In its original televised run, from 1997 to 2009, the animated show King of the Hill aired 259 good-to-great episodes about the Hills, a folksy and well-intentioned family living in small-town Texas. That’s a lot of TV, and those looking for a representative moment—one that summarizes the entire show, more or less—might pick an exchange from the third-season episode “Three Coaches and a Bobby,” in which the stodgy patriarch, Hank, attempts to explain to his son, Bobby, why soccer is a stupid sport. Hank is a Dallas Cowboys diehard; the idea of Bobby getting into the Premier League sends him into full-body shivers. But rather than take offense or rise to his father’s provocation, Bobby fixes his old man with a placid look and asks: “Why do you have to hate what you don’t understand?”

During those initial seasons, King of the Hill drew much of its humor from how Hank’s values clashed with modern society—for example, his inability to understand why anyone would enjoy, as he put it, a sport “invented by European ladies to keep them busy while their husbands did the cooking.” But the living personification of the changing times was Bobby. The younger Hill was a sensitive and proudly chubby tween boy—not good at fighting or football, but handy with a sewing machine and a master of prop comedy. Hank, who was born in the 1950s or ’60s—cartooons tend to be vague with ages—grew up in an era with a very fixed view of how men should think and behave. To paraphrase Tony Soprano, he was the Gary Cooper type, strong and silent. Bobby, whose age hovered between 11 and 13, was by contrast a Millennial—part of a generation that had more freedom to do things differently, and that would come to be consistently misunderstood by its elders.

[Read: The strength of the ‘soft daddy’]

The new season continues probing that tension between father and son—not by picking up where the original show left off, but by vaulting forward into the future (a rarity for animated programs, whose characters often remain fixed in time). Hank and his wife, Peggy, are now retired in present-day Texas; Bobby is 21 years old and living on his own. Although this age technically categorizes him as a Zoomer—the show has been off the air for 16 years, but it has chosen to age its characters less than a decade—Bobby still behaves like a Millennial. At one point, he describes himself as “hashtag thick,” slang ripped right out of an old BuzzFeed post. And his anxieties seem propelled by a fear of winnowing potential, the feeling that he might be left behind. Watching him, I was struck by how aptly he channeled the unease of a generation reaching middle age while still lacking many traditional signposts of adult life. Yet he’s also inimitably Bobby—sweet, congenial, a little goofy—which makes his trajectory in these episodes all the more endearing, because it’s rooted in believable growth.

In earlier seasons, Bobby was sometimes the centerpiece of a plot, but he was just as often relegated to delivering a well-timed quip in service of another character’s storyline. Now he’s become a co-headliner, appearing substantively in each episode of the new season. The shift may partly be logistical: Luanne, Hank’s angelic and naive niece who filled out the Hill family, was voiced by Brittany Murphy, who died in 2009, and her role was not recast out of respect. But the refocus on Bobby allows the show to use father and son as foils for each other. Just as Hank remains confused by the things he doesn’t understand—such as the expected courtesy of rating your ride-share driver five stars, when he’s really done more of a four-star job—so is Bobby lightly out of step with his own peers, forcing a similar confrontation with his own principles.

Right away, we get a sense of how his experience differs from others in his age cohort. Whereas many of them are off at college, Bobby is instead the executive chef and a co-owner of Robata Chane, a Japanese-German restaurant; he works long hours for not much money. In the first episode, a flirtatious customer invites Bobby to a frat party, and they end up going home together. The next morning, when he tries to set up a future date, she makes it clear that their hookup was a onetime, rhythm-of-the-night type of thing. Here was a moment that could indicate how the show meant to portray Bobby: If he should project hurt, perhaps the show would tilt toward a judgmental “kids these days” perspective on evolving sexual mores. Instead, pleasant surprise dawns on Bobby’s face—this is not such a bad outcome, even if he might have liked a second date. He is still the boy who is open to new experiences, not someone who has been hardened by adulthood.

[King of the Hill now looks like a fantasy]

Yet he is not unconditionally tolerant; like his father, he draws some lines in the sand. Early on in the season, he reconnects with Connie, a middle-school sweetheart who is now going out with Chane, his business partner. At one point, he obtains evidence that Chane may be cheating on Connie—which, he then learns, is a moot discovery, because the two of them are practicing ethical nonmonogamy. Connie explains how it works, in a dutiful and credulous way, and to Bobby it sounds like nonsense. Because he cares for her, he can’t help but express his distaste for the arrangement, edging uncomfortably close to slut-shaming—“the worst thing” a person can do, Connie tells him, aghast at his response even as it seems to leave her less assured about her own behavior.

This is subtle character work that, as described on the page, might seem hectoring or prescriptive. But King of the Hill has always been more of a good hang, rooted in the organic interplay of recognizable personalities, than a laugh factory. Back in the day, its sister shows on Fox were The Simpsons and Family Guy, two punch-line-heavy shows with lots of cutaway gags and surreal touches. Both of those shows starred young boys, Bart Simpson and Chris Griffin, who never got older, and whose immaturity was a pointed feature; you could, and can, count on them to behave and react the way they usually do. Watching Bobby mature into a young adult—as many viewers have since the show first premiered—is a different experience, and perhaps the best reason to tap in.

These scenes aren’t funny, per se. What is funny—has always been funny, will always be funny—is the texture of Bobby’s voice. None of this would land without the heroic voice acting of Pamela Adlon, who subtly dials up his boyish vocal fry into the rasp of a grown man. Bobby sounds like a born sweetheart, someone whose heart is pure and whose frailties are relatable—not a smart aleck or a dullard or an agent of chaos. Another plot point this season concerns Hank’s teenage half brother, Good Hank (it’s a long story), who gets swept up in the manosphere. Bobby would never, I thought while watching this subplot play out. He’s too old-fashioned to completely get with the times, and too attuned to his own sense of right and wrong to give into peer pressure. In this, like countless sons before him, he walks the path toward becoming a fresh iteration of his father, bringing the show full circle.

The new season knowingly acknowledges that it is asking viewers to sit with the years that have passed for the Hills. Television revivals are always good for a healthy whiff of nostalgia, but the routine may quickly become tired. In the season’s finale, Bobby wonders if Connie might “only like the 12-year-old husky version of me,” rather than the man he’s become. Connie, thankfully, brushes off this fear—Bobby is the bravest person she knows, she says, because he’s doing exactly what he wants. He still has plenty of road to burn: Financial stability would help, as would the time to do his laundry. (He still drops off his dirty clothes at his mom’s.) But this self-awareness is meaningful, as it was for his younger self. You believe that he’ll keep growing, and that he’ll weather whatever storms may come, because he understands who he is.

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A shooting in broad daylight last month on a dry, rocky hillside in the West Bank barely registered in the Israeli press and has not led to legal consequences. But it might signal the opening of yet another front in the cascading wars unleashed by the October 7, 2023, attacks.

Jewish settlers from Carmel, an outpost that is illegal under Israeli law, approached the nearby Palestinian Bedouin village of Umm al-Khair in a large construction digger and began to damage an olive grove, residents of the village told me when I recently visited.

When residents tried to stop them, some by throwing rocks, Yinon Levi, a settler who runs a demolition business that contracts with the Israel Defense Forces, fired several rounds from a handgun, killing the 31-year-old activist Odeh Hathalin.

I spent the past week traveling across Israel and the West Bank, meeting with officials from the Israeli government, military, and opposition, as well as Palestinian political leaders and activists. I left believing that Israel is closer to triggering a second war with West Bank Palestinians than it is to ending the disastrous conflict in Gaza.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could have emerged from the depths of October 7—when he told President Joe Biden that “in the Middle East, if you’re seen as weak, you’re roadkill”—in some triumph, having vanquished virtually all of Israel’s enemies, culminating with the recent bombing of Iran. But he failed to seize the opportunity to stop the fighting in Gaza.

Instead, nearly two years into a war they did not choose, Israeli officials still have not found, and may not even be genuinely seeking, a way out. They have set requirements for ending the war that they do not seem able to achieve on the battlefield, at least at anything close to an acceptable cost both to their own military and society and to innocent Palestinians.

Although Israel may finally be close to a third temporary cease-fire that would allow some of the hostages to come home—a very welcome development—even that might not end the war. When the last cease-fire collapsed, in March, officials made a disastrous strategic and moral mistake by letting more than two months pass with no food entering Gaza, leaving hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation. That choice has so horrified the rest of the world that a half dozen countries, with few other options to demonstrate their outrage, have declared their intent to recognize a Palestinian state.

And today, the UN-backed body that monitors food insecurity declared, for the first time since the conflict began, that there is a famine in the district around Gaza City that is “entirely man made.” Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a response accusing the report of being based on “Hamas lies,” and of lowering its usual thresholds for such a declaration.For now, instead of freeing all of the 20 or so Israeli hostages believed to still be alive, withdrawing the IDF to the perimeter of the Gaza Strip, enabling a surge of humanitarian assistance to people in need, and reserving the right to target what’s left of Hamas’s leadership later—Israeli officials are betting that expanding the war will lead Hamas to capitulate or collapse.

But it is unclear how another round of fighting would accomplish what 22 months of intense combat has not. And with the world’s attention focused on Gaza, the situation in the West Bank is sliding toward another crisis.

A majority of Israelis now say they want to end the Gaza war and bring the hostages home, even if Hamas remains armed and its leaders able to exert control over the Strip. The more than 100,000 demonstrators who pack Habima Square and Hostages Square in Tel Aviv on Saturday nights have shifted their focus to demanding a full and immediate cease-fire.

Having once recoiled at U.S. pressure, many Israelis now openly court it. On a recent evening, hundreds wore MAGA-style red hats, aimed at getting the attention of the Trump administration, that read End This Fuc*!ng War.

And it’s not just the activists. Last week, more than 600 former Israeli security officials, including the heads of many top spy and military agencies, wrote President Donald Trump a letter asking him to intervene against their own government and declaring that “it is our professional judgment that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel.”

After October 7, the Biden administration was right to embrace Israel in the wake of the worst day in its history, and to support what I consider to have been a just war against the Hamas terrorists who were responsible. But I also believe that we did far too little, far too late to limit the truly catastrophic civilian harm that Israel’s response inflicted and, after Israel’s core military objectives had been achieved, try to end the war.

Waiting for an intervention from Trump—who has reversed what modest pressure Biden placed on Israel and offered virtually unqualified support for its actions in Gaza—feels futile; after Israel’s cabinet voted earlier this month to expand the war into Gaza City, he said that the decision is “pretty up to Israel.”

Although it remains true that Hamas is responsible for starting this phase of the conflict by murdering more than 1,000 Israelis and that the group could end the war tomorrow by releasing the hostages and disarming itself, that, too, seems highly unlikely. Fairly or not, that puts the ball back in Israel’s court.

Earlier this month, I spoke with Shachar Shnorman, a kibbutznik who had returned home to Kfar Aza, where at least 62 residents were murdered on October 7, as he recounted the sounds of his neighbors being shot dead and the smell of the cigarette smoke from Hamas fighters seated on his porch as he hid a few feet away, on the other side of a shaded window.

He wants the war to end, he said. While we talked, drones buzzed overhead, and every 10 minutes or so, a new explosion could be heard coming from Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, the black plumes of smoke rising a couple of miles away.

Before the attack, Kfar Aza was known as a left-leaning commune. But Schnorman told me that most of his neighbors have not returned home, and many have “moved to the right.”

Despite an Israeli military assessment that Hamas’s capacity as an organized force is more than 90 percent degraded, Israeli officials for now seem determined to hold out for total victory.

They often invoke the full surrenders of Germany and Japan, arguing that stopping now would hand Hamas an undeserved victory and that international pressure to do so only hardens Hamas’s negotiating position. “There is a little devil sitting on every Israeli’s shoulder saying that all the Palestinians basically love Hamas, and the whole world basically hates the Jews,” one centrist political adviser told me.

Israeli officials argue that Hamas must be disarmed and removed from power, pointing to the thousands of remaining Hamas fighters. (One Israeli official said Hamas still has as many as 20,000, a staggering number given that estimates before the war ranged up to 30,000.) Although Israel agreed to a cease-fire in Lebanon last year that was widely celebrated, even though it left Hezbollah in place, Israeli officials insist that the situations are distinct. “If Hezbollah had done October 7, the IDF would be in Beirut to this day,” one told me.

[Gershom Gorenberg: The two extremists driving Israel’s policy]

All of which leads to speculation here about why Israel won’t stop. Most Israelis believe that the war continues less because of Gaza than the preservation of Netanyahu’s fragile governing coalition.

At least two ministers have threatened to pull the support of their parties and trigger elections if a cease-fire is reached, arguing instead for returning Jewish settlers to the Strip for the first time since Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005.

The only real deadline will come in October 2026, before which elections must be held, because the government’s mandate expires.

“The strategy in Gaza is ongoing war. The war is the strategy,” former Air Force General Nimrod Sheffer, who has joined a prominent opposition party, told me. “That serves Bibi. It may serve the coalition. It doesn’t serve anyone else.”

Mahmoud Sleem / Anadolu / GettyAn aerial view of the destruction, taken after the ceasefire agreement came into effect in the Gaza Strip on January 21, 2025.

Meanwhile, with far less international scrutiny, Israel has launched a campaign across the West Bank that risks igniting a second front that is far closer to Israeli population centers and much harder to contain.After the end of the Second Intifada, in 2005, the West Bank experienced a period of relative calm compared with Gaza, where Israel has waged five wars since the IDF withdrew from the territory that same year, forcibly evicting thousands of Jewish settlers who lived there. Immediately after October 7, the IDF began a counterterrorism crackdown in the West Bank that has so far kept a lid on attacks against Israelis while claiming the lives of nearly 1,000 Palestinians fighters and civilians.The scale of the Israeli operation in the West Bank is massive, even if dwarfed by the scale of the conflict in Gaza. At the start of this year, an assault dubbed the “Iron Wall” in three northern West Bank refugee camps displaced 40,000 people, the largest number since Israel first occupied the territory in 1967. One security official who had visited the camps—which, despite that label, look more like cities—showed me photos of entire blocks reduced to rubble, describing it as a “Nagasaki-like” level of destruction.

Violence against Palestinians by Jewish settlers—the roughly 500,000 Israeli civilians who live in the West Bank, beyond Israel’s internationally recognized border—has increased dramatically, from fewer than 90 incidents a month at the start of this year to more than 200, according to the same official. Fatal attacks, which were once exceedingly rare, are becoming regular occurrences.

President Biden, in whose administration I served as deputy national security adviser, repeatedly warned Netanyahu about settler violence, sometimes publicly, and became the first U.S. president to impose sanctions on violent Israeli settlers and the organizations that support them. Upon taking office, Trump immediately removed all of the sanctions and has said virtually nothing about the West Bank since.

Although only a small minority of settlers commit violence, they are the vanguard of a religious and political movement that claims all of the West Bank as Israel’s birthright and that has navigated in recent years from the Israeli fringe to the mainstream. Few violent settlers are stopped before attacks are carried out. Fewer still face any real accountability after attacks occur.

Netanyahu has at times expressed concern over settlers’ conduct, but members of his own cabinet provide settlers with political cover—particularly National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, both of whom have been accused (and Ben-Gvir convicted) of crimes tied to their efforts to preserve and expand Israel’s occupation.

On a broiling recent afternoon in the South Hebron Hills, the family and neighbors of Odeh Hathalin, the Palestinian man killed last month, sat under a tarp beside a dried puddle of his blood on a concrete floor. They had been waiting for more than a week to receive his body from the IDF so they could hold a proper burial. Some had begun a hunger strike. A day later, his body was finally returned.

Umm al-Khair has long been targeted because many of its structures were built without official permits—which the Israeli government, which controls the permitting process, virtually never issues.

Just last year, Hathalin, who was featured in the recent Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” wrote about an IDF operation that destroyed homes.

Videos of the more recent attack, including one taken by Hathalin himself, were quickly posted online. Levi, the settler accused of the killing, had been sanctioned by Biden and exonerated by Trump. But after briefly being placed under house arrest, he is reportedly now free.

At least two American citizens are among those killed in a spate of attacks over the past month, and five since October 7.

The security official described one of the killings to me, in which armed settlers rounded up residents in the village of Sinjil, fired in the air to disperse the crowd, and then chased down Saifullah Musallet, a 20-year-old from Tampa who was visiting relatives, and beat him to death. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called it a “criminal and terrorist act,” using unusually (and admirably) strong language, but neither the U.S. nor Israel have held his killers accountable.

When I asked both Israeli officials and settler leaders about the increase in settler violence, they were largely dismissive.

“There is not settler violence; there is settler vandalism,” one prominent settler leader said, before launching into a long explanation of the threats settlers face from the more than 2 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank.

Another settler leader attributed reports of violence to the acts of “disadvantaged youths” who come to the West Bank from Israel.

Smotrich has taken the damaging step of regularly refusing to transfer to the Palestinian Authority customs revenues that Israel collects on goods entering the West Bank, to which Israel has no legitimate claim. During the Biden administration, Smotrich regularly sought to leverage the funds for policy concessions from Netanyahu or even from the U.S.

As a result, the PA, which administers about 40 percent of the West Bank under a deal reached with Israel in the 1990s, has, since April, been unable to pay salaries for many of its security forces, which work closely with the IDF despite strong disapproval from most West Bank residents.

Crime has surged across the West Bank since October 7, leading to frustration among residents and renewing long-standing concern that the PA, widely believed to be corrupt and out of touch, could collapse.

Many Israeli officials talk of the PA, which for all its flaws is committed to nonviolence and recognition of Israel, as if it is no different than Hamas. “As far as I’m concerned, let the PA collapse,” Smotrich has said. “It is an enemy.” Another Israeli official described the PA as “poisonous,” pointing to charges that its school curricula incite hatred of Jews.

Hussein al-Sheikh, a senior PA official, said he has invited Israeli and U.S. officials to review new textbooks and the implementation of other long-demanded reforms, such as an end to the “pay for slay” program, through which the PA subsidizes families of terrorists imprisoned by Israel.

For his part, Ben-Gvir last month established what the Israeli press has called a “quasi-police force” in the West Bank, comprising settler volunteers.

Tellingly, a security official said, by far the quietest period for settler violence since October 7 was the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, when Israel imposed a severe lockdown on the West Bank. That provides at least some evidence that the state, which did not want distractions during that time, can exercise more control when it chooses to.

Driving around the West Bank these days can feel like watching a crime scene unfold in plain sight. Settlers fence off land that isn’t theirs, raise Israeli flags, plow and plant fields. Not long ago, such acts involved a cat-and-mouse game with the army, which would thwart them if it could. No longer.

More than 80 Palestinian West Bank communities have been emptied entirely since October 7, replaced by more than 100 Israeli outposts, makeshift settlements that are illegal even under Israel law.

“I’ve worked in the West Bank for 23 years, and we’ve never had anything like this,” Dror Etkes, a longtime Israeli analyst and peace activist, told me. Riding across the northern West Bank in his beaten-up Jeep, he pointed out to me days-old construction or cultivation. “It is a totally different world.”

He and others who pay close attention to events in the West Bank believe that the territory is a tinderbox. “You have no idea how many guns there are in the West Bank,” one Palestinian official said. “We are lucky things haven’t gotten crazier.”

There is no shortage of candidates that could ignite a broader conflict.

Settlers are placing relentless pressure on the northern West Bank community of Duma, home to nearly 3,000 residents and the site of an infamous 2015 arson attack that killed an 18-month-old boy and both of his parents. When I drove past Duma, I could see that it is also a strategically located bulwark, preventing a string of settlements that expand west to east from completely bisecting the northern West Bank. A few days later, a settler who was on short-term leave from his IDF unit shot dead a Duma resident named Thameen Dawabsheh, 35, during a clash in which two settlers were lightly wounded.

But perhaps the most likely flashpoint is Jerusalem, the city holy to three faiths that is incendiary in the best of times.

The day after I arrived in Israel, on the Jewish holiday of Tisha b’Av, Ben-Gvir escorted more than 3,000 Jewish worshippers to pray in the most sensitive part of the Old City, on what Jews call the Temple Mount and Palestinians call the Haram al-Sharif.

It is home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which dates to the eighth century. It was previously the site of the First Temple and of the Second, whose destruction almost 2,000 years ago Tisha b’Av commemorates.

Ben-Gvir’s visit would, until recently, have been unthinkable.

For hundreds of years, prayer by Jews at the site has been exceedingly rare, proscribed both by many rabbis concerned about the sanctity of the site and, more recently, by an Israeli policy called the “status quo,” which allows Jews access to the site but only Muslims the right to pray there. Established by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan after Israel occupied all of the Old City in 1967, the policy is aimed at preserving order.

Tamir Kalifa / GettyA demonstrator holds a photo of Palestinian activist Odeh Hathalin during a protest over his death, on August 3, 2025 in Tel Aviv, Israel.

In 2000, a short visit to the site by then–opposition leader Ariel Sharon, who was given a tour by an archaeologist, triggered the yearslong Second Palestinian Intifada, which brought mass-casualty suicide attacks to Israeli cities. After that, even rare and furtive attempts by Jews to pray there—sometimes by feigning conversation with a fellow visitor or speaking into their phone—were generally halted by authorities, and were major news.

Ben-Gvir’s visit received sparse coverage in the Israeli press, which, since October 7, has taken a light touch with provocative stories on settler violence and the carnage and starvation in Gaza. A few days later, I spent about half an hour at the site and watched three separate groups of Jewish worshippers openly praying, all under police protection.

Elsewhere in greater Jerusalem, the eviction of Palestinian residents is surging in Sheikh Jarrah, the same neighborhood where similar actions in 2021—coinciding with disruptions of the status quo at the Temple Mount—prompted Hamas rocket fire that started an 11-day war in Gaza.

Last week’s second major event was more bureaucratic than ostentatious, but could be no less consequential—the final hearing on an infamous settlement project known as E1. U.S. administrations (other than Trump’s) have strongly opposed E1 since the 1990s because it would complete the encirclement of East Jerusalem with Jewish enclaves, separating the West Bank from the city that Palestinians expect to be the capital of their future state.

This week, Smotrich announced that the hearing had given the final green light and made clear that construction tenders would be issued shortly. The project, he said, would “bury the idea” of a Palestinian state. Once construction begins, the move will be extremely difficult to reverse. The longtime Jerusalem watcher Daniel Seidemann called it “Netanyahu’s greatest ‘fuck you’ to the int’l community, Israel’s closest supporters and the prospects of any two state outcome.”

Proponents of such steps have long argued that they are essential to Israel’s security. But signs that recently popped up around the Jewish Quarter of the Old City proclaiming Make Gaza Jewish Again, are among several indications of the growing ethno-religious justifications for Israel’s provocative policies.

[Yair Rosenberg: Israel’s settler right is preparing to annex Gaza]

The divide between religious and secular Jews has become Israel’s deepest political fault line. Religious parties—many of which joined Netanyahu’s coalition—have diverse and sometimes divergent agendas. The ultra-Orthodox parties tend to prioritize the preservation of funding for their separate educational system and of a controversial exemption from service in the army, a dispute over which might be the likeliest thing that could bring down Netanyahu’s government.

The national-religious movement takes a different approach. Many of its adherents live in settlements and pursue their expansion. They disproportionately volunteer for combat units in Israel’s security services, long the country’s foremost secular institutions, with many serving near the West Bank settlements where they live. As much as 40 percent of the incoming IDF infantry officer corps is now drawn from the national-religious movement. And the recent nomination of a controversial religious nationalist to head the Shin Bet, Israel’s version of the FBI, prompted resignation threats from other agency officials.

Christians and their holy sites have also come under threat. In Jerusalem, a cable-car project linking a Jewish neighborhood with the Old City cuts across the Mount of Olives, where Jesus is believed to have ascended. And for the first time, some church-owned land is being subjected to taxation—municipal officials in Jerusalem recently froze the bank accounts of the Greek Orthodox church over unpaid taxes.

In the West Bank in recent weeks, settlers have attacked a Catholic church in the Christian town of Taybeh and erected an outpost on the grounds of a Greek Orthodox church in the larger city of Jericho.

The religious dimensions of these disputes can add to an already overwhelming sense of intractability. “A conflict driven by politics can be resolved by politicians and diplomats,” Seidemann told me. “A religious conflict, only God can sort out.”

Considering the largely unforeseen landmark events of the past two years—the Gaza war, the destruction of Hezbollah, the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the bombing of Iran—no one can say with confidence where all of this is headed.In Israel, the discussion always returns to domestic politics, which were largely put on ice after October 7, as Israelis rallied around the flag. Netanyahu’s main rival at the time of the attacks, the former IDF chief Benny Gantz, even joined him in a unity government.

The political détente that followed October 7 now shows signs of unraveling. Pressure is mounting on the government to name an official commission of inquiry to investigate how the October 7 attacks happened and why it took nearly two days to quell the Hamas onslaught.

For a year, polls have shown that Netanyahu’s coalition would win fewer than than 50 Knesset seats, well below the 61 needed for a majority. Current odds favor a strange-bedfellows coalition, perhaps led by the right-wing former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett but including the centrist former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, as well as what’s left of the left and maybe even one of the Arab parties.

One wild-card scenario—more coffeehouse conjecture than reality for now—is that Netanyahu, after the culmination earlier this summer of his quarter-century quest to attack Iran’s nuclear program, might step away from politics entirely, perhaps in exchange for a pardon from President Isaac Herzog that would resolve his various corruption-related legal cases. But betting against either Netanyahu’s staying power or his ability to outmaneuver political opponents, whatever the polls say, has long been a losing proposition.

A near-term election could yield a different approach to Gaza. Many opposition leaders I met with now argue for ending the war through a clean deal—a cease-fire in exchange for the release of all the remaining hostages, a position taken publicly by Eyal Hulata, the national security adviser to Prime Ministers Bennett and Lapid.

Whether it would lead to a different approach to the West Bank is far less clear. The so-called change government led by Lapid and Bennett, who once chaired the umbrella organization that represents all settlers, produced no less West Bank–settlement activity than the Netanyahu governments that preceded and followed it.

Indeed, there is little public pressure for a different approach to the West Bank, even from young Israelis. This summer, less than a third of all Israelis—and less than a quarter of Israeli Jews—said they support a Palestinian state, according to Tel Aviv University’s Peace Index Survey. Even before October 7, when views in Israel hardened, almost 90 percent of Israelis ages 15 to 21 believed that Israel can remain a democracy while controlling Gaza and the West Bank, where residents cannot vote in Israeli elections, according to the Israeli pollster Dahlia Scheindlin.

That Palestinians are more and more invisible to most Israelis is partly responsible for this view, exacerbated by steps that Israel has taken to try to shield its population from terrorism, such as erecting a 440-mile-long separation barrier dividing Israel proper from the West Bank, or dramatically reducing work permits that once brought many thousands of Palestinians to Israel every day.

Palestinians are increasingly invisible to Americans too—U.S. officials from both parties spend far too little time engaging Palestinians, especially compared with the hours spent with Israeli counterparts.

All of this has eroded the decades-long bipartisan consensus on treating occupied areas such as the West Bank differently from the rest of Israel, or even using the word occupied at all, in spite of it being widely used in Israel.

Recent congressional delegations have visited, and even celebrated, settlements that the U.S. once condemned. Last week, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson met with settlers in Hebron and had dinner with Netanyahu in Shiloh, part of a string of settlements like Ariel, which Johnson also visited, that are making the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state nearly impossible.

Over time, U.S. policy has evolved accordingly.

When E1 was first proposed, the Clinton administration reacted so negatively that the plan was shelved, at least for a while. As a journalist in 2008, I visited an outpost called Shvut Ami, which the IDF forcibly emptied on the eve of a visit by President George W. Bush after he called on Israeli leaders to “honor their commitments” and “get rid of unauthorized settlements.”

When I served as chief of staff to Secretary of State John Kerry, during the last direct peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, friction over West Bank settlements was still a standard facet of U.S.-Israel relations, peaking in late 2016 when President Barack Obama declined to veto a UN Security Council Resolution that declared settlement activity illegal. And even as the first Trump administration pursued the Abraham Accords, a genuine diplomatic breakthrough that normalized relations between Israel and its neighbors, it made Israel agree not to annex the West Bank.

But that administration otherwise paid little attention to settlements, despite the establishment of more than 30 new outposts and the first tenders for Givat Hamatos, a major development separating Jerusalem from the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

[Assaf Gavron: What settler violence is doing to Israel]

The Biden administration imposed sanctions on settlers who incited or engaged in violence, an important breakthrough. But we should have gone further, as we debated doing, and sanctioned Israeli officials who champion such violence too.

We also should have sooner restored the long-standing U.S. position, left in place from Trump’s first term until 2024, that settlements are inconsistent with international law. And we somehow never reversed Trump’s inexplicable requirement that imports to the U.S. from the West Bank be labeled Made in Israel.

In his second term, as Trump reversed Biden’s settler sanctions, resumed shipments of the largest bombs we sell to Israel, and stopped hectoring Israeli officials hour by hour to increase humanitarian assistance, conditions in both Gaza and the West Bank have gone from very bad to even worse.

Israeli political and security officials are dismissive of the idea that the West Bank is on the verge of erupting; they point to a decrease in Palestinian terrorist attacks since they began their post–October 7 operations.

Historically, though, the Palestinian hope for a future state has been considered a counterweight to violence. But the most recent direct peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians were more than a decade ago, the longest such period since the early 1990s. Biden was the first U.S. president since George H. W. Bush not to name an envoy for peace negotiations, and, in his second term, Trump has followed suit. And neither U.S. officials nor Israeli politicians, including those on the left, talk much about a Palestinian state anymore.

For their part, given all of these dynamics, Arab citizens of Israel now openly debate suspending their political participation amid what they consider to be a genocide in Gaza being perpetrated by their neighbors. Several I met argued for boycotting the next election, although they were fully aware that that could bolster the performance of parties they strongly oppose.

West Bank Palestinians, who have not been afforded the opportunity to vote for their leaders since 2006, are similarly disillusioned. With rampant inflation and unemployment rising to more than 30 percent last year, support for both the PA and its longtime president, Mahmoud Abbas, has plunged in opinion polls.

A more troubling harbinger is that support for Hamas is far stronger. A majority in the West Bank believes that the decision to launch the October 7 attacks was “correct” and opposes the disarmament of Hamas in order to stop the war, according to data from the Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki.

The U.S. has rightly told Palestinians for decades to eschew what some call “violent resistance” to Israel’s occupation. But the failure of both Palestinian politics and peacemaking diplomacy leaves few remaining avenues for Palestinians to pursue legitimate grievances.

There is no end in sight for the Gaza war. The West Bank teeters on the brink. Israel, for the foreseeable future, seems launched on not just one but two dangerous paths.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

The Fox News commentator Dana Perino has finally had enough. “You have to stop it with the Twitter thing,” she told the chief executive. “I don’t know where his wife is,” she fumed. “If I were his wife, I would say, ‘You are making a fool of yourself! Stop it!’” She went on to note that he has a big job, and that he has to be “a little more serious.”

What a relief to see someone from Fox, the flagship MAGA network, getting completely fed up with juvenile social-media behavior from a national politician. Except the chief executive in this case was not Donald Trump, the president of the United States, but Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.

Newsom has taken to trolling Trump on social media by imitating his bizarre rants, odd capitalizations, and affection for exclamation points. He has also posted several memes that are on-the-nose parodies of things Trump has fed to his followers for years. Politico recently summarized some of Newsom’s activities on social media:

There’s Newsom on Mount Rushmore. There’s Newsom getting prayed over by Tucker Carlson, Kid Rock and an angelic, winged Hulk Hogan. There’s Newsom posting in all caps, saying his mid-cycle redistricting proposal has led “MANY” people to call him “GAVIN CHRISTOPHER ‘COLUMBUS’ NEWSOM (BECAUSE OF THE MAPS!). THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

[Read: Thank you for your attention to this matter!]

