Before becoming a regular travel companion of President Trump’s, the nation’s top housing-finance official and the nation’s top intelligence official for one summer, Bill Pulte, was a meme-stock celebrity who was once honored in a livestream with a gag dinosaur trophy inscribed with the words Bill Pulte Fucks on the front and only the young on the back. “That looks pretty badass,” he said upon accepting the bizarro honor.

The 38-year-old heir to a developer dynasty has brought the same raw attitude to his time as a government servant. In his first months at the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, he oversaw hundreds of firings at the agency and at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and replaced both organizations’ chief executives. He boasted of overseeing five rounds of layoffs during his six-week stint as acting director of national intelligence that eliminated the staff by about 30 percent at an agency that Trump has long viewed as redundant and adversarial. Then, this week, just days after returning to his old job at FHFA, he fired about a dozen more senior executives at Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored company that guarantees $4.1 trillion in U.S. mortgages, two people familiar with the firings told me.

[Read: Trump Has a Bill Pulte Problem]

The bio pages of some of the company’s top executives—Senior Vice President of Capital Markets Devang Doshi, Multifamily Chief Financial Officer Brian Hensen, to name two—were redirecting to 404-error pages yesterday, after announcements were made on Wednesday that they would lose their jobs, according to people involved. The firings were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Doshi, Hensen, and others who were dismissed did not respond to requests for comment.

One person involved in the effort told me that the firings had been carried out because of an evolution in the business at Fannie and not for any ideological reason. “Mostly it was operational. We just don’t need them anymore, especially in the D.C. office,” this person told me, after requesting anonymity to describe personnel matters. “With the advent of AI and stuff, we have gotten a lot of savings.” Spokespeople for Fannie Mae and FHFA did not respond to requests for comment.

But the lasting impact of the firings may have more to do with Pulte’s positioning of himself as a go-to disrupter in Trump’s senior team. It’s a position that has caused tensions with other White House officials, who see Pulte as a distracting and problematic troublemaker who appeals to Trump’s most reckless instincts. Last year, Pulte proposed a new standard 50-year mortgage, which Trump briefly embraced, prompting a bipartisan backlash from policy makers who worried that Americans would lose out on equity gains. During a single July day in 2025, Pulte posted 15 separate attacks on Jerome Powell, then the chair of the Federal Reserve. “As someone with deep experience in construction, I am requesting to tour the Fed building and the new, ridiculous ‘renovations’, which I believe are riddled with fraud,” read one.

The Government Accountability Office has opened an investigation into Pulte’s use of typically private mortgage data to accuse prominent Trump targets, such as Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, of mortgage fraud. Officials told me that Pulte had pushed Trump to replace the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, when he’d failed to indict a Trump foe on mortgage fraud. (The replacement, Lindsey Halligan, was later disqualified by a federal judge, and her major indictments have since been tossed.) When 61 former Fannie employees sued Pulte for defamation after he accused them without evidence of getting “kickbacks” for charitable donations, a judge tossed the case, finding that Pulte’s government position gave him legal immunity.

But Trump has long had a soft spot for the type of advisers he sometimes describes as “killers”—people defined by loyalty and a defiant focus on supporting the boss, even if they sometimes leave controversy in their wake. Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who recently left the administration, and his legal adviser Boris Epshteyn both fit that bill. In this way, Pulte continues to wield power, even if he is unlikely to receive another profane dinosaur trophy while serving U.S. taxpayers.

Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed reporting.

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One of Donald Trump’s current favorite riffs is to contrast how (in his opinion) the United States was seen under his predecessor, Joe Biden, and how it’s seen now.

“They didn’t respect us two years ago. They laughed at us. NATO laughed at us. Everybody laughed at us,” Trump said at a summit in Turkey with allies last month. “They don’t laugh anymore. There’s no more laughing.”

He’s right. It’s worse than laughing—they’re ignoring the president of the United States altogether. Trump styles himself as an heir to Theodore Roosevelt, but where Roosevelt said that America should speak softly and carry a big stick, Trump speaks loudly and carries a small one. Roosevelt’s bully pulpit has been reduced to a bullshit pulpit.

This week, Trump made two announcements that, in the past, would have shaken the globe. Speaking to Fox News’s Trey Yingst about negotiations with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” In an ordinary world, such a threat would be a huge news event. Oman is not a hostile nation: It is one of the oldest U.S. allies in the Gulf region and has been a key intermediary in negotiations with Iran for years.

Yet the news drew little governmental response. Neither Oman nor other U.S. allies in the region issued official comments or took any other action that suggested that they found the threat realistic. One possible reason for their muted response is that Trump has actually made this threat before: He said in May that if Oman didn’t cooperate with Americans’ plans for the strait, “we’ll have to blow them up.”

Trump’s credibility has been undercut by his own capriciousness. Back then, he was threatening Oman over any negotiations that would imperil the neutrality of the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, however, he posted a graphic on Truth Social that declared the strait a “NEW U.S. Territory.” (He’d previously said that he would soon declare it U.S. territory.) American annexation of an international waterway would represent a major shift in maritime legal precedent and require an enormous U.S.-military presence, but everyone knew that the pronouncement was nonsense. Trump has no means of controlling the strait, and The Washington Post reports that the Defense Department is actually considering a reduced regional footprint. Trump has also repeatedly promised that a deal with Iran is near completion, but after multiple false starts, these announcements fool only the markets.

This is a big shift. During his first term, Trump garnered outsized attention for outrageous statements. In August 2017, for example, he created an international incident by threatening North Korea with “fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” Trump clearly delighted in how the press and global leaders would scramble to respond to these provocations, and some people argued that he was pursuing Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of keeping adversaries off balance. One can draw a direct connection between the fire-and-fury threat in 2017 and Trump’s friendly statements about North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the past week. But over time, the world has grown jaundiced about Trump’s threats.

The good news is that few world leaders and observers feel the need to take Trump’s outbursts seriously anymore. Fire drills driven by Trump’s idle talk fatigue the media, the public, and geopolitical systems, and they distract from more important stories. But that’s also the bad news. First, some of the things that Trump says are very dangerous. His favoritism toward North Korea could destabilize the region and encourage South Korea and Japan—to say nothing of Iran and other rogue states—to pursue nuclear-weapons programs. Second, he does occasionally follow through; Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro may have thought that Trump was bluffing before he was arrested during an American incursion in January.

Third, Trump needs credibility to enact his agenda, including to try to end the quagmire in Iran. On Wednesday, he said that he was “announcing the MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY!” All-caps notwithstanding, this declaration didn’t receive a great deal of attention. (“They have no clear plan, unfortunately,” one Middle Eastern diplomat told NOTUS.) In order for the sanctions regime he envisions to have its greatest effect, Trump will need the cooperation of allies as well as rival powers such as China. But years of empty boasts and months of feints on Iran mean that other world leaders don’t really heed Trump’s statements. He’s failed to enlist key allies in the war effort, and China has declined to take any concrete action in the strait, despite Trump traveling to Beijing in May to pressure Xi Jinping.

This diminished respect given to presidential statements is self-evidently bad for Trump, and it does nothing to make America great again. But it’s also bad for the world. Even now, no other country has the power the U.S. has to maintain order, and the closest challengers, Russia and China, pursue systems that are repressive and dangerous. The U.S. can regain credibility only by using its rhetoric more carefully and matching its actions to its words—two things that are unlikely to happen under Trump. If he wants to be believed, the president needs to either surrender some American influence or show that his threats are real, and neither option is appealing. The costs of not being taken seriously are very serious indeed.

Related:

• Oman has gone from “indispensable” ally to target of annihilation.
• David Frum: Only losers play the madman.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• The White House freak-out over Natalie Harp
• From “indispensable” ally to target of annihilation
• Rachel Bedard: America’s gerontocracy needs a public physician.

Today’s News

1. Iran’s lead negotiator with the United States said that Iran must plan to counter U.S. sanctions as the Trump administration prepares new economic measures against Tehran. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to announce details of the measures on Monday, after Trump vowed an “economic D-Day” against Iran.
2. President Trump said that he will exempt 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef from tariffs and that the beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices. A White House official said that Trump is expected to sign an executive order implementing the plan within the next two weeks.
3. A charter plane crashed near a remote radar site in western Alaska yesterday afternoon, killing all eight people on board, including two pilots and six passengers; two of the passengers were members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The cause of the crash is still being investigated.

Evening Read

Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That?

By Lila Shroff

Silicon Valley has long had its own dialect. Venture capitalists are always talking about the value of being “high agency” and making “orthogonal bets.” But lately, tech vernacular has taken a peculiar turn—people have started describing themselves as if they were chatbots. If you misspeak, maybe you’re “hallucinating.” Don’t know the answer to a question? That’s because it’s not in your “training data.” Feeling forgetful? Perhaps you have a case of “context rot,” a phrase that refers to the degradation of a bot’s responses over a long conversation. “I’ve been telling my wife I have context rot for months,” Conor Bronsdon, the host of an AI-focused podcast, told me.

Where I live, in San Francisco, such comparisons are inescapable. “I’ve described myself as high temperature,” a friend recently told me; in AI-speak, this means he is prone to randomness …

Such speech easily comes off as unsettling, if not aggressively bleak: Why describe beautiful, tender life in detached, algorithmic terms?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• It’s low-calorie and packed with protein. Is it healthy?
• Joshua Sohn: Liberal families are looking pretty traditional.
• An unsettling glimpse into the GOP’s future
• President Trump has a pet-project docket at the national parks.
• Ossoff’s “Natalie” moment

Culture Break

Reflect. What’s happening to the WNBA isn’t normal, Jemele Hill argues. The league’s unprecedented success has come with unprecedented controversy.

Read. Last year, Sophia Stewart recommended eight books for people who like to dabble in casual pursuits. Each read reminds us of the possibilities that lie in our hobbies—even the ones we’re bad at.

Play our daily crossword.

PS

A decade ago, my colleague Spencer Kornhaber named FLOTUS, by the indie-folk group Lambchop, as one of the best albums of 2016, likening the band to Bon Iver. Today, Lambchop is out with a gorgeous new record that actually features Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Lambchop’s music always has wry humor and good melodies, but I wasn’t prepared for the sumptuous harmonies on Punching the Clown. The band’s leader, Kurt Wagner, says that he was inspired by a chance hearing on the radio of lined-out singing, a centuries-old practice of church music that migrated from Britain to Appalachia. (For more on the style, read David Ramsey in the Oxford American.) If that seems like an odd basis for an indie record, the results speak—or sing—for themselves.

— David

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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

Ice cream is one of life’s simplest and most enduring culinary pleasures. The first published recipe, which dates back to the 17th century, combined milk, water, sugar, and candied citron or pumpkin. By the early 20th century, companies were regularly adding stabilizers to their ice creams to prevent them from getting freezer burn and artificial dyes to give them appealing hues. But the core essence of ice cream—sweetened, frozen dairy—remained largely unchanged into the 21st century. Even Halo Top, the diet ice cream that surpassed Ben & Jerry’s as the nation’s best-selling in 2017, simply subbed in skim milk and artificial sweeteners to keep the calories down.

Then came David. The protein-bar company has turned its attention to “frozen dessert,” which is, of course, more commonly known as ice cream, though the company can’t legally call their product that. Instead of being made with cream and milk, it comprises a “protein system,” a “structure system,” a “fat system,” and a “flavor system,” each of which is composed of ultra-processed ingredients such as whey protein isolate and “modified plant fat.” The only whole natural ingredients on the vanilla flavor’s label are water, salt, and vanilla bean. And yet, the treat’s basic nutritional stats are impressive: A pint has just 210 calories, less than 1 gram of sugar, and 30 grams of protein. Unlike diet ice creams of the past, it is rich and creamy. When the product launched on David’s website in June, it sold out in 28 minutes. (The company declined to tell me how many units it sold.)

David’s ice cream is perhaps the most outwardly refined of a whole category of frozen desserts that are being deliberately packed with protein. These protein-ice-cream companies and others processing their way to a palatable nutrition label are making a bet on what Americans truly want from food. We (and our government) might have grown more skeptical than ever of industrially produced foods, but we also expect quite a lot from every morsel we consume. When I recently spoke with Brendan Niemira, the chief science and technology officer of the Institute of Food Technologists, he spent nearly two minutes listing qualities that Americans now desire: that food be tasty and safe, sure, but also low-calorie, high-protein, probiotic, full of omega-3 fatty acids, and so on.

Last month, PepsiCo launched a powdered oatmeal drink, with 15 grams of protein, that dissolves in cold milk or water. It also makes a prebiotic version of Pepsi that contains 3 grams of fiber and does not taste like Metamucil. Kraft Heinz recently introduced a mac and cheese with 17 grams of protein and 6 grams of fiber, thanks largely to a “proprietary protein-and fiber-enriched pasta.” Nestlé offers a 45-calorie “pre-meal hunger support nutritional drink” that is composed almost entirely of industrially processed ingredients and that the company says helps people feel full sooner. At the Institute of Food Technologists’ annual conference earlier this summer, I feasted on “better-for-you BBQ pizza,” the crust of which was fortified with wheat-protein isolate, and watermelon-lime “satiety soda” that was spiked with corn fiber. I even ate frozen yogurt that starred a “network of cell-signaling peptides from the fava bean” and was supposed to help me recover from workouts.

On paper, Americans are generally wary of such products: In a June 2025 survey, more than 60 percent of respondents said they believe that ultra-processed foods are addictive. And some experts worry that the ingredients such products depend on—emulsifiers, preservatives, and sugar substitutes—are somehow messing with our metabolism, such that the impressive macros of these products don’t provide the full picture of their healthfulness. (The FDA approves the safety of such additives, but that review process historically has focused on toxicity and, say, cancer risk, not metabolic effects.) Many believe that the manipulation of ingredients causes our bodies to react in unforeseen ways to the food we eat—that a manufactured “protein system” might not be beneficial in the way that, say, lentils’ protein system is. Or they note the simple fact that many UPFs—even those that may be high-protein, probiotic, or high-omega-3—still contain a lot of fat, sugar, and salt, which are clearly bad for us.

