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“We will win!” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer chanted at a rally last month protesting Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service infiltrating Treasury Department payments systems. If Democrats want to win, though, they’ll have to fight first, and they don’t seem totally ready for that.

Schumer says that his caucus will refuse to vote for a short-term funding bill that would prevent the government from shutting down at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday. (In the House, all but one Democrat—Jared Golden of Maine—voted against the funding patch, but Republicans were unexpectedly united and passed the bill.) But no one seems to completely believe that Democrats will keep up their unified opposition. Politico reports that Democrats may instead settle for a symbolic vote on a shorter-term bill that they know they’ll lose: A White House official told the publication, “They’re 100 percent gonna swallow it. They’re totally screwed.”

Democratic leaders have been insisting that the nation is facing a serious crisis caused by President Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg demolition of the executive branch and rule of law. But they have also complained that they have few paths to stop Trump. “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said last month. “What leverage do we have?” Now Senate Democrats have leverage, and what they do with it will show whether they mean what they say.

This is a strange situation for Democrats: As the party that likes to keep government running, even entertaining the idea of a shutdown is novel. But they have reasons related to both policy and politics to take a hard line here. First, if they’re concerned with protecting government services that are essential for citizens, they need to find some way to slow Trump down, because he’s using his power to slash them already. If the government shuts down, some services will be briefly cut. If Democrats keep the government open, some services will be cut—perhaps permanently. The deadline gives them a chance to demand that the White House agree to limitations on DOGE or other Trump cuts in exchange for funding the government. (Complicating the calculus, the White House recently deleted guidance from its website on how a shutdown would work.)

Even if Congress passes the GOP’s short-term funding patch, there’s no guarantee that the administration will comply. Trump and his budget director, Russ Vought, have argued that the president should be able to impound funds—in other words, to treat congressional appropriations as a ceiling rather than a requirement, and thus be able to cut funding for whatever they don’t like. (This is plainly illegal, but Vought and others believe that the law that bans it is unconstitutional, and they hope to challenge it in the courts.) This means that simply continuing to fund the government doesn’t guarantee that key programs will stay running, and that extracting concessions from the White House now is crucial.

Cautious Democrats worry that the party will be blamed if the government closes. But blamed by whom? Republicans have taken the political hit for previous shutdowns, because the GOP has openly clamored for them. Maybe Democrats would take the hit if they refused to help Republicans, and maybe they wouldn’t; voters surely understand that Democrats are the party of government. But in standing up to Trump’s GOP, they’d be taking the side of most of the public. One new CNN poll found that 56 percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, the lowest mark of his career; another found that 55 percent believe that the cuts to federal programs, which Democrats want to stop, will hurt the economy.

Regardless of how independents and Republicans would react, the consequences of not putting up a fight now would be catastrophic for Democratic-voter morale. During Trump’s first two months in office, party leaders have seemed flat-footed and meek, subscribing to what I’ve called a “No We Can’t” strategy. Polling shows that approval of the party and its leaders among Democrats is awful, and the idea of a liberal Tea Party—furious about the Trump administration but nearly as disgusted with Democratic leaders—suddenly seems plausible.

Few Democrats envy the chaos and disorder of the post-2010 Republican Party, but they’ve also seen GOP leaders take risks while their own party avoids them. That’s gotten Republicans control of the White House, the House, and the Senate, while Democrats have little to show for their gingerly approach. If Democratic leaders abdicate the chance to take charge now, many in the voting rank and file may not give them another chance.

The biggest risk for Democrats is that they’ll try to take a hostage by shutting down the government and discover that they are the hostage: Trump continues to do whatever he wants, and they end up folding in a few days, having obtained no concessions. That’s how most shutdowns end. As a matter of policy, however, this wouldn’t change anything. As a matter of politics, Democrats would at least get caught trying.

And if Democrats do take a hit with voters as a whole, so what? If they keep their political standing but lose all of the substantive battles, they won’t have much use for that standing. The longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, last seen misjudging the 2024 election, now says his party should just get out of Trump’s way. “It’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” he wrote in The New York Times last month. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.”

Carville might be right that this would be an effective electoral strategy; Trump seems determined to make unpopular cuts and tie himself ever closer to the ever-more-unpopular Elon Musk, and the more voters see of Trump, the less they tend to like him. But playing dead makes sense only if one’s opponent is making garden-variety bad policy moves. This is different: Democratic leaders have said that the nation faces a historic crisis prompted by unprecedented and unconstitutional actions from the president. Did they really mean it?

