How many times has it happened? You’re on your computer, searching for a particular article, a hard-to-find fact, or a story you vaguely remember, and just when you seem to have discovered the exact right thing, a paywall descends. “$1 for Six Months.” “Save 40% on Year 1.” “Here’s Your Premium Digital Offer.” “Already a subscriber?” Hmm, no.

Now you’re faced with that old dilemma: to pay or not to pay. (Yes, you may face this very dilemma reading this story in The Atlantic.) And it’s not even that simple. It’s a monthly or yearly subscription—“Cancel at any time.” Is this article or story or fact important enough for you to pay?

Or do you tell yourself—as the overwhelming number of people do—that you’ll just keep searching and see if you can find it somewhere else for free?

According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more than 75 percent of America’s leading newspapers, magazines, and journals are behind online paywalls. And how do American news consumers react to that? Almost 80 percent of Americans steer around those paywalls and seek out a free option.

Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation  of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There’s a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness—it dies behind paywalls.

The problem is not just that professionally produced news is behind a wall; the problem is that paywalls increase the proportion of free and easily available stories that are actually filled with misinformation and disinformation. Way back in 1995 (think America Online), the UCLA professor Eugene Volokh predicted that the rise of “cheap speech”—free internet content—would not only democratize mass media by allowing new voices, but also increase the proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, which would then destabilize mass media.

Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and one of the premier scholars on mis- and disinformation, told me he knows of no research on the relationship between paywalls and misinformation. “But it stands to reason,” he said, “that if people seeking news are blocked by the paywalls that are increasingly common on serious professional journalism websites, many of those people are going to turn to less reliable sites where they’re more likely to encounter mis- and disinformation.”

In the pre-internet days, information wasn’t free—it just felt that way. Newsstands were everywhere, and you could buy a paper for a quarter. But that paper wasn’t just for you: After you read it at the coffee shop or on the train, you left it there for the next guy. The same was true for magazines. When I was the editor of Time, the publisher estimated that the “pass-along rate” of every issue was 10 to 15—that is, each magazine we sent out was read not only by the subscriber, but by 10 to 15 other people. In 1992, daily newspapers claimed a combined circulation of some 60 million; by 2022, while the nation had grown, that figure had fallen to 21 million. People want information to be free—and instantly available on their phone.

Barrett is aware that news organizations need revenue, and that almost a third of all U.S. newspapers have stopped publishing over the previous two decades. “It’s understandable that traditional news-gathering businesses are desperate for subscription revenue,” he told me, “but they may be inadvertently boosting the fortunes of fake news operations motivated by an appetite for clicks or an ideological agenda—or a combination of the two.”

Digital-news consumers can be divided into three categories: a small, elite group that pays hundreds to thousands of dollars a year for high-end subscriptions; a slightly larger group of people with one to three news subscriptions; and the roughly 80 percent of Americans who will not or cannot pay for information. Some significant percentage of this latter category are what scholars call “passive” news consumers—people who do not seek out information, but wait for it to come to them, whether from their social feeds, from friends, or from a TV in an airport. Putting reliable information behind paywalls increases the likelihood that passive news consumers will receive bad information.

In the short history of social media, the paywall was an early hurdle to getting good information; now there are newer and more perilous problems. The Wall Street Journal instituted a “hard paywall” in 1996. The Financial Times formally launched one in 2002. Other publications experimented with them, including The New York Times, which established its subscription plan and paywall in 2011. In 2000, I was the editor of Time.com, Time magazine’s website, when these experiments were going on. The axiom then was that “must have” publications like The Wall Street Journal could get away with charging for content, while “nice to have” publications like Time could not. Journalists were told that “information wants to be free.” But the truth was simpler: People wanted free information, and we gave it to them. And they got used to it.

Of course, publications need to cover their costs, and journalists need to be paid. Traditionally, publications had three lines of revenue: subscriptions, advertising, and newsstand sales. Newsstand sales have mostly disappeared. The internet should have been a virtual newsstand, but buying individual issues or articles is almost impossible. The failure to institute a frictionless mechanism for micropayments to purchase news was one of the greatest missteps in the early days of the web. Some publications would still be smart to try it.  

I’d argue that paywalls are part of the reason Americans’ trust in media is at an all-time low. Less than a third of Americans in a recent Gallup poll say they have “a fair amount” or a “a great deal” of trust that the news is fair and accurate. A large percentage of these Americans see media as being biased. Well, part of the reason they think media are biased is that most fair, accurate, and unbiased news sits behind a wall. The free stuff needn’t be fair or accurate or unbiased. Disinformationists, conspiracy theorists, and Russian and Chinese troll farms don’t employ fact-checkers and libel lawyers and copy editors.

Part of the problem with the current, free news environment is that the platform companies, which are the largest distributors of free news, have deprioritized news. Meta has long had an uncomfortable relationship with news on Facebook. In the past year, according to CNN, Meta has changed its algorithm in a way that has cost some news outlets 30 to 40 percent of their traffic (and others more). Threads, Meta’s answer to X, is “not going to do anything to encourage” news and politics on the platform, says Adam Mosseri, the executive who oversees it. “My take is, from a platforms’ perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue [news] might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.” The platform companies are not in the news business; they are in the engagement business. News is less engaging than, say, dance shorts or chocolate-chip-cookie recipes—or eye-catching conspiracy theories.

As the platforms have diminished news, they have also weakened their integrity and content-moderation teams, which enforce community standards or terms of service. No major platform permits false advertising, child pornography, hate speech, or speech that leads to violence; the integrity and moderation teams take down such content. A recent paper from Barrett’s team at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights argues that the greatest tech-related threat in 2024 is not artificial intelligence or foreign election interference, but something more mundane: the retreat from content moderation and the hollowing-out of trust-and-safety units and election-integrity teams. The increase in bad information on the free web puts an even greater burden on fact-based news reporting.

Now AI-created clickbait is also a growing threat. Generative AI’s ability to model, scrape, and even plagiarize real news—and then tailor it to users—is extraordinary. AI clickbait mills, posing as legitimate journalistic organizations, are churning out content that rips off real news and reporting. These plagiarism mills are receiving funding because, well, they’re cheap and profitable. For now, Google’s rankings don’t appear to make a distinction between a news article written by a human being and one written by an AI chatbot. They can, and they should.  

The best way to address these challenges is for newsrooms to remove or suspend their paywalls for stories related to the 2024 election. I am mindful of the irony of putting this plea behind The Atlantic’s own paywall, but that’s exactly where the argument should be made. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably paid to support journalism that you think matters in the world. Don’t you want it to be available to others, too, especially those who would not otherwise get to see it?

Emergencies and natural disasters have long prompted papers to suspend their paywalls. When Hurricane Irene hit the New York metropolitan area in 2011, The New York Times made all storm-related coverage freely available. “We are aware of our obligations to our audience and to the public at large when there is a big story that directly impacts such a large portion of people,” a New York Times editor said at the time. In some ways, this creates a philosophical inconsistency. The paywall says, This content is valuable and you have to pay for it. Suspending the paywall in a crisis says, This content is so valuable that you don’t have to pay for it. Similarly, when the coronavirus hit, The Atlantic made its COVID coverage—and its COVID Tracking Project—freely available to all.

During the pandemic, some publications found that suspending their paywall had an effect they had not anticipated: It increased subscriptions. The Seattle Times, the paper of record in a city that was an early epicenter of coronavirus, put all of its COVID-related content outside the paywall and then saw, according to its senior vice president of marketing, Kati Erwert, “a very significant increase in digital subscriptions”—two to three times its previous daily averages. The Philadelphia Inquirer put its COVID content outside its paywall in the spring of 2020 as a public service. And then, according to the paper’s director of special projects, Evan Benn, it saw a “higher than usual number of digital subscription sign-ups.”

The Tampa Bay Times, The Denver Post, and The St. Paul Pioneer Press, in Minnesota, all experienced similar increases, as did papers operated by the Tribune Publishing Company, including the Chicago Tribune and the Hartford Courant. The new subscribers were readers who appreciated the content and the reporting and wanted to support the paper’s efforts, and to make the coverage free for others to read, too.

Good journalism isn’t cheap, but outlets can find creative ways to pay for their reporting on the election. They can enlist foundations or other sponsors to underwrite their work. They can turn to readers who are willing to subscribe, renew their subscriptions, or make added donations to subsidize important coverage during a crucial election. And they can take advantage of the broader audience that unpaywalled stories can reach, using it to generate more advertising revenue—and even more civic-minded subscribers.

The reason papers suspend their paywall in times of crisis is because they understand that the basic and primary mission of the press is to inform and educate the public. This idea goes back to the country’s Founders. The press was protected by the First Amendment so it could provide the information that voters need in a democracy. “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “and that cannot be limited without being lost.” Every journalist understands this. There is no story with a larger impact than an election in which the survival of democracy is on the ballot.

