The proposal passed both houses of Mexico's Congress, leading critics to fear weakened government transparency.

Before this month’s elections, when Democratic candidates were being attacked for letting transgender athletes compete in girls’ sports, trans-rights activists and their allies had a confident answer: They had nothing to fear, because anti-trans themes were a consistent loser for Republicans. That position became impossible to maintain after the elections, when detailed research showed that the issue had done tremendous damage to Kamala Harris and other Democrats. In fact, the third-most-common reason swing voters and late deciders in one survey gave for opposing Harris was that she “is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class,” an impression these voters no doubt got from endless ads showing her endorsing free gender-transition surgery for prisoners and detained migrants.

Now some of the very people who pushed Democrats into adopting these politically toxic positions have shifted to a new line: Abandoning any element of the trans-rights agenda would be morally unthinkable. “To suggest we should yield even a little to Mr. Trump’s odious politics, to suggest we should compromise on the rights of trans people,” wrote the New York Times columnist Roxane Gay, would be “shameful and cowardly.” Asked whether his party should rethink its positions on transgender issues, Senator Tim Kaine said, “Democrats should get on board the hate train? We ain’t gonna do it.” The writer Jill Filipovic recently argued that Democrats must refuse “to chase the median voter if that voter has some really bad, dangerous, or hateful ideas.”

Refusing to accommodate the electorate is a legitimate choice when politicians believe they are defending a principle so foundational that defeat is preferable to compromise. But in this case, the no-compromise stance is premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of the options on the table. Democrats do not, in fact, face a choice between championing trans rights and abandoning them. They can and should continue to defend trans people against major moral, legal, and cultural threats. All they need to do to reduce their political exposure is repudiate the movement’s marginal and intellectually shaky demands.

[Read: The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity]

The major questions about trans rights are: Do some people have the chance to live a happier and more fulfilling life in a different gender identity than the one to which they were born? Do some of these people need access to medical services to facilitate their transition? Do they deserve to be treated with respect and addressed by their chosen names and pronouns? Do they deserve equal protections from discrimination in employment, housing, and military service? Must society afford them access to public accommodations so as not to assault their dignity?

I believe the moral answer to all of these questions is a clear yes. The evidence also suggests that this is a relatively safe position for politicians to take. Americans broadly support individual choice, and trans rights fit comfortably within that framework. Sarah McBride, the incoming first transgender member of Congress, faced down bullying by her new Republican colleagues—an example of how Democrats can defend the dignity of trans people without allowing themselves to be depicted as extremists. The Trump administration is reportedly planning to kick transgender people out of the military, a move that only 30 percent of the public supports, according to a February YouGov poll. If Trump follows through, this fight would give Democrats the chance to highlight the pure cruelty of the Republican stance.

Democrats mainly ran into trouble because they either supported or refused to condemn a few highly unpopular positions: allowing athletes who transitioned from male to female to participate in high-level female sports, where they often enjoy clear physical advantages; allowing adolescent and preadolescent children to medically transition without adequate diagnosis; and providing state-funded sex-change surgery for prisoners and detainees. The first two issues poll horribly; the last has not been polled, but you can infer its lack of support from the Harris campaign’s insistence on changing the subject even in the face of relentless criticism.

I think there’s a strong case to be made for the Democrats adjusting the first two of these stances on substantive grounds. But even if you disagree with that, as many activists do, there remains an almost unassailable political case for reversing course. Why not stick to what I’d argue are the clearest, most important cases where trans rights must be protected, while letting go of a handful of hard-to-defend edge cases that are hurting Democrats at the polls—yielding policy outcomes that work to the detriment of trans people themselves? The answer is that much of the trans-rights activist community and its most vocal allies have come to believe that the entire package of trans-rights positions is a single, take-it-or-leave-it bloc. That mistaken conviction underlies the insistence that compromise is impossible, and that the only alternative to unquestioning support is complete surrender.

This maneuver is common among political movements of all stripes. Consider how, say, Israel hawks routinely define being “pro-Israel” as not only supporting the existence of a Jewish state but also withholding any criticism of Israel’s military operations or settlement expansion. Once you have defined acceptance of your entire program as a moral test, it becomes easy to dismiss all opposition as bigotry—hence the disturbing ease with which many Israel hawks routinely smear even measured criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

Examples of this dynamic are easy to find. Gun-rights advocates will denounce even the mildest firearms restriction as gun-grabbing and a rejection of the Second Amendment; some climate activists have extended the term climate denier from those who deny the science of climate change to anybody who rejects any element of their preferred remedy.

[Helen Lewis: The worst argument for youth transition]

Trans-rights activists have made especially extensive use of this tactic, frequently accusing anyone who dissents from any element of their agenda as transphobic. Quashing internal disagreements is a necessary step toward casting all dissent as pure bigotry. “A lot of LGBTQ leaders and advocates didn’t want to say they had concerns because they worried about dividing their movement,” the New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters noted.

Perhaps the nadir of this campaign occurred last year, when a group of Times contributors and staffers published an error-riddled letter attacking the paper. The letter accused the Times of “follow[ing] the lead of far-right hate groups” with its reporting on the debate among youth-gender-care practitioners about the efficacy of providing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children. It effectively transmitted the message that calling into question any position maintained by trans-rights activists would create a reputational cost for anybody working not just in journalism but in other industries, too—particularly people in Democratic politics and other nonconservative elite fields. The hothouse dynamic no doubt contributed to Democrats’ inability to form reality-based assessments of their positioning on the issue.

A few days after the election, Democratic Representative Seth Moulton told the Times, “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” This sparked a furious backlash. Kyle Davis, a Democratic official in Moulton’s home city of Salem, called on Moulton to resign. “We’re certainly rejecting the narrative that trans people are to be scapegoated or fear-mongered against,” he told reporters. Moulton has supported the Equality Act and the Transgender Bill of Rights, both of which would extend broad anti-discrimination protections to trans people. He has explained that he favors “evidence-based, sport-by-sport policies,” rather than the sweeping bans favored by Republicans. But Moulton’s general support for trans rights makes his heresy on female sports more, not less, threatening to the left.

The MSNBC columnist Katelyn Burns argues that placing any limits on female sports participation means denying trans women all their other rights. “If trans girls are really boys when they’re playing sports … then trans women should be considered men in all contexts,” she wrote in October. That simple equation collapses under a moment’s scrutiny. Female sports is one of the rare cases in which the broadly correct principle of allowing trans people to set the terms of their own identity can meaningfully inhibit the rights of others. One can easily defend Lia Thomas’s right to be addressed as a woman and allowed access to women’s bathrooms without supporting her participation on a women’s college swim team.

In place of careful reasoning, advocates of the maximal position frequently resort to sweeping moralistic rhetoric. Innumerable columns after this month’s elections have chastised moderates for “throwing trans people under the bus.”

