Compared with its wealthy peer nations, the United States is failing the most basic test of a civilization: keeping its denizens alive. As my colleague Derek Thompson wrote last week, U.S. life spans are shorter on average than in much of Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. I called Derek to discuss why the nation’s life-expectancy rate is falling behind, and what can be done about it.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The most telling moments from the Trump-Carroll depositions Joe Biden’s not popular. That might not matter in 2024. I ruined two birthday parties and learned the limits of psychology. The Mortality Tax

Kelli María Korducki: In your latest article, you repeat a turn of phrase that you used in a previous story, calling the U.S. a “rich death trap.” The rich part is pretty self-explanatory, but unpack the rest of it.

Derek Thompson: The appropriate context is that, over the past 30 years or so, U.S. life spans have increased a little bit, but way behind the pace of similarly rich countries like Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. This is a pretty shocking development because throughout economic history, people living in richer countries have generally lived longer. And yet in the U.S.—which is the richest country in the world—we're not getting the long lives that we would expect. So you could say that there is a mortality tax on being an American as opposed to being French or Japanese, for example.

Kelli: When does this mortality tax emerge in the data?

Derek: You start to see it in the 1980s, but it really picks up in the 1990s. That’s where we really start to see this life-expectancy divergence.

Kelli: What might have happened in the 1980s and ’90s to stagnate life-expectancy increases here in the States but not abroad?

Derek: You could look at guns. Clearly, we have more gun deaths here than in other countries. And you can look at car deaths, which we also have more of than in similarly rich countries. But gun deaths per capita and car deaths per capita haven’t clearly increased a lot in the past 30 years. So that leaves things like drug overdoses, obesity, and health inequalities. But the truth is that health-care access has actually probably gotten more equal in the past 30 years; we passed Obamacare, which has extended Medicaid and all sorts of health care to low-income individuals. My bet, then, is that the growing gap between American longevity and that of other rich countries, at least in the past 30 years, is being driven by our poor health, specifically, more drug addiction, more drug-overdose deaths, and a higher risk of obesity.

Kelli: And despite Obamacare and broadly expanded health-care access, there’s also still a pretty significant health-care gap in the U.S.

Derek: That’s absolutely the case, and health outcomes are much more unequal in the U.S. than in countries with universal health care, where you tend to see that life spans in poor areas and rich areas are pretty similar; in the U.S. they’re much more different. Where you’re born in the U.S., and how much income your parents have, is much more determinative of how long you’ll live.

Kelli: What would it take to make America less of a death trap?

Derek: It’s a really big question. I would say that this conversation needs to be about all of these things that are driving our mortality: thinking more about ways to reduce obesity in America and talking more about the importance of exercise for metabolic health. And we have to reduce  synthetic opioid overdoses (primarily fentanyl), which kill more than 70,000 people in the U.S. every year.

This is sort of an aside, but there are almost two separate opioid crises happening in the country right now. One is the opioid-prescription-addiction crisis with the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma at its center, and then there’s the fentanyl crisis. Nearly 17,000 people a year are dying of opioid-prescription addiction—that is, from the abuse of opioids that were prescribed by a doctor—and about 70,000 people died of fentanyl overdoses in 2021. So the fentanyl crisis is four times deadlier than the opioid crisis that we’re used to talking about, but it doesn’t really occupy that much attention from lawmakers. I think we could use some really hard thinking about how to bend the curve of fentanyl abuse.

Kelli: What about the other American death drivers you mention in your article? Cars, guns?

Derek: So far, it seems that a little bit more working from home is probably good for reducing car use and related deaths. More housing in downtown areas that would reduce the need for driving commutes would probably also be good. And when it comes to guns, I can think of some pretty clear policy ideas for reducing gun deaths but, man, I’m not particularly optimistic about their ability to be passed at the federal level.

Related:

America fails the civilization test. America is a rich death trap. Today’s News President Joe Biden formally announced his bid for reelection today. A fourth cease-fire attempt in Sudan has failed, as residents attempt to flee the country. E. Jean Carroll’s rape lawsuit against Donald Trump has gone to trial. Evening Read Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin

The Pandemic’s Surprising Effect on Suicide Rates

By Clancy Martin

In March 2020, my partner, Amie; our 2-year-old son, Ratna; and I, who usually live in Kansas City, Missouri, were visiting Kerala, India, about to be in the throes of the country’s first COVID outbreak. When it became clear that Kerala was going to be locked down, we drove up the coast as fast as we could and boarded a flight to Delhi. From there we set out for the most remote place we knew—a small village in the Himalayan foothills called Bir.

