Throughout Vice President Kamala Harris’s abbreviated presidential run, she often emphasized one key principle that separated her campaign from that of former President Donald Trump. When Trump mocked her laughter, Harris pushed back by framing her propensity for exuberance as an invaluable strength: “I find joy in the American people,” she said in September. “I find joy in optimism, in what I see to be our future and our ability to invest in it.” On Tuesday afternoon, several hours before the polls closed, Harris once again reminded the voting public of this core value. “To everyone who has worked hard and brought back the joy during this campaign—thank you,” she captioned a video posted to her X account.

But as election results came in, jubilation seemed limited to supporters of her opponent, who espoused a very different view of the fractured electorate. Early Wednesday morning, the media projected that Trump would win, affirming that American voters remain entranced—and energized—by his divisive rhetoric. In her concession speech that afternoon, Harris asked her supporters not to succumb to despair over this moment of darkness, and instead to “fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars—the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service.” Harris’s loss is not an unequivocal indictment of joy as an organizing strategy, in electoral politics or otherwise. But it does illustrate the limits of peddling optimism as a change candidate without rigorously critiquing the status quo—especially when voters see you as part of maintaining it.

Hope is always a hard sell, and Harris inherited an unenviable candidacy: President Joe Biden didn’t step down from his reelection bid until a disastrous June debate performance (and some serious muscling within the party) forced his hand. Not only did Harris have less than four months to make her case to the American people, but as Biden’s VP, she was also saddled with the baggage of his administration—right as his approval rating hit a new low. To many voters, Harris represented an extension of the Biden policies that they (sometimes unfairly) blamed for inflation, low wages, and unemployment, a message that Trump hammered home with his slogan “Kamala broke it. Trump will fix it.” Whereas Trump was able to galvanize the GOP base by stoking economic resentments, Harris was tasked with gamely winning over frustrated voters without undermining her party’s sitting president.

Harris’s position in an unpopular White House made her a tricky messenger for idealistic visions of the future, amid both economic discontent and tremendous geopolitical instability. Her ties to the Biden administration also put Harris in a categorically different position than Barack Obama was in during his first presidential run, in 2008, when his sanguine campaign promises landed with voters in part because his call for unity offered a stark departure from hawkish, Bush-era partisan politics. As a presidential candidate, Obama was also a blank slate, having spent just part of his sole senatorial term in the national spotlight; he had more latitude to define himself because he was weighed by very little history.

When asked what she would have done differently from Biden during the past four years, Harris said last month, “There’s not a thing that comes to mind”—other than that she would have had a Republican in her Cabinet. For some voters in the Democrats’ base, that type of rhetoric just didn’t inspire excitement—moderate Democrats’ attempts at bipartisan collaboration, which Republican lawmakers have been less keen to initiate, have at times yielded disappointing results. Nor did it ameliorate concerns about the Biden administration’s continued support of Israel’s war in Gaza, which put the party at odds with some young voters, as well as many in the Black, Muslim, and Arab American communities. Harris, a supporter of Israel, often spoke more empathetically about the conflict in Gaza than Biden did, but she also skirted the issue; asked during a CNN town hall what she would say to someone who was considering supporting a third-party candidate because of her position on the conflict, she deflected by saying that voters “also care about bringing down the price of groceries.”

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

Moments such as this undercut the Harris campaign’s cheerful aesthetics. Asking voters to look past humanitarian atrocities in the name of curbing inflation may be a strategy with precedent, but it’s not one that feels driven by a joyful service mandate. And during a year that’s been disastrous for incumbent politicians around the world, the Democratic Party failed to offer an energizing vision of doing things differently. Take The New York Times’ reporting on how Wall Street’s private-equity firms, investment banks, and wealthy corporate executives were influencing Harris’s economic-policy agenda. Giving “large corporations a seat at the table and giving them a voice,” as one executive put it, sounded to some voters a whole lot like business as usual.

For many Americans feeling the downstream pains of corporate greed, preserving the sanctity of a dysfunctional political system is not a motivating factor at the ballot box. But as in 2016, the Democrats focused heavily on how unfit Trump is for the presidency—an argument aimed at wooing suburban Republicans and independents—rather than offering their base exciting, practical solutions to the country’s problems. In 2016, substantial portions of the party’s base rallied around the populist senator Bernie Sanders, but the party instead backed the establishment figure Hillary Clinton (and, according to Sanders’s camp, ignored attempts to help keep his supporters engaged in crucial swing states). The following election cycle, the party again picked a more centrist candidate over Sanders, but Joe Biden heeded some of the lessons from Sanders’s popular campaigns—and forged a broader coalition by moving left on some issues.

Several years later, Harris could have used that enthusiasm—but Democratic leadership didn’t seem to give much thought to why those voters supported Sanders in the first place. Despite the fact that voters consistently identified the economy as the issue most important to them, Harris stopped criticizing Big Business abruptly during her campaign, and the party walked back an earlier proposal to lower everyday costs by combatting grocery price gouging. In the immediate run-up to the election, the campaign pivoted away from emphasizing other commonsense, populist ideas that have clear benefits for average working Americans. Paid family and medical leave, which Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, signed into Minnesota law as the state’s governor, is tremendously popular. So, too, is raising the minimum wage, as results on some state ballot measures show, even in red states such as Alaska.

The rich may insist that money can’t buy happiness, but anyone who has struggled to feed their children or afford rent knows that nothing is more thrilling than finally attaining a modicum of financial security. Addressing the barriers that many Americans face when trying to get there—and their frustrations that the Democratic political establishment doesn’t share their priorities—might just have inspired some lasting optimism this time around.  

By electing Donald Trump again, the American electorate has made a bad decision, one that will expose our country to unreasonable risks in areas from foreign policy to public health. Fiscal policy will get worse—budget deficits will become even larger, keeping interest rates high, and programs that provide health care to the poor and elderly are likely to be trimmed back to finance tax cuts for rich people. Abortion rights are likely to be further restricted by a hostile administration that uses the powers of the FDA and the Department of Justice to make abortion harder to provide. And we’ll have another four years under Trump’s exhausting, mercurial, and divisive leadership, making our politics nastier and stupider.

I wish the election had gone the other way. I am annoyed. That said, when Trump won eight years ago, I was much more than annoyed. I was really upset and shocked. This time is different, because Americans have been through this before, and I expect we’ll get through it again. But it’s also different because there’s a big part of me that feels Democrats deserved to lose this election, even if Trump did not deserve to win it.

I write this from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, which doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them, because building a subway line here costs four times as much per mile as it does in France, and because union rules force the agency to overstaff itself, inflating operating costs. Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system—the other day, I was on a bus where one shouted repeatedly at another passenger that he was a “faggot.” And even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense), they don’t do much about these disturbances, and I can’t entirely blame them since our government lacks the legal authority to keep troubled people either in jail or in treatment. The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at pharmacies is in locked cabinets. A judge recently said the city can’t even padlock the illegal cannabis stores that have popped up all over the place—that’s apparently unconstitutional, and so years into what was supposed to be the “wokest” legal cannabis regime in the country, our government still can’t figure out how to make sure that people who sell weed have a license to do so, even though they’ve done that with regard to alcohol forever.

[Read: The ‘stop the steal’ movement isn’t letting up]

Ever since the COVID shutdowns, Democrats here have stopped talking very much about the importance of investing in public education, but the schools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under a state-court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes building anything very hard—and visiting here is really expensive, too, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council made building new hotels functionally illegal. And as a result of all of this, New York is shedding population—the state will probably lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where building housing and growing the economy is still possible.

Meanwhile, the voters of New York have just adopted an equal-rights amendment to the state constitution, which was put on the ballot by the Democrat-controlled state legislature. One effect of this amendment is to create a state constitutional right to abortion. Of course, abortion was already legal in New York, and a state constitutional provision will not override any new federal laws or regulations that Republicans might impose with their new control in Washington. This is exactly the sort of brain-dead symbolism that exemplifies the Democrats who rule our state: They pat themselves on the back for a formalistic, legal declaration of the rights of the people who live here, and meanwhile, people of all races and identities flee New York for other, officially less “inclusive” places where they can actually afford a decent quality of life.

I am unfortunately a Democrat, but as someone who lives in a place that is governed very badly by Democrats, I can easily understand why “Can you imagine what incompetent, lunatic shit those people will do if they get control of the government?” would fall flat as an argument against Republicans. It doesn’t surprise me that the very largest swings away from Democrats in this post-COVID, post–George Floyd, post-inflation election occurred in blue states. The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem. So when Republicans made a pitch to change all this (or even burn it all down), it didn’t fall flat.

Right before Election Day, Ross Douthat wrote a column for The New York Times that left me quite uneasy. It was about the campaign signs he was seeing all over New Haven that read Harris-Walz 2024: Obviously. Douthat started with a point that’s almost tautological: Because the election appeared close, by definition neither candidate was the obvious choice. And he looked at why the decision would not be obvious to so many voters, writing:

Let’s take one last survey of why some waverers might not yet be sold on Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, by returning to where this all began: The world of 2016, when Americans normally disinclined to vote for liberals were first informed that there was no other reasonable choice … the promise was that even if you disagreed with liberalism’s elites on policy, you could trust them in three crucial ways: They would avoid insanity, they would maintain stability, and they would display far greater intelligence and competence than Trump and his hangers-on.