Related:

The conversation Democrats need to have The Democrats’ “No We Can’t” strategy

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Meet the strictest headmistress in Britain. Tesla needs a better story. Musk’s Madisonian insight—and its troubling consequences Radio Atlantic: Gaza is struggling to keep clean water flowing.

Today’s News

A federal judge ordered six federal agencies to reinstate the probationary employees they fired last month. He criticized the Trump administration’s justification for the mass layoffs, calling it a “sham.” The White House withdrew Dave Weldon’s nomination to be the director of the CDC. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to limit the scope of lower-court orders that largely blocked Donald Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship. If the Supreme Court rules in the administration’s favor, some restrictions on birthright citizenship could take effect.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Throughout The Atlantic’s history, writers have interrogated their marriages (and divorces), Serena Dai writes: “By putting themselves in control of what others hear, they try to make meaning of the life they’ve chosen.”

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Kryssia Campos / Getty; Mimi Haddon / Getty; Tooga / Getty.

Academia Needs to Stick Up for Itself

By Nicholas B. Dirks

The first time Donald Trump threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish a university, I was the target. At UC Berkeley, where I was chancellor, campus police had at the last moment canceled an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right political pundit who was then a star at Breitbart News, because of a violent attack on the venue by a group of outside left-wing activists who objected to Yiannopoulos’s presence. In the end, although these protesters caused significant damage both on campus and to shops and businesses in downtown Berkeley, the police restored peace. Yiannopoulos was safely escorted back to his hotel, where he promptly criticized the university for canceling his speech. But on the morning of February 2, 2017, I awoke to a tweet reading: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

Read the full article.

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In 2023, Donald Trump posted that electric-car supporters should “ROT IN HELL.” Now he is showcasing Teslas on the White House lawn. Yesterday, the president stood with Elon Musk and oohed and ahhed at a lineup of the electric vehicles, saying that he hoped his purchase of one would help the carmaker’s stock, which had halved in value since mid-December thanks to a combination of customer backlash and general economic uncertainty. (The stock has rebounded by 7.6 percent since yesterday.)

Trump does not own shares in Tesla, as far as we know. He has said that he is supporting the carmaker because protesters are “harming a great American company,” and has suggested that people who vandalize Tesla cars or protest the company should be labeled domestic terrorists. But he also seems interested in helping his friend, the special government employee Elon Musk, maintain his status as the wealthiest man in the world. Yesterday’s White House spectacle was, my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote, “a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s stock, and certainly beneath the office of the presidency.”

If any other government official had similarly promoted a friend’s product (especially on hallowed White House grounds), they would have been in clear violation of the specific regulation restricting executive-branch employees from using their role to endorse commercial products or services, Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. But the president and the vice president are exempt from that regulation, as well as from some of the other ethics rules that govern federal officials. Norms, in this case, are the primary lever for holding the commander in chief accountable.

Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his appetite for overturning norms and pushing ethical bounds, so his latest stunt as a Tesla salesman is not altogether shocking. When Trump learned in 2016 that U.S. presidents are exempt from the conflict-of-interest rules that restrict other government officials, he seemed delighted. “The president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he told The New York Times then. “I’d assumed that you’d have to set up some type of trust or whatever.”

Despite the lack of legal restriction, modern presidents have generally moved assets into blind trusts, which are controlled by independent managers, in order to diminish any perception that they are profiting from the office (or that they are making policy decisions to boost their own investment portfolios). Trump has shuffled around his assets since taking office but in general has chosen to put his family in charge of managing them. Trump recently said that he’d transferred his shares of Truth Social into a trust controlled by his son Donald Trump Jr., a move that is “irrelevant from an ethics point of view” because the money could still flow to him, Clark told me. And with his own family controlling the trust, Trump likely knows exactly where his money is and can make decisions that would increase the value of his holdings.

Presidential conflicts of interest, or even the appearance of them, can undermine public confidence (nearly two-thirds of Americans said they believe that all or most elected officials ran for office to make money, a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found). Trump may not be directly profiting off Tesla, but the problem with him hawking cars poses the same issue as other potential conflicts of interest: What’s good for Truth Social or Trump’s meme coin or Tesla is not necessarily what’s good for the country, and Trump has so far not inspired confidence that he will prioritize the latter.

Musk, too, hasn’t assuaged concerns that he will separate his business interests from his role in the Trump administration: Musk’s corporate empire relies on government contracts. And the federal firings he is overseeing through his DOGE initiative are already reshaping agencies that regulate his companies.

After he sat in the Teslas and complimented them in front of cameras yesterday, Trump told the press that he would buy one of the vehicles and pay with a personal check. That relatively small financial commitment makes a big statement about the president and where his priorities lie: with the interests of his friend, the billionaire.

