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Wednesday night’s deadly airplane crash was tragic—and, to many experts, not altogether surprising. The collision between a commercial airplane and a military helicopter in Washington, D.C., has led many people to take a closer look at the complex systems that commercial flying relies on, and the strain that some of those systems are under. I spoke with my colleague Ian Bogost, who writes often about the airline industry, about the factors that shape our perceptions of flying.

Lora Kelley: This incident is not an aberration, but rather something experts seem to have seen coming. What were some of the warning signs?

Ian Bogost: Aviation experts had been fearing that something like this would happen not just at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, but all across the country. Near misses have been on the rise, as have “runway incursions”—planes accidentally sharing the same space with other planes. I won’t pretend to understand all of the reasons for that—and that’s part of the problem. The issues here aren’t as simple as something like screws falling off. Rather, near misses and accidents have to do with the whole system of aviation management: pilot experience; air-traffic-control staffing; the number of planes in the air; the complex airspace around Washington, D.C., in this case. More Americans are flying too, and growing demand puts new pressure on all of these systems in invisible ways.

Lora: How should people think about flying at this moment?

Ian: Commercial airlines want you to feel comfortable flying, because their business depends on it. The evolution of commercial air travel, especially in America, has made it so you don’t even have to look at or smell or hear the equipment to the same extent that passengers once did. You’re protected from many things that remind you that you’re in a machine hurtling through the air at 500 miles per hour.

Commercial air travel really is quite safe. When I say commercial air travel, I mean when you fly a major carrier on a scheduled flight that’s regulated. Safety in the cabin has also improved. Flight attendants worked very hard over many decades to establish themselves as safety professionals and not just service staff. The flight crew is trained to act in case of an emergency, and they’re highly prepared to do so. But because travel is so safe, you never get to see them perform that expertise—God forbid you see them perform that expertise.

Lora: Airlines are quite consolidated, and the system of flight relies on a range of factors beyond just individual companies. How does consolidation factor into safety?

Ian: We have fewer choices in flight than we used to—fewer airlines, fewer routes, fewer airport hubs. That does have an impact on safety. One way this plays out is, if you have fewer options for direct flights, you might have to opt for a layover. Takeoffs and landings are the most dangerous part of air travel. So if you can reduce takeoffs and landings—for example, by taking one flight instead of two—you’re safer, at least statistically. This is all still safer than driving somewhere in a car.

It’s really difficult for consumers to make rational decisions about safety today. Especially because we don’t really know what happened yet with this incident, we don’t know how great the risk is of it happening again. I’ve heard people start to consider making changes to their habits, although I don’t think we’re going to see many folks change their plans in the long run. After a door plug blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight last year, I started to see people saying they would try to avoid the aircraft in question, a Boeing 737-9 MAX. Are those people actually safer? Who knows.

Lora: Why do people often pin their safety fears on airplanes themselves, rather than focusing on the people or systems that operate them?

Ian: In the case of flying, people tend to target their concern toward the concrete, visceral problems they can see and touch: Is there a screw loose? Is my seat broken? We mostly don’t consider the more systemic, intangible ones, such as staffing issues and maintenance routines and airspace-traffic patterns.

When an accident like this week’s happens, however, we get a brief insight into just how complex modern life is. For all of us, it’s certainly much easier not to have to think about that complexity.

Related:

Fear of flying is different now. The near misses at airports have been telling us something.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

FBI agents are stunned by the scale of the expected Trump purge. CDC data are disappearing. Trump has created health-care chaos. Legal weed didn’t deliver on its promises.

Today’s News

The Trump administration will impose a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on goods from China tomorrow, according to the White House. Some hospitals across the country have suspended gender-affirming care for people under 19 years old while they assess how to comply with Donald Trump’s recent executive order. North Korean soldiers fighting for Russia have been pulled off the front lines in the Ukrainian war, according to Ukrainian and U.S. officials.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: DeepSeek has already hit the chipmaker giant Nvidia’s share price, but its true potential could upend the whole AI business model, James Surowiecki writes. The Books Briefing: In Catherine Airey’s new novel, a young person’s curiosity about a life lived without social media or streaming is deployed to superb effect, Emma Sarappo writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

The “right way” to immigrate just went wrong. To rebuild Los Angeles, fix zoning. This is no way to talk about children.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

The Benefit of Doing Things You’re Bad At

By Arthur C. Brooks

Between my university lectures and outside speeches about the science of happiness, I do a lot of public speaking, and am always looking for ways to do so with more clarity and fluency. To that end, I regularly give talks in two languages that are not my own—not random languages, of course, but rather those I learned as an adult: Spanish and Catalan …

This is a specific example of what turns out to be a broader truth: Doing something you’re bad at can make you better at what you’re good at, as well as potentially making you good at something new.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

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Watch. A Real Pain (streaming on Hulu) manages to tell a story about the Holocaust “that doesn’t ask all those dead millions to become its supporting cast,” Gal Beckerman writes.

Read. Sarah Chihaya’s unconventional memoir charts her troubled relationship with books.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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From inside the room, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings felt at times more like an awards show than a job interview. While the health-secretary nominee testified, his fans in the audience hooted and hollered in support. Even a five-minute bathroom break was punctuated by a standing ovation from spectators and cheers of “We love you, Bobby!” There were some detractors as well—one protester was ushered out after screaming “He lies!” and interrupting the proceedings—but they were dramatically outnumbered by people wearing Make America Healthy Again T-shirts and Confirm RFK Jr. hats.

The MAHA faithful have plenty of reason to be excited. If confirmed, RFK Jr. would oversee an agency that manages nearly $2 trillion, with the authority to remake public health in his image. “He just represents the exact opposite of all these establishment agencies,” Brandon Matlack, a 34-year-old who worked on Kennedy’s presidential campaign, told me on Wednesday. We chatted as he waited in a line of more than 150 people that snaked down a flight of stairs—all of whom were hoping to get a seat for the hearing. Many of them were relegated to an overflow room.

Of course, Matlack and other RFK Jr. fans could be in for a letdown. Whether Kennedy will actually be confirmed as health secretary is still up in the air. There was less raucous cheering during the hearing on Thursday, as Kennedy faced tough questions from Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, whose vote could be decisive in determining whether Kennedy gets confirmed. But the realization of RFK Jr.’s vision for health care in America may not hinge on his confirmation. The MAHA movement has turned the issue of chronic disease into such a potent political talking point that people like Matlack are willing to trek from Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C., just to support Kennedy. Politicians across the country are hearing from self-proclaimed “MAHA moms” (and likely some dads too) urging them to enact reforms. They’re starting to listen.

Kennedy is best known as an anti-vaccine activist who spreads conspiracy theories. His more outlandish ideas are shared by some MAHA supporters, but the movement itself is primarily oriented around improving America’s diet and the health problems it causes us. Some of the ways MAHA wants to go about that, such as pressuring food companies to not use seed oils, are not exactly scientific; others do have some research behind them. Consider artificial food dyes, a major MAHA rallying cry. Multiple food dyes have been shown in animal studies to be carcinogenic. And although a candy-corn aficionado likely isn’t going to die from the product’s red dye, the additive is effectively banned in the European Union. (Kennedy claims that food dyes are driving down America’s life expectancy. There’s no evidence directly linking food dyes to declining human life expectancy, though one study did show that they cut short the life of fruit flies.)

