In the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, some commentators have argued that Americans don’t believe that the Democratic Party shares their political priorities. According to a large survey we conducted immediately after the election, these critics are onto something. Americans overwhelmingly—but, it turns out, mistakenly—believe that Democrats care more about advancing progressive social issues than widely shared economic ones.

More in Common, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization we work for, asked a representative sample of 5,005 Americans to select the three issues that were most important to them. We then asked them to identify “which issues you think are most important to Democrats,” and the same about Republicans. We used broad category labels rather than asking specifically about, say, “Democratic voters” or “Republican candidates,” to capture general perceptions of each side. Then we compared these perceptions with reality.

Let’s start with reality. We found that Americans have clearly shared a top concern in 2024: the “cost of living/ inflation.” This was the No. 1 most chosen priority within every major demographic group, including men and women; Black, white, Latino, and Asian Americans; Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X, Baby Boomer, and Silent Generation age groups; working-class, middle-class, and upper-class Americans; suburban, urban, and rural Americans; and Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Democratic respondents’ top priorities after inflation (40 percent) were health care and abortion (each at 29 percent), and the economy in general (24 percent). For Republicans, immigration came in second place (47 percent), followed by the economy in general (41 percent).

When it comes to how Republicans’ and Democrats’ priorities were perceived, however, we found a striking disparity: Americans across the political spectrum are much better at assessing what Republicans care about than what Democrats care about.

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

When asked about Republicans’ priorities, all major groups, including Democrats and independents, correctly identified that either inflation or the economy was among Republicans’ top three priorities.

By contrast, every single demographic group thought Democrats’ top priority was abortion, overestimating the importance of this issue by an average of 20 percentage points. (This included Democrats themselves, suggesting that they are somewhat out of touch even with what their fellow partisans care about.) Meanwhile, respondents underestimated the extent to which Democrats prioritize inflation and the economy, ranking those items fourth and ninth on their list of priorities, respectively.

By far the most notable way that Democrats are misperceived relates to what our survey referred to as “LGBT/ transgender policy.” Although this was not a major priority for Democratic voters in reality—it ranked 14th—our survey respondents listed it as Democrats’ second-highest priority. This effect was especially dramatic among Republicans—56 percent listed the issue among Democrats’ top three priorities, compared with just 8 percent who listed inflation—but nearly every major demographic group made a version of the same mistake.

What explains why Democrats’ priorities were so badly misunderstood while Republicans’ were not? Our research suggests that one reason is the Democratic Party’s relationship with its left wing.

In 2018, More in Common conducted a study called “Hidden Tribes,” in which we identified clusters of like-minded Americans who share certain moral values and views on things such as parenting style. The study grouped them into seven distinct “tribes,” each with a different worldview and way of engaging with politics. It also showed that much of the national political conversation is driven by small, highly vocal camps on each side of the political divide: on the left, a group we called “Progressive Activists”; on the right, a group we called “Devoted Conservatives.”

Because these groups’ voices are heard more frequently in the national discourse, their views tend to be confused for those of their party overall. (Think, for example, of the profusion of social-media posts, op-eds, and news coverage about the idea of defunding or abolishing the police in the summer of 2020—a view that was never widely embraced even by the populations most affected by police violence.) This leads people to think that each party holds more extreme views than it really does. For instance, Democrats think Republicans are more likely than they actually are to deny that “racism is still a problem in America,” and Republicans think Democrats are more likely than they actually are to believe that “most police are bad people.”

Our data, however, suggest that Devoted Conservatives’ priorities are more aligned with those of the average Republican than Progressive Activists’ are with those of the average Democrat. For example, Progressive Activists are half as likely as the average Democrat to prioritize the economy and twice as likely to prioritize climate change. By contrast, the biggest difference between average Republicans and Devoted Conservatives is on the issue of immigration, but the discrepancy is much smaller: Devoted Conservatives rank it first and Republicans rank it second. This asymmetry makes the confusion between parties’ mainstreams and their more radical flanks costlier for Democratic politicians.

The outsize influence of Progressive Activists, however, does not fully account for the mismatch between perception and reality when it comes to Democrats’ views on transgender policy. Our survey found that even Progressive Activists listed the issue as their sixth-most-important priority. So the belief that transgender policy is Democrats’ second-highest priority must have other causes.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

One possibility is that Democratic advocacy groups are prominently pushing ideas that even their own most progressive voters are lukewarm about. Another is that Donald Trump’s campaign successfully linked Kamala Harris’s campaign with controversial transgender-policy stances. In a widely seen attack ad, a 2019 interview clip of Harris explaining her support for publicly funded sex-change surgeries for prisoners, including undocumented immigrants, was punctuated by a voiceover intoning that “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.” In tests run by Harris’s main super PAC, 2.7 percent of voters shifted toward Trump after being shown the ad—a massive result. The constant reinforcement of the link between Harris and this policy, coupled with Harris’s apparent inability or unwillingness to publicly distance herself from it, likely reinforced Americans’ association of trans issues with Democrats.

If elections are battles of perceptions, our data suggest that this was a battle Democrats lost in 2024. Despite the Harris campaign spending almost half a billion dollars more than the Trump campaign, Trump appears to have been more effective at defining Democrats’ priorities to the American public. Caught between their leftmost flank and their opponents’ attacks, Democrats were unable to convince the American electorate that they shared voters’ concerns. If the party wants to gain ground in future elections, it will need to solve this perception problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Helen Lewis: The worst argument for youth transition]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you’ve been annoyed over the last few years that you had to pay to get an assigned seat on a flight, so is the government. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in one of its last acts before a more business-friendly Republican majority takes over next year, has issued a report criticizing the…

Read more...