I believe it was a mistake to give away journalism for free in the 1990s. Information is not and never has been free. I devoutly believe that news organizations need to survive and figure out a revenue model that allows them to do so. But the most important mission of a news organization is to provide the public with information that allows citizens to make the best decisions in a constitutional democracy. Our government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and that consent is arrived at through the free flow of information—reliable, fact-based information. To that end, news organizations should put their election content in front of their paywall. The Constitution protects the press so that the press can protect constitutional democracy. Now the press must fulfill its end of the bargain.

Democratic Party analysts and left-leaning economists have had quite enough of their fellow Americans’ complaints. As a striking number of poll respondents express alarm, despair even, about the rising cost of living during Joe Biden’s presidency, experts shake their heads. Don’t people realize that jobs are plentiful, wages are rising, and inflation is in retreat?

Few have struck this chord more insistently than Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and liberal New York Times columnist. In a February column titled “Vibes, Vegetables and Vitriol,” he suggested that inflation is no longer worrisome and backed up his view with field research.

“Now, I go grocery shopping myself, and am occasionally startled by the total at the cash register—although that’s usually because I wasn’t factoring in the price of that bottle of scotch I picked up along with the meat and vegetables,” Krugman wrote.

[Annie Lowrey: Inflation is your fault]

The modern Democratic Party, and liberalism itself, is to a substantial extent a bastion of college-educated, upper-middle-class professionals, people for whom Biden-era inflation is unpleasant but rarely calamitous. Poor, working-class, and lower-middle-class people experience a different reality. They carry the searing memories of the Great Recession and its foreclosure crisis, when millions of American households lost their home. A large number of these Americans worked in person during the dolorous early days of the pandemic, and saw its toll up close. And since 2019, they’ve weathered 20 percent inflation and now rising interest rates—which means they’ve lost more than a fifth of their purchasing power. Tell these Americans that the economy is humming, that median wage growth has nudged ahead of the core inflation rate, and that everything’s grand, and you’re likely to see a roll of the eyes.

Krugman in his column confessed that he had “no idea” what he paid for roughly the same groceries three years earlier, although he allowed that olive oil seemed costly. He and other economists talked of a “vibecession”—an admixture of gloom and worry and misinformation that prevents Americans from seeing the rosy nature of the economy. This is a common take among prominent Democrats and left-leaning economists, all of whom speak with an eye on the upcoming presidential election. In late February, California Governor Gavin Newsom appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and declared that Biden had conducted a “master class” in economic helmsmanship. “The economy is booming; inflation is cooling,” Newsom said, adding, “All because of Biden’s wisdom, because of his temperance.”

[Gilad Edelman: The English-muffin problem]

Around the same time, the Harvard economics professor Jason Furman, who served as chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, posted on social media: “If a year ago you had told someone [that inflation] would come down to 2.5% they would be surprised & delighted.” Just before Biden’s State of the Union address last month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer predicted that “Americans will hear a clear theme: America’s economy is accelerating, inflation is decelerating.”

These commentators have been asking near as one: Where’s the problem?

Such talk of a victory lap once again appeared premature this week, with the news that the consumer price index was 3.5 percent higher in March than a year earlier, a worse reading than many economists had expected.

But even a cooling inflation rate simply means that prices are growing more slowly. Consumers—particularly those whose wages have not kept pace—still remember years of soaring price increases.

Moreover, the core inflation rate, defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and carefully studied by the rate setters at the Federal Reserve, excludes food and energy costs—economic indicators that affect Americans’ daily lives. As the financial analyst Barry Ritholtz long ago noted, core CPI measures “inflation ex-inflation,” meaning inflation without inflation.

[Rogé Karma: What would it take to convince Americans that the economy is fine?]

“The macroeconomy looks great, and it might appear inflation has cooled,” the University of Massachusetts at Amherst economist Isabella Weber told me. “But when you disentangle the indicators that actually matter to Americans day to day, it’s not so pretty.”

The consumer price index for food rose 25 percent from 2019 to 2023. The jump in 2022 was the highest since the late 1970s. As of two years ago, Americans spent 11 percent of their disposable income on food, the highest share in three decades, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Food-price inflation falls most heavily on the poorest 20 percent of Americans, who spent nearly a third of their income on food in 2022, the latest year for which USDA data are available. By contrast, the highest-income fifth of households spent on average 8 percent. “If you are spending 25 to 30 percent of your income on food and prices have jumped 25 percent, you are in real pain,” Weber said.

Other staples of life have also grown more expensive. Gas prices have gone up by about 50 percent in the past four years. Fuel-oil prices jumped by more than half from March 2020 to March 2024. Home prices have gone up nearly 50 percent nationwide since the start of the pandemic; the ratio of home prices to income has reached an all-time high. Once-sharp increases in average rents nationwide have slowed but not reversed. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard reports that poor and working-class renters suffer disproportionate pain. “Among renter households with an annual income under $30,000, the median amount of money left over after paying for rent and utilities was just $310 a month,” the center found, adding that affordability is at an all-time low.

According to recent data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, half of Americans who earn less than $35,000 a year have reported difficulty paying everyday expenses, and nearly 80 percent are “moderately” or “very” stressed by recent price increases.

Then there’s the problem of money, which has become far more expensive to borrow. The Federal Reserve Board’s efforts to tamp down inflation by pushing up interest rates have exacted a painful toll on working- and middle-class Americans—a toll not captured by the inflation rate.

The average mortgage interest payment has increased threefold since 2021. The combination of high prices and high interest rates has shut many Americans out of homeownership altogether. High rates also hurt many people who already own homes: Interest rates on equity credit lines and loans, which many Americans use to pay for home repairs, college tuition, and larger purchases, more than doubled from January 2022 to July 2023. High interest rates punish low-income renters, too, by hampering local and state agencies from financing below-market-rate apartments.

The extra costs keep mounting. Interest payments on new cars have risen 80 percent since the pandemic began. Credit-card interest rates are another burden. In March 2022, before the Federal Reserve started raising rates in response to inflation, the average credit-card rate was 16.3 percent, according to Bankrate. Two years later, it sits above 20 percent.

All of this inflation-related misery has begun to catch the eye of the economics establishment. Recently, four researchers, including the International Monetary Fund economist Marijn Bolhuis and the former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, released a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper noting that consumers are remarkably attuned to what’s going on. “Consumers, unlike modern economists, consider the cost of money part of their cost of living,” the authors write. Consumer unease about costs and borrowing, they say, is greater than at any time since the late 1970s and early ’80s. The authors developed an “alternative” consumer price index that more closely tracks actual costs felt by American consumers. The researchers claim that their preferred inflation index would explain most of why consumers feel more sour than official statistics would normally predict.

Many commentators’ eagerness to ignore inflation’s toll appears inescapably tied to Biden’s precarious reelection prospects. The president is more clear-eyed than his cheerleaders. Several months ago, he largely stopped touting the joys of “Bidenomics” and talked instead about challenging the corporations that raised prices and padded profits. During the State of the Union, Biden pledged to take on corporations that quietly shrink their products and hike prices out of greed. “Too many corporations raise prices to pad their profits, charging more and more for less and less,” Biden said that night. “That’s why we’re cracking down on corporations that engage in price-gouging.”

Mainstream economists cringe at this kind of populist rhetoric; their assumption is that the austerity that follows raising interest rates is an unfortunate but necessary medicine. Similarly, the suggestion that wealthy corporations should bear more of the pain, and the working class less of it, has come to sound radical to some economists. In late 2021, amid the rising prices and supply-chain disruptions of the pandemic, Weber, the UMass economist, proposed a once-popular and now unusual form of economic therapy: limiting what companies can charge for food and energy. “Large corporations with market power,” she wrote in The Guardian, “have used supply problems as an opportunity to increase prices and scoop windfall profits … What we need instead is a serious conversation about strategic price controls.”

Krugman and others harshly dismissed her idea—the Times columnist panned it on Twitter as “truly stupid.” He later deleted the post and apologized. The German and British governments enacted something similar to Weber’s ideas in limited form on energy prices. Weber, whose argument that corporate greed helps accelerate inflation has since been echoed by figures such as European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, has gained acclaim as an iconoclastic thinker about inflation.

“I have been ridiculed in obnoxious ways, but people sense the injustice,” Weber told me. “Many Americans worked throughout COVID; they saw friends die; they think, I did all the things I’m supposed to do, and I still can’t afford this life.”

Perhaps the economic turmoil of Biden’s term will ease in the seven months before the election, and consumer agitation will cool in tandem with inflation. Krugman offers tart counsel to Americans: “Maybe my message here sounds like Obi-Wan Kenobi in reverse: Look, don’t trust your feelings.”

