Donald Trump’s highly public schism with Volodymyr Zelensky has yielded the kind of doublethink that is common in personality cults. Those believers who approve of the policy hail the great leader’s strategic genius. And those who oppose it cast the blame elsewhere, constructing ever more elaborate accounts of Trump’s strategy to avoid acknowledging the obvious: Trump has an affinity for Vladimir Putin.

In the first category, you can find members of the so-called national-conservative movement, who have long rationalized Russia’s aggression and opposed American support for Ukraine. “Trump understands what establishment figures do not: that U.S. voters are no longer willing to allow Washington to write checks on the American people’s account,” the national-conservative intellectual Rod Dreher wrote exultantly after Zelensky’s Oval Office browbeating. Christopher Caldwell, another natcon writer, argued in The Free Press that Trump’s posture toward Ukraine “is a deeper and more historically grounded view than the one that prevailed in the Biden administration,” rejecting Joe Biden’s view of the war as a “barbaric” invasion. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump’s admirers include the Russian government itself, which has congratulated him for “rapidly changing foreign policy configurations,” which “largely coincides with our vision.”)

In the second category, you have Trump defenders who support Ukraine, and reacted to Friday’s events with dismay. To resolve their cognitive dissonance, or perhaps to retain their influence, they do not blame Trump for initiating the breach with Zelensky. Instead, they blame Zelensky.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Trump sided with Putin. What should Europe do now?]

The Ukrainian president’s responsibility for the crisis includes such actions as failing to dress properly. “I mean, all Zelensky had to do today was put on a tie, show up, smile, say ‘Thank you,’ sign the papers, and have lunch,” complained Scott Jennings, who had reportedly been considered for White House spokesperson and performs essentially the same function for CNN. “That’s it. And he couldn’t do that.”

Ah yes, the tie. Apparently Trump and his supporters care deeply about the tie. If we take this line of argument seriously, it posits that the United States reversed its foreign policy based on an outfit choice—and this argument is being made as a defense of Trump’s judgment.

A related and only slightly less damning defense is that Zelensky erred by arguing with Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance when they presented him with a series of pro-Russian positions during their photo op. Trump insisted, falsely, that security guarantees for Ukraine were unnecessary because Putin would never violate one. (He praised Putin’s character and spoke wistfully of how the two men had to endure the “Russia hoax” together.) “Why on earth did Zelensky choose to fact-check Trump in front of the entire world rather than debate the wisdom of a ceasefire behind closed doors?” demands conservative columnist Marc Thiessen, a foreign-policy hawk who has sought to steer Trump toward his own view.

This viewpoint has influenced some mainstream media coverage of the fateful White House meeting. A recent Politico story filled with inside-Trump-world reporting, for example, suggests that Trump was eager to cut a deal, if only Zelensky had flattered him sufficiently: The Ukrainian president “infuriated Trump last week with his public suggestion he was swallowing Putin’s disinformation—a response to Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine started the war.” Or perhaps the source of Trump’s split with Ukraine is revealed by him regurgitating Russian propaganda blaming Ukraine for the war, rather than Zelensky correcting him.

Trump may be vain and childish, but he does have some substantive beliefs. Lindsey Graham, another Trump-worshipping Republican hawk, told The New York Times that he had warned Zelensky before the meeting, “Don’t take the bait,” and publicly criticized the Ukrainian president for not following his advice. But how did Graham know there would be bait? Perhaps because Trump has spent years expressing sympathy for Russia and contempt for its enemies, including Ukraine and the Western alliance.

[Read: Did Russia invade Ukraine? Is Putin a dictator? We asked every Republican member of Congress]

Trump’s Russophilia used to stand almost unique within the Republican Party. But he has brought large segments of the right around to his position, and many of them have turned Zelensky into a hate figure. The enthusiastically anti-Ukraine conservatives are happy to credit Trump for reversing the Biden administration’s support for Kyiv. Say what you want about the tenets of national conservatism; at least it’s an ethos. The more traditionally anti-Russian conservatives, by contrast, need to find a way to disagree with the outcome of the Oval Office meeting without seeming to criticize Trump. That is how authoritarian political cultures operate: The only permissible way to express disapproval of the leader’s choices is to pretend they were someone else’s.

