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.

Updated on February 1 at 10:06 ET

The Democrats are angry. Well, at least some of them.

For months, party activists have felt bitter about Kamala Harris’s election loss, and incensed at the leaders who first went along with Joe Biden’s decision to run again. They feel fresh outrage each time a new detail is revealed about the then-81-year-old’s enfeeblement and its concealment by the advisers in charge. But right now, what’s making these Democrats angriest is that many of their elected leaders don’t seem angry at all.

“I assumed that we would be prepared to meet the moment, and I was wrong,” Shannon Watts, the founder of the gun-control group Moms Demand Action, told me. “It’s like they’ve shown up to a knife fight with a cheese stick.”

For all the people in Watts’s camp, the party’s response to Donald Trump’s first 12 days in office has been maddening at best and demoralizing at worst. After Trump issued pardons or commutations for the January 6 rioters last week, including the ones who attacked police officers, no immediate chorus of anger came from what is supposed to be the next generation of Democratic talent, including Maryland Governor Wes Moore, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, another 2028 hopeful, who is on tour selling a young-adult version of her autobiography, has told interviewers, “I am not out looking for fights. I am always looking to collaborate.”

After Trump threatened Colombia with tariffs, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries attempted to reassure the confused and fearful rank and file with the reminder that “God is still on the throne,” which seemed a little like saying, “Jesus, take the wheel.” And people were baffled after the Democratic National Committee responded on X to Trump’s first week in office by channeling a quainter time in American politics and dusting off an Obama-era slogan to accuse him of being “focused on Wall Street—not Main Street.” “Get new material!” one person suggested in the replies, a succinct summary of the other 1,700 comments.

[Will Freeman: Strong-arming Latin America will work until it doesn’t]

The limp messaging continued this week, after Trump’s administration on Monday issued a federal-funding freeze, including for cancer research and programs such as Meals on Wheels. The next day, Jeffries called for an emergency caucus meeting to hammer out a forceful “three-pronged counter-offensive.” But that emergency meeting would not actually take place until the following afternoon. (By the time lawmakers were dialing in, the White House had already rescinded the order.) Jeffries’s Senate counterpart, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, scowling over his glasses, offered his own sleepy—and slightly unsettling—assessment of the moment: “I haven’t seen people so aroused in a very, very long time.”

Some Democrats say they are hopeful that a new chair of the DNC, who will be elected today, will give the now-rudderless party a bit of direction—a way to harness all that arousal. The committee leads the party’s fundraising apparatus and coordinates with its sister organizations on Senate and House campaigns. But a chair can’t do much if the party’s own lawmakers aren’t willing to swap out the mozzarella for something a little sharper.

Part of the hurdle for Democrats is that they are afraid of sounding shrill. Few are eager for a return of the frantic and indiscriminate alarm-sounding that characterized the response to Trump 1.0, when Democrats clamored for the release of the supposed pee tapes and wore pink pussy hats in protest. There’s something cringey, these days, about reviving the capital-R Resistance—especially because Trump’s second win can’t be chalked up to some fluke; he won the popular vote, fair and square. Most Democrats acknowledge that, this time around, they should choose their targets carefully. “We’re not going to swing at every pitch,” Jeffries told reporters yesterday morning.

But Democrats can’t just stand idly by the plate, several frustrated progressive activists and movement leaders told me. They should be communicating to voters that Trump “is shutting down the government, and stripping it for parts to sell to billionaires,” April Glick Pulito, a progressive communications strategist, said. But Democrats aren’t getting it across, a reality that is disheartening, she told me, but also symbolic. “It’s part of why we fuckin’ lost,” she said. “It’s why people stayed home.” She and others I spoke with are demanding that Democrats be louder and more forceful—using resolutions and press conferences, sure, but also creative social-media campaigns and stunts for the cameras. “Speak like normal people, on platforms that normal people access,” Watts said. “I am not reading your press release. Get on every platform I’m on—talk to me on an Instagram reel, or a Substack live. Tweet things that explain what’s happening and how I can help or what you’re going to do to fix it.”

Some Democratic lawmakers have been doing this. People I talked with pointed to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has regularly gone live on Instagram to spell out the consequences of Trump’s actions. They also pointed to Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker’s vow to thwart unlawful deportation efforts and his new directive blocking any pardoned January 6 rioters from serving in the state government.

But Democrats across the ideological spectrum say they want more from their leaders. Dullness in political messaging is death, they say, and bland consultant-speak is plaguing the party, which right now seems totally incapable of grabbing any voter’s attention. A clear example of this was when Democratic leaders chose 74-year-old Gerry Connolly, who is not exactly a fiery communicator, to head up the House Oversight Committee over Ocasio-Cortez, Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the grassroots group Indivisible, told me. That choice indicates “a failure to recognize the political and media moment that we’re in.”

