War Pony tells the story two Native American men trying to find their place in the modern world.

In the weeks before he took office as president, Donald Trump had a portentous, private chat with the broadcast journalist Lesley Stahl, a prelude to a 60 Minutes interview. As Stahl recounted later, she asked Trump why he so relentlessly brutalized the media. His answer, she said, was strikingly direct: “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.’”

This is, of course, the thinking of an authoritarian. If you can successfully cast doubt on facts and the people whose mission it is to report them, you have tremendous latitude to set your own narrative and do as you please. Over time, Trump has worked to discredit and demean any institution that raises inconvenient truths or seeks to hold him accountable for his actions—not just the media, but law enforcement and the election system itself.

His latest target is the special counsel’s office. Yesterday, Trump announced his own indictment on a variety of charges surrounding his mishandling of classified documents. And, as has now become a familiar mantra in the face of investigations, impeachments, indictments, and legal setbacks, he loudly proclaimed himself the victim of his political enemies and a corrupt system, intent on sidelining him and his movement.

The details and scope of the indictment, unsealed today, are extensive and damning. The 49-page filing alleges that among the documents Trump took from the White House were highly sensitive materials relating to national security. The indictment catalogs Trump’s recklessness in storing these documents, and his bald-faced scheming to avoid surrendering them to authorities.

[David A. Graham: The stupidest crimes imaginable]

Prosecutors could hardly turn away from the evidence of wrongdoing. But will it be enough to do what past scandals have not—cool the ardor of Trump’s devoted base? As remarkable as the charges in this indictment are, anyone who predicts with confidence that this will diminish Trump’s standing with his supporters has a short memory. Throughout his career, he has survived scandals that would have leveled other politicians.

Trump’s diabolical genius for selling his alternative reality cannot be denied. There is no more powerful testimony to the efficacy of his shameless guile than the fact that a twice-impeached, now twice-indicted (with more cases pending), certified and boastful sexual predator who propagated blatant lies about an election he lost and provoked a violent insurrection against the government is, nonetheless, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

A master at imposing his narrative, Trump has made his ignominy work for him in the GOP primary race so far, doubling his lead over his nearest competitor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, in recent months. Notably, Trump’s lead in the polls grew even after his indictment by a New York City grand jury in April, related to the alleged payment of hush money to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels, and after he was found liable for damages for sexually assaulting and defaming the columnist E. Jean Carroll.

[Megan Garber: The defiant humanity of E. Jean Carroll]

True to the revelatory comments he made to Stahl, Trump has created a frame by which anything negative said about him—even if it comes in a court of law—is the equivalent of “fake news,” malicious lies told to try to thwart him. In his telling, Trump is the avenging angel, battling a corrupt “deep state” and a rigged system on behalf of aggrieved citizens.  

“I AM AN INNOCENT MAN,” Trump declared on his Truth Social site last night, in his signature DEFCON 1, all-caps mode minutes after announcing his indictment. “THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION IS TOTALLY CORRUPT. THIS IS ELECTION INTERFERENCE & A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME.”

Alluding to the fact that President Joe Biden himself is under a special-counsel probe for his own mishandling of documents from his days as vice president, Trump accused prosecutors of a malign and egregious double standard. (What Trump left out was that the details of these two cases appear to differ in several ways, starting with the fact that Biden voluntarily surrendered the documents in his possession while Trump did not.)

One day after the Carroll case was decided, Trump was similarly defiant. In a CNN town-hall interview, he blamed the unanimous jury verdict on the presiding federal judge, who, he noted with heavy inference, was “Clinton-appointed.” In the same televised event, Trump continued to insist that the 2020 presidential election had been “rigged,” even though numerous federal judges whom he had appointed had summarily dismissed his fraud claims for lack of evidence. Logistical consistency is not a virtue in Trump’s world; stubborn insistence on his version of reality is.

Up until now, Trump’s sophistry has proved effective. Two-thirds of Republicans continue to embrace his election lie, and a large majority of Republicans believe his claim that the charges brought against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in the hush-money case were politically motivated—a message eagerly amplified by House Republicans and right-wing media.

No signs emerged in the hours after the new indictment that this support would waver. House Republican leaders and even DeSantis—Trump’s chief rival for the Republican nomination—once again rallied to his defense. “It’s unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy wrote on Twitter, echoing Trump’s conspiratorial claim that Biden had orchestrated the indictment to silence him. “I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice.” DeSantis stoutly decried what he called the “weaponization of federal law enforcement.”

[David Frum: An exit from the GOP’s labyrinth of Trump lies]

Many establishment Republicans, including backers of DeSantis, are still hopeful that Trump’s mounting legal woes will erode his dominance in public polling. They seem to believe that enough of the party’s voters, 80 percent of whom still give Trump a favorable rating, will sober up and buy into the argument that the embattled former president would be a liability as the nominee in 2024 and a loser in the race to unseat Biden. The stunning details of the new indictment might put that theory to the test.

Yet we have seen that kind of magical thinking ever since Trump descended the golden escalator at his eponymous tower in 2015 to upend American politics. How often since then have so many misjudged this serial and brazen flouter of rules, laws, and norms? How often have we said, “Well, he’ll never get away with that”?

Trump has survived until now because, to many of his supporters, his flamboyant defiance and the trail of controversies and allegations that follow him are less a cause for concern than an emblem of authenticity. The scorn of elites and myriad investigations to which he has been subjected are, for his faithful, merely certifications of his potency and independence, a reflection of the threat he poses to a corrupt order.

Maybe in the coming months, the sizable bricks that are piling up will prove too much for Trump to bear. Eventually, during or after this campaign, he presumably will have to reckon with truth and facts and 12 voters in a jury box, in settings in which he won’t get to make or flout the rules. Trump’s appeal to a Republican base that feels culturally besieged is rooted in his indomitability. If that aura crumbles, his appeal might, too.

But for now, it is at least an even bet that the World According to Trump will continue to hold power in the Republican nominating contest.

It’s as sincere as the grief at a Mafia funeral.

Who believes that Governor Ron DeSantis—so badly trailing in the polls behind former President Donald Trump—is genuinely upset by his rival’s federal indictment? Or that Speaker Kevin McCarthy—so disgusted by Trump in private—does not inwardly rejoice to see Trump meet justice?

The Fox News talkers have been trying for months to sideline Trump and promote DeSantis. Now they have a turn of events that promises both to help their corporate political agenda and to stoke controversy and ratings. They must be positively ecstatic at the network’s New York headquarters today.

So many in the Republican and conservative world wish Trump off the stage. So few possess the courage or integrity to say so aloud.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

Special Counsel Jack Smith now presents them with an opportunity—if they can find their way past a hitherto intractable, and perhaps still unsolvable, problem of collective action.

If you are DeSantis, here’s what you want to see happen:

Trump is indicted, prosecuted, convicted, and thereby banished from public life. You champion Trump every step of the way, acting as his fiercest and loudest ally. To your pretend regret, your Trump advocacy fails to shield Trump from the law. Trump is removed from the path to office; you inherit all of Trump’s supporters.

Kevin McCarthy and the Fox News talkers share similar interests and goals.

But here’s the intractable collective-action problem: These plans depend on the non-Trump political actors performing just convincingly enough that their audience is deceived, but not so convincingly that their audience is mobilized to actually do something inconvenient about it. That undesirable something might be some kind of mass protest or even violence. Or possibly it would take the form of conservative voters losing faith in the system and withdrawing from voting and political participation altogether.

The conservative world in the age of Trump has coiled itself into a labyrinth of lies: lies about Trump’s victimhood, lies about Trump’s popularity, lies about Trump’s election outcomes, lies about Trump’s mental acuity and physical strength. The architects of the labyrinth presumed that they could always, if necessary, find an exit—and that their keys could someday turn the exit’s locks. Instead, they have found themselves as lost and trapped in the labyrinth as the deceived people they lured into it.

