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This evening, Ron DeSantis is announcing his presidential campaign by talking to Elon Musk on Twitter. The Florida governor’s attempt to fit into Donald Trump’s shoes is only going to get worse from here.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Four forces bind Trump’s supporters more tightly than ever. The meat paradox There is no evidence strong enough to end the pandemic-origins debate. Local politics was already messy. Then came Nextdoor.

Not Serious People

I am not going to open Twitter this evening to hear Ron DeSantis announce—finally, for real, no joke, this time he means it—his campaign to become the leader of the free world. Neither are you, in all likelihood; Twitter is composed of a tiny fraction of highly engaged social-media users, and most people in America aren’t on the platform. Even fewer use Twitter Spaces, the audio component of Twitter where users can tune in to a live conversation. (I’ve participated in some of them. They’re fun, but a bit cumbersome.)

More to the point, very few of the people Ron DeSantis wants to reach are on Twitter. Most of them won’t hear any of the conversation, unless somehow the Ron and Elon Show is blasted from loudspeakers in Florida’s retirement mecca, The Villages. Yesterday, after Fox News announced tonight’s event, Reuters published an explainer: “What is Twitter Spaces where DeSantis will announce his presidential run?” If you’re unfamiliar enough with Twitter that you need to read the explainer, you’re not likely to join the event.

Regardless of what plays out tonight, or how many people tune in (or don’t) to hear it, I have to wonder: Who came up with the galaxy-brained idea of matching up two of the most socially awkward people in American public life for a spontaneous discussion on Twitter? It’s not even laden with the pomp and suspense of a real announcement: As my colleague David Frum tweeted yesterday, “If you tell Fox News you plan to announce your candidacy on Twitter, isn’t that really … announcing on Fox News?”

In any case, the venue is, to say the least, something of a risk. The last time Musk tried to participate in a Twitter Spaces event, he got exasperated with journalists for asking him questions and quickly left the discussion. (Much like Donald Trump, Musk seemingly cannot internalize that everyone in the world does not actually work for him.) This time, Musk has brought in his friend David Sacks as the moderator. Musk reportedly once tossed Sacks out of a room with a wave of his hand by saying, “David, this meeting is too technical for you.” Sacks denies that this happened, but still, a close Musk adviser like Sacks is unlikely to ask anything too challenging.

DeSantis’s campaign likely saw two reasons for choosing this stunt. First, Trump has not come back to Twitter, despite Musk lifting the former’s president ban from the platform. (Trump vowed not to return, and amazingly, it’s one of the few public promises he’s ever kept.) The Florida governor will get a Trump-free environment, where he can show that he’s cool and hip and down with his fellow kids on the interwebs, unlike the elderly Trump. (Trump, of course, pioneered the abuse of social media for political reasons, but he’s now over on his own platform.)

The second reason is likely more important: DeSantis seems to think he can win the nomination by imitating Trump (sometimes physically), and part of that, apparently, is owning the libs on social media. In that sense, Musk’s weird and cloddish right-wing politics make him a perfect partner for DeSantis; both of them need a public-relations boost after months of missteps. Of course, Musk will still be a billionaire and the CEO of three major companies no matter who likes or hates him. DeSantis, meanwhile, needs money and Republican primary voters, and he has apparently decided that the way to gain Trump’s share of those voters is to troll, and troll hard, while generating free publicity by appearing with the guy who tried to wreck Twitter just to get even with the blue-check media elites.

DeSantis’s moves so far fit into that strategy. The war with Disney, the attack on public education, the phobic reaction to anything regarding race, sexuality, or gender—it’s all performative cruelty aimed at the most socially and politically retrograde voters, which is another way of saying “the GOP-base voters who will decide the primaries.” DeSantis could be a true believer in his own policies, but he’s clearly decided to lean into the idea of being a Trumplike outsider and culture warrior. (As Jill Lawrence pointed out today in The Bulwark, possible candidates such as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin are also culture-war partisans, but they seem to understand the risks of scaring off less extreme voters.)