Many voters believe these promises were broken. Of course, the most politically significant aspect of the instability has been post-COVID inflation—a global problem that has taken out incumbent governments of the right and left all over the world. Inflation is mostly not Democrats’ fault, though they did exacerbate it by overstimulating the economy with the American Rescue Plan, and then they failed to focus early enough on inflation as the key economic problem of this administration.

To be precise, the ARP, passed in early 2021, constituted an unnecessary $2 trillion stimulus that mostly produced inflation rather than real GDP growth. Then, throughout 2022, even as inflation started to bite, Democrats were still looking for every way they could find to spend as much money as possible to satisfy interest-group constituencies. Even the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which was supposed to reduce inflation by reducing the deficit, is currently increasing the deficit by tens of billions of dollars a year and, if left unchanged, will continue to do so through 2027. The deficit reduction does not begin until 2028, far too late to be politically relevant for Joe Biden’s Democrats.

The other big destabilizer is the migrant crisis, which was born out of this administration’s fecklessness—Biden rapidly reversing Trump’s immigration executive orders upon entering office without any plan for controlling the border and apparently without realizing that migrants are smart, and will be more likely to come if you make clear that coming very likely means they will get to stay. (A failure to consider incentives is a running theme when Democrats fail.) Democrats did not pivot to enforcement until far too late—and not until after Texas Governor Greg Abbott made the crisis a blue-state issue by bussing migrants here en masse to fill Democrats’ hotels and consume Democratic budgets.

On the “insanity” front, Douthat cites the political movement in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, responses to COVID, and trans-youth medicine—all areas where liberals’ moral fervor has caused them to lose sight of whether the ideologically driven courses they had taken were actually producing the intended positive effects. Democrats know they paid a price for “Defund the police” and they have mostly learned their lesson, or at least they will now, because several high-profile “progressive” prosecutors lost their blue-city posts this week. On the COVID restrictions, Democrats have not really reckoned with how off-putting a lot of the busybody moralizing was, but this issue will likely simply fade with time.

As for trans issues, I have been skeptical about their political salience—although I don’t believe that Lia Thomas belonged on the Penn women’s swim team, I also can’t imagine casting a vote based on my views about that story. But Kamala Harris’s 2019 declaration to the ACLU that she would have the government pay for gender-affirming surgeries for prisoners and people held in immigration detention became a major attack line against her in this campaign. That’s because it highlights several problems with the party’s image all at once: Here was the Democratic nominee, bowing to pressure from interest groups to look for ways to spend your tax dollars on the most bespoke concern of a criminal, or of a noncitizen who isn’t even supposed to be here, before thinking about you and your interests. But the truly grim irony about the political cost of this promise is that, of course, the federal government that only got seven electric-vehicle-charging stations built in two years has performed zero transgender surgeries on detained migrants. That’s the Democrats in a nutshell: the party that promises trans surgeries for undocumented immigrants but doesn’t deliver them.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

And all of this is why I think Democrats’ approach to the cost-of-living issues that have dominated this campaign has fallen so flat. The Democratic argument is, more or less, “look at all my programs”—all of the things I’m going to have the government do to make life easier for you. In some cases, they have a clear track record to run on: The Affordable Care Act has gotten more popular over time, and the expanded subsidies that reduce the premiums most Americans pay to buy individual plans on the exchanges have increased enrollment. But mostly, I think Americans look around at how it goes when the government actually tries to help, and they have a healthy skepticism about how helpful the government is really going to be, and about whether the benefits are really going to flow to them. Democrats are making too many promises; they have tried to do a zillion different things and done them badly at great expense, as was the approach with the moribund Build Back Better Act. They instead need to pick a few things for the government to do really well, with a focus on benefits to the broad public rather than to the people being paid to provide the services.

Although I think Harris should have picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate, I don’t think choosing him would have changed the outcome. But Shapiro is a popular swing-state governor who will be a front-runner for the 2028 nomination. And Shapiro’s signature policy achievement is rebuilding a highway underpass. There is a lesson here: When government focuses on its core responsibilities and delivers on them quickly, efficiently, and with a laser focus on making sure people can go about their lives as normal, the voters reward that. You don’t need a grand vision; you need to execute.

Winning the next federal election is important. For that reason, it is important that Democrats get the voters to believe they deserve to win that election. They have two years to work on it before the midterms.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.

“For all his apparent divisiveness,” wrote the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, “Trump assembled the most diverse Republican presidential coalition in history and rode political trends that will prove significant for decades to come.” That statement neatly describes Donald Trump’s sweeping electoral victory this week. But Ruffini wrote it more than a year ago.

Even though Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he dramatically improved his performance that year among Black and, especially, Latino voters compared with 2016. According to Ruffini’s 2023 book, Party of the People, this was no fluke. American politics was undergoing a fundamental reordering in which the old dividing lines of race and wealth were being supplanted by new ones, namely education and trust in institutions. The ties that once bound low-income and nonwhite voters to the Democratic Party, he argued, were breaking. “If this trend continues,” Ruffini wrote, “it would mean the birth of a new party system, replacing the old twentieth-century class divide between the parties.”

Then came 2024. We don’t yet have precise data on how different groups voted, but the geographic swings make certain conclusions unavoidable. Trump made gains everywhere on Tuesday, but the places where he improved the most compared with 2020 were heavily nonwhite counties that have overwhelmingly supported Democrats for decades. Miami-Dade County, which is majority-Hispanic, voted for the Republican candidate for the first time since 1988; Baldwin County, Georgia, which is 42 percent Black, went red too. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried the 97 percent–Latino Starr County, Texas, by 60 points. In 2024, Trump won it by 16 points.

In Ruffini’s view, the Democratic Party can no longer take the votes of nonwhite Americans for granted. “I think if they want to win back some of these voters,” he told me, “Democrats need to stop presenting themselves solely as the defenders of American institutions and instead as a party committed to change.”

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Rogé Karma: On Election Day, you wrote on X that “the FDR coalition is being dismantled piece by piece and being reassembled in Donald Trump’s GOP.” That’s a pretty provocative statement. So tell me what you were actually seeing in the data on Tuesday that made you think that was happening.

Patrick Ruffini: I often cringe a little bit when this is described primarily in terms of a “racial realignment.” In many ways, it’s a racial de-alignment, because the parties are realigning on educational lines.

If you look at a place like South Texas, which is very heavily Hispanic, Democrats were winning by 50, 60 points in 2012. And now we are at a point where it’s not just trending red but objectively red. You look at a place like Miami-Dade County, Florida, obviously home to a lot of Hispanics—Trump won it by 11 points.

But I think the more interesting county to me was Osceola County, outside of Orlando, a heavily Puerto Rican community. There was obviously a lot of focus on Puerto Rican voters in the closing days of the campaign because of the joke told at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. But Trump actually wins that county, which is unheard of. And if you believe the exit polls, then there’s evidence that this is happening with Black voters and Asian voters as well.

So when I use the term FDR coalition, I’m referring to a lot of groups that have a lot of disparate interests. To me, that has been the character of the Democratic Party for decades. You have groups who are not necessarily ideologically aligned on everything but can all find a home in this big tent. And you’re seeing that more and more in the Republican Party now. Since 2016, educated white voters have shifted left but every other group has shifted right. That was only enough for a near win for Trump in 2020, but this time it was enough for a popular majority in the country.

Karma: The data here are still preliminary, but let’s say you’re right and we are indeed experiencing this racial depolarization. I think the big question is why. One way of viewing it, as you do, is as a continuation of this broader educational realignment in our politics. But another way of looking at it is we’re in the midst of a global anti-incumbent backlash. Ruling parties in countries all over the world are losing left and right, mostly driven by what you once described to me as a “post-COVID inflationary malaise.”

[Rogé Karma: Age isn’t Biden’s only problem]

Ruffini: I think you’re completely right. Absolutely this was an election about the economy. Absolutely it was a change election. But underlying it is a divide in the electorate that has been building for a while now.

I’m not even sure I’d describe it as strictly educational sorting. What happened in 2020—and I think what we’ll continue to see in 2024—is an ideological sorting. Lots of nonwhite voters identify ideologically as conservatives but historically have tended to vote for Democrats anyway. That started to change in 2020. You had data suggesting that Hispanic conservatives, Asian American conservatives, Black conservatives moved by about 35 to 40 points toward Trump. I think that tells us that politics is sorting on an ideological axis.

And I think the reason that’s happening is because the forces that have long kept certain racial and racial-identity groups within the Democratic fold are no longer binding them to the Democratic Party. I think you have large numbers of folks in these groups who are temperamentally not on board with what they perceive to be the race-and-gender identity politics of the left. And that’s very problematic, potentially, for Democrats.

