the Epstein case. Since then, Trump-friendly influencers have struggled to supply their audience’s demands for more Epstein content while preserving their continued access to the White House, which wants them to stop talking about the story altogether. Because these commentators define themselves through skepticism of “approved narratives” and decry their enemies as “regime mouthpieces,” their newfound trust in the establishment has been heartwarming to see.

Some of the same people who used to cast doubts about the government’s handling of the Epstein case are now running that government. “If you’re a journalist and you’re not asking questions about this case you should be ashamed of yourself,” J. D. Vance tweeted in December 2021. “What purpose do you even serve?”

I would be intrigued to hear a response to that challenge from Dinesh D’Souza, who said on July 15 that “even though there are unanswered questions about Epstein, it is in fact time to move on.” Or from Charlie Kirk, who said a day earlier: “I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being. I’m gonna trust my friends in the administration. I’m gonna trust my friends in the government.” Or from Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, who wrote: “Must be some juicy and dangerous stuff in those files. But I don’t feel the need to be a backseat driver on this topic. Four leaders I trust said it’s time to let it go.” (For what it’s worth, some influencers, such as Tucker Carlson, have refused to accept the Trump administration’s official line that there’s nothing to see here. I’m not alone in thinking this reflects a desire to outflank anyone tainted by, you know, actual government experience when competing for the affections of the MAGA base in 2028.)

For all right-wing influencers’ claims of an establishment cover-up, most of the publicly known facts about the Epstein case come from major news outlets. In the late 2000s, when few people were paying attention, The New York Times faithfully chronicled Epstein’s suspiciously lenient plea deal—in which multiple accusations of sexual assault on teenage girls were reduced to lesser prostitution charges—under classically dull headlines such as “Questions of Preferential Treatment Are Raised in Florida Sex Case” and “Amid Lurid Accusations, Fund Manager Is Unruffled.” After Epstein’s second arrest, the paper reported on how successfully he had been able to rehabilitate himself from his first brush with the law, prompting awkward questions for Bill Gates, Prince Andrew, and other famous faces.

Epstein’s second arrest might not have happened at all without the work of Julie Brown of the Miami Herald. She doggedly reported on how Trump’s first-term labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, had overseen the plea deal when he was a U.S. attorney in Florida. She found 80 alleged victims—she now thinks there might have been 200—and persuaded four to speak on the record. Around the time that Epstein was wrapping up a light prison sentence in 2009, newsroom cuts at the Herald had forced Brown to take a 15 percent pay reduction. Sometimes she paid her own reporting expenses.

[Listen: The razor-thin line between conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy]

Over the past two decades, the decline of classified advertising, along with the rise of social media, has left America with far fewer Julie Browns and far more DC_Drainos. This does not feel like progress. The shoe-leather reporters of traditional newspapers and broadcasters have largely given way to a class of influencers who are about as useful as a marzipan hammer in the boring job of establishing facts. In May, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, scheduled a series of special influencers-only briefings, and I watched them all—surely reducing my future time in purgatory. None of the questions generated a single interesting news story.

In recent days, while MAGA influencers have muttered online about the release of camera footage from outside Epstein’s cell on the night of his death, Wired magazine found experts to review the video’s metadata, establishing that it had been edited, and a section had been removed. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal—whose conservative opinion pages make its news reporting harder for the right to dismiss—published details of a 50th-birthday message to Epstein allegedly signed by Trump in 2003. The future president reportedly included a hand-drawn picture of a naked woman and told the financier, “May every day be another wonderful secret.” (Trump has described this as a “fake story,” adding: “I never wrote a picture in my life.” In fact, Trump has donated a number of his drawings to charity auctions.)

Legacy news outlets sometimes report things that turn out not to be true: Saddam Hussein’s imaginary WMDs, the University of Virginia rape story. But that’s because they do reporting. It’s easier not to fail when you don’t even try.

We now have a ridiculous situation where influencers who bang on about the mainstream media are reduced to relying on these outlets for things to talk about. Worse, because no issue can ever be settled as a factual matter, the alternative media is a perpetual-motion machine of speculation. MAGA influencers want the truth, but ignore the means of discovering it.

At the heart of the Epstein story is a real conspiracy, as squalid and mundane as real life usually is. The staff members who enabled Epstein; the powerful friends who ignored his crimes; and the prosecutors who downgraded the charges back in the late ’00s. If the Epstein scandal teaches us anything, it is that America needs a dedicated and decently funded group of people whose job is not just to ask questions, but to find answers. Let’s call them journalists.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

As the questions surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s life and death—questions that Donald Trump once helped whip up—tornadoed into their bajillionth news cycle, the president’s team began to privately debate ways to calm the furor: appoint a special counsel to investigate. Call on the courts to unseal documents related to the case. Have Attorney General Pam Bondi hold a news conference. Hold daily news conferences on the topic, à la Trump’s regular prime-time pandemic appearances.

It dismissed every option. Any decision would ultimately come from Bondi and Trump together—or from Trump alone—and for days, the president was adamant about doing nothing.

Trump was annoyed by the constant questions from reporters—had Bondi told him that his name, in fact, was in the Epstein files? (“No,” came his response)—and frustrated by his inability to redirect the nation’s attention to what he views as his successes, four White House officials and a close outside adviser told us. But more than that, Trump felt deeply betrayed by his MAGA supporters, who had believed him when he’d intimated that something was nefarious about how the Epstein case has been handled, and who now refused to believe him when he said their suspicions were actually baseless.

[Jonathan Chait: Why Trump can’t make the Epstein story go away]

He—the president, their leader, the martyr who had endured scandals and prosecution and an assassin’s bullet on their behalf—had repeatedly told them it was time to move on, and that alone should suffice. Why, he groused, would the White House add fuel to the fire, would it play into the media’s narrative?

In particular, Trump has raged against MAGA influencers who, in his estimation, have profited and grown famous off their association with him and his political movement, according to one of the officials and the outside adviser, who is in regular touch with the West Wing. They and others we spoke with did so on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to anger Trump by talking about a subject that has become especially sensitive. Trump told the outside adviser that the “disloyal” influencers “have forgotten whose name is above the door.”

“These people cash their paychecks and get their clicks all thanks to him,” the adviser told us. “The president has bigger fish to fry, and he’s said what he wants: Move on. People need to open their ears and listen to him.”

But Trump’s haphazard efforts at containment—specifically, his effort to simply bulldoze through this very real scandal—came to an end last night, when The Wall Street Journal published an explosive story about a bawdy 50th-birthday letter that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein, which alluded to a shared “secret” and was framed by a drawing of a naked woman’s outline. (Trump denied writing the letter or drawing the picture, and has threatened to sue the paper.) Shortly after the article posted online, Trump wrote on Truth Social that because of “the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein,” he has asked Bondi to produce all relevant grand-jury testimony related to the Epstein case. Bondi immediately responded, writing, “President Trump—we are ready to move the court tomorrow to unseal the grand jury transcripts.”

The Journal story underscored, yet again, the part of the Epstein saga that Trump and his allies most wish would go away: that Trump was one of Epstein’s many famous pals and had a long—and public—friendship with the hard-partying, sex-obsessed financier who pleaded guilty in 2008 to two prostitution-related crimes and became a registered sex offender. Chummy photos of the two men, including at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago Club, abound; from 1993 to 1997, Trump flew on Epstein’s private jets seven times, according to flight logs that emerged at an Epstein-related trial; in a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he’d known Epstein for 15 years and praised him as a “terrific guy.”

“He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump enthused to the magazine. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” The two reportedly had a falling-out in 2004 when Epstein bought an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion that Trump wanted.

On Wednesday—after the White House had been alerted that the Journal was working on a big story, but at a moment when it still thought it might be able to kill it—Trump took to social media to blast as “past supporters” Republicans still discussing the Epstein matter. He also tore into them during an Oval Office appearance with the crown prince of Bahrain. The president declared that “some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans” had fallen for a hoax that he said had been created by the Democrats. The president also privately fumed at House Speaker Mike Johnson’s call for “transparency”—and for Trump’s Justice Department to release more files related to the Epstein case—while White House aides wondered if the apparent split could lead to further Republican defiance on other issues.

[Helen Lewis: ‘Just asking questions’ got no answers about Epstein]

Still, before the Journal story changed the stakes yet again, Trump did not have plans to make additional calls to MAGA media allies or Republican lawmakers, one of the officials told us; instead, the president believed that his public comments and Truth Social posts were sufficient. (Despite his ire, he did not, for instance, reach out to Johnson or his team.)

“He’s being tested and doesn’t like it,” the official told us. “He doesn’t want to talk about it.”

Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once observed, “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” And although the country does sometimes accept politicians who campaign in poetry and govern in prose, it is less willing to countenance those who campaign in conspiracy theory and then govern in a nothing-to-see-here-folks reality.

Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida state court in 2008 and was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. He received a generous (and controversial) plea deal and served a short prison sentence before being released. He was arrested again in August 2019 and accused of sex-trafficking minors, leading some to wonder who else in Epstein’s powerful orbit might have been involved and also face charges. He died a month later. Getting to the bottom of the details surrounding Epstein’s death in jail while awaiting trial—which has been ruled a suicide—and releasing additional information about Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women, and whether other well-known figures were involved, was never a top Trump-campaign promise. Trump answered when asked, but it was not a mainstay of his stump speech, something he regularly read from the teleprompter or riffed about at rallies.

Nevertheless, when Trump retook office, his supporters were eager for a big reveal. The wave began to crest when Bondi, asked in a February Fox News interview if she would release a list of Epstein’s clients, replied, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.” Less than a week later, she did herself no favors when, with much fanfare, she invited MAGA influencers to the White House to receive what she claimed were binders full of the declassified Epstein files, only for the beaming, gleeful sleuths to realize that the most scandalous thing about the binders was just how little information they contained. But a two-page memo that the Department of Justice released last Monday—which, in bureaucratese, offered a version of Trump’s current time-to-move-on mantra—is what finally sent the MAGA wave crashing down on Bondi and the president.

Laura Loomer, a Trump ally and far-right provocateur who called for Bondi to be fired over the memo, told us on Wednesday that she is sensitive to the challenges of separating fact from fiction—but that although not everyone in Epstein’s orbit is inherently guilty, those who are guilty should be revealed. “They’re trying to say there’s no list,” she said. “There’s a difference between people who were caught on video engaged in foul pornography and people who were caught in Jeffery Epstein’s contact list.” Demonizing everyone in Epstein’s purported black book would be like tying her to the misdeeds of everyone saved in her cellphone—“I have 7,000 contacts,” she said—“but they should release the names of the people involved in the child pornography.” Although Loomer and others have raised questions about video recordings of child sexual abuse collected by investigators, Bondi has said that Epstein downloaded those videos and that they were not records of crimes committed by him or his friends.

Loomer has also publicly called for a special counsel to investigate the Epstein case and release the files. In our conversation, she reiterated that appeal and suggested that having “Pam Blondi”—her derisive nickname for the flaxen-haired attorney general—“apologize for either deliberately lying or overexaggerating” her claim that the key files sitting on her desk in February would help to mitigate the base’s angst. Still, Loomer acknowledged, a Bondi apology would at this point be but “one step.” “Obviously, now this has taken on a life of its own,” she observed.

The Epstein news cycle has also distracted from the accomplishments Trump hopes to showcase—his trade deals, the massive legislative package he just muscled through—and has embroiled his West Wing in a familiar cycle of drama. As the MAGA movement turned not just on Bondi but also on FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, over their handling of the Epstein files, tensions among the three became public. Bongino and Patel seemed to blame Bondi for their reputational hit, and last Friday, Axios reported that Bongino had simply refused to show up for work. Trump was upset with Bongino and Patel, and Vice President J. D. Vance was dispatched as a behind-the-scenes peacemaker. (A White House official told us that the president has no plans to fire Bondi, Bongino, or Patel, but noted pointedly that Trump is very supportive of Bondi, and merely supportive of the other two.)

What additional information could, and should, be revealed remains genuinely unclear. Questions worthy of further scrutiny were raised by Wired’s recent reporting on the footage that the Justice Department released from the lone security camera near Epstein’s jail cell the night before he was found dead; the video’s metadata were shown to have likely been modified, and nearly three full minutes were cut out. But it is also possible that Epstein kept no written log of his crimes, and that whatever has not yet been released is simply to protect Epstein’s victims. (There is also, of course, the competing theory that information is being withheld to protect Trump, or others close to him.)

[Listen: The razor-thin line between conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy]

The White House official told us that the Justice Department did a thorough investigation and that much of what remains unreleased falls into one of these categories: documents that are sealed by courts (though Trump and Bondi’s Thursday appeal may change that); child pornography; and material that could expose any additional third parties to allegations of illegal wrongdoing.

This, perhaps, has been the most confusing and upsetting part for Trump: his inability to manage his uber-loyallists and regular allies. In June, during an unrelated fight with Elon Musk—Trump’s on-again, off-again benefactor and buddy—Elon posted on X, “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” He later deleted the post, but more recently, as the Epstein controversies resurfaced, he again posted an appeal for further disclosure. “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?” Musk wrote.

In the run-up to the Journal story, Trump personally appealed to Rupert Murdoch, his longtime friend and the paper’s owner, not to run the article he also appealed to Emma Tucker, the editor of the paper whose editorial page has long been conservative and generally friendly to Trump (except on the matter of his tariff policy). But again, the limits of his power over normal allies became evident; the president was unsuccessful, and the story ran. But even if he lost the skirmish with the Journal, he may have at least briefly regained his purchase in the broader battle.

This morning, Trump posted a long, angry screed attacking the paper and promising to sue the Journal, its parent corporation, and Murdoch himself. His base likely still has questions surrounding Epstein, but for now, at least, Trump has redirected them back to the more familiar and comfortable territory of fighting with the media.

“This is yet another example of FAKE NEWS!” his post concluded, not accidentally.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

When CBS embarked on the project of replacing David Letterman as the host of The Late Show,in 2014, the network spared no expense. It hired Stephen Colbert, who had collected Emmys and acclaim while hosting his Comedy Central talk show, The Colbert Report; gave him total creative control; and fully revamped Manhattan’s Ed Sullivan Theater so Colbert could make the show’s longtime venue his own. After a shaky first year, Colbert found his footing in the lead-up to the 2016 election by focusing his opening monologues more pointedly on politics. The Late Show soon became the highest-rated talk show in America—a crown it has not relinquished since.

Ten years on, CBS has snatched the crown off its head. The network appears to have grown so dismayed with the state of late-night television that it has unceremoniously canceled one of the genre’s most successful stalwarts: In a statement last night, CBS announced that not only will this season of The Late Show—set to air through May 2026—be the program’s last, but the franchise will also be retired entirely. (“We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable,” the statement offers as explanation.) The decision quickly prompted plenty of speculation among industry observers, given Colbert’s recent, unvarnished scorn for CBS’s parent company, Paramount, after it settled a lawsuit with Donald Trump; the president had accused 60 Minutes, the network’s venerated TV newsmagazine, of deceptively editing an election-season interview with Kamala Harris. (CBS News, which produces 60 Minutes, denied the claim.) But whether or not there was some political motivation behind the cancellation (the network called the reason purely financial), the underlying point is clear: The Late Show is no longer valuable enough for CBS to bother protecting it.

[Read: Is Colbert’s ouster really just a ‘financial decision’?]

As the business of television changes, late-night talk shows have found themselves in a particularly awkward spot. For one, people have stopped flocking to linear television as their evenings wind down. If they do turn the TV on, it’s often to check out what’s new to stream rather than to put up with a somewhat staid format interrupted by many commercial breaks. The customary celebrity chats and musical performances typically appear online not long after they air, and said celebrities now have many other outlets for plugging their projects: video podcasts, YouTube shows. The cost of producing one of those alternatives is also far smaller than the budget for a glitzy affair like The Late Show.

These arguments always get trotted out as nightly programs drop off the map—like when The Late Show’s lead-out, The Late Late Show, didn’t survive its host James Corden’s departure; and when its follow-up, the Taylor Tomlinson–hosted variety show At Midnight, lasted just over a year before the comedian decided to return to performing stand-up full-time. Questions about the genre’s relevance are also why Late Night With Seth Meyers had to get rid of its house band to survive, and why Comedy Central chose not to replace The Daily Show’s former host Trevor Noah. Instead, the cable channel was satisfied with bringing back Noah’s predecessor Jon Stewart for one night a week, rotating the other episodes among the current cast.

And yet: Even though Puck reported that Colbert’s program was losing more than $40 million a year for CBS, there’s something quite shocking about a network simply giving up a foothold as established as The Late Show. Brand names are hard to come by in television, and The Late Show was a big one: Letterman built it up over the course of the 1990s, after NBC passed him over as Johnny Carson’s successor to The Tonight Show. Colbert then inherited a program defined by its past host’s curmudgeonly brand of snark and fundamentally remade it into a much more thoughtful and authentic show. He’s proved capable of deep, empathetic interviews with guests and spiky, aggressive political joke-making (by broadcast TV’s rigid standards).