This leads to absurd logical contortions. Anti-Russia conservatives treat their putative objections to Zelenky’s conduct as legitimate standards that he could have met, as if this is a game with fixed rules. Presented with the obvious objection —that Elon Musk had dressed even more slovenly in the Oval Office and a Cabinet meeting just a few days before—the National Review editor in chief, Rich Lowry, retorted, “When Zelensky is named the head of DOGE, he can do the same and get away with it.” Yet no principle of decorum says that a head of state can’t wear a military uniform in the White House but “the head of DOGE” can wear a T-shirt and baseball cap. Everything about this solemn rule is made up, including the position “head of DOGE.” If you have ever watched a school bully, you may recall that accusing their victim of violating some rule or standard, and then flouting the standard themselves, is part of the abuse, a way of signaling that they hold all the power.

Trump’s base was poised to explode at Zelensky—for his shirt, for his alleged lack of gratitude—because Trump has signaled that he is their enemy. In their desperation, anti-Russian conservatives have reversed the obvious causation.

[Read: The real reason Trump berated Zelensky]

During Trump’s first term, the theory that he loved Putin was complicated by his inability to overcome resistance by bureaucrats and his own hawkish advisers. This created room for analysts to accept explanations for Trump’s stance other than simple affinity for Putin. Now, however, he is able to quickly carry out such steps as cutting off weapons to Ukraine without sneaking around or being slow-walked by mid-level staff. Meanwhile, he publicly blames Ukraine for the ongoing war and accuses Zelensky of being a dictator who spreads hatred against Russia. The theory that Trump trusts and wants to help Putin can parsimoniously explain his rhetoric and actions.

It is the alternative theory, that Trump is playing a clever geopolitical game, that relies on whispered conversations and intricate double-meaning interpretations of his public positions. A Wall Street Journal reporter deduces from “nearly a year of Trumpworld chatter and (sometimes secret) talks with foreign officials” that Trump’s real strategy is to “split Russia from China” and that “there is no way the US will sell Ukraine down the river.” In some foreign-policy circles, analyses discerning a far-reaching plan from wisps of buried evidence are considered sophisticated, while positing that Trump simply believes the things he says almost daily on camera is considered slightly nutty.

Whatever you want to say about the anti-Ukraine right’s moral posture, it is at least able to grasp the reality of Trump’s position: He wants to leave Ukraine at Putin’s mercy. The anti-Russia Trumpers, with their missing-tie theory of Trump’s Russia strategy, and their convoluted efforts to explain away his plain wishes, are the ones who have drifted into the realm of fantasy.

A book festival in Vilnius, meetings with friends in Warsaw, a dinner in Berlin: I happened to be at gatherings in three European cities over the past several days, and everywhere I went, everyone wanted to talk about the Oval Office performance last Friday. Europeans needed some time to process these events, not just because of what it told them about the war in Ukraine, but because of what it told them about America, a country they thought they knew well.

In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand new stereotype for America: Not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast.

Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterwards, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win.” They announced they would halt transfers of military equipment to Ukraine, and hinted at ending sanctions on Russia, the aggressor state. In his speech to Congress last night, Trump once again declared that America would “get” Greenland, which is a part of Denmark—a sign that he intends to run roughshod over other allies too.

[Read: A Greenland plot more cynical than fiction]

These are not the actions of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling.

The Oval Office meeting, the subsequent announcements, and the speech to Congress also clarified something else: Trump, Vance, and many of the people around them now fully inhabit an alternate reality, one composed entirely of things they see and hear in the ether. Part of the Oval Office altercation was provoked by Zelensky’s insistence on telling the truth, as the full video clearly shows. His mistake was to point out that Russia and Ukraine have reached many ceasefires and made many agreements since 2014, and that Vladimir Putin has broken most of them, including during Trump’s first term.