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

Matt Gaetz has withdrawn from consideration for attorney general but many of Donald Trump’s other nominees continue to draw controversy. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss Trump’s other equally improbable Cabinet choices, and what could come next for these nominees.

With the announcement of Gaetz’s withdrawal, much attention has now turned to Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who, like Gaetz, also faces allegations of sexual assault. “The senators to watch on this nomination are going to be not just the national-security hawks but female Republican senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who are always the wild cards, but also someone like Senator Joni Ernst,” Andrew Desiderio said last night. Although Ernst has been complimentary thus far about Hegseth’s nomination, Desiderio explained, she has also been open about her support for women in combat roles, something that Hegseth has spoken out against.

As for longtime Republican lawmakers, questions still remain over how their reactions to Trump’s Cabinet picks will play out in the confirmation process. Are we going to see Mitch McConnell “lead an insurgent faction now that he’s not going to be the Senate leader?” Goldberg asked panelists last night.

“There might be a story of what he does behind closed doors compared to what you see publicly,” Zolan Kanno-Youngs said. No longer serving as the leader of his party, “he now does not need to worry about managing the factions of the Senate” and, given his past criticism of Trump, McConnell “now has the leeway to be more outspoken.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour; Andrew Desiderio, a senior congressional reporter at Punchbowl News; Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; and Ashley Parker, a senior national political correspondent for The Washington Post.

Watch the full episode here.

After Donald Trump won this month’s election, one of the first things he did was to name two unelected male plutocrats, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to run a new Department of Government Efficiency. The yet-to-be-created entity’s acronym, DOGE, is something of a joke—a reference to a cryptocurrency named for an internet meme involving a Shiba Inu. But its appointed task of reorganizing the federal bureaucracy and slashing its spending heralds a new political arrangement in Washington: a broligarchy, in which tremendous power is flowing to tech and finance magnates, some of whom appear indifferent or even overtly hostile to democratic tradition.

The broligarchs’ ranks also include the PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel—Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance’s mentor, former employer, and primary financial backer—as well as venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, both of whom added millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign. Musk, to be sure, is the archetype. The world’s richest man has reportedly been sitting in on the president-elect’s calls with at least three heads of foreign states: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Musk joined Trump in welcoming Argentine President Javier Milei at Mar-a-Lago and, according to The New York Times, met privately in New York with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in a bid to “defuse tensions” between that country and the United States. Recently, after Musk publicly endorsed the financier Howard Lutnick for secretary of the Treasury, some in Trump’s camp were concerned that Musk was acting as a “co-president,” The Washington Post reported.

[Read: Musk’s Twitter is a blueprint for a MAGA government]

Musk doesn’t always get what he wants; Trump picked Lutnick to be secretary of commerce instead. Even so, the broligarchs’ ascendancy on both the foreign- and domestic-policy fronts has taken many observers by surprise—including me, even though I wrote last August about the broligarchs’ deepening political alignment with Trump. Though some of them have previously opposed Trump because of his immigration or tariff policies, the broligarchs share his politics of impunity: the idea that some men should be above the law. This defiant rejection of all constraint by and obligation to the societies that made them wealthy is common among the world’s ultrarich, a group whose practices and norms I have studied for nearly two decades. Trump has exemplified this ethos, up to the present moment: He is currently in violation of a law—which he signed into effect during his first term—requiring incoming presidents to agree to an ethics pledge.

Trump—who infamously said of sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it”—cites his celebrity as a basis for his elevation above the law. Many broligarchs also see themselves as exceptional beings, but arrived at that view through a different path: via science fiction, fantasy literature, and comic books. Ideas from these genres have long pervaded Silicon Valley culture; last year, Andreessen published a manifesto calling for “Becoming Technological Supermen,” defined by embarking on a “Hero’s Journey” and “conquering dragons.”

Superhero narratives also appear to inform many of Musk’s more eccentric political views, including his reported belief that the superintelligent have a duty to reproduce, and may help explain why in September he reposted a claim that “a Republic of high status males” would be superior to our current democracy. Last week, Musk likened Matt Gaetz, Trump’s then-nominee for attorney general, to Judge Dredd, a dystopian comic-book character authorized to conduct summary executions. Musk seems to have meant this as a compliment. He described Gaetz—who, until his resignation from the House, was under a congressional investigation in connection with an alleged sex-trafficking scheme—as “our Hammer of Justice.”

[Read: What Elon Musk really wants]

Whatever its source, the broligarchs’ sense of their innate superiority has led many of them to positions on taxation quite similar to Trump’s. In 2016, the Republican presidential nominee bragged about avoiding tax payments for years—“That makes me smart,” he crowed from the debate stage. The broligarchs have quietly liberated themselves from one of the only certainties in life. As ProPublica reported in 2021, Musk paid zero federal income taxes in 2018 and a de facto tax rate of 3.3 percent from 2014 to 2018, during which his wealth grew by $13.9 billion. Thiel used a government program intended to expand retirement savings by middle-class Americans to amass $5 billion in capital-gains income, completely tax-free. The Trump-friendly broligarchs’ political ascendancy turns the rallying cry of the Boston Tea Party on its head, achieving representation with minimal taxation.