Until recently, concerns over food additives, such as artificial dyes, were the domain of Democrats. In 2023, California became the first state in the nation to ban certain food additives: red dye 3, potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil, and propylparaben. But now food-additive bans are being proposed in Donald Trump country, including West Virginia, Arkansas, and Kentucky. Some of the efforts, such as the Make Arkansas Healthy Again Act, are an explicit attempt to enact Kennedy’s agenda.

In other states, something a bit more Schoolhouse Rock is happening: The purported dangers of food ingredients are riling up Americans, who are then going to their lawmakers seeking change. Eric Brooks, a Republican state legislator in West Virginia, told me that he decided to copy California’s food-additive bill after being prodded by a constituent. “I said, Well, I don’t normally look out West, especially out to California, for policy ideas, to be honest with you,” he told me. “But once I had done the research and I saw the validity of the issue, I said, Okay.” Although his bill, which was first introduced in January 2024, did not move forward in the previous legislative session because, in his words, “there were bigger fish to fry,” Brooks hopes the national interest coming from the MAHA movement will motivate West Virginia legislators to take another look at the proposal.

Other red-state efforts to follow California’s lead have similarly not yet been passed into law, but the fact that the bills have been introduced at all signifies how motivated Republicans are on the topic. The MAHA moms may be enough to propel Kennedy to the job of health secretary. One Republican, Senator Jim Banks of Indiana, told Kennedy on Thursday that he plans to vote to confirm him because doing anything else “would be thumbing my nose at that movement.” Republicans are not only introducing bills to ban food additives; they’re also taking up Kennedy’s other MAHA priorities. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently asked the federal government for permission to forbid food-stamp recipients in her state from using their benefits to buy junk food—a policy Kennedy has repeatedly called for.

Over the past two days, senators seemed shocked at just how loyal a following Kennedy has amassed. One pejoratively called him a prophet. MAHA believers I spoke with made clear that they want RFK Jr.—and only RFK Jr.—to lead this movement. Vani Hari, a MAHA influencer who goes by “Food Babe” on Instagram, told me that, if Kennedy fails to be confirmed, there “will be an uprising like you have never seen.”

But at this point, it seems that the movement could live on even without Kennedy. On Wednesday, the Heritage Foundation hosted a press gaggle with MAHA surrogates. Heritage, an intellectual home of the modern conservative movement, is now praising the banning of food dyes. This is the same pro-business think tank that a decade ago warned that should the FDA ban partially hydrogenated oils, trans fats that were contributing to heart attacks, the agency “would be taking away choices,” “disrespecting” Americans’ autonomy, and mounting “an attack on dietary decisions.”

Republicans have generally been a bulwark for the food industry against policies that could hurt its bottom line. Democrats and Republicans in Washington today seem more aligned on food issues than ever before. “When you have members on both sides of the aisle whose constituencies are now extremely interested in understanding fully what’s in their food products, it does shift the game a bit,” Brandon Lipps, a food lobbyist and a former USDA official under Trump, told me. After all, even Bernie Sanders, despite chastising Kennedy multiple times during this week’s confirmation hearings, professed his support for aspects of the MAHA movement. “I agree with you,” Sanders told Kennedy on Thursday, that America needs “a revolution in the nature of food.” During the same hearing, Cassidy said that he is struggling with Kennedy’s candidacy because, despite their deep disagreements on vaccine policy, on “ultra-processed foods, obesity, we are simpatico. We are completely aligned.”

Although MAHA has shown itself to be a unifying message, the real test will come down to the brass tacks of any political movement: passing actual legislation. How willing lawmakers—especially those with pro-business proclivities—will be to buck the status quo remains to be seen. Politicians have proved eager to speak out against ultra-processed foods; in that sense, MAHA is winning. But policy victories may still be a ways off.

To understand the harm Donald Trump has done with his tariffs on Canada and Mexico, here are four things you need to know:

First, every tax on imports is also a tax on exports.

The most popular beer in America is Modelo Especial, brewed in Mexico. Impose a 25 percent tariff on Modelo and sales will slide. So, too, will exports of the American barley that goes into Mexican beer. Mexico buys three-quarters of U.S. barley exports, almost all for brewing.

Trump surrogates may promise you that by driving Mexican beer off of grocery shelves, Trump’s tariffs will increase sales of U.S. barley to U.S. brewers. That promise may even be substantially true. But that offer has fine print that barley growers will notice.

Barley growers don’t care only about how much barley they sell. They care about the price at which they sell it.

A tariff raises the price of both every imported good and every good that competes with imports. If the price of Modelo is pushed up, the price of American-brewed beer will rise as well. American beermakers are not operating a charity. The tariff on Modelo allows them to both increase their market share at Modelo’s expense and raise their prices enough to increase their margins at the consumers’ expense.

But American consumers do not have infinite amounts of money. If they are paying more for beer, they have to make savings elsewhere. The result—and economists will prove this to you all day with facts and figures—is that prices in exporting sectors such as barley, and agriculture generally, will decline in proportion as prices in the importing sectors rise.

This is why developing countries that tried, after 1945, to bulldoze their way to industrialization using high tariffs—Argentina under Juan Perón; India under Jawaharlal Nehru—ended up instead isolating themselves from world markets. The tariffs did allow them to make their own radio sets and cars, but at the price of lowering national incomes and so shrinking the domestic market for those radios and cars. And, of course, the protected radios and cars could not compete on global markets against the superior products of the countries that accepted world prices, such as Germany and Japan.

Trump tariffs will be paid in the form of higher prices for imports and their substitutes, and lower profits and wages for everyone who works in export industries.

[Juliette Kayyem: Trump is threatening California in the wrong way]

Second, every product is also an input.

When journalists write about tariffs, they look for everyday examples familiar to everyone, the way I just did with Modelo beer. Others will cite tomatoes or avocados, food items for which the cost of the tariff will be reflected in the price at the supermarket checkout. But the greatest harm done by tariffs is concealed in a way that prevents most of us from seeing the harm directly.

The largest glassmaker in North America is a Mexican company, Vitro. It operates plants in the U.S. and Canada, but the center of its operations is Monterrey, Mexico.

Very few of us buy big sheets of industrial glass. We do not see or care about the price. But we do care about the price of a new apartment. That apartment price depends on the cost of construction. Which depends on the price of the window systems that clad the apartment building. Which depends on the price of glass. Which Trump just raised by up to 25 percent.

You may buy a little aluminum in the form of cans and other household products. But the main way you pay for aluminum is in the price of airline tickets. Put a tariff on aluminum, and aircraft prices rise. Inflate aircraft prices, and airline-ticket prices also rise. The traveler will not know why, and will be tempted to blame airline greed—and will find politicians ready to feed that grievance. Who will connect the surprise extra fee they have to pay to sit beside their child with a president’s decree against the cheaper Canadian aluminum that owes its price advantage to superabundant Quebec hydroelectric power?

