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Many Americans—of both parties—have become untethered from reality. When the voters become incoherent, electing leaders becomes a reality show instead of a solemn civic obligation.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The myth of the unemployed college grad Texas becomes an abortion dystopia. They do it for Trump.

National Hypochondria

It’s been a stormy Monday on the East Coast, but with all respect to the Carpenters, I happen to like rainy days and Mondays. So I promise that what I am about to say is not the result of the rain or any Monday blues.

Millions of American voters appear to have lost their grip on reality.

I have been thinking (and writing) about the problem of poorly informed citizens for a long time. Low-information voters are a normal part of the political landscape; in the 21st century, democracies face the added danger of disinformation efforts from authoritarians at home and hostile powers overseas.

But America faces an even more fundamental challenge as the 2024 elections approach: For too many voters, nothing seems to matter. And I mean nothing. Donald Trump approvingly quotes Russian President Vladimir Putin and evokes the language of Adolf Hitler, and yet Americans are so accustomed to Trump’s rhetoric at this point that the story gets relegated to page A10 of the Sunday Washington Post. Joe Biden presides over an economic “soft landing” that almost no one thought could happen, and his approval rating drops to 33 percent—below Jimmy Carter’s in the summer of 1980, when American hostages were being held in Iran, and inflation, at more than 14 percent, was well into a second year of double digits. (Inflation is currently 3.1 percent—and likely will go lower.)

My concern here is not that people aren’t taking Trump’s threat seriously enough (even if they aren’t) or that Biden isn’t getting some of the credit he deserves (even if he isn’t). Rather, the political reactions of American voters seem completely detached from anything that’s happened over the past several years, or even from things that are happening right now. We use vibes to talk about all of this: We’re not in an actual recession, just a “vibecession,” where people feel like it’s a recession.

But you can’t solve imaginary recessions with real policies, just as you can’t cure imagined diseases with real medicine. We are experiencing a kind of political and economic hypochondria, where our good test results can’t possibly be true.

Consider, for example, that last month, Americans felt worse about the economy than they did in April 2009. The key word is feel, because by any standard remotely tied to this planet, it is delusional to think that things are worse today than during the meltdown of the Great Recession. As James Surowiecki (a contributing writer for The Atlantic) dryly observed on X about the comparison to 2009, “It’s true that if you ignore the 9% unemployment rate, the financial system melting down, the millions of people being foreclosed on and losing their homes, and the plummeting stock market decimating people's retirements, it was better. But why would you do that?”

For many reasons, people often say things are bad when they’re good. Even during the best times, someone is hurting. But a simple and very human phenomenon, as I wrote a few years ago, is that people can feel reluctant to jinx the good times by acknowledging them. And of course, partisanship makes people change their views of the economy literally overnight. The media, especially, enables the obsession with bad news. Too many stories about good economic reports (especially on television) are tied to the trope that begins: Not everyone is benefiting, however. Here’s a town …

Such stories are in the name of not forgetting the poor, the dispossessed, the left-behind. The reader or viewer of such stories might be moved to say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” but more likely they will reach the conclusion that the good economic news is a fluke and the destitution before them is the ongoing reality.

A much deeper and more stubborn problem, however, is that Americans, for at least 30 years or more, have developed immense expectations and a powerful sense of entitlement because of years of rising living standards. They are hypersensitive to any change or setback that produces a gap between how they live and how they expect to live—a disconnect that is unbridgeable by any politician.

Trump deals with this disconnect by encouraging it. He indulges his base by talking about “carnage” and the collapse of America, about how terrible things are, how much better they were, and how they’ll be good again in a year. Biden and the Democrats, still tethered to reality, gamely respond with data. Hussein Ibish recently wrote in The Atlantic that Biden can win with this approach: “Biden should ask voters Ronald Reagan’s classic question: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? The answer can only be yes.”

But I think Ibish is being too optimistic. In general, reality-based voters would answer yes. But what if the voters say no?

Even in casual conversations, I find myself flummoxed by people who argue, with much conviction, that America is in fact worse off, even if their own situation is better. When I respond by noting that inflation is not going up, say, or that America is at full employment, or that wages are outpacing prices, or that pay is increasing fastest for the lowest-paid workers, none of it matters. Instead, I get a response that is so common I can now see it coming every time: a head shake, a sigh, and then a comment about how everything is just such a mess.

