Economist Joseph Gagnon argues that tariffs and the shuttering of USAID won’t resolve the US national deficit.

The Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate USAID is many things: an unfolding humanitarian nightmare, a rollback of American soft power, the thin end of a wedge meant to reorder the Constitution. But upon closer examination, it is also an outbreak of delusional paranoia that has spread from Elon Musk throughout the Republican Party’s rank and file.

Several days ago, the administration began promoting the theory that USAID was secretly directing a communist conspiracy of unknown dimensions. Musk, who is running point on Donald Trump’s efforts to unmask and destroy this internal conspiracy, claimed on X, “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” Trump, adopting an uncharacteristic tone of more-in-sadness-than-in-anger, told reporters in the Oval Office: “I love the concept, but they turned out to be radical-left lunatics.”

Soon Musk declared that he had uncovered explosive evidence for this belief: The agency had funneled $8 million to Politico. Why exactly the Marxist plotters at USAID would select Politico as the vehicle for their scheme—its owner, the German media giant Axel Springer, has right-of-center politics with a strong pro-Israel tilt—has not been fully explained. But Musk’s discovery soon rocketed across X, the social-media platform he owns and uses promiscuously, and became official government policy.

“LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS,” Trump wrote on his own social-media site, Truth Social. “THE LEFT WING ‘RAG,’ KNOWN AS ‘POLITICO,’ SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000 … THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY!”

[Jonathan Lemire: Elon Musk is president]

In fact, USAID has not given millions to Politico. The agency subscribed to E&E News by Politico, a premium service that provides detailed, fairly boring, and decidedly noncommunist coverage of energy and environmental policy. Most of Politico’s paying subscribers, according to its editors, work in the private sector. Many of them are lobbyists, who are also, as a rule, unreceptive to communist ideology, and who pay for comprehensive coverage of the inner workings of Congress and the federal bureaucracy, which holds little interest for a general audience.

Government officials themselves also subscribe to Politico and other paywalled news sources. This is because, far from masterminding intricate conspiracies, public employees are often just trying to figure out what’s happening using the same information sources available to the public. Thus USAID spent $24,000 on E&E subscriptions for its staff in 2024, and $20,000 the year before. The $8 million figure encompasses Politico subscriptions across the entire executive branch. Musk has been conspiratorially describing these subscriptions as “contracts,” as if the government is paying Politico for something other than articles about the government.

If USAID is a secret left-wing plot, leftists themselves have not been let in on the secret. Actual Marxists despise USAID, which they consider a tool of American imperialism. Jacobin, a self-consciously radical-socialist journal, has spent years railing against the agency for “stealthily advancing the interests of the Salvadoran corporate class,” working to “augment center-right parties throughout much of the Global South,” and even having the effrontery to fund a rock band that criticized Hugo Chávez, among other nefarious capitalistic schemes.

Some leftists have noticed the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate the hated agency, and they’re not angry. The journalist Ryan Grim, who has decidedly left-wing views on foreign policy, has optimistically asked whether Trump’s crusade against USAID indicates a desire “to unwind and reorient American empire.”

The left-wing critique of USAID is considerably more grounded in reality than Musk’s is. Although the agency carries out humanitarian works, those programs have a dual purpose of advancing American soft power and resisting propaganda from hostile countries—originally from the Soviet bloc, and today from China. Not long ago, USAID’s strongest advocates included some of the most anti-communist (and thus conservative) members of Congress. As recently as 2022, Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who now praises Trump’s crackdown on the agency, was calling for it to boost staffing in order to more efficiently disburse humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

[Russell Berman: Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play]

The process by which Musk came to his conclusions does not inspire great confidence. His expertise lies mostly outside public policy. He arrived in Washington, D.C., and quickly set out to prove that he could identify at least $1 trillion in annual waste and fraud, a figure wildly out of scale with the conclusions of every serious expert. He claims to be working 120 hours a week, yet is posting on X at a manic pace, sending more than 3,000 tweets a month, at all hours of the night. Musk has acknowledged that he has a prescription for ketamine, a drug that can cause unpredictable behavior if abused. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that people close to Musk worry that his recreational drug use—including “LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms,” according to the article—was driving his erratic behavior and could adversely affect his businesses. (His attorney accused the Journal of printing “false facts,” and told the paper that Musk is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test.”)

