At its best, a presidential biopic can delve into the monomaniacal focus—and potential narcissism—that might drive a person to run for the White House in the first place. That’s what Oliver Stone did in 1995’s Nixon, dramatizing the 37th president’s downfall with the exhilarating paranoia of the director’s best work. Though guilty of some fact-fudging, Stone retained empathy for Richard Nixon’s childhood trauma and lifelong inferiority complex, delivering a Shakespearean tragedy filtered through a grim vision of American power. As Nixon (played by a hunched, scotch-guzzling Anthony Hopkins) stalks the halls of a White House engulfed by scandal, and stews with jealousy at the late John F. Kennedy, the presidency never seemed so lonely.

A presidential biopic can also zoom in on a crucial juncture in a leader’s life: Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln explored its protagonist’s fraught final months, during which he pushed, at great political risk, for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. Spielberg’s film was captivating because it didn’t just re-create Lincoln’s famous speeches, but also imagined what the man was like behind the scenes—in backroom dealings, or in contentious confrontations with his wife, Mary Todd. Like its 1939 predecessor, Young Mr. Lincoln, the film wisely limits its scope; focusing on a pivotal period proves a defter approach than trying to capture the full sprawl of a president’s life, a task better left to hefty biographies.

And then there’s a movie like this year’s Reagan, the Ronald Reagan biopic starring Dennis Quaid. Reagan is a boyhood-to-grave survey of the 40th president’s life and administration, with a chest-beating emphasis on his handling of the Cold War that blurs the line between biopic and Hollywood boosterism. Filmed with all the visual panache of an arthritis-medication commercial, the movie is suffocating in its unflagging reverence for its titular hero. In its portrayal of Reagan’s formative years, secondary characters seem to exist primarily to give mawkish pep talks or to fill the young Reagan’s brain with somber warnings about the evils of communism. “God has a purpose for your life, something only you can do,” his mother tells him after he reads scripture at church. Later, in college, he is disturbed by a speech from a Soviet defector, who visits a local congregation and lectures wide-eyed students that they will not find a “church like this” in the U.S.S.R.

Unlike Lincoln, the film seems incapable of imagining what its protagonist was like in private moments or ascribing any interior complexity to him. Even his flirty exchanges with his wife, Nancy, feel like they were cribbed from a campaign ad. “I just want to do something good in this world,” he tells his future spouse on a horseback-riding date. “Make a difference.” The portrayal isn’t helped by the fact that the 70-year-old Quaid is digitally de-aged and delivers his lines in a tinny imitation of the politician’s voice. A bizarre narrative device further detaches the audience from Reagan’s perspective: The entire movie is narrated by Jon Voight doing a Russian accent, as a fictionalized KGB agent who surveilled Reagan for decades and is now regaling a young charge with stories of how one American president outsmarted the Soviet Union.

They say history is written by the winners. But sometimes the winners like to put on a bad accent and cosplay as the losers. Yet despite heavily negative reviews, Reagan remained in theaters for nearly two months and earned a solid $30 million at the box office, playing to an underserved audience and tapping into some of the cultural backlash that powered Donald Trump’s reelection. The film’s success portends a strange new era for the presidential biopic, one in which hokey hagiography might supplant any semblance of character depth—reinforcing what audiences already want to hear about politicians they already admire.

In retrospect, Lincoln, with its innate faith in the power of government to do good, was as much a product of the “Obamacore” era—that surge of positivity and optimism that flooded pop culture beginning in the early 2010s—as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash Hamilton. But the arrival of the Trump era threw cold water on those feel-good vibes, and since Lincoln, presidential biopics have largely failed to connect with crowds. Two lightweight depictions of Barack Obama’s young adulthood arrived in 2016, but neither reckoned with his complicated presidency. In 2017, Rob Reiner delivered the ambivalent and uneven LBJ, which sank at the box office and made little impression on audiences. Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese developed and seemingly abandoned a Teddy Roosevelt biopic.

In development for more than a decade, Reagan emerges from a more plainly partisan perspective. Its producer, Mark Joseph, once called The Reagans, the 2003 TV movie starring James Brolin, “insulting” to the former president. Though Reagan director Sean McNamara expressed hope that his film would unite people across political lines, its source material, The Crusader, is a book by Paul Kengor, a conservative who has written eight books about Reagan and who presently works at a right-wing think tank. And its star, Dennis Quaid, is among Hollywood’s most prominent Trump supporters. In July, Quaid appeared on Fox News live from the Republican National Convention, proclaiming that Reagan would help Americans born after 1985 “get a glimpse of what this country was.”     

The notable presidential biopics of the past were prestige pictures that at least tried to appeal to a wide swath of the moviegoing public, across political spectrums. Even 2008’s W., Stone’s spiritual sequel to Nixon—inferior by far, and disappointingly conventional in its biographical beats—is hardly the liberal excoriation many viewers might have expected from the director; it was even criticized for going too easy on George W. Bush. Released during the waning months of his presidency, when Bush-bashing was low-hanging fruit for audiences, the film portrays the 43rd president as a lovable screwup with crippling daddy issues. As Timothy Noah argued in Slate at the time, “W. is the rare Oliver Stone film that had to tone down the historical record because the truth was too lurid.”

Instead, new entries like Reagan and Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, the more nuanced film, reflect the market demands of a more fragmented moviegoing public—and reality. Rarely do two movies about the same era of American history have so little audience overlap. Set from 1973 to 1986, The Apprentice portrays Trump (Sebastian Stan) as a young sociopath-in-training, dramatizing his rise to business mogul and his relationship with mentor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a Svengali of capitalist chicanery molding a monster in his own image. In the most shocking scenes, the film depicts Trump brutally raping his wife, Ivana, and undergoing liposuction surgery. (Ivana accused Trump of rape in a 1990 divorce deposition, then recanted the allegation decades later. Trump’s campaign has called the movie a “malicious defamation.”) The film, in other words, gives confirmation—and a sleazily gripping origin story—to those who already believe Trump is a malevolent con man and irredeemable misogynist. It knows what its viewers want.

[Read: How the GOP went from Reagan to Trump]

So, seemingly, does Reagan, which shows its protagonist primarily as the Great Communicator who tore down that wall. But as the Reagan biographer Max Boot recently wrote, “the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union were primarily the work of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—two consequences of his radically reformist policies … Reagan did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Reagan resists such nuance, hewing instead to a predictable hero’s narrative. Soviet leaders are swathed in visual clichés: grotesque men sipping vodka in cigar-filled rooms.