In my view,  the United States will be better off if Donald Trump does not become the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. His continued support of violent insurrectionists forever renders him unfit to participate in our elections; anyone would be better on the ticket than Trump, and that includes DeSantis. But DeSantis has learned from Trump that winning the GOP nomination is not about policy; it’s about playacting. He knows that the primary faithful want rallies and revenge, costumes and chaos.

The presidency is a job for a serious person, but in today’s Republican Party, serious people need not apply. DeSantis seems to understand this, and will appear with Elon Musk in the hope, perhaps, of winning over Twitter power users such as @catturd2 and the various pestilential extremists Musk welcomed back to the platform. Though it might be a good move for DeSantis—who needs to do something to reinflate his shrinking political bubble—his cozying up to Musk is just another moment when Succession’s Logan Roy might look at the 2024 GOP primary candidates as he did at his children, shake his head sadly, and say: “You are not serious people.”

Related:

The non-rise and actual fall of Ron DeSantis Twitter is a far-right social network.

Today’s News

Vice President Kamala Harris called for Congress to enact more gun-safety legislation on the first anniversary of the mass shooting in Uvalde. Tina Turner, the rock-and-roll pioneer and pop icon, died at the age of 83 after a long illness. Montana banned people dressed in drag from reading books to children at public schools and libraries, becoming the first state to do so.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Hawaii's feral chickens are out of control, Tove Danovich writes.

More From The Atlantic

The problem with how the census classifies white people The silence that mass shootings leave behind There is no constitutional end run around the debt ceiling.

Culture Break

Read. Chain-Gang All-Stars, a new novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s set in a world where imprisoned people duel to the death as entertainment for others.

Watch. Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me (streaming on Netflix), a perplexing new documentary that offers glimpses of the tabloid star but fails to reckon with the forces that ruined her.

P.S.

Though some readers may know that I spent more than 25 years teaching at the Naval War College (and many years before that teaching at Dartmouth and Georgetown), they may not know that I also have taught for 18 years in Harvard’s continuing-education division, the Harvard Extension School. I have now retired from Extension, and last night I was honored to receive the school’s highest award, the Harvard Extension School Medal, for my teaching and service. Harvard’s program is (of course!) the oldest in America: Founded as the Lowell Institute in 1835 (Oliver Wendell Holmes, who named this very magazine, was a lecturer then), it became known as “Extension” in the early 20th century. I was proud to be part of the mission to deliver quality education to anyone who wanted it, including the nontraditional students who would come to class after a full day at work—just as I had.

My time at Extension, however, also taught me that Americans often overlook or underestimate the value of such programs. I am an advocate for residential, four-year college programs—that is, for the students likely to benefit from them. Not everyone can or should go to a full-time program; some students would rather work, others need to pick up a course on a topic only as part of their professional development, and others might be lifelong learners who are coming back to school merely out of interest in a particular subject. Continuing-education programs at America’s universities help provide this learning at a fraction of the cost of a full-time degree, and often with the same instructors and on the very same campuses.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

A look at rise of Florida governor, who is seen as Trump's most serious challenger for party's presidential nomination.

Filings come ahead of official campaign launch as Florida governor challenges Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination.

The U.S. Census Bureau is considering a historic revision to the 2030 count that would recognize the distinct ethnicity of people of Middle Eastern and North African descent—primarily Arab Americans, who have been subject to post-9/11 discrimination and, until now, have been grouped into the nebulous American amalgam of “white” people.

The census should make this simple and obvious change, but it shouldn’t stop there. It should overhaul the entirety of its facile race and ethnicity reporting.

Like people of Middle Eastern and North African origins, millions of other Americans have been funneled into one side of our country’s enduring binary of whiteness or the other. According to today’s census forms, Greeks, Irish, Italians, Slavs (who were systematically excluded for a century), and Jews—who are still the target of white-supremacist violence—are indistinct from people with Mayflower backgrounds.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-Semitism]

Being an unspecified “white” person has allowed many of us to blend in, when the most unifying thing we might do in this era of identity-driven polarization is acknowledge all the ways we are different.

