The Atlantic is announcing the hires of political reporters Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, who will both become staff writers in mid-January. In an announcement to staff, shared below, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg writes: “Ashley and Michael, who both come to us from The Washington Post, have distinguished themselves as scoop-driven stylists—they are both relentless, well-sourced reporters with a keen sense of language and narrative, and a deep belief in the importance of accountability journalism. They will make great additions to our already excellent politics team.”

In October, The Atlantic announced that it was adding two more print issues annually––returning to monthly publication for the first time in more than two decades––and hiring a number of writers and editors to grow coverage of defense, national security, and technology, in addition to health, science, and other areas. Recent staff writers to join the magazine include Kristen V. Brown, Jonathan Chait, Nicholas Florko, Shane Harris, and Shayla Love.

Below is the full announcement about Ashley and Michael:

Dear everyone,

I’m writing to share the happy news that two of Washington’s most accomplished and authoritative reporters, Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, are joining The Atlantic as part of our effort to deepen our coverage of the incoming administration, and of America's tumultuous politics more generally.

Ashley and Michael, who both come to us from The Washington Post, have distinguished themselves as scoop-driven stylists—they are both relentless, well-sourced reporters with a keen sense of language and narrative, and a deep belief in the importance of accountability journalism. They will make great additions to our already excellent politics team. As we move into 2025, it is vitally important for us to cover Washington—the implementation of the MAGA agenda; the role of money (foreign and domestic) in our politics; the future of the Democratic Party—in the most comprehensive and rigorous way possible, and Ashley and Michael will play important roles in helping us meet our goals.  

Ashley, the Post’s senior national political correspondent, is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who covered Donald Trump’s first term, and covered the Biden administration as White House bureau chief. Before her time at the Post, she spent 11 years at The New York Times, where she covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns and Congress, among other subjects. (She got her professional start at the Times as Maureen Dowd’s research assistant, and before that she served as a reporter and an editor at the world’s greatest college newspaper.) Ashley was part of the Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2018, for coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. She was also a member of the team that won the Pulitzer for Public Service in 2022, for its coverage of the causes, costs, and aftermath of the January 6 siege of the Capitol. And she was part of the Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2024, for their coverage of the role the AR-15 plays in American culture.

Michael has been a national political reporter at the Post since 2017, focusing on campaigns and elections. Most recently, he covered the Republican presidential primaries and the inner workings of the Trump, Biden, Harris, and Kennedy campaigns. Michael’s decision to join The Atlantic represents a kind of homecoming; he is a magazine writer at heart, having previously worked at Time, first as a campaign reporter beginning in 2007, before becoming the White House correspondent and later Washington bureau chief. He wrote more than 20 cover stories for the magazine, including two Person of the Year stories, and interviewed Trump six times. Before joining Time, Michael served as the Washington correspondent for Salon, the Washington correspondent for Mother Jones, and an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. He began his career as a reporter for the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Mass., covering local schools and city government. Michael has served on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association, and won the National Press Club’s Lee Walczak Award for Political Excellence for his article on the 2012 Obama reelection effort, and the 2014 New York Press Club Award for Political Coverage for a cover story on the 2013 government shutdown.

Please join me in welcoming Ashley and Michael to The Atlantic.

Best wishes for a happy new year,

Jeff

Richard Tikey builds coke-oven doors for U.S. Steel. He’s a union guy, through and through: He’s been a union member for 26 years, and is now the vice president of his local, the United Steelworkers 1557 in Clairton, Pennsylvania. He has spent much of his adult life voting for Democrats.

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden lobbied hard for votes like Tikey’s. The Biden administration increased tariffs on foreign steel and spent hundreds of billions on heavy infrastructure. It supported union drives, stocked the National Labor Relations Board with worker-friendly lawyers, banned noncompete clauses, expanded eligibility for overtime, cracked down on union busting, and extended protections for civil servants. Biden was the first president in history to walk a picket line.

In contrast, Donald Trump has supported “right to work” laws, attempted to gut federal worker protections, and named union busters to lead the Department of Labor and the NLRB. He has also supported firing workers on strike, stiffed contractors for his campaigns and businesses, described American wages as “too high,” and bragged that he denied his own workers overtime pay.

Even so, weeks before the election, Tikey appeared in a lime-green hard hat and a Steelworkers for Trump T-shirt, giving a thumbs-up for cameras alongside the once and future president. “Why would we support Democrats?” Tikey told me this month. “Every time we have a Republican in office, things are better.”

Millions of other union members feel the same way. Exit polls indicate that nearly half of union households voted Republican in 2024, up from 43 percent in 2016 and 37 percent in 2000. Other polling shows that Trump commanded a 26-point lead among white voters without a college degree in union homes, up nine points since 2020. Conversely, Democratic support dropped 35 percentage points among Latino voters in union households, and also waned among Black union voters.

These trends are part of a long, slow tectonic electoral realignment. This century, the country has become less polarized in income terms, with Democrats gaining among coastal elites and Republicans among the working class. In the past decade, it has also become less racially polarized, with Black, Asian, and Latino voters shifting red. And education has become a much stronger predictor of a person’s partisanship. Democrats now dominate among the college-educated, and Republicans dominate among white people without a degree.

The Republican coalition has become more diverse, while the Democrats have seen their working-class base—the working-class base that delivered them election after election in the 20th century—walk away. What would it take to get voters like Tikey to come back?

First, Democrats need to understand how they lost them. The commonly told story is an economic one, which I have heard from union leaders, the Bernie left, and blue-collar voters who have started voting Republican. The Democrats have more liberal economic policies than the GOP: They support higher taxes on the wealthy and more progressive spending. But this is not the same thing as being pro-worker. And the party has shed voters as it has become more corporatist, pro-globalization, and cosmopolitan.

A Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed NAFTA, which cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the heartland and suppressed wages. A Democratic president, Barack Obama, failed to pass “card check,” which would have made forming unions radically easier. He also negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which unions argued would send American jobs overseas. More broadly, Democrats failed to prevent the collapse of the unionized workforce, two decades of stagnation in middle-income wages, and the hollowing-out of the Rust Belt. Their answer was to “compensate the losers,” rather than avoid policies that generated losers to begin with. This cost them votes, as well as credibility among many working-class voters.

“Beginning with Jimmy Carter, there was an increasing effort to see unions and labor as a special interest, rather than a foundational part of the party,” Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “There hasn’t been a political party in this country with working people at the table for decades. This is the bed the Democrats made for themselves, and it obviously has not paid off in the way they anticipated.”