Take PepsiCo’s SunChips Fiber, which launched in March. A 7-ounce bag of the chips—seven servings, according to the company, but honestly not that enormous of a snack—has 21 grams of fiber, most of what the FDA recommends an adult eat in a day. But it also has 910 calories. Even if these fiber-filled SunChips had fewer calories, UPF critics would point to the way they’re made—using an industrial process called extrusion, which essentially pulverizes grains into easily digestible morsels—as a potential danger. (Some researchers suspect that extruded grains spike insulin more than their unprocessed counterparts.)

The problem is that the science around which processing steps and industrial ingredients might actually be harmful is still in its infancy. And it will struggle to catch up with the food industry’s innovation. Major food companies are regularly creating new processes for spiking foods with nutrients without making them taste like health foods. Nestlé’s “hunger support” drink, for example, uses something the company calls “whey protein microgels,” which help prevent the drink from getting too thick in the manufacturing process. David’s frozen dessert is so low-calorie and yet so indulgent because of that “modified plant fat,” a chemical called esterified propoxylated glycerol that is not absorbed by the digestive tract and was cleared for use in food by the FDA in 2015. (An earlier nondigestible fat, olestra, infamously flopped after people began reporting that it was causing them “anal leakage” in the ’90s; safety studies of EPG indicate that such leakage could occur with very high doses.) Scientists might be convinced that extrusion can make an otherwise healthy product like whole grains metabolically harmful. But what about “supercritical fluid extrusion” that—according to Frito-Lay, which patented the technology—uses less heat and thus can “deliver high levels of fruits or vegetables” in a still-crispy snack?

Until experts can articulate precisely why ultra-processed health foods are a problem, we’ll all be stuck in limbo. Companies will continue offering ever more processed and refined health foods, made with shiny new ingredients and methods; meanwhile, some experts will continue warning Americans that we should not eat them, without being able to back those warnings up with data on the latest foods. Every time a new processed health food hits the shelves, anyone who visits a grocery store will have to guess whether this one will be truly healthy. In the face of some uncertainty, at least some Americans are, so far, turning to products such as David’s: The company sold $131 million worth of its protein bars in their first year on the market.

Most Americans don’t actually need more protein in their diet, and certainly they could get it without spending about $9 on a pint of David. “This so-called ice cream looks to me a boondoggle for all concerned, save those selling it at, no doubt, extremely high profit margins,” David Katz, the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, told me via email. But David’s CEO, Peter Rahal, told me his detractors are luddites. He argued that people need more protein than the daily recommended amount to “thrive,” and that having the option of a new diet ice cream on the shelf shouldn’t be controversial. “You want the full-fat, full-cream, full-sugar thing that has this amazing heritage, go for it. But if you want something that’s really close to taste and texture, that’s more advanced and more sophisticated, it should be there for you,” he said. (David’s product is so expensive, Rahal said, because of the cost of whey protein.)

Clearly, some Americans see the world like Rahal does. When the craving for ice cream hits, a pint under 300 calories has its own appeal—even if it’s not ice cream at all.

Aside from some brief written statements, the public has not heard directly from 84-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell since he fell at his home in Washington, D.C., and was taken away by an ambulance two months ago. Why he fell, what has happened since, and how he’s doing now remain unclear. His absence has inspired conspiracy theories, memes, and morbid speculation that a couple of awkwardly staged proof-of-life photos have done little to assuage.

If Americans are doubtful that McConnell will ever return to the Senate floor, it’s understandable: This is not the country’s first encounter with a frail or ailing representative. Six elderly members of Congress have died just this term, and others have demonstrated mental decline. Younger members have also had episodes of incapacity, as when Representative Tom Kean of New Jersey missed months of work this past spring while hospitalized for depression. Our previous president suffered obvious but under-disclosed deterioration while in office; our current leader, who will leave office the oldest president we’ve ever had, is under constant scrutiny for signs of impairment.

Historically, our elected leaders have argued, for plenty of good reasons, that they are entitled to privacy regarding their health and discretion about when they leave. Congressional norms tie power to seniority, which discourages early retirement; airing the health status of our leaders risks creating national-security concerns. But letting politicians judge their own capacity to serve has simply not worked in the public’s interest. I’m a physician—a geriatrician, in fact—and I know from countless encounters with frail, aging patients that many have difficulty admitting when their capacity has started to slip. Many people struggle to recognize, too, when a new impairment means a permanent change in conditions, not just a temporary setback.

The United States needs a system to oversee its leaders’ fitness to serve. Currently, no independent entity assesses and publicly reports on the health of the president or members of Congress. Congress should make one. Let’s call it the Office of the Medical Adviser: an office of medical personnel designated to routinely evaluate whether our highest-ranking public servants can reliably fulfill their duties.

The OMA would serve a distinct function from the Office of the Attending Physician, which responds to emergencies at the Capitol, handles occupational-health concerns for Congress and the Supreme Court, and provides many members with primary care. Brian Monahan has held the role of attending physician of the U.S. Congress since 2009. On occasion, Dr. Monahan has provided information to the public about a representative’s health; in McConnell’s case, for instance, he has twice recently provided letters that offered few details about the senator’s condition, other than to imply that McConnell’s health was not as bad as the speculation surrounding it. (The OAP did not respond to a request for comment.)

This is the dilemma of both the OAP and the president’s physician: Their charge is to provide clinical services, not to represent the interests of the public. Their loyalty, correctly, is primarily to their patients. I would never lie if one of my patients asked me to offer documentation of their health, but I might agree to downplay areas of uncertainty or to keep some things private. My obligation to disclose would be secondary to my patient’s wishes and privacy.

The OMA, crucially, would not provide elected officials with care or medical advice. Rather, the office would periodically—say, once every two years—evaluate officials’ health and cognitive well-being. Congressionally appointed physicians would be empowered to request medical records, refer officials to specialists for additional input, and arrange additional testing. Their charge would be to determine whether an individual is cognitively and physically capable of carrying out the responsibilities of their office until their next evaluation, two years down the line.

The OMA would then publicly release brief, structured documentation attesting to a congressional member’s functional capacity. These letters would provide insight into a member’s health status without revealing details immaterial to their ability to meet the demands of their position. The public doesn’t need to know about every blood-pressure medicine someone is prescribed or every mole they have removed. Many members can and do ably perform their role while living with a disability, a chronic disease, or a treated mental illness; the OMA would enumerate only issues relevant to someone’s ability to meet the terms of their job, and would summarize all else as “additional health issues reviewed.”

But were a member to show signs of decline, whether from age or illness progression, the OMA would assess whether that person’s ability to fulfill their responsibilities was in jeopardy. And if an official suffered an acute event that might change their circumstances, as McConnell may have this summer, the office would automatically conduct additional evaluations of their health after a two-week absence.

Other high-stakes professions require their practitioners to submit to this kind of evaluation. Hospitals, the military, and the Federal Aviation Administration all conduct periodic, proactive health assessments to determine fitness for duty. Pilots get evaluated for risk of sudden incapacitation during flight; soldiers get evaluated for “force readiness.” I am tested each year for various communicable diseases and have agreed to random drug testing in order to be staffed at the clinic where I work. If a pilot is found to have a health condition that might put them at risk midair, or a soldier is found to have developed a new impairment, or I am found to have tuberculosis, our employer can compel us to resolve those conditions before returning to duty, or put limitations on what work we can do.

In a situation in which an OMA physician had concerns about a member’s capacity, those concerns would be evaluated by a second physician. If both doctors agreed, they would then communicate their findings to the patient, to allow the person time to consider and adjust their plans—they might take a medical leave, or decide not to run for office again, or, in extreme cases, resign. Within a month, the OMA would provide the documentation to the relevant bipartisan ethics committee for review. In cases of member misconduct, the House and Senate ethics committees can recommend censure, expulsion, or, in the case of the president, impeachment; their mandate should be expanded to consider cases of medical incapacity, with the same recourses to action. Whatever decisions the committees or the officials themselves come to, the OMA would release its findings into the public record after an additional period, barring significant security concerns.

The OMA, in other words, would not have the authority to remove anyone from office; it would be empowered only to provide expert input to the committees already charged with maintaining the integrity of our government and to inform the public of its findings.

The U.S. would not require such an office if elected officials were willing to step aside when their health demanded it or if the people closest to them—their doctors, staff, and family—were willing to confront them in cases of decline. But recent years have provided too many examples of this kind of self-policing failing. In her memoir, Jill Biden confessed that she’d become concerned after President Biden’s disastrous 2024 debate performance that he’d had a stroke; Hunter Biden, on a recent podcast, suggested that perhaps the president’s undiagnosed-at-the-time prostate cancer was already causing impairment. These reports only affirm suspicions that people around the former president knew that he wasn’t well, even as he insisted on another presidential run.

Most Americans resent such lack of transparency. More than 60 percent believe that Biden was not forthcoming regarding his health, and approximately the same percentage agree that presidents ought to be required to release all medical information to the public. In another national survey, a proposal to remove officials when they show signs of mental decline achieved 87 percent approval. Age limits for office, which I support wholeheartedly, are also extremely popular.

Some younger elected officials recognize this. This year, Democratic representatives have put forward three separate proposals that would increase transparency about the health of public officials, whether by empowering a newly created commission to remove a president, creating a standard for “significant irreversible cognitive impairment,” or requiring members to file a public disclosure regarding any absence longer than 21 days. But none of these proposals can account for the uncertainty inherent in so many clinical scenarios, and they rely too much on civilians to make sense of complex medical situations. The proposals also become relevant only once an official shows signs that they are unable to do the job. Creation of an OMA would proactively offer assurance that they could.

Aging representatives may balk at increased medical scrutiny, but an OMA would also protect them. Structured disclosures should help prevent prying and skepticism. The public would be provided with enough information that leaders could then demand their privacy in good faith. An official process for determining whether and for how long someone needs to be out of work when ill would also mean that sick officials can take time and space to convalesce without feeling furtive.

The mere existence of medical oversight would also help nudge American elected leaders to confront their own frailties before they were faced with real censure. The body is a rate-limiting factor that many of us choose to ignore until we can’t; the requirement to disclose some health information might serve as a deterrent to older members considering running again, or to younger ones struggling to balance health issues with the job. Our leaders, after all, are only human, and most people don’t readily give up the keys when it’s time to stop driving. Sometimes, the right decision is to take the keys away.

If there’s one thing young moviegoers seem to fear these days, it’s the idea of the in-between. The term liminal horror has gone from niche internet speak to Hollywood trend, thanks to the acclaimed TV show Severance and the recent smash-hit movie Backrooms. Stories like these mine the unsettling feeling of nondescript office corridors and basement halls that seem to self-replicate into infinity; this spring also saw the U.S. release of the excellent Japanese film Exit 8, a video-game adaptation about someone getting trapped in a subway station with seemingly no way out. Now there’s It Ends, a low-budget bit of creepy cleverness with a punchy pitch: What if you got lost driving down a road that never ends?

That this type of premise has grown more commonplace makes sense. Such a film typically needs only one set (for example, a long, lonely road, flanked by trees), a small cast of characters, and a spare, intentionally circular script. It Ends uses that scrappy charm to its advantage, the lack of frills dialing up a sense of realism. The film, written and directed by the newcomer Alexander Ullom, follows James (played by Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Tyler (Mitchell Cole), four friends who are headed on a celebratory graduation road trip. Their drive is occupied by the sort of nonsensical, wandering conversations young people love to have; there’s no real sign of anything being wrong until Tyler notices that he’s missed his turn.

The horror builds gradually, spikes, then slows to an existentially brutal crawl. The group realizes that there’s no way off the road, but when they get out of the car to look around, swarms of people emerge from the woods and fight to enter their vehicle. As the friends continue on in search of safety, they notice that the gas tank never goes empty, they never feel hungry, and nobody needs to sleep. They’re in a sort of limbo, condemned to keep moving despite having no destination. It’s essentially a Gen Z take on Sartre’s No Exit, a gentle riff on hell being other people, with a few jump scares tossed in for fun.

[Read: The eerie comfort of liminal spaces]

But while prior small-scale horror movies such as The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity had an unseen villain guiding the scares, It Ends thrives on an utter lack of information about what is happening and why. The terror of liminality is how effortlessly it evokes the creepiness of a bad dream, the kind that begins in the middle of the story and seems just off. There’s no monster around the corner, no demonic puzzle to be solved. The characters of It Ends initially debate what’s going on, keeping track of patterns occurring around them in search of some explanation. While James keeps doing so as a way of staying sane, the others start to accept their frozen existence; the strangers in the woods, it seems, are also confined to the road’s environs.

That Ullom manages to squeeze a feature-length movie out of such a mundane premise is impressive; it helps that his cast is charming enough to carry it off. As the film plods on, it starts to skip further and further ahead in time, warping the viewer’s sense of chronology. It Ends is more aggressively aimless than other recent entries in the genre: Exit 8 sees its heroes try to figure a way out of their infinite subway station (it was based on a video game, so some resolution is built into the plot); the protagonists of Backrooms discovered a world of non-Euclidean corridors and lobbies in a basement, then found out that opportunistic corporate villains were plundering it; such a revelation hints at sequels that could expand its lore.

The simplicity of It Ends, by comparison, is wonderful and jarring, as is the total inability for future properties to spill out of it. Part of the dread that liminal horror mines is the drudgery of the never-ending scroll, a familiar feeling for anyone who’s been on social media; no matter how much you look, you’ll never hit bottom, only summon more of whatever the algorithm wants to serve you. It Ends is set entirely outdoors but captures that same fear of being stuck without any touchstones to distinguish simulation from reality.

Picture an old-fashioned, idealized American scene. Young kids walk to and from a redbrick public schoolhouse; almost every kid’s commute is less than 10 minutes. On warm weekend days, the children run lemonade stands, doing brisk business. Their parents host a Christmas-tree-and-baked-goods sale on the school field every December, which draws a boisterous crowd. And about those parents: They’re almost all married. Divorce and single parenthood are rare. The whole tableau is, at first glance, a social conservative’s dream come true.

This scene exists in the real world. The neighborhood is my own; the elementary school is my kids’ school. But this is no conservative small town. It’s an urban neighborhood in Washington, D.C., a city where Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump 90 percent to 6 percent in the most recent election. Virtually all of the parents in this neighborhood are highly educated Democrats. Judging from what I see in my community here, these deep-blue Washington families are the kinds of families that so many conservatives value.

