Everyone, for so long, has been worried about the honeybees. Governments, celebrities, social-media users, small businesses, multinational conglomerates—in the two decades or so since news emerged that American honeybees were disappearing, all manner of entities with a platform or a wallet have taken up and abandoned countless other causes, but they can’t quit trying to save the bees.

In 2022, at least 18 states enacted bee-related legislation. Last year, a cryptocurrency launched with the intention of raising “awareness and support for bee conservation.” If you search Etsy right now for “save the bees,” you’ll be rewarded with thousands of things to buy. Bees and Thank You, a food truck in suburban Boston, funds bee sanctuaries and gives out a packet of wildflower seeds—good for the bees!—with every grilled cheese sandwich it sells. A company in the United Kingdom offers a key ring containing a little bottle of chemicals that can purportedly “revive” an “exhausted bee” should you encounter one, “so it can continue its mission pollinating planet Earth.”

All of the above is surprising for maybe a few different reasons, but here’s a good place to start: Though their numbers have fluctuated, honeybees are not in trouble. Other bees are. But the movement’s poster child, biggest star, and attention hound is not at risk of imminent extinction, and never has been. “There are more honeybees on the planet now than there probably ever have been in the history of honeybees,” Rich Hatfield, a biologist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, told me. “They are in no threat of going endangered. It’s not an issue.”

The idea that honeybees need our help is one of our most curiously persistent cultural myths. It is well intended. But it is also unhelpful: a distraction from more urgent biodiversity problems, and an object lesson in the limits of modern environmentalism and the seductiveness of modern consumerism. That the misconception has survived for so long may tell us less about bees than it does about the species that has, for centuries, adored, influenced, and exploited them more than any other. “Save the bees” rhetoric has turned them into something unspoiled, a miracle of mother nature’s ingenious machinery. But everything about the modern American honeybee has been shaped by humans, including its sustained existence.

A true truth about the bees: The modal American honeybee is, essentially, a farm animal—part of a $200-billion-a-year industry that’s regulated by the USDA and is as sophisticated and professionalized as any other segment of the sprawling system that gets food on our plates. The nation’s largest beekeeping operation, Adee Honey Farms, has more than 80,000 colonies, facilities in five states, and nearly 100 employees. Its bees, and those at other large-scale apiaries, do produce honey, but more and more, the real money is in what the industry calls “pollination services”: the renting-out of bees to fertilize the farms of Big Ag, which have seen their indigenous pollinators decline with urbanization and industrialization.

Every February, right before the almond trees start blooming powdery and white across California’s San Joaquin Valley, bees from all over the country pack onto semitrucks and head west, where they participate in the largest supervised pollination event on Earth, doing their part to ensure that America’s most beloved nut makes its way again into snack packs and candy bars. Throughout the spring and early summer, they do the same for other crops—watermelons, pumpkins, cucumbers, alfalfas, onions—before heading home to the honey farm, where the most ambitious among them can expect to make a 12th of a teaspoon of the gooey, golden stuff over their lifetime. In the early 1990s, when Adee started renting out bees for industrial fertilization, that income accounted for about a third of its revenue, with honey making up the rest. Now the ratio is flipped.

[Read: A uniquely French approach to environmentalism]

As that transition was happening, another force threatened to rearrange the industry even more dramatically. Worker bees were flying away for pollen and never coming back, abandoning their hives’ queens and young like a lousy husband in an enduring cliché. No one could figure out why. Some blamed a common class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are toxic to bees. Others zeroed in on the stress incurred by all that trucking of beehives around the country for pollination. Maybe it was warmer winters, or malnutrition, or the parasitic Varroa mite, or a sign of the Rapture.

This was not the first time bees had gone missing en masse. In 1869, and in 1918, and in 1965, farmers had reported similar phenomena, given names such as “spring dwindle” and “disappearing disease” in the scientific literature. But it was the first time that such an event reached full-scale public crisis, or that knowledge of it spread much beyond the insular world of farmers, beekeepers, entomologists, and agriculture regulators.