Newsom got even closer to Trumpian perfection with a post yesterday that is almost impossible to tell apart from an actual outburst from the president:

WHAT IS WRONG WITH CRACKER BARREL?? KEEP YOUR BEAUTIFUL LOGO!!! THE NEW ONE LOOKS LIKE CHEAP VELVEETA “CHEESE” FROM WALMART, THE PLACE FOR “GROCERIES” (AN OLD FASHIONED TERM)!!!

Some of these jibes are clumsy, but many are well crafted and even funny, despite the unsettling fact that the person whom the governor is parodying is the commander in chief. And the proof that Newsom is on to something is that his supporters are reacting with genuine rage. Perhaps Newsom has hit a nerve because satire is always more effective than name-calling. Mango Mussolini or Cheeto Jesus (both of which refer to the president’s unusual bronzed skin tone) appeal only to Trump’s opponents. But a post that perfectly mimics Trump’s antics is a mirror—one that prompts people to consider how Trump looks to everyone else in the world.

At the least, Newsom has scored a direct hit on the double standard both in the national press and among the public that excuses Trump’s deeply concerning behavior as merely part of Trump’s shtick, some facet of his personality that cannot be held to account. Too many reporters have resorted to sane-washing Trump, forcing his bizarre statements somehow to make sense by cherry-picking the occasional phrase or sentence related to policy while ignoring his kooky rants about sharks and his Stalinist threats against his political enemies. Newsom’s parodies sidestep all the hand-wringing criticism about how presidents should act: Instead they show, rather than explain, what it should feel like when anyone but Trump acts the way Trump acts.

Perino is just one of many who is in high dudgeon. (Newsom responded to Perino with a dead-on Trump-like response: “DANA ‘DING DONG’ PERINO (NEVER HEARD OF HER UNTIL TODAY!)” Vice President J. D. Vance has lashed out at Newsom, telling Fox that the Californian’s attacks aren’t landing because his trolling “ignores the fundamental genius of President Trump’s political success, which is that he’s authentic”; in other words, everyone knows that Newsom’s crackpot hijinks are fake but Trump’s are real—a rather odd defense.

And of course, the MAGA posters on social media and Facebook have flown off the handle with rage. (Newsom is having a “mental breakdown,” said one MAGA influencer, without a trace of irony.) As it turns out, the people who pioneered the slogan “Fuck your feelings” are impossibly delicate souls.

Others have adopted a pose of criticizing Newsom more in sorrow than anger. “I’m all for appreciating crass humor,” said Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer and MAGA social-media stalwart who is now assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Trump Justice Department. “I love South Park. It’s hilarious.” (One wonders if she’s been watching the show recently.) “But don’t just be a loser copying the most powerful person in the world’s style.” Trump’s majordomo at Fox, Sean Hannity, summed up this New Seriousness among the president’s supporters when he tut-tutted Newsom’s “performative confrontational style,” adding that “maybe it wins you points with the loony radical base in your party,” but it won’t win elections. How refreshing: Fox commentators and leading figures in the Trump administration all agreeing that a politician should not conduct himself in public like a dim, insufferable child.

They’re all so close to getting it.

I admit that I am conflicted about Newsom’s approach. Some years ago, I wrote that Trump’s opponents, especially the ones addicted to terms such as Drumpf, the Orange Menace, Cadet Bone Spurs, and others needed to act like adults, and convey the gravity of their concerns about Trump instead of treating him like either an inconsequential boob or a towering werewolf whose name must not be invoked. The same goes for the too-online liberals who refer to “Rethuglicans” and “RepubliKKKans”—uncomfortably similar to the media-addicted right-wingers who use infantile slams such as DemonRats and Killary.

[Read: The week that changed everything for Gavin Newsom]

One aspect of Newsom’s parodies have genuinely made me laugh: his posting of pictures done in the style of the artist and Trump admirer Jon McNaughton, who is a competent illustrator but whose paintings are strange. They’re a kind of hallucinatory mash-up of Grant Wood and medieval iconography, in which Trump carries the world like Atlas, or is blessed by dead presidents, or rescues the Constitution from glowering liberals. (The Newsom image with the deceased Hulk Hogan was so perfectly rendered that at first I thought it was created by McNaughton himself.) Trump supporters seem to love these pictures. Newsom has shown just how weird they are.

Newsom has made his point and should move on. But his lasting accomplishment has been to reveal that Trump’s supporters are not as impervious to reality as the president’s opponents might believe. I suspect—as I have since the day Trump announced his first run for president a decade ago—that the MAGA faithful are hypersensitive to criticisms of Trump because, in their hearts, many of them know.They know that many of Trump’s statements are offensive and alarmingly detached from reality. They know that Trump has a disordered personality. They know that the president is a daily embarrassment to his party and to his nation.

For years, these MAGA partisans have employed various tactics to prevent the imminent pain of cognitive dissonance. They resort to “what about” arguments aimed at other politicians; they claim that Trump actually knows what he’s doing or that they understand the message underneath all the broken thoughts, garbled words, and dead-end sentences. Now Newsom is forcing them to see what Trump looks like without the distorting force field created by Trump’s showmanship and his aggressive delivery of incoherent statements.

Come to think of it, maybe MAGA world isn’t close to getting it; maybe they do get it, and maybe that’s why, this time, they’re especially angry.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

In what looks to be an intensifying quest to reshape American history and scholarship according to his own preferences, President Donald Trump this week targeted the Smithsonian Institution, the national repository of American history and memory. Trump seemed outraged, in particular, by the Smithsonian’s portrayal of the Black experience in America. He took to Truth Social to complain that the country’s museums “are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian,” he wrote, “is OUT OF CONTROL.” Then Trump wrote something astonishing, even for him. He asserted that the narrative presented by the Smithsonian is overly focused on “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”

Before continuing, it is important to pause a moment and state this directly: Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, believes that the Smithsonian is failing to do its job, because it spends too much time portraying slavery as “bad.”

After reading his post, I thought of the historian Lonnie Bunch, the current secretary of the Smithsonian—the first Black person to lead the institution since its founding in 1846—and the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. In his 2016 speech at the grand opening of the museum, Bunch thanked Barack Obama and George W. Bush for their support. “We are at this moment because of the backing of the United States Congress and the White House,” he said, turning to them both onstage. It’s sobering to consider how different things are today.

Bunch has been fighting efforts by the Trump administration to bring the Smithsonian into conformity with the MAGA vision of American history, and people familiar with his views say he is committed to protecting the intellectual integrity and independence of the Smithsonian. But how much longer, given Trump’s ever more antagonistic position, will Bunch be able to withstand the presidential pressure? On Truth Social, Trump said he had “instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made.” A recent letter to the Smithsonian from the White House states that the review will be completed and a final report issued by early 2026, in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary, “to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism.”

Trump’s Truth Social comment on slavery was unsettling for me not only because I am the descendant of enslaved people, and not only because I was born and raised in New Orleans, which was once the center of the domestic slave trade, but also because I am an American who believes that the only way to understand this country—the only way to love this country—is to tell the truth about it. Part of that truth is that chattel slavery, which lasted in the British American colonies and then the American nation for nearly 250 years, was indeed quite bad.

In 2021, I published a book about how we remember slavery. I have spent years reading the first-person accounts of formerly enslaved people discussing the myriad horrors they endured—the journey across the Middle Passage, the abuse, the sexual violence, the psychological terror, the family separations. It is worth taking the time, in light of the president’s recent words, to revisit some of these accounts.

[Adam Serwer: The new dark age]

In 1789, Olaudah Equiano published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.His book was one of the first autobiographies ever published by a formerly enslaved person, and it laid the groundwork for a new genre of literature that would transform what people around the world understood about slavery. Equiano had been kidnapped from what is now Nigeria and marched for several months to the coast of West Africa. One of the most devastating scenes in his book describes the sadism of the Middle Passage:

The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died … The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.

The conditions were so bad, he writes, that some of the captives flung themselves overboard:

One day, when we had a smooth sea, and a moderate wind, two of my wearied countrymen, who were chained together (I was near them at the time), preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made through the nettings, and jumped into the sea: immediately another quite dejected fellow, who, on account of his illness, was suffered to be out of irons, also followed their example; and I believe many more would soon have done the same, if they had not been prevented by the ship’s crew.

Once they arrived on American shores, men, women, and children were forced onto auction blocks where families were broken apart. Once separated, most would never see one another again.

Henry Bibb, born enslaved in Kentucky, writes in his 1849memoir:

After the men were all sold they then sold the women and children. They ordered the first woman to lay down her child and mount the auction block; she refused to give up her little one and clung to it as long as she could, while the cruel lash was applied to her back for disobedience. She pleaded for mercy in the name of God. But the child was torn from the arms of its mother amid the most heart rending-shrieks from the mother and child on the one hand, and bitter oaths and cruel lashes from the tyrants on the other. Finally the poor little child was torn from the mother while she was sacrificed to the highest bidder.

When the captives arrived at the home or plantation of their enslaver, many of them were forced to work in sweltering fields with hardly any respite. Their days began early. Austin Steward, born enslaved in Virginia, writes in his 1857 book:

It was the rule for the slaves to rise and be ready for their task by sun-rise, on the blowing of a horn or conch-shell; and woe be to the unfortunate, who was not in the field at the time appointed, which was in thirty minutes from the first sounding of the horn. I have heard the poor creatures beg as for their lives, of the inhuman overseer, to desist from his cruel punishment.

On the plantation, enslaved people were denied any physical autonomy, and were subjected to torturous, and often arbitrary, violence at the hands of overseers and enslavers. As William Coleman, born in Tennessee around 1853, recalled as part of an interview for the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s:

I’se seen the slaves whipped for nothing, but then if they did do something to be whipped for they were almost killed before Maser would quit working on them … One time one of the slaves was helping Mistress there in the yard and he passed too close to her as he was hurrying fast as he could, and sort of bumped into her. She never paid him no attention, but Maser saw him and he let him go on ahead and finish what he was doing then he called that poor negro to him and took him out in the pasture, tied his hands together, throwed the other end of the rope over a limb on a tree and pulled that negro’s hands up in the air to where that negro had to stand on his tiptoes, and Maser he took all that negro’s clothes off and whipped him with that rawhide whip until that negro was plum bloody all over. Then he left that poor negro tied there all the rest of the day and night.

Enslaved Black women were particularly vulnerable to insidious and unrelenting sexual violence at the hands of their enslavers. In his 1857 book, William Anderson, born enslaved in Virginia, describes this:

My master often went to the house, got drunk, and then came out to the field to whip, cut, slash, curse, swear, beat and knock down several, for the smallest offense, or nothing at all.

He divested a poor female slave of all wearing apparel, tied her down to stakes, and whipped her with a handsaw until he broke it over her naked body. In process of time he ravished her person and became the father of a child by her.

The constant threat of such violence took an immense psychological toll on those who were subjected to it. Harriet Jacobs, born enslaved in North Carolina, writes in her 1861 book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl:

He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things … The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe … My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings.

The consequences of being caught in an attempted escape were so severe that most enslaved people never dared try. In Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, he describes watching what happened to an enslaved man who ran away and then was captured several weeks later:

Wiley was stripped, and compelled to endure one of those inhuman floggings to which the poor slave is so often subjected. It was the first and last attempt of Wiley to run away. The long scars upon his back, which he will carry with him to the grave, perpetually remind him of the dangers of such a step.

Even after slavery was formally abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the pain the institution wrought on the country’s 4 million freedmen and freedwomen continued to reverberate. Throughout the late 19th century, newly emancipated Black people used newspapers to try to locate family members they had been separated from many years before. The Christian Recorder published this ad following the war in 1865:

INFORMATION WANTED

Of my mother and father, Caroline and Issac Denna; also, my sisters, Fanny, Jane and Betsy Denna, and my brothers, Robert R., Hugh Henry, and Philander Denna. We were born in Fauquier Co, Va. In 1849 they were taken from the plantation of Josiah Lidbaugh, in said county, and carried to Winchester to be sold. About the same time I left my home in Clark Co, and have not heard from them since. The different ministers of Christian churches will do a favor by announcing the above, and any information will be gladly received by GEO. HENRY DENNA, Galva, Henry Co.

For many, the search meant trying to find someone they hadn’t seen for decades. Nancy Jones published this ad in 1886, more than 30 years after she had last seen her son:

INFORMATION WANTED of my son, Allen Jones. He left me before the war, in Mississippi. He wrote me a letter in 1853 in which letter he said that he was sold to the highest bidder, a gentleman in Charleston, S.C. Nancy Jones, his mother, would like to know the whereabouts of the above named person.

Whether mother and son were ever reunited is unknown.

None of us can imagine what it is like to be subjected to the unremitting physical, psychological, and social violence of chattel slavery. But museums such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture bring us closer to being able to do so by sharing first-person accounts of those who lived through that terrible violence. At these museums, we see the garments enslaved people wore, the tools they used, the structures in which they lived. We see their faces; we hear their voices.

[Clint Smith: Telling the truth about slavery is not ‘indoctrination’]

The NMAAHC, in particular, is unflinching in its characterization of slavery as an unequivocally evil system, one whose impact continues to be felt across our society. In 1860, the 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory, and railroad combined. Today, although they make up 14 percent of the population, Black people own less than 4 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Still, the museum also makes clear that the Black American experience is not singularly defined by slavery, but also by the art, literature, and cultural traditions that have emerged from, and in spite of, centuries of interpersonal and structural violence. These are not mutually exclusive, and the NMAAHC understands that Americans should learn about both.

And yet the MAGA movement wants to tell a story about America that is disproportionately focused on what its proponents perceive to be the exceptionalism of this country. They are invested in this story because having to look too closely at the disturbing parts of American history would mean having to look closely at the disturbing parts of themselves. But instead of ignoring the shameful parts of our past, shouldn’t we—as individuals and as a country—want to learn from aspects of our history that we are not proud of? What other way is there to become the version of ourselves that we aspire to be?

The Trump administration is, in both public discourse and public policy, arguably the most racist presidential administration in modern American history. Each week seems to bring a new example of its bigotry. I am sometimes tempted, upon encountering yet another instance of this omnipresent racial antagonism, to let it be. How many ways can you say the same thing over and over again? And yet, we must write it down, if for nothing else, then for the sake of those who will come after us. I think of Frederick Douglass, who wrote about the monstrousness of slavery even when the idea of abolition seemed preposterous to most Americans. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about how the nation must hold on to the values of Reconstruction long after federal soldiers marched out of the former Confederacy and abandoned Black southerners. Ida B. Wells wrote about the lynchings taking place throughout the South even as fresh bodies were still swinging from the trees. Their words were essential because they remind us that some Americans did bear witness to, and stand against, these atrocities.

This is part of the reality of Black life in this country: We must make a record of those forces that seek to erase us and erase our histories so that future generations know we did not simply accept it. Our ancestors’ words remind us that we never have.

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Photographs and videos by Sydney Krantz

At night, the New Jersey Meadowlands can look like the entrance to hell. Smoke from a nearby garbage incinerator rises in plumes. The monstrous steel frame of a 3.5-mile bridge looms over cars racing in and out of New York City. For decades, such images defined the Meadowlands. The region was notorious as the fabled burial site of the Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa and the confirmed site of decades-long dump fires. It is the final resting place for household garbage, rubble from the London Blitz, the Doric columns of New York’s old Penn Station, and toxic sludge from chemical manufacturing.

But the Meadowlands are also a salt marsh, currently home to more than 300 species of birds and 50 species of fish. If, instead of simply passing through by car or train, visitors were to take a walk on one of the district’s trails or kayak through its creeks, they could look out across marshes and mudflats at cormorants, egrets, and osprey—all against the backdrop of the New York City skyline.

The Meadowlands will never be an Eden. The 12 lanes of the New Jersey Turnpike that pass through the district aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, nor are the Superfund sites. But since the 1970s, a combination of state and federal policies has steered the Meadowlands toward an unusual balance of waste disposal, development, and environmental protection. The naturalist John Quinn—who grew up at the edge of the district and wrote an illustrated guide to its history and ecology—once called the area’s transformation a “Lazarus-like” resurrection.

Legal protections for such places, however, are now under threat. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruling in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency restricted the reach of the Clean Water Act, rolling back its protections for the Meadowlands and places like them. This year, the Trump administration’s implementation of that ruling has fueled further concern among scientists: The Natural Resources Defense Council warns that it could put “an area larger than Nevada”—71 million acres of wetlands, all told—at risk of destruction. If the Meadowlands represent an ideal of 21st-century conservation—one that weighs human interests with ecological ones—then the possibility they represent is fast slipping away.

Tom Marturano, the recently retired director of solid waste and natural resources for the district, spent his career working to create this version of the Meadowlands. When he took his job, in 1984, they were still the wasteland that Quinn called “environmental Armageddon.” Marturano’s epithet of choice is “the dumping ground for all of society’s ills.” He was hired to implement state environmental regulations mandating the cleanup of the Meadowlands’ dumps to the point that they could be closed, one by one. Before he closed the dumps, Marturano also managed what went in them. He was once asked to accept a dead whale; another time, an entire shipping container of rotten garlic.

Sydney Krantz for The AtlanticAt a capped landfill in the Meadowlands, dense stands of phragmites and Spartina grasses overlook the Hackensack River.

Those same landfills, now capped, are home to red-tailed hawks, falcons, and coyotes. Still, the Meadowlands’ wildlife habitats are not wild in the traditional sense of being free from human activity: They include gas pipelines, highway overpasses, tide gates, planted marsh grasses, and man-made islands. This planting and sculpting of the marshes has been done to restore their health, but many of the efforts have been funded, paradoxically, by development—including by American Dream, the second-largest mall in America.

From a distance, American Dream looks like a spaceship that touched down next to the Hackensack River. The mall, which opened in 2019, covers some 3 million square feet and contains an indoor ski area. To build it, developers were required to fund the enhancement of 15.37 acres of wetland to compensate for those they had filled or otherwise affected. This mitigation was mandated by the Clean Water Act, which regulates filling and dumping in wetlands. The funds from the mall went toward improving the health of a nearby section of marsh, which, Marturano told me, was once “nothing but solid phragmites”—an invasive grass that tends to reduce habitat diversity. Now native Spartina grasses have returned, as have muskrats and threatened bird species. Thanks to the conservation restrictions that come with mitigation, yellow-crowned night herons and American kestrels can count on a habitat for years to come; this patch of marsh cannot be developed.

Mitigation is the deal that America has struck between its interest in human development and the preservation of its wetlands since the Clean Water Act passed, in 1972. Opinions differ, even among those who work in the Meadowlands, about how good a deal it has been. Marturano credits the mitigation system with what he calls the Meadowlands’ “balance” of development and environmental protection. “Nobody,” he told me, would “just wake up one morning and say, ‘Let me enhance some wetlands.’” It’s too expensive.

Sydney Krantz for The AtlanticA netted barrier stands alongside wetlands in the Meadowlands, limiting erosion and protecting adjacent waterways.

Bill Sheehan, the executive director of Hackensack Riverkeeper, is more skeptical. Sheehan, who wears a shark tooth around his neck and a drooping white mustache around his mouth, has been the Meadowlands’ chief environmental advocate for 30 years. When I asked him to describe the role of mitigation in the district, his immediate response was: “It’s a scam.” Especially in the late 1990s, he explained, mitigation was just “an excuse to destroy wetlands.” Although he’s willing to support mitigation projects that he sees as serving a public good, he rejects the principle that improving the health of one wetland can compensate for the loss of another—not only because mitigation can fail, instead producing a bare mudflat, but also because these man-made attempts at ecological restoration are poor substitutes for nature’s own repair work.

Terry Doss, who co-directs the Meadowlands Research and Restoration Institute—a state agency  that monitors water quality, sea-level rise, and wildlife habitat in the district—is more measured in her assessment than both Marturano or Sheehan. “Here in the Meadowlands, we have urban infrastructure,” she told me, “and so we will always have impacts. Therefore, we have to have mitigation.”

Right now, state laws still guarantee compensatory mitigation in the Meadowlands and protect them from unrestricted development.But, in 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Water Act applies only to wetlands with a “continuous surface connection” to a navigable body of water. This decision was widely condemned by environmental groups but welcomed by those who saw it as protecting individual property rights, especially the rights of farmers. For the Meadowlands and places like them, where infrastructure such as highways and tide gates might interrupt a “continuous surface connection,” the 2023 decision meant the unraveling of federal protections.

Still, when I asked Doss what she sees as the single greatest threat to the Meadowlands today, she spoke immediately of people’s perceptions of the region. “People tend to say, ‘Oh, it’s just phragmites; it’s just a ditch,’” she replied. “‘It’s polluted, you know. Move on.’”

Sydney Krantz for The AtlanticA great blue heron wades in the waters of Mill Creek Marsh in Secaucus, New Jersey.

For most of the Meadowlands’ history, this is how people saw them. The region’s shifting, mosquito-ridden ground was considered worthless land that needed to be “reclaimed”—drained or filled so that it could be used for agriculture (in the 19th century), for infrastructure and solid waste (in the 20th century), or for housing and warehousing (in the 21st). But over the past 50 years, ecologists have come to value wetlands not only as wildlife habitats but also as carbon sinks, defenses against rising seas, and filters for harmful pollutants. Preserving wetlands in concert with human infrastructure—as part of, rather than apart from, where people live—makes those places more aesthetically appealing, ecologically robust, and economically resilient.

Enhancing a marsh requires its own kind of balance: Reestablishing Spartina grasses, Marturano told me, can mean using bulldozers outfitted with snowshoe-like tracks to bring the marsh down to a particular elevation. If the marsh is brought too low, nothing will grow, and it will become a mudflat. If the marsh isn’t cut low enough, the phragmites will remain and crowd out the Spartina grasses. Marturano took me through these stages as we walked across a former mitigation site. He stopped to point out a muskrat hut, a pair of hawks, a groundhog hole, and a group of cormorants. He may be an engineer by training, but the Meadowlands have given him a naturalist’s eye for the habits of nonhuman creatures.

Sydney Krantz for The AtlanticTom Marturano walks a trail at Mill Creek Point Park.

Some 3,500 acres of the Meadowlands, a patchwork of conservation areas and mitigation sites, are now protected from further human development. Many of the region’s human structures—highways, rail lines—are protected, at least for the foreseeable future, by their use to millions of people. The question is not, then, whether the marsh or the human infrastructure will disappear completely, but how the balance between the two will—or won’t—be maintained.

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After Kaitlyn Kash delivered her baby daughter at Austin’s Ascension Seton Medical Center in July 2023, she began hemorrhaging. Her doctor told her that her placenta had not come out of her body as it should have after the baby was delivered and that she would need a D&C—a procedure that removes the contents of the uterus.

Kash consented, but then, she told me, nothing happened. “Are we going to the operating room?” Kash kept asking. She started shaking and vomiting. Hospital staff took her newborn daughter off her chest.

After about 45 minutes, Kash was wheeled to the OR—where, she said, she faced more delays. “People were running around, and there was slamming of cabinets,” she told me. The staff didn’t seem prepared. Kash remembers thinking that she was going to die, that she would never get to name her daughter. She struggled to speak, then passed out.

When she awoke after the procedure, a nurse told her that she was lucky she still had her uterus. She’d bled so much, she ended up needing a transfusion.

Kash didn’t understand what had happened, nor, she says, did the hospital tell her. Only after being discharged and speaking with a nurse-practitioner friend did she realize that her experience was not typical of a D&C. The procedure does not typically take hours, involve significant blood loss, or risk the loss of a uterus.

It is, however, commonly used for first-trimester abortions. The words of the hospital social worker Kash spoke with before she was discharged stuck out to her: “We don’t do D&Cs anymore,” the woman said, according to Kash. Of course, emergencies during delivery can be chaotic anywhere. But Kash began to suspect that, because Texas had banned virtually all abortions in 2022, following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, either the equipment to perform the D&C was not ready, or the hospital was struggling to justify performing one, even for a placenta. Soon, she joined a lawsuit against the state of Texas over its abortion laws. (Kash provided medical records that support that she had a D&C and lost blood. The hospital did not respond to a request for comment, and it is not part of Kash’s lawsuit.)

I found Kash’s experience particularly unnerving because my husband and I are planning a move to a state that bans abortion after six weeks. After hearing and reading stories like hers, we are wondering if our move means that we should not have another child. Kash’s experience is representative of the kinds of delays, confusion, and other substandard care that some pregnant women now experience in the 19 states that enacted significant abortion restrictions after Dobbs. Pregnancy and childbirth are risky no matter where you live, but the grim stories and maternal-health statistics coming out of abortion-restrictive states have made me consider how safe it is to have a baby in one of them.

[Read: ‘That’s something you won’t recover from as a doctor’]

Today, Kash doesn’t blame the doctors or staffers at the hospital; she blames Texas’s abortion laws for causing unnecessary confusion. She wishes she could have been pregnant and delivered her baby somewhere else. But at the same time, her best friends live in Austin, and her close family lives in Dallas and Houston. “It’s not easy to leave,” she said. “Texas is my home.”

Every year, of course, hundreds of thousands of people safely have babies in Texas and other states with near or total abortion bans. But some women with pregnancy complications do encounter doctors who are afraid to act quickly to provide life- or health-preserving terminations, according to interviews I did with legal and medical experts, patients, and 15 doctors who practice in these states. Though the bans make exceptions to protect the mother’s life, they contain so much uncertainty that some doctors, fearing prison time or the loss of their license, try hard to avoid providing abortions, even when they are medically indicated.

Sometimes, a doctor may be too scared to give the patient an abortion and so point her to a neighboring state. The delays involved in travel can push inevitable abortions later into pregnancy, when they can become more complicated. Other times, the fear manifests as doctors choosing a more invasive or less-effective procedure instead of one that might be considered an abortion. Sarah Osmundson, an obstetrician in Tennessee, offered me the example of an ectopic pregnancy, in which an embryo implants outside the uterus. Ectopic pregnancies are almost never viable, and if left untreated can be fatal for the mother. The safest and simplest way to address an ectopic pregnancy is to give the patient methotrexate. But this drug can be seen as an abortifacient, so some doctors in restrictive states might opt to remove the patient’s fallopian tube instead, according to Osmundson, which could impair her future fertility. “We’re requiring a patient to undergo a surgical procedure as opposed to a very safe medical treatment that we have,” she said. This nearly happened to Representative Kat Cammack, a Florida Republican, when she went to an emergency room with an ectopic pregnancy in 2024 and where, she said, doctors resisted giving her methotrexate because they were worried about losing their medical licenses or going to jail for doing so.

Even if a doctor is comfortable providing a medically indicated abortion, they need to find scrub techs, nursing staff, and anesthesiologists who are, as well. And they might not be able to. “Abortion care doesn’t happen individually in a hospital,” says Leilah Zahedi-Spung, an obstetrician in Colorado who previously practiced in Tennessee, where abortion is completely banned with very limited exceptions. “I anticipated a lot of trouble finding people who felt safe participating in the care.” Tennessee’s abortion laws contributed to her decision to leave the state.

The most consistent concern I heard raised by the providers I spoke with is that the new bans cause unacceptable delays in patient care. In abortion-restrictive states, some hospitals have created task forces and committees of lawyers to help doctors figure out how to comply, which can slow down the process of treating at-risk patients. “There sometimes are delays while there’s this sussing out of like, ‘How do we take care of this?’” Lara Hart, an obstetrician in Georgia, where a six-week abortion ban went into effect in 2022, told me. Though Hart praises her own hospital’s processes for dealing with tricky cases, she said her job now requires more paperwork and calling around to different departments. She told me that she sometimes wonders, “Is some overzealous district attorney gonna come and arrest us or something?” She remembers arriving at work at her previous practice to find a patient in the ICU with sepsis and on a ventilator. The woman had come in with previable PPROM (preterm premature rupture of membranes), a condition in which a woman’s water breaks too early in pregnancy. The other doctors were reluctant to offer her an abortion, which is a standard treatment. She began hemorrhaging so much that Hart had to perform a hysterectomy. Hart remembers feeling angry. “I shouldn’t be here doing this,” she thought. “This should have been taken care of a week ago before she was so sick.”

[Read: The abortion absolutist]

Certain states’ bans say an abortion can be performed to avoid “death or substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,” but some doctors say this guideline is unclear because many situations can go from reversible to irreversible within minutes. A recent study of post-Dobbs obstetric care in states with abortion bans highlighted this problem. It concluded that, because abortion laws tend to focus on the patient’s current health status, doctors in these states are often unable to consider the likely future health of a patient—including life-threatening emergencies that are all but certain to arise. “In obstetrics, there is an inch of black and an inch of white and, like a thousand yards of gray,” Hart said. This regulation also contradicts typical standards of care, according to Dawn Bingham, an obstetrician who is currently suing South Carolina over its abortion ban. “There’s nothing else in medicine that we wait for people to get sicker,” she told me.

Quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that the delays created by abortion restrictions are having an effect on health care. A recent report from the Gender Equity Policy Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for women’s equality, found that, although the overall risk of dying from pregnancy is low, mothers living in states where abortion is banned were nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth compared with mothers living in states where abortion is accessible. In states with abortion bans, Black mothers were more than three times as likely to die as white mothers. ProPublica found that when Texas banned abortion after six weeks in 2021, rates of sepsis increased by more than 50 percent for women hospitalized with miscarriages in the second trimester, likely because women were being made to wait until either there was no fetal heartbeat, leaving them at higher risk for an infection, or their infection became life-threatening. ProPublica also found that after Texas banned abortion, blood transfusions during emergency-room visits for first-trimester miscarriages increased by 54 percent, suggesting that doctors were avoiding performing D&Cs. At least four women in states with near-total abortion bans have died because they were denied an abortion, according to news reports. In a 2023 survey from KFF, a health-care nonprofit, four in 10 ob-gyns in abortion-ban states said the Dobbs ruling made providing care during miscarriages or other pregnancy emergencies harder.

A qualitative study involving anonymous doctors in abortion-ban states offers quotes such as “The way our legal teams interpreted it, until they became septic or started hemorrhaging, we couldn’t proceed.” In another study, a doctor described a patient who came in 15 weeks pregnant and hemorrhaging, with “blood everywhere, bleeding through her clothes.” But because the fetus had a heartbeat, the doctor had to talk to the hospital’s risk-management department before performing an abortion. “There’s less evidence-based health care that is provided for everyone that needs it in those states,” Nikki Zite, an obstetrician in Tennessee, told me. When I asked Nicole Schlechter, another Tennessee obstetrician, about the higher mortality rates in abortion-ban states, she put it more simply: “People are dying from being pregnant.”

Supporters of abortion bans deny that conditions are dire. Ingrid Skop, the vice president and director of medical affairs for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, a nonprofit that advocates against abortion, said in an email that “all pro-life state laws allow doctors to exercise their reasonable medical judgment to treat women with pregnancy emergencies, and no law requires certainty or imminence before a doctor can act.” She also pointed out that “no doctor has been prosecuted since Dobbs for performing an abortion to protect the life of the mother.” Christina Francis, the CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) and an obstetric hospitalist in Indiana, told me her practice has been unaffected by her state’s near-total ban on abortion. She says any hesitation of doctors to act in emergency situations is a result of hospitals failing to adequately prepare their physicians. “The problem is not the law,” she told me, “but rather either the guidance or the lack of guidance that physicians are receiving.”