In their hostility to taxation and regulation, the men who rule Wall Street and Silicon Valley resemble earlier generations of wealthy capitalists who enjoyed outsize influence on American politics. Even some tech barons who supported Kamala Harris clamored for the firing of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who favors vigorous antitrust enforcement. But the broligarchs are distinct from old-school American oligarchs in one key respect: Their political vision seeks to undermine the nation-state system globally. Musk, among others, has set his sights on the privatization and colonization of space with little or no government involvement. Thiel and Andreessen have invested heavily in creating alternatives to the nation-state here on Earth, including libertarian colonies with minimal taxation. One such colony is up and running in Honduras; Thiel has also invested in efforts to create artificial islands and other autonomous communities to serve as new outposts for private governance. “The nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level,” Thiel said of these initiatives in 2008.

Cryptocurrency is the financial engine of the broligarchs’ political project. For centuries, states have been defined by two monopolies: first, on the legitimate use of coercive force (as by the military and the police); and second, on control of the money supply. Today’s broligarchs have long sought to weaken government control of global finance. Thiel notes in his 2014 book, Zero to One, that when he, Musk, and others started PayPal, it “had a suitably grand mission … We wanted to create a new internet currency to replace the U.S. dollar.” If broligarchs succeed in making cryptocurrency a major competitor to or replacement for the dollar, the effects could be enormous. The American currency is also the world’s reserve currency—a global medium of exchange. This has contributed to U.S. economic dominance in the world for 80 years and gives Washington greater latitude to use financial and economic pressure as an alternative to military action.

[Read: What to expect from Elon Musk’s government makeover]

Undercutting the dollar could enrich broligarchs who hold considerable amounts of wealth in cryptocurrencies, but would also weaken the United States and likely destabilize the world economy. Yet Trump—despite his pledge to “Make America great again” and his previous claims that crypto was a “scam” against the dollar—now seems fully on board with the broligarchs’ agenda. Signaling this alignment during his campaign, Trump gave the keynote speech at a crypto conference last July; he later pledged to make crypto a centerpiece of American monetary policy via purchase of a strategic bitcoin reserve. The day after the election, one crypto advocate posted on X, “We have a #Bitcoin president.” The incoming administration is reportedly vetting candidates for the role of “crypto czar.”

If American economic and political dominance recedes, the country’s wealthiest men may be well positioned to fill and profit from the power vacuum that results. But is a weakened country, greater global instability, and rule by a wealthy few really what voters wanted when they chose Trump?

Musk spent millions of dollars to support Trump’s campaign and promoted it on X. He’s now doing everything he can to capitalize on Trump’s victory and maximize his own power—to the point of siccing his X followers on obscure individual government officials. Some evidence, including Axios’s recent focus-group study of swing voters, suggests that Americans may already feel queasy about the influence of the broligarchs. “I didn’t vote for him,” one participant said of Musk. “I don't know what his ultimate agenda would be for having that type of access.” Another voter added, “There’s nothing, in my opinion, in Elon Musk’s history that shows that he’s got the best interest of the country or its citizens in mind.” Even so, we can expect him and his fellow broligarchs to extend their influence as far as they can for as long as Trump lets them.

Let us extend our ethic of care to our celebrities, and in particular white celebrities, so many of whom contributed their time and talent to the Kamala Harris campaign. These people understand both justice and mercy, and their greatest concern is neither fame nor fortune, but the plight of America’s—and the world’s—most disadvantaged. Consider Mark Ruffalo.

The day before the election, he posted on Instagram a comedic short to “help Trump go bye-bye,” a compilation of clips of Donald Trump saying “Bye” or “Bye-bye.” The day before that, he’d posted a video of two young Native American people worried about the upcoming election: “We need a superhero,” one of them says and, just like that: Mark Ruffalo! “It’s scary,” he says. “Trump does not care about the Native people.”

He also posted a video he’d made with Rania Batrice, a Palestinian American who is a World Economic Forum “Exceptional Woman of Excellence.” Ruffalo, however, was the star. The video was intended for voters so angry about the war in Gaza, they were considering a protest vote for a third-party candidate over Harris: “If you’re thinking of voting for Jill Stein, please take a listen,” Ruffalo said, in his compelling, patronizing way. “I understand how devastated and angry you are,” he said. “For over a year now, many of us have been on the front lines of calling for the end of the genocide in Gaza and now the killing in Lebanon.” Who is “us”? And where was the “front line”? West L.A.? Studio City? (Ruffalo, needless to say, has not spent the past year sharing his outrage over the Hamas attacks of October 7 that took 1,200 lives and precipitated the conflict.)

“We’ve been outraged at the Biden administration’s complicity and inhumanity as the invasion has spread to Lebanon and marches closer and closer towards a forever war,” he said, and offered the weirdest political pitch in history: Show up for Harris because “we can and we will hold her accountable on her first day in office.” Even for those voters who might have shared his premises, it was a bizarre theory: Vote for a war criminal so we can frog-march her to American Nuremberg as soon as she climbs down from the podium.

[Read: America’s class politics have turned upside down]

This is one of the things that white celebrities do best: forge a bond with members of a marginalized community, and then tell them what to do. But this time, it didn’t work. What’s a superhero to do when he learns that at least half of Native Americans voted for Trump? (“Long time coming,” said a former vice president of the Navajo Nation, Myron Lizer.)

