Christopher Nolan has directed two movies in which a soldier washes up on a foreign shore and, battle-weary and sodden, fights to return home. The first, 2017’s Dunkirk, dramatized the World War II evacuation in which thousands of Allied soldiers were killed. It received a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) for “intense war experience and some language.” The other, this summer’s The Odyssey, is a seafaring adventure that laments the atrocities of the Trojan War—and is rated R for “violence and some language.”

That R is surprising. As the translator Emily Wilson wrote in her site-crashing review for the London Review of Books, Nolan’s film is “a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle.” She meant it pejoratively. But that quality is what has prompted beleaguered English teachers across the nation to receive the film as almost a personal gift. The Odyssey is decidedly chaste, and even stars Zendaya; what better way to get students to engage with an ancient Greek text? And yet, at least while The Odyssey remains in theaters, the R restriction—which means anyone younger than 17 isn’t allowed to attend unless accompanied by an adult—cuts off the audience members who might particularly benefit from being exposed to Homer’s epic.

The United States is a relative outlier in keeping The Odyssey away from younger audiences. Among its Anglophone peers, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland deemed the movie suitable for anyone older than 15; Canada gave it a PG. Much of Latin America rated it equivalent to PG-13, as did Spain, Portugal, and France. Denmark approved the film for ages 11 and up.

So what happened here? As a rule, the MPA never discusses specific titles in public. Ratings are voted on by a board composed of parents from outside the film industry, who have children from the ages of 5 to 15; they must leave the board after a term maximum of seven years, or when all of their children reach legal drinking age. “One of the huge problems with the rating system is that there’s no transparency,” Kirby Dick, a filmmaker, told me. For his 2006 documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Dick hired private detectives to suss out who sat on the board at the time. “We don’t know what their backgrounds are, what the diversity is,” said Dick. “They’re making judgments for all of the country, the entire public, and we have no idea who these people are.”

The identities of today’s raters remain secret, as do their deliberations. Their reasoning is so mysterious that, in 2018, the MPA made headlines just by posting a 46-page document outlining the basics of its history and process. Nearly a century ago, Hollywood operated under the Motion Picture Production Code, a series of self-imposed guidelines that were enforced by “a very stern and efficient Irish Catholic named Joseph I. Breen,” Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University, told me. Anyone could read its rules: “It kind of operated like case law.” The code grew defunct in the post–World War II era; in 1968, it was replaced by the film-ratings system. Today’s arrangement, styled as a consumer guide that helps families make informed choices, is more permissive than the code, but also more opaque—and more subjective.

A spokesperson for the MPA declined to make the chair of its ratings branch available for an interview, citing scheduling issues. Instead, I called up Ethan Noble, a former Miramax Films executive, and Scott Young, a former MPA senior rater, who, via their firm Motion Pictures Consulting, guide filmmakers through the ratings process. Their job is to anticipate the ratings board’s reaction to matters such as language and content. By my count, The Odyssey featured three uses of the word fuck and its variants, one of which was used to denigrate a beach. But while the movie’s ratings descriptor did highlight language, there’s no hard line governing how many times the word can be uttered before raters impose an R. In recent years, the rating board has demonstrated more flexibility, Noble told me: Today’s PG-13 movies can sometimes get away with more F-bombs, as long as the expletive isn’t “sexually derived.”

Expletives aside, though, what makes a movie “adult” can rarely be quantified. “It’s really about how these certain movies make you feel,” said Noble. Young recalled instances in which a violent scene was deemed less graphic after simple edits to the sound mix: Dial back the sounds of bones crunching or punches landing “and bring up some music, and it completely changes.” Injury and death are considered more intense when affecting a central character—someone the audience has formed an emotional attachment to. But you can mow down an army of zombies, or decapitate an orc, and get a PG-13. “Blood is a factor,” Noble added. “If the blood is red, that’s something that will easily start pushing it more towards R.”

[Read: A Trojan horse is supposed to have humans inside it]

The MPA’s squeamishness can have ironic effects: A movie that keeps the aftermath of violence off-screen, avoiding realistic depictions of what weapons do to bodies, might be open to all ages, but a movie that dwells on those consequences will likely be restricted. Take another example from the Nolan filmography: In The Dark Knight, the Joker “makes a pencil disappear” by driving it into the eye of a mob henchman. The Odyssey, too, features a memorable ocular injury, when Odysseus and company blind the cyclops Polyphemus. The former avoided the more mature rating, apparently shocking the cinematographer who shot it. Casual sadism and glib brutality can squeak by with a PG-13; the wounds of war (and, okay, one overlong scene of husbandly vengeance) can earn an R.

The PG-13 designation has always been an awkward middle child, caught between Hollywood’s clashing commercial incentives: its desire to reach a wide audience and its eagerness to avoid parental ire. Steven Spielberg first proposed the creation of a PG rating “with a little hot sauce on top” in 1984, after widespread indignation at the gory imagery in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. But over time, as superhero franchises saturated pop culture, violence once confined to R-rated movies has arguably become a staple of family entertainment. Gun violence in PG-13 movies exceeded that of R movies by 2012, according to a study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and it continued to rise in subsequent years. As less and less distinguished a PG-13 from an R, “the rating issue kind of dissolved,” Dan Romer, one of the study’s co-authors, told me.

Doherty, the American-studies professor, took a harsher view: The distinction between PG-13 and R “in the motion-picture industry and among exhibitors is a total joke and everybody knows it,” he said. “There are a lot of R-rated movies that are aimed at the 15-year-old kid, and everybody, everybody, knows.”

Given the substantial overlap between the two ratings, the casual viewer is left to wonder what earned The Odyssey its R. During lulls in the 172-minute run time, I’d think of the MPA’s rating descriptors, a vocabulary rich with persnickety euphemism: Would I call this flashback “mature thematic”? Was the hero, while steering past the churning waters of Charybdis, experiencing mere “action” or the more threatening “peril”? How much bare human-male backside was visible before Odysseus’s crew was transformed into pigs? In fact, was the entire scene on Circe’s island sort of sexual? (It didn’t seem unsexual.)

Scant visible blood was spilled—surprisingly little, actually, especially considering that, at one point, a man gets bitten in half. Perhaps the script’s emphasis on the hero’s psychological scars from war left the MPA board with the impression that the film contained more vivid carnage than was actually on-screen. Watching a movie like a rater, I found, can be perversely rewarding. The exercise sharpens the senses; it heightens attention to the placement of a cut, to what’s depicted or merely implied. Who, after all, has more faith in the power of cinema than someone gauging how it might affect young minds?

Restricted movies, The Odyssey included, appeal to more people than in the past. “It used to be that the movie industry didn’t want to get an R, because it would limit the audience,” Romer told me. “I think that may be changing.” Box-office data indicate that only 4 percent of the audience was younger than 17—but as anyone who has ever been alive knows, teens always find a way. An R can make a movie feel edgier and more exciting. Perhaps it can also save a movie from feeling, suspiciously, like homework.

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The first time I went to sleepaway camp, I was 10 years old. When I returned home, a month later, my mom opened my footlocker to help me unpack. On top was a tray of my belongings—flashlight, lanyard, marksmanship badge, a few items of clothing, and a stack of letters my parents had mailed to me, many unopened. Beneath the tray were the rest of my clothes, neatly folded, undisturbed since the bag had been packed. I had been too busy having fun to change clothes or read letters.

When my now-adult kids went to camp, I sent them daily emails. The camp printed these out for them, along with its own partially written return messages—templates for how to reply. Each day, a photographer posted to the camp website hundreds of images of children swimming, singing, and playing Frisbee. I scrolled and scrolled, “favoriting” the ones with my kids. When they knew their picture was being taken, they flashed a thumbs-up, our family’s agreed-upon code to signify that all was well. By the time they arrived home, I had put together a photo book with highlights of their summer.

This summer, my young nephew went to sleepaway camp. At the start, parents were asked to complete forms about meal preferences and desired bedtime routines. Throughout, his parents received daily emails with photos exclusively of him. Camp photographers used facial-recognition software to ensure that parents would receive every image of their child.

I tell this story across three generations because it captures a profound shift in camp life. Of course, some camps explicitly declare themselves tech-free zones, and some families seek out those experiences. But in many instances, summer camps—previously some of the last places a child could exist beyond the reach of their parents—have adopted a kind of surveillance apparatus in the name of information sharing and safety check-ins, turning camp into yet another environment where moms and dads can hover, ever present.

For most of the 20th century, camps operated on a simple premise: Send your child and they will come back changed. The magical ingredient effecting that change was parental absence. Camp meant independence from home and school—and this was a feature, not a bug. Children without their parents were forced to navigate the world on their own. They learned to make friends without mediation (no play dates!), resolve conflicts without referees, and experience homesickness without rescue. But at many camps, all of that is being renegotiated.

Photos taken using facial-recognition technology are but one indicator of this shift. Some camps now employ teams of full-time photographers who roam the grounds all day, documenting daily life. Parents form WhatsApp groups for their children’s bunks within hours of drop-off. Some send their children to camp with two phones: one to surrender at check-in, the other hidden, for calling home. Technology alone didn’t create this new relationship between parents and camp. But it has made it harder to preserve an essential ingredient of the old experience: distance.

None of the changes to camp culture has happened because parents are suddenly worse parents. If anything, many moms and dads today are more emotionally invested in their children than ever. But some have also come to believe that good parenting means vigilance and continuous connection—which can have noticeable effects on kids’ sense of independence.

Jolly Corley, a co-director of Camp Robindel, in New Hampshire, who has worked there since 1992, remembers when she first perceived the transformation. She didn’t observe it in the parents directly; she saw it in her camp counselors. Sometime between 2008 and 2010, she told me, kids started running to her office. “They were like, Counselors are being so mean. They won’t let us leave the cabin! And they were all upset,” she said. “I was like, Oh, here it is.” Young counselors who themselves had been raised by hypervigilant parents—with stranger-danger drills and supervised play dates—had never experienced the sort of freedom that they were now supposed to be giving their campers. They had to be taught what autonomy looked like.

The more I spoke with camp directors, the more I came to understand how the rise of daily camp photography plays into these dynamics—and has reshaped parents’ perception of camp’s very purpose. Michael Marcus has been a co-owner of the boys-only Camp Greylock, in Massachusetts, since 1994. For years, he resisted posting photos. “When you have a photographer come around and the kids know that this picture is being taken, it takes them out of their moments,” he told me. And camp is supposed to be a “pure time for them”—something he was trying to preserve. At a certain point, however, all the camps around Greylock began posting photos. Marcus found himself, “like an idiot, standing on a soapbox explaining to the world why everybody else was wrong but me. That is not a particularly good position to be in.”

So Marcus hired a photographer, and now Greylock posts 50 to 100 photos each day. Some camps, he said, post 500 to 1,000. A few influencer-run operations, with teams of videographers producing content, make summer camp look like a reality-TV show.

Once posted, camp photos can take on a life of their own. They get scrutinized by parents who go looking for reassurance and instead find reasons to fret. “When you see a kid looking focused, they can also look concerned, or they could look worried or unsure of themselves,” Marcus said. And if that’s “the only photo you’ve seen of your son in three days, you might be worried.” Parents will call to ask if their child is sunburned, or if their kid wore the same shirt two days in a row. If four boys are photographed together and a fifth is shown standing two feet to the right, a parent might wonder, Is he being ostracized? “They can read into absolutely everything that’s natural,” Marcus said. “And unfortunately, ‘natural’ doesn’t seem to sell to parents, because everything in life is scripted and produced.”

Diane Goldberg Marcus—Michael’s wife—co-directs Belvoir Terrace, a girls’ camp also in Massachusetts. She recently received an email from a parent alarmed by a photo of her daughter leaning over a painting in art class. The parent asked that the camp tell the girl to drop the class; she was worried about the child’s posture, afraid that she would hurt her neck. When Diane found the girl and asked her about the class, the camper was confused. “What are you talking about?” she said. “I love this class.”

Parent chat groups have further blurred the boundary between home and camp. When a child appears in a photo, or doesn’t, word travels fast. “It’s not even the individual parent,” Michael Marcus told me. For people “trying not to pay attention, even those parents are bombarded by their friends. Every single age group has their own parent chat, and every bunk has a parent chat, and everybody talks about everything.”

Many camp directors now spend a meaningful part of their summer tending not just to their campers but also to the separation anxiety of the adults who sent them—a phenomenon that the psychologist Michael Thompson calls “childsickness.”

Parents once understood their own occasional absence from their kids’ lives as normal. Many now consider their presence normal and expected. If parents habitually track their children’s locations, attend every game and recital, and are always available by text, the experience of not knowing what’s happening with their kid can feel like a problem to be solved. “When you know what your child is doing every second of the day,” Michael Marcus said, “when they disappear, I truly believe that there’s a void that goes on in parents that is very hard for them to deal with.”

Anxious interventions by parents don’t simply alter camp. They can alter children’s belief in their own capabilities. Corley told me that kids arriving at her camp are sometimes overwhelmed by simple challenges. “If you’ve never had to solve the problem,” she said, “you don’t even know the question you’re supposed to be asking.” Many also seem ill-equipped to manage their feelings, because they haven’t practiced this skill without parental oversight. “Parents are helping to do that,” she said. “I would say maybe they are doing it rather than helping. They’re regulating the emotions of the kids.”

For more than 30 years, Derek Edwards has worked at Incarnation Camp, in Connecticut. He uses a phrase for what he witnesses on visiting day, when parents get to drop in and observe the goings-on: fishing for pain. Some parents arrive primed to interview their child about what might have gone wrong: Was someone unkind? Did someone exclude them? Edwards is careful to say that these moms and dads love their children fiercely and want what’s best for them. Still, he has watched parents arrive and, fueled by the emotions of seeing their child, begin looking for reasons to take them home. The kids, meanwhile, tend not to be bothered by whatever their parent has fixated on. “A lot of times,” he said, the child’s not “fussed.”

My 19-year old daughter went to sleepaway camp for the first time when she was 8. She remembers crying at dinner during her first week and desperately wanting to go home. Her counselor sat with her, listened, and steadied her. My daughter stayed—and went back to camp every summer thereafter and loved it. Recently, I told her that I was working on this article and had heard that some camps now allow children to call home regularly. “That’s terrible!” she said. “If I’d been allowed to call home, I would have begged to leave.”

In his book Homesick and Happy, Thompson argues that missing home is not a problem but a vital developmental milestone. Working through their homesickness, children develop a sense of self-assurance by realizing that they can be away from home, make friends, survive, and, ultimately, thrive. This builds a kind of confidence different from the type derived from academic achievement. It is the confidence of a young person who has discovered something about themselves.

My daughter’s example demonstrates yet another benefit of parents’ backing off: allowing children to learn to rely on a broader community. The person who soothed my daughter’s 8-year-old tears was a counselor, and the experience taught her that when she was in distress, she didn’t necessarily need her parents. She just needed a sympathetic teenager, or an adult, to assure her that she could get through it. This is how children learn that people outside their family have their back, Isaac Saposnik, the executive director of Camp Havaya, in Pennsylvania, where my kids were campers, told me—people who “care about them enough” and who “can be trusted when things aren’t going well.”

For many kids, despite the parental hovering, camp is still doing its job. Once, Corley told me, a tetherball got caught in a bush, and some kids at her camp who’d been there for three summers quickly set about trying to untangle it—going at it from different angles, standing on one another’s shoulders to reach a high branch. (“Had a parent seen that,” she said, “they’d be freaking out.”) Three years before this, the kids would have come running to her for help. Now “they were like, Well, we can do this ourselves.”

An irony worth noting is that camp has become more important precisely because of the culture of hyperconnectivity. In a childhood rife with screens, highly curated schedules, and constant supervision, an extended stretch of relative freedom takes on even greater importance. “Without the screens,” Diane Goldberg Marcus told me, “the kids, every year, they have to relearn how to talk to each other.”

When I think back on my footlocker—the unopened letters, the unworn clothes—I realize that I was too busy to attend to any of it because I was completely absorbed in a world that wasn’t home. I didn’t suffer from the lack of daily photos. And, as far as I know, my parents didn’t either. I was also learning valuable lessons: that I could be somewhere my parents knew very little about and still be fine, that places besides home were full of people worth knowing and experiences worth having, and that I could access these things on my own.

My daughter knows this too. She learned it as an 8-year old, crying in a dining hall. Now she is grateful for that crying, and for the counselor who sat with her instead of handing her a phone. She wouldn’t trade that difficulty for anything, because on the other side of it was the discovery of who she was. That knowledge is no small thing. And for many people, it is the kind of knowledge they can build on only by being, for a while, truly away.

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In the western United States, particularly in fire-prone areas, people have become well versed at preparing to flee. They’re experts at using the tools and technology for monitoring a wildfire’s advance; they consult the Watch Duty app as often as checking the time. They know the three levels of evacuation—Ready, Set, Go—and many perform a running calculation of how much time they might need to get to safety.

On Saturday afternoon, Rita Gregovich was following that script. She wasn’t much concerned about the small wildfire burning across a river from her home in Spokane, Washington, although she’d noticed neighbors running sprinklers on their roofs to make them less immediately flammable and was tracking the fire’s progress on her phone. She was not too worried, either, when she lowered her American flag so that it wouldn’t get too smoky, she told me. Then she stepped around her garage and saw a wall of smoke. “And it was right on top of us,” she said. She and her husband, Dan, would learn, in a moment of rising distress, how much heavier their automatic garage door becomes when the power is out. She would discover what a burning ember feels like when it falls into your shoe.

Nearly 100 large wildfires are burning across the country at the moment, more than half of them in Oregon and Washington, and many of those have prompted evacuations. The three fires converging on Spokane, Washington’s second-largest city, have destroyed 800 to 1,100 homes and other buildings, fire authorities have said, and displaced more than 65,000 people. As more people have moved into forested exurbs and wildfires’ footprints have grown, such evacuations have become a distressingly familiar summer ordeal: a dayslong limbo in relatives’ spare rooms or emergency shelters, pets in hotel lobbies, possessions lugged around in plastic bags. In France and Spain this summer, record-breaking wildfires forced more than 300,000 people from their homes, an exodus that one French minister described as the largest peacetime evacuation in the country’s modern history.

An evacuee, for however long, steps into a kind of parallel existence, in which locations remain familiar but the rhythms of navigating them have changed. The route home is the same, but now a National Guard checkpoint stands in the way. Your boss is still eager to see you at work, but suddenly you’re living in a van at the fairgrounds. Almost as soon as the calculation to flee is complete, you must begin the harder, more uncertain calculation about how to hold together your life until you can return, if you choose to do so. At the Spokane County Fairgrounds, an evacuation site for animals, Jennifer Hynek was trying to ease her anxious horses, which were kicking and pacing, unaccustomed to city water and the confines of a stable after living on an 18-acre ranch, a nonprofit horse-boarding facility. (She also brought five goats, two pigs, two dogs, and four cats, but she “left the chickens all at home,” she told me. “Fend for themselves.”) In one evacuation zone in Spokane that was at the highest level of alert—leaving was mandatory—a sign on the door of the closed Little Garden Cafe read Still level 3, hoping for Weds.

But swaths of devastated land are still smoldering, and more heat and wind are in the forecast. Authorities have not yet been able to say when most evacuees can return home. “I know people want to have certainty about ‘When can I get back to my property? When can I get back to my homes?’ We don’t have it,” Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown told reporters on Monday. “It could be a week. It could be weeks.”

Randall Barkley, a 65-year-old retired Green Beret, spent his first night after leaving home in his Lotus Evora. He loves the two-seat sports car, but he never expected to sleep in it at a park, let alone with another person. He fled on Saturday when he saw flames near a dumpster outside his townhouse and heard the pop of exploding transformers. “The two booms was my cue,” he told me. As he drove away, he watched firefighters hoist patients into vehicles at the Alzheimer’s and dementia-care facility across the street, leaving dozens of tipped-over wheelchairs splayed outside. He and his brother Brian followed the night in the Lotus with one at a “price gouging” motel, as he put it, then a night at Brian’s boss’s house. They never know quite where each day of evacuation will end. “We might sleep in the car downtown,” Barkley told me on Tuesday. “We’re running out of resources.”

The lucky evacuees whose houses still stand may wonder, as they return home to retrieve birth certificates, heart medication, or a pair of pants, whether the gas leak audibly hissing in the wreckage next door will blow them up while they are on their errand. They must consider the inexorably melting side of beef in the now lifeless freezer. The unlucky ones must start thinking about what to buy a teenage daughter who has just lost all of her belongings.

Donna Light learned that her apartment, in a 12-unit building, was gone before she could get there. A friend sent her a photo the day after the fire. She discovered on Facebook that her parents’ home, not far away, had also burned down. On Tuesday afternoon, Light, a 48-year-old who works in hospital administration, poked through the ruins of her apartment, looking for her jewelry and her collection of Polish pottery. Her Honda CR-V was still in its parking spot, charred down to its metal frame. Light had recently given up her rental insurance on her apartment because “nothing ever happens here,” she told me. Her 14-year-old daughter, who kept belongings at both houses, lost everything except for her electronics and a spare pair of pajamas. “We just start from scratch,” Light said.

This is what a successful evacuation looks like, by the most basic measure, at least: So far, in the face of multiple fast-moving wildfires, nobody has been found dead, and first responders have reported no major injuries. The familiarity of evacuation math—when to go, how long to stay away—can be its own kind of protection. Disasters tend to be less disastrous, in certain ways, when the people who face them know what to expect and what’s expected of them.

Police and National Guard soldiers have tended to let people walk or take bikes and scooters back to their properties, but not drive to them. For some people, the walk home covers multiple miles, in the heat of summer, through a bitter pall of smoke. On her way into the disaster zone, Nikki Martin, a 33-year-old caregiver whose home survived, has felt the pang of passing others who had little to retrieve. “One guy held up a brick and a metal Welcome door sign,” she told me. “He said, ‘This is my house, right here.’”

The United States is running out of missiles. After five months of war with Iran, stockpiles of long-range weapons are so low, current and former U.S. defense officials told us, that they don’t believe the U.S. has enough to combat a threat in Asia. The remaining supplies, depending on the munition, are as low as 20 percent of what the Pentagon would like to have in hand. And stores of sophisticated interceptor missiles, such as Patriots and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles, are too depleted to give or sell the weapons to Ukraine or effectively defend against Iran’s launch of ballistic missiles. Even when troops see Iranian missiles approaching, they are forced to decide in a matter of seconds whether to expend a limited number of interceptors or hope for the best, the defense officials told us.  

