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About two hours into the Gen Z influencer Andrew Callaghan’s interview with Hunter Biden, I had a moment of piercing clarity: Here is a Democrat you could put on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Joe Biden’s surviving son became MAGA world’s favorite punching bag because of his suspect business dealings in Ukraine, his infamous laptop, and his presidential pardon for tax and gun offenses. But in temperament and vocabulary, Hunter is MAGA to the core.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s interviews with Rogan, Theo Von, and Logan Paul resonated with many young men. I can imagine that same audience watching Hunter tell Callaghan about his crack addiction and thinking: Give this guy a break*.* One of the most upvoted comments on the YouTube video is from a poster saying that the interview prompted him to go to rehab.

Since their crushing loss in November, Democrats have wondered how they can win the battle for attention and reach voters who find them weak, remote, and passive. Their elected officials have been tiptoeing toward using the occasional cuss word in their public appearances, like teenagers cautiously puffing a joint for the first time and hoping not to cough. Hunter Biden, by contrast, went straight for line after line of the hard stuff. Donald Trump is a “fucking dictator thug,” and Democrats should fight against his deportation agenda because “we fought a fucking revolution against a king, based on two things in particular: habeas corpus and due process. And we’re so willing to give them up?”

Hunter’s cadences and mannerisms are eerily reminiscent of his father’s, except where Joe would say “malarkey,” Hunter says: “I don’t have to be fucking nice.” At times, he sounds like his father’s id, saying the things the ex-president would like to say but cannot.

Clearly, Republicans have not cornered the market in gossipy aggression, although in both their and Hunter’s cases, most of that aggression is directed toward the Democrats and the media. In the Callaghan interview, which was released on Monday, the younger Biden has no time for James Carville (“hasn’t run a race in 40 fucking years”), George Clooney (“not a fucking actor”), or CNN’s Jake Tapper (“completely irrelevant”). His greatest animus is reserved for his party’s anti–Joe Biden faction, such as the men behind Pod Save America, who are “four white millionaires that are dining out on their association with Barack Obama from 16 years ago, living in Beverly fucking Hills.” If you grew up in the pre-Trump media era, your response to this might be: Hunter, you have also made money off of your association with a president. But America has long since passed the point where allegations of hypocrisy are a useful political attack. Most voters now think that all politicians are hypocrites, but at least some of them are open about it.

[Read: Democrats have a man problem]

Everything that was bananas about Hunter’s interview by old media standards—the insults, the frank discussion of drugs, the weird segues, the desire to lean into controversy—had previously been embraced by the Trump campaign. Last year, Trump’s most human moment was talking with Theo Von about his brother’s death from alcoholism, an exchange that also featured Von, who is now sober, joking about the low quality of cocaine these days and Trump nodding solemnly, as if this were something his tariff regime might address. In the interview with Callaghan, Hunter Biden talks about how making crack requires only “a mayonnaise jar, cocaine, and baking soda.”

Then there’s the open shilling for sponsors. In Trump’s preelection interview with Logan Paul, bottles of the YouTuber’s energy drink, Prime, sat prominently on the table in front of the hosts, and Paul did an ad for them right after the section on Gaza. Callaghan pushes the self-promotion even further. He interrupts his Hunter Biden interview with inserted segments in which Callaghan faces the camera and pitches his other work, including a documentary on adult babies. (Don’t make me explain. It’s exactly what you fear.) Even more bizarrely, Callaghan surrounds these ads with questions to Hunter about their subject matter. “Some days I identify as a baby,” Hunter responds, gamely, before suggesting that his host should ask the adult baby-diaper lovers if they vote Democrat or Republican. Then he hints at the conspiracy theory that Trump wears a diaper, a cut so deep that even Callaghan doesn’t get it.

You don’t have to like it, but this is the media world now—podcast chats like this are where elections are won and lost, just as much as at the televised town hall, on the front page of the New York Post, or in the stately sitdown with 60 Minutes. The minimum bar for the next Democratic candidate for president should be the ability to react, live on camera, in a plausibly normal fashion, to the existence of adult baby-diaper lovers.

Hunter Biden is on something of an “I was right” tour. Callaghan recorded the interview last month in Delaware. The former Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison also released an interview with Hunter on Monday, covering many of the same topics. According to Original Sin, the book by Tapper and Alex Thompson on the last days of the Biden presidency, the president’s son wanted to do an interview tour to promote his 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, about his grief over the death of his brother, Beau, and his drug relapse. Hunter “planned to do a book tour through South Carolina, stopping at famed Black churches to talk about his crack addiction, but Biden’s advisers pushed back,” Tapper and Thompson write. “Hunter relented.”

I now wonder whether Hunter’s instincts were correct for once. He shows Callaghan the bullish charm of the narcissist. Bad things happen to him. Bad things might also happen to those around him, but, in his telling, he isn’t really their cause.

That portrait is hard to square with the available facts. Many people manage to grieve for their brother without starting an affair with his widow, or introducing that widow to crack. Many presidents’ children have wrestled with the inevitable allegations of nepotism that their careers have created; few have so obviously traded on their father’s power as Hunter did with the Ukrainian company Burisma, for which he lobbied when his father was vice president. (His defense for this is that Burisma wasn’t a big deal, that he also worked for many charitable organizations, and that in any case the Trump sons and Jared Kushner are worse.)

He plays dumb on the criticisms of the inflated sales price of his paintings, feigning disbelief that anyone would buy one to curry favor with the president. And while constantly stressing his status as a son, brother, father, and grandfather, Hunter never mentions his treatment of Navy, the little girl whose conception he cannot remember and whom he initially refused to acknowledge or financially assist. In American Woman, a history of first ladies, the journalist Katie Rogers reports that many staff members in the Biden White House were upset by Joe and Jill Biden’s unquestioned backing of their son when he refused to support Navy without a paternity test. “Their devotion to keeping Hunter safe, people close to them said, was worth enduring the onslaught of criticism from both Republicans and Democrats,” Rogers writes.

[From the January 2025 issue: The ‘mainstream media’ has already lost]

Hunter’s perpetual refusal to be held accountable is clearly a character trait that many people are prepared to overlook. But then, when did a populist ever accept responsibility for anything? He has understood that to succeed in the modern media environment, you should throw out intimate details about your life in a way that looks like total, raw, unfiltered honesty while glossing over the raw, unfiltered details that reflect poorly on you. If you really screw up, then promise to atone in a fashion that does not inhibit your life or career—rehab, not a jail sentence. Just look at Hunter’s interviewer for more evidence that this works: In 2023, Callaghan was accused by multiple women of overstepping their sexual boundaries. He thanked his accusers for speaking out, said he had “always taken no for an answer,” pledged to attend a 12-step program, and carried on with his life.

Americans love someone who has been born again, and the younger Biden is charming enough to attribute all his past behavior to the Bad Old Hunter, while spinning a yarn about how, when he met his second wife, Melissa, she simply told him to stop smoking crack—and because of his love for her, he did.

The long podcast interview works so well for public figures—or at least, the ones able to master its idiosyncrasies—because hearing anyone’s life story usually puts you on their side. When Hunter describes his “public humiliation,” even a minimally empathetic viewer will reflect on how horrifically his privacy was invaded, and how none of us would react well to our worst moments being splashed across the internet. Incredibly, Callaghan manages to turn the laptop saga into yet another ad, cutting away to promote Incogni, a service that removes people’s information from data brokers: “So, obviously Hunter here is somebody who’s dealt with a complete lack of privacy in the past couple years, but you don’t need to be the president’s son to have your data leaked,” he tells viewers. “In fact, it’s most likely happening to you right now.”

Funnily enough, the pioneer of the endless-interview podcast, Joe Rogan, doesn’t do personalized ad reads like this. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t need to—his first Spotify deal was reportedly worth more than $200 million—but maybe it’s also that he’s 57, and remembers a world where content and ads were divided by a holy wall. In almost every other respect, though, Callaghan is one of Rogan’s children. This is not an adversarial interview; at one point, he tells Hunter, “I’m on your team.” In three hours of conversation, Callaghan barely interrupts. When Hunter wants to go off on a digression about the Dred Scott case or the anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he is allowed to do so.

The most decisive, and probably irreversible, shift in the post-Rogan American political conversation is evident in how both Callaghan and his guest talk in conspiratorial terms: the “Christofascist incel,” in Hunter’s words, who gave the laptop hard drive to Rudy Giuliani; the Mossad’s alleged intelligence about the October 7 attack before it happened. Yet Callaghan also points out how profitable online conspiracies are for everyone involved. He says that he believes that “most mainstream conspiracy theories, flat earth, chemtrails, QAnon, all that stuff is deliberate misinformation to convince dumb people that they’re doing important research and keep them away from the truth.” Callaghan goes on, “So maybe the conspiracy isn’t, you know, Russia telling people what to do and how to think. It’s just profit-incentivized content creators farming outrage through these ridiculous conspiracies.” He’s spinning out a meta–conspiracy theory. But if this argument can’t deradicalize the extremely online, nothing can.

Headlines about the interview have focused on Hunter’s dead-ender defense of his father’s candidacy. He admits that his father underperformed onstage at the catastrophic June debate, but he blames it on Biden’s staff giving him an Ambien the night before. (Oh, look: another Biden with no apparent agency over bad decisions.)

Denial is not just a river in Egypt, but the fluid coursing through Hunter’s veins. “He flew around the world, basically the mileage he could have flown around the world three times,” the younger Biden said of his father in his interview with Callaghan. “He’s 81 years old. He’s tired as shit.” So advanced age does affect someone’s ability to undertake a grueling presidential campaign? Good to know. “We lost the last election because we did not remain loyal to the leader of the party,” Hunter told Jaime Harrison. “That’s my position.” This is a ridiculous position; voters were already worried about Biden’s age, and the debate merely allowed the elites to act on those fears. But who is going to judge a son for refusing to admit his father’s flaws?

[Helen Lewis: Finally, someone said it to Joe Rogan’s face]

So far, more than 2 million people have watched the interview with Callaghan on YouTube, and many more will consume it through extracts on social media. Maybe clips of a president’s son defending habeas corpus and mentioning a crack dealer named Bicycles is what the attention economy demands.

Perhaps the Democrats, instead of spending another $20 million on their “man problem,” should find a candidate who has less baggage than Hunter Biden, but can attack Republican policies with his level of straightforward, pummeling aggression. Maybe someone who was only addicted to one of the more genteel drugs, or only slept with their cousin’s widow. But also someone who can talk about the creepiness of Stephen Miller, and who can attack the greed of the Trump sons (“They’re selling gold telephones and sneakers and $2 billion investments in golf courses, and selling tickets to the White House for investment into their memecoin”) without fretting about being accused of hypocrisy. Maybe even one who can say that they believe in a two-state solution in the Middle East—but also that if Benjamin Netanyahu really did slow-walk the release of hostages for his political gain, that would make him a “monster.”

But don’t just take my word for it—behold the conservative activist Christopher Rufo. “Might be an unpopular opinion, but I find Hunter Biden to be an utterly compelling anti-hero,” he posted on X after watching the interview. “He is honest about his own flaws and sees right through the corruption and artifice of the elite Dem milieu.” Mike Solana, the author of the anti-woke, tech-focused Pirate Wires newsletter, agreed. “If this were a trump son he’d be a MAGA folk hero,” he wrote on X.

This is true. Personally, I would prefer that Hunter Biden show some regret for his actions and how they undermined his father’s presidency, and how that helped return Trump to office. But I would settle for Hunter going on Joe Rogan’s podcast to show MAGA-curious voters that the person at the center of so many conspiracy theories is a real person, not a shadowy villain.


From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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For months, no Republican in either the House or the Senate spoke out more forcefully, or more consistently, against cutting Medicaid than Josh Hawley. As President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” was weaving its way through Congress, Hawley argued repeatedly that stripping health insurance from the poorest Americans would be “morally wrong and politically suicidal” for a party that, in the Trump era, has relied on millions of votes from people who receive government assistance.

Back home in Missouri, the senator was making the same case in private, according to several people I spoke with who met with him or his staff this year. His deep engagement on the issue impressed advocates representing Missouri’s hospitals, doctors, and rural health centers, all of whom were having trouble getting GOP lawmakers to take their concerns seriously. The changes, these advocates argued, could cost Missouri billions of dollars in federal funding, take away insurance from an estimated 170,000 residents, and force hospitals and rural health centers to close.

“I did believe that he was genuine,” Amy Blouin, the president of the Missouri Budget Project, a nonpartisan think tank, told me. “I do see him as a different type of Republican.”

Yet Hawley ultimately joined almost every other Republican in Congress and voted for the bill, which independent analysts project will cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and leave 10 million Americans newly uninsured. With three Republicans opposing the legislation in the narrowly divided Senate, Hawley’s support proved decisive.

In a statement, Hawley said that the bill’s benefits—chiefly the extension of Trump’s first-term tax cuts—outweighed his concerns. “Gotta take the wins where you can,” the senator told a reporter. Then, last week, Hawley’s Medicaid journey took yet another turn when he introduced legislation that would prevent some of the deepest reductions from taking effect—essentially proposing to repeal a major provision of the legislation he had just voted to enact.

[Read: No one loves the bill (almost) every Republican voted for]

Hawley’s contortions on the bill were perhaps the starkest illustration of how a Republican Party, under pressure to deliver a quick win for the president, ended up slashing a core social-safety-net program much more deeply than many people expected—and more than some of its own members, including Trump himself at times, seemed to want. Republicans are only now beginning to assess the fallout from their enactment of such a far-reaching law. Polls have found that the bill is unpopular, and its Medicaid cuts especially so. But the law puts off its most painful provisions until after the 2026 midterm elections. Trump himself won’t face voters again, so lawmakers like Hawley will be left to deal with the bill’s political and real-world consequences.

Democrats have roundly mocked Hawley, painting him as one more weak-kneed Republican who talked a big populist game on Medicaid only to fold quickly under pressure from Trump. “It was a performance worthy of a gold medal in political pretzel gymnastics,” Russ Carnahan, a former Missouri representative in Congress who is now chair of the state Democratic Party, told me. Hawley’s effort to immediately restore the cuts, Carnahan said, was a cynical attempt to fool Missourians: “He turned his back on helping people when he had the chance.” A former three-term Republican senator from Missouri, John Danforth, was barely more sympathetic. Danforth was once a political mentor to Hawley but broke with him after he backed Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He told me that Hawley’s new legislative proposal is tantamount to a press release. “It has no real consequence,” Danforth said, dismissing the measure as “simply a way of saying ‘whoops.’”

Hawley’s office declined to make him available for an interview. Instead, a spokesperson pointed to victories that the senator had secured in the GOP bill, including additional relief for Missourians living with cancers linked to Manhattan Project work that took place in the state more than 80 years ago. This morning, at an event hosted by Axios, Hawley said he had drawn a “red line” on benefit cuts for individual Medicaid recipients, and that the bill did not contain any.

Hawley had seemed to be an unlikely savior for those looking for a Republican willing to thwart Trump’s agenda. Outside Missouri, he is best known as the senator who held up a fist of support for the Trump faithful storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and then, hours later, was seen on video fleeing the same mob. Unlike moderate Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Hawley does not have an extensive record of breaking with Republicans on key votes. Nor does he have an imminent campaign to consider; Hawley won reelection last fall by nearly 14 points.

The Missourians I spoke with presume that Hawley’s populist rhetoric reflects his national ambitions. With an eye toward the 2028 presidential race, he might be trying to stay loyal to Trump—a requirement for political survival in today’s GOP—while separating himself from rivals whose emphasis on fiscal austerity alienates the president’s working-class supporters. Hawley cited Trump’s own past pledges to protect Medicaid in explaining his initial opposition to the cuts, and he was one of a few Senate Republicans who publicly welcomed the idea (which the party ultimately abandoned) of raising taxes on the rich in the GOP megabill.

The bill contains several major changes to Medicaid, and Hawley is trying to prevent only some of them. He continues to support, for example, the work requirements for nondisabled adults that could add administrative burdens to the program and result in millions of people losing insurance. The cuts that Hawley opposes would affect the amount of money that states such as Missouri could receive from the federal government for Medicaid. Hawley has taken credit for the fact that the enacted bill delays the start date of those provisions until at least 2028, and for securing a $50 billion rural health fund in the bill that could partially offset the loss of federal money for states. His new proposal would repeal the Medicaid funding changes altogether and double the rural fund.

Hawley’s attempt at a balancing act has found him few friends so far. Democrats are happy to use his critique of Medicaid cuts as campaign fodder for next year’s midterm elections—the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee hailed him as its “newest surrogate”—while denouncing his vote for the bill. Republicans have mostly ignored him. None have signed on as co-sponsors of his new proposal. When I surveyed the seven other Republicans who represent Missouri in Congress on whether they share Hawley’s concerns about Medicaid or support his new legislation, none responded. (A spokesperson for Missouri’s GOP governor, Mike Kehoe, said that Hawley “is right to be concerned about the long-term sustainability of rural hospitals in Missouri and across the country.”)

[David A. Graham: A Congress that votes yes and hopes no]

Danforth told me he never thought Hawley’s vote on the GOP bill—which the former senator called “terrible”—was in doubt. “It would just be impossible to be a Republican in good standing in this era and vote against it,” Danforth said. “You’re going to be heckled. People are going to abuse you, and you’ll just never come up for air. So you must vote for the ‘big, beautiful bill,’ even though it means voting for elements that are against what you’ve been saying.”

Missouri’s Medicaid advocates haven’t given up on Hawley, however. In some respects, his lonely, politically awkward fight might be their best hope to stave off cuts that Heidi Lucas, the executive director of the Missouri Rural Health Association, described to me as “devastating.” “People are going to die because of these, especially when rural hospitals start closing,” Lucas said. “They were already running on very thin margins, and this is going to put them over the edge.” Lucas said the rural health fund, even if it gets doubled, is “a drop in the bucket” compared with the total loss of federal dollars. “We need stitches to fix the problem, and he’s doing it more like a Band-Aid,” she said of Hawley.

Still, Lucas offered Hawley some praise for introducing his bill. “Whatever we can do to mitigate the damage these cuts are going to have, we need to be supportive of,” she said. “So we’ll support Hawley pushing for these fixes in the hopes that in the long term, these will get into place, and then we can roll back some of the other provisions.” Maybe, Lucas allowed, “this ends up being a great thing.”

Hawley’s bill stands little chance of passing while Republicans control Congress. And Democrats aren’t interested in partnering with Hawley after he voted for the bill that contained the cuts in the first place. “It’s a cynical play, and people see that,” Representative Suzan DelBene of Washington State, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told me. “It’s not an honest attempt to address the issue, because this issue wouldn’t exist if he hadn’t voted for it.”

[Jonathan Chait: They didn’t have to do this]

If Democrats can harness voter anger to recapture one or both chambers of Congress next year, Hawley could become more useful to them as a Republican willing to revisit the president’s signature bill. A political backlash to the bill could make Hawley’s critique look prescient. And Trump, who was never that excited about slashing Medicaid to begin with, could use a further delay or repeal of the cuts as a bargaining chip for other legislative priorities. “What we’ve just seen is these election cycles lead to policy decisions, and they do truly have consequences,” Jon Doolittle, the president of the Missouri Hospital Association, told me. “There is time for these laws to change before they take effect.”

Amy Blouin is hoping that’s true. I asked her whether she still thinks that Hawley was “genuine” in his opposition to Medicaid cuts. She said she does, but his vote for the president’s bill stung nonetheless. “I don’t know the right word to describe the feeling. It’s not necessarily betrayed,” Blouin said. She settled on “extremely disappointed.” Like others I spoke with, she had wondered whether Hawley could withstand the intense pressure all Republican lawmakers were facing to back Trump’s bill. A few of them did, most notably Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who voted no, after criticizing the Medicaid cuts. “I was hoping,” Blouin told me with a rueful laugh, “that Senator Hawley would be a Tillis.”

Unlike Hawley, however, Tillis was not voting with his political future in mind: Shortly after declaring his opposition to the bill, he announced his retirement from the Senate.


From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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A newlywed couple kisses after a wedding ceremony inside a church that has been flooded, with about a foot of standing floodwater.Aaron Favila / APNewlyweds Jade Rick Verdillo and Jamaica Aguilar kiss during their wedding in the flooded Barasoain church in Malolos, Bulacan province, Philippines on July 22, 2025.A bride with a long, flowing train, stands in foot-deep floodwater outside a church.Aaron Favila / APBride Jamaica Aguilar prepares to enter the flooded Barasoain church for her wedding in Malolos on July 22, 2025.Wedding guests walk inside a flooded church.Aaron Favila / APWedding guests walk inside the flooded Barasoain church on July 22, 2025.A top-down view of several pairs of shoes on a church pew, surrounded by shallow floodwaterAaron Favila / APWedding guests leave their shoes on a pew above the high-water mark during the ceremony.A bride walks down the aisle of a church, through foot-deep floodwater.Aaron Favila / APThe bride, Jamaica Aguilar, walks down the aisle during her wedding ceremony.Groomsmen and guests with their pant legs rolled up stand in floodwater.Aaron Favila / APGroomsmen and guests with their pant legs rolled up stand in floodwater inside Barasoain church on July 22, 2025.Five bridesmaids stand and sit among the pews in a flooded church.Aaron Favila / APBridesmaids stand among the pews.Wedding guests lean out over a flooded church aisle to watch the ceremony.Aaron Favila / APGuests lean out over the flooded aisle to watch the wedding ceremony.A couple sits together on a small bench during a wedding ceremony in a flooded church.Aaron Favila / APJade Rick Verdillo and Jamaica Aguilar sit together during their wedding ceremony.A newlywed couple walks together down a flooded church aisle.Aaron Favila / APNewlyweds Jade Rick Verdillo and Jamaica Aguilar walk down the aisle, hand in hand, during their wedding.Guests cheer as a newlywed couple shares a kiss inside a flooded church.Aaron Favila / APGuests cheer as the newlywed couple shares a kiss inside the flooded Barasoain church in Malolos, Philippines, on July 22, 2025.


From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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Donald Trump has so far gotten his way on tariffs and tax cuts, but one economic goal eludes him: lower interest rates. Reduced borrowing costs would in theory make homes and cars cheaper for consumers, help businesses invest in creating jobs, and allow the government to finance its massive debt load at a steep discount. In the president’s mind, only one obstacle stands in the way of this obvious economic win-win: the Federal Reserve.

Trump has mused publicly about replacing Fed Chair Jerome Powell since before he even took office, calling him “Too Late Powell” (as in waiting too long to cut rates) and a “numbskull.” Those threats have gotten more serious recently. In a meeting with House Republicans last Tuesday, the president reportedly showed off the draft of a letter that would have fired the Fed chair. Trump later claimed that it was “highly unlikely” that he would fire Powell, but he left open the possibility that the chair might have to “leave for fraud.” To that end, the administration has launched an investigation into Powell’s management of an expensive renovation of the central bank’s headquarters. (Any wrongdoing would, at least in theory, offer a legal pretext for firing him.)

This plan is unlikely to succeed in the near term. The administration’s legal case against Powell is almost certainly specious, and the Fed sets interest rates by the votes of 12 board members, not according to the chair’s sole discretion. Even if the president eventually does get his way, however, and installs enough pliant board members to slash government interest rates, this could have the paradoxical effect of raising the interest rates paid in the real world. If that happened, mortgages would get more expensive, businesses would have a harder time investing, and government financing would become even less sustainable.

Trump seems to have a simple mental model of monetary policy: The Federal Reserve unilaterally sets all of the interest rates across the entire economy. The reality is more complicated. The central bank controls what is known as the federal-funds rate, the interest rate at which banks loan one another money. A lower federal-funds rate means that banks can charge lower interest on the loans they issue. This generally causes rates on short-term debt, such as credit-card annual percentage rates and small-business loans, to fall.

But the interest rates that people care the most about are on long-term debt, such as mortgages and car loans. These are influenced less by the current federal-funds rate and more by expectations of what the economic environment will look like in the coming years, even decades. The Fed influences these long-term rates not only directly, by changing the federal-funds rate, but also indirectly by sending a signal about where the economy is headed.

[Rogé Karma: The Federal Reserve’s little secret]

What signal would the Fed be sending if it suddenly slashed the federal-funds rate from its current level of about 4.5 percent to Trump’s preferred 1 percent? Typically, an interest-rate cut of this magnitude would be reserved for a calamity in which the Fed drastically needs to increase the money supply to give the labor market a big boost. (This is what happened after the 2008 financial crisis.) Today’s economy has a very different problem: Unemployment is low, but inflation remains above the Fed’s target and has risen in recent months. In this environment, most economists predict that a dramatic increase in the money supply would send prices soaring.