At the same time, particularly in the past decade, Republicans have become more economically populist. The mainstream of the party now promotes restricting trade and running enormous deficits, even during economic expansions. They may threaten to make huge cuts to popular social programs, but rarely actually do so. The Affordable Care Act lives on; Medicare and Social Security remain untouched. Trump signed a stimulus bill twice as large as Obama’s.

Neither party delivered what it promised, economy-wise. It cost the Democrats and helped the GOP.

Political scientists and pollsters layer a cultural story onto this economic story. Since the 1970s, academics have noted that as societies have become wealthier, their voters have tended to care less about bread-and-butter financial issues and life-and-death defense ones. They begin voting on topics such as the environment, immigration, gender equity, and civil rights. (Academics call this “postmaterialism.”) People can “choose parties on the basis of their overall social and cultural views,” Matthew Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University, told me.

Voters on both the right and the left have become postmaterial. The college-educated have aligned with the Democrats, attracted by the party’s views on climate change and racial equality. Non-college-educated voters have shifted toward the Republicans on the basis of immigration, abortion, and race. Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and strategist, told me that Trump’s coalition might have been slightly lower-income than Harris’s during this election. If so, it would likely be the first time the Republican coalition was less wealthy than the Democratic coalition in decades. “You have the party of the working class versus the professional class,” he said, but it’s “cultural issues that are driving these changes.”

The greater emphasis on cultural issues has posed problems for both parties in their appeals to the American center, even as it has attracted votes too. In 2022, voters turned away from the GOP after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. (Some pollsters expected the same in 2024, but other issues predominated.) In the past three elections, the left’s position on immigration has alienated it from Latino voters it was desperately trying to hang on to. As my colleague Rogé Karma writes, these voters didn’t care about immigration as much as they cared about kitchen-table economics, and many had less liberal opinions about the border than professional Democrats.

The Democrats’ positions have proved the more alienating ones for the small-c conservative American public—something the party has been slow to acknowledge. “The Democratic Party is incredibly well educated and has incredibly liberal views on social issues, relative to the population as a whole,” Grossmann noted. “It is just not very easy to change that.”

For all that cultural issues help explain how Democrats lost the working class over the past two decades, the economy nevertheless seems to have been the decisive factor in Trump’s 2024 victory.

In polls, voters consistently named high prices as their top concern. They consistently said they trusted Trump to do better on the issue of inflation. Democrats pointed to the good headline numbers in terms of GDP growth, inequality, jobs, and wages, as well as the inflation-rate decline since 2022. Voters felt like the Democrats were ignoring or gaslighting them. Harris did not criticize the Biden administration for its role in stoking inflation. This cost her votes and perhaps the election, a pattern that has played out for incumbent parties around the world.

The Biden administration also fumbled in making the case for its policies to middle-income voters. Biden and Harris passed a tremendous amount of legislation but struggled to distill the hundreds of billions of dollars in spending and thousands of finicky provisions into tangible policy deliverables that the public could grasp. “While voters across party lines strongly supported Biden’s populist economic policies, many were not aware that his administration had enacted them,” an election postmortem by the left-of-center polling group Data for Progress found.

When I talked with voters during the campaign, I would often ask them what they thought Harris and Trump would do once in office. People tended to give specific answers for Trump, whether they themselves were a Democrat or a Republican. He’d enact tariffs, close the border, fire civil servants, and deport undocumented criminals. Even motivated Democrats, I found, struggled to name Harris’s top priorities. Someone might respond with 10 answers or sometimes none.

The candidates the Democrats ran and the strategies their campaigns deployed were less-than-ideal too. Biden’s age and Harris’s lack of authentic connection with voters, something that’s hard to measure but not hard to see, were obstacles to victory. The Democrats’ character-based vilification of Trump failed to connect for many voters who liked the guy and supported his policies. “People underestimated the appeal of Trump’s message to nonwhite working-class audiences,” Ruffini told me. “They didn’t think it could cross over.”

History suggests that things will get easier for Democrats, in some ways. If past trends hold, the party will pick up five or more points in the midterms without doing anything. The Republicans will start passing policies and instantly become less popular in the eyes of voters, left and right. And in the next presidential campaign, the Democrats will benefit from being able to run unencumbered by incumbency, against Trumpism, if not Trump himself.

Still, pollsters and political scientists told me, the party needs to change. The “Brahmin left”—meaning the educated elite that now makes up the Democratic Party’s base—is not a big enough bloc to defeat Republicans going forward. Democrats have to get back at least some members of the middle class, the working poor, and the unions.

In terms of kitchen-table policies, well, the Democrats need to have some. Just a few. Big ones. Popular ones that are easy to understand. A bill that caps the price of all prescription drugs at $25 a month, say, rather than a 19-point policy white paper.

The content of such proposals matters too. The Brahmin left tends to be more supportive of redistribution than the working class, which tends to prefer something that economists call “predistribution”: high minimum wages rather than welfare payments, pro-union policies rather than refundable tax credits, antitrust measures rather than food stamps. Moderate families also give higher marks to social spending that feels like infrastructure: universal pre-K, guaranteed jobs programs, and public internet.

The cultural drift of the party will be harder to change, political analysts told me. Tacking to the center would mean repudiating activists on immigration, the environment, women’s and LGBTQ rights, and abortion—the same activists who have marched in the streets, raised money, and knocked on doors for Democrats, and have become its most loyal voters. It would mean ignoring many of Washington’s most powerful nonprofits and interest groups. “I’m a progressive,” Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, told me. “I’m not even sure it would work, because the reputation of the party is so set in.”

Indeed, Harris brought up that she was a gun owner and ran on her record as a prosecutor. She did not emphasize trans-rights issues, nor did she use the term Latinx in speeches. What did her relative centrism get her?

Still, pollsters noted that some politicians have had success with their cultural appeals to more conservative voters: John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington. It might not take much more than loudly rejecting some far-left positions, Ruffini told me. “You have to have someone come out and say: ‘Here’s what I’m for and I’m against. And I don’t like some of this cultural stuff.’ Create a clear moment of contrast and differentiation.”

I asked Tikey which issues drew him to the Republicans. He made more money under Republicans, he told me (though union data show that workers got large profit-sharing payments under Biden). He thought Trump would do better on inflation, and he appreciated the GOP’s stance on abortion, gender, and guns. Plus, he said, “I don’t understand why unions endorse Democrats when they want to shut down” plants like the one he works in. He has a point. Democrats are not vowing to save coal plants, for instance. They’re promising to compensate the losers.

