Presidents always seem to have a crisis to deal with. George W. Bush had 9/11. Barack Obama had the Great Recession. Donald Trump had the coronavirus pandemic. Joe Biden had the war in the Middle East. For America’s next president, the crisis might be bird flu.

The United States is in the middle of an unprecedented bout of bird flu, also known as H5N1. Since 2022, the virus has killed millions of birds and spread to mammals, including cows. Dairy farms are struggling to contain outbreaks. A few humans have fallen sick, too—mostly farmworkers who spend a lot of time near chickens or cows—but Americans have largely remained nonplussed by bird flu. No one in the U.S. has died or gotten seriously sick, and the risk to us is considered low, because humans rarely spread the virus to others.

On Friday, the fear of human-to-human spread grew ever so slightly: The CDC confirmed that four health-care workers in Missouri had fallen sick after caring for a patient who was infected with bird flu. A few weeks earlier, three other Missourians showed symptoms of bird flu after coming in contact with the same person. It’s still unclear if the workers were infected with H5N1 or some other respiratory bug; only one has been given an H5N1 test, which came back negative.

The CDC says the risk to humans has not changed, but the incident in Missouri underscores that the virus is only likely to generate more scares about human-to-human transmission. The virus is showing no signs of slowing down. In the absolute worst-case scenario—where Friday’s news is the first sign of the virus freely spreading from person to person—we are hurtling toward another pandemic. But the outbreak doesn’t have to get that dire to create headaches for the American public, and liabilities for the next president.

Either Trump or Kamala Harris will inherit an H5N1 response that has been nightmarishly complex, controversial, and at times slow. Three government agencies—the FDA, the CDC, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—share responsibility for the bird-flu response, and it’s unclear which agency is truly in charge. The USDA, for example, primarily protects farmers, while the CDC is focused on public health, and the FDA monitors the safety of milk.

Adding to the complexity is that a lot of power also rests with the states, many of which have been loath to involve the feds in their response. States must typically invite federal investigators to assess potential bird-flu cases in person, and some have bristled at the prospect of letting federal officials onto farms. The agriculture commissioner for Texas, which has emerged as one of the bird-flu hot spots, recently said the federal government needs to “back off.” Meanwhile, wastewater samples—a common way to track the spread of a virus—indicate that bird flu is circulating through 10 of the state’s cities.

Government alone can only do so much. Though only 14 Americans have knowingly come down with bird flu, we have a woefully incomplete picture of how widely it is spreading in humans. Since March, about 230 people nationwide have been tested for the virus. Although the federal government has attempted to compel farmworkers to get tested—even offering them $75 to give blood and nasal swabs—it has struggled to make inroads. That could be because of a range of factors, such as distrust of the federal government because of farmworkers’ immigration status, and lack of awareness about the growing threat of bird flu. A USDA spokesperson told me the agency expects testing to increase as it “continues outreach to farmers.”

You should be experiencing some serious déjà vu by now. In 2020, the U.S. was operating in the dark regarding COVID because tests were scarce, many states were not publicly reporting their COVID numbers, and the federal government and states were fighting over lockdowns. The systematic problems that dogged the pandemic response are still impediments today, and it’s unclear whether either candidate has a plan to fix them. Trump and Harris both seem more intent on pretending that the worrying signs of bird flu simply don’t exist. Neither has outlined a plan for containing the virus, or said much of anything publicly about it. (The Trump and Harris campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.) If America is going to avoid repeating our COVID mistakes, things need to change fast. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, highlighted the need for more widespread testing, and vaccinations for those at high risk of catching the virus. (The federal government has a stockpile of bird-flu vaccines, but has not deployed them.)

H5N1 is already showing its potential to spoil both candidates’ promises to lower grocery prices. Poultry flocks have been hit hard by bird flu, and the price of eggs has spiked by 28 percent compared with a year ago. (Inflation also played a role in increased prices, but bird flu is mostly to blame.) The next president will have to spar with America’s dairy industry if they want to get useful data on how widely the virus is spreading. Dairy farmers have been reluctant to test workers or animals for fear of financial losses. But none of this will compare with the disruption that a new president will have to deal with should this virus spread more freely to humans. For Americans, that will likely mean a return to masks, another vaccine to get, and isolation. Some experts are warning that schools could be affected if the virus begins spreading to humans more readily.

