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

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

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

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

Which brings me to Gabbard and Hegseth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard?

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

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

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

Related:

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

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

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Evening Read

Justin Chung for The Atlantic

How Jimmy O. Yang Became a Main Character

By Shirley Li

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

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

Read the full article.

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Photographs by Justin Chung

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

It was a small guest role, but he saw it as an opportunity. During his first day on set, although he had only two lines, he asked Mike Judge, one of the show’s creators, whether his character should speak with a Mandarin accent or a Cantonese one. Judge was stumped. “I just said, ‘Oh, well, which one’s more natural to you?’ ” Judge told me. Yang, who’d grown up in Hong Kong, worried that a Cantonese accent was too generic; American viewers might recognize it from Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan movies. Because Mandarin is more standard for official and professional contexts, it can sound more formal, and Yang thought this made sense for an ambitious immigrant like Jian-Yang. Judge told me that he now doesn’t remember which accent Yang chose; “I was just glad he was paying that much attention,” he said.

The show’s writers expanded Yang’s role, and he eventually became a series regular, reshaping his character into a sly villain whose befuddled exterior disguises an inner ruthlessness. To deepen his performance, Yang developed a mantra, which he would say to himself in Mandarin before every take: “Wŏ bù zhī dào,” or “I don’t know.” He drew this mantra from his own experience dealing with his parents. “Even when I know something, and they’re like, ‘Why is Netflix not working?,’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’ ” He grinned at me conspiratorially. “Because I just don’t care to fix it.” That’s how Jian-Yang operates too, Yang said: “I think Jian-Yang knows; he just doesn’t really give a shit.”

And yet, for many viewers, none of this character work mattered. As Silicon Valley grew in popularity, Jian-Yang became the subject of scorn for some Asian viewers and critics, who called out the show’s writers for peddling a caricature of an Asian immigrant with heavily accented, error-prone English. In 2017, a Wired review called him an example of “toxic Asian stereotypes.”

Yang found these reactions exhausting. “It’s like, wow, this is such a big deal for me, and I’m becoming, back in those days, one of the few Asians on TV,” he told me. “But you’re all going to hate on me?” He felt a familiar anguish. The only roles offered to him were goofy sidekicks and background parts, but even when he tried to make characters like Jian-Yang as rounded and complicated as possible, he felt he couldn’t win. “I didn’t understand the beef against Asian accents,” he said. He gets why Asian Americans are sensitive to such portrayals, given Hollywood’s long history of stereotyping, but some of the criticism, he said, felt “a little overblown and a little dumb.” “There’s a constant foreigner bit,” he explained, referring to the industry’s tendency to exoticize Asian characters. “But I was a foreigner.”

Despite the controversy around the character, Jian-Yang ultimately launched Yang’s career. In 2018, the year before Silicon Valley ended its run, he appeared in the romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, a box-office hit now considered a watershed moment for Asian cultural representation. This November, Yang is starring in Hulu’s Interior Chinatown, which feels like a different kind of milestone. Adapted from Charles Yu’s National Book Award–winning novel of the same name, the series tells the story of Willis Wu, a background actor on a generic police procedural set in an unnamed city’s Chinatown. For Yang, the role is more than a chance to be a leading man; it also uncannily mirrors his own life. Willis is stuck in small, clichéd parts, juggling Hollywood’s biases and his own ambition, trying to figure out who exactly he wants to be.

Top: Yang as Bernard in Crazy Rich Asians (2018). Bottom: As Jian-Yang in Silicon Valley (2019). (© Warner Bros. Pictures / Everett Collection; Ali Paige Goldstein / © HBO / Everett Collection)

When Yang first emigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, at age 13, the move left him dazed. He was one of a handful of Chinese kids at his school, and he barely spoke English. “I was like, ‘Guys, you’re speaking way too fast; I can’t,’ ” he told me. After two years, his mother got a job in Shanghai and left the family behind to return to China, where she stayed for the next decade. Without her, Yang became even more adrift.

His father, meanwhile, embraced their new American life. He celebrated their arrival by buying a Pontiac Grand Am. “He thought it was so fucking cool because we always had, like, Honda Accords, in Hong Kong,” Yang told me. “Then he was like”—Yang launched into an impression of his dad, puffing out his chest, his voice going gravelly—“ ‘American six cylinder, baby! This is great!’ ”

Yang worked hard to assimilate to his new surroundings. In Hong Kong, he’d played competitive Ping-Pong and watched kung fu shows on TV. In Los Angeles, he became interested in basketball and football. He fell in love with American television—Bobby Lee on Mad TV, Ken Jeong on Live in Hollywood. He got into hip-hop and tried to build his identity around music, but still felt like he was faking it. “I wasn’t trying to not be Asian,” he said. “I was just trying to be either funnier or catch a football or something so I could fit in.”

