Earlier this week, mission control commanded the International Space Station to turn its cameras toward the Gulf of Mexico. Giant white clouds, gleaming against the blue of the planet’s oceans and the blackness of space beyond, indicated the arrival of Hurricane Idalia, hovering menacingly off the coast of Florida. From that high-flying view, you couldn’t tell exactly how much havoc Idalia would wreak—the record-breaking storm surges; the flooding across Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas—or the very unusual conditions in which the storm had formed.

This hurricane season has been a weird one, because two opposing trends are driving storm dynamics. The planet is in an El Niño year, a natural, periodic climate phenomenon that tends to suppress hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin. The Atlantic hurricane season has been fairly quiet this year, in part because of these conditions.

But we’re also in a very hot year, on track to becoming the warmest on record. Earth’s oceans have been warmer this summer than at any other time in modern history. The Gulf of Mexico has been particularly hot; climate experts have described recent temperatures there as “surreal.” Global temperatures are usually higher during El Niño events, but “all of these marine heat waves are made warmer because of climate change,” Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Physical Sciences Laboratory, told me earlier this summer. And hot seawater tends to supercharge hurricanes that do form by warming up the air above the ocean’s surface.

We’ve never seen a year quite like this, with its particular mix of extreme ocean temperatures and El Niño conditions—which means no one knew exactly how bad this season’s storms could be. In the case of Hurricane Idalia, the warmer temperatures seem to have won out. Idalia feasted on the abundant supply of hot air to jump from Category 1 to Category 4 in just a single day. Climate experts caution that we can’t use the story of one hurricane to fill out the narrative of an entire season. But climate change has warmed our oceans, and warmer oceans make hurricanes more likely to intensify rapidly and become powerful storms in a matter of hours rather than days. Now, with Idalia, we have a clear example of what can happen when that reality is paired with superhot oceans.

[Read: Honestly? The link between climate change and hurricanes is complicated.]

Under more normal ocean conditions, a hurricane can derive only so much fuel from hot water. The toasty air on the surface fuels the winds, and “the motion of the winds themselves churn up the water," which brings cooler water from the depths up toward the surface, Kim Wood, a professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona, told me. The process is called upwelling. But when warm water stretches deep into the ocean, the cool stuff never rises to the top. The winds end up “just bringing more warm water to the surface—and thus continuing to provide energy to the storm,” Wood said.

Hot water, of course, is not the only condition required for a hurricane to form. Many other factors drove Idalia’s intensity, including the behavior of winds in the upper atmosphere, and the structure of the storm itself. "Any particular storm is influenced by a lot of different things, a lot of which can be racked up to chance," Kerry Emanuel, a meteorology professor at MIT, told me. Still, ocean temperatures certainly helped Idalia’s winds reach 125 miles an hour, and potentially increased its intensity by at least 40 to 50 percent, according to the hurricane scientist Jeff Masters.

Around the world, the frequency of rapidly intensifying storms near coastlines has tripled compared with 40 years ago, according to a recent study. Space imagery this week showed another swirling beast in the Atlantic: Franklin, a hurricane that had also exhibited signs of rapid intensification, which means that a storm's top wind speed has increased by at least 35 miles an hour over 24 hours. (According to the meteorologist Philip Klotzbach, the Atlantic Ocean had not seen two hurricanes with 110-plus-mile-per-hour winds at the same time in more than 70 years.) “We don’t understand the physics related to the rapid intensification well at the moment,” Shuai Wang, a meteorology and climate-science professor at the University of Delaware, told me. That unpredictability makes preparedness much more difficult, he said. Government agencies and citizens alike might be planning for one kind of storm, only for it to quickly turn into something very different.

[Read: We’re gambling with the only good oceans in the universe]

Idalia, now a weaker tropical storm, is currently dumping rain on North Carolina as it moves back out to sea. The former hurricane may or may not be a sign of what’s to come for the rest of this hurricane season. The Atlantic Ocean is expected to stay warm through the end of the season, in November, so potential storms will encounter more fuel than usual. But forecasts for the season have been uncertain because there’s not much precedent for the current situation.

“We have El Niño pushing us to maybe think that we have a below-normal season, but then the very, very warm tropical Atlantic is pushing us to think maybe there would be an above-normal season,” Allison Wing, a professor of Earth, ocean, and atmospheric science at Florida State University, told me. “For the hurricane season overall, I think we don’t know yet which one wins at the end.”

There are some things we can say with more certainty about our hurricane future in a hot world. Rising seas and record-breaking air temperatures have made hurricanes wetter. “If the air in which the hurricane is occurring is warmer, it’s going to rain more,” Emanuel said. “The same storm is going to have surge riding on an elevated sea level.” That’s a scary prospect for a world in which the air is getting warmer and sea levels are rising—especially because flooding poses more peril than wind. “Wind is what we think of; it’s what we measure; it’s what we report,” Emanuel said. “But water is the killer.”

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Former President Donald Trump continues to smash through boundaries without losing support. Below, I explain why Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 Republican nomination now seem stronger than ever. But first, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The end will come for the cult of MAGA. The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump. Rudy Giuliani’s attacks on democracy are attacks on people. Fall’s vaccine routine didn’t have to be this hard.