What about the gut punch of almost half of Latino voters choosing Trump? That’s something the white celebrities weren’t prepared for, and it hurt. But they had to put on a brave face. As Brad Pitt told Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.” Let us respect the privacy of the white celebrities at this difficult time. Three-tenths of Black men under the age of 45 voted for Trump. There’s no one with whom white celebrities assume greater common cause than young Black men. The Black Lives Matter protests were their Tiananmen Square.

The minute it became clear that Harris had lost, reporters and panelists began offering explanations—explanations so obvious that you had to wonder why they hadn’t seen the loss coming. Of course they were correct: The results proved that millions of people don’t want to see an apparently endless flow of undocumented immigrants entering the country; they loathe the way DEI absolutism empowered an army of bureaucrats to mete out mysterious punishments for ridiculous offenses. They don’t want to hear anyone’s pronouns; they don’t want to be told that crime is down when they’re busy getting carjacked; and they never, ever want to watch The View again.

These various social causes helped win Trump the election. His narrative didn’t pass most tests of logic or economic theory and yet it was constructed on a foundation of grievances that rang true to millions of Americans, and Democrats met it with no narrative at all. It was as though the party had spent a quarter century running a very large tab, and on Election Day, the whole thing finally came due. I couldn’t really attach that vague sense of the problem to any of its component parts, so as I always do when I’m confused about the Democratic Party, I called Noah Redlich.

“How did this happen?” I asked him, and he said something that not a single aggrieved commentator or anyone on the Topanga front line had said.

“When I heard J. D. Vance say that he was in fourth grade when Joe Biden voted for NAFTA, I said, ‘We’re screwed!’”

Noah is a second-year law student at Fordham University. I’ve known him since he was 5. At 7 he could tell you the name of every U.S. senator. It wasn’t just a party trick—as he grew older, his interest in politics grew into a strong belief in the Democratic Party’s potential to improve the lives of the working and middle classes. I spend a huge amount of time talking to Democrats, some of them extremely well versed in the party’s positions on various topics. So why do I trust Noah more than these mandarins? Because more often than not, they’ll break into an argument that requires me to accept that various facts on the ground don’t exist. Noah has worked or volunteered on many campaigns, and when he would come back from a red state he would never say “Those Republican voters are scum.” He would come back saying “These voters are concerned about …”

“When Vance talked about NAFTA,” Noah said, “it had a visceral connection with a lot of people who continue to be deeply affected by it. Even the name of that agreement has deep resonance for a huge number of people from Appalachia and across the Midwest, because they saw their manufacturing jobs disappear.”

Industrial decline began long before NAFTA, of course, but it was an efficient engine for taking away jobs. Corporations did what they always do, if they’re allowed to do it, which is chase cheap labor. Their response to union efforts and worker resentment was to say, You better just keep working or we’ll send your jobs away.

“No one at the Democratic convention talked about NAFTA,” Noah said. “How could they? They’re too in love with Bill Clinton.”

Bill Clinton spent his first year in office aggressively lobbying for the passage of NAFTA. He curried favor with Wall Street, and in 1999 signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall regulations enacted after the 1929 stock-market crash, which helped lead  to the 2007–08 financial crisis and the Great Recession. He ushered in the era of the billionaire-friendly Democratic Party, which was somehow going to coexist with—and benefit—the members of its traditional stronghold: the working class.

Clinton once held a lot of credibility with the working class, but that was a long time ago. And yet the party remains so convinced of his popularity that it sent him to Michigan to campaign.

And then there’s Hillary. “Noah, why in the world is Hillary Clinton still taken seriously by the Democratic Party?”

“I have no idea! She lost an election; her entire worldview has been rejected; people don’t like endless free trade that sends their jobs overseas; they don’t like the endless wars, like the Iraq War, which she voted for. People don’t want that anymore. She’s stuck in a previous era that people have moved away from.”

And yet she wields a particular power at the most elite levels of the party. In the rooms where the rounds of toast are always spread with roasted bone marrow and the “California varietals” are always Kistler and Stag’s Leap, and where the sons and daughters are always about to graduate from Princeton or rescue an African village or marry a hedge funder or become an analyst at McKinsey—in those lovely rooms, where the doors close with a muffled click of solidity, Hillary Clinton still wears the ring to be kissed.

She was perhaps the first person to launch a woke argument during a presidential campaign, ridiculing Bernie Sanders’s intention to break up big banks by asking: “Would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” Seeing that argument in its infant form, made by a woman who several times collected $225,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, is a reminder of how stupid and morally bankrupt it is.

For that matter, why does the party keep dragging Liz Cheney everywhere like she’s Piltdown Man? Yes, there are Republicans who don’t like Trump, but they don’t hold much sway with Democratic voters. Nicolle Wallace and Bill Kristol do not a coalition make.

One thing the party needs to learn is that no one, anywhere, ever wants to be reminded of the Iraq War.

“It was disastrous to use her so heavily,” Noah told me. “She represents the establishment, the ruling class that people rejected during this populist moment. These people aren’t popular. That’s why Donald Trump runs the Republican Party, not the Cheneys or the Bushes.”

He’s a second-year law student! Why couldn’t the leaders of the Democratic Party see these obvious mistakes?