And yet, after all of the hand-wringing about all the mess, people aren’t acting as if they’re living in an economic crisis. As my colleague Annie Lowrey pointed out recently, few people are spending less, no matter how much they carp about inflation; in surveys, she notes, “people say that they are trading down because of cost pressures. But in fact they are spending more than they ever have, even after accounting for higher prices. They’re spending not just on the necessities, but on fun stuff—amusement parks, UberEats.”

Such paradoxes suggest that dumping on the economy has transcended partisanship or the news cycle and is now a fashion, a kind of expected response, a way of identifying ourselves—no matter what we really believe—as a friend of the downtrodden, a reflex that prevents people from saying that they are doing well and the country seems to be doing fine. No one, after all, wants to get yelled at by the local Helen Lovejoy.

For now, I am going to hope that what we’re seeing is the classic problem of lag: The data are good, but people are still thinking about their situation three months ago—you know, back when the 2023 economy was worse than the Great Recession—and that perceptions will catch up. Abraham Lincoln implored citizens in 1838 to rely on “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason.” But if Americans are now stuck in the mode where nothing but vibes and feelings matter, much more is at risk than one or two elections. No democracy can long survive an electorate whose only guidance is emotion.

Related:

The bad-vibes economy Why Trump won’t win

Today’s News

The Vatican said that the Pope had allowed priests to bless same-sex couples but clarified that the new rule does not amend the Church’s traditional doctrine on marriage. A new ProPublica investigation reported that Justice Clarence Thomas made private complaints in 2000 about his salary, raising alarm across the judiciary and Capitol Hill that he would resign. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas signed a bill into law that gives law enforcement the power to arrest migrants suspected of illegally crossing the Mexican border. The law takes effect in March, but lawsuits against it are expected.

Dispatches

Galaxy Brain: Charlie Warzel asks: Why does nobody know what’s happening online anymore? Stuck in our own corner of the internet, the concept of what makes a trend viral is now up for debate.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Hannah Price

In 2021, Wright Thompson wrote about the barn where Emmett Till was tortured.

The Atlantic article caught the attention of Shonda Rhimes, who today announced a donation to the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, which will buy the barn and convert it into a memorial.

Read Wright’s article.

More From The Atlantic

The curious SNL return of Kate McKinnon The new family vacation The little-known rule change that made the Supreme Court so powerful Give Russia’s frozen assets to Ukraine now.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic

Listen. Today, work isn’t done exclusively in the workplace. What if there are better ways to separate your personal and professional time? Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost discuss in the latest episode of How to Keep Time.

Read. Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, the most buzzed-about work of literary scholarship published this past year, explores the invisible forces behind the books we read.

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.

When my colleague Tom Nichols, who taught at the Naval War College for 25 years, warns people that Donald Trump might be a threat to democracy, they often ask him to prove it. Yes, Trump has said dictator-like things, but if he won a second term, aren’t there barriers in place to prevent him from acting on his rhetoric? Would he really be able to persuade senior command in the military to use force against American citizens? Would he be able to get past the Geneva Conventions? Wouldn’t Congress or the courts intervene to stop him from acting on his worst impulses?

Nichols has never served in the military, but he knows its rules and its culture well. And he has watched over the years as some of his students became more openly partisan. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Nichols explains how a reelected President Trump could bend the military to his will and how political schisms in the military could happen. He emphasizes how close Trump came to achieving some of his goals in his last term, how ill prepared we are as a democracy that assumes a “minimum level of decency in the people who are elected to public office.” And he breaks down his personal nightmare scenario.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Last Tuesday, during a town hall on Fox News, Sean Hannity asked Donald Trump the question, straightforwardly.

Sean Hannity: Do you in any way have any plans whatsoever, if reelected president, to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people?

Rosin: Now, Hannity is friendly to Trump. So this seemed like a question that was supposed to quiet some worries. Because lately, Trump and his allies have been sending a lot of strong dictator-like signals, saying they would “come after” or “crush” people who are unfriendly to them or disloyal. But Trump did not treat it like a softball. And the exchange continued:

Hannity: You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody.

Donald Trump: Except for day one.

[Crowd cheers]

Trump: He’s going crazy.

Hannity: Except for?

Trump: Except for day one.

Rosin: But Trump was not done.

Trump: We love this guy. He says, “You’re not gonna be a dictator, are you?” I said: “No, no, no. Other than day one.”

Rosin: If you ask people who study how dictators rise, they’ll often say that would-be dictators don’t hide their intentions. It’s just that the people they’re talking to fail to take them seriously until it’s too late, which honestly makes a whole lot of sense to me.

