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In The Atlantic’s next cover story, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg profiled General Mark Milley, who served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the last 16 months of Donald Trump’s presidency. What Milley saw as the nation’s highest-ranking officer is a graphic warning of the existential danger America will be in should Trump return to office.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The American face of authoritarian propaganda Airlines are just banks now. Millennials have lost their grip on fashion.

A Patriot and His Duty

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking military position in the United States, designated by law as the principal military adviser to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council. It is a post of vital national importance, but most Americans probably have no idea who serves in it at any given time.

And yet, for almost two years, the safety of the United States and the sanctity of its Constitution may well have depended more than any American could have known on Mark Milley, a career Army officer who became the 20th chairman in late 2019. Milley’s experiences in the waning days of the Trump administration should appall and alarm every sensible American.

Milley served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the most fraught period of civil-military dysfunction in U.S. history. As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes in our next cover story, Milley faced an unprecedented situation in which the president—a man, Jeff notes, horrendously addled by “cognitive unfitness and moral derangement”—was himself the greatest threat to the Constitution.

If that sounds dramatic, consider what Milley’s senior colleagues—career military men who served in the Trump White House—told Jeff about the nightmare facing the chairman. “Mark Milley had to contain the impulses of people who wanted to use the United States military in very dangerous ways,” according to retired Marine General John Kelly, who served as Trump’s second chief of staff. (Milley, for his part, was worried that Trump would try to overcome his electoral loss by creating a “Reichstag moment,” perhaps by sparking a foreign war or by using the military against civilians.)

Army Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, who served as one of Trump’s many hired-and-fired national security advisers, commented on the immensity of the challenge facing Milley by posing a terrifying hypothetical to Jeff: “As chairman, you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?” (We might add to this an even more unsettling question: What if millions of Americans don’t seem to care?)

Even those who may think they’ve fully grasped Trump’s depravity will be shocked by some of the events that Jeff reports.

For example, at the ceremony welcoming him as the new chairman, Milley invited Captain Luis Avila to sing “God Bless America.” Avila had completed five combat tours, lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan, and suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. Jeff writes:

After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley.

“Milley’s family,” Jeff continues,“venerated the military, and Trump’s attitude toward the uniformed services seemed superficial, callous, and, at the deepest human level, repugnant.”

But Trump did respect some military personnel, especially Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL who was court-martialed on multiple charges and whose own comrades testified to his bloodthirsty and reckless behavior. (Gallagher was acquitted of all charges except for posing with a slain enemy’s corpse.) Trump intervened in the question of whether Gallagher, despite his acquittals, should keep his SEAL pin—a decision traditionally made by fellow SEALs.

Milley tried to stop Trump from interfering with this important tradition. Trump, according to Jeff, “called Gallagher a hero and said he didn’t understand why he was being punished.”

“Because he slit the throat of a wounded prisoner,” Milley said.

“The guy was going to die anyway,” Trump said.

It’s a war crime, Milley protested, to no avail. Trump refused to see what the “big deal” was all about. “You guys”—and here he meant combat soldiers—“are all just killers. What’s the difference?”

Gallagher got to keep his pin.

If Trump’s ideal military is one in which Eddie Gallagher is celebrated as a hero and Luis Avila is warehoused out of sight, what does that suggest about who might lead the military if Trump returns to office? Who would have the fortitude to turn back the unlawful orders of a vicious and cowardly commander in chief to kill prisoners, to act as a praetorian guard around the White House, or even to use nuclear arms?

When Trump lost the election, and especially after the January 6 insurrection, Milley was apparently growing concerned about Trump’s emotional stability. The chairman called all of America’s top nuclear officers to a meeting, in which he said, “If anything weird or crazy happens, just make sure we all know.” He then asked each officer to affirm that he understood the proper procedures for the release of nuclear weapons. He also called his Chinese counterpart to assure him that America was not in the kind of chaos that could lead to war.

Milley’s critics raged that the chairman was undermining the president’s authority, and, as Jeff notes, they wanted to see the general in leg-irons—or worse. These charges were partisan nonsense. What should be more concerning to every citizen of the United States is that Mark Milley, and many others around him, felt it was important to reassure the Chinese, and to keep the lines of communication around America’s nuclear command structure clear and open. In normal times, no one would think to do such things, but, as Jeff notes, Milley’s months serving under Trump “were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve.”

