The key to understanding this morning’s Supreme Court ruling unfreezing American foreign aid is that two different rulings are at issue here, and teasing apart those technicalities reveals a loss that is perhaps more significant for the Trump administration than is first apparent.

The two orders both come from U.S. District Court Judge Amir Ali. There’s his underlying temporary restraining order (TRO), which remains in effect (and which the government has neither tried to appeal nor sought emergency relief from), and then there’s his more specific order, which purported to enforce the TRO by obliging the government to pay somewhere from $1.5 billion to $2 billion of committed foreign-aid funds by February 26. It was that order that the government tried to appeal, and from which it sought emergency relief first in the D.C. Circuit Court and then in the Supreme Court. By issuing an “administrative stay” last Wednesday night, Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily absolved the government of its obligation to comply with that order—but not with the underlying TRO, which generally requires the government to spend money that Congress has appropriated for foreign-aid funding.

Against that backdrop, the Court’s ruling today is more than a little confusing. Let’s start with what’s clear: A 5–4 majority (with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three Democratic appointees) denied the government’s application to vacate Judge Ali’s enforcement order. The Court’s ruling contains only one meaningful sentence, and it is maddeningly opaque:

Given that the deadline in the challenged order has now passed, and in light of the ongoing preliminary injunction proceedings, the District Court should clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.

This sentence (or, perhaps, an earlier draft of it) provoked a fiery and more than a little hypocritical eight-page dissent from Justice Samuel Alito, joined in full by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. But before getting to the dissent, let me try to read a couple of tea leaves out of this cryptic but important passage.

[Adam Serwer: Why Trump thanked John Roberts]

First, I think it’s meaningful that the majority denied the government’s application rather than dismissing it as moot. In English, that is the majority signaling that the government likely still must comply with the “pay now” order—the second of the two—albeit not on the original timeline. If the majority thought that the “pay now” order was no longer live because the deadline had come and gone, then the proper disposition would have been to dismiss the application as moot, not to deny it. (Indeed, although there are good reasons to not rely upon dissents to figure out what the majority held, Alito’s dissent seems to reinforce this reading.) This may seem like a very thin reed, but it’s a distinction I can’t imagine was lost upon the justices. The majority (and, apparently, the dissent) seems to agree that the government remains under not just the general obligation of the original TRO but the specific obligation of the “pay now” order.

Second, the clause about the district court clarifying the obligations that the government must fulfill to comply with the TRO strikes me as an invitation to Judge Ali to do exactly that—to issue a more specific order that (1) identifies the particular spending commitments that he believes the government must honor to comply with the TRO and (2) gives the government at least a little more than 48 hours to do so. The upshot is that, even if the Trump administration doesn’t have to pay the money immediately, it will have to do so very soon. That’s small solace to the organizations and people who have already had their lives upended by the spending freeze, but it’s a bigger loss for the Trump administration than the text may suggest.

Third, the timing of the ruling is striking. The Court handed down the order right at 9 a.m. this morning—less than 12 hours after the end of President Donald Trump’s address to Congress last night. It is just about impossible to imagine that the ruling was still being finalized overnight (or that the chief justice was somehow influenced by his awkward moment with Trump). If not, then there appears to have been at least some choice on the Court’s part to hand down the ruling after the president’s speech and not before it at the close of business yesterday—perhaps to avoid the possibility of Trump attacking the justices while several of them were in the audience. I’ve written before about the problem of the Court timing its rulings—and how it underscores the extent to which the justices are, and ought to admit that they are, playing at least some politics even with what should be a straightforward procedure for releasing rulings when they’re ready. This at least seems like it might be another example.

And fourth, here’s that 5–4 lineup again. Back in January, I wrote about how this particular 5–4 alignment (the chief justice, Justice Barrett, and the three Democratic appointees) is starting to show up in cases “in which the Chief Justice’s elusive but not illusory institutional commitments, and Justice Barrett’s emerging independence, are separating them from the other Republican appointees. For a host of reasons that I suspect are obvious, we may see more such cases sooner rather than later.”

On one hand, it’s a bit alarming that Kavanaugh joined the dissent. On the other hand, for those hoping that the Court is going to be a bulwark against the (mounting) abuses of the Trump administration, it’s a cautiously optimistic sign that there may well be at least five votes to support lower-court rulings attempting to rein in those abuses.

In many ways, the dissent is far more illuminating than the majority’s order. As is unfortunately often the case with respect to Alito’s dissents from emergency applications, this one combines a remarkable amount of hypocrisy with statements that are either materially incorrect or, at the very least, misleading.

[Read: ‘Constitutional crisis’ is an understatement]

On page three of the ruling (page two of the dissent), for example, Alito writes that “the Government must apparently pay the $2 billion posthaste—not because the law requires it, but simply because a District Judge so ordered.” Of course, this completely misstates both the theory of the plaintiffs’ lawsuits and the gravamen of Judge Ali’s order. The whole point is that the law does require it—that Congress has mandated the spending and that the contractual obligations have been fulfilled. Indeed, Judge Ali’s “pay now” order is about work already completed for which the money was already due. If there is authority for the proposition that the government is not legally obliged to pay its bills, Alito doesn’t cite it. Yes, there may be separate questions about the courts’ power to compel the government, but that’s not the same thing as whether the “law requires” the government to pay its bills. Do the dissenters genuinely believe that the answer is no?

Alito also makes much out of the argument that sovereign immunity bars the claims against the government. But the Supreme Court has already held that relief under the Administrative Procedure Act can run to whether the government is obliged to pay expenditures to which the recipients are legally entitled. Alito asserts that actually ordering the government to pay those expenditures is something else entirely; suffice to say, I think that’s slicing the bologna pretty thin. His argument would have more force if Judge Ali’s “pay now” order was about funds for which the administrative processes haven’t fully run. But here, they have. And so it’s just a question of whether federal courts have the power to force the government to … enforce the law.

