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There’s Donald Trump, and there’s everyone else. At the moment, the former president of the United States appears unbeatable in the 2024 Republican primary race. But perhaps inevitable is a trickier word than it seems.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Ukraine after the deluge The misunderstood reason millions of Americans stopped going to church One more COVID summer?

It’s Iowa Time

What happens when you say the unsayable? Former Congressman (and current GOP presidential contender) Will Hurd found out the hard way Friday night. “Donald Trump is not running for president to make America great again,” Hurd told the Republican masses inside the Iowa Events Center. “Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison.”

The boos rained down, and, rest assured, they were mighty.

Hurd was one of 13 candidates who had trekked to Des Moines for the Iowa GOP’s cattle-call event known as the Lincoln Dinner. Prospective voters and donors gathered roughly six months ahead of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus to remind themselves of their importance, which may or may not be waning. The night was ostensibly a chance for Iowans to listen to a range of electability pitches. Former Vice President Mike Pence told the room he would reinstate a ban on transgender personnel in the U.S. military and endorsed the idea of a national abortion restriction after 15 weeks. The businessman Vivek Ramaswamy rattled off a list of government agencies he would shut down: the FBI, CDC, DOE, ATF, and IRS. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis boasted that he had refused to let his state “descend into a Faucian dystopia” during the pandemic and called for term limits in Congress. (One dinner attendee, the 89-year-old Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley—currently serving his eighth term—probably didn’t like that one.)

The whole spectacle—including the after-parties where you could snap selfies with candidates or, at the DeSantis event, knock down a pyramid of Bud Light cans—felt like a study in performative competition.

Each speaker was given a democratizing 10-minute time limit to deliver his or her remarks (poor Asa Hutchinson suffered the embarrassment of having his mic cut off), but all were merely warm-up acts for the headliner. When Trump finally took the stage, he seemed tired, bored, and annoyed with this obligation. A lack of teleprompters meant that Trump spent the bulk of his 10 minutes looking down at printed notes, only occasionally making eye contact with the audience or ad-libbing. He got a few chuckles out of his old pandemic go-to, the “China virus.” He notably referred to his White House predecessor as “Barack Hussein Obama.” The only newish development was that Ron “DeSanctimonious” had been shortened to the easier-to-say but far more confusing “DeSanctis.”

Trump is not running as an incumbent, but it sure seems that way. A New York Times/Siena College poll out today shows Trump with a 37-point lead over DeSantis, who was the only other candidate able to crack double digits among respondents. Did January 6 matter? Do the indictments matter? Does anything remotely negative about Trump matter? Not yet. Trump remains the Katie Ledecky of the 2024 contest—so far ahead of the pack that it feels wrong to even call it a race. Trump knows it too. He may not even bother to show up at the first Republican debate next month, in Milwaukee.

These factors would suggest that the Republican Party is delaying the inevitable, that the GOP base earnestly wants to “Make America great again” … again. And yet, the various campaign buses keep on rolling across Iowa and New Hampshire. The noble attempts at retail politics and down-home charm continue apace. Pence strategically name-dropped the Iowa chain Pizza Ranch. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina tweeted a video of himself fist-pumping after sinking a bag in cornhole. (“If God made you a man, you play sports against men,” Scott said onstage Friday night.) Expect much more of this at the Iowa State Fair, which kicks off in just over a week.

I was in the press pen at the Lincoln Dinner on Friday night, and I spent the weekend in Iowa speaking with various Republicans about all things 2024. I came away with the sense that a not-insignificant portion of conservatives is willing to accept Trump’s dominance, but that many are still quietly hoping for a deus ex machina to avoid a 2020 rematch. The still-rolling indictments don’t seem to have much effect—too many Republican voters argue that the legal cases against Trump are politically motivated. He shows no signs of giving up his nickname, “Teflon Don.”

The fact that Trump is running from a stance of inevitability is paradoxically both emboldening and hindering. Trump doesn’t seem to want to actually be president (as Hurd suggested). Maybe he just wants to prove he can win again. Will that motivational gap matter to voters? Will anything matter?