Reading Jeff’s article, I kept thinking of the 1965 novel Night of Camp David, by Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote Seven Days in May, about a military coup in the United States). It’s not a great book, but the premise is scary enough: A young American senator, after a long evening alone with the president at his famous retreat, realizes that the commander in chief has descended into madness and is brewing grandiose plans for conquest that will ignite World War III. In the light of day, the president seems like a reasonable man, so no one but the senator knows that he’s gone completely bonkers.

Milley faced the opposite and more difficult problem: Everyone knew Trump was unhinged. It wasn’t even remotely a secret. General James Mattis even told friends and colleagues that Trump was “more dangerous than anyone could imagine.” But again, nobody had to imagine it; anyone who was ever in the same room as Trump knew it. And yet, few acted to stop him. (Mike Pence’s one day of courage on January 6 is an honorable and important exception.) Many others did not do their duty—including the Republican members of the United States Congress, whose lives Trump endangered.

Milley, unlike so many in Washington, continued to honor his oath to the Constitution. The next time, we will not be so lucky. The next time, Trump will not make the same mistake twice: He will ensure that no one like Mark Milley will be in the National Security Council, or at the Pentagon— or guarding America’s nuclear forces at Strategic Command. The next time, when Trump’s narcissism and cruelty tell him that he must exact revenge on the country, perhaps even on the world, no one will be there to stop him.

Related:

Trump could still start a last-ditch war with Iran. (From 2020) Trump: Americans who died in war are “losers” and “suckers.” (From 2020)

Today’s News

The U.S. temporarily granted expanded access to work permits and deportation relief to about half a million Venezuelans who are already in the country.    House Republicans failed to advance an appropriations bill for the Defense Department in a setback for Speaker Kevin McCarthy as a potential government shutdown looms. Poland will stop providing weapons to Ukraine. The two countries continue to disagree about a temporary ban on Ukrainian grain imports.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: David McNew / Getty; Haldeman Papers.

Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather

By Joshua Benton

In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having said. “Risk energized him.”

But in 1950, Haldeman’s “quirky” politics led him to make an unusual and dramatic choice: to leave Canada for South Africa … What would make a man undertake such a radical change? Isaacson writes that Haldeman had come “to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft.” One of Haldeman’s sons has written that it may have simply been “his adventurous spirit and the desire for a more pleasant climate in which to raise his family.” But another factor was at play: his strong support for the brand-new apartheid regime.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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If you were seeking online therapy from 2017 to 2021—and a lot of people were—chances are good that you found your way to BetterHelp, which today describes itself as the world’s largest online-therapy purveyor, with more than 2 million users. Once you were there, after a few clicks, you would have completed a form—an intake questionnaire, not unlike the paper one you’d fill out at any therapist’s office: Are you new to therapy? Are you taking any medications? Having problems with intimacy? Experiencing overwhelming sadness? Thinking of hurting yourself? BetterHelp would have asked you if you were religious, if you were LGBTQ, if you were a teenager. These questions were just meant to match you with the best counselor for your needs, small text would have assured you. Your information would remain private.

Except BetterHelp isn’t exactly a therapist’s office, and your information may not have been completely private. In fact, according to a complaint brought by federal regulators, for years, BetterHelp was sharing user data—including email addresses, IP addresses, and questionnaire answers—with third parties, including Facebook and Snapchat, for the purposes of targeting ads for its services. It was also, according to the Federal Trade Commission, poorly regulating what those third parties did with users’ data once they got them. In July, the company finalized a settlement with the FTC and agreed to refund $7.8 million to consumers whose privacy regulators claimed had been compromised. (In a statement, BetterHelp admitted no wrongdoing and described the alleged sharing of user information as an “industry-standard practice.”)

