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Emotions can run high in the skies. Why wouldn’t they?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Have you listened lately to what Trump is saying? A moral case against the Israeli hostage deal The money always wins. A sort-of-common, very strange cat trick

Fear of Flying

An airplane is an odd environment: You’re buckled into a flying piece of metal hurling through clouds, sitting in very close proximity to strangers, who may need to shuffle into an aisle every time you have to pee. You’re a member of a temporary, placeless mini-society, following both explicit and unwritten rules distinct from those on Earth. No wonder, then, that some people act sort of strange. They cry. They consume gallons of tomato juice. They swear by rituals (ginger ale and a neck pillow, anyone?) to exert a modicum of control in an environment otherwise totally stripped of it. Most flyers are quiet and courteous to their fellow travelers, even if they’re exhausted or cranky, but some—a small but disruptive cohort—use their time in the friendly skies to act out.

Many of the reasons people might act a little snippy on planes are not that deep: They are in a cramped space; they may be hungry or tired or tipsy; they’re trying to squeeze plump bags into limited overhead bins to avoid paying fees. Seats are cramped, and flight cancellations have been frequent. People place a lot of pressure on flights, especially during the holidays, Sheryl Skaggs, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, told me; those who fly rarely, and who “don’t really understand the rules of the road,” may be making a big annual trip, with high expectations in tow. Someone who spent $600 on a flight and waited through three hours of unexplained delays, missing a family dinner as a result, might be a bit cross.

For most people, the inconvenience and indignities of travel mean they act a bit frosty to their seatmate or retreat into noise-canceling headphones. But a small number of airplane miscreants might vape in the bathroom or throw a fit instead. Incidents of “air rage” have gone viral since the pandemic began, with people acting in erratic and sometimes violent ways, often in response to mask mandates. But problematic plane behavior may have deeper roots. Skaggs and a colleague recently published a paper looking at misconduct on planes—including physical violence and verbal conflicts—over a period of 21 years ending in 2020. Even before the pandemic, she told me, reports of bad behavior in the skies ticked up sharply.

Skaggs found that alcohol frequently fueled problems on flights, but the combination of less comfortable conditions for travelers, alongside low transparency from airlines that often cancel or delay flights, also contributed. Flights were historically choreographed to make passengers feel at ease in a strange environment, Alexandra Murphy, the dean of the college of communication at DePaul University, who has studied airline behavior, told me. From its inception, air travel relied on “building in the familiarity of everyday practice,” she said, and airlines soon started serving hot meals and playing movies. (It’s just like being at home, except that after dinner you find yourself in Albuquerque or Charlotte or London.) Flight attendants passed around drinks and spoke in euphemistic language about what could go wrong, helping make the setting feel safer and more normal for passengers.

But in recent years, airlines have cut costs, and it is no longer the norm for domestic flights to serve free hot meals. Increased security measures since 9/11 mean that flight attendants’ role has more visibly morphed into one of surveillance and discipline, in addition to service. Now that planes are more rule-bound, restrictive environments, some of the illusion of normalcy is shattered, Murphy explained. There’s little to distract people from the fact that they are packed in like sardines, hot, and hungry.

Of course, that dynamic doesn’t always lead to bad behavior, nor does it excuse it. Most flights go off with no crises beyond a few tiffs over who gets the armrests. For a lot of people, the worst they might do is burst into tears while watching a movie. (I asked Dr. Albert Rizzo, the chief medical officer for the American Lung Association, about the theory that low cabin-oxygen levels make people more emotional. He said that this explanation is implausible, because “if you have normal lungs, and if you’re just sitting on a plane, the oxygen saturation in your blood should still be at a very normal level.”) Indeed, most people on planes see others behaving politely and gamely follow suit. And those who do take their plane ride as an opportunity to punch someone are likely displaying a continuity in antisocial behavior that might express itself in other settings, too, Robert Sampson, a sociology professor at Harvard, told me.

Air travel has had a bruising few years, and travelers have felt the effects. Flights were a mess last year. Widespread cancellations and delays, coupled with the infamous Southwest fiasco around Christmas, caused major headaches for flyers. Airlines are seeing fewer cancellations this year. But the ongoing perception that air travel is a nightmare may further poison travelers’ moods, Katy Nastro, a spokesperson for the travel company Going, explained to me. “Pack your patience” may not be the coolest truism, she said, but taking everything with a grain of salt—recognizing that your seatmate may be crabby because she missed a connecting flight, or that the person hogging your armrest may have a fear of flying—is a useful approach if you’re looking to have pleasant holiday-week flights. Nastro noted that most people are stressed out and trying to navigate the unwritten rules of air travel. Hopefully, people on your flight won’t pee on other passengers, refuse to stop singing, or have a meltdown in the aisle. But if they do, remember: You won’t be in the air forever.