Because I have read about the many recent dictator-like statements by candidate Trump. And yet, I experience them like I’m watching a movie about the rise of a dictator somewhere else or, like, in some other time, not right now in the country I actually live in. But I want to take this more seriously.

I’m Hanna Rosin. And in this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Tom Nichols. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he often writes about the U.S. military.

Now, Tom wasn’t in the military himself, but he spent 25 years teaching officers at the Naval War College, and a big part of his job was to talk to them about the Constitution and their role in American democracy.

Tom Nichols: You know, over the years when people like me have said, Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, well-meaning people, people of goodwill, have said, Okay, I get that you’re concerned, but what would that actually look like?

[Music]

Rosin: Tom recently wrote a story with the headline: “A Military Loyal to Trump.” And in our conversation, he fills in a critical part of the Trump-as-dictator scenario, which is how a reelected Trump could bend the military to his will.

[Music]

Nichols: It’s easy to just get your hair on fire and say, Oh, Trump’s a fascist. He’s a threat to democracy. He would do terrible things. I think it was important to say, Here’s how it could happen in a concrete way. Here are the steps he would have to take. Here are the things he’s done that would get him closer to that goal of being an authoritarian leader.

Rosin: You’ve said that if he’s elected, Donald Trump will attempt to make the U.S. armed forces loyal to him, and not to the Constitution. That’s a very big thing to say. Why are you so sure about that?

Nichols: Well, if you look at Donald Trump’s first term, he viewed the senior command of the U.S. military and the senior civil servants of the Defense Department as obstacles and opponents to things that he wanted to do, including using force against American citizens in the streets. So I have no doubt that he views the military, and particularly senior commanders, as obstacles to his exercise of power.

He’s talked about wanting Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, executed. You know, we don’t have to think very hard about Trump’s intentions because he says the quiet part out loud all the time.

Rosin: I know. That’s the hard part about Trump, I feel like. It’s like, it’s hard to understand what’s talk, how plausible anything is. And whenever he says things like this, I immediately think, Well, this is America. We have a system in place. That system keeps somebody like that, a president even, in check.

Nichols: Except that at the very end of his first term, he actually did try to purge the senior ranks of the Defense Department by dumping the secretary of defense. He tried to install Anthony Tata, this retired one-star general who’s kind of a kook and a conspiracy theorist, into the number-three slot in the Defense Department.

He’s made pretty plain that he’s actually willing to engage in those kinds of personnel changes to get what he wants. The difference is the first time around, he didn’t really know what he was doing and there were people around him who were determined to stop him.

This time around, there just won’t be anybody determined to stop it.

Rosin: Tom, you know a lot more about military culture and operations than most people. Inside that culture, how does politics or partisanship—how does it get expressed?

Nichols: When I began teaching at the Naval War College, I was there long enough ago that I actually had people who were prior-enlisted folks in Vietnam. And the thing I’ve noticed is that our officers are resolutely nonpartisan. They serve the Constitution. But the willingness to think in very partisan terms was growing over the years. By the time I retired, in 2022, I was hearing officers saying things almost verbatim from, you know, talking points from Fox the night before. You know, officers, for example, you know, were asking me about why we’re not doing more to reveal the Chinese George Soros hoax about climate change, kind of stuff.

And that worried me. I started hearing a lot more kind of fever-swamp, conspiracy-theory stuff. Because, you know, the military, we have a citizen-soldier military. It’s one of the great strengths of our democracy, but every military, to some extent, lives in something of a bubble. And I feel like over the years that I was teaching, that I could see that bubble getting thicker and thicker and more detached from society in general, I think—at least among a relatively small number of officers, but much more than I would have expected and certainly more than I was comfortable with by the end of my career.

Rosin: What was your sense of their understanding or your students’ understanding of civic duty, how the Constitution works, you know, things like that?

Nichols: Yeah. I think that’s an important question. And I don’t want to be overly alarmist about the men and women that I’ve been teaching and working with for some 30 years. They are resolutely patriotic people who understand that they do not swear an oath to any individual president.

But I think there’s enough concern about that, that Mark Milley, when he retired, made it a point to repeat that, to say, And remember—he said on his way out the door—we do not swear an oath to a particular president.

