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

Pardon the intrusion, but I am asserting my right (such as it is) as editor in chief to seize temporary control of The Atlantic Daily from Tom Nichols (who I imagine is secretly grateful for this hijacking) in order to share good news about our magazine. For the second year in a row, The Atlantic has been named winner of the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. This is the top honor awarded by the American Society of Magazine Editors, and it is quite a privilege to win, especially given the quality of our fellow finalists, which included, among others, New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine.

We received news of this win last night at a ceremony in Manhattan, a ceremony that very much resembled the Oscars, except for the almost total absence of glamor and complete (and somewhat surprising) absence of onstage slapping. Last year, when we won this same award, I assumed we wouldn’t win it again so quickly, but my generally excellent colleagues at The Atlantic have kept producing stellar journalism at such a ferocious pace as to make us unignorable.

I’ll say a bit more about this award, and what it means for The Atlantic and its readers, in a moment. But first, please take a look at some of the stories we’ve published in recent days, stories that make me proud to work here:

How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor? The only realistic answer to Putin In the age of Ozempic, what’s the point of working out?

Notes From Last Night

As some of you know, The Atlantic has been been on a bit of a sprint lately: We’ve more than doubled our number of subscribers over the past five years, and we recently won our first-ever Pulitzer Prizes: In 2021, for Ed Yong’s definitive coverage of the pandemic, and last year, for Jennifer Senior’s mesmerizing story about the aftermath of 9/11. Jen won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for that cover story as well, and this year, she was again a finalist, for her devastatingly knowing profile of Steve Bannon. In fact, many of our writers were National Magazine Award finalists this year: Caitlin Dickerson’s magnificent and Herculean story uncovering the secret history of the Trump administration’s family-separation policy was a finalist in the Public Interest category; Clint Smith’s moving exploration of memory, slavery, and the Holocaust was a finalist in Columns and Essays; George Packer’s searing look at America’s abandonment of its Afghan allies was a finalist in Reporting; and Graeme Wood’s brilliant profile of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was a finalist in the Profile Writing category.

We also won the Best Print Illustration award for Sally Deng’s illustration for “My Escape From the Taliban,” by Bushra Seddique, and we were a finalist in the Best Digital Illustration category. As longtime readers of The Atlantic are aware, we have been known for many things over the years, but not especially for aesthetic excellence. This is a magazine, after all, that didn’t include photography for the first 100 years of its existence (because what’s the rush?). One more note from last night: Jerusalem Demsas, one of our young star writers, was named a winner of the ASME Next Award, for the most promising magazine journalists under 30. I have little doubt that Jerusalem will one day have my job, if my job hasn’t been outsourced to Skynet by the time she wants it.

It is gratifying, of course, to see Atlantic journalists receive so much recognition, but it is not particularly surprising. We realized a while ago that the way to differentiate The Atlantic in a very crowded field is to make stories only of the highest quality and ambition. We sometimes fall short of our objective, but not for lack of trying. My goal at The Atlantic is to build the greatest writers’ collective in the English language, and to surround these writers with the very best editors, artists, designers, and fact-checkers. This goal is not an end in itself. Only by gathering together the best journalists in America can we fulfill our historic mission: To illuminate and inspire; to hold the powerful to account; to stand for the belief that the American idea is worth saving and refining; and to be, in the words of our founding manifesto, “of no party or clique,” to be independent in mind and spirit.

Tomorrow, Tom Nichols will be back (and may very well mock my “climb ev’ry mountain” rhetoric, which is his right), so let me thank our most loyal readers for their support, without which we could not pursue the sort of excellence embodied by our brilliant team of journalists.

Read our finalist stories:

“We Need to Take Away Children,” by Caitlin Dickerson American Rasputin, by Jennifer Senior Monuments to the Unthinkable, by Clint Smith The Betrayal, by George Packer Absolute Power, by Graeme Wood

Today’s News

The Manhattan grand jury hearing the hush-money case involving Donald Trump will reportedly break for two weeks in April, which will push back the possible indictment of the former president. Financial regulators testified before the House Financial Services committee about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. The Senate voted to repeal the 2002 resolution that approved the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 1991 resolution authorizing military force against Iraq in the first Gulf War. The bill now goes to the House.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The West agreed to pay climate reparations. That was the easy part, Emma Marris writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf looks to cosmic events to process the unfathomable.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo-Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Steve Lewis / Getty

“The Gun”

By Clint Smith

the gun heard the first shot /

the gun thought it was a bursting pipe /

the gun heard the second shot and the third /

and the fourth /

the gun realized this was not a pipe

Read the full poem.

More From The Atlantic

One more reason to hate cockroaches Stop sharing viral college-acceptance videos. Photos: a collection of cherry blossoms

Culture Break

Paramount Pictures

Read. After Visiting Friends, the author Michael Hainey’s intimate, noirish quest to find out how his father died.

Or try another of these six memoirs that go beyond memories.

Watch. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, in theaters, marks the return of the sincere blockbuster.

Play our daily crossword.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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

By some accounts, Mike Pence has wanted to be president since his college-fraternity days. Now he finally seems ready to run—but he can’t find a constituency to support him. How did the former VP get here?

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Tattoos do odd things to the immune system. The Malthusians are back. Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading

Deal With the Devil

My colleague McKay Coppins, who profiled Mike Pence for The Atlantic in 2018 and has closely followed Pence’s political career ever since, recently sat in on some focus groups consisting of Republican voters who supported Trump in both 2016 and 2020. “My goal was to see if I could find at least one Pence supporter,” McKay wrote yesterday. Instead, he heard “some of the most withering commentary you’ve ever encountered about a politician.”