Big, sophisticated global companies can shift their input-sourcing from tariffed countries such as China and Mexico to favored countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines. But the shift is never easy. For smaller companies, it may prove altogether unfeasible. The largest maker of outboard motors in the United States employs only about 5,000 people. It is furloughing and laying off more than a quarter of its workforce. This type of firm cannot easily fly into Hanoi to source a reliable replacement for its trusted components supplier in Shenzhen, China. The challenge is only greater when the U.S. manufacturer has no idea how long the Trump tariffs will last. It will probably continue to use its familiar suppliers, pay the tariff, raise its prices, and suffer the stagnation and shrinkage of its business.

[Read: Democrats wonder where their leaders are]

Third, “illegal” is irrelevant; don’t expect relief from tariffs through lawsuits.

You might wonder how can Trump do this. After all, Trump himself renegotiated NAFTA and praised his new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal as “based on the principle of fairness and reciprocity.” Surely, it can’t possibly be consistent with U.S. treaty obligations to impose new tariffs on a whim.

All true. Trump’s actions are almost certainly illegal under treaty rules. But the U.S. stopped obeying treaty rules some time back.

In 2018, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The affected countries took their case to the World Trade Organization. More than four years later, in December 2022, the WTO issued its judgment. The United States lost on every point. Result? The Biden administration declared it would ignore the ruling. The United States “will not cede decision-making over its essential security to WTO panels,” said a spokesperson for then–U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai.

Those defiant words were backed by obstructionist practices. In 2017, the Trump administration had blocked new appointments to the WTO’s appellate court, in effect the supreme court of world trade. The Biden administration continued the embargo. Today, all seven seats on the panel are empty.

The United States has likewise sabotaged the dispute-settlement mechanisms under the North American trade agreements. In 1998, the U.S. escaped defeat on a Mexican complaint by the ingenious method of refusing to appoint anyone to the commission that was supposed to adjudicate the matter. That more or less killed NAFTA from the start as a way to police actions by the American government. Trump’s U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement is even more riddled with exceptions that allow his government to do as it pleases.

On trade, the U.S. itself has led the way back to the law of the jungle. Remember that fact when the other big cats strike back.

[Read: Trump has created health-care chaos]

Fourth, Americans may not remember their past actions, but others do.

You may have already forgotten all about last weekend’s Trump outburst against Colombia, backed by threats of high tariffs on Colombian products. You may not ever have known that Colombia opened up to U.S. wheat, soybean, beef, cotton, and peanut exports in order to secure a free-trade agreement with the United States. But Colombians remember.

Colombia’s politics are intensely polarized, the legacy of bitter years of insurgency and civil war. Through most of the 21st century, Colombia’s politics had been dominated by U.S.-friendly politicians of the right. In 2022, for the first time in its modern history, Colombia elected a president of the left, Gustavo Petro. Petro is a former Marxist guerrilla, but he pledged to continue dialogue with the United States.

How does that dialogue look now to Colombians? And to others in South America and the world?

Trump is single-handedly reneging on 80 years of American work to persuade others to trust and rely on the United States. He is remodeling the international image of the U.S. after himself: impulsive, self-seeking, short-sighted, and untrustworthy. First-term Trump might have been dismissed as an aberration, brought to office by a fluke of America’s archaic Electoral College. A returned Trump, this time empowered by a genuine popular-vote victory, cannot be so readily dismissed. He obviously represents something deep in American politics, something likely enduring, something that other countries must take into account.

Mexico and Canada must ultimately suffer whatever the U.S. imposes on them. They cannot relocate; they have few credible options. Mexico has learned from especially bitter experience that any attempt to strike its own international deals will be vetoed by the U.S., using force if necessary.

Canadians have had an easier time, summed up by the cynical local joke: “The Americans are our best friends whether we like it or not.” But other countries have more options.

[From the March 2025 issue: Europe’s Elon Musk problem]

Over the past five centuries, the Euro-Atlantic world has seen the rise of one great power after another: Habsburg Spain, Bourbon and Napoleonic France, Victorian Britain, Imperial and then Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union. Each of those powers was ultimately brought down because it frightened other powers into uniting against it.

The United States since 1945 tried a different way. It reconciled the world to its dominance in great part by using that dominance for the benefit of willing partners. The United States provided security, it opened markets, it welcomed the improving prosperity of fellow democracies and like-minded allies. Who would hazard the costs and dangers of uniting to topple such a benign hegemon—at least, so long as the hegemon remained benign?

In the 21st century, the United States faces a new kind of adversary. Past rivals might have matched the U.S. in wealth, technology, or military strength, but not in all three. China today is the nearest peer power the U.S. has faced since Americans battled the British Empire in the War of 1812. To balance China while keeping the peace, the U.S. will need more and better friends than ever before. Trump is doing his utmost instead to alienate and offend those friends.

“America First” means “America Alone.” This week’s trade wars are steps on the way to future difficulties—and, unless a great infusion of better judgment or better luck suddenly occurs, future disasters.

The geopolitical verdict on the first Trump presidency could be written with a breath of relief: “Bad as it was, it could have been worse.” On the present trajectory, the verdict on the second may not come with any relief at all.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Our editors compiled six stories about elite schools and the issues they face. Today’s reading list examines how the Ivy League broke America, the problem with college admissions, and more.

Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene

Elite schools breed entitlement, entrench inequality—and then pretend to be engines of social change.

By Caitlin Flanagan

How the Ivy League Broke America

The meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new.

By David Brooks

How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition

Meritocracy prizes achievement above all else, making everyone—even the rich—miserable. Maybe there’s a way out.

By Daniel Markovits

Why I’m a Public-School Teacher but a Private-School Parent

It’s not selling out; it’s buying in.

By Michael Godsey

Why You Have to Care About These 12 Colleges

Change them, and you change America.

By Annie Lowrey

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.

By Rose Horowitch

The Week Ahead

Love Hurts, an action movie starring Ke Huy Quan as a realtor who is forced to confront his past life as a hit man (in theaters Friday) The 67th Annual Grammy Awards, hosted by the comedian Trevor Noah (streaming on Paramount+ tonight) Pure Innocent Fun, an essay collection by Ira Madison III that combines memoir and pop-culture analysis (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Is This How Reddit Ends?

By Matteo Wong

The internet is growing more hostile to humans. Google results are stuffed with search-optimized spam, unhelpful advertisements, and AI slop. Amazon has become littered with undifferentiated junk. The state of social media, meanwhile—fractured, disorienting, and prone to boosting all manner of misinformation—can be succinctly described as a cesspool.

It’s with some irony, then, that Reddit has become a reservoir of humanity.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Starbucks’ most beloved offering is disappearing. What on earth is Eusexua? The Stranger Things effect comes for the novel. “Dear James”: Oh, how the men drone on.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The day Trump became un-president Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI? RFK Jr. has a lot to learn about Medicaid.