[Read: The late-night experiment that puts comedy first]

Still, Colbertwould never be able to achieve the ubiquity that Carson and Letterman enjoyed before the advent of streaming. The occasional clip might go viral, and entertainment sites will write up the best parts of the monologue; the talk-show desk, however, no longer comes with a seat of cultural power. Colbert was once the most irreverent member of his late-night brethren (people forget what a bomb-thrower his satirical Colbert Report character could be), but he has since become more of a fatherly figure—one I value as part of the TV firmament but who doesn’t exactly scream “cutting edge.”

Then again, “cutting edge” is not something CBS has sought in a long time. It’s hard to know what could possibly take over for The Late Show when it vanishes in mid-2026. Sitcom reruns? Movies you could just as easily catch on Netflix? The point of network television is to offer something that has a live jolt to it—sports, stand-up, the occasional drama or comedy shows that become appointment viewing. As the medium dissolves from relevance, its owners instead seem content not to create anything of cultural importance. The Late Show is not the juggernaut it once was, sure. But what’s most tragic is to think of it being replaced by nothing at all.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Recently, I was invited to the Dalkey Book Festival, in Ireland, to speak at a session titled “Books That Changed the World.” I assumed that, as a Shakespeare scholar, I was expected to talk about the global impact of the First Folio. Instead, frightened by what has been happening in America, I decided to choose a book that is changing the world right now. For that, I turned to a 1978 novel I had long heard of but never read: The Turner Diaries, by William Luther Pierce, a physicist and the founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance.

I knew that that the novel had once served as a deadly template for domestic terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh, who drew from its pages when he planned the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, and Robert Jay Mathews, whose white-supremacist gang took its name, the Order, from the novel; a member of the Order killed the Jewish radio host Alan Berg. I also knew that it had inspired John William King, part of a group that dragged James Byrd Jr., a Black man, to death behind a pickup truck. As King shackled Byrd to the vehicle, he was reported to have said, “We’re going to start The Turner Diaries early.”

The book is a vile, racist fantasy culminating in genocide, but it isn’t just a how-to manual for homegrown terrorists. What has been labeled the “bible of the racist right” has influenced American culture in a way only fiction can—by harnessing the force of storytelling to popularize ideas that have never been countenanced before. Literature can be mind opening, but it can also be corrosive, and there is no exaggeration in saying that The Turner Diaries and books like it have played a part in spreading hateful ideas that now even influence government policy.

Seeking a copy online, I was led directly to Amazon. I was surprised to find the book available on that site, which had reportedly stopped selling it after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Before then, according to a New York Times article about the ban, Amazon had marketed the book alongside a warning identifying it as “a racist, white supremacist fantasy.” Amazon had justified the sale of what it acknowledged to be an “infamous work”—one that has now reportedly sold as many as half a million copies—because of the novel’s “historical significance and educational role in the understanding and prevention of racism and acts of terrorism.” I found that to be a sound policy; I would no more ban offensive books, which need to be studied and analyzed, than I would prevent scientists from investigating infectious pathogens.

It was only after reading the novel that I fully grasped why Amazon had previously decided to remove it from its site after a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol. Proud Boys had helped organize and lead that assault, encouraged a few months earlier when Trump was asked during a presidential debate to condemn the group and replied: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by!” The month before the January 6 attack, in a livestreamed video, Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader, described government officials as “evil scum” who “deserved to die a traitor’s death”—to which another leader, Ethan Nordean, replied, “Yup, Day of the Rope.” That was the name that Pierce gave, in The Turner Diaries, to the day when enemies are lynched, “a grim and bloody day, but an unavoidable one” orchestrated in hopes of “straightening out the majority of the population and reorienting their thinking.” The appearance on January 6 of a gallows with a noose hanging from it outside the Capitol visually reinforced the allusion to that defining moment in the novel. Biggs and Nordean were later sentenced for their roles in the assault to 17 and 18 years in prison, respectively. (Trump commuted their sentences.)

[Read: Alt history]

The Turner Diaries tells the story of Earl Turner, who, in the closing years of the 20th century, participates in a revolution that begins as a race war in the United States and results in the annihilation of nonwhite people (and those aligned with them) from the planet. It is told through a series of diary entries that Turner makes from September 16, 1991, to November 9, 1993, the day he pilots an airplane into the Pentagon in a suicide mission. July 19, 1993, is an especially exciting day for him, as Turner witnesses “what surely must be one of the biggest mass migrations in history,” the evacuation of Black people, Latinos, and immigrants at “a rate of better than a million a day.” Once nonwhite people are gone, he writes, the “air seems cleaner, the sun brighter, life more joyous.”

The diary entries are framed by a foreword and an epilogue, said to have been written in 2099 and reflecting back on these world-changing events. The novel, which is horrifying and heartless, slowly acclimates readers to greater levels of violence and hatred, with healthy doses of propaganda justifying large-scale murder. Black people are depicted as rapists and cannibals, Jews as rapacious and controlling, and white people who believe in a multicultural society as race traitors who also deserve to die.

I purchased the $30 paperback, now in its third edition, the first to be published under William Pierce’s name rather than his pseudonym, Andrew Macdonald. The book was advertised on Amazon, shockingly, as a “futuristic action-adventure novel.” The pitch for the book had gotten a thorough makeover, the stain of extremist violence whitewashed by a seemingly innocent, policy-based appeal. Amazon no longer warned customers that The Turner Diaries was infamous; it offered only the publisher’s description of the novel as one “that warns us of how American society might unravel if the immigration and racial policies being pursued then—which are being pursued to an even greater extent today—were allowed to continue.” This language, which existed on sales pages before January 6, also appears on other sites where the book has remained available online, including Books-A-Million and Bookshop.org.

On Amazon, the book’s publisher, which is presumably the creator of the alarming description, was listed as the innocuous-sounding Cosmotheist Books. A search for the publisher leads to the National Alliance, which invites new members committed to “a thorough rooting out of Semitic and other non-Aryan values.” Amazon was sharing profits from the book with a neo-Nazi organization, one that I was now indirectly funding.

That the book had appeared for sale again on Amazon now that Trump is president again didn’t strike me as all that surprising. The start of Trump’s second term calls to mind familiar themes from the novel. I am not suggesting that the president or those in his immediate circle have read it—only that the book, now in circulation for roughly half a century, has informed the thinking of people who yearn to “make America great again” by expelling immigrants and appealing to white grievances. In The Turner Diaries, those who have governed America are blamed for granting “automatic citizenship to everyone who had managed to sneak across the Mexican border,” and liberalism is derided as “an essentially feminine, submissive world view.” Anger is also directed at the mainstream media: “One day we will have a truly American press in this country, but a lot of editors’ throats will have to be cut first.” When the current Trump administration reportedly pushed out two Black military leaders, General Charles Q. Brown Jr. and Lieutenant General Telita Crosland, following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s broader calls to rid the armed forces of DEI, I couldn’t help thinking of Turner’s lament that the U.S. Army was more than 40 percent Black, and that “the day will come when we must make our move inside the military.”

[Read: White supremacy’s gateway to the American mind]

In May, Trump invited white South African refugees to America. When asked by a journalist why he had done so, he repeated the sort of discredited claims of white genocide that fill the pages of The Turner Diaries, while blaming the press for covering it up: “It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about.” (South Africa does have a very high murder rate, but overwhelmingly, the victims are Black.) The roundups and expulsions in the novel rhyme with the Trump administration’s error-prone but unapologetic deportation strategy. Some purges in The Turner Diaries are based on mistaken identities and false accusations, but “there was no admitting to the possibility of mistakes”; acting with “arbitrariness and unpredictability” was part of the plan. On June 15, Trump posted on Truth Social words that echo the novel’s xenophobic rhetoric: “We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities” to “reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia.”

It may be a coincidence that the Los Angeles metropolitan area, to which Trump has deployed Marines and the National Guard, is the site deliberately chosen in the novel to trigger the violent clashes that foment militarization in the country. I would be interested to know whether Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser responsible for overseeing the recent harsh immigration roundups in Los Angeles, has read Pierce’s novel; we do know that he sent emails to Breitbart News recommending Jean Raspail’s 1973 The Camp of the Saints, a novel thatthe Southern Poverty Law Center has called “a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries.” The center’s website still warns about the dangers of both books.

Recently, I went back to Amazon, only to discover that The Turner Diaries had disappeared: By early June, the site had erased all traces of the novel. The title had even vanished from my browsing history. I reached out to Amazon; a spokesperson referred me to content guidelines prohibiting the promotion of “hate speech” and confirmed that the title had been discovered and removed. What they wouldn’t tell me is why it had been briefly available, even on Amazon’s sites in Germany and Canada, countries where The Turner Diaries has been banned. I wondered whether the books’ appearance was a subversive act by an employee who holds extremist sympathies, or was perhaps authorized by someone who had seen Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, squelch the endorsement of Kamala Harris in The Washington Post (which he owns) and donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. But this is speculation. What is badly needed is transparency. The Turner Diaries may remain invisible to many Americans, but its effect on what is happening in the country today is plain to see.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Mark Zuckerberg was supposed to win the AI race. Eons before ChatGPT and AlphaGo, when OpenAI did not exist and Google had not yet purchased DeepMind, there was FAIR: Facebook AI Research. In 2013, Facebook tapped one of the “godfathers” of AI, the legendary computer scientist Yann LeCun, to lead its new division. That year, Zuckerberg personally traveled to one of the world’s most prestigious AI conferences to announce FAIR and recruit top scientists to the lab.

FAIR has since made a number of significant contributions to AI research, including in the field of computer vision. Although the division was not focused on advancing Facebook’s social-networking products per se, the premise seemed to be that new AI tools could eventually support the company’s core businesses, perhaps by improving content moderation or image captioning. But for years, Facebook didn’t develop AI as a stand-alone, consumer-facing product. Now, in the era of ChatGPT, the company lags behind.

Facebook, now called Meta, trails not just OpenAI and Google but also newer firms such as Anthropic, xAI, and DeepSeek—all of which have launched advanced generative-AI models and chatbots over the past few years. In response, Zuckerberg’s company quickly launched its own flagship model, Llama, but it has struggled relative to its competitors. In April, Meta proudly rolled out a Llama 4 model that Zuckerberg called a “beast”—but after an experimental version of the model scored second in the world on a widely used benchmarking test, the version released to the public ranked only 32nd. In the past year, every other top AI lab has released new “reasoning” models that, thanks to a new training paradigm, are generally much better than previous chatbots at advanced math and coding problems; Meta has yet to deliver its own.

[Read: Chatbots are cheating on their benchmark tests]

So, a dozen years after building FAIR, Meta is effectively starting over. Last month, Zuckerberg went on a new recruiting spree. He hired Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old ex-head of the start-up Scale, as chief AI officer to lead yet another division—dubbed Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL—and has reportedly been personally asking top AI researchers to join. The goal of this redo, Zuckerberg wrote in an internal memo to employees, is “to build towards our vision: personal superintelligence for everyone.” Meta is reportedly attempting to lure top researchers by offering upwards of $100 million in compensation. (The company has contested this reporting; for comparison, LeBron James was paid less than $50 million last year.) More than a dozen researchers from rival companies, mainly OpenAI, have joined Meta’s new AI lab so far. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build new data centers to support its pursuit of superintelligence. FAIR will still exist but within the new superintelligence team, meaning Meta has both a chief AI “scientist” (LeCun) and a chief AI “officer” (Wang). At the same time, MSL is cloistered off from the rest of Meta in an office space near Zuckerberg himself, according to The New York Times.

When I reached out to Meta to ask about its “superintelligence” overhaul, a spokesperson pointed me to Meta’s most recent earnings call, in which Zuckerberg described “how AI is transforming everything we do” and said that he is “focused on building full general intelligence.” I also asked about comments made by an outgoing AI researcher at Meta: “You’ll be hard pressed to find someone that really believes in our AI mission,” the researcher wrote in an internal memo, reported in The Information, adding that “to most, it’s not even clear what our mission is.” The spokesperson told me, in response to the memo, “We’re excited about our recent changes, new hires in leadership and research, and continued work to create an ideal environment for revolutionary research.”

Meta’s superintelligence group may well succeed. Small, well-funded teams have done so before: After a group of former OpenAI researchers peeled off to form Anthropic a few years ago, they quickly emerged as a top AI lab. Elon Musk’s xAI was even later to the race, but its Grok chatbot is now one of the most technically impressive AI products around (egregious racism and anti-Semitism notwithstanding). And regardless of how far Meta has fallen behind in the AI race, the company has proved its ability to endure: Meta’s stock reached an all-time high earlier this year, and it made more than $17 billion in profit from January through the end of March. Billions of people around the world use its social apps.

The company’s approach is also different from that of its rivals, which frequently describe generative AI in ideological, quasi-religious terms. Executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind are all prone to writing long blog posts or giving long interviews about the future they hope to usher in, and they harbor long-standing philosophical disagreements with one another. Zuckerberg, by comparison, does not appear interested in using AI to transform the world. In his most recent earnings call, he focused on five areas AI is influencing at Meta: advertising, social-media content, online commerce, the Meta AI assistant, and devices, notably smart glasses. The grandest future he described to investors was trapped in today’s digital services and conventions: “We’re all going to have an AI that we talk to throughout the day—while we’re browsing content on our phones, and eventually as we’re going through our days with glasses—and I think this will be one of the most important and valuable services that has ever been created.” Zuckerberg also said that AI-based updates to content recommendations on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have increased the amount of time that users spend on each platform. In this framework, superintelligence may just be a way to keep people hooked on Meta’s legacy social-media apps and devices.

Initially, it seemed that Meta would take a different path. When the company first entered the generative-AI race, a few months after the launch of ChatGPT, the firm bet big on “open source” AI software, making its Llama model free for nearly anyone to access, modify, and use. Meta touted this strategy as a way to turn its AI models into an industry standard that would enable widespread innovation and eventually improve Meta’s AI offerings. Because open-source software is popular among developers, Zuckerberg claimed, this strategy would help attract top AI talent.

[Read: New Mark Zuckerberg dropped]

Whatever industry standards Zuckerberg was hoping to set, none have come to fruition. In January, the Chinese company DeepSeek released an AI model that was more capable than Llama despite having been developed with far fewer resources. Catching up to OpenAI may now require Meta to leave behind the company’s original, bold, and legitimately distinguishing bet on “open” AI. According to the Times, Meta has internally discussed the possibility of stopping work on its most powerful open-source model (“Behemoth”) in favor of a closed model akin to those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. In his memo to employees, Zuckerberg said that Meta will continue developing Llama while also exploring “research on our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so.” The Meta spokesperson pointed me to a 2024 interview in which Zuckerberg explicitly said that although the firm is generally “pro open source,” he is not committed to releasing all future Meta models in this way.

While Zuckerberg figures out the path forward, he will also have to contend with the basic reality that generative AI may alienate some of his users. The company rolled back an early experiment with AI characters after human users found that the bots could easily go off the rails (one such bot, a self-proclaimed “Black queer momma of 2” that talked about cooking fried chicken and celebrating Kwanzaa, tied itself in knots when a Washington Post columnist asked about its programming); the firm’s stand-alone AI app released earlier this year also led many users to unwittingly share ostensibly private conversations to the entire platform. AI-generated media has overwhelmed Facebook and Instagram, turning these platforms into oceans of low-quality, meaningless content known as “AI slop.”

Still, with an estimated 3.4 billion daily users across its platforms, it may be impossible for Meta to fail. Zuckerberg might appear to be burning hundreds of millions of dollars on salaries and much more than that on new hardware, but it’s all part of a playbook that has worked before. When Instagram and WhatsApp emerged as potential rivals, he bought them. When TikTok became dominant, Meta added a short-form-video feed to Instagram; when Elon Musk turned Twitter into a white-supremacist hub, Meta launched Threads as an alternative. Quality and innovation have not been the firm’s central proposition for many, many years. Before the AI industry obsessed over scaling up its chatbots, scale was Meta’s greatest and perhaps only strength: It dominated the market by spending anything to, well, dominate the market.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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.

In fall 1963, as President Lyndon B. Johnson struggled to pass the Civil Rights Act, some allies warned him that the success wouldn’t be worth the electoral hit he’d take. Johnson was insistent that the point of winning elections was to push the policies he wanted. “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” he said.

No one would have to ask President Donald Trump that question. His vision of power is dangerous but clear, and he’s wasted little time in implementing it. One reason he’s been so successful is that members of the House and Senate seem to have no idea what the hell the Congress is for. The past few weeks have seen Republican members of Congress wringing their hands furiously over bills under consideration, criticizing the White House’s legislative priorities … and then voting for them.

The most torturous, and tortuous, example is Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a prominent member of the supposedly populist wing of MAGA Republicans. On June 28, Hawley criticized Medicaid cuts included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in the form of work requirements. “If you want to be a working-class party, you’ve got to deliver for working-class people,” he said. “You cannot take away health care from working people.”

Three days later, on July 1, he voted for a bill that did exactly that. It also cut funding to rural hospitals, and yet, a few days later, he told NBC News, “I think that if Republicans don’t come out strong and say we’re going to protect rural hospitals, then, yeah, I think voters aren’t going to like that.” This week, he introduced a bill to roll back some of the Medicaid cuts he’d voted for two weeks earlier.

