The teen, it seems, wanted to ask the Florida governor an earnest question. “I can’t legally vote,” the 15-year-old said to Ron DeSantis at an Iowa coffee shop recently.

“It’s never stopped the other party from not letting you vote,” DeSantis interjected.

I think he was trying to say “from letting you vote,” meaning that Democrats supposedly allow 15-year-olds to vote illegally. (DeSantis’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.) But he bungled his words, and either way, this is not a good joke. It’s especially not a good joke when you consider the second half of the teen’s sentence: “But I struggle with major depressive disorder.” Oof.

[Helen Lewis: The humiliation of Ron DeSantis]

This wasn’t an isolated moment of interpersonal clumsiness. On the campaign trail, DeSantis frequently behaves like he’s been dragged to a house party and is counting the seconds until he can look at his phone. He dryly remarked to an Icee-slurping kid, “That’s probably a lot of sugar,” and to a crowd of gathered fans that it was past his bedtime. When a reporter asked why he wasn’t taking questions, he snapped, “Are you blind?” He has a strange laugh that transforms abruptly into an okay-what’s-next industriousness. He passes up even obvious opportunities to show empathy, like when an 81-year-old veteran struggled to read the Pledge of Allegiance at his inauguration as Florida governor. Rather than take the man’s arm and offer help, my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, “DeSantis stood rigid and stern.”

I may not like DeSantis’s policies, but I deeply identify with his affect: Annoyed! Tactless! Maladroit! The New Yorker described him as “at his best on paper” and “a man so aloof that he sometimes finds it difficult to carry on a conversation.” He reportedly, and relatably, likes to keep his earbuds in so that people don’t talk to him. During debate prep years ago, an adviser told DeSantis to write a reminder on his legal pad: “LIKABLE.”

It’s somewhat of a given that DeSantis’s awkwardness undermines him, as it does for similarly stilted candidates. But the fact that voters care so much about a candidate’s smoothness is odd; awkwardness is not, per se, a bad thing. Most of us are a little awkward sometimes, or at least were a little awkward at one time. Some of the country’s most successful business leaders—Bill Gates, say, or Mark Zuckerberg—have a robotic quality, but that hasn’t stopped them. Social dexterity is something we expect of our presidential candidates, but of practically no one else.

It’s not just Democrats who find DeSantis socially awkward. “Ron DeSantis’s problem is that he finds it very difficult to work with people, or make people feel appreciated,” says Whit Ayres, the president of North Star Opinion Research, which polled for DeSantis in 2018.

Sarah Longwell, a pollster who runs focus groups of former Trump voters, told me that one group participant recently described DeSantis as “wooden.” Another, who actually liked DeSantis, called him “fine.” Longwell often asks people whom they would want if Trump isn’t the nominee. “In the last two groups, nobody has brought up DeSantis as the alternative,” Longwell told me.

DeSantis is the latest in a long line of candidates thwarted by awkwardness. It’s a problem some presidential hopefuls bring on themselves. When Jeb Bush, scion and supposed shoo-in, begged people to “please clap” at his carefully written applause line, he revealed a sheen of sweaty desperation. Onetime Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s attempts to connect with the common man resulted in him praising the “right heights” of trees and asking a crowd of Black voters, “Who let the dogs out?” At the 2000 Democratic National Convention, Vice President Al Gore tried to warm up his chilly image by giving his wife a big kiss—too big, it turned out. Hillary Clinton faced repulsive sexism and unfair treatment throughout her political life, but she also struggled to break out of white-paper speak. When she did—and here again I sympathize!—she could come off as haughty and superior, à la the “basket of deplorables.”

Other candidates, though, get struck by awkwardness through little fault of their own. They suffer the consequences nonetheless. At a loud rally in Iowa in 2004, Howard Dean hollered over the background noise into a unidirectional mic, and thus produced the first political meme to go viral (in a bad way). Later that year, the Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, fatefully went windsurfing, which is supposed to make you look cool, but instead made him look like a highfalutin flip-flopper when George W. Bush used the footage in an attack ad. Ted Cruz has somehow acquired a permanent pall of creepiness, helped along by a Twitter meme that he might be the Zodiac killer. (He’s not.) “His expression unsettles me,” one neurologist said when analyzing the senator’s tight little smile.

Awkward candidates have triumphed in the past: Richard Nixon, not exactly a people person, got elected twice. And it seems to be less of a burden for non-presidential offices: As Florida governor, DeSantis won reelection handily in 2022. Romney was governor of Massachusetts, and is now a senator from Utah. Hillary Clinton was a senator and the secretary of state, as was John Kerry.

But awkwardness proves fatal for many presidential candidates. Michael Dukakis, a perfectly competent Massachusetts governor, lost the election to George H. W. Bush after he was photographed riding in a tank while wearing a helmet. (In this case, too, the elder Bush looped the tank ride in an attack ad.) The governor’s advance team knew that the headgear would make him look “goofy,” but they failed to persuade him not to wear it. The aftershocks of that one rippled through politics for decades: Years later, President Barack Obama would decline to don a football helmet for a photo op. “You don’t put stuff on your head if you’re president,” he said. It just looks awkward.

[Mark Leibovich: Ron DeSantis’s joyless ride]

Like that other thing, you know awkwardness when you see it, and voters can see it over and over, anytime they come across a screen. Political news largely travels through TV and social media, two visual platforms that highlight every fake smile and weird comment. “The candidate who is most comfortable in the dominant medium of the time is most likely to be the candidate who is going to gain popular support,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a political-communication expert at the University of Pennsylvania. Reporters like me also play a role, highlighting narratives that (sometimes) take off among voters. President Joe Biden’s many gaffes could be seen as awkward, and I could just as easily have written this article about him, after all.