In that respect, contrast Alito’s analysis here with his dissenting 2023 opinion in United States v. Texas—in which he would have upheld an injunction by a single (judge-shopped) district judge that effectively dictated to the executive branch what its immigration-enforcement priorities must be. In explaining why the Biden administration should lose, he wrote:

Nothing in our precedents even remotely supports this grossly inflated conception of “executive Power,” which seriously infringes the “legislative Powers” that the Constitution grants to Congress. At issue here is Congress’s authority to control immigration, and “[t]his Court has repeatedly emphasized that ‘over no conceivable subject is the legislative power of Congress more complete than it is over’ the admission of aliens.” In the exercise of that power, Congress passed and President Clinton signed a law that commands the detention and removal of aliens who have been convicted of certain particularly dangerous crimes. The Secretary of Homeland Security, however, has instructed his agents to disobey this legislative command and instead follow a different policy that is more to his liking.

In 2023, Alito dismissed the view that courts could not push back against the president in such cases as a “radical theory.” In 2025, apparently, it’s correct. I wonder what’s changed?

Finally, Alito offers what I would euphemistically call a remarkable discussion of why the harm that the plaintiffs are suffering is insufficient to overcome the government’s case for a stay:

Any harm resulting from the failure to pay amounts that the law requires would have been diminished, if not eliminated, if the Court of Appeals had promptly decided the merits of the Government’s appeal, which it should not have dismissed. If we sent this case back to the Court of Appeals, it could still render a prompt decision.

In other words, the plaintiffs are being harmed not by the government’s refusal to pay them but by the D.C. Circuit’s refusal to exercise appellate jurisdiction over Judge Ali’s “pay now” order. I don’t even know what to say about this argument other than that, if that’s how irreparable harm worked, well, emergency relief (and the role of intermediate appellate courts) would look a heck of a lot different.

Alito closes by accusing the majority of imposing “a $2 billion penalty on American taxpayers.” This comes back to the central analytical flaw in the dissent: The “penalty” to which Alito is referring is the government’s underlying legal obligation to pay its debts. Debts aren’t a penalty; they are the literal cost of doing business. And if this is the approach that these four justices are going to take in all of the spending cases to come, that’s more than a little disheartening.

[Read: Trump tests the courts]

As for what comes next, well, I’m not entirely sure. We know that Judge Ali is scheduled to hold a preliminary injunction hearing tomorrow. It is very possible that before then (or shortly thereafter) he will reimpose some kind of “pay now” mandate that, with the hints from the Supreme Court majority, is a bit more specific and has a slightly longer timeline. Of course, the government could seek emergency relief from that order, too, but I take today’s ruling as a sign that, so long as Judge Ali follows the Court’s clues, at least five justices will be inclined to deny such relief. That doesn’t do anything immediately for the plaintiffs and other foreign-aid recipients who are continuing to suffer debilitating consequences. But it does suggest that, sometime soon, the government really is going to have to pay out at least some of the money at issue in these cases (and, as important, perhaps other funding cases too).

The broader takeaway, though, is that this is now the second ruling (the first was Dellinger) in which the Court has, in the same ruling, moved gingerly but at the same time denied the relief that the Trump administration was seeking. Two cases are, obviously, a small data set. But for those hoping that even this Supreme Court will stand up, at least in some respects, to the Trump administration, I think there’s a reason to see today’s ruling as a modestly positive sign in that direction.

Yes, the Court could do even more to push back in these cases. But the fact that Trump is already 0–2 on emergency applications is, I think, not an accident, and a result that may send a message to lower courts, whether deliberately or not, to keep doing what they’re doing.

This article was adapted from a post on Steve Vladeck's Substack, One First.

Rory McIlroy says he does not think a deal to unite golf is "any closer" despite talks between the PGA Tour, LIV Golf and United States president Donald Trump.

Even in the face of economic and political uncertainty, the United States continued to lead the world in wealth creation in 2024, according to a report released by Douglas Elliman and Knight Frank, on Wednesday.

Read more...

Congratulations, American taxpayer: You are going all in on crypto.

This weekend, President Donald Trump announced that he is moving forward with a plan to create a strategic cryptocurrency reserve, purchasing bitcoin and ether, as well as the more esoteric instruments XRP, solana, and cardano. The reserve will “elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks,” Trump wrote on his social-media site, Truth Social. “I will make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World.”

For the taxpayer, the purpose of such an initiative is obscure. The crypto industry is a hyper-speculative casino. It is not essential to the American financial system, nor are cryptocurrencies essential to the American public. Workers cannot put bitcoin in their gas tanks; parents cannot feed XRP to their kids; businesses do not need cardano to build roads, light cities, produce vaccines, or provide loans to homeowners and entrepreneurs.

Yet for the White House, the purpose is obvious. Trump’s commerce secretary, his AI and crypto czar, and several of his most influential policy advisers are crypto investors, and the president launched his own memecoin. Establishing a reserve would boost prices, enriching these public officials and the crypto magnates donating tens of millions of dollars to Republican campaigns. It would not be a public investment, but a private giveaway—one of a mounting number in the Trump era.

The White House has put out few details on how a federal crypto reserve would work. But a stalled Senate bill would order the government to purchase 100 million bitcoins, hold the assets for two decades or longer, and sell them to retire the national debt. The government could transfer the $19 billion in crypto it has seized from criminals to the stockpile; the Treasury could finance additional purchases by revaluing the gold reserve, Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming has proposed, so that “not a single U.S. taxpayer dollar” would be spent. Trump’s crypto czar has also indicated that the reserve would not involve new taxes or spending.