Related:

The Tesla revolt The crypto world is already mad at Trump. (From January)

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Elon Musk looks desperate, Charlie Warzel writes. DOGE is courting catastrophic risk. Don’t trust the Trumpsplainers.

Today’s News

In response to the Trump administration’s tariffs, the European Union announced that it will impose tariffs on $28 billion in U.S. exports, and Canada added 25 percent tariffs on approximately $20.7 billion worth of U.S. goods. The Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident, remains in ICE detention after his procedural hearing. He was arrested earlier this week in an effort to deport him over his role in protests against the war in Gaza. The Department of Education fired more than 1,300 employees yesterday, leaving the department with roughly half the workforce it had before Donald Trump took office.

Evening Read

Caroline Gutman / The New York Times / Redux

The Man Who Owned 181 Renoirs

By Susan Tallman

Of all the ways that today’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an art museum is one of the more benign, somewhere behind eradicating malaria but ahead of eradicating democracy. The art in these museums is almost always contemporary, reflecting the dearth of available old masters along with a global chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde art is socially, intellectually, and culturally important. Few of these tycoons, though, are likely to find the stakes as agonizingly high as Albert C. Barnes did.

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Netflix / Everett Collection

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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This morning, President Donald Trump used the standard diplomatic channel—his Truth Social account—to announce retaliation against Canada for Ontario’s new electricity tariffs, which were themselves retaliatory.

“I have instructed my Secretary of Commerce to add an ADDITIONAL 25% Tariff, to 50%, on all STEEL and ALUMINUM COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES FROM CANADA, ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. This will go into effect TOMORROW MORNING, March 12th,” Trump wrote. The rest of the message is much stranger, again promising the annexation of Canada: “The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World.”

Earlier this evening, Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, pulled back the electricity tariffs after securing a meeting with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and the White House dropped its threat. Ford likely recognized that no matter how belligerent a stance Trump takes, he can be easily induced to change his mind.

Consider what’s happened with tariffs over the past 45 days. On February 1, Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on both Canada and Mexico, to take effect on February 4. On February 3, he announced a one-month pause in implementation. On February 26, he said he might not actually impose the tariffs until April 2; the next day, he said they’d start on March 4. On March 2, Lutnick suggested that the tariff situation was “fluid.” On March 4, the tariffs went into effect after all.

Confused yet? We’re just getting started. That afternoon, with stock markets reacting poorly, Lutnick suggested that the tariffs might be rolled back the next day. Indeed, on March 5, Trump announced that he was suspending parts of the tariffs related to auto manufacturing until April. And then, on March 6, he suspended all of the tariffs until April. Trump once told us that trade wars are “easy to win.” Now he seems unsure about how to fight one, or whether he even wants to.

If the defining feeling of the start of the first Trump administration was chaos, its equivalent in this term is whiplash. The president and his aides have been changing their minds and positions at nauseating speed.

Many of the reversals seem to come down to Trump’s caprices. On February 19, he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “a dictator.” About a week later, he disavowed that. “Did I say that? I can't believe I said that,” he told reporters. “I think the president and I actually have had a very good relationship.” The next day, Trump berated Zelensky in the Oval Office, sent him packing, and began cutting off military help to Ukraine. This afternoon, the U.S. restarted military and financial aid once again.

Another leading cause of whiplash is Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service. Last week, the General Services Administration put up a list of more than 400 buildings that the cost-cutting crew had deemed inessential for government operations. The inventory included some eye-raising entries, including the Robert F. Kennedy building—headquarters of the Justice Department—and the main offices of the Labor Department and the FBI, but also some peculiar ones, such as steam tunnels underneath Washington, D.C. (One imagines that the wrong buyer could cause a great deal of mayhem with those.) Within hours, more than 100 entries had been removed from the list; by the next day, it was gone entirely, replaced by a “coming soon” message—though not before revealing a semi-secret CIA facility.

DOGE and other efforts to slash the federal workforce keep overstepping and requiring reversals. In some cases, officials seem to be discovering that the things Trump wants are either impracticable or too politically toxic to effect. Musk posted on X that if federal workers didn’t respond to an email, it would be tantamount to their resignation. Then the threat was removed. Then Musk sent another email. Thousands of federal workers have been laid off, only to be called back to work. Some workers who accepted a buyout offer were then fired; others had the offer rescinded. Musk tittered over canceling and then uncanceling Ebola-prevention programs, though some officials dispute that they were actually uncanceled. The administration planned to shut down the coronavirus-test-distribution program, then ultimately suspended but did not end it; it killed but then resuscitated a health program for 9/11 survivors.