I called McKay to talk about Pence’s Trump trap, and how one big miscalculation damaged his political prospects.

Isabel Fattal: Mike Pence has a problem: Some voters think he’s too aligned with Donald Trump; others think he’s not aligned enough. How did he end up in this pickle?

McKay Coppins: Well, it’s a problem Pence created for himself. When he joined the ticket in 2016, he decided that his job would be to loyally defend Trump in every context. Pence’s role was to be an obsequious Trump flatterer, and he did it very well. And then he broke with Trump on January 6 by refusing to obstruct the certification of the electoral votes.

On one side, I kept hearing, in these focus groups of Republicans who are still strong Trump supporters, that Pence was disloyal. And on the other side, the less Trump-inclined Republicans felt like Pence was too stained by his time in the Trump administration. What was interesting, though, is that everybody across the MAGA spectrum saw Pence as weak. And I think that that’s what you get when you refuse to take a stand. In trying to walk this line, I think he’s alienated everybody and has come off looking kind of spineless in a way that is not appealing to any voters.

Isabel: You argue that Pence also miscalculated the role of decency in conservative politics.

McKay: Pence made the calculation at the very beginning that he would vouch for Trump with conservative Christian voters. He would assure them that Trump was a good man, and that they didn’t need to worry about the various mistresses and affairs and exploits in his personal life. Pence was a key figure in creating a permission structure for evangelical voters to support Donald Trump, all of his personal foibles notwithstanding.

In doing so, Pence unwittingly wrote himself out of conservative politics. He convinced what should have been his base—conservative religious voters—that personal character and morality don’t really matter in a presidential candidate. I heard that over and over in these focus groups. Voters would praise Mike Pence as an apparently decent, honest, wholesome guy who seems like a good Christian. And then, in the next breath, they would say, But I don’t really want to see him as president. And in many cases, they cited those qualities as evidence that he doesn’t have what it takes to be president.

Pence accidentally conditioned the conservative Christian base to see as their ideal champion a brash, loud, charismatic, and morally dubious figure. Now that’s what they expect in a president. And the fact that Mike Pence doesn’t embody that persona now works against him.

Isabel: Right. He did too good of a job selling Trump.

McKay: Exactly. I’ve been writing about Pence for a long time now. When I profiled him back in 2018, it was clear to me that he had made this deal with the devil, this bargain that he thought would position him to eventually become president. And instead, all of the compromises he made to his principles ended up being his undoing. I think there’s a tragic irony in that.

Isabel: Tom Nichols recently wrote about Pence’s speech at the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, where Pence publicly stated that Trump endangered his life on January 6. Why do you think he is speaking out about this now?

McKay: I imagine that his campaign-in-waiting is holding similar focus groups as the ones that I sat in on. And I imagine that his consultants have recognized the same problem that I’ve identified, which is that right now he has no constituency at all. So it’s possible that he will decide that the most hard-core Trump supporters are out of reach, and that therefore his best bet is to sharpen his criticism of Trump, sharpen his criticism of what happened on January 6, and reach for the portion of the party that’s not still under Trump’s spell. I don’t know if it’ll work, and there are probably other candidates better positioned at this point to win that segment of the party. But it is possible that he’ll decide that’s his best shot.

Related:

Nobody likes Mike Pence. God’s plan for Mike Pence

Today’s News

The Manhattan grand jury that has been hearing evidence on Donald Trump’s alleged involvement in a hush-money payment to an adult-film actress reportedly did not meet today, delaying a possible indictment of Trump until tomorrow at the earliest. Meanwhile, a federal appeals court ordered a lawyer representing Trump to hand over records in an inquiry into Trump’s handling of classified materials. Two faculty members of East High School in Denver were wounded in a shooting at the school this morning; the male student suspected in the incident remains at large. Despite recent banking-sector instability, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates by a quarter-point as part of an ongoing effort to curb inflation.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The environmental toll of bitcoin could be even higher this year than last, Emma Marris writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks: Are suburbs the future?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Houston Cofield / NYT / Redux

How Ivermectin Became a Belief System

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Since fall 2021, Daniel Lemoi has been a central figure in the online community dedicated to experimental use of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin. “You guys all know I’m not a doctor,” he often reminded them. “I’m a guy that grew up on a farm. I ran equipment all my life. I live on a dirt road and I drive an old truck—a 30-year-old truck. I’m just one of you.” Lemoi’s folksy Rhode Island accent, his avowed regular-guy-ness, and his refusal to take any money in exchange for his advice made him into an alt-wellness influencer and a personal hero for those who followed him. He joked about his tell-it-like-it-is style and liberal use of curse words: “If you don’t like my mouth, go pray to God, because he’s the one that chose me for this mission.”

Last March, during an episode of his biweekly podcast, Dirt Road Discussions, he thanked his audience for their commitment to his ivermectin lifestyle: “I love that you guys are all here trusting my voice.” His group currently has more than 130,000 members and lives on Telegram, a messaging app that has become popular as an alternative social-media network. When Lemoi died earlier this month, at age 50, his followers found out via the chat. As first reported by Vice, Lemoi had given no indication that his health may have been failing. In fact, one of his last posts in the group was from the morning of the day he died: “HAPPY FRIDAY ALL YOU POISONOUS HORSE PASTE EATING SURVIVORS !!!”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Inside Ukraine’s nonviolent resistance: chatbots, yellow paint, and payoffs Israeli democracy faces a mortal threat.

