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.

“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.

“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.

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.

For museums and their public, Impressionism is the Goldilocks movement: not too old or too new, not too challenging or too sappy; just right. Renaissance art may baffle with arcane religious symbolism, contemporary art may baffle on purpose, but put people in a gallery with Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro, and explanatory wall texts feel superfluous. Eyes roam contentedly over canvases suffused with light, vibrant with gesture, and alive with affable people doing pleasant things. What’s not to love?

Famously, of course, Impressionism was not greeted with love at the outset. In 1874, the first Impressionist exhibition was derided in the press as a “vexatious mystification for the public, or the result of mental derangement.” A reviewer called Paul Cézanne “a sort of madman, painting in a state of delirium tremens,” while Berthe Morisot was privately advised by her former teacher to “go to the Louvre twice a week, stand before Correggio for three hours, and ask his forgiveness.” The very term Impressionism was born as a diss, a mocking allusion to Monet’s shaggy, atmospheric painting of the Le Havre waterfront, Impression, Sunrise (1872). Few people saw affability: In 1874, the term commonly applied to Monet and his ilk was “intransigent.”

Impressionism’s rom-com arc from spirited rejection to public rapture informs our fondness for the pictures (plucky little underdogs), and has also provided a lasting model for avant-gardism as a mechanism of cultural change. We now take it for granted that young mavericks should team up to foment new ways of seeing that offend the establishment before being vindicated by soaring auction prices and long museum queues. For most of history, however, that wasn’t the way things worked. Thus the 1874 exhibition has acquired legendary status as the origin point of self-consciously modern art.

Its 150th anniversary this year has been celebrated with numerous exhibitions, most notably “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment,” organized by the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. (where it is on view until January 19, 2025). Given the masterpieces that these museums could choose from, this might have been an easygoing lovefest, but the curators—Sylvie Patry and Anne Robbins in Paris, and Mary Morton and Kimberly A. Jones in Washington—have delivered something far more intriguing and valuable: a chance to see what these artists were being intransigent about, and to survey the unexpected turns that art and politics may take in a polarized, traumatized time and place.

Nineteenth-century French history was messy—all those republics, empires, and monarchies tumbling one after the other—but it contains a crucial backstory to Impressionism, often overlooked. In the 1860s, France was the preeminent military and cultural power on the continent. Paris was feted as the most sophisticated, most modern, most beautiful of cities, and the Paris Salon was the most important art exhibition on the planet. Then, in 1870, some fatuous chest bumping between Emperor Napoleon III (nephew of the original) and Otto von Bismarck set off an unimagined catastrophe: By the spring of 1871, mighty France had been vanquished by upstart Prussia, its emperor deposed, its sublime capital bombed and besieged for months. When France sued for peace, Paris rebelled and established its own new socialist-anarchist government, the Commune. In May 1871, the French army moved in to crush the Commune, and the ensuing week of urban warfare killed tens of thousands. In the nine months between the start of the siege in September and the destruction of the Commune in May, perhaps as many as 90,000 Parisians died of starvation and violence.

These events and their impact on French painters are detailed in the art critic Sebastian Smee’s absorbing new book, Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism. His main focus is on the star-crossed not-quite-lovers Morisot and Édouard Manet, but nobody in this tale escaped unscathed. Morisot was in the city through the bombardment, the famine, and the street fighting; Manet and Degas volunteered for the National Guard; Pierre-Auguste Renoir served in the cavalry. Some of their most promising peers were killed. Everyone saw ghastly things.

[From the April 1892 issue: Some notes on French Impressionism]

And yet nothing about Degas’ ballerinas practicing their tendus or Renoir’s frothy scene of sophisticates out on the town suggests recent experience with terror, starvation, or climbing over dead bodies in the street, though they were painted when those events were still fresh. The Boulevard des Capucines, where the first Impressionist show took place, had been the site of “atrocious violence” in 1871, Smee tells us, but in 1874, Monet’s painting of the street is limpid with light and bustling with top hats and hansom cabs. If most fans of Impressionism remain unaware of its intimacy with the horrors of what Victor Hugo dubbed “l’année terrible,” it’s because the Impressionists did not picture them.

Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s unbarking dog, this suggests an absence in search of a story, and indeed, “Paris 1874” ultimately leaves one with a sense of why they chose to turn away, and how that choice helped set a new course for art. The standard version of Impressionism—the one most people will come through the door with—has, however, always emphasized a different conflict: the David-versus-Goliath contest between the young Impressionists and the illustrious Salon.

With more than 3,000 works displayed cheek by jowl, the 1874 Salon was nearly 20 times the size of the first Impressionist show, and attracted an audience of about half a million—aristocrats, members of the bourgeoisie, workers with families in tow. (Of the latter, one journalist sniffed: “If he could, he would even bring his dog or his cat.”) Presided over by the nation’s Académie des Beaux-Arts, an institution whose pedigree went back to Louis XIV, the Salon was allied with the state and had a vested interest in preserving the status quo. The Impressionists, wanting to preside over themselves, had founded their own organization—the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc.—with a charter they adapted from the bakers’ union in Pissarro’s hometown.

“Paris 1874” is built from these two shows. With a handful of exceptions (mainly documentary photographs of the shattered city), the art on the walls in Washington now was on the walls in Paris then. (Identifying the relevant works to select from was no small achievement, given the 19th-century catalogs’ lack of images or measurements, and their penchant for unhelpful titles like Portrait.) Labels indicate which exhibition each artwork appeared in, beginning with the Salon’s medal-of-honor winner, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s L’Éminence Grise (1873), alongside Monet’s celebrated and pilloried Impression, Sunrise.

L’Éminence Grise (1873), Jean-Léon Gérôme (© 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

The two paintings might be mascots for the opposing teams. Impeccably executed, the Gérôme is an umbrous scene in which Cardinal Richelieu’s right-hand monk, François Leclerc du Tremblay, descends a staircase as the high and mighty doff their caps. The fall of light is dramatic and convincing, the dispatch of color deft, the actors choreographed and costumed to carry you through the action. Every satin ribbon, every curl of Baroque metalwork seems palpable.

Beside it, the Monet looks loose and a bit jangly. The muted gray harbor flits between solidity and dissolution. The orange blob of a sun and its shredded reflection are called into being with an almost militant economy of means. And somehow, the painting glows as if light were passing through the canvas to land at our feet. The Gérôme is a perfect portal into another world. But the Monet is a world. More than just displaying different styles, the pictures embody divergent notions of what art could and should do.

Impression, Sunrise (1872), Claude Monet (© Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris / Studio Christian Baraja SLB)

For 200 years, the Académie had defined and defended visual art—both its manual skill set (perspective, anatomy, composition) and its intellectual status as a branch of rhetoric, conveying moral ideals and building better citizens. (L’Éminence Grise is, among other things, an engaging lesson in French history: When Cardinal Richelieu was the flashy power behind the throne of Louis XIII, the somber Capuchin friar was the “gray eminence” behind the cardinal.) Such content is what made “fine art” fine and separated painters and sculptors from decorators and cabinetmakers.

This value system had stylistic consequences. Narrative clarity demanded visual clarity. Figuration ranked higher than landscapes and still lifes in part because human figures instruct more lucidly than trees and grapes. Space was theatrical and coherent, bodies idealized, actions easily identified. Surfaces were smooth, brushstrokes self-effacing. This is still what we mean by “academic art.”

Most visitors confronting the opening wall at the National Gallery will know which painting they’re supposed to like—and it’s not the one with the fawning courtiers. Impressionism is universally admired, while academic art is sometimes treated as the butt of a joke. Admittedly, Jean Jules Antoine Lecomte Du Nouÿ’s huge, body-waxed Eros with surly cupids is easier to laugh at than to love, but most of the academic art on view strives, like the Gérôme, for gripping plausibility. You can see the assiduous archaeological research that went into the Egyptian bric-a-brac pictured in Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s pietà The Death of the Pharaoh’s First-Born Son (1872), or the armor of the sneaky Greeks descending from their giant gift horse in Henri-Paul Motte’s starlit scene of Troy.

