Mark Leibovich | The Atlantic

A 79-Year-Old Freshman Senator?

2026-03-16T07:00:00-04:00

“I’ll share my lipid profile with anybody!” Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, pledged to me.

These are the kinds of assurances that candidates make when everyone keeps harping on their age.

Mills, who is 78, is trying to dislodge Susan Collins, a spring chicken at 73, in Maine’s Senate race this fall. Unlike her Democratic primary opponent, the gun-loving ex-Marine turned oyster farmer Graham Platner, Mills does not have a dicey Reddit history or a recently covered-over Nazi tattoo. She is well-known in the state and has a tested political organization. And yet, in several recent polls, she has been trailing Platner.

One likely factor: If she is elected, Mills would be the oldest freshman senator in history. Platner, at 41, is a relative political infant.

I spoke with Mills on a recent Friday afternoon in the coastal town of Rockland. We were sitting in a quiet café, and I kept steering the discussion to her least-favorite topic.

“I feel bad asking all these questions,” I told Mills.

“No, you don’t,” the governor shot back.

Mills gives off the disarming sense of a secure soul undeterred by whippersnappers who toss around fancy words such as gerontocracy. “I’m too old to care,” she told a CNN reporter last month, which may or may not be a winning campaign message but struck me as sincere. She presents as younger than her years—still sharp of mind, a weathered workhorse whose energy showed no signs of flagging during a 13-hour day that included a speech to a craft-beer convention in Portland, visits to a food pantry and a chocolate factory in Rockland, a stop at a fishing expo in Rockport, and an evening house party in Waterville. At least judging by our day together, she seems to be personally acquainted with a large portion of Maine’s 1.4 million residents.

[Tyler Austin Harper: How ‘big tent’ are Democrats willing to go?]

Still, Mills has to appreciate why Democrats are so sensitive to matters of age these days. The story begins and ends with the fresh trauma of how a certain geriatric presidency ended up for them not long ago. Joe Biden has made this race “far more difficult for her,” Jessica Taylor, the Senate editor for the Cook Political Report, told me. When I spoke with Mark Brewer, the chair of the political-science department at the University of Maine, he said that Democrats simply “do not want to get burned by that again.”

Mills was reluctant to concede the point. Age, she told me, is less of an issue for voters in Maine, which happens to have the oldest population of any state in the country. Angus King, the state’s other senator—a three-term independent—was reelected in 2024 at the age of 80. “And how old is Bernie Sanders? Like, six years older than me?” Mills asked. “Are they asking him not to run again?” (For what it’s worth, Sanders, who is 84, headlined a massive Labor Day rally in Portland—for Graham Platner.)

“I come from hearty Maine stock,” Mills said. She mentioned her ancestry of potato farmers, fishermen, and stone cutters. Her mother lived to be 93. “You don’t stereotype people because of their hair color or their age or their gender.”

The governor’s point was that age affects people differently. “Good Lord, I’m not Joe Biden, for God’s sake,” she told CNN, her exasperation cracking through her stern Yankee demeanor. After Biden’s face-plant during his June 2024 debate against Donald Trump, Mills acknowledged that the president’s performance had been “difficult to watch.” Notably, she did not call for Biden to quit, as some other Democrats did, and instead reaffirmed her support for his reelection. But Mills told me that during a meeting between a group of Democratic governors and Biden around that time, she was among those who pleaded with him to step aside.

“He walked in the room. He said, ‘I’m running again. You’re stuck with me,’” Mills recalled. “That was sad.”

Maine was always destined to be one of the nation’s most fiercely contested Senate races of 2026. Collins, the only Republican incumbent on the ballot this year in a state won by Kamala Harris, has become a kind of white whale for Democrats. She has withstood several well-funded challengers over the years, even while Republicans have lost every presidential election in the state since 1988.

From the start of this election cycle, Mills was the preferred candidate of national Democrats. A two-term governor (now term-limited), she had won several statewide races and has been a fixture in Maine politics since the 1970s. She became an unlikely resistance heroine last February after Trump singled out her state during a speech to a group of governors at the White House. When he asked whether Maine would comply with an executive order that would bar transgender women and girls from participating in female sports, Mills stood up and ceded only that her administration would follow “state and federal law.”

“Well, we are the federal law,” countered Trump, who then threatened to withhold funding from the state.

“See you in court,” Mills replied.

The clip went viral, representing a rare show of backbone amid what had otherwise been a flaccid Democratic opposition after Trump’s return to office. See you in court appeared on hats and T-shirts around Maine. (The state wound up suing the Trump administration, which agreed to restore federal funding soon thereafter.)

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and a host of Democratic officials and donors urged Mills to challenge Collins, even though the governor would be 79 at the start of her Senate term. “It was tough,” she said of her decision. “I mean, I waited a long time.”

Maybe too long. While she deliberated, Platner splashed into the picture last summer: full-bearded, gravelly voiced, and straight out of Everyman casting. He exuded populist appeal and was seemingly designed in a lab as an antidote to Democrats’ ongoing alienation from working-class voters. The media devoured his story like a plate of fresh oysters.

Platner attracted big crowds, loads of cash, and, after a brief honeymoon period, plenty of controversy. First, a bunch of noxious social-media posts surfaced in which Platner had committed all manner of racist, sexist, and equal-opportunity offenses. Then came reports of Platner’s tattoo of a skull and crossbones—widely recognized to be a Nazi death’s head—inked across his chest. Platner claimed ignorance to the tattoo’s Nazi associations, and said he’d acquired it during a drunken bender with his Marine buddies in 2007. He has since gotten the insignia covered over.

Within weeks of his rousing debut, Platner became an object lesson in the perils of rolling the dice with an unvetted neophyte in such a crucial Senate battleground. Yet Platner’s support proved resilient. He has received endorsements from establishment Democrats, including three senators. Although Maine polls have traditionally been unreliable—Collins handily defeated then–Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon in 2020 after trailing throughout the campaign—Platner has led Mills in most surveys. Less than three months before the June 9 primary, he appears to have a good chance of upsetting the sitting governor.

The volume of attention that Platner has received has also had the effect of making him, by far, the primary topic of discussion in the race. “Platner comes on the scene out of nowhere, and all of a sudden, Mills is an afterthought,” Brewer, of the University of Maine, told me.

Or, at the very least, she has been reduced to a one-dimensional caricature—the “old-lady governor.” Mills is barely asked about what she has accomplished in her career: being the first woman district attorney in New England (“one of only two or three in the goddamn country”), the first woman attorney general in Maine, the state’s first female governor.

I asked Mills whether she’s sicker of being asked about Platner or about her age, which have become the two defining features of her campaign.

“Yeah, right,” she muttered, sounding resigned.

I took that to mean both.

One of Mills’s recurring promises is that, if elected to the Senate, she will serve only one term. This is perhaps an unusual pledge—If you vote for me, I will leave soon—but it’s also an obvious nod to the reality of trying to begin a second term at 85. Mills says she wants to be able to devote her energy to fighting Trump, without wasting time having to raise money and run for reelection.

The Senate places a premium on seniority, however. Why would Maine voters want to forfeit Collins’s tenure—and all the benefits it can bring the state—in favor of a freshman short-timer on the cusp of her eighth decade?

Also: “We’re going to have to spend a fuck ton of money six years from now on another open election?” asked Amanda Litman, a co-founder and president of Run for Something, which promotes young Democrats running for office. The group focuses on down-ballot races, and thus does not have a preferred candidate in the Maine Senate race. But Litman seems quite hostile to the idea of a Senator Mills.

“What a damning indictment of the Democratic Party establishment,” Litman told me, “that it couldn’t cultivate literally any other talent or any other leader to run against Susan Collins.” Litman did not say she thinks that Mills is unqualified—just that she is old. “Why does this poor woman want to become a United States senator in her 80s?”

I brought up the notion of ageism. Did that apply in this context?

“I’m not saying ‘Take these elected leaders’ and, like, ‘Take them out back and shoot them,’” Litman said. (Reassuring!) “No one is saying ‘Abuse them,’ ‘Punish them.’ No,” she added. “We’re saying ‘Retire or step aside.’”

On the afternoon that I met Mills, we walked through the Maine Fishermen’s Forum in Rockport, a three-day extravaganza for anglers, gear suppliers, and fish people of all stripes and scales. She chitchatted, hugged, and posed for photos with fans and non-fans alike, including with a woman in a See You in Court T-shirt. At one point, Mills paused to introduce me to some friends, and who should saunter over but Senator Angus King himself.

[From the March 2026 issue: The Democrats aren’t built for this]

“Is this lady bothering you guys?” King asked. Mills told him that she had been talking with me about some whale-related regulation they had worked on together.

I joked that, actually, all we had really been talking about was old age.

“I’m a year younger than Mick Jagger!” King volunteered.

“We went to the Rolling Stones together,” Mills told me.

“Two summers ago,” King said.

“Mick is what, 83 or something?” Mills asked. (Actually 82—which is just a number, anyway.)

“If he’s still rocking,” King said, “so are we, right?”

Mills then belted out a few lines from “Gimme Shelter.”

King mentioned that they bought matching sweatshirts at the concert. “I almost wore it today,” he said. “It’s got the tongue, you know?”

Mills told me that her decision to run for Senate reflects how existential this moment is. Trump, she said, is “taking a wrecking ball to the Constitution.” Never has the check and balance of the U.S. Senate been so important. And the incumbent she is challenging, she said, refuses to stand up to Trump.

“I’m the most qualified person to beat Susan Collins,” Mills said.

In fact, Platner is just as—or more—competitive than Mills in head-to-head polls against Collins. But, as Mills’s allies might point out, that competitiveness assumes that nothing new and damaging will come out about Platner. And if he is the nominee, you can be certain that Collins and the various entities working to elect her will spend tens of millions of dollars ensuring that Mainers get the most chilling impression possible of the tattooed oystermonger.

Mills is at least confident that nothing disastrous will surface about her.

“I don’t have a tattoo,” she promised.

I took the governor at her word on this. But has she ever been on Reddit?

“No,” she said.

Later, while I was writing this story, I returned to the matter of the governor’s lipid profile. Because Mills had vowed to share hers with “anybody”—and told me that her life was “an open book”—I figured that she would gladly release the results. But it was not so simple. Mills’s pledge, as it turned out, came with a condition: that she would release medical information only when “Graham Platner and Susan Collins agree to do the same,” Tommy Garcia, a spokesperson for Mills, told me. Otherwise, those lipids are sealed.

Sherrod Brown Is Grinding It Out

2026-02-25T12:00:00-05:00

Sherrod Brown can be hard to follow at times. He apologizes for his frequent rambles, parentheticals, and asides.

“I don’t think that’s what you came to talk about,” the former and maybe future senator from Ohio told me after a brief soliloquy about how much he enjoys Diet Coke. And also about his efforts to cut back on his intake of Diet Coke.

“It’s just, you know,” he wondered, “what’s in it, man?”

“I’m trying not to drink that shit,” he affirmed.

Brown was sitting in a Toledo coffee shop, having just finished a roundtable discussion about rising health-care costs. A small group of Ohioans had expressed all manner of concerns about how they would afford their medical bills, co-pays, and prescriptions. This was the kind of event that Brown used to do a lot of before he departed the Senate after losing reelection in 2024.

Now that he’s running again, Brown, 73, seems to be satisfying some pent-up appetite for these interactions. He is the same aggressively rumpled figure who was a fixture around the Capitol for more than three decades (seven terms in the House, three in the Senate), and around Ohio politics for five decades. He conveys the frenetic bearing of an over-caffeinated college professor happily returned from a forced sabbatical.

[Read: The Democrats’ biggest Senate recruits have one thing in common]

Republicans currently control the Senate 53–47, and Democrats are a long shot to pick up the four seats they need to take the chamber this fall. Brown is challenging Jon Husted, the incumbent who was appointed by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine to fill the seat vacated by J. D. Vance when he became vice president; Husted is considered a slight favorite to win in this now reliably red state.

Brown, however, represents a wild card on the national map: He is probably the Democrats’ best hope of flipping a seat that otherwise would likely stay Republican. Few, if any, candidates running this year have as consistent a record of appealing to what’s become a kind of holy-grail constituency for Democrats: the coveted “working-class voter.” Once the cornerstone of the party base, they have abandoned Democrats in droves over the past decade. Despite Ohio becoming more Republican during the Trump era, Brown has had more success getting elected in the state than anyone else in his party over the past 20 years.

While national Democrats are obsessed with finding leaders—ideally new ones—conversant in the language of affordability and economic insecurity, their garrulous guy in Ohio has been around forever, talking about just these things. From what I can tell, the major themes of Brown’s campaign in 2026 are pretty much indistinguishable from those of the 1990s and 2000s.

Brown told me he did not expect to run again this year, but found himself shocked at how quickly President Trump’s second term had devolved. He listed multiple factors: the parade of tech billionaires who were seated prominently at Trump’s inauguration, the “No Kings” protests against the administration, the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. What he didn’t mention is probably the most straightforward explanation for his campaign: wanting his job back.

“He’s definitely a grinder,” Tim Burga, the president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, told me. “Sherrod’s had the same haircut, the same voice, the same persistence on getting policy done,” Burga said. “He’s a policy guy. And where do you learn your policy bona fides? You learn them in a union hall, a community center, a senior center.”

Or a coffee shop in Toledo, which is where I met Brown on a gray day in December. Our discussion was part of a long-term project I’d been working on about the state of the Democratic Party. But Brown also seemed worthy of stand-alone treatment. After the roundtable, he pulled up a chair, and we talked for 32 minutes. I had many questions: how he viewed the electorate, how the mood of it had shifted, how Democrats might reclaim some semblance of their working-class coalition. Brown kept getting sidetracked with tangents and non sequiturs, on topics both momentous and random.

How did he enjoy his “gap year” out of the Senate? I asked.

“It’s not really been a gap year,” he protested. Gap year suggests time off, whereas these past months have in fact been extremely busy, he said. He went into minute detail about his week-to-week routine. Early last year, Brown’s wife—the former Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz—tripped over a clothes basket and broke her shoulder.

“I mean, she could function,” Brown said. But he had to chauffeur her each week from Columbus to her teaching job at Denison University in Granville. As he spoke, I happened to be drinking from a can of Diet Coke, which was what triggered Brown’s riveting ruminations on the subject.

“We always stopped at the mile marker 131 on I-71,” he told me. “And went to the same McDonald’s. And she got a fried-fish sandwich. And I went across the street and got an Arby’s roast beef.”

“We had large fries and Diet Cokes, and we did that for eight straight weeks,” he recalled fondly. “We always looked forward to it.”

[From the March 2026 issue: The Democrats aren’t built for this]

For the record, “McDonald’s french fries are the best in the world,” Brown told me. We were now down another fast-food cul-de-sac. “You know, I read somewhere that McDonald’s french fries in England have five ingredients. In America they have 20, because of our food-safety laws,” he said. “I want to check that out.”

Brown apologized for detouring off-topic again. He gestured to my can of Diet Coke.

“Do you ever drink regular Coke?” he asked me. Not that often, I said. He wondered why. “You don’t want the sugar, or you just don’t like the taste?”

I told him that I love the taste of regular Coke, but like the taste of Diet Coke, too. I mentioned to Brown that Trump apparently has a special button in the Oval Office that he can push whenever he wants a Diet Coke.

“How is that guy still alive?” Brown wondered. “Think about that.” He observed that Trump appears to have a terrible diet and is also “angry a lot.”

And yet, Trump is not only alive but probably as big a factor as any in Brown’s bid to return to Washington. As with many constituencies that propelled Trump’s victory in 2024, working-class voters now appear to be losing faith in the president for a number of reasons—one being that he seems way too focused on extraneous things (building a ballroom, seizing Greenland) that have nothing to do with their economic predicaments. And some of those voters might just be primed for a reunion with their old friend Sherrod Brown.

I asked Brown why he thought Democrats had lost so much credibility with blue-collar, lower- and middle-income citizens. In a historic flip of party identity, voters are now more likely to view Republicans as better attuned to the concerns of working-class people, whereas Democrats are more associated with affluent, college-educated elites. “From your perspective, what has that evolution been like over the years?” I asked.

Brown blew off my question. “I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it,” he said. “This might surprise you.”

It did surprise me. Brown started a foundation last year (not a gap year!) called the Dignity of Work Institute. He also wrote an essay in The New Republic titled “Democrats Must Become the Workers’ Party Again,” in which he declared that it would be “my mission for the rest of my life” to help Democrats reconnect with their working-class roots.

But it is perhaps another element of Brown’s appeal that he tends not to get bogged down in hifalutin theories or sociology (his Yale degree notwithstanding). He prides himself on being an unglamorous advocate, who has earned enough trust with enough voters to defy Ohio’s Republican trend lines. At least until he didn’t. Trump’s double-digit victory in Ohio over Kamala Harris in 2024 was too much for Brown to surmount, and he wound up losing to his Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, by 3.5 points.

“Without Trump on the ballot, Sherrod would have won handily,” Ted Strickland, the Democratic former Ohio governor, told me. Strickland said that Brown’s gritty approach to governance is well suited to Ohio at this moment. “He’s not terribly inspiring in his speaking style,” Strickland said. “But he is who he is. I’ve known him a long time, and he’s been terribly consistent over the years.”

Brown has a thing for certain words. “I love this word penultimate,” he told me. And he has a special fondness for the penultimate vote that he cast before departing the Senate last year, to help pass the Social Security Fairness Act, which significantly increased benefit payments to a host of public-sector workers. Brown was a co-sponsor of the bill, and said it has proved life-changing for 250,000 Ohioans.

“That’s what I live for,” he told me. “I worked on it for 10 years.”

An aide tried to nudge things along. “We’re running behind schedule, so we’ve got to get him out of here,” she interjected.

We would have had more time, Brown said, “if we didn’t talk about Coca-Cola so much.”

The Democrats Aren’t Built for This

2026-02-11T07:00:00-05:00

Ken Martin has one of those resting dread faces, as if he’s bracing for someone to dump a bucket of rocks on his head. His nervous eyes make him look chronically unsettled—which is probably appropriate for someone trying to run the Democratic National Committee these days.

“The political equivalent of being a fire hydrant” is how Martin describes his job, and then helpfully explains the image to anyone not grasping it: “You get pissed on by everyone.” This is a favorite line and recurring theme: the put-upon chairman, always being hassled by his easily triggered constituencies.

The first time he said this to me, the week before Thanksgiving, the triggered included Martin’s own employees. He had been dealing with a staff revolt following his November 12 announcement that the DNC would be ending its generous work-from-home guidelines. Everyone would be expected to return to headquarters full-time, Martin told his staff, starting in February.

This did not go over well. Thumbs-down emoji filled the Zoom screen. Employees pelted Martin with questions. He told me that he sympathized, but observed that most major public- and private-sector organizations had long since compelled their employees to return to their offices.

“If it’s unbearable and it’s a quality-of-life thing for you, I’m happy to help you find another job,” Martin said he told his staff. The complaints persisted.

“Shocking” and “callous,” the DNC’s employee union said of the chairman’s directive in a statement to The New York Times.

The squabble underscored how the Democrats can’t help but keep playing to a stubborn stereotype—a soft and pampered bunch, unwilling to make the gritty sacrifices (such as getting dressed) necessary to prevail in their “existential” campaign to save democracy.

“The Democrats treat their fucking people like kindergartners,” Sarah Longwell, a former Republican consultant who quit the party over Donald Trump, told me. Longwell can get exasperated by her new allies on the left. When I mentioned the DNC’s in-person-work kerfuffle, it set her off.

“Republicans are over here being straight-up mercenaries,” Longwell said. “Democrats give everybody Fridays off and talk about work-life balance.” She apologized for yelling into the phone. Democrats “are not built for when the fascists come,” she concluded.

Martin has invited similar doubts about himself. A former head of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, he won an election in February 2025 for the privilege of leading the divided, despondent, and destitute committee. He barely survived the summer after Politico received a leaked audiotape of a May 15 meeting in which an anguished Martin can be heard describing the toll of his job to DNC officers: “The other night I said to myself for the first time, I don’t know if I want to do this anymore.”

Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic
National Committee (Scott Olson / Getty)

But things were looking up. Martin and I were sipping Diet Cokes at the National Democratic Club, next to the DNC headquarters, on the south side of Capitol Hill. The place was bustling, even festive, for a late Monday afternoon. Assorted House members, Hill staffers, Democratic donors, and lobbyist types clustered around tables of drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Representative Gwen Moore of Wisconsin stopped by to say hello to Martin. Others waved as they passed our table, and a few congratulated him. It had been a while since he’d been congratulated for anything.

Despite Martin’s rough start in the job, the party’s spirits had brightened considerably after November 4, when Democrats scored double-digit wins in the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races. Although both candidates—former House members Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey—had been favored to win, their impressive margins, along with other overperformances by Democrats across the country, were viewed as hopeful signs for the 2026 midterms.

A veteran party apparatchik, Martin arrived in Washington just as Trump was returning to the White House. Even more than during his first go-round, Trump has enjoyed near-unanimous complicity from supine Republican majorities in Congress, as well as meek resistance from a dazed opposition. Martin, 52, is the harried face of this meek resistance.

I had been checking in with him periodically since the summer as part of my attempt to assess how the Democrats had managed to so thoroughly marginalize themselves. No matter how eager they were to resist Trump, they kept living up to their worst image as an overly sensitive, out-of-touch, and terminally online band of myopic and overindulged factions.

Martin himself has a knack for reinforcing these caricatures. Just as I was starting this project, he presided over the DNC’s summer meeting in Minneapolis to begin the urgent work of rebuilding the Democratic coalition and making the party palatable to American voters again. Soon after calling the assembly of more than 400 party officials to order, Martin relinquished his mic to a representative of the Saginaw Ojibwe Nation for the DNC’s “land acknowledgment” ritual. Switching between English and her tribal language, the Indigenous woman affirmed that Minneapolis had been stolen from its native Dakota Oyate Tribe (“the original stewards of the lands and waters”).

The interlude took only a minute or two but received outsize attention—and ridicule—as an example of how Democrats remain overly concerned with performative pandering to various small identity groups. “It is difficult to imagine more than a handful of people looking out over the current hellscape of U.S. policy and thinking to themselves: You know what we need to be sure to address today? The Dakota War of 1862,” Andrew Egger wrote in The Bulwark.

“What is Ken Martin doing?” the Democrats’ crank emeritus, James Carville, wondered aloud on his Politics War Room podcast. It is not the DNC’s job to right the well-documented wrongs of American history, Carville said. “It doesn’t exist to make people feel good. It exists—get this through your head—to win elections.”

I asked Martin if gestures like land acknowledgments were worth the trouble. He bristled. “I’ve always felt that it’s important to be an inclusive party,” he told me. This suggested that the land acknowledgments would continue.

“We’re not going to abandon who we are,” Martin said. “People can call it ‘woke’ as much as they want.” He disputed the notion that he was focused on anything other than winning in 2026.

“It’s all gas, no brakes,” Martin insisted. And imperative that “we do the work between now and November.”

Although it seems that many people at the DNC would prefer to “do the work” from home.

The DNC’s mini-mutiny over the return-to-office mandate ruined the brief elation of the off-year victories. Candidates running for office rely on massive numbers of volunteers, Virginia’s now-Governor Spanberger told me. They work their day jobs and then offer up their spare time because they believe in the cause. So it is not a good look for paid party staff to be talking publicly “about how hard it is to go into an office to get paid to do things that campaign workers do in their volunteer time,” Spanberger said.

But perhaps the deeper issue is that Democrats have historically focused too much on keeping their many constituent groups as happy as possible, sometimes at the expense of their principal goal: triumphing in elections so they can implement their policies. “First and foremost, Democrats need to get much more ruthless about winning,” Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan told me. This, she said, is not always compatible with the “weird consensus-based leadership” that their leaders tend toward.

As Trump has rampaged Caligula-like through his second term—draping federal buildings with massive likenesses of himself and renaming them in his honor; razing an entire wing of the White House; deploying masked agents to snatch brown-skinned people from sidewalks; running roughshod over constitutional norms, NATO, Minneapolis, and Venezuela alike—rank-and-file Democrats have shown a clear preference for Team Ruthless. Unleash the alpha dogs, they keep saying—the more rabid, the better.

“They want to win so fucking bad,” said Longwell, who has convened hundreds of focus groups across the political spectrum. Democratic leaders and political strategists need to understand that anything that does not lead to winning elections is extraneous, she said. “If you watch the DNC, you still see the pronouns on the name tags and the land acknowledgment at the start, and the voters are like, Get that stuff out of here.”

My assignment was to pick through the Democrats’ post-2024 debris. I wanted to see if this once-confident multiracial coalition of working-class men and women could somehow get itself together in time for the midterms. Could the Democrats make themselves a viable alternative to the bumbling but dangerous autocrats on the other side? Are they capable of regaining some measure of power, despite themselves?

Representative Jasmine Crockett, of Texas’s Thirtieth Congressional District, is running for the Republican John Cornyn’s Senate seat. (Michael Nigro / AP)

I traveled around the country and interviewed about four dozen Democratic candidates, elected officials, party leaders, operatives, and voters I met at rallies, town halls, and other gatherings. What I encountered was a political party on a search: for a winning message; for a fresh identity; for new leaders; for the elusive white knight, whatever that might look like. In the past, saviors have occasionally materialized, but rarely how a broken party imagined them. No one saw Barack Obama coming, sweeping in to define a winning coalition of Democrats in 2008. Nor, for that matter, did anyone envisage Donald Trump doing the same for Republicans eight years later. Fortunes can turn fast.

But Democrats have remained stuck in their funk for an unusually long stretch. For much of 2025, their doldrums felt much worse than the typical rough patch that parties endure after bad election defeats. They were staggered, self-pitying, and seemingly traumatized by the denouement of the Joe Biden years. They have wallowed and feuded.

They have also analyzed themselves to death. If sheer tonnage of voter case studies and white papers could rescue a party, Democrats would be set for years. My inbox overflowed with the latest theories on how Democrats had lost their way and what was needed to revive them. Dueling autopsies were produced by various advocacy groups.

“How Democrats Lost the White House,” from RootsAction, blamed party leaders. “The Working Class Project,” from American Bridge 21st Century, determined that the party’s traditional coalition of blue-collar voters has come to “perceive Democrats to be woke, weak, and out-of-touch, too focused on social issues.” “Deciding to Win,” a data-based dissection published by WelcomePAC, argued that as Democrats have moved left on issues such as crime and immigration, self-identified moderates and conservatives have abandoned the party. For good measure, the centrist group Third Way produced “Was It Something I Said?,” a guide to help Democrats avoid speaking “like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory enforcers of wokeness.” It included a handy compendium of 45 words and phrases (dialoguing, microaggression, stakeholders, LGBTQIA+) that the party should not use, because they create “a wall between us and everyday people.”

[From the April 2023 issue: George Packer on how banning words won’t make the world more just]

Of all the autopsy porn I luxuriated in, the most compelling was “How the Democrats Lost America: Making Sense of the 2024 Election and the Future of American Politics,” by Scott Ferson, a longtime Democratic campaign strategist. The exhaustive report—which will be published as a book in April—is based on more than 1,000 interviews that Ferson and his team conducted during the Trump and Biden years.

Ferson argues that in recent decades the Democratic Party has developed an “elitist problem” that has caused it to lose its connection to many Americans. The migration of low-income, non-college-educated voters to the GOP has accelerated: Scores of Black and Latino Americans joined Trump’s coalition in 2024. Recent research suggests a significant shift in how voters perceive the parties; more people now believe that Republicans best represent the interests of the poor and working class, while Democrats are coming to be viewed as the party of rich elites. (Ken Martin has called this reversal “a damning indictment” of the Democrats “that’s got to change.”) Recent presidential-election trends illustrate this turnabout. In 2012, Mitt Romney carried voters earning more than $100,000 a year by 10 percentage points; in 2024, Kamala Harris won them by four points. In 2012, Obama won voters making less than $50,000 a year by 22 points; in 2024, Trump won those voters by two points.

In his report, Ferson describes conversations he had with people in the districts in and around Canton, Ohio, which have been decimated by plant closures and job losses. “I think the Democrats’ message to people in Canton, Ohio, is You should move,” Ferson told me, adding that many Canton residents think Democrats feel superior to them and their hometown. His research also confirmed how effective conservative media have been in reducing Democrats to caricatures. “By the time we knock on their door in Pennsylvania,” Ferson said, quoting a line from the Democratic media consultant Joe Trippi, “we’re a pedophile space alien who created AI to take their job away.”

Shortly after Martin became chair, he announced that the DNC would be producing its own report on the lessons of 2024. He purposely called it an “after-action review” and not an autopsy, to emphasize that the party is “not dead.” That was reassuring.

Whatever they’re called, the various post-2024 analyses all posed the same unavoidable questions: How had the party lost the working-class voters who were once the backbone of its coalition? Would Democrats be better served by running more moderate candidates to court persuadable swing voters? Or by running more firebrand, populist types, who are better at creating excitement?

The off-year results of 2025 offered something for everyone. “Your task is going to be not to impose litmus tests,” Obama told a room of giddy Democrats during a live Pod Save America podcast a couple of days after the victories. “We had Abigail Spanberger win, and we had Zohran Mamdani win, and they are all part of a vision for the future.” But Spanberger and Mamdani, who won the New York City mayor’s race, were well situated culturally and ideologically for the very different electorates they were running in. It is hard to imagine the Democratic Socialist Mamdani winning a statewide race in Virginia.

In October, Democrats nominated Aftyn Behn, a Tennessee state representative and former progressive activist, in a special election for a U.S. House seat in a heavily Republican district in the Nashville area. Behn, who once described herself as a “radical” and campaigned with the very progressive Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, was portrayed by her opponent as extreme. She wound up losing by nearly nine points to the Republican Matt Van Epps. Though Democrats celebrated this as another overperformance (Trump had carried the district by 22 points in 2024), a more moderate candidate, one not nicknamed “AOC of Tennessee,” likely would have done better. “The problem is that the left just is unalterably dedicated to this proposition that if you are more radical, you will turn out more voters,” Matt Bennett, of Third Way, told Politico. “And it keeps being disproven over and over and over.”