Harris’s campaigning with Liz Cheney allowed Trump to say, as he did many times, that the Democrats are tied to the Cheneys and their endless wars, and liable to send your kid off to die in a foreign conflict. Trump ran as an anti-war politician, but he certainly wasn’t one the last time he held office. He did most of the things Liz Cheney would have wanted him to do: He ripped up the Iran nuclear deal, and increased military spending numerous times. He was more hawkish on Russia than Barack Obama was, and increased sanctions against the country. I’m not saying any of these things were necessarily wrong, but it certainly wasn’t John and Yoko on a bed-in for peace.

But all of these are mere blunders when compared with the real problem. The sign that needs to be Scotch-taped to a window at the Democratic National Committee should say: It’s the billionaires, stupid. What ails us is that 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and 40 years of allowing private equity and an emergent billionaire class to have untrammeled power has created—in the country of opportunity—a level of income inequality that borders on the feudal. Changing that is supposed to be the work of the Democratic Party, but three decades ago, it crawled into bed with the billionaire class and never got out.

Billionaires are, of course, precious snowflakes, each one made by God and each one unique. But one thing unites almost all of them, be they Republican billionaires or Democratic billionaires: They want to protect a tax code that keeps their mountains of money in a climate-controlled, locked room.

Mark Cuban was a huge and very visible Harris supporter, but for a Democrat, he took some strange turns. He wanted Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, out of her post. Khan has taken on corporate monopolies that block competition and filed some of the most aggressive antitrust litigation in a generation, and has been especially critical of Big Tech. “By trying to break up the biggest tech companies, you risk our ability to be the best in artificial intelligence,” Cuban told a reporter. The response to that was so severe that he backpedaled by saying that he was “not trying to get involved in personnel.” Personnel? She’s the chair of the FTC, not a booker on Shark Tank. Breaking up the monopolies that rule Big Tech would be very bad for Cuban, but probably give the rest of us some breathing room. (On the other team, Vance said he agreed with some of Kahn’s positions.)

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

In a populist moment, the Democratic Party had the extremely rich and the very famous, some great music, and Mark Ruffalo. And they got shellacked. Now a lot of people seemed stunned by what happened, sobered by it.

Cuban scrubbed his X account of all political posts, declared himself on “political vacation,” and joined Bluesky, where, if not absolution, then at least a less political position could be staked out. He made a bad bet (why does Bezos make all the right moves?) and now needs to retool the factory.

Ruffalo appeared at a long-scheduled awards dinner for the ACLU of Southern California five days after the election. He got a little choked up, asked everyone to stand up and hug it out, and admitted that it had been hard for him to come to the event at all—which was a relatable position, because everyone hates the Beverly Hilton, but surely it was an easier gig than the front line?

But it’s not the trans athletes or the immigrants or the wokeism that lost the Democrats this election. It’s the rigged economy that has had its boot on the throat of working people for decades. Billionaires, even our very special Democratic billionaires, care about all kinds of things—and many of them peel off a lot of dollars for worthy causes, no doubt—but their political involvement usually comes with a specific price: that the party leaves alone the tax code that safeguards their counting houses.

And, really, after all the billionaires have done for the Democrats, is that too much to ask?

Donald Trump will never face federal criminal charges for trying to corrupt the 2020 presidential election, the fundamental democratic procedure. Nor will he ever face consequences for brazenly removing highly sensitive documents from the White House, refusing to hand them back, and attempting to hide them from the government.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, representing the Justice Department, today filed to dismiss charges in the two federal cases he was overseeing against Trump. Smith effectively had no choice. Trump had promised to fire him and end the cases as soon as he took office on January 20. (The president-elect reportedly plans to fire not only Smith but also career attorneys who were assigned to his team.)

In both cases, these were crimes that only a president could commit: No one else could have attempted to remain in office by the same means, and few people could have made off with boxes full of these documents. And only a president-elect with nearly unlimited resources could have gotten away with them.

[Read: The Trump-Trumpist divide]

Trump pulled off this legal trick with a simple and effective strategy of running down the clock until being reelected president. Traditionally, defendants have had two ways to beat a rap. They could convince a judge or jury that they didn’t do the crime, or at least that there isn’t enough evidence to prove they did. Or they could look for a way to get sprung on a technicality. Faced with a choice between A and B, Trump chose option C: weaponize the procedural protections of the American justice system against itself.

The problem is not that these protections exist. They are a crucial part of ensuring fairness for all defendants. But just as he has done in other circumstances, Trump sniffed how the things that make the American system great can also be cynically exploited. If you have sufficiently deep pockets and very little shame, you can snow a case under procedural motions, appeals, and long shots, enough to slow the case to a crawl. And in Trump’s case, delay was a victory—not because he could put it off indefinitely, but because he will soon be president again, with the Department of Justice under his authority.

The strategy was not without risks. His claims of presidential immunity drew scoffs from many legal scholars, as well as judges on the first two levels of the federal court system. But the Supreme Court took as long as possible before issuing a ruling substantially agreeing with Trump—the majority included three Trump-appointed justices plus a fourth whose wife was deeply involved in the election-subversion effort.

Even then, the strategy relied on Trump winning the presidential election, which was not a sure bet. Had he lost, the cases would likely have continued, and he might well have lost those. The documents case, though not as grave as Trump’s attack on the basic fabric of the Constitution, was clear-cut in its facts. And in the only criminal case against Trump that did go to a jury—widely viewed as the most tenuous case against him—he was quickly convicted. (Sentencing in that case is now indefinitely paused, also because of Trump’s election.)

