Lora Kelley | The Atlantic

An Awkward Truth About American Work

2025-05-21T08:00:00-04:00

A few years ago, a cheeky meme made the rounds on the internet—a snappy rejoinder to a question about dream jobs: “I do not dream of labor.”

The witticism, sometimes misattributed to James Baldwin, began to spread a few months into the coronavirus pandemic, as the shock of mass layoffs started to give way to broader dissatisfaction with work. Before long, an untethering from office culture, combined with the security of a tight labor market, led many workers to quit their 9-to-5 jobs. Nobody, Kim Kardashian declared, wanted to work anymore—but that wasn’t exactly true. More plausibly, the “Great Resignation” marked a shift—perhaps a permanent one—in when, where, and how people wanted to work.

Moments of cultural change present openings for cons. Early in the pandemic, the number of multi-level-marketing schemes (or MLMs) exploded online. Such enterprises invite non-salaried workers to sell goods and then also earn commissions by recruiting more salespeople; the Federal Trade Commission has over the years outlined subtle legal differences between MLMs and pyramid schemes. As millions of Americans lost or quit jobs, MLM advocates on the internet made an enticing pitch: Work as we knew it wasn’t cutting it anymore; other options were out there. Framing the chance to hawk leggings or makeup or “mentorship” as an opportunity that could yield flexible income and a sense of community, they promised a kind of life that was too good to be true.

A few years ago, the journalist Bridget Read started looking into the outfits behind such appeals. Initially, by her own account, Read couldn’t really understand how MLMs worked. But some big questions stuck with her—among them, why exactly they were legal. She lays out what she’s learned in her engaging new book, Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, which exposes some awkward truths about the nature of American work. Weaving in sympathetic portrayals of women who lost money and friends after working with MLM schemes, she recasts them as victims of a multigenerational swindle.

[Read: LuLaRich reveals a hole in the American economy]

MLM participants surely drive their friends and family crazy with their hard sells; they are also, in Read’s telling, marks. She cites a 2011 analysis that found that 99 percent of participants in one MLM lost money, and she exhaustively catalogs the predations of the sector writ large. Read writes with scorn about the industry’s early architects, who made outrageous health claims and touted their companies’ “profits pyramid,” and about right-wing opportunists who expanded MLMs’ power and reach—especially the founders of Amway, a massive company with connections to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. But she never disparages her sources, whose stories of drained bank accounts and dashed dreams she portrays only with empathy. She threads the tale of a pseudonymous Mary Kay seller, a military veteran struggling to make ends meet, throughout the book. The woman loses more than $75,000. These vignettes keep the human toll of the schemes top of mind.

Read’s indictment of MLM outfits is predictable enough, but her research also reveals how much corporate America has in common with this shady economy, which has long been dismissed as a kooky sideshow. Corporations have borrowed from the methods of MLM companies—hiring large, contingent workforces; pushing employees to think like entrepreneurs; and lobbying hard for friendlier regulations. MLMs turn out to be more closely aligned with the center of corporate life (and political power) than many people might like to think.

A key innovation of the industry was to rely on a fleet of temporary workers. During the Great Depression, when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration was expanding the social safety net and implementing muscular work protections, an organization then called the National Association of Direct Selling Companies agitated for a carve-out that would designate salespeople as “independent contractors” rather than employees. Historically, such contractors had occupied a tiny niche, but in a time of expanding regulation, classifying workers in this way became a handy loophole. This category later set the template for tech start-ups, including Uber and DoorDash, that challenged traditional full-time employers. As of July 2023, about 4 percent of the American workforce had temporary jobs as their main or only role, and an additional 7.4 percent of Americans were independent contractors, according to a survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That percentage may seem small, but it encompasses millions of workers and outnumbers many sectors of employment; other surveys find that tens of millions of Americans do such work for supplemental income too. As Read writes, “The part-time, low-paid work that direct selling pioneered” now “defines our current labor market rather than covers its gaps.”

The low quality of many legitimate jobs has long provided cover for shadier schemes. Squint, and an MLM racket doesn’t look all that different from the work of an influencer or telemarketer or door-to-door-salesman. If a major indictment of MLMs is that many of their contractors don’t seem to actually sell much at all, well—the same could be said of many other jobs today. And the gig economy isn’t walled off from the rest: Many Americans still have full-time, union-eligible jobs, but a lot of them dip into temporary or part-time work to make ends meet. The Mary Kay annual meeting features a special cheering moment for teachers who sell makeup on the side.

[Read: When multilevel marketing met Gen Z]

Many of the messages that MLMs adopt to reel in workers rely on a central contradiction, criticizing the corporate grind while extolling the free market. Amway recruiters, for one, have explicitly used anti-establishment language in their pitch: When you’re working a 9-to-5, you are in the “rut,” but when you break free and set your own hours, you are living “the dream.” In fact, you are often forsaking security for precarity—or worse. As Read and others have written, the opportunity quickly becomes a disaster for all but a very lucky few. MLMs and their boosters deny that the companies are pyramid-shaped—Amway, according to one hagiographer, is shaped more like “a flower.” But each, in Read’s telling, also takes the form of a fun-house mirror.

Throughout the history of MLMs, contractions and collapses in the broader economy have been good for them. Direct selling was hailed as “counter-cyclical” and “depression-proof” during the 1930s, Read notes. In the 1970s, widespread white-collar layoffs and looming stagflation presented another opening. “In the direct selling business hard times are good times,” the founders of Amway wrote in a 1974 edition of their corporate magazine. In more recent decades, the sector’s free-market ethos dovetailed with new cultural moods: MLMs both shaped and reinforced the values of the greed-is-good 1980s, as well as the self-help-obsessed aughts and the “grindset” ethos that followed the 2008 recession. Seizing opportunities to grow businesses is, of course, what companies have always done. But this industry seized them to advance practices that flirted with, and sometimes qualified as, outright fraud.

Read ably explains why these businesses have appealed to generations of underpaid and insecure American workers, and she argues that it’s not greed or stupidity that drives people (especially women juggling family responsibilities) into the arms of the schemes but the decline of middle-class stability. MLM opportunities promise what American jobs used to: security, freedom, dignity. Those promises have consistently failed to materialize. But the fact that so many are desperate to get in on the schemes each year is not a credit to the broader job market. A person well served by the economy is unlikely to salivate at the prospect of making extra cash by pushing lipsticks on the side. Today, many workers at more conventional jobs face the havoc of just-in-time scheduling and inconsistent shifts; these employees seek out more flexible arrangements in spite of their downsides.

In Read’s telling, MLMs are a toxin masquerading as a cure. Among their many ruses is their insistence on a message of empowerment: that participants are “bosses” or “owners.” What makes this easier to pull off is the fact that MLM outfits don’t have the kind of central, visible leader the public associates with many higher-profile schemes—no Sam Bankman-Fried or Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes. Read names the leaders who benefit, and in doing so, she delivers a damning portrait of those who take advantage—and she humanizes the people they rip off. Investigating an industry notorious for doublespeak and euphemism, she calls things what they are.

The DOGE Plan That Endangers U.S. Revenue

2025-04-01T18:35:00-04:00

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Tax season is always a busy time at the IRS. This year has been especially eventful. In February, the agency was told to start firing up to 7,000 workers—before judges ordered that such firings needed to be paused. Some 5,000 more workers have signed up for the government’s deferred-resignation offer, and various departments have been slashed or targeted for cuts. About 50 IT workers were put on administrative leave Friday. Overall, The Washington Post reported, the agency will end May with about 18 percent fewer employees than it had at the start of this year. And people familiar with the matter told The New York Times that the Trump administration’s ultimate goal is to cut the agency’s staffing by half.

The stated purpose of these firings, and of DOGE’s other cuts across federal agencies, is to save money. But the cuts may actually translate to a meaningful dip in taxpayer revenue. The IRS is effectively the government’s accounts-receivable department. Staffing cuts set up the IRS to lose money in two ways, Natasha Sarin, a Yale law professor and former Treasury counselor, told me: A reduced IRS has less capacity to collect and enforce taxation, and taxpayers who think they won’t be audited may be more inclined to start cheating. Sarin expects that the agency’s losses will far outweigh the $140 billion DOGE says it has saved (DOGE’s self-reported data is opaque and has been full of errors). She and her colleagues at the Budget Lab at Yale forecast that the plan to cut half of the agency’s workforce alone would conservatively translate to $395 billion in lost revenue in the next decade, and possibly up to $2 trillion.

Other expectations have been bleak, too—and have considered factors beyond reductions in force. Amid the chaos of this filing season, the agency is on track to see a more than 10 percent drop in tax receipts by the tax-filing deadline this month, according to predictions from Treasury and IRS officials who spoke anonymously with The Washington Post last month; if that happens, it would translate into more than $500 billion in lost revenue this year. Such changes could be because some people are skirting their duties and hoping that an understaffed IRS will lead to less enforcement, but other people’s filing may just happen later this year. Victims of natural disasters, including the 2025 California wildfires, have received deadline extensions—and, in general, corporate tax receipts may decline if businesses are facing challenges. (A spokesperson for the Treasury department denied that a $500 billion tax-revenue drop is plausible, adding that “baseless claims from those who have promoted wasteful spending for years at the IRS should be dismissed out right.” Representatives of DOGE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Recent history provides a case study in what happens when the IRS is diminished: In the 2010s, the IRS’s budget was depleted over several years. The number of agents declined by a third from 2010 to 2017, and the audit rate went down by about 40 percent (and down by about 50 percent for people earning more than $1 million) in that period. The number of agency investigations of people who didn’t file returns went from 2.4 million in 2011 to 362,000 in 2017. The total amount of money lost through weak enforcement during those years amounted to some $95 billion, ProPublica estimated.

One theme of the late 2010s and early 2020s was general sloppiness in filing, especially from corporations, Michael Kaercher, the deputy director of the NYU Tax Law Center and a former IRS lawyer, told me. That period, Sarin argued, demonstrates the “direct relationship” between reduced capacity for enforcement and loss of revenue—though the cuts then were much smaller and more spread out than DOGE’s current plan. Of course, even if the public starts to get the impression that there won’t be consequences for evasion, many will continue to do their civic duty and make good on their obligations. But if the IRS doesn’t have enough staff to help people with the (often confusing) process of filing, some people may just make mistakes, too, and start accidentally underpaying.

The exact amount the IRS may lose in the years to come will depend on a few factors, including which functions and staff end up ultimately being cut. Since January, the IRS has lost nearly 40 percent of the staff of the Global High Wealth unit, which focuses on audits of very wealthy individuals. Those audits have an extremely high return on investment, Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, reminded me—a single audit can lead to millions or tens of millions in revenue. In the 2010s, she noted, the “tax gap”—the amount of taxes that were owed but not paid—rose, which was primarily attributable to high earners underreporting their income. In 2021, the top 1 percent of earners were responsible for more than a third of unpaid taxes, which cost the government nearly $200 billion.

As some of the agency’s functions are diminishing, it is being tasked with a new role. The IRS, which holds information about every taxpayer, is close to signing an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in which it would share addresses and names about migrants. Sending sensitive taxpayer information to authorities would cut against a fairly core aspect of the IRS’s culture, Kaercher told me: The agency has always taken data privacy very seriously. For decades, the IRS has told undocumented people that they need to pay taxes, and that it would not share information with immigration authorities. Now that the agency is reneging on that promise, the changes may deter immigrants from paying taxes, leading to further dips in the revenue the agency can collect.

In recent decades, Williamson noted, even through lean IRS eras, what’s called “tax morale,” or a willingness to pay taxes, has remained high in the United States. “Americans are traditionally good taxpayers by international standards,” she said. But trust in the system is predictive of compliance. As that trust diminishes, compliance may go with it too.

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Voters are heading to the polls in the contentious Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Elon Musk has handed out $1 million checks to two people who signed a petition against judicial activism.
Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey is delivering a speech on the Senate floor that has gone on for more than 23 hours.
The U.S. Health and Human Services Department started issuing notices of dismissal to employees; layoffs are expected to total approximately 10,000 people.

Evening Read

Illustration by Anna Kliewer

The New Marriage of Unequals

By Stephanie H. Murray

Once upon a time, it was fairly common for highly educated men in the United States to marry less-educated women. But beginning in the mid-20th century, as more women started to attend college, marriages seemed to move in a more egalitarian direction, at least in one respect: A greater number of men and women started partnering up with their educational equals. That trend, however, appears to have stalled and even reversed in recent years. Gaps in educational experience among heterosexual couples are growing again. And this time? It’s women who are “marrying down.”

Read the full article.

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Illustration by Liz Hart. Source: Alamy.

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— Lora

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The Risk of Financing Your Errands

2025-03-28T19:10:00-04:00

Americans are feeling anxious about the economy. Amid all the questions—is a recession looming? Will President Trump’s tariffs cause a spike in prices?—one not-so-reassuring prospect exists: You can pay for sandwiches in installments.

Last week, the financial-services start-up Klarna announced that it was partnering with the delivery company DoorDash to allow customers to pay off orders in four parts. Deferred-payment services, once used largely to finance major purchases such as couches or Pelotons, have been expanding into the realm of the day-to-day in recent years, as the companies grow (and in Klarna’s case, eye an IPO). On an internet attuned to #recessionindicators, the memes began to flow, as many noted the absurdity of financing, say, a burrito. (Klarna clarified in a blog post that the feature could be used for purchases of at least $35, and a spokesperson told me that the partnership was intended more for purchasing bigger-ticket items such as home goods and electronics than for use on food delivery. DoorDash has emphasized the same.)

Some 14 percent of Americans had used buy-now, pay-later services (known as BNPL), such as Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay, in the year leading up to fall 2023, one estimate found. The services effectively offer interest-free loans and do not generally require a credit check. In 2019, people bought about $2 billion worth of goods with the apps, and in 2023, it was closer to $34 billion. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that the bulk of BNPL transactions in 2022 were for purchases of less than $100. These arrangements, tempting as they are, come with risks: They run parallel to the traditional credit-card system but lack all of the same protections.

Credit cards are required to follow the Truth in Lending Act, which provides consumer protections such as notices on rate increases and the right to dispute charges—and they allow users to build up their credit when they pay off batches of purchases at once. The idea of paying off a single deferred-payment loan may, on its face, seem simpler than opening a credit card. But what often ends up happening with these services, Ed deHaan, a professor at Stanford’s business school, told me, is that users (many of them young people) who are not in the habit of paying off debt take out several of these loans at once. Keeping track of eight or 10 smaller loans with different deadlines can quickly become overwhelming.

On average, deHaan has found, people using BNPL services are more likely to overdraft their bank account than nonusers (suggesting they are spending beyond their means). And another study found that using the services causes spending to rise by $60 a week. Many regular users of the services are those who have already racked up credit-card debt, and turn to deferred payments as a last resort. As Mac Schwerin wrote in The Atlantic in 2023, “What companies like Klarna once characterized as paradigm-busting behavior—young people rejecting stodgy banks in favor of more freeing forms of finance—now looks like the crest of yet another credit cycle, a familiar note in the motif of American consumption.” Klarna told me that it has “a number of safeguards to ensure responsible lending and consumer protection,” and in a follow-up statement noted that it welcomes “proportionate” rules, arguing that “the CFPB’s previous attempts at this were a step in the right direction but they ultimately failed to recognise what BNPL is.”