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week pleaded with Republicans on Capitol Hill for billions of dollars to replenish America’s dangerously depleted stockpiles of missiles and other crucial munitions. Hegseth’s appeal was nakedly partisan—he ignored Democratic lawmakers entirely—but also long overdue.

The Pentagon this year has awarded tens of billions of dollars in contracts to replenish those arsenals. But signing contracts is not the same as delivering missiles. Those contracts will produce munitions over the coming years, not the coming months. The Trump administration has invested in the defense industrial base to accelerate production, as did the Biden administration, but for crucial systems such as the Patriot, supply is not projected to meet demand until about 2030. Meanwhile, Iran has ramped up production of its offensive drones and ballistic missiles, and enhanced their capabilities. The war is now being shaped as much by industrial supply and logistics as by economic considerations and the politics of the midterms.

President Trump raged at the assessment his national-security team gave him at Camp David on Friday, which showed that the U.S. military was running low on the munitions that would be necessary for Trump to order an escalation against Iran, a senior administration official familiar with the meeting told us. If the U.S. were to strike, Tehran would likely launch a barrage of missiles and drones against its neighbors in the region and the American bases they host.

The president barked at aides and had some pointed words for the Department of Defense’s leadership. (He is not presently considering staff changes, a White House official told us.) Trump has grown frustrated at his inability to escape the stalemate of the war; he’s seething at its toll on the economy and is desperate to move on. In a post on Truth Social earlier today, Trump said that reports of munitions shortages were false and that such “leaks” were treasonous. Manufacturers are shipping “large amounts” of munitions “as needed,” he wrote.

[Read: This may be Trump’s biggest error in the Iran war]

White House aides are concerned that Trump is losing his leverage in the conflict. He has threatened Iran many times but has rarely followed through; Tehran knows that. Tehran also knows that the U.S. is running low on munitions despite what Hegseth and the president say in public. Military leverage depends not simply on the U.S. ability to strike but also on its capacity to defend against Iran’s retaliation. Iran has displayed the confidence to further test the U.S., attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The White House has maintained that Iran would soon face an economic situation so dire that the regime would be forced to negotiate, and U.S. intelligence reports suggest that Iran is struggling. But the Trump administration has been surprised at Tehran’s resilience, and is no longer certain that the regime will reach the point where negotiation is its only option.

In the five months since the war started, the president has never faced such a weak position. The shortage of interceptors makes escalation dangerous. Nor would expanded strikes guarantee that Tehran will come back to the table.

That may leave diplomacy and concessions as the administration’s least risky option. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have repeatedly said that Iran will never be allowed to control any part of the Strait of Hormuz. But Trump is now considering a deal that gives Iran some control over maritime traffic. The proposed agreement between Oman and Iran, pending U.S. and Gulf approval, would reopen the strait by establishing a jointly managed framework for commercial shipping. Such a deal would give Iran the oversight of the crucial waterway it feels it has earned from the war, while also honoring Oman’s insistence on preserving freedom of navigation.

America’s stockpiles have been under strain for years, but became painfully clear after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The U.S. military fired hundreds of missiles, some costing millions each, during the Trump administration’s 53-day campaign last year against the Houthis in Yemen. That was followed by nearly two weeks of U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran and the interception of Iranian missiles and drones aimed at Israel. During the first 38 days of the Iran war, the U.S. launched thousands of munitions.  

Hegseth has repeatedly denied any shortage, including to Trump as recently as last week, one U.S. official told us. On Capitol Hill, the defense secretary did not make a compelling case for the funding he wants, particularly to legislators who face tough reelections partly because of the war’s unpopularity. Between American voters’ frustrations with rising gas prices and Hegseth’s mixed messages and past combative relationship with Congress, “there is no goodwill for the department here,” one congressional aide told us.

[Read: A tragedy in Iran might persuade Hegseth to change course]

Still, Congress is ultimately expected to provide much of the funds the Pentagon says it needs to replenish its stores. But what the U.S. really needs is time. Depending on the weapon, replenishment to prewar levels could take as long as five years, Mark Cancian, who tracks munitions stockpiles for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., told us.

Another three years would get stockpiles “to a level where the joint staff and U.S. commanders in charge of the Asia Pacific would be comfortable,” Cancian said. In theory, that gives Beijing plenty of time to take advantage of American shortages with, say, an invasion of Taiwan.

“Claims of U.S. munition shortages are false,” and the amplification of them is irresponsible, Sean Parnell, Pentagon spokesperson, told us in a statement. “We have everything required to strike at the time and place of the President’s choosing.”

The problem predates the Trump administration. After the Cold War, the U.S. reduced the number, and slowed the pace of production, of vital munitions, figuring that long bouts of peace between short, conclusive wars would provide plenty of capacity. But the military has been almost constantly engaged somewhere in conflicts led by missile strikes: Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Nigeria. And Russia’s war with Ukraine has been defined by rapid advances in munitions. The Biden administration signed contracts to replenish Kyiv’s weapons but could not keep up with demand, Cancian told us.  

The U.S. raced to develop cheaper ways to tackle the Iranian-supplied drones that Russia deployed, and has made some progress. But the stores of interceptors such as Patriots and THAADs were rapidly expended. “There are no good alternatives for stopping ballistic missiles,” Cancian told us. “Without these defensive missiles, attacking missiles will land unopposed. That is what is happening in Ukraine.”

Before Russia’s invasion, the U.S. produced roughly 300 Patriot missiles a year, half of which went to allies. Production has since doubled, but badly trails wartime demand.

Had the Iran war been over in a matter of several weeks, as the administration initially predicted, the U.S. munitions problem would not be so dire. And the problem would be mitigated “if we knew when the war will end,” one defense official told us. “The real problem is that there is no long-term strategy—and we can’t plan around that.”

Before the shortages, the U.S. used its technological advantages to shape its strategy. Now the technological advances of its foes—and the strain they have put on U.S. stockpiles—are forcing Washington to reconsider its strategy again, this time without the long-held assumption that U.S. forces would enjoy an advantage in munitions.

Since November, President Trump has been pushing a plan to paint the granite office building next to the White House, because he thinks it should be white too.

Trump’s proposal for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building is inane, which is why historic preservationists have sued over the project. With its dramatic mansard roof and facade of polished gray granite, the imposing Gilded Age structure has been called a “palace of state.” But painting granite damages the stone and requires expensive upkeep. Moreover, the facade is intrinsic to the design of this century-and-a-half-old building that is revered—and protected as a National Historic Landmark—for its exceptional architecture and prominent role in American history.

In the latest development, preservationists sought emergency relief last week to block the White House from applying test patches of paint to the building. A federal judge then directed the Trump administration to refrain from this and related actions until the court has ruled on the underlying issues; a hearing is tentatively set for August 18.

The EEOB proposal has been overshadowed by Trump’s larger legacy projects, including the White House ballroom and the 250-foot triumphal arch. Like those, the EEOB plan disregards legal and institutional rules in ways that will create dangerous precedents if it is not reversed by the courts. However, the project is notable in that it has no constituency, is of no redeeming value, and would cause irreversible physical damage. Simply put, someone needs to tell the president, Stop.

The EEOB was built from 1871 to 1888 to house the rapidly growing State, War, and Navy Departments. The architect, Alfred Mullett, selected granite for the exterior for aesthetic as well as functional reasons. He sourced the granite from two quarries, in Virginia and Maine. By using the darker, gray Virginia granite for the flat surfaces and the pinker Maine granite for the rusticated base and columns, he highlighted the architectural features of the massive and ornate building.

Mullett’s exuberant French Second Empire design, which reflected the optimism of post–Civil War America, soon fell out of favor, and there were repeated efforts to demolish the building, including by a commission established by President Eisenhower. Fortunately, the cost of demolition impeded such action, and, beginning in the 1960s, architects and historians embraced the EEOB as a Victorian masterpiece.

The Eisenhower building has witnessed at least as much history as all but three others in Washington, D.C.: the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and the Supreme Court. As home to the National Security Council, the National Economic Council, and the Council of Economic Advisers, among other White House offices, the EEOB remains the setting of executive-branch policy making at the highest levels.

Trump apparently doesn’t like the color of the building. “Gray is for funerals,” he said in a November Fox News interview, and he has argued that white would be more congruent with the White House. However, the EEOB dwarfs the White House in size. If it were painted white, the EEOB would appear even larger, visually overwhelming its neighbor.

[Read: Donald Trump’s paint jobs]

History and aesthetics aside, Trump’s plan violates a key rule of building maintenance: Do not paint granite. Granite is a superior building facade that has been used for other distinctive structures in Washington, D.C., such as the Library of Congress and the Old Post Office. Left unpainted, granite requires little maintenance. Once granite is painted, however (and examples are rare), it requires extensive maintenance in perpetuity. Greg Werkheiser, a co-founder of Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm representing the DC Preservation League (which is suing over the project), has warned that the EEOB could become the Golden Gate Bridge of federal buildings: As soon as painting is finished on one end, it will be time to begin again on the other.

The president and his aides claim to have identified a “magic paint,” made with mineral silicate, that avoids the problems of traditional paint. However, 25 technical experts who were surveyed by Cultural Heritage Partners strongly refute that claim, arguing that mineral-silicate paint is no more suited than traditional paint for use on granite. Although the testing that the White House wanted to begin could help settle such disagreements, the process is unlikely to be transparent or impartial.

Despite its flaws, the president’s proposal to paint the EEOB is still alive because key institutions, including ones with a history of nonpartisanship, have fallen under the sway of the White House. One such institution is the Commission of Fine Arts, a seven-member independent federal agency that reviews the designs of major construction projects within Washington, D.C. The president appoints CFA members (no Senate confirmation is required), and the members select the chair and vice chair. Past chairs of the commission, which Congress created in 1910, include such luminaries as Daniel H. Burnham and Daniel Chester French.

Although the CFA criticized the building earlier in its life, the commission later became an advocate, fending off post-Eisenhower proposals to “modernize” its exterior. Members even told the General Services Administration to “launder, but don’t scour” the exterior so as to preserve the natural patina of the granite. In 2018, the CFA published a richly illustrated history of the EEOB.

Since last year, Trump has replaced the entire CFA with loyalists who have largely rubber-stamped the president’s pet projects. The commission’s April deliberation on the EEOB proposal was typical of its Trump-era approach. Vice Chair James C. McCrery II, an architecture professor at Catholic University and the original architect of Trump’s ballroom, conceded that painting the office building would increase its maintenance needs, but compared it to the laundry costs he gladly incurs so he can wear dressy white shirts. McCrery also argued that the EEOB’s shadowy gray color may have suited the 19th-century War Department but was unnecessary now that the building had no military tenant (National Security Council staff might disagree). Another commissioner predicted that painting the EEOB white would improve morale among its occupants by highlighting their connection to the White House.

Another crucial institution bowing to political pressure is the GSA, which manages federal real estate. The EEOB is the crown jewel in the agency’s portfolio. Under normal circumstances, career staff would have dismissed as laughable a proposal to paint the Eisenhower building, because of the risk to it and the prospect of steep maintenance costs that the GSA can ill-afford. (I am a former public-buildings commissioner at the GSA. I testified in May against the plan before the U.S. National Capital Planning Commission, another body tasked with reviewing it.)

[Read: Inside Trump’s rush job to build his arch]

Circumstances being abnormal, the GSA signed a memorandum purporting to delegate its legal authority over the EEOB project to the White House Office of Administration. The White House is exempt from requirements to review construction projects under the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act—requirements that apply to the GSA and other federal agencies. If the GSA’s delegation is found to be lawful, the White House will have effectively eliminated the need for the project to undergo a crucial but time-consuming review that elicits the views of experts, affected groups, and the public. Although the White House says it will carry out the review voluntarily, critics of the proposal are skeptical, and Cultural Heritage Partners and the DC Preservation League have challenged the GSA’s action in federal court.

Critics of the Trump administration’s GSA gambit fear that it could become a template for exempting other controversial projects from review under NHPA and NEPA. Werkheiser told The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott that “the precedent is potentially devastating,” and that “anytime the president takes a personal interest in a project he can simply pluck it out of an agency that is subject to review, and put it in his own shop.”

The president’s GSA plan faces a tough legal test (the key issue is whether the White House Office of Administration, which was created by executive order, is a federal agency). However, even if the president loses, the challengers’ victory could be short-lived. The NHPA and NEPA review processes rely on the goodwill of the federal agencies that conduct the reviews. The National Park Service is making a mockery of its review of the president’s proposed arch. The GSA is likely to do a similarly token job on its review of the EEOB proposal. The Trump administration also plans to gut federal historic-preservation rules more broadly, potentially allowing federal agencies and developers to pursue projects such as the arch’s construction and the EEOB’s paint job without soliciting expert or public input.

The president’s destructive approach to the EEOB is ironic given the positive role he played, before his first term, in restoring another granite landmark with a Pennsylvania Avenue address. Like the EEOB, the Old Post Office was a Victorian ugly baby whose critics tried repeatedly to demolish it before the public eventually warmed to it. The Trump Organization invested $200 million to restore the Old Post Office and convert it into a luxury hotel, working closely with historic preservationists at the GSA, which owned the building. The results are impressive. Sadly, the aesthetic taste and respect for history evident in the Old Post Office’s restoration are absent from the president’s plan for the EEOB.

Had the Trump Organization sought to paint the granite exterior of the Old Post Office, the GSA’s answer would have been not just no, but Hell no. The president’s EEOB proposal deserves the same response.

This article was adapted from the author’s written testimony at a May 7 meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission.

Separating facts from lies, and real thoughts from fabrications, can seem more difficult than ever: Words and images are easily faked, and some writers at every stage—students, academics, novelists—are letting machines do the work for them. The author may as well be dead. Ubiquitous cameras are eroding human privacy, creating the sense that we live in a panopticon. And across many popular platforms, information is often shorn of context, if not outright false.

The fact that I feed my kids and pay my rent as a novelist and teacher likely intensifies the queasiness I feel at these developments. Yet my profession also helps me understand that the idea of society coming apart might be the oldest story in the world. In the second half of the previous century, a group of mostly French theorists made this kind of instability their main subject. Systems built by humans were overpowering our ability to make choices, they explained. Society and language, the scaffolding on which our reality was built, were made up and farcical.

I read these guys—mostly guys, often grouped together as structuralists and post-structuralists—in college, and they baffled and entranced me. After a mediocre high-school education spent checking boxes, the thrill of thinking, of elbowing my way through something hard and complicated, felt like coming to life. Trudging doggedly through these difficult, abstruse ideas—roughly 67 percent of which I felt sure I didn’t understand—made the world feel sharper, different. Twenty years later, looking back on their (not inaccurate) cultural diagnoses generates a complicated feeling: I’m reminded of that seductive sensation of stretching one’s brain, even as I hear speculation that artificial intelligence might one day make thinking obsolete.

No book better captures this paradox than The Frenchmen, Emily Eakin’s new book about her encounters with post-structuralist ideas. Eakin entered college as an aspiring academic, but went on to spend her adult life in journalism (she is an editor at The New York Times). Yet despite her experience in two unstable fields, and her focus on thinkers who proclaimed, among other things, “the death of the author,” her book is filled with life. Every page contains evidence of deep research, an eye for telling details, and the pleasure that can comes from sprawling, sometimes consternating thought.

The Frenchmen opens as a sort of intellectual bildungsroman: At Harvard in the late 1980s—and especially in the classrooms to which Eakin gravitated as an undergraduate—French theory was the rage. It seemed both exclusive and rebellious. The protests of the ’60s seemed to be a distant memory, Ronald Reagan was president, and large portions of the population were quietly ignoring the thousands of deaths caused by AIDS. “In an era of complacency and self-satisfaction,” she writes, “theory was a symbol, however small, of intellectual nonconformism, a badge, like a pink mohawk, that marked you as a member of the counterculture, different from—and critical of—the docile horde.” Like so many college kids before her, Eakin, the child of two English-Ph.D. holders from Indiana, came to campus feeling ineffectual and small. The spirit of the times only amplified that impression, but the sheer force and seeming certainty of these fashionable thinkers gave her a sense of power.

[Read: The theory that explains Trump’s UFC fight]

Before long, Eakin comes to the titular French writers: Jacques Lacan (1901–81), Roland Barthes (1915–80), Louis Althusser (1918–90), Paul de Man (1919–83), Gilles Deleuze (1925–95), Michel Foucault (1926–84), Félix Guattari (1930–92), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). I gave you the dates of their lives because, in Eakin’s telling, they really matter. Having led the reader into their ideas through her own experience, she illustrates how impossible it is to separate any individual thinker’s theories or discoveries from the time in which they lived. This seems obvious, maybe, but in fact it contradicts these philosophers’ core belief in the irrelevance of biography. And to the extent that our lives often feel disembodied today—so much time spent staring at screens—Eakin’s approach is not just a refreshing way of explaining ideas, but also a reminder to readers that we are physical beings first.

One of the primary tenets of most of the Frenchmen was that facts and meaning were difficult to pin down. There was only the text, over which the writer had little control. Even the self was ultimately an unstable text. “Within the structuralist framework,” Eakin explains, “an author was held to be of little account, a ‘fiction’ perpetrated by the ‘linguistic system,’ so it was easy to ignore the philosopher” and instead “focus exclusively on his words.” Eakin’s goal is the opposite: “to re-embody these men—to recover the hidden human element beneath their often stringent antihumanism.”

In carefully parsing not only these men’s arguments but also their lives, Eakin is able to seduce us with their ideas. And by whipping back and forth between theory and life, documenting spats among the players, and jumbling timelines, she lets readers glimpse the twisty paths these ideas followed, the historical currents that accelerated their spread, and the way they still thrum through our lives.

We spend the early chapters with the adolescent Eakin, for whom theory’s appeal was as much aesthetic—scarves and cigarettes, jeans with neckties—as it was intellectual. Eakin spent weeks imagining herself performing as Nadja, the wanton and elusive love interest from André Breton’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. “I didn’t know what I wanted to be,” she writes. “I was hung up on something more basic: what it meant to be. I lacked confidence and, more to the point, skepticism. I didn’t know how to take theory in small doses.” This infatuation seemed to acquire the quality of an addiction. “Theory made thinking feel like doing. There was a rigor and beauty to it, an athletic strenuousness.”

A combination of theoretical gloss, intellectual memoir, and group biography, The Frenchmen is never wholly any of the three, and this is both its great strength and the reason that it sometimes loses hold of itself. From Eakin’s early college days, readers move through various philosophies without the confusion and doubling back that reading the actual works frequently entails. We start with Sartre, Marx, and Freud, who give way to Althusser and Lacan. Nearly all of the structuralists thought Sartre’s emphasis on individual agency was absurd in the face of Vietnam, inequality, and the Cold War. People had no power after all; their unconscious, shaped by systems and structures, was actually in charge.

[Read: I will read Ulysses yes]

Such a smooth summary inevitably sacrifices complexity. My own descriptions have already shortchanged everyone I’ve mentioned. But Eakin doesn’t mean to untangle every theory, only to find “the hidden human element” that unites and explains the movement. Over and over, she knocks these philosophers’ experiences up against their thinking, lets us see these men move (sometimes awkwardly, sometimes dashingly) through time and space, and helps us understand how their theories reflected their lives.

How, for instance, does your understanding of Foucault’s theory of power—that society is a trap constructed to discipline and punish—change when you know that he was told by his headmaster that he had to fix his homosexuality if he wanted to stay at school? What might Derrida’s famous notion of différance—that words and signs mean something only in relation to other words and signs—have to do with the fact that he was a French Algerian Jew, expelled from primary school because of his ethnicity? Sartre and Althusser, each fixated on the limits of freedom, had both been prisoners of war and struggled to reintegrate into civilian life. Both Deleuze and Barthes were not admitted to L’École Normale, which was considered one of the best schools in Paris, for different reasons; each went on to defy academic orthodoxy.

Foucault was hospitalized after a suicide attempt; then he dropped acid in Death Valley. Althusser was diagnosed as bipolar, endured shock treatment, and eventually strangled his wife. Derrida was arrested (erroneously) for drug trafficking in Prague; Barthes was struck and killed by a laundry van. Nearly all the Frenchmen were fast drivers and sharp dressers. None of this made them structuralists or post-structuralists, but all of it is fairly extraordinary.

Watching these details accrue leads to conclusions that undermine the doctrines of the Frenchmen: How could biography not be important? And also, how much more fascinating does it make these ideas? Unstable or not, the author is most certainly a text worth talking about. Instead of ideas bestowed by gods, these iconoclastic theories come to look like intellectual insurrections with both global and highly proximate causes. The eruptions of the 20th century, refracted through idiosyncratic, brilliant, sometimes troubled men, engendered new ways of thinking about freedom, collectivity, social control, and artistic creation. In Eakin’s account, you begin to see the alchemy through which these notions caught fire and spread.   

By the time Derrida died, in 2004, the fever of post-structuralism had long broken in the universities—and in Eakin’s mind. In the end, close reading didn’t lead to revolution. The students supposedly radicalized by Marxist theory and its descendants did not slow down the global march toward free markets and political triangulation. In the late ’80s, De Man was revealed to have been a Nazi apologist with a secret family stashed in Europe. Eakin, for her part, dropped out of her Ph.D. program and went on to work at the academic magazine Lingua Franca; she was there when the outlet published an article by the NYU professor Alan Sokal, who revealed that he had duped a journal into publishing a hoax that mocked literary theory. The death knell of the Frenchmen had been rung before the end of the 20th century.

[Read: A bizarre, challenging book more people should read]

When Eakin, by 2004 already at the Times, was asked to read the paper’s prepared obituary for Derrida, she realized how thoroughly these once-vaunted men had been struck down. She laments the article’s “tone of condescension,” its emphasis on how “unintelligible” theory is: “The Times’s Derrida was a caricature I recognized, and it seemed pointless, maybe even pretentious, to object.” Eakin now seems to regret her failure to ask for changes to the obituary, but she mentions extenuating circumstances that most anyone could understand. She was on maternity leave, and she was unsure what difference she could make. I also got the sense that she was deep inside a bureaucratic system whose rules she had learned to accept. But she wonders, years later, if she wrote off theory too easily—or too early. Maybe it seemed dead only because its influence was so diffuse. Its ideas were nowhere—and in evidence everywhere.

Today, when the slipperiness of truth, the ubiquity of surveillance, and the pervasive politics of identity are all self-evident, an intellectual history of deconstruction seems less like a dip into the past than a sharper lens through which to view our present. Eakin’s skill in distilling and then weaving these ideas together within a biographical context not only gives them new life; it also supports her argument that these lives are essential to the work. The Frenchmen immerses the reader in the thinking and feeling of the world that came before it, and it explains, through one particular writer’s experience, the world we live in now.  