But I do worry that the lack of civic education in the United States in general has also extended to the military. And I have a particular concern that it will become too easy to smudge the difference between loyalty to, or not loyalty, but obedience to the president’s orders and obedience to the Constitution, because Trump will say, as he has done in the past: I am the ultimate authority on what is constitutional. I am the ultimate authority on what is to be obeyed or not to be obeyed. He has said, you know, If there are things in the Constitution I don’t like, I’ll just terminate them.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Nichols: And, again, you only need a very small number of people at the top to agree with him about that.

And then what they will do is put hope in that the chain of command, that obedience, that if a sergeant gets an order, he assumes that the lieutenant who gave it is giving the right order and that the lieutenant who got it from the captain, that she is giving the right order, and so on, all the way up to the chain of command. If things don’t get stopped at the very top, they can spiral out of control as they go down through the chain of command because you don’t want a bunch of people in the military having to stop and say, No. Wait. I have to go consult the constitutional law books about whether or not I should carry out that order.

That’s something that should happen very close to the president, at the White House, between him and his senior military leaders. Trump has made it clear he just might not care about anybody telling him that something is illegal or unconstitutional.

Rosin: Right, right. Okay, so he doesn’t care. Can we get into some specific examples? Like, how would this actually play out? I just need some specific scenarios to understand it.

Nichols: Well, one thing to consider is that Trump will want to issue orders that are probably unlawful, certainly an ethical problem for the military.

So Trump could, for example, order people to commit war crimes, because he clearly has no compunction about whether our forces actually commit war crimes. Take the example of Eddie Gallagher. Eddie Gallagher was a Navy SEAL, right. The best of the best. He was court-martialed for war crimes, for shooting at civilians, potentially for murder.

The only thing he was actually convicted of when it was over, after the testimony even of his own comrades in the SEALs, was photographing himself with a dead body. Trump intervened to make sure that Gallagher could keep his Trident, his badge of being a Navy SEAL, which is a huge kind of trespass, because normally only the SEALs decide who gets to keep that Trident. So imagine that in the future Trump says, You know what? Let’s desecrate bodies. Let’s commit war crimes. Let’s put the fear of God in these people, whoever they are, wherever we are, by doing, you know, terrible things and photographing it. And don’t worry—I’m the commander in chief. Your obedience to me removes the stain from you. I won’t let you be court-martialed for it.

Rosin: Yeah. But what’s the larger significance of doing something like that, of the president allowing something like that to happen?

Nichols: Because the message from the president will be, especially when it comes time, if we get to that terrible moment where if the president wants to use force against Americans (for example, if there’s another January 6), then he says, Listen, I’m going to send in the Army, and none of my people are going to get arrested. You’re not going to disperse them. The Capitol police are not going to arrest these people. And if they want to march into the House, then they’re going to do it. And if there are protests against me, I will tell them to shoot at people.

You acclimate an institution to getting used to that by issuing these terrible orders and getting them to fulfill them over and over and over again over time. I worry that he will just kind of corrode the norms and traditions. The U.S. military—and I feel that I need to say this again—the people for whom I have intense admiration, their culture is built on honor and loyalty and duty. And if Trump chips away at that every day with a small number of people at the top, I worry about what happens at the ultimate moment when Trump says, You know what? I didn’t lose an election, and we are marching to the Capitol, or, I don’t feel like having any protests against me in Washington today.

Remember, he actually wanted to call out troops against the protesters in Washington, and his own secretary of defense said, That’s a really bad idea. Don’t do that.

He won’t make that mistake again. The next secretary of defense is going to be somebody who nods and says, That’s a great idea, sir. Let’s get ’em out there.

[Music]

Rosin: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back: What barriers normally exist against these nightmare scenarios?

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, we’re back. So Tom, in Trump’s first term, we got used to the idea that certain institutions of government held off some of his worst impulses. What would stop him in a second term?

Nichols: There are two institutions that are the most likely to stand in Trump’s way, if he returns to power, when it comes to attacking his opponents, undermining democracy, breaking the rule of law, and squelching any kind of dissent or protest against him. He needs to control two institutions: the Justice Department and the U.S. military. And if he can get control of both of those, he’s most of the way there to be able to do whatever he wants.

And I’m not hypothesizing. We saw him try to do it. We came within a whisker of it just before January 6, where his own appointees of the Justice Department walked in and said, If you do these things—including appointing people like Jeffrey Clark, you know, making him the acting attorney general—you’re going to have mass resignations. Now maybe that would work, but Trump at this point, I think, would say, Great. Mass resignations, and I’ve got a whole list of people now who will step into those jobs. I think lists of people who would take these jobs are already being compiled by Trump loyalists. And I think the answer would be, if someone walks in and says, Mr. President, if you do this, I’ll resign, he’ll say, Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

We always talk about, Well, the Senate won’t confirm these people. That’s the bar. Well, what if Trump says, as he already has—it’s not a what-if; he’s actually done this—Okay, fine. You didn’t confirm him. I’m sending him over to the Pentagon to sit next to the guy who’s in that job?