Related:

The revenge of the normal Republicans The secret presidential-campaign dress code

Today’s News

A state judge in Georgia rejected Trump’s bid to derail the investigation into his attempts to overturn election results in the state. A Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown, killed at least six people, including a 10-year-old girl and her mother, and wounded dozens more. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for Sunday’s suicide bombing of a political rally in Pakistan that killed at least 54 people.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: In 1980, the film critic Roger Ebert argued that movies were better in theaters. The recent success of Barbenheimer is evidence—and points to the ongoing magic of communal experiences, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Getty / The Atlantic

The Myopia Generation

By Sarah Zhang

A decade into her optometry career, Marina Su began noticing something unusual about the kids in her New York City practice. More of them were requiring glasses, and at younger and younger ages. Many of these kids had parents who had perfect vision and who were baffled by the decline in their children’s eyesight. Frankly, Su couldn’t explain it either.

In optometry school, she had been taught—as American textbooks had been teaching for decades—that nearsightedness, or myopia, is a genetic condition. Having one parent with myopia doubles the odds that a kid will need glasses. Having two parents with myopia quintuples them. Over the years, she did indeed diagnose lots of nearsighted kids with nearsighted parents. These parents, she told me, would sigh in recognition: Oh no, not them too. But something was changing.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

What “fitboxing” is missing “Ukrainian is my native language, but I had to learn it.” The weird, fragmented world of social media after Twitter America is drowning in packages.

Culture Break

Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

Read. “I Wish I Could Remember,” a new poem by Michael White.

“It’s just a dream, / I’d tell myself. But dreams are how / we travel through the dark”

Watch. Biopics tend to be “functional to a fault,” better at showcasing an actor than creating challenging art—but these 20 movies manage to break the mold, David Sims writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Last week, the podcast host Jack Wagner went viral on Twitter (er, X) with a prompt: “serious question: if the grateful dead is not the greatest band of all time from the united states then who is?” Thousands of responses poured in: The Beach Boys, The Allman Brothers Band, and The Velvet Underground kept surfacing among the many retorts (as did Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty; I don’t think you can really count either, because even though they play with backing bands, they’re solo artists.) I’m a Deadhead, but the strongest contender I saw was Creedence Clearwater Revival. CCR’s Willy and the Poor Boys remains one of the greatest rock records ever. You likely know “Fortunate Son” and “Down on the Corner,” but the album also features an awesome cover of “The Midnight Special”—I love the moment when the whole band kicks in just after the one-minute mark.

— John

Nicole Blackwood contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Photography by Jędrzej Nowicki

On a hot summer day in Ukraine, two young boys named Timur and Slavik were playing on what used to be the banks of the Kakhovka Reservoir, part of the Dnieper River. I met them when I was visiting the area in July. The air’s tranquility was occasionally pierced by the sounds of fighting in a frontline town not far away. This region is a focal point of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and in June, evidence suggested that Russians, trying to slow down their enemy’s advance, blew up the Kakhovka Dam.

I wanted to witness the devastation firsthand. It soon became clear that the collapse would reshape the landscape for decades to come. Everything south of the dam was swallowed by the murky waters of the river.

Downstream, in the city of Kherson, the flooding forced thousands of people and animals to evacuate, many of them under Russian fire. Northeast of the dam, the reservoir has turned into a barren, muddy plain stretching to the horizon. The task of rebuilding from this environmental disaster is now added to the challenges facing Ukraine when hostilities with the Russians cease.

Built in the 1950s, the Kakhovka Reservoir was close to the size of Utah’s Great Salt Lake and supplied water to all of southern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula. Water from the dam irrigated farms and orchards, and the electricity generated by the dam’s hydropower plant was used in villages throughout the region. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear-power plant also used reservoir water to cool its reactors. Now all of that is gone. In its place lies an uncertain future for the farming and fishing industries.

One day, I started a conversation with an old man who was washing his car behind a fence. His home was not far from where the shoreline of the reservoir used to be. Bob Dylan was playing from a tiny speaker. The man, who said his name was Ihor, invited me up on his roof to survey the scene. “There is no such view of our new desert from any rooftop around,” he told me. We sat together on the top of his dacha as the sun began to set on what I could see was now a surreal lunar landscape.

