For years, Donald Trump’s critics have accused him of behaving like a crooked used-car salesman. Yesterday afternoon, he did it for real on the White House South Lawn.

Squinting in the sun with Elon Musk, Trump stood next to five Tesla vehicles, holding a piece of paper with handwritten notes about their features and costs. Trump said he would purchase a car himself at full price. Then Trump and Musk got into one of the cars. Musk explained that the electric vehicle was “like a golf cart that goes really fast.” Trump offered his own praise to the camera: “Wow. That’s beautiful. This is a different panel than I’ve—everything’s computer!”

This was a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s stock, and certainly beneath the office of the presidency. But you ought not to overlook just how embarrassing the spectacle was for Musk. The subtext of the event—during which Trump also declared that the White House would label any acts of violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism—was the ongoing countrywide protests against Tesla, due to Musk’s role in the Trump administration. In some cities, protesters have defaced or damaged Tesla vehicles and set fire to the company’s charging stations. Tesla’s stock price has fallen sharply—almost 50 percent since its mid-December, postelection peak—on the back of terrible sales numbers in Europe. The hastily assembled White House press event was presented as a show of solidarity, but the optics were quite clear: Musk needed Trump to come in and fix his mess for him.

And Tesla isn’t the only Musk venture that’s struggling. SpaceX’s massive new Starship rocket has exploded twice this year during test flights. And Ontario, Canada, has canceled its contract with his Starlink internet company to provide service to remote communities, citing Trump’s tariffs. According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Musk is $148 billion poorer than he was on Inauguration Day (he is currently worth $333.1 billion).

Just 17 days after wielding a chain saw and dancing triumphantly onstage at CPAC, the billionaire looked like he was about to cry on the Fox Business channel earlier this week. He confessed that he was having “great difficulty” running his many businesses, and let out a long, dismal sigh and shrugged when asked if he might go back to his businesses after he’s done in the administration.

The world’s richest man can be cringe, stilted, and manic in public appearances, but rarely have I seen him appear as defeated as he has of late, not two months into his role as a presidential adviser. In the past few weeks, he’s been chastised by some of Trump’s agency heads for overstepping his bounds as an adviser (Trump sided with the agency heads). Reports suggest that some Republican lawmakers are frustrated with Musk’s bluster and that the DOGE approach to slashing the federal bureaucracy is angering constituents and making lawmakers less popular in their districts. DOGE has produced few concrete “wins” for the Trump administration and has instead alienated many Americans who see Musk as presiding over a cruel operation that is haphazardly firing and rehiring people and taking away benefits. Numerous national polls in recent weeks indicate that a majority of respondents disapprove of Musk’s role and actions in the government.

Musk’s deep sighs on cable TV and emergency Tesla junkets on the White House lawn are hints that he may be beginning to understand the precariousness of his situation. He is well known for his high risk tolerance, overleveraging, and seemingly wild business bets. But his role at DOGE represents the biggest reputational and, consequently, financial gamble of his career. Musk is playing a dangerous game, and he looks to be losing control of the narrative.

And the narrative is everything. Elon Musk is many things—the richest man in the world, an internet-addled conspiracy theorist, the controller of six companies, perhaps even the shadow president of the United States—but most importantly, he is an idea. The value of Musk may be tied more to his image than his actual performance. He’s a human meme stock.

A CNN clip from late October captures this notion. In it, a reporter is standing outside one of Musk’s America PAC rallies in Pennsylvania, interviewing the CEO’s superfans, most of whom are unequivocal that Musk is “the smartest man in the world.” He has an engineer’s mindset, one attendee claims, meaning he sees the world differently. Two other men in the clip say that Musk got them to pay attention to politics (and to Trump, specifically). These people had fallen hard for a cultivated image of  Musk as a Thomas Edison or Tony Stark type, a great man of history who is single-handedly pushing the bounds of progress. Musk has had great success popularizing electric vehicles and building new rockets (though many still debate his direct involvement in the engineering). These supporters might have been fans of his companies, but they seem to have also fallen for the myth of his genius, a story born out of years of hagiographic books, news articles reporting his hyperbolic claims, and Musk’s own ability to command attention.

[Read: Elon Musk’s texts shatter the myth of the tech genius]

The image of Musk as a true visionary has proved surprisingly durable. In the early to mid-2010s, Musk took advantage of a different era of technology coverage—one that was more gadget-focused and largely uncritical—to hype his ideas for the future of transportation and interplanetary exploration. At that time, Tesla, his signature project, was coded as progressive and marketed as being in line with climate-change goals. The cultural dynamic of these ideas has changed, but the fundamental product being sold by Musk has not: one man with a singular ability to brute force his way to the future.

Musk’s trajectory changed after Trump was first elected president. It was during this period that Musk—already an incessant poster—realized how Twitter could be used to command an unbelievable amount of attention. Even when that attention was negative, the process of repeatedly making himself the main character on the platform elevated Musk’s profile. He became more polarizing (for chastising journalists, behaving erratically, making a supposed weed joke on Twitter that got him in trouble with the SEC, and getting sued for defamation for calling somebody a “pedo guy”), yet this somehow only added to Musk’s lore.

For years, valid criticisms of the Tesla executive came with an asterisk: He’s erratic, crude, even a little unstable, but that’s all part of the larger visionary package. Kara Swisher showcased this dynamic well in a 2018 New York Times column titled “Elon Musk Is the Id of Tech.” “I find the hagiography around him tiresome and even toxic,” she wrote. But also, “Mr. Musk’s mind and ideas are big ones.” As Swisher noted, Musk’s attention-seeking at the time had a secondary effect of alienating him from some of his peers and fans. But tweet by tweet, Musk found a different audience, one eager to embrace his visionary image, provided he took up their crusade against “wokeism.”

During the pandemic, Musk’s posting frequency intensified considerably as he began to stake out more reactionary territory. He called the COVID-19 panic in March 2020 “dumb” and later that year tweeted that “pronouns suck.” Musk endeared himself to the right wing by positioning himself as a free-speech warrior, a posture that ultimately led him to purchase Twitter. Right-wing influencers and the MAGA faithful saw Musk’s turn as proof of their movement’s ascendance, but what has happened since Musk turned Twitter into X is nothing short of audience capture: Musk has fully become the person his right-wing fanboys want him to be, pushing far beyond a mere  dalliance with conspiracy theories and “Great Replacement” rhetoric. It is hardly controversial to suggest based on Musk's posts and blatant political activism that the centibillionaire has been further radicalized by his platform, which he then turned into a political weapon to help elect Trump.

Musk’s X and MAGA bets mostly paid off, at least in the near term. Before Musk bought Twitter, I highlighted a comment from Lily Francus, then the director of quant research at Moody’s Analytics, who noted, “I do think fundamentally that a significant fraction of Tesla’s value is due to the fact that Elon can command this attention continuously.” Francus doesn’t go as far as to say that Tesla behaves like a meme stock—which can surge in price after going viral as a result of coordinated efforts online—but that Musk himself has this quality. Musk’s Twitter purchase was a bad deal financially and has been detrimental to X’s bottom line, but his ownership of the platform helped boost his cultural and political relevance by keeping him in the center of the news cycle. Similarly, Musk going all in on Donald Trump, becoming a megadonor to Republicans, and ultimately getting the DOGE gig all resulted in Tesla stock soaring—up until a point.

You can argue that there’s a flywheel effect to all of this. Musk’s polarizing, upsetting, attention-seeking behavior has made him unavoidable and increased his political influence, which, in turn, has increased his net worth overall. This has only improved Musk’s standing with Trump, who both respects great wealth and appears flattered by the notion that the richest man in the world wants to spend his time shadowing him around Washington and Mar-a-Lago.

Musk is used to being leveraged, trading on his reputation or his illiquid assets to keep the flywheel spinning. To his credit, he tends to make it work. He’s flouted the law when that has been advantageous to his business interests and taken advantage of a culture of elite impunity. He’s long been unafraid to get sued or reprimanded by a government agency. But two important things are different in his current situation. The first is the stakes of his reputational bet—rather than alienating himself from progressives or the media, Musk is threatening to meddle with essential government services, such as Social Security, that millions of Americans rely on. Indeed, Musk floated the idea of cutting Social Security benefits in his Fox Business interview on Monday. Whether he’s in charge of cuts or not, as DOGE’s figurehead, Musk risks infuriating countless people who object to the federal firings. Breaking the government is orders of magnitude different than buying a niche but influential microblogging platform.

[Read: There are no more red lines]

The second difference is the man he’s tied his reputation to: Trump. Musk’s attention-seeking and fondness for organizational chaos are usually unmatched, giving him an advantage in most of his dealings. This is not the case with Trump, whose shamelessness and penchant for discarding close confidants when they become liabilities are well documented. Musk is rich and powerful, but he is not the durable, singular political figure that Trump is. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario where this ends poorly for Musk. The flywheel could reverse: Musk could become universally reviled, causing the protests to increase and his net worth to shrink. The richest man in the world is valuable to Trump, as is the myth of Musk as the modern Edison. But mere billionaires? They are fungible tokens and easily interchangeable dais members in Trump’s eyes—just ask Mark Zuckerberg.