The temptation for liberal economists and politicians to deny the pain experienced by many Americans, and to condescend when they might instead try to empathize, is perhaps understandable in a fraught election year. But working- and middle-class Americans might conclude that they are wiser to trust their feelings and checking accounts than to rely on liberal economists riffing as Jedi masters.

Updated 11:29 a.m., April 14, 2024

The moment we were all afraid of finally arrived yesterday evening. For me, it was announced by a phone call from a terrified teenage cousin in Iran. Had the war started? she asked me through tears.

Iran had fired hundreds of drones and missiles on Israel, hitting much more widely than most of us had anticipated. Only thanks to Israel’s excellent defenses, and the help of its Western and Arab allies, have almost all of these been intercepted. The only casualty so far is a 7-year-old Arab girl in southern Israel.

Nevertheless, the Rubicon has clearly been crossed. Iran and Israel have been fighting a shadow war for years, but on April 13, the conflict came into the open. No longer hiding behind deniable actions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the militia that holds most of the power in Iran, declared that it was behind the attacks, which seem to have been launched from various cities in Iran as well as by Tehran-backed militias in Yemen and Lebanon. The IRGC said that it was responding to Israel’s April 1 attack on an Iranian consular building in Damascus, which killed several commanders, including Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the IRGC’s chief official in the Levant region.

You don’t need to be an expert on Iran to know some facts about Iranians in this moment: First, most are sick of the Islamic Republic and its octogenarian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has been in charge since 1989, and whose rule has brought Iran economic ruin, international isolation, and now the threat of a war. You need only look at the majority of Iranians who have boycotted the past two nationwide elections, this year and in 2021, or the hundreds killed in the anti-regime protests of recent years to know that this government doesn’t represent Iranians.

Second, the people of Iran have no desire to experience a war with Israel. Despite decades of indoctrination in anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment by their government, Iranians harbor very little hostility toward Israel. In the past few months, many Arab capitals have seen mass demonstrations against Israel, but no such popular event has taken place in Iran. In fact, in the early stages of the Israel-Hamas war that broke out in October, many Iranians risked their lives by publicly opposing the anti-Israel campaign of the regime.

[Read: What Hamas promises, Iranians know too well]

Third, Iranians have a recent memory of how terrible war can be. I was born in Tehran in 1988, in the final throes of the brutal eight-year conflict that began when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and continued for way too long because of the Iranian regime’s ideological crusade. My mother spent many nights in Tehran’s bomb shelters when she was pregnant with me, taking refuge from the missiles that Iraq rained down on Iran. A cousin of mine was killed in that war, and my father was among the many injured. Iranians remember those years too well to want to repeat the experience. (Incidentally, some also remember that Israel gave occasional military help to Iran in that war.)

The people of Iran know that their main enemy is at home, and that war will bring them only more repression and hardship. Hours before Iran started firing missiles on Israel, it sent police around Tehran to crack down on women’s compliance with the mandatory veiling rules. After the attack, for hours past midnight, thousands of cars thronged gas stations around Tehran; a friend FaceTimed me from a Tehran supermarket crowded with people frantically stocking up. Another friend told me he had retreated to his rooftop and was refusing to sleep for fear of an attack.

The U.S. dollar was already trading for a record 647,000 Iranian rials yesterday morning, and now Iranians are bracing for another increase, which will further diminish their livelihoods. As a point of comparison, in 2022, the dollar sold for fewer than 220,000 rials. I’m old enough to remember when it was just 8,000; in 1979, it was 70. The collapsing Iranian currency reflects Iran’s economic destruction.

Many Iranians will hold their own regime accountable for the horror that a hot war with Israel could bring. Labor unions have already said as much. “With firing hundreds of drones and missiles on Israel, the Islamic Republic has adventurously begun a war that could turn a society of 90 million to a torched ground,” declared the Independent Iranian Workers Union, which represents thousands of workers around the country. “The regime is concluding its final mission to destroy Iran.” A teacher’s union issued a similar call. On X, a user well-known for her support of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote, “I spit on anybody supporting this war on either side. Poor Iran and the people of Iran who are saddled by you.” The Persian-language hashtag #no_to_war has been shared by thousands of Iranians inside and outside the country. Many have used it to attack Khamenei and the Islamic Republic.

The regime has tried to muster a show of public support for the strikes on Israel, with unimpressive results. Videos of a Saturday-night rally for this purpose in Tehran’s Palestine Square appeared to show a couple of hundred people there at most. A gathering at Zahedi’s grave in Isfahan looked to consist of fewer than 30 people. Only slightly more assembled at the grave, in Kerman, of Qassem Soleimani, IRGC’s leading commander who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2020.

For his part, Israel’s troubled prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may want nothing more than a war with Iran to distract from his failing war in Gaza and his declining popularity at home. The United States and its European and Arab allies, who rightly stood by Israel against Iranian aggression tonight, would be wise to push Netanyahu to avoid a broader conflagration that will benefit no one in the region, least of all the people of Iran or Israel. Saudi Arabia, which joined Jordan last night in helping to intercept Iranian missiles, has started off well by calling for immediate de-escalation. Israelis should remember that even after six months of their brutal war in Gaza, several Arab nations stood by them against aggression from Tehran.

Decision makers in Riyadh and Amman, as well as elsewhere, are well aware that Khamenei and his murderous regime are a threat to the peace and security of their own people, the region, and the world. The interests of the whole region lie in helping the people of Iran in their long-lasting quest to overthrow Khamenei and build a different Iran. Short of such a victory, it is quite likely that when the octogenarian Khamenei dies, Iran’s rulers will move away from his disastrous policies, which have brought Iran to the brink of a disastrous war. Even many of Iran’s current elite don’t want such a conflict.

More than a decade ago, in 2012, when Israel came close to attacking Iran over its nuclear program, an online campaign began in Israel that led to thousands of ordinary Iranians and Israelis posting their pictures online with a seemingly naive message: “Israel loves Iran” and “Iran loves Israel,” an announcement that the people of these two nations had no desire to die in a war with each other.

This fundamental reality has not changed. The people of Iran don’t want a war against Israel. And the people of the region and the world can’t afford one.

On April 1, Israel killed Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by attacking Iran’s consulate in Damascus. Iran spent the next two weeks promising revenge, and the world tried to imagine what form that revenge might take. Missile strikes on the Golan Heights? Bombing an Israeli embassy? (Iran has practice at this one.) When I flew from Dubai to Tel Aviv a few days later, I wondered whether Iran would go old-school and attack an El Al check-in counter, the way the terrorists used to in the 1980s. Emirati airport authorities, it turns out, had anticipated that move. They placed the El Al counter next to that of an Iranian airline, so anyone who rolled a grenade at Israelis would also do some damage to passengers bound for the Iranian holy city of Mashhad.

Now we know the form of the retaliation. Late Saturday night, about an hour before midnight Israel time, Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles from its own territory, as well as from Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, at the country it refers to as “the Zionist entity.” Almost all were shot down, officials said, eliminated by Israeli air defenses and, notably, by the militaries of the United States, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. No drones even entered Israeli airspace. This morning, Admiral Daniel Hagari, the Israeli army spokesman, beamingly called the defensive operation an “unprecedented success.” The Iranians, for their part, professed happiness with the outcome, though they also seemed eager to forestall an Israeli counterstrike. While the drones were still in the sky, Iran’s UN mission tweeted that the matter of the assassination “can [now] be deemed concluded.”

To summarize: Israel blew up an Iranian general in an Iranian diplomatic mission—the sort of facility normally inviolable under international law, though the Iranian regime is rather famous for its disregard of such proprieties—and for two weeks, Israel and its allies have been preparing for a regional war or unprecedented terror campaign, something that would make the October 7 Hamas attack and the subsequent Gaza War look like mere prelude. Instead, after its drones and missiles were swatted down like flies, Iran is now suggesting that the two countries call it a tie.

This tie is an astonishing Israeli win. As Hagari suggested, it is an operational triumph, because it demonstrated that swarming attacks from a sophisticated adversary are not effective against Israel over long ranges. These are the same Iranian-made drones that, in Russian hands, have been terrorizing Kyiv for the past two years. In Tel Aviv last night, no air-raid sirens went off. (I didn’t bother setting my alarm, because I was confident that at least a few drones would get through and I’d have to scamper to shelter. I assume many others in Tel Aviv are still snoozing as I write this.) The uneventful night was also a strategic triumph. Iran’s Arab adversaries—Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—all cooperated, taking concrete measures to keep Iran’s response ineffective. Iran’s Arab allies, Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon, did not enter the operation in a significant way. The Israeli skydome held up. The strategic alliance held up. Israeli kids get a day off school as a precaution, but other than that, my neighborhood of Tel Aviv looks normal, with the same population of bleary-eyed hipsters out looking for cappuccinos. (The only reported injury was to a 7-year-old Israeli girl, wounded by falling shrapnel. Inconveniently for Iran, she was Arab.)  

