Megan Garber | The Atlantic

Savannah Guthrie and the Hard Truth About True Crime

2026-04-06T11:20:00-04:00

“Well, here we go. Ready or not, let’s do the news.”

With that, Savannah Guthrie returned to her role as a co-host of Today after more than two months away from the morning show—a leave that she began just after her mother, Nancy Guthrie, was reported missing from her home in Arizona.

As Savannah summarized the day’s headlines (a potential cease-fire in Iran, surging gas prices, UCLA’s victory in the NCAA women’s-basketball championship) she wore a dress of bright yellow, its lace overlay suggestive of delicate flowers. Her co-host, Craig Melvin, wore a yellow tie, with a yellow pocket square peeking from his blazer and a yellow ribbon pinned to his lapel. The desk they shared was surrounded by yellow flowers: roses, mostly, looking like tightly packed blooms of sunshine.

Yellow, used in this way, is a color of hope—the hope, in particular, that a missing loved one will return home. On the Today set, though, it was also a color of defiance.

Guthrie’s return is a refusal to give in to the personal horror that has become a widely followed national news story. Very little has changed since the early days in the case of her mother’s disappearance: no reported new breaks, no new evidence revealed. Her decision to come back, she has suggested, is instead simply a step whose time has arrived. The television host is famous for her grin—wide, slightly crooked, proof that the poets got it right when they compared smiles to beams of light. Now, she suggested, that smile would speak for itself. “My joy will be my protest,” Guthrie told her former Today co-anchor Hoda Kotb, who had filled in for Guthrie during her absence, in an interview that aired late in March.

The protest, though, is also a concession: an acknowledgment that Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance is still a question with no answer, and a story with no conclusion.

The ransom notes the family received after Nancy’s disappearance have not been officially verified, though Guthrie has said she found two to be credible. The images captured by the Ring camera in Nancy’s entryway shortly before she disappeared—showing a figure at her door, masked and gloved and apparently armed—were leads until, it seems, they weren’t. The case grows colder. “We need answers,” Guthrie told Kotb. “We cannot be at peace without knowing, and someone can do the right thing. And it is never too late to do the right thing, and our hearts are focused on that.”

When you’re hoping for a happy ending, it may not occur to you that one day, you might find relief from any ending at all. But this is the hard truth of true crime: The crime itself rarely resolves as neatly as made-for-TV renderings might suggest. Sometimes, it simply doesn’t resolve. The dynamics involved will be familiar to anyone who regularly follows the news: Many news events are, in some way, stories without end.

In the weeks following Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance, the frantic efforts to find her received dedicated coverage on CNN and other networks. The New York Times live-blogged its developments. The case was the subject of regular updates in gossip and entertainment outlets such as People and TMZ. (TMZ’s coverage acknowledged the role that the site itself played in the story—as the recipient of a note claiming to be sent by Nancy’s alleged kidnapper.) It was a steady topic in part because it offered so few meaningful developments. Each twist, however shaky as a lead or a clue, seemed to provide a new reason to hope that she might still be found and reunited with her family.

The hope remains. But it grows fainter. The Guthries have lived through, as The New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham put it last week, “an ordeal the likes of which most of us can contemplate only as part of the plot of an egregiously dramatic movie or television show.” A show makes a basic promise that it will come to an end. Grief makes no such guarantee.

*Photo-illustration sources: Brandon Bell / Getty; Peter Kramer / NBC / Getty; Heritage Art / Heritage Images / Getty

The Disney Princess Who Wasn’t

2026-03-20T16:33:00-04:00

Taylor Frankie Paul’s turn on The Bachelorette was meant to be a fairy tale fit for reality, an age-old love story made modern by a heroine who had risen to fame as an antihero. Frankie Paul first gained notoriety as an online influencer and came to ABC’s soft-lit dating show through her role on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, where—as a reliable purveyor of high-stakes melodramas and telegenic tantrums—she has helped make the Hulu series a hit. In the topsy-turvy world of unscripted shows, toxicity is often currency, and bad behavior is practically a contractual obligation. And here, Frankie Paul delivered.

A Mormon wife who wasn’t (the mother of three is a divorcée, and the person almost single-handedly responsible for bringing soft swinger into the American pop-cultural lexicon), she rose through reality’s ranks in part because she proved so uniquely adept at the art of self-exploitation. She was cast as the Bachelorette both despite her history and because of it. She also landed the gig because the ABC show and Hulu, the distributor of Mormon Wives, share the same corporate parent: Disney.

If reality shows are twists on fairy tales—stories with moral messages and bits of enchantment—ABC’s promotion of its new star was apt. Her participation in the dating show, the network implied, was its own kind of happy ending, and Frankie Paul her own kind of Disney princess, one fit for an era whose fantasies are shaped by reality TV.

But even the most tangled fairy tales, it turns out, have their breaking point. Yesterday, the gossip site TMZ posted a smartphone-shot video from 2023 showing Frankie Paul at home with her on-again, off-again boyfriend Dakota Mortensen and her then-5-year-old daughter. (Frankie Paul now also has a son with Mortensen; his conception, birth, and infancy have been season-spanning plot points on Mormon Wives.) In the video, the adults fight. Frankie Paul launches herself at Mortensen, pulls his hair, screams. She throws metal barstools toward him, and one—the video is shaky—seems to strike her daughter; the girl cries. “You’re done!” Mortensen shouts at Frankie Paul, and to an extent, he is correct: Soon after the video went public, ABC announced that her season of The Bachelorette, which had been scheduled to premiere this Sunday, would no longer be airing.

Frankie Paul, through a representative, responded to the video (allegedly leaked by Mortensen himself): “Releasing an old video, which conveniently omits context,” the representative told People, “is a reprehensible attempt to distract from his own behavior.” The star didn’t have many other options. The video may be grainy; it may be lacking in fuller context; it may be, in its own way, selectively edited. In the version published by TMZ, several portions suddenly go blank, leaving only audio evidence of the encounter. The reality that the recording does depict, however, is all too stark. No edit, and no spin, can counter the hard fact of a child in apparent pain.

The fairy tale Disney had written on Frankie Paul’s behalf alluded to her flaws; the video put them on display. The Bachelorette was an elaborate brand collaboration; the video effectively tarnished Frankie Paul’s brand.

[Read: Love is blind, as long as love does Pilates]

But Disney, too, has been sullied. ABC’s abrupt cancellation of Frankie Paul’s season belies the fact that the video’s revelations, overall, are not new. The footage was recorded during a fight that led Mortensen to file domestic-violence and other charges against Frankie Paul in February 2023. (She eventually pleaded guilty to aggravated assault; the domestic-violence charges were dismissed.) Mormon Wives’ producers managed to get cameras on the scene to capture its aftermath, and the footage that resulted, including Frankie Paul’s interactions with local police, became a Season 1 plot point. Violence, remade for public consumption, was one of the enticements producers offered to help propel the show, to attract a hungry audience. Mormon Wives’ wide viewership was one reason that Frankie Paul became the Bachelorette in the first place.

Traditional fairy tales generally employ a blunt moral calculus: The princess is who she is—pure, good, worthy—and is, in time, rewarded for it. Her path to happily ever after may require luck and patience and a bit of magic, but ultimately, her happy ending is deserved. The Bachelorette’s version of the story required calculation. The show, in casting Frankie Paul, was not merely elevating a princess; it was creating one.

Promotional materials for her season occasionally read as preemptive acts of crisis PR. A trailer featured Frankie Paul, remade as the Bachelorette, living the familiar clichés (limos, fireworks, sailboats!) of made-for-TV courtship. It also featured the men she dated on the show waxing eloquent about her qualities. “She’s what I look for in a wife,” one said. Another declared: “I know her, I trust her, and I love her.” The claims issued by these would-be princes doubled as testimonials. This Bachelorette, swept along on a high-speed redemption arc, was elevated rather than compromised by her flaws, her struggles recast as advertisements—promises of good TV.

[Read: The paranoid style in American entertainment]

ABC effectively gave Frankie Paul a princess edit. She appeared at the Oscars last Sunday—another bit of brand cohesion with the ABC-aired ceremony—clad in a dress decorated with gossamer-like floral details: Cinderella in a red-carpet-ready glow-up. But the gown, featuring a series of cutouts, was notably not demure. This, too, served the edit: In marketing The Bachelorette, ABC has emphasized the star’s discordance in a franchise that, though campy, has been a self-conscious purveyor of moralism. “She’s an absolute wild card,” The Bachelorette’s host, Jesse Palmer, marveled about Frankie Paul in a promotional interview.

“Here for the right reasons” is a long-standing refrain on this particular dating show: a purity test regularly given to contestants who, having been plucked from obscurity to look for love on national television, are made to prove their worthiness for the honor. Yet Frankie Paul was not obscure—and could hardly have been called traditionally “pure.” She was a Bachelorette whose reputation preceded her, and the show turned her unfitness into a sales pitch. “She’s a really confident woman,” one of her ABC-selected suitors says about her in the promotional trailer. “She’s gentle and sweet”—he pauses, dramatically—“unless you piss her off.” Another suitor (quoted after a supercut compilation that finds Frankie Paul berating the men and requesting that they give back the roses she has just handed out) says that “this is the epitome of there being no rules at all.”

But fairy tales, for all their magic, do in the end have rules. In an upside-down way so appropriate for reality TV, Frankie Paul ended up proving that. Her well-publicized fairy tale has given way, for now, to an all-too-familiar kind of nightmare. The princess was not rescued by reality; she was done in by it.

Love Story Is a Horror Story

2026-03-09T13:08:00-04:00

This article contains mild spoilers through Season 1, Episode 6 of Love Story.

If every love story is a ghost story, as David Foster Wallace wrote, those who tell the tales might consider how many of love’s ghosts are still alive. Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, FX’s semi-fictionalized retelling of the relationship between the American prince and his somewhat-reluctant princess, has been a hit with audiences. Since its premiere last month, the show—a fusion of drama and camp, taking pains and liberties with the lives of the people it portrays—has become the most-watched limited series in FX’s streaming history.

Love Story has proved less popular, however, with several of the people who found themselves effectively cast, without their consent, in the production. On Friday, the actor and activist Daryl Hannah—who had a long-term relationship with the Kennedy-family scion before his marriage to Bessette—published an opinion essay in The New York Times that indicted her portrayal in the show. The Daryl Hannah of the series, ditzy and needy and serving as a human complication to the love story on offer, is, Hannah asserted, a lie. The character’s arc is “not even a remotely accurate representation of my life, my conduct or my relationship with John,” she wrote. Her essay came with a plaintive title: “How Can Love Story Get Away With This?”

The show gets away with it, of course, for the same reason many similar ones do: because exploitation can be so entertaining—and so profitable. Semi-fictions sell. Love Story is the latest entry in a franchise, overseen by the producer Ryan Murphy, that includes American Crime Story, American Sports Story, and Monster—many of which offer their own opaquely fictionalized renderings of scandalous American moments. Hannah’s criticisms echo statements made in response to the franchise’s treatment of the predations of Jeffrey Dahmer, the trial of O. J. Simpson, and the impeachment of Bill Clinton. They echo criticisms from Jack Schlossberg, John’s 33-year-old nephew and a current candidate for Congress, who called the Murphy-ized version of his uncle inaccurate and “grotesque.” The perverse irony is that many such protests, however valid they may be, double as publicity for the very shows they are criticizing.

True crime, as a genre, rationalizes its exploitations—people’s tragedies and traumas, recast for popular consumption—by couching the sensationalism in considerations of justice. Its stories typically have victims and perpetrators, their plots turning on basic questions of whether mysteries will be solved and culprits held to account. They are, in that way, intensely moralistic. The productions of the Murphyverse translate the approach on a grander scale, taking famous true-crime stories of the past and recasting them for contemporary sensibilities: The Monica Lewinsky who was semi-fictionalized in Impeachment was a protagonist rather than a punch line. (Lewinsky, in this case, was one of the series’ producers.) The grim spectacles of the O. J. Simpson trial were presented, retrospectively, as moral failures.

These reframings have offered their own kind of rationalization: They might exploit real people’s stories—they might reduce real people to the soft predations of semi-fiction—but they do so, or claim to do so, in the service of a broader sense of fairness. They are correcting the record. They are righting wrongs. If, in the process, they invoke the ire of the semi-fictionalized, this is a small sacrifice in the scheme of things. Even justice, it seems, can bring collateral damage.

Love Story, though a self-conscious departure from the other shows of the Murphyverse, employs a similar logic. This is true love, served up through the tropes of crime. This love story has heroes and villains. It asks questions, retrospectively, about justice. And, as if to forestall the accusations of exploitation that have plagued earlier shows, Love Story goes out of its way to empathize with its lovers. It offers appropriation as a gift rather than as an insult: The show takes two people who are, today, best remembered for their tragic ending (the plane crash that killed John and Carolyn at the ages of 38 and 33, respectively, consigning them to perpetual youth) and resurrects them as full and real. It takes the basic objection of those who have been true-crimed into pieces of entertainment—I am more than my tragedy—and remakes it, on behalf of its subjects, into a premise. It turns real people into characters who are compelling and convincing. They are well written. They are, as played by Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon, well acted.

As John and Carolyn fall in love, the show seems to fall in love with them too. The John of the show, “America’s son” and its most eligible bachelor, has inherited not only his parents’ chiseled jawlines but also their sense of duty, breezy charisma, and telegenic idealism. He is, in today’s terms, a consummate nepo baby; in the show’s telling, though, this is less his blessing than his curse. Princes, traditionally, have at least had a measure of job security. But John, as American “royalty”—as a dynast in a democracy—struggles to make a name for himself. He is constantly caught between his desire to fulfill his birthright and to apologize for it.

Carolyn, for her part, is caught between her desire for the prince and her desire not to be a princess. A fashion publicist—her personal style, in life, helped solidify ’90s minimalism as a timeless trend—Carolyn is a Cinderella whose glass slippers took the form of slinky slip dresses. And she is a cool girl, the show suggests, who is remarkably warm. Early on, we see her sneaking smoke breaks in the Calvin Klein offices (and occasionally gossiping with her close friend, the then-up-and-coming designer Narciso Rodriguez); enjoying dark clubs and cheap beer; and informing the besotted friend she is sleeping with of her preference to keep things “cool and casual.” The Carolyn of the show takes the cliché—“I’m not like other girls”—and makes it literal: She is one of the few women in America, Love Story suggests, who does not care about John’s last name.

This is hagiography fit for an age that prefers its heroes to be relatable. Love Story, by turns, elevates its lovers, pities them, humanizes them. Above all, it sympathizes with them.

But a compelling fiction is fiction all the same. Love is not absolution. These versions of Carolyn and John are characters, in the end, that claim to represent real people. And their audiences are subject to the paradox that plagues so many series in the Murphyverse: The more engaging each show is as a piece of entertainment, the more questionable it becomes as a piece of pseudofiction. When you’re turning real people into characters—when, for legal reasons, you preface each episode with a disclaimer informing viewers that the people they are about to watch are real and unreal—you can expect to hear complaints from those who have been fictionalized.

And you can expect audiences to question what they are watching—even, and perhaps especially, when they are enjoying the show. The same uncertainties that plague Murphy’s works of true crime apply just as readily to this story of true love: At what point do viewers become voyeurs?

Love Story is unsure. It makes some concessions to its protagonists’ privacy. During sex scenes, its cameras follow the pair at close range—before, with pronounced discretion, pulling away. When the two are in public, the show offers canny bits of cinematography: images shot from a distance, turning surveillance into an aesthetic. The fluttering of camera shutters becomes a soundtrack. Yet the series reserves its strongest moralism for members of the paparazzi, whom it portrays as vultures and stalkers and faceless villains. The photographers and their cameras, scene by scene, threaten to turn Carolyn and John’s American love story into a horror story. But Love Story offers its condemnations without seeming to wonder whether a work of semi-fiction—a full-scale imagining of two people’s lives—is a paparazzo by other means.

When John F. Kennedy won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, the writer Norman Mailer predicted the cultural impact of his political rise: “America’s politics,” Mailer declared, “would now be also America’s favorite movie, America’s first soap opera, America’s best-seller.” He was right. He was right because democracies have their dynasties, too: people elevated by our tendency to confuse accidents of birth with acts of fate. Love Story airs and streams in a moment when the Kennedy name has lost much of the cultural currency it once had. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the slain president’s nephew and John Jr.’s cousin, has made a name for himself by turning conspiracy theories into national policy. Camelot, always a fantasy, looks ever more like delusion. The show’s version of Jacqueline Kennedy, talking to John Jr. shortly before her death, warns her son that “the public’s always holding a flower in one hand and a stone in the other. Don’t forget that.” Love Story, trying to keep the old romance alive, manages to hold both.

Love Is Blind, as Long as Love Does Pilates

2026-02-27T10:48:00-05:00

This article features spoilers through Love Is Blind Season 10, Episode 10.

If you are vying for the title of “biggest Love Is Blind villain ever,” you will need to work hard for the honor. Your competition at this point in the Netflix dating show’s run will include 10 seasons’ worth of cheaters and liars, clout chasers and schmoozers and players. You will contend with broad archetypes (the mean girl, the male feminist who isn’t, the promise-wielding commitment-phobe) and singular talents. Villain edits are reality-TV mainstays, and series’ appointed rogues are generally easy to spot from the outset. But Love Is Blind’s latest season, set in Ohio, has provided a cad for the ages: a guy whose bid for villainy was so sudden, so dramatic, that it doubled as a plot twist.

I am referring, of course, to Chris Fusco, the account executive and ice-plunge enthusiast who recently earned his place in the pannable pantheon by finding a creatively callous way to remind viewers of a harsh fact: Even when love is blind, it has its aesthetic standards.

Love Is Blind sells itself as a grand “social experiment” that simply happens to be televised. (Its participants do their dating through walls, to ensure they will fall in love “based on who they are on the inside.”) Early in the show, Chris connected with Jessica Barrett, an infectious-disease doctor who distinguished herself through her warmth, quirks, and humor. Chris, winning Jess over with an easygoing charm, wall-dated his way to an engagement: The two met in person, went on a group trip to Mexico, and were living together in an apartment provided by the show. Things had been going well, it seemed—great, even—when Chris dropped a “We need to talk” bomb: “Do you think we have a good physical connection?”

Jess did think their physical connection was good. She was seemingly unaware that Chris thought otherwise. She was definitely unaware of the source of his ambivalence: In “the normal world,” Chris told his fiancée, he was used to dating women who do Pilates. Or CrossFit. Every day. So.

[Read: The reality show that captures Gen Z dating]

Never has a red flag been hoisted so quickly. Pheromones, sure, can be fickle; chemistry, as a romantic matter, is notoriously unscientific. But Chris’s ambivalence came with attribution. It was specific. And it was personal: An attraction “wasn’t there” for Chris because of something that Jessica, herself, wasn’t doing.

Villainy, at the elite level, will not content itself with offensiveness alone; the all-timers, the boundary-pushers, bring fresh nuance to their antics. Their insults—because they are hypocritical, perhaps, or ironic, or outrageous—are also interesting. Chris, in peak-villain mode, married technical proficiency with artistic flair: He managed to turn Pilates into a euphemism. Here was a guy who told his fiancée that he didn’t want to sound “like a fucking dickhead” but then also told her—what a flourish!—that he was attracted to Bri McNees, their fellow cast member and a former competitive cheerleader. Here was “It’s not you, it’s me,” shed of its meager generosity: “Actually, though, it’s you.”

Jess—whose daily routine involves caring for sick patients at the hospital where she works—met this performance, for the most part, with wide-eyed silence. (She instead made her feelings clear by promptly moving out of the apartment that she and Chris shared.) Love Is Blind’s audience, though, was more vocal. “This dude SUCCCCCCCKS,” one widely liked Instagram post announced. “Absolutely everyone hates him.” In a TikTok, a woman claiming to be Chris’s ex-girlfriend shared her assessment that Chris “thinks he’s God’s gift because he owns two pairs of designer sneakers.” Many people pointed out how beautiful Jess is, how manifestly attractive, how good, how fun, how kind. Some found Chris’s Instagram and mined it for evidence of what Chris had already made clear: Jess had dodged a bullet.

But if Chris is, as his alleged ex also claimed, “a walking red flag,” the label is all the more striking because he had spent so much of his Love Is Blind tenure in generally green-flag territory. Pilatesgate came at the end of Episode 8; the Chris who had appeared in the 7.75 episodes prior had epitomized the bland relatability that is Love Is Blind’s stock-in-trade. While he and Jess were in the dating phase—talking to each other and other romantic prospects through the walls of the show’s “pods”—he told her about his efforts “to be a better person” and his desire “to live in a better society.” He was also effusive in his admiration of Jess. He was quite smug, yes, about his daily ice-plunge practice; but this seemed, in light of everything else, a yellow flag at worst. Little about his storyline suggested that it would find him insulting his betrothed on international television.

Romantic pairings on Love Is Blind have their own character arcs. And this one, until its abrupt conclusion, had been presented as effective proof of the show’s concept: evidence of all that can be revealed romantically when people are invisible to each other. Jess and Chris bonded early over their shared love of animals (she had two bulldogs; he had a cat named Chalupa). They talked about hopes and insecurities and family and finances and the implications, if any, of their six-year age gap. (She was 38 at the time of filming; he was 32.) They bantered. They flirted. They professed mutual awe. Seeing Jess for the first time, Chris called her “perfect.” She called them both “the luckiest.” “He just makes me feel so safe,” she said. “I just know he’s never gonna let me down. I just know it.”