The receding water of the Dnieper River exposes a dock and fishing harbor in the village of Bilenke.

Anti-tank barriers along the road between Nikopol and Kherson, which runs parallel to the Kakhovka Reservoir A couple embrace where the water once flowed on the Dnieper River, in Zaporizhzhia.  

In the village of Marianske, a bridge has been blown up at the edge of the reservoir. Destruction of bridges has been a strategic tactic employed throughout Ukraine since the beginning of the war. Residents of the village of Oleksiivka in the aftermath of the Kakhovka Dam’s destruction A woman fetches water from the drying river in Oleksiivka.

A monument to watermelon, a symbol of the Kherson region. The irrigation canals that feed the region have dried up. Fish found at the bottom of the Sukhyi Chortomlyk River dry under the scorching summer sun. The dried bottom of the Kakhovka Reservoir On the Sukhyi Chortomlyk River, people struggle to access the remaining water. Residents of Nikopol get drinking water from one of the humanitarian-aid points in the city center. The city has been dealing with a water shortage in taps. A cow grazes on one of the farms in the village of Malokaterynivka, with the dried-up Kakhovka Reservoir in the background. In the village of Kushum, boys swim in the Dnieper River. The water level in certain areas of the river has decreased by more than five meters.

The Sukhyi Chortomlyk River, which flows through the village of Oleksiivka, has almost completely dried up since the dam’s destruction. A man pumps leftover water from the Sukhyi Chortomlyk River to irrigate apple orchards in the area. The receding water of the Kakhovka Reservoir

All the latest developments from the war in Ukraine.

Ukrainian official says summit will discuss Kyiv's peace formula, which calls for departure of all Russian troops.

'Attempted terrorist attack' on Russia's capital damaged two office buildings, but caused no casualties, officials say.

Growing up in the bilingual city of Kyiv in the 1990s, I studied the Ukrainian language like a museum object—intensely, but at a distance, never quite feeling all of its textures or bringing it home. Back then, in that part of the country, Ukrainian was reserved for formal settings: schools, banks, and celebrations, often infused with a performative flare of ethnic pride. Russian dominated the mundane and the intimate: gossiping with friends during recess, writing in a journal, arguing with parents. I straddled both languages with my grandmother, who spoke surzhyk, a colloquial mix of the two.

I spoke Russian not because I had any particular connection to it, but because it was an easy default. For 400 years, Russian had seeped into Ukrainian life and across Ukrainian territory: In the process of colonizing the south of Ukraine, the Russian empire called the area the “New Russia,” imposing the language of the metropole on the Ukrainian-speaking population. During the 19th century, Russians, as well as members of other ethnic minorities, populated newly industrialized towns in the Donbas region to work in factories and mines while rural areas remained largely Ukrainian-speaking. As peasants flocked to the cities, Russian became the language of status and social mobility.

[From the June 2022 issue: Ukraine and the words that lead to mass murder]

But when Russia launched an all-out war not only on Ukrainian territory, but also on its independent identity and culture, passive acceptance of the linguistic status quo came to feel like a moral failure. A language once used neutrally as a tool for communication now evoked terror, centuries-long erasure, and oppression. Russian had become the language of filtration camps and interrogations, and speaking it felt like relinquishing one small means to resist.

Self-assertion through language was not a new concept for Ukrainians. The country’s independence in 1991 had come with the promise of a collective return to the Ukrainian language. But the transition didn’t really gain momentum until the 2014 Revolution of Dignity and Russia’s invasion of the Donbas that spring. A 2019 language law established Ukrainian as the state language, requiring it in more than 30 areas of public life, including media and education. Then came the full-scale war in 2022. With Russian imperialism on full display, reviving Ukrainian became a kind of national project: People deliberately committed to speaking their native language, regardless of how well they’d known it or spoken it before.

