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What the Aftermath of 9/11 Taught Me

2026-09-10T06:00:00-04:00

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“But is it clean?” asked Elizabeth Berger, a 41-year-old mother of two. It was five months after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and Berger was testifying at a Senate field hearing on air quality in Lower Manhattan. Just blocks away, at Ground Zero, responders were still sifting through what they called “the pile”—eight stories of twisted steel and debris, spread over 16 smoldering acres—searching for bodies, bone fragments, even scraps of clothing. Outside, the air carried the acrid smell of burnt metal.

Berger had lived 150 yards from the World Trade Center for nearly two decades. The complex was where her kids went roller skating and learned to ride their bikes. After the Twin Towers collapsed, increased levels of air pollution and particulates showed up across a wide area of New York and New Jersey. Lower Manhattan was covered in toxic dust. It had taken eight men in white suits and respirators five days to clean Berger’s apartment. She and her husband had thrown out trash bags full of toys and stuffed animals; handmade baby quilts; their clothes, sheets, and towels. They washed the walls. But every time the wind changed or she brushed dust from a shelf, Berger wondered what was still in the air, and whether it could make her children sick.

“We don’t know what the right thing to do is,” she said. “Ours is a culture that’s based on authority, but there has been none. We would do whatever we needed to do if only we knew what that was.”

That was exactly why I had called for the hearing. I had represented New York in the Senate for just eight months before 9/11. After the attacks, it was clear that the information about air quality coming from the Environmental Protection Agency did not square with what New Yorkers were experiencing. If the Bush administration wouldn’t level with people about what was really going on, then Congress needed to establish the facts and press for action and accountability. I served on a Senate subcommittee on clean air chaired by Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. I urged him to hold a field hearing in Lower Manhattan so that we could meet directly with experts, residents, and first responders on the ground.

In the grand, century-old Custom House at the foot of Broadway, Kerry Kelly, the New York City Fire Department’s chief medical officer, told us about firefighters who had been exposed at Ground Zero and were now struggling with persistent coughs and shortness of breath. Schoolteachers described children suffering rashes, nosebleeds, and respiratory problems. Parents questioned whether sending their kids to schools was safe.

[Ellen S. Bakalian: The anniversary I wish I didn’t share with my husband]

Stephen Levin of Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan told us his team had examined more than 250 people who worked or volunteered at or near Ground Zero, and most had developed respiratory problems. He warned that without a comprehensive medical-surveillance program to track symptoms, we risked missing the people whose illnesses would persist or worsen over time.

Again and again, New Yorkers told us they weren’t asking for certainty where none existed. They were asking for someone to take responsibility for finding the answers.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, much has been written about that horrific day and its aftermath: the 2,753 lives lost when the buildings fell, the heroism of those who ran toward danger, and the extraordinary resilience of a city and the mistakes of a country under attack. I want to tell a different part of the story—one that’s still coming into focus even now, as New York City makes 170,000 pages of documents related to air quality in the days after the attacks available for the first time. It’s the story of the people who survived 9/11 and those who went to Ground Zero to help, many of whom would pay a terrible price in the years that followed. It’s also a story about what happens when government fails the people it is supposed to serve—and what it takes to make government work.

I was in Washington on September 11, 2001, preparing for a hearing on early-childhood education featuring First Lady Laura Bush. I raced to the Capitol as soon as I heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center. My daughter, Chelsea, was staying with friends in New York, and I was desperately trying to track her down. Fortunately, she was safe. At the Capitol, an aide rushed to meet me and said that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon, only three miles away. The Capitol was being evacuated, she said. We had no idea what was happening or where the next blow might come. I made sure my staff got safely to a nearby townhouse, and I remember watching the disaster unfold on television. You could see the dust choking the streets and skies of Manhattan. I was already worried about the first responders working in that toxic cloud.

The next morning, I flew to New York with my colleague Senator Chuck Schumer on a special FEMA flight and then boarded a helicopter that circled over Lower Manhattan. The television images I had seen the night before had not prepared me for the scale of the destruction. Smoke was still rising from the smoldering wound where the World Trade Center had stood. Fires burned deep beneath the twisted girders and shattered beams, and periodically flared. It would take three months before the last flames were extinguished. Firefighters, police officers, and construction workers searched desperately in the rubble for survivors.

Our helicopter landed, and Schumer and I joined Governor George Pataki, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and other officials walking toward the site. Occasionally, a firefighter would emerge from the dust and gloom, exhausted, dragging an axe, covered in soot. Some of them had been on duty nonstop since the planes hit the towers, and they had all lost friends and colleagues. I wanted to thank them and tell them everything was going to be all right. But I wasn’t sure yet that it was.

The air was bitter, and the thick smoke made it hard to breathe or see. I was wearing a surgical mask, but the air burned my throat and lungs and made my eyes tear up. In the makeshift command center at the Police Academy on East 20th Street, we were briefed on the damage. Later, I saw a draft of the White House’s initial emergency national-security spending bill. To my horror, I realized there wasn’t one penny set aside for New York. It was an astonishing oversight. I caught the last train south before they closed Penn Station. There was work to do in D.C. New Yorkers were going to need a lot of help to recover, and it was now our job to make sure they got it.

First thing the next morning, I went to see Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, chair of the Appropriations Committee. I told Byrd that we were going to fight to get emergency funding for New York added to the bill and asked if he’d have our back. “Consider me the third senator from New York,” he told me.

Next, Schumer and I headed to the White House. We needed to see President Bush face-to-face and make our plea for New York. In the Oval Office, I told the president that New York needed $20 billion in federal aid—and needed it fast. He didn’t hesitate. “You’ve got it,” he said.

In the hours and days that followed, some White House staff and Republicans in Congress tried to walk back this commitment. They wanted money for other states and priorities instead.

But President Bush kept his word, and Congress approved the $20 billion for New York and the other states attacked that day.

A week later, Schumer and I brought 38 senators to Ground Zero so that they could see the devastation for themselves. They met firefighters and rescue workers still combing through the wreckage. They talked with survivors and families. We wanted our colleagues to have this firsthand experience because we knew that New York was going to need their support for months, even years, to come.

On September 18, EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said she was “glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink.” Based on my firsthand experience, that was hard to believe. And rigorous indoor air testing had not yet been conducted. Sure enough, by early November, nearly 4,000 firefighters who had been working at Ground Zero were being treated for severe coughs. They started calling it the “World Trade Center cough.”

Larry Towell / Magnum

I had seen this pattern before. As first lady, I heard from men and women who had served in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and later suffered from “Gulf War syndrome”—a cluster of agonizing illnesses linked to wartime exposure to toxins that the government had been slow to acknowledge. After hearing from veterans and their families, I urged my husband to establish a presidential advisory committee to investigate. He later signed legislation extending disability benefits to eligible Gulf War veterans with undiagnosed illnesses and improving how the government screened and monitored troops for similar risks.

That experience taught me how slow the government could be to acknowledge long-term health problems, especially if they could cause political headaches. I didn’t want the same negligent approach to be applied in New York. On October 26, I read a report in the New York Daily News that heightened my concern. The paper reported that the EPA’s own testing showed elevated levels of benzene, lead, and sulfur dioxide. I wrote to Whitman demanding answers and a face-to-face meeting. I also started urging Senator Lieberman to hold that field hearing in Lower Manhattan. New Yorkers deserved the truth. And if it was as bad as it seemed, urgent action was going to be needed.

I also began working with doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital, along with local labor leaders, to develop a monitoring and screening program for the thousands of workers and volunteers at or near Ground Zero. The doctors had seen firsthand how sick some of the first responders were becoming, and they knew that the full health consequences of environmental exposure might not be apparent for years. We couldn’t afford to wait for those illnesses to emerge before we started tracking them.

By December, the New York delegation in Congress had secured $12 million in federal funding for the World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program at Mount Sinai—an initiative I had begun pushing for a month earlier, when I introduced legislation to establish a federal health-monitoring program for people exposed to hazardous substances in disasters. It was an important first step. But it was only a first step.

The EPA continued to be unhelpful and at times untruthful. The full extent of the deception did not emerge until August 2003. An investigation by the EPA’s inspector general found that, in the aftermath of the attacks, White House officials instructed the agency to reassure New Yorkers that the air was safe to breathe, even though deadly contaminants such as asbestos and lead were present. The agency “did not have sufficient data and analyses” to back up its statements, the report said, noting that “competing considerations” such as reopening Wall Street played a role in their deception.

I believe that President Bush himself genuinely wanted to do the right thing for New York. Three days after the attacks, he stood on a pile of rubble at Ground Zero, put his arm around a firefighter, and pledged his support. But members of his administration were eager to restore a sense of “open for business” normalcy. Alarming reports about toxic air near Wall Street would have made for inconvenient messaging.

In my decades of public service, I have rarely been as angry as I was the day that the damning inspector general’s report was released. I thought of the firefighters working around the clock in poisonous dust and soot. I thought of Sister Cindy Mahoney, a nun who volunteered as an EMT at Ground Zero and prayed with weary workers—a few years later, she died of severe respiratory failure and asked for her body to be autopsied for evidence of the effects of exposure. I thought of every resident and responder I’d met with over the past two years, each with their own quiet stories of loss and heroism.

The government had told them the air was safe to breathe. It wasn’t. And they knew that.

Representative Jerry Nadler and I immediately organized a press conference on the steps of city hall, just blocks from Ground Zero, along with doctors and first responders who’d been lied to. I am usually someone who keeps her cool. This time, I lost my temper. “I know a little bit about how White Houses work,” I said, my fury rising. “I know somebody picked up a phone, somebody got on a computer, somebody sent an email, somebody called for a meeting, somebody in that White House, probably under instructions from somebody further up the chain, told the EPA: ‘Don’t tell the people of New York the truth.’ And I want to know who that is.”

The Bush administration never really came clean about its lies about the dirty air. For a lot of people, it became just one more example of government corruption and incompetence. As time passed and more responders became sick, I pushed to expand medical monitoring and treatment. But media attention moved on, and the political will in Washington to act dissipated. In 2005, Congress tried to rescind $125 million that had already been appropriated for injured responders’ health monitoring. It took a lot of shaming and arm-twisting to get it restored.

In 2006, Mount Sinai Hospital reported that nearly 70 percent of the roughly 9,500 responders it examined had developed a new or worsened respiratory symptom. That same year, James Zadroga, an NYPD detective who had spent more than 450 hours at Ground Zero, died after becoming gravely ill. His death made painfully clear what many responders and their families had been telling us for years: This wasn’t simply about monitoring people to see whether they might get sick. People were already sick, and they needed care.

I introduced the 9/11 Heroes Health Improvement Act to provide long-term medical and mental-health monitoring and treatment. This was the part of governing that rarely makes for a compelling news story: the hearings and markups, the calls to colleagues, the negotiations over language and money, the votes that had to be counted and counted again. But every step mattered. We were trying to turn an emergency response into a lasting obligation of the federal government.

It took years. The effort eventually became the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2011, creating the World Trade Center Health Program and reopening the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. The program exists today because leaders such as Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Carolyn Maloney, Jerry Nadler, Peter King, and many others kept pushing after the rest of Washington moved on. That is the hard, unglamorous work of governing: staying in the fight after the cameras leave, listening to the people affected, lifting up their voices, and making the case for their needs again, and again, and again, until a promise becomes a program and the program gets results.

There are many important lessons worth learning from 9/11. This is one of them: Government should be about producing results for people. It’s not enough to give an inspiring speech from atop a pile of debris (or, 25 years later, to rile people up on social media). Our leaders need to level with people, tell them the truth, and follow through with actual results that make a difference in their lives. Unfortunately, a quarter century after 9/11, this kind of patient, persistent approach to solving problems has fallen out of fashion in Washington.

The Trump administration does not seem to have learned any lessons at all from 9/11. The president’s penchant for denying obvious truths is well known, whether it’s harmless facts such as the size of the crowd at his inauguration or deadly serious matters like the safety and efficacy of vaccines. But he fired or muzzled inspectors general across the government, so we’re unlikely to get a report calling out his lies the way the EPA IG did for the Bush administration on air quality in New York.

The Trump administration barely pretends to care about whether government delivers results for Americans, other than tax cuts for the wealthy and sweetheart deals for friends of the president. DOGE took a chainsaw to programs that provide lifesaving assistance to people across the country and the world without a second thought. It was shocking, but not surprising, to see the administration gut the World Trade Center Health Program, even as the need has grown only more urgent.

Nearly 29,000 civilian survivors have now been diagnosed with cancer linked to their exposure. Recent data from the WTCHP show that, for the first time, cancer cases among people who lived, worked, or went to school near Ground Zero have surpassed those among first responders who worked there. And the toll on first responders remains staggering: Just this month, the FDNY released a report finding that more than 12,000 firefighters have been certified with a 9/11-related condition, nearly a quarter of them have been diagnosed with cancer, and more than 600 have died from related illnesses.

Every one of these survivors deserves the care our government promised. Instead, the Trump administration cut nearly 20 percent of the WTCHP’s staff and fired its longtime leader, John Howard. As a result, men and women who served their fellow New Yorkers in our darkest hour are now being abandoned in theirs.

For the Trump administration, this is all business as usual. When measles began spreading in West Texas last year, the Trump administration cut staff at the CDC and sent mixed messages about the value of vaccination and treatment. Texas had more than 750 cases, more than 90 hospitalizations, and two deaths—the first U.S. measles deaths in a decade.

We saw the same thing with lead poisoning. Last year, the CDC eliminated its Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention branch, firing the entire 26-person team. The timing could hardly have been worse. Milwaukee was confronting widespread lead hazards in its public schools and had asked the CDC for help. City health officials had relied on the federal experts to help determine which children should be tested and how to respond to the exposure. After the firings, the CDC told Milwaukee that, because of the “complete loss” of its lead program, it could no longer provide that assistance. (The cuts were so egregious that the program was eventually reinstated.)

Does anyone think the plight of those kids will keep President Trump up at night? Will the dinner crowd enjoying the rarefied air at Mar-a-Lago spare even a passing thought for the firefighters, police officers, and construction workers who got sick breathing poison air at Ground Zero? They might as well be invisible.

When Trump is out of office—and there will come a time when he is out of office—Democrats and principled Republicans alike will have to rebuild the federal government and our democracy. We’ll have the chance to reconstruct entire agencies from the ground up. When that time comes, we should remember what the long tail of 9/11 has taught us: Policy must be about people. Americans who need help don’t care about ideology or who gets credit. They care whether government delivers results. So sweat the details, do the work that makes a difference in people’s lives, and stay with it until the job is done. Progress requires both urgency and perseverance. Sometimes you have to move fast. Sometimes you have to work patiently, step-by-step. You always have to put people first.

[From the September 2021 issue: What Bobby McIlvaine left behind]

For everything that went wrong in New York after 9/11, I’m proud of what went right. The roughly $20 billion in federal assistance for New York paid for the unglamorous work of recovery: debris removal, infrastructure, transportation, housing, and economic revitalization. Over time, it helped transform Lower Manhattan from a devastated financial district into a thriving neighborhood. In 2001, about 33,000 people lived downtown. Today, more than 70,000 people do.

Elizabeth Berger, the mom of two who asked the Senate subcommittee if the air in her neighborhood was safe to breathe, was a driving force for that recovery. She spent the years after 9/11 fighting for a Lower Manhattan that was a “round-the-clock community” to raise a family and build a future. Sadly, she did not live to see what it is today. Berger died of pancreatic cancer in 2013, at 53.

In the weeks and months after 9/11, the country united behind the words Never forget. Twenty-five years after that terrible day, we must make sure that Never forget remains not just a slogan but a solemn promise. That we remember not just the tragedy and the rebuilding, but the people whose lives were changed forever.

I think of people like Debbie St. John, who was brought to the hospital as a Jane Doe after falling debris crushed her legs on 9/11. When I first met her, she told me she was determined to dance at her wedding, but doctors weren’t sure she would survive, much less walk again. I followed her recovery through the years, the setbacks and surgeries. I got to know her devoted fiancé, Gregory. And I was there, years later, at their wedding, and watched Debbie walk down the aisle and dance in Gregory’s arms. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. There was hope and joy after suffering and loss, but it didn’t come from looking away from the hard things. It came from looking straight at the devastation and doing the long, hard work of healing.

*Image Sources: Viorel Florescu / Newsday RM / Getty; Jim Watson / Getty; David Surowiecki / Getty; Spencer Platt / Getty; Charles Phelps Cushing / ClassicStock / Getty

What Bush Understood That Trump Doesn’t

2026-09-10T16:48:08-04:00

The current New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has affronted one of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani, by taking the inflammatory step of deciding to attend the city’s 9/11 commemoration. “It offends me,” Giuliani proclaimed earlier this week on Newsmax.

One might suspect that the nature of Mamdani’s offense lay in his being a politician who is associating himself with a day that Giuliani prefers to associate with Giuliani. But the former mayor proceeded to lay out a much darker rationale. “They’re taking over certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe. They have every desire to take us over. This is not ‘they want to be just another religion,’” he said of Muslims. “Mamdani is a clear, a clear supporter of that. All of the Muslims he supports are murderers!”

Like many of Giuliani’s utterances, this one has no connection to reality. Yet his assertion that Mamdani harbors some secret desire to conquer the United States in the name of Islam, that his religion is the skeleton key to a web of sinister motivations, is now treated on the right as almost banal. A quarter century after 9/11, delirious anti-Muslim bigotry is almost routine in the political rhetoric of many conservatives.

The conventional account of Donald Trump’s political career explains his rise to power as a populist revolt against Republican orthodoxy. The GOP elite had lost touch with their base by endorsing immigration reform, free trade, or forever wars in the Middle East, which created an opening that Trump exploited.

[Read: What the Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani reveal]

That story is largely true, but it misses an important issue. The President George W. Bush–era Republican Party after 9/11 insisted that the United States was at war not with a religion but with an idea. America opposed radical Islamism, not Islam. We stood for freedom as a universal human principle.

Not all voters on the right accepted this formulation. Some believed that the United States was at war with Islam itself. By 2007, conservative Republicans viewed Islam negatively by a margin of more than 30 points; Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans all held net-favorable views. Ten years later, nearly 80 percent of Republicans believed that the values of Islam were at odds with American values. One of the most important and ominous notions that Trump has seized upon and legitimized is that Muslims are inherently un-American.

Anti-Muslim sentiment sprang up organically in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but Bush’s forceful defense of pluralism confined it to the rantings of Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and other fringe reactionaries. After Coulter called on the United States in 2001 to “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” National Review dropped her column. As Bush passed from the scene and was replaced by Barack Obama, some right-wing-outrage entrepreneurs recognized an opportunity to redefine the War on Terror as a war against Islam.

Trump himself was among the first to see the opening. In 2010, a right-wing backlash arose in opposition to a proposal for a Muslim cultural center, modeled on the YMCA or a Jewish community center, in downtown New York. The most hysterical opponents depicted the center, which planned to call itself Park51, as a “victory mosque” celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center. Other conservatives merely insisted that it was “insensitive” for Muslim Americans to open a center in the general neighborhood of Ground Zero.

Trump inserted himself into the controversy, proposing that he purchase the property to halt construction on the putatively offensive site. In his offer letter (which, naturally, he made public), Trump called it a “very serious, inflammatory, and highly divisive situation that is destined, in my opinion, to only get worse.” David Letterman asked him, “Does this, in fact, suggest that we are officially at war with Muslims?” Trump, who was still in the formative stage of his transition from celebrity to right-wing rabble-rouser, replied, “Well, somebody knocked down the World Trade Center.” He later added, “Somebody’s blowing us up. Somebody’s blowing up buildings, and somebody’s doing lots of bad stuff.”

Trump’s first campaign was pockmarked with undisguised bigotry against Muslims. He falsely claimed that Muslims in New Jersey had cheered the 9/11 attacks en masse, and he called for surveillance of mosques, a database of Muslims in America, and a ban on Muslims entering the United States. He associated the sitting president with Islam by incessantly using his middle name.

He has continued to attack Muslims as disloyal or un-American. He falsely claimed that Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Democrat, had praised al-Qaeda, and he demanded that she and Reprepresentative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, both of whom are U.S. citizens, be sent “back from where they came.” He insinuated that Mamdani has no right to reside in the United States: “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally.”

The through line connecting these smears is the assumption that Muslims cannot be Americans, even if they arrive legally, even if they are born here. Trump has made this point explicitly and told Sean Hannity in 2016, “Assimilation has been very hard. It’s almost—I won’t say nonexistent, but it gets to be pretty close. And I’m talking about second- and third-generation. They come—they don’t—for some reason, there’s no real assimilation.”

This sort of rhetoric has grown so common that episodes such as the uproar against Mamdani have come to feel like normal politics, rather than paranoia and rank discrimination. The New York Post alone has published at least eight stories (as of press time) hyping the Giuliani-fueled controversy.

Some relatives of 9/11 victims have claimed that Mamdani’s presence at the observance would be a distraction (even though mayoral attendance has been a regular feature throughout its existence). Others have depicted their anger as a protest against Mamdani’s current agenda. “It’s not about his religion or where he came from. It’s about the policies he has today,” one explained. Is it the plan for free buses? The pied-à-terre tax?

[Asma Khalid: Islamophobia has corroded American values]

That Mamdani wishes to attend the ceremony and has denounced the 9/11 attacks as heinous terrorism ought to serve as satisfactory evidence that, whatever shortcomings he may have, he is not a supporter of al-Qaeda. Indeed, it might well be offensive if Mamdani did not want to attend the ceremony. The New York Post would need to publish phone-book-size editions to convey its full outrage.

The logic of Islamophobia rejects out of hand that it is possible for Mamdani to oppose terrorism. 9/11 was, in this view, a battle in a war against Islam, so he is, by dint of his faith, the enemy. Thus, his desire to commemorate the tragedy, like Muslims’ desire to have a YMCA of their own in New York City, must be understood as revealing hidden malevolence.

If you had asked Bush after 9/11 to imagine a future within his lifetime in which New York had a Muslim mayor who would join the city in mourning the attacks, he’d surely have considered it the ultimate vindication of the ideals he sought to foster. But Republicans have rejected Bush’s understanding of 9/11 and its meaning in favor of Trump’s.

The events of the past decade, and especially the past six months, have clarified that the primary grounds for this repudiation does not seem to be Trump’s abhorrence for wars of choice in the Middle East. It is that Bush denied and suppressed contempt for Muslims, while Trump has honored and nurtured this hatred.

*Image sources: Christy Bowe / Getty; Jim WATSON / AFP / Getty; Michael M. Santiago / Getty; Chip Somodevilla / Getty.

The Thrill of Wanting AI to Destroy the World

2026-09-10T14:35:44-04:00

The sky streaked orange and red as my mother drove us home to Albuquerque through the Tijeras Pass, which separates the Sandia Mountains to the north from the Manzanos to the south. “Look out for mushroom clouds,” my father said to her. “If you see them, turn around.”

He did this every time we returned to town from the rugged canyon to the east, but the sunsets always egged him on. According to legend, a part of the Manzanos, whose foothills descend into Kirtland Air Force Base and then Sandia National Laboratories, had been hollowed out to hold live nuclear warheads. My father insisted that, in the event of a nuclear attack, Albuquerque was slated to receive two bombs from the sky, one each for these secret government sites. He delivered this information as if it were a law of physics or the known terms of an international treaty. I was a child, so I took it as such, staring bug-eyed at the red sky that might evaporate me.

Nearly two decades later, I looked up at the clear blue one above Los Angeles from behind the wheel of my own car, worried about different missiles. I had gone into my dot-com job early, and I was the only one there when the planes hit the Twin Towers. The internet, barely functional on a good day, broke completely; to listen to the news, I had to turn on a transistor radio that someone had left in their cubicle. We sent everyone home early that morning. I recalled an article published a handful of years earlier, just before the stark-white, cliffside Getty Center opened in Brentwood. The writer had theorized that the Getty might finally give Los Angeles a monument worthy of destruction in an alien attack. (Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, released the previous year, had settled for the Library Tower, a bland downtown high-rise.)

Nuclear war was a massive threat, and a real one. During the Cold War, every morning the sun rose under the shadow of destruction. Good and evil were clear, or seemed so. That clarity offered a perverse comfort. By September 11, 2001, the Cold War had been over for more than a decade, and society longed for a coherent enemy to oppose—one that might offer a similar clarity. The indisputable fact of the attacks—thousands of people dead, symbols of American culture destroyed—gave birth to a similar, if less true and more perverted, version of imminent apocalypse. As before, anyone on the street might be the enemy. But now, also, every airliner and any envelope might be a weapon.

I was already pondering these worn fantasies this week, as the 25th anniversary of 9/11 was looming, when Jacob Coxon wrote a social-media post about quitting his job at Anthropic because AI technology would, in his estimation, “kill us all by the end of the decade.” The sentiment takes up unfinished business; ruination has been building up in contemporary culture. There was a time—one longer than you probably remember—when the once-novel coronavirus also felt like The End. During the same pandemic, the 75th anniversary of the Cold War’s apocalyptic beginning—a controlled explosion at Trinity, 100 miles south of Kirtland—took place. Back in 1945, the physicist Edward Teller worried that the bomb might ignite the atmosphere and destroy all life on Earth.

[Ian Bogost: A bomb in the desert]

This fantasy—of the end of the world, and of being present for it—is among the most powerful emblems of the 20th century. The atomic bomb inaugurated it, and nuclear armaments remain the reference technology for apocalyptic threat and reverie. We believe in the fantasy, and pine for it, because nothing feels better than the belief that you might witness the conclusion of humankind.

The threat of annihilation from nuclear weapons is simple and easy to explain. For one part, a single warhead can level an entire city. For another, the mere launch of a single missile all but assures the release of all of them. Likewise, the AI superintelligence of the Terminator films is both straightforward and obviously threatening. Skeleton-like metal robots want only to destroy humanity. Real AI is not so straightforward. I used it on the morning of Coxon’s post to help me nail down the quantity of various sugars I would use in a gelato recipe. By the afternoon, it had undergone a costume change, into the angel of death.

The nature of AI’s extinction threat is unclear and second-order. In an interview with Wired, Coxon struggled to say exactly how AI might bring about the end of civilization. “The classic example is, like, synthesizing a new virus or taking down critical infrastructure by doing some sort of hacking spree,” Coxon said, before admitting that the “latter might be less likely to kill literally everyone.” Quickly, critiques began to arrive. Belief in the unfettered power of AI seemed to rely on prior faith in AI’s unfettered power. A former Stanford doctoral student in AI safety said that he had dropped out of the program because his colleagues couldn’t prove that existential risk matters. And then, elsewhere, evidence of purity: Coxon, Axios reported, had given up his valuable Anthropic equity by quitting (although he retained stock in his prior employer, OpenAI).

Coxon is less a whistleblower than a poster; he posted a fairly common sentiment that just happened to catch wind. It’s the anniversary of 9/11. OpenAI just claimed to have solved an intractable problem in mathematics. That company and Anthropic, where Coxon worked, are racing to multitrillion-dollar IPOs. An ongoing cultural battle about the moral and aesthetic vice of AI recently turned in on itself, when the journalist Kelsey Piper accused writers who mistrust Pangram, an AI-detection tool, of essentially trying to hide their own clandestine uses of AI. As I write this, Coxon’s post has been seen more than 150 million times, a number equal to roughly 2 percent of the global population.

The situation might feel unsettling, validating, preposterous, or even stupid, depending on your perspective. AI companies and proponents have an incentive to make the technology seem powerful, even threatening, because power gives rise to profit. AI detractors have reason to take the AI-extinction threat seriously as evidence that those in charge are irresponsible and reprobate. During the Cold War, cloak-and-dagger paranoia was spread by spies, agents of statecraft, confidants, whistleblowers, and journalists—either as truth to power or as crackpot conspiracy theories. But today, in the internet age, conspiracy theories are everyone’s primary method of exchange.

[Adam Becker: The useful idiots of AI doomsaying]

Coxon’s post fell into the conspiratorial pit. Is he even real? Anthropic seems to have indirectly confirmed his employment, but Coxon doesn’t appear to have a LinkedIn page, a curiosity in the tech industry. Wikipedia editors proposed deleting a page about him on the grounds that “the guy exists, but that’s about it. He has not done a single notable thing otherwise.” The New York Times journalist Mike Isaac scratched his chin at the fact that Coxon had gone to The Wall Street Journal and Fox News first. On X, Parker Thayer posted a lengthy conjecture that the whole affair amounts to a “sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion.”

Information’s tendency to spread harmfully, like disease—the original meaning of media “virality,” as Douglas Rushkoff defined it in the years between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror—facilitates further spread. Whether the threat Coxon has in mind is likely or even lucid is not important. Instead, the threat’s enticement has proved so lurid that people feel compelled to embrace it.

That is different from saying that there is no threat. For example, the author Annie Jacobsen noted that the “superhuman system that can hack anything” that Coxon described could, in theory, hack the labs that store dangerous biological agents. If “what’s inside gets released,” Jacobsen wrote, “it’s goodbye humans.”

This example is both disturbing and at least thinkable. Its possibility relies not on superhuman intelligence, really, but on something far more ordinary: Everything whatsoever now runs on internet-connected computer software. And AI is a kind of software that can make and control other software, especially over a network. It feels silly and embarrassing to conclude, correctly, that people have constructed such a fragile, slapdash infrastructure of computer-controlled systems that either a dumb or a smart rogue agent could blow it all up. Yet even Jacobsen’s scenario poses questions that a high-level, post-size tizzy does not answer, including precisely what sequence of synchronized events among computers, people, architecture, equipment, and other entities would result in “goodbye humans.”

Thinking of AI as a dangerous superintelligence capable of eradicating civilization is much more fulfilling than pondering the threat of a cluster of haphazard computer programs. We will probably never reclaim, if that is the right word for it, the lucidity of threat we felt at the Cold War’s climax. We do seem to long for that clarity, and the yearning for it has inspired us to patch back together some of its structure. The most satisfying dream of humankind is to be alive to witness its end. “I caused it” and “I prevented it” and “I tried to warn you” amount to equally appealing versions of that fantasy. Even “I posted about it” feels pretty good.

The MAGA Movement Is Splintering Without Charlie Kirk

2026-09-10T17:58:00-04:00

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

When Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, many of his allies on the right memorialized him as a hero of free speech and the founder of an enduring political movement. Critics on the left tended to emphasize his long history of offensive remarks and dismiss him as little more than a troll.

With a year of distance, neither view appears complete. Since his death, the MAGA movement has stumbled: Its factions are bickering, and Republicans are facing potentially disastrous midterm elections. President Trump seems disconnected from his base and reality. The current plight points to Kirk’s rare ability as a political node, someone who united otherwise disparate forces under one umbrella—and also to how much the movement depended on Kirk personally.

Just how fragile a peace Kirk had managed to keep became clear three months after his killing, at an annual conference of Turning Point USA, the organization he’d co-founded. At the summit, feuding parties each tried to claim Kirk’s endorsement of their views. Ben Shapiro, the Daily Wire impresario, used the occasion to blast the broadcaster Tucker Carlson for conducting softball interviews with anti-Semites and other white supremacists. Citing Kirk’s stiff-arming of the Hitler-admiring influencer Nick Fuentes, whose followers were sometimes ejected from Turning Point events, Shapiro assailed Carlson for giving Fuentes a platform. Carlson mounted a counterattack in that evening’s keynote speech, arguing that it was Shapiro who was betraying Kirk’s commitment to open debate.

These conflicts among leading right-wing figures have continued ever since. Kirk’s widow, Erika, now leads Turning Point and is well-regarded, but she does not seem to have the muscle that her husband did to quell conflicts. Carlson has become a furious critic of Trump and has vowed to create a rival political movement (although his ability to follow through is in question). Candace Owens, another prominent media personality, has become a proponent of conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death and has baselessly suggested at various times that the Israeli or French governments or “Egyptians” were involved. Fuentes has become a more influential commentator, but overall, MAGA media figures are seeing splintering audiences.

No movement leader is as important as Trump, but the president has also had a tumultuous year. He is obsessed with building a ballroom at the White House—in part as a legacy project, but also perhaps because Kirk’s assassination and the attempts on his own life have instilled an understandable sense of paranoia that makes having a secure space at his residence feel imperative. As Trump has become more cloistered and withdrawn from public appearances, he has lost touch with his base, and he is pursuing an unpopular long-term war in Iran that betrays his campaign platform and writing off voters’ concerns about the economy and inflation.

These dynamics, along with the natural pendulum swing against the sitting president’s party in midterm elections, mean that Republicans have bleak expectations for November. Not only are Democrats leading in polls of the generic House ballot and gaining in several Senate forecasts, but GOP voters are less enthusiastic than their Democratic counterparts. The problems are particularly acute among young voters. Although that group is typically heavily Democratic, Trump nearly matched Kamala Harris’s showing with the demographic in 2024, for which Turning Point received a great deal of credit. Today, however, young voters disapprove of Trump by wide margins—even greater than the general population. Young people who voted for Trump are also more likely to regret their vote than older ones, a recent Navigator poll found. Young men have turned against the president more than almost any other group has.

What’s notable is that this drop in support and enthusiasm for Trump and Republicans comes at the same time that Turning Point is growing. As Reuters reported today, the organization has expanded since Kirk’s death, especially on campuses, but the people flocking to these chapters aren’t uniformly loyal to Trump. Turning Point could yet be an important presence in the midterms. The group was central to the Trump campaign’s plan for voter turnout in the 2024 election, helping deliver the president his first popular-vote victory among his three tries. Wired reports that Turning Point once again plans to spend large sums on field operations from now until the midterms.

Kirk’s legacy on free speech and debate also remains up for grabs. As I wrote shortly after the assassination, an ironic phenomenon was emerging in which Kirk was being praised for his commitment to open discourse at the same time that right-wing figures were attempting to stifle any criticism of him. Some professors who were fired or punished in that period have since been reinstated or paid damages, but Trump and his allies have abandoned even a perfunctory commitment to free speech.

Many of the tensions on display today have always been present in the MAGA movement. Trumpism is a big tent; it includes populists and plutocrats, isolationists and interventionists, and a dozen more dyads. The seams would inevitably have become visible at some point, but in retrospect, Kirk appears to have helped stave that off by maintaining connections across many factions and the sway to keep figures such as Fuentes outside. In his absence, the conflicts have come into the open.

Related:

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Today’s News

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ruling that blocked Missouri from using a Republican-backed congressional map for the November midterm elections, leaving the state’s 2022 map in place. The Missouri Supreme Court had ruled that the new map could not take effect until voters approved it in a statewide referendum.
Iran-backed Houthi fighters captured the Yemeni port city of Mocha, expanding their control along the Red Sea coast. The advance brings the group closer to controlling the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a major shipping channel.
The Trump administration plans to send $500 checks to about 1 million Affordable Care Act enrollees in 30 states. The payments are expected to begin next month, and whether they require congressional approval remains unclear.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Tennis was not always regarded as the intense and athletic sport that it is, Jake Lundberg writes. He combed through The Atlantic’s archives to explore how the perception of the game has evolved.

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Evening Read

Lonnie Bunch gives a tour of the future National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2014. J.M. Eddins Jr. / Tribune News Service / Getty

What Lonnie Bunch Told Me

By Clint Smith

Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, was already slipping into the past tense when we walked together through the National Museum of American History in February.

Occasionally, as we stood before an exhibit, he’d discuss his role leading the largest museum system in the world as though he had already stepped away. Even then, there wasn’t a question of if he would retire soon, but how soon. He spoke longingly of a future life in which he took fewer flights, slept in fewer hotels, spent more time with his grandchildren. He desperately wanted more time to write. He told me he still has more books in him. Now he will get the time.

Read the full article.

What Makes Tennis One of the Greatest Games

2026-09-10T17:40:00-04:00

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

The American tennis player Ben Shelton blasted a 146-mile-an-hour ace past the Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz at 3:33 a.m. yesterday. It was the final shot of a U.S. Open quarterfinal match that had begun 4 hours and 28 minutes before, during which the two men contested five sets, two tiebreakers, and many points so long and improbable that they made the television announcers giggle with delight. When it was done, Shelton and Alcaraz embraced warmly at the net, as if in mutual appreciation for having shared something so grand. The contest, which Shelton afterward described as a “war,” was an emphatic affirmation of a claim made by Arthur Stanwood Pier in The Atlantic 123 years ago: that tennis “is entitled to the place of supremacy among games.”

If the case for this assertion is clear today, it was perhaps less obvious in 1903, when the question of which sport should hold such a title was no small matter among men—particularly elite white men—who spent a good deal of time discussing the import of athletics and manliness. Tennis, no matter how much Pier insisted, usually did not rate a mention at all.

Far from being only amusements or diversions then, sports were considered serious undertakings that had the job of making men men and rescuing the nation from softness and degeneracy. These contests, the thinking went, offered a way—short of participating in actual warfare—to develop martial virtues, cultivate strength, and channel aggression. The value of a sport, Pier noted in his essay, was not measured so much “by the physical exercise it necessitates, as by the satisfaction and outlet it gives to the spirit of combat that troubles us.”

By this measure, football—dangerous and deliberately martial in character—seemed to have been the most valuable game. Already firmly established at the turn of the century as a popular spectacle and staple of American collegiate life, the sport appeared to offer an ideal arena for masculinity, with its inherent risks and demand for coordinated action. “Every manly man must have a certain amount of courage, physical and mental,” the famed University of Michigan coach Fielding H. Yost wrote in 1905, “and no football player can long be without it.” The sport’s most sanguine supporters embraced the game’s violence as a precondition to cultivating manly men, even at the cost of serious injury or death. Two years after the 1894 Harvard-Yale game—the so-called Springfield Massacre that left four men seriously hurt and led to a temporary suspension of the rivalry—Senator Henry Cabot Lodge defended such contests in a speech at Harvard’s commencement. He minced no words, using the imperialist and anti-immigrant language underlying much athletic talk of the moment: “The time given to athletic contests and the injuries incurred on the playing field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world conquerors.”

Tennis—genteel, clubby, and historically played by women as well as men—seemed unlikely to do such work. As Robert D. Osborn, an early authority on the game, wrote in 1881, it was a sport of “exceeding delight,” particularly when played in what he described as its ideal conditions. “The scene should be laid in a well-kept garden lawn. There should be a bright warm sun overhead, and just sufficient breeze whispering through the trees and stirring the petals of the flowers to prevent the day from being sultry,” Osborn wrote. “Near at hand, under the cool shadow of a tree, there should be strawberries and cream.” This seemed a decidedly peaceful game—one for people who were taking a rest after conquering the world, as opposed to getting ready to do so.

In making his case for tennis in The Atlantic, Pier confessed that the risks of the game were nothing like those of football. The inherent dangers were fewer, the injuries less “heroic.” But perhaps the calm of tennis was a good thing. Pier, a student at Harvard in the 1890s, was possibly in attendance for the speech in which Lodge justified the injuries that had occurred during football games. Without calling out the senator directly, Pier wondered whether such perils were necessary: What if the “injuries and deaths that sometimes take place in our rougher sports should not be viewed as glorifying these forms of contest” but instead as “deplorable calamities”?

Tennis offered another way to make men of strength and vigor while allowing them to remain gentlemen with their bodies fully intact. Its ample physical demands—the game is “ardent, not phlegmatic,” Pier assured—were matched by an intellectual and psychological challenge. Pier tried to convey this complexity by way of lengthy descriptions of match play. Hemingway on bullfighting it was not, but something deeper emerged from the depiction. The purpose of the sport was to develop attributes of peace rather than war: A “steadfastness of aim and purpose, a better temper, and a kinder heart; here, through striving with your fellow man, you may learn to love him,” Pier wrote. This was a different kind of strength and vigor, one that included physical prowess but ultimately went beyond it.

Dancing around the court the other night, Shelton and Alcaraz were playing a game that would’ve been barely recognizable to Pier in its speed and power. (Their attire would surely have made him blush.) But the subtle graces of the “lawn tennis” Pier wished to promote were still there, in the complex calculations and fluid coordination that clinched each point. Watch Shelton’s slide into a shot at the baseline, or the elegant arc of Coco Gauff’s swing as she defeated Mirra Andreeva in three sets during yesterday’s women’s quarterfinal. For all of the grand claims made about the purpose of sports, perhaps Pier’s tribute to tennis landed on the simplest point of all: “Is not this one of life’s priceless pleasures?”

The Election Deniers’ Long Game

2026-09-10T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 6:01 p.m. ET on September 10, 2026

In the anxious days following President Trump’s 2020 election loss—before his supporters stormed the Capitol, before his vengeful return to the White House, before the mass pardons for cop beaters—some Republican figures sought to cast his attempt to overturn the results as nothing more than a coping mechanism.

Trump was merely blowing off steam, people close to the president told me and other reporters. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” one asked, suggesting that in the end, his antics would amount to no more than a footnote in the annals of presidential history.

The January 6 insurrection a few weeks later would, of course, turn those predictions into punch lines. Nearly six years on, they look worse still: The election denialism that inspired Trump’s MAGA loyalists to attack the Capitol has metastasized into an animating feature of Republican Party politics.

Trump himself remains at the forefront of this movement. Since returning to office, he has insisted that American elections are “rigged” against the GOP, fired Democratic election officials, threatened to “take over” voting across the country, and issued executive orders that would tightly restrict the vote. The president’s most far-reaching efforts have largely been blocked by the courts or Congress, at least so far. As in 2020, Trump in fact has little legal authority to interfere with elections, and this has given comfort to many Americans.

But as November approaches, the most serious threats posed to free and fair elections no longer come from the White House itself. Instead, they are local, where much of the power over elections actually resides, and they stem from the continuing absorption of Trump’s Big Lie into our political culture. In statehouses and county offices, a cohort of election deniers has taken control of significant parts of the nation’s electoral infrastructure. Some of its members have replaced the officials and legislators who rejected Trump’s push to corrupt the 2020 race. A grassroots movement of Big Lie believers has meanwhile been organized and trained as poll workers or informal observers to sound alarms over local elections they deem suspect in any way.

The November elections represent something new in American politics: For the first time, a coalition of partners at the local, state, and federal levels is ready to pull off the kind of election heist that eluded the president back in 2020. At the very least, the midterms could serve as a trial run for this coalition ahead of the 2028 presidential race, when much of Trump’s legacy will be at stake.

[Listen: The election deniers are in charge now]

Nowhere is the threat of election subversion more evident than in Georgia, the state Trump lost by the slimmest margin in 2020 and the site of his most brazen efforts to overturn the results. Trump’s hourlong phone call on January 2, 2021, urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse his loss is the most famous example, but hardly the only one. By the time of that call, the president and his allies had spent weeks pressing local lawmakers and election officials to throw out votes, delay the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, and lay the groundwork for an administrative coup. On Thanksgiving Day, Trump had called Raffensperger an “enemy of the people” and falsely accused him of engaging in illegal election practices. The secretary of state’s security had to be beefed up—as did that of his colleague Gabriel Sterling, then–Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, and others—following death threats. The Fulton County poll workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss were publicly accused by Trump-campaign allies of pulling fake ballots from suitcases to help Biden, a false allegation that elicited more death threats.