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has only just started to scrutinize the young BNPL sector. Last May, the agency announced that deferred-payment programs would be treated like credit cards in some key ways: Borrowers would be able to dispute charges and be more easily able to get refunds, among other protections (some but not all aspects of the Truth in Lending Act applied). Rather than issuing new regulations for the BNPL sector, the CFPB ruled that the spirit of existing credit-card laws covered the newer industry—a bold move, deHaan argued when we talked earlier this week, and one that was challenged in court. On Wednesday, a court filing suggested that the CFPB would revoke the rule. (The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Although the big BNPL lenders such as Klarna have signaled that they are open to some regulation, the U.S. lags behind Europe in its regulations on the services. The major players face public pressure to operate scrupulously, deHaan noted. The bigger risk to consumers may now come from the smaller, less popular loan companies that can crop up and take advantage of reduced scrutiny.

The deferred-payments sector seems, on paper, like just the kind of issue the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was set up to handle: The agency, which was formed after the 2008 financial crisis, has the mandate to monitor new financial products that may confuse consumers. But in recent months, the agency has been gutted. In February, the entire 1,700-person workforce was sent home (Elon Musk posted “CFPB RIP” on X), and the agency was ordered to pause rule making. A judge is set to decide soon whether firings of probationary workers are legal; in the meantime, some workers have been brought back. And earlier today, another judge issued an injunction to temporarily stop the Trump administration from dismantling the agency, saying that the court “can and must act” to preserve it.

The judge’s ruling brings the agency back from the brink for now. The BNPL industry is one that, in another political era, the CFPB may have been eager to address. And if the agency survives, it still could. But the chaos—and the fact that the administration has attacked it—may ultimately render it less equipped to protect the public.

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More than 150 people were killed, and more than 730 were injured, after a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar. Buildings collapsed in Thailand from the quake, killing at least 10 people in Bangkok.
During Vice President J. D. Vance’s Greenland visit, he said that the country’s people would be better off under America’s security umbrella than Denmark’s.
The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, seeking approval for President Donald Trump to deport people under the Alien Enemies Act.

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Atlantic Intelligence: Damon Beres interviews Ian Bogost about the AI-generated Studio Ghibli images that have taken the internet by storm.
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Evening Read

Warrick Page / Max

The Pitt Has Revolutionized the Medical Drama

By David Sims

Medical dramas are like the old aphorism about pizza and sex: Even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good. Since the glory days of ER faded in the late ’90s, there have been plenty of TV series of varying quality set in hospitals … I had been longing for something more meat-and-potatoes—and then along came The Pitt, Max’s hit new show starring ER’s Noah Wyle. The first season is still airing, yet it’s already without question the finest example of the genre in more than a generation.

Read the full article.

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Trump Wants Credit for That Too

2025-03-19T17:01:00-04:00

“Everyone is calling it the”—Donald Trump paused while speaking to a crowd at a rally the day before his inauguration. “I don’t want to say this,” he insisted. “It’s too braggadocious, but we’ll say it anyway—the Trump effect.” He went on to describe how the stock market was booming and bitcoin prices were surging, and then boasted about a domestic-infrastructure investment from Apple, much of which had already been planned before the November election.

In spite of his claims to the contrary, Trump has no qualms about taking credit, including for achievements that were in progress or complete before he took office. The president has taken full responsibility for negotiating a hostage swap and a cease-fire deal in the Israel-Hamas war (Trump posted on social media in mid-January that “this EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November”), not mentioning that President Joe Biden had announced some of the deal terms last year. The Trump administration said that its policies had quashed migrant border crossings; immigration data are hard to parse, especially for such a short time period, but tallies show that border crossings had already been on the decline during the Biden administration. And this week, Trump credited himself with returning two astronauts who had been stranded for months at the International Space Station; last summer, NASA announced its plan to bring them home in 2025, but Trump still claimed without evidence that Biden “was embarrassed by what happened, and he said, ‘Leave them up there.’”

Trump relied on similar framing during his campaign: Ahead of a debate with Biden last year, he posted that “low INSULIN PRICING was gotten for millions of Americans by me, and the Trump Administration, not by Crooked Joe Biden,” saying of his opponent that “all he does is try to take credit for things done by others, in this case, ME!” Shared credit would have been appropriate here: Trump did sign an executive order in his first term that capped out-of-pocket costs of insulin for some Medicare patients at $35 a month, but Biden expanded this cap to all Medicare drug programs through the Inflation Reduction Act, affecting significantly more patients. Trump enjoyed taking credit for Barack Obama–era achievements during his first term too: In 2017, for example, he claimed credit for Obama’s immigration plan and bragged about a Ford-factory investment that had been in progress since a 2015 union contract.

Politicians are storytellers, and Trump is shameless about telling only the version of the story that flatters him. The stock market is thriving under the Biden administration? That’s thanks to projections that Trump will win, he claimed last year (even though economists suggested that such gains were also linked to low unemployment, flagging inflation, and solid growth). The economy is struggling after Trump takes office? Blame the “catastrophic” situation Biden left him with (even though many economists suggest that recent stock-market downturns are due to anxiety about the effects of Trump’s trade war). Talking about the egg-price crisis in January, the White House team pilloried the Biden administration for killing sick chickens, neglecting to note that this was a tack Trump also took during his first term.

Biden struggled to communicate victories during his term, particularly those related to the economy, which left a “void” for Trump to fill, Lori Cox Han, a scholar of the presidency at Chapman University, told me. And Americans’ perception that the economy was struggling under Biden, boosted by their personal experience of inflation, affected how they voted. Whenever the White House changes hands, some projects inevitably bleed from one administration into the next. Embracing continuity between terms can be a sign that a president cares more about good policy outcomes than about bucking his predecessor: If a federal initiative is good for Americans, why not continue? But Trump is doing something different—he’s attempting to erase other presidents’ role in policy achievements entirely.

Past presidents have also tried to claim credit for a victory set in motion by the previous administration—or perhaps even to hold off the victory until they can take office. The question of whether Ronald Reagan’s aides tried to delay the release of U.S. hostages in Iran so that they could come home during the early days of his administration—with the accompanying photo opportunities—has been discussed for years. Still, Han said, unspoken rules of decorum generally prevent new presidents from claiming full credit or trashing their predecessors. This, she noted, is another norm that Trump has disregarded.

Trump has long sought to portray himself as America’s sole savior. Recall his 2016 campaign refrain: “I alone can fix it.” As my colleague Yoni Appelbaum wrote at the time, in beseeching Americans to place trust in him and only him, Trump “broke with two centuries of American political tradition, in which candidates for office—and above all, for the nation’s highest office—acknowledge their fallibility and limitations, asking for the help of their fellow Americans, and of God, to accomplish what they cannot do on their own.” Trump seems set on sending the message that he doesn’t need help—and that, implausibly, he hasn’t received any along the way.

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Today’s News

Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky held a call to discuss cease-fire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Trump suggested that America could assume control of Ukrainian power plants to protect that infrastructure.
The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged and signaled that inflation may be slightly higher than their December forecast predicted.
Turkish police arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a top political rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on allegations of corruption and terrorism.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Jake Rosenberg / Netflix.

What Impossibly Wealthy Women Do for Love and Fulfillment

By Sophie Gilbert

As With Love, Meghan went on, it started to hit a few of the classic pleasure points. A beautiful woman with a wardrobe of stealth-wealth beige separates and floral dresses? Check. A fixation, both nutritional and aesthetic, on how best to feed one’s family, down to fruit platters arranged like rainbows and jars of chia seeds and hemp hearts to sneak into pancakes? Check. A strange aside where she details what it meant for her to take her husband’s name? Ding ding ding: We’re in tradwife territory now. This is absurd, of course. Meghan isn’t a tradwife; if anything, she’s a girlboss, a savvy, mediagenic entrepreneur with a new podcast dedicated to businesswomen and a nascent retail brand. So why does she seem to be trying so hard to rebrand as one, offering up this wistful performance of femininity and old-fashioned domestic arts that feels staged—and pretty familiar?

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What Trump and Musk Want With Social Security

2025-03-14T17:00:00-04:00

The idea that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security checks is shocking, and bolsters the argument that the federal bureaucracy needs radical change to combat waste and fraud. There’s one big problem: No evidence exists that it’s true.

Despite being told by agency staff last month that this claim has no basis in fact, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have continued to use the talking point as a pretext to attack America’s highest-spending government program. Musk seems to have gotten this idea from a list of Social Security recipients who did not have a death date attached to their record. Agency employees reportedly explained to Musk’s DOGE team in February that the list of impossibly ancient individuals they found were not necessarily receiving benefits (the lack of death dates was related to an outdated system).

And yet, in his speech to Congress last week, Trump stated: “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.” He said the list includes “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149,” among other 100-plus age ranges, and that “money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now.” In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Musk discussed the existence of “20 million people who are definitely dead, marked as alive” in the Social Security database. And DOGE has dispatched 10 employees to try to find evidence of the claims that dead Americans are receiving checks, according to documents filed in court on Wednesday.

Musk and Trump have long maintained that they do not plan to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the major entitlement programs. But their repeated claims that rampant fraud exists within these entitlement systems undermine those assurances. In his Fox interview on Monday, Musk said, “Waste and fraud in entitlement spending—which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements—so that’s like the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe $600, $700 billion a year.” Some observers interpreted this confusing sentence to mean that Musk wants to cut the entitlement programs themselves. But the Trump administration quickly downplayed Musk’s comments, insisting that the federal government will continue to protect such programs and suggesting that Musk had been talking about the need to eliminate fraud in the programs, not about axing them. “What kind of a person doesn’t support eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending?” the White House asked in a press release.

The White House’s question would be a lot easier to answer if Musk, who has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” wasn’t wildly overestimating the amount of fraud in entitlement programs. Musk is claiming waste in these programs on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but a 2024 Social Security Administration report found that the agency lost closer to $70 billion total in improper payments from 2015 to 2022, which accounts for about 1 percent of Social Security payments. Leland Dudek, a mid-level civil servant elevated to temporarily lead Social Security after being put on administrative leave for sharing information with DOGE, pushed back last week on the idea that the agency is overrun with fraud and that dead people older than 100 are getting payments, ProPublica reported after obtaining a recording of a closed-door meeting. DOGE’s false claim about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us,” one of Dudek’s deputies reportedly said, but “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.” (Dudek did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.)

Some 7 million Americans rely on Social Security benefits for more than 90 percent of their income, and 54 million individuals and their dependents receive retirement payments from the agency. Even if Musk doesn’t eliminate the agency, his tinkering could still affect all of those Americans’ lives. On Wednesday, DOGE dialed back its plans to cut off much of Social Security’s phone services (a commonly used alternative to its online programs, particularly for elderly and disabled Americans), though it still plans to restrict recipients’ ability to change bank-deposit information over the phone.

In recent weeks, confusion has rippled through the Social Security workforce and the public; many people drop off forms in person, but office closures could disrupt that. According to ProPublica, several IT contracts have been cut or scaled back, and several employees reported that their tech systems are crashing every day. Thousands of jobs are being cut, including in regional field offices, and the entire Social Security staff has been offered buyouts (today is the deadline for workers to take them). Martin O’Malley, a former commissioner of the agency, has warned that the workforce reductions that DOGE is seeking at Social Security could trigger “system collapse and an interruption of benefits” within the next one to three months.

In going anywhere near Social Security—in saying the agency’s name in the same sentence as the word eliminate—Musk is venturing further than any presidential administration has in recent decades. Entitlement benefits are extremely popular, and cutting the programs has long been a nonstarter. When George W. Bush raised the idea of partially privatizing entitlements in 2005, the proposal died before it could make it to a vote in the House or Senate.

The DOGE plan to cut $1 trillion in spending while leaving entitlements, which make up the bulk of the federal budget, alone always seemed implausible. In the November Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing the DOGE initiative, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who is no longer part of DOGE) wrote that those who say “we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs” are deflecting “attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse” that “DOGE aims to address.” But until there’s clear evidence that this “magnitude” of fraud exists within Social Security, such claims enable Musk to poke at what was previously untouchable.

Related:

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Today’s News

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Democrats will support a Republican-led short-term funding bill to help avoid a government shutdown.
A federal judge ruled that probationary employees fired by 18 federal agencies must be temporarily rehired.
Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s prime minister, succeeding Justin Trudeau as the Liberals’ leader.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: The Trump administration is embracing AI. “Work is being automated, people are losing their jobs, and it’s not at all clear that any of this will make the government more efficient,” Damon Beres writes.
The Books Briefing: Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of literary work that takes on COVID, Maya Chung writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by John Gall*

I’d Had Jobs Before, but None Like This

By Graydon Carter

I stayed with my aunt the first night and reported to the railroad’s headquarters at 7 o’clock the next morning with a duffel bag of my belongings: a few pairs of shorts, jeans, a jacket, a couple of shirts, a pair of Kodiak work boots, and some Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac books, acceptable reading matter for a pseudo-sophisticate of the time. The Symington Yard was one of the largest rail yards in the world. On some days, it held 7,000 boxcars. Half that many moved in and out on a single day. Like many other young men my age, I was slim, unmuscled, and soft. In the hall where they interviewed and inspected the candidates for line work, I blanched as I looked over a large poster that showed the outline of a male body and the prices the railroad paid if you lost a part of it. As I recall, legs brought you $750 apiece. Arms were $500. A foot brought a mere $250. In Canadian dollars.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Music Box Films

Watch. The film Eephus (in select theaters) is a “slow movie” in the best possible way, David Sims writes.

Read. Novels about women’s communities tend toward utopian coexistence or ruthless backbiting. The Unworthy does something more interesting, Hillary Kelly writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Donald Trump, Tesla Salesman

2025-03-12T18:36:00-04:00

In 2023, Donald Trump posted that electric-car supporters should “ROT IN HELL.” Now he is showcasing Teslas on the White House lawn. Yesterday, the president stood with Elon Musk and oohed and ahhed at a lineup of the electric vehicles, saying that he hoped his purchase of one would help the carmaker’s stock, which had halved in value since mid-December thanks to a combination of customer backlash and general economic uncertainty. (The stock has rebounded by 7.6 percent since yesterday.)

Trump does not own shares in Tesla, as far as we know. He has said that he is supporting the carmaker because protesters are “harming a great American company,” and has suggested that people who vandalize Tesla cars or protest the company should be labeled domestic terrorists. But he also seems interested in helping his friend, the special government employee Elon Musk, maintain his status as the wealthiest man in the world. Yesterday’s White House spectacle was, my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote, “a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s stock, and certainly beneath the office of the presidency.”

If any other government official had similarly promoted a friend’s product (especially on hallowed White House grounds), they would have been in clear violation of the specific regulation restricting executive-branch employees from using their role to endorse commercial products or services, Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. But the president and the vice president are exempt from that regulation, as well as from some of the other ethics rules that govern federal officials. Norms, in this case, are the primary lever for holding the commander in chief accountable.

Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his appetite for overturning norms and pushing ethical bounds, so his latest stunt as a Tesla salesman is not altogether shocking. When Trump learned in 2016 that U.S. presidents are exempt from the conflict-of-interest rules that restrict other government officials, he seemed delighted. “The president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he told The New York Times then. “I’d assumed that you’d have to set up some type of trust or whatever.”

Despite the lack of legal restriction, modern presidents have generally moved assets into blind trusts, which are controlled by independent managers, in order to diminish any perception that they are profiting from the office (or that they are making policy decisions to boost their own investment portfolios). Trump has shuffled around his assets since taking office but in general has chosen to put his family in charge of managing them. Trump recently said that he’d transferred his shares of Truth Social into a trust controlled by his son Donald Trump Jr., a move that is “irrelevant from an ethics point of view” because the money could still flow to him, Clark told me. And with his own family controlling the trust, Trump likely knows exactly where his money is and can make decisions that would increase the value of his holdings.

Presidential conflicts of interest, or even the appearance of them, can undermine public confidence (nearly two-thirds of Americans said they believe that all or most elected officials ran for office to make money, a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found). Trump may not be directly profiting off Tesla, but the problem with him hawking cars poses the same issue as other potential conflicts of interest: What’s good for Truth Social or Trump’s meme coin or Tesla is not necessarily what’s good for the country, and Trump has so far not inspired confidence that he will prioritize the latter.

Musk, too, hasn’t assuaged concerns that he will separate his business interests from his role in the Trump administration: Musk’s corporate empire relies on government contracts. And the federal firings he is overseeing through his DOGE initiative are already reshaping agencies that regulate his companies.

After he sat in the Teslas and complimented them in front of cameras yesterday, Trump told the press that he would buy one of the vehicles and pay with a personal check. That relatively small financial commitment makes a big statement about the president and where his priorities lie: with the interests of his friend, the billionaire.

Related:

The Tesla revolt
The crypto world is already mad at Trump. (From January)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

In response to the Trump administration’s tariffs, the European Union announced that it will impose tariffs on $28 billion in U.S. exports, and Canada added 25 percent tariffs on approximately $20.7 billion worth of U.S. goods.
The Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident, remains in ICE detention after his procedural hearing. He was arrested earlier this week in an effort to deport him over his role in protests against the war in Gaza.
The Department of Education fired more than 1,300 employees yesterday, leaving the department with roughly half the workforce it had before Donald Trump took office.

Evening Read

Caroline Gutman / The New York Times / Redux

The Man Who Owned 181 Renoirs

By Susan Tallman

Of all the ways that today’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an art museum is one of the more benign, somewhere behind eradicating malaria but ahead of eradicating democracy. The art in these museums is almost always contemporary, reflecting the dearth of available old masters along with a global chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde art is socially, intellectually, and culturally important. Few of these tycoons, though, are likely to find the stakes as agonizingly high as Albert C. Barnes did.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Netflix / Everett Collection

Watch. There’s nothing else like Mo, Hannah Giorgis writes. The Palestinian American sitcom (streaming on Netflix) is the first of its kind—and takes its humor very seriously.

Read. “As much as I love the [sci-fi] genre, I always have this desire to betray it at the same time,” Bong Joon Ho, the director of Mickey 17, told David Sims in an interview.

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Why This Measles Outbreak Is Different

2025-03-04T17:13:00-05:00

In 2000, the CDC declared that measles had been eliminated from the United States. But now America is at risk of losing that status: A measles outbreak has sickened more than 150 people in Texas and New Mexico since late January. An unvaccinated school-aged child recently died from measles in Texas—the first known death from measles in America in about a decade, and the first child to die from the disease since 2003. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who covers science and health, about why vaccination is the only way to prevent the spread, and how a surge in illnesses that had previously faded from American life could reshape childhoods.

Lora Kelley: Why is measles so reliant on vaccines to prevent its spread?

Katherine J. Wu: Measles is arguably the most contagious infectious disease that scientists know about. Researchers have estimated that, in a population where there’s zero immunity to measles, one infected person is going to infect roughly 12 to 18 other people. That is extremely high. In most cases, it is a respiratory infection that’s going to cause fever, cough, and rash, but it can also restrict breathing, cause complications such as pneumonia, and be deadly.

This is a disease that requires really, really high levels of vaccination to keep it out of a community, because it’s so contagious. Researchers have estimated that you want to see vaccination rates in the 95 percent range to protect a community. If you start to dip just a bit below that threshold, like even 92 percent or 90 percent, you start to get into trouble. Lower uptake creates an opening for the virus to start spreading. And the more unvaccinated people there are, the faster the virus will spread, and the more people will get seriously sick.

Lora: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that this recent outbreak is “not unusual” and pointed to past measles outbreaks. How do you view this current outbreak relative to other times when cases spiked, such as the 2019 outbreak in New York?

Katherine: The current outbreak actually is not as big as the 2019 New York one yet. And we almost lost our elimination status for measles then. But there are ways in which I would argue that this one is worse than the 2019 outbreak. An unvaccinated kid has died. We haven’t had a reported measles death in this country in about a decade. If the situation worsens, that death might only be the first.

Lora: Could people who are vaccinated be affected by a measles outbreak?

Katherine: The MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella, generally provides immunity from measles for decades. But there are kids who are not old enough to be fully vaccinated against measles (kids get one shot at 12 to 15 months and then again at 4 to 6 years old). And it’s rare, but some people, including immunocompromised people, might not respond well to vaccination and may not be protected by it. Also, as people get further from their vaccination date, they may be more vulnerable to the disease. The more measles is around, the more vulnerable even the vaccinated population will be.

Lora: Measles hasn’t been a big issue in this country for a long time. What tools does America have to fight this disease if it resurges in a big way?

Katherine: Because this disease spreads so quickly, the main tool we’ve used to fight it is vaccination. And if people are letting that go, we’re in trouble. There are no antivirals for measles. Doctors generally just have to do what they can to manage the symptoms. Plus, health-care workers aren’t used to diagnosing or dealing with measles cases anymore, which makes it easier for outbreaks to get out of control.

Lora: How might the recent layoffs at federal agencies focused on public health and disease affect America’s ability to respond to outbreaks?

Katherine: I do worry that a lot of the public-health workforce is slowly getting hollowed out, including at the CDC. We’re going to lose our ability to prevent and stop epidemics—we saw resources that researchers rely on to track outbreaks temporarily disappear from the CDC website in January and February, for example. If people’s attitudes keep shifting away from childhood vaccination, a whole other host of diseases could creep in. In refusing the MMR vaccine, you are by definition also refusing protection against the mumps and rubella.

And RFK Jr. has made rampant speculations about the MMR vaccine being more dangerous than the disease itself, which is completely untrue. This week, he published an op-ed on the Fox News website acknowledging the importance of vaccinating against measles but also framing vaccination as a “personal” choice, and described nutrition as “a best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses.” I can promise that no multivitamin will work against measles as well as the MMR vaccine, which has been proved safe and effective at protecting people from disease. Measles, meanwhile, can kill.

Lora: What would more frequent outbreaks mean for America’s kids and their childhood?

Katherine: In the world kids live in now, when they get sick with a disease they catch from other children, it’s not that big of a deal most of the time. Measles outbreaks are just so different from the colds picked up from day care or the stomach bugs you catch at Disneyland. If we choose to let measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases come back, there will be more childhood mortality. Kids might get pneumonia more often. They might be hospitalized more often. Some might grow up with permanent brain damage. Childhood will not only be about whether a kid is going to get a good education or make enough friends. It will once more be about whether a kid can survive the first few years of their life.

Related:

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Today’s News

The Trump administration imposed 25 percent tariffs on most imports from Canada and Mexico, and doubled tariffs for China. In response, Canada put 25 percent tariffs on billions of dollars of American goods, Mexico will announce retaliatory tariffs on Sunday, and China will add tariffs on some American imports on March 10.
Donald Trump will deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress tonight at 9 p.m. ET, in which he is expected to lay out his vision for his second term.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that last week’s Oval Office meeting was “regrettable” and proposed a partial cease-fire with Russia to resume peace negotiations.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Bettmann / Getty; Harold M. Lambert / Getty.

When America Persecutes Its Teachers

By Clay Risen

Several states, most notably Florida, have ordered schools and colleges to restrict or eliminate courses on gender, while groups such as Moms for Liberty have rallied parents to police curricula and ban books from school libraries. Ideological battles over education may be proxies for larger conflicts—Communism in the ’40s and ’50s; diversity, equity, and inclusion today. But such fights are particularly fierce because of how important schools are in shaping American values. To control the country’s education system is, in no uncertain terms, to control the country’s future.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Focus Features

Watch. Even the most mundane moments are riveting in the new deep-sea drama Last Breath (out in theaters), David Sims writes.

Listen. A hugely popular podcast tries to prove that nonspeaking people with autism have supernatural powers—but it misses something more compelling, Dan Engber writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Tax Season Just Got More Confusing

2025-02-26T18:49:00-05:00

Americans love to hate the IRS, that historically unpopular revenue-collection agency with its slow processes and fax machines and many, many forms. But recently, it has started to turn things around, at least by some measures: After receiving tens of billions of dollars from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the agency’s customer-service wait times went down, its tech initiatives helped simplify tax filings for some, and its audits led to the recovery of more than $1 billion in unpaid taxes from wealthy Americans and corporations.

That progress may now be imperiled. As part of the Trump administration’s plan to downsize the federal government, the IRS has been ordered to start firing as many as 7,000 IRS employees in the middle of tax season, including 5,000 people who work on collection and enforcement; the total cuts represent about 7 percent of the agency’s workforce. More layoffs could come: Today, the Trump administration released a memo ordering all federal agencies to submit plans to eliminate more positions, including those of career officials with civil-service protection. The IRS’s acting commissioner, Doug O’Donnell, announced his retirement this week, and Billy Long, Donald Trump’s pick to replace him, has previously backed legislation that would abolish the IRS.

To imagine the future of a diminished IRS, look back to the 2010s. By 2017, the agency’s workforce had shrunk by roughly 14 percent compared with 2010. The agency’s audit rate was 42 percent lower in 2017 than in 2010. In that period, Americans saw slower refunds and delayed call times. There is a tendency to conflate efficiency with cost cutting, and sometimes leaner operations really do speed things up—but if the IRS can’t afford to update its arcane technology or hire skilled professionals, Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told me, it may struggle to operate efficiently.

In a shift of focus, the IRS has prioritized auditing wealthy people and corporations since receiving IRA funding. In 2022, The Washington Post reported that more than half of the IRS’s audits in 2021 targeted taxpayers whose incomes were less than $75,000, because those audits are simpler and can be automated; auditing wealthy people’s tax returns can require far more resources, especially if they have varied income streams and assets (and sophisticated lawyers or accountants). In May, former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel announced that the agency would drastically ramp up its audits of wealthy corporations and people making more than $10 million. The taxes that rich people evade each year amount to more than $150 billion, he told CNBC in 2024. Investigating them could pay off: A 2023 paper estimated that every dollar the agency spends on audits of wealthy people could translate to $12 in recovered funds. And those who see their peers getting audited may be discouraged from cheating on taxes in the future, Williamson noted.

For generations, politicians have sought to politicize the IRS: In 1971, President Richard Nixon reportedly said that he wanted a new commissioner to “go after our enemies and not go after our friends,” and a former Trump chief of staff told The New York Times that Trump spoke of using the IRS to investigate his rivals during his first term (Trump denied this). The agency’s politicization and unpopularity was part of a “cycle that I hoped we had finally broken,” Natasha Sarin, a law professor at Yale and a former counselor at the Treasury, told me. When an agency struggles to perform its job well, its unpopularity makes getting more funding to improve its operations harder, and so forth.

The future of a major effort to improve the tax-filing system is uncertain too. As my colleague Saahil Desai explained last year, the agency’s pilot of a new, free tax-filing program, Direct File, was “a glimpse of a world where government tech benefits millions of Americans.” That the program “exists at all is shocking,” Saahil wrote. “That it’s pretty good is borderline miraculous.” Elon Musk posted earlier this month that he had “deleted” 18F, the government tech initiative that helped launch Direct File (though Direct File, now under the auspices of the IRS, will continue to accept tax returns for now). And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, in his confirmation hearing, that Direct File would operate this year, but added that he would “study” it for future use.

Staffing—this year and in future filing seasons—is another concern: Janet Holtzblatt, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, recommended that taxpayers file as soon as possible, because the IRS workforce may only continue to diminish if some of the remaining employees leave for new jobs, which could lead to tax-refund delays. Many of those who are left are also close to retiring. Before 2022, more than 60 percent of the IRS’s employees were reaching retirement age over the next six years, Holtzblatt told me. A new cohort of younger, more digitally savvy workers (many of whom were probationary agents) was gearing up to replace them. “The long-term effects are potentially worse than what might happen this year,” she said.

More mass layoffs and funding reductions could mean a shrunken and defanged IRS. If the agency doesn’t have the resources it needs to modernize and tamp down tax evasion, revenue won’t be the only thing affected—Americans’ already-shaky trust in the system could be too.

Related:

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Today’s News

Elon Musk, who is not a member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet, attended the first official Cabinet meeting of the president’s second term.
Trump said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would be in the United States on Friday to sign a rare-earth-minerals deal, which has been a source of strain between the two countries.
An unvaccinated child died from a recent measles outbreak in Texas, the first reported measles death in the U.S. since 2015.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Unemployment is low, but workers aren’t quitting and businesses aren’t hiring, Rogé Karma writes. What’s going on?

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Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Adolescent Style in American Politics

By Jill Filipovic

To a certain kind of guy, Donald Trump epitomizes masculine cool. He’s ostentatiously wealthy. He’s married to his third model wife. He gets prime seats at UFC fights, goes on popular podcasts, and does more or less whatever he wants without consequences. That certain kind of guy who sees Trump as a masculine ideal? That guy is a teenage boy.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

A picture of Bridget Jones writing in her diary

Watch. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (streaming on Peacock) finds surprising depth and reveals how the beloved British diarist has outlasted her critics, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Read. “Bird Strike,” a short story by Anelise Chen:

“The woman and her sister had been out jogging by the river when they saw the bird fall from the sky.”

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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DOGE’s Fuzzy Math

2025-02-18T17:32:00-05:00

Last week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called the national debt “one of the biggest betrayals against the American people,” suggesting that Americans’ anger about debt “gave birth to the concept of DOGE.” The idea that Elon Musk and his band of government-efficiency crusaders can bring down the debt is a tidy one. But DOGE’s current plans would hardly put a dent in the deficit.

Musk has lamented that America is “drowning” in debt, which has indeed ballooned over the past decade: As of this month, the federal debt is $36 trillion, about $13 trillion higher than it was five years ago. Debt has not been a priority of either major political party for some time, my colleague Annie Lowrey, who covers economics, told me. And despite Taylor Greene’s claims about American anger over the debt, it’s not a top-of-mind issue for people at the polls, either, Annie argued.

If Musk’s team were serious about reducing the deficit, it could explore some unpopular but effective options: reduce spending for the military and the entitlement programs that make up the bulk of the federal budget—Medicare and Social Security—or simply raise taxes, Annie suggested. Instead, what Musk and DOGE have done thus far is ravage government agencies and departments (USAID, for example, which makes up a tiny portion of the budget, and the destruction of which won’t lead to major savings). They’ve also focused on slashing the federal workforce by offering buyouts to 2 million federal workers (and, over the weekend, axing thousands more federal-agency employees); so far, salaries for the workers who have accepted the buyout offer make up a minuscule portion of the national budget in total.

