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Michael Cohen is an admitted liar and a convicted felon who is openly fueled by a thirst for revenge against Donald Trump. That he is so frank about his motives and past may actually make his testimony seem more credible to jurors.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The real meaning of Trump’s “unified Reich” post Reaganomics is on its last legs. The panic over smartphones doesn’t help teens.

Revenge of the Fixer

For the past week in New York, Michael Cohen has been a valuable—and fraught—star witness in Donald Trump’s criminal trial. The defense has tried to portray Cohen, Trump’s ex-lawyer and fixer, as a jilted lackey—which he openly is. To get a sense of his animus toward his ex-boss, look no further than his T-shirt depicting Trump behind bars, his admission in court that he once called Trump a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain,” and his two memoirs—Disloyal and Revenge—that trash the former president for his many transgressions.

Still, Cohen’s openness about his past and his motivations—in part forced by the public and criminal nature of his previous offenses—may actually make him seem more credible to a jury. His argument in court boiled down to: I committed crimes at Trump’s behest—and suffered consequences—because I would have done anything for him. That transparency made him appear like “the agent who was held accountable, whereas the principal has escaped accountability,” James Sample, a law professor at Hofstra University, told me in an email.

In 2018, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes that included lying to Congress about plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and violating campaign-finance laws by making hush-money payments—one of which went to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. He testified that, during the 2016 election, when she was considering publicizing the story of her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, Trump ordered Cohen to “take care of it.” In turn, Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 of his own money, which he claimed was later reimbursed by Trump.

On the stand, Cohen largely remained calm, though he had some shaky moments. He admitted during cross-examination that he had stolen tens of thousands of dollars from the Trump Organization, pocketing some of the money earmarked for a tech company. (When a prosecutor later probed him, he said that he had been angry because his bonus was cut.) The defense repeatedly tried to assail Cohen’s credibility—an obvious way to undermine a man who had previously lied under oath. Cohen testified that he had spoken with Trump in October 2016, via Trump’s bodyguard’s phone, about paying off Daniels. Attempting to ding Cohen on the details of the call, the defense insisted that Cohen hadn’t spoken with Trump and had actually discussed a different matter with the bodyguard, but Cohen stood by his testimony. Trump’s lawyers also called into question Cohen’s money-related stake in the trial. Cohen admitted that he has a financial interest in the outcome of the trial, because he writes and podcasts about Trump, but added that an acquittal would be better for him economically because it would give him “more to talk about.”

A common paradox lies at the heart of Trump’s criminal case, Sample told me: “To get at the truth in prosecuting criminal enterprises often requires relying on liars.” In most cases, being a convicted felon would make a witness far less credible. But the fact that Cohen has already served time in prison for admitting to crimes related to hush-money payments actually adds to his credibility as a witness here, Valerie Hans, a professor at Cornell Law School and an expert on juries, told me in an email; jurors won’t have to wonder if Cohen is testifying as part of a plea deal to avoid prison time for those charges.

In contrast to the prosecution’s parade of witnesses, Trump’s defense team presented only two witnesses before resting its case earlier today. (Trump himself did not testify.) One of the witnesses was Robert Costello, a lawyer who once did some legal work for Cohen. He was positioned to be a Cohen-antagonist, and he claimed that Cohen previously told him that Trump “knew nothing” about the hush-money payment to Daniels. But in the process of trying to impugn Cohen, Costello “succeeded in impugning himself,” Sample told me. The judge scolded Costello after he reportedly told the courtroom to “strike” something from the record and continued to speak after objections were sustained. “The circus-like debacle of Costello’s testimony is a microcosm of why the defense called so few witnesses,” Sample explained.

Cohen’s history of fealty to Trump, and his willingness to bully and lie, is well documented. That his past would be an asset may seem strange—but the prosecution is banking on him. After Memorial Day weekend, the jury will convene and begin their deliberations. Their decision to convict or acquit a former president will largely hinge on whether or not they think they can trust the word of Michael Cohen.

Related:

Michael Cohen, mediocre hero Trump’s alternate-reality criminal trial

Today’s News

Trump’s defense rested its case in his New York criminal trial. Closing arguments are set to begin next week. Rudy Giuliani and 10 other Trump allies pleaded not guilty to conspiracy, forgery, and fraud charges in an Arizona criminal case related to their alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential-election results. One man died and multiple passengers suffered injuries when a Boeing plane flying from London to Singapore encountered severe turbulence; the aircraft plummeted roughly 6,000 feet within the span of five minutes.

Evening Read

Illustration by Nick Little for The Atlantic

The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing

By Tyler Austin Harper

“Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and equitable relationships.” Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and executive chair of the dating app Bumble, leans in toward her Bloomberg Live interviewer. “How can we actually teach you how to date?”

When her interviewer, apparently bemused, asks for an example of what this means, Herd launches into a mind-bending disquisition on the future of AI-abetted dating: “Okay, so for example, you could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge, and you could share your insecurities. ‘I just came out of a breakup. I have commitment issues.’ And it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself” …

What Herd provides here is much more than a darkly whimsical peek into a dystopian future of online dating. It’s a window into a future in which people require layer upon layer of algorithmic mediation between them in order to carry out the most basic of human interactions: those involving romance, sex, friendship, comfort, food.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The voters who don’t really know Donald Trump Higher education isn’t the enemy. Scientists are very worried about NASA’s Mars plan.

Culture Break

Billie Eilish wears sunglasses and squats in front of a blue gradient background

Listen. Billie Eilish’s new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, sustains a mood of longing that is very now, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Watch. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (out now in theaters) proves that this blockbuster franchise keeps evolving for the better, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Among the many absurd details of the hush-money case are the alliterative, somewhat zippy pseudonyms that Daniels and Cohen apparently used in a nondisclosure agreement. Trump went by “David Dennison,” and Daniels was called “Peggy Peterson.” Earlier in the trial, Keith Davidson, Daniels’s former lawyer, testified that he had come up with the monikers—and that David Dennison was the name of a real person on his high-school hockey team.

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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On Sunday at Duke University, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld delivered a commencement address that was, bizarrely, overshadowed in the media by a tiny, nondisruptive protest.

Seinfeld gave a compliment and a warning to his Gen Z audience.

First came the compliment. “I totally admire the ambitions of your generation to create a more just and inclusive society,” he said. “I think it is also wonderful that you care so much about not hurting other people’s feelings in the million and one ways we all do that.”