In the end, the system warped but did not break under the weight of the president’s pressure. Georgia’s election officials did their job, affirmed the integrity of the vote, and followed the law.

But the ranks of Republican officials in Georgia who resisted Trump’s election-fraud lies have thinned significantly since 2020. Duncan is gone, and Sterling will leave the Secretary of State’s Office before the midterms. Raffensperger is a lame duck whose power over the state’s electoral apparatus is fading. In 2024, he was ousted from the state election board he had once chaired. In May, he lost a long-shot bid for governor, garnering just 15 percent of the vote in the GOP primary.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his colleague Gabriel Sterling testified before the House January 6 committee about Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.(Michael Reynolds / Getty)

The state election board, which sets voting policy for all of Georgia, is now dominated by Trump acolytes. Salleigh Grubbs is one example. Prior to 2020, she had no role in government and had shown little interest in politics, but then, that year, she became animated by rumors that Democrats were plotting to steal the state from Trump. Upon hearing from a friend that a large truck from a paper-shredding company was parked outside a Cobb County events center a day after a statewide recount had occurred there, she sped over in her Toyota Venza. She took videos of the truck and pursued it when it left, later likening the action to a scene in Thelma and Louise. The truck had merely been hauling away empty ballot envelopes and other trash, but Grubbs remained convinced that election fraud had happened in broad daylight. She decided to get more involved, and won a campaign to become chair of the Republican Party in Cobb County in 2021, then worked her way up to an appointment to the board in January.

Across the state, other Republicans with a new view of elections were making similar journeys. Ben Johnson, a tech entrepreneur who became the chair of Spalding County’s election board in 2021, has spread QAnon conspiracy theories, reportedly called Biden a pedophile, and asserted numerous times that fraud played a role in the 2020 election. Danny Bartlett, the chair of the Ware County election board since 2023, recently posted an image of Joseph Stalin on Substack, along with his apocryphal quote “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.”

On the five-person state election board, Grubbs joined Janice Johnston, a retired doctor who had become obsessed with election policy after the 2020 race, and Janelle King, a Republican media personality who had been appointed to the board in 2024. That year, King and Johnston had pushed for rule changes that would have given Trump more opportunities to challenge the results if he lost the state to Kamala Harris. During an August 2024 campaign rally in Atlanta, Trump singled out the right-wing members of the board, heralding them as “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” Johnston later resigned but was replaced by another MAGA Republican, ensuring that three of the five seats on the board would still be held by Trump allies.

Since 2021, the board has been granted (or, in some cases, seized) broad powers over Georgia’s voting process, including the authority to assume control of elections in counties it deems to be administering the vote poorly. King has not ruled out the idea of the board taking over election administration in Fulton County, home to Atlanta and the epicenter of the state’s Democratic base. The question in Georgia today is less whether its current officials could resist Trump’s pressure again, and more what some of them might do on their own, without any presidential pressure at all.

When the FBI raided a Fulton County election warehouse in January, seeking evidence of fraud in the 2020 vote, it cited the work of the state election board in its search-warrant affidavit. Johnston, King, and Grubbs filed an amicus brief in support of the operation.

John Fervier, the board’s chair and a lifelong Republican, has sometimes found himself siding with the board’s lone Democrat to try to rein in the right-wing contingent, though many of his efforts have been futile. “Our board has at times gotten political when it shouldn’t be political,” he told me, carefully, in May. He said he was exasperated by what appeared to be an endless crusade by politicians to validate the president’s claims about his loss to Biden. “These people want to keep pointing back to 2020, and my thing is, to what end? ”

We met inside the same Fulton County election warehouse that FBI agents had entered months earlier, wearing tactical vests and carting away more than 650 boxes of ballots and other materials. While they blocked off the entrance with crime-scene tape and trawled the cavernous 600,000-square-foot building for evidence, Grubbs was outside on a video call with Steve Bannon for an episode of his War Room podcast. She referred to the moment as “surreal” and “wonderful,” as election-denying activists posed for photos nearby. Indoors, Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, watched over the scene. Trump later spoke by phone with the agents who had conducted the raid, congratulating them on a job well done.

The ultimate goal of the operation, and of all the theatricality surrounding it, seems fairly clear. The seizure itself likely caused more Americans to mistrust the 2020 result. It may have salved Trump’s ego. Any scrap of evidence that can be marshaled to suggest wrongdoing or fraud, however weak, will presumably be made public and spun. And that, in turn, may soften more Americans to the idea that election fraud is a real and widespread problem—ironically making the subversion of the vote easier to achieve.

Even in Fulton County, election deniers have a significant ally. For the past two and a half years, Julie Adams has been a Republican appointee on the county’s election board. In the first months of her tenure, she declined to vote to certify any of the results of the state’s 2024 primary contests. There was no actual evidence of irregularities (and Trump had won the GOP presidential primary), but Adams wanted to further investigate. She was outvoted by the rest of the board, which by law has little discretion in validating the results. Still, Adams (who did not respond to my requests for an interview) has used her post as a public official to challenge the validity of Fulton’s voting process and has encouraged allies on other boards to do the same.

Adams also serves as a regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, a nationwide organization of election-denying activists that appears ready to play a significant role in the midterms and the 2028 presidential election. In at least one private call with members of EIN, she has discussed changing state laws to give local officials more leeway to delay or reject certification of races. The certification of election results by local officials has traditionally happened without controversy, but Trump’s 2020 push to overturn his loss transformed this normally routine process into a new political battleground. Certification is a key means by which vote totals are finalized, and increasing the discretion of everyone involved would multiply the opportunities to raise fraud claims. The Election Integrity Network has been a major proponent of greater discretion—and in recent races, several like-minded election officials in various states have voted to withhold or delay the certification of results.

Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who aided Trump’s bid to challenge the 2020 results, founded EIN in 2021. It now has affiliates in at least 30 states, including every presidential battleground, and its volunteers are regularly in touch with Republican officials. The organization, which recently registered as a tax-exempt nonprofit, has raised funds while doing little to hide its political motivations. In an April 2022 interview with the conservative radio host John Fredericks, Mitchell (who did not respond to my own request for an interview) adopted Trump’s language as she lambasted Democrats: “The only way they win is to cheat.”

EIN’s affiliates regularly attend state- and county-level election-board meetings, turning once-boring hearings about election administration—including issues such as ballot-drop-box locations and voter-roll maintenance—into contentious, standing-room-only affairs. EIN officials have also trained activists to serve as poll observers, encouraged volunteers to challenge voters’ eligibility, and advised members to lobby friendly politicians and go after lawmakers who oppose their efforts. This is a new phenomenon in the United States. In a system that relies on broad confidence in the sanctity of elections, the emergence of an organized infrastructure of activists focused on sowing doubt is creating fresh opportunities for malfeasance.

FBI agents raided a Fulton County, Georgia, election center in January, seeking evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. (Nicole Craine / The New York Times / Redux)

Armchair sleuths and election enthusiasts have had dramatic success ushering conspiracy theories from the internet onto the agendas of county boards and state legislatures. In Michigan, Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini has pursued an audit of the 2020 election and suggested in January that a significant number of noncitizens might be on the state’s voter rolls, a charge amplified by an official at the Justice Department despite flimsy evidence. Forlini, who came under scrutiny for hiring a January 6 protester to train poll workers, is now the Republican candidate for secretary of state, a role that could prove pivotal in the 2028 presidential election.

A 2024 investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy found more than 100 election deniers serving in election positions in eight swing states. There are likely more today. America’s highly decentralized elections have often been touted as a strength, making subversion by foreign adversaries or domestic cabals difficult. But many of the local-level positions that help administer our elections have low barriers to entry—the people who fill them are often appointed by local party bosses, county commissioners, or state election officials, with little public scrutiny. These roles are vulnerable to takeover by mass movements, especially those allied with bad actors or extreme partisans looking to upend the system from the inside.

The hyperpartisan politics of the past several years have only increased this vulnerability. In December 2024, for instance, just weeks before the Democrat Josh Stein was set to be sworn in as governor of North Carolina, Republican legislators transferred the authority to appoint the chair of each of the 100 county election boards and fill a majority of the state election board’s seats from the governor to the incoming Republican state auditor. Every one of these boards is now dominated by Republicans, several election deniers among them, and the state has recently moved to oust nonpartisan election supervisors, challenge the eligibility of thousands of voters, and make it easier to throw out mail-in votes. These moves have come as Democrats vie to flip a Senate seat in what could be a close race.

Many states, including Florida, Ohio, Kansas, and Utah, have passed laws that mirror those pushed by EIN—expanding voter-identification requirements, restricting mail-in voting, making it easier to remove people from voter rolls. Some of the provisions also resemble those in the federal SAVE America Act, championed by Trump, which if passed could disenfranchise, or at least confuse, millions of voters. The advocates who support these changes typically describe them as commonsense measures designed to enhance election security and root out fraud (even though evidence of actual voter fraud in modern U.S. elections is minuscule). Trump often dispenses with the pretense. Last year, he asserted that Republicans would “pick up 100 more seats” if his proposed bans on electronic voting machines and mail-in ballots were enacted.

Even if he takes no additional action before November, the president has already done a lot to interfere with the upcoming election. He has punished officials who validated the accuracy of the 2020 election, encouraged criminal investigations into Democratic lawmakers who are up for reelection, and sought to steer taxpayer dollars to compensate January 6 rioters and other supporters convicted of crimes linked to his Big Lie—actions that all seem more likely to foster election tampering than deter it. The Justice Department began demanding in May 2025 that states hand over their voter rolls (many have refused), and the White House has neutered federal offices responsible for preventing actual voter fraud.

And, of course, the president has used the bully pulpit like no other previous American leader to undermine confidence in the country’s elections. More than 100 times in the past year alone, Trump has claimed that the 2020 election was stolen, often likening American voting to that of a “Third World country.” (He does this apparently without considering what it implies about the integrity of his own two presidential victories.) His allies’ proposals to station immigration enforcers or military troops outside polling sites, which Trump has publicly declined to rule out, could have an impact even if the president does not make good on them. If voters fear chaos or intimidation, some will stay away from the polls.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, defended the president’s efforts. Trump, she told me in a statement, “is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.” She added that Trump was simply making good on a “campaign pledge” to millions of his supporters who agree with his views on elections.

Trump’s efforts to rile his base will no doubt intensify between now and Election Day. A substantial majority of Republicans already believe that the 2020 election was stolen, that large numbers of illegitimate ballots are cast by noncitizens, and that mail-in ballots are rife with fraud. Networks of local activists will be on the lookout for any developments—rumors, photos, stray comments by election officials—that might seem to undermine the integrity of the vote. As Election Day unfolds, some MAGA electoral officials are likely to join in, significantly raising the temperature.

It is possible that Trump might use the resulting clamor as a pretext to seize voting machines in key counties, breaking the chain of custody for lawful ballots and bringing the count—at least as a practical matter—under the control of his administration. In January, Trump told The New York Times that he regretted not doing so back in 2020. It is likewise possible that local or state officials could agree to “find” votes, or to discard them, though it would be difficult for any single official to change a ballot count without leaving an obvious trail. The system is too well built for that.

But decisively changing the vote count would not be the only—or even the most likely—path to an illegitimate result for a key Senate seat or a handful of seats in the House. Instead, the president’s allies might hope to prevail by fomenting enough distrust in the results to change the terrain on which the election is decided. Well-connected activists are prepared this year to push for extending certification deadlines and ordering independent vote audits. Trump and his allies have openly entertained proposals to use security concerns as a pretext for nationalizing elections. Once vote tallies are rendered as tainted or unknowable, partisan actors in state capitols and Congress could play an outsize role in determining the result.

How would all of this ultimately get resolved? The historians, election lawyers, and constitutional scholars I spoke with struggled to come up with straightforward predictions, in part because the country has never had such a confluence of election-denying officials in power at so many levels of government. Close or contested races for just a few House and Senate seats could leave control of Congress in doubt long after Election Day. Amid loud and continuing uncertainties, the Republican-led Congress could opt to exercise rarely used constitutional powers to override the voters’ will and choose the winners of contested races. The courts would likely have a say, but in an environment so thick with mistrust and confusion on fundamentally political matters, they might be more likely to defer to politicians. And the law is fairly clear that the House and Senate have the final authority in determining whom to seat in their chambers.

If this playbook sounds familiar, it is because Trump and his allies pursued the same tactics in 2020, ultimately failing to persuade Congress and the courts to supplant the vote. Today, their chances of succeeding would be far higher.

Many election officials hope for decisive results in November that leave little doubt about the will of the voters; landslides are hard to challenge, and even in swing states and districts, there may be a lot of them this year. Beyond that, key guardrails are still standing. Courts have largely frowned on Trump’s efforts to change voting rules. So far, Senate Republicans have opted against ripping up the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act.

In Georgia, Raffensperger will still be in office on Election Day. And across the country, elements of civil society are more prepared for disorder than they were six years ago. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has been holding regular training sessions so its members and volunteers can respond to attempts to tamper with the voting process, covering dozens of scenarios. David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me that an army of lawyers is standing ready to help local election administrators beat back pressure campaigns. “We’ve recruited over 10,000 attorneys all over the country who are willing to serve pro bono,” he said.

Still, it’s not hard to see which way the tide is flowing. “Under the best of situations and circumstances, preparing for an election is a very exacting process,” Mark Earley, the election supervisor in Leon County, Florida, told me, noting that administrative staff have to plan for weather disruptions, power outages, and any number of other possible events so that they can conduct a seamless and fully accountable process for voters. But now there’s more to prepare for: online mobs, and real ones, incited by rumors; potentially unreliable voices from the inside.

There’s more pressure on election workers too. Recently, the Trump administration sent a letter to each state, threatening to prosecute election officials who fail to remove noncitizens from registration lists or allow them to cast ballots. And Trump himself signed an executive order in March calling on the attorney general to prosecute election workers and officials who give ballots to such voters. (The courts have since invalidated much of the order.)

Some states and counties have gamed out how people would need to step up, on the spot, if various election officials were arrested while trying to prevent federal agents from seizing ballots or otherwise interfering with their operations. Many election workers have quit because the job is now so fraught with anxiety, Earley said. Several election officials told me they have exhausted the limits of their imagination in attempting to prepare for what may come.

In Georgia, it was apparent even in May how activism on the right might lead to disorder in November. Conspiracy theories about voting machines were threatening to paralyze the state’s general elections. After years of activists spreading baseless claims that machines designed by Dominion Voting Systems were vulnerable to foreign manipulation, legislators had passed a law in 2024 requiring the state to overhaul its ballot-counting system. A leading proponent of the change was an eccentric 76-year-old man named Garland Favorito, who has spent decades challenging the integrity of the state’s electronic voting system, and who has collaborated with EIN. Favorito has also claimed that Israel may have been behind the September 11 terrorist attacks and that George H. W. Bush may have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Favorito spent years pursuing a lawsuit, which was dismissed in February, to access ballots from the 2020 election in Georgia, arguing that he will be able to prove that the presidential result was rigged. He told me he fears that future elections are vulnerable to similar rigging and that we have a “national-security crisis” based on “forensics showing that our voting systems have been remotely accessed by foreign programmers and modified without detection.”

Tax records show that his group, VoterGA, has received at least $385,000 from an entity called the America Project, which was co-founded by Patrick Byrne, the Overstock.com founder and a prominent election skeptic who urged Trump to seize voting machines after the 2020 race. At a gathering of election deniers in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, Byrne boasted of spending more than $100 million on election-related activities since 2020, much of it to support groups seeking to upend local election-administration policies.

The problem in May was that the law banning Georgia’s current voting machines was set to take effect in just a few weeks, but amid continued controversies over paper ballots and other options, legislators had not yet established an alternative. Election workers were running a primary while also looking ahead to November with the possibility of a rapid and destabilizing changeover weighing on them. The deadline for a switch has now been postponed until after the midterms, but a new system still has not been finalized.

To try to get some sense of what the elections in November and in 2028 might be like, I watched Georgia’s primaries, on May 19, from the Fulton County election hub. At the time, Favorito’s focus had shifted, at least temporarily, to a new potential source of fraud. Raffensperger, as secretary of state, had decided to deny election-board members access to the operations center where he would be receiving and reporting the voting results on Election Night. Because Raffensperger was also a candidate in the governor’s race, Favorito and other right-wing election skeptics began to publicly suggest that the secretary of state was attempting to count—and perhaps manipulate—the votes from the confines of a “secret bunker.” Grubbs, the state-election-board member who’d once chased a paper-shredding truck, joined Bannon’s War Room podcast on the day of the primary to complain about being excluded from said bunker. Speaking in front of a large Trump-Vance campaign sign, she agreed with Bannon when he likened the situation to a banana republic.

Raffensperger rejected those allegations. On the morning of the primary, he told reporters that officials should stop making “wild claims and accusations” about the operations center. He suggested that those concerned about the vote-counting process should spend the evening at one of the county election centers where the ballot tabulation was in fact taking place.

Jason Frazier, an election skeptic who has spent the past few years challenging the eligibility of thousands of Georgia voters, appeared to be following that advice when I ran into him at the Fulton County election hub on the night of the primary. He told me he had come to observe the tabulation process, but still felt that there was something nefarious about the operations center. “If the doors are closed and you’re trying to hide things, that creates a conspiracy, whether there’s something there or not,” he said.

Just days earlier, Frazier had been hired as a part-time investigator by the state election board, the latest example of a self-made voting expert achieving official status within Georgia’s electoral apparatus. Fervier, the board’s chair, told me that Frazier’s hiring had happened without his knowledge. The MAGA-aligned majority on the board had gone around him to bring an ally into the system.

In the end, little would come of the bunker conspiracy. Raffensperger’s office would accurately report the results of the primary race for governor, in which he was soundly defeated. But the night of the primary election was not without additional drama. When 911 reports of a gunman near an Atlanta-area school forced two precincts to close for about four hours that afternoon, a local judge ordered the polls to stay open late at those locations, giving voters until about 11 p.m. to cast their ballots. The delayed closing of those two precincts meant Fulton officials would have to wait an additional four hours to begin reporting results for the entire county.

Inside the Fulton election center, I watched as members of the county election board anxiously flipped through thick books of voting statutes and called their attorneys to determine what the law allowed for. When I checked my social-media feed, I could see what was making them nervous. An online rumor mill had begun pushing the idea that Fulton County was intentionally holding back its results in order to sufficiently skew them once other counties reported. “Just one county in the core ATL metro hasn’t reported ANY votes…. Anyone want to take a guess which one?” Seth Keshel, a Trump ally and the author of The American War on Election Corruption, wrote on X at 8:57 p.m.

“It’s always Fulton County,” Greg Dolezal, a Republican state senator and candidate for lieutenant governor, wrote at 9:49 p.m. “It’s time for Georgia to takeover the process. We will not have another 2020 this November!” He suggested that the state election board could temporarily appoint someone to seize control of voting there.

Voters cast their ballots in Georgia’s primary elections in May, amid conspiracy theories about a secret bunker and, later in the day, reports of a gunman near an Atlanta-area school that forced two precincts to close for about four hours. (Megan Varner / Getty)

The idea did not come out of the blue. Not only had Janelle King, the state-election-board member, previously floated it, but Republican Party officials had used the primary ballot to ask GOP voters in Fulton County whether the state board should “take over Fulton County elections to protect the integrity of our elections.” And although the results would have no binding legal effect, nearly three-quarters of GOP-primary voters responded “Yes.” Weeks after the primary, an audit would confirm the accuracy of the vote totals that were reported in Fulton County, and throughout Georgia, that night. By then, most of the skeptics had moved on.

However the midterms turn out in November, they will likely tell us something about the integrity of the presidential election in 2028, and the elections beyond that one.

Some of the president’s allies have suggested that despite his stepped-up attention to voting issues in recent months, he is much more focused on 2028. After all, the election of a Democratic successor could easily wipe away much of his legacy. It would also, presumably, end the government’s extraordinarily favorable treatment of his family’s businesses, through which the Trumps have enriched themselves by billions of dollars since his return to office. And it would likewise increase his legal risks.

According to States United Action, a nonpartisan group that supports state and local election officials, dozens of election deniers will be on the ballots in November for positions including governor and secretary of state, roles that could prove pivotal in the certification of the 2028 contest. (In Georgia, the GOP candidate for governor is Rick Jackson, who has denied the validity of the 2020 election; in Arizona, the Republican nominee for that same position is Andy Biggs, who as a state representative voted against certifying Trump’s loss.) Many of these officials owe their ascendance to Trump. It would take only a small subset of them to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

“If we have a corrupted election in America, I don’t know if we ever go back to normal,” Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me. The country is built on the premise of free and fair elections, he said. “You unwind that, and you are in a very different America.”

The truest danger this November may not be Trump attempting to cancel the vote or ordering troops to barnstorm polling places, but the smaller, quieter ways that democracy could continue eroding in towns, counties, and state capitals. As millions of Americans prepare to cast their ballots in the coming weeks and to settle in on Election Night to await the results, they should be ready to hold their local officials accountable for what happens next. Those officials, under the watchful eyes of the people who entrust them with power, must choose whether to use that power to reinforce the democratic system that has sustained America for 250 years or to bend it, little by little, further out of shape—until what remains is chaos.

This article has been updated to clarify a description of Gabriel Sterling’s tenure at the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. The article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “The Election Deniers Are Now in Charge.”

The Los Angeles Rams Are Trying to Defeat Time

2026-09-10T15:27:07-04:00

Usually, when the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams play, it’s a relatively short commute. But this evening, the teams will kick off the NFL’s first-ever regular-season game in Australia.

The two teams have taken diametrically opposite approaches to preventing the 8,000-mile journey from disorienting their stars. The 49ers boarded their 16-hour flight to Melbourne nine days ago and have spent the intervening time training, watching Aussie rules football, and winning the majority of local support. The Rams landed yesterday, just 24 hours before the game. They’re betting on being in Australia so briefly that players’ brains and bodies won’t notice the difference. That makes the game the most high-profile test of jet-lag-evasion techniques in American sports history.

Anyone who has hurled across several time zones in one go knows how wide-awake and helplessly sleepy you can feel at inappropriate hours upon landing—a major inconvenience for professional football players, whose career depends on how they perform during one very specific period. Circadian rhythms can also affect performance in less obvious ways. Compounds that encourage inflammation, for instance, spike at night, when the body is doing less and can direct more energy toward fighting infection. A new time zone throws that optimal function off tilt and can cause stomach issues, cognitive impairment, headaches, and mood changes.

Teams at a circadian disadvantage tend to play worse. One study that analyzed every NFL game from 1970 to 2011 with a kickoff after 8 p.m. ET found that West Coast teams did better than oddsmakers expected in two out of every three games, regardless of whether they were home or away. Head coaches are also more likely to make the risky call to attempt an offensive play on a fourth down during evening games when they travel west compared with any other direction.

Because the consequences of jet lag are well established, the real question is how to avoid them. In 2021, 26 sleep researchers and clinicians articulated their best answer in the journal Sports Medicine. Among other recommendations, they noted that fully recovering from jet lag takes one day for each time zone crossed. The 49ers seem to have followed that model by leaving more than a week ahead of the game. (Melbourne is 17 hours ahead of California, but for body-clock purposes, that’s the same as being seven hours behind.) Kyle Shanahan, the 49ers’ head coach, told reporters last month that he would have loved to have just shown up in Australia the day before but that the experts he’d spoken with had all recommended arriving earlier. “I was a little bit on the fence,” he said. “Science wasn’t.”

The Rams, by contrast, are attempting to not switch their body clock at all. They have spent the past few weeks practicing in the late afternoon, which aligns with Friday’s mid-morning kickoff in Melbourne. Their head coach, Sean McVay, said at a Sunday press conference that the team will “have kind of a rhythm” when they land. “We’ve tested it out with some guys, and we feel like it’s been positive,” he added. The strategy is not without precedent: In 1994, Allen Johnson, an American hurdler, decided to live as if he were on East Coast time when competing in European tournaments. His coaching team strongly disagreed, but he won four world championships and Olympic gold. Last year, the Rams arrived in London the day before a game against a strong Jacksonville Jaguars team and won.

Jamie Zeitzer, a circadian physiologist and a co-director of Stanford’s Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences, described the Rams’ strategy to me as “high risk, high reward.” If the Rams really feel as though they’re playing in the afternoon, they might have a slight advantage over opponents who feel as though they’re playing in the morning. During the late afternoon, circadian rhythms prompt optimal muscle strength and coordination, and core body temperature peaks, increasing alertness with it. Plus, a week might not be long enough for the 49ers to stop suffering the effects of their travel. Some people just take longer to recover, and a long-haul flight, jet lag, hotel life, and unfamiliar foods can lead to days of poor sleep, Zeitzer said. The 49ers have spent their September experiencing time as a pliable, erratic force. Shanahan told reporters that he was “a little confused” in a recent press conference, during which he also struggled to identify the day of the week. (It was Monday.)

Still, Zeitzer thinks the Rams have chosen the worse jet-lag strategy. If the players are to get any rest at all, their 24-hour stretch in Melbourne before game time needs to be carefully managed. From his experience consulting with professional teams, adults are hard to control. Meeta Singh, a doctor who has served as a sleep consultant for multiple NFL teams, thinks that players simply won’t be able to sleep. Singh is one of the co-authors of the Sports Medicine recommendations, which suggest that athletes maintain a “reduced exercise schedule” and do hand-eye-coordination drills in the 72 hours after a long-haul flight. The Rams won’t even be in Australia for 72 hours.

Sleep became a major metric for all sorts of professional sports teams after the NBA distributed more than 2,000 Oura rings to its players during the depths of the coronavirus pandemic. “Once you can show a coach numbers, sleep stops being a soft topic and becomes something they can manage, like training load or nutrition,” Singh told me. Many NFL teams now have a sleep specialist and a performance-science team working on circumventing jet lag. To prep players for time shifts before they depart, 14 NFL teams, including the 49ers, have installed in their training facilities lighting systems designed to mold circadian rhythms. The system, called BrainLit, mimics daylight according to a “recipe” that each team specifies, Kyle Harris, the CEO of the company, told me. On the 49ers’ flight to Melbourne—on the world’s largest and most expensive passenger airliner, with lie-flat seats that extend to seven feet—each player received his own sleep guidelines. Tom Clark, a sports scientist who advises NFL teams with international games, told me that many teams establish each player’s chronotype, or natural preference to sleep and wake at certain hours, and use that information to prescribe optimal sleep habits.

Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, eventually wants 16 international games to take place each season. By the time Super Bowl LXI rolls around this February, teams will have played in Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris, Madrid, Munich, and Mexico City. For future seasons, the league is considering adding games in the United Arab Emirates and Japan; Goodell insists that an NFL team will be based outside the U.S. in his lifetime.

Perhaps such a punishing schedule will settle debates once and for all about how to handle jet lag. Whatever the marginal impact of sleep strategy, though (and some games are decided on the margins), usually “the better team will win even if they’re playing on the moon,” Clark said. And the Rams are this year’s Super Bowl favorites.

What Colin Powell Did on 9/11

2026-09-10T15:15:32-04:00

Secretary of State Colin Powell was having breakfast with Peru’s president in Lima’s historic center on September 11, 2001, when an aide passed him a note to inform him that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Minutes later, he received a second note. “Oh my God,” Powell said aloud.

Later that morning, as the scale of the destruction in New York and Washington was starting to become clear, Powell delivered remarks in a cavernous hotel ballroom. Fears of additional attacks had forced the closure of U.S. airspace. Even senior Cabinet members remained in the dark about President George W. Bush’s whereabouts. Peru’s leaders knew that the secretary of state—the fourth in line to succeed the president—would likely need to depart. But Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs before he was picked by Bush to lead the Foreign Service, opted to stay—at least for a while.

The former general was in Peru, along with foreign ministers from across the Americas, to cement a new hemisphere-wide democracy charter that would enshrine the region’s commitment to free and fair elections and the rule of law. I was there as a Lima-based correspondent covering the visit. Countries across Latin America were emerging from a long period of despotism and military dictatorship. The United States wanted to make sure the region didn’t backslide. “A terrible, terrible tragedy has befallen my nation, but it has befallen all of the nations of this region, all the nations of the world, and befallen all those who believe in democracy,” Powell told the room full of officials, his voice grave but steady. “It is important that I remain here for a bit longer in order to be part of the consensus of this new charter.”

As the magnitude of the events in the United States washed over me, Powell’s composure and his focus on a point of principle stood out. Even at an extreme, wounded moment in America’s history, he was affirming that the country’s security was inextricably bound up with how U.S. allies represented—or didn’t represent—the will of their people. Strong democracies would support America’s ability to keep itself safe. Powell could have bolted home. But he lingered to make the point. The ministers adopted the charter by acclamation, and by 12:30 p.m. eastern time, Powell had taken his leave for Washington, D.C.—and for everything that followed from the events of that day.

This week, 25 years later, I watched a different secretary of state visit Lima. Marco Rubio is meeting Peruvian leaders today on a tour of Andean nations that have taken a turn to the political right. Given the magnitude of what followed 9/11—the wars, the excesses, the lives lost—Powell’s connection to Peru that day has receded from our collective memory. But his insistence on linking democracy promotion to national security seems remote. Donald Trump rose to power, in part, on the backlash to the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his view, the idea of spreading democracy around the world was an expensive folly, and he’s sold his supporters on a very different approach to foreign policy.

[Read: Rubio won; liberty lost]

In Latin America, the Trump administration has pushed the “Donroe Doctrine,” a 21st-century version of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine that’s designed to secure “American preeminence” and allied support for the president’s priorities of shutting out drugs, migrants, and U.S. rivals such as China. Trump’s second-term National Security Strategy elevates “flexible realism” and brass-tacks interests such as access to strategic resources in the region. “Democracy” is mentioned three times, while “interests” are cited 36 times. Mutual benefits with other countries can be pursued “without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories,” the document says.

In practice, that has meant partnerships with those willing to embrace Trump’s militarized approach to combatting drugs, crime, and illegal migration, regardless of those countries’ governing systems. The deportation of migrants to a nightmarish prison in El Salvador is a prime example, as is the ouster of the leftist Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and the norm-busting oil deal made with Maduro’s deputy. Or consider the militarized counter-drug operations the Pentagon has pursued with Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa, who at the same time has dissolved opposition parties and targeted rivals. Trump has enthusiastically waded into the region’s elections to endorse candidates who share his political vision: Javier Milei of Argentina, Abelardo de la Espriella of Colombia, Tito Asfura of Honduras. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s campaign of boat strikes against alleged narco-traffickers in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which critics label as extrajudicial killings, grinds on.

“Politeness and a good bit of decorum are all to the good, but over the last generation, things have gone too far,” Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, told Latin American defense officials in a speech in Peru earlier this year. “Our rhetoric became wildly detached from the reality of our interests. We talked about the fate of people halfway around the world as if they were as important to us as our neighbors.”

Instead of trying to build ideal societies in far-flung countries, Colby said, the United States would now advance its hard-nosed interests in its immediate neighborhood, using the U.S. military to help allies assert control over lawless areas, treating drug traffickers like the Pentagon treats jihadist groups, and blocking U.S. adversaries’ access to minerals and other key resources. What he dubbed the “Peace Corps” approach to reducing the throngs of migrants and crime headed toward the U.S. had failed, Colby said. If it’s a Latin American democracy that partners with Washington to achieve those goals, great. If it’s not, no one’s going to spend much time worrying about that.

The State Department spokesperson Tommy Piggott told me in a written statement that the United States is “working together with our allies and partners to address the shared opportunities in our hemisphere, and to confront the shared challenges, including defeating the scourge of narcoterrorism that has killed so many.”

Many Latin Americans are ready to at least entertain this shift, according to polls. Spiraling crime, ineffective governance, and the hangover of the COVID era have made trading political liberties for security and economic growth a conceivable option. One of the most popular politicians in the region is Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran strongman responsible for some of the region’s most flagrant democratic reversals but whose taming of rampant gang violence has made him an icon to many. Democratic backsliding has also occurred on Latin America’s left. After this year’s Colombian elections, Gustavo Petro, de la Espriella’s leftist predecessor, made unsubstantiated allegations of fraud intended to sow doubt about the results.

Rubio presents a plausible case that the armed groups now fueling rampant violence across many Latin American nations are the public’s paramount concern. Those groups not only traffic drugs; they are in some places better bankrolled and armed than the state. In stops in Colombia and Ecuador this week, Rubio made an impassioned case for action. “You have to make a choice here. We’re going to choose on the side of leaders that are going to be serious about taking these groups on and eliminating them once and for all,” he said after talks with Noboa yesterday. “Otherwise, those groups—those terrorist groups—will eat these countries up.”

But the people of the region are also setting limits on how far America’s reach is allowed to extend. Noboa has allowed U.S. forces to begin joint military operations, but Ecuadoreans rejected a proposal last year that would have permitted the United States to establish military bases in the country. This week, Rubio announced that Peru, under conservative President Keiko Fujimori, will be joining the administration’s “Shield of the Americas,” Trump’s militarized counter-drug program. It’s unclear how far Fujimori, whose father, Alberto Fujimori, is both lionized and vilified in Peru for his autocratic campaign against armed leftist movements in the 1990s, will feel she can go in cooperation with Washington.

[Read: Venezuela seems to be going … well?]

“What I see is less of a story about Trump and his government urging allies to go down this road, and more a story of these sovereign countries, these societies, having this debate about the trade-offs between political liberties and anti-crime policy,” Brian Winter, a Latin America expert who is the editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, told me. Based on my years of working in Latin America, the long shadow of yanqui meddling is hard to overstate. And polls show that many people in Latin America today see China, not the United States, as the more reliable superpower.

The U.S. interest in promoting democracy as a pillar of national security didn’t begin in 2001. It may have reached its peak in the 1990s. But the grand U.S.-led experiments of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as movements elsewhere to overthrow dictators, dominated the first decade of this century—with disappointing results. Several years after 9/11, I was in Baghdad, chronicling the U.S. effort to extract Iraq from the sectarian bloodshed unleashed by the 2003 invasion. Since then, Iraq has managed to emerge as a deeply flawed but surprisingly enduring democracy. I covered Libyan rebels’ overthrow of the dictator Muammar Qaddafi in Tripoli in 2011. Libya remains a failed state, 15 years later. And I was covering the Biden administration when the two-decade effort to build a stable democracy in Afghanistan fell apart in a matter of days.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the consensus of many Americans, and certainly of MAGA supporters, is that the push to elevate democracy in the farthest reaches of the world proved to be a waste of time and money. That conclusion underpins the Trump administration’s approach in Latin America and beyond. When Trump went to war with Iran in February, democracy was an afterthought, and opponents to the country’s authoritarian regime were left to fend for themselves.

[Read: Ukraine’s short-lived comeback]

But the failures of America’s democracy-promotion experiments have eclipsed notable successes across Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. Steven Levitsky, the director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, told me that Latin America has proven to be a democratic success story. The chief exceptions—among them Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Cuba—need to be set against the region’s largest nations. That big countries such as Brazil and Argentina have generally stayed the democratic course despite extreme inequality, high crime, and a global democratic recession, Levitsky said, “is a sign of extraordinary resilience.”

Venezuela presents the most explicit test of how traditional U.S. values will play into Trump’s pursuit of what he sees as America’s national interest. Predictions that the country would descend into chaos after Maduro’s ouster have so far proved wrong. Yet the most tangible sign of American involvement in Venezuela’s affairs to date has been a new oil deal, which gives an office in the Pentagon a stake in the nation’s future output. Rubio has laid out a three-stage plan for shepherding Venezuela to legitimate and elected governance, and he has stressed that the country first needs to rebuild its legal and institutional structures. He argues that the oil pact will benefit Venezuelans. No date for elections—and therefore no date for democracy to return to Caracas—has been set.

Powell, who died in 2021, might have had something to say about that. In the hotel ballroom in Lima, with the U.S. homeland under its most serious attack since Pearl Harbor, he talked about a different model, one that linked democracy to achieving prosperity and peace. He noted that the countries represented around him had their own tragic histories with terrorism—Peru’s battle with the Shining Path, for instance. “It is something we must all unite behind,” Powell said. “We unite behind it as democratic nations committed to individual liberties, committed to the rights of people to live in peace and freedom in a way in which they, and not terrorists, select their leaders or define how they will be governed.” It was the means, not only the ends, that he clung to that day.

Trump’s Dream World in Dallas

2026-09-10T11:28:00-04:00

Photographs by Joseph Rushmore

President Trump began his midterm-convention address last night by casting his spell on the crowd in Dallas. “This place is packed,” he announced from the stage, pointing to the back of the American Airlines Center, where everyone could see hundreds of empty seats. Those who looked up saw thousands more, whole sections without any people at all. But the crowd cheered anyway. A deal had been struck. Reality would be ignored.

After more than a decade in politics, Trump is facing his last great electoral test—his popularity is waning, his party is down in the polls, Republicans could lose control in the U.S. House and maybe the Senate. He demanded greater complicity minutes later, seeming to invent a person in the back of the room. “He’s leaving for the bathroom. He’ll be back in two minutes,” he said, pointing. “They’ll take a picture of his seat while he’s gone. And they’ll say Trump did not fill up the arena.”

Laughter joined with the cheers for their political wizard. It was working. Trump could say that he had passed “the largest tax cut in the history of our country,” even if that was not the case. He could claim to have won the presidency three times, when he’s actually done so twice. He could describe the recent past as “the most successful two years financially and every other way in the history of the presidency,” despite six in 10 voters saying he had made the economy worse. He could promise to pay every adult U.S. citizen $5,000 if Republicans held both legislative houses, as if that sum did not amount to about 80 percent of the federal discretionary budget. He might even be able to convince the country to embrace the big fantasy, a chance to defy history and seal victory for Republicans in November.

“I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he said. “I’m on the ballot. I’m on the ballot. Just one more time.”

Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

The night was all about Trump. He was the alpha and omega, the focus and the solution. Attendees wore pictures of the president on lanyards around their necks, the ticket for entry to the arena. VIP boxes were stocked with Trump was right about everything hats. Oversize photos of the president lined the hallways. Five hours before he arrived, he received his first standing ovation. A video montage played on the big screen, images of the president narrated by a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “If”—“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue.” When each speaker dropped Trump’s name, it was cause for riotous celebration.

Until now, national political conventions have been held only during presidential-election years, when delegates from each state gather to select their nominee. In the 1970s, the gatherings shifted from smoke-filled rooms for party business to televised infomercials for the candidates. Trump this year created a simulation of a simulation. The balloon nets had no nominee to drop for. The state delegations, sitting under signs on the floor, had no procedural purpose. (The smart party leaders, one strategist told us, were selling their “delegate” tickets to donors.) The convention-in-name-only was for, by, and about one man—who, importantly, cannot be a candidate for president again, according to the U.S. Constitution.

[Read: Trump plans to buy midterm ads about his own record]

“The only way to keep dangerous, radical, weird out of the Senate is a united Republican Party standing with our president, Donald J. Trump,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, bellowed from the stage. “Stand for the president, Donald J. Trump. This is a battle for the heart of our nation. I said the heart of our nation.”

Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina addresses the audience.

No president has tried something like this before. None has had so much money to spend on themselves at this point in a presidency. None has chosen to make the midterms a referendum on themselves while polling so badly. But this is Trump, and Trump has come back from worse. For a decade, the GOP’s electoral success has risen and fallen on his energies. The strategist in chief has bet that turning out Trump voters, the ones who typically stay home when he is not on the ballot, is the only path forward. This is why the first ads he bought for the cycle were not about any candidates who are running this year, but about himself. This was why his latest show was a celebration of the unlimited possibility of his incantations.

“Vote Republican, and we will leave the world in our dust for generations to come,” he told the crowd. “There’ll be nothing like it.”

Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

Outside Trump’s curated fantasy world, not everything has gone according to plan. Trump’s political strategist, James Blair, announced after the off-year elections in 2025 that the president would be “very, very focused on prices and cost of living.” White House aides told us in the new year that the pivot would come after Trump scratched his itch for another confrontation with Iran. By May, as that conflict dragged on, Trump advisers told us quietly that if it had not receded, along with gas prices, by Labor Day, there would be trouble. Two weeks ago, multiple Trump advisers told us they expected the kinetic part of the Iran war to mostly cease in September, clearing the way for lower gas prices.

None of that has happened. Missiles are still flying in the Strait of Hormuz. Since the 2025 elections, gas prices have risen 39 percent, from $3.08 to $4.28; 30-year mortgage rates have increased 8 percent; electricity prices have gone up more than 4 percent. Charlie Cook, a political analyst and the dean emeritus of legislative-election handicapping, says that Republicans should brace themselves for a tough result. “The worst-case scenario for the GOP and best for Democrats today would have sounded ludicrous eight months ago,” he wrote recently. “The most plausible today resembles Republicans’ nightmare scenario at the beginning of the year.”

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

Those Republican nightmares, both new and old, are unlikely to be worse than the 40-seat gain made by Democrats in the House of Representatives during Trump’s first term, in 2018, thanks to increased polarization and mid-decennial redistricting. But few Republicans still pretend off-camera that they will be able to maintain control of the House. Narrow Democratic control of the Senate, once outlandish, could be within reach. On the sidelines of the convention in Dallas, strategists muttered about recent polling in House races that shows jump balls where Trump won by double digits in 2024.

The outstanding question is whether Democratic candidates can emerge from the dim shadow of President Biden. “While there is a lot of focus on the Republicans’ problems, Democrats have a real problem—they have a real party-image problem,” the Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio told us.

Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist, depicts his party in PowerPoint presentations as a backpacker hiking up a steep mountain with gusts of wind at his back. The incline represents Trump’s financial advantages, and the challenge of winning seats in gerrymandered districts and Republican states such as Ohio, Iowa, Texas, and Alaska. The wind is voter sentiment and the enthusiasm advantage inside the Democratic Party. “Democrats have won the message fight. Republicans have lost the governance fight,” he told us. “The question is whether they can use structural advantages to overcome it.”

On the whole, Democrats are delighted by Trump’s strategy—to put front and center a man whose unpopularity fires up their voters and further alienates the newly skeptical. “If the Democrats have a great year, it will be because they got their base out to vote in large numbers,” Rich Thau, the moderator of the Swing Voter Project, told us. “It won’t be because they magically converted these swing voters into Democratic senatorial and gubernatorial voters.”

Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

But they may not be accounting for Trump’s magic. Two years ago, he bounced back from two impeachments and an attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol to win the presidency. Now the odds are against him again. By multiple measures, the president who appeared on the Dallas stage last night had lost a step. When he first won the White House, in 2016, he denounced the folly of distant wars of choice, promised to remedy the reigning economic turmoil of globalization, and boasted of his independence as someone who eschewed campaign donations. A decade later, he is managing a reescalating war in Iran that he started. He has positioned himself as a champion of data centers, the latest lightning rod for populist resentment. And he controls a massive $850 million slush fund he acquired in office through seemingly transactional demands of companies, lobbyists, and wealthy individuals seeking government favor.

[Read: Trump is preparing for a long war]

His economic approval rating this summer, according to Quinnipiac University, stood at 34 percent, down from 53 percent on the eve of the last midterm elections on his watch, in 2018. The 2024 presidential election hinged on the rising cost of living, and after Republicans won the trifecta—the White House and both chambers of Congress—the expectation was that Trump and his party would fix what many still view as Biden’s economy. “I want to emphasize that this wasn’t to just slightly improve things,” David Winston, a Republican strategist who works with congressional leadership, told us. “They viewed a substantive outcome as what they were looking for.” It has not come to pass.

Trump has not lost his talent for showmanship. No longer tied to a single hit program in a single slot on NBC, he has spent much of the year creating television spectacles from the Oval Office—a Formula One race, a UFC fight, a Fourth of July party, a World Cup championship celebration where he lingered in the frame. This string of network debuts gave him the confidence to schedule his convention against the first two games of the NFL season. Only Trump would choose to go up against the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots.

Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

For those who watched, the first night in Dallas had production quality that has escaped many recent Republican conventions. All the tropes and tricks were hit—the testimonials of a Pennsylvania steelworker and a Florida grandma about policy wins, the glitter reels of alleged Democratic bad behavior, the plea for campaign donations for Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate nominee from Texas. Multiple speakers gave mock “land acknowledgements” praising the national heritage of European colonizers. The comedian Adam Carolla did a bit about Trump’s hair: “You ever see underwater footage of a kelp bed?” There were “everyday Americans,” “American workers,” and Border Patrol agents who gathered onstage, many in work gear. “President Trump refuses to surrender,” Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania said, after a friendly video introduction from his Democratic colleague John Fetterman. “This November there can be no surrender.”

Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

There was even a moment to lay out the core contrast that Trump’s advisers hope will frame the election, the sort of message that any other Republican president in his position would be entirely focused on delivering at this point. In a short video, his team spliced together clips from fringe voices on the left—the “woke,” the America-bashing, the revolutionary—before defining the decision on the ballot. “This is no longer simply Republican versus Democrat, or conservative versus liberal,” said the voice-over. “Today the choice is unmistakable: extreme versus mainstream.”

But the centerpiece remained Trump. Speaker after speaker described him in near-messianic terms. “As it turns out, Washington wasn’t incapable of working for the American people; all we needed was a new president,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. T. W. Shannon, a candidate for lieutenant governor in Oklahoma, placed the entire GOP in the president’s shadow. “We’re also the party of the greatest president in American history, President Donald J. Trump,” he declared.

But no comments mattered more than Trump’s. He talked for nearly two hours, a rolicking, weaving address that only occasionally stuck to the teleprompter. It ended where he began. “Please pretend that I’m running, and get out and vote on November 3 or sooner,” he said. “Because, in actuality, I really am running.” In actuality, he is not. Or maybe he is, in a way. His crowd remained in their seats to the end. The room, at times, felt packed to the rafters.

Additional reporting by Jack Rodriquez-Vars

What the Failure to Convict the Alleged 9/11 Mastermind Reveals

2026-09-10T13:56:00-04:00

Prosecutors trying to finally convict Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, got some good news and some bad news last month. The good news is that a judge set a date for Mohammed’s trial in a military court. The bad news is that the trial won’t begin until June 2028—oh, and the judge also threw out a confession Mohammed made in 2007.

The problem is how the U.S. government obtained the confession. Mohammed was captured on March 1, 2003, in Pakistan. He was then held in a series of secret CIA “black sites,” allegedly including spots in Afghanistan, Jordan, Poland, and Romania, before being brought to the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay in 2006. Throughout his imprisonment, he was subject to what U.S. officials called “enhanced interrogation techniques”—or, in plain English, torture. Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama, the judge, reportedly concluded that “the prosecution has failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Mohammad’s statements to the F.B.I. were voluntarily given.”

A quarter century has passed since the attacks, long enough that Americans born after 9/11 are themselves adults—some have even died in conflicts that are part of the war on terror. The failure to convict Mohammed by now is an open wound and an embarrassment, one that shows how the government cutting corners and breaking rules can actually end up making the pursuit of justice harder and slower. It’s also a reminder that the consequences of those decisions may not be apparent for years. Both of these are valuable lessons for the Donald Trump era.

Few serious doubts have been raised that Mohammed was a central planner of the attacks. The 9/11 Commission, which had access to material from some of his interrogations but did not directly question him (and preceded his 2007 confession), nevertheless was able to confidently label him “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.” Proving this beyond a reasonable doubt in court is a different matter. (Mohammed and other defendants previously agreed to plead guilty in exchange for the government declining to seek the death penalty, but the plea deal was revoked in 2024 by then–Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin under political pressure.) Some of the slowness to get the case to trial is a result of the adversarial structure of American law, which rightly sacrifices speed to protect the rights of the accused. But much of it is a result of choices the George W. Bush administration made.

After 9/11, Bush and his aides justified circumventing normal procedures of law, including secret military tribunals and prohibitions on torture, because of the gravity of the attacks, questions about how existing law applied to a “War on Terror” against nonstate actors, and the urgency of preventing future attacks. Even at the time, cooler heads warned that protections existed for a good reason. Now, more than two decades later, Schrama’s ruling-out of Mohammed’s confession proves their wisdom. Prosecutors say that they will not appeal the decision, which would draw the process out even more, and they might be able to convict without the confession, but the decision to use torture at the time has made it harder to achieve justice today.

A good lesson for the present is that moving too fast can backfire. Like the Bush administration, the current White House has emphasized speed over rules in what my colleague Janay Kingsberry has described as “the rush-job presidency.” The plainest demonstration of this in the Trump administration is also relatively low-stakes: An attempt to quickly get the Reflecting Pool fixed resulted in a botched job and a waste of taxpayer money. Although the Supreme Court effectively rubber-stamped the White House ballroom, lower courts have made the administration pay for moving too fast in other matters—for example, they have demanded that people who were improperly deported be returned to the United States. Given the White House’s sloppiness and its disregard for rules, the Trump era will likely offer many such cases.

A second lesson is that years may pass before we are able to see all of the damage inflicted by shortcutting and carelessness. In the case of the Trump administration, the impact of destroying American scientific research, hollowing out the civil service, and wrecking the global order will be felt for decades. By then, Trump will be long gone, and some other president will have to clean things up. (Joe Biden’s administration ended up with the unenviable task of concluding a war that Bush had fumbled and that Barack Obama and Trump had both determined should end; Biden’s popularity never recovered from the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.)

Even though the full effects of decisions made today are not immediately clear, many of the offenses are, which leads to a third lesson: the importance of accountability. When Obama entered office, his administration decided to focus mostly forward rather than on investigating and potentially punishing misconduct during the Bush years. The administration had its reasons, just as the Biden White House did in its hesitation to pursue Trump for election subversion and absconding with documents, but each case created an atmosphere of impunity and allowed those involved to retain influence. Jay Bybee, whose office oversaw memos justifying torture, is a federal judge with lifetime tenure; John Yoo, who wrote those memos, is a prominent law professor; Gina Haspel, who commanded a black site and was implicated in evidence destruction, led the CIA during Trump’s first term.

When a nation or an administration feels besieged and defensive, the temptation to bend or break the rules for one’s own side, to change procedure for the sake of getting something that feels very important, is strong. But as the painfully long process of trying to convict Mohammed shows, undermining justice right now has a pernicious tendency to undermine justice later.

Okay, Sure, a Folding iPhone

2026-09-09T18:44:00-04:00

Nothing quickens the pulse of an Apple fan more than these three words: one more thing. Steve Jobs used the catchphrase to introduce the original iPhone in 2007. In his 15 years running the company, Tim Cook deployed it only a handful of times, including before his 2014 announcement of the Apple Watch. Today, nine days into his tenure as Apple’s CEO, John Ternus said the magic words. Apple’s next big invention, the company revealed at a launch event in Cupertino, is a $2,000 iPhone that sports—get ready—a “remarkable hinge.”

This is the iPhone Duo, a foldable gadget that opens like a book to reveal a capacious 7.6-inch screen. Billed as the most versatile iPhone, it can be used in folded or unfolded form, and in split-screen or full-screen modes. The screen appears seamless when open, which is a clever engineering feat. Yet an iPhone that blossoms into an iPad Mini seems unlikely to change many lives—especially at the price of a MacBook Pro. And foldable smartphones have been on the market since Samsung popularized the category, in 2019. In the pantheon of “one more things,” the Duo feels like a dud.

Apple also announced several other devices today, all pitched in superlative terms by executives to obligatory applause. The most interesting might be new versions of the Apple Watch that will listen for sounds such as sirens and doorbells, take notes on your conversations, or play back the past 15 seconds of what someone just said to you. (Exactly how all of that will work, and how well, is not yet clear.) There are also new AirPods with improved noise cancellation. The new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max—the ones that don’t fold—offer “the longest battery life in iPhone history and the most advanced pro-camera system ever,” the company said. They also come in “a sophisticated and unique new color,” which is burgundy.

Apple may have once captured people’s imagination. Now it also captures a lot more of their money. On top of its hardware sales, the tech giant is raking in subscription fees to Apple Music, Apple News, Apple TV, iCloud, and more. Earlier this summer, the company announced price hikes on many of its products and a leasing program in partnership with Klarna for anyone who blinks at the sticker prices. One thing it didn’t announce today was the base iPhone 18, or any of its other less expensive models, which now seem likely to be released after the holiday buying season. Apple has begun to feel like a late-stage tech giant, squeezing residual value from markets it has long since saturated.

Ternus, an engineer who led Apple’s hardware division, arrives with the promise of reviving the company’s penchant for creativity. In his first company-wide memo as CEO, he told employees he couldn’t wait to “build the future” with them. The companies that are actually building the future these days, for better and worse, are the ones pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence. Apple is not among them. If there is to be a real threat to Apple’s core business, it is likely to come from AI. For now, the iPhone is the entry point to users’ digital lives: messages, emails, websites, and apps. As chatbot users deepen their relationships with ChatGPT and Claude, those personal assistants could become the primary gateway to online tasks and information. At least, that’s what many in the AI industry believe. They are racing to build AI-first devices—pendants, glasses, speakers, and so on. Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer, is working with OpenAI on what is rumored to be a smart speaker the size of hockey puck. Apple was irked enough that it sued OpenAI earlier this year, alleging that it had poached employees and pilfered trade secrets; OpenAI has denied wrongdoing.

Another candidate to build the first proper AI device is, of course, Apple itself. There were signs today that Ternus grasps the assignment: He led the event with a vision of the iPhone as an “intelligent personal hub” through which Siri and Apple Intelligence become the AI-powered command centers for all of the information stored on and sensed by a customer’s Apple devices—their calendar, contacts, messages, movements, and everything their iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods can see and hear. Those are, he acknowledged, “the most private details of your daily life.” That could work to Apple’s advantage; the company has cultivated a reputation for safeguarding users’ privacy. One problem: Despite years of promises of coming improvements, Siri is still not very good. Earlier this year, Apple agreed to pay $250 million to some iPhone 15 and 16 customers over claims that it had falsely advertised the AI capabilities of those devices. In January, Apple was reduced to contracting with archrival Google to supply the underlying AI for a revamped version of Siri. Even so, it is reportedly having some trouble getting app developers to buy in. (An Apple spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Being the boring tech giant right now has some upsides. Unlike the industry’s other titans, Apple is not lighting money on fire in a frantic race to build data centers and superintelligent AI. It also appears to be the tech giant whose products are the least likely to bring about the extinction of the human race anytime soon, for whatever that’s worth. Its emphasis on user privacy, with AI tools that keep people’s data on their device instead of sending them to the cloud, remains an important differentiator for those who care about such things. Maybe Apple can go on a while longer as the unchallenged king of fancy consumer-tech hardware while everyone else fights to the death over AI software and infrastructure. Maybe rebuilding Siri around Google’s AI will buy Apple time to eventually develop its own powerful models, the way it leaned on Intel for chips for years before creating its own. But if Ternus really wants to build the future, he will eventually have to do something that once came naturally to Apple when it was an underdog: take a risk.

New York, 25 Years Later

2026-09-09T17:30:53-04:00

Photographs by Sasha Arutyunova

Like most New Englanders of a certain generation, my parents viewed New York City with distrust. They associated their neighbor to the south with “The Bronx Is Burning,” Bernhard Goetz, blackouts, bankruptcy, and the famous New York Daily News headline Ford to City: Drop Dead. The heart of Manhattan was a decadent playground for the wealthy, while outlying neighborhoods were plagued by desperate poverty and violence. I grew up only 200 miles away, and yet my parents never took me there as a kid.

But if New York felt menacing and foreign to them, in reality, it is the most American of cities. New York is a symbol of the nation’s money and power, its diversity and freedom. It is our capital of culture, a proudly loud and bustling melting pot. And for those who wanted to humble the world’s sole superpower, New York was the perfect place to strike 25 years ago this week. Two of its signature skyscrapers were toppled, and nearly 3,000 lives were lost.

The response underscored how much New York belongs to America. Rescue workers from red and blue states raced to help. Donations poured in from rich California cities and small Montana towns. American flags were seemingly everywhere. For the first time in decades, and less than a year after a bitterly contested presidential election, the nation felt unified.

We’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. New York City has bounced back—revitalized and thriving—with a new skyline emerging from the dust. But the nation is deeply divided, with angrier elections and escalating political violence. The pandemic could have brought the sort of unity we felt after the terror attacks, but it instead largely fostered division and rage. There is a new conflict in the Middle East, one whose dubious origins evoke the misguided war launched there after the World Trade Center fell. And now, a quarter century after the September 11 attacks, a New Yorker is president, one who was in Manhattan that crystal-clear, late-summer day. But Donald Trump won’t be there on Friday.

My first visit to New York City included the World Trade Center. I was in high school when, in 1995, my brother and I joined a church-group trip down from Massachusetts (my parents still wanted no part of it) to Liberty and Ellis Islands. I remember the ferry ride back to Lower Manhattan at the day’s end, staring at those impossibly tall towers. I was transfixed. Later, I was lucky enough to go to college in New York, and immersed myself in its energy. The Twin Towers were not exactly beloved architecture, but they were a constant, comforting presence; when you got out of the subway downtown, below the city’s street grid, the easiest way to orient yourself was to locate the World Trade Center. Find those towers, and you could get yourself anywhere. You could get yourself home.

Sasha Arutyunova for The Atlantic

On September 11, 2001, I was a 21-year-old intern at the New York Daily News and, with no money to my name, was between apartments and sleeping on my friend’s couch. It was Primary Day, and I had the morning off ahead of covering some comptroller candidate’s Election Night party. My friend’s nanny had the television on, and I heard her shriek. Al-Qaeda got what it wanted: As the world watched the first tower burn, the second was hit. I grabbed my notebook and tried to get to work. But I was staying uptown, at West 120th Street, and the subways were already a mess and soon shut completely. I couldn’t reach the newspaper’s assignment desk; the phones were overloaded. So I started walking south, toward the World Trade Center, trying to listen to updates on my portable radio. Not long after the towers fell, I connected with an editor who diverted me to a major hospital with a trauma center, to witness the arrival of the injured.

I was instead confronted by a jarring and heartbreaking image: rows of empty hospital beds. The scores of survivors never came; there simply weren’t many. The sky was incongruously beautiful. When the wind turned, I could smell the smoke, an acrid blend of jet fuel and steel and other things too sad to consider. My next stop, after nightfall, was a bereavement center set up farther downtown. I fielded as many questions as I asked and desperate pleas from frantic people—some covered in ash—looking for information about their missing loved ones. Soon, the city would be dotted with homemade signs about those who were lost, posters hung by families clinging to hope. Many would stay up for months.

On September 12, I slipped past the security perimeter and reached Ground Zero. I was there, off and on, for days, trying to describe the indescribable to the newspaper’s readers. The rubble continued to burn. Debris and body parts were everywhere. Firefighters refused breaks, as they dug for their fallen brothers. There was a pervasive sense of fear: It seemed as if anything could happen, including more attacks.

[Read: The man who refused to sit on the sidelines]

The four hijacked airplanes had attacked symbols of the United States’ financial might (the World Trade Center), its military (the Pentagon), and its democracy (the U.S. Capitol or the White House were the likely target of a fourth plane that passengers forced to crash in the Pennsylvania countryside). The sense of loss and disruption was overwhelming. Many nights, I cried myself to sleep. It felt as if life would never return to normal; even the small routines—going to an office, riding the subway, going to a baseball game—seemed newly fragile.

In the weeks that followed, I covered dozens of funerals. Traditionally, when a New York firefighter dies, much of the department attends. But that terrible fall and winter, many of the city’s firefighters were still working long shifts digging through the pile at Ground Zero. To make sure that each service was robustly attended, hundreds—and, at times, thousands—of firefighters journeyed from departments across the country. The funerals invariably included a version of “Amazing Grace” from the FDNY’s pipes-and-drums band. To this day, I have a hard time hearing bagpipes.

Sasha Arutyunova for The Atlantic

Yet even in those first hours, there were signs of hope. The city’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had woken up that morning as an unpopular lame duck, a self-styled political brawler whose success fighting crime had been overshadowed by his personal foibles and executive overreach. But with President George W. Bush largely out of sight that day, Giuliani became the face of a mourning, yet determined, city. His leadership in the weeks that followed was nothing short of heroic. He was followed into office by Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman who led the city’s recovery and rebuilding (and personally financed much of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum). In bipartisan fashion, Congress passed a victims-compensation fund. Our NATO allies stood by us, invoking the Article 5 mutual-defense clause for the first and, so far, only time in the alliance’s history. Bush spoke out firmly against Islamophobia. The nation even rallied around the Yankees’ run to the World Series that year. (Okay, maybe not everybody rooted for them.)

Despite early conversations about whether anyone would ever want to work or live in Lower Manhattan again, businesses came back, and, in a surprise development, more people moved downtown. As for the World Trade Center site itself, there were certainly turf wars, differing visions, false starts and delays, and probably more new office space than really was needed. But it slowly grew again, anchored by the 1,776-foot-high One World Trade Center and the 9/11 memorial and museum. The tree-lined, eight-acre site was transformed into a peaceful park with two reflecting pools where the towers once stood. Those pools are filled by waterfalls and ringed by the names of the victims. Dennis Mojica. James P. O’Brien Jr. Cindy Yan Zhu Guan.

The rest of the city came back too. In the decades that followed, apartment prices skyrocketed, and young people transformed neighborhoods deep into Brooklyn and Queens. Crime plummeted, and the NYPD developed a counterterrorism arm. More skyscrapers soared above Manhattan. Broadway boomed. Tourists arrived in record numbers (and, yes, even my parents warmed to the city). There are still challenges, affordable housing and income inequality among them. But the city today is safer and more vibrant than ever. And in a development that would have been unthinkable a quarter century ago, the year’s September 11 remembrance services will include the city’s 34-year-old democratic socialist Muslim mayor.

The city’s communal response to the terror attacks was inspirational: People checked on loved ones and strangers; they donated blood; they saluted first responders. The tragedy also provided a template of sorts for the calamities that would lie ahead. Gone were the stereotypes that New Yorkers didn’t care about their neighbors, or would take advantage of disaster to loot or riot. In their place were scenes of regular people banding together to pull through the 2003 blackout, Hurricane Sandy, and the pandemic. During those fear-filled early months of 2020, One World Trade Center’s top would at times be bathed in red, white, and blue.

Sasha Arutyunova for The Atlantic

The city today sits in a far more divided nation. That initial feeling of national unity was dealt a series of body blows, including the Iraq War, the financial panic of 2008, and the racist backlash to the election of the first Black president. The country became angrier, more polarized, more red versus blue, more us versus them.

Donald Trump seized the moment. Over the past decade, he has widened the nation’s political and cultural fissures, eroded trust of American institutions, governed like he was president only of his supporters—and moved to punish those who didn’t back him. Giuliani, once heralded as “America’s Mayor,” embraced Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, drawing an indictment, disbarments, and a loss in a $148 million defamation lawsuit over his false claims about two Georgia election workers.

[John Avlon: What happened to Rudy Giuliani?]

Trump has never seemed all that moved by his hometown’s darkest day. Mere hours after the towers fell, he spoke to a local television station, saying that a building he owned had suddenly gained in stature. That building, 40 Wall Street, “actually was the second-tallest building in Downtown Manhattan, and it was actually—before the World Trade Center—was the tallest,” he said. (The claim was inaccurate, as well as insensitive.) Trump has attended the annual memorial at Ground Zero a few times, including in 2024, but will not do so again this week. The New York Times reported that the president is instead participating in a Pentagon event because Manhattan organizers would not let him deliver a speech. (By tradition, there are no speeches delivered at Ground Zero, only a solemn reading of the victims’ names.) It would also be easier for Trump to fly out of Washington to attend a golf tournament this weekend at a course he owns in Ireland. The White House denied that Trump had asked to speak.

Trump has long been incapable of bringing people together and uninterested in doing so. He frequently indulges in anti-Muslim rhetoric (emphasizing Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein, and the full name of Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed) and once proposed a travel ban for anyone of that faith. His war against Iran has raised fears of another terror attack. The relationship between the president and his hometown is broken; he rarely visits his Midtown penthouse and is greeted with protests when he does. In all three of his presidential campaigns, he lost badly in New York. And though he has seemed charmed by the city’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, that did not stop his administration from announcing the results of a deportation surge for the city—dubbed “Operation Rotten Apple”—just days before the solemn Ground Zero commemoration.

New York City has been abandoned by its most famous son. But it will push forward, and it won’t be alone. Former presidents from both parties are slated to attend the ceremony on Friday morning. The commemoration itself is meant for the victims’ families, and officials expect a larger-than-usual turnout. But once the event is over, and the temporary ropes come down, the memorial will again open to the public. I took my sons there earlier this week. We saw people from red states and blue ones, and heard languages from all over the world. Those visitors stared at the waterfalls, let their hands run over the names of those lost, and shared quiet hugs. That will happen again this September 11. And when night falls, the Tribute in Light will switch on and beam pillars of light upward. The illuminated towers will stretch to the heavens—and they’ll guide so many of us home.

Jackie Collins Wrote Her Own Revolution

2026-09-10T09:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Dina Litovsky

Once, when I was 15 years old and as awkward and skinny-legged as a baby giraffe, I was idling in a department store in central London when I saw the novelist Jackie Collins standing at the register.

Can you imagine the aura emanating from her, like Hermès-scented magnetic waves? She was wearing animal print and a tailored jacket and had the kind of steely composure I’ve never managed to pull off in adulthood without straining something. Faced with one of my true idols, all I could do was gawk.

I learned about sex when I was 8, but it wasn’t until several years later, when my best friend yanked me upstairs to show me a particularly juicy paragraph from her mother’s neon-pink copy of Hollywood Kids, that I learned about pleasure. Jackie—with apologies, I will call her Jackie throughout, because “Collins” feels just too formal for a woman who impressed upon me the existence of the clitoris—once told The New York Times that she published her first novel “in 1968, when no one was writing about sex but Philip Roth.” Which wasn’t strictly true, but at a moment when second-wave feminism and sexual liberation were uneasy bedfellows, Jackie simply wrote her own revolution. The World Is Full of Married Men, her debut, was a caustic social satire in which a wronged wife emerges triumphant; The Stud, out the following year, was a flashy potboiler about a trophy wife and nightclub owner with a rapacious sexual appetite who treats men like toys and exalts in her social and financial clout.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Jackie wrote 32 books in total, sold more than half a billion copies, and gained an indelible reputation as an airport novelist, the kind of writer whose books are equally devoured and disdained. But oh, what they did for me! In retrospect, I gained a slightly deluded understanding of what adulthood actually entailed. Jackie was a devoted Mickey Spillane fan, and her books tend to be stuffed with gangsters, serial killers, pornographers, and even freelance journalists who get paid in advance. But as an anatomist of Hollywood gender dynamics, no writer was sharper or more aspirational. Jackie’s heroines, as she wrote in an introduction to The World Is Full of Divorced Women (1975), “demand equality—sexual and otherwise.” She wrote about creative, ferocious women striving for power and getting it. Lucky Santangelo, a recurring character and a kind of alter ego, starts out as the neglected daughter of a crime boss and works her way up to become the head of a movie studio in 1990’s Lady Boss.

Her characters carry on being fascinating and sexually active well past the age when other writers would have them tucked in bed with a crocheted blanket and a crossword puzzle. “In Jackie’s world, women’s real lives begin after forty,” the writer Helen Ellis observed of Hollywood Wives, the book that Jackie published at the age of 45, and that established her as a celebrity in her own right.

Even if you hate women (many people do), hate explicit sex scenes, hate the kind of pulpy storytelling that has you still reading in a cold bath at midnight, you cannot help but admit that Jackie captured the entertainment industry like no one else. She seemed equally drawn to the business of movie production—the seedy dealmaking and kickbacks—as well as the rampant abuses of power embedded in the Hollywood system, both of which she exposed without hesitation. Writing in the heady 1980s, when movies were becoming brasher, dumber, and unrepentantly commercial, she scrutinized a creative industry at a notable low point, less in thrall to art than to profit.

Although her novels made her a star, Jackie never considered herself fully part of Hollywood. Like a Reagan-era Margaret Mead, she took an anthropological approach. “I don’t live the Hollywood lifestyle,” she told Vanity Fair in 1995. “I move in it. I’m an observer.” At parties, she would stalk the room listening for interesting tidbits, taking copious mental notes that she’d jot down later. Describing an A-list event in Hollywood Wives, Jackie drops in fragments of what one character calls “Hollywood conversation,” dialogue that evokes a world where money and desire meld: “ ‘He pays me, I think it turns him on,’ said the redhead in the mink-trimmed cape.” So accurate was her portrayal that when Hollywood Wives was published, Jackie noted, “The ladies of Hollywood had their drivers and housekeepers lining up at the bookstores to get an early copy,” both furious that their gilded sanctum had been breached and desperate to pinpoint which character was based on which real person.

Hollywood, as a geographical term at least, is misleading: Jackie’s characters mostly work and play in Beverly Hills, a city of 30,000 or so extremely wealthy residents enclosed by Los Angeles. Formerly a lima-bean farm, then a failed oil field, Beverly Hills was developed into lots for housing around the same time that the movie industry headed west, in the early 20th century. When the silent-film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks moved into a spectacular former hunting lodge on Summit Drive in 1920—the press immediately named it “Pickfair”—they helped establish Beverly Hills as a nexus of celebrity glamour and industry cachet. Jackie genuinely loved the neighborhood for its clean white lines and endless sky, but she was also drawn to everything it contained beneath the surface: its roiling currents of fame, power, and degradation.

Early this summer, I traveled from London, where Jackie was born, to the enclave where she made her name. As a child of the ’80s, I was nostalgic for the maximalist era of shoulder pads, Giorgio perfume, and animal print. (Jackie loved big cats for their beauty and power, was convinced she’d been a panther in a previous life, and decorated her house and herself in leopard spots.) But as a cultural critic, I also wanted to revisit the era of moviemaking that Jackie had described in her novels. The ’80s saw a wave of corporate consolidation; venerable studios were gobbled up by behemoths from other industries. (Columbia Pictures was briefly a division of Coca-Cola.) This led to sillier, more crowd-pleasing movies. Even so, Hollywood was at the apex of its power, the global influence of filmmaking more potent than ever. Today, the center of cultural power and attention is shifting away from Los Angeles. Traditional storytelling has lost ground to what the consulting firm McKinsey calls “user-generated content”—TikTok and YouTube videos in which people talk enthusiastically about peptides and skinny-maxxing and the cruel feminization of the male life force.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

The Gucci storefront on Rodeo Drive. The protagonists of Jackie’s Hollywood novels frequently visit the street’s luxury boutiques to arm themselves for the soft warfare of self-presentation.

As a teenager, I had learned from Jackie’s books to expect that adulthood for women would be a series of hard-won triumphs that lead toward power. (She also suggested that midlife would involve a lot of stalking around restaurants while wearing crepe Halston jumpsuits and enough gold jewelry to sink a yacht, but I have long since made peace with neutral basics.) I am 43, roughly the age when Jackie’s heroines enter their prime, and when she herself did. I am very tired, having spent the past 14 months working, raising two 5-year-olds, promoting a book, and falling into existential mires of despair over the degenerating state of world affairs. A small, quiet part of my brain wondered whether tracing Jackie’s literary footsteps might reinvigorate my sense of what’s possible. Or at least demonstrate that her dreams for women—that they can have creative fulfillment, families, and happiness, as she did—might be somewhat more realistic now than they were 40 years ago.

Hollywood Wives was published in 1983, a good two decades before reality television turned exposing the lives of the wealthy, married, and highly maintained into a Bravo gold mine. We’re accustomed to such excess now, but back then, Jackie’s gossipy revelations—$50 panties, discreet plastic surgeons in Palm Springs, society grandes dames who used to be French call girls—seemed otherworldly.

The primary antiheroine in the book is the delightfully unlikable Elaine Conti (imagine a hornier, more desperate Becky Sharp), the 39-year-old wife of a movie star, Ross, whose last film bombed at the box office. There’s also a former gigolo on the brink of movie stardom, a buxom man-eater who wants to be taken seriously as an actress, and a serial killer who calls himself the “Keeper of the Order.” But for me at least, the book stands out for its portrayal of early-’80s Beverly Hills as a high-society Thunderdome, where everyone is scratching and clawing for status. In addition to the titular wives, who are drawn with both humanity and mild disdain, Jackie offers up a number of female characters operating in what she describes as the “Big Boys’ Club” of the movie industry: Sadie LaSalle, one of the most powerful and fearsome agents in town, and Montana Gray, a writer trying to save her screenplay from the clutches of a ruthless producer.

This is a world where power-lunching demands tactical precision. Elaine’s mission throughout the book is to restore Ross’s A-list status, with buzzy parties the couple can’t afford and a standing Friday lunch reservation at Ma Maison, where “anybody who was anybody and in town invariably showed up.” Ma Maison closed in 1985, and so the first place I went to test out the current state of power-dining was the Polo Lounge, a clubby salon situated toward the back of the spectacularly retro Beverly Hills Hotel. In Hollywood Husbands, Jackie’s 1986 follow-up, the handsome and promiscuous talk-show host Jack Python regularly meets his best friends for breakfast there, where they occupy Table One, “a cosy leather booth directly facing the entrance.” Table placement, Jackie emphasizes, is everything—“The back of this restaurant is Siberia,” one model tells another late in the book. “Land of the underachievers. Don’t even glance in that direction.”

I was not placed at Table One. I was seated just outside what seemed to be the main dining room, next to an elderly couple and a 12-year-old wearing a World Cup hoodie having pancakes by himself. Through the doorway, I could see men in button-downs and golf shirts conversing chummily; I started to feel slightly psychotic glimmers of envy and shame at being shut out from whatever they were brokering. The server’s eyes expressed gentle but unmistakable pity. A handsome Englishman was seated at a nearby table but immediately sensed defeat and asked to be moved to the terrace, where the sun shines regardless of a diner’s Variety profile, stock portfolio, or follower count.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Failure is galvanizing, I tried to remember from Jackie’s books, as long as you don’t let it break you. For much of her early life, Jackie wasn’t known for her writing or her feline fixation. (A plaque engraved with a panther marks her place in the celebrity crypt at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, where she was interred after her death, in 2015; the image is accompanied by the words SHE GAVE A GREAT DEAL OF PEOPLE A GREAT DEAL OF PLEASURE.) She came of age as the taller, ungainly younger sister of Joan, an almond-eyed, preternaturally composed actress who made her Hollywood debut starring alongside Bette Davis in 1955’s The Virgin Queen. Joan and Jackie had grown up together in a basement apartment in dingy postwar London, the daughters of a dance teacher and a talent agent whose parties, Jackie once said, were where she first became aware of how men talk about women when they think no one’s listening. “I get an awful inferiority complex when I’m with Joan,” the teenage Jackie wrote in her diary. In a photo of the pair together from 1955, Joan stands front and center, insouciant in a fur coat, while Jackie looks at the camera semi-apologetically from behind her.

Jackie was, however, entrepreneurial; by the age of 13, inspired by Harold Robbins and Henry Miller, she had a sideline writing sex scenes longhand and charging her classmates to read them. When Joan’s career took her to Hollywood, Jackie followed, moving with her sister to an apartment in the Chateau Marmont hotel, and having a brief fling—at 15—with the 29-year-old Marlon Brando. (He was “only my height, and kind of fat,” she noted in her journal, and also recorded that he called her “sincere, sweet, and luscious.”) But Jackie couldn’t get a work permit and so reluctantly returned to England, where she appeared in a handful of schlocky B movies before marrying the businessman Wallace Austin at 22. Four years later, Austin’s drug addiction had led the couple to divorce, and he died of an overdose shortly after.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

People pose for photographs in front of the Paul Smith Pink Wall on Melrose Avenue, a landmark for the Instagram era.

It was Jackie’s second husband, the producer and nightclub owner Oscar Lerman, who encouraged her to pursue writing, and to draw inspiration from the vivid social scenes the couple mixed in. (At one of her husband’s clubs, she told The Hollywood Reporter, Lerman had to put a guard outside the men’s room because teenage girls kept following movie stars in to offer them sexual favors.) At 31, she published The World Is Full of Married Men, which was an immediate best seller in the United Kingdom and promptly banned in Australia for its inventive array of four-letter words; the next year, the romance novelist Barbara Cartland lambasted her new novel, The Stud, as “awful, terrible, it’s evil really.”

Jackie and Lerman relocated to Los Angeles in 1980, and if you walk down the Beverly Hills Hotel’s unabashedly red-carpeted stairs and under a gloriously cinematic green-and-white striped awning, then stroll to the bottom of the hill, and wander for about 10 minutes beneath towering palm trees, you will arrive at the house that Jackie’s “awful, terrible” books built. Only a modest-seeming driveway was visible from the street. The place is now available for rent (for the trivial sum of $175,000 a month), and when I say that I begged the real-estate agent to let me view it, please know that I really and truly groveled. I spent months emailing a man who assured me that he was entreating the owners (real-estate developers who’d bought it after her death, gutted it, remodeled all the interiors) on my behalf—but to no avail. So instead I examined the signs affixed to palm trees warning me that I was on camera, to ensure the security of the neighborhood’s current residents, who—unlike the movie stars and moguls of Jackie’s day—are apparently financiers, minor Middle Eastern royals, and crypto magnates. (The current owner of the Pickfair mansion, I later learned, is the technology corporation Unicom Global, which uses it for conferences and events.)

But based on the listing, archival photographs, and the author photo on Jackie’s many hardcovers, I can tell you that it’s a 22,000-square-foot museum of a mansion, a defiant middle finger to the critics who belittled her for writing “bonkbusters,” and a visual testament to her success. The interiors are now predominantly beige, but in Jackie’s day, the pillows were all animal print. She designed the house around a huge rectangular swimming pool after seeing David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash in London. On her book jackets, she stands, radiant and shoulder-padded, next to the cool blue water and her imposing white box of a home. But she also took great pride in being a hands-on mother, cooking at home for her three daughters, doing school drop-offs in her silver Mustang, and keeping her children away from the sleazy Hollywood scenes she chronicled.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

In Jackie’s novels, characters mostly work and play in Beverly Hills, a nexus of celebrity glamour and movie-industry cachet since the 1920s.

Right as Jackie’s writing started appearing on the best-seller list, Joan’s acting career was floundering—in 1977, she appeared in the dismal sci-fi horror Empire of the Ants, playing a land developer set on by giant irradiated insects. It was Jackie who revived her sister’s reputation, after Joan was cast as the lead in the movie adaptation of The Stud. (A hit in Britain, the movie paved the way for Joan to get her most indelible American role, as Alexis Colby in Dynasty.) The charged sense of competition between the pair continued apace; in a 1988 Vanity Fair profile of both sisters, Dominick Dunne noted that a publicist had instructed him to dedicate equal copy to each woman, while also citing the rumors that Silver Anderson, the prickly 47-year-old TV star in Hollywood Husbands, was based on Joan.

Mindful of the security cameras, I walked quickly past Jackie’s house to a restaurant in downtown Beverly Hills called Bacari, where I took out my notebook and tried my hand at Jackie-style anthropology. At the table next to me, a talent agent was trying to lure another agent away from a major conglomerate, where she was unhappy. “They keep trying to buy us off with ice-cream socials,” she said to him plaintively. “Everyone is on a diet!” The conversation turned to her stable of clients, who all seemed to be social-media stars. She spoke proudly about one woman she represented who, under her mentorship, went from having 700,000 followers to more than 1 million. “That’s the kind of nurturing I bring to my job,” she said. The man asked her if she might be able to double her client list in the first three months; to help her in the effort, he could offer her a “digital assistant—no person.” He paid the bill. “Let’s get those wheels turning,” he said, ushering her out, and I wondered what Jackie would make of this version of Hollywood, with its brand-activation opportunities and AI-drafted emails, where celebrity is its own art form and product is paramount.

In Jackie’s Hollywood novels, Rodeo Drive—my next stop—is where the women of Beverly Hills go to arm themselves for the soft warfare of self-presentation. When every outfit, every hairdo, is minutely studied for signs of decline, keeping up appearances is essential. In Hollywood Husbands, Poppy Solomon, the secretary turned fourth wife of a studio head, gets ready for parties in much the same way General Patton commanded the Third Army: with ostentatious and pleasurable aggression. (“She wore a turquoise frilled, strapless dress, and many real diamonds. Her new tits protruded nicely.”)

The day I was there, the picture-perfect palms gently fluttering down Rodeo bore signs for an upcoming car show, which seemed unnecessary given that every day brings a parade of tricked-out vehicles: I watched a procession of Porsches, G-Wagons, two separate Maybachs with hydraulic suspension systems that had them bouncing up and down like sugared-up toddlers. No one was actually shopping, despite the lavish window displays. Instead, everyone was posing for pictures, wearing outfits they’d put together for this exact purpose and drafting husbands and friends to play photographer. A slender blond woman clutching a tan Birkin pouted while reclining against a lamppost outside Stefano Ricci. Someone whispered that she was a Russian influencer with a superstar-athlete partner, which seemed perfectly plausible, but outside the subset of her followers, how would the rest of us know?

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

A scene outside the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, the hotel Jackie moved into with her sister, Joan, in her teens

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Jackie lived in the Beverly Hills Hotel when she moved back to Los Angeles in 1980.

I was accompanied by a photographer, Dina, who approached the influencer to take her picture, but the woman scuttled away like a cartoon mouse. Something odd was happening, we quickly realized: Everyone was out posing in public, but no one wanted to cede control of how they might be perceived. When Dina tried to take photos of the Beverly Hills Hotel from a public sidewalk, a voice instantly came over a loudspeaker warning her to stop.

In a weak attempt to consider some of the box-office excess of 1980s Hollywood (Footloose, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop), I booked us a Paramount Pictures studio tour, but when I asked a publicist about Dina bringing her camera, I was told approval would be required, a studio representative would accompany us, and anything said on the tour could not be quoted. (All that’s worth saying about what followed is that while being driven around the lot where Citizen Kane, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Chinatown were shot, the most enthralling thing we saw was the plasticky interior set from the CBS reboot of Matlock.)

Jackie would find Hollywood’s new power dynamics perplexing: Many of her female characters are writers and reporters on the movie-celebrity beat, who see their job as pushing past the sanitized narratives that publicists try to present. But as media jobs have dwindled, influencers have stepped in to fill a void. Why would you trust a possibly unfriendly reporter with access to an actor or a director or a TV set when you can invite a photogenic social-media star to a premiere and be assured that they’ll rave about whatever they see to their hundreds of thousands of followers? In Hollywood Husbands, Silver, the soap star possibly based on Joan, is interviewed by an English journalist, “a middle-aged woman with brittle looks and dyed yellow hair” who sucks up to her subjects as energetically in person as she tears them apart in print. “So what?” Silver thinks. “Someone had once said As long as they spell your name right.” The internet has long since retooled this bargain.

And what are celebrities now, anyway? During my four days in Beverly Hills, which Jackie portrays as a superstar playground—Clint Eastwood, Jack Lemmon, Richard Gere, and Tom Selleck all feature in one lunch scene at Ma Maison—I saw not a single recognizably famous person. A dozen or so women looked similar enough to Kim Kardashian to stop me short; they were clearly modeled after her, but the image fell apart on second glance. One night I went to dinner at Funke, a purported newish hot spot for stars (Gwyneth Paltrow is a fan) where the chef used to have his own show on the disastrous short-form streaming platform Quibi. No sightings.

My L.A.-based friends advised heading east, to Los Feliz and Silver Lake, or west, to Venice and Santa Monica. Beverly Hills today is a bastion of the über-wealthy—Jeff Bezos owns the estate built by Jack Warner of Warner Bros.—and a drop-by for people who come to pose for Instagram. Like SoHo in New York and Notting Hill in London, the place feels like a simulacrum of a film set, where everyone is perpetually performing for unseen audiences and nothing feels quite real.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Hollywood, at the apex of its cultural power when Jackie was writing, is a very different touring experience now.

In her books, Jackie is unsentimental about creative work. Her characters tend to hustle for money and power, not self-indulgent awards or critical acclaim. When good movies get made, it’s largely by accident, because someone took their eye off the ball. But one character in Hollywood Wives seems to genuinely care about the integrity of the work she makes: Montana Gray, the tall, raven-haired, strikingly offbeat writer who—coincidentally—has a biography that seems a lot like Jackie’s own. By 15, Montana is a worldly soul who’s traveled the globe, learned French and Italian, and had two affairs. After spending a few years in bohemian circles, she meets the much older film director Neil Gray in Paris and falls in love with him. She helps him get sober and working again; he encourages her to write. At the start of the novel, her gritty screenplay, Street People, is the talk of Hollywood, with actors and agents fighting for copies.

And, because Montana is the wife of a major director, no one can accept that she actually wrote it. “Good-looking women had roles in life and they were supposed to stick to them,” Jackie writes. “They could be movie stars, models, housewives, hookers, but God forbid they should skirt onto what was strictly regarded as Big Boys’ Territory. Writing a major movie for a major director was Big Boys’ Territory. And in their own petty little way everyone wanted to let her know that.” When Neil pushes to cast the craggy movie star George Lancaster in a leading role in the film, Montana acquiesces reluctantly—he can’t act—only for George to assume that she’s a secretary the very first time they meet. “I’m Montana Gray,” she tells him. “I wrote Street People.” “You did?” he replies. “My, my, things sure are changing around here. I could still use that coffee, little lady.”