Musk, Trump, and their allies have also turned to a bit of magical thinking, claiming that rooting out fraud in the government is the key to saving money. In a meandering address from the Oval Office last week, Musk claimed without evidence that USAID workers were raking in millions in kickbacks, and that people as old as 150 were claiming Social Security benefits. He wrote on X last week that “at this point, I am 100% certain that the magnitude of the fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability, etc) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by FAR.”

Stumbling upon, and reclaiming, trillions of fraudulently spent funds would be rather convenient, and crying “fraud” is a useful way for Musk and his defenders to cast DOGE’s actions as in service of the American people. Trump has touted this same shaky logic, asserting that uncovering a bunch of fraud could mean America has less debt than previously thought. Fraud does exist in parts of the government: Some people intend to defraud government programs; others accidentally sign up for benefits they’re not actually eligible for. And the government does sometimes make payment errors—federal agencies estimated that more than $200 billion was lost in fiscal year 2023 because of such mistakes, and in past years fraud losses accounted for 3 to 7 percent of the budget. But there is no evidence that lowering the deficit is as simple as tamping down on fraud—or that fraud exists to the extent Musk claims.

Plus, by whacking the bureaucracy, Musk and his team are weakening programs that are already working to tamp down fraud. All federal programs have fraud-detection mandates. The Treasury, for example, announced in October that it had recovered or prevented $4 billion in fraud losses in the prior fiscal year, in part from employing AI machine-learning. And as he rails against what he calls fraud, Musk and his associates have effectively shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose mandate is to crack down on fraud in businesses (and which might have regulated Musk’s own companies).

The rhetorical trick of politicians referring to unpopular or disliked government spending as fraud isn’t new. But in an era of rampant scamming, claiming that the American government is swindling its own people hits on a salient national fear. Musk’s first few weeks running DOGE don’t bode well for his ability to solve the debt crisis. He may succeed, however, in further eroding trust in government, which could give him and his team even more leeway in their attempts to dismantle it.

Related:

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Today’s News

Top representatives from Russia and the U.S. met in Saudi Arabia to discuss strengthening economic and diplomatic relations between the two countries and assembling a team to start peace negotiations in the Ukraine war.
The Trump administration fired thousands of probationary federal workers over the weekend in departments including the FAA, Health and Human Services, and Energy.
The acting head of the Social Security Administration resigned after DOGE requested access to sensitive personal information about millions of Americans.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explains how COVID pushed a generation of young people to the right.

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Evening Read

NBC

Saturday Night Live Played the Wrong Greatest-Hits Reel

By Esther Zuckerman

Fifty years is a long time. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from large portions of SNL50: The Anniversary Special, the much-hyped celebration of the long-running sketch show that aired in prime time last night. SNL50 was meant to commemorate the program, created and executive-produced by Lorne Michaels, for achieving five decades of cultural relevance. But the evening’s rundown suffered from a severe case of recency bias, with sketches that were more inclined to play it safe than honor the show’s extensive, complicated, and fascinating history.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Marvel Studios

Watch (or skip). The newest Captain America movie (out now in theaters) seemed set to explore much-needed fresh ground for the Marvel franchise. But the movie quickly wastes any of that potential, writes David Sims.

Read. Robert Frost wasn’t always good, James Parker argues. Before he became America’s most famous poet, he wrote some real howlers.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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The Era of Risk-Averse Super Bowl Ads

2025-02-10T19:29:00-05:00

Every year, Super Bowl advertisers pay millions to appear on screens for a minute or less. The ad slots tend more toward the upbeat than the controversial. But even by the low bar of Super Bowl advertising, this year was rather risk-averse. Sweet animals and mascots abounded. Multiple ads featured vaguely old-timey montages. At a certain point, the commercials started to blend together. (The two different ads featuring flying hair certainly did.)

In past big games, some companies have attempted to speak to the zeitgeist by addressing civic or political themes in their ads. In 2017, just after Donald Trump was inaugurated for the first time, some major Super Bowl advertisers addressed politics head-on: Budweiser released an ad portraying the founder of the company encountering discrimination as he immigrated to America. Airbnb’s spot that year seemingly criticized Trump’s then–travel ban.

In the past decade or so, in particular, some brands have embraced explicitly political marketing, giving credence to the idea that consumers “vote with their wallets.” Some shoppers have said that they do: A 2018 survey from the communications firm Edelman found that nearly 60 percent of American consumers would buy or boycott a brand “solely because of its position on a social or political issue,” up 12 points from the year before. Following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, many consumers (and employees) demanded that major corporations, even those whose businesses didn’t directly relate to social issues, take a stand on topics such as race, voting rights, and abortion—even if some suspected that companies were responding to pressure rather than acting on genuine principle.

This year’s Super Bowl advertisers showed little interest in going near any of that. Few made explicit reference to politics (excepting nonprofits). Timothy Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern, told me that he sees the 2023 Bud Light imbroglio, in which the company faced massive backlash over partnering with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a social-media video, as a shift. By 2023, Americans had started to soften on their interest in companies taking a stand on social issues, according to Gallup. Flickers of a move away from political ads were apparent last year; during both the 2023 and the 2024 games, Budweiser made a nostalgia play, focusing its ads on the brand’s classic Clydesdale horses.

The NFL, for its part, decided this year to remove the message “End Racism,” which had been stenciled onto the edge of the end zone for the past four Super Bowls, and replace it with “Choose Love.” Donald Trump attended the game, the first sitting president to do so; the league has denied that the timing of the change was related to the president’s attendance.

Super Bowl ad space was available for purchase well before the presidential election: Skechers, back in May, became the first brand to confirm that it had bought a national spot. By mid-2024, about 85 percent of the ad units were sold out, and by early November, all of the slots had sold. A bit of reshuffling followed—State Farm pulled its ad after the Los Angeles–area fires—but for the most part, companies have been prepping for many months. Still, Calkins told me, every advertiser likely took a closer look at their cuts after the election, to make sure that nothing would spark too much controversy, given the new administration.

Super Bowl ads cost so much—more than $8 million this year for some national slots, nearly double what they cost a decade ago—and a misstep can pose a dire risk for companies. But many still find the huge audience, a rarity in our fractured media environment, worth the potential treachery, Calkins told me. The challenge for brands going forward, he said, is to find the balance of being “safe” without losing creativity. This year, lots of ads were uncontroversial—and uninspired. Maybe next year, more of them will surprise us.

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Today’s News

Hamas alleged that Israel broke the cease-fire deal and has indefinitely postponed the hostage release scheduled for this Saturday.
A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had failed to comply with his court order to restore federal funding after the recent freeze.
President Donald Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Tom Brady could be worth $375 million in the booth, Derek Thompson writes.
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Evening Read

Patrick Smith / Getty

What Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime Show Said

By Spencer Kornhaber

The Super Bowl halftime show is an opportunity for big, dumb fun: explosions, laser shows, left sharks. But big, dumb fun isn’t Kendrick Lamar’s thing. The 37-year-old Los Angeles rapper and Pulitzer Prize winner prefers subtlety, smarts, and fun that’s tinged with danger and unease. Amid tough, tense circumstances, he put on a tough, tense—and quite satisfying—show.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Laugh (or don’t). A new biography of the Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels profiles the unfunny man who became the arbiter of funny, James Parker writes.

Read. The Finnish writer Tove Jansson was the outsider who captured American loneliness, Lauren LeBlanc writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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How the Tariff Whiplash Could Haunt Pricing

2025-02-07T18:09:00-05:00

When it comes to tariffs for Canada and Mexico, America is ending the week pretty much as it started. Over the course of just a few days, Donald Trump—following up on a November promise—announced 25 percent tariffs on the country’s North American neighbors, caused a panic in the stock market, eked out minor concessions from foreign leaders, and called the whole thing off (for 30 days, at least). But the residue of this week’s blink-and-you-missed-it trade war will stick.

The consensus among economists is that the now-paused tariffs on Canada and Mexico would have caused significant, perhaps even immediate, cost hikes and inflation for Americans. Tariffs on Mexico could have raised produce prices within days, because about a third of America’s fresh fruits and vegetables are imported from Mexico, Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at Yale’s Budget Lab, told me in an email. But “uncertainty about tariffs poses a strong risk of fueling inflation, even if tariffs don’t end up going into effect,” he argued. Tedeschi noted that “one of the cornerstone findings of economics over the past 50 years is the importance of expectations” when it comes to inflation. Consumers, nervous about inflation, may change their behavior—shifting their spending, trying to find higher-paying jobs, or asking for more raises—which can ultimately push up prices in what Tedeschi calls a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The drama of recent days may also make foreign companies balk at the idea of entering the American market. During Trump’s first term, domestic industrial production decreased after tariffs were imposed. Although Felix Tintelnot, an economics professor at Duke, was not as confident as Tedeschi is about the possibility of unimposed tariffs driving inflation, he suggested that the threats could have ripple effects on American business: “Uncertainty by itself is discouraging to investments that incur big onetime costs,” he told me. In sectors such as the auto industry, whose continental supply chains rely on border crossing, companies might avoid new domestic projects until all threats of a trade war are gone (which, given the persistence of Trump’s threats, may be never). That lack of investment could affect quality and availability, translating to higher costs down the line for American buyers. Some carmakers and manufacturers are already rethinking their operations, just in case.

And the 10 percent tariffs on China (although far smaller than the 60 percent Trump threatened during his campaign) are not nothing, either. These will hit an estimated $450 billion of imports—for context, last year, the United States imported about $4 trillion in foreign goods—and China has already hit back with new tariffs of its own. Yale’s Budget Lab found that the current China tariffs will raise overall average prices by 0.1 to 0.2 percent. Tariffs, Tedeschi added, are regressive, meaning they hurt lower-earning households more than high-income ones.

Even the most attentive companies and shoppers might have trouble anticipating how Trump will handle future tariffs. Last month, he threatened and then dropped a tariff on Colombia; this week, he hinted at a similar threat against the European Union. There is a case to be made that Trump was never serious about tariffs at all—they were merely a way for him to appear tough on trade and flex his power on the international stage. And although many of the concessions that Mexico and Canada offered were either symbolic or had been in the works before the tariff threats, Trump managed to appear like the winner to some of his supporters.

Still, the longest-lasting damage of the week in trade wars may be the solidification of America’s reputation as a fickle ally. As my colleague David Frum wrote on Wednesday, the whole episode leaves the world with the lesson that “countries such as Canada, Mexico, and Denmark that commit to the United States risk their security and dignity in the age of Trump.”

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Today’s News

A federal judge said he would issue a temporary restraining order that would pause parts of the Trump administration’s plan to slash the USAID workforce and withdraw employees from their overseas posts.
Donald Trump met with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba at the White House, where they discussed reducing the U.S.’s trade deficit with Japan.
A plane carrying 10 people went missing in western Alaska while en route from Unalakleet to Nome.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka examines a new, unbearably honest kind of writing.
Atlantic Intelligence: For a time, it took immense wealth—not to mention energy—to train powerful new AI models, Damon Beres writes. “That may no longer be the case.”

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Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Wikimedia Commons.

The Rise of the Selfish Plutocrats

By Brian Klaas

The role of the ultra-wealthy has morphed from one of shared social responsibility and patronage to the freewheeling celebration of selfish opulence. Rather than investing in their society—say, by giving alms to the poor, or funding Caravaggios and cathedrals—many of today’s plutocrats use their wealth to escape to private islands, private Beyoncé concerts, and, above all, extremely private superyachts. One top Miami-based “yacht consultant” has dubbed itself Medici Yachts. The namesake recalls public patronage and social responsibility, but the consultant’s motto is more fitting for an era of indulgent billionaires: “Let us manage your boat. For you is only to smile and make memories.”

Read the full article.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Courtesy of Sundance Institute; Neon Films/Rosamont; Luka Cyprian; A24; Lars Erlend Tubaas Øymo.

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The Breaking Point for Eggs

2025-02-05T18:02:00-05:00

One sign that the egg-cost crisis has gotten dire came in the form of a bright-yellow sticker on a laminated breakfast menu: On Monday, Waffle House announced that it would be adding a temporary 50-cent surcharge to each egg ordered.

Egg prices have risen dramatically as of late. First, inflation pushed up their cost. Then the ongoing bird-flu outbreak led to shortages. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump assured Americans that he would get food costs under control: He vowed last summer that he would bring food prices down “on day one”—a promise he did not fulfill. As egg prices have kept ticking up in recent weeks, Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, has blamed the Biden administration for high egg costs, citing the standard, USDA-authorized measure of killing millions of egg-laying chickens that were infected with bird flu (something the previous Trump administration also did). The average price of a dozen eggs in U.S. cities remained below $2 until 2022. Eggs now cost an average of more than $4 a dozen—it’s a lot higher at some grocery stores—and the USDA has forecasted a 20 percent further price jump for eggs in 2025. As a spokesperson for Waffle House said in a statement, high egg prices are now forcing customers and restaurants to make “difficult decisions.”

As egg prices shift, so does the pricing logic that grocery stores and restaurants have long used. For decades now, grocers have helped maintain eggs’ affordable image, even when the amount they themselves spent on eggs was fluctuating. Many stores consider eggs “loss leaders”; they effectively subsidize the cost of eggs in order to draw in shoppers (who, they expect, might then splurge on higher-margin items). This was possible for stores to do because eggs were cheap to produce and readily in supply. Innovations in industrial farming, incubation, artificial lighting (to trick hens into thinking it was morning and time to lay), and carton technology meant that, by the early 20th century, cheap eggs were bountiful in American markets.

But when wholesale costs soar, as they are now, the loss-leader rationale starts to strain. (The cost of a dozen eggs for restaurants and stores is about $7, compared with $2.25 last fall, according to one recent estimate.) A few grocers are keeping egg prices consistent despite rising costs, but many more have started passing high prices over to shoppers. Eggs are also ingredients in lots of grocery items, such as baked goods and salad dressing—so those may see price increases too.

As for restaurants, when the cost of a single item goes up, they are generally willing to absorb it, with the hope that the price will soon go down and perhaps another item will be cheaper the next month, Alex Susskind, a Cornell professor who teaches courses in food and beverage management, told me. But when a cost goes up as continuously as egg prices have, restaurants start to run out of options. Susskind noted that the Waffle House spike was not a permanent price increase but a surcharge, which leaves open the option for the chain to simply remove it in the future. The Waffle House spokesperson said in the restaurant’s statement that “we are continuously monitoring egg prices and will adjust or remove the surcharge as market conditions allow.”

All of this has hit Americans hard, because we eat quite a lot of eggs. Egg consumption peaked around the end of World War II, when Americans ate an average of more than one egg a day per person. After waning a bit in the 1990s, eggs bounced back in the 2010s: By 2019, Americans were eating an average of about 279 eggs a year—that’s five to six a week. The resurgence was due in part to the fact that, after decades of warning about the risks of high-cholesterol foods, the federal government updated its guidance. Now some Americans are cutting back temporarily, but others are attempting to stock up on several dozens of eggs at a time. In spite of all the drama of the past few years, Americans aren’t likely to go eggless anytime soon. Eggs are “so embedded in American culture,” my colleague Yasmin Tayag, who covers science and health, told me, predicting that “it will take a lot more than a few years of price shifts to change that.”

