New York prosecutors have vowed to oppose President-elect Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his criminal conviction, however.

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

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

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

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

Which brings me to Gabbard and Hegseth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard?

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

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

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

Related:

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

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

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Evening Read

Justin Chung for The Atlantic

How Jimmy O. Yang Became a Main Character

By Shirley Li

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

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

Read the full article.

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There’s no longer any doubt that Hollywood writing is powering AI. Researchers are finally unraveling how the mind processes nothing. Trump’s New York sentencing must proceed, Randall D. Eliason argues. American kakistocracy Making government efficient again

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Watch (or skip). Conclave (out now in theaters) treats Catholic theology as mere policy, like the membership rules at Augusta National. It’s even worse than The Da Vinci Code, Matthew Schmitz writes.

Examine. In a market with thousands of dog toys, Lamb Chop, the 1960s puppet, has somehow become ubiquitous.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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For Lucca Baila’s third birthday, his mother, Morgan, knew that he didn’t want balloons or cake or streamers. He wanted Lamb Chop, a stuffed-animal version of the white-and-red puppet from a popular 1960s TV show, and he wanted lots of them. Morgan, a 32-year-old from New York, bought eight small Lamb Chops and turned her apartment into a DIY–Lamb Chop station. Guests got to work on creating custom Lambys, decorating the toys with hats and scarves from Christmas-themed doll kits.

Lucca, a fluffy brown mop of a dog, was then presented with new versions of the toy, one by one. No matter how many times a new Lamb Chop appeared in front of him, his reaction was the same: bouncing, hardwood-floor-scuttling excitement as he accepted each into his mouth and collected them in a pile. Not only did he pose for photos with his new puppet posse, but his “girlfriend”—a jumbo-size Lamb Chop he carries with him everywhere—was also in attendance.

Ask any random dog owner and there’s a good chance they’ll tell you: Lamb Chop is their dog’s favorite toy. They’ll say it with the confidence of having heard it directly from the dog itself. After witnessing my sister’s dog’s dedication to the toy, I spoke with more than 10 dog owners, all of whom were quick to send me pictures, videos, and anecdotes about their own dogs’ seemingly inexplicable Lamby love. One person told me she routinely finds Lamb Chops that her dog has stolen from other dogs’ homes. Another said that her labradoodle has three Lamb Chops but shows particular fondness for the original one, which she’s had for more than five years. This adoration is also a common subject on social media. “Why is no one talking about the dog cult?” the content creator Meredith Lynch asks her followers in a TikTok video before pointing to an image of Lamb Chop. “And this is their leader.”

The numbers seem to prove Lamb Chop’s dominance: According to data shared with me by the pet superstore Chewy, Lamb Chop is the site’s most popular plush dog toy and its second-most-popular dog toy of any kind. Thousands of customers have the toy on autoship. More than 20 iterations of Lamb Chop exist, including Tie-Dye Lamb Chop, Nautical Lamb Chop, and Rainbow Lamb Chop. Stores sell small-size Lamb Chops (six inches), medium-size Lamb Chops (10.5 inches), and jumbo-size Lamb Chops (24 inches)—not to mention Lamb Chop dog costumes, Lamb Chop dog beds, and Lamb Chop food bowls.

The dog market offers thousands of dog toys; Lamb Chop is the only one that many owners seem to treat with the same obligatoriness as they do a collar and leash. My big question is: Why? In pop-cultural terms, Lamb Chop is something of a has-been—she hasn’t been a major presence in the human-entertainment universe for years. In fact, some owners told me they had no knowledge of Lamb Chop ever being anything other than a dog toy. What makes pet owners so sure that buying not just one Lamb Chop but multiple Lamb Chops is money well spent? And is it really possible that dogs, which can be big or small, playful or shy, hunters or herders, could nevertheless share a preference for the exact same plush toy?

For many years, before she featured prominently in pet stores, Lamb Chop was better known on the hands of Shari Lewis, the red-headed puppeteer and ventriloquist. In 1956, the duo made a guest appearance on the children’s CBS series Captain Kangaroo, and eventually, they starred in two TV programs, The Shari Lewis Show in the ’60s and Lamb Chop’s Play-Along in the ’90s. After Lewis’s death in 1998, her daughter, Mallory, took over puppet duties. But Mallory told me that she was not responsible for Lamb Chop’s leap from children’s entertainer to dog’s best friend. The media company Dreamworks owns the Lamb Chop trademark, and the commodification of Lamb Chop seems to have begun sometime after 2008, when Dreamworks offered Lamb Chop’s image to the pet-toy supplier Multipet.

Dog toys, Lamb-ish or not, are necessities. “Playing with toys on their own fulfills dogs’ need to do things like chew, find food, tug … all of which are normal behaviors,” Zazie Todd, the author of Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy, told me in an email. And dogs can have favorite toys, Todd said, depending on their favorite activities—dogs with more energy may prefer to chase a ball, whereas puppies just starting to grow teeth may become attached to a chew toy.

[Read: Dogs are entering a new wave of domestication]

Lamb Chop, incidentally, can fulfill many biological needs for many different kinds of dogs: Big dogs can get big Lambys, and small dogs can get smaller ones. Dogs who prefer to cuddle their toys can find in Lamby a soft companion, and dogs who prefer to destroy them can make quick work of the plushie. Plus, Lamb Chop resembles an animal, which can be enticing—dogs used to hunt. Some dogs, likely with “softer” prey drives, may enjoy simply carrying around Lamb Chop, Christopher Blazina, a psychologist and a co-editor of The Psychology of the Human-Animal Bond, told me. (Sometimes, they carry Lamb Chop to their humans.) Other dogs, such as huskies, malamutes, and terriers, have been bred for their high prey drives and may treat their Lamby more ferociously. Either way, no dog is excluded from the club.

The animal urge to eat Lamb Chop also partly explains the high sales. According to Chewy, many customers buy more than five Lamb Chops a year. Multiple dog owners have shown me the remnants of well-loved Lambys; one owner, in a valiant attempt at frugality, had even tried repairing the toy, until all that remained was an earless, faceless sack held together by string.