Meanwhile, the film renders Reagan’s domestic critics without sophistication or dignity. As Matthew Dallek chronicles in his book The Right Moment, Reagan spent much of his 1966 campaign to become California’s governor sensationalizing and condemning marches protesting the Vietnam War at UC Berkeley, and later called for a “bloodbath” against the campus left. In the film, we see Reagan, as the state’s governor, calling in the National Guard to crack down on Berkeley protesters, but we never learn what these students are protesting; Vietnam is scarcely referenced. (A nastier incident, in which Reagan-sent cops in riot gear opened fire on student protesters and killed one, goes unmentioned.)

A less slanted film might have interrogated the conflict between Reagan’s anti-totalitarian Cold War rhetoric and his crackdown on demonstrators at home. It might also have reckoned with the president’s devastating failure to confront the AIDS epidemic, a fact the movie only fleetingly references, via a few shots of ACT UP demonstrators slotted into a generic montage of Reagan critics set to Genesis’s “Land of Confusion.” But Reagan remains tethered to the great-man theory of history, in which Reagan single-handedly ended the Cold War, preserved America’s standing in the world, and beat back lefty Communist sympathizers. A match-cut transition, from a shot of newly retired Reagan swinging an axe at his ranch to young “wallpeckers” taking axes to the Berlin Wall in 1989, literalizes the message for grade-school viewers: The Gipper brought down the wall himself. It’s not that the movie is too kind to Reagan—but by flattening him in this way, it robs him of the conflicts and contradictions that made him a figure worth thinking about today.

In this way, too, Reagan forms a curious contrast to Nixon. A central message of Stone’s film is that even if Nixon had wanted to end the Vietnam War, he was powerless to act against the desires of the deep state (or “the beast,” as Hopkins’s Nixon calls it). In a defining scene, a young anti-war demonstrator confronts the president. “You can’t stop it, can you?” she realizes. “Because it’s not you. It’s the system. The system won’t let you stop it.” Nixon is stunned into stammering disbelief.

Indeed, Stone’s trilogy of films about U.S. presidents (JFK, Nixon, and W.) all reflect some paranoia about the dark forces of state power. (The unabashedly conspiratorial JFK suggests that Kennedy was eliminated by the CIA and/or the military-industrial complex because he didn’t fall in line with their covert objectives.) They are stories of ambitious leaders whose presidencies were hijacked or truncated by forces beyond their comprehension—movies whose villains are shadowy figures operating within the bowels of the U.S. government. It’s not just Stone’s view of state power that makes his films more interesting; it’s that he takes into account forces larger than one man, regardless of that man’s own accomplishments.   

Reagan’s vision of the institution is more facile. Its hero is endowed with near-mythical power to end wars and solve domestic woes; its villains are as clearly labeled as a map of the Kremlin. The film’s simplistic pandering vaporizes complexity and undercuts the cinematic aims of a presidential biopic. It’s a profitable film because it instead adheres to the market incentives of modern cable news: Tell viewers what they want to hear, and give them a clear and present enemy.     

In his 2011 book, The Reactionary Mind, the political theorist Corey Robin argues that the end of the Cold War had proven unkind to the conservative movement by depriving it of a distinct enemy. For today’s GOP, a good adversary is hard to find—in the past few years, its leaders have grasped around haphazardly in search of one: trans people, Haitian immigrants, childless women. (And, as always, Hillary Clinton.) In Reagan, though, the world is much simpler: There’s an evil empire 5,000 miles away, and a California cowboy is the only man who can beat it. It’s a flat narrative fit for one of his old B movies.

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This essay contains spoilers.

The new movie Conclave is a faithful adaptation of Robert Harris’s 2016 novel—and an absurd portrait of the Catholic Church. A thriller about the politicking that occurs when cardinals gather to elect a new pope, it depicts a clash between racist conservatives and supposedly insightful liberals who talk like a cross between an HR manual and a greeting card. Although the film’s hero describes “certainty” as the enemy, the movie has no doubt about who the bad guys are. Not even a subtle, intelligent performance from Ralph Fiennes can salvage the film’s simplistic morality.

No one expects a movie to be a doctrinal treatise, but Conclave’s blithe approach to Catholic teaching spoils the drama. The best art about the Catholic Church doesn’t necessarily endorse its tenets, but it at least takes them seriously. Novels such as Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour found tragic and comic potential in the Church’s most difficult and otherworldly teachings. They asked questions like, What if marriage really is indissoluble, and a character resolves to act accordingly? The answers were never easy, but they were always interesting. Conclave is incapable of tapping the dramatic potential of Catholic dogma, for the simple reason that the dogma it believes in is not Catholic but progressive.

Early on, we are introduced to Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a wily Italian traditionalist who tries to persuade another cardinal to vote for him in order to prevent an African from getting elected. Tedesco, who longs for the days of the Latin Mass, naturally believes that only a European should be pope. In Conclave, racism and ritualism go together like bread and wine. In the real world, however, traditionalist Catholics have no greater friend in the highest reaches of the Church than Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah.

[Read: Martin Scorsese’s radical act of turning theology into art]

Standing opposite Tedesco are the liberals, led by Cardinal Lawrence (Fiennes). Lawrence opens the conclave with a homily that declares, “Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.” This claim, treated as a searing insight, does nothing to diminish the certainty of his fellow progressives. While claiming to favor “tolerating other views within our own Church,” they resolve to do everything in their power to stop Tedesco.

In one scene, Lawrence uses the sacrament of confession to extract information from a nun about a rival cardinal who had sex with her years before. Employing the sacrament for one’s own purposes, as Lawrence does, is a grave act of spiritual abuse. So is what he does next: Lawrence confronts the offending cardinal with what he has learned—thus breaking the confessional seal.

All of this could make for good drama, in a film that regarded the Catholic sacraments as capable of commanding belief. If Lawrence were genuinely Catholic, he would be racked by his conscience as he weighed his sacramental transgression against the noble aim of preventing an unworthy man from becoming pope. Instead, he intones something about his respect for the sacrament he has just violated, and moves on.

A similar flippancy emerges at the end of the film, when the newly elected Pope Innocent is revealed to be intersex. Catholic sacramental theology holds—for reasons grounded in scripture and elaborated over the course of centuries—that only a man can be ordained a priest, let alone made pope. A more interesting film might have dramatized the ironies arising from a doctrine that holds that an evil man can ascend to an office from which even the holiest woman is barred. But Conclave treats Catholic theology as mere policy, like the membership rules at Augusta National.