It’s precisely because they remember these broken truces that the Ukrainians keep asking what happens after a ceasefire, what kind of security guarantees will be put in place, how Trump plans to prevent Putin from breaking them once more and, above all, what price the Russians are willing to pay for peace in Ukraine. Will they even give up their claims to territory they don’t control? Will they agree that Ukraine can be a sovereign democracy?

But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance—who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year—told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or X.

Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance. This is not new. Back in 2016, at the height of the election campaign, Trump frequently repeated false stories launched by Russia’s Sputnik news agency, declaring that Hillary Clinton and Obama had “founded ISIS,” or that “the Google search engine is suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton.” At the time Trump also imitated Russian talk about Clinton starting World War III, another Russian meme. He produced a new version of that in the Oval Office on Friday. “You’re gambling with World War III. You’re gambling with World War III,” he shouted at Zelensky.

[David Frum: Trump, by any means necessary]

But what was ominous in 2016 is dangerous in 2025, especially in Europe. Russian military aggression is more damaging, Russian sabotage across Europe more frequent, and Russian cyberattacks almost constant. In truth it is Putin, not Zelensky, who started this conflict, Putin who has brought North Korean troops and Iranian drones to Europe, Putin who instructs his propagandists to talk about nuking London, Putin who keeps raising the stakes and scope of the war. Most Europeans live in this reality, not in the fictional world inhabited by Trump, and the contrast is making them think differently about Americans. According to pollsters, nearly three quarters of French people now think that the U.S. is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the U.S. as well.

In reality, the Russians have said nothing in public about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. In reality, they have spent the last decade building a cult of cruelty at home. Now they have exported that cult not just to Europe, not just to Africa, but to Washington too. This administration abruptly canceled billions of dollars of food aid and health-care programs for the poorest people on the planet, a vicious act that the president and vice president have not acknowledged but millions of people can see. Their use of tariffs as random punishment, not for enemies but for allies, seems not just brutal but inexplicable.

And in the Oval Office Trump and Vance behaved like imperial rulers chastising a subjugated colony, vocalizing the same disgust and disdain that Russian propagandists use when they talk about Ukraine. Europeans know, everyone knows, that if Trump and Vance can talk that way to the president of Ukraine, then they might eventually talk that way to their country’s leader next.

Last year, Russia made slow progress in Ukraine: Tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Russian soldiers were killed or wounded, and five whole mechanized divisions were lost, in exchange for Ukrainian territory slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island. At that rate, Russia will control all of Ukraine in about 118 years. Keep that figure in mind when you hear President Donald Trump or Vice President J. D. Vance declare, as Trump did last week at their Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that Ukraine is “not winning” the war and that it is in “a very bad position.” Russia’s position is also “bad”—and perhaps more agonizing, because Russians taste the extra bitterness that comes with the knowledge that they could, in February 2022, have just stayed home and not started the war. Both sides have lost, which means that declaring only one side the loser is a peculiar choice.

I spoke with two people who have watched the conflict during the past three years to find out which country has time on its side. George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War has analyzed the Russian position and accordingly updated ISW’s map of the state of the conflict. Andrey Liscovich manages a charity, the Ukraine Defense Fund, that has supplied nonlethal aid to Ukraine since 2022, on the theory (borne out during the past year) that the war will be won not by who can produce the most artillery shells but by who can most efficiently outfit their troops with items such as battery packs and radio kits available from Best Buy and RadioShack. He has visited the front lines repeatedly from the Ukrainian side.

[Read: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

Barros told me that to measure recent Russian advances, one must “break out the calipers,” because the war has slowed to the point that both sides are taking and losing just a few square miles of empty land at a time. “[Russia is] not slogging through an urban environment,” he said. “These are largely unpopulated steppes, with a handful of villages and only two operationally significant towns last year. That’s all they have to show for it.” The material cost of this territory of dubious value has been shocking. In one of the main areas of operation in Donetsk, Barros said, Russia “lost about 500 tanks and 1,000 armored personnel carriers—roughly a division for every 10 klicks of movement.” He told me that Russia has recently been observed using pack mules in lieu of mechanized equipment.