As a result, they have failed to take each opportunity to escape: the first impeachment, the November 2020 defeat, the January 6 crimes, the second impeachment, the end of the administration, the 2022 wipeout of swing-state election-denying candidates, the first indictment, and now this second indictment.

Along the way, these architects have taught tens of millions of Republican voters and conservative believers to regard the labyrinth of lies as their proper political home. Why escape at all? Escape to where? The ironic outcome of all this is that the deceived followers now block the exits for the deceptive leaders.

[David Frum: Biden laid the trap. Trump walked into it.]

Trump himself may imagine that the deceived are numerous enough, and militant enough, to topple the American constitutional system for his sake. On that, he’s deceiving himself. One of the important lessons of January 6, 2021, was the marginality of Trump’s hard-core support. Another lesson was the strength and endurance of the American legal system when it’s allowed to function. And with Trump out of the presidency, he’s no longer empowered to sabotage it.

But what he can do—and what his adversaries are perversely helping him do—is alienate his supporters from their own society. What consequences will that alienation inflict? I cannot foresee. Perhaps the mania loosens its grip over time, and some number gradually recover their faith in democracy and the rule of law. Perhaps some number become radically demoralized and quit participating in politics altogether.

Or perhaps American society must contrive to bump along with some important minority of the population passively disloyal to the governing authorities, as happened with the white South in the decades after the Civil War. The rebellion had been subdued, but for the rebels to reconcile themselves to the defeat of their cause would take decades.

One thing that would help: for leading Republicans and conservatives to stop positioning themselves for selfish immediate advantage and end their denigration of the legal process. Thanks to the appointment of hundreds of judges, the Trump presidency bequeathed the country a federal judicial system sharply tilted in a conservative direction. As a result, Trump is often playing in front of his own chosen referees. He’s still mostly losing. And he’s losing because he’s in the wrong.

DeSantis, McCarthy, and the others must be well aware that Trump is in the wrong. They do not insist that Trump is innocent, only that it’s improper to hold him to account. The law is being weaponized, they say, to pursue a party leader (their party leader).

[Read: Trump begins the ‘retribution’ tour]

These Republican leaders expect to extract some short-term advantage from their double game. Maybe that’s a plausible calculation. But it is likely to prove, ultimately, a self-harming one.

The big post-Trump choice for conservatives is whether they rejoin the mainstream of American life or wander ever further away from it, toward outright rejection of law and democracy. Voluntarily breaking with Trump is one way to make that choice. Few conservatives have dared to do so at all, and even fewer have dared to consistently.

Now federal prosecutors have opened an easier way. Republican leaders need not explicitly make that break. They need only repeat the standard formula about any pending criminal investigation: “I have no comment at this time. Every accused person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The law will take its course.” That’s it. Problem solved.

This is the right thing to do. It’s the prudent thing to do. And any other course of action points to horrible dangers ahead: a future in which the conservative-minded people who should be America’s strongest bulwarks of law and constitutional order mutate into an enduring malcontent faction willing to subvert that order.

For three months this year, I bled nearly every day. My doctor doesn’t know why. Google doesn’t know why. The condition is simply called “postmenopausal bleeding,” and medicine’s best guess as to the cause is that the postmenopausal hormone-replacement therapy I started last November suddenly made my endometrium, the lining of the uterus, “unstable.” All scientific knowledge added up to “If it’s still happening in six months, get back in touch.” (I’m still bleeding intermittently, and I don’t know why.) This is the kind of massive medical shrug that anyone with female anatomy has probably encountered.

Despite major advances for women over the past 100 years—the invention of the contraceptive pill, greater access to safe abortions—much of female biology is still woefully underserved by science. There are reasons for this, most notably the historical exclusion of women from medical and pharmaceutical trials, partly because our awkward hormone cycles were thought to skew results. There’s also the fact that some scientists still project findings from research on men onto women, seeming not to realize that women aren’t just small men: Women are different down to the cellular level, meaning that many of our immune responses, experiences of pain, and symptoms (including, for instance, those that accompany a heart attack) may be different from men’s. Are you having a nasty, unexpected side effect from your medication? That could be because most drugs were developed with male bodies in mind. A 2020 review of 86 common medications, including antidepressants, cardiovascular drugs, and painkillers, found that women were likely routinely overmedicated and suffered adverse reactions nearly twice as often as men.

The lagging science is particularly apparent when it comes to periods and female hormones more generally—the subject of the anthropologist Kate Clancy’s new book, Period, a scientific and cultural history that purports to tell the “real story of menstruation.” Clancy’s book makes clear that a lack of data is to blame for many of the ills that women and girls face concerning their reproductive health, like doctors’ failure to diagnose painful conditions such as endometriosis.

My severe endometriosis was discovered only when I was 41, accidentally. For decades, I had been given prescription-strength painkillers, and my doctor never seemed to wonder whether the amount of pain I was in was abnormal. When I published an essay about my menopausal depression in 2018, a deluge of women wrote to tell me that when they were going through something similar, their doctors had told them they were imagining their brain fog or panic attacks, or had put them on antidepressants that didn’t work because many depression drugs are inadequate to treat the symptoms of fluctuating estrogen.

[Read: The secret power of menopause]

Yet do a search online, or open any women’s magazine, and you will find repeated assertions that we are living in a time of “period positivity.” In this apparent golden age, women are more open about their menstruation; they are not ashamed of buying tampons; they aren’t afraid to talk about gynecology in general. Elite athletes now admit to being off their game when they are on their period; sensible coaches track their menstrual cycles and understand the impact of hormones on performance and energy. TV commercials for sanitary products that used to suggest that women excrete blue liquid now dare to show red, bloodlike substances in prime time. Over the past 10 years, things have definitely gotten better, for some of us. There are dozens of books about periods; there have been countless magazine articles and TV segments. The period is bloody everywhere. So why do we need yet another book about it?

Because until we have bridged the gap in scientific understanding of male and female bodies, period positivity is really only window dressing. In her book, Clancy shows that faulty and lacking science regarding periods still dominates women’s daily lives. “Within science and especially medical structures,” she writes, “knowledge is power and therefore often withheld … So we know little about menstruation, and what’s worse, what we often know is wrong.” Even the fundamental question of why we menstruate is still not fully understood. We know that the endometrium is shed each month, but is that simply because the body deems it useless if no fertilized egg is implanted? Is it to “help teach the uterus how to grow a great site for the embryo,” as Clancy puts it? Is it to conserve the body’s energy?

Laia Abril

Ignorant views of menstruation and female biology date back thousands of years. Pliny the Elder wrote that a menstruating woman could kill a swarm of bees and rust iron. In her book, Clancy quotes the American physician Edward H. Clarke, who wrote in 1873 that women who got an education would become like a “sexless class of termites” because learning and bleeding simultaneously would overpower the reproductive system. In 2020, researchers asked 2,500 pediatricians about their knowledge, understanding, and practices surrounding menstruation. Of the 518 doctors who replied to the online survey, Clancy writes, “fewer than half … knew when in puberty menarche (that is, the first menstrual period) happens, how long menses lasts, and even how long it is safe to wear a tampon.”

That is basic ignorance. Look even further, and the picture does not improve. One of the most persistent myths about periods is the idea that the menstrual cycle should be normal, neat, and tidy. As Clancy writes, cycles are seen as “static, twenty-eight-day phenomena: the reality is they are malleable, responsive, dynamic.” When I camped in Siberia for three months as a young woman, my periods stopped for the duration and restarted when I came home, as if my uterus had realized that changing a tampon would be tricky when the toilet was a hole in the ground. The idea of a “normal” cycle can cause undue stress to those who think that their body might be abnormal. And underestimating the complexity of female hormonal cycles undermines our ability to predict dangerous conditions such as preeclampsia, or high blood pressure during pregnancy.