Today’s nationalist identity politics are grounded in the grievances of people who think of themselves as white, who fear that established norms are being undone and find it difficult to see themselves in the faces of newer immigrant arrivals. Their insecurity has inspired a new wave of nativism and racial politics in the run-up to the “majority minority” milestone in 2044, when the Census Bureau projects that the share of non-Hispanic white Americans will dip below 50 percent.

But the simplistic survey questions that underpin this milestone—and the accompanying backlash—reflect the choices the bureau has made until now. Once a decade since 1970, the bureau’s demographers and economists make the conscious decision to measure America’s diversity first according to whether someone self-identifies as “Hispanic or Latino” and then whether they are “Black or African American,” “White,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Asian,” “Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander,” or “some other race.”

If these current questions about ethnicity were replaced by a required “select all that apply” question that asked Americans to report the various national, religious, and tribal origins of their ancestors, it would allow us to contextualize race in all the diversity the census’s blunt categories defy. This would not only generate more detailed and measurable data; it would also prompt Americans to reflect on their heritage.

Even the category “Middle Eastern or North African” veils an immense amount of diversity. It groups Iranians, Saudis, Moroccans, Turks, Israelis, and Afghans together. Dozens of other groups would surely appreciate their own checkbox too: Algerians, Bangladeshis, Brazilians, Ghanaians, Sudanese, Trinidadians.

Those who may not be able to trace their lineage to a specific country—including many African Americans—might select a regional origin or identify as “American descendants of slaves.”

Accounting for these differences would swiftly reveal the way today’s racial categories oversimplify the diversity of a nation that has long featured a majority composed of minorities and high rates of intergroup marriage. When we recognize the thousands of national, religious, and language groups that are overlaid, boundaries are harder to draw.

[Richard Alba, Morris Levy, and Dowell Myers: The myth of a majority-minority America]

America’s racial and ethnic lines, which are now recorded by bureaucrats in an office building in Suitland, Maryland, were not drawn in ink at the Constitutional Convention by Washington, Madison, and Mason. The census, instead, reproduces categories that initially reflected the racial worldview of America’s British colonizers and then evolved over a convoluted history that the legal scholar David Bernstein has called “a combination of amateur anthropology and sociology, interest group lobbying, incompetence, inertia, lack of public oversight, and happenstance.”

It’s arguable that the census must account for these categories because so many Americans continue to classify themselves and others along these lines.That said, to contend that the census should reflect existing social boundaries ignores its integral role in constructing them.

Census categories took their modern form after World War II, an era in which the U.S. government began formalizing its system of racial classification to address civil-rights violations. During this period, intense lobbying of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by different parties produced newly recognized categories for people of Asian origins and “American Indians.” Many lighter-skinned ethnic and religious minorities were classified as “white” on employment forms, despite their persistent socioeconomic struggles or exclusion.

Nearly a decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned employment discrimination, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a 1973 report urging the federal government to create a system to collect data on the distribution of America’s major ethnic and racial groups. The resulting categories became required for all reporting by federal agencies when the Office of Management and Budget issued the “race and ethnic standards” that remain the basis for today’s classification system.

The current boundaries ignore the disparate experiences and identities of people of “Asian or Pacific Islander,” backgrounds whose origins stretch from islands in the Western Pacific to the Indian subcontinent. (The Census of 1970 actually classified South Asians as “white.”) They lump Spaniards together with Bolivian mestizos, and recent sub-Saharan arrivals with other Black Americans whose families have been here for centuries.

For their part, Middle Eastern and North African Americans have sought a separate category on census forms for decades. Although early generations of Middle Eastern immigrants saw whiteness as their path toward equal rights, there has been a growing disconnect between the U.S. government’s classification and people’s lived experience.

Under the Obama administration, the Census Bureau conducted studies to determine the extent to which Middle Eastern Americans distinguish themselves from white people in advance of the 2020 count. The researchers concluded that including a “Middle Eastern or North African” category on questionnaires would be “optimal” because it “helps MENA respondents to more accurately report their MENA identities.” The effort stalled during the Trump administration, despite the way the White House’s “Muslim ban” implicitly acknowledged many inside this subgroup. The Biden administration has since endorsed a checkbox for Middle Eastern ethnicity alongside the “Hispanic” checkbox.

