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.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) responded to US president Joe Biden’s announcement that he’s seeking reelection, releasing an AI-generated ad that simulates a second Biden term plagued by disasters.

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US president Joe Biden is officially running for reelection in 2024, announcing his campaign in a sleek video posted online early Tuesday morning (April 25). In the announcement, Biden blames “extremist” Republicans for defunding social security, cutting taxes for the wealthy, and rolling back voting rights.

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The US president's announcement sets the stage for a potential rematch with Donald Trump.

By almost any historic yardstick, President Joe Biden is beginning the reelection campaign he formally announced today in a vulnerable position.

His job-approval rating has consistently come in at 45 percent or less; in several recent high-quality national polls, it has dipped closer to 40 percent. In surveys, three-fourths or more of Americans routinely express dissatisfaction with the economy. And a majority of adults have repeatedly said that they do not want him to seek a second term; that figure rose to 70 percent (including just more than half of Democrats) in a national NBC poll released last weekend.

Those are the sort of numbers that have spelled doom for many an incumbent president. “Compared to other presidents, Biden’s approval is pretty low [about] a year and a half from Election Day,” says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, in Atlanta. “It’s not where you want to be, for sure.”

[David A. Graham: Biden’s in]

And yet despite Biden’s persistently subpar public reviews, there’s no sense of panic in the Democratic Party about his prospects. No serious candidate has emerged to challenge him for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. No elected leaders have called on him to step aside. And though some top Democratic operatives have privately expressed concern about Biden’s weak standing in polls, almost every party strategist I spoke with leading up to his announcement said they consider him the favorite for reelection.

There are many reasons for this gap between the dominant views about Biden’s immediate position and his eventual prospects in the 2024 race. But the most important reason is encapsulated in the saying from Biden’s father that he often quotes in speeches: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” Most Democrats remain cautiously optimistic that whatever concerns Americans might hold about the state of the economy and Biden’s performance or his age, a majority of voters will refuse to entrust the White House to Donald Trump or another Republican nominee in his image, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

“I think there’s no question that neither Trump nor Biden are where they want to be, but … if you project forward, it’s just easier to see a path for victory for Biden than for Trump or DeSantis,” says the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who was one of the few analysts in either party to question the projections of a sweeping red wave last November.

Rosenberg is quick to caution that in a country as closely split as the U.S. is now, any advantage for Biden is hardly insurmountable. Not many states qualify as true swing states within reach for both sides next year. And those states themselves are so closely balanced that minuscule shifts in preferences or turnout among almost any constituency could determine the outcome.

The result is that control over the direction for a nation of 330 million people could literally come down to a handful of neighborhoods in a tiny number of states—white-collar suburbs of Detroit, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Atlanta; faded factory towns in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; working-class Latino neighborhoods in Las Vegas; and small-town communities across Georgia’s Black Belt. “Never have so few people had such a big impact in deciding the future of American politics,” Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton, told me.

On an evenly matched battlefield, neither side can rest too comfortably about its prospects in the 2024 election. But after Trump’s upset victory in 2016, Republicans have mostly faced disappointing results in the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022. Across those campaigns, a powerful coalition of voters—particularly young people, college-educated white voters, those who don’t identify with any organized religion, and people of color, mostly located in large metropolitan centers—have poured out in huge numbers to oppose the conservative cultural and social vision animating the Trump-era Republican Party. Many of those voters may be unenthusiastic about Biden, but they have demonstrated that they are passionate about keeping Trump and other Republicans from controlling the White House and potentially imposing their restrictive agenda nationwide. Biden previewed how he will try to stir those passions in his announcement video Tuesday: Far more than most of his speeches, which typically emphasize kitchen-table economics, the video centers on portraying “MAGA extremists” as a threat to democracy and “bedrock freedoms” through restrictions on abortion, book bans, and rollbacks of LGBTQ rights.

“The fear of MAGA has been the most powerful force in American politics since 2018, and it remains the most powerful force,” Rosenberg told me. “It’s why Democrats did so much better than the fundamentals [of public attitudes about Biden and the economy] in 2022, and that will be the case again this time.”

After the Democrats’ unexpectedly competitive showing in the midterm election, Biden’s approval rating ticked up. But in national polls it has sagged again. Recent surveys by The Wall Street Journal, NBC, and CNBC each put Biden’s approval rating at 42 percent or less.