It’s surprising, though, that voters care about awkwardness, a benign and universal human quality. Who hasn’t accidentally responded to a “Happy birthday!” with “You too”? Being a white-paper-oriented, small-talk-averse introvert can have its upsides. The presidency is a hard job, requiring intricate knowledge of the world’s largest economy and strongest military, plus a few dozen ever-evolving terror groups and simmering crises. It involves a fair amount of glad-handing, but also a lot of reading and thinking. Research has shown that introverts can sometimes be more effective leaders, because they’re more likely to listen to their subordinates. “They can capture information that some extroverts might overlook,” write the researchers Karl Moore and Willing Li. Awkwardness is associated with a sharp focus on details and an enthusiasm for interests, both helpful qualities in a leader. Meanwhile, confidence can sometimes steer you wrong: George W. Bush, with whom everyone wanted to have a beer, made some disastrous decisions on the basis of pluck.

So why do we care if the president is awkward? Partly, it’s because the presidency is also performative, and we want to be sure our pick can perform well. “The American presidency combines the role of head of government, a role that requires policy chops and managerial smarts, with the role of head of state, a role where you are expected to channel the hopes and dreams of everyday Americans and represent those people on the world stage,” Kristen Soltis Anderson, a pollster and co-founder of Echelon Insights, told me via email. We expect presidential candidates to handle the Middle East but also a pork on a stick. “While in other countries, being a bit dry or awkward might not be such a problem on the path to being Prime Minister, we in the U.S. expect our president to both understand what average people are going through while also expecting them to be anything but average themselves,” Soltis said.

Voters prefer candidates who have personality traits they value in themselves. We want someone who just is like us, but “more of a leader,” to quote one study. Hip, compassionate liberals gravitated toward Obama, a cool empath. Trump’s supporters often say the famous billionaire is somehow “just like them.” Most people are sometimes awkward, but awkwardness is not a state that’s valued. To be awkward is human, but we want our politicians to be superhuman.

The opposite of awkward is something like “charismatic,” which political psychologists tend to define as someone who speaks in stories and metaphors, and who can successfully transmit values that voters want to hear. John Antonakis, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland, has found that charismatic candidates do especially well in situations of “attributional ambiguity,” when it’s unclear whether their policy performance is strong or weak. (This may explain the remarkable rise of the charismatic, record-free Trump.) In the absence of better information, “voters will turn to see Who more resembles my prototype of ‘what is a good leader’?” Antonakis told me. He’s also found that smarter people are better able to produce charismatic rhetoric when prompted, so perhaps voters assume that charismatic candidates know their stuff.

Charisma is important not just because voters like smooth talkers, but because it makes candidates seem more authentic—which is what many voters, especially Republicans, look for. “That’s what happens with the woodenness, or the inability to have a comfortable smile, or a normal conversation with a human, is that you don’t seem like an authentic kind of person,” Longwell said. Voters tend to find Trump very authentic, but toward DeSantis, they use phrases like “unable to trust him,” she noted. The Dukakis tank moment was so hilarious precisely because it made the governor seem like “something he wasn’t,” as Josh King put it in Politico.

Awkwardness, then, might be a sign of a candidate’s unease in his role, a subtle clue that he’s only pretending to get it. “Awkwardness is the feeling we get when someone’s presentation of themselves … is shown to be incompatible with reality in a way that can’t be smoothed over with a little white lie,” writes Melissa Dahl in Cringeworthy, her book on awkwardness. Voters had trouble buying Dukakis as a macho tank gunner; they don’t believe that DeSantis would genuinely enjoy small talk. If a candidate looks out of place among presidential contenders, we think, maybe that’s because he is.

The cable-news industry that Americans know today is a cautionary tale in what happens when democracy collides with consumerism. For years, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News raked in profits while amplifying partisan rancor in varying ways. Starting in 2015, CNN pumped its ratings by playing up Donald Trump, whose presidency then buoyed all three cable-news giants. But now CNN is in turmoil after a recent change of ownership and the departure of its president, Chris Licht, after 15 months. After the 2020 election, Fox News amplified false claims about voting irregularities rather than offend its disproportionately pro-Trump audience—and subsequently settled a defamation suit by Dominion Voting Systems for more than $700 million. These cable-news networks have long relied on receiving fees from cable companies for each basic-cable subscriber. Now the networks need to replace that income with subscription dollars as more and more Americans cut the cord, and the scramble for money does not bode well for investment in deep, factual reporting about the United States and the rest of the world.

Cable news, in short, is in a crisis—but not a new one. Indeed, the story goes back years, to a time before Fox News or CNN was even founded. More than half a century ago, the United States had decisions to make about how the emerging medium would operate: Should the government strictly regulate it as a common carrier to cultivate a more informed and engaged citizenry, or should cable be a for-profit industry driven by the bottom line?

[Read: Inside the meltdown at CNN]

Richard Nixon settled the issue in the latter direction. The electronic-media landscape has always existed within parameters determined by regulators, and politicians bend regulatory policy to their own political needs. That’s what Nixon did with cable. His motives were mixed: A believer in free competition, he also despised the main broadcast networks and believed that embattled politicians like him could more easily manipulate a fragmented television world. Some of the paths not taken during cable’s early development should remind us that the current cable-news landscape was not inevitable—and that largely forgotten government decisions from earlier eras turned out to have enormous consequences.

By the late 1960s, federal broadcast-television regulations had fostered a marketplace dominated by the Big Three. The government had effectively allowed CBS, NBC, and ABC to control the national television marketplace in exchange for their promise to serve the public interest. Today’s polarized politics has inspired some nostalgia for an era when Americans all got their TV news—and their entertainment, for that matter—from common sources. But at the time, discontent abounded. Many on the left saw a network culture steeped in racial and gender stereotypes that news and entertainment programs tended to perpetuate. Conservatives were eager to disrupt a media culture that they viewed as ideologically exclusionary. Many economists lamented that new entrants were frozen out, while free-expression advocates reasoned that, as television became the main venue in which national politics played out, average Americans needed ways to present their ideas on the nation’s screens.