The attack is also a gift to the hapless Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, whose incompetence was universally acknowledged just a day ago. Now, after botching the response to the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history, Netanyahu’s government gathers credit for having repelled the most significant Iranian attack in Israel’s history. This morning, one could argue that Israel is safer than it has been since before October 7. “I think there are strategic opportunities,” the IDF spokesperson said in his briefing, and “we should look for those opportunities.” Netanyahu does not even have to launch a counterattack. Joe Biden has advised him that the U.S. will not support one, which relieves Netanyahu of the obligation. European countries that have criticized Israel over Gaza have stopped to condemn Iran instead.

But just because Netanyahu could decide to do nothing precipitous doesn’t mean that he will. He and his cabinet are constantly in search of new and ingenious ways to squander an opportunity. So today in the Middle East everyone is trying to imagine how they will misspend the credit Iran has just extended them. If Netanyahu behaves uncharacteristically, he could reach out to Israel’s Arab allies, and to its international critics, and try to reboot Gaza negotiations and bring home the Israeli hostages who are still alive. With Gaza at least partially in rubble and in famine conditions, and with essentially zero progress in negotiation with Hamas, some jolt to the status quo is necessary. Hamas has shown little interest in achieving a viable deal, and now its position has weakened slightly, because Iran seems so obviously disinclined to intervene in its favor by regionalizing the war. This reminder that Israel’s enemies are not limited to Hamas, and that Israel owes debts to its Arab friends who wish to see Gazans return to their homes (and who not-so-secretly also wish Israel could somehow eliminate Hamas without fuss once and for all), could catalyze a new Israeli reaction to the conflict.

​​These Arab allies deserve Israel’s gratitude. They also might be reminded of what is in their own interest. After all, Iran’s overseas ventures are not limited to Israel. Iran evidently feels free to violate Jordanian airspace as it pleases. If it is willing to swarm Israel with drones, why not Saudi Arabia too? It already attacked Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia’s largest oilfield, in 2019, an attack that went unanswered by Saudi Arabia and the United States. Iran, its Revolutionary Guards Corps at the front, has already wrecked Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon. Who is next? The Gaza war has alienated Israel from these allies, and in particular from their citizens, who see images of the devastation daily on Al Jazeera. Now Israel can point to Iran’s aggression and disregard of national boundaries as a common cause with which to begin to undo that alienation.

Netanyahu’s government is beholden to right-wing elements that have made a hostage deal difficult to strike and post-invasion Gaza planning almost non-existent. These same right-wing elements want retaliation: If Iran sends 300 drones and missiles to Israel, Israel should send 300 back. (Unlike the Iranian ones, many of the Israeli ones will reach their targets.) Now could be the moment for Netanyhu to tell his right flank to stand down. The reasons Israel is not on a war footing this morning—children are merely in Zoom lessons today, and there have been no further call-ups of reserve troops—are technological (an incredible air-defense system) and diplomatic (a partnership extending from the Levant to the Persian Gulf), not ideological. Many Israelis would welcome a shift back to a national-security-focused right, and away from a fundamentalist religious one. Not long ago, Netanyahu had a sort of proprietary hold on that position in Israeli politics. Now the religious right has a hold on him.

Netanyahu is a master of self-preservation, and he knows he likely will not be the one to lead such a shift. His instinct to stay in power would, in that case, come into conflict with his instinct to preserve and improve Israel’s geostrategic position. Unfortunately, in the contest between those two instincts, the outcome is unlikely to be anything close to a tie.

“We don’t need magazine profiles,” California Governor Gavin Newsom told me. “We don’t need any problems.”

We were sitting on opposing couches in his Sacramento office, a makeshift space across the street from his usual suite in the state capitol, currently being renovated. Newsom, leaning his head back into his intertwined hands, looked every bit the sleek pol he plays on TV—the big smile, the suit, the hair gel. He had just led me on a tour of this sterile habitat that he likens to a “dentist’s office.” Everything about it felt slapdash and temporary. “People know they’re not here for very long,” said Newsom, who is 56 but emits the frenetic energy of an upstart.  

This aura can invite distrust. So can participating in magazine profiles when you don’t want to be seen as buffing your national image at the expense of being a team player—the team being President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign.

“The shadow campaign” is what Newsom calls the theory, happily promoted by Republicans and the occasional Democrat, that he’s been plotting a clandestine effort to supplant Biden as his party’s nominee. Newsom is clearly sensitive to this perception and eager to disprove it. He has spent the past several months vouching for the president in a variety of adverse settings: after a Republican debate at the Reagan Library, on Fox News, and across several red states, from South Carolina to Idaho. He managed to put off our interview for nearly two months, long enough for Biden to clinch his nomination. By the time we met at the end of March, Newsom had fashioned himself as a kind of presidential super-surrogate—a chief alleviator of fears about Biden’s lagging poll numbers, advanced age, and ability to again defeat Donald Trump.

But being a super-surrogate requires a performative humility, subordinating one’s own ambition to the candidate’s. This is not something that comes naturally to a restless dazzler such as Newsom. “You’re good at this,” Bill Maher told the governor during a January appearance on HBO’s Real Time, praising Newsom’s pugnacious strikes against Republicans and his willingness to be “kinda mean” at times. Newsom then blasted off into a diatribe about how Democrats need to stop being so timid, earning an extended ovation. At which point, Maher paused, looked approvingly at Newsom, and asked: “Can you teach that speech to Biden?”

[Ronald Brownstein: The Democrats’ new spokesman in the culture wars]

Newsom chuckled awkwardly. He did the same when I recounted the Maher exchange to him. The subtext is obvious, and gets at the thorniness of being Newsom these days: the risk of being so “good at this” that it can seem like he’s running himself.

When pressed about his own presidential aspirations, as he still often is, Newsom is adept at pivoting to his reverential spiel about Biden. “He’s doing things that I could never imagine doing,” the governor told me. He said he has gotten to know Biden and has “really grown to deeply admire him, with conviction.” Newsom has objected in numerous ways, in numerous forums, to the idea that the 81-year-old president is slowing down. “You become an SNL meme,” he said of the challenge Biden surrogates face when trying to defend the president’s geriatric fitness in fresh and credible ways.

I mentioned to Newsom that age seems to be the intractable issue for Biden: Large majorities of Americans keep telling pollsters, over and over, that he is too old to run again. At a certain point, can anything really be done? Newsom swerved the conversation onto delicate terrain.

“Well, there’s Pretagen, and all those things on TV that seem to argue—to help—with that,” he said. He seemed to be referring to an over-the-counter supplement called Prevagen that supposedly promotes brain health. “I can’t turn on the damn TV without the vegetable and fruit supplements,” said Newsom, who professes to watch a lot of Fox News.

“Have you talked to Biden about maybe going on a more vigorous Prevagen regimen?” I deadpanned.

“Look, I mean, I was—” Newsom faltered for a moment. “I don’t know if I was joking, but I was lamenting about how many different ways, on different networks, I’ve answered this question in an effort to try to answer a little differently each time.”

On that, Newsom succeeded. His Prevagen answer was novel, if risky. Sometimes he can’t help himself.

President Joe Biden speaks with California Governor Gavin Newsom as Biden arrives in Santa Clara County, California, in June 2023. (Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux)

Newsom has solicitous eyes that often dart around a room, as if he’s scanning for something that might entertain his guest, or him. He is a fourth-generation Californian who himself embodies many dimensions of the unruly dream-state he is attempting to govern: He is profuse and thirsty at the same time, high-reaching, a bit dramatic, and never far from some disaster.

“I don’t want to be derivative,” Newsom said in our interview. He loves the word derivative almost as much as, he says, he hates things that are derivative—the kind of repetitive sound-biting that can be as basic to a politician’s job as throwing a baseball is to being a pitcher (which Newsom was in his youth, a lefty).

I have known Newsom for about 15 years, but hadn’t officially interviewed him since he was finishing his second term as mayor of San Francisco and preparing to run for governor in 2010. The campaign was short-lived, as it became clear that Newsom had limited reach beyond the Bay Area and little shot against California’s former and future governor, Jerry Brown. Newsom instead ran for lieutenant governor, winning the privilege of spending eight restive years as Brown’s understudy.

[From the June 2013 issue: Jerry Brown’s political reboot]

One of the few highlights of Newsom’s tenure, he told me, occurred in 2013, when Brown was on a trade mission to China. Newsom, in his brief stint as acting governor, issued a proclamation designating the avocado as California’s state fruit. Newsom said he felt like Brown was not showing him or his office “a lot of respect,” so he undertook the avocado gambit as a benign “act of defiance.” (He insists that his love of avocados is genuine and that he tries to eat one “six to seven days a week.”) The rogue operation extended to artichokes (which Newsom named as the state vegetable), rice (the state grain), and almonds (the state nut).

