For a few hours, Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense was the most disturbing act of Donald Trump’s presidential transition. Surely the Senate wouldn’t confirm an angry Fox News talking head with no serious managerial experience, best known for publicly defending war criminals, to run the largest department in the federal government. Then, in rapid succession, Trump announced appointments for Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The appearance of these newer and even more aberrant characters, like a television show introducing a more villainous heel in its second season, muted the indignation over Hegseth.

Obscured in this flurry of shocking appointments is the fact that Hegseth’s drawbacks are not limited to his light résumé or to the sexual-assault allegation made against him. Inexperienced though he may be at managing bureaucracies, Hegseth has devoted a great deal of time to documenting his worldview, including three books published in the past four years. I spent the previous week reading them: The man who emerges from the page appears to have sunk deeply into conspiracy theories that are bizarre even by contemporary Republican standards but that have attracted strangely little attention. He considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically. He may be no less nutty than any of Trump’s more controversial nominees. And given the power he is likely to hold—command over 2 million American military personnel—he is almost certainly far more dangerous than any of them.

Hegseth began his involvement in conservative-movement politics as a Princeton undergraduate. He then joined the Army and quickly developed a profile, when not on active duty, as a budding Republican spokesperson. He testified against Elena Kagan’s appointment to the Supreme Court (on the grounds that, while dean of Harvard Law School, she had blocked military recruiters from campus in protest of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) and lobbied in favor of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. As the Republican Party’s foreign-policy orientation changed radically under Donald Trump, Hegseth’s positions changed with it. But his devotion to the party remained constant. After stints running the advocacy groups Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, and a failed Senate campaign, he finally settled at Fox News, where he joined a chorus in support of Trump.

Along the way, Hegseth has written five books. The first, extolling Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy, revolves around ideas that Hegseth has since renounced after converting to Trumpism. Another is simply a collection of war stories. The other three, all published in the past four years—American Crusade (2020), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and The War on Warriors (2024)—lay out his worldview in florid, explicit, and often terrifying detail.

A foundational tenet of Hegseth’s philosophy, apparently carrying over from his Roosevelt-worshipping era, is a belief in the traditional masculine virtues and the potential for war to inculcate them. Hegseth maintains that boys require discipline and must aspire to strength, resilience, and bravery. His preferred archetype for these virtues appears to be Pete Hegseth, whose manful exploits either on the basketball court (he played for Princeton) or the battlefield are featured in all three books.

[David A. Graham: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]

Hegseth complains that society no longer gives veterans like him their proper measure of deference. “Being a veteran no longer demands respect of the coastal elites or reverence from large swaths of the public,” he writes—an observation that will sound strange to anybody who has ever attended a football game or listened to a speech by a politician from either party. “In previous generations, men had to find ways to salvage their honor if they didn’t get to fight in a war.” (The single strongest piece of evidence for Hegseth’s thesis—the popularity of lifelong coastal elitist, proud war-avoider, and POW-mocker Donald Trump—goes unmentioned).

Hegseth’s demand for greater respect grows out of his belief that he personally succeeded in the face of forbidding odds. “I had been an underdog my whole life,” he writes. “I persisted. I worked my ass off.” But the woke military, he complains, doesn’t reward that kind of individual merit and grit. Instead, it has grown so obsessed with diversity that it promotes unqualified minorities and allows women in combat, reducing its effectiveness and alienating hard-working, meritorious soldiers such as, well, him. He also frets that the inclusion of women in combat erodes traditional gender norms. “How do you treat women in a combat situation,” he asks, “without eroding the basic instinct of civilization and the treatment of women in the society at large?”

(The treatment of women by Hegseth specifically happens to be the subject of a recently disclosed police report detailing an alleged sexual assault of a woman at a 2017 political conference. Hegseth denies the allegation and says that the encounter, which took place while he was transitioning between his second and third wives, was consensual. He paid the alleged victim an undisclosed sum in return for her signing a nondisclosure agreement.)

One episode looms especially large in Hegseth’s mind as the embodiment of the wokification of the military and its abandonment of traditional merit. In 2021, Hegseth, an active National Guard member, wished to join the Washington, D.C., unit protecting incoming President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The National Guard, however, excluded him from the detail because he was deemed a security risk on account of a bicep tattoo of the “Deus Vult” symbol—a reference to the Crusades that is popular with some far-right activists.

The logic of the snub was straightforward. Biden’s inauguration took place in the immediate aftermath of an insurrection attempt that had included many members of the armed forces, some operating within far-right networks. But to Hegseth—who protests that the Deus Vult tattoo is simply an expression of his Christian faith, not a white-nationalist symbol—the decision was an unforgivable personal affront.

He expresses indignation at the notion that he could even be suspected of harboring radical ideas. “I fought religious extremists for over twenty years in uniform,” he writes. “Then I was accused of being one.” This is not as paradoxical as Hegseth makes it sound. Many of the people most eager to fight against extremists of one religion are extremist adherents of another religion. An example of this would be the Crusades, an episode that Hegseth highlights in American Crusade as a model to emulate.

In any case, evidence of Hegseth’s extremism does not need to be deduced by interpreting his tattoos. The proof is lying in plain sight. In his three most recent books, Hegseth puts forward a wide range of familiarly misguided ideas: vaccines are “poisonous”; climate change is a hoax (they used to warn about global cooling, you know); George Floyd died of a drug overdose and was not murdered; the Holocaust was perpetrated by “German socialists.”

Where Hegseth’s thinking begins venturing into truly odd territory is his argument, developed in Battle for the American Mind, that the entire basic design of the public education system is the product of a century-long, totally successful communist plot. Hegseth is not just hyperventilating about the 1619 Project, Howard Zinn, or other left-wing fads, as conservatives often do. Instead he argues that the entire design of the U.S. education system is a Marxist scheme with roots going back to the founding of the republic. The deist heresies of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, he writes, laid the groundwork to implant communist thought into the school system. Then, “American Progressives in the late 1800s blended the idea of Marxist government with aspects from the Social Gospel and the belief in an American national destiny in order to make Marxism more palatable to Americans.”