Then came the warning. “What I need to tell you as a comedian: Do not lose your sense of humor. You can have no idea at this point in your life how much you are going to need it to get through. Not enough of life makes sense for you to be able to survive it without humor.”

Seinfeld went on to defend “the slightly uncomfortable feeling of awkward humor,” arguing that it is “not something you need to fix,” because even as Gen Z improves the world, it will remain “a pretty insane mess.” Humor, he said, is “the most survival-essential quality you will ever have or need to navigate through the human experience.”

[Tyler Austin Harper: America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed]

All of that is newsworthy. Seinfeld is a perceptive observer of life and an undeniable expert on comedy. Plus, as he told the graduates, “I am 70. I am done. You are just starting. I only want to help you.” If he is convinced that humor is a crucial salve—“the most important thing I am confident that I know about life”—those of us who’ll never enjoy his success or wealth had really better keep laughing.  

Yet coverage of the commencement treated something just before his speech as more newsworthy: As the Associated Press reported, roughly 30 student protesters walked out of the graduation ceremony as Seinfeld was introduced. They represented a tiny fraction of the 7,000 students present.

Media outlets covered the Duke graduation with headlines like these: “As Seinfeld Receives Honorary Degree at Duke, Students Walk Out in Protest” (The New York Times); “Duke Students Walk Out to Protest Jerry Seinfeld’s Commencement Speech in Latest Grad Disruption” (USA Today); “Duke Students Walk Out of Jerry Seinfeld’s Commencement Speech Amid Wave of Graduation Antiwar Protests” (NBC News); “Jerry Seinfeld’s Speech at Duke Commencement Prompts Walkout Protesting His Support for Israel” (Reuters); “Duke University Students Walk Out on Jerry Seinfeld’s Commencement Speech, Chant ‘Free Palestine’” (Fox News); “Watch: Anti-Israel Students Walk Out of Duke University Commencement to Protest Jerry Seinfeld” (Breitbart News).

Why was that the focus? The war in Gaza is, of course, more newsworthy than any commencement and has been covered extensively. Many protests about the war are newsworthy, too.

[Read: This is helicopter protesting]

But the airing of grievances at Duke was not notable for the number of people who participated, or for any insight offered on Gaza, or for even a remote prospect of affecting the conflict. To the credit of the students who walked out, it didn’t even disrupt the speech. So it was suspect, I think, to treat the protest as more important than the event that the activists sought to leverage for attention. A protest in and of itself does not confer importance.

Journalists often fail to distinguish between substantively newsworthy protests and mere deployment of the protest mode—a bias that activists have learned to exploit. Social media is optimized to signal-boost conflict more than attempts at distilling wisdom. And too many Americans revel in rather than resist conflicts.

The result at Duke: Coverage of a newsworthy speech was informed, more than any other factor, by the subset of the audience that did not hear it. At least, in the midst of a tragic war abroad and a vexing culture war at home, we can shake our heads and laugh about that absurdity.

The country is stuck in a protest feedback loop. In recent months, students opposed to the Israel-Gaza war have occupied lawns and buildings at college campuses across the country. Emulating climate activists who have stopped traffic on crucial roadways, pro-Palestine demonstrators have blocked access to major airports. For months, the protests intensified as university, U.S., and Israeli policies seemed unmoved. Frustrated by their inefficacy, the protesters redoubled their efforts and escalated their tactics.

[Read: Can protest be too peaceful?]

The lack of immediate outcomes from the Gaza protests is not at all unusual. In a new working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Amory Gethin of the Paris School of Economics and Vincent Pons of Harvard Business School analyzed the effect of 14 social movements in the United States from 2017 to 2022. They varied in size: About 12,000 people marched against a potential war with Iran in January 2020; 4.2 million turned out for the first Women’s March. Pons told me that these large social movements succeeded in raising the general public’s awareness of their issues, something that he and Gethin measured through Google Trends and data from X.

Yet in nearly every case that the researchers examined in detail—including the Women’s March and the pro–gun control March for Our Lives, which brought out more than 3 million demonstrators—they could find no evidence that protesters changed minds or affected electoral behavior.

As the marginal cost of reaching hundreds of thousands, even millions, of potential protesters drops to zero, organizers have mastered the art of gaining attention through public demonstrations. Mass actions no longer require organized groups with members who pay dues, professional staffers who plan targeted actions, and designated leaders who can negotiate with public officials. They just need someone who can make a good Instagram graphic. But notwithstanding the clear benefits of social media for protest participants, the lure of racking up views on TikTok or X and getting on the homepage of major news sites can overwhelm other strategic goals. Protests are crowding out the array of other organizing tools that social movements need in order to be successful—and that has consequences for our entire political system.

The contours of mass protest have evolved over time. Researchers have found that since roughly 2010—perhaps not coincidentally, when smartphone adoption spiked—political protests have become more frequent around the world, particularly in middle- and high-income countries. The “size and frequency of recent protests,” one analysis claims, “eclipse historical examples of eras of mass protest, such as the late-1960s, late-1980s, and early-1990s.”

Movements learn. Over the years, social movements have internalized the strategic superiority of nonviolence: More people are willing to join a peaceful march than are willing to join one that includes violent confrontations. The UC Berkeley professor Omar Wasow’s research bolsters the argument for strategic adoption of nonviolence by looking at Black-led protests from 1960 to 1972. Wasow found that violent protests increased Republican support in the electorate and may have even tipped the 1968 presidential election toward Richard Nixon and against Hubert Humphrey, the lead author of the Civil Rights Act.

Much of the academic literature on mass protest focuses on movements, in countries around the globe, seeking to topple a government or win independence. According to the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth, violent insurgencies against state power have declined, while nonviolent movements have become more common. (Chenoweth defines violent resistance as including not just “bombings, shootings [and] kidnappings” but also “physical sabotage such as the destruction of infrastructure, and other types of physical harm of people and property.”)

Yet seeking change through peaceful persuasion has also become less effective. Since 2010, Chenoweth wrote in a 2020 essay in the Journal of Democracy, fewer than a third of nonviolent campaigns, and just 8 percent of violent ones, have been successful—down from about two-thirds of nonviolent insurgencies and one-quarter of violent ones in the 1990s.

