World's largest religious festival in India struck by deadly stampede

The staff was still setting up dinner on Mar-a-Lago’s outdoor patio on a balmy early-January evening when Donald Trump sat down. He was surrounded by several top advisers who would soon join him in the West Wing and who wanted to get his input before his attention shifted to his wealthy guests and Palm Beach club members.

Susie Wiles, the incoming chief of staff, led the conversation, listing some of the dozens of executive orders that had been teed up for Trump’s signature once he reclaimed the presidency. She wanted to talk about sequencing, according to a Trump adviser present at the meeting, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. How would he like to stagger the orders over the first few weeks back in office?

“No,” Trump replied, this person told me. “I want to sign as many as possible as soon as we show up.”

“Day one,” he said.

Trump has followed through on the promise of an onslaught, unleashing in his first week more than two dozen executive orders, holding a nearly hour-long news conference and other question-and-answer-filled public appearances, and posting several times a day on social media. Some of this, of course, is in Trump’s nature. He is an inveterate showman whose instincts are to seek attention and dominate the discussion.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s second term might have already peaked]

But this time around, Trump’s ubiquity is also a deliberate strategy, several of his aides and allies told me. Part of the point is to send a message to the American people that their self-declared “favorite” president is getting things done. The person at the Palm Beach meeting and another Trump adviser, who also requested anonymity to describe private conversations, told me that the White House’s flood of orders and news is also designed to disorient already despairing Democratic foes, leaving them so battered that they won’t be able to mount a cohesive opposition.

Trump’s actions in his first week have been a mix of signal and noise, of distraction and seriousness. He has taken some defeats. But Trump has succeeded, at least, in creating a stark contrast with the quiet of his predecessor, and in (yet again) shifting the nation’s political discourse back toward him. And compared with 2017, the resistance has been far more muted. The Democrats, without an obvious head of the party and still digging out from November’s election disappointment, have yet to make a focused counterargument to Trump, instead getting largely drowned out in the national discourse.

“This is four years in the making. It’s days of thunder. The scale and the depth of this has blown the Democrats out. It’s blown out the media,” Steve Bannon, a former senior White House aide who still informally advises Trump, told me. “He vowed to start fast and now knows what he’s doing. This is a totally different guy than in 2017.”

When Trump left office in disgrace after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, former administration officials, conservative lawyers, and think-tank researchers began drafting orders and legislation—most famously, the Heritage Foundation initiative known as Project 2025—that could act as the foundation of a Trump revival. And after he won, his inner circle made clear that this time the administration would be staffed with true loyalists.

Wiles, who also co-chaired Trump’s campaign, told a closed-door gathering of Republican donors in Las Vegas in the early days of the transition that the president’s first moves would be to reinstate some executive orders from his first term that President Joe Biden had revoked, according one of the Trump advisers and another person familiar with the meeting. Wiles told the private gathering, for a group called the Rockbridge Network, that Trump would begin by withdrawing from the Paris climate treaty and the World Health Organization. Trump, indeed, signed those orders on his first day back in office, but they were only two of the directives to which he affixed his signature—with a giant Sharpie—in ceremonies held at the Capitol; inside a sports arena in Washington, D.C.; and in the Oval Office during his inauguration festivities and in the days that followed.

His executive orders so far have covered immigration, trade, demographic diversity, civil rights, and the hiring of federal workers. Trump ordered DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs in the federal government to be eliminated. He curtailed the Department of Justice’s civil-rights investigations. Federal health agencies were ordered to halt public communications. And he moved to expand presidential power by eliminating protections for federal workers—so he could more easily staff agencies with supporters—and by refusing, without citing any legal authority, to uphold the U.S. ban on TikTok despite a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in the ban’s favor.

“The EOs are so much better-executed now,” Bannon told me. “Back in 2017, we were writing things on the back of envelopes. It was like a playground game, shirts and skins. Now they have good people working, real lawyers.”

Some of Trump’s moves have been symbolic, such as one order to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and another to insist that, even in national times of mourning, flags be flown at full staff on Inauguration Day. Others ordered government reviews—to examine China’s compliance with trade deals, for example, or the feasibility of creating an External Revenue Service to collect tariffs—but might not have real heft. If it was hard to tell the difference between what was real and what was for show, that was by design, the two advisers told me—to make it difficult for Trump’s opponents to focus their outrage.

His aides debated for weeks about how to enact his campaign pledge to pardon the January 6 rioters, whom the incoming president had declared “hostages.” Days before Trump took office, many advisers, including Vice President J. D. Vance, expected that pardons would be issued for many of the offenders but not, at least immediately, for those convicted of violent crimes, including assaulting police officers. But Trump overruled them, issuing a blanket pardon, and he included commutations for the leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, each of whom had been sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. The two Trump advisers said that Trump thought leaving anyone out would invalidate the underpinning of the Capitol riot—his insistence that he won the 2020 presidential election. Trump also decided that any blowback would be manageable.