Yang began creating what he now calls a “locker” in his mind, where he hid his former self away so he could “make space in my brain to remember American stuff.” He compartmentalized so successfully that he’s had “a weird memory lapse” about his pre-California childhood in Hong Kong.

When Yang arrived at UC San Diego in 2005, the school’s student body was 37 percent Asian, a higher percentage than any other ethnic group. After years of trying to fit in with his Los Angeles classmates, he found it disorienting to suddenly be one among many. “I’m like, I actually want to stand out,” he said. “I don’t want to be grouped in with all of the Asians.” He grew his hair long and started skateboarding and smoking weed, anything to avoid seeming like a stereotype. But he also worried about disappointing his parents, both of whom had practical jobs—his father was a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, and his mother worked in retail—so he pursued an economics degree and interned at a financial-consulting firm.

Then, one summer night before his last year of college, he paid $5 on a whim to do five minutes of stand-up at an open-mic night in North Hollywood. Onstage, he found that joking about his identity somehow alleviated the strain of feeling like an outsider. “They didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t ‘Jimmy’; I was just the next comedian up, this guy who looks Asian,” he said. “They didn’t come to see me, so it’s almost like I have to address, like, ‘Hey, yeah, I know I’m Asian. This is my experience.’ ”

Yang was more than willing to lean into stereotypes. His early stand-up included an impression of an Asian guy trying to hit on a girl: “Let me holler at you! Come back; I’ll do your nails for you,” he’d say in an exaggerated accent. In another bit, he joked about the lack of Asians on The Maury Povich Show. “You never see some dude walking down the steps of shame and being like, ‘Look, Maury, look. I got small eye; he got big eye. That not my baby, Maury.’ ”

Yang had a relaxed, good-natured stage presence. But these bits were, as he put it, “hacky Asian stuff.” He was happy to confirm audiences’ biases if it made them laugh. Around that time, he started using the handle @FunnyAsianDude for his social-media accounts.

To make a living, he worked as a used-car salesman during the day and as a strip-club DJ at night. The latter “combined the salesmanship I learned in the used-car lot with the microphone skills I’d learned doing stand-up,” he told Conan O’Brien years later. Yang turned down an offer for a cushy finance job, against his father’s wishes, in favor of pursuing open-mic nights. He also began auditioning for TV shows and movies, going out for pretty much any casting call that would have him, as he wrote in his 2018 memoir: “Loud Japanese host,” “Weird Korean Jogger guy,” “Video Game addict.”

“You don’t want to be in a box, but at the same time, when you’re first starting, it’s easy to just be like, ‘Hey, I’m an Asian actor. Call me if you need an Asian actor,’ ” he said. Even after landing his guest role on Silicon Valley, he put his earnings into a used car he could drive for Uber, to make a little more cash.

Then, months after he finished filming the first season, in 2014, HBO offered him a contract to be a series regular. When he got the call, he was killing time on the trolley that rolls through the Grove, an outdoor shopping mall in Los Angeles. He rode the trolley back and forth in disbelief, feeling like “the gate’s opened,” like he was finally a “real player now in this industry.” He called his dad, who said, in Yang’s words: “Oh, okay, so you have an employment contract with HBO, which is a company. Good. Thank God.”

In person, Yang is warm and easygoing, with an approachable air. One afternoon this summer, we met for lunch at a Thai restaurant in L.A. As soon as he sat down, a woman leaned over and stopped him mid-sentence. “Are you the famous guy?” she asked.

“Probably not,” he said. She laughed and held up her phone for a selfie anyway.

Yang could have taken offense that the woman seemed to view him as just a vaguely familiar face; he wouldn’t have been the first Asian actor to be confused with another one. (In his 2020 comedy special on Amazon Prime, Good Deal, he joked about fans who approach him, looking anxious. Are you sure that’s not Ken Jeong? he imagines them wondering.) But when I brought up the incident the next time we met, over dim sum in Monterey Park, he laughed, unbothered. He’s accustomed to this particular kind of fame, to being “that guy I’ve seen before.” It’s a long way from where he started.