It would be just as optimal to ensure that other Americans can report their origins too. If the census were to facilitate this, researchers, businesses, and public agencies could examine trends with much more nuance and identify inequities among people of certain national ancestries. Presently, the main time the federal government acknowledges greater detail is when a hate crime occurs.

Why does it take discrimination—or violence—to formally recognize the importance and relevance of people’s national origin and religion? If these are a common basis for discrimination, then they have clearly reached a level of public salience that makes them worthy of full public accounting.

As consequential as census labels are for the way Americans perceive their country, they may be more consequential for the way Americans see themselves. The census could be a reminder of our own complicated stories at a moment when the population share of the foreign-born approaches a historic peak and the boundaries of whiteness can hardly stretch any further. It could reinforce the unquantifiable diversity of American identity rather than its conformity to categories perceived to be mutually exclusive.

During a CNN town hall earlier this month, Donald Trump acted as expected. He used the phrase “wack job” to describe E. Jean Carroll, who was awarded $5 million in damages because a jury unanimously concluded that Trump had sexually abused and defamed her. His statement elicited applause and laughter from the mostly pro-Trump crowd. He also described the January 6 insurrection as a “beautiful day” and declared that, if reelected president in 2024, he would pardon a “large portion” of the rioters. Those statements, too, brought applause from the raucous audience.

There was more. Trump called the Black police officer who had shot and killed one of the rioters storming the Capitol a “thug,” falsely claiming that the officer had bragged about the incident. Trump defended taking top-secret documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate. He wouldn’t say whether he hoped that Ukraine would win the war against Russia. And he spewed lie after lie after lie about the 2020 election and virtually every other topic that came up.

As the CNN anchor Jake Tapper said of Trump, summing up the night, “He declared war on the truth, and I’m not sure that he didn’t win.”

The day after the town hall, I asked a person in the talk-radio world how his listeners had responded. “One hundred percent approval of Trump’s performance,” this individual, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly, told me. “I even tried to get people to call me who didn’t think he did well, but no luck. And I received a number of calls saying they had been either leaning towards [Ron] DeSantis or were firmly in his camp, and they said they have now decided to fully support Trump, based on the town hall.”

The question I’ve been asked more than any other during the Trump era is how Trump supporters—including tens of millions of evangelical Christians and Republicans who have long viewed themselves as champions of “family values” and “law and order”—justify their enthusiastic support for the former president. How do they rationalize their embrace of a man whose ethical transgressions and moral depravity so far exceed that of Bill Clinton, whom many of them attacked in the 1990s on moral grounds?

I’m intentional about trying to better understand the mind of Trump supporters. I read their articles and social-media posts, listen to their interviews, and track the findings of focus groups. I engage them in conversation and reply to their emails, less to debate than to listen. I think I’ve come to understand their perspective, even though I profoundly disagree with it.

[Read: The worst thing to come out of Trump’s town hall didn’t come from Trump]

Trump supporters can’t simply be dismissed as “a basket of deplorables.” Many are devoted parents and spouses, loyal friends and good neighbors, willing to reach out a hand to those in need. I can’t deny what I have seen with my own eyes; I can’t let my own aversion to Trump turn his supporters into caricatures. At the same time, they have aligned themselves with a malignant figure whose corruptions are undisguised. How can these things fit together?

Part of the explanation can be found in the realm of human psychology. None of us live comfortably with cognitive dissonance, the mental stress that results when people’s beliefs and actions come into direct contradiction with one another. This disharmony causes distress, agitation, and self-loathing. It can’t be sustained; something has to give.

The human mind creates defense mechanisms to eliminate such negative feelings: avoiding or ignoring the dissonance, undermining evidence of the dissonance, belittling its importance. What we human beings don’t do nearly enough is change our behavior so that it aligns with values that are estimable and ennobling.

If a person is on a diet and spends late nights eating snacks, they may tell themselves that they’ll work out the next day to burn off the extra calories. A smoker may justify her habit by reassuring herself that even though smoking can cause cancer, she knows people who have smoked and lived long, healthy lives. A man who cheats on his spouse may justify his actions by saying that the marriage was irretrievably broken, that he felt unloved by his wife, that he hasn’t felt happy for many years and she’s to blame.

