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On the campaign trail, Donald Trump has been very clear about the shape of his revenge against the mainstream media. He’s mused, a few times, about throwing reporters in jail if they refuse to leak their sources. He’s talked about taking away broadcast licenses of networks he’s deemed unfriendly. He’s made it clear that he will notice if any member of the press gets too free with their critiques and do his best to get in their way. These last couple of weeks, we’ve gotten a signal that maybe his threats are having an impact. Both The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times had prepared endorsements of Kamala Harris, and their owners asked them at the last minute not to run them. Media reporters floated the obvious question of whether the owners backed off to appease Trump.

In this episode, we talk to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic. This year, The Atlantic made the decision, rare in its history but consistent during the Trump years, to endorse a presidential candidate. (You can read the magazine’s endorsement of Kamala Harris here.) Goldberg talks about navigating both pressures from owners and threats from the administration. And we discuss the urgent question of whether the media, pummeled and discredited for years by Trump, is ready for a second Trump administration.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Journalists who have covered Donald Trump’s rallies—and I am one—know that it’s an uncomfortable situation. He’ll be giving a speech and mention the “fake media” or talk about reporters as the “enemy of the American people,” and then the crowd will all turn towards the press area and start pointing and booing.

Trump has said he would jail reporters who don’t reveal sources or take away broadcast licenses for outlets he doesn’t like. So there’s been a longtime standoff between the free press and a possible future president—which, in these last few days leading up to the election, has gotten a lot more real.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Recently, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, at the 11th hour, decided not to endorse a political candidate, because their owners asked them not to. Both of these papers were going to endorse Kamala Harris, so the last-second decision certainly makes it look like they were backing off to appease Trump.

Motives aside, though, this moment raises an urgent question: Can The Washington Post; the L.A. Times; us, The Atlantic; all of American journalism stand up to a second Trump administration? Today, days before the election, we have with us our own editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to talk about what’s at stake in this endorsement story.

Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Rosin: As you know, the L.A. Times and The Washington Post made news for announcing they would not be endorsing in this presidential race. What was your reaction to that news?

Jeffrey Goldberg: My reaction was that they are not masters of excellent timing. If they had decided that, which is a perfectly fine position to take—and in retrospect, I kind of, sort of wish we took that position in 2016.

Rosin: You do?

Goldberg: Kind of. I just said, “kind of, sort of.” That, I think, connotes ambivalence. Look—I see both sides of the issue, but that’s not the issue right now with the L.A. Times or The Washington Post.

If you’re going to decide that, decide it deliberately. Decide it, well, I would say, any time except two weeks before the most contentious and possibly closest election in American history.

The timing was exquisitely bad. I mean, you could not have chosen a worse time to make these decisions, and it’s mind-boggling.

Rosin: So what you’re saying is: It’s perfectly legitimate for us to have a debate and for newspapers, internally, to have a debate about whether endorsements or not are appropriate. Because, you know, Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, gave reasons in his op-ed for why he didn’t think endorsements were appropriate. So that’s a totally legitimate debate. It’s just that the timing of it is not right.

Goldberg: Yeah. The timing was awful in that it created mistrust, anger, anxiety. It’s way too late to make that decision. I mean, there’s a separate issue. I do believe that it’s the owner’s prerogative to decide if a newspaper should endorse X person or Y person.

Put aside the practical arguments, which, you know—does it really change anybody’s mind? Does it really do anything? I think it’s a perfectly legitimate thing to say that no journalism organization should speak in that kind of declarative voice.

You have a bunch of columnists. You have opinion writers. You have all kinds of people, podcasters. They should talk about what they think is going on in the election. They could talk about who they think is better and who is worse. I get all the sides of it. It’s just—it’s a little late in the process to announce that you’re not going to endorse.

Rosin: The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos—he did defend the decision in his op-ed, saying, Americans don’t trust the news media, and this is a move to restore that trust. Setting the timing aside for a minute, what do you think of that defense?

Goldberg: Horseshit. I think it’s horseshit. I thought the whole first three, four paragraphs of that were horseshit, blaming the victim. I mean, it’s true. It’s true. The media is very, very low in polls of trustworthiness, lower than even Congress at this point, but there’s a reason for that. And a very large reason is that there’s a concerted, multiyear, billion-dollar campaign to undermine public trust in traditional modes of American journalism.

I mean, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are just two of the people who are organizing a campaign to make sure that Americans don’t trust fact-based journalism. Fact-based journalism doesn’t work for them, and so they are literally killing the messenger. And so for Jeff Bezos to write that we, in the press, have a problem and that no one trusts us, without alerting people to one of the huge reasons why, strikes me as ridiculous.

Rosin: I see. So it’s horseshit because (A) it doesn’t apply to The Washington Post—The Washington Post is not part of the problem—and (B) he didn’t elaborate in any even remotely brave way about what he meant.

Goldberg: There’s a war going on against the quote-unquote mainstream media. People who do not want to be investigated by mainstream journalists, by investigative reporters who are professionally trained to uncover things that powerful people don’t want uncovered—the powerful people have organized themselves in a way to make sure that no citizen trusts The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the networks, the Associated Press, Reuters, plus a whole bevy of other investigative outfits.

They want to destroy our ability to communicate to people that we’re trying—I mean, look: I’m not saying that we always get things right. We don’t always get things right. But they have a vested interest in making sure that people don’t trust those outlets, because those outlets are investigating them. And for Jeff Bezos—who is part of the oligarchic class, obviously—for Jeff Bezos to write this op-ed or have it written for him without acknowledging this fundamental fact seemed to be absurd.

Rosin: So readers, as we know, reacted by canceling their subscriptions, 250,000 so far. And I have—

Goldberg: Which is crazy.

Rosin: Crazy. I have many friends who work on the Post. It’s adding up to what? Is it a tenth or an eighth of their subscription base?

Goldberg: I think it’s 10 percent of their subscription base.

Rosin: Which has already been waning over the last many years.

Goldberg: Well, I mean, it did grow. I mean, it grew in the Trump era. A lot of people believed them, as they should have, when they said that Trump was a threat to the democratic order and to the American idea. They made their motto literally “Democracy dies in darkness.”

A large number of people who were opposed to Trumpism became subscribers. What do they think is going to happen to those subscribers? The feeling of betrayal. I mean, I’ve talked to so many people who canceled or were thinking of canceling. The feeling of betrayal was deep in ways that I was even surprised. And here was an example of Jeff Bezos not understanding the consequences of his decision making.

Rosin: One obvious conclusion—or even mild conclusion—is that Jeff Bezos is concerned about what Trump thinks, which leads me to think that if Trump wins, lots of newspapers might have to account for that in their decision making and thinking. Like, it feels like that’s how a chilling effect comes to be, is that you have to take into account what Trump thinks, even if it’s minor. Like, I’ll lose some customers, or I won’t get this contract or another contract, that you have to be thinking about that, and that becomes part of the decision making.

Goldberg: Yeah. Look: no reason to disbelieve Bezos when he says that the meeting between Trump, Trump’s people, and the Blue Origin—his space company—the CEO of that space company that happened that same day was coincidental. He didn’t even know. He runs a very large organization. That’s completely plausible that he had no idea that the timing was just terribly bad for him.

The larger point is: If you have multifarious business dealings with the federal government, and you’re worried about a revenge-minded president with authoritarian predilections, it’s asking a lot of a CEO not to take the threat that that president poses into account when you make decisions, which suggests to me that he’s not equipped to be the owner of a newspaper.

The owner of a newspaper should place him or herself in a structurally oppositional frame of mind, which is: You have to be counter-opportunistic. Oh, the government’s gonna cut my $3 billion contract. Screw them. I’m going to do what’s right, and I’m going to stand up for the newspaper.

If you’re not equipped to own a publication, you really shouldn’t. You just really shouldn’t. And, you know, the shame of this is that, from everything I could see and everything that we all could see, he was pretty good at owning The Washington Post for a while.