[Read: The crypto world is already mad at Trump]

Yet the reserve would use taxpayer resources, diverting them from other purposes. If crypto prices soar, the Treasury could retire a chunk of the debt. If crypto prices crater, the public would end up worse off. “I don’t think turning the government into a hedge fund is a viable solution” to the country’s fiscal challenges, Mark Zandi, of Moody’s Analytics, told me. He suggested addressing them the old-fashioned way, by cutting spending, raising taxes, and promoting growth.

Government experts see no strategic justification for the proposed reserve. The United States maintains stockpiles of crucial materials: vaccines and other pharmaceuticals, rare-earth minerals used in weapons manufacturing, crude oil. “There are important differences between reserves for real commodities, like petroleum, where a shortage may result in serious harm to the American people,” and the kind of speculative fund Trump is promoting, Bharat Ramamurti, an economic adviser to the Biden administration, told me. “Cryptocurrency does not meet any of those standard conditions.”

For the many, the reserve poses an unnecessary risk; for the few, it offers rich rewards. The mere prospect of the government speculating in the crypto market is already enriching the small share of Americans heavily invested in the assets. The price of bitcoin, ether, solana, XRP, and cardano jumped more than 10 percent when Trump published his Truth Social post. More broadly, the proposed reserve would mainstream a fringe industry and create public interest in high crypto prices—justifying later interventions in the market and nudging foreign governments and institutional investors to get in too.

The crypto fund is only the latest example of ascendant crony capitalism in Trump’s Washington. The president is strip-mining taxpayer resources and doling out contracts and favors to the politically connected. The risk is not just corruption, but higher interest rates and less competitive markets.

The tariffs that Trump has implemented on imports from China, Mexico, and Canada create a massive opportunity for favor-trading. In Trump’s first term, the White House imposed levies on $550 billion worth of Chinese goods, allowing American firms to apply for a tariff exemption if they could not find substitutes for imports or if the tariff would “impose significant harm on American interests.” An analysis found that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative disproportionately awarded exemptions to firms that made contributions to Republican candidates and disproportionately denied exemptions to firms supporting Democrats. The policy amounted to a “quid pro quo,” the economists concluded.

The Trump administration has pushed more blatant quid pro quos this time around. The advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group is attempting to merge with its rival Omnicom. Lawyers from Elon Musk’s X suggested that  Interpublic executives should boost advertising spending on the social-media platform “or else,” The Wall Street Journal reported. Or else, the Interpublic employees gathered, they run the risk of federal regulators scuttling or delaying the merger. Musk has also agitated for the Federal Aviation Administration to award a contract for air-traffic-control communications systems to SpaceX, his space-technology company. As a special government employee, Musk is supposed to be banned from influencing contracts in which he has a financial interest.

Threatening companies that decline to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Investigating firms that choose to maintain DEI policies. Proposing to privatize the United States Postal Service. Each is an example of the Trump administration trying to aid his supporters or damage his opponents, without regard for the public’s welfare. Each is an example of crony capitalism.

The strategic crypto reserve is a foolish idea, and the broader trend a dangerous one. Fifty years of studies on Russia, Hungary, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, and elsewhere have found that governments creating policies for and awarding contracts to politically aligned firms warps investment and damages markets. Connected firms flourish. Disfavored firms struggle. Corruption takes root. Taxpayers end up with degraded public services, and lose confidence in their elected representatives. In extreme cases, the practice heightens interest rates, slows down GDP growth, and makes countries vulnerable to financial collapse.

Trump fashions himself a swamp-draining, free-market-loving conservative, but there’s nothing conservative about this kind of intervention in the economy. “I’m against it! I’m against it all,” Veronique de Rugy, an economist at the right-of-center Mercatus Center, at George Mason University, told me. Trump “just announced: Farmers, prepare yourselves to sell all your products here; we’re going to tax exports. What is he talking about, really? Five percent of the consumers in the world are here. There’s only so much corn I can eat.” She told me she held out some hope for Trump’s deregulatory push and his plans to cut the budget. But she worried about the government being in hock to steel CEOs, crypto bros, Big Agriculture executives, military contractors, and anyone else who happens to have deep pockets and Trump’s ear, particularly given the president’s willingness to push his executive authority beyond the limits of American law.

“For us libertarians,” de Rugy said, “it feels like we’re being punched in the face with our own fist.”

Last month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started posting about ketamine.

Musk has said he uses ketamine regularly, so for the past couple of years, public speculation has persisted about how much he takes, whether he’s currently high, or how it might affect his behavior. Last year, Musk told CNN’s Don Lemon that he has a ketamine prescription and uses the drug roughly every other week to help with depression symptoms. When Lemon asked if Musk ever abused ketamine, Musk replied, “I don’t think so. If you use too much ketamine you can't really get work done,” then said that investors in his companies should want him to keep up his drug regimen. Not everyone is convinced. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Musk also takes the drug recreationally, and in 2023, Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker that Musk’s “associates” worried that ketamine, “alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions.” (Musk did not respond to my requests for comment. In a post on X responding to The New Yorker’s story, Musk wrote, “Tragic that Ronan Farrow is a puppet of the establishment and against the people.”)

Ketamine is called a dissociative drug because during a high, which lasts about an hour, people might feel detached from their body, their emotions, or the passage of time. Frequent, heavy recreational use—say, several times a week—has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance. You can see why people might wonder about ketamine use from a man who is trying to usher in multi-planetary human life, who has barged into global politics and is attempting to reengineer the U.S. government. With Musk’s new political power, his cognitive and psychological health is of concern not only to shareholders of his companies’ stocks but to all Americans. His late-night posts on X, mass emails to federal employees, and non sequiturs uttered on television have prompted even more questions about his drug use.