The strong marriages of elite blue America—families whose lives are, in a way, pretty darn conservative—offer a useful counterpoint to the simplistic culture-war narrative. Elite blue Americans are an attractive boogeyman for pundits on the right, who regularly write articles about how such people are pushing outré sexual and family values. But when you actually look at these people, you see a lot of folks who get married, have kids, stay married, and live lives that almost seem ripped from a Norman Rockwell painting. As the cultural commentator Aaron Renn put it, “If you want to see conservative values in practice, you’ll often find them among people who vote Democrat and align on the cultural left.” Conservatives might benefit from closely observing what’s going on here—liberal Americans achieving what seems to be the conservative goal of stable families.

Some social scientists have, in fact, argued that blue values such as egalitarianism and secularism tend to produce stronger marriages than red values such as religiosity and traditional gender roles. A few data points support their thesis. For example, highly educated Americans are trending blue in their politics, and highly educated Americans are also more likely to be married. As couples move up the educational ladder from high-school degree to associate’s degree to bachelor’s degree to master’s degree, the marriage rate keeps climbing.

[From the July 2026 issue: How to save marriage]

But other data paint a different picture. Liberals and Democrats lag behind conservatives and Republicans in marrying and having children, and the gap is growing. As of 2024, among adults aged 30 to 50, Republicans are 18 points more likely than Democrats to be married, and Republican women aged 25 to 35 are 31 points more likely to be mothers. Although delayed marriage and childbearing by Democrats is part of the story, some of the gap is undoubtedly Democrats opting out of marriage and parenthood altogether. Blue values alone don’t seem to directly produce stable families.

I’d offer this hypothesis instead: At least among many highly educated Democrats, stable families display a mixture of blue and red traits. That’s what you see in my neighborhood, as I recently wrote about for the Institute for Family Studies.   

On the blue, egalitarian side, almost every family has two working parents. Stay-at-home moms are scarce. Educational attainment tends to be pretty equal between spouses. And some of the more symbolic lifestyle markers also trend egalitarian. For example, based on the parent lists for my kids’ classrooms, only nine kids out of 50 (18 percent) have two parents who share a last name.

But these families also display some more stereotypically red traits—including income hypergamy, meaning that fathers outearn mothers. In terms of income, there are three main career tiers among these well-educated D.C. parents. At the top of the income scale are the private-sector for-profit workers. In the middle are the government bureaucrats. And at the bottom are the nonprofit NGO workers. Most fathers are in the top or middle tier, while most mothers are in the middle or bottom one. (The small number of families with same-sex parents obviously don’t show this gendered division of income, but they also have two married parents who both work.)

[Read: The return of the Democratic manly man]

Why do these couples gravitate toward this gendered income division? Every couple is different, but for many families, this arrangement allows women to pursue career goals beyond remuneration. For example, one of my female colleagues (married, two young kids, separate last names) is working her self-described “dream job” prosecuting international money launderers in federal court. Her husband is a law-firm partner who makes most of the family’s income. My own household is similar: My wife has her dream job as an immunologist at the National Institutes of Health. It’s a career path that required several years as a poorly paid postdoc, during which I far outearned her. In Jane Austen novels, financially advantageous marriages helped women secure their social station. But in educated blue America, such marriages help women pursue their career goals—while maintaining a household income that can cover the cost of raising kids.           

Many of these families also have other traditionalist or red-coded markers. For example, many are surprisingly religious. I’d estimate that almost a third of my kids’ friends go to church on a weekly basis, mostly in mainline Protestant or Catholic denominations. This might not reach the churchgoing levels of devout Bible Belt communities, and the mix of churches is definitely different, with evangelical options notably few. But these elite liberals go to church at a higher rate than Americans as a whole.    

Elite liberals should be proud of their families—and they should preach what they practice. The conservative family scholar Brad Wilcox wasn’t wrong when he called it “hypocrisy” for liberals to publicly promote freewheeling family diversity even while they themselves follow traditional family patterns. Fortunately, some liberals are starting to speak up for the traditional family values generally out of fashion among liberals. In the past few years, for example, liberal writers such as Nicholas Kristof and center-left scholars such as Melissa Kearney have written about how a stable marriage is the best foundation for raising kids. The preaching, in other words, may be catching up to the practice. Let’s hope more people hear it.

When the United States was looking for a way to talk to Iran about a nuclear deal more than a decade ago, it turned to Oman, asking the country to do something it had quietly done for years: make an impossible conversation possible. Because Washington and Tehran had no diplomatic relations, the U.S. felt that the most promising back channel to get a conversation started led through Muscat.

Iran was skeptical but willing to sit down with U.S. officials, provided there was some very particular diplomatic choreography. At Tehran’s request, Oman’s government found a room with multiple doors, so that American and Iranian officials would not be seen entering together. Omani officials took the head of the table, to create the impression that it was more than a bilateral conversation.

That session laid the groundwork for what ultimately became the 2015 nuclear pact. “Without Oman, I’m not sure there would be an Iran nuclear deal,” Jake Sullivan, one of the top U.S. officials involved in those talks, told me.

But today, that pact lies in ruins. President Trump tore it up, then went to war with Iran. Oman has watched its standing with Washington collapse too. Earlier this week, Trump threatened to “bomb the shit” out of the sultanate unless it did what America demanded—adding another longtime ally to the list of countries he has threatened to attack.

Oman, located on the southeastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, is often overshadowed by its wealthier, more conspicuous neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and by its more tumultuous neighbor, Yemen. Yet for decades, Oman punched above its weight diplomatically by serving as one of Washington’s most useful interlocutors in the Middle East, in part because it has maintained relationships with governments that Washington often cannot or will not talk to.

Trump has accused the sultanate of undermining his efforts to strike a deal with Iran and end the war, which began at the end of February and are now in a stalemate. The Strait of Hormuz, which is central to the conflict with Tehran, is also at the center of Washington’s dispute with Oman. The maritime corridor used to carry one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied-natural-gas supplies before the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran began and Tehran closed the strait to traffic through drone, small-boat, and mine attacks. Trump responded with a U.S. blockade, which remains in place even though the deadline for Washington and Tehran to reach an interim deal and set the stage for broader talks over Iran’s nuclear program expired earlier this week, showing no sign of a breakthrough.

Oman and Iran border opposite sides of the strait; their respective territorial waters meet in the 21-mile-wide choke point. The two countries have been in talks in recent weeks to restore commercial ‌shipping, which has dwindled to a trickle. Both countries have floated the idea of a service fee for passage through the strait, but other Gulf nations have objected. Trump has wavered on the issue, though Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said that the strait must return to being an open and free waterway. Trump has vowed to declare the strait a U.S. territory. He recently claimed that the strait was reopened and that mines and other hazards have been cleared. Shipping trackers continue to show a rate of passage dramatically below prewar levels.

Omani officials insist that charging for passage is within the country’s legal rights. When asked on Monday in the Oval Office whether he was out of patience ​with Oman, Trump told ​reporters: “No, I don’t think ⁠they behaved very well, but we’d handle them very easily, just like we do other things.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has separately threatened Oman with sanctions if Muscat facilitates fees for ships passing through the strait.

A U.S. official familiar with the deliberations told me that the administration views Oman’s handling of the negotiations as “dishonorable,” accusing Omani intermediaries of publicly portraying the two sides as nearing an agreement while privately conveying proposals to U.S. officials that the latter viewed as unacceptable. The official also accused Oman of delivering false statements to the press, which Omani officials deny. But this much is clear: The role that Oman used to play for Washington as a useful regional intermediary is over—at least as long as Trump remains in office.

The president’s anger presents an unusually awkward problem for Washington and for Muscat. Oman is not some distant neutral country that wandered into an American dispute. It has spent decades deliberately cultivating its relationship with Washington.

“Oman has decided its strategic importance is to be nonaligned the way Switzerland is nonaligned,” Jon Alterman, the chair in global security and geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “It’s a relatively small, relatively poor place, surrounded by giants, and Oman has decided it will make itself indispensable to everyone—not because it helps everybody, but because it’s a place that can keep a secret and allows people to meet quietly and resolve conflicts.”

[Read: Trump’s new strategy of nothing]

Modern diplomatic relations between the United States and Oman date to 1972, but their history goes back much further. In 1833, President Andrew Jackson’s administration signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce with Oman, then an important maritime power, as Washington sought to expand commercial ties in the region and protect American merchants operating in the Indian Ocean. An American consulate operated in Muscat from 1880 to 1915. In 1980, after the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Oman became the first Persian Gulf state to officially grant the U.S. access to its military facilities.

Oman doesn’t host a large, permanent American base like the Al Udeid Air Base, near Doha, the capital of Qatar. But Washington does have access to Omani military facilities and ports. In 2019, the two countries expanded that arrangement to include Duqm and Salalah, two key ports on the Arabian Sea, allowing American ships to operate and resupply outside the Gulf before entering the Strait of Hormuz.

Oman has also spent decades pursuing a foreign policy designed to maintain relationships across the region’s fault lines. It has good relations with Iran, maintains a security partnership with the United States, and has kept channels open to the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia in Yemen. It has also maintained contact with Israel.

This is often described as Omani “neutrality,” though some of the sultanate’s regional neighbors believe that it favors Tehran. That has sometimes put Oman at odds with its fellow Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which view Iran as a major regional security threat. Oman declined to join the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in 2015 and stayed out of the 2017 regional blockade of Qatar. Muscat also maintained channels to the Houthis, whom Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have long battled. One Saudi official I spoke with offered a skeptical assessment: “Oman’s definition of neutrality has been questionable.”

Oman rejects the idea that its connections to Iran, including its economic relationship with and ties to the Houthis, amount to complicity. Instead, it casts its ties as a relationship of economic and regional importance. Oman serves as an economic lifeline and reexport hub for Iran, absorbing trade activity that previously passed through the UAE. (The UAE announced this week that it is stopping all trade and financial transactions with Tehran.) Iran, meanwhile, supplies Oman with agricultural products and heavy materials.

A senior Omani diplomat I spoke with described neutrality as a practical necessity for a small state surrounded by larger powers. Oman, the official argued, gets criticized from all sides. “The Iranians will tell us, You’re being too soft on the West,” the official told me, while Western governments accuse Oman of being too soft on Iran. “And the Houthis will tell us we’re being too nice to the Saudis, and the Saudis will tell us we’re being too nice to the Houthis. It just goes with the territory.”

But Oman’s independence—its ability to talk to all sides, even if it irritates the others—is precisely what has made Muscat useful to successive American administrations.

Oman’s record as an intermediary is unusually long. The country has helped secure the release of American detainees held by Iran. It has also facilitated contacts involving Yemen. In early 2013, a small group of senior American officials quietly boarded a military plane bound for Oman. For years, John Kerry had been nurturing a diplomatic channel with Muscat, meeting secretly with Omani officials while he was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in hope of opening back-channel talks with Iran. As President Obama’s secretary of state, he gave the green light to dispatch top foreign-policy officials to Muscat, including then–Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Sullivan, who was serving as national security adviser to then–Vice President Biden.

Those talks helped form the basis for the 2013 interim nuclear agreement and, eventually, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. During the Biden administration, Muscat hosted the U.S. special envoy for Yemen, Tim Lenderking, and brokered his first direct contacts and message exchanges with Houthi representatives. Oman “wanted peace in Yemen, and they were willing to travel to Sanaa to meet with the Houthis and pass messages to Houthi leadership and exert their influence where they could to help us achieve a durable peace,” Lenderking, who is now a principal at the Washington-based law firm Squire Patton Boggs, told me. In 2025, the Trump administration again turned to Oman to host negotiations with Iran. Trump subsequently thanked Sultan Haitham bin Tariq, the country’s leader, for Oman’s role.

[Read: The art of the giveaway]

In addition to serving as an intermediary, Oman offers Washington military access and a stable partner near one of the world’s most important maritime choke points; Oman gets a powerful security partner while preserving the freedom to maintain its own relationships. But that bargain hinges on Oman’s independence.

Analysts told me that this is why the current rupture matters. If the U.S. wants Oman to function as an intermediary, it cannot simultaneously demand that Muscat adopt Washington’s preferred position toward Iran. The very quality that makes Oman useful—the ability to talk to everyone—can look like disloyalty.

That old paradox has now become a crisis. Oman says that it is trying to fulfill its obligations under international law and keep commercial shipping moving, including through Omani territorial waters. The Omani diplomat told me that the country’s lawyers believe that maritime fees can be lawful under international practice and that Oman has no intention of doing anything illegal.

Trump and his negotiators see the issue differently, particularly where any arrangement could give Iran greater control over shipping or legitimize Iranian fees in what Tehran could portray as a victory over its much more powerful nemesis. Other nations have stepped in to play crucial mediating roles in this conflict, thus far to no avail. But Muscat remains one of the few doors available to American negotiators. The difficult question now is whether Trump’s threats will finally slam it shut.

Let’s start with the good: The WNBA is more popular than ever. During the offseason, the league and the WNBA Players Association reached a landmark collective-bargaining agreement resulting in a 400 percent increase, on average, in player salaries. The average franchise valuation has soared 59 percent in the past year; the Golden State Valkyries were appraised at a league-high $850 million. Between now and 2030, the WNBA will add three new teams, in Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia. And the WNBA saw a 44 percent jump in ratings for this year’s All-Star Game—which, for the first time ever, hosted more in-person fans than the NBA’s.

Yet this success has come amid unprecedented controversy. In early July, a group of 11 Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Cathy Engelbert, the WNBA’s commissioner, demanding that she be held accountable for not adequately addressing “repeated acts of unnecessary physical hostility and violence” on the court against the Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, who has emerged as one of the league’s most popular players. The letter also suggested that these acts may be “racially motivated” against Clark, who is white, and called for the Department of Justice to investigate. And right before the All-Star Game, Clark’s teammate Sophie Cunningham told ESPN, “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” which immediately became a massive talking point around and outside the league. Shortly thereafter, multiple rallies sprang up in support of Cunningham; Celeste Keaton, a co-owner of the Seattle Storm, was suspended after verbally confronting a pair of teenage fans during a game who were holding signs supporting Cunningham.

The discussions surrounding Cunningham and Clark have different origins; nonetheless, because they play together, their respective dramas have snowballed into one messy dispute that now envelops the league. Engelbert has certainly guided the league into its most financially stable era, but this is a complicated crossroads requiring delicate steering. Even if the WNBA isn’t in immediate danger of losing popularity, culture wars can be exhausting over time. And because its explosive success is the very thing attracting many of its critics, a narrative course correction may not be so simple. But the league needs to protect its players, and be careful not to kowtow too much to its critics.