But the pet experts I spoke with suggested another, more profound reason for Lamb Chop’s popularity: Dogs may love Lamb Chop because they think their people love Lamb Chop.

Humans and dogs have spent much of their time on Earth together; evidence of shared burials goes back to at least the Stone Age. For most of this time, the relationship was strictly professional: Dogs hunted and herded in exchange for humans’ care. As both “co-evolved,” though, that work shifted, Blazina told me. Although dogs can still aid humans as service dogs or in tasks such as search-and-rescue missions, the average domestic dog’s job “is to be with us and really to be attuned” to our emotions, he said—and “our job is to be with them in the same way.”

In other words, we can’t know for sure that dogs really love Lamb Chop, but we like to think they do—and that might be enough. When we hand a dog the toy, our face may betray a belief that we’re giving the dog something enjoyable, a belief that’s affirmed when the dog sees our excitement and gets excited too. “It ends up being a kind of positive-feedback loop,” Blazina said, “where they get happy and we get happy and then they get happy and then it just keeps going.”

[Read: Why a dog’s death hits so hard]

The truth is, Lamb Chop may just be tactile evidence of this projection and mirroring. In 2020, the U.K. dog-welfare charity Dogs Trust polled 2,000 dog owners; 75 percent said they wished their dog could talk, and two of the top questions respondents had for their dogs were “Are you happy?” and “How can I make your life happier?” In pursuit of a response, many humans imagine all kinds of narratives—that their pets know they’re being abandoned for a family vacation, for instance, or that they feel personally rejected when someone doesn’t share with them a bit of steak from the table. Some of the theories are rooted in veterinary science; other behaviors may be more coincidental.

Regardless of whether humans or dogs are responsible for the Lamb Chop–shaped bridge between us, what matters is what the toy represents. Last year, when Cory Stieg knew it was time to say goodbye to Mookie, the Australian shepherd she’d had since she was 19, she turned to Lamb Chop. The days before a pet’s death can be some of the most helpless for their humans. For Stieg and her husband, the jumbo-size Lamb Chop they bought for Mookie offered an assurance that, amid his declining health, they could do one last thing to bring him joy. In a video of the moment, Mookie stares in wide-eyed anticipation as Stieg’s husband removes the tag. He uses his remaining energy to reach for the toy as it dangles above him, finally getting hold of it by the belly. Lamb Chop was probably the last thing Mookie saw before passing away. “He quite literally had her on his deathbed,” Stieg told me. Lamb Chop was there at precisely the moment an entire little family needed her—a symbol of dogs and humans’ shared, ancient desire to make each other happy.

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In 1991, only one album into its career, De La Soul tried to pull off an unusually audacious move. The hip-hop trio’s 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, was a dense but accessible bricolage of dad-rock samples and flip-it-and-reverse-it nursery-rhyme syntax, establishing the group as innovators with commercial muscle. Two years later, De La Soul publicly renounced the album, dumping everything that made it an instant classic in an act of self-nullification from which the band never really recovered.

The follow-up album, De La Soul Is Dead, sounds like an insecure crew taking wild swings at perceived enemies—Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, the West Coast gangster-rap insurgency—and missing badly. The beats are sluggish, and 3 Feet High’s sample surprises (Hall & Oates! Steely Dan!) are absent, giving the record a thin, attenuated feel. It begins inauspiciously, with a skit involving a kid finding a copy of 3 Feet High in a trash can, and falls further into dispirited score-settling. It is also entirely too long, and both jokey and humorless. And worst of all, it squanders the group’s only opportunity to chart an alternative path for hip-hop at a moment when its adversaries were poised to usurp the genre.

In High and Rising, his new book about De La Soul, the music writer Marcus J. Moore unpacks this baffling decision. De La Soul Is Dead, he argues, was a “bleak and acerbic response to the industry and the band’s mounting frustrations” with music-business chicanery, and with being told they were just one thing when they were confident that they contained multitudes. Moore is a passionate defender of De La Soul Is Dead, which he feels was misunderstood and quickly forgotten, a “ripple” crashing into the “tidal wave” of gangsta rap; N.W.A had released the subgenre’s urtext Straight Outta Compton in 1988. He’s not wrong about the timing of the record, but it is the tenor of De La Soul Is Dead—its blithe disregard for 3 Feet High, and its reactionary swipes at the competition—that didn’t sit well. It still doesn't.

3 Feet High came out of nowhere—to be more specific, from Amityville, Long Island. The 24-track gem from Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, David “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Maseo” Mason was conceived an hour-long train ride away from the center of New York’s hip-hop culture, and the distance was crucial; De La Soul could innovate in relative isolation. Working with the producer “Prince Paul” Hutson, the group reinvented how hip-hop was constructed, stacking samples and beats over, under, and around its intricate conversational flow, the lyrics hovering within some golden mean between fractured fairy tales and the loopy logic of P-Funk’s George Clinton. “It felt distant yet alluring,” Moore writes of the trio’s debut, “a new masterpiece from a bygone era of Black experimentation.”

[Read: The untold stories behind Hip-Hop’s greatest albums]

The album also felt like the start of something larger than the trio itself. Having found common ground with East Coast mavericks such as A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, and Jungle Brothers—artists who also fused Afrocentrism with jazzy beats and whip-smart lyrics—De La Soul brought them under their big tent. A creative collective they called Native Tongues was born. 3 Feet High’s track “Buddy” was Native Tongues’ statement of intent, a pass-the-mic celebration that included verses from Tribe’s Q-Tip and (on the remix) Queen Latifah. The video for the song, in which various members crowd the frame and joyously egg one another on, felt like the first seedling of a cultural movement.

And then, with De La Soul Is Dead, the group turned its back on the whole thing. “Here is the D.A.I.S.Y. / watching it die, see?” Posdnuos declaimed on “Pass the Plugs,” in a not-so-subtle dig at the first album’s flowery artwork and the notion of De La Soul ushering in a “Daisy Age” of comity and community. (D.A.I.S.Y. was in fact an acronym for “Da Inner Sound Y’all.” The second album cover depicted an overturned pot of limp daisies.)