Culture Break

Jon Han

Read. Saving Time, a new book by Jenny Odell that challenges Americans’ relationship with time.

Watch. Arrival (available to stream on multiple platforms), the 2016 alien-contact film to which the Atlantic staff writer Jerusalem Demsas attributes her enduring devotion to the actor Amy Adams.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you haven’t read McKay’s 2018 profile of Pence yet, I recommend sitting with it; he does a beautiful job untangling the political, moral, and religious motivations at play in Pence’s path to power.

“There is, of course, nothing inherently scary or disqualifying about an elected leader who seeks wisdom in scripture and solace in prayer,” McKay writes. “What critics should worry about is not that Pence believes in God, but that he seems so certain God believes in him. What happens when manifest destiny replaces humility, and the line between faith and hubris blurs?”

— Isabel

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

The man introduced to me in the southern port city of Odesa as Taras does not look like what he is: the founder of the civilian resistance to Russia’s military occupation of southern and eastern Ukraine. He’s no tough Marshal Tito or ethereal Mahatma Gandhi. He looks, in fact, like your typical Gen Z tech worker: early 20s, lean, trendy—and he’s always online. He likes to talk about English Premier League football games from the 1980s, but only because he’s seen them on YouTube; he can name scores of Premier League players, but only because he’s used their avatars in the FIFA video game. He adores Instagram.

Since April, Taras has led a group named Yellow Ribbon, which took up the principles of nonviolent resistance soon after the Russians overran his home city of Kherson. (Taras is a pseudonym he uses to help protect his identity from his Russian enemies.) Its goal: to resist Russian occupation through peaceful means wherever possible. The group has now spread throughout the occupied territories of Ukraine, and as it has done so, its reputation has grown. Late last year, Yellow Ribbon was one of four Ukrainian groups honored with the European Parliament’s Andrei Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, the European Union’s main award for the defense of human rights.

[David Patrikarakos: Russia’s hunger war]

What distinguishes Yellow Ribbon from traditional nonviolent resistance movements is its emphasis on the digital. The group’s growing numbers of activists stay connected via a chatbot plugin on the group’s Telegram messaging app. Prompted by the chatbot’s automated questions, activists in the occupied territories can access various resistance tasks to carry out on the ground. The system enables Yellow Ribbon to share the materials and techniques necessary for the resistance to make its activities visible in the real world of the occupation, while safeguarding the anonymity of the participants against Russian efforts to penetrate the network. Among the clandestine actions guided by the chatbot are scrawling pro-Ukraine graffiti, tying yellow ribbons around objects in the streets, and projecting slogans onto buildings taken over by the Russian administration. Such nonviolent actions have made Yellow Ribbon famous across Ukraine—and a serious problem for Russia in the occupied areas.

At first, the Russians ignored the group to avoid amplifying its work. Eventually, as Yellow Ribbon’s activities grew, they were forced to respond. Yellow and blue paint began to disappear from shops in occupied areas. Buying anything yellow became almost impossible; people were reduced to cutting patches of the color out of old clothes.

Even Russian soldiers began to feel the effects of Yellow Ribbon’s activities. Taras told me that after graffiti appeared near the entrance of a Chechen base in Melitopol, another occupied city in south-eastern Ukraine, the soldiers changed their location and started going about town in civilian clothing rather than military uniform.

Access to the Telegram chatbot has allowed resistance activists to spring up across the occupied territories; many of them were women, who, I was told, could more easily pass unnoticed by the Russian occupiers. Earlier this year, I met Liliyia Aleksandrova in Kherson, which was recaptured by Ukrainian forces late last year—though artillery shelling still roared in the background as we spoke. Prior to the occupation, Aleksandrova had, she said, been a middle-aged “mama.” When the Russians first came to Kherson, she attended some street demonstrations, but the tear gas and soldiers soon put a stop to things. “It was clear we couldn’t protest publicly anymore,” she told me. “I was thinking about what I could do for my country; I had to do something to be useful.”

On Telegram, she came across Yellow Ribbon and, using the group’s chatbot tool, she began downloading instructions for tasks. She put up yellow ribbons everywhere she could—on buildings, lampposts, and fences—and took photos. Once or twice, she was almost caught, but she continued. Her work was everywhere around the city. As we talked, we passed Yellow Ribbon graffiti on a street wall. “I did that,” Liliyia told me with quiet satisfaction.

The first time Taras saw the Russians after the February 24 invasion, they had taken an office in the city’s main square; then they took the main police station. By March 2, they were in full control of Kherson. “No one knew what would happen tomorrow or the day after,” he told me when we met earlier this year in Odesa. He’d spent most of last year living under occupation in Kherson before its liberation in November.

Ukrainian partisans have launched sporadic attacks in Russian-occupied areas, but Taras had no military training, so any resistance activity he took on had to be nonviolent. He drew inspiration from earlier causes such as Germany’s White Rose student group, which opposed the Nazis; the U.S. civil-rights movement; and Czechoslovakia’s 1989 protests that led to the Velvet Revolution. Gandhi called nonviolent resistance “mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.”

[Anne Applebaum: The brutal alternate world in which the U.S. abandoned Ukraine]

According to Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, both political scientists and co-authors of the 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works, taking up arms has traditionally given regime opponents a 26 percent chance of succeeding in their aims, whereas the tactics of nonviolent resistance have a 53 percent success rate. Countries where nonviolent, rather than violent, resistance led to change were more likely to remain democratic after the crisis ended.