A new technology, cable television, offered exciting possibilities. Wired television first emerged in the late ’40s, when entrepreneurial engineers in out-of-the-way communities sought to extend broadcasting’s reach. In 1948, for example, a man in Astoria, Oregon, found a way to bring in distant television signals from a hotel roof and then send the connection via a coaxial wire to businesses and homes for a fee. Seeking to protect local broadcasters from competition, the Federal Communications Commission initially regulated which programs cable could offer and where systems could even operate. But by the late ’60s, reform-minded FCC commissioners, think-tank researchers, and political activists alike began to see that wired infrastructure, which could offer far more channels than rabbit-ear antennas, could bring about a communications revolution. All of the power, according to the 1970 Sloan Commission on Cable Television, lay with the government, which could “prohibit” cable, “permit it,” or “promote it almost by fiat.”

[Read: Nixon is gone, but his media strategy lives on]

In the early ’70s, the progressive writer Ralph Lee Smith urged the government to subsidize the creation of a “Wired Nation,” just as it had built the nation’s interstate-highway system. Liberal organizations such as the Americans for Democratic Action, the ACLU, and the Ford Foundation all extolled how the technology could deliver essential employment and educational opportunities to fulfill Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society promises.

Others hoped that cable would bring about more radical social changes. Activists calling themselves “video guerrillas” wanted to use new art forms distributed on the cable dial to criticize capitalism, imperialism, and racial discrimination. To push the boundaries of acceptable content and decentralize production, they built community production centers, shared resources in volunteer collectives, and got support from foundations to underwrite operations.

Nixon, too, saw the possibilities of cable to advance his agenda. The 37th president traced his political struggles to media bias and his own inability to control his media image. He worried that public television—the preferred response of Johnson, his predecessor, to the Big Three monopoly—would only give more power to the liberal elite. So Nixon attacked the credibility and budget of the newly established Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its television-programming partner, PBS.

He saw a different role for cable: undermining the network newsrooms. Nixon was waging a broader campaign against the Big Three’s business operations; his administration also threatened to revoke broadcasting licenses and filed an antitrust suit against them. But his advisers told him that the real dagger to the networks would be to encourage cable television’s expansion as a competitor. In December 1972, an economist for Nixon’s new Office of Technology Policy (OTP) laid out Project BUN (which stood for Break Up Networks), an initiative whose very name shows how Nixon’s media vendetta shaped his policies. It emphasized deregulation of cable, a goal further enshrined in a 1974 special Cabinet-committee report endorsing the idea of letting the medium “prove its worth to the American people” in the marketplace.

Nixon’s approach changed the whole conversation. The video guerrillas’ hopes for cable television as a venue for nonprofit and viewer-created programming soon faded. With the Nixon administration dangling the possibility of deregulation, the cable industry rushed to lobby for that outcome, frequently reminding elected officials how cable could serve their political agendas. Subsequent laws and regulations for cable made little effort to promote common citizenship. Notably, although the FCC once required the major networks to cover multiple points of view about matters of controversy in the name of advancing the public interest, subsequent cable legislation did little to cultivate that ethos.

By the time Nixon retreated to Southern California in disgrace, in 1974, politicians across the political spectrum understood, as he had, that the emerging cable landscape might give them more chances to be on television and more control over how they were presented. Still, Nixon’s motives—manipulating his image, punishing his opponents, decentralizing the television landscape to open it to new voices—pulled the emerging industry in multiple directions, as illustrated by the trajectory of two men who worked for Nixon: Brian Lamb, a former OTP staffer who went on to launch C-SPAN, and Roger Ailes, a former campaign adviser who later started Fox News.

For Lamb, cable television offered a meaningful path to shift power from elitist television networks to individual viewers, providing voters with more information and more transparency into Washington. C-SPAN, a public-affairs channel that aired call-in shows and brought footage of congressional proceedings into American living rooms, soon became proof of this concept. The channel, voluntarily underwritten as a public service by cable companies, delivered political benefits to the very lawmakers who would in 1984 pass a law explicitly lifting many local and state regulations on the industry. As the cable business flourished in the ’90s and early 2000s, the increasing number of subscribers meant that C-SPAN’s budget grew (operators paid a per-subscriber fee to fund it), and C-SPAN expanded programming to include such earnest shows as Book TV and American History TV.

[From the April 1973 issue: The president and the press]

Ailes had less noble goals for television. In 1970, he championed a White House “Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News,” which celebrated TV’s political power. “People are lazy. With television, you just sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you,” the plan explained. At the time, Nixon’s team worried that the partisan propaganda Ailes proposed would generate too much blowback. Three decades later, liberal and centrist criticism did not faze Ailes’s Fox News, which mixed news with entertainment in ways that played to conservative viewers’ fears and grievances and kept them glued to the screen.

Therein lies the dashed promise of cable: Despite Fox’s recent setbacks—and despite the fact that its divisive brand of programming and deliberate delivery of election falsehoods are, I would argue, toxic for democracy—the network’s approach is likely to retain a distinct, sustainable paying audience, even if shifting viewing habits change the delivery mechanism from cable to streaming. By contrast, C-SPAN, which gives viewers genuine information in a neutral way, faces a budding crisis: Because it is dependent on cable subscriptions, cord cutting has put its future into jeopardy.

In recent years, lawmakers in Congress have been debating whether and how to regulate big internet companies. The history of the cable industry highlights the consequences of allowing such a powerful medium to develop with little or no democratic oversight. For the past 50 years, boosters of the cable industry made the case that the marketplace could deliver for American consumers and citizens. But the pursuit of profits has resulted in cable news networks that overwhelmingly appeal to viewers’ worst impulses, overrunning efforts to inculcate good citizenship. That’s why another revelation from Project BUN also matters today as we look at the world it helped create: Technology and public policy together produced our media environment, and this same combination could also change it for the better.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

A four-day workweek sounds great in theory. But what would it take to actually make the practice sustainable?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

When small-town pride sounds like anger Is social media making America’s murder surge worse? The gender war is over in Britain. Trees? Not in my backyard.

Fewer Hours, Same Workload?