Since Yang began his career, in the early 2010s, opportunities for Asian actors have exploded—a surge that Yang attributes largely to the success of Crazy Rich Asians. In that movie, a young Chinese American woman goes to Singapore to meet her boyfriend’s family, and is thrown into the high-flying milieu of Asia’s ultra-wealthy. As the playboy Bernard, Yang found a desperate streak beneath his character’s bravado. When the film became a global hit in 2018, it was hailed as proof that Asian-led projects could find commercial success in Hollywood. In 2020, the Korean movie Parasite swept the Oscars; in 2023, Everything Everywhere All at Once, led by Yang’s Crazy Rich Asians co-star Michelle Yeoh, did the same. A study published by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that the percentage of Asian characters with speaking parts in the top-grossing films each year climbed from roughly 3 percent in 2007 to nearly 16 percent in 2022. Asians were the only minority group to see such a big increase in that period.

At the same time, more Asian writers and directors were getting the opportunity to create their own work, which gave rise to a range of Asian characters who are delightfully eccentric but also specific and human. Now there are far fewer roles like the Jian-Yang of early Silicon Valley, and more roles like, say, Steven Yeun and Ali Wong’s deranged, obsessive duo in Beef, the Emmy-winning drama about a road-rage incident that escalates into a murderous feud. As Jeong, who also appeared in Crazy Rich Asians and has become a close friend of Yang’s, put it to me: “There’s more diversity in our diversity now.”

Justin Chung for The Atlantic

This doesn’t mean that choosing roles was suddenly easy for actors like Yang. Not long after Crazy Rich Asians, he got sent a script for a movie about William Hung, who’d become an early viral sensation after an awkward 2004 American Idol audition during which he gyrated and sang Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” off-key. The writer wanted Yang to play Hung. It was a starring role in a potentially splashy biopic—but Yang turned it down. In June 2020, during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, he told Rogan that the script made him want to “fucking vomit”; Hung, he said, had “set us back 10 years.” In response, Hung posted a video addressed to Rogan and Yang. “I understand where you might be coming from, because you’re not the only person who believes that I portray Asian stereotypes,” Hung said. But, he added, “I believe everyone has a right to try something new without being judged or ridiculed.”

When I brought up his comments about Hung, Yang grimaced. His objection to the project, he told me, was not about Hung himself but rather about the way the script missed an opportunity to examine why he’d become famous and how his notoriety had affected the perception of Asian Americans, especially Asian men. “People made fun of him,” Yang said. “He was the butt of the joke, and every one of us was called ‘William Hung’ in high school for a couple years.” To Yang, the way American Idol portrayed Hung—how the show “threw him out there, and how America ganged up and laughed at him—that should be the story we’re telling.” Many Asian performers still find it hard to shake the fear that they’ll be turned into a punch line the way Hung was. “In hindsight,” Yang said of those 2020 comments, “I think that was my own frustration, my own insecurity.”

For Asian actors living through this cultural sea change, career choices can seem freighted with a new sense of responsibility and, occasionally, feelings of guilt. I spoke with Jeong about what is arguably his most well-known role, the Chinese gangster Mr. Chow in the 2009 comedy The Hangover. To Jeong, Mr. Chow was “puncturing the stereotype, because there are not a lot of stereotypes where, you know, an Asian man jumps out naked on Bradley Cooper’s shoulder and beats him up.” Still, some things about Mr. Chow now seem to give him pause, including his exaggerated accent. “I haven’t done an accent on live TV since,” he told me. “And there’s a reason for that.”

When I mentioned this to Yang, he shrugged and sighed. “Yeah, yeah, and that’s his battle,” he said. As much as Yang admires Jeong, his own view of what makes for “good” representation seems somewhat different. He doesn’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with an Asian character who has a thick accent, and he doesn’t think breaking down stereotypes requires playing a kind of character audiences have never seen before. He’d be interested in a role that seemed like an Asian cliché—say, a mathematician—if it surprised him. “Is there some more interesting angle about the man?” he said. “Or is it just super one-dimensional: ‘Here’s an Asian guy good at math’?” The question he asks himself about each character now is simple: “Is it human?”