Trump isn’t just going back on specifics. Some of his core campaign propositions are also looking shaky. Despite campaigning on the deleterious effects of inflation, he now says that it’s not a top priority. He promised booming wealth for Americans; now he can’t rule out a recession and is warning that people will need to endure some pain (for what higher purpose, he hasn’t made clear). And even though Trump has long said that he won’t cut Medicare or Social Security, Musk is now targeting them and calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme.

This kind of vacillation creates an obvious credibility problem for the president and his administration. As I wrote during Trump’s first presidency, foreign leaders quickly concluded that he was a pushover, easily convinced by flattering words. Trump practically always folded in a negotiation. This history, combined with his mercurial moods, mean that counterparts don’t assume they can take him at his word. In the case of Canada, Trump seems to have come out with the worst possible outcome: Canadian leaders believe he’s deadly serious about annexing the country, a quixotic goal, but they have no reason to take his bluster about tariffs, which he can actually impose, all that seriously.

The situation might be even more dangerous if observers took Trump at his word. His dithering has given markets the jitters, but the economic impacts might be more dire if traders acted as though they expected him to follow through on all of his tariff threats. (After he said this past weekend that a recession is possible, markets plunged. Did investors believe he had some secret plan up his sleeve until then?)

Uncertainty is bad for markets, but the problem is larger than that. One of the most fundamental roles of the state is to create a sense of consistency and stability for society. That provides the conditions for flourishing of all kinds: economic, artistic, cultural, scientific. Trump is both seeking to seize more power for himself and refusing to exercise it in a way that allows the nation to flourish.

Today, my colleague Adam Serwer wrote about the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University who has not been charged, much less convicted, of any crime. This, too, calls into question the stability of the rule of law—specifically, the long-standing fact that the First Amendment and due process apply to legal permanent residents. (Last month, I wrote that Trump’s actions were showing that his commitment to free speech was bogus. He seems determined to prove me right.) The first months of the Trump presidency have been whiplash-inducing, but in the long term, the failure to set and follow consistent rules threatens national pain much worse than a sore neck.

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Ukraine has agreed to an immediate 30-day cease-fire if Russia accepts the plan proposed by the United States. Ontario suspended its 25 percent electricity surcharge for some U.S. states after Donald Trump threatened a 50 percent tariff on steel and aluminum for Canada. The former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who started a widespread crackdown on drugs, was arrested on an International Criminal Court warrant for crimes against humanity.

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Work in Progress: “The chaos emanating from Washington comes at a time when the economy is already slowing,” Annie Lowrey writes. Maybe don’t invite a recession in.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / Getty; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty.

Anti-Semitism Is Just a Pretext

By Jonathan Chait

The [Trump] administration is threatening more arrests of foreign-born campus activists, and more funding cuts, all supposedly to contain anti-Semitism, at the same time that it is elevating anti-Semites to newfound prominence and legitimacy. Donald Trump opposes left-wing anti-Semitism because it is left-wing, not because it is anti-Semitic. And his campaign to supposedly stamp it out on campus is a pretext for an authoritarian power grab.

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On my evening to-do list once I finish this newsletter: Pick up my copy of my colleague Olga Khazan’s Me, but Better at my local bookstore. In 2022, she wrote one of my favorite Atlantic stories ever about her three-month attempt to change her own personality. In the book, which is out today, she goes deeper. Olga is a very funny writer and great at sorting through and explaining complicated science, but for me, what makes her such an outstanding journalist is her ability to see and question a lot of the things that most people take for granted. I feel safe guessing that her research didn’t change that part of her personality.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Yesterday marked four months since Election Day, but North Carolinians somehow still don’t know who will fill a key seat on the state supreme court.

The problem is not that no one knows who won. Justice Allison Riggs, an incumbent Democrat, won by a tiny margin—just 734 votes out of 5,723,987. That tally has been confirmed by two recounts. But certification is paused while Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin, a judge on the state court of appeals, asks courts to throw out roughly 60,000 votes and put him on the state’s highest court.

The votes that Griffin has challenged fall into three groups. Most are from North Carolina residents whose voter registrations don’t include driver’s license or Social Security numbers. Although this is now required by law, these voters registered using old forms that did not require either; the state never asked these voters to reregister. The second set belongs to overseas residents who have never lived in the state, such as the adult children of North Carolinians who live abroad; state law entitles them to vote in-state. A third consists of overseas voters, including some members of the military, who didn’t submit photo identification with their ballot, again because it was not required.