Taras knew many people who wanted to act but for whom armed resistance was not an option. He could, he calculated, attract many more recruits through nonviolence. Almost anyone can participate: Its methods are highly accessible, and no specialist equipment or skills are required. He grasped that nonviolence’s main advantage over violence is scale—the number of people it can rally to a cause is exponentially greater.

Taras knew he could count on the 10 employees of the IT company he ran in Kherson, plus some people in other companies he worked with. This was enough to form the basis of what would become Yellow Ribbon. Even today, the core group of coordinators remains small—about 40 people, all of them known personally to Taras from before the occupation. Most are in their 20s.

At first, the Russians allowed residents of Kherson to protest in person, and many did, going to the central square, waving Ukrainian flags, and demanding the troops leave. Pooling cash, Taras’s group decided to buy online advertisements to spread the message. It gravitated easily from organizing IT projects to rallying support for the local protests and other pro-Ukraine activities through March and into April.

Then, in late April, a rumor spread through the city that Russia was making preparations for fraudulent referendums in occupied cities across the south. The result would be a foregone conclusion; the territories would be annexed to Russia. The resistance activists knew they had to act.

On April 23, they set up a Telegram group that they named Yellow Ribbon, a reference to the color on the Ukrainian flag, to spread pro-Ukraine messages and encourage people to paste leaflets and posters around Kherson. The platform would also work with local media to promulgate similar messages. Taras realized they could now reach hundreds of thousands of people.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The shortest path to peace]

“That’s what you can do with a digital component: reach larger audiences, spread more messages, get people to go out and protest, and do so successfully,” he told me. “We saw it work; things started to build like a snowball.”

The first demonstration, which took place on April 27, was modest in size—maybe 500 people. The Russians were out in force and used tear gas and stun grenades against the protesters. The physical demonstration may have been small, and was quickly put down, but online, via the Telegram channel and on social networks, it went viral. Moscow did eventually hold the referendum, but not until the end of September.

Another protest was planned for May 9, by which time things were getting more dangerous. Within five minutes, the protest was broken up by Russian forces. After the FSB, Russia’s state security police, came to town, the first local collaborators emerged, and activists started to disappear. Taras and his team made the decision to shift their strategy away from street demonstrations. If the resistance could not occupy the streets, it would occupy the online space.

In June, the group used Instagram to create a virtual street protest that included images of flags and banners on a visualization of a street in Kherson. Every person who attended had to write “Kherson is Ukraine” in the comments section. From these posts, the group calculated that 40,000 people had joined from Kherson and 16,000 from Mariupol. The Yellow Ribbon message spread across not only pro-Ukraine but pro-Russia platforms as well.

As Yellow Ribbon’s name and activities grew, new problems arose. Its activists were in constant danger of arrest. The group put several security protocols in place. Unlike specialized messaging platforms such as Signal, Telegram was already in widespread use by Ukrainians and Russians alike, rendering the app’s presence on a phone unsuspicious. Telegram can also be deleted from a phone, removing all the messages, and then downloaded again—with all of the messages still intact.

[Gil Barndollar: Ukraine has the battlefield edge]

Getting people out of jail became a priority for the group. That generally meant one thing: bribes. Usually, it was easy to pay Russian soldiers or local collaborators to release an activist who’d disappeared. Taras knew businessmen in the city who had dealings with the Russians, and he used them as intermediaries. He’d pay them, and they’d pay the Russians.

Then, in late September, the group set up the chatbot. The technology enabled Yellow Ribbon to radically scale up its activities, allowing it to evolve from being a local resistance movement into something more powerful: a franchised one. People like Aleksandrova began to open cabinets across the occupied territories—in Melitopol and Donetsk and Luhansk, even in Crimea.

Over coffee in Odesa, Taras showed me the chatbot homepage on his laptop. In Crimea, chatbot volunteers tied a yellow ribbon on a tree near a shipping port. In September, leaflets announcing Crimea is Ukraine! and Opening soon! were pasted on a government building there. Ukrainian-flag graffiti appeared in Donetsk, and in Melitopol posters mocked the Russian passports that locals were being pressured to get.

The group also taught people how to make stencils in the shape of the “3CY” initialism for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and, using torches, project them onto official buildings. In late January, one appeared on the Russian administration’s office in Melitopol.

[David Frum: Zelensky recalled us to ourselves]

Most of the time, the group judged, Russian soldiers hadn’t themselves seen the resistance graffiti or leaflets in the city, but a monitoring team would report the photo of it that subsequently appeared online. Back in May, the Russian TV channel Izvestia paraded some purported Yellow Ribbon activists from Mariupol, who claimed that they had been paid to put up leaflets (as an alternative to other hourly paid work, which encouraged Russian viewers to infer that they were prostitutes).

The Yellow Ribbon team started noticing people whom it suspected were FSB personnel using the Chatbot app to pose as activists and request to meet in person—a clear violation of security rules. The team’s members, Taras told me, also received phishing links almost daily. In this sense, the digital amplification has increased the reach and impact of the ground activity, forcing the occupier to respond to it.

Eventually, the group’s presence attracted attention in Moscow. Yellow Ribbon’s work prompted a “concerned citizen” in Crimea to message the local Russian Investigative Committee’s Telegram channel: “I request you begin investigating the terrorist activities and spreading of ideology by the Yellow Ribbon group.” On January 27, the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow issued a letter saying that the activity was being investigated, and two days later, a subdivision of the ministry confirmed that it was now regarded as a criminal matter.

A Russian organization calling itself the Committee for the Defense Against Traitors released a video claiming that the group was engaged “in the information war” to push the agenda of “terrorists.” These sorts of attacks are only to be expected: The group’s activities are not just a constant reminder that the locals reject the occupation but also a living rebuttal of Russia’s entire narrative justifying its invasion.