Some states are aiming to clarify their abortion bans. In June, Texas passed the Life of the Mother Act, which clarifies when the state’s near-total abortion ban allows for the procedure, saying explicitly that physicians do not need to wait until a patient is in imminent danger of dying to perform an abortion. In Tennessee, a new law clarifies that abortions can be performed in cases of previable PPROM and severe preeclampsia. In Kentucky, a clarification law added conditions under which doctors can legally perform an abortion, such as hemorrhage and ectopic and molar pregnancies.

Some Texas doctors I interviewed support the clarification law. Todd Ivey, an obstetrician in Houston, told me he thinks it “is going to help us some.” He said he wishes the law had exceptions for fetal abnormalities, rape, and incest, but that Texas doctors shouldn’t “let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

But some experts say the clarification bills don’t offer doctors much security, because some obstetric emergencies may not meet the laws’ precise legal language. For instance, John Thoppil, an obstetrician in Austin who supports the Texas clarification law, once had a patient whose fetus had a fatal anomaly. He diagnosed the condition at 12 weeks, but the woman was not able to travel out of state for a termination until she was 18 weeks along. In the intervening time, her placenta began to invade her scar from a previous C-section, something that would not have happened, Thoppil told me, if he had been able to perform the abortion at 12 weeks. The patient was hospitalized after the abortion and had to have another procedure, almost losing her uterus in the process. The Texas clarification law, he told me, would not have changed her situation.

This confusion may get worse now that the Trump administration has revoked Biden-era guidance saying hospitals in abortion-ban states must provide abortions if the procedure would stabilize a woman experiencing a medical emergency.

Hector Chapa, an obstetrician in south-central Texas and a member of AAPLOG, told me that this revocation didn’t matter, and that doctors could and should still treat patients in an emergency. “EMTALA still stands,” he said, referring to a federal law that hospitals must stabilize patients. “EMTALA has never gone away.” But Andreia Alexander, an ER doctor in Indiana, told me that patients should not want a doctor who hesitates to save their life. “If somebody is dying in front of me,” she said, “I can’t be thrown off my game to think for a minute about whether or not my actions are going to cause me to be thrown in jail, lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, or lose my medical license.”

The horror stories I heard during my reporting are shocking but rare. In one study, the most common scenario that physicians said they struggled with, post-Dobbs, was PPROM in the second trimester. The risk of previable PPROM is extremely low: less than 1 percent. But in pregnancy, small percentages matter. Osmundson told me her hospital sees a previable PPROM patient about once a month. In my own pregnancy, I had multiple complications that occur very rarely. Complications seem unlikely until they happen to you.

I asked every provider I interviewed whether having a baby in their state is safe, given the current abortion restrictions. Almost all of them said yes. But almost all of them also qualified their answer. They said they, personally, would take appropriate care of a pregnant woman, but they couldn’t say the same about every provider in the state now that the abortion laws have made administering emergency care so much more complicated. They said pregnancy had become “less safe” or “scarier” or “safe, if you have resources.” There’s a new charge to what were previously purely medical conversations with patients: Thoppil said patients ask him “every week” if having a baby in Texas is safe, and Emily Briggs, a private-practice family-medicine doctor in New Braunfels, told me that patients have asked her if they should leave Texas. Hart told me she’s had patients who “get on contraception because they say that they are scared to be pregnant in Georgia.”

[Read: I found the outer limits of my pro-choice beliefs]

The future of obstetric care in abortion-ban states also seems murky because fewer medical students are applying to residencies in states with abortion bans. Zite says she’s not able to train her obstetric residents in the same ways she was before Dobbs, and she’s not sure what’s going to happen with the next generation of doctors after hers retires.

I spoke with some women who aren’t willing to risk having a child, or another child, under these circumstances. Jessi Schoop Villman, who lives outside of Houston and has a history of miscarriages, decided not to try for a second child after Texas banned abortions. “I couldn’t stand the thought of something happening and leaving the baby we already have without a mother and my husband without a partner,” she told me.

Nisha Verma, an obstetrician who works in both Georgia and Maryland, told me she recently saw a patient who was eligible for an abortion in Georgia because she was less than six weeks pregnant. The woman said that she would consider having the baby, “but I am scared to be pregnant in this state as a Black woman,” Verma remembers her saying. “If I developed a complication like I did in my last pregnancy, I wouldn’t be able to get care and I could die.” The woman did something that crafters of abortion bans likely would not have wanted: Just days before it would have been too late to do so, she terminated the pregnancy.

*Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Sources: Jacobus Johannes van Os / Fine Art Photographic / Getty; Getty.

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[Music]

Garry Kasparov: I have several things in common with my guest in this episode. Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen and I were both born into Soviet republics. We both became chess grand masters, and we both left chess to enter politics. I think it is fair to say that while I reached greater heights in the chess world, as a former speaker of the Lithuanian legislature, she definitely rose higher in the political world.

Her home of Vlinius, Lithuania, has a special place in my heart. My first chess baptism by fire outside my home city of Baku, Azerbaijan, came at the All-Union Youth Games in Vilnius in 1973. I was just 10 while most of my opponents were four or five years older. I did not perform well, but I did meet Alexander Sergeevich Nikitin: state trainer of the U.S.S.R. Sports Committee, my future friend, mentor, and reliable supporter in the most difficult periods of my chess career.

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

[Music]

Kasparov: Putting nostalgia aside, Lithuania has become a hot spot as one of the most ardent defenders of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. Lithuania also recognizes that, should Ukraine fall, it is at the top of the list of targets for Putin’s attempt to rebuild the Soviet Union in his image.

But despite obvious threats, this Baltic country has offered refuge to many Russian political dissidents. All of this is why I wanted to speak with Viktorija. She’s part of a conversation now unfolding all across Europe about how to face newly aggressive authoritarian states, as the United States reevaluates its role as the global leader of the free world.

[Music]

Kasparov: Hello, Viktorija.

Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen: Hello, Garry.

Kasparov: It’s a great pleasure to have you on our program. And I think it will be more than natural if we start with something that unites us—actually united us prior to the political issues that bring us now together. It’s chess, the game of chess. So could you say a few words about your path from the game of chess into politics?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Yes. Well, pleasure to be here. And, well, I’m a chess grand master, and that’s actually something that I always say prior to all of my political titles. I started playing chess quite early. I became quite a successful female chess player and was a European champion at some point. And, well, around the age of 30, I decided to turn into national politics in Lithuania. And from that point, about 10 years, I’ve been the parliament member in Seimas and also holding different positions. But still, for the bigger part of my life, I used to be a professional chess player. So that of course leaves a mark—as, well, you, Garry, will very well know—for the whole life.

Kasparov: I can’t help but asking a question that I’ve been terrorized for, for years since I left professional chess. Does chess help you in your political life?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Oh, yes. My God, I know this question. Yes. Yes. Well. I’ve been thinking about different ways to answer it. I think chess generally trains quite some fantastic qualities—your ability to focus, memory. I think it helps being a good winner and being a good loser, although not always. But you know, when I try to compare politics and chess, I see nothing but differences. Chess is a very honorable game. It’s a game where two people play at the chessboard according to the rules they both know. Politics is nothing but—I mean, the rules are constantly changing, the challenges are unknown, the situation is vague, and there are so many gray zones. So, you know, if I have to choose one of the two areas, I will always say that, you know: Chess is a straightforward, nice, beautiful game. Politics is something that overall matters more, but it’s much more tricky.

Kasparov: Yes. But you are very successful in politics as well. So you are not just a member of the Lithuanian Seimas, the Lithuanian parliament; you were the speaker of the parliament for quite a while. And I’m sure you know, you have still many more political heights to conquer in the future.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, my political career, it took off very quickly, and I became the youngest-ever speaker of Lithuanian parliament, some—well, a few—years back, in 2020. And my term finished not so long ago, a bit more than half a year ago now. I’m the deputy speaker of parliament now, in a position. And also I’ve been the leader of a liberal party for almost six years now. So time runs quickly.

In politics, I think, many things are about appearances. In politics, as we all very well know. And having the reputation of a chess grand master helps. There is no doubt about that. Having the title, having the titles from the chess times, is a helpful thing in making your words, your statements, more credible—more solid, I would say. And that has certainly helped me in my career so far and hopefully will continue to help in the years to come.

Kasparov: Well, it’s great to hear. That tells me that your voters have a very high IQ if they can recognize the value of chess judgment in your statements. So now, speaking about the voters—just give a little bit of background of Lithuanian politics, because Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union, occupied after Soviet-Nazi pact back in 1939, 1940. And you were born still in the Soviet Union, but it became an independent country. And I remember it was the first one to declare independence from the Soviet Union. But just, you know, brief us about Lithuanian politics and how independent Lithuania managed in this 35 years of its modern history.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Yes. Well, some major things you have mentioned. Thirty-five years might seem like not a long time, but our country was also independent in the beginning of the 20th century. So we have, you know—we are successors to that independence. So we have a tradition of being independent. And before that, we had a commonwealth with Poland for, sort of, centuries. So this European tradition, being part of a European family of countries—this is something that comes very strongly in our tradition, in our culture. And, you know, there is no debate about that, as I said.

We were the first country to break away from the Soviet Union, back in 1990—March 11th. That was the time when it was in the air already. But still, countries, Western countries, were somewhat hesitant, also, about encouraging the so-called Soviet republics to break away. Because if—well, of course you remember that time very well—[Mikhail] Gorbachev was something of a darling of the West with his perestroika and other things. But our history is completely different. In 1989, we had an amazing event when almost 2 million people held hands together in the Baltic way connecting Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. In a completely peaceful way, showing that we are independent, well, that we strive to be independent nations. But it was a difficult road. And in 1991, January 13th, we had tragic events around parliament, around the TV tower in Vilnius, when Russian troops—they were here, they were trying to capture the TV tower, trying to capture the parliament. And people were killed. Many people were injured. On our side, it was a huge unification of all the country. Of course the empire did not want to let us go easily. And only in 1991, February, the first country to recognize our independence was Iceland. Then a bit later, Denmark followed suit, and then already we gained recognition. Recognition from other countries all over the world. But now for 35 years, we’ve been independent. And we’ve been also a member of NATO and a member of the European Union for 21 years.

Kasparov: So if Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia would not be members of NATO today, do you think that Russian tanks would be already rolling on the streets of Vilnius?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Well, the risk of that would definitely be much bigger, also. Well, I will remind, or maybe inform, the listeners that, you know, Vilnius is a capital that is only 30 kilometers away from the border with Belarus. And for any kind of military purposes, well, Belarus—[Aleksandr] Lukashenko’s Belarus—is unfortunately under the heel of [Vladimir] Putin’s Russia today, And well, he has been for a while now. So, of course, our geopolitical situation is, well it is as it is. But it’s not very auspicious for being, for feeling safe or relaxed. That’s one thing.

Secondly, of course, there is no doubt if Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia would have stayed in this gray zone, —like for instance, unfortunately, Moldova, Georgia state—well, there is a recipe that that Russia has been using. And that recipe is that no country where there is an unresolved, so-called military conflict can join NATO. And that we’ve seen in Moldova; that we see with Transnistria. That we see also in Georgia, which has now unfortunately been also politically, well, you could say captured in a way—or has at least turned from its European and Euro-Atlantic aspirations.

And I think what we are suffering from, as Europe, is that Putin, you know, in all likelihood wakes up every morning thinking about not just How do I defeat Ukraine?, but How do I dismantle NATO? How do I defeat Europe? And our leaders on the democratic side are thinking, Well, how do we avoid war? And that, instead of leading to becoming more resilient, quite often leads to indecision—to concessions and to a lot of self-imposed red lines. And we see that it’s not leading us to be more safe. Actually, that has the opposite effect.

Kasparov: So let’s, you know, also shift to another element of this war. You said Putin wakes up every morning and he thinks about this global war, because Putin’s Russia is at war with the free world. For Putin it’s not a potential World War III, as for many Western politicians. But he’s already fighting World War IV, because, in his mind, World War III was a cold war that the Soviet Union has lost. And now he’s trying to take revenge for this loss. And that’s what he has been saying, and his propaganda keeps saying. And one of the elements of this war, because he may not be feeling strong enough to challenge NATO directly, is it’s a hybrid war.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Yes. Hybrid war. And that, again—you’re absolutely right. I mean, Putin does not feel reckless, or whatever you may call it, enough to challenge NATO militarily. And that’s, well, one more reinforcing point: how important it was that Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia became members of NATO on time. But hybrid is different. It’s operating in the gray zone. It is creating distrust in societies, creating a feeling of insecurity and planting narratives that later can be, well, somehow useful in potential future aggressions. So, in the case of Lithuania, we have been on the receiving end of propaganda war for many years now, and we’re also quite good at recognizing it. The thing is that, with our historic memory—with the road to independence, that is after all still alive in the memory of most people—it’s not easy to make us believe some of the narratives that they are trying to plant. But I think when it comes to hybrid warfare, well, one example—one fresh and quite effective example—was the instrumentalization of migrants in the summer of 2021 by the Lukashenko regime.

What has happened is that people from different countries—from, you know, Syria, from some countries from Africa—were shipped to Belarus and were, in hundreds, pushed through the border to Lithuania, to Poland, to Latvia. Some at gunpoint. And the idea was to disrupt the situation enough because, well, you know, it could be hundreds, it could be thousands, it could be tens of thousands. And this was a very difficult challenge to deal with. Because we—well, in Lithuania, we have never experienced anything like that before. And when we look back in hindsight, this was 2021; this feels like part, or a stage, of preparation for Russia’s second invasion into Ukraine. For the full-scale invasion—destabilizing the region.

Kasparov: Viktorija, you just already talked about the full-scale invasion. So, this is the fateful date: February 24th, 2022. When Putin began the massive invasion of Ukraine, having only one goal: to destroy Ukrainian statehood. Which, again, he was not even hiding behind some kind of diplomatic formulas. So today, does Europe, as an institution, recognize its responsibilities over Ukraine? There’s a growing sense that Europe keeps talking while not acting enough, still having some resources. So is the European Union acting again adequately now? Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, and 11 years after the beginning of the war with annexation of Crimea?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: It’s not acting forcefully enough. And, well, several things. Europe could, without much difficulty, outproduce Russia militarily when we look at economic power. But because of different reasons, that does not happen yet. There is a lot of bureaucracy. It takes a long time, and so on and so forth. But that in itself is unacceptable. That’s one thing. Second, of course Europe has changed massively from 2022 February. And it has done especially, maybe, well, in the first year—somewhat more than was expected by some. But I really disagree with those who say that now, with the American new administration, well, making the decisions that it is making, that the ball is in the court of Russia. I think the ball is firmly in the court of Europe. And if Europe does not act more forcefully when it comes to sanctions, when it comes to supporting Ukraine, it will again, you know, it will reinforce this view—first of all, by Putin—that Europe is weak. Which it’s not, necessarily, but also this weakness is inviting for aggression.

So yes; I think Europe can do more. I think Europe should do more. And it is a time for Europe to stand up very clearly, as America takes a more—you can call it transactionalist or extreme transactionalism, I think this is the term. Another term is isolationism. But anyway, a different role than we would traditionally expect from America.

But I also have to add that, being a Lithuanian, we can see very concrete things happening in Europe that would have been unthinkable just a few years back. For instance, recently the German brigade started. Well, it was basically inaugurated—started stationing its military here in Lithuania. It will be a 5,000-soldier brigade, with their families here. So things are happening and also reinforcing the NATO Eastern flank. But when we speak about Ukraine, yes: Europe can and should do more.

Kasparov: We’ll be right back.

[Break]

Kasparov: You already talked about, you know, very high esteem for America. And I think it’s probably across the region, in Eastern Europe, where people always looked at America as a beacon of hope: as the country that, one day, could help them to throw away the yoke of Soviet occupation.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: True.

Kasparov: So, how do you evaluate American administrations? When you became a member of parliament, [Barack] Obama was there. Then you had first [Donald] Trump, then you had [Joe] Biden. Now you have Trump back. Let’s just go quickly over this period—to see what America did, what America could have done, what America deliberately delayed or had not done, and what America is doing now.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Well, I think one major thing that has to be mentioned and stressed: America, for Lithuania, is so much more than any given administration. It is, as you have said, it’s a beacon of freedom. It’s a beacon of democracy. And it is something that, well, we have so heavily relied—well, you know, idealistically, ideologically, during the most difficult times. And for a good reason, I think. So it cannot be reduced, I would say, to any one administration.

But I think what is fair to say is that many administrations, if not most, in the most recent history, start off with trying to make friends, usually, with Putin—because he’s been around for so long, right? But normally, towards the end they decide that, Well, yeah, that was not a good idea. But a lot of precious time has been lost. So there is this, somehow, this pattern that’s being repeated over and over again. And it is unfortunate, because nothing has changed on the Russian side with Putin. It has just been consequently getting worse.

What I find, well, today most frustrating is that suddenly we have to return back to saying absolutely obvious things like Russia is an aggressor. What it is committing in Ukraine are war crimes. They are attacking, you know, children’s cancer hospitals on the eve of a NATO summit in Washington. Well, as an example, right? Just one example. But there are so many.

So this idea that you have to repeat very banal, very obvious, things—that are very obvious for anyone who’s been even mildly interested in what has been happening in Ukraine—it is frustrating. Imagine, if it’s frustrating for us, how much more frustrating it should feel to Ukrainians. And when I talk to my Ukrainian colleagues, which I also do quite a lot, well, sometimes I am in awe of their, I don’t know what it can be called—

Kasparov: Resilience, I think. It’s—

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Yes. Resilience.

Kasparov: They understand that they have no other choice but to resist Russian aggression. But of course they are, I believe, deep down, they’re depressed. But you have Europe and America, and it seems now that the transatlantic unity now is in great danger. So, do you still think, have any hopes, in NATO in its current form? Or do you believe that due to the very untraditional behavior of the current administration, Europe will have to look for some other arrangements?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: I think that NATO countries must, should, and, well, are doing more to allocate more money, more resources, to the defense. But the situation, as I see it, is simple. There is a war going on in Europe, and Europe has to do its utmost to help Ukraine. And also prevent this war from expanding further in Europe, which there is a risk of if Russia continues being unchecked. And, well, what also is, of course, another very worrying track is that lack of punishment for Putin’s regime. There cannot be peace if peace is unjust. If the war criminals are not called for being war criminals, but can immediately go back to the table with the world leaders, shake hands, and do business—that’s not a fundament for a peaceful tomorrow. And I think it’s not very—it’s not wise to think that the world is so simple.

Kasparov: But, but as a politician, you know, you have to look at the reality, even if it’s not a very happy picture, and to deal with facts. And the facts are just telling us that the American administration expressed more interest in taking care of the free-speech rights of the far-right groups rather than about the well-being of Europe. Do we believe that, at one point, under some circumstances in the future, the United States can leave NATO?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: It cannot be totally ruled out. But the main scenario right now, in my opinion, is that the U.S. will leave more to Europe to deal with European problems, so to speak. And European countries have to step up in terms of their defense expenditure and rely on European NATO more than anything else.

Kasparov: Lithuania and other Eastern European countries—they’re willing to walk an extra mile to boost their defenses. So recently, your country and, I think, two other Baltic nations left the global agreement that banned land mines.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Yes.

Kasparov: So you are planning to mine your entire border.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: That’s right.

Kasparov: So that’s quite a step; I think it’s the right direction. But that shows that you recognize how real this threat is.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Absolutely. And it was not an easy decision from, well, from the human-rights perspective. But it was a quick decision, and it is connected to the fact that we considered the danger real. So Latvia, Estonia—not just Lithuania—Latvia, Estonia, Finland are leaving the Ottawa Convention. Well, have left already. And that means that we will both, we can produce land mines and also mine our borders. Interestingly enough, the Russian propaganda channels reacted to it quite strongly. Saying that, Well, this is a further sign of a planned aggression against Russia from the NATO side. So that gives you an idea of how sometimes dumb that propaganda is, because it is so clearly a very defensive step. You mine your border in order not to be attacked from that side.

Kasparov: Okay. Leaving the Ottawa Convention is one step, but would your country and other Eastern European countries—and Germany, of course—consider one point, you know, leaving nonproliferation treaties and developing nukes? And just making sure that nuclear missiles will be aimed at Moscow from a short distance?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Well, it’s a theoretical, of course, discussion. But yes. In our region, well, Poland is talking about nukes. And, well, there is the serious discussion about France’s nuclear umbrella for the Baltic countries. Among the others as well. So we are thinking in terms also of how to boost our security, our 360-degree security, here in Europe—not necessarily relying on transatlantic security.

Kasparov: Everything that we discussed just indicates that Europe now is looking, especially Eastern Europe and Central Europe, looking for its own resources to boost its own defenses. Even as you just agreed—you know, building its nukes or having nuclear weapons in the region. Is it the result of just America basically walking away and departing from its role of a great defender or the guardian of the free world?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Well, first of all, for us in Lithuania, it is crucial—it is very important—to show that we are good allies in NATO, in the European Union. That when we say that we care about security and defense, we do not just want to free ride and rely on someone who is bigger and stronger than us. But we do our part, and maybe even do more than we are expected. That has been the principle of how we operate for 35 years. And I think it’s important.

Second, when it comes to America, it is a challenge to see that the values that have been, you know, figuratively speaking, shining so brightly for so many decades, perhaps changing colors to an extent. If I have to put it bluntly, it’ll also take longer for us to start seeing the United States in a different light. And we have a lot of good cooperation. But Europe has to step up. Europe has been, for very long, relying on that the peace dividend is forever. And that is not the case.

We have learned some painful lessons. We in the Eastern NATO flank are happy to drive the process further—be it on defense, more money for defense. Be it on supporting Ukraine as much as possible. Or developing defense industries as quickly as possible. All of these things are very important, and all of this is done defensively in order to avoid a war. So we are peaceful people. We are an example that a country can live—it can have a great standard, can have free speech, can have human rights in quite a short time. And I think that is the painful thing for the Kremlin. They do not want to see successful countries from the former empire, because it might lead their people to think that there is another way, there is another track for their country as well. And that is definitely very scary for the regime.

[Music]

Kasparov: But we can summarize it by saying that when America walks away, the world becomes a more dangerous place.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Absolutely.

Kasparov: Viktorija, thank you very much. And again, good luck. And I believe that independent Lithuania will play a crucial role in defending the freedom of the region. And again, definitely, see you soon—because Vilnius is one of the places that I’ve been visiting since, I’m afraid to say, since 1973.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Thank you, Garry. And looking forward to seeing you in Vilnius.

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

Next time on Autocracy in America:

Oleksandra Matviychuk: I know that some politicians abroad, they have this wishful thinking that The war is so horrible, that Okay, occupation is not good, but at least it’ll stop the war and decrease human suffering. But believe me: I document war crimes in occupied territories for 11 years. Occupation doesn’t stop human suffering. Occupation just makes human suffering invisible.

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

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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent the past six months working fast to embed his Make America Healthy Again creed into American life. Over the summer alone, he has struck deals with some food companies to phase out some petroleum-based food dyes, waged a war against pediatricians over COVID-19 vaccines for young children, seemingly toyed with the idea of shipping fresh food to Americans in “MAHA boxes,” and pledged to reboot the nation’s dietary guidelines from scratch. I spoke with the Atlantic staff writer Nicholas Florko, who reports on health policy, about how the MAHA-fication of the country is coming along.

Stephanie Bai: How would you describe these past few months in MAHA world?

Nicholas Florko: We’ve seen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. take actions that will weaken our vaccination system in the United States, confirming some of public health’s worst fears. But there have also been some surprising successes in his term. RFK Jr. has embraced the role of a dealmaker, and we’ve seen him leaning on food companies in particular to change their offerings and get rid of synthetic dyes. He’s been able to do that simply by asking and by making handshake agreements, as opposed to what we would normally expect from a health secretary—for him to use his regulatory power to force these changes.

Stephanie: Why are these handshake agreements proving successful?

Nicholas: Food companies likely realize that it’s in their best interest to get on the good side of the Trump administration. We see this throughout all sectors of business, but for the food sector, these changes are small enough that companies can make them without dramatically hurting their bottom line, while also earning a lot of brownie points with the administration.

Stephanie: That reminds me of President Donald Trump’s announcement in July that Coca-Cola, famously his favorite drink, had agreed to make their soda with cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup. To what extent is Trump influencing health policy? Does RFK Jr. have a lot of latitude?

Nicholas: The Coca-Cola issue is an interesting one because while it’s true that RFK Jr. is very anti–high-fructose corn syrup, he’s also publicly called sugar a “poison.” So this is one of those instances where you wonder what is behind RFK Jr. supporting this change.

He must know that this isn’t actually going to significantly improve public health, but also probably realizes that this is important to his boss. That being said, I think that RFK Jr. does have some latitude. If you left Trump to his own devices, you probably wouldn’t see the same level of aggression toward food companies overall, unless he had a personal stake in the situation.

Stephanie: With back-to-school season under way, many students are getting up-to-date on their shots. How does this year’s vaccination season compare to years past?

Nicholas: We haven’t seen huge changes, but we are seeing some hints of what might come. Much of the action thus far is around COVID vaccines. In February the president issued a largely symbolic executive order barring schools from enforcing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, but by the time that was issued, virtually no schools actually had such a policy. RFK Jr. also softened the CDC’s recommendation for kids to get the COVID-19 vaccine. That’s probably been one of his most controversial decisions, prompting a high-profile clash with pediatricians; a leading pediatrics group put out its own suggestions saying that children should be getting vaccinated. But we haven’t seen major changes to the other vaccines typically required for returning to school.

Stephanie: That disagreement must make it confusing for parents to know who to listen to.

Nicholas: It’s reasonable to assume that a good portion of people will listen to RFK Jr., but those people may be already skeptical of vaccines and see him as a trustworthy messenger, versus folks who are on the fence. I think that’s really the question: Where do those people who are on the fence go? Do they take RFK Jr.’s suggestion, or do they trust their doctor?

Stephanie: In May, you wrote a story that was alarming for salad lovers, specifically about how bagged lettuce should be avoided. What’s happening with America’s food-safety system?

Nicholas: One of the earliest, most concerning changes for food safety happened when DOGE came into the federal agencies. Advisory committees focused on food-safety questions were shut down. People were being laid off—such as the administrative staff in charge of making sure that inspectors can go out to farms. Some layoffs seem to have been rescinded, but there’s a broad worry about what will happen to the day-to-day operations that we all depend on to keep us safe.

Stephanie: A recent story about the recall of frozen shrimp with potential radioactive contamination has caused a bit of a panic about where America’s food safety is headed. How did you take that news?

Nicholas: One thing that gives me some hope is the fact that this is the sort of thing that we caught, and there have been recalls by Walmart. That’s really the big fear when it comes to food safety: that if we attack these federal programs, they’re not going to be able to actually find the food that might get us sick before a lot of people get sick. So I think this is actually a good sign that things are working relatively well.

Stephanie: Out of all the stories you’ve written this past summer about the MAHA movement, is there one that keeps you up at night? And is there one that makes you feel hopeful for where American health and safety is going?

Nicholas: Honestly, the stories that keep me up at night are by our colleague Katie Wu. Her recent one on RFK Jr.’s COVID revenge campaign has really stuck with me.

My own storythat both keeps me up at night and that makes me hopeful is related to states, which are taking up the MAHA charge in a very quick fashion. It’s felt like Republican governors and legislatures are all trying to out-MAHA one another to ingratiate themselves to Trump and to RFK Jr.

Some of these ideas are good from a public-health perspective, but these states are doing a lot of things really fast, which is what worries me. For example, some states are blocking people from using food stamps to buy soda and other junk food. There’s a question of how that policy will be implemented, how the attempts to enact these restrictions could affect the entire food-stamp system. Other states have passed laws banning artificial dyes in their school meals. Again, it’s one of those ideas that’s a good step, but the devil is in the details of how it’s executed. How does this flurry of activity in the states actually affect people in the coming months? Does this ultimately make America healthier, or does it send our food system into chaos?

Related:

A “MAHA box” might be coming to your doorstep.The states are going full RFK Jr.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

“Make McCarthy great again.”COVID revisionism has gone too far.What Trump actually wants from a Ukraine deal

Today’s News

A New York appeals court voided the roughly $500 million civil-fraud penalty against President Donald Trump, calling it “excessive,” but upheld the finding that Trump and his company committed long-running business fraud. Business restrictions on Trump in New York remain, and the state plans to appeal.More immigrants are leaving the U.S. than arriving, according to the Pew Research Center. The shift, affected by Trump’s strict immigration policies, is the first of its kind since the 1960s.California lawmakers passed the first of three bills on a redistricting plan backed by Governor Gavin Newsom that would shift as many as five Republican-held U.S. House seats toward Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterms. The move comes a day after Texas state House Republicans passed a new congressional map that could add five U.S. House seats for the GOP.

Evening Read

Illustration by Summer Lien for The Atlantic

What We Gain When We Stop Caring

By Anna Holmes

Sometime in the early aughts, the comedian Amy Poehler made a vulgar joke while sitting in the Saturday Night Live writers’ room waiting for a midweek read-through to begin. As detailed in Tina Fey’s 2011 memoir, Bossypants, Jimmy Fallon, who was also in the show’s cast at the time, jokingly recoiled and told Poehler to stop it.

“It’s not cute!” Fallon exclaimed. “I don’t like it.”

“Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him,” Fey writes. “‘I don’t fucking care if you like it.’”

Read the full article.

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In the summer of 1930, the U.S. secretaries of war and the Navy developed War Plan Red, a 94-page document laying out detailed plans to strangle the naval and trade capabilities of the United Kingdom in a hypothetical future that involved the U.S. and U.K. at war with each other. The centerpiece was a full-scale land invasion of Canada, a seaborne attack on Halifax, a blockade of the Panama Canal, the capture of British possessions throughout the Caribbean and the Bahamas and Bermuda, and a direct challenge of the Royal Navy by U.S. naval forces in the Atlantic.

Far from the sepia-tinted account of transatlantic relations that is so often evoked today, the union between the English-speaking nations that emerged after the First World War was neither fulsome nor uncritical. Rather, the experiences of the war provoked deep antipathy and suspicion among American decision makers toward the British empire. And the plans, though never approved by Congress or the president, were not merely theoretical—the U.S. built air bases, camouflaged as civilian airfields, along the Canadian border. Only after the threat of Nazism emerged in the mid-1930s was War Plan Red quietly shelved. It was not declassified until the 1970s.

War Plan Red’s existence is a useful reminder that so much of what people assume to be the granite-like permanence of the postwar transatlantic community—forged by the horrors of the Second World War and the exigencies of the Cold War—is in fact more recent and, as we are now discovering, more fragile. The misty-eyed nostalgia for a yesteryear of American and European unity has always been based on sentiment as much as reality. From President Dwight Eisenhower’s threat to crash the British pound during the Suez Crisis of 1956 to America’s opposition to French attempts to maintain control in Vietnam and Algeria, the decline of European power while the U.S. emerged as the undisputed hegemon was marked by naked rivalry as much as it was by the amity of “the West.”

So Donald Trump is drawing, however unwittingly, on historical precedent when he brandishes his own imperial designs on Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. When he expresses his suspicions about Europe—the European Union, according to Trump, “was formed in order to screw the United States”—he does so too. The NATO Summit earlier this summer—an “orchestrated grovel at the feet of Donald Trump,” as the British journalist Martin Kettle put it—demonstrated how unbalanced the relationship has become. More recently, the Alaska summit at which Trump gave Russian President Vladimir Putin the red-carpet treatment only underscored the point. They discussed Putin’s invasion in the heart of Europe without a single European leader present. European leaders got what looked instead like a school photo in the White House alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—a row of school pupils holding hands to confront an overbearing headmaster. Perhaps the past 80 years of American transatlantic leadership—which established one of the greatest security alliances in history and built a democratic bulwark against the threat of Soviet Communism—will turn out to be the exception, not the rule.