In retrospect, it was a perfect moment for a predicament like this to effloresce into panic. Social media had recently birthed an immensely powerful way of both disseminating information and performing one’s values loudly and publicly. An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s feature-length climate-change call to arms, had become one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. Michael Pollan was at the peak of his powers, having just published The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which laid out the consequence and quantity of choices facing contemporary eaters. Americans were newly aware of the terrifying fragility of our food systems, and newly in possession of robust ways to talk about it. Brands were interested in aligning themselves with noncontroversial, blandly feel-good causes. Plus, humans were already primed to love bees; we have since biblical times. “We think of bees as being very pure,” Beth Daly, an anthrozoology professor at the University of Windsor, in Canada, told me. They are honey and flowers and sunshine, beauty and abundance, communitarianism and hard work.

By 2007, the mystery thing making these lovely creatures go away had a scary-sounding new name: colony collapse disorder. Within a decade, bee panic was everywhere. A spate of nonfiction books warned of the imminent threat of a Fruitless Fall and A Spring Without Bees. The White House convened a task force. General Mills temporarily removed the cartoon-bee mascot from boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios, enacting a high-concept allegory meant, I guess, to stun Americans into action. The cosmetics company Burt’s Bees released a limited-edition lip-balm flavor (strawberry), some of whose proceeds went to one of the approximately gazillion honeybee-conservation nonprofits that had recently sprung up. Samuel L. Jackson gave Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds “10 pounds of bees” as a wedding gift. Laypeople started keeping backyard hives. Häagen-Dazs created an awareness-raising ice-cream flavor and funded a VR short film shot from the perspective of a bee; in it, Alex, our apian protagonist, warns that “something terrible is happening.”

She (it?) was not entirely wrong. Colony collapse was an actual problem, a scientific whodunit with genuinely high stakes. Honeybees are responsible for pollinating roughly every third bite Americans eat. Scientists were correct to think back then that if colonies were to keep collapsing, our food system would need to change in painful, potentially catastrophic ways.

Much more worrying, though, and more real: The population of wild bees—the non-honey-producing, non-hive-dwelling relatives of the species humans have been intent on saving—has been decreasing steadily, for years. Insects of all kinds are declining in record numbers, and their deaths will have repercussions we cannot even imagine.

[Read: The illogical relationship Americans have with animals]

Yet heads have been turned mostly toward the honeybee. That’s because, unlike so many other imperiled animals, honeybees are part of a huge industry quite literally invested in their survival. Apis mellifera are living things, but they are also revenue-generating assets; the thousands of people who rely on bees’ uncompensated labor to buy groceries and pay the cable bill had every incentive to figure out colony collapse. So they found better agrochemicals and bred mite-resistant bees. They gave their bees nutritional supplements, fats and proteins and minerals ground as fine as pollen and snuck into the food supply. They moved hives into atmospherically controlled warehouses. They adapted.

All told, it was kind of the Y2K of environmental disasters. Not that colony collapse was a hoax, or that the panic surrounding it was an overreaction. Rather, it was an appropriate reaction—a big problem made smaller thanks to the difficult, somewhat unglamorous, behind-the-scenes labor of trained professionals with a vested interest in averting disaster. In 2019, an economist-entomologist team published a study analyzing the effects of colony collapse on the managed-pollinator industry; they found “cause for considerable optimism, at least for the economically dominant honey bee.” According to the most recent data from the USDA Census of Agriculture, honeybees have been the country’s fastest-growing livestock category since 2007. Also, very clearly, our food system has not fallen to pieces.

This doesn’t mean honeybee keepers aren’t struggling—some are. But as Hatfield, the Xerces Society biologist, told me, that’s an issue for the business of honeybee keeping, not the moral and practical project of pollinator conservation. He finds a useful comparison in a different domesticated animal: chickens. “When we get bird flu,” he said, “we leave that up to USDA scientists to develop immunizations and other things to help these chickens that are suffering in these commercial chicken coops. We don’t enlist homeowners to help the chicken populations in their backyard.”

In 2018, Seirian Sumner, a wasp scientist and fan, conducted a survey of 748 people, mostly in the United Kingdom, on their perceptions of various insects. She and her collaborators, she told me, “were absolutely flabbergasted” by their results: Bees are roughly as adored as butterflies and significantly more liked than wasps—their wilder cousins—which serve various important roles in ecosystem regulation, and which are in genuine, fairly precipitous decline.