The idea of a four-day workweek sounds enticing: Work efficiently over a shorter period of time and then reap the benefits of three-day weekends. In the process, workers could find balance and flourish in their personal life. Some employers are game for it too, as they seek to improve employee wellness and retention. But execution matters. Best-case scenario: Shorter workweeks boost productivity and reduce burnout. Worst-case scenario: Workers who are already scrambling to get all their work done face unsustainable pressure to get it done even faster.

Companies and governments around the world have been flirting in recent years with the idea of reducing worker hours while maintaining pay, especially in white-collar industries with standard 40-hour workweeks (of course, many people in those industries end up working more than that). A nonprofit advocacy organization called 4 Day Week Global, which conducts trials with academics and promotes shorter workweeks, released new findings from a yearlong research period with companies that volunteered to participate. After six months of aiming to work 32 hours a week, participants reported overall boosts in well-being and job satisfaction, which remained higher than baseline levels another six months later. Companies and workers included in the report rated the trials positively, and most said they would like to continue four-day workweeks. (Crucially, employees were paid the same amount as they were when working longer hours.) The report notes that participating companies were not “required to institute a particular type of 4 day week.”

Recent reports from 4 Day Week Global raise interesting questions, Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist who studies work, told me in an email. However, skeptics of the benefits of shorter weeks are waiting to see more robust independent research. Now Bloom is gathering his own survey data on four-day weeks.

Bloom noted that as far back as 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that workers could move to a 15-hour week. At that time, many Americans were working 50 hours a week. During the Great Depression, 40-hour weeks became the norm, and they were eventually enshrined into law in 1940. Later, union leaders—and President Richard Nixon—predicted even shorter weeks. But in the past few decades, various factors including Americans’ worship of work and simple inertia have led most companies to stick to standard 40-hour schedules.

A four-day workweek can lead to improvements only if it’s implemented properly. For those workers required to shoulder an unmanageable workload to begin with, trying to complete work in fewer hours could lead to burnout. How workers spend their off-hours matters too. If an employee spends Friday relaxing at the park or enjoying time with family, it’s easy to see how they would come back refreshed and rejuvenated on Monday. But if a worker spends Friday answering emails from clients who are not on a reduced schedule, that may not be the case.

For a four-day week to be beneficial, employees need to know that their time off is really their own, Emma Russell, an associate professor in occupational and organizational psychology at the University of Sussex, in England, and the director of agiLab, told me in an email. Workers facing economic precarity may also use the extra time for another job, Russell noted—and if they are exhausted from moonlighting, they may not reap the wellness rewards of reduced hours in their primary job. It may not be universally helpful for companies to implement the one-size-fits-all solution of a reduced schedule, because workers have varied responsibilities and needs, she added.

Dale Whelehan, the CEO of 4 Day Week Global, acknowledges that shorter weeks are not necessarily a panacea. Companies need to buy into the idea of rethinking workloads too. “It’s much more than a reduction of working time. It’s completely reprioritizing how you work, why you work, and what way you work,” he told me. Whehelan argues that many people are already effectively doing four days of work hidden under five workdays’ worth of hours, because they are not working as efficiently as they could be. To him, the four-day workweek is a way for companies to work smarter rather than assuming that the arbitrary norm of a five-day week is best.

That message may go over well with executives who are eager to mix things up and reimagine their organization. But it may feel insulting to companies that are already doing all they can to be efficient. As Bloom put it in his email, “I doubt we could just work 20% less time and produce the same, otherwise we would have done this already.”

“Nobody likes work,” he added with a smiley-face emoji.

Related:

Kill the five-day workweek. Workism is making Americans miserable.

Today’s News

The Supreme Court has temporarily allowed the Biden administration’s restrictions on “ghost guns,” kits that can be made into untraceable homemade weapons, as legal challenges continue. Governor Ron DeSantis has replaced his 2024 presidential campaign manager as he attempts to regain momentum. More than 11,000 municipal workers in Los Angeles have gone on strike, joining a spate of labor actions this summer.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Local-News Crisis Is Weirdly Easy to Solve

By Steven Waldman

Zak Podmore did not bring down a corrupt mayor. He did not discover secret torture sites or expose abuses by a powerful religious institution. But there was something about this one article he wrote as a reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune in 2019 that changed my conception of the value of local news.

Podmore, then a staff journalist for the Tribune and a corps member of Report for America, a nonprofit I co-founded, published a story revealing that San Juan County, Utah, had paid a single law firm hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees. Among other things, Podmore found that the firm had overcharged the county, the poorest in the state, by $109,500. Spurred by his story, the firm paid the money back. Perhaps because it didn’t involve billions of dollars, but rather a more imaginable number, it struck me: In one story, Podmore had retrieved for the county a sum that was triple his annual salary.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

We must learn to love our sweat. The coup in Niger is about power. Russia will exploit it. Photos: 18 months of war in Ukraine

Culture Break

Illustration by Michael Kennedy

Read. James McBride’s new novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, tells a story of solidarity between Black and Jewish communities.

Watch. The queer drama Passages (in theaters now) is a movie about an affair that breaks with convention.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The long-awaited federal indictment of Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election may be necessary to contain the threat to American democracy that he has unleashed. But it’s unlikely to be sufficient.

The germ of election denialism that Trump injected into the American political system has spread so far throughout the Republican Party that it is virtually certain to survive whatever legal accountability the former president faces.

With polls showing that most Republican voters still believes the election was stolen from Trump, that the January 6 riot was legitimate protest, and that Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 results did not violate the law or threaten the constitutional system, the United States faces a stark and unprecedented situation. For the first time in the nation’s modern history, the dominant faction in one of our two major parties has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to accept antidemocratic means to advance its interests.

The most telling measure of that dynamic inside the GOP is that Trump remains the party’s central figure. Each time GOP voters and leaders have had the opportunity to move away from him—whether in the shock immediately after January 6, or the widespread disappointment over the poor performance of his handpicked candidates during the 2022 election—the party has sped past the off-ramp.

