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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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.

President Donald Trump is planning to hit Mexico, Canada, and China with tariffs, some as soon as Tuesday. Americans will be left holding the bill.

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President Donald Trump has begun a new trade war with Canada, Mexico, and potentially China, and this has had a significant ripple effect on the broader financial landscape, including the cryptocurrency market. Trump’s latest move involves imposing a 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico, while Chinese imports…

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President Donald Trump has officially kicked off the first trade war of his second administration with new taxes on imports from Canada, China, and Mexico.

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President Donald Trump announced new tariffs over the weekend on imports from Mexico, Canada, and China, igniting a trade war.

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The price of Bitcoin has taken a dive as President Donald Trump’s new trade war with Canada, Mexico, and likely China has cryptocurrencies slumping.

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Rubio tells Panama to 'reduce China's influence' over the canal or face US action

Analysts say Beijing hopes to seize moral high ground with referral of tariffs to World Trade Organization.