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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

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

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Three Ways to Become a Deeper Thinker

By Arthur C. Brooks

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

Read the full article.

Culture Break

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

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

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

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch the full episode here.

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A few hours after Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential election, Senator Bernie Sanders released a fiery statement saying, in part, that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” He concluded that those concerned about democracy need to have some “very serious political discussions.”

The statement drew both praise and pushback from others in his party. But the serious discussions Sanders warned about have indeed begun over the past week. Plenty of blame has been tossed around: Democrats have pointed to the economy, identity politics, Joe Biden, racism, sexism, elitism, Liz Cheney, the war in Gaza, and much more as factors in Trump’s resounding victory. Democrats will surely continue to dissect why voters moved to the right in almost every county, as one early analysis showed. Meanwhile, many Democrats are already sharing their vision for where the party should go next. Some are vowing to fight Trump at the state level, and others are pledging to find common ground with his administration. Those on the party’s left, including Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seem to be using this moment to push the party to embrace more progressive policies that serve the working class.

And the soul-searching about how to change a party overrun by elitism has begun. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, in a long thread on X yesterday, outlined what he saw as the party’s major problems, which included fealty to a higher-income voter base and how the party “skips past the way people are feeling … and straight to uninspiring solutions … that do little to actually upset the status quo of who has power and who doesn’t.” Murphy’s prescriptions included: “Embrace populism. Build a big tent. Be less judgmental.” Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a car-repair-shop owner who won a very tight race against a MAGA Republican in Washington State, said, “We need people who are driving trucks and changing diapers and turning wrenches to run for office.” It’s not that lawyers should not be in Congress, she added, but “we need to change our idea of who is credentialed and capable of holding elected office.”

Other Democrats have blamed ultraprogressive messaging for playing a role in the Democrats’ loss, and suggested that the party needs to move on from that approach. Representative Tom Suozzi, who recently won the seat formerly occupied by George Santos on Long Island, told The New York Times that “the Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left.” Representative Ritchie Torres, who represents the Bronx, told my colleague Michael Powell that “Donald Trump had no greater friend than the far left,” which, Torres argued, “alienated historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews with absurdities like ‘Defund the police’ or ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘Latinx.’” To move forward, he suggested that Democrats can’t assume they “can reshape the world in a utopian way.”

Messaging isn’t everything, but given the Democrats’ current position in Washington, it will be key in the years ahead: Facing a probable Republican trifecta—the GOP has won back control of the Senate, and is just four winnable districts shy of a majority in the House—that will stymie their ability to effect legislation, much of what Democrats can do in the years to come boils down to their messaging (and may rely on a new generation of messengers). As Representative Dean Phillips—the only elected Democrat who mounted a primary bid to unseat President Biden this year—put it when asked by a Washington Post reporter what the party must do to reinvent itself, “We have good product and terrible packaging and distribution.”

As the Democratic Party starts to identify which lessons to take from last week’s outcome, they’ll be reckoning with the gaps between presidential and downballot results: Many Democratic Senate candidates did well in swing states where Trump won the presidential race, which has prompted questions about whether the Democrats’ problem is more of a top-of-the-ticket one. And, for all the discussion coming from high-profile party members, reform for the Democrats may actually happen in a way that’s more “organic” rather than centrally directed, Michael told me—including momentum originating in local campaigns. “I suspect if there’s a change, it will come bottom-up and in fits and starts,” he added. For example: “Bernie Sanders in 2016 was dismissed by all serious or self-serious political writers and politicians, and nearly changed the face of the party. I suspect in smaller form that’s how change—if it comes about—will emerge.”

Related:

Mark Leibovich: In praise of clarity The cumulative toll of Democrats’ delusions

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump signals that he’s serious about mass deportation. The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning. The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity, Helen Lewis argues. Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now.

Today’s News

Trump is expected to announce that Stephen Miller, his top immigration adviser and former aide, will serve as his deputy chief of staff for policy. Trump said that Tom Homan, his former acting ICE director and a former Border Patrol agent, will be appointed as his “border czar,” with a focus on maintaining the country’s borders and deporting undocumented immigrants. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York is Trump’s selection to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Her nomination is likely to be confirmed by the incoming Republican-led Senate.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: The Democrats never truly addressed the cost-of-living crisis, Annie Lowrey writes. The Wonder Reader: Sleep is a universal human need, but there’s no universal solution to struggling with it, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Lucy Murray Willis / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

To Find Alien Intelligence, Start With the Mountains

By Adam Frank

The Cambrian explosion [is] the most rapid, creative period of evolution in the history of our planet. In the blink of a geologic eye (hundreds of millions of years), all the basic biology needed to sustain complex organisms was worked out, and the paths to all modern life, ranging from periwinkles to people, branched off. Mega sharks hunted in the oceans, pterodactyls took to the skies, and velociraptors terrorized our mouselike mammalian ancestors on land.

What drove this instantaneous, epic change in evolution has been one of the great unsolved problems of evolutionary theory for decades.

Read the full article.

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Rosalind O'Connor / NBC / Getty

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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The Atlantic is announcing a new staff writer: Jonathan Chait, who will bring his prolific writing and analysis of national politics and policy to the magazine at a pivotal moment. Chait has been a political columnist at New York magazine since 2011. He begins at The Atlantic this week.

“Jon Chait is a journalist of immense gifts who writes in the tradition of Michael Kinsley. He is fearless, indefatigable, funny, acutely analytical, and smartly (which is to say, not axiomatically) contrarian. Our time requires truth tellers like Jon, and The Atlantic’s readers will benefit greatly from his writing,” said editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

Chait has been one of the most influential political columnists of the past three decades, first at The New Republic, where he was a staff writer for 15 years, and most recently with his daily columns for New York magazine. He is the author of Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail and The Big Con: Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America.

Last month, The Atlantic announced that it was adding more print issues in 2025 and expanding the newsroom––hiring a number of writers and editors to grow coverage of defense, national security, and technology, in addition to health, science, and other areas. For the first time in more than two decades, The Atlantic will once again publish monthly, beginning with the January 2025 issue, which will be released in December.