But parties are stuck with whomever their voters decide to nominate. “We have to stop acting like we’re casting parts in a play,” Spanberger told me. “Like, Oh, this person should run in Virginia, or this person feels like a good Texas Democrat.” Candidates are going to run regardless of whether some political operative or professional opinion-haver thinks they’re sabotaging the party’s chances. And primary voters tend to vote for the candidate they personally prefer, regardless of whether that candidate has the best chance of winning a general election.

Consider the scenario playing out in Texas, where Representative Jasmine Crockett, an unrestrained liberal media magnet, is running for the Senate seat held by the Republican John Cornyn. Crockett’s gift for profane insult comedy aimed at Republicans has made her a celebrated sound-bite warrior on the left. But it is not clear that she would have a better chance of winning in red Texas than State Representative James Talarico, a 36-year-old former seminarian and aspiring minister, whose viral speeches have raised his profile, as well as a stunning amount of cash. Talarico’s faith and his relative political moderation could make him more palatable to Texans than Crockett in a general election. In January, an Emerson College poll had Talarico performing slightly better against Cornyn than Crockett in a general-election matchup.

But what if the main divide among Democrats today is not, as so many assume, progressive versus moderate? Slotkin told me that “Is it Mamdani or is it Spanberger? ” is “kind of an outdated approach.” The more consequential split, she said, is between leaders willing “to fight and go on offense” and those content to wait Trump out.

Since Trump’s reelection, Democratic voters have shown a strong preference for the former. They’ve also made it clear that they think their current leaders have been soft and timid. Seventy-one percent of Democrats and 78 percent of all Americans believe that the party has been ineffective in standing up to Trump, according to a June CBS News/YouGov survey. And 62 percent of Democrats say the party needs new leadership, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found, also in June.

If Democratic voters perceive a candidate to be principled and unrelenting, they have been more than willing to look beyond acres of red flags. Graham Platner, a gravelly voiced oyster farmer who is running for Senate in Maine to supplant the Republican forever-incumbent, Susan Collins, offers a case in point: Platner, a political neophyte at 41, spent much of his adult life in the combat thickets of Iraq and Afghanistan before pivoting to mollusks. His campaign started off like gangbusters in August, attracting huge crowds and millions in donations. Reporters flowed to Sullivan, Maine, for an audience with the burly oysterman (just as soon as they were done with the Jesus-loving Democrat in Texas).

Graham Platner, a Maine oysterman and controversial political newcomer beloved of the populist left, is running in the Democratic primary in hopes of taking on long-serving Republican Senator Susan Collins. (Sophie Park / Getty)

“My plan is to just bribe reporters with oysters,” Platner told me as he shucked a few fleshy ones from a cage he’d pulled in. It was a windy morning in early September, and we were out on the white-capped waters of Sullivan Harbor, near Acadia National Park. “Working-class populist” is how Platner described himself. “I’m a small-business owner. And I also own an immense amount of firearms.”

If this was a casting call, Platner nailed it: flannel shirts, weathered caps, a pro wrestler’s voice. “I’m a fucking oyster farmer from Sullivan, for God’s sake,” he told me at one point, which might as well go on a bumper sticker.

Platner seemed a far more compelling character than Maine’s 78-year-old governor, Janet Mills, the candidate preferred by the party establishment. To his excited supporters, Platner might just be the Democrats’ perfect populist insurgent for Maine.

Well, maybe not perfect. Okay, not at all perfect.

Like shellfish, political newcomers only stay fresh for so long before they start to smell. Old Reddit posts can surface. Such as the one where the candidate remarked that some white rural Americans were stupid and racist. Or the ones that were homophobic or misogynistic. Or the anti-police one. Platner, who called his Reddit comments “indefensible,” attributed the “dark feelings” reflected in them to his time in the infantry. Chairman Martin called the old posts “hurtful” but not “disqualifying.”

Next came a swell of questions about the large tattoo that Platner had on his chest, a skull and crossbones widely recognized to be a Nazi death’s-head. He claimed that he had been ignorant of the insignia’s Third Reich associations, and that he had gotten the ink done in Croatia following a drunken night out with his Marine pals in 2007. When the tattoo became a campaign issue, he hastily got it covered over.

It would be nice if Democrats could find a working-class-hero candidate who was not sullied by, say, a Nazi tattoo. But Platner’s early support has proved durable. His supporters blame the surfacing of his old comments on a smear campaign engineered by the establishment and the party’s rich patrons, who are scared of an unfiltered populist outsider who owes them nothing.

“I think he’s running a really good campaign,” Senator Bernie Sanders told me. “It saddens me very much that instead of engaging in a real debate about the future of America, we have some people in the Democratic leadership trying to destroy him.” Sanders said he believes that Platner “stands an excellent chance to be the next senator from Maine.”

As he navigated the choppy waters in his boat, Platner splashed from topic to topic. He talked about the finer points of oyster farming, his love of soccer and of Maine’s native osprey, how therapy had saved him after his return from combat, and various other things.

“I do love gays,” he said at one point. (Good to know!) “Somebody asked me where do I stand on LGBTQIA+,” Platner added.

“What does IA+ stand for?” I asked him.

“That’s actually a good question.”

Platner said that in an earlier speech, he’d just said “LGBTQ.” After thinking for a moment, he posited that the Q, I, and A stand for “queer, intersex, and androgynous.”

“But what’s the plus?” I asked.

“Everything else,” he said.

Platner’s broader argument is that although his campaign is focused on the “material conditions that people are living in”—hospital closures, housing shortages, affordability—he is not willing to compromise on social issues at the expense of vulnerable populations. “I don’t think there is any value, both morally but also politically, in selling people out,” Platner said.

His aide interjected with a correction: In fact, the A in LGBTQIA+ stands for “asexual,” not “androgynous.” The candidate regretted the error.

“It’s asexual, sorry,” Platner said. “It’s asexual.”

Though the Democrats may have been buoyed by November’s elections, it is hard to overstate how far the party had fallen.

At the start of August, the DNC had $13.9 million cash on hand, compared with $84.3 million for the Republican National Committee. A New York Times analysis found that from 2020 to 2024, Democrats lagged Republicans in new-voter registrations in all 30 states that track registrations by party. Polls kept drawing a bleak picture of the party’s popularity. Over the summer, Gallup measured the party’s approval rating at 34 percent, its lowest point since Gallup began tracking partisan approval ratings, in 1992; a Wall Street Journal poll had the Democrats at 33 percent approval; a CNN poll put their approval rating at a wretched 28 percent.

Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, who co-leads the Democrats’ candidate-recruiting efforts for the House, told me Democrats need to project confidence in their policy positions: “People respond to confidence, and they respond to strength.” But because Trump and the Republicans have been so effective in slapping extreme liberal caricatures on their opponents, Democrats are gun-shy. “We can’t be apologetic for our own positions, and second-guessing ourselves, and being weak and timid about it,” Crow said.

“I’ve never seen the party so unsure of itself, and so kind of lacking its own footing,” Colin Allred, the former NFL player and representative from Texas who lost the 2024 Senate race to Ted Cruz, told me. Allred, who is running for a Dallas-area House seat, described the state of the Democratic Party’s brand as “terrible.”

“We are living through hell right now, let’s be honest,” Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, told me. But McMorrow, a 39-year-old state senator and former bartender, sounded oddly buoyant, perhaps because she sees the 2026 midterm campaigns as a chance to clear out the old bones of the party establishment. The party “has not been prepared for this moment,” McMorrow said. “It is inexcusable to go on national television and say things like ‘Well, Democrats aren’t in charge right now, so we can’t do anything.’ Why would anybody vote for you?”

And yet, despite the Democrats’ abysmal approval ratings—and their repeated, self-parodying demonstrations of why they might deserve them—voters have shown a consistent preference for them in recent months. Since Trump took office, Democrats have flipped 25 state legislative seats that had been held by Republicans, while Republicans have flipped zero seats held by Democrats. For all their dysfunction and malaise, Democrats have this key dynamic going for them: The party in power tends to overreach, mess up, and then take most of the blame when voters get cranky. This is a far more reliable blueprint for a party’s resurrection than anything drawn up at a think tank.

True to form, voters have overwhelmingly blamed Republicans for what they see as a gloomy state of national affairs. Americans broadly disapprove of how Trump has handled the economy, immigration, and the cost of living—the three issues most responsible for putting him back in the White House. The Republican policy agenda has proved disastrously unpopular: A November Gallup poll put Trump’s approval rating at 36 percent, a low for his second term, and at just 25 percent among independents.

But none of this should be confused with a national wave of love for the opposition party. On the contrary, Democrats in Congress scored a particularly dismal 18 percent approval rating in a Quinnipiac University poll released in mid-December, a record low.

Yet the DNC apparently prefers to tune this out. The day after the Quinnipiac poll was published, Martin announced that the committee’s deep-dive review of the 2024 debacle would not be released after all. In other words, while the Democratic brand continued to flatline, the autopsy itself was declared dead in the cradle—this despite DNC officials having conducted more than 300 interviews and Martin having previously called the autopsy a crucial exercise.

I’d spoken with several Democratic politicians and operatives who hoped that the memorandum, which would benefit from the DNC’s resources and access to party officials, could be an important addition to the canon of wonkery. It could help determine, for instance, which candidate profiles would work best in certain districts and states, how much blame Joe Biden deserved for 2024, and what, if anything, Kamala Harris could have done differently. But what the DNC essentially declared at the end of 2025 was Never mind. Releasing the DNC report, Martin suggests, would distract from the party’s work. Martin also seemed intent on cramming as many buzz phrases (and banned words) as possible into his official statement about the decision to scuttle the project: “In our conversations with stakeholders from across the Democratic ecosystem, we are aligned on what’s important, and that’s learning from the past and winning the future.” He continued, “Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”

Here is Martin’s north star, based on his first year at the DNC: proceed with extreme caution and commit no microaggressions.

[Read: Democrats can’t stop talking about their problems]

Martin’s decision to bury the DNC’s findings invited suspicion and derision. Simon Bazelon, the lead author on the “Deciding to Win” project, told The New York Times that the aborted autopsy is sadly consistent with the Democratic leadership’s general penchant for complacency, risk aversion, and avoidance.

“It’s reflective of a broader problem within the party,” Bazelon said. “We are scared of ever making anybody in our coalition upset.”

“Democrats are pussies.”

Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona was on the phone, and I was telling him what I kept hearing about his party. Gallego, a former Marine and an Iraq War veteran, did not disagree. This was no surprise, because he has cultivated a reputation for bluntness, and the media have held him up as the Democrats’ ambassador to the regular-bro types who supported Trump by large margins.

Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona won by running as a “big-ass truck” Democrat in 2024. (Talia Sprague / AP)

During his winning Senate campaign in 2024, Gallego held events in boxing gyms and touted the appeal of a “big-ass truck” (apparently his attempt to buck the perception that Democrats drive only puny-ass Priuses and Jettas). Gallego is confident that none of the pejoratives affixed to Democrats—weak, feckless, timid—applies to him.

“I just called the president an idiot on national TV, so I’m not exactly the person to talk about it,” he told me.

Gallego, who is 46, prevailed in his Senate race despite a rough performance by Democrats nationally. Latino men supported him by 30 points, despite Trump carrying about half that group across the country. Everyone was asking who the Trump-Gallego voters in Arizona were, Gallego said. “A lot of them were just men who said, ‘Ruben Gallego is a fighter.’ ”

Or, not a pussy.

I intentionally used that word because I’d heard so many others use it to describe Democrats, typically while conveying how impotent their elected leaders have been in standing up to Trump’s serial abuses. “Yes, exactly, I totally agree,” Gallego said. But he was hesitant to be quoted using that word specifically, and he asked to go off the record.

Back on the record, Gallego told me he’d won in Arizona because those Trump-Gallego voters said, “Ruben is not a wussy like these other Democrats.” One could see why a politician would not want to utter pussy on the record, given its crass anatomical connotation (Gallego wussed out). These are sensitive times, after all, even for big-ass-truck-loving fight-fans.

Being a Democrat can be exhausting sometimes. So many considerations, so many shifting sensitivities and cancelable offenses.

Trump’s steamrolling of anything, including the Constitution, that might impede his authoritarian project has made the limpness of the Democratic opposition more conspicuous.

“What we’ve allowed to become normalized is completely deviant,” California Governor Gavin Newsom told me in the fall. “This is code red.” Newsom said that although he longs for the “When they go low, we go high shit,” this is no time for the usual political bromides and tactics. Democrats need to go beyond writing a concerned “op-ed that lands in The New York Times,” he added, which “we can retweet—to the 12 of us—and say how proud we are about our prose.”

Newsom said the Democrats need to get out of their own heads and enclaves and start acting with a desperation commensurate with the moment. If the Democratic Party remains weak, “we will get rolled,” Newsom said. “Weakness is the toxicity of our brand.”

Among nationally known Democrats, it is Newsom’s political standing that may have risen the most amid the dark Trumpian doings of 2025. The governor’s willingness to mock the president through aggressive social-media parody elevated him to de facto resistance leader. Given voter impatience with wimpy party leaders, a righteous showdown with Trump is not a bad situation for an ambitious Democrat to be in. Newsom was also willing, at great risk to himself politically, to counter GOP efforts to gerrymander red-state House districts. He blew up California’s nonpartisan redistricting laws and led a successful ballot initiative to redraw the state congressional map to favor the Democrats.

As I spoke with Newsom, I realized that pretty much everything he said was some variation of “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” Conversations with him on this topic tend to be a bacchanal of profanity and exasperation. “Wake the fuck up; wake the fuck up,” he kept saying. “This thing is being torn down.”

Newsom’s aggressive trolling of Trump has helped combat the long-standing view of him as a slick opportunist and has won him new admirers. “When people see someone fighting, they get really, really excited, and when they see someone folding, they get really, really demoralized,” Beto O’Rourke, the former representative from Texas and onetime presidential candidate, told me. “Gavin Newsom, who frankly I just wasn’t necessarily a big fan of before, I’m a big fan of right now. That guy’s a fighter.”

There’s a need for fighters, O’Rourke said, because Trump is now a “cornered animal”—one that happens to be “the most powerful animal in the country, who controls the House, the Senate, the White House, the Supreme Court, the National Guard, and has a secretary of defense who is in concert with him on using American cities as the training grounds for the military. So this is some dark stuff.”

I couldn’t help noticing that O’Rourke’s voice acquired a kind of dreamy cadence as he described the darkness. Nothing like a potential Armageddon for American democracy to get a graying former golden boy—he is now 53—excited. “It’s also this extraordinary moment,” O’Rourke continued, “where all of us who are alive today get this chance to save the country. We’re going to be tested in a way I don’t think you and I can even imagine.”

One recurring resentment among Democratic voters is the disconnect between the party’s red-alert anti-Trump rhetoric and the musty vehicles—Biden and Harris, as well as Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and the various other dust-gatherers—it keeps deploying to resist him. “People continue to say, ‘Oh my God, Trump is an authoritarian; the world’s going to end,’ all this stuff,” David Hogg, the 25-year-old gun-control activist and advocate for recruiting young progressive leaders, told me over the summer. Hogg, who had a brief and tumultuous stint as a DNC co–vice chair in early 2025, is contemptuous of the party’s lingering cohort of elder leaders.

“It’s like, ‘Okay, look who your members of Congress are: Some of them literally cannot stand for a press conference,’ ” he said. “You cannot credibly tell the American people that democracy is in danger and the world is ending, and the people that you are putting up on the front lines of fighting back against that genuinely belong in a nursing home.”

On that note, I headed to a Bernie Sanders rally.

“We are living in a moment that is unprecedented in the modern history of this country,” Sanders roared. The socialist senator from Vermont was speaking to a packed theater of about 3,000 people in Wheeling, West Virginia. “We have got to act in an unprecedented way in response.”

Sanders, who turned 84 in September, seems to have earned immunity from the party’s anti-gerontocratic agitators. When I saw him this past summer, he was making a stop on the Fighting Oligarchy tour, which has consistently drawn fiery hordes across the country. At times, he’s been joined by Democratic Socialists of America luminaries such as Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez. The three of them filled a stadium in Queens for a raucous rally in October, which featured chants of “Tax the rich.” Two of the Senate candidates drawing the most enthusiasm from the left—Platner in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan—are Sanders acolytes.

These days, the far left is attracting a lot of the party’s money, media attention, and crowds. But whether this energy on the left represents the Democrats’ path to restoration or to electoral doom depends on whom you ask (or which white paper you read). A remarkable 66 percent of Democrats say they have a positive view of socialism, compared with only 42 percent for capitalism, according to an August Gallup poll.

Sanders strolled onstage in Wheeling to protracted applause and chants of “Bernie!” “I was told that West Virginia was a conservative state,” Sanders said as he hunched over a small podium. It was certainly a Trump state: The president won 70 percent of the vote there in 2024, his second-biggest margin in the country, behind Wyoming.

But West Virginia is a proletarian locale that until not long ago was a Democratic stronghold. Bill Clinton carried it twice in the ’90s; in 1988, it was one of the 10 states that Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis won in his otherwise thumping defeat at the hands of the patrician George H. W. Bush.

“We are losing working-class voters—the core of our coalition since the New Deal—to a corrupt billionaire with a gold toilet,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former top Obama adviser, wrote in his Message Box newsletter. A critical mass of working-class voters has deemed said gold-toilet user to be their kind of tough; they like that he professes to fight for them, and they don’t care that he fights dirty.

A lot of working-class voters prefer Trump, Graham Platner told me, because they believe he intuitively understands that they feel screwed by the world, just as Trump—the billionaire president—himself does. But running against a “rigged deal” was once the main Democratic message. Sanders had been delivering it for decades before Trump came along; the Fighting Oligarchy speeches are essentially the same ones Sanders has been giving for five decades. What’s happening in America today, Sanders declared, with several million working-class people at risk of losing their health care, is an acceleration of what has gone on for half a century: Life gets better and better for the wealthiest Americans—and worse for everyone else.

“You know what happens when people can’t go to a doctor when they need to?” Sanders asked the crowd.

“They die!” the crowd responded.

Keep hope alive this is not. But the audience was on its feet and in full frenzy as Sanders revved up his rhetorical bus and set his sights on … Kamala Harris. Why had she lost?

“One of the reasons,” Sanders said, “is she had too many billionaires telling her not to speak up for the working class of this country.”

The line drew the loudest cheer of the evening.

A big thing for Democratic politicians these days is to swear a lot, as if by appearing pissed off and profane, they will show how raw and real they are. Since February 2025, they have sworn more often than their Republican counterparts, according to a Washington Post analysis of social-media posts and public remarks. (The big wins, they just keep piling up for the Democrats.)

One detects in this penchant for profanity a whiff of overcompensation—an effort by Democrats to prove that they can talk working-class. Ken Martin says that the party needs to stop being so cautious. “The problem we have as Democrats is we throw a punch, and then we pull it back,” he told me. “We don’t want to get canceled by someone in our party.” I was eager to test this proposition, given that Martin is steeped in the cautious language of the Democratic big tent; God forbid he ever utter something hurtful or make someone feel (double God forbid ) unsafe or triggered.

So I asked Martin: What about Biden? Specifically, his fiasco of a presidential campaign. Didn’t he wait too long to bow out, and wasn’t it dumb for him to have run in the first place?

“It’s an academic exercise,” Martin said, ducking the question. “Do you have a time machine?”

I do not.

“The point is,” Martin continued, “we don’t know for sure whether he should’ve or shouldn’t have, and we can’t change it.”

“He was too old,” I said.

“What I’m interested in are things that will inform the next election.”

A few minutes later, Martin was back to talking tough about the importance of speaking freely and not caring about whom he antagonizes.

“I don’t give a fuck who I offend,” Martin declared.

Except Biden, I noted.

“Listen, that has nothing to do with offending him or not,” Martin said. He reiterated that he is not in his job for glory. “All you do is get pissed on all the time,” he reminded me.

I was struck by how often Biden came up in my conversations with Democrats around the country. Specifically, people mentioned that his refusal to step away despite his obvious decline—and the refusal of Democratic leaders to acknowledge this decline until it was too obvious to ignore—was a betrayal that the party has yet to reckon with or recover from. “If their line was As long as the president’s not senile—I just have a higher bar than that,” James Talarico said.

James Talarico, a state representative and former seminarian running for Senate in Texas, believes that the Democrats’ struggles give them a chance to redefine themselves to be more broadly appealing. (Greg Nash / Getty)

“When you tell people that the thing that they are seeing isn’t true,” Graham Platner said, “they’re going to stop fucking believing you. Because you’re obviously lying.”

The lie has become a proxy for distrust of Democratic leaders on issues across the board. It’s a big reason Democrats have lost significant ground with a constituency that was once solidly theirs—the youth vote. “When we told them the president is too old, they told us, ‘No, he’s not; look how strong he is,’ ” David Hogg told me.

To his supporters, Trump approximates what “strong” looks like and what a “man” looks like (and even what a “strongman” looks like). Despite his constant whining and incessant lies, Trump embodies for his base blunt honesty and brutish masculinity.

Let’s pause for a second to appreciate the richness of the irony here: Nearly every elected Republican in Washington who is not named Trump has allowed himself or herself to be effectively neutered by him. Republican “leaders” might fashion themselves as a pack of alpha dogs, but in fact they have proved themselves to be a pack of panting poodles. “They love to call us cucks,” Ken Casey, the lead singer and bassist for the punk band the Dropkick Murphys, told The Atlantic this past summer. “Which I find ironic because there’s a good portion of MAGA that would probably step aside and let Donald Trump have their way with their significant other if he asked.”

Ruben Gallego said that “if I was bullied as much as these Republicans are by President Trump and his followers, I would be so ashamed to see my family.”

The gap between how Trump is perceived by some Republicans (strong and confident) and his actual persona (overwrought and histrionic) is large. “He has built this sort of whole infrastructure around assuaging an insecurity that he has,” Abdul El‑Sayed, the Senate candidate from Michigan, told me. “He is so fragile that he builds this simulacrum of strength.”

I asked El‑Sayed what he meant by that. “It looks strong, and it’s enforced by other people thinking it’s strong,” he explained. “But if you actually got in a physical fight with Donald Trump, you’d kick his ass.”

For the record, El‑Sayed, who is 41, looks like he could kick most people’s asses, certainly mine. A former high-school wrestler and football player, he attended the University of Michigan, and then Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship; he was later appointed executive director of Detroit’s health department. He ran for governor in 2018, losing in the Democratic primary to the eventual winner, Gretchen Whitmer.

We were sitting in a café not far from El‑Sayed’s home in Ann Arbor. Fresh from his Saturday-morning workout, beads of sweat on his forehead and massive arms bulging through a tight black T-shirt, he was sipping a weird energy concoction containing espresso and wheat germ or something. El‑Sayed speaks bluntly about the need for a more muscular Democratic Party that fights harder, shows less mercy, and refuses to cede “masculinity” to the cartoonish version modeled by a president who plans to host an Ultimate Fighting Championship bout next summer at the White House. “If they go low, we don’t go high,” El‑Sayed told the crowd at a rally with Sanders that day in Kalamazoo. “We take ’em to the mud and choke ’em out.”

El‑Sayed is one of the many Democratic candidates and officials I spoke with who readily acknowledged that their party has been actively, albeit inadvertently, repelling men. “Every time you heard the word masculinity in Democratic spaces, it was always preceded by a particular adjective—toxic,” he said. “And if you condemn a whole group of people as toxic, don’t expect them to be like, Yeah, I want to be part of that.”

“When we say ‘The future is female,’ I get where that’s coming from,” Talarico told me. “But to a young guy, that kind of sounds like the future is not for them.”

It was the middle of October, and Talarico and I were talking in the lobby bar of a hotel in Arlington, Texas. Part of his political momentum has been grounded in novelty—Look, Democrats have found a guy they think can talk to Christians in Texas—but Talarico is legitimately talented. Even though he is in many ways more moderate than his primary opponent, Jasmine Crockett, if Talarico wins the nomination, Republicans will inevitably do what they’ve become so adept at: turn him into a one-dimensional embodiment of a radical Democrat and make the race a referendum on “woke” pronouns, DEI, and transgender issues.

Talarico might be especially vulnerable to this because of a remark he made in 2021, during a legislative debate. “God is nonbinary,” Talarico said, in a video clip that resurfaced this past fall. (Josh Barro, a political commentator who left the Republican Party in 2016 and is now a centrist Democrat, promptly weighed in with a Substack essay titled “The First Step to Winning Back the Senate: Don’t Nominate Anyone Who Said ‘God Is Non-Binary.’ ”)

When I mentioned to Talarico that statements such as “God is nonbinary” could present a problem for him, he said he thinks Republicans would have a much harder time turning his race into a referendum on divisive cultural issues in the way they did in 2024, because the dominant issues of 2026 will be the economy and the cost of living. “We’re always focused on what happened in the last election,” Talarico said. Especially, he noted, the stream of out-of-town reporters in their shiny new cowboy boots. Talarico said he can predict what the national press is going to ask: “It’s trans athletes, the ‘God is nonbinary’ thing.” (I felt seen. Or exposed.)

Focusing on cultural issues would be akin to “fighting the last war,” Talarico concluded, perhaps wishfully. But Spanberger’s campaign in Virginia last year provided validation for this. More than half of Republican ad money in her race was spent on anti-trans themes. “The attack ads were trying to do some sort of othering, right?” Spanberger told me. “It worked with Harris, and so then they presumed it could work with me.”

It didn’t. Spanberger figured—correctly—that every ad Republicans ran “talking about a bathroom, or trying to vilify kids, was a moment that they weren’t talking about the economy.” A poll conducted in the final weeks of the campaign found that transgender issues in schools were the top concern for only 4 percent of voters.

Talarico argued that Democrats should not curse the uncertainty they have endured, or treat this period as pointless. “There’s an opportunity here to redefine the Democratic Party,” he told me. “And you can’t do that if the brand is super set, or if there’s a strong leader at the top of the party.” This, he said, should excite anyone who wants to see the party grow and evolve. “The wilderness is where new ideas and new leaders and new movements come forth.”

As Talarico and I talked, a woman from the hotel front desk approached our table to warn us that a coyote had been spotted on the patio earlier. She showed us a picture of the creature on her phone, and we assured her that we would be careful.

Talarico remarked that the nasty interloper would provide good color for my story, and then recalled the time that former Governor Rick Perry had encountered a coyote while running outside Austin—and shot it dead.

“He jogs with a gun” was Talarico’s takeaway.

You never know what you’ll come across in the wilderness.

Although quantifying morale and momentum is hard, by the end of 2025, the Democrats were enjoying an upturn in both. Their message felt more focused, and their resolve stronger, than it had in a long time. Those off-year election wins helped, and so did Trump’s ongoing obfuscation of the Jeffrey Epstein files, which gave Democrats a righteous fight to engage in.

The president helped by continually serving up gold-plated symbolism: He demolished the East Wing of the White House so he could build a $400 million ballroom, and threw a Great Gatsby–themed party at Mar-a-Lago in the midst of a protracted government-shutdown fight that jeopardized health-care subsidies and SNAP benefits for tens of millions of Americans.

Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia governor’s race in November by an impressive margin, giving hope to the beleaguered Democrats. (Bloomberg / Getty)

At the same time, Trump’s National Guard deployments and immigration-enforcement offensives in Democratic-run cities became more aggressive—and more unpopular. Social media served up a daily video deluge of heavily armed agents randomly manhandling dark-skinned people. Opposition to these incursions catalyzed a more determined resistance than Democrats had shown before. Trump’s approval ratings on immigration, which had been his strongest issue, have tanked.

In early November, I traveled to Chicago, the first midwestern blue city Trump had targeted for his immigration crackdowns. J. B. Pritzker, the Illinois governor and a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, found himself in an ongoing Chicago beef with federal authorities, trying to serve as resistance leader against Trump while keeping a volatile situation from exploding in America’s third-largest city.

The president had recently called for Pritzker to be jailed—a status symbol among high-profile Democratic governors who might run for president. (Pritzker and Gavin Newsom could wind up sharing both a jail cell and a debate stage.) I visited him on a sparkling fall day in Chicago. Or, as Trump called it, a “war zone” and “the most dangerous city in the world.”

[Read: J. B. Pritzker’s dark visions]

At the time we spoke, Pritzker had been urging citizens to blow whistles when they saw federal agents in the area so potential targets could flee. (Really? I thought. Has it come to this? ) He was spending his days fielding insults from the president (the sturdy governor endured a lot of fat jokes) while suggesting that Trump himself was “suffering dementia.”

A former venture capitalist and an heir to the Hyatt-hotels fortune, Pritzker kept spitting out dire admonitions. He predicted that the presence of Trump-controlled security forces in Chicago and other cities might foreshadow federal tampering with the 2026 elections. “I think that all the pieces of something nefarious seem to be occurring, and I’m just putting the pieces together,” Pritzker said. “I’m hopeful I’m wrong, but I don’t think we can assume that I’m wrong.”

He was disappointed that it had taken so long for a robust resistance to Trump to coalesce. “My complaint is not about regular folks,” Pritzker said. “What I’ve been frustrated by is people who hold leadership positions. And I’m not talking about elected Democrats only. I’m talking about CEOs of companies. I’m talking about boards of universities. I’m talking about people who have influence, who have the ability to stand up, but are afraid.”

Pritzker talks a lot about Nazis. He does not hesitate to compare Trump’s authoritarian gambits to the rise of the Third Reich. A descendant of Jewish refugees whose family fled Ukrainian pogroms, Pritzker was talking like this even before the Chicago raids. In February 2025, he gave a speech about how “it took 53 days for the Nazis to tear down a constitutional republic,” he told me. “Authoritarianism happens fast.”

Pritzker is a billionaire—not exactly a beloved species among Democrats these days. Other than Trump and his court-flatterers, billionaires are probably the most agreed-upon class of boogeyman that Democrats have. In his 2018 run for governor, Pritzker said, one challenge was “overcoming” that.

“Overcoming being a billionaire?” I asked.