[Read: Trump’s first shot in his war on the ‘deep state’]

Not everything has worked out for Trump in his first week. Even some staunch Trump allies recoiled from the pardons for violent January 6 offenders; Senator Lindsey Graham called them “a mistake” on Meet the Press. Perhaps most notable, Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship generated a wave of legal action and was blocked by a federal judge. On his first day in office, Trump took on the Fourteenth Amendment by issuing a directive to federal agencies to stop issuing citizenship documents to children born on U.S. soil to parents in the country illegally or under temporary visas. The U.S. government has long interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that those born on American soil are citizens at birth, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The U.S. district court judge who blocked the order, John Coughenour, called it “blatantly unconstitutional” and told a Trump administration attorney, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order.”

Trump has also struggled to achieve his goal of fast-tracking Cabinet confirmations in the early days of his administration. His choice for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, became the first Pentagon nominee to require the tie-breaking vote of the vice president to be confirmed. And Trump’s team is even more concerned about his pick for director of national intelligence, former Representative Tulsi Gabbard. The president’s aides are not certain that she has the needed support, and Trump himself has expressed some doubt that she’ll be confirmed, the two Trump advisers told me.

Despite these stumbles, the White House has reveled in Trump’s bombastic, over-the-top style, believing that his message is breaking through. Immigration officers have conducted raids in Chicago; Newark, New Jersey; and other cities. A dozen Guatemalan men in shackles were boarded onto a military aircraft in El Paso, Texas, for the deportation flight to their native country, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump threatened tariffs on Colombia in a tiff, now seemingly resolved, over deportation flights. His advisers have also aimed to keep the media off-balance. The White House press office has not sent out a daily schedule to reporters, and has given little notice for Trump’s events. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has yet to hold a formal briefing (though the first is tentatively slated for later today).

The speed and volume of Trump’s orders so far seem to be scrambling the left. Millions of protesters marched in cities across the nation on January 21, 2017. Democratic civic groups exploded in popularity, liberals organized voter-registration drives, and cable-TV ratings and newspaper subscriptions soared. Late-night comics made Trump their top punch line. Trump’s hastily written travel ban on Muslim-majority countries went into effect seven days into his term in 2017, sending lawyers and even ordinary citizens sprinting to airports to assist those who were suddenly subject to detainment. That moment, in many ways, was the early high-water mark of the resistance and set a template for the Democrats’ defiance going forward.

Yesterday marked the first week of Trump’s second term. No large-scale protests have taken place. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argued during last week’s caucus meeting that Democrats cannot chase every outrage, because the Trump administration will “flood the zone” with maddening changes, one person in the room told me. In a Saturday Night Live sketch this past weekend, the show’s Trump character shut down a performance based on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which became a liberal totem a decade ago. The mood among Democrats, at least in some quarters, feels more like resignation than resistance.

So far, the action on the left has been centered more in the courtrooms than in the streets. Deirdre Schifeling, the chief political and advocacy officer of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me that the organization has filed lawsuits to contest a variety of Trump’s immigration orders and has worked to train volunteers in dozens of states to help local officials in responding to the administration’s plans.

“We’re in a different moment. People are not as surprised as the first time. But I would not mistake that for a lack of willingness to fight,” Schifeling said. “It seems like this first week is one giant test balloon—seeing what will stick, seeing what they can get away with. It’s incumbent on all of us to stay calm and firmly push back on them. Don’t give them an inch.”

[David A. Graham: It’s already different]

Jennifer Palmieri, a longtime Democratic strategist who served as White House communications director for Barack Obama and worked on Hillary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris’s campaigns, told me that Democrats “can’t stay demoralized” and must recognize that Trump proposed “an agenda that people bought into”—that even gave him a popular-vote victory.

“Now [we need] to stay most focused on those issues—like prices—which he is the most vulnerable on,” Palmieri said. Inflation was a core campaign issue, and Trump himself noted during the transition that he “won on groceries,” telling Meet the Press in December, “We’re going to bring those prices way down.”

“It’s a tangible thing, and he needs to deliver,” Palmieri said.

That hasn’t started happening yet. For all the shock and awe of Trump’s first week, none of his initial actions directly took on inflation. But nor are Democrats making Trump look particularly vulnerable.