The United States military has protocols for the modern use of mules in jungles and in rugged, craggy terrain. To use them in the flatlands of eastern Ukraine suggests desperation. “The Russians have been burning through their Soviet-era stocks,” Barros told me. He said that Uralvagonzavod, Russia’s tank factory, and Tula, its ammunition factory, have been working without breaks since the war broke out. Tanks and other resources can be seen in satellite imagery, and the motor pools full of old ones empty out as they get shipped to the battlefield and obliterated. “Assuming they don’t get a massive vehicle injection from the North Koreans or the Chinese, the Russians are on course to run critically low in the next 12 to 18 months,” Barros said. He noted that Russia has covered storage that could conceal more vehicles. But most signs point to eventual depletion—conditional, of course, on Ukraine continuing to receive military aid at the pace it had been before Trump cut it off this week.

These signs would be more welcome for the Ukrainians if the mode of killing hadn’t shifted in the past year, Liscovich told me. “The war has qualitatively changed since 2022,” he said. In the first month of the conflict, Ukraine became a hunting ground in which Ukrainians armed with Javelin missile systems destroyed Russian armored columns. But then the war became an artillery battle in which each side lobbed shells at the other. The issue that worried Ukraine’s allies was the artillery-shell gap: They were being used faster than factories in Scranton and Germany and Slovakia could replace them. “You used to hear these complaints about not having enough 155-millimeter shells,” Liscovich said. “Now it’s primarily a drone war, and you don’t hear those complaints about shells anymore.”

Most of the frontline kills are now attributable to drones. And Russia can build new drones much faster than it can build tanks. Since the beginning of the war, Liscovich said, Ukraine has had the mother of invention on its side: By necessity, it came up before Russia did with clever new ways to use drones. But Russia then noticed the innovations, developed countermeasures, and deployed drones of its own, using the new capability but at a greater scale than its much smaller enemy. None of this iterative loop of deadly innovation involves tanks. “Heavy equipment gets taken out,” Liscovich told me. “Most of [Russia’s] advances are infantry advances. Drones are harder to use against dispersed, small groups.” The main countermeasure is mortar fire, which is cheap and mobile—again, not a serious constraint that requires around-the-clock shifts in Russian factories.

[Read: Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now]

The total number of Russians and Ukrainians killed in the war remains in dispute among experts, although all agree that the numbers are unsustainable on both sides, even over the course of a war much shorter than the 118 years it would take Russia to completely control Ukraine. Earlier this year, Trump himself estimated that Russia has lost 1 million troops (a rate that would leave Russia, whose current population is 143 million, empty before its forces can reach Lviv). Most others estimate a much lower number; Ukraine’s top general, Oleksandr Syrskyi, estimated that Russia suffered 427,000 casualties last year (including but not limited to deaths), a number that is surely inflated.

Barros told me that Russia’s ability to recruit new personnel is “completely busted.” Vladimir Putin has relied on mercenary and convict soldiers, combined with lavish bonuses for poor Russians who volunteer to try their luck against killer Ukrainian robots on the steppe. Barros described a delicate social contract between Putin and his citizens: “The contract is: I don’t force you to go fight in Ukraine. I pay you to go fight in Ukraine.” Russian oblasts are responsible for recruitment, and Samara Oblast has offered a sign-up bonus of $36,000, “not including the other benefits and entitlements in your salary,” Barros said. This is the equivalent of two or three years’ pay, handed over upon enlistment.

In a poor country like Russia, handing out fistfuls of rubles is the very definition of desperation. Russia has inflation at rates approaching 20 percent (officially, they are about 9 percent), and it has been sucking its own sovereign wealth fund dry. But Ukraine is poor, too, and has man-power issues to match Russia’s. Liscovich pointed out that Russia’s population is three times Ukraine’s and that when the money runs out, its population can be forced to serve—which means it would be in roughly the same demoralized state that Ukraine is in right now. “The Russians are more fatalistic [than the Ukrainians] about joining the military,” Liscovich told me. “They’re far, far more obedient when it comes to state action.”