Wilder and Clearer

Consider the Kool-Aid Man. He is large, red-faced, perpetually stuck in the late ’80s, and, whenever he breaks through walls? Celebrated. Our 45th president, much like the Kool-Aid Man, has aligned his personal brand with gleeful destruction. And, at least among GOP leaders and his steadfast base of supporters, Trump’s product remains extremely popular.

Ever since his political rise eight summers ago, Trump’s opponents have been naively clinging to the hope that he might one day say or do something so awful as to alienate even his most ardent fans. This will never happen. The premise itself is flawed—Trump’s enduring appeal is derived from his ability to storm past perceived barriers. Were he to suddenly start walking through doors like the rest of us, he’d lose his bad-boy sheen.

Trump’s recent statements, namely on the idea of imprisoning his enemies if reelected and the specter of political violence, are prime examples of just how flawed this “reckoning” idea really is. At the moment, his rhetoric is as heightened as it’s ever been, and yet his dominance in the Republican presidential primary continues. He’s currently polling at an average of about 50 percent, with his closest competitor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, at just under 15 percent. The rest of the field is fighting to break out of the single digits.

Trump’s 2024 challengers have failed to unite in opposition to him. During last week’s GOP debate, former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie each took their best shot at condemning Trump in relation to January 6, yet neither appears to have even a remote chance of winning the nomination. Most of the others hemmed and hawed. The majority of the field raised their hands in the affirmative as to whether they would support Trump as the Republican nominee even if he were a convicted criminal. That night, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes characterized Trump as “a guy who’s running 40 points ahead, who tried to end the constitutional republic, and whose braying mobs chanted for the murder of one of the guys on stage.” Taken as a whole, the event had a disturbing patina of resignation and nihilism.

Trump, of course, didn’t even bother to show up and field questions from the Fox News moderators. Instead, he staged counterprogramming: a sitdown with the former Fox star Tucker Carlson on X (formerly Twitter). The pair’s conversation was ominous. Rather than wave off Carlson’s questions about the possibility of conflict on American soil, Trump was disconcertingly vague and threatening: “There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen. There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen. And that’s probably a bad combination.”

Yesterday, the former Fox host Glenn Beck asked Trump whether he would “lock people up” if he becomes president again. Trump replied that he would have “no choice because they’re doing it to us,” referring to his own criminal indictments.

Even Trump’s mug shot, which the art critic Jerry Saltz deemed “the most famous photograph in the world,” carried a palpable rhetorical message. As my colleague Megan Garber observed, Trump’s scowl symbolizes his power. “He treats his mug shot as our menace.”

It keeps working. All of it. As we approach September, some four months ahead of the Iowa caucuses, it’s looking less and less likely that anything could slow Trump’s march to the nomination. Rather than being humbled by a jailhouse booking, Trump transformed even that event into a product he could monetize. (A “Never Surrender!” mug-shot T-shirt will set you back $34; a mug-shot coffee mug is a comparative steal at $25.) Citing self-reported campaign data for the past three weeks, the former president’s team sent an email blast yesterday with the subject line “ICYMI: Trump fundraising spikes after Fulton County mugshot, surpassing $20M in August.” (These emails barge in multiple times a day, not unlike the aforementioned Kool-Aid Man.)

Trump’s messaging is simultaneously wilder and clearer than ever. He portrays himself as a martyr and a victim, and, according to the arc of his hero’s journey, he believes that he will return home to the White House as a victor. Trump has shrewdly ascertained that, even eight years later, America can’t look away from the epic saga that is his life. Or, as another recent campaign-email subject line read: “Another disgrace I have to tell you about.”

Related:

The mug shot is a warning. The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump.

Today’s News

Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm and is traveling across Florida and into Georgia and other parts of the Southeast. A federal judge ruled that Rudy Giuliani was liable for defaming two Georgia election workers after he claimed that they had mishandled ballots during the 2020 election. Narcan, the opioid-overdose antidote, will for the first time be widely available over the counter and online next week at major retailers, including Walgreens and CVS.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers respond to Conor Friedersdorf’s question: What would you ask the Republican presidential candidates? The Weekly Planet: Kylie Mohr asks: What happens when the heat repeats?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: David Lees / Getty; Grzegorz Czapski / Alamy; The J. Paul Getty Museum

In Praise of Heroic Masculinity

By Caitlin Flanagan

The phrase toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named Shepherd Bliss. He was a central figure in what he named the “mythopoetic” manhood movement. Bliss had grown up in a punishing military household with a domineering father, and he meant the new term to connote “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men,” a way “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.”

It was a potent phrase, one that expressed something that had never had a name—that there is a particular poison that runs in the blood of some men and poses a deep threat to women, children, and the weak. The phrase didn’t break into the common culture until relatively recently, when the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk needed to be understood with some kind of shared language. They were men, but they were the kind of men who are filled with poison.

As it is with most new terms that roar quickly and powerfully into the culture, toxic masculinity was a rocket ship to the moon that quickly ran out of fuel and fell back to Earth.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Illustration by Molly Fairhurst for The Atlantic

Read. Alicia Kennedy’s first book, No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, lays out the benefits of a meatless diet—without scolding those who find the idea hard to swallow.

Watch. The third and final season of Reservation Dogs (streaming on Hulu) fleshes out its ensemble with backstories that illustrate the lasting effects of grief.

Play our daily crossword.

Nicole Blackwood contributed to this newsletter.

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