Shortly after taking the oath of office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order revoking the security clearances of about four dozen former national-security officials. Their offense was that in 2020, they had signed an open letter suggesting that the publication of emails found on a laptop purportedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter might be the result of a Russian-government operation designed to “influence how Americans vote in this election.”

You may remember the letter, but if not, you should reacquaint yourself with this episode, which remains a fixation of the president and many of his supporters. The Hunter Biden laptop letter inspired the executive order that is Trump’s first shot in a war he has long promised against the “deep state”—that collection of CIA officers, FBI agents, and other career bureaucrats who he believes have conspired against him for nearly a decade. The order accuses 51 former officials, by name, of “election interference,” potentially a serious crime.

Here’s why this is so disturbing: If those people can be targeted simply for exercising their free-speech rights, then conceivably so can you if you stake a political sign in your front yard, slap a bumper sticker on your car, or try to persuade people on social media to vote for your candidate of choice.

The emails first came to public attention in an article published in the New York Post in October 2020, a few weeks before the presidential election. The story implicated Joe Biden in his son’s business dealings in Ukraine, a subject of intense interest among Trump’s allies, including the president’s personal lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The ex-mayor gave the Post a copy of a laptop hard drive that he had obtained through a repair-shop owner, the newspaper reported, and that purportedly contained Hunter Biden’s emails.

[Read: Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’]

In response, the 51 former officials signed a letter asserting that “the arrival on the US political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter … has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Mind you, the signatories offered no evidence of a hidden Russian hand in all of this. They supplied no digital trails leading to Russian spies, no confidential sources claiming a connection. And they were up-front about this: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails … are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement—just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”

That’s it. They were suspicious. Maybe with good reason. At the time, current officials, with access to classified information, believed that Russian intelligence operatives were trying to feed misinformation about the Bidens to Giuliani, as my colleagues at The Washington Post and I reported at the time. The signatories argued that, based on their long experience doing battle with Russia in the arena of international espionage, people should take their suspicions seriously.

If this all sounds like what op-ed writers or self-professed experts on social media or talking heads on TV routinely do, that’s because it is. Indeed, several of the signatories were regular “Never Trump” commentators on cable talk shows, political podcasts, and Twitter. The letter contains no classified information; the CIA made sure of that when it reviewed the text, as the agency routinely does when former officials write books or articles or make speeches. The letter represented nothing more or less than the collective opinion of people with more knowledge about Russia than the average person, alerting the public to what they considered a legitimate cause for concern.

But they were wrong. Embarrassingly wrong. The emails really did turn out to belong to Hunter Biden, and they raised legitimate concerns that he was trying to profit from his father’s political position. No evidence ever surfaced that Russia had played a role in bringing the emails to light. Intelligence experts sometimes make bad calls. This was one of those times.

Trump’s order, which uses turns of phrase he deployed on the campaign trail, says that the signatories tried to “suppress information essential to the American people,” in what he called “an egregious breach of trust reminiscent of a third world country.” Although the signatories clearly wanted to counter the claims that Trump’s allies were making about Biden and his son, no evidence suggests that they were trying to suppress anything. They appear to have sincerely believed that Russia might be behind the story.

Some of the signatories still defend their work by noting, correctly, that they said the emails might be part of some Russian trick, not that they definitely were. That too-cute defense does not absolve them of bad judgment.

But the Constitution protects their right to be wrong. The signatories are free to advertise themselves as experts, and when their analysis turns out to be off base, they have to suffer the reputational consequences. TV producers might not ask them to appear on their shows. The public might not take them seriously the next time they yell “Russia!” But they should not expect to end up called out in a presidential order accusing them of potentially criminal acts.

“It would be contrary to decades of national security norms to suspend the security clearances of individuals who did nothing other than, as private citizens, exercise their protected First Amendment rights,” Mark S. Zaid, a lawyer representing some of the signatories, told me in a written statement. “It is also quite ironic that at the same time this Executive Order is issued, the White House claims it supports the restoration of freedom of speech and seeks to end federal censorship.”

[Read: Trump’s ‘deep state’ revenge]

This is where I have to disclose some pertinent facts. I read this letter before it was published, because the people involved in writing it offered it to me exclusively in the course of my reporting on Russian intelligence activities for The Washington Post. I later learned, thanks to a congressional investigation, that the Biden campaign had wanted me to have this letter before any other journalist, for reasons that I still don’t completely understand but probably have to do with my long history of reporting on intelligence matters. I decided not to write about the letter, because I didn’t find it newsworthy. The authors had no evidence to back up their claims. It was merely their opinion that Russia might be up to some shenanigans. And in 2020, that opinion was not exactly novel. The people coordinating the letter ultimately found another publication that wanted to write about it.

