As Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Stewart Rhodes yesterday to 18 years in prison—the longest yet for a defendant involved in the January 6 insurrection—he explained why the leader of the far-right group the Oath Keepers needed to be behind bars for a long time. “You pose an ongoing threat and peril to our democracy and the fabric of this country,” Mehta told Rhodes.

Mehta was right about that. At his sentencing, Rhodes was unrepentant. In a 20-minute speech before the court, he portrayed himself alternately as a character in Kafka’s The Trial; as an “American Solzhenitsyn,” after the Soviet dissident writer who was sent to the gulag; and as a misunderstood advocate for peace. This monologue was standard fare for Rhodes, a Yale Law School graduate who likes to align himself with literary heavyweights and historical leaders.

And yet Rhodes also unwittingly revealed deepening fissures in the far-right movement that, two years ago, resorted to violence to keep Donald Trump in the White House. The defendant used some of his time to distance himself from the Proud Boys, another extremist organization, with whom he had met in the days before the insurrection. “Unlike other groups like the Proud Boys, who seek conflict and seek to street-fight,” Rhodes explained, “we deter.” I’ve been misunderstood, he was telling the court; the Proud Boys are the ones you want.

Rhodes, it seems, is not entirely in sync with his radical brethren. A unified extremist front is a threat to our democracy; but the story is different when extremists start pointing fingers at one another in the criminal-justice system.

[From the November 2020 issue: A pro-Trump militant group has recruited thousands of police, soldiers, and veterans]

The rift between the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers has been simmering for years, and it hasn’t kept them from collaborating in the past. In 2019, the two groups arrived in Portland, Oregon, to support far-right protests. Rhodes pulled his group, he later claimed, after learning that white nationalists were involved in the demonstrations. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, was outraged. Tarrio—who has also been found guilty of seditious conspiracy for January 6—and Rhodes remained at odds even as they coordinated efforts for the insurrection, including at a secret meeting in a parking garage the night before.

Both testified before the congressional committee investigating January 6 and spoke at length of the division between them. “I didn’t like Stewart Rhodes. I still don’t like Stewart Rhodes,” Tarrio told the panel. The Oath Keepers, Rhodes insisted, are “quiet professionals” who believe that Trump won a second term. The Proud Boys believe the same about Trump, Rhodes said, but are “sloppy” and have been infiltrated by racists.

Whether such distinctions are real matters less than the fact that the rift appears to be deepening. On January 6, a variety of groups put aside their differences, but solidarity is difficult to sustain. As prosecutions continue and participants in the insurrection try to save themselves, divisions within the far right over ideology and strategy—as well as conflicts driven by pure ego—are reasserting themselves.

Over time, mismanagement and general pettiness distract many extremist groups from their cause. Al-Qaeda and ISIS similarly devolved into catfights as they lost on battlefields. Rhodes, who imagines himself an intellectual, appears to feel tarnished by alliances with mere racists. That he would defend himself in court by complaining about the Proud Boys signals to would-be followers that he’s self-absorbed, not that he’s sacrificing himself for noble cause. An effective way to combat right-wing extremism is to put its leaders’ selfishness on display.

[David A. Graham: It was sedition]

Violence, of course, clearly remains a threat to our democracy. The day before Rhodes was sentenced, the Department of Homeland Security warned of a “heightened threat environment” in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. This week, a man carrying a Nazi flag and praising Hitler rammed his U-Haul into a security barrier protecting the White House.

Violent, noxious ideologies do not just vanish with a tough sentence. Success against them can’t be measured by whether bad people see the light, but whether they are able to expand their ranks. Raising money and organizing large-scale collective actions becomes more difficult if seemingly like-minded groups are at war with each other. Far-right groups make noise about left-wing conspiracies, but they are under attack from within their own cause.

Rhodes will have 18 years to contemplate the violence and stew in his resentment of the Proud Boys. In the meantime, let the infighting continue.