One effect of doctrinal limits is to constrain the powerful. If a rule is understood to have been laid down by Christ, not even a cardinal or a pope can undo it. If Catholic doctrine can change, however, the high and mighty have more freedom to remake the faith as they please—a fact that Conclave celebrates.

The film holds up Lawrence as an exemplary “manager,” as the late pope described him. Lawrence employs his procedural acumen both to enforce the rules of the conclave and to set them aside—whichever ensures the outcome he deems best. He blatantly manipulates the voting process. He digs up damaging information on leading candidates, breaking into the sealed chambers of the dead pope and violating the conclave’s ban on outside information by publicizing a dossier that swings the election. For these acts of interference, liberals praise him. “That firm hand of yours has its admirers,” a like-minded cardinal says.

If Lawrence is the image of a responsible managerial elite, his ideological opposite, Tedesco, is the ecclesial version of a conservative populist. He maintains that the Church’s leadership has fallen into lassitude and corruption since Vatican II, and his crude manners and colorful speech hint at a working-class background that he is happy to play up. (Harris’s book reports that he comes from a peasant family.)

The film explicitly proposes a parallel between sacred and secular politics, in case anyone missed the point. At one late-night meeting, a cardinal complains, “I feel as if I’m at some American political convention.” The machinations become so elaborate that another cardinal jokes that he is poised to become “the Richard Nixon of popes.” For Conclave, there is no real distinction between Church politics and electoral politics, between a Cardinal Tedesco and a Donald Trump. It’s all a power game in which anything is justified for the right cause.

[Read: The Exorcist and the lost art of Catholic storytelling]

If the movie has a saving grace, it is the way the camera admiringly lingers on the visible expressions of Catholic belief—the cassocks and tassels, the red silk and white smoke. Perhaps the most striking scene is the one in which Lawrence is carefully vested in his holy livery. These images will communicate the Church’s charisma to some viewers, despite the film’s failure to reckon with the claims that underlie the visuals.

Nonetheless, in its crude view of the Church and its lack of genuine drama, Conclave is even worse than the last great ecclesial potboiler, The Da Vinci Code. That earlier movie was pulpier, including a brief flash of a ritual sex scene. And Tom Hanks’s performance, which is probably less remembered than his hairdo, does not compare to that of Fiennes. But The Da Vinci Code was in a certain way the more intelligent film. Despite its hysterical suggestion that the Catholic Church is a grand conspiracy of albino monks and Hispanic prelates devoted to covering up the fact that Jesus fathered a child, it at least recognized that sacramental ideas, including the all-male priesthood, are central to Catholic belief. Conclave fails because it takes itself—and not its subject—seriously.

Over the past several years, courageous Americans have risked their careers and perhaps even their liberty in an effort to stop Donald Trump’s return to power. Our collective failure to avoid that result now gives Trump an opportunity to exact revenge on them. President Joe Biden, in the remaining two months of his term in office, can and must prevent this by using one of the most powerful tools available to the president: the pardon power.

The risk of retribution is very real. One hallmark of Trump’s recently completed campaign was his regular calls for vengeance against his enemies. Over the past few months, he has said, for example, that Liz Cheney was a traitor. He’s also said that she is a “war hawk.” “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” he said. Likewise, Trump has floated the idea of executing General Mark Milley, calling him treasonous. Meanwhile, Trump has identified his political opponents and the press as “enemies of the people” and has threatened his perceived enemies with prosecution or punishment more than 100 times. There can be little doubt that Trump has an enemies list, and the people on it are in danger—most likely legal, though I shudder to think of other possibilities.

Biden has the unfettered power to issue pardons, and he should use it liberally. He should offer pardons, in addition to Cheney and Milley, to all of Trump’s most prominent opponents: Republican critics, such as Adam Kinzinger, who put country before party to tell the truth about January 6; their Democratic colleagues from the House special committee; military leaders such as Jim Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and William McRaven; witnesses to Trump’s conduct who worked for him and have since condemned him, including Miles Taylor, Olivia Troye, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, and Sarah Matthews; political opponents such as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff; and others who have been vocal in their negative views, such as George Conway and Bill Kristol.  

[Mark Leibovich: In praise of clarity]

The power to pardon is grounded in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, which gives a nearly unlimited power to the president. It says the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” That’s it. A president’s authority to pardon is pretty much without limitation as to reason, subject, scope, or timing.  

Historically, for example, Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon a “full, free, and absolute pardon” for any offense that he “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.” If Biden were willing, he could issue a set of pardons similar in scope and form to Trump’s critics, and they would be enforced by the courts as a protection against retaliation.

There are, naturally, reasons to be skeptical of this approach. First, one might argue that pardons are unnecessary. After all, the argument would go, none of the people whom Trump might target have actually done anything wrong. They are innocent of anything except opposing Trump, and the judicial system will protect them.

This argument is almost certainly correct; the likelihood of a jury convicting Liz Cheney of a criminal offense is laughably close to zero. But a verdict of innocence does not negate the harm that can be done. In a narrow, personal sense, Cheney would be exonerated. But along the way she would no doubt suffer—the reputational harm of indictment, the financial harm of having to defend herself, and the psychic harm of having to bear the pressure of an investigation and charges.

In the criminal-justice system, prosecutors and investigators have a cynical but accurate way of describing this: “You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.” By this they mean that even the costs of ultimate victory tend to be very high. Biden owes it to Trump’s most prominent critics to save them from that burden.

More abstractly, the inevitable societal impact of politicized prosecutions will be to deter criticism. Not everyone has the strength of will to forge ahead in the face of potential criminal charges, and Trump’s threats have the implicit purpose of silencing his opposition. Preventing these prosecutions would blunt those threats. The benefit is real, but limited—a retrospective pardon cannot, after all, protect future dissent, but as a symbol it may still have significant value.

A second reason for skepticism involves whether a federal pardon is enough protection. Even a pardon cannot prevent state-based investigations. Nothing is going to stop Trump from pressuring his state-level supporters, such as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, to use their offices for his revenge. And they, quite surely, will be accommodating.

But finding state charges will be much more difficult, if only because most of the putative defendants may never have visited a particular state. More important, even if there is some doubt about the efficaciousness of federal pardons, that is no reason to eschew the step. Make Trump’s abuse of power more difficult in every way you can.

The third and final objection is, to my mind at least, the most substantial and meritorious—that a president pardoning his political allies is illegitimate and a transgression of American political norms.   

