Photographs by Kent Nishimura

On the first Sunday of spring, surrounded by row houses and magnolia trees, I came to a horrifying realization: My mom was right. I had been flipped off at least 17 times, called a “motherfucker” (in both English and Spanish), and a “fucking dork.” A woman in a blue sweater stared at me, sighed, and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” All of this because I was driving a Tesla Cybertruck.

I had told my mom about my plan to rent this thing and drive it around Washington, D.C., for a day—a journalistic experiment to understand what it’s like behind the wheel of America’s most hated car. “Wow. Be careful,” she texted back right away. Both of us had read the stories of Cybertrucks possibly being set on fire, bombed with a Molotov cocktail, and vandalized in every way imaginable. People have targeted the car—and Tesla as a whole—to protest Elon Musk’s role in Donald Trump’s administration. But out of sheer masochism, or stupidity, I still went ahead and spent a day driving one. As I idled with the windows down on a street in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, a woman glared at me from her front porch: “Fuck you, and this truck, and Elon,” she yelled. “You drive a Nazi truck.” She slammed her front door shut, and then opened it again. “I hope someone blows your shit up.”

Earlier that day, my first stop was the heart of the resistance: the Dupont Circle farmers’ market. The people there wanted to see the organic asparagus and lion’s-mane mushrooms. What they did not want to see was a stainless-steel, supposedly bulletproof Cybertruck. Every red light created new moments for mockery. “You fucker!” yelled a bicyclist as he pedaled past me on P Street. The diners eating brunch on the sidewalk nearby laughed and cheered. Then came the next stoplight: A woman eating outside at Le Pain Quotidien gave me the middle finger for a solid 20 seconds, all without interrupting her conversation.

The anger is understandable. This is, after all, the radioactive center of DOGE’s blast radius. On the same block where I was yelled at in Mount Pleasant, I spotted a hand-drawn sign in one window: CFPB, it read, inside of a giant red heart; and at one point, I tailed behind a black Tesla Model Y with the bumper sticker Anti Elon Tesla Club. But the Cybertruck stands out on America’s roads about as much as LeBron James in a kindergarten classroom. No matter where you live, the car is a nearly 7,000-pound Rorschach test: It has become the defining symbol of the second Trump term. If you hate Trump and Musk, it is a giant MAGA hat, Pepe the Frog on wheels, or the “Swasticar.” If you love Trump and Musk, the Cybertruck is, well, a giant MAGA hat. On Monday, FBI Director Kash Patel called Tesla vandalism “domestic terrorism” as he announced a Tesla task force to investigate such acts. Alex Jones has trolled Tesla protesters from the back of his own Cybertruck, bullhorn in hand. Kid Rock has a Cybertruck with a custom Dukes of Hazzard paint job; the far-right podcaster Tim Pool owns one and says he’ll buy another “because it will own the libs”; and Kanye West has three. Trump’s 17-year-old granddaughter was gifted one by the president, and another by Musk.

When I parked the car for lunch in Takoma Park, where I support federal workers signs were staked into the grass, I heard two women whispering at a nearby table: “Should we egg it?” (In this economy?) Over and over again, as pedestrians and drivers alike glared at me, I had to remind myself: It’s just a car. And it’s kind of a cool one, too. It can apparently outrace a Porsche 911, while simultaneously towing a Porsche 911. Or it can power a house for up to three days. My day in the Cybertruck wasn’t extremely hard-core, but the eight onboard cameras made city driving more bearable than I was expecting. Regardless of what you do with it, the car is emissions-free. “The underlying technology of the Cybertruck is amazing,” Loren McDonald, an EV analyst at the firm Paren, told me. And the exterior undersells just how ridiculous it is. Just before I returned the car on Monday morning, I took an impromptu Zoom meeting from the giant in-car touchscreen. It has a single windshield wiper that is so long—more than five feet—that Musk has compared it to a “katana.”

After 10 hours of near-constant hazing, I navigated to an underground parking lot to recharge the truck (and my battered self-image). Someone had placed a sticker just beneath the Tesla logo: Elon Musk is a parasite, it read. Still, even in D.C., I got a fair number of thumbs-ups as my Cybertruck zoomed by in the areas most frequented by tourists. Near the National Mall, a man in a red bandana and shorts yelled, “That’s awesome!” and cheered. Perhaps it was an attempt at MAGA solidarity, or maybe not. Lots of people just seemed to think it looked cool. One guy in his 20s, wearing a make money, not friends hoodie, frantically took out his phone to film me making a left turn. Even in the bluest neighborhoods of D.C.—near a restaurant named Marx Cafe and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg mural—kids could not get enough of the Cybertruck. One girl in Takoma Park saw me and started screaming, “Cybertruck! Cybertruck!” Later, a boy spotted the car and frantically rode his scooter to try and get a better look. Just before sunset, I was struggling to change lanes near George Washington University when two teens stopped to stare at me from the sidewalk. I was anxiously checking directions on my phone and clearly had no idea where to go. “Must be an Uber,” one said to the other.

[Read: Admit it, the Cybertruck is awesome]

By 9 p.m., I’d had enough. I valeted at my hotel, with its “Tibetan Bowl Sound Healing” classes, and got a nervous look from the attendant. I can’t blame anyone who sees the car as the stainless-steel embodiment of the modern right. This week, a county sheriff in Ohio stood in front of a green Cybertruck and derided Tesla vandals as “little fat people that live in their mom’s basement and wear their mom’s pajamas.” But it is also a tragedy that the Cybertruck has become the most partisan car in existence—more so than the Prius, or the Hummer, or any kind of Subaru. The Cybertruck, an instantly meme-able and very weird car, could have helped America fall in love with EVs. Instead, it is doing the opposite. The revolt against Tesla is not slowing down, and in some cases people are outright getting rid of their cars. Is it really a win that Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona exchanged his all-electric Tesla sedan for a gas-guzzling SUV?