Rosin: Well, that makes me wonder if the industry, as a whole, is ready for a possible second Trump administration. I mean, what you just described sounds like a kind of steeling and bravery that you have to be prepared for. And if Jeff Bezos, who has a huge amount of power, you know—like, if he loses a chunk, what does it matter?

If he can’t do it, doesn’t that make you worry about the industry in general?

Goldberg: Well, it depends, person to person. I mean, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is the owner of the Los Angeles Times, is in a different category. He and his family, apparently, just believe in meddling. I mean, they believe that—look: Let me take one step back and note that ownership in the American system—ownership of a publication or a quality publication or a putatively quality publication in the American system—is very complicated and counterintuitive.

You buy a thing. As a rich person, you buy a publication, a business, and then you have to promise not to interfere with the running of the business. That’s the way it’s worked, traditionally. You have to—literally, there’s no other business that I could think of where, you know, you go out and buy a bakery, and the first thing the bakery manager tells you is, Do not tell us what kind of bread to make, and if you do, all your employees are going to excoriate you publicly. You’d kind of be like, Well, I thought the fun part of owning a bakery is getting them to make bread I like, you know. And that’s what journalism is, and this is my relationship with our owner at The Atlantic.

You know, she turns over to me decision making on all editorial matters. We have a relationship of trust, and we communicate, and I use her as a sounding board all the time, and it’s a healthy relationship. But she accepts the line that our culture has devised and that a healthy democratic culture devises so that ownership is separate from editorial.

Rosin: Right. Okay. Earlier this month, The Atlantic endorsed Kamala Harris, which is the fifth time that the magazine has made an endorsement: Lincoln, LBJ, and then three times in the last three elections, all while Trump was the candidate and while you’ve been editor in chief.

Goldberg: Well, the first time, actually, was becoming editor, but I wasn’t yet editor. I had a lot to do with the editorial, but just technically speaking.

Rosin: Okay, so why did you break the mold here?

Goldberg: The Atlantic promises its readers that it’s going to be of no party or clique. That’s written to the founding manifesto of The Atlantic, written in 1857 and signed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne and all the rest. And, you know, I do not want to screw with those guys, right? (Clears throat.)

I just don’t want their ghosts haunting me. So we try very, very hard to be of no party or clique. But to me, the issue of Donald Trump is not an issue of party. I believe, and I think The Atlantic has expressed this belief in its journalism for 160-plus years: We believe that a strong conservative party, a strong conservative strain in American thinking, and a strong liberal strain—that makes a democracy healthy.

Let these ideas battle it out, and let the people decide who has the better idea. So we are a big tent, where we try to have differing opinions, but we don’t support a particular party. And if Hillary Clinton in 2016 were running against Mitt Romney, John McCain, Marco Rubio, you know, Jeb Bush—name the list—we would have felt no urge whatsoever to endorse.

But I looked back, and others looked back at the 1964 endorsement of Lyndon Johnson to try to understand what that was about. And it was not about Barry Goldwater’s positions on taxation or about privatization of government resources or even, in a way, foreign policy. It was about his demeanor. It was about his character. It was about his extremism.

And so the endorsement of LBJ was less an endorsement of LBJ than a warning about Barry Goldwater’s characterological defects. So when the subject of Trump comes up, we’re not looking at what he thinks we should do about the taxation of tips, or even his position on NATO, as ridiculous as I personally find it.

It’s about his honesty. It’s about his mental fitness. It’s about his moral fitness. It’s about his racism. It’s about his expressed misogyny. It’s about all those things. So it’s not about party. It’s not about ideas. It’s about behavior and disposition and the threat that he poses.

And so in 2016, and then again, for reasons of consistency, if nothing else, in 2020 and now in 2024, we felt a need to endorse—again, not because he’s a conservative, because he’s not actually a conservative.

Rosin: Now, in any of these times, did you ever have doubts—like, real, serious doubts that you should do it?

Goldberg: No. Again, in retrospect, getting into it, I understand where, you know, if Bezos had announced a year ago, You know what? We just don’t want to do this anymore—I totally understand the arguments for not doing it. We did it with Hillary. And remember: We were also, like everybody, in shock, in a kind of shock.

People who cover politics and know American politics—we were shocked that the Republican Party chose this person to be its standard-bearer four years after it picked Mitt Romney and eight years after it picked John McCain. How is this even possible?

So in that shock, in disbelief, I think we are more predisposed to say, You know what? This is so abnormal that we must say something. Then once you say it in 2016 and you see what he’s done over four years, then in 2020, how is it not possible to do the same thing? And then after January 6, 2021, it seemed pretty obvious to me that we would have to keep going with these anti-endorsements.

Rosin: And in your mind, does that shift the magazine’s position to less of an observer-critic and more of a participant in the election?

Goldberg: The magazine is a participant in the election in that members of the writers collective of The Atlantic are pretty clear, in many different ways, about how they feel about Donald Trump, what they think about Donald Trump.

And by the way, we’re not a resistance magazine, and I’ve said this over and over again. If we could run pro-Trump material that could pass through our fact-checking process, I would print it. Our goal is to say things that are true, right?

And so we do have pieces, from time to time, that come in that do argue that “X Trump policy is smart.” We ran a piece recently by H. R. McMaster, his former national security advisor, who said, You know what? Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some of the things that he’s done may be for the wrong reasons. Maybe he executed them stupidly. But these ideas are good ideas.

So we’ll run pieces like that. Again, it just has to get through fact-checking. So yes—it’s a definitively different kind of decision when you speak in an institutional voice, no byline, and say, The Atlantic believes that X person should be president and not Y person.

And yes, you can create an image out in the world that you are now aligned with a party. That’s why I’m so sensitive on this question of being of no party or clique, because this is not about Republican—

If, in the next election, the Republicans nominate, God knows, near anybody, I don’t feel, you know—as long as they adhere to basic notions of rule of law, as long as they exercise self-restraint in their behavior and speech, as long as they haven’t been proven to try to have overthrown the government.

I mean, I was down there on January 6. I saw, I heard his speech. And then I walked down to the Capitol. I know what he did. You know, there’s two candidates in the race right now. One tried to overthrow the government; the other didn’t. It’s not that hard to say, as an institution, We’re against overthrowing the government.

And so yeah, there are consequences to all these decisions, but I’m comfortable with the decision. As I said, there’s a part of me that wishes that we hadn’t gotten involved in that, but I’m also proud of the fact that we took these stands.

Rosin: In what?

Goldberg: In institutional endorsement.

Rosin: Like, if you could avoid it, you would?

Goldberg: Well, look: The Atlantic. I mean, one of the lessons of looking back at The Atlantic, you know, one of the great mysteries, by the way—I haven’t been able to figure this out: 1860, The Atlantic endorses Lincoln for president. 1864, no endorsement. It’s like, What does a guy have to do?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right.

Goldberg: You know, jeez louise. I don’t know. I mean, I would love to find the papers, if there are papers, that communicate why they didn’t run an endorsement. (Laughs.) But anyway, you go from 1860 to 1964. You jump 104 years into the future before they endorse again. You know, as the editor in the Trump presidency, in the Trump era, I’ve got to say, Hmm, for 105, 104 years, they managed not to endorse. That means something. And so, you know, obviously, there’s going to be ambivalence in my thinking.

Rosin: Okay. Time to leave Lincoln and enter the future. After the break, we talk about what a second Trump era might look like.

[Break]

Rosin: All right. So you’ve touched on some of the stakes. Let’s contemplate an actual Trump era. Like, we’re living in a Trump era. You yourself have faced specific—well, I’ll take that back. The Atlantic has faced specific threats—

Goldberg: No. You could say me. It’s true.