Sosnik said the pivotal period for Biden is coming this fall. Historically, he told me, voter assessments of an incumbent president’s performance have hardened between the fall of their third year in office and the late spring of their fourth. The key, he said, is not a president’s absolute level of approval in that period but its trajectory: Approval ratings for Ronald Reagan, Clinton, and Barack Obama, each of whom won reelection, were all clearly rising by early in their fourth year. By contrast, the approval ratings over that period fell for George H. W. Bush and remained stagnant for Trump. Each lost their reelection bid. Economists and pollsters say voters tend to finalize their views about the economy over roughly the same period and once again tend to put less weight on the absolute level of conditions such as inflation and unemployment than on whether those conditions are improving or deteriorating.

With that crucial window approaching, Biden will benefit if inflation continues to moderate as it has over the past several months. He also could profit from more time for voters to feel the effects of the massive wave of public and private investment triggered by his trio of major legislative accomplishments: the bipartisan infrastructure and semiconductor bills, and the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.

[Read: Biden’s blue-collar jobs bet]

But Biden also faces the risk that the economy could tip into recession later this year, which some forecasters, such as Larry Summers, the former Clinton Treasury Secretary who predicted the inflationary surge, still consider likely.

If a recession does come, the best scenario for Biden is that it’s short and shallow and further tamps down inflation before giving way to an economic recovery early in 2024. But even that relatively benign outcome would make it difficult for him to attract more supporters in the period through next spring when voters traditionally have solidified their verdicts on a president’s performance.

That means that, to win reelection, Biden likely will need to win an unusually large share of voters who are at least somewhat unhappy over conditions in the country and ambivalent or worse about giving him another term. Historically that hasn’t been easy for presidents.

For those who think Biden can break that pattern, last November’s midterm election offers the proof of concept. Exit polls at the time showed that a solid 55 percent majority of voters nationwide disapproved of Biden’s job performance and that three-fourths of voters considered the economy in only fair or poor shape. Traditionally such attitudes have meant disaster for the party holding the White House. And yet, Democrats minimized the GOP gains in the House, maintained control of the Senate, and won governorships in most of the key swing states on the ballot.

In 2022, the exit polls showed that Democrats, as the party holding the White House, were routed among voters with intensely negative views about conditions. That was typical for midterm elections. But Democrats defused the expected “red wave” by winning a large number of voters who were more mildly disappointed in Biden’s performance and/or the economy.

For instance, with Trump in the White House during the 2018 midterms, Republicans won only about one in six voters in House elections who described the economy as “not so good,” according to exit polls; in 2020, Trump, as the incumbent president, carried only a little more than one-fifth of them. But in 2022, Democrats won more than three-fifths of voters who expressed that mildly negative view of the economy.

Similarly, in the 2010 midterm elections, according to exit polls, two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Obama’s performance as president voted against Democrats running for the House; almost two-thirds of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Trump likewise voted against Republicans in 2018. But in 2022, the exit polls found that Democrats surprisingly carried almost half of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden.

The same pattern persisted across many of the key swing states likely to decide the 2024 presidential race: Democrats won the governors’ contests in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and Senate races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, even though the exit polls found a majority of voters in each state said they disapproved of Biden’s performance. Winning Democratic gubernatorial candidates such as Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, and Katie Hobbs in Arizona each carried at least 70 percent of voters who described the economy as “not so good.”

Why did Democrats so exceed the usual performance among voters dissatisfied with the country’s direction? The answer is that many of those voters rejected the Republican Party that Trump has reshaped in his image. The exit polls found that Trump was viewed even more unfavorably than Biden in several of the swing states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And nationally, more than two-fifths of voters who expressed negative views about the economy also said they considered the GOP “too extreme.” Particularly on social issues such as abortion rights and gun control, the 2022 results demonstrated that “Trump and these other Republicans have painted themselves into a corner in order to appeal to their base,” Abramowitz told me.

Biden may expand his support by next year, especially in the battleground states, if economic conditions improve or simply because he may soon start spending heavily on television advertising touting his achievements, such as new plant openings. But more important than changing minds may be his ability to replicate the Democrats’ success in 2022 at winning voters who aren’t wild about him but dislike Trump and the GOP even more. “While there are not an overwhelming number of people who are tremendously favorable to Biden, I just don’t think there is an overwhelming number of persuadable people who hate him,” says Tad Devine, a long-time Democratic strategist. “They hate the other guy.”

Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA, told me that dynamic would likely prove powerful for many voters. Even Democratic-leaning voters who say they don’t want Biden to run again, she predicted, are highly likely to line up behind him once the alternative is a Republican nominee whose values clash with their own. “The bottom line is that on Election Day, that Democratic nominee, even the one they didn’t want to run again, is going to be closer to most people’s vision of the world they want to live in than the Republican alternative,” she said.