Photo Album

Germany’s Alexander Zverev plays in a semifinal match against Serbia’s Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open. (Francis Mascarenhas / Reuters)

Take a look at these photos of the week, featuring scenes from the Australian Open, Lunar New Year celebrations, and more.

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Donald Trump threatening to annex Canada? It was an absurd situation. I briefly considered recycling an old joke of mine about merging all of the High Plains states into a single province of South Saskatchewan. But as I toyed with it, the joke soured. The president of the United States was bellowing aggression against fellow democracies. The situation was simultaneously too stupid for serious journalism and too shameful for wisecracks.

In this second Trump presidency, many of us are baffled by how to respond. The former Trump strategist Steve Bannon memorably described Trump’s method as “flood the zone with shit.” Try to screen all the flow, and you will rapidly exhaust yourself and desensitize your audience. Ignore the flood, and soon you’re immersed in the stuff neck-deep.

The first Trump term was very different.

[Read: It’s not amateur hour anymore]

More than a million people demonstrated against him on January 21, 2017, many more than had attended his inauguration the day before. On January 27, Trump issued an executive order purporting to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Thousands of people thronged airports across the nation to protest. About a hundred were arrested. In less formal ways, civic-minded Americans also rallied against the new administration. They read and viewed more news, and paid for it at record levels, too. Trump reviled one news organization more than any other: the “failing New York Times.” In 2017 alone, the company’s revenues from digital subscriptions climbed 46 percent, pushing total company revenues above $1 billion.

Meanwhile, the administration bumbled from fiasco to fiasco. Within the first week, Trump’s choice of national security adviser lied to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian government, setting in motion his early resignation and then criminal indictment. Trump that same week summoned then–FBI Director James Comey to dinner to pressure him to end the bureau’s investigation of Trump-Russia connections. The demand would lead to Comey’s firing, the appointment of a special counsel, and the prosecution and conviction of important Trump allies such as Paul Manafort.

First-term Trump knew what he wanted: unlimited personal power. But he did not know how to achieve it, and an insufficient number of those around him was willing and able to help him. The senior administration officials who supported Trump’s autocratic ambitions lacked bureaucratic competence; the officials who possessed the bureaucratic competence did not support his ambitions. That’s one reason it took Trump more than a year—until March 2018—to impose the first major round of the tariffs that he wanted but his top economic adviser opposed.

First-term Trump also lacked reliable partners in Congress. Then–Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell struck devil’s bargains with Trump to achieve their own agendas: tax cuts, judicial appointments, the attempted repeal of Obamacare. But they were not his men. They overlooked his corruption, but also imposed limits on what he could do. In 2019, Trump tried to name two personal loyalists to the Federal Reserve Board. McConnell’s Senate rejected them.

[Read: Donald Trump’s first year as president: a recap]

Second-term Trump is very different. He has moved rapidly to consolidate power. Even before he took office, the Department of Justice preemptively stopped all legal actions against him for his attempted seizure of power on January 6, 2021. As soon as he was inaugurated, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all of those convicted for the violent attack on Congress. He then announced investigations of the lawyers who had acted to enforce the law against him.

Trump has moved rapidly to oust independent civil servants, beginning with 17 nonpartisan inspectors general. He moved fast to install loyalists atop the two most important federal management agencies, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management. His administration is united in claiming power to refuse to spend funds already appropriated by Congress and to ignore laws that constrain the absolute power of the executive branch. The whole Trump team, not only the president personally, is testing another important tool of power: stopping congressionally approved grants to states, to ensure that he is funding supporters and punishing opponents. The Trump administration retreated from the test after two days of uproar—but how permanently, who can say?

Trump’s administration has launched large-scale immigration raids in Democratic cities and commenced legal action against local officials who stand in the way. The administration has stopped all international humanitarian aid, cutting off Ukraine. Trump is backed, not undercut, by senior national-security officials in his threats of territorial aggression against Greenland, Panama, and Canada. The Republican platform and congressional budget-writers approve Trump’s musings about replacing tax revenues with hoped-for windfalls from tariffs. Even his seemingly juvenile move to rename the Gulf of Mexico was immediately endorsed by his Department of the Interior. The absurd act carries an underlying serious message: The Trump administration stands behind its president’s high-handed rewriting of rules, even the most established and uncontroversial.

Looming ahead are even more crucial acts of consolidation, including the appointment of an FBI director who has proclaimed his willingness to use the federal police force as a tool of presidential personal power.

Trump’s opponents seem dazed, disoriented, and defeated. Despite the GOP’s slender majorities in both chambers of Congress, and despite Trump’s own low approval rating, the new White House for the moment carries all before it. There have been no mass protests. The demand for news and information—so voracious in 2017—has diminished, if not vanished. Audiences have dwindled; once-mighty news organizations are dismissing hundreds of journalists and staff.

[Read: It’s already different]

Compared with eight years ago, Trump is winning more and his opponents are resisting less.

What’s changed?

Four major things.

First, this time Trump is not arriving in power alone. He and the Republican mainstream have merged, a convergence symbolized by the highly detailed Project 2025 plan written for Trump by the Heritage Foundation. Trump disavowed the plan during the campaign. He was lying when he did so. Now its authors are his most effective henchmen, and unlike the situation he faced in 2017, Trump can now combine expertise and loyalty in the same body of staffers.

Second, this time Trump’s opponents feel beaten in a way that they did not after 2016. That year, Hillary Clinton received nearly 3 million more votes than Trump. Clinton’s popular-vote advantage had no legal meaning. The office of the president is won or lost according to the arcane rules of the Electoral College, not by direct vote-counting. Politically, though, the popular vote matters a lot—that’s why Trump confected all those silly lies about his supposedly historic victory in 2016 and his allegedly enormous crowd size at the 2017 Inauguration. Back then, Democrats felt outmaneuvered but not out-voted. By contrast, Kamala Harris’s unqualified loss in 2024 has crushed morale. Democrats are divided, criticizing one another for their loss, not yet uniting to sound the alarm about how Trump is using his victory.

Third, Trump owes many of his early successes to previous Democratic mistakes. On issue after issue—immigration enforcement, crime and public order, race and gender—Democratic governments over the past eight years have drifted away from the mainstream of American public opinion. The drift is best symbolized by that notorious answer Harris gave to a 2019 questionnaire asking whether she favored taxpayer-funded gender-transition operations for undocumented immigrants and federal prisoners. Her related response in an interview with a progressive group was like some kind of smart-aleck word puzzle: How many unpopular hot-button issues can be crammed into a single sentence? Harris believed that punching every one of those buttons was necessary to be a viable progressive in the 2019–20 cycle. She, and America, paid the price in 2024.

A real quandary arises here. The best-organized Democratic interest groups want to fight Trump on the worst possible issues; the Democrats who want to fight on smarter issues tend to be less organized to fight. Until that conundrum is solved, Democrats are disabled and Trump is empowered.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the workforce? Not popular.

Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers entering the United States with little way to expel them if they are ultimately refused (as almost all of them will be)? Even less popular.

Create a rift between the United States and Israel? Very unpopular.

Trans athletes competing in girls’ and women’s sports? Wildly unpopular.