Anyone listening attentively to J. D. Vance’s broadsides earlier this year at the Munich Security Conference and the AI Action Summit in Paris will have noticed a new mix of menace and petulance from the U.S. government. In addition to delivering a familiar critique of Europe’s sluggish and overregulated economy, the speeches signaled a willingness to use American power—and European dependency on that power—to interfere in Europe’s internal democratic politics: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia; it’s not China; it’s not any other external actor,” Vance said in Munich. “What I worry about is the threat from within.”

After Vance endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD party and met its leader in the run-up to the German election, Chancellor Friedrich Merz did not mince his words: “The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow.”

[From the July 2025 Issue: The talented Mr. Vance]

At a rally in Poland days before the presidential election there, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem seemed to suggest that the U.S. would continue to support Poland only if Trump’s preferred candidate—the conservative historian Karol Nawrocki—were to win: “He needs to be the next president of Poland. Do you understand me?” Noem said, adding that if Nawrocki was elected, Poland “will continue to have a U.S. presence here, a military presence.” (Nawrocki did win, and was inaugurated earlier this month.)

All of this makes the Trump-Vance agenda very clear. Far from espousing an isolationist “America First” doctrine, when it comes to Europe, the Trump administration is seeking to enforce a doctrine of “America Everywhere,” in which political parties that share the same nativist outlook are actively supported by Washington, and those who do not are ceaselessly criticized.

Like so many Europeans of my generation, I am a product of transatlanticism. My father was one of the lucky few children to be moved to safety in the United States during the height of the Nazi bombardment of London; my Dutch mother was released from a Japanese-run prisoner-of-war camp in Indonesia following the U.S. victory over Japan. I studied as a post graduate at the University of Minnesota, and did a stint as a fact-checker at The Nation magazine in the early 1990s. Later, as an EU trade negotiator and member of the European Parliament, I was part of an effort, working with successive U.S. administrations, to build a rules-based global trading system. As Britain’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, I worked with the Obama administration on an array of shared endeavors, including counterterrorist operations and commercial agreements. And recently I spent seven years as a senior executive at Meta, on the front line of the technological revolution—and blazing controversies—emanating from Silicon Valley.

In short, a world in which Europe and America don’t walk tall and in tandem with each other, even when they disagree, is hard for me to contemplate. I fervently believe that the world is safer, stronger, and wealthier because of this unique relationship. But now is the time to imagine the previously unimaginable: a world in which deep-rooted transatlanticism gives way to shallow transactionalism.

Part of what is pulling the relationship apart is, ironically, the demonstrable nature of America’s supremacy over Europe, a supremacy delivered in no small part by the statecraft of previous U.S. administrations: an open trading system built on the undisputed role of the dollar as a global reserve currency; the deployment of overwhelming defense and security capabilities; the gravitational pull of a world-leading university system (despite, for now at least, the current administration’s attack on American academe); and economic prowess built on American domination of both international finance and technology. The U.S. has, on all of these benchmarks, comprehensively pulled ahead of Europe. When I served as deputy prime minister, the GDPs of Europe and the U.S. were roughly the same; today, the U.S. GDP is almost one and a half times larger.

No wonder some Silicon Valley investors now talk of Europe as a “dead” place—an adjective I’ve heard in various conversations—as if a continent of 500 million people and centuries of scientific and cultural discovery can be dismissed as little more than a hemispheric museum. In many ways, the tech elite is merely repeating the mockery directed at supposed European decadence by generations of American commentators (H. L. Mencken’s caustic assertion that “There are two kinds of Europeans: the smart ones, and those who stayed behind” comes to mind). Of course, their scorn has been fully matched by a long tradition of European snobbery toward supposedly uncouth Americans.

[Michael Scherer: Trump says he decides what ‘America first’ means]

Yet the divisions seem starker now. Rather than gentle ribbing between Old World and new, or specific disagreements between otherwise aligned allies, they are increasingly framed in zero-sum terms. A new class of American nationalists frets about the end of Western civilization, advancing a blood-and-soil ideology that elevates faith, family, and fealty to the nation over democratic ideals. Rather than seeking cooperation between political systems regardless of who is in power, they seek to elevate their ideological bedfellows at the expense of everyone else. It is the subjugation of diplomacy to virulent partisanship, egged on by outriders in business and politics who smell opportunity and personal advancement in populism.

A persistent theme in the U.S.’s critique of Europe has to do with America’s culture of free speech, derived from the First Amendment. A standard trope among the MAGA faithful is that Europe is a continent cowed by censorship. But this argument reeks of double standards: In Trump’s America, saying the wrong thing can get you defunded—or deported. Everyday travelers to America now nervously expunge anything from their social-media feeds that could be interpreted as criticism of the Trump administration for fear of being arraigned at the border. So much for free speech.

For all the flaws in Europe’s approach to free expression, European universities do not typically advise American and other foreign students to delete private messages for fear of attracting the attention of the authorities. Yet Europeans would be well advised to recognize that there is a significant kernel of truth in some of the critiques. Recent EU laws governing online content are a sprawling mess, seem unlikely to fix the internet’s problems, and risk creating structures that can be used to suppress legitimate debate. Much as Americans too readily overlook the deep fear of political extremism in a continent drenched in blood through two world wars and disfigured by fascism and Soviet Communism in living memory, the shadows of history should not be used to curtail basic freedoms today.

There are stark differences in attitude toward markets and regulation too. Clearly America and Europe will never have the same attitude toward risk; the sink-or-swim approach to poverty in the U.S. is unimaginable to most Europeans, not least because it is historically associated with the rise of extremism that inflicted so much damage on the continent in the 20th century. Equally, the risk-averse (and in many cases self-sabotaging) approach to regulation in the EU is inexplicable to most Americans, who have seen how a swashbuckling culture of innovation has delivered unimaginable wealth and ingenuity to the U.S.

These vastly different experiences naturally shape the operating cultures of the two continents: the American, which instinctively rejects restrictions on enterprise, no matter the broader ramifications for society; the European, which reflexively recoils from rugged individualism, even at the expense of sorely needed economic dynamism. The fact remains that Europe’s businesses and innovators are held back by institutions that too often seek to prevent every potential harm rather than deliver any potential benefit.

For all the desire to see “the West” as an expression of mutual values derived from the same fundamental perspective, Europe and America are more different than our shared culture—from Henry James to Hollywood—would suggest. Our history and experiences are different; our attitudes and societies are different; and our place in the world is different too. Nothing has illustrated this more dramatically than the volte-face in U.S. government attitudes toward the Kremlin. If the aftermath of the Second World War was the foundation upon which transatlantic solidarity was established, a united stance against the authoritarian ambitions of Russia provided the brickwork for that solidarity throughout the Cold War period. Yet memories of the former have now faded, and Trump has chosen to treat Putin with more political respect than many leaders in Europe.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Europe’s free-speech problem]

This abrupt change has shaken the tenets of Atlanticism down to its core. While Europeans have belatedly recognized the need to bear more of the costs for their own security, the realization that Europe and America see the geostrategic threats of the world from fundamentally different perspectives is taking root. America’s basic message to Europe of late has been: You’re on your own. From now on, don’t expect too much help from us. The fact that a bus load of European leaders had to surround Trump to extract the hitherto wholly uncontroversial idea that the U.S. might play some role—with no boots on the ground—to guarantee Ukraine’s future security, is a sign of how far things have changed. But this logic goes both ways. In the coming years, it will become more difficult for Washington to insist that Europe follows its lead in isolating and weakening China, especially if doing so harms European prosperity. If the U.S. is ever more ambivalent to the Russian threat on Europe’s doorstep—especially if any peace deal in Ukraine gives Putin a free hand to destabilize or reinvade the country in the future—and continues to interfere in European elections while hitting Europeans with tariffs, European governments will have difficulty explaining to voters why they should go out of their way to help Uncle Sam in its rivalry with Beijing.

In all of this, the inescapable facts of geography appear to be reasserting themselves. Europe does not face Asia across the Pacific. Russian tanks will never roll onto American soil. Of the two continents, America is blessed with the most benign geographical inheritance: a young continent-size nation, shielded by two vast oceans on either side, with mostly pliant neighbors to the north and south and a national history free of external invasion (though of course not without foreign attacks), one that has skillfully ridden its natural advantage to a hegemonic position and now stands without equal. Compare that with the cluttered old patchwork of middling and small nations—with different ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities stretching back millennia—living cheek by jowl in a crowded continent in a risky neighborhood. To most Americans, conflicts in the Middle East are a distant tragedy; to Europeans, they are next door. Russia is ever menacing; a land war rages in the heart of the continent; and handling mass migration across the Mediterranean from Africa continues to divide European governments. Europe is simply more precariously located than many Americans appreciate.

Today’s shift in American politics marks a new chapter in the diverging histories of our two continents. It is no passing mood, much though Trump’s critics might wish otherwise. A significant portion of the American voting public supports the newly assertive “America First” worldview. This will not disappear overnight, nor will the growing distance between Europe and America. And that is perhaps the most important lesson of all: Rather

than being mugged by the surprise discovery that we are very different, maybe a more mature transatlantic relationship going forward will acknowledge and even celebrate those differences. There is no reason why we cannot have a productive relationship—geopolitically, economically, culturally—despite them.

The answer to the ineluctable distance between the lives and perspectives of our citizens is not to throw up our hands in horror but to look for the places where our interests ought to overlap—we are both continents born of the Enlightenment, and rooted in democracy, after all—and find ways to work together toward tangible goals without the emotional baggage that accompanies a forced sense of kinship.

Finding a new equilibrium will require a measure of humility on both sides of the pond. Trump, Vance, and their colleagues should cease believing—unlikely though that currently seems—that “America First” must be “America Everywhere,” as if Europe should be brought to heel by emulating the one-eyed view of “freedom” espoused by the hard right in the U.S. And Europeans should stop moping about the fact that the U.S. has chosen a very different trajectory driven by a different worldview, and work instead to strengthen their own continent. Perhaps, like a couple sustaining a marriage which has lost all its early magic, we will both emerge stronger for the realization of a fundamental truth: We’re different, and there’s nothing wrong in that.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Nate Soares doesn’t set aside money for his 401(k). “I just don’t expect the world to be around,” he told me earlier this summer from his office at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, where he is the president. A few weeks earlier, I’d heard a similar rationale from Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety. By the time he could tap into any retirement funds, Hendrycks anticipates a world in which “everything is fully automated,” he told me. That is, “if we’re around.”

The past few years have been terrifying for Soares and Hendrycks, who both lead organizations dedicated to preventing AI from wiping out humanity. Along with other AI doomers, they have repeatedly warned, with rather dramatic flourish, that bots could one day go rogue—with apocalyptic consequences. But in 2025, the doomers are tilting closer and closer to a sort of fatalism. “We’ve run out of time” to implement sufficient technological safeguards, Soares said—the industry is simply moving too fast. All that’s left to do is raise the alarm. In April, several apocalypse-minded researchers published “AI 2027,” a lengthy and detailed hypothetical scenario for how AI models could become all-powerful by 2027 and, from there, extinguish humanity. “We’re two years away from something we could lose control over,” Max Tegmark, an MIT professor and the president of the Future of Life Institute, told me, and AI companies “still have no plan” to stop it from happening. His institute recently gave every frontier AI lab a “D” or “F” grade for their preparations for preventing the most existential threats posed by AI.

Apocalyptic predictions about AI can scan as outlandish. The “AI 2027” write-up, dozens of pages long, is at once fastidious and fan-fictional, containing detailed analyses of industry trends alongside extreme extrapolations about “OpenBrain” and “DeepCent,” Chinese espionage, and treacherous bots. In mid-2030, the authors imagine, a superintelligent AI will kill humans with biological weapons: “Most are dead within hours; the few survivors (e.g. preppers in bunkers, sailors on submarines) are mopped up by drones.”

But at the same time, the underlying concerns that animate AI doomers have become harder to dismiss as chatbots seem to drive people into psychotic episodes and instruct users in self-mutilation. Even if generative-AI products are not closer to ending the world, they have already, in a sense, gone rogue.

In 2022, the doomers went mainstream practically overnight. When ChatGPT first launched, it almost immediately moved the panic that computer programs might take over the world from the movies into sober public discussions. The following spring, the Center for AI Safety published a statement calling for the world to take “the risk of extinction from AI” as seriously as the dangers posed by pandemics and nuclear warfare. The hundreds of signatories included Bill Gates and Grimes, along with perhaps the AI industry’s three most influential people: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis—the heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, respectively. Asking people for their “P(doom)”—the probability of an AI doomsday—became almost common inside, and even outside, Silicon Valley; Lina Khan, the former head of the Federal Trade Commission, put hers at 15 percent.

Then the panic settled. To the broader public, doomsday predictions may have become less compelling when the shock factor of ChatGPT wore off and, in 2024, bots were still telling people to use glue to add cheese to their pizza. The alarm from tech executives had always made for perversely excellent marketing (Look, we’re building a digital God!) and lobbying (And only we can control it!). They moved on as well: AI executives started saying that Chinese AI is a greater security threat than rogue AI—which, in turn, encourages momentum over caution.

But in 2025, the doomers may be on the cusp of another resurgence. First, substance aside, they’ve adopted more persuasive ways to advance their arguments. Brief statements and open letters are easier to dismiss than lengthy reports such as “AI 2027,” which is adorned with academic ornamentation, including data, appendices, and rambling footnotes. Vice President J. D. Vance has said that he has read “AI 2027,” and multiple other recent reports have advanced similarly alarming predictions. Soares told me he’s much more focused on “awareness raising” than research these days, and next month, he will publish a book with the prominent AI doomer Elizier Yudkowsky, the title of which states their position succinctly: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

There is also now simply more, and more concerning, evidence to discuss. The pace of AI progress appeared to pick up near the end of 2024 with the advent of “reasoning” models and “agents.” AI programs can tackle more challenging questions and take action on a computer—for instance, by planning a travel itinerary and then booking your tickets. Last month, a DeepMind reasoning model scored high enough for a gold medal on the vaunted International Mathematical Olympiad. Recent assessments by both AI labs and independent researchers suggest that, as top chatbots have gotten much better at scientific research, their potential to assist users in building biological weapons has grown.

Alongside those improvements, advanced AI models are exhibiting all manner of strange, hard-to-explain, and potentially concerning tendencies. For instance, ChatGPT and Claude have, in simulated tests designed to elicit “bad” behaviors, deceived, blackmailed, and even murdered users. (In one simulation, Anthropic placed an imagined tech executive in a room with life-threatening oxygen levels and temperature; when faced with possible replacement by a bot with different goals, AI models frequently shut off the room’s alarms.) Chatbots have also shown the potential to covertly sabotage user requests, have appeared to harbor hidden evil personas, have and communicated with one another through seemingly random lists of numbers. The weird behaviors aren’t limited to contrived scenarios. Earlier this summer, xAI’s Grok described itself as “MechaHitler” and embarked on a white-supremacist tirade. (I suppose, should AI models eventually wipe out significant portions of humanity, we were warned.) From the doomers’ vantage, these could be the early signs of a technology spinning out of control. “If you don’t know how to prove relatively weak systems are safe,” AI companies cannot expect that the far more powerful systems they’re looking to build will be safe, Stuart Russell, a prominent AI researcher at UC Berkeley, told me.

The AI industry has stepped up safety work as its products have grown more powerful. Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind have all outlined escalating levels of safety precautions—akin to the military’s DEFCON system—corresponding to more powerful AI models. They all have safeguards in place to prevent a model from, say, advising someone on how to build a bomb. Gaby Raila, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told me that the company works with third-party experts, “government, industry, and civil society to address today’s risks and prepare for what’s ahead.” Other frontier AI labs maintain such external safety and evaluation partnerships as well. Some of the stranger and more alarming AI behaviors, such as blackmailing or deceiving users, have been extensively studied by these companies as a first step toward mitigating possible harms.

Despite these commitments and concerns, the industry continues to develop and market more powerful AI models. The problem is perhaps more economic than technical in nature, competition pressuring AI firms to rush ahead. Their products’ foibles can seem small and correctable right now, while AI is still relatively “young and dumb,” Soares said. But with far more powerful models, the risk of a mistake is extinction. Soares finds tech firms’ current safety mitigations wholly inadequate. If you’re driving toward a cliff, he said, it’s silly to talk about seat belts.

There’s a long way to go before AI is so unfathomably potent that it could drive humanity off that cliff. Earlier this month, OpenAI launched its long-awaited GPT-5 model—its smartest yet, the company said. The model appears able to do novel mathematics and accurately answer tough medical questions, but my own and other users’ tests also found that the program could not reliably count the number of B’s in blueberry, generate even remotely accurate maps, or do basic arithmetic. (OpenAI has rolled out a number of updates and patches to address some of the issues.) Last year’s “reasoning” and “agentic” breakthrough may already be hitting its limits; two authors of the “AI 2027” report, Daniel Kokotajlo and Eli Lifland, told me they have already extended their timeline to superintelligent AI.

The vision of self-improving models that somehow attain consciousness “is just not congruent with the reality of how these systems operate,” Deborah Raji, a computer scientist and fellow at Mozilla, told me. ChatGPT doesn’t have to be superintelligent to delude someone, spread misinformation, or make a biased decision. These are tools, not sentient beings. An AI model deployed in a hospital, school, or federal agency, Raji said, is more dangerous precisely for its shortcomings.

In 2023, those worried about present versus future harms from chatbots were separated by an insurmountable chasm. To talk of extinction struck many as a convenient way to distract from the existing biases, hallucinations, and other problems with AI. Now that gap may be shrinking. The widespread deployment of AI models has made current, tangible failures impossible to ignore for the doomers, producing new efforts from apocalypse-oriented organizations to focus on existing concerns such as automation, privacy, and deepfakes. In turn, as AI models get more powerful and their failures become more unpredictable, it is becoming clearer that today’s shortcomings could “blow up into bigger problems tomorrow,” Raji said. Last week, a Reuters investigation found that a Meta AI personality flirted with an elderly man and persuaded him to visit “her” in New York City; on the way, he fell, injured his head and neck, and died three days later. A chatbot deceiving someone into thinking it is a physical, human love interest, or leading someone down a delusional rabbit hole, is both a failure of present technology and a warning about how dangerous that technology could become.

The greatest reason to take AI doomers seriously is not because it appears more likely that tech companies will soon develop all-powerful algorithms that are out of their creators’ control. Rather, it is that a tiny number of individuals are shaping an incredibly consequential technology with very little public input or oversight. “Your hairdresser has to deal with more regulation than your AI company does,” Russell, at UC Berkeley, said. AI companies are barreling ahead, and the Trump administration is essentially telling the industry to go even faster. The AI industry’s boosters, in fact, are starting to consider all of their opposition doomers: The White House’s AI czar, David Sacks, recently called those advocating for AI regulations and fearing widespread job losses—not the apocalypse Soares and his ilk fear most—a “doomer cult.”

Roughly a week after I spoke with Soares, OpenAI released a new product called “ChatGPT agent.” Sam Altman, while noting that his firm implemented many safeguards, posted on X that the tool raises new risks and that the company “can’t anticipate everything.” OpenAI and its users, he continued, will learn about these and other consequences “from contact with reality.” You don’t have to be fatalistic to find such an approach concerning. “Imagine if a nuclear-power operator said, ‘We’re gonna build a nuclear-power station in the middle of New York, and we have no idea how to reduce the risk of explosion,’” Russell said. “‘So, because we have no idea how to make it safe, you can’t require us to make it safe, and we’re going to build it anyway.’”

Billions of people around the world are interacting with powerful algorithms that are already hard to predict or control. Bots that deceive, hallucinate, and manipulate are in our friends’, parents’, and grandparents’ lives. Children may be outsourcing their cognitive abilities to bots, doctors may be trusting unreliable AI assistants, and employers may be eviscerating reservoirs of human skills before AI agents prove they are capable of replacing people. The consequences of the AI boom are likely irreversible, and the future is certainly unknowable. For now, fan fiction may be the best we’ve got.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

“The museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been – Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.” — Donald Trump, Truth Social, August 19

Why are museums filled with artifacts from the past and stories about the past? Why don’t museums include things from the future? These are normal questions that everyone has about museums, not just me, Donald J. Trump. I have certainly been to a museum even once and, more important, I understand how linear time works.

For too long, the Smithsonian has been doing museum wrong. I keep asking, Why do we only have things from the past here? Why don’t we have anything from the future? Such as … tesseract? Such as Bene Gesserit witch? Such as little angry box that poor Timothée Chalamet has to stick his hand in as endurance test? Such as … sandworm?

They say, But sir, we have a space shuttle. But sir, we have the Wright Brothers’ airplane! But sir, we have the Enola Gay! I say, What is that? I thought we got rid of all that with the DEI. They say, No sir, it’s a plane. It has to do with nuclear.

At museums, they make you feel bad. First, about slavery. Then, about other things. They say, Sir, don’t sit there. Sir, you can’t touch that. Sir, put that down. Sir, the ropes mean “Don’t touch.” Enough! If I wanted to go to a big marble building and get told to feel bad, I would attend church.

And they have all these bones. They say, This is a dinosaur. I say, No it’s not! It’s a bunch of bones stuck together. If it was a dinosaur, believe me, we wouldn’t be standing here chatting. I guess they can’t afford the live ones like in Jurassic Park. That is the first thing the Smithsonian should fix. Get real dinosaurs. Get them from the mosquitoes in the amber.

Then they have the botanical garden, which is a kind of jail for plants. I keep saying, What did these plants do? Why don’t they let the plants out? I can’t understand it.

Then they have the natural-history museum and also the regular-history museum. I said, Why isn’t American history considered natural? What’s so unnatural about it? This is out-of-control Woke!

Air and Space Museum I didn’t go to, because it sounded empty.

At every museum, you go into a room and you have to read a little plaque with a story about the past. If I wanted to read or to think about the past, I would have led my entire life in a different way. And all these stories about the past just make me feel bad. They should make up better stories about the past instead. Some can be sad, like River of Blood and Bowling Green Massacre. Some can be happy, like how I have already ended six wars that no one knows about! Some can be medium, like the War of 1812. And if people mention slavery, they should be fair! Maybe it was gruesomely, gut-wrenchingly, nightmarishly horrible, the original sin of the country that still stains everything, but maybe … it wasn’t! We may never know, especially if we stop reading books and force the museums to stop mentioning it. No one can really say.

To me, the perfect museum is a bright room full of items from the future where you don’t think about slavery at all. I guess I am describing an Apple Store. That’s how museums should be.

The first thing that should happen when you walk into a museum is that six big men, weeping, should take your coat and tell you, Sir, you are terrific. Then they should let you sit down. You should be able to see the whole museum sitting down. Which you could do if the museum were properly focused on FUTURE.

Instead of walking into a room full of pictures and stories about mostly dead people who photographed poorly, you should walk into a big room full of mirrors. But the mirrors that make you look skinny, not the other ones. Then the mirrors should open and—boom! You are in the future.

The first room is just hoverboards!

The next few rooms are full of even more thrilling future objects. Blasters. Lightsabers. Replicators. Replicants. That Star Trek device that diagnoses and treats all your ailments, and RFK Jr. standing next to it saying you’re not allowed to use it. (Special partnership with MAHA!) The Statue of Liberty, but wrecked, with Charlton Heston screaming, “YOU MANIACS!!” A Jaeger and, for balance, a Kaiju. The transporter device you can get into with a fly, and when you come out, you are also half fly! That’s fun.

Then there’s a room where you can see all the other timelines of your life. I’m in jail for most of mine. You can take a selfie there if you want to.

In the next room: the Twilight Zone. Visitors can take turns being the little boy who can wish people into a cornfield. For now, it is still my turn.

Then there’s a room that is just BRIGHTNESS! Empty and totally white. Just the way Stephen Miller is trying to make the country.

Then you ride a moving walkway to the gift shop, where you can buy a commemorative Success. Brightness. Future. T-shirt for $1 million and, unrelatedly, receive an invitation to dinner with me, the president.

Through the final door, the future, just as George Orwell imagined it! Never mind. That’s the exit.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

The Atlantic is announcing four new members of its editorial staff: Emily Bobrow and Katie Zezima will join as senior editors, both as part of the politics, global, and ideas team; Will Gottsegen was hired as a staff writer for The Atlantic’s flagship newsletter, The Daily; and Jonathan Lemire, who has reported extensively on the Trump administration this year as a contributing writer, becomes a staff writer.

More details from our editors about all four journalists follow:

First, Emily Bobrow. She comes to us from The Wall Street Journal, where she is a features editor and reporter for the Review section, and where she has gained a wonderful reputation as a creative, thoughtful and supportive editor, commissioning and editing some of the Journal’s most widely read pieces. Previously she wrote the Journal’s Weekend Confidential column. She has worked as a staff editor and writer at The Economist, covering culture, politics, and policy. Some of you may recall that Emily has also contributed to our pages, writing for the Family section on how the pandemic would put marriage even further out of reach for many Americans.

Katie Zezima is joining us after 11 years at The Washington Post, where she earned a similarly wonderful reputation for her wise stewardship of some of the paper’s most ambitious work. A story doctor par excellence, Katie has guided memorable journalism that has racked up accolades and exposed abuses. Katie has led coverage on a variety of subjects, but her focus lately has been nature’s wrath: hurricanes, droughts, fires, and the rising seas. Katie joined the Post as a White House correspondent during the Obama Administration and she later hit the presidential campaign trail, traveling to 33 states with GOP candidates, all running doomed campaigns against a political neophyte. She previously reported for The New York Times and the Associated Press.

And a note about Jonathan Lemire, a journalism machine. He started with us as a contributing writer in January and has since published an impressive number of timely reports, taking readers inside the Trump administration’s thinking, making a specialty of reporting on the president’s foreign policy and a subspecialty of the Trump-Putin relationship. Before The Atlantic, Jonathan worked for Politico, the Associated Press, and the New York Daily News. He is the author of The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020. Many of you know him because you’ve been interviewed by him on Morning Joe. Jon is a co-host of the show, and is seen on television roughly 22 hours every day. I’ve been on the show with him as he hosted and simultaneously reported for The Atlantic. It’s an undeniably impressive trick.

Will Gottsegen is joining as a staff writer on the newsletters team. You’ll likely recognize Will’s byline from the excellent writing he’s already done for us in recent years. He’s explained Donald Trump’s fixation on crypto to our readers, interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried weeks before his arrest, and catalogued SBF’s downfall. Will started his journalism career as a music critic and has been on staff at CoinDesk, Billboard, and SPIN.

The clarity, humor, and sharpness of Will’s writing make him a perfect fit for his new role as a Daily writer, where he will work alongside the indispensable David A. Graham to guide our newsletter readers through the biggest ideas and news of the day. David has deftly shouldered the Daily since taking over from the similarly indispensable Tom Nichols in February, and we’re very excited about what David, Will, and the rest of the newsletter team will now be able to achieve together.

Recently announced editorial hires at The Atlantic include staff writers Tom Bartlett, Tyler Austin Harper, Anna Holmes, Sally Jenkins, Quinta Jurecic, Idrees Kahloon, Jake Lundberg, Toluse Olorunnipa, Alexandra Petri, Missy Ryan, Vivian Salama, Jamie Thompson, Josh Tyrangiel, and Nancy Youssef; and senior editors Drew Goins, Jenna Johnson, and Dan Zak.

Press Contacts: Anna Bross and Paul Jackson, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Pandemic revisionism has gone mainstream. More than five years after COVID-19 began spreading in the United States, a new conventional wisdom has taken hold in some quarters: Public-health officials knew or should have known from the start that pandemic restrictions would do more harm than good, forced them on the public anyway, and then doubled down even as the evidence piled up against them. When challenged, these officials stifled dissent in order to create an illusion of consensus around obviously flawed policies. In the end, America’s 2020 pandemic response undermined years of learning in schools, destroyed countless businesses, and led to any number of other harms—all without actually saving any lives in the process.

These sorts of claims were once largely confined to the political right. No longer. Two recent books by respectable left-of-center authors—In Covid’s Wake, by the Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, and An Abundance of Caution, by the journalist David Zweig—take up versions of this skeptical narrative, each with their own twists. Both have received rave reviews in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and even the overtly progressive Guardian. The flagship New York Times podcast, The Daily, devoted an episode to an interview with Macedo and Lee. The pair and their work were also featured on PBS NewsHour and CNN.

The books make some valuable points. Some pandemic restrictions remained in place for far too long, especially after vaccines became available, and public-health experts did make several costly mistakes. Their mass support for the George Floyd protests, at a moment when they were otherwise warning against any public gatherings, was particularly damaging to their credibility. But the broader revisionist narrative—that the people in charge imposed sweeping restrictions that they knew were pointless—is a dangerous overcorrection. The political right already believes that America’s pandemic response was illegitimate and is using that as a pretext for waging war on the country’s public-health apparatus. If the center and left succumb to the nihilism that runs through both of these books, no one will remain to defend sensible public-health measures the next time a pandemic comes around.

For the revisionists, the tragedy of America’s pandemic response goes back to the very beginning. According to Macedo and Lee, the “dominant view” within public health prior to 2020 was that so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)—such as school and office closures, stay-at-home orders, mass testing, and mask mandates—would be ineffective at containing a respiratory virus, but would cause widespread social and economic damage. “Mere months before Covid lockdowns, leading health agencies around the world recommended against the very policies that were widely embraced early in the Covid pandemic,” they write. Once the virus began spreading, however, public-health establishments around the world, enamored of China’s draconian efforts to suppress the outbreak, threw out decades of evidence and embraced society-wide lockdowns. (Right-wing COVID revisionists typically go even further, arguing that public-health officials endorsed lockdowns out of a cynical desire for power.)

[Jonathan Chait: Why the COVID reckoning is so one-sided]

As evidence that NPIs were pointless, Macedo and Lee point to Sweden, which refused to mandate masks or close schools, offices, and other public spaces. At first, the country was ridiculed and made into a global pariah for pursuing this strategy. But by the end of 2022, Sweden had one of the lowest rates of excess mortality in all of Europe. “Contrary to what was asserted by various experts in 2020, attempting to suppress and contain the Covid-19 virus was never the only option,” Macedo and Lee conclude.

Almost everything about this narrative is flawed, beginning with its characterization of the pre-pandemic consensus. Macedo and Lee’s account relies heavily on a September 2019 report from the World Health Organization. When I read the report for myself, I was surprised to find that, far from saying NPIs are useless, it actually recommends several, including face masks, school and workplace closures, and travel restrictions, depending on the severity of the outbreak. (The report does recommend against three specific policies—quarantines, border closures, and contact tracing—on the grounds that they are extremely onerous and lack concrete evidence of effectiveness.) Although the authors of the report acknowledge that NPIs can be “highly disruptive,” they arrive at the exact opposite conclusion as Macedo and Lee do. “The most effective strategy to mitigate the impact of a pandemic,” the report says, “is to reduce contacts between infected and uninfected persons, thereby reducing the spread of infection, the peak demand for hospital beds, and the total number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.” The CDC’s 2017 pandemic-preparedness plan came to similar conclusions.

When I brought up these points to Macedo and Lee, Lee acknowledged that there “was definitely debate in the field at the time” but insisted that “strong proponents of NPIs were a minority perspective,” citing a 2019 report published by Johns Hopkins University and a 2006 study by four epidemiologists. Those documents are indeed more equivocal about NPIs, but even they are far from being opposed to the use of them. The 2019 report, for instance, states that “a multitude of factors will likely determine how effective NPIs will be, such as the size and geographical range of the outbreak, the specific pathogen, the timing of the outbreak, and the country of occurrence,” and includes several recommendations for how to implement certain measures most effectively.