Griffin doesn’t allege that these voters did anything wrong; in fact, as ProPublica’s Doug Bock Clark reported, Griffin himself twice voted under the overseas-voting law while deployed in the National Guard. But now he argues that their votes should be junked for administrative and clerical discrepancies that were not their fault, and he did not express any concerns about these votes until after he appeared to have lost the race.

“What Judge Griffin is asking is for the courts to change the rules of the election after the election has already happened, and for the courts to allow him to hand-select the votes that shouldn’t count, so that he can be declared the winner,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, a senior counsel who works on voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “That is absolutely unprecedented.”

I wrote about the legal wrangling over the election early this year. At the time, the delay seemed long, but I assumed it would be resolved shortly. Instead, it’s now March, and no end is in sight. Griffin petitioned the state supreme court to hear the case directly, skipping over lower courts, but its justices declined. The North Carolina State Board of Elections, the defendant in the case, attempted to move the case to federal court; a federal judge bounced it back to state courts. A trial court then heard the matter and quickly ruled against Griffin. After he appealed, the state board requested that the supreme court bypass the state appeals court and hear the case quickly, but was rebuffed. So now it’s before the appeals court, with no schedule yet set. The federal court could still reclaim the case later, too. (Yes, this is all incredibly confusing. The News & Observer is maintaining a helpful timeline.)

For North Carolina voters, justice delayed is a justice denied. Sweren-Becker told me that Brennan filed an amicus brief on behalf of voters at risk of disenfranchisement, because these people don’t otherwise have a voice in the case as either plaintiff or defendant.

The decision is now essentially up to Republican jurists. The appeals court has a 12–3 GOP majority, though Griffin is recused from the case. Riggs has also asked that Judge Tom Murry be recused, because Murry contributed $5,000 to Griffin’s legal fund in this case, but Griffin has indicated that he’ll oppose the request. Once the appeals court rules, the case may go to the supreme court, where the GOP has a 5–2 majority (and a recent history of intense partisan acrimony); Riggs, too, is recused from this case. Griffin appears to be asking his own party members to hand him a seat—an impression not helped if Murry stays on the case. (Griffin has declined to comment while the case is in court.)

All of this may be an affront to North Carolinians, but voting experts told me that the outcome matters for America as a whole as well. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA who has contributed to The Atlantic, told me it could end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. “Many of us were worried about subverted election outcomes at the presidential level starting in 2020,” he wrote in an email. “But this is the first serious risk at a lower level. Raising these kinds of issues after the election to disenfranchise voters and flip election outcomes risks actual stolen elections potentially blessed by a state supreme court.”

North Carolina has historically been an early indicator for future national voting battles. It has long seen some of the more preposterous congressional maps in the United States. When the Supreme Court struck part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, North Carolina Republicans moved within hours to change laws. An effort by Republican Governor Pat McCrory to challenge his 2016 election loss presaged Donald Trump’s 2020 “Stop the Steal” push. North Carolina also sent important cases about partisan gerrymandering and the controversial “independent state legislature” theory to the Supreme Court. If Griffin prevails, his playbook could go national as well.

In some ways, the effect of this protracted litigation on the workings of the state is contained. The state supreme court has seven members, and Riggs remains on the court for other cases while hers is resolved. But imagining a case with a more direct impact—say, a governor’s race—isn’t hard. A world in which losing candidates can indefinitely delay the certification of elections with ex post facto challenges is one that could paralyze democratic government. Given the contempt for voters on display here, maybe that’s the point.

Related:

Stop the (North Carolina) steal. Election officials are under siege. (From October 2024)

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American allies don’t trust Trump with their secrets. The advice Elissa Slotkin didn’t take This is what happens when reality TV comes for democracy.

Today’s News

Donald Trump said that a range of goods coming from Mexico and Canada will be exempt from his administration’s latest 25 percent tariff until April 2. Trump is expected to sign an executive order that would start the process of dismantling the Department of Education. Ten Democrats voted with House Republicans to censure Representative Al Green, who spoke out in protest during Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday.

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Evening Read

Nina Westervelt / Redux

Cling to Your Disgust

By Spencer Kornhaber

A few weeks before he started selling swastika T-shirts on the internet, I considered letting Ye back into my life.

It was inauguration weekend, and I’d been sitting in a restaurant where the bartender was blasting a playlist of songs by the rapper once known as Kanye West. The music sounded, frankly, awesome. Most of the songs were from when I considered myself a fan of his, long before he rebranded as the world’s most famous Hitler admirer. I hadn’t heard this much Ye music played in public in years; privately, I’d mostly avoided it. But as I nodded along, I thought it might be time to redownload Yeezus.

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P.S.