It would be foolish to suggest with any certainty that Musk is cooked. Historically, he’s managed to wriggle out of trouble. Perhaps the most hopeful outcome for Musk is that Trump has too much of his own presidency tied to Musk to throw him under the bus. It’s too early to say.

Yesterday’s White House stunt had all the hallmarks of Trump corruption, but there was something else, too—an air of desperation. It was a tacit admission that the protests are working and that Musk and Trump are rattled enough by current sentiment that they’re willing to turn the South Lawn into a showroom. Watching Musk clam up on Fox Business or quietly idle next to Trump in front of the White House, it’s even easier than normal to see past Musk’s trademark bullshitting and bluster. These moments make clear that this time, Musk has wagered the only thing he can’t easily buy back—the very myth he created for himself.

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.

From 1912 to 1951, Barnes amassed one of the world’s greatest private collections of modern European artwork—more Cézannes (69) and Renoirs (an absurd 181) than any other museum; Matisse’s game-changing The Joy of Life ; Seurat’s extraordinary Models ; the list goes on and on. The Barnes Foundation was officially an educational institution, but was effectively America’s first museum of modern art. (The New York organization that put capital letters on those words is four years younger.) But if Barnes’s collection is a model to emulate, the saga of his organization is a lesson in founder’s-syndrome perils.

Coinciding with the centennial of the Barnes’s opening, we have Blake Gopnik’s breezy new biography of the man, The Maverick’s Museum, and Neil L. Rudenstine’s reissued history of the institution, The House of Barnes, first published in 2012, when its legal struggles were above-the-fold news. The two deserve to be read together, because the slippage of identity between the man, the art, and the institution provides both the melodrama and the farce of the tale.

Born into ungenteel poverty in 1872, Barnes was smart enough to gain admission to Philadelphia’s selective Central High School and the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Realizing, perhaps, that he lacked something in the bedside-manner department, he went into chemical research, and in 1902 he and his partner commercially released the antiseptic Argyrol, which became standard in American maternity wards for the prevention of perinatal infections. As a chemist, Barnes was a one-hit wonder, but Argyrol made him a fortune.

At first he used his new money in predictable ways. He built a mansion on the Main Line and named it “Lauraston” for his wife. He bought fast cars (a passion that would be the death of him) and joined the local fox hunt. He also did less clichéd things, such as studying philosophy, reading Sigmund Freud, and supporting civil rights. A fan of the pragmatist thinkers William James and John Dewey, Barnes believed that a theory’s worth was measured not by its elegance but by its consequences in the world, and he treated his Argyrol factory as a laboratory for social experimentation. He hired Black and white workers, men and women. Contra then-flourishing notions of top-down, rigidly mandated workplace “efficiency,” Barnes boasted that in his factory, “each participant had evolved his or her own method of doing a particular job.” The “her” in that sentence alone is noteworthy.

At the same time, Barnes was a crank of operatic grandiosity—thin-skinned, bellicose, distrustful, fickle, and vindictive. Ezra Pound described him as living in “a state of high-tension hysteria, at war with mankind.” His bile could be witty, but more often traded on playground scatology, ethnic slurs, and sexual taunts. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was “a house of artistic and educational prostitution”; when a newspaper critic took offense at “the fevered passion for unclean things!” (naked people) in Barnes’s collection, he sent a letter impugning her “well-recognized sexual vagaries.”

Curious about art, he enlisted the advice of a high-school friend, the Ashcan School painter William Glackens, and in 1912 sent Glackens to Paris with a wish list and $20,000 (about $650,000 today). Finding that the Impressionists Barnes sought were costlier than anticipated, Glackens skewed modern. In the course of two weeks, he bought 33 works, including a Picasso, a Cézanne, and the first Van Gogh to enter an American collection, his spellbinding The Postman. When Barnes made his own trip to Paris a few months later, he spent three times the money in half the time and lived up to every stereotype the French had about American millionaires. “He did literally wave his chequebook in the air,” Gertrude Stein wrote to a friend.

Modernism held attraction for someone who considered himself a pugnaciously original thinker. Collecting old art was posh and respectable, but in an America still scandalized by the sight of breasts, collecting modern art was outrageous. Within 10 years, Barnes had acquired some 700 paintings. But art to him was more than a proxy for cultural sophistication and a fat bank account. It made him feel things—intense and important things—and he would spend the rest of his life trying to map precisely how it did so.

If his obsession with Renoir’s late, big-bottomed, pinheaded nudes seems “idiosyncratic in the extreme,” as Rudenstine writes, it was shared by Picasso and Matisse, who prized radical departures in form. Barnes was a turbulent person and Renoir was his happy place, full of pretty colors and willing flesh. Cézanne appealed for different reasons. Barnes found heroism in the artist’s “social strangeness,” and saw it mirrored in the art: “His deformations of naturalistic appearances are akin to the brusque remarks … which, when sociability is the rule, project new interpretations upon conventionally accepted ideas.”

Barnes’s eye wasn’t perfect—he passed on Van Gogh’s Starry Night—but his instincts were remarkably good. He began buying African sculpture in 1922 and amassed an important collection. He bought old masters whose agitation or distortions recalled the moderns he loved. He bought Egyptian and Greco-Roman antiquities. He bought Native American serapes and jewelry. He bought American folk art and—repudiating the distinction between “art” and “craft”—acquired quantities of handwrought hinges, keyhole plates, and door knockers, which he hung alongside the paintings. To Kenneth Clark, then the head of the National Gallery in London, he wrote that he saw “no essential esthetic difference between the forms of the great painters or sculptors, and those of the iron-workers.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Landscape With Figures, Near Cagnes (circa 1910) is one of the Barnes Foundation’s 181 works by the artist. (Sepia Times / Getty)

None of this was quite as extraordinary as Barnes liked to pretend. The connection among folk art, handcrafts, and modernism was made by a number of curators and collectors at the time. Concerning the avant-garde, John Quinn, the visionary behind the 1913 Armory Show, was more adventurous, leaning into Cubism and Duchamp’s radical experiments where Barnes balked. (Their rivalry was such that Barnes, tiring of his usual name-calling, hired private detectives to dig up dirt on Quinn.) Others were not far behind. MoMA’s 2024 book Inventing the Modern celebrates the museum’s female founders—Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan—and the energetic idealism required to get these efforts off the ground in an often hostile culture.

Barnes exaggerated his temerity in the face of philistines partly because he longed to be recognized as more than just a world-class shopper. Applying his chemist’s brain to locating the “scientific” principles behind his aesthetic experience, he concluded that what mattered in art was form—line, color, space, movement. Contextual data such as biographies and subject matter just distracted from the real act of looking. These formalist ideas had been articulated by various critics and art historians before Barnes, though, as usual, he took them to extremes. His 530-page “statement of principles,” The Art in Painting (1925), includes no titles for works reproduced in the book, lest readers be led astray by subject matter.

Much more original was his application of this formalism to John Dewey’s theories of experimental education and social reform. He could cite Dewey’s 1916 book Democracy and Education “almost chapter and verse,” Gopnik tells us. Barnes was convinced that “plain people of average intelligence” could be brought to the kind of art apotheosis he had experienced, just by knowing how to look. He derided art history as a discipline and art scholars individually, but he couldn’t abandon the idea that he himself had expertise other people needed.

Like many people who get a lot out of looking, Barnes was annoyed at the casual attitudes of museum visitors. When the Barnes Foundation opened its doors in 1925—in a purpose-built neoclassical building within a 12-acre arboretum adjacent to Barnes’s home—its indenture permitted no posh parties and no unvetted visitors. The art would not travel or be reproduced in color. To see it, you applied to take classes in the Barnes method. It was not a museum; it was a school.

Inside, he arranged (and regularly rearranged) the collection in “ensembles” that mixed objects of different ages, origins, and functions. Most people do this at home, but Barnes’s stridently symmetrical arrangements—big artworks in the middle, smaller ones to either side, formal echoes bouncing around the room—were emphatically pedagogical. In Room 15, for example, Matisse’s Red Madras Headdress (1907) is flanked by (among other things) a pair of watery landscapes, a pair of fans, a pair of soup ladles, and a pair of pictures, each showing a woman and a dog (one of them from the hand of William Glackens’s daughter, age 9). The effect is of an art-history curriculum designed by Wes Anderson.

Admission was doled out on the basis of whim and choler. Having prior expertise or impressive connections was usually a black mark: T. S. Eliot, Le Corbusier, Barnett Newman, and the heads of both MoMA and the Whitney were among the rejected. Student behavior was monitored. Questioning the method or viewing in the wrong way could get you bounced. Rumor was that Barnes and his second in command, Violette de Mazia, lurked incognito or listened through microphones for heretical conversation. Such ritualistic protocols can actually enhance the experience of viewing: Perceiving the specialness of the opportunity, people will give heightened attention. So while some Barnes students rebelled, others became acolytes.

Dewey, one of Barnes’s very few lasting friends, wrote in his book Art as Experience that the educational work of the collection was of “a pioneer quality comparable to the best that has been done in any field during the present generation, that of science not excepted.” Considering that the science of that generation had produced antibiotics and the theory of relativity, that’s quite a claim.