The very fact that there is a debate to be had about which country has the advantage in this war shows a remarkable inversion in expectation. Early on, even after Ukraine’s initial Javelin-enabled repulsion of the first wave of Russian invasion, pessimists noted that time favored Russia, the larger and richer of the two countries, and the one whose military had more experience with slow, grinding wars. “In 2022, all the analysts assumed that Putin and Russia would be better equipped to weather a long-term, protracted war against a smaller Ukraine,” Barros said. “That assumption has been invalidated. Protracting the conflict now actually hurts the Russians more than the Ukrainians.”

At their most humane, Trump’s Russia-Ukraine statements focus on the daily massacre afflicting both sides. “The big thing is the number of soldiers,” he said at the beginning of the Zelensky meeting, before it went sour. “We’re losing a lot of soldiers, and we want to see it stop.” The war will end in a deal. Why not a deal now rather than a deal in a year? A deal now might spare 1 million Russians and Ukrainians. But this macabre calculation is more complicated when one considers that Ukraine has been fighting for independence and survival. If these goals are now beyond its reach, then prompt surrender, or whatever Trump and Putin propose, is the only option. But Ukraine seems to think that if Russia seizes its territory at the current rate, Russia will eventually run out of men, tanks, money, and the will to fight. If Ukraine is in that position—having to hold out, and suffer and inflict more death and destruction for another year or more—then its position is unenviable, but it is not a losing one.

Trump says Zelenskyy also willing to sign a critical minerals deal, days after their blow-up at the Oval Office.

American politicians of both parties have always known that giving the response to a presidential address is one of the worst jobs in Washington. Presidents have the gravitas and grandeur of a joint session in the House chamber; the respondent gets a few minutes of video filmed in a studio or in front of a fake fireplace somewhere. If the president’s speech was good, a response can seem churlish or anti-climactic. If the president’s speech was poor or faltering, the opposition can only pile on for a few minutes.

So pity Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who got handed the task of a response to Donald Trump’s two hour carnival of lies and stunts. Slotkin gave a good, normal speech in which she laid out some of her party’s issues with Trump on the economy and national security.

It was so normal, in fact, that it was exactly the wrong speech to give.

But first, it’s important to note that it was a good speech. Slotkin wisely decided to forego any stagey settings, appearing in front of neatly placed flags instead of in her office or a kitchen. She gave a shout-out to her home state while managing to avoid folksy familiarity or posturing. She also stayed away from wonkery, speaking in the kind of clear language people use in daily conversation. (Okay, there was some thudding language about investment and “jobs of the future,” but these are minor speechwriting offenses.)

[Read: The Trump backers who have buyer’s remorse]

And to her credit, Slotkin reminded people that Elon Musk is an unaccountable uber-bureaucrat leading a “gang of 20 year olds” who are rummaging through the personal data of millions of Americans. As a senator from a state bordering Canada, she asked if Americans are comfortable kicking our sister nation in the teeth.

So what’s not to like? Slotkin—like so many in her party lately—failed to convey any sense of real urgency or alarm. Her speech could have been given in Trump’s first term, perhaps in 2017 or 2018, but we are no longer in that moment. The president’s address was so extreme, so full of bizarre claims and ideas, exaggerations and distortions and lies, that it should have called his fitness to serve into question. He preened about a cabinet that includes some of the strangest, and least qualified, members in American history. Although his speech went exceptionally long, he said almost nothing of substance, and the few plans he put forward were mostly applause bait for his Republican sycophants in the room and his base at home.

It’s easy for me to sit in my living room in Rhode Island and suggest what others should say. But in her response, Slotkin failed to capture the hallucinatory nature of our national politics. As a former Republican, I nodded when Slotkin said that Ronald Reagan would be rolling in his grave at what Slotkin called the “spectacle” of last week’s Oval Office attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But is that really the message of a fighting opposition? Is it an effective rallying cry either to older voters or to a new generation to say, in effect, that Reagan—even now a polarizing figure—would have hated Trump? (Of course he would have.) Isn’t the threat facing America far greater than that?

