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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

Violence is the engine of Modi’s politics. The trouble with Trump’s tariffs The Simone Biles revolution

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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When my mom makes our family Christmas cookies, she no longer needs a recipe. Instead, we stand side by side in the kitchen while I follow her muscle memory, rolling Russian tea cakes in powdered sugar and pressing the bottoms of forks into the dough balls for chocolate crinkle cookies. But my mom is Type A to a t: She’s scanned the pages of step-by-step instructions and keeps them organized on her Google Drive, just in case. And she’s already made sure that, when she dies—whenever that awful day might come—the folder containing all of these recipes will get sent directly to me.

Technically, the cookie recipes will be part of a larger posthumous digital delivery, arriving in my inbox courtesy of Google’s Inactive Account Manager. They will reach me three months after my mom’s departure—a time frame she selected after doing a regular review of her privacy settings earlier this year (like I said, Type A). With the cookie recipes will come the rest of her Google Drive, containing information including a list of account passwords, and all of her emails. This means there will be a December day when, instead of standing in the kitchen with my mom, I’ll be standing with her digital ghost. I’ll have mourned her physical passing, but will still be able to summon a part of her via my phone, propped up against the flour with one of many smudged and annotated recipe scans on display.

On this day, I expect I will grieve again. As the author Marisa Renee Lee noted in this magazine last year, “Grief is the repeated experience of learning to live after loss.” Today, with our ever-expanding digital and technological reach, loved ones left behind must encounter more reminders of that loss than ever before. Memory endures through the email accounts still collecting marketing messages, the Facebook arguments frozen in time, the iPad that continues to uselessly ping about an overdue library book. Left unattended, these digital assets float aimlessly in the internet’s ether. To have control over them presents the inheritor with a challenging personal quandary: Do they take advantage of the weird comfort these digital remains can provide, sinking into an in-between world where the person who died still feels alive, in small pixelated ways? Or do they shut it all down and accept a second death?  

Estate lawyers have long encouraged clients to account for their digital property, but no one has come up with an emotional road map for the burden of inheriting these things. Some logistical matters will only reveal themselves when it’s too late, forcing widows like Ashley Reese to take their grief to the Apple store.

“I had a weird breakdown,” Reese told me. Her husband, Robert Stengel, died from peritoneal mesothelioma in December at the age of 34. He left behind a comprehensive list of accounts and passwords, and among the things Reese inherited were his AirPods. It was seven months before she felt ready to resurrect his Apple Watch, which she brought to the Apple store for troubleshooting. An employee told her she was wearing it wrong. “I couldn’t do it,” she recalled. “I’m just like, ‘I’m sorry, this is not mine; it’s my dead husband’s.’”

[Read: There are no “five stages” of grief]

More so than ever before, it is possible for someone to live on through these digital shadows. In addition to holding on to his AirPods and Apple Watch, Reese still keeps her iMessage conversation with Stengel pinned to the top of the Messages app—she once accidentally sent him a text, and tried to unsend it when she realized. When she wants to watch something on Hulu, she can still select his profile. When she opens up YouTube, the algorithm still recommends Succession recaps or fight-scene compilation videos, the things Stengel would be watching if he were alive. When she’s really missing him, she’ll open up his camera roll, and look at one of the last pictures he took—a photo of Reese in his hospital room, unaware that she was being snapped. “This is just psychic damage every day,” she said.

Lingering in someone’s posthumous digital presence can be as painful as it is comforting, and comes with unexpected revelations. “You don’t want to read too much,” Marie, a woman whose mother died from ovarian cancer last fall, told me. (Marie asked to withhold her last name in order to speak about her family.) Her mom was proactive about her end-of-life plans, going so far as to order her own headstone before she died. She left Marie with her phone, and a list of passwords for all of her accounts. Looking through the device in the days after her mother’s death, Marie found a text thread where her mom had been venting to a friend about a fight they’d had. Marie discovered a Twitter account that her mom had apparently used to spar with right-wingers online—Marie had always thought her mother was as conservative as these opponents. Her Spotify was also revealing: “She listened to so much Taylor Swift, and I had no idea she liked Taylor Swift.”