Bird flu doesn’t seem like a winning message for either candidate. Talk of preparing for any type of infectious disease triggers the fears of uncertainty, isolation, and inconvenience that Americans are still trying to shake after the pandemic. It’s hard to imagine either Trump or Harris starting their presidency by instituting the prevention measures that so many people have grown to hate. Unfortunately, the next commander in chief may not have a choice.

After former president Donald Trump said he spoke to Elon Musk about using Starlink in Hurricane Helene-hit areas, the U.S. government said it already had a plan to deploy the systems.

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If you show up to a J. D. Vance campaign event and ask some of the red-hat-wearing attendees whether they’re fans of the senator from Ohio, they will say: No, they are fans of Donald Trump.

Yet Vance is better than his ticketmate at one important job: He can squeeze Trumpism through his own post-liberal-populist tube and produce something that looks like a coherent ideology. While Democrats are fond of mocking Vance for being socially awkward, Trump’s supporters see him as their very own Pete Buttigieg: a man with a theory of the case who is eager to defend it both on television and in real life. He is the sharp TV-soundbite counterweight to Trump’s rambling rally speech:

“There is this Christian idea that you owe the strongest duty to your family, and then you owe the next duty to your community, and then to your country, and then to everybody else,” Vance said at a Christian-revival event on Saturday in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, in response to a question about his approach to immigration policy. “It doesn’t mean that you have to be mean to other people, but it means that your first duty as the American leader is to the people of your own country.”

Trump’s supporters will tell you that they appreciate this ability to articulate their values. Maybe they didn’t like Vance at first, but now they believe that he is smart. He brings a wholesome substance to their movement, like a bowl of leafy greens before the red-meat entrée. “He balances Trump out,” Diane Ernest, a retiree from Southampton, Pennsylvania, told me at a Vance event on Saturday in Bucks County. “He’s a good speaker, and he doesn’t run off—just gets right to the facts.”

“In the beginning, I wondered why Trump picked Vance,” 77-year-old Carol Cavanaugh told me at the same event. But she gets it now. Unlike Trump, “Vance keeps his composure,” she said. She’s proud that Trump “went out of his comfort zone and didn’t pick someone just like him.” For voters like these, the symbiotic relationship makes the two men stronger.

Among MAGA voters, no real equivalence exists between the two men. On the trail, Trump gets Beatlemania; Vance receives polite applause. Retail politics requires a level of regular-guy-ness that Vance does not appear to possess. (Exhibit A: his painful interaction with a worker at a Georgia doughnut shop.) This is partly because Vance is not, strictly speaking, a regular guy: Vance is a Yale grad turned venture capitalist with a reputation for ruthless ambition. He also comes off as far more cerebral, and more conservative, than his running mate. He and his intellectual allies view America as being in a state of “civilizational crisis,” and employ phrases like “postmenopausal females” and “replacement fertility rate” in everyday parlance. He once wrote a 7,000-word essay about his conversion to Catholicism in which he quotes theologians and philosophers at length.

Every Vance event follows roughly the same trajectory. He’ll start with a few jabs at Kamala Harris and her reluctance to do media interviews. Then, once the crowd has been worked into a mild froth, Vance will turn to inflation, gas prices, and housing. He will suggest that the solution to these problems involves more energy and more deportations. He’ll say, “Drill, baby, drill!” and everyone will clap. Then he’ll declare that it’s time to send the “illegal aliens” home, and people will clap even harder. To wrap up, he’ll take a handful of questions from the media.

The stump speech does contain a few moments of cringe. When Vance talks about the price of eggs, for example, he likes to replay a bit about his three kids, who love eggs. In Traverse City, Michigan: “My kids eat a lotta eggs!” In Monroeville: “A lotta eggs in my family!”

But the awkward moments seem not to stick with Trump’s base. What matters to them, these supporters say, is how Vance eloquently articulates their positions—and makes them feel righteous for holding them. Harris, Vance often tells his audience, believes that the people complaining about illegal immigration in places like Springfield, Ohio, are racist. “Kamala Harris, stop telling the people of your own country that they’re bad people!” he said on Saturday, to cheers. “You’re a bad person for not doing your job!”

Vance’s biggest strength, though, may be his eagerness and ability to engage with the media. He will announce, at the end of each rally, that it’s time for a few questions from reporters, and every head in the audience will swivel to gawk at the press pen. They will boo and jeer at each question, regardless of its content, and Vance will smile at them like a proud parent, dispelling the tension with something ostensibly magnanimous: “This is America, folks! She has a right to ask the question, and you have a right to tell her how you feel about it.”