Then again, Republicans aren’t buying the Cybertruck en masse. It is too expensive and too weird. Buying any Tesla might be a way to own the libs, but the right has proved maddeningly resistant to going electric. “Your average MAGA Trump supporter isn’t going to go buy a Tesla,” McDonald, the EV analyst, said. Before the car shipped in November 2023, Musk predicted that Tesla would sell 250,000 a year. He hasn’t even sold one-fifth of that in total—and sales are falling. (Neither Tesla or Musk responded to a request for comment.)

Musk made a lot of other promises that haven’t really panned out: The Cybertruck was supposed to debut at less than $40,000. The cheapest model currently available is double that. The vehicle, Musk said, would be “really tough, not fake tough.” Instead, its stainless-steel side panels have fallen off because Tesla used the wrong glue—and that was just the most recent of the car’s eight recalls. The Cybertruck was supposed to be able to haul “near infinite mass” and “serve briefly as a boat.” Just this month alone, one Cybertruck’s rear end snapped off in a test of its towing power, and another sank off the coast of Los Angeles while trying to offload a Jet Ski from the bed.

The Cybertruck, in that sense, is a perfect metaphor for Musk himself. The world’s richest man has a bad habit of promising one thing and delivering another. X was supposed to be the “everything app”; now it is a cesspool of white supremacy. DOGE was billed as an attempt to make the government more nimble and tech-savvy. Instead, the cuts have resulted in seniors struggling to get their Social Security checks. So far, Musk has only continued to get richer and more powerful while the rest of us have had to deal with the wreckage. Let that sink in, as he likes to say. The disaster of the Cybertruck is not that it’s ugly, or unconventional, or absurdly pointy. It’s that, for most people, the car just isn’t worth driving.

Democracies in Europe and their detractors in Washington have radically different understandings of why the continent depends on American military protection. Donald Trump and his aides constantly talk as if crafty Europeans have cynically manipulated the United States for decades, making Americans pay for their defense while Germany, France, and the like enjoy their lavish welfare states, early retirements, and carefree lives. “I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Vice President J. D. Vance in the Trump-administration Signal chat that accidentally included The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. “It’s PATHETIC,” Hegseth added.

European leaders, meanwhile, believe their countries have been dutifully following America’s direction on geopolitical matters for 80 years. Hundreds of millions of Europeans have completely subordinated their fate to the desires of the United States, which looks after them, protects them, and even thinks for them. Most Europeans now alive have known no other security arrangements. Contemplating the disappearance of NATO, the U.S.-led military alliance, is so unnerving for many in Europe, including many of the continent’s political leaders, that they seem incapable of thinking for themselves.

[Read: Here are the attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared on Signal]

But they need to confront that possibility soon. In practice, NATO may already be doomed. The U.S. commitment to European defense was grounded not in the long-ago NATO treaty, but in a political consensus among Americans that a free and democratic Europe was in their interest. Presidents of both parties defended the continent in the Cold War and then oversaw NATO’s subsequent expansion. This policy was a brilliant success. Freedom and democracy spread across the old Eastern bloc, leading to growing prosperity.

Today, Trump and his movement—which dominates the Republican Party—declare that they despise liberal Europe. In the now-infamous Signal chat, when Vance appeared to endorse a delay in bombing Yemen, he implied that Europe would benefit disproportionately from an American attack on the Houthis. The vice president visited Greenland yesterday as part of an American effort to wrest the island from Denmark, a faithful NATO member.

For reasons that are difficult to comprehend as a matter of geopolitical strategy, Trump is moving the United States closer and closer to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, an economically weak but militarily expansionist state that is committed to ending the period of American global dominance. In part because Ukraine, an emerging democracy, sought integration into a U.S.-led security framework in democratic Europe, Russia has attacked that country’s very existence and called for the Ukrainians to surrender much of their internationally recognized territory. Putin had previously invaded one other neighbor—Georgia—and has threatened many others, including the Baltic States, Poland, and Finland. Russia has also worked hard to promote extremist parties across Europe and to subvert democracy in NATO states such as Hungary and Slovakia.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: A wider war has already started in Europe]

After decades of protecting Europe against Russia, the U.S. has abruptly lurched away from its past commitments. The Trump administration has deprived Ukraine of weapons and intelligence at crucial moments. Trump is helping Russia try to escape from the harsh economic sanctions that have been placed on its economy since the invasion of Ukraine. At this moment, the U.S. could very well be classified as a noncombatant ally of Russia, much like it was a noncombatant ally of Great Britain before Pearl Harbor. While the U.S. was not yet fighting alongside Britain, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted the British to defeat Nazi Germany, so he choreographed support for them even without formally siding with them. Trump is offering Russia similar help against Ukraine.

Under these circumstances, a key question is whether European leaders can now emotionally break away from the United States. They have outsourced their strategic thinking, and arguably sacrificed their self-respect, for so long that they no longer know how to defend their continent by themselves. As Trump has moved progressively closer and closer to Putin, European leaders continued to think they could build bridges with Trump’s White House and maintain the Atlantic alliance for a few more years.