It is entirely possible that Musk genuinely thinks he has stumbled upon a vast conspiracy, rather than an anodyne plan to give public employees access to a rather staid news source. Every response he has made to outside criticism tracks the most typical paranoid thought process. He believes that politicians criticize him because they, too, are collecting “kickbacks and bribes.” He has accordingly interpreted all opposition to his moves as just more proof that he is onto something big.

The ultimate conspiracy that Musk thinks he has uncovered goes far beyond even USAID. On Wednesday, Musk reposted an X post claiming that “all the elections are rigged and fake, all the liberal media outlets have no audience and are kept alive by USAID funding. All their politicians and political pundits are paid by USAID to say what the government wants.” Musk’s commentary: “Yes.”

Any well-functioning political party would laugh off such claims as kookery. Musk, however, has attained a unique place of power because of his simultaneous position as Trump’s proxy and the owner of a powerful communications platform. X is teeming with accounts repeating and amplifying Musk’s firehose of nonsense, spinning it into a grand narrative in which Musk has heroically exposed a left-wing, taxpayer-funded cabal that has orchestrated various disasters behind the scenes.

What remains of the conservative establishment has mostly defaulted to applying a sheen of rationality to Musk’s paranoid fantasy. “Mr. Musk sometimes blows hot air, and he needs to be watched to stay within legal guardrails,” a Wall Street Journal editorial gently scolded. “But he’s also hitting targets that have long deserved scrutiny and reform, which helps explain the wailing over the U.S. Agency for International Development.”

[Hana Kiros: America can’t just unpause USAID]

“The tofu-eating wokerati at the USAID are screaming like they’re part of a prison riot, because they don’t want us reviewing the spending,” Republican Senator John Kennedy told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “But that’s all Mr. Musk is doing. And he’s finding some pretty interesting stuff.”

The result is that Musk’s most fervent devotees can believe that he has broken open a globalist plot responsible for stealing elections and manufacturing consent for the liberal agenda, while more responsible figures can pretend he’s doing nothing more than auditing funds for waste. This is the same justification process that enabled Trump’s insurrection after the 2020 election: The true believers said Trump had uncovered massive voter fraud, while the Republicans who knew better claimed he just wanted to use his legal right to count the votes and make sure the result was legit.

The Republican establishment may now be calculating that the smart move is to go along with Trump’s and Musk’s delusions. Just cancel some government-agency news subscriptions, maybe zero out a few spending programs, and wait for the howling mob to move on to new obsessions. But if the Republican Party’s leaders have proved anything over the past decade, it’s that the paranoid demagogues they think they can control are usually controlling them.

Representative Ro Khanna has known Elon Musk for more than a decade, so he thought he should raise some concerns about the billionaire’s assault on the federal government where he would be sure to see them. Posting on the platform Musk owns, the California Democrat said yesterday that Musk should be hauled before Congress to explain himself. “Musk’s attacks on our institutions are unconstitutional,” Khanna wrote.

It took Musk just 16 minutes to reply: “Don’t be a dick.”

The two continued their conversation over text message, Khanna told me. In private, Musk displayed the same anger over Khanna’s criticism of his unrestrained efforts to root out supposed government waste and fraud. When Khanna again urged Musk to appear before Congress to recommend spending cuts—rather than carry them out by fiat—Musk replied by revealing that he had a very different vision of his job as chair of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. Khanna wouldn’t show me their exchange, but he described Musk’s reply this way: “I think his view is, ‘I didn’t come to Washington to give a report to Congress.’”

[Read: Elon Musk is president]

The banter between the pair used to be friendlier. When Trump appointed Musk to lead a team scouring the federal government for spending cuts, few Democrats reacted more positively than Khanna, who quickly offered to partner with Musk on slashing the defense budget.

Virtually alone among Democrats, Khanna has been willing to engage with and occasionally defend the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX as Musk moved further to the right and became a Trump loyalist. Even now, Khanna can’t help but marvel at Musk’s success in business. “I always thought he was a remarkable entrepreneur,” Khanna told me. “He has an eccentric brilliance to him.”

Musk wrote a laudatory blurb for Khanna’s first book, and he would refer to the Silicon Valley Democrat, who twice backed Bernie Sanders for president, as “a sensible moderate.” Khanna, in turn, has connected Musk with members of Congress in both parties. In 2023, he persuaded a skeptical Musk to work with a Republican-led House committee investigating China. (Notably, Musk did not take another piece of advice Khanna offered him when he started getting involved in politics: “Stick to cars and Mars.”)

Like many people in Washington, Khanna assumed that Musk’s DOGE would hole up in an office for a few months and issue a report recommending cuts for Congress to consider. Musk, of course, has done much more than that. With Trump’s approval, he has ignored Congress and burrowed deep into federal departments, sidelining career civil servants, all but eviscerating USAID, and gaining access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems.

