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.

Senator Tim Scott today joined the ranks of GOP candidates hoping to displace Donald Trump as the party’s nominee. America would be better off if one of them could win, but the GOP is no longer a normal political party.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Beware of the food that isn’t food. Harlan Crow wants to stop talking about Clarence Thomas. Where living with friends is still technically illegal A firearm-owning Republican’s solutions for gun violence

Thanos From Queens

Tim Scott of South Carolina joined the field of Republican contenders for the GOP presidential nomination today. He’s polling in single digits among primary voters, as are all of the other (so far) declared candidates. Only Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is managing to get out of the basement—rumors are that he will announce his candidacy this week—and even he is getting walloped by Donald Trump in polls of the Republican faithful.

Scott seems like a classic no-hoper presidential prospect but a strong choice for vice president, which of course is why some weaker candidates run and then bow out (see “Harris, Kamala”). The current GOP field, however, includes at least some politicians who should be credible alternatives to Trump: In any other year, people such as DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Asa Hutchinson, all current or former governors from the South, would be obvious contenders. Instead, their campaigns are flailing about in limbo while the rest of the field is populated by the likes of the wealthy gadfly Vivek Ramaswamy and the radio-talk-show host Larry Elder.

Of course, in a normal year, a twice-impeached president who has been held liable for sexual abuse would do the decent thing and vanish from public life.

The United States desperately needs a normal presidential election, the kind of election that is not shadowed by gloom and violence and weirdos in freaky costumes pushing conspiracy theories. Americans surely remember a time when two candidates (sometimes with an independent crashing the gates) had debates, argued about national policy, and made the case for having the vision and talent and experience to serve as the chief executive of a superpower. Sure, those elections were full of nasty smears and dirty tricks, but they were always recognizable as part of a grand tradition stretching all the way back to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams—rivals and patriots who traded ugly blows—of contenders fighting hard to secure the public’s blessing to hold power for four years.

Such an election, however, requires two functional political parties. The Republicans are in the grip of a cult of personality, so there’s little hope for a normal GOP primary and almost none for a traditional presidential election. Meanwhile, Republican candidates refuse to take a direct run at Donald Trump and speak the truth—loudly—to his voters; instead, they talk about all of the good that Trump has done but then plead with voters to understand that Trump is unelectable. (Hutchinson, who is unequivocal in his view of Trump, has been an honorable exception here and has called for Trump to drop out.)

The electability argument about Trump is not only amoral, but it also might not even be true: Trump might be able to win again. In normal times, there’s nothing wrong with “electability” arguments. It is hardly the low road, if presented with two reasonable candidates in a primary, to choose the one who can prevail in a general election. But such a choice assumes the existence of  “reasonable” candidates. Instead, some of the Republicans who are running or leaning toward running against Trump are saying, in effect, that Trump really should be the candidate, but he can’t win—instead of saying, unequivocally, that no decent party should ever nominate this man again, whether he can win or not.

Republican contenders are caught in a bind. If they run against Trump, they will likely lose. But if they don’t run against Trump, they will certainly lose—to Trump, and then everyone in America loses. GOP primary candidates want to pick up Trump’s voters without overtly selling them Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, which is why the “electability” dodge is nothing but pandering and cowardice. Not that any of these hopefuls have tried to lay a punch on Trump: Haley is AWOL—is she even still running?—and DeSantis is busy clomping around with flaming wastebaskets on his feet as he tries to stomp out fires he’s already set.

Tim Scott is an especially vexing case, because he has a life story that should have made him the natural anti-Trump candidate in every way. A religious man who triumphed over poverty, got an education, and became a successful businessman, his life and character are a photo-negative image of Trump’s. And yet, Scott can’t help himself: He’s “thankful” for Trump’s years in office.

None of these Republicans are going to overcome the Thanos from Queens, who, with a snap of his fingers, will soon make half of the GOP field disappear.