Extreme optimists might hold out hope that, however dangerous Trump is, he will be in office only for a few years, and NATO’s unity can be restored once he leaves. But how likely is the post-Trump Republican Party to return to an Atlanticist outlook? Comments by Vance, perhaps the likeliest of Trump’s political heirs, suggest that such a reversion is a long way off. And even if the Democrats regain power, they cannot simply undo the damage Trump has caused. Europe needs to start facing the future, not harkening back to a probably lost past.  

A few weeks ago, Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, spoke of the need for Europe to be more independent from the United States. French President Emmanuel Macron struck a similar note last year when he discussed sending European forces to Ukraine without American help if need be.

But Europe will need to go beyond rhetoric. Europe has underfunded its own defense for more than 30 years. Military budgets on the continent started collapsing when the Cold War ended. Governments on the continent need to spend more on defense—in some cases twice as much. They must also use their money far more efficiently. European states don’t all need to make their own tanks or other armored personnel carriers. Rationalizing and consolidating production of arms and supplies will be a key long-term survival skill.

[Read: The truth about Trump’s Greenland campaign]

In the short term, Europe must also do everything it can to help Ukraine survive—either by providing the supplies that the country needs to continue fighting or by offering real security guarantees in the event of a truce. The more NATO withers and the closer the U.S. draws to Russia, the more Europe needs a strong, democratic Ukraine to help protect its eastern flank.

Europe’s devotion to the United States has left the continent, in a word, pathetic. It now has an opportunity to rebuild its strategic thinking and capabilities, and to learn again how to protect its own freedom and liberties. As Trump flirts dangerously with authoritarianism, Europe needs to save itself. If it can, Europe might also someday play a role in saving the United States.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

Trying to get better at relaxing might sound silly. Isn’t the point of relaxing to not work at all? But as Arthur C. Brooks points out in a recent article, “doing leisure well will generate the sort of growth in our well-being that work cannot provide.” In order to get to that place of growth, “we must treat it with every bit as much seriousness as we do our careers,” he argues. Part of that process is redefining what rest and relaxation look like. When you hear the word rest, you might think of idleness, or just sleep. But experts on rest (yes, they exist) have highlighted the importance of more active types of relaxation, too, such as exercise or pursuing hobbies. Today’s newsletter explores how to rest.

On Rest and Leisure

You Can Do Leisure Better, Seriously

By Arthur C. Brooks

If you think of personal time only as “not work,” you could be missing out on truly enriching experiences.

Read the article.

Aristotle’s 10 Rules for a Good Life

By Arthur C. Brooks

An ancient Greek recipe for happiness

Read the article.

What Is Rest, Anyway?

By Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost

There’s a difference between leisure and laziness.

Listen.

Still Curious?

How to have your most fulfilling vacation ever: Turning your leisure into learning offers the happiest holiday experience of all, Arthur C. Brooks wrote in 2023. The free-time paradox in America: The rich were meant to have the most leisure time. The working poor were meant to have the least. The opposite is happening, Derek Thompson wrote in 2016. Why?

Other Diversions

The drink Americans can’t quit Susan Sontag’s vision Winners of the 2025 World Press Photo Contest

The White House called the service, which has existed since 1942, 'The Voice of Radical America' and said Trump’s order would 'ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.'

On Tuesday evening, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Fulbright scholar researching children’s digital-media consumption at Tufts University, was taken into ICE custody. Ozturk was handcuffed and forced into a vehicle while on her way to dinner after fasting for Ramadan. In a video, she asks, “Can I call the police?” only to be told, “We are the police.”

Why was Rumeysa Ozturk seized like this? The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization.” But it provided no further details, much less concrete evidence. Asked about her detention, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, “If you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it.” In the absence of actual charges, Ozturk’s purported crime appears to be an op-ed she co-wrote in March 2024. The article called on Tufts to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” A prominent pro-Israel website featuring Ozturk’s photo later provided a link to that article as evidence of her “anti-Israeli activism.”

As Americans who follow Turkish politics closely, we have spent the past two decades decrying the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey. We have pointed to repeated crackdowns on free speech, including the regular use of security forces to arrest and intimidate students. So we watched with particular horror as our own government sent masked agents to arrest a Turkish student because of her political opinions.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Trump is deporting ‘them’ in ways that threaten us]

To anyone who has watched Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in action, all of this was far too familiar. For years the Turkish government has used “support for terrorism” as a sweeping charge to justify jailing its political enemies. Crucially, this support need not involve any action or association with an actual terrorist group. More often than not, it simply involves expressing an opinion critical of Erdoğan or his government.

What made this approach so effective was that Erdoğan usually focused on marginalized or unpopular groups. Because much of the public was hostile to these groups, mainstream politicians played along. Now, after a decade, Erdoğan has been emboldened to jail his main political rival and presidential contender on the same spurious charges. Turkish citizens have rallied in protest—but it may be too late.

Pro-Kurdish journalists and activists have long been a main target of Erdoğan’s terrorism charges. For decades, the PKK, designated a terrorist group by both the U.S. and Turkey, waged a brutal insurgency against the Turkish state. The widespread hatred this conflict generated in Turkey made it easy for Erdoğan to brand anyone who sympathizes with the Kurdish cause as a terrorist. This then helped him jail individuals who called attention to civilian casualties or who protested for peace.