I also know many of the signatories. I have quoted several of them in news articles over my two-decade career. But I never saw the letter before these people signed it, and none of them asked me to write about it or pressured me to do so. Some of them would prefer that I forget the whole episode and not renew attention to it.

The punitive measure Trump has directed isn’t trivial. An active security clearance is a requisite for employment in some companies or organizations, and rescinding it could materially affect some of the signatories’ livelihoods. The order also damages their reputations, beyond any hit they may have taken after they released the letter. And it imperils their safety. Since Trump issued the order on Tuesday, one of the signatories told me that he has received online threats. And a retired Green Beret who bills himself as Trump’s “secretary of retribution,” posted on X calling for “Live-Streamed Swatting Raids” against the signatories, referring to the illegal practice of falsely reporting an emergency in order to summon armed law enforcement to someone’s home. You don’t have to feel sorry for these people to appreciate the broader implications of Trump’s order and what he might inspire his followers to do.

Maybe you could chalk up all of this to bare-knuckle politics. Trump’s order is a predictable form of payback. The claim that the former officials “coordinated with the Biden campaign” to write the letter, in order to discredit the New York Post’s reporting, has some truth to it. The congressional investigation into the letter established, based on emails, text messages, and interviews with the people who orchestrated its writing and release, that the idea got rolling after Antony Blinken, then a Biden campaign adviser, asked Michael Morell, a former senior CIA official who was on the shortlist to run the spy agency in a Biden administration, about the Post report. Morell testified to congressional investigators that the letter was intended to give Biden a “talking point” if Trump tried to use the laptop story to attack the vice president. The signatories certainly knew that, or should have, because this was spelled out in emails asking them to put their names on the document.

But how is that “election interference”? The executive order doesn’t say. You can argue that former intelligence officials should stay out of politics, because they spent their careers in a profession that prides itself on being apolitical. But nothing about writing a letter is illegal, or even all that inappropriate. And being motivated by a desire to help one’s preferred candidate win doesn’t preclude a genuine suspicion that a hostile government might be trying to stop him.

[Nicholas Florko: There really is a deep state]

Well before Trump issued his order, some of the signatories privately told me that they wished they’d never participated in the first place. They stand by what the document narrowly says, but they recognize that it has done more harm than good and handed Trump an easy cudgel to use against opponents, real or imagined.

The order doesn’t just target the signers. It instructs the director of national intelligence, in consultation with the director of the CIA, to report to the president “any additional inappropriate activity that occurred within the Intelligence Community, by anyone contracted by the Intelligence Community or by anyone who held a security clearance” in the writing and publication of the letter.

That’s potentially a lot more people, and a longer story. But for now, just know that Trump remembers who dared to speak out, even mildly, against him.

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.

The aged president of the United States and the young midwestern senator he’d chosen as his second-term running mate were having a private, late-night discussion. The commander in chief wanted to share his plan to make America greater than it’s ever been. He flung an arm toward one end of the room as he explained the most audacious idea in the history of the republic.

“Canada! Canada!”

The senator, a veteran of America’s most recent war, was dumbfounded. “A union with Canada?” he asked.

“Right. A union with Canada. … Canada is the wealthiest nation on earth … Canada will be the seat of power in the next century and, properly exploited and conserved, her riches can go on for a thousand years.”

Not only did the president want to annex Canada, but he then declared the need to bring Scandinavia—with populations ostensibly blessed by genetics—into a new Atlantic union. “Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, to be specific. They will bring us the character and the discipline we so sadly lack. I know these people … I’m of German extraction, but many generations ago my people were Swedes who emigrated to Germany.”

Other NATO members would be frozen out, especially Great Britain, France, and Germany, nations the president believed had faded as world powers. He assured his running mate that eventually they would become part of the new union one way or another—even if that meant using force against former American allies to compel their submission to his plans for greatness. “Force?” the incredulous young senator asked. “You mean military force, Mr. President?”

“Yes, force,” the president said. “Only if necessary, and I doubt it ever would be. There are other kinds of pressure,” the president continued, “trade duties and barriers, financial measures, economic sanctions if you will.” In the short term, however, the president’s first move would be to meet with the Russians—and to propose a nuclear alliance against China.

These exchanges are—believe it or not—the plot of a 1965 political thriller, a book titled Night of Camp David.

The author Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote the more widely known Seven Days in May) came up with these plans as evidence that a fictional president named Mark Hollenbach has gone insane. In the story, a crisis unfolds as the young senator, Jim MacVeagh, realizes that Hollenbach has told no one else of his scheme. He races to alert other members of the government to the president’s madness before the potentially disastrous summit with the Kremlin.

Such ideas—including a messianic president talking about attacking other NATO members—were in 1965 perhaps too unnerving for Hollywood. Unlike Seven Days in May, a book about a military coup in the United States that was made into a well-regarded film starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Night of Camp David was never made into a movie despite decent reviews and more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list. In fairness, the market was glutted with such thrillers in the mid-’60s, but perhaps the idea was too disturbing even for Cold War America.