In a survey conducted some eight months after the full-scale invasion, 71 percent of Ukrainians said they’d started speaking Ukrainian more; a poll from January 2023 indicated that 33 percent of Kyiv’s residents had switched to Ukrainian. All businesses registered in Ukraine are required by law to make Ukrainian the language of their landing pages. As of April, to become a Ukrainian citizen, you need to pass an exam that includes a written component in Ukrainian as well as a 10-minute monologue based on a prompt, in addition to a section on Ukraine’s constitution and history.

“We’re undergoing a kind of rebirth of the language. We’re only beginning to discover what’s always been ours,” Volodymyr Dibrova, a writer and translator who teaches Ukrainian at Harvard, told me. Not religion or territory, but language, Dibrova said, turned out to be the ethno-consolidating factor for Ukrainians—the main external element that differentiated us from the enemy. “It’s as if people have woken up and are asking: Who are we? What does our real history look like? What is our language?”

For me and other predominantly Russian-speaking Ukrainians, the new language context meant wrestling with a kind of cultural dissonance: If Ukrainian was our language, why didn’t we speak it all the time? Why wasn’t it the language of our relationships and of all occasions—formal address but also chitchat, marital fights, grieving?

This question occupied my mind as I began shifting into Ukrainian with previously Russian-speaking friends. I’d lived in the United States for 20 years, and Russian remained the language of my Ukrainian friendships. One friend, originally from Donetsk, from whom I’d not heard a word of Ukrainian in our 25 years of friendship, caught me off guard when she answered my call in Ukrainian to give me parking instructions when I visited her in Pennsylvania.

“You switched to Ukrainian?” I said, buying time to assess how this shift might change our closeness and connection. Throughout our visit, I fumbled through getting my points across in Ukrainian; my thoughts felt flat and my vocabulary lackluster. My mind raced to find the right word in Ukrainian, and I often slipped into a pathetic mix of Russian and English words. I was proud of us both, yet each conversation felt exhausting. With my parents, who live in Kyiv, shifting to Ukrainian still feels new and uncomfortable, a strain on dynamics already complicated by the war and living on different continents.

I know of even more complicated linguistic relationships. Oleksandra Burlakova, a digital-content creator and video blogger in Kyiv, grew up in a Russian-speaking family in the eastern city of Lysychansk. She completely shifted to Ukrainian in 2021 to solidify her national identity, but her husband wasn’t ready to make the change until February 24, 2022, the day the Russian invasion began. For nearly a year, the couple spoke two different languages.

“You fall in love with the whole person, including their language, and then it changes,” she told me. “It was very unusual.”

Burlakova recalled how hard it was at first to match the right Ukrainian words to her emotions. “I’d seen people fighting in Ukrainian on TV, but I’d never seen it in real life,” she said. But after immersing herself in Ukrainian books, movies, and music, she was able to begin aligning her verbal expression with her inner experience. “I felt like a whole person again.”

The Ukrainian language activist and TikToker Danylo Haidamakha made a complete switch to Ukrainian as a teenager and aptly describes how scary the plunge can be. “For me, the language switch—it’s like swimming off one shore, not knowing if you’re going to make it across to the other shore,” he said in an interview last year.

To me, making that departure felt like exposing a vulnerable, unexamined part of who I was. I saw how steeped my consciousness had been in the narratives of Russification, which for centuries convinced Ukrainians that their language was somehow unrefined and inferior to Russian. In the 19th century, the Russian empire banned Ukrainian-language literature and art, excluding it from public life. During Stalin’s rule, even the particularities of Ukrainian phonetics—the language’s suffixes and endings—were viewed as a threat, and Ukrainian words were twisted to sound more Russian or eliminated from the dictionary to make the two languages seem more alike.

[Read: What Ukrainian literature has always understood about Russia]

Along with wiping out millions of Ukrainian lives during the artificial famine of the 1930s, the Stalinist regime deprived the surviving Ukrainians of the ability to think or speak, Christina Pikhmanets, a Ukrainian linguist and educational and cultural adviser at Sesame Workshop, told me. “Language is the center of decision making,” she said. “Around the language, we form the social and cultural understanding of who we are.” Pikhmanets is currently helping translate Sesame Street into Ukrainian, and in doing so she tries to avoid words borrowed from Russian or English.