Other editorial hires who have joined The Atlantic recently include the staff writers Kristen V. Brown, Nicholas Florko, Shane Harris, and Shayla Love; Jen Balderama, Serena Dai, and Allegra Frank, all senior editors for Culture; and contributing writers Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan, both formerly of The Washington Post. Katie Gunn is a new director of creative operations overseeing art and design.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

“You are the media now.” That’s the message that began to cohere among right-wing influencers shortly after Donald Trump won the election this week. Elon Musk first posted the phrase, and others followed. “The legacy media is dead. Hollywood is done. Truth telling is in. No more complaining about the media,” the right-wing activist James O’Keefe posted shortly after. “You are the media.”

It’s a particularly effective message for Musk, who spent $44 billion to purchase a communications platform that he has harnessed to undermine existing media institutions and directly support Trump’s campaign. QAnon devotees also know the phrase as a rallying cry, an invitation to participate in a particular kind of citizen “journalism” that involves just asking questions and making stuff up altogether.

“You are the media now” is also a good message because, well, it might be true.

A defining quality of this election cycle has been that few people seem to be able to agree on who constitutes “the media,” what their role ought to be, or even how much influence they have in 2024. Based on Trump and Kamala Harris’s appearances on various shows—and especially Trump and J. D. Vance’s late-race interviews with Joe Rogan, which culminated in the popular host’s endorsement—some have argued that this was the “podcast election.” But there’s broad confusion over what actually moves the needle. Is the press the bulwark against fascism, or is it ignored by a meaningful percentage of the country? It is certainly beleaguered by a conservative effort to undermine media institutions, with Trump as its champion and the fracturing caused by algorithmic social media. It can feel existential at times competing for attention and reckoning with the truth that many Americans don’t read, trust, or really care all that much about what papers, magazines, or cable news have to say.

All of this contributes to a well-documented, slow-moving crisis of legacy media—a cocktail whose ingredients also include declining trust, bad economics, political pressure, vulture capitalists, the rise of the internet, and no shortage of coverage decisions from mainstream institutions that have alienated or infuriated some portion of their audiences. Each and every one of these things affected how Americans experienced this election, though it is impossible to say what the impact is in aggregate. If “you are the media,” then there is no longer a consensus reality informed by what audiences see and hear: Everyone chooses their own adventure.

[Read: The great social-media news collapse]

The confusion felt most palpable in the days following Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June. I noticed conflicting complaints from liberals online: Some argued that until that point, the media had failed to cover Biden’s age out of fear of crossing some editorial redline, while others said the media were now recklessly engaged in a coordinated effort to oust the president, shamefully crusading against his age. Then, Biden’s administration leveled its own critique: “I want you to ask yourself, what have these people been right about lately?” it wrote in an email. “Seriously. Think about it.” Everyone seemed frustrated for understandable reasons. But there was no coherence to be found in this moment: The media were either powerful and incompetent or naive and irrelevant … or somehow both.

The vibe felt similar around The Washington Post’s decision not to endorse Harris in the final weeks of the race after the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, intervened and shut the effort down. Readers were outraged by the notion that one of the world’s richest men was capitulating to Trump: The paper reportedly lost at least 250,000 subscribers, or 10 percent of its digital base, in just a handful of days following the decision.

But even that signal was fuzzy. The endorsement was never going to change the election’s outcome. As many people, including Bezos himself, argued, newspaper endorsements don’t matter. The writer Max Read noted that Bezos’s intervention was its own indicator of the Post’s waning relevance. “As a journalist, you don’t actually want your publication to be used as a political weapon for a billionaire,” Read wrote. “But it would be nice for your publication to be so powerful and unavoidable that a billionaire might try.” This tension was everywhere throughout campaign season: Media institutions were somehow failing to meet the moment, but it was also unclear if they still had any meaningful power to shape outcomes at all.

I’ve watched for the past year with grim fascination as both the media industry and its audience have sparred and tried to come to some shared understanding of what the hell is going on. The internet destroyed monoculture years ago, but as I wrote last December, it’s recently felt harder to know what anyone else is doing, seeing, or hearing online anymore.

News sites everywhere have seen traffic plummet in the past two years. That’s partly the fault of technology companies and their algorithmic changes, which have made people less likely to see or click on articles when using products like Google Search or Facebook. But research suggests that isn’t the entire story: Audiences are breaking up with news, too. An influencer economy has emerged on social-media platforms. It’s not an ecosystem that produces tons of original reporting, but it feels authentic to its audience.

Traditional journalism operates with a different playbook, typically centered on strong ethical norms and a spirit of objectivity; the facts are meant to anchor the story, even where commentary is concerned. This has presented challenges in the Trump era, which has produced genuine debates about whether traditional objectivity is possible or useful. Some audiences crave obvious resistance against the Republican regime. Outlets such as the The New York Times have tried to forge a middle path—to be, in executive editor Joe Kahn’s words, a “nonpartisan source of information” that occupies a “neutral middle ground” without devolving into “both-sides journalism.” This has had the unfortunate effect of downplaying the asymmetries between candidates and putting detached, clinical language onto politics that feel primal and urgent. When it comes to covering Trump, critics of the Times see double standards and a “sanewashing” of his alarming behavior.

Independent online creators aren’t encumbered by any of this hand-wringing over objectivity or standards: They are concerned with publishing as much as they can, in order to cultivate audiences and build relationships with them. For them, posting is a volume game. It’s also about working ideas out in public. Creators post and figure it out later; if they make mistakes, they post through it. Eventually people forget. When I covered the rise of the less professionalized pro-Trump media in 2016, what felt notable to me was its allergy to editing. These people livestreamed and published unpolished three-hour podcasts. It’s easier to build a relationship with people when you’re in their ears 15 hours a week: Letting it all hang out can feel more authentic, like you have nothing to hide.

Critics can debate whether this kind of content is capital-J Journalism until the heat death of the universe, but the undeniable truth is that people, glued to their devices, like to consume information when it’s informally presented via parasocial relationships with influencers. They enjoy frenetic, algorithmically curated short-form video, streaming and long-form audio, and the feeling that only a slight gap separates creator and consumer. Major media outlets are trying to respond to this shift: The Times’ online front page, for example, has started to feature reporters in what amounts to prestige TikToks.