Related:

There is no good way to travel anywhere in America. There are two types of airport people.

Today’s News

Israel and Hamas agreed to a deal that would release some hostages and include a four-day pause in fighting. North Korea launched a military spy satellite, violating bans by the United Nations. In response, South Korea is planning to resume aerial surveillance on their shared border. Sam Altman has returned to his role as OpenAI’s CEO after a shocking ouster.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: In many ways, OpenAI’s story is just beginning, Damon Beres says. The turmoil at the company will affect the future of AI development. The Weekly Planet: 2023 just notched its most ominous climate record yet, Zoë Schlanger writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf gathers reader responses on what international issues matter most to them. Work in Progress: The OpenAI mess is about one big thing, Derek Thompson writes.

Evening Read

Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

Have Yourself an Early Little Christmas

By Elizabeth Bruenig

All of the arguments that chestnuts should not be roasting on an open fire in the month of November make sense to me: the nagging fact that retailers haul out the proverbial holly before Halloween has fully passed for purely commercial reasons, further cheapening an already materialistic mode of celebration; the dilution of a particularly special time of year by stretching it to the point of exhaustion; the infringement upon both Thanksgiving and the traditional Christian season of Advent, which each tend to be swallowed up by premature Christmas cheer; the obnoxious recruitment of Christmas into the culture wars—think malicious wishes for a “merry Christmas”—that can make the entire season feel alienating and isolating. Every position above has its merits, and none of them stops me from rockin’ around my Christmas tree starting November 1.

Maybe there is no good defense of getting into the Christmas spirit as early as I do—though I can’t help but feel a sense of kinship with those other handful of houses already decked out in lights before Thanksgiving. So have some patience with those of us who need a little Christmas right this very minute: a two-and-a-half-month Christmas really does have a few pleasures to recommend it.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Why Americans hate a good economy How Reconstruction created American public education What Hamas promises, Iranians know too well.

Culture Break

Epic Records

Listen. André 3000, the legendary Outkast emcee, is no longer rapping. But his recent flute album is him speaking anew.

Watch. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (in theaters now) is an enjoyable extravaganza.

Play our daily crossword.

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.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

OpenAI fired its chief executive, Sam Altman, on Friday, accusing him of “not being consistently candid” with its board of directors. This kicked off several days of utter nonsense that astonished the tech world—and probably delighted a bunch of business-school types who now have a great example of why the incredibly boring-sounding term corporate governance is actually extremely important.

Friday: The hour before everything went sideways, OpenAI’s board of directors consisted of just six people, including Altman. Its president, Greg Brockman, apparently took Altman’s side, while the other four members—the chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and three nonemployee members—voted to ether their CEO. Soon after, Brockman quit the company.

Sunday: OpenAI invited Altman back to the office to discuss the prospect of rehiring him as CEO. Despite pressure from Microsoft, however, the board members declined to rehire Altman. Instead, they announced that the next chief executive of the company would be an outsider: Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch, a live-video streaming service.

Monday: The Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella announced that he would hire Altman, along with other OpenAI workers, to start a new AI-research division within Microsoft. Then roughly 700 of the nearly 800 employees at OpenAI signed a letter demanding the return of Altman as CEO and the resignations of all the board members who stood against him.

If this seems dizzying, the next bit might require Dramamine. Sutskever played the key role in firing Altman over Google Meet on Friday, then declined to rehire him on Sunday, and then signed the letter on Monday demanding the return of Altman and the firing of his own board-member co-conspirators. On X (formerly Twitter), Sutskever posted an apology to the entire company, writing, “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions.” Altman replied with three red hearts. One imagines Brutus, halfway through the stabbing of Caesar, pulling out the knife, offering Caesar some gauze, lightly stabbing him again, and then finally breaking down in apologetic tears and demanding that imperial doctors suture the stomach wound. (Soon after, in post-op, Caesar dispatches a courier to send Brutus a brief message inked on papyrus: “<3.”)