The nefarious plan to turn America communist involves steps that appear anodyne to the untrained eye. “Yes, our modern social sciences—like ‘political science,’ previously known as ‘politics,’ and ‘social studies,’ previously known as individual disciplines like ‘history, economics, geography and philosophy’—are byproducts of Marxist philosophy,” he writes. “Let that sink in: the manner in which we study politics, history, and economics in American schools—public and private—today is the product of Marxists. That was always the plan, and it worked.” Hegseth will no longer sit back and allow communist indoctrination to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

The Marxist conspiracy has also, according to Hegseth, begun creeping into the U.S. military, the institution he is now poised to run. His most recent book calls for a straightforward political purge of military brass who had the gall to obey Democratic administrations: “Fire any general who has carried water for Obama and Biden’s extraconstitutional and agenda-driven transformation of our military.” Trump appears to be thinking along similar lines. He is reportedly working on an executive order that will fast-track the removal of officers “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” and compiling a list of officers involved in the Afghanistan retreat, who will likewise be shoved out.

To what end? Trump has already signaled his interest in two revolutionary changes to the Defense Department’s orientation. One is to legalize war crimes, or at least cease enforcement of the rules of war. The president-elect has enthusiastically endorsed the use of illegal military methods and has pardoned American soldiers who committed atrocities against detainees and unarmed civilians, following a loud campaign by Hegseth on Fox News.

[Graeme Wood: War crimes are not difficult to discern]

In The War on Warriors, Hegseth makes plain that he considers the very idea of “rules of war” just more woke nonsense. “Modern war-fighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys,” he writes. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.” He repeatedly disparages Army lawyers (“jagoffs”), even claiming that their pointless rules are “why America hasn’t won a war since World War II.” (Ideally, the secretary of defense would be familiar with historical episodes such as the Gulf War.)

Writing about his time guarding prisoners at Guantánamo Bay—where, as even the Bush administration eventually admitted, most detainees were innocent men swept up by American forces—Hegseth describes calls for due process as a stab-in-the-back against brave soldiers like himself. “The nation was dealing with legal issues (mostly led by weak-kneed, America-hating ACLU types) concerning enemy combatants, ‘international rights’ of illegal combatants, and the beginnings of extrajudicial drone attacks,” he writes. “Not to mention the debate about the ‘rights’ of assholes (I mean, ‘detainees’) at Gitmo.”

Trump’s second and even more disturbing interest in having a loyalist run the department is his enthusiasm for deploying troops to curtail and if necessary shoot domestic protesters. His first-term defense secretaries blanched at these demands. Hegseth displays every sign of sharing Trump’s impulses, but in a more theorized form.

The clearest throughline of all three books is the cross-application of Hegseth’s wartime mentality to his struggle against domestic opponents. American Crusade calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left,” with the goal of “utter annihilation,” without which “America cannot, and will not, survive.” Are the Crusades just a metaphor? Sort of, but not really: “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” (Emphasis—gulp—his).

Battle for the American Mind likewise imagines the struggle against the communist educational plot as a military problem: “We are pinned down, caught in an enemy near ambush. The enemy has the high ground, and is shooting from concealed and fortified positions.”

And The War on Warriors repeatedly urges Hegseth’s readers to treat the American left exactly like foreign combatants. Describing the military’s responsibility to the nation, he writes, “The expectation is that we will defend it against all enemies—both foreign and domestic. Not political opponents, but real enemies. (Yes, Marxists are our enemies.)” The Marxist exception swallows the “not political opponents” rule, because pretty much all of his political opponents turn out to be Marxists. These include, but are not limited to, diversity advocates (“They are Marxists … You know what they are? They’re traitors”), newspapers (“the communist Star Tribune”), and, as noted, almost anybody involved in public education.

Lest there be any ambiguity, Hegseth incessantly equates the left to wartime enemies. “They do not respect cease-fires, do not abide by the rules of warfare, and do not respect anything except total defeat of their enemy—and then total control,” he writes at one point. At another, he argues, “We should be in panic mode. Almost desperate. Willing to do anything to defeat the ‘fundamental transformation’ of the American military and end the war on our warriors.”

Hegseth’s idea of illegitimate behavior by the domestic enemy is quite expansive. Consider this passage, recalling his time advocating for the Iraq War: “While I debated these things in good faith, the Left mobilized. Electing Obama, railroading the military, pushing women in combat—readiness be damned. The left has never fought fair.” The most remarkable phrase there is “electing Obama.” Hegseth’s notion of unfair tactics used by the left includes not only enacting administrative policies that he disagrees with, but the basic act of voting for Democrats. The inability or unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate political opposition likely endeared Hegseth to Trump, who shares the trait.

A Defense Secretary with a tenuous grip on reality, who can’t differentiate foreign enemies from domestic political opponents, and who seems to exist in a state of permanent hysteria is a problem that the United States has never had to survive. The main question I was looking to answer when I started reading Hegseth’s collected works was whether he would follow a Trump command to shoot peaceful protesters. After having read them, I don’t think he would even wait for the order.

The fad began with a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York City on a beautiful day last month. Thousands of people came and caused a ruckus. At least one of the Timothées was among the four people arrested by New York City police. Eventually, the real Timothée Chalamet showed up to take pictures with fans. The event, which was organized by a popular YouTuber who had recently received some attention for eating a tub of cheeseballs in a public park, captured lightning in a bottle. It didn’t even matter that the winner didn’t look much like the actor, or that the prize was only $50.

In the weeks since, similar look-alike contests have sprung up all over the country, organized by different people for their own strange reasons. There was a Zayn Malik look-alike contest in Brooklyn, a Dev Patel look-alike contest in San Francisco, and a particularly rowdy Jeremy Allen White look-alike contest in Chicago. Harry Styles look-alikes gathered in London, Paul Mescal look-alikes in Dublin. Zendaya look-alikes competed in Oakland, and a “Zendaya’s two co-stars from Challengers” lookalike contest will be held in Los Angeles on Sunday. As I write this, I have been alerted to plans for a Jack Schlossberg look-alike contest to be held in Washington, D.C., the same day. (Schlossberg is John F. Kennedy’s only grandson; he both works at Vogue and was also profiled by Vogue this year.)

