When I lived in China, a decade ago, I often saw propaganda billboards covered in words that supposedly expressed the country’s values: Patriotism. Harmony. Equality. And … Democracy. Indeed, China claims to consider itself a democratic country. So do Russia, Cuba, Iran, and so on down the list of nations ranked by their level of commitment to rights and liberties. Even North Korea fancies itself part of the club. It’s right there in the official name: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

I thought of those Chinese billboards recently, when a postelection poll showed that many American voters touted the importance of democracy while supporting a candidate who had tried to overturn the results of the previous presidential election. According to a survey by the Associated Press, a full one-third of Trump voters said that democracy was their top issue. (Two-thirds of Harris voters said the same thing.) In a poll conducted before Joe Biden dropped out of the race, seven out of 10 uncommitted swing-state voters said they doubted that Donald Trump would accept the election results if he lost—but more people said they’d trust Trump to handle threats to democracy than said they’d trust Biden.

Almost all Americans say they support democracy. They even agree that it’s in trouble. But when researchers drill down, they find that different people have very different ideas about what democracy means and what threatens its survival, and that democracy is just one competing value among many. In the collective mind of U.S. voters, the concept of democracy appears to be so muddled, and their commitment to it so conditional, that it makes you wonder what, if anything, they’d do anything to stop its erosion—or whether they’d even notice that happening.

[Yoni Appelbaum: Americans aren’t practicing democracy anymore]

Americans perceive democracy through an almost completely partisan lens. In recent polls, Democrats tend to cite Trump—in particular, the likelihood of him seeking to subvert elections—as the biggest threat to democracy. They also point to gerrymandering, voter suppression, and Trump’s rhetoric about using the government to exact retribution as causes for concern. For Republicans, by contrast, threats to democracy take the form of mainstream media, voting by mail, immigration, and what they see as politically motivated prosecutions of Trump. Perhaps the best Rorschach test is voter-ID laws, which get characterized as “election integrity” or “voter suppression” depending on the perspective: Republicans see them as a commonsense way to make elections more accurate and accountable, while Democrats see them as a ploy to disenfranchise voters who don’t have state-issued identification. No surprise, then, that campaigning on a platform of preserving democracy didn’t work for Kamala Harris. Invoking the term to rally support assumes a shared understanding of what it means.

Even more troubling, American voters rarely prioritize democracy over other considerations. For the most part, we’re willing to overlook mischief that undermines democracy as long as our own team is the one doing it. A 2020 study in the American Political Science Review by Matthew H. Graham and Milan W. Svolik of Yale University found that only 3.5 percent of Americans would vote against a candidate whose policies they otherwise support if that candidate took antidemocratic actions, like gerrymandering or reducing the number of polling stations in an unfriendly district. Another survey found that when left-wing voters were presented with hypothetical undemocratic behavior by right-wing politicians—prohibiting protests, say, or giving private groups the ability to veto legislation—62 percent of them considered it undemocratic. But when the same behavior was attributed to left-wing politicians, only 36 percent saw it as undemocratic.

[Graeme Wood: Only about 3.5 percent of Americans care about democracy]

Some scholars have dubbed the phenomenon “democratic hypocrisy.” Others, however, argue that voters aren’t pretending that the antidemocratic behavior they’re supporting is democratic; they really feel that way. “People are pretty good at reasoning their way to believing that whatever they want to happen is the democratic outcome,” Brendan Nyhan, a political-science professor at Dartmouth, told me. That’s especially true if you can tell yourself that this could be your last chance before the other guy abolishes elections altogether. We just have to sacrifice a little democracy for the sake of democracy, the thinking goes. Graham, who is now an assistant professor of political science at Temple University, has studied the reaction to the 2020 presidential election and the “Stop the Steal” movement. “Our conclusion was that pretty much everyone who says in polls that the election was stolen actually believes it,” he told me.

The disturbing implication of the political-science research is that if the typical forms of incipient democratic backsliding did occur, at least half the country likely wouldn’t notice or care. Stacking the bureaucracy with loyalists, wielding law enforcement against political enemies, bullying critics into silence—these measures, all credibly threatened by President-Elect Trump, might not cut through the fog of partisan polarization. Short of tanks in the streets, most people might not perceive the destruction of democratic norms in their day-to-day life. And if Trump and his allies lose elections or fail to enact the most extreme pieces of their agenda, those data points will be held up as proof that anyone crying democratic erosion is a Chicken Little. “This is a debate that’s going to be very dumb,” Nyhan said.

You might think that, in a democracy, support for democracy itself would be nonnegotiable—that voters would reject any candidate or leader who didn’t clear that bar, because they would recognize that weakening democracy threatens their way of life. But that simple story isn’t always true. The job of genuinely pro-democracy politicians is to convince voters that democratic norms and institutions really are connected to more tangible issues that they care about—that an America with less democracy would most likely also be one with more economic inequality, for example, and fewer individual liberties.

The alternative to making and remaking the case for democracy is a descent into apathetic nihilism. Just look at the Chinese media’s coverage of the U.S. election. A video shared by China News Service said that whoever won would merely be “the face of the ruling elite, leaving ordinary people as mere spectators.” The state broadcaster China Central Television claimed that the election was plagued by “unprecedented chaos.” That kind of talk makes sense coming from democracy’s enemies. The danger is when democracies themselves start to believe it.

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Donald Trump’s decision to tap Pete Hegseth for his Cabinet is one of his nominations that some are reading as pure provocation. Aside from being a veteran, Hegseth has little qualification to lead the Department of Defense. He’s a Fox News host who has written a screed against DEI in the military. He has faced an allegation of sexual assault, which he denies, but the Trump team is not balking. “We look forward to his confirmation,” Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson, said in reply to news reports about the allegation. At another time in our history, many lines in Hegseth’s latest book alone might have disqualified him on the grounds of being too juvenile. In the introduction of The War on Warriors, he criticizes the “so-called elites directing the military today”: “Sometime soon, a real conflict will break out, and red-blooded American men will have to save their elite candy-asses.”

Focusing on scandals and inflammatory rhetoric, however, may serve as a diversion from a bigger, more alarming strategy. The real danger of Hegseth’s appointment lies in the role he might play in Trump’s reimagined military. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with the staff writer Tom Nichols about Trump’s grander plan to centralize control. “He’s going for the trifecta of putting nakedly loyalist, unqualified people into these jobs as a way of saying to everyone in those departments, I’m in control. I run these. You’re going to do what I say. And forget the Constitution. Forget the law. Forget everything except loyalty to Donald Trump,” Nichols says.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: There is such an overwhelming amount of noise around Donald Trump’s proposed nominees—their histories, their scandals, their beliefs—that it’s easy to lose sight of one important pattern, which is Trump placing people in charge of critical Cabinet positions who are utterly loyal to him, so ultimately the real control of those agencies lies with the White House.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Today we are going to talk about a key pillar of that strategy to centralize control: Trump’s plans for the military.

Rosin: Okay. Ready?

Tom Nichols: Ready.

Rosin: Our guest is staff writer Tom Nichols, who’s a professor emeritus at the Naval War College.

Tom, welcome to the show.

Nichols: Thanks, Hanna.

Rosin: So there is so much to talk about in terms of Trump’s proposed appointments, but today we’re going to talk about military- and security-related appointments because they are such high-stakes positions. From Trump’s choice during this transition period, what are you picking up about his attitude towards the military establishment?

Nichols: I think his appointments, particularly for secretary of defense—and some of the rumors that have been floated out of Mar-a-Lago about prosecuting military officers and wholesale firings—these are really direct shots at the senior officer corps of the United States, and I think of it as a direct attack on our traditions of civil-military affairs.

He is trying to send a message that from now on, America’s military officers are supposed to be loyal to him, first and foremost, and not the Constitution, because he still carries a pretty serious grudge against a lot of top military and civilian people during his first term as president who got in his way—or he thinks got in his way—about doing things like, you know, shooting protesters and using the military in the streets of the United States. So he’s sending a pretty clear message that this time around, he’s not going to brook any of that kind of interference.

Rosin: So you think the source of his resistance or hostility towards the military are specific actions that they prevented him from taking, or is it things that, say, generals have said about him—negative things that they’ve said about him?