We leave digital traces about our health everywhere we go: by completing forms like BetterHelp’s. By requesting a prescription refill online. By clicking on a link. By asking a search engine about dosages or directions to a clinic or pain in chest dying???? By shopping, online or off. By participating in consumer genetic testing. By stepping on a smart scale or using a smart thermometer. By joining a Facebook group or a Discord server for people with a certain medical condition. By using internet-connected exercise equipment. By using an app or a service to count your steps or track your menstrual cycle or log your workouts. Even demographic and financial data unrelated to health can be aggregated and analyzed to reveal or infer sensitive information about people’s physical or mental-health conditions.  

All of this information is valuable to advertisers and to the tech companies that sell ad space and targeting to them. It’s valuable precisely because it’s intimate: More than perhaps anything else, our health guides our behavior. And the more these companies know, the easier they can influence us. Over the past year or so, reporting has found evidence of a Meta tracking tool collecting patient information from hospital websites, and apps from Drugs.com and WebMD sharing search terms such as herpes and depression, plus identifying information about users, with advertisers. (Meta has denied receiving and using data from the tool, and Drugs.com has said that it was not sharing data that qualified as “sensitive personal information.”) In 2021, the FTC settled with the period and ovulation app Flo, which has reported having more than 100 million users, after alleging that it had disclosed information about users’ reproductive health with third-party marketing and analytics services, even though its privacy policies explicitly said that it wouldn’t do so. (Flo, like BetterHelp, said that its agreement with the FTC wasn’t an admission of wrongdoing and that it didn’t share users’ names, addresses, or birthdays.)

Of course, not all of our health information ends up in the hands of those looking to exploit it. But when it does, the stakes are high. If an advertiser or a social-media algorithm infers that people have specific medical conditions or disabilities and subsequently excludes them from receiving information on housing, employment, or other important resources, this limits people’s life opportunities. If our intimate information gets into the wrong hands, we are at increased risk of fraud or identity theft: People might use our data to open lines of credit, or to impersonate us to get medical services and obtain drugs illegally, which can lead not just to a damaged credit rating, but also to canceled insurance policies and denial of care. Our sensitive personal information could even be made public, leading to harassment and discrimination.

Many people believe that their health information is private under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects medical records and other personal health information. That’s not quite true. HIPAA only protects information collected by “covered entities” and their “business associates”: Health-insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, and some companies that do business with them are limited in how they collect, use, and share information. A whole host of companies that handle our health information—including social-media companies, advertisers, and the majority of health tools marketed directly to consumers—aren’t covered at all.

“When somebody downloads an app on their phone and starts inputting health data in it, or data that might be health indicative, there are definitely no protections for that data other than what the app has promised,” Deven McGraw, a former deputy director of health-information privacy in the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, told me. (McGraw currently works as the lead for data stewardship and data sharing at the genetic-testing company Invitae.) And even then, consumers have no way of knowing if an app is following its stated policies. (In the case of BetterHelp, the FTC complaint points out that from September 2013 to December 2020, the company displayed seals saying HIPAA on its website—despite the fact that “no government agency or other third party reviewed [its] information practices for compliance with HIPAA, let alone determined that the practices met the requirements of HIPAA.”)

Companies that sell ads are often quick to point out that information is aggregated: Tech companies use our data to target swaths of people based on demographics and behavior, rather than individuals. But those categories can be quite narrow: Ashkenazi Jewish women of childbearing age, say, or men living in a specific zip code, or people whose online activity may have signaled interest in a specific disease, according to recent reporting. Those groups can then be served hyper-targeted pharmaceutical ads at best, and unscientific “cures” and medical disinformation at worst. They can also be discriminated against: Last year, the Department of Justice settled with Meta over allegations that the latter had violated the Fair Housing Act in part by allowing advertisers to not show housing ads to users who Facebook’s data-collection machine had inferred were interested in topics including “service animal” and “accessibility.”

Recent settlements have demonstrated an increased interest on the part of the FTC in regulating health privacy. But that and most of its other actions are carried out via a consent order, or a settlement approved by the commissioners, whereby the two parties resolve a dispute without an admission of wrongdoing (as happened with both Flo and BetterHelp). If a company appears to have violated the terms of a consent decree, a federal court can then investigate. But the agency has limited enforcement resources. In 2022, a coalition of privacy and consumer advocates wrote a letter to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate appropriations committees, urging them to increase funding for the FTC. The commission requested $490 million for fiscal year 2023, up from the $376.5 million it received in 2022, pointing to stark increases in consumer complaints and reported consumer fraud. It ultimately received $430 million.