This seemed to irritate him. “In a Democratic primary,” he said, yes. He asked me to consider the challenges he’d surmounted in running for governor two years after Bernie Sanders had gotten half the vote in the Illinois Democratic primary with a “Billionaires are evil” message. Pritzker had weathered his billionaire status to defeat Republican Governor Bruce Rauner. If he ran for president in 2028, Pritzker said, he would have to face that “obstacle.”

Pritzker said he’s proud of the fact that many of Sanders’s 2016 supporters in Illinois have become strong supporters of his, despite his wealth. Like Newsom, Pritzker exemplifies how using competence and combativeness against Trump plays well with constituents—and can wipe out all kinds of political deficiencies.

While in town, I stayed at the Hilton Chicago, a 1,544-room landmark, built in 1927, on South Michigan Avenue. The hotel overlooks Grant Park. The last time I’d been there was 2008, when I covered Obama’s Election Night rally, one of the most unforgettable experiences of my career. The wholesome pride in Chicago was palpable that night: hometown pride and American pride, as well as a strong sense—or illusion, it turned out—of national unity. The Ethiopian cabdriver who drove me to O’Hare the next morning kept bursting into tears because, he said, he never expected that the people of his adopted country would elect a Black president.

Obama’s ascendancy that night also represented a 21st-century high point for the Democratic Party. Hope, change, all of those things. (As well as the racial backlash, prominently abetted by Trump.) That was a long time ago, and feels longer. The arc of the moral universe is complicated.

My last stop on the tour was a café in Toledo, Ohio, about two weeks before Christmas. Former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown was hosting a roundtable featuring seven Ohioans sharing stories about the financial pain that bloated health-care costs had inflicted on their families, compelling them to scale back their medical care.

One after another, the participants described, at times tearfully, how their struggles had been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s policies, especially the so-called big, beautiful bill that Republicans passed over the summer.

This was a classic Democratic campaign event, centered on the party’s most solid policy terrain—health care. It was also classic Sherrod Brown, a now-rare breed of working-class progressive who had managed to get himself elected three times to the Senate and seven times to the House, in a state that veered to the right during the Trump years. Brown, 73, finally saw his luck run out in 2024, when he lost his campaign for a fourth term to Bernie Moreno, a MAGA disciple.

When he lost, he assumed that his political career was over. “I really was not going to do this again. My wife didn’t want me to do it again, and my kids didn’t want me to do it again,” he told me. But when Trump returned to office and started wreaking even more havoc than he had in his first term, Brown saw an opening. He is now running for a seat held by a Republican incumbent, Jon Husted. “I’m going to win this race because the state is so different,” he said.

“Different from what?” I asked.

“Different from what it was last year,” Brown said, when Trump 2.0 was more popular, the Democrats were a mess, and it looked like Brown’s brand of nuts-and-bolts liberal politics was cooked. Now Trump is so much less popular that the abiding Democratic disarray might not matter.

I wanted to end this journey with Brown because he is not flashy or a media magnet or a handwringer or (bless the man) someone who gets hung up on white papers about why Democrats are adrift. He is simply seizing an opportunity the Republicans have handed him: Large majorities of voters are losing patience with Trump.

Last year, James Carville was criticized in some circles for his argument that Democrats would be best served by staying out of the way, suppressing their penchant for self-harm, and simply waiting for Trump and the Republicans to self-immolate. Which is essentially what they’ve done. Carville’s theory was and remains controversial—his critics point to the lasting damage Trump has inflicted everywhere since his rapacious return to office while the Democrats have looked on haplessly. But as the 2026 midterms approach, Carville’s advice seems likely to be vindicated.

Essentially: Do no harm, strive to remain at least in the ballpark of “normal,” and bank on one huge built-in advantage—opposition parties typically do well in midterms. Also, the past 10 years have shown repeatedly that Republicans vote far less reliably when Trump is not on the ballot. Finally, for all the blundering, there remain just two viable political parties in the United States, and the Democrats are still one of them, despite themselves. No party wants to “lose America,” as the white papers put it. But when the other side is destroying it, there are worse things to be than the alternative.

This article appears in the March 2026 print edition with the headline “Why Do Democrats Hate Winning?”

Trump’s New Method of Humiliation

2026-01-31T07:00:00-05:00

When a conspicuous presidential project goes awry—in this case, federal immigration agents killing two protesters in Minnesota—someone typically loses their job. And for much of this week, Kristi Noem’s deportation from the Trump administration seemed imminent.

Public confidence in the president’s handling of immigration has been plummeting. And as the secretary of Homeland Security—and the ostentatious face of President Trump’s high-profile ICE and Customs and Border Protection dragnets—Noem has seemed the logical sacrifice. Washington loves a good Cabinet deathwatch, just as Trump loves a good public expulsion. Or at least he used to. By this point in his first term, his “You’re fired” bit had migrated seamlessly from TV to politics: His White House had already bled out a national security adviser (Michael Flynn), press secretary (Sean Spicer), chief of staff (Reince Priebus), chief strategist (Steve Bannon), and secretary of Health and Human Services (Tom Price).

But in what can perhaps be called a minor upset, Noem was still in her role by week’s end. Instead, she had been left to twist very publicly in the wind. In a sense, this marks a subtle shift in Trump’s humiliation methods. Rather than firing officials outright—in a quick and relatively straightforward directive, or a tweet—he now seems to prefer sowing public doubt and maximizing attention upon the ultimate decider of someone’s fate: that person, of course, being himself.

[Read: Battles are raging inside the Department of Homeland Security]

For those wearing the putative target on their back, this can surely be agonizing. But Trump seems to rather enjoy this dance. He gets to be puppet master for the whole spectacle—dropping hints, leaving everybody guessing and at his mercy—and all without the hassle of having to find a replacement.

At certain points in his second term, various Cabinet secretaries have allegedly been on the outs but then managed to survive. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s name has circulated, especially since Trump sent her a direct message in September—and then accidentally posted it on Truth Social—urging her to be more aggressive in targeting his political enemies. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth survived a near miss last year after a group of high-level national-security officials erroneously added The Atlantic’s editor in chief to a private Signal group chat, where Hegseth shared military attack plans. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz was replaced over the episode but still wound up remaining in Trump’s Cabinet as ambassador to the United Nations.

The lack of high-level turnover in this White House says plenty about the nature of this Trump administration compared with the first. Whereas his previous term included several relatively experienced and responsible actors willing to disagree with the president, Trump consciously assembled a collection of hyper-loyalists this time around, people focused wholly on carrying out his wishes. Ultimately, if Trump sees a top aide as fulfilling that mission, he has been willing to overlook many shortcomings and embarrassments. He is also, clearly, trying to adhere to a “no scalps” rule, loath to be seen as bowing to pressure from anyone or giving his opponents any satisfaction.

For as much as he relishes his public perception as a tough-guy boss, the last thing Trump seems to want is friction from his underlings. And at least so far this term, he has tended to reward their overheated devotion with loyalty, up to a point. “I think she’s doing a very good job,” Trump said of Noem as he departed the White House on Tuesday for a trip to Iowa. His dutiful tone was reminiscent of a sports-team owner issuing a vote of confidence to a coach suffering through an extended losing streak.

Noem’s slow walk down the Cabinet plank started last weekend, when a 37-year-old ICU nurse, Alex Pretti, was fatally shot by CBP officers in Minneapolis while he was protesting Trump’s immigration crackdown in the city. Noem immediately labeled Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and claimed, without proof, that his goal was “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” Noem’s performance did not play well, especially after videos of the incident contradicted her version of events. The White House distanced the president from her claims. A bacchanal of blame-shifting ensued.

In a statement, the White House immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller suggested that CBP—overseen by Noem’s department—might not have been following proper protocol, and that the initial assessment from DHS about the incident was based on reports from CBP on the ground. Border Patrol’s battering-ram commander, Gregory Bovino, was pulled out of Minnesota, and Trump dispatched his bull-necked “border czar,” Tom Homan, to take over operations there. My colleagues Michael Scherer and Nick Miroff reported this week that some career DHS officials “see Noem’s approach as ad hoc, performative, and possibly motivated by her own political ambitions.” According to an account in Axios, Noem has said, “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen.”

In announcing Homan’s assignment in Minnesota, Trump said Homan would report directly to him, not Noem. Homan held a news conference Thursday morning in which he said, “I didn’t come to Minnesota for photo ops or headlines,” which was impossible not to construe as a shot at Noem and Bovino. Noem’s zeal for photo ops in over-the-top military-style getups has been well established and widely mocked—and earned her the somewhat sexist nickname “ICE Barbie.”

[Nick Miroff: Greg Bovino loses his job]

Even as she has been sidelined, Noem has remained the majordomo of the debacle. Democrats have pushed for her removal and threatened her impeachment. Republican Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have also called for Noem’s resignation. “She has taken this administration into the ground on an issue that we should own,” Tillis told reporters, referring to the issue—immigration—that arguably got Trump reelected. Trump dismissed Tillis and Murkowski as “losers,” and Tillis, in turn, said that he was “thrilled” by the characterization, because it meant that he, too, was “qualified to be Homeland Security secretary.” “I continue to tell the president you’ve got to get the amateurs out of the Oval Office for his own sake,” Tillis told Politico, referring to Noem and Miller.

As is customary when any White House official faces heat, discussion of potential replacements has been rampant. “It is my informed opinion that Kristi Noem should go and Tom Homan should take her place,” the informed-opinion-haver Ben Shapiro said on the Daily Wire’s The Ben Shapiro Show. Also receiving speculation (informed or otherwise): former Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, and former Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah.

On Thursday, Trump convened a Cabinet meeting that featured the cringey exercise of top officials taking turns slathering praise upon the boss. This, at the very least, offered Noem the chance to show proof of life, as well as to grovel her way back into the president’s good graces. It also, in theory, allowed Trump the opportunity to toss some much-needed affirmation her way.

But it was not to be. Trump never called on Noem to speak. Like in Minnesota, it can get cold in Washington.

The Old Guard Is Not Gone Yet

2025-11-21T09:00:04-05:00

Here’s yet another indication that Washington has been turned upside down in recent years: I saw Rachel Maddow at Dick Cheney’s funeral and didn’t give it a second thought. She was sitting with Anthony Fauci, in the same row as James Carville.

Such is life—and death—in the Trump years. You never know who will show up to pay respects at gatherings of this sort, or what odd alliances and strange bedfellows will reveal themselves. Who gets invited and who doesn’t? Whose attendance will Donald Trump take as an act of disloyalty, or treason? Wait, didn’t that one die during the Obama years?

This was one of those pre-Trump Washington-reunion scenes: Cheney, the not-unpolarizing 46th vice president of the United States, was memorialized yesterday before processions of power mourners at the National Cathedral. Guests included former Presidents George W. Bush and Joe Biden, former speakers of the House (John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi), Senate leaders (John Thune, Mitch McConnell), and a bipartisan gallery of lawmakers, some of them Trump’s most persistent antagonists in Congress (including the House January 6 select committee alumni Adam Kinzinger, Jamie Raskin, and Adam Schiff). Every living vice president lined the front pews of the sanctuary, except the current one, J. D. Vance, who, like his boss, was not invited.

[Barton Gellman: What I learned about Dick Cheney]

In the not-so-distant past, it would have been automatic for a sitting president and vice president to attend the funeral of any predecessor who died during their term. But of course, different rules apply when Trump is in the White House.

The absence of Trump and Vance was conspicuous but hardly surprising. Cheney and his family, especially his older daughter, Liz, viewed Trump as a mortal threat to the nation. Both she and her father loathed the man and were vocal in their contempt, and the feeling has been mutual. Trump, who issued no statement following Cheney’s death two weeks ago, spent part of yesterday morning menacing Democrats on Truth Social, calling Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, among others, “TRAITORS” and accusing them of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” (Happy Thursday!)

None of the eulogists at the funeral mentioned Trump, though one line from Liz’s remarks could easily be applied to her father’s unsparing critique of him. “He knew that bonds of party must always yield to the single bond we share as Americans,” Liz said of a man who had been a loyal and partisan Republican for much of his life. “For him, a choice between defense of the Constitution and defense of your political party was no choice at all.”

Liz described long car rides that she took with her father across the country in recent years. He reluctantly let her drive, as long as he could curate the soundtrack, which included John Denver, Johnny Cash, and the Carpenters (!). She described Dick in the passenger seat, wearing his Stetson and in possession of the latest Economist, that day’s newspapers, and a book. He could be exacting on certain topics, she recalled. If someone said that he had “flunked out” of Yale, he would correct them. “No, no, I was asked to leave,” he said, according to Liz. “Twice.”

Dick Cheney was famously quiet and reserved, in keeping with his code of western stoicism. “If any voters came hoping for a kind word and a hug,” Bush said of his old running mate, “they’d have to settle for the kind word.” If Cheney could ever be called expansive, it was in the company of his family, especially his seven grandchildren. “Dick Cheney wasn’t just my grandpa. He was my best friend,” one of them, Grace Perry, said, describing how Cheney would drive her to her rodeo competitions. “I’m pretty sure he’s the only person who ever had the title vice president turned rodeo grandpa,” she said.

[Mark Leibovich: Dick Cheney didn’t care what you thought]

Liz referred to the “gift of time” that Cheney had been granted with his family in his later years, something that seemed unlikely given the chronic heart troubles that he endured, including a transplant in 2012. His cardiologist, Jonathan Reiner, said that he was honored to be Cheney’s physician and friend, but not wild about being a eulogist. “No one wants a doctor who’s great at funerals,” Reiner said. He told a story about a young cardiology fellow who was attending to Cheney in 2000, and somehow did not know who his patient was. The fellow asked the soon-to-be vice president what he did for a living.

“Government work,” Cheney replied.

The congregation laughed, but there was a recurring, and important theme, here: Public service, to Cheney, was a simple and egalitarian duty. Pete Williams, the longtime NBC reporter who served as Pentagon spokesperson when Cheney was secretary of defense, recalled that he once wrote a press release that contained the word bureaucrat. Cheney crossed it out in favor of federal official.

“As the son of a man who worked for the Agriculture Department, he respected people who chose to serve their country,” Williams said of his former boss. Williams delivered this as an obvious, almost throwaway line, but it rang defiant in this time, when career civil servants have been so vilified, if not axed by DOGE.

No one tried to claim that Cheney’s respect-payers constituted a government in exile that would be ready to snap back into place if the country’s current chapter ever ends. The production felt much more vestigial than hopeful. But these big-ticket Washington funerals—bipartisan, ceremonious, patriotic—seem like momentous formalities nonetheless. Although another old-guarder had departed, his send-off at least carried a signal, however faint, for anyone who cared to take something from the observance: that, for now, something powerful still survives.

Donald Trump Is a Lamer Duck Than Ever

2025-11-12T10:16:47-05:00

Sign up for Trump’s Return, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump presidency.

Updated at 12:27 p.m. ET on November 14, 2025

For a president who wants to project vigor and command at all times, Donald Trump made the worst possible spectacle of himself in the Oval Office last Thursday.

It came in the form of two images captured during a press event to announce cheaper weight-loss drugs. The first materialized when a participant fainted and several officials on hand rushed over. Not Trump, however, who, after turning to look at the fallen man, stood a few feet away at the Resolute Desk with his back to the action, wearing an indifferent expression. This was pointedly reflected in news photos that instantly went viral.

The second image, less noticed but possibly more damning, was memorialized just beforehand: As Mehmet Oz, the administration’s head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, delivered remarks, Trump appeared to be nodding off at his desk. The Washington Post, in keeping with its dogged Watergate-era traditions, undertook a thorough “analysis of multiple video feeds” and confirmed that, indeed, the 79-year-old president had “spent nearly 20 minutes apparently battling to keep his eyes open.”

“He put his hand on his temple,” the Post investigation concluded. “He slouched in his chair.”

[Brian C. Kalt: The solution to the third-term threat]

The White House denied that the president had been asleep, echoing Trump’s past sensitivities toward perceived somnolence. But there was something else going on here. The administration has sought to portray Trump as the main driver of all events at all times—potent, essential, and fully engaged. If there has been one unified message coming out of this White House, it’s been that of a presidency in perpetual motion. Yet Trump has looked much less daunting and invincible in recent days. He has been criticized for appearing checked out and oblivious to the economic hardships facing Americans, a sentiment reinforced by voters last Tuesday. Above all, Trump, who is not eligible to run for reelection in 2028—at least that’s what some people think—is loath to be seen as a lame duck. And yet, he is a lamer duck now than he was just a short while ago.

Last week was rough for Trump in that regard. Republicans suffered election routs in the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races, as well as in a statewide ballot initiative pushed by California Governor Gavin Newsom. It wasn’t only that Democrats prevailed by massive margins or that the results confirmed that Trump’s second-term act was playing terribly with a critical mass of Americans, including many of those who’d voted for him. The GOP’s losses suddenly made Trump look vulnerable. By my informal estimation (without the benefit of “multiple video feeds”), “lame duck” was applied more often to Trump last week than in any prior stretch of his second term.

“Donald Trump Enters His Lame Duck Era,” declared one post-election headline in Politico. The accompanying article cataloged recent signs of Republican defiance of Trump. It led with a scene in which the president summoned Senate Republicans to the White House and demanded that they eliminate the filibuster. “Upon returning to the Capitol, the senators made it very clear: they planned to blow Trump off,” according to Politico. (Mike Rounds of South Dakota apparently “laughed out loud.”)

No officeholder welcomes being labeled a lame duck. From its earliest adoption, the phrase has never been meant as a term of flattery. Senator Lazarus Powell of Kentucky was one of the earliest politicians to be quoted using the term, in 1863, when he rejected a colleague’s argument that the U.S. Court of Claims was, as Powell put it, “a receptacle of ‘lame ducks’” or “broken down politicians.” Over time, lame duck evolved into more of a time marker, referring to an elected official completing their final phase in office.

That’s the clinical definition, at least. But lame duck also carries deeper connotations of diminishing cachet, relating to a leader’s lost status and creeping powerlessness. These notions are especially toxic to Trump. Since returning to the White House, he has governed with unchecked abandon, enjoying the total compliance and indulgence of his party. Nowhere has this been more evident than among Republicans in Congress, who have given every impression of living in abject fear of Trump, his loyalty enforcers, and his voters.

It is not difficult to see how being discussed as a weakened short-timer would inflict particular psychic injury upon Trump. Such a status represents an intolerable affront not only to his own grandiosity but also to his political power. Trump and his allies have worked to foster a sense of unquestioned authority and even permanence. Whether or not he is serious about running for a third term, he has been happy to publicly entertain the prospect. “Most any Republican is too intimidated to suggest he might not run again,” Ed Rogers, a longtime GOP lobbyist and former aide to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, told me. Having this unconstitutional gambit in circulation became a strategic taunt after a while, “to keep people glancing at each other, asking, ‘Could he do it?’” Rogers said. “This has caused a pause on the traditional creep of lame-duckedness.”

Trump was more definitive when the third-term prospect came up last month, admitting that he wouldn’t be allowed to run. But Tuesday’s election results struck a blow against his sense of almighty armor. “Trump’s Superman mythology just had 100 pounds of kryptonite shoved down its throat,” Mike Murphy, a vehemently anti-Trump Republican media consultant, told me.

Beyond the undertones of lost influence, being a lame duck can also suggest a president distracted, disengaged, and biding time. Again, these notions would seem anathema to everything Trump wants to convey. Theoretically, at least.

Voters keep identifying the high cost of living as their chief concern. Trump, meanwhile, has displayed a Marie Antoinette–like indifference to the economic struggles that so many Americans keep mentioning. He has recently devoted time to overseeing the construction of a new White House patio and ballroom, hosting a Great Gatsby–themed party at Mar-a-Lago, and reportedly trying to have the future home stadium of the Washington Commanders named after him.

“His gold-leaf excess and ‘Let ’em eat cake’ tone-deafness will likely wear ever thinner,” Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian and the head of the LBJ Foundation, told me. Updegrove, the author of a book titled Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House, predicted that Trump would never “back off his ballroom ambitions,” regardless of how they might be perceived. Trump clearly enjoys the idea that he can build and adorn as he pleases. He will insist on these projects, Updegrove said, “like a toddler unwilling to surrender a lollipop.”

[Tom Nichols: A confederacy of toddlers]

Trump’s Oval Office photo snafu notwithstanding, even casual observers would expect that he will do everything possible to keep himself at center stage for as long as he can. Histrionics are definitely possible. “Like the mob boss with terminal cancer” is Murphy’s comparison, by which he means that Trump will be sure to make himself dangerous to anyone who questions his full authority and treats him as a lame duck.

This almost certainly will extend to the 2028 campaign. Trump almost certainly will insist on full deference from any Republican hoping to succeed him. He almost certainly will devote zero energy to things like “building the Republican bench” or “grooming his successor” or “extending gracious gestures to his worthy Democratic adversaries.”

And the term lame duck will almost certainly remain verboten around the White House until the minute Trump departs the premises for good—assuming that he ever does.

This article originally credited Senator Lazarus Powell with the first political usage of “lame duck”; in fact, Powell used the term in response to a comment by his colleague John Hale, who had used the term earlier.

Dick Cheney Didn’t Care What You Thought

2025-11-06T17:30:00-05:00

Back when he was a House member from Wyoming, Dick Cheney was part of a congressional delegation that visited the Soviet Union in the 1980s. During a lull in the schedule, Cheney and his colleagues were sitting around trying to entertain themselves when one of their wives decided to administer personality tests. The results included professions for which the members would be well suited.

Cheney’s ideal job? A funeral director.

I briefly worried that telling this story at this moment might be in poor taste, given that Cheney, the powerful and polarizing former vice president, died Monday at 84 of complications from pneumonia and heart disease. But he was always amused by the vignette, which was oft-told in his circles. It was also consistent with the “Prince of Darkness” caricature that Cheney readily embraced. In life or death, he wouldn’t have cared much either way.

That was always one of Cheney’s more defining charms, or anti-charms: Of all the political figures I’ve ever written about, I don’t think any of them paid less attention to what anyone else said or thought about them. Cheney was fully secure in what he believed, what he wanted, and ultimately who he was.

He cared, I suppose, about public opinion insomuch as it mattered to his political standing, the selling of his ideas, and the advancement of his agenda. But he was indifferent to self-promotion, and had no need for cheering crowds and fawning coverage, typically the mother’s milk of political ego. He was truly one of the most sheepish and least flamboyant figures ever to skulk through the power alleys of the capital.

[David Frum: There was one Dick Cheney all along]

Could this read to some as arrogant, disdainful, and callous? Sure. Do you think it mattered to him—at all? During Cheney’s vice presidency, I asked his longtime friend and career patron, then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to assess Cheney’s need for public love and appreciation in a job that can be thankless to begin with. “Almost zero,” Rumsfeld told me, and I remember wondering why he had bothered to qualify his response with “almost.”

In the early stages of Cheney and President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, I was assigned to write a profile of Cheney for The Washington Post Style section. It had become clear by that point that Saddam Hussein had not harbored weapons of mass destruction; the Iraq War was headed south, and American troops had not, in fact, been “greeted as liberators” in Baghdad, as Cheney had predicted. The vice president’s approval ratings were somewhere down in the underground bunker (or “secure, undisclosed location”) where Cheney was sometimes said to be housed during the tense post-9/11 years of his vice presidency.

“You never get in trouble for something you don’t say” was one of Cheney’s political mantras, first attributed to Sam Rayburn, the longtime Democratic speaker of the House from Texas. The veep rarely granted interviews, especially on the subject of himself. But for some reason, he let me hang around him a bit. Our first encounter was in his Air Force Two cabin, en route to a fundraiser in the Seattle area. “In my experience, those who have had the most impact are people who keep their own counsel,” he told me. “They don’t spend time worrying about taking credit.” In his own case, Cheney said, “It’s not so much a strategic decision as much as it’s what I’m comfortable with.” This was as close as Cheney ever came to unburdening himself in public.

He offered none of the small talk or icebreakers that typically clutter these exercises, although there might have been one aside about how we had the same haircut. The press had changed a great deal, Cheney told me when I asked him why he almost never made himself available. “As an institution. Evolved. Kind of thing where it’s almost impossible to catch up with a bad story. Factual errors.”

He went on.

“Nobody goes back to check the accuracy. Can be frustrating.”

He was not the most expansive interviewee.

But Cheney could display an exceedingly dry, even absurdist sense of humor on occasion. During his and Bush’s campaign against Democratic nominee John Kerry and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, Cheney had a bit in his stump speech comparing himself to his VP opponent. “People keep telling me that Senator Edwards got picked for his good looks, charm, and great hair,” Cheney would say. “And I say to them, ‘How do you think I got this job?’”

The line always got big laughs, but it was also a sly dig at Cheney’s deeply tanned and heavily hair-sprayed counterpart. Cheney had little use for slick characters such as Edwards. And this was long before the latter’s career imploded over a nasty sex scandal resulting in a love child Edwards had with his campaign videographer.

Cheney’s deep suspicion of peacocks and sycophants was just a sliver of why he despised Donald Trump, his bootlicking MAGA entourage, and what generally has become of the party in which the Cheney family was royalty for nearly half a century. “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in an ad for his daughter Liz’s unsuccessful reelection campaign in Wyoming in 2022.

[Russell Berman: ‘I’m not sure progressives want Democrats to be that big-tent’]

Cheney’s contempt for Trump was deep, visceral, and obviously personal, considering Liz’s fierce resistance after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the public vendetta it stirred against her. He became the highest-ranking Republican official to condemn Trump and warn against his reelection. He did so unequivocally, and conspicuously, in contrast to the determined muteness of the president he had served as deputy. Cheney even endorsed Kamala Harris before the 2024 election, a step that many of Trump’s most fervent Republican critics could not bring themselves to take. Consider John Bolton, who condemned Trump nonstop after serving as his national security adviser: Bolton said that although he couldn’t vote for Trump, he would still vote Republican. He wrote in Dick Cheney’s name instead.

Although Cheney was unlikely to move many swing voters at that point (let alone dislodge many Trump voters), his endorsement of Harris was still an extraordinary move, given how loathed he had been by Democrats when he was Bush’s vice president. There was no greater boogeyman than Cheney in an embattled administration that was full of them by the end. Cheney made it comically easy at times. He once told a Democratic senator to “go fuck yourself” on the Senate floor. (“Best thing I ever did,” he said later.) And yes, there was that time he shot a friend with a 28-gauge Perazzi shotgun while they were quail hunting in Texas. Cheney barely acknowledged the incident, though he did say it was an accident.

Cheney made one of his last public appearances in August 2021 at Rumsfeld’s funeral, on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery. In eulogizing his longtime friend and mentor, Cheney commended Rumsfeld as being a true Washington original. “Nothing about Don was typical or derivative or standard-issue,” he said.

Nothing about Cheney was derivative or standard-issue, either. Regardless of the hatred he drew from Democrats in the aughts and from Trump world post–January 6, he was bipartisan in his indifference to both. He didn’t care what you thought or need your applause, grudging or otherwise.

J. B. Pritzker’s Dark Visions

2025-10-28T14:45:00-04:00

Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has said that he lives “rent-free” in Donald Trump’s head. He also lives part-time in the official governor’s mansion in Springfield.

“It’s the largest governor’s mansion in the country,” Pritzker told me when I met him in Chicago late Friday afternoon. His wife, M. K. Pritzker, oversaw a major redecoration of the 16-room, Italian-style manor after her husband was first elected, in 2018. The governor raves about the job she did.

But does it have a ballroom? I asked.

Pritzker declared this to be a “funny question.” No, he told me, although there is a “large gathering place.”

“Do we call it the ballroom?” he wondered, in the general direction of an aide. She shrugged. (They do.)

Pritzker and I were tucked away in a hybrid conference/break room that was definitely not a ballroom. My opening question felt timely, given that Pritzker’s main political nemesis of late has embarked on building a ballroom at his own official residence, a process that began with the shocking demolition of the White House’s East Wing.

In the scheme of things, this landmark leveling was a small, if highly symbolic, step on the path of havoc that Trump has blazed across much of the federal government and blue America. Chicago and Pritzker have figured prominently as targets. Last month, ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers surged into the greater metropolitan area, engaging in conspicuous raids and stopping people “because of their brown skin,” in the governor’s words. The agents were acting at the behest of Trump, who is also trying to send National Guard troops into what he has called the “most dangerous city in the world.” A judge has blocked the deployment until the legality of Trump’s order is settled in court.

[Read: Democrats bet on a billionaire in Illinois]

Pritzker is currently a focal-point Democratic leader against the activist aggressions of the White House. One could make a case that a state-versus-federal discord of this magnitude has not existed since the civil-rights movement, or even the Civil War era. Throughout our conversation, the governor seemed to project disbelief, bewilderment, a sense of Are you kidding me? over what have now become commonplace parts of his job—asking citizens to film federal officers acting improperly, volleying daily insults with the president, even suggesting that the nation’s commander in chief is “suffering dementia.”

While the Guardsmen’s status remains in limbo, Pritzker has remained in constant action, and in constant demand. Events have been whipping fast around the chief executive, who has been popping up everywhere—in person and on TV screens, often in the midst of chaotic police or press scrums. Corralling the governor for an interview took me three weeks. He granted me 27 minutes of his time.

When we spoke, Pritzker had just finished a ceremony to mark the reopening of the Kennedy Expressway, which connects downtown Chicago and O’Hare International Airport, following the completion of a three-year, $169 million rehabilitation project. It was a gorgeous fall afternoon in the windy “war zone” (Trump’s words), with sun sparkling off of the skyscrapers and Lake Michigan packed with sailboats. The only real hazard I encountered during my day in the city involved dodging bikes, scooters, and jogger-strollers on Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive. I witnessed none of the “ongoing violent riots and lawlessness” (the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson’s words) that the president apparently believes to be the defining characteristics of America’s third-most-populous city.

I suggested to Pritzker that these must be unprecedented times for him. He disputed this, and said that he has become well accustomed to unprecedented times. In fact, he maintained that since he was elected governor, he has enjoyed only about eight months of “precedented times”—a stretch in 2019 and early 2020, before COVID. “Then, the migrant crisis, which was started right, basically, as COVID was waning,” Pritzker told me. “And then now we get the Trump crisis.”