Nichols: Oh, I don’t think we have to pick between those. He believes in a world where he has total control over everything, because that’s how he’s lived his life. So, of course, he’s angry about all of that stuff—reportedly, you know, going back to things like Bob Woodward’s accounts, where he calls the defense secretary and says, I want to kill Bashar [al-]Assad, the leader of Syria, and James Mattis says, Yeah, okay. We’ll get right on that, and then hangs up the phone and says, We’re not doing that.

Rosin: Right. So he doesn’t want anyone to say, We’re not doing that, anymore?

Nichols: No matter what it is and no matter how unconstitutional or illegal the order, he doesn’t want anybody to say, We’re not doing that. And remember, the first time he ran, he said things like, If I tell my generals—“my generals,” which is a phrase he loves—if I tell my generals to torture people, they’ll do it. And of course, immediately, a lot of very senior officers said, No. No, sir. We will not do that. That’s an illegal order. We can’t do that. He doesn’t want to hear any of that guff this time around.

Rosin: So one thing is: He doesn’t want any future resistance from military leaders who might, you know, counter things he wants done. Another is: He seems to be purging from the past. NBC reported this weekend that they were drawing up a list of military officers who were involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, seeing whether they could be court-martialed. How do those two things fit together? Why is that part of the picture?

Nichols: Well, the most important thing about that report from NBC is: It’s not about Afghanistan. If it really were about that and people were looking at it closely—you know, you have to remember that a big part of why that was such a mess, and Biden bears a lot of responsibility for that bungled pullout, but Trump’s the guy who negotiated the agreement and demanded that everybody stick to it.

So this is not about Afghanistan. This is about two things: It’s telling former officers who crossed him that I am going to get even with you. I think a lot of this is just him trying to cut a path to get to people like Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And it’s also a warning for the future that says, No matter what you do, no matter where you go, even if you retire, I can reach out and touch you. So if you’re a colonel or a captain or a general or an admiral, and you think about crossing me, just remember, I will get you for it.

And that’s what I mean about an attack on civil-military relations. Because the other problem, and the reason this whole Afghanistan thing is such nonsense, is these were officers who were following the legal and lawful orders of their commander in chief. If this report is confirmed, it’s a huge muscle flex to say, There is no senior military officer who’s beyond my retribution if he doesn’t, or she doesn’t, do what I want done—no matter how illegal, no matter how unconstitutional, no matter how immoral. All I want to hear out of you is, Yes, sir, and that’s it.

Rosin: Can he do this? In other words, can you reach deep down enough in the military hierarchy to actually accomplish what he’s trying to accomplish?

Nichols: Sure. It doesn’t take many people. There’s a bunch of kind of legalistic stuff that’s going to be difficult. The military—and I’ve actually counseled other people not to get wrapped up in the legality stuff, because that’s not what this is about. This is an effort at political intimidation. But you’d have to find people who are going to hold an Article 32 hearing. It’s kind of like—the military has its own version of, like, a grand jury, and you’d have to find people willing to do that, but you could reach down and find some ambitious and not very principled lieutenant colonel somewhere who says, Sure. I’ll be that prosecutor. I’ll do that.

You don’t need thousands and thousands of people. You just need a handful of men and women who are willing to do this kind of stuff. And yeah. Sure—he can get it done. Remember, this is the president who decided that the military didn’t have the authority to punish its own war criminals and intervened and started handing out dispensations.

Rosin: Yeah. All right. Well, let’s talk about someone who encouraged him not to punish those war criminals.

Nichols: Right.

Rosin: And that is Pete Hegseth, who he nominated for secretary of defense. Tom, in the circles of military people you know, how did people react to that nomination?

Nichols: Well, I’ve been careful not to ask anybody I know who’s still serving, because I don’t want to put them on the spot. But a lot of the people that I worked with and a lot of my colleagues from my days working with the military, I think the first reaction was something along the lines of: If this is a joke, it’s not funny. Are we being pranked? Are we being punked? I mean, the idea of Pete Hegseth running the Defense Department was so spectacularly bizarre—it’s right up there with Matt Gaetz running Justice.

And so now, as it’s sinking in, I think there’s a real horror here—and not just about what could happen in foreign policy. I mean, my biggest clench in my stomach is thinking about a nuclear crisis where the president really needs the secretary of defense—needs this sober and mature and decent man to give him advice—and he turns, and what he gets is Pete Hegseth. You know—

Rosin: Let’s say who Pete Hegseth is, now that you’ve painted the picture—

Nichols: Well, let me just add, though, that for a lot of my military friends and former military friends, there’s a whole other problem, which is: Unlike other departments, the secretary of defense holds the lives of millions of Americans in his hands.

Rosin: Wait. What do you mean? You mean because, because—why? What do you mean by that?

Nichols: Well, because those folks who serve in our military are completely dependent on the DOD for their housing, their medical care, where they’re going to live, what places they get assigned to, you know, all of that stuff. The SecDef doesn’t make those decisions individually every day, but if he turns out to be a terrible manager, the quality of life—and perhaps the actual lives of people in the military—can be really put under a lot of stress and danger by somebody who just doesn’t know what he’s doing.

It’s not like—Ben Carson’s a good example, right? Ben Carson was sent to HUD. He had no idea what he was doing. The department pretty much ran itself. And it’s not like the daily life of hundreds of thousands of people were going to be affected because Ben Carson didn’t know what the hell he was doing. That’s different than people who live under a chain of command to which they are sworn to obey, that goes all the way to the E-Ring of the Pentagon, to the chair Pete Hegseth would be sitting in. That’s a very different situation and very dangerous.

Rosin: Yeah, I see what you’re saying. I mean, at HUD, you go home at 5 o’clock.

Nichols: Exactly.

Rosin: It’s not like that—it’s not like that in the Department of Defense. So it’s totally obvious to you and the people you know why he’s unqualified. Can we just quickly make that case? So he was a weekend host, Fox & Friends. He did end up serving overseas, and I think he has a Bronze Star.

Nichols: He was a major. Yeah, he actually was a major. I think he has two Bronze Stars. Look, I’m, you know—

Rosin: So how does that compare to other people who’ve held this position?

Just so we know.

Nichols: Well, other people who have held these positions had long experience in the national-security and national-defense realm as senior executives who have come all the way up. Look—I think Don Rumsfeld was one of the worst secretaries of defense ever, but he had served in related capacities and had administered a gigantic company that he was the head of. Now, that doesn’t mean he had good judgment, but he—you know, the Defense Department ran every day, and things got done every day.

Ash Carter was a well-known—for, you know, 30 years—a well-known defense intellectual who had contributed substantively to everything about defense, from conventional forces to nuclear weapons. I think one thing people need to understand is how much of dealing with the defense department is just dealing with the intricacies of money.

Hegseth’s going to sit at the top of all that, with no experience in any of this—not in budgeting, not in strategy, not in dealing with allies. I keep having these just head-spinning moments where I think about the first day in the office, and Pete Hegseth has to make calls to his equivalents, to his opposite numbers, as they do in this job. That’s another thing that you don’t do if you’re the secretary of HUD—you don’t call all the housing secretaries on the planet to say hello. Hegseth is going to be on the phone with the Russian minister of defense. He’s going to be on the phone with the Chinese minister of defense. The people that have had these jobs have had exposure to folks like that. This is a guy who’s done none of that— nothing. There’s literally zero background.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, what he lacks in qualifications and experience and everything else, he seems to make up for in this very forceful ideology that he has. I spent the weekend reading his latest book, [The] War on Warriors. Can we just talk about it for a minute?

I mean, here’s what I understand about it. He tells this kind of alternate history of the downfall of the American military. It basically adds up to DEI. It goes: While we were fighting in Afghanistan, we missed the real war, which was happening at home, which was, you know, women in combat roles and DEI all over the place—so basically, a war against what he calls “normal dudes,” who have always fought and won our wars.

Now, I’m going to torture you by reading one passage, and then I would love to get your opinion about how widespread this ideology is, this idea that the culture war has utterly shaped the military. Is he an outlier, or do a lot of people think this? So here’s the quote: “DEI amplifies differences, creates grievances, [and] excludes anyone who won’t bow down to the cultural Marxist revolution ripping through the Pentagon. Forget DEI—the acronym should be DIE or IED. It will kill our military worse than any IED ever could.”