These contests evidently provide some thrill that people are finding irresistible at this specific moment in time. What is it? The chance to win some viral fame or even just positive online attention is surely part of it, but those returns are diminishing. The more contests there are, the less novel each one is, and the less likely it is to be worth the hassle. That Chalamet showed up to his look-alike contest was magic—he’s also the only celebrity to attend one of these contests so far. Yet the contests continue.

Celebrities have a mystical quality that’s undeniable, and it is okay to want to be in touch with the sublime. Still, some observers sense something a bit sinister behind the playfulness of contest after contest, advertised with poster after poster on telephone pole after telephone pole. The playwright Jeremy O. Harris wrote on X that the contests are “Great Depression era coded,”  seeming to note desperation and a certain manic optimism in these events. The comparison is not quite right—although the people at these contests may not all have jobs, they don’t seem to be starving (one of the contests promised only two packs of cigarettes and a MetroCard as a prize)—but I understand what he’s getting at. Clearly, the look-alike competitions do not exist in a vacuum.

The startling multiplication of the contests reminds me of the summer of 2020, when otherwise rational-seeming people suggested that the FBI was planting caches of fireworks in various American cities as part of a convoluted psyop. There were just too many fireworks going off for anything else to make sense! So people said. With hindsight, it’s easy to recognize that theory as an expression of extreme anxiety brought on by the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. At the time, some were also feeling heightened distrust of law enforcement, which had in some places reacted to Black Lives Matter protests with violence.

Today’s internet-y stunts are just silly events, but people are looking for greater meaning in them. Over the past few weeks, although some have grown a bit weary of the contests, a consensus has also formed that they are net good because they are bringing people out of their house and into “third spaces” (public parks) and fraternity (“THE PEOPLE LONG FOR COMMUNITY”). This too carries a whiff of desperation, as though people are intentionally putting on a brave face and shoving forward symbols of our collective creativity and togetherness.

I think the reason is obvious. The look-alike contests, notably, started at the end of October. The first one took place on the same day as a Donald Trump campaign event at Madison Square Garden, which featured many gleefully racist speeches and was reasonably compared by many to a Nazi rally. The photos from the contests maybe serve as small reassurance that cities, many of which shifted dramatically rightward in the recent presidential election, are still the places that we want to believe they are—the closest approximation of America’s utopian experiment, where people of all different origins and experiences live together in relative peace and harmony and, importantly, good fun. At least most of the time.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s movement has repeatedly been written off as a farce, a stunt, a distraction. Now Donald Trump has nominated him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, where, if confirmed, he’ll oversee a life-and-death corner of the federal government.

RFK Jr.’s operation had been building toward this moment for months. On August 23, Kennedy suspended his independent presidential bid and endorsed Trump after what he described as “a series of long, intense discussions” that proved the two were ideologically aligned. Almost immediately, the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement was born, as was a super PAC of the same name.

The group’s near-term goal was simple: persuade Kennedy’s coalition to vote for Trump. His former national field director, Jeff Hutt, became one of the MAHA PAC’s leaders, and throughout the fall, in his phone calls and meetings with Kennedy supporters, he kept hearing the same message: If RFK Jr. couldn’t become president, he should zero in on health reforms.

[John Hendrickson: The first MAGA Democrat]

“HHS is the place where they wanted Mr. Kennedy to be,” Hutt told me last night. He fully expects Kennedy to be confirmed. Hutt and his team have set up a “war room” and are identifying which senators will support the HHS nomination, and which will need coaxing. Either through standard procedure or via a recess appointment (an idea Trump has teased), Hutt said he was confident that Kennedy will land the job.

Kennedy was offered such a significant position—and will have such a “big rein,” as Hutt put it—because Trump returns favors. In 2016, Trump courted Christian voters by dangling the prospect of appointing conservative judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade. This year, Trump spent the final months of the election wooing the MAHA bros. How many Kennedy supporters actually voted for Trump is unclear, but Hutt and others I spoke with believe that Trump’s victory is partially on account of the RFK Jr. brigade showing up. “He got behind them, and he got elected,” Hutt said of Trump.

Kennedy’s acolytes are elated that he will have such a prominent position in the administration. In my conversations with former Kennedy volunteers and others in his orbit this week, I heard some skepticism as to whether he’ll actually be able to accomplish a revolution inside a sprawling government bureaucracy. But for now, Kennedy’s champions are hopeful that he’ll catalyze policy changes that would lead to a “healthier” society—even if they don’t all agree on what that means.

In late September, at a festival of “free thinkers” in Washington, D.C., where RFK Jr. was the star attraction, Mike Patton, a former campaign volunteer who lives in Florida, told me he was unsure about whether he could bring himself to vote for Trump after all the work he’d done for Kennedy.

This week, Patton told me that, in the end, he and his wife each wrote in Kennedy’s name on their ballot. He is happy that Kennedy is ascending to a place of power, and excited that Trump has promised to give Kennedy authority over health matters, but he’s dismayed that Trump apparently wants to keep him away from areas involving fossil fuels and renewable energy. Patton isn’t sure what Kennedy might be able to accomplish within Trump’s administration. The idea of fighting all manner of chronic diseases with cleaner food and water is a pillar of the MAHA movement. But this will be an uphill battle. “Even when he was campaigning, he was saying he was going to make a drastic reduction in chronic disease in his four years, and I can’t wrap my head around how you can make a measurable difference [that quickly],” Patton told me. “But he seems confident, and Bobby seemed confident before. So, pop some popcorn.”

Another Kennedy supporter, Jennifer Swayne, who served as his campaign’s Florida volunteer coordinator, told me she somewhat reluctantly voted for Trump. Swayne is the mother of a child with autism, and she believes that mothers like herself are searching for answers—that’s partly what drew her to Kennedy. “We want to know what's causing this,” she said of autism. “We want to prevent other moms from having to go through this.” She said she would define success for Kennedy’s HHS tenure as removing “dangerous products off the market” and holding drug manufacturers accountable for adverse effects and chemical dependency.

