On August 16, 1867, a young farmer named Alfred McDonald Sargent Johnson walked into the courthouse of Cherokee County, Georgia. He had an oath to swear.

The effects of the Civil War were still visible in Canton, a village of about 200 people and the county seat. For one thing, that makeshift courthouse was inside a Presbyterian church—its predecessor having been torched by William Tecumseh Sherman’s men shortly before their march to the sea. For another, Georgia was still under military rule as federal officials debated how best to reconstruct the former Confederate states. How does a government reintegrate the men who, not that long ago, were engaged in a treasonous rebellion?

[Read: Elon Musk’s anti-semitc apartheid-loving grandfather]

Johnson had, like many of his neighbors, taken up arms against the United States. At age 21, he’d joined Company F of the 3rd Georgia Cavalry. The Third had fought in the Chickamauga and Chattanooga campaigns, and Johnson had even been captured as a Union prisoner at New Haven, Kentucky. But he was just a foot soldier in a much larger war. Johnson had not grown up in a stereotypical plantation “big house”; his family’s farm was modest in size and census records do not list him or his father as having owned slaves. He ended the conflict as a private, just as he’d entered it. Johnson might not even have cared much for his war experience; Confederate records list him as having gone AWOL for a period in 1863.

Still, the federal government had decided that even men like him could not return to political power without making at least a gesture of reconciliation. A few months earlier, Congress had passed, over President Andrew Johnson’s veto, an act that required the men of Georgia and other southern states to swear an oath in order to regain their voting privileges. That oath was why Alfred M. S. Johnson was in the courthouse that August day.

There had been much debate in the North, during the war and after it, about how to reintegrate former Confederates into political life—and how forgiving to be of their rebellion. The most radical Republicans wanted to require an “Ironclad Oath” swearing that the prospective voter had “never voluntarily borne arms against the United States” nor given “aid, countenance, counsel, or encouragement” to the Confederacy. Such language would have disenfranchised most white southern men.

The Wade-Davis Bill of 1864 would have required a majority of white men in each state to take the Ironclad Oath before full readmission to the union. Lincoln pocket-vetoed that bill, considering it too harsh. He’d backed a much more lenient plan requiring only 10 percent of a state’s pre-war voters to swear an oath before that state could be readmitted. And his version was more forgiving than the Ironclad Oath, requiring only future loyalty—that they would “henceforth faithfully support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Union of the States thereunder.”

The oath Alfred Johnson would take had been defined in Congress’ Reconstruction Acts, and it was closer to Lincoln’s than to the Ironclad Oath. Like Lincoln’s, it treated the leaders of the Confederacy with less mercy than it did enlisted men. Johnson had to swear that he had:

never been a member of any State Legislature, nor held any executive or judicial office in any State and afterwards engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof;

that I have never taken an oath as a member of Congress of the United States, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State Legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, and afterwards engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof;

that I will faithfully support the Constitution and obey the laws of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, encourage others so to do.

So help me God.

Johnson had never been a state legislator, or a federal judge, or a member of Congress, so it would not have been a particularly difficult oath to take. The rebellion’s leaders would have to wait a bit longer to be allowed back into full political citizenship.

[J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe: The constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again]

The worst class of rebels, the oath seemed to argue, was those who had joined the attempted insurrection after already been elected or appointed to trusted positions of power—the ones that require an oath to support the Constitution. Both Lincoln and President Andrew Johnson had made similar exceptions for public officials who had rebelled, requiring a more difficult route to amnesty. The Fourteenth Amendment, which was then before the states for ratification, made the same distinction—as Donald Trump is now discovering.

Alfred M. S. Johnson went back to farming after that August day. Not long after, he had a son and named him Andrew Johnson—presumably in honor of the man who succeeded Lincoln in the presidency and had pardoned all ex-Confederates by the end of 1868.

Andrew Johnson eventually moved west to Hempstead County, Arkansas. There, he had a son named Garner James Johnson. As a young man, Garner Johnson left farming and moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, taking a job on the Kansas City Southern Railroad. He begat Raymond Ralph Johnson, who begat James Patrick Johnson, who begat James Michael Johnson.

On October 25, 2023, James Michael Johnson—better known as Mike Johnson—was elected the 56th speaker of the House of Representatives.

[Read: A speaker without enemies–for now]

Like his great-great-great-grandfather Alfred, Mike Johnson was part of an attempt to oust the duly elected government of the United States and replace it with one more to his liking. In Alfred’s day, the tools were secession and battle; Johnson’s were spurious claims of voter fraud and trumped-up legal arguments.

After Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 election, Mike Johnson worked hard to prevent the transition of power. In the days after the vote, he told interviewers that the allegations of rigged Dominion voting machines had “a lot of merit,” that there were “credible allegations of fraud and irregularity,” and that a voting system was “suspect because it came from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.”

In December 2020, Johnson organized an effort to get his fellow House Republicans to sign on to an amicus brief for a lawsuit challenging election results in the four states that would, if their votes were thrown out, give Trump a second term. He sent them all an email with the subject line “**Time-sensitive request from President Trump**” saying the president would be watching to see which GOP members of Congress signed on and which did not.