Where do these ideas come from? Is this just sprouted from his own head, or is there—inside the military, as far as you know—like, a grand resistance against DEI initiatives?

Nichols: This comes from, like, morning editorial meetings at Fox.

Rosin: Uh-huh. (Laughs.)

Nichols: Because I worked with senior military officers, including a lot of my students who had just come back from deployments, and you just didn’t hear anybody talk this way about, you know, Marxism rampant in the Pentagon and DEI is destroying us—in part, because a lot of those folks were standing right next to people that Hegseth would say were DEI promotions. This is kind of the out-of-control bro culture that Hegseth came up in, and some of it’s just generational, I suppose, within the military. But what I found is actually that the military, for all of its flaws, is a pretty meritocratic institution.

Have there been cycles of this, where there’s a lot of sensitivity training and DEI issues? Yeah, of course, because we’re a more diverse country. I’m sorry, but welcome to the world of the 21st century. And what Hegseth and other guys are doing in that book—which is just kind of a big, primal, bro-culture yawp—is saying, I just don’t like this.

So I just think the idea that somehow Hegseth—he wasn’t chosen because of this. He was chosen because he’s a fawning sycophant to Donald Trump. He looks good on TV, which is really important to Trump. And he basically has made it clear, he’ll do anything Trump tells him to do, which is—I think you see this in all of Trump’s appointments.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So to summarize: He hates DEI. He pushed Trump to intervene in the case of those service members who were accused of war crimes.

What is this reimagined military? Like, how do you think Trump sees a reimagined military? What is the American military for? What is it doing under his vision? I mean, if it’s just window dressing—like, he wants a nice parade, and he wants a lot of military officers parading with him, and he wants it to look a certain way—that’s one thing. But if the intention is to use it for mass deportations or for turning against internal protesters, then that’s different. Then we’re living in a different country.

Nichols: And he just said that, right? He said, I’m going to do mass deportations, and I’m going to get the military involved. And one thing I can tell you that I know from more than 25 years of teaching military officers: They hate the idea of any internal role. The ethos of the American military officer is that they are there to defend the United States and not to be in the streets of the United States. And this is an old tradition that goes back a long way. And Trump just doesn’t care about that. He thinks it’s his private security force to be ordered around at his beck and call.

Rosin: I will say, about Hegseth: Most of the things in his book did not surprise me. The one thing that did surprise me is: It does seem to be a sustained argument for why the left is the actual enemy, like a foreign enemy. He talks about how they move, how they fight, how to root them out. I mean, the language is very resonant with Trump’s idea of “the enemy from within.”

Nichols: Right. I mean, part of the problem I had with it, you know, is that sometimes I—you just kind of stop and say, This is childish, right? That it comes across as this really sort of adolescent fantasy of, you know, the “internal enemy,” and how, you know, Christian warriors like me are going to save America, and all that stuff.

Rosin: And what men do and what women do and all that.

Nichols: Well, that’s the thing. I think, interestingly enough, if there’s stuff in the book that could really hurt him in terms of his nomination, ironically, it is the utter contempt with which he speaks of women not being in combat. And, of course, Hegseth knows better. I mean, in a foreign deployment, there’s a lot of places where a combat role and a noncombat role are separated by yards. Just ask Tammy Duckworth.

But, again, it’s this culture of, What would his future—because you asked what Trump’s future Army would look like. But, again, Hegseth—and I keep coming back to this word adolescent or juvenile—it’s lots of tough white guys with, you know, beautiful women cheering them on, going into battle from foreign shores to the streets of Baltimore or San Francisco, if that’s what it takes, all in the name of this kind of civilizational rescue.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, we move from defense to intelligence. Who is Tulsi Gabbard, and what are her qualifications for the director of national intelligence?

[Break]

Rosin: Tulsi Gabbard. Let’s move on to her. She’s his pick for director of national intelligence. She also served in the military, the Hawaii National Guard. You’ve called her a national-security risk, but before we get into that, what does the director of national intelligence do? Why was that office founded?

Nichols: Right. After 9/11, after all the reports and postmortems, one concern was that every part of the American intelligence community, and there’s, like, a dozen and a half agencies that do this stuff—NSA, CIA, the FBI—that they weren’t talking to each other. I have to say, back at the time—I was against this, and I still am—they bolted on this big office called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and that DNI is supposed to ride herd on all of these intelligence agencies.

Now you’re supposed to have this one person who represents the community, who kind of straightens out these internal squabbles and has access to everything, because the DNI sits on top of the CIA, the NSA, and all the other agencies. And that’s a really potentially powerful office.

Rosin: Okay, so good timing. It’s now a big and powerful office. That’s the job. What’s your reaction to the pick?

Nichols: Well, she literally has no experience in any of this—nothing, zero, like, not even tangentially. Her supporters say, Well, she’s a lieutenant colonel. Yes, and her deployments were as support missions to a medical unit, a police unit, and a civil-affairs unit.

She’s, even in the military, never had anything to do with intelligence, intelligence gathering, analysis—nothing. Her only other qualifications are that, you know, she was in Congress and attended committee hearings. But she wasn’t on the Intelligence Committee. So you have somebody who has no executive experience, has no intelligence experience, has no background in the field but is, just like Pete Hegseth, totally loyal, totally supportive, and looks good on TV.

Rosin: Right. And why is she a security risk?

Nichols: Because her views about people like Assad and Putin would really be disqualifying.

Rosin: Can you just—what are her views that she’s voiced? What has she said?

Nichols: Right. Putin is misunderstood. We basically caused the Ukraine war. There’s a kind of seriousness issue with Tulsi Gabbard, too. I find her sort of ethereal and kind of weird, to be honest with you. But she said, Zelensky and Putin and Biden—they all need to embrace the spirit of aloha.

Rosin: Oh, boy. Yeah.

Nichols: Yeah. So, you know, I’m sorry, but if you have a top-secret, code-word, compartmented-information clearance, I don’t really want to hear about how you think you should help Putin embrace the spirit of aloha.

With Assad, it’s even scarier. I mean, she has been an apologist and a denier of some of the terrible things he’s done. She met with him outside of government channels when she was a congressperson, and she took a lot of flak for that. And she said, Well, I just think you have to listen to everybody. You can’t solve these problems unless you go and listen.

Rosin: Yeah. So as far as you could tell, what’s the long game here? Is Trump just looking for someone who will stay out of his way so he can communicate with whatever foreign leaders he wants in whatever way he wants, and there won’t be anybody looking over his shoulder?

Nichols: There’s some of that. He resists adult supervision in everything, as he has in his whole life. But I think there’s something much more sinister going on here. If you really want to subvert a democracy, if you really want to undermine the thousands and thousands of people who work in the federal workforce and do things that are pretty scary—you know, investigate your enemies, send troops into the streets, and so on—the three departments you absolutely need are Justice, Defense, and the intelligence community.

Justice because you control the national cops, the FBI, and the national courts. The military because that is a huge source of coercive power, obviously. And the intelligence community because information is power, but also because the intelligence community is one of the other two branches that actually has people in it who have some control over coercive means, who have some ability to use violence.

So I think that he’s going for the trifecta of putting nakedly loyalist, unqualified people into these jobs as a way of saying to everyone in those departments, I’m in control. I run these. You’re going to do what I say. And forget the Constitution. Forget the law. Forget everything except loyalty to Donald Trump. And that means you at the CIA, you at the FBI, you at the Justice Department, the courts, the cops, the military. And I think that’s what’s going on here.

And I’ll add one other thing: If all of these nominees get turfed, that doesn’t mean the people coming in will be better.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. You know what this is reminding me of? Our colleague Peter Pomerantsev, who writes about autocracy and democracy—he always talks about how fear and humor are closely linked in an eroding democracy. Because there is a sort of, like, troll-joke factor to some of these nominations, but underneath it is just this chilling fear that you described. Like, a strategy of the triumvirate of power, you know?