Karma: This is one of the big themes of your book: Democrats have alienated working-class voters of color by moving far too far to the left on issues around race and gender identity. But it seems to me that Democrats really learned their lesson from 2020. Kamala Harris ran way to the right on immigration. She talked about the importance of having a strong military. She played up her background as a prosecutor. She hardly mentioned race. And yet we saw even bigger shifts than we did in 2020. How do you explain that?

Ruffini: Harris ran a very clinically competent campaign. Speaking as a Republican, I was pretty concerned that she was going to successfully erase the taint associated with the Biden policies. I think it was clear she was trying to pivot the party in a more moderate direction on these issues.

But as the campaign wore on, she was unable to articulate how she would be different from Biden. And Trump got more and more effective at painting her as an extremist. He ran ads saying things like “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” in the voice of a Black man. Sometimes campaigns are not just about what you say about yourself. Campaigns are about how the opposition is able to define you.

The big problem for Democrats is there’s a powerful lingering perception that they are too progressive on some of these issues. And I don’t think anything short of an act of full-on repudiation is going to change that. Some kind of decisive action to distance themselves from that agenda—a kind of modern Sister Souljah moment. And Harris didn’t have any of those.

Karma: I’m interested in what you think that kind of moment would look or sound like. Because one critique I think you could make of her campaign is that you can take moderate positions all you want, but what really tells voters you are serious is when you pick fights with your own side. And she didn’t really do that. She wasn’t getting in fights with the immigration groups or the racial-justice groups. And in areas where she did get into fights, like the corporate-price-gouging proposal, she pretty quickly backed down.

Ruffini: I would put it almost exactly in those terms, because obviously conflict and controversy can be incredibly clarifying for voters. When the differences are subtle, voters are not necessarily going to get the message.

Karma: But there is an area where the difference between the parties isn’t so subtle, and that’s on economics. Nonwhite voters are much more likely to vote their material interests and prioritize economic issues. And when you look at where the two parties stand on those issues, Democrats have embraced a very progressive, redistributive economic agenda. That’s included these huge investments in clean-energy and manufacturing jobs. Lowering prescription-drug prices. Expanding the child tax credit in a way that slashes child poverty. Meanwhile, Trump has sort of gone in the other direction: He’s promising huge corporate-tax cuts and joking with Elon Musk about firing striking workers. Wouldn’t you think that kind of difference would make working-class voters more likely to vote Democratic, not less?

[Rogé Karma: Trump isn’t even pretending anymore]

Ruffini: It’s true that nonwhite working-class voters in general are much more materialist. I simply just don’t think that those policies that you mentioned actually register in the same way as the underlying state of the economy. Maybe sometime down the road these things will bear fruit and Democrats will get credit for these programs. But the economic issue that matters most for voters right now is inflation. And that’s poisonous for the Democratic Party.

Karma: We’ve really only seen this shift among nonwhite voters in the past two election cycles. How much of this is a product of just Donald Trump himself? And would these same shifts still hold in a future where a non-Trump figure was at the top of the Republican ticket?

Ruffini: That’s the big question, because I think, in many ways, Trump ran the perfect campaign that was optimized to exactly this coalition.

Karma: Okay, I have to stop you there. Because, if anything, I think the liberal perspective is that Trump ran a way more unhinged campaign. A way more dark, xenophobic campaign. Alongside some super gimmicky things like serving french fries at McDonald’s. So what about his campaign do you think was so good at breaking through?

Ruffini: In response to the McDonald’s thing, you had some Democrats saying, “That’s crazy. That looks weird. The garbage-truck thing backfired.” But that’s the opposite of how it played. Trump was masterful in this election at crafting these images and these contrasts between him and Kamala Harris, where she was very cautious and scripted. And you’ve got that versus somebody like Trump, who is able to go on Joe Rogan and mix it up and just shoot from the hip for hours.

Look, elections are not clinical exercises of people evaluating competing sets of policy proposals and making rational decisions. They are, in a sense, popularity contests and image-making contests. And something remarkable Trump did was, through the Musk endorsement and the podcast appearances and the UFC matches, he was able to bootstrap his own version of pop culture. And he was able to project that forward as something that voters in his target groups could gravitate toward.

I think that was fundamental. And I think that very few Republicans or Democrats understand how to do it well.

Karma: What advice would you give to Democrats who are dismayed by this election, by the fact that they’re losing so many of their core voters, and want to reverse that trend?

Ruffini: I think the thing they can do to best respond to it is take a page out of Bill Clinton’s playbook. On the one hand, he openly repudiated some of the toxic tendencies within the party. But I think fundamentally what he did was, he was able to address himself as a change agent. People outside the political system don’t like Washington. And I think, unfortunately for the Democrats, their position right now, especially on these issues of democracy and upholding institutional norms, is just completely the opposite temperamentally of where most Americans are when it comes to institutions in Washington, D.C., and Beltway politics.

Karma: Say more on that. It seems pretty clear that at its core, the college-versus-noncollege divide is really a high-trust-versus-low-trust-in-institutions divide. Why are Democrats losing those low-trust voters, and can they do anything about it?

Ruffini: I understand why Democrats are so focused on the need to preserve democracy. Obviously, that’s a message a lot of people can agree with. But think about somebody who is disaffected, angry, who dislikes everything about traditional politics. When they hear that, they immediately think that this is a pro-system party. That this is a party that doesn’t share the dislike and distrust they have—maybe not of institutions generally but of Washington, D.C., in particular. And so I think it was a big mistake for Kamala, in the final days of her campaign, to pivot back to defending democracy with Liz Cheney at her rallies.

Barack Obama was a change candidate. Bill Clinton was a change candidate. I think if they want to win back some of these voters, Democrats need to stop presenting themselves solely as the defenders of American institutions and instead as a party committed to change.

For nearly two years, the world’s biggest tech companies have said that AI will transform the web, your life, and the world. But first, they are remaking the humble search engine.

Chatbots and search, in theory, are a perfect match. A standard Google search interprets a query and pulls up relevant results; tech companies have spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars engineering chatbots that interpret human inputs, synthesize information, and provide fluent, useful responses. No more keyword refining or scouring Wikipedia—ChatGPT will do it all. Search is an appealing target, too: Shaping how people navigate the internet is tantamount to shaping the internet itself.

Months of prophesying about generative AI have now culminated, almost all at once, in what may be the clearest glimpse yet into the internet’s future. After a series of limited releases and product demos, mired with various setbacks and embarrassing errors, tech companies are debuting AI-powered search engines as fully realized, all-inclusive products. Last Monday, Google announced that it would launch its AI Overviews in more than 100 new countries; that feature will now reach more than 1 billion users a month. Days later, OpenAI announced a new search function in ChatGPT, available to paid users for now and soon opening to the public. The same afternoon, the AI-search start-up Perplexity shared instructions for making its “answer engine” the default search tool in your web browser.

[Read: The AI search war has begun]

For the past week, I have been using these products in a variety of ways: to research articles, follow the election, and run everyday search queries. In turn I have scried, as best I can, into the future of how billions of people will access, relate to, and synthesize information. What I’ve learned is that these products are at once unexpectedly convenient, frustrating, and weird. These tools’ current iterations surprised and, at times, impressed me, yet even when they work perfectly, I’m not convinced that AI search is a wise endeavor.

For decades, the search bar has been a known entity. People around the world are accustomed to it; several generations implicitly regard Google as the first and best way to learn about basically anything. Enter a query, sift through a list of links, type a follow-up query, get more links, and so on until your question is answered or inquiry satisfied. That indirectness and wide aperture—all that clicking and scrolling—are in some ways the defining qualities of a traditional Google search, allowing (even forcing) you to traverse the depth and breadth of connections that justify the term world-wide web. The hyperlink, in this sense, is the building block of the modern internet.

That sprawl is lovely when you are going down a rabbit hole about Lucrezia de Medici, as I did when traveling in Florence last year, or when diving deep into a scientific dilemma. It is perfect for stumbling across delightful video clips and magazine features and social-media posts. And it is infuriating when you just need a simple biographical answer, or a brunch recommendation without the backstory of three different chefs, or a quick gloss of a complex research area without having to wade through obscure papers.

In recent years, more and more Google Search users have noted that the frustrations outweigh the delight—describing a growing number of paid advertisements, speciously relevant links engineered to top the search algorithm, and erroneous results. Generative AI promises to address those moments of frustration by providing a very different experience. Asking ChatGPT to search the web for the reasons Kamala Harris lost the presidential election yielded a short list with four factors: “economic concerns,” “demographic shifts,” “swing state dynamics,” and “campaign strategies.” It was an easy and digestible response, but not a particularly insightful one; in response to a follow-up question about voter demographics, ChatGPT provided a stream of statistics without context or analysis. A similar Google search, meanwhile, pulls up a wide range of news analyses that you have to read through. If you do follow Google’s links, you will develop a much deeper understanding of the American economy and politics.

Another example: Recently, I’ve been reading about a controversial proposed infrastructure project in Maryland. Google searches sent me through a labyrinth of public documents, corporate pitches, and hours-long recordings of city-council meetings, which took ages to review but sparked curiosity and left me deeply informed. ChatGPT, when asked, whipped up an accurate summary and timeline of events, and cited its sources—which was an extremely useful way to organize the reading I’d already done, but on its own might have been the end of my explorations.