[Read: Reality TV just leveled up]

This was, of course, an omen. And it foreshadowed more than the dissolution of their relationship. Pilatesgate was a pivot point for Chris as a character. (The show served up the Pilates scene with thudding, somber background music, situating it as an end-of-episode climax: a cliff-hanger with a marriage hanging in the balance.) The Chris who appears post-breakup is a sneering caricature of made-for-TV villainy. This Chris, out at a bar with assorted castmates in a group hang arranged by the show, drunkenly explains to anyone who will listen what he found to be lacking in his sexual relationship with Jess. This Chris brags about his history of dating gym-goers and ballet dancers. This Chris marks his breakup by going to a strip club and makes a point of posting a picture with one of the dancers on Instagram. This Chris informs Bri—whom he dated fairly seriously in the pods, and who got engaged to his show buddy Connor Spies—that her fiancé is too “submissive” for her. This Chris cackles. This Chris provokes. This Chris is “just being honest.”

“He’s a different person,” Bri marvels. She was not alone in such marvelings. Villain edits unsettle their shows’ storylines by bringing conflict and crisis, typically in ways that are melodramatic and thus immediately legible to viewers. Villain twists, though, unsettle the viewers. They expand the core questions of reality as a genre—what is real? what is manufactured?—into questions about the audience’s acuity: What did we miss? What was hidden?

Some people are born villains; others achieve villainy; others have villainy thrust upon them. And a well-executed plot twist tends to make people question everything that came before. The Chris who appeared post-Pilatesgate seemed to have emerged fully formed from the muck of the manosphere; the show offered few direct hints at the character he would become. So Love Is Blind’s villain twist dared viewers to go back and review the tape.

It is not unusual for people in relationships, however good they may be, to change their mind. It is not unusual for people who love each other to find “the physical aspect,” as the show calls it, lacking. Chris’s offense was not his change of heart; it was his change of character. It was You don’t do Pilates. It was his implication that the fault of the failed relationship fell to Jess—specifically, to her body. The text here offends, in large part, because of its subtext: the misogynistic assumption that it’s reasonable for a man to discard a woman, no matter how beautiful and successful and funny and kind, with a glib declaration that she is less than perfect.

Chris’s villain twist, in that sense, is a manipulation—an edit that Love Is Blind exploited for drama—that nonetheless captures something chillingly real. Misogyny rarely announces itself openly; instead, it very often emerges through small slights and insults. Villainy, even at extremes, can manifest similarly. It can reveal itself suddenly. Chris may be “one of the worst, most hateable reality TV show villains of all time.” He is also one of the most watchable—because his manufactured villainy rings true.

Love Is Blind, like the world of dating it claims to reflect, is fluent in the semaphores of romantic engagement: green flags, red flags, yellow, orange, beige. Chris—plucked, after all, from the real world—embodies a lesson that many daters have learned the hard way: Some of the most upsetting relationships feature characters who fly their green flag high, only to flip it, swiftly and shockingly, to red.

The Meme From 2016 That Explains 2026

2026-02-24T07:00:00-05:00

All times are interesting times, but the summer of 2016 was especially interesting. That July, as a Twitter user named Katie Loewy tried to make sense of mass shootings and Brexit and the rising political power of the host of The Celebrity Apprentice, she proposed a theory. “I’m not saying that David Bowie”—who had died earlier that year—“was holding the fabric of the universe together,” she wrote, “but *gestures broadly at everything*.”

The tweet promptly went viral, partly for what it said—the idea of Bowie as cosmic load bearer was, as explanations go, absurd and amusing and plausible—but mostly for what it didn’t. *Gestures broadly at everything* was a punch line to a joke that was all too familiar. It turned overwhelm into a knowing melodrama. Soon, people across the English-speaking internet were posting, emailing, and texting their own versions of Loewy’s stage-whispered aside: [gestures wildly at everything]; <gestures vaguely at everything>; [gestures around]. The meme’s brackets and asterisks—never has punctuation been so eloquent—seemed to step in where words failed.

Recent years have been boom times for language that is inarticulate on purpose. Vibe has become a diagnosis; chaos has become an all-purpose condition. Dictionaries have highlighted, as their words of the year, brain rot and post-truth and an emoji caught between laughter and tears. But [gestures around] might be the term of the decade. It is a vestige of 2016 that, precisely because it is self-consciously speechless, captures the tensions of life in 2026. You can tell a lot about an age by its propensity for empty [gestures]. You can tell a lot about ours by the fact that bracketed addlement is, at this point, a cliché.

[From the August 2025 issue: What are emoji?]

“I think it goes without saying that we are in shockingly unusual times,” a federal judge declared last month. She was referring, most directly, to mass protests—and state violence—in Minneapolis, while hearing a case on the matter. She might also have been referring, though, to crises in Venezuela or Greenland or the thousands of other happenings, both obviously historic and subtly so, making shock such a reliable feature of everyday life.

“May you live in interesting times,” as the old line goes, is never quite the blessing it seems. Interesting times can be incoherent. They can be maddening. This is one reason [gestures around] first caught on. When Loewy tweeted about the fraying fabric of the universe, she later told Slate, she had particular ruptures in mind; her theory of a Bowie-to-Brexit pipeline was connected to both her personal politics and the fact that she lived in London at the time. But her tweet’s wording absolved her of the need to specify. It did the same for the many people who turned her dashed-off gesture, over the years, into a piece of common language. *Gestures broadly at everything* commiserates—Everything, ugh—but maintains plausible deniability. It assumes, correctly, that overwhelm is a nonpartisan proposition.

As they said in 2016: How relatable. In a media environment that delivers news through feeds and flows and fire hoses—in a time that has given us what critics have called the “end of endings”—overwhelm is, to some degree, inevitable. But it is also a profound concession. It can become, at the scale of a population, dangerous. Overwhelm can beget helplessness. Helplessness can beget despair. Despair can beget apathy. And each sensation can make us vulnerable because each can rob us of an elemental form of political power: the ability to understand what is happening around us—and, then, to talk about it.

[Gestures around] acknowledges the theft by, effectively, embodying it. To use it is to perform an extremely condensed piece of theater: Here you are, trying to say something meaningful about the world at large; and here you are—mutely, melodramatically—failing. [Gestures around] resonated in 2016 because it acknowledged what a lot of people thought: Their explosive era was, as times go, exceptional. Today it resonates for the opposite reason: Shockingly unusual times are, for the most part, our status quo. The past decade has found many people striving to stay balanced while things they took for granted—rights, systems, democracy itself—have withered and fallen away. It has given people new ways to wonder about the practical difference between action and apathy, activism and slacktivism, complacency and complicity. [Gestures around], ever elastic, still speaks, silently, to a sense of overwhelm. But it has also become a way to wonder: What do we do if the interesting times never end?

[Read: The short-circuiting of the American mind]

The meme, of course, offers no answers. But it can offer clarity about the character and stakes of people’s uncertainty. Overwhelm is a personal experience that, when it affects the populace at large, becomes a political one; unchecked, it can unsteady people’s sense of themselves as actors and agents. It can replace words with empty gestures. [Gestures around], though, serves as a signal, and potentially as a rebuke—to the comforting and misguided assumption that politics is something that happens to other people.

Democracy, in its American form, takes words for granted. It relies on speech. It assumes people’s ability to identify crises—to distinguish between the everyday dramas and the scene-shifting ones—and then to react appropriately to them. Everything that makes [gestures around] so perpetually useful as a piece of language makes it even more valuable as a warning, and then as an opportunity: It reminds those who keep finding themselves at a loss for words that they always have the chance to find new ones.

James Van Der Beek’s Greatest Trick

2026-02-12T11:53:00-05:00

Adolescence, as life phases go, is not especially easy to idealize. Dawson’s Creek, though, found a way. The ’90s-era soap opera, disguised as a gauzy coming-of-age drama, gave us the fictional Capeside, Massachusetts, a telegenically rustic hamlet populated by telegenically precocious teenagers—chief among them Dawson Leery, a dreamy filmmaker in the making, who spent six TV seasons angsting and aching his way into the hearts of the show’s young audience.

Dawson was strong and sensitive in equal measure. He was a thoroughly nice guy in a show that refused to treat that status as an insult. He was as thoroughly fantastical as the series that shared his name. But the character worked—and the show worked with him—because, against all odds, he seemed so warm and real. That is mostly because he was played by James Van Der Beek.

Van Der Beek died yesterday at the age of 48, after announcing in 2024 that he had been diagnosed with Stage 3 colorectal cancer. The actor leaves behind a large family—he and his wife, Kimberly, had six children—and a legacy that extends far beyond the character who made him, for a certain generation of TV viewers, an icon.

Dawson’s ended its run in 2003; Van Der Beek, having achieved something at the start of his career that most actors spend their lives pursuing, might have gone on to seek lucrative reprisals of his famous role. Instead, for the most part, the actor left Capeside, choosing work that demonstrated his remarkable versatility. He did comedy and drama and romance. He did film and TV. He played Jonathan “Mox” Moxon, the restless quarterback of Varsity Blues. And Elijah Mundo, the FBI agent of CSI: Cyber. And Matt Bromley, the oversexed and undershamed executive of Pose.

His best role, though, found Van Der Beek playing himself.

Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, an ABC sitcom whose awkward title belied its easy charm, ran from 2012 to 2014. A gender-flipped and gimlet-eyed update of The Odd Couple, the show starred Krysten Ritter as Chloe, a New Yorker with a habit of ruining her roommates’ lives, and Dreama Walker as June, the wide-eyed, Midwestern-bred woman who gets caught in Chloe’s chaos. But the series also starred, delightfully, James Van Der Beek, who made regular, scene-stealing appearances as Chloe’s best friend—the actor James Van Der Beek.

TV James is an actor and celebrity who is self-conscious and vain in equal measure: a Hollywood stereotype let loose on the streets of New York. TV James carries glossy headshots around with him to distribute, magnanimously, to wayward fans. TV James is engaged in a long-running and passionately petty feud with the actor Dean Cain (played, yes, by the actor Dean Cain). TV James, eager to de-Dawson his personal brand, lends his name to a line of absurdly skinny jeans (tagline: “Put your cheeks in a Beek!”). TV James can think of no higher aspiration than a seasonal appearance on Dancing With the Stars.

The actor who plays himself is an age-old trope. Since well before Larry David came along, celebrities have been breaking their own life’s fourth wall and finding comedy among the wreckage. Van Der Beek, during his Dawson’s run, made a self-referential appearance in the film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back—his own early attempt, perhaps, to de-Dawson himself.

In Apartment 23, though, he found new verve in the old joke. Having ascended into the sitcom’s semi-fictional form, he created a character who was prickly and smarmy and needy and whiny, and thus richly emblematic of Hollywood then and now. He mocked his industry. He mocked his fame. He mocked himself. (TV James’s overzealous preparations for Dancing With the Stars are, in retrospect, all the funnier, and all the deeper, because Van Der Beek the person eventually appeared on the show.) He remade himself as a human punch line, gamely and, in the end, effectively—playing someone who, through all his flaws, turned a clever but otherwise standard-issue sitcom into a satire.

TV James, like Dawson, is more resonant than he has any right to be. On paper—as scripted—he is aggressively unrelatable. (“I have too much money,” he grouses at one point; “my wallet’s so thick that it’s hurting my back!”) On-screen, though, his plight reverberates. TV James, like Dawson, is trapped in arrested development, perpetually caught between adolescence and adulthood. Underneath his foolishness, he is consigned to an all-too-relatable fate: He is unsure how to reconcile the person he was with the person he wants to become.

All the farce, in that way, hints at tragedy. And it does so because Van Der Beek, playing and mocking himself, also humanized himself. He re-created the magic that made Dawson’s Creek a cultural touchpoint. The show, in exaggerating adolescence—in remaking that consequential phase as a fantasy and a melodrama—also managed to honor it. It took teenagers seriously. Van Der Beek, twisting his remarkable life into a piece of comedy, pulled the same kind of trick. Poking fun at himself, he found something not only real—but also true.

The Grim Paradox of the Nancy Guthrie Case

2026-02-10T19:21:00-05:00

Legal scholars sometimes bemoan what they call the “CSI effect”—the tendency, in courtrooms, for jurors’ familiarity with true-crime TV shows to skew their expectations of how crimes are investigated and solved. The effect emerges from a paradox: People’s interest in televised versions of the criminal-justice system can, regardless of their compassion or sympathies, impede justice in the real world.

The disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, an unsolved mystery playing out in real time, embodies a similar paradox. The 84-year-old—the mother of the Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie—has been missing since February 1, when her failure to attend church services triggered a wide-ranging and, as the days have worn on, ever more desperate search. What seems clear at this point, and what law-enforcement officers say they have determined, is that Nancy was taken from her home near Tucson, Arizona, against her will. Today, investigators released a video recovered from her entryway camera, showing a person—masked, gloved, carrying what appears to be a holstered gun—at her door during the hours of the assumed abduction. The video may be a break in a case that has captured national attention both despite and because of all the questions it has left unanswered. Among them: Where is Nancy Guthrie? What condition is she in? Is her disappearance connected to the fact that her daughter is a celebrity?

The open questions, and the narrative that has risen around them, have turned Nancy herself into something of a celebrity. Her fate has become a matter of feverish national interest, and her abduction a shock that, as it enters its second week, has remained front-page, broadcast-leading news. Its smallest details have been shared on purpose-built live blogs, rehashed through ad hoc podcasts, and discussed endlessly on social media—as melodramas, as cliffhangers, as plot twists. This is the CSI effect at its broadest and most reductive. Nancy’s disappearance, as a human circumstance—a grandmother taken from her house in the middle of the night, held by someone unknown—is unthinkable. As a story, though, the case’s dynamics are all too familiar. Public interest changes the terms of any tragedy. The longer this one has gone on, the more its horrors have hewed to the demands of the show.

This is, to a degree, because of the particulars of the case. Nancy’s disappearance, in addition to playing out as television, has also played out through television. People claiming to be her kidnappers have allegedly communicated with the Guthrie family through notes sent to TV stations. (The gossip site TMZ also said that it had received a note, making it something of a character in the unfolding drama.) And the family has responded, addressing the presumed kidnappers through, at least in part, their own small productions—videos that Savannah and her two siblings have posted publicly, pleading for their mother’s safe return. The messages embody the same split-screen reality as many other elements of the case: Their ostensible aim is to bring things to a conclusion, but each new post—see, for example, the one that Savannah, this time solo, posted yesterday—also adds to the spectacle, providing fodder for viewers and narrative momentum.

Attention can be a blessing and a curse. Statements posted by Savannah explicitly ask for the public’s help in locating Nancy. (NBC, which broadcasts Today, has shared with its audience the FBI’s tip line and the phone number of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department.) And public interest in private tragedies can sometimes lead to clues and insights that might otherwise have eluded law-enforcement officials working alone. The murder of the vlogger Gabby Petito, for example, was solved with the help of social-media users who, following the case from afar, found the crucial clues.

But public interest has also, arguably, made the Guthrie case more difficult to parse than it might otherwise have been. Officials have received multiple letters claiming to be ransom notes—and seem to have spent much of their time attempting to discern which, if any, might be authentic, and which might be the work of hoaxers. (Last week, federal authorities arrested a man who they allege contacted members of the Guthrie family via text message with what seems like a ransom demand. According to the complaint against him, the man, after being read his Miranda rights, admitted to having sent two messages.)

Whatever its direct costs and benefits to an investigation, public interest also comes with broader complications. The Guthrie case, like so many before it, has attracted its own coterie of self-professed “experts”—people who assess the situation from a distance, analyzing the meager evidence available to them and speculating about the victim’s fate. Some seem well intentioned in their interest; having learned of the case, they are following it—participating in it—in the hope that it might have a happy ending. Others seem more craven; understanding that tragedies are also trending topics, they have found new ways to transform public concern into personal clout.

Some commenters, meanwhile, live out the full paradox of the made-for-TV saga: Their sympathy, soon enough, gives way to the needs of the show. Reddit boards hosting discussions of the case offer grim evidence of the concession. Many people come to the story—the missing woman, the panicked family, the ordeal so singular but relatable—expressing compassion. But compassion, once expressed, has nowhere else to go. Instead, some posters might offer theories about what happened, what didn’t, what evidence might have been withheld. A few might escalate into wild speculation: that the suspected abduction was an “inside job,” that it was committed by a drug cartel, that it is related to the fact that Savannah Guthrie, in her work as an NBC journalist, has covered the Epstein files.

Versions of this escalation are familiar features of many sites—platforms that offer people incentives, social and financial and otherwise, to edge toward extremism. Reddit abhors a vacuum. And the conversations it hosts, on their own, do little to affect the case; they are, for the most part, idle chatter. But their trajectories—the ease with which they transform compassion into conspiracism—hint at an everyday tragedy lurking within an exceptional one: the fact that empathy and exploitation are never as distant as they might seem. Attention is currency, in some ways the truest and most valuable we have to give. When one family’s nightmare becomes nationally syndicated, though, attention can become a demand—for more detail, for more drama, for a cathartic conclusion. The vigil can come to look like voyeurism, the human care made crass. What is the difference between feeling someone’s pain and consuming it? From the distance of the screen, it can become all too hard to tell.

What Trump Missed at the Kennedy Center

2025-06-12T16:55:00-04:00

Les Misérables is that rarest of things: a global phenomenon that gets political. The show—not just a musical but a megamusical; not just a drama but a melodrama—is an impassioned argument in the guise of an epic story. Like the Victor Hugo novel that inspired it, the musical rails against autocrats and the systems that elevate them. It resents injustice, inequality, and inhumanity. It does so loudly and extravagantly, and has no use for subtlety. Its gaudiest villain is a greedy innkeeper. Its true villain is unchecked power. And its collective protagonists are protesters who flow into the streets, shouting that their lives matter. Ever popular and ever lucrative, Les Mis has little need for a rebrand, though if it did, it could very well go by: Woke Mob! The Musical.

But Hugo loved a good plot twist. And a performance last night at the Kennedy Center provided one: In the audience to celebrate a new staging of Les Mis was President Donald Trump, a man who treats woke as a slur, wealth as permission, and the American presidency as a kingdom in waiting. Trump appeared at the opening partly in a personal capacity (he is, famously, a fan of the show) but primarily in a professional one. This past winter, soon after his return to the White House, the president ousted the chair of the Kennedy Center’s board, installing himself in the role. He now runs, in addition to “the country and the world,” one of the nation’s most powerful arts institutions. And last night’s performance doubled as a fundraiser. In advance of it, according to reporting by The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, board members received a letter urging them to contribute $100,000; other donors were invited to contribute up to $2 million.

Trump’s attendance also came as real-world protests simmered on the other side of the country he leads. On Saturday, in response to demonstrations in Los Angeles against his administration’s treatment of immigrants, Trump made an announcement: He was ready to counter the protests with military force. By the time the president slipped into his VIP box at the Kennedy Center, 4,000 members of the National Guard and 700 Marines had been ordered to mobilize.

That sound you keep hearing might be Hugo not just rolling in his tomb but protesting from it. Hugo was suspicious of kings, and for good reason: He completed Les Mis in exile, having opposed the coup that installed Napoleon III to power. That Trump would be in the audience for the musical is irony enough; that he would be attending as a champion of the show is a mordant bit of revisionism. In the musical, the “master of the house” brings comic relief. In the bigger theater—of our nation, of geopolitics—he brings the stuff of Hugo’s nightmares.

Yet Trump’s love of Les Mis is not much of a surprise. Irony, for one thing, does not seem to preclude his aesthetic appreciation. (Trump has also said that Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s pitying satire of a wealthy mogul turned politician, is his favorite film.) The president often discusses his love of Broadway shows and of megamusicals in particular. He has, at various points, also claimed Evita, Cats, and The Phantom of the Opera as favorites. Those musicals arose in the era that made Trump into a celebrity: the late 1970s and the ’80s. Trump himself has conducted an “off-and-on flirtation with the theater world,” The New York Times noted in 2016, a flirtation that has included a brief stint as a Broadway producer in the early ’70s, as well as repeated discussions about turning his life into a musical.

Until The Trump Follies makes its debut, though, the president has channeled himself through the political stylings of Les Mis. He has used one of the show’s signature songs, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” in rallies since the days of his 2016 campaign. He used it, in fact, when announcing that he would be running for the White House in the 2024 election. And out of context, the song works:

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Then join in the fight
That will give you the right to be free!

These are unobjectionable lyrics. They are widely applicable lyrics. But their obviousness can abet misreadings, as well. Where the song refers to “the right to be free,” a person might fill in the words “from oppression,” “from hatred,” “from fear”—or “from the woke mob.” When it refers to “crusade” and a better world, audiences might apply those ideas to their own sense of how things are. Les Mis, Hugo wrote, is “a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life.” But evil and good have no fixed meaning. Les Misérables, as a title, is commonly translated as, among others, “The Miserable” or “The Wretched” or “The Poor.” Some translations, though, choose a different word: “The Victims.”