Nichols: Absolutely. And they get you used to it by doing things that are so shockingly unthinkable that it becomes thinkable.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I mean, imagine if we were sitting here, you know, five years ago. Actually, let’s talk about Hegseth again for one moment: Hegseth’s extramarital affairs apparently helped cost him the leadership of the VA.

Rosin: Yeah, you know, Tom, I was remembering that when I was first a reporter, the kind of thing that would sink a nominee was you failed to pay your nanny’s taxes.

Nichols: Or John Tower—drinks too much, hard drinker.

Rosin: And now we have a nominee with a sexual-assault allegation. Now, he denies the allegation, but he did end up paying the woman who accused him as part of a nondisclosure agreement. And it’s like, Nah, he’s fine, you know.

Nichols: Yeah, I know: Whatever. I mean, again, writing the kind of book he wrote would almost—the preface to that book should have been, I want to never be confirmed for anything ever.

Rosin: Right.

Nichols: Right? And this was my argument about why we shouldn’t have elected Donald Trump back in 2016. He wears down our standards to the point where vulgarity and crudeness and criminality and incompetence all just become part of our daily life. When I look back ten years, just in a decade of my life, I think, The amount of change that has happened in the political environment in America is astonishing, and purely because we have signed on to this kind of, as you say, sort of comical and trashy but chilling change, you know, step by step by step, every day. We didn’t do this all in one year. We did this, like, you know, the frog-boiling exercise.

Rosin: Yeah, I feel that way about the last two weeks. You glided by this, but I just want to say: Unless Trump gets around the usual rules, all of these nominees do still need to be approved by the Senate.

Nichols: Right.

Rosin: So you would likely need four senators to oppose. What are the chances of that happening?

Nichols: My big fear—you know, I suppose I could start every sentence these days with, “My big fear,” you know. (Laughs.) One of my many fears is that Gaetz is the political equivalent of a flash-bang grenade that is just thrown into the room, and everybody’s blinded, and their ears are ringing, and they’re like, Oh my God, Matt Gaetz. What kind of crazy nonsense was this? And when everybody kind of gets off the floor and collects themselves, Trump says, Okay, fine, I’ll give you Gaetz. And then he gets everybody else.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I’m writing something right now, actually, where I argue that the Senate should take these four terrible nominations—Gaetz, Gabbard, Hegseth, and throw in Robert F. Kennedy [Jr.], who is not a threat to the existence of the United States but to the health and well-being of millions of its children—just take these four as a package, and say, Look—you’re gonna get a lot of other stuff. You’re not getting these four. That’s the end of it. Because if they go one by one by one, Trump will wear them down. And I think that’s what I’m worried about. Now, with that said, the Senate, you know, my old neighborhood—the one thing that the senators love is the Senate.

Rosin: Meaning what?

Nichols: Meaning, they love the institution.

Rosin: They love to have the power of the Senate, the decorum of the Senate.

Nichols: Yeah. They believe in the institution. I mean, you know, you can see it with somebody like Susan Collins. Susan Collins loves being a senator and loves the romance of the Senate itself more than, you know, than anything. And they don’t like a president walking in and saying, Listen—I want some guys, and the way you’re going to do this is with a recess appointment, where you’re going to go out and take a walk. They don’t like that. And I wonder if John Thune really wants to begin his time as Senate majority leader—one of the most important positions in the American government—being treated like a stooge.

Rosin: Well, that’s what we’ll be watching for. Thank you for joining me today, Tom.

Nichols: My pleasure, Hanna. Always nice to talk with you.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Sara Krolewski, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Videos circulating on Chinese social media show screaming children and people lying injured on the ground.

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As president-elect, Donald Trump has the right to name the people he wants in his Cabinet. Some of Trump’s nominations, such as Senator Marco Rubio to lead the State Department, are completely ordinary. A few are ideological red meat for Republicans. Others are gifts to Trump loyalists.

Four of these nominees, however, are dangerous to the security of the United States and to the well-being of its people: Pete Hegseth (Defense), Tulsi Gabbard (Office of the Director of National Intelligence), Matt Gaetz (Justice), and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services). The Senate must turn back these nominations, and do so en bloc.

The Gaetz and Kennedy nominations are apparently already in trouble, and more than enough has been written about them. Gaetz is an accused sexual predator (he has long denied the allegations); ironically, he is the least dangerous of this pack. Yes, as attorney general he would green-light every raving demand from MAGA world for investigations into Trump’s enemies, but in a strange blessing, he is also likely to be completely incompetent. The Department of Justice, as Trump himself learned during his first term, is packed to the rafters with very sharp lawyers who would almost certainly jam up any of Gaetz’s unconstitutional orders. Gaetz’s tenure at Justice would be a national humiliation and destructive to the rule of law, but it would also likely be very short.

The RFK Jr. nomination is, in a word, pathetic. Most of his views are little more than pure anti-science kookery, and if he is confirmed, Americans—and especially their children—will be in peril from this anti-vaccine crusader. But he would be a danger to the health of individual Americans (especially those who watch too much TV and spend too much time on the internet) rather than to the continued existence of the United States.

Which brings me to Gabbard and Hegseth.

Tulsi Gabbard, as I wrote last week, is unqualified for the job of DNI, but she is also a security risk: I have held security clearances for most of my adult life, and had I worked in any federal office next to her, I would have had no compunction about raising her as an “insider threat” because of her political views and her shady international connections. (As a member of Congress in 2017, she held meetings with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad outside of U.S. government channels—an obvious problem for anyone seeking a senior role in national security.)

Gaetz, Kennedy, and Gabbard are terrible choices. The Hegseth nomination, however, is easily the most dangerous and irresponsible of all of Trump’s picks. (Gabbard is a significant hazard, but she would not have a gigantic army at her disposal, and she would not be involved with the control of nuclear weapons.) Like the other three in this group, Hegseth is shockingly unqualified for the job he’s been asked to take, but in this case, the Senate is faced with a proposal to place a TV talking head at the top of the Pentagon and insert him into the nuclear chain of command.

Hegseth has made personal choices that make him unfit to lead the DOD, including his extramarital affairs (which apparently helped tank his chances to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in Trump’s first administration) and a payoff to a woman who claimed that he’d sexually assaulted her. He denies the assault allegation, but in any case, adultery is a criminal violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and can be a career-ending mistake for a member of the armed forces.

I will leave aside whether Hegseth’s tattoos identify him as a white supremacist. Hegseth denies the claim. But some of Hegseth’s ink is popular with extremists; that’s why one of his own military comrades reported him as an insider threat in the first place—and not, as Hegseth and some whining conservatives claim, because he is being persecuted as a Christian. I knew many people in federal service with patriotic tattoos. (I have one myself, and no, it’s none of your business where it is.) I am also a Christian who wears a cross—one that I had blessed in a church—every day. That’s not what any of this is about.

Hegseth’s defenders seem unable to understand that neither Hegseth nor anyone else has a right to be the secretary of defense: If the nominee made choices earlier in life that would now undermine his effectiveness in the job, then that’s his problem, not the Pentagon’s. But even if Hegseth were not an example of a sexist, MAGA-bro culture—his statements about women in the military are particularly noxious—the Senate is still faced with the problem that he’s utterly unqualified.

A former Army major, he has no serious background in national-security or defense issues beyond his military service. (And how that service ended is apparently now a matter of some dispute.) He has not worked anywhere in the defense world: not in any of its agencies, not with any of its industries, not with any of its workforce in any capacity. He has never managed anything of any significant size.

Not only would he be incapable of administering America’s largest government department, but he’d also be in a position of terrifying responsibility for which he is unprepared. Imagine an international crisis, perhaps only a year or two from now. President Trump is facing a situation that could be rife with danger to the United States and our allies—perhaps even one that involves nuclear threats. At this dire moment, Trump turns to …

Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard?

The Senate must do everything in its constitutional power to stop this. Trump won the election, but no president has an absolute right to his Cabinet nominations: The Constitution requires the Senate to consent to those nominations. Trump has already warned that if the Senate balks, he will subvert this process by using “recess appointments,” in effect a demand that the Senate take a walk and let Trump do whatever he wants—to consent, in other words, to autocracy.

