Charles de Gaulle began his war memoirs with this sentence: “All my life I have had a certain idea about France.” Well, all my life I have had a certain idea about America. I have thought of America as a deeply flawed nation that is nonetheless a force for tremendous good in the world. From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and beyond, Americans fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people across Africa from HIV and AIDS. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions.
Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my very identity was built on this faith in my country’s goodness—on the idea that we Americans are partners in a grand and heroic enterprise, that our daily lives are ennobled by service to that cause. Since January 20, as I have watched America behave vilely—toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe, toward the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office—I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.
George Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing. He understood that it is possible for people to seek power without having any vision of the good. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” an apparatchik says in 1984. “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.” How is power demonstrated? By making others suffer. Orwell’s character continues: “Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.”
Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s budget director, sounds like he walked straight out of 1984. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” he said of federal workers, speaking at an event in 2023. “We want to put them in trauma.”
Since coming back to the White House, Trump has caused suffering among Ukrainians, suffering among immigrants who have lived here for decades, suffering among some of the best people I know. Many of my friends in Washington are evangelical Christians who found their vocation in public service—fighting sex trafficking, serving the world’s poor, protecting America from foreign threats, doing biomedical research to cure disease. They are trying to live lives consistent with the gospel of mercy and love. Trump has devastated their work. He isn’t just declaring war on “wokeness”; he’s declaring war on Christian service—on any kind of service, really.
If there is an underlying philosophy driving Trump, it is this: Morality is for suckers. The strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must. This is the logic of bullies everywhere. And if there is a consistent strategy, it is this: Day after day, the administration works to create a world where ruthless people can thrive. That means destroying any institution or arrangement that might check the strongman’s power. The rule of law, domestic or international, restrains power, so it must be eviscerated. Inspectors general, judge advocate general officers, oversight mechanisms, and watchdog agencies are a potential restraint on power, so they must be fired or neutered. The truth itself is a restraint on power, so it must be abandoned. Lying becomes the language of the state.
Trump’s first term was a precondition for his second. His first term gradually eroded norms and acclimatized America to a new sort of regime. This laid the groundwork for his second term, in which he’s making the globe a playground for gangsters.
We used to live in a world where ideologies clashed, but ideologies don’t seem to matter anymore. The strongman understanding of power is on the march. Power is like money: the more the better. Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the rest of the world’s authoritarians are forming an axis of ruthlessness before our eyes. Trumpism has become a form of nihilism that is devouring everything in its path.
The pathetic thing is that I didn’t see this coming even though I’ve been living around these people my whole adult life. I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, when I worked in turn at National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page. There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and the reactionaries. We conservatives earnestly read Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke. The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative—they were anti-left. I have come to appreciate that this is an important difference.
I should have understood this much sooner, because the reactionaries had revealed their true character as far back as January 1986. A group of progressive students at Dartmouth had erected a shantytown on campus to protest apartheid. One night, a group of 12 students, most of them associated with the right-wing Dartmouth Review, descended on the shanties with sledgehammers and smashed them down.
Even then I was appalled. Apartheid was evil, and worth opposing. A nighttime raid with sledgehammers seemed more Gestapo than Burkean. But conservative intellectuals didn’t take this seriously enough. In large part, I think this was because we looked down on the Dartmouth Review mafia, whose members had included Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. Their intellectual standards were so obviously third-rate. I don’t know how to put this politely, but they just seemed creepy—nakedly ambitious in a way that I thought would destroy them in the end.
Instead, history has smiled on them. A prominent publisher of right-wing authors once told me that the way to sell conservative books is not to write a good book—it’s to write a book that will offend the left, thereby causing the reactionaries to rally to your side and buy it. That led to books with titles such as The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, and to Ann Coulter’s entire career. Owning the libs became a lucrative strategy.
Of course, the left made it easy for them. The left really did purge conservatives from universities and other cultural power centers. The left really did valorize a “meritocratic” caste system that privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class. The left really did pontificate to their unenlightened moral inferiors on everything from gender to the environment. The left really did create a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent. If you tell half the country that their voices don’t matter, then the voiceless are going to flip over the table.
But although Trump may have campaigned as a MAGA populist, leveraging this working-class resentment to gain power, he governs as a Palm Beach elitist. Trump and Elon Musk are billionaires who went to the University of Pennsylvania. J. D. Vance went to Yale Law School. Pete Hegseth went to Princeton and Harvard. Vivek Ramaswamy went to Yale and Harvard. Stephen Miller went to Duke. Ted Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard. Many of Musk’s DOGE workers, according to The New York Times, come from elite institutions—Harvard, Princeton, Morgan Stanley, McKinsey, Wharton. These are the Vineyard Vines nihilists, the spiritual descendants of the elite bad boys at the Dartmouth Review. This political moment isn’t populists versus elitists; it is, as I’ve written before, like a civil war in a prep school where the sleazy rich kids are taking on the pretentious rich kids.
The MAGA elite rode to power on working-class votes, but—trust me, I know some of them—they don’t care about the working class. Trump and his crew could have taken office with actual plans to make life better for working-class Americans. An administration that cared about the working class would seek to address its problems, such as the fact that the poorest Americans die an average of 10 to 15 years younger than their higher-income counterparts, or that by sixth grade, many of the children in the poorest school districts have fallen four grade levels behind those in the richest. An administration that cared about these people would have offered a bipartisan industrial policy to create working-class jobs.
These faux populists have no interest in that. Instead of helping workers, they focus on civil war with their left-wing fellow elites. During Trump’s first months in office, one of their highest priorities has been to destroy the places where they think liberal elites work—the scientific community, the foreign-aid community, the Kennedy Center, the Department of Education, universities.
It turns out that when you mix narcissism and nihilism, you create an acid that corrodes every belief system it touches.
This Trumpian cocktail has eaten away at Christianity, a faith oriented around the marginalized. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The poor are closer to God than the rich. Again and again, Jesus explicitly renounced worldly power.
But if Trumpism has a central tenet, it is untrammeled lust for worldly power. In Trumpian circles, many people ostentatiously identify as Christians but don’t talk about Jesus very much; they have crosses on their chest but Nietzsche in their heart—or, to be more precise, a high-school sophomore’s version of Nietzsche.
To Nietzsche, all of those Christian pieties about justice, peace, love, and civility are constraints that the weak erect to emasculate the strong. In this view, Nietzscheanism is a morality for winners. It worships the pagan virtues: power, courage, glory, will, self-assertion. The Nietzschean Übermenschen—which Trump and Musk clearly believe themselves to be—offer the promise of domination over those sick sentimentalists who practice compassion.
Trumpian nihilism has eviscerated conservatism. The people in this administration are not conservatives. They are the opposite of conservatives. Conservatives once believed in steady but incremental reform; Elon Musk believes in rash and instantaneous disruption. Conservatives once believed that moral norms restrain and civilize us, habituating us to virtue; Trumpism trashes moral norms in every direction, riding forward on a tide of adultery, abuse, cruelty, immaturity, grift, and corruption. Conservatives once believed in constitutional government and the Madisonian separation of powers; Trump bulldozes checks and balances, declaiming on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Reagan promoted democracy abroad because he thought it the political system most consistent with human dignity; the Trump administration couldn’t care less about promoting democracy—or about human dignity.
How does this end? Will anyone on the right finally stand up to the Trumpian onslaught? Will our institutions withstand the nihilist assault? Is America on the verge of ruin?
In February, about a month into Trump’s second term, I spoke at a gathering of conservatives in London called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Some of the speakers were pure populist (Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Johnson, and Nigel Farage). But others were center-right or not neatly ideological (Niall Ferguson, Bishop Robert Barron, and my Atlantic colleague Arthur C. Brooks).
In some ways, it was like the conservative conferences I’ve been attending for decades. I listened to a woman from Senegal talking about trying to make her country’s culture more entrepreneurial. I met the head of a charter school in the Bronx that focuses on character formation. But in other ways, this conference was startlingly different.
In my own talk, I sympathized with the populist critique of what has gone wrong in Western societies. But I shared with the audience my dark view of President Trump. Unsurprisingly, a large segment of the audience booed vigorously. One man screamed that I was a traitor and stormed out. But many other people cheered. Even in conservative precincts infected by reactionary MAGA-ism, some people are evidently tired of Trumpian brutality.