Rosin: —from Trump. And, specifically, in response to your reporting. So in 2020, you reported that Trump called veterans and fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers,” which has clearly remained on Trump’s mind. Your recent reporting that he wished he had “the kind of generals Hitler had” also struck a chord. He’s not a fan. He’s interested in settling scores. Do you actually run through scenarios about the actual things that the magazine could face under a Trump presidency?

Goldberg: Sure. I don’t want to go into specifics, but there are, obviously—and again, I’m not trying to be dramatic here. I don’t expect storm troopers to come and try to padlock the doors of The Atlantic on January 20 if Trump should win or Trump should seize power in some manner or form.

But there are, obviously, ways that someone bent on revenge could take his revenge, not just on The Atlantic but a lot of the press and other institutions in American life. So of course we think about it. But you know, there’s exactly zero choice here. If you find out something that’s true, and it’s relevant for your readers, you just gotta—I don’t mean to sound self-righteous or anything, but that’s literally the job. So you’ve got to do it, regardless of what the threat may be.

Rosin: I mean, I actually do think about what it looks like, because this is a relatively new situation for Americans, for American journalists. I do have trouble imagining what it would look like to operate in that kind of atmosphere. Like, how does a president get in the way of American journalism?

Goldberg: Right. I mean, look: There are—I’m not talking about us, specifically, now—but there have been discussions broadly across journalism. Obviously, one thing that Trump has talked about again and again is changing the libel laws, right? And this would require the Supreme Court to overturn a decision made in the 1960s about what constitutes libel.

But it wouldn’t surprise me if they—and people who are supportive of Trump fund efforts to make it harder for journalists to do their jobs vis-à-vis, you know, nuisance lawsuits and trying to get legislation changed and trying to get the Supreme Court behind this legislation that would make it much easier to win libel suits against journalism organizations.

So there’s that. That’s a threat. There are other things that can happen, obviously. Something that’s been talked about a lot is the use of the IRS against enemies. I mean, obviously, in normal-behaving administrations, you’re not allowed to politicize the tax-auditing process, but I don’t put that past them, obviously.

There are a bunch of things that you can do that don’t involve, you know, frog-marching journalists to jail. I go back to this point: They’re helping to create an atmosphere that’s comprehensively hostile to work that previous American presidents—I’m going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson now—previous American presidents understood was indispensable to the smooth functioning of democracy. Which is to say: have a robust, independent press that could not be punished, jailed, silenced by a government.

Rosin: So that’s the thing that I most worry about, is the shifting understanding of facts and truth. In your conversation with Barack Obama a couple of years ago, it was very interesting. He talked about how, in his campaign, he used to be able to show up in places, say swing-voter places, and convince people to change their minds about him.

And then he told you that he doesn’t really think that that would be true anymore, because there’s a world where new information, a new fact, a truth—it doesn’t really move people. And I wonder if you think journalism is in a similar position. Like, we used to be able to show up and give people new information, new facts, and we would hope that those things would move them. And now it seems to work less that way.

Goldberg: Well, yeah. I’ll give you an example from my own work to buttress your point. So four years ago, I published a story based on sources that Donald Trump has repeatedly used the terms suckers and losers to describe American war dead and American war wounded.

Obviously, a very damaging story. And the criticism from the White House—Donald Trump’s White House at the time—was, Well, you don’t have any evidence. You don’t have any people on the record or using their names, so it’s all made up. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that became the discourse. Right?

Last year, John Kelly came out—John Kelly, former chief of staff, former Marine general, chief of staff to Donald Trump in his White House—came out and said, on the record with his name: Oh yeah. That’s true. He used to say “suckers” and “losers” all the time. He’s confirmed it to any number of publications. He confirmed it on the record to me. And so what I get, even today, are people saying, Well, you never proved it.

And I said, Well, actually, John Kelly’s now said that he’s heard Donald Trump. They say, You’ve never had any sources on the record. Well, John Kelly says it happened. Well, John Kelly’s a liar.

And it’s like, Okay, it doesn’t matter. My point is: It seems not to matter when you present people with what you consider to be evidence or what, in traditional journalism modes, is considered evidence. It doesn’t matter anymore. People are impervious to new information if it doesn’t conform to what they would like to believe.

And so we see that writ large, where, you know, the bubble around a certain group of people in America—let’s say the hardcore Trump voters—the bubble is impermeable, right? There’s no way of penetrating and saying, No. You said you wanted more evidence. Here’s evidence.

Nope. That evidence—that’s a deep fake. That evidence—nope. The person who says it to you is lying.

Rosin: Yes, Jeff, but that’s our tool. Like, that’s what we got. That’s what we do. Like, what we do is evidence, facts. We present those evidence and facts, and if those just drop dead to the ground, then what’s our role? Like, what are we doing?

Goldberg: Well, first of all, I never give up, because why would you give up trying to convince people (A)?

(B) and look: I do think this is a unique proposition of The Atlantic at this moment. I understand 30 percent of the people in America are really not going to believe, or say they don’t believe, The Atlantic at this moment. So we’re writing for the 70 percent, but I also think we’re writing for the 30 percent.

I think just because you’re banging your head against the wall doesn’t mean that wall is not eventually gonna crack. And we have to find new ways of communicating, new ways of buttressing our reporting.

I also believe that people change all the time. And just because this is the pattern, and this is the path we’re on, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be this way forever. I mean, I guess I’m optimistic in the sense that I think, you know, we’re in a fever period right now and that the fever will break.

You know, my colleague—our colleague—Caitlin Flanagan, always says that “the truth bats last.” And I hope she’s right. It’s just harder and harder.

I mean, this calls back to a little bit of the Jeff Bezos piece in which he doesn’t acknowledge that the reason the press is mistrusted is because powerful people are trying to get ordinary citizens to mistrust the press—for their own selfish business reasons or political reasons. So we just have to keep going.

I have a lot of criticism of publications—let’s call them elite publications—that are written for, let’s say, the 20 percent most liberal portion of America and don’t even try to get to other people anymore. Like, maybe it’s a great business model. And fine. You know, everybody should do their thing. Whatever.

But I don’t feel like The Atlantic is that. I think we have to try to build a bridge between, let’s say, these two bubbles: You know, the bubble in which quote-unquote mainstream media lives and the bubble in which the hardcore Trump supporters live. It’s a frustrating question because I don’t know the answer. I haven’t heard anybody come up with a formula for this, but we’re just gonna have to keep trying because the alternative, giving up, is pure nihilism to me.

Rosin: Yeah. Well, we are days before the election. We’ve lived through a Trump presidency. People are talking about this Trump presidency returning without the guardrails of the last one. So how do you see our role, your role in that kind of administration?

Goldberg: I imagine that a coming theoretical second Trump administration is going to be somewhat to very different from the first one in that—I mean, you’ve heard all these clichés before: There will be no grown-ups. Trump and his people know how to manipulate the workings of government better. The velociraptors have learned how to turn the door handles.

You’ve heard all of the lines about it. So we can have more drama and more threats to the constitutional order and more threats to what we used to think of as normative political behavior. But I don’t see our role changing, in the sense that we’re just gonna write about it every day. And we’re gonna cover it.

And, you know, I’ve said this to the staff before: The point of journalism—or the satisfaction of journalism—is not necessarily in changing the world for the better. If you change the world through your journalism to bring more light and truth and justice into the world, great. But you can’t wake up every day assuming that’s what’s going to happen, because most of it is frustrating, just like any job in the world is going to be frustrating. And progress, however you define it, is going to be incremental, and you’re not going to see it for a while, and so on.

But I think to myself, Look—we’re in a democratic emergency. I want to be able to tell myself, as an old man, that I did everything that I could do to try to bring the country back to some kind of normalcy, to hold people who are behaving abnormally accountable.

And I want, especially, the younger people at The Atlantic to think to themselves that, 40 years from now, 50 years from now, when their grandchildren say, What did you do in that antidemocratic era? I want them to be able to say, I did everything that I could do. And that’s important to me. I held my own standards up. I held the standards of my magazine up. And I invested, in a non-nihilistic way, in the future of this country, in the future of the ideas that animate it.