Family and friends, themselves grieving, will send text messages to Marie’s mother’s phone. They say they miss her, hoping the sentiment somehow reaches her in the great beyond. Marie reads them. “It’s a nice reminder that she was important to people,” she told me. To know her mother lives on in the thoughts and memories of others is a comfort, one she can now easily access through a screen. Technology like this, which can document a previously intangible part of a person’s legacy, is a gift. It’s also extremely fragile.

Websites shut down, accounts get hacked, devices break. It’s not safe to assume that direct-message conversations and other social-media memories will be there forever. “My current plan is to just try to do as many digital copies of things as possible,” Reese told me. She has 10 years’ worth of messages with Stengel, and plans to back them up on her computer, in Google Drive, and to her iCloud. “I would be absolutely devastated if I lost that stuff.”

[Read: What losing two children taught me about grief]

At the same time, these digital spaces can help combat another inevitability: that, as the months go by, Reese will start to forget. “I have this compulsion now where if I have any thought about Rob or any memory, I’ll immediately open my Notes app and write it down,” she said, “to remind myself of who I was and who he was, and make sure all those [memories] are intact.”

It’s tempting not to think about death, choosing instead to be walloped by grief’s right hook one day out of nowhere. Even when my mom let me know about the plans for her Google account, fearing I’d receive an email notification and panic, she didn’t use the word dead. We both knew what she meant, though, and now that I know what awaits me, the records of our digital interactions have more meaning. The Wordle scores texted back and forth, the DMs about our favorite Instagram-famous dog, even the hokey e-cards we still send each other on holidays—these things no longer feel like just more clutter in a digital abyss. Someday, they’ll be the only thing that’s left.

Three months into the Hollywood writers’ strike, there is at last some sign of movement. When the writers walked off the job on May 2, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (the organization representing the studios) ended negotiations, and no talks have happened in the 14 weeks since. But on Tuesday, the AMPTP informed the Writers Guild of America that it wanted to meet “to discuss negotiations,” as the guild told its members. That meeting is supposed to happen today.

What the AMPTP (which is also dealing with an actors’ strike) will have to say is anyone’s guess, but we know what the two sides will ultimately be arguing about: streaming. Because, at heart, this is a clash over the way streaming has changed the movies and, more important, television.

Writers, for instance, want to enjoy a share of the upside when streaming shows become hits, just as they once enjoyed sizable residuals—a continuing share of revenue from rights when broadcast shows they wrote went into syndication. (At the moment, writers get small residual payments for streaming shows but reap no additional benefit if a show becomes a huge hit.) But that would require streamers to provide viewership data for their shows—information they would prefer to keep to themselves.

When studios hire a showrunner to develop a show, the WGA wants a minimum number of writers hired for the “pre-greenlight room,” where scripts are nowadays routinely written before a show is officially picked up. And, perhaps above all, the union wants studios to return to creating bigger writers’ rooms when shows are in production. That would involve adopting minimum-staffing requirements and abandoning the decade-long trend toward so-called mini rooms.  

These may seem like wonky issues, but they boil down to a simple idea. The writers are trying to reclaim the ground they’ve lost because of the ascent of one company: Netflix.

We’re all used to the idea that Netflix has changed the way TV is consumed. But it has also changed the way TV is produced.

[Xochitl Gonzalez: The businessmen broke Hollywood]

Netflix’s seasons are shorter—not just shorter than the traditional 22-to-24-episode seasons common on broadcast TV, but shorter even than the 12-to-13-episode seasons that used to be standard on pay-cable networks such as HBO. Netflix habitually pays more for its productions up front, but because it did away with the syndication model and keeps its viewership data to itself, it has also limited the upside for writers.

Most important, at least as far as the strike goes, Netflix ignores the social norms that had long governed TV production: It has generally done away with big writers’ rooms, replacing them with mini rooms. As the name suggests, mini rooms (which were pioneered by AMC but have now become widespread in the industry) have fewer writers. Whereas in the past, a typical TV show might have had 10 to 12 writers, mini rooms might have only three or four.