[Read: America now has a minister of culture]

Justice, in Hugo’s time as in ours, is a slippery aspiration. Woke can mean whatever people want it to mean. So can freedom. For many Americans, Trump included, the January 6 rioters are freedom fighters and political prisoners. For many of those same Americans, Trump is fighting tyranny rather than establishing it. “I don’t know whether it will be read by everyone,” Hugo wrote of Les Misérables, “but it is meant for everyone.” He most likely did not envision that people of the future would take him so literally. If you remove history from the equation, though—if you strip away reality as a context—Les Mis can say anything. The show’s red-white-and-blue color scheme (in context, a reference to the French flag) can seem to be American. Its climactic protests (in context, a recounting of the June Rebellion of 1832) might read like the siege of January 6.

So many things, these days, have Rorschachian edges, which is to say blurred ones. So many things can be shape-shifted into political convenience. Les Mis’s lyrics—“Who cares about your lonely soul / We strive toward a larger goal”—might refer to anyone’s cause. So might another line: “Our little lives don’t count at all.”

[Stephen Marche: America’s cultural revolution]

Les Mis, published in 1862, emerged from a period of constant upheaval: revolutions, counterrevolutions, coups, widespread poverty, displacement. France was a monarchy and a republic and a monarchy again; along the way, chaos reigned. Hugo’s novel distills the human costs of that instability. It considers what happens when “rule” becomes hopelessly unruly.

As a morality play, Les Mis lives in the tension between the spirit of the law and the letter of it. The story radiates from a single, consequential moment: Its central figure, Jean Valjean, steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. He is arrested and imprisoned—the theft, in the eyes of the law, is a crime—and the event is so stark in its morals that it reads like an ethics case study. Who is more just, the man who tried to feed his family or the man who arrested him for it? Which is the true crime, one man’s taking of a bit of food or the circumstances that led to the theft?

The resonances to today’s world are striking. Early in Les Mis, Valjean is released from prison after a 19-year confinement. Announcing himself as “Jean Valjean,” he is sharply corrected by the story’s prime antagonist, Inspector Javert—to whom Valjean is, and always will be, Prisoner 24601. You might think, today, of the people who are defined not as people at all, but as “illegals,” or of the protesters dismissed as “looters” and “rioters” and “terrorists.” Javert and Valjean are doubles of each other: incarnations of Hugo’s interest in the connections between the just and the unjust, the dark and the light. Valjean, and nearly all of Les Mis’s other characters, are not served by the state’s sense of justice; they are oppressed by it. Javert, in enforcing the law, compounds injustice. His morals are so unfeeling that they lead him to immorality.

[Read: The Kennedy Center performers who didn’t cancel]

Little wonder that “Do You Hear the People Sing?” has become a protest song the world over, its words invoked as pleas for freedom. The crowds in Hong Kong, fighting for democracy, have sung it. So have crowds in the United States, fighting for the rights of unions. The story’s tensions are the core tensions of politics too: the rights of the individual, colliding with the needs of the collective; the possibilities, and tragedies, that can come when human dignity is systematized. Les Mis, as a story, is pointedly specific—one country, one rebellion, one meaning of freedom. But Les Mis, as a broader phenomenon, is elastic. It is not one story but many, the product of endless interpretation and reiteration. With the novel, Hugo turned acts of history into a work of fiction. The musical turned the fiction into a show. And American politics, now, have turned the show into a piece of fan fic.

Hugo-like protest, to some degree, was a theme at last night’s performance. Several Les Mis cast members, when Trump’s presence was confirmed, announced that they intended to boycott the show. Some audience members—including a group of drag queens seated in the orchestra section—attended as an act of protest as well. Trump himself came to the show with an entourage including first lady Melania Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, second lady Usha Vance, and several advisers. As they took their seats, clad in tuxes and gowns, many in the crowd booed. In response, Trump stood and grinned and waved, treating the greeting as an ovation. He then took his seat to enjoy a roughly three-hour indictment of autocracy.

Trump, in translating Les Mis for himself, erodes Hugo’s own claims to the story. The convictions that grounded Hugo’s own sense of freedom—his resentment of unaccountable power, his sense that all justice is social justice—recede, just a bit more, toward the backstage. But Hugo remains. So does Les Mis, the historical artifact. The Los Angeles protests have been spreading throughout the country. More protests are planned for this Saturday, to coincide with a military parade that Trump has arranged in the nation’s capital. The parade will coincide with his birthday. The protests against it have a nickname: “No Kings.”

*Lead image credit: Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Hulton Archive / Getty; SSPL / Getty; The Ohio State University Library; Getty.

Fox and Frenemy

2025-05-02T15:21:00-04:00

This week, the White House adviser Stephen Miller used an appearance on the Fox News Channel to criticize Fox News. Asked by the anchor John Roberts about Donald Trump’s plummeting poll numbers, Miller offered a testy reply: “I don’t want to make things awkward for you, John, but it is our opinion that Fox News needs to fire its pollster.”

The comment was classic political spin—when you don’t like the score, go after the refs. And it briefly changed the subject, media-chatter-wise, from the national news to the interpersonal tension, as headlines proliferated about Miller and his MAGA-versus-Fox moment. But Miller’s comment was not exactly news. For starters, it was one more version of the same anti-polling talking points the White House has been issuing in response to the president’s ratings. It was also simply the latest twist in one of the longest-running stories in American politics: the love-hate relationship between Fox and Trump.

That relationship, because of its historical import and turbulence, is a matter of frequent speculation among the media and the public. Questions about its status have taken on the kind of close-reading-from-a-distance that is typically reserved for celebrity couples. (Are Trump and Fox together? Are they taking a break? Have they gone Instagram-official? Is he seeing other people?) Trump might seem to be the one making the decisions. “FOX NEWS IS NOT OUR FRIEND,” he announced in the days leading up to the 2024 election. But the bond between the president and the network is thoroughly symbiotic, and as such thoroughly stable.

[Read: Growing up Murdoch]

Fox is not state media. But Trump still acts, as MSNBC’s Steve Benen wrote on Wednesday, as if Fox is “a political instrument instead of a news organization.” When, in the run-up to the 100-day mark of Trump’s second term, Fox and many other outlets released polls suggesting new extremes of public dismay, Trump complained. “Rupert Murdoch has told me for years that he is going to get rid of his FoxNews, Trump Hating, Fake Pollster, but he has never done so,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “This ‘pollster’ has gotten me, and MAGA, wrong for years.” In that, the president was effectively expanding his duties from “American president” to “Fox News director.” Likewise, when Miller shared the administration’s “opinion” on air that the pollster should be fired, he was appointing himself as an HR consultant.

Miller and Trump were suggesting that the president, in his relationship with the network, has the upper hand. Yet the two were obfuscating the reality. Trump may decry “FAKE POLLS FROM FAKE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS” and assert that “these people should be investigated for ELECTION FRAUD.” He may imply that his emotions carry weight, that his anger will bring consequences. In relationships that are purely transactional, though, love and hate are nullified by mutual need.

On Tuesday, the same day that Miller used Fox’s air to criticize Fox, the CBS reporter Scott MacFarlane published a detailed accounting of the ties between the White House and the morning talk show Fox & Friends. The show, with its journalistically murky blend of news and casual banter, serves the administration’s needs in a few ways, the report suggested. It offers White House representatives a platform for friendly interviews. Its first-thing-in-the-morning timing means that its content is well situated to set the news agenda—or to relay the administration’s spin. Its high ratings mean that anyone who appears on the show can speak directly to many, many Americans.

But the show is useful in another way, MacFarlane suggested: Fox, in addition to serving as a media outlet, also serves as an in-house communications organ. Officials in Trump’s second White House, like officials in his first, use their appearances on Fox & Friends to grab the attention of the chief executive. Attorney General Pam Bondi did that on Monday. (“Good job on television this morning, Pam,” Trump said during an event in the afternoon.) “Often, there’s an audience of one,” a former government official told MacFarlane. Asked by CBS to comment on the administration’s “evolving media strategy,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, responded with a statement: “We are flattered that CBS is asking the Trump White House how to make good TV. Clearly they need the advice!”

Trump may tryst with other networks, but he always comes home to Fox. He does so whether he claims to be angry with the network or not. That’s the thing about a marriage of convenience: It writes emotions out of the equation. As long as the Trump-Fox relationship retains its baseline utility for both parties, it will be, effectively, indissoluble.

[Read: Do you speak Fox?]

This may help explain why Trump’s latest attacks on the network, for all their apparent explosivity, are nonetheless carefully calibrated. In criticizing Fox’s polling numbers, Trump has directed his ire not at Fox News as a body but merely at one of its arms: its polling operation, and more specifically, at one employee within it. His rants may hint at rupture; at their heart, though, they offer assurances of repair. Trump is positioning his anger against the broader needs of harmonious partnership: While his own numbers have been plummeting, Fox’s have been rising. As The Wrap reported this week, “Fox News just enjoyed the highest-rated first 100 days of any presidency in cable news history.”

Fox’s numbers, like Trump’s feelings, are fickle. The partners are faithful to each other both despite and because of that. The microdynamics might change; the broader commitment is steady. As long as Trump treats attention as currency, he will be, to some extent, in Fox’s thrall. This week, the White House released a new platform it calls the White House Wire. The website—Drudge Report in its aesthetic and propagandistic in most other ways—appears to be the administration’s latest effort to circumvent traditional media sources. But the platform thus far contains mostly social-media posts and articles aggregated from, among other sources, Fox News.

The network, ever constant, will continue to play its part as well. On Tuesday, Fox & Friends marked the 100th day of Trump’s second term with a lengthy video claiming to summarize its noteworthy events—a supercut compilation of out-of-context “accomplishments,” fast-paced and set to jazzy music, resembling what marketers call a “sizzle reel.” The package was studiously upbeat. It sold the presidency it claimed to summarize. It looked like a campaign ad. It also looked like a peace offering.

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The Short-Circuiting of the American Mind

2025-04-29T07:00:00-04:00

In a 1995 episode of Seinfeld, an extremely Seinfeldian series of events leads Jerry to a problem: He has to take a lie-detector test. Specifically, he has to beat a lie-detector test. He seeks advice from his friend George Costanza, whose personal flaws render him uniquely suited to the task of polygraph cheating. George initially rejects the idea that conscience-free lying can be taught (“It’s like saying to Pavarotti, ‘Teach me to sing like you!’”). But he relents. “It’s not a lie,” George says, with a melodramatic flourish, “if you believe it.”

The joke, in the episode, is at George’s expense: Only in his upside-down world would sociopathy amount to a moral. These days, though, his advice might as well be political theory. To participate in American politics is to navigate, every day, an avalanche of falsehoods—lies issued, with Costanza-like ease, from the highest levels of power. Fact-checking was a theme of Donald Trump’s first presidency. Journalists kept count of those first-term fictions—30,573 in all, per one count—guided by the optimism that checking the president’s words might also serve as a check on his power. In late 2020, when Trump claimed victory in the presidential election he had lost, scholars saw in his declaration the kind of propaganda typically found only in authoritarian regimes. They gave the fiction an epithet befitting its magnitude: “the Big Lie.”

But that term, with its sense of emergency, has gone the way so many other fact-checks have in this age of heedless lying: It lives, now, in that democratically awkward space between accuracy and irrelevance. In 2024, Trump was reelected despite the Big Lie—and perhaps because of it. His false assertions are not liabilities, it seems, but rather selling points for many of his voters. They are weapons of partisan warfare, disorienting perceived enemies (Democrats, members of the media) even as they foment broader forms of cynicism and mistrust.

Though Trump’s second presidency began on January 20, 2025, the start of the new Trump era effectively began on January 7, 2025. That was the day that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced it would be ending its efforts to fact-check claims made on those platforms. (It also happened to be exactly four years and one day after the attack on the Capitol that emerged from the Big Lie.)

Meta’s pronouncement was the company’s “Latest Bow to Trump,” as an Associated Press headline summed it up. It was also a harbinger of a wider kind of concession. Fact-checking, while increasing as a need over the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, is waning as an enterprise. The lies are winning. The president is wielding them ever more brazenly. George Costanza, for all his idiocy, may also be a savant: It’s not a lie if you believe it.

For decades, American politics have relied on the same logic that polygraph machines do: that liars will feel some level of shame when they tell their lies, and that the shame will manifest—the quickened heartbeat, the pang of guilt—in the body. But the body politic is cheating the test with alarming ease. Some Americans believe the lies. Others refuse to. Some Americans recognize the lies’ falsity but have decided that some things—their own tribe, their vision for the country—are simply more important than truth. Regardless, the lies remain, unchecked by the old machinery. The polygraph is a measure of conscience. So, in its way, is democracy.

A century ago, in his classic book Public Opinion, the journalist Walter Lippmann laid out a bleak argument: One of the threats to the American experiment was American democracy itself. The work of self-government, Lippmann thought—even back then—asked far too much of its citizens. It asked too much of our minds.

Democracy is a task of data management; ours is premised on the idea that voters’ political decisions will be based on reliable information. But it is also a matter of psychology, and of cognition. The atomic unit of democracy is the human brain. Everything will come down to its capabilities, its vulnerabilities, its biases—for better and, definitely, for worse.

Public Opinion considers mass media and propaganda, and the role that emotion plays in political life. Lippmann observed the importance of media inputs well before media was part of the American vernacular. The information people rely on to do the work of citizenship—voting, arguing, shaping a shared future—is data. But those data are processed by notoriously fickle hardware. The data inform our brains’ impressions of the world: the images that Lippmann called “the pictures in our heads.” The pictures are subjective. They are malleable. And, perhaps most of all, they make little distinction between things that are true and things that are merely believed to be.

Lippmann was writing in the 1920s, not only during the early age of radio but also during a smaller kind of communications revolution: penny presses; mass-produced illustrations and photographs; advertising. He was reckoning with the beginning stages of the information environment that humans navigate today. As people consumed these media, he discerned that they would become reliant on images of the world rather than on the evidence provided by the world itself. They would become confused, he feared, by the preponderance of competing images. And the confusion would weaken them—making them susceptible to the advertisements, to all the stories, to information overwhelm. (To describe the effect of the images, Lippmann borrowed a term from the factory floor: They functioned, he argued, as “stereotypes”—a term he used not as an insult but as a simple description of images’ heuristic powers.)

In Public Opinion, Lippmann diagnosed how readily propaganda could make its way into a nation that was officially at peace. He outlined how seamlessly the false messages could mingle with, and override, true ones. He argued that Americans’ unsteady relationship with information made our democracy inherently fragile. The philosopher John Dewey, alternately impressed and horrified by Public Opinion, called it “perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy” ever written.

[From the November 1919 issue: Walter Lippmann on the basic problem of democracy]

Lippmann’s critiques of democracy have become only more relevant with age. The media environment of the 1920s already featured elements of information overload. The first months of the second Trump presidency, having brought a “flood the zone” approach to government, have lent new acuity to Lippmann’s warnings. The number of news stories alone has made it seem almost absurd to expect citizens to attempt the basic work of democracy: staying informed.

With every lie Trump has told, from the petty to the consequential, he has eroded people’s ability to trust the pictures in their heads. Every time he condemns the pollsters who document his waning public approval, he further erodes that trust. The tethers that anchor people to their president—and to the ground truths of their politics—fray just a bit more.

The people closest to Trump weaken those tethers as well. See, for example, the White House’s changing story about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the administration forcibly deported to El Salvador in March. Administration officials initially called his deportation—effected without due process—an “administrative error.” Soon, though, and without providing credible evidence, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was accusing Abrego Garcia of being a gang member, a human trafficker, and a “foreign terrorist.” Earlier this month, after the Supreme Court ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador, the White House adviser Stephen Miller insisted that the administration had “won” the case, “clearly.”

It had not. The Court had rebuked the White House, unanimously. But political power can be narrative power as well. Falsehoods, issued repeatedly from the bully pulpit, threaten to become conventional wisdom, then clichés, then foregone conclusions. Attempts to challenge them, as crucial as those efforts are as matters of historical recordkeeping, take on a certain listlessness. For others to point out the truth is to do the right thing. It is also to bring paper straws to a gunfight.

In February, responding to Trump’s ask-neither-permission-nor-forgiveness approach to presidential power, the New York Times journalist Ezra Klein published an essay titled, simply, “Don’t Believe Him.” The president’s strategy, Klein argued, is to perform a level of power he doesn’t have in the hopes that the performance might become, eventually, reality. Trump “has always wanted to be king,” Klein wrote. “His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.”

[From the June 2025 issue: ‘I run the country and the world’]

This is absolutely correct. It is also an encapsulation of the problem that Lippmann foresaw. The president, a creature—and in some sense a creation—of television, is keenly aware of the power of images. He avails himself of the insight that Lippmann had years before the TV would become a fact of many people’s lives. And Trump knows how much is at stake. The pictures we carry around with us, in our mind’s ever-revolving camera rolls, are much more than representations of the world as we understand it. The pictures are biases, too. They are assumptions and expectations. They are like brands, in their way: ever expandable, ever expendable. They can be shaped by lies as well as truths. Human brains have a hard time telling the difference.

Lippmann was a contemporary of Freud, whose nascent insights in psychology informed Lippmann’s theories of politics. Our minds make us what we are; they also make us, collectively, vulnerable to deceit. They are biased toward emotion over information. They tend to prefer the easy stories over the complicated ones. The pictures they hold might be informed by our interactions with physical reality, or by fantasy. Humans can try to separate the two—reality here, irreality there, stored in separate files—and can do so successfully. But the separation itself is work. And it is work made ever more taxing in a media environment where the human-generated lies mingle with the AI-generated ones, and where even the fact-checked news comes at people in endless feeds and floods.

In the flurry, people can lose control of the pictures in their heads. They can lose control of themselves. “For it is clear enough,” Lippmann wrote, “that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.”

Public Opinion—written not long after a once-in-a-century pandemic, and after the urgencies and contingencies of war had changed the way that Americans thought about truth itself—also contains insights from Lippmann’s experience with public relations. He had worked in the field, on behalf of the United States and its allies, during World War I. He had seen firsthand how easily information could be spun and edited and, all too often, simply manufactured out of thin air.

Modern advertising works, generally speaking, by creating problems rather than solving them. It manufactures desires among the public; it also manufactures, in the process, discontent. Our politics are doing the same work as they sell our nation back to us. Trump is, too. He manufactures problems—the “rigged” elections, the invasion of “illegals,” the “woke mob,” the horrors of “American carnage”—to sell us the solution: Trump himself.

[Read: The 21st century’s greatest, ghastliest showman]

The word propaganda, in Lippmann’s era, had not adopted the negative connotations it carries today. It was a term of politics borrowed from Catholic practice: Propaganda shared a root with propagation and suggested the straightforward act of sharing and spreading the faith. In the 1920s, it meant something akin to what today we might call straightforward “publicity.” But Lippmann’s studies of psychology had chastened him. Our minds, for all their attunement to the nuances of the physical world—the subtle shifts in light, the micro-expressions that move on the faces of other people—are not terribly adept at perceiving those distinctions through the filters of airwaves and screens.

On the contrary, all the inputs people encounter, by choice or by circumstance—the news reports, the novels, the films, the celebrities, the radio shows, the billboards, the histories, the satires, the amusements, the truths, the lies—tend to end up in the same place. The inputs influence, then continually edit, the pictures in our heads. Those pictures might be accurate appraisals. They might be delusions. They are nearly impossible to categorize. They are also totalizing. “Whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat it as if it were the environment itself,” Lippmann observed. The insight might seem simple: Of course we believe what we see. But the opposite is true as well: We see what we believe.

For Lippmann, that meant that the information people rely on to form their mental images would be the lifeblood, or the death, of American democracy. Lippmann was a celebrated columnist, and he wrote Public Opinion as American newspapers were in the process of reforming. This was the era when objectivity, as a standard, was born. It was the age when reporters instituted standards of sourcing and validation. They were responding to the proliferation of information and misinformation, the advent of advertising, the establishment of public relations as a field and a career choice.

The papers were reacting to market pressures, essentially, by creating a new kind of commodity: information that had been collected, vetted, verified. This information would go out of its way to clarify what had been reported and what had been merely opined. The lines were not always entirely clear—but they were efforts to impose new modes of order.

Now, though, the lies are imposing the order. TV-news organizations, hosting candidate debates during the presidential election last year, deliberated over whether moderators should correct inaccuracies uttered on their air. Confusion on the matter led J. D. Vance, facing Tim Walz in a vice-presidential debate, to make his infamous complaint: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” (He was reacting to CBS moderators’ efforts to clarify that many of the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, whom Vance had previously referred to as “illegal,” indeed had legal status in the United States.)

[From the March 2023 issue: We’ve lost the plot]

Challenges to the rules have expanded far beyond the format of the televised debate. In early April, President Trump issued an executive order condemning Chris Krebs—who in Trump’s first term headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—on the grounds that Krebs had said that the 2020 presidential election was free and fair. The order is so blatant in its attempt to rewrite history that to call it Orwellian would be something of an insult to Big Brother. But it is Costanzan. It is authoritarian. What Donald Trump believes, the order suggests, becomes the truth. “When the president does it … that means that it is not illegal,” Richard Nixon claimed, a few years after his association with illegal activity ended his presidency. That tautology, in the age of Trump, is now a matter of judicial precedent. It is also the defining logic of Trump’s attempts to expand executive authority. “I’m a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,” Trump said recently in an interview with my colleagues Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Jeffrey Goldberg. He was responding to their questions about why Trump continues to insist, falsely, that he won the 2020 election. “I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart,” Trump said. “I believe it with fact.”

