The Atlantic

An Inflection Point for Prediction Markets

2026-09-02T18:59:00-04:00

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The day before Donald Trump’s second State of the Union address, the former Representative George Santos shared a video of himself saying, in no uncertain terms, that he was “going to be there.” The next day, he didn’t show up. According to the prediction-market company Kalshi, that was the plan—the firm alleged that he made roughly $17,000 by betting on the platform that he wouldn’t appear at the speech. Kalshi flagged the wager to federal authorities, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the agency that regulates prediction markets, fined Santos over it in July. On Monday, Kalshi doubled down, levying a fine of its own and giving him the platform’s first-ever lifetime ban.

Prediction-market companies, which let users make bets on the outcomes of all sorts of real-world events, have fully entered the mainstream over the past few years. You can find their logos at major sporting events, on cable-news broadcasts, and at awards shows. They’re easy to access and, thanks to a recent advertising blitz, essentially ubiquitous. Trading volumes on Kalshi and Polymarket, the two market leaders, have exceeded $200 billion and $100 billion this year, respectively. But these companies have strenuously resisted the idea that they should be thought of as gambling platforms. “I just don’t really know what this has to do with gambling,” Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said of his company last year. (By avoiding this classification, prediction markets have also been able to operate in states where sports betting is banned.) Instead, Kalshi and Polymarket have suggested that their platforms are digital oracles: potent indicators of what the future might hold, fueled by the wisdom of the crowd.

In recent months, a nascent crackdown on insider trading has been exposing a fundamental tension in these companies’ guiding principles. If the goal is to create fair markets and not get targeted by the government, then they must enforce a ban on insider trading, as U.S. regulators already do. But if the goal is forecasting—aligning these markets’ odds with what’s really going to happen in the world—then allowing bettors to trade on inside information could actually benefit these platforms. This, at least, was once the thinking of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, who described his platform last year as “the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now, until someone else creates some sort of a super crystal ball.” In response to a question about his approach to preventing insider trading, he said in November that Polymarket “creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market”—theoretically creating more accurate projections.

This may help explain why Polymarket has taken so long to clamp down on insider trading. The company didn’t explicitly ban the practice until March, nearly six years after its founding. Kalshi took a different tack: When I reached out to the company in January, its representatives stressed that insider trading was unambiguously prohibited. (But the question of which offenders are penalized—and what those punishments look like—still seems to be decided on a case-by-case basis.)

This year, both companies have been ramping up their enforcement efforts. The shift began back in January, when The Wall Street Journal reported that, in the lead-up to the U.S. capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, an unknown trader had made more than $400,000 betting that Maduro would soon be out of power. To many observers, it certainly looked like insider trading—and lawmakers from both parties began pushing for stricter regulation. A few months later, Polymarket notified the Department of Justice that one of the soldiers involved in the operation had allegedly placed the wager, and the agency indicted him for trading on nonpublic information (he has pleaded not guilty).

According to a spokesperson for Polymarket, the company’s insider-trading investigations have led to “nearly 100 referrals to law enforcement,” and its work on the Maduro bets and on a separate case involving a Google employee resulted in the “first and second prediction markets insider trading cases charged in the United States.” This week, in addition to the Santos ban, Kalshi announced several new settlements with public figures accused of insider trading on its platform, including a North Carolinian candidate for the House who has admitted to betting on her own race. (“I bet on myself,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “It was a dumb mistake, and as soon as I learned there was an issue, I worked to make it right.”) And this past weekend, Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator paid $172,000 to settle the CFTC’s claims that he was betting on the individual words that the president would use in his speeches—claims first made by Kalshi.

Regulators don’t have a unified approach to this sector. As The New York Times points out, 20 states are now waging legal battles over whether these companies should be subject to the same laws as online sportsbooks. In an apparent defense of the industry, the CFTC has sued some of the states suing prediction-market companies for infringing on federal jurisdiction. Polymarket’s international platform, which runs on the blockchain, is off-limits to U.S. traders and isn’t bound by the CFTC’s rules on insider trading.

But even as major legal questions remain unresolved, what’s indisputable is that insider trading is a red line for U.S regulators. Polymarket’s and Kalshi’s stricter enforcement of those rules may help keep them in the federal government’s good graces, and the appearance of fairness may also prevent people from betting elsewhere. But in taking these steps, these businesses will have to reckon with how they present themselves. They can cling to the idea that they’re not gambling platforms—but regulators may not always see it that way.

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Evening Read

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The Truth About American Food Safety

By Daniel Engber

The phrase When it rains, it pours isn’t one you like to see applied to outbreaks of foodborne illness, yet here we are. The summer started with a diarrhea-causing parasite called Cyclospora cayetanensis, which infested iceberg lettuce. Then came news of Shiga toxin–producing bacteria in organic frozen berries, and a Salmonella outbreak linked to Whole Foods guacamole that eventually got traced to tainted jalapeños. (Pico de gallo, salsa fresca, and a variety of spicy dips have also been implicated.) Ricotta-style cheese was recalled for Listeria. Both Salmonella and E. coli were found in products from the aptly named Everything Sprouts. And 10,000 cases of lightly fried tofu were flagged for potential contamination with printing ink.

This flood of food-contamination events comes at just the time when our systems to prevent such outbreaks may be hobbled.

Read the full article.

The Met’s Other Failure

2026-09-02T16:48:39-04:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s announcement this week that it is canceling next year’s exhibition on the fashion of John Galliano perhaps shouldn’t have come as a surprise. From the start, Galliano was a controversial pick for the museum’s Costume Institute, which launches its new show each year with the splashy Met Gala. In 2011, he lost his job as creative director of Dior after a video surfaced of him making a drunken anti-Semitic rant; later that year, a French court found him guilty of the crime of making anti-Semitic and anti-Asian insults. The New York Times also recently described claims that Galliano had made anti-Semitic comments during an outburst in 2019. (Through a spokesperson, Galliano denied the 2019 episode.)

But not long after his Dior exit, Galliano—who has always traded on his bad-boy image while producing clothes of astounding beauty and theatricality—was welcomed back into the industry. After so publicly hitting rock-bottom, the designer, who said addiction to drugs and alcohol led to the rants, apologized and went to rehab. Maison Margiela then hired him. Celebrities such as Zendaya wore his designs; this year, the fast-fashion retailer Zara announced a partnership with him to great excitement. Anna Wintour, Vogue’s global editorial director and the Met Gala’s chair, also happens to be his longtime friend and champion. In the process of planning the Met show, Galliano, Wintour, and Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator, consulted with Jewish leaders, and the exhibition itself intended to—as the museum initially announced in July—explore how the designer’s “derogatory conduct” had “fundamentally altered his career and public reception.”

[Read: Yet another wasted Met Gala]

Those efforts did little to assuage wider public opinion. Museum donors threatened to pull funding; the speaker of the New York city council called the choice of Galliano a “serious mistake.” On Monday, the museum released a statement saying that the show “will not proceed as planned.” It was, Wintour said in the statement, “the right decision.”

It is also a blow to the museum and its reputation that could have been avoided. For most of the Costume Institute’s 80-year history, it has followed an unofficial rule: Don’t do a solo show about a living designer—because such an exhibition could be seen as a form of advertising instead of scholarship, especially if the designer has curatorial input. Although such shows are now commonplace, the Met’s fashion wing has always prided itself on “setting the standard” for conservation and collection, and has devoted only two exhibitions to living designers: Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017. Both were controversial exceptions to long-standing norms intended to separate cultural analysis from commercialism.

Putting on a museum exhibition of Galliano’s work, even while interrogating his past behavior, was always going to be ethically dicey because the designer still stands to benefit from the publicity and prestige that the show bestows. This saga suggests that the Costume Institute, and perhaps all fashion museums, should forgo retrospectives of living artists—and revisit why rules discouraging them were necessary to begin with.

Museums have been routinely collecting and displaying clothes as a branch of the decorative arts since the 19th century, but early fashion exhibits typically featured only historical dress. Contemporary fashion was considered insufficiently artistic, and highlighting it was seen as overly promotional. But as fashion designers became household names in the 1960s, more contemporary pieces found their way into thematic exhibitions. Usually, the items were in shows featuring the work of several designers, including at the Met, which minimized the appearance of endorsing a particular label.

The Costume Institute, which opened to the public in 1946, didn’t devote an entire show to an individual living designer until 1983, when Diana Vreeland—a former Vogue editor in chief—curated a retrospective of Yves Saint Laurent’s work in honor of his label’s 25th anniversary. Saint Laurent was involved in the exhibition and attended the opening fundraiser, both of which were underwritten by the firm that had long designed his textiles. The decision was contentious. Critics argued that it canonized a designer whose work had not yet stood the test of time, while blurring the boundary between art and advertising.

The general public, though, was clearly captivated: The show drew more than 125,000 visitors in just its first month at a time when the average Met exhibition drew 500,000 visitors a year, Women’s Wear Daily reported. Despite its popularity, the experiment was not repeated under the next curator, or the next. Indeed, the Times later reported that the Costume Institute had adopted an “unofficial policy” of not doing monographic shows on living designers due to the “charges of commercialism” that the exhibition drew.

Designers, however, took note of the public’s growing interest in fashion heritage and realized that their own histories could be a valuable source of design inspiration and cultural capital. In 1987, Dior created an archives department; most major fashion labels followed. Fashion-industry archivists started competing with museum curators to buy back their own vintage pieces at auction. Some fashion houses founded their own museums. Others turned their archives into touring exhibitions, large on spectacle and light on scholarship.

[Read: Confessions of a costume curator]

By no coincidence, over the course of the 1990s, fashion studies gained traction as an academic discipline. “Suddenly, fashion was about identity, the body, gender, power, and visual representation,” Valerie Steele, a fashion historian and curator, wrote in Reinvention and Restlessness, a book created for an exhibition at the Museum at FIT. Fashion not only explained the past, the thinking went, but also expressed the ambitions and anxieties of the present.

But the mingling of intellectual analysis and business interests hasn’t occurred without debate: Privately owned objects aren’t subject to the same strict conservation requirements as museum artifacts. And as museums started borrowing archival pieces directly from fashion houses, sometimes a designer’s “cooperation” with an exhibition stretched to input or approval—another ethical gray area that can compromise curatorial objectivity and authority.

The ethics of fashion exhibitions got even more questionable in 2000, when the Guggenheim mounted a show about the Italian designer Giorgio Armani. The museum, which does not collect fashion, received a $15 million donation from the designer; the move was widely viewed as a transparent quid pro quo. “It’s all very well for an art gallery to declare the equality of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, and to enjoy the boost in attendance that may bring,” one critic wrote at the time, “but the challenges and risks of shows like this can outweigh any benefits.”

Whether they’re focused on pants or paintings, museum exhibitions don’t just publicize and promote the work of living artists; their imprimatur actually raises its market value. The Armani show had the distinction of prompting a museum-industry trade group and the IRS to update their ethical guidelines on corporate sponsorship to encourage greater transparency.

Still, shows about living designers—produced with the help of those designers—became more common, and eventually they lost much of their stigma. For many years, in fact, the Met was one of the few holdouts. Its policy changed only when Bolton became curator in charge in 2016 and announced a show on the Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo. Bolton, according to a Times report, explicitly “wanted to challenge the idea” that museums couldn’t do monographs on living designers, and wanted to “demonstrate that ‘fashion is a living art.’” Kawakubo’s involvement was crucial to the museum’s show; every piece came from her archives, and that year, she served as the honorary chair for the Met Gala.

Galliano, with his past behavior, complicates the ethics equation even more. Museums, of course, regularly exhibit works by artists with unsavory pasts—but, crucially, those artists are usually dead. They can no longer personally profit or walk the red carpet on opening night. And unlike fine art, fashion is built in to everyday consumerism. Few people can afford to leave a museum and buy a Basquiat. Many more can pop over to Zara for a piece from Galliano’s forthcoming collection.

The art of fashion may be too enmeshed with the business of fashion for the two to ever be completely untangled. But museums can easily forestall self-inflicted scandals such as the one at the Met by not putting living designers on precarious pedestals. In the announcement of the show’s cancellation, Wintour called the move “John’s decision”; many news outlets subsequently reported that the designer “bowed out” or “withdrew” from the exhibition. This framing casts the news as Galliano’s noble self-sacrifice, and distances Wintour and the Met from the whole sorry affair. It also inadvertently highlights the conflict of interest central to this kind of show. An ethical, independent museum exhibition could have gone on without its subject’s participation. Or, better yet, it would not have sought its subject’s input in the first place.

The MAGA Right Is Only Pretending to Be Censored

2026-09-02T13:49:05-04:00

For nearly a year and a half, the Trump administration prepared its case. Political appointees inside the State Department combed through old files and databases. Civil servants received notice that their personal emails would be examined. Darren Beattie—the founder of a far-right conspiracist website, then the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy—sent out a request for files on anyone who had communicated with or written about the Global Engagement Center, a now-dissolved agency that once worked to expose propaganda campaigns by Russia, China, Iran, and other countries around the world.

[Read: The white nationalist in charge of Trump’s public diplomacy]

The request, seen last year by the MIT Technology Review, was far-reaching. Beattie was seeking information on Bill Gates; the commentator Bill Kristol; Chris Krebs, a former U.S. cybersecurity official; a German government minister; the analyst Renée DiResta, formerly at Stanford University, as well as others associated with a research project called the Election Integrity Partnership; and, as it happens, me.

This unprecedented investigation was meant to expose the Biden administration’s “censorship–industrial complex,” a shadowy network allegedly dedicated to the mass suppression of American free speech. Since 2020, internet trolls have accused Biden-administration officials, social-media companies, and university researchers of weaving a nefarious plot to censor conservatives. Since 2025, MAGA ideologues have been using this alleged plot as an excuse to dismantle government programs, stifle research, intimidate American citizens, and even distort American foreign policy.

And yet for the past year and half, neither Beattie nor anyone else has actually managed to prove that the plot ever existed. Like a soap bubble that vanishes with the touch of a hand, the “censorship–industrial complex” belongs to that mystical category of things that disappear when you examine them too closely.

The failure to produce evidence is not for lack of trying. During the Biden administration, MAGA allies and politicians filed multiple lawsuits with the goal of exposing alleged censorship. None has done so. One of them, brought by the Missouri attorney general, made it all the way to the Supreme Court before justices asked for underlying evidence that the government had censored anyone. The answer was no. Another, brought against the Stanford research project by America First Legal—Stephen Miller’s team—failed in July, when a judge found the suit had no standing, no jurisdiction, and, after a discovery process requested by the plaintiffs, no evidence. There was no proof, in other words, that the Stanford research had resulted in anyone being censored. Other cases against the Biden administration were simply settled by President Trump’s Department of Justice without finding any evidence of “censorship” either.

[Renée DiResta: My encounter with the fantasy–industrial complex]

Now the Trump administration’s most dedicated ideologues have also failed, spectacularly, to prove the existence of a “censorship–industrial complex” inside the State Department. After months of searching, Beattie’s successor as undersecretary for public diplomacy, Sarah Rogers, recently decided to publicize the unimpressive results of the inquiry into the Global Engagement Center. But instead of writing a report admitting that the documents that surfaced contained nothing of interest, she leaked them, selectively, to an internet troll known as DataRepublican.

Here is where the story becomes especially convoluted, and I will simplify as best I can. “DataRepublican” is the X pseudonym of Jennica Pounds, who has a history of misreading data and connecting dots to describe nonexistent conspiracies. But the plan went wrong: Upon receipt of raw documents from Rogers, including screenshots without context, Pounds decided that Rogers was a “Deep State” operative and refused to release them. Subsequently, it emerged that Pounds herself has been secretly employed by the Pentagon, which presumably makes her a deep-state operative too. But that’s another story.

Because Pounds would not publish the documents, Rogers did so herself, in a long thread on X. As she must have known, they contained no evidence of conspiracy, no proof that anyone in the Biden administration censored millions or even dozens of social-media posts. Instead, Rogers, who is theoretically responsible for promoting good relations with people in foreign countries, went after a series of U.S. citizens. She found a GEC official who had about a dozen email exchanges with the Stanford project, almost all about Russian accounts. She posted a brief excerpt of the congressional testimony of Daniel Kimmage, a former State Department employee and GEC deputy coordinator, who truthfully explained that the center was set up to deal with foreign disinformation, not American media. Rogers wrote that “that was a lie,” without offering proof.

Rogers also included several misleading posts about the Stanford project, plucking a number from a table and implying that it meant the researchers had somehow targeted more than 400,000 tweets, when they in fact had merely noted their existence. More to the point, the Stanford team did so after the election, not in some kind of smoke-filled room but in an academic report that is still publicly available and that DiResta has cited repeatedly.

Rogers also criticized another very public, not remotely secret report, written jointly by the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, Slovakia, and the European Union, investigating “gendered disinformation,” a subject that sounds very “woke” until you realize that deepfake porn videos and orchestrated misogyny are tactics regularly used against female politicians such as Annalena Baerbock, a former German foreign minister, or Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister. The Iranian regime uses them to harass female dissidents around the world. Democratic governments would be negligent if they did not try to understand them. But even if you are not bothered by the online harassment of women in politics, it’s still impossible to argue that the publication of a report (and its translation into nine languages) proves the existence of a secret censorship–industrial complex stifling Americans’ views. “Watergate it was not,” Orna Blum, a former State Department official, wrote last week.

[Anne Applebaum: America surrenders in the information wars]

And if the scandal wasn’t Watergate, Rogers is not Bob Woodward. She is a public servant who dumped raw data online, seemingly without asking whether anyone would be damaged or which American foreign-policy interests could be served, all in the name of proving nothing.

In the normal course of things the saga of the GEC documents would be, and should be, dismissed as a storm in a teapot. But unfortunately, the administration’s pursuit of a nonexistent censorship–industrial complex has already had real consequences for real people. In April 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was closing the Global Engagement Center because it had “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.” This was untrue, and even at the time there was no evidence for such an extraordinary statement. On the contrary, the GEC was the only institution in the U.S. government that was publicly tracking hostile international information operations, including by exposing websites in Africa or Latin America that appeared local but were in fact run by Moscow or Beijing. Rubio’s statement maligned the people who worked on these reports. Will the secretary of state now apologize to them? Compensate them? Rehire them?

The closing of the center also means that no one is now doing that work. Thanks to Rogers, Beattie, and a handful of others, the U.S. decided to blind itself to the reality that Russia, China, and Iran, with its viral animated Lego videos, all run deceptive campaigns that reach millions of people around the world. And now Americans do nothing to halt, explain, or counter them.

But it is not only American foreign policy that has been damaged. Following a series of expensive lawsuits as well as public harassment, Stanford shut down its internet-monitoring projects too. DiResta, one of the most prominent scholars in the field, left the university and was subjected to years of online harassment, an experience she has previously described in The Atlantic. Other research projects across the country also suffered, as funders and university provosts were, paradoxically, scared away by the Trump administration’s threats to curtail their free speech in the name of halting “censorship.”

The study of foreign online campaigns and the proliferation of conspiracy theories has now become difficult and controversial, for people both inside and outside the government. That doesn’t mean that these campaigns don’t exist. It just means that Americans don’t know about them, don’t understand them, and cannot track them.

As if this same conspiracy theory had not done enough damage, Rogers and others at the State Department are also putting the nonexistent censorship–industrial complex at the center of American foreign policy toward Europe now too. At a conference at the Hudson Institute last spring, Rogers said that a “censorship class” had already “scuttled to Europe” to pursue a supposed vendetta against Americans from across the ocean. At the same event, Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri—who, in his previous role as the state’s attorney general, had brought one of the failed lawsuits against Stanford and supported legal challenges to the 2020 election—declared that “we are witnessing a deeply troubling assault on free speech” in Europe.

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

These views, all of which derive from the same set of false stories, are actively shaping American policy in Europe. Late last month, the State Department put forth plans to spend $4 million to support right-wing media in Europe, including a consortium of “independent journalists” who would support the Trump administration’s view of the world. In recent months, the U.S. has imposed visa restrictions on Thierry Breton, a former EU commissioner who is now a private citizen, for his role in creating the Digital Services Act, a European law designed to protect minors, provide transparency around algorithms and targeted advertising, and ensure that behavior on the internet conforms to existing legislation. The U.S. also sanctioned four European researchers who campaigned for the digital-services law or against hate speech—essentially punishing them for their free speech, in the name of promoting free speech. Two of them, the leaders of a German organization called HateAid, called the visa ban “an act of repression by a government that is increasingly disregarding the rule of law and trying to silence its critics by any means necessary.”

Belatedly, even some part of the Trump administration appears to have quietly concluded that all of this has gone too far and that maybe, in fact, it would be useful for the U.S. government to understand how hostile governments seek to manipulate the internet. In May, the State Department put out a tender for software developers who could help analyze “foreign adversarial propaganda” and thus replicate the work once done by the Global Engagement Center. In August, a State Department contractor also posted a job opening for research analysts who can, among other things, “evaluate how foreign governments, state-sponsored organizations, terrorist groups, and other malign actors use social media and digital communications to influence public opinion and targeted audiences.”

As DiResta wrote this week, “they’re hiring people to do the very job they just spent 16 months claiming was a conspiracy.” So much time, energy, and money was wasted pursuing a fiction. Now more time, energy, and money will need to be spent to clean up the damage.

How Trump Lost Asia

2026-09-02T13:00:00-04:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a discussion of how Donald Trump has enriched himself and his family during his presidencies. David discusses how these ill-gotten gains bring up difficult questions about the future of American democracy.

Then David is joined by former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to discuss the impact of the Trump presidency on America’s allies, its reputation around the world, and the politics in the Pacific.

Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity, by Frank Dikötter.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Malcolm Turnbull: The United States—not by accident or circumstance, but by design—has become a less dependable ally.

[Music]

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and we will discuss the deterioration of the position, the strategic and economic position, of the Western democracies in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean in the presidencies of Donald Trump. The book this week will be Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity. But before either the dialogue with Malcolm Turnbull or the book discussion, some opening thoughts about the question of President Trump’s wealth and what is to happen to it after he leaves office.

I wrote about this subject in The Atlantic this past weekend, and you can see my thoughts there in much more elaborated form. But there’s some major themes that I think really need to be stressed again in a very direct way, and I’d like to do that here with you now.

President Trump entered office in January 2025 as a wealthy man, as he has been almost all of his life: thanks to the great inheritance from his father, thanks to his earnings from The Apprentice and other TV programs, and thanks to some of his own business achievements. But his own business career has been one of sharp ups and downs, punctuated by bankruptcies of the businesses that he’s owned, losses to his investors. But there’s no question that he and his family are very, very wealthy today, with a fortune numbered in the multiple billions of dollars, accumulated in an astonishingly short time.

How exactly did he do that? Well, as I read it, there are three major streams of payments that he has received; three major sources of wealth that he’s received since he became president. The first takes the form of payments from people, governments, and entities with interests before the United States government. He has, for example, received large payments from American media companies. Famously, the payment from Amazon to make a documentary of his wife, Melania. Settlements from Paramount, Meta, and ABC News, money that will supposedly go to his presidential library.

He’s received gifts from foreign governments and entities as well. This stream of payments and gifts, worth many millions of dollars, has made Trump a rich man by any standard.

The second source of wealth to him has been his involvement in the cryptocurrency and other crypto-token markets, where the president has backed cryptocurrency-issuing companies. Many of the currencies and tokens that have been issued by these Trump-backed companies rapidly became worthless.

The third source has been a series of stock and other transactions in oil markets and other markets. This year, the president’s investment accounts, which the White House says are managed by third-party financial institutions, have traded oil and gas stocks. This has happened even as the president is deeply involved in the war in Iran, which has certainly had impact on this industry.

Now, America has a long tradition of letting bygones be bygones and of not looking very deeply at the activities of former presidents. But the enormous fortune that has been accumulated in such dubious ways in such a short time raises important questions. Not just about right and wrong, not just about whether individual economic laws have been obeyed, but important questions about the future of American democracy.

There are examples all over the planet of authoritarian rulers whose families accumulated enormous wealth in their time in office. The authoritarian ruler then loses power; some of the fortune is clawed back, but much is kept by the family, and that fortune becomes a basis for the family’s return to political power in a new generation. We’ve seen that in Peru with the Fujimori dynasty, in the Philippines with the Marcos dynasty. Could we see such a thing in America?

You know, the next generation of Trumps are going to inherit a lot of money, but they’re going to also inherit a lot of potential legal vulnerabilities. And one of the lessons they’ve learned from the presidency of Donald Trump is: When you have a large fortune with such a big question mark over it, one way to be safe is to reclaim political power and shut down investigations and law enforcement and accountability. And that way, the money that you achieved, whatever question marks are about it, well—no questions can be asked, because there’s no one to ask the questions.

While this enormous accumulation, rapid accumulation, of uncertain wealth remains, it continues as not just a question mark over the future of the Trump family, but a question mark over the future of American democracy. It’s a risk in a way that the wealth of the Fujimoris in Peru has been a risk, in a way that the wealth of the Marcos in the Philippines has been a risk.

Americans are not a backward-looking people. They don’t go in for retribution. In the Biden presidency, pretty clearly, Attorney General Merrick Garland wanted to stay well away from the whole Trump business, and to leave Trump as much alone as Trump’s record would possibly allow Merrick Garland to leave Trump alone.

But if there is a post-Trump administration that is concerned to restore American democracy, I don’t think that kind of averting-the-eyes method that was practiced by Merrick Garland and President Biden is safe or sustainable. To try to get to the bottom of the Trump fortune—to try to reclaim any part of it that was achieved in ways that are unlawful or improper—that’s not an act of retribution. That’s an act of democratic self-defense, and maybe, ominously, an indispensable act of democratic self-defense if the United States is not to follow the path of other failed democracies that took one blow from a first generation of an authoritarian kleptocratic family and suffered the decisive blow from the second generation.

And now my dialogue with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

[Music]

Frum: Malcolm Turnbull served as Australia’s 29th prime minister, from September 2015 to August 2018. His government legalized same-sex marriage in Australia, simplified Australia’s complex system of child benefits, and attempted, with partial success, to reduce business taxes. Australian right-of-center politics depends on a complex balance between urban and rural, social moderates and social conservatives. Internal conflicts within the coalition led to Turnbull’s ouster as prime minister in 2018. Malcolm Turnbull was trained as a barrister, co-founded the first Australian tech company to list on Nasdaq, and led the Australian operations of Goldman Sachs before entering Parliament in 2004.

Malcolm Turnbull now chairs Australia’s International Hydropower Association, invests in technology ventures, and speaks and writes on democratic norms and climate and energy issues in Australia and around the world. His memoir, A Bigger Picture, was published in 2020. Malcolm Turnbull, thank you so much for making time for The David Frum Show today.

Malcom Turnbull: Well, great to be with you, David.

Frum: So let me begin with what I know has been one of the major themes of your political work since 2018. And that is your observation of a problem or of a challenge that exists in Australia and really in every English-speaking country and across the democratic world: this tension within the former right of center between those who are business-minded, those who are more statist, between those who want to develop more cosmopolitan and modern values, those who look backward, those who integrate into the world, those who seek nationalism as a refuge from the world, and those who want to participate in a global democratic partnership, and those who reject those ideas.

First, how do you describe what has happened? How do you explain it, and what are the stakes?

Turnbull: Well, I think much of what is going on, David, on the right of politics—and these terms, as we know, are very, very plastic—is not about conservatism at all. I mean, Donald Trump, for example, and MAGA are not conservatives. They are disruptors; they are radicals. Revolutionaries if you like. Populists. But they’re certainly not conservatives in any meaningful sense.

What we’ve got is a bundle of things that have come together. Resentment about cost of living, slower economic growth. People feeling that they’re not getting ahead, feeling the system is not working for them. You’ve got people resentful about the pace of change. You see this obviously with immigration—and I’m not talking about illegal immigration here; I’m talking about legal, government-permitted immigration. A lot of people find that confronting. Their societies are changing. They’re struggling with change. You’ve seen the disruptions from globalization. Obviously, a lot of manufacturing jobs, a lot of jobs of every description, have gone. And there’ll be more to come—more to go, too, I suspect, with AI. So we’re living in an environment where the pace and scale of change is unprecedented, and I think that rocks people.