About three-quarters of the House Republicans who objected to the Electoral College count on January 6 cited legal arguments Johnson had made, leading The New York Times to call him “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.” He gave what one fellow Republican member called “a fig-leaf intellectual argument” for overturning the election.

Johnson’s attempts were unsuccessful. The Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit in a brief, unsigned opinion. The 147 Congressional Republicans who, like Johnson, objected to the electoral vote count were outnumbered in the end.

But America was once again forced to ask: What do you do with men after they have fomented a rebellion against an elected government? After the Civil War, the federal response was generally lenient. Among the Confederacy’s top leaders, only Jefferson Davis served prison time, and then for just two years. President Johnson pardoned the overwhelming share of ex-Confederates barely a month after Lincoln’s assassination; he spent the remainder of his presidency pardoning the rest. Within a dozen years, conservative white southerners once again ruled the South—a control often achieved through great violence by former Confederate soldiers.

Mike Johnson didn’t lead a civil war, of course. But he did try to overturn an election and impose a president Americans hadn’t voted for. And it is striking how small the repercussions have been for those who did likewise. For members of Congress, opposing false claims of voter fraud has been much more politically dangerous than supporting them. Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, and Tom Emmer each endorsed Johnson’s spurious legal arguments, and each has been nominated for speaker this year. And now, at the mention of Johnson’s actions, the House Republican caucus does little but laugh and boo.

I keep coming back to Alfred McDonald Sargent Johnson, Mike’s great-great-great-grandfather, and the oath he had to take that day in Cherokee County, pledging not to engage in rebellion again. Mike Johnson wasn’t a lowly foot soldier stuck in a war he played no role in starting. He was its architect, its author and finisher. And yet the only oath he’s been asked to take is as speaker of the House of Representatives.

The symmetry is striking: two lawyers, two different eras of Donald Trump’s career, and two courtrooms in different regions of the country. The lessons from Jenna Ellis and Michael Cohen, however, are the same. Loyalty to Trump is seldom returned, with disastrous results for those who offer it.

In an Atlanta courtroom today, Jenna Ellis, a former attorney for Trump, pleaded guilty to a single felony count of aiding and abetting false statements. She agreed to five years’ probation and will pay restitution and testify in future cases. Ellis is the third lawyer—following Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro—to plead guilty in the past week as part of the wide-reaching racketeering case over attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election. But she is the first to make a statement in court as she entered her plea, and what she said was revealing.

“As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings,” she said, her voice breaking with emotion. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges. I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse.”

[David A. Graham: Another domino falls in Georgia]

Also earlier today, 750 miles north, in Manhattan, Michael Cohen was testifying as the star witness for the New York attorney general’s office in a civil fraud lawsuit against Trump. Like Ellis, Cohen worked as a lawyer for Trump, engaging in actions on the fringes of the law; like Ellis, he is now a convicted felon.

Ellis’s remarks today echoed what Cohen told the House Oversight Committee in February 2019: “I regret the day I said ‘yes’ to Mr. Trump. I regret all the help and support I gave him along the way. I am ashamed of my own failings, and I publicly accepted responsibility for them by pleading guilty in the Southern District of New York.”

If Ellis and Cohen are not in good company, they are at least in big company. Over the years, many people have agreed to work for Trump and put their reputations, to say nothing of criminal records, on the line for him. The former president demands near-total fealty, browbeating and punishing allies for any deviations. (Just ask Representative Tom Emmer, who became the GOP’s latest nominee for speaker of the House today, and then almost immediately became the former nominee, after Trump blasted him on his social-media site.) But when these loyal lieutenants need the favor repaid, Trump ghosts them.

[David A. Graham: The cases against Donald Trump—a guide]

This one-way loyalty has burned boldface names and relative nobodies alike. Many of the people who served in Trump’s administration or served as his allies in Congress have found themselves diminished and sometimes legally ensnared. Many of the people convicted for their participation in the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol have expressed anger at Trump and said they felt hoodwinked by him. He has floated the idea of pardoning them if he regains the presidency. Even if he wins, they should know that his track record of following through is bad.

Trump tried to publicly intimidate Cohen into friendly testimony, but didn’t offer a federal pardon that would have prevented a conviction or spared his former fixer prison time. In Ellis’s case, she complained that Trump wasn’t doing much to help her raise funds for her legal defense, even though she was being targeted for working on his behalf. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said on her podcast last month. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”

Ellis’s plea deal appears to be especially bad news for Rudy Giuliani, yet another former attorney who debased himself on Trump’s behalf and was then charged in Fulton County. Ellis worked closely with Giuliani, and though she did not mention him by name in her statement in court, she pointedly said she had relied on the wisdom of more experienced attorneys—a possible preview of testimony incriminating Giuliani for his role in the election-subversion push.

[Mark Leibovich: The most pathetic men in America]

Giuliani, ironically enough, has experienced some of the same abandonment that stung Ellis. Giuliani has begged the former president for legal assistance as well as millions in payment for legal services rendered as part of the election schemes, according to The New York Times: “Among those who remain close to Mr. Giuliani, there is bafflement, concern and frustration that the former mayor, who encouraged Mr. Trump to declare victory on election night before all the votes were counted, has received little financial help.” Trump has since agreed to hold a pair of fundraisers on Giuliani’s behalf, but the amounts raised still seem to pale against both what Giuliani believes he is owed by Trump and what he owes to his own lawyers.