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Reports confirming the death of young love are pouring in: Post-COVID declines in dating aren’t rebounding. Way fewer teens and young adults are having sex. In 2019, 42 percent of single adults younger than 40 told Pew Research Center that they’d never been in a committed relationship.

Thirty years ago, my friends and I thought of romance and marriage much the same way screenwriters did: They were just the expected ending. Now this attitude seems to be less and less the norm. It’s not that people don’t want romantic relationships. But chasing them feels to people like it exacts too much of a toll. So over time, they’ve become less of a priority. As a result, we have entered what The Atlantic’s staff writer Faith Hill calls the “great romance slump,” in which romance is no longer the center of people’s lives.

Hill created a survey and sent it to people all over the country. She heard from men, women, nonbinary people, queer people, and straight people. From their answers and insights from research, Hill came up with solid theories about why more people are giving up on love.

On this week’s Radio Atlantic, Hill explains what’s driving the romance slump, and what its long-term implications are for families, the economy, and politics. And we hear from two people Hill interviewed who have given up, at least for now.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: It didn’t happen all at once. Instead, the modern disenchantment with romance unfolded slowly, subtly, but still unmistakably. Post COVID, young people stopped dating as much. If you talk to them about why, what you hear is exhaustion with the apps—the whole hassle of combing through matches, chatting, finding a mutually convenient time, and then dragging yourself out of the house to meet a total stranger.

All of that started to seem less important than seeing friends, caring for family, getting some work done, watching the series that everyone else was talking about. These shifts were made one by one, inside people’s heads. And then all of these individual decisions accumulated over time and turned into something new, something which staff writer Faith Hill calls the romance slump.

Rosin:  I have a question for you, as my colleague. Are you the romance reporter? Is that your actual job?

Faith Hill: (Laughs.)  You know, I’m proud to hold that mantle. I report on some other things, too, but romance and dating and singlehood specifically has kind of become a big thing for me.

Rosin: That’s amazing. So The Atlantic has a romance-and-relationship reporter, and that is you.

Hill: I guess so.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Faith spent the last several months reporting on what she called the great romance slump. In the last 40 or so years, we’ve seen huge drops in both marriage and cohabitation rates, especially among 25-to-34-year-olds.

Hill: But there’s also just a shrinking share of young adults who have a steady partner. And, you know, in 2019, 42 percent of single adults younger than 40 told Pew Research Center that they’d never been in a committed relationship.

Rosin: That is the statistic that really surprised me.

Hill: I felt the same when I saw that, and I think it’s important to talk about because it’s pretty easy to shrug off the declining marriage rates as kind of: The institution of marriage is not as important to people. You can easily have romance without marriage.

Rosin: Or intimacy without marriage, or children without marriage.

Hill: Right. Exactly. But that’s not the only thing going on. You know, it’s not just about sort of views towards marriage, and I think this is really quite a profound change.

Rosin: Listening to you, I see why you called your story “The Great Romance Slump,” because it is something of a resignation. It’s kind of like a shrug.

Faith: Yes. That’s exactly it. I liked the term for that reason. It, you know, has this kind of subtle, almost passive feel to it. You know, it’s not a sudden and dramatic plummet. It’s not that active. Like, it’s not people all swearing off romance, but rather sort of a lot of people kind of slowly giving up on it kind of captures this pessimism and fatigue.

Rosin: Yeah. It’s like a slight bad smell in the air.

Faith: Yeah, exactly. But it also implies that it’s not necessarily permanent. You know, you can come back from a slump, so there’s that too.

Rosin: Okay, let’s get into some of the reasons this is happening. Some I can just guess right off the bat. I did write a book called The End of Men about a decade ago, so I did a lot of study into how men’s and women’s relationships were changing, and just the basic fact of women being more financially independent, women being able to buy houses. We can have credit cards now—amazing—have any career you want.

So the basic idea that you need a man in order to survive is just not true anymore. What are some of the other reasons that you came across? Or at least, what’s your take on the cause?

Hill: I think that there’s kind of a combination of people needing romance less than they used to, which is great, and also dating being hard in these, you know, very specific frustrating ways. You hear so much about the dating apps, of when people talk about singlehood and romance, and a lot of times, I think people are talking about the sort of distance of the technology making it easier to ghost and people being on bad behavior because of that, kind of a lack of accountability.

[Music]

Hill: And also, you hear a lot about the kind of paradox of choice—like, people are just swimming in options. And I think there’s truth there. But I do kind of think, you know, the big thing that comes to mind for me when I consider online dating is just the toll that it takes on people. You know, when you’re having to set aside time and energy and money to meet strangers, to suss them out on the app, and then meet up with them, and then, you know, try to keep the momentum up, it just is a huge toll.

And, you know, I think that toll means that a lot of people, like, want a relationship but aren’t going to prioritize it. But I think the combination of dating being kind of exhausting and time-consuming and requiring sacrifice from other areas of life, and singlehood being so normal and doable, it starts to make it very easy for romance to just, like, not be the top thing that you wanna pursue.

And, you know, when you want romance but don’t need it, and you don’t feel like it’s gonna be easy to get, and you don’t feel optimistic about those chances or about the people you would be dating, a lot of people are just gonna give it up.

Rosin: And so if you were a sociologist, what would be the sentence? Like, what is the headline in the world of romance that merits bigger attention?

Hill: Well, I would say, you know, romance is obviously a very broad term. Under that umbrella, you know, you might fit sex, dating, partnership, marriage. But all of these forms, particularly among young people, seem to be on the decline.

And I think that shift has a lot of downstream implications. You know, it’s changing how and whether people have families, how people spend their time, how they spend their money, potentially who they vote for. And, you know, if romance is no longer the center of nearly everyone’s life, something else is.

[Music]

Rosin: How fed up with romance do people have to be before they give up? The line is different for everyone, but there are some patterns in people’s breaking points. Faith created a survey and sent it far and wide—she heard back from men, women, nonbinary people, queer, straight, and living in all different parts of the country.

One loud theme that emerges, from the respondents but also from the research, is a gender gap—more women giving up on men, not trusting them to be supportive in the right ways, not getting what they need from them, and not willing to give so much when they’re not getting back.

One of the people that Faith talked to was a woman named Treasure, who drifted away from romance and then did find new things to put at the center of her life.

Hill: Treasure is a 39-year-old woman in Chicago who has been single for a long time, and she’s loving it.

Treasure: I have been single now for 10 years.

Hill: She, for many years, was trying to date seriously, trying to find someone to marry. She was, you know, really a romantic and had high hopes about it.

Treasure: From 18 to about 27, I took dating very seriously.

Hill: She was engaged four different times. In each one, she felt like she was contributing half financially, and yet she was also doing all of the child care. She has three children.

Treasure: I already had two children before I turned 18. I started off as a teen mother. All four relationships failed because it’s like raising another child.

Hill: After that fourth relationship ended, the fourth engagement, that was really the last straw for her.

Treasure: I’m going to get extremely personal here, but I had a miscarriage, and my significant other at the time noticed that I was depressed and noticed that I was upset, and I kept trying to explain to him, “Well, you know, my hormones are changing right now.” I was already four months along. I was like, “I’m really sad right now. I know you feel like you need attention, but right now I can’t do this. This isn’t about you.”

Hill: She said, “You know, the one time that I need something from him, his support, he couldn’t be there.”

Treasure: In my mind, it was like I overperform in these relationships, and when it comes down to the wire and something is needed for me from them, I was not receiving it. And if that’s the case, then what is the purpose?

Hill: I think she just felt really exhausted by holding everyone else up and feeling like the mother to the partners she had.

Treasure: That was the last time for me. I was like, “This isn’t for me.”

[Music]

Hill: She likes to say, you know, she realized if she wasn’t gonna find a husband, she had to make “husband money.” So she did a bunch of training and an apprenticeship, and she ended up becoming a technical engineer in a union job, and that totally changed the financial picture for her, where she felt like, you know, she could be single and take care of her kids herself.

Treasure: I've been in the trades now for nine years, and I choose not to date anymore.

Hill: When she first gave up on dating and romance, she felt really lonely. I think it was a big change. But she realized she just had to start replacing what she had gotten from those partnerships with other things.

Treasure: I adjusted, and I made more friends, and I found myself again. I have new hobbies and go places alone. I travel alone. I go to the movies alone. I go out to dinner alone. I’m literally dating myself, and I’m so much happier. I am the one for me.

Hill: She wishes that she could have found the relationship that she once dreamed about, but she said, “I think at this point, it’s a fantasy.”

Treasure: It’s kinda like, How do you get it all? Is there a way? I haven’t found it. I had to give up romantic love with a spouse in order to achieve everything else that I wanted.

Rosin: That’s so interesting. It’s like when Esther Perel says we look to our partners and we expect everything from them, and that’s not realistic. It sounds like she just took the everything and divided it among people—like, I’m gonna have best friends here. I’m gonna have a community there. I’m gonna make money here, and maybe she just has sex somewhere else. You know?

Hill: Right. Exactly.

Rosin: I bet that there are women who can definitely relate to that. Does she seem happy to you now?

Hill: She really does seem happy. Yeah. She was, I think, one of the happiest people I talked to for this story.

I found that really beautiful to kind of realize that if you can sort of round that bend psychologically, sometimes you just can grow to love your life in the way it is if you sort of lean into it. I don’t think it would necessarily be the same for everyone, but Treasure is really independent, and she has great friendships and meaningful work. I think she just had such a hard time trying to find love that, in comparison, she feels so free.

Rosin: It’s important, because I guess she counts as a post-romance model. Like, it’s not for everyone, but that is a template that might work for some people. Because she did wanna have a romantic relationship at some point. She sought it. She tried many times. And so for anyone in that situation, this is an alternate model that’s maybe hopeful at the other side.

Did you have a sense of how typical she was?

Hill: Yeah, I’ve talked to a lot of people who have sort of stopped searching for romance. I think she might be a little atypical in just how much she’s loving it and thriving.

But I’ve talked to a lot of people who say that they would welcome a relationship if it fell in their lap, but they’re not gonna search for it. They just can’t do that anymore. They’re too exhausted. They spent too much time on it. They wanna focus on other things.

And I actually talked to one researcher who said, you know, she had to stop asking in studies whether people were “actively” looking for a relationship, because what resonated more with people was whether they were “open” to a relationship.

[Music]

Rosin: It’s also interesting because the word slump is sort of a negative word, but Treasure’s case implies that the romance slump is not necessarily a negative thing, because it does open up alternate possibilities, particularly for women.

Hill: I think that’s definitely the hope. And, you know, I think for some people like Treasure, who can kind of pull this off and find meaning and community in all these other ways, it could be really beautiful.

And of course, it is a great thing that this change is happening, partly because women are able to live independently and focus on other things. So I definitely don’t think the shift is all negative. At the same time, you know, the majority of single people do still say that they want a long-term partnership.

And so for me, that’s kind of at the heart of this story. You know, what happens to the people who want love and are struggling to find it or give up on it altogether? I do think that there’s real loss there that we can take seriously, even if, you know, it does open up sort of new ways to think about purpose and community and meaning.

Rosin: Next up: the men. What’s their experience of the romance slump? That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay. We’ve talked about the women’s point of view. What about the men? I wanna talk about one of the guys you interviewed, Arthur. Can you tell me about him?

Hill: Arthur is a guy in his 40s who has spent many years dating. He’s had one-off dates here and there. He’s dated some people for a month or so. He’s had some one-to-two-year relationships. But he’s always felt like it just kind of hasn’t totally worked out.

Arthur: It was always kinda like hedged by them saying stuff like, “Oh, you’re nice and everything. We’ve had some good times, but honestly, you’re not really right for me.”

Hill: Some exes have kind of told him that they feel like he’s almost too nice.

Arthur: I’m not sure how to square that. Like, I mean, I will be, you know, the man and, you know, make all the plans and execute and everything if you want.

Hill: You know, they want him to kind of be more decisive or be the man in the relationship.

Arthur: But I mean, that does kinda come at the cost of me being somewhat less, you know, supportive and more demanding, because it kinda has to be that way.

Hill: One person said that he has “dad” energy.

Arthur: I’m not 100 percent sure what that means, but I’m guessing it’s not very sexy.

Rosin: Ugh.

Hill: Right?

Rosin: That’s trauma. I mean, that could be great, I guess, but it sounds like he did not take it as a good thing.

Hill: Right, and I think this person didn’t take it as a good thing in the romantic context. She wasn’t looking for “dad” energy.

Rosin: Yeah. That gets into something very important, which is the impossible dilemma that men seem to be in.

It’s very hard to know how to be, because you mentioned earlier that part of the problem between Treasure, who we talked about, and lots of women, was that men could not see their needs or weren’t open or communicative enough. And yet, here is poor Arthur maybe trying to be that way and getting dinged for it.

Did you hear men talk about their confusion over roles?

Hill: Yeah, absolutely. I think we’re in a kind of confusing in-between time, where there are sort of these new standards for men that they’re trying to reach, like this—you know, being kind and communicative and emotionally open—but at the same time, the old standards haven’t really gone away fully.

So a lot of men did still feel like they were expected to pay for everything on the dates and, kind of, take the lead on everything, initiate flirting, kissing. And they felt sort of torn between those two and confused. Like, they were trying to kind of exemplify all of these traits at once—like, be sort of masculine and sturdy, but also gentle and empathetic—and feeling like they were sort of always falling down on the job on one of those sides.

Rosin: And did Arthur have any positive experiences? Like, did he have any success or things that worked for him?

Hill: He definitely had some, you know, relationships that ended in friendships. And so it hasn’t been all, you know, a bad time. And yet, I think he felt like he was just putting so much into it. You know, he still very deeply wants to find love.

Arthur: I’m human, right? Like, I want to go out and, like, meet people and, you know, kiss the pretty ladies and all that.

Hill: But he just feels like he can’t be prioritizing it anymore.

Arthur: There’s so much going on. I’ve got all this stuff that I need to learn. I wanna go play with my niece and my nephew. You know what I mean? So something had to give, and I decided it was kinda like, You know what? This romantic stuff is not going my way anyway. Instead of being, like, top three things in my life, let’s bring it down to, like, maybe the bottom of the top 10.

Hill: He’s kind of pulled back from it. He’s focusing on being a good uncle, a good person, a good employee. So he’s like, “Let me just focus on myself and being the best person I can be,” and that has been a real sort of grief that he’s carrying.

Arthur: It really broke my heart to feel like I wouldn’t find my person. Like, it really did. I carried that. It was like I lost a parent. Like, it really felt that hard.

Hill: He feels like he kind of had to at least temporarily say goodbye to this partner he kept expecting to show up.

Rosin: Did Arthur have a moment in the same way that Treasure did? Like, a moment where he thought—you know, like Treasure’s miscarriage moment—where he thought, I gotta stop?

Hill: I think for him, it was a little bit more gradual over time, like, just realizing sort of how draining this was. He also talked about COVID. There was a huge pandemic dating recession, and a big part of that was just young people not meeting as much. You know, the singlehood rates rose a lot after COVID.

But there’s also another element, which is something that Arthur talked about, which is, you know, feeling like he actually lost some social skills when he was isolating in COVID. You know, he just was, obviously, not seeing people as much for a long time, and then when the world kind of opened up there, you know, it takes a while to sort of get back into the social life you used to have.

Arthur: The world fully started opening up again, and I found myself feeling awkward. You know, it’s like being 17 again and, like, afraid to talk to the pretty girl you see.

Hill: I think a lot of people can relate to that, right? Like, in the dating context or otherwise, just, like, feeling weirdly socially rusty. And that does not make making good chat and being charming with a stranger easy. Like, dating is already pretty hard socially.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. You said that Arthur was focusing on other things. How do you hear something like that? Like, do you hear that to mean he’s given up on romance? He’s not actively dating?

Hill: I think that’s kind of one of the big questions of this piece, you know: How much is this a sad thing for people, or how much is it kind of a triumph that people can have other priorities? And I think it’s a big mix. You know, I do think he has a meaningful and full life, and he’s getting a lot of purpose and enrichment from the relationships and the hobbies he does have.

But at the same time, you know, he says himself that he is yearning for a partner. You know, he wants to do all of this with someone.

Arthur: I do wanna find somebody that I can wake up in the morning and snuggle with, you know, for the next 20 or 30 years.

Hill: And so I think it’s kind of both at once. You know, I’m very happy for him that he is able to find meaning in these other ways and that he has taken kind of, you know, a break from dating when it was not feeling good. But at the same time, he’s not getting something that he wants. And I want that for him.

Rosin: So you’re a romance reporter. You’re also an adult woman looking for a long-term partnership. So I’m curious what this reporting experience has done to your outlook. Did you talk to all these people and feel comforted and more hopeful? Or did you talk to all these people and think, Oh, we just have to really accept a new reality? Like, We are entering a kind of post-romance, post-marriage age, and we have to be creative about how we adapt to it?

Hill: Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. I definitely feel comfort in the sense that there are so many great people who just have been struggling with this for a really long time, and it does make one feel less alone in it.

So there’s something really important about knowing there are, like, structural forces at work and a lot of luck too.

Rosin: Like, It’s not just me. Like, The world is conspiring against me in some way.

Hill: Right. Exactly. But at the same time, of course, that makes you feel, like, a little more pessimistic, right?

Because it’s not like I can just change something about myself. It’s like, yeah, you know, dating is really hard right now, and a lot of people are in this situation. And we can’t just sort of fix all of the things that are making it hard.

Rosin: Yeah. You’ve mentioned the yearning a couple of times. I wonder if that made you pessimistic or hopeful. Like, when I think of tens of thousands of young people yearning for a partner, it makes me sad, but maybe also makes me happy. Like, it’s a motivating factor. How did you receive that?

Hill: Yeah, I think the yearning is kind of a beautiful thing. I mean, it’s a human emotion, you know? It can be positive in that it drives people forward to look for something that they really want.

And I love to hear when people can sort of find peace with singlehood and close that door if that makes their life better. And yet, at the same time, I think that’s the thing with the slump, right? Like, a lot of people who do want partnership are just kind of giving up. And I think the yearning is one thing that is gonna kind of keep people having hope and still trying. You know, I wouldn’t want all of that to go away. And I also hope that, you know, people can maybe channel the yearning into other parts of life.

Like, I do think there’s not such a clear objective divide between the romantic and other forms of love and passion. And, you know, I think maybe these single people who are turning their attention elsewhere are really bringing a lot of their heart and soul because they’re looking for other ways to kind of fill the center of their life and, like, give love. And I think that makes them—it gives them sort of a powerful energy.

Rosin: Yeah. Can I ask: Did you shift in any way? Like, after doing all of this reporting and talking to all of these people and finding all of this company in the looking for romance in an ambivalent way, did you make any decisions about your own life?

Hill: I didn’t make any clear ones, but I will say, you know, when I talk to people who have stopped dating—and, you know, a lot of those people are enjoying their life more now than when they were dating, ’cause they weren’t having a good time; that’s why they stopped. So it does, it feels pretty tempting, and I do start to think, you know, of all the different things I could be doing with my time.

Like, I feel like I might be a better daughter and a better friend, and maybe I could, like, start writing fiction or—you know, my mind starts racing, and I think those are good things to be thinking about. We all do have limited time on this Earth, and we have to make choices about how to use it. So that’s something I’m considering, but I also know that some people I talk to, you know, when I checked in after we had an interview, they had had, you know, some dates with someone they were really excited about. I talked to at least one person who was like, “Oh, I found someone. Like, he’s the one. I am not right for your story anymore.” So that also was a reminder that, you know, if you do keep trying, for a lot of people, eventually, like, there is, you know, someone who makes the rest of it all feel like it was worth it to lead to that. So I’m split.

[Music]

Rosin: Ugh. We can never give up on the rom-com ending.

Hill: Yeah.

Rosin: It’s just how we are. We’re just built that way. Well, Faith, thank you so much for joining me today.

Hill: Thank you so much.

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

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

This story was updated on August 5, 2026, at 7:29 p.m. ET

The Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed made the customary call for unity after a hard-fought primary against a fellow Democrat. “Always magnanimity in victory,” he told a packed crowd of supporters, adding that “however much we might disagree with our Democratic opponent, there is so much more that unites us than divides us.”

But just minutes earlier, one of his most famous endorsers was pushing a much different message. “Everyone being like, Abdul has a fuck-ton of work to do mending bridges, here’s the fucking take-nuke for you, okay? You are all unbelievably Islamophobic pieces of shit,” Hasan Piker, the left-wing Twitch streamer who has said that America deserved 9/11 and who El-Sayed has embraced on the campaign trail, told some of his millions of followers. Piker went on to challenge would-be holdouts in the party to back El-Sayed: “Do you want to fucking win or not?”

Democrats in Michigan do, in fact, want to win in November, but they find themselves in a predicament over how to get everyone on board. El-Sayed, a progressive, eked out a victory over the more moderate Haley Stevens in a historically expensive and high-profile showdown between the party’s insurgent and centrist wings. The closeness of the race—El-Sayed led by about one point when the AP declared him the victor this morning—surprised many people, given that a number of polls showed the 41-year-old doctor with a double-digit lead over the four-term congresswoman.

The narrow margin of victory has, predictably, sparked a blizzard of thoughts about what lessons Democrats should garner from El-Sayed’s victory as the party barrels toward November. The candidate has suggested that he doesn’t plan to moderate his platform; he ended a news conference this morning by giving a version of his campaign slogan, asking Michiganders to join a “movement to get money out of politics, so we can put money back in pockets and finally guarantee the promise of health care through Medicare for all.” At the same time, he insisted that Democratic harmony would be crucial in the face of what he predicted would be an onslaught of negative attacks from his Republican opponents.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, were happy to comply. They endorsed El-Sayed’s candidacy this morning, praising his “energetic campaign.” (Both had originally endorsed Stevens.) Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow, who ended her bid for the Democratic nomination last month, announced her support for El-Sayed last night before the race had even been called. Stevens also added her endorsement this morning. But much of the common ground ended there. The takes on what El-Sayed should do and the lessons the party should learn from his victory are so abundant in part because the stakes are so high. Democrats will struggle to recapture the Senate if they do not win the race in Michigan.

Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told us that El-Sayed’s win “sends a signal to every other Democratic politician in America that you can cross very powerful interests and still win if the people are on your side.” Green suggested that El-Sayed doesn’t need to  perform some grand pivot to appeal to general-election voters who may be skeptical about his leftist views: “We believe that Abdul El-Sayed and candidates like him are more electable in a general election because we’re living in an outsider moment and people in all political parties and independents want someone who will shake up a broken system, not be a creature of it.”

