The year was 2020, and schools abruptly closed. Kids Zoomed into kindergarten, and someone had to supervise them. Disproportionately, that task fell—because of course it did—to moms. So out of necessity, the moms quit their jobs. Thus began America’s first female recession.

Beyond the immediate trauma of job and income loss, economists worried that this “she-cession” would scar female employment for the long term. The thinking was that once women stepped back from the workforce, reentering would be difficult or impossible.

But that appears not to have happened. Recently, the she-cession largely ended—or, at least, women’s employment has seen a robust recov-her-y. (Sorry.) In fact, remote work appears to have allowed mothers of young children in particular to join the workforce in record numbers.

[Read: The professional women who are leaning out]

Nearly as many women are working now as before the coronavirus pandemic. Women’s labor-force participation was 57.9 percent in February 2020 and 57.7 percent last month. So-called prime-age women—those from 25 to 54—are working in even greater numbers: More than 77.6 percent of them are in the workforce, compared with 77 percent before the pandemic.

Perhaps more surprising is the group of women whose employment has rebounded the most: Women whose youngest child is under 5 are “powering the pack’s upward trajectory,” a recent Brookings Institution report found. In particular, mothers of young kids who are highly educated, married, and/or foreign-born are working in greater numbers today than before the pandemic. “Labor force participation among mothers with young children who have at least a bachelor’s degree has exceeded its pre-pandemic peak,” the Brookings-report authors, Lauren Bauer and Sarah Yu Wang, write.

The rebound has been so dramatic that, when I emailed Misty Heggeness, an economist at the University of Kansas, she emailed back, “What she-cession.” To be sure, women’s employment did suffer in the pandemic’s early days: Women’s jobs accounted for 55 percent of the 20.5 million jobs that were lost in April 2020, in part because service workers, who are disproportionately female, were laid off in large numbers, and in part because the closure of schools and child care meant that many women stopped working. The pandemic quickly wiped out nearly a decade’s worth of progress in women’s employment.

Now, though, we’re coming off of “hot mom summer,” as Heggeness put it—by which she means high levels of female employment, of course. Several things seem to be driving women back to the workforce. Inflation is high, and student-loan payments are restarting, so many families simply need more money to cover expenses. The labor market is tight, so many women can find jobs with relative ease and negotiate for terms that feel favorable. Child care has finally mostly reopened, so women who want to work are no longer stuck without someone to watch their kids. Also, the pandemic acted as a stress test of sorts, proving to families that they can do hard things. The thinking among many women, as Brookings’s Bauer told me, was something like “the pandemic sucked, but now I can get through anything.”

Another big factor seems to be remote work. Bauer and Wang point out that mothers of young children who have a bachelor’s degree or higher are the most likely group of workers to be teleworking, and married mothers of young kids are among the likeliest groups to be teleworking. These are also the groups that have made the biggest gains in labor-force participation since the pandemic: More than 40 percent of college-educated mothers with young kids teleworked at least one day a week in the early part of this year. “That is so high,” Bauer told me.

Several other data points prop up the idea that remote work is helping women rejoin the workforce. Women’s employment rebounded especially quickly in New England and California, where many jobs can be performed remotely, compared with the Midwest, where in-person manufacturing work is more common. Nearly a dozen women interviewed by The Washington Post recently said that a combination of rising prices and workplace flexibility had prompted them to get jobs.

Across Europe and America, work-from-home days have quadrupled since the start of the pandemic, and 35 percent of Americans who can do their jobs from home now work remotely all the time, compared with 7 percent before the pandemic. Last year, women were more likely to work remotely than men were, and women are generally more interested in remote jobs than men are. Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter’s chief economist, told me that surveys the job site conducted show that 54 percent of men and 69 percent of women are interested in remote jobs. “Work-from-home is by far the largest change to have happened in the labor market,” Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist who studies remote work, told me.

About 90 percent of the candidate pool at the staffing firm FlexProfessionals is female, says Maura Connelly, the company’s senior recruiting manager. Their preference for remote work is overwhelming: Though some are interested in hybrid work, “nobody I talked to wants to be on site five days a week,” she told me. “Nobody.” The candidates say they want to be able to meet the bus when their kid gets home, or drive the occasional carpool. Connelly says many women might have returned to work recently because the pandemic showed them that remote work is out there—that it exists, and that they could get those jobs.

Though families must still pay for child care when parents work remotely, remote work allows them to pay for less child care. Instead of leaving the house for your commute at 7 and returning at 6, you’re rolling to your home office at 8 and “returning” from it at 5. That’s two fewer hours of babysitter coverage every day.

Kerri Sterowski’s son was just a few months old when the pandemic began, and working full-time didn’t feel safe or practical for her. Instead, she helped watch a friend’s child and did some part-time work remotely. She returned to full-time work in August 2022 because she lives in expensive Northern Virginia and her family was feeling financially pinched. Still, she turned down jobs that would have required her to be in the office most of the time, because she wanted to be around in case her son was sick or had a half-day at school. “If I were to have a job in person, then I would be missing out on a lot of my son’s life,” she told me.

Remote work might also have encouraged new mothers who would otherwise have left the workforce to instead stay in. Rather than see themselves trapped in an office all day, they might have figured out that they can breastfeed around Zoom meetings and knock out memos at naptime. After Mozi Nolte’s daughter was born in October 2020, she and her husband spent two years taking care of her at home, without paid child care, while working full-time. She was worried about the infection risk, and she also wanted to save $2,000 a month on day care. It was hard: Her bosses were very understanding, but there were times when she was on a conference call, changing a diaper, and pumping at the same time.

Now Nolte has child care, but she would never consider a job that requires five days a week in the office. She goes in two days a week, but it takes her an hour and a half each way to get to her office. Doing that every day, “it’s three hours when I could pick my daughter up and do laundry, play with her. The quality of life is just not worth it,” she says.

[Read: The other work remote workers get done]

What’s less clear is whether remote work will continue to boom, and women’s employment along with it. There are currently not as many remote-job openings as there are job seekers who want to work remotely. But Bloom believes the work-from-home trend is shaped like a Nike swoosh: There was an initial post-pandemic drop as even Zoom called some of its employees back to the office a few days a week, and now we’re in the fat, flat part of the swoosh. But soon, he thinks, the trend will be on its way up again as technology improves. Beyond videoconferencing, he envisions a future of virtual reality and holograms that would allow you to interact with colleagues in 3-D. What’s more, newer companies that have always been remote will expand and inspire others, he believes, so the norm may shift away from big offices.

Working remotely has some downsides: A spread-out workforce makes mentorship more difficult, so if women are flocking to remote work, they might lose out on valuable networking and learning opportunities. And it’s not clear that remote work is sufficient to keep women in the labor force. Pandemic-era child-care funding is set to end this month, which might cause some day-care centers to close and some parents to step back from work again. You might not need as much child care when you work remotely, but you do need some.

If the remote-work trend continues, though, and women’s employment stays high, it might mean that in the future, women will face less of a “motherhood penalty” for taking time off when their children are born. “If there are more women who can stay on the track that they were [on] prior to having a baby, or closer to an ideal track,” Bauer said, “then that sets their whole family and her on a different trajectory in terms of her participation, earnings, and career ladder.” Far from a she-cession, we might see a future of prosp-her-ity.

Suddenly, it just tumbled out: "Honestly, every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber for what you say."

That was former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s rebuke of businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, easily the best line of Wednesday night’s messy and awkward GOP primary debate. Ramaswamy, for his part, produced his own meme-worthy quote during a heated exchange with Senator Tim Scott: “Thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting.”

Such was the onstage energy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum: Chaotic, sloppy, largely substance-free. Seven candidates desperately fought for fresh relevance; none of them came away with it. Rather than pitching themselves as the candidate who can beat former President Donald Trump, these Republicans seemed to be operating most of the time in an alternate universe, in which Trump was absent not just from the stage, but from the race.

Eight years ago, so many candidates were vying for the Republican nomination that the party took to splitting primary debates into two sessions: the main event and the undercard. The latter contest was mocked as the “kids’ table” debate. So far this time around, there’s only one unified debate night. Nevertheless, Trump has such a commanding lead over his challengers that, for the second debate in a row, he hasn’t even bothered to show up and speak. Voters have no reason to believe he’ll be at any of the other contests. Trump counter-programmed last month’s Fox News debate by sitting down for a sympathetic interview with the former Fox star Tucker Carlson. On Wednesday, Trump delivered a speech in Michigan, where a powerful union—United Auto Workers—are in the second week of a strike.

All seven candidates who qualified for the debate—individuals with honorifics such as “governor,” “senator,” and “former vice president”—spent the evening arguing at the kids’ table. Barring some sort of medical emergency, Trump seems like the inevitable 2024 GOP nominee. As Michael Scherer of The Washington Post pointed out on X (formerly Twitter), the candidates on stage were collectively polling at 36 percent. If they were to join forces and become one person (think seven Republicans stacked in a trenchcoat), Trump would still be winning by 20 percent.

[Read: A parade of listless vessels ]

How many other ways can you say this? The race is effectively over. So what, then, were they all doing there? A cynic would tell you they’re merely running for second place—for a shot at a cabinet position, maybe even VP.

One candidate decidedly not running for vice president is Former Vice President Mike Pence, who has taken to (gently) attacking his old boss. Nor does former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie seem to want a sidekick or administration gig. Christie has staked his entire campaign on calling out Trump’s sins, and, so far, it’s not working. Earlier on Wednesday, Christie shared a photo of himself at a recent NFL game, with a cringeworthy nod to new Kansas City Chiefs fan Taylor Swift: “I was just a guy in the bleachers on Sunday... but after tonight, Trump will know we are never ever getting back together.”

At the debate, Christie stared directly into the camera like Macho Man Randy Savage, pointer finger and all, to deliver what amounted to a professional wrestling taunt. “Donald, I know you’re watching. You can’t help yourself!” Christie began. “You’re not here tonight because you’re afraid of being on this stage and defending your record. You’re ducking these things, and let me tell you what’s going to happen.”

[Here it comes]

“You keep doing that, no one up here’s gonna call you Donald Trump anymore. We’re gonna call you Donald Duck.”

“Alright,” moderator Dana Perino said.

The crowd appeared to laugh, cheer, boo, and groan.

The auto-worker’s strike, and criticisms of the larger American economy, received significant attention at the debate. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum laid the strike “at Joe Biden’s feet.” Pence came ready with a zinger: “Joe Biden doesn’t belong on a picket line, he belongs on the unemployment line.” (Another Pence joke about sleeping with a teacher—his wife—didn’t quite land.)

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once seen as Trump’s closest rival, stood center stage but spent most of the night struggling to connect as all the candidates intermittently talked over one another. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, perhaps trying to fight back against those who claim he lacks charisma, frequently went on the attack, most notably against Ramaswamy, who, in the previous debate, claimed his rivals were “bought and paid for.” Later, Scott attacked DeSantis for his past controversial comments about race: “There is not a redeeming quality in slavery,” Scott said. But he followed that up a moment later with another sound byte: “America is not a racist country.”

[Read: The GOP primary is a field of broken dreams]

However earnest and honest Scott’s message may be, it was impossible to hear his words without thinking of the man he’s running against. So again: What was everyone doing Wednesday night? In an alternate reality, a red-state candidate like Scott, Haley, or Burgum might cruise to the GOP nomination. In a way, Fox Business, itself, seemed to broadcast tonight’s proceedings in that strange other world. The network kept playing retro Reagan clips as the debate came in and out of commercial breaks. And those ads? One featured South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—not a 2024 presidential candidate, but certainly a potential VP pick—making a pitch for people to move to her sparsely populated state. Another ad argued that the Biden administration’s plan to ban menthol cigarettes would be a boon to Mexican drug cartels. What?

It was all a sideshow. Trump’s team seemed to know it, too. With just over five minutes left in the debate, the former president’s campaign blasted out a statement to reporters from a senior advisor: “Tonight’s GOP debate was as boring and inconsequential as the first debate, and nothing that was said will change the dynamics of the primary contest being dominated by President Trump.” For all of Trump’s lies, he and his acolytes can occasionally be excruciatingly honest.

My daughter needs a purple wig for school, and she needs it by this Friday. When I got the news Monday night, I had just one reliable option—Amazon—and the rancid-tapioca feeling that comes with using it. The problem isn’t just the company’s rough track record with worker safety, or its devastating effect on brick-and-mortar stores, or knowing that I was about to toss more data into its insatiable maw. Despite all that, I’m still a Prime subscriber.

Lately, though, shopping on Amazon has become an exercise in frustration. My purple-wig search started with sponsored listings from unfamiliar brands with just a small disclosure noting that they’re advertisements. The organic results eventually do show up, offering hairpieces from brands with names such as DAOTS, MorvallyDirect, and eNilecor. Scroll only a little deeper into the sea of indigo fibers, and the sponsored items resume.

What happened to Amazon? The company no longer excels at the thing it’s supposed to be best at: shopping. Its unparalleled convenience and cost helped turn it into an e-commerce juggernaut, one that now faces an antitrust lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission over alleged anticompetitive practices. Now around every corner lies a brand you’ve never heard of, selling a product you’re not sure about. Good deals on name brands are harder to come by. Amazon’s dominance has also transformed it into a different kind of company. Along the way, the famously customer-obsessed company has lost track of what its customers actually want.