Recently, I spoke with Ivan, a colleague of Taras’s who helped set up Yellow Ribbon back in April last year. (Again, I am using a pseudonym to protect his identity.) Another Kherson native, he is Yellow Ribbon’s main coordinator. When the Russians withdrew from the city, he went to nearby Melitopol, which remains under Moscow’s control. Ivan stayed behind enemy lines, he explained, because the group needs to ensure that the movement keeps growing, especially in that city and other still-occupied areas. It’s hard to find the right materials and places to print, and they need to keep their network of activists in play across the region.  

“Things in Melitopol are tough,” he told me over an encrypted voice call. “The Russians have instituted an ‘anti-terrorist’ regime on the streets, which means increased patrols and video cameras everywhere. A lot of soldiers have arrived from Russia—and they are making a lot of arrests. It’s hard for us to work here now.

“The Russians can be brutal,” he went on. “But it depends on what unit they’re from—the Chechens are really bad. They think that this is their territory.”

[Tom Nichols: Putin’s desperate hours]

Ivan and his fellow activists keep a low profile, especially when they go out to buy necessities. Security is paramount. “I try not to be too active on the streets but instead focus on how to bring in the materials into the city and where to hide them,” he told me. “I work with VPNs and hosts and proxies to make sure my internet connection is safe. I have five cellphones and move from safe house to safe house each night or week.”

Taras left Kherson last August, before the city was liberated. He traveled by car, carrying just one sports bag and about 170,000 roubles (approximately $2,300), which he gave to the soldiers manning a checkpoint out of the city. When he handed over the cash, he felt like telling them they were welcome to it because he’d never be needing roubles again, but he refrained, and instead drove through the barrier in silence, back into free Ukraine.

Since then, he has continued to coordinate Yellow Ribbon’s activities from inside Ukraine. The group plans to expand its activities. The chatbot now serves about 4,600 open cabinets, but the group hopes to get that number to 100,000. This has helped change the nature of nonviolent resistance movements, which in the past tended to center on a single, charismatic figure, such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi. Instead, Yellow Ribbon, with its army of activists across occupied Ukraine, creates impact through a shared disgust at what Russia is doing, unifying opposition to the occupation. Its great strength lies in its digitally diffuse activism—which makes stopping it much harder for the Russians.

“I hope that liberation will come in the next three months,” Ivan said at the end of our conversation. “When it does, we will take our Ukrainian flags to the main square and celebrate with our military, as we did in Kherson.”

Prominent Republicans disagree about a lot these days, but on one point they have found consensus: Getting charged with a crime would be great news for Donald Trump.

After the former president predicted that he will be arrested in Manhattan tomorrow—a forecast that seems questionable, though an indictment from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg does seem to be imminent—conventional wisdom quickly developed on the right that Trump would be the big winner.

“The prosecutor in New York has done more to help Donald Trump get elected president than any single person in America today,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said. “Mr. Bragg, you have helped Donald Trump, amazing.”

[Tom Nichols: Trump did it again]

At National Review, Rich Lowry announced, “It’s going to be very bad for the country and good politically—at least in the short term and perhaps for the duration—for Donald J. Trump.” (Lowry didn’t bother to offer any basis for this claim.)

The former Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich, now running a pro-Trump super PAC called MAGA Inc., said in a statement that an indictment “will not only serve to coalesce President Trump’s support, but it will become the single largest in-kind contribution to a federal campaign in political history.”

Other Republican contenders for president didn’t make predictions quite so firm, but they either hastened to criticize Bragg or kept their mouth shut, both indications that they see this as a moment of strength for Trump, rather than a good opening to bury their own daggers in a weakened rival’s back.

[David A. Graham: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

The immediate spin, backed by so little actual argument, is a bit dizzying and bit déjà vu. Back in the 2008 presidential campaign, when the GOP nominee, John McCain, forgot how many houses he owned, the pundit Mark Halperin became infamous for a prediction: “My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates, but it’s Barack Obama.”

That became a notoriously bad take, but Halperin is unchastened. “You are about to increase the odds that Donald Trump will win another four years in the White House,” he wrote in italics on his Substack. “You could in fact be increasing his chances of winning dramatically, maybe even decisively.”

But don’t dismiss Halperin’s prediction because he’s a washed-up source of conventional wisdom who’s been badly wrong in the past. Dismiss it because it makes so little sense in light of what we know now. Politics is contingent and volatile, which means that any prediction about what will happen is worth the pixels it’s printed on. The future here is especially hard to guess because nothing really like it has ever happened. As the Republican pollster Whit Ayres dryly told Politico, “I have never studied the indictment of a former president and leading presidential candidate, … and I’ve never done any polling on the indictment of a former president and leading presidential candidate.”

[David A. Graham: America has an anti-MAGA majority]

But the assumption that Trump will profit seems to spring from hubris (among his allies) and self-protective fear (on the part of his critics and rivals). They are operating on a shared, obsolete conclusion that nothing can ever harm the former president. For a long time, this made sense. Despite a series of scandals that would have ended the career, much less the candidacy, of any other politician, Trump won the 2016 presidential election and then embarked on an even more scandal-ridden administration. Yet he seemed to chug away, indifferent to bad press. A narrative of Trumpian invincibility developed as an antidote to callow, wish-casting predictions of walls closing in on Trump.