Arguing in this spirit, the New York Times columnist M. Gessen worries that trans people will be outright “abandoned” by the Democratic Party, and insists that Democrats cannot separate trans rights from other social issues, in part because Republicans see them all as linked. “On the right, all fears are interconnected, as are all dreams: Replacement theory lives right next to the fear of trans ‘contagion,’ and the promise of mass deportation is entwined with the vision of an America free of immigrants and people who breach the gender binary.”

[Helen Lewis: The only way out of the child-gender culture war]

As they refine their position profile, Democrats should obviously continue to listen to trans people themselves about their priorities. Those priorities are not always uniform, however, nor are they perfectly represented by the activist organizations speaking on their behalf. Dr. Erica Anderson, a trans woman and the former president of the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health, has criticized rapid medicalization of gender-questioning youth. The trans writer Brianna Wu argues that the movement’s adoption of more radical positions has imperiled its core goals. The tactic of smearing all of these critiques as “anti-trans” is deeply misleading.

In a column demanding that Democrats give not an inch on any element of the trans-rights agenda, the Time columnist Philip Elliott asserts, “Conceding ground to the winners, as seems to be the case here in a culture-war fight that is as over-simplified as it is ill-considered, is not a way to dig out of this deep hole.”

But the hole is not actually that deep. Harris lost both the national vote and Pennsylvania, the tipping-point state, by less than two percentage points. A Democratic firm found that exposure to Trump’s ubiquitous ads showing Harris endorsing free sex-change surgery for migrant detainees and prisoners moved the audience 2.7 points in his direction. And conceding ground to the winners is a time-honored way to escape political holes of any size. After Mitt Romney was hammered in 2012 over Republicans’ desire to cut Medicare, Trump repositioned them closer to the center. In 2024, Trump partially neutralized the GOP’s biggest liability, abortion, by insisting that he would leave the matter to the states, allowing him to pick up enough pro-abortion-rights votes to scrape by.

Gessen argues, “It’s not clear how much further Democrats could actually retreat.” But there is plenty of reasonable room for Democrats to retreat—on female-sports participation, youth gender medicine, and state-sponsored surgery for prisoners and detainees. You may wish to add or subtract discrete items on my list. I can’t claim to have compiled a morally or politically unassailable accounting of which compromises Democratic politicians should make. What is unassailable is the principle that compromise without complete surrender is, in fact, possible.

The list of air-travel fiascos this past year reads like a verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: A chunk of plane fell off mid-flight. Boeing workers went on strike. A CrowdStrike software issue grounded thousands of planes worldwide. A major airline merger was blocked. Passengers were terribly unruly.

And yet, in roughly that same time period, much about the experience of air travel actually went pretty well: Cancellations in the first half of this year (even with that software outage) were way down from the chaos of 2022, even amidst record-breaking travel days, and last year was by some metrics the safest on record. The Biden administration implemented new requirements for airlines to give passengers refunds for canceled or significantly changed flights and announced a new rule to crack down on airline junk fees. Flights are more affordable than they were decades ago, adjusted for inflation.

An air-travel paradox has emerged. As my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote earlier this year, “although air safety is getting markedly better over time, the experience of flying is arguably worse than ever.” Flying in 2024 is safe and relatively consumer friendly but also quite annoying, especially for the customers unwilling or unable to tack on the perks or upgrades that make it more pleasant. In most economy flying situations, seats are cramped, snacks are expensive, storage space is tight, tensions are high. Airlines are seeing record demand; the TSA is predicting that this week will be the busiest Thanksgiving travel week on record. But staffing shortages persist, adding to inconvenience for fliers.

Many of these frustrations are the fault of individual airlines. But a presidential administration’s approach to consumer welfare can play a meaningful role in the experience of flying (and what happens when things, inevitably, go wrong). Under President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the federal government pushed to block mergers that it saw as concentrating the industry in a way that might hurt consumers, and generally focused on consumer protections (sometimes to the ire of the industry). The Trump administration will likely take a more “business-friendly” approach, Henry Harteveldt, an industry analyst, told me. Former Representative Sean Duffy of Wisconsin, Trump’s pick to replace Buttiegieg as transportation secretary, used to be an airline lobbyist. Meanwhile, Project 2025 (which Trump has denied affiliation with) has identified airline consumer protection as a “problematic area.” And many Trump allies have also harshly criticized Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s approach to antitrust policy. Trump—even if he doesn’t fully undo the regulations introduced under Biden—could curb some of the actions that are currently in motion but have not yet made their way to Congress, Harteveldt predicted.

In his first term, Trump’s administration bailed out the airline industry in the early days of the pandemic. And on the Friday after Thanksgiving in 2020, Trump’s Transportation Department quietly announced a new rule that redefined what counted as deceptive practices, to the benefit of airlines over consumers. The airline industry has high hopes for Trump’s next term: Delta’s CEO celebrated the end of an era of “overreach,” and Southwest’s CEO said he is optimistic that the next administration is “maybe a little less aggressive in terms of regulating or rule-making.”

The full scope of Trump’s plans for the airline industry isn’t yet clear, but in a statement announcing his transportation-secretary selection, Trump said that Duffy “will make our skies safe again by eliminating DEI for pilots and air traffic controllers.” Aviation officials have expressed concern that clean-fuel programs will be stymied under Trump, who has promised to repeal parts of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. And another initiative Trump floated during his first term—privatizing air-traffic control—may be revived in his next term (the overworked and sometimes dysfunctional Federal Aviation Administration is presently funded with federal dollars). If air-traffic control does indeed become run by a private company, consumers likely wouldn’t see a big difference in ticket prices, Harteveldt said, but it would be a huge change to the way the travel industry operates.

So much about travel is unpredictable, especially during busy weeks like this one. Will your flight be delayed? Will your boarding area be crowded with “gate lice” trying to skip the line? Will your seat be double-booked, and will the Wi-Fi work? Some of this uncertainty is just the reality of human experience—you could be seated next to a crying baby no matter who is president—but some of the experience will be shaped by the administration’s approach in the next four years. As Trump and his allies attempt to balance the interests of consumers and corporations in a massive, complicated, and closely watched industry, a big question is who will get priority.

Related:

All airlines are now the same. Flying is weird right now.

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Today’s News

Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire deal, which will take effect tomorrow and pause fighting in the region, President Joe Biden announced. President-Elect Donald Trump said yesterday that he would impose a 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10 percent tariff on imports from China. Boris Epshteyn, a top Trump aide, allegedly asked potential nominees for Trump’s second administration to pay him consulting fees if they wanted him to advocate for them to Trump, according to a review by the president-elect’s legal team. Epshteyn has denied the allegations.