We’ve rounded up the most interesting discoveries from this week’s Quartz Daily Brief newsletters. Get the Daily Brief in your inbox every morning, for free! Each day includes a section with surprising discoveries, along with a selection of important and interesting news from the global economy, curated by Quartz.

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In March, 19 Republican governors issued a statement warning of “a direct threat to the American economy, individual economic freedom, and our way of life.” The threat in question was not one of the classic objects of conservative anxiety, like high taxes, government regulation, or socialized medicine. Instead, it was a bugbear of a more recent vintage: ESG investing.

ESG, which stands for “environmental, social, and governance,” purports to allow investors to put their money into companies that care about not just their bottom line, but their impact on the world. ESG has been one of the hottest trends in investing over the past five years. There are now numerous ESG indexes and hundreds of ESG funds, including from the biggest institutional investors, that collectively have garnered trillions of dollars in assets.

[David A. Graham: Why Republicans are blaming the bank collapse on wokeness]

Given that nobody is forcing anyone to invest in these funds, you might see this as the free market at work. But for Republicans, this boom has been nothing short of a disaster, turning corporate executives into softhearted simps who put diversity and environmentalism ahead of the bottom line. The Wall Street Journal opinion page publishes nonstop critical coverage of it. Florida, ground zero for the effort to use state power to punish corporations for being too “woke,” passed a law earlier this month banning state and local officials from considering ESG goals when investing.

Conservative rhetoric about ESG investing may be politically expedient, but it is profoundly out of touch with reality. ESG ratings generally do not, it turns out, measure what most people think they measure. The most scandalous thing about ESG is not that it leads corporations to pursue progressive environmental and social goals. It’s that it pretends to, while in fact doing little of the sort.

The roots of ESG investing go back to the rise, in the 1960s, of what was then called “socially responsible investing.” That approach mainly relied on what’s known as “negative screening”: not investing in companies involved in products or practices deemed harmful or immoral, such as tobacco, nuclear weapons, and support for apartheid.

In the 1990s, some small investment firms began pioneering the idea that one could reap higher returns by identifying and investing in companies with excellent social or environmental performance. The theory was that these types of corporations use resources more efficiently, have lower risk profiles, and are better-positioned to deal with future regulations. Initially, this kind of positive screening catered to a niche market. It was a labor-intensive undertaking that required intensive research and direct communication with corporate executives. But by the mid-2000s, there was wider interest in investing in companies that seemed to be doing good, particularly with regard to climate change, and more hostility to the idea that companies should prioritize shareholder returns above all else. Demand for what we now call ESG investing emerged, and, as happens in a capitalist market, supply sprang up to meet that demand.

In the past few years, a host of what you might call ESG-ratings agencies have formed, many of them as new divisions within existing companies, each promising to rate corporations’ ESG performance in much the same way that credit-rating agencies assess the creditworthiness of corporate bonds. Today you can pick from ratings by Moody’s, MSCI, S&P, Refinitiv, and more. Along with the ratings came stock indexes and exchange-traded funds. Socially conscious retail investors now have an extensive menu of ready-made ESG funds to choose from—no research required. The sales pitch remains the same as it was in the 1990s: ESG investing won’t just assuage your conscience; it will let you outperform the market. You can do better by doing good.

This is, it must be said, a great pitch. The only problem is that it’s mostly smoke and mirrors.

Start with those ratings. An ordinary investor would reasonably assume that if a company has a high ESG rating, it must be doing a lot to curb carbon emissions and pollution or improve diversity in its workforce or, ideally, both. That is, after all, how the ratings are marketed. MSCI, one of the most influential ESG-rating firms, describes itself as “enabling the investment community to make better decisions for a better world” and declares, “We are powered by the belief that [return on investment] also means return on community, sustainability and the future that we all share.”