This is the Costanza principle at work. “Because I believe it” is neither a factual argument nor a legal one. But Trump is treating it as both. He is treating his preferred reality as the only one that can exist. He is behaving, in that respect, less like a president than like a king. He is acting as the kind of demagogue whom James Madison and other Founders feared when they warned about “the passions” and their corrosive effect on politics. Passions, for those men of the Enlightenment, fought against reason. They weakened people’s defenses against the seductions of emotional appeals. They could make people unable to tell the difference between the convenient story and the true one. “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” as the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro put it, is a good slogan, but it gets things wrong: The guiding principle of Trumpism is “Feelings don’t care about your facts.”

And once facts are discarded, anything can come in their place. Trump’s lack of accountability for his lies has expanded, in these early days of his second term, into a more comprehensive form of unchecked power. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive,” he told Parker and Scherer. “The second time, I run the country and the world.”

If Can he say that? was a broad theme of Trump’s first term, Can he do that? is the even graver theme of his second. The deportations. The tariffs. The dismantling of the civil service, of scientific research, of government records, of civil rights, of voting rights, of basic standards of due process: The president’s efforts to destabilize his own government from within—to defund agencies, to “purge” the civil service of people he views as insufficiently loyal—have not merely been escalations of the attempted power grabs he made in his first term. They have been direct assaults on the delicate balance of power: an executive laying siege to the legislative and judicial branches. Lippmann did not predict this turn of events, but he understood their consequences. Democracy, under the sway of lies, becomes a form of anarchy.

What Silicon Valley Knew About Tech-Bro Paternalism

2025-04-16T08:30:00-04:00

Last fall, the consumer-electronics company LG announced new branding for the artificial intelligence powering many of its home appliances. Out: the “smart home.” In: “Affectionate Intelligence.” This “empathetic and caring” AI, as LG describes it, is here to serve. It might switch off your appliances and dim your lights at bedtime. It might, like its sisters Alexa and Siri, select a soundtrack to soothe you to sleep. The technology awaits your summons and then, unquestioningly, answers. It will make subservience environmental. It will surround you with care—and ask for nothing in return.

Affectionate AI, trading the paternalism of typical techspeak for a softer—or, to put it bluntly, more feminine—framing, is pretty transparent as a branding play: It is an act of anxiety management. It aims to assure the consumer that “the coming Humanity-Plus-AI future,” as a recent report from Elon University called it, will be one not of threat but of promise. Yes, AI overall has the potential to become, as Elon Musk said in 2023, the “most disruptive force in history.” It could be, as he put it in 2014, “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” It is a force like “an immortal dictator from which we can never escape,” he suggested in 2018. And yet, AI is coming. It is inevitable. We have, as consumers with human-level intelligence, very little choice in the matter. The people building the future are not asking for our permission; they are expecting our gratitude.

It takes a very specific strain of paternalism to believe that you can create something that both eclipses humanity and serves it at the same time. The belief is ripe for satire. That might be why I’ve lately been thinking back to a comment posted last year to a Subreddit about HBO’s satire Silicon Valley: “It’s a shame this show didn’t last into the AI craze phase.” It really is! Silicon Valley premiered in 2014, a year before Musk, Sam Altman, and a group of fellow engineers founded OpenAI to ensure that, as their mission statement put it, “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” The show ended its run in 2019, before AI’s wide adoption. It would have had a field day with some of the events that have transpired since, among them Musk’s rebrand as a T-shirt-clad oligarch and Altman’s bot-based mimicry of the 2013 movie Her.

Silicon Valley reads, at times, more as parody than as satire: Sharp as it is in its specific observations about tech culture, the show sometimes seems like a series of jokes in search of a punch line. It shines, though, when it casts its gaze on the gendered dynamics of tech—when it considers the consequential absurdities of tech’s arrogance.

The show doesn’t spend much time directly tackling artificial intelligence as a moral problem—not until its final few episodes. But it still offers a shrewd parody of AI, as a consumer technology and as a future being foisted on us. That is because Silicon Valley is highly attuned to the way power is exchanged and distributed in the industry, and to tech bros’ hubristic inclination to cast the public in a stereotypically feminine role.

Corporations act; the rest of humanity reacts. They decide; we comply. They are the creators, driven by competition, conquest, and a conviction that the future is theirs to shape. We are the ones who will live with their decisions. Silicon Valley does not explicitly predict a world of AI made “affectionate.” In a certain way, though, it does. It studies the men who make AI. It parodies their paternalism. The feminist philosopher Kate Manne argues that masculinity, at its extreme, is a self-ratifying form of entitlement. Silicon Valley knows that there’s no greater claim to entitlement than an attempt to build the future.

[Read: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]

The series focuses on the evolving fortunes of the fictional start-up Pied Piper, a company with an aggressively boring product—a data-compression algorithm—and an aggressively ambitious mission. The algorithm could lead, eventually, to the realization of a long-standing dream: a decentralized internet, its data stored not on corporately owned servers but on the individual devices of the network. Richard Hendricks, Pied Piper’s founder and the primary author of that algorithm, is a coder by profession but an idealist by nature. Over the seasons, he battles with billionaires who are driven by ego, pettiness, and greed. But he is not Manichean; he does not hew to Manne’s sense of masculine entitlement. He merely wants to build his tech.

He is surrounded, however, by characters who do fit Manne’s definition, to different degrees. There’s Erlich Bachman, the funder who sold an app he built for a modest profit and who regularly confuses luck with merit; Bertram Gilfoyle, the coder who has turned irony poisoning into a personality; Dinesh Chugtai, the coder who craves women’s company as much as he fears it; Jared Dunn, the business manager whose competence is belied by his meekness. Even as the show pokes fun at the guys’ personal failings, it elevates their efforts. Silicon Valley, throughout, is a David and Goliath story. Pied Piper is a tiny company trying to hold its own against the Googles of the world.

The show, co-created by Mike Judge, can be giddily adolescent about its own bro-ness (many of its jokes refer to penises). But it is also, often, insightful about the absurdities that can arise when men are treated like gods. The show mocks the tech executive who brandishes his Buddhist prayer beads and engages in animal cruelty. It skewers Valley denizens’ conspicuous consumption. (Several B plots revolve around the introduction of the early Tesla roadsters.) Most of all, the show pokes fun at the myopia displayed by men who are, in the Valley and beyond, revered as “visionaries.” All they can see and care about are their own interests. In that sense, the titans of tech are unabashedly masculine. They are callous. They are impetuous. They are reckless.

[Read: Elon Musk can’t stop talking about penises]

Their failings cause chaos, and Silicon Valley spends its seasons writing whiplash into its story line. The show swings, with melodramatic ease, between success and failure. Richard and his growing team—fellow engineers, investors, business managers—seem to move forward, getting a big new round of funding or good publicity. Then, as if on cue, they are brought low again: Defeats are snatched from the jaws of victory. The whiplash can make the show hard to watch. You get invested in the fate of this scrappy start-up. You hope. You feel a bit of preemptive catharsis until the next disappointment comes.

That, in itself, is resonant. AI can hurtle its users along similar swings. It is a product to be marketed and a future to be accepted. It is something to be controlled (OpenAI’s Altman appeared before Congress in 2023 asking for government regulation) and something that must not be contained (OpenAI this year, along with other tech giants, asked the federal government to prevent state-level regulation). Altman’s public comments paint a picture of AI that evokes both Skynet (“I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,” he said at the 2023 congressional hearing) and—as he said in a 2023 interview—a “magic intelligence in the sky.”

[Read: OpenAI goes MAGA]

The dissonance is part of the broader experience of tech—a field that, for the consumer, can feel less affectionate than addling. People adapted to Twitter, coming to rely on it for news and conversation; then Musk bought it, turned it into X, tweaked the algorithms, and, in the process, ruined the platform. People who have made investments in TikTok operate under the assumption that, as has happened before, it could go dark with the push of a button. To depend on technology, to trust it at all, in many instances means to be betrayed by it. And AI makes that vulnerability ever more consequential. Humans are at risk, always, of the machines’ swaggering entitlements. Siri and Alexa and their fellow feminized bots are flourishes of marketing. They perform meekness and cheer—and they are roughly as capable of becoming an “immortal dictator” as their male-coded counterparts.

By the end of Silicon Valley’s run, Pied Piper seems poised for an epic victory. The company has a deal with AT&T to run its algorithm over the larger company’s massive network. It is about to launch on millions of people’s phones. It is about to become a household name. And then: the twist. Pied Piper’s algorithm uses AI to maximize its own efficiency; through a fluke, Richard realizes that the algorithm works too well. It will keep maximizing. It will make its own definitions of efficiency. Pied Piper has created a decentralized network in the name of “freedom”; it has created a machine, you might say, meant to benefit all of humanity. Now that network might mean humanity’s destruction. It could come for the power grid. It could come for the apps installed in self-driving cars. It could come for bank accounts and refrigerators and satellites. It could come for the nuclear codes.

Suddenly, we’re watching not just comedy but also an action-adventure drama. The guys will have to make hard choices on behalf of everyone else. This is an accidental kind of paternalism, a power they neither asked for nor, really, deserve. And the show asks whether they will be wise enough to abandon their ambitions—to sacrifice the trappings of tech-bro success—in favor of more stereotypically feminine goals: protection, self-sacrifice, compassion, care.

I won’t spoil things by saying how the show answers the question. I’ll simply say that, if you haven’t seen the finale, in which all of this plays out, it’s worth watching. Silicon Valley presents a version of the conundrum that real-world coders are navigating as they build machines that have the potential to double as monsters. The stakes are melodramatic. That is the point. Concerns about humanity—even the word humanity—have become so common in discussions of AI that they risk becoming clichés. But humanity is at stake, the show suggests, when human intelligence becomes an option rather than a given. At some point, the twists will have to end. In “the coming Humanity-Plus-AI future,” we will have to find new ways of considering what it means to be human—and what we want to preserve and defend. Coders will have to come to grips with what they’ve created. Is AI a tool or a weapon? Is it a choice, or is it inevitable? Do we want our machines to be affectionate? Or can we settle for ones that leave the work of trying to be good humans to the humans?

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SNL Has Entered the Chat

2025-03-30T11:54:00-04:00

In last night’s Saturday Night Live cold open, three teenage girls chatted over Signal. They gossiped (“Did you guys see what Jessica wore at school today? Oh my God, she is such a pick-me girl”). They teased one another (“Hey, it takes one to know one, Bannessa!”). They did what teenage girls do. And then:

“FYI: Green light on Yemen raid.”

Yep, SNL entered the Signalgate chat. In SNL’s version of events, it wasn’t (just) Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief—played by Mikey Day—who was added to the now-infamous text chain known as the “Houthi PC small group.” This time it was also three teenage girls, played by Ego Nwodim, Sarah Sherman, and the episode’s host, the recent Oscar winner Mikey Madison.

[Read: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]

In this scenario, Pete Hegseth, played by Andrew Dismukes, was the wayward texter. “Tomahawks airborne 15 minutes ago,” he announced. “Who’s ready to glass some Houthi rebels? Flag emoji, flag emoji, flag emoji, fire emoji, eggplant.” Soon, more members of the Trump administration joined the chain. Marco Rubio (played by Marcello Hernández) chimed in from a bedroom. A parka-clad J. D. Vance (Bowen Yang) popped in from the tundra in Greenland. The men congratulated themselves. They sent many, many emoji. They discussed sensitive military information in roughly the same way that Bannessa talked about her classmate’s sartorial choices.

Throughout the chat, the girls repeatedly told the men that they’d made a mistake. “Um, do we know you, bro?” Madison’s character said as Hegseth kept typing away (“God bless the troops … eggplant”). “This is Jennabelle.”

“Oh, nice!” Hegseth replied. “Jennabelle from Defense, right?”

Nwodim’s character tried a more direct tack: “Hey, I think you have the wrong group chat.”

“Lololol!” Hegseth replied. “Could you imagine if that actually happened? Homer disappear into bush GIF. Hey, while I got everyone, sending a PDF with updated locations of all our nuclear submarines.”

In 2017, in an SNL parody that has become a classic, Melissa McCarthy made a surprise appearance as Sean Spicer, Donald Trump’s first press secretary. McCarthy turned Spicer’s anti-press antics against him, pounding her fists, flaring her nostrils, and twisting belligerence into a full-body schtick. The performance allegedly angered Trump—not only because of the mockery but more specifically because the mockery had involved a gender swap. “Trump,” a presidential donor told Politico at the time, “doesn’t like his people to look weak.”

But last night’s cold open brought a new dimension to the satire. The gender-swapping was also a matter of age-swapping—adults became teenagers and men became girls. The comparison wasn’t direct, as it had been with Spicer. But it still played as a rebuke: The teen girls were the ones who read, throughout the sketch, as the adults in the room.

[Read: Here are the attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared on Signal]

In SNL’s portrayal, the men seemed to fancy themselves stars in a classic war epic: swaggering, serious, men being men. But the sketch genre-swapped too: The behavior of the men in charge, the show suggested, found them acting like extras in Mean Girls. Hegseth and his fellow officials, as they congratulated themselves with their GIFs and fire emoji, went on to share the specific location of a nuclear submarine (“right outside Shanghai”), a PDF of “all deep-cover CIA agents,” and “the real JFK files—not those fake ones we released.”

Even after Nwodim piped up (“We’ve been trying to tell you—we’re in high school”) the officials, ignoring the girls’ warnings, proceeded with adolescent recklessness. Their behavior was rash. It was emotional. It was self-conscious. The men, discussing war, preened for one another.

At the outset of the sketch, one of the girls praised a joke that Jennabelle had made. “This is exactly why you’re the Queen Bee,” Sherman’s character said, “and I totally defer to you.” The line didn’t land too well as a joke. But it did establish the stakes of the satire. It was likely a reference to the book that Mean Girls was famously based on, Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence—and a nod to the willingness that grown men have shown to serve the queen bee in the White House.

Before long, Vance was signing in to the chat from his “diplomatic” visit to Greenland. “Nobody knows why I’m here, especially me,” he said. “But praise Trump—our work here is mysterious and important.” The joke suggested that it was Vance’s boss, rather than SNL, that had brought the logic of the gender swap to the workings of the U.S. government. For all their eggplant emoji and their high-fived acts of war, the show suggested, the chatters of Signalgate were mean girls in disguise—government officials remade as pick-me men.

Reality TV Just Leveled Up

2025-03-13T15:54:00-04:00

Some TV shows catch on because they are great art. Others catch on because they offer soothing distractions from a hectic world. And some catch on because they cause people to text their friends, in a frenzy, “Please watch this immediately because I NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT WITH YOU!!!”

When I get texts like that, I almost always oblige: I will take any opportunity to be a good friend by watching bad TV. That is how I came to The Traitors, the hugely popular reality show that has just streamed its third season on Peacock. It is also why I have begun sending my own “Please watch this!” texts to friends. When they ask for more detail, though, I find myself stumbling: How can I explain why they should watch the show when I’m not entirely sure what it is? It’s a reality competition, I might begin, that brings together a group of reality stars. (In a castle! In Scotland!) And they play a version of the party game Mafia, so everyone is sort of scheming against one another. Some people are “killers”—those are the “Traitors”—and they try to “murder” the “Faithfuls,” and anyone might be “banished” …

At this point, sensing that I am confusing my audience rather than convincing them, I might switch gears: So the show’s host is Alan Cumming, the actor and international treasure. He wears glorious outfits that are basically characters themselves. And he’ll casually quote Shakespeare and Tennyson? And he pronounces murder like “muuuuurder.” And the whole thing is definitely camp. But it’s satire too?

The Traitors plays like a live-action Mad Lib. And it is not one show, in the end, but many. It was adapted from a BBC version that was itself adapted from a Dutch series. It collects its cast from the far reaches of the reality-TV cinematic universe: Think The Avengers, with the heroes in question joining forces not to save the world but to win a cash prize of “up to $250,000.” Contestants live together (as on Big Brother) and are divided into tribes (Survivor). They participate in physical “missions” and vote one another off the show via weekly councils (Survivor again).

The Traitors, in that way, might seem to be peak reality TV: all of these people who are famous for being famous making content for the sake of content. But the show has been an ongoing subject of passionate discussion because it is much smarter than that—it’s derivative in a winking way. It doesn’t merely borrow from its fellow reality shows; it adapts them into something that both celebrates reality TV and offers a sly, kaleidoscopic satire of the genre. It is a messy show that lives for drama. It brings a postmodern twist to an ever-more-influential form of entertainment. It’s not just reality TV—it’s hyperreality TV.

Earlier iterations of the show were slightly more traditional than the current one: They featured noncelebrity contestants. The most recent, though, benefited from the second season’s genius pivot: It took an upcycle approach to its casting. And so it unites the infamous (Tom Sandoval of Vanderpump Rules; Boston Rob of Survivor), the semi-famous (several Real Housewives), and those who are tangentially connected to fame (a Britney Spears ex-husband; Prince Harry’s distant relative; an influencer known first for his abs and second for being Zac Efron’s brother). Some are gamers—players who, having come from competition-based shows, are well schooled in the art of televised manipulation—and others are personalities. Some come to the show having met already, bringing old rivalries into a new context: Danielle and Britney from Big Brother, Sandoval and Chrishell Stause (the Vanderpump and Selling Sunset stars have long-standing crossover beef). For the most part, though, the contestants are 23 strangers, picked to live in a castle and have their lives taped.

[Read: The cruel social experiment of reality TV]

Three of those players, initially, serve as the show’s Traitors: the conspirators who bring murder and mayhem, and who manipulate much of the action. The first three Traitors are determined by Cumming, who serves as master of ceremonies and chief agent of chaos. Cumming is, like the contestants, playing both himself and a character: a Scottish laird with a sadistic streak, part Cheshire cat and part jungle predator, prone to purring lines rather than simply delivering them. When he selects his Traitors—the game’s most consequential decision—his rationale is as opaque to viewers as it is to the players.

In short order, though, the contestants are treating their game as a morality play. Those who seem “good” as people are assumed to be Faithfuls. Those who do not (Sandoval, Boston Rob) are assumed to be Traitors. Factions form. Mistakes are made. Faithfuls are banished; Traitors perform innocence so well that they earn other people’s trust. People who have played themselves on TV are now playing other people who have played themselves on TV. “I swear to God—to God!” one competitor says, as he assures his fellow contestants that he is not a Traitor. (He is a Traitor.) Another serves up an Oscar-worthy breakdown after a Traitor’s identity is revealed. (The “shocked” contestant is, yes, a fellow Traitor.) Loyalties, betrayals, manipulations: These are the terms of Mafia as a parlor game. These are also, The Traitors knows, the terms of reality TV.

I should note that all of this melodrama is taking place against an aesthetic of “Castle” and a series of references to … Guy Fawkes? (I think?) The show features literal cloaks and daggers; Cumming repeatedly wears the capotain hat associated with the 16th-century British rebel; Fergus, the castle’s silent assistant, at one point carries a barrel labeled GUNPOWDER. This is another feature of the show: It blurs the line between reference and allusion. It explodes Poe’s Law as effectively as Fawkes tried to explode the high house of the British Parliament. What, actually, is the show getting at with these Fawkesian hints? Is the connection simply that Fawkes was executed as, yes, a traitor? Is the show making a broader point? Is it making any point?

The Traitors raises many such questions. Why, for example, does it do so much to establish its torch-lit, wrought-ironed aesthetic only to adorn its flame-flickered dungeon with sleek camping lanterns that could have come from Bass Pro Shops? Why does one episode feature Epcot-esque re-creations of the moai heads from Easter Island? Why does another feature a wedding? Why does another involve coffins? Why do some of the show’s most climactic scenes—the revelations about who has been muuuuurdered—take place over brunch?

Reality TV has, at this point, schools: the romantic realism of The Bachelor, the impressionism of the Housewives, the Dada of Love Island, the pop art of The Masked Singer. The Traitors references all of them—their structures, their tropes, their tones—but also the world at large. It teases and provokes without offering further explanation. It merges truth and simulation, until the two are indistinguishable. That is how the show turns reality into hyperreality—and “reality” into art.

Reality TV enjoys some of the same affordances that art does. If The Traitors wants to include cloaks that evoke Eyes Wide Shut and clowns that evoke Stephen King and incredible tartan numbers that may or may not reference the suit that Cher Horowitz wore in the 1995 movie Clueless—if it wants to send new players to the castle in wrought-iron cages, or set a physical challenge within a Viking boat carved to resemble a dragon—the show does not need to justify its decisions. The alchemy that turns “reality” into entertainment ultimately makes reason itself somewhat beside the point.

But then: Where is the line between catching a reference and inventing one? The Traitors is not using only reality-TV shows as its source material. It is also using literature. A physical challenge involves a game of human chess (Through the Looking-Glass). Cumming describes revenge as “red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson). He teases upcoming muuuuurders by announcing, “Something wicked this way comes” (Macbeth). He punctuates the revelation of the latest muuuuurder by way of Hamlet: “Good night, sweet prince.”