[Read: Lawful, but enormously destructive]

Slotkin’s best moment was when she pleaded with people to do more than be mere observers of politics, and said that doomscrolling on phones isn’t the same thing as genuine political engagement. And she issued her own Reaganesque call to remember that America is not just “a patch of land between two oceans,” that America is great because of its ideals. But her admonition to her fellow citizens not to fool themselves about the fragility of democracy, while admirable, was strangely detached from a specific attack on the source of that menace.

Did Americans vote for Kash Patel to lead the FBI, or RFK Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, or Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense? Trump took time to recognize and praise all three of those men in his speech. So why not ask that question—directly and without needless throat clearing about the importance and necessity of change?

Slotkin’s response reflected the fractured approach of the Democrats to Trump in general. Some of them refused to attend tonight’s address, some of them held up little ping-pong paddles with messages on them (a silly idea that looked even worse in its execution), and others meandered out. One, Representative Al Green of Texas, got himself thrown out within the first minutes, a stunt that only gave Speaker Mike Johnson a chance to look strong and decisive, if only for a moment.

I’m not a fan of performative protest, and initially I thought the Democrats who chose to attend the address made the right call. But when Trump referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as “Pocahontas,” they could have left en bloc, declaring once they were outside that they would take no part in any further demeaning of the House chamber—or, for that matter, of American democracy. Instead, they sat there and took it, their opposition to Trump a kind of hodgepodge of rage, bemusement, boredom, and irritation.

Slotkin’s address suffered from the same half-heartedness that has seized the Democrats since last November. Her response, and the behavior of the Democrats in general, showed that they still fear being a full-throated opposition party because they believe that they will alienate voters who will somehow be offended at them for taking a stand against Trump’s schemes.

Slotkin is a centrist—as she noted, she won in areas that also voted for Trump—and her victory in Michigan proved that centrism can be a powerful anchor against extremists. But centrism is not the same as meekness. America does not need a “resistance,” or stale slogans, or people putting those slogans on little paddles. It needs an opposition party that boldly defends the nation’s virtues, the rule of law, and the rights of its people.

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In 2000, the CDC declared that measles had been eliminated from the United States. But now America is at risk of losing that status: A measles outbreak has sickened more than 150 people in Texas and New Mexico since late January. An unvaccinated school-aged child recently died from measles in Texas—the first known death from measles in America in about a decade, and the first child to die from the disease since 2003. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who covers science and health, about why vaccination is the only way to prevent the spread, and how a surge in illnesses that had previously faded from American life could reshape childhoods.

Lora Kelley: Why is measles so reliant on vaccines to prevent its spread?

Katherine J. Wu: Measles is arguably the most contagious infectious disease that scientists know about. Researchers have estimated that, in a population where there’s zero immunity to measles, one infected person is going to infect roughly 12 to 18 other people. That is extremely high. In most cases, it is a respiratory infection that’s going to cause fever, cough, and rash, but it can also restrict breathing, cause complications such as pneumonia, and be deadly.

This is a disease that requires really, really high levels of vaccination to keep it out of a community, because it’s so contagious. Researchers have estimated that you want to see vaccination rates in the 95 percent range to protect a community. If you start to dip just a bit below that threshold, like even 92 percent or 90 percent, you start to get into trouble. Lower uptake creates an opening for the virus to start spreading. And the more unvaccinated people there are, the faster the virus will spread, and the more people will get seriously sick.

Lora: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that this recent outbreak is “not unusual” and pointed to past measles outbreaks. How do you view this current outbreak relative to other times when cases spiked, such as the 2019 outbreak in New York?

Katherine: The current outbreak actually is not as big as the 2019 New York one yet. And we almost lost our elimination status for measles then. But there are ways in which I would argue that this one is worse than the 2019 outbreak. An unvaccinated kid has died. We haven’t had a reported measles death in this country in about a decade. If the situation worsens, that death might only be the first.

Lora: Could people who are vaccinated be affected by a measles outbreak?