Incoming Majority Leader John Thune and others who still might care about their duty to the nation have time to go to Trump, right now, and tell him that these four nominations are DOA. They could tell Trump that it is in his own interest—the only interest he recognizes—not to risk multiple defeats. And if the Senate folds and decides to take these up one at a time, Trump will wear them down, likely accepting that Gaetz must be a Succession-style “blood sacrifice,” in return for which Trump gets everyone else. For Thune—who, one assumes, does not wish to begin his tenure as a statelier version of Senator Tommy Tuberville, the MAGA obstructionist who held up military promotions for months—accepting such a deal would be a huge strategic error.

Whomever Trump nominates as replacements will likely be dangerous in their own way. But these four nominees have to be stopped—and right now.

Related:

The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

He was the world’s longest-held death-row inmate. He was also innocent. How Trump could make Congress go away for a while Thomas Chatterton Williams: Is wokeness one big power grab? Europe braces for Trump.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden authorized Ukraine yesterday to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles for strikes inside Russia, according to U.S. officials. Russia said today that the decision would escalate international tensions and add “fuel to the fire” of the war. Trump confirmed on Truth Social that his administration is planning to declare a national emergency and enlist the military to carry out a mass-deportation program targeting undocumented immigrants. Trump picked Brendan Carr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission and a Project 2025 contributor, to lead the FCC.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Learning where famous musicians sleep and what they eat can feel like finally glimpsing the unknowable, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Justin Chung for The Atlantic

How Jimmy O. Yang Became a Main Character

By Shirley Li

Jimmy O. Yang had been trying to make it as an actor for years—cobbling together bit parts in network sitcoms, auditioning for nameless roles such as “Chinese Teenager #1”—when he was cast in a new HBO series. The show, Silicon Valley, was a comedy about a group of programmers at a Bay Area start-up incubator; his character, Jian-Yang, was an app developer who spoke in broken English.

It was a small guest role, but he saw it as an opportunity.

Read the full article.

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When Americans went to the polls last week, they wanted cheaper food. Groceries really are more expensive than they used to be, and grocery costs are how many Americans make sense of the state of the economy at large. In September, Pew Research Center reported that three-quarters of Americans were “very concerned” about them. And this month, many of those people voted for Donald Trump, the candidate who touted his distance from the economic policy of the last four years, and who promised repeatedly to lower prices.

But two of Trump’s other big promises—mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and more restrictive trade regulations—would almost certainly raise food prices, economists told me. American-grown staples would get more expensive owing to a domestic labor shortage, and imported foods would too, because they would be subject to double-digit import taxes. This cause-and-effect dynamic “could be my final exam,” Rachel Friedberg, who teaches “Principles of Economics” at Brown University, told me. “It’s just very straightforward principles of economics.”

The main issue is labor. American farming depends on undocumented workers; if the Trump administration were to enact “the largest deportation operation in American history” and deport every undocumented immigrant living in the United States, somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the people who plant our crops and pick our fruit would leave the domestic workforce. Proponents of immigration enforcement typically say these jobs could be taken by documented or American-born workers. But the farm industry is already in a prolonged labor crisis, and undocumented immigrants tend to be willing to work for less money—that’s why employers hire them, even though it’s illegal. Fewer workers means higher wages means higher prices, straight up.

[Read: Trump signals that he’s serious about mass deportation]

Some farms might be able to get by shorthanded, at least for a little while. Some might embrace technology more quickly, investing in automated systems that could help fill the labor gap. But that would take time, and as David Anderson, a Texas A&M University agricultural economist, told me, “You gotta get the cows milked and fed every day.” America’s agricultural system relies on hands and feet, arms and legs, day in and day out.

If the Trump administration does, in fact, deport millions of people, produce prices would likely increase the most, Bradley Rickard, an agricultural economist at Cornell University, told me in an email, because “labor represents a significant share of total costs.” Prices would probably go up quickest and most dramatically for the crops that are most labor-intensive to harvest: strawberries, mushrooms, asparagus, cherries. So would those for the foods farmed in California, which grows three-quarters of the fruit and nuts, and a third of the vegetables, produced domestically, and is home to about half of the country’s undocumented agricultural workers.

Mass deportations would also drive up prices for dairy and meat, whose industries have also been in a labor shortage, for at least the past half decade. According to a 2022 analysis from the American Immigration Council, which advocates for immigrants and seeks to shape immigration policy, a scarcity of workers led the median wage in the dairy and meat sectors to increase 33.7 percent from 2019 to 2022, and prices to rise between 4.5 and 7 percent. In 2015, Anderson and some colleagues conducted a survey on behalf of the dairy industry and found that eliminating immigrants from the sector would reduce production, put farms out of business, and cause retail milk prices to increase by about 90 percent.

Anderson’s study is 10 years old, and assumed a total loss of all immigrant labor, documented and undocumented. Last week, he told me that he has no reason to believe the dynamic wouldn’t hold to a lesser degree if a smaller amount of the workforce were deported now. “We wouldn’t be able to produce all the stuff that we do today. Less production means less supplies,” he said, “and less supplies means food prices would go up.”

Immigration policy affects food that is grown domestically. But about 15 percent of the American food supply is imported, including about 60 percent of fresh fruit, 80 percent of seafood, 90 percent of avocados, and 99 percent of coffee. Our reliance on, or taste for, imported goods has ticked up steadily over the past few decades, as we have become accustomed to Italian olive oil and raspberries in winter. On the campaign trail, Trump proposed taxing these—and all—imported goods, in an attempt to raise domestic production and to reduce the deficit. If his plan goes through, Chinese imports—which include large amounts of the fish, seafood, garlic, spices, tea, and apple juice we consume—would be subject to 60 to 100 percent tariffs. All other imports would be subject to 10 to 20 percent tariffs. Those taxes would be passed onto consumers, especially in the short term, as domestic production ramps up (if it can ramp up), and especially if undocumented immigrants are simultaneously leaving the workforce. “There’s no safety valve,” Marcus Noland, the executive vice president and director of studies at the nonpartisan think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics, told me. “If you start deporting people, it’s not like you can import the product and make up for it if you have these tariffs.”

[Read: The immigration-wage myth]

We all need food to live, and all food needs to come from somewhere. The process by which it makes it to our plate is complicated, resource-intensive, and subject to the vagaries of policy, weather, disease, and labor supply. The system does not have a large amount of slack built into it. If sticker-shocked milk fans start gravitating toward other drinks, those prices will also go up. If California’s berry industry is squeezed by a labor shortage, and the market for imported berries is squeezed by tariffs, berries will cost more.

And although farms are the biggest employer of undocumented workers, these workers are also a major part of the mechanism that processes, butchers, cooks, and delivers our food, from the sprawling poultry-processing plants of the South to the local fried-chicken place. The restaurant industry—which employs more than 800,000 undocumented immigrants, according to a Center for American Progress analysis—is already struggling to fill jobs, which is driving higher prices; even a small reduction in the workforce would increase operating costs, which will almost definitely result in either restaurants closing or costs being passed onto eaters.

The immigration and tariff policies, in other words, would affect all the food we eat: snacks, school lunches, lattes, pet food, fast food, fancy restaurant dinners. People will not stop eating if food gets more expensive; they will just spend more of their money on it.

Trump’s team proposed deportations and tariffs as a way to fix America’s inflation-addled economy. But voters are unlikely to be comforted by what they see over the next few years. Toward the end of our call, I asked Friedberg if she could see any scenario under which, if the new administration’s policies are enacted, prices don’t go up. “No,” she said, without pausing. “I am extremely confident that food will get more expensive. Buy those frozen vegetables now.”

No surprise, I thought, as I disposed of the 12-volt charging adapter I had purchased for my car. I’d bought the thing on Temu, the Chinese low-cost-shopping app, as part of a larger haul of random other stuff that the app had marketed to me: chargers to plug into my adapter and car-seat gap-filler crumb-catchers to flank them.

The charger cost $2.43 and took weeks to arrive. Because it came from China, I knew I had no hope of returning it, but $2.43 is less than a Diet Coke these days, so who cares? It turned out I cared, because I wanted to use the gadget to charge things. So I felt disappointment, though not affront, when the gizmo’s plastic pins broke loose mere days after arrival, making the device unusable. I should have just bought a Diet Coke instead.