This “Trump crisis,” I suggested, has ensured that Pritzker receives an overwhelming amount of national attention, perhaps more than he ever has. Winding up in a Chicago beef with Donald Trump might be welcome, of course, for a Democrat with possible presidential plans. Pritzker disputed this, too, or at least smirked at the idea that the intense spotlight is a big deal to him. “I think Gavin Newsom gets way more attention than I do,” he told me, referring to his counterpart in California, who has also been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2028—and who, like Pritzker, Trump has said should be arrested.

[Read: The week that changed everything for Gavin Newsom]

At the Kennedy Expressway event, I watched Pritzker standing behind a podium, surrounded by a cluster of state and local politicians, members of his administration, business and labor leaders, and a few dozen people in hard hats and vests. The governor has a thick helmet of brown hair; a large, round, sculpted-looking face; and an overall bowling-ball bearing—something between Babe Ruth and Ralph Kramden. When it was Pritzker’s turn to speak at the ceremony, he seemed to relish the highway reopening as a tactile triumph, something that felt blissfully like normal governor’s stuff.

“It isn’t the flashiest project,” he said, after mentioning the 16 new overhead signs and 1,200 new LED fixtures that now adorn the revamped road, which carries 275,000 vehicles a day. He described the project as “gritty, foundational, and absolutely essential work.”

“At a time of historic division in our politics, there is one idea that we can all rally around,” Pritzker said. “And that’s ‘Traffic sucks.’”

This reprieve from the “Trump crisis” ended for Pritzker as soon as he commenced with questions from the press, about half of which involved ICE, CBP, or the president. The governor talked about a new “accountability commission” that he had introduced the day before, composed of a variety of community leaders. The commission’s charge will be to document any potentially illegal behavior that federal authorities engage in while they are in Illinois.

Pritzker explained his rationale to me. For as long as Trump is president, he said, no ICE or CBP agents, and no civilian managers loyal to the president, will be held accountable for improper or illegal actions. The commission’s objective is to preserve documents, citizen-provided videos, and testimonials that could come in handy during future congressional hearings (if Democrats win control of Congress) or legal actions (after Trump leaves office).

The governor told me that he also envisions a deterrent effect. “Someone who is acting improperly now, who’s acting abusively now,” he said, “will likely think twice if they think that there’s going to be a record of it and that eventually this will come back to haunt them.”

Among nationally known Democratic figures, Pritzker has offered decidedly dire admonitions. He asserted last week that these combative incursions by Trump-controlled security forces are likely a precursor to the White House trying to manipulate next year’s midterm elections. “Look, I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” Pritzker told me. But it’s impossible, he said, to ignore everything that Trump has done in the past, especially after the 2020 presidential election, and not conclude that something is afoot. Pritzker can easily foresee ICE, CBP, and other officers standing outside polling places in uniform, carrying automatic weapons.

[Read: The destruction of one of America’s oldest traditions]

“I think that all the pieces of something nefarious seem to be occurring, and I’m just putting the pieces together,” Pritzker told me. “I’m hopeful I’m wrong, but I don’t think we can assume that I’m wrong.” He made the same basic point to me that he does in pretty much every context of his job these days: Authoritarianism comes fast. “And if you’re not willing to stand up and push back while it’s happening in the early days,” he added, “it gets a lot harder later.”

Pritzker told me that he is running for his third term as governor next year and isn’t focused on the 2028 presidential campaign. He keeps getting asked about the latter, which he says is “flattering” but probably annoying, more than anything. He complained to me about how, at an off-the-record media briefing the night before, one reporter had kept trying to steer the discussion to 2028. “I’m like, ‘Dude, you know, there’s a whole lot going on right now,’” Pritzker said, clapping twice for emphasis.

Yes, there’s a lot going on right now. I wished the governor “precedented times.”

What Not to Fix About Baseball

2025-10-08T09:00:00-04:00

To borrow a baseball term of art (okay, a cliché), Jane Leavy is an elite spitballer. No one is better built than Leavy, a crafty veteran sportswriter, for between-innings repartee, wry asides, and tossed-off ideas for improving her beloved sport—and maybe even keeping its ever-looming obsolescence at bay for another decade or three.

Leavy’s suggestions for spicing up baseball reflect the essence of spitballing—a pastime within a pastime. Baseball’s most devoted fans have a long tradition of complaining loudly about what’s wrong with the game and insisting that they’d run it better if given the chance. Surely, they are smarter than any clueless manager or hapless commissioner. They can be insufferable.

But not Leavy, not ever. She has a distinctly kinetic way of making her case, like a rollicking tour guide through a stuffy museum. She also knows there’s only so much that can be done to renovate the tradition, given its creaky foundations. “Baseball is still a nineteenth-century construct, born at a time when pocket watches were in vogue,” Leavy writes in her latest romp through the sport, Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It.

The title made me a bit wary off the bat. While I endorse Leavy as the sport’s next commissioner—because why the hell not?—I’d quibble with the premise that baseball is in need of much “fixing” these days. In recent years, I seem to have fallen back into a good groove with the sport, especially after the major leagues introduced new rules designed to speed up the action. As far as I was concerned, this was long overdue and I welcomed it, though I also realize that an aversion to change runs deep in baseball, and the spirit of debate has been as fundamental to the game as the three-out inning.

I first met Leavy a decade or so ago at some author event in Washington, and we became fast bantering companions—usually on the topic of baseball. She is a five-tool chatterbox who relishes the ample kibitzing time that the game allows for (or, if you prefer, the endless dead time that makes baseball tedious and keeps boring away the next generation of would-be fans).

[Read: Goodbye to baseball’s most anachronistic rule]

Like most Leavy appreciators, I first cavorted with her as a reader. As an alum of The Washington Post’s crackerjack sports desk of decades past, she is best known as an ace author, whose trilogy of biographies—of Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth—ensure her place in the first division of the baseball chroniclers. She is the rare historian who writes without a speck of pretension, and whose prose reads like she’s typing and shelling pistachios at the same time.

Make Me Commissioner is not Leavy’s typical smorgasbord. For starters, it is not a biography, though the book enlists some of baseball’s most cerebral and unusual characters and philosopher kings. They include current players (Red Sox third baseman Alex Bregman), World Series managers (Dave Roberts, Dusty Baker, Joe Torre), eccentrics (Bill “Spaceman” Lee), stat-heads, innovators, and traditionalists alike.

But the star of this production is Leavy and the game she could never abandon, no matter how much her attention might wander. “Baseball is mine the way my lungs are mine,” she writes of her affliction. She describes the sport’s quirky rites and odd-duck characters as her sanctuary from traditional feminine exercises. “I always got tangled up when I tried to be a proper girl,” Leavy writes.

Yet Make Me Commissioner is anything but an unconditional love letter to the game. It is, in fact, an extended cautionary note, or purpose pitch: Baseball, Leavy warns, should never take its place in American life for granted. This is theoretically something the sport should have internalized decades ago, starting when the NFL lapped Major League Baseball as America’s most popular league. Baseball might be known as the national pastime, but its leaders and practitioners also know full well that much of the country has consigned it to the “National Passed-Time,” as the Washington Nationals’ first baseman, Josh Bell, calls his vocation.

Leavy sets out on a barnstorming tour of Baseball America in search of prescriptions, engaging dozens of her buddies in extended spitballing sessions about how to make baseball more accessible, better attuned to video-game attention spans, and more inviting to over-circuited brains.

[Read: Moneyball broke baseball]

Many of her interviewees land on the same lament: Baseball has a fed-up-audience problem. “Hard to watch,” Hall of Fame player and manager Joe Torre acknowledges during a Cooperstown confab with Leavy and Sandy Koufax. “I don’t watch,” Koufax admits. Leavy catalogs this wistfulness not in the spirit of hand-wringing, but more as an earnest problem solver. “I asked everyone the same questions,” she writes. “What happened? How did baseball lose America? Why doesn’t it move people the way it once did, the way only it can, the way it still moves me? Who now speaks for the game? And what can I do to help?”

One of Leavy’s recurring complaints is that the game has become overloaded with data and analytics. Much of contemporary baseball strategy is now governed by statistical probability, with far less tolerance for good old-fashioned hunches and diminished concern for what she identifies as “the human element.”

Baseball is “unpredictable in a good way,” Torre told Leavy. The numbers experts, he said, are trying to remove as much chance and serendipity from the equation as possible. And yet, this unpredictability is precisely what traditionalists often love about the game. “They’re trying to make an imperfect game perfect,” Torre said of the statisticians. “I resent that.”

As I mentioned before, I’m in a much better place with baseball at the moment than Leavy is. My recent spike in interest will never match my childhood obsession with the game, but I am now paying much closer attention than I did through the majority of my adulthood, when I—like many people—became steadily estranged from the sport. The biggest culprit was its lagging pace of play. Baseball had become interminable. Games were routinely surpassing three or even four hours; players started taking forever to adjust their batting gloves (and other “equipment”); there were endless pitching changes and mound visits, less scoring and less action.

Fans noticed, yawned, and made other plans. MLB’s annual game attendance dropped from 79.5 million in 2007 to 64.5 million in 2022. Finally recognizing the crisis, the league introduced its new rules in 2023 in an effort to heal and revitalize itself. It put in place a host of reforms to speed things along, generate more offense, and essentially liposuction the dead time from its sagging product. The biggest change by far was the introduction of a “pitch clock,” which required that pitchers take no longer than 15 seconds to deliver the ball to home plate. The clock was an instant success: Games moved faster, taking about a half hour less to play nine innings in 2023, the year the changes went into effect, than they had in 2022.

[Read: The great torpedo-bat panic]

I had a close-in view of baseball’s new rules rollout for a story I wrote in 2023. I interviewed many of the architects of the repairs and came away impressed with how thoughtful and deliberate they were in putting their tweaks into place. But the best gauge of the project’s success was my own reaction: I found myself more locked in to the action almost immediately (and yes, there was more “action,” namely offense, as measured by higher batting averages). I’ve probably watched more MLB games in the past three years than I did in the three decades prior. As far as I was concerned, baseball and I were cool again. And I realized how much I’d missed it and how happy I was to have it back in my life.

Leavy, by contrast, would probably say that she and baseball never broke up to begin with. But she will never be fully satisfied with her partner, and her tinkering remains a campaign in progress.

The best ideas in her book are less in the vein of rule changes than they are in cultural initiatives to repair baseball’s diminished appeal among many demographic groups: kids, for starters. Leavy proposes letting anyone 10 or younger into games for free and mandating postgame autograph sessions with designated players. She also decrees that all weekend games should be played during daylight hours, “except four designated showcase games on Friday and Sunday that MLB can put on all their fucking platforms.”

Make Me Commissioner has some good ideas. But I loved it less as a catalog of clinical prescriptions than as a kind of baseball soapbox, a celebration of storytelling and spitballing in the best oral and literary traditions of the sport. In its hilarious opening scene, set at Baltimore’s Camden Yards in 1995, Leavy describes nearly being decapitated by a foul ball on the night Cal Ripken Jr. broke Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive games played. “The ball traveled on a fierce diagonal, like a knife cutting a Passover brisket,” Leavy writes. If you’re keeping score, the story ends well: Leavy survives the attack, emerges from the chaos, and goes home with a baseball.

The tale she’s lived to tell emerges, for all its crotchety complaints, from a place of unerring loyalty. Baseball is “the only game that starts at home and ends up at home,” Leavy writes, quoting Bill Lee (the “Spaceman”). “Baseball is my home,” she adds. She hosts a wickedly fun house party.

Democrats’ Epstein Derangement Syndrome

2025-09-05T12:45:12-04:00

Updated on September 5, 2025, at 2:55 p.m.

To hear Donald Trump’s critics tell it, all of the disquieting news that the president has generated this summer—the FBI raid on former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s home, the National Guard deployment in cities, Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, his accusation that Barack Obama led a coup and committed “the crime of the century”—has been an effort to divert attention from the issue that truly terrifies Trump: the Jeffrey Epstein files.

It has become the Democrats’ go-to exhortation: Trump is just doing this to distract you from Epstein. Do not fall for his grand scheme. In other words, America’s descent into authoritarianism is a mere deflection.

No doubt, the president’s past friendship with the late financier and accused sex trafficker is a legitimate problem for the White House. Trump has repeatedly tried to dismiss the matter, calling it “a Democrat hoax that never ends” as recently as Wednesday. But it has proved to be a rare Trump controversy that has shaken his otherwise steadfast base. His supporters were adamant during the 2024 campaign that Trump should release the Epstein files, and candidate Trump assured that he would. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that Epstein’s client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” In fact, there was no such list, the Justice Department later announced. A MAGA mutiny ensued.

Democrats saw an opportunity and began accusing the president of creating all manner of diversions to steal attention from his Epstein entanglements. They have not stopped since, no matter how extraneous the scandal might be to the topic at hand—everything from ICE raids down to Trump’s demand that the Washington Commanders change their name back to the Redskins and his threats to revoke Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship. You name the recent escapade, and some adversary has tried to dub it a ploy to distract from Epstein.

[Read: Inside the White House’s Epstein strategy]

Upon learning that Trump had canceled former Vice President Kamala Harris’s Secret Service protection last week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer retaliated by slapping Trump with a clever nickname, “Epstein Don” (take that, Mr. President!), and said that Trump was “ready to put everyone he can in danger to distract you from how he’s hiding the Epstein files.”

After Trump said that “CROOKED” Senator Adam Schiff should “be brought to justice,” the California Democrat accused Trump of “political retribution” and “retaliation,” in addition to “trying to distract from his Epstein-files problem.”

Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington State, recently called Trump “a pathetic wannabe dictator” for sending federal agents and the National Guard into the District of Columbia. Murray claimed that he was trying to turn D.C. “into his personal police state” with a mission to—get this—“distract you from his connection to the Epstein files, skyrocketing costs, and his weak job numbers.”

This is a curious strategy. Clearly, Trump’s opponents think they have a killer weapon with Epstein and believe that they should deploy it whenever possible; polls show that large majorities of Americans are not buying Trump’s assertion that the Epstein story is a “hoax.” But Trump’s strongman tactics are a far greater danger to America than his proclivity to “distract,” which is a fairly standard political-communications practice.

The distraction drumbeat not only dilutes the seriousness of Trump’s actions; it also exemplifies the Democrats’ own lame efforts to communicate a potent opposition message. It would seem beside the point for them to divert the public’s attention from the things this president does that are truly devious, un-American, and totalitarian. (See: Obama, Barack, fake AI-generated video of Oval Office arrest.) By constantly warning citizens not to lose focus on Epstein, Democrats imply that Trump’s day-to-day abuses in office are mere stunts and can thus be safely ignored.

“It’s so stupid. It drives me insane,” Dan Pfeiffer, a Pod Save America co-host and former senior adviser to President Obama, told me. Democrats’ overeagerness to “shoehorn” everything Trump does into some alleged Epstein cover-up looks forced and inauthentic, Pfeiffer added. “If all you have to say is ‘Don’t pay attention to this; pay attention to this other thing that polls better,’ you’re not actually motivating people.” Other fervent anti-Trumpers have expressed similar frustration. “I want to congratulate leading Democrats for their insistence on saying the takeover of DC is a ‘stunt’ or a ‘distraction,’” Bill Kristol, the editor at large of the center-right publication The Bulwark, wrote on X. “It’s a rare trifecta of intellectual failure, political stupidity, and moral obtuseness.”

[Read: The Epstein ‘client list’ will never go away]

And yet, Democrats continue to hurl the magic words in response to seemingly every brazen thing Trump does. Maryland Governor Wes Moore recently found himself in a social-media beef with Trump over the president’s threat to send the National Guard into “out of control” and “crime-ridden” Baltimore. Trump also suggested that he might “rethink” the federal government’s funding for the repair of Baltimore’s “demolished” Francis Scott Key Bridge, which was toppled by a cargo ship last year. After more back-and-forth, Moore trotted out his big torpedo. “Trump is doing everything in his power to distract from the Epstein files,” the governor wrote on X. “Really makes you wonder…”

Actually, what this makes me wonder is if Democrats’ continuous invocations of the Epstein-distraction theory might reveal their own lack of imagination—and underscore their inability to find a more effective line of attack against a president who seems to be providing them with endless material. In fact, Democrats’ eagerness to call everything a distraction from Epstein might even be distracting them from discussing much bigger and more far-reaching vulnerabilities for Trump (his failure to bring down prices, as he’d promised; the Republicans’ massive and wildly unpopular reconciliation bill passed in July).

With Congress back in Washington after its summer recess, the Epstein story flared anew Wednesday morning when a group of his accusers held an emotional press conference outside the Capitol. “There is no hoax,” one Epstein survivor said. “The abuse was real.” The same morning, Trump was hosting Polish President Karol Nawrocki for a White House visit that featured a rare flyover of F-16s. A White House spokesperson said that the display was meant to honor a Polish army pilot who had died in a crash last month. But the spectacle also produced a long, loud roar over a large area of downtown Washington, which interrupted the victims’ testimony for several seconds—an actual distraction, in contrast to some of the Democrats’ more tortured claims.

*Sources: Joe Raedle / Getty; Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty; Bill Clark / CQ / Roll Call; Alex Wong / Getty; Ethan Miller / Getty

Another Moderate Republican Opts Out

2025-07-13T10:05:17-04:00

Ideally, this interview would have been over breakfast at a diner in Omaha, and the local congressman, Don Bacon, would have ordered his namesake. He says he eats bacon two or three times a week when he’s in Nebraska; he likes it extra crispy and, if possible, prepared at home. “If you ask me for my favorite bacon, it’s Angie Bacon,” he told me this week, referring to his wife of 41 years. (Sadly, the congressman and I were speaking not over breakfast but by phone.)

Angie enjoys having her husband in Nebraska for a number of reasons. One is that if he’s home, she’s less likely to sleep with a gun—something she resorted to when harassment and death threats got really intense a few years ago. These menaces have become progressively worse in recent years. Protesters showed up at the Bacon house during an Easter-egg hunt that he put on for his grandkids two years ago. County police were parked in the driveway. Eventually, the Bacons moved to another house, in a more remote location. But it all can get exhausting. The congressman was working 12-to-14-hour days, bouncing between Washington, D.C., and Omaha. “After the last election, I was on E. I had no gas in the tank,” he said. Bacon announced last week that he would not run for reelection in 2026.

This was not a huge surprise. Bacon, who had spent 30 years in the Air Force before coming to Congress, in 2017, is one of the last remaining House Republicans who are not thrilled—and willing to say they are not thrilled—by the direction their party has taken since Donald Trump took it over. Bacon has been a rare GOP lawmaker willing to criticize Trump during a second presidential term that has otherwise been marked by acquiescence. After the Signalgate scandal, Bacon suggested that Trump should fire Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, whom Bacon dismissed as “an amateur.” He has also called Trump “very weak” in his approach to Russia.

None of which makes for a savvy career move if you’re a Republican in these Trump-dominated times. For the likes of Don Bacon, quitting in disappointment has become a familiar endgame.

We’ve seen this miniseries before: A Republican who considers themselves to be a traditional Reagan conservative vows to fight for their principles and beliefs. But when these principles and beliefs conflict with what Trump wants, things get complicated—and often unpleasant. Your party threatens to recruit a primary challenger. The president does not take kindly to you. His supporters say nasty things. And it all takes a toll.

[Read: No one loves the bill (almost) every Republican voted for]

Bacon, 61, is coming off of an especially high-stress period. He was considered something of a wild-card vote on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the domestic-policy package that the president signed into law on July 4. It was not universally seen as beautiful, even among some who wound up voting for it, including Bacon. “To me, this bill was an 80–20–type bill,” Bacon said. He liked that the bill bolsters the military and protects the tax cuts that had passed during Trump’s first term. He did not like how the bill will explode the deficit and lead to Medicaid cuts. Ultimately, Bacon swallowed his reservations, voted yes, and decided to head home.

Either you like bacon or you’re wrong, reads a sign in the representative’s Washington office, displayed not far from a prominent model pig. For the most part, House members from both parties seem to like Bacon, the colleague. They describe him as one of the few Republicans left in Washington who do not consider moderate or bipartisan dirty words. This has proved a winning position in Bacon’s swingy Second Congressional District of Nebraska. (Kamala Harris carried it by 4.6 points in 2024, making this the bluest district that a House Republican represents.)

Still, Bacon’s relative independence has made him a bipartisan target. The MAGA contingent derides his RINO, or “Republican in name only,” apostasies, such as when he was the only GOP House member to vote against a bill to rechristen the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” (“I thought it was dumb,” he told me.) Democrats, meanwhile, have been eyeing Bacon’s district since he was first elected, in 2016. “Vulnerable House Republican” has effectively become part of his job title. After a three-term GOP mayor of Omaha was defeated in May by a Democrat, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared that the “Don Bacon retirement watch” had officially begun.

Bacon told me that the nature of the threats he has received has changed. He used to get the hardest time from the far left, “the Bernie Sanders crowd,” he said. “They hate Trump so much, they don’t think straight.” But lately, threats have come more from the “dark MAGA guys.” As Bacon put it, “If you show any disagreement at all with Trump, you’re a traitor. It’s sort of strange.”

[Read: What the next phase of Trump’s presidency will look like]

Things became really ugly in late 2023, during the race to elect a new Republican House speaker. Representative Jim Jordan, the choleric conservative from Ohio, was the clear favorite of Trump and his House acolytes; Bacon was not kosher with this, and the abuse followed. “There’s, like, four people on social media, and they have a million followers,” Bacon told me. “And they are thugs.” He received 31,000 phone calls to his office during the speakership brawl, he said, plus texts and emails.

Bacon continues to believe that “we’re just in a phase right now.” He is among the latest in a long line of departing Republicans who seem to think that the Reagan-vintage GOP will magically return when the phase—which has lasted about a decade—finally ends. “Maybe when President Trump’s term is over, we’ll see a readjustment,” he said. “Right now, what I think America wants is a little bit of normalcy.”

Bacon told me that one of his goals after leaving Congress will be to “fight for the soul of the party,” meaning the GOP. This struck me as typical of the tortured logic that many politicians rely on to justify their departures—the idea that they are pursuing a fight just as they exit the arena. Bacon countered with the idea that representing a district is not necessarily compatible with restoring a soul. Nor is serving in Washington. “I’ve got to worry about being reelected if I want to be a congressman,” he said. “I’d rather be more vocal about what I believe in.”

Bacon does not rule out running for Nebraska governor, or even for the presidency, in 2028—although the latter seems like something that Republican-primary voters would rule out fairly quickly. Whatever he winds up doing, he has more immediate priorities. He has 11 grandchildren who live within a 10-minute drive from his home in Papillion, south of Omaha. “I do feel like there’s a little bit of weight off my shoulders,” Bacon said. He is trying to restore his own sense of normalcy.

He recently had his grandsons over and cooked for them. “They’re not sure they like my eggs,” he told me, “but they like my bacon.”

The Anniversary That Democrats Would Be Wise to Forget

2025-06-28T10:40:25-04:00

Yesterday marked one year since Joe Biden’s debate meltdown against Donald Trump. Happy anniversary to those who observe such things, or are triggered by such things. Please celebrate responsibly.

For Democrats, the debacle was a harsh awakening and the start of an ongoing spiral. Prior to that night, they could hold on to the delusion that the party might somehow eke out one last victory from Biden’s degraded capacity and ward off another four-year assault from Donald Trump. But that all exploded into the gruesome reality of June 27, 2024. Every interested viewer that night remembers where they were, their various feelings (depending on their perspectives) of revulsion, grief, glee, or disbelief.

I was watching at home, thinking for some reason that Biden might exceed his humble expectations. He had managed to do this periodically on big stages during his presidency—including the feisty State of the Union address he’d turned in a few months earlier. But by the time Biden walked to his podium in Atlanta, it was clear that was not happening. Something was off. The elderly president looked visibly stiffer than usual, like he was wrapped in cardboard. As co-moderator Jake Tapper of CNN unfurled his opening question—about rising grocery and home prices—Biden’s eyes bugged out, as if he was stunned. His face was a drab gray color. I remember thinking there was something wrong with my TV, until the texts started rolling in. A friend observed that Biden looked “mummified” on the stage. “Is he sick?” my wife asked as she entered the room.

Not a great start.

And this was before Biden had even said a word. Then he spoke—or tried to. Biden’s voice didn’t really work at first. It was raspy; he kept stopping, starting, dry-coughing. After a few sentences, everything was worse. “Oh my god,” came another text, which was representative of the early returns. “My mother told me she’s crying,” read another. (This person’s mother is evidently not a Trump supporter.) My wife left the room.

[Mark Leibovich: Where is Barack Obama?]

Now here we are a year later. Democrats have been battered by events since. First among them was Trump’s victory in November, in which traditional Democratic constituencies such as Black, Hispanic, and young voters defected to the GOP in large numbers. This was followed by the onslaught of Trump’s second administration. Democrats keep getting described (or describing themselves) as being “in the wilderness,” though at this point “the wilderness” might be a generous description; it at least offers peace and quiet—as opposed to, say, your average Democratic National Committee meeting in 2025.

Or, for that matter, the aftermath of this week’s Democratic primary in the New York City mayor’s race. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist state assemblyman from Queens, became an instant It Boy with his upset of scandal-soiled former Governor Andrew Cuomo. As happens with many progressive sensations these days, Mamdani’s victory was immediately polarizing. New York Democrats seem split over the result: On one side are lukewarm establishment titans such as Senate and House Minority Leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries; on the other are progressive demigods such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders.

The usual Democratic divides revealed themselves: insurgent versus establishment, socialist-adjacent versus moderate, young versus old (except for Bernie, the ageless octogenarian forever big with the kids). The deeply unpopular incumbent, Eric Adams, who was elected as a Democrat in 2021, is running for reelection as an independent; despite getting trounced in the primary, Cuomo plans to stay in the race—running on something called the “Fight and Deliver” ballot line. Mamdani is the clear favorite to prevail in November. But no one knows anything for sure, except that everything feels like a muddled mess, which has pretty much been the Democrats’ default posture since the Abomination in Atlanta a year ago.

The party’s grass roots are showing genuine energy these days. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez drew five-figure crowds at their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies this spring. The nationwide “No Kings” protests two weekends ago were indicative of a galvanized protest movement eager to be led. Yet these signs of Trump resistance are mostly happening separate from the Democratic apparatus. As my colleague David Graham recently wrote, the “No Kings” spectacles were themselves, paradoxically, a sign of how rudderless the party now finds itself. With a few exceptions, the Democratic leadership ranks have been largely AWOL. They toggle and flail between quiet paralysis and loud frustration, especially with one another.

[Mark Leibovich: The week that changed everything for Gavin Newsom]

Democrats have spent an inordinate amount of time and energy relitigating Biden’s tenure in the White House—whether he was fit to be there and how frail he had become. The phrase cognitive decline still comes up a lot, for obvious reasons, none of them fun or especially constructive. The 2024 campaign has also come in for a spirited rehash—especially among factions of Biden world, the Kamala Harris–Tim Walz campaign, and the various PACs and outside groups ostensibly designed to support them. Republicans have of course relished every chance to revisit Biden’s deterioration. The media have hammered this theme as well, most notably Tapper and his co-author, Alex Thompson of Axios, whose blockbuster autopsy, Original Sin, has been at or near the top of The New York Times’ nonfiction best-seller list for several weeks.

The surest way for Democrats to move on would be to jump straight to the future: Look to 2028, as quickly as possible. Presidential campaigns at their best can be forward-looking, wide-open, and aspirational. Yes, local elections—and certainly the 2026 midterms—are important, and maybe even promising for the party. But not as important as picking a new national leader, something the Democrats have not really done since Barack Obama was first elected in 2008. Among the many tragedies of Biden’s last act was that he delayed his party, indefinitely, from anointing its next generation.

Trump himself might not be on the ballot in 2028, but he’s still giving his opposition plenty to run against. So Democrats might as well take the show national and start now, if for no other reason than to escape from fractures of the present and circular nightmares of the recent past. Which began, more or less, on June 27 of last year. When Democrats stop dwelling on that disaster and what followed, that might signal that they’re finally getting somewhere.

The Week That Changed Everything for Gavin Newsom

2025-06-14T15:35:32-04:00

This is the week that Gavin Newsom stopped thinking so much.

The governor of California has found himself in a hot swirl of events: Federal authorities are patrolling streets, ICE agents are raiding Home Depots, and protests (mostly though not entirely peaceful) are spreading across the state. President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, very much against Newsom’s wishes. He also endorsed the idea of Newsom being arrested. House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested as an alternative that Newsom be “tarred and feathered.” And Senator Alex Padilla of California, whom Newsom appointed to his job in 2021, was forced to the floor and handcuffed by federal agents while trying to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question at a press conference.

“We are not going away,” Noem vowed in Los Angeles, referring to the federal officials she said had come to “liberate this city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country.”

As of this writing, Newsom had not gone away either—in handcuffs, feathers, or otherwise.

He got on the phone with me yesterday to debrief on the turmoil of recent days. Newsom was in his office in Sacramento, preparing for any number of contingencies—including what he would do if the feds actually tried to throw him in jail. He told me that he’d initially shrugged off the chatter about his potential arrest. Tom Homan, Trump’s bull-necked border czar, was the first person Newsom heard mention the prospect. “That Homan, or Hoo-man, guy,” is how Newsom referred to him. “Whatever his name is—the guy with the hat on Fox.”

Then someone sent Newsom a clip of Trump saying that he wished that Homan would, in fact, arrest the floppy-maned governor. “My first instinct was to dismiss it,” Newsom told me. “And my second instinct was: ‘Guys, this is actually not funny.’” He said that he would not put it past Trump: “I’ve known this guy for years.”

[Read: Stephen Miller triggers Los Angeles]

Next came the video of Padilla getting manhandled on Thursday afternoon, which made the threats emanating from the Trump administration even less funny. Newsom was meeting with his staff, discussing strategy for a court hearing in his state’s lawsuit against Trump over the Los Angeles deployments. “What the hell is this?” someone said, and suddenly everyone was huddled around a laptop. “People literally turned their head and were like, ‘This can’t be happening,’” Newsom told me. “It sickened all of us. I mean, people were physically impacted by it.”