But the obvious references—obvious in the sense that they can be Googled and otherwise sourced—blend with the references that merely insinuate. One of the show’s physical challenges involves bugs. (A reference, maybe, to Survivor? Or Jackass?) Another requires players to dangle from an airborne helicopter (The Apprentice?) and sway on a single tether as they attempt to drop things into a space that has been designated the “Ring of Fire” (Johnny Cash? Circuses? Plate tectonics?). The Survivor-like councils that determine which contestants will be banished take place around a piece of furniture dubbed the Round Table (Camelot? Pizza?). Cumming introduces an early meeting by saying, “It is time to sentence one of you to a fate worse than death: democracy” (ummm?).

[Read: Reality TV’s absurd new extreme]

Contestants, too, can carry those ambiguities. Ivar Mountbatten, a real-life lord, is the only contestant who hasn’t come from the world of entertainment. You could read his presence as an embedded joke about the British monarchy, that ancient version of reality TV. You could wonder whether he is somehow connected with the Scotland and the Guy Fawkes of it all, since both have sought, in their own ways, to challenge the power of the Crown. Or his presence could be a matter of expedience—whether commercial (Netflix’s historical drama The Crown and its documentary series Harry & Meghan have given the name Mountbatten new recognizability, and he recently became a tabloid name in his own right) or logistical (perhaps his agent knows The Traitors’ producers?).

The hall of mirrors, once entered, is difficult to navigate. And soon enough, the questions can compound. Where do the references end? easily gives way to: Where does the appropriation begin? Although scholars can only speculate about what the moai heads of Easter Island meant to the people who created them, we can pretty safely assume that they were more than mere jokes. Here they are, however, re-created in a vaguely plasticine form, as tools in a challenge that might help lower-firmament reality stars get closer to their full $250,000.

In another context, this might look like an insult. On The Traitors, though, it becomes a question—about the permissions and limits of reproduction. Cumming, at one point, wears a shimmering pale-green suit, accessorized with a spiked tiara. It gives “Statue of Liberty” but also “Catholic saint.” The tiara-meets-halo might connect to Fawkes, whose Catholicism drove him to fight the Protestant power structure. Or it might connect to debates about iconoclasm, with their questions about religious iconography. Or maybe it’s simply a great accessory? Maybe those “connections” are not connections at all?

Camp is its own reference without a source—a term, and a sensibility, claimed and reclaimed so steadily that it has entered the realm of “you know it when you see it.” But one of camp’s features, in most definitions, is performance as a form of resistance: expression and idiosyncrasy serving as a rejection of a stifling status quo. It is queerness, refusing to be constrained. It is authenticity, refusing to apologize. It is absurdity. It is joy.

This is The Traitors too. Yet the series performs freedom not just by rejecting the past but also by embracing it—and, possibly, reclaiming some of it. For the aforementioned wedding challenge, Cumming wears a white suit studded with red flowers. The outfit reads like a declaration about the sanctions of marriage and the rites that shape modern society. An outfit he wears in another challenge—a sequined suit in a military style, with neckwear that suggests a Medal of Freedom—does a similar thing. Most reality shows offer escapism: the relief of alternate and insular worlds. But The Traitors is all too aware of the world it is streaming into—one where hard-won rights are threatened, where expression is being curtailed, where a new bit of progress is being banished every day.

That awareness serves the show’s satirical edge. It also expands the permissions of camp to The Traitors’ audience. People on Reddit threads puzzle out the references, trying to discern what the allusions might mean—or whether they are allusions at all. They analyze. They debate. Every reality show has a version of that digital second life; The Traitors, though, inspires conversations that stretch far beyond the show’s limits. They bring Hamlet and Tennyson and Alice in Wonderland’s human-chess game to new audiences, in new forms.

Along the way, they offer embedded reminders that art is itself a wink to be enjoyed and a mystery to be solved. It is always evolving, reclaimed, and reinterpreted. The works that are venerated today as “high culture”—the stuff of capital-L literature, of exclusivity, of snobbery—began, very often, as works of pop culture. They offered respite, community, wonder. “To be or not to be,” Hamlet said, his angst both performed and very real. He would come to capture, for many, something true and essential about modernity. Before that, though, Hamlet was just a guy on a stage, being messy and dramatic, living out his era’s version of a reality show.

Trump Is Breaking the Fourth Wall

2025-03-06T13:29:00-05:00

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Few White House events have earned the kind of instant infamy that greeted Friday’s disastrous meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And few lines have been as revealing as the one Trump uttered as a benediction, of sorts, to the spectacle: “This is going to be great television.”

The boast was, as the line goes, shocking but not surprising. Trump’s deference to television and the celebrity he has gained from it are core elements of his brand, his biography, his mythology; his connection to the medium is so widely recognized that commentators were calling him the “First True Reality TV President” before his first term had begun. And he earned the epithet. Trump “cast” key roles in his administration based on candidates’ ability to “look the part.” He announced his choices to fill Supreme Court vacancies as if he were the Bachelor, offering a lifetime appointment as his final rose. He churned out ever more dramatic episodes of The Real White House of Donald Trump, and each was a ratings bonanza: Few things make for appointment viewing like a show whose arcs bend the lives of its audience.

“The reality-TV presidency,” in that way, was accurate. But the characterization was also woefully premature. Reality TV, at its core, is a genre of total immunity. Its many contradictions (it is at once fact and fiction, anthropology and escapism, “unscripted” and highly produced) free it from the standards that might constrain other shows. Is it real? is a foolish thing to ask about a genre premised on a shrug—and in which the foolishness is part of the appeal. Reality shows wink. They tease. They make everything delightfully suspect. Plausible deniability, in the hands of skilled producers, can be spun into TV gold.

But the ambiguities that make reality so engrossing as a mode of entertainment make it hazardous as a mode of politics. Trump, in his meeting with Zelensky, was not merely performing “reality” as a show. He was wielding it as a weapon, planting a new flag as he burned another.

The spectacle that resulted was a striking exception (to history, to world stability, to decency). Trump was abandoning an ally and bullying him in the process; he was rejecting frameworks that distinguished America’s friends from its enemies. The meeting declared the president’s—and thus everyone else’s—new reality: Trump’s earlier show was mere prologue. This is Trump’s reality-TV presidency. The new season will be darker, grimmer, and filled with ever more dizzying plot twists. It demands to be watched not as entertainment but as an omen.

Trump’s 2016 campaign, the rumor went, was a bid to control the news by becoming the news: He had hoped to convert his growing political following into an audience for a cable-TV empire. When he won the election, he adjusted course. Like an insult comic who had wandered onto the wrong set, the new president ad-libbed his way through the political drama. The improv explains, in part, why Trump focused so much on appearances while “casting” his Cabinet, and why he bragged about the “ratings” his COVID-related press conferences earned him: TV was the language he knew. Even The Apprentice, the series that had bolstered his image by claiming to show him as he was, had helped him hone his skills as a performer: The Donald Trump of the show was a character acted out by Donald Trump.

He treated the presidency, similarly, as a part to be played. And he prepared for the role with the help of TV—in particular, the channel that had served him so well. The “reality-TV presidency” was also, by conventional wisdom and in practice, the Fox News presidency. The Fox star Sean Hannity effectively operated as Trump’s “shadow press secretary” in his first term; Tucker Carlson, texts would later reveal, functioned as Trump’s mouthpiece. Many days, the president spent hours watching TV news, his staffers said, and Fox in particular. He was so influenced by the viewing that many claims he made in the afternoons could be traced directly—and verbatim—to claims the network had made in the mornings.

Through all of that, though, a fundamental distinction remained: The president was here; Fox was there. Yes, a revolving door spun between Fox’s green room and Trump’s White House. But revolving doors are necessary only when walls stand between the inner space and the outside world. Those walls, in Trump’s first term, remained largely intact. Trump watched the news and tried to influence it; he did not try to stage-manage and wholly subsume it.

Performance itself, in retrospect, served as one more democratic guardrail: Trump winged some lines and ignored many others, but he operated mostly according to an old set of scripts that worked as a check on executive power. He demeaned the role, yes—he twisted and tested it—but he performed the presidency and, in that most basic of ways, preserved it. He paid the role the smallest bit of courtesy by acknowledging it as a role in the first place, scripted and edited and honed over time—a single part meant to be interpreted by many actors.

[Read: The scare quote was 2016 in a punctuation mark]

Trump proved his acceptance of the performance, in fact, by chafing against its scripts. The lawyers who constrained him, the generals who restrained him, the reporters who questioned him, the understudy who threatened him—the assorted producers and directors and designers and actors who had their own roles to play in the show—each, Trump fumed, dimmed his limelight. That first term, as a consequence, found him working as both the government’s headliner and its fiercest critic. He panned the whole thing for its complicated plots and its sprawling cast and, most of all, its failure to be a one-man show.

This was another reason Trump’s first season got the ratings it did. Each of his outbursts was also a cliffhanger, with democracy in the balance. But each, too, was a reminder that the imperiled government, for all its backsliding, had not yet succumbed to the abyss. Even as Trump railed against his castmates, he grudgingly accepted their right to share the stage. Even when he went off-book—even when he missed his marks and ignored his cues—he acknowledged that he was part of a broader production.

Only at the end of his first term did Trump try to torch the stage and shred the scripts. And only at the start of his second has he embraced the full license that comes when “reality” collides with democracy.

As Trump berated Zelensky under the guise of good TV, he also embraced the political force of reality TV. He was converting the genre’s core features—the refusal to distinguish between truth and lies, the ambiguities that verge into nihilism—into an exercise of unchecked power. Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance used the occasion to repeat misinformation so egregiously wrong that it mocked the very notion of “information.” Vance accused Zelensky of being “disrespectful,” of coming into the Oval Office and trying “to litigate this in front of the American media.” (It was the White House, of course, that had turned a meeting that would typically be conducted in a closed-door session into a media event.)

Reality affords total immunity in part because it creates environments that cannot be penetrated by the standards of the outer world. The Apprentice—a spin on Survivor, essentially, set in the kill-or-be-killed world of the corporate jungle—made no sense in practical terms; it reflected the executive-hiring process about as well as Survivor reflected bushcraft. But Does it make sense? is roughly as relevant to a reality show as Is it real? In the worlds established by reality TV, nothing makes sense, and everything does. Reality shows establish, and then are beholden to, their own rules. They are stridently insular. They are thoroughly self-rationalizing. That is the fun—and the danger. They will do whatever they want, because they can.

Trump brought that logic to his meeting with Zelensky—and the permissions of The Apprentice to the White House. Here was the Oval Office, remade as his “boardroom”; here were the confrontations that brought climactic closure to each episode, reconfigured as diplomacy. Here was Trump, the all-powerful executive, bringing his signature glare to the world stage and his signature phrase to a nation: You’re fired, he basically told Ukraine, as he posed and vamped.

The global viewership assured by the cameras in the room was complemented by a studio audience: members of the media who had been selected to join the show. Their presence was the fruit of a claim Trump had made earlier in the week, when his White House announced that it would be determining the makeup of the press pool that covers the president. The announcement, one of many recent White House attacks on press freedom, wrested power from the independent organization of journalists that had overseen presidential reporting for more than a century. In the process, it destroyed a standard meant to ensure that the White House receives independent press coverage—and, with it, one more democratic guardrail. (“We’re going to be now calling the shots,” Trump said of the move.)

The change also helped explain why, after witnessing a meeting that truly deserved to be called “historic”—one that concerned the future of Ukraine, the future of NATO, the ambitions of Russia, and the possibility of World War III—one member of the press gaggle chose to meet the moment by asking about Zelensky’s outfit.

[Read: Intimidating Americans will not work]

In a coup, you first go for the media: You take over the radio stations, the TV channels, the papers. From there, you can do nearly everything else. You can steadily replace the journalists who would question you with ones who will do your will. You can replace the officials who might challenge you with ones who will serve you. You can create a world in which the president of Ukraine is to be blamed for the invasion of his own country; in which Zelensky, not Vladimir Putin, is the dictator; in which Ukraine, not Russia, is the villain; in which you are a president who operates like a king. You can air the new “realities” so relentlessly that, before long, they can seem like the only reality there is.

Power grabs, when made by those who already have power, can be difficult to detect. They can occur gradually, bureaucratically, cut by cut and claim by claim—and they can look, from the outside, innocent, ordinary, and unscripted. The meager distance that once remained between Fox News and the White House has been, in Trump’s second term, obviated; the president has now brought the full weight of “reality” to bear on his relationship with the network. Why watch Fox as a viewer, painstakingly translating the televised content to reality, when you can cut out the middleman and simply integrate TV into the daily operations of your administration? Why allow a division between the Fourth Estate and the First when you can simply incorporate the one into the other?

By one recent count, Trump has appointed 21 Fox News personalities to his staff—many, like Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, at the highest levels of his administration. The president announced the latest addition to his cast last week (around the time he announced that “White House correspondent” would effectively mean, for his presidency, “White House loyalist”): He appointed Dan Bongino—Fox contributor, radio host, purveyor of conspiracy theories, partisan in good standing—to serve not in a media role in the White House but as the deputy director of the FBI.

Bongino, like many of his fellow appointees, is qualified for his new role mostly to the extent that “personality” is a job description. But in a politics governed by “reality,” qualification will be whatever the producers claim it to be. Loyalty can be its own line in the résumé. And Bongino quickly proved his worthiness within the standards of the show: On the same day that Zelensky visited the Oval Office, the White House announced that the FBI, with Bongino installed in its top ranks, was in the process of returning a cache of documents that the Justice Department had previously held as evidence while it investigated Trump’s potential mishandling of classified information.

This was “justice,” in the insular world of Trump’s show. It corrected a “hoax,” as Trump’s lawyer called the investigation, that had put the president in legal jeopardy. In the reality that has no scare quotes, though, the reclamation of evidence might also look like impunity. It might look like the power afforded to Trump when the Supreme Court—three of the nine justices owing their spots on the bench to one Bachelor and his rose—made his broad immunity a matter of law and judicial precedent. In the context of history, this is an emergency. In the context of the show, however, it is simply one more twist in the story. Government by “reality,” like the TV genre, has no obligation to be factual. It has no obligation to be moral. It has no obligation to be anything at all. Wisdom, cruelty, accountability, democracy—in the bleak politics of “reality,” these things no longer exist. They can’t exist. Only one thing matters, as the show goes on: Is it great television?

Control. Alt. Delete.

2025-02-27T07:00:00-05:00

The totalitarian regime of 1984 brings innovation to the erasure of history. While other dystopias have their bonfires—cinematic conflagrations that turn censorship into spectacle—the Party, in George Orwell’s vision, relies on memory holes. The devices are incinerators, in the end; they burn books (and news and letters and art and all other evidence of the non-Party past) as effectively as bonfires do. But their flames are neatly hidden from view. Memory holes look and operate roughly like trash chutes: All it takes, to consign the past to the furnace, is a flick of the wrist.

Memory holes, in that sense, are propaganda by other means. They may destroy words rather than churning out new ones, but they are extensions of the Party’s insistence that “WAR IS PEACE” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” They do the same work as the creation of lies—they unsteady the world—by turning absence itself into a claim of power. The devices are tools of mass forgetfulness. They rob people of their past, of the stories that once bound them to one another, and thereby of their future. But they turn the destruction into a matter of infrastructure. They make the burning effortless. They make it boring. That is their menace—and their genius.

[Read: What Orwell didn’t anticipate]

The bleakness of 1984 has been tempered, in the years since the novel’s publication, with one small bit of relief: The whole thing could be filed away as fiction. But Orwell’s insights are never as distant as we might want to believe, and recent days have provided more proof: The new Trump administration has spent its first weeks in office making memory holes relevant again. Words, websites, policies, programs, funding, research, institutional memory, the livelihoods of roughly 30,000 federal workers—they have all been, in some form, consigned to the chute. Purge, once a term of emergency, has become a straightforward description of policy. It is also becoming a banality.

Memory holes, those analog fictions, translate all too easily to the politics of the digital world. Americans are learning what happens when a president, armed with nearly unchecked power, finds his way to the “Delete” key.

The Trump administration’s purges are, in one way, fulfillments of long-standing political projects: the old aims of small-government conservatism, updated for the age of slash-and-burn partisanship. Trump has long made clear that his approach to leading the government would entail some dismantling of it. The jobs his administration has cut, the agencies crippled and gutted, have been realizations of that plan. The purges are also in line with the president’s own propaganda campaign—his styling of the federal government as a shadowy “deep state” and Washington as a “swamp” in dire need of draining.

The regime of 1984 erases the old truths in order to fill the void with new ones. Many of the Trump administration’s erasures, similarly, have been tactics of “Search-and-Replace.” Last week, Trump abruptly fired several high-ranking Pentagon officials, including Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president chose as Brown’s successor a retired three-star Air Force general. The White House, announcing the firings, offered little explanation. It didn’t need to. Trump, limited in his first term by officials who checked him, has learned his lesson. As he declared last week, in a tense exchange with Maine’s governor about the breadth of executive legal power: “We are the federal law.”

Had the president posted his claim to social media rather than offering it as a retort to an adversary, he might have written it, as is his wont, with all-caps insistence. “We are the federal law” is roughly akin to “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” in the depth of its incoherence. At best, it is a gaffe, uttered in anger. At worst, it hints at a twisted conception of U.S. government—a government so ruthlessly pruned that only one branch remains.

Early this month, The New York Times attempted to quantify the number of government webpages that had been taken offline in the days since Trump’s inauguration. It counted more than 8,000 across “more than a dozen” sites, including those of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Head Start, the Food and Drug Administration, the Census Bureau, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. “The purges,” the reporter Ethan Singer wrote, “have removed information about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research, among many other topics. Doctors, researchers and other professionals often rely on such government data and advisories.”

The information had been removed from public access—memory-holed—in response to an executive order Trump signed on one of his first days back in office: a document banning DEI, and the overall encouragement of diversity, equity, and inclusion, from the federal government. The order reads, and functions, as a legal and political document. It crushes DEI through the force of law and the threat of culture-war weaponry. DEI (sometimes also called “DEIA,” to include accessibility under its umbrella) is not one practice but many, a wide range of initiatives meant to bring fairness to environments where it has previously been absent. DEI has led to “disastrous consequences,” the White House order claims, without citing evidence; it is therefore “illegal,” the order stipulates, even as it neglects to provide a precise definition of what “DEI” entails.

[Read: The great resegregation]

Executive orders, given their stakes, typically bring extreme precision to their wording: Language that is actionable should also be, at the very least, legible. This order, though, exerted itself not only through its declarations—DEI as “corrosive,” “pernicious”—but also through all it left unsaid. DEI, under the order’s auspices, might refer to complicated hiring policies. It might refer to the word woman. It might refer to anything that whiffs of “wokeness.” It means, basically, whatever the White House claims it to mean—another example of the way absence can do the work of propaganda.

It is also how an executive order—its mandate limited, in theory, to the workings of the federal government—can extend to, and bear down on, the country at large. In response to DEI’s overnight illegality, universities across the country removed forums from their calendars and pages from their websites—cuts made in recognition, or fear, that research grants and other forms of federal funding, whatever their size or use, might implicate them in the ban. Corporations (among them Amazon, McDonald’s, Target, Google, Meta, and Walmart) scaled back and in some cases ended programs meant to ensure workforce diversity. Some had done so preemptively, in mere anticipation of the new Trump presidency. Some did so assuming that the federal elimination of DEI would expand, eventually, to the private sector.

The memory holes of 1984, dull as they are, are also warnings. They are always there, always available, always ready to consume new bits of history’s paper trail. The White House transmits its warnings, though, through the fog of endless ambiguity. Its DEI order, as a practical matter, is a mandate with few clear rules. Had Black History Month, for example, just been made illegal? How could one tell? What was to be made of the fact that executive agencies banned it from their calendars while the executive himself hosted a BHM event? The questions lingered, in essence unanswered. The order used imperative language but implied the conditional tense, casting readers—the country at large—to live in the blank space of the could.

When the Party of 1984 announces that “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” it is not trying to persuade. It is reminding people that it no longer needs to. A White House mandate that brings confusion to its demands for compliance—that leaves so much open to interpretation and imagination—makes a similar kind of claim. Words can addle, the propagandist knows, even in their absence. What does DEI mean, really? Who might be accused of using it, in violation of the law? Who will decide the terms?

In this regard, the answer is clear: the White House and its party of one.

The DEI order, despite and because of its ambiguities, imposed itself with remarkable speed and digital-age scale—“flood the zone” tactics, applied to the work of mass erasure. So efficient were the DEI-driven deletions that they were commonly discussed in self-ratifying terms: absences that have been enforced; purges that have been executed. This, too, was memory-hole politics at work. The devices of 1984 serve the Party not only by bringing tidiness to history’s destruction but also by turning the destruction into a passive-voice proposition. Memory holes are so user-friendly—so thoroughly intuitive—that using them quickly becomes a matter of muscle memory. “It was,” Orwell writes, “an automatic action” for people to open the hole’s little flap and consign the past to the fire.