The mystery is why people keep agreeing to work for Trump despite the hazards. Cohen at least got rich out of his long employment with Trump. What Ellis thought she was getting is less clear, other than public attention that was tainted with ridicule from the start. Trump does occasionally bestow favors on those who jump on grenades for him. Some of the aides who waded most deeply in the muck for Trump received presidential pardons, including Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Steve Bannon.

But these are exceptions. More often, even those who place themselves in grave legal or reputational danger end up facing it alone. “I failed to do my due diligence,” Ellis said today of her legal work for Trump in 2020. She could just as easily have been talking about the personal risks she took when she chose to work for him—despite ample warning about how things were likely to turn out.

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Robert Menendez has held on to his Senate seat and retained the loyalty of many Democratic colleagues through past scandals. But, given the current political environment and the gravity of the charges he now faces, many fellow Democrats have had enough—and voters might turn on him too.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

What’s the alternative to a ground offensive in Gaza? The great underappreciated driver of climate change A humanist manifesto

Undermining the High Ground

Yesterday afternoon, a couple of hours after pleading not guilty to the charge that he had conspired to act as an agent of a foreign government, Senator Robert Menendez announced that “the government is engaged in primitive hunting, by which the predator chases its prey until it’s exhausted and then kills it. This tactic won’t work.”

The senior senator from New Jersey’s plea—and subsequent defiant statement—came just a few weeks after he pleaded not guilty to three separate counts of corruption. Menendez and his wife, Nadine, were accused of accepting bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for helping the government of Egypt and several businessmen. The original indictment was quite dramatic, peppered with talk of more than $500,000 of stashed-away cash and photos of gold bars found in his New Jersey home. Within hours of Menendez’s indictment, several state leaders, including the governor, called on him to step down. But Menendez is fighting hard against the allegations, even as colleagues turn on him.

Menendez has positioned himself as a victim, and has invoked identity politics in trying to defend himself. “It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat,” he said shortly after his initial indictment was announced. He has also accused “those behind this campaign” of smearing him as part of their political agenda: “For years, forces behind the scenes have repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave,” he said in a statement last month. “Menendez has been using explicitly Trump-y talking points in his defense,” my colleague David Graham, who has covered the Menendez charges, told me.

The Menendez imbroglio puts the Democrats in a difficult position. The party has enjoyed some moral high ground as Donald Trump faces various criminal indictments. But having a member of their own party facing such galling corruption charges—and saying in his own defense that, essentially, the deep state is out to get him—may not only undermine that high ground, David said. It may weaken Democrats’ case against Trump’s own statements about being the victim of deep-state machinations, and it could damage voters’ faith in the Democratic Party.

This is not Menendez’s first time facing federal bribery charges: In 2015, he was accused of receiving gifts and some $750,000 in campaign donations from a Florida eye doctor. Those charges resulted in a hung jury, and ultimately the judge declared a mistrial. Menendez was able to maintain his seat through the turmoil, and he denied any wrongdoing. His colleagues, by and large, stood by him. But this time, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy called on Menendez to resign almost immediately after his indictment, and other state Democratic leaders soon followed. Cory Booker, the junior senator from New Jersey who has called Menendez a mentor and friend, urged his colleague to step down a few days after the indictment. Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, has reportedly confronted Menendez in the halls of Congress (or, more precisely, on an escalator) to tell him to resign. More than half of Senate Democrats have called on Menendez to resign, though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been more reserved. “The Senator has made it clear that he is innocent and will not resign from his position as the senior U.S. Senator for New Jersey,” Robert Julien, a spokesperson for Mendendez’s office, told me in an email.

Part of the reason that many of Menendez’s colleagues are turning against him this time, David explained, has to do with the relative severity of the charges. Bribery charges are never a great look, but the charges Menendez currently faces cut to the core of his committee work in the Senate, accusing him of using his position as the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to work on behalf of a foreign power.

The calculations are likely political too: The last time Menendez faced bribery charges, Republican Chris Christie was the governor of New Jersey. If Menendez had given up his seat, Christie could have appointed a Republican in his place. Now the state has a Democratic governor in Murphy, who would presumably appoint a Democrat to replace him, David explained. Even so, Democrats are anxious about introducing uncertainty when they have such a razor-thin majority over Republicans in the Senate. Democrats have become more and more obsessed with beating their Republican opponents. That fixation on winning comes at a cost, David said: “If you are so focused on beating Republicans that you’re willing to look past corruption allegations, you ultimately undermine yourself, even if you can win the next election.”

But whether Menendez can actually win his next election is still a major question. He is a savvy backroom fighter, David explained, which has helped him stay in power in the cutthroat world of New Jersey politics. “There’s lots of backstabbing in ways that are totally legal, but not necessarily savory,” he said. Menendez has hung on through turbulence, but whether he can make it through this scandal intact will be, in part, up to the courts. It will also be up to voters.