Newsom seemed to take immense pride in this small harvest of edicts, milking them for laughs and press coverage. He boasted of the “cornucopia of landmark accomplishments” that he had achieved “over these magical six days.” More than a decade later, Newsom still sounds amused, even if Governor Brown, upon his return from China, apparently was not. “I don’t know that amused and Jerry Brown have ever been used in the same sentence,” Newsom said. (Brown declined to be interviewed, but praised Newsom in a brief statement for providing “much needed continuity” on climate and China policy—two issues central to Brown’s time in office.)

For much of his political career, Newsom has been perceived as something of a wild child. He has nurtured that image by getting into occasional trouble. In 2007, as mayor, he admitted to an affair with his appointments secretary, who’d been married to Newsom’s close friend and deputy chief of staff; this was following the breakup of Newsom’s first marriage—to the future Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is now engaged to Donald Trump Jr. As recently as 2020, Newsom violated COVID restrictions by attending a group dinner at the French Laundry, one of California’s fanciest restaurants, which became a major issue in an unsuccessful campaign to recall him.

His breakneck impulses also resulted in the signature policy action that would establish Newsom as a national figure—his 2004 order for San Francisco to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. “It’s the Roger Bannister theory of life,” Newsom told me, referring to the English runner who broke the four-minute-mile barrier. Newsom said that, like Bannister, he was young and dumb and “didn’t know that he couldn’t.” He quoted his political idol, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., who in a 1966 address in South Africa said that the world “demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity.”

Today, Newsom has logged two terms each as a big-city mayor and as lieutenant governor, plus five years leading the nation-state of California. He married again in 2008, and has four children with his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a filmmaker and former actor. Newsom’s tenure as governor has featured high-profile moves that have positioned him as a national avatar of blue-state boosterism: an executive order mandating that new cars sold in California be zero-emission by 2035; a call for a constitutional amendment that would raise the legal age to purchase firearms to 21; a commitment to make California a “sanctuary” for abortion access.

As much as Newsom believes that it’s important to “continue to iterate,” I was struck by how often he talked about keeping experienced mentors close by. During the early crisis months of COVID, Newsom told me, he convened Zoom meetings with his living predecessors—Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gray Davis, and Pete Wilson. “To have these kinds of legendary figures—” Newsom said, shaking his head. Sometimes he would just sit back and absorb the exchanges. “Just the weird history, and the dynamic—it was a lot of fun,” Newsom said. He referred to the group as his “council of the elders.”

[From the April 2023 issue: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last act]

“He has grown, learned, and matured in terms of his approach,” says Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, who has known Newsom since “before he was born.” (Bill Newsom, Gavin’s father, was a well-connected Bay Area judge—appointed to the bench by Jerry Brown—whose sister was married to the brother of Pelosi’s husband, Paul.)

Pelosi is among a gallery of California political giants who have nurtured Newsom through his career. Willie Brown, the longtime speaker of the state assembly and mayor of San Francisco, appointed Newsom to his first political job in 1996, on the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission, and later to a vacant seat on its board of supervisors. Newsom told me he also took boundless knowledge from watching Jerry Brown for eight years in Sacramento, even though the two almost never interacted and Newsom’s impact as lieutenant governor was mostly limited to his heroic advocacy of the avocado.

By any measure, Brown had a remarkable leadership résumé—two previous terms as governor in the 1970s and ’80s, three presidential campaigns, stints as California’s attorney general and secretary of state, time as chair of the state Democratic Party, and two terms as mayor of Oakland. Like Newsom, he was known early in his career for his zesty and impatient style. “He was a man on a mission. He was the guy running for president over and over again,” Newsom said of Brown. But the late-career version of Brown “was just a different Jerry,” Newsom said. He sometimes watched Brown and wondered, “Why hasn’t he said anything about issue x, y, z?” And then, a few months later, the shrewdness of Brown’s silence would reveal itself.

“I want temperance. I want wisdom. I want someone who can govern, someone that’s not unhinged,” Newsom told me. He was talking now about Joe Biden, and trying to make the case that the president’s age should be seen as an asset, just as it was for Brown near the end of his career. It’s a compelling parallel, except that Brown left office at 80, and Biden is running for his second term at a year older. I noted to Newsom that Biden clearly has been well served by his wealth of experience, but that what his skeptics question is his ability to beat Donald Trump. “It’s an election question, I got it,” Newsom told me. “You gotta win.”

As the president departed on a trip to Los Angeles in February, a reporter shouted a question from the White House lawn about whether Newsom should be standing by in case a Democratic alternative was needed for 2024. Biden blew it off, but the episode highlighted the ongoing nuisance of the age issue, which had just been revived by Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report describing the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” As Newsom has denied any interest in replacing Biden, the president in turn has flattered him on the subject. “He’s been one hell of a governor, man,” Biden said of Newsom during a stop in San Francisco last November. “He could have the job I’m looking for.”

For much of last year, however, aides close to the president were wary of Newsom’s motives. He aroused particular suspicion by challenging Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to debate him on Fox News in November, in what the network billed as the “Great Red vs. Blue State Debate,” to be “moderated” by Sean Hannity. Newsom told me he would’ve skipped the debate if asked, but he heard nothing from the White House. “They never said, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it,’” he said. “But I can imagine they were like, What is he doing?” (A spokesperson for Biden’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Viewers watch Florida Governor Ron DeSantis debate California Governor Gavin Newsom in Alpharetta, Georgia, in November. (Elijah Nouvelage / Reuters)

“Yes, there was chatter,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the DreamWorks co-founder, who’s a longtime supporter of Newsom and a co-chair of the Biden reelection campaign, confirmed to me. “It wasn’t, ‘This is terrible. He shouldn’t be doing it.’ But I do think there was chatter like, ‘Really?’” Katzenberg added. “‘Why give DeSantis the platform? You’re elevating him.’”

Senator Laphonza Butler of California, whom Newsom appointed to her job in October after the death of Senator Dianne Feinstein, told me: “Had I been advising him, I’m not sure I would have said, ‘Yeah, that’s a great idea.’”

Newsom went ahead with the debate anyway, in part, he said, because he had already committed to it. “I’m glad for no other reason [than] you develop a muscle you didn’t know you had,” he told me. It was helpful, he said, that the event was delayed for months, allowing Newsom to prove himself a reliable partner to the White House. He has brought in large sums of cash for the reelection campaign and, last March, started a PAC that has raised more than $9 million for Biden and other Democratic candidates. Still, the Fox spectacle, which occurred not long before the start of the primaries, was an odd look for both participants.

[David Frum: Ron DeSantis debates his grievances]

Newsom received generally positive reviews. “I thought he made some solid points,” Butler said. “He made DeSantis stumble.” He delivered perhaps the line of the night when he mentioned that he and DeSantis had something in common: “Neither of us will be the nominee for our party in 2024”—another signal to the White House that Newsom was fully onboard. It was also one of several times that Newsom hammered DeSantis over how Trump was beating him badly in the Republican primary, something that undoubtedly delighted the former president.

Trump represents a more natural foil to Newsom than DeSantis. Both are outsize, sensitive, and at times self-immolating showmen. Newsom clearly enjoys pitting himself against the former president, whose deep unpopularity among Democrats makes his antagonism an unquestioned political asset. Trump recently started calling the governor “New-scum,” which Newsom belittled to me as a lame “seventh-grade nickname.”

At the start of our interview, Newsom pointed across his room to a photo of himself with Donald and Melania in the Oval Office. “My staff put it up there, kind of as a joke, and I kept it,” Newsom told me. It is also a conversation piece, over which Newsom became quite animated. He appears to have a fascination with Trump, and not just as an evil adversary. Newsom, who campaigned in 2018 on a pledge to make California “a resistance state,” likes to mention that he worked well with Trump during his first two years in Sacramento. “We had the baseline of a relationship that benefited California significantly,” he told me. He watched Trump closely and tried to decipher how best to manage the needy president during COVID and severe wildfires in his state. He stroked Trump in public. “I want to thank you and acknowledge the work that you’ve done to be immediate in terms of your response,” Newsom told Trump in front of reporters at Sacramento’s McClellan Airport during a visit from the president in September 2020.

As Newsom continued a prolonged riff about Trump during our interview—what he learned watching Trump’s “dialectic” with the media or riding with him on Air Force One—he sounded strangely captivated, as if he had been privileged to observe a feral and predatory peacock in the wild. The association sounded more important to Newsom than I might have imagined.