That’s a lot of pressure on appointees to say, you know, to be the people to stand up and say, I am not going to follow the orders of the president of the United States, and especially in a military organization where that is just anathema. That’s heresy.

And in normal times, that’s a good thing. In a normal democracy, you don’t want military officers saying, I have your order and now I’ll think about it.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: Donald Trump, he wanted to kill Bashar al-Assad. He called the Pentagon and said, Let’s take this guy out. And the then secretary of defense said, We’ll get right on that, Mr. President. And then he hung up the phone and he turned to an aide and he said, We’re not doing any of that.

And I think there will be more and more of those, kind of, fork-in-the-road moments where Trump, if Trump is president, he’ll say, I want to do this, and someone behind a desk or in uniform is going to have to sit back and say, Am I really going to do that?

Rosin: Right. I mean, I like to think that there are a lot of Jim Mattises, a lot of Mark Milleys out there—these are people who had some power, appealed to their own conscience at some point, you know, understood who they were serving, which was the Constitution in the end—and that there are more of them.

Nichols: I would like to think there are more of them too. And I think most of the military is like—the people that I knew are certainly a lot more like Mark Milley and Jim Mattis than they’re going to be like some of the other people that surrounded Trump. But as I’ve often wondered, you know, how many more of these people are like Anthony Tata, the guy that Trump tried to, you know, stick into the third slot at the Defense Department? Or this retired colonel, Douglas MacGregor, that he tried to make an ambassador to Germany and then, when that failed, sent him over to the Pentagon?

Again, there are a lot more Milleys and Mattises out there, but there’s also a lot of Tatas and MacGregors out there—not as many, I think, but as I keep wanting to emphasize, you only need a handful. That’s the real problem, that if you control a handful at the top, you can gain control of a lot of the institution very quickly.

Rosin: So if Trump gets what he likes to call “my generals,” and then he wants to do something that feels blatantly unconstitutional, are there not checks in place that would stop him if he gives an unlawful command?

Nichols: Well, the first barrier to an unlawful command is the officer to whom it is given saying, I decline that order. Let’s just take an example: I don’t know, you know, Commit a war crime, right? Kill POWs, which is flatly illegal. (We are signatories to the Geneva Conventions. You can’t do that.) And Trump, as he often did during his rallies, for example, would say, Go ahead and do it. I’ll cover you. I’ll be your top cover for this.

That first barrier is an officer or a secretary of defense, even, who says, I am not going to transmit that order. And in a normal country, back when America was, you know, in the pre-Trump days, even the threat of that would be enough to stop a president from considering some of these things.

But what if Trump says, Well, okay. You’re relieved, as he did with so many of his national security advisors, or with Secretary Esper, who he fired. You know, Great. You’re not on board; you’re out. I’m gonna take the next guy behind you and the next guy behind him, until somebody fulfills this order.

The next barrier to that would be, what? A court? The Senate? The Congress? But again, what do you do if the president of the United States says, I am the Article II power. Article II, Section 2, says I’m the commander in chief of the armed forces, and I don’t recognize your authority. I don’t care?

Rosin: Is that a thing? Do we misunderstand something fundamental?

Nichols: I don’t know. We’ll find out, right? If the president says, I don’t recognize your authority to do this, and so I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, what does Congress do at that point? Congress says, Well, we cut off funding to the Defense Department? We use the power of the purse?

These things take time. Remember, Donald Trump tried to create an entirely separate foreign policy regarding Ukraine than the one his own administration was publicly committed to. Like, in public, he said, Of course we support Ukraine. They’re our friends. And then privately, he said to a handful of people, Forget all that. Call Ukraine. Tell them that unless they investigate Joe Biden, they’re out of luck. And then he denied it.

I mean, I guess the bottom line for all of this is our system of government, and our Constitution, is not set up to deal with intentionally and flagrantly criminal behavior from the president of the United States. Our entire Constitution is based on a minimum level of decency in the people who are elected to public office. It’s not designed to cope with somebody like Donald Trump.