Start with the ads. At the top of the results for purple wig, I hit a block of stand-alone results, a sponsored storefront from an unfamiliar brand named BERON. That’s followed by four paid results from unidentified companies, followed by, finally, organic results. Even then, those recommendations are based in part on customer reviews, which vendors have notoriously gamed.

It’s the same mess whether you’re looking for wigs or phone accessories or spatulas or, as the FTC calls out, pens. Hunting for a product on Amazon has become unhelpful in the same way that Google search has become unhelpful, placing sponsored results at the top of the page. As The Washington Post reported last fall, the e-commerce research firm Profitero found that across 70 search terms, Amazon displayed nine sponsored ads on the first results page alone, more than twice the average at Walmart’s site.

[Read: The death of the smart shopper]

Amazon feels less like an online Target or Best Buy than it does Big Billy’s Bargain Bin, dollar-store trinkets sold for name-brand prices. The problem isn’t that it lacks what you want, but that it offers infinite permutations of often unknowable quality. Many of the brand-name items aren’t any cheaper on Amazon than they are elsewhere.

The decline of Amazon is closely tied not just to its size but to how it has chosen to grow. Amazon is now less of a store than a mall, or maybe a sprawling bazaar. Last year, nearly 60 percent of units sold on Amazon came from third-party sellers rather than from Amazon itself. Want to set up a booth? There’s a nominal monthly fee to reserve the space. From there, though, the charges add up quickly, according to a report from the ecommerce-intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.

Amazon takes a cut of every transaction, typically about 15 percent. For front-and-center placement, you’d better pay for one of those sponsored slots. According to the FTC, advertised products are 46 times more likely to get clicks. Call it another 15 percent of revenue. Oh, and if you want to qualify for Prime—and if you want any shot of making a sale, you do want to qualify for Prime—you’ll need to use Amazon to fulfill your orders. That’s another 20 to 35 percent off the top. All of a sudden, half of your revenue is in Amazon’s coffers.

Amazon itself has reported that all of those fees amount to a big business; the revenue generated from them has tripled since 2017, totaling $117.7 billion last year alone. But although it’s been great for Amazon, it hasn’t been great for consumers. When sellers are nickeled-and-dimed, not a lot of savings are left to pass on to you.

Amazon denies that it squeezes its third-party sellers at the expense of shoppers. “The FTC’s allegation that we somehow force sellers to use our optional services is simply not true,” David Zapolsky, Amazon’s general counsel, wrote in a lengthy response to the charges. “Sellers have choices, and many succeed in our store using other logistics services or choosing not to advertise with us.”

That is technically true, but in a world where so much of online retail runs through Amazon, choice is an illusion. Dare to offer a cheaper product elsewhere online, and Amazon might bury your listing on its platform. A heavily redacted portion of the FTC suit claims that the company “deploys a sophisticated surveillance network of web crawlers that constantly monitor the internet” for such sellers. (In his response, Zapolsky says that the FTC “has it backwards” and that the company doesn’t “highlight or promote offers that are not competitively priced.”)

Of course this is where Amazon wound up. The company spent years sacrificing profit for scale, until it had so many customers that sellers couldn’t ignore it. Now that it extracts billions each month from those sellers, it can afford to ignore those customers—or at least prioritize them less. Amazon gets paid by all of its vendors, no matter which products go in our cart.

Shoppers are not privy to any of these machinations while browsing Amazon. We can’t know which third-party sellers have been banished to the shadow realm, or how tightly their margins are squeezed. Even knowing this might not get us far, considering how entrenched Amazon is now in American life. On Monday, I went ahead and bought the Linfairy Kids Child Purple Dye Wig Halloween Costume Cosplay Wave Wig, for $19.88 plus tax. My daughter liked the curls. It’ll be here by Thursday, which is no small relief. After all, it was my only option.

Eugene Stoner was an unassuming family man in postwar America. He wore glasses and had a fondness for bow ties. His figure was slightly round; his colleagues called him a teddy bear. He refused to swear or spank his children. “Boy, that frosts me,” he’d say when he was upset. He liked to tweak self-important people with a dry sense of humor. He hated attention.

A lifelong tinkerer and a Marine veteran, he was also fascinated by the question of how to make guns shoot better. When an idea came to him, he scribbled it down on anything he could find—a pad of paper, a napkin, the tablecloth at a restaurant. He had no formal training in engineering or in firearms design. Yet it was inside Stoner’s detached garage in Los Angeles, during the 1950s, that the amateur gunsmith, surrounded by piles of sketches and prototypes, came up with the idea for a rifle that would change American history.

Today, this weapon is the most popular rifle in America—and the most hated. The AR-15 is a symbol of Second Amendment rights to millions of Americans and an emblem of a violent gun culture run amok to millions more. With a lightweight frame and an internal gas system, the military version can be fired as an automatic, unleashing a stream of bullets from a single pull of the trigger, or as a semiautomatic, allowing for one shot per trigger pull. The civilian semiautomatic version is now the best-selling rifle in the country; more than 20 million such guns are in civilian hands. And it is a weapon of choice for mass shooters—including the white supremacist who killed three Black people last month at a store in Jacksonville, Florida, armed with a handgun and an AR-15-style rifle emblazoned with a swastika.

[Juliette Kayyem: The Jacksonville killer wanted everyone to know his message of hate]

The consequences of the AR-15’s creation have coursed through our society and politics for generations in ways that Stoner never foresaw. He created the gun with a simple goal: to build a better rifle for the U.S. military and its allies during the Cold War. He wanted to protect the country he loved. Now his invention is fused in Americans’ minds with the horror of people going about their daily tasks—at school, the movies, the store, a concert—and suddenly finding themselves running for their lives. Few of the participants in America’s perpetual gun debate know the true, complicated history of this consequential creation—or of the man behind it. The saga of the AR-15 is a story of how quickly an invention can leave the control of the inventor, how it can be used in ways the creator never imagined.

We interviewed Stoner’s family members and close colleagues about his views of his gun. They gave us insight into what the inventor might have thought about the way the AR-15 is being used today, though we’ll never know for sure; Stoner died before mass shootings with AR-15s were common. Later in life, after years of working in the gun industry, he was asked about his career in an interview for the Smithsonian Institution. “It was kind of a hobby that got out of hand,” he said.

As a boy growing up in the Coachella Valley, in Southern California, in the 1920s and ’30s, Stoner was fascinated by explosions. Before the age of 10, he had designed rockets and rudimentary weapons. On one occasion, he begged a friend’s father for a metal pipe and the local drugstore owner for magnesium. Stoner built a primitive cannon and pointed it at a house across the street, but before he could open fire, his father ran to stop him. “I told you to do this at the city dump,” scolded Lloyd Stoner, a veteran of the Great War who had moved the family to California from the farmlands of Indiana in search of a better life.

Eugene Stoner never went to college. He joined the Marines during World War II and was tasked with repairing weapons on aircraft in the Philippines. When he came home, he brought his wife, Jean, an adventurous woman who idolized Amelia Earhart, a special present: gun parts from Asia that he assembled into a rifle. She loved it. The couple often went hunting and shooting together. “He was a very quiet person,” Jean said in an unpublished interview that the Stoner family shared with us. “But if you talked about guns, cars, or planes, he’d talk all night.”

After the war, Stoner got a job as a machinist making aircraft parts. Every day after he came home, he would eat the dinner that Jean had prepared (beef Stroganoff was his favorite), take a quick nap, and then walk to the garage to work on his gun designs. Like other hobbyist inventors of the era, he believed he could move the country forward by the power of his ingenuity. “We were like the 1950s family. It was California. It was booming after the war,” his daughter Susan told us. “I knew from my dad—I felt from him—the future was wide open.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: The California dream is dying]

Stoner had the ability, common among inventors, to imagine engineering solutions that others stuck in the dogmas of the field could not. For centuries, gunmakers had built their rifles out of wood and steel, which made them very heavy. At the time, the U.S. military was searching for a lighter rifle, and Stoner wondered if he could build one using modern materials. If humans were soaring into the atmosphere in airplanes made of aluminum, he figured, couldn’t the lightweight metal tolerate the pressures of a gun firing? By the early 1950s, he had figured out how to replace one of the heaviest steel components of a rifle with aluminum. Then he devised a way of using the force of the gas from the exploding gunpowder to move parts inside the gun so that they ejected spent casings and loaded new rounds. This allowed him to eliminate other, cumbersome metal parts that had been used in the past. The first time he tried firing a gun using this new system, it blew hot gas into his face. But he perfected the design and eventually received a patent for it.

In 1954, Stoner got the opportunity to bring his radical gun concepts to life. That year, as Stoner later recalled, he had a chance encounter at a local gun range with George Sullivan. A relentless pitchman, Sullivan was then the head of a Hollywood start-up called ArmaLite, a subsidiary of Fairchild Engine and Aircraft Corporation whose mission was to design futuristic weapons. Impressed with the homemade guns Stoner was shooting, Sullivan hired him as ArmaLite’s chief engineer.

The small yet brilliant ArmaLite team worked at a fevered pace, designing a series of lightweight guns made of aluminum and plastic. Most went nowhere. Nevertheless, the ambitious Sullivan set the firm’s sights on an improbable target: the U.S Army’s standard-issue rifle. The Eisenhower administration’s “New Look”—an effort to rein in Pentagon spending and shift it toward newer technologies—opened the door for private companies to get big military contracts. The outsiders from Hollywood decided to take on Springfield Armory, the military’s citadel of gun making in western Massachusetts that had equipped American soldiers since the Revolutionary War. Springfield’s own efforts to develop a new rifle had resulted in a heavy wood-and-steel model that wasn’t much more advanced than the M1 Garand used by GIs in World War II.

Eugene Stoner, wearing his trademark bow tie, holds his creation the AR-10. The AR-15 was a scaled-down version of this gun. (Photograph courtesy of Susan Kleinpell via Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

ArmaLite’s first serious attempt at a rapid-fire rifle made of plastic and aluminum was the AR-10—AR for ArmaLite or ArmaLite Research (accounts differ), and 10 because the weapon was the company’s tenth creation. The rifle combined the efficient internal gas system Stoner had devised in his garage and lightweight modern materials with a design that made the gun easy to shoot and keep on target. In December 1956, Time heralded the AR-10 as a potential savior for the bumbling U.S. military and listed Sullivan as the gun’s inventor, a claim that infuriated Stoner’s wife. Sullivan had also meddled with the design, insisting that more aluminum be used in making the gun’s barrel, a move Stoner resisted. During military trials, the AR-10 fared poorly. At one point, a bullet erupted from the side of the gun’s barrel, just missing the hand of the soldier firing the weapon—and seemingly dooming ArmaLite’s chances of landing a military contract.

But within the Pentagon, a cabal of high-ranking officers led by General Willard Wyman launched a back-channel effort to save Stoner’s gun. Wyman was a legendary military leader who, at age 46, had joined the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach as an assistant commander of the First Infantry Division. He knew that the United States needed better firepower as the Cold War flashed hot. America’s enemies around the globe were being armed by the Soviet Union with millions of rugged AK-47s that could spray bullets in automatic mode and were highly effective in guerilla warfare. Wyman was certain that modern wars would be won not by long-range marksmen but by soldiers firing lots of bullets in close combat. They needed a rifle that used small-caliber bullets so they could carry more ammo. And he was worried that the tradition-bound gun designers at Springfield Armory weren’t innovative enough to meet the challenge. When Wyman’s superiors brushed him off, he secretly flew to Los Angeles and stunned Stoner and his team by striding into the ArmaLite office unannounced. Wyman told Stoner that he wanted ArmaLite to build a new version of the AR-10 that fired a smaller bullet.

[James Fallows: Why the AR-15 is so lethal]

Stoner and an ArmaLite draftsman named Jim Sullivan (no relation to George) set about designing the gun. It was simple, efficient, and easy to use. Early versions of the AR-15 weighed just more than five pounds unloaded, less than the hedge trimmers and handheld vacuums of the era. With all of Stoner’s innovations—lighter material, fewer parts, and the gas system, as well as an in-line stock and a pistol grip—Jim Sullivan found shooting the prototype AR-15 to be easy, even after he flipped the selector switch to automatic. “That made it so well handling,” he told us. “If you’re firing full auto, you don’t want a gun that lifts.” Sullivan found the rifle’s recoil to be minimal. As a result, follow-up shots were quick when he switched it to semiautomatic. “It looked a little far-out for that time in history,” Stoner later said in the Smithsonian interview.

As Stoner and his backers sought to persuade the military to adopt the AR-15 in place of Springfield’s rifle, they were often met with skepticism about the gun’s small bullets. During secret military hearings about the rifle in the winter of 1958, Stoner explained to a panel of generals that the AR-15 had “a better killing cartridge with a higher velocity” than the Soviet AK-47. The generals asked Stoner how a smaller bullet fired from his rifle could do so much damage. “The wound capability is extremely high,” Stoner answered. “It blows up on contact rather than drilling a nice neat hole.” A slower .30 caliber round, similar to the one used by Springfield’s wood-and-steel rifles, “will go right through flesh,” but the faster, smaller bullet from the AR-15 “will tumble and tear,” he said.