Albert C. Barnes, 1872–1951 (Keystone-France / Getty)

Fifty-three and childless when the foundation opened its doors, Barnes was not oblivious to the need to arrange its future beyond his lifetime. But his vision for it was inflexible. He unsuccessfully floated prospective partnerships to the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, and Sarah Lawrence College, whose exasperated president finally wrote: “You can stuff your money, your pictures, your iron work, your antiques, and the whole goddamn thing right up the Schuylkill River.” Barnes then trained an affectionate eye on nearby Lincoln University—the second-oldest historically Black university in the nation, alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall.

His relationship with Black culture and Black leaders was characteristically complex. He considered spirituals “America’s only great music,” and his admiration for African sculpture was deep. But this appreciation was often tinged with condescension. The only Black painter in his collection was not one of those artists who had been to Paris and absorbed the lessons of modernism, but the self-taught “primitive” Horace Pippin. (Similarly, the women in his collection tended toward the doe-eyed and decorative. He returned the Georgia O’Keeffes he’d bought, but kept his Marie Laurencins.)

Still, he forged a relationship with Lincoln’s president, Horace Mann Bond, and in October 1950 altered the terms of succession so that Lincoln would eventually assume control of the foundation’s board. This relationship, too, might well have gone south, but in July 1951 Barnes sped through a stop sign in his Packard convertible and collided with a tractor trailer.

For the next 37 years, Violette de Mazia carried the Barnes torch and guarded the Barnes gates. Admission became harder, the dogma stricter, the students fewer but more ardent. When the state forced the tax-exempt foundation to open to the public two days a week, Barnes students picketed. In 1987, the philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto described the sorry state of affairs—the “stunning works” imprisoned in “the sullen museum, with its musty smells and impassive custodians.”

[Read: The controversy over moving the world’s best art collection you haven’t heard of]

De Mazia’s death, in 1988, snapped the foundation out of its torpor. That it had been careening toward insolvency now became clear, and the only paths to income—admission fees, loan shows, event rentals—were blocked by Barnes’s indenture. The new Lincoln-appointed board fought to break the terms; former Barnes students fought to preserve them. The state fought to increase access; neighbors fought to restrict it. Accusations of racism and corruption bounced around. Eventually the board proposed moving the whole collection to a new location near the Philadelphia Museum of Art. YouTube comments below the 2009 anti-move film The Art of the Steal convey the ensuing outrage: “My soul cries for this loss,” “Shame!!!,” “I Truly hope The Philadelphia Of Art [sic] Burns to the ground … art and all.” If this fury seems disproportionate to the situation—a nonprofit institution in need of funds finds a way to preserve its core assets while increasing public access—it was certainly very Barnesian.

The Barnes Foundation has now been on Philadelphia’s Museum Mile for more than a decade. The art is all there—Cézanne’s great The Card Players, the many pink ladies in search of their clothes, the Wes Anderson ensembles. From ceiling vaults to baseboards, every room has been replicated as it appeared when Barnes died. But they sit in a different building, under a different set of rules.

Entry is no longer an achievement on par with getting past the bouncer at Berghain. All you have to do is cough up $30. Inside, you can interrupt your viewing with a cup of coffee in the café or a visit to the gift shop, where you can buy a Van Gogh Postman mug or socks adorned with Horace Pippin’s African American family at prayer (a strange choice for footwear, but maybe the logical outcome of pure formalist thought—the colors and shapes look fine on an ankle).

[Read: Are fine art museums the next Starbucks?]

In other words, outside the re-created rooms, you get the standard, bustling, consumer-oriented museum experience, not arboreal serenity, and inside the rooms, you have to put up with the presence of other people, not all of them models of rectitude. But there is nothing like it. The absence of wall texts can be a welcome relief from current museum practice. And if the ensembles depend more on visual rhyming than on ideas, they really do get you to look. If you want, you can even take classes in the Barnes method, without passing some capricious test of merit.

Arthur Danto was right, though: Barnes is still remembered “for the spectacular collection of early modern art that bears his name, for the enthusiasm with which he kept people from viewing it and for the terrible temper he expended on behalf of these two projects. He was a gifted but an extremely tiresome man.” Barnes’s obvious intelligence, Gopnik observes, is “overshadowed, even eclipsed, by his real emotional and social stupidity.”

And yet, there is something gripping about his struggle, year after year, to solve the riddle of art. By all accounts, Barnes was a man with no theory of mind: Lacking any insight into the subjective worlds of other people, he found their behavior relentlessly inexplicable and infuriating. It must have been exhausting. In an essay soon after he started collecting, he wrote: “Good paintings are more satisfying companions than the best of books and infinitely more so than most very nice people.”

In art, he believed he saw the subjective experience of others—Renoir, El Greco, a Fang craftsperson—made concrete and visible, even measurable. It sat still for examination. His arguments circle endlessly (Rudenstine rightly calls them tautological), seeking the mechanism whereby this subjectivity was transferred from one person to another via form. Each work of art, he wrote, “records a discovery and that discovery can be verified, the artist’s experience can be shared, [but] only by one who has himself learned to see.”

Like mercury, however, the objective mechanism he sought for this intuitive process always wriggled away from his touch. Look at Cézanne’s The Card Players or Renoir’s Henriot Family and you see shifting edges, unstable spaces, fragmentation, dissolution, impermanence. But in life, Rudenstine observes, Barnes found “ambiguity, irresolution, incompletion, obscurity … impossible for him to tolerate.” His need to lock things down nearly killed the foundation that was his great life’s work. The tragedy of Barnes was that the things he could understand least held the key to what he loved most.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Cranky Visionary.”

On January 29, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a U.S. Army helicopter near Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people, in the deadliest U.S. air disaster in recent history. That alone would have been a crisis for the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency charged with ensuring the safety of air passengers.

But the next day, President Donald Trump deepened the FAA’s problems by blaming the disaster on diversity programs, a pronouncement that baffled many in the agency’s workforce. At least one senior executive decided to quit in disgust, I was told.

Rescue teams were still pulling bodies from the Potomac River.

That same day, FAA employees including air-traffic controllers, safety inspectors, and mechanical engineers received an email advising them to leave their job under a buyout program announced just two days before. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” urged the email, sent to all federal workers.

Many FAA employees were prepared to follow that advice, agreeing to leave their government job and get paid through September, according to internal government records I obtained as well as interviews with current and former U.S. officials who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. More than 1,300 FAA employees replied to the email, out of a workforce of about 45,000. Most of those who responded selected “Yes, I confirm that I am resigning/retiring.”

Initially, that included about 100 air-traffic controllers who replied to the email, threatening a crucial and already understaffed component of the workforce. Interest in the offer among air-traffic controllers was alarming, agency officials told me, because an internal FAA safety report had found that staffing at the air-traffic-control tower at Reagan airport was “not normal” at the time of January’s deadly crash. It took the agency, which is housed within the Department of Transportation, about a week to clarify that certain job categories were exempt from early retirement, including air-traffic controllers, according to a February 5 email I reviewed. That guidance arrived in agency inboxes only after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had announced it on cable television, saying on February 2, “We’re going to keep all our safety positions in place.”

[Read: The near misses at airports have been telling us something]

But agency officials told me that many jobs with critical safety functions are indeed being sacrificed, with any possible replacements uncertain because of the government-wide hiring freeze. And records I reviewed show that employees classified as eligible for early retirement—and therefore allowed to walk off the job—include aviation-safety technicians and assistants, quality-assurance specialists, and engineers. Meanwhile, the buyouts reach far beyond air-traffic safety, affecting other core elements of the agency. Top officials in the finance, acquisitions, and compliance divisions have left or are expected to go.

As hundreds of career officials depart, the FAA has a fresh face in its midst: Ted Malaska, a SpaceX engineer who arrived at the agency last month with instructions from SpaceX’s owner, Elon Musk, to deploy equipment from the SpaceX subsidiary Starlink across the FAA’s communications network. The directive promises to make the nation’s air-traffic-control system dependent on the billionaire Trump ally, using equipment that experts say has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.

Starlink is an internet service that works by installing terminals, or dishes, that communicate with the company’s overhead satellites. Already, terminals are being tested at two sites, in Alaska and New Jersey, the FAA has confirmed. Musk, meanwhile, took to X, the social-media platform he owns, to warn last month that the FAA’s existing communications system “is breaking down very rapidly” and “putting air traveler safety at serious risk.”

The FAA’s turn to Starlink as a solution for its aging communications network poses a challenge to a $2.4 billion contract awarded to Verizon in 2023 to upgrade the agency’s network. FAA lawyers have been working 80-hour weeks to figure out what to do—whether they need to cancel or amend parts of the contract or else find the funds to supplement Verizon’s work with Starlink equipment.

The cumulative result is a depleted and demoralized FAA workforce at a time of declining public confidence in aviation safety. A poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released last month shows that 64 percent of American adults say air travel is “very safe” or “somewhat safe,” down from 71 percent last year. In addition to the collision near Reagan airport, several other recent incidents have rattled the public, including the crash of a medical jet in Philadelphia, killing seven, and the midair collision of two small planes at a regional airport in southern Arizona, killing two.

Inside the FAA, morale is at an all-time low, two agency officials told me. A former senior executive told me that recent events—beginning with the crash and the pressure to take early retirement—have sunk the agency into “complete chaos.” The consequences, the former executive said, could be far-reaching. The FAA oversees an industry that supports $1.8 trillion in economic activity and about 4 percent of American GDP. It keeps millions of people safe.