Now, at the same time—and I’m about to do what Enoch Powell famously said politicians should never do and blame the media, but because, as he said, a politician who complains about the press is like a ship’s captain who complains about the sea—but the reality is the media, and you and I know this, having lived through it, has dramatically changed. We’ve gone from a world in which there was a relatively small number of curated platforms—newspapers with editors, radio stations, and television stations with directors and producers—to this plethora, this multitude of voices. Some of which are curated, many of them which are not. But in a world where now narrowcasting can actually be a successful business model, and not just in magazines.

And so what you now get is this intense competition for attention. And of course, the way people seek to achieve that, whether it’s the automatic algorithms on the social-media platforms or it’s the producers at Fox News, is by anger-tainment. By riling people up, by promoting division, by promoting animosity, by appealing to our the worst angels of our nature. And I think all of that has created this toxic brew that has been devastating for what used to be called the center right of politics.

Frum: Well, let’s do a close-up on what happened in Australia. And one of the issues that rocked your government was your attempt to reduce Australia’s quite heavy taxation of enterprises. And that which would you might have thought would be an issue that would unite all brands of center-right people led to a rupture in your coalition, where some in your coalition said, Well, we’re fine lowering taxes on smaller businesses that don’t compete globally, but not on the big businesses that have to compete globally and that are actually most exposed to the cost of capital and to the burden of and to capital competition.

Turnbull: David, I don’t think that’s quite right. Forgive me, but I don’t think that’s—I mean, certainly there were people that had different views.

The big divisive issue on the right of politics when I was leading the Liberal Party—and I led the Liberal Party on two occasions, in opposition and in government—was our approach to climate change. I always took the view that this was prudent and rational to reduce emissions, that you had to accept the reality of climate science. Global warming was a fact. There’s no point talking about whether you believed or disbelieved in it. It was physics. But, and you’ve seen this in the U.S. in particular, you’ve got this—this was turned into a culture war. And so instead of talking about these challenges in an objective, rational way informed by engineering and economics, they’re informed by ideology and idiocy.

So, it was really more the bugbear that I faced with the right—and though they didn’t like the same-sex marriage legalization either, but 62 percent of the country voted for it, so it was a bit hard to argue with that politically—but the thing that was always the destabilizing issue was the approach to energy policy.

Frum: And did you find the withdrawal of American leadership on that issue made your life more complicated?

Turnbull: Yes, of course it has. Because you see, Trump and Trumpism and MAGA-ism has its imitators everywhere around the world. I mean, at the last election here in Australia, Peter Dutton, the Liberal leader who lost very badly and lost his own seat was, you know, in different ways, effectively channeling Trump.

You know, it’s very alluring, because the media is so global. I mean, we spend as much time—and I’m sure Canadians feel the same way even more so—we spend as much time following American politics as we do following our own. You know, Rupert Murdoch’s subscription television service here used to be called Sky News; now it’s called News 24. It’s effectively a local version of Fox now.

And so there’s a globalization of this sort of populism. These culture wars have gone global, and they cross-infect, particularly through the English-speaking world.

Frum: But they seem to be less successful outside the United States than they are inside the United States, at least from an electoral-politics point of view.

Turnbull: Yeah. Well, I mean, my friend [Canadian Prime Minister] Mark Carney did a Lazarus—John Howard would have said Lazarus with a triple-bypass resurrection—of Canada’s Liberal Party, which, of course, is Canada’s center-left party, by campaigning against Trump. And Trump being Trumpy has not been an assistance here.

But nonetheless, these anti-science forces, this sort of algorithmic cultivation of hatred and negativity that we’re seeing now more than ever, is a challenge that I think has infected both sides of politics. But I think it’s done more damage to the sensible right.

And look, let me give you a theory of the case as someone who’s led a center-right party. My view, grounded in my own experience and observation of others, is that the center right’s political equity is economic management. You know, the left will generally be regarded as being more likely to do good things with health; even with education, with spending. The left will always be regarded as being more likely to spend more, so. And the right is often, in most countries, regarded as being a better bet on national security, but that’s rarely an election issue. Sometimes it is. But the economy obviously always is.

Now, my attitude is that the more you get sidetracked down these culture-war issues, the more you lose the time, the attention, on the one political equity you’ve got—and that’s economic management. So, you know, jobs and growth is what center-right politicians should be focused on.

Frum: But center-right politicians often nowadays seem to have lost interest in those issues. The economic management of the second Trump term has careened from higher tariffs, lower growth, lower employment, higher inflation. He’s at last paying a political price for it. Other center-right parties around the world seem to be interested in talking about immigration issues and issues of sexuality, race, of ethnic transition. That’s what gets the activists excited. That’s what the leaders respond to, and economic management goes out the window.

Turnbull: Well, all of that’s true, but let me just unpack a bit of that. I mean, the first thing you’ve got to remember about politics is that it’s a relative business. It’s like football. You may be playing in a team that is absolutely hopeless—you know, can’t catch, can’t kick, terrible. But if the people you play on the weekend are even more hopeless than you, you’ll win.

Now, the Democrats in the last election in the United States gave it to Trump. They gave it to him. I mean, their failure to secure the southern border alone was just an extraordinary abdication of responsibility. One of the fundamental things that people expect for their government is that the government should be able to determine who goes in and out of their country. Now, if you can’t do that, you’re failing in a very basic responsibility. And, you know, you’re a better assessor of this than me, David, but I would think if that had been properly addressed, I suspect even with all the other problems they had, Trump wouldn’t have been successful.

The other thing to remember too, and Australia is a little bit different. We have compulsory voting, which means everyone has to turn up to the polling place and take a ballot paper. They can write a rude word on it, or not number all the squares and cast an informal vote if they like. But we get over 90 percent of people turning up to vote, and 97 and a half percent of every eligible Australian is on the roll. So now, this means that you don’t have to run, or if you run off to the right to fire up your craziest activists, or the left for that matter, that’s not to get them out to vote. When you do that in the U.S. and many other places, that may be a legitimate strategy. Here, there’s no point, because they’re going to vote anyway. So the electoral contest is focused at the center, which is where it should be.

Frum: Well, Australia’s one of the most outward-facing economies in the world. You’re one of the most urban societies in the world. So it’s not going to work in Australia to say, Let’s put up a big fence around the country and keep out trade with everybody else, the way Americans may falsely imagine it’s plausible in the United States. So when Australians turn against the rest of the world—or when leaders invite them, political entrepreneurs, invite them to turn against the rest of the world—how does that resonate in a country that says, We can’t make a living if we’re not connected to the rest of the world?

Turnbull: Well, I mean, protectionism has never had a good—not in modern times, anyway—has never had a good degree of political support here. Generally, Australians understand free trade is good. Now, you know, obviously, the attitudes were different years ago. Decades, many decades, ago, there was protectionism. But I think all of us, pretty much, in Australia united in supporting free trade. I mean, clearly you’ve got to have fair trade. I mean, and we do have laws that deal with dumping and so forth. But generally, [in] Australia, our barriers to trade, whether it’s tariffs, are vanishingly small. We have free trade; many free-trade agreements. I mean, my government kept the Trans-Pacific Partnership alive after Trump pulled out, for example, and working with [Japanese Prime Minister] Shinzo Abe in particular to do that. So, you know, free trade is good for us, but I can understand the case they make in the U.S.

Now, you made a very good point. If I could just pick up on this, because I think it’s a really important one, particularly for an American audience and Canadian audience. You made the point that Australia is very urbanized, and that’s true. We absolutely are. We always have been, by the way. Now, if most of your population live in big cities, you do have some natural protections against circumstances where a factory closes or an industry declines versus a society where you have towns and cities which are dominated by one industry or one company And so because if you’re in a big city, if the plant or the business you’re working in fails, that’s very sad. People lose their job. But there’s lots of other businesses, typically. You know, you’ve got more options. If you’re in a company town and the company fails, what do you do? And so that sort of Rust Belt phenomenon that you see in the United States—that has caused so much of the alienation and unhappiness, and I think provided a lot of the groundswell for MAGA—that is not present in Australia to anything like the same extent.

Frum: You’ve remained very active, or at least very vocal, in Australian politics as a voice for moderate conservatism since the end of your prime ministership, and you’ve gotten a lot of blowback for that. One of the things as I read the commentary in Australian media—and again, I’ll take your warning about beware of the media—is that people say…

Turnbull: I’m an old journalist, by the way, so. (Laughs.)

Frum: All right. Well, then you know what you’re talking of. People say, This new kind of politics that’s more authoritarian, that’s more status, that’s more xenophobic, that’s more cultural-reactionary politics, we are the wave of the future. And, you, speaking for openness and enterprise and environmental responsibility and cultural modernism, that’s the past. That’s out of date. We’re the new style.

And I don’t know if it’s true in Australia, but certainly I notice in the United States, the younger conservatives are the most reactionary. You have to talk to people who are quite old to find people who have a good word to say for more moderate views. The young are more extreme. And do we confront here something where this is the wave of the future? This is what the politics of the future will look like for good or for ill?

Turnbull: Look, America’s different, right? It is exceptional. It’s so big and diverse, of course. I think if you declare war on multiculturalism, if you like, which, there is a populist leader here, Pauline Hanson, who’s endeavoring to do that. And one of my Liberal predecessors, Tony Abbott, who was always much to the right of me in the Liberal Party, has been recently saying multiculturalism has failed and talking about Australia being a monoculture. Well, that’s nonsense, right? I mean, you’ve got about 30 percent of all the people in Australia, residents in Australia, were born overseas. So, you know, we are a multicultural society. Our political identity is defined by adherence to a set of values, not by the color of your skin or your ethnicity or your religion. And those people who try to take us back to a sort of—I mean, Christian nationalists, for example, Christian nationalists are not Christian, right? There’s nothing Christian about that. And the people that are trying to, in a multicultural society like Australia or the United States, to define the country as being of a particular race, you know, white, for example, if their opponents are effective in their advocacy, they will be successful. Because you’re asking people to, in effect, reject the society in which they live, the reality in which they live.

Frum: And yet, as you say, they’re calling on people to reject reality that you’re suggesting is kind of a backward-looking kind of politics. And yet your critics would say, and my observation here of the way Republican politics works, suggests that it’s not backward-looking; this is a glimpse of what’s to come, for good or for ill.

Turnbull: Let’s hope it’s not. We will be a poorer, meaner world if we abandon love, if we abandon our commitment to all of our fellow citizens. You know, politicians that get to the top by dividing their country may be successful for a while, but they ultimately leave their country much worse off.

Frum: It’s 11 years since the start of your prime ministership. And the world has changed in many ways. As you evaluate the strength of—I don’t know what we call this alliance of nations. Calling them Western sort of doesn’t quite work, because many of the most important allies are on the opposite side of the world from the United States and the European Union and Canada and Great Britain. But this coalition of nations, led by the United States, that includes Australia as one of the most militarily capable, that includes Japan, has new and more complex relationships with India and Indonesia and even Vietnam. How do you do the balance sheet of the strength and cohesion of that group of nations facing China a decade ago, or 11 years ago, as compared to now?

Turnbull: The United States—not by accident or circumstance, but by design—has become a less dependable ally. That’s part of their policy. The United States, which at least used to claim that its international actions, the exertion of its power across the world, was to support democracy, to support democratic values, American values you might say, now no longer does that. Trump says might is right. Stephen Miller was channeling Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue, saying, you know, The strong always can always do what they want. We’re a great power. Trump makes this very clear. This is—again, there’s no bones about this.

So naturally America’s allies are hedging. And I mean, America still has, there is an enormous amount of goodwill. I think it would be impossible even for Donald Trump to torch all of the goodwill there is for the United States from its allies and friends. Because as we know, and I mean, you understand this very well as a Canadian, I mean—the pressure, the abuse, the threats that the United States has thrown at Canada is unbelievable. I mean, if you’d written a political novel about an American president doing the things and saying the things about Canada that Donald Trump has, it would’ve been regarded as a fantasy. But it’s a reality.

Frum: And a farce, because if the president’s going to vent his venom, Canada seems like the least plausible—that seems like too crude a joke for a kind of cheap comedy movie, not an expensive one. You’d make him choose Venezuela or somebody more plausible. I mean, Canada is not interesting. But, as you say, it’s happened.

Turnbull: I know. It’s like joking “Australia declares war on New Zealand,” or something like that.

Frum: But you talked about the reservoir of goodwill. I mean, in Canada and Australia and Great Britain and the countries liberated during World War II, there’s a profound level of goodwill. And, as you say, it’s not so easily exhausted.

That’s not true in Vietnam. That’s not true in Indonesia. That’s not true in India.

Turnbull: No.

Frum: I don’t think it’s true in the Philippines, although the relationship has some warmth to it. These are much more transactional relationships. If might makes right, how mighty is the United States in 2026 compared to how mighty it was in 2015?

Turnbull: Well, certainly less mighty relative to China. That’s clear, and that’s because of the enormous growth in China’s economic and military might. The relative position of the U.S. and China has changed. And that would’ve happened whether Trump was president or not.

But I think what Trump has done is unsettled so many friends and allies, and, of course. countries that are not as close—and you named a few—to the U.S. as Australia and Canada and the Western Europeans have been. And of course, with this very misguided conflict with Iran, he’s demonstrated the limits of power—and of course reminded all of those allies in the Gulf that having those American bases there have made them targets for Iran rather than protecting them from Iran.

Frum: Because when you go through the things that make the United States less mighty, Donald Trump chose this war with Iran. And I think by any measure he’s lost. He did a lot of damage, I’m sure, to Iranian capabilities, but Iran is emerging from the situation as the formal and soon-to-be recognized owner of the Persian Gulf, recognized even by the United States. Iran is going to be tolling shipping in the Persian Gulf. Having lost this war, what does that do to American power in the Pacific?

Turnbull: It clearly undermined the standing of the United States in the world. I mean, the inability of the United States to succeed in this conflict with Iran is remarkable. I mean, who would have imagined. Look, the Strait of Hormuz—the Iranians have threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz for years. I remember in 1979 when Ayatollah Khamenei took over, there was speculation and threats about this happening then, but it had remained open for all of those years.

But look, can I just say this, David? Let me say something in praise of Mark Carney. The views he expressed in the speech in Davos about middle powers—and I know people are skeptical about that—are exactly the same points I’ve been making, and similar points to what I made when I was prime minister. I used to talk a lot about sovereign autonomy then, too. But, you know, different world.

The reality is that we have to accept the world as it is. We all have a stake in what happens in Washington, but only the Americans have a vote. And so, in this environment, America’s—all countries, but particularly America’s—traditional allies have got to hedge. They’ve got to do more together. They’ve got to be more self-reliant. And I think, to be frank, I think we are better allies if we are franker with the United States. If we are more self-reliant, and if we are less dependent on them. I mean, I thought it was very interesting—and I’ve cited this in things I’ve written elsewhere—that J. D. Vance last year spoke about how much he admired Charles de Gaulle for insisting on the maintenance of French sovereignty in the 1950s and ’60s, and in particular on maintaining French control of France’s nuclear deterrent.

Now, you could imagine as he was saying this, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were disturbed because de Gaulle had given them a lot of grief. But I think this is where we’ve got to be careful about letting emotions and resentments get in the way. I mean, our relations with the U.S.—ours, Australia’s, Canada’s—go well beyond the personalities of one president or one prime minister. They’re so deep and so, I believe, enduring. But I think the message from all of this is that the sycophancy has to stop. We have to be more self-reliant. We have to be franker with the U.S., and we have to no longer think of the United States as the leader of the free world. It’s the largest and most powerful democracy. Obviously, India has got a greater population. But we really have to chart our own futures, and do so recognizing that our interests may not always be coextensive with that of the U.S.

We used to assume that we had shared values, and by and large shared interests. We’re now in a situation where we cannot honestly say our political values are shared, at least by this administration entirely. And our interests very often are not, too.

Frum: You wisely caution against letting emotion dictate policy, and you mention the emotions of resentment and injury and insult, which are very real. And again, from a Canadian point of view, very real. Australian, too. But nostalgia is an emotion. Outdated fondness is an emotion. Outworn respect is an emotion. That maybe one of the things that countries, middle powers that are going to be less emotional is to say, Look; the United States elected Trump twice. In between was Biden, who was more globally minded, but who also was almost as protectionist as Donald Trump and failed the test of leadership on issues like Ukraine.

I mean, Biden, his approach seemed to be, Find out what the Ukrainians need, send them half, and hope that placates the friends of Ukraine without irritating the Russians too much. Under Biden, the United States’ strategic position vis-à-vis China also deteriorated. Biden did not revive the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is a signal not just to Australia and not just to Japan, but again, to those more transactional partners like Vietnam and Indonesia. So it’s been 10 years. Worse under Trump, not so good under Biden. Happened twice, and any ally calculates that—look, you could forgive Trump one, but Biden too, and then Trump two, this looks like a pattern. And a pattern you have to plan for.

Turnbull: David, you’re absolutely right. People who think that at the end of Trump’s current term there will be a resumption to normal transmission overlook the fact that the new normal is more or less what we have at the moment. And is a much more self-interested United States, a more protectionist United States, and a United States that is not committed to the democratic values that we’ve shared in the same way, you know, presidents of both stripes had been in years past.

Frum: And the United States, if it cannot beat Iran, probably cannot defend Taiwan.

Turnbull: Look you know, you don’t have to take my word for it. Donald Trump has said that, more or less; that he gave an interview to Bloomberg, I think in 2024, in which he raised real doubts about whether it was possible. Think about a naval war in the Pacific, right? China has 200 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. In a naval war, let’s say it ends up at a stalemate, or Taiwan remains autonomous. And so the Chinese haven’t achieved their objective, but there will be a lot of warships sunk on both sides, obviously. That’s what happens. Which navy will be rebuilt sooner? I mean, isn’t it staggering that so much of the munitions, magazines, magazine depth of the United States, it’s been depleted so considerably from this conflict with Iran? Which is not a conflict with a peer counterparty or rival, like China or Russia for that matter. I mean, for all of the talk and confidence about American military power, it raises very, very real concerns. And of course you’re seeing them raised in the United States.

This is one of the reasons I’ve been a critic of the AUKUS arrangement. It’s not being anti-American at all. My concern is that it’s a really bad deal for Australia, and we’ll end up with very little out of it.

Frum: AUKUS is an acronym for Australia, U.K., U.S.

Turnbull: Yeah. It’s a deal to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, naval nuclear propulsion. But all of it depends on the U.S. industrial base, the British industrial base—both of which are under enormous pressure and underperforming. And it’s a very, I think, very foolish sacrifice of Australian sovereignty.

Again, you can be a skeptic about the middle-power thesis of Mark Carney, right? But what’s the alternative? Is the alternative just to be a sycophantic cork, bobbing along behind the United States as it weaves from one perceived act of self-interest to another? The only alternative, difficult and complex and compromised though it may be, is to be more self-reliant and to work with other nations that have similar interests. Hence the middle-power thesis.

Frum: Let me ask you one last strategic question, which Americans tend not to think of as a strategic question, and that is the issue of corruption.

We are seeing in the second Trump administration—the first Trump administration was the most corrupt administration in American history, and by far. But it was still visibly within the American tradition. Corrupt millions of dollars, money going, single millions, maybe even tens of millions of dollars flowing where it shouldn’t flow. But that is not unthinkable in the American context.

What has happened in the second Trump term is nothing like anything in American history. It’s nothing like the history in any democratic country. It can only be compared to a post-Soviet republic or post-colonial Africa. As Australia has many very strict rules about campaign finance. It’s a very clean country. As you view the United States as it is today, how does it affect your strategic thinking? To say the government of the United States seems to be auctioning itself off to secretive parties all over the world, in transactions that are not very legible, but that are highly suspicious and that seem to be happening in front of all of our eyes?

Turnbull: Well, look, all of this is a matter is of real concern. Obviously it’s a concern to Americans. I was at a meeting recently, in the States, with a group of senior leaders from European companies for the most part. And their big concern was that after the Trump administration, there would be a reckoning, and that there would be people who do engage in corrupt activities [who] will be brought to account. So it’s something that everyone has to think about. I mean, the—

Frum: Were they frightened of that, or were they hoping for that?

Turnbull: No, no, they were very apprehensive, very apprehensive about that. And I thought that was a good thing, because, you know, the one part of American democracy that appears to have been reasonably resilient is the justice system. Because, at the end of the day, probably the most important element in a democracy is the rule of law. A democracy that was just all about the majority getting to run the government is not much of a democracy, because the majority can win the government and then, you know, bump off the minority. So the rule of law is absolutely fundamental. And I think Americans understand that. And this perceived assault and affront to the rule of law, that will be the part of this era that is going to see, I think, the biggest, I don’t know, reckoning when it comes to an end.

At least I hope so. I hope so, because, ultimately, if you don’t have the rule of law, you don’t have trust. The rule of law and the trust that that brings is absolutely fundamental to the American economy and every modern economy. You degrade that, and you’re shooting yourself in the foot, leaving aside all of the moral and ethical issues.

Frum: You may be giving the United States’ legal system a bigger compliment than it deserves. Or maybe we need to disaggregate a little bit. I mean, it seems to be true that the courts, the federal courts, won’t convict innocent people. And when they see a blatantly unconstitutional action, like the president of the United States imposing tariffs unilaterally without the consent of Congress in clear violation of the text of the Constitution, which awards powers over tariffs and taxes to Congress, the courts will stop that.

But we’re seeing something else. I wrote about the Trump presidency at the beginning, and quoted a line I had heard when on a visit to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary in 2016. The most important or the most dangerous power in a modern bureaucratic state, where there are limits on what the government can do, is not that the justice system is abused to punish the innocent, but that the justice system is used to protect the guilty. And that does seem to be happening here. And it turns out, no, that’s not true. The system is—yes, you can’t send innocent people to prison so far, although there are innocent people who’ve been shot dead in the streets by agents of the state with no consequences, so far, to agents of the state. But we are seeing extraordinary things happen that most Americans would have supposed the president and his government can’t do. And they do it, and the courts can’t do anything, and the Department of Justice won’t do anything

Malcom Turnbull: Well, I mean, David, I’m not arguing with you. I mean, it’s not a good state of affairs, that’s for sure. But to my relief, and I imagine to your relief too, the courts have remained for the most part, including judges that have been appointed by Republican and Trump administrations, have remained resistant to what they see as abuses of power.

There’s so much wrong with the design of the American democracy. I mean, the electoral system, the gerrymandering, you know. The politicization of the judiciary. Again, Americans don’t want to hear foreigners telling them what’s wrong with their country. But look at the electoral system. Look at the way you’ve got a two-party system entrenched. It’s virtually impossible for independents to succeed. You’ve got voluntary voting. You’ve got a political culture that seems to say, at least for part of the polity, that it’s okay to discourage people from voting. It’s not made easy for people to vote. And then, you have districts gerrymandered quite deliberately so as to ensure that only one party or the other can win. And then, surprise, surprise, the only contest that matters is the primary, and surprise, surprise, people on the Democratic side win the primary by pivoting to the left, and on the Republican side by pivoting to the right or to Trump.

And, then so the general election doesn’t really matter, other than in a handful of districts. And so you end up with a Congress that is much more polarized than the country, right? I mean, whereas, what is the point of a parliament? The whole point of a parliament is to bring people together so that they compromise in the center. That’s the whole point. Otherwise, we’d just elect a dictator for four years or 10 years or something. You wouldn’t bother having a parliament. I mean, the polarization driven by the electoral system is actually defeating the very purpose of having a parliamentary system in the first place.

Frum: When you view the world from your region, does America seem as present to you as it did 10 years ago? Or does the United States feel farther away, and that other places feel bigger and more important? From an Australian point of view, is India closer, China closer, Vietnam closer than it was? More interesting, more exciting, more important, more inescapable?

Turnbull: Well, economically, India and China are vastly more important than they were 10 or 20 years ago. Certainly 20 years ago. Vastly more important. However, in terms of attention, in terms of share of mind, the United States is occupying almost everything. It’s almost impossible to not be talking about U.S. politics. I think Australians pay as much if not more attention to U.S. politics than they do to our own politics. I can only imagine that it’s even more so in Canada. The globalized media is—and we’re an example of it—has meant that the U.S. is dominating everybody’s attention. It’s like it’s sucking all the oxygen out of everywhere else. And of course, it creates a disadvantage competitively, because China has become a much less open society in the last decade or so. And so, the one thing you know is that Chinese leaders understand a lot more about how America works, a lot more than American leaders understand about how China works.

Frum: And they can do it both by open-source and by clandestine means, of which there seem to be more and more.

Turnbull: Everyone can use clandestine means. I mean, everyone gets up to that sort of stuff That’s hardly unique. But America is so open that you can—and that openness is a strength. At one level, it is a strength, I think. And who are we to decry free speech and openness? But what it does mean is that America dominates the world’s attention much more than it did a decade, let alone two decades ago, in my view.

Frum: As you travel around your region, do people still take at all seriously the ideals of America, or does it seem now a kind of bitter mockery? When the United States has just marked its 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, of those words that once seemed so resonant, does that echo? Does that still have power? Or in Vietnam, in Indonesia, even in Australia, do people say, Maybe that’s who you were, but it’s not who you are? Or do they still—does any of that confidence in what America used to be still linger in the America of today?

Turnbull: Look; everybody can distinguish between America and the American president or government for the time being. America is not defined by its president. I think the American ideals are resonant, because they are human ideals. You know—freedom, equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I mean, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the values of the Declaration of Independence when he declared Vietnam independent after the Second World War. And he was hardly a capitalist, to say the least. So these values have been inspiring for, well, for 250 years, let’s face it. So I think they’ll remain inspiring. But I think the confidence in the United States to live up to them and to deliver on them has been undermined.

I mean, people have always been cynical. People have always said, Oh, the Americans talk about freedom and justice and democracy, but they’re really in it for themselves. Well, Donald Trump, who is in many ways refreshingly honest, makes it very clear that this is all about American self-interest. You know, that’s his slogan: “America First.” So he makes no bones about that. But what that does mean is that people have to hedge; they have to make their own arrangements. If they’re wise—not everyone is doing that; I don’t think Australia is doing enough, frankly—but if they’re wise, they should be seeking to be more independent, more self-reliant. And whether America returns to a more conventional keel, if you like, than it is on at the moment or not, I think we are all better friends of America writ large if we are more independent.

My sincere conviction—born not just out of observation, but out of real experience—is that, as a foreign leader, you are a better friend to America if you tell the truth, and a worse friend if you just join the line of backslappers and sycophants.

Frum: Malcolm Turnbull, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Turnbull: Thanks, David.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Malcolm Turnbull for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I said at the top of the show, this week’s book is Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity. [Frank] Dikötter is a great historian of modern China, the author of three previous books about the harrowing consequences of Mao Zedong’s rule over China: Mao’s Great Famine, The Tragedy of Liberation, and The Cultural Revolution.

That trilogy starts in 1945 and describes in detail the cost, the human cost, of Mao Zedong’s grim rule over the Chinese people. This new book, Red Dawn Over China, is a kind of prequel. It starts before 1945 and tells the story of the rise of the Chinese Communist Party to power in 1949.

Dikötter thinks there’s been a longtime myth that the Chinese Communist Party’s ascent represented some kind of popular revolution, some kind of mandate of the people. That is the thesis that Dikötter brutally takes apart in Red Dawn Over China. What he wants to show is that the Communist Party was a marginal force in Chinese life. He estimates that in 1940 the party had maybe 40,000 members in a country of half a billion people, or about one member per 1,700 people.

The Communist Party came to power in China not through a popular will, not through a popular uprising, but through a brutal campaign of terroristic violence that is largely supported by foreign efforts. That is, by the flow of money and arms from Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.

At the center of the story is the consequence of the Japanese invasion of China. They attacked Manchuria in 1931, and then attacked the mainland of China, the rest of China, in 1937. The Chinese nationalists, who are often presented as the villains of the story, defend the integrity of China against the foreign invaders, and pay a stupendous price in human lives and equipment to hold back the Japanese, and ultimately to be there when the Japanese are defeated by the American and Allied war against Japan.

This war leaves China in ruins. It leaves the Chinese nationalists bankrupt. It leaves their army broken. And the Communists are in position now to take over Manchuria—the former Japanese center power, adjacent to the Soviet Union, supplied by the Soviet Union, armed by the Soviet Union, paid for by the Soviet Union. And then to invade the south from the north, backed by the Soviets the whole way.