[Read: No one has to get their period anymore]

The female reproductive system more broadly is also misunderstood. The generally accepted narrative imagines the sperm as the hunter, while the egg is the passive and lucky object of its manly chase. But Clancy rightly gives these “ideas about eggs as princesses in a tower and sperm as rescuing princes” short shrift. The ovaries don’t simply release a chosen follicle (a sac of fluid containing an egg) into the fallopian tube right before ovulation. Instead, they ruthlessly “oversee continual, overlapping waves of competition to select” the best follicle to release. The cervix has crypts where it stores sperm “to use later … to prevent overcrowding at the egg and allow for some selection of preferred sperm.” Gamete fusion is a tango, not a one-way assault.

This poor understanding of the female body has consequences. Only recently have scientists discovered that menstrual blood may speed up skin repair because it contains powerful mesenchymal stem cells. Clancy adds that menstrual effluent, which is made up of blood, endometrial tissue, cells, biomarkers, and hormones, also contains important antimicrobials and antioxidant enzymes. And had more scientists been willing, like Clancy, to take a “deep dive into menstrual effluent,” we might have understood sooner that the menstrual cycle can cause a spike in an inflammatory biomarker called C-reactive protein (CRP). Elevated CRP is also used to diagnose people as prediabetic. How many women who thought themselves prediabetic were actually just menstruating? Female hormones don’t skew data. They are data.

Clancy’s science is revelatory, if often dense (if you don’t know your trophoblast from your oocyte, you may have to wait for several dozen pages to learn what they are). But some of her choices can blur her focus. A confident assertion that sex isn’t “solely biological” might surprise scientists who understand sex to be determined by chromosomes and anatomy. This is also a peculiar position in a book devoted to the uniqueness of female biology. I found Clancy’s preference for terms such as people who menstruate over women and girls troubling, too, in a book that seems intended to argue for the importance of studying the biology of females—and correcting a history that ignored the uniqueness of their medical experiences as women and girls.

This is not the only “real story of menstruation,” but it is definitely one that needs to be told. Clancy’s book will hopefully encourage more scientists to conduct more rigorous research on periods. Until the knowledge gap is filled, women and girls will be left in the dark about how their bodies work and how to fix what goes wrong. And it won’t matter how loud the clarion call of “period positivity” is: It will still be mostly noise.

Half a century ago, at the 1974 Adelaide Festival of Arts, in South Australia, John Updike delivered a muscular manifesto: “We must write where we stand,” he said. “An imitation of the life we know, however narrow, is our only ground.” His call for accurate and specific witness, for a realism dedicated to the here and now, was surely in part an apology for the repeat appearances of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the former high-school-basketball star Updike called his “ticket to the America all around me.” Already the hero of Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971), Harry was destined to star in two more alliterative Rabbit novels, Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), as well as the postmortem novella Rabbit Remembered (2000). Restless and hungry, open to experience and eager to learn, as fallible as the rest of us, and a staunch, often dismayed patriot, Harry is Updike’s everyman.

Following in Rabbit’s zigzag footsteps, Richard Ford’s recurring character, the endearing, occasionally exasperating Frank Bascombe, steers what he calls his “uncompassed course” through the sequence of novels beginning with The Sportswriter (1986) and stretching to Be Mine, the fifth and probably final book of Frank. While graciously acknowledging Updike’s influence (“Anything I might’ve learned from him I gladly concede”), Ford has taken care to distinguish Frank from his precursor. Too ruminative, too intellectual to be an everyman (“Never my intention,” Ford once declared), Frank is nonetheless an accurate and specific witness to the American ground on which Ford stoutly stands.

Frank is different from Harry physically (in high school, Frank was hopeless at basketball), morally (you won’t catch Frank in flagrante with his daughter-in-law), and socially. Until he got rich as a middle-aged Toyota dealer, Harry was unequivocally blue collar. College-educated Frank is white collar all the way: a short-story writer, a sportswriter, a college professor (very briefly), then a real-estate agent. Frank has always had an expansive range of highbrow references. In Be Mine, “the old Nazi Heidegger,” “that scrofulous old faker Faulkner,” and the novels of J. M. Coetzee all pop up—not names Harry would ever drop.

But the key difference between a Rabbit book and a Bascombe book is the texture of the prose. Both authors write in the present tense, but whereas Updike uses a finely calibrated close-third-person perspective, hovering over Harry and cloaking him in luscious Updikean phrases, Ford hides himself away and lets the inescapably, unstoppably logocentric Frank tell his tale in his own distinctive, discursive voice, a roving “I” addicted to description and speculation. Every Bascombe book is full-on Frank.

One more thing Frank has in common with Harry (and Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman): He belongs to the most overexposed cohort in history, the heterosexual white male strutting through postwar America. If the mere mention of those three characters brings on a wave of old-white-guy fatigue, better to give the latest Frankathon a miss. But if you’re up for a dazzling, acutely painful 342-page monologue from a 74-year-old whose favorite shoe is a Weejun, who likes to rhapsodize about suburbia, and who is right now preoccupied with an unspooling tragedy on a road trip through a tranche of Trump country, Be Mine is just the ticket.

Each Bascombe book is loosely centered on a public celebration: Easter for The Sportswriter , Fourth of July for Independence Day (1995), Thanksgiving for The Lay of the Land (2006), Christmas for the four novellas collected in Let Me Be Frank With You (2014), Valentine’s Day for Be Mine. None of these books is plotted; they stumble from incident to incident—never artlessly, but seemingly by accident. Ford has said of the first three that they were “largely born out of fortuity.” The latest is somewhat more focused and linear, though the usual digressions and flashbacks give it the haphazard feel cherished by Frank’s fans.

Now, in the dying days of the Trump administration, Frank is caring for his 47-year-old son, Paul, recently diagnosed with ALS, the fatal neurodegenerative disorder also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Paul is participating in an experimental-drug trial at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. When the trial finishes, they drive west to Mount Rushmore in a rented Dodge Ram with a vintage camper bolted onto the bed—an all-American journey, like the trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Independence Day—father-and-son excursions that play into Frank’s faintly ironic idea of himself as an “arch-ordinary American.”

[From the December 2006 issue: Richard Ford, out of character]

All but retired, rooted in Haddam, New Jersey, a town “as straightforward and plumb-literal as a fire hydrant,” Frank has a part-time job answering phones in the office of a “boutique realty entity” with the inspired name of House Whisperers. In the earlier books, he endured the death of his oldest son, age 9; two divorces; prostate cancer; and being shot in the chest—as an innocent bystander—by a punk with an AR-15. All of that, even his beloved Haddam, even the recent death from Parkinson’s of his first wife (Paul’s mother), is shoved to the side by his surviving son’s illness. In Rochester and on the road, Frank and Paul are “alone together, joined unwillingly at the heart.”

Readers of The Sportswriter will remember Paul as an appealing little boy who kept pigeons in a coop behind the house in Haddam and sent them off with forlorn messages to his dead older brother—who Paul thought lived on Cape May. In the next novel, Paul was a teenager, troubled, abrasive, yet still intermittently appealing. Then he was briefly married and worked for Hallmark writing “dopey” greeting cards. Familiarity with these previous incarnations is in no way necessary, though it does add to the illusion of depth, an accretion of sedimentary layers. The astonishing core of Be Mine is the barbed, tender, despairing bond between father and son, a bond both battered and strengthened by the cruel “progress” of Paul’s disease.