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Kimberley French / A24

A Horror Movie About an Atheist Who Won’t Shut Up

By McKay Coppins

This article contains spoilers for the movie Heretic.

When I was a Mormon missionary in Texas in the early 2000s, my companions and I used to get strange phone calls from a man with a British accent named Andrew. We didn’t know who he was, or how he’d gotten the numbers for a bunch of Church-owned cellphones, but the calls always went the same. He would begin in a friendly mode, feigning interest in our lives and work. Then, gradually, the questions would turn confrontational as he revealed his true agenda: to convince us that everything we believed was wrong.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Dave Free.

Listen (or skip). On Kendrick Lamar’s new album, GNX, a rapper who is obsessed with excellence tries to entertain the masses, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Watch. Jimmy O. Yang spent years stuck in small, clichéd roles. Now, starring on Interior Chinatown (streaming on Hulu), he’s figuring out who he wants to be.

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P.S.

As the Swifties and/or Black Friday die-hards among you may know, Taylor Swift is releasing a book this Friday at Target. For The Atlantic’s Books section, I wrote about what Swift’s decision to self-publish means for the publishing industry. Have a great Thanksgiving!

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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You are so tired! I can tell because I’m tired too. In a couple of days, tens of millions of Americans will get on planes or trains or highways, crunching our limbs in godless ways for hours on end, worrying if we left the stove on or packed enough layers. We will fight the crowds, brave the chaos, pay the money. And then we will get to wherever we’re going, and we’ll eat. It will probably be lovely, or maybe it will be bad, but either way, it will be a little nuts because we will then (then!), in less than the time it takes a carton of half-and-half to go bad, do it all again.

Or at least many of us, those who are gluttons for punishment, will. We’ll move our bodies and our belongings around the country during precisely the time of year when the climate becomes, in many places, dark, wet, icy, and freezing—again. We’ll contemplate togetherness, and family, and potatoes—again. Maybe we’ll watch football—again. Many of us will eat turkey—again. We’ll pack all our traveling and relative-wrangling and big-mealing into one overstuffed, exhausting month, and for no extrinsic reason.

There’s a better way to do things, and in fact another country already does it. That country is Canada, and it celebrates Thanksgiving in October. We should too.

Canadian Thanksgiving is the second Monday of October, though many people observe it over the weekend. To preserve some tradition, I propose we reschedule ours to fall on the Thursday before Canada’s holiday. Superfans of the calendar may notice that this is the same long weekend as Indigenous Peoples’ Day/Columbus Day, which seems fine—they’d each have their own days, and besides, you can probably appreciate that there’s some thematic overlap here. So we’d have Thanksgiving Thursday and another holiday Monday, creating one mega-long weekend, and then roll gently into Halloween. After that, we’d have a whole month to avoid interstate travel and its attendant costs, spiritual and financial. We’d get our blood sugar in order before the holiday-party season begins in earnest.

[Read: The no-drama Thanksgiving]

Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations can easily commingle if we want them to—a squash is a squash—and we’d get to celebrate the bounty of the harvest during the actual harvest. In the parts of the country where the leaves turn, they would be beautiful. Everywhere, it would be a little warmer, a little easier to schlep around. We’d let the holiday season stretch out long and easy, making time for Thanksgiving on its own terms, rather than treating it like the dress rehearsal for Christmas. We could still eat the same stuff, still have a parade, and still, I’m sure, go shopping the next day. The only difference is the timing, which will now have been made rational.

We tend to think of Thanksgiving as something fixed—part of our national topography, like Mount Rushmore. A major feature of holidays is, after all, that they are pretty much the same every year. But another major feature is that they are social constructs, and Thanksgiving has been changing basically since it was invented. The first Thanksgiving—the one many of us learned about in school, the one with the Pilgrims—is believed by historians to have taken place sometime between September and November, and aside from being a meal, it had almost nothing to do with our modern celebration.

In 1789, George Washington and the first Congress did declare Thursday, November 26, a “Day of public Thanksgiving,” but this wasn’t enshrined anywhere in perpetuity: For decades, the holiday was just observed ad hoc by individual governments and families when events warranted giving thanks, which meant not necessarily in the same way, or on the same day, or even in same month, or at all. Not until the 19th century did the Thanksgiving we now know come to be, in part because Sarah Hale, the editor of an influential women’s magazine, decided America needed a holiday that honored the domestic sphere—that is, the topics her magazine covered—and celebrated Protestant values. For years, she “badgered” the government about this, according to the historian Anne Blue Wills, and in 1863, Abraham Lincoln, hoping to unite the nation while war cleaved it apart, acquiesced: Thanksgiving was now a federal holiday, celebrated permanently on the last Thursday of November.

Not that permanently, though, because 76 years later, we moved it. In 1939, Thanksgiving fell on the last day of the month, and retailers worried that a late start to the Christmas-shopping season would depress sales. Fred Lazarus Jr., the chairman of the company that would later become Macy’s, lobbied President Franklin D. Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving a week earlier, to the second-to-last Thursday of the month. Lazarus was successful, though the whole thing did not go over super well. Football coaches were enraged, having seen their big-ticket games suddenly moved from a major holiday to a random Thursday. A political rival of Roosevelt’s accused him of acting with “the omnipotence of Hitler.” The Three Stooges mocked the change in a short film. Only 23 of the 48 states honored the new date, and until 1941 we had two Thanksgivings, a week apart. Finally, Congress passed a resolution declaring Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday of November, where it has remained ever since.

My point is that we as a society are pretty resilient. I think we can handle changing Thanksgiving again. It seems unlikely that retailers will mind much, and I’m sure that if given enough notice, the football coaches can prepare. And Thanksgiving, as many Americans’ favorite secular celebration, deserves better. At its best, the holiday welcomes people regardless of religion or relationship status, and it doesn’t even require them to bring a gift. It pulls us together with the people we love and honors one of the highest art forms of human existence: gratitude, though on Thanksgiving the more apt word is the one Buddhists use—katannuta, “to have a sense of what was done.”

[Read: How to be thankful when you don’t feel thankful]

Thanksgiving has changed along with the country. We started celebrating it in November because of, “basically, one woman’s understanding of the national calendar,” as Wills told me, and then we moved it because some guy named Fred asked the president to. We have made and remade it to serve the needs of nationalism, business, politics. What’s stopping us from remaking it again?

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J.Crew has 2.7 million followers on Instagram, and more than 300,000 on X. But earlier this fall, it announced that it was trying to reach prospective customers the old-fashioned way: by reviving its print catalog. In 2024, everyone shops online. But in recent years, some retailers have returned to the catalog as a way to attempt to grab a bit more of shoppers’ coveted attention. People can and do scroll past the endless stream of marketing emails and digital ads on their phone. But completely ignoring a catalog that appears on your stoop or in your mailbox is tougher. Simply put, you have to pick it up, even if you are planning to throw it in the recycling bin—and brands hope that you might flip through some glossy photos along the way.