[Yasmin Tayag: ‘Make America healthy again’ sounds good until you start asking questions]

When I asked Hutt how he’d gauge Kennedy’s success, he had a range of ideas. “The amount of money flowing through government into corporations would be dramatically reduced. Government would be out of a lot of things, like health care. We would take the middleman out of a lot of things. We would have government agencies whose sole purpose is to publish and report facts and numbers in ways that educate the American people, not to convince them one way or the other of something,” he said. He envisioned Kennedy ushering in an era of more family farms, of citizens gardening and growing their own food. “I guess that's really what it looks like: sort of a health revolution, in a sense,” he said. “Nobody’s ever asked me that question before.”

In announcing the nomination, Trump echoed Kennedy’s core campaign messaging: “Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and one of the key people behind Project 2025, said in a statement that Kennedy’s nomination “sends a clear message to our failed public health establishment,” and that under Trump and Kennedy, “Americans will be in control of their health, not the commissars of three-letter health agencies.”

Many questions surround the HHS nomination, none more significant than whether Kennedy would use his authority to block or recall certain vaccines. Kennedy has spent years sowing doubt about their safety. In the early 2000s, he helped popularize the unproven theory of a link between vaccines and autism. More recently, he was an influential opponent of the COVID vaccines and accompanying mandates. Now he’s poised to inform drug policy at the highest level.

Kennedy’s spokesperson did not respond to my request for comment last night as to whether, as HHS secretary, RFK Jr. would move to outlaw any existing vaccines, and referred me to his victory-lap post on X, which did not mention the topic. Tony Lyons, who founded a different Kennedy super PAC, American Values 2024, said in a text message: “Bobby has said very clearly that he’s not going to take away anyone’s vaccines.” If, hypothetically, we faced another pandemic during Trump’s second term, I asked Lyons, would Kennedy stand in the way of a vaccine-development project such as Operation Warp Speed? Lyons didn’t offer a clear answer. “[Kennedy] believes in robust, transparent and independent science, rather than corporate science propped up by censorship and propaganda,” he wrote.

In my conversations with Kennedy’s supporters, I heard a lot about “medical freedom” and “personal choice,” but no one mentioned the word ban. Kennedy stiff-arms the “anti-vax” label, and his allies steadfastly maintain that he’ll use his position to scrutinize vaccine science—but not to institute a vaccine moratorium for the greater population.

[Benjamin Mazer: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

Perhaps the clearest way to understand Kennedy’s HHS aim is to listen to his musings on “corporate capture”: the idea that government agencies are overly influenced by the companies within the industries they’re supposed to be regulating. This is a long-standing liberal complaint, which Kennedy has built up to the status of a conspiracy theory. (Anthony Fauci, for instance, has not personally profited off of vaccines, as Kennedy has claimed.) His top-line goal is to sever the relationships between corporations and the federal government, but he has yet to explicitly state how he’ll do that. Reforming fast food may be his biggest source of tension with Trump. The future 47th president didn’t just serve fries at a (closed) McDonald’s as a campaign stunt; he seems to genuinely love Mickey D’s, while Kennedy sees it as a scourge—the antithesis of MAHA. But that’s just one company. Hutt conceded that his team faces a challenge in persuading senators from agricultural-heavy states to support the sort of reforms Kennedy is promising: fewer food chemicals, an emphasis on regenerative soil.

And some of what Kennedy speaks of accomplishing is well beyond his reach. For instance, he has called for removing fluoride from our drinking water—something even Republican dentists oppose. But such a change could occur only at the local level, not the federal level. In New York City, for example, Mayor Eric Adams has said he will follow the fluoridation recommendations of city and state health departments.

As Trump prepares to take office again, Kennedy remains a confounding presence: He’s a dreamer, but he’s destructive. Kennedy was never going to win the White House, but he’s now, at last, on his way to Washington. And we all have to live with it.

Although the plight of America’s 2.2 million federal bureaucrats seldom elicits public sympathy, spare a charitable thought for their future. Not since the congressional elections of 1882 has civil-service reform received so much political attention. President-Elect Donald Trump and his allies now face a fundamental decision: Will they listen to the loudest and most extreme voices in their party and be agents of chaos and disruption in upending the civil service? Or will they adopt a more measured, incremental approach that would deliver improvements and burnish their managerial credentials? The recent appointment of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency is a clear signal that Trump is leaning toward disruption. But the risks are significant—and the president-elect has other reform options that could be more effective at a far lower cost.  

Few would argue that the current federal civil service is perfect. In 2017 and 2018, the National Academy of Public Administration, an independent nonprofit chartered by Congress, issued a two-part white paper describing the government’s staffing system as “fundamentally broken,” with too many rules and too little flexibility. Its authors argued that firing nonperformers and attracting new talent can be too difficult. Other observers have bemoaned the bureaucracy for its cost, inefficiency, and unresponsiveness. Change is clearly needed, and would in fact be welcome in many corners of the federal government.

Although distinguished bipartisan commissions may agree on a path forward, Republican and Democratic politicians—buffeted by the interests and passions of their bases—have been unable to come together to address these problems. Under pressure from public-sector unions, Democrats have shied away from even modest reforms of their own and have focused instead on resisting GOP proposals—which have centered on removing protections from federal employees. Some on the hard right are working toward “deconstruction of the administrative state” and the “total destruction of the deep state,” as the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon has put it. But most Americans—including many moderate Republicans and Democrats—do not share this animus. They value government services and simply want to see them performed better.

Efficient and effective institutions are easy to degrade, difficult to build. The United States needs to retain the benefits of technical competence and impartial advice from a meritocratic civil service while ensuring that federal employees are accountable to political oversight. There are more constructive ways to achieve the objectives that both Republicans and Democrats claim to want, while retaining a high-performing, meritocratic civil service.         

[Read: Brace for the storm]

Late in his first administration, Trump used an executive order to introduce Schedule F, which sought to remove civil-service protections from any career official with a policy-making role, giving the White House much greater discretion in hiring and firing. Currently, there are about 4,000 political positions, out of which some 1,200 are subject to congressional approval. The number of positions that could be designated as Schedule F is unknown, but estimates suggest it could be 50,000 or higher. Trump’s campaign pledged to “immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” and he himself has promised to wield this power “very aggressively.”