Those in the military who wanted Springfield’s rifle to prevail tried to sabotage Stoner’s gun, rigging tests and shading reports so that it would seem like it wasn’t ready for the battlefield. During official trials in Alaska, Stoner arrived to find that the aiming sights on his guns had been replaced with bits of metal that were badly misaligned, causing soldiers to miss their targets. The guileless inventor was caught up in the murky world of Pentagon intrigue.

[From June 1981: James Fallows’s ‘M-16: A Bureaucratic Horror Story’]

Eventually, through persistence and luck, and with the help of a cast of lobbyists, spies, and analytics-driven military leaders, Stoner’s rifle would be adopted. At a key moment when it seemed that the AR-15 would be killed off by military bureaucrats, the powerful, cigar-chomping Air Force General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the U.S. bombing campaign in Japan during World War II, was asked if he wanted to shoot the gun. On July 4, 1960, at a birthday party for Richard Boutelle, the onetime head of Fairchild, the gun’s backers set up ripe watermelons as targets at Boutelle’s estate in western Maryland. LeMay fired, causing a red-and-green explosion. The general marched into the Pentagon soon after and demanded that the military purchase the weapon. It would become the standard-issue rifle—renamed the M16, for the prosaic “Model 16”—just in time for the rise of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.   

A U.S. Marine holds his M16 rifle alert after being fired on by North Vietnamese soldiers in the jungle southwest of Da Nang on April 22, 1969. (Yvon Cornu / AP)

In Eugene Stoner’s and Jim Sullivan’s minds, their work was not just intellectually engaging but also noble, a way to help America defeat the Communists. At school, in the 1950s, the Stoner children learned what to do in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. Sirens and bells went off regularly, and teachers ordered kids to hide under their desks and cover their heads, Stoner’s daughter Susan recalled. For her father, the task of making the best rifle for the U.S. military wasn’t burdened with moral quandaries. Many weapons inventors at the time thought about the technical challenges of their weapons first, and wrestled with the consequences of their creations only afterward. “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead developer of the atomic bomb, said almost a decade after bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[From February 1949: J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ‘The Open Mind’]

After Stoner created the AR-15, he continued designing guns and artillery for a variety of gunmakers. Through a company he co-founded, he worked on antiaircraft weapons for the Shah of Iran, before the 1979 revolution scuttled the deal. He helped design a handgun for the venerable gunmaker Colt that the company tried to sell on the civilian market, without much success. But none of his creations came close to the prominence of the AR-15. By the 1990s, he’d become a superstar in the gun world. Royalties from the M16 made him wealthy; Colt, which purchased the rights to the gun from ArmaLite, sold millions of the weapons to the military. Stoner was “a Second Amendment guy,” his daughter said, but he didn’t talk much about the messy world of politics, either privately or publicly. He preferred thinking about mechanisms.

Throughout his life, Stoner was troubled by losing control over the production of his most famous gun. In the 1960s, as the U.S. ramped up production of the rifle for the war in Vietnam, a Pentagon committee made changes to the gun and its ammunition without proper testing. The results on the battlefields in Vietnam were disastrous. Stories of GIs dying with jammed M16s in their hands horrified the public and led to congressional hearings. The shy inventor was called to testify and found himself thrust into an uncomfortable spotlight. Declassified military documents that we reviewed show that Stoner tried in vain to warn Pentagon officials against the changes.

Stoner paid far less attention to the semiautomatic version of his rifle that Colt began marketing to the public in the 1960s as “a superb hunting partner.” Even after Stoner’s patent expired, in 1977, the rifle was a niche product made by a handful of companies and was despised by many traditional hunters, who tended to prefer polished wood stocks and prided themselves on felling game with a single shot. But the rifle’s status shifted after 9/11. Many Americans wanted to own the gun that soldiers were carrying in the War on Terror. When the 1994 federal assault-weapons ban expired after a decade, the AR-15 became palatable for mainstream American gunmakers to sell. Soon, it was a symbol of Second Amendment rights and survivalist chic, and gun owners rushed to buy AR-15s, fearful that the government would ban them again. By the late 2000s, the gun was enjoying astounding commercial success.

AR-15 style weapons are displayed for sale at the 2022 Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, an open-carry event to celebrate the Second Amendment, in Greeley, Pennsylvania. (Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty)

When Stoner died from cancer, in 1997, obituaries hailed him as the inventor of the long-serving military rifle; they made no mention of the civilian version of the weapon. Stoner left clues about his thoughts about the gun in a long letter, sent to a Marine general, in which he outlined his wishes for his funeral and burial at Quantico National Cemetery, in Virginia. He saw the creation of a rifle for the U.S military as his greatest triumph. He didn’t mention the civilian version. The government had wanted a “small caliber/high velocity, lightweight, select fire rifle which engaged targets with salvos of rounds from one trigger pull,” Stoner wrote. “That is what I achieved for our servicemen.”

[Ryan Busse: The rifle that ruined America]

The inventor wouldn’t get to control how his proudest achievement would be used after his death, or the fraught, outsize role it would come to play in American society and politics. Since 2012, some of the deadliest mass shootings in the nation’s history—Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Uvalde—have been carried out by men armed with AR-15s. Now children practice drills to avoid being gunned down by attackers with AR-15s at their school.

The last surviving member of that ArmaLite team, the draftsman Jim Sullivan, was at times haunted by the invention’s later impact. When we visited him at his workshop in Arizona in 2019, Sullivan pulled out the original drawings for the AR-15 and smiled broadly as he described how he and Stoner had designed the gun. He picked up parts to demonstrate how it worked, explaining its functions like an excited professor. He was proud of the weapon and loved Stoner. He said that his years working at ArmaLite were the best of his life. After hours of talking about barrels, bolts, receivers, and Stoner’s gas system, he paused and looked down at the floor. He said he’d grown deeply disturbed by the violence being wrought with the invention he had helped create. He said that mass shooters wouldn’t be able to do what they do without weapons such as the AR-15.

“Every gun designer has a responsibility to …” he said, pausing before finishing his thought, “to think about what the hell they’re creating.”

This article has been adapted from Zusha Elinson and Cameron McWhirter’s book, American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15.

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Every nation needs parties of the left and the right, but America’s conservative party has collapsed—and its absence will undermine the recovery of American democracy even when Donald Trump is gone.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

So much for “learn to code” Where the new identity politics went wrong The origins of the socialist slur The coming attack on an essential element of women’s freedom

The Danger That Will Outlast Trump

The American right has been busy the past few days. The Republicans in Congress are at war with one another over a possible government shutdown that most of them don’t really want. Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona (channeling the warden from The Shawshank Redemption, apparently) railed about “quislings” such as the “sodomy-promoting” Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and said he should be hanged. Gosar, of course, was merely backing up a similar attack from the likely GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who over the weekend floated the idea of executing Milley and swore to use government power to investigate a major television network for “treason.”

Normally, this is the kind of carnival of abominable behavior that would lead me to ask—again—how millions of Americans not only tolerate but support such madness.

But today I’m going to ask a different question: Is this the future of “conservatism”? I admit that I am thinking about this because it’s also one of the questions I’m going to tackle with my colleagues David Frum, Helen Lewis, and Rebecca Rosen on Thursday in Washington, D.C., at The Atlantic Festival, our annual two-day gathering where we explore ideas and cultural trends with a roster of stellar guests.

Slightly more than a year ago, I tried to think through what being a conservative means in the current era of American politics. I have not been a Republican for several years, but I still describe myself as a conservative: I believe in public order as a prerequisite for politics; I respect tradition, and I am reluctant to acquiesce to change too precipitously; I think human nature is fixed rather than malleable; I am suspicious of centralized government power; I distrust mass movements. To contrast these with progressivism, I think most folks on the left, for example, would weigh social justice over abstract commitments to order, be more inclined to see traditions as obstacles to progress, and regard mass protests as generally positive forces.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of conservative views, and some on the right have taken issue with my approach. A young writer at National Review named Nate Hochman took me to task last year for fundamentally misunderstanding modern conservatism. Mr. Hochman, however, was apparently fired this summer from the Ron DeSantis campaign after he produced a campaign video that used Nazi symbolism, which suggests to me that I do, in fact, understand the modern conservative movement better than at least some of my critics might admit.

In any case, the immediate problem America faces is that it no longer has a center-right party that represents traditional conservatism, or even respects basic constitutional principles such as the rule of law. The pressing question for American democracy, then, is not so much the future of conservatism but the future of the Republican Party, another question our panel will discuss—and one that continually depresses me.

The United States, like any other nation, needs political parties that can represent views on the left and the right. The role of the state, the reach of the law, the allocation of social and economic resources—these are all inevitable areas of disagreement, and every functioning democracy needs parties that can contest these issues within the circumscribed limits of a democratic and rights-respecting constitution. Today’s Republican Party rarely exhibits such commitments to the rule of law, constitutionalism, or democracy itself.

The current GOP is not so much conservative as it is reactionary: Today’s right-wing voters are a loose movement of various groups, but especially of white men, obsessed with a supposedly better past in which they were not the aggrieved minority they see themselves as today. These reactionary voters, as I have written recently, are reflexively countercultural: They reject almost everything in the current social and political order because everything around them is the product of the hated now that has displaced the sacred then.

(Although many of my colleagues in academia and in the media see Trumpism as fascism, I remain reticent to use that word … for now. I think it’s inaccurate at the present time, but I also believe the word has been overused for years and people tend to tune it out. I grant, however, that much of the current GOP has become an anti-constitutional leader cult built around Trump—perhaps one of the weakest and unlikeliest men ever in history to have such a following—and could become a genuinely fascist threat soon.)

America needs an actual conservative party, but it is unlikely to produce one in the near future. The movement around Trump will come to an end one way or another; as the writer Peter Sagal noted in The Atlantic after interviewing former members of various cults, “the icy hand of death” will end the Trump cult because it is primarily a movement of older people, and when they die out, “there will be no one, eventually, to replace them.” Although the cult around Trump will someday dissolve, the authoritarians his movement spawned will still be with us, and they will prevent the formation of a sensible center-right party in the United States.

Too many Americans remain complacent, believing that defeating Trump means defeating the entire threat to American democracy. As the Atlantic contributor Brian Klaas wrote yesterday, Trump’s threats on social media against Milley should have been the biggest story in the nation: “Instead, the post barely made the news.” Nor did Gosar’s obscene pile-on get more than a shrug.

Meanwhile, the New York Times opinion writer Michelle Cottle today profiled Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, a man who has called his opponents “degenerate liberals” and who is so empty of character that even Mitt Romney can’t stand him. Cottle, however, noted Vance’s cute socks, and ended with this flourish: “Mr. Trump’s Republican Party is something of a chaotic mess. Until it figures out where it is headed, a shape-shifting MAGA brawler who quietly works across the aisle on particular issues may be the best this party has to offer.”

Something of a mess? That’s one way to put it.

And what about Fox News, the source of continual toxic dumping into the American political ecosystem? “Fox News,” the Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle said yesterday, “does not have nearly as much power over viewers’ minds as progressives think. I am not cutting Fox any slack for amplifying Trump’s election lie nonsense. But I also doubt that it made that much of a difference.” Having traveled the country giving talks about misinformation and democracy for years, and hearing the same stories so many times of people who now find it impossible to talk to their own parents, I have no such doubts.

If Trump wins in 2024, worries about Fox’s influence or reflections on Vance’s adorable socks will seem trivial when Trump unleashes his narcissistic and lawless revenge on the American people. But even if he does not win, America cannot sustain itself without a functional and sane center-right party. So far, the apathy of the public, the fecklessness of the media, and the cynicism of Republican leaders mean that no such party is on the horizon.

Related:

The end will come for the cult of MAGA. Trump floats the idea of executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley.

Today’s News

The Supreme Court ruled against an attempt by Alabama Republicans to retain a congressional map with only one majority-Black district. The Federal Trade Commission and 17 states are suing Amazon in a broad antitrust lawsuit that accuses it of monopolistic practices. An increasing number of Senate Democrats is calling for Senator Bob Menendez to resign from Congress following his federal indictment.

Evening Read

Franco Pagetti / VII / Redux

How We Got ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’

By Martin Baron

I should not have been surprised, but I still marveled at just how little it took to get under the skin of President Donald Trump and his allies. By February 2019, I had been the executive editor of The Washington Post for six years. That month, the newspaper aired a one-minute Super Bowl ad, with a voice-over by Tom Hanks, championing the role of a free press, commemorating journalists killed and captured, and concluding with the Post’s logo and the message “Democracy dies in darkness.” The ad highlighted the strong and often courageous work done by journalists at the Post and elsewhere—including by Fox News’s Bret Baier—because we were striving to signal that this wasn’t just about us and wasn’t a political statement …

Even that simple, foundational idea of democracy was a step too far for the Trump clan. The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. couldn’t contain himself. “You know how MSM journalists could avoid having to spend millions on a #superbowl commercial to gain some undeserved credibility?” he tweeted with typical two-bit belligerence. “How about report the news and not their leftist BS for a change.”

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I’m off to The Atlantic Festival, so I’ll be brief today. But I’ll be back on Friday to talk about Barry Manilow, whom I saw this past week in Las Vegas as he broke Elvis Presley’s record for performances at the venerable Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino. If you’re, ah, ready to take a chance again, you might enjoy it, even now, especially as we’ll be talking about the old songs. All the time, until daybreak.