These Republicans are likely waiting for a miracle, an act of God that takes Trump out of contention. And by “act of God,” of course, they mean “an act of Fani Willis or Jack Smith.” This is a vain hope: Without a compelling argument from within the Republican Party that Fani Willis and Jack Smith or for that matter, Alvin Bragg, are right to indict Trump—as Bragg has done and Willis and Smith could do soon—and that the former president is a menace to the country, Trump will simply brush away his legal troubles and hope he can sprint to the White House before he’s arrested.

No one is going to displace Trump by running gently. A candidate who takes Trump on, with moral force and directness, might well lose the nomination, but he or she could at least inject some sanity into the Republican-primary process and set the stage for the eventual recovery—a healing that will take years—of the GOP or some reformed successor as a center-right party. DeSantis would rather be elected as Trump’s Mini-Me. (It might work.) Hutchinson has tried to speak up, but too quietly. Haley, like so many other former Trump officials, is too compromised by service to Trump to be credible as his nemesis. Tim Scott is perfectly positioned to make the case, but he won’t.

A Republican who thinks Trump can be beaten in a primary by gargling warm words such as electability is a Republican in denial. Trump is already creating a reality-distortion field around the primary, as he will again in the general election. Is it possible that the GOP base would respond to some fire and brimstone about Trump, instead of from him? We cannot know, because it hasn’t been tried—yet.

Related:

Why outspoken women scare Trump America’s lowest standard

Today’s News

The head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has vowed to transfer the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut to the Russian army by June 1. Ukraine insists that the city has not been entirely captured. Arizona, California, and Nevada agreed on a plan to reduce water usage from the drought-stricken Colorado River.   Speaker Kevin McCarthy said U.S.-debt-ceiling talks were on the “right path” ahead of a meeting with President Joe Biden this evening.  

Dispatches

Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn down “Pumptinis” at a live screening of the scariest show on TV.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Apple TV+

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon Is a Triumph

By David Sims

David Grann’s nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is the sprawling story of a criminal investigation undoing a systemic evil. It lays out in riveting detail the mystery of the Osage murders of the 1920s, when dozens of Native Americans were killed in a grand conspiracy to exploit their oil-rich land. Grann digs into the societal phenomenon surrounding the Osage, many of whom became ultra-wealthy after generations of displacement and persecution. But the book’s through line is the federal investigator Tom White, who helped solve the murders on the orders of a young J. Edgar Hoover.

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and will be released in theaters this October, takes a very different narrative approach.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The Roys stumble into the real world. A world without Martin Amis My friend, Tim Keller

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Read. The Princess Casamassima, a novel written more than 100 years ago (and originally serialized by The Atlantic!), is a political novel that could’ve been written today.

Listen. The first podcast episode of our new podcast series How to Talk to People, which explores the barriers to good small talk.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’m concerned about events at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, where the Russians have apparently dug in for a fight. I’m especially concerned that the Kremlin, facing a Ukrainian counteroffensive, might be planning a nuclear disaster in retaliation for losing more ground. That hasn’t happened yet, and I promise I’ll come back to this if events change.

In the meantime, however, the danger at the Ukrainian nuclear installation has jogged loose a memory of a lost bit of music from the 1980s. After the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl—also in Ukraine—the New Zealand musician Shona Laing released a song in 1987 titled “Soviet Snow.” (You can see the video here.) Given my, ah, heterodox musical tastes, you might be surprised that I would like something with such obvious environmental advocacy. (Don’t tell the other young Ronald Reagan voters, but I also bought Bruce Cockburn’s Stealing Fire album in 1984, and I still like it.) There is an urgency and panic in the song, a strong New Wave feel over Laing’s plea:

Are we wide awake? Is the world aware?

Radiation over Red Square

Creeping on to cross Roman roads

I remember feeling a great unease hearing that song the first time. Thirty-six years later, I am feeling that same unease once more.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Arizona, California and Nevada agree to cut water usage from the Colorado River by 13 percent over three years.