Catalogs’ heyday came before the financial crisis—but they never fully went away, and billions have been sent to American consumers every year since. The catalogs of 2024, in part a nostalgia play for those who grew up with the trend, are generally sent to targeted lists of customers who have either shopped with a brand in the past or are deemed plausible future buyers. Some retailers are maintaining what they’ve always done: Neiman Marcus, for example, continues to send a catalog, even as some of its peers have stopped. Both traditional and digital-first companies use catalogs: Amazon has issued a toy catalog since 2018. Brands have started playing with the format too, taking the concept beyond a straightforward list of products: Patagonia puts out a catalog that it calls a “bona fide journal,” featuring “stories and photographs” from contributors. Many of these catalogs don’t even include information about pricing; shoppers have to go to the website for that.

Amanda Mull, writing in The Atlantic in early 2020, foretold a new golden era of catalogs—brands at the time were becoming “more desperate to find ways to sell their stuff without tithing to the tech behemoths.” Since then, the pandemic has only turbocharged consumers’ feelings of overwhelm with online shopping. Immediate purchase is not necessarily the goal; these catalogs are aiming to build a relationship that might lead to future orders, Jonathan Zhang, a marketing professor at Colorado State University, told me. The return on investment for companies is pretty good, Zhang has found, especially because more sophisticated targeting and measurement means that brands aren’t spending time appealing to people who would never be interested (this also means that less paper is wasted than in the free-for-all mailer days, he noted).

With catalogs, brands are supplementing, not replacing, e-commerce: Zhang’s experiments with an e-commerce retailer found that over a period of six months starting in late 2020, people who received both catalogs and marketing emails from a retailer made 24 percent more purchases than those who received only the emails. A spokesperson for J.Crew told me that following the catalog relaunch, the brand saw a nearly 20 percent rise in reactivated customers, adding that this fall, 11 percent more consumers had a positive impression of the J.Crew brand compared with last year. E-commerce is the undeniable center of shopping in 2024, so brands are finding creative ways to use in-person methods to build on its success—including, as I’ve written, reimagining the brick-and-mortar store.

A well-designed catalog may appeal to some of the same sensory instincts that enchant die-hard in-person shoppers. Catalogs work especially well for certain types of products: Zhang said that “hedonic” categories of goods—luxury clothing, perfumes, vacation packages, chocolate—are some of the best fits for stories and photos in a print format. (I smile when I think of Elaine taking this type of luxury marketing to parody levels in her stint running a catalog on Seinfeld.) Zhang himself has been wooed by such a campaign: Around February of this year, he received a mailer from a cruise company (one he had never interacted with in the past). He spent a few minutes flipping through. In August, when he started thinking about planning a winter vacation for his family, he remembered the catalog and visited the company’s website. “That few minutes was long enough for me to kind of encode this information in my memory,” he said. He decided to book a trip.

The catalog has moved forward in fits and starts: 30 years ago, they were the central way to market a product directly to consumers. Then the pendulum swung hard toward online ads. Now we may start to see more of a balance between the two. Some of us would rather turn away from advertising altogether. But if brands are going to find us anyway, print catalogs could add a little more texture to the experience of commerce.

Related:

Why the Restoration Hardware catalog won’t die Stores are small now.

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Pam Bondi’s comeback David Frum on a good country’s bad choice The Trump-Trumpist divide

Today’s News

A New York judge said that he would indefinitely postpone sentencing in the hush-money criminal case against President-Elect Donald Trump. Former Representative Matt Gaetz said that he will not return to Congress next year but will continue to work with the next Trump administration. Democratic Senator Bob Casey conceded the closely watched Pennsylvania Senate race to Dave McCormick last night.

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The Books Briefing: Cher’s memoir is a valuable document of a young girl thrust into the adult world, Emma Sarappo writes. Atlantic Intelligence: Alex Reisner’s recent investigation for The Atlantic found that dialogue from tens of thousands of movies and TV shows has been harvested—without permission—by big tech companies, Damon Beres writes.

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Evening Read

Paramount Pictures

Gladiator II Is More Than Just a Spectacle

By Shirley Li

Long before “thinking about the Roman empire” became shorthand for having a hyper-fixation, Ridley Scott turned the actual Roman empire into a mainstream obsession. In 2000, the director’s sword-and-sandal blockbuster Gladiator muscled its way into becoming that year’s second-highest-grossing film, before winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and cementing its status as—I’m just guessing here—your dad’s favorite movie of all time. “Are you not entertained?!” Russell Crowe’s Maximus goaded the crowd in a memorably rousing scene. We really were: Here was an almost absurdly simple tale of revenge that Scott, via visceral fight scenes (and real tigers), turned into a maximalist epic.

For Gladiator II, now in theaters, Scott has somehow taken it a step further.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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On Christmas Eve of 2020, my father was admitted to the hospital with sudden weakness. My mother was not allowed to join him. She pleaded with the staff—my dad needed help making medical decisions, she said—but there were no exceptions at that grisly stage of the coronavirus pandemic. I contemplated making the trip from Maryland to New Jersey to see whether I, as a doctor, could garner special treatment until I realized that state and employer travel rules would mean waiting for a COVID test result and possibly facing quarantine on my return. In the end, my father spent his time in the hospital alone, suffering the double harm of illness and isolation.

These events still frustrate me years later; I have a hard time believing that restrictions on hospital visitation and interstate travel helped more people than they hurt. Many Americans remain angry about the pandemic for other reasons too: angry about losing a job, getting bullied into vaccination, or watching children fall behind in a virtual classroom. That legacy of bitterness and distrust is now a major political force. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on the precipice of leading our nation’s health-care system as secretary of Health and Human Services. The Johns Hopkins professor Marty Makary has been tapped to lead the Food and Drug Administration. And the Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya is expected to be picked to run the National Institutes of Health. These men have each advocated for changes to the systems and structures of public health. But what unites them all—and what legitimizes them in the eyes of this next administration—is a lasting rage over COVID.

To understand this group’s ascent to power and what it could mean for America, one must consider their perception of the past five years. The world, as Kennedy, Makary, Bhattacharya, and their compatriots variously understand it, is dreadful: SARS-CoV-2 was likely created in a lab in Wuhan, China; U.S. officials tried to cover up that fact; and the government responded to the virus by ignoring scientific evidence, violating citizens’ civil rights, and suppressing dissent. In the face of this modern “dark age,” as Bhattacharya has called it, only a few brave dissidents were willing to flip on the light.