In the future, could a more centrist Democrat, in cultural and economic terms, win Tikey over? “The Democratic Party has changed,” he told me. It just isn’t the party that he and many of his neighbors supported back in the 1990s. “I don’t think so,” he said.

Sia Liilii comes from a big family in Hawaii, the ninth of 11 children. Without her volleyball scholarship at the University of Nevada at Reno, she told me recently, she would never have been able to go to college. So when she got wind this past summer that one of Nevada’s opponents in the Mountain West Conference, San Jose State University, was fielding a transgender player, she rebelled. “It’s not right that this person is taking not only a starting spot but a roster spot, from a female who has, just like us, played volleyball her whole life and dreamt of playing at the collegiate level,” Liilii said.

The story of transgender women competing in female sports is frequently told as one of inclusion—creating opportunities for people to compete as their authentic selves. But for athletes such as Liilii, these rules were a matter of exclusion. Every spot taken by someone with a male athletic advantage is an opportunity closed to a female rival.

Other players in the conference, it turned out, had concerns similar to Liilii’s. In particular, some worried whether a ball spiked over the net by a stronger and more powerful player could injure them. Those concerns would ultimately lead Nevada and other teams to forfeit games to San Jose State, in the largest-scale protest yet by female athletes against the presence of a trans competitor.

More than 200,000 women compete in college sports in the United States, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and more than 3.4 million girls take part in high-school sports, according to the ​​National Federation of State High School Associations. Questions of fair competition tend to resonate intensely with both athletes and their supporters. Sports organizations set rules to minimize unwarranted advantages—witness the restrictions on high-tech sharkskin-inspired swimsuits and running shoes with carbon-fiber plates. But while Nike estimates that its VaporFly sneakers give a 4 percent boost to wearers, the performance gap between men and women is estimated to vary from 10 to 50 percent, depending on the sport. Yet progressives have downplayed that sex difference—which is obvious to many casual observers—because it challenges the idea that transgender women should be treated as women in all circumstances.

[Jonathan Chait: Moderation is not the same thing as surrender]

On Joe Biden’s first day in office as president, he issued an executive order opposing discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Its language did not explicitly address college athletics but declared that all “children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.” After the 2022 midterms, LGBTQ organizations assured Democrats that Republican attack ads about trans athletes in female sports were ineffective—the issue was too far down voters’ list of priorities, they argued.

Yet by this fall, Donald Trump’s campaign was pummeling the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, with a spot that showed, among other images, a 2012 picture of Gabrielle Ludwig, a 50-something basketball player who had returned to college after transitioning. At 6 feet 6 inches tall, Ludwig towered over her teammates. Harris’s campaign reportedly tested several rebuttals, and found that none of them worked. So how did Democrats move from proudly championing trans inclusion in Biden’s early days as president to finding the topic an unanswerable liability three years later? Why did the left refuse to acknowledge the trade-off between inclusion of some athletes and fairness to others? Why were concerns like Sia Liilii’s so easily ignored?

Many progressives have viewed trans rights as an uncomplicated sequel to the successful campaigns for voting rights for Black Americans and marriage equality for same-sex couples. But the volleyball players were pointing to an issue that affected two traditionally marginalized groups: gender-nonconforming people and women athletes. And the left, which had become attached to a simple, hierarchical ranking of oppression, could find no way to arbitrate between the two groups—or even acknowledge that any conflict existed.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, American women fought for the right to play sports at all. They were excluded by arbitrary rules, inadequate facilities and funding, and the belief that competition was unhealthy and unfeminine. The 1972 passage of the law known as Title IX, which prohibited discrimination “on the basis of sex” in educational settings, began to improve the situation for college athletes. But in recent years, lawyers have argued over what the law means—does sex cover only biological sex, or gender identity and sexual orientation? Almost everyone agrees that, in most sports, men and women should compete in different categories. The argument is over whether the lines should be drawn by athletes’ genes or their experience of gender.

Many articles in the popular press have portrayed the growing visibility of trans athletes as a sign of social progress. In 2021, the New Zealand weight lifter Laurel Hubbard was heralded as the first openly trans athlete to compete in the Olympics. In a lengthy 2022 profile, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas told Sports Illustrated, “I just want to show trans kids and younger trans athletes that they’re not alone. They don’t have to choose between who they are and the sport they love.” Some high-profile female athletes have championed this spirit of inclusion. The former U.S. women’s soccer captain Megan Rapinoe has described restrictions on trans players as “trying to legislate away people’s full humanity.”

Throughout the Biden administration, activist groups waved away tough questions, claiming that there was no evidence of “trans athletes” having advantages. But such generic phrasing is deceptive. No one is arguing that trans men have an advantage over biological males; when trans men compete in the male category, they tend to struggle. The actual question is whether natal males have an advantage over natal females. Liilii told me that when she raised the issue with her coaches at Nevada when the players were deciding whether to play against San Jose State, one of the college staff told her to educate herself on the topic, “really implying that we weren’t smart enough to know what is happening.”

For all the plaudits that Lia Thomas received from some quarters, she also came to symbolize others’ concerns. Thomas was a higher-ranked swimmer in the female category than she had been in the male one a few seasons earlier. She had ranked 65th among men in the 500-yard freestyle, for example; she won an NCAA championship in the women’s event. Greater awareness of Thomas and other trans athletes in women’s sports did not translate into greater approval. If anything, the opposite occurred: In 2021, 55 percent of Democrats supported transgender athletes competing in the team of their chosen gender, according to Gallup. Two years later, however, that number had fallen to 47 percent. Overall, nearly seven out of 10 Americans now think athletes should compete in the category of their birth sex.

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

By 2023, the Biden White House seemed to be backing away from the sweeping language in its earlier executive order. The administration proposed to give schools and universities more leeway to limit trans athletes’ participation while prohibiting states from enacting blanket bans. The situation remained in flux when the college volleyball season began this year. Under USA Volleyball rules, trans athletes who take “the necessary steps to transition to their adopted gender,” including lowering their testosterone levels, are allowed to compete in the women’s category.