The album covers, left to right, of “3 Feet High and Rising” and “De La Soul Is Dead.” (Reservoir Media)

Moore, after first chalking up the renunciation to industry frustration, throws out broader theories: The band bristled at being labeled “psychedelic rappers” in the press, and dismissed its public branding as a lure for casual hip-hop fans—in other words, white people. He develops a more layered hypothesis later on. “It’s better to last forever than to exist for a minute,” Moore writes. “De La played the long game.” By this point in the story, in the mid-’90s, the group had been cut down to the size of a cult act. But it hadn’t wanted overnight success; it had wanted a career. Moore rightly argues that, with its second album, De La Soul was trying to steer clear of the trap that has snared so many artists who have had to contend with being “held captive by the music they made as teenagers.” De La Soul Is Dead was the trio’s fast-track bid for respect as mature musicians, but it was protesting too much, too soon.

The second album sold well, but not as well as 3 Feet High, and that wasn’t entirely the group’s fault. It’s hard enough for any popular artist to pivot without shedding listeners; harder still for an act working within hip-hop, a historically conservative genre that tends to tuck its outliers into the margins. The debut had been an avant-garde record with mainstream appeal, but according to Moore, De La Soul was wise enough to know that its fresh commercial sound could quickly grow stale. So the group decided to trash it first.

However legitimate the trio’s outrage may have been, it failed to channel anger into effective art. De La Soul Is Dead took a bulldozer to the debut’s glorious garden. De La Soul’s lightness of touch was muscled aside in favor of churlish criticism of hip-hop’s new turn toward vulgarity, which for the trio was a kind of minstrelsy. But instead of flowing above the fray, De La Soul fell into the petty snipery of the scene—the big dis, the character assassination. 3 Feet High’s Day-Glo grin had twisted into a dyspeptic scowl. The group had given up the high ground, ceded the terms of the debate to its rivals. It was Dre and Snoop’s world now, and De La Soul had sunk into it.

[Read: Did the decline of sampling cause the decline of political hip-hop?]

This heel turn not only blew up the first incarnation of De La Soul; it tore apart the utopian idea that hip-hop’s balkanized turf wars could be set aside in favor of creative fellowship. The trio began to feel rudderless, and the Native Tongues went their different ways. A Tribe Called Quest created its masterpiece, 1993’s Midnight Marauders, while Queen Latifah stopped making hip-hop records after she became a crossover superstar.

Having thrown down the gauntlet at the feet of hip-hop’s stars, De La Soul tried calling a truce with 1993’s Buhloone Mindstate, an album that split the difference between goofy ebullience and acrid critique. The tracks “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” and “Eye Patch” hinted at a return to 3 Feet High’s technicolor schoolyard. But there was also “I Am I Be,” which, Moore writes, showed De La Soul “holding [itself] and [its] collaborators accountable for letting the [Native Tongues] collective falter due to egos.” When Posdnuos decried the “tongues who lied and said ‘We’ll be natives to the end,’” it felt like an elegy for a lost cause.

By the time De La Soul released Stakes Is High, in 1996, hip-hop had been commandeered by what Moore calls the “shiny-suit” era of Sean Combs and Notorious B.I.G., all gangster posturing and clunky, bottom-feeding beats. Stakes Is High, which featured the newcomers and future trailblazers Common and Mos Def, received tepid reviews and was largely ignored, much to the dismay of Moore, the superfan. “Quietly,” he writes, “De La reassembled their own vision of what a Native Tongues collective could look like in the ’90s with … MCs who were just kids when the first iteration took shape.” That may be so, but it takes a nation of millions to recognize a movement, and the audience had moved on.

The consignment of a promising musical coalition to oblivion was compounded by a tragic and deeply ironic debacle: The same elements that made 3 Feet High and Rising so innovative sent the album into perilous legal limbo. Because De La Soul’s label, Tommy Boy Records, hadn’t accounted for some sample clearances and the band’s contract was outdated, the album was blocked from streaming services. And so, in the 2000s, the group that had denounced its debut had to spend years trying to secure a foothold for its catalog in the digital world. That finally happened in 2023. 3 Feet High is by far De La Soul’s most streamed album, and by any standard the band’s greatest achievement. But to listen to it now, within the context of De La Soul’s oeuvre, is to be painfully reminded of the road not taken—and of how a musical revolution can be scuttled from within.

A month after his election in 2016, Donald Trump chose Andrew Puzder, a longtime fast-food-company CEO, to be his secretary of labor. Most of Trump’s Cabinet picks moved smoothly through the confirmation process, but Puzder’s nomination languished amid allegations of wage theft, sexual harassment, and spousal abuse, as well as his acknowledgment that he had hired an undocumented immigrant as a nanny and not paid her taxes. By February 2017, he gave up and withdrew his nomination.

Being a president’s most troubled or scandal-ridden nominee is dangerous—like being the weakest or sickest member of the herd when predators start to circle. Republican senators probably calculated that if they rejected Puzder, Trump would send a pick with less baggage and higher qualifications, which is exactly what he did: Alex Acosta, the eventual selection, had a long government résumé and easily won confirmation.

Something very different is happening with Trump’s Cabinet picks this time. Less than two weeks have passed since the election, but the president-elect has already put forward a batch of nominees so aberrant by historical standards that any one of them would have been a gigantic story in the past. (Hello, Attorney General–designate Matt Gaetz.) Each one barely holds the media’s attention for an hour or two before the next nomination eclipses them. (Whoops, I didn’t see you there, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.)

If Senate Republicans reject one of these unqualified nominees, how can they justify saying yes to any? And yet, how could they reject the whole slate of nominees by a president from their own party, who is so popular among their own voters? Perversely, the sheer quantity of individually troubling nominees might actually make it harder for the Senate to block any of them.