“Maybe I was naive,” Khanna told me. I had called to seek his insights on what Musk is doing and what he ultimately wants; Musk’s critics, both Democrats and Republicans, have speculated that his targets in the government are tied to his business interests. Khanna suggested that Musk’s motivation is more straightforward. Musk “is on a maniacal mission to save the country from fiscal collapse,” Khanna said, and thinks “that he is going to figure out all of the wasteful spending and all of the inefficiencies in a government that no one has been able to figure out.” Musk believes, Khanna said, “that people like me are in the way of what he thinks is in the American interest.”

[Read: Paranoia is winning]

To Musk’s critics—who now include Khanna—it’s not just people standing in his way but the Constitution. “We need to make sure that Elon Musk has an allegiance to the Constitution,” Khanna told me. Do you think he does? I asked him. “No, I don’t,” Khanna replied. “That’s why we need to push back on him.”

Musk’s assault on the government has complicated Khanna’s standing in the Democratic Party. Khanna has made no secret of his ambitions for higher office, and yesterday he delivered a speech in which he called on Americans to “stand up to the unholy alliance of wealth and power.” But nowhere in his address did he mention Musk, and some progressives see him as having vouched for a plutocrat who is now taking a sledgehammer to all they hold dear.

For weeks before Trump took office, Khanna extended his hand to work with Musk and DOGE on defense cuts. He told me that the offer remains—but only “if he committed to following the Constitution.” He added: “There’s a lot of trust that would have to be rebuilt at this point.”

He still seems to see himself as a potential bridge between Democrats and Musk. But if the past two weeks are an indication, any influence Khanna had with Musk might be gone. I asked Khanna whether, after all these years, he had misjudged Musk. He replied: “I underestimated how far he would go.”

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.

When it comes to tariffs for Canada and Mexico, America is ending the week pretty much as it started. Over the course of just a few days, Donald Trump—following up on a November promise—announced 25 percent tariffs on the country’s North American neighbors, caused a panic in the stock market, eked out minor concessions from foreign leaders, and called the whole thing off (for 30 days, at least). But the residue of this week’s blink-and-you-missed-it trade war will stick.

The consensus among economists is that the now-paused tariffs on Canada and Mexico would have caused significant, perhaps even immediate, cost hikes and inflation for Americans. Tariffs on Mexico could have raised produce prices within days, because about a third of America’s fresh fruits and vegetables are imported from Mexico, Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at Yale’s Budget Lab, told me in an email. But “uncertainty about tariffs poses a strong risk of fueling inflation, even if tariffs don’t end up going into effect,” he argued. Tedeschi noted that “one of the cornerstone findings of economics over the past 50 years is the importance of expectations” when it comes to inflation. Consumers, nervous about inflation, may change their behavior—shifting their spending, trying to find higher-paying jobs, or asking for more raises—which can ultimately push up prices in what Tedeschi calls a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The drama of recent days may also make foreign companies balk at the idea of entering the American market. During Trump’s first term, domestic industrial production decreased after tariffs were imposed. Although Felix Tintelnot, an economics professor at Duke, was not as confident as Tedeschi is about the possibility of unimposed tariffs driving inflation, he suggested that the threats could have ripple effects on American business: “Uncertainty by itself is discouraging to investments that incur big onetime costs,” he told me. In sectors such as the auto industry, whose continental supply chains rely on border crossing, companies might avoid new domestic projects until all threats of a trade war are gone (which, given the persistence of Trump’s threats, may be never). That lack of investment could affect quality and availability, translating to higher costs down the line for American buyers. Some carmakers and manufacturers are already rethinking their operations, just in case.

And the 10 percent tariffs on China (although far smaller than the 60 percent Trump threatened during his campaign) are not nothing, either. These will hit an estimated $450 billion of imports—for context, last year, the United States imported about $4 trillion in foreign goods—and China has already hit back with new tariffs of its own. Yale’s Budget Lab found that the current China tariffs will raise overall average prices by 0.1 to 0.2 percent. Tariffs, Tedeschi added, are regressive, meaning they hurt lower-earning households more than high-income ones.

Even the most attentive companies and shoppers might have trouble anticipating how Trump will handle future tariffs. Last month, he threatened and then dropped a tariff on Colombia; this week, he hinted at a similar threat against the European Union. There is a case to be made that Trump was never serious about tariffs at all—they were merely a way for him to appear tough on trade and flex his power on the international stage. And although many of the concessions that Mexico and Canada offered were either symbolic or had been in the works before the tariff threats, Trump managed to appear like the winner to some of his supporters.