Asked about Green’s comment, another Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to be frank, was, well, frank. “What the fuck is he talking about? Now you’re pushing an ideological agenda and not trying to win,” the strategist told us, before addressing El-Sayed himself. “You clearly need to pivot,” this person said. “A lot of the people in the party don’t like you!”

The returns highlighted clear vulnerabilities for the new nominee. El-Sayed performed well in highly educated, mostly white and affluent communities, including some of Michigan’s college towns, while trailing Stevens in some working-class areas and Black neighborhoods. Adam Jentleson, a former Democratic Senate leadership aide, posted on X that El-Sayed begins the general election as an underdog. He predicted that the Democrat would underperform his polls “because a lot of normie Dems are voting against him,” and added that El-Sayed should try to win over these folks by being “a little less rigidly left-wing, and a little more heterodox.”

El-Sayed said today that the primary would “pale in comparison to the cynicism” that would come from his Republican opponent, former Representative Mike Rogers, and President Trump during the general election. That prediction seemed to come true just hours later, as the National Republican Senatorial Committee released its first ad of the general election. “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed—the most radical Senate candidate in America,” the ad’s narrator begins, casting away any sense of subtlety before going on to link the Democrat to the Muslim Brotherhood and describe him as “too dangerous” for Michigan. (The ad uses the full name of the candidate attempting to become the nation’s first Muslim American senator at a time when some Republicans have been fomenting Islamophobia.)

[Read: The Republican who wants to banish his own constituents ]

Michigan continues to swing between Republicans and Democrats—Trump won the state in 2016 and 2024. The president wasted no time weighing in on El-Sayed’s victory this morning, calling him a “Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel.” El-Sayed ran as an unabashed critic of Israel and AIPAC, which spent tens of millions of dollars backing Stevens. Trump predicted that, with El-Sayed, the “Dumocrats crazy policies will only get worse” and called his win “great news for the Republican Party.”

Lis Smith, a Democratic operative who advised McMorrow in the primary, told us that El-Sayed should focus on broadening his coalition, adding that she feels that “he has not tried to do that one iota during this primary.” Rogers, who ran unopposed, came just about 20,000 votes shy of winning a Senate seat in 2024. El-Sayed bashed Rogers last night and this morning, aiming to cast him as an avatar of the corporate elite that has raised prices and left everyday Michiganders struggling. He also tied Rogers closely to Trump, who polls show is unpopular in the state.

[Read: America’s most divided state loves its extremes ]

The call for Democratic unity is a new one for El-Sayed. He showed no hesitation about blasting the party as he pursued its nomination, telling a group of young voters last month that “the Democratic Party brand right now is so bullshit.” El-Sayed also used his primary victory to attack politics as usual—clearly implying that Democrats have been engaged in it for far too long.

Although El-Sayed’s victory was the main event this week, several other races across the country complicated the idea that the Democratic Party has been seized by the progressive movement. In Missouri, former Representative Cori Bush lost handily to Representative Wesley Bell, the moderate who originally ousted her from her seat two years ago. In Washington State, centrist incumbent Marie Gluesenkamp Perez beat back a challenge from the left to win a primary for a district that Trump carried in 2024. Moderate Democrats in Virginia prevailed in two key congressional primaries, while left-leaning candidates claimed victories in two congressional primaries in Michigan.

The murkiness of the results shows that the party is stuck in a state of tension. Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist whose organization, MoveOn, endorsed El-Sayed, told us that although the process appears chaotic, it is necessary for a party trying to redefine itself and recover from traumatic losses in 2024. “Democrats tried an era where we swept things under the rug and we tried to sort things out before it got in front of voters,” he said. “That doesn’t work. We’re in a different era.” Instead, he advised, the party needs to openly “have the fights, let it get messy, and then put it back together on the back side.”

Things in Michigan are certainly messy. Now El-Sayed and his fellow Democrats need to put them back together over the next 13 weeks if Democrats hope to win back the Senate in November.

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

This morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson finally broke his silence on the scandal engulfing Representative Max Miller of Ohio. Well, sort of—Johnson didn’t have much to say.

“I haven’t spoken to Max about this in the last few days. Of course, I will,” he told Politico. Johnson said that Miller, a fellow Republican, was taking the allegations seriously (despite evidence to the contrary) and that a House Ethics Committee process should “play out.” (Miller requested the investigation this week, an apparent stalling tactic.) Johnson added, “There’s all sorts of domestic events going on with 435 members of Congress all the time. It’s not my business to get engaged in it.”

This raises the question of what Johnson does think the speaker’s business is. One might imagine that the Miller situation would concern Johnson for several reasons. Johnson positions himself as a staunch social conservative and defender of morality; Miller has been accused of domestic abuse against his ex-wife and toddler daughter, and of illegal drug use. (Miller has denied the abuse allegations and said that although he has used illegal drugs in the past, he no longer does.) For his caucus, it’s a big distraction from any midterm messaging that the Republican Party might wish to do in the last 100 days before elections. The scandal also puts another GOP seat in play in November; Miller said on CNN last night that Donald Trump had told him that it would be a “tough” race to win. If Miller drops out by Monday afternoon, Republicans in Ohio can replace him on the ballot, but it’s not clear how quickly the Ethics Committee process will move.

If Johnson doesn’t think that his job includes protecting the moral reputation of the House, his small and endangered House majority, or the prospects of the Republican Party more broadly, he must have some other idea about his role. What that might be is mysterious.

Passing legislation would seem like an obvious answer, but the 119th Congress has been one of the least productive in history. Legislators have succeeded in enacting just 104 laws since January 2025. That’s the lowest number by far since at least 1947—only the 274 laws passed last Congress even come close. This is especially remarkable because Republicans hold control over both chambers. Legislative leaders have also yielded some of their power over budgets, one of their most basic duties, to the White House. Even worse, 2025 saw the longest complete shutdown of the federal government in history, as legislators failed to fund the government for 43 days.

Some of the blame for this unproductivity belongs to the Senate, where the GOP edge is narrow and where rules mean that a Democratic minority can more easily block legislation. But senators are at least filling their time with other official duties, such as confirming presidential appointments, that the House doesn’t have. Another basic congressional duty is oversight of the executive branch, but the House has done little to investigate or shed light on what the administration is doing, much less hold it to account. In May, Johnson called a recess rather than hold a vote condemning Trump’s war in Iran, after it became clear that the nonbinding measure would pass. (The House has since passed a similar resolution.)

Johnson isn’t setting some sort of broader agenda for the legislature either. That, too, has been left to Trump, who seems to have been interested in only two bills: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last year, and the SAVE America Act, currently and perhaps permanently bottled up in the Senate. Johnson’s deference to Trump has reportedly led the president to joke in private that he has “two jobs: being president and being speaker.”

That’s rather demeaning for Johnson, but given how Trump dominates the House, one might expect that Johnson would pay close attention to what the president says and does. Yet Johnson has a consistent pattern of pleading ignorance when asked about controversial statements or actions by Trump or his administration. In a characteristic example, Johnson dodged a question in October about cuts to funding for special education: “I’ve been so busy on this; I’ve not had a chance to dig into the details.” Busy on what, precisely?

In fairness to Johnson, he’s working in a difficult environment with just a seven-seat majority, a rebellious right flank, and a mercurial president. But he does have some power when he wants to use it—as became apparent this week. On Monday, the House Ethics Committee found that Representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina, a Republican, had “engaged in persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct towards two young female staffers” and had likely “violated House rules related to sexual harassment and hostile workplaces.” (Edwards denied that any of his conduct had been intended as a sexual or romantic advance.) Yesterday, CNN reported that House leaders were pressuring Edwards to drop his reelection bid. Early this morning, Edwards did just that.

By attempting to remain distant from the Miller scandal, Johnson is allowing Miller to claim, as he did in an interview last night, that “Speaker Mike Johnson, everyone else—they’re standing behind me.” Johnson’s reluctance to become involved in a messy, lurid story like this one is understandable, but it’s also one of the burdens that falls on leaders. By declining to bear it, Johnson may help ensure that he doesn’t have to worry about the duties of the speaker when the new Congress opens next January.

Related:

• A family tragedy in the age of Trump
• Mike Johnson is tuning out the news cycle to focus on self-care, Alexandra Petri writes. (From 2025)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• The once-shameless president is deeply embarrassed.
• Liberals are now fighting a two-front war.
• Anne Applebaum: Putin’s human safari is the dystopian future of war.

Today’s News

1. Abdul El-Sayed defeated Representative Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary, marking a significant win for the party’s progressive wing after a tight race. He will face Republican Mike Rogers in November in a battleground contest that could help determine control of the Senate.
2. The cyclosporiasis outbreak has reached six more states, bringing the total to 15 states. The CDC said there are more than 22,000 confirmed or suspected cases, 517 hospitalizations, and two deaths linked to the outbreak.
3. The White House has declassified FBI records showing that the bureau opened a 2017 investigation into whether President Trump had been acting on Russia’s behalf when he fired then–FBI Director James Comey, according to administration officials. They said that the inquiry had ultimately found no evidence to support the theory.

Evening Read

What Happened to al-Qaeda?

By Graeme Wood

Since September 11, 2001, al‑Qaeda has pulled off exactly one fatal attack inside the United States. If you remember the details of that attack, you probably spend too much time thinking about terrorism. On December 6, 2019, in Pensacola, Florida, a 21-year-old Royal Saudi Air Force officer took out a legally acquired Glock pistol and killed three U.S. sailors at a naval air base, before police arrived and killed him. The shooter, an affiliate of al‑Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, had been on the base for flight training. I was in Taif, Saudi Arabia, at the time, and the Saudis I met said they were sorry about the incident but relieved that after 18 years of terrorist R&D, the most ferocious blow al‑Qaeda could strike on the path of jihad was not much worse than the kind of mundane workplace violence that we Americans regularly inflict on ourselves.

Read the full article.

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• “Disappear the Democrat” backfires in Montana.
• Gen Z is testing the limits of how weird parties can get.
• Bidenomics was more successful than people think.
• Trump should need a warrant to see your phone.
• The David Frum Show: Was Herbert Hoover America’s most misunderstood president?

Culture Break

Take a look. Here are some recent images of canine competitors riding the waves in surfing competitions for dogs.

Reflect. Is Gen Z really saving Hollywood? There’s a more complicated reality beneath the cheery headlines, Sophia Nguyen writes.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Tony follows a very familiar sort of 19-year-old menace—the kind of character coming-of-age movies like this were made for. He’s someone you might have crushed on in college: He sulks around with worldly paperbacks stuffed into his rear pockets, dresses in leather jackets even if it’s unseasonably warm, and seems to wear a permanent glower. Yet Tony, as played by Dominic Sessa, is more than just a pretentious bad boy; he’s starting to work his way toward something meaningful. His full name also just so happens to be Anthony Bourdain, who the audience likely knows will one day become a renowned chef and author, tapping his back-of-house experiences for material; eventually, his celebrity as a TV personality will transcend his punchy writing about the life of a cook.

The film, directed and co-written by Matt Johnson, should be hamstrung by this conclusion. On paper, Tony sounds like it requires the audience to understand something that doesn’t happen during the movie; it saves calling Tony by his full name until its final moments. This often irritating, barely grown dilettante will become someone important when he does a little more maturing, off-screen. The truth about Bourdain, however, is that he really was a cinematic figure, even in his wayward adolescence—at least if his evocative writing on that period is to be believed.

Tony draws from Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s 2000 best seller that laid bare the rough-and-tumble world of haute cuisine from the perspective of a jaded yet passionate New York chef. But the screenplay adapts only the early chapters, which cover Bourdain’s tentative beginnings in the cooking profession, including one teenage summer he spent, frequently hungover, working in the kitchen of a seafood restaurant on Cape Cod. Presenting that appetizer as a rich, earthy main course somehow comes together beautifully. Tony is not burdened by the complex details of Bourdain’s adult life, and Sessa is not asked to imitate a well-known man who spent the latter half of his career on TV. Instead, he just has to capture the feeling of possibility, wrapped up in the recognizable foolishness of youth. He and Johnson both do a beautiful job of it.

[Read: The missing pieces of Anthony Bourdain]

The viewer meets Tony at Vassar College, where he spent two years before dropping out. The school year is over, and he’s hoping to gain a summer writing fellowship that will impress his ditzy dad, Pierre (played by Rich Sommer), and his far more judgmental mother, Gladys (Dagmara Domińczyk). When that falls through, Tony instead follows a crush named Nancy (Emilia Jones) to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she has a summer job; he eventually stumbles into a gig washing dishes at the Flagship, a seafood spot. The staff is made up of the hard-partying guys one might expect (including a garrulous Stavros Halkias and a brooding Leo Woodall). For much of the run time, Tony is an observer, sucking up what knowledge he can while trying to project a precious aloofness—a trait that beguiles many a young man in search of inspiration.

His muse is found, primarily, in a character simply called “Chef” (Antonio Banderas). He’s a wise, older Brazilian man who silently greets the ocean every morning and still loves his trade enough to make his own ketchup rather than buy bottles of Heinz. Banderas could play this role in his sleep: the meditative, somewhat elusive mentor, delivering advice with simultaneous bluntness and poeticism. But he might actually be the best actor alive who could inhabit that sort of sensei role without it feeling clichéd and off-the-rack. Chef exists mostly to invest Tony with a sense of pride in what he does, even if it’s the manual labor of cooking rather than whatever intellectual pursuits Tony thinks he should follow. Johnson understands that this respect for artistry was what made Bourdain such an enduring figure.

That inherent empathy is how Tony gets away with being a biopic that ends in the early chapters of a person’s life. It’s an origin story for how a man became a chef, yes, yet it’s more concerned with how someone might fall in love with a scrappy culture and the beautiful way that cuisine blends the highbrow and the low. Tony is learning how to create shellfish delicacies; at the same time, he’s cracking open oysters and cleaning plates. (He’s also holding his own among seedy, profane company, the kind of ribald back-and-forth that Johnson can present with hilarious immediacy—be it in his prior biopic, BlackBerry, or in the riotous Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.) Although Tony is a necessarily minor piece of storytelling, it feels deceptively major nevertheless—and is infused with just enough of its subject’s real-world charisma.

What does a roughly $100,000 BMW 7 Series get you? With a few taps on the sedan’s massive touch screen, you can play Pac-Man or let the car park itself. Last week, BMW added a new feature to its infotainment system: When drivers start up their car, they are greeted by the following message: “Surprise! Spider-Man just dropped on your BMW!”

Click on the prompt, which appears in most BMWs made after 2020, and the touch screen is taken over by a commercial for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the latest movie in the Marvel franchise. The video is accompanied by blinking lights inside the vehicle. Though drivers can choose to skip the ad, it persists as an app on their car’s display.

Many BMW drivers have not been thrilled by this uninvited pitch for Peter Parker. “Stupid and annoying and totally unnecessary,” one user posted on a BMW Reddit forum. “Wtf am I getting an ad? How is that appropriate in a vehicle?” wrote another. In an email, Phil DiIanni, a BMW spokesperson,  told me that the ad is part of a broader partnership between BMW and Marvel, which has included placing a tricked-out Spider-Man-themed SUV on the red carpet during the movie premiere, last week. “The animation is available for a limited time and only visible to drivers who proactively initiate it on their vehicle’s touch screen,” he said.

A few other carmakers, such as Stellantis, have attempted in-car advertising before in the United States, but not a luxury brand like BMW. Regardless of what you drive, your car might be next. That’s because—to use the automotive world’s favorite cliché—cars are becoming “smartphones on wheels.” No longer is your vehicle a static piece of machinery governed by physical switches and buttons. This comes with many benefits. The modern, digital car can get better over time by virtue of its software: Over-the-air updates deliver new features that weren’t available when you bought the vehicle.

But with great connectivity comes great responsibility. When carmakers can beam code (and content) into our cars, they have more control over our time and money. The tech industry’s most grating strategies are invading the car.

[Read: My car is becoming a brick]

You might already be feeling one downside of smartphones on wheels: subscription fees. Though drivers have already spent decades paying for in-car communications systems, such as OnStar, monthly subscriptions have proliferated. My Tesla wants me to pay $10 a month for “premium connectivity” to access Spotify or Netflix through the touch screen, adding a monthly payment on top of the monthly payment I already pay to access those services outside the car. Self-driving features in Tesla vehicles require an ongoing monthly plan. Subscription fees aren’t always limited to software. In 2022, BMW itself announced that, in countries including the U.K. and South Korea, drivers would have to pay $18 a month to activate the heated seats already built into cars. (The company canceled the plan when customers revolted.)

In-car advertisements are the obvious next step. Cars are the perfect vehicle for this phenomenon because their passengers are quite literally stuck. You can put down your phone if the ads get too annoying, but you can’t just forgo driving the kids to school because your SUV is hounding you to watch a movie trailer. (BMW does allow drivers to permanently disable the pop-ups.) If the automotive industry continues to follow in the footsteps of Big Tech, it’s not hard to see where this goes from here: Soon, you might face targeted ads based on where you drive or Netflix-like tiers that ask you to pay to go ad-free. Serenity inside one’s car, something that was once a given, may become a luxury good.

Carmakers have plenty of reasons to do all of this. New-car prices have reached an average of nearly $50,000, and Americans may be reaching a breaking point. Auto companies facing tariffs, Chinese competition, and even a computer-memory shortage may nickel-and-dime you with subscriptions and ads to keep car prices under control, squeezing money from drivers long after the car is off the lot.

In this way, the auto industry has generated one more thing that’s already widespread with digital technology: nostalgia. Like users fleeing the constant distractions of their devices for a flip phone that does less, plenty of drivers already resent the way cars have ditched physical buttons and routed features such as climate control through a touch screen. But a low-tech new car is hard to find.

Sooner or later, Americans must come to terms with the fact that our machines are not always ours. In that sense, BMW’s Spider-Man ad is eerily reminiscent of another awkward tech collab: In 2014, Apple announced that U2’s new album would be automatically downloaded to hundreds of millions of iPhones without owners’ permission. At the time, the incident starkly illustrated the company’s power. Today that affair seems almost quaint. BMW’s in-car commercial may look tame compared with what comes next.

Last week, the internet raged as social-media posts and news articles accused AI companies of “destroying the world’s books”—including “millions of rare” ones—by chopping off their spines to scan them more easily, and discarding them afterward. One article said the news was “sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed.” The investor and AI skeptic Michael Burry called the practice of sacrificing rare books “evil incarnate.” Even Elon Musk weighed in, posting that he had asked the engineers training xAI’s models to “preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way.”

The destruction of physical books in the process of training AI has been public knowledge for more than a year, but debate over the practice intensified after an article by 404 Media, which described a large number of orders coming to booksellers, suggested that rare books might be included, and named a book-database company called ISBNdb as the possible buyer.

Lost in the outrage, however, are several unanswered questions. The 404 Media story said ISBNdb had advertised bulk buying of books for AI companies, but acknowledged that no evidence directly connects the company to the recent wave of purchases that booksellers have described. And although the story calls out rare-book sellers, it’s unclear how rare most of the books being bought actually are, or whether they’re of great value.

Despite that, the conversation rapidly intensified into a panic. So what is actually going on? And who is actually responsible?

[Read: ]Is This What Comes After AI Slop?

Many of the specifics of this situation are obscured by hard-to-trace purchasing histories and the silence of AI companies and other potential buyers, so let’s lay out what we know. We know that at least one major AI company has used physical books to train their models. Documents unsealed earlier this year in a lawsuit against Anthropic reveal that in the spring of 2024, the AI giant bought millions of new and used books and destroyed them in order to scan the pages to train its AI models. Anthropic and other AI companies are likely keen on books published before the launch of ChatGPT, in 2022, which are all but guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text. Although AI-generated text is readable—if often unpleasant—to humans, it can be devastating to AI models: When trained on their own output, they can degrade significantly in quality in a phenomenon known as “model collapse.”

We also know that something mysterious is afoot. Someone—if not more than one group or company—has been snapping up massive volumes of books from shops around the world. “What’s with the online purchasing bonanza of used books right now?” asked one bookseller on Reddit three months ago. Several people who identified themselves as booksellers responded with their own stories of unusually large orders.

Charlie Becker, the manager of Becker’s Books, in Houston, told me that 95 of the past 100 books ordered through one of his online-selling platforms went to a single buyer. One of the orders was for 70 books. (To avoid breaking the terms of service of his selling platform, Becker would not tell me the name of the buyer.)

But contrary to many news reports, the old books bought from these sellers do not appear to be “rare” in the typical sense of the word. According to Becker and the online discussions I read, the books in these orders are almost entirely nonfiction, were mostly published from the 1970s to the 1990s, and were written in a variety of languages. Becker wrote in a blog post that he has received orders for “stuff like The Insider’s Guide to Metro Denver from 1995 or How to Use Corel WordPerfect 1991.” These belong to a category of books that you could call rare because a small number of copies remain, but they may also be out-of-date, undesirable to readers, and not valuable per se. In some cases, booksellers have noted, the cost of shipping exceeds the books’ resale value.

By most accounts, AI companies want a large volume of text for as little cost as possible. It would be strange if they were intentionally paying premium prices for first editions, unusual printings of cult classics, or yellowed books of esoteric knowledge. Yet it’s possible: The pursuit of training data that their competitors don’t have could lead them to such titles.

We also have a good sense of who’s behind the book buying—and it seems unlikely to be ISBNdb.com, the subject of the 404 Media story. For one thing, no bookseller I could find in online discussions had mentioned an order from ISBNdb. The company maintains a public book database and charges for access to it, but does not appear to buy or sell any books. Things get confusing because, in March, the company added a page to its website that offered AI developers the ability to buy physical books, “up to 1 million titles per order,” with a nondisclosure agreement to preserve anonymity.

When I asked ISBNdb about the service, I received an email from a customer-support representative claiming that “ISBNdb has never purchased, scanned, or destroyed a book—for AI training or anything else. We don’t train AI models, and we never have. The page was up to explore demand for a service we never brought to life.” In response to recent “concern,” the representative said, the company had removed the page advertising that service from its website.

Reddit users did call out a different company for “frequent and sizable online orders”: Zoom Books, based in Canada, claims to use “smart logistics” to “acquire, sort, and resell over 2 million books monthly.” Booksellers in Germany mentioned similar orders from Zoom, as did a New Zealand bookseller who wrote that Zoom had placed multiple orders, including one for 71 titles. Becker would not confirm or deny whether his bulk buyer was Zoom.