A party that is in the minority in both chambers of Congress usually doesn’t have a prayer of blocking legislation, but it can gum up the works. Dozens of Democratic senators have so far voted in support of Trump’s Cabinet nominees when they should be opposing them at every turn, these frustrated activists argue, along with rejecting unanimous consent agreements, voting against cloture, and requesting quorum calls. “They should be slowing everything to a halt,” Amanda Litman, a co-founder of the organization Run for Something, told me.

Glick Pulito compared the Democrats’ situation to a sketch from the Netflix comedy show I Think You Should Leave, in which a man wearing a hot-dog suit crashes a hot-dog-shaped car into a store and proceeds to look around wildly for the culprit. “I don’t want to see Chuck Schumer saying Congress should act,” Glick Pulito said. “Bro, you are Congress!”

Some signs have emerged that Democrats are developing a wartime footing. A group of 23 attorneys general from across the country sued the Trump administration this week over its funding freeze. The former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz came out of election-loss-induced retirement to go on a cable-news rampage about it. (“They defrosted him!” Glick Pulito said.) And when the White House rescinded its funding block, Democrats claimed a grassroots victory. “FAFO,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X. “I am more optimistic now than I was 48 hours ago,” Levin told me. “I am seeing some green shoots. I would like those to bloom into full-fledged flowers.”

[Elaine Godfrey: The resistance almost missed impeachment]

A new DNC chair, activists and progressives leaders hope, could at least be the Miracle-Gro for that process. Since Harris lost and Biden left, Democrats have been leaderless and agenda-free. Any conversations about the party’s brand troubles or its plan for handling the next four years have been haphazard and localized. Ken Martin and Ben Wikler, the two top candidates for the DNC chair job, both have the confidence of the activists I spoke with, not least because both have led political operations from outside the D.C. Beltway. Both men say they understand that people are frustrated. “If we don’t stand up now,” Martin, head of the Minnesota Democrats, told me, “then how in the hell are people going to believe that we’re going to fight for them and their families when we’re back in power?” This is a period of transition, Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin state party, told me: “Very soon, the battle will be well and truly joined.”

But the cavalry’s arrival may not mean much. The DNC has always occupied an amorphous role in the Democratic Party; it holds little sway with congressional leadership, and won't exactly shape the party's ideological future. That reality was on display this week during a chaotic DNC candidate forum characterized by a fixation on diversity issues, constant interruptions from climate-change activists, and frustrated outbursts from the audience.

The scene was indicative of a party not only struggling to fill a leadership vacuum but also stumbling beneath the weight of a tarnished brand, an unhappy base, and a growing reputation for fecklessness.

This article originally misstated the DNC's role in the Democratic Party.

On a Saturday morning almost exactly 22 years ago, the space shuttle Columbia was about to finish what had been, until then, a perfect 16-day mission. The families of the seven astronauts on board were on the runway at Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. But as Columbia reentered the atmosphere—traveling at 15,000 miles an hour, just 16 minutes from home—it suddenly broke apart. Debris began to fall from the skies over East Texas.

President George W. Bush was informed of the disaster at Camp David by his chief of staff, Andy Card. Bush was rushed from the Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin, back to the White House. At 2:04 p.m., speaking from the Cabinet Room, a visibly somber president addressed the nation. I had a particular interest in what he would say. Although I had recently been promoted to a new position on the White House staff, I had served Bush as a speechwriter over the previous two years.

“The Columbia is lost,” Bush told the country. “There are no survivors.” He named the crew of seven, praising their courage and pioneering spirit.

“These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly, knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life,” the president said. “Because of their courage and daring and idealism, we will miss them all the more. All Americans today are thinking as well of the families of these men and women who have been given this sudden shock and grief. You’re not alone. Our entire nation grieves with you. And those you loved will always have the respect and gratitude of this country.”

After assuring America that the space program would continue, he said this:

In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy. Yet farther than we can see, there is comfort and hope. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, “Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.”

The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth. Yet we can pray that all are safely home. May God bless the grieving families, and may God continue to bless America.

The speech, full of empathy, free of blame, lasted three minutes and 12 seconds.

Donald Trump took a dramatically different approach from Bush, and from every one of his modern predecessors. The day after a midair collision over the Potomac River that killed 67 people, Trump—within five minutes of asking for a moment of silence for the victims, saying, “We are all overcome with the grief for many who so tragically perished,” and declaring, “We are one family”—blamed the crash on the two Democratic presidents who preceded him, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. He also blamed Pete Buttigieg, who served as Biden’s transportation secretary (and whom Trump cursed out) and diversity programs that, among other things, encourage the hiring of people with severe disabilities.

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

During his 35-minute press conference, Trump cited no evidence to support his claims and admitted he had none; the investigation into the cause of the crash of an American Airlines passenger jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter had barely begun, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder had yet to be located, and the bodies of all the victims had not yet been recovered from the icy waters of the Potomac. But that didn’t stop Trump from unloading baseless attacks and assigning blame.