Still, the longest-lasting damage of the week in trade wars may be the solidification of America’s reputation as a fickle ally. As my colleague David Frum wrote on Wednesday, the whole episode leaves the world with the lesson that “countries such as Canada, Mexico, and Denmark that commit to the United States risk their security and dignity in the age of Trump.”

Related:

The tariffs were never real. How Trump lost his trade war

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The government’s computing experts say they are terrified. Trump takes over the Kennedy Center. Gary Shteyngart: The man in the midnight-blue six-ply Italian-milled wool suit

Today’s News

A federal judge said he would issue a temporary restraining order that would pause parts of the Trump administration’s plan to slash the USAID workforce and withdraw employees from their overseas posts. Donald Trump met with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba at the White House, where they discussed reducing the U.S.’s trade deficit with Japan. A plane carrying 10 people went missing in western Alaska while en route from Unalakleet to Nome.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka examines a new, unbearably honest kind of writing. Atlantic Intelligence: For a time, it took immense wealth—not to mention energy—to train powerful new AI models, Damon Beres writes. “That may no longer be the case.”

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Wikimedia Commons.

The Rise of the Selfish Plutocrats

By Brian Klaas

The role of the ultra-wealthy has morphed from one of shared social responsibility and patronage to the freewheeling celebration of selfish opulence. Rather than investing in their society—say, by giving alms to the poor, or funding Caravaggios and cathedrals—many of today’s plutocrats use their wealth to escape to private islands, private Beyoncé concerts, and, above all, extremely private superyachts. One top Miami-based “yacht consultant” has dubbed itself Medici Yachts. The namesake recalls public patronage and social responsibility, but the consultant’s motto is more fitting for an era of indulgent billionaires: “Let us manage your boat. For you is only to smile and make memories.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Paranoia is winning. Americans are trapped in an algorithmic cage. A Greenland plot more cynical than fiction Civil servants are not America’s enemies. The challenges the U.S. would face in Gaza

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Courtesy of Sundance Institute; Neon Films/Rosamont; Luka Cyprian; A24; Lars Erlend Tubaas Øymo.

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Discover. David Lynch’s work was often described as “mysterious” or “surreal”—but the emotions it provoked were just as fundamental, K. Austin Collins writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

Elon Musk is targeting federal agencies, slashing workforces, and crippling programs that support millions of people around the world. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic join to discuss how Musk and President Donald Trump are carrying out plans to purge thousands of employees from the federal government.

This week the Trump administration dismantled USAID, the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. “USAID has the thought leadership, the technical ability, to run aid programs at a large scale that nobody else has,” Anne Applebaum said last night. Removing the agency “means probably the collapse of food-aid programs across Africa, probably the collapse of aid to help refugees. USAID runs vaccination programs for children all over the world; it will mean children will not get polio vaccines.”

The takedown of USAID may also have an effect on the ongoing war in Ukraine, Applebaum explained. The agency has a role in restarting the Ukrainian energy grid, as well as in helping provide seeds and technology to Ukrainian farmers. “USAID thinks not only in terms of humanitarian aid, it also thinks more broadly about economics,” she continued. “Ukraine plays a big role in world food production; they want Ukrainian farmers to be back working.”

With Musk leading the takedown of USAID, “it’s a test case for ‘Can agencies just be abolished without Congress having any say?’ but it’s also a test case in cruelty,” Applebaum said. “Are Americans willing to accept a high level of cruelty and death just on the president’s whim?”

Meanwhile, pushback among Democrats has been limited. “Democratic strategists are warning [the party] not to make this their issue because Democrats have to be saying ‘We’re making your lives better, voters,’” Michael Scherer said last night. “If they’re seen as the party of defending a bureaucracy both [that] people don’t know about [and] that helps people very far away, they’re way off their message of eggs and butter.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Eugene Daniels, the chief Playbook and White House correspondent for Politico; Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent at NPR and a political contributor for ABC News; and Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Donald Trump campaigned, in part, on returning political power to American Christians. “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump promised a room full of religious news broadcasters in February 2024. “With your help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5.” At different campaign events, he vowed both that Christian leaders would have a line “directly into the Oval Office—and me” and that he would create a federal task force to “stop the weaponization of our government against Christians.” Now, not even three weeks into his new term, he has begun down quite the opposite path.