Yang’s stand-up comedy has evolved, too. He still riffs on being Asian, but his material is more precise, and more personal. In his 2023 special for Amazon Prime, Guess How Much?, he jokes about the frugality of his mother, with whom he’s grown close again after their long separation. (She loves a bargain; he says her catchphrase is “Guess how much?”) He still plays with stereotypes, but now he has a knack for turning them on their head: Joking about the global rise of K-pop, he says, “I had a 15-year-old white kid come up to me, trying to explain the different members of BTS … I’m like, ‘Dude. They look the same to me.’ ”

Last year, Yang changed his Instagram handle from @FunnyAsianDude to just @jimmyoyang. “If I log on every day on Instagram, I see ‘Funny Asian Dude,’ I’m saying that to myself over and over again: I’m only the funny Asian,” he told me. “But I think I’m more than that. And I could be more.”

In Interior Chinatown, Willis lives in a crowded apartment complex and works as a waiter at a restaurant called the Golden Palace while dreaming of becoming a “Kung Fu Guy.” What Willis doesn’t fully understand is that he’s actually a background actor—otherwise known as a “Generic Asian Man”—in a procedural called Black & White, which is occasionally set in the Golden Palace. (The show within the show stars a Black male detective and a white female detective, who flirt and banter with unrelenting cop-show swagger.) Over time, Willis becomes entangled in the plot of Black & White, landing bigger and bigger roles, and gradually realizing that he’s been trapped inside a Hollywood stereotype all along.

The first episode opens with Willis witnessing an incident related to a crime that Black & White’s detectives are investigating. He starts to notice the strangeness of his circumstances and, with the help of a new-to-town cop, he searches for his long-lost brother, a Kung Fu Guy who may know more about what’s going on.

Yang as Willis in Interior Chinatown (2024) (Mike Taing / Disney)

Charles Yu’s novel is structured like a screenplay, with stage directions full of character descriptions and lyrical digressions. Yu, who is also an executive producer, told me that he wrote the book in part to untangle his anxieties about the way cultural depictions of Asian people have influenced his perception of himself. “Like, Is this face lovable? ” he said. “Do we deserve to be characters, let alone main characters?” He wanted the mechanics of Willis’s world to reflect Hollywood’s narrow logic about race.

The novel is so high-concept that adapting it for the screen was a gamble for Hulu. But the series cleverly uses the tools of television to render the layered realities of the book. The lights in the Golden Palace darken to indicate when Black & White is filming and Willis has entered that world. When Willis goes from being Interior Chinatown’s star to Black & White’s Generic Asian Man, the show challenges the audience to find him again, somewhere in the background of its shots.

And the book’s central metaphor has been made usefully concrete. On the day I visited the set of Interior Chinatown, Yang was filming a scene, invented for the show, that required him to repeatedly run into a pair of doors. The doors lead to the police precinct, the setting for Black & White’s highest-stakes subplots, where Generic Asian Men like Willis are not allowed. Willis is largely a dramatic role, but there are moments of physical comedy, and Yang was clearly having fun with this one. He improvised different takes: He tailgated a group of people, trying to sneak in behind them—blocked. He sidled up to the doors as if he could trick the inanimate wooden panels into staying ajar—blocked again. He took a running start, falling right before he reached the threshold.

When Yang first read the script for Interior Chinatown, he thought of all the ways in which he’d lived Willis Wu’s life. He’d looked for jobs as a background actor by calling Central Casting, the same agency that employs Willis; he’d even worked at a restaurant called Chop Suey in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. But Yang also thought that Interior Chinatown, with its self-awareness and depth, was a new kind of story.

He found a shirt that he’d worn in his 20s, when he still worked as a waiter, and smeared it with chili oil. He put on the scuffed-up Goodwill boots he’d worn back then, too. Then, in a hotel room, he auditioned for Willis over Zoom. In the scene Yang read, the reality-bending mechanics of Black & White are absent. Instead, Willis has a difficult conversation with his father, reluctantly admitting that he feels unmoored in life, and asking for advice, only to get stern replies.

At first, Yang had trouble evoking Willis’s emotions, and worried that he was forcing his tears. Then the episode’s director, Taika Waititi, stepped in. Waititi urged Yang to think about how Willis’s real motivation is to leave the conversation, but he stays out of some helpless instinct: to oblige his father, maybe, or because he’s holding on to the hope that he’ll hear what he wants to hear—that his father understands Willis’s angst. The note evoked a memory for Yang; as a teenager, he’d struggled to communicate his feelings to his father, because when he did, he found it hard to bottle those feelings back up again. “When I was younger,” he told me, “and I’d ask my dad about my mother—like, ‘Why did she move to Shanghai?’—I couldn’t help but start uncontrollably sobbing.”