[From the July 1900 issue: Impressionism and appreciation]

Today these pictures look like film stills. It’s easy to imagine Errol Flynn dashing up Gérôme’s stairs, or Timothée Chalamet brooding in the Alma-Tadema gloom. Perhaps the reason such paintings no longer move audiences the way they once did is that we have actual movies to provide that immersive storytelling kick. What we want from painting is something different—something personal, handmade, “authentic” (even when we aren’t quite clear what that means).

It’s a mistake, though, to assume that this impulse was new with Impressionism. Beginning in the 1840s, concurrent with the literary “Realism” of Stendhal and Honoré de Balzac, Realist painters turned away from the studio confections of the Académie and began schlepping their easels out into the weather to paint en plein air—peasants toiling in fields, or fields just being fields. Visible brushstrokes and rough finish were the price (or certificate of authenticity) of a real-time response to a real world. These were aesthetic choices, and in turn they suggested political viewpoints. In place of explicit narratives valorizing order, sacrifice, and loyalty, Realist art carried implicit arguments for social equality (“These plain folk are worthy of being seen”) and individual liberty (“My personal experience counts”).

The Salon was the Académie’s enforcement mechanism: In the absence of anything like today’s gallery system, it represented the only practical path for a French artist to establish a reputation. Yet for decades it flip-flopped—sometimes rejecting Realist art, sometimes accepting it and even rewarding it with prizes. Manet, considered a Realist because of his contemporary subjects and ambiguous messaging, had a famously volatile history with the Salon. In 1874, Degas explained the rationale behind the Société Anonyme in these terms: “The Realist movement no longer has to fight with others. It is, it exists, it needs to show itself on its own.”

But nothing in 1874 was quite that simple. A room at the National Gallery is given over to art about the Franco-Prussian War, both academic and Realist. All of it appeared in the Salon. The contrast is instructive: The elegant bronze by Antonin Mercié, conceived (prematurely) as a monument to victory, was altered in the face of actual events and titled Glory to the Vanquished. Although the naked soldier in the clasp of Victory has breathed his last, arms and wings still zoom ecstatically skyward and draperies flutter. He is beautiful even in death. The corpses laid out on the dirt in Auguste Lançon’s Dead in Line! (1873), dressed in the uniforms they were wearing when they fell, are neither naked nor beautiful. Their skin is gray, and their fists are clenched in cadaveric spasm. In the background, troops march by, officers chat, and a village burns. There is no glory, just the banality of slaughter. Unlike Mercié, Lançon had been at the front.

Dead in Line! (1873), Auguste Lançon (© Département de la Moselle, MdG1870&A, Rebourg)

Here also is Manet’s quiet etching of women queuing at a butcher shop in Paris as food supplies dwindled. Black lines, swift and short, capture a sea of shining umbrellas above a snaking mass of black dresses, at the back of which you can just make out the faint lightning-bolt outline of an upthrust bayonet. It’s a picture with no argument, just a set of observations: patience, desperation, rain.

In “Paris 1874,” a model of curatorial discretion, the art is allowed to speak for itself. Visitors are encouraged to look and guess whether a given work appeared in the Salon or the Société before checking the answer on the label. One quickly finds that applying the standard checklist of Impressionist attributes—“urban life,” “French countryside,” “leisure,” “dappled brushwork”—is remarkably unhelpful. The dog-walking ladies in Giuseppe De Nittis’s Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (1874, Salon) sport the same complicated hats, fashionable bustles, and acres of ruched fabric as Renoir’s The Parisian Girl (1874, Société). Charles-François Daubigny’s The Fields in June (1874, Salon) and Pissarro’s June Morning in Pontoise (1873, Société) are both sunny summer landscapes laid out with on-the-fly brushwork. Both sides did flowers.

As for the celebration of leisure, the Salon seems to have been full of moony girls lounging around and people entertaining fluffy white lapdogs, while the artists we now call Impressionists were paying much more attention to the working world. The glinting light of Pissarro’s Hoarfrost (1873, Société) falls on an old man trudging down a road with a large bundle of wood on his back. The backlit fug of Impression, Sunrise was probably smog—the admirably informative exhibition catalog alerts readers to Stendhal’s description of the same vista, “permeated by the sooty brown smoke of the steamboats.” Pictured at labor, not at play, Degas’ dancers stand around splayfooted, bored and tired, adjusting their shoe ribbons, scratching an itch. Even the bourgeois family outing in Degas’ transcendently odd At the Races in the Countryside (1869, Société) is focused on work: Together in a carriage, husband, wife, and dog are all transfixed by the baby’s wet nurse, doing her job. As for the scenes of mothers and children, it is possible that later observers have overestimated the leisure involved.