Oh, and one more thing: The “problematic” diversity hiring practices at the FAA that Trump cited during his press conference were in place during his first term, and his claim that he’d changed Obama’s diversity standards for hiring air-traffic controllers is false.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, sentenced to eight years of hard labor for writing critical letters about Joseph Stalin, described an “essential experience” that he took away from his years in prison: how human beings become evil and how they become good. “In the intoxication of youthful successes,” he wrote,

I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.

Solzhenitsyn added:

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

Solzhenitsyn was offering an elegant description of an anthropological truth: Most human beings contain a complicated mix of qualities, and are capable of acts of virtue and acts of vice, even within a single day. There are admirable, even heroic qualities within us, which need to be cultivated, and there is also “the wolf within us,” which needs to be contained.

Whether a society is civilized or decivilized depends in large part on how well it shapes and refines moral sentiments, to use the language of the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, of which sympathy—our capacity to understand and share the feelings of others by imagining ourselves in their situation—is core. Smith called the “man within the beast” the impartial spectator—essentially, our conscience—whose approbation or disapprobation influences our conduct.

[Read: Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini]

Among the things that shape moral sentiments, including sympathy, are words and rhetoric. No one doubts their power; we see it in politics and poetry, in literature and letters, in songs and sacred books. Words evoke and give voice to strong emotions; they shape perceptions and create human connections. At their best they inspire honor and compassion within us; they offer us a glimpse of truth and enrich and purify our souls. But words can also misshape our souls. They can unleash the wolf within. That is why words, including the words of presidents, matter so very much.

What Trump said during last week’s press conference won’t rank among the 1,000 most inappropriate or offensive things he has said, which I suppose is the point. Rhetoric, particularly presidential rhetoric, has formative power, and with Trump, as with many of those in the MAGA movement, it is always the same: words of aggression, demonization, and brutishness, with the intent to stoke conflict, inflame hatred, and turn us against ourselves. Even during times of tragedy.

The way our leaders speak can shape our civic sentiments, and we are in a moment when our leader is inclined to make those harder and colder rather than softer and warmer, which just isn’t what we ought to want. But it is what we have.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus said, “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” Donald Trump’s heart is full of rage, committed to vengeance. As a result, so is much of America.

You might be forgiven for forgetting—ever so briefly—that Donald Trump is president of the United States. Sometimes it seems like he does, too.

In the middle of the night, as news about the plane crash at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport was breaking, Trump posted on Truth Social:

The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!

He raises some valid points—ones that many people might be wondering about themselves. The difference between them and him is that he is the leader of the federal government, able to marshal unparalleled resources to get answers about a horror that happened just two and a half miles from his home. He’s the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, and the crash involved an Army helicopter. But Trump isn’t really interested in doing things. Like Chauncey Gardiner, the simple-minded protagonist of Being There, he likes to watch.

This morning, Trump held an astonishing briefing at the White House where he and his aides unspooled racist speculation, suggesting (without any evidence) that underqualified workers hired under DEI programs had caused the accident. “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong ideas and opinions, and I think we’ll state those opinions now,” Trump said, and he did. Vice President J. D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth criticized diversity efforts from the lectern as well. (Trump also misrepresented Federal Aviation Administration programs.) Trump insisted that he wasn’t getting ahead of the investigation by speculating, and that he could tell diversity was to blame because of “common sense.”

Trump also paused to accuse former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg of “bullshit,” and narrated videos and information he’d seen in the news, interspersing his personal observations as a helicopter owner and passenger. “The people in the helicopter should have seen where they were going,” Trump said. At times, he appeared to blame both the helicopter pilots and air-traffic control. Perhaps it would be better to actually gather some information, but Trump is more interested in pontificating.

The pilots, DEI, air-traffic controllers, Buttigieg—the only common thread appeared to be that everyone was to blame, except for Trump himself.

No one could reasonably hold Trump responsible for the crash, just 10 days into his term—though that is the bar he has often tried to set. “I alone can fix it,” he has assured Americans, telling them that he personally can master and control the government in a way no one else can. He promised to be a dictator, though only on day one. Yet even while discounting his bluster, it would be nice to see the president doing something more than watching cable news and posting about it.

If he’s not going to do that, he could offer some consolation. Almost exactly 39 years ago, after the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger, President Ronald Reagan memorably described how the astronauts aboard had “‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’” Trump is giving us “NOT GOOD!!!”

Though exasperating, this passivity is no surprise. It was a running theme of Trump’s first administration and is already back in the second. In May 2016, Trump reportedly offered fellow Republican John Kasich a chance to be vice president, in charge of domestic and foreign policy; Trump would be in charge of “making America great again.” During Hurricane Harvey, in 2017, he struggled to show empathy for victims or do more than gawk at (and tweet about) the destruction. A few months later, he tried half-heartedly to do more after Hurricane Maria, producing the indelible visual of the president tossing paper towels to victims, like a giveaway at a minor-league baseball game.