Orwell, with that, breaks his own rule of writing—avoid the passive voice—to suggest how people, too, can be broken. Memory holes make their users part of the machinery. They make the purging of the past thoughtless, easy, mechanical, tautological: a thing that is done because it is done. The devices, in imposing passivity on their users, implicate them in the destruction and absolve them at the same time. They also, as they erase the old words, erode the old grammars. They are tools of a regime that has made itself the subject of every verb, and the agent of every action.

As the White House has expanded its project of erasure to the federal government at large, it has availed itself of the permissions of the passive voice. But it has also anointed a clear agent to carry out its project: the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The group, neither a full department nor a full part of the government—overseen by the billionaire Elon Musk, who has been neither elected nor Senate-confirmed—has proved the glib literalism of Musk’s expressed desire to “delete entire agencies.” Armed with widespread access to sensitive government information but scant knowledge of how government works, DOGE’s agents have brought data-driven ruthlessness to their deletions. Barreling into federal offices, DOGE members have sown chaos along with pain. They have cut jobs, then reinstated them. They have introduced errors into the system. But DOGE has also operated, for the most part, in the shadows, its threats omnipresent and unaccountable: Big Brother, remade as Big Bro.

[Read: The DOGE project will backfire]

DOGE has done its work, in theory, in the name of “efficiency”: the business of government given a much-needed reorg, with the attendant collateral costs. But the purges, as “retribution,” have also been outgrowths of Trump’s long campaign to redefine certain government employees as likely agents of the “deep state.” The two rationalizations contradict each other, of course—one claims that civil servants do too little, the other that they do too much—but coherence is not the point. The people on the business end of it all, whether officially dismissed or laid off or cut or culled or forced into resignation, were essentially fired for cause. And the cause, as it so often is, was Donald Trump. Power, when claimed in this way, obviates the need for reason. It will take away whatever it wants—livelihoods, knowledge, history, rights, categories of people, democracy itself—simply because it can.

The Constitution, those crinkled pieces of parchment and ink, has always been at risk of being consigned to the flames, even by those meant to uphold it. Indeed, that risk is acknowledged in the document’s language. The past weeks have in some ways been evidence of the system working as it should, with attempted checks on executive power coming from the courts, from Congress, from the American people—and even, this week, from some chastened members of DOGE.

But these are only potential checks. They are safeguards relegated, like so much else, to uncertainty. If the courts find elements of the White House’s erasures to be illegal—and if the White House refuses to heed the decisions—what then? A Constitution in crisis can become, all too easily, a Constitution erased. Memory holes are tools of planned obsolescence. If they do their jobs, the world that is will eventually be fully severed from the world that was. People will comply not because they choose to but because they have been made to forget that other possibilities exist. The Party will rule not through force but through that final kind of efficiency: power pared so completely that only one regime’s vision remains. 1984 is fiction, yes, but the novel’s insight is not. When history is written by the victors, it can be erased by them too.

You Are Cordially Invited to an Event That Could Ruin Your Life

2024-12-18T08:56:00-05:00

“I’d want to know if anybody nominated for a high-level job in Washington legitimately assaulted somebody … If people have an allegation to make, come forward and make it … We’ll decide whether or not it’s credible.” — Senator Lindsey Graham, December 2024

Dear Accuser,

You may have heard the open call we recently issued to you and others who have leveled allegations of sexual assault against [decent family men / hardworking public servants]. We write now to extend the invitation to you directly. You have been personally selected to share your “experience” of sexual assault with the United States Senate. Congratulations!

Your hearing will take place in person at [specify venue] and will be streamed across our digital platforms. If the “story” you tell proves to be especially [timely / compelling / salacious] or politically [convenient for us / inconvenient for our friends across the aisle], footage of your testimony might also be aired live on cable-news channels or repackaged for prime-time highlight reels.

In short, this is a rare and exciting opportunity for you to [specify benefit of participation for Accuser; if none, substitute “serve your country”]. Indeed, this invitation has already offered several benefits:

First, it has allowed us to (re)introduce the phrase “legitimately assaulted” into the public lexicon.

Second, to be very honest with you, Accuser, we as a group have been slightly concerned about our standing with some women of late. Publicizing this invitation has allowed us to emphasize how willing we are to [tolerate / humor] your accusations before we [assess / dismiss] them.

Third, if you [ignore / decline / are honestly a bit baffled by] our invitation, we may publicize your refusal to cooperate with us and express our dismay at your defiance.

Fourth, as we publicize your refusal, we will [assume / imply / insist] that your silence proves you to be a [liar / fraud / hussy].

Fifth, we will use this evidence of your dishonesty and fraudulence to cast doubt on any assault claim made by you and/or other Accusers, now and in the future.

These, we feel, are reasons enough to accept our offer. However, since we are keenly aware of all that Accusers stand to gain from coming forward, we understand that you, too, might be seeking more personalized benefits from your participation. In the spirit of accommodation, then, we are happy to outline some additional perks:

Self-promotion: Your participation will most likely make you famous—briefly, or perhaps permanently. Your sexual history will become a topic of local investigation and national conversation. So will your story more broadly. Widespread exposure on this level is something that most brands can only dream of.

Self-esteem: Feedback from others can make all the difference in a journey of self-improvement, and your participation will be assessed by a diverse group of reviewers eager to offer their opinions not only on your appearance, but also on your overall demeanor and person. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to gather constructive criticism from a potentially worldwide audience.

Self-improvement: Would you like to build your emotional resilience? You could spend months working with a therapist … or you could spend a few hours being interrogated by some of the nation’s most powerful politicians. Instant grit! Furthermore, because any disclosure you make comes with the possibility that you could be sued for defamation, participation will encourage you to choose your words more carefully than you ever have before—a mindfulness practice that will serve you for the rest of your life.

Self-knowledge: How many people would be willing to uproot their lives for this all-risk/no-reward opportunity? Very few. Are you one of them? There is only one way to find out: If you have an allegation to make, come forward and make it. We’ll decide whether or not it’s credible.

We would be delighted for you to join us, and you are welcome for the opportunity. We await your prompt response. If you have questions in the meantime, we would be happy to put you in touch with some of our past attendees. Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, and several more of our previous participants can attest that their experiences with us have been truly life-changing.

Sincerely,

The United States Senate

The Onion’s Most Trenchant Headline

2024-11-15T12:31:00-05:00

This week, Americans learned that a Fox News personality could become the civilian head of the nation’s armed forces. They heard about a new government-adjacent agency that will be co-headed by Elon Musk and named the Department of Government Efficiency (or … DOGE). The headlines, occasioned by Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House, were new reasons to ask an old question inspired by a classic satirical website: The Onion or real? (The answer: extremely real.) But yesterday morning, reality got an even more Onion-y twist, this time courtesy of the publication itself. The Onion announced that its parent company was the winning bidder in a bankruptcy auction to acquire Infowars. That infamous site—the longtime home of the conspiracist Alex Jones, and a bleak metonym for an age of irony poisoning and reckless lies—will now operate under the auspices of a site whose homepage, as of this writing, was reporting: “Oyster Cracker–Wise, Nation Doing Pretty Good.”

Headlines are The Onion’s stock-in-trade. The site’s articles complete the “fake newspaper” aesthetic but are, for the most part, beside the point. Yesterday’s news followed that form. As a headline—“The Onion Buys Infowars”—the acquisition brought amusement (reactions included “metal,” “poetry,” and applause emoji). As a broader story, though, it brought a familiar kind of addlement: Was this news-news or “fake news”? Was it a prank? (If so, who was the butt of the joke?) “I can’t tell if this is real or satire,” one commenter said on Instagram, speaking for many.

The uncertainty made its way into coverage of the acquisition as well. Several journalistic outlets, reporting on the purchase, attributed a press release to “Bryce P. Tetraeder, CEO of the Onion’s parent company Global Tetrahedron”—apparently not realizing that the executive’s name was, itself, an attempt at satire. (The Onion has a tradition of assigning fake names to its leadership; this particular leader’s bio describes him, in part, as “media proprietor, entrepreneur, human trafficker, thought leader, and venture capitalist.”)

But the confusion was, in its topsy-turvy way, clarifying. “The Onion or real?” is a lighthearted question that has also become a way of life. We muddle, all of us, through a fog of ambient uncertainty. And this, in turn, gives way to suspicion. Question everything, that quintessential cry of the conspiracist, has also become a stark tenet of news literacy. In a media environment where fact and fiction blur, ever more steadily, into each other—where so many pieces of news are punctuated with invisible asterisks and scare quotes and question marks—doubt is written into the texture of things: Real person or bot? Real footage or deepfake? News-news or “news”? The lulz-to-life pipeline has never been shorter.

The result is not merely a White House that treats politics as an endless flame war—a government of the meme, by the meme, for the meme. The uncertainty also encourages, among the people who live within it, a particular strain of cynicism, the kind that can settle in when, to paraphrase the scholar Hannah Arendt, everything is possible and nothing is true.

[Read: Why we should read Hannah Arendt now]

The Infowars acquisition is an everything/nothing proposition: Is the purchase satirical or earnest? Was it made in good faith or bad? Is it a troll or a remedy? It is neither. It is both. “We thought this would be a hilarious joke,” Ben Collins, the (real) chief executive of Global Tetrahedron, told The New York Times of the decision to buy Jones’s site. And the whole thing—down to the (satirical) press release calling Infowars “a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds”—is, very openly, a stunt. But it is also, the publication insists, a strategy. Its comedy will be corrective, and potentially lucrative. Infowars will relaunch in January, Collins told the Times, as a ClickHole-style parody of Jones and his fellow conspiracists. In all those ways, the acquisition is also something of a concession: the martial logic of “own the libs,” upended through literal ownership.

The best satire will spin, always, around an axis of earnestness; its humor will make a serious point. One of The Onion’s most famous headlines—one that reliably goes viral after a new episode of mass gun violence—did precisely that: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” The updated Infowars could engage in that sort of satire too, making it a fitting addition to The Onion’s satiric universe. (The Onion mocks legacy media; ClickHole, started by The Onion and now owned by the team behind the game-design firm Cards Against Humanity, mocks new media; Infowars, it seems, will mock the people peddling media that mock the truth.) The Onion’s goal, the publication asserted in a statement yesterday, “is to end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor for good.”

[Read: We’ve lost the plot]

But even that humor will be rooted in the rawest form of earnestness: grief. The acquisition was supported by families of the children murdered in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in 2012—families burdened, in their anguish, by Jones’s baseless insistence that the whole massacre had been staged. The new site, in addition to publishing parody, will also attempt to educate its audience about the human cost of guns. It will feature advertising from the nonprofit advocacy organization Everytown for Gun Safety. Everytown’s president, John Feinblatt, described “the potential this new venture has to help Everytown reach new audiences ready to hold the gun industry accountable.” The sale itself, one of the families’ lawyers said in a statement, is a form of accountability as well—for the man who, for so long, profited from their pain.

This is not a typical case of tragedy followed by farce; it is, in Infowars’ new owners’ telling, tragedy adjudicated by farce. But “laughter” and “murdered children” sit uncomfortably with each other. And The Onion’s public messaging has suggested that the purchase, in classic Onion fashion, is still a headline in search of a story. What will Infowars’ parody look like? Will the site attempt to coax its current audience away from Jones’s conspiracies? Or will it simply mock its readers? In a social-media post yesterday morning, Collins clarified that the sale has given The Onion ownership of all of Infowars’ assets, including the site’s content, its broadcasting equipment, Jones’s supplements business, and the intellectual property related to those supplements. He added: “We are still trying to figure out what to do with it.” The earnest comment was an adjunct to the final lines of the press release from “Bryce P. Tetraeder”: “All will be revealed in due time. For now, let’s enjoy this win and toast to the continued consolidation of power and capital.”

Cynicism is typically seen as an absence of earnestness—as a posture that places itself, on the irony continuum, somewhere near sarcasm and suspicion. It can be that, definitely. But it can also be, as Arendt observed, a form of earnestness gone awry, a means of coping with a world in which so many things refuse to mean what they claim to. Cynicism, in her framework, is a way to protect the ego in an atmosphere of widespread mistrust. Of the people who lived among endless propaganda, Arendt wrote: “Instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

[Read: American cynicism has reached a breaking point]

Arendt was writing about life under totalitarianism in a century now long past. But her findings are all too timely. Cynicism as she describes it—as sanctuary, as armor, as an outgrowth of despair—is a core feature of life on the web. It will probably become ever more common as the real stories look ever more like satire. Cynicism, as Arendt framed it, can also be a form of complicity. It inures people to the fictions that surround them. It makes them apathetic, compliant, subdued. But cynicism is also, according to Arendt, a reasonable reaction to an unsteady world. Humans don’t do well with uncertainty. For all the concessions it demands, the cynical style has one very obvious benefit: It provides an illusion of control. It imposes order, or at least the semblance of it, on a tumultuous world. (In that way, it turns out, it is very much like a conspiracy theory.)

Satire can do similar work. It can be an eloquent antidote to the kind of chaos that Arendt described: It can cut through the haze. It can clarify things, joke by joke. The earnestness of humor is, it seems, what The Onion hopes to bring to the site that turned suspicion into currency. The Infowars acquisition, Collins told the Times, “is going to be our answer to this no-guardrails world where there are no gatekeepers and everything’s kind of insane.” The irony is that the purchase—as a joke, as justice—may further erode the guardrails. The “answer” meant to address all the madness may be new, but it will provoke the same old question: “The Onion or real?”

The 21st Century’s Greatest, Ghastliest Showman

2024-11-09T09:00:00-05:00

In early 2017, just after Donald Trump took residency in the White House, the New York Times technology columnist Farhad Manjoo engaged in an experiment. He spent a week doing all he could to ignore the new president. He failed. Whether Manjoo was scrolling through social media or news sites, watching sitcoms or sports—even shopping on Amazon—Trump was there, somehow, in his vision. In those early days of his presidency, Trump had already become so ubiquitous that a studious effort to avoid him was doomed. “Coverage of Mr. Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever,” Manjoo observed. Trump was no longer a single story; he was “the ether through which all other stories flow.”

This week, the former president made himself inescapable once more. He will have another four-year term in office, the Trump Show renewed for a second season. And his political power has been ratified, in part, by a dynamic that Manjoo observed at the start of Trump’s first presidency: His celebrity changes the politics that surround him.

Trump is a showman above all, which has proved to be a major source of his omnipresence. He is image all the way down. He is also narrative shed of its connection to grounded truth. He has endeared himself to many Americans by denigrating the allegedly unchecked power of “the media”; the irony is that he is the media.

The book that best explains Trump’s dominance may well have been published in 1962. In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, the historian Daniel J. Boorstin described the image as a medium—a photograph, a movie, a representation of life, laid out on pulp or screen—that becomes, soon enough, a habit of mind. The image doesn’t merely replicate reality; it also surpasses it. It normalizes spectacle so thoroughly—life, carefully framed and edited and rendered in Technicolor—that reality itself can seem boring by comparison. Images, in Boorstin’s framework, are intimately connected to many of the other phenomena that shape so much of American culture: celebrity, fantasy, all that gives rise to the “thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.”

[Read: ‘The Image’ in the age of pseudo-reality]

In describing imagery in action, Boorstin pointed to Phineas T. Barnum, the famous peddler of spectacular hoaxes and lustrous lies. Barnum was a 19th-century showman with a 21st-century sense of pageantry; he anticipated how reality could evolve from a truth to be accepted into a show to be produced. Barnum turned entertainment into an omen: He understood how much Americans would be willing to give up for the sake of a good show.

Trump is Barnum’s obvious heir—the ultimate realization of Boorstin’s warnings. The difference, of course, is that Barnum was restricted to brick-and-mortar illusions. The deceptions he created were limited to big tops and traveling shows. Trump’s versions go viral. His humbugs scale, becoming the stuff of mass media in an instant. Trump lost the 2020 election, and his refusal to accept the defeat became known, in short order, as the Big Lie. His resentments become other people’s anger, too. In the introduction to his 2004 book Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, the future president includes a quote from a book about the rich—a classic Trumpian boast doubling as an admission. “Almost all successful alpha personalities display a single-minded determination to impose their vision on the world,” it reads, “an irrational belief in unreasonable goals, bordering at times on lunacy.”

The assertion was borrowed from the writer Richard Conniff, who would later profess his shock that the line—he had intended it as an insult—had been used by Trump to bolster his own brand. Trump: Think Like a Billionaire was published not long after the premiere of The Apprentice, earlier in 2004; the show, as it reimagined reality as a genre, also transformed its host into a star. When Trump announced his first presidential candidacy, he staged the whole thing in the gilded atrium of the New York City tower emblazoned with his name, a building that was real-estate investment, brand extension, and TV set. Many, at the time, assumed that Trump was running, essentially, for the ratings—that he might try to channel his campaign into an expansion of his power as an entertainer.

In many ways, it turns out, Trump has done precisely that—despite, and because of, his ascendance to the presidency. Barnum, too, converted his fame as a showman into a second life as a politician. While serving in the Connecticut legislature, he crusaded against contraception and abortion, introducing a law that would become infamous for its repressions of both. Trump’s neo-Barnumian status has not only allowed him to exercise similar power over people’s lives; it has also enabled him to convince a large portion of the American electorate of the supreme rightness of his positions.

In 2015, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, HuffPost announced that it would not report on him as part of its political coverage; instead, it would write about his antics in its Entertainment section. “Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow,” the publication declared. “We won’t take the bait.”

That category confusion explains a lot about Trump’s durability. He defies the old logic that tried to present politics and entertainment as separate phenomena. He is a traditional politician, and he isn’t at all. He is a man—a person shaped by appetites and whim and spleen—and a singular one, at that. But he has also styled himself as an Everyman: an agent of other people’s resentments, fear, and anger.

[Read: We’ve lost the plot]

It didn’t matter that Trump lost the presidency in 2020. It didn’t matter that he was impeached and impeached again, held liable for rape, convicted of fraud. In another time, with another figure, any one of those developments would have meant a culmination of the narrative, the disgraced politician slinking into obscurity. The end. But Trump has used his remarkable fame—its insulating power—to argue that he is not a politician, even as he has become an über-politician. Each of his might-have-been endings, as a result, has served for him as a new beginning. Each has been an opportunity for him to reset and begin the narrative anew, to double down on his threats and hatreds. The effect of attempting to hold Trump accountable, whether in the courts or in the arena of public opinion, has been only to expand the reach of the spectacle—to make him ever more unavoidable, ever more inevitable.

“It’s probably not a good idea for just about all of our news to be focused on a single subject for that long,” Manjoo wrote in 2017. He was absolutely correct. But he could not foresee what Trump had in store. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the old Breitbart saying goes. But Trump’s reelection is one more piece of evidence that politics and culture mingle, now, in the same murky water. Both seethe in the same dark sea. Trump once again has carte blanche to impose his vision on the world. And his audience has little choice but to watch.

The Shadow Over Kamala Harris’s Campaign

2024-11-04T07:30:00-05:00

On August 18, 2020, Americans marked the 100-year anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and of women’s right to vote. The next day, Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for her current role, vice president of the United States. The consonance punctuated an already historic candidacy: Harris was the first woman of color to seek that office on a major-party ticket. She acknowledged the moment’s gravity at the beginning of her acceptance speech, thanking Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Mary McLeod Bethune, and many of the other women whose paths had led to the ground she broke that evening.

Harris now seeks to go further still, aiming for the U.S. presidency. But the history-making possibilities of her campaign have been easy to overlook, in large part because of the man Harris faces in her bid. Donald Trump, so ignorant of the past and so careless about the future, is a present-tense kind of candidate. The history he has brought to his fight for a second term—the attempt to overturn an election; the promises of deportations and retributions and violence; the racism; the misogyny; the incompetence, lies, and fraud; the assault; the boast that he has grabbed women “by the pussy”; the installation of judges who have grabbed away women’s rights—has imbued the 2024 contest with a sense of latent emergency. His flaws, as so often happens, have become someone else’s problem.

If the Democrats’ 2020 campaign was a “battle for the soul of America,” its 2024 counterpart has been a battle for the national body: the policies and practicalities that allow the country to function as a democracy. An opponent whose party is “Republican” but whose posture is “dictator” turns talk of history-making into a luxury. Harris rarely mentions her gender or race on the campaign trail. Her recent ads, MSNBC noted, have described her childhood primarily in terms of class. During the nomination speech she delivered at the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris briefly described her background—her South Asian mother, her Jamaican father—but focused on her career as a prosecutor. (The most conspicuous mention of history-making came from Hillary Clinton, whose speech acknowledged the structural integrity of “the highest, hardest glass ceiling.”) As Vox’s Constance Grady put it, “A woman is running for president and has decent odds of making it. She just seems to think her chances of being the first woman president are better as long as she never, ever talks about it.”

[Read: Kamala Harris’s ambition trap]

That reticence may well be good strategy. Clinton’s 2016 loss chastens strategists still: once bitten by the Electoral College, twice shy. And the brevity of Harris’s campaign—Joe Biden’s decision to step down in July left her just over three months at the top of the ticket—has required her to triage her messaging. “Well, I’m clearly a woman,” Harris told NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. Better, she suggested, to spend the time she had telling voters what they might not already know. “My challenge,” she said, “is the challenge of making sure I can talk with and listen to as many voters as possible and earn their vote.”