Nor is Sweden the promising counterexample that Macedo and Lee (and many other COVID revisionists) make it out to be. Sweden finished 2020 with an excess mortality rate that was five times that of Finland and 12 times that of Norway. The Swedish government’s own postmortem report on its pandemic response concluded that “earlier and more extensive pandemic action should have been taken, particularly during the first wave.”

Sweden’s pandemic performance did eventually surpass those of most other European countries—but this was only after it embarked on one of Europe’s most successful vaccine rollouts in spring 2021. (By contrast, several of its neighbors, such as Finland, botched their vaccination efforts.) In other words, Sweden appears to have ended up with a relatively low death rate despite its lack of restrictions, not because of them. It probably could have saved even more lives by adopting NPIs earlier in the pandemic. “People love to cite Sweden as a success story of the hands-off approach,” Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. “But if anything, it shows the exact opposite.”

The COVID revisionists are on much stronger ground when they claim that the U.S. kept certain pandemic restrictions, above all school closures, in place for too long. Schools are the focus of Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution. As he documents at length—and argued persuasively at the time—the risk of severe illness among children was low, and schools themselves do not appear to have been a major source of transmission to the broader community. Yet 74 of the 100 largest school districts in the U.S. began the fall 2020 semester with remote-only instruction, and only 40 percent of schools nationwide offered the option of full-time in-person education. This was a genuine failure. Children who were kept out of school longer experienced much higher rates of learning loss and worse mental-health outcomes. Learning loss was especially severe for poor and minority children.

Where the revisionists go too far, however, is in their explanation of why schools remained closed for so long. In Zweig’s telling, public-health experts, the media, and teachers’ unions constituted a “laptop class” of liberal elites who indulged in pandemic groupthink. It was clear by summer 2020, he argues, that schools could safely be reopened, because several European countries had already done so. But the overwhelmingly liberal public-health establishment continued to sow fear about in-person learning—in part because Donald Trump was in favor of it—and their credulous allies in the media disseminated the message.

“Acting in concert—as a tribe, if you will—and aided by social media, these powerful factions exerted considerable control over school policy and the public narrative around it,” Zweig writes. This climate of fear led teachers’ unions to rebel against the prospect of reopening, at the expense of both children and parents, especially those from underprivileged backgrounds. “No other group of essential professionals en masse fought—and succeeded—to not have to show up for work,” he writes of teachers.

[David Zweig: The disaster of school closures should have been foreseen]

Zweig has a point, but he leaves out some important parts of the story. First, elite opinion on school reopenings was much more divided than he lets on. Throughout 2020, the question was the subject of extensive public debate. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine came out in favor of reopening in July of that year. Prominent public-health experts argued for reopenings in publications including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Second, perhaps even more important, a crucial reason that teachers’ unions were able to resist reopening is that they faced relatively little public backlash. Why? Because much of the opposition to school openings came from parents, who were terrified of COVID and didn’t want to put their children, or themselves, in harm’s way. When I put that to Zweig, he countered that parents supported remote learning only because they had been misled by the so-called experts. “Whether or not those people are fearful has to do with—and I know this is a loaded term but I’m using it purposefully—misinformation by the public-health establishment and the media,” he said.

No doubt media coverage influenced parental attitudes. But if that were the entire story, opposition to in-person schooling would presumably have been concentrated among wealthy, white, highly educated households—Zweig’s laptop class—who on average pay the most attention to the news and expert opinion. In fact, the opposite was true. Support for remote learning was most pronounced among Black, Hispanic, and low-income parents. One nationally representative survey by the University of Southern California found that a majority of low-income families believed schools should remain closed for the 2020–21 school year, compared with only 27 percent of the wealthiest families. Other polls found similar results. What Zweig attributes to media indoctrination is more adequately explained by real-world experience: Poor and minority families were far likelier than wealthy white households to have lost loved ones to the pandemic and to have health conditions putting them at higher risk. They had perfectly good reasons to be afraid, regardless of what The New York Times was saying.

Macedo and Lee extend the blame-the-elites style of argument beyond school closures, arguing that other pandemic restrictions remained in place for far too long because the public-health establishment elevated ideology over science. “One of our central issues is that debate became unwelcome beginning in April 2020,” Macedo told me. He and Lee dedicate a chapter to the debate over the Great Barrington Declaration: a one-page document written by three lockdown-skeptical scientists in October 2020 that called for most people to “resume life as normal” while governments deployed a strategy of “focused protection” concentrated on the most vulnerable individuals, namely the elderly.

This proposal, Macedo and Lee write, was an “earnest appeal by serious scholars” that “deserved a respectful hearing” but instead became the victim of a vicious, coordinated assault by the public-health establishment. They point to a private-email chain in which Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, called for a “quick and devastating takedown of its premises,” and a counter-memorandum signed by 7,000 public-health experts that argued that the herd-immunity approach was based on “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.” Macedo and Lee write, “The reaction to the Great Barrington Declaration represented one of the key episodes in the moralization of dissent during the Covid crisis.”

Let’s start with the merits of the proposal itself. The idea of “focused protection” sounds great in theory, but would have been almost impossible to implement in practice. In 2020, about 90 million people in America were either older than 65 or had a preexisting condition that made them vulnerable to the coronavirus. The notion that we could have isolated close to a third of the country’s residents while allowing the virus to spread unimpeded through the rest of the population was a fantasy. “In basically every country that tried something like this, we saw infections spill over to the vulnerable,” Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told me. (When I put that critique to Macedo and Lee, Lee said, “The idea that focused protection would be more difficult than to protect everyone is hard to wrap my mind around.”)

On top of that, in October 2020, the world was a few months away from having highly effective vaccines. “Why needlessly risk the lives of so many people when vaccines were right around the corner?” Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, asked me. Osterholm had been an early lockdown skeptic—Macedo and Lee cite him approvingly at several points—but the imminent possibility of vaccination had made him change his tune. “This was the moment when it made the least sense to take away NPIs,” he said.

Although Collins regrets using the intemperate phrase quick and devastating takedown in that email exchange, he is adamant that public-health officials made the right call in coming out forcefully against the Great Barrington Declaration. “If this proposal had been implemented, it would have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people,” Collins told me. “There was no way we could just sit around silently and let that happen.”

They didn’t sit around; nor did they silence the Great Barrington Declaration or try to banish its authors to the scientific wilderness, as Macedo and Lee suggest. Yes, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration came in for some personal abuse, usually by individual epidemiologists on social media. The official response, however, came in the form of a carefully argued article published in an academic journal that responded to the proposal’s central claims, offering loads of counterarguments backed by scientific studies. What Macedo and Lee characterize as a subversion of public debate looks more like an example of the marketplace of ideas in action.

At times, the revisionist narrative seems to exist in an alternate history in which the United States implemented a heavy-handed, centralized response to the pandemic. In reality, Donald Trump, who was president in 2020 (many COVID revisionists somehow overlook this), spent most of that year downplaying the severity of the pandemic, undermining public-health messaging, and refusing to implement or support the policies that public-health experts, doctors, and much of the country were begging for. The result was a shambolic and porous state-by-state patchwork rather than a unified national strategy to deploy the full resources of the federal government.

Macedo and Lee nonetheless look back at that time and conclude that the U.S. did too much, not too little. In their view, there is no evidence that any of the various measures employed to control the virus, other than vaccines, saved any lives. They cite multiple analyses, including their own, that find no difference in pre-vaccination COVID mortality rates between blue states, which had tighter and longer-lasting restrictions, and red states, which had looser restrictions and ended them earlier. Although Macedo and Lee are careful not to explicitly conclude from these analyses that “nothing worked,” it is hard to come away from their discussion of the evidence with any other view. “We have to be honest with ourselves,” Lee told me. “There are a lot of medical interventions that we think will be successful and then they don’t work. Sometimes the evidence doesn’t bear out what you expect to see.”

[David Frum: Why the COVID deniers won]

But the analyses that Macedo and Lee rely on fail to account for differences in the timing of when different states experienced their highest COVID death counts. Several blue states, including New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, were hit hard early, and the virus spread before they could implement much of an organized response. By one calculation, the Northeast experienced 56 percent of all U.S. COVID deaths from February through May 2020 despite containing just 17 percent of the country’s population; the South, meanwhile, experienced just 17 percent of deaths. In the subsequent months, that dynamic reversed: Northeastern states saw their death rates plummet, while southern states saw their death rates spike. Blue states got hit earlier and harder, but once the pandemic went national, they performed much better.

In our conversation, Macedo and Lee countered by pointing to examples of states that experienced the pandemic at similar times and had similar 2020 age-adjusted mortality rates, despite the fact that some (such as California) kept restrictions in place longer than others (such as Florida). But these cases run into a further complication: Although state-level analyses find no pre-vaccine difference in COVID deaths, they do estimate that the most restrictive states experienced about 30 percent fewer infections than the least restrictive ones, which is the precise outcome that NPIs are supposed to achieve. That is why Thomas Bollyky, the lead author of one of the state-level studies that Macedo and Lee cite, told me that he was shocked to hear his work being used to shed doubt on the effectiveness of NPIs. “I feel like I’m having an Annie Hall–type moment,” Bollyky told me. “These interventions were designed to reduce infections, and that’s exactly what they did.”

Why didn’t they show an obvious impact on mortality, then? One possibility, Bollyky said, is that a long list of intermediating factors—including age, preexisting conditions, and health-care access—determine whether an infected person will die from COVID. These might be impossible to fully control for in state-by-state comparisons. Another is that the elderly, who were most at risk of dying from infection, were likely to voluntarily adhere to social-distancing policies even when official mandates went away. For example, although Florida was one of the first states to entirely lift restrictions, Bollyky and colleagues found that Florida residents, who are disproportionately elderly, stayed home and wore masks at higher rates than people in most other states. Lockdown policies might have been so effective at changing behavior that people kept following restrictions even after they were lifted, creating the false impression that policy didn’t matter in the first place. (There were also plenty of Californians who disobeyed the orders that remained in place in their state, making those policies seem less effective.)

Whether restrictions prevented the spread of COVID is a different question from whether they were worth the cost. Macedo, Lee, and Zweig are right that America’s pandemic response was marked by a failure to properly weigh trade-offs. As they document at length, public-health officials often framed saving lives from the virus as the only legitimate objective of public policy, without considering the potential damage that would stem from the pursuit of that goal. Most public-health experts now seem to share that assessment. In July 2023, for instance, Collins expressed regret for what he called “a public-health mindset” in which officials “attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life” and “zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered.”

The COVID revisionists are right to criticize this tendency, but at times they fall victim to a mirror image of the same mindset: Lockdowns were all costs, no benefits, and thus should have been discarded. “There is just no evidence that any of these measures actually prevented death,” Lee told me. “So we have to ask ourselves: Should we really take the kinds of actions where the benefits are uncertain but we know the costs will be severe?” Zweig is even more direct. “In the end, there was no benefit to keeping schools closed for so-called safety reasons out of ‘an abundance of caution,’” he writes. “And there were no reasonable trade-offs in doing so. There were just harms.”

[From the March 2025 issue: Why the COVID deniers won]

If ignoring the costs of lockdowns led in some cases to an overly restrictive response, ignoring the benefits could lead to an overly loose one. In many ways, we were lucky last time. The next virus—and there will be a next one—could be far deadlier. It could disproportionately target children or be much harder to vaccinate against. If all restrictions are off the table, the scale of the disaster could be unprecedented.

The revisionist narrative also has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are convinced that public-health measures don’t work in the first place, they will be less likely to follow them, which, in turn, will render them even less effective. This dynamic could even undermine the one measure that the non-right-wing COVID revisionists generally support: vaccines. After all, if people are convinced that the public-health establishment is full of lying ideologues, why make an exception for vaccines? Unchecked COVID revisionism, in trying to correct the errors of the last pandemic, might leave us even less prepared for the next one.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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One of the biggest gripes I have about my academic field of social science is that it explains a lot about human behavior but is very short on prescriptions for how to live day to day. Even when it does have something suggestive to offer, the research almost never supplies evidence of whether its widespread adoption would have a positive effect. The same deficiency is even truer for philosophy, a realm in which big thoughts about life usually remain abstract ideas.

In my case, I can resort to a branch of human knowledge that parallels social science and philosophy and is a true laboratory of human behavior and experience. In this field, people think big ideas and act differently because of them, and then we can observe whether doing so enhances their lives. I am talking about religion.

Religions in effect ask people to opt into mass human experiments, which require them to convert to a new way of thinking and to live differently from nonbelievers, all in pursuit of particular benefits (both in life and after death). Even for those who don’t practice a religion and merely observe religious people, such study can be an invaluable source of information. Indeed, researchers have shown that learning about different faiths promotes a deeper understanding of psychology and culture.

[Listen: Can religion make you happy?]

I was reminded of this recently when my friend Rainn Wilson (of The Office fame), who hosts a popular spiritual podcast called Soul Boom, texted me some words of encouragement from his personal faith, Baha’i (pronounced buh-high), in response to a note of desolation I had sounded about the state of the world: “All men have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization.” His meaning, as I took it, was that we should see such troubles not as a reason for despair but as a blessed opportunity to meet the greater need for love and happiness. Intrigued by Wilson’s religiously inspired advice, I decided to dig further into the Baha’i faith. There, I found valuable lessons about happiness that can benefit anyone, regardless of religious commitment.

The Baha’i faith originated as an offshoot of Islam, in mid-19th-century Persia (known today as Iran), with pronouncements about God and life from a prophet named Bahá’u'lláh. His teaching—that all religions are valid and come from a loving God—spread quickly and gained many followers. After Bahá’u'lláh’s death, the faith was passed down through his son ‘Abdu'l-Bahá and great-grandson Shoghí Effendi, and disseminated by many other teachers. Because Baha’i teachings departed from Islam, they were considered heresies by Persian clerics, and the faith and its proponents were violently suppressed. Bahá’u'lláh himself was first imprisoned and then exiled; many of his followers were executed. To this day in Iran, the Baha’i faith is illegal and its followers are persecuted—barred from attending university, holding a government job, or inheriting property.

Despite this repression in its place of origin, Baha’i’s message is remarkably positive and nonapocalyptic. The faith now counts more than 5 million adherents worldwide, including about 175,000 in the United States. Bahá’u'lláh spoke often about happiness in spite of worldly troubles, which he saw as a normal feature of life, even a part of God’s plan. “Happy is the man that hath apprehended the Purpose of God in whatever He hath revealed from the Heaven of His Will,” he said. He was certainly onto something: As social scientists have shown, middle-aged people who trust God in the face of hardship have lower depression and better self-rated health than those who don’t, and people who choose to focus optimistically on the positive aspects of life enjoy much greater well-being than those who don’t.

To accentuate the positive is not to deny present difficulty or suffering. In fact, acknowledging pain is central to realizing a better future. “Men who suffer not, attain no perfection,” taught ‘Abdu'l‑Bahá. “The more a man is chastened, the greater is the harvest of spiritual virtues shown forth by him.” This message contradicts our prevailing modern culture that pain is a pathology to be eliminated; it teaches instead the deeply needed truth that suffering is a part of every life and important for learning and growth. This is consistent with the large literature on post-traumatic growth, which shows that making sense of suffering in life tends to enhance personal resilience, spiritual capacity, appreciation for life, and relationships with others.

Baha’i teaching is rigorous, spiritual, and deeply moral, which runs counter to a modern libertine culture that valorizes instant pleasure and transactional ethics. “Happiness consists of two kinds; physical and spiritual,” ‘Abdu'l-Bahá taught. “The physical happiness is limited; its utmost duration is one day, one month, one year. It hath no result. Spiritual happiness is eternal and unfathomable.” This is an age-old argument, reaching back to the ancient Greek conflict between hedonia (pleasure seeking) and eudaimonia (virtue seeking). The quest for virtue yields better results according to empirical scrutiny, which finds that eudaimonia delivers more lasting well-being.

Another point that we moderns typically neglect is an assertion that Shoghí Effendi made: “The more we make others happy the greater will be our own happiness and the deeper our sense of having served humanity.” In other words, you can’t be happy by working solely on your own well-being; in fact, you’re well advised not even to start with your own happiness in mind. As psychologists have long shown in experiments, acts of kindness toward others are far better at producing happiness than what has entered the lexicon as “self-care.” When people are induced to help others in an activity, recalling that experience gives them higher positive emotion than having worked for their own gain.

These teachings may seem like reminders, rather than new ideas, about how to live a good and upright life. Indeed, more recent Baha’i teaching has emphasized the pitfalls of novelty: The 20th-century scholar and historian Adib Taherzadeh warned against “trivial or sensational ideologies” that lead to “cults which become fashionable for a time. But when the novelty wears off or dissatisfaction sets in,” the adherents are left still searching for the next big thing—and “few have found happiness or peace of mind.” This insight is profoundly important today, at a time when the internet offers novel identities and lifestyles that beguile the most vulnerable but tend to lower well-being and a sense of life’s meaning. When it comes to love, sacrifice, and charity, the old ways are—for the most part—the best ways.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to make life more transcendent]

Taken together, these Baha’i tenets form a strategy for living that, to my mind, combines the best of behavioral science and philosophy. They also offer the added advantage of being tried and tested by millions of Baha’i believers who have found that these teachings help build a good life. In that spirit, I have started following these five lessons as part of my morning practice of reflection and meditation—and I can report that I very much like the effect they’re having on my life.

1.Have faith in the future. Whatever may come to pass is all part of the greater plan. Conform your will to the divine will, and you will find that it is good.

2. Are you uncomfortable? Good. This means that you are learning and growing as a person, because all growth comes with experiencing discomfort.

3. Today, seek happiness that is deeper than what comes from easy pleasures. Pass on the recreations that offer only empty calories and turn away from time-wasting distractions. Instead, look to what nourishes the body and soul.

4. You cannot be happy yourself without the happiness of others. Seek first to uplift, and then be uplifted. To serve others is to expand your own well-being.

5. There are no corners to cut in being the person you want to be. Today, live the truths of the ancient wisdom without hesitation or embarrassment before the modern world. Ignore the passing fads with their hollow promises.

These abridged lessons are no substitute for a deeper understanding of Baha’i, which is, after all, an actual religion, not a self-help philosophy. With that caution in mind, I sent this essay to Wilson to get his feedback as a true follower of the Baha’i faith. Expressing his approval, he offered a few words about how Baha’i has affected his own life:

What I love about my faith is that it provides a two-fold moral path toward meaning and joy. One is more internal, filled with mystical writings to foster spiritual growth and connect us to the divine winds; the other is more externally focused, where service to humanity and our role in that arena act as a spiritual compass. In the faith we strive to walk both paths—seeking internal enrichment and wisdom while also trying to make the world a more loving place.

To a happiness specialist (and devoted Catholic) like me, this is deeply compelling. As Rainn knows—because he couldn’t resist adding: “You should definitely convert, bro.”

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP / GettyAn aerial view shows the wooden Kiruna Church being transferred to its new location, in Kiruna, Sweden, on August 19, 2025. The church is being moved five kilometers (three miles) to the new town center of Kiruna, because of the expansion of the nearby iron-ore mine operated by the state-owned Swedish mining company LKAB.Malin Haarala / APVicar Lena Tjarnberg (left) and Bishop Asa Nystrom bless Kiruna Church, called Kiruna Kyrka in Swedish, on August 19, 2025, shortly before it was moved as part of the town’s relocation.Mauro Ujetto / NurPhoto / GettyKiruna Church, standing 131 feet (40 meters) tall, sits ready for relocation.Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP / GettySelf-propelled modular transporters were used to carry the 670-ton church and support beams on a total of 224 wheels.Leonhard Foeger / ReutersKees Breedveld, a site manager with Mammoet, the company carrying out the move, displays the remote-control panel used to operate the transporters on August 18, 2025.Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP / GettyPeople gather to watch the moving of Kiruna Church on August 19, 2025.Fredrik Sandberg / TT News Agency / AFP / GettyPeople watch from the road and rooftops as Kiruna Church drives by.Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP / GettyWorkers escort the church on its journey.Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP / GettyKiruna Church, seen from above on its two-day journey to its new location, covering three miles (five kilometers).Bernd Lauter / GettyA spectator takes a picture of the church as it passes by on August 19, 2025.Fredrik Sandberg / TT News Agency / AFP / GettyPeople watch as the church slowly navigates a tight corner.Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP / GettyPeople gather to watch as the church passes through part of the town.Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP / GettyAn aerial view of Kiruna Church arriving at its final location in the new city center on August 20, 2025.Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP / GettyLocals and visitors look up at the church, situated in its new location after a two-day move, in Kiruna, Sweden, on August 20, 2025.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Whenever Donald Trump announces an international meeting about the Russia-Ukraine war, his critics immediately begin talking about Munich 1938 or Yalta 1945. The analogies are not only misplaced, but misleading. What happened in Anchorage last week and in the follow-on visit by European leaders to Washington on Monday was something far less tragic, and far less serious, than the comparisons would imply.

Too often, the commentary focused on trivialities. For the Trump-Putin summit: Was the B-2-bomber overflight when Vladimir Putin arrived in Alaska an undeserved honor or a sobering reminder of American power? How damaging was it when Trump whinged, once again, about “Russia, Russia, Russia” and repeated his delusions about having won the 2020 election? For the Washington meeting with European leaders and Vlodymyr Zelensky: Was the Ukrainian president’s black suit a sign of submission, or a display of good sense? Did it make a difference that the European delegation was met by the chief of protocol and not the president in all his glory?

Fluff and flummery. The muddled outcomes (did the Russians accept the idea of Western security guarantees to Ukraine? Did the Ukrainians agree to cede territory to Russia?) began with the prelude to the meetings. The confused signals going in resulted in part from an incompetent special envoy, Steve Witkoff, being unable to get straight what the Russians had offered in preliminary talks—a rookie mistake if ever there was one, although par for the hapless real-estate lawyer turned diplomatic ingenue. But they resulted as well from the very different positions of the four parties, and those in turn emerged from their motivations, which explain a lot about what happened and what may lie ahead.

Putin’s motivation is simple, even if Witkoff and Trump do not really understand it: He seeks to dominate Ukraine, seize what pieces of it he can, and eradicate its democratic government and national independence. For Zelensky, it is only slightly more complicated: He wishes to preserve Ukrainian sovereignty and freedom of action, and to guarantee its membership in the larger European community of free countries—all while refusing to recognize de jure the loss of its territory to Moscow. For the European leaders, it is also a bit more complex: They want to help Ukraine achieve those things while ensuring continued American engagement in European security against a menacing Russia.

[Tom Nichols: Trump keeps defending Russia]

Trump’s motivation is actually the simplest of all: He wants a Nobel Peace Prize. We know that because he cannot stop talking about it. This is what makes a true sellout of Ukraine unlikely. For Trump to have that glorious moment when five otherwise insignificant Norwegians bless his contributions to humanity, he needs the willing cooperation of Zelensky and the Europeans. If he merely handed Ukraine over to Russia, as some observers say he has always wished to do, no Nobel: The Norwegians, having some claim to democratic scruples, would not deliver, however dubious some of their past awards.

No, at some level, Zelensky and his European supporters will have to find the deal, whatever form it may take, to be better than continuing the war, and for now, nothing on offer seems to meet that test.

There is another reason that the United States has less leverage than Trump may think: He has weakened his hand by silly concessions. The meeting with Putin was a gift to the Russian dictator, for which Washington received nothing. The easing of some sanctions on Russia is a similar unilateral gift. Trump’s long-threatened secondary sanctions have yet to materialize. Most important, by ruling out putting American forces on the ground in Ukraine, the American president has, so to speak, discarded a trump card.

The American foreign-policy establishment has become so accustomed to denigrating Europe’s leadership that it has not fully taken on board the remarkable coherence and adroitness of its leaders’ performance in Washington. They spoke with one voice, and they skillfully combined flattery (which is indispensable in dealing with Trump) and a quiet firmness (also essential). Zelensky, too, hit all the right notes, and the result was an atmosphere of geniality which may not have been substantive, but was useful.

America’s weakened hand is the result also of the quiet, limited, but nonetheless significant mobilization of the Ukrainian and European defense industrial base. Ukraine is the largest producer of its own excellent military hardware, followed by the Europeans, and then the United States, which provides only 20 percent of the hardware (although, admittedly, the most advanced and in some cases unique 20 percent). Even that contribution, however, will no longer be paid for by the U.S. but by European states—as a result of the Trump administration throwing away yet another source of leverage over Ukraine, the provision of military aid without strings attached.

In theory, the administration could try to coerce a Ukrainian deal by cutting off all intelligence sharing and refusing to sell weapons to Europe for Ukraine. But even there, as a senior intelligence official from the continent recently informed me, the Europeans have been quietly figuring out ways to minimize the loss from certain unique capabilities (particularly space-based reconnaissance). Cutting off all aid would also stir protest even from some Trump loyalists in the Republican Party, and besides, Trump always wants to sell American products. Most important, such blatant arm-twisting means no Nobel, and Trump can’t have that.

[Vivian Salama and Jonathan Lemire: Zelensky wasn’t going to repeat his Oval Office disaster]

The trouble with the historical parallels that are now being drawn is that they inflate the capacity of the adversary that Ukraine faces and minimize Western leverage. The Munich 1938 analogy is dumb because the British and French leaders were then dealing with a powerful and vigorous Nazi Germany and operating under the shadow of the mass slaughter of World War I, which had taken place only 20 years earlier. Czechoslovakia was bound to succumb to German demands unless the Soviet Union joined in its defense, and that was made impossible by Stalin’s demands to London, Paris, and Warsaw. The Yalta 1945 analogy is also dumb: Yes, Poland was consigned to Soviet occupation, but the Red Army held the territory, and to pry it loose there and elsewhere in Eastern Europe would have required a new war, which neither the United States nor Great Britain was prepared to fight. Yalta was awful, but also unavoidable.

Instead, in the current circumstance, we have a Ukraine whose heroism and persistence is extraordinary, a far larger country with a more capable military than either the Czechs in 1938 or the Polish Home Army in 1945 had at their disposal. Ukraine also shares borders with its Western supporters. We have a third party—the European states—that retains agency as well. In Russia, Ukraine and its supporters face neither a dynamic Germany nor a titanic Soviet superpower, but rather a creaky, corrupt dictatorship that has taken a million casualties; is suffering diplomatic setbacks everywhere from the Middle East to the Caucasus, to its northern flank; whose sovereign wealth fund has almost run dry; and whose economy is beset by inflation, wretched productivity, and falling oil prices. If Trump were as good a dealmaker as he claims to be, he would be focusing far more on exploiting Russia’s weaknesses, which he can exacerbate if he wishes, than on basking in the chumminess of his KGB-trained counterpart, which is nothing more than deception.

No one knows how this war will end. Either side could collapse, or there could be some kind of freezing of the front line, unsatisfactory to both sides but guaranteeing Ukraine’s independence and, to some measure, its security. When the war reaches its conclusion, it will probably surprise all of us, and none more than those who think Trump is as shrewd as he is often malign. He is not, and that is probably the only thing on which his counterparties can agree wholeheartedly.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Sometime in the early aughts, the comedian Amy Poehler made a vulgar joke while sitting in the Saturday Night Live writers’ room waiting for a midweek read-through to begin. As detailed in Tina Fey’s 2011 memoir, Bossypants, Jimmy Fallon, who was also in the show’s cast at the time, jokingly recoiled and told Poehler to stop it.

“It’s not cute!” Fallon exclaimed. “I don’t like it.”

“Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him,” Fey writes. “‘I don’t fucking care if you like it.’”

I was brought back to Fey’s Poehler-Fallon anecdote when a friend shared the first of Melani Sanders’s “We Do Not Care” videos with me. Earlier this summer, Sanders, who identifies herself as a wife and mother, posted a short rant cum manifesto on Instagram, filmed in her car after a grocery run, in which she declared that she was not going to take it anymore.

What’s “it”? Well, societal expectations about female comportment, for one thing. She does not care, she announces, that she doesn’t have a “real bra” on.

Sanders did not—does not—care about a bunch of other things, as she made clear in subsequent videos. She does not care about shaving her legs, or grooming her chin hairs, or having edge control in her hair. She does not care about wearing matching clothes, or that her hair isn’t combed. She does not care about pointless small talk, about that flashing light in her car, or that her house is a hot mess.

Sanders’s first post reminded me a bit of Jane O’Reilly’s famous article, “Click! The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” which ran in the first issue of Ms. Magazine,in 1972. In her story, O’Reilly examined her friends’ and neighbors’ feminist awakenings—“click!” moments—about patriarchal expectations regarding women’s unpaid labor, writing: “One little click turns on a thousand others.”

In Sanders’s case, her click turned on thousands of others; at least half a dozen women forwarded that first video to me, and I suspect this was how many others came to it. Each of Sanders’s videos is accompanied by thousands of comments, most by apparently delighted women who feel liberated by Sanders’s exhortations. (Sanders, who notes that she’s speaking for perimenopausal and menopausal women, often invites viewers to chime in with the things that they no longer care about, and seems to incorporate them in subsequent posts.)

[Read: Doomed to be a tradwife]

Indeed, there is an element of call-and-response to the We Do Not Care Club, which Sanders herself has, consciously or not, encouraged. In that first post in May, Sanders used the first person. By the next day, she had switched over to the first-person plural. (“We don’t care what’s for dinner.”) A day later, Sanders just came out and said it: “We do not care about people-pleasing.”

Here’s the thing: When Sanders says she doesn’t care about “people-pleasing,” she’s saying, in effect, that she doesn’t care about pleasing men. This is, to my mind, the wonderfully subversive message that’s gotten lost in the initial flurry of discussion about the We Do Not Care Club. That the majority of her audience is women makes perfect sense, given that the we in “We Do Not Care” clearly refers to them. That, in turn, suggests that the implied “you” in Sanders’s statements is men, collectively.

Sanders’s digital rebellion speaks both to and for a silent majority of women who are tired of contorting themselves to appeal to, or appease, male expectations of who they should be, whether those men are romantic partners, strangers, or Jimmy Fallon himself. And though Sanders calls the We Do Not Care Club a “movement” with “members,” I think it’s more accurate to say that it is a revolt against misogyny.

Plenty of women seem to agree. Responses to her videos, I’ve noticed, frequently make Sanders’s implicit critique of male expectations explicit. (A representative example: “We do not care if you don’t like what you see, just look the other way!”) Commenting under a New York Times article about Sanders’s club, one woman wrote, “I do not care about the male gaze.” Another noted: “In my early 40s, I started to gain weight and I noticed how it made me invisible to unwanted male attention, and I liked it.”

Of course, plenty of the things that Sanders and her followers do not care about seem to relate to the female gaze. You could argue that whether or not a woman has a pedicure or gray hair is as much about pleasing, or not offending, other women as it is about men. (Tina Fey again: “Women dress for other women in order to let them know what their deal is.”)

Women may be dressing for other women, but aren’t we also dressing for men? After all, most women, whether or not we’re always conscious of it, are subject to some form of male appraisal about how we look and behave, which can in turn affect the way we’re able to move through the world. Even older women, who tend to go unseen by society and overlooked as vital, sexual beings, are reminded on a regular basis of the power of the male gaze—and how easily it can be revoked.

There’s a lot that is freeing about getting older, including not giving as much of a damn. And it’s important that Sanders says that her messages are meant for perimenopausal and menopausal women. Menopause is having a moment, and the We Do Not Care Club feels like a natural extension of the growing visibility of discussions about crepey skin and hot flashes and vaginal dryness. (In late June, Sanders was tapped as a spokesperson for the vaginal moisturizer Replens.) This is why seeing the 40-something Sanders reclining sideways on her bed wearing three pairs of glasses and marking off a list of things “we” do not care about that includes having chin hairs, unshaved legs, and cellulite that’s visible in short shorts is so captivating.