Last week, in response to Trump flirting with the possibility of firing Powell, a key measure of investors’ long-term-inflation expectations spiked dramatically. The mere prospect of higher inflation is “kryptonite” for lenders and bondholders, Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me, because it creates the risk that any debt paid back in the future will be worth a lot less than it is today. In such a situation, Zandi explained, banks and investors would likely impose a higher interest rate up front.

Many experts, including former Fed chairs, believe that cutting rates simply because the president demands it could have an even more profound consequence: It would tell the world that the U.S. central bank can no longer be trusted to credibly manage the money supply going forward. Investors would “get really nervous about holding U.S. Treasuries,” the economist Jason Furman told me, and demand a far higher return for buying them to make up for the higher risk—which would, perversely, drive interest rates higher, not lower. As evidence, Furman pointed out that, on several occasions, including last week, the interest rates on 10- and 30-year government bonds have shot up in response to Trump threatening to fire Powell. (In fact, the gap between short- and long-term rates jumped to its highest level since 2021 last week in the less-than-one-hour window between when reports surfaced about Trump planning to fire Powell and the president’s denial of that plan.) Because most long-term interest rates, including those for home mortgages, student loans, and auto loans, are directly pegged to the rate on government bonds—which serves as a sort of base rate for the entire financial system—all of those other rates would rise as well.

[Jonathan Chait: What Trump’s feud with Jerome Powell is really about]

The precise consequences of a move as drastic as what Trump has suggested are impossible to forecast with certainty. And the predictions of economists have been proved wrong many times. (Remember the inevitable recession of 2023?) Still, recent history has not been kind to populist leaders who try to forcibly lower interest rates. Between 2019 and 2022, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan replaced three central-bank governors with loyalists who were willing to slash interest rates even as prices were rising. This caused inflation to spiral even higher, at one point reaching 85 percent. Foreign investors panicked, prompting a fire sale of Turkish government bonds. Long-term interest rates spiked, the Turkish lira crashed in value, and the country appeared on the verge of hyperinflation. The crisis began to abate only when Erdoğan changed course in 2023 and brought in new central-bank leadership who raised interest rates to above 45 percent in a desperate effort to restore credibility. (Inflation has since fallen considerably but remains very high.) “When investors start running for the hills, you get into really dangerous territory,” Zandi told me.

A path exists to persuade the Fed to cut interest rates without such a high risk of backfiring. The problem for Trump is that it would require a complete reversal of the highest-priority economic policies of his second term. Last September, the Fed began cutting interest rates and signaled that it would continue to do so. Then Trump entered office and threatened sky-high tariffs on every country on the planet. In response, the Fed has refrained from cutting rates further, terrified that Trump’s policies will unleash another bout of inflation.

There is some debate, including within the Fed itself, over whether tariff-induced price increases will in fact lead to sustained higher inflation. But for now at least, the central bank doesn’t appear willing to take any chances. “In effect, we went on hold when we saw the size of the tariffs and essentially all inflation forecasts for the United States went up materially as a consequence of the tariffs,” Powell said on July 1. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed days later and includes trillions of dollars of unpaid-for tax cuts, has only made Powell’s case stronger.

If the president were serious about lowering the cost of borrowing for families and businesses, he would be wise to leave Powell alone and simply stop enacting wildly irresponsible policies. Trump tends to prefer a different approach to people and institutions refusing to do his bidding: force them into submission. But America’s central bank isn’t like most other institutions; it is the central node in a highly complex chain of interactions that undergirds the entire global economy. Even one seemingly small error or misstep can result in disaster. If Trump manages to break the Fed, he will likely regret it.


From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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This article features spoilers for the ending of Eddington***.***

The director Ari Aster specializes in bringing stress dreams to life: becoming plagued by a demonic curse, as seen in his debut film, Hereditary; joining an evil Scandinavian cult, in his follow-up, Midsommar; realizing a person’s every fear, as occurs in the strange, picaresque Beau Is Afraid.But for his latest movie, Eddington, he turns to a more prosaic topic to get our blood running: the events of 2020. The film initially presents itself as a neo-Western, set in the small, fictional New Mexico town of Eddington at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. In true Aster form, the familiar portrait of that period—and the gnarly headspace it trapped many of us in—disintegrates into something disturbingly surreal. The film dramatizes this downward spiral through the experience of a man consumed by anxiety about how his community is shifting around him. Lockdown may have driven some people to question one another’s reality; Eddington’s protagonist, however, seeks control of his—with violent and gory results.

In interviews about his inspirations, Aster has invoked John Ford’s masterpiece My Darling Clementine, a bittersweet retelling of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. But what I thought of more than anything while watching Eddington was Taxi Driver, a dark fable that’s grounded in the point of view of a delusional maniac similarly defined by his paranoid, even conspiratorial, thinking. In the Martin Scorsese classic, Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro) lives out his fantasy of “cleaning up” New York City by murdering a man who prostituted young girls in a brothel; the subsequent press coverage cements him as a folk hero, ending the film on a strange, bloodily triumphal note.

The local sheriff in Eddington, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), is the film’s Bickle, though his final showdown is a far more absurd spectacle than the one in Taxi Driver. Aster’s film is frightening, yes—but it’s a dark and lacerating comedy first and foremost, playing out the power fantasies that fueled many an online conspiracy theory in the pandemic’s early days (and still do now). And althoughCross may not be as crushingly lonely as Bickle, he does share the character’s escalating sense of paranoia.By plunging the viewer into this chaotic inner world, Aster illustrates the dissonant appeal of being enmeshed in the perspective of, and maybe even rooting for, an individual committed to their belief in justice—even if that commitment can border on sordid.

[Read: A nasty, cynical, and eerily accurate look at all-too-recent history]

Each of Aster’s movies descends into chaos by its third act, but the bloodbath at the end of Eddington is particularly challenging because of what precedes it: a recognizable, if satirical, investigation of life under lockdown. As such, the filmis much more concerned with modern society than the director’s past work, contorting the anxiety and extreme politicization that arose during the early pandemic to fit into Aster’s strange world. Embodying those feelings is Cross, a lonely sheriff who eventually stands up to shadowy, destructive forces.

Eddington introduces its protagonist in much more mundane fashion, however. Cross serves the town of Eddington as a useless figure of authority—a shiftless, asthmatic grump who mumbles complaints at lawbreakers and halfheartedly manages a staff of cops at his office. When the film starts, he is struggling to uphold the state-mandated quarantine regulations, which he rarely follows himself. Eventually, the viewer learns that Cross has a personal connection to the position; his father-in-law once held it, and his tenure is still revered by both his family and his community. But Cross can hardly keep up with his job’s basic tasks, let alone the kind of slick change represented by the person often challenging his control over Eddington: its mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal).

Garcia, unlike Cross, is a friendly, tech-focused modernizer; he’s backing the construction of a local data center that has proved divisive. Garcia and Cross’s mutual disdain initially drives the film’s tension: Garcia has some personal animosity with Cross that revolves around a rumored, long-ago dalliancewiththe sheriff’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone). Just as Garcia and Cross become fixated on each other, Louise develops an obsession with a seeming cult leader named Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Peak posts his elliptical wisdom in popular short-form videos that Louise affirms in the comments. Louise’s mother, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who lives with the Crosses, is similarly buying into questionable lines of thinking; she’s constantly spouting misinformation about the origins of the pandemic, and parroting whatever else comes across her Facebook feed.

Eddington makes plenty of satirical sport of all the characters, including a swath of overly sensitive teenage protesters. But the rageful engine driving Cross’s actions is more disquieting than simple family or small-town drama. In the simplest read of what happens next, Cross becomes a local celebrity of sorts. After an altercation with Garcia at a supermarket, instigated when the sheriff supports a customer refusing to wear a mask—and similarly goes without one, pointing to how it affects his asthma—Cross announces his own mayoral run. He campaigns on a vague populist platform of throwing unhoused people out of town and resisting COVID restrictions, posting his progressively more inflammatory screeds to Facebook. The ramblings go viral, pushing Cross into further confrontations with Garcia.

[Read: Beau Is Afraid is your worst nightmare, and it’s wonderful]

The sheriff’s simmering anger, which reaches boiling point as a result of Eddington’s growing air of claustrophobia and his own loosening grip on his life, leads to Cross assassinating Garcia. He kills Garcia’s son too, and tries to cover up both murders by pinning the blame on a fellow cop. But as the sheriff’s tangled web of lies begins to unravel—and his focus is diverted further away from the town—Eddington is besieged by frightening special-ops forces of unknown origin. The attack culminates in a bloody gun battle in the streets, and Cross barely survives; he emerges as a vigilante who has defended his community from, well, somebody. The film ends with Cross, now paralyzed and heavily medicated, functioning as the town’s mayor. Unlike that of Taxi Driver’s Bickle, however, the sheriff’s victory is a hollow one; his mother-in-law appears to have seized the real power behind the throne, rendering him more a puppet than an icon.

This turn of events offers a perfectly grim button to Cross’s ridiculous hallucinations of grandeur. But it’s also a reminder from Aster that for all the thrilling gunplay of Eddington’s final act, there is no real happy ending awaiting Cross. Eddington does not aim to be a simple tale of heroism, and its events are so outlandish that they are hard to take at face value. The movie, in its fullest expression, is a feverish swirl of the charged opinions that drove so many conversations during the pandemic’s height—be they from the right, the left, or all the way on the fringe. The shadowy characters invading Eddington could be interpreted as a fascist hit squad or an antifa battalion; on-screen, they simply represent the nonsensical extremes that our internet-addled brains are capable of reaching. The uncomfortable result is that Aster at times seems to be challenging the audience to root for Cross, despite laying out all his buffoonery very plainly—because even the most composed person may have found the limits of their patience tested at some point during those strange, dark days.


From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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What should I read next? If only making that decision were simple: Recommendations abound online and off, but when you’re casting about for a new book, especially if you’re coming off the heels of something you adored, the paradox of choice can feel intense. You might turn to loved ones to ask which book would be just right for you. Avid readers frequently face a parallel dilemma; they find themselves bombarded by friends and family members who expect a perfectly tailored recommendation.

Staffers at The Atlantic get these inquiries a lot—often enough to recognize that for many of us, a pattern emerges. We end up suggesting the same book, again and again, no matter who’s asking. Yet each recommender cites a different set of criteria for the work that rises to the top of their list. Some of us pick a read that feels so timeless, and so widely appealing, that it truly does have something for everyone. Others among us evangelize about something so singular that it must be experienced.

The 12 books below have nothing in common except for the fact that their advocates have shared them time after time, and believe in their power to delight or captivate readers who have a variety of tastes and proclivities. One of them will, we hope, be the title you pick up next.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka

book cover

Some people turn to books for history, others for lessons on human nature. They might hope to better understand longing, despair, joy, or love—or simply chase the high of genre fiction (ghost stories, political thrillers, tales of redemption). To all of these readers, I invariably advocate for Karunatilaka’s journey into underworlds: both a supernatural realm beyond death and the demimonde of violence and corruption that fueled the Sri Lankan civil war. Seven Moons was the dark-horse winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, beating books by Percival Everett and Elizabeth Strout and rightly claiming its place in the magical-realism canon. The title character is a gay photojournalist with a conscience—which turns out to be a very dangerous combination in 1980s Colombo. In fact, when the novel opens, he’s already dead. Before moving on from Earth, he gets seven days of purgatory—during which he must try to influence his living friends to publicize a trove of damning photographs while fending off literal demons and the dark truths he’d rather avoid. My closing pitch to friends: I’ve rarely read a better ending.  — Boris Kachka

Made for Love

Made for Love, by Alissa Nutting

I love to suggest Nutting’s work to people, even though it’s been called “deviant”—if folks avoid me afterward, then I know they’re not my kind of weirdo. She has a talent for developing outrageous concepts that also reveal earnest truths about what people expect from one another and why. One of the best examples is her novel Made for Love, perhaps better known as an HBO show starring the excellent Cristin Milioti. The book, too, is about a woman whose tech-magnate husband has implanted a chip in her head, but it grows far more absurd. (A subplot, for instance, features a con artist who becomes attracted to dolphins.) Nutting’s scenarios sometimes remind me of the comedian Nathan Fielder’s work: You will probably cringe, but you’ll be laughing—and sometimes even nodding along.  — Serena Dai

These Precious Days

These Precious Days, by Ann Patchett

Here’s how I start my recommendation: “Did you know that Tom Hanks’s assistant and Ann Patchett went from total strangers to best friends?” And then, when my target inevitably shows interest in the out-there pairing of a beloved novelist and a Hollywood insider, I put These Precious Days in their hands. The titular essay is about this friendship, but the broader subject of Patchett’s book is death: She contemplates the passing of the men who served as fathers in her life; she thinks about the potential demise of her husband, a small-plane pilot; and she considers the mortality of that assistant, a woman named Sooki. After Sooki, who starts her relationship with the author as a long-distance pen pal, is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she moves into Patchett’s Nashville house during the coronavirus pandemic. Much of the writing, funny and sharp, follows the two of them as they work on their art, do yoga, take psychedelics—but the sentences get their power from their awareness of the gulf between life and death that will eventually separate the two women.  — Emma Sarappo

Trust

Trust, by Hernan Diaz

In 1955, James Baldwin famously pilloried Uncle Tom’s Cabin for its “virtuous sentimentality,” and called its author, the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, “not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer.” For Baldwin, Stowe’s well-intentioned advocacy turned her characters into caricatures who existed only in service of her ideological aims—and as a result, he believed that her novel failed as art. This trap ensnares many fiction writers, and I have spent much time thinking about how they can avoid it when tackling contemporary problems. This is one reason I constantly bring up Díaz’s Trust: It navigates the line between politics and artistry with rare skill. Set in New York City’s late-19th-century financial world, the book is composed of four fictional texts, each focused on the same people but written from a different vantage point. The question is: Which narrator does the reader believe? Trust’s storytelling is impeccable, full of twists and surprises. The book is also a remarkable criticism of unbridled capitalism—but the story does not exist in service of a doctrine. It remains unlike anything else I’ve read.  — Clint Smith

An American Sunrise

An American Sunrise, by Joy Harjo

Harjo’s poetry collection begins by recounting a horrific event: In 1830, the United States government forced some 100,000 Indigenous people to walk hundreds of miles, at gunpoint, from the southeastern U.S. to lands west of the Mississippi River. Among those on this Trail of Tears were Harjo’s Muscogee ancestors, who left Georgia and Alabama for Oklahoma, and whose memory the writer resurrects through poems that collapse the distance between generations, making history feel present-tense. The book deftly expresses both grief for all of the violence perpetrated on American soil and a profound love for all of the beings that inhabit this continent. Ancestors and descendants dance at the perimeter of Harjo’s poems, and her definition of relative is wide enough to hold every living thing—panthers, raccoons, tobacco plants. Anyone could spend an afternoon with this book and come away with a refreshed, more capacious view of this country. “These lands aren’t our lands,” Harjo notes. “These lands aren’t your lands. We are this land.”  — Valerie Trapp

Eating Stone

Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, by Ellen Meloy

When Meloy, a desert naturalist, felt estranged from nature, she sought to cure it by stalking a band of bighorn sheep for a year in Utah’s Canyonlands wilderness. She begins in winter and feels cold and clumsy. She envies the bighorns’ exquisite balance as she watches them spring quickly up cliff faces. She feels “the power and purity of first wonder.” Meloy’s writing is scientifically learned—beautifully so—but this book does not pretend to be a detached study. When she hikes alongside these animals at dawn, she aches to belong. She fantasizes about being a feral child they raised. At first, the band is indifferent to her project. But animal by animal, they begin to let her into their world. To follow her there is to experience one of the sublime pleasures of contemporary American nature writing. Meloy gives an account of their culture, their affections for one another, even their conflicts. All these years after my first read, I can still hear the crack of the rams’ colliding horns echoing off the red rock.  — Ross Andersen

Will and Testament

Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth

When I picked up this novel some years ago, I’d never heard of Hjorth, and I was drawn to the book simply because of the quiet mood evoked by the cover of the English-language edition—a serene picture of a lonely cabin in the woods at twilight. What I found inside was a story that reads at once as a juicy diary and as a chillingly astute psychological portrait of a dysfunctional family. The story is narrated by Bergljot, a Norwegian theater critic who is estranged from much of her family because they refused to acknowledge the abuse that her father had inflicted on her. A dispute over inheritance brings the whole distant family back into painful contact. The novel was deeply controversial in Norway after Hjorth’s family claimed that its contents were too close to reality. Later, Hjorth’s sister published her own novelization of their family strife. But the scandal shouldn’t detract from the novel itself, which is utterly specific yet universal: The author captures the pettiness of the family’s drama and the damage they do to one another with equal fidelity.  — Maya Chung

Alanna: The First Adventure

Alanna: The First Adventure, by Tamora Pierce

The kingdom of Tortall has many of the classic features of a fantasy world: strapping lords, tender ladies, charming rogues, mysterious magical forces that can be used for good or for evil. But what makes Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series so timeless and reliable is its heroine, Alanna, who poses as a boy in order to train as a knight. The First Adventure, which introduced her to readers in 1983,serves as an excellent gateway to the fantasy genre. The book covers Alanna’s years as a page in Tortall’s royal palace, where, from the ages of 10 to 13, she must contend with her girlhood—which means navigating periods and growth spurts—while keeping her identity a secret. Pierce never devalues Alanna’s feelings and experiences, and the author isn’t didactic about the choices Alanna makes; readers will feel they’re being taken seriously, no matter their age.  — Elise Hannum

Careless People

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Love, Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams

This book’s summary sounds like something out of Black Mirror:An idealist embraces a new form of technology, convinced that it has the potential to change the world, only to become trapped in a hell of her own making. Wynn-Williams, a former director of public policy at Facebook, describes her experiences working at the social-networking giant with dark humor and a sense of mounting panic. I gasped a few times as Wynn-Williams recounted being commanded to sleep in bed next to Sheryl Sandberg, and being harassed by a higher-up while she was recovering from a traumatic childbirth that nearly killed her. But the real shock comes from seeing how Facebook, a site most people associate with college friends and benign memes, helped to amplify and exacerbate hate speech. This is exactly why I keep pressing it on people. The corporation, now Meta, has described some of the book’s allegations as “false”; regardless, Careless People makes a powerful case for why no single company or boss should have this kind of reckless, untrammeled power.  — Sophie Gilbert

A Floating Chinaman

A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific, by Hua Hsu

The first thing I like to tell people about Hsu’s debut book is that he took its title from a novel that had been lost, or maybe never even existed. The second thing is that it is about America, not China. A Floating Chinaman’s subject, broadly, is Asian American literature between the First and Second World Wars, but its main character is the eccentric novelist and immigrant H. T. Tsiang. Tsiang wrote prolifically at the same time as Pearl S. Buck, the white writer who won a Pulitzer for The Good Earth, her novel about Chinese farmers. Tsiang had high ambitions to combat Buck’s rosy portrait of his birth country, but his manuscripts were dismissed again and again, partly for their political radicalism, their criticism of the U.S. and China, and their sheer weirdness. Tsiang had sketched a novel about a Chinese laborer who travels widely—but as far as Hsu can tell, Tsiang’s book never materialized. Hsu honors the writer’s obsession and perseverance while asking a more pointed question: Were Americans unready to accept an immigrant writer who called out weaknesses in their own country?  — Shan Wang

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha

Beha’s big-swing novel, set in the late 2000s, follows Sam, a young data-crunching blogger from the Midwest who gets hired to work at a legacy New York magazine. He arrives in the city certain that when one has the right information, the world is “a knowable place”—but he is soon forced to reconsider his rational worldview. Sam encounters an apocalyptic preacher, falls for the daughter of a profile subject (though he’s married), and cranks out a near-constant stream of articles while struggling with unexpected doubts. The novel takes on heady themes, but it never feels dull or brainy, and all the people I’ve shared it with over the years love it too. My New Yorker father told me how well it portrayed the city after the 2008 financial crisis; my friends in journalism affirm its perceptiveness about the industry’s “content farm” days; my church friends appreciate how it takes religious belief seriously. I push it upon pretty much everyone I know.  — Eleanor Barkhorn

Black Swans

Black Swans, by Eve Babitz

Reading Babitz’s early work is like being whisked from one glamorous party to another. A fixture of the 1970s Hollywood scene, Babitz transcribed dozens of her own libertine experiences with diaristic recall in autofictional works such as Eve’s Hollywood. But by the time she released this 1993 short-story collection, the parties had fizzled out and the scene was over. Retreating from the zeitgeist didn’t rob her of inspiration, though. As an older writer, Babitz possessed a new clarity about the meaning of all those youthful nights, and the stories in Black Swans—about former bohemians inching toward the staid life, and romantics bumping up against the limits of love—are told with tenderness that is unusual in her other work. Babitz is often contrasted with her frenemy Joan Didion—Babitz was cast in the popular imagination as the fun, ditzy sexpot, as opposed to Didion’s cool, cold-blooded stenographer—but the maturity and thoughtfulness of these stories dispel any lazy stereotypes. Her early work is what made her reputation, but this later collection, in which she’s looking back and making sense of it all, is simply better—a trajectory I wish for all writers.  — Jeremy Gordon


From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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Mark and David Geier were a father-and-son team of researchers who operated on the fringes of the scientific establishment. They were known for promoting a controversial treatment for autism, and for publishing papers on the purported harms of vaccines that experts dismissed as junk science. In 2004, the CDC accused them of violating research protocols. In 2012, the state of Maryland sanctioned them. And in 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tapped one of them to investigate alleged wrongdoing in a crucial CDC database.

For years, Kennedy has claimed that the database, which tracks adverse reactions to immunizations and is known as the Vaccine Safety Datalink, once contained vital information about vaccine safety—and that this information has been withheld from the public, scrubbed from the record, or otherwise manipulated. He wants David Geier to investigate it because he and his late father, a physician, studied it in the early 2000s, after they applied through a CDC program that allows researchers outside the government to access certain data sets.

When the Geiers were first allowed into this trove of millions of anonymized health records, they were supposed to be carrying out a safety study of the DTaP vaccine. But the CDC found that they were instead conducting unauthorized analyses to hunt for a link between the vaccine and autism, and risked breaching patients’ confidentiality in the process; the agency revoked their access. (At the time, the Geiers disputed the charge that they had endangered anyone’s personal information, writing in a 2004 letter to an institutional-review-board administrator that they held the “utmost regard” for patient confidentiality.) Even after they were ousted, the Geiers used information they’d apparently held on to from that database to publish a series of scientific papers advancing the widely discredited theory that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative once common in childhood vaccines, is linked to autism, among other conditions.

[Read: The U.S. is going backwards on vaccines, very fast]

Researchers in the field have long criticized the Geiers’ methodology as sloppy, and noted that their conclusions are at odds with those of numerous higher-quality studies. Since March, when The Washington Post reported that David Geier had been brought into the Department of Health and Human Services, his and his father’s work has come under renewed scrutiny. One scientist found that several of their papers—based on information from the very CDC database that Kennedy has tasked Geier with investigating—contain a statistical error so fundamental that it casts doubt on Geier’s abilities and intentions in assessing data. That scientist and another I spoke with couldn’t believe that some of Geier’s work had ever been published in the first place.

David Geier is currently listed as a senior data analyst in HHS’s staff directory, though what exactly he’s doing for the department is unclear. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Geier is using his new position to continue his search for a link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism. New York magazine floated the possibility that he will attempt to repeat a study from the early 2000s that anti-vaccine activists cite as proof that inoculations harm developing brains. Kennedy has denied that Geier is running the agency’s project to find out what causes autism, and testified that he has instead been hired by a contractor to determine whether information disappeared from the database. (Mark Geier died in March, and David Geier did not respond to interview requests. Reached for comment, an HHS spokesperson pointed to a lengthy X post by Kennedy in which he defends Geier’s record and notes his “extensive background as a research scientist.”)