As the conference went on, I noticed a contest of metaphors. The true conservatives used metaphors of growth or spiritual recovery. Society is an organism that needs healing, or it is a social fabric that needs to be rewoven. A poet named Joshua Luke Smith said we needed to be the seeds of regrowth, to plant the trees for future generations. His incantation was beatitudinal: “Remember the poor. Remember the poor.”
But others relied on military metaphors. We are in the midst of civilizational war. “They”—the wokesters, the radical Muslims, the left—are destroying our culture. There were allusions to the final epochal battles in The Lord of the Rings. The implication was that Sauron is leading his Orc hordes to destroy us. We are the heroic remnant. We must crush or be crushed.
The warriors tend to think people like me are soft and naive. I tend to think they are catastrophizing narcissists. When I look at Trump acolytes, I see a swarm of Neville Chamberlains who think they’re Winston Churchill.
I understand the seductive power of a demagogue who tells you that the people who look down on you are evil. I understand the seductive power of being told that your civilization is on the verge of total collapse, and that everything around you is degeneracy and ruin. This message gives you a kind of terrifying thrill: The stakes are apocalyptic. Your life has meaning and urgency. Everything is broken; let’s burn it all down.
I understand why people who feel alienated would want to follow the leader who speaks about domination and combat, not the one who speaks about healing and cooperation. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve read Edmund Burke or the Gospel of Matthew—it’s still tempting to throw away all of your beliefs to support the leader who promises to be “your retribution.”
America may well enter a period of democratic decay and international isolation. It takes decades to develop strong alliances, and to build the structures and customs of democracy—and only weeks to decimate them, as we’ve now seen. And yet I find myself confident that America will survive this crisis. Many nations, including our own, have gone through worse and bloodier crises and recovered. In Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis, the historian and scientist Jared Diamond provides case studies—Japan in the late 19th century, Finland and Germany after World War II, Indonesia after the 1960s, Chile and Australia during and after the ’70s—of countries that came back stronger after crisis, collapse, or defeat. To these examples, I’d add Britain in the 1830s and ’40s, and the 1980s, and South Korea in the 1980s. Some of these countries (such as Japan) endured war; others (Chile) endured mass torture and “disappearances”; still others (Britain and Australia) endured social decay and national decline. All of them eventually healed and came back.
America itself has already been through numerous periods of rupture and repair. Some people think we’re living through a period of unprecedented tumult, but the Civil War and the Great Depression were much worse. So were the late 1960s—assassinations, riots, a failed war, surging crime rates, a society coming apart. From January 1969 until April 1970, there were 4,330 bombings in the U.S., or about nine a day. But by the 1980s and ’90s—after getting through Watergate, stagflation, and the Carter-era “malaise” of the ’70s—we had recovered. As brutal and disruptive as the tumult of the late 1960s was, it helped the country shake off some of its persistent racism and sexism, and made possible a freer and more individualistic ethos.
But the most salient historical parallel might be the America of the 1830s. Andrew Jackson is the American president who most resembles Trump—power-hungry, rash, narcissistic, driven by animosity. He was known by his opponents as “King Andrew” for his expansions of executive power. “The man we have made our President has made himself our despot, and the Constitution now lies a heap of ruins at his feet,” Senator Asher Robbins of Rhode Island said. “When the way to his object lies through the Constitution, the Constitution has not the strength of a cobweb to restrain him from breaking through it.” Jackson brazenly defied the Supreme Court on a ruling about Cherokee Nation territory (a defiance, it should be noted, that Vice President Vance has explicitly endorsed). “Though we live under the form of a republic,” Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story wrote, “we are in fact under the absolute rule of a single man.”
But Jackson made the classic mistake of the populist: He overreached. Fueled by personal hostility toward elites, he destroyed the Second Bank of the United States, an early precursor to the Federal Reserve System, and helped spark an economic depression that ruined the administration of his chosen successor, Martin Van Buren.
In response to Jackson, the Whig Party arose in the 1830s to create a new political and social order. Devoutly anti-authoritarian, the Whigs were a cultural, civic, and political force all at once. They emphasized both traditional morality and progressive improvements. They agitated for prison reform and for keeping the Sabbath, for more women’s participation in politics and for a strong military, for government-funded public schools and for pro-business government policies. They were opposed to Jackson’s monstrous Indian Removal Act, and to the Democratic Party’s reactionary, white-supremacist social vision. Whereas Jacksonian Democrats emphasized negative liberty—get your hands off me—the Whigs, who would turn into the early Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, emphasized positive liberty, empowering Americans to live bigger, better lives with things such as expanded economic credit, free public education, and stronger legal protections including due process and property rights.
Though we’ve come to call the early-to-mid-19th century the Age of Jackson, the historian Daniel Walker Howe notes that it was not Jackson but the Whigs who created the America we know today. “As economic modernizers, as supporters of strong national government, and as humanitarians more receptive than their rivals to talent regardless of race and gender,” Howe writes, the Whigs “facilitated the transformation of the United States from a collection of parochial agricultural communities into a cosmopolitan nation integrated by commerce, industry, information, and voluntary associations as well as by political ties.” Looking back, Howe concludes, we can see that even though they were not the dominant party of their time, the Whigs “were the party of America’s future.” To begin its recovery from Trumpism, America needs its next Whig moment.
Yes, we have reached a point of traumatic rupture. A demagogue has come to power and is ripping everything down. But what’s likely to happen is that the demagogue will start making mistakes, because incompetence is built into the nihilistic project. Nihilists can only destroy, not build. Authoritarian nihilism is inherently stupid. I don’t mean that Trumpists have low IQs. I mean they do things that run directly against their own interests. They are pathologically self-destructive. When you create an administration in which one man has all the power and everybody else has to flatter his voracious ego, stupidity results. Authoritarians are also morally stupid. Humility, prudence, and honesty are not just nice virtues to have—they are practical tools that produce good outcomes. When you replace them with greed, lust, hypocrisy, and dishonesty, terrible things happen.
The DOGE children are doubtless brilliant in certain ways, but they know as much about government as I know about rocketry. They announced an $8 billion cut to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement contract—though if they had read their own documents correctly, they would have realized that the cut was less than $8 million. They eliminated workers from the National Nuclear Security Administration, apparently without realizing that this agency controls nuclear security, and had to undo some of those cuts shortly thereafter. Trump seems to be trying to give a bunch of Sam Bankman-Frieds access to America’s nuclear arsenal and IRS records. What could go wrong?
When Trump creates an unnecessary crisis, it’s unlikely to be a small one. The proverbial “adults in the room” who contained crises in Trump’s first term are gone. Whatever the second-term crisis—runaway inflation? a global trade war? a cratered economy and plummeting stock market? an out-of-control conflict in China? botched pandemic management? a true hijacking of the Constitution precipitated by defiance of the courts?—it is likely to crater his support and shift historical momentum.
But although Trumpism’s collapse is a necessary condition for national recovery, it is not a sufficient one. Its demise must be followed by the hard work necessary to achieve true civic and political renewal.
Progress is not always a smooth or merry ride. For a few decades, nations live according to one paradigm. Then it stops working and gets destroyed. When the time comes to build a new paradigm, progressives talk about economic redistribution; conservatives talk about cultural and civic repair. History shows that you need both: Recovery from national crisis demands comprehensive reinvention at all levels of society. If you look back across the centuries, you find that this process requires several interconnected efforts.
First, a national shift in values. In the late 19th century, for example, as the country went through the wrenching process of industrialization, America was traumatized by severe recessions and mass urban poverty. In response, social Darwinism gave way to the social-gospel movement. Social Darwinism, associated with thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, valorized survival of the fittest and claimed that the poor are poor because of inferior abilities. The social-gospel movement, associated with theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch, emphasized the systemic causes of poverty, including the Gilded Age’s concentration of corporate power. By the early 20th century, most mainline Protestant denominations had signed on to the Social Creed of the Churches, which called for, among other things, the abolition of child labor and the creation of disability insurance.