The extent to which hormone suppression negates male athletic advantage is a matter of scientific debate. But when Liilii saw videos of the disputed player during the preseason, she remembers thinking, “The way this person is jumping and hitting the ball—I’ve never seen a woman do that.” (The player has not publicly confirmed her transgender status, so I’m choosing not to name her. She did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In legal filings, San Jose State has neither disputed that it was fielding a transgender player nor identified the athlete in question. “Our student athletes are in full compliance with NCAA rules and regulations,” a university spokesperson told me by email.)

In September, the San Jose State co-captain Brooke Slusser and the associate coach Melissa Batie-Smoose went public with their concerns about their own team’s trans player. “Safety is being taken away from women,” Batie-Smoose later told Fox News. “Fair play is taken away from women.” Both women told Quillette that they believed players and coaches were being pressured not to make a fuss. The next month, Liilii told me, she and her Nevada teammates voted, 16–1, to boycott their next match against San Jose State. The Nevada players were not alone: Teams from Boise State, the University of Wyoming, Southern Utah, and Utah State also forfeited games rather than face the trans player.

San Jose State kept competing despite all that—and despite a lawsuit aimed at barring the school from the Mountain West Conference postseason tournament in Las Vegas in November. (The lawsuit failed, and the team finished second in the finals.) The season ended in acrimony. “I will not sugarcoat our reality for the last two months,” San Jose State’s head coach, Todd Kress, said in a statement after the tournament. “Each forfeiture announcement unleashed appalling, hateful messages individuals chose to send directly to our student-athletes, our coaching staff, and many associated with our program.” Afterward, seven of the team’s athletes requested to enter the transfer portal. The disputed player, who is a senior, will not compete again.

By the time of the tournament, San Jose State’s roster had become a national political issue. Sia Liilii told me that after her team put out its statement refusing to play the California school, one of their next matches was attended by Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic member of Congress whom Trump has nominated to be director of national intelligence; Sam Brown, the Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada; and Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. “That was really reassuring,” Liilii said, “just seeing that there’s a lot of support.” Clearly, many on the right felt that a revolt in women’s volleyball had the potential to connect with voters. Meanwhile, on the left, people who questioned the activist line—including the tennis legend Martina Navratilova, a longtime progressive—were being excoriated for their supposed bigotry.

“People like to say that it’s a complicated issue, and I don’t actually think it is … It all boils down to: Do you actually think that trans women and intersex women are real women—and are really female or not?” the transgender cyclist Veronica Ivy told The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah in 2022. “It’s an extreme indignity to say, ‘I believe you’re a woman, except for sport.’” She added that the enforcement of traditional categories was about “protecting the fragile, weak cis white woman from the rest of us.” Noah’s studio audience in New York heartily applauded Ivy’s words. Sports was only one part of a seamless whole: If you believed, as good liberals did, that trans women were women, no carve-outs were justifiable.

In red America, however, a different narrative was developing. The same year that Ivy was soaking up the Daily Show applause, Riley Gaines, a University of Kentucky swimmer who had competed against Lia Thomas, went public with her objection to trans inclusion in her league. She recalls feeling slighted after a race in which she tied with Thomas for fifth place but the Penn swimmer got to hold the relevant trophy. “It took that personal experience,” Gaines told me. “I hate that it took that. I wish I was more bold.” In March 2024, her profile exploded when she was interviewed by Joe Rogan. Here was an everyday Christian girl talking to a sports-mad superstar podcaster about how the left was trying to deny that men are stronger than women. If thousands of YouTube comments are any indication, Rogan’s audience loved it.

Gaines has joined a lawsuit against the NCAA, calling for a nationwide ban on transgender women in female categories. The ACLU and other advocacy groups on the left have intervened to oppose Gaines’s suit, suggesting that conservative slogans about “protecting women’s sports” are a cover for racism, transphobia, and misogyny. The National Women’s Law Center believes that “the work of gender justice is at odds with overbroad generalizations about sex-related traits or abilities” and suggests that the “over-policing” of athletes’ bodies particularly harms minority women.

By contrast, conservatives have welcomed female athletes who feel abandoned by American feminist and civil-rights groups. Today, Gaines, Liilii, and other female athletes who have spoken out on this issue have signed up to be ambassadors for the Independent Women’s Forum, a nonprofit that previously criticized what it saw as overzealous enforcement of Title IX. In 2012, the group’s then executive director wrote that “what is very clear is that legislation in the name of ‘gender equality’ does not actually make men and women the same.” However, the group now fights to “take back Title IX” by separating participation in sports on the basis of biological sex.

People “love to receive information through stories,” May Mailman, the IWF’s director and a former White House adviser to Donald Trump, told me. “The left knows this—George Floyd is one story that sparked immense societal unrest.” During the presidential campaign, the IWF sent its ambassadors on a cross-country bus tour that started in Scranton, Pennsylvania, under the slogan “Our bodies, our sports.” The group’s ambassadors have also testified before Congress and in states considering restrictions on transgender women participating in female sports. The IWF’s ideological opponents may dismiss these athletes as political partisans. But even if some are, so what? Conservatives have a right to speak up, and the institutional left certainly didn’t listen to the players’ concerns. Progressives can’t expect to triumph by silencing dissenters through administrative pressure.

[Helen Lewis: The push for puberty blockers got ahead of the research]

One of the most influential IWF ambassadors is Payton McNabb, who says she received a brain injury in 2022, at the age of 17, when playing volleyball against a transgender opponent. A widely circulated video of the incident shows the spike that hit her, but not what happened subsequently. She told me that she was briefly unconscious. “The neurologist told me that I had a brain bleed, partial paralysis on my right side, and a concussion,” she added. (She declined to provide her medical records for me to verify her account.) Her story is the kind that is invisible to a certain type of American media consumer but achieves the status of lore with another. She has been interviewed by Fox News, Megyn Kelly and the New York Post, and on the podcast of Allie Beth Stuckey, a rising star on the religious right who was described in The Atlantic as the “new Phyllis Schlafly.”

In August 2023, McNabb testified in front of the North Carolina legislature after Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed a law that banned athletes “of the male sex” from competing on women’s teams. All of the state’s Republicans, along with two Democrats, later voted to override the veto. During the hearings, it emerged that in the four years that the North Carolina High School Athletic Association had permitted transgender players to choose their teams, only two natal male students had successfully applied to play as girls. That can be read two ways. One is this: Why were Republicans making such a big deal out of an issue that affects so few students? The other is this: Why did Democrats, a few years ago, make such a big deal out of an issue that affected so few students?