Under any other administration, Geier’s history would almost certainly have disqualified him from any role at HHS. In the mid-2000s, after Mark Geier had established a profitable sideline of testifying as an expert witness in lawsuits that alleged injury from vaccines, the father and son claimed to have discovered a method of treating autism. What they touted as a miracle drug was Lupron, a testosterone-suppressing medication used in many cases of premature puberty. They ran a laboratory out of the basement of their Maryland home and administered the drug to children based on their unfounded theory, advertising their supposed breakthrough on the autism-conference circuit. In 2012, Mark, a physician, was stripped of his license, and David was sanctioned for practicing medicine without one. (The Geiers sued the Maryland Board of Physicians in 2012 for releasing information about medications Mark Geier had prescribed to family members. They were awarded a total of nearly $5 million for the invasion of their privacy and attorneys’ fees, but that judgment was reversed after a different court ruled that Maryland Board of Physicians members were immune from such claims.)

[Read: RFK Jr.’s autism time machine]

The Geiers’ work is well known among autism researchers, though not well respected. “They were seen as not representing the best of autism science,” Craig Newschaffer, a Penn State scientist who has studied how genetics and environmental factors contribute to autism, told me, putting it more gently than others I spoke with. Marie McCormick met the Geiers when she chaired a 2004 review of immunization safety by the Institute of Medicine (now known as the National Academy of Medicine), a nonprofit group that advises the federal government. McCormick, now an emeritus professor at Harvard’s School of Public Health, recalled that the Geiers’ presentation had “really made no sense”: It was a slideshow of vaccine vials with labels indicating that they contained mercury, but it didn’t have much else in the way of evidence. The committee’s report identified a host of “serious methodological flaws” in the Geiers’ research, such as a failure to explain how they had sorted their subjects into groups.

The Geiers’ work from the 2010s likewise has such glaring flaws that the experts I spoke with were baffled as to how the studies had been published at all. Jeffrey Morris, a biostatistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, recently examined a series of papers on which the Geiers were authors that used data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink. One representative 2017 study purportedly showed that the hepatitis B vaccine was associated with an increased risk of autism.

Morris quickly noticed that the paper’s approach rendered its findings meaningless. It compared a group of children with autism to a control group of children without the diagnosis, to see how vaccination rates differed between the two. But these groups of children also differed in another crucial way: The children diagnosed with autism were born during the eight-year span from 1991 to 1998, whereas the control group—children not diagnosed with autism—were born in 1991 or 1992.

That’s more than a minor inconsistency. In 1991, the CDC’s vaccine-advisory committee recommended that all infants in the United States receive the hepatitis B vaccine, and so the percentage of vaccinated children rose steadily throughout the decade, from fewer than 10 percent to approximately 90 percent. That meant that babies born later in the ’90s (who were overrepresented in the autism group) were very likely to have gotten the shot, whereas those born earlier in the decade (who were overrepresented in the control group) were not. By picking a control group in which relatively few kids would have been vaccinated, and an autistic population in which most were, the Geiers made finding a connection between immunization and autism inevitable.

[Read: The conversations doctors are having about vaccination now]

Using this approach, you could blame the vaccine for all manner of maladies. According to Morris, the Geiers did exactly that in at least nine papers, published from 2015 to 2018, that used data from the vaccine-safety database. One of their studies linked hep-B vaccination to childhood obesity. Others showed an association with tic disorders, emotional disturbance, and premature puberty, among other conditions, some of which rose during the ’90s and early 2000s at least in part because of new diagnostic criteria and increased awareness. That likely also explains why autism rates began to climb significantly in the ’90s.

Many flawed scientific papers include a regrettable but understandable oversight, Morris told me, but the Geiers employed “an absolutely invalid design that biases things so enormously that you could throw out the results of all these papers.” Newschaffer reviewed Morris’s critique and told me he doesn’t believe that a study with such a serious problem should have been published in the first place. “I would characterize that as a ‘miss’ in the peer review,” he said. (I also contacted Dirk Schaumlöffel, the editor in chief of the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology, which published the Geiers’ paper connecting the hep-B vaccine to autism. He took issue with Morris’s “polemical allegations” and defended the paper, noting that it “does not argue against vaccination, but merely questions the role of thimerosal.” He told me that he would prefer that the matter be debated in the pages of his journal.)

If David Geier were merely an independent researcher publishing in lesser-known journals, his errors, although egregious, would be of little more than academic concern. But his influence on Kennedy runs deep. In 2005, Kennedy highlighted the Geiers’ research in an essay outlining how he’d come to believe that thimerosal-containing vaccines could cause autism. He wrote about them again that year in “Deadly Immunity,” an article—eventually retracted by both Salon and Rolling Stone after multiple corrections and intense criticism—that alleged that government health agencies had covered up evidence indicating that thimerosal in vaccines was to blame for the rise in autism rates. In his 2014 book, Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak, Kennedy cites the Geiers dozens of times, portraying them as determined truth-tellers battling uncooperative government agencies—the very ones Kennedy has now been appointed to oversee.

[Read: The neo-anti-vaxxers are in power now]

Thanks to Kennedy, Geier seemingly is being handed the keys to the same database he’s proved himself unfit to study. People who are familiar with Geier’s history worry that he’ll use his position on the inside not to defend the truth but to resurrect thoroughly debunked claims, twisting the data to support what he and Kennedy have long believed.


From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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In this first year of his second term, President Donald Trump has claimed broad powers to unilaterally restructure much of how the U.S. government functions. Some of these assertions have gone completely unchallenged. Others have been litigated, and although lower courts have been skeptical of many of these efforts, the Supreme Court has been more approving. Trump has taken as much advantage of his new powers as he plausibly can, prosecuting his political enemies, firing independent agency heads, and dismantling federal agencies almost at a whim.

One salient question now is: When and if the Democrats return to power, how much of Trump’s damage can they undo? Let’s assume, for the moment, that the Supreme Court acts in good faith—that its views on presidential power are without partisan favor, and that it doesn’t arbitrarily invent carve-outs to rein in a Democratic president. What then?

Even with such (unlikely) parameters, the outcomes of this thought experiment suggest few opportunities for a Democratic president to make positive use of these novel presidential powers. Most of the powers that Trump asserts are either preclusive (preventing something from happening) or negating (ending something that is already in process). Few of them are positive powers, allowing the creation of something new, and even those are not permanent—the next Republican president could likely reverse most Democratic initiatives, sending the country into a retaliatory spiral.

Consider, as a first point of examination, the president’s newly established power to restructure the federal workforce, as in the layoffs of more than 1,300 State Department employees, the dismissal of inspectors general, and the firing of independent agency members. Most recently, the Supreme Court authorized Trump to continue with his plan to dismantle the Department of Education, despite a statute mandating its creation.

A future Democratic president, if so inclined, could seek to use that same authority to reverse some of what Trump has done. He could, for example, remove all of the Trump-appointed commissioners from the formerly independent agencies (such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board) and replace them with Democratic appointees whose views are more consistent with the president’s.

[Peter M. Shane: This is the presidency John Roberts has built]

This new president could also attempt to reconstitute institutions that have been decimated, such as Voice of America, and restore the many State Department bureaus and functions that have been terminated. He could, presumably, re-create the Department of Education and restore the workforce at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

Even if attempted restorations are legal, however, they may not succeed in practice. Firing experts is much easier than hiring them. And given the uncertainties that Trump has created, our best and brightest might not willingly take positions in the federal government. Who wants a job that might last only four years?

Meanwhile, across the government, a Democratic president could fire all of the employees who were hired by Trump and agreed to his loyalty requirements. The president could also use the same authority to significantly diminish the workforce at agencies whose functions he is less warm to. Many of the soon-to-be-hired ICE employees, for instance, might find themselves subject to a reduction in force under a new Democratic administration.

To be sure, the Supreme Court, as it is currently constituted, might find a rationale to block the dismantling of the TSA or the Department of Homeland Security. But very few functions at DHS are statutorily mandated at the current level of activity, and there is no legal distinction between presidential authority over DHS and, say, the Department of Education.

Likewise, a Democratic president could reinstate funding to several grant-making agencies that Trump has defunded. He could restore international-aid funding to USAID and authorize the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences to resume distributing grants to American recipients. All of the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health funding that has been pulled from basic research at major universities could be restored. Again, however, this is easier said than done—interrupted funding has likely permanently terminated some scientific inquiry and driven U.S.-based scientists overseas. International-aid programs that were suspended will be hard to rebuild.

Some recent policy changes are more readily reversible. Transgender soldiers could be welcomed back into the military, for example. Forts can be renamed, and the U.S. can rejoin international organizations. Here, too, the harmful effects can be mitigated, but the prospect of a return of Trumpism down the line will resonate for a long time in terms of substantial losses of expertise, stability, and trust.

Trump has also been aggressive in using federal funding as a means of encouraging his policy priorities in the private sector. Even when his efforts are resisted by the courts (such as his attempt to defund Harvard), his threats to federal funding have caused other institutions, such as the University of Pennsylvania, to change their policies or, in the case of the University of Virginia, dismiss their leaders. The same is true of his assault on big law firms; although his efforts have been legally stymied, their impact on major firms has already been significant.

What could a Democratic president do with this power? Most obviously, the president could flip Trump’s agenda on its head—denying federal funding to universities that lack DEI policies, for example, or ousting from federal contracts any conservative law firms that have provided pro bono services to disfavored causes, or whose partners played significant roles in the Trump administration.

Perhaps most dangerous, a Democrat could reverse the changes at the Department of Justice, not in an effort to make it apolitical but in the hopes of serving friends on the left and punishing the Trump-affiliated right. The president could dismiss any pending cases against allies (as Attorney General Pam Bondi recently did for a Utah doctor who issued fake COVID-vaccination cards) and use their power to punish opponents—White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and others could face the expense of criminal investigation. Conservative states such as Alabama and Texas could be investigated for civil-rights violations. Likewise, corporate officials who have caved to Trump, such as Shari Redstone of Paramount, have already been suggested as investigative targets. And the president could unilaterally issue subpoenas to almost any conservative-supporting institution—say, political consultants for evangelical-church organizations. A president could, perhaps, even attempt to end the nonprofit status of all religious organizations—though one suspects that this Supreme Court would not permit that step on religious-liberty grounds.

One of the most significant assertions of presidential power Trump has made is that he can nullify a law—that is, that he can dispense with enforcing it based on his authority as chief executive. The prime example of this is his refusal to enforce the congressionally mandated ban on TikTok on the specious ground that he has national-security power to do so. Under this theory, almost any regulatory requirement could be suspended for being inconsistent with national security. A future Democratic president might, for example, dispense with limits on labor-union organizing on the grounds that the workforce is essential to national competitiveness. Export or import licenses could be manipulated to fund military activities. Or, to parallel Trump as much as possible, penalties against favored European enterprises could be waived as part of “diplomatic negotiations,” and existing exemptions for disfavored nations could be ignored. The possibilities are almost as endless as a president’s imagination.

Ultimately, a Democratic president with the political will to use the levers of power left by Trump could at least partially restore the status quo ante and unilaterally impose certain changes as well—which a subsequent Republican president could then undo.

What lies ahead, then, is a new era of pendulum swings, replacing the stability of the postwar governing consensus. Ahead is a cycle of retributive prosecutions and whipsaw funding decisions. America may see entire Cabinet departments alternatively created and closed every four years while the presidency goes from policy to anti-policy—enforcing DEI in one administration, perhaps, and prohibiting it in the next. The country would, in effect, return to the time before the Pendleton Act, when the entire federal workforce turned over with each successive administration, rewarding cronyism at the expense of expertise.

[Aziz Huq: The Court’s liberals are trying to tell Americans something]

But in this new power arrangement, the Trump-aligned presidents will have the advantage.

It takes only 20 minutes to dismiss 1,300 State Department employees; their expertise cannot be replaced in 20 years, much less a single presidential term. Other departments and agencies can never be fully restored. To cite a mundane example, in the first six months of Trump’s second term, the DOJ has lost two-thirds of the experienced attorneys in the Federal Programs branch (which defends the government in civil court). Many resigned rather than have to defend Trump’s initiatives. That level of destruction cannot be quickly fixed.

What Trump and the Supreme Court have created is a ratchet of destruction. They have discovered that knocking things down is far easier than building them. And because the overall conservative project is to reduce the size of government, the structural advantage of destruction over creation is ineradicable. Even the most effective possible responses from a Democratic president (such as scaling down ICE to a bare minimum) come with their own set of problems.

All of this might have been different had the Supreme Court stepped in to diminish or negate these new assertions of presidential power, but it has not. And so the pendulum will swing back and forth, but the long-term trend is toward an ever-diminishing federal government that does whatever a conservative Court will permit it to do. The prospect is not just sad—it is terrifying.


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Finding love is hard. For a while, dating apps seemed to make it easier, putting a city’s worth of single people in the palm of your hand. But AI has cast a paranoid pall over what can already be a suboptimal experience. If you get a message that feels a little off, it is hard to know whether you are flirting with a bot—or just someone insecure enough to use ChatGPT as their own Cyrano de Bergerac. In frustration, my friend Lonni has started picking up women at the nail salon like it’s 1997.

Or, in the midst of an emotionally fraught conversation with a friend or family member, a text might read strangely. Is the person on the other end using AI to compose their messages about the fairness of Aunt Beryl’s will or the future of your relationship? The only way to find out is to call them or, better yet, meet them for a coffee.

Or maybe you want to learn something. Many of the internet’s best resources for getting everyday answers are quickly being inundated with the dubious wisdom of AI. YouTube, long a destination for real people who know how to repair toilets, make omelets, or deliver engaging cultural criticism, is getting less human by the day: The newsletter Garbage Day reports that four of May’s top 10 YouTube channels were devoted to AI-generated content. Recently, the fastest-growing channel featured AI babies in dangerous situations, for some reason. Reddit is currently overrun with AI-generated posts. Even if you never use ChatGPT or other large language models directly, the rest of the internet is sodden with their output and with real people parroting their hallucinations. Remember: LLMs are still often wrong about basic facts. It is enough to make a person crack a book.

The internet’s slide toward AI happened quickly and deliberately. Most major platforms have integrated the technology whether users want it or not, just at the moment that some AI photos and videos have become indistinguishable from reality, making it that much harder to trust anything online. Over time, LLMs might get more accurate, or people might simply get better at spotting their tells. In the meantime, a real possibility is that people will turn to the real world as a more trustworthy alternative. We’ve been telling one another to “touch grass” for years now, all while downloading app- and website-blocking software and lockable phone safes to try to wean ourselves off constant internet use. Maybe the AI-slop era will actually help us log off.

Even before AI started taking over, the internet had been getting less and less fun for a while. Users have been complaining about Google Search degrading for years. Opening an app to get a ride, order takeout, or find a vacation house can be just as expensive and effortful as taking a taxi, calling in a delivery order, or booking a hotel once was. Social media is a grotesque, tragedy-exploiting, MechaHitler-riddled inferno. Where going online once evoked a wide-eyed sense that the world was at our fingertips, now it requires wading into the slop like weary, hardened detectives, attempting to parse the real from the fake.

Nevertheless, as AI companies build browsers and devices that keep users tidily contained in an endless conversation with their own personalized AIs, some people may spend more time online than ever. Its accuracy aside, AI is already valued by many for entertainment, practical help, and emotional support. In some extreme cases, users are falling in love with chatbots or drifting into all-consuming spiritual delusions, but many more are simply becoming thoroughly addicted. The internet’s new era may push AI skeptics to spend less time online, while another group ramps up their AI-mediated screen time. That split might have implications for the internet’s culture—and the culture at large.

Even for those who run from the slop, the internet is already so woven into every part of our lives that going cold turkey is pretty much impossible. But as it gets worse, the real world starts to look pretty good in comparison, with its flesh-and-blood people with whom we can establish trust, less overwhelming number of consumer options, slower pace, and occasional moments of unpredictable delight that do not create financial profit for anyone.

I have been experimenting with being less online since 2022, when I quit Twitter. As soon as I got through withdrawal, I could feel my attention span start to expand. I started reading books again. Like a lot of people who left social media, more of my socializing moved over to group chats with people I actually know and in-person get-togethers: quick coffees and camping trips and dinner parties. Remember dinner parties?

Later, I quit shopping online, and soon realized that I didn’t need most of what I had been buying. The majority of the stuff I actually did need, I could get at the grocery store and my local hardware store, which, like most hardware stores, carries tons of things besides wrenches and bolts.

Online shopping might have once been more convenient than schlepping to a store, but I think that’s no longer true in many cases. Last winter, when my feet were chronically cold under my desk, I could have spent hours researching space heaters online, trying to guess which reviews were real and which were fake; placed an order online; possibly received a broken or substandard unit; and then had to package it back up and take it to some random third-party store in a return process designed to be annoying. Instead, I walked to the hardware store. “We have one that oscillates and one that doesn’t,” the guy in the vest told me. I took the one that oscillates. It works fine.

I am not, I hasten to say, completely offline. Like most people, my job requires me to use the internet. But I am online less. And I am happier for it. I get outside more. I garden and read more books. I still follow the news, but less compulsively. Spending some parts of my day without my attention being monetized or my data being harvested is a nice bonus. It makes me feel kind of like a line-dried bedsheet smells.

I find myself dreaming about additional returns to offline existence. I live in Portland, Oregon, where we still have lots of movie theaters and even a video-rental place. I could—I might—cancel all my streaming services and just rent stuff and watch movies at the theater. I could even finally assuage my guilt over the lousy way music-streaming services pay musicians and avoid being fooled by AI bands by going back to CDs and records—and by seeing more artists play live. I don’t think I’ll be the only one reorienting toward physical media and physical presence: books and records, live theater and music, brick-and-mortar stores with knowledgeable salespeople, one long conversation with one real person instead of 300 short interactions with internet strangers who might be robots.

Tech companies may assume that the public is so habituated—or even addicted—to doing everything online that people will put up with any amount of risk or unpleasantness to continue to transact business and amuse themselves on the internet. But there is a limit to what at least some of us will take, especially when the alternative has real appeal. One recent study shows that disconnecting your phone from the internet creates a mood boost on par with pharmaceutical antidepressants. And if more people explore offline alternatives—at least until this whole generative-AI explosion works itself out—it could create a feedback loop, livening up cities and communities, which then become a more tempting alternative to screens. What the internet will become in a post-AI world is anybody’s guess. Maybe it’ll finally become something transcendent. Or maybe, as the conspiracy theory goes, it is already dead.


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Donald Trump has been bullying Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell—calling him “too late,” insulting his intelligence, and trying to gin up a case that Powell spent too much on renovations of the agency’s headquarters as a pretext for firing him. The New York Times recently observed that the two men have a “toxic relationship,” which is true, as far as it goes.

But the actual reason for the president’s hostility is neither alleged cost overruns nor Powell’s ability to manage the business cycle. Trump doesn’t think Powell is bad at his job. He objects to the job itself.

The Federal Reserve’s assignment is to steward the long-term interests of the U.S. economy—even at the occasional expense of short-term pain—by balancing the twin objectives of suppressing inflation and managing the unemployment rate. Trump, however, believes that the Fed’s objective should be to speed up the economy under Republican administrations and slow it down under Democratic ones. To the extent that the central bank balances unemployment and inflation, he would like to see the pain of high unemployment shifted onto Democratic administrations so that Republican ones can benefit from rapid economic growth.

Trump’s philosophy on monetary policy is easy to define because he has been publicly vilifying the Fed for at least a decade and a half. His opinions shift, but they shift predictably between two forms, with no relationship to economic circumstances. If the president is a Democrat, Trump complains that interest rates are too low. If the president is a Republican, he complains that they’re too high.

[David Frum: Trump needs someone to blame]

During the Obama years, the U.S. economy featured low inflation and elevated unemployment as it recovered from the Great Recession. Trump nonetheless spent that time complaining about low interest rates. “The Fed’s reckless monetary policies will cause problems in the years to come,” he tweeted in 2011. “The Fed has to be reined in or we will soon be Greece.” Five years later, with inflation still below target and the job market still recovering, he was still at it. “They’re keeping the rates down so that everything else doesn’t go down,” Trump complained in 2016. “We have a very false economy.”

Then Trump became president, and abruptly reversed his position. “I do like a low-interest-rate policy, I must be honest with you,” he told The Wall Street Journal in April 2017. As the Federal Reserve began raising rates, which it generally does when the economy is running hot, Trump denounced those moves. He pushed repeatedly for lower rates, even when the economy was at its peak. “I think they should drop rates and get rid of quantitative tightening,” he said in 2019. “You would see a rocket ship.”

At that time, rates were historically low. That changed after the pandemic sent prices soaring in 2021. Did Trump push back on the Fed’s decision to raise rates to combat inflation? Of course not, because Joe Biden was now president. Last October, Trump denounced Powell for easing interest rates by half a percentage point. “It was too big a cut, and everyone knows that was a political maneuver that they tried to do before the election,” he claimed. Almost immediately after winning his second term, however, he resumed his public drumbeat for cheaper money, a demand he has now backed with the threat of firing Powell.

Whether Trump will follow through on that threat remains unclear, as does whether the courts would allow him to. Even if Trump eventually installs a more pliant figure in Powell’s place (his term as Fed chair expires next year), experts question whether that would actually lead to reduced interest rates. If the Fed loses credibility in the market, borrowing costs could paradoxically get even higher.

[Annie Lowrey: Trump is flirting with economic disaster]

Trump does not appear to have any master plan for how the Fed should function in a world in which he has compromised its independence. For one thing, he doesn’t believe that independence is possible. Laced through his commentary about the Fed over the years is a belief that its commitment to apolitical economic stewardship is a facade hiding naked partisanship. “Janet Yellen is highly political, and she’s not raising rates for a very specific reason,” he said a decade ago: “because Obama told her not to, because he wants to be out playing golf in a year from now and he wants to be doing other things, and he doesn’t want to see a big bubble burst during his administration.”

Trump offered the same diagnosis when Powell was preparing to cut rates last year. “I think he’s political,” he told Fox News. “I think he’s going to do something to probably help the Democrats, I think, if he lowers interest rates.”

Just as Trump is convinced that every president has secretly deployed the Justice Department for their own partisan ends, he believes that monetary policy is nothing but a way to win elections. Trying to advance the national interest, rather than some venal end goal, is a foreign concept. Economic analysts are now trying to predict what would happen under a regime in which the Fed chair is merely following the president’s short-term whims. Trump’s convictions begin with the premise that this is the world that has always existed.


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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.

Updated at 7.44 p.m. ET

President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seem to be on a mission to erase women from the top ranks of the U.S. armed forces. Last week, they took another step along this path by removing the first female head of the United States Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland.

The Naval Academy was founded in 1845, but didn’t admit its first class of women until 1976. The head of the school is known as the superintendent, and Annapolis would not get its first female admiral in that position until 2024. Now the first woman to serve as the “supe” has been reassigned and replaced by a man, and for the first time in the academy’s history, the role went to a Marine. Last week, the Navy removed Vice Admiral Yvette Davids from her post and replaced her with Lieutenant General Michael Borgschulte. (Maybe Hegseth thinks Marines are more lethal, to use his favorite Pentagon worship word.) Davids has been sent to the Pentagon, where she will be a deputy chief of naval operations, a senior—but relatively invisible—position.

No reason was given for reassigning Davids. Superintendents typically serve for three to five years, but Davids was pulled from the job after 18 months. (A short tenure can be a sign of some sort of problem; for what it’s worth, the secretary of the Navy, John Phelan—who has never served in the Navy and has no background in national-defense issues—offered rote praise when announcing her de facto firing as the supe.)

Trump and Hegseth have been on a firing spree throughout the military, especially when it comes to removing women from senior positions. This past winter, the administration fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first female chief of naval operations; Admiral Linda Fagan, the first female Coast Guard commandant; and Lieutenant General Jennifer Short, who was serving as the senior military assistant to the secretary of defense, all within weeks of one another. I taught for many years at the U.S. Naval War College, where I worked under its first female president, Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield. In 2023, she became the U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee—and then she was fired in April, apparently in part because of a presentation she gave on Women’s Equality Day 10 years ago.

At this point, women have been cleared out of all of the military’s top jobs. They are not likely to be replaced by other women: Of the three dozen four-star officers on active duty in the U.S. armed forces, none is female, and none of the administration’s pending appointments for senior jobs even at the three-star level is a woman.

Some observers might see a pattern here.