Yang realized that Willis’s dynamic with his father was one he knew well: the push and pull between wanting to say everything and holding back, the emotional gulf that can stretch between an immigrant father and his more assimilated son. “I don’t know anyone who embodies better a bunch of the feelings and anxieties, and insecurities, that are part of why I wrote the book,” Yu told me of Yang.

If Yang’s relationship with his father was once more strained, lately that has changed. Richard Ouyang has been so encouraged by his son’s success that he recently started auditioning for roles himself. Ouyang told me that Yang now gives him professional advice: “Jimmy always asks me to be more serious about acting and take some classes,” Ouyang wrote by email. “Yet I think I am too old to learn any new tricks and prefer to be a Nepo Daddy!” In May, father and son did an ad for Toyota together, with Ouyang dryly complaining about his son’s driving skills as they navigate a snowy wilderness. “It was so cute—he was so stoked,” Yang said of his father. “He posted it all over his Chinese social media.”

Yang has also reconnected with the younger self he’d placed inside that mental locker back in 2000. His childhood comes rushing back at certain moments: when he smells stuffed fish cakes like the ones he used to eat with his mother at the shop near their Hong Kong apartment; when he’s speaking Cantonese; and, sometimes, when he performs. Playing Willis helped him rediscover, he said, “stuff that I’ve taken for granted, that I’ve forgotten”—the memories of who he was before.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Against Type.”

“On the record? We’re as calm as calm can be,” a European official assured me last week when I called him to ask what he thought about the reelection of Donald Trump.

His answer surprised me. I’d first met the official earlier this year when I was reporting on European allies’ view of the U.S. presidential election. Back then, almost every leader and diplomat I interviewed expressed dread at the prospect of Trump’s return to power; this same official had described the stakes as “existential” for his country. The reasons for the anxiety were obvious: Russia was waging war on NATO’s doorstep, and America, the alliance’s most powerful member by far, appeared to be on the verge of reelecting a president who had, among other things, said he’d encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries he considers freeloaders. Yet now, the official on the other end of the line was talking optimistically about the “transatlantic cooperation” his government looked forward to fostering with its partners in Washington, and “working toward strong relationships with the new administration.”

[Read: What Europe fears]

“We approach the next Trump presidency with calm and focus, not wobbling and panic,” he confidently declared.

Then he asked if he could speak anonymously. I agreed. “Obviously,” he said, “a million things could go wrong.”

Political leaders and diplomats across Europe are clear-eyed about the threat that the next president will pose—and yet they can do very little about it. “The overall level of anxiousness is fairly high,” the official told me. “People are expecting turbulence.” America’s allies now know that they can’t simply ride out a Trump term and wait for a snap back to normalcy. So far this century, Americans have elected George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Trump again. “Predictability is gone,” he said. “The pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.”

In the short term, sources told me, the plan is to cozy up to Trump and those close to him and hope for the best. In the long term, a growing consensus has emerged that Europe will need to prepare for a world in which it no longer counts on America for protection.

Wolfgang Ischinger, a veteran German diplomat who has served as ambassador to the United States, is among those urging calm. He has publicly cautioned European leaders against “finger wagging” in their interactions with the president-elect, and said they should take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to Trump’s foreign policy. Like other Europeans I spoke with, he was relieved by the choice of Marco Rubio—who has signaled support for NATO and has traditional views of America’s role in the world—for secretary of state. Ischinger also welcomed the realism that has shaped Europe’s response so far to Trump’s reelection. “We’re just going to have to deal with him—we’re prepared to deal with him.”

European officials, who have spent years planning for this contingency, are working to deepen personal relationships with Trump’s Republican allies, Ischinger told me, and talking about gestures they could make to flatter him. But these efforts will almost certainly face resistance from the European public, which, he said, broadly finds Trump repellent and even sinister. “I see a lot of disdain and panic,” he told me.

These reactions were reflected in the postelection headlines in the European press, which greeted Trump’s return with a mix of bafflement, scorn, and Apprentice puns. “What Have They Done … Again?” asked the cover of Britain’s Daily Mirror. The Guardian plastered its cover with the words “American dread.” And an op-ed on the homepage of the German newspaper Die Zeit resorted to English to capture the moment with a four-letter headline: “Fuck.”

Behind the scenes, Ischinger told me, European leaders have discussed inviting Trump to a capital for a grand state visit where allies could roll out the red carpet and hopefully cultivate some good will. But Ischinger worries that such an attempt could backfire. “I cannot imagine any such scenario in any German-French-Spanish-Italian city where you would not have huge anti-Trump demonstrations, probably really ugly ones,” he told me. “Organizing a decent visit for Mr. Trump would really be quite a nightmare for the police.”