Newsom told me that every time he placed a call to Trump in the White House, someone would patch him through or the president would call right back. That changed when Newsom reached out a few days after Trump lost the 2020 election. He heard nothing. “And I was like, Wow,” Newsom said. “And then I called a few days later—I figured he was busy—and they said, ‘He’s not available.’ And I’m like, Whoa.” He said he was genuinely taken aback by the snub, despite the addled state Trump was obviously in at the time and the overall madhouse that the White House had become.

I asked Newsom if he had spoken with Trump since, or heard from him after the DeSantis donnybrook. He said no (a spokesperson for the former president echoed this), but my query appeared to trigger an odd reaction in Newsom. His face turned red, which I noted to him. “No, that’s because the sunlight is beaming on me,” he protested, pointing out the window into the expansive California glare.

Newsom said that my “line of questioning is interesting.” He offered a wordy zigzag of a reply: “The fact that you are not the first person to ask me ‘Did he call you?’—particularly some of your sophisticated colleagues—is suggestive.”

I found Newsom’s labyrinthine answer to also be “suggestive.”

Newsom has a personal connection to Trump, via his first wife, Guilfoyle. He does not love to discuss his ex. “I’m sensitive to the world I’m currently living in, at home particularly,” he told me. Still, he is asked about Guilfoyle a lot, mostly in the vein of “What’s the deal there?”

[From the October 2019 issue: The heir]

Newsom and Guilfoyle met in 1994, at a Democratic fundraiser in San Francisco. She worked in the district attorney’s office, and he owned a chain of local food and wine establishments. They married seven years later and were dubbed “The New Kennedys” in a Harper’s Bazaar spread. “Do I think he could be president of the United States?” Guilfoyle told the magazine. “Absolutely. I’d gladly vote for him.” That comment appears no longer operative. (Guilfoyle declined to comment for this article.)

Newsom and Guilfoyle divorced in 2006. Things ended amicably, Newsom said: “No kids, respect, both sides.” Newsom told me he wished Guilfoyle well, and not “backhandedly.” He did not want to say anything negative about her, even though, he said, “She’s taken shots at me publicly.”

In fact, in an interview on CNN’s The Axe Files podcast last year, Newsom said Guilfoyle had been a “different person” when they were married. He told me she was committed to “social justice and social” values, and that she was a Republican, “but it was more traditional conservatism.”

“She fell prey, I think, to the culture at Fox,” he said on the podcast. He added, “She would disagree with that assessment.”

Yes, she did.

“I didn’t change; he did,” Guilfoyle fired back in an interview with the right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk. She said Newsom was once a champion of entrepreneurs and small business but has since become “unrecognizable” to her. “He’s fallen prey to the left, the radical left.”

If Trump wins in November, Newsom will remain the governor of the nation’s most populous state and biggest resistance zone. In his office, he keeps a marked-up copy of a policy blueprint, “Project 2025,” prepared by the Heritage Foundation as a possible preview of a next Trump term. “I’m going through 100 pages of this. I’m not screwing around,” Newsom told me. He said his team is “Trump-proofing California,” preparing to enact whatever measures they can to thwart a hostile Republican White House. To better understand his political opposition, Newsom begins each morning with a heavy intake of far-right media. “There’s so many things that come our way that are so batshit-crazy,” he said. “You can’t deny where half of America lives.”

Newsom has endured a difficult few months in California. His approval ratings recently dropped under 50 percent for the first time since he became governor. He devoted a great deal of time and capital to promoting a ballot measure—Proposition 1—to allocate $6.4 billion to mental-health treatment programs. The proposal was expected to pass easily in March but barely did—a possible sign of weakness as Newsom faces another recall effort and a budget crisis.

After 90 minutes of conversation in his office, Newsom was getting antsy, as he does. He rose from the couch and walked over to his massive desk, where he would soon devour his daily helping of the California state fruit, over chicken salad.

Newsom is a student of workspaces. “I always like going in people’s offices, going, ‘Why is that there?’” he told me. He loved his usual quarters across the street, now deep in renovation. His desk there used to belong to Earl Warren, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court and the governor of California from 1943 to 1953. But Newsom assured me that no serious thought went into decorating these temporary quarters. He seemed pleased to give the impression of being a short-timer. “This is literally the things that came out of the first boxes,” he said. “We threw it up; a lot of it’s no rhyme or reason.”

One of Newsom’s prized mementos is a framed letter he received during the height of the COVID crisis, from none other than the baseball legend Willie Mays. “I don’t write many letters, but I’ve been watching you on TV and thought you might appreciate some words of encouragement,” the “Say Hey Kid” wrote.

[From the July/August 2023 issue: Moneyball broke baseball]

Newsom can be deeply cynical at times when discussing politics. But he can also display a boyish and even starstruck side. I watched him stare wide-eyed at his note from Mays and marvel. “Piles of ‘Go fuck yourself,’” Newsom said, describing his typical mail. “And then Willie Mays sends a letter.”

He showed me a few items in a side office, at the moment dominated by the big-screened head of the legal commentator Jonathan Turley yammering on Fox. A few feet away stood a picture of Newsom and Pelosi from the 1990s, in his first race for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors; shots of Schwarzenegger, Newsom’s late father, and various Kennedys; and a small table full of booze. Newsom hoisted a bottle of wine someone had recently given him: DeSantis, the vintage is called. I imagined a libation of complex and astringent notes, not at all supple or aromatic.

“I may send it to him,” Newsom told me. He said he wanted to strike up at least some tiny bit of rapport with the Florida governor during their Hannity encounter. “I tried, during every commercial break,” Newsom said. “We did the makeup.” Nothing. Newsom shook his head and imitated DeSantis, looking at his shoes, hands shoved into his pockets.

“Impossible,” he said. “Complete asshole.” (A DeSantis spokesperson declined to comment.)

Newsom said his distaste for DeSantis stems from what he describes as his Florida counterpart’s attacks on vulnerable targets—migrants, transgender and disabled people, often kids. Newsom himself was bullied as a child. He struggled with dyslexia, had a bowl haircut, and walked around school with a briefcase. The neighborhood kids could be merciless. He grew into a star athlete, 6-foot-3 with a potential run for president in his future. “But I’m still that kid,” he told me.

Being around Newsom, you sense an ongoing tug between boyish and sober impulses. He can fall heavily on nostalgia—and RFK quotes—while asserting himself as an agent of the future. He reveres the old-school pols who mentored him while striving to be inventive and distinct. It is vital, Newsom told me, “to take risks and not be reckless, but keep trying things.” To be original but restrained when necessary. “I don’t want to be derivative” might be as close as he comes to codifying a leadership philosophy: the Roger Bannister theory of life tempered by the venerated principle of waiting one’s turn, if it ever comes.

The horror of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, to me, isn’t that he’s a killer, or an aspirant, or even a literary version of the parasitic wasp that nests gruesomely inside the zombified form of its prey. Rather, it’s that he’s that most familiar of contemporary monsters: an incurable narcissist. At the beginning of the 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, as Ripley is moldering in poverty in New York and scraping together a living via petty mail scams, he’s sustained by an illogical faith in his own superiority. The “crummy bums” he socializes with aren’t really his friends; the grime in his borrowed tenement apartment is not his dirt. Ripley is pathetic, but we can’t escape him as readers, mired as the novel is in his interiority. We suffer the physical pain he feels when he’s forced to have conversations not focused on himself. We’re steeped in the envy, the self-pity, and the crippling status anxiety that drive him to murder. (It’s not all dark—at one point Ripley feels so pathetically validated when someone sends him a fruit basket that he breaks into sobs.)

Are we supposed to like Tom Ripley? I don’t think so. Nor are we supposed to hate him, nor even find him particularly evil. “Ripley isn’t so bad,” Highsmith once reportedly observed, for her part. “He only kills when he has to.” He’s a pragmatic villain more than a psychopath, although the consequence is that he’s rarely all that surprising. Anthony Minghella’s 1999 movie adaptation of the novel tried determinedly to humanize him, casting Matt Damon as an insecure sad sack who’s driven to a crime of desperate passion when he’s sent to Europe to bring home—and is promptly humiliated by—Jude Law’s wealthy, callous Dickie Greenleaf. The film’s visual splendor, with its bluest blue skies and sun-dappled Neapolitan coast, offered relief from Ripley’s claustrophobic mind and relentless grudgery; it also placed him in the long lineage of sympathetic American strivers who go just a tiny bit too far.

Ripley, a new eight-part adaptation on Netflix by the writer and director Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, The Night Of) is resolutely different, almost to the point of inversion. Shot in striking black and white—it’s the most beautiful series I’ve ever seen on the platform—it is emotionally spare, deliberate in its pacing, and morbidly funny. This Ripley, played with a malevolent flourish by Andrew Scott (Sherlock, All Of Us Strangers), is a void, an emptiness where the soul should be. The show’s lack of color turns it into a chiaroscuro meditation on light and dark, as Zaillian cuts moodily from Caravaggios to gargoyles to endless shots of staircases. What a piece of work is man! the series seems to sigh, encouraging us to mull the depths of human depravity, and the possibility art offers for ascension.