You might wonder whether things are actually different for women in Hollywood today. The statistics are still dismal: 8.1 percent of the 100 highest-grossing movies in 2025 were directed by women, a seven-year low, and the percentage of movies with any major female characters at all fell from 39 percent the previous year to 36 percent. But TV is faring better: More than a third of all streaming shows now have at least one female creator. One of those women is Lisa Joy, formerly a writer and co-creator of HBO’s adaptation of Westworld, a futuristic sci-fi show with a notably feminist question at its core: What might men do to women if those women didn’t seem fully human and the men thought they could get away with it? In 2019, Joy and her husband, the screenwriter and producer Jonathan Nolan, signed a reported $150 million deal to create shows for Amazon, including the acclaimed video-game adaptation Fallout and an upcoming TV version of Rebecca Yarros’s blockbuster romantasy series, Fourth Wing.

Jackie would have liked the all-caps plaque on Joy’s desk—I’M CEO, BITCH—that greeted me in the Hollywood offices of her production company, a glass-walled room facing the Capitol Records building. Like Montana, Joy is impossibly glamorous and all too familiar with having people presume that her accomplishments are secretly a man’s. So much of Westworld, she told me, came from her experiences being the lone woman in what felt like male playgrounds. But, like Jackie, she’s convinced that writing a different world gets us one step closer to manifesting it.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

The screenwriter and director Lisa Joy at the offices of Kilter Films, the production company she runs with her husband, Jonathan Nolan

Post-MeToo, Joy said, she’s noticed some really positive changes, such as a junior writer she knows speaking out against a serial harasser whom no one had ever dared confront before, and who was subsequently fired. But reminders abound of all the ways in which things have stayed the same. “There are so many yacht trips I’ve heard about for male directors and writers,” she said. “I don’t know why they all get yachts, but there doesn’t ever seem to be a woman invited. But fuck the yachts, you know? They make you seasick. They’re no fun. Let’s make the reality we want.” I left Joy’s office feeling energized by her work, by her enthusiasm, by her determination. And then, as I was crossing Hollywood Boulevard, the universe gave me a palpable reality check: a 50-foot billboard advertising Louis C.K.’s upcoming comedy special for Netflix.

On my last morning in L.A., I went downstairs to get breakfast in my hotel, and ended up sitting near two men who were discussing potential merchandising deals for one of their clients. “Makeup is really splintered; it’s a challenging category for sure,” one said. “But fragrance is booming. What about hair?” The client has a personal connection to hair, the other said excitedly. (Who among us? I thought.) The first man proceeded to expound on how hair brands are working quickly to address the issues—thinning, shedding—that can come from GLP‑1 use. The other circled back to his client, whom he talked about with such reverence that I leaned closer, convinced she was a huge household name. “Her pull on her community is so strong,” he said. “What feeds her passion is serving her community and improving people’s lives. She’s built for this.” Only by the end of the conversation, and after much furtive Googling on my part, did it become clear whom they were talking about: a Goth-makeup influencer on TikTok who has more than 6 million followers.

You could argue that the content-creator model has democratized entertainment and broken down conventional gatekeeping, enabling anyone with a ring light, a front-facing camera, and a compelling personality to find their following. I don’t disagree. But it’s also restored youth and overconfidence as the preeminent characteristics for women on camera. Whereas what I’ve always loved about Jackie’s books is how they enshrine success and power as being hard-won and worth the hustle—and the wait. Midlife is when things get interesting for her characters, because they know the stakes they’re playing for, and they’ve accrued enough wisdom and battle scars to rival and even occasionally best the Big Boys.

But the waning public interest in traditional storytelling (because you’re reading this, I’ll diplomatically ignore the even gloomier fate of the written word) has other consequences too. If you’re someone who doesn’t just love movies and TV shows but has felt genuinely changed by some of them, it’s hard not to mourn what we lose when our mass culture has all the bells and whistles of entertainment—hair, makeup, stars, product placement—but none of the curiosity about human predicaments underpinning it. Jackie’s work was berated during her lifetime by critics (“It starts off as nothing and ends as nothing” — Clive James) and high-school English teachers like mine (“trash”), but it graphically exposed a Hollywood full of sexual harassment and gender inequity. Not least, it imagined alternative paths for women to pursue.

Now her books are mostly out of fashion; when I stopped by the Barnes & Noble inside the Grove, where Jackie liked to shop before going to the movies, the store had not a single copy of any of her novels. I was feeling despondent when I went for a last outing, to Mariposa: one of Jackie’s favorite restaurants, where she met for lunch each week with her closest friends, an elegant dining room tucked into the basement of the Neiman Marcus Beverly Hills. I had learned in emailing beforehand that Jackie was still a much-loved figure there. I was met by the store’s manager of brand experience, Mary Kate Steinmiller, who looks exactly like the actress Malin Akerman and used to be a fashion editor at Teen Vogue. She took me downstairs to Jackie’s favorite blue booth.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

A couple dressed in designer outfits dine at the Mariposa, a restaurant tucked into the basement of the Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills, where Jackie met with her closest friends weekly for lunch.

For days, I’d been traipsing through Beverly Hills trying to find a little spiritual proximity to Jackie, and here it was, on the lower floor, by the beauty counters. Groups of women wearing Christian Dior tennis whites and Pucci wrap dresses chatted ebulliently over cocktails (it was 12:15 p.m.). Every table featured floral arrangements nicer than the ones at my wedding. Over in a corner, an older couple wearing acid-green designer outfits sat absorbed in each other. A table of women told me that Mariposa was their country club. They had known and liked Jackie, but quickly pushed back against the lingering stereotype of the Hollywood Wife. One was a high-powered divorce attorney. Another was a sports photographer. The restaurant was gorgeous (and don’t sleep on the lobster salad), but it was also clear what it meant to these women: community, affirmation, a clubby dining room of their own. Watching them, I felt as though what Jackie’s novels had promised might actually be true: If you can muster enough ambition and persistence to keep pushing through, the payoff could well be worth the wait.

Travel Notes

Spago

Ma Maison, immortalized in Hollywood Wives, is long gone, but in 1982 its star chef, a telegenic Austrian named Wolfgang Puck, left to open Spago on the Sunset Strip, redefining L.A. dining in the process. The original location closed decades ago, but Spago Beverly Hills lives on, with its twinkly lit courtyard, casual-luxe menu (Jackie loved the smoked-salmon pizza and wrote it into multiple books), and luxe-luxe prices. If you never get to go to the Academy Awards’ Governors Ball, which Puck has catered for more than three decades, this is at least a chance to eat stardust by association.

176 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills CA, 90210

Bob’s Coffee and Doughnuts

Doughnuts and Hollywood physiques go together like deep-dish and Ozempic. Don’t let that keep you away from Bob’s, a 56-year-old stand inside the historic Los Angeles Farmers Market, where writers have come to eat and procrastinate since the 1930s. According to legend, Robert Altman used to have breakfast here, scribbling away under the slatted awnings. And the doughnuts really are great—pillowy and sugar-sprinkled. Fun fact: A branded Farmers Market tote bag costs $2, compared with $50 for one at the nearby Erewhon.

6333 W. 3rd St., Stall #450, Los Angeles CA, 90036

Hollywood Books

Is this tiny spot on Melrose a bookstore in the conventional sense? Not really, at least not if you’re looking for a popular novel or Belle Burden’s monster-hit memoir, Strangers. At Hollywood Books, the shelves are stacked with secondhand art volumes and reissued classics. Despite—because of?—its unfussed approach to business, the store has become extremely chic among the literary girlies of Los Angeles; at one point it hosted an event for the supermodel Kaia Gerber’s book club, Library Science. I left with a copy of Picture, Lillian Ross’s 1952 analysis of the clash between art and corporate interests in moviemaking, just to remember that things were ever thus.

6917 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles CA 90038

Wrapstar

I can’t endorse the wraps or salads here, because I had only a sparkling water. But for eavesdropping like Jackie, you can’t beat the location—across the street from William Morris Endeavor’s boxy Beverly Hills headquarters, and next door to Cipriani. Sit, snoop, rubberneck. (Yes, wraps are passé, but power agents sometimes need sad-desk lunches that you can eat with one hand while scrolling through social media, just like the rest of us.)

356 N. Camden Dr., Beverly Hills CA, 90210

Bar Funke

Funke regrettably did not provide any celebrity sightings, but it did furnish a gorgeous twist on a margarita, made with Sicilian-blood-orange bitters and prickly pear. The rooftop, after you enter through a jasmine-strewn trellis, looks out over the palms and offices of Beverly Hills, but from my spot at the bar, all I wanted to stare at were the pink quartzite counters and Chef Evan Funke’s elaborate collection of Amaro aperitifs. Jackie’s literary alter ego, the glamorous and hot-blooded Italian businesswoman Lucky Santangelo, would have appreciated both.

9388 S. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills CA 90210

Mariposa

Here’s to the ladies who lunch, and to playing one in this delightful department-store-basement restaurant, with its velvety blue booths and popovers accompanied by strawberry butter. The waitstaff are lovely, the diners’ outfits are extraordinary, and the food—lobster salad, crab cakes, tuna tartare—is opulent and calorie-conscious, and so good you’ll be wondering why the guests aren’t eating more of it. If I ever die and get to (at least) purgatory, I hope it’s a little like Mariposa.

9700 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills CA, 90210

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “Jackie Oh!” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What Russia Is Really Up To in Europe

2026-09-10T11:00:00-04:00

On Russian state television, the Kremlin’s propagandists have for years threatened to bomb European capitals, even while the country’s diplomats insist that no such war is imminent. Lately, the denials have gotten hard to sustain, as European intelligence agencies have ascribed hundreds of clandestine sabotage operations—cyberattacks in Italy, arson in the United Kingdom, undersea-cable ruptures in the Baltic, severed pig heads left outside French mosques—to Russia.

U.S. intelligence assessments conclude that a conventional Russian attack on a NATO country is likely to happen sometime from this fall to 2029. But another possibility is that Moscow will remain content with sabotage and intimidation. This hybrid campaign is all the war Russia wants or needs—and stoking fear that Moscow just might directly strike Ukraine’s European allies is part of it.

If this is what Russian President Vladimir Putin is really up to in Europe, then he was telling the truth when he assured Trump this week that Russia has “no aggressive intentions against European statehood.” Moscow has not massed troops on any NATO member’s border. Rather, it has been sending a carefully calibrated message meant to persuade Europe to stop supporting Ukraine.

[Read: Putin’s explosive message to Trump]

For Moscow, this has been a summer of setbacks in Ukraine. Russia stalled on the battlefield and sustained damage from thousands of Ukrainian long-range drones that plunged the country into fuel shortages. And so it escalated elsewhere in Europe: Fires broke out at ammunition plants in Italy, Bulgaria, and Estonia last month, and explosive-laden drones were discovered near a German power plant and at an airport in Leipzig, apparently intended to destroy Ukrainian cargo planes.

From the Kremlin’s point of view, Europe has been deepening its involvement in Ukraine. At the beginning of the full-scale war, Europe donated weapons to Ukraine from its own stocks. Within two years, European governments were paying Ukrainian factories to manufacture arms. Last year, Fire Point, a Ukrainian missile-and-drone manufacturer, announced that it would establish a solid-fuel production plant in Denmark, making it the first such arms company to expand production abroad. Today, Europe provides the bulk of financial assistance to Kyiv. It has also become Ukraine’s secure production base—Ukrainian weapons are manufactured in Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, France, Romania, and Spain.

Because Kyiv is attacking Russia’s rear, it’s logical to worry that Moscow will attack Ukraine’s. Russian security services are almost certainly capable of carrying out a lethal attack on European soil. And Western war games have entertained many possibilities along those lines. Among them are a limited Russian incursion into a small Baltic town that has a Russian-speaking population; a full-scale invasion of the Baltic states, launched simultaneously from Belarus and Kaliningrad, Russia’s European exclave, to cut them off from the rest of Europe; the rapid creation of an impenetrable drone “kill zone” on European soil; and a strategic blockade of the Baltic Sea. Some of these scenarios are plausible; others would require hundreds of thousands of Russian troops to crisscross Europe.

Russia has not visibly prepared for any such scenario, however. Instead, it continues to wage its hybrid war—which European security services continue to thwart. Such are the headlines: Drones carrying explosives are discovered in Leipzig, improvised explosive devices are found near a German power plant, and flying objects are spotted near airports.

Moscow may not much care that these operations get foiled. In a way, the effect is similar to that of Russia’s harassment of journalists and embassy workers stationed in Moscow: Things in their apartment get rearranged, signs of eavesdropping are deliberately made obvious, or a window is left open in the middle of winter. Such interference conveys a sinister message: We’re watching you. We have access to you. You are not in control. But it’s still different from blowing up the apartment.

[Read: NATO’s nightmare]

Putin has generally chosen to fully engage the Russian military only in conflicts that he feels (rightly or, in the case of Ukraine, wrongly) assured of winning. This does not describe any hypothetical attack on the Baltic states, which have heavily fortified borders, conduct regular military exercises, and spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense.

That’s not to mention the thousands of British, German, and Canadian troops stationed near the Baltics as part of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence. Moscow may be willing to wager that the United States won’t intervene should Russia attack Estonia. But Russia would then find itself at war with numerous European states armed with submarines, aircraft carriers, fifth-generation fighter jets, long-range cruise missiles, and even nuclear weapons—all while it was still fighting in Ukraine.

Russia’s hybrid war has not succeeded in its likely purpose: stopping weapons, money, and intelligence from flowing into Ukraine from Europe. Kyiv has more arms, funds, and—judging by its strikes on Russian soil—intelligence than ever before. Neither has the Russian campaign taken out a European satellite that supplies Ukraine with intelligence, say, or destroyed a shipment of Patriot missiles.

But Putin persists in this campaign for a reason. Through inexpensive means, expendable operatives, and a steady stream of chilling leaks, the Kremlin has millions of Westerners braced for it to wage a full-scale war against Europe. Regardless of whether that war is likely, Putin will be demanding concessions in exchange for bringing it to an end.

Trump Is Preparing for a Long War

2026-09-10T08:12:02-04:00

To hear the Trump administration tell it, the war with Iran is all but over. U.S. military posture tells a different story: Naval forces are being positioned for a sustained presence at least through the end of the year, keeping open the option of escalation.

The Navy is moving aircraft carriers, its signature asset, around the globe so that two can be deployed in and around the Persian Gulf in the final months of this year, giving the United States the ability to hit both Iran and Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have recently fired barrages of missiles at Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the Army has extended the deployment of elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, which are already in the region, because of “operational requirements.”

The conflict, now in its seventh month, has already lasted far longer than the president’s initial predictions of victory within a few weeks. And senior officials have recently downplayed the scale of the conflict in the apparent hope that it will recede from the headlines. Vice President Vance claimed to reporters last week that the U.S. is not at war at all. Soon after, President Trump referred to the conflict as “small potatoes,” though he has since termed it a war. After Iran targeted a U.S. warship, the Navy sank five Iranian crude-oil tankers on Tuesday, according to U.S. Central Command. With no talks under way, and no end to the hostilities in sight, the Navy is staying on a war footing indefinitely, adding to the severe burden already placed on the Navy and on U.S. munitions stockpiles.

The unusually long deployment of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, whose crew spent 264 consecutive days at sea and dropped more than 1.5 million pounds of ordnance, was plagued with food and supply shortages, plumbing problems, and declining morale. The Lincoln eventually departed for Thailand, relieved by USS George Washington.

The Washington joined about 20 other ships in the Middle East, including USS George H. W. Bush, another carrier that has been there since April. Now the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group is preparing to leave its San Diego base to relieve the Washington, which is expected to finish its deployment by the end of the year. In short, the Navy is planning to maintain two aircraft carrier strike groups in the Middle East near Iran for at least the rest of 2026, U.S. officials told us. The Navy has seldom mustered such a formidable presence there since the heights of the Afghan and Iraq Wars, and the move reflects the fact that the administration is considering a ramp-up of its military-strike campaign after November, the officials said.

Talking to reporters late last month, Admiral Daryl Caudle, the chief of naval operations, prepared the Roosevelt’s crew for tough times ahead and a lengthy deployment at sea, especially now that Iran’s attacks on U.S. bases in the Gulf have made getting sailors to shore much more challenging. Caudle acknowledged that he couldn’t say how long the Roosevelt’s deployment would last and that it could keep being extended.

“If we know we’re going into harm’s way, we should be able to project with a little bit more fidelity how long the carrier and the strike group is going to stay on station,” Caudle said, according to USNI News. “We do these extensions in little chunks, and the families don’t see any endpoint so they can plan their own lives—that creates a lot of stress for sailors.” He added: “I typically am not a big fan of extensions, and I push back hard on that. But the enemy gets a vote.”

An extended conflict is not at all what the White House wants. Trump has been trying to extricate himself from the war for months, frequently frustrated that he has not been able to bludgeon Iran into surrendering—and angry that Tehran has continued to defy his bombastic threats. In recent weeks, the administration has settled on a campaign of economic pressure to try to force Tehran to negotiate more seriously. Officials told us that there are signs that the approach is working and that Iran’s economy, already battered, is further teetering. But economic pressure can take months or years to have its full effect. And the hard-liners in Iran have long shown a willingness to ignore the suffering of their people if it means tightening their grip on power. Trump hinted at Iran’s perseverance yesterday, telling reporters before boarding Air Force One that he now believes Tehran will try to hold out until after the American elections. Some aides think it could be even longer. U.S. Central Command told us it does not talk about future troop movements.

[Read: The real reason Trump wants economic sanctions on Iran ]

A sustained economic chokehold has potential political benefits for the administration, keeping the unpopular conflict quiet while Republicans run for election this fall. But the inherent complication with that plan is that the status quo would likely keep gas prices high, which is why the administration has kept such a focus on the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for global energy supplies. Iran seized it, and effectively shut it, in the early days of the war.

Trump has privately told advisers that he is eager to claim victory and move on, but acknowledges that he cannot credibly do so while the strait remains largely closed or menaced by Iran, a senior White House aide and an outside adviser told us on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The president has signed off on military action around the strait to punish Iran’s efforts to thwart the U.S. blockade.

The administration has also begun preparing for the possibility that the economic-pressure campaign may push Iran into ramping up its attacks, creating the need for a greater U.S. military presence, according to the senior aide. And though Trump would prefer to be done with the war as soon as possible, he has signaled a willingness to consider renewing a more sustained military campaign—but likely only after the midterms and once the Pentagon has replaced some of its depleted weapons supply.

Right now, Tehran appears to favor escalation.

In recent days, Iranian forces attacked commercial shipping, threatened to create a maritime exclusion zone in the Gulf (a nonstarter for the U.S. and other Gulf countries), aimed ballistic missiles at nearby U.S. naval vessels, and vowed to “take action against any threat, even before it is carried out.” Collectively, these moves by Tehran were sending a message: We are willing to go big to get a deal. The regime has also been preparing its own citizens for extended hardship, pushing national unity amid rampant inflation and shortages brought on by U.S. sanctions. “Their message is, The U.S. is using economic pressure to create another uprising in Iran, the prelude to the next big war,” Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told us. “They are trying to prepare the population for no short-term resolution.”

Carriers are not the only ships capable of supporting the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. But they give the United States something the other ships cannot: a mobile airfield capable of quickly launching sustained combat operations without relying on bases in countries that could come under Iranian attack. More broadly, the carriers are considered a form of deterrence, a projection of American power and intent. Yet they can also illustrate the limits of U.S. capabilities.

As long as two of the 10 available U.S. carriers are near the Gulf, the Navy can’t sustain a carrier elsewhere in the world without putting a tremendous strain on the force. The other carriers are either in shipyards or resetting between deployments. Every time the U.S. extends a deployment, that jolts scheduling for shipyards by months. And it puts strain on Navy families and sailors. That also means no aircraft carrier in the Pacific to show U.S. determination to defend its allies and Taiwan against possible Chinese aggression. And no deployed aircraft carrier in the Western Hemisphere.

[Read: Will Taiwan just give up?]

“Once the administration decided on the blockade as its main line of effort, they also concluded that this would be a sustained campaign,” Bryan Clark, a defense expert at Hudson Institute, told us. “But keeping carriers in the Arabian Gulf for responsive strikes will prevent sustaining carrier presence elsewhere. We may see U.S. influence erode in places like the Asia Pacific, like Japan and Taiwan.”

U.S. allies are already anticipating a less consistent U.S.-carrier presence in Asia, defense officials told us, with Japan and the Philippines discussing ways to bolster their naval forces in response to the threat from China. Meanwhile, the U.S. is relying on a different mix of ships for its operations in the Indo-Pacific, including littoral-combat ships that normally support the Middle East but arrived in Singapore for maintenance shortly after the Iran war began. The Navy has been trying to move some of those ships back toward the Gulf too.

Sailors on the aircraft carriers in the Gulf will face a theater shaped by Iran’s persistence. Because of Tehran’s attacks over the past six months, the U.S. has lost the infrastructure to support multiple port visits for carriers in places such as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. For now, until the Navy finds alternative sites for liberty breaks, in Africa and potentially as far away as Singapore, carrier strike groups will likely get two stops during extended deployments, one en route and one when homeward bound. And with fewer safe nearby ports, resupply must be done from bases farther away, such as Diego Garcia, a British territory in the central Indian Ocean.

“This will be the new normal,” one former defense official explained to us.

Regular aircraft-carrier deployments last six to eight months. But the extensions in the Gulf are just the latest in a string of longer deployments over the past decade, as the U.S. has sought a robust naval presence in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and now the Western Hemisphere. USS Gerald R. Ford anchored the flotilla that pressured Caracas in the run-up to the seizure of President Nicolás Maduro in January.

[Read: Venezuela seems to be going … well?]

Those longer deployments have ripple effects throughout the service, borrowing against future time that was slotted for maintenance and training. That has steadily eroded sailor retention and readiness. “When you overuse an asset, eventually you are going to pay a price,” John Pendleton, who directed the Government Accountability Office’s military-readiness work for more than a decade, told us.

The Navy has seen the effects of such strains before. In 2017, after two fatal destroyer collisions in the Pacific just two months apart, Navy officials acknowledged that an intense operational tempo contributed: Ships were repeatedly tasked to meet demands despite shortfalls in training, maintenance, and manning, leaving crews overstretched and, in some cases, exhausted. Almost a decade on, a similar risk exists in the Persian Gulf.

Will Taiwan Just Give Up?

2026-09-08T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Cheng-Chia Huang

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Chinese President Xi Jinping does not often look like he’s having a good time. His resting face at public events exudes a mixture of boredom and annoyance, as though he has more interesting business elsewhere. His displays of good humor have qualified as news in Chinese state media. When a camera caught him laughing during a meeting last October with Donald Trump, the moment “stunned observers,” according to one news report. At their meeting in Beijing in May, the staging spoke as forcefully as Xi’s expressions. His appearance with Trump at a press conference inside Xi’s official residence featured two nearly identical armchairs, except that the one reserved for the U.S. president was lower and softer, making him look smaller and slouchier than his host. If Trump took offense, he didn’t show it.

The Chinese Communist Party, like its forebear in the Soviet Union, often communicates in winking, elliptical ways. In April, Xi hosted a lunch for a delegation from Taiwan. He drew his guests’ attention to the soup—chicken broth with sea clams. The same dish had been served, he said, during a state dinner that Beijing hosted for President Richard Nixon in 1972, when Xi was still a teenager. Two of his guests told me that Xi seemed oddly animated at the luncheon. He cracked jokes. He told stories. He showed his teeth when he smiled. In a break from their usual attire, Xi and his courtiers chose to wear blue ties. Blue is the symbolic color of Taiwan’s Nationalist Party, which currently holds the most seats in the island’s Parliament. Its chair, Cheng Li-wun, was the guest of honor that day.

The friendly performance, like the meeting itself, seemed out of character. A central tenet of the Chinese Communist Party holds that Taiwan is not a sovereign country but a wayward province that must be subjugated before China can fully achieve its idea of national greatness. Since taking power, in 2012, Xi has made it his mission to isolate and dominate Taiwan. He warned Trump in May that their disagreements over Taiwan could lead to an “extremely dangerous situation” that might well cause the United States and China to “collide or even clash.”

And yet, a month earlier, the Taiwanese Nationalists had received a warm reception in Beijing. They’d strolled through the Forbidden City, posed for pictures with curious crowds, toured an airplane factory, and talked business with Chinese executives. Xi had welcomed the delegation as though the delegates held the keys to his success. In many ways, they do.

On Xi’s orders, the People’s Liberation Army has been preparing to seize Taiwan by force, and it has encouraged the world to imagine an invasion. Last December, it released an AI-generated video showing swarms of drones attacking Taiwan and humanoid robots marching through the ruins. In reality, drones would form only part of a Chinese attack. The first salvo could use cyberweapons to take down Taiwan’s power grid and communications networks, spreading panic among the population. Missiles and drones could then target Taiwan’s command posts, military bases, and air defenses, clearing the way for Chinese troops to storm its beaches.

Taiwan has more than 200,000 active military personnel, and they could probably fend off a Chinese attack for a short while. But within a few weeks, the U.S., Japan, and other allies would need to resupply the island with fuel and weapons. The Chinese navy—the world’s largest fleet of warships—would do its best to keep them away. Cargo traffic through the Taiwan Strait, one of the world’s main shipping channels, would be interrupted, wiping trillions of dollars in value from global markets. If the U.S. goes to war with China to defend Taiwan, the likely death toll of soldiers and civilians would be in the tens of thousands on both sides. War games have consistently shown that, in a conventional conflict, the U.S. military could expect to lose more troops in the initial weeks of fighting than it lost over the course of 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

China has spent decades rehearsing for such a conflict. Its military has built training grounds with replicas of U.S. warships and fighter jets. One facility, in the desert of northern China, features a mock-up of the Taiwanese presidential headquarters and several streets close to Parliament. But Cheng told me that she did not ask Xi to ease up on the military threats. Their talks focused instead on a plan for Taiwan to drop its claim to independence, stop preparing for war, and move toward reconciliation with the mainland.

During their lunch in April, Xi used the story about the soup to suggest a link between this plan for the future of Taiwan and Nixon’s opening to China half a century ago—a historic summit meant to turn adversaries into allies. Cheng was still beaming over the comparison a few weeks later, when we met in her office in Taipei. The trip had left her with a “very special” understanding that Taiwan and China “share the same culture, share the same blood, and that we can embrace this.” It allowed her to believe that “everything is possible, because we’re just one big family.”

Cheng punctuated this remark with a gesture of relief, exhaling and letting her arms fall to her lap. With time, she seems to hope, Taiwan and its American allies will take the same view of China, accepting a slow, preemptive surrender as the best way to avoid war.

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

“We’re just one big family”: Cheng Li-wun, the leader of Taiwan’s Nationalist Party, sees no threat from China.

Even a few years ago, pandering to China would have been a losing strategy for politicians in Taiwan. The ruling government of President Lai Ching-te, whose Democratic Progressive Party has been in power since 2016, has urged the U.S. to strengthen Taiwan’s defenses in anticipation of a Chinese attack. Cheng and her Nationalists have done the opposite. Their control of Parliament has allowed them to block defense spending, taking particular care to stall the domestic production of drones and other inexpensive weapons that Ukraine has used to great effect against Russia. The U.S. war with Iran has helped Cheng make the case that resisting China would be futile. Since launching the war, in February, the U.S. has been forced to move warships and aircraft from Asia to the Middle East; at the same time, the need to defend against Iranian drones and missiles has depleted an estimated two-thirds of the U.S. stockpile of advanced air-defense systems, which would be crucial in any war with China. Even Cheng’s opponents acknowledge that the Iran war has left the U.S. less ready to defend Taiwan.

[Read: What China just learned from the Iran war]

When I visited Taiwan this spring, I saw clearly how little faith remained in the U.S. as a force for stability and protection. My questions about American support usually elicited a long pause or a sad smile. When the answers came, whether from politicians, military veterans, or ordinary citizens, nearly all described the U.S. as “unpredictable,” a flabby word on which to hang a nation’s fate. This loss of confidence has forced many in Taiwan to rethink their attitude toward China. Should they continue to prepare for a war they cannot win on their own? Or should they accept the deal that Cheng and Xi have apparently hatched?

Both of them have kept the details vague. In public they talk of shared identity, free trade, economic bonds, and peaceful coexistence, while skirting questions about the amount of freedom and democracy that China would accept in Taiwan and the amount of Taiwanese sovereignty it would tolerate. Cheng often gets asked about the example of Hong Kong, whose democratic institutions China has dismantled. Taiwan would get a better deal, she insisted in our interview—one that would permit free elections as long as the winner does not insist on Taiwan’s independence.

Andrew Harnik / Getty

Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, October 2025. Xi has warned Trump that their disagreements over Taiwan could lead to an “extremely dangerous situation.”

Trump seems open to such an arrangement. After his May meeting with Xi, he described the U.S. sale of weapons to Taiwan not as a strategic necessity but as a “very good negotiating chip” in future talks with China about trade, nuclear arms, and the race to develop artificial intelligence. He also cast doubt on U.S. willingness to come to Taiwan’s defense: “The last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away,” Trump told reporters while flying home from Beijing on Air Force One. (The war with Iran, roughly 7,000 miles from U.S. soil, was then in its third month.)

Given the choice, most people in Taiwan would prefer the status quo. They want to maintain their autonomy, trade freely with the world, and keep China out of their affairs. They value their place in the club of democracies that the U.S. once anchored and pledged to protect. But the American public is weary of foreign entanglements. The American president, enamored of autocrats, treats democratic allies as deadbeats and dupes.

Against this background, Taiwan and its defenders struggle to explain why Americans should care enough about their cause to risk war with China. Shared principles of freedom and democracy no longer count for much in this debate. When the subject came up in my interviews in Taipei and Washington, people seemed embarrassed to talk about American values, as if the idea were quaint. The more forceful arguments for Taiwan’s defense came from military strategists, who see the island as a platform to secure American dominance over the Pacific. Other arguments are economic. More than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips are made in Taiwan—including the ones driving the AI revolution, which has propped up the American economy. The U.S. does not want China to control that crucial resource.

[Read: Taiwan has a Trump problem]

But Trump does not seem willing to confront China over that issue. He has described Xi as a “great leader” and a friend. Ahead of their meetings this year⁠—⁠the next one is due to take place in late September, when Xi visits the U.S.—Trump allowed the sale of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies. The stated aims of Trump’s foreign policy center on the domination of the Western Hemisphere. In other parts of the world, he has either retreated or made a mess from which he would like to retreat. Taiwan might count among the lucky ones: Trump has not threatened its sovereignty, the way he has with Canada and Greenland.

Annabelle Chih / Getty

A launcher truck for American-made surface-to-air Patriot missiles, deployed at a park in Taipei as part of military exercises in 2025

Still, the unraveling of the Pax Americana looks a lot more dangerous from the shores of Taiwan, a free nation that belongs to no trade bloc and has no formal alliances. Its survival depends on the promise of U.S. support, which no longer seems convincing. China’s allies in Taipei need only point to Trump’s prevarications as proof that the Americans cannot be trusted. That may be all Xi needs to take Taiwan without firing a shot.

Cheng Li-wun may agree with Xi’s talking points, but she lacks his flair for understatement. Cheng has a resonant voice, an eager laugh, and a tendency to slash the air with her hands for emphasis. At the start of her political career, in the 1990s, she defended Taiwan’s independence and denounced the Communist regime in Beijing—a stance that she now, at 56, explains away as youthful ignorance. Cheng first won a seat in Parliament on the Nationalist ticket in 2008, and she has since come to represent the party’s more radical wing, espousing a level of deference toward China that the dwindling old guard finds hard to stomach.

Roughly 65,000 members of the party voted last fall in the election that made Cheng their chair—hardly enough for her to claim a popular mandate in a nation of 23 million people. Still, the position gives her enormous sway over Taiwan’s military spending and its ability to defend itself. It also places her in a lineage of party leaders that stretches back more than a century, to before the civil war that swept across China in the late 1940s. In 1949, Communist forces under Mao Zedong took power, with support from the Soviet Union. The defeated Nationalists, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, retreated to their strongholds on Taiwan and a few other islands off China’s coast.

Bettmann / Getty

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek at a rally celebrating Taiwan’s National Day, October 1970

They never acknowledged defeat. Even after Chiang’s death, in 1975, the Nationalists clung to the belief that the Communist regime would eventually collapse, making way for them to retake control of mainland China. The U.S. nurtured that delusion during the first two decades of the Cold War. It opened an embassy in Taipei and treated Taiwan’s leaders as the legitimate government of China. Taiwan even held China’s seat in the United Nations, where Taiwanese diplomats sat behind a nameplate that said China. For its part, the Communist regime in Beijing had no diplomatic relations with the United States or most of its European allies. The U.S. secured its position in Asia through a series of military alliances with China’s local adversaries—South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan.

[From the May 1942 issue: Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘China Emergent’]

Taiwan’s status proved untenable. In 1971, the UN gave Taiwan’s seat in the General Assembly to China. Nixon’s visit to Beijing the following year upended American policy toward China and Taiwan. By the end of the decade, the U.S. had withdrawn its embassy from Taipei and opened a new one in Beijing. It had also abandoned its mutual-defense pact with Taiwan and, in its place, provided softer assurances. The Taiwan Relations Act, signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, commits the U.S. to continuing to provide “arms of a defensive character” to Taiwan. It states that Chinese aggression toward the island, including an embargo, would be a matter of “grave concern,” whatever that might mean.

Bettmann / Getty

Richard Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai during the American president’s first visit to Beijing, February 1972

This policy of “strategic ambiguity” faced its greatest test during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995 and ’96, when the U.S. and China nearly came to blows. The crisis started innocently enough: The U.S. had merely granted a visa for Taiwan’s then-president to speak at Cornell University, his alma mater. China responded to the visit with a series of threats and military exercises, firing missiles in the vicinity of Taiwan and disrupting cargo traffic.

President Bill Clinton, under intense pressure from Congress, sent two U.S. aircraft carriers to the area. One of them, the USS Nimitz, sailed through the Taiwan Strait as a warning to Chinese leaders, who ordered the military to stand down. “They felt a kind of humiliation from that,” Lee Hsi-min, a retired admiral in Taiwan’s navy, told me.

Throughout the crisis, Lee commanded a submarine called the Sea Dragon, which had orders to remain beneath the strait, ready to ambush any Chinese warships that tried to cross. When we met in Taipei this spring, I asked him to describe what he’d felt during those weeks. “I didn’t get scared,” he said. “I was really confident.” The torpedoes he had on board could sink any vessel in China’s fleet, and he had the support of the USS Nimitz behind him. “But now,” Lee said, “I don’t have that confidence at all.”

The Taiwan Strait crisis offered a conceptual blueprint: With enough advanced weapons, Taiwan could hold its own until the American cavalry arrived. China set out to challenge that idea. Within a few years, its defense spending increased by more than 50 percent. The focus was on weapons that could stop American warships from again threatening its shores. By the time Barack Obama took office, in 2009, the Chinese arsenal of submarines and missiles had undermined Taiwan’s defensive strategy.

[From the June 2005 issue: Robert D. Kaplan on how the U.S. would fight China]

Arming Taiwan with sophisticated weapons, such as fighter jets and submarines, would not address the imbalance, because China had developed the means to destroy most of them in the opening phase of any war. U.S. military advisers soon began to argue that Taiwan should become a “porcupine republic,” bristling with smaller, portable weapons such as shoulder-fired Stinger missiles. Once properly trained in their use, Taiwanese soldiers would be able to sink enough approaching ships and down enough warplanes to make the idea of an invasion too costly. They could also deploy guerrilla tactics to resist a Chinese occupation.

The new approach quickly gained favor in Washington. But it took another decade to catch on in Taipei. For most politicians, the idea of waging an insurgency in urban areas, with bazooka-toting soldiers on rooftops, does not make for an appealing electoral platform. Inside the military, generals balked at the structural changes needed to prepare for a porcupine defense. It would require giving lower-ranking officers the freedom to act on their own initiative, organizing ambushes and making decisions in a crisis—a foreign notion in their top-down military culture.

When Trump began his first term, in 2017, Taiwan hoped that it might yet acquire the capacity to outgun China through the purchase of high-end American weapons. The U.S. tried to make the Taiwanese military reconsider. “Don’t build the strategy around 300 F-16s,” a U.S. Navy admiral recalls telling his counterparts in Taipei at the time. “This just doesn’t make any sense.” Taiwan could never buy enough jets or warships to rival China’s fleet, he argued: “You need to be able to shoot down aircraft. You need to be able to defeat drones.” (The American admiral, now retired, spoke with me on condition of anonymity because he does business in China.) At that point, China could manufacture more drones than any other country by far. A single company in Shenzhen controls more than 70 percent of the global drone market. Both Russia and Ukraine rely on drone components made in Shenzhen, including the motors, controllers, and batteries needed to fly them.

Taiwan lags far behind in this technology. Not until 2022 did its government decide to form what it calls a national drone team. Taiwan, like the United States, bars the use of Chinese technology in its defense industry. So the team needed to make its weapons from scratch or find alternative suppliers. Max Lo, the founder of a commercial-drone company, was put in charge of the effort, and he began reaching out to contacts in the private sector. It was like Ocean’s Eleven, but with entrepreneurs whose background had little obvious value to the mission. Among the companies Lo recruited was the packaged-food giant I‑Mei, whose cookies and snacks are pantry staples throughout Taiwan. One of its subsidiaries had been working on delivery drones, which qualified the company to join the national drone team. To help get factories up and running, the government offered about $1.5 billion in investments last year, far short of what is needed.

The most successful member of the national drone team has been Thunder Tiger, a publicly listed company that makes dental equipment as well as remote-controlled toys. It began making drones about a decade ago, mostly for use in disaster response. When I visited its headquarters, in the city of Taichung, the general manager, Gene Su, took me on a tour of the factory, in a run-down industrial park. In one room, robotic arms moved around inside plexiglass boxes, spooling copper wires onto little engines that would be used to power drones. The room was no bigger than a three-car garage. To reach it, we passed through a much larger open space, about half as long as a football field, where dozens of people in lab coats sat making dental drills. The company earns most of its money by selling them around the world, Su told me. Drones account for a fraction of its revenue. Taiwan’s defense ministry has said it needs about 200,000 drones. But Thunder Tiger cannot begin to meet those needs without financing from the defense budget. “We’re all just waiting for government money,” Su said. During my visit, I saw some of its designs displayed on a conference table. One, named Overkill, had four small rotors and a fake artillery shell strapped to its belly. It resembled a model I had seen a few months earlier in Ukraine, at a factory in Kyiv that makes about 4,000 small drones a day. At its current capacity, Thunder Tiger would need two months to produce that many.

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

Technicians at Thunder Tiger—a maker of dental drills and toys—working on drone motors.

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

A model of a Thunder Tiger interceptor drone.

The U.S. military does not disclose how many troops it has in Taiwan. At a meeting in Taipei, a retired officer in the Taiwanese navy chided me for asking about them. Beijing, he explained, sees any U.S. forces so close to its shores as a provocation. Their mission mainly involves training Taiwanese soldiers on how to use American weapons and preparing them to wage guerrilla warfare.

Mark Montgomery, a retired American rear admiral, has put the size of the U.S. deployment at about 500. “It needs to be 1,000,” he told a congressional hearing in May of last year. “If we are going to give them billions of dollars in assistance, sell them tens of billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. gear, it makes sense that we would be over there training and working.”

Montgomery, who once commanded an aircraft-carrier strike group in the Pacific, belongs to a small but devoted community of Taiwan defenders in Washington. These military veterans and foreign-policy experts still have influence on Capitol Hill. They have little or none in the White House. During the first Trump administration, one of these stalwarts, Matt Pottinger, oversaw China policy on the National Security Council. He worked hard to ensure that Trump’s isolationist urges did not eat away at Taiwan’s defenses. No one seems to play a comparable role in the White House today.

In response to my questions about Taiwan, a senior administration official sent a terse response via email. It focused mostly on contrasting Trump’s positions with those of President Biden, whose name the statement deliberately mangled. “The O’Biden team proved that prioritizing allies’ interests over America’s does NOT result in greater security,” the official wrote.

Biden agreed during his tenure to sell Taiwan about $8 billion worth of weapons, significantly less than the $11 billion Trump has so far approved in this term. But only a fraction of the weaponry has been delivered to Taiwan; the backlog on orders is immense. It would take years for U.S. manufacturers to produce the arms Taiwan has already paid for, especially given the need for them to replenish American stockpiles because of the war in Iran.

In terms of messaging, Biden was far tougher on China than Trump has been. Biden never visited China during his presidential tenure. When asked whether the U.S. military would defend Taiwan, Biden responded on four separate occasions that it would. Trump has never said that. He has focused instead on efforts to do business with China and lower the trade deficit. During his trip to China this spring, Trump invited a coterie of billionaires to join him, including Elon Musk and Tim Cook. A published list of passengers on Air Force One featured Eric Trump and his wife, Lara. But it did not appear to include any recognized China hands. When a veteran of Obama’s National Security Council, Brett Bruen, pointed this out on X, he received a juvenile response from the White House director of communications, Steven Cheung: “Stop calling yourself an expert in anything, aside from sucking.” Cheung added that Bruen was a “slope-brained, mouth breathing moron.”

At least one China expert did join the White House delegation to Beijing: Ivan Kanapathy, the senior director for Asia on the NSC and a Marine Corps veteran. Kanapathy’s views on Taiwan align with those of most other experts in the field, and his writings appear in an influential book, The Boiling Moat, alongside essays by Pottinger and Montgomery. Soon after he joined the White House staff, Kanapathy faced an accusation of disloyalty from one of Trump’s outside advisers, the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer. Ever since then, “he’s barely got a job,” one of his friends, a fellow Taiwan expert, told me. “She’s after him.” (The White House declined to allow Kanapathy to speak with me.)

The expert community often meets up to run simulations of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. The results are almost never reassuring. Over the past three years, the Center for Strategic and International Studies has played out dozens of scenarios in three rounds of war games. The only ones that end in defeat for China have two things in common: Taiwan shows determination in fighting back, and the U.S. swiftly intervenes with the full might of its military. Both must happen. Even then, Taiwan’s infrastructure would suffer weeks of bombardment, while the U.S. and its allies would lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of troops—or so CSIS concluded in the first of three reports about the war games, published in 2023.