Discerning this pattern does not exactly require Columbo-level sleuthing. Hegseth’s antipathy toward women in the armed forces was well documented back in 2024 by none other than Hegseth himself. In his book The War on Warriors, Hegseth decried what he believed was “social engineering” by the American left: “While the American people had always rejected the radical-feminist so-called ‘Equal Rights Amendment,’ Team Obama could fast-track their social engineering through the military’s top-down chain of command.” (This is probably why Hegseth also fired the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General C. Q. Brown, who is a Black man; Brown was let go for ostensibly being too interested in promoting diversity in the armed forces.)

Not that the secretary hates women, you should understand. Some of his best friends … well, as he put it in his book last year: “It’s not that individual women can’t be courageous, ambitious, and honorable. I know many phenomenal female soldiers. The problem is that the Left needs every woman to be as successful as every man, so they’ve redefined success in a counterproductive way.”

I’m sure that the more than 225,000 American women who serve their country in uniform are relieved to know that they, too, can be courageous, and all that other great stuff. But Hegseth seems to be implying that many women in today’s military might have had their fitness reports massaged “in a counterproductive way” to meet some sort of “woke” quota. And that, you see, is why the U.S. military’s most-senior female officers had to be removed: They were clearly part of some affirmative-action scheme. Thank you for your service, ladies, but let’s remember that the Pentagon’s E-Ring is for the men.

Oddly, Hegseth has no problem with “social engineering” as long as it’s engineering something closer to 1955 than 2025. Indeed, he writes, the military “has always been about social engineering—forging young men (mostly) with skills, discipline, pride, and a brotherhood.” One might think that the goal is also to instill respect for one’s comrades, regardless of gender, and to defend the country and honor the Constitution, but Hegseth is more worried about what he fears is the distracting influence of women in the military. “Men and women are different,” he writes, “with men being more aggressive.” (I read this in Cliff Clavin’s voice: “Yes, Diane … hold on to your hat, too, because the very letters DNA are an acronym for the words Dames are Not Aggressive.”) Hegseth goes on: “Men act differently toward women than they do other men. Men like women and are distracted by women. They also want to impress, and protect, women.”

In other words, after forging these neo-Spartans with some of the finest training from the most powerful military the world has ever known, Americans still must worry that these carbon-steel warriors, ready to do battle with any number of global menaces, might have their “lethality” sabotaged by the fluttering eyelashes and shapely gams of their sisters in arms.

I was teaching senior officers, male and female, from all branches of the armed forces when Hegseth was still in high school. His view of women in the U.S. military would be beneath serious comment were he not, through the malpractice of the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate, the sitting secretary of defense. Instead of defending the nation—or keeping track of the security of his own communications—he is trying to make the American military inhospitable to half of the nation’s population.

As Nora Bensahel, a scholar of civil-military relations at Johns Hopkins University, told me, the firing of Davids and other women “is deliberately sending a chilling message to the women who are already serving in uniform, and to girls who may be thinking about doing so, that they are not welcome—even though the military would not be able to meet its recruiting numbers without those very same women.”

Today is my late mother’s birthday. She enlisted in the Air Force and served during the Korean War. She came from a poor family, and had to leave the military when her father was dying. But she was deeply proud of her service in America’s armed forces; I remember watching her march in uniform in hometown parades. She would be heartbroken—and furious—to know that more than a half century after her service, the message to the women of the United States from the current commander in chief and his secretary of defense amounts to a sexist warning: Feel free to join the military and serve your country—but know your place.

Related:

The backdoor way that Pete Hegseth could keep women out of combatTrump’s new favorite general

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

What Trump’s feud with Jerome Powell is really aboutTrump’s social-media habit is getting weirder.The hype man of Trump’s mass deportations

Today’s News

House Speaker Mike Johnson blocked a potential floor vote on the release of additional files in the Jeffrey Epstein case until at least September.The Trump administration released more than 240,000 pages of long-sealed FBI files on Martin Luther King Jr. last night, prompting warnings from his family about the potential misuse of surveillance records to distort his legacy.President Donald Trump met with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. at the White House and agreed to a trade deal that imposes a 19 percent tariff on goods from the Philippines.

Evening Read

Photo of a narrow street in Corfu’s Old Town, with laundry hanging from above. A narrow street in Corfu’s Old Town Alice Zoo for The Atlantic

Chasing le Carré in Corfu

By Honor Jones

Black dress, pink coat, thick beige stockings. This is the third time I’ve seen her. She walks down the middle of the street outside my window, her head bent forward under its helmet of grandmother hair. She carries her handbag like a briefcase with a bomb in it. She has the look of someone whose friends are all dead.

I saw her first outside Saint Spyridon Church, lighting a candle. And then again in Spianada Square, among the scootering children. I lean out the window to watch her disappear around the corner. Maybe there’s nothing suspicious about it. Corfu is a small city, on a small island in Greece. From my hotel room I can see the green edge of the cricket pitch where, in John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy, the Czech agent, Axel, chased Magnus Pym in slow, limping circles.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Medicaid cuts will be a disaster for ERs.Democracy upside downTrump is stringing Ukraine along.AI slop might finally cure our internet addiction.Like AC for the outdoorsAlexandra Petri: Are you laughing yet?

Culture Break

A still from Jurassic Park showing a T-rex approaching a man Universal Pictures / Alamy

Watch. Stephanie Bai asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors to name the rare movies that are actually better than the books they’re based on, and their picks might surprise you.

Read. Stephanie Wambugu’s novel, Lonely Crowds, explores the emotional complexity of a childhood friendship as it stretches into adulthood, Bekah Waalkes writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

A photo of Tom's mother wearing a US button Courtesy of Tom Nichols

I hope that readers of the Daily won’t mind a personal reminiscence. My mother used to tell me, when I was a boy in the 1960s, that if any other kid used the old insult “Your mother wears Army boots,” I should always correct them: “Air Force boots.” Here’s a picture of my mother, barely an adult, in her uniform. She joined alongside her sister, and both of them went to basic training in Texas—at that time, the farthest from home my mother had ever been. She later was assigned to do office work at an Air Force base in Massachusetts. Like other poor kids from rough backgrounds, she found order and a home, however briefly, in the military, and was proud of her service ’til the end of her life.

— Tom

A photo of Tom Nichols's mom's gravestone Courtesy of Tom Nichols

This article originally misidentified who was responsible for firing Admiral Linda Fagan.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Summer weekends in America are good for lots of things: baseball games, cookouts, farmers’ markets, sipping a bev next to a lake. Or, if you’re President Donald Trump: crashing out on social media in hopes of distracting the nation from nonstop coverage of his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump is an inveterate poster, known for his erratic style and late-night tirades. But over the weekend, as the world refused to move on from his administration’s bizarre handling of the Epstein files—which has led segments of his base to completely melt down—Trump went on a posting spree that was alarming, even by his own standards.

On Sunday alone, Trump posted 33 times on Truth Social, sending off 20 posts between 6:46 and 8:53 p.m. eastern. He demanded that the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians revert to their original names (the Redskins and Indians, respectively), and posted an AI-generated video of Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office set to the song “Y.M.C.A.,” by the Village People. Trump also shared a contextless, grainy video that looks like it was scraped from some viral social-media post. It includes no captions and features 25 stitched-together clips, set to music, of people doing wild or dangerous stunts: A woman appears to catch a charging cobra with her bare hands, a man does a forward flip from one moving skateboard to another, various people contort their bodies in strange ways, a dude stands on the footrests of a moving dirt bike.

Even some of Trump’s die-hard fans on Truth Social seemed caught off guard by the video, struggling to draw a connection between it and Trump’s politics. “Was expecting a video of you at the end!” one top commenter wrote. (A spokesperson for the White House did not answer my questions about why the commander in chief was posting an extreme-sports highlight reel on Sunday night.)

The bizarre video was immediately recognizable to me as the type of garbage that clogs the feeds of many people who still use Facebook, a platform that is filled with inscrutable slop posted by spammers and content farmers. By the early 2020s—before generative-AI images took over—Facebook had already transformed into a vast wasteland of low-quality memes, repurposed videos, and strange pages dedicated to clips like “Shelter Pit Bull Made His Bed Every Day Until a Family Adopted Him.” This type of content fits in a category that I have taken to calling “soft-brain scrolling.” It falls somewhere between probably harmless and not nutritious; it’s mostly low-quality algorithmic arbitrage that helps click farmers make a buck. Your confused relatives seem to love it.

That the account belonging to the president of the United States is now posting to the entire world like a Facebook Uncle, though, is a troubling sign. (It’s unclear if Trump does all of the direct publishing himself, though The Washington Post reported last month that aides have been surprised by messages posted to his account in the wee hours of the morning. In the past, he would reportedly dictate and edit his own tweets, down to the odd capitalization of specific words.) He’s exhibited milder forms of Facebook Uncle syndrome for years now—even in 2016, Trump would retweet white-supremacist accounts, angrily live-tweet Saturday Night Live, and publicly congratulate himself—but the behavior appears to be getting worse.

The best analogue for this moment may be Trump’s online raging after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. During this period, Trump was temporarily banned from mainstream platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. He launched Truth Social in 2022 and began making and sharing more extreme posts, including hundreds from accounts promoting QAnon conspiracy theories. In one day in 2022, he reportedly posted 50 separate times—in many cases about how the 2020 election was supposedly stolen. The tone this past weekend felt similar, with Trump posting an AI-generated image of officials from the Obama administration and former FBI Director James Comey in orange prison jumpsuits, arrayed in a *Brady Bunch–*style grid. The center of the image reads “The Shady Bunch.” Along the same lines, Trump also posted a caps-laden message to his followers last week, demanding that they move on from the Epstein “Hoax” and calling it “bullshit” from the “Lunatic Left.” He is lashing out, on the defensive, and seemingly unable, or at best unwilling, to control his screen time.

Trump has always loved to post, obviously, and even the generative-AI stuff isn’t new, exactly. Last year, during his presidential campaign, Trump fully embraced the technology as a propaganda tool, posting and reposting images of himself praying, Taylor Swift fans endorsing him en masse (that was before the real Taylor Swift endorsed his opponent), and AI Kamala Harris speaking in front of a hammer and sickle flag. As the Post reported in its article about Trump’s social-media use, in the first four and a half months of this term, Trump “posted to Truth Social over 2,200 times—more than three times the number of tweets he sent in the same period in 2017.”

Unlike the material we saw over the weekend, a lot of Trump’s posts during that period were clear political statements and directives. During Trump’s tariff vacillations, which caused markets to plummet, he posted on Truth Social that Americans should “BE COOL” and not become “PANICANS,” an invented term for people who expressed genuine concern that Trump was destroying the economy. (MAGA influencers tried and failed to make that one stick.) Trump also used his account to threaten world leaders. For instance, he lashed out at Colombian President Gustavo Petro over his attempts to block deportation flights. (Petro backed down.) In May, he used the account to admonish Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggesting that “if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia,” and that Putin was “playing with fire!” His posting in the lead-up to bombing Iran was another example of Trump forcing the world to hang on his every word; eventually, he announced the strike via Truth Social. In all cases, Trump was posting, however maniacally, from a position of power and demonstrating influence.

Not so recently. The week that preceded the Truth Social binge on Sunday may very well have been the most frustrating of Trump’s second term, not only because the Epstein scandal threatened to tear apart his MAGA coalition, but because Trump could not persuade the usual people to drop the story. As my colleagues Ashley Parker and Jonathan Lemire reported over the weekend, “the limits of his power over normal allies became evident” as Trump failed to get Rupert Murdoch or The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, Emma Tucker, to stop the paper from publishing a story about a lewd 50th-birthday letter that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein.

Trump had to deal with frustrations like these during his first term, when he was often checked and handled by career politicians and beset by press leaks from anonymous staffers, and faced constant backlash from the media and Silicon Valley. But Trump’s second term has been different. He’s surrounded mostly by true believers and sycophants and able to engage somewhat freely in various forms of government dismantling and corruption. Numerous media companies have bowed to Trump or appeared to soften their adversarial stance. At Trump’s inauguration, Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives stood behind him, offering a tacit show of support for his administration. The vibe had shifted in Trump’s favor, and he behaved with impunity. Yet the Epstein case has been a genuine hurdle. Republicans are seemingly desperate to make the story go away, so much so that Speaker Mike Johnson shut the House down early to avoid “political games” and block any potential votes calling for the release of files pertaining to Epstein.

One can tell a lot about how Trump feels about his own power and influence by the way he’s posting. There are multiple ways to interpret Trump’s weekend posts. The most basic is that Trump’s long-standing obsession with AI slop and memes—working in overdrive right now—is a useful propaganda tool. Before he needed a grassroots meme army to provide memes; now polished and bespoke Trump slop is always just a ChatGPT query away, no genuine enthusiasm required.

A second reading is to see Trump’s affinity for reposting fan art as Executive Cope. Here, the slop is a way for Trump to escape and imagine the world as he’d like it to be. In slop world, Trump is not embattled, getting screamed at by his supporters over what looks to them like a guilty cover-up on behalf of a pedophile. Instead, he’s arresting Obama. It’s pure fan fiction that depicts Trump having power in a moment when, perhaps, he feels somewhat powerless.

A third reading of Trump’s Truth Social posts—especially his reposting of strange viral Facebook garbage and angry culture-war stuff railing against “woke” sports-team names—suggests that these posts aren’t part of any kind of strategy or coping mechanism, but examples of a person who is addled and raging at things he feels he has no control over. For years, people have offered anecdotes that Trump behaves online like some isolated, elderly people who have been radicalized by their social-media feeds—in 2017, Stephen Colbert memorably likened Trump to America’s first racist grandpa. His recent posting certainly fits this template. And paired with some of Trump’s other cognitive stumbles—he seemingly forgot last week that he had appointed Fed Chair Jerome Powell—it all starts to feel more concerning.

In this context, Trump’s Truth Social page is little more than a rapid-response account that illustrates a world that doesn’t actually exist: one in which POTUS looks like a comic-book hero, is universally beloved, and exerts his executive authority to jail or silence anyone who disagrees with him. This sort of revenge fantasy would be sad coming from anyone. That it is coming from the president of the United States, a man obsessed with retribution, who presides over a government that is enthusiastically arresting and jailing immigrants in makeshift camps, is terrifying.

All of this points to what my colleague Tom Nichols noted almost exactly one year ago, when Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination: The president “is emotionally unwell.” In describing Trump’s speech that night, Nichols said that his long, often pointless digressions “were the ramblings of a man who has serious psychological problems. All of it was on display last night: rage, paranoia, pettiness, desolating selfishness.”

The same explanation could be applied perfectly to Trump’s Truth Social posts over the weekend. Trump called for Senator Adam Schiff to be prosecuted. He appeared pathologically aggrieved—spending part of his Saturday night posting a detailed infographic intended to debunk the supposed “Russia hoax” from an election that happened almost nine years ago. (Propaganda experts say this is an attempt by Trump and his administration to rewrite history.) He posted a fake mug shot of Obama. And, on Sunday morning, he pecked out a 103-word message congratulating himself on his first six months in office. Rage, paranoia, pettiness, and desolating selfishness: Trump appears consumed more and more by an online world that offers him the chance to live out the fantasy of the unilateral power and adulation that he craves.

Talking about Trump and social media is complicated because, unlike most users, Trump can post ridiculous things, transform news cycles, and force the world to react to his posts. But lately, his posts are not having the desired effect. It’s possible that what observers witnessed this weekend is a tipping point of sorts. Trump’s posts, instead of influencing reality, suggest that the president is retreating from it entirely.


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All Praise Shade (www.theatlantic.com)
submitted 3 days ago by paywall@ibbit.at to c/theatlantic@ibbit.at
 
 

Every year, heat takes more lives than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. The fatalities can sometimes go unnoticed, perhaps because the danger is invisible: There’s no twister that uproots a neighborhood and no flood that sucks it underwater, nor billions of dollars in property damage. Instead, heat’s imprint is seen in empty streets, work slowdowns, cognitive decline, and hospital bills. When autumn arrives and temperatures relent, heat leaves no discernable trace.

The Earth is getting hotter. In many places on the planet, summer is already two to three weeks longer than in the 1950s. By the end of the century, the warm season in the United States could last six months, and extreme temperatures could force us to spend much of it indoors. Supercharged heat waves will settle over cities for weeks at a time and cause many people to die. Others will suffer heart attacks, kidney disease, and brain damage. What we now call winter will be a brief, two-month interregnum that feels more like spring.

Book jacket This article was adapted from Sam Bloch’s new book, Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource.

Reducing society’s consumption of fossil fuels is necessary for preventing worse-yet climate change. But even if every single power source becomes a renewable one and we stop emitting carbon, the planet’s surface won’t start cooling. The temperature will continue to rise for a few years before gradually leveling off. It will take “many, many centuries,” NASA estimates, to end the global-greenhouse effect. It is a sobering truth that cutting emissions isn’t enough. We also need to figure out how to live on a new Earth.

What if the key to that life is older than civilization itself? We need to manage heat to live. And we have an effective and democratic way of doing it: shade.

[Read: Shade will make or break American cities]

Shade makes long waits for the bus more comfortable. Shade helps keep farmworkers safe when they harvest fruits and vegetables under an unforgiving sun. And shade cools urban environments, improving residents’ chance of surviving blazing summers.

“We all know that cities are cooler when we have shade, but we’re not really planning for it,” V. Kelly Turner, an urban-planning and geography professor at UCLA, said on CNN. “In the future, that’s something that cities are going to need to do, is intentionally think about: What does shade infrastructure look like?”

Turner believes that shade could be America’s next long-term investment in public health. What safe drinking water and clean air were to the 20th century, shade could be to the climate-changed 21st. Scientific models bear her out. If we can get emissions under control and put the planet on a path to moderate warming, then by 2050, getting out of the sun could be the difference between unsafe heat and a livable environment.

One obvious way the planet can get more shade is more trees. We evolved in forests, and some of our oldest myths and stories unfold under their canopies. Hippocrates taught medicine under a plane tree, and Ovid found bittersweet beauty in a laurel’s leaves. The Mesopotamian goddess Inanna slept under a miraculous poplar whose shadow never moved, and Buddha found enlightenment by meditating under a ficus tree. Christian and Muslim heavens alike are cooled by trees’ perpetual shade.

Tree shade is where public space was born and civic identities are forged. In hot climates, people naturally prefer to confer, conduct commerce, and gossip out of the sun’s permanent glare. They spend far more time in shady parks or temple courtyards than in sunny ones. They linger and relax, and that engenders more interactions, and possibly even stimulates social cohesion. It’s true in arid cities, humid regions, and even temperate zones with short summers. People want to be in shade. They muse longer, pray more peacefully, and find strength to walk farther.

[Read: How climate change is killing cities]

Perhaps because we’ve become so adept at cooling inside spaces with air conditioning, we’ve forgotten the importance of cooling outside spaces, too. There is no technology that cools the outdoors as effectively as a tree. These communal parasols are also misting machines that dissipate heat. It’s hard to feel that effect under one or two of them, but get enough trees together and an urban summer can be as fresh as a rural spring, a feat with major implications for energy use and public health.

Where tree-planting isn’t viable, cities must invest in other types of public infrastructure that cast shade. Throughout Los Angeles, on streets that are too cramped and paved over to support green canopies, the preferred protections aren’t arboreal but artificial, such as the pop-up tents of taqueros and the cheerful rainbow umbrellas of fruit vendors. In Phoenix, a desert city that struggles to nourish an urban forest, common tools include sidewalk screens, frilly metal filters, and soaring photovoltaic canopies. These interventions are more effective than many might expect. Ariane Middel, an Arizona State University urban-climate researcher who runs the school’s Sensable Heatscapes and Digital Environments (SHaDE) Lab, surveyed students and staff as they strolled through the shadows that solar panels cast on a Tempe campus thoroughfare. More than any change in ambient temperature, humidity, or wind, the mere presence of shade was the only significant predictor of outdoor comfort.

Shade’s effectiveness is a function of physics. It depends on the material properties of the sun-blocking objects that cast it—how they reflect, absorb, and transmit different wavelengths of energy in sunlight. It depends on the intensity of that light and the extent of the shade thrown. (A telephone pole that casts a perfect shadow on your body does nothing to stop the solar heating of the surfaces around you.) And it depends on the biology of the person who receives it. Middel has come as close as anyone to adding up all these factors. She praises humble umbrellas and plastic sails, because their shade feels like taking 30 degrees off the afternoon sun, which is about as good as shade cast by a tree. Ultimately, she finds that a city itself can offer the most relief in the shadows of arcaded sidewalks and looming skyscrapers.

The Greek philosopher Onesicritus taught that shade stunts growth, a belief that presaged a modern fixation on the healthiness of sunlight. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, doctors and public-health advocates feared that darkness itself caused the poor health of urban slum-dwellers. It was a vector of disease, where contagions bred and spread, and the murkiness also encouraged licentiousness and other urban vices. Some literally believed sunlight was the best disinfectant. Solar codes were written into urban plans, and new materials and technologies allowed architects to design brighter buildings flooded with natural light.

[Read: America’s climate boomtowns are waiting]

Now we’re beginning to see how a solar fetish may be maladaptive. In New York, a recent summer saw a throng of neighborhood activists protest the construction of a 16-story office tower, with signs to Save Our Light. They did this while huddling in the shadow of another building.

As intense heat bears down, we have to see shade as a basic human right. We have forgotten that shade is a natural resource. We don’t grasp its importance, and we don’t appreciate its promise for a better future. Loggers and farmers cut down forests, forcing animals to flee and land to turn fallow. Engineers ignore time-honored methods of keeping out heat, locking us into mechanical cooling systems that fail during blackouts. And urban planners denude shady parks and pave neighborhoods with heat-sucking roads, only to drive us mad with the infernal conditions. But shade is a path to a better future—if we just learn to value it again, and design for it in the places we live.

This article was adapted from Sam Bloch’s new book, Shade: The Promise Of A Forgotten Natural Resource.


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Every so often, Donald Trump sends an encouraging signal to Ukraine, despite his long pattern of deference toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last week, the president of the United States allowed the transfer of a number of American Patriot anti-missile systems through Germany—a move that will strengthen Ukraine’s air defense at a dangerous time. The Ukrainians are so pleased with this offer that President Volodymyr Zelensky has floated an expanded military relationship, wherein Ukraine would share its drone expertise with Americans in exchange for further arms sales.

Then again, Ukrainian air defenses are overstretched in part because of another recent decision Trump made: As he was agreeing last week to allow the transfer of more Patriots to Ukraine—at Europe’s expense—he also gave Putin about 50 days to come to the negotiating table before the White House will consider new sanctions against Russia. In essence, Trump gave the Russian dictator the rest of the summer to continue his bombing campaign against Ukrainian cities.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine’s warning to the world’s other military forces]

Recognizing that supporting a democratic Ukraine against Putin’s invasion is in America’s interest, the Biden administration had donated weapons to Ukraine, rather than expecting to be paid for them. Ukraine, which needs supplies to continue its fight, has no real choice but to keep seeking the White House’s favor. But Trump seems to be stringing the Ukrainians along. The equipment he plans to furnish will not be enough to enable the Ukrainians to win. Whatever help he provides appears less decisive than the obstacles he puts in their way.

For months now, the Russians have spurned any real negotiations with Ukraine and ramped up their bombardment of Ukrainian cities—killing and maiming civilians on almost a nightly basis. In response to this, Trump has regularly decried Putin’s actions, but resolutely refused to take any concrete steps himself to rein the Russian dictator in.

[Thomas Wright]: Putin needs to believe he can’t win

As Russia launched an ever-larger number of missiles and drones at Ukrainian cities, many in Congress were eager to approve crippling secondary sanctions that would have all but prevented outside powers from doing business with Russia. These measures were included in a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal—and co-sponsored by more than 80 other members of the senior chamber. It was also a bill that stood to gain quick passage in the House—if Trump would allow House Speaker Mike Johnson bring it to a vote. Trump even indicated that his wife, Melania, was appalled at the destruction that Ukrainians keep suffering. “I go home. I tell the first lady, ‘You know, I spoke to Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation.’ She said, ‘Oh, really? Another city was just hit,’” Trump said last week.

But instead of moving firmly against Putin, Trump gave his 50-day ultimatum—which may not even be an ultimatum if, in the end, Trump backs off his threat to impose “very severe tariffs” on Russia. As nationalist commentators in Russia quickly understood, Trump was offering Putin a great strategic gift. In part because Trump has refused to add new sanctions after his inauguration in January, and suppliers have found ways around existing ones, Russia can now manufacture more missiles. After dark, Russian forces are bombarding Ukrainian cities with a growing number of missiles and drones—the record for one night, set earlier this month, is more than 700, a quantity that would have been inconceivable in 2022, at the start of the full-scale invasion. And German General Christian Freuding, head of the Ukraine Situational Center at the German Ministry of Defense, recently said that Russia wants to be able to launch 2,000 drones in a single attack.