By the time they embark on their road trip—knowing, as they’ve always known, that no miracle cure will present itself—every step Paul takes, every gesture, is a struggle. Even when he sits, his right hand trembles, “clenching and curling”; knees shudder; feet fidget. His life “pares down to arch necessities—ambulation, swallowing, talking, breathing.” Devastating as this is for Paul, it also takes a heavy toll on an already death-haunted Frank, who early in the novel scattered the ashes of his first wife. “If three house moves are the psychic equivalent of a death, a son’s diagnosis of ALS is equal to crashing your car into a wall day after day, with the outcome always the same.”

As he did so often in the earlier novels—especially The Sportswriter, when his sexual magnetism (age 38) was irresistible and his conquests legion—Frank seeks the comfort of a woman’s love. He visits a massage parlor called Vietnam-Minnesota Hospitality, improbably located in an isolated farmhouse 18 miles north of Rochester. His “massage attendant,” Betty Duong Tran, is a diminutive 34-year-old “with bobbed hair … darkly alert eyes … pert, friendly gestures.” Frank takes Betty on dinner dates; afterward, “inside my still-frozen car … we’ve kissed and embraced sweetly a time or two.” The smarmy soft focus is unusual for Ford, but less disappointing than the safe, generic description that accompanies those occasions when Betty—“for reasons I never anticipate”—decides to strip naked for the massage session: “Undressed, she is as tiny as she seems clothed, but unexpectedly curvy and fleshy where you wouldn’t expect.”

Frank’s “love” for Betty Tran (“Much of life should have quotes around it,” he observes) is surely meant to relieve the gloom of degenerative disease. Frank knows that he’s “reached the point in life at which no woman I’m ever going to be attracted to is ever going to be attracted to me.” He quite reasonably asks, “How do you stand it, these dismal facts of life, without some durable fantasy or deception or dissembling?” Naked Betty and her sweet embraces are presented as fact, as real as the chrome ram’s head on the hood of the Dodge, but even if she were presented as fantasy and the nude massage as erotic reverie, surely a writer of Ford’s inarguable talent should do better than “curvy and fleshy.” He doesn’t do explicit sex—only very rarely does he do bland cliché.

What a contrast with the exact and wholly convincing descriptions of Paul’s inexorable decline. On the morning of the visit to Mount Rushmore, he emerges from their motel room at the Four Presidents Courts, stumbles on the curb, and bashes his hand and face on the bumper of the Dodge. The challenge is then to hoist him into the truck:

“My hand hurts, and I can’t control my fucking feet,” Paul says, reaching for the hand grip on the windshield post.

“Yes, you can,” I say. “Shift your weight. I’ll push you.” I am pushing him—his pillowy butt, his still-muscled thighs straining, straining …

With his bad hand Paul loops his wrist through the inside hand-hold, manages a foot up to the running board, grasps the seat back with his good hand, and I push him forward and up like a sack of rocks. I fear he might fart more or less in my face where I’m close to him, helping him … Miraculously he doesn’t.

And then he is almost in. I give another grunting upwards lift, ignoring everything but what I’m doing and doing my best to do. And in he sags. At which point nothing else matters.

Ford has a loud and faithful following among writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Lorrie Moore, John Banville, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Geoff Dyer, among others, have been effusive in their praise. My hunch is that he won their admiration (as he won mine) with both the care he takes and the risks he takes. Every sentence is considered, yet many look like they’re about to fall apart in their devious careening. Something similar can be said of the meandering Bascombe books, too: Their course, like Frank’s, is uncompassed by design. Every detour offers an opportunity to ponder. Here we are in Rapid City, South Dakota:

What causes places to be awful is always of interest, since places can be awful in myriad ways—though you sense it the moment you step off the bus. It’s never the air quality or the car-truck congestion or income differential or racial mix or number of parks, miles of bike paths and paved jogging trails, a developed waterfront, access to public transit or a thriving art scene. A town can be on this year’s “best place to live and raise a family” list—alongside Portland Maine, Billings Montana, and Rochester—and be wretched. It’s about yawning streets, deathwatch stoplights and the aggregate number of used car lots … It’s about how fast new “loft” projects pave over old cow pastures, and how the older malls are faring and whether new-car dealerships look like Ming pagodas.

The path from car-truck congestion to yawning streets and deathwatch stoplights to old cow pastures and Ming pagodas is crooked and jumbled in true Ford fashion, a curated chaos. What Frank says about himself also applies to his voice: “I personally have never minded a low-grade sensation of randomness and have sought, as much as convenient, to keep randomness nourished.”

One of the risks Ford skirts is boredom. Are there things you’d rather be doing, you wonder, than listening to Frank bloviate? Ford pulls back from the brink with the brilliant set pieces that punctuate the narrative: traversing the atrium of the Mayo Clinic, “where, on any given day, thousands enter and thousands leave 200% confident that if there’s a cure for them, this is where it lives”; a visit to the World’s Only Corn Palace, in Mitchell, South Dakota (“everything in your wildest dreams made out of corn”); the “Life-Changing Patriotic Experience” of Mount Rushmore.

The four chiseled visages. L to R—Washington (the father), Jefferson (the expansionist), Roosevelt #1 (the ham, snugged in like an imposter) and stone-face Lincoln, the emancipator (though there are fresh questions surrounding that). None of these candidates could get a vote today—slavers, misogynists, homophobes, warmongers, historical slyboots, all playing with house money.

Ford is far too subtle to make an explicit connection between Paul’s degenerative disease and whatever has happened to our nation, but those four “granitudinally white faces” inevitably evoke an absent other. On a television screen in an airport lounge a few months earlier, Frank had caught a glimpse of “President Trump’s swollen, eyes-bulging face … doing his pooch-lipped, arms-folded Mussolini.” He’s got his number: “tuberous limbs, prognathous jaw, looking in all directions at once, seeking approval but not finding enough.”

Paul’s desperate condition insulates Frank from “the whole nationwide Busby-Berkeley” of impeachment and election. Proliferating yard signage elicits a characteristic response: “Trump–Biden. Hard to know which bunch I’d rather run afoul of—a mob of shrieking, sandaled liberals waving blue security blankets, or a stampede of tattooed muscle-bound yokels with AR-15s and redacted copies of the constitution.” As usual, he’s willing to see every side of every story.

Always the meditative humanist (at one point he kept a copy of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” in his car), Frank dedicates himself in Be Mine to the problem of happiness—a problem particularly acute when you’re a septuagenarian caring for your dying middle-aged son. In Sioux Falls, with Heidegger’s help, he comes to a tentative conclusion: “Being old really is like having a fatal disease, at least insofar as I’m no more ready than my son is to give up on comfort, idleness and taking grave things lightly.” Later he plumps for Augustine of Hippo (just as “good is the absence of bad … happiness is the absence of unhappiness”) with an added dash of William Blake (“Good [is] only good in specifics”). Here’s what he tells himself:

I know the hollow in the heart that is longing and longing’s opposite—doing good because you want to do good and are a good man in spite of what you know is true of you. Yes. Happiness can still be yours, ole chap; since happiness is not a pure element like Manganese or Boron, but an alloy of metals both precious and base, and durable.

What does he crave in the aftermath of his road trip with Paul? “I desire to feel free for a moment of airy, well-earned ease and clear-sightedness. Which is to say, not walled off.” Uncompassed is Frank’s default mode; un-encompassed suits him too. He’ll stand his ground, keep his distance, look around—and withhold judgment if possible. If not, he may offer his favorite equivocation: “Yeah-no. The entire human condition in two words.”

This article appears in the July/August 2023 print edition with the headline “Inside Frank Bascombe’s Head, Again.”