Katherine: The MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella, generally provides immunity from measles for decades. But there are kids who are not old enough to be fully vaccinated against measles (kids get one shot at 12 to 15 months and then again at 4 to 6 years old). And it’s rare, but some people, including immunocompromised people, might not respond well to vaccination and may not be protected by it. Also, as people get further from their vaccination date, they may be more vulnerable to the disease. The more measles is around, the more vulnerable even the vaccinated population will be.

Lora: Measles hasn’t been a big issue in this country for a long time. What tools does America have to fight this disease if it resurges in a big way?

Katherine: Because this disease spreads so quickly, the main tool we’ve used to fight it is vaccination. And if people are letting that go, we’re in trouble. There are no antivirals for measles. Doctors generally just have to do what they can to manage the symptoms. Plus, health-care workers aren’t used to diagnosing or dealing with measles cases anymore, which makes it easier for outbreaks to get out of control.

Lora: How might the recent layoffs at federal agencies focused on public health and disease affect America’s ability to respond to outbreaks?

Katherine: I do worry that a lot of the public-health workforce is slowly getting hollowed out, including at the CDC. We’re going to lose our ability to prevent and stop epidemics—we saw resources that researchers rely on to track outbreaks temporarily disappear from the CDC website in January and February, for example. If people’s attitudes keep shifting away from childhood vaccination, a whole other host of diseases could creep in. In refusing the MMR vaccine, you are by definition also refusing protection against the mumps and rubella.

And RFK Jr. has made rampant speculations about the MMR vaccine being more dangerous than the disease itself, which is completely untrue. This week, he published an op-ed on the Fox News website acknowledging the importance of vaccinating against measles but also framing vaccination as a “personal” choice, and described nutrition as “a best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses.” I can promise that no multivitamin will work against measles as well as the MMR vaccine, which has been proved safe and effective at protecting people from disease. Measles, meanwhile, can kill.

Lora: What would more frequent outbreaks mean for America’s kids and their childhood?

Katherine: In the world kids live in now, when they get sick with a disease they catch from other children, it’s not that big of a deal most of the time. Measles outbreaks are just so different from the colds picked up from day care or the stomach bugs you catch at Disneyland. If we choose to let measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases come back, there will be more childhood mortality. Kids might get pneumonia more often. They might be hospitalized more often. Some might grow up with permanent brain damage. Childhood will not only be about whether a kid is going to get a good education or make enough friends. It will once more be about whether a kid can survive the first few years of their life.

Related:

RFK Jr. is America’s leading advocate for getting measles, Benjamin Mazer writes. The return of measles

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

​Trump’s tariffs are his most inexplicable decision yet. The nicest swamp on the internet Good on Paper: You may miss wokeness.

Today’s News

The Trump administration imposed 25 percent tariffs on most imports from Canada and Mexico, and doubled tariffs for China. In response, Canada put 25 percent tariffs on billions of dollars of American goods, Mexico will announce retaliatory tariffs on Sunday, and China will add tariffs on some American imports on March 10. Donald Trump will deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress tonight at 9 p.m. ET, in which he is expected to lay out his vision for his second term. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that last week’s Oval Office meeting was “regrettable” and proposed a partial cease-fire with Russia to resume peace negotiations.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Bettmann / Getty; Harold M. Lambert / Getty.

When America Persecutes Its Teachers

By Clay Risen

Several states, most notably Florida, have ordered schools and colleges to restrict or eliminate courses on gender, while groups such as Moms for Liberty have rallied parents to police curricula and ban books from school libraries. Ideological battles over education may be proxies for larger conflicts—Communism in the ’40s and ’50s; diversity, equity, and inclusion today. But such fights are particularly fierce because of how important schools are in shaping American values. To control the country’s education system is, in no uncertain terms, to control the country’s future.

Read the full article.

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Watch. Even the most mundane moments are riveting in the new deep-sea drama Last Breath (out in theaters), David Sims writes.

Listen. A hugely popular podcast tries to prove that nonspeaking people with autism have supernatural powers—but it misses something more compelling, Dan Engber writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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