For its part, the FTC has created an interactive tool to help app creators be in compliance with the law as they build and market their products. And HHS’s Office for Civil Rights has provided guidance on the uses of online tracking technologies by HIPAA-covered entities and business associates. This may head off privacy issues before apps cause harm.

The nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology has also put together its own proposed consumer-privacy framework in response to the fact that “extraordinary amounts of information reflecting mental and physical well-being are created and held by entities that are not bound by HIPAA obligations.” The framework emphasizes appropriate limits on the collection, disclosure, and use of health data as well as information that can be used to make inferences about a person’s physical or mental health. It moves the burden off consumers, patients, and users—who, it notes, may already be burdened with their health condition—and places it on the entities collecting, sharing, and using the information. It also limits data use to purposes that people anticipate and want, not ones they don’t know about or aren’t comfortable with.

But that framework is, for the time being, just a suggestion. In the absence of comprehensive federal data-privacy legislation that accounts for all the new technologies that now have access to our health information, our most intimate data are governed by a ragged patchwork of laws and regulations that are no match for the enormous companies that benefit from having access to those data—or for the very real needs that drive patients to use these tools in the first place. Patients enter their symptoms into search engines or fill out online questionnaires or download apps not because they don’t care, or aren’t thinking, about their privacy. They do these things because they want help, and the internet is the easiest or fastest or cheapest or most natural place to go for it. Tech-enabled health products provide an undeniable service, especially in a country plagued by health disparities. They’re unlikely to get less popular. It’s time the laws designed to protect our health information caught up.

President Joe Biden’s administration moved boldly yesterday to solve his most immediate immigration problem at the risk of creating a new target for Republicans who accuse him of surrendering control of the border.

Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security extended legal protections under a federal program called Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that will allow as many as 472,000 migrants from Venezuela to live and work legally in the United States for at least the next 18 months.

With that decision, the administration aligned with the consensus among almost all the key players in the Democratic coalition about the most important thing Biden could do to help big Democratic-leaning cities facing an unprecedented flow of undocumented migrants, many of whom are from Venezuela.

[Jerusalem Demsas: How deterrence policies create border chaos]

In a series of public statements over the past few months, Democratic mayors in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and other major cities; Democrats in the House and Senate; organized labor leaders; and immigrant advocacy and civil-rights groups all urged Biden to take the step that the administration announced yesterday.

Extending TPS protections to more migrants from Venezuela “is the strongest tool in the toolbox for the administration, and the most effective way of meeting the needs of both recently arrived immigrants and the concerns of state and local officials,” Angela Kelley, a former senior adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, told me immediately after the decision was announced.

Despite the panoramic pressure from across the Democratic coalition, the administration had been hesitant to pursue this approach. Inside the administration, as Greg Sargent of The Washington Post first reported, some feared that providing legal protection to more Venezuelans already here would simply encourage others from the country to come. With polls showing widespread disapproval of Biden’s handling of border security, and Republicans rallying behind an array of hard-line immigration policies, the president has also appeared deeply uncomfortable focusing any attention on these issues.

But immigrant advocates watching the internal debate believe that the argument tipped because of changing conditions on the ground. The tide of migrants into Democratic-run cities has produced wrenching scenes of new arrivals sleeping in streets, homeless shelters, or police stations, and loud complaints about the impact on local budgets, especially from New York City Mayor Eric Adams. And that has created a situation where not acting to relieve the strain on these cities has become an even a greater political risk to Biden than acting.

“No matter what, Republicans will accuse the administration of being for open borders,” Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist working with immigrant-advocacy groups, told me. “That is going to happen anyway. So why not get the political benefit of a good policy that so many of our leaders are clamoring for and need for their cities?”

Still, it was revealing that the administration paired the announcement about protecting more Venezuelan migrants through TPS with a variety of new proposals to toughen enforcement against undocumented migrants. That reflects the administration’s sensitivity to the relentless Republican accusation—which polls show has resonated with many voters—that Biden has lost control of the southern border.