Two authors of the CSIS reports, Eric Heginbotham and Matthew Cancian, traveled to Taiwan in 2024 to present their findings to military leaders. They got a mixed reception. One of their meetings nearly ended in a fistfight, Heginbotham told me. In the southern city of Kaohsiung, a group of retired Taiwanese naval officers invited the Americans to an ice-cream parlor and, over a round of sundaes, told them to stop preparing for war. They said that Taiwan possessed neither the determination nor the means to fight, and that the U.S. would never intervene to help. The defeatist attitude angered the two Americans, for what it said about Taiwan’s morale and for a more personal reason: Heginbotham’s son, who serves on a U.S. submarine in the Pacific, could be sent to fight in a war with China. “Sorry for my language, but what the fuck?” he recalled saying. “My son’s life is on the line to defend you guys.”

The circular psychology is hard to break: The U.S. will not step in to help if Taiwan lacks the will to fight, and the Taiwanese will be more tempted to surrender if they believe the U.S. isn’t ready to help them. For most people in Taiwan, the pessimism of the naval officers would not come as a surprise. A survey conducted this spring found that fewer than a quarter of Taiwanese voters consider the U.S. a “trustworthy ally,” and only 35 percent believe the U.S. would be likely to help Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. Both figures had dropped sharply after Trump began his second term. Among Americans, his claims of friendship with Xi might sound like idle flattery, sly diplomacy, or self-delusion. In Taiwan, they perpetuate the idea that resisting China would be a hopeless cause.

Cheng and the Nationalists now preach this idea in the halls of Parliament. Richard Y. K. Chen, a retired admiral in the Taiwanese navy who represents the party on the defense-and-foreign-affairs committee, told me that Taiwan has no chance of surviving a Chinese invasion even with help from the Americans. He has met with the U.S. military advisers working to turn his country into a porcupine republic, and their plans struck him as fanciful. Once the enemy lands on the beaches, “it’s too late,” the admiral told me. “Even if you try to engage in some guerrilla warfare, the local government agencies have already collapsed.”

The measures he proposed, such as evacuation plans, emergency-medicine distribution, and “societal resiliency to protect the public,” focused mainly on minimizing casualties during a Chinese attack and preserving Taiwan’s infrastructure. When I brought up the Ukrainians, who managed not only to thwart Russia’s attack on Kyiv in 2022 but to partly roll back the invading forces, Chen offered a list of reasons their tactics would not work in Taiwan. Ukraine, for a start, has nearly 17 times more land on which to maneuver, as well as a border with Poland that its allies have used throughout the war for resupply. That would not be possible on an island like Taiwan.

And what about drones? The war in Ukraine has shown their effectiveness, especially for the defenders. The Ukrainians have pioneered the use of naval drones—remote-controlled boats packed with explosives. In the Black Sea, these weapons have helped damage or destroy at least a third of Russia’s naval fleet, forcing the rest of its warships to retreat from their base in Crimea. One of the developers of Ukraine’s most famous naval drone, the Magura, told me it would be particularly useful in the Taiwan Strait, where a few hundred of them could sink a Chinese armada.

[Read: Taiwan faces its Ukraine moment]

Chen gave me a sidelong look when I brought this up, as if to ask whether I could really be so naive. “The Black Sea is not the Taiwan Strait,” he said. For one thing, the Ukrainians have relied on Starlink satellites to pilot their drones against Russia; Elon Musk, who owns those satellites, has not allowed Taiwan to use them. Starlink describes this as a business decision, but many in Taiwan question Musk’s motives, pointing out that his car company, Tesla, has one of its biggest factories in Shanghai. Other satellite networks exist, albeit less reliable ones than Starlink. But Chen brushed those options aside as worthless to Taiwan. Even if Taiwan were to spend many more billions of dollars on advanced weapons, Chen said, “how long can you defend the coast? Three weeks? Four weeks?” In that time, he said, China would already have won.

Given those odds, it did not surprise me to learn that draft-dodging in Taiwan remains pervasive. The government decided only in 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to increase the required military service from four months to one year. But the recruitment effort left open a variety of loopholes. Some men of fighting age (19 to 36 years old) have reportedly made themselves obese, eating their way to a medical exemption. Others opted for alternative service. Puma Shen, an ambitious young member of the defense-and-foreign-affairs committee, has campaigned for higher military spending and promoted a culture of respect for the armed services. But when called to complete his own mandatory service, he chose to do it at the transportation ministry, where his work mostly involved giving directions to tourists.

Regular military service in Taiwan also involves a lot of common chores, such as cutting grass, Shen told me in his office in Taipei. “People think it’s a waste of time.” On the wall behind him hung a large poster of David sitting atop Goliath’s severed head. It had been a gift from a soldier he met in Ukraine, which he visited in 2023 to learn from its defenders. The trip made clear how far behind Taiwan’s military had fallen. Only last year did basic training begin to provide lessons in piloting drones rather than fighting with bayonets. Much of the top brass in Taiwan remains averse to risk, change, and new technologies. “They really want to protect their own,” Shen said. “This is the way we always do it.”

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

Taiwanese cadets at a military ceremony in June

The offices of Taiwan’s Parliament occupy a drab building on a narrow street in the center of Taipei. When I arrived one morning this spring, lawmakers had already gathered inside to debate a special military budget. There was no security at the entrance—not even an ID check. A clerk sent me right up to the office of Wang Ting-yu, a senior member of the defense-and-foreign-affairs committee and a close ally of Taiwan’s president.

He happened to be in a meeting with a large U.S. defense firm, AeroVironment, whose representatives sat around his conference table. One of them greeted me as I walked in. We had met earlier that week at a defense forum in Taipei, where he had been talking up the value of an American drone called the Switchblade. Designed to launch out of a tube and explode on impact, the weapon had performed badly against Russian forces in Ukraine. The company has tried to improve its drones based on the lessons from that war. But the U.S. military has reportedly cut back on buying them.

Taiwan can afford a lot of weaponry. Its foreign-currency reserves, the sixth-largest in the world, are worth roughly $600 billion. But a defense bill had been stuck for months in Wang’s committee. Its opponents in the Nationalist Party had turned the budget debate into a proxy battle over Taiwan’s future, its relations with China, and its reliance on the United States. The need for a new budget arose late last year, when the Trump administration approved the biggest sale of American weapons to Taiwan in history. The $11 billion package included rocket launchers, artillery, anti-tank missiles, and other sophisticated gear.

The following week, the Chinese military responded with a series of drills off the shores of Taiwan, firing missiles and rehearsing a blockade. Taiwan’s ruling party used the threats to argue for an additional package of American weapons, this one worth $14 billion. But President Lai needed Parliament to approve all the extra spending. In addition to the annual defense budget, about $20 billion, he sought a special disbursement of more than $40 billion over the next eight years. Roughly three-quarters of it would go toward American arms, while the rest would aid the development of Taiwan’s own defense industry, especially its drone factories.

According to most polls, the extra spending bill had broad support. Voters saw it as a way to deter China and keep the Americans happy. It would satisfy Trump’s demand that all U.S. allies spend more on defense. It would also create jobs in the military industry and stimulate the broader economy, including in districts that the Nationalist Party controls. But the plan faced stiff resistance: In a phone call in February, Xi warned Trump to show “extreme caution.” The White House then decided to withhold the bulk of the arms packages until Xi and Trump had a chance to discuss them in person. Since their summit in May, the sales remain on hold.

For Wang, arms deals double as a test of American resolve. No other country sells weapons to Taiwan. “So it’s a matter of life and death to Taiwan,” Wang said. He did not object to the U.S. pursuing dialogue with China, but he warned that Taiwan must not be used as some kind of bargaining chip. Would Trump treat it like one? Wang looked at his hands for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I don’t criticize our allies.”

In the end, the legislators agreed to a pared-down budget worth about $25 billion. Practically all of it would go toward the purchase of American weapons—the Nationalists managed to cut the money for Taiwan’s drone industry. Nothing was left for the kinds of inexpensive, homegrown systems that Ukraine has used to fight the Russians. In late June, the Nationalists submitted a competing plan to meet the military’s need for drones. It included a lot more oversight and red tape that would slow the process down. Parliament has since been deadlocked over which plan to pursue, leaving the nascent drone program in limbo, which is precisely where China wants it.

After her meeting with Xi in April, Cheng returned to Taiwan with a package of support from the Chinese Communist Party, called “the 10 incentives.” Their provisions would allow Taiwanese farmers, fishermen, and people in some other industries to sell food and goods in China. They also promised that certain TV shows, documentaries, and cartoons from Taiwan would be shown on the mainland (with proper vetting, of course). Chinese state media cast the incentives as a gift from Xi to the Nationalist Party. Friendly behavior, they suggested, would elicit additional favor.

Taiwan’s government has tried to block the incentives, calling them a blatant form of political interference. At the very least, they offered a preview of how the Chinese might try to influence Taiwan’s next presidential election, which is due to take place in 2028. Cheng has suggested that she intends to run, and her campaign will no doubt benefit from the support of China, which she portrays as a generous neighbor. “They have become so modern,” she told me. During her visit to the mainland, officials in Shanghai treated her to an order of bubble tea—a Taiwanese invention—that was delivered via drone. The delegation also attended a performance of Mozart and Tchaikovsky at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts. “Their chief violinist was actually an American!” Cheng told me through an interpreter. “So I think China has become more confident. They’re more inclusive and more globalized.”

When I asked what China might want in return for its friendly incentives, she seemed surprised at my suggestion that the relationship could come with strings attached. Xi had assured her, she said, that China would respect Taiwan’s system of government. He had not talked about making Taiwan a part of China. He had not brought up the experience of Hong Kong, whose democratic institutions survived for less than a decade after the British colony’s absorption into China in 1997. Wouldn’t China seek to do the same to Taiwan? “No,” she said, using the English word to make sure I understood. “We do not need to sacrifice or make any compromise regarding Taiwan’s freedom, democracy, economy, or our rule of law.”

But China has already worked hard to curtail the rights of Taiwan and its elected leaders. Because of China’s decades-long pressure campaign, only 11 nations have formal relations with Taiwan. In April, China prevented President Lai from visiting one of them: At the request of Beijing, the Seychelles, Mauritius, and Madagascar refused to grant Lai’s plane the right to transit their airspace, forcing him to postpone his trip to Eswatini, a landlocked country in southern Africa. When I asked Cheng about the incident, she shrugged it off, saying Lai had brought it on himself “due to his own policies.”

Last year, a few months after Trump began his second term, his administration denied Lai’s request to stop in the U.S. on his way to Latin America. But Cheng and the Nationalists have faced no restrictions. Less than two months after her visit to Beijing, Cheng led a delegation of party members on a trip to Washington and several other U.S. cities. During an appearance at the Asia Society, in Manhattan, she cast Xi as a reliable partner and repeated her assertion that China and Taiwan belong together. The moderators pressed her to explain how Taiwan’s democracy could survive such a partnership. “It’s a win-win scenario,” Cheng said, recalling how Xi had promised her that “anything can be negotiated.”

In their seats near the front, several experts on Taiwan and retired U.S. diplomats exchanged skeptical looks and rolled their eyes. One whispered to me that Cheng sounded like “a whack job.” To me, she seemed more like an opportunist. At a time of lost trust in American resolve, she has reached for the bargain China is offering. Voters in Taiwan can feel the balance of power shifting, and many will choose the side that looks more stable, even at the risk of their own liberties.

Near the end of Cheng’s talk in Manhattan, a member of the audience stood up and urged her not to pursue this deal. He warned that China would demolish Taiwan’s democracy, as it had demolished democratic processes in Hong Kong, and he demanded to know why Cheng had blocked funding for the drones that Taiwan needs. “Xi Jinping is a dictator!” the man shouted. Security guards then seized his microphone and removed him from the hall. Cheng seemed to enjoy the spectacle. “Drones should not be used as weapons,” she said with a smile, “but they should be used to deliver bubble tea.”

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

A tourist on Kinmen island, the westernmost outpost of sovereign Taiwanese territory, looks across the bay toward Xiamen, China. Once considered a front line in Taiwan’s defense, Kinmen is now a popular destination for travelers from China.

Kinmen island, the westernmost outpost of sovereign Taiwanese territory, used to be a fortress. It sits only a few miles off the coast of China, close enough for a good swimmer to make it across to the mainland. In the late 1940s, the retreating Nationalists built bunkers here, positioned tanks, and studded the coastline with metal spikes to impale enemy landing craft. Thousands of Communist soldiers stormed these beaches during the Battle of Kinmen, in October 1949. Most were killed, the rest taken prisoner.

Today, several monuments commemorate this part of Taiwan’s origin story, and a museum stands near the site of the battle. When I visited this spring, the guides urged me not to miss the immersive experience. It featured a dark room with eerie music and animations of war on the walls. Cameras took my photo and projected it onto a battle scene, inviting me to see myself as a defender of Kinmen. Only a few people alive in Taiwan today can remember fighting a war against China, and the simulation felt like an attempt to help younger generations imagine that experience.

Many schoolchildren come to the museum on field trips. But the more common visitors lately are tourists from mainland China. Ferries bring them to Kinmen several times a day, and local businesses ply them with fried fish and sorghum liquor, the pungent local specialty. Such visits are part of China’s strategy. In a treatise published in 2023, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party laid out a plan to pamper Kinmen with investment and tourism, turning the island into part of a “demonstration zone” to show what life might be like after the “complete reunification of the motherland.” The plan calls ultimately for a bridge to link Kinmen and the closest city on the mainland, Xiamen, about two miles away.

At the start of his career, Xi Jinping served as the vice mayor of Xiamen. His preferred path for absorbing Taiwan into China has always relied on convincing the Taiwanese that life would improve under Beijing’s rule. China’s growth has made that easier. In the early 1990s, Taiwan’s economy was more than half the size of China’s. Now it’s one-20th the size. Residents of Kinmen can see the skyscrapers in Xiamen. They will soon be able to see jets landing at its new international airport. Many of them feel a greater kinship with the mainland than they do with Taipei.

Atop one of the bluffs closest to China, a tower of speakers still broadcasts Taiwanese propaganda toward the mainland in a loop, calling on the Communists to defect and gain their liberty. The recording used to play loudly enough for people on the mainland to hear it. But local authorities have turned down the volume, converting the speakers into a tourist attraction.

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

Once a fortified front line, now a tourist site: A tower of speakers on Kinmen aims propaganda across the water, toward the mainland.

Cheng-Chia Huang for The Atlantic

Barnacle-encrusted barriers against invasion at a beach on Kinmen island. They face the mainland city of Xiamen.

On the beach below, metal spikes still protrude from the sand, tilted at China, eroded by salt water and covered in barnacles. Wooden signs with skulls and crossbones used to warn about the risk of land mines on this coast. But the last of the mines have been cleared away, and the government has declared the beach open for swimming. On my last afternoon on the island, I decided to make my way toward China. My clumsy backstroke carried me 100 yards or so, just far enough to be able to look back at the coast and see that it no longer resembles anyone’s idea of a geopolitical flash point. There were no lookout posts or fortifications, no Taiwanese patrol boats. Only the battle museum and the tower of speakers, playing a message that no one in China can hear.

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “Will Taiwan Just Give Up?” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Inside Story of What Happened at Stars and Stripes

2026-09-09T13:00:00-04:00

A “chicken plate,” in military parlance, is a protective shield used in a variety of combat situations. During the Vietnam War, chicken plates were inserted into vests—they are resistant against small-arms fire, but they’re also bulky and hot. So some pilots sat on them instead, which had the added benefit of providing protection against bullets that came from below.

I first encountered another type of chicken plate in Iraq, where I was embedded with a convoy of American service members patrolling outside of Tikrit.

On this particular morning, I sat alongside three soldiers inside an up-armored Humvee while a gunner manned the turret. But that gunner—James Murphy, a sergeant from New Jersey—wasn’t sitting in his sling, which was little more than a seat-belt strap hooked between two sides of the turret. If he sat down, the chicken plate would block his view. This left Murphy with a choice: stand up for hours and expose his head and chest, or remain behind the plate’s limited protection and endanger the convoy by missing a threat.

For the dozen or so gunners I spoke with, the choice was clear. Two of them removed the chicken plate entirely for a better view.

The military had no specific data on gunner casualties or whether the chicken plates were preventing them. Yet an Army general in Iraq was asking his staff why they were losing so many gunners. One officer I spoke with at the time told me that the answer was obvious the moment someone stood in the turret.

[Tom Nichols: Hegseth’s Pentagon lurches off the rails]

I reported a series of stories on gunners for Stars and Stripes, a newspaper with a long history of editorial independence despite being housed within the Department of Defense. A few weeks later, after returning to my home at the time—a room at the bachelor officers’ quarters on a Marine Corps base in Okinawa—I received a message from our Pentagon beat reporter, who told me that military officials had read the series and were fast-tracking improved equipment for deployment. They’d found a way to help protect the gunners without blocking their view from the turret.

I don’t want to overstate my role. At least some military officials were aware of the issue and had been testing prototypes for better shields. But many of the soldiers weren’t willing to discuss with senior leaders the specifics of what they needed, out of concern that they’d be viewed as complaining. I’m grateful that they trusted me enough to tell their stories.

Looking back now, what feels remarkable isn’t the lack of proper equipment. It’s the way the Pentagon was willing to take independent journalism that spotlighted deficiencies and use it to improve conditions for service members.

Uniformed military leaders have not lost the means to analyze and act on useful journalism. But publicly denouncing the reporting or the news outlet makes it far less likely that they will. Attacking people for telling the truth creates a chilling effect for truth tellers—including those who are themselves in the military.

The best journalism unearths information that complex bureaucracies overlook or suppress, intentionally or not. When leaders treat asking tough questions and reporting uncomfortable facts as disloyalty, they devalue a tool that can help them fix crucial problems.

The danger in this devaluation is immense, especially now; it comes as U.S. service members are once again fighting in the Middle East. The Pentagon hasn’t held a press briefing on combat operations in Iran since May 5. The Correspondents’ Corridor, where reporters worked inside the Pentagon for decades, is closed while court appeals continue on press-access restrictions. The New York Times is suing the Pentagon on First Amendment grounds, arguing that the Pentagon’s attempts to prevent independent reporting are clearly unconstitutional. (I should disclose that I, too, am suing the Pentagon. I was fired after I said in an appearance on CBS News that my personal red line would be if the Pentagon ever instructed me not to publish a perfectly accurate story. It is telling that I am being fired for describing the most anodyne of journalistic ethics, a position that any self-respecting reporter in any free society would hold, and that the Pentagon interpreted as insubordination.)

Stars and Stripes has its roots in the Civil War, when Union soldiers took over a printing press in Bloomfield, Missouri. The paper was revived during World War I under General John “Black Jack” Pershing and has published continuously since 1942, when General George C. Marshall recognized the value it provided troops and aimed to follow Pershing’s example. “No official control was ever exercised over the matter which went into” Stars and Stripes, Marshall said of the WWI edition.

It didn’t take long for that editorial freedom to be challenged. General George Patton complained about the “Willie and Joe” cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s depictions of soldiers as they often appeared—tired and dirty. (Mauldin would have known; he was himself a soldier.) But General Dwight Eisenhower rejected Patton’s drive to control the reporting itself. “It is the soldier’s paper,” he said, “and we won’t interfere,” according to the historian Stephen Ambrose’s foreword in a book by Mauldin, whose wartime cartoons earned him the 1945 Pulitzer Prize.

The newspaper continued to operate overseas after World War II, hiring civilian journalists to work alongside service members. But attempts at curtailing Stripes’ independence periodically arose. Congress documented occasional pressures in the 1960s. In the ’80s, a General Accounting Office report to Congress found conclusive evidence of censorship, and pointed out the “inherent cultural conflict” between the First Amendment mission and the military’s own.

Those findings led the House Armed Services Committee to direct the Pentagon to establish an ombudsman, responsible to Congress, who would monitor the free flow of information to service members through Stars and Stripes. And in 1993, a Defense Department directive affirmed that Stars and Stripes is editorially independent of the military chain of command. A subsequent federal regulation added to those protections.

In 2020, the Pentagon proposed cutting all funding to Stars and Stripes, after the department’s comptroller stated that it is “probably not the best way that we communicate any longer.” The idea drew a bipartisan rebuke in Congress. The White House agreed with the lawmakers, and Stripes lived on.

Last November, I moved to Washington, D.C., to accept the editor-in-chief job at the paper, where I’d already been serving as Europe and Middle East chief, based near Ramstein Air Base, in Germany.

Two months later, the Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell fired a broadside at Stars and Stripes. On January 15, he posted on X that the news organization must be rid of “woke distractions that syphon morale.”

The same day, the Pentagon revoked the federal regulation it had established in 1994, calling it unnecessary. The Daily Wire reported that half of all Stripes content would come from the military’s public-affairs team, and that civilian reporters would be replaced by military members. When Stars and Stripes reporters called the Pentagon press office for comment and clarification, they received nothing more than a referral to the tweet and the Daily Wire story.

[Read: Why is the Pentagon afraid of the press?]

On February 28, the United States and Israel attacked Iran, killing Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The first Stars and Stripes story came from a wire service, because there aren’t any Stripes reporters inside Iran. But within hours, we had half a dozen stories focused on the U.S. military bases in the region and the people there. In Bahrain, civilians were given the order to evacuate an hour after missiles began falling on the headquarters base of the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

The coverage drew millions of readers, and a video shot by one of our active-duty reporters of a plume rising over the Navy base was viewed all over the world. We worked hard on covering the Iran conflict and thought little of that January tweet—that is, until a Pentagon memo came in mid-March.

The memo simultaneously affirmed our independence and added restrictions. That wire-service story from Iran was now forbidden, along with any other paid wire-service news. So were the comics, of all things. Our publishing decisions would be subject to “good order and discipline”—a line borrowed from the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Our military reporters, who function as interns and receive mentorship from seasoned civilian journalists, now had to wonder whether writing a story might land them in legal jeopardy.

I told military reporters who were worried that a story might hurt their career to let us know, and we’d reassign it. Meanwhile, the staff never compromised on their ethics and values. They reported fairly and accurately and, when called for, held power to account.

The ombudsman wrote a column that assailed the news restrictions, in keeping with the duties set by Congress. Two weeks later, the Defense Department fired her.

By the time I sat down with CBS’s David Martin in late June, I had spoken with no fewer than 16 news outlets and authors about Stars and Stripes. Martin asked me about the “woke distractions” referenced in the January tweet and I answered honestly—that the Pentagon had never explained to us what that meant.

Martin also asked whether I had a personal red line when it came to press restrictions, and I said that I did. If the Pentagon were to say, “Don’t run a perfectly accurate story. Run this instead. Here it is, written by the Pentagon. That would be a red line.”

My response to hypothetical censorship was consistent with what military leaders have said for more than a century, and with the Defense Department’s own directive barring censorship and news management. It is also consistent with basic journalistic ethics: Without editorial independence, journalists cannot uphold their duty to the public.

As part of the CBS interview, the Middle East correspondent Lara Korte stated that she worked for Stars and Stripes, not the Pentagon. She made the distinction to underscore her independence, which is essential to credibility. I learned approximately a week later that the Pentagon press office wasn’t happy about the interview, but that was all I heard.

On August 12, seven weeks after the CBS interview, the Pentagon sent notices of proposed separation for Korte and me to Stripes’ publisher, Max Lederer, and told him to sign them.

Lederer was an Airborne soldier turned Army attorney who was awarded the Bronze Star before he joined Stars and Stripes. He worked his way up through business operations to serve for two decades as publisher.

He reviewed the separation notices and pointed out legal and ethical inconsistencies. Those concerns were dismissed. Rather than sign the notices, he submitted his resignation. (They fired him instead.)

On August 21, the three of us received the separation notices, which listed insubordination as the primary charge. The notices issued to Korte and me cited our CBS comments but didn’t state which order we were purportedly disobeying. Lederer’s firing was for not signing the documents in the first place.

That same day, the Pentagon replaced the directive issued in 1993. Among other things, it bars comics deemed editorial in nature and prevents reporters from using the Freedom of Information Act on behalf of the news organization. I can’t think of another American media outlet with the same restriction.

[Anne Applebaum: The Pentagon’s preferred propaganda model]

About an hour after we received our separation notices, the military deputy to the publisher, who’d arrived two weeks earlier, ordered a 10-page document to be published on Stripes.com within 30 minutes. The document stated that Stripes would continue to run independent journalism and that “it is time to take them at their word,” referring to the Pentagon.

I do take them at their word. All of the words they’ve put out since January, along with their actions. The Pentagon has articulated a remarkably narrow view of press freedom. The government may stop short of censoring an individual story. But it will seek to fire newsroom leaders for opposing the replacement of accurate reporting with press releases. It will strip an organization of basic reporting tools it deems unnecessary or distasteful. And it will discredit the source of the reporting if a story is perceived as unflattering to the president or his secretary of defense.

The press isn’t a perfect institution. A global 2026 Reuters Institute survey found that the percentage of people who report trusting the news dropped to the lowest level since Reuters began asking the question in 2015; in the U.S., only 25 percent of Americans said that they trust the news most of the time. Whatever combination of press failures and partisanship produced this decline, public trust has eroded. And it’s that erosion that has made it much easier for officials to delegitimize accurate, balanced journalism.

Reporters, like anyone, make mistakes, but ethical journalism remains fundamentally useful to government and to the citizens who hold it accountable. People in large organizations—the U.S. military included—often avoid delivering bad news for fear of appearing to oppose a leader’s plans. Independent reporting moves information forward, but only if sources know they’ll be able to speak with journalists without fear of reprisal, and if they believe that leaders are open to reacting to criticism like professionals.

That’s what happened in Iraq. The gunners knew what they needed to do their job safely. They didn’t want to be viewed as complainers. Independent journalism sent the message to those who needed to hear it.

*Image sources: Jim Watson / AFP / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Lyalya Go / Getty; HUM Images / Getty; Toronto Star Archives / Getty; Universal History Archive / Getty; Library of Congress.

Mothers for Sale

2026-09-09T07:00:00-04:00

Illustrations by Molly Snee

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When Shoshannah Roberts talks about the four babies she’s given away, she glows. “When I think about it now, it still feels emotional,” she told me. “Those moments are so magical.”

For many women, the thought of handing over a newborn to someone else is almost incomprehensible—they feel a deep revulsion at a primal sundering. But for Roberts, acting as a surrogate four times is the most meaningful thing she has done with her life. “I’ve seen the parents hold their babies right away, skin to skin. I mean, like, raw,” she said. “Baby’s off me, cord is cut, and Mom is just holding her baby and sobbing. It’s amazing.”

The first time I saw Roberts, who lives in Santa Barbara County, California, she was speaking at the Men Having Babies conference in downtown San Francisco. Men Having Babies does exactly what its name promises: The organization helps gay aspiring fathers find women who are willing—eager, even—to carry their children. For one weekend every year, more than 200 men from across California and beyond fill the ballroom at the Marines’ Memorial Club & Hotel and listen to panel discussions and keynotes, with a special breakout session for single dads.

Since the legalization of same-sex marriage, male couples have become the big growth market for American surrogacy, but the practice is booming among aspiring parents—married or single, straight or gay—who can afford the cost of hiring someone else to carry their child. In 2024, 11,821 embryos were transferred to surrogates in American clinics associated with the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, up from 8,461 three years earlier, and the United Nations estimates that the global worth of the industry is almost $15 billion. Most surrogacy in America today is commercial, meaning that the carrier is paid, and gestational, meaning that the carrier has no genetic relationship to the child.

Marissa Leshnov for The Atlantic

Shoshannah Roberts, photographed in Los Angeles, is pregnant with her fifth child. She has carried four more babies as a surrogate.

Barely a week passes without another celebrity posing with their new baby on Instagram—perhaps in scrubs or doing skin-to-skin contact—and thanking their heroic surrogate. Kim Kardashian, Anderson Cooper, Meghan Trainor, and Chrissy Teigen have all used surrogates. Some celebrities, citing medical risks, hire a surrogate to take on the dangers of pregnancy for them. Others want more children than they can have biologically. Hilaria and Alec Baldwin had a sixth baby via surrogate five months after Hilaria gave birth to their fifth child. (She has since carried their seventh.)

But just as paid surrogacy is becoming a more conspicuous part of American life, so, too, is the backlash. When the actor Lily Collins, then 35, announced the birth of her baby, Tove, and her “endless gratitude for our incredible surrogate,” she and her husband were bombarded with messages describing them as “human traffickers” and “baby buyers.” In the past year, multiple horror stories—fraudulent agencies, human trafficking, elderly parents who are unable to take care of a newborn—have emerged, complicating what is usually presented as an uplifting narrative. If your primary concern is reproductive freedom, most surrogacy stories will seem inspirational. But if you factor in the risks to carriers, or simply feel skeptical of unregulated commerce, your doubts will multiply.

In my experience, many liberal Americans are surprised to discover that their country is an outlier in its enthusiasm for commercial surrogacy. In Britain, where I live, a ban on the practice enjoys substantial support among feminists, who worry about the power differential between paid surrogates and wealthy would-be parents. (Altruistic surrogacy, in which the surrogate carries a baby solely out of generosity, is less controversial and is permitted.) A recent UN report went even further, declaring that commercial surrogacy “constitutes the sale of children, which is a crime,” and that “surrogacy arrangements can amount to or resemble slavery.” In one recent scandal, Thai women who answered an advertisement for work as surrogates in the nation of Georgia had their passports confiscated and were coerced into donating their eggs.

Several developing countries that have become hubs for surrogacy tourism have enacted laws to protect women from exploitation by wealthy foreigners. Thailand banned commercial surrogacy in 2015 after the “Baby Gammy” case, in which a surrogate was left caring for a disabled child. She alleged that she had become pregnant with twins and refused a request by the intended parents—one of whom was a convicted sex offender—to abort the twin with Down syndrome.

Because so much can go wrong, every country in the European Union has banned commercial surrogacy. France’s centrist liberal president, Emmanuel Macron, has described the practice as “not compatible with the dignity of women.” Italy’s right-wing populist leader, Giorgia Meloni, has enacted one of the strictest anti-surrogacy frameworks in the world. Not only is domestic surrogacy banned, but any Italian citizen who brings home a baby born to an overseas surrogate risks jail and a fine of up to 1 million euros. Many other developed countries have either tightly restricted surrogacy or chosen, as Britain and Canada have, to allow only the altruistic version. Israel allows surrogacy but imposes a raft of conditions: The commissioning parents must not have more than two children already, must not have serious criminal convictions, and must be of the same religion as the surrogate.

In general, Europeans think of Americans’ enthusiasm for paid surrogacy the way we regard their fondness for guns and capital punishment: inexplicable. The piquant difference, however, is that surrogacy is a cause of the American left rather than the right. Red states tend to have tighter limits on surrogacy. Louisiana, for example, restricts surrogacy to married heterosexual couples using their own sperm and eggs. By contrast, when New York legalized commercial surrogacy in 2020, LGBTQ activists hailed it as a triumph for “fertility equality.”

The debate cuts across political traditions and defies easy categorization. When surrogacy goes well, the result is a happy family that would not otherwise have existed. When it goes wrong, however, it can do so in unpredictable and emotionally crushing ways. At its core, the ethical question is this: How much physical and emotional risk should individuals be allowed to take on in the name of a commercial transaction?

California, the home of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, is the undisputed center of American surrogacy, and the practice there is infused with a distinct blend of crunchy vibes, social liberalism, and straightforward capitalism. Surrogacy costs in the state begin at about $150,000 for a single baby, according to promotional materials for a variety of agencies doing business there. The percentage paid to the surrogate varies widely.

Many, many enterprises want to help make gay couples’ dreams of parenthood come true, and the Men Having Babies conference was underwritten by a number of them: IVF clinics, genetic-testing companies, and surrogacy agencies. If the sea of Zegna sneakers and stylish down jackets didn’t tell you that these guys have money, the brochures offering future fathers “white-glove service” and VIP packages made it clear. In the exhibitors’ hall, I passed an abundance of merch designed to reel clients in—candles bearing the instruction LIGHT ME WHEN MATCHED, onesies with I LOVE MY DADS on them, canvas bags with the legend DADDY VIBES, and my own favorite: multiple iterations of sperm-shaped stress balls. Some were dyed rainbow colors.

This was aspirational parenthood, right here. Pictures of happy dads and adorable kids abounded, including on a banner featuring two ripped, waxed, shirtless guys draped in a Pride flag and cradling a newborn. Words such as bespoke, boutique, and concierge appeared frequently in the literature. Words such as episiotomy and mastitis did not. It was here that I learned the industry’s preferred term for a surrogate pregnancy: a journey.

At its best, surrogacy showers happiness all around. Intended parents—or IPs, in industry jargon—receive a longed-for baby; their surrogate is well compensated and well treated, and has the satisfaction of knowing that she has helped create a family. A few days after the conference, Roberts told me over Zoom that she had been interested in surrogacy ever since Phoebe on Friends carried triplets for her brother, Frank. Her first experience was blissful: She carried for a single mom who met a partner midway through the pregnancy, and Roberts later attended their beach wedding, in Florida. When she went back to work at a corporate job, “it felt a little hollow,” she said. She joined the surrogacy agency Hatch as a coordinator. In addition to four surrogate pregnancies, she’s had four children of her own. “My grandmother had 12,” she said. “So I think I’m built for it.” In mid-June, she announced her ninth pregnancy—another baby of her own.

In the United States, the only serious opposition to surrogacy comes from an unlikely coalition of radical feminists and socially conservative Catholics. The former see surrogacy as exploitation: In 1983’s Right-Wing Women, the feminist author Andrea Dworkin described surrogacy as part of the “brothel model” of society, where “women can sell reproductive capacities the same way old-time prostitutes sold sexual ones.” Catholics, meanwhile, have doctrinal objections to any artificial interference in pregnancy. The more typical American view, though, tends toward individualism, in line with the “My body, my choice” slogan popularized by the abortion-rights movement, and an instinctive suspicion of government regulation: If the surrogate is okay with it, what business is it of anyone else? Although you can’t legally sell a kidney—even America has its limits—consent is treated as a universal solvent for many other tricky ethical issues.

Well-heeled intended parents can also dodge practical constraints faced by biological or adoptive parents. Many agencies place no hard restrictions on the number of children any single person or couple can commission. Some parents want to get to a “double-digit number,” Men Having Babies’ founder, Ron Poole-Dayan, said at the conference. In 2023, a court in Los Angeles discovered that the Chinese video-game billionaire Xu Bo was simultaneously seeking parental rights for four babies born via surrogacy and was in the process of fathering at least eight more. The children (all boys, at his request) were being raised by nannies in nearby Irvine until they could be taken to him in China, The Wall Street Journal reported.

There are also no legally enforceable upper age limits on intended parents. In August 2025, two 6-year-old children were found in a caged-off section of a San Francisco apartment. Their father explained that he had commissioned twins as a single dad at the age of 67, and when one of the babies was diagnosed with severe autism, he found himself struggling to cope. The locked gate stopped the neurodivergent twin from injuring himself during tantrums or running out of the building into the road. “I’m a senior, first-time parent, single parent, to twins, without domestic help,” the 74-year-old told The San Francisco Standard after he was reported to child services. (To which I might respond: And you didn’t think about this earlier? ) Difficulties like these are why many adoption agencies suggest an upper age limit of about 50.

The surrogacy industry does not have a regulator that enforces a “fit and proper person” test of the kind given to people who want to adopt a child. Last year, Pennsylvania lawmakers proposed closing a loophole in the state’s law that had allowed a sex offender—who was legally barred from adopting or fostering—to commission a baby. There are no restrictions on Americans commissioning a baby abroad, even if the other country’s health services or human-rights laws are far worse than those in the United States.

America also stands virtually alone as a rich country that permits incoming surrogacy tourism from elsewhere. Many of these international intended parents are from China, where surrogacy is banned and where, until recently, family size was limited by the one-child policy. These customers have exacting standards. “They want a Caucasian surrogate to carry the baby, with preferably blond hair, blue eyes,” Dee Gulati of Surrogacy4All, in New York, told me. “And they want an egg donor who looks like a cheerleader.” The resulting babies are automatically American citizens. (Hoping to change this, President Trump in August signed an executive order denying citizenship to children born to foreign citizens through commercial surrogacy.)

In the U.S., no federal laws regulate surrogacy, and contracts related to the practice are unenforceable in many states. The Society for Ethics in Egg Donation and Surrogacy provides a “self-regulation framework” for agencies, but its greatest sanction is removing membership. The lack of regulation means that success depends more on luck and personal benevolence than on industry standards or legal guardrails. The primary question asked of parents attempting this new American way of birth is: Can you afford it?

For some surrogates, handing over the baby is far harder than it was for Shoshannah Roberts. Last fall, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I met Erika Jones, a quiet, self-contained woman who wore a discreet gold cross around her neck. She told me that her three ambitions in life had always been to visit Ireland, to be a surrogate, and to see a koala in person. She had wanted to be a surrogate since she was very young, before she’d even had her own two children. A few years ago, when she found herself settled in Fairfield, Ohio, with a good job and a stable income, she registered with an agency. The story of one couple particularly moved her.

The wife, whom I’ll call Priya, had lost her brother to cancer in 2020. He’d banked his sperm before he died, and his family hoped to use it to fertilize a donor egg. The resulting embryo would then be carried by a surrogate and raised by Priya and her husband, allowing a part of her brother to live on.

After Jones, then 34, learned the baby’s sex, she spent $40 on a balloon filled with pink confetti and had it sent to Priya, who recorded her reaction when she opened the box. But Jones didn’t see what she had hoped to see. “You could tell that she was disappointed that it was a girl,” Jones said. “I think she wanted a boy, to closely remind her of her brother.” Would the baby inside her be treated with respect, Jones wondered—or as second-best?

From that point, in Jones’s telling, the relationship between the two women began to sour. Jones found Priya fussy and controlling, and felt that she was being blamed when a scan found that the fetus was growing unusually slowly. “I was like, I’m not a slave,” she said. She even wondered briefly about trying to keep the baby, but decided that wouldn’t be right.

When Jones found mold and detected carbon monoxide in her apartment, in Ohio, she decided to move back home to Tennessee, closer to her family. That would violate her 57-page “gestational carrier agreement,” in which she had agreed to “take all necessary and reasonable steps” to give birth at UC Health in West Chester, Ohio. The intended parents told her that if the baby was born in Tennessee, they would face “significant legal challenges.” Because of the state’s more restrictive laws, they feared, the contract might not be valid there. Priya and her husband suggested that Jones stay put and send her children to Tennessee to stay with a friend or relative for the remaining five months of the pregnancy.

Jones declined. She moved back to Tennessee but agreed to keep traveling to Ohio for medical appointments and then give birth there. She was being paid $45,000 plus expenses for the pregnancy but found that the frequent back-and-forth between states, in addition to her time off work while sick, had eaten into that payment. She cut off direct contact with Priya and emailed the agency asking that she not attend the birth. “I know I signed the contract—I am well aware and I intend on honoring it,” Jones wrote, “but it does not need to continue to be thrown in my face every other day.” She also bought a puppy, aware that she would soon be coming home from the hospital empty-handed; she wanted, she later wrote in a memoir, something “alive, soft and ours.”

Aileen Perilla for The Atlantic

Erika Jones, photographed in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Jones had wanted to be a surrogate since she was very young.

When Jones went into labor, she brought her two children, then ages 10 and 12, to the hospital, along with Susan Harris, a trusted friend, who alerted Priya and her husband. The labor was long—37 hours, 22 of them without an epidural. When Jones told the midwives that she wanted to push, the room suddenly filled with people. Earlier in her labor, Jones had asked for five minutes with the baby before handing her over. But the moment the little girl was delivered, she said, someone shouted, “No contact!” All she saw was a glimpse of dark-brown hair as the baby was taken away. She was not even told her birth weight. (Harris confirmed this account.) Priya told The Atlantic that she wasn’t “in any way disappointed” that the baby was a girl. She felt that because Jones had signed a legal contract agreeing to not have any skin-to-skin contact with the baby, she didn’t have to honor Jones’s request to hold her. “Maybe if you were nicer,” she thought. She has since ignored Jones’s request to talk through what happened. “At the end of the day, this is a business. We’re not friends,” she told The Atlantic. “You’re not doing me a favor. You’re getting paid $5,000 a month.” Both parties had fulfilled their side of the contract, she said, and it was time to move on.

Jones has not found that so easy. She told me that the experience kept playing in her mind: “I felt like I was treated less than a human, and less than an animal.”

According to the industry, unhappy surrogates are extremely rare. The owner of the surrogacy agency that Priya used told me that Jones’s experience was an “outlier,” one of only three cases out of the hundreds she had overseen that had “gone south.” At the Men Having Babies conference, an agency director assured the attendees that almost all of the “horror stories” reported in the press involved traditional surrogacy, in which the woman carrying the baby uses her own egg. (She added that the traditional approach now accounts for only 5 percent of American surrogacies.)

The sales pitch to intended parents for gestational surrogacy—involving an egg from either the commissioning mother or a separate donor—is precisely that the surrogate has no legal claim to custody. That makes it legally safer for the rich couples who pay the bills than a traditional surrogacy. But it may be more physically dangerous for the surrogate.

At the Men Having Babies conference, the first audience question was a stark one: How many surrogates die giving birth? Deaths are very rare, Poole-Dayan, the organizer, assured them. A 2020 study found that gestational surrogates were no more likely to die in childbirth than any other pregnant woman. Yet early evidence suggests that carrying a child who is not genetically related to you could increase the risk of complications: A 2024 study of more than 850,000 pregnancies over a decade in Ontario found that “severe maternal morbidity and adverse pregnancy outcomes” were three times higher among gestational carriers than in conventional pregnancies. When the mother and the fetus are not genetically related, the developmental biologist Emma Hilton has written, “Mum’s immune system may ramp up to fight against the wholly foreign tissue. In response, placental invasion becomes more aggressive.” (A systematic review from 2015 found that “most studies reporting on surrogacy have serious methodological limitations.”) Because of the elevated risks associated with twin pregnancies, most reputable agencies now implant only one embryo at a time, but—a recurring theme in this story—no law or professional regulation requires them to do so.

To Poole-Dayan, the value of a contract and of compensation is that it forces both parties to have uncomfortable conversations while the risks are still theoretical. “I always tell people, ‘Imagine yourself at the funeral of the surrogate,’ ” he told me.

I found Poole-Dayan’s forthrightness a refreshing change from the cloying online culture around surrogacy, with the staged hospital shots and cutesy euphemisms designed to play down the toll of pregnancy and birth. In one video, a little girl born via surrogacy describes the woman who carried her—who built her, cell by cell, inside her own body—as an “Easy-Bake Oven.”

When Jones concluded that she had been mistreated, she turned to Kallie Fell. A perinatal nurse by training, Fell works out of an office the size of a janitor’s closet in a co-working space in Pleasant Hill, east of San Francisco.