On our way there we were nearly turned around at a series of police checkpoints. To go where? That was never clear. Hotels and Airbnbs were sending foreigners away. On WhatsApp, rumors were spreading about fellow expats being rounded up into camps.

An initially reluctant Airbnb host took us in only a few days before a nationwide lockdown went into effect. “Really I should never have let you stay,” he told me. “But now you can’t leave.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Chatbots sound like they’re posting on LinkedIn. Why aren’t we evacuating Americans from Sudan? Why economists should study hope Searching for a conservatism of normalcy Culture Break Mingasson / ABC

Read. “The Site of Memory,” a 1986 essay by Toni Morrison. A new exhibit of the author’s personal materials shows her capacious empathy.

Watch. Abbott Elementary’s season finale (available on Hulu). It’s a show that lets Black kids be kids.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

With Derek’s blessing, I’m hijacking this platform to recommend the new Laura Poitras documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about the photographer Nan Goldin and her fight to bring down the Sackler family by striking at the heart of their cultural credibility: the art-museum wings that bear the Sackler name. Although the documentary focuses primarily on the higher-profile prescription-drug crisis within the devastating sweep of U.S. opioid addiction that Derek and I discussed, it’s worth watching for how it captures the greed and cynicism that so often lie just beneath the surface of our national tragedies.

— Kelli

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Donald Trump, who is accused of rape, will likely not appear in court to defend himself against the charge. The former president declined the chance to appear at the trial that begins today, he explained through his lawyer, because of the “logistical burdens” his presence would place on the courthouse and on New York City, where the civil proceeding is taking place. It seems he does not want to be an inconvenience.

But Trump will be an unavoidable presence as the trial unfolds. The writer E. Jean Carroll is suing him for damages related to the allegation she made in 2019, which he has vehemently denied: that Trump, encountering her in a New York City department store in the 1990s, led her into a dressing room and raped her. At issue in the trial are defamation and battery—the latter claim made possible by a New York State law that provides a one-year window for adult victims of sexual assault to file civil claims after the criminal statute of limitations has expired. Carroll is also suing Trump in a separate defamation case, based on the disparaging comments he made in response to her accusation; the path of that case may depend in part on the outcome of the current trial. Jury selection will begin today, with arguments expected throughout the week.

[Read: The cruel paradox at the heart of E. Jean Carroll’s allegation against Trump]

Trump has tried to dismiss Carroll’s claims in both the narrow sense—his lawyers tried and failed to get both cases dismissed—and the broad. You could read the empty excuse Trump offered for his non-appearance at the trial in a similar vein: as an extension of efforts he has made to minimize Carroll’s accusation, undermine her credibility, and paint her story as a hoax. Trump has made those attempts not merely in public statements but also in sworn testimony. In January, Lewis Kaplan, the federal judge hearing both of Carroll’s cases, ordered a partial unsealing of depositions that both Carroll and Trump had given in October 2022 for the defamation suit. The portions of the transcripts made available detail the contested events of that day as well as their public aftermath. In them, Trump repeats his familiar insults. But he also acknowledges, seemingly in spite of himself, the gravity of Carroll’s claim. “She’s accusing me of rape—of raping her, the worst thing you can do, the worst charge,” Trump says. In testimony that found the former president ranting, rambling, and generally resisting the word rape itself, this was a rare moment of clarity.

Carroll had also been hesitant to use the word rape, she has made clear: The word had felt too loaded, too stark, to describe what she says happened in that dressing room. She does not use the term in the book excerpt, published in 2019 in New York magazine, in which she first made her claim public. Per her account, the interaction began when she encountered Trump at Bergdorf Goodman. He told her that he wanted to buy clothes for someone else as a gift, she alleges, and asked her to try on his selection. As she writes in her excerpt:

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. … He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

She struggled against him, she alleges, as he raped her.

I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand—for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other—and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

Not until Carroll told a friend about the alleged assault, she says in the deposition, did she find the language for it. “Lisa shocked me in the call,” Carroll says. “She told me I had been raped.”

“Had it occurred to you?” Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba asks.

“No,” Carroll replies.