[Elaine Godfrey: Either way, Matt Gaetz wins]

The list of wild picks also includes Tulsi Gabbard, the walking embodiment of horseshoe theory and Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence; Pete Hegseth, a square-jawed Fox News host tapped by Trump to lead the Pentagon; and Kristi Noem, a governor with no national-security experience, selected to head the Department of Homeland Security. By the time anyone gets around to noting that Trump is appointing his personal lawyers (who defended him in his several criminal trials) to top legal posts in the government, who will have the energy to be shocked?

We don’t know yet if the Senate will confirm any or all of these nominees, but weariness is apparent in the voices of Republican senators, who face a choice between approving Trump’s nominees and allowing Trump to use a dubious constitutional work-around to appoint them without requiring a Senate vote. Many have gasped or raised pained questions about Gaetz, and some have even predicted that his nomination will fail, but none has publicly pledged to vote against him.

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is a medical doctor who has shown a willingness to buck Trump and even voted to convict him during Trump’s second impeachment; he’s the incoming chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Yet Cassidy responded to the preposterous HHS nomination by posting on X that Kennedy “has championed issues like healthy foods and the need for greater transparency in our public health infrastructure. I look forward to learning more about his other policy positions and how they will support a conservative, pro-American agenda.”

This isn’t how things used to work. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated former Senator John Tower to be secretary of defense. Few could question Tower’s credentials. A World War II veteran, he’d served nearly 20 years on the Armed Services Committee; he later investigated the Iran-Contra affair. But allegations of womanizing and alcohol abuse led the Senate to reject his nomination, even though the body tends to give former and current members an easy ride. Hegseth, by comparison, is a veteran but has no government experience, has a history of infidelity and was in 2017 accused of sexual assault, and has expressed various extreme views, including lobbying Trump to pardon American soldiers accused of murdering prisoners and unarmed civilians. (Trump granted the pardons.)

Or consider Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, whom President Barack Obama nominated to lead HHS in 2009. Daschle was forced to withdraw his nomination over $140,000 in unpaid back taxes. That was a serious lapse, yet it feels quaint compared to Kennedy’s or Gaetz’s dubious résumé.

[Franklin Foer: Why the Gaetz announcement is already destroying the government]

A clear sign of how much things have changed may come from Puzder, whom Trump is reportedly considering nominating as labor secretary again. If Senate Republicans are willing to approve the same guy they rejected eight years ago, the advice-and-consent guardrails will be well and truly gone.

The circuslike bombardment of freakishly unqualified personnel picks calls to mind Steve Bannon’s notorious insight that the press can handle only so much information, real or fake, without being overloaded. Uncovering, verifying, debunking, and explaining information takes time and resources. “The real opposition is the media,” Bannon told the journalist Michael Lewis in 2018. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Something similar might apply to U.S. senators who might otherwise be tempted to show some independence.

Ascribing too much strategic intent to Trump is always a risk. The president-elect works from impulse and intuition. Trump selected Gaetz on a whim during a two-hour flight, according to The New York Times; Politico has reported that Susie Wiles, Trump’s campaign manager and incoming chief of staff, was on the plane but was unaware of the Gaetz pick. Even if Trump is not consciously following Bannon’s directive, however, the effect is the same. Intentionally or otherwise, the shit level is high and rising.

Nick Cave, one of the most physically expressive figures in rock and roll, was looking at me with suspicion. His eyebrows climbed the considerable expanse of his forehead; his slender frame tensed defensively in his pin-striped suit. I think he thought I was trying to get him canceled.

What I was really trying to do was get him to talk about being a man. For much of his four-decade career fronting Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave has seemed a bit like a drag king, exaggerating aspects of the male id to amusing and terrifying effect. He performs in funereal formal wear, sings in a growl that evokes Elvis with rabies, and writes acclaimed songs and books brimming with lust, violence, and—in recent years, as he weathered the death of two sons—pained, fatherly gravitas. His venerated stature is more akin to a knighted icon’s than a punk rocker’s; he has been awarded a badge of honor by the Australian government and a fellowship in the United Kingdom’s Royal Society of Literature, and was even invited to King Charles’s coronation, in 2023.

So when I met the 67-year-old Cave at a Manhattan hotel in August, before the release of the Bad Seeds’ 18th studio album, Wild God, I suspected that I might not be alone in wanting to hear his thoughts about the state of masculinity. Meaning: Why are guys, according to various cultural and statistical indicators, becoming lonelier and more politically extreme? I cited some lyrics from his new album that seemed to be about the way men cope with feelings of insecurity and irrelevance, hoping he would elaborate.

Between the long pauses in Cave’s reply, I could hear the crinkling leather of the oversize chair he sat in. “It may be a need that men have—maybe they’re not feeling like they are valued,” he told me, before cutting himself off. “I don’t want to come on like Jordan Peterson or something,” he said, referring to the controversial, right-leaning psychology professor and podcaster who rails against the alleged emasculating effects of modern culture.

Cave seemed taken aback by the idea that he himself was an authority on the subject. “It feels weird to think that I might be tapping into, or somehow the voice of, what it means to be a man in this world,” he told me. “I’ve never really seen that.” In fact, he said, his songs—especially his recent ones—“are very feminine in their nature.”

“I’m criticized for it, actually,” he went on. Fans write to him and say, “ ‘What’s happened to your fucking music? Grow a pair of balls, you bastard!’ ”

When Cave was 12, growing up in a rural Australian village, his father sat him down and asked him what he had done for humanity. The young Cave was mystified by the question, but his father—an English teacher with novelist ambitions—clearly wanted to pass along a drive to seek greatness, preferably through literary means. Other dads read The Hardy Boys to their kids; Cave’s regaled him with Dostoyevsky, Titus Andronicus, and … Lolita.

Those works’ linguistic elegance and thematic savagery lodged deep in Cave, but music became the medium that spoke best to his emerging point of view—that of an outsider, a bad seed, alienated from ordinary society. When he was 13, a schoolmate’s parents accused him of attempted rape after he tried to pull down their daughter’s underwear; at the school he was transferred to, he became notorious for brawling with other boys. His father’s death in a car crash when Cave was 19, and his own heroin habit at the time, didn’t help his outlook. “I was just a nasty little guy,” he told Stephen Colbert recently. His thrashing, spit-flinging band the Birthday Party earned him comparisons to Iggy Pop, but it wasn’t until he formed the Bad Seeds, in the early ’80s, that his bleak artistic vision ripened.