Menendez’s trial is scheduled to begin on May 6, about a month before the primary race for his Senate seat. So far, Menendez has made no public indication that he won’t run for reelection. But his odds are not looking promising. He is being trounced in polls by Andrew Kim, a member of the House of Representatives who announced his campaign for Menendez’s seat the day after the senator was indicted. Menendez is innocent until proven guilty, but his constituents might just be ready to move on.

Related:

Bob Menendez never should have been senator this long in the first place. The case against Bob Menendez (From 2015)

Today’s News

A third former Trump-campaign lawyer, Jenna Ellis, pleaded guilty in the Georgia election-interference case. Israel escalated attacks on targets in Gaza, including a refugee camp. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said that more than 700 people were killed in a 24-hour period. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer has dropped out of the Speaker of the House race, just hours after becoming the nominee.

Evening Read

Fryderyk Gabowicz / picture-alliance / dpa / AP

Britney Finally Tells Her Story. It’s Dark.

By Spencer Kornhaber

One of the most disturbing parts of Britney Spears’s story has long been the way people talk about her. As soon as the pop star was released from the legal guardianship of her father in November 2021, ending a 13-year ordeal that she has described as torture, some onlookers asked whether one of the most successful women on Earth could handle living as an adult. In barroom chitchat, meandering podcasts, and online comment sections, you can now find people claiming that freeing Britney—allowing her to, for example, choose how she spends her money or what she eats for dinner—was a mistake. They cite alleged evidence of erratic behavior such as the recent video that the 41-year-old Spears posted of herself dancing sexily with prop knives.

Usually such skeptics speak in a conspiratorial tone, indicating that they think of themselves as radical truth-tellers defying the pink-uniformed groupthink of the #FreeBritney movement. But Spears’s new memoir makes clear that this shaming and second-guessing, using the language of care and concern, is deeply conventional. She portrays herself—including with the title The Woman in Me—as battling the media expectation that she remain trapped in girlhood, virginal and helpless.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

A former inhabitant of the Chagos Archipelago—expelled when the U.S. built its military base there in the early 1970s—and his granddaughter in Port Louis, Mauritius. (Tim Dirven / Panos Pictures / Redux)

Read. A new book from Philippe Sands, The Last Colony, tells the story of the Chagossians, an island people who were expelled from their homes by the British and Americans.

Watch. The Pigeon Tunnel (streaming on Apple TV+) tries to capture the essence of John le Carré. It’s one of our critics’ 22 most exciting films to watch this season.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The MAGA movement has been infused with violence and threats of violence for years. Those threats—now aimed at Republican lawmakers—are the new normal in the GOP.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The hard truth about immigration A record of pure, predatory sadism Too many people own dogs. How the media got the hospital explosion wrong

Sleeping With a Gun by the Bed

The trash fire that is the Republican competition to elect the speaker of the House is entering a new phase now that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio is out of the running. Nine men have put themselves forward; Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota is the apparent favorite, at least for now. Of the nine, seven voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election. (Emmer and Representative Austin Scott of Georgia voted to certify the results.)

Before this contest moves into horse-race handicapping, we should revisit the astonishing stories from over the weekend about the threats made against Republican legislators during Jordan’s brief candidacy. CNN’s Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, and Aaron Blake at The Washington Post, among others, reported on these threats, but many Americans seem unable to muster more than a shrug and a kind of resigned acceptance that this is just how some Republicans are now. The only people who seem angry about this are the Republican lawmakers who, along with their families, received these threats.

Although Jordan repudiated these tactics, some of his colleagues blame him anyway, and Americans are now, as Blake wrote last week, in a “long-overdue” conversation about the role of threats in public life, one that “should include a recognition that these threats and intimidation can work, and probably have.”

That “conversation,” unfortunately, is unlikely to continue. Republicans have long feared their own voters, and have for years whispered about it among themselves. Now that Jordan has been defeated, they will likely go back to pretending that such threats are isolated incidents. But the threats during Jordan’s candidacy should confirm that Trump’s MAGA loyalists, firmly nested in the GOP, constitute a violent movement that refuses to lose any democratic contest—even to other members of its own party.

Some of these threats can be dismissed as the result of technology: The frictional costs of threatening people are basically nonexistent. Angry cranks once needed time and materials (envelopes and stamps, or at least a call to an information line) to say awful things. Today, people are surfing the internet with a smartphone—their personal secretary and valet—right by their side, so the interval between having a repulsive thought and expressing it to a target is now functionally zero.

But email and the internet, and political violence in the United States, have been around for a while. Only in the age of Trump have threats become a common part of daily American partisan politics. Almost anyone who is even remotely a public figure now gets them over almost anything, and Trump and his movement have gone quite far in killing any sense of shame for saying terrible things to other people or their families over political differences.

Not only does Trump expressly model this kind of behavior; he and his media enablers provide rationalizations for such threats. Ironically, many of these excuses were once associated with the violent far left a half-century ago: The system is rigged; democracy is a mug’s game; anyone who disagrees with you is an enemy; those in power will never give it up without being subjected to violence and intimidation. But much of it is also out of the far-right, fascist playbook: The elites are plotting against you; anyone who disagrees with you is obviously in on the plot; the only salvation is if We the People engage in violence ordained by God himself.

We’ve seen these illiberal, populist attitudes and beliefs before. What we have not seen in America until now is the capture of a major political party by this kind of paranoia and violence.