Ischinger told me that the return of Trump and his hard-edged “America First” policy is emboldening Europeans who have been arguing that the continent needs more independence from its most powerful ally. Ischinger himself seems to be listening. When we spoke earlier this year, he was somewhat dismissive of the idea that Europe could chart a post-America course, at least in the near term. “Dreaming about strategic autonomy for Europe is a wonderful vision for maybe the next 50 years,” he told me in March. “But right now, we need America more than ever.”

Last week, though, he spoke urgently of the need for Europe to start manufacturing more of its own weapons and get serious about being able to defend its borders. “Are we finally going to wake up to the fact that we cannot rely forever on being protected by the United States?” he asked. He said he doesn’t believe that Trump will move to withdraw from NATO, but the fact that it’s even a question puts Europe in a deeply precarious position. The U.S. has more troops stationed in Europe (about 85,000) than the entire militaries of Belgium, Sweden, and Portugal combined. It provides essential air-force, intelligence-gathering, and ballistic-missile defense capabilities; covers about 16 percent of NATO’s operating costs; and manufactures most of the weapons that are bought by European militaries. Ischinger said that the situation is untenable: It’s just too risky to rely indefinitely on American military might to deter Russian aggression in the region. “We have a war now. This is urgent—this is not just political theory,” he told me. “This is a decisive moment in European history.”

Meanwhile, some in Europe are looking beyond the immediate military implications of Trump’s election. At Faith Angle Europe, an annual conference hosted last week by the Aspen Institute in France, journalists and scholars from both sides of the Atlantic gathered in a resort on the French Riviera and, in between pastry buffets and dips in the pool, contemplated the potential end of liberal democracy in America. To many in Europe, Trump’s election looks less like a historical fluke or “black swan event” and more like the climactic achievement of a right-wing populism that has been upending politics on their continent for much of this century—the same forces that led to Brexit in the United Kingdom, brought Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy, and made Marine Le Pen a major player in France. Not all Europeans, of course, are put off by the brand of politics that Trump represents

Nathalie Tocci, an Italian political scientist who has worked as an adviser for the ministry of foreign affairs and the European Union, predicted that Trump’s victory would “galvanize” far-right movements around the world. “They feel they really are on a roll, and they probably are,” she told attendees at the conference. “There’s a sense of legitimization … If this is happening in the heart of liberal democracy, surely you can’t make the argument that this happening in Europe is undemocratic.”

In recent years, Tocci said, far-right leaders in Europe were on their best behavior, eager not to alienate America by, say, airing their real views about Putin and Ukraine. Now that Biden, a classic transatlanticist, is set to be replaced with Trump, she said, “there’s going to be quite a lot of lowering of the masks.”

Bruno Maçães, a writer and consultant on geopolitics who has served as Portugal’s Europe minister, told me his phone had been ringing constantly since Trump’s election. European business leaders want to know what Trump will do with his second term, and how they can prepare. Maçães was not optimistic. He scoffed at Trump’s decision to create new, lofty-sounding administration posts for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and was baffled by the Silicon Valley types who believe the billionaires will transform the federal government, usher in a new era of unprecedented economic growth, and colonize Mars. “Maybe,” Maçães said. “I don’t know. But if you saw this in another country, you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy.”

Maçães, like others I talked with, was eager not to be seen as hysterical or fatalistic. He said he didn’t think Trump’s foreign-policy appointments so far have been disastrous. But when he looked at the people Trump was naming to key domestic positions, most notably Matt Gaetz as attorney general, he found it hard to see anything other than a profound deterioration of political culture and democratic norms. “Americans have more reason to worry than the rest of the world,” he said.

For nearly two years, the world’s biggest tech companies have said that AI will transform the web, your life, and the world. But first, they are remaking the humble search engine.

Chatbots and search, in theory, are a perfect match. A standard Google search interprets a query and pulls up relevant results; tech companies have spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars engineering chatbots that interpret human inputs, synthesize information, and provide fluent, useful responses. No more keyword refining or scouring Wikipedia—ChatGPT will do it all. Search is an appealing target, too: Shaping how people navigate the internet is tantamount to shaping the internet itself.