Yet the influencer model is also deeply exploitable. One of the most aggressive attempts to interfere in this election didn’t come directly from operators in Russia, but rather from a legion of useful idiots in the United States. Russia simply used far-right influencers to do their bidding with the large audiences they’d already acquired.

[Read: YouTubers are almost too easy to dupe]

Watching this from inside the media, I’ve experienced two contradicting feelings. First is a kind of powerlessness from working in an industry with waning influence amid shifting consumption patterns. The second is the notion that the craft, rigor, and mission of traditional journalism matter more than ever. Recently I was struck by a line from the Times’ Ezra Klein. “The media doesn’t actually set the agenda the way people sometimes pretend that it does,” he said late last month. “The audience knows what it believes. If you are describing something they don’t really feel is true, they read it, and they move on. Or they don’t read it at all.” Audiences vote with their attention, and that attention is the most important currency for media businesses, which, after all, need people to care enough to scroll past ads and pony up for subscriptions.

It is terribly difficult to make people care about things they don’t already have an interest in—especially if you haven’t nurtured the trust necessary to lead your audience. As a result, news organizations frequently take cues from what they perceive people will be interested in. This often means covering people who already attract a lot of attention, under the guise of newsworthiness. (Trump and Musk are great examples of people who have sufficiently hijacked this system.) This is why there can be a herding effect in coverage.

Numerous media critics and theorists on Threads and Bluesky, themselves subject to the incentives of the attention economy, balked at Klein’s perspective, citing historical social-science research that media organizations absolutely influence political metanarratives. They’re right, too. When the press coheres around a narrative that also manages to capture the public’s attention, it can have great influence. But these people weren’t just disagreeing with Klein: They were angry with him. “Another one of those ‘we’re just a smol bean national paper of record’ excuses when part of the issue was how they made Biden’s age the top story day after day after day,” one historian posted.

These arguments over media influence—specifically the Times’—occurred frequently on social media throughout the election cycle, and occasionally, a reporter would offer a rebuttal. “To think The Times has influence with Trump voters or even swing voters is to fundamentally misunderstand the electorate,” the Times political reporter Jonathan Weisman posted in October. “And don’t say The Times influences other outlets that do reach those voters. It’s not true.” The argument is meant to suggest that newspaper coverage alone cannot stop a popular authoritarian movement. At the same time, these defenses inevitably led critics to argue: Do you think what you do matters or not?

In a very real sense, these are all problems that the media created for itself. As Semafor’s Ben Smith argued last month, discussing the period following Trump’s 2016 win, “a whole generation of non-profit and for-profit newsrooms held out their hands to an audience that wanted to support a cause, not just to purchase a service.” These companies sold democracy itself and a vision of holding Trump’s power to account. “The thing with marketing, though,” Smith continued, “is that you eventually have to deliver what you sold.” Trump’s win this week may very well be the proof that critics and beleaguered citizens need to stop writing those checks.

A subscription falloff would also highlight the confusing logic of this era for the media. It would mean that the traditional media industry—fractured, poorly funded, constantly under attack, and in competition with attention gatherers who don’t have to play by the same rules—is simultaneously viewed as having had enough power to stop Trump, but also past its prime, having lost its sway and relevance. Competition is coming from a durable alternative-media ecosystem, the sole purpose of which is to ensconce citizens in their chosen reality, regardless of whether it’s true. And it is coming from Musk’s X, which the centibillionaire quickly rebuilt into a powerful communication tool that largely serves the MAGA coalition.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

Spaces like X offer an environment for toxic ideas paired with a sense of empowerment for disaffected audiences. This is part of what Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington, calls the right’s “powerful, partisan, & participatory media environment to support its messaging, which offers a compelling ‘deep story’ for its participants.” By contrast, the left’s media ecosystem, she argues, relies “upon rigid, self-preserving institutional media and its ‘story’ is little more than a defense of imperfect institutions.” The right’s media ecosystem might be chaotic, conspiracist, and poisonous, but it offers its consumers a world to get absorbed in—plus, the promise that they can shape it themselves.

Would it have been possible for things to go differently if Harris had attempted to tap into this alternative ecosystem? I’m not so sure. Following Harris’s entrance into the race, each passing week felt more consequential, but more rigidly locked in place. Memes, rallies, and marathon podcast appearances from Trump offered data points, but there was no real way to interpret them. Some Zoomers and Millennials were ironically coconut-pilled; people were leaving Trump rallies early; everyone was arguing about who was actually garbage. Even when something seemed to matter, it was hard to tell whom it mattered to, or what might happen because of it. When it’s unclear what information everyone is consuming or which filter bubble they’re trapped in, everyone tends to shadowbox their conception of an imagined audience. Will the Rogan bros vote? Did a stand-up comedian’s insult activate a groundswell of Puerto-Rican American support? We didn’t really know anything for certain until we did.

“You are the media now” is powerful because it capitalizes on the reality that it is difficult to know where genuine influence comes from these days. The phrase sounds empowering. Musk’s acolytes see it as the end of traditional-media gatekeeping. But what he’s really selling is the notion that people are on their own—that facts are malleable, and that what feels true ought to be true.

A world governed by the phrase do your own research is also a world where the Trumps and Musks can operate with impunity. Is it the news media’s job to counter this movement—its lies, its hate? Is it also their job to appeal to some of the types of people who listen to Joe Rogan? I’d argue that it is. But there’s little evidence right now that it stands much of a chance.

Something has to change. Perhaps it’s possible to appropriate “You are the media now” and use it as a mission statement to build an industry more capable of meeting whatever’s coming. Perhaps in the absence of a shared reality, fighting against an opposing information ecosystem isn’t as effective as giving more people a reason to get excited about, and pay attention to, yours.

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.

When delegates of the world gather in Baku, Azerbaijan, next week for the most important yearly meeting on climate change, their meetings will overlook a reeking lake, polluted by the oil fields on the other side. This city’s first oil reservoir was built on the lake’s shores in the 19th century; now nearly half of Azerbaijan’s GDP and more than 90 percent of its export revenue come from oil and gas. It is, in no uncertain terms, a petrostate.