Ketamine’s great strength has always been its ability to sever humans from the world around them. It was first approved as an anesthetic in 1970, because it could make people lose consciousness without affecting the quality of their breathing. In the 1990s, as a street drug known as Special K, ketamine took ravers to euphoric states. Then, in the 2000s, researchers found that doses of ketamine that didn’t put people to sleep could rapidly reduce symptoms of depression, because, the thinking went, the drug altered the physical circuitry of the brain. In 2019, the FDA approved a nasal spray containing a form of ketamine called esketamine (sold under the brand name Spravato) for patients with depression who hadn’t responded to other treatments. Spravato came with a list of rules for how the drug should be administered: in a certified medical setting by a health-care professional, and with limited dosage amounts determined by how long a person has been in treatment.

But Spravato’s approval was followed by a surge in prescriptions for generic ketamine, which, because it’s already FDA-approved as an anesthetic, can be administered off-label without the rules that govern esketamine. (Recreational use has shot up over the past decade too.) Some providers pair low-dose injections with talk therapy. Across the country, bespoke ketamine clinics offer shots and lozenges to treat a wide variety of mental-health conditions, including anxiety and PTSD; some focus on IV drips at doses high enough that maintaining a conversation is not feasible. Few take insurance. One market report estimated that the ketamine industry was worth nearly $3.5 billion in 2023. Outside the clinic, the drug is reportedly popular among Silicon Valley’s tech elite, and a feature at some wellness retreats, including those for leadership development, corporate team building, or couples counseling.

[Read: The horseshoe theory of psychedelics]

Research has not yet established the side effects of long-term ketamine therapy, but older studies of recreational users offer some insight on heavy, extended dosing. Celia Morgan, now a psychopharmacology professor at the University of Exeter, in England, led a 2010 study that followed 120 recreational ketamine users for a year. Even infrequent users—those who used, on average, roughly three times a month—scored higher on a delusional-thought scale than ex-ketamine users, people who took other drugs, and people who didn’t use drugs at all. Those who averaged 20 uses a month scored even higher. People believed that they were the sole recipients of secret messages, or that society and people around them were especially attuned to them. The psychological profile of a frequent ketamine user, Morgan and her team concluded, was someone who had “profound” impairments in short- and long-term memory and was “distinctly dissociated in their day-to-day existence.” Morgan's study was not designed to determine whether people who are more likely to be delusional are also more likely to recreationally use ketamine, but Morgan told me that stopping the drug, in most cases, will dramatically reduce these side effects.

Psychedelic enthusiasts have for decades cautioned about the dangers of prolonged ketamine use, including serious damage to the bladder, intense stomach cramps, and a struggle to stop using. In 1994, the researcher D. M. Turner wrote, “A fairly large percentage of those who try Ketamine will consume it non-stop until their supply is exhausted.” John Lilly, a neurophysiologist and psychedelic researcher who once used LSD to investigate dolphin communication, famously abused ketamine until he believed that he was contacted by an extraterrestrial entity who removed his penis. “For anyone who is using a very significant amount of ketamine on a regular basis over a long period of time, I think there’s good reason to suspect that they could have different kinds of cognitive and psychological forms of impairment,” David Mathai, a psychiatrist who offers ketamine therapy to some of his patients in Miami, told me.

Such theoretical impairments would be concerning in any context—but especially when contemplating a person who has achieved enough power to be unironically described as co-president of the United States. To be sure, ketamine may have nothing to do with his actions. He may be simply acting in accordance with his far-right political ideology. Musk also famously brags that he rarely sleeps—never a good strategy for measured speech or actions.

[Read: Elon Musk is president]

Musk hasn’t publicly acknowledged the risks of ketamine, despite having once claimed that SSRIs, the drugs commonly used to treat depression, “zombify” patients. Other highly visible ketamine promoters tend to do the same. Dylan Beynon, the founder of the ketamine telemedicine company Mindbloom, recently wrote on X, “Ketamine is not physically addictive. SSRIs are very difficult to wean off of for many.” (Beynon’s wife, the former head of engineering at Mindbloom, now works at DOGE.) Although ketamine doesn’t lead to the same kind of physical withdrawal symptoms as opioids or alcohol, Morgan, the University of Exeter professor, said its abuse potential is widely accepted, partly because people build a tolerance to the drug very quickly. In the United Kingdom, where health data are more centralized, more than 2,000 people sought treatment for ketamine addiction in 2023. More to the point, ketamine’s most dramatic risks depend on simply how much ketamine a person takes, and for how long.

Swaths of the tech world have long been drawn to Stoic philosophy, which encourages a detachment from that which is out of your control. Stoicism offers excellent coping strategies in the face of adversity—useful in an industry where most start-ups fail—but taken to extremes, it can also be a pathway to disengagement from the world and people around you. Ketamine, similarly, can afford its users space between themselves and overwhelming despair, which might help explain how it can treat depression, Mathai, the Miami psychiatrist, said. But there are consequences for leaning into that escape for too long.

Serena Kocourek dreaded the lullaby. She worked in a hospital, and every time a baby was born, staffers would play the same song over the loudspeaker. She was going through IVF, trying without success to conceive a baby. When the lullaby played, she told me, “I felt like I was two feet further away from finally being a mom.”

One thing helped: messaging her IVF coach, Kristin Dillensnyder. She’d say, “They just played the lullaby thing and I didn’t cry.” “Win,” Dillensnyder would respond. Or she’d remind Kocourek, “Just because somebody else is having a baby doesn’t mean that you can’t have a baby.” Dillensnyder also offered advice for staying hopeful during the grueling process of IVF: She suggested that Kocourek create a playlist of songs to listen to as she gave herself hormone injections. Kocourek liked that Dillensnyder had gone through IVF herself and would help her come up with responses to insensitive questions from family and friends about when she planned to get pregnant. Occasionally, in the middle of her day, she’d think, “I just need to step away. I just need to talk to Kristin real quick.”