Mass struggles have come to rely too much on street protests, Chenoweth observes, and to neglect the “quiet, behind-the-scenes planning and organizing that enable movements to mobilize in force over the long term, and to coordinate and sequence tactics in a way that builds participation, leverage, and power.” Past research by the sociologist Kenneth Andrews on the Mississippi civil-rights movement and the War on Poverty found that counties with “strong movement infrastructures” yielded greater funding for anti-poverty programs; activists in these areas had better access to decision-making bodies and more influence over how social programs worked. “Movements were most influential,” Andrews explained, “when they built local organizations that allowed for an oscillation between mass-based tactics and routine negotiation with agency officials.”

Even under the most favorable circumstances, public protest will never be perfectly orderly. As the prominent sociologist Charles Tilly once wrote, a social movement is not unitary. It’s a “cluster of performances,” a “loosely-choreographed dance,” or even a “jam session with changing players”—all of which, he says, “have well-defined structures and histories, but not one of them is ipso facto a group, or even the actions of a single group.”

Many critics of modern protests are fixated on a picturesque, Tocquevillian vision of democracy—an imaginary world where interest groups always argue respectfully and compromise amiably. This vision isn’t aspirational; it’s fundamentally at odds with how human beings normally behave. Real-life democracy is a marketplace of ideas and emotions and arguments bouncing off one another, scrabbling for purchase in the hearts of voters, the minds of the cultural elite, and the press clippings skimmed by harried politicians.

[Read: Do protests even work?]

The Gethin and Pons study about the inefficacy of modern American mass movements identified one glaring exception: the protests over George Floyd’s murder. In the summer of 2020, nearly 2 million people participated in more than 5,000 separate racial-justice protests in the United States. Gethin and Pons found that after the protests, Americans expressed “more liberal answers on racial issues.” They also appeared more likely to vote in the upcoming presidential election and less likely to vote for then-President Donald Trump. This finding about the effectiveness of the 2020 anti-racism protests on the American public is supported by other research.

Policy change did occur in the aftermath of these protests. The Brennan Center for Justice found that, in the year following Floyd’s death, half of American states enacted legislation regarding use-of-force standards, police-misconduct policies, or both.

The Black Lives Matter protests during that period were different in part because they defied the caricature of protesters as radical college students with nothing but time. According to a study led by the Johns Hopkins economist Nick Papageorge, on factors such as gender and race, the demographics of the protests were actually more representative of the American public than the 2020 presidential electorate was.

What’s more striking is that a full third of protest participants identified as Republicans. Underscoring the ideological diversity of the movement, 30 percent of summer 2020 protesters in the researchers’ survey sample had attended BLM rallies as well as demonstrations seeking less stringent pandemic precautions—even though the two causes were widely characterized as coming from opposite sides of the political spectrum.

Another reason the BLM protests succeeded is that they were overwhelmingly peaceful—despite some high-profile outbreaks of violence in cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. According to research by Chenoweth and the political scientist Jeremy Pressman, more than 96 percent of the 2020 racial-justice protests resulted in no property damage or police injury, while nearly 98 percent resulted in zero reports of injuries among participants, bystanders, and police.

The Floyd protests did not materialize out of nowhere. The intellectual foundation had been laid by years of previous protests that created some organizational infrastructure and steadily increased the public’s support for the BLM movement until it surged upward in June 2020. Perhaps the other movements in the Gethin and Pons sample will prepare the way for future actions when the circumstances are ripe.

Still, many movements seeking to capitalize on public attention find themselves trampled underneath its power. Media attention flocks to the most radical and provocative elements and emboldens the voices on the fringes. Movement leaders have lost their ability to promote an overall message. Not surprisingly, despite the full slate of potential reforms that could have gained traction after Floyd’s murder, the slogan that everyone remembers is “Defund the police”—a policy demand that represented just a minority of voters’ views even as the majority of Americans were calling for far-reaching reforms of police departments. Who can credibly claim to speak for the campus protesters who oppose the war in Gaza?

Even though nobody knows who the leaders are, some of the protesters’ positions do seem to resonate off campus: Morning Consult polling from late last month suggests that 60 percent of Americans support a cease-fire, 58 percent support humanitarian aid to Palestinians, and fewer than half of voters support military aid to Israel.

Still, other stances taken by protesters—such as pushing universities to divest from companies with ties to Israel or, in some cases, calling for an end to Israeli statehood—have scant support among the general public. And the college protests themselves are widely frowned upon: In another poll from May 2, when asked whether college administrators had responded too harshly to college protesters, just 16 percent of respondents said administrators had responded too harshly; 33 percent thought they weren’t harsh enough.

While even entirely nonviolent protests cannot count on public support, escalatory actions such as trespassing, vandalism, and property destruction undermine and distract from broadly shared goals. People in left-leaning movements know full well that some of their own supporters are undermining message discipline and strategic imperatives. Groups critical of Israel have tried to organize boycotts of a handful of companies that, in their view, have been complicit in harming Palestinians. But among sympathizers on social media, perhaps the most prominent boycott target has been Starbucks, which is not on the list.

[Tyler Austin Harper: America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed]

Yet even as the burden is on protest organizers to articulate clear, feasible policy and persuade their fellow citizens to go along, everyone should be concerned if protesters whose demands have substantial support fail time and again to register gains in Washington. Civil unrest is inherently delegitimizing to a government. Protests are in part a rejection of traditional methods of registering opinion. Their increasing regularity indicates that people believe voting and calling their representatives are insufficient. In fact, many people who participated in the 2020 protests—both the Floyd ones and the anti-lockdown ones—did not end up voting in the presidential election that year.

In remarks about the campus demonstrations last week, President Joe Biden offered a tepid defense of nonviolent protest, saying, “Peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.” Later on, he added that “dissent must never lead to disorder.”

But the disorder that Biden warned against is not just a matter of college students getting graduation canceled this year; it’s also a matter of some Americans deciding over time that voting may not be worthwhile. Polls suggest that the public is deeply dissatisfied with how the U.S. political system is working. A feedback loop in which demonstrations proliferate to little effect, while radicalized protesters become ever more disillusioned with democracy, is a dangerous one. If you’re worried about the disorder on college campuses now, imagine if Americans lose faith in the power of democratic voice altogether.

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Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that the number of tenured and tenure-track professors at his school declined from 1990 to 2022, while the number of administrators nearly sextupled in that period. “Happily, there is a simple solution,” Smith wrote in a droll Washington Post column. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, his modest proposal called to get rid of all faculty and students at Pomona so that the college could fulfill its destiny as an institution run by and for nonteaching bureaucrats. At the very least, he said, “the elimination of professors and students would greatly improve most colleges’ financial position.”