Last year, too, the UN Conference of Parties (COP) meeting was a parade of oil-state wealth and interests. Held in the United Arab Emirates, the conference included thousands of oil and gas lobbyists; its president was an executive of the UAE’s national oil company. Baku’s COP president, Azerbaijan’s ecology and natural-resources minister, is also an ex-executive of its oil company.

Optimistically, handing influence over this conference to the UAE, and now Azerbaijan—states whose interests are, in many ways, opposed to its aim—means that leaders who depend on fossil fuels must face the costs of burning them. As host this year, Azerbaijan’s job will be to broker an agreement that secures billions—possibly trillions—of dollars from wealthy countries to help along the green transition in poorer countries. Developing nations need these funds to set ambitious climate goals, the next round of which are due in February 2025. A failed COP could set off a chain reaction of failure. The world is gambling that a country that’s shown a bare minimum of commitment to this entire process can keep us all on a path to staving off catastrophic warming.

Baku came to host COP by process of elimination. Hosting duties rotate among regions of the world; this year is Eastern Europe’s turn. Russia nixed the possibility of any European Union country, leaving only Armenia and Azerbaijan standing. Armenia retracted its bid after Azerbaijan agreed to release 32 Armenian service members from prison. (Armenia freed two Azerbaijani soldiers in exchange.)

In many ways, Azerbaijan is an extremely unlikely candidate. Joanna Depledge, a fellow at the University of Cambridge and an expert on international climate negotiations, has followed all 29 years of COP so far, and told me that Azerbaijan has “been pretty much off the radar since the beginning.” The country has hardly ever spoken during previous negotiations, and is not part of any of COP’s major political coalitions, she said. The Paris Agreement requires that, every five years, each country must lay out how it will reduce emissions in a Nationally Determined Contribution plan; Azerbaijan is “one of the very few countries whose second NDC was weaker than the first,” Depledge said. To Steve Pye, an energy-systems professor at University College London, having a petrostate host a climate meeting presents an unambiguous conflict of interest. The country has been clear that it’s looking to ramp up gas exports and has made “no indication” that it wants to move away from fossil-fuel dependency, he told me. That’s an awkward, even bizarre, stance for the entity in charge of facilitating delicate climate diplomacy to hold.

Still, in some ways, Azerbaijan “could be seen as an honest broker” in the finance negotiations, because it is neither a traditional donor country nor a recipient of the funds under negotiation, Depledge said. Azerbaijan, for its part, says it intends to “enable action” to deliver “deep, rapid and sustained emission reductions … while leaving no one behind.”

The whole point of COP is to bring diverse countries together, Depledge said; global climate diplomacy cannot move forward without petrostates on board. Last year’s COP, in Dubai, resulted in the first global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels, and was seen as a modest success. To run COP, Azerbaijan will be forced to reckon with global climate change directly; its team will have to listen to everyone, including the countries most ravaged by climate change today. That’s bound to have an impact, Depledge thinks. Ultimately, Azerbaijan will also need to adapt to a post-oil economy: The World Bank estimates that the country’s oil reserves will dwindle by mid-century. And, since being chosen to host, it has joined a major international pledge to limit methane emissions, as well as announced that its third NDC (unlike its previous one) will be aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goals—although it has yet to unveil the actual plan.  

COP also gives Azerbaijan a chance to burnish its image. After Armenia withdrew its hosting bid, Azerbaijan branded this a “peace COP,” proposing a worldwide cease-fire for the days before, during, and after the meeting. An army of bots have been deployed on X to praise Azerbaijan just ahead of the talks, The Washington Post reported. Ronald Grigor Suny, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about Azerbaijan, told me that he views the country’s hosting exercise as an elaborate propaganda campaign to sanitize the image of a fundamentally authoritarian and oil-committed nation—a place that last year conducted what many legal and human-rights scholars considered an ethnic-cleansing campaign in one of its Armenian enclaves. “This is a staging of an event to impress people by the normality, the acceptability, the modernity of this little state,” he said. But hope for any peace-related initiatives, including a peace deal with Armenia, is already dwindling. Climate and geopolitical experts have called the whole thing a cynical PR stunt, and Amnesty International reports that the country, which Azerbaijani human-rights defenders estimate holds hundreds of academics and activists in prison, has jailed more of its critics since the COP presidency was announced.

Azerbaijan will still need to broker a real climate deal by the end of the event for it to be declared a success. Failure would be deeply embarrassing and, more pressingly, dangerous for the planet. The world is on track for up to 3.1 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, and total carbon-dioxide emissions in 2030 will be only 2.6 percent lower than in 2019 if countries’ current NDCs are followed, according to new analysis. Keeping to a 1.5 degree Celsius warming limit would require a lowering of 43 percent over the same time period, which many scientists now say is out of reach. Keeping warming below the far more catastrophic 2 degree limit now will take far faster and more decisive action than the slow COP process has historically produced.

Even if this COP ends in success, Pye, who has worked on the UN Environment Program’s Production Gap Report, notes that, without follow-through, what happens at the conference is merely lip service. Once the spotlight of COP was off it, the UAE, for instance, returned more or less to business as usual; this year, the state oil company increased its production capacity. Then again, the UAE is investing heavily in clean energy, too, following a maximalist approach of more of everything—much like the theory that President Joe Biden has followed in the United States, which recently became the world’s biggest oil producer and gas exporter even as Biden’s domestic policies, most notably the Inflation Reduction Act, have pushed the country toward key climate goals.

Perhaps more than Baku’s leadership, the outcomes of the U.S. election will set the tone for the upcoming COP. News of a second Trump presidency would likely neutralize any hope for a strong climate finance agreement in Baku. In 2016, news of Trump’s election arrived while that year’s COP was under way in Marrakech, to withering effect. America’s functional absence from climate negotiations marred proceedings for four years. Wherever COP is held, American willingness to negotiate in good faith has the power to make or break the climate deals. Put another way, it’s still possible to save the world, if we want to.   

X has always had a Nazi problem. I’ve covered the site, formerly known as Twitter, for more than a decade and reported extensively on its harassment problems, its verification (and then de-verification) of a white nationalist, and the glut of anti-Semitic hatred that roiled the platform in 2016.