You could read Harris’s disinclination to talk about history-making as, in its own way, historic. She is campaigning to become the president, full stop, no other qualifier required. This doesn’t mean she has not focused on traditionally feminist priorities—reproductive freedom and care-related policies are at the center of her campaign messaging. She just hasn’t made her identity an explicit part of her pitch. This is a notable departure from the era of “I’m with her.” Progress can be exhilarating. It can also be condescending. (After Biden promised early in his 2020 campaign that he would name a woman as his running mate, the satirical website Reductress offered a headline that neatly captured the resulting discourse: “Biden Says VP Pick Is Between Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and a Beautiful Lady Ostrich.”)

The candidate who has most directly acknowledged the historical nature of Harris’s candidacy has been, instead, her opponent. After “Sleepy Joe” stepped aside, Trump began auditioning insults with the frenzy of a Hollywood casting agent, suggesting by turns that Harris “happened to turn Black”; that she is “mentally impaired”; that she has the “laugh of a crazy person”; that she will be seen by world leaders as a “play toy”; that she’d traded sexual favors to propel her rise to power. In a rally held shortly after Biden left the race, Trump made a great show of mispronouncing the name of a politician who has been nationally famous for years—butchering “Kamala” more than 40 times over the course of a single speech. J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, tried to denigrate Harris by accusing her of membership in that shadiest of cabals: “childless cat ladies.”

Americans tend to talk about history’s march as a matter of physics: movements, momentum, progress, resistance. The language can imply that the advancement is inevitable, an arc that moves ever forward as it bends toward something better. It can, as such, mislead. Susan Faludi’s 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against America’s Women, was premised on the fallacy, expressed repeatedly in the American media of the time, that feminism’s fights had by that point been, essentially, won. Clinton’s 2016 loss, and the many other kinds of losses that followed, served as a further rebuke: Gains can be ungained in an instant. Rights are inalienable, until they’re not.

Backlash was published the year before a record number of women ran for, and won, national office. Media outlets, in a fit of ahistorical optimism, dubbed it the “year of the woman.” What they might not have realized was that the “year of the woman” had already been proclaimed (as an analysis in Slate found) in 1966. And in 1968, 1984, and 1990. It would be declared again to describe the electoral results of 2008, 2010, 2016, 2018, and 2020.

History warns, in that way, against the easy comforts of “making history.” The progress and backlash that Faludi identified tend not to take turns—the one giving, the other taking away—but instead to crash together. The 2016 election failed to produce a woman president and in that sense preserved the status quo, but many more people voted for Clinton than for Trump, and this was its own bit of progress. Polls attempting to measure Americans’ opinions about a potential woman president have reflected a fairly steady increase in comfort since the idea was first tested, in the mid-1930s. But the endurance of such surveys—their treatment of a woman in the White House as a question to be debated, a disruption to be endured—is, itself, a concession.

[Read: Pop culture failed to imagine Kamala Harris]

Harris has had to contend with these tensions in her campaign. She has navigated them by emphasizing what her presidency might do rather than what it might mean. (“I am running,” she told CNN’s Dana Bash, “because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.”) Along the way, though, she has also navigated backlash in human form. Some of the enduring images of the 2016 debates captured Trump looming over Clinton, blithely and menacingly, belittling her not only with his words but with his movements. He has been attempting to do something similar to Harris, even from a distance: Take up her space. Get in her way. Put the whole thing on his terms. The moments when his campaign has seemed the most flummoxed, the most pessimistic, are the ones when everyone seems to be paying attention to her, not him.

Trump has a unique kind of gravitational pull—a way of forcing everything else into his orbit, however strongly it might resist. And he has brought those brute physics to the 2024 campaign. When Harris delivered her “closing argument” speech in Washington on October 29, the location chosen for the event was the same one Trump had used for the speech that preceded the January 6 insurrection. And the address did not merely evoke Trump; it discussed him. As she spoke, Harris emphasized the disparities between herself and her opponent. She warned of what a second Trump presidency could do to the country. She expressed her desire to “turn the page.” She emphasized the future she wants to prevent more than the history she herself wants to make.

This was the right speech, the rousing speech, the prudent speech—the speech Harris needed to deliver. In its message, though, the candidate who has argued that she is the “best person” for the presidency “regardless of race and gender” was consigned to the stereotypically feminine role: He acts, she responds. The man so accustomed to taking what he wants robbed her of her full moment, and the moment of its full meaning. Crises fix things to the present. They demand sacrifice for the sake of the future. In pursuing the presidency, Harris is “not concerned about being the first,” a campaign official said. “She’s concerned about making sure she’s not the last.”

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What Orwell Didn’t Anticipate

2024-10-31T07:30:00-04:00

1984 ends not with a bang, but with a grammar lesson. Readers of George Orwell’s novel—still reeling, likely, from the brutal dystopia they’ve spent the previous 300-odd pages living in—are subjected to a lengthy explanation of Newspeak, the novel’s uncanny form of English. The appendix explains the language that has been created to curtail independent thought: the culled vocabulary; the sterilized syntax; the regime’s hope that, before long, all the vestiges of Oldspeak—English in its familiar form, the English of Shakespeare and Milton and many of Orwell’s readers—will be translated into the new vernacular. The old language, and all it carried with it, will die away.

With its dizzying details and technical prose, “The Principles of Newspeak” makes for a supremely strange ending. It is, in today’s parlance, a choice. But it is a fitting one. Language, in 1984, is violence by another means, an adjunct of the totalitarian strategies inflicted by the regime. Orwell’s most famous novel, in that sense, is the fictionalized version of his most famous essay. “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946, is a writing manual, primarily—a guide to making language that says what it means, and means what it says. It is also an argument. Clear language, Orwell suggests, is a semantic necessity as well as a moral one. Newspeak, in 1984, destroys with the same ferocious efficiency that tanks and bombs do. It is born of the essay’s most elemental insight: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

The essay, over the years, has enjoyed the same backhanded success that Orwell himself has. Its barbs have softened into conventional wisdom. Its enduring relevance has consigned it, in some degree, to cliché. Who would argue against clarity?

But the essay, today, can read less as a rousing defense of the English language than as a prescient concession of defeat. “Use clear language” cannot be our guide when clarity itself can be so elusive. Our words have not been honed into oblivion—on the contrary, new ones spring to life with giddy regularity—but they fail, all too often, in the same ways Newspeak does: They limit political possibilities, rather than expand them. They cede to cynicism. They saturate us in uncertainty. The words might mean what they say. They might not. They might describe shared truths; they might manipulate them. Language, the connective tissue of the body politic—that space where the collective “we” matters so much—is losing its ability to fulfill its most basic duty: to communicate. To correlate. To connect us to the world, and to one another.

And semantic problems, as Orwell knew, have a way of turning into real ones. Violence descends; threats take shape; emergencies come; we may try to warn one another—we may scream the warnings—but we have trouble conveying the danger. We have so much to say. In another way, though, we have no words.

Earlier this month, Donald Trump mused aloud about the violence Americans might anticipate on November 5. If Election Day brings havoc, he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, the crisis would come not from outside actors but instead from “the enemy from within”: “some very bad people,” he clarified, “some sick people”—the “radical-left lunatics.”

The former president further mused about a solution to the problem. “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard,” he said, “or, if really necessary, by the military.”

A presidential candidate who may well retake the White House is threatening to use the military against American citizens: The news here is straightforward. The language that makes the news, though, is not. The words twist and tease, issuing their threats in the conditional tense: It should be. If necessary. Trump’s words often do this; they imply very much while saying very little. They are schooled, like the man himself, in the dark art of plausible deniability. In them, Orwell’s doublespeak—that jargon of purposeful obscurity—gets one more layer of insulating irony: The former president says whatever he wants, and reserves the right not to mean it.

Do we take him at his word? The answer to this question, on which so much else depends, can only ever be “maybe.” When he describes “the enemy from within”—or when he muses about police forces fighting back against criminals for “one real rough, nasty day,” or when he announces his intention to spend the first day of a second term acting as “a dictator”—you could read each as a direct threat. You could assume that he’s lying, embellishing, teasing, trolling. You could say that the line, like Trump’s others, should be taken seriously, but not literally. You could try your best, knowing all that is at stake, to parse the grammar of his delusion.

But the fact that you need to translate him at all is already a concession. The constant uncertainty—about the gravest of matters—is one of the ways that Trump keeps people in his thrall. Clear language is a basic form of kindness: It considers the other person. It wants to be understood. Trump’s argot, though, is self-centered. It treats shared reality as an endless negotiation.

The words cannot bear the weight of all this irony. Democracy is, at its core, a task of information management. To do its work, people need to be able to trust that the information they’re processing is, in the most fundamental way, accurate. Trump’s illegibility makes everything else less legible, too.

[Read: Do you speak Fox?]

Orwell published “Politics” at the end of a conflict that had, in its widespread use of propaganda, also been a war of words. In the essay, he wrestles with the fact that language—as a bomb with a near-limitless blast radius—could double as a weapon of mass destruction. This is why clarity matters. This is why words are ethical tools as well as semantic ones. The defense of language that Orwell offered in “Politics” was derived from his love of hard facts. “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information,” he confessed in his 1946 essay “Why I Write.” His was an elegant dogma. Words matter because facts matter—because truth matters. Freedom, in 1984, is many things, but they all spring from the same source: the ability to say that 2 + 2 = 4.

One October surprise of 2024 took an aptly Orwellian turn: The scandal, this time around, was a matter of language. Earlier this month, John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, escalated his warnings that his former boss is unfit for office. Kelly told The Atlantic that Trump had expressed a desire for generals like the ones “that Hitler had.” Then, in an interview published by The New York Times, Kelly described Trump’s dictatorial approach to leadership, his drive to suppress opposition, his insatiable appetite for power. He concluded that Trump fits the definition of fascist.

Kelly’s claim was echoed, more mildly, by Trump’s former secretary of defense—he “certainly has those inclinations,” Mark Esper said—and, less mildly, by Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump is “the most dangerous person to this country,” Milley warned in Bob Woodward’s latest book, its publication timed to coincide with the election. He is also, Milley added, “fascist to the core.” (Trump denied the men’s claims: “I am the opposite of a Nazi,” he said.) Late last week, 13 others who had served in high-level positions in the Trump administration signed an open letter: “Everyone,” they wrote, “should heed General Kelly’s warning.”

The comments made headlines because of the people who expressed them: Each had worked directly with Trump. The former officials made history, though, because of the word they deployed in their warnings. Fascist is a claim of last resort. It is a term of emergency. Because of that, its validity, as a description for Trump’s seething strain of populism, has been the subject of a long-standing debate among scholars, journalists, and members of the public—one made even more complicated by the fact that, as the historian Ian Kershaw has observed, “Trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”

But one need not be a scholar of fascism to see the plain reality. Trump lost an election. He refused to accept the result. In a second term, he has suggested, he will “terminate” the Constitution, use the American judicial system to take revenge on those who have angered him, and perform sweeping immigration raids, expelling millions of people from the country. Trump, in addition to praising Hitler’s generals, regularly uses language that echoes Hitler’s hatreds. He has described immigrants, whatever their legal status, as a formless “invasion,” and the press as “the enemy of the people.” He has dismissed those who are insufficiently loyal to him as “human scum” and “vermin.”

[Read: This is Trump’s message]

Fascism—that call to history, that careful description, that five-alarm piece of language—is the right word. But it may turn out, at the same time, to be the wrong one. It might, in our cynical moment, provoke exhaustion rather than alarm.

In “Politics,” Orwell reserves particular vitriol for political language that hides its intentions in euphemism and wan metaphor. Wording that resorts to ambiguity can disguise atrocities (as when, in one of the examples Orwell offers, the bombing of villages and their defenseless people is referred to merely as “pacification”). Orwell’s problem was language that gives writers permission not to think. Ours, however, is language that gives readers permission not to care. Even the clearest, most precise language can come to read, in our restless age, as cliché. “The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet,” the old line goes; “the second, an imbecile.” On the internet, anyone can become that imbecile. For language in general, this is not an issue: When on fleek goes off in an instant or cheugy plummets from coinage to cringe, more words will arrive in their place.

When the restlessness comes for political language, though—for the words we rely on to do the shared work of self-government—the impatience itself becomes Orwellian. Urgent words can feel tired. Crises can come, but no words suffice to rouse us. Americans face an election that our democracy—hard-fought, hard-won, ever fragile—may not survive; “defend democracy,” though, can read less as a call to arms than as a call to yawn. Trump himself is insulated by all the ennui. Nearly every word you might apply to him fits the picture that was already there. His depravity has become tautological: It’s just Trump being Trump. It’s shocking, not surprising.

The word fascism can fail that way, too. And it can be further defanged by the biggest cliché of all: thoughtlessly partisan politics. Some audiences, seeing the word deployed as a description, will dismiss it as simply more evidence of the media’s (or John Kelly’s) alleged bias against Trump. Others, assuming that fascism and Nazism are the same thing—assuming that fascism cannot be present until troops are goose-stepping in the streets—will see the term as evidence of hysteria.

But fascism can come whether the language acknowledges it or not. It marches toward us, restricted right by restricted right, book ban by book ban. It can happen here. The question is whether we’ll be able to talk about it—and whether people will care. An ABC News/Ipsos pol l released last week asked registered voters across the country whether Trump was a “fascist” (defined as “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents”). Nearly half of respondents, 49 percent, said he was—roughly the same percentage of people who, in recent national polls, say that they plan to vote for him.

The philosopher Emilio Uranga observed, in Mexican political life of the mid-20th century, a gnawing sense of uncertainty—a “mode of being,” he wrote, “that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on.” The unsteadiness, he suggested, amounts to pain. In it, “the soul suffers.” It “feels torn and wounded.” Uranga gave the condition a name: zozobra.

The wound he describes, that plague of doubleness, has settled into American political language. In her 2023 book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the “mirror world” in right-wing politics—a place where every reality has a rhetorical double. She focuses on the rhetoric of Steve Bannon, the former Trump-administration strategist. As Democrats and journalists discussed the Big Lie—Donald Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 presidential election—Bannon began discussing the Big Steal: the idea that Joe Biden, against all evidence, stole the presidency.

The tactic is common. Trump regularly fantasizes before his cheering crowds about the violence that might befall his opponents. Journalists describe him as engaging in “extreme” and “inflammatory” rhetoric. Republicans in Trump’s camp, soon enough, began accusing Democrats of, as one of his surrogates put it, “irresponsible rhetoric” that “is causing people to get hurt.” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s response to the former military leaders’ warnings about Trump took a similar tack: Their rhetoric is “dangerous,” he said this weekend. On Monday, Trump gave John Kelly’s comments about him a predictably zozobric twist. Kamala Harris, he said, is a fascist.

“In the mirror world,” Klein writes, “there is a copycat story, and an answer for everything, often with very similar key words.” The attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has commonly been described as an insurrection; Republican power brokers have begun describing peaceful political protests as “insurrections.” We must save American democracy, the stark slogan that gained new currency in response to the Big Lie, is now a common refrain on the right. (Elon Musk, at a recent Trump rally, argued that the former president “must win to preserve democracy in America.”)

Mirroring, as propaganda, is extremely effective. It addles the mind. It applies a choose-your-own-adventure approach to meaning itself. Mirroring does, in that way, precisely what Orwell feared: It gives up on the very possibility of common language. It robs political terms of their ability to clarify, to unite, to warn. In a world that is endlessly doubling itself, 2 + 2 = 4 may be a liberating truth. Or it may be a narrative imposed on you by a smug and elitist regime. Freedom, soon enough, becomes the ability to say that the sum of 2 + 2 is whatever you want it to be.

[Read: Why are we humoring them?]

The words fly, flagrant and fast; the definitions that might ground them trail, meekly, in their wake. But when the words are mere slogans—shibboleths and signifiers, narrowcast to one’s tribe—dictionary definitions miss the point. Slogans are rhetoric. They are advertising. They are vibes. They can function, in that way, as what the author Robert Jay Lifton called “thought-terminating clichés”: words or phrases that effectively curtail debate—and, with it, critical thought itself. Last year, an author who wrote a book decrying the “woke indoctrination” of children struggled to define what woke actually means. In 2022, the New York Times editorial board effectively declared lexicographic defeat: “However you define cancel culture,” it wrote, “Americans know it exists and feel its burden.” On Tuesday, Musk—who has been spreading his Trump-friendly brand of groupthink on his social-media platform, X—shared an image: a man, his face obscured, wearing a green cap. Stitched onto the hat, in large, all-caps letters, was MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN.

In 1990, a conservative Republican group headed by Newt Gingrich sent a pamphlet to Republican candidates running in state elections across the country. The document amounted to a dictionary: 133 words that operatives might use to elevate themselves (family, freedom, pride) and vilify their competitors (decay, corruption, pathetic, traitors). The pamphlet was titled, unironically, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Many in the media, nodding to the Orwell of it all, came to know it as “Newtspeak.”

The 1990s were years when politicians were translating the insights of postmodern discourse (the power of “framing” and the like) into the everyday practice of politics. But Gingrich’s memo turned spin into a plot twist. Every word of its grim new language represented an argument: that Democrats were not merely opponents, but enemies; that the differences between the two sides were not merely political, but moral. It recast American politics not as an ongoing debate among equals, but as an epic battle between good and evil. The core aim of propaganda, Aldous Huxley observed, is to make one group of people forget that another group is human; the pamphlet, cheerfully promising aspiring politicians that they could learn to speak like Newt, wove that logic, word by word, into Americans’ political habits.

The language in the pamphlet is stark. It is evocative. It is so very, very clear. It also takes the advice Orwell gave to preserve the thing he most loved and puts it in service of the thing he most feared.

Orwell watched the rise of communism. He fought the rise of fascism. He observed, from a distance and, at times, from intimately close range, the blunt-force power of words. He saw how quickly a common language could be transformed into a divisive one—and how readily, in the tumult, new hatreds and fears could settle into the syntax of everyday life. And he knew that history, so rarely consigned to the past, would repeat—that the battles of the 20th century would very likely be refought, in some form, in the future.

He knew all that, but he could not know it all. And there are moments in “Politics and the English Language” that can read, today, as nearly naive, with its faith in facts and its hope that clarity could be our salvation. Orwell was a satirist, too—1984, he believed, was an example of the genre—but he did not account for the ways that irony could come for language itself. He did not imagine propaganda that does its work through winks and shrugs rather than shouts. He did not sense how possible it would become for people in the future, seeking his wisdom, to wonder whether use clear language offers any counsel at all.

This is not Orwell’s failing, necessarily. And it need not be our own. If we look to him for refuge and find none, that means simply that we will have to use the words we have to create new advice, new axioms, new ways forward. We can take the insight that drove him—that words can expand the world, or limit it; that they can connect us to one another, or cleave us—and seek new means of clarity. We can treat language not just as a tool, but as a duty. We can keep remembering, and reminding one another, that 2 + 2 = 4.

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Why Are We Humoring Them?

2024-10-23T13:12:00-04:00

In September, Secret Service agents apprehended a man carrying an AK-47-style gun near Donald Trump’s Palm Beach golf course—in an apparent attempt, the FBI concluded, to assassinate the former president. To some, the thwarted violence was a bleak testament to the times: one more reminder that politics, when approached as an endless war, will come with collateral damage. To Elon Musk, however, it was an opportunity. The billionaire, treating his control of X as a means of owning the libs, gave the Palm Beach news a MAGA-friendly twist. “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote on the platform, punctuating the line with a thinking-face emoji.

Musk was wrong—authorities have arrested several people for death threats made against the president and vice president—and he eventually deleted the post. But he did not apologize for the mistake. Instead, earlier this month, Musk used an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s X-based show as a chance to workshop the line. “Nobody’s even bothering to try to kill Kamala,” Musk told Carlson, “because it’s pointless. What do you achieve?”

At this, both men guffawed. Musk, having found an appreciative audience, kept going, finding new ways to suggest that the vice president was not worth the trouble of assassinating. Carlson’s reply: “That’s hilarious.”

First as tragedy, then as farce, the adage goes. If only the old order still applied. Not that long ago, public figures such as Carlson and Musk might have been embarrassed to be seen using political violence as a punch line. But embarrassment, these days, is a partisan affliction. It can ail only the soft, the sincere—the people willing to be caught caring in public. The brand of politics that Musk and Carlson practice is swaggering and provocative and, as a result, entirely devoid of shame. And so the two men, wielding their mockery, make a show of each chortle and smirk. They may consider their delight to be defiant—a rebuke to the humorless masses who see the violence and not the lol—but it is not defiant. It is dull. This is the way of things now. The tragedy and the farce, the menace that winks, the joke that threatens, the emoji that cries with joy and the one that simply cries: They bleed together, all of them. Irony storms the Capitol. Cynicism reigns.

[Read: Political violence feeds on itself]

Trump, that louche comedian, is partially to blame. His humor—some of it crude, some of it cruel, most of it treating politics and the people who engage in them as the butt of an endless joke—is more than a performance. It is also permission. Musk and Carlson laughed at the thought of Harris’s death both because they wanted to and because they knew they could. Trump and his crowbar will come for every Overton window. Now no claim is too much. No joke is too soon. Deportations, assassinations, the casual suggestion that America is due for its own version of Kristallnacht: Invoked as ideas and implications, they might be threats. They might be omens. For Trump and the many who humor him, though, they’re simply material—fodder for jokes in a set that never ends.