Administrative growth isn’t unique to Pomona. In 2014, the political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg published The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, in which he bemoaned the multi-decade expansion of “administrative blight.” From the early 1990s to 2009, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew 10 times faster than tenured-faculty positions, according to Department of Education data. Although administrative positions grew especially quickly at private universities and colleges, public institutions are not immune to the phenomenon. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent from 2004 to 2014.

How and why did this happen? Some of this growth reflects benign, and perhaps positive, changes to U.S. higher education. More students are applying to college today, and their needs are more diverse than those of previous classes. Today’s students have more documented mental-health challenges. They take out more student loans. Expanded college-sports participation requires more athletic staff. Increased federal regulations require new departments, such as disability offices and quasi-legal investigation teams for sexual-assault complaints. As the modern college has become more complex and multifarious, there are simply more jobs to do. And the need to raise money to pay for those jobs requires larger advancement and alumni-relations offices—meaning even more administration.  

But many of these jobs have a reputation for producing little outside of meeting invites. “I often ask myself, What do these people actually do?,” Ginsberg told me last week. “I think they spend much of their day living in an alternate universe called Meeting World. I think if you took every third person with vice associate or assistant in their title, and they disappeared, nobody would notice.”

In an email to me, Smith, the Pomona economist, said the biggest factor driving the growth of college admin was a phenomenon he called empire building. Administrators are emotionally and financially rewarded if they can hire more people beneath them, and those administrators, in time, will want to increase their own status by hiring more people underneath them. Before long, a human pyramid of bureaucrats has formed to take on jobs of dubious utility. And this can lead to an explosion of new mandates that push the broader institution toward confusion and incoherence.

The world has more pressing issues than overstaffing at America’s colleges. But it’s nonetheless a real problem that could be a factor in rising college costs. After all, higher education is a labor-intensive industry in which worker compensation is driving inflation, and for much of the 21st century, compensation costs grew fastest among noninstructional professional positions. Some of these job cuts could result in lower graduation rates or reduced quality of life on campus. Many others might go unnoticed by students and faculty. In the 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber drew on his experience as a college professor to excoriate college admin jobs that were “so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”  

Another reason to care about the growth of university bureaucracy is that it siphons power away from instructors and researchers at institutions that are—theoretically—dedicated to instruction and research. In the past few decades, many schools have hired more part-time faculty, including adjunct professors, to keep up with teaching demands, while their full-time-staff hires have disproportionately been for administration positions. As universities shift their resources toward admin, they don’t just create resentment among faculty; they may constrict the faculty’s academic freedom.

“Take something like diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Ginsberg said. “Many colleges who adopt DEI principles have left-liberal faculty who, of course, are in favor of the principles of DEI, in theory,” he said. But the logic of a bureaucracy is to take any mission and grow its power indefinitely, whether or not such growth serves the underlying institution. “Before long, many schools create provosts for diversity, and for equity, and for inclusion. These provosts hold lots of meetings. They create a set of principles. They tell faculty to update their syllabi to be consistent with new principles devised in those meetings. And so, before long, you’ve built an administrative body that is directly intruding on the core function of teaching.”

Bureaucratic growth has a shadow self: mandate inflation. More college bureaucrats lead to new mandates for the organization, such as developing new technology in tech-transfer offices, advancing diversity in humanities classes through DEI offices, and ensuring inclusive living standards through student-affairs offices. As these missions become more important to the organization, they require more hires. Over time, new hires may request more responsibility and create new subgroups, which create even more mandates. Before long, a once-focused organization becomes anything but.

In sociology, this sort of muddle has a name. It is goal ambiguity—a state of confusion, or conflicting expectations, for what an organization should do or be. The modern university now has so many different jobs to do that it can be hard to tell what its priorities are, Gabriel Rossman, a sociologist at UCLA, told me. “For example, what is UCLA’s mission?” he said. “Research? Undergraduate teaching? Graduate teaching? Health care? Patents? Development? For a slightly simpler question, what about individual faculty? When I get back to my office, what should I spend my time on: my next article, editing my lecture notes, doing a peer review, doing service, or advancing diversity? Who knows.”

Goal ambiguity might be a natural by-product of modern institutions trying to be everything to everyone. But eventually, they’ll pay the price. Any institution that finds itself promoting a thousand priorities at once may find it difficult to promote any one of them effectively. In a crisis, goal ambiguity may look like fecklessness or hypocrisy.

[George Packer: The campus-left occupation that broke higher education]

For example, in the past few years, many elite colleges and universities have cast themselves as “anti-racist” and “decolonial” enterprises that hire “scholar activists” as instructors and publish commentary on news controversies, as if they were editorial boards that happened to collect tuition. This rebranding has set schools up for failure as they navigate the Gaza-war protests. When former Harvard President Claudine Gay declined to tell Congress that calls for Jewish genocide were automatic violations of the school’s rules of harassment, she might not have caused a stir—if Harvard had a reputation for accommodating even radical examples of political speech. But Gay’s statements stood in lurid contrast to the university’s unambiguous condemnation of students and professors who had offended other minority groups. This apparent hypocrisy was goal ambiguity collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions: one mandate to police offensive speech versus another mandate to allow activist groups to speak offensively.

Confronted with the Gaza-war protests, colleges are again struggling to balance competing priorities: free speech, the safety of students and staff, and basic school functions, such as the ability to walk to a lecture hall. That would be hard enough if they hadn’t sent the message to students that protesting was an integral part of the university experience. As Tyler Austin Harper wrote in The Atlantic, university administrators have spent years “recruiting social-justice-minded students and faculty to their campuses under the implicit, and often explicit, promise that activism is not just welcome but encouraged.” But once these administrators got exactly what they asked for—a campus-wide display of social-justice activism—they realized that aesthetic rebelliousness and actual rebellion don’t mix well, in their opinion. So they called the cops.