The price of eggs has become a symbol of where America is going: first as a sign of inflation, now of the ongoing bird-flu outbreak. Even if you had tuned out current events for the past couple of years—if you’d deleted social media, turned off news notifications, read only Victorian novels—a version of this news was still going to reach you, in the egg aisle of the grocery store. Stocking up on eggs or cutting back is a temporary solution to a bird-flu problem that is likely to persist. The virus, Yasmin said, will keep coming back, at least until more effective mitigation measures, such as vaccines, become widespread. And week after week at the grocery store, many Americans will feel the effects.

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Today’s News

Secretary of State Marco Rubio walked back Donald Trump’s announcement last night that the U.S. should “take over” and “own” Gaza. Rubio told reporters that Trump was offering to help clean up and “rebuild” Gaza.
A federal judge blocked Trump’s executive order that attempted to end birthright citizenship.
Trump signed an executive order aimed at banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

America’s ‘Marriage Material’ Shortage

By Derek Thompson

Adults have a way of projecting their anxieties and realities onto their children. In the case of romance, the fixation on young people masks a deeper—and, to me, far more mysterious—phenomenon: What is happening to adult relationships?

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Illustration by Trevor Shin

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Try. Stop listening to music on a single speaker—you have two ears for a reason, Michael Owen writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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What It Takes to Make Flying Safe

2025-01-31T19:14:00-05:00

Wednesday night’s deadly airplane crash was tragic—and, to many experts, not altogether surprising. The collision between a commercial airplane and a military helicopter in Washington, D.C., has led many people to take a closer look at the complex systems that commercial flying relies on, and the strain that some of those systems are under. I spoke with my colleague Ian Bogost, who writes often about the airline industry, about the factors that shape our perceptions of flying.

Lora Kelley: This incident is not an aberration, but rather something experts seem to have seen coming. What were some of the warning signs?

Ian Bogost: Aviation experts had been fearing that something like this would happen not just at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, but all across the country. Near misses have been on the rise, as have “runway incursions”—planes accidentally sharing the same space with other planes. I won’t pretend to understand all of the reasons for that—and that’s part of the problem. The issues here aren’t as simple as something like screws falling off. Rather, near misses and accidents have to do with the whole system of aviation management: pilot experience; air-traffic-control staffing; the number of planes in the air; the complex airspace around Washington, D.C., in this case. More Americans are flying too, and growing demand puts new pressure on all of these systems in invisible ways.

Lora: How should people think about flying at this moment?

Ian: Commercial airlines want you to feel comfortable flying, because their business depends on it. The evolution of commercial air travel, especially in America, has made it so you don’t even have to look at or smell or hear the equipment to the same extent that passengers once did. You’re protected from many things that remind you that you’re in a machine hurtling through the air at 500 miles per hour.

Commercial air travel really is quite safe. When I say commercial air travel, I mean when you fly a major carrier on a scheduled flight that’s regulated. Safety in the cabin has also improved. Flight attendants worked very hard over many decades to establish themselves as safety professionals and not just service staff. The flight crew is trained to act in case of an emergency, and they’re highly prepared to do so. But because travel is so safe, you never get to see them perform that expertise—God forbid you see them perform that expertise.

Lora: Airlines are quite consolidated, and the system of flight relies on a range of factors beyond just individual companies. How does consolidation factor into safety?

Ian: We have fewer choices in flight than we used to—fewer airlines, fewer routes, fewer airport hubs. That does have an impact on safety. One way this plays out is, if you have fewer options for direct flights, you might have to opt for a layover. Takeoffs and landings are the most dangerous part of air travel. So if you can reduce takeoffs and landings—for example, by taking one flight instead of two—you’re safer, at least statistically. This is all still safer than driving somewhere in a car.

It’s really difficult for consumers to make rational decisions about safety today. Especially because we don’t really know what happened yet with this incident, we don’t know how great the risk is of it happening again. I’ve heard people start to consider making changes to their habits, although I don’t think we’re going to see many folks change their plans in the long run. After a door plug blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight last year, I started to see people saying they would try to avoid the aircraft in question, a Boeing 737-9 MAX. Are those people actually safer? Who knows.

Lora: Why do people often pin their safety fears on airplanes themselves, rather than focusing on the people or systems that operate them?

Ian: In the case of flying, people tend to target their concern toward the concrete, visceral problems they can see and touch: Is there a screw loose? Is my seat broken? We mostly don’t consider the more systemic, intangible ones, such as staffing issues and maintenance routines and airspace-traffic patterns.

When an accident like this week’s happens, however, we get a brief insight into just how complex modern life is. For all of us, it’s certainly much easier not to have to think about that complexity.

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Today’s News

The Trump administration will impose a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on goods from China tomorrow, according to the White House.
Some hospitals across the country have suspended gender-affirming care for people under 19 years old while they assess how to comply with Donald Trump’s recent executive order.
North Korean soldiers fighting for Russia have been pulled off the front lines in the Ukrainian war, according to Ukrainian and U.S. officials.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

The Benefit of Doing Things You’re Bad At

By Arthur C. Brooks

Between my university lectures and outside speeches about the science of happiness, I do a lot of public speaking, and am always looking for ways to do so with more clarity and fluency. To that end, I regularly give talks in two languages that are not my own—not random languages, of course, but rather those I learned as an adult: Spanish and Catalan …

This is a specific example of what turns out to be a broader truth: Doing something you’re bad at can make you better at what you’re good at, as well as potentially making you good at something new.

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Culture Break

Searchlight Pictures

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Trump Targets His Own Government

2025-01-22T18:31:00-05:00

Within hours of taking office on Monday, Donald Trump released a raft of executive orders addressing targets he’d gone after throughout his campaign, such as immigration, government spending, and DEI. He issued full pardons for 1,500 January 6 rioters, and signed the first eight executive orders—of dozens so far—in front of a cheering crowd in a sports arena. But amid the deluge of actions, Trump also signed an executive order that takes aim at his own federal bureaucracy—and allows his perceived enemies within the government to be investigated and punished.

The executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” opens by stating as fact that the Biden administration and its allies used the government to take action against political opponents. Democrats, it says, “engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Its stated purpose, to establish “a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people,” reads like a threat. The order calls out particular targets, including the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission—agencies that Trump and his supporters allege betrayed them under President Joe Biden. Trump’s team, led by whoever is appointed attorney general and director of national intelligence, will be sniffing out what it determines to be signs of political bias. These officials will be responsible for preparing reports to be submitted to the president, with recommendations for “appropriate remedial actions.”

What exactly those remedial actions would look like is not clear. The vagueness of the order could result in a “long-running, desultory ‘investigation,’” Quinta Jurecic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer to The Atlantic, told me in an email.

But the information gathered in such investigations could lead to some federal employees being publicly criticized or otherwise punished by Trump. And beyond theatrics, this order could open the door to the “prosecutions that Trump has threatened against his political opponents,” Jurecic noted. Put another way: In an executive order suggesting that Biden’s administration weaponized the government, Trump is laying out how his administration could do the same.

Trump’s Cabinet is still taking shape, and whoever ends up in the top legal and intelligence roles will influence how this order is executed. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney-general pick, is an established loyalist with long-standing ties to Trump (he reportedly considered her for the role in his first term, but worried that her past scandals would impede her confirmation). Bondi, in her first Senate confirmation hearing last week, attempted to downplay Trump’s persistent rhetoric on retribution, and avoided directly answering questions about how she, as head of the Justice Department, would engage with his plans to punish enemies. She said that she wouldn’t entertain hypotheticals about the president, though she did claim that “there will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, has a history of political shape-shifting, though she has lately shown fealty to MAGA world.

Well before Trump took office, his allies were signaling their interest in turning federal bureaucracy, which they deride as “the deep state,” into a system driven by unquestioning loyalty to the president. As my colleague Russell Berman wrote in 2023, some conservatives have argued, without even cloaking “their aims in euphemisms about making government more effective and efficient,” that bureaucrats should be loyal to Trump. Russ Vought, the nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget (an unflashy but powerful federal position), who today appeared before Congress for the second time, has previously written that the executive branch should use “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

The executive order on weaponizing the federal government is consistent with the goals of retribution that Trump expressed on the campaign trail. And accusing rivals of using the government for personal ends has been a favored Republican tactic in recent years. Still, this order confirms that, now that he is back in office, Trump will have no qualms toggling the levers of executive power to follow through on his promises of revenge. Many of Trump’s executive actions this week are sending a clear message: If you are loyal, you are protected. If not, you may be under attack.

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Today’s News

A shooter killed at least one student and injured another before killing himself at Antioch High School in Nashville.
Donald Trump said last night that by February 1, he would place a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products. He has also pledged to put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico by the same date.
An Israeli military assault in the occupied West Bank began yesterday, killing at least 10 people and injuring 40 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Be Like Sisyphus

By Gal Beckerman

This anxious century has not given people much to feel optimistic about—yet most of us resist pessimism. Things must improve. They will get better. They have to. But when it comes to the big goals—global stability, a fair economy, a solution for the climate crisis—it can feel as if you’ve been pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it come rolling back down, over and over: all that distance lost, all that huffing and puffing wasted. The return trek to the bottom of the hill is long, and the boulder just sits there, daring you to start all over—if you’re not too tired.

Read the full article.

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Soda’s Rebound Moment

2025-01-17T18:58:00-05:00

For a few years in the 2010s, America seemed to be falling out of love with soda. But some blend of price-conscious shopping, kooky social-media trends (milk and coke, anyone?), and perhaps a streak of fatalistic behavior on the part of Americans has made the beverage newly relevant.

Soda consumption declined consistently over the decade leading up to 2015, in part because of backlash from a health-conscious public and a series of soda-tax battles; some soda drinking was also displaced by the likes of energy drinks, coffee, and bottled water. However, in 2017, the CDC announced that rates of sugary-beverage consumption had plateaued—at a rate far above the government-recommended limit. Now soda sales are ticking back up modestly: Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper both saw soda-case sales rise in the past year, and total sales volumes for soft drinks have risen, according to the investment-bank advisory firm Evercore ISI; last year, Coca-Cola was among the fastest-growing brands for women, Morning Consult found. Soda is having a cultural moment too: Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” was a, if not the, song of the summer. And the U.S. president-elect is famously a fan of Diet Coke, reportedly drinking a dozen a day during his first term.

Compared with 20 years ago, Americans are drinking far fewer sugar-sweetened beverages, particularly soda—but compared with a decade ago, they are drinking almost as much, Dariush Mozaffarian, a physician and a nutrition expert at Tufts, told me. Researchers have suggested that there are links between drinking large amounts of sugary drinks and a range of negative health outcomes, but the people most open to changing their soda habits may have already changed them, Mozaffarian noted. In order for cultural norms around soda to shift, drinking it needs to become uncool, he argued. That’s not an impossible goal, but it can be achieved only through a combination of sustained policy efforts, strong messaging from public-health officials, and perhaps even a bit of help from celebrities.

Public-health messaging alone can’t get people to change their behavior. Soda brands have been “a part of our cultural life for decades,” my colleague Nicholas Florko, who covers health policy, told me. “And so there is going to be some reluctance if you tell people” to ease up on “this thing that your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, have been drinking forever.” Part of the draw of soda is that it’s generally quite cheap. To undercut that appeal, activists and politicians have pushed to implement taxes on sugary drinks; in many cases, they have received major pushback from industry and business groups. Researchers have found that, in places where sugary-drink taxes managed to pass, they do help: One study last year found that sales of sugary drinks went down by a third in American cities with soda taxes, and there’s no evidence that people traveled beyond the area looking for cheaper drinks. But these taxes require political will—and pushing for people’s groceries to cost more is not always an appealing prospect for politicians, Nicholas pointed out, especially in our current moment, when Americans are still recovering from the effects of high inflation.

Soda taxes are controversial, but a soda tax isn’t just about cost: Part of the reason such policies work, says Justin White, a health-policy expert at Boston University, is that they can make sugary drinks seem less socially acceptable. “Policies affect the norms, and norms feed back into people’s choices,” he told me. Now new soda norms are emerging, including a crop of sodas that claim to be gut-healthy (although, Mozaffarian said, more research needs to be done to confirm such claims).

Soda feels like an intrinsic part of American life. But generations of canny advertising and celebrity endorsements, Mozaffarian noted, are responsible for embedding soda in so many parts of America—think of its placement in ballparks and other social spaces—and in the day-to-day rhythms of offices and schools. Curbing soda consumption would require a similarly intentional shift.

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Today’s News

The Supreme Court upheld a law that will effectively ban TikTok in the United States if the social-media platform’s Chinese parent company does not sell it by Sunday.
The Israeli cabinet voted to approve a cease-fire deal with Hamas, which is expected to take effect Sunday.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem testified in her Senate confirmation hearing for the role of secretary of Homeland Security.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

‘I Won’t Touch Instagram’

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

If TikTok does indeed get banned or directly shut off by its parent company, it would be a seismic event in internet history. At least a third of American adults use the app, as do a majority of American teens, according to Pew Research Center data. These users have spent the past few days coming to terms with the app’s possible demise—and lashing out however they could think to.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Apple TV+

Watch. The first season of Severance was a chilly riot, too cool to offer viewers catharsis. The second season (streaming on Apple TV+) digs into more human questions, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Commemorate. The death of David Lynch, America’s cinematic poet, is shocking only because it seemed he’d be with us forever, David Sims writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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How Worried to Be About Bird Flu

2025-01-15T17:33:00-05:00

Over the past several months, bird-flu numbers have been steadily ticking up, especially among farmworkers who interact closely with cows. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who reports on science, about her level of concern right now, and the government’s response to the spread of the virus so far.

Lora Kelley: We last spoke in April, after a dairy worker became infected with bird flu. At the time, you described your level of concern about bird flu as “medium.” How would you describe your level of worry now?

Katherine J. Wu: At this point, I would upgrade it to “medium-plus.” I don’t think I will upgrade to “high” unless we start to see strong evidence of human-to-human transmission. I am not ruling out that possibility, but we aren’t there yet.

The situation has gotten quite a bit worse since last spring. We are seeing consistent infection of dairy workers, meaning an especially vulnerable population is exposed in their work environment. Each time the virus infects a new person, it’s an opportunity for it to evolve into something that could eventually become a pathogen that moves easily from person to person.

Lora: What could public-health officials have done differently in recent months to contain the outbreak?

Katherine: Part of the reason I feel concerned is the government’s lackluster response. The movement of the virus into cows was a huge red flag. Cows have never been a known source of this flu, so that was a complete surprise. That should have been a moment when officials said: We really need to contain this before it gets out of control. If some of the first afflicted herds had been kept from moving around, or even culled, it’s possible that the virus might have been contained before dairy workers got sick.

The USDA has ramped up its testing of milk, and the CDC is still working hard to do outreach to farmworkers, who are the population most at risk here. But there could still be more testing at the individual level—individual animals, individual people. There could be more frequent, aggressive sampling of where the virus is in the environment, as well as on farms.