Second, nations that hang together through crisis have a strong national identity—they return to their roots. They have a leader who replaces the amoralism of the nihilists, or, say, the immorality of slavery, with a strong redefinition of the nation’s moral mission, the way Lincoln redefined America at Gettysburg.
Third, a civic renaissance. After the social gospel took root, Americans in the 1890s and early 1900s launched and participated in a series of social movements and civic organizations: United Way, the NAACP, the Sierra Club, the settlement-house movement, the American Legion.
Fourth, a national reassessment. As Jared Diamond notes, nations that turn around don’t catastrophize. Rather, they develop a clear-eyed view of what’s working and not working, and they pursue careful, selective change. According to Diamond’s research, the leaders of successful reform movements also take responsibility for their part in the crisis. For instance, Germany’s leaders accepted responsibility for the country’s Nazi past; Finland’s leaders took responsibility for an unrealistic foreign policy before World War II, when they had to deal with a looming Soviet Union on their border; and Australia’s leaders took responsibility in the 1970s for a political culture and foreign policy that had become overly dependent on Britain.
Fifth, a surge of political reform. In 1830s and ’40s Britain—racked by social chaos, bank failures, a severe depression, riots, and crushing wealth inequality—Prime Minister Robert Peel, a leader of great moral rectitude, built the modern police force, reduced tariffs, pushed railway legislation that literally laid the tracks for British industrialization, and helped pass the Factory Act of 1844, which regulated workplaces. In early-20th-century America, Progressives produced a comparable flurry of effective reforms that pulled the country out of its industrialization crisis.
Part of political reform is an expansion of the circle of power. What that would require in America today is, among other things, a broad effort to include working-class and conservative voices in what have traditionally been cultural bastions of elite progressivism—universities, the nonprofit sector, the civil service, the mainstream media.
Finally, economic expansion. Economic growth can salve many wounds. Pursuing a so-called abundance agenda—a set of policies aimed at reducing government regulation and increasing investment in innovation, and expanding the supply of housing, energy, and health care—is the most promising way to achieve that expansion.
in the long term, Trumpism is doomed. Power without prudence and humility invariably fails. Nations, like people, change not when times are good but in response to pain. At a moment when Trumpism seems to be devouring everything, the temptation is to believe that this time is different.
But history doesn’t stop moving. Even now, as I travel around the country, I see the forces of repair gathering in neighborhoods and communities. If you’re part of an organization that builds trust across class, you’re fighting Trumpism. If you’re a Democrat jettisoning insular faculty-lounge progressivism in favor of a Whig-like working-class abundance agenda, you’re fighting Trumpism. If you are standing up for a moral code of tolerance and pluralism that can hold America together, you’re fighting Trumpism.
Over time, changes in values lead to changes in relationships, which lead to changes in civic life, which eventually lead to changes in policy and then in the general trajectory of the nation. It starts slow, but as the Book of Job says, the sparks will fly upward.
This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “Everything We Once Believed In.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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In America, the chaotic first few months of Donald Trump’s term have featured roiling stock markets, mass deportations, and a Tesla showroom on the White House lawn. But if you look north, it has unified Canadians against a common threat: a country once considered a friend.
In a bewildering reversal of a close allyship that’s lasted for more than a century, Trump recently started a hot-and-cold trade war that has so far produced 25 percent tariffs on many of Canada’s goods. Canada has imposed retaliatory tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. imports, and announced yesterday that more are set to go in effect in response to Trump’s latest auto levy. In the meantime, Trump keeps waving around the threat of annexation. He has repeatedly suggested that Canada become America’s “51st state” and, according to The New York Times, told then–Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in early February that he considers the 1908 treaty delineating the Canada-U.S. border to be invalid. Many Canadians have responded in kind, sending a clear message to the Trump administration by hitting America where it hurts: the economy.
Now is “the time to choose Canada,” Trudeau said in February. “It might mean opting for Canadian rye over Kentucky bourbon, or forgoing Florida orange juice altogether.” The “Buy Canadian” movement is gaining ground; Canada is America’s top export market, and 63 percent of Canadians are actively looking for Canadian-made products when they shop, according to a poll from February (though enthusiasm for the movement varies based on class and age). Some stores are adding Made in Canada labels to products—one liquor store in Vancouver posted Buy Canadian Instead signs on empty American-whiskey shelves—and Canadian grocers are reporting that domestic-product sales have recently increased by up to 10 percent. Canadians make up the largest group of international visitors to the U.S., but Canadian airline bookings for U.S. destinations have reportedly dropped more than 70 percent for the spring and summer, according to one industry monitor. The U.S. Travel Association calculates that a 10 percent annual decline in Canadian travelers could amount to more than $2.1 billion in spending losses for America.
Figuring out how to deal with Trump’s recent attacks is the top issue for some Canadian voters ahead of the April 28 federal election, ranking even higher than the economy. Conservative and Liberal party platforms prominently feature their plans for how to rebuild Canada with reduced dependence on America. “The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said last week. Across party and provincial lines, the path is clear: Canada wants to Trump-proof itself and America-proof the future.
On the other side of the border, Americans who oppose Trump have struggled to come up with a unified response to his presidency. In part because of the speed and scale of his directives, it’s been hard to develop a protest message or strategy that is as ubiquitous as the “Buy Canadian” movement. Since January 22, the number of street protests in the U.S. has more than doubled compared with the same period at the start of Trump’s first presidency—but they also tend to be smaller in scale, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium. Jeremy Pressman, a co-director of the organization, told me that disorientation could be a factor affecting protests. Since taking office, Trump has signed off on a flurry of actions that empower ICE to detain and deport peoplewithout due process, pave the way for Elon Musk’s shadow presidency, gut the federal government, and grant mass pardons for January 6ers (while also floating the idea of compensating them for their prison time). What should the next protest focus on when so much of American life is under attack?
That’s not to say that larger-scale action has been absent in America. The People’s March took place in D.C., two days before Trump’s second inauguration, to “help participants find a political home.” Thousands joined, but it ultimately saw far fewer people than the Women’s March, eight years prior. Pressman noted that lately, more people have shown interest in economic boycotts of companies that support Trump or the administration’s anti-DEI agenda, including Amazon, Target, and Tesla. Republican representatives are getting shouted down in local town halls (Democrats, too, for their inaction), and protesters are demonstrating at Tesla facilities across the country. A bright spot has been the national “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, headlined by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which has drawn more than 100,000 attendees over the past month.
Protesters also face an environment especially hostile to dissent. When Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist on a green card, was arrested in New York last month, the government did not provide evidence of illegal activity. And when Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student who co-authored an op-ed urging her university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” had her visa revoked without her knowledge and was confronted by six masked federal agents last week, the Department of Homeland Security stated vaguely that she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” Their stories are a warning from the Trump administration: Defiance can come at a steep price.
Of course, protests outside the U.S. are bound to look much different from those in a country contending with its own leadership. But Canada’s situation is a notable point of contrast, because the sentiment of citizens is being echoed and acted on by their representatives. Even if America’s anti-Trump protests pick up more speed, a successful movement requires those in power to be willing and able to harness that energy. Traditionally, two important avenues for such action run through Congress and the courts. When Trump signed an executive order in 2017 banning travel to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries, thousands of people flooded airport terminals in protest. Civil-liberties groups took notice and filed suits in quick succession to block the order; the watered-down version of the ban, upheld by the Supreme Court more than a year later, was a pale imitation of the original.
Things are different this time. “Two months into Trump’s second term, fear is taking hold across broad cross sections of American society,” my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker wrote last week. Trump and his allies are openly calling for the impeachment of federal judges who push back on his orders, and high-powered law firms are falling like dominoes as they capitulate to the administration’s demands. Half of Congress is beholden to the president; the other half is dogged by historically low favorability polling. Whereas Canadian leaders of all political stripes are calling for their constituents to boycott American goods, America’s only opposition party is scrambling to cobble together a coherent strategy. Democratic Senator Cory Booker, who delivered a record-breaking 25-hour speech on the Senate floor this week, issued a wake-up call to his fellow senators: “Generations from now will look back at this moment and have a single question: Where were you?”