In both parties, many analysts agree that in a Biden-Trump rematch, the election would probably revolve less around assessments of Biden’s performance than the stark question of whether voters are willing to return Trump to power after the January 6 insurrection and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “President Biden by every conventional standard is a remarkably weak candidate for reelection,” the longtime Republican pollster Bill McInturff told me in an email. But “Biden’s greatest strength,” McInturff continued, may be the chance to run again against Trump, who “is so terrific at sucking up all the political oxygen, he becomes the issue on which the election gets framed, not the terrible economy or the level of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the direction of the country.”

On both sides, there’s greater uncertainty about whether DeSantis could more effectively exploit voters’ hesitation about Biden. Many Democrats and even some Republicans believe that DeSantis has leaned so hard into emulating, and even exceeding, Trump’s culture-war agenda that the Florida governor has left himself little chance of recapturing the white-collar suburban voters who have keyed the Democratic recovery since 2018. But others believe that DeSantis could get a second look from those voters if he wins the nomination, because he would be introduced to them largely by beating Trump. Although Devine told me, “I do not see a path to the presidency in the general election for Donald Trump,” he said that “if DeSantis were to be able to get rid of Trump and get the credit for getting rid of Trump…I think it’s fundamentally different.”

One thing unlikely to change, whomever Republicans nominate, is how few states, or voters, will effectively decide the outcome. Twenty-five states voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and the strategists planning the Biden campaign see a realistic chance to contest only North Carolina among them. Republicans hope to contest more of the 25 states that voted for Biden, but after the decisive Democratic victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2022, it’s unclear whether either is within reach for the GOP next year. The states entirely up for grabs might be limited to just four that Biden carried last time: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin. And as the decisive liberal win in the recent state-supreme-court election in Wisconsin showed, winning even that state, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, may be an uphill battle for any Republican presidential nominee viewed as a threat to abortion rights.

[Read: The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment]

In their recent book, The Bitter End, Vavreck and her co-authors, John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch, describe hardening loyalties and a shrinking battlefield as a form of electoral “calcification.” That process has left the country divided almost in half between two durable but divergent coalitions with antithetical visions of America’s future. “We are fighting at the margins again,” Vavreck told me. “The 2020 election was nearly a replica of 2016, and I think that largely this 2024 election is going to be a repeat of 2020 and 2016.” Whatever judgment voters ultimately reach about Biden’s effectiveness, or his capacity to handle the job in his 80s, this sorting process virtually guarantees another polarized and precarious election next year that turns on a small number of voters in a small number of states.

US President Joe Biden saw his popularity increase in European countries bordering Russia or Ukraine; while Russian President Vladimir Putin saw his popularity slump.

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.

As the race for the GOP presidential nomination gets under way, the party’s ideological divisions are sharpening.

Consider the opening salvo of Donald Trump’s third Republican presidential campaign. The former president and his allies have fusilladed Ron DeSantis over the Florida governor’s past support for curbing the growth of Medicare and Social Security spending, echoing a similar line of attack from President Joe Biden. This all comes before DeSantis has even formally announced a presidential bid, an indication, perhaps, that Trump aims to deter his most formidable Republican opponent from entering the fray.

Faced with a pincer movement from an adroit former president and Democrats keen on a Trump-Biden rematch, DeSantis finds himself in the most vexing position of his strikingly successful political career. His chief advantage in running against Trump has been the widespread perception that as the governor of a competitive, vote-rich state, he would be more appealing to suburban independents and other marginal voters. But with Trump pivoting to the political center—on entitlements but also, more tentatively, on the scope of abortion regulation—DeSantis is at risk of losing the electability argument. Despite his many liabilities, the former president is positioning himself as the only candidate capable of cementing working-class moderates as a core part of the Republican coalition.

Assuming that DeSantis does move forward with a presidential campaign, he’ll have to decide how to counter Trump’s moderate turn on entitlements. He could charge the former president with hypocrisy, pointing to the fact that the Trump administration explicitly called for reducing future safety-net spending in its fiscal 2021 budget. But it’s hard to see that approach succeeding. A famously protean figure, Trump has always worn his ideological commitments lightly. As the political strategist Liam Donovan recently observed in an interview with The New York Times, “In 2016, Trump was exempt from the punitive standards we hold conventional politicians to, and what’s remarkable is that seven years and a presidential term later, that still holds true.”

[Read: The glaring contradictions of Republicans’ rhetoric of freedom]

Recognizing that Trump will continue to press his advantage on entitlements, DeSantis could instead offer a vigorous defense of entitlement reform, leaning into his own apparent vulnerability. In the absence of a larger narrative connecting fiscal consolidation and American renewal, however, the Florida governor would risk reinforcing Trump’s role as the GOP’s defender of middle-class economic interests. And of course DeSantis wouldn’t be the only Republican aspirant to face this dilemma.