As Biden’s administration tries to set immigration policy, it has been forced to pick through a minefield of demands from its allies, attacks from Republicans, and lawsuits from all sides.

Compounding all of these domestic challenges is a mass migration of millions of people fleeing crime, poverty, and political and social disorder in troubled countries throughout the Americas. In Venezuela alone, political and social chaos has driven more than 7 million residents to seek new homes elsewhere in the Americas, according to a United Nations estimate. “Venezuela is a displacement crisis approximately the size of Syria and Ukraine, but it gets, like, one one-thousandth of the attention,” Todd Schulte, the president and executive director of FWD.us, an immigration-advocacy group, told me. “It’s a huge situation.”

Most of these displaced people from nations across Central and South America have sought to settle in neighboring countries, but enough have come to the U.S. to overwhelm the nation’s already strained asylum system. The system is so backlogged that experts say it typically takes four to six years for asylum seekers to have their cases adjudicated. If the time required to resolve an asylum case “slips into years, it does become a magnet,” encouraging migrants to come to the border because the law allows them to stay and work in the U.S. while their claims are adjudicated, says Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a center-left think tank.

Former President Donald Trump dealt with this pressure by severely restricting access to asylum. He adopted policies that required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their cases were decided; that barred anyone from claiming asylum if they did not first seek it from countries between their homeland and the U.S. border; and, in the case of the pandemic-era Title 42 rule, that turned away virtually all undocumented migrants as threats to public health.

Fitfully, Biden has undone most of Trump’s approach. (The Migration Policy Institute calculates that the Biden administration has taken 109 separate administrative actions to reverse Trump policies.) And Biden and Mayorkas, with little fanfare, have implemented a robust suite of policies to expand routes for legal immigration, while announcing stiff penalties for those who try to enter the country illegally. “Our overall approach is to build lawful pathways for people to come to the United States, and to impose tougher consequences on those who choose not to use those pathways,” Mayorkas said when he announced the end of Trump’s Title 42 policy.

Immigration advocates generally express confidence that over time this carrot-and-stick approach will stabilize the southern border, at least somewhat. But it hasn’t yet stanched the flow of new arrivals claiming asylum. Some of those asylum seekers have made their way on their own to cities beyond the border. At least 20,000 more have been bused to such places by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, hoping to produce exactly the sort of tensions in Democratic circles that have erupted in recent weeks.

[Ronald Brownstein: The GOP’s lurch toward extremism comes for the border]

However they have arrived, this surge of asylum seekers has created enormous logistical and fiscal challenges in several of these cities. Adams has been the most insistent in demanding more help from the federal government. But he’s far from the only Democratic mayor who has been frustrated by the growing numbers and impatient for the Biden administration to provide more help.

The top demand from mayors and other Democratic interests has been for Biden to use executive authority to allow more of the new arrivals to work. “There is one solution to this problem: It’s not green cards; it’s not citizenship. It’s work permits,” Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney told me earlier this week. “All these people need work. They wouldn’t be in [a] hotel, they wouldn’t be lying on streets, if they can go to work.”

That answer seems especially obvious, Kenney continued, because “we have so many industries and so many areas of our commerce that need workers: hotels, restaurants. Let them go to work. [Then] they will get their own apartments, they will take care of their own kids.”

The obstacle to this solution is that under federal law, asylum seekers cannot apply for authorization to work until 150 days after they filed their asylum claim, and the government cannot approve their request for at least another 30 days. In practice, it usually takes several months longer than that to receive approval. The Biden administration is working with cities to encourage asylum seekers to quickly file work applications, but the process cannot be streamlined much, immigration experts say. Work authorization through the asylum process “is just not designed to get people a work permit,” Todd Schulte said. “They are technically eligible, but the process is way too hard.”