He will have broad support from his party, which has sought to reap political benefit from stoking public hostility toward civil servants. In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, then a presidential primary candidate, claimed that he would start “slitting throats” of federal bureaucrats from day one. Other prominent Republicans, such as Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have indicated their openness to Schedule F. During the primaries, Ramaswamy denounced the administrative state as “an unconstitutional fourth branch of government,” and proposed firing more than three-quarters of federal employees. He later revised this mass-termination plan to cover just half the federal workforce, selected randomly: “If your SSN ends in an odd number, you’re fired.” More recently, Ramaswamy has expressed admiration for Musk’s drastic staff cuts at X (formerly Twitter) as a template for reducing the federal government.

In the Senate, Florida’s Rick Scott has been the Republican most aggressively pressing for a radical restructuring of the civil service. In 2022, he rolled out his 12-point Rescue America plan, which included a proposal for many government agencies to either move out of Washington or shut down entirely. Although about 85 percent of federal employees already work outside the greater Washington, D.C., area, the idea of moving staff out of the capital has caught on in Republican circles—the Trump campaign said he would move as many as 100,000 civil-service positions “to places filled with patriots who love America.” Cutting civil-service protections is also popular with the MAGA base: The Public Service Reform Act, which Scott introduced last year, proposed to place the entire workforce in “at will” employment status, allowing them to be terminated “for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all.” (The bill has not yet passed through committee.)

And then there is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Tonally, the document is uncompromising. The federal government is a “behemoth” deployed against American citizens and conservative values; federal bureaucrats are “underworked, over compensated and unaccountable.” The project argues that the entire edifice of civil-service protections is a legacy of the American left: “Progressive intellectuals and activists demanded a more professionalized, scientific and politically neutral administration.” That statement is partly accurate but woefully incomplete. Republicans have historically been at the forefront of reform efforts, and the last major one, during the Carter administration, was a notably bipartisan affair.

Rhetoric aside, the project’s analysis of central agencies and federal personnel policy is more subtle and nuanced, grounded in a careful review of the relevant institutions and legal and regulatory frameworks. What influence Project 2025 will have on the second Trump administration remains to be seen. Tactically, the president-elect chose to distance himself from it during the campaign, but in office Trump may draw heavily on the document—as well as the personnel who drafted it.

As Francis Fukuyama has argued, the reintroduction of Schedule F will make the federal government “less competent and vastly more politicized.” The United States already has a much higher number of political appointees than any other advanced-industrial democracy—nearly 28 times the number in the United Kingdom, for example. Political appointments stretch down four or five levels of bureaucracy in some agencies (such as the Department of Defense).  

Republicans would be unwise to view Trump’s reelection as a mandate for completely uprooting the civil service. The most recent survey of public confidence in government by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service found disturbing evidence of reduced trust in government. Yet attitudes toward federal employees remain positive. A majority of respondents (55 percent) agreed with the statement that most civil servants are competent; a similar proportion agreed that most are committed to helping people “like me.” Only a quarter of respondents said that presidents should be able to fire “any civil servants that they choose for any reason,” whereas 72 percent disagreed with this statement.

[Read: Trump takes aim at Republicans]

Several measures could improve responsiveness, accountability, and performance at a much lower cost and risk than the ideas currently circulating in Republican circles. Departments and agencies should have more flexibility in managing their human resources, and be empowered to tailor their personnel policies to their particular business needs. The allocation of political appointees across the government needs regular review: A bipartisan commission should examine the current 4,000 such posts and make recommendations to the administration about streamlining and redistribution. Performance management is a key area for improvement: Currently, less than 0.5 percent of the federal workforce is rated “marginally satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory,” which at best stretches credence and at worst damages public trust. All government agencies ought to evaluate their staff’s performance on a standard curve, so that poor delivery is consistently identified and addressed. (Adjustments could be made so as not to penalize high-performing agencies and units.) Lastly, labor relations in the civil service need an overhaul: The processes and paperwork surrounding termination should be simplified; the window for appeals should be narrowed; and the role of unions in the grievance process for individual employees should be curtailed.

Such measures may disappoint the more fervent anti-government voices in today’s GOP. But a sober assessment would view Musk’s experience with X as a cautionary tale. Although the platform has functioned as a megaphone for its owner, it has also shed users; experienced repeated and embarrassing technical glitches; witnessed steep declines in advertising revenue; and may now be worth as little as a fifth of what he paid for it in 2022. In the private sector, such failures fall primarily upon owners and investors; in the public sector, they would affect us all. Do Americans want vital government services such as food inspection, air traffic control, or Social Security payments to suffer similar breakdowns? Dislocation and deconstruction may have a visceral appeal among elements of the MAGA base. But once the new Trump administration is in office, the American people will expect it to deliver the public goods and services they rely upon—and do so smoothly, fairly and efficiently. Disruption may sound trendy in Silicon Valley or tough in conservative think-tank circles, but delivery is what will ultimately determine the success or failure of these reforms.

Democrats in mourning over Donald Trump’s victory can comfort themselves with the fact that, if the United States follows the pattern of other democracies that elect wannabe strongmen, their party should have a very good chance to win back the White House in 2028. The same cannot be said for the United States Senate.

With very few votes left to count in last week’s election, the Republican Party appears to have flipped four Senate seats—in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Montana—giving it a presumptive 53–47 majority. On the surface, that outcome may not seem dramatic, and in fact represents a fine performance for Democrats. The party had no realistic pickup opportunities this election cycle. Meanwhile, it had to defend three seats in red states and five seats in swing states. Democratic incumbents lost all the red-state races, but won four of the five purple-state contests: in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan—all states that voted for Trump.

The real problem for Democrats is that the 2024 map was only slightly harsher than usual. Going forward, every Senate election is going to be brutal. The institution is so skewed in favor of the current Republican coalition that Democrats need at least a few red-state seats to win consistent majorities. Now they have none.