Kurdish politicians faced a similar fate. The former Kurdish presidential candidate and party co-leader Selahattin Demirtaş has been jailed since 2016. More than 150 Kurdish mayors have been removed during this same period. The decades of stigmatization that Kurds have experienced as an ethnic minority help explain how the government gets away with repressing them. On top of this, pro-government media outlets depict oppositional Kurds as affiliated with the PKK whether or not they actually have ties to the group.

Individuals affiliated with, or accused of being affiliated with, the Fetullah Gulen religious movement have been targeted in the same way. In 2016, some of Gulen’s followers participated in a coup against the Turkish government, generating an angry backlash among Turkish citizens. Following this, Erdogan arrested not only anyone plausibly connected to the coup but also anyone he saw fit to charge with being connected, plausibly or not, with the entire Gulen movement. People who had attended the wrong high school, put money in the wrong bank, or gone to the wrong Quran-reading course were jailed as members of the “Fethullah Gulen Terror Organization.” The government used the chance to target its political enemies. In the case of one of our colleagues, the evidence presented for his Gulenist ties was a decorative bell with the word Pennsylvania on it—a supposedly clear reference to the state in which Gulen lived.

[Henri J. Barkey: Erdoğan’s war on truth]

Then, last week, Erdoğan arrested Ekrem İmamoğlu, the popular mayor of Istanbul. İmamoğlu was reelected by a wide margin last year, and was days away from a primary election that would anoint him the presidential challenger to Erdoğan. But after numerous failed moves to disqualify him from politics, the police detained İmamoğlu on corruption and terrorism charges. He remains in jail, while his supporters are out on the street protesting this blatant subversion of democracy. Not surprisingly, Erdoğan has accused them, and their lawyers, of being terrorists as well.

The Trump administration, like Erdoğan’s government, has started its consolidation of power by going after minorities with dissenting opinions. Like Kurds or Gulenists in Turkey, Muslim and nonwhite students without citizenship make for easy targets in America. Before Ozturk, ICE targeted Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil and Yunseo Chung in New York. The only evidence presented against them was their role in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. For too many American commentators and politicians, that was reason enough. And, in the absence of firm political and popular pushback, the number of students suffering similar treatment is growing. The University of Alabama student and Iranian national Alireza Doroudi, seized the same day as Ozturk, remains in ICE custody without a clear explanation.

In arresting his political enemies, Erdoğan counted on the support of mainstream Turks who hated the PKK and Fetullah Gulen more than they cared about the rule of law. Likewise, in arresting student activists, Trump is counting on the support of mainstream Americans who hate Hamas more than they respect the Constitution. So far, Erdoğan seems to have calculated correctly, and he has reaped the benefits. If Americans remain silent in the face of mounting detentions, they will ensure that Trump does as well.

For decades, you couldn’t drive down a highway in America without seeing her: a tan, blond woman, scantily clad in orange and white, laid across a billboard, her legs as long as the semitrucks zooming past her. Keep Your Eyes on the Road, it might say. Or Come See Me at Hooters.

When I was 12, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, I went to Hooters for the first time. It was 2010 and the chain was only a few years away from its peak, when it would have more than 430 locations around the world. It was the kind of place my mom refused to enter, but my friends’ parents didn’t seem to feel the same compunction. When the waitress came to take our order, I remember being surprised that my friend’s dad knew her name. I stared down at my kids’ menu, feeling keenly that I should avoid eye contact with both the woman and the owl on her shirt.

It was obvious to me, even as a kid, that this restaurant wasn’t made for me. It was there to serve the appetites of America’s men. And now its day may be ending. Hooters of America is about $300 million in debt, and this winter began preparing for a possible bankruptcy filing. In 2024, it closed about 40 locations in the United States.

Hooters isn’t the only chain in trouble. The full-service casual chain restaurant as a category—what Sam Oches, the editor of Nation’s Restaurant News, calls the “generic American bar and grill”—is struggling. Last year, Red Lobster and TGI Friday’s filed for bankruptcy. These restaurants lost customers during the coronavirus pandemic and have struggled to attract young diners, Oches told me, who are “more adventurous” and want “an exciting experience so they can post it to their social accounts.” These chains could possibly restructure and turn their business around. But it’s not likely, experts in the restaurant industry I spoke with predicted. Especially not for Hooters.

Hooters was founded in 1983 by six Florida men with no restaurant experience who wanted to “open a place they couldn’t get kicked out of.” They were all in their 30s, except for the oldest, whom they lovingly referred to as Uncle Billy. The business was a joke—the friends expected it to fail, and incorporated the company on April Fools’ Day. Instead, the sexually explicit restaurant, with its Hooters Girls and boob-forward logo, became a hit.

[Derek Thompson: America’s loneliness epidemic comes for the restaurant]

For a long time, the “titillating naughtiness of Hooters” was a draw, Sarah Pedersen, an expert in women in the media at Robert Gordon University, in Scotland, told me. But lately, the brand has gotten dated. The menu is tired; people can get chicken wings anywhere. What made Hooters special was the Hooters Girl, and the Hooters Girl seems to be going out of style. “This idea of sort of smacking the ass of the woman wearing the tight shorts,” as Pederson put it, isn’t attractive to younger people who have grown up with the explicit sexuality of porn and OnlyFans and learned to be “very careful about consent.”

And yet even while Hooters falters, another chain of “breastaurants” is booming. Twin Peaks, which was founded in Texas in 2005, also uses sex to sell bar food: Draft beer comes in Dirty Blonde, Knotty Brunette, and Drop Dead Redhead. Uniforms at Twin Peaks are even skimpier than the ones at Hooters—on holidays and specific weekdays, waitresses wear only lingerie. And the company plans to open at least 10 new locations this year.