Managing the WNBA responsibly is especially challenging in this political and media environment. As Media Matters for America recently noted, Fox News has dedicated at least 206 segments to the WNBA since late June, most of which revolved around racial issues or the inclusion of trans athletes in the league. It’s difficult to refocus attention when a major news network isn’t letting up.

Much of what’s happening now began when Clark entered the league, in 2024. In a short time, her tenure has helped the WNBA transform financially and receive more mainstream attention. But Clark’s stratospheric popularity has been complicated to manage. By keeping her views private, she’s become a blank slate for anyone’s cause. Though she has never publicly acknowledged her own political leanings, prominent conservatives have wielded Clark against her own league to advance MAGA’s racial grievances.

And whenever a perception emerges that Clark is being treated unfairly by her peers, the backlash is outsize. In June, the Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas was suspended after hitting Clark in the throat during a game, one of the incidents prompting the letter from the Republican lawmakers. It was a bad play, but aggressive physical contact is an inevitable part of sports. Yet it was treated as an outlier: Thomas, who is Black, told reporters that after her play with Clark went viral, she received death threats and was called racial slurs.

The heated environment can be seen as part of a larger outcry. The league is about 70 percent Black, and anywhere from 25 to 35 percent queer; historically, its players have embraced progressive issues. In 2016, the Minnesota Lynx wore T-shirts calling for justice and accountability following the police-related deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. A few years later, Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, a Republican, wrote a letter to Engelbert criticizing the league’s support of the Black Lives Matter movement. In response, players backed Raphael Warnock, who eventually won the seat from Loeffler in the 2020 election.

This history has made the WNBA low-hanging fruit for MAGA figures, whether politicians or commentators, who use it to score cheap points with their base. Critics lacking a serious investment in women’s basketball can conveniently swoop in to recite their spiel, and pay no attention to the sport itself. When the league was less popular, its players may have been freer to express their opinions without blowback. Perhaps that’s no longer possible. During All-Star weekend, I spoke with the Lynx’s rookie sensation, Olivia Miles, who talked about the difficulty of using the league as a platform for other issues, given the current attention. “Learning how to navigate that through sports is not an easy thing to do, because everyone is watching us at all times,” she said. “There’s so many things that are said and done and criticized.”

The freedom to voice one’s politics goes both ways, and in Cunningham, conservative critics have a figure whose beliefs explicitly align with theirs on one particular topic. In the ESPN profile, she characterized her politics as “very much in the middle.” But her actions have drawn polarized attention. In Minneapolis, Cunningham took pictures with the former college swimmer Riley Gaines, who for years has advocated to keep transgender women out of women’s sports, and whose activism has been far more explicitly partisan. (Gaines has said the Biden administration “pushed radical gender ideology every chance it got,” and campaigned for President Trump.) “I think it’s people just practicing their rights of freedom of speech and doing what other fans have been doing since the WNBA has started,” Cunningham told reporters of the rallies held in her support. “And so props to them, props to everyone who is able to be competent and be bold and courageous enough to speak their truths.”

Now coaches and players are being peppered with questions about where they stand—even though the league has never had a trans-woman player. (Layshia Clarendon, who was the first WNBA player to undergo top surgery, identified as nonbinary and trans. They retired in 2024.) Clark, too, has been criticized for not backing Cunningham’s stance. Some, like the Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, are choosing to do their own form of counterprotesting. Reeve wore a T-shirt during a recent game against the Fever that read Trans Kids Belong; ahead of the game, she defended trans rights to the media. “I’ve chosen to listen to transgender families, and what I know is exclusion is not the answer,” she said.

This is a snapshot of the current WNBA experience—unprecedented growth and great basketball at risk of being swallowed up by the same culture wars plaguing the broader political landscape. Nearly every day brings some new development conflating the conflicts. Last week, the former NBA players Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom announced their intentions to identify as transgender in order to play in the WNBA. (It’s highly unlikely they’ll be allowed in the league.) During a game, Cunningham received a hard foul; the other player, the Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington, was ejected and subsequently posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” to social media. The implication, presumably, was that Carrington, who is Black, was more heavily penalized because of the perception that Cunningham, and by extension her image and outspokenness, needs to be protected.

With the overall success of the league at stake, being dragged into the political fray may be a steep price to pay for visibility. Still, the players don’t seem ready to shut up and dribble. “I think it’s really important that we don’t lose something that’s a foundational truth in our league, to the growth,” Jonquel Jones, who plays center for the New York Liberty, told me during All-Star weekend. “There’s enough space where we can grow as a league but still continue to have our integrity and continue to operate in a certain type of way. I feel like we’re losing that a little bit.”

[Read: A brief exchange that shows the enormous difference between Trump and Obama]

Competitive friction is one thing—but all of the WNBA’s players, regardless of who they are and what they believe, are now being publicly harassed. Before the All-Star Game, members of the players’ union executive and justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion committees met with league officials to express their concerns about the escalation in abuse. Yet the players are, in many ways, subject to political dynamics outside their control. “We’ve experienced a lot of great changes, but the perspective I have, it really weighs heavily on—and I want to say this in a way that isn’t taken the wrong way—this isn’t a problem that was created by the players,” WNBA Players Association President Nneka Ogwumike told me. “So looking to us to always fix it is not the only way.”

The question now is how the league can cool the rhetoric used around it. Clark, for example, has criticized the racism and misogyny that her fame has brought upon the WNBA, but that has done little to slow it down. When she was asked about the pregame demonstrations supporting Cunningham after a recent game against Minnesota, she opted for a generic, noncommittal answer. “I think it’s for leagues and the governing bodies to work with their athletes to find solutions, but our focus is on basketball,” she said. Perhaps she shouldn’t have to be more forceful—but soon enough, she may not have a choice.

Meanwhile, Cunningham has taken a different approach. Detractors call her “MAGA Barbie,” a nickname she’s disavowed, although, at the very least, she’s played just enough footsie with MAGA to enrich her own personal brand. Nevertheless, she seems to recognize that things have gotten out of control: “I’m going to let people just do the speaking for themselves, but for me, I want to get back to basketball,” she said in early August.

But how exactly can the league pivot back to basketball, especially during a time when outrage is so easily stoked? Last Wednesday, a task force of WNBA-team presidents and general managers met to discuss trans-athlete inclusion, as well as the abuse that many of their players have received. In a statement released after the meeting, the league denounced the outside criticism as “bad-faith efforts” that were meant to “demean or marginalize others.” The meeting didn’t result in any new eligibility guidelines regarding trans players, and it showed that the league is on the defensive—which won’t cut it.

The WNBA doesn’t get the luxury of being conveniently neutral the way other leagues do, not when its Black and queer players remain easy targets. Yet while all of this has been going on, excellent basketball is still happening. The league hasn’t imploded. Clark and Cunningham are able to play without causing riots. Nobody’s taken the bait regarding White and Freedom’s trollish provocations.

Perhaps the best thing the WNBA can do is stay firm in its own identity, even if a few brushfires get started in the process. A more visible commissioner with consistent messaging certainly could help. But all of this stems from the players feeling the freedom to express themselves—and, in turn, feeling confident in their capacity to navigate any criticism. In a way, the fuss around Clark and Cunningham shows that giving in to the social-media comments section isn’t the answer. The league needs to be who it is, and take whatever comes with it.

How many words does it take to trigger MAGA world? Three, it turns out.

When Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia said at a rally on Sunday that President Trump wants to “travel with Natalie”—implying an untoward relationship between the 80-year-old grandfather and his 35-year-old special assistant, Natalie Harp—the outrage from Trump allies was as loud as it was predictable: Megyn Kelly, Newt Gingrich, and Laura Ingraham, among others, accused Ossoff of misogyny, despite having previously defended Trump’s own sexist comments. (The word hypocrisy feels inadequate here.)

But as this debate over propriety unfolds, a dedicated swath of the Democratic base is delighted. Since Trump’s reelection, these voters have been hankering to see their leaders show, well, a little more fight. So far, most of that fight seems to have come from midterm candidates on the far left, who often target the Democratic Party itself or the so-called establishment. To hear Ossoff, a more moderate Democrat in a reddish-purple state, direct a sharp—albeit petty—jab directly at the president thrilled such voters.

Some, in fact, found it almost cathartic. “Someone finally said something,” a 52-year-old woman named Rebecca, who attended Ossoff’s Atlanta rally, told me, sounding delighted. Bring on the “smoke,” Aaron Whitely, the chair of the Democratic Party of Chatham County, in Georgia, told me. “The younger folks are looking for it. The older folks are loving it.”

Ossoff appears to know this. It’s why viral clips of the senator, who is running for reelection, seem to pop up every few weeks like zinnias in summer. It’s also why you can’t have a conversation about the 2028 presidential race without mentioning his name. But just because the base loves the smoke doesn’t mean every other Georgia voter will.

Throughout Ossoff’s reelection campaign, Democratic talking heads have credited the senator for succinctly calling out the Trump administration’s alleged self-dealing. His speech at the Center Stage Theater in Atlanta on Sunday afternoon contained his usual anti-corruption message: “They made you pay more for everything and took us to war on lies and spent most of last year trying to cover up for the world’s most famous pedophile,” he told the crowd, “while the crook president and his crook family raked in billions.”

But this time, about 10 minutes into the speech, Ossoff threw in the comment that lit up social media and group chats. “The president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks,” he said. “See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

[Read: Five theories of the Jon Ossoff moment]

The rowdy crowd laughed and groaned. Ossoff’s speeches are typically so dense with current-affairs references that only the most plugged-in rally-goers fully understand them. In those few lines alone, the senator nodded to the ongoing Iran war, to viral footage of Trump appearing to nap in public, to the controversial gift of a plane that Trump was forced to abandon because of security concerns, and, ultimately, to Trump’s intense closeness with Harp, the aide whose obsession with the president reportedly alarmed the Secret Service. Attendees understood him immediately. “He didn’t have to make any reference to their relationship; it’s very well known,” Rebecca, who declined to share her last name for fear of being targeted by the administration, said. “It’s in the public consciousness.”

People who have scrolled Facebook or tuned in to MS NOW during the past two years—and plenty of engaged Democrats of a certain age have done both, obsessively—are quite familiar with Harp. In 2024, reporting from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan identified her as Trump’s closest aide, one who keeps the president updated on positive press coverage and social-media buzz and who once gushed to Trump in a letter, “You are all that matters to me.” This week, CNN reported that Harp had once hunkered down in the trunk of an SUV to avoid being separated from the president. Another report revealed that Harp had worked in the White House for more than a year without an active security clearance.

It’s obvious that Ossoff’s comment about Harp found its target in the West Wing, because, as that awful saying goes, a hit dog really does tend to holler. “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted. When the CNN reporter Kristen Holmes asked Trump about Ossoff’s remark, the White House Rapid Response X account called her a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession” and said that one day, her children would be “sickened and embarrassed” by her. Soon, it was as though a private memo had gone out—and perhaps one did—to MAGA talking heads instructing them to frame Ossoff’s words as a misogynistic smear on a woman simply doing her job. “I feel bad for your staff if this is what you think of women,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida wrote on X. “Donald Trump has done more to elevate women in politics than any other President,” CNN’s Scott Jennings, who might be auditioning to replace Karoline Leavitt as White House press secretary, offered on X.

Some Democrats were irked with Ossoff too. The comments about Natalie “distracted and detracted from the power” of his otherwise effective message, the former Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod wrote on X. On the whole, “Ossoff has gone after Trump in a tough, fair, and pointed way,” Axelrod told me on a phone call yesterday. “This just seemed a little unnecessary and a bit gratuitous.”

Axelrod’s response was dismissed by the voters and local party leaders I spoke with as too sensitive. They pointed out that Ossoff had made only a light reference to Harp—one that a listener could interpret as they pleased. He didn’t actually accuse them of having an affair! Even if he had, those Democrats said, isn’t it time for party leaders to take a break from the high road? When I read Axelrod’s quote over the phone to Wanda Townes, the chair of the Democrats of Camden County, in Georgia, she was instantly annoyed. “That softness is the reason that Trump is in office. Stop being soft,” she told me. (“There’s no doubt it was chum in the water” for people “who feel like Trump has pushed Democrats around,” Axelrod said when I asked for his response.)

Earlier this summer, I wrote about the Democrats’ frustration that their party leaders still haven’t seemed to match their voters’ rage. “We’re still pissed that we lost the election in 2024—and we’re pissed at them for not doing a better job of standing up to the Republicans and to Trump,” Susan Polakoff Shaw, a leader of an Ohio grassroots Democratic group, told me then. It makes sense that she loved Ossoff’s comment this week about Harp. “If nothing else, Ossoff shed light on who this young woman is, what her job is, and the twisted relationship the two of them have,” she texted me. “I mean, who writes love letters to an 80 year old!??”

[Read: The Democratic base is angry ]

Pissed is certainly the operative word. And Ossoff has been successful lately because he sounds about as ticked off as voters are and channels that anger into clippable sound bites for social media. California Governor Gavin Newsom similarly attempts to provoke Trump in an aggressive, Trumpian style. But from Ossoff, who cuts a more wholesome figure and doesn’t imitate the president, the attacks are more surprising—and therefore perhaps more effective. Videos of the senator that have gone viral this year include Ossoff referring to Trump as a “failed president and a national disgrace” and using the phrases “Mar-a-Lago mafia” and “the Epstein class” to describe the president’s allies. Last month, Ossoff repeatedly asked Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, who had won the 2020 presidential election and called it “humiliating” when Clayton would not answer.

This kind of assertiveness is refreshing to Democrats, the party members I spoke with said. “Older white ladies, older Black ladies—they’re loving it,” Whitely said. Townes described her ideal future for the Democrats: “We need more Ossoffs; we need more Jasmine Crocketts,” she said, referring to the Texas representative whose own MAGA jabs have gone viral.

There is, of course, a downside to jabbing in politics: Not every voter relishes the melee. Crockett, to use Townes’s example, lost a primary for Senate in Texas this year, at least in part because even the Democrats who loved her pugnacity did not believe that she would be able to persuade independent and moderate Texans to vote for a Democrat. Similarly, success for Ossoff will be measured not by how much he delights his party’s most loyal supporters but by how many Georgians he can win over in November.