And, you know, that’s enough. All you can do is try using your journalism techniques, using the techniques of journalism to bring more illumination to the things that, in this case, a Donald Trump might do.

So all we can do is go to work and write about what they’re doing and cover what they’re doing and hold it up to the light and let people judge for themselves if what they’re doing is good or bad. So, you know, it’s anticlimactic in a way. It’s not overly dramatic. The thing that we can do is go to work and do our jobs, the jobs that we were trained to do.

We were not expecting, people my age, your age, whatever—we’ve been in journalism for a while, never really expecting a presidency like the first Trump presidency and certainly what could be a second Trump presidency. Never really expecting anything like this, but here we are.

So just cover the hell out of it, and make sure that you have put into the public record truth and reality and evidence, and, you know, tell truth to power. You know, you can’t do anything more than that. And so all we’re going to do is just do what we do.

Rosin: I really appreciate that. I feel exactly the same way. There are words out there like anxious, afraid, apathetic. I don’t feel any of those things. I feel alert.

Goldberg: Alertness is great. We have the tools to alert people to these changes. We don’t have to sit there just passively or impotently. So work as hard as you can to bring as much information and analysis to people who need it. That’s great—great to have a job, great to have a role.

Rosin: Thank you for being inspirational, Jeff.

Goldberg: You want me to sing outtakes from Sound of Music?

Rosin: I wouldn’t mind if you could stand on the desk while doing it. It would be even better.

Goldberg: “Climb Every Mountain?” I’ll sing “The Battle Hymn of the”—look: If we have another Trump presidency, we’re gonna get the staff every morning on Zoom to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” together.

Rosin: Sounds good. I’ll practice.

Goldberg: Yeah. I’m sure people are gonna really enjoy that.

Rosin: Sounds good. (Laughs.) All right, Jeff. Thank you so much for joining us.

Goldberg: Thank you.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Happy Halloween. Get lots of candy. And don’t forget to vote. Thank you for listening.

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The latest salvo in the decades-long conflict between Iran and Israel lit up the predawn sky over Tehran on Saturday. Israeli aircraft encountered little resistance as they struck military targets in retaliation for an Iranian attack earlier this month. Although Iran appeared to downplay its impact, the strike was Israel’s largest ever against the Islamic Republic. It raised not only the specter of full-scale war but also a prospect that experts told me has become much more conceivable in recent weeks: the emergence of Iran as a nuclear-armed state.

Think of Iran’s defenses as a stool with three legs. Two of them have suddenly gone wobbly. The first is Iran’s regional proxy network. This includes, most notably, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which Israel has dismantled through air strikes, incursions, and high-profile assassinations. Israel has even gone after Iran’s top military commanders. The second is an arsenal of missiles and drones, which Iran used to directly attack Israel for the first time in April, and then again this month. Not only did the strikes prove ineffective—Israeli and U.S. defenses largely thwarted them—but they also failed to deter Israel from continuing to hack away at the first leg and strike back as it did over the weekend.

That leaves the third leg: the Iranian nuclear program. Now that Israel has demonstrated its superiority over Iran’s proxies and conventional weapons—and degraded both in the process—Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may decide to pursue a bomb in a risky attempt to salvage some measure of national security. He won’t have far to go. The program has made major advances since 2018, when the U.S. withdrew from its multilateral nuclear agreement with the regime, which now has enough near-weapons-grade uranium to produce several bombs, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This already gives the country considerable leverage, but “there is a risk Khamenei decides that in this environment, a nuclear threshold won’t cut it, and Iran needs nuclear weapons,” Eric Brewer, a nonproliferation expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told me.

Although Brewer and other experts I spoke with did not predict that Iran will go nuclear in the near term, they agreed that it is likelier than ever before. If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons during the metastasizing conflict in the Middle East, it could become the first country to do so while at war since the United States in 1945. But Iran also has many ways to wield its nuclear program that stop short of getting a weapon, injecting further peril into an already volatile new nuclear age.

In recent years, current and former Iranian officials have insisted that the country is either already able to build a nuclear bomb or very close to that point. In the past month, as Iran awaited the retaliation that came on Saturday, its pronouncements got more pointed. Although the regime still denies that it’s seeking a weapon, a senior adviser to Khamenei warned that any Israeli strikes on its nuclear sites—which were spared over the weekend—could alter the nation’s “nuclear strategic policies.” That same week, a group of 39 Iranian lawmakers urged the Supreme National Security Council to eliminate its formal ban on the production of nuclear weapons.

[Read: What if Iran already has the bomb?]

The latest rhetoric in official circles could be a response to Iran’s shifting public discourse. Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iranian nuclear decision making at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that Israel’s assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last month seems to have piqued Iranian public interest in their country’s nuclear program. She’s noticed a greater number of Iranian commentators on Telegram discussing Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.

Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, a Texas A&M professor who studies nuclear statecraft and Iranian politics, has also observed this shift in Iranian public and elite sentiment. But he traces it back further, to America’s exit from the Iran nuclear deal and then, two years later, its assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. When the deal took effect in 2015, Tabaar told me, the regime was responsive to public pressure to limit its nuclear program and improve relations with the United States. Discussing the nuclear-weapons option was, as he put it, “taboo.” But in recent weeks, he said, he’s seen “a lively debate” on social media about whether or not to pursue a bomb, even among critics of the regime outside the country.

“There is this realization that, yes, the regime and the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] are repressive, but we live in this neighborhood and maybe we need to have” nuclear weapons, Tabaar told me before the latest strike.

That decision belongs to Khamenei, but the increased public interest that Tabaar has observed creates an opening for Iranian leaders to advance the country’s nuclear program. As Tabaar noted, such decisions are often informed by the views of elites and by the regime’s “fear of popular revolt.”

Still, neither Grajewski nor Tabaar anticipates that the regime will immediately seek a bomb. Iran could instead use its near-nuclear status to its advantage, including by escalating threats to go nuclear, announcing progress in uranium enrichment, rebuffing international oversight, or exiting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In addition, Iran could try to reinforce the other legs of its security—by working with partners such as Russia and North Korea to upgrade its conventional military capabilities, and by bolstering proxy groups such as the Houthis in Yemen while seeking to rebuild Hamas and Hezbollah.

But strengthening these other legs could take years, and Israel appears poised to press its military advantage. That leaves a crucial question for Iran’s leaders: Is the country’s nuclear-threshold capability enough of a deterrent?

If they decide to cross the threshold and go nuclear, Iranian leaders know that their adversaries will likely detect their efforts and try to intervene, potentially undermining the very security Tehran may be seeking. The latest U.S. estimates indicate that Iran might require only a week or two to enrich uranium to weapons-grade. But concealing such a move from IAEA inspectors without kicking them out of the country would be challenging. And Iran could need more than a year—or at least several months, by some estimates—to convert its uranium into a usable weapon.

Those months constitute “a pretty big window of vulnerability” in which “Israel or the United States could disrupt Iran’s work to build a nuclear weapon, including through military action,” Brewer explained. So he thinks it’s “unlikely” that the supreme leader will wake up one morning and declare, “Damn the torpedoes. All hands on deck. We’re going to weapons-grade today.”