I have long been a critic of AI-powered search. The technology has repeatedly fabricated information and struggled to accurately attribute its sources. Its creators have been accused of plagiarizing and violating the intellectual-property rights of major news organizations. None of these concerns has been fully allayed: The new ChatGPT search function, in my own use and other reports, has made some errors, mixing up dates, misreporting sports scores, and telling me that Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is bigger than Manhattan’s (much larger) Central Park. The links offered by traditional search engines are filled with errors too—but searchbots implicitly ask for your trust without verification. The citations don’t particularly invite you to click on them. And while OpenAI and Perplexity have entered into partnerships with any number of media organizations, including The Atlantic—perhaps competing for the high-quality, human-made content that their searchbots depend on—exactly how websites that once relied on ad revenue and subscriptions will fare on an AI-filtered web eludes me. (The editorial division of The Atlantic operates independently from the business division, which announced its corporate partnership with OpenAI in May.)

[Read: AI search is turning into the problem everyone worried about]

Although ChatGPT and Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite their sources with (small) footnotes or bars to click on, not clicking on those links is the entire point. OpenAI, in its announcement of its new search feature, wrote that “getting useful answers on the web can take a lot of effort. It often requires multiple searches and digging through links to find quality sources and the right information for you. Now, chat can get you to a better answer.” Google’s pitch is that its AI “will do the Googling for you.” Perplexity’s chief business officer told me this summer that “people don’t come to Perplexity to consume journalism,” and that the AI tool will provide less traffic than traditional search. For curious users, Perplexity suggests follow-up questions so that, instead of opening a footnote, you keep reading in Perplexity.

The change will be the equivalent of going from navigating a library with the Dewey decimal system, and thus encountering related books on adjacent shelves, to requesting books for pickup through a digital catalog. It could completely reorient our relationship to knowledge, prioritizing rapid, detailed, abridged answers over a deep understanding and the consideration of varied sources and viewpoints. Much of what’s beautiful about searching the internet is jumping into ridiculous Reddit debates and developing unforeseen obsessions on the way to mastering a topic you’d first heard of six hours ago, via a different search; falling into clutter and treasure, all the time, without ever intending to. AI search may close off these avenues to not only discovery but its impetus, curiosity.

The issues with factuality and attribution may well be resolved—but even if they aren’t, tech companies show no signs of relenting. Controlling search means controlling how most people access every other digital thing—it’s an incredible platform to gain trust and visibility, advertise, or influence public opinion.

The internet is changing, and nobody outside these corporations has any say in it. And the biggest, most useful, and most frightening change may come from AI search engines working flawlessly. With AI, the goal is to keep you in one tech company’s ecosystem—to keep you using the AI interface, and getting the information that the AI deems relevant and necessary. The best searches are goal-oriented; the best responses are brief. Which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising coming from Silicon Valley behemoths that care, above all, about optimizing their businesses, products, and users’ lives.

A little, or even a lot, of inefficiency in search has long been the norm; AI will snuff it out. Our lives will be more convenient and streamlined, but perhaps a bit less wonderful and wonder-filled, a bit less illuminated. A process once geared toward exploration will shift to extraction. Less meandering, more hunting. No more unknown unknowns. If these companies really have their way, no more hyperlinks—and thus, no actual web.

“You are the media now.” That’s the message that began to cohere among right-wing influencers shortly after Donald Trump won the election this week. Elon Musk first posted the phrase, and others followed. “The legacy media is dead. Hollywood is done. Truth telling is in. No more complaining about the media,” the right-wing activist James O’Keefe posted shortly after. “You are the media.”

It’s a particularly effective message for Musk, who spent $44 billion to purchase a communications platform that he has harnessed to undermine existing media institutions and directly support Trump’s campaign. QAnon devotees also know the phrase as a rallying cry, an invitation to participate in a particular kind of citizen “journalism” that involves just asking questions and making stuff up altogether.

“You are the media now” is also a good message because, well, it might be true.

A defining quality of this election cycle has been that few people seem to be able to agree on who constitutes “the media,” what their role ought to be, or even how much influence they have in 2024. Based on Trump and Kamala Harris’s appearances on various shows—and especially Trump and J. D. Vance’s late-race interviews with Joe Rogan, which culminated in the popular host’s endorsement—some have argued that this was the “podcast election.” But there’s broad confusion over what actually moves the needle. Is the press the bulwark against fascism, or is it ignored by a meaningful percentage of the country? It is certainly beleaguered by a conservative effort to undermine media institutions, with Trump as its champion and the fracturing caused by algorithmic social media. It can feel existential at times competing for attention and reckoning with the truth that many Americans don’t read, trust, or really care all that much about what papers, magazines, or cable news have to say.

All of this contributes to a well-documented, slow-moving crisis of legacy media—a cocktail whose ingredients also include declining trust, bad economics, political pressure, vulture capitalists, the rise of the internet, and no shortage of coverage decisions from mainstream institutions that have alienated or infuriated some portion of their audiences. Each and every one of these things affected how Americans experienced this election, though it is impossible to say what the impact is in aggregate. If “you are the media,” then there is no longer a consensus reality informed by what audiences see and hear: Everyone chooses their own adventure.

[Read: The great social-media news collapse]

The confusion felt most palpable in the days following Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June. I noticed conflicting complaints from liberals online: Some argued that until that point, the media had failed to cover Biden’s age out of fear of crossing some editorial redline, while others said the media were now recklessly engaged in a coordinated effort to oust the president, shamefully crusading against his age. Then, Biden’s administration leveled its own critique: “I want you to ask yourself, what have these people been right about lately?” it wrote in an email. “Seriously. Think about it.” Everyone seemed frustrated for understandable reasons. But there was no coherence to be found in this moment: The media were either powerful and incompetent or naive and irrelevant … or somehow both.

The vibe felt similar around The Washington Post’s decision not to endorse Harris in the final weeks of the race after the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, intervened and shut the effort down. Readers were outraged by the notion that one of the world’s richest men was capitulating to Trump: The paper reportedly lost at least 250,000 subscribers, or 10 percent of its digital base, in just a handful of days following the decision.

But even that signal was fuzzy. The endorsement was never going to change the election’s outcome. As many people, including Bezos himself, argued, newspaper endorsements don’t matter. The writer Max Read noted that Bezos’s intervention was its own indicator of the Post’s waning relevance. “As a journalist, you don’t actually want your publication to be used as a political weapon for a billionaire,” Read wrote. “But it would be nice for your publication to be so powerful and unavoidable that a billionaire might try.” This tension was everywhere throughout campaign season: Media institutions were somehow failing to meet the moment, but it was also unclear if they still had any meaningful power to shape outcomes at all.

I’ve watched for the past year with grim fascination as both the media industry and its audience have sparred and tried to come to some shared understanding of what the hell is going on. The internet destroyed monoculture years ago, but as I wrote last December, it’s recently felt harder to know what anyone else is doing, seeing, or hearing online anymore.

News sites everywhere have seen traffic plummet in the past two years. That’s partly the fault of technology companies and their algorithmic changes, which have made people less likely to see or click on articles when using products like Google Search or Facebook. But research suggests that isn’t the entire story: Audiences are breaking up with news, too. An influencer economy has emerged on social-media platforms. It’s not an ecosystem that produces tons of original reporting, but it feels authentic to its audience.

Traditional journalism operates with a different playbook, typically centered on strong ethical norms and a spirit of objectivity; the facts are meant to anchor the story, even where commentary is concerned. This has presented challenges in the Trump era, which has produced genuine debates about whether traditional objectivity is possible or useful. Some audiences crave obvious resistance against the Republican regime. Outlets such as the The New York Times have tried to forge a middle path—to be, in executive editor Joe Kahn’s words, a “nonpartisan source of information” that occupies a “neutral middle ground” without devolving into “both-sides journalism.” This has had the unfortunate effect of downplaying the asymmetries between candidates and putting detached, clinical language onto politics that feel primal and urgent. When it comes to covering Trump, critics of the Times see double standards and a “sanewashing” of his alarming behavior.

Independent online creators aren’t encumbered by any of this hand-wringing over objectivity or standards: They are concerned with publishing as much as they can, in order to cultivate audiences and build relationships with them. For them, posting is a volume game. It’s also about working ideas out in public. Creators post and figure it out later; if they make mistakes, they post through it. Eventually people forget. When I covered the rise of the less professionalized pro-Trump media in 2016, what felt notable to me was its allergy to editing. These people livestreamed and published unpolished three-hour podcasts. It’s easier to build a relationship with people when you’re in their ears 15 hours a week: Letting it all hang out can feel more authentic, like you have nothing to hide.

Critics can debate whether this kind of content is capital-J Journalism until the heat death of the universe, but the undeniable truth is that people, glued to their devices, like to consume information when it’s informally presented via parasocial relationships with influencers. They enjoy frenetic, algorithmically curated short-form video, streaming and long-form audio, and the feeling that only a slight gap separates creator and consumer. Major media outlets are trying to respond to this shift: The Times’ online front page, for example, has started to feature reporters in what amounts to prestige TikToks.