After the 2024 election, a handful of Democrats broke ranks. “I have two little girls,” Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told The New York Times. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” His campaign manager subsequently resigned, protesters gathered outside one of his offices, and he was rebuked by the state’s Democratic governor. But many of Moulton’s fellow Democrats were notably silent. “Asked for comment on Mr. Moulton’s remarks, each of the 10 other members of the state’s congressional delegation, all Democrats, declined to comment or did not immediately respond,” the Times reported. Further evidence that a taboo had been broken came on the Friday before Christmas. The White House abandoned its proposed rule change forbidding blanket bans on trans athletes after 150,000 public responses, acknowledging that the incoming Trump administration will set its own rules.

Meanwhile, many international sports organizations have opted to define their women’s division in biological terms. This past summer, Lia Thomas lost her legal case against World Aquatics, which had barred her from the female competition. A leading contender to be the next head of the International Olympic Committee, Britain’s Sebastian Coe, has said that “the protection of the female category, for me, is absolutely non-negotiable.” Those who favor defining women’s sports according to biology feel confident that their side will prevail. “I have nieces, and I have little sisters,” Sia Liilii told me. She said she was happy “knowing that I did the right thing, and knowing that when they are in my position, they won’t have to deal with this.”

[Read: I detransitioned. But not because I wasn’t trans.]

In my view, the way forward lies in an empathetic compromise, one that broadly respects transgender Americans’ sense of their own identity—for example, in the use of chosen names and pronouns—while acknowledging that in some areas, biology really matters. Many sports organizations have established a protected female category, reserved for those who have not experienced the advantages conferred by male puberty, alongside an open one available to men, trans women, trans men taking testosterone supplements, and nonbinary athletes of either sex. Unlike Veronica Ivy, many voters who support laws protecting trans people from housing and employment discrimination don’t see trans rights as an all-or-nothing deal; in fact, a few limited carve-outs on the basis of biological sex might increase acceptance of gender-nonconforming people overall.

Not everything has to be an entrenched battle of red versus blue: As more and more Democrats realize that they shouldn’t have built their defense of trans people on the sand of sex denialism, Republicans should have the grace to take the win on sports and disown the inflammatory rhetoric of agitators such as Representative Nancy Mace, who responded to the election of the first trans member of Congress by deploying anti-trans slurs. As the second Trump administration begins, the lesson from the college-volleyball rebellion is that institutions cannot impose progressive values by fiat. Attempts at social change will not survive without the underlying work of persuasion.

Sia Liilii and other women athletes said no. Universities and sports organizations needed a better response.

Jimmy Carter couldn’t keep his hands still. As he began to speak to the nation on the evening of July 15, 1979, one hand lay on top of another on the Resolute Desk. But soon he was pumping his fist, chopping the air in front of his chest. He had a confession of sorts to make: He had been planning something else, yet another speech about the energy crisis, his fifth, when he realized that he just couldn’t do it. He changed his plans, he ripped the script up, and he would now speak to a “deeper” problem, “deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession.”

The news of Carter’s death today at the age of 100 will no doubt resurrect the memory of this infamous address, the “malaise” speech as it came to be known—though Carter himself never used the word. America was down. Its people were losing the ability to connect with one another and commit to causes bigger than themselves, like overcoming their dependence on foreign oil. This moment, in which Carter’s preacherly tendencies took over, would become—after the loss of his re-election bid—emblematic of all that was doomed about his presidency: voters’ impression of him as a moralizing man and a weak leader, a pessimist who was pointing an accusing finger at Americans. “I find no national malaise,” Ronald Reagan responded when accepting the Republican nomination for president a year later. “I find nothing wrong with the American people.”

The lore about Carter’s speech is not all true; for one thing, it was very well received—his approval went up an incredible 11 points immediately after it. And with great distance from his presidency, the speech now seems less like an encapsulation of what made Carter a bad president, than what made him a strange one. In his words that night was a yearning for his leadership to mean more than passing laws or commanding an army. He wanted to speak to people’s souls, genuinely, and not just in hazy, disingenuous bromides. He wanted to push Americans to think about who they were and what they hoped for out of life.

In the beginning of the speech, he read from “a notebook of comments and advice,” offering quotes from people he had spoken with after he decided to abandon his planned speech. The quotes are filled with criticism—of him. “You don’t see the people enough anymore,” he read, smiling sadly to himself, then looking back up sheepishly at the camera. He went on like this, telegraphing not just his own humility—can we imagine Donald Trump sharing his concerns about being out of touch with the American people?—but the need to listen to others.

Then came Carter’s conclusion: “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

Our longing for meaning. The emptiness of lives.

Carter set aside the policy proposals—which he would get to—and instead spoke in a different register, one that American presidents do not usually reach for. Beneath the energy crisis, he saw human beings who had lost the ability to think beyond their own needs, and it was damaging them. Was this moralizing? Yes, but why shouldn’t a leader talk about morality?

He was also asking for specific sacrifices, the kinds Americans had not been asked to make in the postwar era: to carpool or take public transportation, to obey the speed limit, to set their thermostats at a lower temperature. You can just put on a sweater, he was saying.

“Every gallon of oil each one of us saves is a new form of production,” Carter said, “It gives us more freedom, more confidence, that much more control over our own lives.”

What made this speech so unusual was Carter’s explicit linking of the work of government with the granular existence of everyday people. Americans had heard this kind of language in wartime, but Carter now applied it not to weapons production, but to freedom, both personal freedom for individuals who had been reduced to consumers and national freedom from a thirst for oil from abroad. His vision was one in which the government and its citizens had to work in tandem.

Carter looked the country in the eye and said “all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America.” The problem was “nearly invisible,” and it could be solved only by confronting “the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives.” This was not Carter avoiding responsibility. It was a president doing the hardest thing: admitting that in the end he was just a citizen among citizens, and that all he had to offer, when it came to this deeper problem, were his words and his empathy.

Much can be said, and will be said, in the coming days about Carter’s presidency. Despite how it's remembered, this speech did not doom his re-election chances. That had to do with inflation and high unemployment, and a hostage crisis in Iran that dragged down his campaign—only in retrospect did the speech come to seem like a cherry on top. In many ways Carter was unlucky, dealt a bad hand as presidents sometimes are. But he should also be remembered for trying to speak to Americans not just as an abstract and disembodied whole, as “Americans,” but in existential and individual terms, as the small and seeking human beings we are. It made him seem vulnerable, but that was a risk he took—the kind of risk we should hope that any true leader would take.

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.