Winning more blue congressional seats in the 2026 midterms is one way to loosen Trump’s grip on the federal government, but those are more than a year away. “The only way to win is people power,” Jonathan V. Last, the editor of The Bulwark, wrote last week; the Democratic Party “will have to be pushed into fighting by a mass popular movement.” “Hands Off!” protests against Trump and DOGE will take place around the country tomorrow, with a large march planned in Washington. Thousands have rallied to oppose the detainment of Öztürk and Khalil. And the sweeping “Liberation Day” tariff announcements have already ramped up outrage over potentially devastating price increases. Many Americans still have an appetite for dissent. But whereas the Trump presidency has cast into sharp relief Canada’s national identity, it has had the opposite effect domestically. The challenge for Trump’s detractors will be figuring out how to take a fractured coalition and rebuild.
Over the past decade or so, an influential set of female novelists has been circling a shared question: Given how often women are forced to understand themselves as fundamentally in relation to others (most commonly a child and/or a partner, but also parents, extended family, friends), is it possible for a woman to have an authentic, independent self? If a female narrator is extracted from her core relational ties, what kind of consciousness is left?
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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Annie Joy Williams, an assistant editor who has written about the end of Hooters and the Republican leaders who once thought January 6 was “tragic.”
Annie Joy enjoys listening to Michael Martin Murphey with her father, recommends watching Vengeance for some proper honey-butter-chicken-biscuit appreciation, and is a proud Alex Cooper apologist.
But first, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
A musical artist who means a lot to me: Michael Martin Murphey. I have to thank my father for introducing me to him. My father was a pilot, so he was constantly traveling when I was growing up outside of Nashville. When he was in town, it was a special treat for me and my sisters to get picked up in his GMC truck, which was equipped with crank windows and decorated with enough bumper stickers to cause some serious fights with my mom.
There was always a Michael Martin Murphey tape in the cassette player. His song “Wildfire” brought my dad to tears. My personal favorites were “Vanishing Breed” and “Children of the Wild World.” When he played “Pilgrims on the Way,” my dad would slap his Wrangler jeans in time with the lyric “The cowboy slaps the dust away.” Some combination of hay, dirt, and dust would fly into the air (he moonlighted as a farmer), and I thought it was hilarious. He and I went on a trip to Montana this past winter, and Murphey was once again our soundtrack, for the first time in about 15 years. We both cried as we looked out the window.
My favorite movies: La La Land, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, and (500) Days of Summer are all top films for me. A less widely known film that I just adore is B. J. Novak’s Vengeance. I find that many films about the South are offensive to those of us who hail from there. And I get it, it’s easy to make southerners the butt of the joke—we really tee it up for people sometimes. Rarely do I find a film that adequately captures both the good and the bad of a place so storied and complex. Novak spent substantial time in West Texas before filming to better understand its people. “I want this to be Texans’ favorite movie,” he told Texas Monthly.
The film is hilarious. I saw it in D.C. with a group of friends I once lived with in Texas, and we kept saying how its portrayal of the North-South disconnect is spot-on. Plus, it pays proper homage to the honey-butter chicken biscuit, which I appreciate. [Related:The podcast spreading the love of cowboy culture]
The last museum or gallery show that I loved: The Alvin Ailey exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City. As a dance teacher, I’ve always admired the contributions Ailey made to modern dance. He was a gay Black man from rural Texas who used choreography as a form of protest during the civil-rights movement. He eventually became a household name in New York, showcasing routines inspired by the river baptisms and gospel music of his Texas childhood. My favorite part of the exhibit was the collection of notes he wrote to himself, a mix of manifestos and eight-count choreography. I visited the exhibit with my mother, who sacrificed a lot to put me through dance classes and endless competitions, so experiencing that together was sweet.
A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: I’m more of a quiet-song person myself, so I’ll give you three: “Boyhood,” by the Japanese House; “Bathroom Light,” by Mt. Joy; and “Into the Mystic,” by Van Morrison.
A loud song that I love is “Love It if We Made It,” by the 1975. Also, “Yoü and I,” by Lady Gaga. Makes me wish I was from Nebraska.
A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: It wasn’t so much a cultural product as it was a cultural moment, but I’d like to think I grew up in the era of peak Disney Channel. My sisters are firmly Millennials, so I got to bear witness to the greats of their generation, such as Lizzie McGuire and Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, as well as those of my generation—Hannah Montana, The Cheetah Girls, and, perhaps most notably, Disney Channel Games. I might have been too cool to love this stuff by my teenage years, but I’ve recently returned to these classics. My best friend and I discovered a Disney Channel Original Hits dance class at a studio in Brooklyn. We’ve gotten really close with the instructor, and it’s quickly become the highlight of our week. Now, the concealer lips, ultra-thin eyebrows, and extreme side parts from that era? We can leave those in 2005. [Related:What tween TV teaches kids]
An online creator whom I’m a fan of: Look, say what you will, but Alex Cooper is a mastermind. I used to be a skeptic. The first time I listened to Call Her Daddy, I was stunned. It was 2019, and she was still tag-teaming the podcast with Sofia Franklyn. The episode was truly one of the most vulgar things I’d ever heard. Now I know she was scheming from the start. Cooper grabbed the world’s attention through her sex-forward crassness, and right when the public was ready to cast her out as a buxom blonde with little more to her than sex tricks and a pretty face, she showed her smarts. In the new, sans-Franklyn version of her show, she often gets rare sit-downs with pop-culture phenomenons, political candidates, and renowned actors. And they actually share revealing things with her because they’re thinking: This girl was just detailing her sex life in front of the whole world—she can’t judge me. Her unconventional openness invites openness from anyone sitting across from her. Not every interview is groundbreaking, but at least she’s getting every interview. Is her approach my style? Maybe not, but I’m a proud Alex Cooper apologist.
A poem that I return to: I’d like to think that I’m above bias here, but my sister is a poet, and I have spent my life trying to be half the writer she is. I always come back to this one poem she wrote about our experience as girls in church. Now we watch our nieces grow up and discover God.
God was not a girl. The earth he made
with apples seeds, the heavens with half-priced glitter.
We danced, and God smiled.
Drop the crayon,
take a tampon.
Sundays are for silver crosses
and I’m sorry, prayer groups circling
rumors. God is purity vow and camp deposit.
God is a one-piece swimsuit.
God is not a girl. Our hips he made
with hunger, our tongues with minty silence.
We kneel, and God tells us to smile.
The Week Ahead
Warfare, a film based on the co-director Ray Mendoza’s experiences during the Iraq War (in theaters Friday)
Authority, an essay collection by the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu (out Tuesday)
Essay
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: solarseven / Getty.
Why You Should Work Like It’s the ’90s
By Chris Moody
One Friday afternoon 10 years ago, Andrew Heaton, then a cable-news writer, joined his colleagues for a meeting. The show’s producer asked the staff to keep an eye on their email over the weekend in case they needed to cover a breaking news event. No one seemed to mind—working full days in person while remaining on call in the evening and on weekends has always been a standard practice in the news business—but Heaton had a simple request.
He said he would be happy to go in but asked if his boss could call him on the phone instead of emailing him. He didn’t want to spend his time off continually monitoring his inbox for a message that might not even come …
Followers of the Layene Sufi Order, dressed in white, gather to perform the Eid al-Fitr prayer at the tomb of Seydina Limamou Lahi, the founder of the Layene Order. (Cem Ozdel / Anadolu / Getty)
Take a look at these photos of the week, showing Eid al-Fitr celebrations around the world, a new volcanic eruption in Iceland, the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in Myanmar, unrest at a town hall in Indiana, and more.
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One evening earlier this year, I came downstairs after putting our 4-year-old daughter to bed to find my husband looking at a series of maps of the United States, each showing possible futures given different climate-change projections. In one, my home states of Oklahoma and Nebraska succumb to intense heat; growing crops gets harder. In another, wildfires seem to consume the West. In the Northeast, sea levels rise. Everywhere, average temperatures skyrocket. In Vermont, where I now live, the maps imply that we will still have precious rainfall—and that catastrophic floods will continue.
It’s not that I don’t care about these predictions of doom. But I admit that my initial response—as the United States has (again) moved to exit the Paris climate agreement, as the protections of the Endangered Species Act are threatened, as the way is cleared for drilling in the Arctic—is to succumb to the temptation of apathy. It’s all too much, I think. I find myself bewildered over how best to respond to these crises—and how to reconcile our daughter, peacefully asleep upstairs, with a burning world that is widely expected to keep burning.