Yet the influencer model is also deeply exploitable. One of the most aggressive attempts to interfere in this election didn’t come directly from operators in Russia, but rather from a legion of useful idiots in the United States. Russia simply used far-right influencers to do their bidding with the large audiences they’d already acquired.

[Read: YouTubers are almost too easy to dupe]

Watching this from inside the media, I’ve experienced two contradicting feelings. First is a kind of powerlessness from working in an industry with waning influence amid shifting consumption patterns. The second is the notion that the craft, rigor, and mission of traditional journalism matter more than ever. Recently I was struck by a line from the Times’ Ezra Klein. “The media doesn’t actually set the agenda the way people sometimes pretend that it does,” he said late last month. “The audience knows what it believes. If you are describing something they don’t really feel is true, they read it, and they move on. Or they don’t read it at all.” Audiences vote with their attention, and that attention is the most important currency for media businesses, which, after all, need people to care enough to scroll past ads and pony up for subscriptions.

It is terribly difficult to make people care about things they don’t already have an interest in—especially if you haven’t nurtured the trust necessary to lead your audience. As a result, news organizations frequently take cues from what they perceive people will be interested in. This often means covering people who already attract a lot of attention, under the guise of newsworthiness. (Trump and Musk are great examples of people who have sufficiently hijacked this system.) This is why there can be a herding effect in coverage.

Numerous media critics and theorists on Threads and Bluesky, themselves subject to the incentives of the attention economy, balked at Klein’s perspective, citing historical social-science research that media organizations absolutely influence political metanarratives. They’re right, too. When the press coheres around a narrative that also manages to capture the public’s attention, it can have great influence. But these people weren’t just disagreeing with Klein: They were angry with him. “Another one of those ‘we’re just a smol bean national paper of record’ excuses when part of the issue was how they made Biden’s age the top story day after day after day,” one historian posted.

These arguments over media influence—specifically the Times’—occurred frequently on social media throughout the election cycle, and occasionally, a reporter would offer a rebuttal. “To think The Times has influence with Trump voters or even swing voters is to fundamentally misunderstand the electorate,” the Times political reporter Jonathan Weisman posted in October. “And don’t say The Times influences other outlets that do reach those voters. It’s not true.” The argument is meant to suggest that newspaper coverage alone cannot stop a popular authoritarian movement. At the same time, these defenses inevitably led critics to argue: Do you think what you do matters or not?

In a very real sense, these are all problems that the media created for itself. As Semafor’s Ben Smith argued last month, discussing the period following Trump’s 2016 win, “a whole generation of non-profit and for-profit newsrooms held out their hands to an audience that wanted to support a cause, not just to purchase a service.” These companies sold democracy itself and a vision of holding Trump’s power to account. “The thing with marketing, though,” Smith continued, “is that you eventually have to deliver what you sold.” Trump’s win this week may very well be the proof that critics and beleaguered citizens need to stop writing those checks.

A subscription falloff would also highlight the confusing logic of this era for the media. It would mean that the traditional media industry—fractured, poorly funded, constantly under attack, and in competition with attention gatherers who don’t have to play by the same rules—is simultaneously viewed as having had enough power to stop Trump, but also past its prime, having lost its sway and relevance. Competition is coming from a durable alternative-media ecosystem, the sole purpose of which is to ensconce citizens in their chosen reality, regardless of whether it’s true. And it is coming from Musk’s X, which the centibillionaire quickly rebuilt into a powerful communication tool that largely serves the MAGA coalition.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

Spaces like X offer an environment for toxic ideas paired with a sense of empowerment for disaffected audiences. This is part of what Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington, calls the right’s “powerful, partisan, & participatory media environment to support its messaging, which offers a compelling ‘deep story’ for its participants.” By contrast, the left’s media ecosystem, she argues, relies “upon rigid, self-preserving institutional media and its ‘story’ is little more than a defense of imperfect institutions.” The right’s media ecosystem might be chaotic, conspiracist, and poisonous, but it offers its consumers a world to get absorbed in—plus, the promise that they can shape it themselves.

Would it have been possible for things to go differently if Harris had attempted to tap into this alternative ecosystem? I’m not so sure. Following Harris’s entrance into the race, each passing week felt more consequential, but more rigidly locked in place. Memes, rallies, and marathon podcast appearances from Trump offered data points, but there was no real way to interpret them. Some Zoomers and Millennials were ironically coconut-pilled; people were leaving Trump rallies early; everyone was arguing about who was actually garbage. Even when something seemed to matter, it was hard to tell whom it mattered to, or what might happen because of it. When it’s unclear what information everyone is consuming or which filter bubble they’re trapped in, everyone tends to shadowbox their conception of an imagined audience. Will the Rogan bros vote? Did a stand-up comedian’s insult activate a groundswell of Puerto-Rican American support? We didn’t really know anything for certain until we did.

“You are the media now” is powerful because it capitalizes on the reality that it is difficult to know where genuine influence comes from these days. The phrase sounds empowering. Musk’s acolytes see it as the end of traditional-media gatekeeping. But what he’s really selling is the notion that people are on their own—that facts are malleable, and that what feels true ought to be true.

A world governed by the phrase do your own research is also a world where the Trumps and Musks can operate with impunity. Is it the news media’s job to counter this movement—its lies, its hate? Is it also their job to appeal to some of the types of people who listen to Joe Rogan? I’d argue that it is. But there’s little evidence right now that it stands much of a chance.

Something has to change. Perhaps it’s possible to appropriate “You are the media now” and use it as a mission statement to build an industry more capable of meeting whatever’s coming. Perhaps in the absence of a shared reality, fighting against an opposing information ecosystem isn’t as effective as giving more people a reason to get excited about, and pay attention to, yours.

The first former president to be convicted of a felony is now also the first convicted felon to be elected as president.

Donald Trump won reelection on November 5, paving the way for his return to the White House—as well as the end or postponement of the criminal cases against him. The extent to which those cases also paved the way for his return to the White House will be a topic for years of debate. One plausible argument is that the sense that Trump was being persecuted strengthened his support; another is that the failure to bring cases sooner and finish them deprived voters of complete information. Both may be true.

In any event, the discussion is moving from the legal to the political because the legal side seems to have reached a dead end. Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Justice Department are expected to end the cases against him related to attempting to subvert the 2020 election and hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, neither of which has made it to trial. The documents case, long considered the most straightforward, was bottled up by a Trump-appointed judge on dubious procedural grounds. The election-subversion case took a detour to the Supreme Court, where a conservative majority ran down the clock before ruling that a president has very broad immunity for most acts done as president; the lower court hearing the case only recently got back on track, but on November 8, Smith asked the judge to pause the case, citing Trump’s victory.

But now, given that DOJ guidance says a sitting president can’t be tried, and that Trump has promised to fire Smith and immediately dismiss the cases anyway, the two federal cases are likely to wind down. An election-subversion case in Fulton County, Georgia, is effectively frozen already amid challenges to the prosecutor’s handling of the case. Trump has been convicted but not sentenced in New York State related to hush money paid to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, and sentencing in that case may never happen, either.

If the failure to swiftly prosecute Trump enabled his election, then, his election seems to guarantee that he will never face accountability for the acts he committed, including those for which he has already been convicted of 34 felonies.

What follows is a summary of the major legal cases against Trump, assessments of the gravity of the charges, and the prognosis. This guide will be updated as necessary.

New York State: Fraud

In the fall of 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil suit against Trump, his adult sons, and his former aide Allen Weisselberg, alleging a years-long scheme in which Trump fraudulently reported the value of properties in order to either lower his tax bill or improve the terms of his loans, all with an eye toward inflating his net worth.

When?
Justice Arthur Engoron ruled on February 16 that Trump must pay $355 million plus interest, the calculated size of his ill-gotten gains from fraud. The judge had previously ruled against Trump and his co-defendants in late September 2023, concluding that many of the defendants’ claims were “clearly” fraudulent—so clearly that he didn’t need a trial to hear them.

How grave was the allegation?
Fraud is fraud, and in this case, the sum of the fraud stretched into the hundreds of millions—but compared with some of the other legal matters in which Trump is embroiled, this is a little pedestrian. The case was also civil rather than criminal. But although the stakes are lower for the nation, they remain high for Trump: The size of the penalty appears to be larger than Trump can easily pay, and he also faces a three-year ban on operating his company.

What happens now?
On March 25, the day he was supposed to post bond, an appeals court reduced the amount he must post from more than $464 million to $175 million. Trump has appealed the case. In a September hearing, New York appeals-court judges seemed skeptical of the case against Trump and sympathetic to his arguments. They have not yet ruled.

Manhattan: Defamation and Sexual Assault

Although these other cases are all brought by government entities, Trump also faced a pair of defamation suits from the writer E. Jean Carroll, who said that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s. When he denied it, she sued him for defamation and later added a battery claim.

When?
In May 2023, a jury concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll, and awarded her $5 million. A second defamation case produced an $83.3 million judgment in January 2024.