Although that is, formally, an accurate description of what Biden would be doing, to me any potential Biden pardons are distinct from what has come before. When Trump pardoned his own political allies, such as Steve Bannon, the move was widely (and rightly) regarded as a significant divergence from the rule of law, because it protected them from criminal prosecutions that involved genuine underlying criminality. By contrast, a Biden pardon would short-circuit bad-faith efforts by Trump to punish his opponents with frivolous claims of wrongdoing.

[Daniel Block: The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning]

Still, pardons from Biden would be another step down the unfortunate road of politicizing the rule of law. It is reasonable to argue that Democrats should forgo that step, that one cannot defend norms of behavior by breaking norms of behavior.

Perhaps that once was true, but no longer. For the past eight years, while Democrats have held their fire and acted responsibly, Trump has destroyed almost every vestige of behavioral limits on his exercises of power. It has become painfully self-evident that Democratic self-restraint is a form of unilateral disarmament that neither persuades Trump to refrain from bad behavior nor wins points among the undecided. It is time—well past time—for responsible Democrats to use every tool in their tool kit.

What cannot be debated is that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris owe a debt not just of gratitude but of loyalty to those who are now in Trump’s investigative sights. They have a moral and ethical obligation to do what they can to protect those who have taken a great risk trying to stop Trump. If that means a further diminution of legal norms, that is unfortunate, but it is not Biden’s fault; the cause is Trump’s odious plans and those who support them.

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

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

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

[Conor Friedersdorf: Treat Trump like a normal president]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump’s decisive victory may proclaim an unpredictable new era for American government and society, but it also reaffirmed an enduring political truth: It is virtually impossible for the incumbent president’s party to hold the White House when Americans are discontented with that president’s performance.

Americans provided Trump with a sweeping victory after a campaign in which he had darkly promised “retribution” against a long list of enemies and offered an agenda centered on mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Trump seems within reach of winning the popular vote, becoming the first Republican to do so since 2004. Republicans, exulting in winning at least three Senate seats as well as the White House, instantly called the magnitude of the victory “a mandate”—and Trump seems sure to treat it as a license to pursue his most aggressive ideas.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her team, recognizing the threat of widespread disillusionment with President Joe Biden, tried to transform the Democratic campaign from a retrospective referendum on the performance of the administration in which she served into a prospective choice about the agenda and style of leadership she and Trump would bring to the next four years. Ultimately, she could not overcome the widespread unhappiness over the country’s current conditions. Biden’s approval rating among voters never exceeded 43 percent in any of the major swing states, according to exit polls. At least 55 percent of voters in each of those states said that they disapproved of Biden’s performance, and Trump typically won four-fifths or more of them.

Overall, despite any expectation to the contrary, the gender gap was not especially large. Harris’s inability to amass a greater advantage among women likely reflected the fact that they were at least as dissatisfied with the economy and Biden’s performance as men were, according to exit polls. Just 44 percent of women in exit polls said they approved of Biden’s performance, and nearly seven in 10 described the economy in negative terms—a view even more emphatic than the one men expressed.

Disapproval of Biden’s record and disaffection over the economy proved a headwind that Harris could not overcome. Exit polls showed that Americans remained concerned about the possible excesses of a second Trump presidency. But in their deep frustration over current conditions, they placed less weight on those worries.

[Read: How Donald Trump won everywhere]

As Doug Sosnik, the top White House political adviser to Bill Clinton, wrote in an email yesterday: “The 2024 election marks the biggest shift to the right in our country since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.” The New York Times calculated that nine in 10 U.S. counties moved at least somewhat toward Trump in this cycle. A striking sign of that change was his dramatic improvement in big urban centers with large populations of Black and/or Latino voters, including the counties encompassing Philadelphia, Detroit, and Las Vegas. But Trump also improved (compared with 2020) in communities dominated by working-class white voters, such as Macomb in Michigan, Luzerne in Pennsylvania, and Kenosha and the small cities around Green Bay in Wisconsin.

Harris maintained the Democratic hold on the prosperous, well-educated inner suburbs around major cities. But in most of them, her party’s margins declined relative to its 2020 results. She slipped just slightly in predominantly white-collar areas such as Montgomery and Delaware Counties outside Philadelphia, and Oakland outside Detroit, and failed to improve on Biden’s deficit in Waukesha, around Milwaukee. The result was that in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Harris’s margins in these big suburbs were closer to Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 than Biden’s in 2020. That wasn’t enough to withstand what I’ve called the “pincer” move of Trump’s concurrent gains in the smaller, mostly white, blue-collar places and the much more diverse urban cores.

The geographic pattern of actual vote tallies for Trump captured the magnitude of the red shift more vividly than the two major surveys that try to measure voters’ behavior for media organizations: the exit polls conducted by Edison Research and the VoteCast survey done by NORC. Neither found any increase from 2020 in the national level of support for Trump among white voters; nor did the exit polls show more than minimal improvement for him among white voters in the Rust Belt states. The exit polls recorded modest improvements for Trump among Black voters, with his gains coming entirely from men, and a big improvement among Latinos. (VoteCast found solid advances for Trump among both Black and Latino voters.) In each survey, Trump made his most dramatic gains with Latino men but scored notable improvements among Latina women as well. Young voters, in both data sets, moved notably toward Trump as well.

The exit polls showed Harris winning women (of all races) by eight percentage points and losing men by 13 points. The VoteCast study similarly showed Harris winning women by seven points and Trump winning men by 10 percentage points. At that level, Harris’s lead with women was much smaller than Biden’s in 2020, and even smaller than Clinton’s advantage in 2016.

The story on the economy was similar. Two-thirds of voters in the national exit polls described the economy as only fair or poor; roughly that many expressed negative views in each of the three former “Blue Wall” states and Arizona, with discontent rising to about seven in 10 in North Carolina and Nevada, and beyond that in Georgia. Solid majorities of those economically discontented voters backed Trump in each state. So did a big majority of the roughly 45 percent of voters who said they were worse off than four years ago.

Harris did win handsomely among those who said they were better off, but they constituted just one in four voters. She also won the narrow backing of those who said their condition was unchanged. But none of that was enough to overcome Trump’s preponderant advantage among those who thought their condition had deteriorated under Biden.

Working-class voters without a college degree—many of them living paycheck to paycheck—were especially down on the economy. More than three-fourths of white voters without a college degree nationwide described the economy in negative terms—as did seven in 10 Latino voters. (An even more telling eight in 10 Latinos did so in the Sun Belt swing state of Nevada.)