“By coming up with these rationalizations, people are able to preserve the impression that their behaviors and attitudes are consistent,” Benjamin Le, a psychology professor of Haverford College, has written.

Which brings me back to supporters of Donald Trump. It’s a challenge for many of them, especially those who identify as people of faith, to reconcile what they claim to value—integrity, honor, truthfulness, decency, compassion—with the fact that they support a misogynist who has cheated on his wives and sexually abused women; threatened judges, prosecutors, and election officials; used hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance to pressure a foreign leader to dig up dirt on his political opponent; catalyzed a violent insurrection and engaged in a multipart conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election; dined with white-supremacist and anti-Semites; cheated on his taxes; lied pathologically; routinely used cruel and dehumanizing rhetoric; and promoted political violence.

So what are the psychological defense mechanisms Trump supporters employ to relieve feelings of dissonance, shame, and embarrassment?

First, Trump supporters deny the worst things he has done. Jury verdicts against him are always unfair; impeachments are unjust partisan acts. Investigations of him that have found wrongdoing, all of them, are “WITCH HUNTS.” That is true in perpetuity. So whatever Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Special Counsel Jack Smith find, whatever indictments they may bring, the charges are by definition unwarranted. Trump is always the victim of persecution. “I think I have been violated as badly as anybody that's ever walked,” he recently said.

Trump is not perfect, most of his supporters will concede; he may be rough around the edges—a “bull in a China shop,” in the words of one friend of mine; a “wrecking ball,” in the words of another—and a man who does some unsavory things. But all of that, and far more than that, is acceptable because he is a “fighter” for their cause, which they are convinced is just, true, and right. His conduct may not always be ideal, and you may not want your son to model his life after Donald Trump’s. But more than any other Republican politician, he understands the viciousness of his opponents and will respond in kind. Trump will bring an AR-15 to a cultural knife fight, and his supporters find that to be anywhere from tolerable to thrilling.

Second, Trump supporters catastrophize the threats of the left. It’s one thing to believe, as some of us do, that the progressive movement includes dangerous, illiberal elements that need to be opposed. But that is quite different from believing that if Democrats gain or maintain power, calamity follows and America as we know it dies.

What we’re talking about isn’t just fear; it’s a sense of desperation and impending doom. Trump supporters feel that the political right has lost on every front over the past several decades, even though that’s clearly not the case. Since 1990, for example, the right has gained significantly more power in the courts, in Congress, and in the media—hardly unimportant institutions. Roe v. Wade was overturned after a half century, securing one of the great goals of the American right, and no land has afforded more religious-liberty protections to Christians than the United States today. Yet none of these victories offers much reassurance to people addicted to “doomscrolling,” searching social media for upsetting news.

Moreover, the unwillingness of others to share in their despair—the unwillingness to fight as if our lives depended on the outcome of this or that political election—is viewed as a sign of weakness. All of this is reinforced by a media ecosystem that is constantly promoting narratives that elicit feelings of fright, grievance, agitation, and rage. Those outlets take their cue from Trump, who last year said Democrats are responsible for “blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable.” He added, “Our country is going to hell.”

If the threat is truly existential, then it justifies—indeed, it demands—that patriotic Americans stand with Trump, regardless of his ethical transgressions. To offer anything less than full support would be a betrayal of our nation. A significant number of Trump supporters see themselves as embattled but heroic figures, involved in a great drama, standing against the demise of almost everything they cherish.

[Peter Wehner: MAGA is ripping itself apart]

But this disposition comes with a price. Perfect love may cast out fear, as the New Testament says, but the converse is also true. As Aldous Huxley wrote, “Fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.”

Third, Trump and his supporters are frantically trying to portray President Joe Biden as more corrupt than his predecessor. If Trump is an innocent man forever being framed, Biden is the head of a “crime family,” according to Trump, who labeled a set of unproven allegations against Biden as “Watergate times 10.”

The charge against Biden is led by the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, James Comer, who declared himself a “Trump man” shortly after the January 6 assault on the Capitol.