The threats around Jordan’s attempt to gain the gavel are also different because the people making them are reaching down into granular, inside-baseball GOP politics. In recent years, some MAGA adherents have made threats against their partisan opponents in order to defend Trump’s honor, or because they were convinced that the 2020 election was stolen. Now, however, the movement is turning on its own. Some people follow internal House conferences as if they are members of the caucus, and treat the election of a speaker—which is important, to be sure—as an existential battle.

Amazingly, these people made threats in support of … Jim Jordan. They are actually menacing other human beings over the ambitions of a loudmouthed, ineffectual member of Congress.

After threats over the speakership, what’s next? Death threats over who becomes deputy whip? Put the honorable Mr. Bloggs on the Rules Committee, or I’ll hurt your family? As the writer Eric Hoffer so presciently noted more than 70 years ago, decadence and boredom can be among the most useful raw materials for the construction of an authoritarian movement, and clearly, American society has plenty of both.

Many Republican legislators are scared, and they should be. Only 25 members of the House GOP conference voted against Jordan on the floor during the last round of voting. Many more opposed making him speaker; in a secret ballot, 112 of Jordan’s colleagues voted against him—which suggests that more than 80 of them feared doing so in public.

It’s not uncommon for members of Congress to vote one way among themselves and then cast a different vote on the floor, especially if the issue is one where the national party is at odds with the voters in a member’s district. Such political calculations, though sometimes distasteful, are common. But democracy cannot function if legislators feel that their lives—and those of their families—are in danger from their fellow citizens. No matter what happens with Trump and the MAGA cult, the Republican Party cannot go on this way, and some of the legislators who spoke up about threats during Jordan’s attempt to become speaker seem to know it.

What they are willing to do about it is less clear. But I wonder if the arrests and convictions for the January 6 insurrection are having their effect: One caller to a representative, after a string of f-bombs and barely veiled threats, made an effort to stipulate that he was speaking only of nonviolent harassment. Perhaps holding such people legally accountable for their actions—whether they intended violence or were just trying to throw a scare into others—might begin to reverse this trend.

Republican elected officials didn’t seem to care very much about such rhetoric when it was aimed at their opponents, and they were only briefly shaken on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob made clear that there was plenty of room reserved on the gibbet for Mike Pence and other Republican leaders. Perhaps they’ll take such threats more seriously now that their internal squabbles could lead to their wives having to sleep with a gun by the bed, but I suspect that the hyper-partisanship and stunning cowardice that brought the GOP to this moment will, as ever, win the day.

Related:

The new anarchy Only the GOP celebrates political violence.

Today’s News

Two more hostages were released by Hamas. The International Committee of the Red Cross said that it facilitated their release. The Philippines accused the Chinese coast guard of “intentionally” hitting its boats in a disputed area of the South China Sea. María Corina Machado won the Venezuelan opposition’s first presidential primary in more than a decade. If allowed to run, she will challenge President Nicolás Maduro in what he has promised will be an internationally monitored election next year.

Dispatches

Famous People: Lizzie Plaugic and Kaitlyn Tiffany try to find ghosts in Manhattan, but all they see is Anderson Cooper’s apartment.

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P.S.

A while back, I said that I would occasionally use this space to revisit some 1980s musical oddities. This week, I want to remind you how very political music videos could be in the Decade of Excess. You’ve probably seen the video for the 1986 Genesis hit “Land of Confusion,” which used Britain’s Spitting Image puppets to portray world leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to trippy effect. Reagan made a lot of appearances in words and images in those days, including in Sting’s “Russians,” Men at Work’s “It’s a Mistake,” and others.

But for my money, the best video with a Reagan reference was made by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Better known for its huge dance hit “Relax,” in 1984, the band recorded “Two Tribes,” a song about nuclear war. (I wrote about MTV’s nuclear genre here.) The video features two actors, one obviously Reagan, and the other—and this is the cool trivia part—meant to be the Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The two of them beat each other up until the world explodes. The end.

But wait—who? Exactly. Chernenko was leader of the U.S.S.R. for all of 13 months, mostly as a seat warmer in ill health. History has forgotten him, but thanks to a video filmed at the right moment in time, he will live on, forever headbutting Reagan and biting the American president’s ear in an eternal arena match.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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TV's Georgia Harrison, a violence against women campaigner, hopes to inspire young girls.

Three down, 16 to go.

With the attorney Kenneth Chesebro agreeing to plead guilty to a single felony today, the Fulton County, Georgia, racketeering case against Donald Trump and others for attempting to steal the 2020 election has one more conviction and one fewer defendant.

As part of the deal, Chesebro pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to file false documents. He’ll pay $5,000 in fines, write an apology letter, and face five years of probation. Perhaps most important, he agreed to testify in upcoming trials. Chesebro faced seven counts that portrayed him as central to a scheme to send slates of false electors to Washington, D.C., after the 2020 election and to efforts to disrupt the certification of the election on January 6, 2021, in Congress. He had argued that he was merely offering legal opinions to clients. Chesebro’s plea came on the same day that jury selection had begun in his case, and one day after the attorney Sidney Powell took a somewhat similar plea deal. Scott Hall, an Atlanta bail bondsman, pleaded guilty in September.