Vance seems most at ease in these moments, because he has shifted the focus away from his personality and back toward his well-studied message. He, like most lawyers, is comfortable with debate and confrontation, turning the media’s questions into opportunities to get back to the issues: inflation and immigration. He will not lose the thread as Trump does, when he gets lost in his own stories about Hannibal Lecter and electric boats. Vance will answer the question, or at least provide an elegant-sounding nonanswer. Asked in August if he and Trump would support raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour, Vance made a quick pivot: “Whether you have a higher minimum wage or a lower minimum wage, the way to destroy the wages of American workers is to import 20 million illegal aliens and let them stay here with work visas,” he said.

His willingness to do this sets him apart from Harris, who has mostly refused to grant interviews. Vance’s supporters recognize this. “He’s good unscripted, which a lot of people in this race aren’t,” Milo Morris, an opera singer at the Bucks County event, told me.

Vance has been a political shape-shifter, changing his views on politics, Trump, and even the lessons of his own 2016 book. But that slipperiness is easy for MAGA supporters to ignore when he’s applying a gloss of coherence to their movement. If Vance performs well in tonight’s debate with Harris’s vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, it will be because he has what Trump voters see as talents. A debate isn’t a doughnut-shop photo op or a glad-handing line-walk requiring baby-kissing and charm. A debate is a contest of ideas—something that Vance has spent his whole life preparing for.

If there’s one thing everyone can agree about Former President Donald Trump, it’s that he’s a businessman.

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This weekend, at his rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump descended into a spiral of rage and incoherence that was startling even by his standards. I know I’ve said this before, but this weekend felt different: Trump himself, as my colleague David Graham wrote today, admitted that he’s decided to start going darker than usual.

At this point, voters have everything they need to know about this election. (Tomorrow, the vice-presidential candidates will debate each other, which might not have much of an impact beyond providing another opportunity for J. D. Vance to drive down his already-low likability numbers.) Here are some realities that will likely shape the next four weeks.

Trump is going to get worse.

I’m not quite sure what happened to Trump in Erie, but he seems to be in some sort of emotional tailspin. The race is currently tied; Trump, however, is acting as if he’s losing badly and he’s struggling to process the loss. Other candidates, when faced with such a close election, might hitch up their pants, take a deep breath, and think about changing their approach, but that’s never been Trump’s style. Instead, Trump gave us a preview of the next month: He is going to ratchet up the racism, incoherence, lies, and calls for violence. If the polls get worse, Trump’s mental state will likely follow them.

Policy is not suddenly going to matter.

Earlier this month, the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote about very specific policy questions that Kamala Harris must answer to earn his vote. Harris has issued plenty of policy statements, and Stephens surely knows it. Such demands are a dodge: Policy is important, but Stephens and others, apparently unable to overcome their reticence to vote for a Democratic candidate, are using a focus on it as a way to rationalize their role as bystanders in an existentially important election.

MAGA Republicans, for their part, claim that policy is so important to them that they’re willing to overlook the odiousness of a candidate such as North Carolina’s gubernatorial contender Mark Robinson. But neither Trump nor other MAGA candidates, including Robinson, have any interest in policy. Instead, they create cycles of rage: They gin up fake controversies, thunder that no one is doing anything about these ostensibly explosive issues, and then promise to fix them all by punishing other Americans.

Major news outlets are not likely to start covering Trump differently.

Spotting headlines in national news sources in which Trump’s ravings are “sanewashed” to sound as if they are coherent policy has become something of a sport on social media. After Trump went on yet another unhinged tirade in Wisconsin this past weekend, Bloomberg posted on X: “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a political vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Well, yes, that’s one way to put it. Another would be to say: The GOP candidate seemed unstable and made several bizarre remarks during a campaign speech. Fortunately, Trump’s performances create a lot of videos where people can see his emotional state for themselves.

News about actual conditions in the country probably isn’t going to have much of an impact now.

This morning, the CNN anchor John Berman talked with the Republican House member Tom Emmer, who said that Joe Biden and Harris “broke the economy.” Berman countered that a top economist has called the current U.S. economy the best in 35 years.