Makary, Trump’s pick for the FDA, presents as being in the truth-to-power mold. A surgeon, policy researcher, and—full disclosure—my academic colleague, he gained a loyal following during the pandemic as a public-health critic. Through media outlets such as Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, Makary advocated for a more reserved use of COVID vaccines: He suggested that adults who had recovered from a COVID infection, as well as children more generally, could forgo some doses; he is also skeptical of booster shots for everyone and vaccine mandates. Makary, too, thinks that public-health officials have been lying to the American people: “The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government,” he told Congress last year, referring to public-health guidance that emphasized transmission of COVID on surfaces, downplayed natural immunity, encouraged boosters in young people, and promoted the efficacy of masking.

[Read: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

Bhattacharya, a doctor and health economist, rose to fame in October 2020 as a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a “focused protection” approach to the pandemic. The idea was to isolate vulnerable seniors while allowing low-risk individuals to return to their normal lives. Much of the public-health community aggressively criticized this strategy at the time, and—as would later be revealed—NIH Director Francis Collins privately called for a “quick and devastating” takedown of its premise. Twitter placed Bhattacharya on a “trends blacklist” that reduced the reach of his posts, according to internal documents released to the journalist Bari Weiss in 2022. Among conservatives and lockdown skeptics, Bhattacharya has come to be seen as a fearless truth teller who was silenced by the federal government and Big Tech. (In reality, and despite his frequent umbrage, Bhattacharya was not ignored. He met with the Trump administration and was in communication with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.)

In response to their marginalization from polite scientific society—and long before they were in line for key government positions—Makary and Bhattacharya have each sought out a public reckoning. They both called for the medical establishment to issue an apology to the American people. Makary demanded “fresh leadership” at an FDA that had made serious blunders on COVID medications and vaccines, and Bhattacharya asked for the formation of a COVID commission as a necessary first step in “restoring the public’s trust in scientific experts.” They even worked together at the Norfolk Group, a cohort of like-minded scientists and doctors that laid out what they deemed to be the most vital questions that must be asked of the nation’s public-health leaders. The gist of some of these is: Why didn’t they listen to “focused protection” supporters such as Bhattacharya and Makary? The report wonders, for instance, why Deborah Birx, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, avoided meeting with a cadre of anti-lockdown advocates that included Bhattacharya in the summer of 2020. (“They are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience,” Birx wrote in an email to the vice president’s chief of staff at the time.)

This sense of outrage over COVID will be standard in the next administration. Trump’s pick for surgeon general, the doctor and Fox News personality Janette Nesheiwat, has called the prolonged isolation brought about by shutdowns “cruel and inhumane,” and said that the collateral damage caused by the government’s actions was “worse than the pandemic” for most Americans. His nominee for secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, pushed for herd immunity in May 2020 and encouraged anti-lockdown protests.

[Read: Donald Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet pick]

Bhattacharya, at least, has denied having any interest in revenge. Last year he helped write an op-ed that cautioned against initiating a “Nuremberg 2.0” and instead presented scientists like himself and Makary as “apostles of evidence-based science” who are simply “calling for restoring evidence-based medicine to a pride of place in public health.”

Taken on its own, I’m sympathetic to that goal. I consider myself a fellow member of the “evidence-based medicine” movement that values high-quality data over blind loyalty to authority. I’m also of a similar mind as Makary about the FDA’s long-standing dysfunction. The COVID skeptics are correct that, in some domains, the pandemic produced too little knowledge and too much bluster. We still don’t know how well various social-distancing measures worked, what the best vaccination policy might be, or what the true origins of the virus were. I remember following the debates about these issues on Twitter, which functioned as a town square for doctors, scientists, and public-health leaders during the pandemic years. Mainstream experts tended to defend unproved public-health measures with self-righteousness and absolutism: You were either in favor of saving lives or you were one of the skeptics who was trying to kill Grandma. Nuanced conversations were rare. Accusations of “misinformation” were plentiful.

[Read: COVID science is moving backwards]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was indeed spreading misinformation with a fire hose. (For example, he has falsely said that the COVID shots are the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”) Bhattacharya and Makary have been far more grounded in reality, but they did make their own share of mistakes during the pandemic—and they haven’t spent much time rehashing them. So allow me to reflect on their behalf: In March 2020, Bhattacharya argued that COVID’s mortality rate was likely to be much lower than anyone was saying at the time, even to the point of being one-tenth that of the flu. “If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic,” he wrote, “then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible.” Bhattacharya continued to be wrong in important ways. A pivotal assumption of the Great Barrington Declaration was that as more healthy people got sick and then recovered, the residual risk of new infections would fall low enough that vulnerable people could safely leave isolation. This process would likely take three to six months, his group explained. SARS-CoV-2, however, is still circulating at high levels nearly five years later. At least 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID. Had effective vaccines not arrived shortly after the 2020 declaration, senior citizens might be in hiding to this day.

As for Makary, his most infamous take involved a February 2021 prediction that the United States would reach herd immunity within two months. “Scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. The Delta and Omicron waves followed, killing hundreds of thousands more Americans.

When I reached out to Bhattacharya, he said his early guess about COVID’s mortality rate was meant only to help describe a “range of possible outcomes,” and that to characterize it otherwise would be false. (Makary did not respond to my questions for this story.)

The incoming administration’s COVID skeptics have also expressed sympathy for still-unproved theories about the pandemic’s origin. If you want to become an evidence apostle, believing that SARS-CoV-2 came from an NIH-funded lab leak seems to be part of the deal. Kennedy wrote multiple books purporting to link Anthony Fauci, in particular, to the creation of the virus. Similarly, Makary appears in a new documentary called Thank You Dr. Fauci, which describes “a bio-arms race with China and what could be the largest coverup in modern history.” (Fauci has denied these claims on multiple occasions, including in congressional testimony. He called the idea that he participated in a cover-up of COVID’s origins “absolutely false and simply preposterous.”)

A certain amount of sycophancy toward the more bizarre elements of the coalition is also common. Makary and Bhattacharya have both praised Kennedy in extravagant terms despite his repeated falsehoods: “He wrote a 500-page book on Dr. Fauci and the medical industrial complex. A hundred percent of it was true,” Makary said of a volume that devotes multiple chapters to casting doubt on HIV as the cause of AIDS. Earlier this month, Bhattacharya called Kennedy a “disruptor” whose views on vaccines and AIDS are merely “eccentric.” (Bhattacharya has also suggested that the vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert Malone would be an “amazing leader” for the country’s health agencies.)

Anger about the government’s response to the pandemic swept the COVID contrarians into power. Resentment was their entrée into Washington. Now they’ll have a chance to fix some genuine, systemic problems with the nation’s public-health establishment. They’ll also have the ability to settle scores.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our current system has not fixed the problem.