A more plausible outcome, Brewer and Grajewski believe, is that Iran covertly resumes the research on weaponizing fissile material that it halted in 2003. The goal would be to “shorten the window of vulnerability” between amassing weapons-grade uranium, putting it into a nuclear device, and fashioning a deliverable weapon, Brewer told me. This weaponization work is more difficult (though not impossible) to spot than uranium enrichment, at least at declared facilities still monitored by the IAEA. International inspectors retain access to facilities containing fissile material, but Iran has reduced the frequency of inspections since 2018, when the U.S. exited the nuclear deal. The regime has also ended IAEA monitoring of other sites related to its nuclear program, raising the possibility that it has moved some centrifuges to undeclared facilities. Nevertheless, U.S. officials said this month that they could probably detect any decision to build nuclear weapons soon after Iranian leaders make it.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: The growing incentive to go nuclear]

American officials often speak about whether Iran’s leaders have “made the decision” to attain nuclear weapons, but Tabaar argued that Tehran’s calculations don’t work that way. Think of a dimmer, not a light switch: Iran is “making sure all components are there to preserve its option to develop nuclear weapons, gradually more and more.” Tabaar added, however, that there are “two very extreme scenarios” in which he could imagine Iranian leaders suddenly making the call to flip the nuclear switch. The first is a “window of opportunity” in which Iran’s enemies are distracted by, say, a major conflict elsewhere in the world. The second is “a window of threat” in which Iranian leaders fear that their adversaries are about to unleash a massive bombing campaign that could destroy the country or regime.

Brewer posited one other wild-card scenario: The supreme leader might proceed with weapons-grade enrichment at declared facilities if he assumes that he can achieve it before Israel or the U.S. has a chance to destroy those facilities, thereby establishing some measure of deterrence. “That would be a very, very risky gamble,” Brewer said—particularly if Israel learns of Tehran’s decision in time to unleash preemptive strikes. Additional enrichment might not ward off an Israeli or American attack anyway. Although 90 percent enrichment is typically considered the level required for weaponization, experts believe that Iran might already be able to use its current stock of 60-percent-enriched uranium to make a bomb. Anything higher wouldn’t necessarily establish greater deterrence.

But, as Brewer has noted, history offers several examples of regional crises prompting states to “break out,” or race for a bomb. Shortly before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel reportedly rushed to assemble nuclear devices out of concerns about possible Egyptian strikes on its nuclear facilities. Amid tensions with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir, Pakistan is believed to have begun building nuclear weapons by 1990. That same year, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein ordered an impractical (and unsuccessful) effort to quickly build a nuclear weapon. “I can give you lots of really good reasons why breaking out would be a terrible decision by the supreme leader,” Brewer told me. “I can also give you lots of reasons why the crash nuclear-weapons program in Iraq was a terrible decision. But [the Iraqis] still made it.”

I asked my Atlantic Council colleague Danny Citrinowicz, who from 2013 to 2016 led the Israeli military’s analysis of Iranian strategy, whether Iran is more likely to become a nuclear-weapons state today than it was at any point in the many years that he’s monitored its nuclear program. He didn’t hesitate: “Definitely.”

Citrinowicz broke down that answer into relative probabilities. He pegged the chances of Iran “storming” to a bomb—by, for example, detonating a nuclear device for demonstration purposes—at 10 percent, the highest he’s ever assessed it. Before Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, he would have said “close to zero.” He assigned a 30 percent probability to the scenario of Iran enriching uranium to weapons-grade, though perhaps only a minimal amount to show off its capabilities.

To my surprise, the scenario he deemed most likely—at 60 percent—was Iran pursuing negotiations on a new nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers. Citrinowicz could envision Kamala Harris and even Donald Trump—perhaps reprising the openness to nuclear diplomacy that he displayed with North Korea, despite his typically hard-line stance on Iran—being amenable to such talks after the U.S. presidential election. A diplomatic agreement would probably inhibit Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but it could also provide the country with economic relief. As an added benefit, a deal with Washington might serve as a wedge between the United States and Israel, the latter of which would likely oppose the agreement. Israel would be less inclined to strike Iranian nuclear facilities if it couldn’t count on U.S. support, or at least it would be less capable of penetrating their heavy fortifications without help from America’s arsenal.

[Read: The unraveling of Trump’s North Korea policy]

Still, there are many reasons to be skeptical about the possibility of a new nuclear deal with Iran. Russia and China, both parties to the 2o15 pact, are far more hostile to the United States today than they were then. Khamenei has expressed a general willingness to reengage in negotiations, but he has also instructed his government that the U.S. can’t be trusted. And Iran will be much less likely to enter into a comprehensive agreement again now that Washington has already pulled out of one and reimposed sanctions, delivering a shock to Iran’s economy. Getting the regime to agree to anything beyond limited concessions on its nuclear program appears implausible.

One way or another, though, Citrinowicz expects 2025 to be “decisive.” Without a new agreement, Iranian leaders could start procuring a bomb. Or Israel and the U.S. could take military action to stave them off. And either of those scenarios could trigger the other.

If Iran heads for the bomb, or leverages its threshold status for geopolitical gain, that could encourage other countries, including U.S. partners, to develop their own nuclear programs. “I absolutely do worry that we could live in a world in the future of not necessarily more nuclear-weapons states but more countries that have this capability to build nuclear weapons,” Brewer said.

In some ways, Iran has already passed the point of no return. By enriching uranium to 60 percent, Tehran has demonstrated that it probably possesses the technical expertise to further enrich that material to weapons-grade, which requires minimal additional effort. Destroying Iran’s physical nuclear infrastructure would be exceedingly difficult. Wiping out Iran’s nuclear knowledge base is not possible. Even if Israel or the U.S. takes military action, the threat of a nuclear Iran will almost certainly persist, at least as long as the current regime remains in power.

Should Iran get nuclear weapons, that would likely embolden its regime at home and abroad, elevate the risk of nuclear terrorism, upend deterrence dynamics between Iran and Israel along with the United States, and spur either an extension of the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Arab partners in the Middle East or a nuclear-arms race in the region—among a host of other potential consequences.

But such outcomes are hard to forecast, because so much of what we know about the interplay between nuclear weapons and international affairs is based on the Cold War and post–Cold War periods. We are now in a third nuclear age, in which nuclear and near-nuclear states come in a greater variety of shapes and sizes. Arms-control agreements have unraveled, diplomatic channels between adversaries have vanished, and establishing nuclear deterrence has never been more complicated.

After the advent of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, at least one new country acquired the world’s most destructive arms every decade until the 2010s, when the streak ended. Nearly halfway through the 2020s, it seems like we may revert to the historical pattern before this decade is done.

For the past several years, I’ve been telling my friends what I’m going to tell you: Throw out your black plastic spatula. In a world of plastic consumer goods, avoiding the material entirely requires the fervor of a religious conversion. But getting rid of black plastic kitchen utensils is a low-stakes move, and worth it. Cooking with any plastic is a dubious enterprise, because heat encourages potentially harmful plastic compounds to migrate out of the polymers and potentially into the food. But, as Andrew Turner, a biochemist at the University of Plymouth recently told me, black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid.

In 2018, Turner published one of the earliest papers positing that black plastic products were likely regularly being made from recycled electronic waste. The clue was the plastic’s concerning levels of flame retardants. In some cases, the mix of chemicals matched the profile of those commonly found in computer and television housing, many of which are treated with flame retardants to prevent them from catching fire.

Because optical sensors in recycling facilities can’t detect them, black-colored plastics are largely rejected from domestic-waste streams, resulting in a shortage of black base material for recycled plastic. So the demand for black plastic appears to be met “in no insignificant part” via recycled e-waste, according to Turner’s research. TV and computer casings, like the majority of the world’s plastic waste, tend to be recycled in informal waste economies with few regulations and end up remolded into consumer products, including ones, such as spatulas and slotted spoons, that come into contact with food.

You simply do not want flame retardants anywhere near your stir-fry. Flame retardants are typically not bound to the polymers to which they are added, making them a particular flight risk: They dislodge easily and make their way into the surrounding environment. And, indeed, another paper from 2018 found that flame retardants in black kitchen utensils readily migrate into hot cooking oil. The health concerns associated with those chemicals are well established: Some flame retardants are endocrine disruptors, which can interfere with the body’s hormonal system, and scientific literature suggests that they may be associated with a range of ailments, including thyroid disease, diabetes, and cancer. People with the highest blood levels of PBDEs, a class of flame retardants found in black plastic, had about a 300 percent increase in their risk of dying from cancer compared with people who had the lowest levels, according to a study released this year. In a separate study, published in a peer-reviewed journal this month, researchers from the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future and from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam found that, out of all of the consumer products they tested, kitchen utensils had some of the highest levels of flame retardants.