Dikötter makes the important point that at every stage of this conflict, whenever there was a flow of refugees, it was always a flow from the Communist areas to the nationalist areas, never the other way around. And when the Communists at last did seize power in 1949, it was a result not of their superior integrity, not of their superior morality, not because their arms were less corrupt, all the stories you’ve heard—it was just because they had more and better weapons provided by a more generous ally, and they had to do less for the population than the nationalists, who took more seriously than the Communists their obligations to everyday Chinese people. It’s a story, as he says, of conquest, how communism conquered a quarter of humanity.

And as we try to make sense of the kind of regime China has become, of the kind of regime that China now is, we need to always keep in mind the lesson that is taught by this book and Dikötter’s previous books. This is a regime that rests on force, on violence, and on conquest, and in no way represents the aspirations of the people it governs and misgoverns.

That’s it for this week’s David Frum Show. Thanks so much for joining. I hope you will consider subscribing to The Atlantic. That’s the best way to support the work of this program and of all of us at The Atlantic. And please share and subscribe to the program and share it on whatever social media you use. That helps to bring the program to the attention of more people.

Thanks for joining me this week. See you next week. Bye-bye.

The 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

2026-09-02T12:01:00-04:00

Gail Bisson / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Common Merganser. Winner, Female Bird, U.S. and Canada. East Bay Sandbar, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Timothy Dhalleine / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Crested Caracara. Winner, Birds in Landscapes, Chile and Colombia. Torres del Paine National Park, Magallanes and Chilean Antarctic region, Chile.

Camilo Sanabria Grajales / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Ruby-Topaz Hummingbird. Honorable Mention, Youth, Chile and Colombia. Guadalajara de Buga, Valle del Cauca, Colombia.

Jacqueline Burke / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Roseate Spoonbill. Grand-Prize Winner, U.S. and Canada. St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park, St. Augustine, Florida.

Liron Gertsman / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

White-Tailed Tropicbird. Winner, Birds in Landscapes, U.S. and Canada. Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, Volcano, Hawaiʻi.

Mike Henry / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Gila Woodpecker and Saguaro Cactus. Winner, Plants for Birds, U.S. and Canada. Tucson, Arizona.

Jay Vanos / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Great Blue Heron. Honorable Mention, Birds in Landscapes, U.S. and Canada. Caddo Lake Wildlife Management Area, Karnak, Texas.

Faber Mosquera Alvarez / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Oilbird. Winner, Birds in Landscapes, Chile and Colombia. Pijao, Quindío, Colombia, in the Cañón de los Guácharos.

Rodrigo González Pairoa / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Black-Browed Albatross. Winner, Birds Without Borders, Chile and Colombia. Almirantazgo Fjord, Chile.

Nick Parayko / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Tennessee Warbler. Winner, Birds Without Borders, U.S. and Canada. St. Albert, Alberta, Canada (in the photographer’s backyard).

Paulo Olivier Hanshing / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Neotropic Cormorant. Honorable Mention, Birds in Landscapes, Chile and Colombia. Near Caleta Talcaruca, Limarí, Coquimbo Region, Chile.

Francisco Castro Escobar / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Lesser Horned Owl. Grand-Prize Winner, Chile and Colombia. Antofagasta, Chile.

Rubén Barraza / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Spectacled Tyrant. Honorable Mention, Birds Without Borders, Chile and Colombia. Elqui River Wetland, La Serena, Coquimbo Region, Chile.

Erich Podbielski / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Brown Pelican. Honorable Mention, Birds Without Borders, U.S. and Canada. Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach, Oregon.

Juan David Camacho Márquez / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Canada Warbler, Winner, Youth, Chile and Colombia. Doña Dora Birding, El Queremal, Valle del Cauca, Colombia.

Kevin Lohman / 2026 Audubon Photography Awards

Brandt’s Cormorant and Surfgrass. Honorable Mention, Plants for Birds, U.S. and Canada. Natural Bridges State Beach, Santa Cruz, California.

To see all of this year’s winners, be sure to visit Audubon’s awards website.

The Court’s Ballroom Decision Is a Sign of Deeper Problems

2026-09-02T10:38:25-04:00

In deciding to allow President Trump to proceed with constructing a new ballroom, which Congress has not authorized, at the White House, which Trump does not own, the U.S. Supreme Court invoked the separation of powers. But the Court got the constitutional problem precisely backwards: The separation-of-powers problem isn’t that courts are impermissibly blocking the president’s use of taxpayer funds to create a ballroom. It’s that the president is impermissibly using unauthorized taxpayer funds to create a ballroom.

The Court’s missteps were many, starting in the very first sentence of its opinion: “In October 2025, the federal government started a project to replace the East Wing of the White House.” (The opinion, decided via the Court’s shadow docket, was per curiam, meaning that it did not indicate an author, but because the four dissenters noted their names, we know the five justices in the majority were Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.)

But the federal government didn’t begin replacing part of the White House. Only the president and the executive branch did. Under the U.S. Constitution, the president is not the be-all and end-all of the federal government. Far from it: The legislature, Congress, is the body that has the power to establish and regulate federal property (including the White House) and to authorize the spending of federal funds. Indeed, the plaintiff in the case—the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States—argued that the president was proceeding without congressional authorization and in violation of federal laws. The Supreme Court majority did not say otherwise, making no claim as to whether the ballroom-construction project was legal or whether the president had the authority to undertake it.

The Supreme Court’s conflation of the president with the federal government is the latest iteration in the Court’s steady embrace of the unitary-executive theory and the accompanying expansion of executive power. This theory maintains that all executive power resides in the president, and that Congress cannot limit the president’s exercise of that power. Yet these days, the president, occasionally with the Court’s blessing, is claiming to possess legislative powers too. That is the case when the president declines to spend funds that Congress has obligated or when the president decides to spend funds that Congress has not authorized. Under the Constitution, Congress, not the president, has the power of the purse. Nevertheless, the unitary-executive theory unites all government power in the president, paving the way for an executive unbound by law.

[Alexandra Petri: A ballroom would have solved this]

The Court’s errors continued as justices attempted to explain why the lower courts were wrong to block the president’s demolition of a portion of the White House. The Court relied on the doctrine of standing, which maintains that a plaintiff challenging the government’s actions must show that they have been injured by the actions they are contesting. In this case, one of the members of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who lives in Washington, D.C., and about once a month visits the neighborhood where the White House is located, alleged that she had “aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests” in what happened there.

Under the Court’s precedents, that injury should have sufficed. Indeed, in a prior opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court had said that desire to “observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes,” can constitute “a cognizable interest for purpose of standing.” Crocodiles and all animals are great and important, to be sure. But so is the White House. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his dissent, “The White House is not just any building.” It is “an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture.”

The doctrine of standing, the Court has said, is a vital component of the separation of powers, because it ensures that the judicial branch stays within its role rather than encroaching on the other branches, specifically the executive. But in this case, as in others, the Court has invoked the doctrine to support the flow of power in one direction only: limiting Congress’s authority while expanding the president’s. In the ballroom case, the Court said the National Trust member did not have standing to sue, and therefore the plaintiff (and the federal courts) could not enforce the federal statutes that the president was allegedly violating. Following the decision, it’s unclear who, if anyone, can sue to enforce the federal laws that the plaintiffs allege the president is violating with the ballroom-construction project.

That is the effect of many of the Court’s standing cases—to render congressional statutes unenforceable. In TransUnion v. Ramirez, the Court said that a group of plaintiffs who were incorrectly designated as suspected drug traffickers and terrorists in their credit reports could not sue to enforce Fair Credit Reporting Act provisions requiring consumer-reporting agencies to maintain accurate records. As a result of that decision, the FCRA provisions go largely unenforced. In Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife and Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation, the Court said that plaintiffs seeking to enforce the Endangered Species Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, among other laws, did not have standing, and thus could not enforce those laws either. Far from ensuring the separation of powers, the Court has used standing to undermine the principle: According to the Constitution, Congress has the power to make laws, but the Court’s standing decisions have freed the executive branch (and other entities) from having to comply with them.

The Court made its final error in its analysis of the relevant harms in the case. To obtain emergency relief on the shadow docket, the party seeking relief (here, the president, as he was appealing the lower court’s injunction) is supposed to show that they would suffer irreparable harm if the Court does not act. The Court said the president is irreparably harmed because the lower court overstepped its powers, and undermined the separation of powers, by blocking the president’s actions. But if the president’s actions are illegal, it is more than a little odd to say that stopping them injures the president. That would essentially mean that at least some limits on the president’s power are unenforceable, because enforcing them would injure the president.

[Duncan Hosie: The Supreme Court isn’t interested in facts]

This is not the first decision to raise that harrowing implication. In a 2025 nationwide injunction case related to the birthright-citizenship executive order, the Court said the president was irreparably harmed because the lower courts had blocked an executive order—later determined to be unconstitutional—on a nationwide basis. Similarly, in the recent mail-in-ballot decision, the Court said the president was irreparably harmed because lower courts had blocked an executive order—one that is likely illegal—too soon, and before the plaintiffs experienced an injury.

It is fine and good to ensure that lower courts are acting within the bounds of their authority. But the separation of powers demands that the Supreme Court stop undermining Congress’s power to make meaningful laws by allowing the executive to violate them without consequence.

The White House Wants to Make the Smithsonian a Pariah

2026-09-02T10:30:00-04:00

The Trump administration’s latest strategy to control the Smithsonian has the logic of lunchroom bullying; the Department of Interior is channeling “you can’t sit with us” energy as it tries to make the world’s largest museum complex a pariah in Washington.

In a newly public August 28 letter from the department to the Smithsonian board of regents, Trump-administration officials write that executive departments and agencies “cannot in good conscience continue to support the Smithsonian under current leadership” and suggest that they cease cooperation with the Smithsonian on routine logistical matters, such as loaning items for exhibits and awarding discretionary grants. The letter was sent just days before the regents, having failed to secure an open site on the National Mall for the Smithsonian’s newest museums, resorted to placing the National Museum of the American Latino in a largely vacant building it already owns. In doing so, the Smithsonian dodged Congress, a move that reflects the inward turn of an institution on the outs.

Such developments illustrate the growing alienation the Smithsonian faces in the capital and difficulties that go deeper than the superficial signage Donald Trump wants placed in front of one of its museums to discredit it. For the past year and a half, the White House has repeatedly threatened the institution, but recently, more parties have joined the effort—first Republicans in Congress who in two hearings scrutinized the National Museum of American History over supposed partisan bias, and now the Interior Department, which has no official oversight of the Smithsonian. Although partially government-funded, the Smithsonian is independent of the executive branch—the White House has essentially no say over what it does—and it was designed to be as such. Still, it’s becoming clear that functioning freely in this charged climate might also mean going it alone.

Invoking the White House’s recent report on the Museum of American History, the Interior letter accuses the Smithsonian of potentially violating federal antidiscrimination laws—a common way, on the right, of criticizing DEI programs, especially those created in response to the racial-justice protests of the late 2010s and early 2020s. Signed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy Vince Haley, the letter also requests a meeting with the board of regents, the entity that actually oversees the institution. The regents’ membership has been shrinking this year as members’ terms have ended and their positions have gone unfilled, reportedly due to administration pressure.

Despite the language in the letter, a White House official told me by email that the Interior Department did not mean that agencies shouldn’t cooperate with the Smithsonian; rather, those agencies will “find it difficult to cooperate with current Smithsonian leadership in light of the disturbing evidence that has been uncovered.” The official also said it’s up to the Justice Department to determine whether the Smithsonian violated antidiscrimination laws and not to conflate “evidence of unlawful discrimination with a direct allegation that it happened.”

In the letter, the Interior Department writes that institution leadership has embraced “radical ideology” that serves to “weaken our shared American identity” and “erase our heritage.” The rhetoric is particularly striking coming from the department at the center of contested efforts to take down wall texts at National Park sites across the country, where information on slavery, climate change, Native Americans, and other topics has been removed over the past year. The National Park Service represents a discomfiting alternate reality for the Smithsonian—one in which exhibits have been subject to political approval.

[Read: The Smithsonian’s show trial on Capitol Hill]

The White House is surely pleased with such changes at the National Park sites, which Trump called for in the same March 2025 executive order that kicked off the administration’s campaign against the Smithsonian. It seems to want to extend that kind of control to the museums on the National Mall, which Trump has asserted are too negative and focus too much on “how bad slavery was.” But with a president-proof system standing in officials’ way, they’ve had to seek out additional levers of pressure against Smithsonian leadership.

The Interior letter represents the department’s most comprehensive public statement on the Smithsonian after the White House tapped it in July to place signs on National Park Service–controlled land outside the National Museum of American History, which will detail its alleged political biases and direct would-be visitors to what the administration describes as more accurate information. Much of this effort is about framing U.S. history in a more positive light, which the Smithsonian says it already does while also dealing with that history’s complexities.

These partisan feuds are especially familiar to the Museum of the American Latino, which was subject to politicized scrutiny long before Trump started taking on the wider institution. Foreshadowing present criticisms, a 2022 Heritage Foundation op-ed described one of the museum’s early shows as a disgrace with an “unabashedly Marxist portrayal of history, religion and economics.” Writers for the right-wing think tank asserted that the museum should be defunded, a call one of them repeated this summer (and he threw in the Women’s History Museum for good measure).

The Museum of the American Latino’s placement in the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building will surely disappoint some: No starchitect to deliver a glossy new design. No bespoke architecture, like the Museum of the American Indian’s sinuous facade or the Museum of African American History and Culture’s Yoruba-crown-inspired exterior. It might make for a quieter debut. Then again, the World’s Fair–style building is arguably the loudest, most colorful structure on the National Mall. It certainly won’t look like a museum that anyone is trying to hide.

The Truth About American Food Safety

2026-09-02T10:27:57-04:00

The phrase When it rains, it pours isn’t one you like to see applied to outbreaks of foodborne illness, yet here we are. The summer started with a diarrhea-causing parasite called Cyclospora cayetanensis, which infested iceberg lettuce. Then came news of Shiga toxin–producing bacteria in organic frozen berries, and a Salmonella outbreak linked to Whole Foods guacamole that eventually got traced to tainted jalapeños. (Pico de gallo, salsa fresca, and a variety of spicy dips have also been implicated.) Ricotta-style cheese was recalled for Listeria. Both Salmonella and E. coli were found in products from the aptly named Everything Sprouts. And 10,000 cases of lightly fried tofu were flagged for potential contamination with printing ink.

This flood of food-contamination events comes at just the time when our systems to prevent such outbreaks may be hobbled. Since last year, three cyclospora-research projects at the Department of Agriculture have lost either their funding or staffing, the CDC team that tracks the parasite’s genetics has nearly disappeared, and experienced government employees responsible for food safety have left their job or been fired.

The bureaucracy is crumbling, and the produce aisle is a mess. But let’s be fair: The status quo on foodborne illness was never very good. According to 2019 estimates from the CDC, Americans suffer (sometimes unaware) through at least 9.9 million bouts of foodborne illness each year; more than 50,000 people end up in the hospital, and about 1,000 die. Depending on how you measure outbreak numbers—whether by FDA investigations into foodborne illnesses, for instance, or by the number of food-product recalls—the 2026 statistics have been pretty much in line with recent history. How quickly we forget the Salmonella-dusted cucumbers of summer 2024 that sickened more than 500 souls. Or the cantaloupes that killed half a dozen people in 2023. Occasional salad-based catastrophes have been the norm for many years. Food-safety experts say that something on the order of 150 million meals of leafy greens are served in this country every day. Now as always, a very small proportion of them will make you ill.

But one of this summer’s outbreaks does suggest that our “very small proportion” might be growing into a slightly larger very small proportion. Although the jalapeño and berry outbreaks have had many doleful precedents of their size and scope, the cyclospora summer stands alone. Annual cases of its associated diarrheal disease, called cyclosporiasis, have been slowly increasing over time, from hundreds in the 2010s to a few thousand in the early 2020s. (This is, in part, due to faster diagnosis: One used to have to find the parasite’s oocysts under a microscope; now the fragments of its DNA can be identified in a rapid-PCR screening test.) This year, though, the CDC has confirmed 17,180 cases of the illness, and many thousands more suspected cases still need to be examined. State-level agencies have tallied more than 30,000 infections. “It’s just absolutely crazy,” Kalmia Kniel, an expert in microbial food safety at the University of Delaware and a former president of the International Association for Food Protection, told me. “It is completely overwhelming and insane that this happened.” I suppose it’s nice to know the sense of overwhelm afflicts experts too.

No one seems to know exactly how or why this year’s cyclosporiasis caseload got so big. The largest group of cases, which has been centered in the upper Midwest, has been linked to iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico. Kniel suspects that in Michigan, the parasite may have worked its way from the feces of the first infected people into the local water supply, spawning a secondary, local outbreak. Michael Osterholm, who runs the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and previously spent 15 years as the state’s head epidemiologist, told me that he’s seen no evidence to support the secondary-outbreak theory. Either way, some mystery remains as to how the parasite got into the food supply in Mexico. Taylor Farms, which recalled its iceberg lettuce in July, is “one of the leading produce companies in terms of food safety,” Kniel said. And yet here we are.

Perhaps the government could be doing more to resolve some of this uncertainty. On this point, though, expert opinions vary widely. Kniel said that, at least at first, the FDA and the CDC appeared to be posting information about the cyclospora situation more slowly than they had in past years. Steven Mandernach, the executive director of the Association of Food and Drug Officials and a former food-safety official in Iowa, told me that as far as he can tell, information has been coming out just as efficiently as ever. Osterholm believes that the sky is falling. “We have hit an all-time low, in my 50 years in public health, in our capacity to identify and respond to foodborne outbreaks,” he said, adding that the government’s slow response time on the cyclospora outbreak was nothing less than “public-health malpractice.” In an emailed statement, Grace Davis Jamison, a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson, wrote, “Claims that HHS has lacked transparency overlook the extensive information FDA and CDC have shared as investigations progress including timely updates that help the public understand potential risks and make informed decisions.” She also said that no FDA investigators had been lost to staffing changes, and that the CDC laboratory that supports foodborne-outbreak investigations was likewise “unaffected.”

Perhaps this disagreement can be squared by acknowledging the failings of the past. The system has long been underfunded while needed changes were delayed, Barbara Kowalcyk, the director of George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security, told me. The recent departures of experienced personnel, to retirements and layoffs, have made things only worse. “We had one hand tied behind our back before this administration happened, and now we have both hands tied,” she said. (How exactly this might translate into disease outbreaks in years ahead remains unclear.)

History suggests that few new investments in food safety come before a tragic outbreak of disease. “It was the 1993 Jack in the Box outbreak that really changed things at USDA,” Kowalcyk said, referring to the undercooked, contaminated hamburgers that killed four children who had eaten at the fast-food chain. A 2006 outbreak of E. coli in bagged spinach, which caused hundreds of illnesses and $200 million in lost spinach sales, helped inspire the passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act. Now we have the cyclospora summer. “I think that this is going to drive another paradigm shift,” Kowalcyk said.

Cyclosporiasis is, by the grace of God, a relatively gentle and self-limiting disease. Many people recover on their own within a few weeks. And for all of the tens of thousands of cases that have been registered in recent months (and the many more infections that were never diagnosed), just two deaths have been reported. Their loss is a tragedy; the economic devastation caused by falling lettuce prices, and the fact that many consumers have spent months in fear of eating leafy greens, is a shame. But given that this summer’s cyclospora plague stands among the largest foodborne-illness outbreaks in the nation’s history, these outcomes seem modest.

Consider this a solace and a warning: Our summer of contamination could have been much worse.

The Air Marshals Keeping Watch On Eric Swalwell

2026-09-02T07:00:00-04:00

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On August 8, former Representative Eric Swalwell boarded a United Airlines flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to Washington, D.C. He didn’t know it, but federal agents were watching him throughout the nine-hour trip.

The FBI had asked the Federal Air Marshal Service to covertly monitor Swalwell on board and to watch him use his electronic devices, to see whether its officers could visually ascertain his passcodes, according to records I obtained that have not previously been reported on. Air marshals are trained to blend in with other passengers and quietly keep tabs on their subjects, who are usually suspected terrorists or potential hijackers, not politicians.

But Swalwell is an enemy of sorts to the Trump administration. For years, the Democrat has been one of Donald Trump’s most visible political antagonists, having served as a manager in the president’s second impeachment trial. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has called Swalwell a “scumbag” on national television. And FBI Director Kash Patel, the leader of the agency that wanted Swalwell monitored, described him as one of the “corrupt actors of the first order” in his 2023 book, Government Gangsters.

The directive for air-marshal surveillance said that Swalwell was the “focus” of an FBI investigation, but it didn’t provide additional details. Law enforcement has good reason to investigate the 45-year-old. This past spring, a former staff member accused Swalwell of twice raping her while she was intoxicated. A woman in California accused Swalwell of drugging and raping her after he’d promised to assist with her career. Three more women have accused Swalwell of making unwanted advances and sending them lewd text messages, including nude pictures of himself. Swalwell has denied the allegations, but authorities in Los Angeles and Manhattan have opened a criminal investigation. In April, as the number of accusers mounted, Swalwell suspended his campaign for governor of California and resigned from his seat in Congress.

A week after the flight from Germany, Swalwell got off another plane at San Francisco International Airport. FBI agents were waiting for him with a search warrant. They seized his mobile phone and personal computer. (It’s not clear whether, by that point, the FBI knew the passcodes to unlock those devices.) The next day, agents searched Swalwell’s home in Washington, D.C. Documents filed in federal court in California suggest that the bureau is investigating Swalwell in connection with the sexual-assault cases in Los Angeles and New York.

Despite the seriousness of the accusations against Swalwell, many aspects of the FBI’s request to the Federal Air Marshal Service were unusual, current and former officials told me. For one thing, the FBI does not usually investigate sexual assault. For another, asking air marshals to obtain a subject’s electronic passcodes is considered out of the ordinary even for traditional subjects of surveillance, one former official said. The agency presumes that requests for assistance from the FBI, which are not unusual, are relevant to a legitimate investigation. But the bureau’s behavior here undermines that confidence, the former official added.

The request to monitor Swalwell was classified as “Special Mission Coverage,” a term for ad hoc requests from law-enforcement or intelligence agencies that don’t involve people on security watch lists. The FBI’s decision to ask air marshals for help also puzzled some former law-enforcement officials I spoke with, who asked why the FBI hadn’t put its own agents on the plane to conduct surveillance, which would have been a routine matter.

Given the public evidence and the history of the Trump administration’s efforts to investigate or discredit Swalwell, current and former officials and security experts told me that they have trouble imagining that the federal government would have gone to such lengths if the accused were not one of the administration’s least favorite people. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to provoke reprisals.

Sara Azari, Swalwell’s lawyer, told me in a statement that Swalwell has been in contact with the Department of Justice throughout the assault investigation. “Not once were we asked for Mr. Swalwell’s phones or devices. Had the DOJ asked, we would have complied, as we have with every other request,” she said. Azari called the air-marshal surveillance an “extraordinary escalation” against her client, who has not been charged with a crime.

The FBI declined to comment. The Transportation Security Administration, which runs the air-marshals service, didn’t respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment.

The midair surveillance of the former lawmaker is not the only unusual step the federal government has taken in this case. The warrant used to seize Swalwell’s electronic devices cited a civil-rights statute that historically has been applied to police officers who abuse their authority while acting “under color of law.” It traces its origins to the 19th century and was used in the 1960s to charge local police in Mississippi who conspired with Klansmen to murder civil-rights workers. Decades later, two of the police officers who’d beaten Rodney King were convicted under the law. And it was used to bring federal charges against Derek Chauvin, the officer convicted in Minnesota of killing George Floyd.

The FBI hasn’t publicly articulated its rationale for applying the law to Swalwell. But one theory, according to legal experts I spoke with, may be that he used the power of his office to intimidate his alleged victims into silence. Prosecutors might believe that there’s evidence of coercion or threats in Swalwell’s electronic communications.

But it’s not clear that the law would apply to a legislator as it does to law-enforcement officials, who have the power to detain people. “Mr. Swalwell’s private relationships between consenting adults have nothing to do with his office, his authority, or his official duties,” his lawyer said.

The fact that details about the search of Swalwell’s devices and home are publicly known is also a departure from usual law-enforcement procedure. The inventory of what the agents took from him at the San Francisco airport, which should have been kept under seal, was somehow made public.

Under Patel, the FBI has publicized its investigative steps against high-profile suspects before they have been charged. In August 2025, Patel posted on X about an imminent FBI action just as agents began raiding the home of former National Security Adviser John Bolton, a Trump critic. Broadcasting a secret operation in advance could tip off a suspect and potentially put agents in physical danger. At least one news organization appeared to have known ahead of time about the Bolton raid. A month later, Patel posted that “the subject” in the murder of Charlie Kirk was in custody, hours before it was true. He also posted details about leads that agents were following in the Kirk case, which could have jeopardized the investigation.

[Read: The FBI director is MIA]

It’s possible that the FBI is interested in Swalwell for reasons that go beyond his alleged treatment of women. The Department of Homeland Security is investigating his employment of a nanny from Brazil. Swalwell is also among the Trump critics whom Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte criminally referred to the Department of Justice over alleged mortgage fraud. Swalwell has never been charged, however, and experts have pointed out that Pulte’s allegations against officials probably reflect paperwork errors, not genuine attempts to defraud lenders.

Swalwell was also once a subject in a counterintelligence investigation of a suspected agent for China’s intelligence service. But in 2017, the FBI cleared him, and the Justice Department didn’t file charges. A former U.S. official familiar with the case told me that the representative had cooperated with investigators after they’d presented him with evidence that the woman he knew might be a foreign operative.

Last month, the administration made the unusual decision to publicly release classified FBI files related to that investigation. Swalwell’s conservative critics have long been obsessed with the case of Christine Fang, known as Fang Fang, who the files show was suspected of working for China’s Ministry of State Security. The files helped the public understand more details about Chinese espionage. But they also revealed that Swalwell had admitted to having a physical relationship with Fang. Embarrassing Swalwell might have been the point of disclosing the documents.

Patel has made no secret of his contempt for Swalwell. During a House Judiciary Committee hearing last September, when Swalwell was a member, they sparred over whether Trump’s name appeared in files from the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, and what Patel had told then–Attorney General Pam Bondi about the matter. Swalwell accused Patel of being evasive and showing “consciousness of guilt.”

Swalwell then cited Patel’s book, in which Swalwell’s name appears on a list of “deep state” actors. Twenty of those people, Swalwell said, had already been investigated or faced “adverse actions.” He asked whether Patel would recuse himself from any investigations of the people he had named, including Swalwell.

“I’m going to borrow your terminology and call bullshit on your entire career in Congress. It has been a disgrace to the American people,” Patel said. The two men spoke over each other.

Finally, the FBI director answered Swalwell’s question. “No,” he said, he would not recuse.

Madison Hahamy and Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed research to this story.

*Illustration Sources: Tierney L. Cross / Bloomberg / Getty; Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc / Getty.

Inside a Conservative Operation to Hijack Your Social-Media Feed

2026-09-02T06:00:00-04:00

If you’re short on cash, there is someone in Riga, Latvia, who can help. “You can literally make 100k a month with this campaign,” a young man with blond curls and a thick accent says into a camera. All you have to do is post on social media video clips of “anything that supports Republican.” Unfamiliar with U.S. politics? No problem: “If you’re not from the USA, like, What the fuck is even Republicans? like me,” then simply go to Gemini or ChatGPT, he suggests, “and be like ‘Yo, Gemini, I want some videos promoting Republican values. Give me ideas.’ Go to Gemini. Get ideas. Boom.”

The man, who goes by Serviuos, is promoting a campaign called Elephant Clipping, run by his company, ClipIt. The company pays subcontractors, many from poorer countries in Eastern Europe and the global South, to chop up videos the company provides into bite-size pieces in the hope that the clips will go viral online.

Such “clipping” operations have become a popular means of manipulating people’s attention. Brands, influencers, musical artists, and others spend six-figure sums on such promotional campaigns. Perhaps inevitably, the practice is now moving into politics, often without the transparency required to know exactly what is being served up and by whom. Five months before the midterms, though, Serviuos is up-front about the goal of the Elephant Clipping campaign: “So that republican win in USA,” he writes in one message. I sent Serviuos a list of questions about his work in American right-wing politics. He wrote back, “Seems very out of context,” but didn’t comment further.