Joe Biden entered office promising to “beat” the coronavirus pandemic, cure cancer, and get more people health care. Arguably no one on Earth can talk more passionately about funding cancer research than Biden, whose son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 and who, in 2022, announced an initiative to halve U.S. cancer deaths in the next 25 years. Robert Califf, Biden’s FDA commissioner, has been particularly stalwart in arguing that the agency must play a role in reversing a “catastrophic decline” in Americans’ life expectancy, and has repeatedly warned of “an ever-growing epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases,” such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. A 2019 study found that just 12 percent of Americans are considered metabolically healthy, based on their waist circumference, blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol.

Of course Biden’s White House was never going to end cancer or obesity in four years. But many of its policies barely scratched the surface of America’s wide-ranging health problems. Despite Califf’s dramatic language about the country’s diet problems, for example, the FDA’s efforts to improve the situation have mostly revolved around giving Americans more information about healthy foods.

The public-health bureaucracy that the Trump administration will inherit is more focused on and skilled at treating America’s health problems than preventing them. That shortcoming—despite the billions of dollars spent every year at these agencies—has damaged the credibility of the public-health establishment enough that Kennedy is now Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. Marty Makary, Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, has similarly risen in prominence by second-guessing "medical dogma" in the U.S. and beyond. And Trump’s pick to lead the CDC, former Representative Dave Weldon, has criticized the agency’s vaccine policies and once attempted to block its vaccine-safety research because of what he claimed were conflicts of interest. A set of men who have made careers of distrusting our existing health-care agencies may soon be empowered to try to blow them up.

The Biden administration, to be fair, had less time to deal with America’s deeper health issues, because it was forced to deal with at least a few calamities. Much of Biden’s term was spent navigating the country out of the pandemic. On the whole, his administration achieved most of its COVID goals. The Biden White House provided Americans with free COVID tests and mounted a vaccination campaign that resulted in more than three-quarters of the country getting a shot. Still, the pandemic left the CDC beleaguered by claims that it was simultaneously too slow and too aggressive in its efforts to fight the virus. During Biden’s presidency, the agency promised to “share science and data faster” and “translate science into practical policy,” but it has struggled to respond to the continued spread of bird flu. Public-health experts have slammed the CDC for not sharing enough information about the virus’s spread, including a human case in Missouri earlier this year, and farmers have been reluctant to implement the agency’s recommendations for preventing transmission of the virus from sick cattle to humans.

Some of those calamities were self-inflicted. The FDA is entrusted with ensuring that our food and medicines are safe, and it generally does spot issues quickly after they occur. But for months, the FDA failed to act on a whistleblower complaint alerting regulators to deplorable conditions at an infant-formula factory that eventually caused nationwide formula shortages and two infant deaths. The FDA is also supposed to decide what tobacco products can be sold, but it has failed to police the illegal market for vapes and nicotine pouches, such as Zyn. And for all the administration’s talk of being guided by “science and truth,” the White House seemingly bowed to political pressure and abandoned a plan to ban menthol cigarettes at the very end of a long rule-making process. The past four years have revealed that crucial parts of the agency’s remit—most notably its oversight of tobacco and the food system—have been neglected by agency leadership; in 2022, independent reviews of the FDA’s food and tobacco centers found that both lacked clarity on mission and goals.

At the same time, the administration has failed to deliver on its loftier ambitions. Biden quietly dropped some of his bolder ideas, such as his campaign promise to create a public-option insurance plan. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a new government agency that funds high-risk, high-reward research and is essential to Biden’s cancer goals, is in its infancy, and Republicans in Congress are already eager to cut its budget. And some promises, such as Biden’s grand goal to help change America’s diet, have been approached more like trivial pursuits.

The administration branded its 2022 hunger and nutrition conference, for instance, as the largest and most important gathering on nutrition policy since the Nixon administration. That 1960s conference led to millions of children gaining access to school lunch and to the creation of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (or WIC), which provides food to about 6 million Americans each month. The Biden administration’s summit ended with a pledge to end hunger and improve America’s diet by 2030, but the steps taken toward tackling those goals—such as developing a plan to add warning labels to unhealthy foods—have been modest. And all the agency has done so far on that project is conduct research on the labels’ potential design. The FDA has also pledged to lower the sodium in foods, but the targets it’s set for the food industry are entirely voluntary.

These efforts are understandably careful and bureaucratic. The agency’s caution over warning-label design comes amid threats from the food industry to sue over any label deemed unjustified. Indeed, in the U.S. legal system, regulators have trouble mandating that companies do much of anything without it being branded as unconstitutional. But the Biden administration’s efforts look comically inadequate given the scope of America’s health problems.

RFK Jr. is promising a break from the status quo. This is not to say that he, should he be confirmed as health secretary, has a better plan. Most of his ideas amount to little more than pronouncements that he will take sweeping actions immediately once Trump is sworn in as president. The reality is that many of those efforts would take months, if not years, to implement—and some might not be feasible at all. He has signaled, for example, that he will clear house at the FDA’s food center, despite rules that prevent government bureaucrats from being fired willy-nilly. He also has pledged to ban certain chemicals from food, which he’s argued are contributing to American’s lower life expectancy. But for every chemical the FDA bans, it will have to go through a lengthy regulatory process, which would likely be challenged by food companies in court. Kennedy’s notion of significantly altering the system of fees that drug makers pay the FDA to review their products would likely send the agency into a budgetary crisis.

If Kennedy gets confirmed to lead HHS, he will quickly be confronted with the reality that governing is a slow and tedious process that doesn’t take kindly to big, bold ideas, even with an impatient leader like Trump calling the shots. At the outset of his first term, Trump declared war on drug companies, which he claimed were “getting away with murder” due to their high prices. Trump’s then–health secretary, Alex Azar, in turn spent the next four years trying radical fixes that included requiring drug makers to post their prices in TV ads, importing drugs from Canada, tying American drug prices to other countries’, and eliminating the rebates that middlemen negotiate for insurance companies. But each idea got bogged down in bureaucracy and lawsuits. Trump’s early attempts to contain COVID by blocking international air travel similarly did little to keep the virus out of America, despite his claims at the time that the policy “saved us” from widespread outbreaks.

Biden benefited from Operation Warp Speed's rapid push to create vaccines, but it was his team of technocrats that finally got them distributed. And they eventually lowered drug prices too, in a much simpler way than Trump was proposing. But technocracy has also failed to address our most pressing—and most visible—health problems. Trump’s picks have little experience navigating the Rube Goldberg puzzle that is American bureaucracy. They certainly aren’t afraid of trying something new, but we’re about to find out how far that will get them.

Those of us who first became politically homeless in 2016 have lately been in a quandary: We need to figure out who we are. If we are not to succumb to the Saruman trap—going along with populist authoritarians in the foolish hope of using them for higher purposes—then we had better establish what we stand for.