IVF coaching may sound niche, but it’s far from the most specialized type of coaching on offer. These days, if a problem exists, there seems to be a coach for it. Having trouble focusing? An “executive function” coach might be right for you. Undecided about having kids? There’s a coach for that too. Too burned out to plan a “transformative” vacation? A travel coach can help you for $597 (a price that does not include the actual booking of the trip).

[Read: The teen-disengagement crisis]

Discovering all these types of coaches made me wonder: Whatever happened to asking people you know for advice? So I set out to try to understand why people hire coaches and what they get from the experience. Most of the coaching clients I spoke with asked to use only their first name because of the personal nature of the issues they sought help for. One woman, Sarah, sees a meditation coach for $350 a session, justifying it because she does not own “expensive purses or clothes.” Another woman, Liz, has, at various points, had a career coach, an executive coach, a doula (or birthing coach), a co-parenting coach, and two different accountability coaches who focus on diet and exercise. She recently added a Disney “concierge”—a coach for navigating the Magic Kingdom. Each one of her coaches costs at least a couple of hundred dollars a session. She told me that if she hasn’t done something important before and wants to do it right, she tends to hire a coach to help her. “Winging it is so not my style,” she said. “Why not go into it informed if you can?”

People have long sought advice for some of life’s biggest questions—marry that guy or don’t; take or don’t take that job. But over the past few decades, the options for living one’s best adult life have expanded so much that knowing the right or wrong way to do anything can be difficult. Today, many Americans can join a polyamorous triad, remain child-free by choice, launch a new career in their 30s, or dedicate themselves to running ultramarathons, all without ruffling any feathers within their community. “Identities are no longer given,” Michal Pagis, a lecturer of sociology and anthropology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, who has studied coaching, told me. “They are now achieved … It’s a project.” A number of people seem to crave sounding boards for all of this identity making, especially if they want to do it “correctly”—i.e., in a way that is still impressive, if unconventional. Erik Baker, a Harvard historian and the author of Make Your Own Job, told me that coaching is the latest example of “the therapeutic culture that emerged in the United States in the 20th century: a sense of needing to have some kind of expert to help optimize your performance.” Being “normal” is no longer enough, so people hire coaches to help them transcend normal.

In some ways, coaching stands in for the free, civic sources of support that over the past decade have been slowly fading away. People are less likely now to be members of the kinds of community groups or religious congregations where they might have previously sought help. In some circles, an idea has taken hold that asking strangers for advice without paying is gauche. Emailing someone to “pick their brain” has become a corporate misdemeanor. (“Set the precedent that you are not comfortable talking without a pre-booked and pre-paid official meeting,” goes some typical advice on how to respond to such an affront.)

People today also have fewer close friends than they used to, and they may be reluctant to rely on those friends for help. Overwhelmingly, the coaching clients I spoke with told me that they would not expect their (few, flawed, busy) friends to provide the same level of guidance that their coaches do. Friends and family members are biased. (“You never know if someone has your best interest in mind,” Liz told me.) A stranger who doesn’t know you seems more likely to be neutral. Friends may say clumsy or unsupportive things as they respond to your texts between meetings; a coach’s job is always to have the right mantra at hand.

[Read: Want to change your personality? Have a baby.]

In her book The Outsourced Self, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild writes that when it comes to advice, “anything you pay for is better.” A coach is like a super-friend—someone very smart and attentive who can help you make the best possible decision. Kiya Thompson, a travel coach, refers to her service “like a best friend pre-trip, during the trip, and … after the trip.” Dillensnyder, the IVF coach, told me that she sees herself as kind of like “a big sister”—one whose counsel is, presumably, better than your real sister’s. “Friends and family are really good,” Dillensnyder said. “However, they often give advice that is not helpful.” Another refrain I heard was that coaches allow you to be messy and depressed around them so that you can be bubbly and interesting around your friends. As another woman, Emily, put it to me about her weight-loss coach, “Your friends don’t want to listen to you talk about that all the time.”

But using coaching in this way undermines one important aspect of friendship: reciprocity. During a common type of friend hang, one person shares their problems for a while and the other person offers their best stab at some solutions. Then they switch. Pagis told me that debts—for example, owing someone a few minutes of uninhibited venting—“are important for social relations.” With coaching, however, “you are avoiding creating these debts.” If part of friendship is being there for each other, what becomes of the institution when you don’t have to be? When the well-heeled can afford to take their problems to a coach, friends risk becoming merely the people with whom we have pleasant catch-up brunches before we rush home to pay by the hour to give the real dirt to a stranger.

Yet the advice a coach dispenses may not be as reliable as clients hope. Coaches, who in many cases bear no qualifications other than personal experience, do not need to adhere to official standards. Some coaches might be only dabbling in the practice: A 2023 report by the International Coaching Federation, a credentialing body for some types of coaches, noted that the average coach spent just 12 hours a week coaching.

The casualness of these arrangements, and the lack of standards, can lead to disappointment—and little recourse—when people pay hundreds for coaching that turns out to be lackluster. One woman I spoke with, Maria, told me she was scrolling through TikTok when she came across a bariatric-surgery coach who promised to help her adjust to the dramatically different eating habits the procedure requires. “I booked a call with her,” Maria said, “and she sold me within, like, 20 minutes.” For about $500 a month, the coach would check Maria’s MyFitnessPal food log and text her an emoji assessing her performance—a fire emoji if she was doing well, for example. But during their one-on-one sessions, Maria felt like she was talking with the coach’s TikTok character rather than with a devoted adviser. “She has, like, five things that she repeats over and over again,” Maria said. She quit after two months.