The inability to generate work permits for large numbers of people through the asylum process has spurred Democratic interest in using the Temporary Protected Status program as an alternative. It allows the federal government to authorize immigrants from countries facing natural disasters, civil war, or other kinds of political and social disorder to legally remain and work in the U.S. for up to 18 months at a time, and to renew those protections indefinitely. That status isn’t provided to everyone who has arrived from a particular country; it’s available only to people living in the U.S. as of the date the federal government grants the TPS designation. For instance, the TPS protection to legally stay in the U.S. is available to people from El Salvador only if they were here by February 2001, after two major earthquakes there.

The program was not nearly as controversial as other elements of immigration law, at least until Trump took office. As part of his overall offensive against immigration, Trump sought to rescind TPS status for six countries, including Haiti, Honduras, and El Salvador. But Trump was mostly blocked by lawsuits and Biden has reversed all those decisions. Biden has also granted TPS status to migrants from several additional countries, including about 200,000 people who had arrived in the U.S. from Venezuela as of March 2021.

The demand from Democrats has been that Biden extend that protection, in a move called “redesignation,” to migrants who have arrived from Venezuela since then. Many Democrats have urged him to also update the protections for people from Nicaragua and other countries: A coalition of big-city mayors wrote Biden this summer asking him to extend existing TPS protections or create new ones for 11 countries.

Following all of Biden’s actions, more immigrants than ever are covered under TPS. But the administration never appeared likely to agree to anything as sweeping as the mayors requested. Yesterday, the administration agreed to extend TPS status only to migrants from Venezuela who had arrived in the U.S. as of July 31. It did not expand TPS protections for any other countries. Angela Kelley, now the chief policy adviser for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that providing more TPS coverage to any country beyond Venezuela would be “a bigger piece to chew than the administration is able to swallow now.”

But advocates considered the decision to cover more Venezuelans under TPS the most important action the administration could take to stabilize the situation in New York and other cities. The reason is that so many of the latest arrivals come from there; one recent survey found that two-thirds of the migrants in New York City shelters arrived from that country. Even including this huge migrant population in TPS won’t allow them to instantly work. The administration will also need to streamline regulations that slow work authorization, experts say. But eventually, Kelley says, allowing more Venezuelans to legally work through TPS would “alleviate a lot of the pressure in New York” and other cities.

Kerri Talbot, the executive director of the Immigration Hub, an advocacy group, points out the TPS program is actually a better fit for Venezuelans, because the regular asylum process requires applicants to demonstrate that they fear persecution because of their race, religion, or political opinion, which is not the fundamental problem in Venezuela. “Most of them do not have good cases for asylum,” she said of the new arrivals from Venezuela. “They need TPS, because that’s what TPS is designed for: Their country is not functional.”

Biden’s authority to expand TPS to more Venezuelans is likely to stand up in court against the nearly inevitable legal challenges from Republicans. But extending legal protection to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans still presents a tempting political target for the GOP. Conservatives such as Elizabeth Jacobs, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, have argued that providing work authorizations for more undocumented migrants would only exacerbate the long-term problem by encouraging more to follow them, in the hope of obtaining such permission as well.

Immigration advocates note that multiple academic studies show that TPS protections have not in fact inspired a surge of further migrants from the affected countries. Some in the administration remain uncertain about this, but any worries about possibly creating more long-term problems at the border were clearly outweighed by more immediate challenges in New York and other cities.

If Biden did nothing, he faced the prospect of escalating criticism from Adams and maybe other Democratic mayors and governors that would likely make its way next year into Republican ads denouncing the president’s record on immigration. That risk, many of those watching the debate believe, helped persuade the administration to accept the demands from so many of Biden’s allies to extend TPS to more undocumented migrants, at least from Venezuela. But that doesn’t mean he’ll be happy about this or any of the other difficult choices he faces at the border.

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This month has been a messy one for the Biden family. Last week, Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was indicted on three charges of gun-related crimes, including lying about drug use while purchasing a firearm and illegally possessing a weapon (he reportedly plans to plead not guilty). On Monday, he sued the Internal Revenue Service, accusing the agency of violating his privacy by disclosing details about his taxes. And earlier today, Attorney General Merrick Garland defended himself against House Republicans, who have accused him of trying to protect the Bidens in the investigation into Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukraine. I spoke with David A. Graham, who covers politics for The Atlantic, about how Donald Trump and House Republicans are seeking to use Hunter’s troubles against his father.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Radical vegans are trying to change your diet. Why Republicans can’t keep the government open The killing in Canada shows what India has become. Dogs need understanding, not dominance.