Surely it crossed Newsom’s mind that he, too, might find himself in a similar situation. What would he do? What are the protocols when a state’s chief executive gets arrested by federal authorities? Newsom and his staff discussed this possibility. “They put together an all-hands meeting about how they would handle it,” Newsom told me. “I mean, I’m talking a little out of school,” he acknowledged. One key takeaway: Do not resist arrest under any circumstances, Newsom was told, “because that would be grounds for the actual arrest.”

Newsom has been talking a lot about how Trump is crashing through new guardrails every day. After a certain point, it becomes hard—or impossible—to revert to whatever the previous norms and rules were.

Newsom himself has crossed a line of his own. Like many Democrats in the Trump era, the governor has been prone to overthinking things at times, worrying about scaring off swing voters by playing to woke stereotypes. Polls, too, have suggested over the years that voters generally approve of Trump’s proactive approach to immigration enforcement, and Democrats have been wary of being seen as weak on the issue.

In Newsom’s case, he has battled a perception of being slick and eager to cater to all sides. He recently launched a podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, and has taken criticism from the left because of his willingness to host MAGA guests such as Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk. Fairly or not, Newsom’s reputation for opportunism and political expediency comes up in seemingly every discussion of his presidential prospects.

[Juliette Kayyem: Trump’s gross misuse of the National Guard]

Now the Los Angeles clash has provided Newsom with a national showcase he’s never had before. For an ambitious Democrat, there are worse places to be than co-starring in a righteous showdown with Trump. “Donald Trump’s government isn’t protecting our communities. They’re traumatizing our communities, and that seems to be the entire point,” Newsom said in a prime-time address he delivered Tuesday that earned widespread praise from Democrats.

The governor resists discussing this crisis in political terms, but he did describe the episode to me as perhaps the most consequential of his career—even more than when he was mayor of San Francisco and established himself as a national figure by granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004. “This is the one for me,” Newson said of the recent discord. “This one is—this is not political. This is literally about looking your kids in the eyes.”

He has cast the stakes of the conflict as fundamental to preserving democracy against the “authoritarian tendencies” of a rogue president. “He is not a monarch. He is not a king,” Newsom said of Trump, speaking to reporters in San Francisco on Thursday. “He should stop acting like one.”

Newsom told me that he recently discovered a change in how he was reacting to events—that he was feeling less restrained and bogged down. “It was, I think, Sunday,” he said. “Sunday, I woke up a different guy.” If nothing else, being subjected to the full force of the federal government can be liberating, just as seeing troops in the street can be clarifying. The events of the past few days go to “the very essence of why the fuck I am even here,” he said.

Newsom said it is “critical” that Americans engage in visible protest against the military parade that Trump has planned in Washington, D.C., today for the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, as well as the president’s own 79th. It is just as “critical,” he added, that the protests be peaceful. “You have these idiots, these assholes, these anarchists,” Newsom said, referring to the inevitable pockets of trouble that arise at such events. These people “have the same chaos theory of life that Donald Trump has. They want to sow chaos, and they’re no different than he is.” He said the tension in the United States was at a “slow boil,” and now everything is even more precarious.

“You could lose this thing so fast,” he said. “We’re on the other side.”

Where Is Barack Obama?

2025-06-08T08:00:00-04:00

Last month, while Donald Trump was in the Middle East being gifted a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, Barack Obama headed off on his own foreign excursion: a trip to Norway, in a much smaller and more tasteful jet, to visit the summer estate of his old friend King Harald V. Together, they would savor the genteel glories of Bygdøyveien in May. They chewed over global affairs and the freshest local salmon, which had been smoked on the premises and seasoned with herbs from the royal garden.

Trump has begun his second term with a continuous spree of democracy-shaking, economy-quaking, norm-obliterating action. And Obama, true to form, has remained carefully above it all. He picks his spots, which seldom involve Trump. In March, he celebrated the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act and posted his annual NCAA basketball brackets. In April, he sent out an Easter message and mourned the death of the pope. In May, he welcomed His Holiness Pope Leo XIV (“a fellow Chicagoan”) and sent prayers to Joe Biden following his prostate-cancer diagnosis.

No matter how brazen Trump becomes, the most effective communicator in the Democratic Party continues to opt for minimal communication. His “audacity of hope” presidency has given way to the fierce lethargy of semi-retirement.

Obama occasionally dips into politics with brief and unmemorable statements, or sporadic fundraising emails (subject: “Barack Obama wants to meet you. Yes you.”). He praised his law-school alma mater, Harvard, for “rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt” by the White House “to stifle academic freedom.” He criticized a Republican bill that would threaten health care for millions. He touted a liberal judge who was running for a crucial seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. When called upon, he can still deliver a top-notch campaign spiel, donor pitch, convention speech, or eulogy.

Beyond that, Obama pops in with summer and year-end book, music, and film recommendations. He recently highlighted a few articles about AI and retweeted a promotional spot for Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds, a new Netflix documentary from his and Michelle’s production company. (Michelle also has a fashion book coming out later this year: “a celebration of confidence, identity, and authenticity,” she calls it.) Apparently, Barack is a devoted listener of The Ringer’s Bill Simmons Podcast, or so he told Jimmy Kimmel over dinner.

In normal times, no one would deny Obama these diversions. He performed the world’s most stressful job for eight years, served his country, made his history, and deserved to kick back and do the usual ex-president things: start a foundation, build a library, make unspeakable amounts of money.

But the inevitable Trump-era counterpoint is that these are not normal times. And Obama’s detachment feels jarringly incongruous with the desperation of his longtime admirers—even more so given Trump’s assaults on what Obama achieved in office. It would be one thing if Obama had disappeared after leaving the White House, maybe taking up painting like George W. Bush. The problem is that Obama still very much has a public profile—one that screams comfort and nonchalance at a time when so many other Americans are terrified.

“There are many grandmas and Rachel Maddow viewers who have been more vocal in this moment than Barack Obama has,” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Institute, told me. “It is heartbreaking,” he added, “to see him sacrificing that megaphone when nobody else quite has it.”

People who have worked with Obama since he left office say that he is extremely judicious about when he weighs in. “We try to preserve his voice so that when he does speak, it has impact,” Eric Schultz, a close adviser to Obama in his post-presidency, told me. “There is a dilution factor that we’re very aware of.”

“The thing you don’t want to do is, you don’t want to regularize him,” former Attorney General Eric Holder, a close Obama friend and collaborator, told me. When I asked Holder what he meant by “regularize,” he explained that there was a danger of turning Obama into just another hack commentator—“Tuesdays With Barack, or something like that,” Holder said.

Like many of Obama’s confidants, Holder bristles at suggestions that the former president has somehow deserted the Trump opposition. “Should he do more? Everybody can have their opinions,” Holder said. “The one thing that always kind of pisses me off is when people say he’s not out there, or that he’s not doing things, that he’s just retired and we never hear from him. If you fucking look, folks, you would see that he’s out there.”

[From the April 2016 issue: The Obama doctrine]

Obama’s aides also say that he is loath to overshadow the next generation of Democratic leaders. They emphasize that he spends a great deal of time speaking privately with candidates and officials who seek his advice. But unfortunately for Democrats, they have not found their next fresh generational sensation since Obama was elected 17 years ago (Joe Biden obviously doesn’t count). Until a new leader emerges, Obama could certainly take on a more vocal role without “regularizing” himself in the lowlands of Trump-era politics.

Obama remains the most popular Democrat alive at a time of historic unpopularity for his party. Unlike Biden, he appears not to have lost a step, or three. Unlike with Bill Clinton, his voice remains strong and his baggage minimal. Unlike both Biden and Clinton, he is relatively young and has a large constituency of Americans who still want to hear from him, including Black Americans, young voters, and other longtime Democratic blocs that gravitated toward Trump in November.

“Should Obama get out and do more? Yes, please,” Tracy Sefl, a Democratic media consultant in Chicago, told me. “Help us,” she added. “We’re sinking over here.”

Obama’s conspicuous scarcity while Trump inflicts such damage isn’t just a bad look. It’s a dereliction of the message that he built his career on. When Obama first ran for president in 2008, his former life as a community organizer was central to his message. His campaign was not merely for him, but for civic action itself—the idea of Americans being invested in their own change. Throughout his time in the White House, he emphasized that “citizen” was his most important title. After he left office in 2017, Obama said that he would work to inspire and develop the next cohort of leaders, which is essentially the mission of his foundation. It would seem a contradiction for him to say that he’s devoting much of his post-presidency to promoting civic engagement when he himself seems so disengaged.

To some degree, patience with Obama began wearing thin when he was still in office. His approval ratings sagged partway through his second term (before rebounding at the end). The rollout of the Affordable Care Act in 2013 was a fiasco, and the midterm elections of 2014 were a massacre. Obama looked powerless as Republicans in Congress ensured that he would pass no major legislation in his second term and blocked his nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

“Obama, out,” the president said in the denouement of his last comedy routine at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in 2016. In Obama lore, this mic-drop moment would instantly become famous—and prophetic.

After Trump’s first victory, Obama tried to reassure supporters that this was merely a setback. “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes,” he said in an interview with The New Yorker. Insofar as Obama talked about how he imagined his post-presidency, he was inclined to disengage from day-to-day politics. At a press conference in November 2016, Obama said that he planned to “take Michelle on vacation, get some rest, spend time with my girls, and do some writing, do some thinking.” He promised to give Trump the chance to do his job “without somebody popping off in every instance.”

But in that same press conference, he also allowed that if something arose that raised “core questions about our values and our ideals, and if I think that it’s necessary or helpful for me to defend those ideals, then I’ll examine it when it comes.”

That happened almost immediately. A few days after vowing in his inaugural address to end the “American carnage” that he was inheriting, Trump signed an executive order banning foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States for 90 days. The so-called Muslim travel ban would quickly be blocked by the courts, but not before sowing chaos at U.S. points of entry. Obama put out a brief statement through a spokesperson (“the president fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion”), and went on vacation.

Trump’s early onslaught made clear that Obama’s ex-presidency would prove far more complicated than previous ones. And Obama’s taste for glamorous settings and famous company—Richard Branson, David Geffen, George Clooney—made for a grating contrast with the turmoil back home. “Just tone it down with the kitesurfing pictures,” John Oliver, the host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, said of Obama in an interview with Seth Meyers less than a month after the president left office. “America is on fire,” Oliver added. “I know that people accused him of being out of touch with the American people during his presidency. I’m not sure he’s ever been more out of touch than he is now.”

Oliver’s spasm foreshadowed a rolling annoyance that continued as Trump’s presidency wore on: that Obama was squandering his power and influence. “Oh, Obama is still tweeting good tweets. That’s very nice of him,” the anti-Trump writer Drew Magary wrote in a Medium column titled “Where the Hell Is Barack Obama?” in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. “I’m sick of Obama staying above the fray while that fray is swallowing us whole.”

Obama did insert himself in the 2024 election, reportedly taking an aggressive behind-the-scenes role last summer in trying to nudge Biden out of the race. He delivered a showstopper speech at the Democratic National Convention and campaigned several times for Kamala Harris in the fall. But among longtime Obama admirers I’ve spoken with, frustration with the former president has built since Trump returned to office. While campaigning for Harris last year, Obama framed the stakes of the election in terms of a looming catastrophe. “These aren’t ordinary times, and these are not ordinary elections,” he said at a campaign stop in Pittsburgh. Yet now that the impact is unfolding in the most pernicious ways, Obama seems to be resuming his ordinary chill and same old bits.

Green, of the Progressive Change Institute, told me that when Obama put out his March Madness picks this year, he texted Schultz, the Obama adviser. “Have I missed him speaking up in other places recently?” Green asked him. “He did not respond to that.” (Schultz confirmed to me that he ignored the message but vowed to be “more responsive to Adam Green’s texts in the future.”)

Being a former president is inherently tricky: The role is ill-defined, and peripheral by definition. Part of the trickiness is how an ex-president can remain relevant, if he wants to. This is especially so given the current president.

“I don’t know that anybody is relevant in the Trump era,” Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian and head of the LBJ Foundation, told me. Updegrove, who wrote a book called Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House, said that Trump has succeeded in creating a reality in which every president who came before is suspect. “All the standard rules of being an ex-president are no longer applicable,” he said.

Still, Obama never presented himself as a “standard rules” leader. This was the idea that his political rise was predicated on—that change required bold, against-the-grain thinking and uncomfortable action. Clearly, Obama still views himself this way, or at least still wants to be perceived this way. (A few years ago, he hosted a podcast with Bruce Springsteen called Renegades.)

[From the July 1973 issue: The last days of the president]

Stepping into the current political melee would not be an easy or comfortable role for Obama. He represents a figure of the past, which seems more and more like the ancient past as the Trump era crushes on. He is a notably long-view guy, who has spent a great deal of time composing a meticulous account of his own narrative. “We’re part of a long-running story,” Obama said in 2014. “We just try to get our paragraph right.” Or thousands of paragraphs, in his case: The first installment of Obama’s presidential memoir, A Promised Land, covered 768 pages and 29 hours of audio. No release date has been set for the second volume.

But this might be one of those times for Obama to take a break from the long arc of the moral universe and tend to the immediate crisis. Several Democrats I’ve spoken with said they wish that Obama would stop worrying so much about the “dilution factor.” While Democrats struggle to find their next phenom, Obama could be their interim boss. He could engage regularly, pointing out Trump’s latest abuses. He did so earlier this spring, during an onstage conversation at Hamilton College. He was thoughtful, funny, and sounded genuinely aghast, even angry.

He could do these public dialogues much more often, and even make them thematic. Focus on Trump’s serial violations of the Constitution one week (recall that Obama once taught constitutional law), the latest instance of Trump’s naked corruption the next. Blast out the most scathing lines on social media. Yes, it might trigger Trump, and create more attention than Obama evidently wants. But Trump has shown that ubiquity can be a superpower, just as Biden showed that obscurity can be ruinous. People would notice.

Democrats love nothing more than to hold up Obama as their monument to Republican bad faith. Can you imagine if Obama did this? some Democrat will inevitably say whenever Trump does something tacky, cruel, or blatantly unethical (usually before breakfast). Obama could lean into this hypocrisy—tape recurring five-minute video clips highlighting Trump’s latest scurrilous act and title the series “Can You Imagine If I Did This?”

Or another idea—an admittedly far-fetched one. Trump has decreed that a massive military parade be held through the streets of Washington on June 14. This will ostensibly celebrate the Army’s 250th anniversary, but it also happens to fall on Trump’s 79th birthday. The parade will cost an estimated $45 million, including $16 million in damage to the streets. (Can you imagine if Obama did this?) The spectacle cries out for counterprogramming. Obama could hold his own event, in Washington or somewhere nearby. It would get tons of attention and drive Trump crazy, especially if it draws a bigger crowd. Better yet, make it a parade, or “citizen’s march,” something that builds momentum as it goes, the former president and community organizer leading on foot. This would be the renegade move.

Few things would fire up Democrats like a head-to-head matchup between Trump and Obama. If nothing else, it would be fun to contemplate while Democrats keep casting about for their long-delayed future. “The party needs new rising stars, and they need the room to figure out how to meet this moment, just like Obama figured out how to meet the moment 20 years ago,” Jon Favreau, a co-host of Pod Save America and former director of speechwriting for the 44th president, told me. “Unless, of course, Trump tries to run for a third term, in which case I’ll be begging Obama to come out of retirement.”

Biden’s Age Wasn’t a Cover-Up. It Was Observable Fact.

2025-05-20T15:00:00-04:00

Washington is abuzz these days, The Atlantic has learned. I love it when Washington is abuzz. Let’s jump right in. Why the buzzing?

Because apparently, Joe Biden is still really old. Older than he was last summer, when Washington was even more abuzz about the 46th president being really old—and about whether he was fit to lead the country, run for reelection, beat Donald Trump, thwart fascism, etc.

Or three years ago, when overwhelming majorities of Americans were already saying in polls that Biden should definitely not seek reelection. Or two years ago, when he declared that he would in fact seek reelection, while Democrats anguished (off the record; you did not hear this from me) that if Biden went ahead with a campaign, it would surely end in disaster. Or six months ago, when it did, in fact, end in disaster.

Or, for that matter, Sunday, when Biden announced that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer—an especially pronounced marker of his advanced age.

You know what else is old? The story about Biden being old.

For the latest chapter in this saga, we give thanks to a new book, out today, whose arrival has been as hotly anticipated around Washington as a sundae cart at the senior home. Biblically titled Original Sin, the book—by the CNN host Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson—offers the latest after-action report of the calamitous culmination of Biden’s career. The book depicts a kind of West Wing Weekend at Bernie’s, with Biden playing the frail, prideful, and self-deluded leader.

[Tyler Austin Harper: An autopsy report on Biden’s in-office decline]

Original Sin includes the requisite shocking new details—many of which have already been pre-circulated and selectively leaked, probably by the publisher, in an effort to drum up more excitement for the book. (You think buzz gets generated on its own?) Oh, and you can read The Atlantic’s excerpt of the book here.

“We got so screwed by Biden, as a party,” David Plouffe, one of Kamala Harris’s top campaign aides, told the authors, referring to the president’s refusal to step aside until it was way too late. Other revelations: Biden routinely forgot the names of his top aides. His personal doctor advocated for him to get more rest. There were “internal discussions” about putting him in a wheelchair. “It was incredible,” one Democrat told the authors, referring to Biden’s state in 2020. “This was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.” Four years later, Biden seemed not to recognize George Clooney, despite having met the handsome actor on many occasions. “Clooney was shaken to his core,” Tapper and Thompson write.

Original Sin focuses heavily on how Biden, his family, his White House staff, and many top Democrats conspired to hide the extent of the president’s deterioration from the public. It describes how journalists who dared report on the matter were bullied, frozen out, and gaslighted by the White House. The somewhat loaded and breathless term cover-up has gotten tossed around a lot in the promotion of Original Sin, including in the book’s subtitle (President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again).

The authors have engaged in some strategic umbrage-taking, including at last month’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In remarks at the event, Thompson chided the previous administration for concealing the president’s full decrepitude but also finger-wagged his fellow journalists for not reporting more vigorously on Biden’s decline. “We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows,” Thompson said while accepting the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage, for his work on Biden. This came a minute or so after Thompson mentioned that Original Sin was “available for preorder right now” (proving, as always, that if shamelessness is not the “original sin” of book promotion, it’s definitely in the top three.) He added that “being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves” and that “we should have done better.”

I should note that everything Thompson said was true, if somewhat obvious, and also that Biden and his aides and family members—the cover-uppers—deserve a history’s worth of blame for this episode. But here’s the deal, as the former president might say (presumably between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., his peak mental-acuity time): Politicians and their spinmeisters are not always on the level. No one would be “shaken to their core” by this statement. Just as scores of Republicans in Washington have been privately horrified over the years by Trump’s conduct while they’ve smothered him in rhetorical smooches on the record, Democrats confidentially expressed near-unanimous awareness of Biden’s feeble state, but claimed the exact opposite in front of cameras and microphones.

Here’s the deal, part two: The overriding objective of any White House is to make the principal look as good as possible. This is done through basic flackery, gobbledygook, selective disclosure, and rampant omission. We should not expect aides or congressional allies to run out and announce to the nation that the president—any president—seemed really out to lunch at his economic briefing, or was hurling ketchup against the wall, or was messing around with an intern.

[Benjamin Mazer: The MAHA crowd is already questioning Biden’s cancer diagnosis]

Yes, it’s a cynical business, politics, but here is why I think that the “cover-up” of Biden’s “true condition” is beside the point—and why I’m not really vibing with the umbrage-mongering: It’s pretty much impossible to “cover up” for something that is hiding in plain sight. Democrats could trot out as many White House officials as they wanted to claim I was with the president just this morning, and he was sharp as a tack and running circles around staffers less than half his age. But whenever Biden was allowed to go out in public—a rarity, which itself was a red flag—the public’s preexisting consensus about his infirmity was only reinforced. Biden was in no position to keep doing his job given his condition, which had been evident for years to most people paying even casual attention. Observable facts, people: They can be a real pain to cover up.

In the spirit of full—and, yes, shameless—disclosure, I am obligated to inform readers that I have been observing these facts in my coverage for years. (Without me, the American public might never have caught on that Biden is old!) In June 2022, I wrote an article for The Atlantic headlined “Why Biden Shouldn’t Run in 2024.” It began, “Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for reelection in 2024. He is too old.” You get the gist. I am a brave and courageous truth teller.

Although Tapper and Thompson interviewed approximately 200 people, I spoke with fewer than a dozen for that story, relying mostly on my own two eyes and a few obvious data points, such as the fact that Biden would be 82 on Inauguration Day 2025 and 86 at the end of his hypothetical second term. “He just seems old,” one senior administration official told me at the time. Over the next two years, I contributed periodic entries to the “Biden is too old” canon. One story called for some Democrat, or several Democrats, to primary him; another was about how he seemed destined to become a presidential version—a far more calamitous version—of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I wrote a “Time to Go, Joe” article in the hours after Biden’s debate face-plant last June and another headlined “C’mon, Man” nearly two weeks later, when Joe had still not gone.

Yes, a lot of White House and Democratic operatives were upset with me at the time. Early on, they insisted that I was wrong (I was with him just this morning), ageist, unfair, and uninformed. As time went on, several people in Biden world accused me of being obsessed with the president’s age and “beating a dead horse.” As it turned out, I had barely laid a hand on the horse, given the pulverizing in store for Biden after his debate debacle—which was when he effectively sent his own legacy to the glue factory.

The Biden age story will surely persist. In a recent review of Original Sin, my colleague Tyler Austin Harper praised the authors, correctly, for “describing a gruesome political car crash in dispassionate, clinical detail.” He also called it “the latest and most significant book to date about Biden’s cognitive decline.” I found two of Harper’s words to be quite ominous: to date.

Tim Walz Looks Into the Void

2025-04-23T12:15:00-04:00

Photographs by Brian Kaiser

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Tim Walz and I were sitting down for breakfast earlier this month at a Courtyard by Marriott in Independence, Ohio, just outside Cleveland. Walz, who was Kamala Harris’s running mate last year, is still the governor of a state that happens not to be Ohio—or West Virginia, Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, or Texas, all of which he had visited recently.

This was a bit curious, especially because it is not a presidential-election year. His three-day tour of northeastern Ohio included labor roundtables, impromptu roadside stops, and two town-hall meetings. What was he up to exactly?

Like Democrats in general, the two-term Minnesota governor is still trying to process the insanity of last summer and fall, the earthquake of Election Night 2024, and the horrors that have spiraled out since then. Also, like Democrats in general, he isn’t sure how best to counter the daily onslaught of the second Donald Trump administration. Walz seems to be figuring things out as he goes, but at the very least feels itchy to help jump-start the second Donald Trump resistance.

Walz is a big breakfast guy. It gets him jump-started. He ordered his standard morning bowl of oatmeal with a sliced banana. Walz is also a big metaphor guy. For instance, he refers to his delirious vice-presidential campaign as his “90-day Eras Tour.” It is a good line, but an imperfect metaphor. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour reinforced her rolling dominance; Walz’s ended abruptly—and badly.

“I own it,” Walz told me, referring to the inevitable critiques that have followed his and Harris’s defeat. He swigged from a bottle of Diet Mountain Dew, the first of four he consumes on an average day.

[Mark Leibovich: Tim Walz is too good at this]

I had a vague memory of Walz’s affinity for the phosphorescent soda. It was part of the populist persona that he debuted on the national stage after Joe Biden’s candidacy imploded in July, and that helped endear Walz to Harris. Walz, as her running mate, was that plainspoken lover of hunting, coacher of football, changer of air filters, wearer of camo. He was briefly the prototype hero for all of those “White Dudes for Kamala” (they had T-shirts!).

I also had a vague memory of Walz briefly becoming a Democratic sensation last summer, even though that now feels like last century. But despite his star turn in July and August—the viral cable interviews, the killer convention speech—Walz virtually disappeared after Labor Day, except for a not-great debate performance against J. D. Vance.

To a certain degree, Walz’s recent travels represent a return to the national political scene. I was curious to see how he would be received. It’s not as if anyone senses a great public clamor for Tim Walz less than six months since Election Night. He seems a less than likely—and less than ideal—candidate to lead Democrats through their desperate straits. He often acknowledges this himself, as he did at a town hall in Youngstown.

“Probably the last guy” who should be telling the party what to do, he said, “is the guy who got his ass kicked in the last election.”

Walz (center) at a roundtable discussion in Martins Ferry, Ohio, with members of the United Mine Workers of America and the United Steelworkers (Brian Kaiser for The Atlantic)

Audiences laugh at this, always. Political self-deprecation is a winner, especially in this period of abundant gallows humor.

But here is the notable part: A lot of people are showing up to see Tim Walz. The crowd at Youngstown’s DeYor Performing Arts Center was loud and boisterous—about 2,800 people, including a packed overflow room. They lined up on a snowy Monday, the same night as the NCAA men’s basketball title game. Walz drew another 2,000 people (with overflow room) to a large high-school auditorium in Lorain, Ohio, the next night.

“Something is definitely happening,” Walz told me a few hours before the Youngstown town hall, during a stop for lunch across the border in Wheeling, West Virginia. By “something,” he meant a great and building frustration among people who are horrified not just by what Trump is doing but also by the lack of response from the putative leaders of the Democratic Party.

No one at these events seemed to view Walz per se as the Democrats’ savior, though I sensed nothing but goodwill for him. More than anything, he was a vehicle for them, someone to give voice to their anger. He had heard a “primal scream from America,” Walz said in Youngstown, the line that drew probably the loudest cheers of the night. “When people on the streets were saying, ‘My God, elected Democrats, do something!’”

[Read: Can you really fight populism with populism?]

There have been stirrings of late. “Cory Booker stood there for 25 hours,” Walz said in Youngstown, referring to the senator from New Jersey’s record-long floor speech the previous week. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have embarked on a nationwide “Fighting Oligarchy” tour that is drawing crowds sometimes in the tens of thousands to places such as Missoula, Montana, and Nampa, Idaho. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts attracted a few thousand people at a recent rally in Austin and about 1,500 in Nashville. And Governor Gavin Newsom of California started a podcast last month; two of his first guests were staunch MAGA luminaries, Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. Another was Walz.

“I’m kind of wondering where I fall on the list of guests,” Walz told Newsom after he was introduced. Walz praised his fellow governor for “doing something to try and fill a void that’s out there, and hopefully trying to use it as a platform to articulate our values to a broader audience.” He added, “We’ve not figured this out yet.”

Walz talks a lot about this void. About a month ago, he set out to be part of the Democratic effort to fill it. He said he was appalled by the unwillingness of many Republican House members to hold town-hall meetings after agitated constituents started showing up to them. In March, Walz became one of a handful of Democrats who decided to host their own events in districts where Republicans had been refusing to. This would also be a chance for Walz to figure out a few things of his own, a version of the “where I fall on the list of guests” question. He wanted to see if there was any audience for someone like himself.

Walz’s town halls are cathartic and fascinating spectacles—equal parts group therapy, strategy brainstorm, and gripe session. Walz is constantly spitting out fun facts and skips from topic to topic. He sometimes appears to be processing aloud as he speaks. One hobbyhorse is how Democrats need to communicate their message in simpler, real-life language. Walz affects a serious, highfalutin voice. “You hear Democrats say this, ‘We really need to address food insecurity,’” he said in Youngstown. “What we really need to do is make sure people aren’t hungry. And just talk about that.” (Oligarch is another bad term, Walz says, as opposed to greedy billionaires.)

Walz is a good storyteller, and nails his applause lines. But he couches the current state of things as scary and getting more so. “The road to totalitarianism is people telling other people they’re overreacting,” Walz said in Youngstown. He throws around phrases such as “constitutional crisis” and “the world melting down around us.” He mentions that the White House is not far from jailing its political enemies.

[Adam Serwer: The constitutional crisis is here]

Walz offers the power of citizen engagement as the Democrats’ ultimate weapon. “One man should not be able to destroy the global economy,” he said in the crescendo of his speech in Youngstown. He said that Congress isn’t doing its job to check Trump, and now Trump is defying the courts. “So, I got to tell you,” he said, “this is what you call a constitutional crisis.” The crowd went nuts—presumably because they agree, not because they like constitutional crises.

“But there is one final fail-safe. That’s the people,” Walz said. “The people,” he said again, over the building applause. “The people are going to solve this.”

Audience members at Walz’s town hall in Youngstown (Brian Kaiser for The Atlantic)

About that “running for something” question: Everything about Walz’s three days in Ohio resembled a well-advanced campaign trip. He had an entourage of about a dozen people, including security, traveling staff, local officials, and press; he does not have a political PAC, according to his staff, and he worked with local Democratic organizations to set up the events. He held big ones, smaller forums and meetings, media scrums, and meandering retail stops.

“We’re going to eat fish sandwiches!” Walz announced upon his arrival at Coleman’s Fish Market, in downtown Wheeling. He greeted employees, visited a few tables, and posed for photos. Someone recommended that he try a cup of the alligator soup. It is one of the fish shop’s most popular items, even though alligators are not common in West Virginia—nor, for that matter, are they fish. Walz ordered some and immediately raved, in the way that politicians always rave about restaurant cuisine when cameras are present. “It’s like minestrone,” he said. “You gotta try it.” (I did, and found it bland and watery.)

I sat at a wooden table across from Walz, who was joined by former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland. Walz started telling me about how a day earlier, while stopping at a convenience store, he’d met a woman who raises emus. I heard him tell this story several more times over the next day and a half. These goofy and serendipitous encounters are part of what Walz loves about campaigning, or whatever it is that he’s doing. He projects an obvious sense of missing being out on the trail, as if maybe he has his own void to fill.

“So, are you going to run for president?” I asked Walz over breakfast the next morning at the Courtyard in Independence.

“No, no,” he said.

He told me he will decide in a few months whether to seek a third term as governor; he is up for reelection next year. He briefly thought about running for an open Minnesota Senate seat in 2026 but decided not to. I tried the “running for president” question a few more times. He gave me more “no”s, but at a certain point they started coming with equivocations—or I heard them as such.