On May 26, a book-industry newsletter called Publishers Lunch noted accusations that Zoom was buying books for AI companies. On the following day, the newsletter included a response from Zoom, claiming that it “has no involvement in digitization, scanning, or destruction of books, and we do not sell books for those purposes to our knowledge.” (Zoom did not respond to a request for comment.)

Some booksellers who received orders from Zoom have reported that the shipping addresses on these orders belong to a company called PrepFort. PrepFort specializes in preparing items for sale on Amazon and Walmart, but as a third-party logistics company, it can route books to other destinations as well. Using such a company would be consistent with the AI industry’s practice of acquiring training data through intermediaries, a strategy that has been used for images, paywalled articles, and other media. I emailed PrepFort to see if it could provide any details about these orders. Sufyaan Kalota, a co-founder of the company, responded: “While we would love to assist, we unfortunately cannot share any details regarding our customer agreements due to our confidentiality commitments.”

In June, the NL Times, an Amsterdam-based publication, reported that some Dutch booksellers had received emails from a Singapore-based organization called 2077AI, which claims to be “revolutionizing AI data,” partly by creating training data sets. One bookseller reported that the email from 2077AI was accompanied by a list of 3,000 English-language titles the company wanted to purchase. The examples given were academic books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics. Such books might legitimately be considered “rare”: they had small print runs, contain esoteric knowledge, but are important within a specific field. (404 Media linked to this story but did not reference these books specifically, or 2077AI.) 2077AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For now, this is what we know: A lot of used books are suddenly being bought up by companies including Zoom Books. But we do not know how many of these orders are coming from AI companies, or whether these books will be destroyed. Based on the practices of Anthropic and the attempted purchases by 2077AI, it seems very possible that the books are destined for AI companies, but we can’t be certain.

Regardless, the idea of an AI behemoth destroying books has sent a bolt through the collective psyche. Book destruction is historically linked to authoritarian regimes and attempts to control public discourse, as well as ancient tragedies—the burning of the Library of Alexandria comes to mind. The encroachment of AI, particularly in the realm of books, is now everyday news: Last month it emerged that a top-selling Kindle book may have been partly written by AI, and grandparents are buying children’s books filled with AI-generated slop.

Even if a literal book burning is not under way, the process of ingesting millions of books, stripping them of authorship, and blending them into a homogenous “intelligence” branded with the name of a chatbot certainly feels destructive. It masks the hard work and collaboration that goes into knowledge creation, undermines incentives for authors to write books, prevents experts from finding one another, and gives AI companies tremendous power over what information people can access. Given this scale of cultural damage, the physical destruction of books seems almost quaint.

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One of President Trump’s superpowers is his shamelessness. Most of the time, he demonstrates a singular ability to shrug off—or flat-out lie about—scandals or missteps that would have caused another politician’s career to self-immolate. Get caught on an Access Hollywood video boasting about abusing women? That’s just locker-room talk! Grow insecure about crowd size? The photo must be doctored! Mistakenly suggest that Alabama was in the path of a hurricane? Someone get a Sharpie and a map! Trump has long been able to shrug off a bad headline and move on to the next news cycle, counting on his base to swallow his claims and never waver in their support.

But that power appears to be fading. Trump is undeniably in a bad spot. His poll numbers have tumbled, and Republicans are fearful that they will lose at least one chamber of Congress this November. Trump’s behavior has grown more erratic in recent months—just check out his Truth Social account most nights—and he recently marked his 80th birthday. And lately, he has shown something else: an ability to be embarrassed. When that has happened, he has lashed out angrily—and has been willing to deploy the levers of government, and his compliant staff, to menace those he blames for his humiliation.

His recent targets include an Olympic canoeist accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after a rushed and botched renovation project, and journalists who reported about the security deficiencies of Trump’s new Air Force One. In the first matter, he pushed for a prosecution after an arrest was made; in the other, he ordered a criminal investigation. (The case against the canoeist and other alleged vandals fell apart, and the subpoenas of the journalists have been dropped, at least for the moment.)

For months now, Trump has been on the receiving end of another humiliation: He has been repeatedly mocked and ignored by the hard-line leaders in Iran. Once more this week, the president reacted with rage when Iran again contradicted his claims about negotiations to bring the war to a close. How will he lash out this time?

Trump really, really does not want to be forgotten, and he cares deeply about leaving his physical mark on Washington. He is a developer at heart who spent decades obsessing over the details of his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach while also overseeing the design of luxury golf courses around the world. He mostly kept that impulse in check during his first term, but now, facing his political mortality, he has decisively shifted his focus to his legacy, whether that be trying to claim territory for the United States or reshaping the nation’s capital. You know the list: the East Wing, the Rose Garden, the Kennedy Center, the arch, the municipal golf courses, a helipad on the White House South Lawn, and so on. Trump has long prized symbols—particularly when the symbols can project his power—and seized upon America’s 250th birthday as an opportunity to further beautify Washington, his backdrop as he presided over the grandiose celebrations. His attention was particularly drawn to the Reflecting Pool.

[Read: Let them eat gold]

Trump was not wrong in thinking it could use a little love. The Reflecting Pool, which stretches east from the Lincoln Memorial, on the National Mall, toward the Washington Monument, has long leaked and showed its age, bedeviling administrations for decades. In April, Trump announced a solution: a swimming-pool liner that would be, in his words, American-flag blue. To complete the project before the July 4 festivities, the Trump administration awarded no-bid contracts to redo the base of the pool and install a nanobubbling system that was meant to kill off algae growth. Instead, the algae flourished, the pool turned green, fences went up, and mitigation efforts failed. The Reflecting Pool undeniably looked worse. More than $16 million was wasted, and the national symbol was closed on the nation’s birthday.

Trump was furious. One of his signature projects had fallen apart—and he needed a scapegoat. He settled on an unexpected one: an Olympic canoer. David Hearn, 67, says he had just finished up a bike ride when he swung by the Reflecting Pool to see the failing sealant and reached down to touch the green water. He was arrested and detained for hours. The case, on its surface, seemed ridiculous. But it gained traction when Trump, reeling from the renovation’s failures, began going on Truth Social to blame so-called vandals for destroying the pool and accuse them of cutting an (improbable) 250-foot gash down the middle. Media outlets promptly debunked the claim with a series of fact-checks, but Trump was undeterred, relentlessly claiming that the pool had been vandalized.

Even some of his closest allies, two of them told me, privately rolled their eyes at the president’s obsession and scoffed at his refusal to admit a mistake. One Republican lawmaker, speaking to me on the condition of anonymity to avoid Trump’s wrath, deemed it “the dumbest controversy of his term” but added, with a rueful chuckle, that “it’s better than talking about how badly everything else is going.” But the episode had real-world consequences: Hearn told my colleague Matt Viser that it was “unsettling to feel like I’m being targeted by my government.” He had to hire lawyers and attend court dates, and he had his phone seized. The legal process itself functioned as a form of punishment.

The Reflecting Pool was an unlikely cause célèbre this summer, but it seemed likely to end with a whimper at the end of last week. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who once touted her office’s ability to prosecute the case, executed a textbook Friday news dump when her office asked to dismiss the cases against Hearn and the handful of others accused of vandalism because evidence had emerged that suggested the damage was the the result of a botched installation, not vandalism. The farce seemed, mercifully, over.

[Read: How the Reflecting Pool vandalism case fell apart]

Nope! Trump went on social media this past weekend to eviscerate Pirro, who has been one of his most loyal allies. Throwing the facts out the window, Trump declared that “to me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM” and that he would “disagree 100%” with the U.S. attorney in D.C. Accustomed to complete fealty, he raged to allies. In the Oval Office on Monday, he declared that the former Fox News host had “choked” and “folded like an umbrella.” Pirro was then summoned to the Oval Office; she was later seen walking out of the West Wing, wheeling a box full of materials from the case that she had brought to show the president and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose agency has oversight of the Reflecting Pool (Trump did not appear to be mollified by the meeting and continued to criticize his longtime ally last night). A White House official told me that Pirro still had her job. The official added that may not be the case for long.

Trump has complained about Air Force One for nearly a decade. When he took office after his 2016 election, the president—who had grown accustomed to flying around in his luxury private jet—was dismayed by the antiquated state of the two VC-25 aircraft that usually bear the call sign, which had been in use since the early ’90s. He pushed for a new plane with a more Trumpian color scheme, but a series of setbacks and delays pushed the arrival of the modern replacement jet until 2028. This was not something, most people understood, that could be rushed: Air Force One needed to be outfitted with top-of-the-line (and often classified) communications and security features that allow it to serve as a White House in the sky, especially in case of an emergency.

But Trump grew impatient. So when Qatar’s royal family offered to give him a $400 million “palace in the sky,” Trump immediately demanded that the luxury liner become his interim aircraft until Boeing completed delivery. It would, Trump said, be a gift to the Department of Defense, and it would go to his presidential library once he left office. This, of course, prompted all sorts of pushback. Permitting a foreign government to supply the signature American aircraft struck many people as not just unpatriotic, but also an outrageous security risk. It was also yet another example of Trump displaying a disregard for norms and for traditional legal and political guardrails—and this time at a truly gargantuan scale.

[Read: The MAGA-world rift over Trump’s Qatari jet]

Trump didn’t care. Nor did he seem bothered that it would cost up to $1 billion to retrofit the jet to make it acceptable for an American president to use. He set the same aggressive timeline as with the Reflecting Pool: He wanted the interim plane ready for use on the nation’s birthday. And there it was, soaring above Mount Rushmore on July 3 and then off to a NATO summit in Turkey a week later. But then, suddenly, Trump was back aboard the old baby-blue-and-gold Air Force One when he left Ankara. He claimed that the new jet had gone ahead of him to England to give troops stationed there a chance to tour it and that he was taking the original “for old time’s sake.”

A few days later, The New York Times reported what many had suspected: When hostilities ignited again in nearby Iran, the Secret Service determined that there were security concerns with the new aircraft flying near a danger zone. It was missing some key defense modifications, the paper reported, in a story that ran only after the president had safely returned to the United States. Trump, once more, was furious and embarrassed, and summoned FBI Director Kash Patel to the White House. In an extraordinary escalation of the administration’s pressure on independent news organizations, subpoenas were issued to several Times reporters, some delivered at their homes. The government requested the reporters’ phone records and demanded that they provide grand-jury testimony as part of a leak investigation to unmask the confidential sources who had provided information to the newspaper about a national-security matter.

The Times defended its reporters, while press organizations and Democrats issued statements about overreach and intimidation. Trump, once again, took to social media to blast his hometown paper and its journalists, sometimes in ugly, personal ways. It didn’t matter, it seemed, that the White House later admitted that the new plane would need upgrades, and that the president himself said it would be “maxxed out,” which all but confirmed the newspaper’s reporting. Trump was “incensed,” one adviser told me, and “wanted a head on a pike.” But, again, the legal process intervened, this time in the shape of a federal judge who grilled Department of Justice lawyers late last month over the handling of the subpoenas. DOJ then withdrew them. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement, “The President and the Administration remain committed to holding individuals who recklessly and illegally leak classified information to the media accountable.”

There was a reason Trump reacted so strongly to those two humbling moments, some people close to him told me. And that’s because they came against the backdrop of the near-daily humiliation that the president has been suffering at the hands of Iran. The war is not going well. A conflict that Trump thought might take a few weeks at most has now stretched into its sixth month, and, try as he might, he can’t get out of it. He has declared victory many times and threatened to wipe Iran off the map nearly as often. Neither has happened. At this point, his unfulfilled threats—with Iran calling his bluff—have almost become a dark running gag.

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

The past few days, in a way, have been a microcosm of the whole conflict: Over the weekend, Trump came close to ordering a new wave of attacks, but walked them back after calls from regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, and fears of how Iran might respond. Instead, Trump said he would give diplomacy another chance, claiming that good progress was being made and that the Strait of Hormuz would soon be open. But Tehran denied that any negotiations were happening. And then another ship was attacked in the strait. Trump reacted in fury, posting that the Iranian regime was “unbelievably duplicitous,” when decades of history would suggest that Tehran was, in fact, very knowably duplicitous.

But how Trump will respond next to this ongoing embarrassment remains unknown. He’s made the war deeply personal. Will he now bail on the stalled war entirely, leaving Iran more empowered in the region? Will he follow through on his threats to dramatically escalate the conflict, perhaps even to strike civilian infrastructure and energy sites? Or will he channel his rage against Americans who point out his mistakes?

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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his reaction to the Justice Department’s decision to drop its case against the Olympian David Hearn. He argues that the prosecution was baseless from the start and, using the classic “prisoner’s dilemma” thought experiment, explains why future administrations must hold abuses of power accountable if American democracy is to endure.

Then, David is joined by Margaret Hoover, the host of PBS’s Firing Line and the great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover. They discuss the newly renovated Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, Hoover’s remarkable life of public service, and why his presidency deserves a more nuanced place in American history.

David ends the episode with a discussion of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré, exploring the evolution of the spy novel and the moral questions at the heart of the genre.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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 Margaret Hoover, host of the TV program Firing Line, and, very relevantly for today’s discussion, great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover. This week’s book will be The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, a classic from 1963 of espionage literature by John le Carré.

But before either the dialogue with Margaret Hoover or the book discussion, I want to open with some thoughts that build from the news that the Department of Justice has at last dropped its indictment of David Hearn, the U.S. Olympian who was absurdly and falsely charged with vandalizing the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial.

The United States Constitution has a guarantee of a fair trial. The United States Supreme Court has long interpreted this guarantee to mean that when the Department of Justice discovers exculpatory evidence against an accused—that is, evidence that proves that the accused is falsely accused—it must immediately drop the case or at least bring the information to the notice of the defendant. The Department of Justice in this case is claiming that while they indicted David Hearn on July 2, it took them until July 31 to find out that no, the damage at the Reflecting Pool was due to shoddy work by the no-bid contractor selected by President Trump and not by the three-time Olympian canoeist.

Now, you knew from the first instant that the charge was false, and I knew from the first instant that the charge was false, but the Department of Justice wants us to believe that it took them a month to figure it out, that they didn’t have the basis to bring these charges, and they therefore were not acting outside their duty but were behaving perfectly conscientiously in letting somebody hang for a month under a threat of a 10-year prison sentence.

The question for all of us is what are we to do with this information now that we have it? Now, you might say, David Hearn is not one of the worst injustices of the presidency of Donald Trump. He’s walking away from this, and he may be able to recover his legal fees and other costs by some kind of civil action against the U.S. Department of Justice. So it’s not the worst, but in some way it’s the most startling because it was so obviously true that there was nothing here to meet the eye, no basis for this prosecution. And we’re all left to wonder—what do we do with this? With the lawyers who brought the case, with the U.S. Attorney’s office—what do we do?

And I want to suggest a way to think about this. Perhaps you’ve heard of the political-science problem the prisoner’s dilemma. Imagine two people are arrested for a crime and held in separate rooms, unable to communicate. Each is given the same offer. If you betray your partner by testifying against your partner and the partner stays silent, you will go free and your partner gets a heavy sentence, say, 10 years. If you both stay silent, the evidence against you is thin and you each get a light sentence, say, one year. If you each betray the other, you both get a moderate sentence, say, five years each. Each prisoner has to decide without knowing what the other will do. Okay. And now, the problem with this game is while both are hoping to get off scot-free, they end up to get—each of them getting a five-year sentence because they didn’t cooperate.

Now, this is a profound problem in political science, and political science has been wrestling with it. A political scientist named Robert Axelrod proposed to solve the problem once and for all by inviting academics from all over the world to write suggestions that he would model on a computer game. The winner was a Toronto political scientist named Anatol Rapoport, and he designed a solution called tit for tat. And we are getting back to the Trump administration, but this simple story has a lot of richness for what is ahead.

The tit-for-tat program designed by Anatol Rapoport had an almost absurdly simple structure: Cooperate on the first move, and after that, do whatever your opponent did on their previous move. Cooperate if they cooperate; retaliate if they retaliated. Tit for tat won not by beating any individual opponent head-to-head, but by creating incentives for the other opponent—that if you behave wrongly, there will be retaliation, but if you resume cooperation, we’re happy to rejoin you with a cooperation of our own. In a game with two players [who] play round after round against each other, this threat of retaliation from bad conduct and cooperation for good conduct proved extremely powerful.

Now, this I think is very relevant to American politics. We have, right now, a game with multi rounds between two parties, one of which has, over the decade of the Trump experience, but especially since January of 2025, broken every rule of the game, including the rule “you don’t prosecute people who are innocent because the president told you to do it.” Now, there is going to be a lot of impetus, as the power balance in Washington maybe changes in November of 2026, maybe changes in a bigger way in November of 2028, to let bygones be bygones and to let the party that broke the rules get away with it in the name of turning the page and going on to the future.

The suggestion of the tit-for-tat program is, this is not going to lead to better outcomes. The only way to get back to a stable political situation in the future is for those who broke the rules when it was their turn to pay a price for breaking the rules, so that everyone understands tit for tat. You do this; we do that. You break the rules; you will suffer. There will be consequences. Maybe not perfect consequences—maybe not even exactly justice. Justice is a very hard thing to achieve, but some understanding that the rule-breaking that has been in place since January 2025 comes at a future cost. If that cost is not in some way imposed by those in a position to impose it, the whole system will break down into ever worse spirals of defection, betrayal, violation of norms.

That’s the challenge ahead. I think there are a lot of people, especially on the Democratic left, who think the answer to the Trump problem is to create a better and fairer society so that Donald Trump will never reappear. You know, building a better or fairer society is a big agenda, and it may not work. And who knows what a better and a fairer society is anyway? But saying, For those people who broke rules, clear rules, like, “don’t prosecute the innocent,” there will be consequences. Keep that in mind. It won’t be forgotten. It will be retaliated against, I think that may be the first step on the path to wisdom.

Oh, one last thing. The David Frum Show will be taking a two-week break on August 12 and August 19. No shows on those two days. Resuming thereafter for the later part of August and early September.

And now my dialogue with Margaret Hoover.

[Music]

Frum: Margaret Hoover hosts Firing Line With Margaret Hoover, which she launched on PBS in 2018. I had the honor of appearing on Season 4 of that show alongside my friend Anne Applebaum, as I had appeared on its predecessor program with William Buckley back in the 1990s. Margaret Hoover published her book, American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party, in 2011. In that book, she argued that Republicans should modernize on social and personal issues—wise advice that was not taken. She worked for the George W. Bush administration as associate director of intergovernmental affairs, on Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, and as deputy finance director for Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid. She’s also the great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover and one of the driving forces behind the 20-month renovation and restoration of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, which will reopen its public galleries August 6, the day after this program posts online. And Margaret, welcome.

I want to talk a little bit about that library restoration and your important role in driving it. Now, this may seem to some viewers and listeners a kind of off-the-beaten-path issue, but one of the emerging scandals of the Trump administration is Donald Trump’s break from the presidential-library system fighting a legal battle to reassert, for the first time in half a century, personal presidential ownership of his presidential papers so he can, not the National Archives, but he personally can offer access to them or refuse access according to whether people meet his favor or don’t meet his favor, maybe even according to whether they pay a fee.

I’ll say one more thing about this before talking about Herbert Hoover’s innovations in the system. The modern presidential-library system started with a scandal almost exactly a century ago. President Warren Harding died unexpectedly in the summer of 1923. At the time, he was very popular, but his widow, Florence, the real brains of the operation in the Harding household, knew that tremendous scandals, both financial and sexual, were about to break upon the legacy of Warren Harding. And so she tried to destroy many of his papers. She was not successful. She was thwarted by some of President Harding’s staffers, but she did a lot of damage, and important things were lost to history. And she was able to do that because these records were, at that time, considered presidential private property. The system became public in tranches, and Herbert Hoover is the beginning of the modern presidential-library system.

And Margaret, let’s talk now about what you have done to bring that library back into the modern age and to reassert the example that presidential papers belong to the people of the United States, not to the president himself.

Margaret Hoover: Well, I mean, that’s the entire premise. You’ve summarized it so clearly. And look, there are 16 official presidential libraries in the National Archives and Record Administration. And the reason Herbert Hoover, along with Harry Truman, in conjunction sort of accepted funds for a library from the federal government was particularly because Hoover had felt and always felt that the gifts that were given to him when he was president of the United States and the papers that consisted of the operations of the presidency were the possession of the American people.

Prior to the Presidential Records Act, Hoover had actually collected all of his and had them on display at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a public-policy think tank that he had invented in 1919 at the end of World War I because nobody was collecting the documents from the Treaty of Versailles, and he thought they would be rather important for the future.

But that said, there is this premise that Hoover believed deeply and that every president until now, with perhaps the exception of Nixon, believed that these papers were part—they belonged to the American people because the institution of the presidency is only bestowed on individuals because of the faith of the American people, and thus they belong to the American people.

Frum: Let’s retrace some of this history so we can understand what you have accomplished. So the tradition through the 18th and 19th century and into the 20th was that presidential papers were the private property of the president. And this theory made a kind of intuitive sense in the age of quill pens. I mean, many of the presidential papers were in the president’s own handwriting, or if not his handwriting, the handwriting of secretaries whom he paid for out of his own personal presidential allowance. So the president would say, This work is mine. There aren’t that many papers, because they are written by hand, and I’m taking them back with me, and I will do with them what I will. Now, many donated their papers to the Library of Congress.

Hoover: And many also donated them to universities that they were associated with. Thomas Jefferson’s were at the University of Virginia. George Washington donated his. There’s a long tradition of universities holding these papers. And I do think there was a sense amongst the founding that the papers were part of establishing a precedent for a self-governing republic, and so they ought to be on display. I mean, private matters are private matters, but any matter that the president assumes in the context of his responsibility to the people of the United States and in the context of leading the country—there is a really strong sense of responsibility towards the American people so they could establish precedence. And that has been the case, I think, until the 20th century.

Frum: As you just said, Herbert Hoover was a great collector of papers, not only from the Versailles conference but from his famine-relief work in Belgium and his work in the Russian Revolution. I don’t think people are always aware of the prepresidential career of Herbert Hoover and its extraordinary impact. And one could argue that if Hoover had never become president, he might be an even more famous person than if he did become—

Hoover: There’s no question.

Frum: He would be there with George Marshall among the greatest Americans of the 20th century. So tell us a little bit about Herbert Hoover’s prepresidential career.

Hoover: I would suggest he still is one of the greatest Americans of the 20th century. And I think the full story—I think the dust hasn’t settled in terms of history really reckoning with Hoover’s, the scope of Hoover’s full legacy.

Frum: Take the career up to 1928.