Sumner was born in 1974 and doesn’t recall much love for bees when she was growing up. You weren’t “buying your bee slippers and your bee socks and your bee scarf and your bee mug and everything else,” she told me. Today’s craze for bees, her research suggests, is a mutually reinforcing phenomenon. People love bees because they understand their importance as pollinators. People understand their importance as pollinators because it is easier to fund research and write magazine articles and publish children’s books and engage in multi-platform brand campaigns about animals that people are already fond of.

Honeybees are, in point of fact, amazing. They have five eyes, two stomachs, and a sense of smell 50 times more sensitive than a dog’s. They do a little dance when they find good pollen and want to tell their friends about it. They are feminists, and obviously, they dress well. They produce a near-universally-liked substance, and they do not have to die to do it. Loving bees, and wanting more of them in our food system, is simple. Engaging meaningfully with the cruel, complicated reality of industrial food production, or the looming, life-extinguishing horror of climate change, is not.

To save the bees is to participate in an especially appealing kind of environmental activism, one that makes solutions seem straightforward and buying stuff feel virtuous. Worried about vanishing biodiversity? Save the bees. Feeling powerless about your mandatory participation, via the consumption required to stay alive, in agriculture systems that produce so much wreckage, so much waste, so much suffering for so many living things? Save the bees. Tired of staring at the hyperobject? Save the bees. When we are grasping for ways to help, we tend to land on whatever is within arm’s reach.

In the 17th century, when what is now called the American honeybee was imported from Europe, large-scale industrial agriculture did not exist. Farms were surrounded by wild flora and powered by non-machine labor, without pesticides and chemical fertilizers, which also did not exist. Bees lived, ate, and pollinated all in the same place; they built their nests in untilled soil and unchopped trees. Even if farmers could have trucked them in, they didn’t have to. But as farming changed, bees became livestock, then itinerant laborers—there to meet the needs of the industrial systems that created those needs in the first place. Their numbers have always oscillated based on our demands: In the 1940s, when sugar rationing made beekeeping extraordinarily profitable, the bee population swelled; as soon as the war was over, it fell again. In 2024, thanks to the efforts of professional beekeepers and (to a lesser extent) backyard hobbyists, they’re faring better than ever.

Now the industrialized world that made, and saved, the honeybee as we know it is being called on to save other insects—the ones that really are in trouble. This will be trickier. When you ask experts what a layperson should do for all pollinators in 2024, they have a lot to say: Use fewer insecticides, inside and outside. Convert mowed lawn into habitat that can feed wild animals. Reconsider your efforts to save the honeybee—not just because it’s a diversion, but because honeybees take resources from wild bees. Buy organic, and look for food grown using agricultural practices that support beneficial insects. Get involved with efforts to count and conserve bees of all species. (The experts do not think you should buy a lip balm.)

What they are getting at is … an inconvenient truth: America does have an insect-biodiversity crisis. It is old and big—much older and much bigger than colony collapse disorder—and so are the solutions to it. The best require returning our environment into something that looks much more like the place the first American honeybees encountered. Having a backyard beehive isn’t the answer to what’s ailing our ecosystem, because having a backyard is the problem. Buying ice cream from a global food conglomerate isn’t the answer, because buying ice cream from a global food conglomerate is the problem. The movement to save the honeybee is a small attempt at unwinding centuries of human intervention in our natural world, at undoing the harms of the modern food system, without having to sacrifice too much. No wonder so many of us wanted to believe.

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GOP operative Brad Parscale is credited with using technology — specifically social media — to help get a certain former reality TV star elected President. Now, Parscale is back and he wants to use tech again to disrupt America’s political game. This time, the tech he’s excited about is artificial intelligence.

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America’s public schools, since their creation, have repeatedly become a locus for our nation’s most divisive fights over politics and civil rights, whether the subject be evolution, segregation, sex ed, or school prayer. After all, it is in its classrooms—in social-studies curricula and civics lessons and mandatory-reading lists—that the country wrestles with how to tell its story to new generations, how to teach kids what’s right and wrong, true and false. And the decisions that society makes about what children ought to learn, or ought not to, have the power to shape culture and the future of democracy.