Around the turn of the millennium, viewers of the daytime soap opera General Hospital may have noticed a shift in their favorite afternoon medical drama. The show, which had aired on ABC since 1963, had once been preoccupied with the titular hospital in the fictional city of Port Charles. Storylines in the ’90s were dedicated to socially relevant topics like a teenage couple navigating the HIV/AIDS crisis, a doctor dealing with her own breast-cancer diagnosis, and an adoptee tracking down her birth mother in adulthood. But in the early aughts, the soap’s gentle, humanistic notes gave way to machismo energy as it fixated on the dimpled mob don Sonny Corinthos (Maurice Benard) and those in his violence-ridden orbit. This about-face prompted the television critic Ed Martin to dub the show “Sopranos in the daytime.” Here was the ultimate indictment: One of daytime television’s crown jewels had become the Great Value knockoff of a prime-time masterwork.

Too often, General Hospital and its fellow daytime soaps—shows historically consumed and cherished by women and Black audiences—tend to get a bum rap from critics, who malign them as unworthy of respect. These days, slandering the soap opera is almost a form of punching down, considering how much the genre has fallen on hard times: Daytime soaps have been circling the drain for years, thanks to sagging ratings and slashed budgets. As if by miracle this spring, General Hospital celebrated its 60th anniversary, making it the longest-running scripted show on American television still in production, while CBS’s The Young and the Restless marked its 50th anniversary. Those two, along with CBS’s The Bold and the Beautiful, are the sole daytime soaps that remain on traditional American airwaves. (Last year, NBC jettisoned Days of Our Lives from its daytime network lineup, where it had been since 1965, and ferried it over to the streamer Peacock.) That’s a stark decline from the genre’s heyday in the early 1980s, when more than a dozen daytime soaps aired across ABC, NBC, and CBS; eight daytime soaps were on American television at the start of 2009, just before the wholesale purge of the genre began that year.

The watershed anniversaries of General Hospital and The Young and the Restless might provide an occasion to rue what’s become of the art form, but the strands of daytime soaps’ DNA are thriving elsewhere. They have a direct and obvious descendant in soaps that air at night, a category of television that has flourished since the 1960s with Peyton Place and the subsequent popularity of Dallas and Dynasty in the following decades. And nearly 20 years after Martin’s dig at General Hospital, the inverse of his observation holds true: Prime-time prestige darlings of this current television era—the kind you’d find airing on Sunday nights on premium television networks like HBO or Showtime—often borrow from and refine the style of daytime soaps. Once you identify the tropes that have buttressed daytime soap operas, you’ll spot them everywhere.

Let’s establish the hallmarks of daytime-soap storytelling. Even the most ardent devotees of the genre would admit that daytime soaps contain hairpin plot turns that defy logic. Major arcs on Days of Our Lives have dealt with satanic possessions; a storyline on General Hospital a few years ago involved a human’s memory being stored on a flash drive. Characters return from the dead after their corpses go cold. Plastic surgery gets wheeled out as an explanation for a role being recast and a startling lack of resemblance between two actors who inhabit the same character. Secret long-lost twins abound.

But at their finest, daytime soaps provide far more than pulpy pleasures. These shows, with their expansive canvases, have long explored thorny family dynamics across generations in a way few other genres have had breathing room for. They also use the grammar of exaggeration to moving effect. The ostentatious acting associated with daytime soaps—All My Children’s Susan Lucci and other grande dames of the small screen emoting with gale-force intensity—harkens back to classic Hollywood, where every Bette Davis or Joan Crawford knew how to wring emotional truth from extravagance. Soapy has long been a pejorative in the American vernacular, a byword for a piece of art that traffics in sappy schlock. But deploying that term can be more than a lazy way to sully an object’s artistic merit.

[Read: The unsung legacy of Black characters on soap operas]

The soapy spirit of absurdity courses through Showtime’s breakout hit Yellowjackets, a show that, as is customary of so many daytime soaps, centers the lives of women. Two timelines run parallel to each other; the first, in 1996, chronicles how the members of a New Jersey girls’ high-school soccer team fend for themselves after a plane crash strands them in the Canadian wilderness, while the second examines the aftershocks of their teenage trauma in the present day. Despite its pretense of seriousness, Yellowjackets doesn’t take long to freefall into preposterousness. Some viewers might still wonder how the girl whose face got mauled to pieces managed to heal within a few episodes, how another survivor could smash and destroy the aircraft’s ironclad black box (a device, mind you, that is engineered to withstand a literal plane crash), how the abandoned cabin where the team seeks shelter miraculously had enough pillows and blankets for each of the crash’s dozen-plus survivors.

But Yellowjackets, like any propulsive daytime soap, asks its audience to overlook any inconsistencies and instead submit to its base delights. The show is populated by characters who occupy a moral gray zone and engage in deliciously theatrical subterfuge, and Yellowjackets works best when it slyly unpeels the duality of these women. The frizzy-haired and bespectacled outcast Misty (played by Christina Ricci as an adult) might be the soapiest character of all. Her emotions shift on a dime: She is perky in one moment, sociopathically diabolical the next. Bullied as a teenager by the popular girls, she is still a loner longing for acceptance a quarter century later, but Yellowjackets resists making her too easy an object of sympathy. For example, she injects a cigarette with poison and hands it to a woman she’s kidnapped. Her actions seem stripped straight from the playbook of a soap-opera villain like Days of Our Lives’ Kristen DiMera, a vixen whose demonic machinations are direct consequences of the untended wounds from her past.

Ridiculousness is in high supply in American prime time’s most popular scripted television show, Paramount’s Yellowstone, a show often tagged with the soap-opera label as a snide way of impugning its worth. Characters do outrageous things, like walking out of a just-bombed building and asking a passerby for a cigarette, that might make viewers raise eyebrows. But like any solid soap, part of Yellowstone’s bargain with the viewer is the demand that they suspend their disbelief. Yellowstone concerns John Dutton (Kevin Costner), the aging patriarch of the land-owning Dutton family in Montana, and the struggle over his legacy among his children. The tussle between Dutton and his spawn on that show resembles the bitter feuds among the Quartermaine family of General Hospital, a fractured clan of strong personalities who constantly find themselves at loggerheads. Some of Dutton’s children remain fiercely loyal to him; others, like Jamie (Wes Bentley), never quite feel adequate enough to gain Daddy’s approval. On Yellowstone, as in General Hospital, the siblings trade barbs and spew such venom at one another that one wonders how they could possibly ever have lived under the same roof. The show also provides splashy anvil-drop reveals—like, say, that Jamie isn’t John’s biological kid—whose consequences reverberate over seasons.

[Read: How Taylor Sheridan created America’s most popular show]

Denigrators have reductively dismissed Yellowstone as the downmarket, red-state cousin of HBO’s Succession, perhaps the most glimmering emblem of this current prestige era in television. The marital squabbles between Shiv (Sarah Snook) and her husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), will ring familiar to anyone who’s endured the verbal sparring between General Hospital’s aforementioned Sonny and his on-again, off-again wife, Carly (played by four actresses throughout the span of the show), who cherish and despise each other in equal measure. For a time in the early aughts, Sonny and Carly’s shouting matches seemed to dominate each episode, just as the clashes between Shiv and Tom became crucial to Succession’s plots.