Caution is understandable, but we know enough now to realize that although Trump is exceptionally resilient, he’s also not invulnerable. In 2018, after he decided to frame the midterm elections as a referendum on him personally, Democrats won big in House and governor elections. In 2020, the House impeached him; when the Senate did not vote to convict, some observers took this as proof that he couldn’t be stopped. But it did damage Trump, and later that year, he lost his reelection bid narrowly but decisively, losing the popular vote for the second time. After his extended attempt to overturn the 2020 election, voters once again punished candidates flying his banner and rallying around his causes in the 2022 midterms.

What charges against Trump are certain to do is inflame his most devoted supporters. They will be furious that anyone would dare try to hold Trump accountable, view it as an act of political persecution, and make a great deal of noise about it. But no one should mistake the vociferousness of this group for size. They’ve always been noisy. They’ve always been a minority: As I wrote in November, we now have multiple demonstrations that an anti-MAGA majority exists among American voters. And now, with the country heading into the 2024 election cycle, Trump alternatives are gaining more traction—most significantly, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.

[Juliette Kayyem: The Secret Service’s day of reckoning approaches]

Although Bragg has not announced exactly what charges he might bring against Trump, a consensus has developed among legal analysts that the Manhattan case is the weakest and strangest of the several criminal investigations into Trump. The case involves whether Trump attempted to conceal a $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actor who alleges that Trump had sex with her in 2006. In 2016, the then–Trump fixer Michael Cohen arranged a payment to Daniels in exchange for keeping the story private. Trump then reimbursed Cohen in 2017. Prosecutors will probably seek to prove that Trump and Cohen falsified business records to hide a violation of campaign-finance law. (Trump denies the affair and any wrongdoing.)

A case would appear to hinge on some tenuous legal theories, and Trump might well beat the rap. But any suggestion that he’s delighted by this fight is belied not only by his irate response but by common sense. Trump doesn’t want to discuss the underlying facts of this case—there’s a reason, after all, that Cohen paid Daniels six figures to buy her silence in the first place. Beyond that, several other probes—which look from the outside to be more perilous to Trump—are still on deck, regardless of the outcome in Manhattan.

“Look, at the end, being indicted never helps anybody,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a lonely dissident from the GOP consensus, said on ABC News yesterday. Trump could be the Republican nominee in 2024, or even win the White House back, but if so, it will probably be despite any criminal case against him, not because of it.

The next president will almost certainly inherit some kind of peace in Ukraine. As the economist Herb Stein said, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” This war cannot go on forever, certainly not at its current intensity. It will stop or dwindle into a cease-fire, official or otherwise. The potential contenders for the 2024 U.S. presidential election talk about how to deal with the conflict, but by the time one of them gets the job, he or she will most likely face the question of how to deal with the aftermath.

So, in assessing the presumptive candidates for president, a crucial question to ponder is: Who would be the most successful peacemaker?

Ukraine will have to be rebuilt, a mission that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Some of that money can perhaps be squeezed from Russia—for example, by transferring frozen Russian assets to Ukraine. But the greater part will likely have to come from Ukraine’s Western allies.

This reconstruction will surely prove a solid investment, as did the outlay to rebuild the liberated former Warsaw Pact countries after the end of the Cold War. From 2004 to 2021, Poland alone received some $225 billion in European Union funds. Over that same period, the Polish economy has nearly doubled in size; the country has roughly tripled its imports from EU trading partners such as Germany, France, and Italy.

[Tom Nichols: DeSantis will betray Ukraine for MAGA votes]

However, it takes vision and generosity to see economic potential amid the ruin left by war. Politicians who shake their heads and mutter about “blank checks” lack that vision and generosity. They follow in the inglorious tradition of Senator Robert Taft, who opposed the Marshall Plan in 1947, because it might cause inflation and raise taxes in the U.S., as well as the creation of NATO in 1949, because the Soviet Union might regard it as provocative.

Russia must somehow be reintegrated into the community of nations. Tough-minded diplomacy will be necessary to offer relief from Western sanctions in return for Russian commitments on peace, security, and economic reconstruction. Russia’s aggression and atrocities have inflamed emotions, especially among its immediate neighbors. Only those Western leaders with clear pro-Ukraine credentials will have the moral authority to persuade all of NATO’s members to accept possibly distasteful compromises and concessions for the sake of peace.

Successful peacemaking will demand creative new ideas about energy security. Russia tried to use gas exports as a weapon against Europe. The weapon did not work as Russia had hoped, but it inflicted cost, pain, and insecurity. After this war, Europe will want to pivot permanently away from Russia as an energy supplier. Organizing a secure transatlantic market in liquified natural gas, and then transitioning away from fossil fuels entirely, will be a huge undertaking that will require close cooperation among its participants. Politicians who distrust European allies as freeloaders—and who reject a transition away from oil and gas as an ultimate goal—are unlikely to succeed in this job.  

The shock of the war in Ukraine has cost Europe dear. Although the EU forecasts no recession in 2023, the outlook is worrying. The energy transition will be expensive. European populations are aging, their workforces poised to shrink. Europe needs a new motor of growth. Trade liberalization is the most promising candidate. Reviving the dormant idea of a Transatlantic Free Trade Area spanning the EU, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the U.S. could help Europe afford its share of Ukraine’s reconstruction. Antitrade politicians will fail as peacemakers.

[David Axelrod: Why neither party can escape Trump]

The peace the next president should pursue is not merely a regional compact. The conflict we all dread most is a war with China, sparked by Chinese aggression against Taiwan or another of China’s neighbors. To safeguard that peace will require new global institutions that have absorbed the lessons of the terrible war in Ukraine—starting with the need for defense cooperation among democratic allies. Politicians who use the word global as an insult will have no grasp of the problems of peacemaking, let alone the capacity to solve them. Both major American parties contain figures who are skeptical of collective security and international alliances. Both also have antitrade politicians. President Joe Biden himself has fallen away from the free-trade principles he held earlier in his career.