The partisan divide of the 50 states is not an immutable fact of nature, but here’s how things look for the foreseeable future: 24 states are solidly red; 17 are solidly blue. Over the past three presidential cycles, only six states have swung back and forth: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. Throw in New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Minnesota—where Trump or Kamala Harris won by about four points or less—and America has nine purple states in total, representing 18 Senate seats. To hold the chamber, Republicans need to win just two of those seats if they control the presidency, and three if they don’t. Democrats need to sweep almost all of them. They must pitch perfect game after perfect game to have a shot at even the narrowest majorities.

And even a perfect game will not be enough in the 2026 midterms. That year’s map features just two realistic pickup opportunities: Maine and North Carolina. Democrats, meanwhile, will need to defend seats in Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Minnesota. Unless they pull off a major upset, they can at most cut the GOP majority to 51. In that best-case scenario, they will then need to flip either North Carolina or Wisconsin in 2028 without losing seats in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, or New Hampshire. Barring any unexpected deaths or retirements, Democrats can afford to lose only one swing-seat race over the next four years to have a shot at 50 senators.

[Rogé Karma: The strategist who predicted Trump’s multiracial coalition]

Anything short of that means that, even if a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028, that president will be immediately hamstrung. Even a narrow GOP majority will make it impossible for, say, President Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer to pass liberal legislation. They would instead, from the moment they’re sworn in, have to contend with congressional investigations, government shutdowns, and debt-ceiling hostage negotiations.

Their troubles would hardly end there. A GOP Senate majority would slow-walk or even block a Democratic president’s Cabinet nominations and personnel appointments. An administration without administrators would be unable to issue new regulations and rules. Whatever policies the administration did manage to make would then be tied up by an ever more hostile judiciary. Without control of the Senate, Democratic presidents will struggle to get nominees confirmed at even the district and circuit levels. They can forget about the Supreme Court.

Democrats have been aware of their Senate problem for years. That’s why, during the first Trump term, many liberals urged the party to prioritize scrapping the filibuster and making Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico states as soon as it had the opportunity. But the opportunity never truly arrived, because the Democrats’ brief trifecta under Joe Biden depended on moderate senators, such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who refused to entertain any such hardball tactics. Addressing the Democrats’ Senate problem legislatively would appear to require a more substantial Democratic Senate majority, which is precisely the issue.

And so, if they are to expand their options in the Senate, Democrats will have to find some way to broaden their appeal in the states where voters seem to have irrevocably abandoned them. That is not a new idea, and it is not an idea that anyone has yet figured out how to implement. But it is the only option. If Democrats don’t figure out how to compete in more states, Trump and his allies won’t need to dismantle the free press, imprison their enemies, or overturn election results to ensure perpetual GOP dominance. The basic math of the Senate will do that for them.

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

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

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

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

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York State: Fraud

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

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

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

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

Manhattan: Defamation and Sexual Assault

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

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

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

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

Manhattan: Hush Money

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

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

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

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

Department of Justice: Mar-a-Lago Documents

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

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

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

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

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

Fulton County: Election Subversion

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

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

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

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

Department of Justice: Election Subversion

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

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

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

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

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

Additionally …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[From the July 1900 issue: Impressionism and appreciation]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Why absolutely everyone hates Renoir]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday was not just an electoral success but a triumph over the legal system. In the years since reluctantly leaving office in 2021, he has been dogged by four separate criminal prosecutions for his various abuses of power before, during, and after his first term as president. Securing a second term was the simplest way to bring these prosecutions to an end, and now his path to doing so is clear—mostly.

That the country is even facing these questions is evidence of the novel—and frightening—position it now finds itself in. Trump has made history as the first person ever to be elected president with a felony record, having been convicted by a New York jury in May, but not yet sentenced. Additionally, he has been indicted in three other cases in both state and federal court, though these cases have not yet made it to trial, and now may never. An apparent majority of American voters decided that these charges, the bulk of which speak directly to Trump’s willingness to abuse the powers of the presidency and his refusal to acknowledge that the law might apply to him, were not disqualifying when they made their selection for the nation’s highest office. And now, because of their decision, Trump has won the impunity he so craved.

The federal cases are done for. The day after the election, reports began to surface that Special Counsel Jack Smith was already in conversation with the Justice Department about bringing his two prosecutions of Trump—one over his hoarding of classified documents, and one over his efforts to unlawfully hold on to power following the 2020 election—to an end before Trump swears the oath of office for a second time on January 20. If for any reason that doesn’t happen, Trump can simply order those cases dismissed—the Department of Justice answers to the president, after all. The state cases, over which Trump has no such power, are somewhat more of a puzzle. In no instance, however, is the answer satisfying for anyone who cares about seeing Trump brought to justice.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Treat Trump like a normal president]

Both of Smith’s cases had already been seriously weakened—particularly the charges concerning the classified documents. That case should have been the most straightforward. Trump appears to have blatantly ignored the law in taking classified materials with him after leaving office, and then refusing to hand that material back to the federal government when the FBI came knocking. But Smith got extremely unlucky when the case was randomly assigned to  the Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon, who has been hamstringing the prosecution ever since with absurd delay after absurd delay. In July, she capped this off by dismissing the charges altogether, on the legally dubious grounds that Smith had been unconstitutionally appointed. Smith has appealed, leaving the documents case in limbo while the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit weighs the arguments.

The other federal case concerns the president-elect’s failed attempt to unlawfully hold on to power after his loss in 2020. In court in Washington, D.C., prosecutors were stopped in their tracks for months while the Supreme Court considered what sort of presidential acts are immune from criminal prosecution. In July, the Court ruled that presidents enjoy extensive immunity for so-called official conduct. Following that, Judge Tanya Chutkan was tasked with figuring out which aspects of the charges might be salvageable, as Trump argued that the entire prosecution should be dismissed because of his newfound immunity. Smith has used the resulting back-and-forth as an opportunity to release material capturing Trump’s culpability: Most damningly, a filing by Smith states that when Trump was alerted on January 6 that a mob of rioters had broken into the Capitol and that then–Vice President Mike Pence’s life was in danger, he responded, “So what?”