“This isn’t Twitter, where the worst that happens is people losing access to their accounts,” the former senior executive said. “People die when FAA workers are distracted and processes are broken.”

Disruptions to U.S. airspace can have many different triggers, including severe weather, military operations, and accident investigations. Last week, disruptions occurred at airports from Florida to Pennsylvania because of the explosion of SpaceX’s Starship—the rocket that Musk wants to use to take people to Mars—on its latest test flight, which rained down debris and snarled air traffic.

[Read: Fear of flying is different now]

When these disturbances occur, sometimes suddenly, it falls to aeronautical-information specialists to update charts, maps, and flight procedures that each day guide more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace.

Trump’s drive to downsize the federal government, as directed by Musk’s DOGE initiative, is drastically reducing the number of aeronautical-information specialists and other workers in critical safety roles. Interviews and internal FAA records show that as many as 12 percent of the country’s aeronautical-information specialists have been fired or are exiting the agency as part of the government-wide buyout program.

At least 28 of the specialists signed up for the buyout, including several supervisors, according to a list I obtained. That’s on top of 13 probationary employees working in these roles who were terminated last month, says David Spero, the president of the union representing them, the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists. The agency had only 351 of these technical experts on hand, Spero told me, so the reductions are significant.

“Their work product is used by aviators and air-traffic controllers to navigate safely through U.S. airspace,” Spero said. “Aeronautical-information specialists have helped make this country’s aviation safety the world’s gold standard, and firing them summarily or letting them walk out the door is unacceptable.”

The offer of early retirement and the dismissal of probationary employees are the two main ways the FAA is trimming its workforce. Both are blunt instruments that threaten to sacrifice key talent, current and former officials told me.

All told, at least 124 engineers, 51 IT specialists, and 26 program managers signed up for early retirement.  The vice president for mission-support services, who started as an air-traffic controller in the 1990s, expressed interest in leaving. So did the agency’s acting vice president for air-traffic services.

Some agency personnel opted into the buyout because they feared they would be fired if they didn’t, several officials told me. The FAA fired fewer than 400 probationary employees, Duffy, the transportation secretary, wrote on X last month. Probationary employees who were fired were told that “you have not demonstrated that your employment at DOT FAA would be in the public interest,” according to emails I reviewed.

[Read: Purging the government could backfire spectacularly]

Some have been rehired, agency officials told me, contributing to an atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty. Duffy, in a White House meeting last week, expressed frustration about sweeping changes to his workforce and blamed DOGE for threatening the jobs of the FAA’s air-traffic controllers, according to a New York Times report.

“What I’m seeing is an FAA workforce that is completely distracted and off its game,” a longtime FAA contractor told me. “Almost all interactions I have with federal staff begin with catching up on the amount of time they’re spending on personnel issues instead of their normal jobs.”

The contractor added, “To say they’re not focused on the mission at the moment would be an understatement.”

The uncertainty is compounded by a lack of communication from agency leadership, officials told me. The acting administrator, Chris Rocheleau, is a longtime agency official brought back after a three-year stint at a lobbying group. The acting deputy administrator, Liam McKenna, was previously general counsel to Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, on the Senate Commerce Committee. He’s serving double duty as the agency’s chief counsel. The position of associate administrator for airports is vacant. So is that of assistant administrator for communications.

In response to questions about workforce reductions, the FAA said in a statement, “The agency has retained employees who perform safety critical functions.”

When Musk and his allies turned their attention to the FAA last month, they identified a problem: The communications infrastructure used by the agency to manage air-traffic control and aviation safety dates to 2002. It still relies on copper-based wiring and traditional radio. It’s showing its age.

So Malaska, the SpaceX employee leading an engineering unit inside the FAA, unveiled a solution that he said came directly from Musk: The FAA would set up thousands of Starlink satellite terminals to improve communication and connectivity within the national airspace system. And they would do it within 18 months.

Agency officials were well aware of the problem identified by Malaska, and they had already found a solution. In 2023, they awarded Verizon a 15-year, $2.4 billion contract to modernize the network. But that award is now in jeopardy, as agency officials race to determine whether aspects of the work can be allocated to SpaceX instead—and how much extra money they would need to come up with to make that happen. Musk, in a series of posts on X last month, initially blamed Verizon for the FAA’s aging communications system, later clarifying that the “ancient system that is rapidly declining” was made not by Verizon but by a different technology company. “The new system that is not yet operational is from Verizon,” Musk wrote.

[Read: Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold]

The agency’s career contracts and acquisitions personnel are trying to sort out the details. The highly sensitive work is being conducted by a diminished legal staff; more than a dozen agency attorneys have signed up for early retirement. That includes supervisors and several attorney-advisers working specifically on contracts.

Malaska’s instructions are not easily ignored: He has an agency email address, according to internal FAA directories shared with me, and he claims to speak directly for Musk, at one point telling U.S. officials that they could be dismissed if they thwarted his objectives. Malaska did not respond to a request for comment. But he defended his work in a post on X last month: “I challenge anyone to question the honesty and my technical integrity on this matter. I am working without biases for the safety of people that fly.”

SpaceX did not respond to detailed questions, but in a post on X last week, the company disputed that it was seeking to take over the Verizon contract, maintaining instead that it was working with the FAA and the contractor behind the 2002 upgrade to provide Starlink equipment “free of charge” for an initial testing period. The company also said it was helping the agency “identify instances where Starlink could serve as a long-term infrastructure upgrade for aviation safety.”

In a statement, the FAA said that no decisions about the Verizon contract had been made but confirmed that the agency was testing Starlink equipment at its facility in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and at “non-safety critical sites” in Alaska. Verizon did not address questions about the status of its contract, but a spokesperson told me, “Our teams have been working with the FAA’s technology teams and our solution stands ready to be deployed. We continue to partner with the FAA on achieving its modernization objectives.”

When the FAA selected Verizon after a competitive bid process in 2023, several factors recommended the telecommunications giant, among them that the company’s cloud and IT services had been approved for federal agencies based on a rigorous security review known as FedRAMP. SpaceX’s services have not. That’s one of the reasons that plugging Starlink terminals into FAA infrastructure concerns several members of a confidential task force convened by the FAA last year, called Vector, to review cybersecurity protocols.

“Starlink presents many risks,” one expert member of the task force, who declined to be named to avoid reprisal from Musk, told me.

Part of the risk, the expert said, is that Musk could simply choose to switch the devices off, as he did during a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian naval fleet in 2022. Musk later wrote on X that he took that action to prevent his company from being “complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” The use of Starlink devices also presents a “risk of an insider threat,” the expert told me, because SpaceX has not gone through the kind of vetting to which Verizon and other government contractors have been subjected. This means the government has less information about SpaceX’s security protocols and threat prevention. “Could someone go in and steal U.S. secrets simply by getting a job at SpaceX?” the expert said. “The problem is, we don’t know.”

[Donald Moynihan: The DOGE project will backfire]

The turn to Starlink is also noteworthy, current and former FAA and DOT officials told me, because Musk stands to benefit financially from its government contracts and because the company has other significant interests before the agency. The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation decides whether to license SpaceX’s commercial rocket launches—and whether to penalize the company for failing to comply with its license requirements. When the agency last fined the company, in September, Musk erupted, saying the FAA was engaged in “lawfare,” employing a term used by Trump and his allies to decry his various criminal indictments.

“One deals with a certain amount of that pushback all the time,” John Putnam, a former Department of Transportation general counsel, told me. “Musk’s anger certainly rose to a higher level.”

Now the billionaire is trying a different tack, one that could leave the agency even more beholden to Musk’s whims. As an agency official told me, “Mr. Musk has been very generous … He offered to supply as many Starlink terminals as we need.”

If the Trump administration’s goal was to sow chaos among America’s colleges, it has definitely succeeded. Last month, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights sent a letter to universities explaining the agency’s view that, because of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down affirmative action, any consideration of race—not just in admissions, but in hiring, scholarships, support, “and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life”—is now illegal. Even race-neutral policies intended to increase racial diversity are not allowed, the department stated. It gave schools two weeks to comply with the new guidance or risk losing their federal funding.

The reaction from universities could best be described as “panicked bewilderment,” Peter Lake, a law professor at Stetson University, in Florida, told me. “There’s a sense of, Should we run, hide, or counterattack?” The first challenge was figuring out what changes the department had in mind. Because the letter partly targeted “DEI,” which has no legal definition, university administrations said they weren’t sure what it applied to. Many will likely get rid of the most overt and controversial forms of DEI, such as required diversity statements for faculty, but beyond that lies an immense gray area.

Then there was the question of whether universities had to comply at all. This type of document—called a “Dear Colleague” letter—states an agency’s interpretation of the law, not the law itself. Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, told me that the letter’s definition of what the Supreme Court has outlawed goes far beyond what the Court actually ruled. “The Court is not saying that you can’t pursue diversity, but that’s what the letter says,” he said. Already, education groups have sued to block the letter’s enforcement. The American Council on Education, a nonprofit trade group that represents universities, has told institutions that if they were following the law before Donald Trump took office, they’re still in compliance now.