[Nataliya Gumenyuk]: Ukraine’s new way of war

Even if Ukraine gains access to greater defensive firepower, the country almost certainly won’t be able to shoot down all of the incoming munitions in attacks of that size, and the toll in Ukrainian lives seems sure to mount.

On the ground, Russia can step up its efforts to take one tiny parcel of Ukrainian land after the next—even at the cost of sending tens of thousands more of its own soldiers to their doom. If Trump genuinely has plans to increase pressure on Russia after his 50-day grace period expires, he’s essentially giving Putin reason to set a goal of conquering as much territory as possible before coming to any peace talks.

At the end of a 50-day rampage, the Russians could even decide to take up the terrible “peace” deal that the Trump administration floated a few months ago. This included letting the Russians keep almost every piece of Ukrainian land they have seized, granting U.S. recognition of Russian control over Crimea, depriving Ukraine of any hope of NATO membership, and withholding any meaningful security guarantees whatsoever.

Having done everything Trump has asked, having negotiated in good faith, having kissed up to the president, having avoided attacking Russian civilian targets partially out of deference to the U.S., the Ukrainians now see the White House basically guaranteeing the Russians a sanctions-free summer to commit any atrocities they want.

Under these circumstances, Zelensky’s offer to share drone expertise is a gamble, given Trump’s apparent sympathy for Putin. Hoping to entice his American counterpart into providing reliable support, the Ukrainian leader previously offered the United States an interest in his country’s mineral wealth. The deal is in effect, but Trump’s support remains fickle at best, because supporting a free people in their struggle against a foreign dictatorship is no longer a priority for the United States.


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Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.

Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear James” in your inbox.

Dear James,

I’ve been a lifelong participant in various recreational sports. Candidly, I’m not a great athlete, but I’ve always been enthusiastic. Now, in my late 50s, I’ve gotten especially serious about tennis. Sometimes, I play five times a week. I’ve committed to improving and have taken group and individual lessons. I play in competitive United States Tennis Association leagues specific to my age and ability, and play pickup games whenever I can.

But I realize that when I play competitively, I have a negative, lingering, outsize reaction to losing. When I lose, I try to reframe it less as a defeat and more as What did I learn today? Yet my mind leads me back to despair and rumination on my mistakes.

Logically, I know that if I were to win these competitions, I would most likely be bumped up to the next level. And at that point, I would probably be the weakest player in a higher level of competition—leading right back, with even more frequency, to despair. Some athletes joyfully stick with their sports for a lifetime and don’t seem to be derailed by losing. What am I missing? How can I develop a healthier relationship to defeat?

Dear Reader,

I don’t think you’re missing anything. We all lose in the end—that’s the second law of thermodynamics. And every intervening loss, be it in business, love, or tennis, simply reminds us of this elemental fact. Is it even possible to have a healthy relationship with losing? I’m not sure it is, any more than it’s possible to have a healthy relationship with food poisoning. Certain human experiences simply resist philosophy.

My grandfather, who had an ego like a piece of Roman statuary, enjoyed a game of chess. Especially in his final years: late-night, booze-fueled and booze-fuddled, with the occasional, accidental knocking-over of pieces. He enjoyed it—if he won. If he didn’t win, he would take it as a melancholy comment on his old age, as evidence that his mind was going at last. And then he would slump, and brood loudly upon his failing faculties. So, as his opponent, you had to lose. But you couldn’t lose too easily or obviously; fuzzy as he was, he would pick up on that. You had to lose while looking as if you were trying to win. (It often fell to my brother, a teenager at the time and—luckily for my grandfather—an excellent chess player, to perform this complex operation.)

What’s my point? Good question. I think my point is that losing is never just losing. In your case, losing at tennis connects to what? An ever-present and not particularly welcome sense of your limitations as a player? A whisper of advancing decrepitude? Some other, deeper, darker thing? When I lose, I feel like the cosmos is against me. And I’m right.

So forget about being a good loser. Work on the comeback: That’s my advice. Doomed as we may be to entropy, we humans also possess nearly idiotic capacities for self-renewal. We bounce back! Soak up the gall of losing, absorb the horrible information, feel it to the full, go there—and then rebound, with superb elasticity. Save your energy for that.

Anticipating a National Magazine Award for this column,

James

By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.


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You all remember comedy? That thing from the 1980s where you hate your wife? Well, it’s back! We’re in a golden age of comedy now where everyone can say exactly what they want, free of the fear of censorship, except by the government. Donald Trump has made comedy legal again!

  Remember, censorship is when people don’t laugh at your jokes. Freedom is when your late-night show gets permanently taken off the air for financial reasons (16 million of them) and the president expresses his approval. Comedy is great again, which is to say, it’s funny only if the president says so. Jokes are back, baby! Airplane travel is the worst! Take my wife, please. She’s a green-card holder who’s been in the country for 25 years! Knock, knock! Who’s there? Sorry, they won’t identify themselves, but they say they’re here about the op-ed.

  The Norwegian tourist who was denied entry by border officers—after the agents took a special interest in the meme of J. D. Vance he had on his phone—didn’t understand that when we say that comedy is legal again, we mean real comedy. This was clearly not comedy. This was somebody laughing at J. D. Vance. Comedy is when you laugh with J. D. Vance about people who don’t look to him like their ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Comedy is the memes that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House keep sharing about how Donald Trump is Superman and “my body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations” and “even E.T. knew when it was time to GO HOME”!

If you need any more clarity about what comedy is, here’s one of Trump’s favorite comedians (“I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined.”) offering what has been identified as a joke: “You know what?” Gutfeld said on Fox News. “I’ve said this before: We need to learn from the Blacks, the way they were able to remove the power from the N-word by using it. So from now on, it’s ‘What up, my Nazi?’ ‘Hey, what up, my Nazi?’ Hey, what’s hanging, my Nazi?’”

Laugh? I thought I’d die! This joke is funny, because people are constantly saying that Gutfeld is a Nazi, and he is getting a little sick of it. So, to dodge the Nazi allegations, he’s riffing on the N-word! This is comedy now!

Comedy is legal again. You are free to say whatever you want, provided it’s a slur. You must say it, or President Trump won’t approve your new stadium! No, that’s not a joke. That’s completely serious.

You should know by now: Everything is serious, until it’s suddenly a joke and you were a fool for not laughing. Everything is a joke, until suddenly it’s serious and how dare you laugh. Everyone is trolling, until they aren’t, and even when they aren’t, they are. Everyone is always and never joking. It’s not a threat. It’s a joke. Comedy is legal again!

Tragedy, to paraphrase Mel Brooks, is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die. More and more people are getting pushed into open sewers lately. Boom times for comedy. Boom times for laughing at. From the open sewer, you can hear a lot of laughing.

They are so glad not to have to remember anymore that other people are in the room. What an enormous relief! Finally, they can say it! That is the project of Trumpism: becoming the only people in the room again. Becoming both the protagonists and the intended audience, the only people whose laughter counts.

What you think is funny depends on what you believe to be true. When you make a joke, you are asking someone to look at something and see the same thing you see. When the response is laughter, it is a way of making eye contact, of looking through the world at one another. That is the terror of bombing onstage: the realization that what you are seeing is not what everyone else is seeing. The anxiety that you have got the world by the wrong end, that you are alone in what you think.

But there are two reasons you can laugh. One is recognition, and the other is coercion. Some jokes are funny only with a power differential to back them up. This is the kind of comedy that’s legal now: the joke whose punch line you’re afraid to be. The kind of joke you have to take. Laugh, so they’ll know you’re one of them. Laugh, or he’ll kill you. Laugh, and maybe you won’t be next.


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If you have a heart attack in the United States, you might assume that an ambulance will bring you to an ER and its staff will take care of you. But hospital closures over the past 20 years and physician shortages were undermining that assumption even before President Donald Trump signed his “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law. Now that legislation—which will cut Medicaid spending by an estimated $1 trillion over 10 years, puts the entire emergency-medicine safety net at risk. The destabilizing effects will be felt not only by those who lose access to Medicaid, but also by those who have private health insurance.

As an ER doctor in New York City, I am terrified about the coming cuts. A recent study from the Rand Corporation confirms that ERs across the entire country are dangerously overstretched and underfunded. About a fifth of emergency visits each year are never paid for, amounting to nearly $5.9 billion in care costs absorbed by hospitals. The uninsured and underinsured were already more likely to have to seek treatment in the ER when they fell ill. With the changes to Medicaid eligibility, their ranks are set to swell.

Medicaid provides coverage to more than 71 million Americans; in addition, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (which provides low-cost coverage for children of families that do not qualify for Medicaid) covers 7 million children. Trump’s legislation is expected to deprive some 12 million people of Medicaid by 2034, and an additional 5 million will lose insurance because of changes to provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The cost of replacing this lost coverage for 17 million Americans will be especially daunting for low-income families: On average, health-insurance premiums add up to nearly $9,000 a year%20%5BFigure%201.3%5D.), whereas a full-time minimum-wage job generates just$15,000.

I went into frontline medicine to help people, not to bankrupt them—yet I am acutely aware that medical debt is a major factor in nearly three-fifths of bankruptcy cases in the United States. When someone who does not have insurance comes into the ER, I am forced to discuss with the patient what necessary care they may have to delay or forgo if they cannot afford it. These conversations will become only more frequent when millions of people are kicked off their health insurance.

[Jonathan Chait: The cynical Republican plan to cut Medicaid]

The 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, one of the most important public-health measures ever enacted in the United States, mandates that every emergency department must provide treatment to anyone who comes through the door, regardless of their ability to pay or their insurance status. “People have access to health care in America,” President George W. Bush once declared. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.” But the treatment mandate is unfunded. Bush neglected to say that patients are still charged for that visit once they receive the care they need. When they can’t pay, they get hounded by a collection agency. If they still can’t pay, the hospital ends up eating the cost. The downstream effect is lower staffing and fewer services. The burden of uncompensated emergency care unquestionably contributes to hospital closures.

Even before Trump’s huge budget-reconciliation bill passed, many people living in rural communities were at risk of losing access to health care. Of 25 hospitals that closed last year, 10 were in rural America, the industry publication Becker’s Hospital Review reported; according to a nonpartisan health-policy center, another 700 rural hospitals are financially distressed and at risk of closure. Nearly half of all children and one in five adults in small towns and country areas rely on Medicaid or CHIP; half of all births in these communities are financed by Medicaid. This makes rural hospitals highly dependent on the reimbursement that they receive from Medicaid for treating those patients.

The more patients who lose coverage, the greater the threat to these institutions. A report from the National Rural Health Association and the research firm Manatt Health finds that, because of Trump’s BBB, rural hospitals “will lose 21 cents out of every dollar” they’d previously received in Medicaid funding. The inevitable result will be more service cuts and more hospital closures, which will endanger everyone in these areas—even people with insurance.

The rational course would be for the government to put more resources into Medicaid, so that patients in need could access care in an optimal setting, instead of visiting the ER, where treatment is more expensive to provide and less comprehensive. Supporters of the BBB purport to have data showing that patients with Medicaid misuse the ER by seeking unnecessary treatment, and they argue that visit volume will go down once they are uninsured. My own experience is that although uninsured patients see me less, they typically show up much sicker—and need more resource-intensive care.

One of my regular patients has both Crohn’s disease and a debilitating psychiatric condition. He has no family support, usually lives in a shelter, and only sometimes has a job. After requiring an emergency intestinal surgery last year, he now comes into the ER every few days to have his ostomy bag changed, because the only clinic that takes Medicaid is in another borough. In an ideal world, he would have access to a clinic with wound-care nursing and social support. In this far-from-ideal world, taking away his Medicaid will not stop him from having chronic disease.

This patient could try to skip visits, but he will have to come to the ER when he gets an infection or his illness flares again, and then he will also be stuck with a bill that will hurt his credit rating and set back his efforts to pull himself out of poverty. The hospital, too, will be worse off—forced to absorb the cost of his treatment when previously it did receive at least small payments for his visits. In short, any appearance of less demand on health-care resources is a mirage; the real outcome will be worse health for the patient and higher costs for his health-care providers.

Imagine various such scenarios replicated all across the country, when millions of people lose Medicaid coverage. In a letter to Senate leadership last month, the American Medical Association’s chief executive, James Madara, warned that the proposed law “could lead to delays in treatment, increases in emergency room visits and hospitalizations, and other expensive forms of care.” His appeal went unheeded, as Congress passed the legislation on largely party-line votes. As Alison Haddock, the president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, put it: “The very idea of emergency medicine as we now know it—lifesaving care available for anyone at any time—is under direct threat.”

The threat is dire, but a stay is still possible. The majority of health-care cuts in the act will not go into effect until after the midterm elections in November 2026. Lawmakers have at least a theoretical opportunity to change course and save our emergency-medical system—if enough voters make them pay attention.


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Today The Atlantic is announcing more speakers, events, and the agenda for the 17th annual Atlantic Festival, taking place September 18–20 for the first time in New York City. This year’s festival will be anchored at the Perelman Performing Arts Center along with venues around the city, including the Tenement Museum, the Town Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Hauser & Wirth, and McNally Jackson Seaport.

Among the speakers announced today: actor Robert Downey Jr. and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, in conversation with The Atlantic's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg; actor Tom Hanks, who voices several historical figures in the new Ken Burns documentary series The American Revolution and who will join the premiere screening of the series at the Town Hall; comedian, writer, and director Richard Ayoade in a conversation moderated by talk-show host, comedian, and producer David Letterman; Executive Producer of The Apollo Kamilah Forbes; Professor of Marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur Scott Galloway; clinical psychologist and Founder and CEO of Good Inside Becky Kennedy; and TV personality, chef, author, and activist Andrew Zimmern. Previously announced Festival speakers include Mark Cuban, Jennifer Doudna, Arvind Krishna, Monica Lewinsky, Tekedra Mawakana, H.R. McMaster, and Clara Wu Tsai.

The Atlantic Festival will also host an exclusive first look for Season 3 of Netflix’s The Diplomat, which debuts this fall, followed by a conversation with the show’s stars Keri Russell and Allison Janney and creator and executive producer Debora Cahn; a sneak peek screening of FX’s The Lowdown, along with a talk with creator, executive producer, writer, and director Sterlin Harjo and executive producer and star Ethan Hawke; and a screening of The American Revolution, followed by a discussion with directors and producers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, along with actor Tom Hanks, who voices several historical figures, and historian Annette Gordon-Reed.

New this year: The Atlantic Festival introduces Out and Abouts, intimate events around the city that are ticketed individually. Among the events announced today:

Atlantic Reads book talks at McNally Jackson Seaport. Featuring Walter Mosley for his new novel Gray Dawn; Susan Orlean for her memoir Joyride; and a poetry conversation around The Singing Word: 168 Years of Atlantic Poetry, featuring the book’s editor and Atlantic contributing editor Walt Hunter, with Singing Word contributor and MIT professor Joshua Bennett.

Premiere of Dread Beat an’ Blood at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), featuring a live performance by legendary poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.

The Big Story Live events, across downtown venues:

“What Does it Mean to Be an American?,” at the Tenement Museum, featuring staff writers Xochitl Gonzalez and Clint Smith, plus more speakers to be announced.

“The Future of the Arts in a Changing World,” at Hauser & Wirth, featuring Jeffrey Goldberg, Noah Hawley, and Kamilah Forbes, with more speakers to be announced.

With more to be announced, including a live taping of the Radio Atlantic podcast.

The festival’s Single-Day Passes and Out and About tickets will go on sale this Wednesday, July 23, at 11 a.m. ET. Atlantic subscribers receive an exclusive 30 percent discount on festival passes and select Out & About programming.

Festival sessions will be led by Goldberg and many of The Atlantic’s writers and editors, including Adrienne LaFrance, Tim Alberta, Ross Andersen, Anne Applebaum, Gal Beckerman, Elizabeth Bruenig, Sophie Gilbert, Jemele Hill, Walt Hunter, Shirley Li, Ashley Parker, and Clint Smith.

The 2025 Atlantic Festival is underwritten by Microsoft at the Title Level; CenterWell, Eli Lilly and Company, and Scout Motors at the Presenting Level; and Aflac, Allstate, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Destination DC, Diageo, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, Hauser & Wirth, KPMG, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation at the Supporting Level.

Press should request a credential by emailing press@theatlantic.com; in-person seating will be limited and will need to be reserved in advance.

The Atlantic Festival September 18–20, 2025 Perelman Performing Arts Center, Virtually and Additional Locations Across NYC For Passes: https://theatlanticfestival.com/


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Three weeks ago, Donald Trump attended the opening of an immigrant-detention center in the Florida Everglades, about 50 miles west of Miami. “Pretty soon, this facility will handle the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet,” the president said. Officially named Alligator Alcatraz, it was constructed in eight days by the state of Florida on a disused airport runway. The detention center features tents that contain chain-link cages crammed with bunk beds, surrounded by miles of barbed wire. By the end of August, it may have the capacity to hold 4,000 people waiting to hear whether they’ll be deported.

On Fox News that night, Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff for policy, argued that there was nothing dehumanizing about an immigrant-detention center built in a hot, humid, mosquito-infested, subtropical wetland. “What is dehumanizing is when Democrats let illegal alien rapists into the country to attack our children,” Miller said. Laura Loomer, a Trump adviser, expressed the hope that alligators would eat the immigrants detained in the Everglades. “Alligator lives matter,” she posted on X, along with an implied threat to the Latino population of the United States: “The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.”

The Everglades detention center, the nationwide roundups of immigrants, the massive increase in spending for ICE, and the Trump administration’s harsh rhetoric were foreshadowed during the 2024 presidential campaign. “This is country changing; it’s country threatening; and it’s country wrecking,” Trump said about undocumented immigration at one campaign rally. At another he said, “It’s a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities all across our land.” Trump called immigrants “animals,” accused them of stealing and eating pet dogs and cats, and claimed that they were “poisoning the blood of our country.” These claims helped ensure Trump’s election. Last year, an opinion poll commissioned by CBS News found that almost half of all adults in the United States agreed that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. More than three-quarters of Republican adults agreed.

I’ve been writing about the role of undocumented immigrants in the American economy for 30 years. They are the bedrock of our food, construction, and hospitality industries. They are also some of the nation’s poorest, most vulnerable, most devout, most family-oriented workers in the U.S. They routinely suffer wage theft, minimum-wage violations, sexual harassment on the job, and workplace injuries that go unreported and uncompensated. Most of them have lived here for more than a decade. The lies now being spread about them are too numerous to mention. But one that must be addressed is the falsehood at the heart of Trump’s immigration policy: that undocumented immigrants are likely to be murderers, rapists, and violent criminals who wreak havoc upon law-abiding citizens.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The message is ‘we can take your children’]

A recent study of 150 years of American incarceration data, from 1870 to 2020, found that immigrant men were far less likely to be sent to prison than men born in the U.S. Since 1990, the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has roughly tripled—yet the homicide rate has fallen by almost 50 percent. A 2020 study published in the journal PNAS compared the crime rates of undocumented immigrants in Texas with the crime rates of U.S.-born citizens there. “Relative to undocumented immigrants,” the study found, U.S.-born citizens “are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.” That helps explain why crackdowns on undocumented immigration aren’t the most effective way to improve public safety. Texas would be a much safer place if everyone born in Texas got deported.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are targeting eight terrorist organizations, including six Mexican drug cartels that threaten the foreign policy, the public safety, the national security of the United States,” Miller said during his Fox News appearance, stressing the urgent need to build more ICE detention centers. But ICE isn’t part of the criminal-justice system. The apprehension and deportation of immigrants is conducted under civil law by the executive branch of the federal government. The phrase criminal alien, widely used by the Trump administration, is misleading. It conjures images of a dangerous, perhaps homicidal, stranger. Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, likes to issue grave warnings about the threat posed by “illegal criminal aliens” and “criminal illegal aliens.” That threat is greatly overstated.

A criminal alien is an immigrant who has already been convicted of a crime. Last year, the U.S. Border Patrol arrested about 17,000 criminal aliens. Among the convictions recorded for that group, 29 were for homicide or manslaughter, 221 were for sex offenses—and 10,935 were for unlawful entry or reentry to the U.S. The Trump administration’s harsh, fearmongering rhetoric is contradicted by a simple fact: The overwhelming majority of criminal aliens become criminals by violating immigration laws. And almost three-quarters of the people now being held in ICE detention centers aren’t even criminal aliens.

The federal agencies actually devoted to hunting down terrorists and members of Mexican drug cartels—-the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)—all face major cuts in Trump’s 2026 budget. The FBI’s budget will be reduced by $545 million; the ATF’s by $418 million; the DEA’s by $112 million. The Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Forces program, created to “disrupt and dismantle transnational criminal networks,” will lose its entire $547 million in funding. The program is being completely shut down. Meanwhile, the omnibus bill that Trump signed on July 4 triples the size of ICE’s budget and allocates about $170 billion to immigration enforcement. Roughly $45 billion will be spent during the next four years to build new ICE detention centers, which will hold mainly people who have never been convicted of any crime.

Unauthorized entry to the U.S. wasn’t a criminal offense until 1929, almost a century and a half after the nation’s founding. The Undesirable Aliens Act had two sections outlining the first federal immigration crimes. Section 1325 made it unlawful to enter the U.S. without proper inspection, and Section 1326 made it unlawful to reenter the U.S. after being deported. As Eric S. Fish, a law professor at UC Davis, reveals in a 2022 Iowa Law Review article, “Race, History, and Immigration Crimes,” the Undesirable Aliens Act was designed to keep people from Latin America, especially Mexicans, out of the U.S. Its principal sponsors were advocates of eugenics, a pseudoscience that claims that races have innate characteristics and that the white race is superior to every other.

[From the September 2022 issue: An American catastrophe]

Harry Hamilton Laughlin served as the “expert eugenics agent” for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization when the bill was written. Laughlin had a biology degree from Princeton. He called for laws against interracial marriage. He called for laws requiring the forced sterilization of criminals; people suffering from alcoholism or epilepsy; deaf people; blind people; people deemed mentally or physically impaired; and poor people, including “orphans, n’er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps, and paupers.” The Nazi Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was directly inspired by Laughlin’s model law on forced sterilization. He believed that Mexicans were innately criminal and feeble-minded as well as carriers of disease. “If we do not deport the undesirable individual,” Laughlin testified before Congress, “we can not get rid of his blood, no matter how inferior it may be, because we can not deport his offspring born here.”

Coleman Livingston “Coley” Blease, a Democrat from South Carolina, introduced the Undesirable Aliens Act in the Senate. Blease publicly called Black people “apes” and “baboons.” He publicly celebrated the lynching of Black men in “defense of the virtue of the white women of my State.” He sought a constitutional amendment to outlaw interracial marriage. He opposed all immigration to the U.S., especially from Mexico, arguing, “I believe in America for Americans.” The legislation that became the Undesirable Aliens Act made it through the Senate with a voice vote and without any debate. In the House, Representative John Box, a Democrat from Texas, claimed that Mexican immigration would lead to the “mongrelization” and “degradation” of white racial purity, creating the “most insidious and general mixture of white, Indian, and negro blood strains ever produced in America.” The House debate on the bill didn’t focus on “legal versus illegal methods of entry,” Fish writes, “but on the reasons why we should not let Mexicans immigrate at all.” He goes on: “The primary reason given was their race.”

Almost 100 years later, Sections 1325 and 1326 are still in force. Today, more people are prosecuted for violating those two sections than for any other federal crimes. Indeed, the majority of all convictions in federal court stem from that pair of statutes. Unlawful entry is a misdemeanor; unlawful reentry is a felony, often punished with a sentence of about a year in federal prison. Ninety-nine percent of the people convicted for unlawful reentry last year were Latino—-just as the authors of the Undesirable Aliens Act intended. Nevertheless, by some estimates, almost half of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. violated neither of those statutes. They entered the U.S. legally and then overstayed their visas. They have violated civil immigration law but not federal criminal law.