But Republicans are the ones who have turned most radically inward. Former President Donald Trump just this month reaffirmed that his idea of peacemaking is not integrating Ukraine into Europe, but conceding parts of Ukraine to Russia. In his response to a questionnaire from Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis explicitly rejected the idea that the peace and security of Europe was a “vital interest” for the U.S. Ominously, recent polling suggests that the Republicans most hostile to aiding Ukraine are also the most resistant to defending Taiwan.

These developments return Republicans to the days of Taft—only worse. At least in the Eisenhower era, Republicans were willing to go toe-to-toe against opponents inside their own party to fight such shortsighted and self-destructive isolationism. We need their like again now, maybe more than ever.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 4, Donald Trump gave a speech that my colleague Tom Nichols called “long and deranged,” adding that it was, “even by his delusional standards, dark and violent. Much of it was hallucinatory.” And revealing too—not just of Trump’s worsening state of mind but of the attitudes and temperament of MAGA world which Trump has, for seven years, personified. He remains the GOP’s apotheosis.

That doesn’t mean that Trump is unbeatable in the Republican presidential primary. He’s viewed throughout much of the party as a loser; his presentation is noticeably more lethargic than when he ran in 2016; and his obsessive promotion of lies about the 2020 election is exhausting even some of his loyal supporters. He’s also having trouble drawing large or enthusiastic crowds, which he never had a problem with in the past.

Despite that, at this early stage, Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are polling as the overwhelming favorites to win the Republican nomination. And although individual surveys are scattered, two recent ones, from Emerson and Fox, show Trump leading DeSantis by 30 and 15 points, respectively. (An Emerson poll from New Hampshire earlier this month showed Trump with a 41-point lead over DeSantis in that early-primary state.) But what the polls can’t measure is just how much the party’s sensibilities have fused with Trump’s, or how many imitators Trump has spawned. His imprint on the Republican Party is almost impossible to overstate. Which is why Trump’s remarks at CPAC are instructive.

[Read: Trump has become the thing he never wanted to be]

One section of the nearly two-hour speech particularly caught my attention, and not mine alone. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher devoted an article to the implications of these comments:  

In 2016, I declared, “I am your voice” Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.

“This is the final battle,” America’s 45th president said. “They know it, I know it, you know it, everybody knows it. This is it. Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.”

To understand the modern Republican Party, you must understand the intense sense of fear and grievance that drives so many of its voters, which has in turn given rise to a profound desire for retribution and revenge, for inflicting harm on Democrats, progressives, and other perceived enemies. Those negative emotions existed before Donald Trump ran for the presidency, but he tapped into them with astonishing skill.

In September 2015, I had an email exchange with a person who worked for a theologically conservative church. In the course of sharing thoughts on the early stages of the Republican primary, I described my views and concerns: “I consider Mr. Trump to be in an entirely different category—wrong not just on the issues and philosophically unanchored, but alarmingly erratic … wholly untrustworthy, a flippant misogynist, crude and vulgar, and downright obsessive. As president, he would be unstable and dangerous. As leader of the Republican Party, he would be an embarrassment. As the de facto face of conservatism, he would be a disaster. That’s why I would not vote for him under any conceivable circumstances.”

Although Trump was not this person’s first choice in the primary, his response was instructive. “I am fed up with our side rolling over.” He then said: “I think we have likely slipped past the point of no return as a country and I’m desperately hoping for a leader who can turn us around. I have no hope that one of the establishment guys would do that. That, I believe, is what opens people up to Trump. He’s all the bad things you say, but what has the Republican establishment given me in the past 16 years? First and foremost: [Barack Obama].”

Note the line of argument: My interlocutor agreed with all of the negative things I said about Trump—misogynistic, untrustworthy, erratic, psychologically unstable, and dangerous—but in the end, they didn’t matter. Trump was, to use a word I heard repeatedly to describe him, a fighter. The negative aspects of his character were assumed to be essential to that pugilism. Over time—and it wasn’t much—most of those on the right who had reservations about Trump made their peace with his flaws. Some even quietly celebrated them.

A year later I participated in an event at Stanford University with the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, the author of the acclaimed book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Hochschild spent five years immersed in a community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, then a Tea Party stronghold. What was important to understand about the rise of Trump, Hochschild told me during one of our offstage conversations, was that it was tied to feelings of being dishonored and humiliated. Trump supporters feel they have been disrespected; Trump is their response, she said, their antidepressant. Hochschild understood the power of emotion in politics, how reason is so often the slave of the passions. And the passions of people who feel unseen, who feel they have been treated with contempt, are destructive and dangerous.

[From the January/February 2019 issue: The real roots of American rage]

Since the Trump era began, we’ve seen a particularly toxic mix of passions on the right: fear and desperation, anger and indignation, feelings of betrayal and victimhood, all of which cry out for vengeance. Whether the nominee is DeSantis—who bills himself as a God-given “protector” and a “fighter”—or Trump, or someone else, the MAGA wing of the Republican Party will demand that the leader of the GOP seek vengeance in its name. Donald Trump has energized a movement and a propaganda infrastructure that will outlast him.

Vengeance is different from justice. The psychologist Leon F. Seltzer puts it this way: Revenge is predominantly emotional, while justice is primarily rational; revenge is, by nature, personal, while justice is impersonal and impartial; revenge is an act of vindictiveness, justice an act of vindication; revenge is about cycles, justice about closure; and revenge is about retaliation, whereas justice is about restoring balance.