[Read: Nick Cave is still looking for redemption]

Blending blues, industrial rock, and cabaret into thunderous musical narratives, the Bad Seeds’ songs felt like retellings of primal fables, often warning about the mortal dangers posed by intimacy, vulnerability, and pretty girls. On the 1984 track “From Her to Eternity,” piano chords stabbed like emergency sirens as Cave moaned, “This desire to possess her is a wound.” Its final stanza implied that Cave’s narrator had killed the object of his fascination—a typically grisly outcome in Cave’s early songs. His defining classic, 1988’s “The Mercy Seat,” strapped the listener into the position of a man on death row. It plumbed another of Cave’s central themes: annihilating shame, the feeling of being judged monstrous and fearing that judgment to be true.

As Cave aged and became a father—to four sons by three different women—his vantage widened. The Bad Seeds’ 1997 album, The Boatman’s Call, a collection of stark love songs inspired by his breakup with the singer PJ Harvey, brought him new fans by recasting him as a romantic tragedian. More and more, the libidinal bite of his work seemed satirical. He formed a garage-rock band, Grinderman, whose 2007 single “No Pussy Blues” was a send-up of the mindset of those now called incels, construing sexual frustration as cosmic injustice. (Cave spat, “I sent her every type of flower / I played a guitar by the hour / I patted her revolting little Chihuahua / But still she just didn’t want to.”) In his sensationally filthy 2009 novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, he set out to illustrate the radical feminist Valerie Solanas’s appraisal that “the male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others.” (The actor Matt Smith will soon play the novel’s protagonist, an inveterate pervert, in a TV adaptation.)

But the Cave of today feels far removed from the theatrical grossness of his past, owing to personal horrors. In 2015, his 15-year-old son Arthur fell off a cliff while reportedly on LSD; in 2022, another son, Jethro, died at 31 after struggles with mental health and addiction. “I’ve had, personally, enough violence,” Cave told me. The murder ballads he once wrote were “an indulgence of someone that has yet to experience the ramifications of what violence actually has upon a person—if I’m looking at the death of my children as violent acts, which they are to some degree.”

Nick Cave and his early band the Birthday Party at the Peppermint Lounge in New York, March 26, 1983 (Michael Macioce / Getty)

Music beckoned as a means of healing. The Bad Seeds’ 2019 album, Ghosteen, was a shivery, synth-driven tone poem in which Cave tried to commune with his lost son in the afterlife; by acclamation, it’s his masterpiece. Wild God marks another sonic and temperamental reset. Its music is a luminous fusion of gospel and piano pop: more U2 than the Stooges, more New Testament than Old. Compared with his earlier work, these albums have “a more fluid, more watery sort of feel,” he said. “Which—it’s dangerous territory here—but I guess you could see as a feminine trait.”

On a level deeper than sound, Cave explained, his recent music is “feminine” because of its viewpoint. His lyrics now account not just for his own feelings, but for those of his wife, Susie, the mother of Arthur and his twin brother, Earl. In the first song on Ghosteen, for example, a woman is sitting in a kitchen, listening to music on the radio, which is exactly what Susie was doing when she learned what had happened to Arthur.

“After my son died, I had no understanding of what was going on with me at all,” Cave said. “But I could see Susie. I could see this sort of drama playing out in front of me. Drama—that sounds disparaging, but I don’t mean that. It felt like I was trying to understand what was happening to a mother who had lost her child.” His own subjectivity became “hopelessly and beautifully entangled” with hers. On Ghosteen, “it was very difficult to have a clean understanding of whose voice I actually was in some of these songs.”

That merging of perspectives reflects more than just the shared experience of suffering. It is part of what Cave sees as a transformation of his worldview—from inward-looking to outward-looking, from misanthrope to humanist. Arthur’s death made him realize that he was part of a universal experience of loss, which in turn meant that he was part of the social whole. Whereas he was once motivated to make art to impress and shock the world, he now wanted to help people, to transmute gnawing guilt into something good. “I feel that, as his father, he was my responsibility and I looked away at the wrong time, that I wasn’t sufficiently vigilant,” he said in the 2022 interview collection Faith, Hope and Carnage. He added, speaking of his and Susie’s creative output, “There is not a song or a word or a stitch of thread that is not asking for forgiveness, that is not saying we are just so sorry.”

On the Red Hand Files, the epistolary blog that Cave started in 2018, he replies to questions from the public concerning all manner of subjects: how he feels about religion (he doesn’t identify as Christian, yet he attends church every week), what he thinks of cancel culture (against it, “mercy’s antithesis”), whether he likes raisins (they have a “grim, scrotal horribleness, but like all things in this world—you, me and every other little thing—they have their place”).

At least a quarter of the messages he receives from readers express one idea—“The world is shit,” as he put it. “That has a sort of range: from people that just see everything is corrupt from a political point of view, to people that just see no value in themselves, in human beings, or in the world.” Cave recognizes that outlook from his “nasty little guy” days—but he fears that nihilism has moved from the punk fringe to the mainstream. The misery in his inbox reflects a culture that is “anti-sacred, secular by nature, unmysterious, unnuanced,” he said. He thinks music and faith offer much-needed medicine, helping to re-enchant reality.

[From the October 2024 issue: Leonard Cohen’s prophetic battle against male egoism]

Cave has been heartened to see so many people evidently feeling the same way. Back when Jordan Peterson was first making his mark as a public figure, Cave devoured his lectures about the Bible, he told me. “They were seriously beautiful things. I heard reports about people in his classes; it was like being on acid or something like that. Just listening to this man speak about these sorts of things—it was so deeply complex. And putting the idea of religion back onto the table as a legitimate intellectual concern.”