Polls now show Trump leading in the 2024 GOP presidential race by one of the biggest margins ever recorded for a primary candidate in either party. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has been exploring ways to expunge his two impeachments and/or block the investigations he faces. Even the other candidates ostensibly running against him for the 2024 GOP nomination have almost uniformly condemned the indictments against him, rather than his underlying behavior. Prominent conservatives have argued that Trump cannot receive a fair trial in any Democratic-leaning jurisdiction.

All of these actions measure how much of the GOP is now willing to accept Trump’s repeated assaults on the basic structures of American democracy. The same inclination was evident in 2020, when most House Republicans voted to reject the election results and most Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit to decertify the outcome in the key swing states won by President Joe Biden. In the election’s aftermath, the majority of Republican-controlled states, inspired by Trump’s baseless claims of endemic voter fraud, passed laws on a party-line basis making it more difficult to vote, or increasing partisan control over election administration.

Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian who specializes in American politics, told me that U.S. history has no exact precedent for a party embracing a leader so openly hostile to the core pillars of democracy. Presidents have often been accused of violating the Constitution through their policy actions, he said, but there is not another example of a president moving as systematically to “manipulate the apparatus of government or elections in order to subvert the will of the people.”

The closest parallel to Trump’s actions, Wilentz said, may be the strategies of the slaveholding South in the decades before the Civil War. Those included violent attacks on abolitionists, suppression of antislavery publications, and the promulgation of extreme legal theories such as the denial of basic rights to Black people in the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, all of which were designed to protect slavery against the emerging national majority dubious of it. That decades-long “antidemocratic thrust” from the South, Wilentz noted, “finally culminated in the greatest violation of the American Constitution in our history, which was secession.”

By contrast, Wilentz added, the GOP’s continued embrace of Trump amid the evidence of his misconduct contrasts sharply with the party’s refusal to defend Richard Nixon in the final stages of Watergate. “When Richard Nixon was about to be impeached, he didn’t storm the Capitol to get rid of Barry Goldwater,” Wilentz said, referring to the conservative Republican senator who warned Nixon that he would lose a Senate vote to remove him. “He resigned.”

All of this suggests that personal accountability for Trump is unlikely to erase the tolerance for antidemocratic actions that has spread in the GOP since his emergence. Yet many experts who study the health of democracy still believe that prosecuting him remains essential.

Kristy Parker, a counsel at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group that focuses on threats to democratic institutions, says it is crucial to show the “silent majority” of Americans who support the constitutional system that no one is above the law. “They need to see that the Department of Justice prosecutors are willing to take the risk of indicting Trump,” Parker told me. “They need to see the election workers ensuring that people get their vote counted. They need to see the police officers standing up to the rioters. They need to see people within the system working.”

Michael Waldman, the president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, told me that he has been ambivalent about indicting former presidents, because of the risk of precipitating a retaliatory spiral between the parties. “It is a line that we as a country have never crossed,” Waldman said shortly after the Trump indictment was disclosed last night. “One could imagine how it could be abused and become one more shattered norm.”

Waldman said that failing to indict Trump would have been far more dangerous, because such a decision would have suggested that there is no effective way to hold presidents accountable for misbehavior. Neither of Trump’s two impeachments really damaged his position in the party, Waldman noted, in part because virtually all GOP elected officials defended his behavior. But the multiple criminal indictments facing Trump, he said, show that “the criminal-justice system still is producing tangible legal consequences” that future presidents cannot brush off as easily as an impeachment.

Waldman said the trials of hundreds of January 6 rioters already demonstrate that prosecution can have some deterrent effect. Unruly crowds of supporters, Waldman noted, did not descend on courthouses in Manhattan or Florida after Trump’s earlier indictments, despite his signals that he’d like to see that happen. “The fact that this stuff is not just a bad idea but illegal and you can go to jail for it really makes a big difference,” Waldman said.

John Dean, the White House counsel whose Senate testimony helped doom Nixon during Watergate, also considers prosecution of Trump to be “essential,” he told me. President Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon and preempt a trial, Dean said, was “a historical disaster,” because it emboldened presidents to believe they would never face criminal charges for their actions. Allowing Trump to avoid consequences, Dean believes, would send an even more dangerous signal than Ford did with Nixon. “Trump’s corruption is so much more fundamental to the system than Nixon’s,” Dean said. “Nixon, he abused power, he had his enemies list, he wanted to make government work for the benefit of Republicans and not Democrats. But he wasn’t going after the foundations of government and the system like Trump.”

[Peter Wehner: The indictment of Donald Trump—and his enablers]

Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election required the cooperation of many other GOP officials and conservative activists and lawyers. Now a growing number of them face consequences of their own, including disbarment proceedings, ongoing state and local investigations, and the potential of further federal charges from Special Counsel Jack Smith against the six unnamed co-conspirators listed in the Trump indictment.

“I’m not sure how much additional prosecutions will deter Trump—unfortunately, he’s all-in on winning as a way to stay out of prison at this point,” says the Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan, a co-founder of Bright Line Watch, a collaborative of political scientists studying threats to U.S. democracy. “But Republican operatives and activists may hesitate as the evidence mounts that participating in an attempted coup puts you in legal jeopardy. That’s important, because Trump can’t carry out his plots by himself.”

Some analysts have worried that the trials could strengthen Trump if die-hard supporters of his on a jury refuse to convict him regardless of the evidence. But Parker told me that cannot be allowed to dissuade prosecutors from bringing cases when there’s evidence that Trump violated the law. The problem, she said, is analogous to the challenges she faced as a Department of Justice civil-rights attorney prosecuting excessive-force cases against police officers who were likely more popular in the community than the victims they abused: “You can’t just give in and allow, effectively, a bully to force his way out of accountability, because then you’ve crushed the ideal that no one is above the law.”

Yet although all these possible sanctions create legal reasons for the GOP to resist another Trump-led attack on democracy, the party’s political incentives point in the opposite direction.