Thus today we see fights over how to discuss racism in schools, with progressives championing lessons that connect the stain of slavery to modern inequities, conservatives demanding instead that children be taught “not to see color,” and plenty of debate somewhere in between. We see fights over whether first-graders should be allowed to check out picture books featuring LGBTQ characters, whether teens should be made to read literature with graphic depictions of sex, whether the Ten Commandments should be posted inside classrooms. The recent wave of activism targeting schools has sometimes seemed unprecedented in its ferocity and scale. But of course, these types of debates are not new. They fit into a long tradition of reactionary movements seeking to shape what children in America learn.  

This article was adapted from Mike Hixenbaugh’s new book, They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms.

Early in the 20th century, Christian fundamentalists waged a crusade to stop the teaching of human evolution in public schools, culminating most famously with 1925’s Scopes “monkey trial,” in which a high-school teacher in Tennessee was charged with violating a new state law banning evolution lessons from classrooms. With the United States on the precipice of entering World War II in the late 1930s and early ’40s, groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion waged a successful nationwide campaign against popular social-studies textbooks written by the progressive educator Harold Rugg; they argued that the books—which raised questions about the unequal distribution of wealth in the U.S. and advocated for civil rights for African Americans—were “subversive.” Attempts to force schools to integrate in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s were met with riots and racist protests.

While researching my book on the latest political wars over public education, I came across a 1981 New York Times article that sounded as if it might have been printed this year. It described a coalition of suburban residents who, “armed with sophisticated lobbying techniques,” were fighting to “remove books from libraries” and replace history syllabi with “texts that emphasize the positive side of America’s past.” The article documented efforts by parents’ groups across the country to “cleanse their local schools of materials and teaching methods they consider antifamily, anti-American and anti-God.” Here was a tale of conservative activists waging a national assault on school lessons more than four decades ago, though that earlier generation applied a different label to the threat it perceived than activists do now: secular humanism.

Rooted in 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment thinking, secular humanism, as it was originally understood, refers to a belief system that rejects religion as the basis for morality and emphasizes the need to test dogma with science, to pursue justice by opposing discrimination, and to focus on improving conditions here on Earth rather than looking to the afterlife. But in the 1970s and ’80s, it was redefined by white Christian conservatives—much like the term critical race theory, decades later—as a catchall to describe any lesson or book they found objectionable. If a text mentioned the struggle for women’s rights, it was secular humanist; if it mentioned the racism of the Jim Crow era, it was secular humanist.

[Read: The banned books you haven’t heard about]

Also much as in today’s fights, the battles over secular humanism, which occurred in the years immediately following the civil-rights movement, were a response to evolving social norms around gender, race, and sexuality. And just as the protests for racial justice following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 incited school-board conflicts in communities with rapidly changing demographics, many of the battles a generation ago emanated from predominantly white but diversifying suburbs, where angry parents formed groups with such names as Young Parents Alert and Guardians of Education. Portraying teachers, textbook writers, and school bureaucrats as liberal foot soldiers in a shadowy scheme to indoctrinate their children, these citizen activists described their cause as one of good versus evil, a framing that stoked passions—and sometimes violence.

The simmering right-wing movement against secular humanism exploded into national view in the spring of 1974, when white fundamentalists launched a political attack on the public school system in Kanawha County, West Virginia. The district had introduced new multicultural textbooks as required by a recent state mandate. Months of protests were led by Alice Moore, a white school-board member and preacher’s wife who argued—while explicitly invoking the dangers of secular humanism—that new language-arts textbooks would teach students “ghetto dialect” instead of “standard American speech.” Picketers carried homemade signs, including one that read I have a “Bible,” I don’t need those dirty books. Angry parents were soon joined by members of the Ku Klux Klan. An elementary school’s entrance was defaced with a swastika. Arsonists attacked schools with firebombs and Molotov cocktails, vandals cut the fuel lines of school buses to keep them from running, and the county board-of-education building was blasted with 15 sticks of dynamite.

The unrest largely died down after six months, but the school board made a concession. All future textbooks in Kanawha County would have to “encourage loyalty to the United States” and “not defame our nation’s founders”—provisions strikingly like those sought by the GOP today. In states such as Texas and Oklahoma, legislators have passed laws requiring that students be taught a “patriotic” version of America’s past and banning texts that depict slavery as central to the nation’s founding.