But over time, he lost interest in Peterson as he watched him get swept up in the internet’s endless, polarized culture wars. Twitter in particular, he said, has “had a terrible, diminishing effect on some great minds.”

The artist’s job, as Cave has come to see it, is to work against this erosion of ambiguity and complication, using their creative powers to push beyond reductive binaries, whether they’re applied to politics, gender, or the soul. “I’m evangelical about the transcendent nature of music itself,” he said. “We can listen to some deeply flawed individuals create the most beautiful things imaginable. The distance from what they are as human beings to what they’re capable of producing can be extraordinary.” Music, he added, can “redeem the individual.”

This redemptive spirit hums throughout Wild God. One song tells of a ghostly boy sitting at the foot of the narrator’s bed, delivering a message: “We’ve all had too much sorrow / Now is the time for joy.” The album joins in that call with its surging, uplifting sound. The final track, “As the Waters Cover the Sea,” is a straightforward hymn, suitable to be sung from the pews of even the most traditional congregations.

But the album is not entirely a departure from Cave’s old work; he has not fully evolved from “living shit-post to Hallmark card,” as he once joked in a Red Hand Files entry. “Frogs” begins with a stark reference to the tale of Cain and Abel—“Ushering in the week, he knelt down / Crushed his brother’s head in with a bone”—and builds to Cave singing, in ecstatic tones, “Kill me!” His point is that “joy is not happiness—it’s not a simple emotion,” he told me. “Joy, in its way, is a form of suffering in itself. It’s rising out of an understanding of the base nature of our lives into an explosion of something beautiful, and then a kind of retreat.”

A few songs portray an old man—or, seemingly interchangeably, an “old god” or a “wild god”—on a hallucinatory journey around the globe, lifting the spirits of the downtrodden wherever he goes. At times, the man comes off like a deluded hero, or even a problematic one: “It was rape and pillage in the retirement village / But in his mind he was a man of great virtue and courage,” Cave sings on the album’s title track. In Cave’s view, though, this figure “is a deeply sympathetic character,” he told me, a person who feels “separated from the world” and is “looking for someone that will see him of some value.”

As with Ghosteen, the album mixes Susie’s perspective with Cave’s. One song, “Conversion,” was inspired by an experience, or maybe a vision, that she had—and that she asked her husband not to publicly disclose in detail. “There is some gentle tension between my wife, who’s an extremely private person, and my own role, which is someone that pretty much speaks about pretty much everything,” Cave said.

In the song, the old god shambles around a town whose inhabitants watch him “with looks on their faces worse than grief itself”—perhaps pity, perhaps judgment. Then he sees a girl with long, dark hair. They embrace—and erupt into a cleansing flame, curing the man of his pain. As Cave described this moment in the song to me, he flared his eyes and made an explosive noise with his mouth. In my mind, I could see the old god, and he looked just like Cave.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Nick Cave Wants to Be Good.”

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Jen Balderama, a Culture editor who leads the Family section and works on stories about parenting, language, sex, and politics (among other topics).

Jen grew up training as a dancer and watching classic movies with her mom, which instilled in her a love for film and its artistry. Her favorites include Doctor Zhivago, In the Mood for Love, and Pina; she will also watch anything starring Cate Blanchett, an actor whose “ability to inhabit is simply unmatched.”

The Culture Survey: Jen Balderama

My favorite blockbuster film: I’m grateful that when I was quite young, my mom started introducing me to her favorite classic movies—comedies, romances, noirs, epics—which I’m pretty sure had a lasting influence on my taste. So for a blockbuster, I have to go with a nostalgia pick: Doctor Zhivago. The hours we spent watching this movie, multiple times over the years, each viewing an afternoon-long event. (The film, novelty of novelties, had its own intermission!) My mom must have been confident that the more adult elements—the rape, the politics—would go right over my head, but that I could appreciate the movie for its aesthetics. She had a huge crush on Omar Sharif and swooned over the soft-focus close-ups of his watering eyes. I was entranced by the landscapes and costumes and sets—the bordello reds of the Sventitskys’ Christmas party, the icy majesty of the Varykino dacha in winter. But I was also taken by the film’s sheer scope, its complexity, and the fleshly and revolutionary messiness. I’m certain it helped ingrain in me, early, an enduring faith in art and artists as preservers of humanity, especially in dark, chaotic times. [Related: Russia from within: Boris Pasternak’s first novel]

My favorite art movie: May I bend the rules? Because I need to pick two: Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and Wim Wenders’s Pina. One is fiction, the other documentary. Both are propelled by yearning and by music. Both give us otherworldly depictions of bodies in motion. And both delve into the ways people communicate when words go unspoken.

In the Mood for Love might be the dead-sexiest film I’ve ever seen, and no one takes off their clothes. Instead we get Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in a ravishing tango of loaded phone calls and intense gazes, skin illicitly brushing skin, figures sliding past each other in close spaces: electricity.

Pina is Wenders’s ode to the German choreographer Pina Bausch, a collaboration that became an elegy after Bausch died when the film was in preproduction. Reviewing the movie for The New York Times in 2017, the critic Gia Kourlas, whom I admire, took issue with one of Wenders’s choices: In between excerpts of Bausch’s works, her dancers sit for “interviews,” but they don’t speak to camera; recordings of their voices play as they look toward the audience or off into the distance. Kourlas wrote that these moments felt “mannered, self-conscious”; they made her “wince.” But to me, a (highly self-conscious) former dancer, Wenders nailed it—I’ve long felt more comfortable expressing myself through dance than through spoken words. These scenes are a brilliantly meta distillation of that tension: Dancers with something powerful to say remain outwardly silent, their insights played as inner narrative. Struck by grief, mouths closed, they articulate how Bausch gave them the gift of language through movement—and thus offered them the gift of themselves. Not for nothing do I have one of Bausch’s mottos tattooed on my forearm: “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.”