You might say communal living runs in Julia Rosenblatt’s family. Her parents met in a six-unit house shared by college students and anti-war activists in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the 1970s and lived there until shortly before her birth. In high school, Rosenblatt heard stories about the commune and fantasized about the lifestyle, she told me. So when, as an adult, she decided to move into a house with 10 other people—her husband, her two kids, and six of her friends, plus one of their children—it wasn’t a big surprise to her family and friends. In 2014, Rosenblatt chose a nine-bedroom mansion in a wealthy enclave of Hartford, Connecticut, which cost, in total, a little less than half a million dollars. She knew the house was technically meant for a single family, but she didn’t think much of it. Her group was living together—sharing the living room and bathrooms; collectively preparing meals—much like a typical family.

A few months after moving in, Rosenblatt found a cease-and-desist letter in the mail from the city, demanding that the 11 of them vacate their house. The charge was an obscure zoning violation: Rosenblatt’s group had broken the definition of family in Hartford. More than two unrelated people, according to laws buried deep in the city code, could not live together under the same roof. Neighbors, Rosenblatt learned later, had filed a complaint after seeing the number of cars parked outside of her house.

Rosenblatt went to court, and eventually, in 2016, the city dropped its case against her. But laws like Hartford’s are widespread across the U.S., though they are unevenly enforced. A study from last year found that 23 of the 30 largest American metro areas placed limits on the kinds of groups who could buy or rent a single-family home. Most of these statutes define family as people related by “blood, marriage, or adoption.” Though some places permit additional “unrelated persons” (usually two to five) to live under the same roof, others don’t allow any at all. Yet this does not reflect how a lot of Americans live. Although 44 percent of households in the U.S. were composed of married parents and their children in 1965, just 19 percent were in 2020, according to the Population Reference Bureau. Much of the rest of the country lives with roommates, in multigenerational households, or with long-term partners they’re not married to.

For decades, “definitions of family” clauses have sculpted who is allowed to live with whom across America, entrenching the nuclear family through housing law. At times, these clauses have also become convenient vehicles for NIMBYism: Neighborhood groups have deployed them to block queer and extended-family households from forming. Limited definitions of family are all over the legal system. Laws for domestic violence, rent control, insurance, and—as I’ve written about before—inheritance rely on narrow understandings of the term, which often prioritize biological and marital relationships, and relegate other kinds of relationships. Yet efforts to reform zoning laws have also charted a better way to consider kinship in modern America—one based on how people act together and care for one another.

There are few good statistics on how often people are blocked from living together because they are not considered family. Some cases start with a complaint from a neighbor to a city’s zoning-enforcement officer, which might bubble up into a more serious sanction. Lincoln, Nebraska, which allows only families related by blood, marriage, or adoption, plus two unrelated people, to live together, sees about 20 to 30 complaints a year, according to the Lincoln Journal Star.

Bryan Wagner, the president of the American Association of Code Enforcement, told me that the enforcement of these rules appears to be “variable” across the country. He speculated that college areas would field more complaints than quieter residential communities. But in his 10 years working as a code-enforcement official in the city of Westerville, Ohio, “I can probably count on two hands the number of complaints I’ve received alleging over-occupancy violations,” he said.

Complaints from neighbors do trickle in, though, and their outcomes sometimes feel cruel. In 2016, the town of Wolcott, Connecticut, refused to allow a group home for people with disabilities to open. A resident of Bar Harbor, Maine, fought the development of a home for seasonal workers (last year, the resident lost the case). Perhaps even more egregious, in 2006, an unmarried couple with three kids—including one from a partner’s previous relationship—in Black Jack, Missouri, was forced from their home because the town’s zoning ordinance effectively banned unmarried couples from living with more than one child.

In several cases, the weight of these laws has fallen most heavily on immigrant families living in multigenerational households. After the city of Manassas, Virginia, passed a law in 2005 that restricted single-family households to only “immediate relatives,” zoning-enforcement officers largely wielded it against Latino households. In Cobb County, Georgia, 95 percent of investigations into violations of family-based zoning also focused on Latino residents. A similar pattern has appeared in the cities of Waukegan and Cicero in Illinois.