And in the end, the only weapon that you would have against Donald Trump would be impeachment and removal, which, I suppose could get ugly if Trump said, Well, I’m not leaving the White House. Then you literally have to go in and drag him out. But as we’ve already seen, the Republicans are not going to be a break on Donald Trump’s behavior.

He was impeached twice and the Republicans have acquitted him twice, and I just don’t see any of those guardrails functioning this time around if Trump is returned to office, in part because he’s going to make the case of: The country is with me. The people are with me. The Army is with me. He used to say that, which, you know, is a pretty uncomfortable thing to hear. And I just don’t—is it a thing? That’s a great question. I hope we never find out.

Rosin: Can I ask you—it sounds like you are genuinely worried—what is your actual biggest fear? Like, if you actually let your mind wander to the worst place, what is your scariest scenario?

Nichols: Two things keep me awake at night. One is that Trump provokes a schism within the armed forces in the United States—that we have pro- and anti-Trump factions within the armed forces that don’t necessarily come to open blows with each other but that paralyze our effectiveness as a military.

There may be talented and experienced officers who will simply resign or refuse to carry out orders that are unconstitutional, and then operations that we actually may need to be conducting get bogged down in internal fights about who’s giving which orders, and Who am I supposed to listen to? Do I listen to the guy that was the appointee, or do I listen to the guy who’s obviously the president’s pick, who’s sitting right next to him? What do I do if the chief of staff in the White House calls me, who has no power, but says the president wants X?

And that can happen even in the best of times just through miscommunication. I really worry about what happens if that becomes something that happens because of a partisan political divide within the military. I can’t even imagine the words partisan political divide in the American military.

Like, I’ve never really—I’ve spent years lecturing at the Naval War College saying how fortunate we were not to have that problem.

Rosin: Mm- hmm.

Nichols: But Donald Trump will actively try to create that problem if he thinks it serves his purposes.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Nichols: The other thing that keeps me up at night is Donald Trump in control of nuclear weapons.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: There’s no way around that. Nuclear weapons, colloquially, are referred to as the president’s weapon. Only the president of the United States can authorize the use of nuclear weapons. I just worry about the fact that Donald Trump, who I think is a deeply unstable person, shouldn’t be anywhere near America’s nuclear arsenal. And if he’s commander in chief, he will have that daily code, that little biscuit in his pocket that lets him unleash nuclear disaster if he really wants to.

We are relying on people who have been trained to follow the orders of the commander in chief. We are relying on men and women in uniform to say, I’m not going to do that.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. And that’s not in their nature, generally.

Nichols: And it’s not in their nature, and it’s not fair to them.

[Music]

Rosin: Tom, thank you for laying that out in such great detail. I feel like one of the issues we have with this Trump-as-dictator discussion is a failure of imagination. Like, we just can’t get our heads around what it would actually look like, and you definitely help with that, and I appreciate it.

Nichols: Thank you.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Sara Krolewski, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

The acrobat is taken to hospital after the accident on the circus's "giant wheel of death".

Midway through last week’s Republican presidential-primary debate, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy started running through conspiracy theories like a frustrated child mashing buttons on Street Fighter, alleging that the Capitol riot was an “inside job” and that the so-called “Great Replacement” theory “is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory, but a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.”

Right-wing apologism for January 6 is no longer shocking, not even from Republican presidential candidates. Trumpists often vacillate between denying it happened, justifying and valorizing those who attempted to overthrow the government to keep Donald Trump in power, or insisting that they were somehow tricked into it by undercover agents provocateurs. But the basic facts remain: January 6 was a farcical but genuine attempt to overthrow the constitutional government, which many Trump supporters think is defensible because only conservatives should be allowed to hold power.

It was slightly more bizarre to watch Ramaswamy justify “the Great Replacement,” a white-supremacist conspiracy theory holding that, in the words of the disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” This conviction has motivated slaughter in Buffalo, New York; El Paso, Texas; and as far away as New Zealand. Seeing Ramaswamy invoke it was strange because he, the practicing Hindu son of Indian immigrants, is an obvious example of why it is a dumb idea.

Since Trump’s election, in 2016, the Great Replacement has gone from the far-right fringe to the conservative mainstream. After a white supremacist in Texas targeted Hispanics, killing 23 people in 2019, many conservatives offered condemnations of both the act and the ideology that motivated it. But over the past several years, a concerted campaign by conservative elites in the right-wing media has made the theory more respectable. By 2022, after another white supremacist murdered 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, some prominent voices on the right were willing to claim that there was some validity to the argument that white people are being “replaced.”