We still don’t know much about the OpenAI fracas. We don’t know a lot about Altman’s relationship (or lack thereof) with the board that fired him. We don’t know what Altman did in the days before his firing that made this drastic step seem unavoidable to the board. In fact, the board members who axed Altman have so far refused to elaborate on the precise cause of the firing. But here is what we know for sure: Altman’s ouster stemmed from the bizarre way that OpenAI is organized.

In the first sentence of this article, I told you that “on Friday, OpenAI fired its chief executive, Sam Altman.” Perhaps the most technically accurate way to put that would have been: “On Friday, the board of directors of the nonprofit entity of OpenAI, Inc., fired Sam Altman, who is most famous as the lead driver of its for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Global LLC.” Confusing, right?

In 2015, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and several other AI luminaries founded OpenAI as a nonprofit institution to build powerful artificial intelligence. The idea was that the most important technology in the history of humankind (as some claim) ought to “benefit humanity as a whole” rather than narrowly redound to the shareholders of a single firm. As Ross Andersen explained in an Atlantic feature this summer, they structured OpenAI as a nonprofit to be “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”

After several frustrating years, OpenAI realized that it needed money—a lot of money. The cost of computational power and engineering talent to build a digital superintelligence turned out to be astronomically high. Plus, Musk, who had been partly financing the organization’s operations, suddenly left the board in 2018 after a failed attempt to take over the firm. This left OpenAI with a gaping financial hole.

OpenAI therefore opened a for-profit subsidiary that would be nested under the OpenAI nonprofit. The entrepreneur and writer Sam Lessin called this structure a corporate “turducken,” referring to the dubious Thanksgiving entrée in which a cooked duck is stuffed inside a cooked turkey. In this turducken-esque arrangement, the original board would continue to “govern and oversee” all for-profit activities.

When OpenAI, the nonprofit, created OpenAI, the for-profit, nobody imagined what would come next: the ChatGPT boom. Internally, employees predicted that the rollout of the AI chatbot would be a minor event; the company referred to it as a “low-key research preview” that wasn’t likely to attract more than 100,000 users. Externally, the world went mad for ChatGPT. It became, by some measures, the fastest-growing consumer product in history, garnering more than 1 billion users.

Slowly, slowly, and then very quickly, OpenAI, the for-profit, became the star of the show. Altman pushed fast commercialization, and he needed even more money to make that possible. In the past few years, Microsoft has committed more than $10 billion to OpenAI in direct cash and in credits to use its data and cloud services. But unlike a typical corporate arrangement, where being a major investor might guarantee a seat or two on the board of directors, Microsoft’s investments got them nothing. OpenAI’s operating agreement states without ambiguity, “Microsoft has no board seat and no control.” Today, OpenAI’s corporate structure—according to OpenAI itself—looks like this.

(OpenAI)

In theory, this arrangement was supposed to guarantee morality plus money. The morality flowed from the nonprofit board of directors. The money flowed from Microsoft, the second biggest company in the world, which has lots of cash and resources to help OpenAI achieve its mission of building a general superintelligence.

But rather than align OpenAI’s commercial and ethical missions, this organizational structure created a house divided against itself. On Friday, this conflict played out in vivid color. Altman, the techno-optimist bent on commercialization, lost out to Sutskever, the Brutus cum mad scientist fearful that super-smart AI poses an existential risk to humanity. This was shocking. But from an organizational standpoint, it wasn’t surprising. A for-profit start-up rapidly developing technology hand in glove with Microsoft was nested under an all-powerful nonprofit board that believed it was duty-bound to resist rapid development of AI and Big Tech alliances. That does not make any sense.

Everything is obvious in retrospect, especially failure, and I don’t want to pretend that I saw any of this coming. I don’t think anybody saw this coming. Microsoft’s investments accrued over many years. ChatGPT grew over many months. That all of this would blow up without any warning was inconceivable.

But that’s the thing about technology. Despite manifestos that claim that the annunciation of tech is a matter of cosmic inevitability, technology is, for now, made by people—flawed people, who may be brilliant and sometimes clueless, who change their mind and then change their mind again. Before we build an artificial general intelligence to create progress without people, we need dependable ways to organize people to work together to build complex things within complex systems. The term for that idea is corporate structure.

OpenAI is on the precipice of self-destruction because, in its attempt to build an ethically pristine institution to protect a possible superintelligence, it built just another instrument of minority control, in which a small number of nonemployees had the power to fire its chief executive in an instant.