Representatives at USDA and CDC have denied that their response has been inadequate—though independent experts I have spoken with dispute that. To be clear, officials can’t fully predict the future and stop an outbreak the second it starts to get bad, and critics aren’t demanding that. But right now, it’s still a very reactive approach: We see that the virus has been here; I guess we can keep checking if it’s there. But a more proactive approach with testing and better communication with the public would really help.

Lora: How has the government’s response to bird flu compared with its response to COVID?

Katherine: There’s no doubt that having COVID in the rearview affected the government’s response. I think they didn’t want to overreact and cause widespread panic when there wasn’t a need. That’s fair, but there’s a middle ground that I think they missed.

The response to COVID was by definition going to be haphazard, because we didn’t have a preexisting arsenal of tests, vaccines, and antivirals. We hadn’t dealt with a coronavirus like that in recent memory. Here, though, there is a slate of tools available. We’ve dealt with big flu outbreaks. We know what flu can do. We know that flu, in general, can move from animals into humans. We’ve seen this particular virus actually move into people in different contexts across the world.

Lora: Have we missed the opportunity to mitigate the spread of bird flu?

Katherine: Because there has not yet been evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission, there is still time to intervene. Did officials miss some opportunities to intervene more and earlier? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that from here the attitude should be I guess we should just let this roll.

Lora: We may have RFK Jr., a vaccine skeptic, leading the Department of Health and Human Services soon. How might his leadership affect the bird-flu response?

Katherine: I don’t think there is a need to roll out bird-flu vaccines to the general public yet. But I think there are likely to be major changes to public-health policy in this country. RFK Jr. has specifically said that the National Institutes of Health will be taking a break from focusing on infectious disease for the next few years, and that doesn’t bode terribly well. Infectious diseases are not going to take a break from us.

Lora: Are there lessons from the COVID era that the public should better absorb in order to deal with illness more broadly?

Katherine: To be fair, it’s hard to avoid getting sick in general, especially at this time of year. During the worst of the pandemic, when people were still masking more consistently and not going into public places, we did get sick a lot less often because we were avoiding each other.

That said, I think people did forget very, very quickly that the things that worked against COVID work well against a lot of other diseases, especially other respiratory viruses. I am not saying that we all need to go back to masking 24/7 and never going to school or work in person. But maybe don’t go to work when you’re sick—a practice that all employers should enable. Maybe don't send your child to day care sick. Maybe don’t sneeze into your hand and then rub your hand all over the subway railing. Wash your hands a lot.

Unfortunately, there is this tendency for a really binary response of doing everything or nothing. Right now, people seem to be leaning toward doing nothing, because they are fatigued from what they felt like was an era of doing everything. But there’s a middle ground here too.

Related:

Bird flu is a national embarrassment.
America’s infectious-disease barometer is off. (From April)

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a 42-day cease-fire deal that will include an exchange of hostages and prisoners, President Joe Biden announced.
Senate confirmation hearings were held for multiple Trump-administration nominees, including Pam Bondi for attorney general and Marco Rubio for secretary of state. During Bondi’s testimony, she refused to say that President-Elect Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.
South Korea’s impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was detained and questioned last night over his attempt to impose martial law last month.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Hipster Grifter Peaked Too Soon

By Sophie Gilbert

In the spring of 2009, Vice published a blog post, notorious even by its own standards, titled “Department of Oopsies!—We Hired a Grifter.” An employee had started chatting with the magazine’s new executive assistant, Kari Ferrell; after she reportedly began coming on to him over instant messages, he Googled her, only to find out that she was on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s most-wanted list. Instead of simply firing Ferrell, Vice outed her online.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Jan Buchczik

Test out. Here are 10 practical ways to improve your happiness, according to happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks.

Read. Kindness has become countercultural, James Parker writes. Perhaps Saint Francis can help.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Time for Senate Republicans to Decide

2025-01-13T18:56:00-05:00

Over the next several days, many of Donald Trump’s Cabinet selections will appear before the Senate for confirmation hearings. By putting forth a series of unqualified candidates who, in other political moments, would likely not have made it this far, Trump has muddled the process before the hearings have even begun: As my colleague David Graham put it in November, “the sheer quantity of individually troubling nominees might actually make it harder for the Senate to block any of them.”

But the outcome of the Senate confirmation hearings is not a foregone conclusion. Yes, Senate Republicans have shown that they are reliably deferential toward Trump (though some drew a line at his selection of Matt Gaetz for attorney general). Many of his picks will be easily confirmed, my colleague Russell Berman, who covers politics, predicted, given the Republicans’ 53–47 majority in the Senate. But with the current makeup of the Senate, each pick can afford to lose only three GOP votes (assuming that every Democrat opposes the nomination), so for the ones who have yet to lock in support from every single Republican, the hearings could make the difference. Democrats, Russell explained to me, will attempt to use the hearings to build a case for the public that some of Trump’s nominees “are either unqualified or don’t reflect the views and values of most Americans.”

Among the first hearings is one that will reveal whether even a few Republicans are willing to defy the president-elect. Tomorrow morning at 9:30 a.m. EST, Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host and Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense, is scheduled to appear before senators. They will have much to ask him about, including Hegseth’s confirmation that he reached a financial settlement with a woman who accused him of sexual assault (though he has denied the assault allegation), accusations that he is prone to excessive drinking (he has denied having a drinking problem, and one Republican senator has claimed that Hegseth told senators that he has stopped drinking and won’t drink if confirmed), reports of his failures in leading veterans’ organizations and forced departures from those roles (which Hegseth’s camp called “outlandish claims”), and his suggestion that women shouldn’t serve in military-combat positions.

Democrats have already hammered him on these issues: Senator Elizabeth Warren released a scalding 33-page letter last week outlining questions about his fitness to serve. Republicans have also scrutinized Hegseth and other nominees, although none has yet said publicly that they would vote against any of Trump’s picks. Russell advised that in addition to the Republican moderates Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, GOP senators to keep a close eye on throughout the hearings include Senator Mitch McConnell, who is somewhat liberated from total deference to Trump because he’s no longer leader of the party, and Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who voted to impeach Trump after January 6.

Not every pick has a hearing scheduled yet—RFK Jr., Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, and others are not yet on the calendar. In recent decades, just one Cabinet nomination (John Tower, George H. W. Bush’s pick for secretary of defense) has been voted down; others who faced tough odds have withdrawn—a path Hegseth or other nominees may follow if it seems likely they won’t win enough support. Gaetz, Trump’s initial pick to lead the Justice Department, bowed out shortly after being tapped, following an ethics-committee inquiry into allegations that included sexual misconduct and illicit drug use (Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing).

Senators from both parties have pushed to see FBI background checks that, although not legally required, have been customary for a president to mandate (the agreement that Trump’s transition team signed with the DOJ did not specify whether he will require FBI involvement for his picks). Trump and his supporters have for years been attempting to damage the reputation of the FBI, and now some, including Elon Musk, are suggesting that anything the agency digs up won’t be credible. That posture, Russell explained, is another tactic to “speed up the confirmation of nominees whom the Senate might have rejected in an earlier political era.” In an effort to get their way, Trump’s allies seem poised to cast doubt on the whole process, encouraging Americans to mistrust another long-standing government norm. That legacy could last longer than Trump’s second term.

Related:

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Today’s News

Winds are expected to pick up across parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, according to the National Weather Service. The wildfires in Southern California have killed at least 25 people, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Federal Judge Aileen Cannon allowed the release of a portion of a report written by former Special Counsel Jack Smith about the 2020 election-interference case against Trump.
President Joe Biden announced that student loans will be forgiven for more than 150,000 borrowers.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Everyday decisions can accumulate into a life of isolation, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Leon Edler

The Easiest Way to Keep Your Friends

By Serena Dai

The hardest part about adult friendship is, by far, scheduling time to see one another, especially when trying to plan for a group. Thursday’s bad for one person, and Saturday’s not good for another. Monday would work—but hold up, the restaurant we want to try isn’t open that day. Let’s wait a couple of weeks. Somehow, though, the day never comes. Your friends forgot to follow up, or maybe you did. Either way, can you even call one another friends anymore?

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic

Explore. Strange turns of phrase online—“he’s so me for this,” “if you even care”—have seeped into daily life. A going theory about the cause is that people have gotten stupider, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes. But maybe this isn’t true.

Read. In her debut novel, Too Soon, Betty Shamieh isn’t trying to educate or enlighten, Gal Beckerman writes. She’s telling a Palestinian story unlike any other.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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How Solitude Is Rewiring American Identity

2025-01-08T17:24:00-05:00

Americans are spending more and more time alone. Some are lonely. But many people—young men in particular—are actively choosing to spend much of their time in isolation, in front of screens. That proclivity is having a profound effect on individual well-being and on American’s “civic and psychic identity,” my colleague Derek Thompson writes in our new cover story. I spoke with Derek about what he calls our anti-social century.

Lora Kelley: The pandemic was obviously very disruptive to people’s social lives. How much is it to blame for this trend toward aloneness?

Derek Thompson: I never would have written this story if the data showed that Americans were hanging out and socializing more and more with every passing year and decade—until the pandemic happened, and we went inside of our homes, and now we’re just slowly getting back out. That’s not a story about America. That’s a story about a health emergency causing people to retreat from the physical world.

The anti-social century is the opposite of that story. Every single demographic of Americans now spends significantly less time socializing than they did at the beginning of the 21st century, when some people already thought we were in a socializing crisis. Overall, Americans spend about 20 percent less time socializing than they did at the beginning of the century. For teenagers and for young Black men, it’s closer to 40 percent less time. This trend seems, by some accounts, to have accelerated during the pandemic. But as one economist pointed out to me, we were more alone in 2023 than we were in 2021.

Lora: We’ve talked a bit about shifts in isolation for young people. Where do older Americans fit into this? Are we seeing similar dynamics play out for that cohort?

Derek: Aloneness is rising across the board—for every age group and for every ethnicity and for every type of education—but it’s rising slower for old people and faster for young people.

Older people have always spent more time alone than young people. They don’t go to school from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.; they’re not legally forced to be around people the same way that many young people are. They aren’t in college, and they are often unemployed, so they aren’t in offices.

The solitude inequality that used to exist between different age groups—where old people were very alone, and young people were very social—is shrinking. You could say young people are acting more like old people.

Lora: What would you say to someone who thinks: Well, what’s wrong with spending time alone? If people are doing what they want to do, and pursuing their idea of a good life, why not spend more time in the house?

Derek: I don’t want this article to be a criticism of introversion, and I certainly don’t want this article to be a criticism of quiet. I myself am somewhat introverted and love a bit of quiet time. But what’s happening in America today is not a healthy trend of people simply spending more time being happy by themselves. Many researchers who looked at the rise of alone time have come to the conclusion that Americans self-report less satisfaction when they spend lots of time alone or in their house.

I think a certain amount of alone time is not only acceptable; it’s absolutely essential. But as with any therapeutic, the dosage matters, and people who spend a little bit of time taking moments by themselves, meditating, or decompressing are very different from people who are spending more hours, year after year, isolated.

Lora: To what extent is the rise of isolated lifestyles an individual issue—one that’s concerning because it’s making people sadder—versus a civic issue that’s causing a shift in American politics?

Derek: This pullback from public life started with technology, with cars and television, and ultimately smartphones, allowing Americans to privatize their leisure. But I absolutely think it’s becoming a political story.

I think we don’t understand one another for a reason that’s mathematical, almost tautological: Americans understand Americans less because we see Americans less. More and more, the way we confront people we don’t know is on social media, and we present an entirely different face online—one that tends to be more extreme and more negative and more hateful of the “out” group. I don’t think there should be any confusion about why an anti-social century has coincided with a polarized century.

Lora: You write in your article that “nothing has proved as adept at inscribing ritual into our calendars as faith.” How do you think about the way that so many Americans use technology—things like phone reminders and calendar tools and self-improvement apps—to inscribe rituals into their personal routines?

Derek: We haven’t just privatized leisure. We’ve privatized ritual. Modern rituals are more likely to bind us to ourselves than to other people: Meditate at this time alone. Remember to work out alone, or around other people with noise-canceling headphones.

It’s profoundly ironic that a lot of people are optimizing themselves toward solitude. The anti-social century is about accretion. It’s about many small decisions that we make minute to minute and hour to hour in our life, leading to a massive national trend of steadily rising overall aloneness.

Related:

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Wildfires are ravaging Southern California, scorching thousands of acres and forcing more than 70,000 people to evacuate. Below is a collection of our writers’ latest reporting on the fires:

Today’s News

Federal prosecutors said they plan on releasing the part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report that details Donald Trump’s election-interference case if the court order blocking them is lifted.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot warned Trump against taking over Greenland, Denmark’s autonomous territory.
Trump asked the Supreme Court to halt the sentencing hearing in his New York criminal hush-money case, which is scheduled to take place on Friday.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: BFA / Alamy; Roadside Attractions / Everett Collection; Pablo Larraín / Netflix.

The Film That Rips the Hollywood Comeback Narrative Apart

By Shirley Li

[Demi Moore’s] fame, when contrasted with some of her forgettable films—The Butcher’s Wife, The Scarlet Letter—turned her into an easy punch line. As the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane sneered at the start of his review of the latter: “What is the point of Demi Moore?”

Look at Moore now.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Marcus Brandt / Picture Alliance / Getty

Try something new. The unique awfulness of beef’s climate impact has driven a search for an alternative protein that’s ethical and tasty, Sarah Zhang reports. Is the answer ostrich meat?

Read. Recent entries into the literature of parenting offer two different ways of understanding fatherhood, Lily Meyer writes.

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Foreign Leaders Face the Trump Test

2025-01-07T18:26:00-05:00

In a news conference today, President-Elect Donald Trump previewed his second-term approach to foreign policy. One theme was force: He didn’t rule out using the military to seize the Panama Canal or to acquire Greenland, and floated the idea of employing “economic force” to compel Canada to operate as an American state. Some of his ideas seem largely symbolic; at one point, he suggested renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. But these statements also fall into what my colleague David Frum has called a zero-sum attitude toward the rest of the world. Either a foreign country is with Donald Trump—and ready to collaborate with American interests—or it is against him.

Trump’s transactional outlook has put foreign leaders in a difficult position—including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who announced his resignation yesterday. Trump has threatened in recent months to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada, and he’s relished taunting the nation, repeatedly making comments about Canada joining the United States, including calling the prime minister “Governor Trudeau.” Almost immediately after Trudeau announced his decision yesterday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the Canadian prime minister was stepping down because “many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State,” and suggested that Trudeau had resigned in direct response to the threat of tariffs.

Trump is tying himself more to Trudeau’s resignation than he should. The prime minister’s downfall was rooted in factors that have bedeviled him for years: Canada has suffered from high inflation and cost of living, and Trudeau has also faced backlash over immigration. And though the first few years of Trudeau’s term came with progressive policy wins (and international celebrity), it also produced a series of ethical and personal scandals. His approval ratings have tanked in recent months.