World leaders rubbed shoulders with 56 survivors of Hitler's death camp as they marked 80 years since its liberation.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, is a longtime conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist. He thinks Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates are leaders of a “vaccine cartel” that intentionally prolonged or even started the coronavirus pandemic in order to promote “mischievous inoculations.” Kennedy also blames immunizations for autism and obesity (among other chronic diseases) in children. In the meantime, he isn’t really sure whether HIV causes AIDS, or whether vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles are actually dangerous.

As a doctor, I have spent years following—and fighting—anti-vaccine falsehoods. Along the way, I’ve learned an important lesson: Despite RFK Jr.’s fringe beliefs, he often seems to make sense. Kennedy’s defenders celebrate his fondness for, and facility with, evidence. His real talent, though, is for the clever manipulation of facts. Kennedy is not just a conspiracy theorist; he’s a very good conspiracy theorist. When his confirmation hearing starts on Wednesday, we can expect that he will do what he’s always done, which is to apply a veneer of erudition to nonsense. He may even come off as almost … reasonable.

To witness how this works, read the letter he sent to the prime minister of Samoa on behalf of the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense in November 2019, during that country’s deadly measles outbreak. Kennedy offers his condolences for the tragic deaths of “precious Samoan children,” and then suggests the need to study the outbreak carefully, so as to “thoroughly understand its etiology.” What might have caused thousands of Samoans to get sick? The letter poses two possibilities: “It is critical that the Samoan Health Ministry determine, scientifically, if the outbreak was caused by inadequate vaccine coverage or alternatively, by a defective vaccine.”

At first glance, and for nonexperts, this letter may appear well reasoned and well sourced. It weaves in historical elements and biomedical data, and includes a list of peer-reviewed references at the end. The letter’s main request—that Samoan officials do nothing more than perform genetic testing on the circulating virus—sounds prudent. Prior research has indicated that vaccinated individuals may shed the virus and infect others, the letter says. Wouldn’t it be good to know if that produced the outbreak?

[Read: We’re about to find out how much Americans like vaccines]

In reality, of course, the epidemic was caused not by the vaccines but by the lack of them. (A vaccine-administration accident the year before had produced a scare that led vaccination rates to decline dramatically.) Although the letter’s implication that vaccines were to blame seemed wrong on its face, only when I dived into the cited scientific articles could I see the problems with its details. Kennedy incorrectly claims that genetic sequencing of a large measles outbreak in California from about four years prior found that at least one-third of the cases were due to the vaccine. “Alarmed CDC officials documented this emerging phenomenon,” he wrote. The referenced articles show this to be a fundamental misrepresentation. Although they do describe how the vaccine may, in rare cases, produce a dangerous case of measles, they specifically note that there is no risk of its being transmitted to another person. The genetic testing that Kennedy referenced is used, in part, to distinguish among people who have experienced mild vaccine reactions such as rash and fever from those who have true measles infections. This is important during active epidemics when public-health officials are widely immunizing people, while at the same time trying to isolate infectious individuals. (Kennedy’s press team did not respond to emailed questions about his letter to Samoa, or about other issues with his credibility that are raised in this article.)

A complete refutation of the Samoa letter would run many pages. That may be the point. With his ample, erroneous allusions to scholarship and appeals to authority, Kennedy has perfected the art of the Gish Gallop: a debate strategy in which the speaker simply overwhelms the listener with information, not all of it true. Kennedy’s skill at flooding his audiences with specious claims that sound logical or highbrow was on full display during his 2023 interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan. Over the course of three hours, Kennedy regaled the host with stories about vaccine safety, Albert Camus, Wi-Fi radiation, and the sexual health of frogs, among other subjects. He offered up a bounty of scientific arguments: The words study and studies came up 70 times during the conversation. And, as he has done elsewhere, he encouraged the audience to fact-check everything he said. “Nobody should trust my word on this,” he declared. “You know, what I say is irrelevant. What is relevant is the science.”

[Read: The new Rasputins]

Most of Rogan’s listeners—like most U.S. senators—aren’t likely to have the scientific expertise to assess each of his claims, and certainly not in real time. I caught some errors in the Rogan interview only by virtue of my medical training. For example, Kennedy criticized the inclusion of the hepatitis B shot in the childhood vaccine schedule. The virus is primarily a problem for intravenous-drug users, prostitutes, and homosexuals, he suggested. “Why would you give it to a one-day-old baby, you know, or a three-hour-old baby, and then four more times when that baby is not going to be even subject to it for 16 years?” he asked Rogan. Kennedy’s story sounds informed: He is facile with epidemiology and vaccine regulations; he can describe historical machinations that supposedly took place between Merck and the CDC. But the truth is that most chronic hepatitis B infections are contracted during early childhood, or through mother-to-child transmission. That’s why the World Health Organization recommends immunizing babies, and it’s why nearly every country has chosen to do so.