I’m sorry. I promise: no more Manilow puns. See you in a few days.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

I should not have been surprised, but I still marveled at just how little it took to get under the skin of President Donald Trump and his allies. By February 2019, I had been the executive editor of The Washington Post for six years. That month, the newspaper aired a one-minute Super Bowl ad, with a voice-over by Tom Hanks, championing the role of a free press, commemorating journalists killed and captured, and concluding with the Post’s logo and the message “Democracy dies in darkness.” The ad highlighted the strong and often courageous work done by journalists at the Post and elsewhere—including by Fox News’s Bret Baier—because we were striving to signal that this wasn’t just about us and wasn’t a political statement.

“There’s someone to gather the facts,” Hanks said in the ad. “To bring you the story. No matter the cost. Because knowing empowers us. Knowing helps us decide. Knowing keeps us free.”

Even that simple, foundational idea of democracy was a step too far for the Trump clan. The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. couldn’t contain himself. “You know how MSM journalists could avoid having to spend millions on a #superbowl commercial to gain some undeserved credibility?” he tweeted with typical two-bit belligerence. “How about report the news and not their leftist BS for a change.”

Two years earlier—a month into Trump’s presidency—the Post had affixed “Democracy dies in darkness” under its nameplate on the printed newspaper, as well as at the top of its website and on everything it produced. As the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, envisioned it, this was not a slogan but a “mission statement.” And it was not about Trump, although his allies took it to be. Producing a mission statement had been in the works for two years before Trump took office. That it emerged when it did is testimony to the tortuous, and torturous, process of coming up with something sufficiently memorable and meaningful that Bezos would bless.

Bezos, the founder and now executive chair of Amazon, had bought The Washington Post in 2013. In early 2015, he had expressed his wish for a phrase that might encapsulate the newspaper’s purpose: a phrase that would convey an idea, not a product; fit nicely on a T-shirt; make a claim uniquely ours, given our heritage and our base in the nation’s capital; and be both aspirational and disruptive. “Not a paper I want to subscribe to,” as Bezos put it, but rather “an idea I want to belong to.” The idea: We love this country, so we hold it accountable.

No small order, coming up with the right phrase. And Bezos was no distant observer. “On this topic,” he told us, “I’d like to see all the sausage-making. Don’t worry about whether it’s a good use of my time.” Bezos, so fixated on metrics in other contexts, now advised ditching them. “I just think we’re going to have to use gut and intuition.” And he insisted that the chosen words recognize our “historic mission,” not a new one. “We don’t have to be afraid of the democracy word,” he said; it’s “the thing that makes the Post unique.”

Staff teams were assembled. Months of meetings were held. Frustrations deepened. Outside branding consultants were retained, to no avail. (“Typical,” Bezos said.) Desperation led to a long list of options, venturing into the inane. The ideas totaled at least 1,000: “A bias for truth,” “Know,” “A right to know,” “You have a right to know,” “Unstoppable journalism,” “The power is yours,” “Power read,” “Relentless pursuit of the truth,” “The facts matter,” “It’s about America,” “Spotlight on democracy,” “Democracy matters,” “A light on the nation,” “Democracy lives in light,” “Democracy takes work. We’ll do our part,” “The news democracy needs,” “Toward a more perfect union” (rejected lest it summon thoughts of our own workforce union).

By September 2016, an impatient Bezos was forcing the issue. We had to settle on something. Nine Post executives and Bezos met in a private room at the Four Seasons in Georgetown to finally get over the finish line. Because of Bezos’s tight schedule, we had only half an hour, starting at 7:45 a.m. A handful of options remained on the table: “A bright light for a free people” or, simply, “A bright light for free people”; “The story must be told” (recalling the inspiring words of the late photographer Michel du Cille); “To challenge and inform”; “For a world that demands to know”; “For people who demand to know.” None of those passed muster.

In the end, we settled on “A free people demand to know” (subject to a grammar check by our copy desk, which gave its assent). Success was short-lived—mercifully, no doubt. Late that evening, Bezos dispatched an email in the “not what you’re hoping for category,” as he put it. He had run our consensus pick by his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, a novelist and “my in-house wordsmith,” who had pronounced the phrase clunky. “Frankenslogan” was the word she used.

By then, we needed Bezos to take unilateral action. Finally, he did. “Let’s go with ‘Democracy dies in darkness,’ ” he decreed. It had been on our list from the start, and was a phrase Bezos had used previously in speaking of the Post’s mission; he himself had heard it from the Washington Post legend Bob Woodward. It was a twist on a phrase in a 2002 ruling by the federal-appellate-court judge Damon J. Keith, who wrote that “democracies die behind closed doors.”

“Democracy dies in darkness” made its debut, without announcement, in mid-February 2017. And I’ve never seen a slogan—I mean, mission statement—get such a reaction. It even drew attention from People’s Daily in China, which tweeted, “ ‘Democracy dies in darkness’ @washingtonpost puts on new slogan, on the same day @realDonaldTrump calls media as the enemy of Americans.” Merriam-Webster reported a sudden surge in searches for the word democracy. The Late Show host Stephen Colbert joked that some of the rejected phrases had included “No, you shut up” and “We took down Nixon—who wants next?” Twitter commentators remarked on the Post’s “new goth vibe.” The media critic Jack Shafer tweeted a handful of his own “rejected Washington Post mottos,” among them “We’re really full of ourselves” and “Democracy Gets Sunburned If It Doesn’t Use Sunscreen.”

Bezos couldn’t have been more thrilled. The mission statement was getting noticed. “It’s a good sign when you’re the subject of satire,” he said a couple of weeks later. The four words atop our journalism had certainly drawn attention to our mission. Much worse would have been a collective shrug. Like others at the Post, I had questioned the wisdom of branding all our work with death and darkness. All I could think of at that point, though, was the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

But the phrase stuck with readers, who saw it as perfect for the Trump era, even if that was not its intent.

The Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan, speaks to the newsroom as the staff celebrates winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty)

We must have been an odd-looking group, sitting around the dining-room table in the egg-shaped Blue Room of the White House: Bezos, recognizable anywhere by his bald head, short stature, booming laugh, and radiant intensity; Fred Ryan, the Post’s publisher, an alumnus of the Reagan administration who was a head taller than my own 5 feet 11 inches, with graying blond hair and a giant, glistening smile; the editorial-page editor, Fred Hiatt, a 36-year Post veteran and former foreign correspondent with an earnest, bookish look; and me, with a trimmed gray beard, woolly head of hair, and what was invariably described as a dour and taciturn demeanor.

Five months after his inauguration, President Trump had responded to a request from the publisher for a meeting, and had invited us to dinner. We were joined by the first lady, Melania Trump, and Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. By coincidence, just as we were sitting down, at 7 p.m., the Post published a report that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was inquiring into Kushner’s business dealings in Russia, part of Mueller’s investigation into that country’s interference in the 2016 election. The story followed another by the Post revealing that Kushner had met secretly with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and had proposed that a Russian diplomatic post be used to provide a secure communications line between Trump officials and the Kremlin. The Post had reported as well that Kushner met later with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Russian-owned development bank.

Hope Hicks, a young Trump aide, handed Kushner her phone. Our news alert had just gone out, reaching millions of mobile devices, including hers. “Very Shakespearean,” she whispered to Kushner. “Dining with your enemies.” Hiatt, who had overheard, whispered back, “We’re not your enemies.”

[Read: Trump’s war against the media isn’t a war]

As we dined on cheese soufflé, pan-roasted Dover sole, and chocolate-cream tart, Trump crowed about his election victory, mocked his rivals and even people in his own orbit, boasted of imagined accomplishments, calculated how he could win yet again in four years, and described The Washington Post as the worst of all media outlets, with The New York Times just behind us in his ranking in that moment.

Trump, his family, and his team had put the Post on their enemies list, and nothing was going to change anyone’s mind. We had been neither servile nor sycophantic toward Trump, and we weren’t going to be. Our job was to report aggressively on the president and to hold his administration, like all others, to account. In the mind of the president and those around him, that made us the opposition.

There was political benefit to Trump in going further: We were not just his enemy—we were the country’s enemy. In his telling, we were traitors. Less than a month into his presidency, Trump had denounced the press as “the enemy of the American People” on Twitter. It was an ominous echo of the phrase “enemy of the people,” invoked by Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Hitler’s propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, and deployed for the purpose of repression and murder. Trump could not have cared less about the history of such incendiary language or how it might incite physical attacks on journalists.

Whenever I was asked about Trump’s rhetoric, my own response was straightforward: “We are not at war with the administration. We are at work.” But it was clear that Trump saw all of us at that table as his foes, most especially Bezos, because he owned the Post and, in Trump’s mind, was pulling the strings—or could pull them if he wished.

At our dinner, Trump sought at times to be charming. It was a superficial charm, without warmth or authenticity. He did almost all the talking. We scarcely said a word, and I said the least, out of discomfort at being there and seeking to avoid any confrontation with him over our coverage. Anything I said could set him off.

He let loose on a long list of perceived enemies and slights: The chief executive of Macy’s was a “coward” for pulling Trump products from store shelves in reaction to Trump’s remarks portraying Mexican immigrants as rapists; he would have been picketed by only “20 Mexicans. Who cares?” Trump had better relations with foreign leaders than former President Barack Obama, who was lazy and never called them. Obama had left disasters around the world for him to solve. Obama had been hesitant to allow the military to kill people in Afghanistan. He, Trump, told the military to just do it; don’t ask for permission. Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, fired FBI Director James Comey, and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe were slammed for reasons that are now familiar.

Two themes stayed with me from that dinner. First, Trump would govern primarily to retain the support of his base. At the table, he pulled a sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. The figure “47%” appeared above his photo. “This is the latest Rasmussen poll. I can win with that.” The message was clear: That level of support, if he held key states, was all he needed to secure a second term. What other voters thought of him, he seemed to say, would not matter.

Second, his list of grievances appeared limitless. Atop them all was the press, and atop the press was the Post. During dinner, he derided what he had been hearing about our story on the special counsel and his son-in-law, suggesting incorrectly that it alleged money laundering. “He’s a good kid,” he said of Kushner, who at the time was 36 and a father of three, and sitting right there at the table. The Post was awful, Trump said repeatedly. We treated him unfairly. With every such utterance, he poked me in the shoulder with his left elbow.

Baron’s office at the Post. (The Washington Post / Getty)

A few times during that dinner, Trump—for all the shots he had taken during the campaign at Bezos’s company—mentioned that Melania was a big Amazon shopper, prompting Bezos to joke at one point, “Consider me your personal customer-service rep.” Trump’s concern, of course, wasn’t Amazon’s delivery. He wanted Bezos to deliver him from the Post’s coverage.

The effort quickened the next day. Kushner called Fred Ryan in the morning to get his read on how the dinner had gone. After Ryan offered thanks for their generosity and graciousness with their time, Kushner inquired whether the Post’s coverage would now improve as a result. Ryan diplomatically rebuffed him with a reminder that there were to be no expectations about coverage. “It’s not a dial we have to turn one way to make it better and another way to make it worse,” he said.

Trump would be the one to call Bezos’s cellphone that same morning at eight, urging him to get the Post to be “more fair to me.” He said, “I don’t know if you get involved in the newsroom, but I’m sure you do to some degree.” Bezos replied that he didn’t and then delivered a line he’d been prepared to say at the dinner itself if Trump had leaned on him then: “It’s really not appropriate to … I’d feel really bad about it my whole life if I did.” The call ended without bullying about Amazon but with an invitation for Bezos to seek a favor. “If there’s anything I can do for you,” Trump said.

Three days later, the bullying began. Leaders of the technology sector gathered at the White House for a meeting of the American Technology Council, which had been created by executive order a month earlier. Trump briefly pulled Bezos aside to complain bitterly about the Post’s coverage. The dinner, he said, was apparently a wasted two and a half hours.

Then, later in the year, four days after Christmas, Trump in a tweet called for the Postal Service to charge Amazon “MUCH MORE” for package deliveries, claiming that Amazon’s rates were a rip-off of American taxpayers. The following year, he attempted to intervene to obstruct Amazon in its pursuit of a $10 billion cloud-computing contract from the Defense Department. Bezos was to be punished for not reining in the Post.

Meanwhile, Trump was salivating to have an antitrust case filed against Amazon. The hedge-fund titan Leon Cooperman revealed in a CNBC interview that Trump had asked him twice at a White House dinner that summer whether Amazon was a monopoly. On July 24, 2017, Trump tweeted, “Is Fake News Washington Post being used as a lobbyist weapon against Congress to keep Politicians from looking into Amazon no-tax monopoly?”

As Trump sought to tighten the screws, Bezos made plain that the paper had no need to fear that he might capitulate. In March 2018, as we concluded one of our business meetings, Bezos offered some parting words: “You may have noticed that Trump keeps tweeting about us.” The remark was met with silence. “Or maybe you haven’t noticed!” Bezos joked. He wanted to reinforce a statement I had publicly made before. “We are not at war with them,” Bezos said. “They may be at war with us. We just need to do the work.” In July of that year, he once again spoke up unprompted at a business meeting. “Do not worry about me,” he said. “Just do the work. And I’ve got your back.”

A huge advantage of Bezos’s ownership was that he had his eye on a long time horizon. In Texas, he was building a “10,000-year clock” in a hollowed-out mountain—intended as a symbol, he explained, of long-term thinking. He often spoke of what the business or the landscape might look like in “20 years.” When I first heard that timeline, I was startled. News executives I’d dealt with routinely spoke, at best, of next year—and, at worst, next quarter. Even so, Bezos also made decisions at a speed that was unprecedented in my experience. He personally owned 100 percent of the company. He didn’t need to consult anyone. Whatever he spent came directly out of his bank account.