How grave was the allegation?
Although these cases didn’t directly connect to the same fundamental issues of rule of law and democratic governance that some of the criminal cases do, they were a serious matter, and a federal judge’s blunt statement that Trump raped Carroll has gone underappreciated.

What happens now?
Trump has appealed both cases, and he posted bond for the $83.3 million in March.

Manhattan: Hush Money

In March 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to bring felony charges against Trump, alleging that the former president falsified business records as part of a scheme to pay hush money to women who said they’d had sexual relationships with Trump.

When?
The trial began on April 15 and ended with a May 30 conviction. A judge is scheduled to rule September 16 on whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity invalidates the case. On September 6, he announced that he was postponing sentencing to avoid interfering with the election.

How grave was the allegation?
Many people have analogized this case to Al Capone’s conviction on tax evasion: It’s not that he didn’t deserve it, but it wasn’t really why he was an infamous villain. Trump did deserve it, and he’s now a convicted felon. Moreover, although the charges were about falsifying records, those records were falsified to keep information from the public as it voted in the 2016 election. It was among the first of Trump’s many attacks on fair elections. (His two impeachments were also for efforts to undermine the electoral process.) If at times this case felt more minor compared with the election-subversion or classified-documents cases, it’s because those other cases have set a grossly high standard for what constitutes gravity.

What happens now?
Sentencing was scheduled for November 26, but with Trump now in the middle of a presidential transition, some observers expect that Justice Juan Merchan will either postpone sentencing or even forgo a sentence altogether.

Department of Justice: Mar-a-Lago Documents

Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with 37 felonies in connection with his removal of documents from the White House when he left office, but Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed the case, finding that Smith’s appointment was not constitutional. Smith has appealed. The charges included willful retention of national-security information, obstruction of justice, withholding of documents, and false statements. Trump took boxes of documents to properties, where they were stored haphazardly, but the indictment centered on his refusal to give them back to the government despite repeated requests.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

When?
Smith filed charges in June 2023. On July 15, 2024, Cannon dismissed the charges. Smith appealed that dismissal on August 26.

How grave is the allegation?
These are, I have written, the stupidest crimes imaginable, but they are nevertheless very serious. Protecting the nation’s secrets is one of the greatest responsibilities of any public official with classified clearance, and not only did Trump put these documents at risk, but he also (allegedly) refused to comply with a subpoena, tried to hide the documents, and lied to the government through his attorneys.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Vanishingly unlikely. Smith and the Justice Department are reportedly working on winding down the case now, both because Trump would quash it on his first day in office and also because long-standing guidance says a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. This once looked to be the most open-and-shut case: The facts and legal theory here are pretty straightforward. But Smith drew a short straw when he was randomly assigned Cannon, a Trump appointee who repeatedly ruled favorably for Trump and bogged the case down in endless pretrial arguments. Even before her dismissal of the case, some legal commentators accused her of “sabotaging” it.

Fulton County: Election Subversion

In Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, District Attorney Fani Willis brought a huge racketeering case against Trump and 18 others, alleging a conspiracy that spread across weeks and states with the aim of stealing the 2020 election.

When?
Willis obtained the indictment in August 2023. The number of people charged makes the case unwieldy and difficult to track. Several of them, including Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, struck plea deals in the fall. Because a challenge to Willis’s presence on the case isn’t going to be heard until December, the case will not begin before the election.

How grave is the allegation?
More than any other case, this one attempts to reckon with the full breadth of the assault on democracy following the 2020 election.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Trump’s election casts even more uncertainty over an already murky future. This is a huge case for a local prosecutor, even in a county as large as Fulton, to bring. The racketeering law allows Willis to sweep in a great deal of material, and she has some strong evidence—such as a call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” some 11,000 votes. Three major plea deals from co-defendants may also ease Willis’s path, but getting a jury to convict Trump will still be a challenge. A judge on September 12 tossed three counts as outside state jurisdiction, and dismissed several other but said the state can refile them with more detail. The case has also been hurt by the revelation of a romantic relationship between Willis and an attorney she hired as a special prosecutor. On March 15, Judge Scott McAfee declined to throw out the indictment, but he sharply castigated Willis. Trump’s victory may result in the case being frozen indefinitely.

Department of Justice: Election Subversion

Special Counsel Smith has also charged Trump with four federal felonies in connection with his attempt to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. This case is in court in Washington, D.C.

When?
A grand jury indicted Trump on August 1, 2023. The trial was originally scheduled for March but was frozen while the Supreme Court mulled whether the former president should be immune to prosecution. On July 1, 2024, the justices ruled that a president is immune from prosecution for official but not unofficial acts, finding that some of Trump’s postelection actions were official and sending the case back to the trial court to determine others. Smith obtained a new indictment on August 27, which retains the same four felony charges but omits references to corrupting the Justice Department. On November 8, Smith asked the trial-court judge to pause the case because of the “unprecedented circumstance” of Trump’s reelection.

[David A. Graham: Trump attempted a brazen, dead-serious attack on American democracy]

How grave is the allegation?
This case rivals the Fulton County one in importance. It is narrower, focusing just on Trump and a few key elements of the paperwork coup, but the symbolic weight of the U.S. Justice Department prosecuting an attempt to subvert the American election system is heavy.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
It’s not happening, folks.

Additionally …

Once upon a time, cases were filed in more than 30 states over whether Trump could even appear on the 2024 ballot under a novel legal theory about the Fourteenth Amendment. Proponents, including J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe in The Atlantic, argued that the former president was ineligible to serve again under a clause that disqualifies anyone who took an oath defending the Constitution and then subsequently participated in a rebellion or an insurrection. They said that Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election and his incitement of the January 6 riot meet the criteria.

The Supreme Court conclusively disagreed. The justices ruled unanimously on March 4 that states could not remove Trump from the ballot, and appear on the ballot he did. Trump is set to be sworn in as the 47th president on January 20, 2025.

Among the bizarrest phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most accomplished club in the storied history of Dutch soccer. Its fans—blond-haired men with beer guts, boys with blue eyes—sing “Hava Nagila” as they cram into the trams taking them to the stadium on the fringes of Amsterdam. Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David onto their forearms. In the moments before the opening kick of a match, they proudly shout at the top of their lungs, “Jews, Jews, Jews,” because—though most of them are not Jewish—philo-Semitism is part of their identity.   

Last night, the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club of actual Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium, after their club suffered a thumping defeat, they were ambushed by well-organized groups of thugs, in what the mayor of Amsterdam described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.” What followed was a textbook example of a pogrom: mobs chasing Jews down city streets, goons punching and kicking Jews crouched helplessly in corners, an orgy of hate-filled violence.

That this attack transpired on the streets of Amsterdam is beyond ironic. At least 75 percent of Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust. But there was an affectionate Yiddish nickname for the city: mokum, “safe place.” After the Spanish Inquisition, Holland absorbed Iberian Jewry, which flourished there. Amsterdam was the city that hid Anne Frank, the most famous example of righteous Gentiles taking risks on behalf of Jewish neighbors. And then there was Ajax.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the few remaining survivors of the Holocaust in the city supported the team, as they had before the war. No Dutch club had a larger Jewish fan base, because no Dutch city was as Jewish as Amsterdam. They were supporting a club on the brink of glory. Ajax reinvented the global game by introducing a strategic paradigm called total football, a free-flowing style of play that exuded the let-loose spirit of the ’60s. Led by the genius Johan Cruyff, perhaps the most creative player in the history of the game, Ajax became an unexpected European powerhouse.

During those glorious postwar years, Ajax had two Jewish players; three of the club’s presidents were Jews. Before games, the team would order a kosher salami for good luck. Yiddish phrases were part of locker-room banter. In Brilliant Orange, David Winner’s extraordinary book about Dutch soccer, Ajax’s (Jewish) physiotherapist is quoted as saying the players “liked to be Jewish even though they weren’t.” It isn’t hard to see the psychology at work. By embracing Yiddishkeit, Ajax players and fans were telling themselves a soothing story: Their parents might have been Nazi collaborators and bystanders to evil, but they weren’t.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?]

Israelis took great pleasure in Ajax’s affiliation, and they especially revered Cruyff. His family had Jewish relatives—a connection he honored on a trip to Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. It was said that he once walked down the streets of Tel Aviv wearing a kippah, and was a devoted fan of the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. Israelis embraced Cruyff as one of their own.

But Ajax’s rival clubs exploited this history, this strange identity, to taunt its players and fans with anti-Semitic bile. Among the common chants deployed at Ajax games: “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” To taunt Ajax, these fans would make the hissing noise, mimicking the release of Zyklon B. Dutch authorities never effectively cracked down on this omnipresent Jew hatred.

Philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism went hand in hand during the postwar years. It wasn’t so different from the way that American sports franchises turned Indigenous tribes into mascots. Only after Jews or Native Americans have been wiped out by genocide can they become vehicles for the majority population to have some fun at the murdered group’s expense. And behind even Ajax’s nominal expressions of love, there was something profoundly disturbing: Jews barely existed in Holland, yet they remained an outsize obsession.