A recent national poll released by the Bright Line Watch project found that the majority of Republican voters accepted all of Trump’s key arguments about 2020 and the multiplying legal challenges accumulating against him. In that survey, only small minorities of Republicans said that he had committed crimes in any of the cases he’s facing. Most Republicans said Trump was singled out for prosecution for behavior that would not have prompted charges against other people. Six in 10 Republicans described the January 6 riot as “legitimate protest.” And although the share of Republicans who said that Biden was elected through fraud had declined somewhat from its peak of about three-fourths, nearly two-thirds of them still denied the legitimacy of his victory.

[Quinta Jurecic: The triumph of the January 6 Committee]

These attitudes provide an ominous backdrop to Trump’s hints that if he wins the nomination but loses the general election, he’s likely to challenge the results again. Trump might not attempt another mass physical attack on the Capitol in 2025, but such sentiments could allow him to enlist Republicans again for a more targeted legal effort to overthrow the results in a few key states or in Congress, Nyhan told me. The widespread Republican rejection of the idea that Trump violated any laws in his actions after 2020 offers reason to doubt that the party would object any more strenuously if he launched another campaign to delegitimize the results in 2024.

Nyhan said he can imagine future circumstances in which Democrats at some point challenge the legitimacy of a presidential race, such as the election coming down to a Republican-controlled state that has restricted voting rights. But he said the more immediate danger is that Republicans won’t accept any presidential race they lose. Traditionally, presidential nominees from each party, including Al Gore and John McCain, have made statements in which “the losing side specifically affirms the legitimacy of the winner,” Nyhan said. But for the GOP next year, he added, “we can no longer take that for granted whether or not Trump is the nominee, and that’s really worrisome.”

Trump may constitute a unique threat to America’s democratic traditions. But he has always connected his claims of pervasive electoral fraud to the widespread anxiety among white, Christian conservatives that they are losing control of the country to a racially diverse, secular, and LGBTQ-friendly Democratic coalition centered in the nation’s largest cities. As Trump put it during one 2020 rally before a predominantly white, rural audience in Georgia: “This is our country. And you know this, and you see it, but they are trying to take it from us through rigging, fraud, deception, and deceit.” Whether Trump is convicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election or not, voters who accept that argument will remain the most powerful force in the GOP coalition. And they will continue to demand leaders who will fight the changes that they believe threaten their position in American society.

Those other Republican leaders may not attempt to overturn an election as brazenly as Trump did with the conduct Smith catalogs in his indictment. But, as Wilentz told me, for the foreseeable future, they are likely to pursue other means “toward the same end: that majoritarian democracy cannot be tolerated under any circumstances if the outcome is not what you wanted it to be.”

Rarely have so few, seemingly inconsequential words generated so many consequential ones.

In a mere 109-word paragraph tucked away in an autobiographical collection of interviews published in 2000, just as he ascended to power in Russia, Vladimir Putin tells a nightmarish tale: Once, when he and his friends were chasing rats with sticks in the dilapidated apartment building in St. Petersburg where he grew up, a “huge rat” he’d cornered suddenly “lashed around and threw itself at” him, chasing the “surprised and frightened” Putin to his door before he slammed it shut in the rodent’s face. For Putin, it’s a parable: “I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word cornered.”

More than two decades later, that anecdotal seed has sprouted into a ubiquitous narrative that has helped shape the West’s response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. A cornered Putin, commentators and policy makers in the United States and Europe have frequently insisted, could behave like the rat, lashing out even with weapons of mass destruction if provoked. The assumption has informed policies on arms provisions to Ukraine and nuclear deterrence against Russia.

Yet the Russian leader’s response to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed mutiny in June has called the cornered-rat concept into question. Some experts argue that Russian propaganda amplified the metaphor, and that Putin’s reaction to the rebellion exposed it as a lie. Others paint a more complicated picture, suggesting that the story does reveal deep truths about Putin, but not the ones we imagined.

To better understand the Russian leader’s psychology—and make sounder policy decisions as a result—it’s worth tracing how an obscure vignette from Putin’s childhood took on such a prominent life of its own.

Putin has retold the rat story, and the lesson he learned about the perils of cornering others, several times in the 23 years since he first dropped the biographical breadcrumb, including in a 2005 60 Minutes interview. I’ve come across at least one instance of a former Kremlin official explicitly comparing Putin and Russia to the cornered rat. And Putin, along with other Russian officials and their allies, has occasionally implicitly echoed the anecdote’s themes via warnings to the West to not back Russia into a corner.

But the story was barely mentioned in the Western media (with some exceptions, including a fleeting reference in this magazine) until Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, when references gradually ticked up. As Putin suffered setbacks in Ukraine, Russia experts and journalists writing about the conflict and searching for insight into the Russian leader’s mindset started citing the anecdote from the 2000 interview collection. And they did something curious: They identified Putin not with his younger self but with the cornered rat, suggesting that his precarious position made him liable to lash out against his adversaries.

Only after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, however, did the notion of Putin as a “rat in a corner” achieve escape velocity, to the point that it now seems to be invoked much more frequently in Western countries than in Russia.

The rat story served as the framing device for a flurry of articles in the early days and months of the war, both serious-minded (with headlines such as “A Cornered Vladimir Putin Is More Dangerous Than Ever”) and more sensationalist (“A rat with nuclear weapons ... That’s why we mustn’t drive Vladimir Putin so far into a corner he will do anything to save his own skin”). A May 2022 CNN documentary promising to take viewers “inside the mind” of the Russian leader seized on the rat story as a leitmotif of his biography, noting that Putin grew up in the “darkest corners” of St. Petersburg and that being “trapped in a corner only to fight his way out” has been “a theme throughout Vladimir Putin’s life,” building to the big question: “Erratic, obsessed, enraged. Is Putin now that cornered rat he once encountered?”

References to the tale tend to crop up when Putin is either issuing nuclear threats or under intense economic or military pressure, and they have become so common that experts often describe Putin as a “cornered rat” or even “a snarling rat backed into a corner,” with nary a mention of the childhood story that spawned the metaphor. Perhaps most consequentially, the language has made its way into the vernacular of U.S. and European governments—popping up in NATO research and remarks by British lawmakers. In his new biography of Putin, the journalist Philip Short refers to a conclusion by CIA analysts that Putin’s rat story should be “read as a warning that, if Putin were ever cornered, he would turn and fight.”