[From the November 2019 issue: Franklin Foer on Jeff Bezos’s master plan]

In my interactions with him, Bezos showed integrity and spine. Early in his ownership, he displayed an intuitive appreciation that an ethical compass for the Post was inseparable from its business success. There was much about Bezos and Amazon that the Post needed to vigorously cover and investigate—such as his company’s escalating market power, its heavy-handed labor practices, and the ramifications for individual privacy of its voracious data collection. There was also the announcement that Bezos and MacKenzie Scott were seeking a divorce—followed immediately by an explosive report in the National Enquirer disclosing that Bezos had been involved in a long-running extramarital relationship with Lauren Sánchez, a former TV reporter and news anchor. We were determined to fulfill our journalistic obligations with complete independence, and did so without restriction.

I came to like the Post’s owner as a human being and found him to be a far more complex, thoughtful, and agreeable character than routinely portrayed. He can be startlingly easy to talk to: Just block out any thought of his net worth. Our meetings took place typically every two weeks by teleconference, and only rarely in person. During the pandemic, we were subjected to Amazon’s exasperatingly inferior videoconferencing system, called Chime. The one-hour meetings were a lesson in his unconventional thinking, wry humor (“This is me enthusiastic. Sometimes it’s hard to tell”), and fantastic aphorisms: “Most people start building before they know what they’re building”; “The things that everybody knows are going to work, everybody is already doing.” At one session, we were discussing group subscriptions for college students. Bezos wanted to know the size of the market. As we all started to Google, Bezos interjected, “Hey, why don’t we try this? Alexa, how many college students are there in the United States?” (Alexa pulled up the data from the National Center for Education Statistics.)

In conversation, Bezos could be witty and self-deprecating (“Nothing makes me feel dumber than a New Yorker cartoon”), laughed easily, and posed penetrating questions. When a Post staffer asked him whether he’d join the crew of his space company, Blue Origin, on one of its early launches, he said he wasn’t sure. “Why don’t you wait a while and see how things go?” I advised. “That,” he said, “is the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me.”

Science fiction—particularly Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven—had a huge influence on Bezos in his teenage years. He has spoken of how his interest in space goes back to his childhood love of the Star Trek TV series. Star Trek inspired both the voice-activated Alexa and the name of his holding company, Zefram, drawn from the fictional character Zefram Cochrane, who developed “warp drive,” a technology that allowed space travel at faster-than-light speeds. “The reason he’s earning so much money,” his high-school girlfriend, Ursula Werner, said early in Amazon’s history, “is to get to outer space.”

Baron and the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, in 2016 (The Washington Post / Getty)

From the moment Bezos acquired the Post, he made clear that its historic journalistic mission was at the core of its business. I had been in journalism long enough to witness some executives—unmoored by crushing pressures on circulation, advertising, and profits—abandon the foundational journalistic culture, even shunning the vocabulary we use to describe our work. Many publishers took to calling journalism “content,” a term so hollow that I sarcastically advised substituting “stuff.” Journalists were recategorized as “content producers,” top editors retitled “chief content officers.” Bezos was a different breed.

He seemed to value and enjoy encounters with the news staff in small groups, even if they were infrequent. Once, at a dinner with some of the Post’s Pulitzer Prize winners, Bezos asked Carol Leonnig, who had won for exposing security lapses by the Secret Service, how she was able to get people to talk to her when the risks for them were so high. It had to be a subject of understandable curiosity for the head of Amazon, a company that routinely rebuffed reporters’ inquiries with “No comment.” Carol told him she was straightforward about what she sought and directly addressed individuals’ fears and motivations. The Post’s reputation for serious, careful investigative reporting, she told Bezos, carried a lot of weight with potential sources. They wanted injustice or malfeasance revealed, and we needed their help. The Post would protect their identity.

Anonymous leaking out of the government didn’t begin with the Trump administration. It has a long tradition in Washington. Leaks are often the only way for journalists to learn and report what is happening behind the scenes. If sources come forward publicly, they risk being fired, demoted, sidelined, or even prosecuted. The risks were heightened with a vengeful Trump targeting the so-called deep state, what he imagined to be influential government officials conspiring against him. The Department of Justice had announced early in his term that it would become even more aggressive in its search for leakers of classified national-security information. And Trump’s allies and supporters could be counted on to make life a nightmare for anyone who crossed him.

Journalists would much prefer to have government sources on the record, but anonymity has become an inextricable feature of Washington reporting. Though Trump-administration officials claimed to be unjust victims of anonymous sourcing, they were skillful practitioners and beneficiaries as well. The Trump administration was the leakiest in memory. Senior officials leaked regularly, typically as a result of internal rivalries. Trump himself leaked to get news out in a way that he viewed as helpful, just as he had done as a private citizen in New York.

Trump had assembled his government haphazardly, enlisting many individuals who had no relevant experience and no history of previously collaborating with one another—“kind of a crowd of misfit toys,” as Josh Dawsey, a White House reporter for the Post, put it to me. Some were mere opportunists. Many officials, as the Post’s Ashley Parker has observed, came to believe that working in the administration was like being a character in Game of Thrones : Better to knife others before you got knifed yourself. Odds were high that Trump would do the stabbing someday on his own. But many in government leaked out of principle. They were astonished to see the norms of governance and democracy being violated—and by the pervasive lying.

Trump’s gripes about anonymity weren’t based on the rigor of the reporting—or even, for that matter, its veracity. Leaks that reflected poorly on him were condemned as false, and the sources therefore nonexistent, even as he pressed for investigations to identify the supposedly nonexistent sources. With his followers’ distrust of the media, he had little trouble convincing them that the stories were fabrications by media out to get him—and them. Conflating his political self-interest with the public interest, he was prone to labeling the leaks as treasonous.

At the Post, the aim was to get at the facts, no matter the obstacles Trump and his allies put in our way. In January 2018, Dawsey reported that Trump, during a discussion with lawmakers about protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries as part of an immigration deal, asked: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” In March, Dawsey, Leonnig, and David Nakamura reported that Trump had defied cautions from his national security advisers not to offer well-wishes to Russian President Vladimir Putin on winning reelection to another six-year term. “DO NOT CONGRATULATE,” warned briefing material that Trump may or may not have read. Such advice should have been unnecessary in the first place. After all, it had been anything but a fair election. Prominent opponents were excluded from the ballot, and much of the Russian news media are controlled by the state. “If this story is accurate, that means someone leaked the president’s briefing papers,” said a senior White House official who, as was common in an administration that condemned anonymous sources, insisted on anonymity.

To be sure, sources sometimes want anonymity for ignoble reasons. But providing anonymity is essential to legitimate news-gathering in the public interest. If any doubt remains as to why so many government officials require anonymity to come forward—and why responsible news outlets give them anonymity when necessary—the story of Trump’s famous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky offers an instructive case study.

In September 2019, congressional committees received a letter from Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community. A whistleblower had filed a complaint with him, he wrote, and in Atkinson’s assessment, it qualified as credible and a matter of “urgent concern”—defined as a “serious or flagrant problem, abuse or violation of the law or Executive Order” that involves classified information but “does not include differences of opinion concerning public policy matters.”

Soon, a trio of Post national-security reporters published a story that began to flesh out the contents of the whistleblower complaint. The article, written by Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller, and Shane Harris, cited anonymous sources in reporting that the complaint involved “President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader.” The incident was said to revolve around a phone call.

Step by careful step, news organizations excavated the basic facts: In a phone call with Zelensky, Trump had effectively agreed to provide $250 million in military aid to Ukraine—approved by Congress, but inexplicably put on hold by the administration—only if Zelensky launched an investigation into his likely Democratic foe in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, and his alleged activities in Ukraine. This attempted extortion would lead directly to Trump’s impeachment, making him only the third president in American history to be formally accused by the House of Representatives of high crimes and misdemeanors.

The entire universe of Trump allies endeavored to have the whistleblower’s identity revealed—widely circulating a name—with the spiteful aim of subjecting that individual to fierce harassment and intimidation, or worse. Others who ultimately went public with their concerns, as they responded to congressional subpoenas and provided sworn testimony, became targets of relentless attacks and mockery.

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council, who had listened in on the phone call as part of his job, became a central witness, implicating Trump during the impeachment hearings. He was fired after having endured condemnation from the White House and deceitful insinuations by Trump allies that he might be a double agent. Vindman’s twin brother, Yevgeny, an NSC staffer who had raised protests internally about Trump’s phone call with Zelensky, was fired too. Gordon Sondland—the hotelier and Trump donor who was the ambassador to the European Union and an emissary of sorts to Ukraine as well—was also fired. He had admitted in congressional testimony that there had been an explicit quid pro quo conditioning a Zelensky visit to the White House on a Ukrainian investigation of Biden. The Vindmans and Sondland were all dismissed within two days of Trump’s acquittal in his first impeachment trial. Just before their ousters, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham had suggested on Fox News that “people should pay” for what Trump went through.

The acting Pentagon comptroller, Elaine McCusker, had her promotion rescinded, evidently for having merely questioned whether Ukraine aid could be legally withheld. She later resigned. Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general, was fired as well, leaving with a plea for whistleblowers to “use authorized channels to bravely speak up—there is no disgrace for doing so.”

“The Washington Post is constantly quoting ‘anonymous sources’ that do not exist,” Trump had tweeted in 2018 in one of his familiar lines of attack. “Rarely do they use the name of anyone because there is no one to give them the kind of negative quote that they are looking for.” The Ukraine episode made it clear that real people with incriminating information existed in substantial numbers. If they went public, they risked unemployment. If they chose anonymity, as the whistleblower did, Trump and his allies would aim to expose them and have them publicly and savagely denounced.

“We are not at war with the administration. We are at work.” When I made that comment, many fellow journalists enthusiastically embraced the idea that we should not think of ourselves as warriors but instead as professionals merely doing our job to keep the public informed. Others came to view that posture as naive: When truth and democracy are under attack, the only proper response is to be more fiercely and unashamedly bellicose ourselves. One outside critic went so far as to label my statement an “atrocity” when, after my retirement, Fred Ryan, the Post’s publisher, had my quote mounted on the wall overlooking the paper’s national desk.

I believe that responsible journalists should be guided by fundamental principles. Among them: We must support and defend democracy. Citizens have a right to self-governance. Without democracy, there can be no independent press, and without an independent press, there can be no democracy. We must work hard and honestly to discover the truth, and we should tell the public unflinchingly what we learn. We should support the right of all citizens to participate in the electoral process without impediment. We should endorse free speech and understand that vigorous debate over policy is essential to democracy. We should favor equitable treatment for everyone, under the law and out of moral obligation, and abundant opportunity for all to attain what they hope for themselves and their families. We owe special attention to the least fortunate in our society, and have a duty to give voice to those who otherwise would not be heard. We must oppose intolerance and hate, and stand against violence, repression, and abuse of power.

I also believe journalists can best honor those ideals by adhering to traditional professional principles. The press will do itself and our democracy no favors if it abandons what have long been bedrock standards. Too many norms of civic discourse have been trampled. For the press to hold power to account today, we will have to maintain standards that demonstrate that we are practicing our craft honorably, thoroughly, and fairly, with an open mind and with a reverence for evidence over our own opinions. In short, we should practice objective journalism.

The idea of objective journalism has uncertain origins. But it can be traced to the early 20th century, in the aftermath of World War I, when democracy seemed imperiled and propaganda had been developed into a polished instrument for manipulating public opinion and the press during warfare—and, in the United States, for deepening suspicions about marginalized people who were then widely regarded as not fully American.

Baron and his Boston Globe colleagues react to winning the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the paper’s coverage of sexual abuse by priests in the Roman Catholic Church. (The Boston Globe / Getty)

The renowned journalist and thinker Walter Lippmann helped give currency to the term when he wrote Liberty and the News, published in 1920. In that slim volume, he described a time that sounds remarkably similar to today. “There is everywhere an increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and misled,” he wrote. The onslaught of news was “helter-skelter, in inconceivable confusion.” The public suffered from “no rules of evidence.” He worried over democratic institutions being pushed off their foundations by the media environment.

[From the December 1919 issue: Walter Lippmann’s “Liberty and the News”]

Lippmann made no assumption that journalists could be freed of their own opinions. He assumed, in fact, just the opposite: They were as subject to biases as anyone else. He proposed an “objective” method for moving beyond them: Journalists should pursue “as impartial an investigation of the facts as is humanly possible.” That idea of objectivity doesn’t preclude the lie-detector role for the press; it argues for it. It is not an idea that fosters prejudice; it labors against it. “I am convinced,” he wrote, in a line that mirrors my own thinking, “that we shall accomplish more by fighting for truth than by fighting for our theories.”

In championing “objectivity” in our work, I am swimming against what has become, lamentably, a mighty tide in my profession of nearly half a century. No word seems more unpopular today among many mainstream journalists. A report in January 2023 by a previous executive editor at The Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr., and a former CBS News president, Andrew Heyward, argued that objectivity in journalism is outmoded. They quoted a former close colleague of mine: “Objectivity has got to go.”