Still, no school wants to be the first to find out the hard way whether that’s true. This, combined with the amorphousness of the term DEI, and the fact that so much of it was performative to begin with, has led to a flurry of nomenclature modifications—a kind of anti-woke theater. The University of Alaska system instructed departments to replace the words DEI and affirmative action with terms that communicate the “values of equal access and equal opportunity for all.” Carnegie Mellon University’s old DEI page is now titled “Inclusive Excellence.” Northwestern University has scrubbed almost all mentions of diversity from its websites. The University of Pennsylvania edited its Diversity and Inclusion website, removing most of its content and renaming it “Belonging at Penn.” The school’s former vice dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion is now the vice dean for academic excellence and engagement. The University of Southern California merged its Office of Inclusion and Diversity into its Culture Team. The University of Arizona deleted the words diversity and inclusion—from its land acknowledgment. (These schools did not directly answer when I asked whether they had made changes beyond nomenclature, other than the University of Alaska, which confirmed that it had not.)

[Graeme Wood: ‘Land acknowledgments’ are just moral exhibitionism]

These universities seem to be betting that changing job titles and editing websites will be enough to keep the Trump administration off their back. Meanwhile, they’ll continue the work of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion—the actual things—just without using that terminology. In their view, the programs they are retaining were legal all along, because they don’t involve race-based discrimination. Services such as guiding low-income students through the financial-aid process and providing support groups for those whose parents didn’t attend college help universities recruit and retain students. “The first-order reaction is just to try to get out of the target zone,” Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, told me. “When the investigators seem to be using word searches to identify potential investigations, it makes all the sense in the world that you’d want to get ahead of that.” Universities are also emphasizing that identity-focused programs are open to students of all races, or expanding them so that they are, he said.

For any individual school, the odds of the federal government peering under the hood to figure out the precise difference between, say, the Office of Belonging and the Office of DEI are low. The Education Department’s civil-rights section has always been small. And Trump has repeatedly signaled that he wants to shut down the Education Department in its entirety. Even if the inquisitors are spared, investigating more than a few schools will be difficult. Many universities might conclude that as long as they don’t stand out, they'll be able to get by.

The cost of getting that bet wrong, however, could be severe. On Friday, the administration announced that it was canceling $400 million of Columbia University’s federal grants and contracts as punishment for allegedly insufficient efforts to combat anti-Semitism. The legality of the move is unclear, in part because the administration’s announcement alternately refers to “canceling” and “freezing” the funds. Black, the law professor, told me that Title VI requires a number of procedural steps before the government can revoke a university’s funding, steps that don’t appear to have been taken in Columbia’s case. Notably, however, Columbia did not announce that it would fight the decision. Rather, in a statement, it pledged “to work with the federal government to restore Columbia’s federal funding.” (According to The Wall Street Journal, Columbia will have 30 days to prove that it’s doing enough to have the grants reinstated.) “Most universities are not interested in getting into legal squabbles with the Department of Education,” Black said. “It’s like, do they like diversity? Yes. Do they like it more than not being investigated? No.”  

If some private universities are betting on lying low, public universities in red states, where state legislatures and university regents might share the Trump administration’s hostility to DEI, may have little choice but to go beyond cosmetic changes. Ohio State University shut down its Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the end of February. Ohio University postponed its Black Alumni Reunion, technically open to everyone, while it reviewed the event for compliance. When Texas banned DEI policies at the state level, the University of Texas at Austin first changed the name of its DEI office to the Division of Campus and Community Engagement. After state lawmakers said the effort was insufficient, however, the university closed the office and laid off 60 employees. Jackie Wernz, an education civil-rights lawyer and former Office of Civil Rights staffer, says that few people will mourn the name changes or the end of some diversity trainings. “It’s this other type of support that I think could have a really important impact on students,” Wernz told me. “Creating spaces on primarily white campuses for minority students to connect and to find support from staff who look like them and who come from their backgrounds.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: DEI has lost all meaning]

“DEI” is clearly dead. But it’s too soon to say what will happen to the underlying principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. On February 28, the Department of Education published an FAQ document walking back some of the most extreme implications of the Dear Colleague letter. It acknowledged, for example, that it had no power over university curricula, and that observances such as Black History Month are fine “so long as they do not engage in racial exclusion or discrimination.” Language changes and the elimination of the most overtly progressive DEI efforts might allow the Trump administration to declare its mission accomplished. “The word belonging is being used a lot,” Lake, the Stetson professor, told me. “And I think what everybody’s trying to figure out is, Is the B-word a target?” Universities are also talking about “thriving,” “retention,” and “outcomes.” They might be able to continue working toward some of the same goals they have been for decades. Just don’t call it DEI.

Upon hearing the news that President Donald Trump had suspended military aid to Ukraine, I sat down for some Russian must-see TV: white guys screaming about international relations. Curious to understand how Trump’s Kremlin-friendly move was playing in the motherland, I wanted to compare the reaction of Russian state news to that of American right-wing channels. Pretty soon, I started thinking about that meme from The Office in which Pam holds up two photos, saying, “Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture,” before the camera cuts to her privately admitting, “They’re the same picture.”

Over the past few days, Russian news talk shows have consisted almost entirely of translated clips of Trump-administration officials and Trump surrogates—Vice President J. D. Vance, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, among others—defending the president and attacking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Fox News. The interview clips were interspersed with video of the fateful meeting between Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office last week, along with readings, in Russian, of Trump’s posts on Truth Social and Elon Musk’s posts on X, which is funnier than it sounds.

Soon after the Trump-Zelensky blowup, the Kremlin said that America’s foreign policy now “largely aligns with our vision.” Across three different news shows on the state-owned Channel One and Russia-1, which take their marching orders directly from Russian President Vladimir Putin, this cozy alignment was on full display. It seemed that Russian state TV, and Putin by extension, could not be more pleased with what has been happening. The shows I watched simply broadcast clips of Trump officials, and then their all-male panels of analysts—no DEI in Russia!—echoed their exact words, approvingly.

[Read: The simple reason for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Even when the shows’ panelists admitted to some nervousness about Trump’s next moves, they said his decision to cut off aid to Ukraine “raised our spirits,” as one guest put it. At times, they sounded like they were discussing a problematic friend who everyone agrees is crazy but who inadvertently did something useful.

Panelists repeatedly made reference to Ukraine drawing the world closer to “World War III”—a direct quote from Trump, which has since been parroted in various U.S. media appearances by his loyalists. They fawned over Trump’s prowess and insulted Zelensky; one guest called the Ukrainian president “dust under the feet of Trump,” an even nastier take on the man whom Trump called “no angel” and “a dictator.”

On the show The Great Game, panelists derided Zelensky as someone who believes himself, wrongly, to be “the great leader of the West.” One panelist referred to Zelensky’s conduct during the Oval Office meeting as “hysterical diplomacy” and said, “He couldn’t figure out how to behave himself in the interest of his own country.” The panelist declared that the showdown probably “shortened the war by many months.” Presumably, he said this because he believes Russia will win.

On Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, panelists discussed how the confirmation of Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy, “would be very good news for us, because the part of Trump’s team that supports putting Ukraine on Europe’s shoulders would be strengthened considerably,” as one analyst put it. Solovyov noted favorably that Trump hit Europe and Zelensky “on the nose.” The show played a clip of Vance saying that the United States and Europe can’t support Ukraine indefinitely, and one panelist heartily agreed. Actually, they all agreed—they aren’t allowed to disagree—and they voiced this agreement at an eardrum-popping volume. They sounded mad, but they were very, very happy.

60 Minutes—Russia’s version—pointed out how reasonable Trump was being, highlighting that Trump had praised Ukrainian soldiers during the Oval Office meeting. Zelensky, however, called Vance “J.D.,” “as though they are schoolyard buddies,” and was “biting the hand that feeds him.” The show then played clips of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick saying that he wished Zelensky had said “We love America,” and of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claiming on Fox News Sunday that Zelensky’s government is canceling elections and silencing the opposition. (Elections there have been postponed because of the war.)

The panelist Spiridon Kilinkarov added that Zelensky “presented not the interests of Ukraine but of the anti-Trump European globalists,” a nearly verbatim echo of Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville’s claim that Zelensky has been “brainwashed by the globalist socialist group in Europe.” The show played a clip of Tuberville saying on Newsmax that “Putin and President Trump and the people on our side … will end up making this decision for the future of Ukraine.” They liked the sound of that.

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

Another panelist jumped in with a claim that Zelensky once campaigned for the Democrats in Pennsylvania—a misleading statement, originally made by Vance, that referred to a fall meeting between Zelensky and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro at an ammunition plant. Then, in an ouroboros of surreality, the show played a clip of The Daily Show, which itself featured a clip of that same Russian show in which a host expressed joy at the crumbling of the U.S.-Ukraine alliance. Perhaps DOGE can make the Russian news industry more efficient by firing all its commentators and broadcasting a direct feed of One America News instead.

Finally, the panelist Igor Korotchenko put a bow on everything by remarking with relief that “Biden financed this war, but the priorities of the new administration are different.” He suggested that the Trump administration should go further than pausing military aid, that it should have Elon Musk cut Ukraine’s access to the Starlink satellite-internet system—something the Trump administration has already threatened to do.

“If Trump is able to remove Zelensky as a political figure from the global chessboard,” Korotchenko added, “he should be eligible for the Nobel Peace Prize.” Darrell Issa, the Republican U.S. Representative who nominated Trump for the award on Monday, couldn’t have said it better himself.