Comer’s target isn’t simply Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who has engaged in problematic business dealings. The U.S. attorney in Delaware, David C. Weiss, will soon decide whether Hunter Biden should be prosecuted for crimes related to taxes and a gun purchase. (The investigation into Hunter Biden began in 2018 and initially centered on his finances related to overseas business ties and consulting work, but later shifted in focus.)

However, Republicans are after the president himself, not his son, and so far, despite months of investigation, they have yet to uncover incriminating material about him. That doesn’t stop Republicans from accusing President Biden of wrongdoing. The Trump acolyte Charlie Kirk has admitted that “one of the reasons why Joe Biden is tough to beat is because he’s tough to hate.” Portraying Biden as unscrupulous is one way to change that impression, even if the specific charges made against him are false. If Republicans are able to get at least a draw between Biden and Trump on personal and public morality, they’ll take it.

A fourth justification that supporters of Donald Trump have constructed is that his presidency was an unqualified success, that Trump did practically everything right. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary: failing to build the wall or to get Mexico to pay for it, to reduce illegal immigration, to handle the coronavirus pandemic, to close the trade gap, to narrow the deficit or, pre-pandemic, substantially grow the economy and real wages. The Trump presidency, however, did witness health-care costs and drug prices increasing; income inequality growing; abortions rising after a three-decade decline; homicides spiking, including the largest single-year increase in murders in more than a century; the erosion of U.S. credibility worldwide; a posture of petty feuding with allies and abject capitulation to dictators; and a U.S.-Taliban agreement and subsequent announcement that the American military would withdraw, which had a devastating effect on the Afghan military’s morale and was a “catalyst” for its collapse, according to a May 2022 interim report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Yet all of these things, and more, are either ignored or explained away.

Let’s assume that Trump supporters believe, contrary to the facts, that every bad thing that happened on Trump’s watch was not because of his policies but in spite of them. Even then, they’re conceding how easily thwarted Trump was and how, in many cases, he was ineffective.

[Peter Wehner: Trump supporters think they’re in a fight to the death]

A fair-minded assessment would conclude that on Trump’s watch, some things got better and some things got worse, some of which he’s responsible for and some of which he’s not. But no one can reasonably make the case that America was markedly better or stronger during the Trump presidency than under either his predecessor or his successor. And certainly America under Bill Clinton, reviled by many on the right, prospered in ways that far exceed anything we saw under Trump. But back then, unlike now, we were told that character mattered.

The psychological phenomenon I’ve described in this essay isn’t exclusive to members of one party or to politics. We all live in ways that are at odds with our deepest beliefs. We all rationalize our shortcomings; we all engage in forms of denial. Each of us has blind spots, seeing confirmation bias in others but not in ourselves. But there are varying degrees of self-deception, different lengths to which we go to justify our decisions. What is so striking is just how much Trump demanded of his supporters. He has gone to the darkest places, and they have followed him every step of the way.

So, will anything invalidate the rationalizations of Donald Trump supporters? Or do his violations bind them to him more tightly than ever? For almost eight years, the answer has been the latter. Trump’s sensibilities have become theirs; they have thoroughly internalized his will-to-power ethic. An extraordinary psychological and moral accommodation has occurred.

If a decade ago you had told Trump supporters that this is the kind of man they would defend, that this is what they would become, most of them would have been horrified.

At this stage, though, for Trump supporters to call him out would be to call out themselves, and that’s too painful for too many people. The greater the ethical compromises we make, the fiercer our justifications become—and the angrier and more frustrated we get at those who won’t go along for the ride.

If most Republicans finally do break with Trump—and at this point, very little evidence suggests they will—it won’t be because of any road-to-Damascus revelation. It will be done respectfully, even reverentially, not because they have rejected his style of politics, but because they sense that his time has come and gone. And if Trump is dethroned as the leader of the Republican Party, whoever succeeds him will have modeled themselves after him. Trumpism will outlive Trump. It’s the cost of the lies we sometimes tell ourselves.

The ex-president says a judge's decision to hold the trial in March next year is "very unfair".