Which makes you wonder: Is Hooters too naughty, or not naughty enough?

From the start, Hooters faced blowback—and lawsuits. In 1997, a group of men sued Hooters for hiring only female servers. The restaurant responded that being a woman was a bona fide occupational qualification and that employing an all-female waitstaff was a business necessity. They said that Hooters waitresses were not just waitresses but also entertainers. The company eventually paid a settlement and agreed to hire more men as bartenders and hosts—just not as servers. (As some Hooters websites put it: “We’re looking for a few good men and a lot of great women.”)

On other occasions, Hooters restaurants have been sued for sexual harassment (in one case, a jury ordered a Hooters in Kentucky to pay a server $275,000 in damages after she accused her managers of harrassing her; the company said the evidence didn’t support the verdict). Hooters restaurants have been sued for weight discrimination (two servers sued a Michigan location for firing them because they were not slim enough; the company objected that its waitresses are entertainers whose looks are a business concern, and the case was settled through arbitration). And some have been sued for racial discrimination (just last year Hooters settled a suit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that, after a North Carolina restaurant laid off 43 employees early in the pandemic, it hired back only the white and lighter-skinned women; the company argued that “skin tone is subjective” but agreed to change some of its policies).

Lawsuits may have been factored into Hooters’ business model, but the company has had a harder time responding to broader shifts in society, such as the decreasing tolerance for boorish and predatory male behavior. In 2017, the year the #MeToo movement first went viral, Hooters opened an offshoot called Hoots Wings, which hired both male and female waiters wearing more traditional uniforms. It was an attempt to rebrand as family friendly, and to draw in more female customers. But it was seen as a failure. Only a handful of Hoots Wings opened, and most have now closed.

In 2021, Hooters tried to introduce a new uniform bottom that looked far more like underwear than shorts. Hooters Girls took to TikTok to complain about the change. “Love my job but dont love wearing undies to work,” read the caption on one employee’s viral video. Leadership quickly reversed the policy, leaving it up to the waitresses to decide which bottoms they would wear.

Hooters seemed to be flip-flopping between, on the one hand, striving for political correctness and wooing female diners and, on the other, trying to keep up with the sexual desires of its male customers. But restaurants are never successful when they try “to be something that they’re not,” Jonathan Maze, the editor in chief of Restaurant Business, told me. “Hooters is Hooters,” he said. “You really think that women en masse are going to go to Hooters? The logo is an owl deliberately designed to look like two breasts. There is zero way that women are going to actively go into the restaurant.”

[Leah Sottile: ‘Just because I work here doesn’t mean I don’t respect myself’]

Oches agreed. “People know Hooters for one thing,” he said: the skimpy outfits. Say the chain dressed all its waiters in khakis and white-collared shirts tomorrow. People aren’t going to go around saying, “‘Hooters? Oh no, they don’t do that anymore,’” Oches said. “It’s always going to be a part of them.” Hooters’ sexual image is literally in its name, which was inspired by a Steve Martin monologue on Saturday Night Live. (“I believe it’s derogatory to refer to a woman’s breasts as boobs, jugs, Winnebagos, or golden bozos, and that you should only refer to them as hooters.”)

The way forward, Oches argued, is to “lean into” your identity and “own it.”

Maybe that will be easier for Hooters to do under the Trump administration. Benjamin Sachs, a labor-law professor at Harvard, predicted that a more conservative Equal Employment Opportunity Commission might mean laxer rules for businesses. “I think we’ll see less rigorous enforcement of the discrimination laws,” he told me, an outcome that he said would be “unfortunate.” If Donald Trump saves the “breastaurant” industry, it would be one of the less shocking developments of his second term.

Downsizing could be another way for Hooters to get back to its target audience, geographically speaking. If you look at a map of Twin Peaks restaurants, you’ll notice that there are none in the Northeast and very few in blue states elsewhere in the country. Twin Peaks may have a smaller national presence than Hooters, but it’s going public, not bankrupt. If you don’t “sell well in a particular market, then you shouldn’t be there,” Dennis Gemberling, the president of the hospitality consulting firm Perry Group International, told me. The nation is already divided into red and blue Americas; maybe red America remains Hooters America, and breastaurants still have a future there.

Regardless of the reasons behind the company’s decline, the impending bankruptcy threatens to put Hooters’ staff—70 percent of which is female—out of work. The company employs more than 18,000 Hooters Girls around the globe. What will these people do next?

Stripping is one possible answer, though many understandably bristle at the comparison. “What’s the difference between a Hooters waitress and a stripper?” Mike Dickinson, the manager of the Admiral Theatre strip club, in Chicago, asked me. His answer: “About six weeks.”

His club is offering a special sign-on bonus of $10,000 for former Hooters Girls. The press release invited “Hooters bartenders and waitresses facing possible unemployment due to Hooters’ impending bankruptcy” to “immediately audition as professional nude entertainers to put their assets to use in more profitable work.” Dickinson told me that nine Hooters Girls have signed on since the announcement, and many more have reached out to audition.

Ashley Williams is one of the women who’s taken the Admiral Theatre up on the offer. She’d noticed on Instagram that a woman she’d worked with at a Hooters in the Chicago suburbs had a new BMW and “a lot of cash.” She reached out and learned that the woman was stripping at the Admiral, and soon followed. “At Hooters, we were lucky to make $150 in tips,” she told me. On an average night at the Admiral, she now makes $2,500.