Among the Trump administration’s first efforts were orders that delivered a stunning blow to humanitarian organizations, including the suspension of foreign aid pending review, the halting of refugee-resettlement programs, the dismantling of USAID, and the freezing of all federal grants that normally flow to nonprofit organizations such as Catholic Charities USA, the official domestic relief agency of the Catholic Church. Catholic Charities represents a network of 168 local groups nationwide offering disaster assistance, meals, and housing for people in need, and refugee services and programs for migrants. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the freeze was part of a broader effort to root out “wokeness,” though it’s difficult to match that descriptor to this particular organization. And although the freeze on federal grants and loans was paused two days after Trump signed the order, many organizations are still unable to access funds.

[Read: You can’t just unpause USAID]

Late last month, hundreds of leaders from Catholic relief and aid organizations met for the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington, D.C. What ensued was “a scene of real panic,” Stephen Schneck, the chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, told me. “They were in shock, and they were disturbed, and they were feeling really panicky about the situation and wondering what to do.” Schneck recalled speaking with an attendee from El Paso, Texas, who was suddenly unable to buy diapers for babies in his charity’s care. “And this happened with no warning, no extensions,” Schneck said. “It just happened overnight.” Catholic agencies providing relief overseas were also affected by the freeze on foreign aid, which came with a stop-work order that suspended operations.

Along with the shutdown of federal funding for so many Catholic charitable organizations, Trump also revoked a Joe Biden–era policy that prevented Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from apprehending people in or near “sensitive locations” such as churches and schools. The change elicited a statement from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which registered its dismay at the transformation of places for “care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need,” and called for “a better path forward that protects the dignity of all those we serve, upholds the sacred duty of our providers, and ensures our borders and immigration system are governed with mercy and justice.”

The statement set off a back-and-forth between the bishops and Vice President J. D. Vance, who responded to the bishops on Face the Nation late last month, saying that “the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” The USCCB followed up with another statement, saying that “faithful to the teaching of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church has a long history of serving refugees … In our agreements with the government, the USCCB receives funds to do this work; however, these funds are not sufficient to cover the entire cost of these programs. Nonetheless, this remains a work of mercy and ministry of the Church.”

[Read: Bishop Budde delivered a truly Christian message]

Vance, speaking with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, provided further Catholic reasoning for his administration’s approach to migrants and refugees, arguing that he thinks it’s “a very Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world”—a statement to which the bishops have not responded. If they did, however, I imagine they would point out that Jesus addresses this matter in his Sermon on the Mount, saying, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Christian mandate is more arduous than Vance’s account seems to allow.

Catholic politicians disputing the bishops’ witness to the faith is nothing new, though the allegations of avarice and corruption are somewhat surprising, and presage bitter conflict ahead. Perhaps that could be helpful, insofar as it would sharply distinguish the teaching of the Church from certain politicized versions of Catholicism tailored to the ideological preferences of their confessors. The Church is called to be a sign of contradiction—a bulwark of Christian priorities against the demands of the political and cultural eras that the faithful pass through. Comporting with political and cultural demands is what politicians do; the degree to which Catholic politicians do the same is the degree to which they ought to suspect themselves spiritually compromised. Perhaps they all are, and perhaps so are we.

In fact, the tendency of humankind to be self-serving and deceitful is part of what makes me believe that Christianity is at its purest and most beautiful when it is counterintuitive and unwieldy—that is, when it is least amenable to human convenience. The command to love even those who aren’t your kith and kin is an excellent example of just that. The command to serve the weakest and most outcast members of society is another. Thus, the decision to love and serve the stranger, the refugee, and the foreigner with charity is a hallmark of the Christian faith, such that a government crackdown on this work seems to be a threat to Christian practice itself, or an attempt to reshape it into something else altogether.

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.

The following contains spoilers for some of the episodes mentioned.

Recently, I tasked seven Atlantic writers and editors with selecting a perfect episode of TV. What emerged was a list that spans genres, generations, and cultural sensibilities. Their recommendations, which include the Veep episode “C**tgate” and a SpongeBob episode that examines “the empty promise of the good life,” are proof that identifying good TV is, at its core, a gut instinct. A perfect episode must find a way to burrow itself in the viewer’s mind, ready to be recalled in today’s crowded field of television.

When I posed the same challenge to The Daily’s readers earlier this week, I was met with enthusiasm and exasperation. “This is an impossible question,” Eden wrote back. “It’s like asking for the perfect song, the perfect movie, or the perfect book.” That being said, “I can think of five off the top of my head!”