Yesterday, I had some harsh words about directionless Democrats. Today, several members of Congress picked a perplexing direction. The group collaborated on a TikTok video playing on a viral trend based on the video games Mortal Kombat and Super Smash Bros Melee. (No, the Trump administration still has not followed through on a law forcing the app’s sale.) “Choose your fighter,” the clip says, before the participants—including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minority Whip Katherine Clark—stream through, posing as fighters to be selected in the game. Some are less awkward than others, but the whole thing is pretty cringe. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone some harmless fun, but I’m perplexed by the message. While Democrats are asking people to choose their fighter, voters just want Democrats to pick some fights. It doesn’t look like the party is anywhere close to a flawless victory.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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For a few years, Democrats were so regimented that one could almost forget Will Rogers’s well-worn quip that he was not a member of any organized political party but rather a Democrat. After Hillary Clinton’s ignominious loss in 2016, the congressional team of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer quickly took charge. They were mostly able to keep a fractious coalition together through Donald Trump’s tumultuous first term. Democrats won the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020. At the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, despite noisy complaints about the inconstancy of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the party managed to enact a huge legislative agenda.

That seems a long time ago now. The party was able to force Biden out of the 2024 race, but much too late. After Trump’s win, Democrats did a great deal of hand-wringing about what went wrong, but they don’t seem to have learned much. Their inability to find their footing was on painful display during last night’s non–State of the Union address. Not only could Democrats not figure out an effective response to Trump’s speech; they couldn’t even settle on one or two ineffective responses.

First-term Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan got the unenviable duty of giving the official Democratic Party response, and delivered a workmanlike, solid speech that, as my colleague Tom Nichols wrote, nonetheless “failed to capture the hallucinatory nature of our national politics” and thus felt a little irrelevant.

Ahead of Trump’s speech, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warned his caucus not to become the story. It didn’t work. This morning, the bible of Washington conventional wisdom, Politico Playbook, declared that “the reaction in the chamber was the story.”

A few Democrats decided to skip the speech altogether, but not enough for the boycott to be apparent in footage or images from the House chamber. Dozens of women in Congress wore pink as some sort of protest, but the message was so vague as to be illegible as anything other than generic protest. Other members brandished little signs—I saw them variously mocked as church fans, auction paddles, or table-tennis paddles—with text including “FALSE,” “MUSK STEALS,” and “SAVE MEDICAID.” (They at least opted against brandishing egg cartons as a comment on inflation.) A group of Democrats invited laid-off federal workers to join them, but without the microphone, they didn’t have much way to draw attention to their guests. Representative Jasmine Crockett posted a lip-synch to “Not Like Us,” for some reason. The scene-stealer was Representative Al Green, a veteran showman who got himself ejected for heckling Trump a few minutes in.

None of this matters a great deal in the specifics. The State of the Union (and its off-year sibling) don’t tend to have much lasting political or policy import. But the image of Democrats sitting glumly in the chamber—a mostly passive audience for Trump, neither supporting him nor meaningfully resisting him—felt like a metaphor for their broader messaging struggle. If Green’s act, complete with a cane waved at the president, was a bit buffoonish, at least he looked like he cared.

My social-media feeds were flooded last night, as they have been over the past few weeks, with progressives wincing, groaning, and gnashing their teeth about Democratic fecklessness. This is not merely an online phenomenon, as MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem recently reported. Only one in five voters approves of the party’s leadership, and they’re underwater even among Democrats (40 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove).

Part of the problem may be that Democrats respond to each new crisis slowly. Jeffries seems to be eyeing the coming budget battle as his moment to flex power. Republicans are unlikely to be able to pass a bill that satisfies both far-right lawmakers and vulnerable moderates, which means they will need House Democrats’ help to pass a bill. As a matter of tactics, Jeffries may be right, but it’s a very old-school, procedural approach to a moment that Democrats are simultaneously trying to convince voters is chaotic and unprecedented.

During his speech last night, Trump claimed a historic electoral mandate, despite one of the narrowest wins in recent memory. Democratic leaders speak like they have accepted that as true. “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have,” Jeffries said last month. “What leverage do we have? Republicans have repeatedly lectured America—they control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It’s their government.”

Even insofar as Jeffries is technically right, Democrats’ best leverage is in motivating the roughly half of the country that voted against Trump. “No We Can’t” is a bad way to do that. That’s one reason that, as I wrote last week, the odds of a progressive equivalent to the Tea Party—a large grassroots movement that furiously opposes Republicans but also has little use for the Democratic establishment—are higher than ever.