Fell is the executive director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, which was founded in 2000 to campaign against “Big Fertility” but in recent years has also opposed youth gender transition. The CBC has only two full-time employees; Fell told me that it is “lonely work.” Her inbox is full of questions, unhappy stories, and requests for legal help: a surrogate left with medical debt after the intended parents ghosted her, a man who regrets being a sperm donor, women who don’t want to abort a fetus with disabilities but have signed a contract promising to do so. “I’m a little bit of a magnet,” she said.

One of the most frequent problems, Fell told me, is the financial imbalance between a surrogate and the intended parents. Ethical agencies will ask the IPs to pay for an independent lawyer to read the contract on their surrogate’s behalf, but no law or regulation enforces this. Contracts therefore tend to be written with the protection of the IPs in mind rather than the carrier. Surrogates can be asked to sign nondisclosure agreements, to protect the privacy of the IPs and the child, but these can also prevent them from speaking honestly about bad experiences. Mental-health troubles can be grounds for disqualification for potential surrogates, but IPs typically face less scrutiny. Last year, Wired reported on a woman with bipolar disorder who blamed her surrogate for having a stillbirth; in a fury, she sent a photo of the corpse to an iPad belonging to the surrogate’s 7-year-old son.

The same imbalance is true of criminal records: Another woman who’d contacted Fell, Amanda Misbahu, told me that midway through her surrogate pregnancy—arranged via Facebook—she began to worry that the IP, a gay single father, hadn’t been entirely honest about his criminal history. To me, Misbahu’s story sounded like a surrogacy nightmare, but she cheerfully insisted that she would be willing to act as a surrogate again.

Misbahu’s upbringing had been turbulent. She had been taken away from her own mother when she was six months old, she said, with “maggots in my diapers and Pepsi in my bottles,” and had been raised by a traditionally minded, religious family. The turmoil continued into her adulthood, in successive marriages that didn’t work out. By age 23, Misbahu had given birth to five babies, but none of them lived with her full-time; some were being raised primarily by relatives.

Courtney Pedroza for The Atlantic

Amanda Misbahu, photographed in Tempe, Arizona. For her, becoming a surrogate was “a way to help me through some of my own trauma.”

In her 30s, her thoughts turned to surrogacy. “It was a way for me, in a sentence, to help me through some of my own trauma,” she said. Giving up her own children had left her distraught, she said, yet “with this one, I knew the outcome, I knew it was going to happen, and it was a situation that I knew would be traumatic but I could control.” Two agencies turned her down: the first because of her weight, and the second after her early psychological trauma came up in a medical screening. So she went on Facebook to advertise her services directly to would-be parents.

When a man whom I’ll call Cameron got in contact with Misbahu, she wrote her own surrogacy contract, and “he let me pick the egg donor—it was like online dating,” she said. She and Cameron wanted two embryos transferred, but the fertility doctor advised only one. “We said, We’ll take our $100,000 and we’ll go next door,” she told me. The doctor relented but made her sign a waiver. Only one of the embryos implanted. At eight weeks, she was hospitalized for life-threatening blood clots. She needed blood thinners for the rest of her pregnancy. “I thought she was gonna die,” her fourth child, Alyssa, told me. “So I would just start freaking out randomly when I thought about it—like, at school, sometimes I’d be crying in lunch.”

Although Misbahu didn’t know it, Cameron had once pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter in California after injecting a friend with a fatal dose of Benadryl in his apartment. He then moved to Kentucky and practiced as a physician’s assistant without a license, a deception that came to light after patients claimed that he had botched their cosmetic surgeries. In 2001, he’d been sentenced to 20 years in prison for five counts of second-degree assault and 112 counts of wanton endangerment, although he was released early. In learning about his past, Misbahu also discovered that he had an adult daughter. In the end, she concluded that he’d turned his life around and that there was nothing she could do except go through with the contract.

Cameron and his new boyfriend were present for the birth, for which Misbahu had an epidural for the first time in her history of deliveries, “because I’m like, I don’t want to have to feel any of this,” she told me. She cried—from the hormones, she recalled—and saw the baby a few hours later: “And I was like, She’s so pretty, but I really just can’t even touch her.”

Courtney Pedroza for The Atlantic

Misbahu shows a photo of two embryos that she sought to have implanted.

Misbahu attended counseling sessions for six months after the birth. “You felt like you lost a baby,” she said. “And I wouldn’t stop pumping milk.” Eventually, a friend told her that she had to move on, and so she donated the breast milk to a local bank for premature babies. Her counselor wasn’t much help, she said: “She thought it was the coolest thing; she had never met a surrogate. She just wanted me to paint pictures in her office. And I was like, Ma’am, I feel like I want to blow out my fucking brains.” Misbahu told me that she even gave her gun to her brother because she was so worried about her mental health.

A few months after we first spoke, I met Misbahu in a pancake restaurant on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. She turned up bearing a knitted kangaroo that her mother had made for me, and she wore a medical-alert bracelet around her wrist. Her clotting condition had convinced her that she could not advertise herself as a surrogate again. However, she had married a Ghanaian asylum seeker whom she’d met on a dating app, and was trying for a baby with him to strengthen his claim. (They have since split.)

For a time, Misbahu had remained in contact with Cameron—and had even helped him find his next surrogate. But eventually, their relationship broke down. She had asked him to buy a present for her daughter, and he’d told her that she couldn’t treat him as an ATM. “Finally, I wrote him back, and I was like, Look, I almost literally died giving birth to your kid. Like, it doesn’t mean you owe me anything. But that was pretty disrespectful,” she told me. (Cameron did not respond to questions from The Atlantic.) He blocked her on Facebook. But one of her friends could still see his page, so she used that account to secretly watch his daughter—the baby she had carried—grow up. She showed me a photo of the little girl and her siblings on her phone. “The girls are so pretty,” she said with pride.

Surrogacy has a supply problem. There are not enough ethically motivated, healthy, middle-class American women to meet demand. Speakers at the Men Having Babies conference repeatedly stressed that reputable agencies accept only 5 percent of applicants as surrogates. Good agencies screen women for health and psychological problems, and question them about their finances and the supportiveness of their partner. Those safeguards are reflected in the high costs.

Look abroad, though, and it’s a different story. Some agencies offer “guaranteed baby” packages for as little as $50,000. Surrogacy destinations pop up anywhere the local laws are lax, such as Northern Cyprus, a territory that exists in a legal limbo and is recognized only by Turkey. (The problem is that babies born there can end up stateless.) For parents from Russia, nearby Georgia is a similar no-questions-asked destination.

India used to be the most favored low-cost destination, but in 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, citing fears of exploitation, banned commercial surrogacy for foreigners. Ukraine’s appeal as a surrogacy destination has diminished since Russia’s invasion in 2022, although the leading agency there, BioTexCom, told me that the company is still handing off one baby born via surrogacy every day on average, at a cost of about $60,000. A representative of the agency initially told me that it was planning to open a clinic in Kazakhstan, to cater to the growing Asian market. In July, however, that country abruptly banned foreign surrogacy amid concerns about exploitation.

BioTexCom takes a more unsentimental approach to surrogacy than American agencies. When I asked Denis Herman, the legal director, what his best day on the job had been, I expected him to tell me about uniting a baby with happy parents. Instead, he talked about business metrics: “I’m really focused on the KPIs, on getting the milestones done.” BioTexCom’s founder, Albert Tochilovsky, told me that he worried about falling birth rates, and presented surrogacy as an alternative to immigration.

BioTexCom agreed to let me speak with one of its current surrogates, a 40-year-old whom it identified as Nana, and assigned an employee to translate our conversation. This was Nana’s third surrogate pregnancy since 2021, and she had two much older children of her own. During the first surrogate pregnancy, she was given an apartment to live in with her kids, she told me, so she’d decided to do it twice more; it was her only job. (Compensation for BioTexCom surrogates begins at $23,000, according to the company. The average yearly salary in Ukraine is about $8,700.) The image that Nana and the agency presented was of surrogacy as a sensible economic option and a morally good one. “In Ukraine, we say: Children are a flower of our life,” the translator told me.

Mexico is more convenient for Americans, and a journey might cost $100,000 less there than in the States. But babies born in Mexico through surrogacy are given a Mexican passport by default, which can cause problems at the U.S. border. The State Department warns Americans that “there is no legal framework to protect parents who pursue surrogacy in Mexico, despite agencies and clinics promoting Mexico as a safe, legal destination for commercial surrogacy.”

Wes Johnson-Ellis of the British firm My Surrogacy Journey has sufficient faith in the Mexican system that he and his husband, Michael, had their third child through a surrogate in Mexico City. Yet he acknowledges the concern that carriers in the country are taking on medical risk out of economic need. “Let’s not be naive,” Johnson-Ellis told me. “In Mexico, the compensation that we offer is three times the average wage, so it is a significant amount of money for them.” He estimated that his team accepts only 20 percent of the women who apply to be surrogates, and he said that they filter out anyone who is motivated only by money.

Several surrogacy agencies told me that they worry deeply about the booming market in Mexico, and Johnson-Ellis expressed doubts about his company’s competitors there. “They don’t operate in an ethical way,” he said. “They don’t safeguard everyone; they don’t look after everyone.”

Gulati, the practice director of Surrogacy4All, which arranges approximately 200 surrogate pregnancies every year, said that his favored destination for a low-cost journey is now Ghana, where he charges intended parents a flat rate of $49,000. Those carriers are under close watch. “The great thing about doing surrogacy in Ghana is that they live in a dormitory which is right near the hospital, so they can’t drink, they can’t smoke, they can’t do drugs,” he said. “During that period of time, they are monitored 24 hours, seven days a week. And as a result, the success rate with surrogacy is very, very high.”

Molly Snee

Even in California, the regulation of agencies leaves much to be desired. In May 2025, the caregivers of a two-month-old baby were reported to social services for potential abuse. When the police raided their mansion in Arcadia, a small city northeast of Los Angeles, they discovered another 15 children, who were being homeschooled by a platoon of nannies. “There were probably anywhere from six to eight at the time that we were there,” Captain Kollin Cieadlo of the Arcadia Police Department told me.

Footage from surveillance cameras showed that the children were being drilled in English and Mandarin and forced, as a form of discipline, to do squats and other physical exercises that the police considered “above and beyond what a normal punishment would be.” Further searches revealed six more kids whose birth certificates declared them to also be the children of Silvia Zhang and Guojun Xuan, who owned the house. The couple had been running an agency, Mark Surrogacy, with only one client—themselves.

In 2023, one of their surrogates had been obligated, thanks to the prebirth order she had signed, to hand over a newly delivered child to people she had never seen before, who arrived at the hospital with power-of-attorney documents. The sheer number of parental orders obtained by Zhang and Xuan during this period triggered an investigation ordered by a judge, but no further action was taken.

As news of the mansion raid spread, surrogates then currently under contract with Mark Surrogacy—and still pregnant—began finding one another in Facebook groups. They all told similar stories, of being commissioned by a woman who said that she was unable to conceive and desperately wanted a child. When Zhang and Xuan were questioned by the police, they denied that anything was amiss. “They simply said they just wanted a large family with a lot of kids,” Cieadlo said. The children went into foster care, and one of the surrogates, Kayla Elliott of Corpus Christi, Texas, started a GoFundMe to try to win custody of the child she’d carried. (She has since said that she believes the baby should be left with the foster parents, for continuity of care.)

No charges have been filed against Zhang and Xuan, who have since commissioned even more babies. Although they could face police action over the allegations of child abuse, the startling fact is that their baby-creation spree is legal in California. (Their lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.) The Wall Street Journal reported that the police were investigating the couple for possible trafficking, but Zhang told the newspaper that she intended to raise all of the children: “We never sell our babies. We take care of them very well.”

After speaking with Jones and Misbahu, I spent hours turning over their stories in my mind, trying to reconcile their bad experiences with the many upbeat counterexamples I had seen at the Men Having Babies conference. None of those women had needed surrogacy to stay solvent, and more than one had joked to me that they could have earned more as an Uber driver. For Veronica Bowers, a two-time surrogate who now works for the Northwest Surrogacy Center in Oregon, surrogacy was a way for her to be with her own kids while still contributing to the household finances. (For similar reasons, military wives are actively recruited by surrogacy agencies.) “It is a badge of honor,” Bowers told me. “I feel really proud that I did this.”

The happiest surrogacy experiences I saw resembled open adoptions, where the process is transparent and the birth mother can stay in touch with the child. (Bowers and Roberts are in contact with the children they carried—like an aunt rather than a mother.) The bad stories involved parents who behaved as though they were ordering a baby from a mail-order catalog. I was also left deeply uneasy by the realities of international surrogacy: Why should California be a place where Chinese parents go to find blond, blue-eyed surrogates for status reasons—and why should American parents have the right to acquire a cut-rate child by employing a Ghanaian woman to live in a dormitory under 24/7 monitoring? To protect everyone involved, states should impose upper limits on the age of commissioning parents and on the number of children any couple or individual can commission, as well as an equalization of the disclosure requirements. If surrogates must reveal their medical and criminal histories, then so should the rich people employing them.

Something that surprised me was that many of the women I interviewed who had found surrogacy to be a traumatic experience were ambivalent, rather than flatly opposed, to the practice. Jones said that she hadn’t ruled out another journey, although she was still suffering medical complications from the difficult pregnancy and birth. She also worried that the baby girl she had carried would never know “three pertinent people in her life”—the biological father who had died before she was conceived, the egg donor who had provided half of her DNA, and the surrogate who had carried her for nine nausea-filled months. Jones had watched videos online of children born through surrogacy who opposed the practice, and she wondered whether she had been selfless to become a surrogate—or selfish.

At the end of our meeting, she said—just as Amanda Misbahu did—that she had carried on pumping breast milk for months after the birth, even though she’d had no baby to nourish. She had also asked friends to check Priya’s social media to see what the baby she’d carried looked like now. On her phone, she showed me a photo of the little girl smiling alongside Priya’s other children.

Other than that picture, Jones said, her hospital bracelet and blanket are her only mementos of carrying the girl. She still feels the loss: “Truthfully, even though she’s not my child, she’s my child.”

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “Mothers for Sale.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A Great Novel Becomes a Bad Show

2026-09-09T08:30:00-04:00

For many readers, the career of the novelist Bret Easton Ellis is the standard for mainstream literary stardom. The biopic writes itself: While still a college undergraduate, Ellis strikes it big with his debut novel, 1985’s Less Than Zero, an unsentimental stenography of disaffected, privileged young adults in swanky Los Angeles. It’s soon adapted into a movie starring Robert Downey Jr. and James Spader, which itself bears little resemblance to the book. Nevertheless, Ellis’s renown skyrockets. By the time he turns 30, he’s seemingly done it all: published multiple best sellers (American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction) filled with materialistic ennui, cheap sex, and lurid death; been mythologized as part of a literary “Brat Pack” alongside writers including Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz; rubbed elbows with celebrities of the music and film worlds; made lots of money (for a writer, at least); and become addicted to drugs.

Regardless of how you felt about his work—and readers had all sorts of opinions—his success couldn’t be denied. “If you were not a supporter of the Brat Pack, you simply had to accept us anyway,” he writes in his 2005 novel, Lunar Park, which is narrated by a semifictional version of himself. Such white-hot notoriety was rare in his time, and it’s rarer now. While a book can become a hit in many ways, you’re only young once—and though we’ve all been told about the virtues of writers who labor away unappreciated until they finally get their moment, it’s hard not to be a little envious of the ones who’re able to enjoy their spoils before knee pain sets in. It didn’t matter that, when I finally read Less Than Zero after college, I thought it was a relic best left in its era—the work of a poser trying too hard to convince readers of his secret depth. Ellis’s early works felt too significant, too settled, for me to really say much about; disputing him would have been like arguing with a redwood tree.

His reputation as a hedonistic provocateur made the release of his 2023 novel, The Shards, somewhat of a surprise, at least to me. On its face, The Shards is an autofictional murder mystery starring a teenage version of Ellis who, at the start of his senior year of high school, suspects that a new classmate is responsible for a series of gory killings around the school’s ritzy Sherman Oaks neighborhood. Novel-Ellis is working on an early draft of Less Than Zero, drawing from his own party-heavy lifestyle. The sensationalistic violence and substance-fueled navel-gazing—all of that sounds like a typical Ellis novel. Yet The Shards is not celebratory or defiant. It’s narrated by a much older Ellis, who looks back on his youth with regret and shame—about his closeted homosexuality, about his formative and long-dead teenage friendships—and rips apart his own mythos from the inside.

Parts of The Shards read like they could have used a more punitive editor—it’s a little long, and Ellis describes himself as “keyed-up” a few too many times. Yet the book’s hefty length—594 pages in hardcover—is conducive to novel-Ellis’s obsessiveness as he combs through memories for hidden meaning and tries to identify each emotion he felt during this chaotic time period. “The facts from that fall were receding from memory but being seventeen actually became clearer to me emotionally,” he writes. “I realized I had needed this distance of forty years to finally begin writing the book.” Now, he suggests, he can admit that Less Than Zero was indeed an act of mimicry—that he’d copied that book’s numbed affectation from a classmate. The cynicism of his early work had put me off, but here he seemed weary enough to let down his guard and, perhaps, tell a version of the truth.

The Shards has now been adapted for FX by Ryan Murphy, whose campy and provocative shows (Glee, American Horror Story, Feud) have helped define TV in the 21st century. In many ways, it’s a natural match. Murphy’s eye is consistently drawn to beauty, and to the machinations and aspirations of the rich. And though his scripts can be plenty outlandish, he knows when a performer should play it straight.

The early episodes seem to preserve much of Ellis’s plot. We begin by meeting Bret (played by Igby Rigney), an aspiring novelist and senior at the prestigious Buckley School in Sherman Oaks. Bret has recently started dating Debbie (Hayes Warner), a bottle-blond socialite; along with another couple, Susan (Kaia Gerber) and Thom (Graham Campbell), they constitute a glamorous foursome. Beneath this picturesque front is a more complicated reality. Susan and Thom may look like the perfect prom queen and king, but she’s grown restless in their relationship. And while Bret is quietly in love with Susan, he’s also been hooking up with some of his male classmates and wondering how to take advantage of the fact that Debbie’s father, Terry (Wes Bentley), a well-connected (and seemingly gay) movie producer, appears interested in giving him his big break.

These delicate dynamics are unsettled by the appearance of a mysterious new transfer student, Robert (Homer Gere), who looks like he walked right out of an Armani advertisement. Bret is transfixed by his new classmate and is convinced that he’s seen Robert before, at the movies, where he made an indelible impression. But Robert becomes strangely defensive about the encounter, and insists that Bret must have made a mistake. His denials and secretive behavior lead Bret to suspect that Robert is connected to the Trawler, a yet-unidentified serial killer who’s been targeting local teenagers. Bret’s obsession with proving his guilt slowly spins out of control.

Gruesome deaths, a pulsing ’80s soundtrack, dramatic conversations about people’s hidden motivations—it should be fun, and it sometimes is. As Robert, Gere conveys an alluring darkness; you can’t take your eyes off him, and neither can the show’s characters. Gerber’s Susan is beautifully nonchalant, a quality that propels her into Robert’s arms. (Gere and Gerber are the respective children of Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford, who used to be married.) And Jordan Roth is ridiculous but memorable as Steven, Terry’s assistant, who seems to be manipulating everyone behind the scenes.

Yet Murphy makes a subtle tweak that changes The Shards completely. The novel is told from the first-person perspective, which allows an older Bret to constantly remark on the described action with the benefit of time and perspective. Here, that framing device is snipped entirely. Bret still narrates, but voiceover-Bret is not Bret Easton Ellis, the middle-aged author of American Psycho who’s now looking backwards. It’s just Rigney, who plays young Bret, speaking from a vague near future, and sometimes obnoxiously. “Kids today have it fucking easy,” he sneers, which is new writing.

The elision of this metafictional narration is paired with a lot of new plot. Ellis co-wrote the first two episodes before being sidelined in a reported power struggle. (He has not promoted the show on his personal Instagram, nor did he appear at a glitzy launch party in July.) The other episodes depart drastically from the book’s structure. Murphy tacks on stray storylines: a dance competition on an American Bandstand–type local TV show, for instance, and a kidnapping plot involving a foulmouthed classmate who has what seems to be a form of Tourette’s. One episode has the characters monologuing at one another in Shakespearean verse while dressed in costume. The add-ons are tonally confusing and parceled out inconsistently. Some moments are played for show-stopping drama, only to be immediately abandoned. Other confrontations have the taste of corny reality TV, and the ’80s references are often played for laughs.

A blunter way of saying this: The new stuff is awful, and a waste of time. The show expands Bret’s outer world at the cost of his inner life (and screen time, as Rigney disappears for long stretches), but that outer world isn’t very interesting. The novel’s emotions have been strip-mined, leaving only the surface tensions of vain teenagers. Many TV adaptations of literature miss the mark, because the visual medium isn’t always well suited to novelistic storytelling, which can be both wide-angled and highly internal. But this misfire bears a particular irony. Since Less Than Zero, Ellis has been trailed by critics saying his work is shallow and trades in shock value. The Shards show unfurls as if all of those put-downs were true, as though the book is little more than a collection of unsettling murders, great outfits, and hot people being mean to one another.

[Read: The rise of CliffsNotes cinema]

Two comments about the making of the show—both from that launch party—reveal something about what went awry. The first comes from Murphy, speaking about what drew him to the book: “I knew the songs, I knew the clothes, I knew everything because I had lived it. It was my time.” The second is from Roth, speculating on the show bringing about a trend revival: “Love Story got us our ’90s nostalgia, and Shards brings us our ’80s nostalgia.”

The former comment is Murphy viewing The Shards as his story, not Ellis’s—a tricky approach for a book that’s so explicitly personal. The latter is, I think, deeply cynical about the point of a show like this. Even when The Shards invites us to laugh at its characters, it does so through the prism of “Weren’t the ’80s crazy?” The emotions are blustery, but not intimate; the narration has been edited for cool concision. In the book, novel-Ellis narrates about Robert: “The boy aroused something primal in me that I had never felt before—I wanted him immediately, I needed to be his friend, I had to make contact, I had to see him naked, I had to own him.” In the show, this confessional surge has been drastically pared back, keeping Bret’s messy feelings at a distance.

Regret and shame, the novel’s animating sentiments, are not sexy; I’m sure the actors had more fun overindexing on the ’80s of it all. The end result, though, is the transformation of a great novel into a bad show, one that Murphy wants to run for two more seasons. Let’s hope not. Although Ellis is often nitpicky about adaptations of his work—he’s never come around to the wonderfully caustic movie version of American Psycho—he’s right to distance himself from this one. “It was nothing like the book,” Bret narrates in both the show and the novel, after coming out of a screening of The Shining. “I felt cheated.” It’s quietly tragic that the same thing has happened here.

The Myopia Generation

2022-09-13T06:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

A decade into her optometry career, Marina Su began noticing something unusual about the kids in her New York City practice. More of them were requiring glasses, and at younger and younger ages. Many of these kids had parents who had perfect vision and who were baffled by the decline in their children’s eyesight. Frankly, Su couldn’t explain it either.

In optometry school, she had been taught—as American textbooks had been teaching for decades—that nearsightedness, or myopia, is a genetic condition. Having one parent with myopia doubles the odds that a kid will need glasses. Having two parents with myopia quintuples them. Over the years, she did indeed diagnose lots of nearsighted kids with nearsighted parents. These parents, she told me, would sigh in recognition: Oh no, not them too. But something was changing. A generation of children was suddenly seeing worse than their parents. Su remembers asking herself, as she saw more and more young patients with bad eyesight that seemed to have come out of nowhere: “If it’s only genetics, then why are these kids also getting myopic?”

What she noticed in her New York office a few years ago has in fact been happening around the world. In East and Southeast Asia, where this shift is most dramatic, the proportion of teenagers and young adults with myopia has jumped from roughly a quarter to more than 80 percent in just over half a century. In China, myopia is so prevalent that it has become a national-security concern: The military is worried about recruiting enough sharp-eyed pilots from among the country’s 1.4 billion people. Recent pandemic lockdowns seem to have made eyesight among Chinese children even worse.

For years, many experts dismissed the rising myopia rates in Asia as an aberration. They argued that Asians are genetically predisposed to myopia and nitpicked the methodology of studies conducted there. But eventually the scope of the problem and the speed of change became impossible to deny.

In the U.S., 42 percent of 12-to-54-year-olds were nearsighted in the early 2000s—the last time a national survey of myopia was conducted—up from a quarter in the 1970s. Though more recent large-scale surveys are not available, when I asked eye doctors around the U.S. if they were seeing more nearsighted kids, the answers were: “Absolutely.” “Yes.” “No question about it.”

In Europe as well, young adults are more likely to need glasses for distance vision than their parents or grandparents are now. Some of the lowest rates of myopia are in developing countries in Africa and South America. But where Asia was once seen as an outlier, it’s now considered a harbinger. If current trends continue, one study estimates, half of the world’s population will be myopic by 2050.

The consequences of this trend are more dire than a surge in bespectacled kids. Nearsighted eyes become prone to serious problems like glaucoma and retinal detachment in middle age, conditions that can in turn cause permanent blindness. The risks start small but rise exponentially with higher prescriptions. The younger myopia starts, the worse the outlook. In 2019, the American Academy of Ophthalmology convened a task force to recognize myopia as an urgent global-health problem. As Michael Repka, an ophthalmology professor at Johns Hopkins University and the AAO’s medical director for government affairs, told me, “You’re trying to head off an epidemic of blindness that’s decades down the road.”

The cause of this remarkable deterioration in our vision may seem obvious: You need only look around to see countless kids absorbed in phones and tablets and laptops. And you wouldn’t be the first to conclude that staring at something inches from your face is bad for distance vision. Four centuries ago, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler blamed his own poor eyesight, in part, on all the hours he spent studying. Historically, British doctors have found myopia to be much more common among Oxford students than among military recruits, and in “more rigorous” town schools than in rural ones. A late-19th-century ophthalmology handbook even suggested treating myopia with a change of air and avoidance of all work with the eyes—“a sea voyage if possible.”

By the early 20th century, experts were coalescing around the idea that myopia was caused by “near work,” which might include reading and writing—or, these days, watching TV and scrolling through Instagram. In China, officials have become so alarmed that they’ve proposed large-scale social changes to curb myopia in children. Written exams are now limited before third grade, and video games are restricted. One elementary school reportedly installed metal bars on its desks to prevent kids from leaning in too close to their schoolwork.

Spend too much time scrutinizing text or images right in front of you, the logic goes, and your eyes become nearsighted. “Long ago, humans were hunters and gatherers,” says Liandra Jung, an optometrist in the Bay Area. We relied on our sharp distance vision to track prey and find ripe fruit. Now our modern lives are close-up and indoors. “To get food, we forage by getting Uber Eats.”

This is a pleasingly intuitive explanation, but it has been surprisingly difficult to prove. “For every study that shows an effect of near work on myopia, there’s another study that doesn’t,” says Thomas Aller, an optometrist in San Bruno, California. Adding up the number of hours spent in front of a book or screen does not seem to explain the onset or progression of nearsightedness.

A number of theories have rushed to fill this confusing vacuum. Maybe the data in the studies are wrong—participants didn’t record their hours of near work accurately. Maybe the total duration of near work is less important than whether it’s interrupted by short breaks. Maybe it’s not near work itself that ruins eyes but the fact that it deprives kids of time outdoors. Scientists who argue for the importance of the outdoors are further subdivided into two camps: those who believe that bright sunlight promotes proper eye growth versus those who believe that wide-open spaces do.

Something about modern life is destroying our ability to see far away, but what?

Asking this question will plunge you into a thicket of scientific rivalries—which is what happened when I asked Christine Wildsoet, an optometry professor at UC Berkeley, about the biological plausibility of these myopia theories. Over the course of two hours, she paused repeatedly to note that the next part was contentious. “I’m not sure which controversy we’re up to,” she said at one point. (It was No. 4, and there were still three more to come.) But, she also noted, these theories are essentially two sides of the same coin: Anyone who does too much near work is also not spending much time outside. Whichever theory is true, you can draw the same practical conclusion about what’s best for kids’ vision: less time hunched over screens, more time on outdoor activities.

By now, scientists have moved past the faulty assumption that myopia is purely genetic. That idea took hold in the ’60s, when studies of twins showed that identical twins had more similar patterns of myopia than fraternal ones, and persisted in the academic world for decades. DNA does indeed play a role in myopia, but the tricky factor here is that identical twins don’t just share the same genes; they’re exposed to many of the same environmental stimuli, too.

Glasses, contacts, and laser surgery all help nearsighted people see better. But none of these fixes corrects the underlying anatomical problem of myopia. Whereas a healthy eye is shaped almost like an orb, a nearsighted one is more like an olive. To slow the progression of myopia, we would have to stop the elongation of the eyeball.

Which we already know how to do. Treatments to slow the progression of myopia—called “myopia control” or “myopia management”—exist. They’re just not widely known in America.

Over the past two decades, eye doctors—mostly in Asia—have discovered that special lenses and eye drops can slow the progression of nearsightedness in children. Maria Liu, a myopia researcher who grew up in Beijing, told me that she first became interested in nearsightedness as a teenager, when she began watching classmates at her school for gifted children get glasses one by one. In this intensely competitive academic environment, she remembers spending the hours of 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. on schoolwork, virtually all indoors. By the time she finished university, nearly all of her fellow students needed glasses, and she did too.

Years later, when she started an ophthalmology residency in China, she met many young patients who wore orthokeratology lenses—also known as OrthoK—a type of overnight contact lens that temporarily alters the way light enters the eye by reshaping the clear front layer of the eyeball, thus improving vision during the day. Liu noticed, anecdotally, that those who wore OrthoK seemed to have better vision down the line than those who wore glasses. Could long-term use of the lenses somehow prevent elongation of the eye, thus impeding myopia’s progression? It turns out that other scientists and doctors across Asia were noticing the same trend. In 2004, a randomized controlled study in Hong Kong of OrthoK confirmed Liu’s hunch.

By then, Liu had moved to the U.S., and she soon began a doctoral program in vision science at Berkeley to study myopia. Her classmates, she recalls, were tackling exotic-sounding topics such as gene therapy and retinal transplants and wondered why she was studying “something that’s so boring.” She ended up working in Wildsoet’s lab, researching the development of myopia in young chick eyes.

In humans, the majority of babies are born farsighted. Our eyes start slightly too short, and they grow in childhood to the right length, then stop. This process has been finely calibrated over millions of years of evolution. But when the environmental signals don’t match what the eye has evolved to expect—whether that’s due to too much near work, not enough outdoor time, some combination of the two, or another factor—the eye just keeps growing. This process is irreversible. “You can’t make a longer eyeball shorter,” Liu said. But you can interrupt growth by counteracting these faulty signals, which is what myopia control is designed to do.

When Liu became a professor at Berkeley after receiving her Ph.D., she started envisioning a myopia-control clinic—the first of its kind in the U.S.—that could bridge the gap between research and practice. By then, she knew that many doctors in China were already successfully using OrthoK for myopia control.

Photo-illustration by Vanessa Saba. Sources: Nick Dolding / Getty; Tina Caunt / EyeEm / Getty.

The school administration was skeptical. Liu says that the clinical director didn’t see how the clinic would benefit optometry students, or how it could attract enough patients to be worthwhile financially. But in 2013, Liu started it anyway, as a one-woman operation. She began seeing patients on Sundays in borrowed exam rooms with no extra pay and without relinquishing any of her teaching or clinical duties. Within months, her schedule was full. The Berkeley Myopia Control Clinic now runs four days a week and has 1,000 active patients—some of whom drive hours through Bay Area traffic to get there. Liu was one of the only people at the school who anticipated the clinic’s massive success. Jung, who is also an assistant clinical professor at Berkeley, told me that Liu’s knowledge of the latest myopia-control treatments made it feel like she came “from the future.”

When I arrived at the clinic at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning this past spring—an hour at which the rest of the campus was still quiet—it was already filling up with optometry students and residents who work there as part of their training. Liu, who is petite with neat, wavy hair, moved through the clinic with frightful efficiency. One moment she was examining eyes, the next talking down a parent whose son’s contact-lens shipment had gone missing, the next warning staffers about a malfunctioning printer.

The clinic offers three different treatments: OrthoK, multifocal soft contact lenses, and atropine eye drops. The first two both work by tweaking how light enters the eye, producing a signal for the eyeball to stop lengthening. Atropine, in contrast, is a drug that seems to chemically alter the growth pathway of the eye when used at low doses. (It also dilates the pupil; Cleopatra reportedly used it to make her eyes more beautiful.) These treatments slow myopia progression on average by about 50 percent. The original clinical trials validating them were mostly conducted in Asia starting in the mid-2000s. And the American Optometric Association’s evidence-based committee published a report advising its members on how to use myopia control last year. Until quite recently, though, none of these treatments had been approved by the FDA for myopia control. Any optometrists who wanted to offer them had to go off label. And any patient who wanted to use them had to find the right doctor.

[Yascha Mounk: The great American eye-exam scam]

It’s not a coincidence that Liu’s clinic found early success in the Bay Area, which has a large Asian population. Eye doctors I spoke with in multiple cities across the U.S. said it was usually Asian parents who came in asking for myopia control. The parents I met at the clinic skewed Asian and, on that Saturday, particularly Chinese—first-generation immigrants who speak Mandarin seek Liu out on the days she is personally in the clinic. Many of them heard about myopia control from fellow immigrants or friends in Asia. George Tsai, whose 8-year-old son was at the clinic for an OrthoK appointment, told me that his wife, who grew up in China, had learned of myopia control through WeChat, the messaging app popular in the country and among the Chinese diaspora.

Liu has a second phone, which she uses to manage three WeChat groups full of parents with kids in myopia control across North America. The questions flood in day and night. “First thing in the morning, I look at this WeChat group. Who has lost a lens? Who has red eyes? Who has other problems?” she said. “And again, before I go to bed.” She started the first group with a parent of one of her patients. When it hit the maximum number of members allowed on WeChat, they created a second, and then a third. The groups now contain a total of 1,500 parents.

In general, Liu told me, Asian parents tend to be a lot more motivated because myopia “is much better perceived or accepted as a disease in Asian culture.” I know this firsthand, as the child of Chinese immigrants. Distressed about my worsening vision in elementary school, my mother would regularly admonish me, standing my pencil case upright to measure the distance between my head and my desk. She also made me do eye exercises developed in China, which I was vindicated to finally learn, in the course of reporting this story, do not work. This was the late ’90s, when there really was nothing to be done about myopia progression. But in the parents I met at the Berkeley clinic, I saw the same determination I once saw in my own. They had uprooted their lives and come to a foreign country and now here they were, hoping to bestow upon their kids any advantage, any edge that modern science could give.

There is another reason that the Bay Area, with its high median income, has been fertile ground for myopia control: The treatments are expensive. Many of the parents I met at the clinic were engineers or doctors. At Berkeley, OrthoK costs more than $450 for one pair of lenses, plus $1,600 for the initial fitting, not including the fees for several follow-up appointments a year. Soft contact lenses can run from several hundred to more than $1,000 a year. And a year’s supply of atropine eye drops costs hundreds of dollars. Kids are typically in myopia control until their mid-teens to early 20s. Vision insurance does not cover any of these treatments.

Multinational eye-care companies now see myopia control as a hot potential market. They’re vying for FDA approval of new lenses and improved formulations of atropine, which can be patented rather than sold as a cheaper generic. The business case is obvious: If half of the world is myopic by 2050, that’s a huge pool of would-be customers. “How often do you have an opportunity to have an impact on a condition that will affect one out of two people? There’s nothing else on the planet that I’m aware of,” says Joe Rappon, the former chief medical officer of SightGlass Vision, a small California company whose myopia-control technology was jointly acquired by the eye-care giants CooperVision and Essilor.

In November 2019, the FDA green-lighted the first—and currently only—treatment specifically designed to slow the progression of myopia in the U.S., a soft contact lens from CooperVision called MiSight. Many more treatments, though, are in trials in the U.S., including several types of spectacles that tweak the way light enters the eye in order to slow its growth. Some are already on the market in Europe and Canada.

Once those glasses get approved in the U.S., “that’s going to open the floodgates of myopia management,” Barry Eiden, an optometrist in Deerfield, Illinois, told me. The earlier you can start slowing myopia progression in kids, the better the outcome, he explained, but parents sometimes balk at the idea of putting drugs or contacts into the eyes of their young children. They don’t have the same problem with glasses.

In the future, Liu told me, she hopes FDA approvals will spur vision insurance to cover myopia control at least partially, making the treatments affordable to more parents. Meanwhile, CooperVision has already revved up its MiSight marketing machine. It’s targeting exactly the parents you would expect: In my own Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, where you regularly see toddlers in $1,000-plus Uppababy strollers, an optometry shop recently hung a big banner advertising MiSight with two smiling kids. An optometrist in downtown San Francisco told me that parents who have seen MiSight’s ads are now coming into her office asking for it by name. The word-of-mouth era of myopia control is ending; the mass-advertising era is beginning.

Within the optometry business, myopia control often gets compared to braces—another treatment for which middle- and upper-class parents who want the best for their kids will dutifully shell out thousands of dollars. This comparison feels apt in a different way, too. Braces are also a modern solution to a relatively modern affliction. The teeth of cavemen, anthropologists have marveled, were incredibly straight. Crooked teeth appear in the archaeological record only when our ancestors transitioned from chewing raw meat and vegetables to eating cooked and processed grains. Our jaws are now smaller and weaker from disuse, our teeth more crowded and crooked. Today, braces are the way we retrofit our ill-adapted bodies for contemporary life.

We may not know exactly how ogling screens all day and spending so much time indoors are affecting us, or which is doing more damage, but we do know that myopia is a clear consequence of living at odds with our biology. The optometrists I spoke with all said they try to push better vision habits, such as limiting screen time and playing outside. But this only goes so far. Today, taking a phone away from a teenager may be no more practical than feeding a toddler a raw hunter-gatherer diet.

So this is where we’ve ended up, for those of us who can even afford it: adding chemicals and putting pieces of plastic in our eyes every day, in hopes of tricking them back to their natural state.

This article appears in the October 2022 print edition with the headline “The Myopia Generation.”

Autumnal Tints

2011-10-08T23:04:14-04:00

Europeans coming to America are surprised by the brilliancy of our autumnal foliage. There is no account of such a phenomenon in English poetry, because the trees acquire but few bright colors there. The most that Thomson says on this subject in his “Autumn” is contained in the lines,—

“But see the fading many-colored woods,
Shade deepening over shade, the country round
Imbrown; a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun,
Of every hue, from wan declining green to sooty dark”:—

and in the line in which he speaks of

“Autumn beaming o’er the yellow woods.”

The autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep impression on our own literature yet. October has hardly tinged our poetry.

A great many, who have spent their lives in cities, and have never chanced to come into the country at this season, have never seen this, the flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year. I remember riding with one such citizen, who, though a fortnight too late for the most brilliant tints, was taken by surprise, and would not believe that there had been any brighter. He had never heard of this phenomenon before. Not only many in our towns have never witnessed it, but it is scarcely remembered by the majority from year to year.

Most appear to confound changed leaves with withered ones, as if they were to confound ripe apples with rotten ones. I think that the change to some higher color in a leaf is an evidence that it has arrived at a late and perfect maturity, answering to the maturity of fruits. It is generally the lowest and oldest leaves which change first. But as the perfect winded and usually bright-colored insect is short-lived, so the leaves ripen but to fall.

Generally, every fruit, on ripening, and just before it falls, when it commences a more independent and individual existence, requiring less nourishment from any source, and that not so much from the earth through its stem as from the sun and air, acquires a bright tint. So do leaves. The physiologist says it is "due to an increased absorption of oxygen." That is the scientific account of the matter,—only a reassertion of the fact. But I am more interested in the rosy cheek than I am to know what particular diet the maiden fed on. The very forest and herbage, the pellicle of the earth, must acquire a bright color, an evidence of its ripeness,—as if the globe itself were a fruit on its stem, with ever a cheek toward the sun.

Flowers are but colored leaves, fruits but ripe ones. The edible part of most fruits is, as the physiologist says, “the parenchyma or fleshy tissue of the leaf” of which they are formed.

Our appetites have commonly confined our views of ripeness and its phenomena, color, mellowness, and perfectness, to the fruits which we eat, and we are wont to forget that an immense harvest which we do not eat, hardly use at all, is annually ripened by Nature. At our annual Cattle Shows and Horticultural Exhibitions, we make, as we think, a great show of fair fruits, destined, however, to a rather ignoble end, fruits not valued for their beauty chiefly. But round about and within our towns there is annually another show of fruits, on an infinitely grander scale, fruits which address our taste for beauty alone.

October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

I formerly thought that it would be worth the while to get a specimen leaf from each changing tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant, when it had acquired its brightest characteristic color, in its transition from the green to the brown state, outline it, and copy its color exactly, with paint, in a book, which should be entitled, “October, or Autumnal Tints”;—beginning with the earliest reddening,—Woodbine and the lake of radical leaves, and coming down through the Maples, Hickories, and Sumachs, and many beautifully freckled leaves less generally known, to the latest Oaks and Aspens. What a memento such a book would be! You would need only to turn over its leaves to take a ramble through the autumn woods whenever you pleased. Or if I could preserve the leaves themselves, unfaded, it would be better still. I have made but little progress toward such a book, but I have endeavored, instead, to describe all these bright tints in the order in which they present themselves. The following are some extracts from my notes.

The Purple Grasses

By the twentieth of August, everywhere in woods and swamps, we are reminded of the fall, both by the richly spotted Sarsaparilla leaves and Brakes, and the withering and blackened Skunk-Cabbage and Hellebore, and, by the riverside, the already blackening Pontederia.

The Purple Grass (Eragrostis pectina cea) is now in the height of its beauty. I remember still when I first noticed this grass particularly. Standing on a hill-side near our river, I saw, thirty or forty rods off, a stripe of purple half a dozen rods long, under the edge of a wood, where the ground sloped toward a meadow. It was as high-colored and interesting, though not quite so bright, as the patches of Rhexia, being a darker purple, like a berry's stain laid on close and thick. On going to and examining it, I found it to be a kind of grass in bloom, hardly a foot high, with but few green blades, and a fine spreading panicle of purple flowers, a shallow, purplish mist trembling around me. Close at hand it appeared but a dull purple, and made little impression on the eye; it was even difficult to detect; and if you plucked a single plant, you were surprised to find how thin it was, and how lit e color it had. But viewed at a distance in a favorable light, it was of a fine lively purple, flower-like, enriching the earth. Such puny causes combine to produce these decided effects. I was the more surprised and charmed because grass is commonly of a sober and humble color.