My day-to-day parenting to-do list often goes something like: clean up endlessly after an enthusiastic tornado of a child; work toward a condition that, sometimes, resembles financial security; raise my child to be a decent adult; brace myself for the overwhelm that comes with the pressure I feel to help save a planet in the grips of the sixth extinction.
In my climate-related dread, I know I’m not alone—even though the surgeon general’s report last year about the extreme anxiety coloring the experience of growing numbers of U.S. parents doesn’t mention climate change in the list of concerns causing rampant stress, guilt, and shame among caregivers. Nearly two-thirds of Americans are worried about climate change and feel a personal responsibility to do something about it. Yet when I speak with my climate-conscious friends, family, and fellow mothers, everyone seems to be straining to find agency and purpose.
Raising young children tethers people firmly to the now—to a sometimes joyful, sometimes harrowing, often mundane and narrow world. (As Bluey’s dad laments while carrying a laundry basket in one episode of the eponymous TV show: “This never ends!”) But global climate change tugs many parents’ attention and energy outward—to frightening events and uncertain futures, both of which can feel paralyzing.
I can read scientific papers and the latest United Nations climate reports; I can watch Los Angeles burn. But how do I understand what I’m supposed to do, with my hands?
Lately, to answer that question, I’ve been turning to tiny worlds for help.
I received a microscope for Christmas, and I’ve been disappearing into the preset slides it came with: onion skin (staggered oblong blocks with a dark dot, a nucleus, held in each); a smear of human blood (thousands of scattered discs); a splice of rabbit spinal cord (a spongy oval, misshapen beads around its perimeter). Here, among these orderly universes mere millimeters wide, I find I can breathe.
My husband gave me the microscope, aware of my growing obsession with the small—an interest sparked by my introduction to foraminifera (forams for short), single-celled organisms of an ancient order of protist, which number in the thousands of species. These organisms have inhabited marine ecosystems for more than 540 million years, surviving numerous mass-extinction events.
I first learned about forams when I was researching sea-level rise in Maine’s salt marshes. Forams inhabit almost all marine environments, from deepest water to shore. Perhaps the first record of them in the human canon dates to the fifth century B.C.E., in Herodotus’s Histories, when he makes note of shell-like fossils embedded in the limestone blocks of the Egyptian pyramids.
As their longevity indicates, forams are incredibly adaptable and resilient. They build their shells, called “tests,” around themselves, some by collecting minerals from the surrounding waters and cementing them together. The shelters, most of them between half a millimeter and one millimeter long, are single- or multichambered, and shaped like a tube or a sphere, a spiral or a whorl. If you search for an image of a foram, you might see one that looks like a rudimentary shell with a series of ethereal lines shining around it like the sun’s corona. These are pseudopodia, or rhizopodia (rhizo meaning “root”), and are made up of cytoplasm; forams extend and retract these cytoplasmic threads as needed for moving, feeding, and constructing their shells.
Do I digress?
For me, forams were not a digression, but a revelation. Because, listen: Many species of foram are highly site-specific; they evolved within a narrow set of conditions, such as the temperature and oxygen content of the water and the mineral makeup of the surrounding sediments. These site conditions are not preferences but nonnegotiable bounds of survival. The more closely I looked at forams, the more I realized that they might have lessons to impart to humans about our physical place in a changing world.
The forams’ shells keep the fossil record. When the cell dies, the shell remains. The shape and structural content of these shells, as determined by their immediate surroundings, gives precise information about the environments that they exist in today, or that existed millennia ago. Their fossils are snapshots: miniature witnessings of a particular place and moment of transformation. It is thanks to this place-bound existence that forams have contributed to our understanding of massive, global change over eons.
Foram-fossil-informed discoveries include: changes in sea levels during the Carboniferous period (more than 300 million years ago), fluctuations in the oxygen content of the oceans during the Jurassic (roughly 201 million to 145 million years ago), and glacial activity during the Quaternary (beginning about 2.5 million years ago). The fossils tell us about present-day conditions as well. On a slide under a microscope, scientists can read the work of those tiny cytoplasmic arms. Perhaps a shell has been partly dissolved by acid in an industrial waterway, or is deformed by an encounter with pollutants. As Pratul Kumar Saraswati, an earth sciences professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, wrote: “Foraminifera is both the clock and the recorder of the Earth’s history. It has played a crucial role in developing our understanding of the evolution of life and the environment on Earth.”
Pulling myself back to the human-scale world, I lift my eyes and look out the window with a new clarity. I think of the river down the street that flooded about a decade ago; the summers of record-breaking heat; the shifting composition of birdsong in the trees; the human community, in all its messy complexity. From this site-specific view, I don’t long for escape. Foraminifera have helped me remember that I, too, am tiny and fleeting. The conditions of my physical existence are narrow. This river valley defines my visible horizon. I breathe oxygen made from these trees. And with that remembrance, I feel a wave of relief. This is a world I can touch—a scope I can manage.
But I suppose what I’ve been seeking goes beyond even this. Like the foraminifera building their shells, I want to construct something for myself and my family. As the scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes in Braiding Sweetgrass:
Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.
The very small reminds me that I exist within limits, within constraints, within particular environments and communities and moments in time. From this narrow space, I can find expanded agency with which to act, and with which to parent.
So this past winter, I paid attention to the northern cardinal that sang at dawn. I began reading my daughter her first chapter books. I also began the process of getting my prescribed-fire certification, hoping to help with local ecosystem restoration. This spring, my daughter and I will pull invasive knotweed from our yard, and we’ll plant the wildflower seeds we collected late last summer. When the weather turns warmer, I’ll take her to swim in the river. Through these acts, I can construct the foundation of a worldview. I can extend my arms to what I can touch and taste. I can practice building a structure, a house—a home—where caring for my daughter and caring for the planet are not two separate things.
The order came down late in the evening, when the orangutans, lions, and crocodiles would be resting. The next morning, March 28, the animals awoke to a new political reality: The world’s most powerful man had taken an acute interest in their place of lodging, the National Zoo. President Donald Trump had directed Vice President J. D. Vance to rid the Smithsonian Institution of all “improper ideology.” As a ward of the Smithsonian, the zoo was not only covered by this mandate; it was specifically mentioned as one of the facilities to be cleansed of wrongthink.
Trump’s order leaves little mystery about what he wants changed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and its National Museum of African American History and Culture. It calls for the removal of “divisive,” “race-centered ideology” from those museums, and says that their exhibits should instead instill pride “in the hearts of all Americans.” But the order’s text is silent on the nature of the zoo’s ideological transgressions, and my email to the White House asking what they might be went unanswered. Trump has not previously been counted among the zoo’s critics, who tend to lament the life of captivity suffered by its animals, not their potential indoctrination.
I reached out to the zoo staff to ask if they knew what the administration wanted changed. When I did not immediately hear back, I decided to visit the zoo, in the mindset of a freshly appointed cultural commissar. One morning this week, I arrived at its Connecticut Avenue entrance. Pollen-coated cars were lined up outside, and blossoms on the zoo’s magnolias were turning themselves inside out in the clear morning sun. Just a few hundred yards down its central path, near the Asia Trail, a food truck was already serving cocktails.
On my way over to the zoo, I’d read the institution’s most recent strategic plan. In the introduction, former National Zoo Director Steven Monfort says that by going from a global population of 1 billion to 8 billion in only 200 years, “humans have made things very hard for wildlife.” It occurred to me that Vance might find this characterization a touch too Malthusian; he has often railed against what he perceives as anti-natalism in liberal culture. But the sight of parents carrying Moscow mules and margaritas away from the food truck suggested family-friendliness, at least of a certain kind.
At the zoo’s newly renovated Bird House, I joined a long line of families clustered around strollers, waiting to be let into the aviaries. In 2023, I’d met the zoo’s chief curator for birds, Sara Hallager, while reporting a story about the institution’s decision to euthanize a fox that may have killed 25 of its flamingoes. Hallager had told me that after the renovation, the zoo would no longer acquire birds from Africa, Asia, or South America. Its new exhibits would showcase only North American birds. Now I wondered: With this “America First” approach, had the zoo intended to obey (way) in advance? If so, that might explain why an enormous pink-marble sculpture of an eagle—salvaged from the original Penn Station—had been placed near the Bird House entrance.