[Read: The real meaning of Trump’s ‘she’s not my type’ defense]

Elsewhere in her deposition, Carroll explains her initial hesitance to go public with her claims. “Did you ever consider coming forward with your account prior to #MeToo?” Habba asks.

“Never,” Carroll replies.

“Why not?”

“Just—I’m going to say something that even surprises me—because women who have been raped are looked at in this society as less, are looked at as spoiled goods, are looked at as rather dumb to let themselves get attacked. I mean, even you have to say, ‘Did you scream?’ I mean, every woman who admits to being attacked has to answer that question—‘Why didn’t you scream, why did you come forward when you did, why didn’t you come forward before?’ And so, no, I didn’t—I would have been fired.”

Carroll, throughout the deposition, acknowledges the cultural reality of rape: the suspicion placed on those who say it has happened to them, the impulse to blame them, the stigma that follows. Trump, by contrast, repeatedly describes her allegation as a mere political tactic—one more effort, waged by unnamed enemies, to take him down. He repeatedly attacks Carroll: In his testimony, he treats her mental fitness (“sick,” “really sick,” “sick, mentally”) as a refrain. He dismisses Carroll’s lawyer, Robbie Kaplan, as a political operative, and threatens to sue her. He threatens to sue Carroll as well (“I’ll be suing her very strongly”). He writes off Judge Kaplan (no relation to Carroll’s lawyer) as “not a fan of mine.” He returns to his favored role—the cable-TV critic—to analyze an appearance Carroll made on CNN, and thoroughly misrepresents the claims she made during the segment. At one point, he gets in a dig at Joe Biden. At another, via his dismissal of this publication’s report about Trump’s disparagement of Americans who died in war—“hoax,” “total hoax,” “failed magazine”—he gets in a dig at The Atlantic.

[Read: Trump: Americans who died in war are ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’]

It’s all extremely familiar: Distract, deflect, “flood the zone with shit.” The strategy has proved effective for him in the past, both when it comes to Carroll’s claims and when it comes to those of the other women—more than 20—who have accused him of sexual misconduct. (Trump has denied all of their claims.) It is the same tactic that Trump reportedly demanded of Brett Kavanaugh when the then–Supreme Court nominee was credibly accused of assault: Perform rage. Sell it. Make the indignation so incandescent that the heat of it consumes everything else.

But the pared-down scope of the trial will likely limit Trump’s ability to put his typical antics to use. The case will rest on a binary question: Did he rape Carroll, or didn’t he? The question is big and consequential. That helps explain why Trump has seemed to resist talking about it in straightforward terms. Robbie Kaplan, in the deposition, asks him about public statements he made about Carroll from 2019 to 2022. Carroll’s claim, Trump wrote in one of them, is that he “swooned her” in the dressing room.

“What does ‘swooned her’ mean?” Kaplan asks.

“That would be a word,” Trump replies, “maybe accurate or not, having to do with talking to her and talking [sic] her—to do an act that she said happened, which didn’t happen. And it’s a nicer word than the word that starts with an F, and this would be a word that I used because I thought it would be inappropriate to use the other word.”

Kaplan looked up swoon in the dictionary, she notes. Did Trump intend it to mean “to faint with extreme emotion”?

“Well, sort of that’s what … she said I did to her,” Trump replies. “She fainted with great emotion.”

That is manifestly not what Carroll says happened. But Trump’s evasion also acknowledges, in its way, the immensity of the assertions she has made. Swoon is simply not a word most people use—unless, that is, they are trying to avoid using another one.

Carroll’s defamation case against Trump preceded the current one: In denying her allegations so disparagingly and so personally, Carroll argued, the former president has harmed her reputation. That claim will hover over the trial as it moves forward this week. The proceeding itself, for that reason and others, will likely be particularly complicated, as lawyers struggle to find unbiased jury members and debate which evidence is admissible and which is beyond the trial’s scope. Still, the stakes of it all are painfully clear. The trial will make Carroll one of the few Trump accusers to have her day in court. And it will decide whether the man who has earned so many epithets over the years is deserving of one more: rapist.

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.

Most Americans do not want President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in another head-to-head match for the White House. But barring a dramatic change in circumstances, that’s the contest we’ll see in 2024.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Tucker Carlson’s successor will be worse. A refuge from internet algorithms is hiding in plain sight. Dear Therapist: I won’t marry someone with a mountain of debt. Chris Christie doesn’t want to hear the name Trump.