Another food product, black plastic sushi trays, had the highest level of flame retardants in the study. Children’s toys also ranked high: A single pirate-themed plastic children’s necklace was almost 3 percent flame retardant by weight. “When you’re using black plastic items, there’s going to be a risk that they could be contaminated,” Megan Liu, the science and policy manager at Toxic-Free Future and the first author on the study, told me. Those flame retardants migrate into toddlers’ saliva and into the dust in our homes and, thus, in the air we breathe. Last year, Toxic-Free Future tested breast milk taken from 50 women in the U.S. and found flame-retardant compounds in each sample.

Many of the flame-retardant compounds that showed up in the tests that Liu and her co-authors conducted should no longer be in the product stream. Brominated flame retardants have mostly been phased out of products in the U.S. and Europe, including from many electronics. In the U.S. and elsewhere, some of the most harmful flame-retardant compounds are now illegal for use in most consumer goods. Massachusetts banned a list of 11 flame retardants in 2021. Starting this year, a New York bill restricts the use of organohalogen flame retardants—one large class of the compounds—in electronic casings, and a similar Washington State ban will go into effect in 2025.

But these compounds keep coming back. The sushi tray tested in Liu’s study contained 11,900 parts per million of decaBDE, also called BDE-209, which she described as a “really alarming” level of a chemical that was banned from most U.S. commerce in 2022 and largely phased out of production long before that. Because plastic recycling is a global economy with scant oversight, patchwork legislation may do little to keep these compounds out of the supply chain. “You send your electronic waste abroad, and you just haven’t got a clue what happens to it,” Turner told me. “I think the assumption is that it gets handled safely and it’s disposed of properly. But, you know, it comes back in the form of things that we don’t want.”

For a consumer, this problem would be simpler to handle if it was clear that only certain black plastic products posed a risk, or that all of them did. But Turner found that products were contaminated with flame retardants at random. Not all of the black plastic he tested in his 2018 study contained the compounds, and in those that did, “the amount of chemicals in the black plastic varied hugely,” he said. Some items would have the same chemical profile of what you’d expect from, say, the flame-retardant plastic housing of a television or a cellphone. Other objects would have just a trace of flame retardant, or none at all. Of the more than 200 black plastic products Liu bought at retail stores for her study, hardly any were labeled as being made from recycled materials, she said. Consumers have no way to tell which black plastics might be recycled e-waste and which aren’t. “It’s just a minefield, really,” Turner said.

Putting your black plastic in the recycling bin might seem like the right thing to do, but recycling isn’t a solution to the most noxious qualities of plastics. “I personally have been throwing out my black plastic takeout containers,” Liu told me, because if they are contaminated, “it’s scary to think that those might be reentering other products with the same flame retardants.” Until flame retardants and any dubious compounds that arise to replace banned ones are eliminated from the supply chain, reusing black plastic will perpetuate a potential health hazard. In her view, “the onus shouldn’t fall on consumers to have to make these daily changes in their lives.” Ultimately, federal bans or more ubiquitous state laws that go beyond single-compound phaseouts are the only way to keep flame retardants out of takeout containers and other black plastic intended for use in things such as foodware and toys. Until manufacturers use safer flame-retardant compounds and laws effectively prohibit recycled electronics material from entering consumer products, these chemicals will continue circulating through our kitchens, arising and re-arising like toxic zombies.

But that doesn’t mean we need to consume them by way of our kitchen utensils. Replacing a black plastic spatula with a steel or silicone option is an easy way to cut down on at least part of one’s daily dose of hormone disruptors. I’ve also taken this news as a reason to coax myself into carrying a reusable coffee mug more often, if only to avoid the black plastic lids on disposable cups—heat plus plastic equals chemical migration, after all. It’s a minefield of random hazards out there, as Turner said. Most of the time we’re trying to navigate without a map. But in at least some areas, we can trace a safer path for ourselves.

Cryptocurrency has been declared dead so many times that its supposed demise is a running joke within the industry. According to the website 99Bitcoins, the obituary of crypto’s flagship token has been written at least 477 times since 2010. A round of eulogies occurred last year, after several crypto-trading giants, including FTX, collapsed, and the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a barrage of lawsuits against major blockchain companies. “Crypto is dead in America,” said the tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya on the All-In podcast in April 2023. Publications including The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic wondered if the technology was, once again, kaput.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that crypto is back. What’s shocking is just how back it is. The total market capitalization of crypto assets this year has been within striking distance of its all-time highs in 2021. The crypto sector has been the biggest political donor in the current election cycle, surpassing even the fossil-fuel industry, with contributions flowing to candidates from both parties. In May, the House of Representatives passed a bill that included many of the policy demands of crypto lobbyists, while the Senate rolled back guidelines by the SEC designed to protect consumers of cryptocurrencies. And both presidential candidates have flirted with crypto enough that, no matter who wins in November, the market could be on the brink of a deregulation-fueled bonanza.

How did crypto bounce back so fast? Part of the answer is pure smashmouth politics: The industry started spending gobs of money—at least $130 million to date—to elbow its way into this year’s congressional races. It has also refined its sales pitch. Since the FTX meltdown, the industry has been making efforts to distance itself from the Sam Bankman-Fried school of charm. Gone are the mussed hair and grandiose talk of altruism and saving humanity. In are the MBAs and lawyers, the Ivy Leaguers who know how to speak the language of Washington persuasion. The industry’s message now: Make crypto normal. Regulate us, please. All we want is to know the rules of the road. They highlight the most mundane, inoffensive applications of crypto, while condemning the scammers who tarnish the industry’s reputation and avoiding mention of the “degens,” or degenerate gamblers, who represent much of crypto’s actual demand.

[Annie Lowrey: When the Bitcoin scammers came for me]

But the truth is that the scammers are only getting bolder, finding new creative ways to rip off retail investors. Should the crypto lobby get its way, the new regulatory regime will clear a path not just for the industry’s “respectable” wing but also for the wildcatters and criminals. If you thought crypto was a problem before, you should be alarmed. The worst is likely yet to come.

The crypto industry insists that its goal—the reason it’s spending ungodly sums of money to sway elections—is to be boring. Nothing to see here. Crypto companies say they merely seek “regulatory clarity.”

This phrase is, to be generous, a sleight of hand. Companies don’t just want clarity; they want a particular set of rules. Currently, crypto exists in a state of regulatory limbo. The SEC says that most crypto assets are securities, defined as an “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.” The paradigmatic case is a share of stock in a publicly traded company. Securities are subject to a lot of rules: You can only trade them through a registered exchange, and issuers have to disclose a bunch of information about the underlying companies. That way, investors can make informed decisions about which securities to buy and which to avoid.

If digital assets are indeed securities—a position that some federal judges have accepted, at least one judge has questioned, and is currently being tested in a number of ongoing enforcement cases—then crypto operations would have to behave like other Wall Street institutions. Companies like Coinbase, for example, would need to separate their brokerage services—that is, helping their customers buy and sell tokens—from their exchange services. (This is one aspect of the SEC’s pending lawsuit against Coinbase.) Plus, crypto operations could no longer launch overnight—not legally, at least. They’d have to register with the SEC and issue thorough disclosure documents before allowing the public to invest, a burdensome and costly process that would weed out a huge share of dodgy crypto schemes with no sound business model.

The main plank of crypto’s bid for normalcy is that tokens should be considered commodities, not securities. What could be more boring than a commodity? Wheat, orange juice, coffee beans, livestock: Commodities are interchangeable, and you can trade them with other people directly. The crypto lobby says tokens are clearly commodities, since they’re fungible like bags of corn and do more than just go up and down in price. For example, users can spend tokens as “gas” to interact with a blockchain or participate in the governance and upkeep of the blockchain; they don’t merely rely on “the efforts of others.” (The SEC agrees that bitcoin is a commodity, since unlike almost every other crypto asset it has no central issuer.)