Objectivity, in my view, has got to stay. Maintaining that standard does not guarantee the public’s confidence. But it increases the odds that journalists will earn it. The principle of objectivity has been under siege for years, but perhaps never more ferociously than during Trump’s presidency and its aftermath. Several arguments are leveled against it by my fellow journalists: None of us can honestly claim to be objective, and we shouldn’t profess to be. We all have our opinions. Objectivity also is seen as just another word for neutrality, balance, and so-called both-sidesism. It pretends, according to this view, that all assertions deserve equal weight, even when the evidence shows they don’t, and so it fails to deliver the plain truth to the public. Finally, critics argue that objectivity historically excluded the perspectives of those who have long been among the most marginalized in society (and media): women, Black Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Indigenous Americans, the LGBTQ community, and others.

Genuine objectivity, however, does not mean any of that. This is what it really means: As journalists, we can never stop obsessing over how to get at the truth—or, to use a less lofty term, “objective reality.” Doing that requires an open mind and a rigorous method. We must be more impressed by what we don’t know than by what we know, or think we know.

[Darrell Hartman: The invention of objectivity]

Journalists routinely expect objectivity from others. Like everyone else, we want objective judges. We want objective juries. We want police officers to be objective when they make arrests and detectives to be objective in assessing evidence. We want prosecutors to evaluate cases objectively, with no prejudice or preexisting agendas. Without objectivity, there can be no equity in law enforcement, as abhorrent abuses have demonstrated all too often. We want doctors to be objective in diagnosing the medical conditions of their patients, uncontaminated by bigotry or baseless hunches. We want medical researchers and regulators to be objective in determining whether new drugs might work and can be safely consumed. We want scientists to be objective in evaluating the impact of chemicals in the soil, air, and water.

Objectivity in all these fields, and others, gets no argument from journalists. We accept it, even insist on it by seeking to expose transgressions. Journalists should insist on it for ourselves as well.

This article was adapted from Martin Baron’s book, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post, which will be published in October 2023. It appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “We Are Not at War. We Are at Work.”

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.

On September 18, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood before his country’s Parliament and leveled a dramatic charge: Ottawa had “credible evidence” that the Indian government had assassinated a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. The citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, had been gunned down outside the Sikh temple where he served as president. Trudeau declared the killing “an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty” and “contrary to the fundamental rules by which free, open, and democratic societies conduct themselves.”

The prime minister’s claim made headlines around the planet, but it shouldn’t have been altogether surprising. Nijjar was a prominent activist who called for Sikhs—a religious group mostly concentrated in northern India—to break away from New Delhi and form an independent nation. As a result, New Delhi had labeled him a terrorist. The Indian government has denied involvement in the killing, but under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it has become illiberal at home and bellicose abroad, such that assassinations on foreign soil are no longer an unimaginable part of its agenda. New Delhi, in other words, could well be a government that will do anything to silence dissidents.  

Nijjar is not the first Canadian whom India has labeled a terrorist, and he is hardly the first to support Sikh secession. During the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, Sikh insurgents in northern India waged a violent campaign to establish an independent Sikh nation, called Khalistan, and many Sikhs in Canada supported them by raising money and promoting the movement’s message in Canadian temples. Some Canadian Sikhs helped separatist cadres travel to Pakistan, where they received financial and military help. And in 1985, Talwinder Singh Parmar—a Sikh Canadian—orchestrated the bombing of Air India Flight 182. The plane exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 329 passengers and crew members in a plane attack deadlier than any the world would see until September 11, 2001.

Parmar was a terrorist, and experts believe that the Khalistani movement, with all its bloodshed, was unpopular among Indian Sikhs. But New Delhi was no less vicious. India responded to the Sikh insurgency with unremitting violence that killed thousands of civilians. At one point, separatists took shelter in the country’s Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest site, and the Indian government sent in the military, killing scores of people and damaging the building. Two Sikhs then assassinated India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, which in turn prompted an anti-Sikh pogrom. Pamar himself was shot by police when he traveled to India after the plane bombing.

Nijjar, then, wouldn’t even be the first Canadian to be killed by Indian state actors. But his fate feels discontinuous with this history. His activism was peaceful, the Sikh insurgency having come to an end more than two decades ago. If India is behind Nijjar’s killing, its actions don’t reflect fears of Sikh secession so much as India’s transformation into an illiberal state where the government has elevated one religion—Hinduism—at the expense of all others, and where policy makers tolerate little dissent.

Since Modi came to power in 2014, violence against India’s minorities has dramatically increased, and New Delhi has moved to strip many non-Hindus of protections. The country revoked the partial autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir—India’s only Muslim-majority state—and split the entity in half. It passed a law that could deprive millions of Muslims of their citizenship, and it has done conspicuously little to stop the killing of members of tribal minorities in India’s northeast.

[Read: Violence is the engine of Modi’s politics]

So far, Sikhs have been spared the worst ethnonationalist measures. But this week’s incident suggests that they are no longer as exempt, and the reasons are not hard to fathom. Sikh farmers played a major role in forcing Modi to withdraw his agricultural-reform bills in 2021, one of his few political defeats. The prime minister may worry that, as his Hindu-nationalist project becomes more dominant, Sikhs could throw more obstacles in its path—or rekindle a separatist insurgency. He may have decided that the time has come to wage an open battle against the religion. But if he thought that doing so would preempt calls for secession, he miscalculated: Sikh activists across the world have already responded to Nijjar’s death with protests, some of them calling for the creation of Khalistan.

The killing has also antagonized Canada. But Ottawa’s anger is unlikely to trouble New Delhi. India has prohibited Jagmeet Singh—a Sikh Canadian politician and an outspoken defender of Sikh rights—from entering the country. (Singh now leads Canada’s third-largest political party.) India’s foreign minister has accused critics of the Modi government of colonialism and said that outsiders have no right to question India’s behavior. And India’s main Hindu-nationalist organization, to which Modi belongs, has called for the creation of Akhand Bharat: a greater India encompassing all or parts of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. India unveiled a new Parliament building in May that featured a mural of Akhand Bharat. Three countries lodged complaints in response.

[Read: Indian dissidents have had it with America praising Modi]

So far, Washington has professed to be “deeply concerned” by Trudeau’s allegations but has issued no serious rebuke to India, at least in public. In fact, according to The Washington Post, Trudeau originally asked the United States and its other closest allies to jointly announce the Canadian findings, but was rebuffed. (The Canadian government denied the Post’s report.)

The silence might seem logical: The United States sees India as an essential partner in its competition with China, so it does not want to alienate New Delhi. But American policy makers don’t just refrain from criticizing India. They praise the country’s politics and repeatedly declare that New Delhi is a natural partner for Washington. They invited Modi to address a joint session of Congress, where the prime minister crowned India the “mother of democracy,” its ambitions guided by the notion of “one Earth, one family, one future.”

Trudeau’s claim, if true, should remind the United States that India is not, in fact, a natural friend. The Indian government is trying to create not a great, peaceful democracy but an avowedly Hindu power that dominates South Asia. It may work with America to constrain China, but that is because challenging Beijing is in India’s interests, not because India supports the West.

Illustrations by Chantal Jahchan

On the last morning of his life, Shinzo Abe arrived in the Japanese city of Nara, famous for its ancient pagodas and sacred deer. His destination was more prosaic: a broad urban intersection across from the city’s main train station, where he would be giving a speech to endorse a lawmaker running for reelection to the National Diet, Japan’s parliament. Abe had retired two years earlier, but because he was Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, his name carried enormous weight. The date was July 8, 2022.

In photos taken from the crowd, Abe—instantly recognizable by his wavy, swept-back hair; charcoal eyebrows; and folksy grin—can be seen stepping onto a makeshift podium at about 11:30 a.m., one hand clutching a microphone. A claque of supporters surrounds him. No one in the photos seems to notice the youngish-looking man about 20 feet behind Abe, dressed in a gray polo shirt and cargo pants, a black strap across his shoulder. Unlike everyone else, the man is not clapping.

Abe started to speak. Moments later, his remarks were interrupted by two loud reports, followed by a burst of white smoke. He collapsed to the ground. His security guards ran toward the man in the gray polo shirt, who held a homemade gun—two 16-inch metal pipes strapped together with black duct tape. The man made no effort to flee. The guards tackled him, sending his gun skittering across the pavement. Abe, shot in the neck, would be dead within hours.

At a Nara police station, the suspect—a 41-year-old named Tetsuya Yamagami—admitted to the shooting barely 30 minutes after pulling the trigger. He then offered a motive that sounded too outlandish to be true: He saw Abe as an ally of the Unification Church, a group better known as the Moonies—the cult founded in the 1950s by the Korean evangelist Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Yamagami said his life had been ruined when his mother gave the church all of the family’s money, leaving him and his siblings so poor that they often didn’t have enough to eat. His brother had committed suicide, and he himself had tried to.

“My prime target was the Unification Church’s top official, Hak Ja Han, not Abe,” he told the police, according to an account published in January in a newspaper called The Asahi Shimbun. He could not get to Han—Moon’s widow—so he shot Abe, who was “deeply connected” to the church, Yamagami said, just as Abe’s grandfather, also a prime minister and renowned political figure in Japan, had been.

[David Frum: Shinzo Abe made the world better]

Investigators looked into Yamagami’s wild-sounding claims and found, to their alarm, that they were true. After a quick huddle, the police appear to have decided that the Moonie connection was too sensitive to reveal, at least for the moment. It might even affect the outcome of the elections for the Upper House of the Diet, set to take place on July 10. At a press conference on the night of the assassination, a police official would say only that Yamagami had carried out the attack because he “harbored a grudge against a specific group and he assumed that Abe was linked to it.” When reporters clamored for details, the official said nothing.

After the election, the Unification Church confirmed press reports that Yamagami’s mother was a member, and the story quickly took off. The Moonies, it emerged, maintained a volunteer army of campaign workers who had long been a secret weapon not just for Abe but for many other politicians in his conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which remains in power under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Later that month, the Japanese tabloid Nikkan Gendai published a list of 111 members of parliament who had connections to the church. In early September 2022, the LDP announced that almost half of its 379 Diet members had admitted to some kind of contact with the Unification Church, whether that meant accepting campaign assistance or paying membership fees or attending church events. According to a survey by The Asahi Shimbun, 290 members of prefectural assemblies, as well as seven prefectural governors, also said they had church ties. The rising numbers exposed a scandal hiding in plain sight: A right-wing Korean cult had a near-umbilical connection to the political party that had governed Japan for most of the past 70 years.

The Japanese were outraged not just by the appearance of influence-peddling but by a galling hypocrisy. Abe was a fervent nationalist, eager to rebuild Japan’s global standing and proudly unapologetic for its imperial past. Now he and his party had been caught in a secretive electoral alliance with a cult that—it soon emerged—had been accused of preying on Japanese war guilt to squeeze billions of dollars from credulous followers.

As information about Yamagami’s personal history and the LDP’s role became more widely known, a strange inversion took place: People began expressing sympathy for the alleged assassin and anger at the victim. A Japanese weekly devoted a cover story to the swooning fans known as “Yamagami Girls” and other supporters. Well-wishers began sending Yamagami gifts. Thousands of people protested the decision to grant Abe a state funeral, and a hastily made feature film that portrayed Yamagami as a tragic hero was shown all over the country. The LDP’s poll numbers, already falling, continued to drop, and a cabinet minister was forced to resign after he failed to adequately explain his ties to the church.

The assassination exposed deep divisions over the legacy of Abe, who is hailed by some for restoring Japanese influence around the world and reviled by others as a dangerous throwback to the country’s warlike past. The influence of the Moonies on Abe and the LDP remains a live issue, and last November the Kishida government—eager to clear its name—opened an inquiry that could threaten the Unification Church’s legal status in Japan as a religion. That could prove a lethal blow, and might raise questions about the church’s role in the other 100 or so countries where it has a presence, including the United States. Because the group’s leaders have not been charged with any crime, the Japanese government would, in essence, be asserting the power to decide when a religion does more harm than good.

All of this might have remained hidden were it not for the desperate act of a man who had failed at just about everything else. As he awaits trial in the solitude of his prison cell, Tetsuya Yamagami can console himself that he may be among the most successful assassins in history. A year after Abe’s death, his murder has come to seem less the random act of an unhinged loner than a tragedy unfolding slowly over decades.

In the days after Abe’s assassination, many people were amazed to discover that the Moonies were still relevant at all. In Japan, as in the United States, the group had receded from the headlines since the 1980s and ’90s, when it made news with its bizarre mass weddings, eerily totalitarian style, and often brazen bids for political influence—including Sun Myung Moon’s founding of The Washington Times, a conservative newspaper in the U.S. capital.

Another surprise was Japan’s central role in Moon’s activities. Although the Unification Church is headquartered in South Korea, since the 1970s the bulk of the group’s money has come from Japan, and so have many of its most fanatical followers. “Japan is actually designated as a core pillar” of the church’s finances, I was told by Masaue Sakurai, a former high-ranking official in the church who was forced out in 2017. Of all the people I spoke with while reporting on the Moonies in Japan—about a dozen current and former members and their families, as well as lawyers, journalists, political figures, and activists—Sakurai was the only one who seemed to sympathize with both sides: those who loathe the church and those who revere it. He met me in a Tokyo coffee shop where Mozart and Schubert piano sonatas played softly in the background, and he stood to greet me in the Japanese manner, bowing and proffering his business card with both hands.