You could be forgiven, watching television lately, for wondering whether we’re in a new mini-era of Difficult Men, after a stretch defined by complicated female characters. Sullen, brooding heroes and antiheroes have returned to the small screen, paying homage to European New Wave and Old Hollywood alike. On Apple TV+’s Sugar, a different show with a vexing protagonist that leans heavily on dreamy cinematography and the innate brutality of life, a private detective played by Colin Farrell searches for a missing girl while clips of film-noir classics flash erratically through his head. Late last year, the most fun I had watching television was with Reacher, Amazon’s kinetic adaptation of the Lee Child potboiler series, starring Alan Ritchson as the phlegmatic, solicitous, intensely violent giant.

In his 2013 book, Difficult Men, a history of television’s second Golden Age and the troublesome characters who embodied it, the writer Brett Martin argues that “the most important shows of [that] era were … largely about manhood—in particular the contours of male power and the infinite varieties of male combat.” The current state of masculinity on TV, by contrast, is one of alienation. These shows are steeped in nostalgia and pay homage to bygone eras but offer up heroes who feel resolutely other, isolated and disconnected and driven to acts of baroque violence that they don’t want to inflict and can’t enjoy.

The decision to shoot Ripley in black and white works on multiple levels: It evokes the heft and visual symbolism of classic film while keeping pleasure manifestly at bay. We are in Ripley’s world, and something is missing. The lush florals and endless summer of Minghella’s film offered consolation for what the hero himself lacked, but Zaillian wants us to experience life the way Ripley does, as something cold and sharp. When he’s tasked in the first episode by the wealthy American shipbuilder Herbert Greenleaf to bring home his feckless son, who’s gallivanting off the proceeds of a trust fund, I half expected the show to bloom into color once Ripley landed in Europe, as if to signify the opening up of his gloomy world. Instead, things stay monochrome. His travels, his new friends and experiences, will not bring him any relief.

Ripley could be grimly ponderous—each episode runs close to an hour, and one is spent in intensely close quarters with the hero as he labors to get rid of a dead body. Strangely though, it’s not. There’s so much to look at on-screen, so much that draws the viewer’s eye, that the series is intensely absorbing, and the rhythm of the later episodes, whose dialogue is largely in Italian, feels almost musical. Ripley’s sense of humor is also a surprise. Dickie (played by Johnny Flynn) is a nonentity whose paintings are so bad that they bring to mind the botched “Monkey Christ”; Marge (Dakota Fanning), his American “friend”—sexuality is as ambiguous here as in Highsmith’s novel—is prim and self-serious, toiling diligently away at writing a very dull book. These are Bad Art Friends, which gives Ripley, a natural if untrained aesthete, the moral high ground. His murderous dedication to self-improvement isn’t wholly original (Constance Grady has labeled the genre he belongs to “striver gothic”), but he does, like Hannibal Lecter, appreciate beauty infinitely more than capital.

[Read: 20 undersung crime shows to binge-watch]

This latest Ripley has been interpreted as an antihero for the current moment, a scammer and confidence trickster who, in the present day, would surely have a gallery under investigation by the IRS and a hugely popular Instagram. (The 2023 movie Saltburn, which followed a working-class student drawn into the circle of an aristocratic friend, borrowed heavily from Highsmith, heaping on homoerotic melodrama, bodily taboos, and Millennial kitsch.) But Scott plays Ripley in a way that feels chilly to the touch—his grand ambitions and desires, if he has them, are hard to determine. When he first gets to Italy, we see him sweating and huffing his way up ancient cliffside stairs, recognizably vulnerable, without a grasp of the language or a clue how to behave. As the series progresses, though, he hardens like a flint. Scott’s eyes betray no emotion beyond boredom or malice: The more comfortable his Ripley gets, the more sinister he feels—and the more operatic as a character.

The performance doesn’t quite match the nuance of the show. On Sugar, it’s the other way around: Farrell is giving us something so poignantly human that it transcends the heightened, sometimes absurd plot points he has to navigate. The series, created by Mark Protosevich (I Am Legend, Thor), has been billed as “genre-bending,” spanning film noir, sci-fi, and Westerns, with some global gangster intrigue thrown into the mix. What it really is, though, is a surprisingly good crime drama with an awful lot of unnecessary adornment. John Sugar (Farrell) is an oddball private detective working for a clandestine agency; he abhors violence but is very good at deploying it, is an ardent cinephile, and cares deeply about vulnerable people and dogs. Watching it, I’d heard a twist was coming, which still didn’t quite prepare me for how erratically the show upends itself. It’s obvious that Sugar isn’t what he seems, and he appears to have based his personality whole cloth on gruff cinematic legends and Raymond Chandler novels. And yet he’s manifestly good—too good for this seedy realm.

In the first episode, Sugar is commissioned to find a missing girl, the granddaughter of a storied Hollywood film director, Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell), and the former stepdaughter of a rock star, Melanie Mackintosh (Amy Ryan). The series uses a fair amount of voice-over, requiring Farrell to spout clichés as pat as “Sometimes a thing is just a thing that happened,” and “We all have our secrets. Even me. Especially me.” Sugar’s car (a vintage Corvette), his suits (“Savile Row”), and the specific affliction he has of seeing life crosscut with scenes from Humphrey Bogart films all suggest he’s nostalgic grist for Apple’s key dad demographic. So why couldn’t I stop watching?

Maybe because the performances are extremely good—Farrell, yes, and Ryan’s softening punk edges, as well as Eric Lange playing a terrifyingly charismatic criminal and Anna Gunn as a scheming mother. Sugar also looks extraordinary, casting Los Angeles in shades of coral and green without sanitizing its seamier side. The episodes, running about half an hour each, are tightly plotted, and the central mystery is an enticing one. (Not the one about Sugar himself, which will be better the less I acknowledge it.) Really, though, the detective himself is a lovely puzzle, more interesting for what he doesn’t say than for what his labored interior monologue spells out. What is a man? How can Sugar try to retain his humanity and integrity in a landscape of abjection? And the most difficult question of all: Are the stories we love the most actually serving us? This, to me, is what makes John Sugar so compelling: He loves the movies, and the lessons of light and dark that they impart. He’s just not always sure that he can trust them.

In 2010, as California was moving forward with plans to raise taxes sharply on million-dollar earners, opponents issued dire warnings that the hike would drive away entrepreneurs and cripple the state economy. “There’s nothing more portable than a millionaire and his money,” warned the ranking Republican on the state Senate’s budget committee. The tax hike passed anyway—and California’s share of the nation’s million-dollar earners actually grew, reaching 18 percent in 2021. (Californians make up just less than 12 percent of the overall population.) And yet, when California recently considered a proposal to impose a wealth tax on mega-rich households, even some Democrats echoed the same old worry.

The idea of millionaire flight is one of America’s most persistent beliefs. Expert consensus holds that “redistributive policies should be undertaken by the most central level of government rather than state or local governments,” as one academic summary puts it. In other words, rich people can’t avoid high federal taxes, short of leaving the country, whereas if a state tries to impose a progressive tax code, its millionaires will decamp for lower-tax jurisdictions. And, indeed, state tax codes, which bring in about one-third of U.S. tax revenue, largely reflect this received wisdom. Unlike the federal system, which is fairly progressive, state and local tax systems on average shift money from poorer households to richer ones. According to a recent report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, “forty-four states’ tax systems exacerbate income inequality,” with the poorest 20 percent of households paying the highest effective tax rates.  

Things don’t have to be this way. The notion that rich taxpayers will flee if the state comes for their money is mostly fiction. The most obvious clue comes from the existence of the small number of states, including California, New Jersey, Minnesota, and New York, that buck the overall trend by taxing rich people at higher rates. If the conventional wisdom were accurate, you would expect those states to be devoid of wealthy people. Instead, they are among the richest in the country.

[Annie Lowrey: If you soak the rich, will they leave?]

A number of international studies from the past decade further undermine the idea of millionaire flight. In 2011, for example, Spain reintroduced its wealth tax. Crucially, the exact rate varied from place to place within Spain. In Madrid, the rate was zero percent, whereas in other places, it exceeded 3 percent—equivalent, under certain assumptions, to an income tax of more than 60 percent. Skeptics suggested that the measure would cause so much capital flight that it would actually cost the government money. Yet very few households moved to Madrid—hardly an undesirable destination!—in response to the tax, and the government raised $19 in new revenue for every dollar lost to relocations. A study of the Swiss wealth tax, which varies among cantons, found broadly similar results, as did studies of Scandinavian wealth taxes.