If Hawley didn’t like the cuts, he could have voted to stop them. I don’t mean that symbolically: The bill passed 51–50, with Vice President J. D. Vance breaking the tie. By withholding his vote, Hawley could have killed the bill or forced changes. This is how legislating is supposed to work. But in his defense, Hawley has terrible role models: He’s a relatively young senator surrounded by elders who seem just as confused about their role.

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted for the OBBBA too, and then told reporters that she hoped that the bill she had just voted for would not be enacted as written, pleading with the House to do her job for her by altering it. (The House didn’t.) Years ago, my colleague Ashley Parker, then at The New York Times, identified the existence of a Republican “Vote No/Hope Yes Caucus.” Murkowski is perhaps the spiritual founder of a Vote Yes/Hope No Caucus.

She has plenty of company. Her comrades were out in force for this week’s vote on rescissions, retroactive budget cuts requested by the White House and approved by Congress. Some members worry that acceding to the rescissions is effectively surrendering the power of the purse to the executive branch. “I don’t have any problem with reducing spending. We’re talking about not knowing,” complained Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the former Senate majority leader. “They would like a blank check, is what they would like. And I don’t think that’s appropriate. I think they ought to make the case.” McConnell voted for the bill.

“I suspect we’re going to find out there are some things that we’re going to regret,” North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, ostensibly freed up by his decision not to run for reelection, said on Wednesday. If only there were some way to avoid that! But Tillis voted yes, because he said he’d been assured by the White House that certain programs wouldn’t be cut. It should be clear by now that the administration’s promises to senators aren’t worth the red cent that Trump is eliminating; regardless, the way to ensure that something happens is to write it into law. Isn’t that what we send legislators to Washington to do?

Apparently not. Also this week, Senate Majority Leader John Thune paused a bill to levy sanctions against Russia, deferring to Trump, who has threatened to impose tariffs on Moscow. “It sounds like right now the president is going to attempt to do some of this on his own,” he said. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise concurred: “If anybody’s going to be able to get Putin to the table to finally agree to peace, it’s President Trump.” Never mind that the Constitution places the tariff power primarily with Congress.

Trump’s executive-power grab, I’ve argued here and in my recent book, is the product of careful planning laid out in Project 2025, whose authors make a case for how and why the president should seize new authorities. In Project 2025’s main document, Kevin D. Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, attacks “Congress’s preening cowardice” in refusing to exercise its duties and leaving them to the presidency. Project 2025’s paradoxical response is for the executive to seize even more power. That has worked because members of Congress are—unlike LBJ—afraid to take votes that might create some sort of political backlash.

They might pay the price anyway. “In recent decades, members of the House and Senate discovered that if they give away that power to the Article II branch of government, they can also deny responsibility for its actions,” Roberts writes. That trick works for only so long. Trump never has to face voters again, but having passed up the chance to set their own agenda, many members of Congress will have to answer for his decisions in next year’s midterms.

After the longest vote in House history this week, Speaker Mike Johnson—no relation genealogically, ideologically, or stylistically to Lyndon—lamented the state of affairs in the legislature. “I am tired of making history; I just want normal Congress,” he said. “But some people have forgotten what that looks like.” It’s a shame that Johnson doesn’t know anyone who has the power to change the way things work at the Capitol.

Related:

The missing branchThe Trump administration targets Congress—again.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Can this man save Harvard?David Sims: Why CBS snatched its talk-show king’s crownAutocracy in America: The pollster who sensed democracy was faltering

Today’s News

President Donald Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to unseal grand-jury testimony from the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking crimes.An explosion at a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department training facility killed at least three deputies, according to department officials.The House gave final approval to Trump’s request to cut $9 billion from public-broadcasting funding and foreign aid. Trump is expected to sign the bill into law.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Emma Sarappo on what Andrea Gibson understood about very simple poetry.

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Evening Read

Photograph by Johnathon Kelso

What to Do With the Most Dangerous Book in America

By James Shapiro

The novel had once served as a deadly template for domestic terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh, who drew from its pages when he planned the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, and Robert Jay Mathews, whose white-supremacist gang took its name, the Order, from the novel; a member of the Order killed the Jewish radio host Alan Berg. I also knew that it had inspired John William King, part of a group that dragged James Byrd Jr., a Black man, to death behind a pickup truck. As King shackled Byrd to the vehicle, he was reported to have said, “We’re going to start The Turner Diaries early.”

The book is a vile, racist fantasy culminating in genocide, but it isn’t just a how-to manual for homegrown terrorists. What has been labeled the “bible of the racist right” has influenced American culture in a way only fiction can—by harnessing the force of storytelling to popularize ideas that have never been countenanced before.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The dispute behind the violence in SyriaHow the right is waging war on climate-conscious investingMake Coca-Cola great again.Anti-Semitism gets the DEI treatment.Stephanie Burt: A strange time to be trans

Culture Break

A24

Watch. Eddington (out now in theaters) is a nasty, cynical, and eerily accurate look at all-too-recent history, Shirley Li writes.

Read. “Seven Summers,” a poem by Jana Prikryl:

“The summer I was twelve I don’t remember / Thirteen we drive the Continent, hit Chamonix / The summer I’m fourteen go back alone to Čechy”

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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In January 2020, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock—the world’s largest asset-management firm—released his annual letter to corporate executives. The letters had become something of a tradition: part investor missive, part State of the Union, dispatched each year from the top of the financial world. This one struck a tone of alarm that would reverberate far beyond Wall Street.

“Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects,” Fink warned. “We are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.” He said that BlackRock would be “increasingly disposed to vote against management and board directors when companies are not making sufficient progress” on sustainability.

The message signaled the degree to which a once-obscure investing philosophy known as ESG—short for “environmental, social, and governance”—had become a boardroom priority. For a moment, it looked like corporate America would weigh carbon emissions alongside profits. More major companies soon announced climate goals and promised new standards of accountability. BlackRock helped lead an effort to elect sustainability advocates to the board of ExxonMobil. A consensus seemed to be forming: Business could be a force for good, and markets might even help save the planet.

Now, just five years later, that consensus is crumbling. BP is pulling back on a commitment to invest in renewables—and is reportedly expanding plans for drilling. PepsiCo and Coca-Cola have scaled back their plastic-reduction pledges. Major banks, such as JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, are hedging their climate bets and investing heavily in fossil-fuel companies. Asset-management firms that joined BlackRock in embracing ESG—including Vanguard and State Street—have also backed off. And Fink’s 2025 letter to investors does not even mention the word climate.

[James Surowiecki: The hottest trend in investing is mostly a sham]

“This further exacerbates the problem of slow-walking climate action at a time when the temperature records are being broken and devastating weather events are accelerating,” Richard Brooks, the climate finance director for Stand.earth, an international environmental-advocacy organization that focuses in part on corporate contributions to climate change, told us.

This global retreat has been particularly acute in the United States, where political resistance to ESG has grown into an organized countermovement. The issue is now a fixture in partisan attack ads, Republican statehouse legislation, and right-wing media. The forces arrayed against ESG say they are just getting started.

In January, a group of present and former Republican state officials gathered at a posh resort in Sea Island, Georgia, together with conservative leaders, for a two-day lesson in how to dismantle corporate America’s most ambitious response to climate change. At the Cloister, with its golf courses, tennis courts, and beaches, ESG was denounced as a sinister force undermining free markets and democracy.

“I would hope everyone here is pretty much committed to destroying ESG,” said Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research, the organization that has led the fight. His group, he said, had spent $5 million running ads “educating consumers” about the dangers of ESG.

Hild spread a similar message at other events this spring, according to transcripts of his remarks that we obtained. “ESG is when they use their market share to push a far-left agenda, without ever having to go to voters, without any electoral accountability,” said Hild at a March meeting of state activists. “This is not the free market operating. This is a cartel. This is a mafia.”

At its core, ESG investing means integrating nonfinancial factors—such as climate risk, carbon emissions, pollution, and corporate governance—into investment decisions, with the idea that these issues could materially affect long-term performance. Firms that offer ESG funds screen out companies that don’t meet a set of criteria for climate protection, and pitch their products to investors as climate-friendly alternatives to conventional funds.

But in the eyes of its critics, ESG investing undermines democratic governance, imposes political priorities through the financial system, and breaches the independence of state financial officers to seek maximum return on investments. “By applying arbitrary ESG financial metrics that serve no one except the companies that created them, elites are circumventing the ballot box to implement a radical ideological agenda,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said in 2023 when he introduced legislation prohibiting the use of ESG investment by Florida pension and other state funds.

That narrative has taken hold with a wide swath of Republican leaders. Donald Trump attacked ESG on the campaign trail last year, and in an April 8 executive order, the president said that state-level climate-emissions and ESG laws “are fundamentally irreconcilable with my Administration’s objective to unleash American energy. They should not stand.”

The roots of ESG can be traced to faith-based investing of the 18th century, when some religious denominations sought to avoid investment in corporations that promoted trading enslaved people. In the 20th century, the movement called “socially responsible investing” gained momentum during the civil-rights era and, later, in connection with opposition to apartheid in South Africa.

The term ESG was formally coined in a 2004 report by the United Nations Global Compact titled “Who Cares Wins,” which argued that better corporate integration of environmental, social, and governance factors could lead to more-sustainable markets and better outcomes around the globe. ESG investing grew in the 2010s as the public grew more concerned about diversity, the environment, and executive pay. Major asset managers such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street began offering ESG products, and companies competed to establish metrics to track compliance. As the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock played an especially influential role.

Because there was no single established metric for meeting climate goals, critics on the left complained that ESG encouraged greenwashing, in which companies claim to be making environmental progress without making an actual commitment. But even critics were forced to concede that ESG brought about increased transparency. In 2018, 34 percent of publicly traded global companies disclosed greenhouse-gas-emission details. By 2023, that share had risen to 63 percent, an increase generally attributable to ESG efforts, according to R. Paul Herman, the founder and CEO of HIP Investor Inc.

Although many asset managers noted the difficulties of measuring greenhouse-gas emissions, they embraced ESG as part of their long-term management strategy—and trillions of dollars flowed to them. According to Bloomberg Intelligence, global ESG-fund assets reached around $30 trillion in 2022. The analytics firm forecast in February 2024 that global ESG assets would surpass $40 trillion by 2030.

Expectations for ESG have now fallen off dramatically—and Hild and his three colleagues at Consumers’ Research can claim much of the credit. At seminars such as the one at Sea Island, Hild and his allies armed a network of Republican state attorneys general, state treasurers, and comptrollers with legal and political ammunition.

The key funders of such efforts include fossil-fuel-industry executives and Leonard Leo, who is best known for his leadership of the Federalist Society. In recent years, Leo has moved beyond his focus on transforming America’s courts, vowing in videotaped remarks in 2023 to take on “wokeism in the corporate environment, in the educational environment,” biased media, and “entertainment that is really corrupting our youth.”

Beginning in 2021, Leo and his team injected cash into a long-dormant organization that they would use to fight ESG: Consumers’ Research. A spokesperson for Leo told us that “woke companies are defrauding their consumers and poisoning our culture, and Leonard Leo is proud to support Will Hild and Consumers’ Research as they crush liberal dominance in those woke companies and hold them accountable.”

The organization found a receptive audience among Republican state officials eager for a road map to combatting ESG. The group emphasized using leverage that states possess through their management of pension funds to punish investment firms that had signed on to boycott oil and gas companies.

[Zoë Schlanger: The climate can’t afford another Trump presidency]

Republican attorneys general from a few fossil-fuel-dependent states, such as Texas and West Virginia, began in 2021 to investigate whether investments tied to ESG guidelines violated state laws. They sent letters of inquiry to major firms such as BlackRock and Vanguard, questioning whether their ESG practices were legally compatible with states’ fiduciary obligations, especially concerning pension funds.

That same year, Texas enacted Senate Bill 13, which requires state pension systems and other state endowments to divest from financial institutions seen as hostile to the oil and gas industry. Under that law, the state attorney general’s office placed more than 370 investment firms on a blacklist—including BlackRock and several divisions of major banks such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.

The following year, the offensive intensified. A coalition of 19 Republican attorneys general sent a joint letter to Fink, the BlackRock CEO, accusing the company of putting climate goals ahead of financial returns and pressuring corporations to align with international climate treaties such as the Paris Agreement.

“BlackRock appears to use the hard-earned money of our states’ citizens to circumvent the best possible return on investment,” the letter warned. It cited proxy-voting strategies and coordination with groups such as the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative as potential legal overreach.

Since 2022, 23 Republican state attorneys general have opened investigations into ESG-focused investment firms. Several of those officials had help from an Arizona-based private firm, Fusion Law, which received $4.5 million from Consumers’ Research in its first two years of existence. One of the firm’s founders, Paul Watkins, is a former Arizona civil-litigation chief in the state’s attorney general’s office—and was also a legal fellow at Consumers’ Research.

“Paul Watkins and Fusion Law have been essential in helping to unravel and document the inner workings of ESG,” Hild told us. The firm has had contracts to work on ESG-related issues with attorneys general in Tennessee and Utah. Watkins has been a featured speaker at Consumers’ Research events, including the gathering in January.

Recently, state-level investigators began probing the question of whether environmental groups, asset managers, and shareholder-advocacy organizations were engaged in collusion, using ESG to restrain trade in fossil-fuel companies, in violation of antitrust laws.

The opposition of red-state officials has chilled discussion of sustainable investments at institutional-investor meetings, according to participants, despite accusations of hypocrisy from Democratic officials in blue states. Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller, told us that Republicans are distorting investment decisions by putting their thumb on the scale against ESG.

“These are people who once upon a time believed in free markets,” Lander, a Democrat, told us. “I’m not telling anyone how to invest. I just don’t want them to tell me.”

Evidence suggests that the Republican push has been costly to taxpayers. A study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business found that the Texas law banning municipalities from doing business with banks that have ESG policies reduced the competition for borrowing—and generated a potential cost of up to $532 million in extra interest per year.

Nonetheless, the anti-ESG movement is spreading: What began largely as a state-level attack has now blossomed on Capitol Hill. In mid-2023, House Republicans, led by Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, launched a wide-ranging probe into ESG practices. More than 60 entities, including environmental groups, corporations, and financial institutions, were asked to provide information on alleged coordination aimed at limiting fossil-fuel investment.

The committee’s interim staff report, released last year, accused ESG advocates of forming a “climate cartel” that sought to “impose left-wing environmental, social, and governance goals” through coordinated pressure campaigns. The report alleged that such efforts amounted to collusion in restraint of trade.

During his inquiry, Jordan issued waves of subpoenas targeting organizations such as Ceres, BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and the shareholder-advocacy nonprofit As You Sow. Targets of the inquiry were required to turn over more than 100,000 pages of email and other communications as the committee investigated allegations of antitrust violations and collusion in recommending sustainable-investment options. “The investigation was abusive, and it was chilling,” said Danielle Fugere, the president and chief counsel of As You Sow, who testified for more than eight hours before Jordan’s panel last year.

“You cannot defy the reality of climate change and the scientific imperative of acting,” said Mindy Lubber, the president and CEO of the pro-sustainability nonprofit group Ceres, which has been active in prodding companies into taking part in ESG measures. But, she said, “everybody is afraid of the bull’s-eyes on their backs.”

[Annie Lowrey: If you’re worried about the climate, move your money]

Jordan’s inquiry is continuing this year, with a focus on possible antitrust violations by environmental organizations and asset managers and advisors.

The pressure is working as intended. After Jordan launched his inquiry, many high-profile firms exited the Climate Action 100+ initiative. Coalitions of financial institutions that once committed to sustainable investing have collapsed. Several U.S. banks—including JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo—withdrew from an influential bankers’ climate coalition, citing legal risk and political pressure. BlackRock and Vanguard pulled out of the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, leading that group to halt operations.

“Our memberships in some of these organizations have caused confusion regarding BlackRock’s practices and subjected us to legal inquiries from various public officials,” the company said in a letter to clients. “BlackRock’s active portfolio managers continue to assess material climate-related risks, alongside other investment risks, in delivering for clients.” The company, which declined our request to interview Fink, referred us to other official statements including one noting that “BlackRock’s sustainable and transition investing platform is driven by the needs of our clients and our continued investment conviction that the energy transition is a mega force shaping economies and markets.”

Other asset managers issued similar statements, noting that they would still offer green-investment options. But interest in ESG funds has declined substantially.

U.S. investment funds specializing in climate experienced net inflows of $70 billion in 2021—but by 2023, the tide had reversed, with money flowing out of the funds faster than it was coming in. Last year, net outflows amounted to $19.6 billion, with the trend continuing into the first quarter of 2025, according to Morningstar Analytics. Proxy initiatives from shareholders interested in sustainable investing have also declined, another casualty of the war against ESG.

“This has been a silent spring,” William Patterson, a former director for investment for the AFL-CIO who tracks climate-related shareholder action, told us. “Investor initiatives on climate, which attained broad shareholder support in the past, are barely present” at investor meetings this year. Meanwhile, the number of anti-ESG proxy proposals more than quadrupled from 2021 to 2024. As of February, a fifth of all shareholder proposals submitted were filed by anti-ESG groups.