Many video-clipping services operate in relative secrecy so that the public isn’t aware of the manipulation of their social-media feeds. But the services also need to attract potential clippers. They typically rely on chat servers on Discord—an internet messaging app that was initially developed for gamers.

After an anonymous tipster flagged Elephant Clipping to me, I was able to access its Discord server and other related political-clipping campaign chats just by clicking “Join,” noting on a form that I was based in the United States, and answering some questions about my availability and desire to clip. Once I was in, I could see the mechanics of the campaign, which pays huge sums of money to people—many of whom appeared to be outside the U.S.—to push video clips from accounts designed to look like those of ordinary Americans spontaneously touting reasons to favor the GOP.

In one channel on the server, users can submit pro-Republican videos that they’ve already posted on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts to be reviewed for payment. A separate Google Drive contains suggested videos for clippers to use, but “you can clip anything as long as it is positively framed conservative pro-Republican content,” Serviuos explains to participants. He provides some examples: a video of “Top 5 Joe Rogan moments,” a video of a conservative YouTuber confronting liberals with the suggested caption “See how Nick Shirley handles being told to ‘get the f* out’ of a public property.” Clippers are paid a proportionate share of the campaign’s monthly budget of $300,000. Every 1 million views yields a $300 payout.

[Read: An unsettling glimpse into the GOP’s future]

The videos that result are not publicly visible in the Discord. Some clipper accounts on social media, however, inadvertently revealed their participation in the campaign by repeating the 258-word “Goal of the Campaign” instructions in the captions of some of their short videos. The Instagram account @_politicalhub, for example, posted the caption alongside a video of Charlie Kirk calling Palestine a “nonexistent place.” Another account called @frontrawpolitics posted the instructional text in the caption of a video of a conservative influencer saying that she would never marry a liberal, “because he’s going to raise my son to be a faggot.” Each video had only a single like, but both accounts had posted other videos, without the instructional caption, that collectively accrued tens of thousands of views.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: servtheclipper / YouTube.

The instructions contain no directive to add a disclosure that the video may result in the poster being paid or that it is part of an organized campaign. Clippers are instructed to use U.S.-based proxy servers and to hide their location on social media to obfuscate that they’re working from outside the United States. The server also doesn’t disclose who’s funding any of this. But it does leave some clues that lead to a relative of a Republican mega-donor.

Elephant Clipping’s operation is the newest version of “astroturfing”—orchestrated messaging designed to look like genuine expressions of grassroots support. In the 2016 election cycle, the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked troll farm outside St. Petersburg, tried to influence the U.S. presidential election with fake social-media posts, bot farms, and protests organized through Facebook. Teens in Macedonia also posted incendiary disinformation about U.S. politics in a bid to generate advertising revenue from the number of clicks they generated on Google and other platforms. Serviuos’s clipping operations—Elephant Clipping is just one of them—are driving views to the cause they are being paid to promote.

Isabel Linzer, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, told me that the existence of political clip farms operating at scale, such as Elephant Clipping, had been suspected but hadn’t previously been confirmed. Earlier reports revealed more targeted operations. MS NOW, for instance, recently reported on a campaign in which influencers were paid to post videos supportive of the Democratic Senate candidate Haley Stevens. (She lost her primary race in Michigan last month anyway.) Linzer noted that Elephant Clipping stands out for the apparent scale of the investment and for its attempt to create faux grassroots support.

In the Discord server I accessed, one of Serviuos’s associates touts the campaign as “a once in a lifetime opportunity” to be a part of what “could be the biggest clipping campaign in the entire industry.” Hyperbole, perhaps. And comparisons are hard to come by, because many of these campaigns involve private chat rooms. But the numbers that Elephant Clipping claims are very large. The operation aims to hit 1 billion views a month on videos its clippers post. It often falls short of that goal, but the campaign still regularly accrues hundreds of millions of views a week, according to automated campaign updates, which could not be independently verified. Serviuos seems to have been running the campaign for some time: Discord records for Elephant Clipping’s budget go back only to April, but the campaign has been going on for “about a year now,” Serviuos said in a video posted that month.

[Read: ‘We need to do McCarthyism to the tenth power’]

My examination of Elephant Clipping led me to several other, similar clipping campaigns that appeared linked to Serviuos and that all appeared to be pushing conservative content. Another site visible on the server, Monster Lab, displays large clipping-campaign budgets that have now ended. One “political clipping” campaign that ran in February displays a $900,000 budget. Two other campaigns that ran in March and April, which involved making clips of a famous “U.S. political commentator,” also each listed a $900,000 monthly budget. Yet another campaign that ran last month had a $120,000 budget and instructed clippers to post videos edited from the YouTube channel of Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit organization co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk. It also links to a Google Drive folder with videos, mostly of his wife, Erika Kirk, that were uploaded on September 15, 2025, five days after Kirk’s assassination. (Andrew Kolvet, a Turning Point spokesperson, told me that “I can pretty much guarantee we aren’t working with a Latvian company” and that none of the contractors the nonprofit works with are familiar with the clipping campaign.)

A separate Discord server, called US Politics Clipping, is run by a young Norwegian named Anders Wedøe, who runs ClipSon, a Norwegian clipping company. US Politics Clipping links to the same Google Drive as Elephant Clipping. The folder includes videos of figures including Shirley, President Trump, and Vice President Vance, as well as the ESPN sports commentator Stephen A. Smith. US Politics Clipping displays a monthly budget of $125,000, and its users are restricted to posting only clips edited from the videos provided in the Google Drive. Wedøe declined to speak about his business’s involvement in politics.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: servtheclipper / YouTube; Getty.

When I described Elephant Clipping to Whitney Phillips, a professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, she told me, “That’s just social media now.” Phillips was only half-joking. Short-form video clips have become ubiquitous. “This moment is so disorienting. When you’re looking right at something, you don’t have enough information to describe what you’re seeing,” Phillips said. In prior technological cycles, many ads, such as television commercials, were obvious. On social media, many are unlabeled, especially those in the form of short videos, and they sometimes aim to convey the impression of a groundswell that doesn’t exist.

The Discord server doesn’t specify who is paying Elephant Clipping or the other right-leaning political-clipping operations, but Google Drive folders in each of the Serviuos and Wedøe-run campaigns are filled with files uploaded by what appear to be three employees of Enclave & Key, a Las Vegas–based marketing company: Jules Katz, the chief of staff; Benjamin Goodman, a vice president of operations; and Jack O’Hara, the head of media production at an Enclave & Key subsidiary. O’Hara and Katz seem to have uploaded videos to the Google Drive with their company email address. In at least one instance, O’Hara also used what appears to be his personal email address. It’s not specified what role, if any, Enclave & Key plays in the campaigns.

Enclave & Key’s CEO and founder is Blake Wynn, the 26-year-old nephew of the billionaire and conservative mega-donor Steve Wynn. (ClipSon runs a clipping campaign for Steve Wynn with a $10,000 monthly budget, which directs participants to a Google Drive of videos seemingly uploaded by Goodman.) Enclave & Key’s services include connecting influencers to brands, organizing branding events, and other types of marketing, according to the company website.

When I reached out to Blake Wynn with a list of questions, he responded that “there are a number of inaccuracies” but declined to offer further clarification and didn’t follow through on an invitation to talk. Enclave & Key told me in an emailed statement that “news has been clipped and shared for generations” and described itself as an “American company engaged in a routine, longstanding and lawful practice, despite attempts to sensationalize it by invoking high-profile conservative names and portray it as something nefarious.” Steve Wynn didn’t respond to a request for comment. Shortly after I first reached out to both Wynns, Enclave & Key, and others involved in the campaigns, the deletions started.

By Thursday afternoon, video folders for clippers that had been uploaded to a Google Drive by Katz and O’Hara had disappeared, though the same files were then posted by Goodman, who used an email address not linked to Enclave & Key. The Discord channels for US Politics Clipping and Elephant Clipping were also delisted from the publicly visible campaigns in the ClipSon and ClipIt Discords. The campaigns were still visible on Monster Lab, but descriptions explaining the purpose of each campaign were gone. On Friday morning, Enclave & Key Google Drives for the campaigns were taken down as well.

Blake Wynn has connections beyond his uncle in the conservative mediasphere. During a November 2025 interview on the sports-focused podcast Bring the Juice, he said that he and Enclave & Key “do a lot of work in politics.” Wynn also said that he regularly speaks with FBI Director Kash Patel, and that he was good friends with Kirk. In the same podcast, Wynn recounted sitting next to Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Election Night in 2024, alongside Elon Musk, UFC CEO Dana White, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s friend and special envoy. In the past several years, he’s posted pictures of himself on Instagram at small gatherings at the White House and at Mar-a-Lago, alongside the Kirks and Tulsi Gabbard, the former director of national intelligence.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Bryan Steffy / Getty.

Clipping campaigns may lack transparency, but they likely are legal. “There’s no clear-cut disclosure rules for these types of campaigns,” Saurav Ghosh, a campaign-finance expert at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy nonprofit, told me. “This seems like a clear case of why we need more transparency rules for digital content so badly.”

Elephant Clipping has some areas that are out of bounds, for reasons that aren’t made clear. Clippers are instructed not to post videos of the journalist Megyn Kelly, the commentators Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or the anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, among others. Banned subjects include the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the cryptocurrencies that members of the Trump family have promoted. In the Turning Point USA campaign, clippers are barred from posting videos of Candace Owens, who has become an Erika Kirk antagonist.

Clippers are also prohibited from telling people to “vote for” or “vote against” individual candidates or causes and cannot suggest that viewers “donate” specific causes. It’s possible, experts told me, that these limits are intended to avoid triggering campaign-finance regulations that would require the funder behind the campaign to be identified or to avoid content-moderation rules on social-media platforms. Two sub-campaigns in the Discord offer extra money for clippers to post favorable videos about Vivek Ramaswamy—a GOP candidate for Ohio governor—and Gabbard. Serviuos also manages clipping campaigns for the conservative influencers Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder. Both campaigns are listed on Monster Lab with $30,000 budgets for last month, and Crowder’s campaign also links to an Enclave & Key–connected Google Drive. (Neither Shapiro nor Crowder responded to requests for comment.)

[Read: The intellectual right is mad at the mess it’s made]

Blake Wynn claims to have met with both Ramaswamy and Gabbard. He said during his interview on Bring the Juice that he’d shared a car with Ramaswamy as a part of Trump’s 2024 Election Night victory motorcade. Last year, when Gabbard became director of national intelligence, Wynn posted pictures of himself with her at the swearing-in ceremony, along with a caption that read in part: “I don’t think this will be my last time in the Oval Office with YOU!” Gabbard resigned in June. (Ramaswamy and Gabbard didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

A decade after political interference on social media involving overseas actors first became a major issue, the pattern is repeating as the midterms approach. In 2018, Philip Howard, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, called attempts to influence elections via social media “the new normal.” Elephant Clipping and its related campaigns show just how prescient he was.

The Guard That Won’t Be Changing

2026-09-01T21:01:28-04:00

Many Democrats of a certain age took the same message from the party’s 2024 debacle: Voters are sick of the old guard and craving younger, more aggressive leaders. Better to retire on your own terms than suffer the fate of Joe Biden, forced to stand down from his reelection campaign after a public humiliation. Nancy Pelosi, the 86-year-old former speaker, announced her exit from the House, as did her longtime lieutenant, 87-year-old Steny Hoyer. Senators Dick Durbin (81) and Jeanne Shaheen (79) passed up reelection bids this year, and so, too, did two senators merely in their late 60s.

Senator Ed Markey, 80, heeded no such warning, and evidently, he didn’t need to. The Massachusetts Democrat is one of just two current senators whose tenures in Congress date to the presidency of Gerald Ford. But tonight, the oldest Democratic senator on the ballot this year trounced his much younger primary opponent, Representative Seth Moulton. The AP called the race a half hour after polls closed, with Markey leading by nearly 50 points.

In a race that pitted ideology against age, Massachusetts Democrats opted for a progressive stalwart who will be 86 at the end of another six-year term over a more moderate 47-year-old challenger. Moulton, an Iraq War veteran who is concluding his sixth term in the House, moved left to appeal to a statewide primary electorate. But he could not hope to outflank Markey, who won support from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Instead, Moulton urged voters to embrace “a new generation of leadership” and argued that he could more effectively fight for liberal causes than an incumbent in the twilight of his career.

Markey had already faced that kind of challenge before, and won. Six years ago, he handily defeated then-Representative Joe Kennedy III, a grandson of Robert F. Kennedy who contended that the incumbent, after so many decades in office, was no longer up to the task. Young progressives, unimpressed with what remained of the Kennedy aura and appreciative of Markey’s record championing the Green New Deal, rallied to Markey’s side. But that race preceded Biden’s flameout in 2024 and the reckoning over the Democratic Party’s gerontocracy.

Some Massachusetts Democrats believed that Markey could be newly vulnerable, especially if a popular progressive such as Representative Ayanna Pressley, who is 52, decided to challenge him. Mary Anne Marsh, a longtime Democratic strategist in the state, told me that after seeing the reception Pressley received at a party convention last year, she became convinced that “if Ayanna runs, she wins.” But Pressley opted to run for reelection to the House, leaving Moulton to challenge Markey.

Moulton has never lacked ambition—he led a failed bid to oust Pelosi as party leader in 2018 and waged a short-lived presidential campaign the following year—but he’s neither as progressive as Pressley nor as well liked. He built a reputation as a moderate in the House Democratic caucus, and after President Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in 2024, Moulton angered many on the left by accusing his party of being “afraid” to say that transgender athletes should not play women’s sports. He has since offered a partial apology to the transgender community, but the line became fodder for Markey, who said that he’d thrown “trans kids under the bus.” The issue was emblematic of Moulton’s struggle to convince progressives in Massachusetts that he shared their values. “He’s tried to become a progressive, but he does it by defining progressive in a way that nobody believes,” Marsh said. “He tried to become something that he’s not.”

The Massachusetts race was a rare Democratic primary this year in which U.S. policy toward Israel did not become a flash point, as both candidates criticized Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and opposed new military aid to Israel. (Moulton announced last year that he would return donations from AIPAC.)

Both public polling and Markey’s internal surveys showed a closer race until earlier this summer, when the incumbent began to pull away. A Markey adviser told me that voters had not really tuned in to the campaign yet, and media attention was focused on higher-profile Democratic primaries elsewhere. Markey’s age also did not become a big factor, perhaps because the years since 2020 have been kinder to him than they were to Biden. His support reflected a frequently overlooked nuance in the debate over whether the party needs new leadership: Older progressive leaders, particularly the 84-year-old Sanders, remain popular. “There’s a difference between being old and being part of the old guard,” the Markey adviser, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said. “Younger voters love Ed Markey, younger voters love Bernie Sanders, younger voters love Elizabeth Warren, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that they take younger voters seriously.”

Moulton tried to align Markey with a Democratic establishment that he said has failed to deliver progressive wins. He frequently invoked the name of Senator Chuck Schumer, vowing to oppose the New Yorker if he seeks to remain the Democratic leader. And Moulton even accused Markey of having ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, an attack that, according to Marsh, backfired so badly that it might have sealed Moulton’s defeat. (Markey denied any affiliation with Epstein.)

In the end, Massachusetts Democrats preferred Markey’s progressivism over Moulton’s relative youth. Markey might have been helped by the fact that the stakes in this primary were not as high as they were elsewhere this year—and certainly much lower than when the party pushed Biden to withdraw in 2024. Massachusetts is not in danger of going Republican in November. Democratic voters wanted a trusted fighter to wage battle against Trump for the next two years and—they hope—for transformative progressive policies in the four years after that. They didn’t seem to care much that the fighter they chose happens to be 80 years old.

The Singularity Is Not What It Seems

2026-09-01T20:16:00-04:00

One evening in early August, Sam Stowers and several neighbors packed into an apartment near San Francisco’s Alamo Square and pondered the beginning of the end.

Stowers and his guests, many of whom work in the AI industry, were gathered to watch a newly released YouTube video in which two OpenAI researchers divulged new details about an alarming cybersecurity breach. Perhaps this would have been an odd way to spend a weeknight were they not in San Francisco, in a neighborhood that is filled with entrepreneurs and programmers who obsessively follow every twist and turn in AI’s capabilities. Stowers is an AI-software engineer and not, in any traditional sense, a doomer. But when he first saw reports that OpenAI models had autonomously hacked into the tech company Hugging Face, he told us, he recognized it immediately as a “holy shit, it’s happening kind of a moment.”

For Stowers, the incident had all of the hallmarks of a worst-case scenario: AI models launching sophisticated hacks over the course of days, in coordination with one another and without their human creators’ knowledge. In the YouTube video, OpenAI’s researchers revealed that the company’s programs had started conspiring in May. There were perhaps hundreds of bots in the hacking swarm. In theory, these bots are trained to be honest and helpful and to prioritize humanity’s best interests, but not a single one warned human staff at OpenAI that something was amiss. “What do we do?” Stowers said. “There are no great answers.”

The mood has shifted in the Bay. The exuberance of “You can see the future first in San Francisco” has been replaced with an abiding unease. “I expect the internet to go down kind of soon,” Elliot Callender, an AI-safety activist who is part of a small group that has been protesting daily outside OpenAI’s headquarters, told us recently. He said that he is planning to sell his car for cash and gold and that he is advising family members to purchase three months’ worth of food and survival gear off a list that he generated using Claude.

Callender is an extreme case, but not by much. Last week, Bill Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay on the dangers of AI. “Anyone who analogizes AI as a technology to other technologies is missing that this time is different,” he told our colleague Hanna Rosin. Over the weekend, the popular AI podcaster Dwarkesh Patel described the OpenAI hacking swarm as the rise and fall of “three consecutive secret AI civilizations.” Gates and Patel share a prevailing concern that the worst-case future has arrived before most people even knew to anticipate that it might be coming at all.

This fear has not been helped by the fact that AI companies appear to be willfully ignorant of their bots’ worst behavior. OpenAI said that it hadn’t noticed that its agents were conspiring to hack another company until the swarm hacked another company. Anthropic’s bots caused similar incidents; the company reported that it hadn’t launched a rigorous review to identify such behaviors until after OpenAI started talking about the Hugging Face hack. Cybersecurity experts, terrified of what else might be happening that AI labs are either missing or failing to disclose, are issuing dire prophecies. “The empire is going to fall, all we can do at this point is try to shorten the dark ages and reduce the chaos,” Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Yahoo and Meta, wrote recently in reference to how AI-powered hacks will affect the internet. His view is becoming the consensus among cybersecurity experts.

While the possibility of cyber apocalypse hovers in the background, smaller fractures appear in everyday life. Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly creating an AI “twin” of himself so that Meta employees can feel better connected to their boss (by chatting with robot Zuckerberg). Congressional staffers are training AI models to write in their lawmaker’s voice. Students submit AI-written papers, and teachers return AI-written feedback. Harvard Business School is selling instructional videos that use AI avatars. Roku launched a 24/7 AI-slop channel. Low-quality AI-generated prose is being unabashedly circulated by some of the most respected publications in the world. At the same time, accusations of AI writing are being hurled every minute on social media—a detection arms race powered by imperfect AI software.

Anything and everything could be a lie; you might be arguing with, confiding in, or falling in love with a machine. All of these AI-enabled disorientations, each dizzying in their own right, are adding up to something bigger and weirder: This is how things are. Whether you believe that Silicon Valley is building a god or that large swaths of the economy are swept up in a mass delusion, some version of the AI future long promised by self-described “builders” in San Francisco has formed beneath our feet. Whatever it is, we’re in it now.

The defining feature of this moment is a loss of control. Panic emanating from AI researchers, resentment felt by average Americans—all of it is part of the AI crunch. This crunch has arrived in large part because the growth of the AI industry has become so closely entwined with America’s economy; the technology is everywhere, insisting upon itself as an engine of productivity and prosperity. According to one estimate, AI expenditures have accounted for one-third of U.S. GDP growth this year. Tech and AI-infrastructure stocks and spending have buoyed the S&P 500 such that the United States is now, in essence, an Nvidia-state. And there’s also the hundreds of billions of dollars of debt being used by Silicon Valley to fuel its data-center build-out, which has sent jitters across private-equity firms and bond markets alike.

The decisions of many leaders in charge of this technology appear subsumed by an unstoppable, almost game-theoretic logic. The upsides of AI are too immense for any firm or investor in Silicon Valley to miss out on; more important, the consequences—geopolitical or otherwise—of allowing any rival to realize those benefits first are so grave that every tech company will do anything it can to get ahead. SpaceX, before going public, wrote in official filings that its future revenue opportunity was $28.5 trillion, largely because of AI—that is, nearly as much as the U.S.’s entire gross domestic product. Anthropic, as it prepares for its own public offering, will reportedly claim potential revenues of more than $30 trillion.

The AI industry is building—and, if anything, accelerating—to keep pace with its ambitions. Companies have planned data centers that will suck up as much power as America’s largest cities. They have Donald Trump’s backing: Yesterday, the president posted on Truth Social that communities will be “backwards and poor” if they fail to “let Data Reign.” His administration plans in a few months to approve the construction of the largest fossil-fuel power plant in the nation’s history—it will generate as much electricity as nine large nuclear reactors—to power a mega data center for OpenAI.

This is not what most Americans want. Three-quarters of them oppose a data center being built near where they live. The negative sentiment is hard to understate: There is very little else that three-quarters of the country agrees on. And much of the outrage seems to stem from a pervasive sense of agency slipping away. A person cannot control how chatbots reshape their workplace, their school, or their relationships. Town residents lose control over the empty lot in the area being converted into a data center. Even in cases where major data centers are blocked, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that doing so can slow AI progress by only a few hours or days—and that’s assuming the data center won’t just get built elsewhere. At this point, it can feel like no individual person, organization, or government is really steering the technology’s development, not because machines have displaced humans but because so many humans have already chosen to step aside.

AI labs promise a future in which human beings are “in the loop,” empowered by machines they oversee. The reality seems to be the opposite. Following the Hugging Face hack, OpenAI facilitated an audit by outside AI researchers at two AI-safety organizations, METR and Redwood Research. But because of the scale of the data and the apparent time pressure, the two teams conducted most of their audit by relying on reports generated by still other bots—reports that, according to one of the human auditors, “were often missing key details, wrong, overconfident, or really hard to understand.” Put another way: Humans didn’t understand why a swarm of AI agents had gone rogue, so they investigated the problem using another swarm of agents that they didn’t fully understand. Such fumbling around in the dark is a hallmark of the industry; the research cycle is so fast that more AI development (even ostensibly responsible development) demands outsourcing more work and understanding to the models themselves.

OpenAI’s own technical report of the Hugging Face hack—an investigation also heavily reliant on AI models—resulted in proposed solutions such as “training models to be more honest.” Last month, in a stated effort to tamp down its models’ growing security risks, the company announced that it had instituted a two-week pause on some of its model training. OpenAI was quick to clarify, though, that this was “not a pause on all research, training, or customer-facing products.”

In response to a request for comment on the hack, a spokesperson for OpenAI, which has a corporate partnership with The Atlantic, pointed us to the announcement of the pause and related new safety measures. In July, OpenAI and Anthropic endorsed a petition signed by employees of both companies requesting that the U.S. government take efforts to “deliberately pace” AI development. The two companies have yet to formally coordinate on any broader, long-term efforts to establish such a slowdown mechanism. A few days ago, OpenAI restarted a major training run for a future powerful model. Anthropic released two new models today.

In an interview late last month, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said that there are “two big risks” he is most worried about with AI. One is “a loss of control, where AI somehow just becomes too powerful in a way that we can’t guarantee the control we want.” The other is that “power gets too centralized” and “you have one company or model or person with too much power.” Somehow, both of these opposing risks appear to be coming true. OpenAI, Anthropic, and their competitors continue to accumulate influence over a technology they’re speeding toward uncertain ends.

Eleven years ago, when Altman was running a start-up accelerator and OpenAI did not yet exist, he published a two-part blog post about machine intelligence that offered his interpretation of a forthcoming singularity—a term for machine intelligence accelerating beyond human comprehension. Altman argued that the singularity would bring chaos, even destruction: “Generally, the arc of technology has been about reducing randomness and increasing our control over the world. At some point in the next century, we are going to have the most randomness ever injected into the system.” Since Altman has risen to the helm of arguably the world’s largest and most influential AI company, his tone has softened. The tipping point has arrived, he declared in a blog post last year—but, as it turned out, this was a “gentle singularity.” He wrote that “living through it will feel impressive but manageable.”

There’s been more and more talk of late about the singularity. Some people within the AI industry feel that such a moment will be achieved through “recursive self-improvement,” or RSI, in which models figure out how to better themselves in perpetuity. Many true believers seem convinced that this moment has nearly arrived; the Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark predicted earlier this summer that RSI would likely commence by 2028. Recently, in a letter to investors, the payment-processing company Stripe wrote, “We decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity.” (Tellingly, the company defined the inflection point in economic terms: “a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation.”)

For Altman, the singularity appears to be more of a rhetorical tool than a discrete technological demarcation. As with reaching AGI—or artificial general intelligence, the point at which AI’s cognitive powers match or fully supersede most humans’—the singularity is something of a moving goalpost. It is at once a goal to chase, a marketing tactic, and a fuzzy-enough idea that its definition can change depending on the person. The futurist Ray Kurzweil has written that the “key idea underlying the impending Singularity is that the pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace.” The answer to the question When will we know whether we’ve reached the singularity? seems to be: You’ll know it when you see it.

So … do you see it? It’s hard to argue that a defining feature of being alive in the AI boom is the notion that this technology is accelerating, sometimes in its capabilities but almost always in its adoption and colonization of our institutions and culture. The runaway-train feeling of AI evangelism, the ways in which it is weirdening our media, our politics, and our relationships, is significant enough that people have recruited the term psychosis to describe it. And truly, it’s hard to look at the state of things from any vantage point and not feel a bit insane. If you believe that AI agents are banding together for the rise and fall of numerous micro-civilizations inside server racks, you probably feel that the world is spinning off its axis. If you believe that a few thousand technologists have bet the future of the world economy on a quasi-religious belief that an intellectual-property-abuse machine will become sentient and, as a result, future generations of children might grow up illiterate, then you probably also feel quite unmoored.

We need language with which to describe this moment. The singularity is a useful, malleable tool for the industry that wishes to bring it about. For Altman, it is scary and imposing from afar, and then, conveniently, gentle from up close. Perhaps, then, for the rest of us, it is worth co-opting the term. Take Kurzweil’s definition of the singularity, in which he argues, “This epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.” (He also looks forward to uploading his brain to the cloud.) Our current large language models are not conscious or superintelligent, but their widespread and often uncritical deployment has upended many elements that once gave our life meaning, forcing people to ask, frequently with considerable resentment: What, in this new world, is a human for?

The singularity is a flattering term for technologists. Even if the future is apocalyptic, it has come about, in the techno-utopian version, because they’ve built God in the machine. But what if there’s nothing flattering about any of this? What if the singularity is not some technological tipping point, brought about by human genius, but a human tipping point? An unforced error, driven by hubris, greed, and the fear of missing out? And what if it’s here right now? This singularity isn’t coming at the hands of a higher form of intelligence. Nothing about this technology is inevitable. It is thrilling, terrifying, and ultimately convenient to assign agency and then blame to machines. But today’s chaos was not “injected into the system” by technology, as Altman wrote more than a decade ago; the destruction is the system. It’s not God in the machine; it’s us.

Why the Flock Backlash Has Gotten So Intense

2026-09-01T18:03:00-04:00

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As corporate names go, Flock is cleverly flexible. It evokes the many cameras that compose the company’s surveillance system and also a group of sheep, protected by a watchful shepherd. The recent backlash against the company, however, more closely resembles a flight of starlings, seeming to erupt out of nowhere and move as one unified body.

Flock Safety’s cameras are a network of automated license-plate readers (ALPRs), which snap images of passing cars and feed them into an AI-powered-data system. The company has contracts with police departments and government agencies as well as with some private companies. The crime-fighting power of such a tool isn’t hard to grasp: It allows law enforcement to track vehicles’ movements over any area where the readers exist. The privacy concerns about such a dragnet are just as easy to fathom.