[Read: Sun Myung Moon's groundbreaking campaign to open North Korea]

Sakurai was blunt about the church’s ruthless methods in Japan, but he spoke warmly about its adherents, whom he sees as victims of a misguided leadership. (He grew up in the church.) He told me that when he began working for the church, in 1998, it was “already focusing 100 percent on the forced collection of donations.” The group initially raised money from “spiritual sales.” Japanese followers were pressured to buy and sell cheap Korean-made products at outrageous markups—miniature stone pagodas, personal inkan signature stamps, “special” ginseng tea—with the promise of healing powers. When that triggered lawsuits and public complaints, the church moved to direct donations.

Moon, who died in 2012, justified a predatory focus on Japan by proclaiming that South Korea is an “Adam nation” and Japan an “Eve nation.” Like a traditional wife, Japan was obligated to fulfill the needs of her husband. Behind this blithely patriarchal formula was an old and festering grievance between the two countries. From 1910 until 1945, Japan ruled Korea as a colony and treated its people as an inferior race, an attitude that remains widespread in Japan to this day. During the Second World War, thousands of Korean women and girls were forced into sexual slavery by Japan as “comfort women.”

This sordid history was never fully acknowledged or taught in Japan after the war, and the Moonies have exploited that willed ignorance to tremendous effect. They make a practice of showing new members photos of Japanese soldiers committing war crimes in Korea, says Pascal Zivi, a Frenchman who has lived in Japan for 43 years and runs a research center on religious extremism based in the city of Sapporo. “Young Japanese are shocked, and that makes them more likely to believe that other things have been hidden from them,” he told me. The Moonies then tell their recruits that their ancestors are suffering in hell for their sins, and that the only way to save them is by giving money.

Few outsiders know as much about the Moonies as Hiroshi Yamaguchi, a grandfatherly lawyer of 74 who founded a legal consortium to help former church members recover their money. “What they do,” he explained to me, “is dig up your concerns,” probing for family troubles and emotional vulnerabilities. They then attribute those difficulties to sins committed by ancestors, sins that can be atoned for only by donating to the Unification Church. Meanwhile, the Moonies ferret out the details of a target’s income and assets, and report it up the chain. All of these methods are laid out in manuals for the church’s fundraisers, who answer to a military-style hierarchy. (Although I spoke with several individual members, the church did not respond to queries about its practices.)

Yamaguchi is a devout Buddhist who told me he got involved because he was revolted by the way the Moonies “abuse religion to make money or manipulate people.” When Yamaguchi first heard that Abe had been shot, he was horrified. But when he discovered that the suspected killer was a victim of the church, his reaction was “No wonder.”

Hiroshi Yamaguchi, the founder of a lawyers’ network that has brought thousands of claims against Unification Church followers and employees (Yoshio Tsunoda / AFLO / Alamy)

He and his fellow lawyers have brought roughly 35,000 compensation claims against church followers and employees by former members since 1987, and have recovered more than $206 million. Presumably that represents only a fraction of the church’s donation revenue in Japan during those years. And Japan, where the church has an estimated 60,000 followers, was a rich resource for decades before the lawyers got involved. The church transferred at least $800 million from Japan to the United States from 1975 to 1984, according to two former church officials who spoke with The Washington Post in 1984. (The church never did gain a large American following, despite its visibility in the U.S. in the ’80s.)

Behind the numbers is widespread human suffering of a kind that Yamagami helped reveal. His mother joined the Unification Church when he was a boy, after his father committed suicide and his brother was diagnosed with malignant lymphoma. She donated about 100 million yen to the church—roughly $700,000—forcing her to declare bankruptcy, and leaving the family destitute. Yamagami had to abandon his hopes of going to university. His brother killed himself. “It is no exaggeration to say that the experiences then have continued to distort my entire life,” he wrote in a letter to a blogger the day before the assassination.

Yamagami may seem an extreme case. But Sakurai, the former church official, told me the family’s account was familiar. Sakurai’s job involved traveling all over Japan and counseling church families who had complaints or problems. He heard so many stories about suffering caused by excessive donations that he began speaking up about it to his superiors. His warning was not well received, he said, and when he persisted, he was asked to retire.

The Japanese public got an unusual real-time glimpse of the familial wounds suffered by church members in early October 2022, when a defector appeared at an emotional press conference in Tokyo. The defector was a 26-year-old woman who had grown up in the Unification Church, and still felt so threatened by it that she used a pseudonym, Sayuri Ogawa. Her face was partially covered by a surgical mask. Dressed in a gray suit and seated alongside her husband, she was earnest and concise, describing the church’s abusive practices and offering proposals to curtail them. She spoke of the fear of hell that the church had instilled in her as a child, and of people pressured into marrying virtual strangers during group weddings, with many of the couples “now living a life of regret.”

The most powerful moment came 47 minutes into the press conference, when a hand-delivered message arrived unexpectedly from the Unification Church. The message—read aloud in front of the cameras by Ogawa’s husband—declared that Ogawa suffered from psychiatric issues, that she had a tendency to lie, and that the press conference must stop immediately. The message had been signed by her parents. Ogawa was visibly stunned and upset. But she went on to describe her struggles with dissociative and panic disorders, brought on by her parents’ rigid adherence to church practices. Fighting back tears, she said she was now mentally healthy and had been free of the church for the past four years. Many in the audience were deeply moved to see the way Ogawa maintained her dignity in such a vulnerable moment. “If you truly believe in me,” Ogawa said unsteadily before the conference ended, “please make sure that this organization is dissolved.”

The church’s leaders have tried to tamp down criticism once again by conceding that their fundraising has been too aggressive. In September 2022, a senior official said the church was putting new measures in place to prevent excessive donations.

But when I spoke with current believers—all but one of them chosen by the church—I heard a much less penitent tone. Every one of them said that complaints about fundraising were exaggerated, and that money was given voluntarily. Two of them said they didn’t believe that Yamagami’s motive for the alleged murder had anything to do with his mother’s donations. He is a “terrorist,” one of them told me, and the whole affair was cooked up by leftists as a pretext to go after the church.

The Moonies I met in Japan surprised me with their friendliness and candor, but I got the impression that they live in a world apart from their fellow citizens. One of them was a 27-year-old woman named Kiaki Kojima, who belongs to what the church calls its “second generation”—the children of believers. We met in a Tokyo office building where tiny furnished rooms are rented by the hour for business meetings, each one numbered and code-locked in long corridors, like cells in an immaculate prison. Kojima told me her mother had donated 100 million yen to the church, the same amount as Yamagami’s mother. Kojima had grown up in poverty as a result, eating frugally and wearing hand-me-downs, her university options limited. She said she had resented those privations at one brief moment in her childhood, but had then come to accept them.

She also accepted the church’s choice of husband for her, a Filipino man whom she married online in 2021 without ever having met him. (They have met since then, but he has not yet moved to Japan.) She demonstrated how she had leaned forward to kiss her laptop screen during the wedding ceremony, sitting in a bridal dress in a church some 2,000 miles from the groom. At times, I thought I caught a hint of embarrassment in her eyes, as if she understood how odd these things sounded to an outsider. But she said she had grown up in the church and felt loved there.

In retrospect, Abe’s relationship with the Unification Church looks exactly like the political land mine it turned out to be. Hiroshi Yamaguchi and his lawyers’ group wrote repeatedly over the years to politicians in the LDP and other parties, urging them to cut ties with the Moonies. Abe himself may have recognized the risks. In 2003, a Japanese journalist named Yoshifu Arita, who had written about the Unification Church, appeared on a TV talk show alongside Abe, then a senior LDP lawmaker. Arita, who later served in parliament with a party opposed to the LDP, told me that during a commercial break he asked Abe if the Moonies had ever approached him. Abe said yes, they were very persistent about it, and he tried to avoid them.

Abe’s ambitions appear to have changed his mind. He became prime minister for the first time in 2006, and then resigned a year later, brought down by financial scandals, election losses, and a painful case of ulcerative colitis that made it difficult for him to work. “Abe was traumatized by the failure of his first term,” Koichi Nakano, a political-science professor at Sophia University, in Tokyo, told me. “When he came back, he was focused on never letting that happen again.”

Abe did not get another chance to run until 2012. The opportunity came after what may have been a fateful meeting. In April of that year, Abe hiked up Mount Takao, a forested peak about an hour from downtown Tokyo where many visitors stop at a Buddhist temple to pray for good fortune from a long-nosed supernatural being known as a daitengu. Abe was accompanied by a senior church-allied figure named Masatoshi Abe (no relation). Along with them, Masatoshi said in an interview years later, was a contingent of some 300 young Moonies. Masatoshi and the younger Moonies urged Abe to run for prime minister.

It’s impossible to know what difference this mountainside pep talk made to Abe, but it may have served as a reminder of the church’s power to enlist eager volunteers. It may also have underscored their political common ground. Although the LDP has no religious orientation, its longtime emphasis on family values, anti-communism, and neoliberal economics meshed well with Moon’s neobiblical conservatism. The party appears to have conveniently ignored Moon’s other beliefs, including his claim to embody the “perfect Adam” who would redeem humanity through his own sinless family.

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The moment was an important one for the Moonies too. By the early 2000s, the group had come under renewed suspicion, and not just because of the rising number of lawsuits filed by victims of its “spiritual sales.” In early 1995, members of a doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas on the Tokyo Metro at rush hour, killing more than a dozen and injuring hundreds. The attack was a terrible shock for a country unused to violent crime, much less terrorism, and drew hostile attention to what are known in Japan as “new religious movements.” (Aum had no links to the Moonies.) The Unification Church, Yamaguchi told me, became worried that it no longer had political protection. So church officials reached out to Abe. “Why Abe? Because Abe already knew he could use them for his political advantage. And his hawkish politics jibed with theirs.”

For Shinzo Abe, the Unification Church was also a family inheritance. His grandfather Nobusuke Kishi had helped the Moonies become established in Japan when he was prime minister in the late 1950s, and in 1964 the church moved its Japanese headquarters to an Art Deco–style building in Tokyo’s Shibuya ward that Kishi had used as his official residence when he was prime minister. His own home was next door. The relationship was rooted in their shared anti-communism. Kishi was a political survivor. He had risen to prominence in the 1930s, when he oversaw Japan’s brutal occupation of Manchuria. He was jailed in 1945 as a Class A war-crimes suspect, but American authorities released him when they saw that right-wing anti-communists like Kishi could help steer Japan on a pro-Western course. Kishi brokered the founding of the LDP in 1955.

Political influence had been Moon’s guiding star almost from the start. Although he founded his church in the 1950s, it gained a broad following only after Lieutenant General Park Chung Hee staged a military coup in South Korea in 1961. The church was then “organized” by the founder and director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, Brigadier General Kim Jong-pil, according to an American CIA report written two years later, though it is not clear exactly what role the Korean agency played. South Korea’s leaders appear to have seen Moon as a useful instrument because of his fierce opposition to communism. But they were also anxious about the quasi-religious cult of personality being developed in the ’60s and ’70s by the North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung. It is possible that they saw Moon as a cultural counterweight of sorts, says Peter McGill, a British journalist with decades of experience in Japan and South Korea who has written about the Unification Church.

Moon used his state connections and his growing Japanese income to build a large portfolio of holdings. Tongil Heavy Industries, headed by one of Moon’s cousins, manufactured artillery guns and other weapons for the South Korean military. Moon’s family owned or controlled chemical and construction companies, resorts, Brazilian soccer teams, and real estate all over the world, including the New Yorker Hotel. Moon’s most successful business venture may have been sushi, which he and his Japanese followers helped popularize in the United States. Eating raw tuna was still an exotic pursuit to Americans when Moon—the self-declared “king of the ocean”—began investing in shipyards in the late 1970s and sending his followers to sell door-to-door from refrigerated vans. True World Foods, a seafood company founded at Moon’s direction, controls a large share of the sushi trade, selling raw fish to thousands of restaurants across the United States and Canada.

Kishi and Moon exchanged favors for decades, often under the aegis of church-sponsored groups such as the International Federation for Victory Over Communism, which helped Moon curry favor with right-leaning political figures around the world. After Moon was convicted of tax fraud in the United States and sent to federal prison, Kishi wrote a letter to President Ronald Reagan, urging him to release his old friend. (Reagan did not.) Kishi passed on his Moonie connections to another leading LDP member, his son-in-law, Shintaro Abe (Shinzo Abe’s father), who would serve four years as Japan’s foreign minister.

Revelations about the depth of the Abe dynasty’s involvement with the Moonies have continued to trickle out over the past year. In April, church records published online in South Korea showed that Moon considered himself a kingmaker and even a kind of savior in Japanese politics. “Anyone who wants to become prime minister in Japan needs my support,” he was quoted as saying in 1987. He boasted about his relationships with three generations of the Abe family.

In 1995, Reverend Moon and Hak Ja Han Moon presided over the mass wedding of 35,000 couples at Olympic Stadium in Seoul, South Korea. (Yamaguchi Haruyoshi / Sygma / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Wikimedia)

Shinzo Abe’s involvement with the church appears to have been discreet at first. Leaked church memos direct members to support him, and suggest that the church saw Abe as a reliable conservative who agreed with its positions on gay marriage and traditional gender and family roles. Later on, Abe became less cautious. In September 2021, he delivered a prerecorded video address at an online church conference, praising Moon’s widow, Hak Ja Han Moon, for her “tireless efforts in resolving disputes in the world, especially in relation to the peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula.” (Donald Trump delivered a speech at the same event.) Yamagami reportedly saw Abe’s video at the 2021 conference, which may have helped him decide to target the former prime minister.