Williams’s former Hooters is still open, but she thinks the brand is doomed: It’s “just too tame for today’s customers.”

[Sophie Gilbert: The movement of #MeToo]

For a long time, Hooters knew how to sell just enough sex to be palatable to people like my Southern Baptist neighbors. There weren’t any strip clubs in my town. There was just Hooters, and men could always say they only went there for the wings.

One of my high-school classmates, Halle Grogan, started as a hostess at the Hooters in Murfreesboro when she was 17. The day she turned 18 and could start serving liquor, she became a Hooters Girl. “I wore my birthday sash” that day, she told me, and “made the most money I’ve ever made in my life on a night serving.”

She had good managers and bad ones; good customers and bad ones. “A lot of them weren’t creepy,” she said about the men she served. Then she added: “Half of them were.” Regulars tended to come on weekday afternoons “between, like, noon and four, at that slow time” when they could “sit and have their time with” their favorite Hooters Girl. Many of the men were veterans who she thought had PTSD, she said. She felt sorry for them, and saw Hooters as “a hub for lonely, single men.” Her colleagues called one man the “Pantyhose Guy” because he would pay $50 for the pantyhose the Hooters Girls wore to make their legs look tan.

“I was a baby,” Grogan told me. “I’d grown up in a very Christian household.” She had barely “even touched alcohol in my life. I didn’t even know what drunk men were like. I was thrown into a shark tank.”

One night, she was cleaning out the bathroom before the restaurant closed. Men were lined up outside waiting for her to finish. “I was in the back stall changing the trash. I never heard him come in. I never heard him. I turned around, and he’s standing there staring at me.” A middle-aged man who was a regular at the restaurant had entered the restroom and shut the door behind him. She said he had pulled his pants down and told her to “suck my dick.”

If that had happened to her now that she’s a 26-year-old woman, she said, “I would have knocked him out with my fist. At that time, all I knew what to do was run. So I shoved him to the side” and ran out the door. Immediately, she told her manager that the man had exposed himself to her, expecting him to be promptly kicked out. But she said that’s not what happened. The manager “goes, ‘We can’t. He’s a regular, and he gives us a lot of money.’” Grogan recalls her manager saying: “You signed up for this position. Look at what you’re wearing.” (Hooters did not reply to a request for comment.)

Grogan described it as “probably the most mortifying thing that ever happened to me as a teenager.” She walked out and quit that week.

That Hooters is still open, but maybe not for long. Even in Murfreesboro, customers seem to have gotten uncomfortable dining at the crossroads of erotic and family friendly—at a place that offers its customers high chairs, kids’ menus, and waitresses dressed in uniforms just large enough to head off harassment charges. On many nights, the parking lot is almost empty.

On March 18, the official White House account on X posted two photographs of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who was arrested earlier this month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post described her as a “previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking,” and celebrated her capture as a win for the administration. In one photograph, Basora-Gonzalez is shown handcuffed and weeping in a public parking lot.  

The White House account posted about Basora-Gonzalez again yesterday—this time, rendering her capture in the animated style of the beloved Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, who co-founded the animation company Studio Ghibli. Presumably, whoever runs the account had used ChatGPT, which has been going viral this week for an update to its advanced “4o” model that enables it to transform photographs in the style of popular art, among other things. The White House did not respond directly to a request for comment, instead referring me to a post by Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr that says, in part, “The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.”

It’s worth pausing here: The internet has been flooded with AI-generated images in this exact Studio Ghibli style. Some people have used it for images of pets or family members. Others opted for a trollish register, leading ChatGPT to spit out cutesy renderings of JFK’s assassination, planes hitting the World Trade Center, and the torture at Abu Ghraib. On X, the prevalence of these images became an event unto itself, one in which the White House decided to participate by sharing a cartoon of a woman crying in handcuffs.

This is how the White House account operates now. In previous administrations (including much of Donald Trump’s first term), the account was used to post anodyne updates, highlight press releases, and share information about the administration. It was, to be fair, often painfully dull or written in the stilted language of a brand. Now the account exists to troll its political enemies and delight the MAGA faithful.

[Read: The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine]

On Wednesday, the account posted a picture of Vice President J. D. Vance shooting a tactical rifle, referring to the bullets he fired as “freedom seeds,” a term popular among gun YouTubers. When Google Maps adopted the “Gulf of America” language pushed by the administration, the White House account celebrated by sharing a video in which the words Gulf of Mexico are wiped off the globe. In February, it posted an AI-generated picture of Trump as an American monarch, wearing a crown. The image’s caption reads, “Long live the king.” After the disastrous Oval Office ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the account posted a photo of Vance staring at Zelensky with the caption “Have you said thank you once?” Although the account sometimes shares actual news, it’s frequently preoccupied by rapid-response engagement bait for MAGA diehards. Less information, more content. The intent is not to inform but to go viral.

Beyond the fact that this kind of shitposting is so obviously beneath the office, the posts are genuinely sinister. By adding a photo of an ICE arrest to a light-hearted viral trend, for instance, the White House account manages to perfectly capture the sociopathic, fascistic tone of ironic detachment and glee of the internet’s darkest corners and most malignant trolls. The official X account of the White House isn’t just full of low-rent 4chan musings, it’s an alarming signal of an administration that’s fluent in internet extremism and seemingly dedicated to pursuing its casual cruelty as a chief political export.