In AI research, there is something called the “alignment problem.” When we engineer an artificial intelligence, we ought to make sure that the machine has the intentions and values of its architects. Oddly, the architects of OpenAI created an institution that is catastrophically unaligned, in which the board of directors and the chief executive are essentially running two incompatibly different companies within the same firm. Last week, the biggest question in technology was whether we might live long enough to see humans invent aligned superintelligence. Today, the more appropriate question is: Will we live long enough to see AI’s architects invent a technology for aligning themselves?

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

The former president, after years of espousing authoritarian beliefs, has fully embraced the language of fascism. But Americans—even those who have supported him—can still refuse to follow him deeper into darkness.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Elon Musk’s disturbing ‘truth’ The non-end of George Santos Why you maybe shouldn’t write a memoir

The Decisive Outrage

Readers of the Daily know that I am something of a stubborn pedant about words and their meanings. When I was a college professor teaching political science and international relations, I tried to make my students think very hard about using words such as war and terrorism, which we often apply for their emotional impact without much thought—the “war” on poverty, the “war” on drugs, and, in a perfecta after 9/11, the “war on terrorism.”

And so, I dug in my heels when Donald Trump’s critics described him and his followers as fascists. Authoritarians? Yes, some. Illiberal? Definitely. But fascism, a term coined by Benito Mussolini and now commonly used to describe Italy, Germany, and other nations in the 1930s, has a distinct meaning, and denotes a form of government that is beyond undemocratic.

Fascism is not mere oppression. It is a more holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual (except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality), glorifies hypernationalism and racism, worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances. It asserts that all public activity should serve the regime, and that all power must be gathered in the fist of the leader and exercised only by his party.

I argued that for most of Trump’s time as a public figure, he was not a fascist but rather a wannabe caudillo, the kind of Latin American strongman who cared little about what people believed so long as they feared him and left him in power. When he would make forays into the public square, his politics were insubstantial and mostly focused on exploiting reflexive resentment and racism, such as when he called for the death penalty for the Black youths wrongly accused in the infamous Central Park–jogger case. But Trump in those days was never able to square his desperate wish to be accepted in Manhattan society with his need to play the role of an outer-borough tough guy. He was an obnoxious and racist gadfly, perhaps, but he was still a long way from fascism.

As a candidate and as president, he had little in the way of a political program for the GOP beyond his exhausting narcissism. He had only two consistent issues: hatred of immigrants and love for foreign autocrats. Even now, his rants contain little political substance; when he veers off into actual issues, such as abortion and taxes, he does not seem to understand or care about them very much, and he will turn on a dime when he thinks it is to his advantage.

Trump had long wanted to be somebody in politics, but he is also rather indolent—again, not a characteristic of previous fascists—and he did not necessarily want to be saddled with any actual responsibilities. According to some reports, he never expected to win in 2016. But even then, in the run-up to the election, Trump’s opponents were already calling him a fascist. I counseled against such usage at the time, because Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill. (A rare benefit of his disordered character is that his defensiveness and pettiness likely continue to limit the size of his personality cult.)

After Trump was elected, I still warned against the indiscriminate use of fascism, because I suspected that the day might come when it would be an accurate term to describe him, and I wanted to preserve its power to shock and to alarm us. I acknowledged in August 2022 that Trump’s cult “stinks of fascism,” but I counseled “against rushing toward the F-word: Things are poised to get worse, and we need to know what to watch for.”

The events of the past month, and especially Trump’s Veterans Day speech, confirm to me that the moment has arrived.

For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric. Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His address in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday was the usual hot mess of random thoughts, but near the end, it took a more sinister turn. (It’s almost impossible to follow, but you can try to read the full text here.) In one passage in particular, Trump melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism:

We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.

As the New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat later pointed out to The Washington Post, Trump is populating this list of imaginary villains (which she sees as a form of projection) in order “to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom. Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”

Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.

Unfortunately, the overuse of fascist (among other charges) quickly wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words. Trump seized on this strategic error by his opponents and used it as a kind of political cover. Over the years, he has become more extreme and more dangerous, and now he waves away any additional criticisms as indistinguishable from the over-the-top objections he faced when he entered politics, in 2015.