Classifying cryptocurrencies as commodities would bring them under the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than the SEC. The CFTC has been friendlier to crypto, going so far as to advocate for controversial deregulatory measures pushed by FTX. It’s also much smaller, with roughly one-sixth the budget and staff. With the CFTC in charge, the SEC’s long list of pending cases would disappear, and we’d probably see a lot fewer prosecutions of crypto companies.

Consumer advocates argue that exempting crypto from securities laws would make it easier for Americans to buy risky digital assets: Not only would exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken be likely to offer fringier coins—they’d be harmless commodities, after all—institutional investors like pension funds might see the new rules as a stamp of approval to dive into crypto. Hilary J. Allen, a law professor at American University who studies financial regulation, told me that designating cryptocurrencies as commodities would create a loophole that non-crypto companies could exploit. “Slap a blockchain on it,” she said, “and you too can be free from securities regulation.” Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of the nonprofit Better Markets, told me the real reason the crypto industry doesn’t want tokens to be classified as securities is that disclosure rules would expose them as financially dangerous. “If you had to fully and truthfully disclose the risks associated with crypto, the people who would engage in crypto would be near none,” he said.   

The industry deflects such arguments by downplaying its chaotic history and focusing on its more mundane use cases: stablecoins, for example, which are designed to maintain a fixed value and can be used for instantaneous peer-to-peer transactions, particularly cross-border remittances, and as a hedge against inflation. (Argentina has seen growing adoption lately.) Or, even more boring, “decentralized physical infrastructure networks,” or DePIN, which employ blockchain technology to reward users for providing public resources such as data storage or Wi-Fi.

But the rules the industry is pushing would also juice some of crypto’s most degenerate schemes. The breakout hits of 2024 are fundamentally just new ways to gamble. Polymarket, the platform where wagers are made exclusively with crypto, has taken off this year thanks to interest in betting on the election. “Tap-to-earn” games such as Hamster Kombat have surged in popularity, luring users with rewards in the form of tokens. The apotheosis of speculative crypto insanity, though, is the website Pump.fun. On Pump.fun, anyone can create a memecoin instantly—all you need to do is select a name and an image—and the site creates a market where people can buy and sell it. One recent top token was named after the internet-famous baby hippo Moo Deng. Inevitably, creators are going to absurd lengths to promote their tokens: One guy posted a photo of himself apparently using meth. Another suffered burns after shooting fireworks at himself during a livestream.

The industry doesn’t foreground these casino-like use cases, but it implicitly blesses them. Speculation is normal, advocates say. In fact, it’s what drives innovation in the first place. “Speculation, taking risks—that’s what fuels the economy,” Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association, told me. Sheila Warren, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, says that allowing people to buy and sell tokens isn’t about whether crypto is good or bad. “I don’t necessarily know that it’s net positive or negative,” she told me. “I think it’s about the ability of people to determine what they want to do with their own money.”

The biggest degen of all is on the ballot. Donald Trump clearly has no idea what a blockchain is, but he understands that it’s related to money, which seems to be enough. He has declared himself “the crypto president.” In July, speaking at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, he pledged to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet” and called crypto “the steel industry of a hundred years ago.” In September, he stopped by a bitcoin-themed bar in New York City and spent $950 worth of bitcoin on a round of burgers and Diet Cokes. Trump has also announced his involvement in a new crypto platform called World Liberty Financial. While the details of the project are hazy, it would apparently offer a stablecoin. (The project’s launch last week saw low demand and extended outages.)

[Read: The Trump sons really love crypto]

The industry is salivating at the prospect of a Trump win. Trump has said he would fire SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile,” and free the American cybercriminal and crypto hero Ross Ulbricht from prison. Any Trump-affiliated crypto project, such as World Liberty Financial, would operate in a legal gray area unless Congress passed the new regulatory regime the industry is asking for. In other words, he has skin in the game. “It’s clear Trump would be very positive for crypto,” Smith, the Blockchain Association CEO, said.

How a Kamala Harris administration would regulate the technology is less clear, but her recent statements have given crypto fans hope. In September, she promised to help grow “innovative technologies” including “digital assets.” Then she announced that she would support regulations that enable “Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation” while keeping those investors “protected”—a strange and careful framing that implicitly acknowledged how many Black men have lost money on crypto. These comments could just be campaign rhetoric meant to fend off attacks by the crypto lobby. But they show that Harris is listening to the industry’s arguments, particularly those couched in the language of opportunity and equity. Harris is, if nothing else, sensitive to the direction of political winds. If a newly crypto-friendly Congress were to pass the industry’s desired legislation in a bipartisan way, a President Harris might feel great pressure to sign it.

And even if Trump and Harris do nothing to help crypto, the technology has by now proved its indestructibility. As if to drive home the point, 99Bitcoin’s obituary tracker seems to have dropped off this year. The last entry is from April. I messaged the site’s owner to ask if he was still updating it. He didn’t respond.

US Presidential Election: Kamala Harris delivers closing pitch to voters in Washington DC

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The phrase election integrity sounds noble on its face. But in recent years, election deniers have used it to lay the groundwork for challenging the results of the 2024 election.

A few months after Donald Trump took office in 2017, he signed an executive order establishing the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” The Brennan Center for Justice wrote at the time that “there is strong reason to suspect this Commission is not a legitimate attempt to study elections, but is rather a tool for justifying discredited claims of widespread voter fraud and promoting vote suppression legislation.” That proved prescient. Although there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2016 or 2020 elections—or in any other recent elections, for that matter—Trump and his allies have fomented the narrative that such interference is a real problem in America, employing it in the illegal attempt to overturn the 2020 election and their reported plans to claim that the 2024 race is rigged.

As part of this strategy, right-wing activists and lawyers have organized initiatives under the auspices of election integrity, warping the meaning of those words to sow distrust. Through her Election Integrity Network, the right-wing activist Cleta Mitchell has been recruiting people—including election deniers who will likely continue to promote disinformation and conspiracy theories—to become poll workers and monitors, in an effort that was reportedly coordinated with members of the Republican National Committee. Poll watching in itself is a timeworn American practice, although it has been misused in the past; now, however, election-denial groups are sending participants to polling places under the presumption that fraud is taking place.

More recently, Elon Musk—in addition to his own brazen efforts to get Trump reelected—has invited X users to report activity they see as suspicious through an “Election Integrity Community” feed, an effort almost certain to trigger a flood of misinformation on the platform. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit has gone to great lengths to seek evidence of fraud; in one case, nine armed officers reportedly appeared with a search warrant at the door of a woman who had been working with a Latino civil-rights organization to help veterans and seniors register to vote.

The RNC, especially under the influence of its co-chair Lara Trump, has taken up “election integrity” as an explicit priority: As she said at a GOP event over the summer, “we are pulling out all the stops, and we are so laser-focused on election integrity.” Her team created an election-integrity program earlier this year and hired Christina Bobb, who was later indicted for efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Arizona (she has denied wrongdoing), as its lead election-integrity lawyer. As The New Yorker reported earlier this month, the RNC plans to staff a “war room” with attorneys operating an “election-integrity hotline” on Election Day. Such initiatives have helped inject doubt into a legitimate process. Despite the clear lack of evidence to suggest fraud is likely in this election, nearly 60 percent of Americans already say they’re concerned or very concerned about it, according to a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll; 88 percent of Trump supporters said they were concerned about fraud (compared with about 30 percent of Kamala Harris supporters).