After videos of the violence emerged from Amsterdam in various media outlets, there could be no denying the global surge of anti-Semitism. But a swath of the press—and an even larger swath of social media—has minimized the assault, sometimes unintentionally. Some headlines described the anti-Semitic nature of the assaults in quotation marks, despite all the conclusive evidence about the motive of the mob. Because some of the Israeli fans ripped Palestinian flags off buildings and chanted bigoted slogans, it was implied, the mob was justified in stabbing and beating Jews. Such widespread ambivalence over the attack reflects a culture that shrugs in the face of anti-Jewish violence, which treats it as an unavoidable facet of life after October 7.

But the most bitter fact of all is that these assaults transpired the same evening that the Dutch commemorated the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht. In the presence of actual Jews, the Dutch failed them again.

“Ukrainians don’t care who will be president of the United States,” my boss, the editor in chief of one of the largest television stations in Ukraine, told me in 2012 as I headed overseas to cover the American election. I was at the Obama campaign’s headquarters, in Chicago, when the president gave his victory speech that year—but back then, Ukrainian television didn’t broadcast live at night, so my report didn’t air until the next morning, local time.

Covering the 2024 U.S. election for the Ukrainian media was an entirely different experience. People in Ukraine were following every turn. Multiple Ukrainian radio stations called me for reports from the rallies I’d attended in Saginaw, Michigan, and State College, Pennsylvania. Ukraine is at war, and the United States is its biggest provider of military aid; the future of that relationship was at stake. The contest’s eventual winner, Donald Trump, had promised to end the war in 24 hours—which Ukrainians understood to mean that he intended to sell our country out to Russia.

But for me, that was only one dimension of this election’s significance. I’ve covered five American presidential contests for the Ukrainian press, starting in 2008, and in that time, I feel that I have witnessed an American transformation that resonates uncomfortably with the Ukrainian past.

After Ukraine became independent, in 1991, our political parties were for decades run from the pockets of oligarchs. A handful of unimaginably wealthy men, each with holdings in media and industry, controlled factions of political representatives who competed almost exclusively with one another. Political campaigns lacked substance and consisted mainly of personal attacks. In the United States in 2008 and 2012, by contrast, the candidates had real constituencies and actual debates about health care and the economy. Many Ukrainians envied the strength of American institutions, media, and civic engagement.

[Read: ‘They didn’t understand anything, but just spoiled people’s lives’]

Sure, I was a bit stunned when, at a 2008 John McCain rally in Columbus, Ohio, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger warned voters that socialism was on the rise and would destroy America the way it had his native Austria. I had just been to Youngstown, Ohio, where I’d interviewed laid-off workers who lacked basic health care; Austria, meanwhile, was a country I knew well, and it had one of the highest standards of living in the world. Why would an elected official peddle such nonsense to this enormous crowd? Still, American democracy seemed, to an outsider, like the picture of health.

The roles had all but reversed when I came back in 2016. Ukrainians had risen up in 2014 against the corrupt, Russia-backed government of then-President Viktor Yanukovych. Our transition wasn’t perfect, but we elected a government that was at last serious about reform. The Kremlin responded by occupying Crimea and assaulting eastern Ukraine, where it backed separatists in the Donbas region. A low-level war would continue in the Donbas straight up until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022. Even so, we were building up our democracy. Something was happening to America that seemed to point in a different direction.

That year, Americans were more divided than I’d ever seen them. And it wasn’t easy to talk with Republicans. Some Trump supporters told me that a European reporter could never understand their views on guns. One shut the door in my face at a campaign headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina, explaining that he didn’t trust the foreign media. I’d reported from the rallies of pro-Russian separatists in Crimea and the Donbas, who considered Kyiv-based journalists suspicious if not outright enemies, and I knew when to leave.  

That feeling wasn’t the only disconcertingly familiar one. The worldviews of many Americans I talked with that year diverged starkly from the visible facts of their lives. Democrats scoffed that nobody would vote for Trump—but the excitement at his rallies was plainly evident. A man at a Trump rally in Wilmington, Ohio, complained to me about unemployment. Neither he nor anybody in his family had lost a job—in fact, the mayor of Wilmington told me that the town had more than 300 job vacancies. A retired prosecutor told me that the only media outlet he trusted was WikiLeaks. I was reminded of Russia’s coordinated disinformation campaign against Ukrainians: Since the start of the war, we’d been flooded with fabricated news. We had struggled to make the international press understand that high-profile politicians were simply inventing stories. Now something similar seemed to be happening in the United States.

As of this fall, Ukraine is two and a half years into an all-out war with Russia, and America is eight years into a style of politics that my American colleagues describe as substanceless. I listened for mentions of Ukraine at the rallies I attended, and heard none. The closest the candidates came was when Trump, in Pennsylvania, promised that his administration wouldn’t get involved in the affairs of “countries you’ve never heard of,” and Kamala Harris reminded a crowd in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that Trump had a strange fascination with Russia. Nonetheless, the Trump supporters I spoke with assured me that their candidate would bring an end to all wars, including the one in Ukraine. I heard this from Bill Bazzi, the mayor of Dearborn Heights, Michigan. And I heard it from rally-goers, including an elderly woman at a J. D. Vance event in Saginaw, who told me that she’d persuaded skeptical family members to overlook Trump’s personality and focus on his leadership qualities and ability to bring peace to the world.

Harris didn’t speak much about foreign policy at the event I attended in Ann Arbor, but she did warn her audience about the risk of fascism. That word surprised me. Since the full-scale invasion of our country, Ukrainians have frequently used it to describe the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin. The international media have been reluctant to pick up the term, perhaps because it is so heavily freighted with historical meaning. But now it has become part of the American political vernacular.

This American campaign season was rife with reminders of a politics that were once routine in Ukraine, and that we are now happy to be mostly rid of. We know very well, from our experience, what happens when billionaires own media platforms: They can withdraw endorsements written by their editorial boards and back political candidates in order to curry favor. In Warren, Michigan, I talked with a man who claimed that he’d earned $80,000 in one month for collecting signatures for Elon Musk’s petition to support the Constitution. In another echo, the Trump camp threatened that it would challenge the election results if they didn’t name him the winner: Ukraine has some experience with elections followed by months of litigation.

Some of the Americans I met on the campaign trail wanted to know if I found the situation in their country disturbing. Sure. But everything is relative. Americans are fortunate not to live through what we do in Ukraine. There were times in the past week when I’d be reporting in the Midwest and, because of the time difference, the air-raid-alert app on my phone would go off in the middle of the day, announcing another nighttime attack on my home city of Kyiv. In between interviews, I’d scroll through photos of the buildings hit, hoping not to see my family’s home.   

Trump has won the contest for the U.S. presidency. If he withholds military aid, Ukraine may suffer huge losses on the battlefield and enormous civilian casualties. But one way or another, Kyiv is going to have to work with his administration. My time reporting on the campaign has convinced me that this election was not an aberration so much as a reality to be accepted. For the foreseeable future, the United States will turn inward, becoming a country more and more focused on itself. Outsiders will simply have to take this into account.

[Listen: Autocracy in America]

As for the threat of encroaching authoritarianism, I remain an optimist. Take it from a member of the generation of Ukrainians who successfully defended democracy: To capture a state requires not just a strong leader but an apathetic society. Democracy survives when citizens actively defend their rights on every level.

I saw a lot of that in Nevada and Arizona, where I spent the last two days of the campaign following canvassers. I went door-to-door with members of the Culinary Union of Las Vegas—a guest-room attendant, a cocktail server, and a porter—and listened as they urged residents to pay attention to the Nevada Senate race. In Phoenix, I followed a group of volunteers from California who’d spent weeks trying to talk with people they disagreed with. They told me they had knocked on 500,000 doors in Arizona. Friends in New York and Washington told me that they or their relatives had done campaign work outside their cities—writing letters, phone-banking. Even those critical of both candidates and the system itself cared deeply about the country; some who were alienated from the national races focused their energies on local ones. I have never seen anything like this in Europe, where elections are all about going to the polls once every few years.

One thing we have learned in Ukraine, confronted with foreign invasion and war, is that life goes on. The same will be true for America after November 5. I’m reminded of the time a foreign journalist asked a Ukrainian general how Ukraine would survive the winter. He confidently replied that after the winter, there would be spring.

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The MAGA hats were flying like Frisbees. It was two weeks before Election Day. Charlie Kirk, the Millennial right-wing influencer, had been touring college campuses. On this particular Tuesday, he’d brought his provocations to the University of Georgia. Athens, where the school’s main campus is located, is an artsy town in a reliably blue county, with a famed alternative-music scene. (R.E.M., the B-52s, and Neutral Milk Hotel are among the many bands in the city’s lore.) But that afternoon, the courtyard outside the student center was a sea of red, with thunderous “U-S-A!” chants echoing off the buildings. Kirk had arrived on a mission: to pump up Gen Z about the return of Donald Trump. He was succeeding.

I was standing in the back of the crowd, watching hundreds of young guys with their arms outstretched, hollering for MAGA merch. Once a stigmatized cultural artifact, the red cap is now a status symbol. For a certain kind of bro, MAGA is bigger than politics. MAGA makes you manly.