In the jittery days following Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine, as the United States slapped sweeping sanctions on Moscow, one anonymous official quoted by The New York Times gave a name to the ambient concern in the White House, voiced repeatedly in Situation Room meetings, about a trapped Russian leader lashing out: the “Cornered Putin Problem.” Last fall, when the Biden administration was resisting Ukrainian requests for more sophisticated weapons amid advances against Russian forces, Colin Kahl, then the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, expressed concern that “Ukraine’s success on the battlefield could cause Russia to feel backed into a corner, and that is something we must remain mindful of.” Cornered-rat logic arguably has also informed calls to negotiate a face-saving way for Putin to get out of his quagmire.

[Read: Putin is caught in his own trap]

Alina Polyakova, the president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis, told me she’s seen the concern about pushing Putin and Russia into a corner most “profoundly” among U.S. and Western European officials, whereas officials in Eastern European countries and in Ukraine itself, given their experience with Soviet occupation, tend to believe the best way to deter Russia is through “force and strength.”

“I don’t know if senior policy makers, as they look at this situation, call to mind that [cornered rat] metaphor, but anyone who says, ‘We can’t take certain steps in Ukraine, because Putin might go nuclear’ is manifesting the logic of that paradigm, which is precisely the policy impact that Putin has been seeking,” John Herbst, the head of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council (where I work), told me.

Some leading experts on Putin and Russia have argued compellingly that the cornered-rat metaphor has real merit in illuminating how the Russian leader might act. Shortly after Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, for example, the journalist Masha Gessen wrote that the rat story “keeps coming up in my conversations in Moscow” and that “no one who has ever heard it doubts that the adult Putin identifies with the rat.”

Around the same time, the Cold War historian Vladislav Zubok told me he was alarmed by those in the West who “keep shouting, ‘Press this guy Putin against the wall. Squash him like a rat! Kill him!’ And this guy has a nuclear button. Come on! Don’t make him nervous.” Andrei​ Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based expert on Russian politics at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote to me that, in his opinion, the cornered-rat image “is very accurate.” He noted that Putin “responds to every challenge (e.g. damage to the Crimean bridge) with a brutal attack (e.g. missile strikes).”

But other experts—such as Polyakova, who studies disinformation, and Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine—argue that Putin and the Kremlin have intentionally spread the image of Putin as a cornered rat as a form of propaganda, a verminous spin on Richard Nixon’s “Madman Theory.” They hypothesize that Putin, as a former KGB agent during the Cold War, would have been well versed in psychological operations and thus likely had a calculated reason to repeatedly relay the rat story and the lesson he drew from it.

Whether or not Putin had an ulterior motive in sharing the rat story, Herbst told me, the Russian leader and “his henchmen” have emphasized the trope over the years “to instill fear in Western policy makers and also in policy makers in smaller, closer-by countries” that if they oppose Putin getting what he wants, he will strike back in devastating ways. Putin doesn’t have to repeat the story often, Herbst said, because the West has done the work for him by amplifying its theme.

[Read: The accidental autocrat]

As striking as the story’s repetition is the frequency with which it has failed to predict Putin’s behavior. Faced with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s June rebellion—as mercenaries marched toward Moscow—Putin’s reaction was not to lunge forward but rather to back away, negotiate with the Wagner Group leader, and make concessions to the mutineers to defuse the crisis.

Polyakova considers Putin’s behavior during the episode consistent with a broader pattern that even predates the current conflict: “In every instance where we [in the West] have pushed back against either Russian aggression or Russia’s economic interests, there hasn’t been this ‘all hell breaks loose’ response.”

Herbst agrees. He points out that Western countries have repeatedly crossed ostensible Russian red lines—by providing advanced weapons to Ukraine, for example, or admitting Finland and Sweden into NATO—without Putin resorting to nuclear use or other major escalations. And yet, the notion persists, perhaps usefully to Putin, that he must not be forced on the ropes or he will unleash World War III.

Natalia Gevorkyan was one of three Russian journalists who spoke with Putin for the 2000 autobiographical interviews. She told me she doubts that the Russian leader deliberately planted the rat story as propaganda—at least in its initial telling. Putin didn’t know in advance the questions the journalists would be asking, and he volunteered the anecdote only when they pressed him on whether the conditions at the communal apartment where he grew up were as horrible as a former teacher of his had suggested.

The Kremlin had encouraged Putin to “talk openly” about himself so that the interviews would introduce him to Russians who “didn’t know anything about him” at the time, Gevorkyan said. Stories like the one about the rats seemed intended to fulfill that directive.

“Nobody was cornering him” back in 2000, Gevorkyan reasoned. “I don’t believe that he was that smart to say, ‘Look, guys, listen to this story and never push me into the corner.’” She conceded that it’s “quite possible” he has sent a political message by repeating the story and its lesson in the ensuing years.

But Gevorkyan, who is now based in Paris, did challenge the conventional interpretation of the story. She wonders why so many people (herself included, until she looked at the tale in a new light after Russia’s assault against Ukraine last year) gravitate toward a convoluted reading of it that associates Putin with the dangerous rodent. The more straightforward moral of the story is that a frightened young Vladimir backed off when threatened, and that the elder Vladimir might do the same under similar circumstances. Something about the tale, she mused, tempts people to concentrate on the pouncing rat rather than the fleeing boy.

[Read: Why Putin let Prigozhin go]

Putin had a stick that he could have used to protect himself against the much smaller animal. Instead, Gevorkyan said, “he runs away and he hides in his own apartment and he feels safe. For me, this is much more a story about Putin than about the rat.”

No one but Putin himself will ever know for sure if, when push comes to shove, he is the cornered rat, the frightened boy, or something else entirely. But policy makers and the public can pay particularly close attention to what Putin does rather than what he says or what others say about him, and build their understanding of the Russian leader on a foundation of empirical evidence. They can avoid the siren song of popular frameworks that offer simplistic explanatory models for a complicated geopolitical actor. They can design policies and strategies to defend their interests that factor in their best assessments of Putin, while not accepting as gospel any single measure of the man and how he might behave.