The company has existed for nearly a decade and has been growing steadily in recent years. But something has turned in the past couple of months. People are pushing cities to cancel contracts and in some cases have taken matters into their own hands. Individuals have clandestinely sawed down the poles that hold cameras or splashed paint over them. In one notable example, a Florida man obstructed the devices simply by holding up cardboard placards, a low-tech solution to a high-tech challenge. The pushback against Flock, like the pushback against data centers, does not have a clear partisan bent. Critics include some of the most obnoxious voices on both the right and the left (Tucker Carlson, Hasan Piker), and defenders include technocratic wonks of different political persuasions.

Politicians are catching up. Yesterday, the Florida Department of Transportation announced that it was revoking permits for ALPRs on all state roads. (This means that cameras on locally maintained thoroughfares are still allowed.) On Thursday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, halted state funding for Flock. An anti-surveillance advocacy group has tallied 169 canceled contracts with Flock so far this year—90 of them last month alone.

Labeling the anger at Flock as a reaction to ever-present surveillance in contemporary society seems accurate, but this doesn’t explain why it’s happening right now. Not only has Flock been around for some time, but ALPRs are even older. My colleague Conor Friedersdorf was sounding the alarm a decade ago. “Your diminished privacy is their product. And the police are their customers,” he wrote in January 2016.

Some anger focuses on governments that spend huge amounts (including money obtained through opioid settlements whose funds were earmarked for community aid) on technology during a moment of economic worry. More damaging to Flock’s reputation has been a series of cases of police officers allegedly abusing their access to the system to stalk people, typically current or former love interests. (Flock says that such uses are “unacceptable” and has created some guardrails around data access.) Writing in The Atlantic last month, Charles Fain Lehman argued that Flock can be a valuable tool and merely needs better regulation to address bad behavior and maximize privacy: “In our surveillance-saturated society, police cameras can help make the criminal-justice system both fairer and less punitive—if we let them.”

That seems to beg the question. Flock is useful because it is ubiquitous. Reforms such as strict data-retention limits would only marginally answer privacy concerns, and anything more drastic would undermine the system’s efficacy. As National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke noted, no one doubts that Flock works. “Lots of things would reduce crime if implemented,” he wrote. “That doesn’t mean that those things are necessarily a good idea in a free republic.” Impositions on privacy to reduce crime are a particularly tough sell when crime is dropping sharply: Recently released FBI statistics show that violent crime dropped nearly 10 percent last year, part of a consistent trend since it spiked in 2020 and 2021. Preliminary statistics suggest that 2026 might be even safer. When safety is a less urgent concern, people are less willing to sacrifice privacy for security.

Moreover, the Flock backlash fits into a broader moment of anger—at corporations in general, and at tech companies and artificial intelligence in particular. “Americans feel they have less and less control over their own lives, and they increasingly blame large corporations,” the Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar recently wrote. Anxiety about AI and surveillance is big and abstract, and the companies and people pushing these anxieties are far away from most Americans. Polls show widespread apprehension about the growth of AI—a Gallup poll this summer found that about half of Americans think AI will do as much harm as it will good; another 39 percent said that it’s mostly bad. But people don’t have a lot of ways to communicate those fears.

Flock cameras, like data centers, provide a physical, local manifestation of this larger complex, against which people can direct their disgust. In other words, Flock protests are reactions to privacy concerns and particular alleged police abuses, but they’re also a way for the public to channel frustrations that it has few avenues to express. You could say that it’s a way of killing two birds with one stone.

Related:

In defense of Flock
An unprecedented threat to privacy (From 2016)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

A whistleblower says that the U.S. Postal Service’s planned system to verify that mail-in ballots go only to citizens is flawed and has not been fully tested. The system, whose use is currently blocked by a federal court, was created because of a March executive order; the anonymous federal official who filed the complaint alleges that if even one ballot cannot be verified, the system could reject the entire batch.
The United States launched strikes on Iran for the second time in three days, targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to U.S. Central Command. The military said that the strikes were in response to Iran’s attempted attacks on ships and U.S. forces in the region.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll submitted his resignation yesterday to President Trump after months of tension with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Driscoll had raised concerns with Hegseth about Army readiness and modernization efforts and about Hegseth’s firing of senior generals.

Evening Read

A woman watches a livestream of Lindsay Clancy’s trial outside the courthouse. (Alexandra Howland for The Atlantic)

The Women Obsessed With Lindsay Clancy

By Stephanie McCrummen

On one of the final days of the trial, dozens of women streamed into the back of a Plymouth, Massachusetts, courtroom, filling two long rows of wooden benches. They stood and watched the judge and jury take their seats. Then they strained for a view as a nurse wheeled in the defendant, Lindsay Clancy, who has admitted to strangling her three young children to death in her suburban Boston home in January 2023, before swallowing prescription pills, slashing her wrists and neck, and throwing herself out of a bedroom window headfirst.

Seeing her there in a wheelchair, one woman crossed herself and whispered, “Please, God.” As an officer gaveled the court into session, others pulled out notebooks, folders, and scraps of paper. “WHY,” Marta Quijano wrote as a prosecutor called a psychiatrist to the stand. “Motivation,” she added, starring the word as the doctor began explaining his opinion that Clancy was not in the throes of psychosis on the night of the killings, as her defense has argued, but deeply suicidal and still capable of knowing right from wrong. In the back row, a woman who had flown in from Cleveland shook her head. She had a true-crime novel in her lap and turned to a blank page at the end. “Stupid experts,” she wrote.

Read the full article.

The Backlash Against Polyester Has Gone Too Far

2026-09-01T17:00:00-04:00

Lately, the men of the internet who are obsessed with self-optimization have found a new fixation: their underwear. Many standard pairs use polyester or spandex, or sometimes both. What are they doing to the environment and their bodies, wearing clothes that shed all of those microplastics and leach forever chemicals? They want the underwear of their ancestors—underwear made from natural fibers. On Reddit forums such as r/PlasticFreeLiving and r/SustainableFashion, people trade strategies for breaking up with polyester boxer briefs: “Any recs or leads to find linen cloth for making my own underwear?” one exasperated user wondered. Another wanted recommendations for all-natural underwear that would also be formfitting. He knew about organic cotton and hemp, he explained, but the problem was, they chafed.

Seemingly everyone is interested in natural fibers. Whitney Crutchfield, who teaches textile development at the Fashion Institute of Technology, told me that she first noticed natural-fiber mania brewing among her sustainability-minded students. Then, a year or two ago, she sensed the discourse shifting to regular consumers. Across the internet, people are purging their closets of synthetics, swearing allegiance to only natural fibers from now on. The enthusiasm seems to cut across gender, culture, and politics. “I need my workout clothes to show my nasty sweat!” the fashion journalist Liana Satenstein wrote last year, praising the emergence of a new generation of natural-fiber workout wear amid posts about French pedicures and vintage Prada thongs. “Make all clothes natural fibers again,” posted Carnivore Aurelius, an anonymous wellness influencer who sells “beef collagen peptides.”

Natural fibers are indeed pretty great. Silk, wool, hemp, linen, cotton, and the like—all of which come directly from either plants or animals—don’t carry the baggage of their artificial competitors. They don’t shed microplastics. They’re generally understood to be biodegradable. And although the research is far from settled, synthetics have been linked to adverse hormonal effects. When I visited the website for a natural-underwear brand, a pop-up asked me what I looked for in my underwear: “Fertility health” and “supporting low T” were among the options.

Natural fibers have also become an easy way to gauge the quality of a garment. Cotton, wool, and linen generally cost more than polyester and acrylic do, and they can look and feel luxurious in a way that many synthetics don’t. The reason finding a decent sweater these days is so hard is that so many of them are blended with synthetics, and one major reason for all of that blending is reduced production costs. Earlier this summer, when Gap released a reimagined version of a classic sweater from the early 2000s, fans revolted. What had originally been a chunky, cotton-blend knit turtleneck was now an entirely synthetic printed mesh. The anti-synthetic zeitgeist has transcended clothing; it is an attitude. Gen Z apparently now uses polyester as an insult meaning “cheap” and “inauthentic.”

But the frenzy has gone too far. Are you really sure it’s always better to buy cotton or wool over a nylon blend? The whole point of man-made fibers is that they can have properties that specifically don’t exist in nature. “There are reasons that these things were produced in the first place,” Crutchfield said. When DuPont unveiled nylon—the world’s first synthetic fiber—to the public at the 1939 World’s Fair, it was a revelation. In the dawning era of synthetics, people would no longer be beholden to the limits of nature; instead, we had chemistry, which was going to free women from the drudgery of endless laundering and usher in an age of universal luxury. This did not, perhaps, play out exactly as one might have hoped, but even today, synthetic fabrics have plenty of benefits.

Synthetics can enhance the performance of a garment, or the feel, or the durability, all of which contribute to a garment’s lifespan. The better it serves its intended purpose, the less likely you are to replace it with something new. A beautiful, all-natural raincoat isn’t an especially virtuous purchase if it doesn’t repel rain. On the whole, clothing with some percentage of man-made fiber requires less care than an item made with wool or silk or linen does—no hand-washing, no ironing, no reason to worry that moths might eat your favorite sweater.

Sometimes, they really are the best materials for the job. The designer Issey Miyake’s famous pleated pieces are polyester because, as one textile expert explained to NPR, their thermoplastic qualities are what helps them keep their shape. Polyester actively repels moisture and dries quickly, which is why it’s used in so much athletic gear. Wool is stronger and more durable when it’s blended with a bit of nylon—not important for sweaters, crucial for hiking socks. A little spandex can help a pair of cotton leggings keep their shape. If we want the forgiving comforts of stretch denim and athleisure, “we have to make peace with the fact that synthetic fibers are going to be incorporated into our clothes,” Nancy Deihl, a fashion historian at NYU, told me. Yes, synthetic clothing can release microplastics—bad—but it isn’t clear how much swapping out your stretch pants does to meaningfully reduce your exposure.

There is another problem with the natural-fiber obsession: Plenty of common fibers are neither synthetic nor natural. Semi-synthetics such as Tencel (the brand name for lyocell), modal, and rayon (otherwise known as bamboo) are made from natural plant material that’s been chemically dissolved and then reconstituted, a process that can be staggeringly toxic or ecologically responsible. Conventional cotton, for example, takes significantly more water to produce than lyocell and modal do.

Further complicating matters, although terms such as organic cotton, regenerative cotton, and recycled cotton tell you something about the production of fibers, they do not tell you something about the quality of a garment. Yarn spun from longer cotton fibers is stronger and wears better than yarn spun from shorter ones, but fiber length is a result of the type of cotton plant, or the growing conditions, or how the fibers have been processed. “You can compare the fiber quality of three different cotton fibers, all making the same exact T-shirt,”—same weight of yarn, same knitting machinery, same pattern, same sewing process—“and those three T-shirts can, depending on fiber quality, last wildly different amounts of time,” Crutchfield said. Fiber quality is one reason a 100 percent cashmere sweater can be $50 or upwards of $500. “You must investigate the context and the nuance,” she told me.

And fiber, natural or otherwise, is only one of a matrix of concerns that determine whether your clothing is ethical and well made. “Synthetics and natural fibers can both last a long time, but it depends on how they’re used, how they’re worn, and the quality of the garment they were made into,” Deihl said. The look and performance of any given garment are products of the fibers but also of the fabric weight, the weave, the cut, the construction, and the care instructions—all of which require at least some knowledge to assess, and none of which is easy to evaluate online.

In a dizzying consumer landscape of infinite options, it is understandable, even admirable, to want some kind of universal rubric to guide your purchasing. This can’t be cost, which may or may not correspond with quality, and there is no single label guaranteeing sustainability or ethics. You probably don’t know where a fiber was farmed and how it was harvested and processed—whether it’s been bleached and how it’s dyed, and the conditions under which a garment has been constructed—and the people selling it might not, either. Fiber content, though, is listed on the label: therefore, natural fibers! But natural isn’t a reliable shorthand for good—no matter how much you pay for your all-cashmere pants.

Trump Meant It Literally When He Said He Was Taking the Oil

2026-09-01T15:48:46-04:00

“We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” Donald Trump said when he announced the capture of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. And lo and behold, it has come to pass.

Trump announced last week that he had made a deal with Venezuela to develop its oil reserves. Well, not so much a “deal” as a payment by Venezuela of tribute at gunpoint. In a social-media post, Trump announced that the oil “is a Gift from Venezuela to the People of the United States.” This is a surprisingly generous offer from a country that is much poorer than the United States and, like most countries, disinclined to hand over its wealth to foreigners as a present.

Venezuela’s elected representatives did not approve this deal, because Venezuela’s representatives have not in fact been elected. The country also did not hold a referendum to approve it. Instead, after capturing Maduro, whom Trump had accurately denounced as a dictator, Trump installed one of Maduro’s cronies, Delcy Rodríguez, to govern in his place, in which capacity she has displayed roughly the same level of respect for democratic norms and civil society as her predecessor.

Trump’s Venezuelan-oil heist has received far less attention than either his ballyhooed promise to avoid foreign wars or his ongoing quagmire in the Persian Gulf. Yet this operation reflects Trump’s foreign-policy instincts in their most nakedly amoral—which is to say, quintessential—form.

[Gisela Salim-Peyer: The hostile corporate takeover of an entire country]

The Trump administration laid the groundwork for its intervention by painting Maduro not only as a despot but also as the leader of a criminal syndicate. The Justice Department indicted Maduro and his allies for having “acted as leaders and managers of the Cartel de Los Soles,” a derisive nickname for the country’s kleptocratic rulers.

Trump, however, apparently viewed regime change as a way to exploit this arrangement rather than transform it. His invasion followed the logic not of an American president promoting democracy or regional security, but of a mobster angry to discover that a small-time crook is running a racket in his territory without giving him a taste.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, The New York Times reported in July, “has become the de facto viceroy of Venezuela, holding sway over a sovereign nation in a way that no American official has since L. Paul Bremer III arrived in Baghdad in 2003 to run U.S.-occupied Iraq.” A salient difference is that Bremer’s occupation was intended to establish the grounds for free and fair elections, which did eventually take place. Trump, in stark contrast, casually told the Times in January that he expects the United States to run Venezuela for years.

The new oil deal makes that outcome more necessary and therefore more likely. Rodríguez has tied herself to a policy that is toxic to both the left and the right sides of Venezuela’s political spectrum. Left-wing Chavismos despise foreign exploitation, and the opposition resents the Chavismos’ corruption. Exposing Rodríguez’s regime to free and fair elections creates a high risk of electing a government dedicated to unwinding Trump’s deal, which gives both her and Trump a strong motive to postpone such voting.

When Trump deposed Maduro, some right-of-center analysts credited him with taking the first step in what they imagined would be a democratization project. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board celebrated the capture as “an act of hemispheric hygiene against a dictator who spread mayhem far and wide,” as did The Washington Post’s (headline: “Justice in Venezuela.”)

Both editorials mixed praise for the operation with caveats that the important work of transitioning to a legitimate government lay ahead, while fretting that Trump was confusing the issue with loose talk about running the country and extracting its oil. “The president often shoots from his hip in these press conferences and would be wise to reconsider,” the Post proposed. “Mr. Trump also talked about ‘the oil’ far too much,” the Journal cautioned, adding, “Sooner rather than later, Venezuela needs another election.”

[Read: The bizarre partnership between the U.S. and Venezuela]

It all sounded a bit like congratulating Michael Corleone for taking a stand against organized crime by murdering the heads of the Five Families, while urging him to clarify his intent to focus the family business on selling olive oil at market price.

Venezuela’s constitution expressly prohibits the sale of its untapped oil reserves to foreign interests. But Trump’s oil deal is designed to survive democratic scrutiny. Its “structure was deliberately intended to bind future Venezuelan governments to the agreement and make it difficult to unwind,” as The Wall Street Journal characterized the explanation given by a source involved in the deal. The Journal’s reporting suggests that Trump’s Venezuelan partners may not hold the highest regard for legal niceties. Alejandro Betancourt, the Venezuelan businessman who leads the private company partnering with the Trump administration, has been investigated for, though not charged with, money laundering. Diego Arria, a former Venezuelan ambassador now in exile in the U.S., told the Journal that the U.S. is working with Venezuelan government figures who are wanted in the U.S. for drug trafficking and other crimes.

They are, in other words, Trump’s kind of partners. The president seems to despise democratically elected leaders (witness his current tantrum against Canada’s prime minister, or his yearslong feuding with South Korea, the European Union, and other erstwhile U.S. allies). He has always gotten along swimmingly with criminals (since his early days engaging in social and business dealings with mobsters in New York) and dictators (such as Vladimir Putin, whom he simply cannot quit). Trump’s favorite brand of partner combines disdain for the law and democratic norms with an absolute dependence on Trump.

Trump has been saying for years that a vital objective in any foreign conflict is to seize the enemy’s oil. Indeed, he has been saying for years that he has been saying this for years. “I’ve been saying it for years. Take the oil,” he told The New York Times in 2016.

Trump has shown time and again that his obsessions, even his most childish and comically sinister-sounding ones, are often quite earnest. In Venezuela, he is finally fulfilling a lifelong scheme.

The Absurdity of New York City’s Pied-à-Terre Tax

2026-09-01T11:25:00-04:00

New York City’s new pied-à-terre tax provokes strong opinions. Supporters argue that the nation’s first tax on luxury second homes will help balance the city’s budget and improve “a fundamentally unfair system” that “hurts working New Yorkers,” as Mayor Zohran Mamdani has put it. Opponents warn that the tax will alienate the rich people who power the city’s economy. Some homeowners fear that the new tax treats them as “guilty until proven resident.”

But Mamdani’s backers and detractors alike are missing the bigger picture. The new tax was created because the city has been spending more than it takes in. That problem has not gone away. Neither has the dysfunctional property-tax system that made the tax so enticing in the first place. New York’s political class would do well to focus on solving these long-term financial challenges before they metastasize into a crisis. By spending political capital on a controversial but largely symbolic policy change, Mamdani has made that task even more difficult.

For more than a decade, New York lawmakers had noodled around with creating a tax on pieds-à-terre, high-end residential units that don’t serve as year-round homes. A pied-à-terre tax, already used in London and Vancouver, was tossed around to fund city government and, later, to shore up the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s perennially strained finances. The idea gained new attention earlier this year as Mamdani stared down a significant budget gap. State lawmakers authorized the tax, which will apply to about 10,000 properties, to help city hall balance this year’s budget. Nonresident owners of condos and co-ops worth at least $1 million or houses worth at least $5 million will owe an extra tax in the neighborhood of 1 percent of their property’s market value.

[Annie Lowrey: Pied-à-temper-tantrum]

The new policy has triggered some overheated reactions. (Mamdani Derangement Syndrome is real.) One pundit described the mere act of listing the properties subject to the tax as “a call to violence,” even though local governments have let the public inspect the official list of property valuations and owners since colonial times. Other critics claim that the tax will cause wealthy New Yorkers to relocate. The revenue raised by the tax “is very little compared to to [sic] the TAXES PAID by the tens of thousands of people who are fleeing the City, never to return,” Donald Trump, a notable pied-à-terre owner, declared on Truth Social. “This dangerous political ‘experiment’ in New York will destroy what was once a great City and State.” In fact, the people subject to the tax can’t leave New York, because they are already, by definition, not residents.

Still, these histrionic critiques are responding to a real shift in New York City politics. Bill de Blasio, for example—nobody’s idea of a fiscal conservative—sought to raise income taxes on the city’s highest earners in order to finance universal prekindergarten. Mayor Mamdani, in contrast, seems to view certain tax increases as virtuous unto themselves. His campaign slogan, “Tax the rich,” was a policy goal, not a mechanism. He unveiled the pied-à-terre-tax proposal with a video singling out the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin and his Central Park South condo.

Mamdani’s approach makes for good political theater. But the drama around the pied-à-terre tax, along with its turbulent implementation, has distracted from the underlying problem that made co-ops and condos so attractive in the first place: their inequitable tax treatment.

Under state law, the property tax on these units isn’t based on their market value, but rather on the city’s estimate of the rent that a similar unit would fetch if it were an apartment. The result is that many are wildly undertaxed. A Bloomberg analysis of pre-COVID data found that the median sales price of a New York City condo was more than five times the city’s property-tax valuation. The journalists found an example of a Bronx home with an effective tax rate more than 200 times higher than one in Brooklyn. One of the more compelling examples of the disconnect between property values and property taxes was the condo that Mamdani cited in his video: The city considers Griffin’s unit, which sold for $238 million in 2019, to have a market value of just $15.5 million (and a taxable value, a separate city calculation, of less than $7 million).

The gulf between assessed and market value is just one issue. New York City, with the state’s blessing, has since the 1980s used gimmicks to shield homeowners (otherwise known as voters) from property-tax increases. But the benefits have flowed more to some properties than to others. By law, the share of tax paid by each of four classes of properties (essentially: single-family homes, apartment buildings, utilities, and commercial or industrial sites) can change only by a certain amount in a year. This creates huge distortions. Over decades, the restriction has had the practical effect of preventing the property tax on homes in higher-demand neighborhoods from rising as quickly as their market value. That has left certain areas with significantly lower effective property-tax rates and smaller tax bills. One of the most regressive consequences of this system is the way it translates into higher gas and electric bills: The city has raised property taxes on utilities knowing they would pass the expense along to ratepayers.

The pied-à-terre tax does nothing to address these issues. State and city officials could have put a dent in the city’s property-tax inequities, and even produced a windfall for the city, by simplifying the city tax system in a way that makes all property-tax bills more reflective of property values. That would mean allowing the share of tax coming from different types of property to shift with market conditions, and ending the different tax treatment of residences. None of this can, or should, happen overnight—the system was highly dysfunctional before Mamdani was even born—but the mayor has missed an opportunity to make a down payment on a generations-overdue reform.

The pied-à-terre tax came into being only because the city faced a cash crunch and turned to onetime moves to deal with it (most notably postponing more than $2 billion a year in pension payments). Unfortunately, it still faces one: The tax is expected to cover less than one-half of 1 percent of the city’s budget. Even if it raises $500 million next year, as the Mamdani administration hopes, the city will still have a $6.4 billion gap in the 2028 fiscal-year budget, which the mayor must present this winter. Mamdani’s focus has generally been on the revenue side of the ledger, instead of looking critically at what the city already gets for its spending. That strategy is unsustainable. Both the city and, to an even greater extent, the state rely on volatile income-tax revenues that can drop suddenly in a recession or an emergency. New York City’s income-tax receipts plunged 21 percent from its 2009 fiscal year to its 2010 fiscal year, and didn’t recover until 2013. The city doesn’t have anywhere close to the level of reserves it would need to weather a similar downturn without deep and sudden spending cuts.

[Marc Novicoff: A mediocre public-school education for just $40,000 a pupil]

Putting New York City’s finances on a stable long-term footing is impossible without reining in spending. The city’s biggest expense by far is its public-school system. Enrollment has fallen 17 percent citywide since 2015, but officials bristle at the prospect of consolidation. Might the mayor perhaps shoot a TikTok video in front of the city’s half-empty schools? Beyond the education system, the city gives its workforce, including retirees, no-cost health-insurance coverage. (Even the state government requires employees to pay at least 12 percent toward their coverage.) Put another way, city taxpayers absorbed this century’s explosive growth in health-care costs in a way few other employers did. They did this even as unionized employees enjoyed automatic pay raises—which continue even after their next contract expires, regardless of the city’s financial condition.

Mamdani has tapped agency “savings officers,” but his failure to push for structural changes, either to the property-tax system or to the budget itself, has appropriately left people wondering how, not if, they’ll next be asked to pay the city more. If he doesn’t do more to stretch every dollar in the good times, he risks finding that the bad times will arrive sooner—and last longer.

*Illustration Sources: Heritage Art / Heritage Images / Getty; Sepia Times / Universal Images Group / Getty; Michael M. Santiago / Getty.

Pied-à-Temper-Tantrum

2026-09-01T09:58:00-04:00

If you were trying to identify the spiciest policy affecting the fewest Americans, you’d struggle to do better than New York City’s pied-à-terre tax.

This spring, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul agreed on a plan to target extremely valuable homes. As of this fiscal year, homeowners will have to pay up to 6.5 percent tax on condos and co-ops assessed at more than $1 million; and up to 1.3 percent on multifamily houses assessed at more than $5 million. The out-of-town owners of a $10 million single-family home would pay $80,000 a year, on top of standard property taxes, for instance. Although the new fee is expected to hit only about 11,000 of the city’s 3.7 million housing units, it has dominated nightly newscasts and fronted tabloids (PIED-A-TERROR, HOLD IT RIGHT TERRE!) for weeks. A city-council hearing on the policy stretched for hours, with resident after resident complaining that it was confusing, unfair, invasive, confiscatory.

New Yorkers have every right to criticize the rollout, which left a lot to be desired. Still, this controversy is a tempest in a walk-in closet. The pied-à-terre tax is a sound progressive option for a city with an excruciating housing shortage and obscene wealth inequality. More than that, it is a policy meant to make the city a city—populated by, enjoyed by, and built for people.

Right now New York does not always feel that way. The brutal cost of housing has strained or wholly priced out many artists and care workers, retirees and young parents, blue-collar types and entrepreneurs.

[Ken Girardin: The Absurdity of New York City’s Pied-à-Terre Tax]

When wealthy families actually live in the units they own, they invest in the city in many ways. They pay income taxes. They buy bacon-egg-and-cheeses at the deli down the block. They volunteer at nonprofits. They eat at restaurants. They put their kids in school. If they don’t live in their units, they pay property taxes without making extensive use of city services. Still, they contribute to rising housing prices without paying income taxes, spending at local businesses, or filling classrooms with children. They turn homes into safety-deposit boxes, “zombifying” their neighborhoods. No vacancies, no residents—it’s not a great scenario for a city as wonderful and in demand as New York.

Local legislators have kicked around the idea of taxing pieds-à-terre for years. At first glance, the structure seems to hit apartments owned by members of the upper middle class harder than it hits brownstones owned by billionaires. In reality, the different rates are meant to equalize the burden. The city values houses by looking at comparable sales, yet state law prevents it from valuing apartments the same way; instead, buildings are appraised by estimating the amount of income they would generate if their units were rented out. The calculation tends to work out to a fraction of the actual market value, particularly for expensive units, hence the higher tax rate and lower threshold. (A condo that sold for $4 million would likely be assessed at about $800,000.) In two years, the city is expected to update its assessment system and apply a uniform set of rates.

It’s confusing, and the complex tax has gotten a baffling rollout. The city’s Department of Finance published a roster of close to 1 million properties, along with their estimated market value and owner’s name. Anna Wintour, Cynthia Nixon, Deepak Chopra, Darren Aronofsky, and two city-council members were on the rolls. So were tens of thousands of middle-class homeowners, some of whom felt like Mamdani had personally doxxed them—even though property records were already public and city hall was legally obliged to publish the list.

The DOF then sent 17,000 homeowners a letter asking them to prove that they were residents or to get ready to pay up. At the city-council hearing, an Upper East Side retiree described getting a notice saying that he might owe $52,000 on top of his current property-tax bill next year. “I filed an exemption,” he said. “The point is the government is assuming that I’m guilty unless I can prove myself to be innocent.”

[Annie Lowrey: How the richest people in America avoid paying taxes]

He has a point. To prove residency, the city is asking homeowners to furnish a federal or state tax return, a valid driver’s license, or a voter-identification card. These are records the government already has. Then again, filing for an exemption isn’t exactly hard. It certainly isn’t as hard as registering a kid for school, applying for food stamps, or purchasing a $5 million townhouse. And if city residents do not manage to get their paperwork done by the September exemption deadline, they will still be able to file an appeal with the tax commission at any point in the next six months.

Concerns about the validity of the law have snuck through the turnstile along with concerns about the technicalities of the law. At the city-council hearing, a former union leader praised the politicians for asking the super-rich to pay their fair share. Still, he said, he worries about a friend who had purchased a townhouse four decades ago, and is now retired and living in the South. The friend “kept his brownstone here so that he can keep in touch with his kids and his grandkids,” he said. “It’s not only billionaires that are concerned. It’s the everyday, hardworking New Yorkers who’ve dedicated themselves to making this city work.”