Labels matter in politics. They can also lose their meaning. There is, for example, nothing “conservative” about the MAGA movement, which is, in large part, reactionary, looking for a return to an idealized past, when it is not merely a cult of personality. Today’s progressives are a long, long way from their predecessors of the early 20th century—just invoke Theodore Roosevelt’s name at a gathering of “the Squad” and see what happens.

Even the terms left and right—derived, let us remember, from seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the early days of the French Revolution—no longer convey much. Attitudes toward government coercion of various kinds, deficit spending, the rule of law—neither party holds consistent views on these subjects. The activist bases of both Democrats and Republicans like the idea of expanding executive power at the expense of Congress and the courts. Both see American foreign policy in past decades as a tale of unremitting folly, best resolved by leaving the world to its own devices. Both brood over fears and resentments, and shun those who do not share their deepest prejudices.

[David Frum: A good country’s bad choice]

What is worse is the extent to which the MAGA- and progressive-activist worlds are more interested in destroying institutions than building them. Both denounce necessary parts of government (the Department of Justice on the one hand, police departments on the other); seek to enforce speech codes; threaten to drive those they consider their enemies from public life; and pursue justice (as they understand it) in a spirit of reckless self-righteousness using prosecution as a form of retribution. Neither group of wreckers, for example, would really like to see, let alone help rebuild, the great universities as politically neutral oases of education rather than incubators of their own partisans.

To call those made politically homeless by the rise of Donald Trump “conservatives” no longer makes sense. To be a conservative is to want to slow down or stop change and preserve institutions and practices as they are, or to enable them to evolve slowly. But in recent decades, so much damage has been inflicted on norms of public speech and conduct that it is not enough to slow the progress of political decay. To the extent that the plain meaning of the word conservatism is indeed a commitment to preservation, that battle has been lost, and on multiple fronts.

We certainly are not “progressives” either. We do not believe that progress is inevitable (and can be accelerated), or that history bends in a certain direction. Being on the right side of history is a phrase that sends chills down the spines of those of us who have a somewhat dark view of human nature. The notion that the arc of history bends inexorably toward justice died for many of us in the middle of the 20th century. Moreover, the modern progressive temper, with its insistence on orthodoxies on such specifics as pronouns and a rigid and all-encompassing categorization of oppressors and victims, is intolerable for many of us.

What we are is a kind of old-fashioned liberal—a point recently made by the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. Liberal is not an entirely satisfactory term, but given the impoverishment of today’s political vocabulary, it will have to do.

What does being a liberal mean, particularly in a second Trump term, when politics has become coarse and brutal and the partisan divide seems uncrossable?

It begins with a commitment to the notion of “freedom”—that is, a freedom that most suits human nature at its finest and requires not only the legal protection to express itself but a set of internal restraints based on qualities now in short supply: prudent good judgment, the ability to empathize, the desire to avoid unnecessary hurt, a large measure of tolerance for disagreement, an awareness that error awaits all of us. We agree with Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued in Democracy in America, that it is mœurs—mores or habits of belief or norms—and not laws alone that keep America free.

If this does not sound like a partisan political agenda, that is because it is not. It is, rather, a temperament, a set of dispositions rooted in beliefs about the challenges and promise of free self-government. It is an assertion of the primacy of those deeper values over the urgency of any specific political program, and reflects a belief that, ultimately, they matter more.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, whose early-19th-century writings shaped the idea of a liberal education, famously captured these qualities in his description of the product of such an education:

He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out loud. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injury … He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust … He knows the weakness of human reason as well as its strength, its province and its limits.

These qualities will, no doubt, seem otherworldly to many. They are not the stuff of which a vigorous political party will be built; they are easily mocked and impossible to tweet. They are more the stuff of statesmanship than politics. They will satisfy neither of our political parties, and certainly none of their bigoted partisans. They will not, at least in the short run, capture the imagination of the American people. They are probably not the winning creed of a political movement that can capture the presidency in 2028, or secure majorities in the House or Senate.

[Caitlin Flanagan: The Democrats’ billionaire mistake]

But principled liberals of the modern American type can exercise influence if they are patient, willing to argue, and, above all, if they do not give up. We can write and speak, attempt to persuade, and engage. Our influence, to the extent that we have it, will be felt in the long term and indirectly. It may be felt most, and is most urgently needed, in the field of education, beginning in the early years when young people acquire the instincts and historical knowledge that can make them thoughtful citizens. It is a long-term project, but that is nothing new: The struggle to eliminate formal discrimination on the basis of race and religion in public life took a very long time as well.

True liberals are short-term pessimists, because they understand the dark side of human nature, but long-run optimists about human potential, which is why they believe in freedom. At this troubled moment, we should neither run from the public square nor chant jeremiads while shaking our fists at the heavens. We need to be the anti-hysterics, the unflappable skeptics, the persistent advocates for the best of the old values and practices in new conditions. We need to persistently make our case.

Nor is this a matter of argument only. We need to be the ones who not only articulate but embody certain standards of behavior and thought. We may need the courage that the first editor of this magazine described as the willingness to “dare to be, in the right with two or three.” For sure, we should follow the motto that he coined for The Atlantic and be “of no party or clique.” If that means journeying in a political wilderness for a while, well, there are precedents for that. Besides, those who travel with us will be good company—and may be considerably more numerous than we now think.

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Among Donald Trump’s many campaign-trail promises was his threat to dismantle the Department of Education, which he has claimed without basis is filled with “radicals, zealots, and Marxists.” But the president-elect seems to want to have it both ways: In trying to hamstring the federal agency, Trump says he will give power back to the states. But he has also said he is prepared to use executive power to crack down on schools with policies that don’t align with his culture-war agenda.

Trump proposed dismantling or dramatically cutting the DOE during his 2016 run, but he didn’t follow through while in office. This time, even if he does stick with it, he’s not likely to succeed: Because the department was elevated to a Cabinet-level agency by an act of Congress under President Jimmy Carter, shutting it down would likewise require an act of Congress. Passing such a law is a probable nonstarter even though Republicans will soon control the House and Senate. It would require a 60 percent vote in the Senate (at least as long as the filibuster is in place), and some Republicans would likely not support cutting the DOE, because it could be unpopular with their constituents. Red, rural, low-income areas are among the parts of the country whose school districts receive the most Title I supplemental funding from the agency. Although the DOE has found its place in the crosshairs of the culture wars, its daily function largely involves distributing funds to K–12 schools and administering federal loan programs for college students—not getting involved in the curriculum issues that inflame the political right.

Whether he follows through on his DOE threat or not, Trump has other channels through which to alter America’s schools. Trump’s statements on the campaign trail suggest that he’s likely to use his executive power to roll back the changes President Joe Biden made to Title IX, which related in part to protections for LGBTQ students and rules for how colleges respond to allegations of sexual violence on campus (these changes are currently blocked in some states). Trump’s platform also states that he “will sign an executive order instructing every federal agency, including the Department of Education, to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition, at any age,” and he has signaled that he may threaten to withhold federal funds from schools that don’t fall in line. Trump and his team may also push to direct public money to parents with students in private and religious K–12 schools through a system known as “school choice” vouchers, which has gained political momentum after sustained attacks on public schools from Republican politicians (vouchers were a priority of Trump’s last education secretary, Betsy DeVos, too).