[Read: That time Trump threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans]

Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Trump ally, has claimed that Trump wasn’t even running the government during his first term. During the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, Matt Yglesias notes, Trump was more interested in offering punditry on how the government was doing than acting like the head of the executive branch. And on January 6, 2021, according to federal prosecutors, Trump sat at the White House watching the violent sacking of the Capitol and doing nothing to stop it.

This approach to governance—or refusal to approach it, rather—is inextricably tied to Trump’s Gardiner-like obsession with television. The president watches hours of news every day, and if reports from inside the White House didn’t bear witness to this, his all-hours social-media posts would. Because he has little grounding in the issues facing the government and little interest in reading, television frequently seems to set his agenda. Political allies learned that the best way to get a message to Trump was to appear on Fox News. (Trolls, similarly, learned that a good way to rankle him was to take out ads on the channel.) Trump has used the Fox roster as a hiring pool for his administration.

One vignette from the first Trump administration illustrates the dynamic. In April 2019, as the White House was juggling half a dozen serious controversies, Trump called into Fox & Friends and yakked at length about whatever happened to be on his mind until even the hosts couldn’t take it any longer. Finally, Brian Kilmeade cut in and brought things to a close. “We could talk all day, but looks like you have a million things to do,” he said. Trump didn’t appear concerned about it.

[Read: Donald Trump calls in to Fox & Friends]

What’s odd is that even as Trump acts so passively, his administration is moving quickly to seize unprecedented powers for the presidency. In part, that’s because of the ideological commitments of his aides, but Trump also has a curious view of presidential power as an à la carte thing. He’s very interested in acquiring and flexing power to control the justice system, punish his enemies, and crack down on immigration, but he’d just as soon get the federal government out of the emergency-management business.

The presidency is not a spectator sport, though. At the end of Being There (spoiler alert), a group of political advisers conspires to put Chauncey Gardiner forward as the next president. The movie’s central joke is that the childlike, TV-obsessed protagonist has inadvertently fooled the nation’s most powerful circles into believing that he is profound, simply by stating directly what little he sees and understands. Joke’s on us.

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The aged president of the United States and the young midwestern senator he’d chosen as his second-term running mate were having a private, late-night discussion. The commander in chief wanted to share his plan to make America greater than it’s ever been. He flung an arm toward one end of the room as he explained the most audacious idea in the history of the republic.

“Canada! Canada!”

The senator, a veteran of America’s most recent war, was dumbfounded. “A union with Canada?” he asked.

“Right. A union with Canada. … Canada is the wealthiest nation on earth … Canada will be the seat of power in the next century and, properly exploited and conserved, her riches can go on for a thousand years.”

Not only did the president want to annex Canada, but he then declared the need to bring Scandinavia—with populations ostensibly blessed by genetics—into a new Atlantic union. “Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, to be specific. They will bring us the character and the discipline we so sadly lack. I know these people … I’m of German extraction, but many generations ago my people were Swedes who emigrated to Germany.”

Other NATO members would be frozen out, especially Great Britain, France, and Germany, nations the president believed had faded as world powers. He assured his running mate that eventually they would become part of the new union one way or another—even if that meant using force against former American allies to compel their submission to his plans for greatness. “Force?” the incredulous young senator asked. “You mean military force, Mr. President?”

“Yes, force,” the president said. “Only if necessary, and I doubt it ever would be. There are other kinds of pressure,” the president continued, “trade duties and barriers, financial measures, economic sanctions if you will.” In the short term, however, the president’s first move would be to meet with the Russians—and to propose a nuclear alliance against China.

These exchanges are—believe it or not—the plot of a 1965 political thriller, a book titled Night of Camp David.

The author Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote the more widely known Seven Days in May) came up with these plans as evidence that a fictional president named Mark Hollenbach has gone insane. In the story, a crisis unfolds as the young senator, Jim MacVeagh, realizes that Hollenbach has told no one else of his scheme. He races to alert other members of the government to the president’s madness before the potentially disastrous summit with the Kremlin.

Such ideas—including a messianic president talking about attacking other NATO members—were in 1965 perhaps too unnerving for Hollywood. Unlike Seven Days in May, a book about a military coup in the United States that was made into a well-regarded film starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Night of Camp David was never made into a movie despite decent reviews and more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list. In fairness, the market was glutted with such thrillers in the mid-’60s, but perhaps the idea was too disturbing even for Cold War America.

And now, 60 years later, Donald Trump—an elderly president with a young midwesterner as his vice president—is saying things that make him sound much like Mark Hollenbach. He, too, has proposed annexing Canada; he, too, has suggested that he would use coercion against U.S. friends and allies, including Panama and Denmark. He, too, seems to believe that some groups bring better genes to America than others. Like Hollenbach, he dreams of a giant Atlantic empire and seeks the kind of accommodation with Russia that would facilitate an exit from our traditional alliances, especially NATO.