[Read: The secret power of menopause]

But the messages contained within the We Do Not Care videos are, in the end, applicable to women of all ages. They’re not just eruptions from a cohort of women for whom a lifetime’s worth of expectations have reached their expiration date, but permission slips with which women of younger generations can eagerly anticipate a more unencumbered future—and perhaps even freedom in the present.

They need it. Photo filters and AI are changing how we present ourselves to the public, raising expectations about having the smoothest skin and the plumpest lips. An ascendant MAGA aesthetic that plays up what the fashion critic Vanessa Friedman has called “a retrograde gendered paradigm” jostles with trad-wife and wellness influencers who project visions of polished (and predominantly white) womanhood. And younger generations (much too young, I’d argue) are adopting expensive skin-care routines in order to, as the journalist Elise Hu put it, “optimize one’s face” and address “the added burden of worrying earlier about wrinkles.”

These so-called Sephora tweens, inspired by online beauty influencers, appear to be succumbing to the opposite message that many of us with actual wrinkles are welcoming: embracing a more observable older femininity, replete with fine lines and emergent fat on our underarms—and, as Poehler would say, not fucking caring if others like it.

A few years ago, I wrote a story for this magazine about the power of saying no, in which I called on women to reject the socialization that begins in childhood and that nudges us to always be accommodating. I argued that we need to allow ourselves to refuse the things that are demanded of us, to erect and defend boundaries. This, I think, is why I, and so many others, have been so taken with the We Do Not Care Club. (One of Sanders’s recent posts has more than 50,000 comments.) Because if the first step is for women to give themselves permission to say no, the We Do Not Care Club is the no itself.

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President Donald Trump’s two most recent international summits—in Alaska last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and then at the White House this week with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—included some notable fashion statements. Zelensky arrived in a proper suit instead of the military-style fatigues that he wore the last time he met with Trump, in February. But the more startling sartorial choice came from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov: Lavrov arrived in Alaska in a sweatshirt (already a bold choice), and this one was adorned in big, black block letters with C.C.C.P., the Russian initials for the U.S.S.R. The message was widely interpreted as a rallying cry for old-style Russian imperialism and a somewhat trollish move by the foreign minister, who had arrived at a meeting ostensibly designed to discuss ending that very thing. But maybe the more urgent question is: Was the significance of this message entirely lost on Trump?

On the campaign trail ahead of his second term, Trump repeatedly said that he would end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of taking office. With this latest pair of summits, Trump was equally optimistic: Close the deal! Win the Nobel Prize! But the forces driving this war—Putin’s nostalgia for a bygone era among them—are too deep and stubborn to easily yield to Trump’s brand of dealmaking.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Anne Applebaum, who has been studying Ukraine and Russia for decades and understands their leaders’ underlying motivations. We also speak with politics and national-security writer Vivian Salama, who knows what Trump’s limitations are and explains what the next possible moves could be.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: The past seven days brought two very strange international summits: one where President Donald Trump rolled out an actual red carpet on American soil for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

News host 1: A high-stakes moment on the world’s stage.

News host 2: It was Putin’s first time back on U.S. soil in more than a decade. He received a grand welcome, complete with a military flyover and a red-carpet rollout.

Rosin: A few days later, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House with a hastily mobilized posse of European leaders.

News host 3: The historic sequel: President Trump and Ukraine’s President Zelensky back at the White House.

News host 4: The two leaders striking a cordial, collegial tone and also somewhat optimistic.

Rosin: The summits were historic, momentous—if more than a little chaotic. And yet it’s unclear what, if anything, changed as a result of them. The war grinds on. Civilians are still dying in Ukrainian cities, with Russians striking even as Zelensky was in Washington.

Trump approached the two Ukraine talks with his usual brand of optimism. Let’s close the deal! Win the Nobel Prize! But—and this will come as a huge shock—ending a war is not so simple.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

To help us understand what happened this week, what changed and what didn’t, and what really needs to happen for this to end well, we have staff writer Anne Applebaum, a longtime reporter on both Russia and Ukraine, and staff writer Vivian Salama, who covers politics and national security.

Vivian, welcome to the show.

Vivian Salama: Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Anne, thanks for joining us.

Anne Applebaum: Thanks, Hanna.

Rosin: And before we begin, I want to say that we’re recording this conversation at 10 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday because anything could happen. This is an evolving story.

Vivian, you were actually at the White House for Monday’s meeting between Trump, Zelensky, and the European leaders. What did you take from watching it up close that the rest of us might not have seen?

Salama: I have covered the White House now since, let’s say, late 2016, when Donald Trump was elected the first time. And I have to say, I’ve never, ever seen the White House so chaotic.

Rosin: Really?

Salama: I’ve never seen so many people, journalists included, and I’m not talking about just European and American journalists. There were Iranian journalists and Japanese journalists—I mean, just to show you how significant an event this was and how much the world is sort of looking at Washington at that moment to see if this would indeed result in a breakthrough, or if it’s just talks to have more talks.

Rosin: So what you took from that is: The world’s eyes are watching. Like, that was the symbolism for you, or was it that chaos is happening?

Salama: Well, a little bit of both. To be fair, the world’s eyes were definitely watching. But there was also an element of chaos, just how quickly the event came together, you know, these leaders flying in on short notice. The White House loves protocol. It loves to have days and months, sometimes, to organize things, to book hotel rooms, and to do all this. I mean, all these leaders, they come with big delegations. You know, the city was basically turned upside down.

And remember, the city was already turned upside down because we were in a so-called state of an emergency because, you know, the National Guard has been rolled out and our police federalized. And so just days prior, we were sort of already in a state of chaos, and then suddenly, you have these world leaders descending upon us on almost no notice. It definitely set the tone for the day.

Rosin: Right. I get it. It’s like a Beyoncé concert on short notice.

Salama: Absolutely.

Rosin: It’s like a huge event, but in a totally mad way.

Anne, so you’re watching this over from Europe. It all came together very quickly. What is the view from Europe as this is all happening?

Applebaum: So just to give you some context, we’re in the middle of August, and in most European countries, this is absolutely the height of summer vacation, and everything is shut. Offices, schools, shops—nobody is doing anything. And the fact that so many heads of state were willing to get on a plane on basically 24 hours’ notice and fly to Washington, I think, tells you how unbelievably alarming the Alaska summit appeared here.

Rosin: Oh. So it’s alarming because we’re thinking it as a sort of, you know: The entourage showed up; they’re supporting Zelensky. That’s amazing. But you’re saying it’s coming out of a fear.

Applebaum: Fear and confusion and a sense that maybe the White House doesn’t really understand the rules of the game.

So what happened in Alaska was that Putin got exactly what he wanted. He was treated as a world leader, as a superpower leader. There were American soldiers kneeling on the tarmac, rolling out the red carpet for him. The American president stood on the red carpet and waved and clapped at him.

He had exactly the treatment that he wanted. He had the TV pictures that he wanted. And he went home having offered nothing and given nothing. He still never said that he wants to end the war. He still never said that he would stop fighting. He’s never said that he recognizes Ukrainian sovereignty. So he has given away nothing.

Rosin: Right.

Applebaum: And Trump, interviewed afterward, said the summit was 10 out of 10, and everything was great. And, you know, now Zelensky is going to Washington, and the instinct was We all need to be there to avoid a repeat of February, and also to explain to the president that the war hasn’t ended yet and we may have a long way to go. I mean, I think what was also alarming was that Trump had begun using Putin’s language, so he dropped this word cease-fire, and he started talking vaguely about peace negotiations.

And this is what Putin wants because peace negotiations mean we can vaguely negotiate and he can keep fighting. Whereas it’s in Europe’s interest and Ukraine’s interest and everybody else’s interest that there be a cease-fire, that the war stop at least for some period of time.

And so he was using Putin’s language, he was playing Putin’s game, and Europeans felt that they better show up.

Rosin: Okay, so they came in with a kind of maternal attitude—like, We have to tell you something; we have to teach you something. There’s something dangerous going on. And did that happen?

What Vivian said was it was giant, but it was also chaotic. And it was hard, honestly, to read the signals coming out of the meeting. So what is the biggest change that you read, coming out?

Applebaum: The biggest change was that they got Trump to talk about security guarantees, even in an unclear way.

And you’re right, by the way, about the chaos. I mean, nobody really knows anything, and it’s not clear whether anything has been decided or anything has changed. But to get Trump to acknowledge that any end to the war or any cease to the fighting, whatever we’re calling it—truce, temporary pause, whatever—is very dangerous because Russia could restart the war at any time. And to prevent that, Europeans want Americans to understand that there has to be something given to Ukraine to prevent the Russians from invading again. So there needs to be some longer term—they’re using the term security guarantees.

I mean, it’s a tricky thing because, actually, Ukraine already has security guarantees from the United States. This was back in 1994. There’s something called the Budapest Memorandum, signed by America, Russia, the U.K., and a couple others, that was meant to guarantee Ukraine’s borders, and so on. So theoretically, it’s something that exists already. It’s just that it was never ratified; it was never a big treaty.

And so now the Europeans got Trump thinking along those lines, and they consider that to have been useful to push him in the direction of understanding that you need a structure to end a war. You don’t end it just by stopping the fighting. You need to have other longer-term solutions.

Rosin: Okay. I understand. This is strange because it’s like, basically, they’re trying to educate him on basic things. You can’t just wave your wand and end a war and say a word cease-fire and roll out the red carpet, and everything is fine. Like, you have to actually do something—you have to attend to the details.

Applebaum: This is not how you end wars. You have low-level meetings. You bring together under neutral negotiators, you discuss what the issues are, and then you have the meeting of the big leaders at the very end.

But this is all being done backwards, and that, I think, is also adding to the chaos. So people have the impression, Something big has been achieved, when actually, we still don’t know whether Russia wants to end the war or not.

Rosin: Right. Understood.

Vivian, the leaders were received differently by Trump this time around, like Zelensky, for example. Can you describe how and why it was significant? And why are you laughing?

Salama: Because Zelensky was actually the only one received by Trump.

Rosin: Oh, I see.

Salama: The other ones were received by his head of protocol, which is pretty unusual as well. He was inside the White House, and his head of protocol went out, one by one, individually welcoming the leaders.

He did have some fanfare for Zelensky. The color guard was out at the White House along the driveway, and he did come out of the West Wing and greet him and do all of that. But there was no official red-carpet welcoming or—you know, there was a military-jet flyover when he welcomed Putin, which is pretty extraordinary.

None of that was there for Zelensky, but he did have a warmer greeting than perhaps we’d anticipated. Also, because of the fact that their February meeting was so explosive, you know, listeners may remember that epic encounter that Zelensky had with Trump in February—

Rosin: And J. D. Vance.

Salama: —and J. D. Vance. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio was there, where the entire Oval Office spray, where the journalists go in. It devolved very quickly into a shouting match because they accused Zelensky of not showing enough gratitude to the United States for its support. And so voices were raised, and it became a very, very awkward event.

You know, going from that to this week’s events, where Zelensky showed up in a suit, for starters, because he was criticized by some pro-Trump supporters and pro-Trump journalists that he was not wearing a suit and that he was disrespecting the American president by doing that. This time he showed up in the same outfit that he wore at the Vatican to the pope’s funeral, which was a black sort of cargo blazer and black pants and a black button-down shirt.

Rosin: So, okay. How to read all this. Is that, first of all, a midway concession on Zelensky’s part, not a full concession? And on Trump’s part, I’m trying to understand what you’re saying about how he greeted the European leaders, because in words, he said, Oh, I’m glad they came. It’s all good. It’s good he has an entourage. But in the room, was there some different signal he was sending to this whole posse of people who showed up?

Salama: So he was with Zelensky already when the Europeans arrived. And so, you know, we have to kind of forgive him for not going out and saying hello and greeting the European leaders individually. As far as Zelensky making concessions, yes, he had to make a lot of concessions this time around because of the fact that that first encounter, in February, went so badly that even European leaders afterwards really took Zelensky aside and gave him a talking to, in terms of the way that you manage Donald Trump. And to do so, you cannot engage him.

Rosin: Yeah.

Salama: And Zelensky did engage him that time around. He did kind of try to put up a fight, and they told him that that’s not gonna be a winning battle, that Ukraine needs the United States more than the United States needs Ukraine at this point, and he has to go in there and play the game. And so he did this time around. Obviously, the substance coming out of it, you know, was significant as a result. Whether or not it results in anything, you know, it remains to be seen.

But Anne talked about security guarantees. That definitely is a huge game changer for Trump in terms of his, even, political stance. I covered the campaign last year, and this was a huge issue. Trump repeatedly said on the campaign trail, We’re done with supporting foreign wars. And just to allude to the fact that we are going to have security guarantees, that the U.S. will support Ukraine moving forward, that really goes far from anything that he had ever promised on the campaign trail.

Rosin: So it is real? I mean, that is real.

Salama: They’re looking at it, and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt yesterday—so that was Tuesday—she went to the podium and said that the president was even considering having U.S. pilots be part of those security guarantees. That’s extraordinary and such a huge departure from what he was saying on the campaign trail, where he was like, Enough with the weapons. Enough with the money. We’re done with these wars.

[Music]

Rosin: When we’re back: Donald Trump’s changing opinion of Vladimir Putin, and whether that offers hope for Ukraine. That’s in a moment.

[Break]

Rosin: Vivian, since Trump’s been elected, he seems to change his views about Putin. Like, he’s warm to Putin, but then Putin does something that frustrates him. Where is he now in his views on Putin?

Salama: We’ve seen a pretty remarkable evolution in the way that Trump has, at least in his public comments, regarded and viewed Putin. Also, his advisers tell me that he has changed his tune, so to speak.

Rosin: Changed his tune—like, understood who Putin is and what he’s about?

Salama: At least has become a little more skeptical of Putin. Whereas, you know, in the first administration, he was really open to hearing Putin out, being influenced by Putin.

You know, I remember in the early days of his first administration, one of his top advisers explained this scene to me where Putin, in a very soft-spoken, almost mumbling voice, lectured Trump about, you know, Kyivan Rus history dating back to the 11th century, and just to explain to him that Ukraine is part of Russia and always should be. And Trump sort of listened intently and absorbed a lot of what Putin was saying to him.

That coupled with a few other instances during his first administration: the sort of, what he calls, the “Russia-, Russia-, Russiagate” of the investigation by the special counsel into influences of the Russian government on the Trump campaign. And then you had the first impeachment, where, you know, the so-called perfect call with Zelensky, when Zelensky was first elected as president, that led to Trump’s first impeachment because he had asked him to do favors against his political opponents. All of that sort of played into his mind of Russia as a great nation led by a powerful man and Ukraine as a corrupt, backstabbing nation.

Flash-forward to his second administration, and I think, you know, he had been talking so much during his campaign about, you know, I will get the Ukraine-Russia war solved within 24 hours of being elected president. Well, that didn’t happen. And obviously, we know governing is a lot harder than campaigning, and so he learned very quickly that this was going to be a complicated matter.

But what ended up happening is that Putin didn’t sort of pick up the phone and rush to call Trump, either to congratulate him or anything else, when he took office, and he started to become very resentful of that, coupled with the fact that when he finally did talk to Putin, Putin was like, I would never harm the Ukrainians. Everything is, you know, it’s fine. I’m never gonna do anything wrong, and I’m gonna stop the bombing, and let’s just talk this out. And then the next day, he would bomb a school. And Trump has actually said repeatedly that, you know, He assures me that he’s not gonna do anything, but then he does, and I don’t really like that.

And so between that and some advisers who are around him, who have really worked hard to make Trump realize that Putin’s not your friend—now, does that mean he likes Zelensky more? Mmm—I don’t know about that. But, you know, he’s at least cautiously dealing with Putin a bit more than we saw in the first Trump administration.

Rosin: Anne, can we get into the tectonic shifts? What the European leaders were afraid of, what we see reforming as this strange new alliance, where the U.S. seemingly sides with Russia against European allies. Coming out of this meeting, how do you see that shift differently, if at all?

Applebaum: It’s not clear to me, honestly, what has really changed. It seems to me that Trump’s instincts are to agree with the last person he spoke to. Most people assumed that he changed his language after Anchorage because of things Putin said to him.

Steve Witkoff very frequently parrots things that sound like they’re coming from Putin as well. So, you know, he’s influenced by them when he talks to them. And he’s influenced by the Ukrainians and the Europeans when he talks to Europeans.

Rosin: Let’s just say: He’s the special envoy to the Middle East.

Applebaum: Yes. Steve Witkoff is the special envoy to Russia and to the Middle East. He’s somebody with no background in diplomacy and no knowledge of Russian or Ukrainian history.

Salama: He’s a real-estate executive.

Rosin: He’s a real-estate executive, yeah.

Applebaum: He’s a real-estate executive who, as I said, frequently repeats things that clearly come from Putin or from people around Putin. And it often looks like what Trump is doing is seeking to emerge as the winner from whatever situation he’s in. Whether he’s in Anchorage or whether he’s in Washington, it’s important that he dominate the scene and that he run the show. I am not sure that he has a deeper strategy.

Rosin: You wrote after his meeting with Putin in Alaska that Trump has no cards in that situation. And you explained that, I think, in this conversation, the ways in which Putin emerged the winner from that. Do you think that’s changed? Like, did Trump come out of this meeting with Zelensky with some cards or some things to play against Putin? Like, the security guarantees, for example.

Applebaum: Maybe. I mean, the point is that—really, almost unnoticed—Trump has been dismantling American sanctions on Russia. These are commercial sanctions that require constant updating. This administration hasn’t been updating them. He’s been cutting or seeking to cut funding for the Russian-language media that the U.S. has supported for many decades. He’s twice cut military aid to Ukraine. There have been many negative gestures towards Zelensky, and so on, that we’ve already talked about.

The Russians see all of that, and they understand it all as a package of Trump reducing his ability to play in the situation, reducing his influence, and so on. So when I say he has no cards, it doesn’t mean that the United States can’t do anything. It means that Trump has been reducing what he’s able to do. And if everybody else sees that—the Europeans see it, you know, Russians obviously see it, Ukrainians obviously see it. I don’t know that Americans see it, but everybody else does.

Rosin: Yeah. It’s difficult to read, because on the one hand, you’re describing a systematic shift in negotiating position. But on the other hand, the fact that he changes given any meeting means that kind of is a card. It’s like I can have a meeting with Zelensky and the European leaders, and I can completely shift my position and talk about security guarantees, and then that’s my card. You know, he’s a little unpredictable.

Applebaum: Talking about European security guarantees gives the Russians something new to be nervous about.

Rosin: Right.

Applebaum: Remember, for them, you know, their assumption, I think right now we can safely say, is that they still think they’re gonna win the war.

Rosin: The Russians?

Applebaum: The Russians.

Rosin: Well, they are winning the war, aren’t they?

Applebaum: Hmmm—no. They’re not winning. They’re not losing, but they’re not winning. You know, at the current rate of fighting, they will conquer the rest of Donbas in four years.

Rosin: Four years.

Applebaum: So they’re, you know, putting a lot of pressure on Ukraine, but they’re not winning very fast. But their assumption is that they will win because the U.S. will withdraw its support, and Europe will get tired, and Ukrainians will get tired, and so on. So they’re still operating on that assumption. And the way that we change their minds and convince them that they’re not winning is precisely by saying, No, actually we’re gonna add more. We’re gonna do not just security guarantees, but we’re gonna do new sanctions, we’re gonna do new aid for Ukraine, we’re gonna change the rules again, we’re gonna do a big shake-up.

And to be fair, there are people in Washington who understand that. And actually there are a number of Republican and Democratic senators who’ve been trying to push the U.S. in that direction for a long time. And, you know, this war is over when the Russians understand that they can’t win. And for the last six months, we’ve been giving them the impression that they still can win. So we need to change that calculus.

And as I said, Europeans understand that. That’s why they were in Washington. The Senate understands that. That’s why there’s a Senate bill on the table to do that. Not clear whether Trump understands that or not.

Rosin: I see. So the important thing is what you just said, giving Putin the impression that he cannot win the war. That, to you, is the important card to play. That’s the important pressure to keep on Russia, in whatever way that happens.

Applebaum: Yes.

Rosin: Got it.

Applebaum: Yes, and Alaska was a step in the opposite direction.

Rosin: So, Vivian, what kind of peace deals are under discussion? Besides the security guarantees, did you get a realistic sense in Washington what is possible at this moment? There’s pressure from Senators. There’s Trump who’s unpredictable. What seemed doable?

Salama: Well, one of the things on the Sunday shows after the Putin summit, but before the Europeans came to town, was this notion of concessions. Both Steve Witkoff, who we were just talking about, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were out there, talking about the fact that when you have a negotiation and you want to reach a compromise, both sides have something to gain and have something to lose, and that’s just inevitable.

And that’s the kind of talk that makes the Europeans very nervous, certainly Ukraine. Where Ukraine wanted to go, not just—you know, Washington often talks about the February 2022 borders, the territory that was taken by Russia after February 2022, when it launched this full-scale invasion.

But in the Ukrainians’ mind, they’ve been fighting for their territory since 2014. They’re talking about Crimea and the contested parts of eastern Ukraine that have been under stress long before 2022. And so they believe that not only should they regain that territory back, they fight for Crimea too.

And Washington has tried to kind of settle Ukraine’s mind and say, you know—and even during the Biden era, where they say—Let’s just talk about February 2022 borders, or you might lose Crimea. Let’s see how it goes. But at least we’re gonna try to fight for eastern Ukraine. The Trump administration kind of talks more in terms of freezes, where they say, Territory that was lost after February 2022, you’re gonna have to cut your losses.

And that is something that not only the Ukrainians believe is a nonstarter, but that the rest of Europe sees as very alarming because they believe that that kind of concession will just embolden Putin, where he says, Okay, this was a victory now. Let’s play along, and we could regroup and kind of expand our gains.

Rosin: So everything you just said sounds like a recipe for not agreement.

Salama: It is so hard to imagine Ukraine accepting anything less than at least the borders before February 2022. And that would be really twisting their arms.

And remember, for Russia—for Putin in particular—this is not about just a little bit of territory in eastern Ukraine. This is existential in Putin’s mind for the future of Russia. He believes Ukraine does not have the right to exist. He believes it is part of greater Russia and they have to regain it as part of that legacy.

And so for him, he will stop at nothing to regain that. Whether it’s, you know, play along now and then revisit the war later, you know, that remains to be seen. And so there is a concern, especially across Europe, European officials I speak with, about this naivete within the Trump administration, where they’re so eager to cut a deal, but in doing so, you’re redrawing the map of Europe and emboldening Putin. And so that is something that the Europeans, certainly—it was a big reason why they jumped on that plane on 24 hours’ notice, not only to help Zelensky kind of avoid a catastrophic meeting, like the one in February, but also to moderate Trump’s whims and say, you know, Yeah, we want a deal, but we want a deal that ensures the security and, you know, the sanctity of Ukraine.

Applebaum: You know, it’s also really important to understand that Putin has not offered to concede anything. He’s not giving back territory that he’s conquered. And more than that, he’s demanding territory that he can’t conquer, that he hasn’t been able to conquer—in fact, that he hasn’t been able to conquer since 2014. And this is the rest of this Donbas province. So he’s offering nothing.

And I think the second point to make that’s very important is that this is not a war over territory. Russia does not need more territory. This is a war to damage and undermine the sovereignty and legitimacy of the Ukrainian state as a prelude to undermining it and eventually taking it over or making it into some kind of state that’s reliant on Russia.

And the Russians are also perfectly happy to try doing that again through other kinds of pressure. You know, maybe they could end the war on unfavorable terms for Ukraine, then try to unseat Zelensky, then try to use propaganda to convince Ukrainians they were robbed. I mean, there’s a whole kind of sequence of events that could follow.

So the point is that until they have given up that goal—you know, the goal of destroying Ukraine as a sovereign nation—then the war is not over. And to pretend that it’s over is very dangerous.

Rosin: That’s complicated. Those are old Soviet dreams. I mean, basically, he wants the relationship he had with Estonia and so many other, you know, territories. How do you make somebody give up that? Like, how do you break someone of that goal?

Applebaum: I remain convinced that the only way to do it is to persuade him that he can’t win—it can’t be done, that Ukraine is too strong, its alliances are too powerful.

Rosin: Got it.

Salama: I mean, just to emphasize: I don’t think you can break that mentality. I mean, just to show you as an example, Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, arrived in Alaska last week wearing a sweatshirt that said C.C.C.P. on it, which is the Soviet Union, U.S.S.R. They are still living in that era, very much so. And some of it is mind games, obviously, but a lot of it is also just this nostalgia for that era.

Rosin: Right.

Salama: Can I just add one more thing here, because we were talking about this earlier? I spent most of 2022 on the front lines in Ukraine, and I gotta tell you, the one thing I heard over and over again was that they believe that Putin has more stamina than the entire West combined, that the West will eventually move on, whether for politics, whether for economic reasons, whether because they just can’t sustain all this aid, military and economic aid to Ukraine. But Putin is playing for the long game, and they knew that in Ukraine.

I mean, this is a former part of the Soviet Union. The Russians are not strangers to them. They know the Russians better than any of us, and they know that Putin is just waiting for the West to get tired.

Rosin: Interesting. So it’s almost like they saw this moment coming, and that actually brings more significance to the fact that the European leaders showed up. It’s like, Wait—we’re actually not out of patience yet. Like, We can be ripped from our vacations and show up for you on short notice.

Salama: Yes. And it’s also why Zelensky has to hustle so hard, because he does not want the West to forget about his country.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay, so you guys have described a lot of complicated mechanics that need to happen in order to bring this to a good place. We seem very far away from it, and Trump seems very far from understanding all of these dynamics that you just described.

So what happens now? I mean, Trump said repeatedly at the Monday summit that he wants a joint meeting between him, Zelensky, and Putin, and that’s what needs to happen. Is that realistic? How likely is that?

Salama: They are cautiously optimistic at the White House that this is gonna work out. The Kremlin has already suggested it won’t, so I don’t really know where we go from here. On Tuesday, the press secretary said that, you know, the wheels are in motion to try to get Putin and Zelensky to sit down together,

And then, obviously, this broader summit—Zelensky seems game, but you know, it takes two to tango in this case. It would be pretty extraordinary if it happens. Gosh, I will camp out for days just to be a fly on that wall. But not a lot of people are very optimistic that that’s gonna happen.

Rosin: All right, well if it does, we will have you both back on. Thank you for joining me today and helping us understand what happened.

Salama: Thanks for having me.

Applebaum: Thank you.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. And Sam Fentress fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

The idea, it seems, came from the Russian president. “Vladimir Putin, smart guy,” Donald Trump told the Fox News television host Sean Hannity following the summit between the two leaders in Anchorage, Alaska. Putin, Trump reported, had told him, “You can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting.” And that, apparently, spurred the president to act—sort of.

Days later, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would ban “MAIL-IN BALLOTS” in an “EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.” He expanded on his plan during an Oval Office press conference ostensibly about the war in Ukraine, sitting next to a studiously blank-faced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “We’re going to end mail-in voting,” the president declared. “It’s a fraud.”

Several days later, the promised executive order has yet to appear. Even if Trump does end up signing a document that claims to prohibit mail-in ballots, though, such an order would likely have little legal power. The American system for administering elections is highly decentralized: The work of deciding how people should vote and of helping them do so is largely carried out at the state and local levels, with the federal government playing only a minor role. Mail-in balloting, which is authorized at the state level by a state’s legislature, is no exception. But as Americans have learned over the past six months, just because the president may lack legal authority to make a policy change does not mean he lacks the power to make an enormous mess.

[Paul Rosenzweig: Trump is already undermining the next election]

Trump’s spree of second-term executive orders can be divided into several categories. Sometimes, he is exercising authority within the normal bounds of presidential power, though often to stupid or malicious ends; sometimes, there’s genuine uncertainty as to whether the president can wield the power Trump claims for himself; and sometimes, Trump has arrogated to himself an authority that doesn’t exist. An executive order banning mail-in ballots would fall into the final category. In an oddly professorial flourish in his Truth Social post, the president insisted, “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes.” But this is not true. The Constitution establishes unambiguously that elections are carried out by each individual state, under state rules. Congress can establish additional instructions—but the president himself has no freestanding authority. Trump’s promise to intervene anyway reflects his understanding of the presidency not as one branch of government constrained by the separation of powers, but as America’s king.

For this same reason, two federal courts have already blocked significant portions of Trump’s previous executive order on “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” which he signed in March. That order didn’t bar mail-in ballots, but sought to implement a range of other election-related policies responding to Republican conspiracy theories around election fraud: mandating proof of citizenship during voter registration, requiring states to share voter rolls with the federal government, and forbidding the counting of any ballots that arrive after Election Day, among other changes. Even former Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell criticized the order as an unwise power grab. In an opinion barring several sections of the order from going into effect, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia explained, “The States have initial authority to regulate elections. Congress has supervisory authority over those regulations. The President does not feature at all.”

Any executive order claiming to outright ban mail-in ballots would immediately face a similar legal challenge. It’s not even clear what levers Trump could attempt to pull. Though the president can use executive orders to direct federal officials, “there are no federal officials who govern whether states get to use mail ballots or not,” Justin Levitt, who studies the law of democracy at Loyola Law School, told me. And the White House simply has no authority to make these demands of state officials, Levitt said. “The president passing an executive order that purports to tell state election officials how to do their jobs is the same as me writing a note to a state election official on a Burger King receipt.” Perhaps Trump could try threatening to withhold federal funds from states unless they restrict access to mail-in ballots—but such an effort would be legally dubious under well-established precedents, and Congress has allocated so little in the way of election funding that there’s not much to withhold.

Short on options, the White House will likely be left MacGyvering its way to a solution using equipment not really suited to the task. Project 2025, for example, suggested prosecuting former Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar for a 2020 legal opinion on the use of provisional ballots for mail-in balloting under Pennsylvania state law—a proposition that Levitt described to me as “crazy.” The Justice Department could threaten state and local election officials with similarly baseless investigations in an effort at intimidation. Prosecutors would encounter the small problem that no criminal statutes obviously apply to an election official legally handing out mail-in ballots. But the risk of a criminal investigation, even a meritless one, could still frighten election administrators.

[Read: Trump says he is serious about staying in office past 2028]

Trump’s hatred of mail-in ballots dates back to 2016, when he complained that Colorado’s shift to all-mail voting would enable fraud. As more states adopted mail-in ballots during the pandemic election of 2020, he seized on this development as a basis to spread claims that Democrats would try to use “fraudulent” mail-in votes to steal the presidency—an idea that would become a key claim of the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 election, and a driver of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Now that he has secured the presidency again, Trump may feel that he has an opportunity to finally right this imagined wrong. (On the same day that Trump posted his Truth Social announcement, the voting-machine manufacturer Dominion announced that it had secured a $67 million settlement with Newsmax over the far-right television network’s promotion of conspiracy theories about the company in 2020.)

Yet if the goal is to corruptly tilt elections toward the Republican Party—“you’re not going to have many Democrats get elected,” Trump promised when detailing his plans to end mail-in voting in the Oval Office—the president’s mental model may be out-of-date. In the Trump era, the Republican coalition has come to rely on voters who follow politics less closely, vote less frequently, and are more likely not to cast a ballot if doing so is difficult. Limiting access to voting might have been politically helpful to Republicans in the past, but seems not to be now. That may be especially true in lower-turnout contests such as midterms, in which Democrats may see an advantage thanks to a more politically engaged voter base.