Madison Hahamy contributed research to this report.

You are reading this story only because the White House didn’t want you to.

I’ll explain. This past Sunday, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia—who has become quite good at delivering viral campaign sound bites, slickly filmed by multiple cameras—unleashed a blistering indictment of President Trump’s leadership. Ossoff, a former documentary filmmaker who is generating 2028 buzz, denounced Trump’s handling of the Iran war this way: “While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

It was a pithy and well-structured attack, but not so different from the broadsides delivered daily by Democrats on the campaign trail or on MS NOW. But one new word stood out: Natalie.

The line got a knowing laugh from a handful of observers in the room, and it electrified a subset of political obsessives on social media, who took to their favorite platforms and group chats with some version of “Oh, he went there!” or “I can’t believe he did that!” But although Ossoff’s aside resonated with the junkies, the majority of Americans likely had no idea who this Natalie woman was, and might never have given it another thought.

But then the West Wing lost its mind. And Trump did too. Their pushback was so overwhelming, so obviously coordinated, so ugly and personal that it became a story. The White House inadvertently created news, as well as a permission structure for even the most cautious, fact-based media organizations to take on the topic. Which is why the name Natalie Harp is now everywhere.

In Trump’s second term, his White House is populated by true believers. And no one believes more truly than Harp, whose devotion to Trump is unparalleled. A cancer survivor who credits the president with saving her life, the 35-year-old aide seems firmly glued to his side, an adoring smile stretched across her face. Harp has become an Oval Office gatekeeper, a ubiquitous travel companion, and one of only a few people with the keys to the president’s social-media account. She’s become one of the most unlikely powerful people in the administration—often seen in public but rarely heard from—and her presence has turned into a curiosity. Although she got some mentions in the press as well as in a new, best-selling book about Trump, Harp largely stayed out of the headlines even as she became the subject of Washington gossip and some West Wing grumbling.

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

But things changed because of a Turkish catering truck. The Washington Post reported last week that Harp was one of a handful of aides chosen to join Trump when he was furtively whisked off Air Force One at the Ankara airport earlier this summer because of Secret Service concerns about a threat from Iran. The questions were immediate: Why did this young aide, whose official responsibilities remain murky at best, hide with Trump in the truck as the president secretly boarded a different aircraft, even as the secretary of state and the secretary of the Treasury were left on board what became, in essence, a decoy plane? Just who is she, and what does she actually do? That chatter is likely what prompted Ossoff to name-drop Natalie. But it was the White House that pushed the story into the national discourse.

This White House rarely does things subtly—just look at all of the gold in the Oval Office or the maps depicting Canada as the 51st state. And when it comes to pushing back against a story aides don’t like, the two options are usually a) scorched earth or b) total obliteration. But even by that over-the-top standard, the outsize reaction was eyebrow-raising. Beyond some winking posts and passing mentions on cable-news shows, the story really wasn’t going anywhere until White House Communications Director Steven Cheung unleashed a flamethrower of a post on Monday morning, writing, in part, “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country.” Just a few minutes later, the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle chimed in with “Jon Ossoff is a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama. Nobody gives a shit what this lightweight loser says.”

Well then! Suddenly, the story had life. A few hours later, the press pool was invited into the Oval Office for a photo op as Trump honored a heroic California lifeguard. The president prides himself on his accessibility to the media and took a few questions. Kristen Holmes of CNN asked, “Jon Ossoff said that you’d rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp and build the ballroom than do your job as president. What is your response?” Trump responded with his standard, 1980s-vintage insult about Ossoff—he called him “Pee-wee Herman”—and then, well, he proved the senator’s point by launching into a several-hundred-word defense of the ballroom. Later, he shushed Holmes as she tried to ask another question by snapping, “You’re a loud, boisterous person. You’re fake news. Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet.”

A short time later, the official White House Rapid Response X account went a step further, posting that Holmes was an “embarrassment to her alleged profession” and then, in a deeply personal attack, declaring, “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive.” The ugliness of the comment drew immediate pushback from CNN and other journalists, who defended Holmes.

Meanwhile, White House aides and Trump allies began an all-out shielding of Harp. One of the president’s sons defended her, as did a Cabinet member and a congresswoman. With some prodding from the White House, a whole bunch of conservative media members and MAGA influencers joined them, I was told by one of the people who’d received a nudge. (Ossoff, for his part, told MS NOW yesterday that Harp was fair game because “these White House staffers are adults, public officials paid by the taxpayer with immense power in positions of public trust.”)

If the goal was to shut down talk about Harp, it backfired spectacularly. Suddenly, media outlets that had ignored her felt the need to write about her. Questions about her security clearance came up, along with this one: When was the last time First Lady Melania Trump was seen in public anyway? (July 19, at the World Cup final.) And as more stories were written, West Wing aides got angrier, taking their cues from a furious president, two outside allies and a senior staffer told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to have that ire turned their way. “It’s rare to see them this worked up about anything,” one of the outside allies told me.

That furor, in a way, underlines Harp’s importance in Trump’s world. She is the president’s constant companion on Marine One, at Mar-a-Lago, and at summits across the world, those familiar with her position told me. They added that the president has described her to them as “my Natalie.” She’s also been nicknamed the “human printer” because she totes around a portable printer so she can, at any point, dash out a paper copy (Trump’s preferred form in which to read things) of a poll or a news story. She has learned his cadence—and unorthodox capitalizations—well enough to draft social-media posts for him to approve. She trawls social media for material that the president can use in his feeds, including posts that have led to trouble, such as one depicting the Obamas as apes. Some aides have quietly grumbled to those I spoke with that Harp is too inexperienced to have such unfettered access to the president.

Each item she prints, whether a positive poll of dubious origin or an attack on a political foe, reinforces Trump’s worldview. In Regime Change, a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump is depicted explaining to people that Harp is the only aide who loves him as much as his family does. Haberman now says that Harp is Trump’s “human binkie.” Tales of Harp’s commitment to Trump are legion: She rode in the trunk of an SUV to accompany him to court. She sprinted across a golf course in Scotland so he wouldn’t be out of her sight. She left notes for the president that documented her intense devotion. And so on.

Ingle, the White House spokesperson, perhaps unsurprisingly reacted strongly when I asked for a comment about the matter, sending me a statement that read: “The media should get back to reporting real news and stop regurgitating Trump-Deranged liberal talking points.” And there is no expectation that, despite the whirlwind week, Harp’s role will change; a senior official told me that Harp was “upset by the unfair attention” but would not allow it to deter her from her duties. But those in the West Wing are bracing for more scrutiny. And, it just so happens, Melania Trump chose today to make an appearance in public.

“Good afternoon, I heard you missed me,” she told a Rose Garden crowd gathered for a foster-care initiative. “Here I am.”

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Cory Mills’s reelection campaign was in trouble before it even began. Washington, D.C., police investigated the Florida representative early last year after a woman alleged that he’d assaulted her; later in 2025, a different woman was granted a restraining order against him. Neither woman was his wife. Mills, who has denied any wrongdoing, was never charged with anything, and the woman who alleged that he’d assaulted her walked back her claim after it became public. Still, questions lingered. Then, in February, Donald Trump endorsed him anyway, calling him an “America First Patriot and Tremendous Champion” of his district.

Not everyone in Florida’s Republican establishment felt the same. Governor Ron DeSantis declined to back him, and Representatives Anna Paulina Luna and Mike Haridopolos threw their support behind his opponent. A House ethics probe is ongoing. On Tuesday, Mills lost his primary election—and despite never having rescinded his endorsement, Trump is now trying to back away from the congressman retroactively. “I told Congressman Cory Mills of Florida, a friend of mine, to get out of the Race, but he wouldn’t listen,” he posted on Truth Social yesterday morning. Mills’s opponent, Ryan Elijah—who already won the primary—now has Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement!”

What does a presidential endorsement mean for a Republican facing a primary election in 2026? If not enduring loyalty from the White House, then at least a reliable boost in the polls. The candidates that Trump supports still tend to win big; about 96 percent of the politicians he tapped this year (more than 300 of them) won their primary, according to Ballotpedia—an impressive ratio. Trump clearly enjoys the perception that his endorsement makes or breaks a candidate. “If they don’t get the endorsement, they don’t win,” he said in 2021.

For many voters, particularly in the MAGA camp, perceived loyalty to Trump remains a deciding factor. (Just ask Bill Cassidy.) But not every bet Trump makes pays off. An endorsement has never been an outright guarantee of victory, and the rare exceptions illuminate some truths about Trump and the GOP. Two of the president’s other picks lost their primary race on Tuesday: Megan Degenfelder, the head of Wyoming’s Department of Education, who was running for the state’s governorship, and the former Commerce Department adviser Catalina Lauf, who was up for an open House seat in southwest Florida. By CNN’s count, that makes 10 Trump-endorsed candidates who have so far lost their primary this year.

No single, unifying theory can explain these races. Sometimes, the timing makes a difference. When Trump endorsed Degenfelder as Wyoming’s best choice for the governorship, back in January, the state’s education chief hadn’t even entered the race. Once she did, the nod gave her campaign an early lead—an advantage she held on prediction markets for about seven months, despite being outraised and outspent by her main opponent in the GOP primary. In the end, she couldn’t sustain it. Lauf got her endorsement from Trump last week, almost a full year into her campaign, and well after mail-in voting had already begun. Her primary was always more of a toss-up than Degenfelder’s, but Trump’s endorsement may have arrived too late to make a difference.

The president also cares more about some races than he does about others. In Indiana, he was able to use his endorsement power to punish those who had opposed his agenda. Trump vowed that Republican state senators who were up for reelection would lose their race if they rejected a gerrymandering plan he backed—and in May, after a concerted effort and successful fundraising from the MAGA base, most of those politicians did indeed lose their primary. Compare that with what he gave Lauf: not much more than a one-off Truth Social post.

Not every race is a blanket referendum on Trump’s endorsement power; the particulars always matter. The Republican strategist Doug Heye told me that “when the voters go in the voting booth, the word Trump doesn’t appear. It’s those candidates.” Mike Lindell, the Trump-endorsed MyPillow founder and MAGA stalwart, lost his bid for the Minnesota governorship earlier this month. He’d been leading in the polls, despite the fact that he was obviously unqualified—and that the state’s GOP leadership had declined to endorse him, suggesting that he’d be an “easy target” for Democrats. On Election Day, though, he lost to the experienced state House speaker Lisa Demuth. His adjacency to Trump couldn’t get him over the line.

As much as Trump likes the idea that he alone can propel a candidate to victory, he also seems to try to skew the odds in his favor. As NPR points out, the president has lately been backing more incumbents than he did during the 2018 midterms (75 percent of his choices this year have been sitting politicians), which suggests a greater aversion to risk. He also tends to make endorsements much earlier than he used to, getting involved from the outset and attempting to deter competition. Recent history is full of examples of races where Trump’s endorsement did make a big difference: The Ohio Senate seat that ultimately went to J. D. Vance in 2022 was fiercely contested until the president made his pick. Often, though, the president is simply playing the odds, betting on the candidate he thinks has the best chance.

That’s exactly what happened in Texas earlier this year. Ahead of the GOP primary for John Cornyn’s Senate seat, Trump was widely expected to endorse the incumbent. As my colleague Elaine Godfrey noted at the time, the senator tried to rename a highway after Trump in an effort to secure his support. But the president went with a competitor, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’d been ahead in the polls despite being impeached a few years prior. Back in 2022, in the lead-up to Missouri’s Senate primary, Trump went with a more unusual strategy. He wrote on social media that he’d decided to endorse “ERIC”—but didn’t specify which of the three candidates named Eric he actually supported. Was it a gaffe, or a sly acknowledgment that he didn’t want to pick among them?

Trump has been more involved in primaries than his predecessors were, setting a new expectation for how active presidents should be in those races. Many of his endorsements have been a boon for his favored candidates. But not every election is about Donald Trump.

Related:

• Trump might already be a lame duck.
• David A. Graham on the price of Trump’s primary wins

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Tom Nichols: Donald Trump effectively just told Iran to get a nuclear weapon.
• Another big difference between liberals and conservatives
• Ukraine planned to swarm Moscow airports with AI-guided drones.

Today’s News

1. The FBI searched the Washington, D.C., home of former Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell and seized his electronic devices over the weekend, according to a person familiar with the matter. The actions were part of an investigation into sexual-misconduct allegations against Swalwell, who has previously denied them.
2. Canadian officials resumed trade talks with the United States ahead of a Saturday deadline that could trigger 50 percent tariffs on about $20 billion in Canadian exports. President Trump suspended the planned tariffs on Tuesday, saying that the two countries had reached a deal that still needed to be finalized.
3. The USS Abraham Lincoln and its crew of about 5,000 people began its journey home to San Diego from the Middle East after a nine-month deployment that largely focused on supporting U.S. operations against Iran. The USS George Washington has arrived in the region to take its place.

Evening Read

The Color Recession May Be Permanent

By Amogh Dimri

When Bob Buckter, a 79-year-old housepainter who also goes by “Dr. Color,” began his career, in the 1970s, the job was a lot more fun. Acid-tripping hippies in his hometown of San Francisco wanted “wild-ass color combinations” for their facades, he told me. Armed with mustard-yellow, lime-green, and vermilion paint, Buckter happily transformed drab Victorian and Edwardian homes into vivid eye candy.

Today, almost no one seems to be looking to the hues of jelly beans for inspiration for their home—or car or couch or fridge or practically anything else.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• President Trump has a pet-project docket at the national parks.
• Jonathan Chait: The “resistance” won.
• Another pot of paint thrown in the public’s face
• Radio Atlantic: Secrets of a Jeopardy champion
• Are you sure you want a car with a giant touch screen?
• Kelsey Ables on the new history wars

Culture Break

Take a look. Alan Taylor compiled recent images of animals released back into their natural habitat.

Read. In 2023, Dan Brooks recommended nine books that will actually make you laugh.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Normally, when a primary candidate finishes with 10.5 percent of the vote, it is a clear signal of their irrelevance.