Complex organizations need to do a lot of different jobs to appease their various stakeholders, and they need to hire people to do those jobs. But there is a value to institutional focus, and the past few months have shown just how destabilizing it is for colleges and universities to not have a clear sense of their priorities or be able to make those priorities transparent to faculty, students, donors, and the broader world. The ultimate problem isn’t just that too many administrators can make college expensive. It’s that too many administrative functions can make college institutionally incoherent.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Kevin Townsend, a senior producer on our podcast team. He currently works on the Radio Atlantic podcast and has helped produce Holy Week—about the week after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—and the Peabody-winning Floodlines, which explores the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Kevin enjoys reading Philip Levine’s poems and visiting the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., where he can sit with Mark Rothko’s large-scale works. He’s also a Canadian-punk-music fan—Metz is one of his favorite bands—and a self-proclaimed Star Trek nerd who’s excited to binge the final season of Star Trek: Discovery.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Amanda Knox: “What if Jens Söring actually did it?” How Daniel Radcliffe outran Harry Potter The blindness of elites

The Culture Survey: Kevin Townsend

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: In college, I developed a steady rotation of quiet songs that didn’t distract me while I was studying. Artists such as Tycho and Washed Out were some of my favorites.

Recently, I’ve been into Floating Points, the moniker for Samuel Shepherd, a British electronic-music producer. I could recommend his Late Night Tales album or Elaenia, but the one that stands out most to me is his collaborative album, Promises, featuring the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s a gorgeous, layered work that’s best listened to all the way through—but if you’re pressed for time, “Movement 6” is an exceptional track.

As for a loud song, one of my favorite bands is the Canadian punk trio Metz. I’ve had “A Boat to Drown In” on heavy rotation for the past year. It doesn’t have the thrumming precision of their earlier singles such as “Headache” and “Wet Blanket,” but the song is a knockout every time. Metz just released a new record, Up on Gravity Hill, that I’m excited to get lost in.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, showcased some of the abstract painter’s lesser-known works. The show closed recently, but the museum’s permanent collection features a good number of his works, including some of his famous color-field paintings. The National Gallery is also home to many pieces from the collection of the now-closed Corcoran Gallery of Art, and they’re worth a visit—especially the Hudson River School paintings, which must be seen in person in all of their maximalist glory.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: A few months ago, on my honeymoon, I reread No Country for Old Men. It’s far from a romantic beach read, but few writers are as tersely gripping as Cormac McCarthy. The Coen brothers’ film adaptation is fantastic, but the novel—published in 2005, two years into the Iraq War—encompasses a wider story about generations of men at war. It’s worth reading even if you’ve seen the movie.

I also brought with me a book I’d long meant to read: Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist. Part science history, part memoir, the book is mostly a biography of David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s first president and a taxonomist who catalogued thousands of species of fish. It’s a unique and remarkable read that I can’t recommend highly enough. Fundamentally, it’s about our need for order—in our personal world, and in the natural world around us.

Miller’s book reminds me of a recent Radio Atlantic episode that I produced, in which Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger discusses her new book, The Light Eaters, about the underappreciated biological creativity of plants. Miller and Schlanger both examine and challenge the hierarchies we apply to the natural world—and why humanity can be better off questioning those ideas.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: My favorite poet is Philip Levine. His work is spare and direct, alive with love for the unsung corners of America and the people who inhabit them. Levine lived in Detroit during the Depression and spent more than three decades teaching in Fresno. Having grown up in Pittsburgh and moved to California as a teenager, I connected easily with the world he saw.

“What Work Is” and “The Simple Truth” are two of his poems that I often return to, especially for the final lines, which feel like gut punches. [Related: An interview with Philip Levine (From 1999)]

Speaking of final-line gut punches, the poem (and line) that I think of most frequently is by another favorite poet of mine: the recently departed Louise Glück. “Nostos,” from her 1996 book, Meadowlands, touches on how essential yet fragile our memories are, and there’s a haunting sweetness to its last line: “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.”

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: It’s May, so, honestly: the NHL playoffs. (And it’s been a great year for hockey.) But when it comes to actual television, I’m excited to binge the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery.

It’s bittersweet that the series is ending. Sonequa Martin-Green gives an Emmy-worthy lead performance, but for all of the show’s greatness, it can lean a bit too much into space opera, with the galaxy at stake every season and a character on the verge of tears every episode. Trek is usually at its best when it’s trying to be TV, not cinema. (And that’s including the films—Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan succeeded by essentially serving up a movie-length episode.) [Related: A critic’s case against cinema]

Being a friend of DeSoto, I want to give another Trek-related recommendation: The Greatest Generation and Greatest Trek podcasts, which go episode by episode through the wider Trek Industrial Complex. The humor, analysis, and clever audio production elevate the shows above the quality of your typical rewatch podcast. I came to The Greatest Generation as an audio-production and comedy nerd, and it turned me into a Trek nerd as well. So be warned.

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: The Hunt for Red October. Somehow, it gets better with every watch. “Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.”

The Week Ahead

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, an action sci-fi movie about a young ape who must face a tyrannical new ape leader (in theaters Friday) Dark Matter, a mystery series, based on the best-selling novel, about a man who is pulled into an alternate reality and must save his family from himself (premieres Wednesday on Apple TV+) First Love, a collection of essays by Lilly Dancyger that portray women’s friendships as their great loves (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of Elena Dudum.

I Am Building an Archive to Prove That Palestine Exists

By Elena Dudum

My father collects 100-year-old magazines about Palestine—Life, National Geographic, even The Illustrated London News, the world’s first graphic weekly news magazine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. “I have proof,” he would say, “that Palestine exists.”

His father, my paternal grandfather, whom I called Siddi, had a similar compulsion to prove his heritage, though it manifested differently. Siddi used to randomly recite his family tree to my father when he was a child. As if answering a question that had not been asked, he would recount those who came before him …

Although my American-born father didn’t inherit Siddi’s habit of reciting his family tree, he did recite facts; he lectured me about Palestine ad nauseam in my youth, although he had not yet visited. Similar to his father’s, these speeches were unprompted. “Your Siddi only had one business partner his entire life,” he would say for the hundredth time. “And that business partner was a rabbi. Palestinians are getting pitted against the Jews because it’s convenient, but it’s not the truth.”

Read the full article.

More in Culture

How do you make a genuinely weird mainstream movie? The godfather of American comedy The sci-fi writer who invented conspiracy theory Hacks goes for the jugular. “What I wish someone had told me 30 years ago” Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk? The complicated ethics of rare-book collecting The diminishing returns of having good taste When poetry could define a life

Catch Up on The Atlantic

What’s left to restrain Donald Trump? Democrats defang the House’s far right. America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed, Tyler Austin Harper argues.