An actor I would watch in anything: Cate Blanchett. Her ability to inhabit is simply unmatched: She can play woman, man, queen, elf, straight/gay/fluid, hero/antihero/villain. Here I’m sure I’ll scandalize many of our readers by saying out loud that I am not a Bob Dylan person, but I watched Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There precisely because Blanchett was in it—and her roughly 30 minutes as Dylan were all I needed. She elevates everything she appears in, whether it’s deeply serious or silly. I’m particularly captivated by her subtleties, the way she turns a wrist or tilts her head with the grace and precision of a dancer’s épaulement. (Also: She is apparently hilarious.)

An online creator I’m a fan of: Elle Cordova, a musician turned prolific writer of extremely funny, often timely, magnificently nerdy poems, sketches, and songs, performed in a winning low-key deadpan. I was tipped off to her by a friend who sent a link to a video and wrote: “I think I’m falling for this woman.” The vid was part of a series called “Famous authors asking you out”—Cordova parroting Jane Austen, Charles Bukowski, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe (“Should I come rapping at your chamber door, or do you wanna rap at mine?”), Dr. Seuss, Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce (“And what if we were to talk a pretty yes in the endbegin of riverflow and moon’s own glimpsing heartclass …”). She does literature. She does science. She parodies pretentious podcasters; sings to an avocado; assumes the characters of fonts, planets, ChatGPT, an election ballot. Her brain is a marvel; no way can AI keep up.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Lego Masters Australia. Technically, we found this one together, but I watch Lego Masters because my 10-year-old is a Lego master himself—he makes truly astonishing creations!—and this is the kind of family entertainment I can get behind: Skilled obsessives, working in pairs, turn the basic building blocks of childhood into spectacular works of architecture and engineering, in hopes of winning glory, prize money, and a big ol’ Lego trophy. They can’t churn out the episodes fast enough for us. The U.S. has a version hosted by Will Arnett, which we also watch, but our family finds him a bit … over-the-top. We much prefer the Australian edition, hosted by the comedian Hamish Blake and judged by “Brickman,” a.k.a. Lego Certified Professional Ryan McNaught, both of whom exude genuine delight and affection for the contestants. McNaught has teared up during critiques of builds, whether gobsmacked by their beauty or moved by the tremendous effort put forth by the builders. It’s a show about teamwork, ingenuity, artistry, hilarity, physics, stamina, and grit—with a side helping of male vulnerability. [Related: Solving a museum’s bug problem with Legos]

A poem that I return to: “Joint Custody,” by Ada Limón. My family is living this. Limón, recalling a childhood of being “taken /  back and forth on Sundays,” of shifting between “two different / kitchen tables, two sets of rules,” reassures me that even though this is sometimes “not easy,” my kids will be okay—more than okay—as long as they know they are “loved each place.” That beautiful wisdom guides my every step with them.

Something I recently rewatched: My mom died when my son was 2 and my daughter didn’t yet exist, and each year around this time—my mom’s birthday—I find little ways to celebrate her by sharing with my kids the things she loved. Chocolate was a big one, I Love Lucy another. So on a recent weekend, we snuggled up and watched Lucille Ball stuffing bonbons down the front of her shirt, and laughed and laughed and laughed. And then we raided a box of truffles.

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

How the Ivy League broke America The secret to thinking your way out of anxiety How one woman became the scapegoat for America’s reading crisis

The Week Ahead

Gladiator II, an action film starring Paul Mescal as Lucius, the son of Maximus, who becomes a gladiator and seeks to save Rome from tyrannical leaders (in theaters Friday) Dune: Prophecy, a spin-off prequel series about the establishment of the Bene Gesserit (premieres today on HBO and Max) An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, a novel by Anna Moschovakis about an unnamed protagonist who attempts to find—and eliminate—her housemate, who was lost after a major earthquake (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Raisa Álava

What the Band Eats

By Reya Hart

I grew up on the road. First on the family bus, traveling from city to city to watch my father, Mickey Hart, play drums with the Grateful Dead and Planet Drum, and then later with the various Grateful Dead offshoots. When I was old enough, I joined the crew, working for Dead & Company, doing whatever I could be trusted to handle … Then, late-night, drinking whiskey from the bottle with the techs, sitting in the emptying parking lot as the semitrucks and their load-out rumble marked the end of our day.

But this summer, for the first time in the band’s history, there would be no buses; there would be no trucks. Instead we stayed in one place, trading the rhythms of a tour for the dull ache of a long, endlessly hot Las Vegas summer.

Read the full article.

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Why the Gaetz announcement is already destroying the government The sanewashing of RFK Jr. The not-so-woke Generation Z

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People feed seagulls in the Yamuna River, engulfed in smog, in New Delhi, India. (Arun Sankar / AFP / Getty)

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Donald Trump hasn’t filled his Cabinet yet, but evidence suggests he’s looking for two main attributes in his picks: loyalty to him and a loathing for what he calls the “deep state.” On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists discussed why there’s a split in thinking over these nominees and their qualifications.

This week, Donald Trump named, among others, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine denier, to head Health and Human Services; Matt Gaetz, the subject of a federal sex-crimes investigation, as attorney general; and Tulsi Gabbard, an apologist for Vladimir Putin, as director of national intelligence.

Though Trump’s nominations have left some in Washington with a sense of shock, these potential Cabinet members should come as no surprise, Leigh Ann Caldwell explained last night. His picks are exactly what the president-elect promised on the campaign trail: “We have to reorient our mindset of what is normal, what has happened for decades in Washington within the guardrails of tradition, the law,” she said. “Trump is trying to throw all of that out, and he’s doing that by nominating people who will do exactly what he says.”

In addition to his quest for loyalty, Trump has also promised that he will hollow out many federal agencies. Between these potential mass firings and resignations, “it’s going to be night and day” compared with the last Trump administration, Mark Leibovich said last night. And especially because many of Trump’s nominees have never run massive agencies before, “it’s going to make the built-in chaos of what this administration is going to try to do all the more so.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Elisabeth Bumiller, the assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief for The New York Times; Leigh Ann Caldwell, the anchor of Washington Post Live; Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic; and Francesca Chambers, a White House correspondent at USA Today.

Watch the full episode here.