But something is different today. Heaps of unfiltered posts that plainly celebrate racism, anti-Semitism, and outright Nazism are easily accessible and possibly even promoted by the site’s algorithms. All the while, Elon Musk—a far-right activist and the site’s owner, who is campaigning for and giving away millions to help elect Donald Trump—amplifies horrendous conspiracy theories about voter fraud, migrants run amok, and the idea that Jewish people hate white people. Twitter was always bad if you knew where to look, but because of Musk, X is far worse. (X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

It takes little effort to find neo-Nazi accounts that have built up substantial audiences on X. “Thank you all for 7K,” one white-nationalist meme account posted on October 17, complete with a heil-Hitler emoji reference. One week later, the account, which mostly posts old clips of Hitler speeches and content about how “Hitler was right,” celebrated 14,000 followers. One post, a black-and-white video of Nazis goose-stepping, has more than 187,000 views. Another racist and anti-Semitic video about Jewish women and Black men—clearly AI-generated—has more than 306,000 views. It was also posted in late October.

Many who remain on the platform have noticed X decaying even more than usual in recent months. “I’ve seen SO many seemingly unironic posts like this on Twitter recently this is getting insane,” one X user posted in response to a meme that the far-right influencer Stew Peters recently shared. It showed an image of Adolf Hitler holding a telephone with overlaid text reading, “Hello … 2024? Are you guys starting to get it yet?” Peters appended the commentary, “Yes. We’ve noticed.” The idea is simply that Hitler was right, and X users ate it up: As of this writing, the post has received about 67,000 likes, 10,000 reposts, and 11.4 million views. When Musk took over, in 2022, there were initial reports that hate speech (anti-Black and anti-Semitic slurs) was surging on the platform. By December of that year, one research group described the increase in hate speech as “unprecedented.” And it seems to only have gotten worse. There are far more blatant examples of racism now, even compared with a year ago. In September, the World Bank halted advertising on X after its promoted ads were showing up in the replies to pro-Nazi and white-nationalist content from accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Search queries such as Hitler was right return posts with tens of thousands of views—they’re indistinguishable from the poison once relegated to the worst sites on the internet, including 4chan, Gab, and Stormfront.

The hatred isn’t just coming from anonymous fringe posters either. Late last month, Clay Higgins, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, published a racist, threatening post about the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, saying they’re from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Then he issued an ultimatum: “All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th,” he wrote in the post, referencing Inauguration Day. Higgins eventually deleted the post at the request of his House colleagues on both sides of the aisle but refused to apologize. “I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want,” he told CNN later that day.

And although Higgins did eventually try to walk his initial post back, clarifying that he was really referring to Haitian gangs, the sentiment he shared with CNN is right. The lawmaker can put up another vile post maligning an entire country whenever he desires. Not because of his right to free speech—which exists to protect against government interference—but because of how Musk chooses to operate his platform. Despite the social network’s policy that prohibits “incitement of harassment,” X seemingly took no issue with Higgins’s racist post or its potential to cause real-world harm for Springfield residents. (The town has already closed and evacuated its schools twice because of bomb threats.) And why would X care? The platform, which reinstated thousands of banned accounts following Musk’s takeover, in 2022—accounts that belong to QAnon supporters, political hucksters, conspiracy theorists, and at least one bona fide neo-Nazi—is so inundated with bigoted memes, racist AI slop, and unspeakable slurs that Higgins’s post seemed almost measured by comparison. In the past, when Twitter seemed more interested in enforcing content-moderation standards, the lawmaker’s comments may have resulted in a ban or some other disciplinary response: On X, he found an eager, sympathetic audience willing to amplify his hateful message.

His deleted post is instructive, though, as a way to measure the degradation of X under Musk. The site is a political project run by a politically radicalized centibillionaire. The worthwhile parts of Twitter (real-time news, sports, culture, silly memes, spontaneous encounters with celebrity accounts) have been drowned out by hateful garbage. X is no longer a social-media site with a white-supremacy problem, but a white-supremacist site with a social-media problem.

Musk has certainly bent the social network to support his politics, which has recently involved joking on Tucker Carlson’s show (which streams on X) that “nobody is even bothering to try to kill Kamala” and repurposing the @america handle from an inactive user to turn it into a megaphone for his pro-Trump super PAC. Musk has also quite clearly reengineered the site so that users see him, and his tweets, whether or not they follow him.

When Musk announced his intent to purchase Twitter, in April 2022, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein aptly noted that “Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by how he acts on it.” By this logic, it would seem that X is vying to be the official propaganda outlet not just for Trump generally but also for the “Great Replacement” theory, which states that there is a global plot to eradicate the white race and its culture through immigration. In just the past year, Musk has endorsed multiple posts about the conspiracy theory. In November 2023, in response to a user named @breakingbaht who accused Jews of supporting bringing “hordes of minorities” into the United States, Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.” Musk’s post was viewed more than 8 million times.

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

Though Musk has publicly claimed that he doesn’t “subscribe” to the “Great Replacement” theory, he appears obsessed with the idea that Republican voters in America are under attack from immigrants. Last December, he posted a misleading graph suggesting that the number of immigrants arriving illegally was overtaking domestic birth rates. He has repeatedly referenced a supposed Democratic plot to “legalize vast numbers of illegals” and put an end to fair elections. He has falsely suggested that the Biden administration was “flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona” and argued that, soon, “everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.” According to a recent Bloomberg analysis of 53,000 of Musk’s posts, the billionaire has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic (more than 1,300 posts in total), garnering roughly 10 billion views.

But Musk’s interests extend beyond the United States. This summer, during a period of unrest and rioting in the United Kingdom over a mass stabbing that killed three children, the centibillionaire used his account to suggest that a civil war there was “inevitable.” He also shared (and subsequently deleted) a conspiracy theory that the U.K. government was building detainment camps for people rioting against Muslims. Additionally, X was instrumental in spreading misinformation and fueling outrage among far-right, anti-immigration protesters.