Photo Album

Shed hunters unpack their haul on the opening day of the Wyoming shed-hunt season. (Natalie Behring / Getty)

Take a look at these images of devastating floods across Kenya, a pagan fire festival in Scotland, antler gathering in Wyoming, and more.

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Updated at 9:05 a.m. ET on May 3, 2024

President Joe Biden will make a speech on anti-Semitism on Tuesday, May 7, by way of observing the Holocaust remembrance in the Jewish religious calendar. If the speech is not to fail, or even backfire, the president needs to be very clear in his mind about what he has to say, and why.

The questions Biden needs to answer on Tuesday are not questions about beliefs or values. They are not questions about himself or his personal commitments. They are questions about American liberalism in general, about its ability to defend its stated commitments against challengers who plead victimhood as their justification. Biden hit a lot of the right themes in informal remarks at the White House yesterday. But there’s more to say, and it should be said clearly and without any Trumpian caveats about “good people on both sides.”

Anti-Semitism appears chiefly in two different forms in the United States. There is a right-wing variant based on religious dogmas or delusions of racial supremacy, which was the one on display in the “Jews will not replace us!” chants in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. There is also a left-wing variant, the one on display at American college campuses this spring, in which Jews are presented as the supreme oppressors of all the world’s oppressed. The first version is echoed by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s worry that she might be prevented from accusing Jews of killing Christ. The second is exemplified by Representative Ilhan Omar’s sneer about “pro-genocide” Jews.

Most American Jews accept that mainstream U.S. liberals like Biden reject both variants of anti-Semitism. But very observably, mainstream American liberalism is a lot more comfortable standing up to the Greene version than the Omar one.

This disparity explains why the campus anti-Israel protests have so alarmed many American Jews. The schools are reverberating with slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free” which to many ears means “Destroy the state of Israel and kill, expel, or subjugate its Jewish inhabitants.” We hear chants of “Globalize the Intifada,” which translates as “Bring mass murder to Jews everywhere on Earth.” We hear Jews blamed by association for every problem from police brutality to climate change—even both of those things at once. We see checkpoints on campus where Jews are quizzed on their beliefs before they are allowed to approach the university library.

[Tyler Austin Harper: America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed]

I would assume that virtually every university president in the country (and surely the great majority of university professors and administrators) disapproves of these behaviors. But these officials have over many years demonstrated that they flinch from acting against such misconduct: Jews are subjected to harassment and intimidation in ways that, if carried out against any other similarly identifiable group of students, would instantly invite the full weight of institutional punishment. Yet those responsible for the harassment and intimidation of Jews enjoy near-total impunity.

The universities provide the most conspicuous current instances of this phenomenon in American society, but they are not unique cases. In every domain where American liberalism holds sway—public education, local politics in deep-blue cities, labor unions, literature and the arts—Jews who share the almost-universal Jewish connection to the land of Israel face insult, threat, ostracism, even outright violence.

All of this presents a tremendous political problem for Biden. Of course, he’s not in charge of the art world or the literary milieu or the unions. He does not have much influence over public education, and even less over local politics. But he personifies American liberalism, and his political hopes in November are deeply intertwined with American liberalism’s image and standing.

Think of a national election as a job interview. The Republican candidate needs an answer to the question “Do you have the heart to care about me?” The Democrat must have an answer for the question “Do you have the guts to protect me?”

When Democrats look too weak to stand up to anti-Israel protests on campuses and in other liberal domains, their problem is not only one of how they handle anti-Semitism. It is a problem that goes to the central risk to their political brand: the perception of weakness.

[Daniel Block: Will Biden have a Gaza problem in November’s poll?]

The anti-Israel protesters get this: There’s a method to their mayhem. They want to punish Biden in November. They don’t have the votes to elect anyone they like better, nowhere near. But if they cannot hope to replace Biden, they can help to defeat him. By creating images of chaos, they support the Republican message that liberals like Biden are to blame for disorder.

Republicans audaciously tried that message during the riots that devolved from protests against the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, when Donald Trump was actually president. They’re eager to repeat the message in 2024.

Biden’s instinct on May 7 will be to speak sympathetically about Jewish fears while stressing his respect for the right to protest. His instinct will be to express compassion for all civilians at risk from the violence in the Middle East, both Palestinians and Israelis. If he does that and stops there, he will be delivering the right answer to the wrong question—the one for a Republican, about caring enough.

The speech he needs to give is not a speech from the heart. It’s a speech about his guts. The message wanted is more than “I care.” The message wanted is “I dare.”  

So after saying the things that are instinctive for him to say, he must keep going. He needs to say that no cause justifies violence on the streets and quads of America. He needs to affirm that universities cannot accept intimidation and unlawful disruption of educational activities. He needs to make clear that he supports those leaders who have protected their universities’ academic function, including their decision to call in the police where required. He should share his firm conviction that protest is not peaceful if it forcibly interferes with the rights of others.

He needs to do all of these things—not as a special favor to Jews on campus or off, but as a basic rule of good government. As president and as a presidential candidate, Trump has played favorites among lawbreakers. With one kind of culprit, he urged the police to crack their heads on the doors of their squad cars. Another kind of culprit he hailed as “hostages” and promised to pardon. If Biden is to campaign against Trump by calling him an inciter of riots, he himself needs to be an unwavering voice against riots, whatever the ideology of the rioter.

[David A. Graham: Biden’s patience with campus protests runs out]

The campus protesters may fantasize about a rerun of the disturbances of 1968. Mercifully, I do not see history repeating itself. But one lesson from that year bears applying to this year: Disorder hurts Democrats. When Biden speaks about anti-Semitism on Tuesday, he will be speaking not only for and about Jews; he will be speaking for and about his party and his belief system. Can Democrats enforce rules? Do they uphold equal justice, or do they indulge privileged categories of rule-breakers? Is his party strong enough to lead? Is he strong enough to lead?

In 1843, Karl Marx wrote an essay titled “On the Jewish Question” that argued for “the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” Marx was calling not for murder, exactly, but for the forced dissolution of Jewishness as a form of self-identification. In the century-plus since that essay, Marxist thinking has mutated in many ways, yet Marxist revolutionary movements have consistently resented Jewish particularity and identified it as a problem to be overcome, one way or another.