There are also parallels in the financing of these movements, with support then and now drawn from a large network of conservative think tanks and activist groups. The campaign against secular humanism was backed by national organizations including the Heritage Foundation, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Pat Robertson’s National Legal Foundation, and the antigay, anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. Some of those same organizations remain involved today, joined by dozens of emergent activist groups, such as Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and the 1776 Project PAC.

Some aspects of the right’s new playbook appear to have been copied from history—including its campaign to leverage school-board conflicts to push for a conservative reinterpretation of foundational rights. With help from conservative law firms, parents filed lawsuits in the 1970s and ’80s claiming that secular humanism was itself a religion, and as such should be barred from schools or balanced with Christian perspectives. Others in the movement simultaneously sought to overturn the principle of Church-state separation that was the basis for that argument. Insisting that America’s founding was grounded in biblical principles, activists demanded that educators present Christianity in a favorable light, that children be taught to respect the United States and its military, and that men and women be depicted in “traditional” gender roles in classroom reading assignments.

[Read: The librarians are not okay]

Although many of these demands were denied by local and state education boards, Christian conservative groups scored major victories throughout the 1980s—largely through targeted lawsuits and local pressure campaigns—before the movement’s power and momentum began to wane, in the ’90s. The biggest win from that era may have come in 1984, when Congress passed a law that included an amendment written by Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, prohibiting the use of federal funds for the teaching of secular humanism. Hatch failed to clearly define the concept, however, leaving confused educators to guess at which ideas were or were not allowed in classrooms. As one of Hatch’s aides would later concede, the senator’s amendment was meant mostly as a “symbolic thing.”

A similarly vague warning is being broadcast to educators across the country today, leading many to change the way they teach. A recent survey by Rand found that two-thirds of teachers nationally reported choosing to limit instruction about political and social issues, including racism and LGBTQ topics. Even in states and school districts where Republicans haven’t adopted laws or policies restricting lessons on race, gender, and sexuality, educators say their fear of political attacks has caused them to avoid subjects and lessons that might stir backlash.

Now, in many classrooms, dark chapters of America’s history are being softened or skipped. Some students are being taught a distorted narrative about our nation’s past and present, and books challenging that depiction are being pulled from shelves. All of this is helping shape what a new generation of Americans believes about our country—exactly the effect that anti-secularism activists fought for decades ago.

As it turns out, secular humanism itself may be experiencing something of a rebound as a boogeyman. On a recent reporting trip to Virginia Beach, where I was covering a live taping of a pro-Trump, Christian-nationalist television program, I listened to a young political strategist named Luke Ball bemoan the failure by his parents’ generation to teach children what is good and right. “We replaced Christianity with secular humanism in our classrooms,” Ball said. He then proceeded to blame the philosophy’s insidious influence for much of what the Christian right believes is wrong with the country today—pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, LGBTQ pride flags fluttering outside the White House, drag queens reading to children.

But there was still time to turn things around, Ball said. Conservatives just needed to look to the past and learn from their history.

A few months ago, I had an email exchange with a person who works in the right-wing-media world. He said that crime was “surging,” a claim that just happened to advance the Trumpian narrative that America during the Biden presidency is a dystopia.

I pointed out that the preliminary data showed a dramatic drop in violent crime last year. (Violent crime spiked in the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, during the coronavirus pandemic, and has declined in each year of Joe Biden’s presidency.) During our back-and-forth, my interlocutor at first denied that crime had dropped. He sent me links showing that crime rates in Washington, D.C., were increasing, as though a national drop in crime couldn’t be accompanied by an increase in individual cities. He insisted the data I cited were false, implying they were the product of the liberal media. “Perception is reality,” he told me. “Nobody is buying the narrative that crime is getting better.”

Eventually, after I responded to each of his claims, he reluctantly conceded that crime, rather than surging, was dropping—but ascribed the source of the progress to Republican states. I corrected him on that assertion, too. (Crime has dropped in both red and blue states.) He finally admitted that, yes, crime was decreasing, and in blue states too, but said the drop was inevitable, the result of the pandemic’s end. So he blamed Biden when he thought violent crime was increasing and insisted Biden deserves no credit now that violent crime is decreasing.