And now, 60 years later, Donald Trump—an elderly president with a young midwesterner as his vice president—is saying things that make him sound much like Mark Hollenbach. He, too, has proposed annexing Canada; he, too, has suggested that he would use coercion against U.S. friends and allies, including Panama and Denmark. He, too, seems to believe that some groups bring better genes to America than others. Like Hollenbach, he dreams of a giant Atlantic empire and seeks the kind of accommodation with Russia that would facilitate an exit from our traditional alliances, especially NATO.

One of the most important differences between the novel and real life is that until the titular night at Camp David, Hollenbach is a highly intelligent and decent man, a president respected by both parties after a successful first term. His new plans (which, in another moment of life imitating art, also include unleashing the FBI on America’s domestic “enemies”) are wildly out of character for him, and in the end, MacVeagh finally manages to convince the Cabinet that the president is suffering from a sudden illness, perhaps dementia, a nervous breakdown, or the onset of paranoia.

Trump, however, has always talked like this. He is regularly caught up in narcissistic and childlike flights of grandeur; he routinely lapses into fits of self-pitying grievance; he thinks himself besieged by enemies; and he talks about international affairs as if he is playing a giant game of Risk. (In the novel, MacVeagh at one point muses that the president’s “once brilliant mind now was obsessed with fancied tormentors and played like a child’s with the toy blocks of destiny.”) Whatever one thinks of the 47th president, he is today who he has always been.

I am not a doctor, and I am not diagnosing Trump. I’m also not the first one to notice the similarities between the fictional Hollenbach and Trump: The book was name-checked by Bob Woodward, Michael Beschloss, and Rachel Maddow during Trump’s first term, and then reissued in 2018 because of a resurgence of interest in its plot. Rumors that the United 93 director, Paul Greengrass, wanted to make a movie version circulated briefly in 2021, but the project is now likely languishing in development hell.

In any event, rereading Night of Camp David today raises fewer disturbing questions about Trump than it does about America. How did the United States, as a nation, travel the distance from 1965—when the things Trump says would have been considered signs of a mental or emotional disorder—to 2025, where Americans and their elected officials merely shrug at a babbling chief executive who talks repeatedly and openly about annexing Canada? Where is the Jim MacVeagh who would risk everything in his life to oppose such things? (I’ve read the book, and let me tell you, Vice President J. D. Vance is no Jim MacVeagh.)

The saddest part of revisiting the book now is how quaint it feels to read about the rest of the American government trying hard to do the right thing. When others in Congress and the Cabinet finally realize that Hollenbach is ill, they put their careers on the line to avert disaster. At the book’s conclusion, Hollenbach, aware that something’s wrong with him, agrees to give up the presidency. He resigns after agreeing to a cover story about having a serious heart condition, and the whole matter is hushed up.

Perhaps such happy endings are why some thrillers are comforting to read: Fear ends up giving way to reassurance. Unfortunately, in the real world, the GOP is not responding to Trump’s bizarre foreign-policy rants by rallying to the defense of America’s alliances and its national values as the leader of the free world. Instead, Republican members of the United States Senate are seeing how fast they can ram through the nomination of an unqualified talk-show host as secretary of defense.

In 2018, Knebel’s son was asked what his father would have thought about the renewed interest in the book. The younger Knebel answered: “He’d say, yeah, this is just what I was afraid of.” But at least Mark Hollenbach only dared whisper such ideas in the dark. Donald Trump says them, over and over, in broad daylight.

Related:

Emperor Trump’s new map The political logic of Trump’s international threats

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

MAGA is starting to crack. Turns out signing the Hunter Biden letter was a bad idea, Graeme Wood writes. Capitulation is contagious.

Today’s News

A federal judge temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.” Trump told the countries attending the World Economic Forum that if they don’t make their products in America, they will face a tariff. The Senate voted to confirm John Ratcliffe as the new director of the CIA.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Stephanie Bai spoke with Russell Berman about the last president to lose, then win, a reelection bid.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

America Is Divided. It Makes for Tremendous Content.

By Spencer Kornhaber

Amid the madness and tension of the most recent presidential-election campaign, a wild form of clickbait video started flying around the political internet. The titles described debates with preposterous numerical twists, such as “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” and “60 Republicans vs Democrats Debate the 2024 Election.” Fiery tidbits went viral: a trans man yelling at the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for a full four minutes; Pete Buttigieg trying to calm an undecided voter seething with rage at the Democrats. These weren’t typical TV-news shouting matches, with commentators in suits mugging to cameras. People were staring into each other’s eyes, speaking spontaneously, litigating national divisions in a manner that looked like a support group and felt like The Jerry Springer Show.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Bishop Budde delivered a truly Christian message, Elizabeth Bruenig writes. Radio Atlantic: Even some J6ers don’t agree with Trump’s blanket pardon. Trump’s first shot in his war on the “deep state” OpenAI goes full MAGA. The animal story that RFK Jr. should know A possible substitute for mifepristone is already on pharmacy shelves.