In Springfield, Ohio, X played a similar role as a conduit for white supremacists and far-right extremists to fuel real-world harm. One of the groups taking credit for singling out Springfield’s Haitian community was Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group known for marching through city streets waving swastikas. Blood Tribe had been focused on the town for months, but not until prominent X accounts (including Musk’s, J. D. Vance’s, and Trump’s) seized on a Facebook post from the region did Springfield become a national target. “It is no coincidence that there was an online rumor mill ready to amplify any social media posts about Springfield because Blood Tribe has been targeting the town in an effort to stoke racial resentment against ‘subhuman’ Haitians,” the journalist Robert Tracinski wrote recently. Tracinski argues that social-media channels (like X) have been instrumental in transferring neo-Nazi propaganda into the public consciousness—all the way to the presidential-debate stage. He is right. Musk’s platform has become a political tool for stoking racial hatred online and translating it into harassment in the physical world.

The ability to drag fringe ideas and theories into mainstream political discourse has long been a hallmark of X, even back when it was known as Twitter. There’s always been a trade-off with the platform’s ability to narrow the distance between activists and people in positions of power. Social-justice movements such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter owe some of the success of their early organizing efforts to the platform.

Yet the website has also been one of the most reliable mainstream destinations on the internet to see Photoshopped images of public figures (or their family members) in gas chambers, or crude, racist cartoons of Jewish men. Now, under Musk’s stewardship, X seems to run in only one direction. The platform eschews healthy conversation. It abhors nuance, instead favoring constant escalation and engagement-baiting behavior. And it empowers movements that seek to enrage and divide. In April, an NBC News investigation found that “at least 150 paid ‘Premium’ subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months.” According to research from the extremism expert Colin Henry, since Musk’s purchase, there’s been a decline in anti-Semitic posts on 4chan’s infamous “anything goes” forum, and a simultaneous rise in posts targeting Jewish people on X.

X’s own transparency reports show that the social network has allowed hateful content to flourish on its site. In its last report before Musk’s acquisition, in just the second half of 2021, Twitter suspended about 105,000 of the more than 5 million accounts reported for hateful conduct. In the first half of 2024, according to X, the social network received more than 66 million hateful-conduct reports, but suspended just 2,361 accounts. It’s not a perfect comparison, as the way X reports and analyzes data has changed under Musk, but the company is clearly taking action far less frequently.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

Because X has made it more difficult for researchers to access data by switching to a paid plan that prices out many academics, it is now difficult to get a quantitative understanding of the platform’s degradation. The statistics that do exist are alarming. Research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in just the first month of Musk’s ownership, anti–Black American slurs used on the platform increased by 202 percent. The Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic tweets on the platform increased by 61 percent in just two weeks after Musk’s takeover. But much of the evidence is anecdotal. The Washington Post summed up a recent report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, noting that pro-Hitler content “reached the largest audiences on X [relative to other social-media platforms], where it was also most likely to be recommended via the site’s algorithm.” Since Musk took over, X has done the following:

Seemingly failed to block a misleading advertisement post purchased by Jason Köhne, a white nationalist with the handle @NoWhiteGuiltNWG. Seemingly failed to block an advertisement calling to reinstate the death penalty for gay people. Reportedly run ads on 20 racist and anti-Semitic hashtags, including #whitepower, despite Musk pledging that he would demonetize posts that included hate speech. (After NBC asked about these, X removed the ability for users to search for some of these hashtags.) Granted blue-check verification to an account with the N-word in its handle. (The account has since been suspended.) Allowed an account that praised Hitler to purchase a gold-check badge, which denotes an “official organization” and is typically used by brands such as Doritos and BlackRock. (This account has since been suspended.) Seemingly failed to take immediate action on 63 of 66 accounts flagged for disseminating AI-generated Nazi memes from 4chan. More than half of the posts were made by paid accounts with verified badges, according to research by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

None of this is accidental. The output of a platform tells you what it is designed to do: In X’s case, all of this is proof of a system engineered to give voice to hateful ideas and reward those who espouse them. If one is to judge X by its main exports, then X, as it exists now under Musk, is a white-supremacist website.

You might scoff at this notion, especially if you, like me, have spent nearly two decades willingly logged on to the site, or if you, like me, have had your professional life influenced in surprising, occasionally delightful ways by the platform. Even now, I can scroll through the site’s algorithmic pond scum and find things worth saving—interesting commentary, breaking news, posts and observations that make me laugh. But these exceptional morsels are what make the platform so insidious, in part because they give cover to the true political project that X now represents and empowers.

As I was preparing to write this story, I visited some of the most vile corners of the internet. I’ve monitored these spaces for years, and yet this time, I was struck by how little distance there was between them and what X has become. It is impossible to ignore: The difference between X and a known hateful site such as Gab are people like myself. The majority of users are no doubt creators, businesses, journalists, celebrities, political junkies, sports fans, and other perfectly normal people who hold their nose and cling to the site. We are the human shield of respectability that keeps Musk’s disastrous $44 billion investment from being little more than an algorithmically powered Stormfront.

The justifications—the lure of the community, the (now-limited) ability to bear witness to news in real time, and of the reach of one’s audience of followers—feel particularly weak today. X’s cultural impact is still real, but its promotional use is nonexistent. (A recent post linking to a story of mine generated 289,000 impressions and 12,900 interactions, but only 948 link clicks—a click rate of roughly 0.00328027682 percent.) NPR, which left the platform in April 2023, reported almost negligible declines in traffic referrals after abandoning the site.

Continuing to post on X has been indefensible for some time. But now, more than ever, there is no good justification for adding one’s name to X’s list of active users. To leave the platform, some have argued, is to cede an important ideological battleground to the right. I’ve been sympathetic to this line of thinking, but the battle, on this particular platform, is lost. As long as Musk owns the site, its architecture will favor his political allies. If you see posting to X as a fight, then know it is not a fair one. For example: In October, Musk shared a fake screenshot of an Atlantic article, manipulated to show a fake headline—his post, which he never deleted, garnered more than 18 million views. The Atlantic’s X post debunking Musk’s claim received just 28,000 views. Musk is unfathomably rich. He’s used that money to purchase a platform, take it private, and effectively turn it into a megaphone for the world’s loudest racists. Now he’s attempting to use it to elect a corrupt, election-denying felon to the presidency.