We used to hear a lot about eggs from J. D. Vance. On the campaign trail, he talked about them constantly: how his kids were nuts for them, and how, thanks to the failed policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, omelets were ruined for everyone.

“My kids eat a lotta eggs!” he said in Traverse City, Michigan. And in Monroeville, Pennsylvania: “A lotta eggs in my family!” Although other elements of the speech changed here and there, eggs—and their rising price—were always front and center. “The 7-year-old, he’s got his mama’s personality, very practical, worried about whether we have enough eggs,” Vance told a crowd in Charlotte, North Carolina. “And right now all across our country, we’ve got a lot of families that are cutting back because of Kamala Harris’s war on affordability in this country.”

For Republicans in 2024, eggs were a convenient shorthand for the squeeze of inflation, and nobody was more committed to this commiseration—or more devoted to the egg as a breakfast concept—than Donald Trump’s running mate. You had to respect Vance’s dedication to the project. Here was a man who seemed to have a genuine, Gaston-level passion for eggs. But now, as egg prices rise again—to historic highs—that shell has cracked.

For a man who so loved the egg, and so reviled any egg-related cost hurdle, Vance has been conspicuously silent as egg prices have continued to increase under President Trump. Last week, I reached out to Vance’s office to ask why he wasn’t talking about it. Had the Vance family found a new, more affordable source of complete protein? Had the kids developed a taste for Frosted Flakes? “The Trump Administration is working tirelessly to respond to the Avian flu outbreak that has decimated our egg supply,” Taylor Van Kirk,the vice president’s press secretary, told me in an emailed statement.

[Read: What Democrats don’t understand about J. D. Vance]

But Vance certainly talks less about them. “Today for breakfast, I made my kids (aged 6, 4, and 2): 6 pieces of toast and 7 fried eggs,” the then-senator from Ohio posted on X in May. “I now understand the dads buying two 36 packs of eggs at Costco.” In September, the VP candidate filmed himself walking through the aisles of a Pennsylvania grocery store with his two young sons, pausing in front of the eggs to look aghast at the cost. Vance was, as people on the internet quickly pointed out, exactly wrong about the price of those particular eggs, but what drew more headlines was his children’s seemingly insatiable hunger for them. “Let’s talk about eggs. Because these guys actually eat about 14 eggs every single morning,” Vance said to the crowd of nearby shoppers, who seemed not nearly shocked enough at the idea that two little boys were regularly eating seven eggs apiece.

All the egg talk has died down since January. That month, Vance did predict in an interview with CBS’s Margaret Brennan that eventually “prices are going to come down” on gas and grocery items. And Van Kirk, his spokesperson, assured me that, “despite the damage caused by the last administration, President Trump is going to bring down prices and unleash American prosperity the likes of which the Fake News losers at the Atlantic have never seen.” But, as all egg lovers know, that hasn’t actually happened yet. Instead, the retail price of a dozen is now, on average, $4.95, more than 10 cents above the peak during the Biden administration, in January 2023. Because grocery stores typically use eggs as a loss leader, the wholesale price is much higher, and some restaurants have added an egg surcharge to their menu. These numbers could jump by as much as 41 percent over the next year, according to a new report from the Department of Agriculture.

[Read: It’s weird that eggs were ever cheap]

Perhaps Vance has gone silent on eggs because his boss, like Biden before him, can’t actually do a whole heck of a lot about inflation. Trump once promised that prices would go down on “day one,” but the new administration is encountering the same problem on eggs that the old one did: namely, a nasty bird-flu outbreak that has caused the destruction of more than 40 million egg-laying chickens in 2024.

The Trump administration says it’s trying. Last week, Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced a new $1 billion plan to address the bird flu, including enhanced biosecurity efforts and bird-vaccine development. Still, Rollins acknowledged that there is “no silver bullet” to solving the crisis. Confounding matters, of course, is that Trump’s friend and American meme-ster in chief, Elon Musk, has overseen the mass firing of thousands of federal workers, including several USDA employees who were working on the federal response to the bird-flu outbreak. Trump and Musk seem to have adopted the mantra that you have to break some eggs to make an omelet. But, of course, in a more basic sense, you’ve got to have eggs to begin with.

Now it’s the Democrats’ turn to stand up for egg lovers. Each time the Trump administration embarks upon an objectionable move, such as a new slapdash effort to dismantle some government agency, Democrats return to a common refrain: “What’s this got to do with the price of eggs?” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has been particularly outspoken. Voters “expected that [Trump] was going to be a change maker, not for chaos, not for corruption, but they wanted him to do something on their costs,” she told The New York Times last week. “But that’s not what he’s doing.”

Eggs have once again become a compelling symbol of political dysfunction. But Vance seems to have lost his appetite for them.

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At least the Oval Office meeting held by President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was held in front of the cameras. False friendliness in public by Trump and Vance, followed by behind-the-scenes treachery, would have been much more dangerous to the Ukrainian cause.

Instead, Trump and Vance have revealed to Americans and to America’s allies their alignment with Russia, and their animosity toward Ukraine in general and its president in particular. The truth is ugly, but it’s necessary to face it.

Today’s meeting gave the lie to any claim that this administration’s policy is driven by any strategic effort to advance the interests of the United States, however misguided. Trump and Vance displayed in the Oval Office a highly personal hatred. There was no effort here to make a case for American interests. Vance complained that Zelensky had traveled to Pennsylvania to thank U.S. ammunition workers, because, Vance charged, the appearance amounted to campaigning for the Democratic presidential ticket. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump angrily explained. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia.”

Both the president and vice president showed the U.S.-led alliance system something it needed urgently to know: The national-security system of the West is led by two men who cannot be trusted to defend America’s allies—and who deeply sympathize with the world’s most aggressive dictator.

Through the Cold War period, Americans were haunted by the fear that a person with clandestine loyalties to a hostile foreign power might somehow rise to high office. In the late 1940s, the Alger Hiss case convulsed the country. Hiss’s accusers charged—and it later proved true—that Hiss had betrayed U.S. secrets to Soviet spymasters in the 1930s, when Hiss served as a junior official in the Department of Agriculture. The secrets were not very important; they included designs for a new fire extinguisher for U.S. naval ships. But Hiss himself was a rising star. The possibility that a person with such secrets in his past might someday go on to head the Department of State or Central Intelligence Agency once tormented Americans.

But what if the loyalties were not clandestine, not secret? What if a leader just plain blurted out on national television that he despises our allies, rejects treaties, and regards a foreign adversary as a personal friend? What if he did it again and again? Human beings get used to anything. But this?

It’s not hard to imagine a president of Estonia or Moldova in that Oval Office chair, being berated by Trump and Vance. Or a president of Taiwan. Or, for that matter, the leaders of core U.S. partners such as Germany and Japan, which entrusted their nations’ security to the faith and patriotism of past American leaders, only to be confronted by the faithless men who hold the highest offices today.

We’re witnessing the self-sabotage of the United States. “America First” always meant America alone, a predatory America whose role in the world is no longer based on democratic belief. America voted at the United Nations earlier this week against Ukraine, siding with Russia and China against almost all of its fellow democracies. Is this who Americans want to be? For this is what America is being turned into.

The Trump administration’s elimination of PEPFAR, the American program to combat HIV infection in Africa, symbolizes the path ahead. President George W. Bush created the program because it would do immense good at low cost, and thereby demonstrate to the world the moral basis of American power. His successors continued it, and Congresses of both parties funded it, because they saw that the program advanced both U.S. values and U.S. interests. Trump and Vance don’t want the United States to be that kind of country anymore.

American allies urgently need a Plan B for collective security in a world where the U.S. administration prefers Vladimir Putin to Zelensky.

The American people need to reckon with the mess Trump and Vance are making of this country’s once-good name—and the services they are performing for dictators and aggressors. There may not be a deep cause here. Trump likes and admires bad people because he is himself a bad person. When Vance executed his personal pivot from Never Trump to Always Trump, he needed a way to prove that he had truly crossed over to the dark side beyond any possibility of reversion or redemption; perhaps his support for Russia allowed him to do that. But however shallow their motives, the consequences are profound.

In his first term, Trump sometimes seemed a rogue actor within his own administration. The president expressed strange and disquieting opinions, but his Cabinet secretaries were mostly normal and responsible people. The oddball appointees on the White House staff were contained by the many more-or-less normal appointees. This time, Trump is building a national-security system to follow his lead. He has intimidated or persuaded his caucus in the House to accept—and his caucus in the Senate not to oppose—his pro-authoritarian agenda.

The good and great America that once inspired global admiration—that good and great America still lives. But it no longer commands a consensus above party. The pro-Trump party exposed its face to the world in the Oval Office today. Nobody who saw that face will ever forget the grotesque sight.

The distant past and potential future of the Democratic Party gathered around white plastic folding tables in a drab New Jersey conference room last week. There were nine white men, three in hoodies, two in ball caps, all of them working-class Donald Trump voters who once identified with Democrats and confessed to spending much of their time worried about making enough money to get by.

Asked by the focus-group moderator if they saw themselves as middle class, one of them joked, “Is there such a thing as a middle class anymore? What is that?” They spoke about the difficulty of buying a house, the burden of having kids with student loans, and the ways in which the “phony” and “corrupt” Democratic Party had embraced far-left social crusades while overseeing a jump in inflation.