One of the most important differences between the novel and real life is that until the titular night at Camp David, Hollenbach is a highly intelligent and decent man, a president respected by both parties after a successful first term. His new plans (which, in another moment of life imitating art, also include unleashing the FBI on America’s domestic “enemies”) are wildly out of character for him, and in the end, MacVeagh finally manages to convince the Cabinet that the president is suffering from a sudden illness, perhaps dementia, a nervous breakdown, or the onset of paranoia.

Trump, however, has always talked like this. He is regularly caught up in narcissistic and childlike flights of grandeur; he routinely lapses into fits of self-pitying grievance; he thinks himself besieged by enemies; and he talks about international affairs as if he is playing a giant game of Risk. (In the novel, MacVeagh at one point muses that the president’s “once brilliant mind now was obsessed with fancied tormentors and played like a child’s with the toy blocks of destiny.”) Whatever one thinks of the 47th president, he is today who he has always been.

I am not a doctor, and I am not diagnosing Trump. I’m also not the first one to notice the similarities between the fictional Hollenbach and Trump: The book was name-checked by Bob Woodward, Michael Beschloss, and Rachel Maddow during Trump’s first term, and then reissued in 2018 because of a resurgence of interest in its plot. Rumors that the United 93 director, Paul Greengrass, wanted to make a movie version circulated briefly in 2021, but the project is now likely languishing in development hell.

In any event, rereading Night of Camp David today raises fewer disturbing questions about Trump than it does about America. How did the United States, as a nation, travel the distance from 1965—when the things Trump says would have been considered signs of a mental or emotional disorder—to 2025, where Americans and their elected officials merely shrug at a babbling chief executive who talks repeatedly and openly about annexing Canada? Where is the Jim MacVeagh who would risk everything in his life to oppose such things? (I’ve read the book, and let me tell you, Vice President J. D. Vance is no Jim MacVeagh.)

The saddest part of revisiting the book now is how quaint it feels to read about the rest of the American government trying hard to do the right thing. When others in Congress and the Cabinet finally realize that Hollenbach is ill, they put their careers on the line to avert disaster. At the book’s conclusion, Hollenbach, aware that something’s wrong with him, agrees to give up the presidency. He resigns after agreeing to a cover story about having a serious heart condition, and the whole matter is hushed up.

Perhaps such happy endings are why some thrillers are comforting to read: Fear ends up giving way to reassurance. Unfortunately, in the real world, the GOP is not responding to Trump’s bizarre foreign-policy rants by rallying to the defense of America’s alliances and its national values as the leader of the free world. Instead, Republican members of the United States Senate are seeing how fast they can ram through the nomination of an unqualified talk-show host as secretary of defense.

In 2018, Knebel’s son was asked what his father would have thought about the renewed interest in the book. The younger Knebel answered: “He’d say, yeah, this is just what I was afraid of.” But at least Mark Hollenbach only dared whisper such ideas in the dark. Donald Trump says them, over and over, in broad daylight.

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America Is Divided. It Makes for Tremendous Content.

By Spencer Kornhaber

Amid the madness and tension of the most recent presidential-election campaign, a wild form of clickbait video started flying around the political internet. The titles described debates with preposterous numerical twists, such as “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” and “60 Republicans vs Democrats Debate the 2024 Election.” Fiery tidbits went viral: a trans man yelling at the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for a full four minutes; Pete Buttigieg trying to calm an undecided voter seething with rage at the Democrats. These weren’t typical TV-news shouting matches, with commentators in suits mugging to cameras. People were staring into each other’s eyes, speaking spontaneously, litigating national divisions in a manner that looked like a support group and felt like The Jerry Springer Show.

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Photographs by John Francis Peters

Amid the madness and tension of the most recent presidential-election campaign, a wild form of clickbait video started flying around the political internet. The titles described debates with preposterous numerical twists, such as “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” and “60 Republicans vs Democrats Debate the 2024 Election.” Fiery tidbits went viral: a trans man yelling at the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for a full four minutes; Pete Buttigieg trying to calm an undecided voter seething with rage at the Democrats. These weren’t typical TV-news shouting matches, with commentators in suits mugging to cameras. People were staring into each other’s eyes, speaking spontaneously, litigating national divisions in a manner that looked like a support group and felt like The Jerry Springer Show.

The clips were created by Jubilee Media, a booming entertainment company that has built a huge young following by turning difficult discussions into shareable content. Launched in 2017, it has produced videos with titles including “Flat Earthers vs Scientists: Can We Trust Science?” (29 million views), “6 Vegans vs 1 Secret Meat Eater” (17 million views), along with hundreds of others in which delicate subjects—Middle East politics, parenting strategies, penis size—are explored by strangers in gamelike scenarios. During an era of ideological chaos, when all consensus seems in flux, Jubilee has become a phenomenon by insisting that it’s okay, even fun, to clash. In doing so, it represents a challenge to traditional media: Jubilee’s founder, Jason Y. Lee, told me he’s hopeful that the company can host one of the presidential debates in 2028.