Immigrant-detention centers are not prisons. They are being built throughout the U.S. not to punish criminals but to hold people facing deportation for violations of civil immigration law. The Department of Homeland Security, which administers these centers, admits that fact. “Detention is non-punitive,” according to ICE. But immigrants in ICE detention centers frequently endure living conditions much worse than people who are incarcerated in American prisons.

ICE puts immigrants into dangerous, overcrowded jails, paying local authorities for their care. It sends immigrants to state prisons. And it holds about 90 percent of detainees in facilities run by private prison companies—-whose stock prices have soared since Trump’s reelection. The name Alligator Alcatraz suggests that the health and well-being of detainees are not top priorities. Each of the Florida facility’s chain-link cages can house 32 men but has only three toilets. Immigrants detained by ICE have been forced to sleep on floors, live in windowless cells, spend a week or more without a shower, and go without medicine for chronic illnesses. ICE can move immigrants to jails or detention centers anywhere in the U.S., regardless of where they were apprehended or where they may have lived for years. During an unannounced visit to the Krome Detention Center in Miami this May, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida found the conditions “incredibly disturbing.” An attorney for one immigrant detained there said that the daily ration of food was a cup of rice and a glass of water. In June, a group of immigrants at Krome went outside and arranged their bodies into an “SOS.”

The tactics used by ICE agents to arrest immigrants and bring them to detention evoke those of a police state—masked, armed officers raiding churches, farms, schools, garment factories, and Home Depots; appearing by surprise to seize graduate students; separating parents from children; conducting sweeps while on horseback. ICE agents can arrest anybody, without a warrant, based on probable cause that a person is undocumented and may flee. All of these practices may be legal, but they don’t inspire faith in the rule of law.

[Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable.]

The administrative hearings that determine whether an immigrant can remain in the U.S. are similarly out of keeping with traditional democratic norms. Immigrants have no legal right to an attorney in these proceedings, and most never gain access to one. The stakes are extraordinarily high now that the Supreme Court has permitted the deportation of immigrants to distant nations they’ve never visited before, such as El Salvador and South Sudan. Immigration courts are run by the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security employs the attorneys who make the government’s case for deportation. Both the DOJ and the DHS are headed by Cabinet members who report to the president. The Trump administration has imposed quotas on ICE agents to increase apprehensions, and may once again impose quotas on immigration judges to speed the completion of cases.

An immigration judge can be removed from a case at the discretion of the federal attorney general. And a thorough knowledge of the intricacies of immigration law no longer seems to be a job requirement. On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order—“Protecting the American People Against Invasion”—that authorizes state and local officials to serve as federal immigration officials. During Trump’s visit to the Everglades detention center, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that 47,000 Florida law-enforcement officers had been deputized to work for ICE. DeSantis has also proposed letting attorneys who serve with the Florida National Guard act as immigration judges.

Outside the Everglades facility on its opening day, Enrique Tarrio spoke with a group of reporters. Tarrio is a former leader of the Proud Boys, a neofascist group. He was convicted of seditious conspiracy after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, sentenced to 22 years in prison, pardoned by the president, and praised by Trump during a recent visit to Mar-a-Lago with his mother. Tarrio is now promoting a new app, ICERAID, that offers a cryptocurrency reward to users who help the government locate and arrest undocumented immigrants. “We didn’t vote for cheaper eggs,” Tarrio said in the Everglades. “We voted for mass deportation, and we voted for retribution.”


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President Donald Trump’s latest assault on the news media came in the form of another lawsuit last week. After The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had allegedly written a birthday note, complete with “bawdy” doodling, to the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, Trump boiled over with indignation. He denied writing the note and filed a libel suit the next day, demanding $10 billion in damages from the Journal, its parent company, and its principal owner, Rupert Murdoch, a sometime Trump ally.

Although Trump faces considerable legal obstacles to win in court, betting against him would be unwise. In his first six months in office, he has been on a winning streak in his campaign to punish and diminish the press. His dispute with the Journal, after all, hijacked the news cycle from another Trump “victory”: eliminating federal support for public broadcasting. Early Friday morning, Congress voted to cancel $1.1 billion in subsidies for NPR, PBS, and their affiliated stations, marking the first time Congress has cut off public broadcasters since its funding began nearly 60 years ago. Trump had pushed for the defunding, repeatedly asserting that NPR and PBS offered “biased and partisan news coverage.” Republicans in Congress apparently agreed.

“The independent press in the United States is facing what media outlets in too many other countries with aspiring autocrats have confronted,” the former Washington Post editor Marty Baron told me on Thursday. He compared Trump’s “repressive measures” to those of Hungarian President Viktor Orbán: “The playbook is to demean, demonize, marginalize, and economically debilitate” independent reporting.

Ever since he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, Trump has fulminated against “the fake news.” But only in his second term has Trump gone beyond such rhetoric to wage a multifront war on media freedom with all of the tools at his disposal: executive actions, lawsuits, a loyal regulatory bureaucracy, a compliant Republican majority in Congress and a sympathetic Supreme Court. Each of his actions has been extraordinary in its own right; collectively, they represent a slow-motion demolition of the Fourth Estate.

The principal question isn’t just whether anyone can stop Trump, but whether anyone in power really wants to.

[David A. Graham: Is Colbert’s ouster really just a ‘financial decision’?]

One of Trump’s early targets was the Voice of America and other government-funded international news broadcasters, such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia. These outlets—unlike commercial media—had a mission to advance American interests and extend U.S. soft power dating back to the early 1940s. But they also served a crucial role in reporting important stories that other outlets did not and reaching an international audience with little access to reliable news. By slashing the administration’s support to the bare minimum and firing employees, he has all but destroyed these broadcasters. The White House says they deserve their fate, because they, too, are rife with bias.

Trump has also given a baleful master class in so-called SLAPP litigation—strategic lawsuits against public participation—to bring independent media corporations to heel. He hasn’t won a single case in court. Instead, the prospect of presidential retaliation has been enough to lever some $67 million in settlement payments out of news and information companies. These began last year, when Disney-ABC paid $15 million in December to Trump’s presidential library, to settle his assertion that anchor George Stephanopoulos had defamed him by saying he’d been found “liable for rape” (in fact, a jury had found Trump liable for “sexual abuse” of the author E. Jean Carroll). The list of settled suits continued with Meta’s agreement in January to pay $25 million (of which $22 million goes to the Trump library); a February deal with X, to write Trump a $10 million check; and this month’s deal with CBS’s parent, Paramount Global, which agreed to fork over $16 million to the presidential library.

The odor of corporate appeasement is so strong that even seemingly unrelated decisions have taken on suspicious cast. When CBS announced last week that it was axing The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, ending the long tenure of the network’s most prominent and popular Trump critic, many questioned the network’s claim that the decision was strictly a financial one. The timing—just days after Paramount settled with Trump—suggested Colbert’s sacking was another bone being thrown to the president.

At the same time, Trump has used his bully pulpit to intimidate reporters and news organizations. After CNN broke the news of a Pentagon assessment raising doubts about the success of the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities last month, Trump sought the dismissal of the story’s lead reporter, Natasha Bertrand (who was formerly a staff writer for The Atlantic). The White House press staff attacked the ABC News reporter Terry Moran after he called Trump a “world-class hater” on X. ABC got rid of Moran a few days later; CNN has stood by Bertrand.

Alongside the pressure campaign against the news-media industry’s big players, Trump has reconfigured the presidential press operation in self-serving ways. In one of his first anti-press actions in February, he banned the Associated Press from Oval Office press conferences, White House events, and Air Force One over its refusal to use his preferred terminology. He’s given preference to MAGA-friendly outlets at news conferences and special briefings, and commandeered the press pool that covers him at certain events, ensuring a reliable stream of softball questions.

A key Trump stratagem was his appointment of a loyalist, Brendan Carr, to head the supposedly independent Federal Communications Commission; that appointment put a rabid anti-media activist and co-author of the conservative Project 2025 policy plan in charge of the broadcast industry’s chief regulatory agency. Almost immediately after the chairmanship, Carr reinstated complaints against NBC, ABC, and CBS that his predecessor had dismissed on First Amendment grounds (though he let stand the dismissal of a petition against Fox News’s parent company). Carr has also launched investigations of NPR and PBS. The FCC’s lone Democratic appointee, Anna Gomez, told me on Thursday that the agency is “playing a dangerous game” by injecting politics into broadcast regulation, and that she would continue to oppose it.

Finally, the Trump administration has rescinded Biden-era policies that had protected journalists in federal investigations of classified leaks, creating a potential chilling effect on reporting. Previously, the Justice Department had ruled out demanding reporters’ phone and email records in such probes; Trump’s attorney general decided that the tactic should be more available.

[Read: Why CBS snatched its talk-show king’s crown]

Every president has had his beefs with the press, of course. But only rarely has a president lined up his powers to hobble it. In the late 18th century, John Adams signed into law the Sedition Act, which, on the pretext of national security, was intended to suppress criticism of Adams and his administration. In the early 20th century, Woodrow Wilson backed another Sedition Act to stifle dissent about the U.S. entry into World War I. Allies of Richard Nixon, at the president’s urging, challenged broadcast licenses held by CBS and the Washington Post Company, in retaliation for their aggressive coverage of his Watergate crimes.

Over time, courts, Congress, and popular opinion doomed such actions as insults to the First Amendment—but that pushback has not occurred, at least so far, in Trump’s second term. In the face of such threats, many of the news media’s corporate barons have mostly responded with timidity, even capitulation. A handful of leaders—the New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger, for one—have mustered some courage, but the bravery of the few has exposed the cowardice of the many. The most emblematic case may be Jeff Bezos, the once-resolute owner of The Washington Post, whose recent efforts to mollify Trump look like a gross sellout.

Other top media executives have pretended that the president’s predatory behavior is just business as usual. At Paramount’s annual shareholder meeting earlier this month, co-CEO George Cheeks characterized the company’s settlement with Trump over a disputed 60 Minutes interview as a rational response, given that the corporation would have faced “significant financial as well as reputational damage” if it had lost in court. True as a general matter, but few legal experts, including Paramount’s, believed that Trump had any chance of winning. A more honest assessment came from Colbert, who noted on the Late Show: “This kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: It’s ‘big fat bribe.’”

Little suggests that the American public is greatly aroused or agitated by any of this. The indifference to Trump’s march against the media may reflect declining trust in mainstream news organizations, or merely their diminished visibility in an information landscape remade by cable-service cord-cutting, social-media influencers, and TikTok videos. This erosion has also been accompanied by the steady disappearance of professional reporting, creating so-called news deserts in hundreds of counties across America.

The short-term forecast is for more of the same. Trump’s next chance to torpedo a few more “enemies of the people” will come if the parent companies of MSNBC and CNN need to seek government approval to spin off their cable-TV channels. This could provide new choke points for Trump to demand more tribute: Another round of shakedowns looms.

“The sky’s the limit with him right now,” Jim Acosta, the former CNN anchor and reporter, told me last week. Trump briefly banished Acosta from the White House during his first term, an instance of presidential retaliation that seemed shocking then, but looks almost quaint now. “Right now,” said Acosta, who left CNN in January and now streams on Substack, “he’s taking on whole news organizations, the information system we’ve had in place since the end of World War II.”

For the moment, as exemplified by the Journal’s Trump-Epstein story, reporters are continuing to report without fear or favor. As far as is known, no news organization has spiked an unflattering story about the Trump White House out of concern for the backlash. Baron is guardedly optimistic. “The everyday tenacity, resourcefulness, and dedication of journalists covering this administration deserve admiration and support,” he said. A free and independent press, he declared, “can survive this administration.”

That assessment places great faith in the journalists working in the trenches of Trump’s war against the news media.

So far, that faith is justified. How long it can be sustained is another matter.


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Photographs by Alice Zoo

Black dress, pink coat, thick beige stockings. This is the third time I’ve seen her. She walks down the middle of the street outside my window, her head bent forward under its helmet of grandmother hair. She carries her handbag like a briefcase with a bomb in it. She has the look of someone whose friends are all dead.

I saw her first outside Saint Spyridon Church, lighting a candle. And then again in Spianada Square, among the scootering children. I lean out the window to watch her disappear around the corner. Maybe there’s nothing suspicious about it. Corfu is a small city, on a small island in Greece. From my hotel room I can see the green edge of the cricket pitch where, in John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy, the Czech agent, Axel, chased Magnus Pym in slow, limping circles.

I think A Perfect Spy is a nearly perfect book. Only a few of its more than 600 pages are actually about Corfu. If you wanted to write about le Carré and travel, you could go almost anywhere: Vienna or Bern or Kenya or Cornwall would make the list long before Corfu. But as Axel would tell you, if you’re trying to find someone who doesn’t want to be found, you don’t go to the obvious places. You ignore the booked flight to Washington and the train ticket to Paris because you know they’re false leads. You look where the trail is colder.

[Read: An innocent abroad in Mark Twain’s Paris]

Magnus is an MI6 agent who has betrayed England by spying for the Czechs, but now the Americans are onto him. In a frenzy of denial, he drags his wife, Mary, and son, Tom, on a frantic Greek holiday: Lesbos, Athens, Hydra, Spetses. The Pyms change “boats and islands like driven souls, though only Magnus knows the curse, only Magnus knows who is pursuing them and why, and Magnus has locked that secret behind his smile with all his others.”

Corfu is where their journey begins. For centuries the island was a playground for spies, a place torn between great powers, where minor officials could go to make a name for themselves or jaded expats could try to fashion new lives. But if you’re trying to escape the past, it’s the wrong place to go.

Over the span of a generation, beginning at the turn of the 19th century, Corfu tumbled through the hands of four great powers. Walk into the city’s Old Fortress and you’ll meet a winged lion of Venice, whose face was hammered off by the Napoleonic French. On the ground is a paving stone where a Russian soldier carved his name. Prince Philip was baptized here, in the fortress’s Church of St. George. Nearly 2,000 Jews were held here, before deportation to Birkenau. Across the water: Albania. My tour guide, Andreas Grammenos, tells me about a defector who swam the channel to escape the Communist dictatorship. Andreas’s father served in Corfu’s Coast Guard, and still has the pool float the man used to get across. The fortress’s clock tower kept time until 2003, when the last technician who knew how to fix it retired.

Picture of the clock tower of the Old Fortress in Corfu's view of Corfu’s Old Town at dusk. The clock tower of the Old Fortress in Corfu (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

It was the British who brought cricket here, Magnus tells Tom. “Magnus knew those things. Or pretended to.” Their holiday is all late lunches, amorous siestas, tennis lessons for Tom, and, for restless Magnus, long evening walks. Until, one day, Axel tracks him down on the cricket pitch to warn him. “It’s over,” he says. “Come with me.” He means disappear, defect. The double agent has to pick a side, or at least admit that the game is over.

Magnus refuses to hear it. He spins lies, hauling his family to one island after another: “Sorry, Mabs. Sorry, Tom, old chap. But this place is too damned idyllic.” Tom knows something, though. He has seen this “mystery man at cricket,” he tells his mother—a “wise, stringy man with a sad moustache like a conjuror’s.” They went “round and round the ground together with the thin man going slowly like an invalid.” He was kind to Magnus. He was “like a father.”

John le Carré’s real name was David Cornwell, and his father, Ronnie, was a con man and a criminal. In 1977, David took his family—his first wife, Ann, and their three boys—to Corfu on vacation. Adam Sisman tells the story in John le Carré: The Biography:

Sitting outside at an open-air beach restaurant David overheard a familiar voice talking at a nearby table.

“Reg?” he asked tentatively.

“What if I am?”

“It’s David.”

The suspicious glare melted. “Ronnie’s boy!”

Reg was one of Ronnie’s loyal hangers-on, a cast of courtiers that included innocent marks and faithful henchmen and a rotating roster of replacement mothers for young le Carré. Reg told le Carré that he and others had taken the rap for some of Ronnie’s crimes, and served time in prison for them. “We was all bent, son,” Reg said. “But your dad was very, very bent.”

That scene from Corfu turns up in A Perfect Spy, though Reg is replaced by a character named Syd Lemon, who drops these lines back in England. Syd is speaking with Magnus’s MI6 boss, who is trying to find him before the Czechs, or Magnus’s own despair, catch up to him. In the novel, Magnus’s father is called Rick. “I did time” for Rick, Syd says. “A lot of us did.” Rick “was bent, you see. We was all bent.” But Rick “was very bent indeed.”

Le Carré tried, and felt he failed, for 25 years to write about his father, before he found, with A Perfect Spy, that he could lay the story of life with Ronnie over the armature of an espionage thriller. The book begins with Magnus on the run, heading for the hiding place of his own imagination, a guest room by the sea. The story slips between past and present while the narration slips from first person to third and back again, sometimes from sentence to sentence, which is entirely natural, because we’re not the people we used to be. Magnus’s childhood—the missing mother; the boarding schools; the weepy, groping hugs from Rick—is every bit as harrowing as being hunted by the East and West at once.

Le Carré wrote 26 novels before he died, in 2020. He traveled to research many of them. Everywhere he went, he dreaded meeting victims of his father’s schemes. Ronnie showed up in Cairo and Beirut—trying, maybe, to get into the gun-running business—then in Singapore, where he was arrested; then in Hong Kong, where he was arrested again. Now a letter came: Ronnie was in Delhi, claiming that he’d been appointed a maharaja’s right-hand man and asking his son for £1,000.

The seductive power of this guy! This is a man who wooed his own prosecutor. After a conviction for fraud, Ronnie wrote admiring letters from prison to the man who had argued against his appeal. Upon his release, Sisman writes, the prosecutor came to stay with Ronnie, who introduced him to “obliging young ladies.” Decades later, in Hong Kong, where le Carré went to research the novel that became The Honourable Schoolboy, he ran into the policeman who had overseen Ronnie’s imprisonment there: “Mr. Cornwell, sir, your father is one of the finest men I have ever met,” he told le Carré. “When I get back to London, he’s going to set me up in business.” You couldn’t touch him without being corrupted by him.

When Ronnie died, le Carré may have thought himself liberated. The feeling lasted for about five minutes. At the beginning of A Perfect Spy, the phone rings, announcing the death of Magnus’s father: “I’m free,” Magnus says. But even after death, Rick keeps turning up. Very near the end, A Perfect Spy is addressed to his ghost.

Once, a woman contacted le Carré. He had no idea who she was, but she seemed to believe that they’d had sex on a train. Of course, Sisman writes, it had been Ronnie, “passing himself off as the world-famous author.” The first person, the second, the third; fact, fiction, death—they were no match for Ronnie Cornwell.

One day in Corfu, I catch a cricket match played by a group of veterans. A man asks me something in Greek, then switches to English: He’s wondering if I can explain the rules to his son. I’ve been writing in a notebook—maybe he thought I was some kind of official, keeping score, when what I’m actually writing is that I’ve never seen so many older gentlemen taking their shirts off in public. They thwack the ball into the parking lot, and I imagine le Carré pretending to watch while dreading, always, the possibility of his father appearing in the crowd.

Picture of laundry hanging to dry high above the streets of Corfu Old Town A narrow street in Corfu’s Old Town (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

Just as Corfu isn’t the first place you’d look for John le Carré, I’m probably not the first person you’d expect to write about him. A Perfect Spy was published in 1986, the year I was born. Also, I’m a woman. One of the complaints against le Carré was that he couldn’t write female characters. They tended to be beautiful and faithless, always running off, one critic wrote, “with another male, like a cat.” Anyway, I don’t care about that. I don’t really care about the women or lack of women in the 25 other novels, either.

The character I identify with is Magnus—with his compulsive adoption of other people’s values, with the way he puts on an identity only to cast it aside, with his damage and delusion, with his ravenous need to be loved. Everywhere he goes, Magnus compiles pieces of Magnus: from Ronnie’s retinue; from the fancy boys at boarding school and the Oxford socialists he spies on; from Axel; from Jack Brotherhood, his mentor at MI6. “Magnus is a great imitator,” Axel tells Mary. “I sometimes think he is entirely put together from bits of other people, poor fellow.”

[Read: John le Carré knew England’s secrets]

At the risk of turning an island full of real people into a handy literary metaphor: Corfu is a good place to think about influence and identity, about how so many disparate fragments can cohere into a whole.

Corfu emerged from the churn of ancient and colonial history only to plunge into devastating world wars—as many as one in 20 Greeks died during World War II from violence or famine—and then into a brutal civil war, and then into a tourism boom. Today, about a quarter of its inhabitants were born abroad. And yet Andreas’s family has lived here for eight generations. He can find, in the archives stored in the Old Fortress, letters from his ancestors haggling over the price of wine. When he was growing up, you didn’t need a ticket to enter the fortress, and he and his friends used to play there, daring one another to run through the tunnels, the children’s footsteps echoing off the ancient walls.

Andreas takes me and Alice, the photographer I’m traveling with, from the fortress through the city. The houses aren’t the blue and white of the Greek flag. Instead (thanks to the Venetians) they’re sherbet-colored—cream and butter yellow, pink, apricot, and peach. The cafés on the avenue near the cricket pitch are busy, but whole grids of empty tables remain roped off. It’s April, and one feels already the dull tread of the approaching summer crowds. Andreas says that as late as the 1950s, it would have been “unthinkable” for an average villager to come here for coffee—only the elite were welcome. Tourism changed that. One night, a restaurant is playing “I’m too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt, so sexy it hurts.”

Today Corfu is one of the most densely populated World Heritage Sites in Europe. Andreas says the local government is involved in a contentious debate about air conditioners: Can they be rigged up outside people’s homes, or are they a desecration of the scenic past? It’s hot here in the summer. Personally, I don’t think tourists should even be allowed to see this place if they’re going to go around complaining about AC units ruining their view.

Tourists and locals agree that the most important thing to do in Corfu is visit Saint Spyridon. Spyridon was a shepherd in Cyprus who became a bishop, went to the Council of Nicaea, performed miracles, and (after he died and was disinterred and embalmed) traveled through the mountains from Constantinople to Greece in a sack on the back of a mule.

Outside his church, people buy candles to light: The bigger the prayer, the bigger the candle. Inside is his body. Each morning, Spyridon’s slippered feet are revealed so that people can kiss them, but it’s the afternoon now, so the line to get into the crypt isn’t too long. Above his casket dangle dozens of silver thuribles, and from the silver thuribles, silver tamata—plaques engraved with the images of answered prayers (a baby, a heart)—and little silver ships, the symbol of Corfu. The church’s altar stands behind an iconostasis, a wall of icons and paintings. Andreas says this is a common feature of Greek Orthodox churches because his countrymen “love mystery”—because they understand the power of the hidden, the unseen.

Corfu was never a center of diplomatic activity, but it was a hub of information, where facts were dug up and traded like the metals and minerals of other lands. Aggelis Zarokostas, a historian at Utrecht University who is writing a book about 18th- and 19th-century espionage in mainland Greece and the Ionian Islands, told me the story of an agent named for the saint. Spiridon Foresti was a British consul who kept filing dispatches even after the French put him under house arrest for a year. He must have dropped his reports out his windows; how he was able to gather the information while locked inside, no one knows.

photo of hand reaching in from side and lighting thin candle by touching a lit candle, with a much larger candle burning nearby A woman lights candles outside the Holy Church of Saint Spyridon. (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

British rule in Corfu lasted from 1815 to 1864. The English argued that they were bringing law and order to a cutthroat land. Immediately after they arrived, a plague broke out. Officials, going door-to-door gathering information about the ill and their contacts, dragged priests along with them to threaten people with excommunication if they didn’t comply.

Long after Corfu was turned over to the Greeks, traces of the English remained, as did many expats. The most famous were the Durrells, who moved to Corfu in 1935. There’s a popular British TV show about them: The Durrells, which begins with a broke and plucky widow ditching England to bring her four obstreperous children here. Two of those children grew up to be authors—Gerald, the famous nature writer, and Lawrence, the novelist.

I brought with me a copy of Lawrence’s memoir of life on the island, Prospero’s Cell. Published in 1945, it’s full of lush writing about the landscape: “The olives are tacking madly from grey to silver”; the “cypresses are like drawn bows.” But he can be nasty about the “natives.” He describes the hands and feet of peasants as “blunt and hideous: mere spades grown upon the members through a long battle with soil, ropes, and wood.” After reading that, I feel a little less good about the fact that my hotel room is called the Durrell suite. There’s a bust of Lawrence outside the Old Fortress. Andreas says people think that he was a spy too.