Existential and Inevitable

Polls for the past six months or so have consistently shown that a majority of Americans do not want to see a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. And yet, unless health issues sideline one or the other (or unless a newly unemployed Tucker Carlson decides to take his angry-racist-preppie shtick into politics), the Trump-Biden showdown feels inevitable.

But Trump and Biden are likely to be renominated for very different reasons. Obviously, Biden is the incumbent—and, as I have argued, has been a remarkably successful president under difficult circumstances. Whatever the grousing from Democratic faithful, parties do not torpedo their own president: The only sitting chief executive who was elected in his own right and then denied renomination for another term was Franklin Pierce, in 1856. (Four others were denied nomination after becoming president upon the death of the incumbent.)

My colleague Mark Leibovich, however, has suggested that Biden’s age is too big a problem to ignore, and that the Democrats would benefit from a contested primary:

The public silence around the president’s predicament has become tiresome and potentially catastrophic for the Democratic Party. Somebody should make a refreshing nuisance of themselves and involve the voters in this decision.

I don’t quite agree. Biden, as the expression goes, has lost a step, but I kind of like the new Joe Biden. As a senator and a vice president, Biden was often a great source of Kinsley gaffes, the accidental truth-telling that made him a must-watch on the Sunday shows. Biden as president is different, and not just older. There’s a greater seriousness to him, a somberness, and an obvious weight on his shoulders. To me, that’s a better Biden.

But the president is older. He’s still liable to blurt out a gaffe or scramble his sentences, and it sounds less charming or amusing now than it did a decade ago. And sometimes, his rambles go off into mystifying detours, some of which are untrue. But on the man’s record alone, it’s going to be hard to argue to Democrats and independents that he somehow doesn’t deserve another term. Republicans, for their part, seem to know this, which is why they’ve rarely bothered attacking Biden on policy, resorting to debt-ceiling chicanery and invocations of Hunter Biden rather than more substantive (and legitimate) criticism.

Let’s put it this way: If Ted Kennedy could not take out Jimmy Carter, no one in today’s Democratic Party is going to defeat Joe Biden.

But let’s also admit an uncomfortable truth that the Democrats dare not say out loud: At least some of the concerns about Joe Biden’s age are in reality barely veiled worries about Kamala Harris. Biden’s approval ratings are struggling, but the vice president’s numbers are worse—in fact, among the worst of any modern vice president at this point in an administration. (Mike Pence is a strong competitor in this category.) I think Harris ran a lousy campaign and has been, at best, a lackluster VP. Yes, Joe Biden rambles, but Harris, when off script, often sounds like a compilation of disjointed clichés, delivered with a kind of corporate-trainer earnestness. (Some of this is likely related to her reported staffing problems.) Her few forays into policy have been unimpressive, and even her intensely dedicated online supporters seem to have become a bit quieter.

Personally, I have no doubt that if something happened to President Biden, Vice President Harris—along with an able and well-staffed administration—would be a reasonable steward of the White House for the remainder of Biden’s term. Nevertheless, when health and age are prominent issues (as they were with Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower), voters are going to look more closely at the vice president. Harris no doubt still has dedicated supporters in the party, but that might not be enough to overcome how much of America just doesn’t like her.

Concerns about Joe Biden’s renomination, however, are trivial compared with the problem facing those Republicans—roughly four in 10—who do not want Donald Trump as the GOP nominee.

The GOP as a political institution has functionally ceased to exist at the presidential level. The nomination process is controlled, at this point, by a cult of personality; Trump bitter-enders are now the backbone of the party, and their fanaticism gives Trump a stable plurality of votes that no other candidate can match. To defeat Trump for the nomination, a conventional candidate would not only have to attack Trump hammer and tongs; they would also have to demand that the national Republican Party buck millions of its own base voters. This is even more unlikely than Biden getting primaried by some youthful Democrat, because it would require the Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel and other GOP leaders to replace the tapioca in their spines with something like principle, and declare that the Party of Lincoln will not lend its money and support to a sociopath who has incited violent sedition against the government of the United States.

That’s not going to happen. It is possible, I suppose, that if Trump is facing multiple state and federal indictments by late summer, Republicans will finally throw their support to someone else, perhaps even Ron DeSantis, out of desperation. But for now, the nomination belongs to Donald Trump.