And longtime viewers of The Young and the Restless will recognize the melodramatic sweep of Succession’s basic conceit, with siblings warring over the future of a media conglomerate spearheaded by their father, Logan Roy (Brian Cox). Succession’s Waystar Royco has a daytime analogue in The Young and the Restless’s Jabot Cosmetics, a beauty brand begun by the family patriarch, John Abbott, and fought over by his children after his death. The tension between the Abbott siblings sometimes comes to a thrilling head: One scene from 2018 involves Jack (Peter Bergman) admonishing his sister, Ashley (Eileen Davidson), for besmirching the family’s legacy, and throwing their late father’s favorite chair through a glass wall before Ashley’s horrified eyes. The gesture is objectively hilarious—the kind of sequence that, shorn of context, might confirm prejudices against the genre of daytime soaps. But it’s not hard to imagine how such a scene might play on Succession, with its handsome HBO production values. Even brawls between the siblings—like the volcanic scene in the finale where Kendall (Jeremy Strong) lunges at Roman (Kieran Culkin) in a conference room—have a whiff of these high-octane daytime-soap sibling fights.

As Shiv, Snook gives a masterclass performance that’s reminiscent of daytime’s most indelible doyennes, refusing to blunt her character’s rough edges. Take the scene where, after Logan collapses on a plane, Tom holds a phone up to his ear and asks Shiv to say what may be her last words to him. The uncertainty over whether her father can actually hear her causes Shiv to cycle through a galaxy of feelings—disbelief, regret, heartbreak—within the span of minutes. Her choked reaction recalls a scene from the glory days of General Hospital in 1998, where the conniving, damaged Carly (then played by Sarah Joy Brown) tearfully monologues before the body of her deceased adoptive mother, with whom she had an acrimonious relationship. Snook, like Brown before her, doesn’t shy away from excess here: Her downpour of emotion feels torrential. Actorly indulgence of this nature, the kind one might find on a daytime soap, is precisely what lends this sequence in Succession its lasting power.

Succession seems to be aware of what it owes to daytime soap operas. There’s a scene in the show’s final season where the gruff Logan tells his kids he’s sad they didn’t come to his birthday party. “It's like a fucking telenovela,” Kendall sneers in response, likening his father’s rare display of vulnerability to the kind of outsized expression common on a Latin American daytime soap. This throwaway quip feels like a subtle nod to the genre that has left its imprint on a show like Succession. Even as the daytime soap careens toward extinction, a time may soon arrive when calling a creative work “soapy” is no longer an insult but a compliment, a way of paying tribute to an undersung art form whose influence might just outlive it.

As the stretcher was wheeled into the room, I glanced up from the patient chart. Following right behind was a burly man in the distinctive dark-green uniform of the U.S. Border Patrol. The patient, a young woman, lay shivering. A spinal collar had been placed around her neck to immobilize it in case it was broken. Her face, fixed upward, grimaced.

“Wall fall?” I asked as the nurses prepared to move the patient from the stretcher to the bed.

“Yeah,” the officer said.

“How high?”

“Eighteen feet. We found her on the ground. Not sure how long she was out there like this.”

It was the end of the monsoon season in El Paso. On my way to this night shift several hours earlier, I had driven through a torrent of rain that must have slicked the surface the young woman had climbed.

[Ieva Jusionyte: What I learned as an EMT at the border wall]

I took a closer look at her. She seemed to be in her late 20s, about my age. Loose dirt and sand clung to her drenched clothes, a dark hoodie and sweatpants. I leaned down next to her so that I was at eye level. I’m Dr. Elmore, I said in fumbling Spanish. She turned to face me, still trembling. We’re going to take good care of you. But first we need to take off your wet clothes to make sure you’re not injured anywhere else. Confused, she looked to the nurse, who explained to her in flawless Spanish what we were going to do. She nodded and closed her eyes.

As a medical resident, I have spent the past year treating the victims of U.S. border policies on both sides of the frontier. I co-founded and run Clínica Hope, a clinic in Juárez, Mexico, where my patients include migrants who have been turned back from the U.S. border and forced to wait in Mexico. I am also an emergency-room resident in the University Medical Center in El Paso, Texas, where I treat those who couldn’t wait any longer.

This woman was my first patient to have fallen from the border wall. I had only recently begun my residency, and the motions weren’t yet automatic. The nurses and I took off the patient’s Converse sneakers and socks. Coins and Mexican pesos tumbled out of them. With trauma shears, we cut through her hoodie and sweatpants, revealing a Chicago Cubs jersey and jeans underneath, the prototypical American outfit. I cut through the jeans as the patient winced. Her right leg was swollen and misshapen; it was broken. As we cut, we found more pesos, some jewelry, a tiny cross, a picture of the Virgin Mary, a soaked Colombian passport. The nursing staff carefully placed each item in a bag for the patient as the Border Patrol officer looked on.

The nurses rolled the patient onto her side. I moved my hand down her spine, looking for any deformity or tenderness, and performed a neurological exam, watching her eyes follow my finger. I examined every joint, listened to her heart, and pressed on her belly. The CT scan would reveal a pelvic fracture, a right-leg fracture, and a liver laceration.

When I arrived in El Paso a year ago, the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy was in its last days. Under it, asylum seekers who presented themselves at ports of entry would be returned to Mexico to wait, many of them for months, for their hearings. The policy ended in August 2022, but Title 42, an emergency public-health authority that allowed border officials to rapidly expel migrants without due process or the promise of a future hearing, remained. The stated rationale behind Title 42 was to stop the spread of the coronavirus across borders, but in Texas, this measure outlasted every other COVID-19 safety protocol.

Title 42 left hundreds of thousands of migrants waiting in border communities that can be exceptionally dangerous for them. Human Rights First has documented more than 10,000 instances in which migrants removed to Mexico by Title 42 were subject to violence including rape, kidnapping, murder, and torture.

[David A. Graham: Biden is making a Trumplike mistake at the border]

American border policies are designed to impose a high price on those seeking asylum. But people are willing to pay incalculable costs. At the intensive-care unit in the El Paso hospital, I encountered one such person, a woman who stared blankly at the ceiling. With her 10-year-old daughter, she had traveled—who knows how far? Hundreds, thousands of miles? They made it over the border wall intact, but to get to El Paso, they had to traverse the Border Highway and I-10. A car hit them in the night, killing the daughter and leaving the mother with multiple fractures. “We were going to Virginia,” the woman said to me just as I prepared to leave the room. “Can my daughter be buried there?”

In September, the demographics of my patients seemed to change overnight; most of the migrants I saw in both El Paso and Juárez were now coming from Venezuela. These were among the most traumatized I had treated. To reach the border, Venezuelans must first cross the Darién Gap—a stretch of jungle between Panama and Colombia that lacks roads and must be traversed by foot. Some of the people I spoke with described the bodies of less fortunate travelers they had passed on their trek. The Darién is notorious for bandits and inclement weather, but it also harbors another peril: disease. In our emergency department, we began seeing cases of tropical illnesses that are rare in America, such as malaria and dengue.

This spring, when Title 42 was set to expire but no one knew what would take its place, migrants came to the border in droves. The El Paso community rose to the occasion, welcoming newcomers in shelters.

[From the August 2022 issue: An American catastrophe]

The policy that the U.S. government then unveiled required migrants to request asylum in the first “safe” country they reached outside their own, which for most of those from Central and South America is technically not the United States. As a result of the shift, U.S. Border Patrol’s encounters with migrants in El Paso are down by more than 60 percent since Title 42 ended. But the migrant population at shelters in Juárez has increased. Last week, the shelter that houses my Juárez clinic held about 850 people, compared with its typical population of 400 to 500, and the situation is similar in other shelters. Many of these asylum seekers will lose hope and try to climb over the wall. Some will end up in my emergency department.

Every time I cross the border to get from the Juárez clinic to the El Paso emergency department, I think about how easily and swiftly I can do what many people risk their life to do.

My patients come to the border because they believe that America will do the right thing. Their injuries and deaths are avoidable—they are the cost American society has decided to impose on those seeking a better life.