Kennedy does, at times, say true things about vaccines. He was not wrong, for example, when he told the podcaster Lex Fridman that early batches of the polio vaccine were contaminated with a virus called SV40. But he magnifies and distorts such flaws to the point of absurdity. SV40-containing vaccines did not cause an “explosion” of cancers, as he has argued. Kennedy is also right to say the MMR vaccine doesn’t always provide lifelong immunity to the mumps virus. However, his more extreme assertions—that the shot is causing mumps outbreaks in the military or that the disease is harmless in children—are wrong. (Before vaccination, service members routinely suffered from infections, and kids were at a heightened risk of developing brain inflammation and hearing loss.) Kennedy relies on scraps of truth to construct an alternative reality in which vaccines don’t work, their harms outweigh their benefits, and the diseases themselves aren’t so bad.

At his confirmation hearing, senators will ask him to defend that dangerous, alternative reality. He is likely to do so with impressive-sounding falsehoods, delivered with aplomb. Heed his own advice. No one should trust his word on this.

No one would blame you for thinking that we’re in the midst of an unprecedented global loneliness emergency. The United Kingdom and Japan have named “loneliness ministers” to tackle the problem. In 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness a pressing public-health concern, and then-President Joe Biden’s surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory warning about an “epidemic of loneliness.” American commentators have painted a bleak portrait of a nation collapsing into ever more distant and despairing silos. And polls do suggest that a lot of people are lonely—some of the time, at least.  

But a close look at the data indicates that loneliness may not be any worse now than it has been for much of history. It’s tough to track: Not many surveys look at the trends over time, and those that do don’t date back very far. Some measure the time that people spend alone or the number of close friends they have, but these metrics are proxies for isolation, which isn’t the same as loneliness (as my colleague Derek Thompson wrote earlier this month) and doesn’t always predict it. Comparing social habits across historical periods is tricky, too, because the context—what friendship means to people, what emotional needs they have, how much fulfillment they expect their relationships to give them—keeps shifting. A 2022 review of research on changes in loneliness concluded that existing studies “are inconsistent and therefore do not support sweeping claims of a global loneliness epidemic.”

The greatest difficulty with measuring loneliness—and deciding how much to focus on ending it—may be that we don’t really know what loneliness is. Different people, researchers told me, seem to mean different things when they say they’re lonely: Some want more time with friends; some yearn to be seen for who they are; some feel disconnected from a collective identity or sense of purpose. What those experiences tell us about society’s ills—or whether they tell any coherent story at all—remains unclear. And if nations are going to devote precious resources to solving loneliness, they should know what it is they’re trying to fix.        

This is not America’s first loneliness panic. For much of the country’s history, concern about loneliness has cycled through the national conversation, Claude S. Fischer, a UC Berkeley sociologist, told me. Often, those fears have been spurred by urbanization or technological development: In Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, a 1929 examination of Muncie, Indiana, two sociologists suggested that the telephone was keeping people from visiting their neighbors. Vance Packard’s 1972 book, A Nation of Strangers, described a country fractured by people traveling for jobs. Throughout the 20th century, writers and researchers worried about loneliness induced by the introduction of radio, of TV, of cars; now they fret about smartphones. The warnings sometimes have merit, but they also align with a popular kind of folk wisdom, Fischer said: “That once upon a time there was a lot of tight-knit community and everybody was happy and social relations were, quote, unquote, authentic.”

[Read: Why you should want to be alone]

That golden period may never have existed. Social interaction has changed; that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gotten worse. In preindustrial farming communities, people usually had to depend on whoever was around them—mostly family or neighbors—for support. That lack of choice was perhaps comforting but also “very restrictive,” Fay Bound Alberti, a historian of emotions and the author of A Biography of Loneliness, told me. After more people started moving to cities, it became common to make friends who provide distinct benefits—what Keith Hampton, a Michigan State University sociologist, calls “specialized” relationships. Pure friendship, the kind of relationship that’s just about having fun and bonding, blossomed. In fact, the greater cultural value now placed on friendship, Fischer has written, might be one reason people are so worried about loneliness; perhaps we expect deeper fulfillment from our friends than we once did.

Of course, the worry could be warranted this time. From all the distressing headlines, you’d probably think so. But the story of loneliness in contemporary America isn’t so straightforward.

Many of those alarming articles, for starters, cite studies whose results have since been called into question. One 2006 paper reviewed findings from two decades of the General Social Survey, a national poll that asks people about, among other questions, those with whom they discuss “important matters”—and found that from 1985 to 2004, the number of names that participants listed shrank by about a third. Even more shocking, the percentage of respondents who listed zero confidants nearly tripled. But several researchers have highlighted methodological flaws, including errors in coding cases and possible interviewer and respondent fatigue (the later in the survey this question was asked, the more likely interviewers or subjects were to skip it, and the 2004 version posed it near the end).