Jason Y. Lee (left) watches a taping of Surrounded. He relaunched Jubilee in 2017 as an effort to bridge national divisions revealed by Donald Trump’s election. (Photographs by John Francis Peters)

That idea shouldn’t sound far-fetched. The 2024 election demonstrated the influence of YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, and other online forums in fostering discussion that’s less regulated than what journalistic norms allow. Gen Z’s rightward swing since 2020, combined with its high rate of independent party identification, suggests a remarkable openness to persuasion from across the political spectrum. Basic policy shibboleths, such as the efficacy of vaccines, are being questioned by all sorts of constituencies; once-predictable public-opinion trend lines—regarding feminism, LGBTQ rights, democracy itself—are going wobbly. As Jubilee’s former creative director John Regalado told me, the internet is “updating our tolerance for disagreement—and disagreement on a lot of things that we thought were in the can.”

Jubilee has proved adept at mining this new paradigm for views. Its video with Shapiro was the fifth-most-watched bit of election-related content on YouTube, just a few spots down from Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump; that “1 Woke Teen,” the fledgling TikTok commentator Dean Withers, was invited to the White House after his performance. The company’s offerings also include dating shows, a forthcoming dating app, and a card game to provoke interesting interactions with friends. Students at high schools and colleges have held Jubilee-inspired events to mimic the debates they see on-screen. Lee said he’s trying to build “the Disney of empathy”: a media empire that teaches people how to connect, listen, and healthily disagree—an ambitious, even fanciful-sounding notion in a time of cultural fracturing and political polarization.

Pursuing that goal has meant emphasizing seemingly old-fashioned media ideals—neutrality, fidelity, hearing from all sides—in ways that can seem extreme. Moderators, when they’re involved at all, take only the lightest touch in steering conversations, which can mean letting misinformation and misdirection fly. (Fact-checks happen after filming and are provided by another start-up, Straight Arrow News, which pitches itself as “Unbiased. Straight Facts.”) Cast members tend to seem like regular, if colorful, folks who speak off-the-cuff. The point isn’t to change participants’ minds—full-on ideological conversions almost never happen in the videos. Rather, Regalado said, Jubilee thinks of its efforts as a “practice” or a “ritual.” The awkward or upsetting moments that inevitably arise are part of the product. “That rawness and that authenticity is what young people desperately are seeking,” Lee told me.

Jubilee’s critics, however, contend that the company is simply manufacturing ragebait and platforming dangerous ideas in order to pull eyeballs. Regalado noted that angry viewers often leave comments joking that Jubilee might do “Holocaust Survivors vs. Holocaust Deniers” next—but in the company’s logic, that’s really not an outrageous idea. “Internally, Jubilee has argued about whether or not we would do that episode,” Regalado said, adding that he himself would “want to see that dialogue happen” so long as the Holocaust survivors understood what they were getting into. “I don't think it’s good for society to deny an opportunity for discourse.”

Jubilee’s headquarters have the rumpled, run-and-gun energy of a newspaper office. The ceiling panels are scuffed, the walls are decorated with movie posters, and the desks are dotted with equipment, knickknacks, and struggling houseplants. I visited on a Friday, when most of the staff was working from home, save for a casting director making calls from a private booth. Lee explained that, because Jubilee makes around 200 videos a year, finding participants is a constant chore. “One day we’ll be like, ‘Hey, we need to get nuns,’” he said. “The next day we’ll be like, ‘We need 50 gang members.’”

Lee took me into a corner office with a sweeping view of the Los Angeles International Airport’s tarmac. Using a dry-erase marker to write on the glass tabletop we were sitting at, he drew a graph. One axis was labeled “value” (as in social value) and the other “savvy” (as in business savvy). He wants most of Jubilee’s content to fall in the top-right quadrant, meaning it’s highly benevolent—informative, uplifting, helpful—but also highly entertaining and, therefore, profitable. He pointed to a sign on one wall that said Provoke Understanding and Create Human Connection. That’s Jubilee’s mission statement, whose acronym, PUCHC, is pronounced puke, so people “actually remember it,” he said.

Participants crash into one another while rushing to the debate chair. (Photograph by John Francis Peters)

Sporting a tastefully mussed mullet and canvas pants, Lee sounded like a start-up founder who has delivered countless pitches about his company’s significance. Clearly, however, his desire for impact is deeply rooted. Raised in Kansas by Korean-immigrant parents, Lee is a devout Christian. His résumé bears the hallmarks of can-do Millennial idealism: an internship on Barack Obama’s 2007 primary campaign; five months in Zambia working for the Clinton Health Access Initiative. In a 2017 TEDx Talk, Lee said that he grew up wanting to be a police officer in order to help people.