Democrats have veered into identity politics and away from the interests of the working class. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, George Packer joins Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss his recent reporting on the Democratic Party’s illusions and the future of American politics.

Donald Trump’s reelection should put an end to two progressive illusions, Packer explained last night: The first of these illusions is the notion that identity is political destiny; the second is the theory that the Democratic Party has been kept out of power by a white Republican minority thwarting the popular will through means such as voter suppression or gerrymandering.

[George Packer: The End of Democratic Delusions]

“The Democratic Party has become the party of establishment, of status quo, of the institutions,” Packer said. The party has come to organize itself under a framework that the “most basic identity of a citizen is group identity based on race, gender, sexuality.” But in doing so, they’ve “lost a large number of ordinary Americans who don’t see themselves primarily in those terms, who are mostly working-class … and who used to be the backbone of the Democratic Party.”  

Meanwhile, as with the drift of the working class away from Democrats and towards Republicans, the country’s increasingly isolationist global stance has also been building. “We are not the unipolar power that we were after the end of the Cold War,” Packer said. “We stood for a certain order, a certain set of values, a certain liberal view of the world, and I think that could collapse very quickly under Trump because he doesn’t believe in it—in fact, he wants to destroy it, and so do the people he’s putting into key positions.”

Packer discusses this, as well as his reporting on conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in Phoenix, Arizona, the nation’s fastest-growing city, with the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Watch the full episode here.

Over the past year, the writers on The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health desk have investigated academic fraud, tracked infectious-disease outbreaks, studied the evolution of artificial intelligence, and chronicled extreme weather events. We’ve reported on the quirks of animal behavior and the latest in psychedelics research. Along the way, we stumbled across facts that surprised, sobered, and humbled us, and we wanted to share them with you. We hope they blow your mind too.

Onions were used to treat wounds during the French and Indian War. The energy required to show a new Instagram post from Cristiano Ronaldo to each of his followers could power a house for several years. A group of butterflies flew across the Atlantic Ocean without stopping. It took them only about eight days. Children with cystic fibrosis are no longer automatically eligible for the Make-A-Wish Foundation because a new drug works so well that these kids are now expected to have an essentially normal lifespan. Your body carries literal pieces of your mom—and maybe your grandmother, siblings, aunts, and uncles. The generative-AI boom is on pace to cost more than the Apollo space missions. Early space capsules lacked handholds and footholds on the outside, and some spacewalking astronauts really struggled to make it back on board. Around the world, more than 10,000 barcodes are scanned every second. McDonald’s cooked its french fries in beef tallow until 1990. The fast-food giant also grills its beef patties for exactly 42 seconds. California grizzly bears are mostly vegan, but over time, humans have made them more carnivorous. A tick bite can make you allergic to mammalian meat—so much so that some ranchers are becoming allergic to their own cattle. When some people took a drug originally approved to treat asthma, their food allergies also started disappearing. Brains have a consistency not unlike tapioca pudding. The weight of giant pumpkins increased 20-fold in half a century. Kids don’t really need to eat vegetables. You can give rice a nutty flavor by growing cow cells inside the grains. Mushroom genes can make petunias glow. In the Middle Ages, people took their pet squirrels for walks and decked them out in flashy accessories. You can buy a fitness tracker for your pet. Humankind has basically reached the limit of airplane-overhead-bin space. Study-abroad accents might be real. Each clan of sperm whales uses its own set of clicking sounds to communicate. Some of these sounds may be older than Sanskrit. Subtitles from more than 53,000 movies and 85,000 TV-show episodes have been used to train generative AI. In 1998, Aaron Sorkin insisted to ABC executives that if he were forced to add a laugh track to his first-ever TV show, Sports Night, he’d “feel as if I’d put on an Armani tuxedo, tied my tie, snapped on my cufflinks, and the last thing I do before I leave the house is spray Cheez Whiz all over myself.” Sports Night still debuted with a laugh track. Comic Sans was originally designed for a program in which an animated dog taught people how to use their first personal computer. AI image generators have a penchant for rendering hot people. The total employees of the government’s free tax-preparation software, Direct File, are outnumbered by the lobbyists working for Intuit. Electric cars, with powerful acceleration and no fuel costs, might make the best police vehicles. Minivan sales in America have fallen about 80 percent from their all-time high in 2000. One breadfruit tree can feed a family of four for at least 50 years. Proteins can make pretty good sugar substitutes. Sylvester Graham, the inventor of the graham cracker, thought his crackers would curtail masturbation. In July, a cybersecurity company accidentally introduced a single software bug that canceled or delayed tens of thousands of flights and trains, halted surgeries, and blacked out television broadcasts around the world. Americans threw out four times as many small appliances in 2018 as they did in 1990. Luddites actually didn’t hate technology. When our writer ran his own dissertation through the plagiarism-detection software that was likely used to help bring down Harvard President Claudine Gay, it initially claimed that his work was 74 percent copied. The correct number was zero. Classical composers used dice to randomly compose songs. Male birth control could soon be as simple as rubbing a gel on the shoulders and upper arms daily. Humans could find alien life by detecting fluorescent corals on other planets. In April, a red Tesla Model S became the first electric car to travel 2 million kilometers. The car could have traveled from the Earth to the moon and back, twice, then circled the equator 11 times. Blocking the sun can lower how hot a person feels by 36 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit. Termites bury fellow colony members that have been dead for a while. Fresh corpses, they devour. In the 20th century, each day on Earth got longer by between 0.3 and 1.0 millisecond. That rate has been increasing since 2000, and could nearly double by 2100. The winds of a Category 5 hurricane are faster than the world’s fastest rollercoaster. In 1993, scientists dumped nearly 1,000 pounds of iron crystals into the Pacific Ocean to draw carbon dioxide out of the air. And in 2008, China used cloud seeding to clear the skies over Beijing ahead of the Olympics. In Goodyear, Arizona, a data center used for generative AI may guzzle as many as 56 million gallons of drinking water each year. Forty-two percent of MIT students now major in computer science. Air conditioners’ money-saver mode is a lie. By 2040, as few as 10 countries will have enough snow to host the Winter Olympics. Dogs may be entering a new wave of domestication. And the domestication they’ve already undergone may have led them to bark more. Elephants and parrots use namelike calls that identify them as individuals. Whales and bats might too. Sigmund Freud said he put his patients on the couch because he could not deal “with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day.” Our brains release dopamine in response to even the most rudimentary animations. A model of a human embryo made from stem cells secreted hormones that turned a pregnancy test positive. American men married to women are five times more likely to fully adopt their wife’s surname than to append it to their own with a hyphen. Bedbugs’ mating rituals may have supercharged their immune system. Lions on the East African savannas struggled to hunt zebras because of a single ant species. Wanting is different from liking. A “Christian conservative” mobile-phone-service provider has been operating in the U.S. for more than a decade. It pays T-Mobile for access to its cellular network. Before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, his campaign team maintained an account on Donald Trump’s Truth Social site. They used it to try to goad the Trump campaign into selecting a more extreme vice-presidential candidate. A slim majority of Republican voters now favor legalizing recreational marijuana. The hottest new psychedelic drugs might not cause any trip at all. Some scientists believe that multicellular life may have arisen thanks to enormous mountain ranges. BRCA mutations, famously linked to breast cancer, can also lead to cancer in the pancreas and prostate. A dentist found a hominin jawbone in a floor tile of his parents’ newly renovated house. Chewing gum became a baseball standby in part because Philip Wrigley, the heir to the Wrigley Company, gave it to players in the Chicago Cubs clubhouse after he took over ownership of the team in 1932. Sociologists have conducted several ethnographies on long-running pickup-basketball games. The 10,000-steps-a-day goal doesn’t originate from clinical science. Instead, it comes from a 1965 marketing campaign by a Japanese company that was selling pedometers. As the world warms, some dog mushers are running their teams at night so the animals don’t overheat. Extreme heat led schools to move recess indoors for millions of students in August and September. Higher amounts of naturally occurring lithium in tap water are associated with lower suicide rates in some countries. You can buy a $99 quantum water bottle “charged” with special healing frequencies. Humans have 10 times as many sweat glands as chimpanzees do. If you want to tame all that sweat, you should put your antiperspirant on at night.