Now, with Trump poised to reenter the Oval Office, the January 6 case will never make it to trial, and the Florida prosecution of Trump will never be resurrected. The only question is what precise sequence of events will lead to that outcome. Smith may be aiming to have both cases dismissed before Trump once again resumes the presidency, “to comply with long-standing department policy that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted,” NBC first reported. The reasoning behind Smith’s reported conversations with the Justice Department is not entirely clear: Is the thinking that a trial will never come to pass, so it’s better to simply wind things down now? Or is it that the Justice Department’s prohibition on prosecuting a sitting president somehow also forbids moving forward with a prosecution of a president-elect?

Either way, this approach looks a lot like admitting defeat. The alternative would be for Smith to fight to the end and keep moving forward with the cases until Trump takes office, daring the new president to shut them down.

Such a confrontation could play out in a number of ways. Trump declared in October that he would “fire Smith in two seconds” after coming into office. He could make good on that threat and then order the Justice Department to drop the cases. Or he might even take the constitutionally untested step of pardoning himself. Whatever option he chooses, forcing him to take such a step would make obvious the magnitude and impropriety of Trump’s actions: a president abusing his authority to evade criminal accountability for his own wrongdoing. For all of Trump’s battles with the law, he has never tried to so directly quash a case against himself, even during the Mueller investigation. No president ever has.

When Richard Nixon tried to suppress the Watergate investigation, in 1973, setting in motion a series of Justice Department resignations during the “Saturday Night Massacre” until he managed to dismiss Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, the ensuing political inferno ultimately led to the end of Nixon’s presidency. There is not the slightest possibility that a dismissal of Smith and of the cases against Trump would have the same outcome—the erosion of political norms over the course of the first Trump presidency has seen to that. But there is still some power in letting Trump write himself into history this way.

The counterpoint, such as there is one, is that winding these cases down before Trump enters office might allow for a fuller public accounting of what exactly the once and future president has done. The Justice Department regulations under which Smith operates provide that, upon completing an investigation, the special counsel must provide a report of his work to the attorney general—who may “determine that public release of these reports would be in the public interest.” That’s the provision under which Robert Mueller wrote his famous report. But the Mueller report was delayed in its release thanks to political chicanery by Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr—and likewise, there’s no guarantee that a Trump-selected attorney general or acting attorney general would lift a finger to release any Smith report. If Smith wraps up under the Biden administration, in contrast, it’s far more likely that the special counsel might be able to release a final accounting of Trump’s deeds to the public.

[Arash Azizi: Don’t give up on America]

The twist, of course, is that it’s hard to imagine that the same public that just elected this man to the presidency would care. At this point, it’s a truism to say that the legal system is not designed to deal with a criminal president or former president, and that the only solution was a political one—to vote him out. Well so much for that, too. What’s more, Trump will enjoy even greater impunity during his second term, thanks to wording in the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling that seems to sharply limit the ability of any future special counsel to investigate a sitting president—if, that is, the special-counsel system survives Cannon’s ruling.

So that’s it for the federal cases. The state prosecutions represent a somewhat more complicated problem, simply because there’s no easy way for Trump to cleanly do away with them. The president has no authority over state criminal cases. Still, the prognosis is not much better.

In Georgia, the ungainly Fulton County prosecution of Trump and 18 other co-defendants for their effort to steal the 2020 election has been stalled since this summer, following a baffling scandal over the personal conduct of District Attorney Fani Willis. This July, a judge placed the case on hold while Trump pursued Willis’s disqualification from the prosecution—a matter that will come before the Georgia Court of Appeals in early December. If that court agrees that Willis is disqualified, another Georgia prosecutor would be appointed to the case, and would have the option of continuing to pursue the prosecution or dropping it entirely. That may be the end of the case right there.

If Willis survives the litigation, or if her replacement decides to move forward, whoever is leading the case will immediately run into two interrelated problems. The first is the very same Supreme Court immunity decision that has bogged down the federal case. Although that ruling directly concerned the federal charges against Trump over January 6, the conduct at issue in the Georgia indictment is substantially similar, and Trump would have strong arguments that the Court’s decision rules out some or all of the Georgia prosecution. The second problem is that, as the Justice Department has long held and as the immunity decision recognizes, there can be no criminal prosecution—even at the state level—of a sitting president. Trump would have no power to get rid of the case, but state prosecutors couldn’t proceed with it, either.

What then? Might prosecutors seek to somehow place the case on ice and unthaw it when Trump leaves office in 2028? “I think we are in an entirely uncharted territory,” Anthony Michael Kreis of Georgia State University College of Law, who has been following the Fulton County case closely, told me.

That leaves the New York case, in which Trump was already convicted on 34 felony counts in May. That verdict, which involved conduct unrelated to Trump’s official duties as president, should have been safe from the Supreme Court’s interference, but the Court contrived to meddle in the prosecution by inventing a bizarre rule largely prohibiting prosecutors from introducing evidence of official presidential acts, even when prosecuting unshielded private conduct. Trump immediately seized on this to argue that the verdict should be thrown out. As a result, his New York sentencing was delayed until after the election—it is now scheduled for November 26—and Justice Juan Merchan is set to rule on Trump’s immunity motion this coming Tuesday, exactly a week after the election.

Merchan once again finds himself in the unenviable situation of trying to work through how the law ought to apply to a particularly sui generis defendant. If the judge decides against tossing out the verdict and moves forward with sentencing, Trump’s defense lawyers may argue that sentencing should be put on hold until after Trump’s presidency. They could also seek to appeal any adverse immunity ruling in New York state courts and up to a potentially friendly Supreme Court. Trying to sort through what happens next requires traveling down the twists and turns of any number of fractals, but the bottom line is that the far-fetched scenario of a president being sworn in from the inside of a New York prison cell—always unlikely—is not going to occur.

All of this places Merchan in a very strange position. “Obviously the court is trying to proceed as if this is any other case, but it really isn’t,” Rebecca Roiphe, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and a professor at New York Law School, told me. But, she said of the New York case and the other Trump prosecutions, “from a perspective of the rule of law, it’s really important to follow it through to the end—even if in the end, it fizzles out.”