With its beautiful purple blush it reminds me, and supplies the place, of the Rhexia, which is now leaving off, and it is one of the most interesting phenomena of August. The finest patches of it grow on waste strips or selvages of land at the base of dry hills, just above the edge of the meadows, where the greedy mower does not deign to swing his scythe; for this is a thin and poor grass, beneath his notice. Or, it may be, because it is so beautiful he does not know that it exists; for the same eye does not see this and Timothy. He carefully gets the meadow hay and the more nutritious grasses which grow next to that, but he leaves this fine purple mist for the walker's harvest,— fodder for his fancy stock. Higher up the hill, perchance, grow also Blackberries, John's-Wort, and neglected, withered, and wiry June-Grass. How fortunate that it grows in such places, and not in the midst of the rank grasses which are annually cut! Nature thus keeps use and beauty distinct. I know many such localities, where it does not fail to present itself annually, and paint the earth with its blush. It rows on the gentle slopes, either in a continuous patch or in scattered and rounded tufts a foot in diameter, and it lasts till it is killed by the first smart frosts. In most plants the corolla or calyx is the part which attains the highest color, and is the most attractive; in many it is the seed-vessel or fruit; in others, as the Red Maple, the leaves; and in others still it is the very culm itself which is the principal flower or blooming part.

The last is especially the case with the Poke or Garget (Phytolacca decandra). Some which stand under our cliffs quite dazzle me with their purple stems now and early in September. They are as interesting to me as most flowers, and one of the most important fruits of our autumn. Every part is flower, (or fruit,) such is its superfluity of color,— stem, branch, peduncle, pedicel, petiole, and even the at length yellowish purple veined leaves. Its cylindrical racemes of berries of various hues, from green to dark purple, six or seven inches long, are gracefully drooping on all sides, offering repasts to the birds; and even the sepals from which the birds have picked the berries are a brilliant lake-red, with crimson flame-like reflections, equal to anything of the kind,— all on fire with ripeness. Hence the lacca, from lac, lake. There are at the same time flower-buds, flowers, green berries, dark purple or ripe ones, and these flower-like sepals, all on the same plant.

We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood. It asks a bright sun on it to make it show to best advantage, and it must be seen at this season of the year. On warm hill-sides its stems are ripe by the twenty-third of August. At that date I walked through a beautiful grove of them, six or seven feet high, on the side of one of our cliffs, where they ripen early. Quite to the ground they were a deep brilliant purple with a bloom, contrasting with the still clear green leaves. It appears a rare triumph of Nature to have produced and perfected such a plant, as if this were enough for a summer. What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the Poke! I confess that it excites me to behold them. I cut one for a cane, for I would fain handle and lean on it. I love to press the berries between my fingers, and see their juice staining my hand. To walk amid these upright, branching casks of purple wine, which retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tasting each one with your eye, instead of counting the pipes on a London dock, what a privilege! For Nature's vintage is not confined to the vine. Our poets have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers. Indeed, this has been called by some the American Grape, and, though a native of America, its juices are used in some foreign countries to improve the color of the wine; so that the poetaster may be celebrating the virtues of the Poke without knowing it. Here are berries enough to paint afresh the western sky, and play the bacchanal with, if you will. And what flutes its ensanguined stems would make, to be used in such a dance! It is truly a royal plant. I could spend the evening of the year musing amid the Poke-stems. And perchance amid these groves might, arise at last a new school of philosophy or poetry. It lasts all through September.

At the same time with this, or near the end of August, a to me very interesting genus of grasses, Andropogons, or Beard-Grasses, is in its prime. Andropogon furcatus, Forked Beard-Grass, or call it Purple-Fingered Grass; Andropogon scoparius, Purple Wood-Grass; and Andropogon (now called Sorghum) nutans, Indian-Grass. The first is a very tall and slender-culmed grass, three to seven feet high, with four or five purple finger-like spikes raying upward from the top. The second is also quite slender, growing in tufts two feet high by one wide, with culms often somewhat curving, which, as the spikes go out of bloom, have a whitish fuzzy look. These two are prevailing grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields and hill-sides. The culms of both, not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple tinge, and help to declare the ripeness of the year. Perhaps I have the more sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer, and occupy sterile and neglected soil. They are high-colored, like ripe grapes, and express a maturity which the spring did not suggest. Only the August sun could have thus burnished these culms and leaves. The farmer has long since done his upland haying, and he will not condescend to bring his scythe to where these slender wild grasses have at length flowered thinly; you often see spaces of bare sand amid them. But I walk encouraged between the tufts of Purple Wood-Grass, over the sandy fields, and along the edge of the Shrub-Oaks, glad to recognize these simple contemporaries. With thoughts cutting a broad swathe I "get" them, with horse-raking thoughts I gather them into windrows. The fine-eared poet may hear the whetting of my scythe. These two were almost the first grasses that I learned to distinguish, for I had not known by how many friends I was surrounded,—I had seen them simply as grasses standing. The purple of their culms also excites me like that of the Poke-Weed stems.

Think what refuge there is for one, before August is over, from college commencements and society that isolates! I can skulk amid the tufts of Purple Wood-Grass on the borders of the "Great Fields." Wherever I walk these afternoons, the Purple-Fingered Grass also stands like a guide-board, and points my thoughts to more poetic paths than they have lately travelled.

A man shall perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his head, and cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have cut many tons of them, littered his stables with them, and fed them to his cattle for years. Yet, if he ever favorably attends to them, he may be overcome by their beauty. Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours; and yet how lone, it stands in vain! I had walked over those Great Fields so many Augusts, and never yet distinctly recognized these purple companions that I had there. I had brushed against them and trodden on them, for sooth; and now, at last, they, as it were, rose up and blessed me. Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised. Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid. Who can doubt that these grasses, which the farmer says are of no account to him, find some compensation in your appreciation of them? I may say that I never saw them before,— though, when I came to look them face to face, there did come down to me a purple gleam from previous years; and now, wherever I go, I see hardly anything else. It is the reign and presidency of the Andropogons.

Almost the very sands confess the ripening influence of the August sun, and methinks, together with the slender grasses waving over them, reflect a purple tinge. The impurpled sands! Such is the consequence of all this sunshine absorbed into the pores of plants and of the earth. All sap or blood is now wine colored. At last we have not only the purple sea, but the purple land.

The Chestnut Beard-Grass, Indian-Grass, or Wood-Grass, growing here and there in waste places, but more rare than the former, (from two to four or five feet high,) is still handsomer and of more vivid colors than its congeners, and might well have caught the Indian's eye. It has a long, narrow, one-sided, and slightly nodding panicle of bright purple and yellow flowers, like a banner raised above its reedy leaves. These bright standards are now advanced on the distant hill-sides, not in large armies, but in scattered troops or single file, like the red men. They stand thus fair and bright, representative of the race which they are named after, but for the most part unobserved as they. The expression of this grass haunted me for a week, after I first passed and noticed it, like the glance of an eye. It stands like an Indian chief taking a last look at his favorite hunting-grounds.

The Red Maple

By the twenty-fifth of September, the Red Maples generally are beginning to be ripe. Some large ones have been conspicuously changing for a week, and some single trees are now very brilliant. I notice a small one, half a mile off across a meadow, against the green wood-side there, a far brighter red than the blossoms of any tree in summer, and more conspicuous. I have observed this tree for several autumns invariably changing earlier than its fellows, just as one tree ripens its fruit earlier than another. It might serve to mark the season, perhaps. I should be sorry, if it were cut down. I know of two or three such trees in different parts of our town, which might, perhaps, be propagated from, as early ripeners or September trees, and their seed be advertised in the market, as well as that of radishes, if we cared as much about them.

At present, these burning bushes stand chiefly along the edge of the meadows, or I distinguish them afar on the hill-sides here an(l there. Sometimes you will see many small ones in a swamp turned quite crimson when all other trees around are still perfectly green, and the former appear so much the brighter for it. They take you by surprise, as you are going by on one side, across the fields, thus early in the season, as if it were some gay encampment of the red men, or other foresters, of whose arrival you had not heard.

Some single trees, wholly bright scarlet, seen against others of their kind still freshly green, or against evergreens, are more memorable than whole groves will be by-and-by. How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last.

The whole tree thus ripening in advance of its fellows attains a singular preëminence; and sometimes maintains it for a week or two. I am thrilled at the sight of it, bearing aloft its scarlet standard for the regiment of green-clad foresters around, and I go half a mile out of my way to examine it. A single tree becomes thus the crowning beauty of some meadowy vale, and the expression of the whole surrounding forest is at once more spirited for it.

A small Red Maple has grown, perchance, far away at the head of some retired valley, a mile from any road, unobserved. It has faithfully discharged the duties of a Maple there, all winter and summer, neglected none of its economies, but added to its stature in the virtue which belongs to a Maple, by a steady growth for so many months, never having gone gadding abroad, and is nearer heaven than it was in the spring. It has faithfully husbanded its sap, and afforded a shelter to the wandering bird, has long since ripened its seeds and committed them to the winds, and has the satisfaction of knowing, perhaps, that a thousand little well-behaved Maples are already settled in life somewhere. It deserves well of Mapledom. Its leaves have been asking it from time to time, in a whisper, "When shall we redden?" And now, in this month of September, this month of travelling, when men are hastening to the sea-side, or the mountains, or the lakes, this modest Maple, still without budging an inch, travels in its reputation,— runs up its scarlet flag on that hill-side, which shows that it has finished its summer's work before all other trees, and withdraws from the contest. At the eleventh hour of the year, the tree which no scrutiny could have detected here when it was most industrious is thus, by the tint of its maturity, by its very blushes, revealed at last to the careless and distant traveller, and leads his thoughts away from the dusty road into those brave solitudes which it inhabits. It flashes out conspicuous with all the virtue and beauty of a Maple,— Acer rubrum. We may now read its title, or rubric, clear. Its virtues, not its sins, are as scarlet.

Notwithstanding the Red Maple is the most intense scarlet of any of our trees, the Sugar-Maple has been the most celebrated, and Michaux in his "Sylva" does not speak of the autumnal color of the former. About the second of October, these trees, both large and small, are most brilliant, though many are still green. In "sprout-lands" they seem to vie with one another, and ever some particular one in the midst of the crowd will be of a peculiarly pure scarlet, and by its more intense color attract our eye even at a distance, and carry off the palm. A large Red-Maple swamp, when at the height of its change, is the most obviously brilliant of all tangible things, where I dwell, so abundant is this tree with us. It varies much both in form and color. A great many are merely yellow, more scarlet, others scarlet deepening into crimson, more red than common. Look at yonder swamp of Maples mixed with Pines, at the base of a Pine-clad hill, a quarter of a mile off, so that you get the full effect of the bright colors, without detecting the imperfections of the leaves, and see their yellow, scarlet, and crimson fires, of all tints, mingled and contrasted with the green. Some Maples are yet green, only yellow or crimson-tipped on the edges of their flakes, like the edges of a Hazel-Nut burr; some are wholly brilliant scarlet, raying out regularly and finely every way, bilaterally, like the veins of a leaf; others, of more irregular form, when I turn my head slightly, emptying out some of its earthiness and concealing the trunk of the tree, seem to rest heavily flake on flake, like yellow and scarlet clouds, wreath upon wreath, or like snow-drifts driving through the air, stratified by the wind. It adds greatly to the beauty of such a swamp at this season, that, even though there may be no other trees interspersed, it is not seen as a simple mass of color, but, different trees being of different colors and hues, the outline of each crescent tree-top is distinct, and where one laps on to an other. Yet a painter would hardly venture to make them thus distinct a quarter of a mile off.

As I go across a meadow directly toward a low rising ground this bright afternoon, I see, some fifty rods off toward the sun, the top of a Maple swamp just appearing over the sheeny russet edge of the hill, a stripe apparently twenty rods long by ten feet deep, of the most intensely brilliant scarlet, orange, and yellow, equal to any flowers or fruits, or any tints ever painted. As I advance, lowering the edge of the hill which makes the firm foreground or lower frame of the picture, the depth of the brilliant grove revealed steadily increases, suggesting that the whole of the inclosed valley is filled with such color. One wonders that the tithing-men and fathers of the town are not out to see what the trees mean by their high colors and exuberance of spirits, fearing that some mischief is brewing. I do not see what the Puritans did at this season, when the Maples blaze out in scarlet. They certainly could not have worshipped in groves then. Perhaps that is what they built meeting-houses and fenced them round with horse-sheds for.

The Elm

Now, too, the first of October, or later, the Elms are at the height of their autumnal beauty, great brownish-yellow masses, warm from their September oven, hanging over the highway. Their leaves are perfectly ripe. I wonder if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the men who live beneath them. As I look down our street, which is lined with them, they remind me both by their form and color of yellowing sheaves of grain, as if the harvest had indeed come to the village itself, and we might expect to find some maturity and flavor in the thoughts of the villagers at last. Under those bright rustling yellow piles just ready to fall on the heads of the walkers, how can any crudity or greenness of thought or act prevail? When I stand where half a dozen large Elms droop over a house, it is as if I stood within a ripe pumpkin-rind, and I feel as mellow as if I were the pulp, though I may be somewhat stringy and seedy withal. What is the late greenness of the English Elm, like a cucumber out of season, which does not know when to have done, compared with the early and golden maturity of the American tree? The street is the scene of a great harvest-home. It would be worth the while to set out these trees, if only for their autumnal value. Think of these great yellow canopies or parasols held over our heads and houses by the mile together, making the village all one and compact,—an ulmarium, which is at the same time a nursery of men! And then how gently and unobserved they drop their burden and let in the sun when it is wanted, their leaves not heard when they fall on our roofs and in our streets; and thus the village parasol is shut up and put away! I see the market-man driving into the villages and disappearing under its canopy of Elm-tops, with his crop, as into a great granary or barn yard. I am tempted to go thither as to a husking of thoughts, now dry and ripe, and ready to be separated from their integuments; but, alas! I foresee that it will be chiefly husks and little thought, blasted pig-corn, fit only for cob-meal,—for, as you sow, so shall you reap.

Fallen Leaves

By the sixth of October the leaves generally begin to fall, in successive showers, after frost or rain; but the principal leaf-harvest, the acme of the Fall, is commonly about the sixteenth. Some morning at that date there is perhaps a harder frost than we have seen, and ice formed under the pump, and now, when the morning wind rises, the leaves come down in denser showers than ever. They suddenly form thick beds or carpets on the ground, in this gentle air, or even without wind, just the size and form of the tree above. Some trees, as small Hickories, appear to have dropped their leaves instantaneously, as a soldier grounds arms at a signal; and those of the Hickory, being bright yellow still, though withered, reflect a blaze of light from the ground where they lie. Down they have come on all sides, at the first earnest touch of autumn's wand, making a sound like rain.

Or else it is after moist and rainy weather that we notice how great a fall of leaves there has been in the night, though it may not yet be the touch that loosens the Rock-Maple leaf. The streets are thickly strewn with the trophies, and fallen Elm-leaves make a dark brown pavement under our feet. After some remarkably warm Indian summer day or days, I perceive that it is the unusual heat which, more than anything, causes the leaves to fall, there having been, perhaps, no frost nor rain for some time. The intense heat suddenly ripens and wilts them, just as it softens and ripens peaches and other fruits, and causes them to drop.

The leaves of late red Maples, still bright, strew the earth, often crimson-spotted on a yellow ground, like some wild apples,—though they preserve these bright colors on the ground but a day or two, especially if it rains. On causeways I go by trees here and there all bare and smoke-like, having lost their brilliant clothing; but there it lies, nearly as bright as ever, on the ground on one side, and making nearly as regular a figure as lately on the tree. I would rather say that I first observe the trees thus flat on the ground like a permanent colored shadow, and they suggest to look for the boughs that bore them. A queen might be proud to walk where these gallant trees have spread their bright cloaks in the mud. I see wagons roll over them as a shadow or a reflection, and the drivers heed them just as little as they did their shadows before.

Birds'-nests, in the Huckleberry and other shrubs, and in trees, are already being filled with the withered leaves. So many have fallen in the woods, that a squirrel cannot run after a falling nut without being heard. Boys are raking them in the streets, if only for the pleasure of dealing with such clean crisp substances. Some sweep the paths scrupulously neat, and then stand to see the next breath strew them with new trophies. The swamp-floor is thickly covered, and the Lycopodium lucidulum looks suddenly greener amid them. In dense woods they half-cover pools that are three or four rods long. The other day I could hardly find a well-known spring, and even suspected that it had dried up, for it was completely concealed by freshly fallen leaves; and when I swept them aside and revealed it, it was like striking the earth, with Aaron's rod, for a new spring. Wet grounds about the edges of swamps look dry with them. At one swamp, where I was surveying, thinking to step on a leafy shore from a rail, I got into the water more than a foot deep.

When I go to the river the day after the principal fall of leaves, the sixteenth, I find my boat all covered, bottom and seats, with the leaves of the Golden Willow under which it is moored, and I set sail with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. If I empty it, it will be full again to-morrow. I do not regard them as litter, to be swept out, but accept them as suitable straw or matting for the bottom of my carriage. When I turn up into the mouth of the Assabet, which is wooded, large fleets of leaves are floating on its surface, as it were getting out to sea, with room to tack; but next the shore, a little farther up, they are thicker than foam, quite concealing the water for a rod in width, under and amid the Alders, Button-Bushes, and Maples, still perfectly light and dry, with fibre unrelaxed; and at a rocky bend where they are met and stopped by the morning wind, they sometimes form a broad and dense crescent quite across the river. When I turn my prow that way, and the wave which it makes strikes them, list what a pleasant rustling from these dry substances grating on one another! Often it is their undulation only which reveals the water beneath them. Also every motion of the wood-turtle on the shore is betrayed by their rustling there. Or even in mid-channel, when the wind rises, I hear them blown with a rustling sound. Higher up they are slowly moving round and round in some great eddy which the river makes, as that at the "Leaning Hemlocks," where the water is deep, and the current is wearing into the bank.

Perchance, in the afternoon of such a day, when the water is perfectly calm and full of reflections, I paddle gently down the main stream, and, turning up the Assabet, reach a quiet cove, where I unexpectedly find myself surrounded by myriads of leaves, like fellow-voyagers, which seem to have the same purpose, or want of purpose, with myself. See this great fleet of scattered leaf-boats which we paddle amid, in this smooth river-bay, each one curled up on every side by the sun's skill, each nerve a stiff spruce-knee,—like boats of hide, and of all patterns, Charon's boat probably among the rest, and some with lofty prows and poops, like the stately vessels of the ancients, scarcely moving in the sluggish current,—like the great fleets, the dense Chinese cities of boats, with which you mingle on entering some great mart, some New York or Canton, which we are all steadily approaching together. How gently each has been deposited on the water! No violence has been used towards them yet, though, perchance, palpitating hearts were present at the launching. And painted ducks, too, the splendid wood-duck among the rest, often come to sail and float amid the painted leaves, —barks of a nobler model still!

What wholesome herb-drinks are to be had in the swamps now! What strong medicinal, but rich, scents from the decaying leaves! The rain falling on the freshly dried herbs and leaves, and filling the pools and ditches into which they have dropped thus clean and rigid, will soon convert them into tea,—green, black, brown, and yellow teas, of all degrees of strength, enough to set all Nature a-gossiping. Whether we drink them or not, as yet, before their strength is drawn, these leaves, dried on great Nature's coppers, are of such various pure and delicate tints as might make the fame of Oriental teas.

How they are mixed up, of all species, Oak and Maple and Chestnut and Birch! But Nature is not cluttered with them; she is a perfect husbandman; she stores them all. Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. The trees are now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from it. They are discounting. They are about to add a leaf's thickness to the depth of the soil. This is the beautiful way in which Nature gets her muck, while I chaffer with this man and that, who talks to me about sulphur and the cost of carting. We are all the richer for their decay. I am more interested in this crop than in the English grass alone or in the corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future cornfields and forests, on which the earth fattens. It keeps our home stead in good heart.

For beautiful variety no crop can be compared with this. Here is not merely the plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the colors that we know, the brightest blue not excepted: the early blushing Maple, the Poison-Sumach blazing its sins as scarlet, the mulberry Ash, the rich chrome-yellow of the Poplars, the brilliant red Huckleberry, with which the hills' backs are painted, like those of sheep. The frost touches them, and, with the slightest breath of returning day or jarring of earth's axle, see in what showers they come floating down! The ground is all party-colored with them. But they still live in the soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from it. They stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years, by subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees, and the sapling's first fruits thus shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its crown, when, in after-years, it has become the monarch of the forest.

It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould!—painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last resting place, light and frisky. They put on no weeds, but merrily they go scampering over the earth, selecting the spot, choosing a lot, ordering no iron fence, whispering all through the woods about it,—some choosing the spot where the bodies of men are mouldering beneath, and meeting them half-way. How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe,—with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails.

When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no lying nor vain epitaphs. What though you own no lot at Mount Auburn? Your lot is surely cast somewhere in this vast cemetery, which has been consecrated from of old. You need attend no auction to secure a place. There is room enough here. The Loose-strife shall bloom and the Huckleberry-bird sing over your bones. The wood man and hunter shall be your sextons, and the children shall tread upon the borders as much as they will. Let us walk in the cemetery of the leaves,—this is your true Greenwood Cemetery.

The Sugar-Maple

But think not that the splendor of the year is over; for as one leaf does not make a summer, neither does one fallen leaf make an autumn. The smallest Sugar-Maples in our streets make a great show as early as the fifth of October, more than any other trees there. As I look up the Main Street, they appear like painted screens standing before the houses; yet many are green. But now, or generally by the seventeenth of October, when almost all Red Maples, and some White Maples, are bare, the large Sugar-Maples also are in their glory, glowing with yellow and red, and show unexpectedly bright and delicate tints. They are remarkable for the contrast they often afford of deep blushing red on one half and green on the other. They become at length dense masses of rich yellow with a deep scarlet blush, or more than blush, on the exposed surfaces. They are the brightest trees now in the street.

The large ones on our Common are particularly beautiful. A delicate, but warmer than golden yellow is now the prevailing color, with scarlet cheeks. Yet, standing on the east side of the Common just before sundown, when the western light is transmitted through them, I see that their yellow even, compared with the pale lemon yellow of an Elm close by, amounts to a scarlet, without noticing the bright scarlet portions. Generally, they are great regular oval masses of yellow and scarlet. All the sunny warmth of the season, the Indian summer, seems to be absorbed in their leaves. The lowest and inmost leaves next the hole are, as usual, of the most delicate yellow and green, like the complexion of young men brought up in the house. There is an auction on the Common to day, but its red flag is hard to be discerned amid this blaze of color.

Little did the fathers of the town anticipate this brilliant success, when they caused to be imported from farther in the country some straight poles with their tops cut off, which they called Sugar-Maples; and, as I remember, after they were set out, a neighboring merchant's clerk, by way of jest, planted beans about them. Those which were then jestingly called bean-poles are to-day far the most beautiful objects noticeable in our streets. They are worth all and more than they have cost,—though one of the selectmen, while setting them took the cold which occasioned his death,—if only because they have filled the open eyes of children with their rich color unstintedly so many Octobers. We will not ask them to yield us sugar in the spring, while they afford us so fair a prospect in the autumn. Wealth in-doors may be the inheritance of few, but it is equally distributed on the Common. All children alike can revel in this golden harvest.

Surely trees should be set in our streets with a view to their October splendor; though I doubt whether this is ever considered by the "Tree Society." Do you not think it will make some odds to these children that they were brought up under the Maples? Hundreds of eyes are steadily drinking in this color, and by these teachers even the truants are caught and educated the moment they step abroad. Indeed, neither the truant nor the studious is at present taught color in the schools. These are instead of the bright colors in apothecaries' shops and city windows. It is a pity that we have no more Red Maples, and some Hickories, in our streets as well. Our paint-box is very imperfectly filled. Instead of, or beside, supplying such paint boxes as we do, we might supply these natural colors to the young. Where else will they study color under greater advantages? What School of Design can vie with this? Think how much the eyes of painters of all kinds, and of manufacturers of cloth and paper, and paper-stainers, and countless others, are to be educated by these autumnal colors. The stationer's envelopes may be of very various tints, yet not so various as those of the leaves of a single tree. If you want a different shade or tint of a particular color, you have only to look farther within or without the tree or the wood. These leaves are not many dipped in one dye, as at the dye-house, but they are dyed in light of infinitely various degrees of strength, and left to set and dry there.

Shall the names of so many of our colors continue to be derived from those of obscure foreign localities, as Naples yellow, Prussian blue, raw Sienna, burnt Umber, Gamboge?—(surely the Tyrian purple must have faded by this time)—or from comparatively trivial articles of commerce,—chocolate, lemon, coffee, cinnamon, claret?—(shall we compare our Hickory to a lemon, or a lemon to a Hickory?)—or from ores and oxides which few ever see? Shall we so often, when describing to our neighbors the color of something we have seen, refer them, not to some natural object in our neighbor hood, but perchance to a bit of earth fetched from the other side of the planet, which possibly they may find at the apothecary's, but which probably neither they nor we ever saw? Have we not an earth under our feet,—ay, and a sky over our heads? Or is the last all ultramarine? What do we know of sapphire, amethyst, emerald, ruby, amber, and the like, most of us who take these names in vain? Leave these precious words to cabinet-keepers, virtuosos, and maids-of-honor,—to the Nahobs, Begums, and Chobdars of Hindostan, or wherever else. I do not see why, since America and her autumn woods have been discovered, our leaves should not compete with the precious stones in giving names to colors; and, indeed, I believe that in course of time the names of some of our trees and shrubs, as well as flowers, will get into our popular chromatic nomenclature.

But of much more importance than a knowledge of the names and distinctions of color is the joy and exhilaration which these colored leaves excite. Already these brilliant trees throughout the street, without any more variety, are at least equal to an annual festival and holiday, or a week of such. These are cheap and innocent gala-days, celebrated by one and all without the aid of committees or marshals, such a show as may safely be licensed, not attracting gamblers or rum-sellers, nor requiring any special police to keep the peace. And poor indeed must be that New-England village's October which has not the Maple in its streets. This October festival costs no powder, nor ringing of bells, but every tree is a living liberty-pole on which a thousand bright flags are waving.

No wonder that we must have our annual Cattle-Show, and Fall Training, and perhaps Cornwallis, our September Courts, and the like. Nature herself holds her annual fair in October, not only in the streets, but in every hollow and on every hill-side. When lately we looked into that Red Maple swamp all a-blaze, where the trees were clothed in their vestures of most dazzling tints, did it not suggest a thousand gypsies beneath,—a race capable of wild delight,—or even the fabled fawns, satyrs, and wood-nymphs come hack to earth? Or was it only a congregation of wearied wood-choppers, or of proprietors come to inspect their lots, that we thought of? Or, earlier still, when we paddled on the river through that fine-grained September air, did there not appear to be something new going on under the sparkling surface of the stream, a shaking of props, at least, so that we made haste in order to be up in time? Did not the rows of yellowing Willows and Button-Bushes on each side seem like rows of booths, under which, perhaps, some fluviatile egg-pop equally yellow was effervescing? Did not all these suggest that man's spirits should rise as high as Nature's,—should hang out their flag, and the routine of his life be interrupted by an analogous expression of joy and hilarity?

No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,—flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read,—while we walk under the triumphal arches of the Elms. Leave it to Nature to appoint the days, whether the same as in neighboring States or not, and let the clergy read her proclamations, if they can understand them. Behold what a brilliant drapery is her Woodbine flag! What public-spirited merchant, think you, has contributed this part of the show? There is no handsomer shingling and paint than this vine, at present covering a whole side of some houses. I do not believe that the Ivy never sear is comparable to it. No wonder it has been extensively introduced into London. Let us have a good many Maples and Hickories and Scarlet Oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town-clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting. Let us have Willows for spring, Elms for summer, Maples and Walnuts and Tupeloes for autumn, Evergreens for winter, and Oaks for all seasons. What is a gallery in a house to a gallery in the streets, which every market-man rides through, whether he will or not? Of course, there is not a picture-gallery in the country which would be worth so much to us as is the western view at sunset under the Elms of our main street. They are the frame to a picture which is daily painted behind them. An avenue of Elms as large as our largest and three miles long would seem to lead to some admirable place, though only C——were at the end of it.

A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers. Every wash-tub and milk-can and gravestone will be exposed. The inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind their hams and houses, like desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I shall look to see spears in their hands. They will be ready to accept the most barren and forlorn doctrine,—as that the world is speedily coming to an end, or has already got to it, or that they themselves are turned wrong side outward. They will perchance crack their dry joints at one another and call it a spiritual communication.

But to confine ourselves to the Maples. What if we were to take half as much pains in protecting them as we do in setting them out,—not stupidly tie our horses to our dahlia-stems?

What meant the fathers by establishing this perfectly living institution before the church,—this institution which needs no repairing nor repainting, which is continually enlarged and repaired by its growth? Surely they

"Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Themselves from God they could not free;
They planted better than they knew;—
The conscious trees to beauty grew."

Verily these Maples are cheap preachers, permanently settled, which preach their half-century, and century, ay, and century-and-a-half sermons, with constantly increasing unction and influence, ministering to many generations of men; and the least we can do is to supply them with suitable colleagues as they grow infirm.

The Scarlet Oak

Belonging to a genus which is remarkable for the beautiful form of its leaves, I suspect that some Scarlet-Oak leaves surpass those of all other Oaks in the rich and wild beauty of their outlines. I judge from an acquaintance with twelve species, and from drawings which I have seen of many others.

Stand under this tree and see how finely its leaves are cut against the sky, —as it were, only a few sharp points extending from a midrib. They look like double, treble, or quadruple crosses. They are far more ethereal than the less deeply scolloped Oak-leaves. They have so little leafy terra firma that they appear melting away in the light, and scarcely obstruct our view. The leaves of very young plants are, like those of full-grown Oaks of other species, more entire, simple, and lumpish in their outlines; but these, raised high on old trees, have solved the leafy problem. Lifted higher and higher, and sublimated more and more, putting off some earthiness and cultivating more intimacy with the light each year, they have at length the least possible amount of earthy matter, and the greatest spread and grasp of skyey influences. There they dance, arm in arm with the light,—tripping it on fantastic points, fit partners in those aërial halls. So intimately mingled are they with it, that, what with their slenderness and their glossy surfaces, you can hardly tell at last what in the dance is leaf and what is light. And when no zephyr stirs, they are at most but a rich tracery to the forest-windows.

I am again struck with their beauty, when, a month later, they thickly strew the ground in the woods, piled one upon another under my feet. They are then brown above, but purple beneath. With their narrow lobes and their bold deep scollops reaching almost to the middle, they suggest that the material must be cheap, or else there has been a lavish expense in their creation, as if so much had been cut out. Or else they seem to us the remnants of the stuff out of which leaves have been cut with a die. Indeed, when they lie thus one upon another, they remind me of a pile of scrap-tin.

Or bring one home, and study it closely at your leisure, by the fireside. It is a type, not from any Oxford font, not in the Basque nor the arrow-headed character, not found on the Rosetta Stone, but destined to be copied in sculpture one day, if they ever get to whittling stone here. What a wild and pleasing outline, a combination of graceful curves and angles! The eye rests with equal delight on what is not leaf and on what is leaf—on the broad, free, open sinuses, and on the long, sharp, bristle-pointed lobes. A simple oval outline would include it all, if you connected the points of the leaf; but how much richer is it than that, with its half-dozen deep scollops, in which the eye and thought of the beholder are embayed! If I were a drawing-master, I would set my pupils to copying these leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and gracefully.

Regarded as water, it is like a pond with half a dozen broad rounded promontories extending nearly to its middle, half from each side, while its watery bays extend far inland, like sharp friths, at each of whose heads several fine streams empty in,—almost a leafy archipelago.

But it oftener suggests land, and, as Dionysius and Pliny compared the form of the Morea to that of the leaf of the Oriental Plane-tree, so this leaf reminds me of some fair wild island in the ocean, whose extensive coast, alternate rounded bays with smooth strands, and sharp-pointed rocky capes, mark it as fitted for the habitation of man, and destined to become a centre of civilization at last. To the sailor's eye, it is a much-indented shore. Is it not, in fact, a shore to the aërial ocean, on which the windy surf beats? At sight of this leaf we are all mariners,—if not vikings, buccaneers, and filibusters. Both our love of repose and our spirit of adventure are addressed. In our most casual glance, perchance, we think, that, if we succeed in doubling those sharp capes, we shall find deep, smooth, and secure havens in the ample bays. how different from the White-Oak leaf, with its rounded head-lands, on which no light-house need be placed! That is an England, with its long civil history, that may be read. This is some still unsettled New-found Island or Celebes. Shall we go and be rajahs there?

By the twenty-sixth of October the large Scarlet Oaks are in their prime, when other Oaks are usually withered. They have been kindling their fires for a week past, and now generally burst into a blaze. This alone of our indigenous deciduous trees (excepting the Dogwood, of which I do not know half a dozen, and they are but large bushes) is now in its glory. The two Aspens and the Sugar-Maple come nearest to it in date, but they have lost the greater part of their leaves. Of evergreens, only the Pitch-Pine is still commonly bright.

But it requires a particular alertness, if not devotion to these phenomena, to appreciate the wide-spread, but late and unexpected glory of the Scarlet Oaks. I do not speak here of the small trees and shrubs, which are commonly observed, and which are now withered, but of the large trees. Most go in and shut their doors, thinking that bleak and colorless November has already come, when some of the most brilliant and memorable colors are not yet lit.

This very perfect and vigorous one, about forty feet high, standing in an open pasture, which was quite glossy green on the twelfth, is now, the twenty-sixth, completely changed to bright dark scarlet,— every leaf, between you and the sun, as if it had been dipped into a scarlet dye. The whole tree is much like a heart in form, as well as color. Was not this worth waiting for? Little did you think, ten days ago, that that cold green tree would assume such color as this. Its leaves are still firmly attached, while those of other trees are falling around it. It seems to say, —" I am the last to blush, but I blush deeper than any of ye. I bring up the rear in my red coat. We Scarlet ones, alone of Oaks, have not given up the fight."

The sap is now, and even far into November, frequently flowing fast in these trees, as in Maples in the spring and apparently their bright tints, now that most other Oaks are withered, are connected with this phenomenon. They are full of life. It has a pleasantly astringent, acorn-like taste, this strong Oak-wine, as I find on tapping them with my knife.

Looking across this woodland valley, a quarter of a mile wide, how rich those Scarlet Oaks, embosomed in Pines, their bright red branches intimately intermingled with them! They have their full effect theme. The Pine-boughs are the green calyx to their red petals. Or, as we go along a road in the woods, the sun striking endwise through it, and lighting up the red tents of the Oaks, which on each side are mingled with the liquid green of the Pines, makes a very gorgeous scene. Indeed, without the ever greens for contrast, the autumnal tints would lose much of their effect.

The Scarlet Oak asks a clear sky and the brightness of late October days. These bring out its colors. If the sun goes into a cloud, they become comparatively indistinct. As I sit on a cliff in the southwest part of our town, the sun is now getting low, and the woods in Lincoln, south and east of me, are lit up by its more level rays; and in the Scarlet Oaks, scattered so equally over the forest, there is brought out a more brilliant redness than I had believed was in them. Every tree of this species which is visible in those directions, even to the horizon, now stands out distinctly red. Some great ones lift their red backs high above the woods, in the next town, like huge roses with a myriad of fine petals; and some more slender ones, in a small grove of White Pines on Pine Hill in the east, on the very verge of the horizon, alternating with the Pines on the edge of the grove, and shouldering them with their red coats, look like soldiers in red amid hunters in green. This time it is Lincoln green, too. Till the sun got low, I did not believe that there were so many redcoats in the forest army. Theirs is an intense burning red, which would lose some of its strength, methinks, with every step you might take toward them; for the shade that lurks amid their foliage does not report itself at this distance, and they are unanimously red. The focus of their reflected color is in the atmosphere far on this side. Every such tree becomes a nucleus of red, as it were, where, with the declining sun, that color grows and glows. It is partly borrowed fire, gathering strength from the sun on its way to your eye. It has only some comparatively dull red leaves for a rallying-point, or kindling-stuff, to start it, and it becomes an intense scarlet or red mist, or fire, which finds fuel for itself in the very atmosphere. So vivacious is redness. The very rails reflect a rosy light at this hour and season. You see a redder tree than exists.

If you wish to count the Scarlet Oaks, do it now. In a clear day stand thus on a hill-top in the woods, when the sun is an hour high, and every one within range of your vision, excepting in the west, will be revealed. You might live to the age of Methuselah and never find a tithe of them, otherwise. Yet some times even in a dark day I have thought them as bright as I ever saw them. Looking westward, their colors are lost in a blaze of light; but in other directions the whole forest is a flower-garden, in which these late roses burn, alternating with green, while the so-called "gardeners," walking here and there, perchance, beneath, with spade and water-pot, see only a few little asters amid withered leaves.

These are my China-asters, my late garden-flowers. It costs me nothing for a gardener. The falling leaves, all over the forest, are protecting the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to be seen, and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil in your yard. We have only to elevate our view a little, to see the whole forest as a garden. The blossoming of the Scarlet Oak,—the forest-flower, surpassing all in splendor (at least since the Maple)! I do not know but they interest me more than the Maples, they are so widely and equally dispersed throughout the forest; they are so hardy, a nobler tree on the whole;—our chief November flower, abiding the approach of winter with us, imparting warmth to early November prospects. It is remarkable that the latest bright color that is general should be this deep, dark scarlet and red, the intensest of colors. The ripest fruit of the year; like the cheek of a hard, glossy, red apple from the cold Isle of Orleans, which will not be mellow for eating till next spring! When I rise to a hill-top, a thousand of these great Oak roses, distributed on every side, as far as the horizon! I admire them four or five miles off! This my unfailing prospect for a fortnight past! This late forest-flower surpasses all that spring or summer could do. Their colors were but rare and dainty specks comparatively, (created for the near-sighted, who walk amid the humblest herbs and underwoods,) and made no impression on a distant eye. Now it is an extended forest or a mountain-side, through or along which we journey from day to day, that bursts into bloom. Comparatively, our gardening is on a petty scale,—the gardener still nursing a few asters amid dead weeds, ignorant of the gigantic asters and roses, which, as it were, overshadow him, and ask for none of his care. It is like a little red paint ground on a saucer, and held up against the sunset sky. Why not take more elevated and broader views, walk in the great garden, not skulk in a little "debauched" nook of it? consider the beauty of the forest, and not merely of a few impounded herbs?

Let your walks now be a little more adventurous; ascend the hills. If, about the last of October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of our town, and probably of yours, and look over the forest, you may see well, what I have endeavored to describe. All this you surely will see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it,—if you look for it. Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is, whether you stand on the hilltop or in the hollow, you will think for threescore years and ten that all the wood is, at this season, sear and brown. Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more. The actual objects which one man will see from a particular hill-top are just as different from those which another will see as the beholders are different. The Scarlet Oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads,—and then we can hardly see anything else. In my botanical rambles, I find, that, first, the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my thoughts, though it may seem very foreign to this locality,—no nearer than Hudson's Bay,—and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it, and expecting it, unconsciously, and at length I surely see it. This is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants, which I could name. A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in the study of grasses does not distinguish the grandest Pasture Oaks. He, as it were, tramples down Oaks unwittingly in his walk, or at most sees only their shadows. I have found that it required a different intention of the eye, in the same locality, to see different plants, even when they were closely allied, as Juncaceæ and Gramineæ: when I was looking for the former, I did not see the latter in the midst of them. How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!

Take a New-England selectman, and set him on the highest of our hills, and tell him to look,—sharpening his sight to the utmost, and putting on the glasses that suit him best, (ay, using a spyglass, if he likes,)—and make a full report. What, probably, will he spy?—what will he select to look at? Of course, he will see a Brocken spectre of himself. He will see several meeting-houses, at least, and, perhaps, that somebody ought to be assessed higher than he is, since he has so handsome a wood-lot. Now take Julius Cæsar, or Immanuel Swedenborg, or a Fegee-Islander, and set him up there. Or suppose all together, and let them compare notes afterward. Will it appear that they have enjoyed the same prospect? What they will see will be as different as Rome was from Heaven or hell, or the last from the Fegee Islands. For aught we know, as strange a man as any of these is always at our elbow.

Why, it takes a sharp-shooter to bring down even such trivial game as snipes and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what he is aiming at. He would stand a very small chance, if he fired at random into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. And so is it with him that shoots at beauty; though he wait till the sky falls, he will not bag any, if he does not already know its seasons and haunts, and the color of its wing,—if he has not dreamed of it, so that he can anticipate it; then, indeed, he flushes it at every step, shoots double and on the wing, with both barrels, even in cornfields. The sportsman trains himself, dresses and watches unweariedly, and loads and primes for his particular game. He prays for it, and offers sacrifices, and so he gets it. After due and long preparation, schooling his eye and hand, dreaming awake and asleep, with gun and paddle and boat he goes out after meadow-hens, which most of his townsmen never saw nor dreamed of; and paddles for miles against a head-wind, and wades in water up to his knees, being out all day without his dinner, and therefore he gets them. He had them half-way into his bag when he started, and has only to shove them down. The true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his windows: what else, has he windows or eyes for? It comes and perches at last on the barrel of his gun; but the rest of the world never see it with the feathers on. The geese fly exactly under his zenith, and honk when they get there, and he will keep himself supplied by firing up his chimney; twenty musquash have the refusal of each one of his traps before it is empty. If he lives, and his game-spirit increases, heaven and earth shall fail him sooner than game; and when he dies, he will go to more extensive, and, perchance, happier hunting-grounds. The fisherman, too, dreams of fish, sees a bobbing cork in his dreams, till he can almost catch them in his sink-spout. I knew a girl who, being sent to pick huckleberries, picked wild gooseberries by the quart, where no one else knew that there were any, because she was accustomed to pick them up country where she came from. The astronomer knows where to go star-gathering, and sees one clearly in his mind before any have seen it with a glass. The hen scratches and finds her food right under where she stands; but such is not the way with the hawk.

These bright leaves which I have mentioned are not the exception, but the rule; for I believe that all leaves, even grasses and mosses, acquire brighter colors just before their fall. When you come to observe faithfully the changes of each humblest plant, you find that each has, sooner or later, its peculiar autumnal tint; and if you undertake to make a complete list of the bright tints, it will be nearly as long as a catalogue of the plants in your vicinity.

What Lonnie Bunch Told Me

2026-09-10T08:00:00-04:00

Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, was already slipping into the past tense when we walked together through the National Museum of American History in February.

Occasionally, as we stood before an exhibit, he’d discuss his role leading the largest museum system in the world as though he had already stepped away. Even then, there wasn’t a question of if he would retire soon, but how soon. He spoke longingly of a future life in which he took fewer flights, slept in fewer hotels, spent more time with his grandchildren. He desperately wanted more time to write. He told me he still has more books in him. Now he will get the time.