Donald Trump has been indicted by federal prosecutors in connection with his removal of documents from the White House, the former president announced on his social-media site tonight. He said that he has been summoned to appear on Tuesday at a U.S. courthouse in Miami. Several outlets reported that he faces seven counts, but more information was not immediately available.

“I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States,” Trump wrote in a post, adding, “I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!”

[David A. Graham: Don’t take your eye of Jack Smith]

In fact, the indictment is, like so many of the signal moments of his presidency, both eminently foreseeable and utterly astonishing. If it never seemed possible that a former president would face such charges, that’s mostly because it never seemed possible that a president would abscond with a large number of documents and then defy a subpoena to return them. Trump’s shock also reflects his feeling that he was, or ought to be, immune to consequences for his actions and not subject to the same rule of law as other citizens.

This indictment began looking likely in August 2022, when the FBI conducted a surprise search at Mar-a-Lago. Each new revelation since then has pointed toward charges. The federal government repeatedly asked Trump to return the documents; he refused, claiming that some belonged to him and that he had already returned those that didn’t. Some of the documents are believed to be extremely sensitive to national security. By this spring, I wrote, the big question was when and not if.

The indictment does not break the taboo of indicting a former president—that happened in April, when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records. But the case in Florida, apparently brought by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, represents the first federal charges against a former president. And it poses a far greater danger to Trump than the New York case, for several reasons.

[David A. Graham: Lordy, there are tapes]

The public evidence in both cases suggests that the Florida case is much stronger. The Manhattan prosecution is based on a tenuous legal theory. As I have previously reported, legal experts and former prosecutors see the legal questions in this case to be much simpler. Many former officials have been prosecuted for mishandling official records and classified records. Trump has tried to draw a parallel to President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence, both of whom also took classified documents, but neither of those cases includes the appearance of great efforts to obstruct the government and refuse to return papers. (Trump also faces potential legal troubles in Atlanta, where a local prosecutor is investigating efforts to subvert the 2020 election in Georgia.)

If the legal question for federal prosecutors is straightforward, the political calculations are much more complex. As if charging a former president were not explosive enough, Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican nomination in next year’s presidential election.

But Trump faces his own political complications. Voters have proved fairly willing to forgive politicians’ personal failings, especially in recent decades and especially when it comes to Trump. (The Manhattan case, for example, stems from hush-money payments to an adult-film actor who has claimed a sexual liaison.) But the removal of the documents is an act that stems directly from his role as president, and it implicates the very security of the country. The documents removed are reported to have included detailed information about Iran’s missile program and intelligence programs in China—the sorts of things that are kept under tight wraps in government facilities, but were reportedly stuffed haphazardly in storage areas at Mar-a-Lago.

[David A. Graham: If they can come for Trump, they can come for everyone]

Trump was also able to survive his (also unprecedented) two impeachments, both because he could write them off as political processes and because he was ultimately accountable to politicians, including many aligned with him politically or afraid of his backers. In this case, Trump will have to come before a jury of his peers or a federal judge.

In Trump’s long career in and out of the courts, he has not yet faced a legal peril this serious, but just how serious it is will not be clear until the charges emerge. Prosecutors could use several laws to bring those charges, with different standards and different penalties.

His defense will face difficulties, including the huge amounts of evidence obtained in the raid, as well as a ruling that one of his lawyers had to turn over information that otherwise would have been shielded by attorney-client privilege. Trump will likely try to spin the charges as concerning “process crimes,” as though those are not just crimes, and deflect from the papers themselves. He has also claimed that he declassified all of the papers at the end of his presidency, but he produced no evidence for that, and his lawyers have avoided making the claim in filings. Reports last week said that prosecutors have a recording in which he seems to acknowledge that he cannot show a document to visitors because it is classified. And if he’s charged for refusing to return the documents, their classification status will not matter.

[David A. Graham: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

Trump is certain to make his strongest and most impassioned defense in the court of public opinion, where he will present himself as the victim of a politicized witch hunt. He previewed that argument in a video posted tonight. That’s a familiar refrain, and one that has never borne much weight, but it has also bound his strongest supporters more closely to him—in fact, as his legal troubles have escalated, so has his polling in the Republican primary. Yet the overall population has always been, and remains, skeptical of him.

Court cases take time, and Trump’s attorneys will make every effort to draw this one out, trying to push a trial past the point of the 2024 election. If Trump wins, he would likely have the power to shut down any probe and perhaps even to pardon himself. That means that the court of public opinion may also render its verdict sooner than any federal court, and the jury will be American voters.

Last Friday, The Atlantic published Tim Alberta’s profile of then–CNN CEO Chris Licht. Yesterday, Licht was ousted from the network. Below, in selected excerpts from today’s episode of our podcast Radio Atlantic, Alberta reflects on how Licht’s attempts to save the network went so wrong.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The true purpose of Ukraine’s counteroffensive The golf merger may be dead on arrival Is Gen Z coming for the GOP? The happiest way to change jobs A Plan Gone Awry

When Chris Licht was brought in to replace CNN’s former president Jeff Zucker in 2022, he was on a mission: He wanted to rid the network of what he saw as the mistakes of the Trump era, and to welcome more Republican viewers. After spending long periods of time talking with Licht over the past year, my colleague Tim Alberta found that while Licht’s theory of how to fix CNN may have made sense, the execution of that theory seemed to backfire at every turn.

The Atlantic published Alberta’s major profile of Licht last Friday. Yesterday, CNN staff learned that Licht is leaving the network. On today’s episode of our podcast Radio Atlantic, in his first (and, so far, only) interview on his reporting about Licht and CNN, Alberta joined host Hanna Rosin to discuss this week’s news. Below are some highlights from their conversation.

Licht came in with an “incredibly ambitious objective.”

After Alberta told Rosin how hard he’d worked to pitch Licht’s team on this story, she wondered: Why did Alberta want to write this profile so badly? “CNN had really been the poster child for Republican attacks on the media during the Trump years,” he replied. “I’d spent as much time covering Republican voters and Republican campaigns as anybody over the past five or six years. And I’d seen firsthand, time and time and time again, how, at rallies or smaller candidate events, CNN had sort of become the face of the hysterical liberal media that was out to get Trump and leading a witch hunt on his impeachment and on January 6 and on everything else.”

“Licht came in and quite overtly made it known, from the beginning, that his mission was to change that perception of CNN—was not to coddle the extreme right wing, so to speak, but to win back the sort of respectable rank-and-file Republican voter who had become so distrustful of CNN during those previous five or six years. And that struck me as an incredibly ambitious objective for somebody taking over one of the world’s biggest news organizations … at a really sensitive time.”

Licht was an awkward fit from the start.

Licht’s network predecessor, Jeff Zucker, was a beloved, “larger-than-life figure who had real personal rapport with just about everybody—not only the on-air talent but the producers behind the scenes, the camera crews,” Alberta explained. Licht, on the other hand, “went out of his way from the outset to be everything that Zucker wasn’t. So if Zucker was warm and affectionate and intimate with everyone, Licht was sort of cold and detached, almost aloof, purposely inaccessible.”

One of Licht’s first decisions as CEO was to turn Zucker’s former office—on the 17th floor of the CNN building, in the heart of the network’s newsroom—into a conference room. He then moved himself up to an office on the 22nd floor, a spot that most employees didn’t even know how to find. “And that one move, although it seems small, I think really in many ways came to define Licht’s relationship with his journalists,” Alberta said.

Licht’s mission was about more than just CNN.

“This was about the journalism industry itself,” Alberta said. Licht was “making it known that he felt that all of media had gotten played by President Trump. And he believed that if something was not done to fix that, that if there weren’t dramatic measures taken to restore and rehabilitate the media’s image in the eyes of much of the country, that it posed a real threat to democracy itself.”