Personally Painful

Lora Kelley: What about Hunter Biden makes him such a potent target for people who seek to undermine or embarrass Joe Biden?

David A. Graham: We know a lot about his personal peccadilloes, and he has clearly been involved in some shady things. It seems likely that he violated gun laws, and it seems likely he violated tax laws, since he was ready to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses. His business work, as Sarah Chayes has described in The Atlantic, may or may not be illegal, but it seems clearly unethical.

All of those things make Hunter Biden a good target, and they are a way to tie him to his father and spread a miasma of wrongdoing around the Biden family. That’s helpful from a partisan standpoint if you’re trying to hurt Biden, and it’s also helpful for Donald Trump. Trump himself is under indictment. We saw years of Trump’s misconduct, and there are also questions about his own family’s ethics and business. This allows Trump to say, Well, look, the other side has this too. Trump has tried repeatedly over the years to weaponize Hunter’s problems against Joe Biden, and that’s what led to his first impeachment.

Lora: Do Hunter’s business dealings have anything to do with his dad?

David: So far, the evidence that has turned up suggests: No. The closest thing that anyone seems to have tying the president to Hunter’s business is that they regularly spoke on the phone while Hunter was speaking with business partners. It’s not clear that the president knew what was going on, and there’s no evidence that he profited from this.

Lora: What did you make of the announcement earlier this week that Hunter Biden is suing the IRS for privacy violations?

David: His lawyers are clearly taking a more aggressive approach than they have in the past. They tried to work with prosecutors to make this go away quietly. It didn’t work; his plea deal last month collapsed under questioning from a judge.

Now we’re seeing him switch legal teams. His team is going after House Republicans; they’re going after the IRS. They’re trying to take the offensive, and that might be legally effective. But when Hunter does things like file lawsuits, it just puts him more in the spotlight. I don’t know that it’s good for his father or for the Democratic Party.

Lora: How has Hunter been affected by both sides of the nepotism coin?

David: He’s become prominent and wealthy through his family, but it also means that he’s going to attract greater scrutiny. He went to work for a bank in Delaware that had strong political ties to his father. He was a lobbyist in Washington. And, most notably, he had this high-paying gig with Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, even though he had no expertise in Ukraine, and no expertise in natural gas. He’s benefited from his ties to his father, and he’s made a lot of money. That’s not illegal. People have been doing that for as long as there has been politics. But it’s unsavory.

On the flip side, in these legal proceedings, you have legal experts looking at the charges against Hunter and saying: These are just not crimes that are typically charged in this way. They say it looks like Hunter is getting closer scrutiny than a normal person might.

Lora: How, if at all, do you think that Hunter’s legal troubles will affect Joe Biden’s reputation and reelection campaign?

David: He’s certainly a distraction. It’s hard to say how much of a liability he is. We have to see where these investigations go. So far, House Republican efforts to turn up something that ties this to wrongdoing by Joe Biden have come up short in embarrassing ways. They keep contradicting themselves, and have lost a potential witness. I don’t know how closely they’ll manage to tie this to Biden or to create an impression that he is linked to corruption. But if you’re running for president, you don’t want your son to be facing criminal charges.

Lora: Is there any way this situation could help Joe Biden politically, or help him seem like a sympathetic figure?

David: This is clearly personally painful to Joe Biden, who loves his son dearly, which is one reason why he has not cut him loose. Biden’s personal story—the car crash that killed his first wife and daughter and injured Hunter and his other son, Beau, and later Beau’s death—is already a part of what people see about him. There are people who admire the fact that he is sticking by his troubled son. There are people who will say: Every family has a kid who struggles. Especially with addiction, there’s a lot of sympathy there.

That’s less the case when you get into business corruption. And that’s why the stakes are higher for the impeachment and for the business allegations. But there’s also no real evidence of corruption so far. It’s murky.

Related:

The truth about Hunter Biden’s indictment Not illegal, but clearly wrong

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