The issues that Harris and the Democrats had hoped would offset economic discontent simply did not have enough bite. Two-thirds of voters in the national exit polls said that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, but about three in 10 of those voters supported Trump anyway. More than a quarter of women nationwide who supported legal abortion backed Trump.

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

The muting of the abortion issue was especially dramatic in the former Blue Wall states that ultimately settled Harris’s fate. In 2022, the first election after the Supreme Court rescinded the constitutional right to abortion, Democratic gubernatorial candidates Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania each won about four-fifths of voters who supported legal abortion, while Tony Evers in Wisconsin carried about three-fourths of them. But, in a crucial erosion of that pro-choice support, Harris won only about two-thirds of those voters in Michigan and Wisconsin and about seven in 10 in Pennsylvania. A much smaller share of voters in each state said abortion should be illegal most of the time, but Trump won about nine in 10 of those.

Harris did not entirely fail at raising alarms about Trump. In the national exit polls, 54 percent of voters agreed that Trump was “too extreme.” But about one in nine voters who viewed Trump as too extreme voted for him anyway—a striking measure of their willingness to risk an uncertain future over an unacceptable present. Likewise, in the VoteCast survey, 55 percent of voters said they were very or somewhat concerned that Trump would steer the U.S. in a more authoritarian direction; yet nearly one in six of those voters supported him.

“I think that Trump has been helped by this sense that things are careening out of control at home and abroad, and it makes people more willing to contemplate the smack of authority,” William Galston, a senior fellow at the center-left Brookings Institution, told me.

Jackie Payne, the founder and executive director of Galvanize Action, which studies moderate white women, told me that according to her research, many female voters who believed Trump would improve their economic situation simply brushed aside rhetoric and proposals from him that they found troubling. “They were choosing to believe a vision of him that was aligned with what they wanted to get out of him—a strong economy—and they were absolutely discounting anything that felt extreme as disinformation or hyperbole, even if he said he would do it,” she said.

Voters around the world have reached similar judgments this year in the aftermath of the inflation that followed the coronavirus pandemic: As a Financial Times analyst pointed out this week, incumbent parties have lost ground, or lost power altogether, in all 10 major democracies that held elections in 2024. The priority voters gave to current economic conditions in their decision making followed a long U.S. tradition too. Incumbent presidents with low public-approval ratings almost never win reelection—as Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1992, and Trump himself in 2020 demonstrated. The similar but less discussed scenario is the difficulty facing a party seeking to hold the White House even when its unpopular president isn’t running. That applied when Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008 were off the ballot; their party lost the race to replace them in each case. Biden now joins that dour procession.

But the most apt precedent for this election may be 1980. Laboring under widespread discontent, including over a raging bout of inflation, Carter tried to use his campaign to shift attention to the risks he said his right-wing rival, Ronald Reagan, represented, with some success: Doubts about Reagan did keep Carter close in the polls. But in the campaign’s final days, voters decided that continuity with Carter represented a greater risk than change with Reagan—and flocked to the challenger in crushing numbers.

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

Voters were willing to take an even greater leap this time. Trump made almost no accommodation for voters uneasy about him. Instead, he intensified his false accusations, inflammatory racist rhetoric, and profane personal attacks. Trump has surrounded himself with extreme figures who promise a revolution in government and society.

His senior immigration advisers have promoted plans for a militarized mass-deportation operation, complete with internment camps, and the possible removal of U.S.-citizen children of undocumented adults. His party is likely to control both chambers of Congress—and in any case, the president has broad unilateral authority to set immigration policy, as well as to impose the large tariffs Trump has pledged. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has already rendered him virtually immune to criminal prosecution for any action he takes as president. Trump is returning to the White House unbound.

Reagan’s victory in 1980 solidified a realignment in American politics that began under his Republican predecessor, Richard Nixon. Reagan cemented working-class white voters into the conservative movement’s electoral coalition—both white southern evangelical Christians and northern industrial workers in places such as Michigan’s Macomb County—who became lastingly known as “Reagan Democrats.” Those voters remain a cornerstone GOP constituency: Even four-plus decades later, they were the two groups that supported Trump in the largest numbers on Tuesday.

Many Republicans believe that Trump now has the chance to secure an equally significant shift in the party allegiance of Black men and Latino voters of both genders, who voted for him in historic numbers this week. That opportunity surely exists. But realizing it in a lasting way will require Trump and the Republican Party to maintain the support of millions of voters of color and justify their faith in him on the economy over any concern about policies such as mass deportation and more aggressive law enforcement.

Now those communities, along with all of the other Americans disappointed in Biden over the past four years, will learn whether Trump can deliver the economic benefits he promised without plunging the country into deeper acrimony.

In the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump did the following things: falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating their neighbors’ pets; invited a comedian onstage at a rally to call Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”; said he wouldn’t mind if someone shot the reporters who cover his rallies; fantasized about former Representative Liz Cheney having guns “trained on her face”; called America a “garbage can for the world”; and pretended to fellate a microphone in public. Then, on Tuesday night, he decisively won the presidential election, sweeping every battleground state in the country.

That Trump routinely gets away with saying things that would have ended any other politician’s career is hardly a novel observation. People have been making this point since he launched his first campaign nine years ago. Theories abound to explain the phenomenon, and we’ll get to those in a moment. But, first, do me a favor and reread that paragraph above. Clock your reflexive reaction. Do you find yourself indifferently skimming, or notice that your attention has begun to drift? Do you roll your eyes at what looks like yet another scoldy catalog of Trump’s alleged misdeeds, or mentally quibble with my characterizations? (He was obviously joking about Cheney.) Perhaps you’re thinking that you missed one of these moments—or maybe you’re not quite sure. Hasn’t he said something about shooting reporters before? Who can remember—all of this stuff blends together.

What you’re experiencing is the product of Trump’s clearest political accomplishment, and perhaps his most enduring legacy: In his near decade as America’s main character, he has thoroughly desensitized voters to behavior that, in another era, they would have deemed disqualifying in a president. The national bar for outrage keeps rising; the ability to be shocked has dwindled.

Trump is not the first modern president to contribute to this national numbing effect. Richard Nixon’s abuses of power shattered the idyllic image many Americans had of the presidency, seeding a skepticism that would eventually blossom into generational cynicism. And Bill Clinton’s affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky—complete with the airing of every graphic detail by opponents, and the rush to excuse his indiscretions by allies—helped normalize the idea that presidents don’t need to be moral exemplars.