James Fishback finished third in Tuesday’s Florida Republican gubernatorial primary, and at no point in the race did it seem like he ever had a chance. In fact, at no point in his broader career has the 31-year-old, who is known for his racist slurs and unabashed bigotry, achieved anything of note. The high-school-debate nonprofit he founded was hit with allegations that he had sexually groomed a 17-year-old employee. A hedge fund where he’d once worked said that it had planned on firing him before he resigned, and accused him of claiming a job title that had never existed at the firm. He founded his own investment firm but left after the board decided to shut down the funds he managed. Fishback told me that he had left the firm to run for governor. He claims to have been an adviser to DOGE—but former senior DOGE officials have denied it.

However, Fishback is defiantly proud of his showing, despite losing the primary to Representative Byron Donalds and also finishing well behind Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins. “I would much rather have gotten 10 percent and done all of this and really moved the needle in political discourse,” he told me today, “than have gotten 24 percent like Jay Collins did and have nothing to show for it.”

Despite his penchant for spectacular, serial failure, Fishback matters because he managed to figure out at least one thing: how to capture attention from the youthful right. Heading into Election Night, this was the one area where Fishback appeared to excel. A February poll from the University of North Florida found Fishback to be the leading candidate among GOP primary voters under 35, with 31 percent supporting him. By July, that number was up to 51 percent, according to a Change Research poll paid for by the conservative nonprofit Freedom Project USA. His candidacy was, in some respects, a test run for what might work with the next generation of Republican voters. What seems to be working is unrepentant bigotry.

[Read: Young Republican activists are turning against Trump]

Fishback’s appeal to younger voters can be explained by a few other things: He is relatively young. He ran a rage-bait campaign that met young people where they are, maintaining a heavy digital presence with posts and appearances on the livestreams of prominent influencers. He spoke with sympathy of the economic concerns of downwardly mobile youth. He did all of this while regularly tossing off casual racism and anti-Semitism.

During the campaign, he referred to Byron Donalds, who is Black, as By’rone and called him a “slave” to donor and corporate interests. When a Black man questioned Fishback about the grooming allegations against him, the Florida politician said that the man should be “lynched.” When I reached out to him earlier today, he doubled down: “I think anyone should be executed” for making those kinds of “false allegations,” he said. When I pressed him on why he’d specifically said “lynched” instead of “executed,” he trailed off before claiming that he might have actually gained votes for saying this. He has made not-so-subtle overtures to Groypers—slang for fans of the white-supremacist internet personality Nick Fuentes—by reportedly claiming that he rebuffed a PAC that offered him $500,000 under the condition that he rebuke Fuentes. “I hung up the phone, because I will never disavow patriotic Americans,” he told a crowd. He has used the term goyslop, anti-Semitic internet slang suggesting that there’s a Jewish conspiracy to harm the Gentile masses by feeding them junk food.

Fishback contests the “anti-Semitic” label. “I’ve condemned anti-Semitism repeatedly. It has no place in our society. Neither does the hatred of Christians,” he said when I questioned him about his use of goyslop and his praise of Groypers as “insightful” and “patriotic.” Fishback also pushed back against most of the ways he’s been described in the media. He said that he has “never claimed to be a DOGE adviser” even though he posted on X last year that he has “advised DOGE.” Fishback has maintained that the sexual-misconduct allegations are “completely false,” and he reiterated this to me, saying that no court ever found him guilty.

If you’re not prone to anti-Semitism and don’t enjoy far-right politics, it’s tempting to see Fishback as an aberration. When poll-tracking websites observed that Fishback seemed to be dominating campus precincts in Florida on Tuesday, several pundits were quick to point out that, in many cases, winning meant accruing only dozens of votes, because few students had returned to campuses from summer break. “FSU has 46,184 students. Twenty-eight people voted in this precinct. Fishback got 25,” wrote the conservative communications strategist Erica Knight. “He didn’t capture the youth vote. He captured a group chat.”

But the signs of a shift to the hard right among young Republican voters have been well documented. The New York Young Republicans Club’s Nazi tendencies are well known. A Yale poll from this past spring found that younger voters are more anti-Semitic than older generations.  And a Manhattan Institute poll from December found that 25 percent of Republicans under the age of 50 openly express anti-Semitic views. “I do see the youth right turning the dial up on misogyny, anti-Semitism, and racism—even as the youth right is racially and ethnically diverse,” Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a historian who has written about American campus conservatism, told me when I asked her about Fishback. She suspects that the “online populism and anti-establishment politics” that Fishback espouses are here to stay.

[Read: ‘Looksmaxxing’ reveals the depth of the crisis facing young men]

In my own coverage of the right, I’ve observed a steady uptick in the far-right drift of young conservatives. At large right-wing events, young conservatives have consistently espoused a deeply nativist strain of politics, and expressed their fandom of Fuentes and his politics. Even young right-wingers who don’t like Fuentes have told me that they’ve witnessed the growing influence of his politics or that they agree with his views and simply see him as an imperfect vessel. Young Republican staffers on Capitol Hill are increasingly open to his far-right, Groyper style of politics.   

Fishback was able to show that the energy Fuentes and other young far-right figures online have tapped into isn’t just an internet or a conservative-staffer phenomenon. It’s an ideology that someone savvier and more skilled than Fishback might well leverage to achieve greater real-world success at some point in the near future.

Silicon Valley has long had its own dialect. Venture capitalists are always talking about the value of being “high agency” and making “orthogonal bets.” But lately, tech vernacular has taken a peculiar turn—people have started describing themselves as if they were chatbots. If you misspeak, maybe you’re “hallucinating.” Don’t know the answer to a question? That’s because it’s not in your “training data.” Feeling forgetful? Perhaps you have a case of “context rot,” a phrase that refers to the degradation of a bot’s responses over a long conversation. “I’ve been telling my wife I have context rot for months,” Conor Bronsdon, the host of an AI-focused podcast, told me.  

Where I live, in San Francisco, such comparisons are inescapable. “I’ve described myself as high temperature,” a friend recently told me; in AI-speak, this means he is prone to randomness. AI experts now talk about updating their “weights” when they learn something new and training on “synthetic data” when going over internal thoughts. “Humans have a huge base model trained over billions of years of evolution,” one software engineer wrote on a popular tech forum. “It’s impressive how quickly we learn, but it’s arguably comparable to fine tuning.”

[Read: Machine unlearning]

Such speech easily comes off as unsettling, if not aggressively bleak: Why describe beautiful, tender life in detached, algorithmic terms? At the same time, language is a fossil record of previous technological revolutions, and if this current transformation is anything like previous ones, some of this new slang may well stick around. AI experts have repeatedly cautioned that anthropomorphism, or the tendency to attribute human qualities to nonhuman objects such as chatbots, can be misleading. But now the reverse is occurring in everyday speech—a sort of modelmorphism, wherein people describe themselves as if they were large language models.

The comparisons really took off a few years ago, after a group of AI researchers argued that language models are “stochastic parrots” that link together language based on statistical patterns without possessing any understanding of meaning. Dissenters retorted that humans are also “stochastic parrots.” As one software engineer riffed, “Humans are basically a sophisticated Markov chain. They are very good at pattern matching, but have no understanding of anything.”

Language has historically evolved alongside technology. Expressions such as running out of steam and cog in the machine, for instance, were adopted into common speech after the Industrial Revolution as shorthand for the human condition. AI metaphors are simply figures of speech, Anna Ivanova, a cognitive scientist at Georgia Tech, told me: When someone says, “My gears are turning,” they don’t literally mean that there are gears or gearlike things in their brain that are actually moving; in much the same way, when people say that they have “context rot,” they don’t mean that they literally have a transformer-based AI model running in their brain.

The difference between earlier technologies and AI systems is that artificial neural networks are loosely inspired by the brain itself. Philosophers such as Raphaël Millière and Cameron Buckner have argued that LLMs could serve as potential models of certain aspects of human cognition. In the 2010s, scientists found parallels between how image-recognition neural networks and the human brain process visual information. There may also be “parallels” between how LLMs and humans represent language, Ivanova said. The MIT neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko and others have identified a type of “language network” inside the human brain, which Fedorenko believes is “very similar in many ways to early LLMs.” These comparisons are contested, but they are receiving research attention: “The recent success of LLMs is rooted in the same computational principles that govern biological brains,” scientists wrote in a position paper last week.  

“Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it,” the philosopher John Searle wrote in the 1980s. “I am told that some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult.” In the 19th and 20th centuries, people turned to telegraphs and telephone switchboards as models for the mind: “The brain is no more than a kind of central telephonic exchange,” the philosopher Henri Bergson once wrote. By the ’60s, some scholars were arguing that the mind functions like a computer. “Cognitive scientists often say that the mind is the software of the brain,” the philosopher Ned Block explained in 1990. Today, LLMs make for an alluring comparison.

For now, these analogies are being made mostly by those working in the AI industry. But over time, some of the metaphors might start to seep into everyday language. If you look at the growth of railroads, “a whole range of language change began to happen” as people started to use the new transportation system, Naomi Baron, a linguist and professor emerita at American University, told me. Some of the AI slang isn’t introducing new phrases into English so much as transforming the meaning of existing speech. Take the word hallucinating, which is used to describe AI models confabulating. People are “taking a term created for what the human mind is capable of doing, projecting it onto AI, and then projecting it back onto humans with an AI flavoring,” Baron explained.

None of this is to say every AI-inflected term should get a free pass. I’ve started chastising my friends when I catch them unironically referring to themselves as chatbots. Using LLM metaphors to describe our minds could lead to a reductive and dehumanizing understanding of human cognition. Earlier this year, when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was pressed on AI’s natural-resource demands, he said that “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”

Still, the people in tech I spoke with told me that using LLM-speak to describe their own mind helps them reflect on their cognitive habits. Language subsumes new idioms over time and masks their origins. People today say “My plans have been derailed” without much thought to the phrase’s railroad origins. Perhaps my great-grandchildren will grow up saying things such as “I have context rot” and “That’s not in my training data” without pausing to remember that those phrases first applied to machines.

President Trump gets what he wants, when he wants it, from the National Park Service. One and a half million dollars to replace brick pavers in Lafayette Park, across from the White House? Contracting officials at the NPS Washington headquarters found the money within five days last month. A $170,000 request to remove a fence around the Hains Point golf course, preparing the ground for a new “championship-quality” layout? Six days this summer. And the more–than–$5 million project to gild equine statues along the nearby Memorial Bridge? That took 12 days.

The rapid-approval system is specific to projects Trump wants, thanks to a reorganization at the Interior Department led by Secretary Doug Burgum. Trump issued an executive order to make the District of Columbia “safe and beautiful,” justifying the creation of an NPS docket of “White House priorities” that is handled separately from other park projects and is prioritized both for funding and contracting resources, according to documents I obtained and interviews with five current or former NPS officials. Meanwhile, many other projects throughout the nationwide system of parks are languishing.

The list I received includes Trump’s well-known projects on the National Mall and the refurbishment of the White House, along with several lesser-known efforts: The hiring and equipping of 450 new U.S. Park Police officers in the Washington region, and more than $12.8 million—some of which came from the Department of Justice—for police equipment, including new Flock license-plate-reading cameras, radios, tasers, laptops, body cameras, and body armor. Internal documentation for park projects typically includes “Consequences of Failure to Act,” which scores the urgency based on health and safety measures. When work began in January on fountains near the White House, officials described the need for the work in this way: “Such failure will disappoint visitors, as well as residents and employees of the White House.”

The new project-funding system was described by a contracting officer during an April meeting with NPS officials. “There’s three different lists: White House priorities, high priorities, and low priorities,” the official told colleagues on the virtual call, according to a written account that was provided to me. Those on the call, who do not work on White House priorities, were advised that projects on the low-priority list likely would not be completed, so they should attempt to get their needs moved to the high-priority list.  White House priorities, meanwhile, were nonnegotiable. As Washington is beautified at great expense, officials told me, vital needs at dozens of national parks are not being filled.

I obtained copies of the high- and low-priority lists that circulated this summer inside the NPS. As of mid-July, that low-priority list included 1,573 projects, including many that officials told me would have been funded under prior administrations. Projects that have not yet been funded from that list, according to a separate national-park database, include requests for new wildlife-resistant dumpsters in Bryce Canyon National Park, snow machines to provide fire remediation in Alaska’s remote Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve, and an archaeological survey of recently acquired land at Camp Nelson National Monument, a major Union supply base during the Civil War that trained Black soldiers.

The Interior Department dismissed the concerns over this approach when I reached out for comment and told me that the low-priority list I had obtained included items that had been “mis-prioritized and were corrected.” Interior leaders have also boasted about new funding streams, including revenue from more expensive national-park passes for foreign visitors. “In any year, the National Park Service must prioritize projects most in need,” the press office said in an unsigned statement. “The National Park Service has not only been focused on beautifying the district for the 250th celebrations in our nation’s capital but has also been working on many deferred maintenance projects throughout the country.”

[Read: ‘Rush project at request of POTUS’]

But those working in the parks say that it is not just money holding these projects back. It’s also a lack of staff, after rounds of workforce reductions, who are able to handle contracts, a problem that the contracting official on the April call referred to as “capacity.” When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency targeted the department last year, many contracting managers at the NPS took buyouts, and many of those who remained found themselves reassigned within the larger department. The NPS had 179 full-time administrative officers in June, a 21 percent decrease from the month Trump took office, according to Office of Management and Budget records. The result is a growing backlog of unfinished projects in far-flung parks, as government employees try to jury-rig temporary fixes, the officials said. “There is very little acquisition support,” one of the NPS employees told me. “This is going to get exponentially worse.”

Spencer Morgan, the site superintendent of the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site, in Buffalo, New York, told me that his facility is still waiting on this fiscal year’s promised operating-support funding, which needs to arrive before the end of September, or he will have to institute major cuts. He has been told that an additional stream of routine-maintenance funding he was expecting will never arrive. Because the site is run in conjunction with a local nonprofit that pays Morgan’s salary, he said that he was comfortable speaking openly about the struggles his staff faces as funding and resources are instead directed to the White House list. “I am not beholden to hold my tongue at this point,” he said.

Inside the NPS, Morgan said, the staff has been decimated. “I started in this role in April of 2024, and the number of people who are not there since I started is gut-wrenching,” he told me. “There is a whole loss of institutional knowledge.”