As I moved deeper into the exhibit, this theory seemed less plausible. Its interpretive panels were not overtly political—I searched high and low for land acknowledgments and found none—but they also didn’t seem to have been designed to please Trump. For one thing, they’re printed in English and Spanish, a first for the zoo. They also celebrate the ability of migrating birds to move freely among the Amazon rainforest, North America, and the High Arctic.
I did find one potentially “divisive” panel in the turkey enclosure. It drew a distinction between North America’s Indigenous people, who hunted turkeys for thousands of years but took care not to wipe them out, and European colonists, who in just two centuries drove the birds to the brink of extinction. This may not be the sort of sentiment that “instills pride in the heart” of Americans. And yet it’s true.
Everywhere I went, I heard kids buzzing about the zoo’s new star attractions, two pandas named Bao Li and Qing Bao that Xi Jinping had sent from China as a gesture of friendship. A source at the Smithsonian Institution who was not authorized to speak to the press told me that before the pandas went on public view, the zoo had been besieged with messages from senators requesting advance meet and greets. I briefly entertained the thought that the zoo had ended up in Trump’s crosshairs because some key ally of his had been denied a picture with the bears. Whatever the case, Bao Li himself seemed entirely indifferent to politics. He sat, lolled back against a green hillside, chewing through whole sticks of bamboo like they were Twizzlers at the movies.
The zoo features less explicit climate advocacy than you might expect from an institution devoted to animal conservation. Most of it is concentrated in a single room in the Amazonia building. The Trump administration has been relentless about scrubbing government websites of all mentions of climate change, no matter how anodyne, but this was gentle stuff. In the center of a large mural from the 1990s recommending solar power, a kid wearing baggy clothes—now back in fashion—picks up trash in a forest. No fossil-fuel multinationals are named and shamed in the surrounding panels. The staff members in green vests did not appear to be indoctrinating anyone. They just gamely answered questions about the neon-blue tree frogs in a nearby terrarium.
The exit from Amazonia dumped me out onto a path that runs along the zoo’s southern edge. Traffic noise wafted down from the Duke Ellington Bridge, reminding me that I was not in a rainforest, but in the middle of Washington, D.C.—a city that Trump has derided as a “filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation.” Continuing down the path, I arrived at the Kids’ Farm exhibit, a shining scene of rural Americana that would not have been out of place on a butter label. Near the big red barn and stables, toddlers were perched on a fence, petting mules. A cow’s blotchy black coat shimmered in the bright heat of the afternoon. Like the Bootheel BBQ & Southern Catering food truck parked nearby, which promised to “feed your Southern soul,” the exhibit seemed designed to flatter, not antagonize, a narrow and nostalgic view of “real America.”
Before leaving the zoo, I popped into the visitor’s center. I confirmed that the bookstore inside was aimed at the nonpartisan animal lover, not the activist, and learned that the zoo usually holds a secular-coded celebration of Easter—its focus is nature’s post-winter bounty, not the newly risen Christ. The zoo’s website calendar does show that last year, and for several years prior, it also recognized International Family Equality Day. Local LGTBQ organizations participated in the event, and some described it as “Gay Day at the Zoo.” As part of the festivities, guests were able to watch a beaver or seal eat rainbow-dyed ice cake. Last year’s event also had a musical performance featuring themes of “climate justice, inclusion, queer identity, and community.” When I emailed the zoo to ask whether International Family Equality Day would continue this year, I did not receive a reply.
I could see how this celebration might inflame a social conservative, but the tame, one-day event did not seem like enough to merit the zoo’s inclusion in the executive order. Nor did any of the other things that I’d found—unless the administration is taking a “broken windows” approach to policing ideology.
Then again, I can’t claim that my audit was exhaustive. I had intended to visit every exhibit, but I ended up skipping the Reptile House. Not for lack of interest; it’s actually one of my favorite places at the zoo—the pythons and unblinking crocodiles provide a real encounter with the animal other. But the line was very long, with little shade. And so I can’t tell you for certain that the Reptile House isn’t a hotbed of critical race theory, or other MAGA heresies. Vance and his team will have to find out and let us know.
Recently, I accidentally overdrew my checking account. That hadn’t happened to me in years—the last time was in 2008, when I was running a small business with no safety net in the middle of a financial crisis. Back then, an overdrawn account meant eating canned soup and borrowing cash from friends only slightly better off than me. This time, I didn’t need to worry—I was able to move money from a different account. And yet all the old feelings—heart palpitations, the seizure of reason in my brain—came right back again.
I have one of those wearable devices that monitors my heart rate, sleep quality, activity level, and calories burned. Mine is called an Oura ring, and at the end of the day, it told me what I already knew: I had been “unusually stressed.” When this happens, the device asks you to log the source of your stress. I scrolled through the wide array of options—diarrhea, difficulty concentrating, erectile dysfunction, emergency contraceptives. I could not find “financial issues,” or anything remotely related to money, listed.
According to a poll from the American Psychiatric Association, financial issues are the No. 1 cause of anxiety for Americans: 58 percent say they are very or somewhat anxious about money. How, I wondered, was it possible that this had not occurred to a single engineer at Oura?
For all of the racial, gender, and sexual reckonings that America has undergone over the past decade, we have yet to confront the persistent blindness and stigma around class. When people struggle to understand the backlash against elite universities, or the Democrats’ loss of working-class voters, or the fact that more and more Americans are turning away from mainstream media, this is why.
America is not just suffering from a wealth gap; America has the equivalent of a class apartheid. Our systems—of education, credentialing, hiring, housing, and electing officials—are dominated and managed by members of a “comfort class.” These are people who were born into lives of financial stability. They graduate from college with little to no debt, which enables them to advance in influential but relatively low-wage fields—academia, media, government, or policy work. Many of them rarely interact or engage in a meaningful way with people living in different socioeconomic strata than their own. And their disconnect from the lives of the majority has expanded to such a chasm that their perspective—and authority—may no longer be relevant.
Take, for instance, those lawmakers desperately workshopping messages to working-class folks: More than half of congressional representatives are millionaires. In academia, universities are steered by college presidents—many of whom are paid millions of dollars a year—and governed by boards of trustees made up largely of multimillionaires, corporate CEOs, and multimillionaire corporate CEOs. (I know because I serve on one of these boards.) Once, a working-class college dropout like Jimmy Breslin could stumble into a newsroom and go on to win the Pulitzer Prize; today, there’s a vanishingly small chance he’d make it past security. A 2018 survey of elite newsrooms found that 65 percent of summer interns had attended top-tier colleges.
College attainment is more than a matter of educational status; it is also a marker of class comfort. Seventy percent of people who have at least one parent with a bachelor’s degree also have a bachelor’s degree themselves. These graduates out-earn and hold more wealth than their first-generation college peers. At elite schools, about one in seven students come from families in the top 1 percent of earners. Graduates of elite colleges comprise the majority of what a study in Nature labeled “extraordinary achievers”: elected officials, Fortune 500 CEOs, Forbes’s “most powerful,” and best-selling authors.
What we have is a compounded problem, in which people with generational wealth pull the levers on a society that they don’t understand. Whether corporate policies or social welfare or college financial aid, nearly every aspect of society has been designed by people unfamiliar with not only the experience of living in poverty but the experience of living paycheck to paycheck—a circumstance that, Bank of America data shows, a quarter of Americans know well.
The dissonance between the way the powerful think and how the rest of America lives is creating a lot of chaos. It can be seen in the rejection of DEI and “woke-ism”—which is about racism, yes, but also about the imposition of the social mores of an elite class. It can be seen above all in the rise of Donald Trump, who won again in part because he—unlike Democrats—didn’t dismiss the “vibecession” but exploited it by addressing what people were feeling: stressed about the prices of eggs.