These are bad fights for Democrats to have. For that very reason, they are the fights that Trump Republicans want to start. Dangerously and unfortunately, they are also the fights that some of the most active of Democratic factions seek to have.

The fourth difference between 2017 and 2025 is the difference in the information space in which American politics is conducted. In 2017, politically minded Americans used platforms like Facebook and Twitter to share links to news sources. Some of those sources were deceptive or outright fake, but even fake news at least replicated the form and style of actual news.

Since then, new platforms have risen to dominance, especially among younger Americans and those less connected to politics. These new platforms are far more effective at detecting and manipulating user bias, fear, and anger. They are personality-powered, offering affirmation and bonding as their proofs of truth.

For pro-Trump Republicans, this new information space is marvelously congenial. They love and hate based on personal recommendations, and will flit from issue to issue as their preferred “influencers” command. Such a movement centered on celebrity and charismatic leadership has no problem with the fact that its favorite media spread disinformation and distrust. In fact, it’s useful. Trump has in effect adapted a slogan from Mussolini: “Trump is always right.” Its corollary is: “Only Trump is right.” Nothing important is lost from a Trump point of view if right-wing media encourage their users to despise science, law, and other forms of expertise.

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

The anti-Trump coalition, however, is all about institutions. It depends on media that promote understanding of, and respect for, the work that institutions do. The new-media age is inherently inhospitable to institutionalists, and deeply demoralizing for them. Before they can organize to resist Trump, they must build new ways of communicating that adapt to contemporary technology but do not succumb to that technology’s politically destructive tendencies.

All of the above takes time. But it all can be done and must be done.

The second Trump administration has opened purposeful and strong. Its opponents have opened confused and weak. But today’s brutal reality can be tomorrow’s fading memory.

The second-term Trump synthesis does not even pretend to have an economic agenda for middle-class people. The predictable next round of tax cuts will disfavor them. The ensuing deficits will keep mortgage rates high. The tariffs and immigration crackdowns will raise consumer prices. Trump is offering nothing to help with the cost of health care and college.

Trump using James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” as his walk-on song, staffing his administration with accused abuser of women upon accused abuser of women, and relying heavily on reactionary anti-woman gender politics as his political message and messengers: All of that will exact a political price in weeks and months ahead.

Trump himself will lead and epitomize an administration of rake-offs and graft. He may succeed in sabotaging laws designed to prevent and punish corruption in high offices. He won’t be able to suppress awareness of his corruption.

The second-term Trump world will bubble with threats to U.S. security. Trump is determined to make each of them worse by fracturing our alliances in both the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific regions. The worst threat of all is that Trump will be drawn into military action inside Mexico, without the cooperation of the Mexican authorities. Trump’s project to brand drug cartels as international terrorist organizations has legal implications that Trump supporters refuse to consider. Right now, the cartels have powerful incentives not to commit violence against U.S. citizens or on U.S. territory. Yet Trump is poised on the verge of actions that could change the cartels’ calculus and import Mexico’s criminal violence north of the border on a huge scale.

[Read: What’s guiding Trump’s early moves]

Trump won the election of 2024, but still failed to break 50 percent of the vote. His hold on Congress could slip at any time. His plans to foster voter-ID laws and gerrymandering to disenfranchise Democrats will collide with the new reality of American politics that these measures will harm his prospects more than his opponents’: Trump does best among the most disaffiliated Americans, whereas Democrats are widening their lead among those Americans who follow politics closely and vote most often.

The most immediate task for the anti-Trump coalition in these early months of 2025 is to avoid more mistakes. President Joe Biden ended his presidency by listening to advice to grant clemency to thousands of drug offenders, including heinous murderers. Who offered that advice? Don’t listen to them anymore! Fight Trump where he’s most vulnerable, not where progressive interest groups are most isolated and most dogmatic. Build unity from the center, rather than indulge the factionalism of the ultra-left.

A great many Americans despise Trump for the basic reason that he’s a very nasty person who speaks in demeaning ways and does cruel things. The movement to stop him should look and sound and act nice. If you get reprimanded for “respectability politics,” or caricatured as “cringe,” or scolded for appealing to suburban “wine moms,” that’s when you’ll know you’re doing it right.

The MAGA elite feels and fears the weight of American democracy. It knows that democratic accountability and action will grind down its authoritarian aspirations and corrupt schemes. The MAGA elite’s best plan for success is to persuade the American majority to abandon hope and surrender the fight. Its most useful allies are the extremists who have too often misled the great American center into doomed leftward detours.

November 2024 was bad. January and February 2025 are worse. The story is not over yet—unless you agree to lay down in despair the pen that can write the remainder of the story.

To judge by the shelves of America’s vice merchants, the nation is in the grips of a whipped-cream frenzy. Walk into any vape store or sex shop, and you’ll find canisters of nitrous oxide showcased in window displays—ostensibly to catch the eye of bakers and baristas, who use the gas to aerate creams and foams. At the bodega near my apartment, boxes of up to 100 mini-canisters are piled up to eye level, next to Baby Yoda bongs.

In fact, culinary professionals generally don’t shop for equipment at stores with names like Puff N Stuff or Condom Sense. The true clientele inhales the gas to get high. A dangerous and technically illegal drug, nitrous oxide is widely available as long as everyone pretends it’s destined for use as a food product. Indeed, a whole industry appears to have built its business model around exploiting this loophole. Large distributors brand and flavor nitrous in ways that attract young inhalers, stock it with retailers catering to other vices, and sell it in quantities that are implausible for culinary use but ideal for huffing. The gas can even be ordered from Walmart, Amazon, and eBay. Without meaningful regulation, getting high on nitrous will remain as convenient as picking up a bag of chips.

Nitrous oxide has been recreationally inhaled since the 1800s. It induces a euphoric head rush and tingling in the user’s fingers and toes, often followed by giddy laughter. Almost as soon as it starts, it’s over. The effects of a single hit typically last for less than a minute.

The modern version of the drug, known colloquially as a “whippet” or “whip-it,” has recently climbed the youth-popularity ranks. (These products are distinct from the Reddi-Wip cans found at the supermarket, which contain cream and nitrous oxide together. The canisters proliferating now contain the gas alone.) Although pandemic-era lockdown protocols hampered illicit drugs’ supply chains, nitrous oxide remained broadly available by comparison. In 2018, about 12.5 million Americans over age 12 reported having ever used it, a number that rose to nearly 14 million in 2022. Social media is full of clips of young people ripping hits before falling on their faces (so much so that TikTok eventually banned nitrous-related search terms). Fans of the drug have created gas-tank accessories in the video game Roblox; one rapper’s song “Whippet” features him and his entourage ripping hits of nitrous from tanks tucked in their waistbands between verses. A recent Columbia graduate told me that, back in college, one friend’s birthday party featured a salad bowl “full to the brim” with used nitrous canisters. (He spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss illegal drug use.)