Hampton told me, too, that the average person might well have fewer people with whom they discuss all kinds of “important matters”; rather, they talk about specific issues with specific people. In one study, he asked about particular topics—with whom, for instance, participants discussed their career, or their health, or their “happiness and life goals”—and found that “almost everyone gets a near-full range of social support,” he told me. In 2011, one of the 2006 study’s authors published a “reexamination” of that initial paper, finding that “social isolation has not become more prevalent.” Other oft-cited socializing studies have suffered from similar oversights.

In recent years, some seemingly solid studies have suggested that Americans are spending more time alone. According to the American Time Use Survey, leisure time spent with other people declined by more than 20 percent from 2003 to 2023. Yet it’s worth noting that the poll considered only the time people spent with others in person. It doesn’t account for the virtual connections that are crucial for so many: those with disabilities; older adults; ostracized queer teens; recent immigrants alone in a new country; anyone who enjoys texting random thoughts to family group chats or old friends throughout the day, or who likes to keep in touch with far-away loved ones. When a book club decides to meet on Zoom because more members can attend, Fischer pointed out, the result is interaction among more people. Even if you think that time spent physically together is superior, discounting remote hangs entirely might give you a picture of American life that sounds more profoundly isolated than it is.        

[Read: The new age of endless parenting]

Perhaps most important, measuring isolation isn’t a good way to track loneliness. Someone with lots of unsatisfying friendships, or in an unhappy marriage, could easily be lonelier than, say, an introvert who lives alone and has a few close confidants. Some polls do ask participants to report how lonely they feel, or use a measure called the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which asks subjects to rate, for instance, how often they feel excluded, or how often it seems as if “people are around you but not with you.” But according to Fischer, that scale is used in experiments with small samples more often than it is employed systematically in large-scale longitudinal studies meant to track trends over time. And comparing data from various polls taken at disparate points in history isn’t a good solution, because each might use entirely different questions, scales, or thresholds at which someone is considered lonely.

Of course, given the dearth of reliable data, it’s also difficult to argue with certainty that loneliness hasn’t gotten worse. Findings vary depending on what period you’re looking at and what population you’re talking about. Young adults, as I’ve written, do seem to be reporting more loneliness than in the past. That might be related to something as prosaic as housing costs, which have driven many people to move in with their parents—and away from where their friends live. But even the coronavirus pandemic didn’t seem to spur a clear increase in reported loneliness, perhaps because hunkering down in early 2020 felt like being part of a communal experience, or because so many started reaching out to loved ones virtually. People are resilient. And in general, across groups and over time, the “idea that there is evidence of large-scale upheaval,” Hampton said, “is really not supported by any kind of data.”

It’s hard to square a finding like that with all the dire warnings—warnings that have become so common as to feel unimpeachable. Thompson argued in his Atlantic cover story that the lack of a loneliness surge suggests that Americans have become so comfortable in their solitude that they’re no longer feeling an instinct to seek out social time. That’s possible. It’s also possible that many Americans are getting the social time they need—and that the ways they interact are, as always, simply evolving.       

If substantial numbers of people report feeling lonely, that’s a problem regardless of how rates stack up against those from other points in time. Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me he was alarmed by the results of a survey of 1,500 American adults he conducted last year: 21 percent of respondents said that in the past 30 days, they’d felt lonely either frequently or almost all of the time. “There are a lot of people who are suffering,” he told me. “We have to do something about it.”

The trouble is that it’s not clear exactly what needs to be addressed. Weissbourd’s survey took the extra step of asking participants why they’re lonely and got all kinds of answers. Some people described an existential loneliness: They don’t feel connected to their country, or they don’t feel that their place in the world is important. Some said they can’t be their authentic self with others. Some said they don’t feel good about who they are. “Are people looking for a name for a sort of amorphous stew of feelings they’re having right now?” Weissbourd wondered. Or perhaps they’re experiencing depression or anxiety, both conditions alongside which loneliness commonly occurs, he noted. Fischer mentioned that after John F. Kennedy’s assassination and 9/11, researchers recorded spikes in reported loneliness—even though these events were unlikely to suddenly reduce people’s social ties. Maybe the respondents were just expressing distress.

[Read: How much alone time do kids need?]