Despite the precipitous decline of ESG investing, its detractors are not ready to declare victory. Consumers’ Research, for one, is committed to pressing on. “ESG is in retreat, but it is not defeated yet,” Hild told us. “We have a long way to go before people get rid of it.”

Proponents are not relenting either, and are looking forward to a moment when the political winds shift once more. “What I hear, especially in the U.S., is twofold,” said Daniel Klier, the chief executive of the advisory firm South Pole. “One message is ‘Keep your head down,’ but also that climate change will not go away—and we need to prepare for the decades to come and not just in the next four years.”

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Andrea Gibson wasn’t, in most circles, a gigantic celebrity—but their face and words were visible and prominent. Gibson, the poet laureate of Colorado, who died on Monday, began their career with spoken-word performances in cafés and at open mics around Boulder. Despite their intense stage fright, Gibson would stand in front of crowds of strangers and recite intensely confessional verse about their anxieties, their queerness, their heartbreaks. As their public profile rose, Gibson kept speaking to strangers—though more often than before, the audience wasn’t in the same room. In the 2010s, when slam poetry exploded in popularity, Gibson began appearing online—in Button Poetry recordings, in a video submission for the NPR Tiny Desk competition during which they were accompanied by piano. When the pandemic, and then cancer, prevented them from touring and performing live, they held virtual readings and distributed videos recorded at home. They asked listeners to have an experience with them, and they valued the way speaking poetry aloud can amplify its power.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

What we gain by forgetting“Buying Shrimp at Bennetts Point,” a poem by Roey LeonardiWhat to do with the most dangerous book in America

Gibson was all over Instagram. They were a visual poet—not in the manner of writers such as Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine, who have included photographs, drawings, and found materials in their books, but instead in a distinctly 21st-century fashion. In performance, their face and their body became crucial parts of the work, and their written words were frequently arranged in stark type on plain backgrounds. That’s how I most often interacted with Gibson’s poems: as small snippets of video or text on friends’ and strangers’ Stories. An avalanche of these posts was what informed me of the poet’s death.

Because Gibson leaned so much on the spoken word, their poems were obvious and emotional—to their benefit. Figurative language played its part, but so did lines as straightforward as “Why did I want to take / the world by storm when I could have taken it / by sunshine, by rosewater, by the cactus flowers / on the side of the road where I broke down?” As my colleague Faith Hill wrote this week, “Their verse sometimes risked seeming cloying or sentimental because of how unselfconsciously it concerned love: feeling it, cultivating it, spreading it, protecting it.” And this unabashed style made their words easy to share, as Hill points out; the universality of their themes was a feature, not a bug. Clearly, they wanted to be understood instantly, and by all kinds of readers.

This kind of accessibility is not always prized. “Instagram poetry” is sometimes invoked as a derogatory description of writing that prioritizes drama over artistic reflection. But I saw Gibson’s open-hearted verse strike a chord with all kinds of people, including readers who don’t spend much time on poetry. Gibson’s focus on the connection between poet and listener allowed them to reach beyond traditional readers of verse. And they used that platform almost exclusively to spread a message of gentleness: “Nearly every poem is an exercise in empathy, summoning generosity even in response to cruelty,” Hill points out. Gibson was well read, well watched, and well loved for that approach.

Courtesy of Coco Aramaki

Andrea Gibson Refused to ‘Battle’ Cancer

By Faith Hill

The last years of the poet’s life were among their most joyful.

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Book of Records, by Madeleine Thien

The Book of Records takes place in a postapocalyptic limbo called The Sea, where past, present, and future fold in on themselves and thoughts float in the air like dust. It’s a giant structure—maybe also a metaphysical construct—on an island in the middle of an ocean, full of refugees from some vaguely described ecological and political catastrophe. Our narrator, Lina, is remembering the time she spent at The Sea with her father 50 years ago, when she was a teenager. The pair had interesting company there: Their neighbors were the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Baruch Spinoza and the eighth-century Chinese poet Du Fu. Or maybe these were their spirits; the reader isn’t quite sure. Thien writes beautifully about the lives of these thinkers, and their tales of escape from political or religious oppression end up melding with Lina’s own story: Her father, we discover, was also a dissident of sorts. With The Sea, Thien literalizes a state of mind, the in-betweenness that comes before one makes a major decision. The stories Lina absorbs in that out-of-time place all ask whether to risk your family or your life on behalf of an ideal—whether it’s worth sacrificing yourself for another, better world you can’t yet see.  — Gal Beckerman

From our list: 24 books to read this summer

Out Next Week

📚 Shade, by Sam Bloch

📚 Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar, by Katie Yee

📚 Pan, by Michael Clune

Your Weekend Read

Illustration by Josie Norton

I Fought Plastic. Plastic Won.

By Annie Lowrey

Before I could buy something expensive and relax, I stopped, for once. Was I actually reducing my exposure to dangerous chemicals? Was my family safer than it had been before I began my campaign? What kinds of plastic are truly dangerous in the first place? I had no idea. More than I wanted to spend hundreds of dollars at Williams-Sonoma, I wanted to know my enemy.

Read the full article.

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Once again, images of horrifying violence are pouring out of Syria: dead bodies piled up in a hospital corridor. Gunmen calling out insults as they drive their cars over the corpses of murdered civilians.

These are not the first sectarian massacres in the seven turbulent months since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. But they represent something different, and not just because they led to a dramatic Israeli bombardment of Syria’s Defense Ministry on Wednesday that sent huge clouds of smoke billowing over central Damascus.

The latest intercommunal violence, which has left some 600 people dead in Syria’s southern province of Sweida, illustrates a fundamental disagreement between the United States and Israel over the nature of the Syrian state. Washington has been pushing for a strong central government in Damascus, but its closest ally in the region fears Syria’s new leaders, and has bolstered their domestic rivals.

The killings began just days after Thomas Barrack, President Donald Trump’s special envoy to Syria (and the U.S. ambassador to Turkey) laid out a muscular vision for a centralized Syria. “What we’ve learned is federalism doesn’t work,” Barrack said after meeting with Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. This was a startling rebuke to those who have argued for years that Syria should avert another dictatorship by conferring greater power on local authorities. Barrack made clear that he wants the Kurdish-led enclave in northeastern Syria—which has been holding out for more autonomy, like the Druze in the country’s south—to make larger concessions to Sharaa. “There is only one road, and it leads to Damascus,” Barrack said.

[Read: Can one man hold Syria together?]

That is not the Israelis’ view. Although they were happy to be rid of Assad, a sworn enemy, the Israelis do not trust Sharaa, a former jihadist whose forces swept to power in December, and who was once the leader of the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. The Israelis have often seemed to believe that they are safer when their Arab neighbors are too weak and divided to pose a threat. That perspective may have motivated recent Israeli demands that southern Syria remain a demilitarized zone. The Israelis also have a special relationship with the Druze, historically a warrior community that lives both in Israel and across the border in Sweida, their stronghold.

Barrack’s comments, on July 9, may have suggested a kind of carte blanche to Sharaa: Do what you have to do to get the country’s troublesome minorities in line. Sharaa knew that the Israelis did not want him to send troops into Sweida. But for weeks, he had engaged in back-channel talks with Israel, in an American-sponsored effort to resolve decades of tensions over a host of issues. Perhaps Sharaa assumed that the Israelis and the Americans had worked out the differences in their positions toward him.

If so, he was wrong. On July 13, when small-scale fighting broke out in Sweida between local Bedouin and Druze men, Sharaa sent a large contingent of fighters southward from Damascus in aging tanks and pickup trucks. Their ostensible mission was to restore order, but Druze militia leaders mobilized, convinced that Sharaa’s real goal was to crush them and assert full control over Sweida.

Things turned ugly very quickly, just as they had in two previous outbreaks of sectarian murder, in March and May, and for the same reasons. Sharaa was able to defeat the Assad regime in December with the help of a loose coalition of undisciplined Islamist militias, many of them veterans of the long struggle against Damascus. Among these men are many violent extremists who consider Syria’s minorities—including Alawites and Christians, as well as Druze and Kurds—to be heretics.

As in the previous violent episodes this spring, the militias were joined by rifle-toting young men from across Syria, who could be seen in handheld videos, calling for the murder of heretics as they jumped into pickups and headed south. Government-aligned channels on Telegram and other platforms were full of rhetoric so viciously sectarian that it could make anyone despair about Syria’s future.

Sharaa’s cleanup operation in Sweida soon turned into a bloody clash between Sunni and Druze gunmen. One local Druze man told me on Tuesday that artillery was raining down on the provincial capital, and that kidnappings and gun battles were taking place across the area. One of the most prominent Druze spiritual leaders, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, recorded a dramatic video in which he declared, “We are being subjected to a comprehensive war of extermination.” Hijri also broke an old taboo by calling for help from Israel and any other power willing to rescue the Druze.

Making matters worse, some Druze men in Israel began flooding the border to aid their co-religionists in Syria. That prompted Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to record a video telling the Israeli Druze not to cross into Syria, saying that Israeli forces were “acting to save our Druze brothers and to eliminate the gangs of the regime.”

The Israeli military soon made good on that threat, carrying out dozens of air strikes in Sweida and—more shocking—in central Damascus, where it struck near the presidential palace and hit the compound of the Defense Ministry.

The Israeli strikes got everyone’s attention. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was in the Oval Office with President Trump and a visiting Bahraini royal, told reporters that the bombing arose from “a misunderstanding, it looks like, between the Israeli side and the Syrian side.”

But if there was a misunderstanding, it originated at least partly with the U.S. president. Although Trump didn’t pay much attention to Syria in the first months of the year, he seems to have taken notice after meeting Sharaa in Riyadh in May. The leaders of Turkey and the Gulf States had already urged him to embrace Sharaa and drop the sanctions that have long strangled Syria’s economy. Trump quickly complied, and added a personal touch: Sharaa, he said, is an “attractive, tough guy” with a “strong past.”

[Read: The honeymoon is ending in Syria]

In other words, Sharaa looks to be Trump’s favorite kind of leader: a strongman. Barrack has been repeating Trump’s message and amplifying it ever since. He has compared Sharaa to George Washington, and even dropped hints that if Lebanon doesn’t clean up its own act soon, it could end up getting absorbed into a greater Syria. That is an odd way to talk about a country that remains shattered after many years of civil war, and where the government—desperately short on money and qualified people—is struggling to rebuild a national army.

Trump’s decision to give Sharaa his full support isn’t necessarily wrong. A unified Syrian state is what the country’s Sunni Muslim majority wants, and it is what the most influential regional powers—Turkey and Saudi Arabia—prefer. Some sort of compromise could possibly be worked out on the question of federal and local authority over the coming months and years, if Sharaa and the leaders of Syria’s minority communities are willing to be flexible.

But that would require Israel to be flexible too. If Israel keeps lobbing bombs at Syria, the prospects for peace along their border could evaporate, and with it the quiet diplomacy the Trump administration has pursued between the two countries. Sharaa’s attitude seemed already to be shifting in a televised speech he gave yesterday, in which he lashed out at Israel for the first time since he assumed power.

More than diplomacy is at stake. After three terrible waves of sectarian bloodletting in recent months, many in Syria’s minority communities have started to conclude that the state Sharaa envisions will—despite his regular protestations about pluralism and tolerance—be a place where they are not welcome. Thousands of them have already fled the country.

Trump and Barrack can say what they like about Sharaa being Syria’s George Washington. But if they do not press him harder to restrain the sectarian thugs in his own ranks, he may turn out to be a lot more like Saddam Hussein.

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After the COVID-19 outbreak began, the internet seemed to offer the thinnest of silver linings. Zoom kept kids in class, sort of. Celebrations—birthday parties, anniversaries—involved “socializing” in multiplayer games. Tech companies built applications for contact tracing to help forecast the pandemic’s spread. The industry eagerly welcomed its novel reputation as a portal to normalcy, for those who could access these opportunities. “The world has faced pandemics before,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a column for The Washington Post in April 2020, “but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good.”

The film Eddington, now in theaters, gleefully rebukes Zuckerberg’s assertion. Written and directed by Ari Aster—the filmmaker behind Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid—the neo-Western thriller is set during the early days of COVID’s spread in the United States. But rather than explore the impact of the coronavirus, the movie studies the misinformation, paranoia, and outrage that grew amid the internet’s dominance during social isolation. The small town of Eddington, New Mexico, becomes a literal battleground for its locals; they are overcome with the fear fomented by what they’ve seen on their screens. The movie is nasty and cynical—and also eerily accurate in its rendering of the digital reality of pandemic life. Eddington captures what happens when a community can’t log off: people becoming stupefied by the illusion of connection, and muting logic in the process.

Eddington isn’t the first film to take advantage of virtual world-building by incorporating social-media feeds and messaging apps into its visuals. But it does so in a way that makes the online world feel like it’s bleeding into the characters’ daily lives. Joe (played by Joaquin Phoenix), the town’s sheriff, is introduced via a video he’s watching on his phone; the YouTube page fills the frame until the camera zooms out to reveal him as the viewer. His conspiracy-theorist mother-in-law prints out “news” articles that she believes prove her points, reads them out loud, and chatters away about what she’s convinced Joe and his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), refuse to see. While running for mayor against the incumbent, Ted (Pedro Pascal), Joe blares his speeches over his police vehicle’s loudspeaker, creating a chaotic soundscape evoking a crisis-driven news feed.

[Read: Why Ari Aster freaks people out]

Among all this incessant noise are people whose digital personas dramatically contrast with who they are offline: Ted and his teenage son can barely stand each other, but in a campaign ad, they embrace warmly. Joe is celebrated on Facebook after defending a man who refused to wear a mask in a grocery store, but a rally attracts just a handful of supporters. Louise becomes obsessed with Vernon (Austin Butler), an influencer with a cultlike following, and disappears for long stretches of time, but Joe doesn’t register her fixation until he spots a comment she left under one of Vernon’s videos. Dread permeates Eddington: When Joe and his deputies watch a clip of an attack on a police precinct instigated by militant protesters, they never check the provenance of the footage; they just begin to arm themselves.

Research has shown that spending time on social media isn’t necessarily bad; users can generate a sense of kinship by actively participating in discussions and offering feedback and support. But that finding seemed to hold more weight prior to 2020, when the internet existed in tandem with people’s fuller lives. For the characters in Eddington, as it was for many of us living in America that year, there is nowhere to turn to but the conspiratorial thinking, heated debates, and endless updates online.

At one point, Joe barrels through a crowd of people chanting social-justice slogans while brandishing a ring light like it’s a weapon—an absurd image that conveys the disconnect between his actual and digital lives. Joe is a meek man: He struggles to express himself to his wife, who prefers not to be touched by him; he’s desperately outmatched in the mayoral race by the popular Ted; and only his two deputies seem to respect his authority as sheriff. For him, the emergency becomes an opportunity to project a more confident version of himself online. Yet in his quest to become Eddington’s most admired townsperson, Joe ends up trapped in a nightmare of his own making. “Is this what I’m supposed to do?” he cries when violence breaks out. Nobody answers, because nobody knows; his reality has become a void.

[Read: The year that changed the internet]

Joe’s despair reminded me of a conversation my colleague Charlie Warzel had with the writer and technology theorist L. M. Sacasas in 2022. They’d discussed why being on the internet can make people feel stuck in a loop of doom and confusion. Sacasas explained that the present is never the point of social-media engagement—that posting requires being reactive, thereby turning social-media users into the perfect vessels for propagating conflict. “What we’re focused on is not the particular event or movement before us, but the one right behind us,” Sacasas said then. “As we layer on these events, it becomes difficult for anything to break through.” Information, as a result, becomes abstracted into tangents. “We’re caking layers of commentary over the event itself,” Sacasas added, “and the event fades.”

In Eddington, COVID becomes a mere footnote to the events unfolding throughout the town—Joe doesn’t even check his test results when he starts exhibiting symptoms. What he continually responds to instead is the stress built up as a result of the pandemic; he’s left playing catchup to scuffles happening around Eddington, unraveling emotionally as the days pass. The film never interrogates why the early pandemic led to so many ideological conflicts, but it suggests that the prognosis is bleak for those who continue to venture too far into the internet’s noxious rabbit holes. Being too online, in other words, can be its own kind of sickness.

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The email landed at 10 minutes to midnight on a Friday in early April—a more menacing email than Alan Garber had imagined. The Harvard president had been warned that something was coming. His university had drawn the unwanted and sustained attention of the White House, and he’d spent weeks scrambling to stave off whatever blow was coming, calling his institution’s influential alumni and highly paid fixers to arrange a meeting with someone—anyone—in the administration.

When he finally found a willing contact, he was drawn into aimless exchanges. He received no demands. No deadlines. Just a long conversation about the prospect of scheduling a conversation.

Garber wanted an audience because he believed that Harvard had a case to make. The administration had been publicly flogging elite universities for failing to confront campus anti-Semitism. But Garber—a practicing Jew with a brother living in Israel—believed Harvard had done exactly that.

In the spring, Garber had watched Donald Trump take aim at Columbia, where anti-Israel demonstrations the previous year had so overwhelmed the campus that the university canceled the school’s graduation ceremony and asked the New York Police Department to clear encampments. In early March, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal funding to the school and said that it would consider restoring the money only if Columbia agreed to dramatic reforms, including placing its Middle East–studies department under an auditor’s supervision.