On Lee’s 22nd birthday, in 2010, he saw news reports about an earthquake devastating Haiti and felt a need to contribute in some way. He went to a New York City subway station and started busking for donations to relief efforts while filming himself. He came up short of his $100 goal for the day. But when he posted the video of his busking online with a pledge to donate a penny each time the video was viewed, something strange happened: He went viral, or at least more viral than any random guy warbling Coldplay on shaky footage could have expected. He then founded the Jubilee Project, a nonprofit to create socially conscious videos; two years later, he quit his six-figure consulting job at Bain & Company to run the project full-time.

The early version of Jubilee was very much a product of its time—a moment when the internet was widely assumed to be a force for progress. The Arab Spring, Kony 2012, the Ice Bucket Challenge: All were early-2010s mass mobilization efforts for a better world, fostered by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Peppy infotainment start-ups—BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Vox—were proliferating, and legacy brands were “pivoting to video,” believing that traditional journalistic values could persist in new shapes.

Really, though, those values were being tested. The dynamics of the internet in those days encouraged newsgatherers to communicate with a clear point of view; the ability to drive traffic by targeting specific audiences, who could in turn orchestrate social-media backlash to coverage, helped make so-called both-sidesism distinctly unfashionable. The rise of Donald Trump, campaigning on what would be later called “alternative facts,” added to the widespread sense that media organizations would play a more active role in refereeing democracy. Traffic boomed, but cultural fracturing worsened as MAGA created its own information ecosystem via independent outlets and forums like Facebook.

After the 2016 election, Lee was disturbed by the divisions he noticed among his acquaintances. Back home in Kansas, people couldn’t fathom why anyone voted for Hillary Clinton; in L.A., they couldn’t do so for Trump. He felt pained to realize that the Jubilee Project’s PSA-like content—about topics including school bullying and global poverty—mostly seemed to be preaching to people who already thought as he did. He relaunched Jubilee as a for-profit company, pitching it as an effort to bridge ideological silos.

Lee and his team devised a set of “shows”: repeatable formats that could liven up discussions about any topic. Middle Ground asks two seemingly opposed factions—minimum-wage workers and millionaires, sex workers and clergy—to try to come to some sense of agreement through discussion. In Odd One Out, a group of similar people tries to root out a mole, thereby examining individual stereotypes (for example, a group of straight guys tries to identify the secretly gay one). Jubilee’s dating videos force people to “swipe” through potential mates in real life, which highlights biases, preferences, and the general inhumanity of apps such as Tinder. Surrounded, which encircles one expert debater with 20 to 25 rivals, is intended to showcase “the many versus a mighty,” Regalado said.

At best, the videos are eyeball-scorching documents of human behavior. The 2024-election hit “Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative? (Feat. Charlie Kirk)” had a carnivalesque feel, showcasing all sorts of people trying out all sorts of rhetorical strategies—nitpicking; filibustering; even, from time to time, building logically sound arguments. Conversations got cut maddeningly short and insults flew to and fro, but that made it all the more satisfying when, for example, a nose-ringed student named Naima incisively landed a complex point about structural racism. Over 90 minutes, an odd kinship seemed to develop between Kirk—a slick and buttoned-up pundit who’s made a career out of “owning” liberals—and his opponents, almost like they were all in on a joke.

Sometimes the chemistry among Jubilee participants becomes poisonous. Last year, the company posted one of its most controversial installments, “Is Being Fat a Choice? Fit Men vs Fat Men.” It featured Myron Gaines, a manosphere podcaster, who repeatedly referred to overweight people—four of whom were in the room with him—as “fat asses” who should be put in a fitness “concentration camp.” Social media lit up with outrage directed toward Jubilee for giving voice to a vicious troll. Lee told me he felt that criticism was fair: Strong voices are good, but voices that hijack the conversation with an agenda and dehumanize other participants are not. “Every year, we put over 2,000 people in our videos,” he said. “I’m not gonna lie; there have been certain videos [where] I’m like, Oh, we might have gotten this balance off.”

Participants in Surrounded can raise red flags, signaling a vote to replace the current debater with someone else from their side. (Photographs by John Francis Peters)

Balance is a word that comes up often in the many, many takedowns that have been aimed at Jubilee over the years. Every issue may have two sides, but not all sides are equally valid, and some are even dangerous. Lee told me that Jubilee has a “harm clause” against featuring groups that openly want to hurt other groups. Harm, of course, is a relative—and ever-expanding—term. Jubilee’s team mostly resolves contentious programming decisions through internal discussion and debate, which seems fitting. For example: Lee told me he disagrees with Regalado about potentially doing a “Holocaust Survivors vs. Deniers” video. Certain topics are just “beyond the realm where people will give us any benefit of the doubt.”