These phenomena might not be rational. But anxiety isn’t rational. Studies have found that working through a challenging financial time can affect one’s brain as much as missing an entire night’s sleep, or a loss of 13 IQ points. Financial anxiety is linked with higher rates of depression and psychological distress, which can manifest in physical health issues such as heart disease and reduced immune response. The feeling of scarcity can also affect people’s ability to make sound decisions and retain information—not helpful when you can’t afford the late fee on a bill. In short, the haves are literally in a different head space than the have-nots.
Exacerbating this problem is widespread class dysmorphia. One reason so many well-off Americans feel capable of opining about less well-off Americans is because they don’t realize that they are, in fact, well-off in the first place. The explosion of the American billionaire class—from 272 individuals in 2001 to 813 in 2024, according to Forbes—has made millionaires feel relatively poor. There are more of them too. The number of Americans worth $30 million or more grew by 7.5 percent in 2023 alone. And still, according to a survey of millionaires done that year, two-thirds of them did not consider themselves wealthy.
Here’s the broader situation: 30 percent of American households are classified by Pew as low income, and 19 percent are upper income. And yet a 2024 Gallup survey found that only 12 percent of Americans identified themselves as “lower class” and just 2 percent as “upper class.” In short: No one wants to be perceived as poor, and no one rich ever feels rich enough.
As a result, the very term middle class has become a meaningless catchall for a disparate range of lived financial experiences. No wonder so much policy and rhetoric geared toward this group fails to stick. Who are these policies actually for? And what theoretical problems do they aim to address? Those of the third-generation college-educated social worker, whose parents helped her with a down payment on a house? Or those of the first-gen woman with student loans who holds the same job and lives in a rental apartment? Technically they earn the same wage and both likely see themselves as middle class, but they have extremely different lives because only one is a member of the comfort class.
Members of the comfort class are not necessarily wealthy. Perhaps one day they will earn or inherit sums that will put them in that category. But wealth is not the marker of the comfort class. Security is. An emergency expense—say a $1,200 medical bill—would send most Americans into a fiscal tailspin; for the comfort class, a text to Mom and Dad can render “emergencies” nonexistent.
This helps explain why the comfort class tends to vote differently. Someone who feels they don’t fundamentally need to worry about money if things go south will be more willing to vote on their values—issues like democratic norms or reproductive rights—than someone whose week-to-week concern is how inflation affects her grocery budget.
Many things drove voters to Trump, including xenophobia, transphobia, and racism. But the feeling that the Democratic Party had been hijacked by the comfort class was one of them. I recently saw—and admittedly laughed at—a meme showing a group of women from The Handmaid’s Tale. The text read: “I know, I know, but I thought he would bring down the price of eggs.”
To many Americans, classism is the last socially acceptable prejudice. It’s not hard to understand the resentment of a working-class person who sees Democrats as careful to use the right pronouns and acknowledge that we live on stolen Indigenous land while happily mocking people for worrying about putting food on the table.
Even when Americans of different classes are in close proximity, they tend to talk past one another. I still remember, my freshman year of college, coming back to my dorm to discover that my roommate had eaten the leftovers I’d saved from dinner the night before. I flew into a rage, and she had no idea why. She came from a household where leftovers were disposable. From her perspective, all she’d done was have a harmless drunken snack. From my perspective, she’d eaten my next meal, and I couldn’t afford another one.
I move in circles now where everyone’s zip code and alma mater alludes to a homogeneity of experience, but when I start discussing policy or politics with people—be they on the left or the right—I often feel that invisible gap yawn between us.
Just the other day, in honor of Indie Bookstore Day, I was asked to share a childhood memory of an independent bookstore. But I did not have a childhood memory of an independent bookstore. I grew up going to the library because there was no bookstore—independent or otherwise—in my blue-collar Brooklyn neighborhood. I didn’t go to a bookstore until I was a teenager, roaming Manhattan with my friends. For a moment, I felt embarrassed. But then I remembered how much unexamined presumption was behind the question. Most authors come from the comfort class, raised in homes full of books in quaint neighborhoods with local bookstores.
That’s a harmless example. But in the past eight weeks, life for working-class Americans has deteriorated in real ways. Millions of senior citizens are nail-biting about their Social Security benefits. People are worried for their jobs. The costs of eggs, orange juice, and utilities are on the rise. Mortgages and medical bills need to be paid. Rents will be due. Blood pressures will spike; judgments will be clouded; debts will no doubt be incurred. And the pundits and politicians, on all sides, will watch it from a safe, comfortable distance.
Margaret remembering in summer how they’d fly
into her hand, black-capped, black-masked,
bobbing one birdseed at a time—I remember
in cold Amherst how they’d fill the lonely feeder
just outside the kitchen window, especially
when the ice mixed in with snow would slap
the double glass, shake it a little, and start to sing.
One wearies of the sublime, the great deep thing,
the red-tailed kiting hawk sliding down the sky
to make the kill, the sky itself changing on its own,
depth of feeling depth of field. Margaret sitting still,
pieces of the sun falling in the shadows all around her,
while my bright chickadees are braced against the wind,
feathers fluffed, each of them so small I could wrap one
in my fist to keep it warm, alive, then suddenly gone.
All winter in the snow depths just outside you live
in separations made of glass—I’d never have
the patience to hold out my hand and wait out
a bird, regardless of how beautiful the weather.
Stanley Plumly’s posthumous collection, Collected Poems, will be published in August 2025. This poem appears in the May 2025 print edition.
After Thursday’s stock-market sell-off provoked by Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would be imposing new tariffs on almost every country in the world, the one thing we can say for sure is that Wall Street blew it. In the three trading days leading up to Trump’s much-anticipated “Liberation Day” speech, the market rose steadily as investors apparently convinced themselves that Trump would not do anything too crazy. Surely moderation would prevail.
It did not, much to the chagrin of the stock market and anyone with a 401(k). Trump’s protectionist scheme—which he’s applied unilaterally through a dubious invocation of emergency economic powers—is unprecedented in modern times. It inflicts crushingly high tariffs not only on an obvious target such as China, America’s emerging strategic rival, but also on such countries as Vietnam (which makes much of the clothing and shoes that Americans wear) and Bangladesh, as well as on our allies, the European Union and Japan. Although Trump described these tariffs as “reciprocal,” the reality is that they’re nothing of the sort: In most cases, they’re far higher than the rates other countries impose on us. This lays the groundwork for retaliation by our trading partners, potentially leading to a trade war.
All of this stunned investors, which is why the sell-off was so sharp. (Even though the timing of Trump’s announcement on Wednesday coincided with the New York Stock Exchange’s closing, the rout began in after-hours trading even as he was speaking.) To a degree, one can excuse the markets for their utter lack of foresight. Trump is nothing if not capricious, and in the past couple of months, he first imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico and then put them “on pause.” The notion that he might back off his more extreme protectionist impulses was wishful but not unthinkable.
In the end, however, investors’ unwillingness to believe that Trump would overturn the global trading order has to be seen as a willful blindness to who he is and what matters to him. In general, Trump is uninterested in policy, but trade is the one exception, and always has been. His attitude toward trade—namely, that trade deficits are horrible and tariffs are great—has been strikingly consistent for almost 40 years. The way he talks about trade has stayed the same, and his position on tariffs has stayed the same.
What happened on Wednesday, in other words, was not a case of the president throwing the market a curveball. It was a case of him doing exactly what he’d promised to do and what he’s wanted to do for decades.
Understanding Trump’s view requires no great interpretive skills, because his position on trade is a very simple one: If the U.S. has a trade deficit with another country, that means the U.S. is being “ripped off” (a phrase he has used many times in his political career). In the real world, a bilateral trade deficit, meaning that the U.S. buys more from a country than it sells to that country, can happen for many reasons, many of them non-nefarious. The U.S., for instance, buys agricultural products and basic manufactured goods from developing countries that don’t have a big appetite for Boeing airplanes or Microsoft software. So those countries typically take the dollars they earn and buy U.S. government bonds, knowing that their money will be safe, instead of purchasing American goods. That creates a trade deficit, without anything sinister behind it. But for Trump, any trade deficit means that Americans are being played. And Trump hates few things in this world more than feeling that he’s been played.