“It was for the people and everything, and now it is just lies,” one man said when asked how the Democratic Party has changed.

Trump, another man said, was the only one inhabiting the political center these days. But some expressed concern about how much they were benefiting from the early days of Trump’s second administration, about the potential cost of new tariffs, and about the president’s embrace of “distracting” issues such as renaming the Gulf of Mexico and planning to redevelop Gaza.

“I feel like the administration is going for things that grab headlines, like trans rights, wars, things that people pay attention to, rather than actual inflation and pricing,” one of the men told the group. “So that is part of the negativity of politics that I don’t really enjoy.”

The February 18 focus group, in a state that saw deep Democratic erosion last year and will elect a new governor this fall, was the first stop of a new $4.5 million research project centered on working-class voters in 20 states that could hold the key to Democratic revival. American Bridge 21st Century, an independent group that spent about $100 million in 2024 trying to defeat Trump, has decided to invest now in figuring out what went wrong, how Trump’s second term is being received, and how to win back voters who used to be Democratic mainstays but now find themselves in the Republican column.

“We want to understand what are the very specific barriers for these working-class voters when it comes to supporting Democrats,” Molly Murphy, one of the pollsters on the project, told me. “I think we want to have a better answer on: Do we have a message problem? Do we have a messenger problem? Or do we have a reach problem?”

Mitch Landrieu, a former New Orleans mayor and senior adviser to the Joe Biden White House, said the Democratic Party needs to think beyond the swing voters that were the subject of billions in spending last year and give attention to the people of all races and ethnicities who have firmly shifted away from Democrats to embrace the politics of Trump.

“The first thing you got to do is learn what you can learn, ask what you can ask, and know what you can know,” Landrieu told me last week, before the New Jersey focus group. “When you see it through a number of different lenses, it should help you figure out how you got it wrong.”

Since losing last fall, Democrats have railed against the price of eggs, denounced “President Elon Musk,” and promised to defend the “rule of law.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer even led a chant of “We will win” outside the U.S. Treasury building. But there is still little Democratic agreement about the reasons for Trump’s victory or how Democrats can make their way back to power.

The Bridge plan is to launch a series of interviews with party leaders, tracking polls and meetings with voters around the country to try to figure out how best to fix the party after an election that saw Democrats lose the popular vote for the first time since 2004. Former Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez and former Representative Colin Allred of Texas, who lost a bid for Senate last year, have signed up to work with Landrieu on the project.

Several other parts of the Democratic power structure are searching for answers as well. The new chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, has promised his own “postelection review” by the party. “Not an autopsy, because we’re not dead as a party,” he said late last year. The details have not yet been announced.

Third Way, a moderate Democratic group, ran a recent Democratic strategist retreat outside Washington to begin the conversation about how to create a new economic agenda and how to extricate the party from unpopular positions on issues such as transgender athletes and immigration enforcement. Future Forward, the largest Democratic independent spender in the 2024 campaign, has continued to circulate “Doppler memos” to Democratic decision makers, offering them real-time updates about how Americans are digesting Trump’s actions and the most promising avenues for pushing back.

The Bridge effort emerged from a four-day Palm Beach donor retreat this month, just down the road from Mar-a-Lago. Top Democratic donors gathered for days of closed-door panels with titles such as “What Went Wrong?,” “What’s Going on With Men?,” “How to Stop Losing the Culture Wars,” and “Sending the Right Message: Reviving the Democratic Brand.” A Saturday-night panel at the conference with Landrieu, Allred, and others laid out how much was still unknown. The title: “It’s All About Listening: How Can We Reconnect With the Voters We Have Lost?”

“I just really believe you have to start from scratch. You have to throw out all of your assumptions,” Landrieu told me. “Whatever happened in the past is the past, and that is the last campaign. Joe Biden isn’t president anymore, and they don’t have Joe Biden as a foil.”

Even though the answers remain unclear, donors came away from the retreat saying they were eager to keep spending. Bridge has planned another donor conference in San Francisco for early next month. “At a time when some Democrats are in retreat, I saw a large group of donors at Democracy Matters in Palm Beach spoiling to re-engage in the fight,” John Driscoll, a health-care executive and an American Bridge donor, said in a statement.

The early after-action autopsy of Bridge’s own spending in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania last year echoed the early findings of other groups: Advertising for Kamala Harris and against Trump had a clear marginal impact where it was targeted, but it was unable to hold back the much greater Trump gains, including significant erosion among longtime Democratic voting blocs. A Bridge analysis conducted by the Democratic data firm BlueLabs of voters in the three states found that Democratic support overall dropped 3.9 percentage points in urban counties, 2.5 points in Hispanic-dominant counties, and 2.1 in Black-dominant counties. At the same time, counties where Trump received 60 percent or more of the vote saw their vote totals rise by about 5 percent.

Landrieu hopes to share early results before this year’s fall elections so that new tactics and messages get a test run before next year’s midterm elections.

After the focus group of white men, Bridge gathered a similar group of eight New Jersey Latino men—Trump-supporting members of the working class who had previously voted for Democrats. One voter said that the Democratic Party has walked away from representing the working class, given rising costs. Another expressed concern about the “woke” rules of Democratic governance. “People were getting hurt for any little comment, so you had to be politically correct for everything,” he said.

Democrats have spent years trying to convince nonwhite voters that Trump’s racial insensitivity should be a redline. These voters did not try to defend Trump’s racial views or argue that he is not racist. But even in that was a warning for the next iteration of the Democratic Party.

“Whether he is or not, I don’t care,” one voter said. “I vote with my pocket.”

Jennie Bromberg was somehow still exuberant last weekend about her future career in public health. In January, she interviewed for a competitive Ph.D. program in epidemiology at the University of Washington, one of several to which she has applied. “I loved them. It was amazing,” she told me by phone while on a walk with her Australian shepherd. But the email that arrived from UW shortly after she got home was not the acceptance letter that she’d hoped for. Nor was it even a rejection. Instead, it said that she’d been placed in grad-school purgatory. All new offers of admission were being put on hold “in response to the uncertainty we are facing because of the rapidly changing financial landscape.” The email finished: “We appreciate your patience as we navigate through these uncertainties and disruption.”

Those words euphemize a cascade of traumas that have befallen higher education since Inauguration Day. The Trump administration has frozen, slashed, threatened, and otherwise obstructed the tens of billions of dollars in funding that universities receive from the government, and then found ways around the court orders that were meant to stop or delay such efforts. In the meantime, new proposals to raise the tax on endowment income could further eat away at annual budgets. And all of this is happening at just the time when graduate admissions are in progress. Future researchers such as Jennie Bromberg are caught in the middle.

The University of Washington is not alone in putting things on hold. The University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Southern California have also paused or cut their graduate admissions, at least temporarily. Ilya Levental, a biophysicist at the University of Virginia, told me that his program in biomedical sciences reduced the size of its incoming class by 30 percent. In other words, grad school is in trouble. And because grad school trains the next generation of academics—those who will be teaching students, discovering knowledge, and translating science into practice—this means the future of the university itself is in trouble too.

Doctoral students typically do not pay for their advanced degrees. Instead, they work in research groups or labs, or sometimes as classroom instructors. In exchange for this work, universities usually pay them a modest salary and waive or cover their tuition. In engineering, the sciences, and medicine, the cost of that support comes mostly from faculty research that is in turn paid for by grants received from the federal government.

[Read: A new kind of crisis for American universities]

Once it became clear, in recent weeks, that this grant money was in jeopardy, schools began gaming out contingencies. Reducing the number of graduate students they will have to pay next year is one way to lower near-term risk. It’s also an act that universities would want to take right now, before their offers of admission are sent out. “People are trying to be conservative, because the worst outcome is very bad here,” Aaron Meyer, an associate bioengineering professor at UCLA, told me. “A commitment to a Ph.D. student in the sciences is easily half a million dollars, over many years.”

Administrators’ choices on admissions are made even more complicated by a weird dynamic in play across higher ed. No one wants to overreact and cut new students without good reason, but they also have to hedge against the risk of others’ cuts. The situation is structured like a prisoner’s dilemma: If lots of programs start reducing their admissions, that means fewer total spots for applicants, which in turn could lead to greater “yields”—that is, a higher proportion of each school’s offers gets accepted. No school wants to end up with too many students, so if one expects a growing yield, it may decide to cut admissions offers on that basis—and thus exacerbate the larger trend.

The administration has also called for tightened scrutiny on visas of all kinds, including student visas. This could further muddy grad-school yields by making some applicants unable to accept their offers of admissions or enroll. Graduate-student unions, which now represent more than 150,000 students nationwide, add another layer of uncertainty. Organizing has allowed grad students, who can barely afford to live in many cities, to advocate for better pay and labor practices. But it also increased the cost of graduate education in a way that worried administrators even before the grant and overhead cuts arrived. Schools sometimes take graduate tuition, and normally pay student stipends, from the same grants that are now at risk. And some grants have already been canceled, leading to a scramble for money to cover current students. The whole system has been thrown out of whack.

Choosing to take fewer students forestalls or even ends the careers of future scientists. It also makes research harder. In most science, engineering, and medicine programs, students get accepted into specific labs or groups led by the faculty whose grants also fund those students. These faculty members take on students to help them carry out their research. “Ph.D. students make up the bulk of the academic-research workforce,” Levental told me. Without their labor, work on already awarded grants can’t be done—assuming the funds to carry out those grants continue flowing in the first place.