But in Attorney General Merrick Garland, Trump drew the ideal foil. The man overseeing the two cases against Trump is obsessive about proceduralism. His view was that the best way to restore the justice system, and the Justice Department, after the first Trump presidency was to do everything precisely by the book, no matter how long it took. It took quite a while—Smith was not appointed until November 2022, two months after the paperwork coup began and three months after the FBI seized documents at Mar-a-Lago. By the time Smith brought charges, in summer 2023, the timeline was tight, either for verdicts soon enough to inform voters or to avoid dismissal if a Republican won the presidential election.

This was the problem with Garland’s calculation: It may have temporarily restored the proper function of the Justice Department, but it didn’t win back public approval, nor did it really benefit the Justice Department in court. Garland appointed Smith as special counsel after Trump entered the presidential race, so as to create an appearance of insulation from politics. Little good that did: The Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon delivered a blatantly political ruling throwing the case out because she deemed the appointment unconstitutional.

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

Most important, Garland’s attention to detail meant the system failed to do the basic work of holding accountable someone who had committed serious crimes in plain sight. And partly because of that, Trump will soon return to the White House with the power and intention to destroy all the independence and careful procedures that Garland took such pains to protect.

Not only that, but the Justice Department will be led by the lawyers who developed Trump’s strategy. His new nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, spoke outside his trial in New York and defended him in his impeachments. His appointees for deputy attorney general and principal associate deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, represented him as defense lawyers. D. John Sauer, who argued the immunity case at the Supreme Court, will be solicitor general, the fourth-ranking post at DOJ.

The lack of accountability for January 6 is an affront to the Constitution. But the lesson that Trump will take from charges being dropped, along with the immunity ruling, is that the system is not capable of holding him accountable for most rules that he violates. The affronts will continue.

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.

In the almost three weeks since his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump has more or less completed nominations for his Cabinet, and he and his surrogates have made a flurry of announcements. The president-elect and his team have spent much of November baiting and trolling their opponents while throwing red meat to the MAGA faithful. (Trump, for example, has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to a nonexistent “Department of Government Efficiency,” an office whose acronym is a play on a jokey crypto currency.) And though some of Trump’s nominees have been relatively reasonable choices, in recent days Trump has put forward a handful of manifestly unqualified and even dangerous picks, reiterated his grandiose plans for his first days in office, and promised to punish his enemies.

We’ve seen this before. As I warned this past April, stunning his opponents with more outrages than they can handle is a classic Trump tactic:

By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil … Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.

Neither the voters nor the members of the U.S. Senate, however, should fall for it this time. Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University has written that the most important way to resist a rising authoritarian regime is not to “obey in advance”—that is, changing our behavior in ways we think might conform to the demands of the new ruling group. That’s good advice, but I might add a corollary here: People should not panic and exhaust themselves in advance, either.

In practice, this means setting priorities—mine are the preservation of democracy and national security—and conserving mental energy and political effort to concentrate on those issues and Trump’s plans for them. It’s important to bear in mind as well that Trump will not take the oath of office for another two months. (Such oaths do not matter to him, but he cannot grab the machinery of government without it.) If citizens and their representatives react to every moment of trollery over the coming weeks, they will be exhausted by Inauguration Day.

Trump will now dominate the news cycle almost every day with some new smoke bomb that is meant to distract from his attempts to stock the government with a strange conglomeration of nihilistic opportunists and self-styled revolutionaries. He will propose plans that he has no real hope of accomplishing quickly, while trying to build an aura of inevitability and omnipotence around himself. (His vow to begin mass deportations on his first day, for example, is a logistical impossibility, unless by mass he means “slightly more than usual.” He may be able to set in motion some sort of planning on day one, but he has no way to execute a large-scale operation yet, and it will be some time before he has anywhere to put so many people marked for deportation.)

The attempt to build Trump into some kind of unstoppable political kaiju is nonsense, as the hapless Matt Gaetz just found out. For all of Trump’s bullying and bluster, Gaetz’s nomination bid was over in a matter of days. Two of Trump’s other nominations—Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence—might be in similar trouble as various Republicans begin to show doubts about them.

Senator James Risch, for example, a hard-right conservative from deep-red Idaho and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declined over the weekend to offer the kind of ritualistic support for Hegseth and Gabbard that Trump expects from the GOP. “Ask me this question again after the hearings,” Risch said on Saturday. “These appointments by the president are constrained by the advice and consent of the Senate. The Senate takes that seriously, and we vet these.”

What Risch seems to be saying—at least I hope, anyway—is that it’s all fun and games until national security is involved, and then people have to get serious about what’s at stake. The Senate isn’t a Trump rally, and the Defense Department isn’t a backdrop for a segment on Fox & Friends.

Similar thinking may have led to Scott Bessent as Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury. Bessent would have been an ordinary pick in any other administration, but in Trump World, it’s noteworthy that a standard-issue hedge-fund leader—and a man who once worked for George Soros, of all people—just edged out the more radical Trump loyalist Howard Lutnick, who has been relegated to Commerce, a far less powerful department. Culture warring, it seems, matters less to some of Team Trump when real money is involved.

None of this is a case for complacency. Hegseth and Gabbard could still end up winning confirmation. The anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could take over at the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, reports have also emerged that Trump may move Kash Patel—the very embodiment of the mercenary loyalist who will execute any and every Trump order—into a senior job at the FBI or the Department of Justice, a move that would raise urgent questions about American civil liberties.