Ever since William F. Buckley Jr. turned his alma mater, Yale, into a bête noire, the American right has dreamed of shattering the left’s hegemony on campus, which it sees as the primary theater for radical experiments in social engineering. Now the Trump administration was using troubling incidents of anti-Jewish bigotry as a pretext to strip Ivy League adversaries of power and prestige.

The administration’s demands of Columbia impinged on academic freedom. But from Harvard’s parochial vantage point, they were also oddly clarifying. Whatever had gone wrong in Cambridge—and Garber’s own university faced a crisis of anti-Jewish bias—it hadn’t metastasized like it had in Morningside Heights. Harvard had disciplined protesters, and Garber himself had denounced the ostracism of Jewish students. Whichever punishment the administration had in mind, surely it would fall short of the hammer dropped on Columbia.

[Franklin Foer: Columbia University’s anti-Semitism problem]

That was Garber’s frame of mind when the late-night ultimatum arrived: Submit to demands even more draconian than those imposed on Columbia, or risk forfeiting nearly $9 billion in government funding. Even for Harvard, with a $53 billion endowment, $9 billion represented real money. The email ordered the university to review faculty scholarship for plagiarism and to allow an audit of its “viewpoint diversity.” It instructed Harvard to reduce “the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship.” No detail, no nuance—just blunt demands. To the Trump administration, it was as if Harvard were a rogue regime that needed to be brought to heel.

Trump’s team was threatening to unravel a partnership between state and academe, cultivated over generations, that bankrolled Harvard’s research, its training of scientists and physicians, its contributions to national security and global health. Federal funds made up 11 percent of the university’s operating budget—a shortfall that the school couldn’t cover for long. Stripped of federal cash, Harvard would have to shed staff, abandon projects, and shut down labs.

Yet the message also offered a kind of relief. It spared Garber from the temptation of trying to placate Trump—as Columbia had sought to do, to humiliating effect. The 13 members of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body, agreed unanimously: The only choice was to punch back. The university’s lawyers—one of whom, William Burck, also represented Trump-family business interests—wrote, “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

Soon after Harvard released its response, absurdity ensued. The Trump administration’s letter had been signed by three people, one of whom told Harvard he didn’t know the letter had been sent. The message, Garber realized, may have been sent prematurely. Or it may have been a draft, an expression of the White House’s raw disdain, not the vetted, polished version it intended to send.

But the administration never disavowed the letter. And over the next three months, the president and his team would keep escalating.

On Memorial Day, I met Alan Garber at his home, a 10-minute walk from Harvard Yard. One of the perks of leading Harvard is the right to reside in Elmwood, an imposing Georgian mansion that befits a prince of the American establishment. But Garber had declined the upgrade, choosing instead to remain in the more modest home provided to the university’s provost. When he took the president’s job last year at 69, after 12 years as provost, he agreed to a three-year term; he didn’t want to uproot his life.

I was surprised he found time to talk. It wasn’t just a national holiday—it was the start of the most stressful week on a university president’s calendar. Graduation loomed on Thursday, with all its ceremonial burdens: the speechifying, the glad-handing, the presence of the school’s biggest donors.

Garber led me into his living room, undid his tie, and slouched into a chair. A health-care economist who also trained as a physician, he carries himself with a calm that borders on clinical. Even an admirer such as Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor, describes Garber as “meek in the way he sounds.” He is the opposite of bombastic: methodical, a careful listener, temperamentally inclined to compromise. But after Harvard’s feisty reply to the administration, Garber found himself cast a mascot of the anti-Trump resistance.

This was surprising, because in his 18 months as president, Garber has positioned himself as an institutionalist and an opponent of illiberalism in all its forms: its Trumpian variant, yes, but also illiberal forces within his own university, including those concentrated in the divinity and public-health schools, the hot centers of extremism after October 7, 2023.

[Rose Horowitch: What Harvard learned from Columbia’s mistake]

As provost, Garber rarely voiced his concerns about the emerging zeitgeist. And the lesson of Larry Summers—the Harvard president overthrown in 2006, in part for his criticisms of the campus left—suggested that challenging the prevailing politics might doom a career, or become an unhappy headline. So instead of acting on his convictions, he largely kept them to himself. He played the part of loyal deputy, helping presidents—Drew Faust, Lawrence Bacow, and then the hapless Claudine Gay—execute their chosen policies, which included robustly defending affirmative action and expanding the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus. In 2019, when university administrators modestly defied progressive orthodoxy by denying tenure to an ethnic-studies professor, they sparked a sit-in and a controversy covered in the national press.

During Garber’s time as provost, he told me, he developed a nagging sense that the campus was losing its capacity for difficult political conversation. As the social movements of the day—Black Lives Matter, #MeToo—took root, he grew alarmed at the tendency of students to demonize ideological opponents. Self-censorship was shutting down debates over race and identity even before they began. “The people arriving at Harvard as first-year students over time found it more and more difficult to speak about controversial issues,” he said. Israel was a subject that seemed to buck that trend, because it elicited such noisy displays of passion. But those paroxysms of anger frequently entailed calls for boycotting intellectual enemies and the social exclusion of contrary voices—adding to the broader problem of closed-mindedness on campus.

Garber’s first major appointment as president signaled a symbolic break. He elevated law-school dean John F. Manning, a former clerk to Antonin Scalia and one of the few prominent conservative voices at Harvard, to the position of provost. Manning’s rise represented more than token inclusion: Garber has quietly begun exploring a broader initiative to expand conservative representation among tenured faculty, in an effort to cultivate a more pluralistic ethos on campus.

Even as Harvard sits on the receiving end of vitriolic attacks from the right, Garber has turned inward—willing to engage with Harvard’s harshest critics and to admit that even bad-faith attacks sometimes land on uncomfortable truths. He’s treated the university’s crisis as an opportunity, leveraging the looming threat of Trump to make changes that would have been politically impossible in less ominous times. The leader of Harvard, bane of MAGA, agrees with much of the underlying substance of the MAGA critique of higher education, at least when stripped of its rhetorical froth and fury. He knows that elite higher education is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, one that is, in no small measure, of its own making, because it gives fodder to those who caricature it as arrogant and privileged.

[Franklin Foer: Trump has found his class enemy]

On June 20, Donald Trump used Truth Social to declare his willingness to strike a deal with Harvard—an opening that any devoted institutionalist would have no choice but to seize, however narrow the path to an acceptable deal. Now Garber is gambling that he can reconcile two immense and opposing burdens, each tugging at his conscience: the imperative to protect the enormous research engine that sustains Harvard’s excellence, and the obligation to preserve academic freedom in its fullest form.

Despite his technocratic impulses and his centrist temperament, Garber has been drawn into a struggle for power, forced to make choices that will shape not just Harvard’s future but that of all the venerable, if flawed, institutions that Trump is targeting.

Garber was never meant to be one of the most consequential presidents in Harvard’s history. In fact, he wasn’t meant to be president at all. When the university began its search to replace Lawrence Bacow, in 2022, Garber indicated that he didn’t want to be considered. He was ready to disappear from university leadership.

Anyway, an aging white man didn’t fit the brief. Harvard was preparing to defend itself in the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the university would argue the legality and necessity of affirmative action on behalf of American higher education. It was a last stand for race-conscious admissions, likely a doomed one given the composition of the Court, and Harvard was eager to telegraph its commitment to diversity. When the Corporation chose Gay in December 2022 to become Harvard’s first Black president, Garber intended to stay on just long enough to ease the transition.

Then came October 7. While Hamas militants were still killing families and abducting civilians from Israeli kibbutzim, a group called the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee released a statement blaming the “Israeli regime entirely” for the murder of Israelis. Thirty-three student organizations—including the campus chapter of Amnesty International and the Harvard Islamic Society—co-signed a declaration that didn’t just blame Israel; it appeared to rationalize slaughter. The statement was posted before Israel had launched its war in Gaza, and it was swiftly and ferociously denounced—especially by Jewish groups, but also by lawmakers—as evidence of pervasive anti-Semitism at the university.

On October 8, Garber visited Harvard Hillel with Gay. For Garber, this wasn’t just a supportive gesture. He’d been raised in an observant family in Rock Island, Illinois. During his senior year of high school, he studied at a yeshiva in Chicago. As a university mandarin at Harvard, he treated Hillel as a spiritual anchor—the place where he often joined the daily minyan.

Now, in the rawness of the moment, Garber heard directly from Israeli students about the ostracism they had long faced at Harvard. “They might sit down at dinner with a group of students who didn’t know them and have a very pleasant conversation,” he told me. “And when the other students learned that they were Israeli, the other students would ignore them or shun them completely. Or they’d get up and leave. This is a particularly corrosive form of discrimination.”

[Tyler Austin Harper: The real Harvard scandal]

For years, Garber had worried about how hostility toward Israel was becoming established on campus. The problem wasn’t criticism of Israeli policy; it was the shunning of Israeli people, who were punished for their national origin. Zionists were treated as pariahs unworthy of inclusion in the Harvard community. No other religious commitment or national identity was socially radioactive in this way.

Whatever empathy Garber might have felt that night didn’t surface in Harvard’s official posture. Critics accused the university of reacting to the October 7 attacks with silence—a jarring absence, given its habit of weighing in on tragedies such as the killing of George Floyd and the invasion of Ukraine. Former President Larry Summers, who said he was “sickened” by the student statement, described himself as “disillusioned” by Harvard’s nonresponse. Only then, after a rush of similar criticism, did the administration issue a statement lamenting “the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend” and “the war in Israel and Gaza now under way.”

Facing pressure to say more, Claudine Gay followed up with a second message the next day: “Let there be no doubt that I condemn the terrorist atrocities”—a formulation tacitly conceding the proliferation of doubts. More than 100 faculty members, including Summers, signed a letter accusing her of drawing a false equivalence between Hamas’s rampage and Israel’s initial response. On October 12, Gay released a short video, in which she tried again: “Our University rejects terrorism—that includes the barbaric atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.”

As Gay flailed, pro-Palestinian demonstrations spread across campus. At a “die-in” outside the business school, protesters surrounded an Israeli student who was filming on his phone and physically removed him from the demonstration. (Two were later charged with assault and battery, though the court granted them pretrial diversion in exchange for undergoing anger-management training, performing community service, and taking a Harvard course on negotiation.) Some of the university’s big donors recoiled at what was happening in Cambridge. The Wexner Foundation announced that it was severing ties with the university. Billionaires followed, including Len Blavatnik, the owner of Warner Music, whose foundation had gifted $270 million to the school.

At that moment, a lifetime of bureaucratic training left many university presidents ill-equipped for managing inflamed passions. But Gay, new in the job, seemed more hamstrung than most. On December 5, she testified before the House Committee on Education & Workforce, alongside the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. In response to a question from Representative Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna and Trump supporter, Gay refused to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s policies on bullying and harassment. Her over-lawyered, emotionally inert answer became infamous: “It depends on the context.” Garber, seated just behind her, was a bystander to catastrophe.

Five days after Gay’s testimony, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo and a co-author, Christopher Brunet, published allegations of plagiarism in her dissertation. In most cases, she had sloppily neglected to cite sources; Rufo, reaching, declared that “racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, administrative priorities, and rise through the institution.” Initially, the Corporation’s instinct was to defend Gay against what it saw as a coordinated attempt by the right to bully her from office.

But over winter break, members of the Corporation began to absorb just how much damage the past months had inflicted on Harvard’s reputation. As The New York Times later reported, Penny Pritzker, the chair of the Corporation, phoned Gay in Rome, where the beleaguered president was vacationing with her family. Pritzker asked the only question that mattered: Was there still a path forward? Gay understood that there wasn’t.

As she prepared to resign, the Corporation had nowhere to turn but Garber, who agreed to serve as interim president. “I basically had to say yes,” Garber told me. Harvard needed a stabilizing hand, someone who could keep the school out of the headlines and deflect the waves of crisis.

[Rose Horowitch: The worst job in America]

As Garber absorbed the reality of his unexpected role, he began to imagine something more than caretaking. He had one last chance in his career to help Harvard confront the illiberalism that he had come to consider the underlying cause of its crisis. Perhaps a placeholder—someone with no designs on permanent leadership and a willingness to take political fire from faculty and students—would have the freedom to address the ideological rigidity that stifled classroom discussions and led smart people to shun heterodox opinion.

In part, his convictions were rooted in nostalgia for his undergraduate days at Harvard, which he remembers as a citadel of intellectual seriousness. His reverence for genius stretched back to his childhood in Rock Island. His father, a liquor-store owner, moonlighted as a violinist in the local orchestra. When virtuosos came to town, they often ended up at the Garber dinner table. As a teenager, he found himself seated across from the likes of Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

When he arrived at Harvard, he carried that same sense of awe that he felt at those dinners. His parents, true to type, hoped he’d become a doctor. But he quickly fell under the spell of the economics department, packed with future Nobel winners. In a graduate course on labor economics, he met Summers, who became a lifelong friend. Unwilling to disappoint his parents or abandon his new passion, Garber chose both paths: He became a bicoastal graduate student, earning a medical degree at Stanford while pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard. He taught health-care economics at Stanford for 25 years—also founding research centers and practicing medicine—before returning to Harvard as provost.

His peers who studied the byzantine American health-care system often passed through Washington. But politics didn’t suit Garber. His instincts weren’t ideological. That same apolitical disposition shaped his campus life. He never fought Harvard’s battles with the fervor of a culture warrior; temperamentally, Kulturkampf was alien to him. As provost, he developed a managerial style that was therapeutic—patient in meetings, attuned to grievances. Faculty called him for intimate medical advice; his leather doctor’s bag sits on a shelf in his office. Sublimating his ego, he tended to the institution and never hesitated to carry out programs that he might have pursued differently, if he were the one in the president’s chair.

Yet gradually, and almost despite himself, Garber began to share some of the right’s critiques. The debates over race and identity on campus lacked the spirit of openness that he remembered from his own undergraduate bull sessions. “If you didn’t know where somebody stood on a controversial issue, when I was a student, it didn’t matter,” he told me. “You could still talk about it.” Garber had come to believe that a deepening culture of self-censorship was eroding the conditions that allowed excellence to flourish.

His critique isn’t a broadsided attack on DEI, but it brushes against it. As Harvard welcomed more students, many of them students of color who were the first in their family to attend college, the school shielded them from the discomfort of hurtful arguments. “There was a lot of deference to students who didn’t want to hear certain messages,” Garber told me. In his view, Harvard’s culture had tilted toward emotional safety, at the expense of intellectual risk. The harder task—teaching students to withstand ideas they disliked, to probe disagreement without retreat, to stay in relationship across political divides—had gone neglected.

As president, Garber launched a series of task forces to study the state of intellectual inquiry on campus. A university-led survey revealed that nearly half of the students, faculty, and staff—45 percent—felt uneasy sharing their views on controversial topics in class. Many feared that a stray opinion might trigger social reprisal. Some admitted to shaping their coursework to mirror what they presumed were their professors’ ideological leanings, not in pursuit of truth, but in search of a higher grade.

The faculty had its own theory of what had gone wrong. Professors lamented that undergraduates were pouring more ambition into their extracurricular activities than their coursework. Students were skipping class with impunity. Instructors, wary of backlash in end-of-semester evaluations, responded by easing workloads and inflating grades. (At Harvard, the problem is referred to euphemistically as “grade compression,” not inflation.) Rigor, central to Harvard’s identity in Garber’s day, had become a liability.

This academic neglect only deepened the culture of self-censorship. One task force—the Classroom Social Compact Committee—noted a subtler but equally corrosive failure: “Students are not learning how to ask clarifying questions (including the important ability to acknowledge that they are confused about something).” Harvard, in other words, was routinely failing at the most basic task of liberal education: cultivating minds capable of independent thought. “If we can’t address that deeper cultural malady,” Garber told me, “we will never be fully successful as a teaching institution or as a research institution. Because in order to be successful in teaching, learning, and research, you need to be open-minded.”

These problems were immune to quick fixes. As interim president, Garber pushed through one major change: prohibiting the university from issuing official pronouncements on political events. Harvard also changed its undergraduate application, adding the prompt “Describe a time when you strongly disagreed with someone about an idea or issue.” But otherwise, Harvard remained stuck—mired in protest, and drifting ever further from the ideal of open inquiry that Garber hoped to restore.

On April 22, 2024, Harvard suspended the Palestine Solidarity Committee’s privileges as a student organization because it had helped to stage a protest that transgressed university rules. Two days later, activists pitched tents in Harvard Yard, joining the wave of encampments happening on campuses nationwide. For Garber, the timing was perilous: The protesters had seized the ground where commencement was set to unfold in just a few weeks.

Precisely what a college could actually change in Gaza wasn’t clear. But with Harvard’s $53 billion endowment and political influence, it was a protest target that made at least some strategic sense. Calling on the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel, protesters cast Harvard as a handmaiden to genocide—which meant they cast its president that way too.

Activists circulated a poster showing Garber as a devil, horned and seated on a toilet. It didn’t take a degree in medieval iconography to recognize anti-Semitic caricature. When the symbolism was pointed out, organizers quietly took the image down. Garber himself wasn’t especially rattled. But the episode gave him license to describe himself as a target of bigotry—and in the vernacular of campus politics, that granted him the moral authority of lived experience. He now had the platform to speak more forcefully about anti-Jewish bias and link it to what he saw as deeper institutional failings.