I would be relieved to be wrong about this, but if nothing changes, 2024 will again be a stark and existential choice. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has grumbled that if the election is Biden versus Trump again, he probably won’t vote. The rest of us, however, cannot afford this kind of petty tantrum. The Republican Party has mutated from a political organization into an authoritarian movement. Democracy itself will be on the line for the third time since 2020, and staying home—or taking the dodge of voting for some no-hope third-party candidate—is not a responsible option.

Related:

The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden Leave Joe Biden alone.

In Remembrance

Courtesy of Michael Kelly’s family

Michael Kelly, who was the editor in chief of The Atlantic from 1999 to 2002, worked at many publications in a career that was tragically cut short 20 years ago this month. He wrote for small newspapers and big ones, for political magazines and general-interest ones. He was a beat reporter and a writer of profiles and feature stories, a war correspondent and a columnist. He led a number of publications—The New Republic, National Journal, The Atlantic. His acclaimed reporting on the Gulf War, in 1991, was eventually turned into the book Martyrs’ Day. Mike was covering the Iraq War for The Atlantic in 2003 when he was killed on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Michael Kelly is remembered the same way by everyone who worked with him. He was disorganized—his desk drawers held manuscripts but also laundry and dishes—and his handwriting was illegible. He was disarmingly funny, raised by journalist parents in a boisterous Irish family. He was passionate about his principles—a collection of his writing, Things Worth Fighting For, was aptly titled. Perhaps counterintuitively, given his own strong convictions, one thing he believed in was the value of publishing diverse points of view: Ideas need vigorous testing. Another was the central importance of character in public life.

Mike’s family—including his wife, Madelyn, and his children, Tamzin and Jack—and many friends and colleagues gathered this past weekend in Washington, D.C., to mark the 20th anniversary of his death. Tamzin and Jack were 6 and 4 when Mike was killed. “One lesson my father taught me,” Tamzin Kelly said in her remarks, “is the importance of standing up for what you believe in. More than that, the importance of believing what you believe in.” Jack Kelly spoke about the experience of encountering his father through the pages of Things Worth Fighting For—discovering the opinions they shared and, more important, the ones they did not:

It’s both useful and comforting to think about our similarities with those we’ve lost. But there’s a flatness to it—it takes a static image of the dead and asks us to find a portion of ourselves in it. Thinking of our differences with those who are gone is at once more difficult and more rewarding: It asks us how we might have co-evolved with them, how we may have changed each other, and how we would have loved each other as humans who—like all humans—argue and disagree.

A year after Mike’s death, Robert Vare, the editor of Things Worth Fighting For, wrote about his colleague and friend in an article for The Atlantic. You can find Vare’s article here.

— Cullen Murphy, editor at large at The Atlantic

Today’s News

CNN released a statement declaring an end to its relationship with the anchor Don Lemon. Myles Cosgrove, the former Louisville officer who fired the fatal shot that killed Breonna Taylor, has been hired by a police force in a nearby county. Countries are hurrying to extract their citizens from Sudan as violence continues between the military and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group.

Dispatches

Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn head to Queens for a day at the racetrack.

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Culture Break

Thomas Jordan

Read. “AAAAdam,” a new poem by Adam Giannelli.

“my mother liked // the name because it couldn’t be undone / by a nickname and my father loved my mother.”

Watch. The Canadian comedy Letterkenny (available on Hulu), which delights in wordplay and linguistic silliness.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Tucker Carlson was reportedly fired from Fox News today. I will not deny the schadenfreude of seeing Fox boot one of the most cynical and destructive figures in American public life off the air. (And one who took a weird shot at me in his program some weeks ago.) If the reports of his firing are true, this would be Carlson’s third dismissal from a media network; he’s only 53, so maybe he can take a bit of time to consider why this keeps happening to him. Unless his replacement is someone worse—and my colleague David Graham thinks that’s a distinct possibility—Fox has made at least one decision that will improve our public discourse.

Today’s news reminded me how much it seems as though the writers of the HBO series Succession have a crystal ball somewhere. Last night’s episode (covered here by The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber) had Lukas Matsson, the internet tycoon trying to buy out the Roy family businesses, talking about how it’s time for ATN—the series’ obvious Fox News stand-in—to dump its “news for angry old people” format. As I’ve told you, I have a bit part in some upcoming Succession episodes as an ATN pundit, and although I cannot tell you what happens next, I think it’s fair to say that art and life will remain intertwined in the coming weeks.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.