Hoover: Well, Herbert Hoover—first of all, his father died when he was six years old. He was a blacksmith in a small frontier town in 1873 in West Branch, ’74, in West Branch, Iowa. His mother was a Quaker minister, which is a bit of an oxymoron because ministers didn’t really exist in the Quaker tradition, except for that she was so powerful of a speaker and an evangelist of the word of God that she went on a speaking circuit in sort of the central part of Iowa.

And his father dies when he’s—

Frum: And she’s a Canadian. She was a Canadian by origin.

Hoover: She was a Canadian! Only David Frum would point that out, and also Herbert Hoover’s wife, Lou Henry Hoover, also is descended from Canadian Quakers. So there is a good representation of Canadians in the Hoover family. (Laughs.) I’m so glad you pointed that out. I would expect nothing less.

The mother died when he was nine, leaving him orphaned after his father had died when he was six. He was sent to live with, actually, Native American Osage tribes in Oklahoma for a period of time, and then ultimately adopted by an estranged uncle in Oregon, who raised him with an incredibly strong Quaker work ethic and not much TLC. And Hoover stumbled upon an opportunity to enroll in a new university that was started by Leland Stanford in California. He was, in fact, the first student to matriculate into Stanford University, because he had to get there early for classes that would then qualify him to be a student there. His formal education stopped when he was 14 and [he] was essentially an autodidact until he got to Stanford.

He graduated with a degree in geology. He met his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, there, who was the first woman to graduate with a degree in the hard sciences from Stanford, but started in the middle of an economic downturn, and so he shoveled ore in a mine for $2 a week in the graveyard shift in the Sierra Nevadas until he had an opportunity to work for an English mining firm to explore properties in Western Australia.

And so in the outback, outback, outback outside of Perth, he happened upon what ultimately became the most productive gold mine for the next 50 to 75 years in Western Australia. It is currently still functioning. It is an open-pit mine that can be seen from the moon.

Anyway, really, his innovations in terms of new technologies in mining and efficiencies that he created brought him under the sort of esteem of his bosses in London, which was the capital of mining finance, and he cabled a marriage proposal to his wife, Lou Henry Hoover. Goes to California, marries her, and they take off to China, where they are then overseeing additional properties by their English investors in China, where they are caught in the beginning of the Boxer Rebellion. Ultimately, they’re part of a group of 137 foreigners who are kicked out of China. They’re the last of the foreign encampments. They’re rescued in a German mail boat and ultimately spend the next decade or so of their lives circumnavigating the globe on steamship, exploring and investing in mining properties all over Southeast Asia, Africa, Russia, literally all over the world.

He ultimately leaves the firms, sets up his own consulting establishment, and publishes his first book, called The Principles of Mining, which is still in print, and becomes this sort of technologist in this new age of, sort of, mining and materials and metallurgy, which really is the new tech of its day.

And the one other thing I would say about this is that he spends so much time on steamships going to these different countries, interacting with the highest level of people in the countries: the leadership, the governance, the monarchies, and also the laborers and the people and everyone in between. He observes—really, this is the turn of the century, and he observes the tide of revolution sweeping the globe and begins to develop philosophies about what kinds of governments are workable, don’t work. He has this practical experiment or observation of political science practically applied, and he notices the wave of isms that are sweeping the globe—Bolshevism, Marxism, Leninism, fascism—and begins to develop a theory about why his life has been possible as an orphan of no means from this frontier town in the West [that] has put him in a place to become a person of enormous influence and self-made wealth at the turn of a century.

And so he is really sort of this extraordinary figure. At 40 years old, he’s Stanford University’s most famous alum. He’s invited onto the board of overseers. And in 1914, when war breaks out in Europe, he’s heading home to Stanford, to California, to ultimately buy a newspaper or do something that is a bit more public-facing and decides instead to stay in Europe and organize famine relief for the country of Belgium, which had been invaded and occupied by the Germans, blockaded by the English, and faced imminent starvation.

Frum: This is the summer of 1914. He’s 40 years old. He’s a rich man. He’s one of the best traveled Americans ever to date at that point. He’s trapped in London by the First World War, and he has an idea—and it needs to be stressed because this idea is now so familiar: No one’s had this idea before—that in a war, it should be possible to deliver some kind of humanitarian relief to hungry civilians. Now, this is a new idea, and there have always been displacements and refugees as long as there has been wars. The idea that you would organize mass feeding of displaced people—no one had ever thought that that was possible, and that’s his first innovation in the realm of public policy. What if we fed people in a war zone? Could that be done? And that’s what he organizes, beginning in the summer of 1914.

Hoover: And when you think about it, because he had been moving materials around the world in the form of ore and coal and gold and minerals, he actually had a network of ships with which to send food around the world.

And so he was actually uniquely positioned as a private citizen. Of course, the U.S. wasn’t in the war yet, so he’s an American living in London, but both sides decide that he can fairly administer food relief in the name of feeding the Belgians. Because remember, the Belgians were occupied by the Germans, and the Germans took no responsibility for feeding the population they occupied. They were happy to let them starve to death, and it would’ve taken six to eight weeks. Belgium didn’t have enough food inside it. It was a postindustrial country. Eighty percent of their food was imported. Because no food could get in, they really were going to starve. This is 8 million Belgians, and then there were, like, 2 million French on the other side of the lines. And they would’ve faced imminent starvation, and Hoover is able to get wheat, corn, flour from all over the world, from Argentina, from the United States. And he creates, essentially, this independent republic of relief. It’s called the Commission for the Relief of Belgium. They have their own ships. They have their own flags. They have their own powers of immunity. They have their own powers to negotiate treaties, and they have their own set of volunteers, and it’s all run by volunteers.

And essentially, they bring all the food into Belgium, unload it into ports, and then volunteers within Belgium distribute it under the watchful eye of the Germans and the watchful eye of the English, who don’t want the Germans to be—they don’t want to be feeding or allowing for the feeding of their enemy army.

So this process—it took about 10 weeks to get under way, and then it lasted until the end of the war. Hoover is the only individual, they say at the Treaty of Versailles—I think John Maynard Keynes said he was the only individual to emerge from the ordeal in Paris with his reputation enhanced.

I mean, it was just this extraordinary sort of endeavor that actually ultimately creates the model for international humanitarian food relief.

Frum: And he then repeats the experiment inside the area of what had been the Russian empire during the Russian Revolution, feeding millions of people in Russia and Ukraine.

Hoover: He becomes so popular that [President Woodrow] Wilson realizes he has to be in his wartime cabinet. And nobody knew if he was a Republican or a Democrat, but he actually, in this post of Wilson’s government, persuades the U.S. Congress to feed Bolshevik Russia because Russians are also about to starve. And so there were U.S. outlays in the budget to feed Communist Russia. [The Russian writer] Maxim Gorky said that he’s the most impactful person in the 20th century at that time. Of course, he’s been completely forgotten in Russia since then. But it was this notion that America could feed her enemies and still sort of win a war, that food wouldn’t be a weapon of war.

And it was also the first time that Hoover, or that the United States, had really deployed humanitarian relief in a way that became legitimate American soft power. Even though it was voluntarily orchestrated at first and then it became part of U.S. policy, this is a charitable American volunteerism turned outward to the world in what becomes this extraordinary display of soft power, and then becomes one of, sort of, the arsenals of our diplomacy in the 20th century.

Frum: Let me add a point here, because one of the things—we’re having a little resurgence of communism in contemporary America—and one of the things communists are very bad at is telling the truth about history. One of the myths that communists and their apologists promote is that the United States and the other countries tried to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution in its cradle, which would’ve been a good thing to do if it had been done—it was not done—because Russia, under Lenin, became a kind of de facto ally of the Germans, who were still fighting. The Bolshevik Revolution is in the fall of 1917. They become, in 1918, an important source of food and assistance to Germany, still battling the Western Allies. And so the United States and others were suspicious. There were American troops and other troops as well on the territory of the Russian empire. But through all of this, the Americans are feeding Russian people, more and more of them, and this feeding will continue until past the war, into about 1920, correct?

Hoover: That’s right. He did two rounds because there were basically two seasons in which Lenin requisitioned the grain, and so there were two full harvest seasons where they were entirely depleted of foodstuffs, and so Hoover fed them both times.

Hoover writes at this time, eventually, this pamphlet, it’s called American Individualism, from which I riffed my own title, but—which is, and the title is often misunderstood. But he writes about the feeding of the Bolsheviks in that period, that as deadly and bloody as the revolution was, it was important for humanity to see for itself with its own eyes that the idea of Bolshevism and of communism, which is, you know, theoretically a beautiful idea, had proved itself in rivers of blood, and that Hoover believed this was, as horrible as it was, this necessary experiment for humanity to then learn from, because this idea, practically applied, simply doesn’t work. It had proved itself in rivers of blood. And this is Hoover developing his own political philosophy about what made the U.S. of his time so extraordinary and the ideas of these other new nations—nations that had swept off monarchies, czars, old forms of power—flirt with new sort of isms that had ultimately and were ultimately failing before all of our eyes.

They forget that part, the modern communists, I think, and the modern socialists.

Frum: So Hoover then returns to the United States after the Russian Revolution.

Hoover: So he comes back, and he’s so popular, [President Warren] Harding puts him in the Cabinet. Harding wins; Harding puts him in his Cabinet. He has this, like, backwater agency called the Commerce Department, which didn’t really do anything except for it was the beginning of the Roaring ’20s, and he thought, Huh, well, there’s these new frequencies. Perhaps radio; we can grab radio and television. He’s the first person to appear on television. His image is the first image of a face to be transmitted through television waves. Yeah, you can see the television itself at the Hoover Library. So when they tell you that it’s FDR who’s the first president on television, actually, Hoover was the first president on television, but he wasn’t president at the time.

Sorry, there’s always little quibbles with FDR’s legacy.

Frum: Little family pride, yeah.

Hoover: So he standardizes industry, essentially, which allows for a housing boom, which allows—when I say standardizes industry, I mean, we all take for granted that two-by-fours all come in the same dimensions, and we take for granted that bricks are all in the same dimensions, and that screws and nails and nuts and bolts and tires and bedsheets are kings and queens and twins, and eggs come in half dozens and dozens, and milk comes in liters and quarts. All of that happened as Hoover was overseeing the Commerce Department, not because he decided, Here’s how we’re going to do it, but he believed—and this is part of his philosophy of government—that government had an important role in terms of convening industry and convening stakeholders. And so there are parodies of all of the conferences that he hosted in the Commerce Department, because he would invite the farmers and the dairy people and the distributors, all the different players to the table, and exhaustively they would talk and then ultimately decide that, Sure, we’ll do half dozens and dozens of eggs, or whatever it was.

And ultimately, this created an efficiency because of the convening of the government and then the agreement of the stakeholders that allowed for massive booms in every area of industry throughout the 1920s.

Frum: My impression is the most enduring or the most significant thing he did as secretary of commerce was the United States—Louisiana, Texas—were hit by a devastating hurricane in the second [Calvin] Coolidge administration.

Hoover: It was a flood.

Frum: A flood. Okay, my mistake.

Hoover: Nineteen twenty-seven Mississippi River flood.

Frum: Thank you. And just as no one had ever before had the idea that you could feed people in a war zone, no one had ever thought that it might be the responsibility of the federal government to organize aid to victims of a natural disaster, but that was another Hoover innovation.

Hoover: Well, you know, Silent Cal, who was, of course, the, sort of, begrudging president, begrudging of Hoover a bit. Hoover had earned such a huge reputation. He was called the secretary of commerce and the undersecretary of everything else, and it just sort of bothered the president. But the president really didn’t believe there was, to your point, a role in emergency relief. But Hoover, who had really cut his teeth in emergency relief in Europe, thought, Certainly there are things that can be done. Because it was 50 million acres that was flooded, David. So it was the entire Mississippi River Valley all the way down through Missouri, Alabama, Louisiana—the entire portion of the South. I mean, like, a third of the agricultural land in the South—and by the way, it’s a lot of Black Americans who are farming and growing cotton on those lands—essentially are wiped out.

But the thing about a flood is that you know it’s coming. And so what he did is worked with local authorities to move people out of the rising part of the flood days before it would hit. So he would go to the local mayors; he would go to the governors and say, Look, we’re building a tent city over here. You have to take all your things and get out. And sometimes they would agree, and sometimes they wouldn’t, but as soon as word got out that this was happening up the river, people started listening.

And essentially, he organized these massive tent cities—that had vaccines, food, water—that were temporary that people could then live in until they were able to go back and rebuild. And this was the largest, to your point, weather event up until [Hurricane] Katrina. And Hoover basically took charge, but then also deployed this, sort of, spirit of volunteerism. He got the American Red Cross involved in a way the American Red Cross had never been involved at this large of a scale. And through massive telethons and fundraising drives, they didn’t take a cent—there was no congressional money deployed to help in the 1927 Mississippi River flood. It was all voluntary donations distributed through the American Red Cross that helped the country rebuild in that time.

And so Hoover had this very strong philosophy that if you asked Main Street for what you needed, Main Street would deliver tenfold, because there was something about his experience with the American people as opposed to peoples in sort of all over the world, and literally he had been in every other continent except Antarctica, that really felt committed to communities they were part of. And he observed this in the American people. He observed a sort of deep, embedded degree of philanthropy on a local level that he felt could be harnessed in a way unlike anywhere else.

Frum: And again, the papers and all of this must be a massive collection.

Hoover: It is the largest private collection in the United States. One of the largest in the world. And by the way, it now doesn’t just contain the czar’s abdication papers and all of the materials from Russia that, by the way, the Bolsheviks would have destroyed, but it also contains enormously important materials from all over the world that deal with war, revolution, and peace. So we have all of the secret papers from Saddam Hussein’s Baathist secret police; many of the papers from Adolf Hitler’s top-tier, inner-circle cabinet as they litigated the war. We have papers from the Republic of China, from the fleeing parties, the Kuomintang, before they came to Taiwan to establish their own country, papers that for sure would have been destroyed by Mao’s revolutionaries.

And Hoover really became—his organizing principle in his later years was anti-communism because he had taken the lessons to heart, but realized that the world hadn’t. And so these materials are incredibly diverse, long span, and really concentrate on the political history of the 20th century.

Frum: Because Hoover lived to an enormous age.

Hoover: He was 90 years old. So up until the point that Reagan died, he had been the oldest president, and up until the point where Jimmy Carter died, he had had the longest post-presidency. And it’s often commented that Jimmy Carter, who had this long and enormous post-presidency, also very much modeled his post-presidency on Hoover. There had never been a longer post-presidency up until Hoover.

And so there’s this pre-presidency part of Hoover’s life, but then there’s this post-presidency part of Hoover’s life that I’ll just say, you know, we probably don’t have time to get into, but Jared Cohen wrote a very good book called Life After Power that follows different post-presidencies. And his research, academic research, on Hoover’s humanitarian work in his post-presidency, of course: He’s laying the foundation for the Marshall Plan. He’s brought back into public life by Truman two days after Roosevelt dies. He’s just this elder statesman in his post-presidency, reorganizes the federal government.

Frum: He outlives John F. Kennedy.

Hoover: He does outlive John F. Kennedy, sadly. And this is another piece of the narrative that’s wrong, but Hoover and the Kennedys were quite close. Like, you can listen to these YouTubes of John F. Kennedy calling Mr. President to let him know about the Cuban, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban missile crisis.

So Joe Kennedy was a dear friend of Herbert Hoover’s. There’s actually a still-living research assistant who worked with Herbert Hoover in the Waldorf Astoria when she was in her early 20s. She’s 92 now, 93, and she tells a story of Joe Kennedy calling and thinking, Oh, God, what are you gonna want to do talking to him? And instead, he puts him through. He comes to visit. You know, there’s a very close bond between the Kennedys and the Hoovers, mostly because both of them were exiled by FDR from the Democratic Party for some time. So they bonded in their distaste of FDR, among other things.

Frum: And Truman had the same distaste for FDR, and so did—

Hoover: He did. He did.

Frum: I’m going to double back to the presidency, but I want to—so the library’s founded in what year?

Hoover: 1962. Harry Truman dedicates it in 1962. But Hoover actually acquired his birth cottage, a 200-square-foot cottage, two bedrooms—sorry, two rooms—in which he is born, his brother is born, his sister is born which is right across from the blacksmith shop that his father works in and the Quaker meeting house that his mother ministers in.

And this siting is incredibly important to Hoover because it suggests a degree of possibility and opportunity that he believes his story could happen in nowhere else besides the United States. So this siting is all there in West Branch, Iowa, which was, again, then a town of 600 and now a town of 3,000. It’s on the outskirts of Iowa City, Iowa, where the University of Iowa is. If you happen to be anywhere in the Midwest, it’s a very easy day visit, and it tells the story of Hoover’s life, of somebody who feeds the world, who serves the world, but is ultimately from just a small, humble beginning.

And look, here’s the thing. There are a lot of presidential libraries. Now there are 16 that are part of the National Archives and Records Administration system. They have evolved over time. I mean, it is really Eisenhower, FDR, Truman, and Hoover who begin the process, recognizing that—and Hoover had this innovation. He created a foundation because ultimately he thought private philanthropy would have to sustain the library.

Now, as we have moved forward, it has become abundantly clear that the federal government is not gonna continue to sustain these temples to presidencies. I mean, if you go to the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, it is literally a temple to LBJ’s presidency. And Hoover’s is quite small. It is very humble. It represents his Quaker roots and the humility that he very much felt and embodied.

Every president gets to tell their story the way they want to tell it, and ultimately, there has been this evolving question about to what degree should the taxpayers be on the hook for that? And so, Reagan was really the first to create a massive foundation for his. I mean, he had, like, a $400 million endowment by the time he died. Nancy continued raising to endow that presidential library. And the Bushes, and then the Clintons, and then the Bushes again, and each president has sort of evolved the way they both present their story and the way they fund the continuing operations of their presidential library.

But it is the first four presidential libraries—Eisenhower, FDR, Hoover, and Truman—that really created a template for how these other ones should improve upon it. And for those four presidents, who, if they’re lucky, have completely obsessed descendants who want to continue to tell their story, but most don’t. And it’s a really hard thing to go about and raise money for a presidential library for dead presidents. I mean, the Obamas have billions of dollars and a huge endowment, and they will have the benefit of young daughters to continue to raise money and support the operations for many, many years, as do the Bushes and as do the Clintons.

But when you get down to a great-granddaughter who’s four generations down, who never met the president that she’s obsessed with—not obsessed with,but who quite inspires me. Like, his presence is quite palpable and was quite palpable in my upbringing because it was such a foundational pillar in terms of growing up in the family I grew up in.

But I also am unburdened by a sense of, I don’t know, my identity being tied to it. I’ve really chosen it because I’m quite passionate about Hoover’s legacy. I really want a fair accounting of not just his presidency, but his life in the fullness of his contributions, which we have not yet seen but we continue to near, get closer to every year. And so, it’s a passion project for me. And frankly, it’s, you know, it’s—well, we can get to the presidency, but I think the 800-pound gorilla in the Hoover story is the Depression, and it continues to cast a long shadow. And I continue to believe that as people take more into account what was known about modern macroeconomics in the 1920s and the 1930s and the 1940s, nobody really knew what to do. And Hoover did the best he could, and probably better than anyone else.

Frum: Well, now let’s focus on the part of the story that people think they know and that makes a negative example. So when President Trump explained why he was making the disadvantageous peace he made in the Persian Gulf he said, I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover. Because he remembers Herbert Hoover as being associated with—

Hoover: Economic hard times.

Frum: With economic hard times. And America had had a very severe depression in the 1890s, but there weren’t very good records and numbers, so we don’t exactly know whether the 1930s are worse than the 1890s. By the 1930s, we’re beginning to have statistics. We know what the unemployment rate is. And of course, it’s on the edge of living memory.

So tell us your understanding of the presidency and how to-blame Hoover was or wasn’t for the events of the Great Depression. And we may have slightly different views on this question.

Hoover: By the way, and I would love to engage with your views on them, David, because you’re one of the smartest people I know. But also, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, and you and I have spoken about this before. And I’ve amended my thinking in some ways, and in other ways, I haven’t.

Hoover, of course, is nine months in. By the way, the book 1929 that Andrew Ross Sorkin just wrote about 1929, about the Great Depression, is a really important contribution to the understanding of the Hoover narrative. Hoover comes to the presidency in March of 1929, and the stock market crashes in October of 1929. So he’s there for roughly less [than] six months. He had this fabulous quote, actually, which was that he was basically swept into the presidency almost unopposed. I mean, five states went against him. It wasn’t that he was unopposed, but, like, he wasn’t unopposed, essentially, on the Republican side, and on the Democratic side, it was a complete landslide.

And Hoover had been made into this kind of Superman because he had fixed the Mississippi River flood. He had done the Belgian relief. He had done European food relief. He had done all these marvelous things. People just thought, like, Of course, he should be the president. He had never been in elective office before. He was the first president, literally, to ascend to the presidency without ever being elected to public office. And he said, My friends have—”

Frum: Or serving in the military.

Hoover: Or serving in the military, exactly. “My friends have made the American people think of me some sort of Superman. They expect the impossible of me, and should there arise in the land of conditions in which the political machinery is unable to cope, I will be the one to suffer.” Like, he knew his reputation was too outsized and too big to meet a moment that a political circumstance couldn’t meet. And the Great Depression, to be very clear, was that moment.

It is the largest economic calamity in the history of the world—the second-largest calamity in the history of the country after the Civil War. And if a quarter of Americans are out of work, that’s, like, way more than a quarter because only men are working. I mean, there’s no downsizing what happened or minimizing how difficult a period that was. What is true is that, and this is the main point—and you and I can disagree on this perhaps—but when we had the global financial crisis in 2008, Ben Bernanke was at the Fed and is largely credited with having used monetary policy to help stave off what could have become a Great Depression, another global Great Depression. And it is Ben Bernanke’s Ph.D. thesis from Princeton that centered entirely on what happened in 1929, ’30, ’31, ’32 to begin to understand and develop alternative theories about what happened, that the collapse of the economy and the banks had as much to do with monetary policy—though it was little understood—as it did with fiscal policy.

And nobody understood really anything about monetary policy. Very few people did. Keynes wasn’t publishing until the 1940s about stimuluses and how to get us out of the war. Ultimately, I think historians and economists now believe that it was World War II that got us out of the [depression], not the New Deal. You know, FDR’s own sort of kitchen cabinet, Ray Mosley in particular, sort of admits to the programs of the New Deal being essentially throwing things against the wall to see what sticks. And so there’s this narrative that maybe Hoover didn’t cause it, or maybe he did, but he sure didn’t do anything about it. And the truth is: Nobody really knew what was happening. What we understand about modern macroeconomics, we understand now because of exhaustive study of that period. And to be clear, the economy bottoms out again in 1937, worse than in 1932. And as you review that, I mean, you simply can’t look at the details and say, Well, the New Deal got us out, if what happened in 1937 rivals 1932.