To be clear, the actions of the second Trump administration—the dismantling of the federal government via DOGE, the apprehension and detainment of immigrants and green-card holders with seemingly no due process—are of far more consequence than what it posts on social media. But White House posts are not random missives either: They’re official government communications from the executive branch, sent out to 1.4 million followers, to say nothing of whatever additional reach these posts receive via algorithmic recommendation and ad hoc sharing.

The account’s true obsession is immigration: @WhiteHouse has posted dozens of mugshots of immigrants arrested by ICE. Each one lists an offense they’ve been arrested for in big block letters, and usually the catchphrase “MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN” is appended. Earlier this month, after the Department of Homeland Security commented on the deportation of a Lebanese professor at Brown University—a violation of a court order temporarily protecting her from expulsion—the White House account responded by posting a photo of Trump waving goodbye from a McDonald’s drive-through window. (The picture was taken during a 2024 campaign stunt.) On Valentine’s Day, the account wrote, “Roses are red / Violets are blue / Come here illegally / And we’ll deport you.”

And in an infamous example, on February 18, the White House account posted a 41-second video of faceless men being shackled and marched onto planes. The post’s caption read, “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” (ASMR is short for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” or the titillating sensation caused by certain noises, such as whispering, tapping, or crinkling; videos of people making such noises are enormously popular across social media.) The subtext of the White House post is far from subtle and is reminiscent of something out of 4chan’s notoriously bigoted politics message board: Watching allegedly undocumented immigrants bound in chains is a pleasurable, even sensual experience. Like any trolling post, it’s meant to be simultaneously taken seriously and played off as a dumb online joke. Even those inside the Trump administration seemed taken aback by the audacity of the post. Even some MAGA supporters appeared uncomfortable by @WhiteHouse’s brazenness. “If you guys could stick with the grim shock and awe, and leave the edgy gloating to those of us who don’t work in the White House I think that would probably be better for optics,” one user wrote on X. The “ASMR” deportation video, as of this writing, has been viewed almost 104 million times on X.

Exactly who is running the White House X account is an object of fascination for close observers. Some accounts fantasize that Trump’s college-age son, Barron, is running it. Those outside of Trump fandom have insisted that it is being run by edgelords—one post referred to the operator as an “incel reddit user.” One Bluesky user described the account as “lowkey goebbelsmaxxing,” a reference to the Nazi propagandist. (The White House did not respond to a request to identify who writes the account’s posts.) What all the speculation suggests is that at least someone with access to the account is intimately familiar with far-right internet spaces and culture, specifically Groypers, a term for the loose online movement that has succeeded the alt-right. Earlier this year, the writer John Ganz argued that “Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right.” He and others have suggested that the culture is present in the offices of Republican representatives in Washington, D.C., including in the White House. (A Trump staffer was fired in the first administration for associating with white nationalists; he’s now back, in a role at the State Department.) Although the identities of whoever is running the account are, at present, unknown, what’s clear is that their output appears to delight prominent extremists online. The message coming from the account, to borrow language from one far-right X user, is clear: The posters are in control.

[Read: X is a white-supremacist site]

And the posters have goals. The first is to engage and supply their loyal audiences with constant memes and content. The second is perhaps more strategic. The account’s blatant humiliation of immigrants who it alleges have heinous criminal records is intentional. The goal is to goad their opponents into defending people accused of indefensible crimes. The primary accusation from the MAGA faithful toward people who are outraged about the White House’s Studio Ghibli post or the ASMR video is that the left is more concerned with defending fentanyl dealers and immigrants accused of rape and robbery than they are about the safety of the country. “Disappointing that folks are more upset about this meme than they are about the fentanyl crisis,” Dorr said in the same post that the White House pointed me to. But this is a false binary; in all cases, the chief objections are to the dehumanization and glee on display and the worrying lack of due process.

The White House is after something more than just shock value. It’s propaganda, and Trump’s allies are learning the playbook. This week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a video on X from a prison in El Salvador where deported immigrants are being held. Behind Noem are dozens of men in one jail cell, many shirtless with tattoos; their heads have all been shaved during intake. The prisoners are props, a backdrop for Noem’s message of intimidation to undocumented immigrants: “If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison.” Like the ASMR post or the Ghibli cartoon, the implication is that these deportees are utterly undeserving of any shred of human dignity. There are many other examples, such as FBI Director Kash Patel’s recent posts, one of which features him walking around in camouflage, set to rock music, as FBI agents blow open doors with explosives. Taken together, the posts offer a bracing but useful insight into how the administration sees itself, and the message of casual cruelty and overwhelming force it wants to project to the rest of the world.

That this administration should fully embrace the tactics and aesthetics of online far-right extremists and technological tools like generative AI to further its message makes perfect sense. These are reliable ways to increase engagement, gain attention, and illustrate a precise vision of the future they want to usher in. Even so, the account is chilling. Those who’ve spent enough time in the online spaces that have clearly influenced this administration—or at least whoever runs its social accounts—know how this goes. This is a game of accelerationism and nihilism, using tools and platforms that excel at depersonalizing, thus rendering empathy for others ever more difficult. That this sociopathic posting style is coming out of this administration—that it has been so thoroughly mainstreamed by the right—suggests that the cultural architecture of the internet has changed. There is still a fever swamp, but now the White House sits on top of it.

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Americans are feeling anxious about the economy. Amid all the questions—is a recession looming? Will President Trump’s tariffs cause a spike in prices?—one not-so-reassuring prospect exists: You can pay for sandwiches in installments.