[David A. Graham: What Sidney Powell’s deal could mean for the Fulton County case against Trump]

The question for anyone watching the proceedings now is whether these pleas portend the sort of falling-dominos scenario that prosecutors hope for in a big racketeering case like this, in which low-level defendants decide to cut their losses and aid prosecutors in convicting the biggest names—in this case, a group including Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer John Eastman, and the former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark.

Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who has closely followed the case, cautioned against expectations of a flurry of pleas now. But he told me that the agreements will force other defendants to think carefully about their choices.

“Do you want to drag it out and risk being lumped in with Donald Trump and the other top-tier people in this alleged racketeering scheme?” he said. “Are [defendants] willing to take the deals of the kind that Powell and Chesebro took, or are they going to fall on their swords for Donald Trump and go down with him?”

[David A. Graham: The Georgia indictment offers the whole picture]

This week’s pleas appear to be a win for all parties. Chesebro and Powell both got fairly lenient sentences and, as first offenders, can have their convictions wiped from the record if they comply with the terms of the deals. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, meanwhile, scored two convictions and will now be able to draw on testimony from two people who were deeply enmeshed in the paperwork coup.

The pleas also spare all parties the rigamarole of a trial. Chesebro and Powell were the only two defendants who had requested a speedy trial under state law; others preferred more time to mount a defense. Now neither has to deal with the stress—and legal bills—of a trial. Nor do Willis and her team have to go through the exercise and risk revealing their strategy before the other defendants go on trial, which is expected sometime next year. This might help explain why both Chesebro and Powell got what many observers feel were favorable deals.

[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump—a guide]

“It was an open-ended question as to what the district attorney was willing to do for them in terms of a deal, and where the district attorney saw them in the pecking order [of defendants],” Kreis told me. “It’s clear to me now that the D.A. sees them as linchpins, and they want them to testify.”

What’s not clear is what exactly Chesebro might testify about. Unlike Powell, he doesn’t have much of a public profile, and didn’t spend time in front of cameras. In fact, he was one of the last witnesses to testify to the House committee investigating the 2020 election subversion, because investigators took time to chase him down in Puerto Rico. A quiet man and reputedly a skilled lawyer, he attended Harvard Law School, was a protégé of the prominent liberal legal mind Laurence Tribe, and worked for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign before getting involved in conservative legal causes starting around 2016, including working with Eastman to challenge birthright citizenship.

[David A. Graham: The paperwork coup]

Given that Chesebro has been described as a key architect of the false-elector scheme, he could presumably speak to the actions of the major players, perhaps even Trump’s. But Chesebro’s deposition for the House committee gives few hints of what he might be able to divulge. He said that his main contacts on the campaign included the close Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, and that he had spoken with Giuliani only once or twice. But in most cases, he invoked both the Fifth Amendment and attorney-client privilege to avoid giving answers, including about whether he had any direct communication with Trump.

That will be different if and when he is called to testify in Fulton County. The judge in the case has already ruled that attorney-client privilege does not apply to some of Chesebro’s communications under an exception that covers the commission of crimes, and having pleaded guilty, Chesebro can’t cite his right against self-incrimination. His role, instead, will be to incriminate others.

Kenneth Chesebro admits conspiracy charge in 2020 election interference case in Georgia.

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The incentives of social media have long been perverse. But in recent weeks, platforms have become virtually unusable for people seeking accurate information.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The sociopaths among us—and how to avoid them MAGA Bluey is stressing people out. What Sidney Powell’s plea deal could mean for the Fulton County case against Trump Hamas’s hostage-taking handbook says to “kill the difficult ones” and use hostages as “human shields.”

Dangerous Incentives

“For following the war in real-time,” Elon Musk declared to his 150 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) the day after Israel declared war on Hamas, two accounts were worth checking out. He tagged them in his post, which racked up some 11 million views. Three hours later, he deleted the post; both accounts were known spreaders of disinformation, including the claim this spring that there was an explosion near the Pentagon. Musk, in his capacity as the owner of X, has personally sped up the deterioration of social media as a place to get credible information. Misinformation and violent rhetoric run rampant on X, but other platforms have also quietly rolled back their already lacking attempts at content moderation and leaned into virality, in many cases at the cost of reliability.

Social media has long encouraged the sharing of outrageous content. Posts that stoke strong reactions are rewarded with reach and amplification. But, my colleague Charlie Warzel told me, the Israel-Hamas war is also “an awful conflict that has deep roots … I am not sure that anything that’s happened in the last two weeks requires an algorithm to boost outrage.” He reminded me that social-media platforms have never been the best places to look if one’s goal is genuine understanding: “Over the past 15 years, certain people (myself included) have grown addicted to getting news live from the feed, but it’s a remarkably inefficient process if your end goal is to make sure you have a balanced and comprehensive understanding of a specific event.”

Where social media shines, Charlie said, is in showing users firsthand perspectives and real-time updates. But the design and structure of the platforms are starting to weaken even those capabilities. “In recent years, all the major social-media platforms have evolved further into algorithmically driven TikTok-style recommendation engines,” John Herrman wrote last week in New York Magazine. Now a toxic brew of bad actors and users merely trying to juice engagement have seeded social media with dubious, and at times dangerous, material that’s designed to go viral.