Coaching can also be a problem if it replaces therapy, which, unlike coaching, is regulated and typically covered by insurance. Most coaches take pains to point out that they are not therapists, and most of the coaching clients I interviewed either have or have had therapists. Still, about 25 to 50 percent of coaching clients have a diagnosable mental-health condition, and they aren’t getting any formal mental-health treatment from their coaches, Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatry professor at Stanford, told me. “In my clinical work, it’s a common thing that comes up,” he said. “We recommend a therapist to someone, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, but I’m seeing a life coach.’”

[Read: The isolation of intensive parenting]

I do have a therapist. Even so, the more I dug into coaching, the more I wanted to understand what people saw in it. I soon had the opportunity to find out. In the course of my reporting, I spoke with Nell Wulfhart, a “decision coach” who, for $247 per hour-long session, helps her clients make one big life decision—as varied as whether to have kids or what color to paint their kitchen.

Wulfhart told me that she’s always had a “fixer brain,” and that often, she’s simply listening for what the person really wants to do anyway. “It just helps to have a totally neutral third party to check your work,” she said, “and make sure, ‘Yes, this is not a ludicrous risk you’re taking.’” What qualifications does she have? “Nothing,” she said. “People have said to me, ‘You’re so wise.’ And I was like, I think they mean you’re in your mid-40s.”

I’m allergic to people who embellish their credentials, so I liked that she admitted her lack thereof. I also liked that she has worked as a journalist, a profession I associate with straight shooters. And as it happened, I did have a decision I was struggling with. So I decided to book a session with her.

I told Wulfhart that I couldn’t decide whether to move to Florida or to Texas. She began asking me questions about what was important to me, what else I’d considered, and what each place had to offer me. Unlike my therapist, she didn’t ask about my childhood—in fact, she didn’t seem much interested in my backstory, my neuroses, or any of my usual patterns of behavior. “Why you feel this way is not that relevant,” she said. “The only thing that matters is that you do feel this way.”

It did feel like talking with a super-friend—someone who was smart and likable, but also disinterested and ruthlessly rational. After about 30 minutes, she told me what I should do. It was what I’d wanted to do anyway.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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.

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.

On the same day that the Access Hollywood tape landed, a month before Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton at the ballot box, the Nigerian American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie drew a surprising gender-related battle line of her own. In an October 2016 interview, she expressed mild displeasure that on Beyoncé’s track “Flawless,” the pop star had sampled (with permission) from Adichie’s by-then-famous 2013 TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists.” “Her type of feminism is not mine,” she observed, politely calling Beyoncé out for giving “quite a lot of space to the necessity of men.” Hastening to say that she thinks “men are lovely,” Adichie envisioned a recalibration: “We women should spend about 20 percent of our time on men … but otherwise we should also be talking about our own stuff.”

Dream Count, her fourth novel, is about how difficult this task actually is. Adichie is interested in women who, in certain ways, shrug off the patriarchal straitjacket of decades past, yet who also can’t quite manage to focus on their “own stuff,” letting men monopolize more than their allotted 20 percent. This is provocative cultural terrain—rife with historical and social and psychological (and biological) tensions—and the sort of ground that Adichie has nimbly traversed in her fiction before. In Dream Count’s predecessor, Americanah, she casts a satiric eye on race in America. Her well-heeled Nigerian protagonist Ifemelu navigates postcollege life—and sex and romance—in the United States, recording her reflections in a blog titled Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. Like her creator, Ifemelu has an outsider’s knack for spotlighting the cruelties, vacuous niceties, and comic absurdities of race relations in a country caught between the past evils of slavery and Jim Crow, and the aspirational multiculturalism of a semi-enlightened 21st century.

But Adichie also provided Ifemelu a comparatively sanguine view of relations between the sexes. And it is precisely this optimism that has been scrubbed, more than a decade later, from Dream Count, an unusually dispiriting novel. Americanah’s incisive critique of race was set within a rom-com arc: Ifemelu ends up back home and in the arms of her high-school-and-college boyfriend, Obinze, whose own story of a brutal immigrant sojourn in Britain shares center stage in the novel. This time, Adichie’s protagonists are all women: three globally mobile Nigerians from the kind of upper-class backgrounds familiar from her earlier fiction, and one Guinean immigrant who has taken refuge in America, following her romantic partner.

Each is accorded her own section of Dream Count, yet their stories intersect and share a basic trajectory and bleak tone: Men enter their lives like meteors entering the atmosphere, leaving a trail of heat and light but always burning out. Whose fault this is—the women’s, the men’s—is for the most part unclear. Adichie’s protagonists are independent and deeply ambivalent, not so much aloof as detached, both from their love interests and from their own desires and aspirations. In a novel stuffed with reminiscences of past relationships, regret is startlingly absent. If Adichie the feminist-manifesto writer is comfortable dispensing advice in the form of shoulds and should nots, Adichie the novelist seems allergic to such judgments.

Dream Count unfolds during the peak of the COVID era, yet reaches back to a time before Zoom screens and hoarded toilet paper. Chiamaka, a struggling travel writer quarantined in a suburban Maryland house purchased for her by her father, is the hub of the group, and her first-person narration opens and closes the novel. At 44, she’s been based in the U.S. for years but has resisted putting down roots, and she spends much of the novel reflecting on her history with men. She calls her self-imposed audit her “dream count,” which she uses as a softer-edged synonym for “body count.” This effort to reckon with her flings and love affairs speaks to the novel’s broader project: a bricolage of confusion, set against a backdrop of 21st-century feminism, with its unsatisfying forms of liberation, and traditionalist African patriarchy, with its equally unsatisfying constraints and at-times-violent indignities.