[Malcolm Ferguson: Marijuana is too strong now]

As you might imagine, depriving your brain of oxygen in favor of laughing gas is not wise. Heavy nitrous users can suffer severe health consequences, including, occasionally, death. Varun Vohra, an emergency-medicine professor at Wayne State University, in Detroit, told me that heavy users experience symptoms including irregular walking, bodily weakness, and severe limb pain. (Nitrous-oxide-related emergency-room visits in Michigan more than doubled from 2022 to 2023.) Inhaling the gas deactivates vitamin B12, which harms nerves in the brain and the spinal cord. Among chronic users, this can eventually induce paralysis. Users also report depression, anxiety, mood swings, and even hallucination. A senior at Tulane University, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that he’d quit the drug after one night when he took a deep inhale and blacked out. He awoke on the floor a few seconds later, unable to remember what had happened; his friends told him he’d had a seizure.

Perhaps the greatest danger arises from what people do while huffing the drug. Ed Scott, a city-council member in Rialto, California, told me that his son, Myles, died in a car accident after his friend inhaled the gas while driving and passed out at the wheel. This inspired Scott to investigate the drug’s use in California. He told me that he found many other fatal car accidents in which nitrous-oxide products were discovered at crash sites but police—who thought they were helium cannisters—did not register the crashes as DUIs.

Given the health and safety risks, the sale and use of nitrous oxide for recreational purposes is technically illegal. The key word here is technically. Businesses can generally get away with selling nitrous oxide over the counter as long as they say it’s for culinary use—and pretend not to know what customers are really doing with it. (Some states prohibit sales to anyone under 21 or 18.) If, that is, they even bother pretending. The Tulane senior told me that the clerks at his local smoke shop greeted him with shouts of “whip-it boy!” when he visited to restock.

A major industry has grown out of the regulatory vacuum. In 2020, Marissa Politte’s family sued United Brands, the Silicon Valley–based company that distributes the brand Whip-It!, after she was killed by an unconscious nitrous-huffing driver. Documents revealed by the lawsuit suggest that the players involved know they’re benefiting from a legal loophole. A former warehouse employee estimated that three-quarters of United Brands’ customers were smoke shops, not bakeries or cafés. The client list named retailers including Mary Jane’z Novelties, Herban Legend Smoke Shop, Smoke 420, and Precious Slut 1. In a seven-year span, documents show, the company sold about 52,000 “chargers,” or miniature nitrous capsules, to Kaldi’s Coffee—and more than 1 million to the It’s A Dream smoke shop.

Internal emails between United Brands and retailers, uncovered by the lawsuit, suggest a certain cynicism around legal compliance. One United Brands employee emailed a retailer requesting that the Whip-It! chargers “are used properly and legally.” The retailer responded: “yah man we know the deal we put a disclaimer… you know we all got to cover our asses, better safe than sorry.” (United Brands did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Meanwhile, many other companies market nitrous in ways that seem conspicuously ill-tailored to professional pastry chefs. A variety of gas tanks are sold with names that evoke marijuana strains, not whipped cream—Monster Gas (slogan: “Become easy, Become happy!”), Hippie Whippy, Baking Bad, Cosmic Gas—and in flavors such as mango smoothie and tropical punch. Colorful labels feature fruits, unicorns, women in bathing suits, or sports cars. (Hervé Malivert, the director of culinary affairs at the Institute of Culinary Education, told me that many food professionals are loyal to iSi chargers, which they order from the company’s website—not at a gas station. Malivert said he has never heard of a chef using flavored gas or gas tanks.)

One of the most prominent nitrous companies is Galaxy Gas, which was founded in 2021 by three brothers who ran Cloud 9, an Atlanta-based smoke-shop chain. A Cloud 9 executive told New York magazine that Galaxy Gas at one time made up nearly 30 percent of all nitrous sales nationwide. Asked by CBS to explain why anyone would need to buy a tank with enough nitrous oxide to make thousands of servings of whipped cream, a Galaxy Gas spokesperson claimed that the product was for customers seeking an “erotic culinary lubricant.” (The company’s rising profile in the world of whip-its has brought legal scrutiny. According to New York, its trademark was recently sold for $1 to a newly registered corporate owner, and it has paused direct sales. Galaxy Gas did not respond to requests for comment.)

[Mike Riggs: Congress accidentally legalized weed six years ago]

In response to the spread of nitrous-oxide use, states and the federal government have begun taking steps toward more effective regulation. The most notable example is Louisiana, where the drug used to be outlawed only if sold for the purpose of being inhaled. Legislation enacted last May made its sale presumptively illegal, with carveouts for genuine industrial and culinary use. Jeanette Brick, the president of iSi North America, told me that her company does not oppose the Louisiana law. “These laws are intended to prevent misuse, and they have not negatively impacted our ability to serve the culinary community in the state,” she said in an email. She also noted that “iSi does not sell large tanks of nitrous oxide, as they have no culinary application and are increasingly associated with misuse. We strongly advocate for additional restrictions on these large tanks to help curb their growing misuse among teenagers.”   

Outside Louisiana, however, legislative efforts have yet to deliver significant change. In 2017, for example, then–California State Senator Jim Nielsen proposed a bill to ban nitrous-oxide sales in stores selling tobacco or tobacco-related products. Industry lobbyists opposed the bill, and it eventually failed to pass.

In the absence of effective regulation, litigation has emerged as the best tool to achieve accountability. In 2023, a Missouri jury found United Brands liable for conspiring to sell nitrous oxide as a drug. The company was ordered to pay $720 million to Marissa Politte’s family for her wrongful death. The novel jury verdict and the large court-mandated payout might set a lasting precedent. “You have companies whose full-time scheme it is to pour this stuff onto our streets,” Johnny Simon, the Politte family’s attorney, told me. “That’s who we need to go after.”

Still, case-by-case litigation can push only so hard against countervailing market forces. Nor should it have to, when the blueprint for lifesaving regulation exists. Had something like Nielsen’s California bill been federal law in 2020, Politte might still be alive. The driver who killed her bought his nitrous oxide from a smoke shop.

On a Saturday morning almost exactly 22 years ago, the space shuttle Columbia was about to finish what had been, until then, a perfect 16-day mission. The families of the seven astronauts on board were on the runway at Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. But as Columbia reentered the atmosphere—traveling at 15,000 miles an hour, just 16 minutes from home—it suddenly broke apart. Debris began to fall from the skies over East Texas.

President George W. Bush was informed of the disaster at Camp David by his chief of staff, Andy Card. Bush was rushed from the Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin, back to the White House. At 2:04 p.m., speaking from the Cabinet Room, a visibly somber president addressed the nation. I had a particular interest in what he would say. Although I had recently been promoted to a new position on the White House staff, I had served Bush as a speechwriter over the previous two years.

“The Columbia is lost,” Bush told the country. “There are no survivors.” He named the crew of seven, praising their courage and pioneering spirit.

“These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly, knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life,” the president said. “Because of their courage and daring and idealism, we will miss them all the more. All Americans today are thinking as well of the families of these men and women who have been given this sudden shock and grief. You’re not alone. Our entire nation grieves with you. And those you loved will always have the respect and gratitude of this country.”

After assuring America that the space program would continue, he said this:

In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy. Yet farther than we can see, there is comfort and hope. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, “Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.”