Trudeau’s attempts to stay on good terms with Trump, including by visiting him at Mar-a-Lago, seemed to contribute to the perception among some on his staff that he was not equipped to handle a second Trump term. In a pointed resignation letter, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said that she was “at odds” with her boss over the best way forward, arguing that Canada needed to take Trump’s threats more seriously and not resort to “political gimmicks.” Freeland’s resignation, which came as a surprise, only hastened the prime minister’s downward trajectory; by this month, many of his allies were pushing him to step down. He will remain in office until a new party leader is selected later this year.

In Trump’s first term, Trudeau managed to frame himself as a progressive foil to Trump. The leaders had some open differences, and Trump did impose some tariffs at the time, a narrower set than what he is threatening now. But Trump’s policy agenda, especially at the start of his term, was less about antagonizing allies than it was about domestic and culture-war issues (and shortly after he started focusing on tariffs, the coronavirus pandemic derailed everything else). But the approach Trump seems to be taking in his next term posed a new challenge for Trudeau. If Trudeau’s “domestic political position had been just a little bit stronger,” David wrote to me in an email, “he might have tried to gamble on a confrontational policy—bad for the Canadian economy, yes, but good for his own survival.” President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico seems to be navigating a similar dilemma; she first threatened counter-tariffs in response to Trump’s warnings, then appeared to walk this back, stating that there was no possibility of a tariff war with America.

Trump is pleased with Trudeau’s demise right now. But in reality, the president-elect is making it harder for the U.S. to work productively with Canada in the future. Cooperating closely with the Trump administration may now become a political liability in Canada, David predicted, and Trudeau’s Liberal Party will seek to embarrass any future Conservative government that gets too close to Trump. Ultimately, David warned, Trump is playing a “dangerous game.”

Related:

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Today’s News

A New York appeals court denied Donald Trump’s request to delay the sentencing hearing in his criminal hush-money case.
Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon blocked the Justice Department from releasing Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on his investigations into Trump’s classified-documents case and election-interference case.
The House passed a bill that would require ICE to detain undocumented immigrants charged with nonviolent and minor-level crimes.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Republicans have promised to deliver “crypto-friendly regulations” that will supposedly “bring an unheralded era of American prosperity,” writes Annie Lowrey. But the clock is ticking on a crypto crash.
The Weekly Planet: Climate models can’t explain what’s happening to Earth, Zoë Schlanger writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Stephan Dybus

The Agony of Texting With Men

By Matthew Schnipper

My friend’s boyfriend, Joe Mullen, is a warm and sweet guy, a considerate person who loves dogs and babies. When I see him in person, once every month or two, he makes a point to ask me what I’ve been up to, how my life is going. Joe is a big music fan, and we share a love of music made by weird British people. I once got excited for him to check out an artist I thought he’d like. So I asked him for his number, and later I sent him a Spotify link to an album. “Hi :) It’s Schnipper,” I wrote. “I think u would dig this guy’s stuff.” I figured this might be the first step into a portal of greater closeness, a relationship of our own. Man to man. Except it wasn’t, because Joe did not text me back.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Jack Smyth

Explore. Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories are exploding now that the detective is in the public domain. Critics believe that it should have happened decades ago, Alec Nevala-Lee writes.

Examine. At the Golden Globes, nobody had much to say about the presidential election—or politics at all, Hannah Giorgis writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Coffee’s Grip on America

2025-01-03T17:56:00-05:00

American personal-finance gurus love to rail against the habit of spending money on coffee: The finance personality Suze Orman once compared buying coffee outside the house to “peeing $1 million down the drain.” But this criticism hasn’t curbed Americans’ love of ordering coffee. Neither has a yearslong stretch of brutal inflation. Through it all, Americans have kept purchasing their lattes and Americanos and drips, their cold foams and pumps of flavor and alternative milks.

Most American adults drink coffee regularly. The beverage is inescapable in America in part because it has enabled the long work hours that contribute to America’s culture of productivity. As Michael Pollan wrote in The Atlantic in 2020, “Coffee has helped create exactly the kind of world that coffee needs to thrive.” But this alone doesn’t explain its pull: Many people view the act of buying a cup of coffee as a small pleasure, one that fits easily into a busy routine. As the price of everything—including lattes—has gone up in recent years, Americans have stood by this particular habit.

Inflation-squeezed consumers are shying away from eating at restaurants, but many have kept indulging in to-go coffee. Starbucks is stumbling—last year, its sales and store traffic dipped, its workers went on strike, and it brought in yet another new CEO—but cafés are flourishing overall. The retail-research firm Circana found that spending at coffee shops in 2024 was up 55 percent compared with 2017 (restaurant spending overall was up about 20 percent in that period). Businesses serving coffee and tea are one of the fastest-growing slices of the restaurant industry.

Because coffee has a price cap that’s fairly low, it is generally the “last to go” when people are cutting back on meals out, Alex Susskind, a professor of food and beverage management at Cornell, told me. A restaurant dinner could cost hundreds of dollars. But even the most elaborate coffee concoction in most cities couldn’t be more than $8. (I am ignoring stunt orders, such as this one that apparently involved 101 shots of espresso.) Spending more than a few dollars on a coffee drink might seem absurd, especially to those who grew up in an era of much lower pricing. But many people continue to view coffee as a relatively affordable luxury, making it unique in the realm of dining out, Susskind noted: Just like fast-food chains, which did well in the second half of last year, coffee survives through customers’ strong perception that the price won’t go above a certain threshold.

But even the last to go may have a shaky future. In December, coffee hit its highest price in nearly 50 years. Major droughts in coffee-growing areas such as Brazil meant that the cost of Arabica beans (a common variety served in the United States) went up about 70 percent in 2024. The price has eased slightly in recent weeks, from $3.35 a pound to $3.20 a pound, but it was closer to $1.80 this time last year. Store brands such as Nescafé and Folgers have raised their prices, pointing to bean costs. In 2025, coffee shops will need to decide how much of the expense to pass on to coffee drinkers. With all of the resources and labor that go into it, a cup of coffee arguably should cost more than what we pay for it now. If coffee prices keep rising, coffee enthusiasts may be forced to consider how much their daily ritual is truly worth.

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Today’s News

Representative Mike Johnson narrowly won reelection as the speaker of the House.
South Korean investigators failed to detain President Yoon Suk Yeol after an hours-long standoff with roughly 200 soldiers and members of the presidential security detail.
A small plane crashed into a warehouse in California yesterday, killing two people and injuring 19.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: During a week of tragedy and chaos, Emma Sarappo has been thinking about the figurative language of death and decay that we use to describe the close of the year.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Thermometers Are Hot Garbage

By Daniel Engber

Germs are in the air again: Indicators show that the winter wave of flu and COVID is finally under way. Are you on the verge of getting sick? Am I? My 5-year-old does feel a little warm to me; his sister seems okay. Maybe I should take their temperature?

Maybe I should not. Here’s my resolution for the year ahead: I will not take their temperature. No parent should be taking temperatures. Because doing so is next to useless.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Todd Webb Archive

Take a look. These photos show the painter Georgia O’Keeffe’s life in New Mexico.

Pay attention. Parents, put down your phone cameras, Russell Shaw writes. In trying to capture so much of our kids’ lives, we risk missing out.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I enjoyed reading this set of food and drink predictions from Kim Severson, who suggests that we are in for a year of breaking with convention. One trend she’s eyeing? Savory coffee experiences. “Chefs are infusing coffee with sunchoke purée and avocado, and flavoring drinks with ginger, lemongrass and rosemary smoke,” Severson writes. “And yes, coffee is starting to get the omakase treatment.” Happy new year!

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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How the Ugly Shoe Got Chic

2024-12-30T17:00:00-05:00

From a young age, I respected the Croc. But somewhere along the way, I got the message that my favorite orange clogs were not chic, and I moved on.

Then, something remarkable happened. After years of being periodically trendy, comfy shoes took off during the early pandemic. Crocs started selling like crazy. Last year, Birkenstock went public. And elite designers have started collaborating with mass-market comfort brands, sometimes festooning their joint creations with ribbons or pearls. A series of such collaborations has emerged over the past few years: Miu Miu x New Balance, Cecilie Bahnsen x Asics, Collina Strada x Ugg, Sandy Liang x Salomon, and Simone Rocha x Crocs, to name a few. Multiple pairs of tricked-up Crocs clogs have appeared on runways lately, and Fendi x Red Wing boots graced the runway at Milan Fashion Week. Birkenstock has collaborated with designers including Jil Sander, Proenza Schouler, and Manolo Blahnik. At this point, nearly every canonical American comfort-shoe brand has paired up with a runway designer.

Yes, many of these shoes are not conventionally beautiful, and that’s part of the fun. The fashion world has a long-standing fascination with ugliness, Emily Huggard, who teaches a class on fashion collaborations at the Parsons School of Design, told me. Designer brands such as Collina Strada and Simone Rocha, both of which have collaborated with mainstream shoemakers, play with themes of grotesquerie and beauty, she noted. Beyond shoes, fashion designers have recently been returning to the grungy, oversize, jagged silhouettes of the 1990s and early 2000s. After a yearslong reign of sleek, minimalist looks, fashion’s extravagantly ugly era is upon us. Ugliness is, of course, subjective: As the fashion critic Vanessa Friedman noted earlier this year, “One person’s ugly shoe is another person’s footwear treasure.”

At least some of high fashion’s interest in working with big comfort-shoe brands is about reaching new audiences. Many of these luxury brands are small—almost certainly not as widely known as mall mainstays such as Crocs and Mephisto. Plus, making a shoe that functions well requires special expertise, which big brands such as Asics and New Balance can provide to smaller, independent collaborators, Thomaï Serdari, a marketing professor at NYU’s business school, told me in an email. From the mainstream brands’ perspective, such collaborations make them seem cool and relevant—and there’s little to lose. As Crocs’ chief marketing officer told The New York Times last year, experimentation isn’t so risky when your shoes are already pretty controversial.

People do actually want to buy some of these shoes: The Simone Rocha x Crocs collaboration, for example, sold out swiftly. The pure shock factor likely helps—Is that a Croc covered in pearls? And because they’re so wacky, such shoes generate rapt, if sometimes quizzical, coverage in fashion magazines. Some shoppers buy the shoes as a way to demonstrate a winking insiderness, or to signal that they’re very online (the collaborations are frequently hits on social media). The high price of high-fashion shoe collaborations may also be part of the appeal. As the Substack newsletter Blackbird Spyplane put it in a September edition about four-figure sneakers, at a time when clothes “seem either criminally cheap or nauseatingly expensive,” $1,500 Loro Piana x New Balance sneakers may be “substantially ‘about’ their own hideous pricetags.”

Not all of these collaborations are unappealing or even in-your-face—those Loro Piana sneakers are pretty subdued—but the mix of high-low is core to the concept. That balance takes skill to pull off. I am personally unlikely to pay hundreds or thousands for a designer version of the shoes I rocked when I was 12. But there’s something undeniably fun about the whimsy, and at times ugliness, of these creations.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin*

What Not to Wear

By Ellen Cushing

As long as people have been able to dress in color, we’ve been desperate to do it better. In the mid-19th century, advances in dyeing technology and synthetic organic chemistry allowed the textile industry, previously limited to what was available in nature, to mass-produce a rainbow’s worth of new shades. The problem was, people began wearing some truly awful outfits, driven to clashy maximalism by this revolution in color.

The press created a minor moral panic (“un scandale optique,” a French journal called it), which it then attempted to solve. An 1859 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely read American women’s magazine of the antebellum era, promised to help “ill-dressed and gaudy-looking women” by invoking a prominent color theorist, the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, and his ideas about which colors were most “becoming” on various (presumably white) women.

Chevreul died in 1889, 121 years before Instagram was invented, but had the platform been available to him, I think he would have done very well on it.

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Why Online Returns Are a Hassle Now

2024-12-18T18:32:00-05:00

A few months ago, a men’s suit jacket appeared on my doorstep. What I had actually ordered was a pink dress. I emailed the retailer, and thus began a weeks-long back-and-forth involving photos of the jacket, photos of tags, and check-ins with customer-service representatives. For the first time in my online-shopping life, I was facing a truly inconvenient return process. The company, it seemed, was going to great lengths to ensure I wasn’t trying to defraud them.

After enjoying years of easy and free returns as the norm of online shopping, I was surprised by this experience. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been: Retailers, dealing with the high costs of rampant returns since the start of the pandemic, plus a growing problem of return fraud, have begun to issue stricter, sometimes byzantine, return policies and processes over the past few years. You can return that shirt, an e-commerce site might say, but only within a 14-day window, or only for store credit. Yes, you can bring back that toaster, but you’ll need to deliver it to a local shop—a practice that’s known in industry terms as BORIS, or “buy online, return in store.”

Return fraud—when people claim they never received a package that in fact arrived, or send back a shoebox full of rocks—is starting to mess with retailers’ operations. To some extent, fraudsters have ruined the fun for rule-abiding customers. When companies put in place policies to deter the worst offenders, “average consumers get caught in that too,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, told me. (I saw that myself in my jacket-dress back-and-forth.) Still, fraud on its own didn’t lead us here. Returns ballooned during the pandemic, when people were shopping online prodigiously, and have kept growing: Total returns are expected to hit nearly $900 billion in 2024, compared with $309 billion in 2019. The average return rate was about 8 percent in 2019, then almost 11 percent in 2020. By 2021, the rate was above 16 percent; that’s about where returns are projected to be this year, too, according to surveys from the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns, a UPS company.

Free returns are the second-most-popular reason people shop with a given retailer, according to a 2024 Forrester survey (the first is free shipping). But stores are trying to make returns worth it for themselves, too. In addition to more complex return policies, some stores, such as REI, JCPenney, and DSW, are putting the onus on online shoppers by way of return or shipping fees (last year, one logistics company estimated that 40 percent of retailers were adding such fees). Restrictive return policies have the potential to deter shoppers, although it’s too soon to say for certain if new rules have had any cumulative effect on shopping habits. Retailers need to balance the risk of some potentially annoyed customers with the massive costs of returns, Kodali noted. A single return of a $100 item can cost a store up to $30, according to one estimate—so this may be a trade-off brands are willing to make. And though people signal in surveys that they notice and care about free returns, shoppers may well gripe but keep spending.

The customer is famously always right—and for generations, going back to the early days of big-chain-store shopping, American retailers offered generous return policies in the hopes of keeping shoppers happy. People started getting accustomed to the idea that they could buy lots and return some (and that, in many cases, even a damaged or used item could be brought back in exchange for cash). The rise of Amazon and Zappos supercharged the dynamic of stores wooing shoppers to spend by absorbing the costs of returns. But in the current world of online retail—now that consumers are sending back more and more of what they buy online, totaling many billions of dollars in lost revenue for the stores—that logic has been tested.

The reality of returns is expensive, and it’s also ugly. In many cases, your unwanted sandals or skirt won’t be going to the next stylish customer. They are likely going in the trash—many retailers determine that the cost of vetting and repackaging merchandise is too high to be worth it. As Amanda Mull explained in The Atlantic in 2021, though some out-of-season or late-in-the-trend-cycle returned goods are sent to the T.J.Maxxes and Marshalls of the world for a second life, every year billions of pounds of returns are thrown away in the United States. Dealing with returns is so expensive and annoying that some 60 percent of retailers are issuing refunds and telling customers to just keep cheap goods rather than send them back.