“So, you’re not running for president?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Ever? Possibly? Maybe? Rule it out? All that?”

“My line always is: Don’t ever turn down a job you haven’t been offered,” Walz said, cryptically.

Walz speaks at a Network for Public Education conference in Columbus, Ohio. (Brian Kaiser for The Atlantic)

Walz has obvious regrets and second-guesses about the last campaign. He agrees with those who wish that he and Harris had been less cautious. “I’m a big believer in flooding the zone,” he told me. The candidates should have gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast and talked with other Trump-friendly media outlets, he said. “I’m like, fuck it,” Walz said. “Just go.” If there is one lesson that Democrats can take from Trump, he said, it is to “continually be present.”

As far as his own role, Walz clearly felt restrained and, to some degree, reduced to a one-dimensional prototype for those coveted “White Dudes for Kamala” guys.

[Mark Leibovich: Trump says he is serious about staying in office past 2028]

He is careful not to criticize the campaign directly, but not subtle in parroting the critiques of others. Walz volunteered that Bill Clinton had called him in early October. “He said, ‘Don’t allow them to make you a caricature.’” (The “them” here refers to Walz’s own campaign higher-ups, not the Trump-Vance campaign.) “You are a consequential governor,” Clinton told him, according to Walz. “And that’s what you should be running on.”

I asked Walz if he’d ever pushed back against the campaign’s decisions. He said that he offered suggestions, but did not want to create problems. Yet he wishes he could have done more interviews, showed a less canned version of himself, and been more freewheeling.

“Why didn’t they have me do this shit, like we did yesterday?” Walz wondered aloud, a bit wistfully, referring to his encounter with the emu lady, which he’d just excitedly finished talking about (again). “Solid, for 100 days, just that?”

Near the end of our breakfast, Walz veered into another campaign story. He was doing a photo line at an event in California, and who should come roaring through but Katy Perry. “And for five minutes, she just chastised me about Diet Mountain Dew,” Walz said. “I was like, ‘You’re scaring me, Katy.’” Perry’s persistence didn’t work—Walz still guzzles the stuff with gusto—but at least this was another cherished vignette from the campaign trail that he seems to crave more of.

After Walz finished his speech in Youngstown, he thanked everyone, waved, pointed, and lingered onstage. He had a big, almost euphoric smile on his face that went beyond the usual politician’s perma-grin. It felt at odds with the darkness of the Democrats’ predicament. He was relishing the moment.

So was the crowd. They lingered on their feet, cheering for the guy who got his ass kicked in the last election.

Trump Says He Is Serious About Staying in Office Past 2028

2025-04-10T11:00:00-04:00

President Donald Trump keeps getting asked about the possibility of seeking a third term in 2028.

“Well, there are plans,” he recently told NBC’s Kristen Welker, who became the latest interviewer to raise the topic. She will almost certainly not be the last.

This appears to be by design—Trump’s design. His answers always contain enough tantalizing ambiguity to keep people interested: What plans exactly?

“There are—not plans,” Trump said to Welker, correcting himself, if not clarifying anything. “There are methods.”

What methods?

This went on for a bit. It was not immediately clear how serious Trump was, or whether he was just savoring the flattery of being asked these questions again and again. After all, they allow him to note, correctly, that a good portion of the Republican Party would love to see him run; they also ensure that he will continue to be the central figure of the Republican Party straight through the 2028 presidential primaries (assuming the GOP bothers with that formality).

[Read: Why Trump says he’s ‘not joking’ about a third term]

“I’m just telling you I have had more people say, ‘Please run again,’” Trump reminded reporters aboard Air Force One a few hours after the Welker interview aired. “We have a long way to go before we even think about that,” he added.

In other words, it’s probably time to start thinking about it.

Or, at the very least, to recognize that a familiar pattern seems to be reasserting itself, one that can become quite messy. It begins with Trump musing over some seemingly outlandish idea—say, his desire for the United States to annex Greenland. At first, the prospect is treated as an absurd amusement. Republicans on Capitol Hill are asked what they think. They either laugh it off or avoid the question.

Soon enough, the prospect does not seem so ridiculous. Donald Trump Jr., Vice President J. D. Vance, and Second Lady Usha Vance show up in Greenland. Hyper-MAGA Representative Andy Ogles introduces the Make Greenland Great Again Act in support of efforts to acquire the now-coveted land mass. The Greenland gambit graduates to a legitimate intra-NATO disturbance—and then no one is questioning whether Trump is serious.

This trajectory has become an utterly familiar dynamic of the Trump-era GOP. Probably the most shameful example occurred when Trump refused to concede the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, then did nothing as his supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol. Many Republicans assumed that he would eventually relent. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” one senior GOP official told The Washington Post that November, in what became one of the most infamous and foreboding blind quotes ever rendered.

By now it should be clear to Republicans that, however ridiculous—and funny—Trump can seem, he should always be taken seriously. Especially when he says something explicitly, and when it involves a potential violation of the Constitution.

“I’m not joking,” Trump told Welker. “I’m not joking.” And yet.

“It kinda sounded like he was joking,” Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas told reporters about the third term that Trump expressly had said he was not joking about.

“The president and I have talked about this,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said, also in response to the Welker interview. “Joked about it. He’s joked about it with me onstage before.”

Trump is “just having some fun with it,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on the same subject.

When I asked a smattering of other elected Republicans about this issue on Capitol Hill last week, they responded with various shrugs, brush-offs, and other nonresponses.

Several Republicans have pointed out that the Constitution doesn’t allow Trump to run for a third term. “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” the Twenty-Second Amendment reads. Unless, of course, the Constitution is ignored, or changed.

Ogles, who has made a subspecialty of gratifying Trump through boutique legislation tailored to his passion projects, has already introduced a resolution that would amend the Constitution to allow a president to run for a third term. This would seem to open the door to a dream showdown pitting Trump against his twice-elected predecessor, Barack Obama. Except that Ogles’s resolution conveniently excludes presidents who served their two terms consecutively. So, sorry, Obama. Trump would be the only living president, or ex-president, eligible to run again—other than, well, Biden, if he’s still interested.

Ogles’s resolution appears unlikely to succeed. Amending the Constitution requires the support of at least two-thirds of the House and Senate, along with three-quarters of the individual states. But that’s not stopping Trump loyalists from making clear that they consider this a noble and achievable goal.

“I’m a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028,” Steve Bannon, who served as Trump’s chief White House strategist during his first term, said in an interview with NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo last month. “We’re working on it. I think we’ll have a couple of alternatives,” Bannon said.

[Anastasia Edel: Why America’s oligarchs may regret their obedience]

One alternative involves Trump running as a vice-presidential candidate on a 2028 ticket with Vance. Assuming they win, Vance would step aside and Trump would retain his accustomed office, reaching the age of 86 if he served a full term. (The Constitution says that you can’t be elected more than twice to the presidency, Trump supporters like to point out, not that you can’t serve more than twice—a potential loophole that few constitutional scholars credit and that hasn’t been tested in the courts.)

It’s easy to imagine that these Trump-perpetuation efforts will become a pretext for pressure campaigns from the president’s enforcers against elected Republicans. Even if they note that Trump is constitutionally ineligible to run again, that would not stop anyone from asking whether they support an amendment to change the Constitution. Soon, Trump’s brazen position on third terms might become a litmus test for Republicans who wish to stay viable in the party. The White House could make clear that refusing to support Trump’s remaining in office will be considered an act of disloyalty.

Again, the 2020 election offers a germane precedent. Republicans who dared acknowledge Biden’s victory faced intense and sustained ire from the White House. GOP lawmakers who voted to certify the election—once a pro forma act of governance—were seen as traitorous by much of Trump world. Saying that the 2020 election was “rigged” became almost a default position inside the GOP.

One can envision that, for any Republican, supporting Trump in 2028 will soon become a prerequisite for good standing. The idea might seem dubious, for a lot of reasons. Such as the Constitution. But there are methods.

Democrats Have a Problem

2025-04-04T07:00:00-04:00

Democrats have a problem: too many problems. Identifying the problems is not one of those problems.

“Democrats have a trust problem,” suggests Representative Jason Crow of Colorado.

“Democrats have a big narrative problem,” adds Representative Greg Casar of Texas.

“Democrats have a vision problem,” says Representative Ro Khanna of California.

In general, Democrats have a “Democrats have a problem” problem.

This is to be expected from a party suffering through a “major brand problem” and a “major image problem,” and whose favorability ratings have plunged to new lows, in part thanks to its “smug problem” and “media and communications problem.”

“Over the last decade, the Democratic Party has had a working-class voter problem,” Representative Brendan Boyle, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, told Politico last week. “It started out as a white working-class voter problem,” Boyle said. “And it has, as I’ve long feared, spread. It is not just a white working-class issue. It has now spread to the Latino working class and African American working class.”

[Mark Leibovich: Have the conversation before it’s too late]

So many problems! Where to begin? Perhaps last November. Since their election wipeout, Democrats have been engaged in—and subjected to—a free-for-all of problem-naming. It’s hard to know whom to believe, if anyone, about what the party’s biggest problem is—which itself is a problem (see the aforementioned “trust problem,” as well as the “credibility problem” and the “authenticity problem”).

It can also be hard to keep track of all the problems. New interpretations and analyses are constantly being circulated (and regurgitated). Fresh polls and focus groups attempt to quantify the various problems, which include the party’s perception problem, Gen Z and young-bro problems, working-class and plutocrat problems, man problems, woman problems, and transgender problems.

Here’s another problem: Problems are tedious. Talk about them endlessly, and people will start to avoid you at parties. It can foster self-loathing—and exacerbate the Democrats’ preexisting “big problem with its own voters.”

In fairness, Democrats themselves aren’t the only ones focused on their party’s problems. Podcasters, Substackers, YouTubers, and other geniuses across the political spectrum have also obsessed over the Democrats’ latest this problem or that problem. Also in fairness, headline and chyron writers have a cliché problem. They tend to overwork the “Democrats Have a (Blank) Problem” construction. This only heightens the tedium.

Parties that lose big elections are always wallowing in their problems. They are said to be “in the wilderness,” “rudderless,” and “in disarray.” Their putative leaders attend “policy retreats”—sometimes held in the actual wilderness. They engage in circular hand-wringing and browbeating, and arrive at “key takeaways.”

The media tends to amplify the losing party’s most self-hating and scornful voices. “If we don’t get our shit together, then we are going to be in a permanent minority,” Democratic Senator John Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, said last week. (Important context: Every party that loses an election supposedly risks becoming a “permanent minority.” This concern usually lasts no longer than an election cycle or two. “Permanent” minorities usually turn out to be temporary.)

Both parties tend to over-dissect their problems and defeats. After President Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney in 2012, the Republican National Committee commissioned an “autopsy” report. The problem with autopsies is that they are, by definition, backward-looking. The patient is already dead. After 2012, various Republican steering committees and task forces determined that the party had done a poor job reaching Black, Latino, immigrant, young, and women voters. They had a big “diversity problem” and needed to stop speaking in a way that alienated so much of the electorate. This appeared self-evident, except that it also proved to be exactly what Republican voters did not want. As it turned out, they wanted Donald Trump.

[Jonathan Chait: The Democrats show why they lost]

Yes, Democrats do have many problems. But a good election can solve many of them. Campaigns should be about the future, as Bill Clinton used to say. And Democrats should get on with theirs. They can start the 2028 presidential clock now and find their next cohort of leaders. Good candidates can solve a lot of problems too.

Good candidates can also hurl the discussion back to the Republicans’ own problems, which seem to be mounting: the tariff problem and the inflation problem, the Signal problem and the Elon Musk problem. That last problem was laid bare on Tuesday by the liberal judge Susan Crawford’s victory in Wisconsin’s state-supreme-court election (this despite—or because of—the $25 million Musk spent against her campaign).

As a politician, Trump has many special qualities, but he also has a knack for creating new problems, for himself and for his party. His announcement of sweeping new tariffs spurred a massive stock sell-off yesterday and accelerated a global trade war. His aggressive foreign-policy posture has strained long-standing alliances, in addition to the patience of global leaders.

Here is another problem: Republican voters have proved unreliable when Trump is not on the ballot—which he will not be in 2026. This is “the GOP’s big voter problem.” Theoretically, Trump also won’t be on the ballot in 2028, although he keeps suggesting that he might try to run for a third term, which would temporarily solve the GOP’s big voter problem.

But this could also be problematic. Constitutionally, for starters.

When I’m 84

2025-03-31T08:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Dina Litovsky

Let’s start with something that I’m not proud of but feels important to disclose up front. Last spring, I was interviewing Ringo Starr at the Sunset Marquis hotel, in West Hollywood, when I committed an embarrassing breach of journalistic ethics: As we were wrapping up, I asked Starr if he would pose for a photo with me.

“Or is that grossly unprofessional?” I asked, trying to come off as sheepish and apologetic.

Starr smirked.

“No, no, everybody’s unprofessional,” he said. “Don’t feel special.”

He moved next to me and flashed a compulsory peace sign as his publicist snapped our photo. “Everybody does it,” she said, and then handed me a white “peace and love” bracelet as a parting gift. Starr flashed another peace sign—a double this time.

Okay, end of disclosure. From here on, this will be a sober and detached treatment of a seminal figure in the history of popular music. (Also: The photo can be viewed on my Instagram.)

Ringo Starr is 84 years old and has lived quite an extraordinary life. I realize I am late to this story.

He is among the most scrutinized, fetishized, analyzed, and catechized people in history. I admit to feeling out of my depth, if this was not already clear. Usually, I write about politics. I am not accustomed to interacting with Beatles. As opposed to, say, congressmen.

That first day I met him, Starr had a new record to promote—a solo record, it still feels necessary to say. I had been granted a brief slot on his schedule around the release of Crooked Boy, a four-track collection that features the Strokes’ guitarist Nick Valensi. Starr had a packed interview dance card, with a procession of podcasters, YouTubers, and other species that didn’t exist when he and his Liverpool mates first started doing this, back when America’s chief influencer was Ed Sullivan.

Starr greeted me with a light fist bump, in keeping with his hypervigilance about avoiding germs.

“You might be one of the most-interviewed people in the world,” I felt the need to say.

“I am,” he confirmed.

I wondered how I could make this interesting. “Well, just make it short,” Starr suggested, as we headed out onto the patio adjacent to his suite.

“So, how short?” I asked. “Like, three minutes, two minutes?”

“You can have the whole three!” Starr said, and then punctuated his sentence, as he punctuates many of his sentences, with a dry and devilish giggle. Four quick “hah”s jackhammered in succession. He tends to speak in quips, toggling between his two dominant modes, seen-it-all sarcasm and glib nonchalance.

Born Richard Starkey, he became Sir Richard Starkey when he was knighted in 2018. I asked his excellency whether I should address him as “Ringo” or “Richard” (or “Richie,” as intimates call him). “You’ll call me Ringo, because I don’t know you,” he said. “A-hah-hah-hah-hah.”

“My family don’t call me that,” he added.

After a few minutes, the publicist started gesturing in my direction. I feared this was the universal “wrap it up” sign, but no, false alarm (she was just trying to get a photographer’s attention). “This is longer than three minutes, you know,” Starr took the opportunity to observe, affecting a sneer. Or maybe he was not affecting it.

Starr looks remarkably well maintained for his age. This is a testament to the preservative power of his fitness regimen, strict sobriety, a vegetarian diet, and lots of hair dye. He is also one of those rare figures whose face has been such a fixture of our cultural lives for so long that his actual, three-dimensional presence in front of you elicits a double take. Is this the genuine cargo or some wiry wisp of a Ringo impersonator?

It feels perfectly suitable to describe him as “looking exactly like Ringo Starr” and expect to be understood. He has the shaped beard, the little red shades, and a peace-sign pendant on a necklace. He appears just as he has in countless pop-art pieces and wax museums, and that Simpsons episode in which Starr, playing himself, turns out to be Marge’s artistic muse.

Everyone scurrying in and out of Ringo’s suite looks famous, or almost famous. They include a swarm of well-wishers and maybe some actual friends whom Starr has gotten by with a little help from. I was struck by how Starr’s presence arouses giddiness even in other rock stars. Valensi told me that when people hear that he worked with Starr, they tend to transform into elated teenagers. “Everybody who I tell that to is just so phenomenally either excited for me, or is baffled, and kind of questioning, How did that happen? ” he said. “My wife and my mom, and my sisters, and even close friends who are musicians—everybody just kind of wants to know what the whole thing was like.”

People who spotted Starr moving through the Sunset Marquis kept shouting out “Peace and love” at him. This of course has been Starr’s personal mantra, greeting, and aloha for most of his post-Beatles decades.

“Peace and love, peace and love,” Starr said back to a cluster of onlookers, sounding cheerfully bored. At one point, I watched Starr pause and puff out his cheeks into an ostentatious deep breath. I imagine that’s one of the hassles of immortality: It tends to go on forever.

I have always been a Ringo guy. This was true long before the Fab Four were reduced to an antique duo of Starr and Paul McCartney, now 82. Starr had seven straight top-10 singles after the Beatles broke up, and those early solo tracks were among the first pop songs I remember hearing on the radio when I was a kid. “It Don’t Come Easy” was released in 1971, when I was 6, and played in heavy rotation on the local pop station, WRKO-AM, Boston. It was one of my first favorite songs.

Starr always seemed like the friendliest and most life-size of the four Beatles. The others felt less accessible than the droopy-eyed drummer with the cartoon-cowboy name and childlike tunes. Ringo was yellow submarines and octopus gardens, the mascot little brother, despite being the eldest Beatle, and the best at flittering above the feuds that afflicted the trio of geniuses around him.

Ringo Starr, drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, circa 1959 (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty)

Starr was the fastest to comic relief and most averse to pretension in any form. “There you go, hiding behind a smoke screen of bourgeois clichés,” he says in Richard Lester’s 1964 comedy, A Hard Day’s Night, after a stagehand has accused Starr of being “rather arbitrary” for not letting him touch his drum kit. I latched on to this line immediately. In high school, when certain highfalutin friends would try out their fancy SAT words, I would tell them, “There you go, hiding behind a smoke screen of bourgeois clichés.” (Admittedly, this itself was rather arbitrary on my part.)

“He’s the most sympathetic of all the Beatles,” T Bone Burnett, the legendary producer and guitarist, told me. When I spoke with him, Burnett had just produced a new Starr record, a country album called Look Up, which came out in January and has since become one of the biggest hits of his solo career. “Nobody has generated more goodwill than Ringo,” Burnett added. “Not a single person in the world.”

Clearly, this is hyperbole. Starr has had his moments of tribulation. As the Beatles were reaching their collective wits’ end in 1968, he up and left the band while the others kept on recording what would become The White Album. It was the first time a Beatle had quit, though as the journalist Rob Sheffield writes in Dreaming the Beatles, “It later became one of their favorite pastimes.” Ringo decamped to Sardinia, and somehow the press didn’t hear about it. McCartney took over on drums for “Dear Prudence,” a fact that would remain a secret for nearly two decades.

[From the July/August 2023 issue: Paul McCartney’s photographs from a 1964 trip to New York City]

For the most part, though, Starr is depicted as an unfailingly positive force within the band. Starr, in Sheffield’s summation, is “the guy who holds it together because he can get along with the high-strung divas up front.”

This idea of Ringo as a source of solace, lowerer of temperatures, and defuser of tensions resonated with me. I spent much of 2024 covering the bleak spectacle of the U.S. presidential campaign. Nothing was making sense, and everywhere I went, people seemed stuck in rival camps of resentment. If “peace and love” had been on the ballot, it would have lost in a landslide.

But here was Ringo, still banging around. It felt like a small but significant win for humankind, and one to be celebrated as often as possible.

On July 7, I went to Starr’s birthday gala in Beverly Hills, where celebrities of varying wattages (Fred Armisen, the Eagles’ Joe Walsh) wished him well. Starr has turned his birthday into an international celebration of peace and love; at noon local time, Ringo fans in 34 nations exclaimed “Peace and love,” as did NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station. I attended events tied to the release of Starr’s two new records, and two concerts by his long-running “Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band.” Throughout, the Ringo habitat stayed blissfully sealed off from Donald Trump, Joe Biden, national reckonings, crises of democracy, and things of that nature.

On the rare occasions when politics did intrude, the context was fittingly fun-loving. “I agree!” Starr announced last fall, as he held up a RINGO FOR PRESIDENT 2024 placard that he had grabbed from a fan in the audience during a show in Washington, D.C.

If only. Instead, Starr would be my roving ambassador of joy and amity in an America that felt starved of such things.

“I can’t force you to be peaceful and loving; I can only say, ‘Peace and love,’ ” Starr told me. But how wonderful it would be, I replied, if his “peace and love” birthday festivities kept growing and growing. The event might outlive him, and July 7 could be a certified international holiday. One day a week should be dedicated to peace and love, Starr countered: “I want Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Peace and Love, Thursday, Friday.” (Naturally, this would require eight days a week.)

Starr has a gift for coining offbeat phrases. His fellow Beatles referred to them as “Ringo-isms.” The phrases might sound askew at first, and don’t always track precisely. But something about them is just right. They fill a gap in the language you hadn’t realized was there.

Starr once described a particularly grueling Beatles session as being a hard day’s night. This presumably was meant to convey a hybrid sense of fatigue, relief, and satisfaction. Everyone who heard him seemed to know just what he meant. Soon enough, it would be a song, a movie title, and a universal refrain.

[From the July/August 2014 issue: The power of two]

McCartney and John Lennon were mesmerized by these nonsensical yet lyrical coinages. Starr has said that Lennon would follow him around, pencil at the ready, “waiting to hear what I’d say next.” His quirky phraseology was unpredictable and did not keep normal hours. Suddenly, inspiration would strike. How to capture Father McKenzie’s abject isolation in “Eleanor Rigby”? Say he’s “darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there.” That was all Ringo.

The Beatles, 1963. All four members endured gritty upbringings, but Starr overcame what one biographer called “a Dickensian chronicle of misfortune.” (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty)

(Eight days a week has been credited as a Ringo-ism, but Starr told me the phrase came from an overworked cabdriver, who said it to McCartney. “At one time I did want to take credit for it,” he admitted. “I said all those other lines.”)

I first learned about Ringo-isms last spring while sitting in a Beverly Hills Starbucks cramming for my first meeting with Starr. A few months earlier, he had done an interview with AARP the Magazine on the occasion of yet another record, the EP Rewind Forward, which had come out in October 2023. The title track is a great and uplifting song. I especially loved the concept of “rewind forward,” a contemporary Ringo-ism that is also something of a mental strategy for him.

Starr explained that when he’s in despair, he tries to transport himself to a happier time in order to break his sadness. “If I’m in a bad space, rewind to the good space you were in,” he said. “Like yesterday, an hour ago, or last year. And bring it forward.” Starr said he loved the term rewind forward as soon as it popped into his head and out of his mouth. “When I said it—like hard day’s night—it made no sense,” he told me. But soon enough, it made perfect sense. “Just, hey, bring it forward,” he said.

I instantly appreciated the notion of “rewind forward.” One of the most powerful examples of this in my own life, in fact, involves Ringo Starr.

It was the summer of 1991, and I was going through a brutally difficult time. My little brother, Phil, had just died after a terrible car crash and a six-year ordeal in a coma. I was 26; living in Cambridge, Massachusetts; depressed as hell; and not able to sleep, write, or do much of anything. Finally, a shrink prescribed me an antidepressant—something far less common and more stigmatized in those days, and I didn’t dare tell a soul. As the pharmacist at the crowded CVS in Harvard Square reviewed my prescription, he said to me in a very loud voice, “You will be taking this to treat clinical depression, right?” I cannot emphasize how loud this was.

I stood there mortified, while everyone in the long line behind me cracked up. As did I, after a few seconds. It was my first moment of pure lightness in months. I will always remember that episode, as well as what was playing over the CVS speakers at just that moment: “It Don’t Come Easy,” that great Ringo tune about persevering through darkness.

Looking back on that period in my 20s, it now feels less a dreary memory than something to celebrate—a testament to the miracle of survival. Whenever I hear “It Don’t Come Easy,” it inspires an odd nostalgia for that moment in CVS when brightness peeked through. The song offers a chance to connect with an old, surmounted pain.

Starr began working on “It Don’t Come Easy” in the late 1960s, as tensions within the Beatles were reaching their full boil. He has spoken of the song in terms of his own self-doubt. The other three were much more accomplished songwriters; how would he fare on his own? “When I first started writing, I would play the songs to the boys, and they would all be on the floor laughing their asses off,” Starr told me. “Because I had just rewritten someone else’s song. I just changed the words, but it had the same melody. And so I had to get out of that.”

Starr had always been set apart from the other three, and not just onstage, as drummers often are. Although all four Beatles had endured gritty Liverpool upbringings, Starr was a true vanquisher of long odds, overcoming a childhood steeped in poverty and chronic illness—“a Dickensian chronicle of misfortune,” as the Beatles biographer Bob Spitz has called it.

At age 6, little Richie Starkey contracted a ghastly case of peritonitis. “They went in for my appendix, but, too late, it had exploded; all the poison was in my body,” Starr told me. “And they did actually say to my mother—three times they said to her—‘He’ll be dead in the morning.’ And, hey, here I am.” He spent several months in the hospital before he recovered. He then contracted tuberculosis, endured another long hospitalization, and nearly died of boredom until one fateful day.

“The teacher came with percussive maracas and triangles,” he told me. “We weren’t doing school, so we learned to play a percussive band. And I got a drum, and that was the moment. I hit that drum.” He was 13. “I only wanted to be a drummer from then on.”

This is another reason I’m a Ringo guy—he projects a kind of playful pathos. His hardships are never far from the surface, which makes him feel approachable, perhaps more so than he intends.

A few minutes after I’d met Starr for the first time, I heard myself telling him the story about depressed 20-something me hearing “It Don’t Come Easy” in CVS. This was, I realize, a bit of an overshare right out of the gate. “Every time I hear that song now, I feel joy,” I told him. Starr said nothing at first. “But enough about me,” I said to fill the silence. He did not respond for a second, which felt more like an hour. Why is this man I just met baring his soul to me? I imagined him thinking.

“No, but it’s a cool thing,” he finally said.

He gave me an empathetic look, the distinctly Ringo eyes.

Fans watch Starr perform at the Grand Ole Opry, in Nashville, in February. Starr’s new
country album has been one of the biggest hits of his long solo career. (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

Starr often conveys a sense of not wanting to linger or drag out an obligation. Make it short. T Bone Burnett told me about a listening party for Look Up that Starr hosted in L.A. “He said, ‘Well, it’s been wonderful having you all listen to the record. Over there is the food,’ ” Starr told his guests. “ ‘And over there is the door.’ ” But he also has a knack for snapping into a quiet mode of comforting contemplation.

“I think it goes back to that extraordinary scene in A Hard Day’s Night,” Burnett told me. The band members spend much of the movie being swarmed by fans and press, chased by girls, and cloistered in their hotel room (with Starr receiving by far the biggest stack of fan mail).

At one point, Starr grabs a camera and walks off on his own to experience the world. He attempts, with mixed success, to avoid detection. “He’s quiet; he’s thoughtful; he’s sensitive,” Burnett told me. “You could feel in the film there’s all this madness around him. But here’s this very thoughtful cat. And I think it goes back to that. And there’s something—and you can feel—there’s a hurt in him that he wears very gracefully.”

At various times, both Lennon and George Harrison spoke of being in the Beatles as a burden. Starr, by contrast, always seemed like the Beatle most fully grounded in gratitude. He was lucky to have survived his merciless Liverpool youth, the madness of being in the Fab Four, years of addiction to drugs and alcohol after the band’s dissolution, even the apparently quite dangerous status of having been a Beatle at all. (Lennon was murdered by a deranged fan in 1980; Harrison was brutally stabbed by a paranoid schizophrenic who invaded his home in 1999.)

Starr has not always hidden his annoyance at the hassles of his hyper-fame. In 2008, he released an exasperated video begging fans to stop sending him stuff in the mail to sign. (“Nothing!” he railed. “Peace and love.”) For the most part, though, he has carried himself like someone who won a long-shot bet and has been playing with house money ever since. He seems eternally grateful to have been tapped for the World’s Greatest Band, or any band.

“I’m a band guy,” Starr has said, often. “I need a group of guys,” he told me. “I need the bass player and the guitar players.” It’s not like the drummer can go out and perform by himself.

Last June, I went to see Starr and His All Starr Band play the Venetian in Las Vegas. Since 1989, Starr has been playing and touring with a revolving cast of old musical buddies. The current lineup comprises seven members, all in their 60s or older, including Steve Lukather of Toto, Colin Hay of Men at Work, and Hamish Stuart of Average White Band.

Starr’s people let me show up early for sound check. I watched from the front section of an empty theater of soaring ceilings, balconies, a massive chandelier, and pale-pink seats. Starr was wearing a black tracksuit and holding a mic at center stage. “Testing, one, two, three,” he said into the mic. “Hello, Mark.” I waved a peace sign back at him and did my best to keep my composure and not turn into a giddy groupie again. I failed. “Holy shit, he knows my name,” I said, pathetically, to Starr’s publicist, who probably had just reminded him of my name, and that I existed.

After rehearsing a few more songs, including “It Don’t Come Easy,” Starr wandered over. “Hello,” he said. Fist bump. How did he like Las Vegas? I asked. His 2024 spring tour included six dates at the Venetian, of which this was the last.

Starr circa 1990, around the time he convened the All Starr Band and resumed touring (Lester Cohen / Getty)

“I don’t care; I’ll play anywhere,” he said. “I’ll go where they send me.”

Given the crowds, the chaos, the ad campaigns condoning venial sin, I suggested that Vegas might be one of the least peaceful and loving cities in America. Starr pointed to the empty hall. “Tonight, this space will be all peace and love,” he vowed.

I wondered why Starr was still subjecting himself to this grind. If nothing else, it illustrated how being a “band guy” remains essential to his center of gravity. “He loves musicians,” Lukather, of Toto, told me. “There’s something to be said with going through the good and the bad with people, as opposed to all by yourself. Because the highs are high and the lows are real low.”