MAGA, as this week affirmed, is also not an aberration. At its core, it remains a patriarchal club, but it cannot be brushed off as a passing freak show or a niche political sect. Donald Trump triumphed in the Electoral College, and when all the votes are counted, he will likely have captured the popular vote as well. Although it’s true that MAGA keeps growing more powerful, the reality is that it’s been part of mainstream culture for a while. Millions of Americans, particularly those who live on the coasts, have simply chosen to believe otherwise.

Democrats are performing all manner of autopsies, finger-pointing, and recriminations after Kamala Harris’s defeat. Many political trends will continue to undergo examination, especially the pronounced shift of Latino voters toward Trump. But among all the demographic findings is this particular and fascinating one: Young men are more conservative than they used to be. One analysis of ​​AP VoteCast data, for instance, showed that 56 percent of men ages 18–29 supported Trump this year, up 15 points from 2020.

Depending on where you live and with whom you interact, Trump’s success with young men in Tuesday’s election may have come as a shock. But the signs were there all along. Today, the top three U.S. podcasts on Spotify are The Joe Rogan Experience, The Tucker Carlson Show, and The Charlie Kirk Show. All three hosts endorsed Trump for president. These programs and their massive audiences transcend the narrow realm of politics. Together, they are male-voice megaphones in a metastasizing movement across America. In 2023, Steve Bannon described this coalition to me as “the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right.” Trump has many people to thank for his victory—among them men, and especially young men with their AirPods in.

Trump can often be a repetitive bore when speaking in public, but one of his more interesting interviews this year was a conversation with dude-philosopher Theo Von. As my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, Trump’s “discussion of drug and alcohol addiction on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast demonstrated perhaps the most interest Trump has ever shown in another human being.” (Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., died of complications from alcoholism at the age of 42.) Similarly, five days before the election, Trump took the stage with Carlson for a live one-on-one interview. The two bro’d out in an arena near Phoenix, and that night, Trump was especially freewheeling—and uncharacteristically reflective about the movement he leads. (Trump looks poised to win Arizona after losing it in 2020.)

It’s not just one type of talkative bro who has boosted Trump and made him more palatable to the average American. Trump has steadily assembled a crew of extremely influential and successful men who are loyal to him. Carlson is the preppy debate-club bro. Rogan is the stoner bro. Elon Musk is the tech bro. Bill Ackman is the finance bro. Jason Aldean is the country-music bro. Harrison Butker is the NFL bro. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the crunchy-conspiracist bro. Hulk Hogan is the throwback entertainer bro. Kid Rock is the “American Bad Ass” bro. And that’s hardly an exhaustive list. Each of these bros brings his own bro-y fandom to the MAGA movement and helps, in his own way, to legitimize Trump and whitewash his misdeeds. Some of these men, such as Kennedy and Musk, may even play a role in the coming administration.

My colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote this week that Democrats are losing the culture war. He’s right, but Trumpism extends even beyond politics and pop culture. I’ve been thinking a lot about that day I spent at the University of Georgia. Students I spoke with told me that some frat houses off campus make no secret of their Trump support, but it seemed less about specific policies and more about attitude. That’s long been the open secret to Trump: a feeling, a vibe, not a statistic. Even Kirk’s “free speech” exercises, which he’s staged at colleges nationwide for a while now, are only nominally about actual political debate. In essence, they are public performances that boil down to four words: Come at me, bro! Perhaps there is something in all of this that is less about fighting and more about acceptance—especially in a culture that treats bro as a pejorative.

These Trump bros do not all deserve sympathy. But there’s good reason to try to actually understand this particular voting bloc, and why so many men were—and are—ready to go along with Trump.

Related:

Why Democrats are losing the culture war The right’s new kingmaker

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What the left keeps getting wrong Conor Friedersdorf: The case for treating Trump like a normal president “You are the media now.” Why Netanyahu fired his defense minister

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A federal judge granted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request to pause the election-subversion case against Trump after his presidential victory. The Department of Justice charged three men connected to a foiled Iranian assassination plot against Trump. Trump named his senior campaign adviser Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman to hold the role.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Strange History Behind the Anti-Semitic Dutch Soccer Attacks

By Franklin Foer

Among the bizarrest phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most accomplished club in the storied history of Dutch soccer … Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David onto their forearms. In the moments before the opening kick of a match, they proudly shout at the top of their lungs, “Jews, Jews, Jews,” because—though most of them are not Jewish—philo-Semitism is part of their identity.

Last night, the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club of actual Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium, after their club suffered a thumping defeat, they were ambushed by well-organized groups of thugs, in what the mayor of Amsterdam described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.”

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Americans voted for change in this week’s presidential election, and in foreign policy, they’ll certainly get it. Donald Trump has shown disdain for the priorities and precedents that have traditionally guided Washington’s approach to the world. He speaks more fondly of America’s autocratic adversaries than of its democratic allies. He derides “globalism” as a liberal conspiracy against the American people. And he treats international agreements as little more than wastepaper.

At stake is not only the survival of Ukraine and the fate of Gaza, but the entire international system that forms the foundation of American global power. That system is built upon American military might, but more than that, it is rooted in relationships and ideals—nations with shared values coming together under U.S. leadership to deter authoritarian aggression and uphold democracy. The resulting world order may be badly flawed and prone to error, but it has also generally preserved global stability since the end of World War II.

Despite its endurance, this system is fragile. It is sustained by an American promise to hold firm to its commitments and ensure collective defense. Trump threatens that promise. His plan to impose high tariffs on all imports could disrupt the liberal economic order on which many American factories and farmers (and Trump’s billionaire buddies) rely. His apparent willingness to sacrifice Ukraine to Russian President Vladimir Putin in some misguided pursuit of peace will strain the Atlantic alliance and undermine security in Europe. By signaling that he won’t defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, he could undercut confidence in the United States throughout Asia and make a regional war more likely.

[From the December 2024 issue: My hope for Palestine]

The American global order could end. This would not be a matter of “American decline.” The U.S. economy will likely remain the world’s largest and most important for the foreseeable future. But if Washington breaks its promises, or even if its allies and enemies believe it has or will—or if it fails to uphold democracy and rule of law at home—the pillars of the American international system will collapse, and the United States will suffer an immeasurable loss of global influence and prestige.

The risk that this will happen has been gathering for some time. George W. Bush’s unilateralist War on Terror strained the international system. So did Trump’s disputes with NATO and other close allies during his first term. But world leaders could write off Washington’s wavering as temporary deviations from what has been a relatively consistent approach to foreign policy over decades. They understand the changeability of American politics. In four years, there will be another election and a new administration may restore Washington’s usual priorities.

With Trump’s reelection, however, the aberration has become the new normal. The American people have told the world that they no longer wish to support an American-led world order. They have chosen U.S. policy makers who promise to focus on the home front instead of on the troubles of ungrateful allies. Maybe they’ve concluded that the United States has expended too many lives and too much money on fruitless foreign adventures, such as those in Vietnam and Afghanistan. And maybe now America will reassess its priorities in light of new threats, most of all China, and the potential burden of meeting them.

The problem is that if the United States won’t lead the world, some other country will, and a number are already applying for the job. One is Putin’s Russia. Another is the China of Xi Jinping.

China began to assert its global leadership more aggressively during Trump’s first term and has worked ever harder to undermine the American system since—strengthening China’s ties with Russia and other authoritarian states, building a coalition to counterbalance the West, and promoting illiberal principles for a reformed world order. Trump seems to believe that he can keep China in check with his personal charm alone. When asked in a recent interview whether he would intervene militarily if Xi blockaded Taiwan, he responded, “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me.”

That’s narcissism, not deterrence. More likely, Putin and Xi will take advantage of Trump’s disinterest. Once appeased in Ukraine, Putin may very well rebuild his army with the help of China, North Korea, and Iran, and then move on to his next victim—say, Georgia or Poland. Xi could be emboldened to invade Taiwan, or at least spark a crisis over the island to extract concessions from a U.S. president who has already suggested that he won’t fight.

[Read: The case for treating Trump like a normal president]

The result will be not merely a multipolar world. That’s inevitable, whatever Washington does. It will be a global order in which autocrats prey on smaller states that can no longer count on the support of the world’s superpower, regional rivalries erupt into conflict, economic nationalism subverts global trade, and new nuclear threats emerge. This world will not be safe for American democracy or prosperity.

The fate of the world order and U.S. global power may seem of little consequence to Americans struggling to pay their bills. But a world hostile to U.S. interests will constrain American companies, roil international energy markets, and endanger jobs and economic growth. Americans could confront bigger wars that require greater sacrifices (as in 1941).

Perhaps Trump will surprise everyone by pondering his legacy and choosing not to pursue the course he has signaled. But that seems unlikely. His messaging on his foreign-policy priorities has been too consistent for too long. Over the next four years, Americans will have to decide whether they still want the United States to be a great power, and if so, what kind of great power they wish it to be. Americans wanted change. The world may pay the price.