The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth. Yet we can pray that all are safely home. May God bless the grieving families, and may God continue to bless America.

The speech, full of empathy, free of blame, lasted three minutes and 12 seconds.

Donald Trump took a dramatically different approach from Bush, and from every one of his modern predecessors. The day after a midair collision over the Potomac River that killed 67 people, Trump—within five minutes of asking for a moment of silence for the victims, saying, “We are all overcome with the grief for many who so tragically perished,” and declaring, “We are one family”—blamed the crash on the two Democratic presidents who preceded him, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. He also blamed Pete Buttigieg, who served as Biden’s transportation secretary (and whom Trump cursed out) and diversity programs that, among other things, encourage the hiring of people with severe disabilities.

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

During his 35-minute press conference, Trump cited no evidence to support his claims and admitted he had none; the investigation into the cause of the crash of an American Airlines passenger jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter had barely begun, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder had yet to be located, and the bodies of all the victims had not yet been recovered from the icy waters of the Potomac. But that didn’t stop Trump from unloading baseless attacks and assigning blame.

Oh, and one more thing: The “problematic” diversity hiring practices at the FAA that Trump cited during his press conference were in place during his first term, and his claim that he’d changed Obama’s diversity standards for hiring air-traffic controllers is false.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, sentenced to eight years of hard labor for writing critical letters about Joseph Stalin, described an “essential experience” that he took away from his years in prison: how human beings become evil and how they become good. “In the intoxication of youthful successes,” he wrote,

I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.

Solzhenitsyn added:

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

Solzhenitsyn was offering an elegant description of an anthropological truth: Most human beings contain a complicated mix of qualities, and are capable of acts of virtue and acts of vice, even within a single day. There are admirable, even heroic qualities within us, which need to be cultivated, and there is also “the wolf within us,” which needs to be contained.

Whether a society is civilized or decivilized depends in large part on how well it shapes and refines moral sentiments, to use the language of the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, of which sympathy—our capacity to understand and share the feelings of others by imagining ourselves in their situation—is core. Smith called the “man within the beast” the impartial spectator—essentially, our conscience—whose approbation or disapprobation influences our conduct.

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

Among the things that shape moral sentiments, including sympathy, are words and rhetoric. No one doubts their power; we see it in politics and poetry, in literature and letters, in songs and sacred books. Words evoke and give voice to strong emotions; they shape perceptions and create human connections. At their best they inspire honor and compassion within us; they offer us a glimpse of truth and enrich and purify our souls. But words can also misshape our souls. They can unleash the wolf within. That is why words, including the words of presidents, matter so very much.

What Trump said during last week’s press conference won’t rank among the 1,000 most inappropriate or offensive things he has said, which I suppose is the point. Rhetoric, particularly presidential rhetoric, has formative power, and with Trump, as with many of those in the MAGA movement, it is always the same: words of aggression, demonization, and brutishness, with the intent to stoke conflict, inflame hatred, and turn us against ourselves. Even during times of tragedy.

The way our leaders speak can shape our civic sentiments, and we are in a moment when our leader is inclined to make those harder and colder rather than softer and warmer, which just isn’t what we ought to want. But it is what we have.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus said, “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” Donald Trump’s heart is full of rage, committed to vengeance. As a result, so is much of America.

The U.S. federal government manages a larger portfolio of risks than any other institution in the history of the world. In just the past few weeks, wildfires raged across Southern California, a commercial flight crashed over the Potomac, a powerful Chinese-developed AI model launched to great fanfare, the nuclear-weapons Doomsday Clock reached its closest point ever to midnight, a new strain of avian flu continued its spread across the globe, and interest rates on long-term government bonds surged—a sign that investors are worried about America’s fiscal future. The responsibility of managing such risks is suffused throughout the federal bureaucracy; agencies are dedicated to preparing for financial crises, natural disasters, cyberattacks, and all manner of other potential calamities.

When one of those far-off risks became a real-life pandemic in the final year of Donald Trump’s first term, this sprawling bureaucracy, staffed mostly by career civil servants with area-specific expertise, helped limit the damage, often despite Trump’s own negligence and attempts to interfere. This time, things may turn out differently. Trump is committed to dismantling the federal bureaucracy as we know it—and, with it, the government’s capacity to handle the next crisis. Like an individual who chooses to forgo health or fire insurance, most Americans won’t feel the negative impact of this effort as long as everything in the world runs smoothly. What happens when the next crisis strikes is another story altogether.  

No country was fully prepared for what became one of the deadliest pandemics in history, but it is hard to think of a leader who handled COVID more poorly than Trump. He spent the crucial weeks leading up to the outbreak downplaying the severity of the virus, at one point referring to it as the Democrats’ “new hoax.” His administration never developed a national plan for getting the virus under control and reopening the economy, leaving the states to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, the president undermined his own public-health agencies at every turn, telling states to “LIBERATE” their economies, refusing to wear a mask, and, at one point, suggesting bleach injections as a potential therapeutic. A February 2021 analysis by The Lancet, a British medical journal, found that the U.S. could have avoided 40 percent of the deaths that occurred under Trump’s watch if its death rate had matched the average among America’s peer countries.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil-service reform]

The administration’s pandemic response did include one shining success: Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership that produced and distributed high-quality vaccines in record time, saving countless lives. But that triumph is the exception that proves the rule. The idea for the program came from Robert Kadlec, an assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Peter Marks, an FDA official—two seasoned public-health experts who had served in top government roles for years beforeTrump took office. The project was then championed by HHS Secretary Alex Azar, who had been appointed by Trump after working off and on for the department since 2001; managed by Gustave Perna, a four-star general who had served in the military for more than 40 years; and staffed by bureaucrats with decades of public-health experience. (This success story has, of course, become distasteful to mention on the right, because it involves vaccines.)

These are exactly the sorts of experienced public servants whom Trump is trying to push out of government. On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order known as Schedule F; if upheld in court, it will give him expansive new power to unilaterally fire federal employees. In the meantime, his administration is finding creative ways to begin its purge of the federal government. Last week, the administration “reassigned” at least 20 career lawyers at the Department of Justice, allowing them to be sidelined without being officially fired; sent home 160 members of the National Security Council; and offered the remaining 2 million federal employees an ultimatum: Resign voluntarily and receive a severance package, or stay and risk being fired at some point in the future. As Axios reports, the White House expects 5 to 10 percent of the federal work force to take the buyout. Those bureaucrats who remain will, by and large, be reporting to Trump loyalists.

If Trump’s plan succeeds, the inevitable result will be a government that finds itself hamstrung in the face of the kinds of risks that it is designed to manage. (Almost unbelievably, Trump has also floated the idea of abolishing FEMA.) Imagine how much worse the pandemic would have been if Kadlec and Marks, the architects of Operation Warp Speed, had been pushed out of government before March 2020. Imagine if Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, had been in charge of the nation’s public-health apparatus, and surrounded not by scientific experts but by hard-core Trumpists. How many more Americans would have died?