This week, Amazon announced a new store, Amazon Haul, that hopes to compete with Temu, Shein, and other purveyors of such items. When I opened Haul, which is available only on Amazon’s mobile app, it presented me with an array of “unbelievable finds” at “crazy low prices”: a $3.99 table runner; a pair of blue-and-white zebra-printed women’s swim bottoms for $5.99; a barrage of smartphone cases as low as $2.99; a $2.99 set of foundation brushes; a $2.99 silicone sink strainer; two dozen cork-bottomed chair-leg floor protectors for $6.99.

Temu and Shein have been popular for a long time. But Amazon’s entry into this market officially makes it mainstream. The result isn’t just “low cost” shopping, but a different kind of shopping. Now people buy low-quality goods that they don’t necessarily expect to use, and knowing full well that they’re maybe worthless, for the experience of having bought them.

Of course, people have always shopped just to shop: to hang out at the mall, to experience the relief of retail therapy, to adopt the identity of a label or a style, to pass the time between events. But the internet changed shopping. First, e-commerce made it more standardized and efficient. Instead of fingering through the garments on a rack or rummaging through a discount bin, shoppers clicked product images set against stark white backgrounds. They searched for keywords, which assumed that shopping was driven by need rather than desire. Shopping became more rational, more structured.

[Read: Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk?]

It consolidated, too. Amazon.com became a so-called everything store, and others, including Walmart.com, followed suit. They offered consumers, well, everything; people no longer needed to visit specialized websites. Then online sellers deployed algorithmic recommendations to steer shoppers toward goods that might benefit the sellers or that might lead buyers to buy more. Slowly, over years, online shopping became disorienting. When I recently searched Amazon for a 16x16 gold picture mat, I was shown a family of products, none of which was a 16x16 gold picture mat. The one I finally bought took forever to arrive—it was not eligible for Prime shipping—and was damaged in transit. I wish I’d made different choices, but which ones? I couldn’t find this product in a local store, and I wasn’t willing to pay for a custom-made one from a specialty shop. This experience is now commonplace. I buy things online that I fully expect to be unfit for purpose, necessitating their return (which has become its own kind of hell). Now shopping neither satisfies a need nor sates a desire. It burns up time and moves money around.

Haul is the perfect name for a habit that contributes to this feeling. On early YouTube, circa the mid-aughts, beauty vloggers seeking topics for vlogging started sharing the goods they had recently purchased, online or in person. They produced what became known as “haul videos.” Eventually, as vloggers gave way to influencers on YouTube, Instagram, and elsewhere, direct sponsorships, feed advertisements, and other incentives drove haul or haul-adjacent content: People would make money for posting it.

Shein started recruiting these influencers to promote its service in the West. The products it sold were so cheap, it didn’t really matter if they were any good. One decent fast-fashion top or accessory out of a $20 haul was still cheaper than Abercrombie or American Eagle. Soon enough, you couldn’t even go to those stores anyway, because of pandemic lockdowns; by 2022, Shein accounted for half of fast-fashion sales in the United States. Shopping became a kind of gambling: Roll the dice and hope that you come out a winner, whatever that would mean.

[Read: Amazon returns have gone to hell]

Showing off has always been a part of shopping, but hauls set use aside entirely, replacing it with exhibition. For the YouTuber or Instagram influencer, it wasn’t important if the clothing or skin-care products were useful or even used, just that they afforded the content creator an opportunity to create content—and, potentially, to get paid by sponsors to do so. Not everyone is an influencer, but lots of people wished to be, and dressing for the job you wanted started to entail hauling as a way of life. Shein, Temu, and now Amazon Haul encourage bulk purchases to justify low costs and minimize freight, while slipping in under the $800 threshold of U.S. import tax. These shops made the haul a basic unit of commerce.

At the same time, Chinese sellers—including some that appear to sell the very same goods found on Shein, Temu, Alibaba, and more—began to dominate Amazon’s third-party-seller platform, known as Marketplace. By 2023, Amazon acknowledged that nearly half of the top 100,000 Marketplace sellers were based in China. If you’ve ever searched for goods and been presented with weird, nonsense-name brands like RECUTMS (it’s “Record Your Times,” not the other thing), these are likely China-based Marketplace sellers. For some time now, cheap products of questionable quality and dubious fitness for purpose have dominated Amazon search results—especially because those sellers can also pay for sponsored ads on Amazon to hawk their wares.  

Amazon Haul closes the gap between normal e-commerce and the haul retail that social-media influencers popularized. Now ordinary people can get maybe-useful, maybe-garbage goods purchased for little money in bulk.

Great to have the choice, perhaps. But likely also irritating, because the phone case, table runner, or makeup brush you might purchase that way are probably garbage. Nobody is hiding this fact—thus Amazon’s carefully chosen language of “unbelievable finds” and “crazy low prices,” and not “high-quality goods.” And consumers are now ready to expect crap anyway, having spent years buying random wares from Instagram ads, TikTok shops, Shein, or the discount manufacturers that dominate Amazon itself. When I open a box that arrives at my door, I don’t really expect delight anymore. Instead, I hope that what’s inside might surprise me by bearing any value at all.

Haul might sound like the latest curiosity of concern only to the very online, but it could be an omen. Over time, Amazon has devolved from an everything store that sold stuff I liked and wanted into a venue for bad things that don’t meet my needs. Haul is just one way to shop, not the only way. But that was also true of Marketplace, which slowly took over Amazon’s listings. For now, you can still buy what you want or think you do. But eventually, hauls could take over entirely, and all shopping could become a novelty-store, mystery-grab-bag experience.

Photographs by Justin Chung

Jimmy O. Yang had been trying to make it as an actor for years—cobbling together bit parts in network sitcoms, auditioning for nameless roles such as “Chinese Teenager #1”—when he was cast in a new HBO series. The show, Silicon Valley, was a comedy about a group of programmers at a Bay Area start-up incubator; his character, Jian-Yang, was an app developer who spoke in broken English.

It was a small guest role, but he saw it as an opportunity. During his first day on set, although he had only two lines, he asked Mike Judge, one of the show’s creators, whether his character should speak with a Mandarin accent or a Cantonese one. Judge was stumped. “I just said, ‘Oh, well, which one’s more natural to you?’ ” Judge told me. Yang, who’d grown up in Hong Kong, worried that a Cantonese accent was too generic; American viewers might recognize it from Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan movies. Because Mandarin is more standard for official and professional contexts, it can sound more formal, and Yang thought this made sense for an ambitious immigrant like Jian-Yang. Judge told me that he now doesn’t remember which accent Yang chose; “I was just glad he was paying that much attention,” he said.

The show’s writers expanded Yang’s role, and he eventually became a series regular, reshaping his character into a sly villain whose befuddled exterior disguises an inner ruthlessness. To deepen his performance, Yang developed a mantra, which he would say to himself in Mandarin before every take: “Wŏ bù zhī dào,” or “I don’t know.” He drew this mantra from his own experience dealing with his parents. “Even when I know something, and they’re like, ‘Why is Netflix not working?,’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’ ” He grinned at me conspiratorially. “Because I just don’t care to fix it.” That’s how Jian-Yang operates too, Yang said: “I think Jian-Yang knows; he just doesn’t really give a shit.”

And yet, for many viewers, none of this character work mattered. As Silicon Valley grew in popularity, Jian-Yang became the subject of scorn for some Asian viewers and critics, who called out the show’s writers for peddling a caricature of an Asian immigrant with heavily accented, error-prone English. In 2017, a Wired review called him an example of “toxic Asian stereotypes.”

Yang found these reactions exhausting. “It’s like, wow, this is such a big deal for me, and I’m becoming, back in those days, one of the few Asians on TV,” he told me. “But you’re all going to hate on me?” He felt a familiar anguish. The only roles offered to him were goofy sidekicks and background parts, but even when he tried to make characters like Jian-Yang as rounded and complicated as possible, he felt he couldn’t win. “I didn’t understand the beef against Asian accents,” he said. He gets why Asian Americans are sensitive to such portrayals, given Hollywood’s long history of stereotyping, but some of the criticism, he said, felt “a little overblown and a little dumb.” “There’s a constant foreigner bit,” he explained, referring to the industry’s tendency to exoticize Asian characters. “But I was a foreigner.”