Conservative politicians have long been outwardly skeptical of the federal government playing a major role in schools—yet many are also inclined to push through policy priorities on education when they are in positions of national power, Jon Valant, an education policy expert at the Brookings Institution, told me. The Department of Education, in particular, has been an on-and-off boogeyman of Republicans. President Ronald Reagan talked about closing the agency as part of his effort to shrink the federal government (obviously, he did not succeed). But for all the talk about reducing the federal government’s power, eliminating the DOE would likely just mean moving things around—the Justice Department might handle civil-rights programs currently managed by the DOE; the Treasury Department might take over student-loan administration. It’s not clear that these changes “would actually shrink the federal role in education or the cost of administering those programs,” Valant told me.

Even as he claims that he will axe the department, Trump is moving forward with staffing it. He has put forth Linda McMahon, a major campaign donor with roots in the professional wrestling world, as his secretary of education. McMahon fits the description of some of Trump’s other recent Cabinet picks: a friend or loyalist who is unqualified for the role at hand. She has scant experience working in or with schools—she once claimed to have a degree in education because she had spent a semester student-teaching, The Washington Post and the Hartford Courant reported. But the choice of McMahon does not send as strong a signal as selecting a louder culture-war voice, such as Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, or the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo—all of whom policy experts speculated about as possible picks—might have.

In his first term as president, Trump spoke with bombast about his education plans but didn’t end up doing much. The national conversation on schools was in a different place then—before the culture wars further heated up and public trust in schools and other institutions declined. Trump and his allies have made schools a villain in many of the social issues he centered his campaign on. This time, he may have more incentive to take action, if he’s willing to do the work of transforming the system.

Related:

Donald Trump claims public schools offer sex-change surgeries. George Packer: When the culture war comes for the kids

Today’s News

Former Representative Matt Gaetz withdrew himself from consideration for the attorney-general role in Trump’s second administration. Trump announced that former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is his new pick for the position. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif—whom Israel claims to have killed—over allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Brazil’s federal police announced that former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 other people have been indicted for allegedly plotting a coup after he lost in the 2022 elections.

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Time-Travel Thursdays: The bean—small, humble, protein-dense—has the potential to remake American diets, Lora Kelley writes. But it also has an image problem.

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Three Ways to Become a Deeper Thinker

By Arthur C. Brooks

You may have encountered this cryptic question at some point. It is a koan, or riddle, devised by the 18th-century Zen Buddhist master Hakuin Ekaku. Such paradoxical questions have been used for centuries to train young monks, who were instructed to meditate on and debate them. This was intended to be taxing work that could induce maddening frustration—but there was a method to it too. The novitiates were not meant to articulate tidy answers; they were supposed to acquire, through mental struggle, a deeper understanding of the question itself—for this was the path to enlightenment.

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Well, that was fast.

Last Wednesday, President-Elect Donald Trump shocked even his allies by nominating Representative Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Today, Gaetz has pulled out of consideration, one day after meeting with senators on Capitol Hill.

“It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” the Florida man wrote on X. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I'll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1.”

For at least one presidential nominee to withdraw at some point in the process is very common. What is unusual is how quickly Gaetz’s nomination fell apart. Eight days is not the record, but it’s close. (Recall that White House Physician Ronny Jackson’s nomination to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs took nearly a month to collapse.) Just two days ago, Trump was insisting he had no second thoughts about picking Gaetz.

[Listen: What Pete Hegseth’s nomination is all about]

The reason why Gaetz withdrew is no secret and no surprise. He’s been shadowed for years by allegations of sex trafficking, paying for sex, drug use, and sex with an underage girl. Trump doesn’t appear to have bothered to vet Gaetz in any serious way before nominating him, but all of this was known. The Justice Department investigated Gaetz for years but in 2023 decided against bringing charges; the House Ethics Committee was still probing him. Gaetz himself denies any wrongdoing. The fact that Gaetz, like Trump, has a personal vendetta against the Justice Department seemed to be his main credential for the job.

When Gaetz was nominated, he also resigned from Congress. That froze the House Ethics Committee investigation, since he was no longer a member. Speaker Mike Johnson, a Gaetz ally though he is primly conservative where Gaetz is a libertine, opposed releasing the committee’s work, and the committee deadlocked in a vote. But Gaetz’s victory was hardly complete. His nomination dislodged lots of damaging new information, including testimony about him twice having sex with a 17-year-old, though witnesses believed Gaetz did not know she was underage. A lawyer for two women said they testified to the House that Gaetz paid them for sex. The New York Times published an impossibly elaborate diagram outlining payment schemes. Gaetz fooled around, and the public found out; by accepting the scrutiny that comes with a nomination, he also fooled around and found out.

But don’t cry too much for Gaetz, and not only because of his record as a scoundrel. (He’s detested by House colleagues, and many reports indicate he shared naked videos of paramours on the House floor.) His infamy hasn’t prevented his rise so far, and he is believed to have designs on running for governor of Florida when Ron DeSantis’s term ends.

The question now is what this defeat portends for the rest of Trump’s slate of outrageous nominees. The president-elect likes to take a gamble, even if he sometimes loses, but as I argued last week, the presence of so many unqualified picks might perversely make it easier for some of them to get through—after all, the Senate couldn’t reject them all, right?

[Read: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]

Gaetz’s quick exit shows that Senate Republicans aren’t willing to accept literally anyone who Trump throws their way, and the fact that they were able to send that message so quickly suggests just how deep their reservations were. If the rejection is a sign of weakness for Trump, it is also one for his vice president-elect, Senator J. D. Vance. Vance was given the tough job of squiring Gaetz around Senate offices yesterday to drum up support, which obviously did not go well.

The Gaetz failure doesn’t mean that senators will reject any other picks, but with Gaetz out of the way, the troubled nomination of Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon will be able to get more attention. A police report about a sexual-assault allegation against Hegseth from 2017 was released today, and it’s a stomach-churning read. Alternatively, Gaetz could end up looking like a sacrificial pick to save the others, or like a stalking horse for Trump to appoint someone else at DOJ. It seems unlikely that Trump intended either of these—he doesn’t usually play to lose—but that could be the effect.

Before Trump chose Gaetz, he reportedly concluded that other contenders simply didn’t have what he wanted in an attorney general, according to The New York Times. Now he’ll have to go back his lists to choose someone who has one thing that Gaetz conspicuously lacked: the ability to get confirmed.