Why was the church such a valuable ally? I tried to ask LDP officials, but they would not speak with me. The Moonie connection remains politically toxic for Japanese politicians. The Moonies are less shy about the relationship.

“I was able to get candidates elected for the parliament, for gubernatorial elections, and city mayors,” Mamoru Kamono, a dapper 67-year-old who spent decades as an in-house journalist and election organizer for the Unification Church, told me. Kamono met me at the church’s Tokyo headquarters, on a high-rent downtown street just a few minutes from the crowds and digital billboards of Shibuya Crossing, the world’s busiest pedestrian intersection. We were escorted into a spotless room overseen by a portrait of Sun Myung Moon. Kamono seemed proud of and eager to talk about the political work he’d done for LDP candidates in Toyama prefecture, northwest of the capital. The church’s volunteers did more than just knock on doors and make phone calls, he told me. They worked their contacts with leading executives in hundreds of companies, and leveraged an informal system of group voting. After obtaining the names of all the employees in a given company, Kamono told me, the Moonie volunteers would press them to secure the votes of their family members and neighbors. In Japan’s highly disciplined, hierarchical society, this strategy often resulted in big margins for the church’s favored candidates.

After elections, logs of campaign phone calls would show that the Moonies did 10 times as much outreach as any other group, Kamono said, and this translated into immense gratitude from candidates. That made it all the more hurtful, he added, when the Toyama city council passed a resolution severing all ties to the church after Abe’s assassination.

What tangible gain did the Moonies get in return for their campaign miracles? They may not have needed much, because they had trust in the LDP’s conservative views about gay marriage, women’s rights, and the importance of family, core issues for the church. (Moon’s own homophobia went far beyond the LDP’s; he once described gay people as “dirty, dung-eating dogs.”) But the Abe administration does appear to have gone out of its way to do them at least one big favor.

In 2015, the government took the controversial step of allowing the church to rename itself, to the outrage of its longtime critics. This was a matter of real import, because since the mid‑’90s the words Unification Church had been tainted in Japan. The church now advertises itself under the more anodyne banner of Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, though most outsiders still use the old name.

Kihei Maekawa, who was a senior official in the education ministry when it approved the rebranding, is still stewing about it. (Religion falls within the ministry’s portfolio.) When I arrived at his office, he handed me a printout of the 41-page Law on Religious Corporations. He told me the church’s application to change its name was granted a quick approval by the education minister at the time—an ally of Abe’s who had received his own election help from the Moonies and taken money from a church-linked publication. (The minister, Hakubun Shimomura, has denied that he was involved in the name change.) This wasn’t just political opportunism, Maekawa said. It was also a repudiation of his ministry’s prior decision. When the church had first approached the government about changing its name, in 1997, Maekawa was in charge of the relevant bureau. He and his colleagues reached a consensus that allowing the change would be “an extreme cover-up,” because the church had become notorious for its fundraising practices.

There are hints that the government may have done other favors. Arita, the journalist and former parliamentarian, told me that he spoke with a group of senior police officials after the 1995 sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo Metro, when all new religious groups were under greater scrutiny. One of the officials told him that “next, we are aiming to expose the Unification Church.” A decade later, Arita said, he met some retired police officials, and when he asked them why there had been no prosecution of the Unification Church, they replied, “Its political power.” The police have declined to comment on the matter, and last year the church sued Arita and several others for defamation.

The LDP denies that it did anything for the Moonies and maintains that it simply accepted the help of campaign volunteers. But after Abe’s assassination, the party’s plummeting poll numbers created a political imperative for Prime Minister Kishida (who has denied any connection to the church) to prove that he and the rest of the LDP are not Moonie stooges. In November 2022, his culture minister announced a formal probe into the church’s alleged misbehavior. This would help establish whether there are grounds to withdraw the church’s tax benefits and status as a religious organization. Even if there are such grounds, a resolution could take years.

Is the Unification Church a religion at all? The church’s representatives scoff at the question. They point out that the Moonies have been recognized in Japan since 1964, and that only two of the country’s 180,000 registered religious groups have ever been dissolved. One was Aum Shinrikyo, and another was a Buddhist group whose priests were enriching themselves through fraud. In both cases, the group’s leading figures were convicted of crimes—a standard that the Unification Church’s main lawyer, Nobuya Fukumoto, told me ought to be the relevant legal precedent. There is no criminal case against the Unification Church’s leaders in Japan, and therefore, in his view, no basis to withdraw the church’s legal status. He said the current government inquiry is nothing more than a desperate effort by Kishida to shore up support.

Others say the church should have been confronted long ago. Kihei Maekawa, the former government official, showed me a line in the Law on Religious Corporations declaring that the state is entitled to revoke a religion’s status if, “in violation of laws and regulations, the religious corporation commits an act which is clearly found to harm public welfare substantially.” Individual members of the Unification Church have been sued successfully; the unanswered question is whether the institution itself can be held liable. Maekawa noted that the Church of Scientology, which is not approved as a religion in Japan, approached his ministry during the 1990s about applying for official recognition. It was told not to waste its energy. If the Unification Church were applying today for the first time, the same thing would likely happen.

Some critics say the church has done so much damage that removing its nonprofit status is not enough. They want a law to help protect the public from the dangers of cults. Eito Suzuki, a journalist who has been writing about the Moonies for decades and who has helped reveal the extent of their relationship with the LDP, told me that a government report proposed a law of just this kind back in 1995—after the Aum Shinrikyo subway attack—with a provision for monitoring abuses by religious movements. The idea, Suzuki said, was shelved.

Perhaps all religions start off as cults. It’s not hard to imagine Buddha or Christ showing up at a Japanese government ministry today, application in hand, and being sent packing. But there are reasons to regard the Unification Church as unusual. Its devotees systematically misrepresent themselves and their intentions. They use fear to police their ranks and maximize their profits in a way that is often more redolent of the Mafia than of a holy order.

This was brought home to me during a long talk I had with a woman who was lured into joining the Moonies in 1997 and spent two years as a member. She and her husband—who helped her get out—agreed to tell me their story but asked that their names not be used, because even today they fear retaliation. I will refer to them as Keiko and Jun.

We met in a restaurant in downtown Tokyo. Keiko, a small, pale woman of 68, told me it all started when she was befriended by a fellow member of the parent-teacher association at her son’s school. The woman invited Keiko and several other mothers to a place called the video center, where they watched films and TV shows. The center didn’t have any visible affiliation, but as they returned over the following months—they were housewives with time on their hands—they noticed that religion began to play a bigger role in the films they saw. Twice Keiko asked, “Is this a religion you’re trying to convert me to?” Both times, her new friend said no; it was just about education. The women grew closer. After a year, Keiko arrived at the center one day and was surprised to be handed a copy of the Bible. “They sat us down and said, ‘We’ll tell you who the Messiah is,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘It’s Moon.’ ”

Keiko said she was taken aback, but also reluctant to abandon her new friends. She decided to continue, telling herself she’d quit if things got bad. She attended lectures on the principles of the Unification Church, and soon she was being sent into the street to sell socks and handkerchiefs to benefit charities. (She later discovered that the charities did not exist, and the profits went to the church.) She concealed all of this from her husband, at the urging of her Moonie supervisors. She began spending money on vases and other supposedly spiritual products, and traveled to the church’s headquarters in South Korea for “expel the demon” ceremonies. As her attachment to the group grew stronger, she began hearing a new message: If you speak ill of the church, you could die. If you betray Reverend Moon, you and your ancestors will burn in hell forever.

Jun, a retiree with a quiet, steadfast manner, told me it didn’t take him long to figure out what had happened to his wife. He was determined to act, but he knew that other deprogramming efforts with Moonies had backfired, in some cases in spectacular fashion, when believers were locked up by their families for months, even years, and sometimes returned to the church anyway after regaining their freedom. The Moonies I met talked about these failed interventions (some of them documented in court) as evidence of the hostility they often face in Japan.

Jun told me he spent 18 months coming up with a team and a strategy before confronting his wife. He wanted to approach her “with sense, with feelings,” and not just castigate her. He organized a month-long decompression, living with her in a hotel where relatives and former church members visited and helped her gain a fuller perspective on what she’d been through. Eventually, Keiko told me, she realized that the church had reduced her to a state of infantile dependence. This, she told me, is at the root of its doctrine: “They tell you not to think on your own,” because that was Eve’s original sin.

On April 15, 2023, Prime Minister Kishida was about to give a campaign speech at a fishing port in the southern city of Wakayama when a man in the crowd tossed a homemade pipe bomb at him. The smoking projectile landed just a few yards from his feet. Kishida’s aides quickly pulled him to safety, and local fishermen wrestled the assailant to the ground. Although no one was seriously hurt, the incident instantly reawakened memories of the Abe assassination.

Japanese politicians may never again approach a campaign crowd with the same ease Abe displayed when he arrived that July morning at Nara. His death may come to mark a moment of lost innocence, the way the assassination of John F. Kennedy does in the United States.

[Read: The legacy of John F. Kennedy]

The broader legacy of the Abe assassination is still taking shape. One thing seems clear: The Unification Church is likely to suffer in Japan even if it doesn’t lose its legal status. The Moonies I met described a litany of insults and abuses hurled at them over the past year. The church’s current faithful may not be overly troubled (“the Messiah is always ostracized,” they are told), but recruiting new followers will be a challenge.

Nor has what Moon called the “Perfect Family” fared well since his death. Its members have spent much of the past decade fighting in court over his assets and legacy, and his children have struggled to live up to their “sinless” billing. One son was accused by his wife of cocaine addiction and domestic abuse. (He denied both claims and has since died.) Another son leaped to his death from a balcony at a Nevada casino. A third son, Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, founded a separate, gun-centered church in Pennsylvania known as Rod of Iron Ministries, where followers do target practice with AR-15s and bring guns to church to be blessed. Hyung Jin wears a golden crown made of rifle shells, and delivers hate-filled sermons against the Democratic Party. He also expects to become the king of America. He reviles his mother—who runs the international church in South Korea—as the “whore of Babylon.”

Although Abe’s reputation has been stained, it may recover somewhat. His harshest critics tend to be older Japanese who have strong memories of the war and its aftermath, and who fear the revival of their country’s military power. As that generation dies off, Abe may come to seem prescient, because of the way he prepared his country for the threats of a new century in which Japan must defend itself from an assertive China.

Counterintuitively, the reputation of Yamagami, his alleged assassin, may not suffer. There is an old tradition in Japan of reverence for the doomed hero, the man who undertakes a suicidal quest and becomes a figure of deep nobility, regardless of the justice of his cause. Many Japanese still revere the right-wing nationalists who stormed Tokyo’s government buildings in 1936 and killed not one but two former prime ministers. The plot’s ringleaders were later tried and executed, but a shrine to their memory stands in a prominent place in central Tokyo. The great Japanese author Yukio Mishima memorialized them in a story and a film. Their sincerity and patriotism are what matter to their admirers, not the cruelty of their act or its ramifications.

Shinzo Abe’s alleged assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami, used a homemade gun. After the shooting, he did not attempt to flee. (The Asahi Shimbun / Getty; Minokuniya / Getty)

Something similar could be said of Yamagami. “I no longer have room to think about the political meaning and consequences of Abe’s death,” he wrote a day before the assassination. The purity of his motives—his righteous anger at the Unification Church—seems to have resonated with the Japanese public.

Yamagami’s trial will offer Japan a chance to relive the entire drama. No date has been set as of this writing. Japanese prosecutors take their time, and for a man who has admitted to killing a former head of state, there may be pressure to apply the death penalty. If so, Yamagami will face an excruciating fate. Death-row prisoners in Japan are not told the date of their execution in advance. They wake up every morning not knowing if this day will be their last.

In the months before he fired the fatal shots, Yamagami described himself as a tragic figure, drawn inexorably to a confrontation that would destroy him. And he did not miss the ironic parallel between his own heedless fury and the zealotry of the church members who had ruined his life. His desperation for a murder weapon, he wrote, was “like a member of the Unification Church throwing his life away for a false savior.”

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “The Prime Minister and the Moonies.”

Editor’s Note: Washington Week with The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

House GOP infighting reached new heights this week as Trump-aligned House Republicans threatened to shut down the government.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy opened an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden based on no evidence this week in an effort to appease his far-right party members. But the move doesn’t appear to have satisfied them. If their demands aren’t met, they plan to challenge McCarthy’s speakership and vote against funding the government. With no agreement in sight, McCarthy dared his detractors to bring a vote to oust him from his leadership post.

And weeks after his plea deal fell apart, President Biden’s son Hunter was indicted on Thursday with three federal firearms charges.

Joining the guest moderator and PBS NewsHour White House correspondent Laura Barrón-López this week to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, a co-author of the Early 202 newsletter and an anchor at Washington Post Live; Andrew Desiderio, a senior congressional reporter at Punchbowl News; Weijia Jiang, a senior White House correspondent at CBS News; and Heidi Przybyla, a national investigative correspondent at Politico.

Read the full transcript [here].