Today, the mistake of early overreaction and the subsequent complacency it engendered has aided Trump in his efforts to subvert American democracy. His presence in our public life has become normalized, and he continues to be treated as just another major-party candidate by a hesitant media, an inattentive public, and terrified GOP officials. This is the path to disaster: The original fascists and other right-wing dictators of Europe succeeded by allying with scared elites in the face of public disorder and then, once they had seized the levers of government, driving those elites from power (and in many cases from existence on this planet).

It is possible, I suppose, that Trump really has little idea of what he’s saying. (We’re under threat from “communists” and “Marxists” and “fascists?” Uh, okay.) But he has reportedly expressed admiration of Hitler (and envy of Hitler’s grip on the Nazi military), so when the Republican front-runner uses terms like vermin and expressions like poisoning the blood of our country, we are not required to spend a lot of time generously parsing what he may have meant.

More to the point, the people around Trump certainly know what he’s saying. Indeed, Trump’s limited vocabulary might not have allowed him to cough up a word like vermin. We do not know if it was in his prepared text, but when asked to clarify Trump’s remarks, his campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, told The Washington Post that “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

What?

Cheung later clarified his clarification: He meant to say their “sad, miserable existence" instead of their “entire existence,” as if that was somehow better. If that’s not a fascist faux pas, nothing is.

But here I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word. But although he leads the angry and resentful GOP, he has not created a coherent, disciplined, and effective movement. (Consider his party’s entropic behavior in Congress.) He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse. Although some of Trump’s most ardent voters support his blood-and-soil rhetoric, millions of others have no connection to that agenda. Some are unaware; others are in denial. And many of those voters are receptive to his message only because they have been bludgeoned by right-wing propaganda into irrationality and panic. Even many officials in the current GOP, that supine and useless husk of an institution, do not share Trump’s ambitions.

I have long argued for confronting Trump’s voters with his offenses against our government and our Constitution. The contest between an aspiring fascist and a coalition of prodemocracy forces is even clearer now. But deploy the word fascist with care; many of our fellow Americans, despite their morally abysmal choice to support Trump, are not fascists.

As for Trump, he has abandoned any democratic pretenses, and lost any benefit of the doubt about who and what he is.

Related:

Fear of fascism Donald Trump, the most unmanly president

Today’s News

Representative George Santos will not seek reelection in 2024 after the House Ethics Committee found “substantial evidence” that he “violated federal criminal laws.” Last night, the Senate passed a stopgap bill to avert a government shutdown and fund federal agencies into the new year. A new CNN poll shows that Nikki Haley has moved into second place, behind Donald Trump, among likely voters in the New Hampshire Republican primary.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Don’t be fooled by the AI apocalypse, Matteo Wong argues. Here’s a guide to understanding which fears are real and which aren’t. Time-Travel Thursdays: The Atlantic’s archives chronicle nearly two centuries of change in America, Adrienne LaFrance writes. Our newest newsletter takes you on a journey through them. Work in Progress: The future of obesity drugs just got way more real, Yasmin Tayag writes. Wegovy is about to go mainstream.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Why the most hated man in Israel might stay in power The nameless children of Gaza Don’t expect U.S.-China relations to get better. The unexpected poignancy of second-chance romance

Culture Break

Listen. Streaming is about to change. Hanna Rosin discusses the poststrike future of Hollywood with staff writers David Sims and Shirley Li in the latest episode of Radio Atlantic.

Watch. Hulu’s Black Cake explores how marriage, migration, and motherhood can shift one’s sense of self.

Play our daily crossword.

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.

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

The race for second place in the Republican primaries has gotten closer. Nikki Haley has been rising surprisingly quickly in the polls in recent months, becoming a top rival to Ron DeSantis; both are still trailing Donald Trump. I called my colleague Elaine Godfrey, who covers politics for The Atlantic and attended a campaign event for Haley in New Hampshire last week, to talk about what Haley offers that DeSantis does not, and what her surge tells us about voters’ hunger for normalcy.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

“We do not want to deal with customers like you!” America’s most dangerous anti-Jewish propagandist Trump can’t hide his utter disdain for the rule of law.

New Scrutiny

Lora Kelley: Why has support for Haley been rising lately?

Elaine Godfrey: Her support has been ticking upward since August, when we had the first GOP debate. Supporters in New Hampshire told me that they saw her on the debate stage and really liked her. She has presented herself as an alternative to Trump, basically saying: If you don’t like Donald Trump, or if you did like Trump but now you’re over him, please vote for me.