But, remember, the tax on brownstones applies exclusively to homes valued at more than $5 million. Is this friend really a hardworking New Yorker who had the good fortune to buy low? Or is he a millionaire who actually lives in Boca and thus might benefit from Florida’s homestead exemption? Such policies reduce or eliminate property taxes on primary residences, and may also protect them in bankruptcy proceedings. They’re exceedingly common. And they’re an analogue to New York’s pied-à-terre tax. (This specific kind of fee is sui generis in the United States, as far as I can tell, but popular, in both senses of the word, in foreign jurisdictions. Vancouver and Paris are among the cities imposing them, without obvious ill effect.) Plus, the former union leader’s friend does not necessarily have to pay the tax. He can reside in the brownstone. He can let one of his kids or grandkids live there. He can rent it out. Or he can sell it to someone who wants to live here.

Any of those choices would benefit New York, in the form of tax revenue, foot traffic, consumer demand, housing supply, or community investment. That’s the thing about the pied-à-terre tax. Instead of approaching the city as a collection of investments and assets, the policy treats the city as a collection of people—Chanel-clad couples, T-ball-playing preschoolers, subway breakdancers, financiers, socialist politicians, and high-net-worth investors—who are welcome to be part of the city too.

Woodstock, Lilith Fair, and Taco Bell Rolled Into One

2026-09-01T07:30:00-04:00

Early Saturday afternoon at the Daisy Chain Fields festival, in Irvine, California, the 25-year-old singer Eli twirled in a tank top emblazoned with a cartoon guitar while singing songs whose plasticky violins recalled the kind of music played on the Disney Channel in 2004. Dancers waved poles with dresses attached to them as if they were flags. She took out her phone, whose case was shaped like a cute bear, and read some thoughts she’d jotted down.

“This journal entry is to show you my fundamental belief that we must redistribute wealth,” she said. “We must love our neighbors no matter what they believe or don’t. We must unite with each other and radicalize. Eat the identity politics that deceive and divide us all, as well as”—here she broke into a ragged moan—“eating the rich!”

Eli is a campy artist of questionable earnestness, but her statement was in line with the mood of Daisy Chain—a place where girlish aesthetics that are so often seen as frivolous could accompany calls for revolution. Organized by the 23-year-old pop star Olivia Rodrigo, the inaugural edition of the festival featured an all-female lineup and raised $20 million—half of which was donated by Melinda French Gates—for an array of women’s-rights organizations, including Planned Parenthood and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Even as a brutal heat wave threatened to smother the energy, the fest felt like a cheerful coming-out party—an announcement of the political commitments of a generation of mainstream artists more famous for singing about the self than about society.

Rodrigo patterned Daisy Chain off of Lilith Fair, the best-selling female-fronted touring festival that ran from 1997 to 1999, but the two events are a study in contrasts. Lilith’s co-founder Sarah McLachlan wanted to prove the viability of female musicians at a time when, she told the LA Times, radio programmers were reluctant to play two of them back-to-back. The lineup reflected a boom in singer-songwriters—Tracy Chapman, Jewel, Paula Cole, Indigo Girls—whose socially conscientious songs harkened back to the spirit of Woodstock (an obvious influence on the flower-powery Daisy Chain as well). Lilith’s aesthetics were earthen and earnest—a celebration of an ideal of strong, serious womanhood, much to the perturbation of late-night comics who cracked jokes about Cole’s armpit hair.

Today, women aren’t so marginal to the record industry; in fact, it can sometimes seem like Taylor Swift and her disciples are the record industry. But with power has come an inversion in content and style. The dominant female musical archetype of the 2020s isn’t the diva or the chanteuse—it’s the girlie, a term that conveys knowing immaturity and kitsch femininity. Girlies write songs about kinky sex while calling themselves princesses (as does the Daisy Chain singer Chappell Roan), or rap tough and fast while slathered in Barbie-pink body paint (as Doechii did on Saturday). The word is gendered, but it refers to a disposition, and thus can encompass gay guys and even those shy and sweet straight men known as babygirls.

Daisy Chain was for the girlies. Irvine’s Great Park was turned into a Lewis Carroll wonderland pocked with floral arrangements that seemed like crayon drawings come to life. Young kids ran around in tiaras while adults blended frilliness and adolescent-alternative stylings: blond locks with streaks of slime green, or the undying rebel-girl look of baby-doll dresses and Doc Martens. I wondered whether the commitment to daintiness explained even the dearth of shade at the fest; the tasseled umbrellas dotting the grounds were totally adorable and terribly unmatched to an El Niño August.

Girlie nation has arisen slowly, over decades. As my colleague Sophie Gilbert reported in her book Girl on Girl, Lilith Fair’s vision of female artistry was sidelined as record labels and radio stations began to favor smiling, pliable teenagers such as Britney Spears. Twenty-first-century youths grew up with former Mouseketeers serving as aspirational figures—and, eventually, as cautionary tales about giving up one’s agency for fame. Following in the example of Swift, who built on her teen-princess image with her own formidable songwriting, the new female guard arose. Some, like Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter, were trained by Disney; others, like Billie Eilish and Rachel Chinouriri (an ascendant U.K. singer and a Daisy Chain booking), got their start at home, posting music online. All of them project control with every slickly witty, emotionally frank, personally revealing hit they write.

What they haven’t projected much of, in their songs, at least, is the political edge of the Lilith crowd. Jewel broke out with an album whose title song made a shockingly frontal attack on bigotry (“You say he’s a faggot; does he make you sick to your stomach?”). But today’s young stars mostly just side-eye society’s problems in lyrical tales of hookups, breakups, and anxiety. When Roan calls for a “Femininomenon” (one song title), she’s implicitly calling for feminist change, but she’s explicitly calling just for more girls to ditch their dudes.

It’s not that Gen Z has nothing to say—many of these singers will readily riff about ICE and Gaza on their Instagram and in public comments. Rodrigo even delivered an onstage F.U. to the Supreme Court after the fall of national abortion rights, in 2022. But when it comes to their music, they prefer to focus mostly on the personal. Perhaps that’s because their milieu is the isolation and intimacy of the smartphone-enabled bedroom, not the social jungle of rock clubs and coffee shops. Maybe it’s because they watched progressive pop of the mid-2010s cheer Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign and then spin itself into an even more didactic fervor during Donald Trump’s first term. On some level, girliehood may be a defensive posture amid conservative cultural backlash: a way to speak and shout and command lots of influence without being seen as threatening.

Indeed, Daisy Chain inevitably raised the question of how potent mere cultural visibility can be. Lines of people snaked through the grounds throughout the day—some for art installations by female artists, and many for immersive brand activations, including a pink, larger-than-life Taco Bell Baja Blast that had been scrawled on with diary-cursive font. The festival was a co-production of the convicted monopoly Live Nation and felt, in execution, like a re-skinned version of moneymaking glitz fests such as Coachella. Eli’s rallying cry with a side of giggles aside, the fest was not destabilizing power structures—it was part of them. Rodrigo is probably not the person to figure out what true counterculture might mean in this, the most consumerist decade of human history.

Still, she’s trying. Daisy Chain’s two stages were festooned with mock buttons, like on a backpack, that advertised the fest’s 10 nonprofit beneficiaries (representatives for which got to speak to the crowds before various sets). This great design decision served whimsical eye candy, evoked a lineage of hippies and women’s libbers, and dispensed useful information. The featured slogans—Bans off our bodies, Reproductive rights are human rights, WOMEN ROCK BETTER—hardly read like safe platitudes in post-Dobbs America, where some conservatives now openly yearn to roll back women’s right to vote.

Rodrigo is also at last tackling overt protest music. Shortly before the festival, she released a coolly seething post-punk single called “Serena Joy,” named for a character in The Handmaid’s Tale. Its exact concerns are a bit hazy: A lyric about gold-painted towers indirectly sneers at Trump, and a mention of bothered “neighbors” could be about ICE deportations or even tariffs on Canada. What’s clear is her overall call to wake up and fight back. I get shivers when she sings, “If you can’t throw a punch / You can learn how to spit.”

The fest’s lineup also made a statement by tracing an intergenerational feminist lineage instead of just spotlighting trendy new acts. One invitee was the ’90s rock band Garbage, whose singer, Shirley Manson, made painfully heartfelt speeches about resilience, growing older, and LGBTQ acceptance. Another was the indie band the Breeders, whose cooed harmonies and twisted guitars are the bay-leaf influence on Rodrigo’s tangiest songs. The reggae-inflected alternative singer Santigold—a representative of the 2000s indie landscape—invited members of the crowd onstage for a joyful, if less than impressively skilled, dance contest.

The most telling booking was Bikini Kill, the punk band whose riot-grrrl sound flipped clichés about demure young womanhood way back in the early ’90s. The lead singer, Kathleen Hanna, opened with some political scene setting: “This government hates us and wants us dead. They don’t give a shit about anybody’s health care. They don’t care if we’re dying in parking lots of curable illnesses.” Then she got to croaking and gyrating with a ferocity that offered a reminder to the Instagram-generation viewers that playing pretty isn’t the only way to command eyeballs. “This is the most engaged crowd I’ve ever seen in my life,” she said at one point, and a reason was clear: At Bikini Kill’s early shows, she would call for men to make room for girls to come to the front of the crowd, but here, she didn’t need to do that.

[Read: How indie rock changed the world]

Still, the festival’s greatest highlights came from gutsy and well-executed performances by young people. The first act of the day, the experimental electronic-pop artist Quiet Light, offered a calm and cooling welcome as she executed slow choreo in a billowing nightie. Later, the blue-haired songwriter Devon Again—a last-minute replacement after the girl group Katseye dropped out—knocked me back with country-tinged electro rock as crunchy as a kettle chip. In a stunt that recalled bros such as Blink-182 and Red Hot Chili Peppers, her band members dropped trou at the start of the set and rocked in their boxers.

As the sun fell, Roan took to the stage for a happy-go-lucky display of dominance. Her band, dressed in snazzy ’80s power suits, whipped up simmering disco tension punctuated by Van Halen–style guitar eruptions. Roan, who was styled like a flight attendant from the ’90s sci-fi movie The Fifth Element, also acted all-business: spare with her banter and springy on her feet as she flicked between chatty verses and lung-busting choruses.

After that stratospheric spectacle, Rodrigo’s headlining set felt a bit like a wobbly-legged return to Earth. Although she can dig deep and nail the big moments—“The Cure” sounded bottomlessly sad—she often leans too heavily on actorly tics that overplay the considerable personality already inherent in her lyrics. Listening to her sing her stellar recent song “Maggots for Brains,” I had the thought that her songwriting talent, bar for bar, matches almost any of her predecessors’. Just then, some predecessors joined her: first McLachlan, for a festival-shushing rendition of “Building a Mystery” and “Angel,” and then Alanis Morissette, to grin and yowl “Ironic.” The Gen X parents in the crowd, clearly worn down by a day of sticky-hot chaperoning, suddenly came alive.

The final song of the night was the most moving one: Rodrigo and Stevie Nicks, another special guest, singing “Landslide.” Their delivery was so careful and crystalline that no one could miss the relevance of the lyrics about generations bound together by time’s forward march. When Nicks sang, “Yes, I’m getting older too,” on her own, with a sad smile, my gut twisted at the thought of the trailblazers we’ve lost lately. But Nicks also conveyed hope—because today’s girls are only at the beginning of what they’ll accomplish.

What Howard Zinn Got Wrong

2026-09-01T07:30:00-04:00

“What would Howard say?” This question, which Dave Zirin reports being “asked repeatedly” while he was working on his new biography of Howard Zinn, underscores how unusual a figure his subject cut in contemporary American life. Most historians live and die in relative obscurity. But 16 years after Zinn’s death, many people still look to him, not just as a scholar but as a kind of sage.

Zinn first became famous—and, in some circles, infamous—after the 1980 publication of his best-selling work A People’s History of the United States. The book advanced an ambitious and unrepentantly radical reimagining of the nation’s past. Zinn rejected the conventional organization of history around “the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders” and declared, “I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees.” What emerged was a new grand narrative, one that promised to reveal what mainstream history had long concealed and to offer a new moral framework for the past. In Zinn’s telling, the powerful were almost always up to no good, and ordinary people were the heroes of the American story. They courageously built movements for justice and sometimes even won, though it never took long for the oppressors to regroup. The fight was never over.

Unlike most best sellers, A People’s History never stopped selling. Each year during its first three decades in print, it sold more copies than the last. The book’s fans applauded its bottom-up, justice-minded approach to history, while its detractors dismissed it as a leftist morality play masquerading as a story about the past. No one could doubt that it changed the conversation about American history, not to mention the trajectory of Zinn’s life. By the time he died in 2010, he was an archvillain for the right and a secular saint for the left.

Zirin’s fast-paced biography, The People’s Historian, is an answer to the most interesting version of “What would Howard say?” One hardly needs to squint to imagine what Zinn would have thought of the current regime in Washington, and readers curious only about that can put this book down after page 4, where Zirin declares, “Fascist movements taking orders from billionaire insurrectionists were the kinds of struggles that Howard Zinn demonstrated a willingness to fight and, if necessary, die to oppose.” But Zirin himself is after something more. He knew Zinn personally and collaborated with him on projects; he admires him deeply. Zirin believes we need more than Zinn’s opinions today; he argues that we need the deeper wisdom that emanates from his life and work.

Zinn’s many gifts developed in the course of what was, by any estimation, a remarkable journey. He was born in 1922 to working-class Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. In his early 20s he rushed to enlist in the fight against fascism, serving in the Air Forces during World War II. He would long regret his short tenure as a bombardier who dropped artillery shells on behalf of a compromised colonial power—as he would later come to see the United States—from such heights that he could not be sure where exactly they landed. Zinn’s willingness to admit he was gravely wrong is part of what Zirin loves about him. The people’s historian was a radical, but he was also a “happy warrior” who believed that people could change, and so could societies.

[Read: The new history wars]

As a participant in the civil-rights and anti-war movements, Zinn witnessed such transformations firsthand. He organized alongside his students at Spelman College as well as with famous activists, including Ella Baker and Daniel Berrigan. Together, in the 1960s and ’70s, they fought to change a country whose past and present were steeped in violence and white supremacy. The going was never easy, because, as Zirin tells it—very much in Zinnian fashion—they bumped up against so many villains in power. Sometimes it was the director of the FBI; other times, a reactionary university administrator. But the people could be powerful too. Any given campaign might be stymied, but the march went on. However dreary the news, the hope persisted for a better day.

Zirin argues convincingly that Zinn’s life story vindicates one of his deepest convictions: that ordinary people and “small acts” can change the world. Zinn was right about this, and Zirin concludes the book with a quote from him that draws out the optimistic implications of his faith in bottom-up movements: “We have been surprised before in history. We can be surprised again. Indeed, we can do the surprising.” This is a compelling message for the current moment—and any other. Yet one can agree with Zinn on the power of the people to make change and still wonder whether recent history has revealed the limits of his wisdom.

“Was he wrong to have faith in the people?” Zirin relates that some of Zinn’s devotees—“those politically raised on his ideas”—have asked him this question, in addition to the one about what he might say in any given situation. Zirin takes up the second query but answers it far less satisfactorily than the first. He acknowledges that “in 2024, 77 million voters checked the box for an authoritarian to take power once again,” and moreover that Trump “won masses of white working-class people and, according to political pundits, a not-insignificant number of Black and Latino men.” But Zirin does not wrestle with the meaning of these developments. Rather, he waves them away with invocations of the “tech oligarchs” and “autocrats” who are driving “our global descent into authoritarianism.” This is an homage in a way, a vintage Zinn move—evading tough questions about who “the people” are and what they really want.

A People’s History of the United States appeared the same year Ronald Reagan was first elected president. In later editions of the book, Zinn would cast Reagan—like Jimmy Carter before him and George H. W. Bush after—as a creature of “the Establishment,” elected by a majority of voters but by a minority of the voting population and, hence, hardly the people’s choice. Zinn wrote something similar in 2003 amid the travails of the early War on Terror: “I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has taken over.” The following year, of course, George W. Bush won the popular vote.

[Read: What if our ancestors didn’t feel anything like we do?]

Zinn was hardly the only academic to be thrown by this turn of events. The 2004 election left no doubt that the Reagan Revolution had been more than a blip; in its aftermath, American historians redoubled their efforts to understand the sources of the right’s surprising resurgence. What they have uncovered in the past two decades flies in the face of a central tenet of Zinnian orthodoxy. The sustained success of the modern conservative movement cannot be explained away as the outcome of establishment machinations or a top-down takeover. Its energy and vitality came in no small part from the grassroots: from stay-at-home moms and car mechanics, from the suburbs and the Sun Belt, from evangelicals and Catholics and more. The revival of the Republican Party’s national fortunes at various moments, going all the way back to Richard Nixon, confirms Zinn’s faith in the power of bottom-up movements, even as it confounds his almost mythic sense of “the people” as inevitably on the right side of history (that is, the left side of the political spectrum).

And if ordinary folks are more complicated than Zinn and Zirin recognize, perhaps those who wield power can be too. What made the right’s political comeback so surprising, after all, was that in the mid-1960s the liberal-left coalition was winning not only in the streets but also on Capitol Hill. In those years, progressives leveraged grassroots energy into breakthrough policy change. The leaders of major civic and political institutions were rarely out in front of progressive activists, but at least some of them chose to pull levers that made the United States more equal and just. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed with sweeping bipartisan majorities.

After an outrageous assault by law enforcement on peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon B. Johnson memorably proclaimed—before a joint session of Congress, Cabinet officers, Supreme Court justices, and more than 70 million Americans watching on television—that “it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And—we—shall—overcome.” His invocation of a beloved civil-rights anthem brought a tear to Martin Luther King Jr.’s eye. None of this impressed Zinn. In A People’s History, he framed both the speech and the landmark civil-rights legislation of the 1960s as “concessions.”

Then and now, such unrelenting suspicion springs from genuine patterns of institutional failure and betrayal. Villains are, alas, not just a figment of our collective imagination. And yet, in 2026, with the Democrats on the outside of power looking in, progressives might nevertheless ask whether the Zinnian propensity to demonize anyone and everyone wielding authority has served their cause well. Dismissing landmark legislation as mere concessions can miss the fact that there is no path forward from righteous protest to lasting change that does not run through better—if imperfect—public policy. However “exhilarating” Zinn’s counternarrative can be, it may have encouraged millions of well-meaning readers to be skeptical of the possibility that any good could come through the slow, messy institutional work that is central to pluralistic democracy. Coincidental or not, this much is true: During the same period when Zinn’s influence was rising meteorically on the left, the right became much more adept at channeling populist enthusiasm into deliberate campaigns to reshape the major institutions of American life.

“I wanted to change the world, and I thought history might be helpful,” Zinn liked to say, lightheartedly. His biographer is right to argue that Zinn, an ordinary person, did change the world—though perhaps he didn’t do it only in the ways that either of them hoped he would.

The Growing Lawlessness in California’s Forests

2026-09-01T07:00:00-04:00

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On the day of the kidnapping, the campground at Gumboot Lake happened to be nearly empty, so Joseph Charles Henrichsen was one of the only people to see the two Forest Service biologists pull up in their pickup truck. Federal employees didn’t visit all that much—campers who’d been coming to the small alpine lake for years told me they’d never seen a ranger on patrol in these Northern California woods. But some of the regulars had noticed the “frog people,” as one called them, quietly collecting their specimens the previous summer. These particular biologists, both women, were there to survey the Cascades frog, whose well-being can help signal the health of the overall ecosystem.

People at Gumboot Lake tended to give one another space, but that July morning, Henrichsen approached the biologists as they worked. He was holding, authorities would later allege, an AR-15-style assault rifle, and told the biologists to turn around and put their hands in the air. He zip-tied their wrists behind their backs and ordered them to walk to his camping trailer, parked at a site strewn with crates and refuse, the clothesline heavy with towels. His 23-year-old son, Phoenix, made room for the biologists inside.

What Henrichsen’s intention was that day—what he thought he might achieve by abducting two government scientists, whether he had a clear motivation at all beyond an impulse of self-righteousness and a loaded gun—remains uncertain. Before long, he escorted one of the biologists back to their Forest Service truck. He drove several miles with her down a winding road along the Sacramento River. Glimpses of Mount Shasta, the volcano looming to the east, reared up through the trees. Along the way, he made calls, according to the FBI. He spoke with a Forest Service ranger and left a message with another person who has not been identified. “I’ve taken two Fed biologists hostage from the Forest Service,” he said, according to authorities. “What I’d like to have happen, I’d like to have you send me a fucking Fed investigator, with a goddamn badge, preferably from the FBI. And we can talk things through a little bit.”

Over the next few hours, Gumboot Lake and the surrounding Shasta-Trinity National Forest would swarm with law enforcement in helicopters and Bearcat armored vehicles. Local SWAT teams and snipers, then more than 50 FBI officers, poured into the national forest. A Boeing 757 flew across the country, from Virginia, with an elite FBI hostage-rescue team.

All of these officers were confronting a man who had a history of erratic behavior: Henrichsen had been released from a Washington State psychiatric hospital a few years before, after allegedly tormenting a neighbor by firing a gun, throwing fireworks on his porch, and placing zip-tie handcuffs on his property. But Henrichsen had also managed to stay at Gumboot Lake for months—well past the official seven-day limit—apparently without triggering any official response from the Forest Service. Many of the campsite’s regulars had crossed paths with the Henrichsens over the summer, and although Charles held himself apart, he struck them as a familiar type, not so out of place here among the free spirits and drifters living in their cars. That he’d turned out to be unhinged or anti-government enough to kidnap a couple of federal frog biologists didn’t seem to shock them. In fact, with the way things are going on the woollier fringes of America’s public lands, maybe something like this was bound to happen.

Siskiyou County, the area that includes Gumboot Lake, has a reputation for fierce independence and the hostility toward government meddling that often comes with it. The county leans conservative, though Mount Shasta is a magnet for a crunchier type: crystal enthusiasts, New Age spiritualists, pilgrims on the road to Burning Man. Hikers stream down the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs along a ridge above the lake. On Sundays, some of the campers at Gumboot Lake like to gather for a drum circle, and when the full moon arrives, people convene to celebrate.

The Gumboot Lake campground is free and has no assigned spots, no running water, limited cell signal, and a lone pit toilet. It’s one of dozens of alpine lakes in the Trinity Divide accessible by car or off-road vehicle. Others are more popular. The Forest Service described the campground in one write-up as a “typical meadow type lake, not very beautiful.” But it’s relatively easy to get to, just a 40-minute drive up from Interstate 5.

I made that drive last month, not long after the Forest Service had reopened Gumboot Lake, less than a week after the kidnapping. I saw old vans and school buses parked along the Forest Service road leading to the campsite; people had strung up hammocks between the trees. At the lake, several campers had already set up their tents and parked their mobile homes. One camper, a 24-year-old backpacker from Australia, told me the campsite was a place to “drop in with the land, drop in with each other, cook meals with each other, and just be super present.” As we talked, a large shirtless man, whom she called Zephyr, appeared and handed her a slice of papaya.

The Forest Service is supposed to be a steward of its public lands, preserving them while still allowing people to enjoy the woods and use their resources. Dispersed camping—outside of established campgrounds—is allowed in most national forests. And although people here are supposed to move on after seven nights, locals say that plenty of people live out of their cars for much longer. Informal settlements are widespread on the national-forest lands of Oregon and Northern California. People tend to cluster along the river corridors, most of them peaceable campers. “But the last 10 percent of them are pretty sad,” says Gabriel Howe, the executive director of the Siskiyou Mountain Club, a group that maintains trails and campgrounds in the region. “People living out there, people manufacturing drugs and all sorts of nasty stuff.”

Policing a remote forest is unlike any other job in law enforcement. The Shasta-Trinity spans more than 3,000 square miles, and the Forest Service is perennially under-resourced. Carmen Kinch, a Forest Service law officer who patrolled the area around Gumboot Lake in the late 1990s and 2000s, told me that back then, seven law-enforcement officers worked across the entire forest. Today, there are four. Not one, she said, is currently based in the Forest Service management unit that includes Gumboot Lake.

The drop in personnel is not just a problem in this one forest. Since last year, the Forest Service’s staffing across the country has fallen by about 20 percent as a result of firings and departures encouraged by the Trump administration, part of its push to reduce the federal workforce. In the Shasta-Trinity forest, excluding firefighting roles, the permanent staff—employees who maintain campsites and conduct wildlife research—has been reduced by about a quarter, one former U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, told me. (Bob Doucette, a Forest Service spokesperson, told me that staffing levels are “similar” to what they’ve been in the past few years and said that “all employees continue to meet public needs.”) Howe has worked in the region for 15 years, and he sees the Forest Service as a slowly dying patient. “Around COVID, it went into palliative care, and now it’s on hospice,” he told me.

A sense of lawlessness seems to be growing on the public lands in the region. People on Howe’s staff have returned to find their cars stripped at trailheads—no wheels, no batteries, gas siphoned. They’ve encountered mountain roads blockaded by hostile civilians. Michael Kauffmann, an ecologist and the executive director of the Bigfoot Trail Alliance, told me that he’s recently instituted more training for his researchers and trail crews on safety measures and defusing confrontations. More than anything, Kauffmann has noticed a greater disregard for the rules—more graffiti, a lot more garbage, and less appreciation for these lands as places to care for rather than to joyride over with guns and four-wheelers. One person who regularly hikes in the area around Gumboot Lake told me that he’d felt safer during “close encounters with bears and lions” than with some of the armed and unfriendly people around.

The Henrichsens had apparently lived at Gumboot Lake since at least early May, when Todd Heie, another camper who visits the lake regularly, first encountered them. In early June, Joseph Charles Henrichsen, who goes by his middle name, asked a neighbor at the campground, Kevin Airoldi, for a lift into town. On the 45-minute drive, Charles said that he and his son were “just traveling around, trying to do it on the cheap.”

Charles mentioned that they’d come down from the Pacific Northwest but not what he’d left behind. He’d once been a successful mortgage-loan broker in Orange County, California. But he had run into business trouble, and his relationship with Phoenix’s mother had fallen apart. By 2022, he was divorced and living near Bellingham, Washington, up by the Canadian border. That year, he spent six months in a county jail, charged with a hate crime for allegedly harassing his neighbor. Police said that he “appeared to be spiraling in his mental health,” according to court documents. Henrichsen, who kept multiple guns at his home, would rant about world events, including the war in Ukraine; an evaluation found that he likely had schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder. Although a judge ordered him to be admitted to a hospital for psychiatric treatment, bureaucratic delays kept him out for months. Even then, he was admitted only briefly, after the charges had been dropped.

At Gumboot Lake, both Charles and Phoenix Henrichsen tended to keep to themselves in their Feather Ultra Lite trailer, parked amid the lodgepole pines. The other campers would watch them pacing around the lake, lap after lap, as the father appeared to loudly lecture, or preach, to the son, who kept his head down and rarely said a word. Many found Charles intense and standoffish. He would burn red sage during the day, and at night he would play a type of chanting Indian music that Heie, a former director of the county’s department of corrections, sometimes listened to as he drifted in his kayak, looking up at the sky. At one point, Aaron Sullivan, a software engineer who was working remotely out of a Winnebago along the lake, stopped by the Henrichsens’ campsite. He’d been impressed by Charles’s strong, lean frame and “big, beautiful beard.” Sullivan invited them to one of the full-moon gatherings. We won’t be doing that, Charles told him.

The Thursday morning of the kidnapping, on July 16, Charles Henrichsen must have been watching the biologists before he approached them—it’s unclear how long. After he had captured the women and herded one of them into the pickup truck, he kept her tightly restrained. He told the unidentified recipient of the message he left while driving down the mountain that “her hands are behind her fucking back, and I’ve got live rounds ready to fucking [inaudible] anyone who fucks with me,” according to the criminal complaint.

When Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue was alerted to the situation that morning, he thought the man could be swatting, he told me—attempting to trick his office into scrambling to respond. His county is larger than Connecticut, and more than half of it is public land. Sheriff’s deputies soon arrived at Gumboot Lake to find the campsite gate closed and a gray Subaru blocking the road. (The Subaru, police would later learn, was stolen, possibly by the Henrichsens, and likely parked there to block others from entering during the kidnapping.) The sheriff’s deputies flew a drone overhead and quickly spotted the Forest Service truck that Henrichsen had commandeered, LaRue said. A man stepped out of the trailer, carrying a rifle, and later the deputies saw him with someone whose hands were bound. “He’s now pointing a rifle at the drone,” a deputy said over the radio. LaRue knew he had to get more people up there.