[Chimamanda Adichie: How I became Black in America]

Adichie quite deliberately presents us with protagonists who have trouble sticking to that one-fifth time limit of thinking about men. Her quartet of characters is a lineup of familiar female archetypes. Chia is a romantic intent on true love, an adventurer forever seeking a soulmate. Her best friend, Zikora, is a striver eager to have it all—a lucrative legal career and a husband and children. Omelogor is Chia’s cousin, recently back home after a leave from her Nigerian finance job to study pornography in American graduate school; she’s an acerbic pragmatist who avoids serious relationships. And Kadiatou, Chia’s hired help, has been lured from Guinea by dreams and is shocked by permissive American mores. Motherhood, real and hypothetical, is front of mind for all, and expectations veer off course for each of them.

In Omelogor, Adichie seems to be reaching for another satirical guide on the model of Ifemelu, Americanah’s race-blogger protagonist: a participant observer of fraying gender dynamics, emotionally preoccupied with the opposite sex while also bemusedly untethered. For several years, Omelogor has been running a popular website, For Men Only, which takes off during the pandemic. There she dispenses anonymous but clearly female counsel about gender, sex, and romance, having decided that men need more than the pornographic tutelage they’re steeped in. She signs her missives with a lightly pandering flourish: “Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.”

But Omelogor is angry too (sometimes a symptom of depression, Chia notes). She’s well aware that despite the persona she creates for her blog, she is no expert on serious relationships, and she suspects that she may be too cynical and disillusioned to be on anyone’s side in the gender war, including her own. She cops to having returned from her American sojourn with “a jaundiced spirit and a mood like midnight.” Instead of enjoying the restorative break she’d hoped for (money laundering loomed large in her African banking work), she felt lonely and alienated, not least by “perfect righteous American liberals,” insistent that “you board their ideological train.”

Omelogor, who bridles at pigeonholing and being pigeonholed, is a study in contradictions. Online, she urges her readers to shower their partners with verbal affection—because “love needs tending”—while out in the world, she breaks off relationships at the first sign of a possible “emotion happening,” her term for falling in love. Dream Count is peppered with excerpts of For Men Only’s invariably banal advice (there are many ways to be a man, etc.), blog entries so anemic that you’re left wondering whether that’s the point: Nobody’s heart is really in communicating. Omelogor herself is skeptical that she can commit to truly opening up to others, in either her public or private life. When she was young, she chose aloofness because she “wanted to be free.” Now her general self-diagnosis is “disappointed disenchantment, or disenchanted disappointment.”

That spirit pervades the COVID-haunted novel, as Adichie undercuts conventional assumptions about gender roles and attitudes. Tucked into Chia’s romantic quest for a “merging of souls” is a self-reliant ruthlessness more often associated with the male script. “I did want a husband and child, but not under any circumstances,” she reflects early on. “I didn’t want to be single, but being single was not intolerable.” In the relationship that stands out most in her memory—with a kindhearted Nigerian named Chuka, eager to marry and have kids, and great in bed—he’s the one left protesting that “I told you my intentions from day one.” She cannot come up with a reason for torpedoing it that will satisfy either him or herself, and instead admits simply: “I did not want what I wanted to want.”

[Read: America’s blindness to the racism all around us]

Adichie counterposes a more recognizable script for Zikora, who for all her confidence at work lacks Chia and Omelogor’s bold assurance with men. She’s endured a few insufferable boyfriends—classic narcissists—when she finds Kwame, a fellow lawyer with a background very different from hers: Reared in northern Virginia, he’s been pushed hard by his Ghanaian father and African American mother, “his dreams already dreamed for him.” But she’s thrilled to discover what feels like true intimacy: “So this was happiness, to live in the first person plural.” When he abruptly disappears at the news that she’s pregnant, she is stunned and can’t stop wondering how she could have made herself any clearer.

In some sense, Dream Count is a novel about inscrutable intentions: our own and those of other people. Why does Chia leave Chuka? Why does Omelogor cut and run at the first tremor of an “emotion happening”? Why does Zikora’s seemingly forthright boyfriend abandon her? Even as Adichie scatters hints (was Kwame more of a cowed son than Zikora grasped?), she is also explicit, in a closing “author’s note,” that sometimes the goal of a successful novel is to leave its tangles tangled. “To attempt to fictionally humanize a person,” she writes, means confronting

how we let ourselves and others down, how we emerge or don’t from our failings, how we are petty, how we try to overcome and strive to improve, how we seethe in our self-pity, how we fail, how we hold on tenaciously to hope.

Adichie, with her focus squarely on women, doesn’t hold back in Dream Count from revealing how her protagonists, in their romantic relationships, can be as deluded about themselves and their desires as they are about men and theirs. “Each day with Chuka, I encountered his otherness,” Chia reflects in a patronizing tone as she cites examples of his shirt-tucked-in, methodical ways: “sturdy, reassuring, uncreative.” However, Adichie also resists turning these uncoupled couplings into cautionary tales: Years later, Chia feels a belated tug of uncertainty about her decision to leave Chuka, but the reader is given no clear sense that she made the wrong choice, only that she made a sad one.

[Chimamanda Adichie: Nigeria’s hollow democracy]

Nor do conflicting African and American values get resolved, melded into a best-of-both-worlds fusion of beliefs. Zikora, overwhelmed with shame at being a single mother, is jolted into a new perspective on her own mother, who comes to help with her baby: She learns that a long-ago family rupture when her father took a second wife—an Igbo tradition when the first hasn’t produced a male heir—is more complicated than she had guessed. Kadiatou is a victim of female genital mutilation, and yet she’s taken aback when her Guinean boyfriend describes the practice as “barbaric.” She initially balks at his suggestion that she seek asylum on the pretext of sparing her own daughter from the cutting.