[Rogé Karma: The great normalization]

I consider where we ended up a victory, but only a partial and temporary one. His fundamental storyline hasn’t changed. Virtually every day he insists that life in America under Biden is a hellscape and that his reelection would lead to its destruction.

Welcome to MAGA world.

I mention this exchange because it reveals something important about the MAGA mind. Trump and his supporters have a deep investment in promoting fear. At almost every Trump rally, the former president tries to frighten his supporters out of their wits. He did this in 2016 and 2020, and he’s doing it again this year.

“If he wins,” Trump said of Biden during a rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, “our country is going to be destroyed.” Trump also said this of Biden: “He’s a demented tyrant.” After Trump’s victories on Super Tuesday, he told an audience of his supporters, “Our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying.”

Other politicians have been fearmongers, but none has been as relentless and effective as Trump. He has an unparalleled ability to promote feelings of terror among his base, with the goal of translating that terror into votes.

But as I recently argued, Biden has been president for nearly three and a half years, and America has hardly entered a new Dark Age. In some important respects, in fact, the nation, based on empirical evidence, is doing better during the Biden years than it did during the Trump years. And evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, who comprise the most loyal and embittered parts of the Trump base, enjoy perhaps the greatest degree of religious liberty they ever have, and they are among the least persecuted religious communities in history. The number of abortions, of particular concern for evangelical Christians, declined steadily after 1990. At the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, during which there was a decrease of nearly 30 percent, the number of abortions reached its lowest level since Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973. (During the Trump administration, the number of abortions increased by 8 percent.)

For many Trump supporters, then, fear is not so much the cause of their support for the former president as a justification for it. They use fear to rationalize their backing for Trump. They have a burning need to promote catastrophism, even if it requires cognitive distortion, spreading falsehoods, and peddling conspiracy theories.

But why? What’s driving their ongoing, deepening fealty to Trump?

Part of the explanation is partisan loyalty. Every party rallies around its presidential nominee, even if the nation is flourishing under the stewardship of an incumbent from the other party.

But that reasoning takes us only so far in this case. For one thing, it’s nearly inconceivable to imagine that if any other former president did what Trump has done, Republicans would maintain their devotion to him. Richard Nixon committed only a fraction of Trump’s misdeeds, and the GOP broke with him over the revelation of the “smoking gun” tapes. It was not his liberal critics, but the collapse of support within the Republican Party, that persuaded Nixon to resign.

Beyond that, Trump was not an incumbent this cycle. In 2020, he lost the presidency by 72 electoral votes and 7 million popular votes; Republicans lost control of the Senate, and Democrats maintained their majority in the House. In the past, when a one-term president was defeated and dragged his party down in the process, he was shown the exit. But despite Trump being a loser, Republicans remain enthralled by him. So something unusual is going on here.

Human beings have a natural tendency to organize around tribal affiliations. Some are drawn to what the Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen calls the “need for chaos,” and wish to “burn down” the entire political order in the hopes of gaining status in the process. (My colleague Derek Thompson wrote about Petersen and his work earlier this year.) And social scientists such as Jonathan Haidt point out that mutual outrage bonds people together. Sharing anger can be very pleasurable, and the internet makes doing this orders of magnitude easier.

For several decades now, the Republican base has been unusually susceptible to these predispositions. Grievances had been building, with Republicans feeling as though they were being dishonored and disrespected by elite culture. Those feelings were stoked by figures such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, who decivilized politics and turned it into a blood sport. And then came Trump, the most skilled and successful demagogue in American history.

An extraordinary connection between Trump and his base was forged when he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015 and employed his dehumanizing language. Almost every day since then, he has selected targets at which to channel his hate, which appears to be inexhaustible, and ramped up his rhetoric to the point that it now echoes lines from Mein Kampf. In the process, he has fueled the rage of his supporters.

Trump not only validated hate; he made it fashionable. One friend observed to me that Trump makes his supporters feel as if they are embattled warriors making a last stand against the demise of everything they cherish, which is a powerful source of personal meaning and social solidarity. They become heroes in their own mythological narratives.