Studying one’s native language seems like a contradiction in terms. But many Ukrainians need to “activate” their linguistic inheritance, Burlakova believes. Ukrainian conversation clubs and online schools have sprouted to help with that. TikTok and Instagram brim with young Ukrainians unearthing the richness of the language.

One of the more astounding finds on Ukrainian-language TikTok is a post suggesting nearly 30 Ukrainian synonyms for the word vagina. Another post lists Ukrainian words for rare colors such as periwinkle, cinderblock, and wheat. The latter is the work of Anna Finyk, who has more than 20,000 followers, and who told me she grew up speaking surzhyk, the informal hodgepodge of two languages my grandmother spoke.

As a university student, Finyk began refining her speech to eradicate Russified words. After the February 2022 invasion, she wanted to help others do the same. “My mission is to help people improve their language without any pressure,” she told me. In her playful posts, she excavates old Ukrainian words and synonyms, exposes mispronounced words, and pretends to be a translation service spewing authentic Ukrainian equivalents for such words and phrases as the wine is fermenting, exploitation, and quicksilver.

The war has given birth to a slew of new idioms and expressions in Ukrainian. Together with her colleagues, Alla Kishchenko, a philologist and lecturer in applied linguistics at Odesa Mechnikov National University, has been collecting new phrases tied to specific moments of the war. My favorite on the list is zatrydni, or “in three days,” a reference to Russia’s failed plan to conquer Kyiv in three days, which now refers to a person making unrealistic plans. Makronyty uses the name of French President Emmanuel Macron to describe a public appearance that does not correspond to substantive action. “These expressions are built on irony, sarcasm, and satire,” Kishchenko told me. “This contemporary folklore helps us feel a kind of unity.”

Collective language-making offers some playfulness amid the onslaught of Russian atrocities. On the website Slovotvir, where people can suggest and vote for new Ukrainian words to replace borrowed English words such as deadline, screenshot, and puzzle, the proposed word for tablet is a Ukrainian word roughly translated as “swiper”; the highest-voted equivalent for the @ symbol, previously denoted by the Russian word for dog, is now the Ukrainian word for snail. Ukrainian equivalents for hashtag and like are already widely used in speech.

The voting website makes clear that its creators’ goal is not to force the usage of new words, but to give people options. And replacing foreign words that have crept into the Ukrainian language with authentically Ukrainian equivalents is not possible in every instance. You’d need a full sentence to describe the concept of “catering” in Ukrainian, for example. Still, Pikhmanets, of Sesame Street, endorses the effort: “If we borrow the word, we borrow the context and the culture,” she told me.

Today’s work is a bit like putting together a puzzle, uncovering the shape of a language subjected to centuries of suppression. Throughout those centuries, Ukrainian survived in rural communities and in the country’s west, developing a diversity of quirks and dialects. But Russification policies shut down any effort to standardize the literary language and precluded its proliferation and modernization. A literary ideal of the language will eventually come into balance with the messiness of colloquial speech, according to Pikhmanets: “Language is a living organism, and it’s supposed to evolve and change,” she said.

Put another way, strengthening the Ukrainian language at its core will be the simultaneous work of literature, music, art, and everyday speech—“the collective commitment and persistent efforts of the entire society,” as Volodymyr Dibrova said.

For those of us just beginning to make Ukrainian our language of first resort, an atmosphere of inclusive effort is freeing. More proficient speakers and language experts almost encourage us to make mistakes. After all, perhaps the proper endings and suffixes are not the main point.

Mastery will arrive one day, I’m hopeful, but first will come the awkward pauses and sloppy turns of phrase. These imperfections, too, inhabit ideals that the Ukrainian language represents: freedom, resilience, and empathy.

The latest developments from the war in Ukraine

The International Olympic Committee has "picked a side" in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, says the president of Russia's Olympic Committee.

More Ukrainian athletes could be competing against Russian opponents in Olympic qualifying events after a change in policy. A controversial fencing match Thursday highlighted the difficulties that could bring.

Ukrainian fencer Olga Kharlan is disqualified from the World Fencing Championships for refusing to shake hands with Russian Anna Smirnova.