Today, Marxism has yielded to Palestinianism as the latest iteration of revolutionary idealism. But if the goal has changed, the obstacle has not. As Marx wrote, “We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time.” Swap out Judaism for Zionism, which has become protesters’ dog-whistling euphemism, and you could repeat Marx’s vituperation almost word for word at any campus encampment and get applause from your audience.  

Those are the people who also seek, in effect, to swap out Biden for Trump in November. When Biden speaks against them, he is speaking not only for and in defense of American Jews. He is speaking for and in defense of himself and the ideals to which he has devoted his public career.

This article originally stated that President Biden’s speech would be on Sunday, May 5. In fact, it is scheduled for Tuesday, May 7.

Representative Lauren Boebert had an important point to make. But it could be difficult to hear the rabble-rousing Republican from Colorado over a packed-in crowd of counter-agitators.

“So this is what the students here at GW University are facing each and every day,” Boebert was trying to say into a bank of microphones in the middle of the downtown Washington, D.C., campus of George Washington University on Wednesday afternoon. She and five of her GOP colleagues from the House Oversight Committee had just toured an encampment of tents, or a “liberation camp,” that protesters had put up last week in opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza.

“Their learning activities are being disrupted,” Boebert said of the students. “Their finals are being disrupted.”

But protesters kept disrupting Boebert. Or were she and her friends from Congress the disrupters in this particular Washington-bubble showdown? Who were the rabble in this equation, and who were the rousers?

“What about you in that theater?” one woman called out at Boebert from the back of the crowd, referring to a September incident in which the congresswoman was kicked out of a musical comedy after canoodling with a date, vaping, and talking in the midst of the production.

This was not the same protester as the one who had been trailing behind Boebert holding up a cardboard sign that said, simply, Beetlejuice, referring to the play that she’d been evicted from. (Google it, and you’ll find security footage of the episode—or don’t.)

[David A. Graham: Biden’s patience with campus protests runs out]

If only theaters could always incubate such frivolity. But these are bloody days in the embattled theater of the Middle East, which have in turn triggered a spate of protests on American campuses, marked by episodes of bigotry, sporadic violence, and arrests. Combine this with a group of elected performance artists who couldn’t help but try to grab a cheap morsel of attention from this bitterly serious conflict, and you have the political theater that played out on Wednesday.

“Dude, are you gonna talk, or am I gonna talk?” Representative Byron Donalds, Republican of Florida, admonished a protester who interrupted his turn at the mic, after Boebert had spoken. Donalds wore dark glasses and a tight-fighting navy suit.

Like his colleagues, Donalds called for the immediate removal of the protesters from campus—something that, to this point, the D.C. police department has declined to do. “The mayor is weak in the face of foolishness,” Donalds said, referring to Washington’s chief executive, Muriel Bowser.

“You wouldn’t allow someone to stay in your house or stay in your dorm room. You would have them removed,” Donalds said. “Everybody believes in peaceful protest, but this is trespassing.”

“What about January 6?” a man standing next to me called out. Yes, what about that, sir?

“Calm down. I’m talking now,” Donalds said, addressing another heckler.

[Tyler Austin Harper: America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed]

About 20 minutes earlier, Representative James Comer, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, had also urged calm as he paraded through the tent city. People shouted after Comer, mocking his committee’s fizzling effort to impeach President Joe Biden, while another said something about Hunter Biden. The voices and signs all blurred together into a muggy cacophony.

“Lauren Boebert, seen any good movies lately?”

Lesbians for Palestine.

I Stand With Israel.

Comer led his delegation past a row of tables covered with donated food for the protesters—pizza, granola bars, peanuts, bags of tangerines. Everything is FREE, like Palestine will be free, advertised a poster on the food spread, which covered several yards at the edge of the quad.

“Mr. Chairman, do you think your appearance today is going to lead to police violence on campus?” a man with a British accent asked Comer.

“Probably,” the congressman said, projecting zero concern.

“You want some pizza?” another onlooker asked Comer, who kept walking.

The congressman seemed eager to get on with the quick and chaotic press conference that would punctuate the lawmakers’ visit. “Thank you, Mr. Chairman, thank you,” an outnumbered supporter yelled out. The congressman waited for his colleagues to make their brief statements and seized the closing message for himself.

“Help is on the way for George Washington University,” promised Comer, who then joined his colleagues as they struggled through a thick crowd—and a “Beetlejuice” chant—before departing this enclave of academia and heading back to their own pillared sanctum on Capitol Hill.

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

In a recent interview with Time magazine, Donald Trump once again told Americans what he will do to their system of government. Why don’t they believe him?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Amanda Knox: “What if Jens Söring actually did it?” Trump can’t seem to stay awake for his own trial. America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed, Tyler Austin Harper argues.

The Day After

While I was away from the Daily this past month, a lot of news and life happened, including the passage of a major foreign-aid bill, campus protests, and House Democrats offering to save the job of a GOP speaker. But Donald Trump also gave an interview to Time magazine that, after the usual burst of shock and commentary, has flown under the radar, relatively speaking, pushed out of the headlines by the unrest at elite colleges.

In the interview, Trump once again promised to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists; once again, he vowed to use the Justice Department as his personal legal hit squad. He said he will prosecute Joe Biden, deport millions of people, and allow states with newly strict abortion regulations to monitor pregnant women. He will kneecap NATO and throw Ukraine to the Russians.

Trump told Time that he thinks people actually like it when he sounds like a dictator, and he’s not entirely wrong: As I’ve noted, much of his base loves talk of “vermin” and the idea of exacting revenge on other Americans. But there are two other important reasons that many people are not taking Trump seriously enough—and that Biden, a long-serving American politician, is struggling in the polls with an often incoherent would-be autocrat.

One problem has been around as long as the republic: Americans don’t pay attention to politics, and when they do, they frequently blame the current president for whatever is going wrong in their lives. For most people, economic cause and effect is mostly notional; if gas prices are high today, or if someone is still not working despite low unemployment rates, it’s because of the guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Combine this with the peculiar amnesia that helps people forget how many Americans needlessly died of COVID while Trump talked about ingesting bleach, and you have a population that fondly remembers how good they had it during a terrifying pandemic.

Nostalgia and presentism are part of politics. But a second problem is even more worrisome: Americans simply cannot imagine how badly Trump’s first term might have turned out, and how ghastly his second term is likely to be. Our minds are not equipped to embrace how fast democracy could disintegrate. We can better imagine alien invasions than we can an authoritarian America. The Atlantic tried to lay out what this future would look like, but perhaps even words can’t capture the magnitude of the threat.