But Trump cannot simply will things into existence. Yes, “the people have spoken,” but it was a narrow win, and Trump again seems to have fallen short of gaining 50 percent of the popular vote. Just as Democrats have had to learn that running up big margins in California does not win the presidency, Republicans are finding yet again that electoral votes are not the same thing as a popular mandate. The Senate Republican conference is rife with cowards, but only a small handful of principled GOP senators are needed to stop some of Trump’s worst nominees.

The other reality is that Trump has already accomplished the one thing he really cared about: staying out of jail. Today, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to dismiss the January 6–related case against him. So be it; if enough voters have decided they can live with a convicted felon in the White House, there’s nothing the rest of us can do about that.

But Trump returning to office does not mean he can rule by fiat. If his opponents react to every piece of bait he throws in front of them, they will lose their bearings. And even some of Trump’s voters—at least those outside the MAGA personality cult—might not have expected this kind of irresponsible trolling. If these Republican voters want to hold Trump accountable for the promises he made to them during the campaign, they’ll have to keep their heads rather than get caught up in Trump’s daily dramas.

Allow me to add one piece of personal advice for the upcoming holiday: None of the things Trump is trying to do will happen before the end of the week. So for Thanksgiving, give yourself a break. Remember the great privilege and blessing it is to be an American, and have faith in the American Constitution and the freedoms safeguarded within it. If your Uncle Ned shows up and still wants to argue about how the election was stolen from Trump four years ago, my advice is the same as it’s been for every holiday: Tell him he’s wrong, that you love him anyway, that you’re not having this conversation today, and to pass the potatoes.

Related:

Pam Bondi’s comeback Another theory of the Trump movement

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Revenge of the COVID contrarians The end of the quest for justice for January 6 Caitlin Flanagan on the Democrats’ billionaire mistake

Today’s News

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed motions to drop the federal election-subversion and classified-documents cases against Trump, citing a Justice Department rule against prosecuting sitting presidents. A California judge delayed the resentencing date for Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers imprisoned for killing their parents in 1989, to give the new Los Angeles County district attorney more time to review the case. The Israeli cabinet will vote tomorrow on a proposed cease-fire deal with Hezbollah, which is expected to pass, according to a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said on Israeli Army Radio that an agreement could be reached “within days” but that there remain “points to finalize.”

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Climate negotiations at COP29 ended in a $300 billion deal that mostly showed how far the world is from facing climate change’s real dangers, Zoë Schlanger argues. The Wonder Reader: One of the most humbling parts of being alive is realizing that you might need to reconsider some long-held habits, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Everyone Agrees Americans Aren’t Healthy

By Nicholas Florko

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

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Dear Therapist”: No one wants to host my in-laws for the holidays. The right has a Bluesky problem. The leak scandal roiling Israel What the broligarchs want from Trump

Culture Break

Everett

Watch. Every generation has an Oz story, but Wicked is the retelling that best captures what makes L. Frank Baum’s world sing, Allegra Rosenberg writes.

Try out. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends, Mikala Jamison writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I often tell people to unplug from the news. (Hey, I get paid to have opinions about national events, and yet I make sure to stop watching the news now and then too.) If you’d like a break that will not only get you off the doom treadmill but refresh and recharge you, allow me to suggest binge-watching the new Ted Danson series on Netflix, A Man on the Inside. It’s charming and funny, and it might bring a tear to your eye in between some laughs.

Danson plays a recently widowed retired professor who takes a job with a private investigator as the “inside man” at a senior-citizen residence in San Francisco. (As someone who watched the debut of Cheers 42 years ago, I feel like I’ve been growing old along with Danson through his many shows, and this might be his best role.) He’s tracking down a theft, but the crime isn’t all that interesting, nor is it really the point of the show: Rather, A Man on the Inside is about family, friends, love, and death.

My wife and I sometimes found the show almost too hard to watch, because we have both had parents in assisted living and memory-care settings. But A Man on the Inside never hurts—it has too much compassion (and gentle, well-placed humor) to let aging become caricatured as nothing but tragedy and loss. It is a show for and about families, just when we need something we can all watch over the holidays.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Once she became the nominee, I expected Vice President Kamala Harris to win the 2024 presidential election.

More exactly, I expected ex-President Donald Trump to lose.

What did I get wrong?

My expectation was based on three observations and one belief.

Observation one: Inflation was coming under control in 2024. Personal incomes rose faster than prices over the year. As interest rates peaked and began to subside, consumer confidence climbed. When asked about their personal finances, Americans expressed qualms, yes, but the number who rated their personal finances as excellent or good was a solid 46 percent, higher than in the year President Barack Obama won reelection. The same voters who complained about the national economy rated their local economy much more favorably.

None of this was great news for the incumbent party, and yet …

Observation two: All through the 2024 cycle, a majority of Americans expressed an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Almost one-third of Republicans were either unenthusiastic about his candidacy or outright hostile. Harris was not hugely popular, either. But if the polls were correct, she was just sufficiently less unpopular than Trump.