Other NPS employees requested anonymity to speak with me because they fear retaliation from their supervisors. One employee told me that their park can’t hire employees to fill vacant slots but also can’t contract out work, because it’s difficult to get on the high-priority list. “We keep being told to be creative,” this employee said. “And we are running into dead ends every time we try to pivot.”

[Read: Let them eat gold]

This reduction in spending showed up in budgetary documents I reported on in June. The documents showed a decrease of $854 million, or 68 percent, in spending on projects in park regions outside the Washington area in the first eight and a half months of fiscal year 2026, compared with the full prior fiscal year. During that same period, spending around Washington increased by about $100 million, not counting about $310 million in donations that the NPS received from allies of the president, most of which is going to fund a new White House ballroom.

The frustration over these shifting priorities has been a frequent topic of conversation among park superintendents, who are struggling to maintain services this summer. At another NPS meeting in early July, an employee presented a list of 133 projects, totaling $35.8 million, that they said were ready to go but lacked contracting staff to make them happen, according to a person on the call.

It’s not clear whether all of the projects on the White House priority list will receive funding this fiscal year. The list also includes a $25 million plan to replace the Eagle One helicopter used by the U.S. Park Police (and at least once by Burgum when he was running late for an Air Force One flight), $475,000 to clean and repaint the White House exterior, drones “to support law enforcement” in the Washington region, a new park-police substation for Rock Creek Park, and streetlight replacement along the National Mall. The priority list also includes improvements for parts of the country where Trump is known to travel. The document shows a $77,300 expense to clear brush and plant new trees around Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, as part of a much larger effort to plant 3,000 trees and provide a “security benefit” to the facility.

And Trump continues to add more projects to the list—or expand projects already on it. Take, for example, the brick pavers in Lafayette Park outside the White House gates. In May, Trump said that the park renovation would be funded by “a contribution that I made,” even though internal documentation shows public funds being used. After the Fourth of July celebrations, the NPS agreed to pay an additional $1.5 million to replace more of the brick pavers in that park. Then, in August, the president told reporters in the Oval Office that he was still deliberating on whether the brick pavers were good enough.

“Now we have a big decision to make,” he said. “Do we take the pavers that are red—you know, the red-brick pavers—and do we change them into a granite, to gray granite? They’re beautiful, but they’re not the original. So we’re gonna have to make that decision.” The National Park Service, no doubt, will be ready to follow the president’s lead if he pivots.

For several months, something discomfiting has been creeping onto San Francisco’s lampposts, bulletin boards, and restaurant windows: more and more signs, for run clubs and a July 4 parade and tacos, all of which are obviously entirely produced by generative AI.

This bothers me terribly. (Friends have called it a fixation.) But why does it bother me? A ChatGPT-generated poster for a garage sale seems legitimately dispiriting compared with a handwritten flyer, or even a haphazardly formatted Word document. What about a bodega using an AI-generated image of a hamburger instead of a random piece of clip art pulled from the internet? It’s not like most of these flyers were ever going to be high art anyway. Still, the issue nags at me constantly, whenever I pass one of these synthetic images plastered over the real world.

Last month, in part looking for a reprieve from the AI onslaught, I went to what promised to be an imaginative new exhibition of Henri Matisse and other fauvists’ work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The show was centered on Femme au chapeau (“Woman With a Hat”), a foundational painting in modern art. Matisse depicted his wife with colors that were totally detached from reality: teal patches of skin, an orange-and-green neck, a phantasmagoric hat. In 1905, when the painting debuted, this was scandalous: “A pot of paint has just been thrown in the public’s face,” one critic declared.

Walking through the galleries, I was taken aback by what struck me as a scandal of its own. The museum, in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, had used generative AI to augment visitors’ experience—in ways I found, at least initially, rather off-putting.

Part of the exhibition’s conceit was to re-create Femme au chapeau’s historical context. The museum commissioned a local artist to develop wallpaper that could have been in the palace where the painting debuted and worked with an animator to create a visual projection of the walls of Gertrude and Leo Stein’s living room, where the canvas hung for many years. I loved all of that. But an AI-generated animation of the streets of Paris circa 1905, with shadowy figures walking to the gallery and a dirigible floating above, felt more like a gimmick than historical immersion. The museumgoers around me, however, seemed awed.

Then, near the gallery’s exit, came the second AI experiment: a row of screens, each showing an expanded Matisse painting made with Veo, Google’s video-generation model. A painting of a seashore became a 3-D rendering in fauvist style; a portrait of a girl with green eyes was reimagined to place the girl in Matisse’s studio.

The fauvists painted the world with flat slabs of highly saturated hues, delighting in color for the sake of color rather than realism. Using AI to move beyond the frame and give the images “realistic” depth seemed antithetical to their original vision. I recalled childhood memories of being entranced by various Matisse works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, marveling at his Dance and The Piano Lesson. The AI videos alienated me rather than inviting me in.

Yet maybe I’m just a grump? I am at least open to the possibility that my response is not so different from that of the pot-of-paint conservatives in the early 1900s. So I reached out to the museum’s chief curator, Janet Bishop, to learn more about these AI experiments—how they’d been conceived, what effect they had on the show, and what role AI broadly has to play in traditional art museums. We met at the galleries, where Bishop told me that curators wanted to “give a sense of what early-20th-century Parisians or visitors to the Grand Palais would have experienced in approaching this imposing exhibition hall and then going into the sprawling 1905 salon.” The AI installations resulted from extensive human research and oversight. I came away, to my surprise, not unconvinced of these experiments’ utility—though still a bit skeptical of their tastefulness.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Matteo Wong: How did your collaboration with Google Arts & Culture come about?

Janet Bishop: It was early in 2026. We were fairly far along in terms of planning for the exhibition. We had secured all the artwork by that point and were in the process of developing a couple of the ideas that we had for how to situate visitors, such as by re-creating the gallery where Matisse’s painting made its debut at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris and the successive scandal.

Our original idea for the opening gallery, where we wanted to bring our visitors back in time to turn-of-the-century Paris, was to project a lantern slide that is an image of the Grand Palais. Then our museum director, Christopher Bedford, and head of education and community engagement, Gamynne Guillotte, got back from a really inspiring trip to the Google Arts & Culture offices in London and proposed the idea of setting still images in motion.

Through our curatorial research, we had postcards, still images, interior shots, exterior shots, and other material to work with. So in what became weekly meetings with Google Arts & Culture and project team members, we reviewed the images we had and developed this film.

Wong: What does having the animated film provide to a visitor that projecting the lantern slide and displaying postcards wouldn’t?

Bishop: We have some archival displays throughout the exhibition. But what we’re programming for in this entrance gallery is to give people a sense of what it felt like to approach the Salon d’Automne in a more immersive way.

Wong: Someone could look at this AI animation and its imperfections and perhaps find it kitsch. Were you worried about that at all?

Bishop: “AI-generated” makes it sound like AI did it by itself or that this was quick and easy. The project was very labor-intensive, and everything is historically accurate. One moment that was especially exciting to me was when we were looking at a draft, and there were all of these figures that were moving away from the building, and I said to the Google engineer, “Oh my gosh, it would be so amazing if we could have them walk toward the building,” and she said, “No problem.”

Wong: Is it harder now to get people to come here and engage with the art, especially younger folks? Or is this something that would have been just as helpful decades ago?

Bishop: You were talking about your experience as a child going to MoMA, and now we recognize that people have a lot of things that command their attention. One of the challenges in getting people to art museums is just pulling people away from their screens.

People are used to experiencing content in a really wide variety of ways. I know that it is important to our director that, given our proximity to Silicon Valley, we pay attention to developing technology and how it might enhance visitor experience. I loved the idea of the original lantern slide as a projection, but I can say that I think this film does something different in terms of giving our visitors a sense of the energy of Paris around the turn of the last century.

Wong: I’d also like to talk about the other AI collaboration with Google in the exhibition, near the exit. Can you tell me the origins of this one?

Bishop: The thought for what we called the “Experiment” was to enter into the world of a select number of Matisse paintings and imagine the context for those paintings beyond what is represented on the canvas. For instance, with The Girl With Green Eyes, we don’t know who the sitter was, but we do know that it was made in Matisse’s studio. So in the Experiment, you see the figure get up and walk across the studio. The details of the studio are consistent with his actual studio, which—we know what it looks like. And she looks out the window across the Seine.

Wong: Clearly a lot of visitors are enjoying this, but I wanted to ask why you thought it was important to help people imagine the world beyond the frame. My initial reaction, if I’m being honest, was that there’s a frame for a reason, and that the paintings aren’t naturalistic for a reason. What was so shocking 100 years ago was that these were, like, just flat planes of color, and that the colors were the focus. To turn that into a three-dimensional seascape seems almost wrong or off-putting.

Bishop: It’s part of our interest in engaging with different sorts of learners, people of different ages. They’ve been very popular with kids, and these images of paintings might encourage people to look more closely at the actual paintings. We’re experimenting, and I think experimentation is very definitely what we embraced with these features within the exhibition.

Wong: You mentioned earlier that you were excited by changing the historical AI video to have visitors walking toward the palace, rather than away from it. Was there a similar moment of excitement here?

Bishop: The big surprises came for me in the first piece, where in terms of the ability to conjure an experience, the use of AI as a tool made us more effective in achieving our goals than would have been possible without it. So that was really actually quite exciting. I think the Experiment is a little bit less integral to the story but an engaging feature that I’m happy that we pursued.

Donald Trump celebrated the defeat of one of his first impeachment nemeses—retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vindman, who lost the Democratic Senate primary in Florida on Tuesday—in typical form. “SleazeBag Vindman loses tonight to a Radical Left Lunatic. How cool is that???” Trump exulted on Truth Social.

Vindman served as a witness in Trump’s first impeachment. Whatever currency this once gave him with Democratic voters has long since expired. In this, he is not unique. Democrats such as Dan Goldman, George Conway, and Tom Steyer, all of whom pushed for or played prominent roles in Trump’s first impeachment, have discovered in primaries this year that this credential means little to their party’s voters. Diana DeGette, a House manager during Trump’s second impeachment trial, and Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who battled insurrectionists, have also lost primaries.

The rout of the Democratic Party’s impeachment stars has been interpreted, generally, as a sign of the end of resistance politics. “The string of losses for resistance candidates from the first Trump term illustrates a new era for the restive Democratic base, where vocal opposition to the president through official channels and public remonstrations no longer guarantees success,” Politico reports.

[David Frum: The ‘resistance’ is over]

The “resistance,” once a dominant mode of Democratic politics during the first Trump administration, was never cool. But in the second term, the “resistance liberal” has fallen out of favor so completely that the phrase has become a derisive punch line across the political spectrum. Which is a shame, because the resistance was, broadly speaking, correct. It was right about Trump’s nature, and also right about how to defeat him.

Resistance politics depicted Trump as a crook and an aspiring authoritarian with a troubling fondness for dictators, especially Vladimir Putin. He was a con man, unfit for office, and had broken faith with the best traditions of American politics. The Robert Mueller investigation found, among other things, that Putin had dangled a lucrative no-risk deal to Trump during the 2016 campaign. The Senate Intelligence Committee found, in a bipartisan report, that the campaign’s links to Russia posed a “grave counterintelligence threat.” The first impeachment charged Trump with having “placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security.”

These much-derided processes turned out to supply an accurate, almost banal, description of how Trump has operated during his second term. His corruption and abuses of power have been let loose at a scale that was previously only imagined. Trump has all but severed America’s system of alliances, mocked and bullied Ukraine’s president, and showered praise upon Kim Jong Un.

What discredited resistance politics in liberal eyes is that it was closely associated with institutional procedures that were deemed to have ultimately failed to restrain Trump. Mueller’s investigation ended anticlimactically. Neither impeachment drew enough Republican support to remove Trump from office. Somewhat similarly, conservatives have sometimes claimed that the Russia investigation and first impeachment helped Trump politically by drawing to his side Republicans who resented the overreach.

One Republican who doesn’t seem to believe either of these arguments is Trump. The president has worked hard to ensure that no such humiliations recur during his second term, by stacking the Justice Department with loyalists, firing inspectors general en masse, purging the armed forces of “woke” officers, and generally eliminating any potential source of independence within the federal government.

Trump himself does not seem to think that the investigations that were avidly followed by resistance liberals did nothing to restrain his actions during his first term, or that they helped him shore up partisan support. And the absence of any such processes in his second term has not made Republicans in Congress feel freer to criticize the president. To the contrary, their fealty is more absolute than ever.

Even in the first term, resistance Democrats were dogged by their populist left-wing critics. This split first appeared in the spring of 2017, when Jon Ossoff ran to fill a special election for a House seat in Georgia, in a previously Republican district. Ossoff’s campaign, which attacked Trump’s corruption but declined to articulate a sharp progressive alternative, fell short.

Supporters of Bernie Sanders blamed Ossoff, and the party, for not taking up the Sanders message. “Ossoff’s campaign has failed to support or address any progressive issues. He embraces a centrist—not progressive—message, that both political parties waste taxpayer money, rather than politicians being corrupt by outside money,” the progressive writer Michael Sainato complained in the Observer. Winnie Wong, a co-founder of People for Bernie, told The Guardian of Ossoff, “He didn’t have a core progressive message and that ultimately is why he lost.” (Ossoff won a Senate race in 2020 and is leading the polls again this year, making slashing attacks on Trump’s personal corruption while steering clear of controversial left-wing policy stances.)

[Jonathan Chait: Liberals are now fighting a two-front war]

Like the Republican critics of resistance politics, progressive ones depicted it as substituting legal tactics for electoral victories. Yet the resistance was never limited to cheering on Mueller or hoping to persuade Republicans to convict the president of high crimes and misdemeanors. Resistance themes inspired the Democrats’ political message during Trump’s first term. And that message landed. Democrats retook the House in the 2018 midterms, despite a hot economy, and then defeated Trump’s reelection effort. Joe Biden, a link to a bygone era of civility and bipartisanship, ran in 2020 on a message of restoring the soul of America. He won.

Once in office, however, Biden ceded his domestic agenda to progressives who believed in Sanders’s vision of transformational change. They believed that only overturning the neoliberal order, handing control of domestic policy to neo-Brandeisians and climate hawks, and giving unions almost every policy they demanded would allow Democrats to regain the trust of working-class voters. This theory, not the resistance, failed. Biden’s support collapsed within his first year, and Kamala Harris’s half-hearted efforts to distance herself from her unpopular boss were too little, too late.