Alice and I have gone back to the fortress to visit the library housed in the British garrison, where the manager lets us touch a 16th-century edition of The Iliad. As we’re leaving, some teenagers on a field trip mark us out as English (Alice is English but, for the record, I’m American—and this is the one and only time I have ever imagined that this fact could be a defense against anything). They mock us, mercilessly. To be fair, all they do is say “Hello,” but they draw out the greeting in a way that makes clear what a totally preposterous word hello is. “Hellooo,” they keep saying, waving and laughing at us.

photo of dimly lit room with vaulted stone ceiling and shelves of books, with light coming through a window in background The public library in Corfu is located inside the Old Fortress. (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

We hustle away with our heads down and continue on to the two main sites of British memory in Corfu: the British Cemetery and the estate of Mon Repos.

The cemetery is a disheveled green dreamscape. Just inside is an ancient stone lawn roller, more sculpture now than tool. For a little while, I pulled it, creaking, through the long grasses. Farther in, we find the graves. There are the ancient ones of midshipmen and babies, the graves of British soldiers from both world wars, and then, from more recent years, plaques for the expats: Barbara Anne Reason (BORN IN OXFORD, ENGLAND—FOREVER IN CORFU), Gladys Fish (RESTING IN CORFU: A PLACE SO LOVED), and Adda Dendrinou:

BORN KARACHI 1941 DIED CORFU 1995 TRUE CORFIOTE SHE LOVED ENGLAND

The Mon Repos estate was built in 1828 for the British lord high commissioner, and a century later, Prince Philip was born on a tabletop inside. I would like to see the table, but the shutters of the mansion are sealed tight. (Anyway, it turns out the table is long gone—sold to a shipping company for the boardroom of its London office.) You can find Roman retaining walls on the grounds here, and debris from a temple to Hera. In the back of the derelict garden is a row of metal arches driven into the ground like a giant’s croquet hoops. They were covered in wisteria once, but the shade must have shifted as the trees grew taller. The plant didn’t die though; it just reared up and threw itself toward the sun, kudzuing over the nearby treetops. I lie there, breathing in the sweet, woozy smell of wild wisteria.

At the bottom of the estate, Alice and I step off a jetty and swim out into the cold, blue sea. By this point, I totally get Gladys Fish: I’m ready to live and die here too.

photo of sunlit field surrounded by trees, with enormous blooming wisteria vines on the right side and woman reclining in the grass, looking at them Wisteria drapes over trees in the now-derelict garden of the Mon Repos estate. (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

I’m not supposed to be swimming and smelling flowers; I’m supposed to be doing John le Carré things: walking on cliff tops muttering to myself, checking dead-letter drops, sweet-talking my agents in the field. I keep looking for men in dark raincoats, but it doesn’t rain and my sole candidate for either surveillance or countersurveillance remains my lady with the handbag.

Le Carré was only ever a minor spy, and he quit the service the minute he could afford to. After the publication of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, in 1963, his family lived abroad to lower their tax bill. Some of that time was spent in Greece, on Crete. Le Carré was miserable there. He wrote long letters to the wife of a colleague and flew back and forth to Paris, London, and New York, where he was suddenly famous. When he was on Crete, his wife, Ann, nagged him about visiting the island’s historic sites. “I hate ruins,” he wrote to a friend. He took so many walks and made so many long-distance phone calls that, Sisman writes, “a local official accused him of spying for the Turks and asked for a bribe as the price of his silence.”

[Read: The double life of John le Carré]

At one point, a Czech writer, or someone posing as a Czech writer, came to Crete and kept asking him to meet. Le Carré was nervous enough to contact the head of the Athens station to report that Czech intelligence was trying to recruit him. In an interview with Sisman, I asked if he really believed this. His biography isn’t a study of just a fascinating man, but a fascinating liar, one who—very much like his father—spun fictions that he then struggled to distinguish from the truth. But a Czech approach, Sisman told me, seemed plausible.

Le Carré said that he was drawn to spying because he wanted to serve his country—and to do penance for Ronnie’s crimes. But he also found that secrecy could be a “place of escape,” a way of feeling “superior to life rather than engaging in it.” He “relished the notion of appearing to be someone dull, while all the time I was someone terribly exciting.”

After spying, he found other ways to escape. One was writing; another was travel. When he went abroad to research a new novel, he would go in character, pretending to be whomever he was writing about. Maybe he got the idea from a training exercise for MI6, which involved posing as a German tourist in Brighton; he kept the accent up even while being interrogated by local police.

Picture of a building undergoing maintenance work on Kapodistriou Street at the edge of Corfu Old Town A building undergoing renovations in Old Town (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

I had the idea that, while writing this story, I would go around pretending to be other people. I’m hopeless at accents, but I could come up with backstories: Maybe I was heading to a destination bachelorette party, or was on a soul-searching journey before pursuing IVF. My name might be Olivia, or Stef, or Gladys Fish. But getting strangers to ask me personal questions is harder than I expected, especially because I mostly want to talk with Alice, and after two days together, I’ve already told her everything that has ever happened to me. Magnus never has that problem. “Why don’t you just tell me the truth?” Mary demands. “The suggestion amused him.”

It was not until I read Sisman’s second book on the author, The Secret Life of John le Carré, which he published only after le Carré’s death, that I grasped how much of le Carré’s writing substitutes one place for another, one woman for another. In 1983, le Carré went back to Greece, this time to Lesbos. By then he’d divorced Ann and married his second wife, Jane, but he wasn’t traveling with her. He had a new mistress—Sue Dawson, half his age. In the mornings, Sisman writes, she would “lean out of bed to peer through the gaps between the old floorboards to see him working in the room below.” The book he was writing at the time was, of course, A Perfect Spy, in which Magnus’s wife, Mary, does the same thing, looking through the “gaps between the planks” to see Magnus showering in the room downstairs.

Le Carré told Dawson that she was his muse. He’d met her through her job: producing abridged books for cassette tapes. Mary’s job is to rebind old books for MI6 with secret messages hidden inside. The one book Magnus never lets her repair is his battered old copy of Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, which purports to be the autobiography of an adventurer during the Thirty Years’ War and is considered Germany’s first literary masterpiece. Magnus won’t let Mary touch Simplicissimus because it’s the secret codebook he uses to communicate with Axel. When le Carré got home from Lesbos, his wife typed up the pages he’d written.

“Without much effort,” Sisman writes, “I was able to identify eleven women with whom he had affairs,” and “there were plenty more besides.” Sisman suggests that cheating became a replacement for espionage for le Carré, an “ersatz form of spying”—another way to live a double life.

photo of light sparking on clear water with stony shallow bottom that deepens into darkness, with fish Fish in the sea off Mon Repos (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

It’s 10 days until Good Friday, and according to Lawrence Durrell, there’s a myth here about the 10 days leading to Good Friday: Goat-legged creatures are sawing through the trunk of the tree that holds up the world. Every year, they’ve almost cut through it when they hear the shout of “Christ has arisen!” and it makes them drop their saws to fly “in a chattering throng into the real world—if I may call our world that.”

Le Carré took inland walks, so Alice and I go inland too. In a little town called Nymfes, we see a waterfall: a glittering curtain down black rock, splitting into quick rivers that seem to uncannily slow down the longer you stare at them. It’s not hard to imagine nymphs living in that sparkling grove; it’s hard to imagine them not living there. I’ve never wanted to drink something so badly.

Next we head to the mountain village where we’re staying the night. We Google the directions and start driving, and then say “This can’t be right” 7,000 times. At first the road is a rustic track through olive groves. If we’re going the wrong way, we don’t mind too much; any moment now, it’s sure to loop us back onto a road. Nope. Instead we climb higher and higher, to scenic overlook after scenic overlook, each one of which is, to me, a rocky hellscape.

We drive over boulders, the car juddering from side to side, the wheels spinning in loose stones. I really hope those ominous scraping sounds are just branches gouging the rental car’s paint job and not jagged rocks tearing up the undercarriage. There are puddles too, deep-brown puddles of unknown fathoms in which the wheels will slip and the engine flood. I try to keep to the shallow edge while not, ideally, driving us straight off the cliff. Each turn is so tight that it appears to be a dead end. I crawl to a halt, crane my neck, sigh, and keep driving around a switchback so extreme, I feel like I’m driving back onto myself.

Should we have turned around? A thousand times, yes. It’s clear that no one in the history of the world has ever driven up this path. The only explanation is that we angered the nymphs and they’re leading us to our deaths and we are just completely going along with it. Alice keeps getting me to stop so that she can take photographs of how glorious everything is, while I keep checking the tires for puncture wounds. At one point, I try to Google Are nymphs dangerous, but something on the risks of dating a nymphomaniac comes up, and then my phone loses service again.

“How many kilometers left?” I ask Alice many, many times.

“Five point six,” she says. Countless white-knuckle hours later: “5.4.”

At last, we arrive in the village of Old Perithia. If only Magnus had come this way, I keep thinking, Axel never would have found him.

Corfu’s wealth used to be concentrated inland, because of the oaks and olive groves, and because it was safer from pirates there. According to the information sheet I find in my room that night, if you owned land near the water, you’d give it to your daughter, not your son. Old Perithia is a beautiful ghost town. It dates to 1357, and at times, as many as 1,200 people would have lived here. Now there are just a few tavernas, this bed and breakfast, meadows of blossoming wildflowers, and the ruins. The town was abandoned because of the tourists, who sucked all of the wealth and workers from the interior toward the coasts. But now so many tourists gather on the coasts that some tourists, wanting to get away from all the other tourists, come out here. They’re drawn by the promise that they’ll find something truer and more authentic here. To paraphrase Durrell: the real Corfu, if I may call it that.

Checking in, we ask the owner about the path we drove in on. “Were we … supposed to do that?”

She looks at us blankly. “You came from where?”

“Back there, through the farm, up the mountain.”

We explain about the waterfall. She knows about the waterfall. She doesn’t know about any path.

She points to the parking lot. On the other side of it lies the ordinary, non-enchanted asphalt road.

sunset photo looking out over crowded buildings with hills on the horizon A view of Corfu’s Old Town at dusk (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

Early in his career, John le Carré tried to write a literary novel that had nothing to do with spying: The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. It was awful. He wanted to be seen as a major writer, and resented the suggestion that he should stick to what he was good at. He resented, too, the assumption that once the Cold War ended, he’d have nothing left to write about. In the introduction to the 1993 edition of The Little Drummer Girl, he complained about people who believed his “rice-bowl was broken.” How could they not appreciate the fact that, “of my fourteen novels to date, five have had nothing whatever to do with the Cold War”?

The level of defensiveness is a little pathetic, a little endearing. As one critic put it, he had “already beaten the genre trap”—not by leaving genre behind, “but by finding unexpected room within, as in A Perfect Spy.” When Magnus goes to Greece, he isn’t just trying to get away from the Czechs and the English while enjoying a nice vacation with his family; he’s also trying to write a literary novel, one that will contain and transcend his past and reconcile the fragments of his many selves. Magnus fails to write that great work, the lines deteriorating into “ponderous aphorisms about betrayal”: “betrayal as love,” “betrayal as escape,” “betrayal as travel.” But le Carré succeeded. No one reading A Perfect Spy for the first time today is going to wonder if it’s a literary novel. What else could it possibly be?

The thing I love most about the book is how it uses time to turn self-pity into something purer. A writer, Magnus thinks, is like a king, looking “down with love upon his subject, even when the subject is himself.” Later he repeats the idea: If only he could write, he’d be able to “look with favour on this child that was myself.” Maybe we should all be talking about our childhoods in the third person.

Le Carré’s mother walked out when he and his older brother were sleeping upstairs. They were 5 and 7. “One just couldn’t live like it,” she later said, as if that were an excuse. When he met her again as an adult, she informed him that Ronnie had infected her with syphilis when she was pregnant, and that he had been born with pus dripping out of his eyes. Ronnie abused him—hurt him in every way you could hurt a child—but Ronnie was the only parent he had.

I’m sitting in Spianada Square when I see the old woman again. I’ve been watching children play soccer, and thinking about how always, everywhere in the world, the littlest boy is grabbing the ball with his hands to steady it before he kicks. She’s wearing the same pink coat and clutching her bag, heading in the direction of the Old Fortress.

“Nothing goes away in life,” Magnus says in Athens, between one island and another. He’s been gone all night and most of the day, and Mary demands to know why. He’s crying; he kisses her hand and she feels the tears. He makes up a story about having to talk down an old Czech agent who was threatening to expose him. It’s a lie. It’s one version of the truth.

Travel Notes

Swimming off Mon Repos

Maybe you’ve been to paradise before and can yawn at crystal-clear waters, but I’ve swum only off America’s East Coast, where the ocean is mostly the color of strong tea, which is a nice way of saying the color of dirt. Normally I’d be appalled if my leg touched slimy fish, but when you can see them, it’s totally different. I like the delicate fish, quick and bright as sunbeams. Floating in the water, you feel outside of time, as if this could be any century. Hera’s worshippers might be carting their stones over the hilltop, or British soldiers could be galloping by—a “flash of red hunting coats through the olive-groves,” as Lawrence Durrell describes their trace on the landscape. But I can’t stay in the water long. My arms are ice, and my chest is hot. “It’s your heart,” Alice says. A more organized traveler would have brought a towel, but lying dripping on the sun-warmed rock is better.

Analipsi 7, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece

Lunch at Pergola

This restaurant is in Corfu’s Jewish quarter. The area was heavily bombed by the Nazis, and you can still see the gaps where buildings were destroyed. It makes you think about how full of history an empty space can be. Some ruins still stand, flowers growing through the blasted window frames. At the restaurant, we sit outside and order bread and salad and giant beans (that’s what they’re called: giant beans). A patchwork array of stray cats sit on their haunches, watching every bite we eat.

Ag. Sofias 15, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece

Kissing Saint Spyridon’s casket

The casket is small, though it holds another, smaller casket inside it. The inner one has a removable bottom for slipper access, because each morning, worshippers come to kiss the saint’s feet. About once a year, the slippers are replaced with new ones. The idea is that he wears them out by walking around at night performing miracles—or maybe it’s all the kissing. When I’m there, we can’t get at the saint’s feet, so the women around me press their lips to the casket instead. There’s a faint odor, and when it’s my turn to bend down, I realize, to my shame, that instead of kissing the casket, I’m sniffing it. But the smell isn’t coming from the saint. It’s coming from us: the crowding people, the smell not of death but of life. Outside the crypt, a priest is blessing a baby in a blue onesie. While the pious wait in line for the saint, another baby waits in line for the priest.

Agiou Spiridonos 32, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece

Treats

If you go to Corfu, I recommend eating lots of things—salty and sweet things, but especially sweet things—enfolded in pastry. Here’s a fun word: galaktoboureko. It’s custard under phyllo dough, with sweet syrup poured on top, and we have the best version at Periklis Alexis. The back of the bakery is decorated, inexplicably, with framed photos of fighter jets from sometime in the past century, deadly silver in blue skies. I have a feeling that le Carré would have appreciated that—some menace to cut the sweetness.

Agiou Vasileiou 12, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece

The Merchant’s House in Old Perithia

Here you can sleep in a cozy suite knowing that you’re snuggled in a valley of spring wildflowers and ghosts. A printout in my room says that after Old Perithia was deserted, “nature decided to reclaim the land, and in doing so she enveloped the village.” I like this part: The creeping roots of orchids, asparagus, oregano, and wild mint “either protected many old buildings and churches, or sped up their ruination.” The village is abandoned except for the inn and a handful of taverns for day-trippers. We’re there on the very first day of the season, so I think we get special treatment, but the food is delicious and the owner gives us big slices of walnut cake for free. We linger until he has to ask us to leave, because his wife is late for physical therapy, and the appointment is probably a long way from Old Perithia.

Old Perithia, Kerkyra 49081, Greece

Kanoni Beach

In Prospero’s Cell, Lawrence Durrell writes about “perhaps the loveliest beach in the world. Its name is Myrtiotissa.” Of course we go there. Nudist Only is spelled out in white pebbles at the top of the path. At the bottom is a tangled heap of discarded beach umbrellas, the metal rusting, the sunshades in tatters. Accustomed by then to the baseline beauty available anywhere you look, we decide the view is just okay. “I’ve seen better beaches in England,” Alice says. But after a few days of searching, we find what is actually the loveliest beach in the world, or at least the loveliest beach on one April day in Corfu. It’s in the northeast, below a green spit of land lifted high over the sea. In fact, there’s a perfect beach on every side of the outcrop, but my favorite is this one, Kanoni. It was too cold to swim, or I’d still be there, diving off the rocks. Someday I want to go back and swim around the outcrop, stopping off at each side. Maybe I loved it so much because even while I was there, I was dreaming of returning.

Kassiopi 491 00, Greece

Plous Books & Coffee

Corfu has plenty of tourist traps, long lanes lined with generic shops selling honey, body lotion made from donkey milk and olive oil, evil-deflecting blue-glass eyes, and—for some reason—tote bags with Frida Kahlo’s face on them, as if they ordered all of their products from the same conglomerate’s catalog. But this bookstore is quirky and sweet, with shabby damask chairs in a dimly lit back room where you can sit and drink coffee and read. I get a copy of The Dead, by James Joyce, in Greek. Notably: I can’t find any books by John le Carré.

Nikiforou Theotoki 91, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece

This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “Chasing le Carré in Corfu.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.


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The English novelist E. M. Forster believed that people know the characters in the novels they read better than they know one another. In fiction, he argued, a character’s true nature and deepest secrets are plainly available, whereas “mutual secrecy” is “one of the conditions of life upon this globe.” This idea is strikingly isolating. Can it possibly be true?

By the end of Stephanie Wambugu’s debut novel, Lonely Crowds, I could see where Forster was coming from. Following the decades-long convolutions of an intense and volatile friendship between two women, Ruth and Maria, Lonely Crowds poses similar questions about the limits of personal relationships. As the girls grow older and their unhealthy childhood patterns repeat in adulthood, their friendship begins to seem more dangerous than idyllic. Perhaps the most prevailing myth about childhood friends is that they know each other completely and love each other best. Wambugu counters such sentimentalism by revealing the many secrets and misunderstandings at the core of Ruth and Maria’s friendship. In their world, a lifelong bond is not a comfort but a liability.

Lonely Crowds begins in the contemporary present with Ruth, as an adult, seeming very lost at her own birthday party. As the novel’s title suggests, a crowd full of people can be a remarkably lonely place. “That Maria wasn’t here at the party was a source of great distress,” Ruth thinks, blowing out the candles. Ruth recalls that when she met Maria years ago, “I learned that without an obsession life was impossible to live. I’d forgotten. Now, I remembered.” Despite her success as an art professor and painter, Ruth feels adrift and bitter. She thinks she sees Maria everywhere. As she falls asleep the night after her party, she recollects her history with Maria, starting from the beginning.

Ruth’s obsession with Maria sparks from their first encounter, in a uniform shop for the Catholic school where they will soon be classmates. The scene is a small spectacle of shame: Ruth watches while Maria’s aunt tries to buy a uniform for Maria on layaway, promising to pay when her disability check comes through. The owner refuses and castigates Maria’s aunt in front of a long line of customers, throwing the two of them out of the store. As they leave, Ruth makes eye contact, and Maria “looked back at me as she crossed the threshold, wide black eyes, perfect. Then she was gone. I felt doomed.” Ruth decides she will befriend the girl at her new school and spends the rest of the summer besotted with the idea.

[Read: The Ghosts of Wannsee]

Maria and Ruth meet again on the first day of third grade at Our Lady in Providence, Rhode Island, where the two are the only Black girls in their class. They’re the same age, but to Ruth, Maria seems much older and wiser. During their first real conversation at school, Maria brags about her pearl earrings, a gift from a teacher, offering to let Ruth borrow them if she’s careful. “Oh, I’m not careful,” Ruth responds. “I’m careless.” Her utterly honest response demonstrates Wambugu’s knack for capturing the humor of childish intransigence on the page. But the scene also looms large for young Ruth: Maria’s earrings represent the mysterious world of adults, one that Ruth is hungry to learn more about. That the gift is inappropriate simply does not register for her.

Ruth is an only child, sheltered by her parents, who are Kenyan immigrants to a working-class neighborhood in Pawtucket, outside of Providence. Her mother values hard work and minding one’s own business, while her father is “lonely, mercurial, romantic,” often changing jobs and exacerbating marital tensions. Ruth’s upbringing is strict but stable. Maria lives with her aunt, who is severely bipolar, after her mother’s death by suicide.

The girls’ first playdate sets the stage for the uneven dynamic they’ll share for the rest of their friendship. After inviting Maria home from school with her, Ruth reminds herself to “come across as measured, impassive, and confident.” By the end of supper, Maria’s politeness and intelligence have charmed Ruth’s parents. But the success of the evening is punctured when Maria, as she is leaving, turns around to ask Ruth, “What’s your name again?”

Although Ruth never tells the reader how she feels about the question, nor how she responds, the moment feels pivotal, capturing how Ruth’s earnestness and longing are so often met with coolness, even rejection. But she soon wins Maria over, and eventually Maria comes to be a part of Ruth’s family. Like her biblical namesake, Ruth is loyal and steadfast to her friend, while Maria is independent and creative, often controlling the narrative of their relationship and even determining their future trajectories: Maria is an extrovert, so Ruth must be an introvert. Maria is the type to never settle down, while Ruth is going to get married. Ruth always looks to Maria for advice and approval, and Maria’s responses to her vary among love, tolerance, and disgust. Reading scene after scene in which Ruth is so passive can be frustrating. She is content to be molded by Maria, unaware of the danger: She is becoming a person who knows herself only in relation to her friend.

When Maria decides she wants to be an artist in New York, the girls both apply to and get into Bard College, where Ruth takes up painting and Maria studies film. Maria sees this moment as her great escape from bleak Pawtucket, while Ruth worries that she, too, is part of the past that her friend wants to leave behind. Maria is clear about one thing. “When we go to school, we have to go our own way,” she tells Ruth. “We don’t have to be together all the time. We still can be close and be … separate.”

In college, Ruth and Maria do pursue different paths and new relationships. The biggest test of their friendship comes when they move to New York City after graduation and both try to make it in the art world of the 1990s. Their childhood competitiveness grows into an adult professional envy: Where Maria meets easy success as a filmmaker, Ruth’s path is more complicated, riddled with self-doubt and jealousy. Like a piece of cherished childhood clothing, their friendship appears more and more ill-fitting as time passes. The two grow apart, not because they change, but because they do not; they are stuck in the same dynamics, unable to find new ways to connect to each other.

[Read: A film that captures a ‘friend breakup’]

As the novel progresses, Ruth often stops existing on the page, overtaken by her endless loops of fixation on the thoughts and feelings of others. In part because the reader has no insight into  Maria’s perspective, Ruth’s narrative voice makes it hard to discern what either woman gets from their friendship, or even the extent to which they know each other at all. I don’t believe that Maria enjoys Ruth’s overbearing attention, or that Ruth likes being consistently rejected by Maria. After a final confrontation, the women appear to accept their incompatibility, and their friendship becomes something more distant. But even when Ruth gets a prestigious fellowship at Bard and moves upstate with her new husband, her obsession with Maria never really disappears; it just morphs.

If Ruth never stands up to Maria, it’s because nothing is worth the risk of losing her. When they’re teenagers, Maria asks Ruth to throw away the many portraits that Ruth painted of her; Ruth complies. “I had a hard time forgiving her for that,” Ruth reflects, though she never tells that to Maria. Decades later, in New York, Maria uses footage of Ruth in a video without asking her permission. Watching herself on-screen, Ruth is unable to “shake the feeling that there was a violent thrust to the video and that something had been done to me that I hadn’t asked for.” Yet when Maria asks her what she thinks, Ruth demurs, telling Maria the piece is “cool.” “I would have been content spending the rest of my life walking behind her,” she thinks, as the two women cross the gallery back to their partners. It’s an insight that makes the risk of their friendship clear: For Ruth, losing her friend would mean losing herself, too.


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In the upper ranks of the Border Patrol, 20 officials have the title of sector chief. Gregory Bovino is the only one holding a gun in his social-media profile photo. Most of the others conform to a pretty standard formula: wearing a crisp green uniform in front of Old Glory and the black-and-green Border Patrol flag.

Bovino’s photo is more like a movie poster, or an AI-generated image of a comic-book character. He stands wearing a bulletproof vest against a black background, holding a tricked-out M4 rifle with a scope in his hands. He isn’t holding the weapon so much as cradling it affectionately, like a cellist getting ready to play. Bovino’s jaw is stiff, and his gaze is distant. Several Customs and Border Protection veterans with whom I spoke—who value the quiet strength of professional modesty—think the photo is ridiculous.