Soon after taking office, Garber had announced the creation of two parallel task forces—one focused on anti-Semitism, the other on anti-Muslim bias. Some critics dismissed the pairing as a false equivalence. But the symmetry reflected Garber’s hope that dialogue and debate were the best mechanisms for defusing charged disagreements. The two task forces submitted joint progress reports to the Corporation. To serve on both, Garber appointed the political theorist (and Atlantic contributing writer) Danielle Allen, who has long argued that universities have lost, and must recover, the habits of intellectual pluralism.

At the core of the crisis, Garber believed, was Harvard’s retreat from open inquiry. That retreat had created pockets of ideological orthodoxy—most notably at the divinity school, where the religion-and-public-life program hosted events in the spirit of “de-zionization,” including an inaugural webinar in which a speaker described “a specific Jewish sinfulness.” In Harvard Yard, that same rhetoric echoed in protest chants—“Zionists not welcome here”—a slogan that branded certain students as unworthy of civic participation. Garber gave an interview to The Harvard Crimson condemning that slogan. “There’s a disappointing level of ignorance among people who have very, very strong views,” he told me.

Engaging across political differences, in the spirit of open inquiry, wasn’t just Garber’s slogan; it was his strategy for easing campus tensions and rebuilding trust. When angry emails landed in his inbox, he responded quickly and graciously. He persistently engaged Harvard critics, including high-profile donors such as Mark Zuckerberg and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Members of the Harvard Corporation watched Garber preside over a fraught gathering of donors, a room thick with grievance and ready for combat. Garber managed to calm the room, by robustly and empathically acknowledging their gripes. “Everyone came back and said, ‘Wow, this is the right man at the right moment,’” Shirley Tilghman, the former Princeton president and then a member of the Corporation, told me. Inside the board, a consensus was quietly forming: Harvard didn’t need another presidential search.

Still, for weeks in the spring of 2024, the protest encampment in Harvard Yard was a crisis Garber couldn’t fix. He heard troubling reports of harassment. Protesters had hoisted a Palestinian flag outside University Hall, one of Harvard’s most iconic buildings. When a university worker lowered it, a demonstrator chased the person down and attempted to reclaim the flag. Garber felt as if he had no choice but to authorize a police sweep to dismantle the encampment. But in a final gambit, he sent a message to the protesters: He would meet with them to discuss the endowment—though divestment from Israel was off the table. He wouldn’t promise amnesty. But he would expedite their disciplinary process, allowing them to learn their fates swiftly and move on with their lives. The students accepted. By the thinnest of margins, Garber was spared a violent confrontation.

Some of the protesters later complained that they felt hoodwinked, after misinterpreting his promise of speedy justice as a grant of leniency. By May 23, the day of commencement, 13 students had been barred from receiving their diplomas. When Garber appeared on the dais in his ceremonial robes, he was roundly booed, as attendees chanted, “Let them walk.” Nearly 500 faculty and staff signed a letter denouncing the punishments for their “unprecedented, disproportionate, and arbitrary manner.” Later that month, on Alumni Day, an animal-rights protester dumped glitter on Garber’s head. “It’s fine,” he said, after brushing himself off. “I could use a little glitter.”

Then, as summer break dissipated the tension, the Corporation and the Board of Overseers made their decision. On August 2, it announced that Alan Garber would become the 31st president in Harvard’s 387-year history.

Far in advance, it was clear: The 2024 election posed a grave threat to the status quo in American higher education. Trump-style populists thrilled at the prospect of humbling elite universities. Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, once said, “The professors are the enemy.” In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis treated his public universities accordingly, banning critical race theory; weakening tenure protections; commandeering New College, a quirky liberal-arts school that has since become a showcase for conservative pedagogy. In Wisconsin, lawmakers insisted that the state’s flagship university, in Madison, install a professor of conservative thought, funded by the elimination of a program to recruit faculty members from underrepresented minority groups.

To fend off Trump, universities recruited Republican fixers, hiring K Street friends of Trump and lawyers from the right flank of Big Law. Harvard brought on Robert Hur, the Republican prosecutor who’d investigated Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents. And it hired William Burck, who’d represented many Trump White House figures during Robert Mueller’s Russia probe—and who continued to advise the Trump family as an outside ethics counsel. Burck was well practiced in brokering back-channel deals involving the White House; in one that he’d helped hatch, the law firm Paul, Weiss promised to do pro bono work on behalf of the president’s favored causes.

For someone as preoccupied with brand names as Donald Trump, though, Harvard would be too tempting a target to pass up. When musing in early April about the prospect of cutting the university’s funding, Trump said, “Wouldn’t that be cool?”

On April 14, three days after the late-night email from the Trump administration, Harvard learned that the government wasn’t bluffing. Its professors began receiving stop‑work orders on government contracts. On May 6, the National Institutes of Health terminated grants tied to research on antibiotic resistance and pediatric AIDS. On May 12, the Department of Defense canceled a bioweapons‑related study, and the Department of Energy pulled support for research on subatomic particles. None of these eliminated programs had anything remotely to do with anti-Semitism.

Harvard has some short-term cushion; this spring, it began to sell $1 billion in private-equity assets. But real austerity isn’t far off. Roughly 80 percent of the endowment is legally bound to specific purposes and inaccessible for plugging budget holes. Cuts have already begun. The Kennedy School has laid off staff. As a symbolic gesture, Garber gave himself a 25 percent pay cut—and more than 80 faculty members donated 10 percent of their salaries to cover shortfalls.

The extremity of Trump’s demands forced the university to protect itself by any available means. It sued the administration to restore its funding, even as it hoped that it could persuade the president to relent. By resisting Trump, Harvard further provoked him. “They want to show how smart they are,” the president fumed in the Oval Office in May. To punish this impertinence, the administration kept devising new ways to inflict pain on the institution.

In short order: The Department of Education demanded records of all foreign gifts. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened a civil‑rights investigation into alleged discrimination against white, Asian, male, and straight applicants. The White House accused Harvard of collaborating with the Chinese military. On Truth Social, Trump demanded the names of Harvard’s international students—then signed a proclamation barring them from entering the United States. Trump publicly vowed to revoke Harvard’s tax‑exempt status and instructed his sons to cut ties with William Burck. And his administration instigated a process to strip Harvard’s accreditation.

[Rose Horowitch: Trump’s campaign to scare off foreign students]

As I watched Trump’s fusillade, I thought back to 2019, when I reported on Viktor Orbán’s campaign to close Central European University, in Budapest. Orbán harassed the university using legal fine print, imposing onerous new requirements, grinding the school down until it fled to Vienna. That story had once felt extreme. But even Orbán never dared anything as heavy-handed as what Trump is doing to Harvard.

When I raised the subject of the Trump administration, Garber grew reticent. There were things he couldn’t discuss, given that Harvard was slogging through negotiations with the White House. That the university would seek a settlement is understandable. A presidential vendetta is all-consuming: Will international students be allowed to enter in the fall? Will crucial research projects survive? Without a deal, Harvard is placing its future in the hands of the courts—hardly reliable bulwarks these days.

Harvard wants to convince the administration that punishment is unnecessary because it has already taken meaningful steps to address the heart of the White House’s critique. The university removed the leadership of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. It expanded harassment policies to include anti-Israeli bias, suspended programs at the public-health and divinity schools that leaned too far into activism, and increased kosher food offerings. In April, it renamed the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging—now the Office for Community and Campus Life. It is contemplating a new academic center where conservative and free-market ideas might flourish.

[Rose Horowitch: The era of DEI for conservatives has begun]

In normal times, even one of these moves might have caused a revolt. And some objections to Garber’s policies do seem to manifest themselves in bureaucratic obstinacy. For instance, Harvard deans have missed deadlines for reports mandated by his anti-Semitism task force. But having been cast as a figure of resistance, Garber has earned the political capital to pursue his agenda. At commencement this May, he received a sustained ovation. In a Crimson survey, 74 percent of arts-and-sciences faculty expressed satisfaction with his leadership—far higher marks than the Corporation received.

That capital isn’t infinite. Garber has ventured into dangerous territory, negotiating with a White House that doesn’t care about the details—only the imagery of submission. That places him in an excruciating dilemma. He must protect careers, research, and the basic quality of academic life, while also avoiding any precedent that could lead to a broader collapse of liberal institutions. He can push for a settlement that formalizes changes that he’s already made—and maybe even helps him implement additional reforms—but will face intense pressure from the administration to trade away Harvard’s independence.

Garber is the quintessential liberal institutionalist in an age when such figures are faring poorly. His reverence comes from his own experience—how Harvard lifted him from Rock Island; how it placed him in classrooms alongside future scientists and economists whom he regards as the smartest people on the planet; how, even as a member of a once-excluded minority, he felt entirely at home. Although Garber knows that many Jews at Harvard no longer feel that same sense of belonging, he is also achingly aware of the irony—that he is a Jewish university president defending his institution against enemies who present themselves as protectors of his people.

Garber also knows that the place he loves so deeply has grown widely disdained, a symbol of arrogance and privilege. To save Harvard, to recover its legitimacy, he must succeed in both of the campaigns that he is waging in defense of liberalism. If Harvard fails to conquer its own demons, or if it fails to safeguard its own independence, then it will have confirmed the harshest critiques leveled against it, and it will stand no chance of ever reclaiming the place it once occupied in American life.

---

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Have Americans grown complacent, thinking nothing can shake the United States’ democracy? Host Garry Kasparov is joined by Frank Luntz, someone well versed in taking the temperature of the American public.

Luntz is perhaps best known as a behind-the-scenes operative in Republican politics. He is the pioneer of an “Instant Response” focus-group technique that lets him understand not just what people think but why. That’s how he began to sense, more than 10 years ago, that something had gone very wrong in American politics.

Frank and Garry discuss how the problem started—and what must be done to fix it.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Garry Kasparov: A common problem for citizens of the free world is that they do not have the vocabulary to understand authoritarian regimes and leaders. They expect their own terms and experiences to translate, when often they are meaningless or even contrary. Long before the question of autocracy in America became an issue, I spent a lot of time trying to explain these differences. One example stands out: my appearance on the Bill Maher show Real Time in October 2007. Maher, who considers himself well informed and often is, walked right into the point I wanted to make. He said:

Bill Maher: But when you look at what’s going on in Russia, Putin has a very high approval rating.

Kasparov: And I had to interrupt.

Kasparov: How do you know?(Laughter.) Are you seriously relying on the polling results in a police state? I think that with the same tight control of media and the pervasive security force, I believe Bush and Cheney could enjoy the same approval rating here.

Kasparov: The audience erupted in cheers. And Maher could only respond,

Maher: Checkmate to me! (Laughs.)

Kasparov: From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Garry Kasparov.

The American political system has been an example of a stable democracy for some 250 years. But have Americans grown complacent, thinking that nothing can shake a system that has worked so well for so long? My guest, longtime pollster Frank Luntz, is well versed in taking the temperature of the American public. Frank is perhaps best known as a behind-the-scenes operative in Republican politics, but he’s also an author, adviser to CEOs, and, most recently,an instructor in American politics at the military academy at West Point. Frank is the pioneer of an “Instant Response” focus-group technique that lets him understand not just what people think but why. That’s how he began to sense, more than 10 years ago, that something was very wrong in American politics.

Hello, Frank.

Frank Luntz: Hello, Garry.

Kasparov: Let’s start with personal stuff. Do you remember when we met?

Luntz: I believe we were introduced by a human-rights activist about 15 years ago. And one of the coolest moments for me is when you and I marched in a protest in Russia, and you told me to be careful. It was—I could not believe I was with you. And to be doing this podcast right now, I know you’re gonna get into some stuff, some pretty heavy stuff about where we are and where we’re headed as a country and the leadership. But this is Garry fucking Kasparov. I can’t believe it. But what I respect the most is your courage. The courage of conviction. You know, I teach at West Point, and we teach students to have leadership with character. You have character, courage, and selfless service. So whatever you want to know from me for the next however long we go, this is an honor and a privilege. By the way, I may even get emotional. I’ve had two strokes, and that disconnects my emotions from my head, and so you’ll know that I really mean it. But Garry, this is very special.

Kasparov: Frank, I’m speechless. I want people to feel that you’re so special, also, because no one can read the minds of voters and all the on-the-ground trends in American politics better than you did, and you still are the master of it. And, I wanna go back, so just—

Luntz: But, but you’re going back, and yet it’s so bad right now.

Kasparov: No, it’s so bad. But let’s, I mean, let’s analyze it.

Luntz: We have never been this angry. We’ve never been this distrusting. We don’t trust any institution except for the military. We don’t trust any people who lead anything right now. We’re fed up, we’re mad as hell. If I were to summarize in a single word how Americans feel, it’s all caps with an exclamation point: ENOUGH! Enough politics, enough lies, enough being ignored, forgotten, betrayed, which is an emotion that breaks society. And however bad you think it is, it’s worse. Because I can’t sit 15 people in a room that’s a little bit bigger than this and have them not tear each other apart. The problem that I have right now, and I don’t know how to fix it, is that we don’t want to listen to each other. We want to be heard, we want to speak and make sure that other people listen. And when a democracy stops learning and a democracy stops listening, that democracy’s in trouble.

Kasparov: And we’re going to get into all of that. But first, as a chess player, I did a little research. And researching this project, I came across a 2014 profile of you in The Atlantic by Molly Ball.

Luntz: Yeah. You know, that profile almost cost me tens of millions of dollars. I dunno if you know this.

Kasparov: No, I didn’t know! Tell us.

Luntz: She ran that—and it was a good interview, and she told the truth. I believed that America was breaking apart back then.

Kasparov: Yes.

Luntz: The level of anger, the level of disrespect.

Kasparov: What did you see? That’s, again—can you be more specific? What did you see then? Because the picture that, from this interview, emerges of a man who may be in the political wilderness. But you were getting a sense of what, you know, what was wrong. You know, in America, the real American problems.

Luntz: And it’s not what I saw. It’s what I heard. I did focus groups. I’ve been doing focus groups now for 35 years—

Kasparov: But this country has zillions of pollsters. They all heard the same stories. How come that you indicated this? Just, you know, just deep down, you know, just many layers beyond what others saw—this is the rotten core.

Luntz: Because they could hear it, but they weren’t actually listening. They were dismissing it. And this is a problem that I have. It makes me a good pollster and not particularly great to be around at nights and weekends—which is, if I’m surrounded by angry people, I get angry. If I’m surrounded by people who are depressed, I get depressed. For some reason, and this is partially my upbringing, I become the people that I’m talking to. And it’s more than just even empathizing. I understand it. I appreciate it, and I become one of them. And in 2014, my head was exploding, because we were heading toward the conditions that gave us Donald Trump just two years later. And my company was for sale right then, and Molly correctly indicated that I was getting ready to give up. And the owner of my company, the company that was buying me, literally pulled me out of the room, pulled me out to say, What the hell are you doing? You sound like someone’s giving up. Frankly, you sound suicidal. What am I buying here? Tell me. And I’m thinking to myself, Oh shit. I have now, through my honesty—through my candor, let’s put it that way—I have now doomed myself. So I’m telling the owner, No, I’m not quitting; I’m not giving up. And the truth is, I was. He had figured it out. He didn’t have to read through the lines. I was very blunt about it, but I did not want to lose the money. I did not want to lose the sale. So I said to him, No, she misquoted me. She misread it. She doesn’t understand. This is my clarion call to say: We have to be better. We have to do better. We have to find a way to get out of this. That’s not how I felt. And even today, if I can be candid with you again, if I didn’t have West Point to give me hope and a belief in the future, if I didn’t have these 4,000 incredible young people that you’ve met twice now—

Kasparov: I did.

Luntz: These cadets are just amazing in their commitment to their country, in their willingness to sacrifice, and even the greatest sacrifice—and that, and they know what this means. And if I had not discovered that, I was heading out. I was getting ready to move to the U.K., not that it is so wonderful, but I just couldn’t watch my country tear itself apart. Because I still have, I still have even deep down, a love for this place, even with its flaws and even with the anger that we get out there.

Kasparov: But it seems to me that we have to go even deeper. Because in 2014, you already sensed this anger that gave us Trump two years later and then led to January 6, 2021, and to current crisis. So—

Luntz: And in 2014, I got it. I got how awful our country already was with each other. And that’s because all these focus groups I was doing would degenerate into delegitimization, dehumanization. It was all the bad that we were to come to see 24 months later. And the reason why I saw it is because I heard it. Because I did these focus groups—not the polling. I have to sit with people and see them. First, the arms get folded. Then the head starts to nod back and forth in a rejection of what they’re hearing. Then the eyes roll and the head goes back, and at that moment they’re getting ready to be disrespectful, disingenuous. I see it coming. And I saw this again and again and again. And my issue is, I don’t know how to fix it.

Kasparov: Just to clarify, so this is, you were a Republican pollster—

Luntz: At that time.

Kasparov: At that time. But did it mean that in 2014, you sat only with Republican voters, or you had independents and Democrats as well?