You can see this conviction that any trade deficit is a problem in the peculiar formula that the administration used to calculate the supposed “tariff rates” Trump says countries are charging us. In his Rose Garden speech, Trump claimed that those rates represented the impact of overt tariffs plus non-tariff trade barriers (such as currency manipulation and restrictive regulations). But that’s not where the numbers came from. Instead, the administration calculated its rates simply by dividing our trade deficit with a country by our imports from that country. As a result, any country with which we have a high trade deficit got labeled as having a high tariff rate, even if its actual rate might be low; likewise, countries with which we have small trade deficits—or, in some cases, a surplus—got labeled as having low tariff rates, even if their actual tariffs might be high.
As former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote on X, “This is to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy, or RFK thought is to vaccine science.” The Trump formula was silly and deceptive, but it was also a perfect expression of his view that trade deficits are evidence that America is being ripped off. The sole reason you would equate a trade deficit with a tariff rate is because you think that trade deficits exist only as a result of trade barriers or other manipulative activity. In fact, that’s exactly how a White House official explained the reasoning: “The model they used is based on the concept that the trade deficit that we have with any given country is the sum of all the unfair trade practices, the sum of all cheating.” And that’s exactly what Trump thinks. So it’s no surprise that, as The Washington Post reported today, Trump personally decided to use that formula, instead of an approach that would have actually targeted high trade barriers.
Using this formula also has another goal: The only way for a country to bring down its tariff rate according to the White House model—and therefore have Trump lower his new tariffs in return—is for the country to dramatically narrow the United States’ trade deficit with it. Simply lowering trade barriers, if they exist, won’t be enough, because they don’t factor into the random calculation of these so-called tariff rates. Israel, for instance, eliminated all of its tariffs on U.S. imports on Tuesday. Trump still imposed new tariffs on Israel on Wednesday. That’s because Trump’s real goal is not really to eliminate trade barriers; it’s for the U.S. not to have a trade deficit with any country in the world. Only then, theoretically, would he feel that America is not being ripped off.
That sounds crazy. And it is. There is no good economic reason the U.S. should have zero bilateral trade deficits; there is no chance that we will eliminate all of them, and if we did, it would be an economic disaster, with Americans forced to sharply curtail their purchases of everything from electronics to apparel. But this is what Trump has been working for all along. In 2017, during his first year in office, he said: “The United States has trade deficits with many, many countries, and we cannot allow that to continue.” He’s told us who he is and what he wants. We’re all going to pay the price for believing otherwise.
When Korean skin care arrived in the United States several years ago, it became the stuff of legend among beauty enthusiasts. They raved about the sunscreen from the Korean brand Beauty of Joseon, which used advanced UV filters and left no white film behind; currently, it costs $18—its closest American counterpart would be about $40 and gloopier. Korean snail mucin promised to hydrate skin and improve fine lines, and prompted a buying frenzy, during which I did drop my own American dollars on a facial “essence” made from the secretions of snails. It has made my skin softer and only grossed me out twice.
Now my snail mucin is caught in a trade war. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s announcement of nearly global tariffs included a 25 percent hike on goods imported to the U.S. from South Korea; his administration has also repealed a customs loophole used by certain K-beauty exporters based in Hong Kong. Some skin-care enthusiasts had been preparing for possible trade disruptions—“spent my paycheck on korean skincare because those tariffs are about to go crazy,” one person posted in December. But now, they’re springing into action. “If you love your glow, get it now,” one skin-care influencer said on TikTok. “This is your last chance before it becomes unaffordable.”
Americans’ love affair with K-beauty was fostered by many years of free trade with South Korea, when our mucin came free of additional fees. The new tariffs will be “a good test to see how powerful the K brand is” in America, Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies U.S.–South Korea relations, told me—how much “soft power” Korea has accumulated here. If people have been buying K-beauty products because they love K-beauty (or K-pop or K-dramas), a price hike might not matter. But if they decide Korean products haven’t done that much for their skin, maybe they’ll switch to Neutrogena.
Beauty enthusiasts have, at times, gone to great lengths to import Korean serums, face masks, moisturizers, sunscreens, and the like from exporters usually based in Korea or Hong Kong. When Joshua Dupaya, a beauty influencer, first got into Korean products in 2016, for instance, he sourced them mostly from “trusted eBay sellers,” he told me. Cosmetics have become a fairly significant part of Korea’s exports—$10 billion globally last year, nearly $2 billion of which went to the United States. And certain K-beauty brands are more beloved here than in their home country. A co-founder of Beauty of Joseon said on a podcast in December, “We’re not really popular in Korea, I have to admit.” (Their Korean brand name means “beautiful woman in Joseon,” referring to the former, long-reigning Korean Joseon dynasty. She said Koreans think the name is “so tacky.”)
Part of K-beauty’s appeal is its price point—$15 for a high-quality moisturizing cream compares favorably with a $20 bottle of CeraVe, and extremely favorably with the $390 La Mer “crème” touted by the upper echelon of skin-care influencers and celebrities. Korean beauty products also contain ingredients that are uncommon in U.S. skin care, but that some American consumers swear by—Centella asiatica (Asiatic pennywort), rice water, ginseng extract, and of course, snail mucin. Their sunscreen is also just objectively better. The FDA is notoriously slow to approve new UV filters, which has meant that sunscreen in America is generally worse than it is in Europe and Asia. Formulations here feel chalkier and oilier, and they can leave white residue behind, because American chemists have a smaller palette of UV technology to draw from. For $12, someone could buy American sunscreen in uninspiring packaging that makes them look like a ghost. For the same $12, they could buy a K-beauty sunscreen in expensive-looking packaging that will not make them look like a ghost. When my friend returned from South Korea with an entire carry-on full of Korean skin care, we applied gobs of sunscreen, feeling like royalty with our advanced UV protection. For skin-care aficionados, K-beauty was an ideal trifecta: a product that feels luxurious, seems effective, and is relatively affordable.
The tariffs will test whether a higher price outweighs those other benefits. Yesterday, the founder of the Korean company KraveBeauty announced on TikTok that the tariff will hit their next shipment to the U.S. and will have to be passed on to customers. “We’re still calculating what the implications of this new trade policy would be to our business, but this will change pretty much everything,” she said—for her company and others. She said the tariffs could upend her brand’s long-standing policy of keeping all their products under $28; those responding in the comments already spoke of K-beauty in the past tense; many included crying-face emoji.
Trump’s tariffs, of course, apply only to imported K-beauty. In the past several years, a handful of major K-beauty manufacturers have opened factories in the United States and will be able to avoid the tariffs, Yeo told me. But he expects that other Korea-based companies will wait about a year to see if these tariffs last and how U.S. consumers respond to the price hike before they consider relocating to America. “I don’t know if Koreans want to invest that much,” he said. “It depends how bullish you think the U.S. market is.” American demand for K-beauty has grown a lot, but brands will have to decide if they think it’ll keep growing. The U.S. isn’t their only market, and companies may choose to focus on countries such as China instead.
But if the tariff succeeds and more K-beauty is soon made in America, the industry could lose its major selling point: it is not made in America. These non-U.S. formulations are the “whole allure of using Korean beauty,” Dupaya told me. Beauty of Joseon recently began making versions of its beloved sunscreen specifically for the U.S. market, which meant it could use only UV technology approved by the FDA. Fairly or not, American users seem to think they have the same problems as U.S. sunblock. “Garbage,” a skin-care influencer said about one of the American formulations. “Absolute garbage.”
Editor’s Note:Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
Donald Trump’s tariff announcement has baffled global leaders and forced markets to reckon with the fallout from America’s dramatic shift in international trade policy. Panelists joined on Washington Week With The Atlantic to discuss what tanking financial markets could mean for the president’s administration.
“Trade has not delivered the benefits that economists and politicians of both parties have been promising for decades,” David Leonhardt explained last night. While the United States economy has tended to work in favor of educated professionals, blue-collar workers have not benefited in the same ways. Adjustments to trade policy could be one way to address this, but Trump’s tariffs are “shambolic, they’re extremely high,” and “no one knows whether he’s going to take them back the next day,” Leonhardt continued.
Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Stephen Hayes, editor of The Dispatch; David Leonhardt, an editorial director for The New York Times editorial board; Kayla Tausche, a senior White House correspondent at CNN; Nancy Youssef, a national-security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.