But it doesn’t stop there. Trump has set himself up both as a Christ figure persecuted for the sake of his followers and as their avenging angel. At a speech last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said, “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.”

“You’re not selling ‘Morning in America’ from Mar-a-Lago,” Steve Bannon, one of the MAGA movement’s architects, told The New York Times’ Charles Homans. “You need a different tempo. He needed to reiterate to his followers, ‘This is [expletive] revenge.’”

Malice, enmity, resentments: These are the emotions driving many Trump supporters. They’re why they not only accept but delight in the savagery and brutishness of Trump’s politics. They’re why you hear chants of “Fuck Joe Biden” at Trump rallies. His base constantly searches for new targets, new reasons to be indignant. It activates the pleasure center of their brain. It’s a compulsion loop.

Which brings me back to the exchange I described at the beginning of this essay. My interlocutor was clearly rooting against good news; though he would deny it, the implication of his response was that he wanted crime to get worse. Not because he was rooting for innocent people to die, though that would be the effect. What appeared to animate him—as it has for the entire Biden presidency—is the awareness that good news for America means bad news for MAGA world. Worse yet, good news would be celebrated by people—Biden, Democrats, Never Trumpers—he has grown to hate. But hate is an unattractive emotion to celebrate; it benefits from a polite veneer.

[Read: You should go to a Trump rally]

In this case, the finishing coat is fear, the insistence that if Biden is president, all that Trump’s supporters hold dear will die. This isn’t true, but it doesn’t matter to them that it’s not true. The veneer also makes it easier for Trump supporters—evangelical Christians, “constitutional conservatives,” champions of law and order, and “family values” voters among them—to justify their support for a man who embodies almost everything they once loathed.

Even as Donald Trump’s politics has become more savage, his threats aimed at opponents more ominous, and his humiliation of others more frequent—he has become ever more revered by his supporters.

I imagine that even some of the Republican Party’s harshest liberal critics could not have anticipated a decade and a half ago that the GOP would be led by a man who referred to a violent mob that stormed the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power as “political prisoners,” “hostages,” and “patriots.” It’s been an astonishing moral inversion, a sickening descent. And it’s not done.

The guardian of the special relationship—the historical but possibly mythical bond between the United States and the United Kingdom—is a short woman with discerning blue eyes and a penchant for glittering headbands.

The role of an ambassador has always been strange. They’re expected to be fun—to flit around comfortably at galas and cocktail parties, charming guests and making inroads with important people while waiters weave around with platters of deviled eggs. Still, British Ambassador Karen Pierce’s real duty is to lobby for her country and offer advice on delicate matters during heated international moments. And the job of an ambassador—even one representing a close ally—has become far more complex because of the strident partisanship that has taken hold in D.C.

Part of Pierce’s mission recently has been to represent the British government’s firmly pro-Ukraine position on providing military aid—even when the Biden administration’s matching desire became mired in Congress because of protests by a Trump-aligned faction of House Republicans.

[Elaine Godfrey: Trump’s VP search is different this time]

Pierce had not only lobbied hard on Capitol Hill ahead of last week’s long-awaited congressional vote on aid; she’d also traveled with Britain’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, to Mar-a-Lago to try to get buy-in from Donald Trump. (She has been tight-lipped about their meeting, and was certainly claiming no credit, but the former president’s toned-down opposition to the bill probably did help the package pass—even though more Republican lawmakers voted against it than for it.)

In an era when populist politics and rising nationalism are challenging the institutions of the international liberal order, diplomacy can seem like a quaint relic of bygone etiquette.

The more public side of an ambassador’s job seems much easier. Over the past three years, Pierce has become well known for throwing lively and well-attended Pimms-fueled bashes, especially in the D.C. social season surrounding the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Underneath the surface frippery, though, Pierce is a serious operator. The true art of her diplomacy is the very English thing of working hard to make it all look totally effortless.

One evening last week, I watched Pierce at work. During a party two days before the WHCD, she buzzed around the lush green garden of her Washington residence, chatting with various politicos.