Luntz: No, I’ve always sat with the entire electorate.

Kasparov: Yeah. You could feel the temperature in just various segments of American polity.

Luntz: And the temperature was hot.

Kasparov: In 2014? The temperature was hot.

Luntz: And that’s why Trump emerged. And I felt that in 2014. And when you and I first started to engage in this, I did not believe, at the beginning, that Trump was gonna win. Let’s be completely candid in this. I thought—

Kasparov: At what point, you knew he would be winning?

Luntz: Oh, by September.

Kasparov: 2015.

Luntz: So let me tell you something that nobody knows.

Kasparov: Okay, good. You are sharing it with many more people, of course.

Luntz: But I’m sharing it with you, and other people are just listening.

Kasparov: Okay.

Luntz: I held a meeting, I sat down with the Senate leadership, and I thought I was only meeting with John Thune and Mitch McConnell. John McCain shows up. John Barrasso shows up. The entire leadership, and no one tells me, ’cause they’re afraid that I’m gonna be nervous. The entire Republican Senate leadership walks into the room. Mitch McConnell folds his arms like I’m doing right now and says, “I hear you have something to tell me. What is it?” And I said, “Sir, unless you do something right now, Donald Trump is your nominee, and he may well get elected president.” Not a single vote had been cast—no Iowa, no New Hampshire—but Trump was rising and rising in the polls. And this was their wake-up call that it was working.

Kasparov: And?

Luntz: They didn’t do enough, and it was too late. Donald Trump is a phenomenon. Donald Trump is a—we’ve never had anything like him, and we never will.

Kasparov: So by 2014, the Republicans were ready to embrace Donald Trump, and some independents moved in the same direction. So what did go wrong prior to 2014? So it’s the, clearly we are seeing now, the decline of the political system, the two-party system. So when did it go wrong? Because there were many moments where people talked about, you know, We probably need a third party. We have to change this and that. But now we are, you know, deep down in this, you know, just in, in this swamp, political swamp. So 2014 was already the moment where you were the only one, or just one of very few, great experts who could read the minds of people and could smell the trouble. So when did it start?

Luntz: 2000.

Kasparov: 2000? That’s the presidential election you’re talking about?

Luntz: Yes.

Kasparov: So the Florida recount?

Luntz: Yes.

Kasparov: Okay. Tell us.

Luntz: Five weeks. We went on and on, and no one knew who was president. And one-third of the Democratic Party never gave George W. Bush the respect that he’d been actually elected president. They thought that the election had been stolen, and they were bitter, and they never forgave him. They never accepted him as their president. And then we had another close election in 2004.

Kasparov: It wasn’t that close.

Luntz: Yeah. With John Kerry. Yeah. It was close enough.

Kasparov: He lost Ohio by quite a margin.

Luntz: But people thought that Kerry was gonna win. They thought on Election Day that Kerry had the lead. So they were wondering, Why is this happening? It was the beginning of the divide. And then in 2007, 2008, our economy went to hell. A whole lot of people lost their homes, lost their jobs, lost their savings, and lost their future. And in the end, politics is a reflection of the economy, not the other way around. And when you’re promised a better future, when you’re promised that you’re gonna have it better than your parents, and then it doesn’t happen—and worse than that, all these life savings are destroyed—not only are you mad, that’s where the word betrayed comes in. And people, and their future, their whole perspective on life, began to close in on them. And America wasn’t the land of opportunity for them. America was a broken promise. And I’m afraid that we’re back to the same way right now. Which is why this thing on tariffs has me so concerned, and why I’m reading again about the rise of anger. And this time it’s coupled with complete distrust of our court system, of our health-care system, of our media, of our government and the people who are in it. All the institutions that keep America moving forward are disliked and distrusted, and the only one that’s left is the military.

Kasparov: Okay. This is, it’s very, very important, because you said few times the word, the key word in my opinion: trust.

Luntz: Yes.

Kasparov: Trust.

Luntz: Let’s stop there. That is the key word. It’s the No. 1 priority that Americans have: trust and truth. They’re connected to it. Of all the values that are essential to democracy, none is more important than the truth. It’s more important than participation. It’s more important than anything else, because if you don’t trust the information or the people providing it, how can you possibly govern yourselves when you have no idea what’s right and what’s wrong?

Kasparov: So are you telling us now that, over 225 years, Americans never lost trust in the government or in government agencies and all other institutions created throughout this time period and in the various places in the country?

Luntz: What was our worst economic calamity? 1929. And it took 10 years, 11 years, 12 years for us to come back from what happened in 1929. And eventually it was the war.

Kasparov: So we had few other moments in American history. But something I remember:, So the late ’70s, also, the mood was dark; the country was not doing well. Then we had Ronald Reagan.

Luntz: Yes. At the very moment we were so upset, at the very moment that we were giving up, the malaise of Jimmy Carter gave us the hope and the passion of Ronald Reagan.

Kasparov: Okay, now the question is, so why the Great Depression—and all the tragic consequence of Great Depression for millions and millions of Americans—gave us FDR as a leader? Why the malaise, in your words, of Jimmy Carter’s rule brought Ronald Reagan to power and to the Oval Office? But why the relatively small crisis, on the surface visually, compared to these two periods of American history brought us not a new Reagan or new FDR, but Donald Trump?

Luntz: For tens of millions of people, Donald Trump is Ronald Reagan, is FDR. For tens of millions of people, Donald Trump speaks the truth, and only Donald Trump does. And his graphic descriptions and language that is accessible to a high-school grad is exactly what FDR was to people back in 1932 and what Reagan was to people in 1980. That’s exactly the point. I know how you feel about him, but there’s a reason why he beat Vice President [Kamala] Harris. And they knew what he stood for, and they knew that he had been indicted, and they knew that he had been impeached, and they knew what kind of administration he would do. And they still voted for him. Because to half of America, Donald Trump is exactly the kinda leader that they’re looking for.

Kasparov: We’ll be right back.

[Midroll]

Kasparov: Going back to people expected Trump and still expect Trump to do something—it’s, you know, he’s a doer. And he’s already in power. So it’s just, it’s several months, and he did a lot of things. So are they still happy with what he’s doing? Because you mentioned tariffs a few times.

Luntz: They’re happy with most of what he’s doing. They’re not happy with how he’s doing it. They’re happy with the agenda and the priorities, but they’re not happy in the execution. Best example of this is DOGE and wasteful Washington spending. So they want to cut government spending. They wanna reduce the bureaucracy, but they don’t want to do it haphazardly. And when Elon [Musk] took a chainsaw on stage and everyone saw this visual, that’s not what they—that is what the hardcore Trump voter wanted: a chainsaw to Washington. But the people who put him over the top wanted a scalpel, not a chainsaw. And that’s what’s been happening—the idea that, yes, this is the right agenda, but this may not be the right approach. And this is definitely not the right communication. And I don’t think Trump cares, because to him, the only—his priority are his voters. And we’ve never had that before either. Someone who says, I’m really not president of the whole country. I’m president of the people who voted for me, and I’m going to damn well ensure that they get what they voted for. You don’t see, we don’t see, and this is something that’s important to this conversation: I hear from these people every day, but they’re not obvious. They’re not people we talk to. They’re not gonna be listening to this podcast, I’ll tell you that.

Kasparov: I have no doubt about it.

Luntz: Because they’re struggling. Because they live paycheck to paycheck, because they’re holding three jobs between two people, or four jobs between two people. And I sympathize with them. And they were promised that if they worked hard, played by the rules, paid their taxes, and raised their kids well, there would be something good at the end for them. And you know what they got? Nothing. They didn’t get a raise. Some of them got fired. They were unable to save for the future. What does that mean? If they get into a car accident, they’re done. They can’t afford a new car. They can barely afford a used car. They truly are struggling. And I sympathize with them. I don’t think that justifies their rudeness. I don’t think that justifies how so many of them are mean. But they were promised something as they grew up: in their textbooks, in their history books. They were promised an America that would deliver for them a better future. And it didn’t happen.

Kasparov: It is not happening now.

Luntz: Correct.

Kasparov: So what will they do?

Luntz: I think they tune out.

Kasparov: They will just, you know, just drop dead. I mean, this is not, not physically, but just, you know, just politically.

Luntz: They will cease to pay attention. They will cease to care. And that’s just as dangerous. I’d rather hear from my enemy. I’d rather know where they are. I’d rather know what they think. Because it gives me a chance to talk to them. They will tell their kids that democracy doesn’t work. Don’t bother to vote. Don’t participate.

Kasparov: Democracy doesn’t work?

Luntz: For these people, it does not. No. And capitalism; you call it capitalism. I would like to use the phrase economic freedom. Capitalism is about the rich. Economic freedom is about everybody else. I need them to buy into the economic system, because that will help them buy into the political system without—

Kasparov: But it’s not going to happen.

Luntz: There’s a shot that that could happen.

Kasparov: How?

Luntz: If people once again see that the economy is not rigged against them, if they once again can save for the, to live the good life. Nobody wants the American dream anymore; they just want the good life. And the good life—

Kasparov: But you said if. So what should happen for them to change their mind?

Luntz: So they can afford to take a long weekend at a nice place. So they can afford to buy their children birthday gifts or Christmas gifts, or these things that they want in their life. So once again, they can afford to live the good life.

Kasparov: But is it happening?

Luntz: No.

Kasparov: Okay. So that means, you know, it’s the further, you know, distrust in politics.

Luntz: That’s why all the institutions are upside down in terms of public support, because they’re not being protected. If they get sick, they can’t afford the health-care bills.

Kasparov: But are they going to blame Donald Trump, or the system that prevented him from delivering to them?

Luntz: They’re blaming the system at this moment.

Kasparov: So if they are blaming the system and not the president, does that empower the president to work outside the system? So can you imagine the situation where the president will find himself above the law and will try to act on this belief? So does it mean that Donald Trump will be in unique position to be above the law?

Luntz: Uh-huh.

Kasparov: So the answer is yes.

Luntz: Yeah.

Kasparov: Okay. So what are the chances?

Luntz: Maybe, maybe.

Kasparov: Maybe. Do you think it’s a real threat? That, at one point, he decides that, you know, he should not bother with the legal restrictions and will try to impose his direct rule?

Luntz: When he made a comment about the Constitution, whether or not he has to follow it, I think that said it all. You know, at West Point, they don’t defend America. They don’t defend the president. They don’t defend the people. You swear an oath to the Constitution. It is genuinely sacred, because it gave us our freedoms, and it protects us. And when you start to say, I’m not sure if I have to do something, if the Constitution mandates that I do it—that’s a problem. That’s a real problem.

Kasparov: If we have another January 6 in some form or shape, will Kash Patel and Pam Bondi follow Trump or Constitution?

Luntz: I don’t know.

Kasparov: You don’t know. What about the cadets?

Luntz: Oh, they follow the Constitution.

Kasparov: Good. Good to know.

Luntz: Without a doubt.

Kasparov: Okay. That’s good to know.

Luntz: And they won’t engage in politics.

Kasparov: So if the president of the United States decides to go against the Constitution—

Luntz: They will, they will follow a—they follow lawful orders, is the best way for me to answer it.

Kasparov: Lawful orders—I don’t know what it means. If the president of the United States, who is the commander in chief, you know, who goes against the Constitution. Again, if it’s a choice between—

Luntz: Now you’re instigating.

Kasparov: No; I’m not instigating. It’s a logical, you know, set of questions, because I saw enough in my life. So that’s why, you know, it’s just being in the situation. Which I think, I all thought would be unheard in the United States—where we ask these questions. You know they’re legitimate questions. You don’t want to answer, because nobody wants to answer this question. But the fact is, we are in the position to ask these questions and to debate them seriously. What does it tell us about the current situation of America?

Luntz: It tells us that we still have a democracy. It tells us that freedom of speech matters.

Kasparov: So what can be done, if anything, to preserve the two-party system?

Luntz: It’s to take the priorities of the Trump administration and add to it a level of communication, which says, I hear you. I get you. We’re gonna try to get this done, but we’re gonna do so in a respectful way.

Kasparov: But you’re talking about Democrats; you are not talking about the magic rise of the third party.

Luntz: I’m talking about those who can still be talked to. Because right now, MAGA Republicans don’t want to hear any of this. They like what’s happening. And Democrats don’t want to hear any of this, because they want to stop what’s happening. They want the resistance, and that’s what they call it. That’s not helpful for democracy. You several times have tried to get me to tell you, Here’s a road map to restore our democracy. And I’m telling you that that is my source of my frustration. That’s the source of who I am right now in 2025.

Kasparov: There is no road map.

Luntz: I don’t have it.

Kasparov: You don’t have it, and no one else has it.

Luntz: Correct. Do you know how that makes me feel? I’m old. I was the youngest person in the room. Now I’m the oldest person.

Kasparov: No, that you’re definitely the youngest in this room. Yeah. Okay. (Laughs.)

Luntz: Okay. I have some serious people, some major CEOs, some cultural leaders, some politicians on both sides of the aisle. And they sit me down, and they say, Get us out of this. And I have to say, I don’t know how. The system is set up to reward the most extreme, angry, vicious, disrespectful voices. The public is listening to the most awful videos and audio, and anyone who is thoughtful and considerate—okay, I’ll give you the answer. I’ll give you two answers. I’ll give you two specific people: Joe Rogan and Stephen A. Smith. Both of them stretch beyond the traditional appeal of a populist in one case and a centrist Democrat on the other. Stephen A.—more and more people are listening to him for his political commentary, not just sports. In Joe Rogan’s case, everybody wants to know what his podcast is gonna say. The guy has an audience that continues to grow.

Kasparov: Continues to grow?

Luntz: Yes, they can make a difference. They—by what guests they have, by what conversations they have, and how they have it—can instill a different set of priorities, but they have to want to do it. It can’t just be us.

Kasparov: But, okay. Is there room, just following what you said, for a new leader and a new organization to rise and to force traditional Republicans, Democrats, whatever the name they call themselves now—MAGA, far-left woke—push them aside, because it’s happening in some of the European countries? We see this. [French President Emmanuel] Macron was a typical phenomenon. But it’s, you know, it’s, for instance, Romanian presidential elections—

Luntz: I saw that.

Kasparov: The response to the rise of the far-right populist was not a traditional candidate, but another outsider who rallied behind him, support of all people who were not ready to push Romania into the Russian camp.

Luntz: So in addition to the two people I mentioned, another one is Mark Cuban, because Mark Cuban is a businessman. He’s not a political guy, but he understands politics. And Mark Cuban could change the tenor of the debate on the Democratic side.

Kasparov: So, is there room for somebody in the middle to rally? Okay, you talk about Army generals, that’s the only institution that has trust.

Luntz: McRaven.

Kasparov: McRaven. So in a hypothetical run from the retired Admiral William McRaven, AOC, J. D. Vance, does McRaven have a chance?

Luntz: At this moment? No.

Kasparov: No, we’re talking about 2028.

Luntz: But the idea that that’s that whole word, that whole principle, the idea that we’ve had enough—

Kasparov: May work for him?

Luntz: Could work for any of those people.

Kasparov: So, and if people like Joe Rogan, you know, just support this, the idea that enough is enough, then you could end up with a new candidate who could win an election by opposing both parties?

Luntz: And opposing the style and the substance.

Kasparov: Okay. Do Democrats, with a capital D, have to look for a general, an admiral, just an officer, flag officer, to lead them in 2028?

Luntz: They need to find someone who has not wedded to the past, someone who’s not been responsible for the failures of government, someone who’s outside the mainstream. And I’m gonna flip it on you before you end this podcast, which is: You chose to be here. You’re not an American citizen.

Kasparov: No, I’m not. My wife is; my kids are.

Luntz: And you love this country. I know you do.

Kasparov: Absolutely.

Luntz: How do you feel when you see our democratic system, small-d democrat, in such pain?

Kasparov: Awful. Awful. That’s why I believe it’s my duty to do whatever I can to communicate the nature of the threat to American democracy and to help those who are willing to fight back—not resistance, but those who are willing to restore democracy. Or just probably, more accurately, to adjust it to the challenges of the 21st century. Look, I saw a lot. And I have an advantage, because I grew up in a communist country. So I learned many things through my own experience, not just reading books. And I saw democracy rise in Russia and then collapse. And not only in Russia. So I saw the world celebrating the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, 1991, and then going back to the rules of autocrats. So we—it’s almost two decades that we see these steady rise of autocratic regimes around the globe. Democracies in retreat. And America proved not to be immune as other democracies against the virus of authoritarianism and corruption and distortion and fake news. So, I’m here fighting the same battle I fought back in Russia. So in Russia, we lost. But here, I hope our chances of winning and helping America to recover its global prominence and leadership—our chances are not slim to none. I think that’s a very good chance.

And also, again, I believe that without America restoring its greatness—not MAGA, I’m sorry—but America restoring its historical greatness and returning to its founding values, that’s the only chance for the world to actually reap the benefits of this technological revolution and to move us forward into the brighter future. We need America to recover its place in the world and to—it’s not about “make America great again.” It’s about finding the right combination of these ingredients, magic ingredients that have been mixed magically by Founding Fathers. And to make sure that American democracy, the American Republic—built on these traditional American values that made America great in the past—would help America to adjust to the new challenges of the 21st century.