Yet Jubilee’s success suggests why deplatforming—the strategy of blocking bigots and liars from public stages—has proved ineffective. Audiences can always follow provocateurs to alternative platforms; a billionaire can buy the old platform and raise up once-canceled voices. “An anti-vaxxer is about to be part of the Trump administration, and that’s not because of a Jubilee video,” Regalado said. “That’s because information is accessible to people in a new way, and ideas are being resurrected because of our relationship to the internet.” (He was referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump selected to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.)

Lee declined to comment on his own political beliefs, but he said that his staff generally leans left; Regalado, who exited his full-time role at the company in 2023 but still contributes as a consultant and podcaster, told me he’s “a little bit more liberal than conservative.” Both men suggested to me that progressive critics of Jubilee, who believe that political debates on the platform tend to end up favoring the conservative side, may be reacting to an imbalance in the wider political culture. In the pugilistic, digressive arena of a YouTube debate, advocates for the right are just more experienced at getting their point across.

“Something that people will ask us quite a bit is like: You featured Ben Shapiro and you featured Charlie Kirk. Why aren’t you featuring those people on the left?” Lee said. “And usually the question I ask is, Who are you talking about?” The only establishment Democrat to sit down for a Jubilee video this past cycle was Buttigieg; other liberal Surrounded anchors were a TikToker (Withers) and a video-game streamer (Destiny). Of course plenty of other camera-tested Democrats exist, but they tend to be native to mainstream TV news, which hasn’t been a forum for robust, sustained argument since Jon Stewart shamed Crossfire off the air 20 years ago. Regalado characterized liberals as suffering from “a reluctance to meet the moment that we have.” He added, “Their ideas have suffered for it.”

The day after I visited Jubilee’s offices, I arrived at an industrial building in South L.A. for a taping of Surrounded that would pit 25 Christians against one atheist. In a circle of folding chairs sat youthful theologians with tattoos, a midwestern pastor in a fleece vest, and one blond-bearded Mormon in a suit. At the center was a blue-blazered 25-year-old named Alex O’Connor, who had come to argue that God probably wasn’t real and that Jesus probably didn’t rise from the dead.

At first, the mood was tense. O’Connor would state an assertion, and Christians would sprint up to debate him, sometimes crashing into one another on the way. A large countdown clock enforced 20-minute time limits on each round; as the conversations went on, the other participants started to raise red flags, signaling a vote to kick out the current champion of their faith and install a new one.

And yet, despite the gladiatorial trappings, the discussions turned out to be heady and technical—largely focused on disputes over interpreting specific biblical passages. At one point, the shoot’s director, Suncè Franičević, tried to create some sparks by urging participants to not be afraid to share personal experiences. Lee, watching the shoot alongside me, referenced the graph he’d drawn at Jubilee’s headquarters. This episode was shaping up to land high on the do-good side of the spectrum but possibly lower on entertainment value. “The question is,” he asked, “do you think people will watch it?”

Surrounded, which encircles one expert debater with 20 to 25 rivals, is intended to showcase “the many versus a mighty,” Regalado says. (Photograph by John Francis Peters)

As civil as the debate was, I felt the same thing I always feel while watching Jubilee content: squirming discomfort with confrontation but also amazement at the eagerness of the young participants to dive into thorny subjects. I’ve long thought that what Stewart said on Crossfire was correct—that bickering on camera just feeds division and sows confusion. But I’m also of a generation whose worldviews about religion and politics and so much else were, for many of us, set long ago, in the TV-news era. We then gorged on the internet’s wealth of sharp and smart commentary designed to tell us what we already thought. Jubilee, however, is largely being consumed by people who came up in the fractured aftermath, scanning comment-section flame wars and social-media controversies, trying to figure out where they fit.

I spoke with O’Connor afterward. He’s a rising YouTube star and podcaster who has participated in rollicking discussions with the likes of Piers Morgan, Jordan Peterson, and Richard Dawkins. Many of the Christians at the shoot recognized him from the internet and said they were, in spite of his atheism, big fans. He started his influencer career as a teenager ranting at the camera, but over the years, he told me, he’s learned to tone down the vitriol and show more humility. Commenters on his channel sometimes grouse that he’s gone soft, but his viewership numbers keep going up: He just hit 1 million subscribers on YouTube.

O’Connor’s trajectory made me think of something Lee had told me. In the time since the company was founded, online discourse has hardly become more empathetic, and America’s divisions haven’t healed. But Lee has faith that Jubilee’s influence will be felt in years to come, in the words and deeds of people who grew up watching the company’s videos, honing their sense for what productive—and not-so-productive—conversation looks like. “I am confident that we are nudging us towards better,” he said.

I asked O’Connor whether he bought into the idea that Jubilee really was teaching people how to become better thinkers and speakers. “I don’t know,” he said, choosing his words with the same care and precision that he had during the taping. “I think that kind of is an empirical question.”

The only evidence that he could offer was this: He’d been an atheist arguing with a room full of Christians, “and afterwards, we all went out to the pub—and we had a wonderful conversation.”

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