Hoarfrost (1873), Camille Pissarro (© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt)

Jules-Émile Saintin’s Washerwoman (1874, Salon) is assertively a picture of urban working life, but in an entirely academic mode. The scene is “modern” in the same way that Alma-Tadema’s pharaoh was ancient, time-stamped by an array of meticulously rendered accessories. But the Alma-Tadema at least had the gravitas of tragedy. Saintin is content with smarm: He arranges his working girl awkwardly in the street, grinning coquettishly at the viewer while twirling a pole of white linens and hoisting her skirt to give a peek of ankle—the eternal trope of the trollop.

[Read: Why absolutely everyone hates Renoir]

Then there is art so wonderful and so peculiarly modern, it seems unfair that it went to the Salon. In contrast to Saintin’s washerwoman, Manet’s The Railway (1873) is reticent to the point of truculence. Against the backdrop of an iron railing, a little girl stands with her back to us, watching the steam of a train below, while next to her, a poker-faced young woman glances up from the book and sleeping puppy in her lap to meet our gaze. A bunch of grapes sits on the stone footing of the fence. The emotional tenor is ambiguous, the relationships between woman, child, dog, grapes, and train unclear. Everything is perfectly still and completely unsettled. Why was this at the Salon? Manet believed that appearing there was a necessary career move and declined to join in the Société event.

The Railway (1873), Édouard Manet (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art)

He had a point. The Société chose, in its egalitarian zeal, to have no jury and to give space to anyone who paid the modest membership fee. The exhibit ended up even more of a grab bag than the Salon, so alongside some of the most adventurous and lasting art of the 1870s, you got Antoine Ferdinand Attendu’s conventional still-life pile of dead birds, and Auguste Louis Marie Ottin’s marble head of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the great master of hard-edged Neoclassicism, made more than 30 years earlier.

One function of “Paris 1874” is to debunk the tale of the little exhibition that could. The “first Impressionist exhibition,” it turns out, wasn’t all that Impressionist (only seven of its 31 participants are commonly categorized as such). Many artists took part in both shows simultaneously, prioritizing career opportunities over stylistic allegiance. (Not only was organized avant-gardism not a thing before 1874; it appears not to have been a thing in 1874.) As for those famously annoyed reviews, the catalog explains that they came from a handful of critics who specialized in being annoyed, and that most of the modest attention the Société show received was neutral or even friendly. Impression, Sunrise was “barely noticed.” Just four works sold. Goliath wandered off without a scratch, and David went broke.

But debunking is a short-lived thrill. The real rewards of “Paris 1874” lie in the rising awareness one gets walking through the galleries of a new signal in the noise, a set of affinities beyond either the certainties of the Académie or the earthy truths of Realism, and even a hint of how the unpictured traumas of 1870–71 left their mark. We know about the highlights to come (Monet’s water lilies at Giverny are hanging just down the hall), but there is something much more riveting about the moment before everything shifts into focus. By contrast, later Impressionist shows (there were eight in all) knew what they were about. The standard checklist works there. In 1874, it wasn’t yet clear, but you can begin to see a kind of opening up, a sideways slip into letting light be light and paint be paint.

As the Salon-tagged items demonstrate, the battle over subject matter had abated by 1874. Myths and modernity were both admissible. The shift that followed had less to do with what was being painted than how. The most frequent complaint about Impressionist art concerned style—it was too “sketchy.” The preference for loose brushwork, the disregard for clean edges and smooth gradients, was seen as slapdash and lazy, as if the artists were handing in early drafts in place of a finished thesis. More than one painting in the Société show was compared to “palette scrapings.”