Luntz: And if I could add to that, to me, and the positive campaign is freedom. Both kinds of freedom. Freedom to. Freedom to own a gun: Second Amendment. Freedom to speak your mind: First Amendment. Freedom to work and do what you want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. Freedom to, but also freedom from. Freedom from fear, freedom from poverty, freedom from despair. It has to be both. One of them is basically conservative. The other one’s basically progressive. And a commitment against corruption, because I think government waste is corruption. I think what they do with our tax dollars is corruption. I think that lobbyists and loopholes and special interests, that is corruption. And I believe that if you combine the positive—the freedom—with a fight against corruption and a commitment to say what you mean, mean what you say, and do what you say, that that is the perfect candidate for 2028.

[Music]

Kasparov: Sounds encouraging, Frank. So, fingers crossed. Let’s see if this message is being heard. And again, I am encouraging optimism by nature, and I believe that what you had just said here in the studio would become the road map. Road map for the future president of the United States.

Luntz: And you should know that, actually, I will go back to my condo 30 minutes from now, and I’m writing that road map as we speak. So you just saw the initial structure of it.

Kasparov: Okay. You definitely can count on me, and I’m sure many of those who are listening to this podcast will be more than happy to join this campaign to rebuild America.

Luntz: Well, Garry Kasparov.

Kasparov: Frank Luntz, thank you.

Luntz: Thank you very much.

Kasparov: This episode of Autocracy in America was produced by Arlene Arevalo and Natalie Brennan. Our editor is Dave Shaw. Original music and mix by Rob Smierciak. Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado. Special thanks to Polina Kasparova and Mig Greengard. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Next time on Autocracy in America:

Masih Alinejad: Garry, this is very ironic. A girl who was forced to shout “Death to America.” The country that I wish death for, the United States of America, gave me a second life. And that’s why I love America. And I wanna dedicate my life to fight for America as well, to protect America from terrorists, from authoritarianism. And that’s why I am full of hope and energy.

Kasparov: I’m Garry Kasparov. See you back here next week.

[Music out]

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Donald Trump is enamored with Coca-Cola. In January, he smiled from ear to ear in a photo with the company’s CEO, who gifted him a special Coke bottle commemorating his inauguration. When Trump officially returned to the Oval Office as president a few days later, his desk was already set up as it had been in his first term: with a button to summon a bottle of Diet Coke. Between sips of the fizzy drink (at one point, he reportedly drank up to 12 cans a day), the president has apparently been working the company behind the scenes. Yesterday, he announced on Truth Social that Coke has agreed to start making its signature soda with “REAL Cane Sugar” rather than high-fructose corn syrup. “I’d like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola,” he wrote.

So far, little else is known about the supposed deal. I asked Coke for more information but did not hear back. The company has yet to even confirm that it has agreed to anything at all. (“More details on new innovative offerings within our Coca-Cola product range will be shared soon,” a company spokesman told The New York Times earlier today.) Although the move may seem random, it follows a pattern of Trump trying to score easy political points—especially during a moment when his base is at war with itself over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. The clearest argument for cane sugar over corn syrup is taste. “You’ll see. It’s just better!” Trump said on Truth Social. Coke is made with cane sugar in Mexico and many other countries, and “Mexican Coke” has long had a cult following in the United States. Trump may also be doing the “Make America healthy again” movement a solid. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has focused on high-fructose corn syrup as a major contributor to diabetes and obesity. “Thank you, @POTUS!,” Kennedy wrote on X following the announcement.

The taste argument is fair enough. But if Trump does think Americans’ health is at stake in a switch from high-fructose corn syrup to cane sugar, he’s relying on some very confused reasoning. Like many MAHA priorities, the change is better on paper than in practice. Kennedy may oppose high-fructose corn syrup, but he has also called sugar “poison.” He’s right to be wary of both, because sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are, by and large, the same thing. Multiple independent meta-analyses have found that there is little difference between the two when it comes to health metrics such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. The two products “have nearly identical metabolic effects,” Dariush Mozaffarian, the director of Tuft University’s Food Is Medicine Institute, told me. Trump is essentially claiming that he got Coke to agree to switch its sugar … for sugar.

If Trump wanted to use Coke as a lever to improve Americans’ health, he would need to focus on making sure as few people drink the stuff as possible. In the world of public health, soda is a scourge. Consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages has been tied to increased body weight, diabetes, and heart disease. These drinks are the largest source of added sugar in the American diet. The Trump administration, to its credit, has spent the past several months trying to temper the United States’ insatiable soda habit. At the urging of RFK Jr. and other top officials, six states—Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, and Utah—have experimented with bans on the purchase of soda using SNAP benefits.

But at times, RFK Jr. has seemed to lose the plot on sugar. It’s among the biggest problems with the American diet, but it hasn’t been Kennedy’s primary focus as health secretary. He has spent more time and effort attempting to crack down on synthetic food dyes. For the past several months, Kennedy has been pressuring food companies to voluntarily remove such dyes from their products—a move that, like Trump’s purported deal with Coke, makes for grabby headlines. Food giants such as Kraft Heinz, General Mills, and Nestlé have all agreed to phase out artificial dyes from their products. But Lucky Charms made with natural food dyes and still loaded with sugar is hardly a win for American health.

It’s a tumultuous time to be a food company; the MAHA army might suddenly come after an ingredient in your product that people previously agreed was safe. (Yesterday, after Trump’s announcement, Coke defended on X the safety of high-fructose corn syrup.) Agreeing to remove a controversial ingredient is a way to get in the administration’s good graces and can be a good business move—even if your foods are largely still unhealthy.

In fact, food companies have started to find that they don’t actually need to sell healthy food in order to be MAHA approved; they just need to remove the few ingredients Kennedy objects to. No company quite embodies this strategy like Steak ’n Shake. The burger chain has become a MAHA darling: Steak ’n Shake announced earlier this year that it would begin frying french fries in beef tallow instead of seed oils. To celebrate the change, Kennedy had a meal at a Steak ’n Shake for a photo opp with Sean Hannity that was broadcast on Fox News. (He thanked the restaurant for “RFK-ing the french fries.”) What this moment didn’t capture was that, at Steak ’n Shake, you can still order a double cheeseburger with 1,120 milligrams of sodium—half the recommended daily amount for adults. Wash it down with a vanilla milkshake, and you’ll have just consumed 92 grams of sugar, equivalent to gorging on three Snickers bars. Or how about a Coke with your beef-tallow fries? Today, Steak ’n Shake announced the next step in its “MAHA journey”: In a few weeks, it will begin selling “Coca-Cola with real cane sugar in glass bottles.”

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In a recent ruling allowing the Trump administration to disassemble the Department of Education and fire nearly 1,400 federal workers, the Supreme Court did not answer a straightforward question: Why? In a separate ruling empowering the Trump administration to ban transgender troops from the military, at least for now, the Court once more offered no explanation. And when a majority of justices cleared the way for noncitizens to be deported to countries they aren’t from, such as South Sudan, their rationale was elusive yet again.

“There’s something taunting, almost bullying, about this lack of reasoning, as if the conservative supermajority is saying to the country: You don’t even deserve an explanation,” Quinta Jurecic, an Atlantic staff writer who covers America’s legal system, recently wrote. Though the justices are well within their rights to offer little to no explanation for emergency rulings through their “shadow docket,” they’ve begun issuing far more decisions this way in recent years, to the concern of legal experts. I spoke with Quinta to ask her about the power of the shadow docket and how the Supreme Court has responded to President Donald Trump’s policies.

Stephanie Bai: How would you characterize the Court’s approach to the Trump presidency?

Quinta Jurecic: The Court has definitely been solicitous of the administration, let’s say that. This pattern has been most visible on the Court’s emergency docket, also called the “shadow docket.” When a case is being litigated, often there’ll be this question of whether or not a policy should be implemented while litigation is continuing.A district court can block the policy from going into effect, and then the government can go to higher courts to try to get that block overturned. That will reach the Supreme Court on the shadow docket.

The Trump administration has been very aggressive in running straight to the Supreme Court’s shadow docket to overturn lower courts’ blocks on their policies, and the Court has been surprisingly willing to take the administration up on that. According to some numbers tabulated by Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, the Court has issued 15 rulings since early April granting the Trump administration emergency relief. In seven of them, the justices didn’t provide any explanation at all for their decision,including in their recent ruling allowing the administration to dismantle the Department of Education.

Stephanie: What are the implications of the Supreme Court’s more frequent use of the shadow docket in recent years?

Quinta: If you imagine a typical Supreme Court case, what happens is that somebody sues, the case goes to the district court, they appeal, it goes to an appeals court, then only at the very end of the road does it reach the Supreme Court. And that can take years.

Because the Supreme Court is agreeing to hear these cases on its shadow docket, it’s stepping in before the underlying legal question is actually resolved. It’s allowing that policy to go into effect while the litigation continues. What is so strange about this dynamic is that it means that, for example, Trump is going to be able to fire roughly 40 percent of the workers at the Education Department before the courts have even determined whether he has the legal authority to do so.

Stephanie: It’s not hard to understand why the Trump administration keeps rushing cases to the Supreme Court, when it keeps winning. But why does the Court itself seem to prefer this approach?

Quinta: That’s a question that a lot of us who study courts and the law are asking ourselves. I think there is a decent argument that they’re kind of encouraging the Trump administration to keep coming to them because they’re so willing to take up these cases, instead of sending a signal that the government should slow down. Maybe they just want the government to win. Another possibility is that the Court is more conservative than a lot of the lower courts, so the conservative justices might feel like the lower courts aren’t getting it right. It’s difficult to say because the justices aren’t explaining their reasoning in many cases. Or they explain it in the broadest of strokes.

It’s been striking not only that the Court has been willing to give the Trump administration so many wins, but that it hasn’t even been bothering to explain itself. We’re at a moment where there is a lot of concern about the Supreme Court being politicized and how that affects the Court’s legitimacy. You would think that the justices would want to present their reasoning in a way that would make clear that they were acting according to legal principles rather than just handing the Republican Party a win. The puzzle is: Why are the conservative justices taking this approach? Do they not realize the effect that it has? Do they not care?

Stephanie: Trump has not been shy about his disdain for the American legal system. But is there a risk that the Supreme Court’s legitimacy could also be undermined by its own actions?

Quinta: So far, Trump has mostly confined his attacks to lower courts. He’s gone after the Supreme Court occasionally when they handed down a ruling that he didn’t like, especially in his first term, but now they’re handing him all of these victories. As you say, this sets up a dangerous situation for the Court, even though the conservative supermajority seems very confident that the Court will be able to maintain its power.

I’m reminded of the Twitter joke about the woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party and is surprised when her face is eaten by a leopard. Trump is going after all of the other courts. Do the justices really think that he’s not going to turn on them? And once you have already damaged your own legitimacy with the public because you appear to have become a political actor, what support do you have left?

Related:

The Supreme Court won’t explain itself.The Court’s liberals are trying to tell Americans something.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Nobody (not even Trump) can control the Epstein story.Alexandra Petri: Just a tiny, minuscule technicality about the people held at “Alligator Alcatraz”How to be more charismatic, but not too much more

Today’s News

President Donald Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a common vein condition, after he noticed swelling in his legs, according to the White House.Senate Democrats walked out before the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance the nomination of Emil Bove, a former personal attorney for Trump, for a lifetime appointment to a federal judge position.The Justice Department asked for a one-day sentence for a former Louisville, Kentucky, police officer who was convicted in the 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Has air travel ever been good? Transporting human bodies through the air at hundreds of miles an hour has always been somewhat unpleasant, Ellen Cushing writes.

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Evening Read

Netflix

Romance On-Screen Has Never Been Colder. Maybe That’s Just Truthful.

By Sophie Gilbert

These are hard times to be a romantic, especially on Netflix. Two years ago, on a New Yorker podcast lamenting the modern state of the rom-com, Alexandra Schwartz noted that the most crucial quality for any romance is this: “You have to believe that these two people want to be together, and you have to buy in.” On this front, Too Much barely even tries … Initially, this set my teeth on edge—two characters with seemingly little interest in each other being paired off with the chaotic insistence of a child making her soft toys kiss. But the more I’ve come back to the show, the more its slack, unromantic approach to love looks intentional.

Read the full article.

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Former intel chief banned from dog’s graduation ceremonyIran has a mass-deportation policy too, Arash Azizi writes.The wheels are falling off Netanyahu’s government, Yair Rosenberg writes.The states are going full RFK Jr.

Culture Break

Ronald Dumont / Daily Express / Getty

Take a look. These are some weird, wonderful photos from the 20th century, depicting stunt diving, unusual war training, giant household objects, and much more.

Read. “Buying Shrimp at Bennetts Point,” a poem by Roey Leonardi:

“My father says to pick a beer. / Outside, two men in yellow coats / hose mud from a reef of oysters”

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Building an empire takes decades. Destroying it can only take a few years, and sometimes the vandals are in the palace, not outside the gates.

For much of the 20th century, American broadcast television revolved around three networks: NBC, ABC, and CBS. William S. Paley, CBS’s longtime CEO, made sure that his company—the Columbia Broadcasting Service—was a leader among them. The network was home to Edward R. Murrow, who brought World War II in Europe home to Americans on CBS Radio; after the war, Murrow’s reporting played a pivotal role in bringing down Senator Joseph McCarthy. Walter Cronkite dominated American evenings from his perch at the Evening News. And from the days of Mike Wallace to the more recent era of Lesley Stahl and Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes set the standard for longform television reporting.

Yet CBS’s current ownership seems determined to demolish this legacy. This evening, the network announced plans to end The Late Show With Stephen Colbert when the host’s contract ends next May. Late-night personalities come and go, but usually that happens when their ratings sag. Colbert, however, has consistently led competitors in his timeslot. CBS said this was “purely a financial decision,” made as traditional linear television fades.

Perhaps this is true, but the network that once made Cronkite the most trusted man in America no longer gets the benefit of the doubt. CBS’s owners have made a series of decisions capitulating to President Donald Trump, and the surprise choice to allow Colbert—a consistent, prominent Trump critic—to walk seems like part of that pattern.

One reasonable starting date for the trouble would be 2016. That was both the year that Trump was first elected president and the year that Sumner Redstone, the cussed but aging owner of CBS’s parent company Paramount, surrendered control to his daughter, Shari Redstone. In 2023, Shari Redstone began seeking a buyer for the company, eventually striking a deal, in 2024, with Skydance. The merger requires federal approval.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, 60 Minutes interviewed Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent. Trump sued CBS, alleging that the network improperly edited her interview. As supposed evidence, he cited different excerpts of the interview that had aired on different CBS shows. (If CBS was seeking to hide anything, then airing the clips on their network wasn’t a very effective way to do it.) He demanded $20 billion, a sum that was preposterous especially because—as most First Amendment lawyers agreed—the suit had no merit.

But Trump had major leverage: He won the November presidential election, giving him a role in approving the proposed Skydance-Paramount merger. During his first term, he’d already demonstrated his willingness to use his approval power to punish political opponents in the media, unsuccessfully seeking to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner.

Since the election, CBS has seemed eager to please Trump however it can, though the company continues to insist the merger has no bearing on its decisions. The network handed over transcripts of the 60 Minutes interview to Brendan Carr, the close Trump ally appointed to lead the Federal Communications Commission. In April, 60 Minutes chief Bill Owens, a widely respected journalist, stepped down. “It’s clear the company is done with me,” he told staff during a meeting. In a memo, he elaborated: “Over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.” Some of the shows’ reporters, who are not prone to histrionic statements or partisanship, raised alarms in interviews and speeches.

Earlier this month, CBS agreed to a $16 million settlement to end Trump’s lawsuit. The agreement doesn’t pay Trump directly, but the network agreed to pay legal fees for him and a co-plaintiff, and to contribute to Trump’s future presidential library. Trump has stated that the deal also includes unspecified “advertising,” reportedly for public-service announcements that boost Trump-approved causes. Paramount denies this. Now comes Colbert’s departure. If the reasons are truly financial, one wonders how his salary compares to the money spent to settle a dubious lawsuit.

The president now seems favorably disposed toward the merger. Last month, he spoke highly of Skydance head David Ellison, who is the son of Oracle founder and Trump pal Larry Ellison. Still, the deal has not yet been approved by the FCC.

Paramount and Skydance’s executives have demonstrated that they aren’t interested in defending CBS’s journalism or its editorial independence, to the detriment not only of the network’s historical reputation but also the many excellent journalists still working there. Journalism, along with Colbert’s program, make up only a small portion of Paramount’s portfolio, and so business executives might view sacrificing them to preserve a deal as a prudent, if cold-blooded, maneuver.

But the recent experience of another Columbia—Columbia University—offers a warning. When assailed by the Trump administration, the university’s administration struck a conciliatory stance, trying to make a deal with the president. The capitulation only encouraged Trump, who then sought a judicial decree for oversight of the school. (The two parties are still in talks.) What happened at Columbia is the same thing Trump has done to many other adversaries: If you give him an inch, he’ll take a yard, and immediately scheme to grab a mile, too. Institutions that are willing to sacrifice their values for the government’s favor are likely to end up with neither.

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