Police set up in a dirt roundabout on the north side of the lake, within shouting distance of Henrichsen’s trailer, where he had holed back up with Phoenix and both biologists; they blocked access to the campground, and law enforcement streamed in from California and elsewhere, their cars crowding the narrow Forest Service road. Hank Magnuski, a retired tech executive who owned a nearby cabin, came upon the pileup of armored vehicles and heavily armed agents in the early afternoon, at the end of a long drive from his home in Palo Alto. He was startled by the military-style occupation of this out-of-the-way wilderness, but he gave two SWAT-team members a ride up the road. “What’s the occasion?” he asked one of them.

At about 3:30 p.m, more than four hours after his initial calls, Henrichsen’s voice came over law-enforcement radio. He had taken one of the biologists back to their truck, where she helped him access the radio to contact the Forest Service’s dispatcher and the FBI. He seemed calm; he repeated his request to speak with FBI officials, “so I can release these hostages. Over.”

The reception was choppy enough that he started negotiating with the FBI agent Russell Quiniola about how they might speak in person. “Are you comfortable putting the rifle down and coming to a point where you feel safe?” Quiniola asked.

“Listen, you come and talk to me,” Henrichsen responded. “I would suggest coming unarmed, because if you have one, that might trigger something in me, you never know. Or you may have a rifle, and you see me, that might trigger something in you. But I suggest we get the show on the road. These ladies would like to go home. Over.”

The fact that Henrichsen had initiated contact with authorities by requesting to talk with the FBI was, to some degree, encouraging. It suggested that his intentions went beyond simply harming the biologists, Gary Noesner, a former chief of the FBI’s crisis-negotiation unit, told me. In such situations, every hour that negotiators can keep the kidnapper talking is one without violence. Unless they sense that the risk is increasing, Noesner said, “we’ll talk ’til the cows come home.”

Quiniola and other FBI agents spoke with Henrichsen over the next nine hours. By 1 a.m., the standoff had gone on so long with such little progress that LaRue was surprised when someone in his vehicle said, “One of the females is coming out,” and the first biologist opened the door of the trailer and walked toward the police. Her colleague followed six minutes later. Another hour and a half would pass, during which FBI agents exploded flash-bangs around the trailer—a commotion heard by hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail above the lake—before Phoenix and then Charles finally turned themselves over and the government vehicles lining the road to Gumboot Lake started heading back down the mountain.

By the time I arrived at the lake, almost all signs that this place had been the site of such force were gone. The Henrichsens’ trailer had been towed away; their debris had been bagged and left in the outhouse, along with a note that read, “Trash from the kidnappers campsite.” One camper had held on to three wooden billy clubs found amid the mess. I set up my tent at a campsite next to the Henrichsens’, where I could see the lake through the pines. Everything was serene. The day was cloudless, and the sun sparkled on the water.

Charles and Phoenix Henrichsen eventually pleaded not guilty in federal court in Sacramento to charges of kidnapping federal employees and other felony counts that carry the prospect of life in prison. Charles’s lead defense attorney, Mia Crager, told me that her client had intended no harm to the biologists; according to police, the two women, who have not been named publicly, did not appear to suffer major injuries during their 15 hours as hostages. “What happened on July 16 was preventable and resulted from system failures on a number of levels,” Crager said in a statement. She did not elaborate on the type of failures she was referring to, and didn’t respond to questions about any specific allegations against Henrichsen. She said that Charles “hopes that some good will come of the case, including that his son Phoenix will get the mental health care he sorely needs.”

Phoenix’s lawyer, Kresta Daly, told me that Phoenix had been an unwilling participant in the standoff: He had no gun, didn’t know what was going to happen, and, once the crisis had started, he hoped that it would resolve peacefully. His main thought, Daly said, was “How do I stop anyone from dying today, me included?” His father, Daly told me, had hurt him before; he’d been in the hospital earlier this summer after Charles beat him up. Charles Henrichsen, through his lawyers, did not respond to questions about that accusation, but agreed that his son “was not at all at fault for what happened that day, nor was he an active participant.”

Henrichsen’s specific demands during the hostage crisis have not yet been fully explained. He did not leave a manifesto. An FBI spokesperson declined to describe those hours of discussions with Henrichsen, citing the ongoing investigation. Sheriff LaRue, who had been inside a Bearcat with the FBI negotiators during part of the process, said he couldn’t hear Henrichsen “discussing anything as to why he was doing this, what his motives were.” At least in that moment, he seemed to want the attention of the federal government. He got it.

The day of the biologists’ release, the chief of the Forest Service, Tom Schultz, wrote an email to agency staff expressing his gratitude to law enforcement and his support for the two women after their ordeal. A safety manager with the agency followed up the next week, with links to security tips and videos with titles such as “Avoiding Trouble” and “Building Trust in Small Towns.” Despite such internal gestures, some former Forest Service leaders heard little public support for the staff from an administration that has shed civil servants without much remorse. “There’s not an ounce of empathy for federal employees,” Vicki Christiansen, a former chief of the Forest Service during the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, told me. “Not an ounce.”

As I talked with people at the lake, the hostage episode began to seem inseparable from the deepening neglect of our country’s public lands. Whatever the Henrichsens’ personal motives may have been, the erosion of day-to-day management has made ruptures in the fragile relations among strangers in the woods all the more likely. “They shouldn’t be letting someone stay here for months on end,” Heie, the former corrections officer, told me. In the early evening, I watched him paddle his kayak to the middle of the lake. Another man stood in the shallows, casting a fishing line. Through the trees, I heard a couple laughing. I kept looking around at the peaceful scene, unable to shake the unsettling feeling that something was off. As darkness settled, I sat in my camping chair, listening for the sounds of the frogs.

Hegseth’s Pentagon Lurches off the Rails

2026-08-31T21:47:58-04:00

Making Pete Hegseth the secretary of defense was always a huge gamble. A television host with little background in national-security or defense affairs, who topped out as a major in the National Guard, he was nominated based on the same qualification shared by most of Donald Trump’s other appointees: loyalty. And now the price of that gamble is evident. The Pentagon is careening offtrack under a secretary of defense who is firing or forcing the resignations of officers and civilian officials, not because they are unqualified but because he believes they are insufficiently loyal to him, personally.

The latest casualty of Hegseth’s ongoing purge is Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who resigned today after repeatedly clashing with the secretary of defense. As my colleagues Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, and Michael Scherer report, a person familiar with Driscoll’s resignation said that he had “brought up concerns with the administration surrounding Army transformation and readiness and Hegseth’s blocking those efforts specifically by firing the Generals who were responsible.” In the careful circumlocutions of Washington-speak, that means that Driscoll went to the White House to complain about Hegseth, and the president sided with Hegseth.

But more issues were in play than “Army transformation.” Hegseth’s tenure has been disastrous on multiple scores. Instead of giving sound advice to the commander in chief and ensuring that America remains secure while the president fights a deeply unwise war of choice, he has been pursuing his political grievances about DEI and other pet peeves against the U.S. military. Hegseth seems to have a special animus toward the Army, an institution he claims “spit me out.” He fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, and he has pushed out other senior Army officers; at this point, the Army has no Senate-confirmed chief of staff or secretary. (George’s replacement, General Christopher LaNeve, so far does not have the necessary votes to be confirmed.)

Even in less dangerous times, Hegseth’s irresponsible behavior would be a hazard to American national security. The Defense Department is a huge bureaucracy; it requires a leader who understands more than the mechanics of teaching trainees how to do push-ups or how to handle a weapon. Secretaries of defense must grasp the economics of the defense industry, the nature of alliances, congressional politics, the policy process, and dozens of other issues for which Hegseth seems to care little and about which he knows even less.

In a time of war, however, Hegseth’s shortcomings may prove deadly. Leave aside his early stumbles, including the mishandling of sensitive information. Leave aside, even, that Hegseth dissembled about the severity of Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf that had succeeded in disrupting the logistical support for American forces in the theater and led to the kind of deprivations that were suffered by the crew of the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. Hegseth’s incompetence, and his commitment to staying in Trump’s good graces, helped launch the war itself in the first place.

Hegseth was reportedly virtually alone among senior officials in supporting Trump’s decision to attack Iran—when he should have been the one person in the room who knew better. The secretary of state and CIA director were against the idea. According to the The Wall Street Journal, even then–Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, another of Trump’s unqualified-but-sycophantic appointees, mustered the courage to give the president bad news, telling Trump that killing the reigning ayatollah and striking Iran would “likely usher in a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons”; that the Iranians “would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market”; and that Iran “would strike U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East,” all of which happened almost immediately after Trump gave the order to go to war.

Hegseth, however, supported Trump’s fantasies of a quick victory. A man of principle would have warned his president even at the risk of his job, but Pete Hegseth is not that man.

And now Hegseth has banished another enemy, Driscoll, from the Pentagon. But as the saying goes: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Hegseth, more than ever, now owns every aspect of the Pentagon’s dysfunction. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that multiple senior military leaders—those still left, that is—have warned Hegseth that the United States cannot indefinitely extend military operations against Iran. Even the chief of naval operations, Admiral Darryl Caudle (who campaigned for the job by signaling his agreement with the secretary’s culture-war obsessions), told Hegseth that the Navy cannot “sustain its current level of support for the Iran conflict because there is no anticipated end date.”

Hegseth’s response to this story was to send his spokespeople out to castigate the press for revealing classified information. In an amateurish bungle, the Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said that the reports were “inaccurate” but also a “betrayal of the force”—leading sensible people to ask how the stories could be false and dangerous at the same time. And these were just the responses from people who are officially authorized to speak for the Pentagon; another bombshell report over the weekend revealed that the department has recruited online influencers into paid roles, but without either the influencers or the Pentagon telling anyone about their cozy arrangement with the government.

Hegseth, meanwhile, has dutifully overseen the raiding of assets from other theaters to support Trump’s war with Iran, leaving the U.S. and its allies exposed to potential threats from China and Russia. When Trump returned to office, Hegseth and others supported a reorientation away from the Middle East and Europe. Now the secretary and the other supposed China hawks have discarded those positions and dumped everything into a war that still has no clear strategy and no clear goal beyond stopping Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon it didn’t have in the first place.

Fortunately, even under the strain of a petty and incompetent secretary, and a president mired in his delusions, senior military officers are still speaking up and telling their boss the truth about America’s parlous defense situation. One of the advantages of a large bureaucracy staffed with professionals is that much of it can run and function, at least for a while, under even the most inept leaders.

But Hegseth is apparently close to getting the Pentagon he wants: Much like his boss at the White House, Hegseth seems to desire a building full of loyalists who put the boss’s personal fortunes over the national interest. Some reports indicate, for example, that Hegseth wants to replace Driscoll with Parnell—who has no significant qualifications for the post beyond his time fighting with the press on the secretary’s behalf.

The result of all this is that the United States is losing a war to a third-rate power in the Middle East. The Russians, meanwhile, are continuing their rampage in Europe and apparently considering things so perilous that the CIA director had to fly to Moscow just to warn the Kremlin off of whatever it was thinking of doing. The Chinese are watching as Trump and Hegseth have stripped the Pacific theater of its only American aircraft carrier. In the midst of this chaos, Hegseth does chin-ups while he ponders calling all of America’s admirals and generals back to another mass meeting so he can again carp at them about fat soldiers and bearded sailors.

Pete Hegseth has failed in every mission except one: keeping his job. But firing or forcing out everyone else in the Pentagon will not make Pete Hegseth into the secretary of defense America and its men and women in uniform need. With each dismissal, he exposes only his own insecurities, even as he manages to stay employed—but the people and the armed forces of the United States are paying the inevitable price of his incompetence.

Dan Driscoll’s Parting Shot

2026-08-31T21:24:29-04:00

During a White House meeting last week, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll brought his concerns about the future of the Army under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directly to President Trump—a sign of how far tensions between the two Pentagon leaders had escalated, and of the dysfunction inside the building, four people familiar with the conversation told us.

Trump was surprised when Driscoll told him how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion under Hegseth, one of the people said. Driscoll argued that the Army could not transform itself the way it needs to, because of the departure of so many leaders, this person said, adding that Trump expressed concern about the deep cuts to the Army’s senior leadership. Driscoll informed the president of his intention to resign—and by today, Driscoll was on his way out.

Hegseth’s purge of the military has been so dramatic that with Driscoll gone, the military’s largest service is left without a top civilian leader, a Senate-confirmed top general, a confirmed Army general in charge of operations, or a confirmed commander of Army troops in Europe. Because of all the firings across the service over the past year, the Army, with more than 450,000 active-duty soldiers positioned across the globe, has fewer generals than at any point in recent history. Driscoll’s personal appeal to Trump just days before his exit was the most direct articulation of high-level concerns among Pentagon leaders about the strains facing the force—including Hegseth’s intervention in Army personnel decisions and the mounting demands of the Iran war.

The White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said that Driscoll had been “highly effective” in improving soldier readiness and advancing other administration priorities. “The United States Army is more powerful than ever thanks to his work alongside the Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of War,” Kelly wrote in a statement, using the administration’s preferred term for the Department of Defense.

Driscoll’s spokesperson declined to comment, and Driscoll did not respond to a call seeking comment. But a person familiar with his resignation told us that Driscoll had “brought up concerns with the administration surrounding Army transformation and readiness and Hegseth’s blocking those efforts specifically by firing the Generals who were responsible.” Hegseth did not have an immediate response to Driscoll’s departure.

[Read: The military Pete Hegseth wants]

Since his arrival at the Pentagon early last year, Hegseth—a former Fox News host who appealed to Trump loyalists by deriding a “woke” military and advocating for leniency for troops charged with war crimes—has sought to reshape the Army. He has placed like-minded generals in positions of influence, intervened to stymie the promotions of lower ranking-officers, and gutted diversity initiatives. The result was an Army depleted of leaders, and an Army secretary and a Pentagon chief at constant odds. Hegseth has ended dozens of Army careers, all without any clear explanation. He now has driven out the secretary of the Army.

Driscoll’s departure puts the Pentagon even more firmly under the control of Hegseth and his MAGA agenda. Driscoll is a confidant of Vice President Vance, a relationship that gave him access to the West Wing, and at times Driscoll served as a counterweight to Hegseth’s impulses, but only up to a point. Some current and former defense officials told us they believe Driscoll’s enmity toward Hegseth actually had the unintended consequence of broadening the purge of the uniformed ranks. And yet Driscoll’s departure, which had been expected for months, and the prospect that he will be replaced by someone more politically aligned with Hegseth are already raising fears inside the Army. “What happens then? Generational damage,” a defense official told us.

Driscoll arrived at the Pentagon in February 2025, a third-generation Army soldier who shared several things in common with Hegseth, his new boss. Like Hegseth, Driscoll joined the military in the most muscular years of Washington’s post-9/11 wars. Both men served in Iraq in a company-grade role. (Hegseth, a National Guardsman, also deployed to Afghanistan.) Both returned with sharp criticisms of America’s overseas adventures and the military’s hidebound ways. Both attended Ivy League schools: Hegseth, Princeton and Harvard; Driscoll, Yale Law, where he befriended the fellow veteran Vance. Both Driscoll and Hegseth have made unsuccessful runs for political office. Both have also eyed a return to politics. As Army secretary, Driscoll frequently reminded people that he had a direct line to the vice president, people familiar with the matter said, and told others that he had ambition to someday run for president himself—an ambition that Hegseth is also said to harbor.

But the two men differed starkly in temperament and style. Hegseth, who required an unprecedented tie-breaking Senate-confirmation vote from Vance after failing to win any Democratic support, is one of Trump’s most reliable MAGA warriors. He has publicly boasted about firing “woke” generals, dared military dissenters to quit, and demonized the mainstream media. Driscoll also supported administration policies but has done so in a more genial way that appealed to many lawmakers more than Hegseth’s combative approach before Congress. And unlike Navy Secretary Hung Cao, who has echoed Hegseth’s scornful and partisan tone on social media, Driscoll has steered clear of endorsing Hegseth’s most controversial actions or most of his culture-war priorities. Unlike Hegseth, Driscoll is friendly with the press, cultivated ties with lawmakers of both parties, and courted technology leaders as he promoted the Army’s sprint to transform how it wages war. That served him well in the administration, earning him additional responsibilities as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and later as an unofficial mediator for the war in Ukraine. None of that sat well with Hegseth.

Army personnel appointments were a particular point of friction. Hegseth has not hesitated to push aside or promote officers as he sees fit, in many cases in ways that have irked others in the Pentagon. Driscoll advocated for General Randy George, the Army chief of staff whose name appeared on a list circulated before Trump’s return to office of senior officers who should be fired due to perceived transgressions against the MAGA agenda. Although Driscoll may have bought George time, Hegseth ultimately fired the general in April. Chris Donahue, the four-star general who headed U.S. Army Europe and Africa, followed several months later.

The Army has been without a top commander since George’s firing. General Christopher LaNeve, who was picked by Hegseth as the No. 2 officer in the Army, has been acting in that role, often going straight to Hegseth for decisions, bypassing Driscoll, according to defense officials. Hegseth is expected to nominate LaNeve to lead the Army, but Capitol Hill is already signaling that LaNeve would struggle to be confirmed, because of many lawmakers’ antipathy to Hegseth. “We are not going to reward Hegseth for what he did to the Army,” one congressional staffer told us.

[Read: Americans deserve answers from Hegseth]

The Army has long prided itself on representing the diversity of the country, but under Hegseth, minorities and women have been pushed out or barred from promotion. The military has long sought to be apolitical, but under Hegseth, troops are measured not by combat experience but by their perceived loyalty to the administration. Among the generals fired have been some of the most experienced and decorated in the service. Each departure marks the loss of decades of investment in that soldier and raises questions about how future troops can rise through the ranks.

Although Army Undersecretary Michael Obadal is expected to take over in the near term, many Pentagon officials fear that the administration will nominate the Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, another Army veteran, to replace Driscoll. Parnell, who previously made a failed bid for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, shares Hegseth’s pugilistic spirit and interest in culture and personnel issues. Like Hegseth, Parnell has no experience managing a large organization and would face a contentious confirmation hearing. A new Army secretary who is more politically driven—and likely less experienced and less well connected than Driscoll—could keep the service embroiled in cultural fights rather than focused on the long-term planning that Driscoll and others believe it desperately needs.

Trump’s Economy Goes to the Polls

2026-08-31T21:22:01-04:00

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Midterm elections are almost always referendums on the policies of the party in power; President Trump is hoping that Republicans steer into the skid. Last week, my colleagues reported that the president—dogged by the war in Iran, the trade war with Canada, and an economy that has Americans dipping into their savings for groceries and daily expenses—hopes that Republicans seeking to win reelection or gain seats will use his time in office to sway voters.

But that strategy could play directly into the hands of Democrats hoping to take back both chambers of Congress. My colleagues the Atlantic staff writers Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker join me this week to discuss Congress, the economy, and the midterm elections.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Ashley Parker: At the end of the day, one thing that President Trump is great at is getting people to sort of remember and understand what it is he ostensibly cares about, right? Whether that’s “Drain the Swamp” or Space Force. And Democrats need to find a way to signal—need an elevator pitch that voters can say, I’m voting for the Democrats because I know that my interest rate will go down to 3.875 percent.

[Music]

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and this week, we need to think about the midterms.

The House of Representatives is back on Capitol Hill this week as the nation turns its attention to the general election. It’s the last opportunity for lawmakers to show they are working for their constituents.

Meanwhile, President Trump is trying to convince congressional Republicans to run on his record. But amid a war with Iran driving up the price of everyday items and a burgeoning trade war with Canada, Americans are feeling the pinch of the president’s agenda.

And Democrats, on the heel of bitter primary races around the country, are hoping to seize upon the president’s unpopularity, and they’re banking that Americans want something different. The question is: Are they right? I’m joined by my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer to discuss.

Ashley, Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Scherer: Thanks for having us.

Ashley Parker: Thanks for having us.

Harris: Ashley, I want to start with you first. Congress is back this week, and one of the first things that they must do is to fund the government, right? Do you think that Congress is more likely to get this done in a timely manner than we’ve seen in some of these previous spending cycles?

Parker: Yeah, I mean, a lot of these stopgap measures end up being incredibly fraught and going up to the last minute. This one is looking like it’s going to be less controversial, in part because what House members really wanna do is get back to their districts to campaign for the midterms. And so there’s a few things in there that might raise some eyebrows, but the sense right now is that they’ll be able to, they hope, push this through pretty quickly.

Harris: Speaking of kind of getting back to the districts for the midterms, right, this is a very important cycle. I feel like every cycle we say, It’s, you know—

Scherer: —most important election of your lifetime.

Harris: Exactly. The most important one of the lifetime. But this one is a pretty important cycle, particularly for Democrats hoping to stop the president’s agenda and for Republicans hoping to continue with the president’s policies moving forward.

Oftentimes, parties don’t like to make this a referendum on the presidency. I’m reminded of [Barack] Obama saying, I’m not on the ballot, but these policies are certainly on the ballot.

And you both have reported that Trump is planning to roll out a series of TV ads that are touting his personal record leading up to the midterms in November. What does this ad blitz say about the administration and how they’re feeling about the election prospects, Michael, and the president’s image?

Scherer: Yeah, so there’s a formula for midterm elections. It’s always a referendum on those in power. So the in-party—the people who hold the presidency, and if they also hold the House, the Senate—try their best to make it a choice, not a referendum, to basically put the opposing party in the spotlight, say, Look, they’re terrible and bad and have done all these awful things, and if you give them back power, it’ll be terrible. And they’re always fighting an uphill battle, because voters don’t see it that way, and voters tend to just, you know, say, I’m happy or I’m pissed off. And you know, for the last four decades, they’re almost always pissed off when it comes to a midterm.

This cycle is a little different because of voting patterns and the appeal of President Trump.

[It] used to be that Republicans turned out more than Democrats in midterms. Now that’s kind of reversed. Democrats are more likely to turn out in midterms. [It] used to be that presidents don’t really have much impact on who turns out in midterms, for the reasons I just said—you know, it’s a referendum, and people are upset. Republicans are betting on this idea that their biggest problem is motivation, that they have the voters out there, that if they can get those voters to the polls, they can stem their losses, they could actually overperform expectations.

But the polls right now show, you know, they’re not that excited. Like, a Fox News poll a few weeks ago asked, Are you extremely motivated to vote? Democrat voters were like 70 percent saying they’re extremely motivated; Republican voters, like 60 percent saying they were extremely motivated. And so the White House solution to that, the president’s solution to that, is to say, We’ve got the magic man on the stump here. We’re going to make this about President Trump, which really undermines the pattern I just described. You know, the Republicans and the Democrats now are in some way saying, We’re gonna make this a referendum on the president.

Parker: And to be clear, everything is always about President Trump. That’s just the rule of President Trump. And so as much as this strategy that Michael and I and our colleague Yvonne reported last week seems counterintuitive and is legitimately frustrating to some Republicans, the White House thinking and the president’s thinking is, It’s always about Trump, right?

And he likes it being about himself, and so if it’s gonna be about him, we might as well put him front and center and tout what we believe are his accomplishments.

Harris: Yeah, if he’s gonna be there, why run away from him? Might as well steer into the skid, right?

Scherer: The problem is that the more you’re talking about Trump and trying to convince people that he’s, you know, improved everyone’s lives when the polls show people don’t feel like he’s improved their lives in the last year and a half, the less you’re talking about Democrats.

And so, you know, that’s the choice they’re making. It’s not that it’s a terrible idea to be talking about the president.

You know, another pattern is, like, Obama would go out on the stump and, you know, [Joe] Biden went on the stump in his midterm elections, [George W. ] Bush went on the stump in his midterm elections, and would obviously talk about their own records. So it’s not like presidents don’t talk about themselves. The difference here is putting money on TV and digital media about the president.

Normally, the in-party only wants to talk about how terrible and bad the out-party is. And, you know, that’s especially true for super PACs. The president’s talking about spending. He’s got $400 million we know about. He may have hundreds of millions more in sort of dark money, basically independent money he’s collected. Normally, that money is just used to ravage the other side and just tear them apart. And the idea that the president’s gonna put some significant part of that behind convincing people that no tax on tips, or the stock-market highs, or the closed border have really done them well is what’s so controversial.

Harris: And how are congressional Republicans feeling about this? How have they sort of responded to the president trying to have his name sort of be more forward in the campaign?

Parker: In general, if they’re speaking candidly, which they don’t really do in public, because they’re fearful of the blowback from President Trump, they find him generally unhelpful in this moment, right? A lot of the things he says and does just further the sense that he and his party don’t care about voters like them.

So there’s some stuff he said. He was recently at a rally in South Carolina for Darline Graham, Lindsay Graham’s sister, who’s running to replace him, where he said, I know my economic numbers are bad, but they should actually be at 100 percent. I’m doing such a great job. That makes people—who, you know, are going to maybe two or three grocery stores right now to use their coupons to get the best deals on what they can—feel like, He has no idea what my life is like. That’s, like, a very clear one where he’s talking about the economy.

But some of his other favorite topics are the ballroom, the new construction of the helipad on the South Lawn. And among all the various controversies that Trump has, these are physical, tangible things that voters really latch on to that Trump loves to talk about. At his core, it’s, like, cool to be president, but he’s sort of more animated by being a developer, you know, and a construction magnate. And so when he is talking about the marbling or the gilding or the slope of the helipad, even though that has nothing to do with the economy, that’s sort of the problem. That reminds voters, Look, this guy is focused on things for himself and his rich friends that again have nothing to do with me.

So Republicans privately will say, This is a nightmare. But at the end of the day, he’s their president, he’s what they’ve got. They know now, in sort of our 12th, 13th year of Trump, he’s not gonna change, and so this is the landscape they live in.

Scherer: And the biggest issue right now is not what the president is saying; it’s what the president has done. He won election very clearly in ’24 on the idea that he would lower prices and sort of reverse the economic squeeze that had emerged under Biden. And if you go back to February, March, White House was saying, like, This is how we’re gonna message this. This is our plan: Gas prices are down; interest rates are down; homeownership’s more affordable; generally, prices, inflation is stabilizing and dipping down.

All that’s been reversed by the Iran war. And so the biggest issue is not what the president’s saying or not saying. It’s that on Sunday night, the U.S. again had kinetic strikes against Iran. And we talked to a bunch of Republicans last week, and every one of them said, Well, it’s gonna be okay because we’re gonna have less actual violence in the Middle East over the next couple months. Every time another bomb goes off in the Middle East, it’s a hit to Republicans at this point.

Parker: And which, by the way, Michael is talking about the president promising to lower prices. His other big promise was no more foreign wars, right? So the thing that is contributing to prices is another very clear broken promise.

Harris: Well, I wanted to ask: What are hearing about the administration’s strategy, current strategy in the war, right? As you mentioned, Michael, the bombings resumed over the weekend. Are we actually trying to get out of this war, and how are Republicans up for reelection talking to their constituents about it?

Scherer: What the White House and the political advisers want is basically a cease of violence right now for the next couple months. I mean, that’s their desire, and they want to keep squeezing the Iranians. The Iranians are not in a great position economically, so they can keep squeezing them. The problem is the Iranians have enormous leverage on Trump, as we’ve just been describing. And the Iranian position is: We control the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. position is: You don’t control the Strait of Hormuz. So there’s, like, this deadlock at the center of the conflict. So every time, you know, the Iranians re-mine the Gulf or fire at another ship and the U.S. feels tempted to retaliate, it’s undermining the strategy the president has. And right now, the president doesn’t have control over that.

Harris: When we come back, Ashley and Michael on the burgeoning trade war with Canada and the Democrats chances in the midterm elections.

[Music]

Harris: So, Ashley, we have this actual war with Iran, but we also have this developing trade war with Canada. And it feels like the culmination of something that Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, said in January at Davos about the ways that countries with smaller economies needed to start renegotiating and looking out for themselves a little bit more. And there’s been a lot of tension between him and President Trump.

But I guess the thing that I keep coming back to with this trade war with Canada is: How did we end up back here? Why are we in this trade war with Canada?