Musk has also introduced financial incentives for posting content that provokes massive engagement: Users who pay for a Twitter Blue subscription (in the U.S., it costs $8 a month) can in turn get paid for posting content that generates a lot of views from other subscribers, be it outrageous lies, old clips repackaged as wartime footage, or something else that might grab eyeballs. The accounts of those Twitter Blue subscribers now display a blue check mark—once an authenticator of a person’s real identity, now a symbol of fealty to Musk.

If some of the changes making social-media platforms less hospitable to accurate information are obvious to users, others are happening more quietly inside companies. Musk slashed the company’s trust-and-safety team, which handled content moderation, soon after he took over last year. Caitlin Chin-Rothmann, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me in an email that Meta and YouTube have also made cuts to their trust-and-safety teams as part of broader layoffs in the past year. The reduction in moderators on social-media sites, she said, leaves the platforms with “fewer employees who have the language, cultural, and geopolitical understanding to make the tough calls in a crisis.” Even before the layoffs, she added, technology platforms struggled to moderate content that was not in English. After making widely publicized investments in content moderation under intense public pressure after the 2016 presidential election, platforms have quietly dialed back their capacities. This is happening at the same time as these same platforms have deprioritized the surfacing of legitimate news by reputable sources via their algorithms (see also: Musk’s decision to strip out the headlines that were previously displayed on X if a user shared a link to another website).

Content moderation is not a panacea. And violent videos and propaganda have been spreading beyond major platforms, on Hamas-linked Telegram channels, which are private groups that are effectively unmoderated. On mainstream sites, some of the less-than-credible posts have come directly from politicians and government officials. But experts told me that efforts to ramp up moderation—especially investments in moderators with language and cultural competencies—would improve the situation.

The extent of inaccurate information on social media in recent weeks has attracted attention from regulators, particularly in Europe, where there are different standards—both cultural and legal—regarding free speech compared with the United States. The European Union opened an inquiry into X earlier this month regarding “indications received by the Commission services of the alleged spreading of illegal content and disinformation, in particular the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech.” In an earlier letter in response to questions from the EU, Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, wrote that X had labeled or removed “tens of thousands of pieces of content”; removed hundreds of Hamas-affiliated accounts; and was relying, in part, on “community notes,” written by eligible users who sign up as contributors, to add context to content on the site. Today, the European Commission sent letters to Meta and TikTok requesting information about how they are handling disinformation and illegal content. (X responded to my request for comment with “busy now, check back later.” A spokesperson for YouTube told me that the company had removed tens of thousands of harmful videos, adding, “Our teams are working around the clock to monitor for harmful footage and remain vigilant.” A spokesperson for TikTok directed me to a statement about how it is ramping up safety and integrity efforts, adding that the company had heard from the European Commission today and would publish its first transparency report under the European Digital Services Act next week. And a spokesperson for Meta told me, “After the terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel, we quickly established a special operations center staffed with experts, including fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers, to closely monitor and respond to this rapidly evolving situation.” The spokesperson added that the company will respond to the European Commission.)

Social-media platforms were already imperfect, and during this conflict, extremist groups are making sophisticated use of their vulnerabilities. The New York Times reported that Hamas, taking advantage of X’s weak content moderation, have seeded the site with violent content such as audio of a civilian being kidnapped. Social-media platforms are providing “a near-frictionless experience for these terrorist groups,” Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which is currently facing a lawsuit from Twitter over its research investigating hate speech on the platform, told me. By paying Musk $8 a month, he added, “you’re able to get algorithmic privilege and amplify your content faster than the truth can put on its pajamas and try to combat it.”

Related:

This war shows just how broken social media has become. How to redeem social media

Today’s News

After saying he would back interim House Speaker Patrick McHenry and postpone a third vote on his own candidacy, Representative Jim Jordan now says he will push for another round of voting. Sidney Powell, a former attorney for Donald Trump, has pleaded guilty in the Georgia election case. The Russian American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva has been detained in Russia, according to her employer, for allegedly failing to register as a foreign agent.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Hickey

The Annoyance Economy

By Annie Lowrey

Has the American labor market ever been better? Not in my lifetime, and probably not in yours, either. The jobless rate is just 3.8 percent. Employers added a blockbuster 336,000 jobs in September. Wage growth exceeded inflation too. But people are weary and angry. A majority of adults believe we’re tipping into a recession, if we are not in one already. Consumer confidence sagged in September, and the public’s expectations about where things are heading drooped as well.

The gap between how the economy is and how people feel things are going is enormous, and arguably has never been bigger. A few well-analyzed factors seem to be at play, the dire-toned media environment and political polarization among them. To that list, I want to add one more: something I think of as the “Economic Annoyance Index.” Sometimes, people’s personal financial situations are just stressful—burdensome to manage and frustrating to think about—beyond what is happening in dollars-and-cents terms. And although economic growth is strong and unemployment is low, the Economic Annoyance Index is riding high.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

How a common stomach bug causes cancer Egypt’s Gaza problem You won’t hear much about the next chapter of space travel.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Alfred Gescheidt / Getty; Getty

Read. “Explaining Pain,” a new poem by Donald Platt:

“The way I do it is to say my body / is not my / body anymore. It is someone else’s. The pain, therefore, / is no longer / mine.”