Eden’s list includes “Forks” from The Bear, “Through the Looking Glass” from Lost, “The Suitcase” from Mad Men, and “Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us. And that doesn’t even cover “Friday Night Lights, or The Wire, or Insecure, or Derry Girls, or The Sopranos, or The Wonder Years, or My Brilliant Friend, or Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Eden added. I can sympathize—the breadth of options is dizzying.

Maybe some criteria would help. Our culture writer Sophie Gilbert wrote that “the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center.” Radio Atlantic’s podcast host, Hanna Rosin, argued that, “unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way.” And Suzanne, 59, offered her own formula: “The script must be: (1) tense or funny; (2) warm and loving to the viewers, performers, and crew; and (3) move the overall story forward.”

Of course, the benchmarks for what makes an episode perfect are as subjective and varied as viewers’ selections. But a thorough analysis of The Daily’s reader responses has uncovered some patterns. At least five people named a West Wing episode: Two readers nominated “Two Cathedrals,” which shows “the effects of death on time,” wrote David, from Chicago; L. Hawkins, 70, recommends “Noel,” adding that viewers should “listen for the sirens as the episode fades out.”

“Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us was mentioned by both Eden and Bob—it offers “a lesson that love may find you at any time, any place, and under the most unexpected circumstances,” Bob wrote. Two readers agreed with Atlantic film critic David Sims, who insisted in our recent roundup that “the richest cache [of perfect episodes] to search is the ‘case of the week’ entries of The X-Files.” Lisa, 47, wrote that she was thrilled to see “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” in our list (she also recommends the series finale of Derry Girls).

Other readers highlighted examples of good comedy. In only 22 minutes, “Remedial Chaos Theory” from Community “tells seven different stories, with each timeline building on the last,” E.F., 46, wrote. “The Ski Lodge” from Frasier stands out to Bruce, 52, who said that the episode is “riddled with quotable laugh-out-loud lines.” And L.M., 61, laughed until she cried watching a loopy Steve Martin in Only Murders in the Building’s “Open and Shut.”

For some, a perfect episode tells a story that reverberates throughout their life. Sharon, from California, wrote about an episode she remembers watching on Hallmark Hall of Fame, which follows a grief-stricken child who reads a story about magical silver shoes. To his astonishment, he finds skates that look identical, which he puts on to go skating in hopes of bringing back his dead parent. “As life went on and I became the mother of a child who lost his father in childhood, I’ve recalled the episode more than once,” Sharon wrote. “Now, at 80 years old, it still breaks my heart.”

Related:

Eight perfect episodes of TV The 13 best TV shows of 2024

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler The last days of American orange juice America’s “marriage material” shortage

The Week Ahead

Captain America: Brave New World, a Marvel action movie starring Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford (in theaters Friday) Season 3 of Yellowjackets, a thriller series about a girls’ soccer team whose plane crash-lands in the wilderness (premieres on Paramount+ Friday) Beartooth, a novel by Callan Wink about two brothers near Yellowstone who agree to commit a heist to settle their debts (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic

ADHD’s Sobering Life-Expectancy Numbers

By Yasmin Tayag

When I was unexpectedly diagnosed with ADHD last year, it turned my entire identity upside down. At 37, I’d tamed my restlessness and fiery temper, my obsessive reorganization of my mental to-do list, and my tendency to write and rewrite the same sentence for hours. Being this way was exhausting, but that was just who I was, or so I thought. My diagnosis reframed these quirks as symptoms of illness—importantly, ones that could be managed. Treatment corralled my racing thoughts in a way that I’d never before experienced.

Read the full article.

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10 indie films you should watch for in 2025 A horror movie that already gave away its twist How the economists took over the NBA Music’s new generation is here. The modern voice of war writing

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The government’s computing experts say they are terrified. Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago. Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play, Russell Berman writes. How Trump lost his trade war

Photo Album

Naga sadhus, or Hindu holy men, arrive in Prayagraj, India. (ANI / Rahul Singh / Reuters)

Take a look at these photos of Maha Kumbh Mela, a religious festival in India that’s also the largest gathering in the world.

P.S.

I realize it’d be a bit unfair to make everybody else share their perfect episode without naming mine: the series finale of Fleabag. There are many good things I can point out about this episode—Claire’s mad dash to happiness, Fleabag’s final confession, the Alabama Shakes song that plays over the show’s last moments. But above all else, it moved me, reminding me that love can outlast the person who prompted it.

— Stephanie

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