What you have to say is everybody was trying their best. People were making mistakes. Hoover certainly made mistakes. I mean, conservatives begrudge him for raising taxes when he shouldn’t have, for forcing wages to be lower. He tried to get industry to keep wages even and so sort of tampered with the free markets. Certainly, there are mistakes that were made on Hoover’s side. And yet, it’s hard to use a modern and contemporary context and knowledge to judge him at that time, or even FDR, really.

Frum: Here’s what I think is one of the most important lessons for living politicians from Herbert Hoover’s legacy.

Supposing somebody got into a time machine right now with Ben Bernanke’s thesis and everything that is known about exactly what is the right thing to do, and traveled back to the fall of 1929 and said, “President Hoover, here’s the book from the 21st century of exactly everything you need to do to get everything right, which includes, yeah, a much more stimulative monetary policy. It means getting rid of the tariffs that were—never mind not signing Smoot-Hawley—but getting rid of the tariffs that your Republican predecessors passed in the 1920s, which sustains the completely false and inflated reputation on the right of Harding and Coolidge, who had as much to do with the Depression by their tariff policies as anybody else. Oh, and you have to go off gold when the British do in 1931. Here’s the book.” And Hoover said, “Right, I accept the book. I’ll read the book. I’ll do everything you say.” If he had done everything right, American economic recovery would have begun probably sometime in 1931. And that would’ve been great because you would’ve missed the terrible year 1932. German democracy might’ve been saved. No Hitler, no World War II. But [Hoover] would still have presided over the worst recession in living memory from 1929 to ’31. That’s in the cake already. And he would still have lost the election of 1932, even if he had done everything right.

And one of the things that is hard for a modern politician: Sometimes you can do everything right, and you don’t get a political reward for it because the timing of doing the thing right comes too late to save your particular career.

Hoover: That’s certainly true. I think the economy actually was getting better in 1931. At least there were some signs that it was getting better in 1931. There were also,—Andrew Ross Sorkin actually documents very clearly in his book that the biggest story in The New York Times in, at the end of 1929 was not the stock-market crash, it was Admiral Byrd’s discovery of the North Pole. Nobody realized sort of that there was going to be this cataclysmic effect. But what also did happen, and I think this is where Hoover really failed in his presidency and departed from his previous habits and patterns. Something happened with Hoover, and I’ve heard this both from his biographers and from my father, and from my grandmother when she was alive: Hoover had been masterful at managing his image in the press, really, throughout his entire career. I mean, from the time he was in Western Australia, he was getting coverage of the successful mining operations in Australia; all through the good press he got through World War I—you know, the only man to emerge from the ordeal in Paris with his reputation enhanced. All through the Commerce Department years, he had very strong relationships with the media, the press, with reporters, journalists, and many people who helped tell his story or tell the story of what he was doing. And something happened in the presidency where he—and this is what my father has told me, but it is complemented by a biographer’s accounts—is that he believed suddenly that the American presidency was such a revered position that his ambition should no longer drive the efforts to shape how it was seen. And so he stopped engaging in a robust communications effort. He just stopped. Like, he didn’t talk to the press. I mean, he would do press conferences or whatever, but he just didn’t do all the sort of reputational management stuff that he had previously done. And so nobody was telling his side of the story. And, you know, perhaps, perhaps he might have done better in 1932 had he bothered to care for his reputation.

Frum: In my view, for whatever is worth, the key moment, because this is where you have to deal with the speak bluntly about this, the Wall Street Journal version of history. So the Wall Street Journal version of history is that what Hoover got wrong was raising taxes in 1931.

And you say, Okay, why did he do that? Why did he raise taxes in 1931? And the answer is because the budget deficit was growing, and had the budget deficit continued to grow, the United States would’ve been put in a position, as Britain was, where it could not stay on the gold standard. And Hoover chose preserving the dollars linked to gold.

Now, The Wall Street Journal won’t talk about this because they believe in putting the United States back on the gold standard, and the idea that the gold standard and the tariffs are the villains of the Depression is a story they can sort of accept, but sort of can’t.

So he’s confronted in 1931: If you continue to run deficits, you will be forced off gold like Britain, and that will be a calamity. It won’t. It’s the solution. But you had to be a very unusual person or a very desperate person in 1931 to understand that being forced off gold was the solution, not the problem. And so he said, “I can’t be forced off—”

Hoover: Especially as a mining engineer.

Frum: Yeah. “We can’t be forced off gold, therefore we have to raise taxes in the middle of a depression to keep the link to the gold standard.” No one understood that.

Hoover: I think you’re right. I mean, I think The Wall Street Journal’s version of history has changed a little bit over time. It used to blame it entirely on Smoot-Hawley. Smoot-Hawley of course was the, the tariff acts that everybody implored Hoover not to sign; that he really didn’t want to sign but he signed because he was trying to work with the Congress. But you know, everybody says that was definitive, but global trade was what, less than 3 percent of GDP at the time?

Frum: Also Smoot-Hawley comes too late. People don’t know, and this is very relevant to where we are today. The United States at the end of World War I went back to high tariffs, choked off European exports, forced Europe into debt, made the monetary situation unstable, made the gold standard untenable in any kind of shock. And Coolidge and Harding are villains in the story, but in the Wall Street Journal version of history, they’re heroes. And so we have to blame the Hoover tariff, not the Harding and Coolidge tariffs, and above all, never, never, never the gold standard, which for some crazy reason they keep on promoting into the 21st century.

Hoover: Hoover had a quote later on. He said, “Once upon a time my political opponents honored me as possessing the fabulous intellect and economic power by which I created a worldwide depression all by myself.”

Frum: Yes. I want to say one last thing as we head toward the end here about one of his great contributions, and it’s a contribution that is really under immense threat now, and this is, I think, quite an urgent problem.

So, as you said, because of the New Deal and the war, the United States creates this jumble of regulatory agencies in the 1930s and ’40s with very weak and mysterious constitutional basis, very murky limits on their powers, and that operate outside the constitutional system. And Hoover was one of the people who was really alarmed by this. And President Truman then gave him the mission—and when I say “the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946,” I can feel eyes glaze over—but this is like, along with the Bill of Rights, this is maybe the most important law that you, it’s certainly the most important law you’ve never heard of, and it’s the one that is under direct attack now by the Trump administration. Talk a little bit about his contribution to bringing these agencies back under constitutional review after World War II.

Hoover: Well, so I mean, one of the things that—another piece of the history is as soon as FDR is inaugurated, Hoover is alarmed by the New Deal, and he writes a book called The Challenge to Liberty. The Challenge to Liberty might be among Hoover’s least-read books, but again, like in the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, eyes glaze over at roll. This is Hoover’s description of how the exploding of these federal agencies is going to impede and impose upon individual liberty. And so he calls it—he actually has his own word for it—he calls it “regimentation.”

And what he ultimately does when Truman brings him back in to feed the world after World War II and help establish the foundation of the Marshall Plan, he also, both through Truman and then through Eisenhower, is asked to assemble a review of how the executive branch and the federal government work. And he has essentially this huge committee, a congressionally mandated committee, that reviews the executive agencies, reviews their authority, and then makes recommendations to Congress, of which 80 to 90 percent of them are passed into law that are intended to bring efficiencies and accountability to the federal government that had exploded previously.

And then Eisenhower brings him back in. So this is called the Hoover Commission. I mean, it had its own title, but it is known as the Hoover Commission: the first Hoover Commission and then the second Hoover Commission. And one of the things Hoover was known for was his ability to operate massively scaled operations in a highly efficient way. And so it was this idea of bringing his abilities at efficiencies to the federal government.

Frum: And this is maybe the point of alarm to end on. So the Trump administration is arguing that every administrative agency is a pure expression of the will of the president. The president can give an order to the Food and Drug Administration, to the Federal Trade Commission, to any agency—even the Federal Reserve—and they have to carry it out just as much as if they are a member of the military. That his order is absolute and plenary over the entire administrative aspect of the government.

And this was a vision that Americans had in the 1930s and ’40s, from which they retreated in fear and terror and corrected very much under Hoover’s leadership with laws that said the administrative apparatus of the federal government must be bound by law. It is not a pure expression of the president’s will. And every day we’re having battles with the Trump administration of, is it presidential will that governs the country? Or is it the law? And you can feel the ghost of Herbert Hoover reminding us of his achievements after his presidency.

Hoover: I think that’s right because the point is that one can have professionals in the federal government that are intended to execute the operations of the executive branch and the federal government despite the person who is in the office. And if you don’t, then what you’re doing is reverting to a 19th-century system of spoils, where political appointees are rewarded for their loyalty and placed in positions of power where they can take advantage of the trust placed in the president by the American people to their own ends. This is not the sort of fair administration of the government that is to serve all of us as equally as possible. And it is true, and it’s an affront, actually, on the notion that the government is there to operate very specific tasks on behalf of all of us who need it rather equally rather than through privilege or patronage or association with power.

Frum: Margaret, thank you so—I know, speaking of family, you have taken time away from your family on holiday to join me today, and I’m very grateful for that. I hope anyone who hears your voice and is anywhere in the vicinity of the great state of Iowa will make a special trip to see what you have accomplished with the renewal of the Herbert Hoover library. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Hoover: You’re so kind to have me, David. It is a great privilege and honor to be on with you.

Frum: Bye-bye.

Hoover: Bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Margaret Hoover for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a classic of espionage literature, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, published in 1963 by John le Carré. John le Carré being a pseudonym for an English writer named David Cornwell, who had served as an officer in the English intelligence system in the 1950s.

The novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is a kind of a reply to the success of the James Bond novels. James Bond, written by Ian Fleming, offered a very glamorized view of the life of a spy, full of excitement and danger, lavish expense accounts, and beautiful women. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is a much grimmer reality of betrayal and mutual betrayal.

I won’t summarize the plot. It’s very complicated and very exciting, and if you haven’t read it before, I urge you to read it now, and I will not dim your enjoyment of this very morally complicated novel. I want to talk instead about the evolution of the spy novel as a form, how it came about that this form was developed in the 20th century, and why we associate it so much with British writers especially.

There are American spy thrillers, but they tend to emphasize either technology or, like Robert Ludlum’s novels, a hero who is so powerful, so tough, so indestructible that he himself is more like Batman or Spider-Man or Superman than he is like a human secret agent. The British tradition—Len Deighton, John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, and John le Carré—emphasizes even very human people. Even James Bond, at least in the novels, does not have superpowers. If you shoot him, he will die.

Why this particular attraction of British writers to the creation of this particular form? What is it about the spy novel that made it such an important form in the 20th century? Now, I’ve been thinking about this as I wrestle with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. I see two great themes in these books and others like them. The first is that spy novels are novels ultimately about bureaucracy. There’s a person in a government office doing a government job; dealing with expense accounts, which figure large in the work of John le Carré; dealing with all the drabness and meanness of government offices, especially in the pinched years after World War II; and trying to achieve things for their fellow countrymen against the background of this bureaucracy. And it’s difficult, and it raises very complicated moral choices.

At one point, the British protagonist of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is confronted by an East German counterpart who asks him, Why do you do it? What do you believe in? And he’s a little taken aback by the question. The real answer is a kind of personal commitment, a personal vendetta, but under the circumstances of the question, he can’t answer. And the East German spy goes on to explain he’s a Marxist. He thinks it’s perfectly valid to sacrifice one human life for the benefit of humanity or other human lives for the benefit of the collective. But Britain is nominally a Christian society, where each life is sacred in itself. How do they justify sacrificing one life to save others? And that is the kind of moral dilemma of a bureaucratic system of the one versus the mass that I think haunted the generation that came through the Second World War and the early part of the Cold War where they saw good people being sacrificed as individuals for some idea of the benefit of many others, and not quite able to answer what that benefit was and not being quite so sure that benefit was really there.

The second theme that struck me as I pondered this is: Spy fiction is fiction about people who are secretly powerful. And not the American version. Again, it’s about machines or superheroes. But the British novels are about people who look humdrum, ordinary, but who, in fact, have these giant bureaucracies at their back.

And this fantasy of secret power is something that seems especially appealing to a society like Great Britain that had been so powerful and was watching its power ebb through the 20th century and being displaced by a power with which they had some friendly relationship—the United States—but also some relationship of envy.

I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that those American writers who, in my opinion, do excel at the spy fiction form—not, again, in the superhero, Robert Ludlum way—are Alan Furst, Daniel Silva, are both Jewish and are therefore, in their own way, marginal people in the way just as the British are marginal to American power, Furst and Silva have experiences that are at the margin of their own society.

Spy fiction at its best can be morally challenging in a way that few other forms really are. The particular moral dilemma in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold—and again, no plot spoilers here; if you haven’t read it, I recommend it—is a really heart-rending one because the moral calculus that you see that is revealed by the end of the novel makes a kind of sense—a brutal sense, but a kind of sense. But the human costs of this calculus are extreme and painful, and we are made to feel them and not allowed to escape them. That’s something that it’s easy to dismiss as you simply read the news and read about espionage as a product of something that reveals information, and not see that behind all of these stories, there are real human beings whose lives are compromised in one way or another.

Thank you so much for watching The David Frum Show this week. As I mentioned, we are taking two weeks holiday, August 12 and August 19, or a two-week break. We will be working, but we will not necessarily be producing video content in that period. We will resume in the later part of August and early September. Thank you for watching The David Frum Show. Please, as always, if you can, share and subscribe [to] the show so others find out about it. And as ever, the best way to support the work of this program is by subscribing to The Atlantic. That supports me and all of my colleagues. Again, thank you. See you soon on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

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The Democratic nominee for Montana’s open U.S. Senate seat, Alani Bankhead, has been telling everyone for months that there is no price anyone can pay to keep her name from appearing on the November ballot. “Why is it you are asking me a question I have been asked a thousand times?” she told me on Monday, when I tried to probe her commitment to the race. “There is nothing that is going to force me from the ticket unless God himself tells me to drop out.”

The lack of divine intervention has challenged Democratic hopes for a big-sky Senate pickup. As it stands, Bankhead will likely split the state’s ever shrinking number of non-Republicans with an independent candidate, Seth Bodnar, who has raised more money and secured more support from senior party leaders who believe he will caucus with Democrats if he prevails. That all but ensures a win for the Republican candidate, Kurt Alme, which has set off a last-minute scramble to push Bankhead from the race before the August 10 deadline for locking the ballot. The state Democratic Party has been preparing for her to leave the race. A national Democratic polling firm, Global Strategy Group, circulated new polling yesterday arguing that she should drop out. And national Democrats have been calling her, seeking meetings. Bankhead told me that former Governor Steve Bullock, a Democrat who has not yet endorsed in the race, called her last week to ask if she would meet him for coffee. She said she did not respond. “It is a very strange process to be in this position where Alani feels more like the independent than the independent,” Jeri Bucy, her communications strategist, told me.

Shannon O’Brien, the head of the state party, convened a meeting of its executive board last Thursday to discuss the possibility of leaving the Democratic line on the ballot empty if Bankhead does leave the race. State law says political parties “shall” appoint a replacement if the nominee bows out 85 or more days from an election. State Democratic party bylaws say that the party central committee “shall” call a meeting and “shall” vote on a replacement. The Montana secretary of state, a Republican, says the state party must follow those words and pick a replacement.

But Jacquelyn Lopez, the general counsel for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, attended the meeting to argue that the party would likely win in court if it opted not to replace Bankhead, according to three people familiar with the meeting who were not authorized to speak publicly. Under this plan, the party would gloss over the “shall”s in state law and party rules on the grounds that political parties have the power to interpret their own rules and significant right under the First Amendment to do what they please. Someone in the meeting asked Lopez if the Democratic National Committee would fund the inevitable lawsuits that would result from such a move, the three people said. Lopez answered in the affirmative, all three said, including one who referenced written notes of the meeting made the following day. “There was without a doubt comments made that made everyone think the DNC would pay for it,” one of the people told me. “For everyone after the meeting, there was the gist that we were going to have our bills paid for us.”  

Lopez, an attorney at the Elias Law Group, told me that she represented the state party and not the DSCC at the meeting. “I did not state that the DNC would fund a lawsuit at any point, and it would be inaccurate to report that,” she told me. She did not respond to follow-up questions. A spokesperson for the DNC, Angelo Fernández Hernández, told me that the national party “has never been approached to pay any legal bills related to candidates dropping out from the election.” A DSCC spokesperson told me the committee was not involved in the meeting.

[Read: One morning of controlled chaos in Maine]

The discussion only deepened suspicions that national Democrats are conspiring against the state’s Democratic candidate in what is emerging as the clumsiest, if not the most catastrophic, political gambit of the 2026 midterms. “It’s pretty wild out here,” Nancy Keenan, a former Montana Democratic Party executive director, told me. “They call it the Wild West—but holy Toledo.”  

The disappear-the-Democrat electoral strategy—a response to the party’s terrible national brand, especially in states Donald Trump comfortably won—has had more success elsewhere.  In Nebraska, Democrats nominated a candidate for Senate who pledged to abandon her campaign to clear the way for an independent, Dan Osborn. In Idaho, the Democratic Senate nominee, David Roth, dropped out last week to make way for the independent Todd Achilles. Yesterday Julian Beaudion, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in South Dakota, said he would suspend his campaign to protect “the mental and physical safety of my family,” making way for an independent candidate, Brian Bengs.

Democrats hoped Montana would follow a similar script to clear the way for Bodnar, a former university administrator and U.S. Army Green Beret, who is running on a moderate Democratic platform with a “both parties are to blame” message. As former Senator Jon Tester put it in a text message to fellow state Democrats about supporting Bodnar, “During my last two races the democratic Party was poison in my attempts to get re-elected.”

But that message never filtered down to the Democratic rank and file, a largely populist and freethinking bunch who have watched their state vote for Trump by double digits three times in a row. Party activists have rebelled, saying that there will be downballot repercussions for abandoning the party brand in the premier statewide race this year, and state voters continue to show significant support for Bankhead, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and a first-time candidate. Recent Republican and Democratic polling shows Bodnar and Bankhead roughly splitting the non-Alme vote, giving the Republican a significant double-digit lead in a four-way race that also includes a libertarian candidate.

The situation has created a last-minute scramble and deepening paranoia on all sides. Days after Bankhead heard from Bullock, Montanans began getting calls from pollsters, first reported by the Washington Reporter, testing a hypothetical scenario in which Bullock replaced both Bodnar and Bankhead, creating a two-person race between Bullock and Alme. The possibility of Bullock running again for Senate, after losing a bid in 2020, has long circulated in the state, and the funding for the poll has not been disclosed. Bullock did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

To make matters more complicated, Bankhead won her June 2 primary with significant financial backing from apparent Bodnar allies, according to federal records. They sided with Bankhead over another primary candidate, the fierce Bodnar critic Reilly Neill. The Progressive Vet PAC spent $2.8 million to support Bankhead and oppose Neill. Jason Carroll, a tech entrepreneur and Bodnar donor, gave the group $200,000. The other $2.6 million came from a nonprofit called Contours Inc. that has supported other independent-candidate efforts. Bankhead maintained that she had no ties to the group, and had made no pledge to get out of the race if she won. She has held true to that bargain.

The pledges of other Democrats in the state have been a bit more complex. Back in April, O’Brien told me she would “support the Democratic nominee,” and rejected any rumors that the state party was preparing to clear the way for Bodnar. “To my knowledge there is no intention to change the rules to allow for support of anyone else,” she said. State Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers told me that the idea of secret plotting for a change in rules to allow Democrats to not field a nominee was a “fever dream.”

Days after the executive-board meeting last week, O’Brien sent a four-page legal memo from the Elias Law Group to Democrats in the state. The memo acknowledges that the state party’s bylaws instruct the committee to name a replacement candidate if a nominee withdraws. But it went on to argue that if the party tries to replace a candidate and fails, it would likely survive the resulting lawsuit. “The key question,” the document reads, is how the Montana Democratic Party “interprets its own bylaws and whether a failure to appoint a replacement candidate is defensible as a reasonable interpretation of the party’s own rules.” In one scenario, the state party could construe its rules to put forward a “none of the above” option at its nominating meeting. In another scenario, the state party could require qualifications for a replacement candidate that are so stringent that “no available candidate satisfies those requirements.”

[Read: America’s most divided state loves its extremes]

Bankhead has concluded that O’Brien cannot be trusted. “There is only one person in the state Democratic Party that is standing against me, and that is Shannon O’Brien, who has been in Bodnar’s pocket the whole time,” Bankhead told me. O’Brien has previously denied any effort to support Bodnar, but could not be reached for comment for this story. A spokesperson for the state party declined to comment.

Bodnar’s campaign, for its part, says he is prepared to win a four-way contest. A super PAC supporting his campaign began running new ads against Bankhead today, asking, “What else don’t we know about Alani Bankhead?” Bankhead and Bodnar met privately in Helena on Friday, according to three people familiar with the meeting. Bankhead asked Bodnar to drop out and transfer his endorsement and money to her, two people said, which he declined to do. Bankhead told me Monday that Bodnar has not made the same request of her. “He said, I would never ask you to drop out, and I said, Great, because I wouldn’t,” she told me. But both candidates have also made clear that they think the other can’t win, and allies of Bankhead have been calling for Bodnar’s exit. “If there were somebody else who had a pathway to defeat Kurt Alme in this race, I’d step aside in a heartbeat,” Bodnar told supporters in a livestream Monday night.

The pressure is likely to only increase over the coming days, testing Bankhead’s resolve. “Nobody can accurately predict any election,” she told me. “If polls mattered, Hillary would have won. If name ID mattered, Bullock would have won. If money mattered, Tester would have won.”

When she mentioned the Almighty as the only one who might persuade her to abandon her campaign, I asked how frequently she communicated with God. “I am a person of faith,” she said.

On a recent Thursday night, I sat among other guests at a house party and listened intently to a PowerPoint presentation about radium. Lauren Pickens, a 25-year-old who lives in the Washington, D.C., area, stood at the front of the room and flipped through slides about the carcinogenic chemical: A century ago, radium was marketed as a miracle. Americans added it to everything—including food and cosmetics. Within years, some had died. “We’re smarter than that these days,” Pickens said, pivoting to raw milk and other questionable substances people are ingesting today. Everyone laughed.