Many shoppers aren’t happy about seeing their free-returns rights rolled back. But the old way was not sustainable in any sense of the word. The returns clampdown echoes the so-called end of the Millennial-lifestyle subsidy in the early 2020s, when services such as Uber were no longer subsidized by venture capitalists, and consumers had to pay full price for what they were once getting at a discount. Luring shoppers in with pricing perks and overconvenience can only last for so long. Eventually, reality sets in.

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Today’s News

In a secret vote earlier this month, the House Ethics Committee agreed to release the report into the alleged misconduct and illegal activity of former Representative Matt Gaetz, according to CNN.
House Republicans released a report recommending that the FBI investigate former Representative Liz Cheney over her work on the January 6 subcommittee.
California declared a state of emergency over bird flu, which has been detected in 645 herds of dairy cattle in the state, according to officials. Governor Gavin Newsom called the decision a “proactive action.”

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Evelyn Freja / Connected Archives

12 Years Later, Two Different Tales of Grief for Sandy Hook Parents

By John Hendrickson

On the night of his daughter’s death, Robbie Parker remembered the Christmas cards. Back at home, hours after his 6-year-old had been murdered in her classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary, he thought about the portrait: he and his wife Alissa, posing with their three little girls, Madeline, Samantha, and Emilie. Alissa had mailed all the cards the day before.

Amid the shock and chaos, Robbie couldn’t stand the thought of their friends and family opening the envelopes and seeing Emilie, his deceased first grader.

Read the full article.

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Silicon Valley Heads to Mar-a-Lago

2024-12-16T20:17:00-05:00

The days of tech CEOs tussling with Donald Trump are fading. After distancing themselves from Trump during his first administration—and publicly rebuking him after the events of January 6, 2021—many Silicon Valley leaders are now taking a softer approach. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have each pledged, through their companies or their personal coffers, individual $1 million donations to Trump’s inauguration fund. The Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who protested Trump’s immigration policies in 2017, apparently dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, this month; Bezos, along with the the heads of TikTok and Netflix, are reportedly on the schedule there this week too. As Trump put it in a press conference today: “In the first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

Friendship may not be exactly what these tech CEOs are after. Self-preservation seems to be playing a role—these companies don’t want to lose out on government contracts or face retribution from a man known for threatening to punish his critics. For years, Trump was no friend to tech, and vice versa: During his first term, he used Twitter to lob insults at Amazon and its then-CEO Bezos. And as recently as this past summer, Trump was hurling unfounded accusations at Zuckerberg. Ambition is likely part of the calculus too; CEOs hope that Trump will go easier on the industry than the Biden administration did, including on crypto and AI. Now, as Trump prepares to take office a second time, tech executives seem eager to please the president-elect—and to start a new chapter in their relationship that elides the past.

Throughout Trump’s 2024 campaign, tech executives were privately speaking with Trump about their interests and policy preferences; after the election, the public congratulations quickly rolled in. Business leaders attempting to get on good terms with an incoming administration is not unheard of. But the machinations here are happening out in the open. As my colleague Ali Breland wrote last week, “Until recently, elites and politicians who worked together feared the scandal of the sausage-making process being revealed, and the public backlash that could come with it.” Now, with Elon Musk setting a new standard for blatantly self-serving political participation—including attempts to influence the outcome of an election—his peers are operating more brazenly than they once did. Beyond the tech CEOs who are donating to and hobnobbing with Trump, several prominent venture capitalists who stumped for Trump are now advocating for their fellow tech leaders to be nominated for roles in the Trump administration. The venture capitalist David Sacks, an outspoken Trump supporter, has been named the “A.I. and Crypto Czar” for the incoming administration. And of course, the vice-president-elect was once a venture capitalist too.

Donating to any president-elect’s inauguration fund is a standard way for corporations to signal goodwill. Some tech companies, including Google and Amazon, quietly gave relatively small amounts to Trump’s first inauguration fund, according to data published by OpenSecrets. Firms such as Google and Microsoft donated to President Joe Biden’s inauguration fund. And a seven-figure tech donation is not unprecedented—Microsoft gave more than $2 million to President Barack Obama for his 2013 inauguration. The flow of such large sums from multiple executives this year, Margaret O’Mara, a historian of Silicon Valley, told me in an email, is “both a reflection of the growth of inaugural spending generally” and “the surging profits and net worth of tech’s biggest names.” And the meetings with and warm statements from tech leaders who are donating this money signal a new chapter of cooperation between Big Tech and Trump.

The tech industry has always relied, to an extent, on the federal government, but its political allegiances have shifted. A free-market libertarian strain has long run through the region and industry, though in the 2010s, the industry cozied up to the Obama administration, a relationship that benefited both sides. During the first Trump term, the government-tech relationship became uneasy: Social platforms attempted damage control after blowback from employees and users who blamed them for Trump’s ascent to office (remember Zuckerberg’s national listening tour in 2017?). As Trump enters his second term having received close to half of the country’s vote, support for him may not risk that same level of public outrage: In many circles, the Trump taboo is over. As O’Mara put it, the social consequences of supporting Trump are lesser, and the business risks of crossing him are higher.

When Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago on the evening before Thanksgiving, he and other guests reportedly stood with hands over hearts while listening to a recording of the national anthem sung by people accused of January 6–related crimes. Whether Zuckerberg knew who the singers were is unclear. But the scene was uncanny given that January 6, when it happened, was a bright-red line for the tech industry. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch banned or suspended Trump, and companies such as Amazon paused donations to election deniers. Now, with the arrival of Trump 2.0, that red line has been erased entirely.

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At least two people were killed and several others were injured by a shooter at Abundant Life Christian School, in Madison, Wisconsin. The suspect, who was found dead, was a student at the school, according to the Madison police chief.
Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet. She wrote that Trudeau told her on Friday that he wanted to move her to another role in the cabinet, and that she disagreed with him on the best path forward in the face of Trump’s threat to implement new tariffs.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a vote of confidence; the country will face snap elections next year to form a new coalition government.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Pete Gamlen

What If You Just Skipped the Holidays?

By Faith Hill

For years, ahead of family holiday gatherings, Alicia Dudley would wake up anxious. Since she’d gotten married, her relatives and her husband’s had wanted them at multiple different celebrations for each occasion. Bundling up her small child and toting him about was a pain. Dudley, a creative director in Virginia, couldn’t believe that on her rare, precious days off, she was doing what she always did: running around.

Eventually, she made a simple but major decision—she quit the holidays.

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When a Shooting Spurs a Social-Media Cycle

2024-12-12T18:54:00-05:00

In the hours and days that followed the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, even before any information was known about the suspect, social media was flooded with speculation and opinion. When Luigi Mangione’s identity was made public on Monday, the digital trail he left behind—and the difficulties of tying him to a particular ideology or movement—only intensified the cycle of reaction. I spoke with my colleague Charlie Warzel, who covers technology, about how the past week played out online, and why social media rewards the urge to make meaning even in situations where it’s not readily apparent.

Lora Kelley: What made this particular event so suited for quick reactions online, even before we had much information?

Charlie Warzel: It is a shocking thing to watch a video of an anonymous person gun somebody down in the street in midtown Manhattan. It is even more shocking when you find out that the victim is powerful. Then it becomes shocking that the suspect escapes, and that he’s not immediately caught. It defies all these different types of expectations. There was an information vacuum, essentially, during the whole manhunt. All we knew for a few days was that someone was shot in cold blood, the shooter got away, and the victim was someone whose industry is reviled by many Americans. When something this surprising happens, people want it to mean something. As I wrote today, the internet abhors a vacuum.

Lora: Why are many people online so quick to try to form narratives about a given news event? Is that just a very human impulse that the online ecosystem exacerbates?

Charlie: The old conception of the internet was that it democratized access to information, and that seemed utopian. It was seen as a tool for sense-making. What we’ve learned and seen since—the dark side of all this—is that the internet is this place where we try to make meaning, even where it doesn’t yet exist. On social media, people start marshalling all the evidence to support different claims, before we know anything for a fact. The most dangerous time for the truth is in the moments right after something happens. When there’s not much information, people can exploit the gaps. That’s not new, and it’s not just an internet thing.

But on social media, after something genuinely shocking happens, you can see that machine in motion: the way so many people—reporters, vigilante investigators, politicians, people who run shops online making merch—jumped in. There is a vicious cycle here. People post takes. Then people post takes about the takes.

People are trying to make this event match with their understanding of the world. There were so many people who immediately jumped to: The fabric of society is fraying, or This is the beginning of a lasting movement. Social-media users tend to try to sort things into very strict political camps. So they say: Was the suspect a leftist? Was he a conspiracy-theory crank? Was he a political activist?

Lora: How did the discourse shift once the suspect was identified and announced?

Charlie: At least based on what we know so far, this suspect doesn’t seem easy to put into a box. In some ways, acts of partisan violence are more easy to sort ideologically: when the man who sent pipe bombs in the mail turned out to have a van covered in MAGA bumper stickers, for example.

There is a history of people sorting through the digital breadcrumbs of someone who has committed an act of violence, in order to understand what might have pushed them to do that. This suspect defied a lot of expectations. He had seemingly praised the Unabomber’s manifesto on what appeared to be his Goodreads account. But he also seems pretty interested in Peter Thiel. And at the same time, he didn’t have an extremely partisan online presence. So he doesn’t sort evenly into any camps. People online hate that kind of nuance and uncertainty.

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Today’s News

President Joe Biden announced that he will commute approximately 1,500 sentences for people who were released from prison and placed in home confinement under a pandemic-era law, and he will pardon 39 people who were convicted of nonviolent crimes.
The FBI did not station any undercover agents in the crowd during the January 6 insurrection, according to a Justice Department watchdog report.
A missing American man was reportedly discovered in Syria after being freed from a prison, where he was held for about half a year.

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The Virtuous Circle of a Happy Personality

By Arthur C. Brooks

You might assume that Beethoven, whose 254th birthday classical-music fans will celebrate this coming week, was a characteristically joyful man. You would be incorrect in that assumption. He was well known among his contemporaries as an irascible, melancholic, hypercritical grouch. He never sustained a romantic relationship that led to marriage, was mercurial in his friendships, and was sly about his professional obligations …

At the same time, he clearly saw—and regretted—the effects of his unhappy personality.

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The Trump Family’s Many Entanglements

2024-12-10T17:52:00-05:00

President-Elect Donald Trump is, in some respects, a family man. During his first term in the White House, his children regularly surrounded him, appearing in important meetings and at major public events. Ivanka Trump served in an unpaid advisory role to the president, along with her husband, Jared Kushner, and his two elder sons ran the family business while their father served in office.

Ivanka was notably absent during her father’s 2024 campaign, having retreated to a semi-private island in the Miami area with her family. And in 2023, Trump told Fox News’s Bret Baier that his family members would not serve in his administration should he return to the White House: “It’s too painful” for them, he said. But as he prepares for Inauguration Day, a new set of more distant family members is stepping in. Trump has already bestowed official positions upon the fathers-in-law of his daughters: Massad Boulos, Tiffany’s husband’s father, has been named a senior adviser to the president on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs, and Charles Kushner, father-in-law of Ivanka, was nominated to serve as U.S. ambassador to France.

Having family members serve in key government positions presents such clear opportunities for conflicts of interest that most government officials avoid it altogether. And there are legal barriers too: After President John F. Kennedy selected his brother for attorney general, Congress passed an anti-nepotism law in 1967 restricting presidents from appointing relatives to agency jobs. White House roles are still permitted, but most presidents don’t go near the line. Trump, however, happily did so in his first term.

Trump’s family benefitted from this arrangement. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in 2020, “Both the Kushner and the Trump families have tried to turn the White House into a vehicle for self-enrichment.” Jared Kushner, he argued, had become his father-in-law’s “most dangerous enabler” as he led some of the country’s pandemic-response strategies. What Kushner “lacked wasn’t competence, but the courage to challenge his father-in-law’s fantasies,” Foer wrote. In this case, familial appointments weren’t just unseemly; they hindered the government’s capacity to function well in a moment of crisis.

Trump’s potential entanglements extend beyond his family’s role in the White House to his businesses. After winning the presidency in 2016, he promised to avoid conflicts of interest introduced by his involvement in the Trump Organization, though he ultimately just transferred control of the company to his two older sons. The Trump Organization’s 2017 ethics plan said that it would restrict dealings in foreign countries. It is apparently not planning to do so to the same extent this time: The New York Times reported earlier this month that Eric Trump, who leads most of the Trump Organization’s operations, was preparing to limit deals done directly with foreign governments, but not to restrict deals in foreign countries altogether.

Eric has openly justified a looser approach, telling the Times that “the first term, we did everything imaginable to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and frankly, we got crushed anyway … We can’t just sit out in perpetuity, and I won’t.” (Donald Trump racked up some 3,400 conflicts of interest during his first term, according to a nonpartisan ethics watchdog.) In recent months, per the Times, Eric has struck deals in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Jared Kushner, who has said he will not return to an official White House role, in recent years has gone into business with the governments of Saudi Arabia (which contributed roughly $2 billion to his private-equity firm) and Serbia (with whom his firm plans to share profits from a hotel on the site of the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense).

Trump’s business interests have only gotten more varied and complex since his first term: Trump and his sons—including the youngest, Barron—helped launch a cryptocurrency project in the fall. (None of the Trumps is an officer of the company.) Trump’s social-media app, Truth Social, debuted on the public markets in March. Both welcome foreign investments. His team has waved away criticism, saying that Trump didn’t get into politics to make money and that he would follow ethics guidelines in his next term in office, but Trump has not promised to divest from his business interests, and the ethics code that his team issued last month for the transition period notably appeared to exclude restrictions on the president-elect himself.

Trump’s first term was rife with apparent and actual conflicts of interest. This time, it seems, there will be fewer constraints. And his loyal advisers and family members will remain disinclined to raise questions if he crosses ethical lines, given that many of them stand to profit—be it financially or politically—from his success. Writing shortly after Trump endorsed Lara Trump, the wife of his son Eric, for RNC co-chair earlier this year, my colleague David Graham noted that the president-elect ran both his companies and his White House by stocking them with questionably qualified “ultra-loyalists.” This approach, he wrote, helps “ensure that the only thing that matters, and the only person who decides, is Trump.”

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Today’s News

Luigi Mangione, who was charged with murder in the UnitedHealthcare-CEO shooting, is fighting extradition from Pennsylvania to New York.
Israel said that its air strikes have destroyed Syria’s navy. After ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government crumbled over the weekend, Israel’s forces entered Syrian territory for the first time in more than 50 years.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu testified in his corruption trial, which began four years ago. He is charged with bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, all of which he has denied.

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Work in Progress: Democrats have spent more than a decade tacking left on immigration to win Latino votes, Rogé Karma writes. It may have cost them the White House—twice.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Celebrity Machine Never Dies

By Michael Waters

Humphrey Bogart—best known as the swaggering nightclub owner from Casablanca and the scotch-slinging private detective from The Maltese Falcon—has been dead since the 1950s. But his legacy is big business. As the face of a fountain pen, a Gucci sweatshirt, and formerly a gin brand, he’s also just one of many celebrities who have been resurrected to sell products.

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