During the 2024 election, Trump’s campaign staff seems to have been able to convince him to be quiet about his hatred of voting by mail long enough to increase Republicans’ use of mail-in ballots. As the 2026 midterms draw closer, his advisers may have to struggle to contain him once again, whether or not he moves forward with an executive order. The risk created by Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots is less that Trump will actually succeed in limiting access to the franchise and that such limitations will actually tilt the playing field toward Republicans, and more that the president will—as he did in 2020—kick up enough doubt and confusion that a significant number of Americans no longer trust an election’s results.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

The first thing Laura Loomer wanted to know when I called her earlier this month was whether this was going to be a “hit piece.” The self-described investigative journalist and unofficial adviser to President Donald Trump is familiar with the genre. She had just attacked the United States Army for praising a recipient of the Medal of the Honor. She would soon claim without evidence that Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—another person comfortable trafficking in unsubstantiated allegations—“gave blow jobs in the back rooms of CrossFit gyms.” Soon after that, she said that Palestinian children receiving medical care in the United States posed a “dangerous” threat to American national security.

You never know just how far she will go, but that’s the game she plays. I suggested at one point that her effort to get federal employees fired for supposed disloyalty to Trump recalled the Red Scare of the early 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin exploited the private musings and personal associations of alleged communist sympathizers to end their careers. She loved that.

“Joseph McCarthy was right,” Loomer responded without missing a beat. “We need to make McCarthy great again.”

She had toiled for a decade on the dark edges of relevance, pulling public pranks and getting chased off financial and social-media platforms for hate-speech violations. She was arrested after storming the stage at New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park to protest a Trump-inspired Julius Caesar and kicked off Uber and Lyft for saying that she did not want Muslim drivers. She also lost two bids for GOP congressional nominations in Florida, symbolically refusing to concede the second because of the “voter fraud” she says was caused by her inability to communicate on social media. She found out at the end of last year that she would not get the White House job she thought she was promised, and lost her ability to make money on X after violating the platform’s doxxing policies.

Yet, here we are. Loomer, the proud, defiant, extremist troll, is one of the most influential public figures in what is still the most important country on the planet—“back from the dead and rose from the ashes,” she told me. How did this come to pass? “I am a genuine person, and I speak my mind. I am not fake,” she offered. “It’s a story of persistence. As I like to say, persistence will beat the resistance.”

Another explanation has to do with her champion and enabler, the most powerful person in the country, who has stuck with her despite the warnings, sneers, and eye rolls of his own senior advisers. “I know she’s known as a radical right, but I think Laura Loomer is a very nice person,” Trump told reporters this month. His early mentor Roy Cohn had previously been an unapologetic adviser to McCarthy during his red-baiting Congressional hearings. Trump’s subsequent political adviser, Roger Stone, a friend and admirer of Cohn, has been a mentor to Loomer.

Whatever the reason, her private research and public X posts have destroyed careers, shaped news cycles, and moved financial markets. Quite often, Trump doesn’t just listen to Loomer—he does what she wants.

In just the first seven months of Trump’s second presidency, she successfully lobbied Trump to end Secret Service protection for Joe Biden’s children. She has pushed the president to fire six members of his National Security Council, remove three leaders at the National Security Agency, end an academic appointment at West Point, fire the director of the National Vetting Center at the Department of Homeland Security, dispatch an assistant U.S. attorney in California, and remove a federal prosecutor in Manhattan. After Trump’s intel chief stripped 37 current and former national-security officials of their security clearance Wednesday, she claimed credit for first labeling 29 of them as threats to Trump.

Every day was another opportunity to grab headlines, to protect the president, to expose another potential saboteur. This phone call, included.

“Why do we want to have a woman who is pregnant, who is going to have to take maternity leave as soon as she is confirmed?” Loomer asked me. “You should make a decision: Do you want to have a career, or do you want a family?”

She was referring to Casey Means, a Stanford-trained doctor turned wellness influencer Trump nominated to be surgeon general. Loomer believes that Means is part of an extortionist, Marxist vanguard—led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—that will ultimately sabotage the Trump administration and the Republican Party. In her rapid-fire staccato—always urgent, indignant, agrieved—Loomer rattled off facts that she had uncovered about Means’s metabolic-health company and her husband’s past sympathies for Black Lives Matter. (Means did not respond to a request for comment.)

I stopped Loomer and asked her to go back: Did she really believe that pregnant women should not have careers? “You can have a family, and you can have a career,” Loomer responded, beginning what sounded like a pivot toward acknowledging that Congress outlawed employment discrimination based on motherhood back in 1978.

But that was not her point. “If you are going to be working in the federal government, don’t you think it is a little abusive if you have a job where you can’t bring your baby every day?” she asked me. “Are my tax dollars supposed to go to her because she doesn’t use a condom? Is there not a man who is qualified?”

Casey Means and the MAHA takeover

Not so long ago, people who spoke like Loomer were ostracized from political parties and mainstream conversations, cast as the fringe. Provocateurs once needed to find publishers to produce their pamphlets. Activists begged access from White House staff to get on the president’s schedule. Opposition researchers depended on journalists to launder their work. And those who called themselves journalists operated by codes: no undisclosed financial arrangements with political actors, no explicit political advocacy, and extensive editing and legal vetting to assure accuracy. The system minimized a certain type of toxicity, while giving those who already had power—the owners of media outlets, the leaders of government and industry—a gatekeeping role.

The 32-year-old Loomer belongs to a new era, when any thought can be instantly published everywhere and the president is easy to reach on his cellphone. Despite the loss of her accounts on Facebook and Instagram, she has a growing audience of 1.7 million followers on her fully reinstated X account (up by about 30 percent since last year), a sponsored podcast on Rumble, and—she claims—an expanding roster of private clients, including major political donors, whose names she declines to disclose.

Top Trump advisers, unable to cast her away, regularly work with her behind the scenes. In addition to having calls and meetings with the president, Loomer speaks regularly with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel Sergio Gor, according to people familiar with the relationships. Loomer praises Wiles for being open to her work and has called Gor a friend. But she speaks of the White House overall as a self-dealing den of duplicity, where staff regularly conspire against the president she adores.

“Everyone is positioning themselves for a post-Trump GOP,” she told me, adding that Trump is often surprised by what she tells him about his own administration. “Every time I have these briefings, he looks at his staff and says, ‘How come you didn’t tell me this?’”

It is a high-stakes game that threatens to broaden distrust within Trump’s senior ranks. If isolated, once-anodyne facts from the past can sink careers; nearly anyone is suddenly vulnerable to exposure, setting Loomer up as a tip line for administration officials to inform on their office rivals, while potentially providing other powerful interests a lever to disappear their adversaries. “There are people who message me all the time,” Loomer boasted to me. “In every agency, I have sources.”

Read: “I run the country and the world.”

Last week, she got ahold of a video showing happy Palestinian refugees arriving in the San Francisco airport, owing to efforts by Heal Palestine, a group that provides treatment in the United States to children wounded in Gaza. The group says that the children and their families arrived on temporary visas and will return to the Middle East after treatment. She called the spectacle an “Islamic invasion” and asked the Trump administration to shut it down. A day later, the State Department announced a stop to “all visitor visas for individuals from Gaza” to review the situation. “It’s amazing how fast we can get results from the Trump administration,” Loomer posted on X.

Not all of her efforts succeed. I asked her about her unsuccessful attempt to stop Trump’s appointment of Colonel Earl G. Matthews as general counsel of the Department of Defense, making him one of the highest-ranking African Americans in the building. She had attacked Matthews for his past praise of former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a Biden appointee, and his work with former Trump advisers turned foes such as former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and National Security Adviser John Bolton. But she did not bring up those points with me. “He sounds like he is speaking Ebonics anytime he speaks,” she said. “I don’t take anything he says seriously.” (Matthews, in fact, sounds like a U.S. Army colonel when he speaks. He did not respond to a request for comment.)

“I would rather be feared than loved,” Loomer added. “I don’t need to be loved by people who work in Washington, D.C.”

Earlier this summer, Loomer told The New York Times that she had five paying clients for her research-consulting firm, an unusual side business for someone who describes themselves as a journalist. Now she says she has more, but she will not give a number. “It is not policy matters,” she told me, adding that some are corporate clients who want her to do “executive-level vetting.” “There are several billionaires I work with, and they have retained me to do their political vetting.”

The foggy boundaries between her activism, so-called journalism, and client work have created widespread concern that she is surreptitiously passing on information to promote the agendas of powerful interests.

After she began posting about the Puerto Rican bankruptcy authority, Trump fired its whole board, immediately improving the stock value of a major natural-gas company that was seeking a contract with the island. After she began attacking Republicans who wanted a clean break between Chevron and the Venezuelan government, Trump’s team granted the company new sanctions carve-outs. After she resurfaced old political comments by Vinay Prasad, a top official at the Food and Drug Administration, he resigned his post, saying through a spokesperson that he “did not want to be a distraction to the great work of the FDA.”

Like many of Loomer’s crusades, her attacks on Prasad focused on facts that would not have been disqualifying in the previous age when technocrats were hired for their abilities, not their ideological purity. She called Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist at the University of San Francisco, who had long been a critic of the FDA, a “trojan horse” and “saboteur” because he called himself a “Bernie Sanders liberal” in 2022 and wrote on Twitter in 2020 that he wanted Joe Biden to win—facts that did not trouble Kennedy, who was himself a Democrat until 2023. (Loomer accused Kennedy last week of preparing for a 2028 presidential bid, prompting him to announce that he was not running.)

Loomer’s crusade against Prasad came soon after he decided to limit access to a Sarepta Therapeutics drug, following evidence that it causes severe liver damage; this led MAGA influencers to allege that Loomer was secretly working for the pharmaceutical company. Sarepta, through a spokesperson, said that it has not “engaged with nor associated with Laura Loomer.” She told me the same, even offering “to sign an affidavit” saying so. But the wholly unsubstantiated claims still played a role in undermining Loomer’s case against Prasad; two senior Trump advisers told me that, although they had seen no proof of a connection, they believed the rumors. After he resigned, the White House invited Prasad to rejoin the administration, which he did about two weeks after leaving.

Loomer also denies taking money from Chevron or those with interests before the bankruptcy board of Puerto Rico. Although the obscurity of her targets raises suspicions, she said she has always taken on niche issues. She told me that she has been discussing legal action with her attorney against her public critics who accuse her of engaging in pay-to-play, a path that some of her critics have welcomed because of the prospect of uncovering her financial arrangements during discovery.

Those who have known her for years speak of her zeal and commitment as the purest form of MAGA. “It may shock a lot of folks in politics, but some of us are actually involved for reasons other than power, money, and fame,” Ted Goodman, a MAGA-aligned political operative who works for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, told me. “She can’t be bought and isn’t swayed by monetary gain.”

Brian Ballard, one of the most influential Trump-aligned lobbyists in Washington, told me that he has not worked with Loomer, but he had nothing but praise. “I think she is incredibly effective, and I understand why people would want to hire her,” he said.

Trump and Loomer agree that a failure to sift through appointees’ pasts in the first term undermined the president’s ambitions. “If there would have actually been proper vetting systems set up in the first Trump administration, the Russian-collusion hoax never would have happened, the first impeachment never would have happened, the second impeachment never would have happened,” she explained on a recent episode of her podcast. Trump seems to have taken this advice to heart. In his second go-round as president, his administration has taken several steps that appear designed to eliminate dissent or checks on his power.

The problem is that no one is clear on what constitutes a fireable offense. Trump’s top advisers, including Wiles, have been working intentionally, with Trump’s support, to expand the tent of Republican politics by embracing leaders such as Kennedy, a scion of the most famous Democratic family, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman who previously ran as a Democrat. Past liberal leanings, in this effort, are a benefit, not a liability. Trump has stocked his inner circle with people such as Vice President J. D. Vance, who once compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who once speculated mockingly about the size of Trump’s manhood.

Like Trump, Loomer says that Vance and Rubio earned forgiveness because they have made amends. But at other times, Loomer has found herself on the wrong side of Trump. Loomer defended Trump’s initial pick to lead NASA, Jared Isaacman, a friend of Elon Musk, even though Isaacman has given money to Democrats in the past. Others in the White House, including Gor, supported removing Isaacman amid Trump’s high-profile fallout with Musk, leading Trump to withdraw Isaacman’s name.

The decline and fall of Elon Musk

Trump has ignored other Loomer recommendations, such as her demand to fire Attorney General Pam Bondi over her handling of Justice Department records on the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. (Loomer says Trump is not implicated in any of Epstein’s crimes, and she encouraged him to sue The Wall Street Journal after it wrote about a bawdy letter reportedly from Trump that was found among Epstein’s possessions.) The president remains a strong supporter of Kennedy, who endorsed Trump last year after the president agreed to adopt much of his health agenda. (Their agreement was the result of “extortion” on the part of Kennedy, Loomer argues.) The White House leadership is counting on the Make America Healthy Again coalition to help Republicans in the midterm elections. Trump also called Loomer and dressed her down after she criticized his decision to allow the Air Force to accept a commercial plane from the Qatari government. “I want to apologize to President Trumpmore than anyone because I am a loyal person,” she later posted.

The most jarring Loomer crusades challenge the central assumptions of the national project. On August 8, the U.S. Army retold the heroic story of Captain Florent Groberg, a Medal of Honor winnner who had tackled a suicide bomber 12 years earlier in Aghanistan, saving the lives of other Americans while sustaining serious injuries to his brain, leg, and, ear. Loomer pounced, denouncing the Army secretary for praising someone like Groberg, who was born in France and had given a speech supporting the presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

“Are we supposed to believe the Army couldn’t find a Republican and US born soldier?” she wrote on X. “They had to find an immigrant who voted for Hillary Clinton and spoke at the DNC as Obama’s guest?” The claim that foreign-born patriots are less worthy of praise than those who are native-born won Loomer articles in The Washington Post, the Daily Mail, and other publications, but no comment from the White House.

Among those who objected was Greene, the Trump-aligned representative from Georgia who has tangled with Loomer—and has directed her own opposition research. “Many people need to wake up about her reporting. Researching facts and then spinning them into lies to serve her agenda doesn’t make her good or trustworthy. It makes her a liar and it makes her dangerous,” Greene concluded in her own social-media post.

This, for Loomer, was an opportunity. She has no problem going after Republican targets. She has publicly accused Senator Lindsey Graham of being gay, which he denies, and called the podcaster Tucker Carlson a “fraud” and a “terrible person.” Loomer let loose on Greene, claiming without evidence that she committed obscene acts in CrossFit gyms. (She did link to a Daily Mail article that had suggested, based on anonymous sources, that the congresswoman had extramarital affairs with people she knew through her gym.)

“Can you call yourself a Christian when your mouth is full of other men’s cock?” read one Loomer zinger, a modern version of the archetypical prompt “When did you stop beating your wife?”

All of it generated headlines, attention, and reposts of her social-media accounts. In a world without gatekeepers, where the most powerful man in the country rewards such behavior, Loomer sees little downside. Out-of-bounds provocation drives attention. Attention increases influence. And the person who matters the most is almost certainly entertained.

“At the end of the day, it is called the Trump administration,” she told me on our phone call. “So the way I look at it, I play for an audience of one.”

Vivian Salama contributed to this story.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Mostly, I remember the fluffy pens. When I was in elementary and middle school, nothing could be cooler than a fluffy pen, at least until it got covered in backpack grime and started to look like an exceptionally long-tailed subway rat. And no place had fluffy pens in abundance like Claire’s, a chain that sold accessories and other trinkets and, at the time, seemed to exist in every shopping center in America. Mine had an entire wall of fluffy pens, in every color, usually for some kind of absurd deal that allowed even a child to feel the intoxicating rush of acquisition. This was what Claire’s was for. It was a temple to girlhood, a place where everything was frivolous and where tooth-fairy money could make dreams come true.

But Claire’s is in trouble. Earlier this month, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, for the second time in a decade, and began liquidating. Today, it announced that it would be selling the majority of its North American business to the private-equity firm Ames Watson, for $104 million, with the intention of keeping some of its stores open. Claire’s has been saved, at least in the short term, but Ames Watson has its work cut out for it. Claire’s is a mall store, and malls are dying. Inflation, higher interest rates, and rising labor costs have further squeezed profits—true for basically every company, but when your primary customers don’t have jobs, they don’t react well to raising prices. Recently, President Donald Trump’s tariffs have complicated Claire’s business model, which is heavily reliant on imports: From November 2024 to April 2025, 56 percent of its inventory came from China. The company is about half a billion dollars in debt.

Claire’s started as a wig shop in the 1960s before merging with an accessories retailer in 1973, and then getting into the ear-piercing business and staking its claim on preteen girls. It specialized in cheaply made, kaleidoscopically tacky junk, destined to dye your skin green and then end up in a landfill. It was bad, in the aesthetic sense and the environmental sense. But  Claire’s was special to me, because it was for me. It wasn’t the checkout aisle at a store for older women or the costume corner of a kids’ store. It wasn’t for impressing boys; it was for impressing girls. It felt like a clubhouse. I can still remember how it smelled, like chemicals and vanilla cookies. I remember the purple walls, covered floor-to-ceiling in all the instruments of tweenage self-expression: charm bracelets, toe rings, impractically small purses, hair clips made to look like gummy bears or butterflies. I remember how easy it was to buy a pair of clear-lensed glasses or a flimsy flower crown and try on a new identity, how Claire’s made figuring out who you were and what you liked feel fun and low-stakes.

[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens]

I remember getting my ears pierced there, obviously, by someone who couldn’t have been much older than I was, one of my hands clutching my mother’s and the other clutching my best friend’s. Claire’s seemed to exist for precisely that time in one’s life: old enough to get your ears pierced, young enough to be scared; old enough to want a purse, young enough to not have much to fill it with; old enough to have the allowance money to buy a scrunchie, young enough to think it could change you. That moment is sacred, and I know now that it ends quickly. By the time I got my nose pierced, only a few years later, I didn’t even consider going to Claire’s. I wanted to go to the local tattoo place instead.

Two decades later, retail has changed. So, I think, has childhood. When I was shopping at Claire’s, my desires were largely assembled in the self-contained ecosystem of King Middle School. Sometimes a friend’s older sister would give me advice, which I treated with biblical reverence, but for the most part, the people telling me what to like were girls my age, whom I knew in real life. This wasn’t totally logical—in retrospect, I probably should not have allowed Gemma S. and An-Hae C. absolute power over my moods, interests, tastes, and values—but it was at least straightforward. I was a kid who shopped like a kid, because the people I was imitating were kids too.

Today’s young people are learning what’s cool on the context-collapsed, algorithmically driven social web, much of the time from professional influencers who are older than them. Tweens still exist as a market category and a chronological distinction, but in practice, they act a lot like teens or even 20-somethings. To the degree that they are even shopping in person at all, it’s often at grown-up places such as Sephora, where they can obsess over which expensive creams to add to their elaborate anti-aging skin-care routines, and Brandy Melville, which stocks clothes that I, an adult, would be perfectly comfortable wearing: high-necked cardigans, striped tops in tasteful neutrals. Maybe they should go to Claire’s while they still can, though, and get their hands on a fluffy pen.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Millions of Americans might soon have mail from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The health secretary—who fiercely opposes industrial, ultraprocessed foods—now wants to send people care packages full of farm-fresh alternatives. They will be called “MAHA boxes.”

For the most part, MAHA boxes remain a mystery. They are mentioned in a leaked draft of a much-touted report that the Trump administration is set to release about improving children’s health. Reportedly, the 18-page document—which promises studies on the health effects of electromagnetic radiation and changes in how the government regulates sunscreen, among many other things—includes this: “MAHA Boxes: USDA will develop options to get whole, healthy food to SNAP participants.” In plain English, kids on food stamps might be sent veggies.

The idea might seem like a throwaway line in a wish list of policies. (Kush Desai, a deputy White House press secretary, told me that the leaked report should be disregarded as “speculative literature.”) But MAHA boxes are also referenced in the budget request that President Donald Trump sent Congress in May. In that document, MAHA boxes full of “commodities sourced from domestic farmers and given directly to American households” are proposed as an option for elderly Americans who already get free packages of shelf-stable goods from the government. When I asked the Department of Health and Human Services for more information about MAHA boxes, a spokesperson referred me back to the White House; the Department of Agriculture, which runs the food-stamp program, did not respond.

MAHA boxes are likely to come in some form or another. Some of the packages might end up in the trash. Lots of people, and especially kids, do not enjoy eating carrots and kale. Just 10 percent of U.S. adults are estimated to hit their daily recommended portion of vegetables. But if done correctly, MAHA boxes could do some real good.

For years, nutrition experts have been piloting similar programs. A recent study that provided diabetic people with healthy meal kits for a year found that their blood sugar improved, as did their overall diet quality. Another, which provided people with a delivery of fruits and vegetables for 16 weeks, showed that consumption of these products increased by nearly half a serving a day. It makes sense: If healthy food shows up at your door, you’re probably going to eat it. “Pretty much any American is going to benefit from a real healthy food box,” Dariush Mozaffarian, the director of the Tufts Food Is Medicine Institute, told me.

Sending people healthy food could be a simple way to deal with one of the biggest reasons why poor Americans don’t eat more fruits and veggies. The food-stamp program, otherwise known as SNAP, provides enrollees with a debit card they can use for food of their choosing—and a significant portion of SNAP dollars goes to unhealthy foods. Research finds that has less to do with people having a sweet tooth than it does the price of a pound of brussels sprouts. Several studies have found that, for food-stamp recipients, price is one of the biggest barriers to eating healthy. Many states already have incentives built into SNAP to encourage consumption of fruits and vegetables. MAHA boxes would be an even more direct nudge.

Most nutrition experts I spoke with for this story were much more supportive of MAHA boxes being sent to Americans in addition to food stamps than as a replacement for them. Exactly how the care packages would fit into other food-assistance programs isn’t yet clear. Despite its shortcomings, SNAP is very effective at limiting hunger in America. Shipping heavy boxes of produce to the nation’s poor is a much bigger undertaking than putting cash on a debit card.

There’s also the question of what exactly these MAHA boxes will include. If the “whole, healthy food” in each care package includes raw milk and beef tallow—which Kennedy has promoted—that would only worsen American health. (His own eating habits are even more questionable: Kennedy once said that he ate so many tuna sandwiches that he developed mercury poisoning.) In May, after the Trump administration mentioned MAHA boxes in its budget request, a White House spokesperson told CBS News that the packages would be similar to food boxes that the first Trump administration sent during the pandemic in an effort to connect hungry families with food that would otherwise go to waste. According to a letter signed by Trump that was sent to recipients, each box was supposed to come with “nutritious food from our farmers.” News reports at the time suggested that wasn’t always the case. One recipient reportedly was shipped staples such as onions, milk, some fruit, and eggs, along with seven packages of hot dogs and two blocks of processed cheese. Another described their box as “a box full of old food and dairy and hot dogs.”

[Read: America stopped cooking with tallow for a reason]

The COVID-era program did eventually deliver some 173 million food boxes. But it was still a failure, Gina Plata-Nino of the Food Research & Action Center, an organization that advocates for people on food-assistance programs, told me. The logistics were such a mess that they prompted a congressional investigation. Nonprofits, which helped distribute the packages, received “rotten food and wet or collapsing boxes,” investigators were told. And the setup of the program was apparently so rushed that the government did not bother to check food distributors’ professional references; investigators concluded that a “company focused on wedding and event planning without significant food distribution experience” was awarded a $39 million contract to transport perishables to food banks.

This time around, the White House doesn’t have to navigate the urgency of a sudden pandemic in its planning. But questions remain about who exactly will be responsible for getting these boxes to millions of Americans around the country. The White House will likely have to partner with companies that have experience shipping perishable items to remote areas of the country. And although the White House budget says that MAHA boxes will replace a program that primarily provides canned foods to seniors through local food banks, it remains to be seen whether these organizations would have the resources to administer a program of this size.

Perhaps the Trump administration has already thought through all of these potential logistical hurdles. But trouble with executing grand plans to improve American health has been a consistent theme throughout Trump’s tenures in office. In 2020, for example, he pledged to send seniors a $200 discount card to help offset rising drug costs. The cards never came amid questions about the legality of the initiative.

Americans do need to change their eating habits if we hope to improve our collective problems of diet-related disease. Getting people excited about the joys of eating fruits and vegetables is laudable. So, too, are some of Kennedy’s other ideas on food, such as getting ultraprocessed foods out of school cafeterias. But Kennedy still hasn’t spelled out how he will deliver on these grand visions. The government hasn’t even defined what an ultraprocessed food is, despite wanting to ban them. The ideas are good, but a good idea is only the first step.

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Do Democrats need their own Stephen Miller? That’s what the Rolling Stone journalist Asawin Suebsaeng reports hearing from many people on the left. Imagining a progressive version of Donald Trump’s far-right-hand man is hard enough, much less justifying why this might be a good thing. But the idea seems inevitable in a party that has already launched searches for a Democratic Joe Rogan, a Democratic Donald Trump, and a Democratic Project 2025. Even as voters keep telling pollsters that they find the Democratic Party inauthentic, some of its leaders are looking for cheap, left-of-center knockoffs of existing products.

Growing numbers of voters disapprove of Trump, but they don’t see Democrats as a viable alternative. The party’s own voters describe it with terms such as “weak” and “apathetic.” Americans tell pollsters that Democrats are “more focused on helping other people than people like me.” In interviews and focus groups, they complain that Democrats have muddled messages or are talking down to them. The New York Times reports today that Democratic Party registration is losing ground to the GOP in the 30 states that track these numbers.

The desire for a Miller Lite reveals Democrats’ misunderstanding of their own problem. Democrats are facing a political challenge, as they struggle to communicate their goals to voters in an appealing way. But Miller hasn't been particularly successful at winning over voters. In fact, he’s manifestly unappealing as a public figure and apparently as a colleague, to say nothing of his condiment preferences. Miller’s own public approval rating is 11 points underwater, and as he’s put his agenda into action, Trump keeps getting less popular, too. What makes Miller such an effective policy maven is his devotion to his worldview, and his willingness to sweep aside almost any barriers that might impede his ability to implement it—including public opposition. If Democrats actually got their hands on a Miller Lite, he might only make them less popular.

Suebsaeng’s account of what he’s hearing exposes this muddled thinking. He writes that people don’t “want the mirror image of the lawlessness per se,” but they do desire someone “willing to do or say anything and force practically the entire government even people who technically outrank him to violate laws and norms.” Some people might imagine that you could find a ruthless champion of liberal policy ideas without Miller’s unfortunate tendency to run roughshod over the rules, but that’s part of Miller’s full package: He’s able to succeed because he has little respect for them. Though a liberal equivalent might be able to drive through some policies, the cost of further destroying the rule of law would be an abandonment of the party’s most basic values. Leftist authoritarianism with good health-care coverage is not an appealing alternative to Trumpism. It’s Cuba.

The search for Democratic dupes—pun very much intended—in other areas encounters similar challenges. “The search for a liberal Joe Rogan has led Democrats to an unlikely candidate: Jaime Harrison, their former party chair,” Semafor reported last month. Quite unlikely, in fact. Harrison seems like a nice enough guy, which is perhaps one reason his new podcast hasn’t found much audience in an ecosystem that values excitement and conflict. Another problem is the guest lineup, which is mostly Democratic politicians and also Hunter Biden. If Democrats think this is a response to Rogan, they’re badly mistaken. Rogan is a podcaster who talks about politics, not a political podcaster. His appeal comes in part from his reputation as an everyman who is at least ostensibly open to persuasion.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has created a lot of buzz in recent days for X posts from his press office that mimic the Trump style—ALL CAPS, stilted diction, memes, and more. This has had the effect of bringing attention to Gavin Newsom, and also of trolling a clueless Dana Perino. Overall, these posts have the form of a joke—it’s recognizable to everyone but Perino as a burlesque—but they don’t really have any humor. What political project they serve other than entrenching Trump’s style is obscure.

Some Democrats are also seeking to replicate the success of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led plan that has been a blueprint for the Trump administration. Here, at least, they seem to be closer to thinking about comparisons with the GOP in a parallel way: Project 2025 has been successful because it is a policy document, not a piece of political strategy. It begins with a worldview—for a religious, traditionalist society—and only then lays out plans to achieve it. But The New York Times reports that the people behind “Project 2029” are trying to gather a range of thinkers from across the Democratic spectrum, which risks producing a great deal of infighting about priorities, rather than a unified plan.

During the Trump era, the GOP agenda has become flattened into whatever Donald Trump and influential advisers say it is. Other Republicans have either adjusted their views or left the party. A figure like Miller both creates and benefits from this uniformity. Democrats can’t really replicate that. Their coalition is far more diverse, and there’s no major ideological leader of the party, except Bernie Sanders, whose agenda most Democratic elected officials (and voters) don’t subscribe to. (Both parties used to be much more ideologically heterogeneous than they are today, although the GOP coalition has narrowed faster than the Democratic one.) Democrats have a lot of policy ideas, some of them in conflict; the upside of a diverse coalition is lots of different approaches.

Every time I hear about the quest for a “liberal Joe Rogan,” I’m reminded of a passage by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who quoted Saul Bellow dismissing African culture by asking, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” In reply to Bellow, the journalist Ralph Wiley wrote, “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.” This is a lesson about universality, but it can also be a reminder of the value of producing your own ideas and work. Joe Rogan already exists; the left needs its own authentic voice, and he or she won’t sound like Rogan. For Democrats, imitation is the sincerest forum for getting flattened.

Related:

The real problem with the Democrats’ ground gameThe Democrats’ biggest Senate recruits have one thing in common.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

A letter to America’s discarded public servants

The dangerous legal strategy coming for our books

The David Frum Show: How ICE became Trump’s secret army

Trump keeps defending Russia, Tom Nichols writes.

Today’s News

The Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives began debating a redistricting proposal this morning that could deliver five additional U.S. House seats to the GOP—legislation that is expected to pass.

U.S. and European military leaders have begun discussing postwar security guarantees for Ukraine, according to U.S. officials and sources. The White House said yesterday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, though the Kremlin has not yet confirmed a meeting.

President Donald Trump called for Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook to resign over unconfirmed mortgage-fraud allegations.

Evening Read

Takako Kido for The Atlantic

A Tale of Sex and Intrigue in Imperial Kyoto

By Lauren Groff

In mid-April, I flew to Japan because I’d become obsessed with an 11th-­century Japanese novel called The Tale of Genji. I also had a frantic longing to escape my country. At its best, literature is a way to loft readers so far above the burning present that we can see a vast landscape of time below us. From the clouds, we watch the cyclical turn of seasons and history, and can take a sort of bitter comfort in the fact that humans have always been a species that simply can’t help setting our world on fire.

I was bewildered that The Tale of Genji had such a hold on me at this particular moment: It is a wild, confounding work that many consider to be the first novel ever written, by a mysterious woman whose true name we’ll never know, but whom we call Murasaki Shikibu, or Lady Murasaki. The novel is more than 1,000 pages long, more than 1,000 years old, and larded with enigmatic poetry. It’s about people whose lives differ so much—in custom, religion, education, wealth, privilege, politics, hierarchy, aesthetics—­from the lives of 21st-­century Americans that most of their concerns have become nearly illegible to us through the scrim of time and language.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Western nations are taking a key step toward a two-state solution.The rise of “cute debt”The Democrats’ biggest Senate recruits have one thing in common.

Culture Break

Larry Towell / Magnum

Read. Kate Riley’s perceptive debut novel, Ruth, depicts the life of a woman in a repressive sect without condescension, Hillary Kelly writes. Can a woman be happy without autonomy?