This might all seem like splitting hairs, but it is possible—essential, even—to be precise about shaggy concepts. Take happiness, Fischer said: Researchers have studied what people mean when they say they’re happy or unhappy, how the wording of the question can affect survey answers, and the conditions under which people are likely to answer one way or the other; those empirical inquiries have led us to a deeper understanding of a sprawling, multifaceted experience. Given the cultural moment that loneliness is having, Fischer told me he wouldn’t be surprised if we have many more studies—and hopefully more nuanced ones—to draw on in 10 years. But for now, we don’t. We have no idea whether the loneliness of a high-school student feeling excluded is the same as the loneliness felt by a 30-year-old lacking a sense of purpose, or a 50-year-old in a bad marriage, or an 85-year-old recent widower.  

Pulling apart these varied hardships might matter a great deal for finding tailored solutions. If people aren’t seeing their friends often enough, maybe we need more social infrastructure so they can easily meet pals in public spaces. If Americans are hungering for a collective sense of meaning, Weissbourd told me, the best approach might be to get people involved in volunteer opportunities. For those who socialize plenty but still feel alone—well, some of them might benefit from more solitude, to take a breather and reflect on who and what gives them real fulfillment.

More than one of these challenges can be taken seriously at once, but the time and resources required to tackle all of them are limited: Only so many policy initiatives can be dreamed up, fought for, and funded. Loneliness might even be the wrong priority altogether. Fischer pointed out that the country has other, very real public-health issues that need attention: preparing for the next pandemic, addressing gun violence, reversing the shortening of the average American lifespan. None of that is to say that our social lives are perfect; as patterns of socializing shift, something is almost always lost. But when it comes to identifying what’s ailing the nation, “loneliness” may no longer be a sufficient answer.

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In this episode of Centre Stage, our guest is Humza Yousaf.

Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a credible threat to return to the White House, the guardrails that seemed to restrain him in his first term—political, legal, psychic—have collapsed with astonishing speed. His nominees are sailing through their confirmation hearings, including some who are underqualified and ideologically extreme. Titans of business and media are throwing themselves at his feet as supplicants. He has obliterated long-standing norms, unashamedly soliciting payoffs from corporations with business before the government. (The Wall Street Journal reports that Paramount, whose parent company needs Trump’s approval for a merger, is mulling a settlement of one of his groundless lawsuits.) Steps that even his allies once dismissed as unthinkable, such as freeing the most violent, cop-beating January 6 insurrectionists, have again reset the bar of normalcy.

These displays of dominance have convinced many of Trump’s critics and supporters alike that his second term will operate in a categorically different fashion from the first. Where once he was constrained by the “deep state”—or, depending on your political priors, by the efforts of conscientious public servants—Trump will now have a fully subdued government at his disposal, along with a newly compliant business and media elite. He will therefore be able to carry out the sorts of wild policy objectives that failed to materialize during his first term.

The earliest indications, however, suggest that this might prove only half true. Trump has clearly claimed some territory in the culture wars: He is now dancing with Village People in the flesh, not merely to a recording of the group’s most famous track. And when it comes to getting away with self-dealing and abuses of power, he has mastered the system. But a politician and a party that are built for propaganda and quashing dissent generally lack the tools for effective governance. As far as policy accomplishments are concerned, the second Trump term could very well turn out to be as underwhelming as the first.

Trump has promised a grand revolution. At a pre-inaugural rally, he announced, “The American people have given us their trust, and in return, we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.” He branded his inauguration “Liberation Day,” labeled his incoming agenda a “revolution of common sense,” and boasted, “Nothing will stand in our way.” After being sworn in on Monday, he signed a slew of executive orders in a move that has been termed “shock and awe.”

[David A. Graham: The Gilded Age of Trump begins now]

Those orders fall into a few different categories. Some are genuinely dangerous—above all, the mass pardon of about 1,500 January 6 defendants, which unambiguously signals that lawbreaking in the service of subverting elections in Trump’s favor will be tolerated. Others, including withdrawing from the World Health Organization and freezing offshore wind energy, will be consequential but perhaps not enduring—that which can be done by executive order can be undone by it.

What’s really striking is how many fall into the category of symbolic culture-war measures or vague declarations of intent. Trump declared a series of “emergencies” concerning his favorite issues, just as Joe Biden had. His order declaring an end to birthright citizenship seems likely to be struck down on constitutional grounds, although the Supreme Court can always interpret the Fourteenth Amendment’s apparently plain text as it desires. He is re-renaming a mountain in Alaska—which, in four years’ time, could be renamed yet again, perhaps after one of the police officers who fought off Trump’s insurrection attempt. He has ordered the federal government to officially recognize only two genders, male and female. “You are no longer going to have robust and long drop-down menus when asking about sex,” an incoming White House official said. Ooooh, the federal intake forms will be shorter!

Meanwhile, Trump has already scaled back many of his most grandiose day-one promises from the campaign. Broker an end to the Ukraine war before taking office? He has “made no known serious effort to resolve the war since his election,” The New York Times reports. Ask again in a few months. Bring down grocery prices? Never mind.