Lukather has played guitar in the All Starr Band for 13 years. Every one of those years, he said, Starr has insisted would be the finale. “This is the last one, lads, the last one,” he says. No way, Lukather replies. Starr will get restless in a month and come running back. “Here’s the deal with the circus,” Lukather told me. “Once he joined the circus, he could never leave.”

Starr confirmed that he is a failed retiree, many times over. “I’ve had enough; I’ve done enough,” he will say. “And I get a phone call: ‘Well, we’ve got 10 gigs if you’re interested.’ ‘Okay.’ And we’re on the road again.” It’s much easier doing only 10 or 11 gigs a month, he said, compared with the 30 or so they used to do. “It still gives me time to get my rocks off and play the drums,” Starr told me. “With a band.”

Ringo’s All Starr Band shows last about two hours and feature several of his best-known solo tracks, such as “Photograph” and “Back Off Boogaloo.” The set also includes Beatles songs that Starr did vocals on (“Octopus’s Garden” and “With a Little Help From My Friends”). Interspersed throughout are songs from each of the All Starrs’ primary bands: Lukather will lead renditions of Toto’s “Africa,” and Hay will do Men at Work’s “Down Under.”

Starr wore a bright-red jacket over a black peace-sign T-shirt, and split his stage time between front-man duties and drums. He clearly preferred one role to the other. Holding a mic, Starr looks stiff. On the drums, he looks 20 years younger. Valensi, of the Strokes, has also observed how much looser he looks behind the kit. “Whatever redemption he got through his drumming as a kid, it’s still there,” he told me.

If the Beatles at Shea Stadium in ’65 was packed with shrieking teenage fans, the All Starrs at the Venetian incubated quite a different ambience about six decades later. About a third of the sold-out audience looked old enough to have been at Shea. “When I first started doing this, there were a lot of high voices: ‘We love you, Ringo,’ ” Starr said from the stage, imitating a screaming girl’s voice. “Now: ‘We love you, Ringo,’ ” he said, affecting the labored voice of an old-timer.

Forty minutes or so in, after “Yellow Submarine,” Starr leaves for a break while the others keep performing their songs. “I’m going to have a cup of tea,” he tells the audience as he heads off. On one hand, this is a bit odd, the headliner just up and leaving mid-show; what is he doing while he’s offstage? On the other hand, does this octogenarian really need to hear another rendition of Average White Band’s “Cut the Cake”? I say Ringo has paid his dues and earned his rest.

Starr in 1965 (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty)

After a few minutes, Starr jogs back onstage in a fresh T-shirt and the same blazer. The first chords of “Octopus’s Garden” twang out, and the crowd goes an aging version of nuts. Everyone sings along. I sense some earnest effort in the theater to make this gathering count for more than just nostalgia.

“Peace and love! Peace and love!” a group of women screamed from behind me. They pretty much kept this up for two solid hours. It was slightly annoying, but their conviction was undeniable.

Paul McCartney was on the phone. It was late January, and I was in Greenland, reporting on Donald Trump’s inauguration from one of the foreign territories he was proposing to annex. McCartney sounded intrigued by my whereabouts, or perhaps merely amused that I was marooned there waiting out a predictably bad run of snowy weather. I asked whether he’d ever been to Greenland. “The only way would be if the plane had to stop there,” McCartney allowed. “For refueling and stuff.” He had just completed a global tour that featured 59 shows and lasted two and a half years—but no date in Nuuk. I felt a swell of pride at having found a spot on the globe that a Beatle had never been to.

Starr had joined McCartney onstage a few weeks earlier at a concert at London’s O2 arena—the last stop on McCartney’s tour. McCartney introduced him that night as “the mighty, the one and only Mr. Ringo Starr.” They played a few Beatles tracks (“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise),” “Helter Skelter”) and shared an embrace, and the stadium rocked accordingly.

Starr told me he and McCartney keep in close contact. Starr lives in Beverly Hills, where he’s owned a home since the 1990s, and McCartney resides mainly in the U.K. But they FaceTime regularly, and pop in on each other when proximity allows. “I had dinner with him on Wednesday,” Starr mentioned during our first meeting.

The Beatles have often spoken of one another as brothers. “I was an only child, and then suddenly I had three brothers,” Starr told me. He said he felt sorry for Elvis Presley, who had to go through megastardom by himself. Harrison drew this contrast as well. “There was only one Elvis,” he once said. “Nobody else knew what he felt like.” He seemed to speak with a note of pity.

Many theories have taken hold about the Beatles—about their genius, their rivalries, their time at the summit of the world. Few bands have inspired such complicated or closely studied mythology. But the truth will always reside in the exquisite space that John, Paul, George, and Ringo inhabited together.

The Beatles in May 1967, at a party celebrating their new album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Jeff Hochberg / Getty)

Only the four of them can understand. And now there’s just two. Ringo and Paul, Paul and Ringo. “He’s the only one who knows,” Starr said to me of McCartney.

I asked McCartney about Starr’s remark. What, exactly, does only he know?

“Well, there’s nothing to mean by it; it’s just true,” McCartney said. “It’s just simple truth. There were four of us. The Beatles. And we worked together, we lived together, we were a Beatles sandwich.” No other soul could ever fully comprehend that sandwich.

“Nobody else,” McCartney continued. “People might have been in the room, but they weren’t really in the room. There were just four of us that knew how it felt.”

Ringo and Paul were roommates when the band went on the road. “I never really roomed with anyone,” McCartney told me. “I didn’t go to college. I had one brother—I have one brother—but after a certain age, we got our own rooms.” Bunking with Starr at that age strengthened their bond, McCartney said. “And we were in a million vans, trains, planes, cars.”

[In Focus: Beatlemania 1964]

Starr’s friends tend to speak about him in a particular key of fascination. I also detect a note of protectiveness, especially against the critics who have described Starr as the band’s weakest link. The rap is that any drummer would have made it work with the Beatles. McCartney mentioned Buddy Rich, the late jazz drummer, who apparently once dismissed Starr as “adequate, no more than that.” From a technical standpoint, McCartney said, Rich might have been correct. “None of us would have passed a music exam,” he said. “None of us ever could read or write music.”

Starr’s admirers say his genius lies in something far more intuitive than the likes of Buddy Rich could appreciate. Starr says “I play to the song”; his drumming relies on feel more so than technique or training.

McCartney recalls the first time that he, Lennon, and Harrison played with Starr in front of an audience, in the early 1960s. “I remember just glancing at the other two guys, and we all had a look in our eyes,” he said. “It was one of those magical moments, you know; it was like, Shit, something just happened. ”

Then there is the matter of Starr’s extramusical contributions to the group. He was an essential figure of cohesion.

“He’s glue, you know; he’s the glue kind of thing,” McCartney told me. “We were all what you’d call ‘grammar-school kids,’ ” he continued, referring to Lennon, Harrison, and himself. “Ringo was just University of Life.” Starr barely went to school. He had his medical torments, and grew up in the “Dingle,” one of the roughest, poorest sections of Liverpool. “You can’t be trained to be like Ringo,” McCartney told me.

Starr was also older, the last to join the Beatles, and the only one who’d already played in another professional band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. McCartney said that all of the Beatles looked up to one another. They never dared to admit it, but it was a driving dynamic. “I think we all kind of had that,” McCartney said. “Quietly.”

[From the June 2013 issue: 1963, the year the Beatles found their voice]

Their reverence for Starr was perhaps the hardest to distill. “You’d meet Ringo, and it would cut across everything you’d ever learned,” McCartney told me. “You’d think, God, I’ve got to try to be a little more like this. This guy’s cool.” Starr would sit and assess and stay silent for long stretches. Then, periodically, he would blurt out something “that comes out of left field”—a Ringo-ism.

“He’s actually making mistakes,” McCartney said. “But he says it with such conviction that it works.” Starr would coin something like hard day’s night, and grammar-school kids would hear it and immediately want to correct the grammar. “ ‘I’ve never heard it said like that,’ ” McCartney told me. “And then it’s basically, ‘Well, I’m not sure why no one’s said that before. Because that’s the perfect phrase.’ ”

Once, McCartney told me, the Beatles were sitting in a restaurant, preparing to order. “And Ringo said, ‘I’ll have slight bread.’ ”

Slight bread?

“Slight bread, yeah,” McCartney said.

What exactly is “slight bread”?

“Well, who knows?” McCartney said. “There’s no answer to these questions. It’s just right.”

What does “normal” life look like for an 84-year-old former Beatle? I was able to ascertain some details about Starr’s day-to-day. Does he drive? (Yes.) Does he have a trainer? (Yes: three days a week, weights, yoga, pilates, treadmill.) Streaming? (“Yeah, I love TV,” he told me.) What shows?

“Well, I’m not going to plug anybody,” he said, and I withdrew the question.

Naturally, Starr is a fan of Liverpool FC of the Premier League, but also the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL. He saw me wince when he mentioned the Cowboys and asked why. “Just like everyone loves the Beatles, everyone hates the Cowboys,” I explained. Starr objected—mostly to my choice of words.

“Why would you hate them?” he wondered. “That’s a strong word, to hate. Dislike is a better word.”

Confronted with more inner-directed questions about what it’s like to be Ringo Starr, the man can be stubbornly understated. “My name is Ringo, and I play drums,” he said when he entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist in 2015. On the topic of how he came to join the Beatles, Starr is similarly laconic. “They wanted me to join the Beatles,” he told me. “I got this phone call, and that’s how it all happened.”

Starr at the Grand Ole Opry. His life has always been steeped in country music; Hank Williams and Lightnin’ Hopkins were early idols. (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

In 2022, Starr was given an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music, in Boston. “I don’t have a lot to say, just ‘Thank you,’ ” he said.

“You know, I just hit them. That’s all I do. I just hit the buggers,” he added, “the buggers” being the drums. “In a way, it’s like some strange fairy tale.”

Perhaps the strangest quality of this fairy tale is that it’s still unfolding. Starr’s country collaboration with T Bone Burnett, Look Up, is one of Starr’s most successful albums in years, hitting No. 1 on the U.K.’s Official Country Artists Albums Chart and selling briskly in the U.S. as well.

Coverage of Look Up has noted that Starr is one of several pop acts who have recently made country albums, as if Starr has latched on to some new crossover fashion, chasing the likes of Beyoncé and Post Malone. But Starr sounds genuinely oblivious to the bandwagon he’s supposedly hopping on. “I know Beyoncé made a record and it was No 1,” Starr said in an interview with The Times of London. “But no, I haven’t heard it.”

In fact, Starr’s life and career have always been steeped in country music. As a boy, he loved Westerns and worshipped Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy. His early music idols were Hank Williams and Hank Snow; later, he admired Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. He dreamed of escaping the Dingle for Texas. He even wrote to the Houston Chamber of Commerce after resolving to live close to the country-blues icon Lightnin’ Hopkins. As a general rule, this was not something poor Liverpool boys aspired to do.

Burnett says he always considered Starr to be the Beatles’ resident country ambassador. He thought of him as “rockabilly.” Burnett pointed to “What Goes On,” from Rubber Soul, and “Don’t Pass Me By,” from The White Album. “Even ‘Octopus’s Garden’ is country,” Burnett told me. “It sounds like Chet Atkins playing guitar.”

Country also played an essential part in helping Starr adapt to his post-Beatles life. The withdrawal was difficult at times: eight years of manic, identity-warping hysteria and creative intensity. Then, suddenly, nothing. Starr wallowed. He drank, a lot. The plaintive strains of country music made for a fitting companion. “The wife’s left, the dog’s dead, or I need some money for the jukebox” is how Starr sums up the standard trajectory of country tunes.

“I sat in my garden, wondering what to do with myself,” Starr told me. “And get over, really, missing and playing with the other three boys. And I thought one day, I’ve got to get up.”

He talked with Pete Drake, an American producer who worked with Harrison on his album All Things Must Pass, about making a country album. Beaucoups of Blues would be Starr’s second solo release. Hearing it now, it’s striking how well suited Starr’s voice is to country singing. He sounds playfully mournful—or mournfully playful—like someone perfectly at home in the genre.

Starr has long been a casual acquaintance of Burnett’s, who has won about a million Grammys (13). In November 2022, the pair encountered each other at a reception for Olivia Harrison’s book of poems about her late husband. Starr mentioned that he was making an EP and asked Burnett if he wanted to contribute a track. Sure, Burnett said. He came back with a song, and then Starr asked for more. He sent nine, all of them country songs, figuring Starr could pick one or two. Starr said he liked them all.

Look Up is a vibrant and gentle compilation with recurring themes of despair, resilience, and, especially, gratitude. “Thankful” (with Alison Krauss), the record’s second release, is an homage to hard-won lessons and, in some ways, a countrified rendering of Starr’s post-Beatles trajectory.

His descent into alcoholism and long path to sobriety is a clear subtext. “ ‘Thankful’ is the most personal song he’s ever written,” Burnett told me. “It starts off, ‘I had it all and I started to fall,’ ” Burnett said. “It’s about being in the Beatles, and being on top of the world, being the most famous person in the world. And then being an addict.” A central figure of Starr’s recovery—and the main object of his gratitude—is his wife of more than 40 years, Barbara Bach. Together, they embraced sobriety in the late 1980s, which was around the time Starr convened the All Starr Band and resumed his touring career.

“Thankful” resonates with familiar Ringo refrains (“hoping for more peace and love”) and contains echoes of some of his signature songs (“I needed a friend to help me along”). After I listened a few times, I came to hear the song as an updated version of “It Don’t Come Easy,” conveyed by a blessed old soul, who had lived, thankfully, to sing the tale.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

In the middle of January, I dropped into Nashville to watch Starr play the Ryman Auditorium, a converted downtown basilica known as the “Mother Church of Country Music.” He was joined by a lineup of country royalty: Emmylou Harris, Brenda Lee, Molly Tuttle, Billy Strings, plus a few hybrids such as Sheryl Crow and Jack White. Both the younger crowd and the grandes dames betrayed an endearingly starstruck appreciation for the Liverpool cowboy. “Oh man, this is extremely cool,” said Tuttle, the Grammy-winning bluegrass player. “I cannot think of a better way to spend my 32nd birthday than to sing one of my favorite songs,” she said, and swung into a fiddle-heavy rendition of “Octopus’s Garden.”

“Such a thrill to be playing with really one of the most amazing people that ever was, but also right now,” Crow said when she took the ancient stage. “Don’t we need this love?” she asked. Trump’s inauguration was about a week away, and for a moment, it seemed that politics might cast a shadow over the evening. Instead, Crow and Tuttle launched into a vivacious duet of “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party.”

In my final conversation with Starr, I asked him about the title track of Look Up. He’s complained that people are always looking down—he sees them walking, eyes fixed on the pavement. “You look up, your attitude changes,” he told me. “You’re looking around.” Otherwise, “you’re just trapped in your head.” He’s been asked if there’s some religious message in the phrase: Several people have said, “ ‘Oh, you’re looking at God.’ ” But they have it wrong, Starr said. “I’m looking up at the world.”

And what does he see? As Starr has made the media rounds for Look Up, I’ve watched him get hit a couple of times with the requisite questions about our parlous political moment. “Are you worried at all?” Jimmy Kimmel asked him. “Why would I be worried?” Starr replied. He has no interest in playing the role of pundit, or sounding a note of protest.

“You can only do what you do,” Starr told me, when I took my own shot at asking him about the state of the world. “I can only do what I do.” Starr flashed me another double peace sign, which is him doing what he does. Maybe it will start something. Maybe others will follow. Who can say? As a wise man once put it, tomorrow never knows.

This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “When I’m 84.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

It’s Not Easy Being (Marjorie Taylor) Greene

2025-03-26T22:35:00-04:00

Where have you gone, Elmo, Cookie Monster, and Big Bird?

In a more innocent time, the hallowed puppets of Sesame Street were recurring characters in congressional debates about public broadcasting. They served a vital and somewhat quaint Kabuki function: Whenever a politician questioned whether PBS or NPR should continue to receive government funding, public-broadcast advocates predictably trotted out their furry or feathered friends to disarm the bullies and remind everyone how beloved these creatures are. Especially by kids. Remember the kids!

Sadly, Messrs. Elmo, Monster, and Bird were nowhere to be seen on Capitol Hill today. They would not have fit in, anyway, as the proceedings in a crowded basement-level hearing room of the Capitol Visitor Center were not sweet, accepting, or the least bit neighborly.

[Tom Junod: My friend Mr. Rogers]

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, had invited the heads of PBS, Paula Kerger, and of NPR, Katherine Maher, to testify before the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE). As chair of the subcommittee, Greene had many questions. And, it would seem, preexisting impressions: The hearing was titled “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.” (The Atlantic has a partnership with WETA, which receives funding from PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.)

Greene gaveled the proceeding to order at 10 a.m. “Today, we are looking at the more than half a billion dollars federal taxpayers spend annually to fund public radio and television,” she said in her opening statement. She vowed to grill the witnesses about their oversight of “radical left-wing echo chambers,” and accused the CEOs of perpetrating a “communist agenda” and being fine with “sexualizing and grooming children.”

This seemed hostile.

It was not really surprising, though. In her brief time in Congress, Greene has proved a relentless voice of MAGA grievance and one-woman Masterpiece Theatre in reacting to the latest outrage visited upon Donald Trump. Her newly created DOGE subcommittee fashions itself as a corollary to the efforts of Elon Musk in his quest to identify and slash or eliminate whatever government work and workers he deems unworthy.

The panel quickly fell into a familiar pattern of Republicans and Democrats taking turns giving five-minute speeches, nominally framed as questions for the witnesses. Representative Stephen F. Lynch of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat, devoted most of his statement to railing against the subcommittee’s priorities. He believed that it should not be using its power to “go after the likes of Elmo and Cookie Monster,” but should be more concerned with getting to the bottom of why high-level officials in the Trump administration texted sensitive national-security material to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of this magazine (a big story this week, apparently). “If shame was still a thing, this hearing would be shameful,” Lynch said.

James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, said that he used to listen to NPR while working on a farm during his rural Kentucky youth. He spoke with a measure of nostalgic fondness for the outlet, until his inevitable pivot. “I don’t even recognize NPR anymore,” lamented Comer, who now dismisses the outlet as “propaganda.”

Even if the Sesame Street characters were not physically present, Democrats were eager to apply the show’s recurring bits to Trump’s conduct in the White House. “To borrow a phrase from Sesame Street, the letter of the day is c—for corruption,” Greg Casar, of Texas, said. “Leave Elmo alone!” he pleaded.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

Robert Garcia, a Democrat from California, had pointed questions for Kerger, of PBS. He wanted to know whether Elmo’s ruddy complexion signaled some troubling political sympathies. “Is Elmo now or has he ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?” he asked. Garcia also wanted to know if Bert and Ernie had an extremist liberal agenda. He appeared to be kidding.

The spectacle lasted a few hours and was mostly forgettable. But it illustrated how another entrenched (and somewhat goofy) Washington tradition—wrangling over whether to defund public broadcasting—has devolved into cheap and predictable posturing. Theoretically, it should be possible to hold a perfectly legitimate debate over whether public money should subsidize radio and TV outlets—and to do it without the chair of the subcommittee accusing PBS of being “one of the founders of the trans child-abuse industry.”

Alas, this was not to be today. The hearing room emptied out around lunchtime, and that was it for conducting the nation’s business.

This article was brought to you by the letter d—for depressing.

A Rare Moment of Bipartisan Disbelief

2025-03-25T19:40:00-04:00

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But really, who among us hasn’t inadvertently shared secret plans about an imminent military strike on Yemen with the editor in chief of The Atlantic?

Wait, what?

Occasionally, Washington gets hit with one of those stories. The kind that halts the busy company town in its divided tracks. Everyone seems to unite, at least briefly, in disbelief. A single dominant topic comes along and crushes everything, and all the rest is suddenly beside the point. It rarely happens in this day and age of competing social-media ecosystems. But yesterday was one of those days. Even Elon Musk could barely crack the headlines.

The group gobsmacking began shortly after noon, when The Atlantic dropped a bombshell story headlined “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.” Spoiler alert: The story is about how the Trump administration accidentally texted the author its war plans.

You’ve likely heard about this by now. Said author—The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg—somehow was added to an extremely sensitive discussion, on the nongovernmental messaging app Signal, about a planned U.S. attack on the Houthis in Yemen. The chat, seemingly initiated by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, appeared to include Secretary of State Marco Rubio (delineated by his initials, “MAR”), the vice president (“JD Vance”), the defense secretary (“Pete Hegseth”), the Treasury secretary (“Scott B”), Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (“TG”), and other Trump-administration principals. Presumably, the discussion was not meant to include Goldberg, or “JG,” as he was identified.

This was, to say the least, an extraordinary security breach caused by uncommon recklessness at the tippy-top of the national defense hierarchy. It also constituted a major scoop by The Atlantic, so before I go any further, I should disclose that I work for The Atlantic. Yay The Atlantic!

[David A. Graham: But her emails?]

The news spread fast across the capital. Jaw-dropping appeared to be the dominant go-to descriptor. Trump critics promptly circulated old statements from Republicans railing against Hillary Clinton for having a private email account when she was secretary of state. Users on X resurfaced a clip of Hegseth speaking on Fox News about President Joe Biden “flippantly” handing classified documents, and a post from Gabbard promising that “any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law.” (The White House has said that no classified information was shared on the Signal thread.)

Within a few hours, the fiasco had been christened “Signalgate,” proving that no matter how much Washington changes, the un-clever naming construction of its scandals remains stuck in the Watergate era.

How could such a stupefying breach take place? How was this error not immediately discovered and “JG” not swiftly removed? Who did Waltz and his colleagues think “JG” actually was? The best running theory seems to be Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative. Or perhaps someone mistook Jeffrey Goldberg for Jeff Goldblum’s character in Independence Day. Also: Why don’t defense secretaries ever text me their war plans?

“You’re saying that they had what?” Donald Trump replied when he was asked by reporters about The Atlantic’s access to the channel, a few hours after the story came out. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said, a bit surprisingly. “I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic,” he added, less surprisingly.

[Listen: Jeffrey Goldberg on the group chat that broke the internet]

I might have been misreading Trump’s expression, but for a split second, he seemed genuinely taken aback by what he was told. There was something familiar and maybe a bit comforting about the universal sense of shock: What took place yesterday was a rare pop-up scandal in the Trump era that brought bipartisan recognition of a massive mistake having been committed.

Soon enough, MAGA world would regain its hostile posture and proceed with its requisite smearing of the messenger. Trump repeated his false claim that The Atlantic is going out of business. Hegseth called Goldberg a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist” (exactly the kind of guy you’d want to be sharing war plans with).

This morning, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, claiming that “Goldberg is well-known for his sensationalist spin,” denied that war plans had been shared. A prime-time chyron on Fox News last night offered a friendly public-service reminder: “We’ve all texted the wrong person before.”

But even Leavitt admitted error at least to a degree, stating that the White House was investigating “how Goldberg’s number was inadvertently added to the thread.” The Signal chat group “appears to be authentic,” the White House National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes said in a statement yesterday, confirming what he’d told Goldberg for the story. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson assured reporters that Team Trump would “make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

[Read: Trump goes after the messenger]

“Everyone should know better than putting top-secret war plans on an unclassified phone,” Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska told CNN. “Period. There is no excuse.”

“Sounds like a huge screwup. I mean, is there any other way to describe it?” Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas said when asked about the mishap. Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s former transportation secretary, agreed, though he chose another way to describe it: “This is the highest level of fuckup imaginable,” he wrote on X.

Hillary Clinton did not miss her chance to weigh in. “You have got to be kidding me,” she wrote, with an eyes emoji.

Speaking to reporters today, Trump did not rule out people in his administration using Signal again in the future. But he did not sound enthused about it, and POTUS (or “DJT,” or “47”) does not seem likely to join the app soon. “I don’t think it’s something we’re looking forward to using again,” the president said.

Mitch McConnell and the President He Calls ‘Despicable’

2025-03-07T06:00:00-05:00

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“I’m avoiding getting too high on the good days and too low on the bad days,” Mitch McConnell was telling me.

“Is today a good day or a bad day?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” was all McConnell said, chuckling.

It was late Tuesday afternoon, a few hours before President Donald Trump was scheduled to arrive at the Capitol to address Congress. Earlier that day, the White House had imposed 25 percent tariffs on all imports from Canada and Mexico and a new 10 percent tariff on all imports from China. The stock market was cratering. Trump seemed to be systematically dismantling the federal government and methodically abandoning Ukraine and freaking out scores of leaders and citizens from Kyiv to Panama City to Ottawa to Nuuk to, perhaps most of all, Washington. And McConnell was sitting in his Senate office, wondering what fresh horrors Trump had in store for the evening.

Or at least that’s what I imagined McConnell was wondering. He’s not one to offer up much confirmation about what he’s wondering.

It seemed like a logical assumption, given the outlying position the senator from Kentucky occupies in today’s GOP. Few Washington species are more isolated these days than elected Republicans who despise Trump and are very much despised back by Trump. Not to mention a lame-duck Republican—until recently one of the most powerful figures in his party—who has been a steadfast advocate for free-trade policies and has vowed to devote his remaining time in office to national security, specifically fighting for the causes of Ukraine and NATO and against Russia.

The night before, Trump had announced a halt to all aid to Ukraine. A few days earlier, he and Vice President J. D. Vance had engaged in a televised ruckus with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Virtually no Senate Republicans had raised objections to any of this, with a few exceptions.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

McConnell had not yet weighed in, either. And I felt fortunate to be granted an audience, considering how rarely he gives interviews. I have been writing about politics in Washington for more than two decades and had never spoken to him, although I’ve tried many times in various Capitol corridors. “For the last couple of decades, I’ve spent my time smiling and walking on by,” McConnell told me, summarizing his general approach to hallway press relations. Occasionally, McConnell might blurt out a “Good try” in response to a shouted question, but only if he’s feeling expansive.

I was also eager to speak with him because many people around McConnell have described him as feeling “liberated” now that he has stepped down as head of the Senate Republican Conference after 18 years. This sense of newfound freedom seemed like it would be even greater after McConnell announced on February 20—his 83rd birthday—that he would not run for an eighth term in the Senate in 2026. I wasn’t expecting McConnell to start wearing shorts and a hoodie around the Capitol like his Democratic colleague Senator John Fetterman, but I was curious to ask the former leader what being “liberated” means for him, especially in light of recent events.

“Well, an example is the Washington Post op-ed today,” McConnell told me. He had just published an article about how a government shutdown could be costly to defense spending in the long run: “Extending the 2024 budget through the end of FY2025 would mean the Defense Department would lack the funds to make payroll for 2 million service members,” McConnell wrote. “Especially after accounting for the additional 10 percent junior enlisted pay raise authorized last year.”

The op-ed was not riveting. But I mention it because McConnell did—three times—as an example of his current state of liberation.

I asked McConnell what he thought about that Trump-Vance-Zelensky scene in the Oval Office last week. “Here is the way I look at this whole episode,” McConnell told me. “What we need to avoid at the end is a headline that says ‘Russia Won, America Lost.’”

A sphinxlike response. Or perhaps a nonresponse.

“With this particular president, we know we’re going to have a lot of drama along the way,” McConnell continued. “The really important thing is, how does it end?”

I took another crack at getting his reaction to the Oval Office episode. Trump had actually paused U.S. funding to Ukraine—a massively tangible action, much more than just drama. I also mentioned that a few of his Republican colleagues—most pointedly, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—had been critical of Trump’s recent posture on Ukraine and Russia. Did he have any reaction to the past few days?

“Well, at risk of repeating myself,” McConnell said, before repeating himself: “I’m trying not to overreact to every moment of drama that went on.” When I pressed him on Trump’s funding pause, McConnell said he hoped it would be “just a temporary thing.”

How did McConnell think things were going generally in these first months of the second Trump administration? “Better than expected?” I asked. “Worse than expected?”

“Well, I’ve already answered that twice.”

I tried a different tack. Many people around Washington, of both parties, sound quite concerned about what appears to be happening in the second Trump administration so far. What was his level of concern or despair or whatever the word is?

“I’m not going to answer that,” McConnell replied.

“Okay.”

“You’ll get the answer to it in pieces.”

“How should we look?” I asked.

“Well, I mean, take the Washington Post editorial today …”

The afternoon I met with him, McConnell told me he didn’t know whether he would attend Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday evening. “I’m sure gonna listen to every word,” he said of the speech. “It doesn’t make any difference whether I’m physically present.” He wound up watching from home.

The senator’s health appears to be in some decline. Over the past few years, he has suffered a number of distressing public freeze-ups and falls. McConnell is currently using a wheelchair; his staff has in some cases attributed his recent infirmities to the lingering effects of childhood polio. His face is gaunt, his voice pinched and his words at times hard to decipher. He has suffered hearing loss.

When spotted around the Senate these days, McConnell cuts a delicate figure. He is also a delicate topic among his Republican colleagues.

[Read: Mitch McConnell’s worst political miscalculation]

Most of them once granted McConnell their unambiguous allegiance. He was first elected to head the Senate Republican Conference in 2007 and went on to become the longest-tenured party leader in the history of the chamber. But Trump’s continued dominance of the GOP has made it impossible for McConnell to serve in any meaningful leadership role these days.

The mutual loathing between the two men has been richly cataloged. A quick sampler: Trump has called McConnell “dour, sullen, and unsmiling”; a “broken down hack politician”; and a “disaster,” among other things. (He also referred to McConnell’s Taipei-born spouse, the former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, as McConnell’s “China loving wife, Coco Chow.”)

In turn, McConnell has described Trump as a “despicable human being,” “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” and someone who “has every characteristic you would not want a president to have.” In a 60 Minutes interview last month, host Lesley Stahl read McConnell some other choice brickbats McConnell had reserved for Trump (“nasty,” “sleazeball,” “not very smart”), which the senator hilariously tried to downplay as “private comments.”

“Well, they’re in your biography,” Stahl pointed out, referring to a recent volume by the longtime Washington journalist Mike Tackett, who drew on about 50 hours of on-the-record interviews with his subject, as well as exclusive access to a series of private oral histories that McConnell had recorded.