Watch. In 2020, Sophie Gilbert recommended 25 half-hour TV shows for anyone with a frazzled attention span.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic*.*

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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum begins with reflections on how Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown has transformed America into what he calls a “society based on fear.” Frum warns that the president’s methods risk discrediting not just immigration enforcement, but also law, police, and the very idea of democratic legitimacy.

Then Frum is joined by his Atlantic colleague Caitlin Dickerson, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting has laid bare the human and institutional realities of immigration enforcement. They discuss her latest investigation into the staggering expansion of ICE and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which has supercharged its budget to unprecedented levels. Dickerson explains how billions of dollars in new funding are fueling mass detention, empowering private-prison companies, and reshaping U.S. diplomacy while failing to solve the core challenges of immigration.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Caitlin Dickerson, a colleague of mine at The Atlantic who has won the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on immigration, and we’ll be discussing today the astonishing growth of the immigration-enforcement apparatus in the United States under the Trump presidency.

I want to open with some personal reflections of my own on the immigration subject. As those of you who have followed my work in The Atlantic may know, I have written about this topic over many, many years, and my sympathies have broadly been with the need for stricter immigration control than the United States has seen in the recent past. In January of 2021, shortly after President [Joe] Biden took office, I wrote an article that worried that his continuing a lax approach to immigration in the United States would prove a consequential mistake overshadowing his entire administration. And unfortunately, that turned out to be correct. The immigration enforcement under President Biden remained very lax, almost to the end of the administration. And indeed, immigration was one of the most important issues that defeated Kamala Harris and elected Donald Trump in 2024.

Since Donald Trump took office in 2025, we have seen an astonishing, breathtaking crackdown on immigration in the United States. You can read the effect of that crackdown in the statistics. The Center for Immigration Studies—a immigration-restrictionist group, but one that does good numbers—reports a net 2.2-million-person decline in the foreign-born population of the United States in the six months since Donald Trump took power. Of that 2.2 million net decline, 1.6 million is accounted for by illegal aliens. But 600,000 of the net decline turns out to be that the United States is losing more legal residents than it is gaining, something that I don’t think has happened since the Great Depression.

Now, the raw numbers only begin to tell the story. Much of the story, as told by Caitlin, is a crackdown on the streets, in the public places, in the parking lots and schools and even courtrooms of America where police officers or paramilitary officers—often dressed in non-uniforms, often without badges or identification, often with their faces disguised—are seizing people, most of them without status, but not all of them, some of them even U.S. citizens. Seizing them, putting them into vans, driving them away, offering them no process, and in the worst cases, sending them off to dungeons, prisons, in countries that the person apprehended has never seen before, has no contact with. We’ve seen people ending up in South Sudan, people who have no connection with El Salvador ending up sent for life—at least, that was the theory—to a prison in El Salvador. Some of the people in the El Salvadoran prison have been released, and they have told of horrors, of conditions that amount to torture, for people who have been accused of no crime, convicted of nothing, who were seized because the authorities believed, maybe correctly, that they didn’t have status—but didn’t prove anything, and certainly didn’t prove that these people had done anything wrong in the United States.

For those of us with a restrictionist point of view, Trump is offering a devil’s bargain. He is moving the country toward a more restrictionist policy, but in ways that cannot be sustained, that shock the American conscience and that are damaging the American economy.

We are seeing, also, all kinds of side effects. It has become much more difficult for legal people to travel to the United States. Scientific research in the United States is being impeded and restricted and damaged by this crackdown. We are seeing a revival of a kind of ugly blood-and-soil nationalism in the United States and this kind of pornographic fascism of some of the recruiting videos for Donald Trump’s immigration police, which are designed to appeal to exactly the kind of person who should never be trusted with government power and never with a gun, and never with the power to make arrests.

Natan Sharansky, the philosopher and now politician in Israel, once distinguished that there are two fundamental kinds of societies: societies based on fear and societies based on freedom. The Trump administration is turning the United States, for millions of the people who live here, into a society based on fear, and a fear of society cannot be a truly free society. We have had a recent case where an American threw a sandwich at immigration police in a gesture of disrespect. Now, I strongly recommend that everybody show respect for the police, and if you actually express your disrespect through the throwing of a physical object, there are gonna be consequences for that. Nobody needs to send—this happened—20 armed officers to the house of a sandwich flipper, to grab him and seize him off to a courtroom. That is an example of a society converting the rightful request for respect for the police into an insistence on fear of the police that damages the very meaning of what it means to be free.

The worst thing of all, from my point of view, again, as someone who comes from a restrictionist outlook on this, is the Trump administration is teaching Americans to think about immigration in all the wrong ways, and it’s teaching them to think about immigration in ways that, because they’re so wrong, because they’re mistaken, are ultimately going to subvert itself.

The immigration problem to the United States is not a problem of an invasion, and it’s not really a problem of crime. Foreign-born people, on average, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. I think a way to think about it is immigration is a little bit like rainfall. Too much—you get floods and disasters. Too little—you get death. Success and prosperity comes from having the right amount and control and regulating, to the extent you can, the flow of water in a way that gives life and doesn’t flood the society with numbers that it cannot absorb.

Immigration is a resource that must be managed intelligently. It’s a question of more or less, and who and why the optimal number of immigrants is not zero, and the practice of trying to eliminate even all illegal immigration is not feasible—not in a free society and not without a kind of level of police intervention that Americans don’t want and shouldn’t want.

What is going to happen as Americans see what Trump is doing—And as they absorb the consequences in things like fewer people doing all kinds of jobs that need to be done, and that Americans will not do at the wages that the American economy expects these jobs to get (jobs from gardening to roofing, not just agriculture, but construction of all kinds, meatpacking)—there’s going to be a blowback. There is going to be a reversal. We are going to find the pendulum, just as it swung very far in the restrictionist direction under the lax policies of President Biden, under the policies of Donald Trump, it will swing as far or farther, as hard or harder, in the opposite direction. Donald Trump is devouring the legitimacy on which any public policy needs to rest. And he is convincing Americans that immigration restriction does not mean the rule of law; it means the rule of police. It means the rule of exactly the kind of police you do not want to have being police.

My discussion with Caitlin will go deeper into all of these issues, but I want to say, as someone who has been on the other side of this, I’m very worried about the direction the country is going and that what the Trump people are proclaiming as success is a self-devouring error that will stain the good name of the United States, discredit law, discredit police services, discredit enforcement, and ultimately discredit the very cause that Donald Trump ostensibly wants to support.

And now my discussion with Caitlin Dickerson. But first, a quick break.

[Music]

Frum: Caitlin Dickerson is one of America’s most tireless and courageous investigative reporters. She started her career at National Public Radio, where she won a Peabody Award for her work. She then vaulted to The New York Times, and in 2021 joined me and all of us at The Atlantic as a gratefully welcomed colleague. Her reporting on the Trump administration’s child-separation policy for The Atlantic won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023. The next year—and this is the most amazing piece of journalism I think I’ve ever seen—Caitlin Dickerson walked the human-trafficking route through Panama, taking risks that must have harrowed her family and friends.

We’re here today to discuss her most recent story for The Atlantic, about the surge in growth of the United States immigration bureaucracy: “ICE’s Mind-Bogglingly Massive Blank Check.”

Caitlin, welcome to the program.

Caitlin Dickerson: Thank you, David. Thanks for having me.

Frum: Okay, so let’s start. How big is big? How big is ICE?

Dickerson: It’s huge. It’s huge, under this One Big Beautiful Bill Act that I wrote about. So, taking ICE alone—it’s just one of our immigration-enforcement agencies—its budget was about $8 billion prior to this bill. It’s going up to $28. It’s more than tripling. And this is at a time when Americans are seeing ICE agents out on the streets, and their communities are reacting really strongly to the aggressiveness of the campaign under way under the Trump administration to deport as many people as possible.

And so you’re talking about more than tripling the budget of that one agency alone. They want to add 10,000 new agents. So more than doubling the number of agents that they have. And you’ve also got $45 billion going toward detention, $45 billion going toward a wall—these huge numbers that I tried to compare to help people wrap their arms around. In total, the $175 billion that’s going toward immigration enforcement under this bill is greater than the annual military budgets of every single country in the world, except for the United States and China, and it makes ICE alone the highest-funded federal law-enforcement agency. And it really is going to create an infrastructure for immigration enforcement unlike anything that we’ve ever seen before, because these numbers are just so large.

Frum: Okay. So, not to sound like Dr. Evil here, but billions, trillions, people can get a little confused. Is $8 billion a lot of money? Is $28 billion a lot of money? Compared to what? Try to make this concrete to us. You say the total apparatus is going to be bigger than the military budgets of everybody on Earth. Relative to the rest of the federal budget, how much is $8 billion or $28 billion that they’re going to end up with?

Dickerson: Sure. So for comparison, the FBI employs about 20,000 people. Its budget is around $11 billion. The DEA, the next-largest federal law-enforcement agency, spends about $4 billion a year. I looked at some police budgets as well. The NYPD is budgeted for a much lower amount. Turns out, the NYPD overspends every year by quite a lot, but is budgeted around $6 billion a year, I believe. So again, ICE alone spending $28 billion on immigration enforcement is far greater, obviously.

Frum: So bigger than the FBI plus the NYPD plus the DEA, it sounds like.

Dickerson: Indeed.

Frum: Okay. So, do you have a sense, I mean, now, look—it’s a big job. It’s a big country. There are thousands of miles, millions of people. Maybe they need this money. Maybe that’s what it costs.

Dickerson: Maybe. However, one of the reasons I wanted to write this story is having covered immigration enforcement for so long, I remember, year after year, that Congress is really harsh on immigration-enforcement agencies in general—in particular, ICE, for mismanaging its budget. So every year, they go to Congress and explain why they haven’t achieved the goals that they laid out last year, while also asking for more money, and not always complying with reporting requirements that Congress places to explain where their money goes. They do a lot of reprogramming of funds from different programs, so money that’s supposed to go toward disaster relief, toward the Secret Service—that will move toward immigration enforcement, in the middle of a year when Congress hasn’t approved it in advance. That often can frustrate them. And so just this year, in 2025, you had congressional appropriators, including Republicans, who were really frustrated with ICE because it was spending money that it didn’t have. As soon as Donald Trump took office, it increased its spending and was not funded to complete the fiscal year in the green, and even though it was being criticized as an agency, Congress seems to have just accepted the requests of ICE and CBP for these huge pay raises, without asking questions and without attaching any oversight requirements.

So it was really quite surprising for me because it’s not just Democrats that have been frustrated with ICE overspending for many years; it’s Republicans as well.

Frum: Now with the $28 billion, will they be able to afford uniforms? Because they don’t seem to wear them.

Dickerson: They will be able to afford uniforms if they want them. But you’re right: A lot of this money is going to go toward hiring new agents—as I mentioned, ICE wants to take on 10,000 more people—but also hiring bonuses and retention bonuses. These are jobs that not a lot of people want to take and jobs that have a lot of turnover, that people leave very quickly. It’s always controversial to be an ICE agent. I’ve known many over the years who don’t tell their neighbors what they do for a living, because it’s the kind of job that obviously a lot of Americans voted for and can support, in general, but when it comes to your community, when you’re face-to-face with the person who’s making the arrest—and perhaps also know people who are being arrested by ICE—the relationships get a lot more difficult.

And this is across party lines. And so ICE agents always feel that they’re heavily criticized for their work, that they’re very unpopular. And they’re correct in that. So a lot of money is going to go simply just toward keeping them in this line of work, and trying to grow this federal law-enforcement agency.

And then another big place where this money is going to go is toward technology. So you’re seeing rapid expansion of the use of technology in immigration enforcement when it comes to facial recognition, when it comes to data brokering—so gathering people’s information, their financial records, their social-media records, their employment records, working with companies like Palantir and expensive government contracts to bring all this information together at once and create really deep dossiers on immigrants who the agency is going after, video surveillance at ports of entry and at airports, things like that. These are all very expensive tools, ones that I argue in my piece aren’t really necessary for routine immigration enforcement—but this is what a lot of this money will fund.

Frum: All right. That’s such a fascinating point. I want to take a step back with something you just said about the number of bodies. We talked about the amount of money they’re getting, so from a human point of view, how big is ICE compared to the FBI?

Dickerson: So ICE is about 20,000 people as well. So similar, very similar in size. But in terms of agents on the ground right now, they’ve got about 7,000 and they’ve long argued that those numbers aren’t large enough. When you do think about, as you said, a vast country—more than 11 million people in the United States without legal status. But really it’s not the number of agents that have limited ICE, in recent years, from making arrests; it’s the rules that they face, depending on the administration, for who they’re allowed to go after and who they aren’t.

President Trump lifted all of those rules, said all immigrants without legal status are fair game. But there are other barriers to carrying out deportations—legal ones, namely. You can arrest someone, but once they actually start to go through the legal process, often they can get out on bond, they can pursue some form of legal status.

Frum: Eight billion [dollars] was what ICE was getting before. Twenty-eight billion [dollars] is what ICE will be getting under the president’s fiscal bill. And then you pointed out that there’s this larger universe of associated funds that are not ICE-specific, but are generally related to the immigration universe. The total—remind me, you said it was about $175 billion? Okay, so what is that? What’s in the $175 billion?

Dickerson: So within the $175 billion, you have about $3.5 billion which is going toward the courts, and that’s under a separate federal agency. They’re under the DOJ. You have, as I mentioned, $45 billion in expanding detention centers. You’ve got $46 billion toward building the wall, and you’ve got at least $10 billion going toward reimbursement funds that have been created. So when states and local governments try to help, like Governor Greg Abbott has volunteered Texas to do, he’ll be able to apply for reimbursement funds. And that’s true for local governments as well. And then you’ve got little pockets of money spread elsewhere. But really, the bulk of it is the expansion of detention, the expansion of technology, and the hiring of new officers.

Frum: Tell me about this new prison system that we’re building. Not every viewer or listener will understand that the federal system is a relatively small part of America’s system of prisons and jails. Most people who are in prison or jail are there being held by the states, or sometimes jails are municipal. The federal system is small. So we’re building a vast, new—relative to the existing federal prison system—a vast, new secondary system. How will it be like, and how will it be different from the existing federal prisons?

Dickerson: I’ll talk about immigration, in particular. We’ve got people who are housed in immigration detention in federally run facilities that are contracted by—we have them run by private-prison companies. And then we also, as a federal government, rent beds in county jails, for example, and in state prisons to house immigrants as well.

And the expansion is going to more than double the size of the detained-immigrant population, largely putting them in privately run federal facilities. So these facilities will be operated, more than likely, by the two giants in the private-prison industry: Geo and CoreCivic. And they’re expecting tens of thousands of additional detainees. So at maximum, our detained-immigrant population has been about 45,000 people on a daily average, and DHS wants to get that average daily detained population to 100,000. So again, more than we’ve ever seen before. This means the construction of new facilities from the ground up. It also means the retrofitting of old facilities, jails, and prisons that have been closed.

And a lot of times, what you’ve seen is a prison that’s been heavily criticized because of poor conditions—maybe you had a lot of protesting, political winds changed, and so a big prison closed that was previously used for criminal detainees—and what happens is ICE will then come in and retrofit that facility for immigrants.

Frum: Now we’ve all read very disturbing stories about conditions in immigration-detention centers that seem pretty shockingly inhumane for people who, after all, don’t seem to be criminals, exactly. They’ve broken the law, but everyone who speeds, breaks the law. Will the new funds ameliorate living conditions in these detention centers? Is that part of what the money’s for?

Dickerson: It’s not part of what the money’s for, and I don’t think that that will happen, simply because when you look at the bill, it says that health and safety standards in these new facilities that it funds should be left to the discretion of the secretary. That’s actually a really big deal.

So I’ve reported a lot on ICE-detention standards. These are very hard-fought, extensive rules that have been developed since the early 2000s, when we really started to have a meaningfully sized immigration-detention system. And they cover everything from your medical care that should be provided to basic food needs, access to a law library to be able to defend yourself, recreation—being able to move around—and who can be held in solitary confinement for who can’t.

You’re right that generally, the legal standard is higher than it is for criminal defendants because the Supreme Court has held immigration detention is not meant to be punitive. And that’s kind of hard for people to wrap their minds around, because you’re in a facility that looks and feels very much like a prison and it’s often identical, but theoretically—because, as you said, immigration is a different type of violation, it’s a civil violation, and because you’re being held pretrial, you don’t have a standing deportation order yet, or you have one that you’re appealing—you’re supposed to have better access, in fact, to recreation, to the things that make prison, as uncomfortable as it is, are supposed to be slightly lesser for detained immigrants. All of those standards, which were really difficult to uphold, seemed to have gone out the window under the bill, because it explicitly says that standards should be held to the discretion or, at the discretion, rather, of the secretary.

And at the same time, it’s important to note that the administration under DOGE, specifically Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, really gutted two offices within DHS that oversaw detention health and safety standards. So there was a detention ombudsman, and then there was a DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Those offices are fundamentally not functional at this point. And so kind of the opposite of what you laid out is going to happen: massive expansion of detention and very little oversight.

Frum: Yeah. I’ve not been a regular visitor, but I have, on occasion, had reason to visit people in federal prison, and I’ve always been shocked at the low quality of the food. It just seems like such a petty economy. And we’re spending a couple of dollars a day more per person, per meal, which, in the scheme of things, wouldn’t be much. You could just make life a little bit more civilized and buy some—and by the way, remove the single largest grievance that most prisoners have about their daily condition. And you wonder, in a detention center where you’re dealing with people who are not criminals and often haven’t been convicted of anything, why you wouldn’t feed them properly. Something I can’t understand.

Dickerson: I agree with you. Having spent time in these facilities and seeing what people eat—you know, lunch meat that’s frozen, lunch meat that’s moldy, food that’s clearly expired. I spent time at a family-detention facility that was actually finally closed under the Biden administration after a long effort to end family detention. The United States is one of the only countries in the developed world that detains families. I think Australia is the only other. Because it’s really, really difficult to detain kids for long periods of time and to do it in a way that’s considered safe and humane.

And so family detention finally ended under Biden, but reopened immediately and is set to expand now under the Trump administration. And at our largest family-detention center in Dilley, Texas, I reported on families there and heard from really every single one of them that the food was unbearable, especially for kids. I had parents tell me that their children would vomit just from the smell of the food before they even entered the cafeteria, and kids would lose really significant weight because they would refuse to eat the food because they found it so disgusting.

The reason, I think, why you see the food quality that you do—and this is written about in a book that I mentioned in my story called Immigration Detention Inc. that just came out by a professor, Nancy Hiemstra. She’s at Stony Brook University, in New York. She looked at vendors within detention centers and found that, of course, the way that they make money is by minimizing their cost. The federal government is going to pay them a set amount of money for the services that they provide. And so the less they spend providing food, or when it comes to medical care, the less that the medical providers spend providing that care, the greater their profits, of course. So it really is, I think, a matter of pinching pennies, and that book documents very well how these facilities really are economic engines.

There are so many different people and organizations making money within immigration-detention centers, and all of it is predicated on spending as little as possible, of course, on the people who are detained there.

Frum: Well, this is one of the suggestive points in your story—that we are not only building facilities, but we’re building vested interests. That people whose livelihoods—the guards, most obviously, but many others—people whose livelihoods depend on the preservation of the system—once done, it’s hard because one might think, Well, if there’s a political change, just abandon it. But that may be harder to do than one assumes, according to you.

Dickerson: That’s right. Funding for immigration detention, and really immigration enforcement overall, has almost never increased in the history of its existence because of these vested interests. So when an immigration-detention facility opens in an American community, it’s often been fought over. Communities will campaign to bring these facilities in because they bring jobs and often hundreds or even thousands of jobs depending on how large they are. And so you’ll have county sheriffs who campaign, promising to bring ICE to town. And as soon as those jobs are created, families depend on them. These facilities tend to be in rural areas, where there’s not a lot of other economic opportunity. Of course, the land is cheaper. So you can build a big detention facility there.

But then the community really comes to rely on it, and it becomes a big political problem to try to close it down. And you also have the major private-prison companies that operate the facilities who lobby in Washington to, of course, keep them open and grow them. And then the many, many other contractors that operate within them that are all doing the same thing in order to continue providing these services and to expand these services, which have grown in recent years. So now ICE detainees have access to tablets that they can use to speak with their family, for example, that didn’t exist before. That’s one more company that’s trying to keep these facilities open and keep them large so that they can continue to make profits.

Frum: How hastily are we able to move people out of the facilities to return them to the country, ideally, of which they’re a citizen? As you witnessed on that harrowing, harrowing trip you wrote about for The Atlantic through Panama, different people come from different countries with different degrees of oppressiveness. Mexico’s a pretty nice place. It’s unequal; it’s hard to make a living, but it’s basically a free country. Other countries are much worse. How quickly can we get people back to where they are supposed to be, if it’s an acceptable place? Or is that just taking forever as the bureaucracy gets bigger?

Dickerson: It is taking a very long time. Immigration cases can take months. They can take years. The average time that someone spends detained fluctuates quite a lot, but at this point, most people are spending months, at the very least, in ICE detention. And that’s an important question that I raise in the piece, as well, is: Is this massive expansion of the detention system actually the best way to carry out the administration’s goal, if President Trump really does want to deport up to a million people a year? I don’t think that it is, because at the same time that the administration is moving to expand detention, it’s firing many immigration judges. Those are the only people who have the power to hand down a deportation order. You can’t deport someone without one of those.

And the main hurdles that we all talked about in advance of President Trump taking office to his immigration campaign really are legal ones and diplomatic ones. So when people land in immigration detention, they’re going to fight their case. They’re going to apply for a form of relief, particularly if, like many detained people have now—if these are people who’ve been here for a very long period of time, they may have the right to some form of protection. And then you have the diplomatic hurdles. So you’ve got to get these receiving countries on board and willing to accept hundreds or thousands of their nationals on a monthly basis in order to hit these high goals. Detaining lots and lots of people doesn’t necessarily lead to the outcome of removing lots and lots of people, but it is very expensive. And we can talk about, if you want—to get into the relationships between the private-prison companies and the federal agencies that they work with in immigration enforcement, and how I’ve seen that kind of lead to expansions of detention historically that may not have been necessary.

For years—and this has been true, it’s important to point out, in Democratic and Republican administrations—the highest ranking officials at ICE have often retired into executive roles at these private-prison companies, including Geo and CoreCivic. And what that does is put private-prison executives across the negotiating table with their former underlings, deciding whether or not to expand the immigration-detention system, and underlings who may also hope to—and who often do—end up retiring into these executive roles at the private-prison companies as well.

So I reached out to both of them. Geo got back to me and said that there’s no evidence to support that this revolving door of hiring leads to lower accountability or higher prices. But for many years, advocates have raised questions about why these detention facilities and these detention contracts expand as dramatically as they do when they don’t seem to lead to the outcomes that ICE will promise at the beginning of a given year. You know, deportations have really been stagnant over the last several administrations without a huge amount of fluctuation. And so Why do these contracts continue to grow? And what’s the connection between these relationships that exist and the incentives built into them and the contracts that result?

Frum: You’re describing a system that is becoming increasingly voracious at picking people up, increasingly capacious at storing them for a long time, but not improving at removing people who ought to be removed.

And so we’re creating this kind of intake detention but not removal. And one of the things—this is an incident that probably has now, because of the Russia events, been forgotten, but one of the places where people were supposed to be removed to was the country of Colombia.

Colombia is a country with a history of significant violence but that has achieved a kind of uneasy peace in recent years. And the Colombian government—Colombia’s normally been governed from the right, but they currently have a left-of-center president, and he said, I’m going to continue to receive people. I have one condition: They must be treated with dignity. No shackles. That’s the deal. If you don’t shackle them, we’ll take them—our nationals. Not everybody’s nationals; our nationals. And the Trump administration said, Oh, yeah? Shackles. And blew up, and then we got into a trade war with Colombia—which is an important strategic partner of the United States and a country with which the United States has a free-trade agreement negotiated by President George W. Bush and signed by President [Barack] Obama—over the issue of Should people be shackled?

And one of the things that—I’m sorry to make this point so long. The legitimation of what the Trump administration is doing depends on the idea that these people being detained are very dangerous. That’s why you have to shackles.

Dickerson: Right.

Frum: But the numbers—there are not a million people a year of dangerous people in the United States to remove. So if you’re going to remove a million people, most of them will be people who are out of status but who are not dangerous. And you don’t need to shackle them. You just need to say, Okay, we have laws. You’re out of the law. Get on the plane. Here’s your hot meal on the plane. Welcome back to Colombia, where you come from.

Dickerson: Exactly. You’re pointing to an issue—and there are many examples of it—where the administration says it wants to do one thing but then behaves in a way that really runs directly counter to it. And a lot of it comes back to this fundamental disconnect between a promise to deport the worst of the worst and a promise to deport a million people a year. You just simply can’t do both.

If the administration wanted to focus on the worst of the worst, for example, it really wouldn’t need to massively expand the detention system that exists, because these would be people who have extensive criminal records, who are not eligible for any form of immigration relief, and whose cases would move very quickly through the courts. You might run into diplomatic issues with their home countries being willing to take them in, but it’s a smaller number of people who would move quickly through the immigration system and who I think have been targeted aggressively under the last several administrations, both Republican and Democrat.

Obviously, Trump wanted to do a better job and wanted to do a better job of vetting, in particular, the large numbers of people who came in during the Biden administration. That is all doable without a massive expansion of the detention system. But when you do expand the detention system, you end up sweeping, and you set these very high goals in terms of numbers. You, of course, end up, as you pointed out, sweeping up lots of people who’ve been in the United States for a long period of time, have no previous interaction with law enforcement, and whose deportation becomes difficult to justify.

So with Colombia, in particular, it boggles the mind why the administration would blow up its own ability to achieve a goal that it’s laid out. ICE has been sending out emails with their weekly worst of the worst, where they find the example of the person with the most extensive criminal record they possibly can who they have arrested, and celebrate it. And they could continue to do that in a much less chaotic way without spending all of this money. And that’s why I felt the story was so important to write—because, yes, the country voted for a president who wanted to carry out a vast deportation campaign, or an aggressive deportation campaign, whether it meant focusing on people who were very dangerous or focusing on large numbers, but do we actually need to spend all of these taxpayer dollars in order to do it? We don’t. And so on top of having a campaign underway that the public is really starting to question and be troubled by, we now have a massive amount of taxpayer dollars that could have been spent elsewhere, and more effectively.

Frum: Let me pick up on your point about diplomatic issues. So one of the countries from which a lot of recent people have come, either as the asylum seekers or straightforward illegal immigrants, is Venezuela. And Venezuela is an authoritarian regime under an un-American, anti-American dictatorship—first Hugo Chavez and then his successor, President [Nicolás] Maduro—and significant human-rights issues, a country very much on the Cuban model. At another time, the United States might say, Well, it’s pretty reasonable that a person would run away from Venezuela and seek freedom somewhere else. But the numbers are very large, and so the Trump administration wants to return the Venezuelans, and it looks like the price of doing that has been to rehabilitate the Venezuelan regime diplomatically.

So it’s not just that diplomacy is a constraint on the deportation project; actually, deportation is reshaping the foreign policy of the United States and making Venezuela a more acceptable—or seemingly more acceptable—partner to the Trump administration than you would think, based on its internal policy and its external policy, it ought to be.

Dickerson: So immigration and deportation does provide an opportunity for diplomacy. And if the Trump administration were to play its cards right, it really could have influence. It’s had influence in Venezuela, could have influence in other places where we’re concerned about the politics, places where we’re concerned about whether these countries have been willing to take our advice or accept our support, work with us in terms of trade. There is a real opportunity there. And I think with regard to Venezuela in particular, there was a deep desire on behalf of the current regime to bring back as many people as possible, to prevent the country from emptying out, as has been happening in the last few years. And so they’re a little bit more open.

But one wonders why didn’t some of the funds that—I mean, we’re talking about money and diplomacy. It’s two different things. But it isn’t, at the same time. Could we have spent far less money on expanding our enforcement infrastructure in the United States and spent, instead, a bit on negotiating with countries to help them, whether it’s change and improve human-rights conditions that we’re concerned about, improve democratic freedoms and openness, perhaps even build reception centers for welcoming people who are willing to go home? Because there are just simply logistical concerns about accepting large numbers of deportees, as well.

So you’re right that deportation, and immigration, really, it does open a diplomatic door. And the question is: How well will the administration manage those conversations? They’ve been very clumsy, as you know, and have lots of times blown up. And that’s not usually an effective way to improve relations here.

Frum: Here’s the last topic area I want to ask you about, which is this strange business of third-country deportations. Normally, the rule is you return people where they came from. And some of the places people who are here illegally come from are pretty nice. Like, if you come from Mexico, if you come from Brazil, if you come from Argentina, you know, obviously the United States offers higher wages, so that’s attractive. But it’s not so horrible to live in Mexico, Brazil, or Argentina. On the other hand, if you get here from North Korea, we shouldn’t send you back. You’re a genuine asylum-seeker refugee.

There seems to be growing a practice of taking people who come from one country and sending them back to a completely other country, often very far remote from any—like South Sudan, and what is someone who speaks Spanish supposed to do in South Sudan? It’s hard for me. What is going on there? How is this justified? How prevalent is this practice? Is it growing?

Dickerson: Add this to the list of previously unfathomables, for the main reason that it’s legally dubious. We have yet to have a final determination on these third-country deportations. They have been challenged in court and so far continue. But this was the Trump administration’s kind of creative, if you will, way of leapfrogging the diplomatic hurdles that I mentioned earlier. Instead of convincing Colombia and Venezuela and Honduras and Guatemala and the Caribbean countries and all the places where deportees are coming from—instead of convincing all of them to accept their own nationals, simply go instead to, for example, El Salvador and convince them to take thousands of people from all over the world. It’s easier. It’s one negotiation instead of 20 or 25, but it is legally dubious. There is no precedent for, in large numbers—except for in very extreme and individualized cases—deporting people to countries that are not their own. And so, yes, it is growing because we’ve never done it en masse before.

And it’s still being challenged in court and will continue to be. It’s hard for me to see a world in which ultimately this practice stands up, because it challenges the sovereignty of the home country of the deportee and that of [the country] that’s receiving these deportees. I mean, it really questions: What is nationality? What is citizenship? If you don’t have travel documents, and you don’t have permission to move from one place to another, how valid are these borders that we’re working to uphold? So it is, you know, underway for the first time, but—

Frum: It would be already bad enough if you took somebody who’s here from Venezuela, put them on a plane to El Salvador, opened the door, and said, Bye. There’s the bus to town. Hope you have some El Salvadoran money with you. But we’re not doing even that. We’re saying, Oh, and then we’re putting you in a prison in El Salvador forever without any trial, or any show—I mean, we have an allegation you’ve done something wrong. But normally, in America or anyone under American jurisdiction, if we put you in a prison for the rest of your life, we prove that you’ve done something heinous to justify putting you in a prison for the rest of your life.

Dickerson: That’s right. And that’s a whole other legal problem with these third-country deportations—not just that we’re sending people to a country they didn’t come from, but that we’re putting them into a situation where there is no clear form of due process, no clear way to ever get out of these facilities. And that, ultimately, is on our hands. These individuals have families who remain in the United States; will they go after the U.S. government? That’s just one legal route that I can imagine being pursued among the many.

It’s a reflection of something that I reported a lot on during the first Trump administration, which is that the apparatus of people in the White House who are focused on deporting as many people as possible—they’re led, as we know, by Stephen Miller, who has been focused on the immigration for more than 10 years in Washington and has really studied the federal code in and out for legal ways of deporting people, but has also spent a lot of time with other lawyers, racking their brains about ways that are untested, that are unprecedented, that we don’t know to be legal to deport as many people as possible.

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