Listen. A ground invasion in Gaza seems all but certain, Hanna Rosin discusses in the latest episode of Radio Atlantic. But then what?

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Working as a content moderator can be brutal. In 2019, Casey Newton wrote a searing account in The Verge of the lives of content moderators, who spend their days sifting through violent, hateful posts and, in many cases, work as contractors receiving relatively low pay. We Had to Remove This Post, a new novel by the Dutch writer Hanna Bervoets, follows one such “quality assurance worker,” who reviews posts on behalf of a social-media corporation. Through this character, we see one expression of the human stakes of witnessing so much horror. Both Newton and Bervoets explore the idea that, although platforms rely on content moderators’ labor, the work of keeping brutality out of users’ view can be devastating for those who do it.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The Kraken has been released—on probation.

Sidney Powell, the attorney who used that catchphrase for her work to overturn the 2020 presidential election, pleaded guilty today to six misdemeanors in Fulton County, Georgia, as part of a sweeping racketeering case against Donald Trump and 16 others. Under the terms of the deal, Powell admitted she conspired to breach the election systems in Coffee County, Georgia. She recorded a proffer video with prosecutors that described the crimes and she agreed to testify at future cases. She also wrote an apology letter to citizens of Georgia and agreed to pay almost $9,000 in fines.

The plea deal appears to be a very good one for Powell—letting her off with only misdemeanors, which can be wiped from her record as a first offender if she complies with the terms of the agreement. She was set to go on trial tomorrow, alongside lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who is accused of designing a scheme to submit false electors on behalf of Trump. (Powell still faces defamation charges from manufacturers of voting machines, and she’s an unindicted co-conspirator in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal case against Trump.)

[David A. Graham: The Georgia indictment offers the whole picture]

“It's a great deal. If I were her I’d be very pleased,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State, told me. “It’s a great outcome especially if you’re engaged in what most people would say are obvious felonies.”

The question is what it gives prosecutors. Although today’s plea doesn’t offer the public any new information about prosecutors’ case or the evidence they have, it seems to have a potential to affect the overall Fulton County case in three ways. In short, Kreis told me, “I think there are a lot of people who are in more trouble than they were before.”

First, the plea simplifies the Chesebro trial. Powell and Chesebro had asked for speedy trials, rather than waiting a few months for a more standard trial. Though both are attorneys, their roles were very different. Powell, flashy and drawn to animal prints and chunky jewelry, became a household name in the weeks after the election, as she often spoke to the press about the election scheme, though her role seems to have been mostly lower-level and operational. Chesebro, by contrast, was little known and had no public profile, but worked closely with John Eastman and other lawyers on the broad contours of the paperwork coup.

[David A. Graham: The paperwork coup]

Removing Powell will narrow the Chesebro trial, which could help prosecutors, but it may also satisfy Chesebro, whose attorneys wanted the cases separated. “There has never been any direct contact or communication between Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell,” they argued in a filing last month. “Similarly, there is no correlation or overlap between the overt acts or the substantive charges associated with Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell.” (Chesebro rejected a deal that would have spared him prison time but required him to plead guilty to a felony and testify, ABC News reports.)

Second, Powell’s plea moves forward the Coffee County portion of the racketeering case. According to prosecutors, the conspirators arranged to unlawfully access and copy data from voting machines in the Southeastern Georgia location. Powell is the second person to plead guilty to involvement there, following Scott Hall, an Atlanta bail bondsman who copped a plea in September. Their testimony may help prosecutors to target Jeff Clark, a little known Justice Department official who attempted to lead a coup inside the department, getting Trump to appoint him acting attorney general, and to convince state legislatures to overturn election results. (He has pleaded not guilty.)

[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump—a guide]

“The person in the gravest of danger [now] is Jeff Clark,” Kreis said. “Now we have a direct chain of individuals who can link Sidney Powell to Scott Hall and Scott Hall to Jeff Clark. Now there’s two witnesses who can presumably talk about the way in which Jeff Clark was not just concocting letters in his office to encourage the general assembly to overturn the election but was involved in and linked to unlawful actions in Georgia.”

The third level is the question of how other people accused in the case might react to Powell’s plea. Prosecutors likely hope that it might convince some of the lower-level defendants to conclude that their chances of beating the rap are low but also that cooperating now might produce favorable terms. Agreements to testify would, in turn, presumably make it easier to mount a successful case against the biggest names in the case—Trump, of course, as well as attorneys Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. A trial for these defendants likely won’t occur until next year.

[David A. Graham: This is going to be a mess]

“It’s a real prisoner’s dilemma,” Kreis said. “Who’s talking, who’s doing what, what’s the deal I’m going to get? It’s a complicated set of game theory.”

How all of the remaining defendants, with all their different interests, choose to play will help determine what sort of game is being played: Powell’s conviction could be the first domino in a dramatic cascade, or simply an early piece taken off the board in a long, grueling chess match.

Sidney Powell will now testify for prosecutors at the trial where Donald Trump is a defendant.