What the former president’s Republican rivals are missing, in short, is a compelling ideological thesis, one that offers a clear alternative to Trump’s class-war conservatism and that resonates with the “somewhat conservative” voters who are the party’s center of gravity. What they need is a conservatism of normalcy.

In his influential 1957 essay “Conservatism as an Ideology,” the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington defined conservatism as “that system of ideas employed to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter.” Conservative ideology is thus best understood as situational, not ideational. Rather than offer a substantive vision for the remaking of a given social order, the task of conservatism is to defend established institutions and beliefs against those with the power and determination to remake them.

Given the anti-establishment ethos of contemporary conservatism, this definition might at first seem out of date. But it still captures something important about how conservatives understand their role in American life. Conservatives see themselves as guardians of the nation’s distinctive constitutional and cultural inheritance and their opponents as partisans of destructive innovations that would make Americans less prosperous and free.

The question for conservatives, then, is which threat to the American social order merits their focused attention?

Last month, Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker examined the differences between two clashing conceptions of what the right should stand against: rural economic populism, which he associates with Trump and Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, and “the ‘anti-woke’ educational crusade that has captured other corners of the GOP.”

In keeping with his class-first sensibilities, Kang sees the populist political formula as more potent. As much as he might doubt the credibility of Vance’s and Trump’s populism, Kang warns that the two politicians “understand how to sell a message to the rural, economically depressed white voting population.” Viewed through Huntington’s lens, this rural populism identifies the most urgent threat to American flourishing as the advent of a cosmopolitan corporate elite committed to shredding the social protections, both formal and informal, that have undergirded the civic and economic health of the nation’s middle-class communities.  

As for conservative anti-wokeness, Kang deems it little more than a distraction from class politics, “a smoke screen of supposed cultural principles that allow the establishment to feel comfortable with a candidate who likely will protect business interests without inviting the potential chaos of a Trump Presidency.” Michael Lind offered a similarly biting assessment of anti-wokeness in UnHerd, characterizing it as “just a revival of the old culture-war politics of the Bushes, particularly George W. Bush.”

But new cultural fault lines can give rise to new coalitions, and discounting the power and resonance of anti-wokeness would be a mistake. Critics on the left take the notion that there is something deeply flawed with America under “late capitalism” for granted, hence their begrudging respect for class-war conservatism. A large majority of Republican voters, by contrast, describe themselves as believers in capitalism for whom hard work is its own reward, and one of the main conservative objections to wokeness is that it represents a rejection of meritocratic ideals.

Although class-war conservatism undoubtedly has a constituency, it remains a minority persuasion on the right. For example, when Gallup asked voters if they favored imposing heavy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth in 2022, 24 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed, far lower than the 79 percent support among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. And in April, a Wall Street Journal survey found that 55 percent of GOP respondents prioritized fighting “woke ideology in our schools and businesses” over protecting entitlements. It would be foolish to overinterpret this finding, not least because the same survey found that Republicans oppose entitlement reform by a wide margin. Nevertheless, it speaks to the potential for a conservative synthesis that would incorporate anti-racialism into a larger politics of normalcy.

In 1920, the Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding successfully campaigned on a “return to normalcy,” an implicit rebuke of the dislocation the nation had endured under Woodrow Wilson, who was very much a modernizing progressive. Our own era has been similarly tumultuous, and one can imagine a new return to normalcy having broad appeal. Indeed, as Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation noted in January, DeSantis explicitly contrasted woke ideology with “normalcy” in his second inaugural address. DeSantis’s formulation—“We seek normalcy, not philosophical lunacy”—offers a way forward for those on the right who consider class-war conservatism a distraction from the threat of militant progressivism.

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

Rooted in growing Sun Belt suburbs, this ideological tendency would be less nostalgic and more aspirational. If class-war conservatives define business elites and entitlement-cutters as the fundamental challenge to America’s social order, a conservatism of normalcy would stand in opposition to the divisive racialism, unlimited welfarism, and cartel federalism of the progressive left. It would celebrate America’s multiethnic mainstream, defend law and order, and demand responsive, efficient, and limited government. And above all else, it would aim to competently advance its policy priorities.

It might be too much to expect this still-inchoate brand of conservatism to emerge victorious in the coming months. For one, a not-inconsiderable number of Republican primary voters are in no mood for normalcy. But as the right looks to the future, and to an electorate exhausted and demoralized by the politicization of every aspect of public life, the prospects for a conservatism of normalcy will grow only stronger.

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