[Adam Serwer: Conservatives are defending a sanitized version of ‘the Great Replacement’]

When Ramaswamy gave voice to it last week, white supremacists celebrated with joyful disbelief. Ramaswamy briefly liked and reposted one of those celebrations, despite telling CNN after the debate that “I don’t care about skin color.” The Great Replacement conspiracy theory does not make sense without reference to race. The theory itself is racist, in that it takes as a given that white Christians are the only true Americans; it opposes not illegal immigration but the presence of immigrants who are simply not white, and implies that the purpose of immigration policy should be to preserve a white majority. But it is also racist in assuming that nonwhite people are “obedient” or even liberal simply as a consequence of not being white. It manages to be both racist and stupid in assuming that political coalitions are permanently stable, and that they are not affected by the salience of particular issues, voters’ own personal experiences, or world events, because non-whites are simply interchangeable.

Arab American voters, both Christian and Muslim, are withdrawing support from Joe Biden over his thus-far unconditional support for Israel’s conduct in its war with Hamas. This shift, along with a drift to the right that had already begun among more conservative segments of the Muslim community over LGBTQ rights—is an obvious example of how religious and ethnic minority groups can realign politically in unanticipated ways. Muslim voters were a largely pro-Bush constituency in 2000, prior to the GOP embrace of anti-Muslim bigotry after 9/11. So  were Hispanic voters in 2000 and 2004, and Trump showed similar strength with such voters in 2020, as well as making gains with Black voters. Many immigrants who fled left-wing or Communist regimes in Asia and Latin America—Vietnamese, Venezuelans, Cubans—lean right, much as the influx of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union in the 1990s did. Immigrants from West Africa are often highly religious and socially conservative. And even within particular groups, there are tremendous regional, cultural, class, and educational differences—Puerto Rican voters in Chicago will not necessarily have the same priorities and values as Tejano voters living in Laredo. The far right and its admirers are too busy railing against diversity to understand that diversity is precisely why “the Great Replacement” is nonsense.

In short, the Democratic Party cannot control how these constituencies vote, because it cannot control how they interpret the world or which issues become salient. Racial identities, including definitions of whiteness, are not stable or permanent across time, and are entirely dependent on politics.

The Republican Party, and its valorization of racial intolerance, has been the Democratic Party’s most effective ally in holding its multiracial coalition together. But even this is no guarantee of party loyalty. Black voters were once a core constituency of the Republican Party, but they preferred the economic agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the party of Dixie to empty Republican platitudes about racial tolerance and being the party of Lincoln.

The fantasy of a “Great Replacement” as a plan to defeat conservatism is, in short, a really dumb idea on its own terms—unless, of course, you are a white nationalist who simply thinks that nonwhites should not be allowed to live in America. In that sense, the most telling thing about Ramaswamy’s invocation of the Great Replacement is that he clearly believes that it’s the kind of thing the Republican base wants to hear.

The Great Replacement is simply another log on the bonfire of right-wing victimhood, an ideology whose consistent position is that its adherents would have unquestioned political hegemony over American life if not for the powerful, shadowy forces arrayed against them. That is the greatest injustice of all—the existence of Americans who oppose them politically, a cataclysm so traumatic that it requires a library of conspiracies to explain.

Match of the Day 2 looks at the best, worst, and funniest moments from the Premier League weekend in 2 Good 2 Bad.

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The typical career is about 80,000 hours long, or one-sixth of the average person’s waking life. One would love to be deliriously happy for all 80,000 hours. But, alas, we’re not. And the economic-news industry loves nothing more than to remind us of it. In fact, for the past three years, finance media have become so desperate to explain the state of workplace misery to their audience that they’ve often ignored facts, logic, or basic common sense.

In 2021, finance journalism couldn’t stop talking about the “Great Resignation.” Judging by the ample coverage, it appeared that workers everywhere were smashing their laptops and machines in a bacchanal of joblessness. This was all hooey. In reality, more Americans were just breaking up with their old employers to get higher-paying jobs. In professional sports, when star athletes sign larger contracts with different teams in the offseason, ESPN doesn’t call it a “great resignation”; it calls it “free agency.” And that’s what the economy’s Great Resignation really was: a welcome free-agent period for low-income workers looking for higher wages.