[Read: The world is finally cracking down on ‘greenwashing’]

In fact, an ESG rating from MSCI does not measure how much a company is doing to combat climate change. Instead, as an in-depth 2021 Bloomberg investigation showed, the “environmental” portion of the rating measures how much climate change is going to affect a company’s business and how much the company is doing to mitigate that risk. So, if MSCI thinks climate change is not a big danger to a particular corporation, it doesn’t consider carbon emissions in determining that firm’s environmental rating—even if that corporation is a big emitter. So a company like McDonald’s can have its ESG score upgraded even if its total carbon emissions have risen.

Beyond that, the ESG framework smushes together a wide range of variables into a single rating, including one category—corporate governance—that has nothing at all in common with environmental and social values. A company might score well on governance because it limits the CEO’s power, has an independent board of directors, and is transparent and open with shareholders. All of that is economically valuable, but there’s nothing inherently good for the world about it. A sinister but well-governed corporation will simply accomplish its sinister goals more effectively. Yet governance constitutes a key ingredient in a company’s score, and in the Bloomberg study was responsible for the highest percentage of upgrades. One consequence of this is that a company that has high carbon emissions and an ordinary record on diversity, but excellent corporate governance, can end up with a very high overall ESG score.

Some of these problems could be addressed by building ratings that actually focus on reducing emissions, or by building ES indexes rather than ESG ones. But another issue would remain: Different agencies provide widely divergent ratings. A 2019 study by the economists Florian Berg, Julian Kölbel, and Roberto Rigobon, for instance, found that the ratings of the six biggest agencies correlated poorly with one another, and the biggest source of disagreement had to do with how different agencies measure the same criteria. One agency might say a company is a leader in the field, while another might see it as an ordinary performer at best.

On top of all of this, ESG indexes and funds don’t always do much screening to begin with. When you invest in an ESG fund, you may think you’re buying into a highly curated selection of positive-outlier companies. In reality, it will often look similar to an ordinary market-wide index fund. The 10 biggest holdings in the S&P 500 ESG index include Big Tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet; big banks such as JPMorgan Chase; and, incredibly, ExxonMobil. This has two consequences: First, ESG investors aren’t always directing their money toward companies that are doing an exceptional job on the environmental or diversity fronts; second, to the extent that an ESG fund performs well, it’s often just because the market as a whole is doing well—yet ESG funds typically have higher costs than index funds.

ESG investors, then, aren’t always, or even usually, getting what they think they’re paying for, which in turn means that the conservative claim that companies are contorting themselves to satisfy ESG criteria is hugely overblown. The ESG boom has probably encouraged companies to improve their disclosure about such issues as emissions and gotten them to think more concretely about the risk that climate change poses to their operations. But a vehicle for woke capitalism it’s not.

Indeed, if the ESG boom has had any systemic effect, it may have been to weaken the demand for government action by fostering the illusion that corporations can solve, and indeed are solving, the world’s problems on their own. In 2021, for instance, Larry Fink, the CEO of the investing behemoth BlackRock and the anti-ESG crowd’s favorite villain, argued against mandating climate-risk disclosures. Thanks to self-regulation, he said, “We’re not going to need, really, governmental change or regulatory change.” That’s a message that Republicans would normally find quite appealing. Instead of trying to bury ESG capitalism, free-market conservatives should really be praising it.

It would have been better for Governor Ron DeSantis if his Twitter Spaces announcement had crashed altogether. As bad as the tech failures were, the really bad part of his presidential launch was the part when the tech worked—and the world could hear a man radically and pathetically unready for national leadership.

DeSantis won the governorship of Florida in 2018 after a campaign in which he proclaimed himself one of Donald Trump’s most zealous and fawning followers. His best-known ad showed him indoctrinating his infant children into the Trump cult: “Then Mr. Trump said, ‘You’re fired.’ I love that part.” That history raised the question: Could DeSantis ever emerge as his own man; could he transition from follower to leader?

Last night’s formal presidential announcement offered him a big-audience opportunity to reveal himself in a new role. Instead, he showed himself to be a beta to the bottom of his soul, one of nature’s henchmen.