“Not The Onion,” people might warn one another on social media, as they share the video of Trump’s nearly 40-minute attempt to turn a town hall into a one-man dance party. “Beyond parody,” they might moan, as J. D. Vance spreads racist lies about immigrants snatching and eating their neighbors’ pets. The disclaimers are hardly necessary. Americans, whatever their political convictions, have become accustomed to politics that read as dark comedy—and to politicians who commit fully to the bit. These leaders don’t merely lie or misspeak or make light of life and death. To them, leadership itself is a joke. They’re trolling one another. They’re trolling us. They’ve made mischief a mandate.

Call it the trolligarchy—and have no doubt that its regime is inescapable. Trump says that if reelected he’ll be a dictator on “day one” and then insists that he’s only joking. Under Musk, X’s email for press inquiries auto-responds to reporters’ questions with a poop emoji. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a congressional seat in Georgia by turning trolling into a campaign strategy, has been using the House bill-amendment process as an opportunity for cheap acts of score-settling. In a proposed amendment to a bill meant to allocate funding to aid Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia’s invasion, she stipulated, among other things, that any colleague who voted for it would be conscripted into Ukraine’s military.

“Messaging bills” may be fairly common among politicians seeking new ways to rack up political points. And Greene’s amendment was roundly defeated. Her stunt, though, wrote tragedy and farce into the congressional record. Roll Call, reporting on it, quoted social-media posts from Matt Glassman, an analyst at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute. There have “always been chucklehead Members of the House,” Glassman wrote of Greene’s antics. “But the prominence of many of the chuckleheads in the GOP and the ever-increasing general level of chucklehead behavior worries me.”

Life under the trolligarchy requires constant acts of micro-translation: Did she mean it? Was he joking? Were they lying? The lulz, as a result, can be exhausting. The scholar Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, analyzing fMRI studies that illustrate how the brain processes jokes, argues that humor can impose a cognitive tax. Jokes, for all their delights, ask more of their audiences than other forms of discourse do: They require more split-second parsing, more energy, more work. And a troll is a joke unhinged—which makes it extra taxing. Its terms are particularly murky. Its claims are especially suspect. Under its influence, the old categories fail. Nihilism takes over. Fatigue sets in. Sincerity and irony, like stars whose centers cannot hold, collapse into each other.

Humor is an age-old political tradition—Common Sense, the pamphlet that persuaded many Americans to become revolutionaries, was powerful in part because it was often quite funny—but trolling, as a mode of political engagement, is not comedy. It is its antithesis. Nazis of both the past and present have tried to hide in plain sight by characterizing their racism as merely ironic. As The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum wrote in a 2017 essay, jokes deployed as rhetoric played a crucial role in helping Trump win the presidency.

[Read: Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini]

Since then, the trolling has only intensified. But it has also become—in a twist that can read as a cosmic kind of troll—ever more banal. In 2008, The New York Times published “The Trolls Among Us,” a lengthy introduction to a subculture that was then emerging from the dark recesses of the internet. The article is remarkably prescient. It treats trolling as a novelty but frames it as a new moral problem. It parses the cruelty that has become a standard feature of online engagement. But it was also written when trolls’ power was relatively contained. Trolling, today, having slipped the surly bonds of 4chan, is no longer subculture. It is culture.

Many trolls of the early internet hid behind pseudonyms and anonymity; they largely performed for one another rather than for a mass audience. But trolling, as a political style, demands credit for the chaos it sows. Trump, the “troll in chief,” channels that status as brand identity. He will happily lie, his followers know; maybe he’ll lie on their behalf. He will trick his opponents. He will set traps. He will reveal his rivals’ foolishness. He will humiliate them. That old Times article captured one of the abiding ironies of this brave new mode of digital engagement. Trolling may manifest as pranks. But many practitioners insist that their hijinks have ethical ends. Trolls claim to be puncturing pieties, saving the sanctimonious from themselves. They’re righting social wrongs as they subject “elites” to a barrage of corrective humiliations meant to reveal empathy and equality and other such values as nothing more than smug little lies.

Trolling, in that way, can be self-rationalizing, and therefore particularly powerful when its logic comes for our politics. Trump once gave a speech in the rain and then bragged about the sun shining down on his performance. His bravado was propaganda in its most basic and recognizable form—overt, insistent, blunt. It did what propaganda typically will, imposing its preferred reality onto the one that actually exists. But the lie was also so casual, so basic, so fundamentally absurd—even the heavens, Trump says, will do his bidding—that it barely registered as propaganda at all.

[Read: The slop candidate]

Trump came of age as a public figure in the 1980s, long before irony was alleged to have died—a time, on the contrary, when cynicism had become cultural currency. It was a period when earnestness, or at least the appearance of it, was curdling into a liability. Trump has taken the irony-infused assumptions of those years and used them as tools of power. His lies invade and destroy, trampling the truths that stand in their way with casual, cunning brutality. But Trump’s jokes can be similarly, if more subtly, ruinous. A troll reserves the right, always, to be kidding—even about matters of life and death.

That attitude, once it takes hold of the body politic, spreads rapidly. People talk about “irony poisoning” because irony, in the end, has so few antidotes. Greene’s attempt to troll her colleagues as they determined aid to Ukraine led to several more proposed amendments—this time from Jared Moskowitz, a Democratic representative from Florida. One proposed to appoint Greene as “Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.” Another suggested renaming Greene’s office for Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who is widely denigrated for his appeasement of Hitler.

Recommending that a congressional office be called the Neville Chamberlain Room may not be a great joke; it’s even worse, though, as a mode of government. Democracy is an earnest enterprise: It requires us—challenges us—to care. It assumes that people will disagree, about the small things and the big ones. It further assumes that they will settle differences through acts of debate. But cynicism makes argument impossible. “How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?” Nussbaum asked in her 2017 essay, and the question still has no good answer. The old insult comic remains onstage, serving up the same routine to a crowd that cackles and roars. He’ll roast anyone in his path. He’ll soak up the applause. He’ll trust that, in all the levity, people will miss the obvious: When the comedy keeps punching down, anyone can become the butt of the joke.

Trump’s Offensive Spin on Sex

2024-09-20T17:13:00-04:00

Donald Trump has been held liable for rape. He has been accused, by more than 20 women, of sexual misconduct. He has denied each charge. He has also bragged about assaulting women and getting away with it.

One might assume, then, that he would prefer to avoid sexual violence as a campaign issue. But Trump has rarely let facts get in his way—and as the 2024 presidential election draws near, he has been searching, ever more desperately, to expand his inventory of attack lines against Kamala Harris. And so, earlier today, the former president shared a meme on Truth Social: an image, based on a years-old and heavily doctored photo, purporting to show Harris posing next to Sean “Diddy” Combs. “MADAM VICE PRESIDENT,” the meme asks, “HAVE YOU EVER BEEN INVOLVED WITH OR ENGAGED IN ONE OF PUFF DADDIES FREAK OFFS?”

The image lies in the way that doctored images typically do: by blending truth and fakery. (The original photo that the meme falsified, taken in 2001, depicts Harris with the talk-show host Montel Williams and his daughter Ashley. The version that Trump shared features Combs’s face grafted onto Williams’s body.) But the meme’s text is wrong too—in a way that reveals nothing about Harris’s behavior but everything about Trump’s.

[Read: ‘I moved on her very heavily']

“PUFF DADDIES FREAK OFFS” is a reference to a federal indictment unsealed this week accusing Combs of crimes that include sexual abuse, sex trafficking, and, as the Associated Press put it, “shocking acts of violence.” (Combs, having denied many earlier allegations of abuse, pleaded not guilty after being detained earlier this week.) The “freak offs,” as the indictment calls them, were a series of coerced sex acts that Combs allegedly organized, watched, and recorded. They involved “highly orchestrated performances of sexual activity”—with women in Combs’s network and with male sex workers. They also allegedly involved manipulation and bodily harm.

The performances “sometimes lasted multiple days,” the indictment claims. “Combs and the victims,” the filing notes, “typically received IV fluids to recover from the physical exertion and drug use.” And as the events continued, the filing further alleges, Combs choked, shoved, hit, kicked, and threw objects at people. He allegedly dragged people by their hair. The physical injuries took days and sometimes weeks to heal, according to the indictment; the broader effects lasted much longer.

This is what “freak offs” were. This is what Trump was amplifying when he “retruthed” the post asking Harris, in cheeky all caps, whether she had participated in them. Combs pressured people into participating in these events, the filing claims, “by obtaining and distributing narcotics to them, controlling their careers, leveraging his financial support and threatening to cut off the same, and using intimidation and violence.” He taped the sessions, the indictment alleges, using the recordings as “collateral” to ensure participants’ cooperation and silence. Combs also turned participants’ career aspirations against them, the filing claims, promising them opportunities in exchange for their participation; it also asserts that he tried to control their appearance and monitor their health records.

These are criminal allegations of the direst sort: claims of abuse both physical and emotional. They are not funny. They are not fodder for glib social-media posts. Although the allegations against Combs involve sex, they are not, strictly, about sex; they are about abuse. Assault is not sex. Rape is not sex. The meme that Trump shared ignores those distinctions. In sharing it, he revealed not only his shamelessness but also his ignorance. Women have long alleged that Trump doesn’t know the difference between sex and violence. Today, he proved them right.

Look What She Made Him Do

2024-09-16T13:08:01-04:00

The post was sandwiched between a screed about capital-gains taxes and a video clip from a Donald Trump rally. Four words, all-caps: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”

Haters gonna hate (hate, hate, hate, hate), Taylor Swift has observed, and the claim has been validated, now, by an expert. Yesterday morning, Trump made his current feelings about Swift known on Truth Social—an extremely belated reaction, it would seem, to the pop star’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, issued last Tuesday evening. While “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” was not a proportional response, it was a revealing one—because Trump’s anger did not come out of nowhere. It came, instead, from the same place so many of his declarations of hatred do: indignation.

And so, as his fellow Americans were going about their Sundays, he took his revenge. He hates Taylor Swift now, the former president would like you to know. He hates her in all caps. He hates her with an exclamation point.

Swift’s endorsement of Harris might have been unexpected, but it was not, strictly, a surprise. She has made no secret of her political leanings; she has, in fact, starred in a documentary whose entire premise was her unwillingness to keep her political leanings to herself. In the past, Swift has made her feelings known through direct endorsements—of the Tennessee congressional candidates Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper in 2018, of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020—and through blunt commentary. Trump “thinks this is an autocracy,” she said in 2019. Trump spent his presidency “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism,” she said in 2020. She has criticized his attempts to “subvert and destroy our right to vote and vote safely.” In August 2020, Swift said that Trump had “chosen to blatantly cheat and put millions of Americans’ lives at risk in an effort to hold on to power.”

With these, and with her newly announced support for Harris, the artist who sings in poetry made a point of using prose—strident, clear, unable to be misinterpreted. Whether her comments will sway voters is unknown. But Trump loves adulation, and he likely wanted Swift’s endorsement—badly enough to claim her support even when she hadn’t given it: In August, Trump shared a collection of images that included a picture of Swift dressed as Uncle Sam. “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump,” the caption read.

“I accept!” Trump “replied” while sharing the collage.

This was fakery, all the way down—and in her Harris endorsement, Swift referred to the incident, writing that it “conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation.” The images were of a piece with other moments that seemed to suggest Trump’s belief that Swift could be charmed into supporting him. In a book published in June, Trump went on the record praising Swift’s appearance: “I think she’s beautiful—very beautiful! I find her very beautiful.” For a moment, he conceded the reality: “I think she’s liberal,” he told the book’s author. “She probably doesn’t like Trump.” But then: “I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually—unusually beautiful!”

The flattery came after Trump declared, in February, that “I signed and was responsible for the Music Modernization Act for Taylor Swift and all other Musical Artists. Joe Biden didn’t do anything for Taylor, and never will.” He added: “There’s no way she could endorse Crooked Joe Biden, the worst and most corrupt President in the History of our Country, and be disloyal to the man who made her so much money.”

[Read: The Taylor Swift way to defuse a troll]

Beauty and riches—these are the currencies Trump understands. And loyalty leads to, in his world, remuneration. Swift may have spent years making her feelings known—but feelings, Trump knows, can change. He seemed to believe that he actually could win her endorsement, despite her years’ worth of protestations. He seemed to believe that she owed him her support. After all: He had made her money. He had called her beautiful. What else is there? He had initiated the transaction, and he expected to be repaid.

When Swift refused, the former president responded like a jilted boyfriend: broken heart, wounded pride. Look what you made me do. “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” may read primarily as pitiable—a 78-year-old man treating the internet as his personal burn book. But the post also marks a real change. When Swift announced, in 2018, that she would be supporting Bredesen, the Democrat in Tennessee’s senatorial election, Trump was able to laugh about it: “I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, okay?” he said. The old laughter has now curdled into something more personal and petulant—and potentially dangerous. Haters will hate, yes. The question is: to what end?

Kamala Harris’s Most Successful Power Play

2024-09-11T14:37:00-04:00

In the end, her face said it all.

Before Kamala Harris and Donald Trump met in Philadelphia last night, they agreed to rules stipulating that each candidate’s microphone would generally be muted while the other was speaking. The rules were meant to ensure, among other things, equal air time. Predictably, Trump ignored them. He talked out of turn, again and again, forging ahead until ABC’s production staff relented, turning on his mic to let him have his say. As a result, the debate ended with, by one estimate, a five-minute difference in speaking time between the two participants. The vice president spent more than half of the debate quite literally silenced. Nevertheless, she communicated.

Harris is known for her ability to turn onstage reactions into discourse; she did that to great effect as a senator and while debating Vice President Mike Pence in 2020. Last night, when unable to reply to Trump’s claims, she met them instead with a range of expressions: indignation, amusement, perplexity, pity. Trump is a man of many words, but it does not follow that the words he speaks will be coherent, compelling, or true. On the contrary: They might be so unhinged that the only reply they deserve is a look of baffled incredulity. Over the course of the debate, the former president claimed that Democrats favor the execution of newborn babies; that President Joe Biden secretly hates Harris; that immigrants are eating people’s pets.

[Read: What was he even talking about?]

The claims are gaudy fictions—and the debate’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, tried to clarify that fact, maintaining poker faces while dutifully informing viewers that, for example, officials in Springfield, Ohio, have seen no evidence of the alleged pet-eating. Harris’s reactions were fact-checks too. They denied Trump’s assertions the dignity of a check in the first place. They refused to take the former president at his word. They refused to normalize him or entertain his antics. Instead, they turned his claims into silent questions: You … really want people to believe that immigrants are eating puppies?

The pollster Frank Luntz, analyzing the debate on social media last night, suggested that Harris’s reactions to Trump were liabilities. The vice president, he argued, needs to “train her face not to respond,” because the response itself “feeds into a female stereotype and, more importantly, risks offending undecided voters.” This was wrong in every sense. Harris’s many reactions to Trump flipped the gender dynamics to her advantage. Her wordless responses were language by another means, eloquent in all they left unsaid.

[Read: Kamala Harris broke Donald Trump]

But Harris’s expressions were more than memes in the making. They were also distillations of a broader strategy for interacting with an opponent who is capable of saying so much and so little at the same time. Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, once argued that the best way to fight the media is to “flood the zone with shit.” Trump long ago abandoned Bannon, but he has maintained the strategy: The former president floods the zone with words, and this is the source of much of the chaos he has sown. Few people—few institutions—have known quite how to react.

Harris’s silent assessments of Trump restored a bit of order. The Washington Post, analyzing the debate through the body language of each candidate, broke the event down into individual images and moments of reaction: “Harris put her hand to her chin,” “Trump looked straight ahead,” “Harris used her eyes.” The snippets were blunt to the point of absurdity, but this was the idea. In a debate as in everything else, the reactions matter. They reveal a lot about who someone is—and isn’t.

Luntz’s analysis, wrong in so many ways, was correct in one: It was true that the split screen, for Harris, was also a tightrope. The vice president had to react without seeming reactive. She couldn’t seem angry. She couldn’t seem too flippant or too indignant. While TV viewers had a variety of reactions available to them (face-palms, high-fives, fetal positions), the woman onstage had limited possibilities. But she used them to her advantage. If her strategy was to goad her opponent into revealing who he is, she succeeded.

[Read: Kamala Harris is the first post-Trump candidate]

And her success was written on his face. Trump’s expression, at the debate’s outset, was frozen into a stoic glare. As Harris baited him, though—and as he repeatedly took the bait she offered—his composure frayed. He began grimacing and puckering and glaring. He seemed, at several moments, to lose control of his emotions. He seemed, indeed, to become a little hysterical—and appeared far from presidential.

Any jury, a good lawyer knows, observes more than the witness on the stand. They watch everything in the courtroom, gathering their evidence and making assessments. Last night, Harris gave Americans something to see. She let Trump talk. And then she widened her eyes at the spectacle.

What Tucker Carlson’s Spin on World War II Really Says

2024-09-05T13:31:00-04:00

In the movie The History Boys, based on Alan Bennett’s play, a student wins a scholarship to Oxford with the help of an argument he makes on an entrance exam: Hitler, he claims, was “much misunderstood.” As fiction, this is mordant comedy—a mockery of the particular type of arrogance required to twist the tragedies of the Holocaust into personal gain. But now the satire has come for our news cycle.

In a long and meandering interview on Tucker Carlson’s show this week, the podcaster Darryl Cooper offered musings about the “mythology”—the heroes, the villains, the plot, the moral stakes—of World War II. In his version, however, it is Winston Churchill who has been much misunderstood. Churchill, Cooper told Carlson, with dramatic flair, “was the chief villain of the Second World War.”

The claim is wrong, in every sense. The gravity of its error was highlighted by a resonant coincidence: Around the time the interview was posted, Alternative for Germany became the first far-right party to win a German state election since the Nazi era. The past is never dead, the old line goes; it is not even past. But Cooper and his enthusiastic host, these history boys with microphones, were not talking about history—not really. They were talking about themselves. They were treating World War II as a branding exercise. And this was, though not surprising in the context of Carlson’s show, a new nadir.

[Read: Tucker Carlson’s manufactured America]

Consensus reality relies on consensus history. In this time of fragile facts, one point most people have been able to agree on is that Hitler was a bad guy. But the time for consensus is over, Cooper implied. Instead, as a phrase in the title of his episode summed things up: “Winston Churchill Ruined Europe.”

What becomes clear during the interview, as Cooper makes his convoluted case (“maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic,” he allows at one point), is that the true villains of his story are not, in the end, Hitler or Churchill, Axis or Allies. Instead, they are the culture warriors of the present: the woke, the mobs, the ruling class—the people who will be offended by claims such as “Winston Churchill Ruined Europe.” And the true heroes, consequently, are those who dare to say the unsayable. “There are just certain things you’re not allowed to question,” Cooper told Carlson, as he questioned the “myths” of World War II. (“Literally, it’s a crime to ask questions?” Carlson replied, before answering his own query: “Yes.”) One might not go to jail for the myth-busting, Cooper allowed; still, “you might have your life ruined and lose your job.” (“You might absolutely go to jail in this country,” Carlson countered.)

[Read: American cynicism has reached a breaking point]

If your aim is to offer a clever reading of history rather than a true one, World War II will serve you well: Its excessive documentation is fertile ground, giving you many cherries to pick. It will provide the fodder you need to suggest that the Holocaust was, essentially, an unfortunate accident. And then it will allow you, if you choose, to treat the suffering of the people of the past as evidence for your own victimhood. You can take the accepted narrative and rewrite it.

In other contexts, Cooper and Carlson might have decried such an approach—an archly postmodern attitude in which all facts are relative, all orthodoxies suspect. But history boys need their straw men. And Churchill was the war’s true villain is less an argument than a provocation: a contention that, when World War II is mapped onto Hallin’s spheres, Hitler’s villainy should be relocated to the realm of legitimate controversy. It should be moved there because it is one of those things that you are not allowed to question. “Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” Carlson’s show announced, in promoting the interview. “His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two.”

“Forbidden”—the stuff of perfumes, of clothing, of heterodox educational institutions—makes sense as branding. The forbidden is exotic. The forbidden is brave. The forbidden can transform history boys into men. And it can do all that from the comfort of one’s personal podcast studio.

[Read: Tucker Carlson’s final moments on Fox were as dangerous as they were absurd]

History, from such a distance, is easy. Carlson and Cooper can talk about being arrested for questioning orthodoxies with no fear of that actually happening. They can traffic in the mystique of the “forbidden” with no reference to the many things—books, ideas, people—that bear the real risk of being banned. They are free to speak their mind. They are free to do so, indeed, because of the actions of people who did not have the luxury of treating the Holocaust as a thought exercise. The influencers can, if they choose, interpret others’ indignation as their victory. They can brag that they have “weakened the narrative” about World War II. They can choose not to wonder what their questioning really amounts to. “History nowadays is not a matter of conviction,” a teacher in The History Boys announces. “It’s a performance. It’s entertainment.” His students still have time to age out of such arrogance, the film implies. Or at least they should.