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

Besides Trump, other defendants who participated in his various schemes now have new hope of reprieve. Across the country, state cases outside the president’s control are moving forward against people involved in the 2020 fake-electors plot. Will the new administration attempt to leverage threats or political pressure to push state prosecutors to drop these charges? In Florida, Trump has two co-defendants, men who allegedly helped him hide classified documents from the FBI. Will he pardon them as well? What will happen to the five unindicted co-conspirators whom Jack Smith lists as aiding Trump’s unlawful effort to hold on to power in 2020—might Smith recommend charges against them as well, perhaps forcing Trump to pardon them? Or will they slip away?

And then there are the other January 6 defendants—the people who broke into the Capitol on Trump’s command, and whom he has repeatedly indicated he will pardon upon retaking office. Already, one defendant, Christopher Carnell, has unsuccessfully asked for his federal case to be halted, because he is “expecting to be relieved of the criminal prosecution that he is currently facing when the new administration takes office.” Lawyers for another defendant, Jaimee Avery, put the matter even more plainly in asking to delay her sentencing until after the inauguration: “It would create a gross disparity for Ms. Avery to spend even a day in jail when the man who played a pivotal role in organizing and instigating the events of January 6 will now never face consequences for his role in it.”

Legal arguments aside, they have a point. What moral logic is there to punishing rioters when American voters have decided to grant the instigator of the riot a free pass?

How should the women who didn’t vote for Trump go about their lives, knowing that a majority of Americans voted not just against their immediate health and well-being, but for a candidate who actively sidelined and maligned people like them? After months and months of watching Donald Trump and his band of bros belittle Kamala Harris and all women generally—the childless, the childbearing, and the post-childbearing—55 percent of male voters supported him, according to CNN’s exit polls. So did 45 percent of female voters. What are the other women—those who feel that they’re living in a nation that is hostile to their very existence—to do?

The answer is something different from what they did the last time.

In 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s loss sent thousands of women into the streets of Washington, D.C., with their signs and their pussy hats, many assumed that the sexism Clinton had experienced was a bug of the Trump era. That if women banded together, expanded their notion of feminism to include experiences across race and class, and fought back, they could change things.

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

And in some ways, they did. That collective strength laid the foundation for the #MeToo movement in 2017. More women ran for office, and won, in the 2018 midterms than ever before. But the ground has shifted in the intervening years.

Sexism, it turned out, was not a bug but a feature of the Trump years. Misogyny certainly appears to come naturally to Trump, but it was strategically amplified—through surrogates and messaging—to attract supporters, particularly younger men of all races. Elon Musk’s political-action committee even put out an ad referring to Harris as “a big ole C-word”—and Communist was only one of its intended meanings. Trump has always been good at exploiting the ugliest aspects of America, and the growing isolation and rightward drift of young men was a perfect target.

American men are lonely—in 2021, 15 percent were likely to say they had no close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990. They are also more likely to not be in a relationship: In 2022, six in 10 men under 30 were single. In a 2023 survey of men ages 18 to 45, a majority agreed with the statement “No one really knows me.” Many find solace online, where they consume their news on Reddit and X and soak up content from influencers such as Andrew Tate, Adin Ross, and Joe Rogan. The content, like its creators, is often blatantly misogynistic.

Many of these young men apparently see Trump—with his microphone-fellating pantomime and his crowds chanting the word bitch—as presidential. He spoke to young men, in a voice they recognized. More than half of men ages 18 to 29 voted for him.

But Trump didn’t just pick up support from young men; he picked up support from almost every group. For many older white men, and the many, many Latino men who broke for Trump—well, the misogyny may have seemed macho. And what about his female supporters? Representative Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for president, wrote in 1970 that “women in America are much more brainwashed and content with their roles as second-class citizens than Blacks ever were.” This remains true today. No matter the number of marches women hold or memes they post online about sisterhood, many women are unswayed: 53 percent of white women (and a growing percentage of Latinas) voted for Trump. Women can enforce patriarchy just as well as men, as the “trad wives” on the internet have demonstrated.

Many had hoped that as president, Harris would have reached across not just the political aisle, but the gender divide. In her concession speech yesterday, she listed women’s rights as one cause among many, speaking of the need for women to “have the freedom to make decisions about their own body,” for schools to be safe from gun violence, “for the rule of law, for equal justice.”

No such repair will happen under a second Trump administration, for the obvious reason that division benefits him. Misogyny helps disempowered men feel empowered. After Trump’s victory, the right-wing activist Nick Fuentes tweeted: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” It really is a man’s world now.

The situation isn’t hopeless, but it may require new tactics. The time for thumping on our chests and railing against the patriarchy might be past. The protests that felt so powerful in 2016 may have backfired to some extent, by causing the people women most needed to listen to their message to tune them out instead. But women can’t simply retreat, either—their lives and futures depend on it.  

The answer is engagement: soft diplomacy in everyday life. “We will continue to wage this fight in the voting booth, in the courts, and in the public square,” Harris said in her speech. But “we will also wage it in quieter ways.”

Start easy: Thank the men in your life who supported Harris; thank them for trusting and respecting women and believing that they can lead. It seems small, but millions of men apparently don’t feel that way, so let’s encourage the ones who do.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

For mothers and aunties of young men and boys: You may not be able to control what they are reading on the internet, but you can combat it, through conversation and counterprogramming.

And most important, women who voted against Trump should talk honestly with the men in their lives—their cousins and fathers and colleagues and friends—who voted the other way. Talk to them about women’s lives and values. Better yet, enlist other men to help you. One reason fewer Black men drifted toward Trump than Latino men is because, in the months leading up to the election, on social media and in private conversations and at church, many Black people talked honestly about the importance of valuing women. They addressed voters’ hesitance about female leadership directly, by discussing the long history of excellent Black female leaders. Minds can be molded by the internet and its algorithms, yes, but minds can be changed by conversations as well. As Harris reminded everyone, “You have power.”

Despite what many say, the modern woman doesn’t need a man. But women’s lives can certainly be improved by men not hating them.