State Department unit established in 2016 closes after US Congress fails to extend funding amid Republican accusations.

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A senior GOP representative from Texas vanished from Congress for five months. Kay Granger, who is 81 years old, stepped down as chair of the House Appropriations Committee this past spring, and she announced last year that she would not seek reelection. Sometime in July, she disappeared from Congress entirely and has since missed months’ worth of votes.

Last week, The Dallas Express (whose now-CEO mounted a primary challenge against Granger in 2020) reported that Granger has been residing in an assisted-living facility. Her son soon confirmed that she has lived there for at least several months; yesterday, he reportedly said that the representative’s decline was “very rapid,” and that she’d moved into the facility before she’d begun showing signs of dementia. In a statement to Axios, Granger said, “Since early September, my health challenges have progressed making frequent travel to Washington both difficult and unpredictable.” Yesterday, her staff posted a picture of the representative; it’s unclear how many of her colleagues knew about her condition.

Once again, the moral questions of America’s political gerontocracy reveal themselves. This is an especially sensitive subject, because so many of us have loved ones—parents, grandparents, siblings—who are in cognitive decline. They deserve our consideration, compassion, and honesty. That’s also true for members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and presidents. But the stakes there are much higher, and in those cases, sometimes compassion means being truthful about when it’s time to move on.

As the Granger story reminds us, having a politician stay in their role even while suffering cognitive decline is damaging to those who rely on them. Constituents and local officials in Texas seemed stunned to learn that their representative had vanished. State Republican Executive Committeeman Rolando Garcia said it was a “sad and humiliating way” for Granger to end her career. “Sad that nobody cared enough to ‘take away the keys’ before she reached this moment,” he wrote on X. Did Granger’s staff and family cover for her? Did they mislead the public? Did they lie to Granger herself? How hard is it to tell powerful figures in politics that it’s time to resign? In 2024, these are familiar questions. Elderly members of Congress and Supreme Court justices alike have resisted calls to retire; Senator Dianne Feinstein and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg both died in office. For much of this year, our politics has been dominated by octogenarians, including Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Grassley (who, at the age of 91, is actually a nonagenarian). But Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection at the age of 80 was the strongest case against the gerontocracy.

Despite growing signs that Biden was in decline, the White House remained firmly in denial—at least until the disastrous presidential debate in June. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported in detail how Biden’s staff formed a protective phalanx around the frail president, tightly controlling access, scripting interactions with his Cabinet, and scheduling meetings around his “bad” times. (The White House denied that the president’s schedule “had been altered due to his age.”) “Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent,” the Journal reported. “Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.” All the while, the White House pushed back against evidence that Biden—the oldest man ever to serve as president—might be unable to effectively serve for another four years.

America’s politicians have an age problem, and the issue seems especially acute among congressional Democrats. The prevalence of older politicians can arguably make the elected class less relevant to younger voters and make it more difficult for new voices to rise in politics. But at its core, this is an issue of honesty: Didn’t the American people have a right to know that Biden was struggling? Didn’t Texans deserve to know about Granger? And if either of them was being lied to by those supporting them, didn’t they themselves deserve the truth too?

Eventually, Biden did bow out—and one consequence is that the next president of the United States will, like Biden, be 82 years old at the end of his term.

Related:

Why do such elderly people run America? (From 2020) You’ll miss gerontocracy when it’s gone, Franklin Foer argues.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

New York City has lost control of crime. How tortillas lost their magic Not the life Matt Gaetz was planning on Mark Leibovich on the politics of procrastination

Today’s News

President Biden commuted the sentences of almost all of the prisoners currently on federal death row. Thirty-seven prisoners, all of whom were convicted of murder, will serve life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Jordanian foreign minister and the Qatari minister of state arrived in Damascus to meet with Syria’s new leadership. At a rally yesterday, Donald Trump said that his administration could attempt to regain control of the Panama Canal. The remark prompted a response from Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, who said that “every square meter of the Panama Canal belongs to Panama.”

Dispatches

Work in Progress: California raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers—and employment kept rising, Rogé Karma writes. So why has the law been proclaimed a failure?

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Evening Read

Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: How Do I Deal With My Hostile Sister?

By Lori Gottlieb

This holiday season, I’ve been navigating some major challenges with my older sister and my boyfriend. The difficulty started last winter, when my boyfriend wanted to buy an investment property in the state where I’m from and my sister currently resides. My sister became very upset with me and my boyfriend for investing in a place where she lives. We received angry phone calls and disparaging text messages from her. We were shocked at her response. I have yet to make up with my sister as she never apologized, but I have been cordial with her when around the rest of our family.

Read the full article.