To stay on X is not an explicit endorsement of this behavior, but it does help enable it. I’m not at all suggesting—as Musk has previously alleged—that the site be shut down or that Musk should be silenced. But there’s no need to stick around and listen. Why allow Musk to appear even slightly more credible by lending our names, our brands, and our movements to a platform that makes the world more dangerous for real people? To my dismay, I’ve hid from these questions for too long. Now that I’ve confronted them, I have no good answers.

This might be nostalgia talking, but I miss the old Election Nights, the kind we used to have before the stakes became so gruesomely high. No one was warning of “existential consequences” or calling trauma counselors into the office.

The end of a campaign was once something to celebrate, a shining marker of our participatory traditions—a jubilee of civic duty, a peaceful transfer of power. Now the once-routine exercise of certifying electoral votes has been officially designated a “National Special Security Event.”

Ideally, this ordeal won’t last too long, and we will have something in the ballpark of clarity soon enough. Ideally, no one will get hurt or killed this time. I wish I could reassure you that our democracy will survive, no matter what.

[Elaine Godfrey: The real election risk comes later]

Alas, I can say only this: Elections matter. And this one really matters. I’m guessing that you’re with me on this, and that you’re not one of those “undecideds” from the cable focus groups “still waiting to hear more specifics” from Kamala Harris or whatever. But if you’re reading this, I’m assuming that you’ll be watching tomorrow with a rooting interest. And you will not be calm.

Why not at least try? Perhaps attempt something that approximates “grief minimization,” a term I came across recently that has been bubbling back up into my brain a lot. Grief minimization is a choice—or at least a worthy goal, especially this week.

I’ve spent the past several days gathering wisdom. I’ve gone back and revisited some of the solace I found useful after the earthquake of 2016. “This is not the apocalypse,” then-President Barack Obama said in a postelection interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker. “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.” Certainly, Donald Trump’s presidency was bad, maybe worse than feared. But I took Obama’s point to be that prolonged grieving would be counterproductive, a kind of self-inflicted paralysis.

Likewise, preemptive anguish achieves nothing good. My friend Amanda Ripley wrote in The Washington Post last week about a study in which women waiting to learn the results of breast biopsies were found to have similar levels of stress hormones in their saliva as women who had already learned that they had cancer. “In experiments, people who believe they have a 50–50 chance of getting a painful electric shock become significantly more agitated than people who think they have a 100 percent chance,” Ripley wrote. “Anticipating possible pain feels worse than anticipating certain pain.”

In other words, don’t wallow in the potential for, or inevitability of, a worst-case scenario. Instead, seek out distractions. Maybe edibles too.

Shop for enlightenment beforehand, which you can apply during the white-knuckle hours. To that end, I spent a few days last week reaching out to some of my favorite campaign gurus. I wasn’t seeking intel about the election itself. Rather, my goal was to assemble a last-minute tool kit of coping mechanisms and best mental-health practices.   

As much as possible, we should try to make ourselves sensible consumers of the treacherous and triggering torrent of information we will soon be drowning in. Note the metaphor here, as it segues into the important piece of guidance: Be careful where you swim. Avoid needless waves and currents. This includes the majority of information you get on TV before a critical mass of returns are processed, not to mention most of the inane opinions and guesswork and “partial data” you’re getting from the various walls of broadcast noise (disguised as maps) before 9 or 10 o’clock.  

“It’s extremely important to consume news on your own terms,” CNN’s Paul Begala, the longtime Democratic consultant, told me. As Election Day approaches, Begala tries to turn off every news notification on his phone that could increase his level of tension. “You cannot let anyone weaponize your amygdala against you,” Begala said, referring to the brain area that helps regulate emotions such as fear. Text bulletins, algorithms, and (God knows) social media are engineered to prey on our amygdala. But resist. You do not need this information right now, let alone predictions or useless speculation. It’s just empty-calorie pregaming. Trust me, you will learn who won and who lost. The news will find you.  

In the meantime, be humble and surrender to the unknown. Again, no one knows who is going to win. I’m pretty sure it will be Donald Trump or Kamala Harris (you’re welcome). Yet people still have a primal need for certainty, even when it’s obvious that none is possible. They are convinced that some special class of TV decoders exists that is in possession of secret knowledge otherwise off-limits to the uninitiated. They want to believe that these alleged super pundits are hoarding the “big secret” for themselves and their various co-conspirators.

“Some woman at LaGuardia came up to me and said, ‘Who’s going to win?’” James Carville, who will be yapping on Election Night with Brian Williams on Amazon Prime, told me. “And the guy who’s with her said, ‘Oh, he knows who’s going to win. He’s just not telling you.’”

Carville gets this a lot. “People think people like us have all the answers,” he said. Here’s a not-so-big secret: They do not.

I used to watch a lot of live sports on TV. I did this in large part because I wanted to see what happened in real time. Now, thanks to any number of screens that didn’t exist 30 years ago, I can be confident of learning exactly what happened and seeing what it looked and felt like as many times as I want. I partake of far more 10-minute YouTube synopses of NFL games than I do of full three-hour slogs (with the endless penalty flags, referee huddles, commercials, injury time-outs, official reviews, etc.). This saves me a whole lot of time and spares me a whole lot of the roller coaster.

I’m always hesitant to make sports analogies, especially with events of such terrifying magnitude as this election. Excluding those who have money on a game, sports will have very little real-life impact on most of the people who are choosing to invest emotionally in them.

Regardless, sporting events are much better-suited to television than election coverage is. When you watch a live game, the result is unfolding chronologically in front of you. That’s not possible for an event as huge and diffuse as Election Night, where partial data, secondhand projections, and “unconfirmed reports” are flying in haphazardly from all around the country. Chris Hayes had a good riff about this on MSNBC: “When you think about Election Night,” he said, “it’s like hearing the results of a full basketball game, basket by basket, but being read totally out of order, after the game already ended.”