After racing through his drab, standard-issue stump speech, DeSantis submitted himself to what felt like an old-time radio call-in show, hosted by Elon Musk and Musk’s business partner, David Sacks, who is also known as one of the most scornful anti-Ukraine trolls on Twitter. The two hosts made it clear that, in their opinion, DeSantis was the third-ranking attraction of the evening. They talked about Twitter, not about DeSantis’s presidential aspirations. They summoned callers from the weirdest corners of the far right. One of them needed to be reminded to unmute himself, like Grandpa on the Zoom call. Another praised DeSantis as a “cold-blooded, ruthless assassin”—this on the first anniversary of the Uvalde school massacre.

In the aftermath of the debacle, declaring a presidential run in a Twitter chat may appear to have been a miscalculation. Yet it started as a calculation entirely in keeping with DeSantis’s style of campaigning.

DeSantis’s ads raise barriers between the candidate and the voters. In his first one, voters again and again encounter the candidate via a screen: They see him on TV, on their phone. In the one scene in which the candidate is inserted among actual people, they look at one another and raise their phones toward him, presumably to video the encounter. In his second ad, DeSantis walks toward a speaker’s platform as somebody else’s voice delivers his message for him. Obviously, the directors of these ads are adopting strategies to cope with an immediate problem: DeSantis looks awkward when he interacts with people, and his voice is grating and uninspiring. But the unintended effect is to send a message that the candidate is a contrivance.

So it was unsurprising that DeSantis would make his announcement on what sounded like an amateur hour. He was literally invisible at his own announcement. He did not interact with voters. He was protected from direct exposure by the interposition of allies and supporters. Or such was the plan.  

[David A. Graham: The non-rise and actual fall of Ron DeSantis]

Only, the plan backfired. This time, DeSantis was not protected by all the layers of mediation around him. He was thoroughly and humiliatingly exposed.

Nobody ever seemed to have given any thought to the question What’s our message to the people we hope to persuade to our cause?

Watch some old announcement speeches on YouTube, and you see a carefully considered plan in every one. The candidates stand among family or supporters; they speak to particular crowds; they focus on biography or policy or some crisis of the day. Somebody has thought hard about why the candidate is there, what the candidate hopes to achieve, what the point of this exercise is.

DeSantis’s corporate sponsors had a plan. They were there to demonstrate the messaging potential of Twitter Spaces for far-right political content. That plan went awry when Twitter Spaces proved glitchy and unreliable, but still, a plan it was. DeSantis, though, had no plan. He just twirled about Elon Musk’s ballroom, dancing to Musk’s tune.

Why should Ron DeSantis be the Republican nominee, then perhaps ultimately the president of the United States? What does he hope to achieve for his country? Those were the questions he should have been seeking to answer, but almost all of his remarks were backwards-looking: about COVID, book bans, his feud with Disney. Whether you agreed or disagreed with his talking points, whether you thought his tone whining and aggrieved or righteous and defiant, everything he had to say was about the past, his past: how he’d been right and his critics had been unfair and wrong (he specifically complained about The Atlantic).

Announcement speeches are occasions for broad visions, reflections on the things that bind and unite Americans. Barack Obama expressed such a vision in 2007:

This campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us. It must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice to push us forward when we’re doing right, and let us know when we’re not. This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.

George W. Bush hit the same notes in 1999:

We will also tell every American, “The dream is for you.” Tell forgotten children in failed schools, “The dream is for you.” Tell families, from the barrios of L.A. to the Rio Grande Valley: “El sueno americano es para ti.” Tell men and women in our decaying cities, “The dream is for you.” Tell confused young people, starved of ideals, “The dream is for you.” This is the kind of campaign we must run.

There was no such message from DeSantis for Americans in 2023. No dreams, no commonality. It was a message for a faction, not a nation. It was a small message for a big country. DeSantis has gotten this far by identifying enemies rather than building coalitions—but it now seems that “this far” is as far as he’s going to go.

Into the gap where the intentional message should have gone, DeSantis’s true message inserted itself. He’s a divider who seeks a position that usually is won by unifiers. To the question of his potential for the highest office, he showed us once again that he is merely one of nature’s followers hoping to thrust himself into a leadership role that does not suit him.