Despite the controversy around the character, Jian-Yang ultimately launched Yang’s career. In 2018, the year before Silicon Valley ended its run, he appeared in the romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, a box-office hit now considered a watershed moment for Asian cultural representation. This November, Yang is starring in Hulu’s Interior Chinatown, which feels like a different kind of milestone. Adapted from Charles Yu’s National Book Award–winning novel of the same name, the series tells the story of Willis Wu, a background actor on a generic police procedural set in an unnamed city’s Chinatown. For Yang, the role is more than a chance to be a leading man; it also uncannily mirrors his own life. Willis is stuck in small, clichéd parts, juggling Hollywood’s biases and his own ambition, trying to figure out who exactly he wants to be.

Top: Yang as Bernard in Crazy Rich Asians (2018). Bottom: As Jian-Yang in Silicon Valley (2019). (© Warner Bros. Pictures / Everett Collection; Ali Paige Goldstein / © HBO / Everett Collection)

When Yang first emigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, at age 13, the move left him dazed. He was one of a handful of Chinese kids at his school, and he barely spoke English. “I was like, ‘Guys, you’re speaking way too fast; I can’t,’ ” he told me. After two years, his mother got a job in Shanghai and left the family behind to return to China, where she stayed for the next decade. Without her, Yang became even more adrift.

His father, meanwhile, embraced their new American life. He celebrated their arrival by buying a Pontiac Grand Am. “He thought it was so fucking cool because we always had, like, Honda Accords, in Hong Kong,” Yang told me. “Then he was like”—Yang launched into an impression of his dad, puffing out his chest, his voice going gravelly—“ ‘American six cylinder, baby! This is great!’ ”

Yang worked hard to assimilate to his new surroundings. In Hong Kong, he’d played competitive Ping-Pong and watched kung fu shows on TV. In Los Angeles, he became interested in basketball and football. He fell in love with American television—Bobby Lee on Mad TV, Ken Jeong on Live in Hollywood. He got into hip-hop and tried to build his identity around music, but still felt like he was faking it. “I wasn’t trying to not be Asian,” he said. “I was just trying to be either funnier or catch a football or something so I could fit in.”

Yang began creating what he now calls a “locker” in his mind, where he hid his former self away so he could “make space in my brain to remember American stuff.” He compartmentalized so successfully that he’s had “a weird memory lapse” about his pre-California childhood in Hong Kong.

When Yang arrived at UC San Diego in 2005, the school’s student body was 37 percent Asian, a higher percentage than any other ethnic group. After years of trying to fit in with his Los Angeles classmates, he found it disorienting to suddenly be one among many. “I’m like, I actually want to stand out,” he said. “I don’t want to be grouped in with all of the Asians.” He grew his hair long and started skateboarding and smoking weed, anything to avoid seeming like a stereotype. But he also worried about disappointing his parents, both of whom had practical jobs—his father was a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, and his mother worked in retail—so he pursued an economics degree and interned at a financial-consulting firm.

Then, one summer night before his last year of college, he paid $5 on a whim to do five minutes of stand-up at an open-mic night in North Hollywood. Onstage, he found that joking about his identity somehow alleviated the strain of feeling like an outsider. “They didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t ‘Jimmy’; I was just the next comedian up, this guy who looks Asian,” he said. “They didn’t come to see me, so it’s almost like I have to address, like, ‘Hey, yeah, I know I’m Asian. This is my experience.’ ”

Yang was more than willing to lean into stereotypes. His early stand-up included an impression of an Asian guy trying to hit on a girl: “Let me holler at you! Come back; I’ll do your nails for you,” he’d say in an exaggerated accent. In another bit, he joked about the lack of Asians on The Maury Povich Show. “You never see some dude walking down the steps of shame and being like, ‘Look, Maury, look. I got small eye; he got big eye. That not my baby, Maury.’ ”

Yang had a relaxed, good-natured stage presence. But these bits were, as he put it, “hacky Asian stuff.” He was happy to confirm audiences’ biases if it made them laugh. Around that time, he started using the handle @FunnyAsianDude for his social-media accounts.

To make a living, he worked as a used-car salesman during the day and as a strip-club DJ at night. The latter “combined the salesmanship I learned in the used-car lot with the microphone skills I’d learned doing stand-up,” he told Conan O’Brien years later. Yang turned down an offer for a cushy finance job, against his father’s wishes, in favor of pursuing open-mic nights. He also began auditioning for TV shows and movies, going out for pretty much any casting call that would have him, as he wrote in his 2018 memoir: “Loud Japanese host,” “Weird Korean Jogger guy,” “Video Game addict.”

“You don’t want to be in a box, but at the same time, when you’re first starting, it’s easy to just be like, ‘Hey, I’m an Asian actor. Call me if you need an Asian actor,’ ” he said. Even after landing his guest role on Silicon Valley, he put his earnings into a used car he could drive for Uber, to make a little more cash.

Then, months after he finished filming the first season, in 2014, HBO offered him a contract to be a series regular. When he got the call, he was killing time on the trolley that rolls through the Grove, an outdoor shopping mall in Los Angeles. He rode the trolley back and forth in disbelief, feeling like “the gate’s opened,” like he was finally a “real player now in this industry.” He called his dad, who said, in Yang’s words: “Oh, okay, so you have an employment contract with HBO, which is a company. Good. Thank God.”

In person, Yang is warm and easygoing, with an approachable air. One afternoon this summer, we met for lunch at a Thai restaurant in L.A. As soon as he sat down, a woman leaned over and stopped him mid-sentence. “Are you the famous guy?” she asked.

“Probably not,” he said. She laughed and held up her phone for a selfie anyway.

Yang could have taken offense that the woman seemed to view him as just a vaguely familiar face; he wouldn’t have been the first Asian actor to be confused with another one. (In his 2020 comedy special on Amazon Prime, Good Deal, he joked about fans who approach him, looking anxious. Are you sure that’s not Ken Jeong? he imagines them wondering.) But when I brought up the incident the next time we met, over dim sum in Monterey Park, he laughed, unbothered. He’s accustomed to this particular kind of fame, to being “that guy I’ve seen before.” It’s a long way from where he started.

Since Yang began his career, in the early 2010s, opportunities for Asian actors have exploded—a surge that Yang attributes largely to the success of Crazy Rich Asians. In that movie, a young Chinese American woman goes to Singapore to meet her boyfriend’s family, and is thrown into the high-flying milieu of Asia’s ultra-wealthy. As the playboy Bernard, Yang found a desperate streak beneath his character’s bravado. When the film became a global hit in 2018, it was hailed as proof that Asian-led projects could find commercial success in Hollywood. In 2020, the Korean movie Parasite swept the Oscars; in 2023, Everything Everywhere All at Once, led by Yang’s Crazy Rich Asians co-star Michelle Yeoh, did the same. A study published by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that the percentage of Asian characters with speaking parts in the top-grossing films each year climbed from roughly 3 percent in 2007 to nearly 16 percent in 2022. Asians were the only minority group to see such a big increase in that period.

At the same time, more Asian writers and directors were getting the opportunity to create their own work, which gave rise to a range of Asian characters who are delightfully eccentric but also specific and human. Now there are far fewer roles like the Jian-Yang of early Silicon Valley, and more roles like, say, Steven Yeun and Ali Wong’s deranged, obsessive duo in Beef, the Emmy-winning drama about a road-rage incident that escalates into a murderous feud. As Jeong, who also appeared in Crazy Rich Asians and has become a close friend of Yang’s, put it to me: “There’s more diversity in our diversity now.”

Justin Chung for The Atlantic

This doesn’t mean that choosing roles was suddenly easy for actors like Yang. Not long after Crazy Rich Asians, he got sent a script for a movie about William Hung, who’d become an early viral sensation after an awkward 2004 American Idol audition during which he gyrated and sang Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” off-key. The writer wanted Yang to play Hung. It was a starring role in a potentially splashy biopic—but Yang turned it down. In June 2020, during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, he told Rogan that the script made him want to “fucking vomit”; Hung, he said, had “set us back 10 years.” In response, Hung posted a video addressed to Rogan and Yang. “I understand where you might be coming from, because you’re not the only person who believes that I portray Asian stereotypes,” Hung said. But, he added, “I believe everyone has a right to try something new without being judged or ridiculed.”