But when it comes to lowering our collective expectations of presidential behavior, Trump is a singular figure. The lines he has enterprisingly crossed—legal, ethical, constitutional, moral—are too numerous to list. (Plus, chances are, you’d get bored and abandon this article if I tried.) But it seems worth noting here just a few of Trump’s firsts. He is the first president to try to stay in power after losing an election. He is the first president to be impeached twice (for attempting to trade military aid for political favors from the Ukrainian president, and for sending a violent mob to storm the Capitol). He is the first to be convicted of a felony (for crimes connected with hush-money payments to an adult-film star with whom he had an affair), and the first to be found liable for sexual abuse (for assaulting E. Jean Carroll in a department-store dressing room). He demonstrates no contrition for these acts. In fact, he’s always denied all wrongdoing—even as he’s boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing the support of his base.

Trump’s apologists might argue that his success is a symptom, not the cause, of the country’s coarsened character. Alternatively, something about his public persona, forged in the New York tabloids and on reality TV, may make people uniquely tolerant of his sins. After all, the same voters in North Carolina who delivered him the state’s 16 Electoral College votes this week also rejected a Trump-aligned candidate for governor who’d been discovered making vile anti-Semitic and racist comments on a porn site. Trump has also no doubt been aided by Republican politicians who cravenly defend everything he does, blundering Democrats who have struggled to provide a compelling alternative, and a press corps still constrained by its “bias toward coherence.”

In any case, the fact remains that Trump’s brazenness damages the political culture. Every time he crosses a new line, he makes it that much easier for the next guy to do so. Nearly a decade into the Trump era, too many Americans have internalized the idea that expecting our political leaders to be good people is quaint and foolish. But this savvier-than-thou attitude only empowers Trump and his mimics to act with impunity.

Is it possible to resensitize an electorate to scandal and cruelty? I don’t know. Maybe we start by trying to remember how we felt when all of this was still new.

In recent weeks, Gen Z voters have been sharing videos of themselves on TikTok listening—for what they say is the first time—to Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape. I found watching these videos, and reading some of the young people’s interviews in The Washington Post, at once heartbreaking and hopeful. Brigid Quinn, a 15-year-old in Georgia who had never actually heard the once and future president say “grab them by the pussy,” told the paper she “didn’t understand how people thought this was normal.” Kate Sullivan, a 21-year-old student in Ohio, was similarly shocked when she heard it for the first time. “I just recently got into politics,” she said. “The fact that people knew about this, and he still won, is pretty wild to me.”

A less cynical age may dawn again.

This is an election about elections.

One of the two leading candidates in the race, Donald Trump, has not only demonstrated a long-running skepticism of rule of law; he is also the only president in American history to attempt to remain in office after losing an election. This election is a test: Can the American public resoundingly reject a man who has not merely been a chaotic extremist but has also attacked the American system of republican government itself?

Less than four years ago, this question would have seemed preposterous—not because Trump’s antidemocratic impulses were any secret, but because they seemed to have ended his career. Trump summoned supporters to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, the day that Congress was set to certify the election’s results. Then he instigated an assault on the Capitol, during which insurrectionists waged hand-to-hand combat against law-enforcement officers and sacked the seat of American democracy. They hunted for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and talked of hanging Vice President Mike Pence. Trump sat by for hours, watching the chaos on television and refusing to intervene.

As the nation learned in the days and weeks after, the violence was only the climax of a long-running effort to steal the election. Even though Trump’s advisers understood that he had lost the election, he attempted a paperwork coup, pressuring state election officials to “find” votes and conjuring fake slates of electors to submit to Congress.

[David A. Graham: Trump isn’t merely unhinged]

By January 7, it seemed like it was all over for Trump. Even Senator Mitch McConnell, one of the canniest operators in American politics, thought so. “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” he told a reporter. Polls backed that up: Americans were intensely repulsed by the riot, and they blamed Trump. He was banished from social-media platforms and, it appeared, public life.

I warned on January 7 that the horror of the previous day would be whitewashed, but I had no idea how successful the effort would be. The road to impunity began with McConnell and his House counterpart, Kevin McCarthy, who had also fiercely criticized Trump. McCarthy traveled to Mar-a-Lago to make amends. McConnell, hoping that voters would do the work of banishing Trump without him having to take any personal risks, flinched from an impeachment conviction that could have barred Trump from running. For other Republicans, espousing election denial became a litmus test.

President Joe Biden’s new attorney general, Merrick Garland, was determined not to appear too political, and the Justice Department was painfully slow to bring charges against Trump in connection with his election subversion; to this day, he has not been tried, and if he wins the election, he probably never will be.

[David A. Graham: The paperwork coup]

Trump exploited all of these failures to plot his comeback. Richard Nixon was forced to resign for offenses that paled in comparison with Trump’s. Even so, as Elizabeth Drew wrote in The Atlantic, Nixon devised a secret yearslong plan to restore himself to semi-respectability. Trump, by contrast, has shown no remorse, has not gone away, and stands a good chance of becoming president once again. He’s done so while embracing January 6. What he once insisted was a false flag by leftist agitators he now celebrates as patriotic and justified.

So now the matter is before voters, every other safeguard having failed. Trump has abandoned none of his election denial. He has refused to acknowledge that Biden is the rightful president, despite Biden having won a resounding victory. Trump has discredited Americans’ faith in their own democracy, with consequences that will last for generations. He’s spent the past few weeks seeding doubt about another American election, even though he might win it.

Democracy is a tough idea to get one’s arms around. It’s abstract, and until recently, it felt so deeply embedded in life in this country that, despite its failures, it could be treated as a given. When voters decide whom to support, they understandably sometimes focus on the more urgent questions directly in front of them—matters such as their standard of living, their rights, and their social structures. But the essence of the American system is not which path we take on these issues, but the procedures by which we decide. That fundamental idea is being put to the test today.

If Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. really do team up to “make America healthy again” from the White House, the implications would be surprisingly trippy. On Sunday, at his rally in Madison Square Garden, Trump said he would let Kennedy “go wild” on health, food, and medicine if he wins the presidential election. The next day, Kennedy shared that Trump had promised him control of several agencies, including the CDC, the FDA, the Health and Human Services Department, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “and a few others.”