The “consistent, disciplined, repetitive use” of the term election integrity in this new context is “designed to confuse the public,” Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me. A sad irony, she added, is that those who use this framing have done so to push for restrictions that actually suppress voting, including strict voter-ID laws and limitations on early ballots, or to threaten the existence of initiatives to ensure fair voting. Many of the same activists promoting “election integrity,” including Cleta Mitchell, organized a misinformation campaign to undermine a bipartisan state-led initiative called the Electronic Registration Information Center, which was created in 2012 to ensure that voter rolls were accurate. Multiple states eventually left the compact.

The term election integrity isn’t entirely new—Google Trends data suggest that its usage has bubbled up around election years in recent decades. But its prominence has exploded since 2020, and the strong associations with election denial in recent years means that other groups have backed away from it. “Like so much charged language in American politics, when one side really seizes on a term and uses it in a loaded way,” it becomes “a partisan term,” Clapman told me. Now groups unaffiliated with the right are turning to more neutral language such as voter protection and voter security to refer to their efforts to ensure free elections.

Election deniers are chipping away at Americans’ shared understanding of reality. And as my colleague Ali Breland wrote yesterday, violent rhetoric and even political violence in connection with the election have already begun. This month so far, a man has punched a poll worker after being asked to remove his MAGA hat, and hundreds of ballots have been destroyed in fires on the West Coast. Election officials are bracing for targeted attacks in the coming days—and some have already received threats. If Trump loses, the right will be poised—under the guise of “election integrity”—to interfere further with the norms of American democracy.

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Today’s News

Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, was released from federal prison after completing his four-month sentence for being found in contempt of Congress. Vice President Kamala Harris's speech tonight—which she says will be her campaign’s closing argument—will be delivered from the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., the same location where Trump spoke on January 6, 2021. Israel’s Parliament passed two laws yesterday that include provisions banning UNRWA, a UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, from operating in the country. Israel has accused several members of UNRWA, which distributes the majority of aid in Gaza, of participating in the Hamas attack on October 7.

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The Worst Statue in the History of Sports

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Earlier this year, the Lakers unveiled a Kobe Bryant statue with oddly stretched proportions and a too-angular face. It made Bryant look like a second-rate Terminator villain, and to add insult to injury, the inscription at its base was marred by misspellings. In 2017, fans of Cristiano Ronaldo were so aghast at a sculptor’s cartoonish bust of the legendary footballer that they hounded him into making a new one.

It gives me no pleasure—and, in fact, considerable pain—to report that Dwyane Wade’s statue may be the worst of them all.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, a raft of self-help books and articles appeared, written by students of post-Soviet society. Drawing on lessons gleaned from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, these authors sought to supply Americans with a manual for thwarting Trumpism. In The New York Review of Books, Masha Gessen published an essay titled “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.” The Yale historian Timothy Snyder churned out a best-selling pamphlet, On Tyranny, a step-by-step guide to resistance.

The core lesson these writers hoped to impart was the necessity of sustained outrage. “It is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock,” Gessen instructed. Without outrage, they warned, apathy would set in. And once that happened, autocracy would seem as natural as the forest.

Those warnings were stirring, and they helped propel a spirit of loud, uncompromising opposition to Trump. Those who embraced this style, and their critics who facetiously mocked it, began referring to the “Resistance.” Although the Resistance harbored grifters and occasionally flirted with conspiracy theories, it also worked at the time. Pressure from the Resistance bolstered institutions, especially segments of the media and the Democratic Party, that might have plausibly buckled as Trump attempted to impose his will. And it supplied the electoral energy that helped the Democrats win at the ballot box in 2018 and 2020.

In the closing weeks of this election, I can’t help but recall the very different mood that prevailed four years ago. Back then, many journalists acted as if the prospect of a second Trump term was a national emergency, necessitating unrelenting negative coverage of the incumbent. Voting was portrayed as an act of heroism, because of the raging pandemic. Even if Joe Biden provoked little affection, his campaign felt to his supporters like the culmination of a liberation movement.

On the cusp of Trump’s potential return to power, the Resistance now feels like a relic of another era. The sense of outrage, which carried Biden to victory, is not what it once was. Pollsters privately suspect that this election will have lower turnout than the last. Organizers canvassing for Vice President Kamala Harris say that they encounter widespread indifference among progressive voters, especially the young. Segments of the elite that once proudly opposed Trump have made peace with him.

At a certain point, some humans, even the richest and most powerful, simply give up. The most graphic illustration of this is Jeff Bezos. In the years after he bought The Washington Post, the Amazon founder seemed to bathe in the praise that his paper received for its coverage of Trump. He paid for glossy Super Bowl ads, blaring the paper’s new motto, “Democracy dies in darkness.” By financing journalistic resistance to Trump, he whitewashed his own growing reputation as a rapacious monopolist. He became a darling of the Washington elite and a heroic figure in some journalistic circles. But he also suffered Trump’s lashings and retaliatory threats against his business.

Two presidential elections later, Bezos has made a different choice. Last week, he vetoed a Post editorial endorsing Harris, just before its publication. After 11 years of owning the paper, he broke with tradition and suddenly decided that the Post should no longer put its weight behind a presidential candidate. He later supplied a high-minded justification for his meddling, which mostly blamed journalists rather than autocrats for widespread mistrust of the media, but it wasn’t hard to interpret the psychology at play. In his mind, and for the sake of his balance sheet, resistance is no longer worth it.

[Read: Don’t cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime.]

Outrage is a transient emotional state, almost impossible to sustain over the years, because it’s so draining, both physically and emotionally. (Gessen and Snyder warned about that, too.) And Trump has a special talent for provoking exhaustion, because he’s such an all-consuming figure, with a unique ability to spike his critics’ blood pressure and populate their nightmares.

Another reason outrage has faded is that Biden won the last election. He campaigned on the promise of returning the nation to normal, and so the establishment reset itself to neutral. The belief that the nation had escaped Trump gained purchase in much of traditional media, especially after the January 6 attack. The Trump era resulted in a break from the profession’s norms; it demanded an uncharacteristic spirit of partisanship and emotionalism. But with Biden’s arrival in the White House, a broad swath of media attempted to restore its impartiality, to reclaim whatever authority it might have sacrificed in its combat with Trump.

Having reverted back to their old ways, many outlets were somehow caught unprepared for Donald Trump’s return. They have been painfully slow to describe the even more autocratic version of the man who has emerged in this campaign, who is running on far more explicit pronouncements of his authoritarian intentions. It’s hard to quantify the tilt of news coverage—and easy to overstate its influence. But there’s a pet phrase that recurs in news stories that captures the inability to grasp the danger: The press likes to describe Trump’s “old grievances,” which implies that he’s merely playing back his greatest hits, more of the same old anger. But that downplays the novelty of Trump’s promise to unleash the military on “enemies within.” Or the fact that, as my colleague Anne Applebaum has noted, his rhetoric has come to resemble that of Hitler and Mussolini. On the merits, this warning should crowd out every other story in the campaign.

Hardly a sector of society is immune from the onset of apathy. It exists within the business elite, embodied by Jamie Dimon and Bill Gates, who can’t be bothered to publicly announce their private opposition to Trump, perhaps because it might somehow cost them. It exists within the segment of the left that has decadently announced that it can’t stomach voting for Harris because she hasn’t been sufficiently outraged by the war in Gaza, as if democracy at home wasn’t hanging in the balance.

I’ll admit, shamefacedly, that I feel a measure of apathy myself. The prospect of a second Trump term is a nightmare that I’d rather not ponder, a fear that I’d rather repress. If I didn’t have a professional obligation to obsess over this election, I would be hiding in escapist entertainment. But that would just be a less destructive version of Bezos’s selfishness.

In this final stretch of the campaign, there are glimmers of outrage. According to NPR, 200,000 Washington Post readers have canceled their subscriptions to protest Bezos’s decision. In the long run, that boycott might self-destructively imperil an essential institution. In the short run, it’s evidence that a meaningful portion of the electorate is unwilling to sleepwalk into a second Trump term, a hopeful indication that the cloud of apathy might, however belatedly, be lifting.