Trump’s return to office has left Democrats casting about for a stronger and more effective response. Perhaps the most obvious solution is the one they hit upon when Trump was first elected nearly a decade ago: Rather than promise to change everything about American politics, focus relentlessly on Trump’s unfitness. The crisis in the United States is not the general corruption of both parties; it is the specific corruption of Trump and his enablers. And the solution is simply to replace the corrupt, racist authoritarian with a governing party that respects the rule of law, equality, and basic decency.

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Anyone can get distracted now and then, and say things out loud he or she probably shouldn’t say. Perhaps an excited friend lets on about a surprise party, or a co-worker dishes up some unseemly office gossip. Or, if you’re the president of the United States, you might reveal some numbers about an adversary’s nuclear arsenal and then admit that those weapons, even a relatively small number of them, are pretty darn useful.

Donald Trump made this impromptu foray into nuclear-deterrence issues yesterday when he was inspecting the destruction he’s inflicted on the White House East Wing. A reporter asked whether he was again exchanging letters with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a reference to the president’s earlier epistolary bromance with Pyongyang’s dictator. “I can’t tell you that,” Trump responded. “But I get along with him. And you know what? The fact that I get along with him, that’s a good thing. Not a bad thing.”

It’s not always a “good thing” to “get along with” a murderous autocrat who runs a country that is functionally a prison camp, especially one with a nuclear arsenal. The size of that arsenal is a tightly held secret in Pyongyang, but it is not inconsequential: Experts working from open sources have made various guesses, usually in the range of roughly 60 thermonuclear weapons.

[Tom Nichols: Trump will make South Korea pay for his Iran humiliation]

Trump, however, blurted out an exact tally. “He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons,” the president said. That’s a pretty specific number; the intelligence community almost never issues such precise figures, instead offering ranges of plausible guesses. Trump may be making it up out of nowhere, or perhaps talking about some subset of Pyongyang’s arsenal, as the arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis suggested, or he’s garbling something he saw in a classified setting and didn’t understand. In the end, Lewis mused in a series of posts on social media, “Trump is trying to tell us a secret he heard, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it means.”

Clearly, Trump has been getting briefed on developments about the North Korean nuclear inventory. And yet, he seems strangely unconcerned. The stockpile might be small, but it is in the hands of a dangerous regime. Even at its current estimated size, the Hermit Kingdom’s arsenal can kill tens of millions of people in Asia; soon enough, the North Koreans may be able to reach the United States with nuclear-armed long-range missiles.

The president, however, seemed more concerned with blaming other chief executives for the situation, and he assured everyone that all was well.

Should have never allowed it to happen. They should have never allowed it. If I were president, I wouldn’t have allowed it. But he’s got ’em. I get along with him very well. I can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon. And I know Kim Jong Un very well, and he’s gonna be fine. As long as we have a smart president, he’s going to be fine. If we have a dumb president, then he’s probably not gonna be so fine.

“Smart” and “dumb” need a bit of unpacking here, of course. When Trump says “smart,” he means me, and when he says “dumb” he means not me. What he seems to be implying is that although North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is very dangerous, he has no intention of messing with either the bombs or the regime and that future presidents would be fools to do otherwise.

Trump never says how he would have stopped North Korea’s nuclear program, and despite his current equanimity about North Korea’s nukes, he has emphasized that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, because … well, his reasoning on this double standard isn’t clear. Is it because the North Koreans—fighting alongside Russia in the middle of Europe, sharing missile technology with U.S. enemies, and running giant crypto scams—are somehow less dangerous a regime than Iran? Or perhaps he thinks the Iranian ayatollahs aren’t as reasonable as the North Korean leader—a man whose regime routinely threatens to turn Western cities into a “sea of fire”? Or—more likely—Trump feels he can live with Kim’s nuclear ambitions because the two of them took nice walks during a meeting that sated Trump’s ego with lots of saluting and pageantry.

Whatever Trump’s feelings, his bumbled comments (and needless fumbling of likely classified information) nonetheless revealed how much Trump regards nuclear weapons as a sign of status, and sent a message of crystalline clarity to Iran: Nuclear deterrence, even with only a few bombs, works. Get a nuclear weapon as soon as you can if you want to be safe and treated with the kind of deference America shows to North Korea.

[Tom Nichols: Russia and America are rediscovering the limits of nuclear weapons]

Iran and North Korea are practically allies, and in all likelihood, the North Koreans have probably already said something like this to their friends in Tehran. Recall that when NATO began its 2011 intervention in Libya, officials in Pyongyang said that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi should have held on to his nuclear program, instead of bargaining it away in exchange for Western promises. Months later, Qaddafi was dragged into the street and torn to pieces by his own people. The North Koreans, according to one scholar, probably felt “alarmed, but also deeply satisfied with themselves” as they watched countries such as Iraq and Libya suffer a fate that the DPRK averted by having a nuclear shield.

And now the sitting president of the United States has affirmed North Korea’s strategic wisdom: Trump has shown the world that even a tiny nuclear arsenal deters America from taking military action, and in Trump’s case, enemies who acquire nuclear weapons will also receive fawning letters and precious visits from the most powerful man on the planet. Forgo those weapons, as the Iranians have done until now, and the result is destruction, attempts at regime change, and demands for unconditional surrender.

Build a nuclear bomb, and you’ll face sanctions and other hardships—but you won’t get stealth bombers pulverizing your country. Your regime will survive, and after everyone gets used to the idea of another nuclear-armed power in the world, you’ll get entreaties and offers for talks.

And if America has a “smart” president, you might even get a love letter or two.

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Early this year, Ukrainian officials came to President Volodymyr Zelensky with a risky new plan to end the war with Russia. It would require expanding their bombing campaign to include a set of targets and a class of weapons they had long avoided. In addition to Ukraine’s ongoing strikes against Russian military bases, oil refineries, supply lines, and logistics hubs, the officials wanted to launch waves of AI-enabled drones at Moscow’s airports, hoping to stop international carriers from flying in and out of the Russian capital, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the plan, which has not been previously reported.

Both people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive military operations. If executed, the plan would mark a terrifying milestone in the history of warfare: an attack in which swarms of autonomous drones equipped with AI guidance systems would seek out and hit their targets without a human pilot controlling their movements. Such systems have been tested by various countries in recent years, including the United States. But the legality of their use has been vigorously debated as a possible violation of the laws of war, and they have never been deployed at scale.

When officials presented the plan to Zelensky this winter, he expressed strong reservations, one of the sources said. He worried that it could be seen as “piracy” if the drones hit a civilian airliner in Moscow, especially if the strikes killed or injured passengers, airport staff, or members of the flight crew. But in his desperation to find a Russian pressure point that could restart the peace process, Zelensky allowed preparations for the strikes to continue for several months this spring and early summer, both sources said.

A spokesperson for Zelensky declined to comment. Another official in the president’s office denied the existence of a plan to launch swarms of AI-enabled drones at Moscow’s airports. “That’s total nonsense,” the official told me, asking not to be named in an article about this topic. Ukraine has long sought to force the closure of Russian airports, the official added, and its drone strikes against various targets in Russia have often achieved that goal for short periods of time. But Ukraine does not have long-range weapons that are precise and reliable enough to hit Russian airports without posing an undue risk to civilians, the official said.

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

According to Russian aviation authorities, airports across the country were forced to close 114 times during a one-month period last summer, from June 28 to July 28, usually due to the threat of Ukrainian drones. Moscow was affected by the highest number of shutdowns—at least 17 in total at its four main airports. The Russian association of travel agents reported more than 290 of these incidents nationwide in the first quarter of this year. The airport closures, which Russians refer to as a kovyor, meaning “carpet,” usually last a few hours before authorities give the all-clear and allow flights to resume. “We’ve only ever had one operation against the airports,” the official said. “Force the Russians to declare ‘carpets’ all the time.”

By the middle of spring, the plan to force a more permanent shutdown of Moscow’s airports had advanced far enough to receive a code name: M&Ms, a reference to the many small, cheap, and nearly identical drones that the mission would require. To overwhelm Russian air defenses, the operation would need to send as many as 1,000 drones a night to airports in and around Moscow, said one of the sources familiar with it.

Attacks of that size would not be far outside the norm in this conflict. Earlier this week, Russian authorities reported shooting down 791 Ukrainian drones in a single night, one of the largest attacks of the war; more than 600 of them were flying toward the Moscow region, according to the city’s mayor.

“The idea is to shut down the Moscow airspace to civilian flights for an extended period of time,” one of the sources familiar with the plan told me. Since the start of the Russian invasion, in February 2022, civilian air travel over Ukraine has been suspended. But Russian airports have mostly remained open, and millions of passengers used them this year to travel abroad. Due to Western sanctions, only a few international carriers still fly in and out of Moscow, including Turkish Airlines and Emirates, which many well-to-do Russians use to reach hubs in Istanbul and Dubai.

Forcing those carriers to stop flying to Russia would make life less comfortable for officials, oligarchs, and other wealthy loyalists of President Vladimir Putin. “People in the elites might come to Putin and say: We have a problem here,” said one of the sources familiar with the Ukrainian plan. That kind of pressure from the elites, in combination with other wartime strains on Russia’s economy and society, could force Putin to negotiate a peace deal, the source said.

Both sources told me planning for the operation was halted in July, when Zelensky abruptly fired its mastermind, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. As the architect of Ukraine’s military drone program, Fedorov had worked on the plan for most of this year, keeping it a secret even from some of his closest aides. He helped assemble a team of Ukrainian computer programmers to develop the AI guidance system, and he secured financing from Ukraine’s allies in Europe to produce the autonomous drones at scale, the two sources said.

Having served throughout the war as a crucial member of Zelensky’s team, Fedorov changed this month into a potential rival for the presidency. In a video address posted on YouTube yesterday, the former defense minister called for Ukraine to hold elections and choose a new government. Ukraine has not held presidential or parliamentary elections since 2019, because Ukrainian martial law, which has been in effect since the start of the invasion, prohibits elections in a time of war. Opinion polls taken in recent weeks show that Fedorov has grown popular enough in Ukraine since his dismissal to pose a serious challenge to Zelensky in a presidential race. “Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” Fedorov said in his speech.

The same day, the Ukrainian Parliament confirmed the nomination of a new defense minister, Yevhenii Khmara, a decorated military veteran. The vote in Parliament foreclosed Fedorov’s hopes of returning to his previous post anytime soon. It also threw into doubt the future of the operation known as M&Ms. One of the sources familiar with the plan expressed hope that the new defense minister would carry it forward. “We will try. Technically it’s possible,” the source said. “You can revive this project with a new team, but it would take, in my view, around three months.” By that time, another brutal winter of war will have arrived.

In the months before his dismissal, Fedorov pursued numerous high-tech plans to force the Russians to negotiate before the onset of winter. The Atlantic reported earlier this month that he had appealed for help from Elon Musk, and that Zelensky had asked President Trump to secure Musk’s assistance. The Ukrainians needed Musk to allow the use of Starlink, his satellite-communications network, as a navigation tool for drones to hit targets inside Russia, including Russian ballistic-missile launchers, with precision. Musk has refused to allow the use of Starlink over Russian territory. He has not replied to my messages seeking comment on the matter.

As an alternative to Starlink, the Ukrainians have rushed to develop reliable drones equipped with AI, which offer a way to get around Russia’s counter-drone defenses. Most attack drones require a pilot to guide them to their targets, through radio signals, mobile internet connections, or some other means of remote control. Russia, like most advanced military powers, uses electronic jamming to disrupt the signal between enemy drones and their pilots, forcing the weapons to crash or veer off course.

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Last summer, the Ukrainians found an ingenious way around this problem. They hid 117 drones inside five long-haul trucks and hired unwitting drivers to bring them close to Russian air bases. Once in position, the drones connected to the internet, reportedly using Russian SIM cards, and flew out of the trucks’ secret compartments. Drone pilots back in Ukraine used the internet connection to guide most of the weapons to their targets. The mission, known as Operation Spider’s Web, damaged or destroyed roughly two dozen Russian warplanes, including nuclear-capable bombers, that stood parked on the tarmac of their bases in Russia.

Ukraine’s latest plan would allow the drones to pilot themselves, using an AI-powered technique known as map matching, the two sources familiar with the plan told me. The technique involves uploading detailed maps of a drone’s intended flight path to its onboard computer, along with pictures of its targets. As the drone flies, its camera collects images of the terrain below. The onboard computer uses an AI model to compare those images with the ones stored in its memory, a bit like a person consulting a map on an unfamiliar highway. When the camera spots something that matches, or resembles, the image of the target, the drone flies into it and explodes. A human pilot does not need to confirm that the drone has found the right target before it strikes.

When this technology first appeared in Ukraine a couple of years ago, some drone manufacturers told me, they had declined to make it available to their clients in the military, because they found it too risky. One drone maker showed me an AI-targeting system with a kind of accuracy selector, which he could slide up and down on a screen. If he chose the lower setting, it would give the drone permission to attack even if its AI model is only 30 percent certain that it sees the right target. The highest setting tells the AI to reach 90 percent certainty before it decides to strike. Even that did not seem precise enough for the manufacturer, who wondered what would happen if a child on a bicycle were to enter the frame of the drone’s camera as it locked onto its target: “Who is responsible if that kid dies?”

Ukrainian officials, arms makers, and military officers have wrestled with such questions for years. Some have called for the Ukrainian Parliament or an international body such as the United Nations to develop guidelines for the use of AI targeting in warfare. No such rules exist in Ukrainian law. The U.S. and most of its allies have vague guidelines about a human needing to be “in the loop” before an AI model decides to attack. But most experts on the laws of war see such restrictions as outdated and insufficient.

Zelensky raised concerns about unintended targets being struck when it came to the plan to attack Moscow’s airports, one of the sources familiar with these conversations told me. The officials behind the plan offered work-arounds, the source said. They suggested, for example, that Ukraine would warn civilian airlines to avoid Russian airports and evacuate their planes before the swarm of Ukrainian drones arrived. “If they say to themselves, You know what, it’s getting too risky. Why even continue flying there?” the source said. “That would already have quite an impact on the Russian elites. Those are their main connections to the outside world.”