Last week, the financial-services start-up Klarna announced that it was partnering with the delivery company DoorDash to allow customers to pay off orders in four parts. Deferred-payment services, once used largely to finance major purchases such as couches or Pelotons, have been expanding into the realm of the day-to-day in recent years, as the companies grow (and in Klarna’s case, eye an IPO). On an internet attuned to #recessionindicators, the memes began to flow, as many noted the absurdity of financing, say, a burrito. (Klarna clarified in a blog post that the feature could be used for purchases of at least $35, and a spokesperson told me that the partnership was intended more for purchasing bigger-ticket items such as home goods and electronics than for use on food delivery. DoorDash has emphasized the same.)

Some 14 percent of Americans had used buy-now, pay-later services (known as BNPL), such as Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay, in the year leading up to fall 2023, one estimate found. The services effectively offer interest-free loans and do not generally require a credit check. In 2019, people bought about $2 billion worth of goods with the apps, and in 2023, it was closer to $34 billion. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that the bulk of BNPL transactions in 2022 were for purchases of less than $100. These arrangements, tempting as they are, come with risks: They run parallel to the traditional credit-card system but lack all of the same protections.

Credit cards are required to follow the Truth in Lending Act, which provides consumer protections such as notices on rate increases and the right to dispute charges—and they allow users to build up their credit when they pay off batches of purchases at once. The idea of paying off a single deferred-payment loan may, on its face, seem simpler than opening a credit card. But what often ends up happening with these services, Ed deHaan, a professor at Stanford’s business school, told me, is that users (many of them young people) who are not in the habit of paying off debt take out several of these loans at once. Keeping track of eight or 10 smaller loans with different deadlines can quickly become overwhelming.

On average, deHaan has found, people using BNPL services are more likely to overdraft their bank account than nonusers (suggesting they are spending beyond their means). And another study found that using the services causes spending to rise by $60 a week. Many regular users of the services are those who have already racked up credit-card debt, and turn to deferred payments as a last resort. As Mac Schwerin wrote in The Atlantic in 2023, “What companies like Klarna once characterized as paradigm-busting behavior—young people rejecting stodgy banks in favor of more freeing forms of finance—now looks like the crest of yet another credit cycle, a familiar note in the motif of American consumption.” Klarna told me that it has “a number of safeguards to ensure responsible lending and consumer protection,” and in a follow-up statement noted that it welcomes “proportionate” rules, arguing that “the CFPB’s previous attempts at this were a step in the right direction but they ultimately failed to recognise what BNPL is.”

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has only just started to scrutinize the young BNPL sector. Last May, the agency announced that deferred-payment programs would be treated like credit cards in some key ways: Borrowers would be able to dispute charges and be more easily able to get refunds, among other protections (some but not all aspects of the Truth in Lending Act applied). Rather than issuing new regulations for the BNPL sector, the CFPB ruled that the spirit of existing credit-card laws covered the newer industry—a bold move, deHaan argued when we talked earlier this week, and one that was challenged in court. On Wednesday, a court filing suggested that the CFPB would revoke the rule. (The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Although the big BNPL lenders such as Klarna have signaled that they are open to some regulation, the U.S. lags behind Europe in its regulations on the services. The major players face public pressure to operate scrupulously, deHaan noted. The bigger risk to consumers may now come from the smaller, less popular loan companies that can crop up and take advantage of reduced scrutiny.

The deferred-payments sector seems, on paper, like just the kind of issue the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was set up to handle: The agency, which was formed after the 2008 financial crisis, has the mandate to monitor new financial products that may confuse consumers. But in recent months, the agency has been gutted. In February, the entire 1,700-person workforce was sent home (Elon Musk posted “CFPB RIP” on X), and the agency was ordered to pause rule making. A judge is set to decide soon whether firings of probationary workers are legal; in the meantime, some workers have been brought back. And earlier today, another judge issued an injunction to temporarily stop the Trump administration from dismantling the agency, saying that the court “can and must act” to preserve it.

The judge’s ruling brings the agency back from the brink for now. The BNPL industry is one that, in another political era, the CFPB may have been eager to address. And if the agency survives, it still could. But the chaos—and the fact that the administration has attacked it—may ultimately render it less equipped to protect the public.

Related:

The “Buy now, pay later” bubble is about to burst. Why is there financing for everything now? (From 2020)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The double standard at the center of the Signal debacle David Frum: Why Sheinbaum can surrender to Trump The truth about Trump’s Greenland campaign

Today’s News

More than 150 people were killed, and more than 730 were injured, after a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar. Buildings collapsed in Thailand from the quake, killing at least 10 people in Bangkok. During Vice President J. D. Vance’s Greenland visit, he said that the country’s people would be better off under America’s security umbrella than Denmark’s. The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, seeking approval for President Donald Trump to deport people under the Alien Enemies Act.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Damon Beres interviews Ian Bogost about the AI-generated Studio Ghibli images that have taken the internet by storm. The Books Briefing: We surveyed more than 400 writers, readers, and editors to assemble a rich array of works. Here is the best American poetry of the 21st century (so far).

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Evening Read

Warrick Page / Max

The Pitt Has Revolutionized the Medical Drama

By David Sims

Medical dramas are like the old aphorism about pizza and sex: Even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good. Since the glory days of ER faded in the late ’90s, there have been plenty of TV series of varying quality set in hospitals … I had been longing for something more meat-and-potatoes—and then along came The Pitt, Max’s hit new show starring ER’s Noah Wyle. The first season is still airing, yet it’s already without question the finest example of the genre in more than a generation.

Read the full article.

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