[David Frum: Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already?]

DeSantis likes to present himself as a man eager for political combat. In a 2022 ad for reelection as governor, he dressed up in a flight suit and pretended to instruct fellow pilots: “Never, ever back down from a fight.” His super PAC is literally named “Never Back Down.” Yet in the fight immediately upon him, the fight against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, DeSantis always backs down. He may deal the occasional side insult in oblique, passive-aggressive language that does not mention Trump by name. He decries a “culture of losing” in the GOP, and maybe that’s supposed to imply that Trump did, in fact, lose the presidential election of 2020. But DeSantis does not dare say so explicitly—and it’s almost unimaginable that he’d ever have the nerve to say so to Trump’s face on a debate stage, assuming he ever had the nerve to share a debate stage with Trump at all.

“Trump specializes in creating dominance-and-submission rituals,” I wrote here a year ago. “Roll over once, and you cannot get back on your feet again.” DeSantis has rolled over so often for Trump that by now he qualifies for a job with Cirque du Soleil. Trump attacks, and DeSantis bleeds; Trump attacks again, and DeSantis bleeds some more. DeSantis is tough on gay school teachers, tough on Disney, but weak on foreign dictators and weak on Trump.

Bill Clinton used to say that “strong and wrong beats weak and right.” DeSantis already bet his political career on the hope that truculence and peevishness might be perceived as strength. That bet was proving a bad one even before his self-abasing announcement event. It looks even worse afterward.

[David Frum: Never again Trump]

Those of us who identify as Never Trump Republicans are sometimes challenged: Why don’t we  back DeSantis, the poll-leading alternative to Trump? One answer was to doubt that DeSantis ever presented much of an alternative. Back in 2021, a wealthy Floridian who had donated to DeSantis’s campaigns for governor cautioned me, “There are two kinds of people in politics: those who think DeSantis is a viable national candidate, and those who have met Ron DeSantis.”

Yet even assuming his viability, the question remains for us: What kind of alternative would DeSantis be? We did not want Trump’s abuse of power for selfish advantage replicated by a president who differed from Trump only by arriving at the office on time instead of watching television until 11 a.m. We did not want a more efficient use of nontransparency to conceal financial corruption. We did not want more strenuous disdain for allies—Ukraine today, who knows who else tomorrow? We did not want a more systematic and shrewd exploitation of tensions in American society, more deft manipulation of resentments along lines of race, faith, sex, region, and educational attainment.

Never Trump Republicans want a free-trade, free-market economic conservative. We want a Republican who upholds the rule of law, defends free institutions, and supports democracies under fire. We want honor, character, and largeness of spirit. Is that too much to ask from our former political home? And if so, why would we return to it?

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.

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.

For years, Republican presidential primaries have been chaotic affairs.

In 2008, Rudy Giuliani looked like a prohibitive front-runner until his disastrous decision to forsake campaigning in the calendar’s first two states (an indicator of judgment issues to come) created openings for Mike Huckabee and eventually John McCain. In 2012, things got so weird that Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Herman Cain all led the field at various points. Then 2016 was even weirder—the earliest debate saw 17 participants in two tiers—and culminated in Donald Trump’s stunning victory.

But 2024 was supposed to be different. In one corner was Trump, making his attempt at a comeback from an election loss he still hasn’t acknowledged. No one was sure whether he was unbeatable or if he was a hollowed figure, outwardly fearsome but ripe for toppling. If the latter, then the man to do it was surely Ron DeSantis, the hotshot young Florida governor who his backers believed had formulated a highly potent version of Trumpism without Trump.

[David A. Graham: The 2024 U.S. presidential race–a cheat sheet]

And who knows? That might be where things end up, but it’s not where they are now. This week, DeSantis is finally expected to formally enter the race—a leap that some people already believe is coming too late. But rather than consolidating the Trump-alternative space, DeSantis enters a race that is expanding. The growing number of candidates reflects wariness among Republicans about Trump’s weakness in a general election, yet a big field could smooth his path to the nomination.  