The presentation was part of the theme that night. The co-hosts—Pickens and her boyfriend, Luke Brandl—had sent detailed instructions to everyone: “Pick a historically bad decision, from either personal or public memory, and tell us about it in the form of an 8–10 minute presentation.” We’d then vote and crown a winner. One guest discussed the chaotic 1904 Olympic marathon (one runner ate rotten apples and took a nap during the race, yet still managed to place fourth); another rehashed her relationship with an ex in the form of a book report. The party was held at Brandl’s home, which doubles as a museum of sorts to the various parties the couple has hosted. Sticky notes from an “embracing your cringe” party hung on a wall, as did a poster of the 1978 film Starcrash, which people had watched at another themed party—“bad-movie night.”

Pickens and Brandl are more ambitious than the average party planner, but their events lean into a common enthusiasm among young partygoers for niche, even absurd, themes. I’ve been collecting examples for weeks: “dress like your favorite Metro stop,” a murder mystery about tech billionaires on a private island, a farewell to Spirit Airlines (“bring the spirit and spirits”). In some circles, hyper-specific party themes are becoming a norm, sometimes a requirement. “Having a coherent theme is more of an expectation now than it was two years ago,” Alexa Jordan, a 25-year-old incoming law student, told me. She’s hosted a spelling-bee birthday party and a cul-de-sac 5K, which entailed running in a circle for more than 65 laps. She estimated that about eight out of every 10 parties she’s invited to now have a theme.

In one sense, the appeal of a niche party is simple. Themes are fun, as people discovered long ago. (In 1897, New York City socialites held a costume ball that has been dubbed the “most ostentatious party in US history.”) Now that friends are only a text message or FaceTime away, though, there’s also a higher bar for what gets people hanging out in person. Wearing a funky costume or presenting on a weird interest gives people “something to talk about,” Samika Lewis, a 25-year-old who also attended the bad-decisions party, told me. Especially at a time when some young adults are turning away from alcohol, a wacky party can act as its own kind of social lubricant. “I never really liked bars that much,” Brandl told me. “I always wanted something a little bit different and more creative.”

[Read: Millennials are sick of drinking]

These parties are themselves fueled by social media as much as they are a rebuke of hyper-online culture. The event I attended started the way it ended—on Partiful. The couple had invited everyone through the popular event-planning app. The morning after, Brandl sent a text blast via Partiful, announcing that a presentation on dueling had won. One of the guests added pictures to the app’s shared photo album.

Partiful, which was founded in 2019, has become especially integral to the rise of niche party themes. Events can be made public or accessible only to those who are sent the link, which is the setting that the hosts I talked with primarily use. Public events show up on the homepage for anyone to see, allowing the strangest parties to get lots of attention and priming people to get creative with their own themes. If you’re stuck, the app has a feature, “Ask the Party Genie,” that lets you choose a vibe (such as “chill” or “chaos”) to get specific theme ideas. When I tried it out, the genie suggested that I host parties including “make lamps out of non-lamps” and a “Lana del Rage Room.” On Partiful, RSVPs to “niche and high-concept events” grew more than four times from 2024 to 2025, Partiful’s CEO, Shreya Murthy, told me.

[Read: The internet, but for hot people]

On Instagram and TikTok, many recaps of themed parties draw millions of views, which help inspire more niche parties. Jordan, the law student, hosted her spelling-bee bash after a friend sent her an Instagram Reel of a similar event. At the extreme, social-media memes are themselves the theme. Komal Kamdar, a 27-year-old who lives in New York City, attended a party where guests dressed up like Adam Sandler, who has gone viral for his combinations of a baggy graphic T-shirt and shorts.

The result is a feedback loop: People get inspiration from Instagram and TikTok. Then they whip up an invitation on Partiful and upload pictures to social media when the party’s over. In some cases, the themes can start to feel forced—more of a performance for some brief attention online than anything else. In D.C., more than 5,000 Partiful users have expressed interest in attending a five-minute “eat an apple with me” event. Normal park picnics have been rebranded as “sit down and touch grass” events.

At the party I attended, one guest scrambled to finish making his PowerPoint before the start of the event. And hosts often drop hundreds of dollars on decorations and spend weeks planning to make sure that the theme comes to life. Kamdar said she spends an average of $200 to host a niche party, and has held fewer gatherings because of the cost.

Still, any kind of in-person gathering seems better than the alternative. Americans could certainly stand to party more. At its best, a niche party is not about chasing clout, but about actually getting to know people. At the PowerPoint party, guests initially exchanged awkward small talk and nibbled on homemade garlic knots. But once the presentations began, everyone loosened up. By the end, we hardly felt like strangers at all. As I slipped out, at close to midnight, the stragglers were already talking about Pickens and Brandl’s next party. Of course, there would be a theme: Guests would compete in a treasure hunt dressed up as either a Roman or a pirate.

Yuri is a 52-year-old Ukrainian who runs a market stall in Kherson, not far from the front line. Yesterday, he was sorting through vegetables when he heard the loud, distinctive buzz of a Russian drone. As he later told the journalist Zarina Zabrisky, he had nothing more than a couple of garlic bulbs in his hands, and no weapons. “Not even a phone.” He gestured at his tomatoes and peppers, so that the drone operator, whoever and wherever he might be, could see that he wasn’t a soldier.

The drone kept following him. Police footage shows it chasing Yuri around his truck. He hides under the umbrella that covers the stand, runs from one side to the other, gestures at the vegetables. Then the drone dives beside him and explodes. Miraculously, Yuri survived, with just cuts and a concussion. Zabrisky interviewed him in the hospital, where he was lucid, and surprisingly sane.  

Sane might be the key word here, because the experience of being chased by a murderous kamikaze drone, a flying machine that behaves as if it were alive, is not one that humans are equipped to understand. Premodern fanatics used to hallucinate flying devils. But few modern civilians have been chased by mechanized flying objects. Unless they live in or around Kherson.

Today, many were shocked by yet another video of the drone “safari” Russians are carrying out against civilians in Kherson. A Russian drone deliberately hunted down a man selling vegetables and detonated right next to him. The Russians even admitted to the crime, showing zero… pic.twitter.com/uGjC7esFwR

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 4, 2026

Since 2024, Russian drones have been conducting human safaris in Kherson and other parts of southern and eastern Ukraine, tracking Ukrainian civilians with the aim of killing them. When I reported in the city in 2023, no one went near the Dnipro River, because the Russians were on the other side. Rapidly changing technology has now put the whole city and surrounding countryside within range of Vladimir Putin’s forces.

A United Nations inquiry last year documented hundreds of drone attacks on individuals across eastern Ukraine that targeted people walking on sidewalks, working in gardens, driving ambulances, commuting to work. Sometimes drones hang over burning buildings, waiting for fire brigades to appear so that firemen can be murdered too. The motive can only be terror, and perhaps revenge. Russian troops occupied Kherson at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022; Ukrainian forces took the city back seven months later following what remains the most significant counter-offensive of the war.

Many people, myself included, have written about the incredible achievements of the Ukrainian drone industry. In Kyiv, I’ve visited warehouses where hundreds of different drones and robots, each with specialized properties, are on display. They can defend Ukrainians and surveil and attack enemies. They can deliver food and weapons. They can crawl along the ground and rescue people stranded in no-man’s-land. They can make intelligent decisions autonomously.

[Read: Inside the feud over Ukraine’s drone success]

Drones with capabilities like the ones that hit Yuri originally offered a humanitarian advantage, allowing their operators to avoid civilian casualties. Because they have cameras, the remote operator can see whether the target is really a soldier or military object, and call off the drone if it is not. But as with all technologies, the purpose can be radically altered by the users. Instead of avoiding civilians, Russian operators can now target them, as if playing a video game.

They will not be the last drone operators to do so. Although not all Pentagon procurement officers (or indeed Pentagon leaders) know it yet, nobody is prepared, technically or psychologically, for a new era of intelligent, deadly machines. Warfare is on its way to being transformed beyond recognition. Separate drone battalions are a thing of the past. Every aspect of fighting now requires drones, and drone interceptors.

How long until the rest of the world also experiences this change? Crime and terrorism will be transformed next, followed by the work of lawyers and police. Today’s bizarre dystopia, something we view in video clips coming from Ukraine, might be tomorrow’s new normal.

Last year, an Atlanta activist, Samuel Tunick, caught a felony charge for something that Americans are free to do anytime: He wiped the data from his phone. The only problem was that he did it by providing a federal agent in an airport with a “duress password” that, rather than unlock the device so the agent could search it, deleted its contents.

Federal prosecutors have charged Tunick with destruction of evidence. He was detained at the Atlanta airport in January 2025, after returning from a vacation to the Dominican Republic. His attorneys have argued that agents approached him to inspect his phone because he was a member of the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement, which was protesting against a proposed police-training facility in Atlanta that opponents refer to as “Cop City.” But prosecutors have not suggested what underlying crime he committed or released any information about what the agents might have been looking for.

The authorities who wanted to search Tunick’s phone had no warrant. Thanks to a massive Fourth Amendment loophole, they didn’t need one. This is the so-called border exception. The Supreme Court has held for years that searches at the border are distinct from the usual law-enforcement search. As a result, Department of Homeland Security officers don’t need a warrant to search your luggage for contraband or weapons. Although the rules differ based on federal-circuit-court decisions, in many states, Customs and Border Protection agents at international ports of entry can do the same with cellphones. Some courts have distinguished between a manual search, in which a border agent scrolls through your phone, and a forensic search, which involves copying and downloading the entire contents of the device. In Georgia, border officials can search your phone either manually or forensically—a rule buttressed by a 2018 decision by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in Atlanta, that upheld a conviction based on a warrantless search of a man’s phone that uncovered child pornography.

For obvious reasons, though, a cellphone is different from a suitcase. When the Fourth Amendment was written, establishing “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” its authors could not have imagined that someone could carry a device with all their “papers and effects” in it.

[Read: Homeland Security’s plan to squeeze international flights]

“You search someone’s luggage, maybe that person is traveling with a diary or a bank statement or a few photographs or something in their wallet or whatever, but that’s a small sliver of who they are as a person,” Sophia Cope, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)—a nonprofit focused on protecting digital rights—told me. But a smartphone can hold all the intimate details of a person’s life: their medical, financial, and location history; their faith, sexual orientation, political views. Group-chat gossip is the least of it.

It was with this in mind that the Supreme Court ruled in a 2014 case, Riley v. California, that police need a warrant to search a cellphone. “It is no exaggeration to say that many of the more than 90% of American adults who own a cell phone keep on their person a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives—from the mundane to the intimate,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”

But this decision said nothing about searches at the border. Federal agents continued to treat those searches differently, a practice that was then sanctioned by the Eleventh Circuit ruling. “The way the government interprets the Eleventh Circuit rule is they can search for any purpose at all with no limitation,” Nate Wessler, an attorney with the ACLU, told me. “They don’t need to go to a judge; they don’t need reasonable suspicion” to swipe through someone’s device without a warrant.

The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on warrantless border searches has previously focused on the illegal movement of goods and people in and out of the country. But a phone is a different kind of container from a car or a piece of luggage, and the high court has yet to rule on digital searches. EFF rightly argues that device searches are different because only a few possible kinds of contraband can be contained on a phone—including child pornography. Nevertheless, as it stands, border officials anywhere in the country can initiate a manual search of your device simply by stating that they are looking for such digital contraband. That is a legal standard that is easily exploited as a pretext to target someone for reasons that have nothing to do with contraband, digital or otherwise.

Under Donald Trump, the number of border searches of cellphones and other devices has grown significantly, amounting to tens of thousands a year. Although those tens of thousands of searches amount to a small fraction of total international travelers, the increase means that journalists, activists, or anyone seen by the administration as a political enemy may reasonably fear being targeted. The Trump administration has made no secret of its intent to prosecute left-wing activists as terrorists—in June, the Department of Justice indicted anti–Cop City activists on conspiracy charges for a protest in which fireworks were set off. The administration has indicted more than 50 people on such charges, NPR reported. Although most of those prosecutions have failed so far—and the administration has been frequently rebuked for trying to deceive the courts—at least one has resulted in serious prison time.

[Read: Trump can prosecute anyone now]

Before the American Revolution, one of the English abuses of power most hated by the colonists was the use of “general warrants” or “writs of assistance”—documents that gave representatives of the Crown blanket authority to enter people’s homes and search through their private effects. Searches could be done without any evidence or suspicion of a crime, “a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer,” in the words of the founding-era lawyer James Otis.

In the 18th century, though, your “persons, papers, and effects” couldn’t be held on a powerful pocket computer that also tracks your location at all times. Virtually everything that a corrupt or authoritarian government would have wanted to know about someone in the founding era can now be found on your cellphone. This may be of greater concern to Trump critics today, but conservatives inclined to insist that they have nothing to hide should consider how they would feel about a future Democratic president authorizing border agents to perform warrantless searches on the devices of people he considers his political enemies.

The Trump administration already has a track record of using the Justice Department for political persecution—a use facilitated by Roberts Court jurisprudence that eviscerated the department’s independence. In addition to left-wing activists, federal prosecutors have gone after former FBI Director James Comey, a sometime Trump critic, and accused a former Olympian of having vandalized the Reflecting Pool (the charges were eventually dropped; the damage was actually caused by the shoddy work of a Trump-selected contractor). Anyone critical of the administration would have ample reason to be concerned about federal agents searching their phone without a warrant, but one needn’t be a vocal opponent to find themselves subject to a nonsense prosecution by a president trying to shore up one lie or another.

A duress password can be set up through the use of a third-party operating system. But using one is risky precisely because the government is more likely to prosecute someone who deletes their phone’s content before a search. Anyone worried about a warrantless border search would likely be better off using an alternate phone for their trip, or backing up their data and then wiping their device before leaving.

But Americans should not have to make those kinds of calculations to avoid federal agents invading their privacy. The possibility of having to prepare for such a search might be enough to persuade people to censor themselves—to avoid public criticism, political activity, or any kind of personal expression that might draw the wrath of the government—lest they attract the wrong kind of attention from federal authorities. And online anonymity is not necessarily a shield—The Wall Street Journal has reported that DHS has been seeking to unmask online commenters critical of ICE by subpoenaing social-media companies. These people weren’t committing crimes—they were “saying naughty things about ICE and immigration enforcement,” as one attorney put it to the Journal.

Tunick’s lawyers are arguing that the search itself was a violation of his constitutional rights. The Guardian reported that Tunick was being observed because of “suspected terrorism activities” and that, while being detained, he repeatedly asked for an attorney, a request rebuffed by interrogators. “Law enforcement seemingly took advantage of the relaxed constitutional protections at the border to try to dig up evidence against Mr. Tunick, and possibly others” connected to his political activism, Tunick’s attorneys wrote.

[Quinta Jurecic: The ‘presumption of regularity’ is evaporating]

If their account is correct, then the worst-case hypothetical is already taking place: Federal authorities are searching for legal loopholes that allow them to drum up prosecutions against people the Trump administration sees as political enemies by circumventing their basic constitutional rights.

The result, Wessler said, will be “domestic law-enforcement agencies, from the FBI on down, who can call up their buddies at CBP and say, Hey, we think the suspect of ours is gonna come across the border. Would you do us a solid and search his phone? We wanna see if there’s evidence for our domestic investigation.”

This is a relatively simple problem for Congress to solve. In 2021, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky proposed legislation to close the border-exception loophole for electronic devices. Congress could easily pass a law compelling warrants for most border searches of electronic devices.

Were Tunick’s case to make it to the Supreme Court, the Riley decision suggests the Court might rule that federal authorities at international ports of entry should not be allowed to just rummage through the private life of anyone who commits the crime of taking an international flight. This Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has been friendlier toward civil liberties than one might expect, and in Riley, the justices unanimously told the police that if they want to search a suspect’s phone, they need to get a warrant.

That was years ago, however, and it is fair to wonder whether the perspective of the Roberts Court has changed, as it has become far more receptive to kingly assertions of power than it once was.

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When left-wing insurgents defeated a trio of progressive House members in New York, the House Democratic leadership suffered merely an embarrassment. Last night’s primary election in Michigan, by comparison, is an outright catastrophe for the party’s leaders. The Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, who defeated the four-term Representative Haley Stevens, has attacked the party as corrupt, offends some of its heretofore-cherished principles, and is currently trailing the Republican candidate in a race to hold a Democratic seat that ought to have been safe this year.

Parties generally follow bitter primaries with talk of coming together and moving forward. But the center-left liberals who have run the Democratic Party for decades need to be honest with themselves: They just suffered a crushing blow, and more will come unless they quickly absorb bracing lessons from this debacle.

[Read: The anti-Democrat]

Some of the fixes are obvious. AIPAC has become a poisoned brand among Democratic voters. Fending off a leftist insurgency will be all but impossible unless Democrats reject AIPAC’s endorsements and stop supporting unconditional aid for an Israel that no longer works toward a two-state solution. Democrats also have to stop passively allowing multiple candidates to split the mainstream vote while the leftist vote consolidates behind a single candidate, as occurred in Michigan’s Seventh District and the Wisconsin governor’s race.

But the greatest challenge for mainstream liberals is to find a way to engage in and win the substantive argument with the left. This is inherently difficult, because within any political party, the extreme faction can appeal to ideological purity without concern for the opinions of voters outside the party. Democratic socialism, for instance, is unpopular with the American public as a whole, yet it wins the approval of three-quarters of Democrats. As a result, Democratic Party moderates who have good reason to oppose socialism have a hard time convincing partisans who show up to vote in primaries to feel the same way.

A similar dynamic has played out in Republican primaries for years on end. Conservatives have lost winnable Senate races because hard-right candidates such as Herschel Walker, Kari Lake, and Todd Akin won their primaries by emphasizing positions that appealed to most of their party’s voters but repelled a majority of the electorate. Political consultants use the term wedge issues for positions that separate a candidate’s views from those of a majority of voters. But in primaries, the wedge can work the opposite way: It can discredit a broadly popular stance in favor of a narrowly base-pleasing one. El-Sayed does not endorse socialism, but he does support abolishing ICE, providing health insurance for undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, and making private health insurance “redundant and unnecessary.”

Policy is only part of the disagreement between the factions. Left-wing insurgents have won support less by appealing to ideological disagreements within their party and more by expressing a broad frustration with its failures.

The Democratic Party establishment lost credibility by standing behind a wan, ineffective president who failed in his fundamental goal of burying Trumpism. Democratic voters, writes the former Barack Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer, “just don’t trust Democratic politicians to tell them who can really win. This is a very understandable impulse after 2024 and every Democratic leader backing Biden when he clearly shouldn’t have run.”

What makes the Democratic revolt so perverse, however, is that the party’s left provided Joe Biden with his longest-lasting and most enthusiastic base of support. Biden gave progressives a free hand to shape his domestic policies. Elizabeth Warren had more influence than anybody, perhaps even Biden himself, over the administration’s personnel. And even after Biden’s catastrophic debate performance laid bare his unfitness to run for a second term, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood behind his candidacy. It was the dread party establishment, including Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, that was trying to push Biden out of the race, while Ocasio-Cortez was attacking the efforts to replace Biden as a putsch by “a bunch of rich people.” Amazingly, however, the left has turned this history on its head. The establishment now bears the brunt of Biden’s failure, whereas the left positions itself as an untried alternative.

And the deeper you wade into the left’s view of the Democratic Party and its legacy, the more bizarre and counterfactual that belief system becomes. Left-wing activists and intellectuals have settled on a historical account that blames the Democratic Party for everything that has gone wrong in America, including Donald Trump’s rise. Under Jimmy Carter or perhaps Bill Clinton, the theory holds, Democrats adopted “neoliberalism”—a pro-capitalist ideology only marginally preferable to the Republican platform—and stubbornly adhered to it through the Obama era. In fact, the left rallied around Biden precisely because he adopted its theory that the key to restoring the trust of the working class is to reject neoliberalism.

El-Sayed, for instance, expressed this view to Hasan Piker in response to the left-wing streamer’s mockery of the former Clinton adviser James Carville. “You think about James Carville. I’m like, Bro, you architected the complete right-wing, like, ascent to neoliberalism in ’96,” he said. Piker, nodding along, replied, “This state is a swing state because of the machinations of the Clinton era of politics.”

These claims don’t stand up to casual scrutiny. Even if you hold Carville responsible for everything Clinton did, and hold Clinton responsible for everything that happened in Michigan over the past 30 years, the fact is that Clinton made the state more, not less, Democratic. Republicans won Michigan for five straight elections before Clinton ran in 1992. His campaign began a streak of six straight presidential-election victories in the state. Republicans haven’t won a Senate election in Michigan since 1994.

Ahistorical beliefs such as those held by El-Sayed and Piker have circulated in part because the left has relentlessly waged factional warfare against the leadership of the party. It is normal for political parties to experience a mix of winning and losing. The left has played down every success by the establishment while forcing it to own every failure, including those for which the left shares responsibility.

This dynamic points to a broader asymmetry between the two factions. The mainstream liberals of the Democratic Party have focused their energies on defeating Republicans. The left-wing faction has focused on defeating them.

[Jonathan Chait: Abdul El-Sayed fuses together two toxic ideologies]

El-Sayed has suggested that he will beat Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate, by seven points. Piker, during a rally he held for Francesca Hong, the socialist candidate who is leading in polls to be the Democratic nominee for governor in Wisconsin, repeated his claim that her state and Michigan had become swing states only because of the bungling of the party’s establishment. He promised that they would turn permanently Democratic under left-wing leadership. “We are going to bring back the working class to both Wisconsin and to Michigan,” he declared, without mentioning that El-Sayed and the Democratic Socialists of America have performed poorly among voters who lack a college degree. “A Republican will never be elected in this state ever again once our movement is done.”

Carville recently said that he would leave the party rather than share it with the likes of Piker. That is an understandable impulse, given Piker’s oft-expressed admiration for terrorist groups and authoritarian regimes (he has, for example, called Communist China the state he most wishes the United States would emulate). But it is also a prospect that fills Piker and other leftists with glee.

Piker appeared alongside El-Sayed on Monday at a pool party for content creators. “You got John Fetterman, James Carville fantasizing about leaving the party. I’m like, You’re sweetening the deal!” Piker gloated.

What left-wing insurgents such as El-Sayed and Piker want is to take over the Democratic Party, a goal that gets easier when traditional liberals flee it. Carville’s wing of the party is being out-strategized by an insurgent faction that has shrewdly exploited the weaknesses of the party’s leadership. The soundest course of action for mainstream liberals is to recognize how and why they have been losing, and learn how to fight smarter and harder.