The 64-year-old Pierce grew up in northwest England and has worked for the U.K.’s Foreign Office for 43 years. She’s held positions in Japan, in Ukraine, and in the Balkans during the conflicts in former Yugoslavia. For a year, she lived in Kabul as Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan, and she represented the U.K. at the United Nations for three years. Although she was made a dame in 2018, Pierce’s working-class background makes her a relative outsider in the foreign service, which is otherwise a bastion of the upper-class elite. Being Britain’s first female ambassador to the U.S. does too. She leans into it.

The day I saw her, she was wearing a vivid chartreuse dress and black tights, with her feet tucked daintily into a pair of black-and-white kitten heels. Despite being shorter than everyone else at the party, she still commanded the attention of all the people in her vicinity. Pierce has worn tangerine suits to state events, and baby-pink silk dresses with huge round sunglasses. Once, to attend a UN summit, she wrapped herself in what looked like a maroon feather boa. Such displays aren’t just a sartorial choice; they’re a strategy.

“When you’re an ambassador, you want people to remember you,” she told me. So I made note of her leaf-patterned sheath dress, shiny blue blazer, and cheetah-print headband. About that feather boa; it wasn’t one. “It was a fur, but it was fake,” Pierce insisted. “Though the Russians tried to say it was an exotic fur.” She rolled her eyes. “The Russians will go for anything. They really have no scruples whatsoever.”

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The wall behind the desk in Pierce’s office, a cheerful, sunlit room in an otherwise sterile building, is covered in magnets collected from around the world (“The tackier the better,” she told The Washington Post). Orchids decorate the tables.

Entertaining is part of the job. But don’t call them parties: “We would call them receptions, because we treat them as work events,” she chided me. In the days surrounding the WHCD on April 27, Pierce hosted an embassy reception that provided not only a selection of assorted British pasties, but a cigar room and Scotch bar as well. She also made appearances at half a dozen events put on by various Washington bigwigs and media outlets, and emceed a Sunday brunch in the embassy garden. Pierce’s drink of choice? “I like lots and lots of cocktails, but the more pink they are, the better, I’m afraid.”

Pierce’s first job in D.C. was as private secretary to the then-ambassador. She arrived in 1992 with her husband, former U.K. Treasury Secretary Charles Roxburgh, and her first of two children, an infant at the time. “The fact that politics is in the air is just—and also the fact that you’re in the capital of the leading nation in the world—I get a real buzz out of that,” she said.

In 1995, Pierce watched as Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House, and American politics grew more polarized. When she came back to serve as ambassador in March 2020, she saw that trend intensify, culminating in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. “I watch all of these developments, and we spend a lot of time evaluating them and finding historical context for them,” she told me.

But Pierce wasn’t particularly eager to discuss current politics—or the ex- and possibly future president who has sent that polarization into overdrive. Her caution made sense: Pierce’s predecessor, Kim Darroch, resigned from his position after leaks revealed that he’d criticized the Trump administration as “inept and insecure.” When I asked her about the former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, whose time in office famously lasted only about as long as a head of lettuce stayed fresh, and who has recently cozied up to the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Pierce’s expression was steely. “She’s a private individual, and she’s welcome to pursue her politics,” she said. “It’s not where the British government is.”

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The day after we met in her embassy office, Pierce showed up early at the Hilton Hotel, in a rich-blue gown and a pair of cascading diamond earrings, greeting as many people as possible before the Correspondents’ Dinner officially began. This year’s dinner was probably Pierce’s last spring soirée; a new British ambassador is expected to replace her by the end of 2024.

Leaving will be hard, Pierce said during a Politico podcast taping—“I’ll have to be dragged out of [here] by my fingernails”—not least because this is an election year. A return to the Oval Office for the resident of Mar-a-Lago could mean a challenging new dynamic between the U.S. and the U.K. Pierce joked about being reluctant to leave America, but her concern about a possible end of aid to Ukraine seemed obvious.

That aside, her domestic assessment was surprisingly rosy—or at least highly diplomatic. “I personally do not worry about America,” she told me. “I have a lot of faith in American democracy and in Americans, and I think you have very strong institutions.” Pierce’s faith in what an ambassador to America can achieve seemed unshaken, even amid the capital’s current dysfunction. She didn’t hesitate to assert that confidence when I asked her advice for her soon-to-be-announced successor: “Make the weather.”