But the changes go beyond that. In traditional writers’ rooms, which still exist on some TV shows, writers are paid through the actual production of the show. Individual writers commonly also act as the show’s producer on specific episodes, and even junior writers get the chance to learn the ins and outs of making TV: They are on set while shows are filmed, and they work with showrunners on editing and post-production. In effect, writers’ rooms are not just about writing scripts. They are also about training the next generation of writers to make and run their own shows in the future.

A mini room is very different. Writers’ tenures are shorter, and their job scope is narrowed: They’re there purely to write, or in some cases just buff, scripts. The opportunities to learn other aspects of show production have mostly vanished.

Writers’ rooms, in fact, were never written into any WGA contract, seemingly based on an assumption that business would continue as usual. But Netflix, perhaps because it was coming from outside the industry, had no interest in business as usual. So it discarded the old norms. And as other studios tried to keep up with Netflix, they did the same.

One result is that despite an explosion in the number of TV series being produced (and therefore an increase in the number of people writing for television), the amount of money going to writers has not really risen in recent years. On top of that, shows employ fewer writers, and writers now get a lot less hands-on experience.

[Gavin Mueller: The Luddites of Hollywood]

So the WGA wants to bring back the writers’ room. The guild’s contract proposals include minimum-staffing requirements (one writer per episode, plus another writer for every two episodes after six, up to a maximum of 12 writers) and a demand that not less than half of the writers stay employed throughout the production of the show, with at least one writer staying through post-production. This, the WGA argues, wouldn’t just be good for writers; it’d also be good for the industry as a whole, because it would encourage the steady production of new showrunning talent.

That’s not wrong. But the problem for the writers should be obvious: Netflix is the only streaming company that’s earning substantial profits from its business. (In fact, Netflix and, to a lesser extent, Hulu are the only two major streaming companies that are profitable at all.) That’s in part because streamers are investing heavily up front to build content libraries and acquire subscribers. Even so, Netflix’s stock has the highest valuation and the highest price-to-earnings multiple in the industry. The company has become a bellwether for the studios, the model that everyone else—explicitly or implicitly—is trying to copy. Accordingly, to convince Netflix that it should stop making shows the way it’s been making them, and to convince the other studios that they should not emulate Netflix, will be a challenging task.

That’s especially so because the writers are trying to roll back changes that have already happened—with results that Netflix and its investors are pretty satisfied with. (If the writers had written minimum-staffing requirements into their contracts in, say, 2007, and the studios were only now trying to get rid of writers’ rooms, the dynamic would be very different.) And although it’s true that the disappearance of writers’ rooms will probably hurt the quality of new shows in the future, that’s an industry-wide issue. Even if the studios collectively benefit from young writers getting broader on-the-job training, any individual company would prefer that everyone else pays for that training, which it could then get a free ride on.

[Sonny Bunch: Why the studios are risking everything]

The issue is not that going back to bigger writers’ rooms would actually cost that much money—the amount studios spend on writers is a tiny fraction of their overall budget. It’s that the practice runs counter to the optimizing, efficiency-maximizing ethos that Netflix brought to the industry. And that same conflict is at the heart of another battle between the writers and the studios, this one over AI: The WGA has proposed rules barring AI from writing or rewriting literary materials, or being used as source material; the studios have said only that they’ll commit to holding annual conversations about technological advances.

As far as we know, no studio is yet using AI in place of human writers, and at present, any attempt to do so seems unlikely to result in a good script. But the writers can foresee, and are trying to forestall, the day when efficiency-hungry studios will use AI to generate rough drafts that writers will then be asked to polish. As with mini rooms, that wouldn’t be ideal for creativity or quality, but it would certainly be more efficient.

Thinking about the kind of deal the studios and the WGA might eventually reach, it’s easier to imagine the studios compromising on AI than getting rid of mini rooms. The WGA may be able to keep robots from writing scripts in the future; much less clear is whether they’ll be able to win a deal for more humans to write them.