If anything good comes from last night’s speech, perhaps it will be the hastening of the end of the State of the Union, a bloated, obsolete ritual. The president is required under the Constitution to report to Congress annually, but that has taken the form of a speech only since 1913. When I was a kid, the State of the Union felt majestic: a moment of comity and decorum, where the president and Congress sat on a mostly equal footing and the focus was on policy.

Those days are long gone. Hectoring—both by and directed at—the president is now standard. In a funny hot-mic moment before Trump started last night, Vice President J. D. Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson were caught joking about how hard it is to sit through a long speech on the dais. “The hardest thing was doing it during Biden, when the speech was a stupid campaign speech,” Johnson said.

This is an ironic remark, given the strident, partisan speech that followed, but he’s not wrong: The State of the Union has become just another political rally. Several Supreme Court justices have already concluded that it’s not productive, seemly, or fun to be there, and they skip. Picking a low point of Trump’s speech last night is challenging—elevating himself above George Washington? Telling a debunked lie about Social Security beneficiaries? Reprised threats against Greenland and Panama?—but some of the most uncomfortable moments were a showdown between Trump and Senator Elizabeth Warren, whom he called “Pocahontas,” as well as Trump’s repeated, needless attacks on Biden.

It’s hard to think of any reason most Democrats would want to attend Trump’s State of the Union next year, where they will surely be browbeaten and used as partisan props but are unlikely to learn anything new about his policy agenda. That would be a much stronger and clearer message than anything Democrats tried this year. But then again, we haven’t seen the party unite much around its best interests lately.

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Today’s News

Donald Trump paused auto tariffs for Mexico and Canada for a month, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. A divided Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s foreign-aid freeze, kicking the issue back to lower courts. The Trump administration paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine in an effort to pressure Ukraine’s government to cooperate with America’s plans for peace negotiations.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Coaching Is the New ‘Asking Your Friends for Help’

By Olga Khazan

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).

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.

Read the full article.

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Mauro Pimentel / AFP / Getty

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evening Read

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

When America Persecutes Its Teachers

By Clay Risen

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

Read the full article.

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

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Somewhere, Richard Nixon is raging with envy. Nixon was twice left for politically dead, after the 1960 presidential election and then the 1962 California governor’s race, but Watergate proved too much for even him to overcome. (Not that he didn’t try, as Elizabeth Drew reported in The Atlantic in 2014.)

Andrew Cuomo, inheritor of Nixon’s resting scowl face, may have found a way to do what the 37th president couldn’t: come back from an apparently career-ending scandal. Over the weekend, the Democrat launched a campaign for mayor of New York, and polling right now shows him with a wide lead, thanks to the corruption allegations plaguing the incumbent and newly minted Donald Trump ally Eric Adams.

The idea that Cuomo is the man to clean things up, however, is ridiculous. He was forced to step down as governor of New York in 2021 after revelations that his administration covered up mishandling of COVID and multiple allegations of sexual harassment. (Cuomo has denied wrongdoing but did admit to instances that were “misinterpreted as unwanted flirtation.”) Cuomo’s candidacy is an indictment of New York City politics: A city so eager to tell the rest of us how great it is should be able to produce a better class of mayoral contender (a point made pithily by The Onion with this parody headline: “De Blasio: ‘Well, Well, Well, Not So Easy to Find a Mayor That Doesn’t Suck Shit, Huh?’”).

The nascent comeback is also a sign of the weird amnesia some Americans seem to have developed about the past few years. After his resignation, Cuomo followed his brother, Chris, into the media, launching a podcast where he assailed cancel culture. The implication was that he was a victim; his reemergence as a candidate suggests that the podcast successfully spread that idea, but Cuomo is a victim of nothing except his own bad behavior.

In the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, Cuomo’s clear, consistent briefings made him a media star, and they provided a counter to then-President Trump’s erratic statements. As it turned out, though, New York wasn’t especially effective at fighting the virus, and Cuomo’s administration went to great lengths to cover up the number of deaths in nursing homes.

Then, in August 2021, the state attorney general’s office released an investigation finding that “Governor Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of both federal and state laws.” The probe found 11 credible accusers who brought allegations against Cuomo.. He denied wrongdoing, though he admitted to making at least some of the alleged statements. “I acknowledge some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that,” he said.

It is true, and irrelevant, that Cuomo was not ultimately charged with any crimes. The facts in either of these scandals still ought to disqualify him from holding public office, and his resurrection represents a failure of the Democratic Party.

“Parties help to make political choices legible for voters, and, even more importantly, they organize politicians in pursuit of collective policy goals,” Jacob M. Grumbach, a political scientist at UC Berkeley who studies state-level politics, wrote to me in an email. The system is working if “the goals of the group come before the ambitions of individual politicians,” Grumbach said. The Democratic Party knows there are potential candidates who would be better than Cuomo for the party as a whole, but it’s “unable to coordinate to stop Cuomo from using his political capital to enter and likely win the NYC mayoral elections,” he said.