Trump’s supporters probably realized that some of his campaign pledges were hyperbolic. Even by realistic standards, however, Trump seems unprepared to deliver on some of his biggest stated goals. Take his signature domestic policy. Trump loudly promised throughout the presidential campaign to impose massive global tariffs once he took office. And yet, even that proposal remains theoretical. Trump’s executive order on trade instructs, “The Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the United States Trade Representative, shall investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits in goods, as well as the economic and national security implications and risks resulting from such deficits, and recommend appropriate measures,” and then proceeds to issue more solemn calls for study of the matter.

Presidents don’t always come into office with fully formed plans, but Trump doesn’t even have concepts of a plan, or any way to resolve fundamental tension between his belief that foreign countries should pay tariffs and the reality that tariffs raise prices for Americans. Another White House document announces, “All agencies will take emergency measures to reduce the cost of living.” What measures? We can be fairly sure that there is no secret plan waiting to be unveiled.

None of this is to say that Trump will accomplish nothing. At a minimum, he will restrict immigration and sign a regressive tax cut. But even his policy successes will likely sow the seeds of a thermostatic backlash in public opinion. Americans favor mass deportation in the abstract, but their support dwindles when they contemplate specifics. An Axios poll found that strong majorities oppose separating families, employing active-duty military to locate undocumented immigrants, and using military funds to carry out immigration policy. Even some high-level Trump allies have warned that mass deportations will cause immediate economic disruption.

Trump’s fiscal agenda is where the desires of his wealthy benefactors, the preferences of his voters, and economic conditions will clash most violently. The previous two Republican presidents to take office—George W. Bush in 2001, and Trump in 2017—inherited low inflation and low or falling interest rates. Both were able to cut taxes and raise spending without facing any near-term economic costs. In his second term, Trump faces an economy that, while growing smartly, is still plagued with high interest rates relative to the pre-COVID norm. If Trump revises the old playbook of cutting taxes now and worrying about the cost later, he may discover that “later” happens right away.

One answer to the dilemma would be to pay for tax cuts with deep cuts to social spending on the poor, a staple of past Republican budgets. Yet Trump’s strength with low-income voters turns that maneuver into another potential source of backlash. Last month, The Washington Post’s Tim Craig interviewed low-income Trump voters in a poor town in Pennsylvania who earnestly believe that he will not touch their benefits.

[Russell Berman: What Trump can (and probably can’t) do with his trifecta]

Meanwhile, some of Trump’s most prominent backers refuse to acknowledge that any tough choices await. In a recent interview, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat presented Marc Andreessen, one of the Silicon Valley billionaires hoping to influence Trump’s domestic agenda, with concerns that Elon Musk’s plans to cut the budget would alienate voters. In response, Andreessen insisted that the very suggestion reflected “absolute contempt for the taxpayer,” repeating versions of the line rather than engaging with the problem. Musk himself recently reduced his goal of cutting $2 trillion from the budget to a mere $1 trillion. When the brains of the operation are picking arbitrary round numbers and then revising them arbitrarily, one begins to question their grasp on the challenge they face.

Whether Trump pays any political price for failing to deliver on unrealistic promises—or for succeeding at delivering on unpopular ones—is an open question. Political difficulties won’t generate themselves. They will require an energetic and shrewd opposition. And a major purpose of Trump’s maneuvers to intimidate corporate and media elites is to head off a backlash by gaining control over the information environment.

One of Trump’s greatest strengths as a politician is to constantly redefine his policy goals so that whatever he does constitutes “winning.” The success of this tactic reflects the degraded intellectual state of the Republican Party’s internal culture. The conservative movement rejected institutions such as academia and the mainstream media decades ago, building up its own network of loyal counterinstitutions that would construct an alternate reality. This has helped Republicans hold together in the face of corruption and misconduct that, in a bygone era, would have shattered a governing coalition. (Today, Watergate would just be another witch hunt.) But the impulse to disregard expertise and criticism has also disabled Republicans’ ability to engage in objective analysis. The past two Republican administrations accordingly both ended in catastrophe, because the president had built an administration of courtiers who flattered his preexisting beliefs, whether about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq or COVID and the economy.

[George Packer: The end of democratic delusions]

None of those pathologies has disappeared. To the contrary, the MAGA-era GOP has grown more cultlike than ever. The rare, feeble attempt to steer Trump away from bad decisions is usually buried in obsequious flattery. The Trump presidency will be, by definition, a golden age, because Trump will be president during all of it. But it is a measure of his allies’ decrepitude that, whatever positions he ultimately lands on, they are prepared to salute.