“With revenge,” William Mikulas, a professor of psychology at the University of West Florida, told ABC News, “you are coming from an orientation of anger and violence or self-righteousness: ‘I want to get him, I want to hurt them … I want to make them pay.’ You’re coming from a place of violence and anger and that’s never good.”

Revenge creates a cycle of retaliation. It “keeps wounds green, which otherwise would heal,” in the words of Francis Bacon. Vengeance is insatiable, and in any society, over the long term, it can be deeply damaging. The desire for revenge reduces the capacity for legislators to work together across the aisle. It creates conditions in which demagogues can successfully peddle conspiracy theories and call for a “national divorce.” It leads Americans to see members of their opposing party as traitors. And exacting revenge tempts people to employ immoral and illegal methods—street violence, coups, insurrections—they would not otherwise contemplate. (The defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems revealed that a Fox producer texted Maria Bartiromo, a Fox news anchor, saying, “To be honest, our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition.”)

White evangelical Christians have been a driving force in creating the politics of retribution and revenge—maybe the driving force. White evangelicals are among the GOP’s most loyal constituencies, and if they declared certain conduct off-limits, candidates and elected officials would comply. But no such signals were ever sent. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2020—after all the lies, misconduct, and deranged conspiracy theories we saw unfold during the Trump presidency—85 percent of white, evangelical Protestant voters who frequently attended religious services voted for Trump. Most of them became more, not less, tolerant of Trump’s misconduct over the course of his tenure.

Human emotions can be dominant and even determinative in distorting and deforming people’s judgments. Individuals who honestly believe that the Bible is authoritative in their lives—who insist that they cherish Jesus’s teachings from the Sermon on the Mount (blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, and the pure in heart; turn the other cheek; love your enemies) and Paul’s admonition to put away anger, wrath, slander, and malice and replace them with compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, a spirit of forgiveness, and, above all, love, “which binds everything together in perfect harmony”—find themselves embracing political figures and a political ethic that are antithetical to these precepts. Many of those who claim in good faith that their Christian conscience required them to get passionately involved in politics have, upon doing so, discredited their Christian witness. Jesus has become a “hood ornament,” in the words of the theologian Russell Moore, in this case placed atop tribal and “culture war” politics.

[From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church]

One recent example: Jenna Ellis, a former attorney for Donald Trump who has made much of her Christian faith and worked for several different evangelical associations. “My mission is Truth, my God is the Lord Jesus Christ, and my client is the President of the United States,” she tweeted in 2020. But last week she admitted in a sworn statement that she had knowingly misrepresented the facts in several of her public claims that widespread voting fraud led to Trump’s defeat—and she posted a video on Twitter mocking an injury from a fall that sent 81-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell to the hospital. (McConnell, although a Republican, has been a critic of Trump, earning the enmity of MAGA world.)

The antidote to the politics of retribution is the politics of forbearance. Forbearance is something of a neglected virtue; it is generally understood to mean patience and endurance, a willingness to show mercy and tolerance, making allowances for the faults of others, even forgiving those who offend you. Forbearance doesn’t mean avoiding or artificially minimizing disagreements; it means dealing with them with integrity and a measure of grace, free of vituperation.

None of us can perfectly personify forbearance, but all of us can do a little better, reflect a bit more on what kind of human beings and citizens we want to be, and take small steps toward greater integrity. We can ask ourselves: What, in this moment, is most needed from me and those in my political community, and perhaps even my faith community? Do we need more retribution and vengeance in our politics, or more reconciliation, greater understanding, and more fidelity to truth?

The greatest embodiment of the politics of forbearance was Abraham Lincoln. With a Civil War looming, he was still able to say, in his first inaugural address, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have been strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Those bonds were broken; the war came. By the time it ended, more than 700,000 lives had been lost in a nation of 31 million. But the war was necessary; Lincoln preserved the Union and freed enslaved people. And somehow, through the entire ordeal, Lincoln was free of malice. He never allowed his heart to be corroded by enmity or detestation.   

In his 1917 biography of Lincoln, Lord Charnwood wrote, “This most unrelenting enemy to the project of the Confederacy was the one man who had quite purged his heart and mind from hatred or even anger towards his fellow-countrymen of the South.”

Another Lincoln biographer, William Lee Miller, said of America’s 16th president, “He did not mark down the names of those who had not supported him, or nurse grudges, or hold resentments, or retaliate against ‘enemies’—indeed, he tried not to have enemies, not to ‘plant thorns.’” Lincoln’s previous failures did not leave scars or resentments, Miller says; he was an unusually generous human being, lacking in ruthlessness, disinclined to make himself feared, explicit in disavowing vengeance. Some believed he was too sympathetic to be a great leader. He turned out to be our greatest leader.

Lincoln was unique; we will never see his kind again. But the contrast between America’s first Republican president and its most recent Republican president is almost beyond comprehension. Each is the inverse of the other. One cannot revere Lincoln and embrace the political ethic of Trump, his many imitators, and the MAGA movement.

Sensibilities and dispositions can be shaped and reshaped; the “ancient trinity” of truth, beauty, and goodness can still inspire the human heart, even among cynics. The burning question for each of us is what we aspire to, for ourselves and for our leaders, and the kind of political culture we will help build. We are citizens, not subjects, and so it is within our power to write magnificent new chapters in the American story. But that requires letting go of hatred and vengeance and to be again touched, as we surely can be, by the better angels of our nature.