Arguably undergirding Harris’s popularity advantage was …  

Observation three: In the 2022 midterm elections, abortion proved a powerful anti-Republican voting issue. That year in Michigan, a campaign based on abortion rights helped reelect Governor Gretchen Whitmer and flipped both chambers of the state legislature to the Democrats. That same year, almost a million Kansans voted 59 percent to 41 percent to reaffirm state-constitutional protections for abortion. Democrats posted strong results in many other states as well. They recovered a majority in the U.S. Senate, while Republicans won only the narrowest majority in the House of Representatives. In 2024, abortion-rights measures appeared on the ballot in 10 states, including must-win Arizona and Nevada. These initiatives seemed likely to energize many Americans who would likely also cast an anti-Trump vote for president.

If that was not enough—and maybe it was not—I held onto this belief:

Human beings are good at seeing through frauds. Not perfectly good at it. Not always as fast as might be. And not everybody. But a just-sufficient number of us, sooner or later, spot the con.

The Trump campaign was trafficking in frauds. Haitians are eating cats and dogs. Foreigners will pay for the tariffs. The Trump years were the good old days if you just forget about the coronavirus pandemic and the crime wave that happened on his watch. The lying might work up to a point. I believed that the point would be found just on the right side of the line between election and defeat—and not, as happened instead, on the other side.

My mistake.

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

In one of the closest elections in modern American history, Trump eked out the first Republican popular-vote victory in 20 years. His margin was about a third the size of President Joe Biden’s margin over him in 2020. For that matter, on the votes counted, Trump’s popular-vote margin over Harris was smaller than Hillary Clinton’s over him in 2016.

Yet narrow as it is, a win it is—and a much different win from 2016. That time, Trump won by the rules, but against the expressed preference of the American people. This time, he won both by the rules and with a plurality of the votes. Trump’s popular win challenges many beliefs and preconceptions, starting with my own.

Through the first Trump administration, critics like me could reassure ourselves that his presidency was some kind of aberration. The repudiation of Trump’s party in the elections of 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022 appeared to confirm this comforting assessment. The 2024 outcome upends it. Trump is no detour or deviation, no glitch or goof.

When future generations of Americans tell the story of the nation, they will have to fit Trump into the main line of the story. And that means the story itself must be rethought.

Trump diverted millions of public dollars to his own businesses, and was returned to office anyway.

He was proved in court to have committed sexual assault, and was returned to office anyway.

He was twice impeached, and was returned to office anyway.

He was convicted of felonies, and was returned to office anyway.

He tried to overthrow an election, and was returned to office anyway.

For millions of Americans, this record was disqualifying. For slightly more Americans, however, it was not. The latter group prevailed, and the United States will be a different country because of them.

American politics has never lacked for scoundrels, cheats, and outright criminals. But their numbers have been thinned, and their misdeeds policed, by strong public institutions. Trump waged a relentless campaign against any and all rules that restrained him. He did not always prevail, but he did score three all-important successes. First, he frightened the Biden administration’s Justice Department away from holding him to account in courts of law in any timely way. Second, he persuaded the courts themselves—including, ultimately, the Supreme Court—to invent new doctrines of presidential immunity to shield him. Third, he broke all internal resistance within the Republican Party to his lawless actions. Republican officeholders, donors, and influencers who had once decried the January 6 attempted coup as utterly and permanently debarring—one by one, Trump brought them to heel.

Americans who cherished constitutional democracy were left to rely on the outcome of the 2024 election to protect their institutions against Trump. It was not enough. Elections are always about many different issues—first and foremost usually, economic well-being. In comparison, the health of U.S. democracy will always seem remote and abstract to most voters.

[Read: Trump’s first defeat]

Early in the American Revolution, a young Alexander Hamilton wrote to his friend John Jay to condemn an act of vigilante violence against the publisher of a pro-British newspaper. Hamilton sympathized with the feelings of the vigilantes, but even in revolutionary times, he insisted, feelings must be guided by rules. Otherwise, people are left to their own impulses, a formula for trouble. “It is not safe,” Hamilton warned, “to trust to the virtue of any people.”

The outcome of an election must be respected, but its wisdom can be questioned. If any divine entity orders human affairs, it may be that providence sent Trump to the United States to teach Americans humility. It Can’t Happen Here is the title of a famous 1930s novel about an imagined future in which the United States follows the path to authoritarianism. Because it didn’t happen then, many Americans have taken for granted that it could not happen now.

Perhaps Americans require, every once in a while, to be jolted out of the complacency learned from their mostly fortunate history. The nation that ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 was, in important ways, the same one that enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850; the nation that generously sent Marshall Plan aid after the Second World War was compensating for the myopic selfishness of the Neutrality Acts before the war. Americans can take pride in their national story because they have chosen rightly more often than they have chosen wrongly—but the wrong choices are part of the story too, and the wrong choice has been made again now.

“There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause,” T. S. Eliot observed in a 1927 essay (here he was writing about the arguments between philosophical Utilitarians and their critics, but his words apply so much more generally). “We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”

So the ancient struggle resumes again: progress against reaction, dignity against domination, commerce against predation, stewardship against spoliation, global responsibility against national chauvinism. No quitting.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

In search of a faith beyond religion Radio Atlantic: What Pete Hegseth’s nomination is really about Cher has a history lesson for us all.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Three Ways to Become a Deeper Thinker

By Arthur C. Brooks

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

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Snap a picture. The Publishers Marketplace book-deal social-media post is the most coveted screenshot in the literary world, Jordan Michelman writes.

Try out. Suddenly, celebrity look-alike contests are everywhere, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes. What’s going on?

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.