You should really consider skipping most of this. Take a walk. Leave your phone at home. Steer clear of any news, stimuli, or people that could raise your blood pressure. This almost certainly includes Trump, who will probably declare a massively premature (and maybe erroneous) victory, no matter what the early returns say. Yes, this will be deeply irresponsible, but it should surprise no one. And any energy you devote to reacting will only sap your reserves for later, when you will need them.

[David A. Graham: How is it this close?]

I’ve seen landslide projections for both sides, and cogent arguments for why pollsters might be undercounting the support of both candidates. But a very close race remains the most likely scenario. Pace yourself and be realistic. Breathe, meditate, pray, seek simple pleasures, and be kind. It’s okay to be scared about whatever might unfold. Appropriate, even.

Rest assured, you will have a sizable community of fellow basket cases to commiserate with. Take comfort in them. Reach out and say you love them.

“This is easily the highest-stakes election of my life where I have not been personally involved,” Mac Stipanovich, a longtime GOP operative and lobbyist in Florida, told me. Stipanovich, a Never Trump Republican, says he is as nervous about tomorrow “as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

Stipanovich wouldn’t speculate on an election result. But I got the gist: Anxiety is a natural side effect of this exercise, and maybe even a privilege of a democracy—if we can keep it.

Scholars and advocates for democracy who have tried to warn voters about the dangers posed by a second Donald Trump term are, to some extent, victims of their own success—or, rather, the perception of it. Having fought to defend the nation’s institutions during Trump’s first term, they now worry that Americans have become complacent about the risks of a potential second term.

“There’s this mythology that permeates that Trump didn’t damage institutions in the first term,” Amanda Carpenter, a former GOP staffer who now works for the civil-society group Protect Democracy, told me recently. “And I think that’s completely wrong.”

Indeed, institutions at nearly every level of American society failed during Trump’s first term, which is a big reason a second Trump term is even possible. The press, all three branches of the federal government, nongovernmental organizations such as the Republican Party, and the private sector all crumpled when confronted. The failures were of both personal leadership and systems. A reelected President Trump won’t just have figured out how to better fight a healthy system. He will face one that is already in dire condition.

[David A. Graham: We’re watching an antidemocratic coup unfold]

An exhaustive account of institutional collapses would be, well, exhausting, but a tour d’horizon should suffice. In 2015 and 2016, a majority of Republican-primary voters and an overwhelming majority of Republican Party leaders opposed Trump’s candidacy for president, but the party revealed itself to be incapable of organizing—one of its most basic functions—to resist the threat posed by a charismatic outsider. The traditional press also showed its susceptibility to a candidate able to attract almost endless attention, and how powerful that attention was, even when negative. The result was a narrow Trump victory in 2016.

The first constitutional check on a president is Congress. In the first two years of Trump’s presidency, both the House and the Senate were controlled by Republicans, who showed little interest in serious oversight work. After Democrats took over the House following the 2018 midterms, they began investigating Trump. They even impeached him after he attempted to withhold funds from Ukraine in exchange for helping Trump’s reelection campaign, but the GOP-led Senate declined to convict him, moving the goalposts. Elsewhere, however, Democrats were slow to respond to Trump’s stonewalling. For example, they sought his tax returns and were finally able to release them—in December 2022, nearly two years after he’d left office.

This was in part because Trump was able to recognize that the courts were a weak link in the constitutional order. The justice system is designed with lots of protections to ensure that no one is deprived of due process, but that also means that a defendant with sufficient money and bad faith can manipulate those protections to run down the clock.

The nature of the failures in the executive branch was more complex. Many members of the administration cooperated with Trump on legally, ethically, or morally dubious schemes. Others resisted them, sometimes bravely: Whistleblowing and public testimony from White House and State Department officials rattled by Trump’s pressure on Ukraine was courageous and came at a cost to them. In other cases, administration officials resisted Trump simply by refusing to execute bad ideas. This may have sometimes staved off acute disasters, but the federal government cannot function correctly if unelected officials feel empowered to decide when to follow lawful orders from the president. This is one of the institution’s vulnerabilities: Officials of conscience sometimes have no good options.

Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election demonstrated the disastrous convergence of all of these failures. The president’s attempts to railroad state officials into supporting his efforts were prevented by people such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, but Trump demonstrated how brittle the systems were by coming close to subverting the election. Some local election officials also showed far less integrity.

After January 6, the House once more impeached Trump, but the Senate again refused to convict. One major factor was that the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, concluded that Trump’s career was finished, thus excusing himself from taking any political hit by supporting a vote to convict.

The judicial branch is frequently celebrated as the institution that best resisted Trump’s election subversion. Courts did reject the Trump campaign’s legalistic efforts to keep him in office, but that is largely because its claims were so flimsy and lacking in evidence that judges had no other choice. The judiciary’s actions since then have revealed it to be as fragile as the other two branches. Trump has managed to thus far avoid criminal trials for his election subversion and for pilfering sensitive national documents and trying to hide them from the government; he has promised that will obstruct justice to ensure that remains true if he wins. Politico recently reported that judges have repeatedly expressed concerns about Trump gumming up the legal system with frivolous process arguments.

[Read: Trump is being very honest about one thing]

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has played along with Trump. It ruled this past summer that nearly anything a president does under cover of the presidency is immune from prosecution, giving Trump sanction for past actions and opening up new avenues for future chicanery. One of the justices in the majority is married to a prominent participant in Trump’s election subversion. Another had a pro-Trump flag flying over his house, for which he blamed his spouse.

The private sector is no more resilient. After January 6, social-media companies banished Trump, and major corporations pledged not to contribute to politicians involved in election denial. But Trump is back on Facebook and X, and many of the companies that made the pledge have since quietly begun donating to such politicians once again. Major private institutions have continued to bend the knee to Trump, even before the election has taken place. The press has also weakened. The Washington Post spent years warning that “democracy dies in darkness,” but last month, the paper opted not to endorse a candidate for president, reportedly at the direction of its owner, Jeff Bezos.

The bad news is that the only major institution left is the American electorate. That is also the good news. A majority of voters rejected Trump in 2016 and again in 2020. They rejected his party in 2018 and only weakly supported it in 2022, with Trump out of office. In a democracy, the people are the most important institution—the source of legitimacy for all parts of government, and of accountability for the private sector. The choice is in their hands.