So what happened to that mission?

Alberta quotes “the great philosopher Mike Tyson”: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth … Chris Licht had a plan, and then he came in and he got punched in the mouth a bunch of times.

“The recurring theme that I heard from a lot of the top talent at CNN was that, in a lot of ways, they actually agreed in theory with the mission that Chris Licht had laid out, as far as toning down some of the outrage, trying to be more selective with when they really wanted it dialed up to 11, as he would say, and go strong on certain stories,” Alberta said. “But the execution of that mission was really what started to become shaky.”

One particularly troubling question was “what [to] do with Republicans who systematically attempted to deconstruct our democratic institutions a couple of years ago and prevent a peaceful transition of power. I mean, what do you do with those folks? Do you treat them as rational actors who need to be given a platform to reach the viewing masses?”

Licht’s programming decisions sometimes seemed to answer that question in ways that conflicted with his stated vision, Alberta explained, culminating in the network’s much-criticized town hall with Donald Trump last month.

Licht seemed defeated during Alberta’s final interview.

When Alberta met with Licht in mid-May, a week after the Trump town hall, “I could sense, having … gotten to know him fairly well over some period of time, that there was something a little bit different in his body language, that there was some self-doubt. There was maybe even a bit of sadness that things had gone so wrong.”

Looking back, did Licht’s mission fail?

Alberta pointed out that Licht set a lofty goal for himself: to reimagine the mainstream media’s relationship with a Republican base that had been “systematically manipulated” into not trusting them for decades. “It’s hard to draw any other conclusion” than failure “just based on the ratings,” Alberta said. “One year in the grand scheme of things is not a ton of time, but in that one year, there was just no measurable improvement. And in fact, all of the measurables actually showed that things were getting worse.”

Rosin posed an important final question: “My immediate thought after hearing that he was out at CNN was, In our political climate, is it even possible to do a reset like he was trying to do?”

“I think that’s the $64,000 question here, to be honest,” Alberta replied. He noted that he sees some of the internet’s “pile on” of Licht as unfair. Licht is a “talented guy” who has been successful in his past roles, Alberta said, and “I do think that he was dealt an exceptionally difficult hand, but I also think he made it even harder on himself than it had to be.”

“I don’t know if anybody at this point is capable of doing what Chris set out to do.”

Listen to the full podcast episode here.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

Today’s News In a surprise decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that Alabama’s current congressional map dilutes the electoral power of its Black voters, a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act. Federal prosecutors handling the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents were spotted at a Miami courthouse where a grand jury has been hearing witness testimony, further evidence of a potential indictment. The Baptist minister Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and an influential coalition of conservative Christians, has died at the age of 93. Robertson is widely considered a key figure in the rise of religious conservatism over recent decades. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf considers the battle over smartphones in schools. Weekly Planet: The not-COVID reason to mask is here, Katherine J. Wu writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read CBS Photo Archive / Getty

The People Who Use Their Parents’ First Name

By Jacob Stern

On a 1971 episode of The Brady Bunch, the family’s eldest son, Greg, decides that, as a freshly minted high schooler, he ought to be treated like a man. When he asks for his own bedroom, his parents acquiesce. When he asks for money to buy new clothes, they give it to him. When he asks to skip the family camping trip, they say okay.

But when he sits down at the breakfast table and calls his parents by their first name—“Morning, Carol! Morning, Mike!”—well, that’s a bridge too far. “Now, look, Greg,” his father answers with a wag of his finger. “Calling your parents by their first names might be the fad these days, but around here, we are still ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ to you!”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Don’t forget the other half of Europe’s abortion compromise. We don’t really know what wildfire smoke does to your brain. Netanyahu sends in the clowns. Culture Break Photo-illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Frazer Harrison / Getty; Jerod Harris / Bravo / NBC / Getty; Paula Lobo / Disney / Getty

Read. Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, in which the Slate staff writer Henry Grabar makes a case for why parking has made American life worse.

Watch. Top Chef, the juggernaut cooking competition that, for 20 seasons, has redefined what it means to be a chef—and a leader.

Play our daily crossword.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

A decade’s worth of disappointment has conditioned Black Americans and Democrats to fear voting-rights rulings from the Supreme Court. In 2013, a 5–4 majority invalidated a core tenet of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Subsequent decisions have chipped away at the rest of the law, and in 2019, a majority of the justices declared that federal courts have no power to bar partisan gerrymandering.

So this morning, when two conservatives joined the high court’s three liberals in reaffirming a central part of the Voting Rights Act, Democrats reacted as much with shock as with relief. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder that stripped the government’s power to vet state voting laws in advance, today released an opinion ruling that Alabama’s congressional map illegally diluted the votes of Black people by packing them into one majority-minority district rather than two.

[From the March 2021 issue: American democracy is only 55 years old—and hanging by a thread]

The decision in the case known as Allen v. Milligan preserves, for now, the landmark civil-rights law that many legal observers worried the Court would render all but moot. It also could have important ramifications for the 2024 elections and control of the House of Representatives, where Republicans hold just a five-seat majority.

Many Democrats believe that the ruling will have a domino effect on other pending cases and ultimately force three Southern states—not only Alabama but also Louisiana and Georgia—to each add a new majority-minority district before the congressional election, which would almost certainly flip seats currently held by Republicans. Texas might have to add as many as five majority-minority districts to its map. “It really clears the path for these cases to move forward hopefully in a quick resolution,” Abha Khanna, a Democratic lawyer who argued the Allen case before the Supreme Court on behalf of Black voters from Alabama, told me.

These potential gains could more than offset the losses that Democrats are anticipating in North Carolina, where a new conservative majority on the state supreme court is expected to draw a congressional map more favorable to Republicans. After the ruling, the nonpartisan prognosticator Cook Political Report immediately shifted its projections for the 2024 elections by moving five House seats in the Democrats’ direction.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a 2018 appointee of former President Donald Trump, joined Roberts and the Court’s three Democratic appointees, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in the 5–4 ruling. The decision was surprising not only because it ran counter to the court’s recent jurisprudence on voting rights but also because last year, a majority of justices left in place the same maps that the court today deemed illegal. That ruling, which came in an unsigned opinion on the Court’s so-called shadow docket, might have made the difference in the Democrats losing their House majority.

“While we were certainly disappointed,” Khanna told me of that decision, “I think today’s victory shows that in this case, justice delayed was not justice denied.”

[From the October 2022 issue: John Roberts’s long game]

Advocates for voting rights were caught off guard. “Supreme Court Shocks Nation By Doing the Right Thing,” one left-leaning group, Take Back the Court, wrote in the subject line of an email that read like a headline from The Onion. George Cheung, the director of a voting-rights group called More Equitable Democracy, told me he was stunned by the ruling: “I and many others assumed that they would undermine if not completely gut what remained of the federal Voting Rights Act.”

Instead, the Court’s majority rejected a bid by Alabama to reinterpret the redistricting provisions of Section 2 of the law as “race neutral,” a change that would have reversed the VRA’s original intent to protect disenfranchised Black voters.

For Democrats, the decision offered a rare moment to celebrate a ruling from an institution in which many in the party have lost faith. The Court’s decisions in earlier voting-rights cases, on gun laws, the environment, campaign finance, and in particular the national right to abortion—which was reversed last year—have led progressives to accuse conservative justices of ruling according to their political preferences instead of the law

The Court’s decision, Khanna told me, shouldn’t have been surprising—even if, to many people, it clearly was. “It's certainly a remarkable victory for the Voting Rights Act and for minority voting rights,” she said, “but it’s rather unremarkable, because what it says is the law is as we have said it to be for the last nearly 40 years.”