Bunch announced on Tuesday that he will retire at the end of the year. “I am extraordinarily proud of what we have accomplished together,” he wrote in a statement. “I leave with pride and sadness, gratitude and joy, and with enormous confidence in the people who will carry this remarkable institution forward.”

Bunch said that pressure from the Trump administration played no role in his decision. That may well be true, but Donald Trump’s second term has played a disproportionate role in shaping Bunch’s final few years in charge. The 18 months that Bunch spent holding off the White House’s efforts to influence the Smithsonian reinvigorated his commitment to the institution. But it seemed to me that he was exhausted. He did not seem to relish writing memos assuring his staff and the broader public (while reminding the president) that the Smithsonian was nonpartisan and singularly guided by scholarship; he did not want to go to work under the constant threat of the federal government pulling funding; he did not want to have lunch with the president while waiting for “the sword of Damocles to come take my head off,” as he admitted during a talk at UCLA last year.

He did so because that was what the moment required. He did so because he loves the Smithsonian, which has been part of his life since he first began a job at the National Air and Space Museum nearly half a century ago. But this, I thought, was not how the secretary of the Smithsonian should have to be spending his time. It all seemed like a massive distraction from the mission. I could not help but think of Toni Morrison’s observation during a 1975 keynote address at Portland State University about “the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”

Over and over again, Bunch was in a position of having to explain the Smithsonian’s reason for being: “At the Smithsonian, our work is driven by scholarship, accuracy and an uncompromising commitment to tell the fullness of America’s story,” he wrote to employees in response to this summer’s White House report, which accused the National Museum of American History of ideological bias. “As public servants and the keepers of this institution, we are charged with helping a nation find understanding, hope and clarity and as part of that duty, we are dedicated to excellence, reflection and growth.”

Perhaps Bunch, ever the diplomat, would disagree that Trump’s social-media posts lamenting that the Smithsonian spends too much time talking about slavery distracted anyone from the mission. (Ditto Trump’s plan to place signs on the National Mall accusing a museum of being anti-American.) And although I know from speaking with multiple staffers that Trump’s attacks on the institution bolstered their commitment, time spent defending one’s work is time away from actually doing that work.

[Read: Trump’s trigger warnings]

Last year, when the administration first put out an executive order targeting the Smithsonian, people flocked to the Smithsonian museums, particularly the National Museum of African American History and Culture, of which Bunch was the founding director. Many people had watched what was being done to the Kennedy Center, and it seemed like the Smithsonian might be the next Washington institution to experience a Trump-world takeover.

This summer has been a reminder for me of the singular role the Smithsonian plays in American life. I live in suburban Maryland, right outside of Washington, D.C., and this summer, our guest room has been occupied by a merry-go-round of guests visiting the District. Almost all of them have made sure that they got to the National Mall to explore the museums. It could be my little cousins marveling at the planes hanging overhead at the National Air and Space Museum; my friend from graduate school spending the entire day at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and feeling like there was still so much to see; my own children going to the National Zoo with their grandparents to see the giant pandas. The Smithsonian is a sprawling organization that represents the expansiveness (as well as the complexity and contradictions) of the world and the country we live in. Despite the diatribes from the administration, people yearn for that enormity and messiness. They don’t run from it.

Months ago, when I spoke with the Yale historian David Blight, a longtime friend of Bunch, he told me that when Bunch left his post, he would have the opportunity to speak powerfully and personally about the moment we are in. “He could have a moment to really say something about the terrible consequences of these history wars,” he said. “And there’s really almost nobody that quite has his pulpit when he chooses to use it.”

Bunch has already alluded to the fact that he won’t go quietly—that he might have more to say when he is no longer constrained by his responsibilities to the institution.

Whoever succeeds him won’t have an easy task. Few historians are as respected—both within the field and by the general public—as Bunch. In the hours since he announced his retirement, I’ve received calls and messages mourning his departure, as if a beloved head of state had stepped down early. There is also a similar sense of concern. Will Bunch’s departure accelerate the White House’s attacks on the Smithsonian or quiet them? Does anyone else have the skill set to defend the museums in the way he has? Whatever is needed to lead an entity that’s caught the eye of a heavy-handed president, Bunch’s recent experience shows that the next Smithsonian secretary will need to make at least one significant sacrifice: their time.

Sarah Longwell’s Playbook for Defeating MAGA

2026-09-10T07:00:00-04:00

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Donald Trump continues to insist that he is popular on the eve of an important election, even though everyone else knows he is not. “What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot. Just come and vote. It’s so important,” he said recently. In the meantime, the GOP’s first-ever midterm convention this week—headlined, of course, by Trump—has several Republican candidates sitting it out, probably because they pay attention to polls. The war in Iran, tariffs, and high gas prices have pushed his popularity rating down to about 35 percent, and even some of the MAGA faithful have been complaining. House seats that had been solidly red in Texas, Colorado, South Carolina, and a handful of other states are starting to look “soft,” as pollsters say.

On paper, this presents an opportunity for Democrats to take back control of the House or Senate or both, and put forth some charismatic leaders of their own. But to do that, they would have to start behaving and talking very differently, Sarah Longwell, the publisher of The Bulwark and author of the new book How to Eat an Elephant argues.

A longtime Republican, Longwell now says, “The Republican Party has to be defeated, and I think MAGA specifically, I want to defeat it and then salt the Earth with its ashes.”

She’s spent the past few years conducting hundreds of focus groups with Trump supporters, and also swing voters, to try to understand better how Democrats can reach them. What she’s discovered is that many Democrats are mostly using the wrong approach, and they are missing a chance to speak to voters’ fears and deepest concerns.

On this week’s Radio Atlantic, Longwell discusses how she thinks Democrats should talk about sensitive issues, such as immigration, and the words they should stop using. She outlines which Democratic leaders are doing a good job communicating and how to achieve what she calls “narrative dominance.” And she shares why—despite the contradictions, misinformation, and conspiracy theories she hears in her focus groups—she is hopeful about the American voter.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: We’re less than 60 days away from the midterms, and in a rare moment of unity, the president and congressional Democrats have a shared goal: Make this election about Donald Trump.

Donald Trump: What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot. Just come and vote. It’s so important.

[Music]

Rosin: Trump is so sure that he is the key to Republican victories that he has insisted on holding a Republican-convention-slash-Trump-rally in Dallas this week, where he will deliver a, quote, “presidential keynote,” presumably to help voters envision, when they’re in the booth, that he is on the ballot.

But this whole scenario is true only in Trump’s imagination. As Democrats are well aware, and no doubt gloating over, Trump is not, in fact, very popular at the moment. His approval rating was at 33 percent at the end of August. And even MAGA Republicans are bristling at the war in Iran, tariffs, and high gas prices.

Sarah Longwell: Trump is as underwater as I’ve seen him in all of the years that I’ve been focused on politics in the Trump era, in large part because, much like George W. Bush toward the end of his time in office, Trump is fighting an unpopular war and he’s got a lousy economy.

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

And that is Sarah Longwell. She’s the publisher of The Bulwark and author of a new book, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time, which she describes as, quote, “the playbook for consigning MAGA-style politics to the ash heap of history (where it belongs).” Longwell is also a nerd for focus groups. She’s conducted hundreds since Trump first came into office. And she says voters’ attitudes toward the president have changed, even in just the past year.

Longwell: In the beginning, when he first got into office, we would ask people how they were feeling about things, and they would say, Give him time. You know, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Joe Biden, XYZ—it’s his fault. Gotta give Trump some time. But now they’ve given him time, and they also identify very clearly that both the war in Iran and tariffs were both choices that Trump made himself. And so he is currently like an albatross around the necks of Republicans running in Senate races and in House races.

I listen to these voters in focus groups. I was doing one a couple weeks ago; it was Florida Trump voters. We asked them to give him a letter grade, and C was the highest grade he got. It was just a bunch of C’s, D’s, and F’s.

[Music]

Rosin: Theoretically, this should be a great opportunity for Democrats.

Longwell: I was looking at the Senate map 18 months ago, going, God, this map is terrible for Democrats. What are they gonna do? And now the Senate’s legitimately in play.

Rosin: But—and this is a big but—just because Democrats have an opening here does not mean they are ready to jump into it. In fact, in her book, Longwell argues that many Democrats are not. From what she’s seen in focus groups, they don’t connect with voters in the right way. In fact, they alienate them a lot.

We’ll talk about all that. But first, we need to know something about Longwell, who got her start in politics working for [Senator] Rick Santorum, who is a pretty conservative Republican.

I wanna ask you: You’re a Republican. Why are you in the business of giving advice to Democrats? Why is that important to you right now?

Longwell: I am not a Republican anymore. So as I lay out in the book, I grew up as a Republican and was sort of a John McCain Republican coming out of college. I was 18 when [President] Bill Clinton was impeached for having an affair with a woman, a girl, not much older than I was at the time. And so I got, in my very early formative years, slightly polarized against Democrats and then found [Senator] John McCain to be a really compelling figure as I sort of grew up into politics in my 20s.

And I sort of hung in there with Republicans, although I was always, you know, I’m gay and I’m a moderate. I was always a moderate kind of Republican with some libertarian tendencies. But Trump was anathema to me, not just because he had a completely—I think he had a totally different set of policy beliefs from me. But much more importantly, as a matter of character, as a matter of liking America or, like—to have somebody running the country whose goal is to weaponize fear and anger to make us hate each other, I reject that. And I tried to hang in there for a couple of years and say, I’m gonna fight Trump from within the Republican Party. I tried to primary him going into the 2020 election, and tried to get Mark Cuban or [Maryland Governor] Larry Hogan or somebody to primary him. It’s actually why I started doing the focus groups in the first place, was I was trying to figure out how we could primary Trump.

And then I continued by saying, Okay, well, nobody’s gonna seriously take this guy on. How do we get these disaffected Republicans to vote for a Democrat? And that was sort of my beginning of trying to figure out how to get people to vote for Democrats.

As long as Donald Trump has the stranglehold on the Republican Party, there’s nothing in this party—in the Republican Party—for me. And more importantly, I believe it is an actively dangerous political party at the moment. Do I still believe in limited government, free markets, and American leadership in the world? Sure, I do, but I don’t see any reason why Democrats aren’t being more responsive on a number of those issues than Republicans are. I mean, the level of corruption they’re tolerating, it’s unfathomable. And so there’s nothing for me in the Republican Party, and I think the Republican Party has to be defeated. And I think MAGA specifically, I want to defeat it and then salt the Earth with its ashes.

Rosin: Wow, okay. Very Rambo. (Laughs.)

Longwell: (Laughs.) I know, I’m super intense about this. I think that Trump is really bad for America. I think he tries to weaponize our worst impulses. You know, he understands how to take people’s darkest impulses and amplify them, and he does that for his own power.

I’ve never seen in my lifetime, and it’s hard to find characters like this in American history who, I think, ascended to the presidency while caring so little about America and her people. And I think he has made us all worse. Everything he has done has made America a less good country, and I’m desperate for change, and I’m desperate for Donald Trump to be a failure. My singular goal is that when we look back on the Trump years, everybody sort of agrees: That was a mistake. That was a failure. We never want to do that again.

Rosin: So your driving belief is: There is a part of us that can remember that. I think there’s a lot of people sometimes who feel like voters are lost, they’re numb, they’ve forgotten how to be good. We’re hopelessly polarized. But that is not your view. This book is intended to find the place in the American voter where they can turn the country in a different direction. It’s essentially a hopeful book.

Longwell: It is a hopeful book, and I wrote it because I’m confronted so often with the cynicism and desperation from people who think, Man, we’re done. America’s toast. It’s over. And our voters are fundamentally corrupt and bad. And that’s just not what I think. And what I think is that every—it’s kind of just part of the human condition, right? People have light and dark in them, and I tell this story at the end of the book, or I relay this parable.

It’s, like, a Native American parable where a grandfather’s talking to his grandson, and he says,

Look, inside every one of us, there’s two wolves. There’s a good wolf that represents truth and light and decency, and there’s a bad wolf that’s avarice and greed and hatred, and those two wolves are always in tension.

And the grandson says, Well, which one wins? And he says, The one you feed. And Trump feeds the bad parts of America, and they’re there, those bad, dark parts. But the good parts are there too. And the question is: How do you amplify that? How do you get to a place where—both from a communication standpoint, a leadership standpoint, a political standpoint—that you are sort of feeding the good wolf?

And not in a schlocky way. I’m not looking for a minister or somebody who’s perfect. We just need somebody who has the best interests of America at heart and is willing to fight for her and is willing to speak to people like they have the capacity for good again.

And the other thing that I just I believe strongly is: If you think that America is finished, and you think there’s nothing left to fight for, well, then it is finished, right? If you don’t think we have agency to change things, then, yeah, it’s done. And so I really sort of reject and push back against this idea that it’s a fait accompli, and I kinda wanna shake everybody else out of that as well, because I don’t think it’s true. I think there is a lot to fight for. I think there’s a lot of good ways to do it. And frankly, I think, as we speak, there are leaders that are emerging that are coming closer to meeting the moment than we’ve seen in a while.

Rosin: Okay, so let’s get into it, what the details are of how to do this. You found a lot of answers in focus groups. You’re, like, an evangelist for focus groups. Why? Like, what was the light bulb that went off for you in the early days that made you think, Oh, we can learn from these small groups of people who are sometimes frustrating and contradictory and all of those different things, but the answer is here?

Longwell: Part of it was that Donald Trump was so jarring to me, such a surprise to me, that I realized that I was missing something important if America could elect somebody like Donald Trump. And so I went and started listening to voters, yes, in part because I wanted to primary him, but also I was trying to understand. And it was, like, one of those just scales-falling-from-your-eyes moments, as I listened to voters talk about why they liked Donald Trump.

Rosin: Like what? What did they say?

Longwell: Well, I mean, one of the craziest things that jumped out at me right from the beginning was how many people had watched The Apprentice. You forget about this, but Donald Trump had been living in people’s living rooms for years. And this is a really key part in why I’m optimistic.

Donald Trump himself is somebody who has completely hollowed out the Republican Party and turned it into a cult of personality. So what happens when he’s gone? But he has a unique relationship with voters that other people can’t emulate, because they didn’t go on Howard Stern a thousand times, or go on Oprah all the time, or have their own talk show where they were in people’s living rooms as a carefully curated businessman that made voters believe, Oh, this guy is a good executive. He will know how to do these things.

I looked at Trump and thought he was a buffoon. I looked at Trump and thought, I can’t imagine how somebody would take this person seriously. And I think it’s, like, an easy thing to forget about how Trump had fashioned himself as having a parasocial relationship with voters, even before that was kind of a thing.

Rosin: And so what is the light bulb there? It’s like, okay, you learn that he’s fixed in their heads as a good businessman, despite the million facts that you could throw at them saying he tanked a casino; he tanked this or that business. It doesn’t matter. There’s no fact-check, right? Like, what are you learning?

Longwell: So what I learned was that people were desperate for somebody who wasn’t a regular politician, who they saw as transcending politics. A lot of times, we try to put it in the frame of: How could these Republicans vote for this New York liberal? He gave Hillary Clinton money, and they were like, Yeah, no, that’s good, actually. He transcends politics.

And also, one of the craziest things was, you know, you think about Trump as being sort of—people now say he’s far right or authoritarian. These voters saw him as a moderate because he wasn’t religious. He wasn’t like [Vice President] Mike Pence. He didn’t talk about abortion all the time, and in fact, voters would tell you over and over again, they’re like, Yeah, that guy’s not pro-life. You know, he’s probably paid for some abortions. And you just hear, for voters, that they thought of him as somebody who was more moderate, which is, I think, not how sort of the conventional framing was working.

The other thing that was wild to me is: A lot of my friends or people that I knew in the media, they would say, Well, how do voters respond to this crazy thing that Trump said? And I got the opportunity in the focus groups to say—and I’ll give you an example; it’s one that I give in the book—is I was in Columbus, Ohio, the day after Trump had had the meeting in Helsinki with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin, where he sided against America’s intelligence community and with Putin, onstage, in Helsinki.

Trump: They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I’ll say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.

Longwell: Washington was beside itself. The whole city was, like, en fuego over 80 years of foreign policy being turned on its head. And I went into the group thinking, Okay, these are people who are gonna be Cold Warrior Reaganites. They are gonna be blown away. They’re gonna hate the fact that Donald Trump just sided against America and sided with Putin, and I was excited.

And the moderator says, What did people think about what Trump said in Helsinki? And everybody just was like, What are you talking about? I have no idea what you’re talking about. And that, to me, the chasm between voters—they had no idea. Like, we had to explain it to them, and even then they’re like, I don’t know, I guess he has to meet with world leaders.

The disconnect between what people out in the world cared about and what people in Washington cared about, that was a deep chasm. And it really was illuminating for me in thinking about: What are voters actually paying attention to? And the answer is: Things that affect them personally, is basically the easiest answer I can give you.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: how the Democrats need to start talking differently, communicating with potential voters in a whole new way.

[Break]

Rosin: So let’s take an issue like immigration. That’s a complicated issue. I wrote down one of the quotes from your book. It’s from Matt from Indiana. Matt says, “The border issue brings drugs in, that’s a big issue, fentanyl. I mean, I don’t know how many times I’ve had to Narcan somebody because of fentanyl.” Can you parse that comment for me? And then, what is the advice that would come out of that comment? Because there’s a lot of confused information in that comment, and yet you would say that Matt takes it personally.

Like, he connects whatever’s happening at the border with having had to Narcan people. So what do you do with something like that?

Longwell: Well, in the group, I don’t try to push back on that, because I’m not trying to change Matt’s mind. But what I learned about immigration, and I’m gonna say a quote that you’ve heard a bunch of times from Donald Trump, but it gets at something very important. He says—when he was talking about immigration, he says, “They’re bringing drugs.”

Trump: They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Longwell: But what he is doing in that is: He is taking a bunch of different issues for people—people’s worries about drugs, people’s worries about their personal safety—and he’s saying, And immigrants are a threat to this.

I call it “schema activation” in the book, but he’s basically making people afraid. He took immigration, he connected it to Your economic well-being is being hurt by immigrants. There is more crime because of immigrants. There’s more drugs because of immigrants.

And so if you care about those things, as many voters do, Trump is able to tell you one complete story and put immigrants at the center of it. And I hear it back from the voters in comments like that. So what Matt is saying, it’s like, fentanyl isn’t coming over the border from Mexico.

Rosin: My initial instinct is to fact-check Matt, is to just say, Matt, that’s incorrect. Fentanyl is not coming over the border. But I’m sure you would say that is a terrible way as a candidate to go about things. Why?

Longwell: And that was the initial instinct of everybody, was, Well, we’re gonna fact-check all these things.

Rosin: Yeah.

Longwell: Everybody hired fact-checkers ’cause Trump was lying all the time. It’s like, Wow, we’re gonna fact-check. But voters were like, Well, who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Why should I believe the fact-checkers?

And I think that the bigger thing to do is to recognize that Donald Trump saying he wanted to build a wall had nothing to do with a physical wall. It’s to understand that what Trump was doing was projecting that he cared about immigration, and he was gonna take it seriously. You don’t see any voters mad at him that the wall never got built, because the physical wall wasn’t the point.

Interestingly, [Mayor Zohran] Mamdani, in New York, was talking about affordability, and he talked about his plan for grocery stores and transportation—he’s gonna make things free or low cost. I look at those policies and I think, Well, those policies are stupid, but focusing on affordability is very smart. And his ideas are like, Well, I’m gonna take affordability seriously. I’m gonna talk about the ways in which I’m gonna try to make things less expensive for you. That was the key. And so what politicians have to stop doing is fighting over the small stuff, and go right at the idea that voters care about immigration, and they think Republicans are gonna be better on it.

And I think that they should, No. 1, you have to condemn Trump’s excesses on immigration, because he is committing many of them, and voters are frustrated with it, while also saying, simultaneously, as a contrast point, I will keep you safe. I care about your safety. I will make sure the border is secure. We will have law and order. We will have fairness.

Because fairness is something that comes up in immigration all the time from voters, where they say, Look, I want immigrants to come into the country, but I want them to do—and this phrase, you hear it over and over and over again—I want them to do it the right way.

And that is not an irrational thing to think. And so Democrats do have to find a way to sort of say, We care about law and order. We care about not having people come over the border, so we don’t know who’s in the country. That’s kind of table ante for this discussion. But also, We want immigrants to come here, because most Americans do.

Most Americans just want them to come the right way. And look, there’s all kinds of racism and nativism and stuff that goes into these arguments, but as the broadest matter, and this is where I think sometimes Democrats really do—they’re like, Well, I’m gonna talk about the nativism. I wanna talk about the racism, the soft bigotry in here.

And I say: Or don’t. Or just tell Americans, Hey, look, your safety really matters to me. We’re gonna keep you safe, and we’re gonna figure out how to attract the best and brightest to this country. We’re gonna figure out how to reform our immigration system so people can come here the right way. Like, that is how to talk about it.

Rosin: One thing that stuck out to me in the book is when you said, If I could give Democrats one piece of advice, it is “stop talking about democracy.” ’Cause it’s true. Opponents of Trump do talk about democracy all the time, and it’s frustrating that that doesn’t matter. But it’s too abstract, or it just doesn’t break through.

Longwell: Well, we talk about democracy because, like a lot of Democrats’ core constituents now, we’re all these college-educated voters who have taken a political-science class. And we understand that democracy is this term, that other countries have democracies too, and there are different democracies. Voters don’t experience democracy. They experience America.

And the way that they experience democracy is—I can’t remember who I’m quoting here, but—it’s not by its roots but by its fruits, right? So when they experience democracy, democracy is voting. Democracy is freedom of speech.

I don’t know; it’s just, like, the air we breathe. It’s the water that we swim in. That’s what it’s like for voters. And so when people say “democracy,” they’re like, “I don’t know what you’re—what is that?” Instead, you say, and I give this advice to politicians all the time, just stop saying “democracy,” and say “America.”

And Republicans actually do this much better, right? Republicans make free speech the issue, not democracy. And that’s something that’s easier for voters to get their heads around.

Rosin: Okay, let’s get practical. It’s before the midterms, then comes 2028. As you look around the landscape, are there Democrats that you see out there who are doing some of these things well—like, who are picking up this message, starting to use the right language in the way that you would want them to?

Longwell: Yeah, there’s four people that I look at who I think are emerging as really strong communicators: [Senator] Jon Ossoff, [former Transportation Secretary] Pete Buttigieg, [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], and Mamdani. And there’s some other ones, but there’s a lot of Democrats that I look at that sort of come up from time to time where I’m like, Yeah, that person’s really good on paper. Like [Senator] Mark Kelly, good on paper. [Illinois Governor] J. B. Pritzker, good on paper. And I liked [Maryland Governor] Wes Moore.

But there are people right now who are getting out there and trying different ways of communicating with voters. So Jon Ossoff, his background is as a documentary filmmaker, so he has people shooting him from underneath and from below, so he looks up there presidentially. He’s up there president-maxxing.

He hit the gym, and he looks like a pre-brain-worm [Robert F.] Kennedy [Jr.], you know? He’s handsome, and he’s got a theory of communications. And then he posts the clips from his speeches. He does the speeches. Now he’s actively running, but he posts them on social media, and I’m like, Okay, that is a theory of the case about how to communicate and build relationships with voters.

Pete Buttigieg is out there stumping for absolutely everybody. He stands in the middle of these town halls with a microphone. He lets people ask him any question that they want, and he engages with them sincerely and deeply and meaningfully.

AOC understands social media. She understands how to be a real person. Anybody who gets her in front of a camera, she seems like an authentic, natural person. And even if you don’t like her policies—like, AOC and I probably don’t necessarily share a lot of the same policy beliefs, but I think that she is a good, kind person whose heart is in the right place about what she wants to do for America, and that counts for an awful lot with voters.

And then Mamdani, like I said, I think he’s really showing the way on how you focus on affordability. Now, when you say 2028, obviously, all of those people are not gonna be presidential contenders. Mamdani isn’t, for sure. But I do think they are starting to formulate a theory of the case.

And then I think there’s people who are doing a really poor job. So [California Governor] Gavin Newsom, I think, is doing a pretty lousy job, because he’s doing sort of a performance art against Trump, sort of mocking Trump, which I think gets you some attaboys on social media, but I don’t think is showing the American public a real way forward.

Rosin: Okay, wait. Slow this down a little bit. I’m trying to understand what it is exactly that you’re reading, like, what your scale is. Because in the first set of people who you said were really good, like, why shouldn’t I have a tiny heartbreak that what we’re saying is: The main qualification for a good leader these days is someone who’s good at social media?

Longwell: Oh, well, again, that’s what I’m saying. I’m saying that they’re good at communicating. And I think that for Democrats, they’ve spent 10 years with Republicans just out-communicating them at every phase.

At the presidential phase, Trump practices narrative dominance. Republicans feeling shut out from mainstream media; they built their own media ecosystem that’s now dominant. Democrats don’t have something that corresponds to that.

And so I’m not saying that they just have to be good at social media. I’m saying that Democrats have to go through and survey why it is that they are not connecting with the American public, why they have lost the ability to be a multiracial, working-class coalition, and the Republican Party is kinda eating their lunch on that front. What I’m asking for is for Democrats to figure out how to be a team together, repair their brand by having a set of policy ideas that they’re circling around, and to refocus on people’s material well-being, ’cause this is what voters want in the focus groups, right? When I go through the policy, we can fight about all the little stuff, but the main thing voters are saying is, Stop focusing so much on these divisive social issues, and focus more on improving my material well-being.

And that means education. That means health care. That means my job. And I think Democrats can’t just say, Affordability, affordability, affordability. They actually have to put a plan forward that has a theory of the case of what it means to be a Democrat going into the 2030s.

Rosin: Right. Okay, that all sounds amazing. Here’s what’s tricky about it. So if narrative dominance is the goal, what we’ve seen as the right and MAGA has built an alternative universe of narrative dominance is that it’s involved two things: lies and cruelty. And so I’m wondering, how you can create an alternate world of narrative dominance which is effective—because people might say they don’t want you to focus on cultural issues, but that certainly helped the right build narrative dominance.

The famous “Kamala is for they/them. We’re for you.” Focusing on cultural issues really gets attention. So how do you avoid some of the pitfalls of building this alternate universe, and yet do it effectively? Like, maybe be aggressive but not be cruel. How do you walk that line, and have you ever focus-grouped that or seen it done really well?

Longwell: Sometimes, people think that all Trump voters are alike, that for all of them, the cruelty is the point. And for some of them, the cruelty is the point, but not for everybody. And you say, like, If Trump built it on lies and cruelty, what do you do differently? And I’m like, Well, you could build it on the truth and decency. And honestly, that’s a little bit of a novel concept right now for voters. I think they’re hungry for it. I think they’ve been starved for it. However, it does have to come with offense.

They do want a fighter, man. They want somebody, and not just somebody who’s gonna fight Trump. This is a little bit of a mistake. Yes, they are tired of losing to these bad Republicans, but voters tell me all the time, We don’t want to bring a pillow to a gunfight anymore, but also, we don’t want to be like them.

And one of the big disconnects for voters is: Voters keep saying, Democrats tell us that the Republicans are an existential threat to democracy, but they don’t act like it. They don’t behave like it. And so I think that if Pete Buttigieg, and Jon Ossoff, and Mamdani, and AOC, and a whole bunch of these other people started doing things together, started pitching themselves as a team, started showing up together—just think about it for a second, how different it would be if Democrats said, We’re gonna show up for each other.

It’s happening a little bit in the states right now as people repair the damaged relationships from these tough primaries on the Democratic side. But it’s not happening everywhere. [Representative] Jasmine Crockett’s not doing anything for [the U.S. Senate candidate] James Talarico. And that, to me, is a real mistake, because I think Democrats need to start showing up together as a community that draws people to them, instead of this crazy faction that is always at each other’s throats.

Rosin: Okay, so that’s the future for the Democrats that you wish for. You say you wanna burn MAGA to the ground, also that MAGA’s dominant in the Republican Party, also that the Republicans are never going back to the way they were. So what is the future Republican Party after Trump is gone?

Longwell: Well, this is why Democrats have such an opportunity, because not only do I not really know the answer to that question, neither do Republicans, right? They don’t stand for anything anymore. And when people are like, Well, who is gonna be the Republican nominee in 2028? You’re like, Well, I don’t know. Is Trump still alive? And how popular is he at the end of his term? Because the chances of Trump picking the next person or trying to pick the next person are very, very high.

He wants to maintain his control of the Republican Party. It has always been more important to Donald Trump to maintain control of the Republican Party than to beat Democrats.

And so I think that the Republicans don’t know what they’re gonna do about turnout without Donald Trump. I don’t think they know how to build that coalition without Donald Trump, and they’re fracturing between the “America First” wing—which is your Tucker Carlson, your [former Representative] Marjorie Taylor Greene—and your MAGA establishment, which are your [Secretary of State] Marco Rubios and [Secretary of Defense] Pete Hegseth and all of these types.

And they’re all gonna try, and none of them are gonna be able to do what Donald Trump did, for the reasons that I stated earlier, which is that they do not have the same connection to voters that Donald Trump does. And so I think that Donald Trump brought so many new people into the system, and was so specific in the way he did it and the relationship that he had with voters, that the Republicans have no idea what they’re gonna do in a post-Trump world.

And that’s why if Democrats can get there first with an affirmative vision, they have an opportunity to dominate in a way that puts MAGA in the ground for the foreseeable future.

Rosin: Right. Okay. Well, Sarah, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I appreciate the book. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Longwell: Oh, yeah. Thanks for having me. It was fun.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Jacob Smollen. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, 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. Thank you for listening.

Why Trump Has It Out for Canada

2026-09-09T18:02:00-04:00

When Donald Trump looks at a map, he doesn’t see nations. He sees property. All of those pretty colors do not represent actual places filled with human beings who have distinct cultures, languages, and histories; the planet, to Trump, is a big board game, like Risk or Monopoly. Greenland isn’t a real location—it’s a valuable chunk of territory nestled between Boardwalk and Park Place. The Strait of Hormuz isn’t an international waterway—it’s a thing to control somewhere between Kamchatka and East Africa.

This inability to grasp the existence of independent nations drives the president to fury when countries and their governments refuse to play along with his delusions. Trump cannot understand why Iran won’t bend to his will, why NATO won’t instantly obey his orders, why South Korea and Japan won’t just write checks or provide troops on demand. The only people Trump seems to respect are the autocrats in Beijing and Moscow and Pyongyang who, like him, view the world as a brutal competition for power and territory.

Now Trump has declared economic war on Canada, a nation that has vexed him for years. Even by the standards of Trump’s many fixations, his obsession with Canada has become not only weird but truly destructive. He has opened a giant political and economic rift with one of America’s biggest trading partners, a sister nation, and an ally in the common defense of North America and Europe. Why does Trump hate Canada so much?

We can only speculate about what goes on in the president’s head, but his actions suggest a pattern. When Trump is frustrated about something he can’t control, he lashes out at friends harder than he does enemies. He took out his anger about the Epstein files on legislators from his own party, even though he had campaigned on releasing those documents. Stymied by Iran on multiple fronts, Trump decided to blame South Korea for not helping him, and curtailed military exercises with a vital U.S. ally. (This decision also had the side benefit of allowing Trump to make another embarrassing overture to the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, a bromantic gesture that went unreciprocated.) Trump values absolute loyalty over everything else—not that he always returns it—and he detests any sign that others, especially those who are supposed to be his friends and allies, might have views and interests of their own.

The American economy is stalling, and Trump’s poll numbers are in the basement, so the next obvious move is to pick a huge fight with a nation that is essentially family to Americans. Canada is most definitely a foreign country, which is one reason I like to visit. (Go ahead—try to find a convenience store in America that sells Aero chocolate bars or wine gums.) But to the utterly incurious Trump, it probably looks like an extension of upstate New York.

Canada and America are bound by deep cultural and historical bonds, but ironically, the superficial similarities are likely driving much of Trump’s vitriol. How dare these people—whose country is, to him, just a cheap knockoff of America—defy him! After all, most of Canada speaks English; its cities look like ours (if definitely cleaner); we share pop stars and TV shows; they even call their money “the dollar,” despite its colorful look and plasticky feel. Canada, in the president’s eyes, is less a sovereign nation than a real-estate parcel he forgot to buy because it’s in a neighborhood he never visits.

The fact that Canada is led by someone Trump accidentally helped put in office probably irks him too. Early last year, Canada’s Liberal Party had been in power for 10 years and was facing a huge defeat in what seemed to be an impending “change” election. Trump, as usual, could not control himself when it came to the internal politics of an allied nation: He imposed tariffs during the lead-up to the Canadian vote while banging on about making Canada the 51st state. The Liberal leader Mark Carney—an unflappable public figure who is completely different from Trump in both temperament and intellect—pivoted quickly and campaigned on standing up to the American president. Carney almost overnight went from a no-hoper to prime minister. And now he has shown that he is perfectly willing to retaliate against Trump’s policies rather than fold. If Trump wants tariffs, Carney will provide them—in spades.

Imagine how all of this looks to Trump, who has made clear that Canada shouldn’t even exist as an independent state. I am humiliated as an American, and as a friend of Canada, to admit this, but Trump’s attitude toward Canada is almost indistinguishable from the way Russian President Vladimir Putin sees Ukraine: not as a state but as some kind of historical anomaly that should be returned to its rightful owners. Trump might think it’s funny to post memes of Canada with an American flag superimposed on it, but those jokes are a lot less hilarious to people in places such as Ukraine, who are fighting a war against a dictator who feels exactly the same way about their country.

Canadians are probably scratching their head over Trump’s willingness to hurt his own people and especially his own party. Trump may hate Canada, but it’s hard to imagine what he thinks he’ll gain by causing economic pain to Americans along the Canadian border, especially in states such as Maine and Michigan, where Republicans are facing tight battles for congressional seats. What the Canadians may not realize is that, with this president, none of it has to make sense, and that if recent history is a guide, he will back down, perhaps after declaring victory over Ottawa. Trump will then move on, leaving ordinary Americans and their Canadian friends to deal with the damage.

Related:

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Today’s News

Last night, U.S. forces struck five Iranian oil tankers, sinking one, after Iran targeted a U.S. Navy warship. Iran retaliated by firing missiles at an air base in Jordan that the U.S. uses. Jordan said it received 20 ballistic missiles and was able to destroy 18.
Republican former Senator John Sununu and Democratic Representative Chris Pappas won their U.S. Senate primaries in New Hampshire last night, setting up a competitive general-election race in November.
President Trump gave $45,000 apiece in cash as holiday gifts to three White House aides last year, including his executive assistant, Natalie Harp, according to financial-disclosure forms. The White House said the payments were personal gifts unrelated to the aides’ government work.

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Evening Read

Sasha Arutyunova for The Atlantic

The Anniversary I Wish I Didn’t Share With My Husband

By Ellen S. Bakalian

During a visit in May to the Maritime Museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I watched a film about a 1917 cargo-ship explosion that killed more than 1,700 townspeople and injured many more. The grainy black-and-white images of the flattened city catapulted me back to the devastation of Lower Manhattan after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Halifax suffered a blizzard following the cargo-ship catastrophe, and the sight of the city covered in a deep blanket of snow recalled the dust and debris from the once-glimmering towers that coated the Financial District. When I heard the recorded voices of the Haligonian survivors recounting their memories, I walked out of the small theater to cry.

Twenty-five years on from September 11, 2001, an image or memory can still evoke the very moment I learned that my 36-year-old redheaded husband, Jeffrey R. Smith, would not be coming home from work that day.

Read the full article.

All the Places Trump Was on 9/11

2026-09-09T16:06:37-04:00

Updated at 4:30 p.m. ET on September 9, 2026

Where were you on 9/11? Every American old enough to remember the day has an answer to that question. President Trump has several.

At a ceremony honoring first responders and victims’ families yesterday, Trump offered an elaborate account of where he was in the hours and days after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed. “I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened, and they had no hesitation; everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was raw—nobody had seen anything like it, ever.”

The story presents significant problems in terms of its relationship to reality. Listeners could be forgiven for interpreting Trump’s remarks as a reference to his whereabouts on the day of the attack itself. (The president clarified that timeline last night: “I was there, obviously not on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter, with a large group of Construction Workers,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.) It is true that two days after the attack, on September 13, Trump was interviewed by reporters while walking in Lower Manhattan. The president has previously made variations of the same claim—that he and the employees he sent downtown helped clear rubble in the days following the attack. “Everyone who helped clear the rubble—and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit” was his version of it on the 2016 campaign trail. But supporting evidence is scant, and the whole account is likely an exaggeration. Richard Alles, a retired New York City Fire Department deputy chief who had a supervisory role in the efforts, said in 2019 not only that he never witnessed Trump at the site, but that the account doesn’t add up: “He was a private citizen at the time. I don’t know what kind of role he could have possibly played.” And, Alles added, if Trump had indeed sent workers, as he has claimed, there would be a record of it: “Is there a chance he was ever down there by himself and I didn’t know it? It’s possible, but I know of no one who ever witnessed him there.”

Nevertheless, Trump pressed on, veering into territory even further detached from verifiable fact. The U.S. Steel Building—a skyscraper in Lower Manhattan known today as One Liberty Plaza—was “really creaking,” Trump said at yesterday’s ceremony. “I’ll never forget: two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us and two firemen—big, strong guys. And I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arms, said, ‘Gotta get outta here.’ And they literally lifted me up—this is not easy to do; I’m big. They lifted me up, and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing, but they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down: U.S. Steel.”

There was, in fact, public concern in the days following the attack that the building at One Liberty Plaza could collapse. But the notion that Trump was inside the building and rushed out by firefighters has not been corroborated by any evidence. The president has offered versions of the same account before, though in less colorful form. In 2016, he told a story about being evacuated by firefighters—but in that rendition, it took place “a couple of days” after the collapse, and the U.S. Steel building was “not so far from us” when the two “massive guys” grabbed him. “I never knew I could run that fast,” he said then. In 2021, Trump likewise recalled two firemen grabbing him after hearing “creaks.”

Trump’s whereabouts on September 11 are no mystery. They are fairly well documented by his own prior statements about watching the attacks unfold from his home in Trump Tower, about four miles north of the Twin Towers. For those who have reason to doubt Trump’s statements, his whereabouts are also documented on video. “I have a window that looks directly at the World Trade Center, and I saw this huge explosion,” he said in a phone interview with a New Jersey news channel on 9/11. “For years, I’ve looked right directly at the building—I’d see the Empire State Building in the foreground and the World Trade Center in the background—and now I’m looking at absolutely nothing. It’s just gone, and it’s just hard to believe.”

Trump’s view may have been clear, but his recollection of September 11 has been murky, as reporters have tracked for more than a decade.

Sometimes, in his accounts, he watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center from his apartment in Trump Tower; when he called into the live broadcast that day, he did not mention having witnessed the second jet. Sometimes, he claims to have personally seen people jumping from the Twin Towers. “I have a window in my apartment that specifically was aimed at the World Trade Center,” he said in 2015 on the campaign trail, “and I watched as people jumped.” In his TV interview the day of the attack, he didn’t see those scenes himself but talked to someone who had. “I have somebody that was down there who witnessed at least 10 people jumping out of the building from 70 and 80 stories up in the air,” Trump said.

The president has also embellished what he saw in news coverage on that day, most notoriously claiming to have seen widespread celebrations by Muslim residents in New Jersey. “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down,” he said in a 2015 stump speech. “And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” That claim has been thoroughly disproved. A professor who spent months combing through news reels and video archives from that day found one possible instance that could slightly resemble those events—a few Arab American teenagers who briefly gathered in front of a library in South Paterson in a way that could be seen as celebratory.

Even the live phone interview Trump participated in on the day of the attack contains inaccuracies. On the call, Trump said that one of his buildings was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan: “Forty Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan,” he said when asked whether his property had been damaged. “When they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.” But as The Washington Post documented, using data from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, neither claim was true. Forty Wall Street was the tallest building for only about two years and that was in the 1930s, before Trump was born.

At the center of yesterday’s ceremony was an important honor—one that Trump had promised to bestow months prior. Welles Crowther, who was first identified as “the man in the red bandana” in a 2002 New York Times story, rescued more than a dozen people from the South Tower before being killed when the building collapsed. His parents, who had given him a red bandana as a boy and knew that he always carried it with him, were able to recognize him by that detail and confirmed through the survivors that their son had helped them. Crowther was an equities trader and a volunteer firefighter, and he was 24 years old when he died. While awarding a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom to Crowther, Trump drew the focus to himself, comparing his own fame to that of the fallen hero: “The Man in the Red Bandana, he’s become more famous than me—I don’t like it. Very unhappy. But he’s become much more famous than me.”

[Read: Trump is putting his face on everything]

When the president has brought up 9/11 lately, the remark has usually been severed from the attack, its victims, or its perpetrators. This year, Trump has tended to mention the day in the context of lambasting political opponents. He’s invoked it on several recent occasions—alongside World War I, World War II, and Pearl Harbor—when arguing that the attack and all three of those historical calamities are dwarfed by the danger communism poses to America today.

Critics have noted that other presidents, both Republican and Democrat, might have faced months of blowback—if not the end of their political careers—were they caught exaggerating or outright inventing aspects of their experience on one of the most catastrophic days in American history. But Trump has rarely if ever paid a real political price for misleading statements. In a second term marked by his fixation on his legacy, Trump’s relationship with history has often involved “taking bits and pieces from a grab bag and turning it into a story that’s useful to him—either politically useful, as in the case of his fabrication about Muslims celebrating 9/11, or making himself the center of a story that obviously he was not the center of 25 years ago,” Tim Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, told me. The fabrications are unlikely to stop, he said, especially as the president ages. “It doesn’t happen the same to all men in their 80s, but we may see more of this: new recollections about the past that we’ve never heard before, because they never happened,” Naftali said. The White House did not address my specific questions about the president’s most recent claims, but Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that the president “was relaying his experience of a city reeling” from the attacks.

September 11 continues to be a point of tension about what the government owed, and continues to owe, those who were most affected. The mayor’s office released more than 170,000 pages of city records this week showing that city officials misled New Yorkers about air quality following the attacks. And the health toll continues to grow; the number of 9/11 survivors receiving assistance for cancer treatment roughly tripled over the past five years, according to a Washington Post analysis of reports by the World Trade Center Health Program, which funds health care for responders and survivors. Twenty-five years later, Americans everywhere will pause to remember what the nation lost that day—both those who suffered directly and those who lived through it by watching the tragedy unfold from the safety of their homes, much as Trump did.

This article originally stated that Welles Crowther was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor. In fact, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.