In this regard, Europe and America don’t appear to be too different. An analysis of confidential IRS data on earnings and relocations reported that “millionaires are not very mobile and actually have lower migration rates than the general population.” Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business found that, much as in Spain, relocations sapped only about a nickel out of each new dollar in revenues from the 2010 California tax increase.

It makes sense, when you stop to think about it. Wealthy people tend to be more deeply embedded in their community and local institutions than the average person. And when it comes to the ultra-wealthy, we really aren’t talking about people who can do their job over Zoom. Whether it’s a public-company CEO, a private-equity manager, or the owner of the local car dealership, top-level managers and entrepreneurs are usually closely tied to their headquarters and the site of their business’s operations.

Even so, designing an effective, progressive state tax system isn’t as simple as just raising rates on top earners. Wealthy families, especially those whose money comes from investments rather than from a salary, have many ways to slash their tax bill without physically relocating. In a recent paper, David Gamage, Darien Shanske, and I explore the various “money moves” that wealthy households in the U.S. use to delay income until retirement (or death), when they are no longer tied to their business and can redirect their income to a low-tax jurisdiction such as Florida.

The simplest example is what we could call “the Musk.” Build your billion-dollar business in California but never sell any of the stock. If you find yourself in need of funds—say, to buy and destroy a social-media company—you can always borrow against the value of the unsold shares. Don’t sell until you’re somewhere with a lower rate.

What makes the Musk work is what tax wonks call the “realization” rule: the principle that we tax property only when it’s sold. This is supposed to make it easier to know how much the property is worth and to ensure that the taxpayer has cash on hand to pay the bill. For related reasons, the U.S. system has traditionally not treated borrowed funds as taxable income. Combining these two policies gives taxpayers a powerful option: the right to choose not just when but also where to pay taxes.

[Read: The golden age of rich people not paying their taxes]

The federal tax base is mostly safe from these kinds of moves. The United States taxes its citizens’ income no matter where they live. A person who gives up their citizenship is taxed immediately on all of their property, as if they had sold it on the date of their expatriation. This kind of “exit tax” would probably be unconstitutional at the state level, however. Somewhat counterintuitively, then, states’ best answer to money moves is to impose a wealth tax on the extremely wealthy. A well-designed wealth tax could reach any asset a taxpayer owns, whether it’s stowed in an out-of-state pension account or held in a foreign corporation. Another approach would be to modify the realization rule for the wealthiest state taxpayers and to track changes in the value of their property annually; tax mavens call this “mark to market” taxation.

But what if millionaires really do start uprooting their life once the money-move loopholes get closed? As we’ve seen, a wealth tax didn’t cause mass migration in Spain. And Norway’s crackdown on wealth-tax avoidance didn’t lead to any big changes in mobility either, despite anecdotal reports of a few billionaires pulling up stakes. To see why that makes sense, consider Elon Musk again. If California had put a mark-to-market tax in place in time, he would have already paid taxes on his Tesla billions and had little to gain from moving to Texas.

Of course, if a state wants to tax annual value or changes in value, it has to figure out how much things are worth. In our academic work, my co-authors and I explain how to pull that off. For example, states can just wait until taxpayers actually sell, then charge interest. That would also help resolve the discomfort some voters seem to have with taxing assets before they’re sold.

Another objection might be that, even if established business owners don’t move, maybe the next generation of entrepreneurs will tend to prefer states where they can be assured that their lifetime tax burden will be low. There’s no current evidence that this is true. But supposing it were, the best response wouldn’t be to keep our current, broken system. A better compromise would be to lower the official top tax rates but close up the loopholes so that everyone is paying what they’re supposed to. That’s a classic of good tax policy: The more income there is subject to taxation, the lower tax rates need to be.

Whatever the precise solution, state fiscal systems badly need to be repaired. We shouldn’t let the myth of millionaire mobility prevent that from happening.

Next Thursday, former President Donald Trump’s lawyers will argue before the U.S. Supreme Court that he is immune to all criminal charges against him arising from acts he committed while president. It is no exaggeration to say that this argument—that a president is permanently immune to criminal prosecution for any crimes committed in his official capacity—is the most dangerous assertion any official or former official has ever made in a U.S. courtroom.

Should this argument be adopted by the Court, a president would have license to make use of the U.S. military to subvert democracy in multiple ways, for example by endeavoring to remain in power past the end of his legitimate term, or attempting to avoid accountability for his past criminal activities, and the country would have little to no recourse. A less appreciated danger, but one that would present itself with greater regularity, is the weakening of the military chain of command, and with it civilian control of the U.S. armed forces. As we, along with 13 other national-security professionals, including high-ranking retired military officers, argue in an amicus brief we filed in this case, holding everyone in the chain of command to the same principles of accountability under the criminal laws of the United States is essential for ensuring the legality of military orders, and for providing all levels of the chain of command with reassurance of that legality. This includes the president.

[David A. Graham: Trump loses his presidential immunity claim]

Some people may take comfort in the fact that officers and ordinary enlisted alike swear an oath to abide by the Constitution, and furthermore that the duty to follow orders extends only as far as the lawfulness of the orders received. This means that everyone in the chain of command who receives a patently unlawful order has a duty to disobey. Consistent with this principle,  “following orders” is no defense to a charge of illegality when the recipient of the order knows or has reason to know that the order was illegal. The infamous “Nuremberg defense” asserted by Nazi military officers in war-crimes trials after World War II was rightly rejected by that tribunal.

But in practice, a presidential order has strong gravitational pull. Under normal circumstances, then, when the commander in chief issues an order, there is a presumption of its legality. Wouldn’t a president’s advisers stop him from issuing an illegal order for his own good, if not for the good of the country? If the president is immune to criminal prosecution, however, his lawyers may not be quite so concerned about the order’s legality, and his subordinates will be left to determine for themselves whether following the order places them in legal jeopardy. This may erode confidence in the chain of command and would create the potential for disparate interpretations of the duty to obey orders, thereby risking military discipline and regular functioning. In this way, immunity for criminal acts committed in the president’s official capacity would undermine military obedience to civil authority, the foundation of our civil-military relations since the inception of the republic.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of a putative order to commit war crimes. Imagine a president who orders U.S. troops to engage in a massacre such as the one that famously occurred in My Lai, Vietnam, in 1968. In such a situation, every service member must assess for themselves the legality of an order and thus the weight to accord the general duty to obey orders. Where the order is patently illegal, as was the case with My Lai, no service member could carry out such a command without risking major sanctions following trial by court-martial, as is made clear by the U.S. Manual for Courts-Martial. In less dramatic cases, the order’s legal status may be unclear, and then failure to obey a lawful order may incur criminal charges and proceedings triable by court-martial, unless the recipient of the order has a high degree of knowledge that the order is illegal. If he merely thinks the order is illegal but the order is in fact legal, he is virtually certain to be convicted for refusal to obey.    

Against this backdrop, presidential immunity for criminal use of commander-in-chief authority is untenable. Although the duty of obedience on the part of subordinates does not extend to patently illegal orders, an order issued by the president himself would exert considerable pressure on service members. If everyone in the chain of command except the president can be prosecuted both for failure to obey a legal order and for obeying an illegal order, and if presidential orders cannot be presumed to be legal, military service would be fraught with peril. Placing the men and women who put their lives at risk to protect the Constitution—as every service member swears to do—in such moral and legal jeopardy would be both dangerous and profoundly unfair to our troops.

President Trump gives no answer to such concerns in the brief his attorneys filed in this case, preferring to focus on the risk of unfair prosecution of presidents by political rivals. He cites numerous instances, from allegations of corruption against John Quincy Adams to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II to Barack Obama’s targeted killing of Americans overseas. “In each such case,” Trump’s lawyers argue, “those opponents later came to power with ample incentive to charge him. But no former President was ever prosecuted for official acts—until 2023.” But, as our brief maintains, there is a distinction between political rhetoric based on morally or politically controversial acts and actual, prosecutable offenses. From the fact that prosecutors and their associated grand juries may have difficult decisions to make, it hardly follows that there are no actual cases of presidential crime or that prosecution in such cases would necessarily be politically motivated. But the downstream effects of a total lack of accountability for all presidential crime, whether in war or elsewhere, cannot be tolerated.

The Supreme Court should unequivocally reject Trump’s proposed doctrine of presidential immunity and leave no doubt in the minds of Donald Trump, the public, and all occupants of the Oval Office that the president will be held to the four corners of the law in both his personal and official capacities. And this is because the president, like all U.S. officials as well as ordinary citizens, is not above the law.

South Korean electronics giant Samsung is the latest chipmaker to receive billions from the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, the Biden administration said Monday.

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It is the first time in US history that a former president has faced a trial for criminal charges.