For now, that question is a thought experiment. Soon, it might not be. In recent weeks, public-health officials have begun warning about the rapid spread of a new variant of the H5N1 virus, also known as bird flu, which infected 67 Americans last year and appears to be becoming more transmissible. Rather, officials were warning about it; last week, the Trump administration instructed federal health officials to temporarily halt all public communications, including reports about the escalating H5N1 crisis, “as the new Administration considers its plan for managing federal policy and public communications.” Kennedy has already cast doubt on the safety of H5N1 vaccines and implied that the virus itself was partly a creation of the U.S. government.

[Kristen V. Brown: Trump has created health-care chaos]

Pandemics are only one example of a broad swath of risks facing America today. Tensions between the U.S. and China are high, the AI arms race is well under way, wars have broken out across the globe, and climate-change-fueled natural disasters have become ever more common. None of this means that a major crisis will inevitably strike next week, or even over the next four years. But Trump’s actions make that possibility far more likely, including by exposing the country to risks that might have previously seemed arcane. On Thursday, the U.S. experienced its first fatal crash of an American airliner in 16 years. This was barely a week after the Trump administration dissolved the federal Aviation Security Advisory Committee, a body that advises the Transportation Security Administration on airline safety, and fired the head of the TSA, whom Trump himself had appointed during his first term. As the aviator and Atlantic contributor James Fallows points out, dismantling the board was likely not directly responsible for the crash, but it represents “the thoughtless destruction of the taken-for-granted institutions that have made modern aviation as safe as it is.” Trump, meanwhile, in a moment that revealed how he might respond to future crises, immediately began blaming the incident on a push for DEI initiatives within the Federal Aviation Administration.

In a crowded field, this might be the most alarming aspect of Trump’s second term. At first, most people won’t notice an agency gutted here or a program slashed there. But those cuts will make disaster more likely, and when that disaster strikes—whether during Trump’s presidency or his successor’s—the government will be far less capable of handling it. What we don’t know is how bad that crisis will be, and whether Trump will still be in office to face the consequences.

Can Jewish space lasers protect America? At first glance, President Donald Trump seems to think so. The 2024 Republican Party platform had just 20 planks, consisting of only 277 words. Twelve of those words were: “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY.” Since taking office, Trump has moved to make good on that pledge. On January 27, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised swift action on the subject. That night, Trump signed an executive order titled “The Iron Dome for America,” turning the plan into policy.

In actuality, what Trump is proposing looks very little like Israel’s Iron Dome. His executive order calls for a space-based interception system to counter “ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles.” Iron Dome is a land-based array that mostly targets unsophisticated short-range rockets and mortars fired by terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel supplements this system with several other layers of missile defense, including David’s Sling and Arrow 3, which did most of the work repelling Iran’s aerial assaults on the country last April and October. Later this year, Israel is also expected to roll out Iron Beam, a laser-based system that can down projectiles for a fraction of the cost of Iron Dome’s interceptors—provided that it isn’t raining.

Many of these systems were developed with American partnership, and some could perhaps be adapted for deployment in the United States—although, as a land mass surrounded by oceans, the U.S. homeland has very different defense needs than the tiny Israeli state. But the point of Trump’s “Iron Dome for America” is not its feasibility. The system doesn’t have to work—or even exist—for it to serve the president’s interests.

[Read: The costly success of Israel’s iron dome]

A singular self-promoter, Trump excels at cutting through the cacophony of American politics with bold, blunt, and often cinematic images—such as “Iron Dome for America.” At a time when civil discourse is scattered across innumerable media platforms, attention is arguably a public figure’s most important resource, and Trump knows how to monopolize it. As when the president promised draconian tariffs against Mexico during his first weeks in office only to fold before they went into effect, he has figured out what our sclerotic political system actually rewards—brash bombast, not results—and governs accordingly, performing toughness rather than achieving outcomes.

This talent for theatricality is actually a big part of how Trump became president in the first place. In 2015, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas launched his own presidential bid as a harsh critic of illegal immigration, promising in a detailed 4,700-word policy platform to “secure the border once and for all.” Yet Cruz failed to gain traction, because he was bigfooted by a political outsider who had no policy experience but unmatched show business savvy. Trump promised to “build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” and rode that mantra to the presidency—after which the wall was never completed and Mexico did not pay for it.

Given Trump’s exceptional instinct for indelible images, that he landed on the Iron Dome as his latest gimmick is no surprise. For both Israel’s supporters and its detractors, the country’s missile-defense system emblemizes the technological frontier of warfare, thanks to countless photos and videos of its dramatic mid-air interceptions of enemy projectiles. As someone who made his name in real estate and television by manipulating people’s perceptions, Trump intuitively grasped the power of the Iron Dome in the popular imagination, and crudely co-opted it. Whether the system’s details make sense for America is not particularly important. For his purposes, the symbolism supercedes the substance.

Ronald Reagan, himself a former actor, also understood that a grand missile-defense project would appeal to the public consciousness. Critics derided Reagan’s plan as “Star Wars,” but its futuristic feel was precisely what made it so captivating, which is why the project consistently polled well, despite never coming to fruition.

Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was a fanciful eccentricity in an otherwise robust governing agenda. But for Trump, flashy contrivances such as Iron Dome for America are the agenda. Unlike Reagan, who developed a broad political philosophy over his years in public life, Trump has few real principles and little interest in the nitty-gritty of legislation. He cares less about long-term outcomes than about being seen to be driving events. This is why he prefers to rule through grand pronouncements and executive actions, even though these are often ephemeral and can easily be tied up in litigation or overturned by a successor.

[Read: Trump doesn’t believe anything. That’s why he wins.]

Such indifference to end results might seem like a recipe for disappointing one’s supporters. But Trump is betting that in today’s chaotic information and political environment, appearing to care about issues that voters care about will be more important than actually delivering on them. And he has reason to be optimistic: Trump’s electoral coalition depends on people who don’t closely follow politics; many of them are less aware of the policies a politician implements than the image he projects. Trump, ever the performer, has mastered the art of marketing himself to the masses, and has used this skill to transform American politics.

In 2016, Cruz had a punctilious 25-point plan to curb illegal immigration; Trump had a sensational slogan about making Mexico pay for it—and trounced him. President Joe Biden’s economic policies delivered major gains for low-wage workers; Trump’s proposed tariffs are essentially a tax on those workers, but they voted for him over Biden, because Trump appeared to be vigorously fighting for them. Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency is a basket case run by people with little government experience, and is less likely than a commission staffed by experts to effectively curb federal spending without ugly unintended consequences. But DOGE is also a far more visible endeavor, fronted by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. The Abraham Accords were mostly a symbolic handshake between Middle Eastern countries that had never fought a war against one another, but Trump’s branding and ceremony made the agreements into something more.

Again and again, Trump has managed to transmute political performance into the appearance of political achievement. Whether it’s promising a border wall or an Iron Dome, he may not be America’s most competent president, but he is its greatest showman, and in our broken political system, that might be enough to maintain his dominance over our collective attention and affairs of state.

Donald Trump calls the EU’s approach “an atrocity”. It will respond with retaliation and deflection