When I brought up his comments about Hung, Yang grimaced. His objection to the project, he told me, was not about Hung himself but rather about the way the script missed an opportunity to examine why he’d become famous and how his notoriety had affected the perception of Asian Americans, especially Asian men. “People made fun of him,” Yang said. “He was the butt of the joke, and every one of us was called ‘William Hung’ in high school for a couple years.” To Yang, the way American Idol portrayed Hung—how the show “threw him out there, and how America ganged up and laughed at him—that should be the story we’re telling.” Many Asian performers still find it hard to shake the fear that they’ll be turned into a punch line the way Hung was. “In hindsight,” Yang said of those 2020 comments, “I think that was my own frustration, my own insecurity.”

For Asian actors living through this cultural sea change, career choices can seem freighted with a new sense of responsibility and, occasionally, feelings of guilt. I spoke with Jeong about what is arguably his most well-known role, the Chinese gangster Mr. Chow in the 2009 comedy The Hangover. To Jeong, Mr. Chow was “puncturing the stereotype, because there are not a lot of stereotypes where, you know, an Asian man jumps out naked on Bradley Cooper’s shoulder and beats him up.” Still, some things about Mr. Chow now seem to give him pause, including his exaggerated accent. “I haven’t done an accent on live TV since,” he told me. “And there’s a reason for that.”

When I mentioned this to Yang, he shrugged and sighed. “Yeah, yeah, and that’s his battle,” he said. As much as Yang admires Jeong, his own view of what makes for “good” representation seems somewhat different. He doesn’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with an Asian character who has a thick accent, and he doesn’t think breaking down stereotypes requires playing a kind of character audiences have never seen before. He’d be interested in a role that seemed like an Asian cliché—say, a mathematician—if it surprised him. “Is there some more interesting angle about the man?” he said. “Or is it just super one-dimensional: ‘Here’s an Asian guy good at math’?” The question he asks himself about each character now is simple: “Is it human?”

Yang’s stand-up comedy has evolved, too. He still riffs on being Asian, but his material is more precise, and more personal. In his 2023 special for Amazon Prime, Guess How Much?, he jokes about the frugality of his mother, with whom he’s grown close again after their long separation. (She loves a bargain; he says her catchphrase is “Guess how much?”) He still plays with stereotypes, but now he has a knack for turning them on their head: Joking about the global rise of K-pop, he says, “I had a 15-year-old white kid come up to me, trying to explain the different members of BTS … I’m like, ‘Dude. They look the same to me.’ ”

Last year, Yang changed his Instagram handle from @FunnyAsianDude to just @jimmyoyang. “If I log on every day on Instagram, I see ‘Funny Asian Dude,’ I’m saying that to myself over and over again: I’m only the funny Asian,” he told me. “But I think I’m more than that. And I could be more.”

In Interior Chinatown, Willis lives in a crowded apartment complex and works as a waiter at a restaurant called the Golden Palace while dreaming of becoming a “Kung Fu Guy.” What Willis doesn’t fully understand is that he’s actually a background actor—otherwise known as a “Generic Asian Man”—in a procedural called Black & White, which is occasionally set in the Golden Palace. (The show within the show stars a Black male detective and a white female detective, who flirt and banter with unrelenting cop-show swagger.) Over time, Willis becomes entangled in the plot of Black & White, landing bigger and bigger roles, and gradually realizing that he’s been trapped inside a Hollywood stereotype all along.

The first episode opens with Willis witnessing an incident related to a crime that Black & White’s detectives are investigating. He starts to notice the strangeness of his circumstances and, with the help of a new-to-town cop, he searches for his long-lost brother, a Kung Fu Guy who may know more about what’s going on.

Yang as Willis in Interior Chinatown (2024) (Mike Taing / Disney)

Charles Yu’s novel is structured like a screenplay, with stage directions full of character descriptions and lyrical digressions. Yu, who is also an executive producer, told me that he wrote the book in part to untangle his anxieties about the way cultural depictions of Asian people have influenced his perception of himself. “Like, Is this face lovable? ” he said. “Do we deserve to be characters, let alone main characters?” He wanted the mechanics of Willis’s world to reflect Hollywood’s narrow logic about race.

The novel is so high-concept that adapting it for the screen was a gamble for Hulu. But the series cleverly uses the tools of television to render the layered realities of the book. The lights in the Golden Palace darken to indicate when Black & White is filming and Willis has entered that world. When Willis goes from being Interior Chinatown’s star to Black & White’s Generic Asian Man, the show challenges the audience to find him again, somewhere in the background of its shots.

And the book’s central metaphor has been made usefully concrete. On the day I visited the set of Interior Chinatown, Yang was filming a scene, invented for the show, that required him to repeatedly run into a pair of doors. The doors lead to the police precinct, the setting for Black & White’s highest-stakes subplots, where Generic Asian Men like Willis are not allowed. Willis is largely a dramatic role, but there are moments of physical comedy, and Yang was clearly having fun with this one. He improvised different takes: He tailgated a group of people, trying to sneak in behind them—blocked. He sidled up to the doors as if he could trick the inanimate wooden panels into staying ajar—blocked again. He took a running start, falling right before he reached the threshold.

When Yang first read the script for Interior Chinatown, he thought of all the ways in which he’d lived Willis Wu’s life. He’d looked for jobs as a background actor by calling Central Casting, the same agency that employs Willis; he’d even worked at a restaurant called Chop Suey in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. But Yang also thought that Interior Chinatown, with its self-awareness and depth, was a new kind of story.

He found a shirt that he’d worn in his 20s, when he still worked as a waiter, and smeared it with chili oil. He put on the scuffed-up Goodwill boots he’d worn back then, too. Then, in a hotel room, he auditioned for Willis over Zoom. In the scene Yang read, the reality-bending mechanics of Black & White are absent. Instead, Willis has a difficult conversation with his father, reluctantly admitting that he feels unmoored in life, and asking for advice, only to get stern replies.

At first, Yang had trouble evoking Willis’s emotions, and worried that he was forcing his tears. Then the episode’s director, Taika Waititi, stepped in. Waititi urged Yang to think about how Willis’s real motivation is to leave the conversation, but he stays out of some helpless instinct: to oblige his father, maybe, or because he’s holding on to the hope that he’ll hear what he wants to hear—that his father understands Willis’s angst. The note evoked a memory for Yang; as a teenager, he’d struggled to communicate his feelings to his father, because when he did, he found it hard to bottle those feelings back up again. “When I was younger,” he told me, “and I’d ask my dad about my mother—like, ‘Why did she move to Shanghai?’—I couldn’t help but start uncontrollably sobbing.”

Yang realized that Willis’s dynamic with his father was one he knew well: the push and pull between wanting to say everything and holding back, the emotional gulf that can stretch between an immigrant father and his more assimilated son. “I don’t know anyone who embodies better a bunch of the feelings and anxieties, and insecurities, that are part of why I wrote the book,” Yu told me of Yang.

If Yang’s relationship with his father was once more strained, lately that has changed. Richard Ouyang has been so encouraged by his son’s success that he recently started auditioning for roles himself. Ouyang told me that Yang now gives him professional advice: “Jimmy always asks me to be more serious about acting and take some classes,” Ouyang wrote by email. “Yet I think I am too old to learn any new tricks and prefer to be a Nepo Daddy!” In May, father and son did an ad for Toyota together, with Ouyang dryly complaining about his son’s driving skills as they navigate a snowy wilderness. “It was so cute—he was so stoked,” Yang said of his father. “He posted it all over his Chinese social media.”

Yang has also reconnected with the younger self he’d placed inside that mental locker back in 2000. His childhood comes rushing back at certain moments: when he smells stuffed fish cakes like the ones he used to eat with his mother at the shop near their Hong Kong apartment; when he’s speaking Cantonese; and, sometimes, when he performs. Playing Willis helped him rediscover, he said, “stuff that I’ve taken for granted, that I’ve forgotten”—the memories of who he was before.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Against Type.”

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