When I was in high school and taking driver’s education, our teachers would show us horrible films, with names like Death on the Highway, that included gory footage of actual car wrecks. The goal was to scare us into being responsible drivers by showing us the reality of being mangled or burned to death in a crash. The idea made sense: Most people have never seen a car wreck, and expanding our imaginations by showing us the actual carnage did, I suspect, scare some of us into holding that steering wheel at the steady 10-and-2 position.

Likewise, Americans had a hard time conceiving of a nuclear war until 1983, when ABC showed the made-for-television movie The Day After. The movie (as I wrote here) made an impact not because anyone thought a nuclear exchange would be a walk in the park but because no one could really get their head around what would happen if one took place. (That’s despite how thoroughly fears of nuclear war had otherwise permeated the culture.) The movie includes a stomach-churning scene of people watching a football game at a stadium, looking up to see the contrails of American missiles in the sky, and realizing that the world as they’ve known it would last for another 30 minutes at most. This was not Dr. Strangelove; it was a moment people could see happening to themselves.

We just don’t have a similar conceptualization for the end of democracy in America. I have not seen the film Civil War, but I’m not worried about another civil war—at least not the kind we had before. Rather, I’m worried about the gray fog of authoritarianism settling, in patches and pieces, across the United States. In 2021, my colleague George Packer tried to present a realistic scenario of democratic collapse; the next year, I wrote about what such a process might look like. But looking back, I see the limits of my imagination.

I did not, for example, think it possible that state troopers would stop women who might try to leave their state to seek an abortion. In his concurrence with the Dobbs v. Jackson decision that threw out Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that such travel bans on pregnant women might be unconstitutional, and no state has tried to enact one—yet. But I now view this as only one of many inhuman outrages that could come to pass if the federal government is overtaken by Trump and his authoritarian cronies and the state courts feel free, with Trump’s blessing, to ignore the Constitution. I can imagine state legislatures passing repressive laws and expelling any representatives who oppose them. And I can easily see the former president and right-wing governors attempting to use the U.S. military and the National Guard as their personal muscle.

People have a hard time imagining all of this is in part because Trump has a compliant, right-wing media ecosystem arrayed around him that tries to explain away his behavior. But it doesn’t help that others in the national media remain locked in the mindset that this is a normal election. Today, The New York Times ran an op-ed from Matthew Schmitz, a right-wing writer who assured readers that all will be well: “Mr. Trump may pose a threat to our political system as it now exists,” he writes, “but it is a threat animated by a democratic spirit.” (Back in December, the Times ran an essay by Schmitz in which he argued that Trump is a moderate: “Mr. Trump’s moderation can be easy to miss, because he is not a stylistic centrist—the sort who calls for bipartisan budget cutting and a return to civility.” Well, that’s one way to put it.)

Crucial to deadening our imaginations about Trump is the idea pushed by some of his supporters that his unhinged statements are just a lot of tough talk, and that the second term would be like the first, only without the pandemic and with cheaper eggs. In reality, of course, Trump’s first term was (to use a rather vivid Russian expression I learned in my days in the Soviet Union) about as organized as a whorehouse on fire during an earthquake. Even before COVID, responsible men and women, some of whom agreed deeply with Trump on many issues, nonetheless had to run around stamping out one crisis after another. None of those people will be present to restrain Trump this time, and he will bring to Washington a crew that is even more morally reprehensible—and far more organized—than those who joined him in his first term.

Trump’s most alarmist opponents are wrong to insist that he would march into Washington in January 2025 like Hitler entering Paris. The process will be slower and more bureaucratic, starting with the seizure of the Justice Department and the Defense Department, two keys to controlling the nation. If Trump returns to office, he will not shoot democracy on Fifth Avenue. He and the people around him will paralyze it, limb by limb. The American public needs to get better at imagining what that would look like.

Related:

Trump’s contempt knows no bounds. If Trump wins

Today’s News

The House passed a bill yesterday aimed at responding to reports of rising levels of anti-Semitism on college campuses. Israeli officials warned the U.S. government that if the International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants for Israeli leaders over alleged war crimes on Palestinian territories, Israel may retaliate against the Palestinian Authority, according to Axios. The governor of Arizona signed into law a repeal of the state’s controversial Civil War–era abortion ban.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: The gulf between critically acclaimed art films and blockbuster movies keeps growing, Jacob Stern writes. Sixty years ago, the critic Pauline Kael saw it coming. The Weekly Planet: The French Biodiversity Agency is a nationwide police force charged with protecting French species across the country. It’s a uniquely French approach to environmentalism, Jess McHugh writes, and it just might work.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

America’s IVF Failure

By Emi Nietfeld

A sperm donor fathers more than 150 children. A cryobank misleads prospective parents about a donor’s stellar credentials and spotless health record. A cancer survivor’s eggs are stored in a glorified meat locker that malfunctions, ruining her chance at biological motherhood. A doctor implants a dozen embryos in a woman, inviting life-threatening complications. A clinic puts a couple’s embryos into the wrong woman—and the biological parents have no recourse.

All of these things have happened in America. There’s no reason they won’t happen again.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Biden’s patience with campus protests runs out. Cancer supertests are here. Milk has lost its magic. Why a bit of restraint can do you a lot of good The complicated ethics of rare-book collecting

Culture Break

Max

Watch. In the third season of Hacks, premiering today on Max, the show faces the failures of late-night comedy head-on.

Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, staff writer Zoë Schlanger discusses a provocative scientific debate: Are plants intelligent?

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

A lot of other things happened while I was gone (and you’ll continue to see me here a little less frequently than usual for a stretch, as I’m still working on some longer-term projects). Some of you may have seen the personal news that my cat, the amazing Carla, passed away. I will write about Carla here next week, but thanks to the many of you on social media who sent your condolences. As anyone who’s loved an animal knows (and as Tommy Tomlinson wrote here), it’s astonishing how much you can miss them.

I’ll be back next week, but in the meantime, I also want to wish my fellow Eastern Orthodox Christians a happy Easter, which for us is this Sunday. (It’s because we rely on the Julian calendar. Why can’t we just change it, and use a common calendar, like we do with Christmas? Well, we’re Orthodox, and … Look, it’s complicated.) Anyway, a blessed Easter to those who are celebrating this weekend.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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