Kennedy, an anti-vaccine advocate, has not explained how such a position—which does not currently exist within the U.S. government—might be created. But a recent post on X offers some clues about what his leadership might entail. He outlined a number of products and interventions he wants released from federal “suppression,” including raw milk, ivermectin, and sunshine. The very first item on his list was psychedelics.

Since the 1960s and ’70s, when mushrooms and LSD were considered inseparable from the anti-war movement and hippie culture, psychedelic drugs have been culturally associated with the American left. But in this election cycle, many prominent people who’ve expressed support for or have personally used psychedelics, such as Kennedy and Elon Musk, have rallied behind Trump, the hard-right candidate. Over the past few years, libertarians, wellness influencers, research scientists, MAGA die-hards, and titans of corporate tech alike have endorsed hallucinogenic drugs. It’s clear that modern psychedelic users and advocates, as a group, have no consistent political slant. Instead, they may reveal the polarization that already plagues us.

Although the use of psychedelics long predates American politics, about half a century ago, the substances began to take on a distinctly political valence in the United States. Psychedelic advocates championed the idea that these drugs would end wars and promote left-wing ideals. In 1966, the poet Allen Ginsberg told a roomful of ministers that if everyone tried LSD, “we will all have seen some ray of glory or vastness beyond our conditioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will unite us into a peaceful community.” The Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary wrote in 1968 that “turning on people to LSD is the precise and only way to keep war from blowing up the whole system.”

Echoes of that philosophy still resound today, in speculations that wider psychedelic use would encourage personal and political action on climate change, or that MDMA will help eradicate all trauma by 2070. But now you’re just as likely to encounter psychedelic use in clinical trials as a mental-health treatment, as a tool for spiritual exploration, or in more individualistic applications such as optimizing and enhancing productivity. In contemporary U.S. society, there is no longer one psychedelic culture. “If the only thing you knew about someone is that they’re pro-psychedelics, that wouldn’t necessarily be an obvious indication of their political affiliation,” Aidan Seale-Feldman, a medical anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame who studies the current psychedelic renaissance, told me. “It is surreal that in this era of so much division and difference in the U.S. that psychedelics are something that people would actually have in common.”

[Read: When does a high become a trip?]

An affinity for psychedelics may be bipartisan these days, but when it comes to current advocacy, “it seems like those on the right promote psychedelics more than the left,” Jules Evans, a philosopher who directs the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, told me. Before the FDA rejected MDMA-assisted therapy as a treatment for PTSD this summer, members of Psymposia, a nonprofit that describes itself as offering “leftist perspectives on drugs,” raised concerns about the approval. Rick Perry, the conservative governor of Texas, said of psychedelic legalization last year that “at the federal level, this is more supported by the Republicans.”

Last week, the German psychedelic investor Christian Angermayer wrote on X that many attendees at a recent psychedelics event in San Francisco were pro-Trump, “some of them very openly.” In recent years, Silicon Valley has moved both to the right and toward psychedelics. Musk, Trump’s largest donor, has said that he has a ketamine prescription for depression, and has been reported to take other psychedelics. Rebekah Mercer, a benefactor of Breitbart News and of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, gave $1 million to MDMA research. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, has invested millions in companies researching psilocybin and other psychedelics; Thiel is also the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance’s mentor, and was Vance’s largest donor during his 2022 senate race.

Kennedy hasn’t said whether he’s used hallucinogenic drugs, but he has talked about how ayahuasca helped his son process his grief over his mother’s death. Before he dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Trump, Kennedy had “more psychonauts around him than any presidential candidate in American history,” Evans said. Kennedy’s vice-presidential pick, Nicole Shanahan, was once married to the psychedelic enthusiast and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, from whom she separated after taking ketamine and having sex with Musk. (Shanahan denies the affair.) Kennedy’s former senior adviser Charles Eisenstein has said that psychedelics are necessary to “get us out of the Matrix.”

Groups with varying political or cultural motives have long dabbled with psychedelics. The CIA wanted to use LSD as a truth serum during enemy interrogations, or as a brainwashing tool, or as a weapon on the battlefield to incapacitate soldiers. President Richard Nixon, who signed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, which prohibited many psychedelics, was close friends with Claire Booth Luce, a Republican Congress member and staunch advocate for psychedelic therapy. (Once, while she was tripping on LSD, Nixon called her for advice about his upcoming debate with John F. Kennedy. She had to call him back later.) But on the right, such views were mostly fringe. “If Richard Nixon could be alive today and see the Republican governor of Texas advocating for psychedelics, it would completely blow his mind,” Benjamin Breen, a historian at UC Santa Cruz and the author of Tripping on Utopia, told me.

Even five years ago, psychedelics might have been accurately described as a horseshoe issue, picking up people on both extremes of the political spectrum. But today, the drugs are more like a magnet, attracting Americans indiscriminately. Thanks to years of positive coverage in both traditional media and extreme outlets such as Breitbart, “psychedelics did go mainstream in the U.S.,” says Nicolas Langlitz, an anthropologist at the New School and the author of Neuropsychedelia. The number of young adults using mushrooms has nearly doubled over the past three years, and use of other psychedelics is increasing too. “The mainstreaming of psychedelics perhaps ironically signals the end of the psychedelic community,” Ido Hartogsohn, an assistant professor of science and technology studies at Bar-Ilan University and the author of American Trip, told me.

One of the paradoxes of psychedelics is how they can sometimes amplify ideas people already hold or the values of the communities they’re immersed in, but at other times (such as during therapy) they can provide an opportunity for radical change. Leary thought this was the influence of “set and setting”—that a person’s mindset and environment can affect whether a psychedelic experience ends up hardening or cracking open a person’s worldview. Hartogsohn has argued that the social and cultural context in which the psychedelic experience happens matters too. And right now, the American cultural context is hyperpolarized. That might help explain why, as Evans wrote in March, “psychedelics don’t seem to dissolve the arguments of the culture wars of the last few years. They amplify them.”

This year, social-media users have circulated AI-generated videos of Trump and Musk renouncing their wealth and power after an ayahuasca ceremony, and choosing to instead devote their lives to those less fortunate. But as much as Americans yearn to reduce the country’s political polarization, the idea that psychedelics will automatically do so is a fantasy. “People may be taking the same drugs, but they are imagining very different futures,” Evans said. Psychedelic enthusiasts have long hoped that widespread acceptance of the drugs would usher in utopia. Instead, it may actually reveal how starkly American visions of utopia diverge.