Several months later, in 2022, the false idea that Americans were resigning en masse grew into a larger narrative that—to quote both The New York Times Magazine and the economic analysis of Kim Kardashian—“no one wants to work.” Here, again, the vibes were strong and the evidence was weak. Every month, hundreds of thousands of people were joining the workforce, unemployment was nearing multi-decade lows, and one measure of job satisfaction hit an all-time high. Sure, work is terrible sometimes. But of all the years to soft-launch the theory that “nobody wants to work,” this was among the strangest times to do it.

Undaunted, finance media moved on to another bogus trend, as Bloomberg and other news outlets published dozens of articles and podcasts tracking the surge of “quiet quitting” in the labor force. In theory, quiet quitting marked an epidemic of employee boredom and disengagement. And, to be sure, people commonly feel bored and disengaged at work. But again, to the extent that this was any kind of novel or rising trend, there was little empirical meat on the bone. Private surveys and federal data showed that, in a hot labor market, the average worker was roughly as engaged with their work as they had been five years earlier.

The fake unhappiness trend is still going strong. This year the narrative is that workers are more miserable than ever.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an instantly viral essay entitled “Why Is Everyone So Unhappy at Work Right Now?” The article shot to No. 1 on the Journal website, where it remained for several days. The essay’s popularity is fully understandable: Complaining about your job is the oldest job. Long before modern work satires such as Severance and Office Space, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, in Works and Days, complained that the gods kept plenty for themselves and pressed men into hard labor, and the Bible asks, “What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?”

But the point of this Journal article was that everybody is “so” unhappy “right now.” Where’s the evidence? The authors cited a new workplace report by Gallup, which allegedly shows that the number of U.S. workers “who say they are angry, stressed and disengaged is climbing.”

Now let’s take a closer look at that Gallup report. For the past 23 years, Gallup has asked American workers questions about their jobs: Are you satisfied? Are you engaged? Is this a good time to find a job? Do you have opportunities to use your skills? In most of these answers, it’s very hard to see that anything new or interesting is happening.

In 2013, 30 percent of U.S. employees said they were engaged at their jobs. For a few years, the number bounced around the low-to-mid-30s. Today the number is 32 percent. In 2013, 35 percent of American workers told Gallup that opportunities abounded for them to do “more of what they do best.” In 2023, that number is unchanged. In 2013, less than 40 percent of Americans said it was “a good time to find a job.” Today, almost 60 percent of Americans say so.

Did your eyes sort of sleepily glaze over those numbers? Well, that’s the idea. Americans keep telling Gallup that work is consistently blah, not that they’re more and more miserable.

The real story, to the extent that these surveys are accurate, is that American workers are astonishingly happy and engaged compared with the rest of the rich world. The same international Gallup survey finds that employee engagement in the United States is higher than in Australia, Canada, and every country in Europe, and more than six times higher than in Japan.

Even the authors of the Journal story acknowledge that another survey this year by the Conference Board found that employee satisfaction just set a new record high—as it has for the past 12 straight years since the Great Recession.

Could one make the argument that, actually, American workers are happier than they’ve been in decades? Yes. And don’t just take my word for it. The very same Wall Street Journal published exactly that take in a May 11 exclusive entitled “Workers Are Happier Than They’ve Been in Decades.” Best of all, that article claimed that the “the happiest workers” in the country included “individuals working in hybrid roles,” while the November article (yes, in the same newspaper!) claimed that the “isolating aspects of hybrid work” were responsible for making workers especially unhappy.

What do we make of the fact that the same news outlet concluded, within a seven-month period, that Americans were both “happier than in decades” and “so unhappy right now” in articles that both pointed to the same survey and workplace phenomena? If you were defending the Journal, you might note the slight uptick in the unemployment rate since May, or the decline in the quit rate, to show that something major has changed in Americans’ experience of work in the past 200 days.

But trend journalism isn’t really about capturing a statistical truth. It’s about indulging reader anxiety by saying not only Everyone is feeling what you’re feeling, but also This moment is special, and you’re special too. By validating the fears and stresses of workers and managers, these articles succeed as a form of therapy, which is all the more powerful because it is discovered not on a counselor’s couch but in the business section, where it carries a patina of statistical authority.

The truths here are old and familiar. Work is work: mostly necessary, often boring, frequently annoying, occasionally insulting, and sometimes rewarding. The media keep inventing a new lexicon every few months to explain this consistent state of affairs, and readers lap it up, because we demand fresh language to communicate to ourselves the stale drudgery of the 9-to-5. I can live with it. Fake economic-trend spotting might not be one of the world’s 1,000 most important problems. It’s just wrong.