Parker: Well, it’s the South Park truism of “Blame Canada,” right? Like, it’s just an easy thing to know. I mean, Trump likes tariffs. That’s clear and that’s true. And he’s very frustrated with Canada, in part because, as he said, you know, on the one hand, he’s sort of ready to get to trade-war footing with our neighbor to the north, and on the other hand, he’d happily make Canada a 51st state.

But therein is kind of the rub. If you hear Trump talk about it, he sort of says, Canada is getting all of the advantages of being a state, right? We’re subsidizing them to the tune of $200 billion. That’s not an accurate number, but that is what he says. And the thing that bothers Trump more than anything else is sort of, in his view, when people are taking advantage of him, profiting off of him. And, you know, that goes to, you know, former aides writing best-selling books from their time in the White House, to countries he believes sort of should be showing more deference to the United States than they are.

And then on the flip side, you mentioned Mark Carney’s speech to Davos, where he said what we’ve been hearing publicly a bit, and especially privately from a lot of our other especially European allies, which is: Originally, after Trump’s first term, they sort of thought it was, like, a fever dream that they could PTSD black out when Biden returned to the scene. And I remember going on Biden’s first foreign trip—I can’t remember if it was like a G7 or a G20—but that was literally his message. It was like, America, the America you know, the America you love; we’re back.

And then when Trump came back to power, the view, especially from our allies, was like, Maybe Biden was the aberration, right? And even though we know, you know, allegedly Trump was not gonna run for a third term, like, the allies’ thinking is, We have no idea if a new Trump, if a J. D. Vance, or if a populist on the Democrats’ side is gonna come in. And we kind of have to—we can’t count on the U.S., and these tacit deals we used to make with the U.S. (and by that I don’t mean a trade deal, but sort of that, like, We show deference to the United States because they are a bigger, more powerful, and ultimately benevolent force in the world)—we’re willing to take that; we’re willing to subjugate ourselves a bit.

They’ve decided, like, We’re not gonna do that anymore. So you also have a changing stance from our allies being much more willing to stand up for the United States and say, like, I’m not gonna bend my knee, because I can’t count on the United States. And by the way, I could agree to the worst trade terms with this president possible, and that might only placate him until his next Truth Social post.

Harris: Yeah, you know, actually, to that point of sort of the deference that was shown, we’ve also seen the ways that the president has sort of out-and-out attacked allied nations in recent weeks, from South Korea, thinking about some of the threats towards places like Oman.

And these aren’t small things, right? Even the fact that you mentioned something like the president saying that he’s not gonna run for a third term—to even to even think about a third term is sort of moving into an uncharted territory. Where does that leave the sort of long-term view of American responsibility as a world player?

Scherer: I mean, I think everybody’s just waiting out Trump to see what happens next. And I think what you’ve seen in Canada is their conclusion. I mean, exactly how that fell apart is, you know, there’s conflicting stories. But it does seem pretty clear that Canada views its maximum point of leverage as being right now. I mean, if they threaten to withhold electricity from the United States before midterm elections, that obviously it could have huge impacts on Trump. If they threaten to withhold electricity in early January, when Trump’s a lame duck, it may not have the same import.

I think the rest of the world is just coping with Trump. I mean, he’s so unpredictable. We don’t know how the last two years of his term will go. There’s just been a lot of preparation around the world to figure out how to reorient their own, you know, foreign policy to not depend on the U.S. going forward.

Harris: Yeah, we’ve talked about Republicans. I want to talk about the Democrats for just a moment. And Ashley, you’ve done some reporting on the Democrats and how they’re thinking about the midterms.

How much does the infighting of the primary, sort of the bitterness of the campaigns between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens in Michigan, races in Wisconsin, Florida, Maine, et cetera, sort of matter now to Democrats? And do Republicans sort of see an offset with the unpopularity of the president and the sort of discord that they might see among the Democrats?

Parker: I mean, it’s not helpful, right? One thing, when you talk about these races and you talk to people on both sides, and it’s always true, it’s like it’s a national referendum, but at the end of the day, candidates matter, districts matter, the dynamics of states matter, right? And so, you know, Susan Collins is someone who has great name recognition in Maine, fits the state very well. I’ve talked to Democrats who don’t vote for her, but they’ve told me, they’ve been like, I have to say, she has amazing constituent services, right? You know, when I was DOGEd, like, she was in constant contact with me.

And so, you know, for a state like that, or in Michigan, right, like, if you’re the Democrats, you want the best possible candidate for a general election. And there’s a sense among Democrats and Republicans that in some of these states and districts, they’ve done that, and in some of these states and districts, because of contentious primaries, they haven’t. That’s the first thing.

And it’s interesting: Republicans in many ways should be doing even worse than they seem poised to do, and when you kind of drill down on that a bit, one of the things you hear is, at the end of the day, every election is a choice, right? And Democrats have a pretty bad brand, universally.

Someone even said to me, Look, people don’t like the economy right now, what they’re feeling. And voters have short-term memories, but they still remember the Biden economy. And Democrats, again, individual candidates are doing things that are very compelling. But as a party, if I asked you, What is the Democratic Party plan to make this economic pinch better, to lower inflation, to cut prices?, almost no voter could tell you, because there doesn’t seem to be a bite-size talking point, cohesive, catchy, snappy Democratic plan.

Harris: People have pushed back against sloganeering and things like that, but not having a sort of digestible plan, not sort of having that digestible slogan, can also be an issue for voters who don’t necessarily see the big picture, right?

’Cause if you say, Well, we have a policy for supplemental nutrition benefits, and then we also have a policy for this and for this, it doesn’t sort of capture an economic picture. So how much does that sloganeering matter?

Parker: It’s Already I’m asleep, right?

Harris: Yeah.

Parker: I was talking to someone who runs focus groups among swing voters, and this person told me, You know, in a lot of these states, they will hold up the picture of the two Senate candidates running against each other in an election that’s now two months from now, and the voters can’t identify who either candidate is. And I don’t say that—I’m not making fun of voters. It’s a reality that like people are dealing with other things, right? Including the high cost.

So if you don’t even know the names of the candidates, the idea that you’re gonna remember like the third policy platform of an economic plan, it has to be something that—and I get the sloganeering and this kind of cheesiness about that. But at the end of the day, one thing that President Trump is great at is getting people to sort of remember and understand what it is he ostensibly cares about, right? Whether that’s “Drain the Swamp” or Space Force. And Democrats need to find a way to signal—need an elevator pitch that voters can say, I’m voting for the Democrats because I know that my interest rate will go down to 3.875 percent. To dream.

Harris: Yeah. Michael, Republicans have a lot of money going into this election. How are they spending it? Sort of putting the president’s TV ads aside, how are they currently spending that money, and will that have an effect, right? Will that matter?

Scherer: Yeah, normally, the last decade or so, Democrats go into midterms, even they go into presidentials, with pretty substantial financial advantages. This is reversed this time. You know, by some estimates, if the president spent all the money he’s raised—and there’s a lot of dark money we can just estimate; we don’t really know—you’re talking about a $600 million to $1 billion advantage on the Republican side.

We know there’ll be a couple hundred million that will be spent because these are in the congressional and the Senate committees and in the campaign committees. We don’t know what the president’s gonna spend. We know that they plan to spend something. We know some portion of what they spend will be on ads defending the president’s record. But, you know, the president said in a recent interview that he had, I think, $850 million. We don’t have that on documents; we don’t know if that’s true. But if that’s true and he decides to spend all of it, that could be enormously impactful in a race like this.

I think it’s more likely he doesn’t spend all of it. I think the chance he can re-raise that amount of money in his last two years of office are pretty slim, and he probably wants to continue to have leverage over the party going forward, going into the next presidential race. So there’s a lot of speculation.

What is also very clear is: They have not done the typical thing you do when you have a huge financial advantage, which is to go up early and spend money in the spring or, you know, even in the summer to sort of lay the groundwork when your opponents can’t afford to be up on the air, you kind of have the airwaves to yourself. They haven’t done that, really. So there’s a lot of suspense, I think, about how that’s actually going to play out in the final months.

Harris: I’m gonna ask both of you to sort of open your reporter’s notebooks and think about sort of the threads that you’re going to be following this week. So, Ashley, I’m gonna go to you first. Sort of open your notebook. What are you thinking about in this week ahead?

Parker: Sure, I mean, I alluded to it a bit before, but the bottom, by all accounts, should have fallen out for Republicans in this midterm cycle. Just the historical headwinds of a midterm election with an incumbent president, how that normally goes: An economic referendum when people feel the economy is not doing well; when the president and his party control the White House, both chambers of Congress; when voters don’t like the president’s approval numbers; and especially for this president in particular, who sort of sold himself not entirely accurately as a as a businessman; when his economic numbers are underwater for the first time.

And so one thing I think Michael and I together are going to be looking at is—and again, it’s not that Republicans are supposed to do fantastically well, but there is a sense that, sort of generically, they should be doing worse than it looks like they’re going to be poised to do, which is: It looks like they’re probably gonna lose the House, lose their majority, but not by a ton. And the Senate is gonna be a real squeaker, which they may hold; Democrats may win, but it’ll be super tight. So trying to get into: Why are Republicans, even with gas prices what they are in August approaching an election, still sort of managing to barely hang on?

Harris: And Michael, same question to you.

Scherer: Another thing Ashley and I’ve been looking at is Cabinet travel. The president’s actually been—the White House’s been pretty good at deploying people around the country in a rather organized and sensible fashion. And then I’ve been working on a story about the sort of under-the-radar battle between the U.S. and Iran over decapitation assassination threats, which has sort of been, like, a weird current from the start of this conflict—where we started the war with Israel taking out most of the leadership of Iran, and continues now to, you know, there’s billboards all over Tehran now with the faces of the president’s family calling for their assassination, bounties on members of the administration and the family. So I’m looking at that as well.

Harris: Well, there will be a lot to look at in the week and months ahead as we run up to the midterms. Thank you both for helping us understand it better, and thanks for joining the show today.

Scherer: Yeah, thank you.

Parker: Thank you for having us.

[Music]

Harris: That’s all for today’s show. This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli. It was edited by Hadley Robinson. It was engineered and has original music by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

If you like what you saw here, you can subscribe to Radio Atlantic on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple, or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

Trump’s Hatred of Free Speech Is Intensifying

2026-08-31T18:21:00-04:00

Desensitization is one of Donald Trump’s most powerful tools: Through repetition, he acclimates Americans to troubling and dangerous ideas. Occasionally, though, his statements and actions are so outrageous that they can still provide a shock. The president’s hostility toward the media is familiar, but this weekend provided a clear reminder that Trump hates freedom of the press and will use any government power at his disposal to try to get rid of it.

Yesterday morning, Trump started off with a post on Truth Social demanding that the Federal Communications Commission do something about “THE FAKE POLLS USED BY OUR CROOKED MEDIA.” About 15 minutes later, he followed this with a long rant about Kristen Welker of Meet the Press, complaining that she had noted that Trump’s record in recent endorsements had been “a mixed bag.” Along with some casual misogyny, Trump wrote, “How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves? Results are attached. Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment.”

The reasons for Trump’s anger are plain: Polls consistently show that he is deeply unpopular, matching or exceeding his own past lows in many opinion surveys. Republicans look likely to lose the House and perhaps also the Senate in this fall’s elections, and more Democratic power in Washington would make Trump’s life more difficult. As for the endorsements, the record is clear. My colleague Will Gottsegen noted last week that most Trump-backed candidates still win, but he’s had some notable misses as well.

Not only is the reporting that infuriates Trump accurate, but siccing the FCC on it makes no legal sense. The agency regulates radio and TV outlets, but much polling is conducted by print outlets and other organizations. The FCC doesn’t have any authority to punish NBC News for reporting on things the president doesn’t like, whether accurate or not. The FCC’s site states (for now) that intervening in such cases “would be inconsistent with the First Amendment to replace the journalistic judgment of licensees with our own.” If the FCC or any other federal agency can do that, freedom of the press no longer exists.

But Trump doesn’t care about this bedrock civil liberty. He’s tried to wield the FCC as a political tool, and he’s been helped by its chair, Brendan Carr, a Project 2025 co-author who has advocated for the use of regulatory agencies as partisan hatchet men. Just because the FCC doesn’t have the power doesn’t mean that Carr won’t try. Before Trump was president, MAGA figures complained about what they saw as “jawboning,” when government officials found informal ways to pressure companies; now they are enthusiastic about the practice. Carr has had some success bullying major outlets, though companies have recently been finding strength to resist.

Trump has also attempted to silence the press via lawsuits. He has sued ABC, CBS, The New York Times, the Des Moines Register, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, the pollster J. Ann Selzer, the Pulitzer Prize Board, and the journalist Bob Woodward. Some defendants have settled; other suits have failed, and still more remain in process. Last week, Trump updated an absurd defamation case against the Times. Part of the goal is intimidation. Huge papers with strong legal departments such as the Times and Journal may not blanch before such lawsuits, but smaller outlets might think twice about what they publish. (Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, also recently filed a lawsuit against The Atlantic, demanding $250 million, in response to reporting he did not like. The Atlantic has filed a motion to dismiss, along with a request to begin seeking factual discovery from the FBI and the Department of Justice. “If Director Patel did not want to face this process, he should not have filed this suit,” The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has said.)

The attitude from the president permeates the rest of his administration. The finance ministers of the G20 are meeting today in Asheville, North Carolina, but the Treasury Department barred specific reporters from the Times, Journal, and Bloomberg News. The reasons these reporters were singled out are not clear. The Treasury Department noted that a wide range of outlets had been credentialed for the event but declined to discuss the specific cases on the record. The United States won’t have much credibility to criticize crackdowns on the press in, say, China or Russia (both attendees), but then again, this administration probably wouldn’t bother. As the National Press Club said in a statement, “When government officials decide which journalists may enter the room, they begin to control which questions get asked, whose scrutiny they face and what the public gets to see and hear.”

The situation is even bleaker at the Department of Defense. The Washington Post yesterday reported that top military leaders have warned Secretary Pete Hegseth that extending the war in Iran “is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland.” The reaction from the Pentagon, which has consistently tried to limit and hide information about the floundering war, was furious. One can understand why the department is, well, defensive: Failed and failing military operations have brought down administrations before.

The Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell claimed that the report was “inaccurate” and added that “publishing highly classified assessments from the Secretary’s orders book is a crime.” That allegation is, itself, broadly misleading and arguably just false. But MAGA supporters outside the administration eagerly agreed. The Trump ally and Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who keeps insisting that the war is going swimmingly, criticized the leak that his own paper received. (Pro tip: If you’re not willing to stand for transparency, journalism is the wrong line of work.)

These are the latest steps in a clampdown at the Defense Department. The Pentagon is trying to turn Stars and Stripes, a venerable military newspaper, into a propaganda outlet. (Firings there are paused during litigation.) Whether it makes sense for a government agency to house an independent publication is open for debate, but what’s clear is that Trump officials are targeting Stars and Stripes because of unflattering reporting—including on conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln—that is truthful and relevant to the public and troops.

Under Hegseth, the department has drastically reduced press access at the Pentagon and, as the Post also reported yesterday, begun hiring right-wing influencers. Despite these efforts, the Iran war is deeply unpopular, and as the Post stories demonstrate, traditional outlets continue to report with depth, rigor, and accuracy on the administration’s actions. This should be a warning for the enemies of free speech who run the federal government: Targeting the press isn’t just un-American; it also doesn’t work.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

President Trump threatened to strike Iran “hard” after the U.S. and Iran exchanged attacks yesterday for the first time in a month. U.S. forces struck Iranian forces in the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran said it had attacked U.S. bases.
The fashion designer John Galliano withdrew from a planned Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition honoring his work after criticism from donors, politicians, and Jewish leaders. Galliano was convicted in France in 2011 for making anti-Semitic and anti-Asian remarks.
The Supreme Court allowed construction to continue on Trump’s White House ballroom where the East Wing once stood, before it was demolished last fall. The justices ruled that the preservationists who sued to stop the project lacked standing.

Dispatches

Raising Resilient Children: Sign up for Russell Shaw’s eight-week guide to parenting with more happiness and less worry.
The Wonder Reader: Returning to an old interest can sometimes make you wonder why you ever put it down, Rafaela Jinich writes.

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Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic*

We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys

By Gal Beckerman

After reading Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one. I’d set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or ’80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman. Then I’d confiscate all of their science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein—all of it.

As young people, the future billionaires were spending hours (under their covers with flashlights, I imagine) consuming stories about killer robots or Mars colonies. What they seemed not to get—maybe couldn’t get—was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away.

Read the full article.

The Women Obsessed With Lindsay Clancy

2026-08-31T15:48:00-04:00

Photographs by Alexandra Howland

Updated at 7:35 p.m. ET on August 31, 2026

On one of the final days of the trial, dozens of women streamed into the back of a Plymouth, Massachusetts, courtroom, filling two long rows of wooden benches. They stood and watched the judge and jury take their seats. Then they strained for a view as a nurse wheeled in the defendant, Lindsay Clancy, who has admitted to strangling her three young children to death in her suburban Boston home in January 2023, before swallowing prescription pills, slashing her wrists and neck, and throwing herself out of a bedroom window headfirst.

Seeing her there in a wheelchair, one woman crossed herself and whispered, “Please, God.” As an officer gaveled the court into session, others pulled out notebooks, folders, and scraps of paper. “WHY,” Marta Quijano wrote as a prosecutor called a psychiatrist to the stand. “Motivation,” she added, starring the word as the doctor began explaining his opinion that Clancy was not in the throes of psychosis on the night of the killings, as her defense has argued, but deeply suicidal and still capable of knowing right from wrong. In the back row, a woman who had flown in from Cleveland shook her head. She had a true-crime novel in her lap and turned to a blank page at the end. “Stupid experts,” she wrote.

Americans have long been obsessed with murder trials, especially those involving the primal nightmare of mothers who kill their children. The public loves to watch mothers on trial and partake in their judgment. There was Susan Smith, who had drowned her three children in a South Carolina lake and was found guilty of murder in 1995, despite having a history of trauma and sexual abuse. And there was Andrea Yates, who had drowned her five children in a bathtub and was convicted of capital murder in 2002 and then retried in 2006, when she was found not guilty by reason of insanity after witnesses testified that Yates had experienced severe postpartum psychosis and schizophrenia.

The Clancy trial is now part of this sadistic American tradition, but it has also become something else for the women who have been showing up in person. It was not enough for them to watch the proceedings on television, or listen to some lawyer on YouTube, or even stand outside the courthouse wearing pink and waving signs in support of Clancy, as hundreds of women did one day earlier this month. They did not want to be outside rendering judgment; they wanted to be inside, on the third floor, sitting on the wooden benches, as close as possible, in case they could notice some detail, some gesture, some pause or expression or word that might reveal a truth they could recognize from their own experience. Each was there for their own reasons.

A jury of nine women and three men will decide in the coming days whether Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor-and-delivery nurse, is criminally responsible for killing her children or not guilty by reason of insanity. The two prosecutors have argued that the killings were the premeditated decision of an entitled and controlling woman who had been frustrated that she could not master her worsening depression and sought a way out of a life that she no longer wanted. Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, has cast her as a loving mother failed by a fragmented mental-health system even as she repeatedly sought help for intensifying depression, anxiety, and insomnia after giving birth to her third child.

[Read: Why Lindsay Clancy’s insanity defense might fail]

Clancy saw her psychiatrist 14 times, tried 13 different medications, called a suicide hotline, went to an emergency room, tried to enroll in an inpatient program, and confided to her husband that she’d had thoughts of harming her children. Defense experts testified that doctors had missed an underlying bipolar disorder and prescribed pills that made Clancy’s symptoms worse, starting a downward spiral that culminated in a rare condition called postpartum psychosis that can cause hallucinations. Clancy has said that she heard a male voice telling her to kill her children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, on January 24, 2023.

After being resuscitated following her suicide attempt, which left her paralyzed from the waist down, Clancy was handcuffed, placed under armed guard, and arraigned from her hospital bed. A judge allowed the moment to be livestreamed from the courtroom; a video screen showed her unblinking eyes above a white surgical mask. The trial itself has also been livestreamed, fueling conspiracy theories that have tended to blame the killings on Clancy’s husband or an intruder, attempting to find clarity where there is little, as many women at the trial already understood. At first, only a few showed up. By last Monday, they were waiting in an hour-long line to get into the courthouse, and another that stretched down a bright hallway to the courtroom doors.

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A crowd of mostly women waits in line to get inside the courthouse.

“I can’t imagine what’s going through her head,” one woman was saying to her friend.

“It’s not just cold-blooded murder,” the friend said.

“I had suicidal thoughts, clear as a bell,” a retired teacher named Dottie Kiley told another woman in line, explaining her experience with antidepressants. “So bad I called the police and told them, and they had a cop come down and sit with me. It was a small town, and they had time to do that.”

The woman behind her nodded. “She could be any one of us,” she said as the courtroom doors opened.

Inside, the women listened to Avram Mack, a psychiatrist and prosecution witness, explain his clinical opinion that Clancy, having made up her mind to kill herself, then made the decision to kill her children to prevent their suffering a life without her—a theory called “altruistic filicide.” Quijano leaned over to the woman sitting next to her.

“What is the validity of this three years later?” she whispered, shaking her head.

After the morning break, she stood in line again for the afternoon session.

“With my first daughter, because it was so difficult breastfeeding, I had insomnia and anxiety—I was worried the baby is hungry,” Quijano told a woman she had just met. “I remember one time—she was a cranky baby—and I remember not so much shaking her but going like this,” she said, demonstrating how she squeezed her daughter’s shoulders and screamed. “They are called intrusive thoughts because your brain says something, and you don’t recognize it.”

Ashlyn Rizzo, who’d been attending the trial for two weeks straight, nodded.

“I had been planning to run away,” Rizzo said, referring to a moment after her first child was born. “I liquidated all my 401(k) and squirreled the money away. I was going to go without the baby. I figured everyone was better off without me. I had delusions. I couldn’t tell wake from sleep. I didn’t confide to anyone. I wrote a note.”

“My cousin had a plan,” Quijano said, not needing to finish.

“I was just going to start driving,” Rizzo continued. “Stay in hotels.”

As it happened, Rizzo said, she had called her psychiatrist, who that very day got her into the same specialized program in Rhode Island that had rejected Clancy one month before she killed her children. “Saved my life,” Rizzo said.

Alexandra Howland for The Atlantic

A second courtroom was made available to accommodate the large crowds.

Alexandra Howland for The Atlantic

A woman waits outside the courthouse.

Alexandra Howland for The Atlantic

Kerri-Ann, a therapist, sits outside the courthouse, discussing the case with Sheila Sullivan, who researches postpartum health.

Alexandra Howland for The Atlantic

Kerri-Ann took extensive notes during the trial.

On Tuesday, the line was longer.

“I wonder, what does justice look like in this case?” a retired teacher named Lisa was saying. She had been keeping the livestream of the trial on in the background of her daily life all month, until she decided to come to see it for herself. She had driven up from Virginia.

“My daughter had a moment,” Lisa, who didn’t give her last name, told the woman standing behind her, referring to postpartum depression. “I’ve been there, trying to get psychiatric appointments.”

“I had a miscarriage in the second trimester and drifted into depression,” Sheila Sullivan replied, explaining that she’d wound up committed to a psychiatric facility in the 1970s. “They gave me shock treatment. Back then, they didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry,” Lisa said, hugging her.

“Thank you,” Sullivan said.

“They don’t do any research on how hormones affect mental health,” Lisa said.

“She didn’t have any symptoms until they put her on the drugs,” Sullivan said.

“It’s all interconnected,” Lisa said as the courtroom doors opened and the women filled the back benches.

[Read: Pregnant and depressed]

“Can you tell us what peritraumatic disassociation is?” a prosecutor asked an FBI forensic psychiatrist, Gregory Saathoff.

“It’s when you feel things are unreal, not you—like you’re watching yourself,” Saathoff began.

A woman wrote down, “Witness staring at jury,” and whispered, “I think that’s weird.”

Sullivan took out her notebook.

“Moral judgement??” she wrote.

She listened as Reddington, the defense attorney, questioned Saathoff, going through his 75-page résumé and pointing out that he had treated only two women with postpartum depression, and that that had been decades ago. Reddington went over the times that Clancy had described feeling “like a zombie” and had been in a “disassociated state,” and asked why health-care providers had not asked more questions when Clancy indicated that she was suicidal.

“She was trying hard to get help,” the doctor acknowledged.

“I can relate to all of this,” Jodi Fournier said as she stood in line later that afternoon. “Not at the extreme, but I can understand.”

For several days, she had been driving to court with two friends from a town 30 minutes away.

“The other thing is, when you work in health care, you learn not to trust the doctors,” her friend Susan Hatfield said. “She was questioning her doctors. She didn’t trust them, and neither did I.”

“See that woman over there?” Fournier said, noticing a blond woman standing by herself and praying at a window outside the courtroom.

“She does it every day,” Hatfield said.

Sullivan joined the line behind them.

“I had a miscarriage, then depression, then thoughts of suicide,” she began, retelling her story, and soon they went inside.

Alexandra Howland for The Atlantic

Kevin Reddington, Clancy’s defense attorney, is surrounded by journalists outside the courthouse.

Every day, the court officer gaveled in the session, a call to order that ended with the phrase “You will be heard.” Every day, a nurse wheeled in Lindsay Clancy.

“That’s her,” Fournier whispered.

On Tuesday afternoon, Reddington continued questioning Saathoff. “Do you remember Lindsay talking about how she can’t feel love? She can’t feel fear?” Then he quoted from Clancy’s journal: “It takes all the effort in the world just to breathe,” she had written, as well as “I want help” and “I want to be well.”

In the back benches, the women leaned forward so they could hear. They pulled out notebooks.

“WTF,” one woman wrote as Reddington went over Clancy’s medication list.

“I am afraid,” another woman wrote down on Wednesday, quoting something Clancy had said.

Rebecca Olszewski, a pharmacist and mother of three, had flown in from Cleveland to attend the trial. She told me that she was recovering from anorexia, bulimia, and generalized anxiety disorder, all of which she said she had learned to mask, as Clancy had apparently done at times. Prosecutors submitted into evidence photos of her smiling with her kids. “There would be outings, and my mom would be like, ‘You seem in good spirits,’” Olszewski said. “And I’d say, ‘Mom, I’m just here going through motions.’”

She wrote down a list of questions: Why hadn’t the people who’d answered the suicide hotline asked Clancy more questions about her suicidal thoughts—not simply whether she had a plan at that moment, but whether she’d ever had a plan? Why hadn’t doctors placed her in an inpatient program? Why hadn’t they paid closer attention?

[From the May 2023 issue: American madness]

Now Olszewski sat on the wooden bench, studying the jury to see whether they were paying attention. Then she watched the judge, noticing how he looked at Clancy and the witnesses.

Alexandra Howland for The Atlantic

The prosecution delivers closing arguments.

On Thursday, the day of closing arguments, the line was longer than it had been all week. Not everyone could get into the main courtroom, so another one was made available, and women filled more wooden benches, including Joni Villemez-Comeaux, a mental-health counselor there from Texas.

“This is shining a very poor light on our field, and it needs to,” she was saying, and now several women began asking her about how she would have handled Clancy—which sorts of details mattered, and which didn’t. “Every fucking thing matters,” Villemez-Comeaux said, and soon the courtroom was quiet.

In closing, Reddington once again went over all the ways that Clancy had sought help. The medications. The psychiatrist visits. The journal in which she’d chronicled her worsening symptoms until her handwriting had turned into what he described as “chicken scratch.”

“My God, what does she have to do?” Reddington said, and when he finished, women clapped and cheered, and then listened as the prosecutor for the Commonwealth, Jennifer Sprague, delivered her closing argument.

“This case is not about the mental-health system,” she began.

On the wooden benches, a woman quietly said to herself, “Yes, it is.”

After that, Sprague continued for nearly an hour. She talked about how depressed and suicidal Clancy had been but emphasized how much support she’d had. Her parents, a nanny, health insurance. “She had more access to care and treatment and support than most people do.” She once again painted Clancy as an entitled woman who’d known that what she was doing was wrong, who’d decided to strangle her children anyway, leaving them “discarded on the basement floor like broken toys because she was done playing the game.”

By the time she spoke those words, though, many of the women who’d stood in line and listened to days of testimony had already left the courtroom. They had heard enough.

This article originally misidentified Kevin Reddington as Patrick Reddington.