Trump has struck fear into his party and America’s corporate bosses. His inauguration was a display of mastery, a sign that none will dare defy his wishes. But a leader surrounded by sycophants cannot receive the advice he needs to avoid catastrophic error, and to signal that his allies can enrich themselves from his administration is to invite scandal. In his inaugural spectacle of dominance and intimidation, Trump was planting the seeds of his own failure.

During Donald Trump’s first term as president, critics used to ask, Can you imagine the outcry if a Democrat had done this? As Trump begins his second, the relevant question is Can you imagine the outcry if Trump had done this eight years ago?

Barely 24 hours into this new presidency, Trump has already taken a series of steps that would have caused widespread outrage and mass demonstrations if he had taken them during his first day, week, or year as president, in 2017. Most appallingly, he pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 rioters, including some involved in violence. (Of course, back then, who could have imagined that a president would attempt to stay in power despite losing, or that he would later return to the White House having won the next election?). In addition, he purported to end birthright citizenship, exited the World Health Organization, attempted to turn large portions of the civil service into patronage jobs, and issued an executive order defining gender as a binary.

Although it is early, these steps have, for the most part, been met with muted response, including from a dazed left and press corps. That’s a big shift from eight years ago, when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered in Washington, and Americans flocked to airports at midnight to try to thwart Trump’s travel ban.

[David A. Graham: Trump isn’t bluffing]

The difference arises from three big factors. First, Trump has worked hard to desensitize the population to his most outrageous statements. As I wrote a year ago, forecasting how a second Trump presidency might unfold, the first time he says something, people are shocked. The second time, people notice that Trump is at it again. By the third time, it’s background noise.

Second, Trump has figured out the value of a shock-and-awe strategy. By signing so many controversial executive orders at once, he’s made it difficult for anyone to grasp the scale of the changes he’s made, and he’s splintered a coalition of interests that might otherwise be allied against whatever single thing he had done most recently. Third, American society has changed. People aren’t just less outraged by things Trump is doing; almost a decade of the Trump era has shifted some aspects of American culture far to the right.

Even Trump’s inaugural address yesterday demonstrates the pattern. Audiences were perplexed by his “American carnage” speech four years ago. George W. Bush reportedly deemed it “weird shit,” earthily and accurately. His second inaugural seemed only slightly less bleak—or have we all just become accustomed to this sort of stuff from a president?

[Read: The coming assault on birthright citizenship]

One test of that question is Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, which attempts to shift an interpretation of the Constitution that has been in place for more than 150 years. Now “the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States,” Trump stated in an order signed yesterday. Lawyers are ready; the order was immediately challenged in court, and may not stand. In any case, the shift that Trump is trying to effect would have a far greater impact than his 2017 effort to bar certain foreign citizens from entering the United States. Birthright citizenship is not just a policy but a theoretical idea of who is American. But Trump has been threatening to do this for years now, so it came as no surprise when he followed through.

In another way, he is also trying to shift what is seen as American. Four years ago, almost the entire nation was appalled by the January 6 riot. As my colleagues Annie Joy Williams and Gisela Salim-Peyer note, United Nations Ambassador-Designate Elise Stefanik called it “un-American”; Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it “anti-American.” Yesterday, Republicans applauded as Trump freed members of that mob whom he has called “hostages.” That included not just people who’d broken into the Capitol but also many who’d engaged in violence. Just this month, Vice President J. D. Vance declared, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Even Vance has become desensitized to Trump. (Heavy users become numb to strong narcotics.)

[Read: Republican leaders once thought January 6 was “tragic”]

But the percentage of Americans who say they disapprove of January 6 has also gone down as distance from the events has grown and propaganda has taken hold. Support for immigration has decreased as well. The WHO exit might have raised more of a fuss before the coronavirus pandemic; now the failures of public-health authorities and insistent attacks on them from politicians including Trump have convinced many people not just that these bodies need reform but that they aren’t needed at all. It’s not just Silicon Valley titans who have acquiesced to Trump and taken up his ideas. Although many people still oppose the president’s agenda, the 2024 election was the first time in three tries that he was able to win a plurality of the popular vote.

In recent weeks, Trump has embarked on a baffling crusade against Panama’s ownership of the Panama Canal. He claimed (incorrectly) that the canal is under Chinese control and suggested the U.S. should go back on the treaty that gave Panama control over the canal zone. Initially, this produced confusion. People were even more surprised when he refused to rule out military action (caveat lector). Still, one couldn’t be sure whether Trump was messing around or serious. Then he brought it up again during yesterday’s inaugural address. By the time Trump sends an expeditionary force to seize the canal, will anyone even raise an eyebrow?

Political leaders across the world urge good relations with the new president, with some expressing concern.

World's richest man accused of making a Nazi salute during a speech after Donald Trump's inauguration.