One of the many troubling consequences of Donald Trump’s reelection is that he will largely avoid responsibility for his conduct in his four criminal cases. No other criminal defendant in American history has had the power to shut down his own prosecution. This is an unprecedented and wrenching affront to the principle that no one is above the law.

The potential exception is the New York State case. In May, a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts related to falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 election.

Justice Juan Merchan recently granted the parties’ joint request to pause the New York proceedings while both sides consider what should be done in light of Trump’s reelection. Trump’s attorneys claim that the case must be dismissed altogether to avoid “unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern.” Even the district attorney’s office said it wants time to consider how the court should balance the “competing interests” of the jury verdict and the needs of the office of the presidency.

Out of an abundance of caution, Merchan avoided a preelection sentencing that potentially could have influenced the election. But the election result changes nothing about the criminal case. Now that the election is over, sentencing should proceed promptly.

[Quinta Jurecic: Bye-bye, Jack Smith]

Once in office, Trump may cancel federal prosecutions of himself and his allies. He has threatened to use the Justice Department to pursue political opponents. He may seek to bend the justice system to his will in unprecedented ways. But that doesn’t mean the DA or Merchan should “obey in advance” by abandoning the jury’s verdict.

Trump’s attorneys are essentially arguing that the election wipes the slate clean, that the people have spoken and all criminal matters must be dismissed. His former attorney general William Barr made a similar point in an interview with Fox News, where he called on prosecutors to drop all the pending criminal cases. “The American people have rendered their verdict on President Trump,” Barr argued. Prosecutors, he said, should “respect the people’s decision and dismiss the cases against President Trump now.”

What nonsense. The election was not a “verdict” on Trump’s criminality. A majority of voters apparently concluded that Trump’s criminal cases were not disqualifying—just as the sexual assaults, pandemic response, efforts to overturn the last election, and many other things apparently were not disqualifying. That doesn’t mean they didn’t happen or that Trump is not legally and morally responsible.

No doubt all public-official defendants would like to be able to say that winning their next election means everyone should just forget about their alleged crimes. That’s not how our system works. An election is not a jury verdict, and winning an election doesn’t make you any less guilty.

When it comes to Trump, the New York case may be the rule of law’s last stand. As president, Trump is sure to swiftly kill off the two pending federal prosecutions—the classified-documents case in Florida and the January 6 case in D.C. He may not even need to do it himself. Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Justice Department have already begun discussing how to wind down the cases, based on the DOJ policy that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

Even if the current Justice Department were to attempt to keep the cases alive somehow—such as by merely agreeing to pause them until Trump is out of office in four years—the new Trump Justice Department will simply dismiss them. Trump may pardon his co-defendants and co-conspirators, and may even try to pardon himself.

Unlike with the federal cases, Trump cannot unilaterally make the state prosecutions go away. The Georgia case is currently mired in appeals over whether the DA should be disqualified for a conflict of interest. But although the Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president does not bind the states, the reality is that a state will not be allowed to put a sitting president on trial. If prosecutors survive the appeals, the trial might proceed against the remaining defendants in a year or two. But any potential trial of Trump is sure, at a minimum, to be postponed until he is out of office—and who knows whether there will be any appetite to pursue the case at that point.

That leaves New York. Until he granted the most recent extension of time, Merchan was set to rule on November 12 on Trump’s claim that the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity requires dismissal of his convictions. That argument is a long shot, because almost all of Trump’s relevant conduct in the case took place before he was president. And although Trump is arguing that a few items of evidence in his trial should have been barred by immunity, those claims are unlikely to derail the convictions. Assuming Merchan denies the motion to dismiss, sentencing was set for November 26—until the election results cast that into doubt.

The sentencing should go forward. The argument by Trump’s attorneys that the entire case should be dismissed based on his reelection amounts to nothing more than a claim that a president (or in this case, a president-elect) is above the law and may never be held criminally accountable. Thanks to the election results and the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, that appalling claim may often be true—but it doesn’t have to be in this case.

The defense claim that sentencing would unconstitutionally impede “Trump’s ability to govern” is laughable. Trump is not yet the president. He’s not responsible for governing anything other than his transition. A sentencing proceeding would involve a few hours in a New York courtroom—probably less time than a round of golf. He could squeeze it in.

[David A. Graham: The twisted logic of Trump’s attacks on judges]

The defense may be suggesting that if Trump were sentenced to prison, that would interfere with his duties. It’s true that a prison sentence could be problematic. If Merchan were inclined to sentence Trump to prison, he would likely stay that sentence pending appeal. Once Trump was in office, even if the convictions were affirmed, the state presumably would not be allowed to jail the sitting president.

In the unlikely event of Merchan trying to jail Trump immediately, a higher court would undoubtedly intervene. The federal courts are no more likely to allow a state to jail the president-elect than to allow a state to jail the president.

But Merchan has sentencing options short of locking up the president-elect. He could impose a fine and/or sentence Trump to probation, suspending the service of any probationary period until Trump leaves office. He could even impose a jail sentence but similarly suspend that until Trump is no longer president.

At this point, the details of the sentence are less important than the sentencing taking place. Justice requires that the criminal process be completed. The defendant has been found guilty by a jury. The next step, in the ordinary course, is for the judge to impose a sentence. That will formalize Donald Trump’s record as a convicted felon. Even if Trump ends up with no substantial sentence, that’s an important legal and historical statement.

Once he is sentenced, Trump’s attorneys may appeal his convictions. That can proceed with almost no involvement from Trump himself. The appeals process will be handled by the lawyers and will not interfere with any of his presidential duties. His convictions may be affirmed on appeal or they may be tossed out, but there’s no reason the regular criminal process can’t continue.

Although the idea was unthinkable to many of us, a criminal can be president of the United States. The people have spoken, as Trump’s attorneys and supporters would say. But just as Trump’s criminal cases did not prevent his reelection, the election should not prevent the regular criminal process in New York from concluding. This sentencing must proceed.

Jon Jones says he channeled legendary martial artist Bruce Lee to beat Stipe Miocic at UFC 309 at New York's Madison Square Garden.