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The normal rules of public disgrace may no longer apply to Donald Trump. But at least some expectation of good behavior remains, it seems, for a politician in Trump’s orbit.

After a multiyear investigation, the House Ethics Committee reported today that former Representative Matt Gaetz paid “tens of thousands of dollars” to various women, including one 17-year-old girl, “for sex and/or drugs” on at least 20 occasions. Many such allegations had been reported before but specific details are always more shocking to the senses, and the report was heavy on those.

“The Committee received testimony that Victim A and Representative Gaetz had sex twice during the party, including at least once in the presence of other party attendees,” the panel said. “Victim A recalled receiving $400 in cash from Representative Gaetz that evening, which she understood to be payment for sex. At the time, she had just completed her junior year of high school.”

In its conclusion, the committee said it had found evidence that Gaetz violated several House rules “prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”

I reached out to Gaetz’s former congressional aides for his comment on the report, and they pointed to his long denial on X, now pinned to the top of his profile, which is full of all-caps disclaimers. “I was charged with nothing: FULLY EXONERATED,” he wrote. “It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”

That life is already different from the one he’d carefully planned. A week after the November election, the 42-year-old Florida Republican was named as President-Elect Trump’s choice to lead the Justice Department. Gaetz quickly gave up his seat in Congress—to forestall, it was widely assumed, publication of the ethics committee’s report. But the maneuver seemed to have failed when, a month ago, he pulled out of the running for attorney general and announced the launch of a show on the relatively marginal One America News Network. As one former Republican lawmaker from Florida who’d collaborated with Gaetz in the House (and who asked for anonymity to speak candidly) described his former colleague’s future: “It’s oblivion.”

A man who reportedly dreams of being Florida governor is now facing the blunt reality of his own political irrelevance. “He is farther from the governor’s mansion now than ever,” Peter Schorsch, a Florida publisher and former political consultant who previously worked with Gaetz, told me. “GOP voters are not going to go with the P. Diddy of Florida politics.”

[Read: The potential backlash to Trump unbound]

“Matt Gaetz is winning,” I wrote in my profile of the congressman back in April. “He has emerged as the heir of Trumpism. And he’s poised to run for governor in a state of nearly 23 million people.”

Until very recently, Gaetz was winning. He had, in the past few years, become a MAGA folk hero for his commitment to posture and provocation—as well as a trusted confidant of Trump. He was able to exact revenge over his arch-nemesis, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. More than anything, though, Gaetz seemed relieved: He’d been released from a set of ruinous claims after the Justice Department, which had been investigating sex-crimes allegations against him, dropped its probe in 2023, reportedly because of witness-credibility problems.

Already personally rich, Gaetz has only ever wanted one thing: relevance. And his path forward seemed obvious to anyone who’d ever known him. At the end of 2025, he would run for governor of his home state—and, given his relationship with Trump, he seemed likely to win the GOP primary. Serving two years at the helm of Trump’s Justice Department could help Gaetz in that quest; even if his nomination were to be blocked, he could campaign as a victim of the “deep state” and the GOP establishment.

Yet all of Gaetz’s planning fell apart. After initially voting not to release the report, the ethics panel took a second, secret vote earlier this month in which all five Democrats on the panel, plus two of its Republicans, chose to make their findings public. This morning, Gaetz filed a restraining order against the House panel to halt the official release, accusing the committee of an “unconstitutional” attempt “to exercise jurisdiction over a private citizen.” That last-ditch effort failed.

After standing down from consideration as attorney general, Gaetz was being wooed by Newsmax, a TV network owned by the Trump ally Christopher Ruddy, where Gaetz has previously guest-hosted. But with the unreleased ethics report still hanging over his head, Gaetz instead accepted a role anchoring a show on OANN, a significantly smaller and less influential network. “If it gets much worse, he’s gonna be on public access,” Schorsch said. Some observers I spoke with expect Gaetz to relocate to San Diego, where OANN is based, which is nearly 3,000 miles from the Trump White House—far enough that it might as well be Mars.

Some in MAGA world have come to Gaetz’s defense: Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, said today on his War Room podcast that the ethics report is “a big nothingburger” and encouraged Gaetz to “go full Harper Valley PTA” by returning to Congress on January 3 to take the oath of office—which Gaetz could technically do, given that he was reelected to his seat in November. Bannon called OANN a “great little channel,” but said Gaetz could do better than being a talk-show host: “You’ve got enough crazy people like Tucker Carlson and myself yelling in microphones,” he said. “We need a man in the arena.”

Gaetz has already mused about a plan for revenge that would force other House members to disclose their sexual-harassment settlements. “He’s lashing out because he knows it’s over,” the former Republican lawmaker from Florida told me.

Trump has not seemed eager to jump to Gaetz’s defense. After Gaetz withdrew from the AG race, the president-elect posted on Truth Social the kind of message you might read in your high-school yearbook from a loose acquaintance: “Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do!”

In two years’ time, Gaetz might still run for Florida governor. But his chances of success have dwindled, allegation by toxic allegation. “Who knows” whether Gaetz will try to run, the former Republican legislator texted me. “This isn’t being MAGA or America first. This is being a disgrace.” Gaetz’s implosion has probably made it easier for Trump and his allies to begin consolidating their support behind a candidate in a crowded field. “I know the bar has been lowered for what is acceptable behavior out of our politicians, but Florida voters know a creep when they see one,” Schorsch said.

Gaetz’s superpower has always been his ability to find the spotlight and stay stubbornly in it. Yet he will have a hard time accepting his ouster from the white-hot center of MAGA world during a new Trump administration and adjusting to a new perch far outside the perimeter. At OANN, Gaetz could engineer a way to make himself relevant once again—transforming himself into a media personality with influence and reach. But for now at least, Gaetz’s winning streak is over.

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

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* “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending” lead image source: Top row from left to right: Michael Ochs Archives / Getty; Universal History Archive / Getty. Middle row from left to right: Robert Mitra / WWD / Penske Media / Getty; Ulf Andersen / Getty; Jean-Régis Roustan / Roger Viollet / Getty; CBS Photo Archive / Getty; Daily Herald / Mirrorpix / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; David Lefranc / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Frederick M. Brown / Getty; CBS Photo Archive / Getty; Theo Wargo / Getty; Max B. Miller / Archive Photos / Getty. Bottom row from left to right: ABC Photo Archives / Getty; Bachrach / Getty; Getty; Bernard Gotfryd / Getty.

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