And yet, the performative qualities that have made Bovino a sometimes-mocked figure within CBP are the same ones that have landed him a starring role in the promotion of President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign. Bovino, whose formal title is chief patrol agent of the El Centro sector, has been put in charge of the administration’s immigration crackdown on the streets of Los Angeles, more than 200 miles from his office, which sits near the border. While much of the local anger has been directed at ICE, it’s actually Bovino who’s been calling the shots. The guys in camouflage, masks, and military gear running around Southern California car washes and Home Depot parking lots aren’t Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, but Border Patrol tactical teams trained to hunt drug smugglers in remote mountains and deserts.

When horse-mounted Border Patrol agents rode through MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles with camera crews in tow on July 7, Mayor Karen Bass came rushing to the scene and pleaded with Bovino to call them off. No arrests were made, but the sight of heavily armed federal agents advancing in formation through palm trees and soccer fields was jarring to a city on edge after weeks of raids and protests. Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the Los Angeles City Council president, told reporters that if Bovino wanted to make Border Patrol promotional videos, he should “apply for a film permit like everybody else” and “stop trying to scare the bejesus out of everybody.”

“Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon,” Bovino fired back on Fox. On Friday, he released a video—set to the song “DNA” by the rapper Kendrick Lamar, who is from L.A.—showing National Guard troops and mounted agents parading through the park with an armory of weapons and black masks covering their faces. “People ask for it, we make it happen,” Bovino posted to his government account on X, sounding more like a hype man than a lawman.

[Joshua Braver: When the military comes to American soil]

At a time when Trump-administration officials have done little to conceal their frustration with ICE leaders, demoting several over the past few months for missing the White House’s ambitious arrest quotas, Bovino’s assignment in California has been viewed by some at ICE as a slight against the agency. Current and former CBP officials told me it was more an indication that the White House wants field generals who will press the president’s deportation goals as aggressively as possible.

During the Biden administration, Border Patrol agents were often overwhelmed and exhausted as record numbers of migrants crossed into the United States. Unlawful entries fell sharply during Joe Biden’s last year in office, but they have plunged in recent months to levels not seen since the 1960s as a result of Trump’s all-out push to seal the border. That has left the Border Patrol’s roughly 19,000 agents with far less work and a lot more time. ICE, under relentless White House pressure to ramp up arrests and deportations, is now the agency that needs help.

Bovino, a 29-year veteran of the Border Patrol, seemed to anticipate the opportunity well before Trump took office. Two weeks before Inauguration Day, he sent dozens of El Centro Border Patrol agents five hours north to Kern County, California, near Bakersfield. Over the course of several days, agents in plainclothes made arrests at gas stations and stopped vehicles along the highway. The surprise tactics sent a wave of fear through the farms of California’s Central Valley, and though Bovino said his agents had targeted criminals, only one of the 78 people they arrested had a criminal conviction, according to records obtained by the nonprofit news organization CalMatters. The ACLU and other advocacy groups sued the government in February and won an injunction barring the Border Patrol from racially profiling suspects, and a federal district court found that Bovino’s teams likely violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. (Earlier this month, another federal judge ordered the government to stop racially profiling suspects in Los Angeles.)

Bovino had launched the Kern County expedition, which he called “Operation Return to Sender,” without getting clearance from superiors in Washington, according to CBP officials I spoke with who weren’t authorized to speak to reporters. The raids far from the border were not the kind of operation Biden officials would have endorsed. But those officials were already on their way out, and the Trump team coming in was thrilled with Bovino’s audition.

The Department of Homeland Security did not approve my request to interview Bovino. I sent a list of more than a dozen questions to DHS and CBP, asking about his record in the Border Patrol and why he’s been elevated to his current role. “Because he’s a badass” was all that the DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote back.

What Bovino is doing in Los Angeles is a pilot of sorts. It showcases the potential for a broader Border Patrol role in U.S. cities and communities, especially those that have adopted “sanctuary” policies restricting local police cooperation with ICE. By law, the Border Patrol’s ability to conduct warrantless searches is limited to within 100 miles of the nation’s international boundaries. But that includes maritime borders, and roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population, including the country’s largest metropolitan areas, fits within those boundaries.

ICE has only about 5,500 immigration-enforcement officers nationwide, and though the president’s tax-and-immigration bill includes funds to hire thousands more, recruiting, hiring, and training them will likely take at least a year. The Border Patrol has idle agents who are ready to go now.

Federal agents with US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) ride on an armored vehicle driving slowly down Wilshire Boulevard near MacArthur Park. Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty

Border Patrol agents generally have less experience than their ICE counterparts with the procedural elements of civil immigration enforcement in urban environments. Video clips went viral last month showing a masked Border Patrol team pummeling Narciso Barranco, a landscaper and the father of three U.S. Marines, as the agents arrested him outside an IHOP in Santa Ana. Viewers were shocked, but the tactics used were not out of line with the way agents often handle migrants who try to run or resist arrest near the border. (The Department of Homeland Security justified the use of force and claimed that Barranco had tried to “mow” them with his trimming tool.) The difference this time was that the arrest occurred on the streets of a U.S. city, not out in the desert with no one watching.

[Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable.]

During the past five and a half years in El Centro, which covers southeastern California’s Imperial Valley, Bovino has repeatedly insisted that he oversees the “premier sector” of the Border Patrol. It’s a facetious claim. El Centro is not considered a top-tier CBP assignment like El Paso or San Diego, where there’s a lot more smuggling activity.

“It's the type of sector where someone would usually be chief for a couple years and then move on to a larger sector,” one former DHS official told me. Bovino’s long tenure in El Centro without a promotion points to a lack of confidence from senior CBP leaders, the official and three former CBP officials said. DHS declined to respond.

Border Patrol chiefs have always enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy from Washington regarding day-to-day operations, but they aren’t supposed to make partisan statements in uniform or criticize elected officials in the states where they work. During Biden’s term, Bovino was the chief who created the most consternation among CBP officials at headquarters because of his outspoken conservative views and social-media enthusiasm, current and former DHS and CBP officials told me.

“He has done things that Border Patrol leadership has had to spend time cleaning up, such as posting information that was law-enforcement-sensitive on social media, which can hamper broader law-enforcement operations,” said the former DHS official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal disciplinary actions.

But the contentious relationship Bovino had with his superiors during those years has only bolstered his standing among Trump-aligned border hawks. As El Centro chief, Bovino became the lead auteur of a new style of highly produced videos for CBP.

During the first Trump administration, the Border Patrol launched its own public-relations operation—the Strategic Communications division, or StratComm—to give rank-and-file agents a bigger role in touting their work, improving the agency’s reputation and boosting recruitment. Many of the videos emphasized Border Patrol humanitarian efforts and rescues of distressed migrants in remote areas, or the benevolent serve-and-protect image of agents and officials attending parades and community events.

Bovino has taken StratComm messaging in a different direction. In September 2020, soon after he took command in El Centro, his social-media team released “The Gotaway,” a fictionalized video showing a migrant sneaking into the United States and murdering the first person he encounters. The video caused an uproar, and the Border Patrol temporarily took it down, as lawmakers demanded to know why agents were spending time making movies. (One former CBP official told me El Centro benefited from the talents of two agents who had taken filmmaking courses before signing up for the Border Patrol).

Bovino has had legal problems as well. In 2022, a federal judge in Louisiana rejected DHS’s attempt to dismiss a lawsuit filed by two Black Border Patrol employees who claimed discrimination when Bovino became sector chief in New Orleans. The two were finalists for the second-ranking position in New Orleans in April 2018 when Bovino abruptly canceled the job listing and used a transfer process to hire his close friend, a white Border Patrol official. The court found an email from the friend that compared Bovino to a Confederate general and the New Orleans office to a unit of Black Union soldiers. “Oh jeez. DELETE!!!!” Bovino replied.

The exchange raised “concerns of racial animus” in the hiring process, the judge wrote. DHS settled the case.

In 2023, Bovino landed at the center of a partisan fight in Congress when Biden officials blocked him from testifying during a Republican-led investigation of the administration’s border policies. Top Republicans sent a letter to CBP claiming Bovino had been silenced and retaliated against when he was temporarily reassigned to a desk job in Washington. Rodney Scott, the current commissioner of CBP and the former Border Patrol chief, was one of Bovino’s most ardent defenders.

Bovino returned to El Centro, his social-media enthusiasm undiminished. He published holiday-themed videos, including hokey parodies of Home Alone and A Christmas Story. The old serve-and-protect messaging was out in favor of guns, ATVs, and tactical teams kicking ass to heavy metal and thumping bass tracks.

More recently, the messaging has turned messianic. A CPB video circulated this month by the Department of Homeland Security embodies a new synthesis of high-paced action with Christian-nationalist themes. The video, “Bible Verse,” opens with a monologue by the actor Shia LaBeouf, lifted from the World War II movie Fury, in which a soldier prepares his comrades to fight the Nazis with a stirring passage from the Book of Isaiah about answering the call of God. The song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” plays to stylized, washed-out footage of Border Patrol tactical agents zooming around in helicopters and speedboats.

The video has nearly 3 million views on X, and as a work of pure propaganda, it’s the most engrossing CBP video I’ve ever seen. But former DHS and CBP officials I shared it with recoiled at the underlying message that Border Patrol agents are delivering holy vengeance.

The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, which performed the song in the video, sent a cease-and-desist warning to the Department of Homeland Security. “It’s obvious that you don’t respect Copyright Law and Artist Rights any more than you respect Habeas Corpus and Due Process rights, not to mention the separation of Church and State per the US Constitution,” the band wrote, adding: “Oh, and go f… yourselves.”

I have gotten to know at least a dozen Border Patrol sector chiefs during the decade I’ve spent reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. The chiefs are police commanders, but they are also politicians. They tend to value the same skills required of any good leader: smooth public speaking, personal decorum, equanimity under pressure. They are not especially impressed by guns or social-media posting, and they dislike anything that elevates individual flash over institutional traditions.

Much of the job of the Border Patrol is mundane and uneventful; it consists of sitting alone in a truck and watching “the line” for hours on end in case anyone or anything potentially threatening comes across. There are periodic moments of action, especially when smuggling activity increases, but fewer now that the border is so locked down.

[Adam Serwer: The deportation show]

Blas Nuñez-Neto, a top border-policy official during the Biden administration, told me that Democrats have at times been too reluctant to let the Border Patrol trumpet its work stopping actual threats and capturing dangerous criminals. The stressful, tedious work agents perform while processing record numbers of asylum seekers is not meant to be their primary job, Nuñez-Neto said.

"The Border Patrol's job should focus on detecting and preventing the entry of people who may present a threat to our security, not serving as the entry point for the asylum system,” he said. “We should have an organized, safe, and orderly process for people who want to claim asylum that doesn’t involve distracting the people who work between ports of entry from doing their core mission.”

The Trump administration’s social-media messaging has become extreme and dehumanizing, Nuñez-Neto said, but he understands Bovino’s push to make the job look exciting and heroic.

The former DHS official I spoke with told me he is concerned that Bovino’s hard-charging approach will ultimately hurt recruitment, even if it’s popular among the most gung-ho agents.

“They’re going to end up with a growing recruitment challenge, because the people that they will be attracting are not actually the people that they will need to do the unglamorous work,” the former official told me. “And most law-enforcement work is unglamorous work.”

Bovino, now with a bigger stage, has continued making the work look as glamorous as possible as he and his team move from Los Angeles to other parts of California. He released another video Thursday, this one set to Kanye West’s “Power” and showing his agents rolling into Sacramento and chasing people through a Home Depot parking lot. “There is no such thing as a sanctuary state,” Bovino says to the camera, his thumbs tucked in his belt in the style of an Old West sheriff. Tear-gas canisters dangle from his vest like hand grenades. “This is how and why we secure the homeland,” Bovino says. “For Ma and Pa America: We’ve got your backs.”


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Last month, President Donald Trump’s administration scrapped a long-standing Texas law that provided access to financial aid for “Dreamers”—undocumented immigrants, brought into this country as children, who grew up here, graduated from local high schools, and are committed to becoming permanent residents. The administration’s allies tried and failed to persuade the state legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, to repeal the law, which has had nearly a quarter century of bipartisan support. So the administration made an end run around Texas’s democratic process: The Department of Justice hatched a plan with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to kill the law, filing a joint motion that asked a federal court to declare the Texas Dream Act unconstitutional. A judge approved the motion the very same day. The whole process took just six hours. Whatever one’s views are on Dreamer policy, the fact is that this maneuver went against the will of the people of Texas.

The organization I lead, Democracy Forward, has, along with several other groups, filed a motion to defend the law. Texans deserve to have the constitutionality of their Dream Act judged in court, not killed off via a collaboration between the president and the state attorney general. And even more alarming than the Trump administration’s dismantling of this law is that it’s part of a broader effort to short-circuit democracy at the state level.

State-level democracy is essential to America’s federalist system. During another time in U.S. history when a majority of the Supreme Court was imposing barriers to the public’s ability to self-govern, Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously observed, “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Later, Justice William Brennan argued that states have the “power to impose higher standards” under state law “than is required under the Federal Constitution.” Throughout America’s long history, state-level innovations have pushed the country forward: Some states abolished slavery long before the Civil War, granted women the right to vote before the Nineteenth Amendment was adopted, and legalized marriage equality years before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling.

Of course, states have not always been on the side of human freedom and progress. Appeals to “states’ rights” have served as rallying cries for enslavers, segregationists, and others seeking to deny the rights of people and communities since the nation’s founding. “No state,” the Fourteenth Amendment proclaimed after the Civil War, shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” When America’s system of government works as it should, the federal government steps in to prevent states from undermining human freedom.

[David Frum: The courts won’t save democracy from Trump]

That’s what America saw in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to implement a Supreme Court ruling to desegregate schools; the governor, an avowed segregationist, had refused to comply. President John F. Kennedy similarly federalized the Alabama National Guard to carry out desegregation orders at the University of Alabama, again over the objection of a pro-segregation governor.

Now the president and his political appointees, not a state’s governor, are ignoring federal-court orders. In April, a federal court found that the government had exhibited “a willful disregard for its Order” that planes carrying migrants who had been denied basic due process be turned around until the court could hear the migrants’ case. (Democracy Forward and the ACLU represent the migrants in that matter.) Two months later, in early June, Trump federalized the California National Guard and deployed active-duty Marines to Los Angeles without the approval of Governor Gavin Newsom, who argued that local law enforcement was fully capable of managing anti-ICE protests. Trump’s move was a federal flex that made a mockery of state sovereignty and democracy, and created more chaos than it solved. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said that what she saw in a local park “looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation.”

To justify its actions in California, the administration invoked Eisenhower’s 1957 move to enforce federal-court orders on civil rights. Yet Trump’s actions aim for the opposite of Eisenhower’s. Instead of using federal power to protect people’s rights, Trump is misusing federal power to undermine them. That is democracy upside down.

Similarly, when Maine insisted that it would defend transgender athletes’ participation on women’s college-sports teams, the president brazenly interfered. Maine was following the law as it argued was set forth in Title IX and the state’s Human Rights Act, but Trump sought to force a new interpretation of the federal law through executive actions, including a February order. That month, Trump pronounced, “We are the federal law,” at which point the administration began a process to cut off funding to Maine’s public-school meal programs as punishment—funds appropriated by Congress to help children in need. “See you in court,” Maine Governor Janet Mills told the president. She did, and Maine won.

The administration has also attempted to usurp the power that the Constitution provides both Congress and the states. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution mandates that only states and Congress can make or alter the “times, places, and manner” of holding federal elections. Ignoring that, Trump, in an executive order, has sought to impose federal time, place, and manner requirements that create barriers to the ballot box. Much of this executive order has been blocked by two federal courts in response to litigation filed by 19 states, among other parties. One federal judge found that the requirements Trump is seeking to impose would create time-consuming burdens on states and could chill voter participation— “the antithesis of Congress’s purpose in enacting” federal election laws. (The Trump administration is also pressuring Texas Republicans to redraw congressional districts in the middle of the decade, outside the normal cycle, to skew the midterm elections.)

[Adam Serwer: Trump is wearing America down]

The Trump administration has called lawsuits filed against its actions “frivolous” and “vexatious.” But as with so many of Trump’s attacks, this is really a confession. The Texas ploy is just one of many ways the administration is undercutting the checks and balances in the U.S. constitutional system. The administration has eviscerated agencies and programs created by Congress, attacked judges and the legal profession as a whole, and attempted to stifle a free and open press through intimidation tactics. It’s all in keeping with a theme: To empower one man, you need to disempower everyone else, everywhere else—including in states where laws are counter to the president’s political agenda.

What’s happening in Texas, California, Maine, and other states goes beyond normal political disagreements or turf spats. This isn’t the typical tug-of-war of federalism. The Trump administration is undermining foundational democratic principles and turning what are supposed to be “laboratories of democracy” into laboratories of repression—something that should have no place in a nation founded on the promise of human freedom and the pursuit of happiness.


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Presidents are, like the rest of us, flawed human beings. Many of them had volcanic tempers: Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Joe Biden, among others, reportedly could sling Anglo-Saxonisms with gusto. In public, most of them managed to convey an image of geniality. (Nixon might be the exception there, but he embraced being an uptight square and his admirers found it endearing.) But all of them, regardless of their personality, had at least some notion about government, some sense of what they wanted to accomplish in the most powerful office in the world.

Donald Trump exhibits no such guiding belief. From his first day as a candidate, Trump has appeared animated by anger, fear, and, most of all, pettiness, a small-minded vengefulness that takes the place of actual policy making. It taints the air in the executive branch like a forgotten bag of trash in a warm house on a summer day—even when you can’t see it, you know it’s there.

Trump’s first run for office was itself a kind of petty tantrum. Trump had always wanted to run for president, a wish he expressed as far back as the 1980s. But Trump’s journey from pro-abortion-rights New York oligarch to anti-abortion Republican populist picked up speed after President Barack Obama humiliated him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Trump denies that Obama’s jibes moved him to run, but he jumped into the open GOP field once Obama’s two terms were coming to an end, and to this day, he remains obsessed with the first and only Black president—to the point that he misspoke on at least one occasion and said that he defeated Obama, not Hillary Clinton, to win his first term.

Trump’s second term has been a cavalcade of pettiness; his lieutenants have internalized the president’s culture of purges, retribution, and loyalty checks. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s insistence, for example, on renaming U.S. military bases after Confederate leaders has led to clumsy explanations about how the bases are now named for men who had names that are exactly like the 19th-century traitors’. This kind of explanation is the sort of thing that high-school teachers get from teenage smart alecks who think they’re being clever in class.

My colleague Shane Harris recently reported an appalling story about how former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sponsored a rescue dog to become a working animal at the CIA. He named the dog Susan, after his late wife, an animal lover who volunteered at a local shelter. Clapper was looking forward to attending Susan’s graduation ceremony at a CIA facility—but the agency, taking what it believed to be Trump’s lead, barred him from even setting foot on CIA property. (Trump despises Clapper, and blames him for what Trump calls “the Russia hoax,” among other slights against the president.) As Shane wrote: “The upshot is that an octogenarian Air Force retiree who spent half a century in his nation’s service was not allowed to attend a party for a dog he essentially donated to the government and named after his dead wife.”

Meanwhile, those still in government are being harassed and driven out of public service because of who they know—or even what they might be thinking. Over at the FBI, as I wrote earlier this month, Director Kash Patel is reportedly strapping people to polygraph machines to find out whether anyone is saying bad things about him. Michael Feinberg, a senior FBI counterintelligence agent, was told that he could accept a demotion or resign because of his friendship with Peter Strzok, an agent fired years ago who has long been an object of Trump’s wrath.

Now Trump wants to fire Fed Chairman Jerome Powell because Powell refuses to lower interest rates and make Trump’s economy look better than it is. (Inflation and joblessness are both rising.) Trump can’t summarily fire Powell, but the president is taking the Fed chair’s opposition so personally that he is already ginning up a baseless accusation that Powell is somehow guilty of malfeasance on a building project, on the theory that it might be the kind of misconduct that would allow Trump to remove him.

Even on matters of grave international importance, Trump governs by emotion rather than any coherent sense of policy. A few weeks ago, the president seemed to change course on the war in Ukraine. He said he would allow arms shipments to continue, and promised last week to have advanced systems such as Patriot missile batteries sent to Ukraine. Trump’s own Defense Department was caught flat-footed after repeatedly putting a stop to those shipments. (After all, Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance seemed to be on Vladimir Putin’s side after they engaged in an unseemly—and yes, petty—ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House this past winter.)

But Putin had finally done something worse than murdering thousands of Ukrainian civilians and kidnapping Ukrainian children: He had made Donald Trump look like a chump. Putin refused to help Trump fulfill an unwise campaign promise by acceding to a cease-fire. Instead, the Russian president has unleashed some of the most violent attacks of the war, a raised middle finger to the White House and its chief occupant.

You can do a lot of bad things around Trump. You can ignore court orders. You can deport people without due process. You can let Ukrainian rivers fill with the blood of innocent people. But when you make Trump look weak or stupid, you’ve gone too far.

Trump’s promises on Ukraine might amount to very little. Emotional reactions pass quickly, and Trump’s attention span is measured in milliseconds; he flip-flops on everything from trade to friendships. So far, some shipments to Ukraine have resumed, but Trump has also offered Putin a respite of 50 days to come to the table—which would be just about the number of days left of good weather for military operations. (“Fifty days” could also be just another version of the way Trump uses “two weeks” to punt issues that he doesn’t want to deal with further downstream.)

Now Trump’s attention seems to be on strong-arming the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians football and baseball teams into reclaiming their old names, the Redskins and the Indians. It’s possible that Trump is responding to some hidden groundswell of nostalgia. He’s also not the first president to get fired up about Washington’s home team: Obama was clearly interested in getting rid of the Redskins name, and undoing anything Obama did is something of a Trumpian rule.

More likely, however, Trump is focusing on this small issue in the hopes of picking a racist scab that will occupy the attention of his base—because much of that base right now is deeply angry about a supposed cover-up relating to Trump’s former friend and the convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.

Yet again, when trying to throw red meat to the faithful, Trump picked something small and silly. Trump rules by appeals to grievances—rather than focusing on substantive national problems—because at least some of the MAGA movement revels in that kind of cruelty. This culture-warring behavior helped get him elected, and Trump’s voters have been willing to join him on these capricious roller-coaster rides for the first six months of his second term. But roller coasters don’t have actual destinations, and sooner or later, even the most dedicated riders will want to get off.

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Today’s News

The Pentagon is starting to pull out 700 Marines who were sent to Los Angeles last month, as President Donald Trump’s military deployment to the city winds down.A federal judge appeared to be leaning in favor of Harvard University during today’s hearing over Harvard’s lawsuit claiming that the Trump administration moved to cut its federal research funding to the university for political reasons.The Justice Department confirmed to Fox News that it has received a criminal referral from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who alleges that Obama administration officials “manufactured and politicized intelligence” about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal compiles a roundup of articles that look at the changing nature of family vacations—and how to enjoy them without putting too much pressure on making every moment perfect.

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Evening Read

A cartoon elephant dumps sunscreen on its head. Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Should You Sunscreen Your Cat?

By Katherine J. Wu

For all of the eons that animal life has existed on Earth, the sun has been there too. And for all of those eons, animal life has had only one solution for intense exposure to the sun: evolution. Some creatures have thick, dark skin that’s resistant to UV harm; others sprout fur, scales, or feathers that block the sun’s rays. Many fish, reptiles, amphibians, and birds may produce a compound that protects their cells against the sun’s damaging effects. Hippos, weirdly, ooze a reddish, mucus-y liquid from their pores that absorbs light before it can destroy their skin. And plenty of creatures have evolved behaviors that take advantage of their environment—rolling around in dirt or mud, simply retreating into the shade.

But certain modern animals have sun problems that natural selection can’t easily solve.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Meryl Streep in Julia & Julia Jonathan Wenk / Columbia Pictures / Everett Collection

Read. Tyler Austin Harper recommends eight books that break down what’s really going on with America’s universities.

Watch. In 2020, David Sims shared 25 feel-good movies perfect for rewatching—whether you need a laugh, a dose of nostalgia, or just an escape from everyday stress.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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