Instead, Democrats seem to be either acquiescing or openly backing him. Representative Ritchie Torres, a young moderate who has become prominent for criticizing the party’s progressive wing, endorsed Cuomo—in an exclusive given to the conservative New York Post, no less—as someone who would battle extremists on the left and right. Torres refused to “relitigate” Cuomo’s resignation, telling the Post: “America loves a comeback, New York loves a comeback.” Okay, but doesn’t it matter who’s doing the comeback, and what they’re coming back from? Cuomo is likely benefiting from a broader societal backlash to cancel culture and “wokeness.” But if, in order to curb the far left, Democrats like Torres are willing to embrace an alleged sex pest who tried to cover up seniors’ deaths, is it worth it?

This kind of selective amnesia about the recent past is not exclusive to New York or to politics—it’s afflicting many areas of American culture. The film director Brett Ratner, who faced multiple credible accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct in 2017 (which he denied, and for which he wasn’t charged), released a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump that received a reported $40 million licensing fee from Amazon. Jon Gruden, a football coach who was forced to resign for emails that used homophobic language, among other things, has been restored to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Ring of Honor. The late Pete Rose, who in 2022 blithely dismissed the allegation of having had a sexual relationship with a 14- or 15-year-old girl by telling a reporter, “It was 55 years ago, babe,” is in line for a presidential pardon and possible reinstatement in Major League Baseball after he was barred for gambling.

But politics is where voters and institutions seem most ready to ignore the past. As my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote last week, the whimpering end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia has led many on the center and left to pretend that no scandal existed. “But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing,” Jonathan wrote.

In some Trump-related cases, his administration is trying to force the country to forget what happened. The most maddening of the Trump scandals was his alleged hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The president escaped a trial on the case by winning the election, but the basic facts were not really in dispute: He possessed boxes and boxes of documents, he had no credible claim to them, and he didn’t give them back when asked to by the government. Now the FBI has handed the materials back over to Trump. And as my colleague Quinta Jurecic recently wrote, Trump and his administration are trying (in vain) to pretend that the January 6 insurrection never happened, yanking down government webpages and issuing pardons.

At the peak of social-justice activism in America, critics complained that pulling down statues of Confederates or removing the names of tarnished figures from institutions was tantamount to erasing history. Now, as the movement wanes, a different message is emerging: Some parts of history are apparently fine to erase.

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Donald Trump said that 25 percent tariffs will be imposed on Canada and Mexico tomorrow, and that there is “no room left” for last-minute deals. In the first full month of Trump’s presidency, the number of migrants illegally crossing America’s southern border hit a new low not seen in at least 25 years, according to preliminary government data obtained by CBS News. Israel will stop all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza until Hamas accepts the new terms for an extension of the cease-fire agreement, Israeli officials said yesterday.

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Evening Read

lllustration by Katherine Lam

Migrants Prepare to Lose Their American Lives

By Stephanie McCrummen

At a Mexican restaurant, the owner stashed newly laminated private signs under the host stand, ready to slap on the walls of the kitchen and a back dining room where workers could hide if agents arrived without a proper warrant.

Inside a house nearby, a woman named Consuelo went to the living-room window and checked the street for unusual cars, then checked the time as her undocumented husband left for work, calculating when he was supposed to arrive at the suburban country club where he’d worked for 27 years, where he’d earned an “all-star” employee award, and which now felt like enemy territory. She lit the first prayer candle of the day.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: NEON; Patrick T. Fallon / Getty; Trae Patton.

Watch. Anora (available to rent online) swept the Oscars, proving that Hollywood’s biggest night can still recognize indie movies, David Sims writes.

Examine. The trend known as “anti-fan art” hinges on irony: The creators’ best works are inspired by the pop culture they disdain, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If I invoke the musical style called Americana, who comes to mind? Jeff Tweedy? Tyler Childers? Jason Isbell? As Giovanni Russonello wrote in 2013, the genre is heavily white and male, in contrast to its influences. I’ve been listening a lot over the past week to “Cry Baby,” a song by Sunny War that features Valerie June. It’s a summit of two young Black women from Tennessee who are making music—and a reminder that there’s no American music, or Americana, without Black music. Sunny War’s Anarchist Gospel was one of my favorite records of 2023, and Armageddon in a Summer Dress, which features “Cry Baby,” is one of my favorites of 2025 so far.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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