Aleksandar Matovski, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, has studied the connection between Putin’s military adventurism abroad and his political standing at home. He told me that he sees some limited but significant truth in the cornered-rat paradigm: “There is a genuine threshold at which cornered Putin (in the sense of losing his grip domestically) would lash out aggressively, as a fall from power for a personalized dictator like him would be catastrophic,” he wrote to me, noting that his comments constitute his own assessment and not the position of the U.S. Department of Defense. But he also underscored the evidence that has piled up against the paradigm. Putin has “exploited the fear of the ‘cornered rat’ as a sort of bluff, particularly through nuclear blackmail in recent years,” he observed.

To avoid a situation in which a weakened Putin in dire circumstances blunders into nuclear use, Matovski argued, Western officials will need “to appeal to the survivalist outlook of Putin and his elite by signaling determination to retaliate in ways that will deny the Kremlin the benefits of a nuclear strike” and exert painful pressure on the Putin regime.

In other words, to manage the risk of nuclear escalation with Russia, they shouldn’t dismiss offhand the man who once saw in a cornered rat a warning about the dangers of desperation. But they should nevertheless appeal to the survival instincts of the boy with the stick who, when faced with those dangers, decided to run for it.

Both his supporters and and his opponents assume that former President Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy will go away if he can win the 2024 presidential election. That’s a big mistake. A Trump election in 2024 would settle nothing. It would generate a nation-shaking crisis of presidential legitimacy. Trump in 2024 means chaos—and almost certainly another impeachment.

Trump’s proliferating criminal exposures have arisen in two different federal jurisdictions—Florida and the District of Columbia—and in two different state jurisdictions, New York and Georgia. More may follow.

As president, Trump would have no power of his own to quash directly any of these proceedings. He would have to act through others. For example, the most nearly unilateral thing that Trump could try would be a presidential self-pardon. Is that legal? Trump has asserted that it is. Only the Supreme Court can deliver a final verdict, which presents a significant risk to Trump, because the Court might say no. Self-pardon defies the history and logic of the presidential-pardon power. Would a Supreme Court struggling with legitimacy issues of its own take such a serious risk with its reputation to protect Trump from justice?

[Tom Nichols: Trump seems to be afraid, very afraid]

Trump has one way he might avert the hazard of the Supreme Court ruling against him. He could order his attorney general to order the special counsel not to bring a case against his self-pardon, and then order the Department of Justice to argue in court that nobody but the special counsel has standing to bring a case.

Then things get complicated. Would the attorney general do it? Would the special counsel submit? Would the professionals in the Department of Justice stay in their jobs? And what would happen in Congress and in the country?

The situation becomes even more complicated if you assume that Trump couldn’t win a majority of the popular vote (given that he has twice failed to win one). If he returns to office, he’d most likely do so thanks to a fluke in the Electoral College.

So a criminally indicted president would have to argue that he’s entitled to self-pardon, and also that he’s entitled to forbid the prosecutors to challenge that in court, and also that he can order his Department of Justice to fight in court against anybody else who seeks to sue in the prosecutors’ stead. He’d have to do all of this based on a claim that he represents the will of the people, even though he likely did not win a majority of the popular vote.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

And after all that, he’d still face indictments in state courts, where he has no pardon power. So, for his next move, he would have to order the Department of Justice to argue that state courts have no criminal jurisdiction over a serving president. He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City, or on the street in any state, and nobody could do anything about it until his term was up, if then.

As the absurdity of this situation would play out, it’s probable that within a couple of days of an attempt at self-pardoning, Trump wouldn’t have a Department of Justice. There would be mass resignations, and probably no way to confirm replacement senior officials in the U.S. Senate. (The first Trump administration repeatedly relied on acting appointees rather than on Senate-confirmed officials, but for a second administration to intentionally bypass the Senate in order to shut down the courts would invite a constitutional crisis all of its own.)

Trump’s other routes to the same destination run into the same problems. Trump could try a more indirect maneuver to shut down the federal indictments: Order Special Counsel Jack Smith to stand down, and fire him if he refuses. That approach bypasses the courts, but it depends even more heavily on finding a compliant attorney general to cancel the indictment, and on the acquiescence of Congress in what would look like an outright nullification of federal law enforcement. The federal Department of Justice would dissolve. The state cases would continue regardless. Trump scandals would be the only order of business in Congress.

Trump himself may not care: He was neither chastened nor deterred even by impeachment. But Trump leads a minority faction in the country, and the kind of permanent crisis a second presidential term would generate would invite a 2026 Democratic congressional landslide big enough to jolt even a Trump-led GOP.

Trump may imagine that he’s got a one-and-done fight on his hands: Strike hard, strike fast, then settle back to enjoy the corrupt perquisites of lawless power. If so, he and his followers are deluding themselves. The entire term would be consumed by the battle over Trump’s project to use the power of the presidency to protect himself from the consequences of his alleged crimes.

[Benjamin Wittes: Trump’s self-pardon fantasy will meet a harsh reality]

Trump’s past practice when in trouble was to deflect attention from one scandal by lurching into another scandal. Maybe this time he’d try to cut off aid to Ukraine or blow up NATO or start a culture war against drag queens. But none of those stunts would distract Americans; they would only embitter them.

A Trump bid for self-pardon would not be the equivalent of President Gerald Ford pardoning former President Richard Nixon, a decision unpopular at the time but ultimately accepted by many of its fiercest critics as well as a majority of the public. A self-pardon attempt would convulse the country. It would never gain acceptance as a legitimate act undertaken for public-spirited, bipartisan ends. The furor would not subside; the constitutional injury would not heal.

A second Trump presidency would offer only division, chaos, and paralysis that would never be quieted. Nor would it cease—until that presidency itself ceased, and perhaps not even then.