Months of prophesying about generative AI have now culminated, almost all at once, in what may be the clearest glimpse yet into the internet’s future. After a series of limited releases and product demos, mired with various setbacks and embarrassing errors, tech companies are debuting AI-powered search engines as fully realized, all-inclusive products. Last Monday, Google announced that it would launch its AI Overviews in more than 100 new countries; that feature will now reach more than 1 billion users a month. Days later, OpenAI announced a new search function in ChatGPT, available to paid users for now and soon opening to the public. The same afternoon, the AI-search start-up Perplexity shared instructions for making its “answer engine” the default search tool in your web browser.

[Read: The AI search war has begun]

For the past week, I have been using these products in a variety of ways: to research articles, follow the election, and run everyday search queries. In turn I have scried, as best I can, into the future of how billions of people will access, relate to, and synthesize information. What I’ve learned is that these products are at once unexpectedly convenient, frustrating, and weird. These tools’ current iterations surprised and, at times, impressed me, yet even when they work perfectly, I’m not convinced that AI search is a wise endeavor.

For decades, the search bar has been a known entity. People around the world are accustomed to it; several generations implicitly regard Google as the first and best way to learn about basically anything. Enter a query, sift through a list of links, type a follow-up query, get more links, and so on until your question is answered or inquiry satisfied. That indirectness and wide aperture—all that clicking and scrolling—are in some ways the defining qualities of a traditional Google search, allowing (even forcing) you to traverse the depth and breadth of connections that justify the term world-wide web. The hyperlink, in this sense, is the building block of the modern internet.

That sprawl is lovely when you are going down a rabbit hole about Lucrezia de Medici, as I did when traveling in Florence last year, or when diving deep into a scientific dilemma. It is perfect for stumbling across delightful video clips and magazine features and social-media posts. And it is infuriating when you just need a simple biographical answer, or a brunch recommendation without the backstory of three different chefs, or a quick gloss of a complex research area without having to wade through obscure papers.

In recent years, more and more Google Search users have noted that the frustrations outweigh the delight—describing a growing number of paid advertisements, speciously relevant links engineered to top the search algorithm, and erroneous results. Generative AI promises to address those moments of frustration by providing a very different experience. Asking ChatGPT to search the web for the reasons Kamala Harris lost the presidential election yielded a short list with four factors: “economic concerns,” “demographic shifts,” “swing state dynamics,” and “campaign strategies.” It was an easy and digestible response, but not a particularly insightful one; in response to a follow-up question about voter demographics, ChatGPT provided a stream of statistics without context or analysis. A similar Google search, meanwhile, pulls up a wide range of news analyses that you have to read through. If you do follow Google’s links, you will develop a much deeper understanding of the American economy and politics.

Another example: Recently, I’ve been reading about a controversial proposed infrastructure project in Maryland. Google searches sent me through a labyrinth of public documents, corporate pitches, and hours-long recordings of city-council meetings, which took ages to review but sparked curiosity and left me deeply informed. ChatGPT, when asked, whipped up an accurate summary and timeline of events, and cited its sources—which was an extremely useful way to organize the reading I’d already done, but on its own might have been the end of my explorations.

I have long been a critic of AI-powered search. The technology has repeatedly fabricated information and struggled to accurately attribute its sources. Its creators have been accused of plagiarizing and violating the intellectual-property rights of major news organizations. None of these concerns has been fully allayed: The new ChatGPT search function, in my own use and other reports, has made some errors, mixing up dates, misreporting sports scores, and telling me that Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is bigger than Manhattan’s (much larger) Central Park. The links offered by traditional search engines are filled with errors too—but searchbots implicitly ask for your trust without verification. The citations don’t particularly invite you to click on them. And while OpenAI and Perplexity have entered into partnerships with any number of media organizations, including The Atlantic—perhaps competing for the high-quality, human-made content that their searchbots depend on—exactly how websites that once relied on ad revenue and subscriptions will fare on an AI-filtered web eludes me. (The editorial division of The Atlantic operates independently from the business division, which announced its corporate partnership with OpenAI in May.)

[Read: AI search is turning into the problem everyone worried about]

Although ChatGPT and Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite their sources with (small) footnotes or bars to click on, not clicking on those links is the entire point. OpenAI, in its announcement of its new search feature, wrote that “getting useful answers on the web can take a lot of effort. It often requires multiple searches and digging through links to find quality sources and the right information for you. Now, chat can get you to a better answer.” Google’s pitch is that its AI “will do the Googling for you.” Perplexity’s chief business officer told me this summer that “people don’t come to Perplexity to consume journalism,” and that the AI tool will provide less traffic than traditional search. For curious users, Perplexity suggests follow-up questions so that, instead of opening a footnote, you keep reading in Perplexity.