“Yeah,” McConnell acknowledged, not disputing any of the descriptions.

It did not matter that McConnell was instrumental in helping Trump achieve his 2017 tax overhaul and his appointment of three justices to the Supreme Court. Or that McConnell, despite saying that Trump’s conduct on January 6 showed him to be unfit for office, voted to acquit the outgoing president after he was impeached a second time. Or that McConnell, in his leadership role, remained a fierce partisan and steadfast in his support for Republican candidates, including Trump, whom he supported again after he became the Republican nominee in 2024.

The tumultuous political alliance between McConnell and Trump clearly could not be salvaged, let alone repeated. McConnell announced early last year—several months before the November election—that he would step down as Republican leader at the start of the current Congress in January.

Since Trump’s reelection, McConnell has come to occupy an uncharacteristic role inside his caucus: The old horse has turned into something of a maverick. His foreign-policy views in support of strong, Reagan-style engagement abroad—especially against authoritarian regimes—run counter to the Trump-style isolationism that dominates much of today’s GOP. “I picked this issue because it’s the most important thing,” he told me of his focus on national security. “Because we’re talking about world peace here.”

He added that Russia’s “horrible invasion” of Ukraine has had a unifying effect on the world’s democracies. “If you look at who’s on the other side—North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, and Iran’s proxies—I don’t think it’s hard to figure out who the good guys are,” McConnell told me. Yes, I said, although the more pertinent question seemed to be whose side a Donald Trump–led America was on. Did he worry that things might be moving in the wrong direction?

“That’s the doomsday scenario, right?” McConnell said. “I tend to come down on the optimistic side.” He did not say why, other than to reiterate that “there is a lot of drama” and “in the end, it depends on how it works out.”

Freed from the constraints that leadership imposed on him, McConnell did vote against more of Trump’s Cabinet nominees—Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—than any other Senate Republican. Would he have taken the Hegseth, Kennedy, and Gabbard votes if he were still leader? “Probably not,” McConnell told me.

[Read: The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine]

“When he says that he feels liberated, he is no longer responsible for advancing the administration’s priorities or a strictly Republican agenda,” Senator Susan Collins, the moderate Republican of Maine, told me. Collins, who counts herself as a strong McConnell ally, said that the majority of her caucus respects the former leader, even if it doesn’t always seem that way. “There are a handful of Republican senators who are polite in our conference meetings that trash him online or on television or podcasts,” Collins said, adding that this is “a real problem.” To praise McConnell too fulsomely in public runs the risk of annoying Trump, who tends to see even the most tepid praise of an enemy as disloyal.

In the days after McConnell announced that he would not seek reelection, I surveyed a handful of other Republican senators about his awkward position inside the caucus that he had led for so long. Their responses comprised a hodgepodge of restrained respect, resigned pity, and laughable obfuscation.

“Look, I respect the leader, I do, as I said in a tweet that got all kinds of retweets,” Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has shown more-than-occasional disrespect for McConnell over the years, told me. As he waited for an elevator just off the Senate floor last week, Johnson noted that McConnell “absolutely reveres and respects” the institution of the Senate. “It’s sad that he’s had these falls. There’s nothing good about getting old,” he added.

A few minutes later, I encountered the Trump loyalist Josh Hawley of Missouri. Hawley, who had called for McConnell’s ouster long before he stepped down as leader, seemed rather un-thrilled by my questions as I walked alongside him.

“Gosh, I don’t know. I don’t want to speak for him, or comment,” Hawley told me, when I asked what he thought these last days in the Senate have been like for McConnell, and what his legacy will be. “I don’t want to comment, or commentate.”

I asked Hawley whether he believed that McConnell has been an ally of Trump in the new administration. “He’s voted against a bunch of his nominees, but again, I can’t comment on what his viewpoint is,” he said.

What was Hawley’s own viewpoint on McConnell?

“Well, that’s a big question. In what sense?” he asked.

“As a colleague, as a senator, as a champion of the Republican Party of today,” I said.

“Oh, listen, I think he’s had a very long career. I think he’s served his state and his country with a tremendous sense of duty.”

Hawley did not comment—or commentate—beyond that.

“You realize I’ll be 84 when I leave here. I was 42 when I got here,” McConnell told me. “Half of my life I’ve spent here.”

This was McConnell becoming a bit more chatty, if not expressive, as our interview wound down. My visit to his office also yielded these Kentucky kernels:

He said he hasn’t talked to Trump since Trump’s first term ended.
He did speak with Joe Biden recently. “Not in any great detail. He just gave me a ring,” McConnell told me. “We became friends years ago. And I ended up actually being the only Republican at Beau’s funeral.”
He said his treatment in the media has gotten considerably better of late. “I’ve discovered how to improve your press,” McConnell told me. “Announce you’re leaving.”

After not quite half an hour, my time was up. McConnell’s time was not, he emphasized—any valedictions or obituaries for his career would be premature. “My story’s going to unfold over the next year and a half,” he said.

[Read: The Trump voters who are losing patience]

A minute earlier, I’d wondered aloud where the larger story was headed—whether the good guys or the bad guys would prevail, and which team America was on.

“I think between Ukraine and Russia, it’s not hard to figure out who the good guys are,” McConnell said.

“It’s unclear who Trump thinks the good guys are,” I replied, hoping to trigger some reaction. No such luck. “Not gonna touch that?” I said to fill the silence.

“Good try.”

Donald Trump Is Very Busy

2025-02-12T15:31:37-05:00

Let us pause the various constitutional crises, geopolitical showdowns, and DOGE dramas to make a simple observation: Donald Trump seems kind of busy, no?

In recent days, he kicked off what the media have dubbed “Tariff Week” by declaring Sunday, February 9, to be Gulf of America Day. This occurred as he flew to New Orleans to become the first-ever sitting U.S. president to attend the Super Bowl and just before Fox News aired a Super Bowl Sunday/Gulf of America Day interview, a presidential news-making tradition that Joe Biden had blown off the past two years, in which Trump, among other things, (1) reiterated that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state, (2) declined to endorse Vice President J. D. Vance as his successor (“but he’s very capable”), and (3) referred to Gaza as a “demolition site.”

Trump spent much of the afternoon and evening getting fussed over by billionaires, celebrities, and other dignitaries in front of 127.7 million viewers, during the most watched television broadcast in history. He received mostly cheers when his ubiquitous mug was shown on the Caesars Superdome big screen before the game, which he watched with his daughter Ivanka and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell from a 50-yard-line suite. He closed out his weekend by stirring up bad blood with the Kamala Harris supporter Taylor Swift via Truth Social (“BOOED out of the Stadium”) and ordering his Treasury secretary to terminate the bipartisan menace of the penny.

[Read: A Super Bowl spectacle over the gulf]

After a brief overnight respite, the Trump-centric events kept hurtling forth in a flurry of perpetual motion—also known as Monday and Tuesday. Trump imposed 25 percent duties on all steel and aluminum imports, pardoned former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, and threatened that “all hell is gonna break out” if Hamas does not release all Israeli hostages by Saturday at noon. He signed an executive order that calls for a halt to all federal purchases of those flaccid paper straws (which, let’s face it, are as annoying as pennies), and another directing all federal agencies to cooperate with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to “significantly” reduce the federal workforce. This came a few hours after he held an Oval Office meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II in which the president reasserted, in reference to Gaza, “We’re going to take it; we’re going to hold it; we’re going to cherish it.”

In summation: Yes, Trump definitely does seem kind of busy.

Opinions, of course, vary about whether this is a good or a catastrophic kind of busy. And for what it’s worth, several federal judges have declared themselves hostile to Trump’s executive orders. Regardless, these rapid-fire feedings of attention-seizing fodder represent a fundamental ethic of Trump 2.0: Frenetic action—or at least the nonstop impression thereof—seems very much the point. And notwithstanding the whiplash, turbulence, and contradiction of it all, people seem to like it so far.

In a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday, 53 percent of the 2,175 U.S. adults surveyed said that they approved of the job Trump is doing, a higher share than at any point in his first go-round. Perhaps more revealing, the poll’s respondents described these first weeks of the 78-year-old president’s term as “energetic,” “focused,” and “effective.” They might not necessarily approve of what Trump has been energetic, focused, and effective about doing (pardoning the January 6 perpetrators, for example) or not doing (66 percent said Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to lowering prices for goods and services). But Trump has created a sense of action, commotion, disruption, and maybe even destruction that many voters seem to welcome for now. At the very least, there is nothing sleepy about any of this.

“He said he was going to do something, and he’s doing it,” one woman told a Bulwark focus group of Biden-turned-Trump voters conducted in the days after Trump returned to the White House. At this point, the fact of this “something” seems to be trumping the substance of it. The woman said she works in clinical research at a hospital and interacts with people who might lose National Institutes of Health grants to Trump and Musk’s barrage of cuts; she described a work environment that has been thrown into chaos.

“Like, what do we do? We have no idea; the CEO has no idea. We’re confused a little bit,” the woman said. “I’m not saying it’s the right move, the wrong move,” she added. “But it’s definitely like, Something’s happening. He’s actually doing something.”

[Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz]

The Bulwark’s publisher, Sarah Longwell, who runs the focus groups, told me that Trump appears to be benefiting from “Joe Biden’s complete lack of communication” during his time in office. Longwell said she’d repeatedly heard from voters that they had no idea what Biden wanted to do in office, or what he was doing. “He created this huge vacuum of presidential communication that Trump is now filling,” Longwell said.

She added that Biden also presents a cautionary example of how a president’s initial popularity can be fleeting. Four years ago, at this same point, voters were sounding quite appreciative of having someone in office who was not constantly in their faces. Biden was seen as restoring “normalcy” after the tumultuous, COVID-dominated, violent end of Trump’s first term. He polled in the low 60s in a March 2021 CBS survey, was still getting compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and enjoyed a popularity that would last until the summer of 2021, when Afghanistan went south and inflation headed north.

A hallmark of presidential honeymoons is that presidents tend to look better when they act in ways that contrast with their predecessor, especially when their predecessor was unpopular. Another hallmark of those honeymoon periods: They tend not to last. In other words, Trump should cherish this while he can—or until all hell breaks out and people start pining again for normalcy.

Greenland’s Prime Minister Wants the Nightmare to End

2025-01-26T07:00:00-05:00

Updated at 4:50 p.m. ET on January 27, 2025

Greenland’s prime minister, Múte Egede, looked like he was being chased by an angry musk ox.

“Mr. Prime Minister, have you spoken to President Trump yet?” I asked as he fled a lunchtime news conference on Tuesday in the capital city, Nuuk (population 20,000). Egede, who is 37, wore a green zip-up sweater, stared straight ahead, and was walking toward me. He said nothing.

“Prime Minister Múte Egede,” I tried again, using his full name this time, for some reason.

He remained … mute.

I made one more attempt—“Have you talked to President Trump?”—to no avail.

As he walked out the door, Egede looked flushed and somewhat stunned. The briefing room had been tense, crowded with about three dozen journalists, several from other countries. This is—I’m guessing here—two and a half dozen more journalists than typically show up at his press conferences.

“This is not usual for us,” said Pele Broberg, a member of the Greenlandic Parliament and an off-and-on Egede nemesis, who had come to enjoy the spectacle and watch Egede squirm.

The briefing had lasted about 30 minutes and consisted of Egede giving a canned statement and then taking eight or nine questions, all on the same topic.

“Do we have reason to be afraid?” one Greenlandic journalist asked.

“Of course, what has happened is very serious,” Egede replied in Greenlandic. He projected the grave aura of a leader trying to be reassuring in a time of crisis; his tone and language seemed better suited to a natural disaster than a geopolitical quandary.

“We have to have faith that we can get through this,” Egede said. His hands shook slightly as he sipped from a glass of water.

“In Greenland,” he said, “there is a lot of unrest.”

Extreme cold was predicted for Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., so I figured I’d decamp to somewhere warmer: Nuuk.

Temperatures in the icy capital were in the low 30s, or several degrees balmier than those in Washington. More to the point, this autonomous Danish territory—the world’s biggest non-continental island—has surfaced as a subject of diplomatic dispute.

Trump had first announced his interest in America buying the territory in 2019. At the time, the Danish prime minister promptly rebuffed the overture (she called it “absurd”), to which Trump responded predictably (he called her “nasty”). And then, after a few weeks, the episode melted away. That is, until Trump managed to get himself reelected and started piping up again about how he still coveted the place. Ever since then, his renewed designs on Greenland have become a source of global fascination. The furor grew earlier this month, when Trump, in response to a reporter’s question, refused to rule out using military force to resolve the matter.

“Greenland is in the center of the world,” Egede proclaimed a few days later in Copenhagen, perhaps overstating things but still offering a whiff of the heady sense of relevance that’s been sweeping through Official Nuuk.

I went to Greenland to watch this peculiar production unfold in this most unlikely of places. Another big objective was to meet Egede, the young and ambitious prime minister. Like many other minor global figures who become overnight attention magnets, Egede had seemed at first exhilarated by all the interest, then overwhelmed, and then regretful. Watching his recent public appearances from afar, I had noticed his demeanor sometimes shift from the burly confidence of a local wunderkind to the nervousness of someone fully aware that his actions were being observed closely, especially by Washington and Copenhagen.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump triggers a crisis in Denmark—and Europe]

“We are Greenlanders,” Egede often says, robotically, when asked—as he is constantly—about Trump’s continued focus on his country. “We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t want to be Danish, either.”

Egede just wants to be left alone, is the impression he is leaving these days. I learned this before I set out for Nuuk, when I placed a few calls to his office in an attempt to watch Trump’s inaugural speech with the prime minister. He shouldn’t be that hard to track down, I figured, given that the total number of humans in Greenland, which is roughly three times the physical size of Texas, is 56,000—smaller than the population of Bethesda, Maryland.

“Can you call back tomorrow?” his communications aide, Andreas Poulsen, pleaded on the phone. “We are very busy right now. Thank you for understanding.”

I tried the next day.

“Can you call back tomorrow?” Poulsen said again. “We are very busy right now.”

I sensed a pattern.

“Hi, Andreas,” I said when Poulsen picked up again on the third day. (Clearly Greenland’s government offices need more robust call-screening protocols.) “Do you have a second to talk now?”

“Can you call back tomorrow?” he said again. “I am very busy right now.” Poor guy sounded more beleaguered with each call. I empathized.

“Well, I’m going to be on my way to Greenland tomorrow,” I finally said, “so I’ll be in the air.”

(Silence.)

“Andreas, are you there?”

It’s not easy being in Greenland. Especially in January: never-ending snow, frigid winds, and maybe five or six hours of daylight, if you’re lucky. Greenland is known as Kalaallit Nunaat in the native tongue, which roughly translates, fittingly enough, to “Land of the Greenlanders.” Residents of Nuuk account for about one-third of the national population, the great majority of whom are all or part Inuit.

Greenland is also not easy to get to, even though Nuuk is, in fact, closer to the East Coast of the United States than to Copenhagen. There are currently no direct flights from the U.S., though United Airlines says it will begin direct routes to Nuuk from Newark in June. The few flights currently available, via Reykjavik, are often canceled due to weather. Until a recent renovation of the Nuuk airport, flying to the capital had required a stop in Kangerlussuaq, a former U.S. air base to the north, and then switching to a smaller plane. The airport-modernization project has been a source of local pride in Nuuk and a godsend of convenience to its visitors (no more nightmare layovers in Kangerlussuaq!).

On the Thursday before the inauguration, I managed to get the last seat on an Icelandair flight from Washington, which miraculously went off without major complication. When I arrived in Nuuk, I found the people of the capital to be nothing but warm and welcoming, starting with my cab driver from the airport. When I mentioned I was from Washington, he asked if I was in town “because of this situation with Trump.” Correct, I said.

In the grand and feverish scheme of Trump’s early agenda, Greenland remains a remote curiosity next to his higher-profile priorities such as mass deportations, mass pardons, and trying to end birthright citizenship. But his ongoing fascination with the country can’t be dismissed as merely the frivolous object of one egoist’s manifest destiny. For a variety of strategic reasons—energy, trade, and national security, among others—Greenland has become a legitimately prized territory. Melting ice has made for better access to valuable mineral deposits and potential oil bounties, and easier trade passage through Arctic waterways. To varying degrees, both Moscow and Beijing have shown that they want in on Greenland. “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

A Trump hat in Nuuk, Greenland (Juliette Pavy / Hors Format)

Not surprisingly, this message has been received as something rotten in Denmark. The NATO ally has held sovereignty over Greenland for more than a century. (Greenland was a colony until 1953, when it became a territory of the Danish kingdom, though it gained home rule in 1979.) Although the Danes provide about $600 million in subsidies to the island each year—about half of Greenland’s annual budget—critics of its stewardship have said that Denmark lacks the will and resources to fully realize Greenland’s potential or protect it militarily. A strong majority of Greenlanders—68 percent—want independence from Denmark, according to a 2019 poll.

The degree to which Greenlanders would welcome closer ties to America, much less actually becoming a part of the United States, is unclear. For the most part, Trump’s proposal has been met with something at the junction of amused, flattered, and resistant to being associated with such a thundering and aggressive entity, as embodied by its president. These qualities, to say the least, run counter to the affable, happily innocuous, and slightly mysterious national image that Greenlanders have traditionally preferred.

[From the July/August 2024 issue: A wild plan to avert catastrophic sea-level rise]

If nothing else, Trump’s Greenland campaign has set off a blizzard of conspicuous attention from Copenhagen. Denmark recently increased its military spending on the island, stepped up its government services, and offered two new dog-sled patrol teams. In a truly magnanimous pander to Greenland from His Majesty, the Danish king even put a bigger, more prominent image of a polar bear onto the monarchy’s royal coat of arms.

“It’s a show for the Danes to try to reassure everybody else that they still have full control of Greenland,” said Broberg, the member of Parliament, who is a strong advocate for independence from Denmark.

I met him last Sunday, at a televised forum of Greenlandic political officials that was broadcast across Denmark and Greenland. The event, which included the prime minister, was held at a theater next to the Parliament building and drew a packed house of engaged students and professionals, similar to a suburban Manchester or Nashua town hall before the New Hampshire primary. The panelists included Greenlandic and Danish politicians debating the various permutations of “independence,” how realistic they would be, and the merits of Danish and U.S. proprietorship, if any.

“It’s a historic time that we live in,” an audience member named Niels-Olav Holst-Larsen, who moved to Nuuk from Denmark 18 months ago, told me. “Today was, I think, the biggest television-broadcasting event from Denmark in Greenland in a lot of years.”

Trump’s inaugural address the next day was shaping up to be another major television event in Greenland. “Don’t we all have to watch this speech?” Qupanuk Olsen, a candidate for Parliament who describes herself as “Greenland’s biggest influencer on social media,” told me.

I first encountered Olsen, who goes by “Q,” via a delightful YouTube video titled “How Do We Say ‘Hello’ in Greenlandic.” I resolved to find and meet her. This did not take long. Olsen told me that she considers Trump’s interest to be an “amazing” boon for her country, at least from a PR perspective. Spreading Greenland’s abundant charms, she said, is something of a life’s mission for her. “I’ve been working on showing the rest of the world what Greenland is really about.”

I asked Olsen whether she was hoping for an inaugural mention of Greenland. She paused for several seconds before declaring herself a yes. “If he doesn’t mention Greenland”—she turned strangely plaintive—“we’re just going to be forgotten again.”

I spent much of January 20 visiting members of the Greenlandic Parliament. Called Inatsisartut, or “those who make the law,” the Parliament consists of 31 members, who, from what I can tell, represent 31 nuanced flavors of pro-Greenlandic-independence. Egede, for instance, is a former member of Inatsisartut, where he represented the left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party, which supports independence. But as the nation’s chief executive now, he recognizes the pragmatic benefits of the status quo, which requires working closely with Denmark, especially given the recent uncertainty that Trump has introduced.

The low-slung parliamentary-office building felt a bit like a small college dorm. MPs wandered in and out of conference rooms, bantered in hallways, and shouted to one another across a courtyard. My first stop on my tour of Greenland’s greatest deliberative body was a meeting with Broberg. A member of the (also) pro-independence Naleraq party, he served for a while as foreign minister until his anti-Danish rhetoric began to wear thin in Copenhagen, as well as with key figures in Nuuk—notably, Egede.

Broberg told me he admires politicians who eschew niceties and jump right to the point. He appreciates this about Trump, whose pursuit of Greenland he says has been a blessing to the cause of independence. I noted the obvious contradiction here: that Trump’s desire to “buy” Greenland is by definition antithetical to independence. Broberg argued that existing laws and treaties would make it impossible for the U.S. to actually “own” Greenland. Still, Trump’s public zest for the country enhances its cachet, Broberg explained. It also brings the added benefit of freaking out Denmark, he said.

As he spoke, I noticed a bright-red baseball hat on a shelf. I pointed to it, wondering if it was a Trump hat. In fact, the cap was emblazoned with the words Great Greenland, which Broberg told me is a Greenlandic company that makes sealskin furs and jackets. He added that he is not a Trumper; he enjoys watching people react to the hat.

At the end of the interview, Qarsoq Høegh-Dam, a top official with the Naleraq party and an adviser to Olsen, popped in to say hello. Høegh-Dam is a gregarious politico, of a familiar sort you often find in insular government towns. He said he was trying to organize a “watch party” for Trump’s inauguration.

I noticed that he was wearing a massive claw on a necklace. A polar-bear nail, he told me. As I studied the menacing trinket—roughly the size of a small croissant broken in half—Høegh-Dam launched into an aside. “It’s an age-old debate,” he said—who would win a fight between a tiger and a polar bear? I told him I was just here to learn. “I’ve seen a tiger,” Høegh-Dam said. “I was surprised how small they were.” He told me his sister had once almost been eaten by a polar bear. “Nobody is for polar bears eating people,” Høegh-Dam said—a seemingly safe position, even within the blood sport of Greenlandic politics.

[Jonathan Chait: The intellectual rationalization for annexing Greenland]

This was all riveting, but I was late for a meeting with Aqqalu Jerimiassen, a conservative member of Parliament, who was waiting down the hall. I noticed a photo in Jerimiassen’s office of him wearing a Trump shirt and drinking a Guinness. He told me he belongs to “likely the most right-wing party in Greenland.” This does not mean he would call himself a Trump supporter (and, in fact, he told me a few days later that he had taken down the Trump-shirt photo). If he lived in the U.S., he said, he would probably have voted for Nikki Haley.

Still, Jerimiassen appreciates the recognition Trump has brought to his country. “If someone asked me 10 years ago where I’m from, and I say Greenland—for example, if I’m in Europe, in Bulgaria—nobody knows where that is,” he said.

Before we finished, Jerimiassen detoured to a topic about which he becomes endlessly animated: how the Nuussuaq Peninsula, near where he is from, boasts the finest-tasting reindeer in all of Greenland. Up north, he said, the reindeer eat more moss, as opposed to grass, which makes for a more piquant cervine experience. “The smell. Aromatic. It’s very, very aromatic, and the savoriness,” he raved. And the reindeer in Nuuk?

“Very plain,” he opined.

Nuuk, Greenland (Juliette Pavy / Hors Format)

The inauguration watch party took place in a Naleraq meeting room near Broberg’s office. Broberg was there. So was Olsen, or “Q,” the influencer, along with a few parliamentary staffers, operatives, and assorted European broadcasters on hand to capture “the scene.” As with most watch parties, this “scene” was not much to watch: a bunch of people sitting around staring at a TV and sharing a communal bowl of Bugles, or whatever the Greenland equivalent of those crunchy cone-shaped snacks is.

“Greenland, Greenland, Greenland,” Broberg called out as the newly sworn-in Trump began speaking at the Capitol. I took this to mean that he wanted Trump to mention Greenland, but Broberg had told me earlier that he couldn’t care less. “We are getting all the attention that we need anyways,” he said.

Soon, the room turned quiet. Trump’s dark and aggressive tenor appeared to make the viewers uneasy. I watched Olsen, who kept fidgeting whenever it seemed Trump might name-check Greenland. This was something she was no longer wishing for, it appeared.

“Here it comes,” I heard one person say, when Trump started talking about changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and how the U.S. should retake control of the Panama Canal. But the president did not mention Greenland.

[Franklin Foer: Emperor Trump’s new map]

The speech still had a ways to go. Trump stated his goal “to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” He declared that “the spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts.” Olsen began nervously tapping her black boot on the floor. She grimaced. A few minutes later, the speech ended. No Greenland. Harpoon, dodged.

“Can you feel the sigh of relief in here?” Høegh-Dam remarked.

I asked Broberg what he thought of the speech. He chuckled and read aloud a text he’d just received.

“Greenland has a code name now,” he said. “Mars.”

Before I blew out of Nuuk, I figured I would make a final approach to Egede for an interview. His press conference on Tuesday felt like my best bet.

A pack of international journalists filed into the briefing room, like scavengers descending on a fresh caribou carcass. There were cursory checks of our press IDs, but no security checkpoints or metal detectors. The prime minister wandered in pretty much by himself, with no visible protective detail.

Egede, who has been Greenland’s prime minister since 2021, hewed closely to his scripted lines about how Greenland will decide its own future, and to a theme of national unity. “We are a small population, but togetherness is our strength,” he said via translation headphones issued to the press. He urged Greenlanders to stand firm, and said, “Together, we can get over this incident.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Drop the outrage over Trump’s foreign-policy bluster]

As Egede’s news conference wore on, and the questions became more pointed, the prime minister looked a bit frozen. I noticed a guy in a black T-shirt standing behind a pane of glass, waving to get Egede’s attention. He looked familiar. I soon realized who it was: Andreas Poulsen, the PM’s snowed-under communications officer, whom I’d been harassing for days. He was trying to tell Egede to wrap things up.

I made a point of introducing myself to Poulsen, who stepped out from his glass booth. “I’m sorry I kept calling you last week,” I said. Not to worry, he replied. Nothing is normal in Nuuk these days. We chatted a bit, and then I shot my last shot.

“Would it be possible to interview the prime minister while I’m in Nuuk?”

“Not today, not today,” Poulsen said.

“How about tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We’re very busy.”

Postscript: I was supposed to leave Greenland on Wednesday, but my flight home got snowed out. I was stuck indefinitely. (Nuuk in January, man. Next year, I’ll bring my whole family.) As it happened, I had a phone interview scheduled for Thursday, related to another project: a conversation with, of all people, Paul McCartney.

“Greenland?” McCartney greeted me when he came on the phone. Apparently someone had told him about my situation.

Yeah, I seem to be stranded here, I told him.

“Trump’s gonna buy it,” Sir Paul said. “So don’t worry.”

Correction: This article originally misstated that the image of a polar bear was newly added to the Danish royal coat of arms.

Have the Conversation Before It’s Too Late

2024-12-23T13:14:00-05:00

We need to start an important conversation about all of the important conversations we need to have.

Our backlog of important conversations seems to be growing at a much faster rate than these actual conversations are taking place at. The docket is becoming overloaded. The conversations are overdue. Some of them are long overdue.

No one knows if or when these important conversations will ever take place, or who will participate, or whether fines will be assessed for overdue conversations (like for library books). What will ignite the conversations? Who will frame them, and then—if things start to drag—take it upon themselves to reframe them?

And at what point does a conversation graduate from being merely “overdue” to “long overdue” (say, about paid family and medical leave, IUD insertions, mental health, and paternity leave)?

The only thing we know for sure is that these conversations will be worth having. They might even be tough, difficult, or uncomfortable conversations—or perhaps they won’t be difficult or uncomfortable or overdue at all, because they will never happen.

And this is often the point of declaring that a conversation is important to have. The affirmation becomes a stand-in for an actual exchange. Sometimes the most important conversations are the ones you don’t have, or never intended to have.

I write a lot about politics and do my best to try to keep up with the important conversations people are having—or planning to have. This involves watching a lot of interviews, debates, and speeches—in which politicians are constantly identifying important conversations that we need to have. The topics might even call for a dialogue with the American people, just so long as no one politicizes anything (always a danger with politicians). As a general benchmark, anything that elicits a moderate response on X or Facebook can be lazily credited with starting—or sparking—a national conversation.

[Read: Actually, conversations are bad]

I’ve found that when someone responds to a question by establishing that such-and-such is an important conversation to have, this is usually a sign that the person is about to dance around the issue for a while. Still, they will dance with great urgency. They will announce—forcefully, reassuringly—that the conversation will be important to have. And by saying so, they will have successfully validated and obfuscated the topic in a single move.

In other words, this is a delay tactic. To designate something as an “important conversation” means “come back later.” Stall for time and hope the problem recedes. Maybe it will even resolve itself. That was essentially the Democrats’ approach to discussing (or not discussing) issues such as inflation and the border in the 2024 election, and it didn’t work. Now Democrats are talking about having the kinds of important conversations that losing political parties tend to engage in—and that typically include words reserved for the examination of dead bodies: autopsies, dissections, postmortems.

Recently, we’ve heard from a lot of Democratic eulogists on this. They keep insisting that they badly need to regain the trust of working-class voters, with whom they’ve been deemed out of touch. What better way to get back in touch than to have these tough and maybe painful conversations? Maybe they can do this in lieu of Kamala Harris’s postelection fundraising e-mails?

[Read: Is this how Democrats win back the working class?]

I’ve also heard that Democrats should preach and scold less, and let others lead these overdue conversations. Or even drive the conversation, if they’re old enough.

“I think we just need to go out and listen for a while,” Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan told me last month. I guess she was calling for Democrats to go into listening mode, which is always a popular refuge for election losers.

Perhaps most of all, Democrats doomed themselves by refusing to have the one conversation they desperately needed to have: about President Joe Biden’s age. No doubt it would have been a delicate, sensitive, uncomfortable, and highly personal conversation. At some point.

[Read: Biden’s age is now unavoidable]

But in fact, that point was in about 2021. By the time Biden had his debacle of a debate performance against Donald Trump in June, his ability to get reelected to—and to serve—a second term had become an overdue conversation. And then a long-overdue conversation. And then a moot conversation.