Now we like the slap and the dash. We tend to see those independent-minded brushstrokes as evidence not of diminished attention, but of attention homing in on a new target—a fresh fascination with the transitory fall of light, at the expense, perhaps, of the stable object it falls on. Like a shape seen in the distance, sketchiness has the power to suggest multiple realities at once. Monet’s dark-gray squiggle in the Le Havre water might be a rock or a boat; certainly it is a squiggle of paint. Emphasizing the physicality of the image—the gloppiness of the paint, the visible canvas below—calls attention to the instability of the illusion. Step backwards and it’s a harbor; step forward and it’s bits of colorful dried goo.

At the Races in the Countryside (1869), Edgar Degas (© 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Sketchiness wasn’t the only means of undermining pictorial certainty. Degas never went in for fluttering brushstrokes or elusive edges, but his Ballet Rehearsal (1874) is scattered with pentimenti—the ghosts of a former foot, the trace of an altered elbow, the shadow of a male observer removed from the scene. He had sketched the dancers from life, but then used and reused those drawings for years, reconfiguring them like paper dolls, exactly the way an academic artist might go about peopling a crowd scene. The all-important difference is that Degas shows how the trick is played. In At the Races in the Countryside, the carriage and family are placed so far down and to the right that the nose and shoulder of one of the horses fall off the canvas, as if the painting were a snapshot whose taker was jostled just as the shutter clicked. It’s a way of calling attention to the bucket of artifice and conventions on which painterly illusion depends. This is art being disarmingly honest about being dishonest.

What this fledgling Impressionism puts on offer, distinct from the works around it, is a kind of gentle disruption or incompleteness—a willingness to leave things half-said, an admission of ambiguity, not as a problem to be solved but as a truth to be treasured. Nowhere is this more compelling than in Morisot’s The Cradle (1872). A portrait of the artist’s sister Edma watching her sleeping daughter, it takes a soft subject—mother and child, linen and lace—and girds it with a tensile framework of planes, taut lines, and swooping catenaries. Look beyond the “femininity” and you can see the first steps of the dance with abstraction that would dominate 20th-century painting from Henri Matisse to Richard Diebenkorn. At least as astonishing, though, is the neutrality and distance of the expression on Edma’s face. It might be exhaustion, or reverie, or (because before her marriage, she too had been a gifted professional painter) dispassionate study. Think what you will.

The Cradle is not harrowing or angst-ridden. It doesn’t picture unpleasantness. But when Smee writes of Morisot’s pursuit of “a new language of lightness and evanescence—a language based in close observation, devoid of rhetoric or hysteria,” he’s talking about a response to 1870–71. Both the right-wing empire and the left-wing Commune had ended in pointless, bloody, self-inflicted tragedies. The survivors, at least some of them, had learned to mistrust big ideas. An art about nothing might seem a strange defense, but the act of paying attention to what is rather than what should be—to the particular and ephemeral rather than the abstract and eternal—could be a bulwark against the seductions of ideology.

Resistance, of necessity, adapts to circumstance. In China during the Cultural Revolution, when message-laden art was an instrument of the state, artists belonging to the No Name Group took to clandestine plein air painting in the French mode precisely because it “supported no revolutionary goals—it was hand-made, unique, intimate and personal,” the scholar and artist Chang Yuchen has written. “In this context nature was less a retreat than a chosen battlefield.”

I used to think that Impressionism’s just-rightness was simply a function of time’s passage—that its inventions had seeped so deeply into our culture that they felt comfy. But although familiarity might explain our ease, it doesn’t fully explain Impressionism’s continued hold: the sense that beyond being nice to look at, it still has something to say. The more time I spent in “Paris 1874,” the more I cooled on the soft-edged moniker “impressionist” and warmed to the bristlier “intransigent.” It was a term often applied to unrepentant Communards, but the most intransigent thing of all might just be refusing to tell people what to think.

The contemporary art world, like the world at large, has reentered a period of high moral righteousness. Major institutions and scrappy start-ups share the conviction that the job (or at least a job) of art is to instruct the public in values. Educators, publicists, and artists work hard to ensure that nobody gets left behind and nobody misses the point. But what if leaving the point unfixed is the point?

Whether all of this would have developed in the same way without the violence and disillusionment of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune is impossible to know. But there are worse lessons to derive from trauma than these: Take pleasure in your senses, question authority, look around you. Look again.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Dark Origins of Impressionism.”