The change will be the equivalent of going from navigating a library with the Dewey decimal system, and thus encountering related books on adjacent shelves, to requesting books for pickup through a digital catalog. It could completely reorient our relationship to knowledge, prioritizing rapid, detailed, abridged answers over a deep understanding and the consideration of varied sources and viewpoints. Much of what’s beautiful about searching the internet is jumping into ridiculous Reddit debates and developing unforeseen obsessions on the way to mastering a topic you’d first heard of six hours ago, via a different search; falling into clutter and treasure, all the time, without ever intending to. AI search may close off these avenues to not only discovery but its impetus, curiosity.

The issues with factuality and attribution may well be resolved—but even if they aren’t, tech companies show no signs of relenting. Controlling search means controlling how most people access every other digital thing—it’s an incredible platform to gain trust and visibility, advertise, or influence public opinion.

The internet is changing, and nobody outside these corporations has any say in it. And the biggest, most useful, and most frightening change may come from AI search engines working flawlessly. With AI, the goal is to keep you in one tech company’s ecosystem—to keep you using the AI interface, and getting the information that the AI deems relevant and necessary. The best searches are goal-oriented; the best responses are brief. Which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising coming from Silicon Valley behemoths that care, above all, about optimizing their businesses, products, and users’ lives.

A little, or even a lot, of inefficiency in search has long been the norm; AI will snuff it out. Our lives will be more convenient and streamlined, but perhaps a bit less wonderful and wonder-filled, a bit less illuminated. A process once geared toward exploration will shift to extraction. Less meandering, more hunting. No more unknown unknowns. If these companies really have their way, no more hyperlinks—and thus, no actual web.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here.

You might think, given the extreme pronouncements that are regularly voiced by Silicon Valley executives, that AI would be a top issue for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Tech titans have insisted that AI will change everything—perhaps the nature of work most of all. Truck drivers and lawyers alike may see aspects of their profession automated before long. But although Harris and Trump have had a lot to say about jobs and the economy, they haven’t spoken much on the campaign trail about AI.

As my colleague Matteo Wong wrote yesterday, that may be because this is the rare issue that the two actually agree on. Presidential administrations have steadily built AI policy since the Barack Obama years; Trump and Joe Biden both worked “to grow the federal government’s AI expertise, support private-sector innovation, establish standards for the technology’s safety and reliability, lead international conversations on AI, and prepare the American workforce for potential automation,” Matteo writes.

But there is a wrinkle. Trump and his surrogates have recently lashed out against supposedly “woke” and “Radical Leftwing” AI policies supported by the Biden administration—even though those policies directly echo executive orders on the technology that Trump signed himself. Partisanship threatens to halt years of bipartisan momentum, though there’s still a chance that reason will prevail.

Illustration by The Atlantic Something That Both Candidates Secretly Agree On

By Matteo Wong

If the presidential election has provided relief from anything, it has been the generative-AI boom. Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has made much of the technology in their public messaging, and they have not articulated particularly detailed AI platforms. Bots do not seem to rank among the economy, immigration, abortion rights, and other issues that can make or break campaigns.

But don’t be fooled. Americans are very invested, and very worried, about the future of artificial intelligence. Polling consistently shows that a majority of adults from both major parties support government regulation of AI, and that demand for regulation might even be growing. Efforts to curb AI-enabled disinformation, fraud, and privacy violations, as well as to support private-sector innovation, are under way at the state and federal levels. Widespread AI policy is coming, and the next president may well steer its direction for years to come.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next The slop candidate: “In his own way, Trump has shown us all the limits of artificial intelligence,” Charlie Warzel writes. The near future of deepfakes just got way clearer: “India’s election was ripe for a crisis of AI misinformation,” Nilesh Christopher wrote in June. “It didn’t happen.”

P.S.

Speaking of election madness, many people will be closely watching the results not just because they’re anxious about the future of the republic but also because they have a ton of money on the line. “On Polymarket, perhaps the most popular political-betting site, people have wagered more than $200 million on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election,” my colleague Lila Shroff wrote in a story for The Atlantic yesterday. So-called prediction markets “sometimes describe themselves as ‘truth machines,’” Lila writes. “But that’s a challenging role to assume when Americans can’t agree on what the basic truth even is.”

— Damon

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.