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina officially announced his campaign yesterday. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, a fairly outspoken Trump critic, is “accelerating” his move toward a bid, according to The Dispatch. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who earlier this month ruled out a bid “this year” (careful language!) is now acting like a guy who’s not ruling out a bid altogether. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who not long ago was publicly wrestling with the gap between his desire to run and his worry that Trump was unbeatable, is now rumored to be announcing a bid any day now. Former Energy Secretary Rick Perry is, for some reason, thinking about a third stab at the nomination. So is Doug Burgum, who you’ll be forgiven for not knowing is the governor of North Dakota.

Yes, a couple of potential candidates, Larry Hogan and Mike Pompeo, have decided against running, but the new entrants join an already large field that includes Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Pence (presumptively), and Asa Hutchinson. All of this happens even as Trump’s position has actually improved over the past few months, despite his indictment in New York, legal troubles elsewhere, and a loss in a $5 million civil case for sexual assault and defamation.

[Read: A bouncy, fresh brand of Trumpism]

The growing candidate list reflects skepticism about both DeSantis’s and Trump’s chances. DeSantis’s estimation has sunk sharply since last fall, as he has appeared lethargic, unsure how to take on Trump, and frankly just a little weird, and some Republicans simply don’t believe that Trump is as invincible as he looks. Perhaps this is because they think his legal troubles will eventually catch up with him, or perhaps they are indulging in wishful thinking.

Not every candidate runs because they think they can win. They could be trying to raise their profile for a 2028 run, when Trump will presumably actually be out of contention, or they could be hoping for a Cabinet role under whoever the winner is, or even a good cable-news sinecure. Another reason would be that someone is willing to pay for it. Why not take a chance to bask in attention and travel the country on other people’s tab? Any semi-viable Republican candidate has to have some megadonors in his or her corner, or believe he can get one. (Burgum is a billionaire in his own right.)

The important thing is that many major Republican donors are up for grabs. These people tend to be older-school Republicans who want low taxes, a favorable business environment, and not a lot more. They were never all that enamored of Trump, whom they found gauche and whose love of tariffs and dislike of immigration turned them off. They didn’t give much to him in 2016, when he ran on a shoestring budget and eschewed them, and although they grudgingly donated in 2020, they didn’t like January 6 and worry he can’t beat Joe Biden in a rematch.

Initially, many of them gravitated toward DeSantis, but as his polling has faded, so has their ardor. John Catsimatidis, a New York grocery baron, told the Washington Examiner that he wouldn’t back DeSantis, asking, “Why would I support somebody to become president of the United States that doesn’t return phone calls?” The financial-tech billionaire Thomas Peterffy, sounding uncannily like a Joe Biden ad, told the Financial Times he was cool on DeSantis too: “Because of his stance on abortion and book banning … myself, and a bunch of friends, are holding our powder dry.” He then sent a big check to Youngkin’s PAC. The financier Ken Griffin, who’d looked like a DeSantis backer, is among those waiting. A fellow Wall Street titan, Stephen Schwarzman, wasn’t convinced after a meeting with the Florida governor. Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has said she plans to stay neutral in the GOP primary. The Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, a former Trump backer, hasn’t committed to any candidate yet, per Puck. Larry Ellison, who co-founded Oracle, reportedly plans to put millions behind Scott. The hedge-funder Steve Cohen is reportedly backing Christie. (DeSantis did recently pick off the former Trump donor Hal Lambert, the New York Post reports.)

As long as the big money hasn’t started consolidating around a few candidates, there’s no reason for the field to start contracting. But the splintering is a reminder of why so many donors gravitated to DeSantis in the first place: because they wanted to stop Trump. The irony is that a diffuse field is good news for the former president, just as it was in 2016, when he won the nomination despite plenty of party opposition split among his many rivals. Trump is often described as a chaos agent, but he’s happy to be a chaos client, too.

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