[Read: The chaos in higher ed is only getting started]

The situation could deteriorate if current doctoral students start jumping ship. A Ph.D. student might make $35,000 a year, a sum they tolerate because “they are investing in themselves and are dedicated to the cause,” as Levental put it. But that investment might start to look foolish. Dallas McCulloch, a doctoral student who studies health and illness at Wayne State University with four years of supposedly guaranteed funding, told me that he is thinking of quitting and moving abroad to pursue his degree, because of “the grim prospects of any future funding, including for my dissertation.” McCulloch, an American who also holds a German passport, said he is worried that if he doesn’t act soon, he’ll end up competing with a “mass exodus” of researchers seeking to leave the United States.

Universities could decide to cover shortfalls in science and engineering by reallocating funds for graduate education from elsewhere. Some faculty and administrators I spoke with are worried that the humanities might become a casualty of such reapportionment. There, graduate students are typically paid for teaching, not research. Knock-on cuts to their admissions could follow, the effects of which might then reverberate into undergraduate education. If grad school in the sciences falters, the effects will not be contained.

For the moment, though, the whole system is in limbo. UW’s “pause” on graduate admissions was set to last at least two weeks, according to the email that was sent to Bromberg two weeks ago. No news was promised either way—and no news is what Bromberg has received so far. Given the chaotic and aggressive rush of new directives from the federal government, universities have no idea whether their financial outlooks will improve or worsen in the coming months. They don’t even know when they’re likely to find out. Over the weekend, Carolyn Ibberson, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, created a shared spreadsheet to track the latest news. Its title sounds definitive, “Graduate Reductions Across Biomedical Sciences (2025),” but much of the information there is cited to private conversations and internal emails. In other words, academics face uncertainty about how universities are handling uncertainty.

Bromberg can only take things as they come. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, but plans to attend, at her own expense, Washington’s on-campus open house for prospective graduate students and is still waiting to hear back from other schools. She told me that she understands the pressures that administrators are feeling at the moment: “I just feel so bad for people who have to make these decisions.” And if Bromberg doesn’t get into a doctoral program—or if the research career she hopes the degree will unlock becomes unviable—she’ll just have to think of something else. Like McCulloch, she has wondered if she could flee to Europe. Even before the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole urged his government to steal American scientists, Bromberg had already researched the cost of moving Gatsby, her 70-pound dog, from Columbus to Dublin: $8,000, or about one-quarter of a typical annual graduate salary. “I’ll be devastated if this is the end of everything I’ve worked for in my career,” Bromberg said. “But what am I going to do? I have to start looking into these things.”

At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.

Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”

Democrats talk a big game about “inclusion,” but as Buttigieg notes, they don’t produce a message that feels inclusive to most voters, because they’re too focused on appealing to the very nonrepresentative set of people who make up the party apparatus. Adam Frisch—a moderate Democrat who ran two strong campaigns for Congress in a red district in western Colorado but got little traction among DNC members when he sought to be elected as vice chair of the party—wrote about his own experience in the DNC campaign. He noted how just about the only people he’d encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were “the impressive delegates from the High School Democrats of America.” Frisch lost out to two candidates who were much better positioned to speak to the very highly educated, very left-wing electorate that is the DNC membership: State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, a “champion for social justice” who has lost multiple statewide campaigns in Pennsylvania by doing his best impression of Elizabeth Warren; and David Hogg, the dim-bulb gun-control advocate who still seems to think “Defund the Police” is good politics. Speaking of things that seem like they came out of Portlandia: Hogg believes that the gun-control movement was “started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous lgbtq women and nonbinary people that never got on the news or in most history books.”

Yet Buttigieg pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the people who have led Democrats down this road of being off-putting and unpopular.

[Read: The HR-ification of the Democratic party]

These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped. And although DEI-speak can and does make Democrats seem weird and out of touch, that’s not the main problem with it. The big problem with the approach Buttigieg rightly complains about—and that Kenyatta and Hogg exemplify—is that it entails a strong set of mistaken moral commitments. These have led the party to take unpopular positions on crime, immigration, and education, among other issues. Many nonwhite voters correctly perceive these positions as hostile to their substantive interests.

What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them according to how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are because of those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences of the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent. That is, they decide that some people are more important than others, and then they don’t even correctly assess the desires of the people they have decided are most important.

Let’s look, for example, at what progressive Democrats have to offer to Asian voters—or, as a DNC member might say, “AANHPI voters.” On higher education, Democrats advocate for race-conscious admission policies that favor “underrepresented” groups and disfavor “overrepresented” ones. In practice, those policies have meant that Asian applicants must clear higher academic bars than white applicants—and much higher bars than Black and Latino applicants—to win admission to top schools. Progressives have also responded to demographic imbalances at selective public K–12 education programs (which are disproportionately Asian) by fighting to change the admission systems. In New York, progressives sought to to abolish the admission exam, which Asian students have dominated; in San Francisco, where the city’s most prestigious magnet school has become majority-Asian, they actually did away with the exam for a time; in Fairfax County, Virginia, they changed admission rules to be less favorable to Asian applicants. Within schools, they have opposed tracking and fought to remove advanced math courses, “leveling” the playing field by reducing the level of rigor available to the highest-performing students.

Democrats see Asian Americans disproportionately getting ahead in school as an “inequitable” outcome, so they try to stack the deck against them. Not a great pitch to the Asian community.

Of course, I’m sure Democrats who favor affirmative action would say that framing is very unfair. But these are the same people who keep telling us we need to focus on the effects of actions rather than intentions. When Democrats get control of education policy, they make changes that hurt Asians. Is it any kind of surprise that, as Democrats have become ever more obsessed with racial “equity” as a policy driver, Asian voters have swung hard against the party? Is it surprising that Republicans—in spite of overt racism among some operatives and activists in the party—have made strong inroads among Asian voters? I don’t find it surprising, given that Democrats are the party of official discrimination against Asians.

[Read: Democrats deserved to lose]

Or consider Democrats’ approach to crime. Progressives’ insistence on using marginalization as a marker of moral worth has led them to prioritize the needs of people who are engaged in antisocial behavior over those of ordinary citizens who abide by the social contract. After all, few people are more marginalized than criminals, or the “justice-involved,” as a DNC member might call them. As progressives have grown skeptical of police and policing, they have made it more difficult to detain dangerous defendants ahead of trial, and they have de facto (and sometimes de jure) decriminalized nuisances such as public drug use. These policies, combined with the effects of COVID and the George Floyd protests, have led to an increase in crime and disorder in cities. This has been unpopular. And because major cities are disproportionately nonwhite, the negative effects of the disorder have fallen disproportionately on nonwhite voters. So it makes sense that diverse cities swung harder against Democrats than did whiter suburbs, where physical distance has insulated the electorate.

On immigration, similarly, Democrats are excessively focused on the interests of the most marginalized group in the policy equation—foreign migrants—even though these migrants are not citizens and not really stakeholders in our politics. The Biden administration presided over the entry of millions of migrants into the country in a way that was not in accordance with any intentionally enacted public policy. It did this with the enthusiastic support of progressive groups that purport to speak for the interests of Latinos. But the broader population of Latinos reacted—surprise!—quite negatively to the migration wave, as they watched migrants receive expensive government services, overwhelm institutions of local government, and in some cases produce crime and disorder. Some of the hardest-swinging counties against Democrats from 2020 to 2024 were overwhelmingly Latino counties on the U.S.-Mexico border. If you wanted to predict how the migration wave would affect the Hispanic American vote, you would have done better to focus on the “American” aspect of their identity rather than on the “Hispanic” part; as it turns out, long-settled Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans don’t necessarily put a high premium on ensuring that our government spends a ton of money to house and care for economic migrants from Central and South America.

So the problem here is not really the $10 words. Consider the term BIPOC. This (decreasingly?) fashionable buzzword—which means either “Black and Indigenous people of color” or “Black, Indigenous, and people of color,” depending on whom you ask—contains a clear message about how progressives view the hierarchy of marginalization: Black Americans and Native Americans outrank Latinos and Asians. It seems that the message has been received: In 2024, Democrats hemorrhaged support from Latinos and Asians. But the problem can’t be fixed by dropping BIPOC from the vocabulary. To stop the bleeding, Democrats need to abandon the toxic issue positions they took because they have the sort of worldview that caused them to say “BIPOC” in the first place.

[Read: How to move on from the worst of identity politics]

Democrats should say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. They should say that the U.S. government should primarily focus on the needs of U.S. citizens, and that a sad story about deprivation in a foreign country isn’t a sufficient reason for being admitted to the United States and put up in a New York hotel at taxpayer expense. They should say that the pullback from policing has been a mistake. They should say that they were wrong and they are sorry! After all, Democrats talk easily about how the party has gotten “out of touch,” but they don’t draw the obvious connection about what happens when you’re out of touch: You get things substantively wrong and alienate voters with your unpopular ideas. To fix that, you have to change more than how you talk—you have to change what you stand for, and stand up to those in the party who oppose that change.

Even better, you can nominate people who never took those toxic and unpopular issue positions in the first place.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.