Asylum is not what Kadiatou, who is the most burdened of the four yet who also unexpectedly emerges feeling the most liberated, finds in America. She gets caught up in a justice system clearly not designed to serve people like her after she is assaulted by a rich and powerful man in the hotel where she has found work as a maid. The scene is harrowing but short, the procedural aftermath briefly hope-instilling. The police are called, the evidence gathered, the perpetrator identified. And then Kadiatou’s ordeal goes on and on: grueling interrogations that make her feel guilty and trip her up, while the monstrous VIP uses his fame and fortune to delay and delay.

The author’s note reveals that Kadiatou’s story is based on the real-life case of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant and hotel maid who accused the head of the International Monetary Fund of assault in 2011. The case, Adichie reminds readers, was dismissed—not because prosecutors had proved the accused was innocent, but because the defendant’s lawyers felt that she had lied too much about her past for a jury to trust her. In the novel, Adichie vividly imagines the lawyerly grilling, the media hounding, the experience of being ambushed and isolated. And then, taking artistic license, she dispenses a fate that departs from Diallo’s; Kadiatou is granted a resolution that brings her huge relief, even if it undercuts the convictions of her far wealthier Nigerian friends.

In We Should All Be Feminists, the book that grew out of the TED Talk, Adichie observed that women are habituated to give up “a job, a career goal, a dream”; ultimately, as she put it, “compromise is what a woman is more likely to do.” In the end, none of Dream Count’s protagonists compromises, yet Adichie seems uninterested in turning this refusal into a feminist triumph. Their dreams don’t pan out. Her characters experience no cathartic epiphany that they are better off without men after all. Nor do they truly second-guess their life choices: We get no sense that they would be better off with men either.

We aren’t treated to a valorization of the nuclear family, or an African spin on resurgent tradwifery, or a paeon to the miracles of motherhood. “What am I supposed to do with him?” Zikora wonders about her baby. “There would be more days and weeks of this, not knowing what to do with a squalling person whose needs she feared she could never know.” Omelogor doesn’t hesitate to take a closing swipe at the special proclivity to pontificate that she encountered everywhere in the U.S.: “They want your life to match their soft half-baked theories,” she once ranted in a For Men Only entry that she deleted before posting but shares with us. She claims to detest the “provincial certainty” of Americans who are overconfident in their quick cultural judgments, yet Dream Count makes clear that the cosmopolitan uncertainty of the wealthy African abroad is not much better.

Eight years ago, President Donald Trump got generally good reviews for his first speech to a joint session of Congress. Back then, it would have seemed both incredible and churlish to suggest that the man who delivered that relatively conciliatory, relatively presidential speech, might within four years try to overturn an election by violence.

But that’s what happened. And that attempt remains the single most important fact about Trump’s first term as president.

Eight years later, not even Trump’s staunchest partisans would describe his 2025 address as conciliatory. He mocked, he insulted, he called names, he appealed only to a MAGA base that does not add up to even half the electorate. But in 2025, the big question hanging over the nation’s head is not one about oratory, but about democracy. In 2017, Americans did not yet know how far Trump might go. Now they do. They only flinch from believing it.

Second-term Trump has opened his administration with a round of actions likely to prove drastically unpopular: tariffs that raise prices, budget cuts that will reduce services for veterans, at national parks, for anyone who depends on weather services. Prices are rising, measles is spreading, airplanes are falling out of the sky. His effective co-president and chief policymaker, Elon Musk, is widely distrusted and disliked. Trump’s repeated claims of massive fraud within Social Security strongly suggest that he’s got something big and radical in mind for the most popular program in American life.

Trump knows he’s steering into political trouble. He alluded to “disruptions” ahead because of his policies. His party holds the narrowest of margins in the House of Representatives. Yet he’s governing without the slightest concession to majority opinion, even to a majority sense of decency. He talks of the Democrats as remorseless enemies. At the same time, he is making political choices that would normally seem certain to deliver those enemies a big majority in the House after the midterms. Is he delusional? Crazy reckless? Or is this a signal that the man who tried to overturn the election of 2020 has some scheme in mind for the 2026 midterms?

Maybe Trump has turned over a new leaf. There was, however, a tell in this speech that Trump’s attitude to other people’s consent remains as contemptuous as ever.

In his joint-session speech, Trump returned to his fancy of annexing Greenland to the United States. He read aloud from the teleprompter some perfunctory language about respecting Greenlanders’ right to decide their own future. But when he came to the end of the section, he apparently ad-libbed a thought of his own: “We’ll get it one way or another.” That’s not the language of a man who has learned his lesson about respecting democratic choice.

In the second term, unlike the first, Trump has swiftly and methodically installed do-anything loyalists at the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense. Given Trump’s 2021 record, that seems something to worry about now.

Had Trump lost the 2024 election, he would right now be facing sentencing for his criminal convictions in the state of New York. He would be facing criminal and civil trials in other states. He was rescued from legal troubles by political success. Now Trump’s acting in ways that seem certain to throw power away in the next round of elections–if those elections proceed as usual. If they are free and fair. If every legal voter is allowed to participate. If every legal vote is counted, whether cast in person or by mail. Those did not used to be hazardous “if’s.” But they may be hazardous in 2026.

Trump is keenly alert to his legal danger, deeply committed to keeping power by any means necessary. He also seems to be sleep-walking toward a stinging political loss that will expose him to all kinds of personal risk. He’s not trying to expand his coalition, to win any votes he does not already have. So what is his plan to preserve his immunity and his impunity? Trump’s behavior in 2021 showed that there were no limits to what he would do to keep power. What will 2026 show?