Like so many other Trump defenders, Emmer didn’t care. He doesn’t have to. Many voters—and this is a bipartisan problem—have accepted the idea that the economy is terrible (and that crime is up, and that the cities are in flames, and so on). Gas could drop to a buck a gallon, and Harris could personally deliver a week’s worth of groceries to most Americans, and they’d probably still say (as they do now) that they are doing well, but they believe that it’s just awful everywhere else.

Undecided voters have everything they need to know right in front of them.

Some voters likely think that sitting out the election won’t change much. As my colleague Ronald Brownstein pointed out in a recent article, many “undecided” voters are not really undecided between the candidates: They’re deciding whether to vote at all. But they should take as a warning Trump’s fantasizing during the Erie event about dealing with crime by doing something that sounds like it’s from the movie The Purge.

The police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told: If you do anything, you’re going to lose your pension; you’re going to lose your family, your house, your car … One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out, and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know? It’ll end immediately.

This weird dystopian moment is not the only sign that Trump and his movement could upend the lives of wavering nonvoters. Trump, for months, has been making clear that only two groups exist in America: those who support him, and those who don’t—and anyone in that second group, by his definition, is “scum,” and his enemy.

Some of Trump’s supporters agree and are taking their cues from him. For example, soon after Trump and Vance singled out Springfield, Ohio, for being too welcoming of immigrants, one of the longtime local business owners—a fifth-generation Springfielder—started getting death threats for employing something like 30 Haitians in a company of 330 people. (His 80-year-old mother is also reportedly getting hateful calls. So much for the arguments that Trump voters are merely concerned about maintaining a sense of community out there in Real America.)

Nasty phone calls aimed at old ladies in Ohio and Trump’s freak-out in Erie should bring to an end any further deflections from uncommitted voters about not having enough information to decide what to do.

I won’t end this depressing list by adding that “turnout will decide the election,” because that’s been obvious for years. But I think it’s important to ask why this election, despite everything we now know, could tip to Trump.

Perhaps the most surprising but disconcerting reality is that the election, as a national matter, isn’t really that close. If the United States took a poll and used that to select a president, Trump would lose by millions of votes—just as he would have lost in 2016. Federalism is a wonderful system of government but a lousy way of electing national leaders: The Electoral College system (which I long defended as a way to balance the interests of 50 very different states) is now lopsidedly tilted in favor of real estate over people.

Understandably, this means that pro-democracy efforts are focused on a relative handful of people in a handful of states, but nothing—absolutely nothing—is going to shake loose the faithful MAGA voters who have stayed with Trump for the past eight years. Trump’s mad gibbering at rallies hasn’t done it; the Trump-Harris debate didn’t do it; Trump’s endorsement of people like Robinson didn’t do it. Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. Close enough: He’s now rhapsodized about a night of cops brutalizing people on Fifth Avenue and everywhere else.

For years, I’ve advocated asking fellow citizens who support Trump whether he, and what he says, really represents who they are. After this weekend, there are no more questions to ask.

Related:

Trump is taking a dark turn. Peter Wehner: The Republican freak show

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

North Carolina was set up for disaster. Will RFK Jr.’s supporters vote for Trump? Hussein Ibish: Hezbollah got caught in its own trap.

Today’s News

Israeli officials said that commando units have been conducting ground raids in southern Lebanon. Israel’s military is also planning to carry out a limited ground operation in Lebanon, which will focus on the border, according to U.S. officials. At least 130 people were killed across six states and hundreds may be missing after Hurricane Helene made landfall last week. A Georgia judge struck down the state’s effective six-week abortion ban, ruling that it is unconstitutional.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: The decision to have kids comes down to a lot more than “baby fever”—and it may be about more than government support too, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Director Bartlett Sher, star Robert Downey Jr., and writer Ayad Akhtar OK McCausland for The Atlantic

The Playwright in the Age of AI

By Jeffrey Goldberg

I’ve been in conversation for quite some time with Ayad Akhtar, whose play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, about artificial generative intelligence and its impact on cognition and creation. He’s one of the few writers I know whose position on AI can’t be reduced to the (understandable) plea For God’s sake, stop threatening my existence! In McNeal, he not only suggests that LLMs might be nondestructive utilities for human writers, but also deployed LLMs as he wrote (he’s used many of them, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini included). To my chagrin and astonishment, they seem to have helped him make an even better play. As you will see in our conversation, he doesn’t believe that this should be controversial.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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