What happens when the owner of one of the most important news organizations in the country decides that the journalists are the problem? That’s the question I keep asking myself in response to Jeff Bezos’s op-ed explaining his decision to have his newspaper, The Washington Post, stop making presidential endorsements just days before it was reportedly set to formally back Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bezos argued that the press needs to accept reality about its unpopularity, and implied that journalists are to blame for our sinking reputation. He didn’t even acknowledge the concerted, multiyear campaign—led most recently by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel—to convince Americans that the free press is, to borrow a phrase, the “enemy of the people.” Bezos writes, “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased … It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”

Not once did Bezos even try to explain why it is that “most people believe the media is biased.”

The decision to get out of the presidential-endorsement game itself is not problematic to me. In fact, I’ve always felt sorry for any working journalist who has to cover a candidate’s campaign the day after its opinion page comes out against that candidate. As NBC’s political director, I had to deal with analogous situations over the years, when campaigns refused to grant interviews to or even interact with NBC journalists because they didn’t like an opinion that was aired on MSNBC’s more ideological or partisan programs. For reporters who are simply trying to do their job—covering a campaign, reporting what’s happening, and writing the most factually accurate account of the day that they can confirm by deadline—it’s not a comfortable position to be in.

[Ellen Cushing: Don’t cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime.]

For years, I pushed NBC to invest in a conservative talk-show lineup on CNBC. I wanted to be able to say: We have a red cable channel at night and a blue cable channel at night, but here at NBC, we are stuck covering politics as it is, not as we wish it was. Covering politics as it is continues to be my mantra. Those who want to push their own politics should leave reporting and become activists; there are plenty of places where they can do that.

The real problem with what Bezos did was not the decision he made, but its timing and execution—rolled out on the eve of an election with little explanation. And then, when he did publish an explanation, he somehow made things worse. There are many legitimate criticisms of contemporary journalism, but Bezos didn’t level any of them. Instead, he wrote that media outlets suffer from a “lack of credibility” because they “talk only to a certain elite.” He betrayed no awareness that he was parroting a right-wing talking point, revealing his ignorance of the 50-year campaign to delegitimize the mainstream press—which arguably began when conservative supporters of President Richard Nixon vowed revenge for the media’s exposure of the Watergate crimes.

What Bezos failed to acknowledge is that a legion of right-wing critics—most notably the longtime Fox News CEO, Roger Ailes—spent decades attacking media outlets, repeating the charge that they are irredeemably biased. For Ailes and others, it proved a lucrative approach—when you hear something over and over, you tend to believe it. Trump and his team have used the same strategy, building their appeal by attacking the press. Social-media algorithms have only made this repetitive, robotic attack on the press worse.

But instead of defending his reporters against such attacks, Bezos decided to blame the victim in his extremely defensive op-ed. He is right to note that “complaining is not a strategy.” But neither is surrender. Six years ago, I argued in The Atlantic that media outlets had made a mistake by failing to respond to their critics. Many journalists feared that fighting back against bad-faith attacks on our work would make us look partisan. So instead, we chose not to engage when partisan actors at Fox News or campaign operatives used the charge of media bias against working journalists. And I wrote that this needed to change.

I thought that if journalists defended their work, at a minimum, the owners of media institutions would have our back. Boy, was that naive. It turns out that Bezos himself has fallen victim to the campaign to convince the world that all media should be assumed to be biased politically unless proved otherwise. His op-ed must have felt like a gut punch to reporters at the Post. Only in its final lines did he say that the journalists he employs deserve to be believed.

To Bezos’s credit, he has at least put his name on an op-ed and attempted a defense of his actions. The leaders of the publicly traded companies that happen to own major news organizations have not had the guts to explain publicly—either to the employees they’ve laid off or the ones they’ve kept—why they’ve decided to either “Trump-proof” their companies or to shrink their commitment to the news-and-information business.

And if you haven’t been paying attention to the accelerating contraction of major news organizations, just wait until the first quarter of the coming year, when many publicly traded companies may decide that news divisions aren’t worth the headaches they cause their CEOs. These companies have plenty of cash to help sustain their news divisions while they find their footing in the new media landscape. The fact they are choosing not to do so says a lot.

Part of me understands the logic of much of corporate America. The idea that Trump could use the power of the government to punish companies for journalism he dislikes is not hypothetical. Amazon alleges that he did this once already—interfering with the award of a $10 billion defense contract—because the Post’s tough reporting made the president see Bezos as his “political enemy.” Executives have a fiduciary responsibility to protect their shareholders’ investment. If that means accepting the terms of coercion by Trump, apparently, so be it.

Bezos could have made the case that The Washington Post is not a partisan institution, but instead, he argued that journalists have to accept the perception of media bias as our reality. If that’s what we have to do, then perhaps Bezos should either sell the Post or put it in some sort of blind trust. Because he has created the perception—among both the public and his own employees—that his other business interests influenced his decision not to raise Trump’s ire with a Harris endorsement.

Bezos, who owns the space company Blue Origin, is in a rich-guy race with Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, to become the leader in commercial space exploration. That Musk has become Trump’s chief surrogate, and a leading financier of his campaign, must surely have made folks at Blue Origin nervous. Perhaps that’s why Blue Origin executives secured a meeting with Trump before the election. The timing of their meeting—the same day the Post made its no-more-endorsements announcement—only adds to the perception problem facing Bezos. But in the same op-ed in which he told his journalists that they needed to accept perceptions as reality, he insisted that the perception of a quid pro quo was wrong, and that he hadn’t known about the meeting beforehand.

[Robert Greene: Why major newspapers won’t endorse Kamala Harris]

By Bezos’s own logic, how are the journalists at the Post supposed to be able to get out from under the perception that Bezos is hopelessly biased? What about readers? Do they now have to assume that the Post’s politics are Bezos’s politics?

I’m sorry that Bezos has not brought the same energy, focus, and innovation to the Post that he brought to Amazon. The man who built the “everything store” could have developed the Post into an “everything portal,” a model for information sharing. If he wanted to foster ideological diversity, he could have purchased multiple publications, each with its own editorial board. Instead, he apparently decided he wanted a trophy. And now that trophy has gotten in the way of another ambition—becoming a commercial space pioneer.

What chance do journalists have to regain public confidence if the person who owns one of the most important media institutions in the world doesn’t have the first clue about the long-standing campaign to delegitimize the very publication he owns?

Whatever the public perception, the reality is that most journalists, across the country, show up at work each day determined to be fair, honest, and direct. That’s what their readers expect of one another, and they should expect the same of the people who report the news they consume.

If only Jeff Bezos understood that.