How zoning legislation became concerned with the definition of family probably traces back to a Berkeley, California, real-estate developer named Duncan McDuffie. In 1916, McDuffie successfully lobbied the city to implement one of the earliest forms of single-family zoning laws, which restricted development to stand-alone homes only, as opposed to duplexes or apartments. Single-family zoning, he argued, would “prevent deterioration and assist in stabilizing values” in the city. Another effect—this one largely unstated—was that it would prevent Black residents from moving into developments adjacent to his properties. McDuffie’s properties included stipulations that they not be sold to nonwhite residents, and citizens soon petitioned to use the new regulations to stop a Black-run dance hall from opening nearby.

In other words, single-family zoning was exclusionary from the start. But the term family was not. Zoning laws spread across the U.S. in the 1920s and ’30s, but Kate Redburn, a historian at Columbia Law School who has written about these laws, told me that it was surprising “to find how willing courts were to interpret the term family and these statutes extremely broadly.” Courts kept an open mind: Sorority sisters and temporary roommates, for instance, had little trouble living together in houses meant for single families. Michigan’s supreme court even remarked in 1943 that “the word ‘family’ is one of great flexibility.”

[From the March 2020 issue: The nuclear family was a mistake]

By the end of the 1960s, however, the rising political power of homeowners and a growing fear of communes encouraged local governments to restrict the word’s definition. “One of the ideal ways to respond to that moral decline in their view is to legislate the ideal social force, and that’s going to be a nuclear family,” Redburn said. In 1976, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, wielded its ban on unrelated people living together to order out a pair of men—whom press reports implied to be gay, according to Redburn—from their home. Even foster parents were affected: Newark, New Jersey, convicted several of them because they had too many “unrelated persons”—meaning their foster children—in their home.

Parallel to these efforts, restrictive definitions of family were entering other parts of the law. When states began passing domestic-violence statutes, for instance, they largely excluded same-sex couples, and in some cases even unmarried partners, from protection. A similar phenomenon has played out in rent-control and accident-insurance cases, where people who consider themselves family are surprised to find that they don’t meet the legal definition—and therefore can’t receive insurance coverage or inherit a rent-controlled apartment.

Today, definitions of family are slowly expanding again—and, in some ways, becoming even more capacious than those from the early 20th century. Recently, a court in New Jersey recognized that half-siblings who didn’t share a home but who were frequently together at family functions counted as “household members” in the context of domestic violence. In zoning law, too, some officials have attempted to purge definitions that, in many cases, have not been updated since the 1960s: In recent years, both Iowa and Oregon have done away with family-based occupancy limits.

Other cities have chosen to update their laws in a more interesting way—measuring family based on how people act together. These so-called functional-family rules allow groups who do traditional household acts, such as making meals together and sharing expenses, to count as a family, regardless of biological or legal ties. Burlington, Vermont, for instance, allows groups who share furniture, expenses, and food preparation to live together. In Mount Pleasant, Michigan, functional families merely need to prove a permanent “demonstrable and recognizable bond.” In its rent-stabilization laws, New York City defines a family member as any person “who can prove emotional and financial commitment, and interdependence” with the main tenant—wording so expansive that, late last year, a New York court suggested that people in polyamorous relationships should qualify as family.

[Cory Doctorow: This is what Netflix thinks your family is]

Gradually, definitions of family focused on mutual care are entering other parts of the law. In its sick- and family-leave policy, for instance, Colorado now allows workers to take time off to care for any “person for whom the employee is responsible for providing or arranging health- or safety-related care.” Solangel Maldonado, a law professor at Seton Hall University, also pointed me to the rise of “de facto parent” legislation, which recognizes parentage based on action—for example, for an unmarried partner of the biological parent. Roughly two-thirds of states have these laws on the books, either by court mandate or explicit legislation. “It is very much this idea that families are not created necessarily by blood or by law, but rather by what people do for each other,” Maldonado said.

In the context of zoning, functional-family rules are still a half measure. In the midst of a housing crisis, why restrict living arrangements to any kind of family at all? Still, though in many cases imperfect, these definitions are clearing a path toward a bigger, vital idea: A person’s relationships with their loved ones, irrespective of biological or marital ties, can and should be enshrined in law.