A lot of voters who don’t want to support Trump don’t really want to support Ron DeSantis, because they see him as a mini Trump. Haley’s lane, and the kind of voter that she’s going for, is much clearer.

Lora: How big is the appetite among voters for someone who has more conventional political experience than, say, Trump?

Elaine: Last week, I was sitting in the room at Haley’s campaign event in New Hampshire, and the person who introduced her said something like “Aren’t we happy that we finally have a candidate who was once an accountant?” And the room just went wild. I remember laughing. Can you picture that happening at a Trump rally? It was a blast from the past of pre-Trump Republican politics—this person knows how to balance a budget.

There is such an appetite among a small set of Republican primary voters, but a pretty significant set of independent and moderate voters, for normalcy. These voters complain that Joe Biden is too old to be president, and that Trump is too unpredictable and crazy. They want to know: Why can’t we just have younger, more “normal” candidates? That being said, most Republican primary voters are still in the bag for Trump. They do not want an accountant. Haley’s more conventional political experience would probably play really well in a general election. But it doesn’t seem like a recipe for success in the primary.

Lora: Haley says that she’s personally pro-life but doesn’t judge people who are pro-choice. How will that go over with voters on both sides of the abortion issue?

Elaine: I don’t think that stance is actually very polarizing. Most Americans support abortion access of some kind, but they want a limit. They don’t want abortion to be legal in all circumstances, but they’re really turned off by the strict bans that some states have been passing.

Haley was initially sort of murky on her abortion position. Now when people talk to her about that, her answer is that she is unapologetically pro-life, but she understands why someone might be pro-choice. She often tells voters that a federal abortion law isn’t likely to pass, but can’t we come together to condemn late-term abortions? And can’t we all agree to support good-quality adoption?

A lot of voters like that and respond to that. Frankly, I’m surprised that more Republican candidates aren’t talking that way.

Lora: To what extent might Haley’s background in foreign policy (she was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for two years under Trump) be an asset to her?

Elaine: Voters I talked to last week—and, granted, this was at a Nikki Haley event—said: Things are so scary right now in the world. She makes me feel better. She knows what’s going on. She wants peace through strength. That is a real plus for her in this particular moment, with this Middle East conflict and the war between Russia and Ukraine. I don’t know if it’s an issue that pushes her over the top, but some voters definitely see her as an experienced adult in the room when it comes to war and foreign policy.

Lora: What could tomorrow’s debate—where Haley will face off against DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy—mean for her?

Elaine: More people are going to be watching her now and seeing how this momentum translates to tomorrow’s debate. She’s likely going to be thinking: What kind of moment could I create for myself? What sound bite will set me apart? Maybe she’ll pick another fight with Vivek Ramaswamy. Maybe she’ll go harder on Trump, which most of the candidates have been hesitant to do. Watch for others onstage to attack her, now that her star is rising. They might criticize her for flip-flopping on her support for Trump—or for being a foreign-policy hawk, which is something that sets her apart from DeSantis and others onstage.

She and DeSantis are probably going to go after each other; both will be trying to create viral moments. They are both aware that they’re vying for second place in this primary.

Related:

Nikki Haley offers an alternate reality. Nikki Haley is the new Ron DeSantis.

Today’s News

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a federal law that prevents people with domestic-violence restraining orders from possessing a firearm. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel plans to “have overall security responsibility” in Gaza for “an indefinite period” when the war ends. House Republicans met behind closed doors to debate the structure of a stopgap measure as the government’s next shutdown deadline, November 17, approaches.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf gathers readers’ thoughts on how to talk about the Middle East during a polarizing conflict. Work in Progress: Maybe don’t drive into Manhattan, Annie Lowrey writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times / Getty

‘How Much Can This Child Take?’

By Franklin Foer

On the night of Friday, October 6, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg laid their hands on the head of their 23-year-old son, Hersh, so that they could bless him, a ritual of the Sabbath. They recited in Hebrew: May you feel God’s presence within you always, and may you find peace.

It was an exquisitely temperate Jerusalem evening, and the Goldberg-Polin family made the most of it, dining al fresco at a long table of friends. Hersh’s presence was an unexpected blessing. He had only recently returned from several months of traveling across Europe by himself, occasionally meeting up with his boyhood friends. Earlier in the week, Hersh had told his mother that he would be away for the weekend, attending a music festival in the north. But that festival’s organizers had neglected to obtain the necessary permits, and the event ended prematurely.

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