Culture Break

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Read. Will Bahr writes on growing up three doors down from the late director David Lynch. “David drove me to school a handful of times … Though he was more dad than director to us, David did carry a certain air.”

Contemplate. Here’s how philosophy can save your life, according to the happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

On Monday, Stewart Rhodes, the eye-patched founder of the far-right militia known as the Oath Keepers, was in prison, which is where he has been since he was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. By Tuesday afternoon, he was taking a nap at my neighbors’ house.

I learned this when I recently walked past that house, which I’ve gotten to know well. A couple of years ago, my partner and I discovered that it was a kind of refuge for January 6ers. The mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed during the riot, lives there, along with Nicole Reffitt, the wife of a Texas man who brought a gun to the Capitol grounds. Occasionally a young January 6 defendant named Brandon Fellows stays at the house too. We got used to seeing them around the neighborhood, which, like most of Washington, D.C., is heavily Democratic. Before the election, the house was decorated with Christmas lights and the lawn with Trump signs, and no one complained. But on day one of Donald Trump’s new presidency, something came loose.

Strangers in MAGA hats and scarves started showing up with suitcases. Someone egged the house, twice. Fellows’s motorcycle was stolen. Although it was freezing on Tuesday, lots of people were on the porch, people I didn’t recognize. I spotted Fellows outside, wearing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement jacket, his version of a sartorial troll. “We were at breakfast with Stewart,” he said. “He’s taking a nap real quick.”

[Listen: Even some J6ers don’t agree with Trump’s blanket pardon]

Rhodes is among the most infamous J6ers for a reason. For years, he recruited and cultivated a militant group to resist government tyranny. His estranged ex-wife recently said she fears that she and some of her kids are on his “kill list” (lawyers for Rhodes denied this). In 2023, he was sentenced to 18 years for plotting to thwart the peaceful transfer of power on January 6.

When I ran into Fellows, Rhodes had just been released from prison, after Trump had pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 defendants in his first hours back in office. Trump had repeatedly promised that the pardons were coming, but the fact that he included those charged with the most serious crimes came as a surprise. In effect, he chose not to distinguish between the mildly and the severely dangerous—people who demonstrated terrible judgment on one day, getting swept up in a mob, versus those who had planned to carry out violence, for example. (Rhodes, however, was one of 14 of individuals granted a commutation, meaning his sentence was erased, but he did not have all his rights restored.)

In the past year, I spoke with many January 6ers and their families as my partner, Lauren Ober, and I made a podcast about our neighbors’ house. I know how their lives have been upended by the prosecutions, and so I understand that, for many of them, day one was some kind of setting things right. Many of them absorbed Trump’s framing: They thought of their loved ones as actual hostages, held by the government. “Today, we are a free country,” I heard one tearful father of a January 6er say outside the D.C. jail on Monday night as he waited for his son to be released.

In an instant, thousands of families were living a day they’d feared would never come. But in Donald Trump’s America, one person’s order restored is another person’s lawless abandon.

In our podcast, my partner and I followed the story of Marie Johnatakis, whose husband, Taylor, had been serving a seven-year sentence in a federal prison in Springfield, Missouri. Three weeks ago, when her world was still in chaos, Marie bought a one-way ticket home for Taylor, back to Seattle. Her daughter kept cautioning her that politicians don’t keep their promises—that Trump wouldn’t follow through on the pardons he campaigned on—but Marie is an optimist. On Tuesday night, she sent me a picture of her and Taylor an hour after she had picked him up from prison. They sat side by side, smiling, like in a Christmas-card photo. I asked her if it would be hard to adjust to him being home but she said no; it would be seamless. Taylor has written each of their five children one letter a week from prison, and read them books over the phone. Family harmony will be restored, Marie believes, and so will the rightness of all things.

“I mean, this started with January 6, four years ago, and we were the scum of the Earth. We were ‘domestic terrorists.’ We were, you know, like, we were people that you were supposed to be afraid of. And then the January 6 committee and all of that, and every time Trump had anything with criminal charges,” she told me. “He’s not a savior,” she said of Trump. “But for a lot of us, this is a miracle. A lot of us feel like it was one miracle after another.”

[Read: Republican leaders once thought January 6 was ‘tragic’]

Before taking office for a second time, Trump sometimes said he would pardon defendants on a case-by-case basis. I spoke with Republican lawyers who mentioned the idea of a review board, a Justice Department committee that might evaluate cases such as Taylor’s. His was a middling case; he was not among the several hundred people convicted solely of misdemeanors, such as trespassing and disorderly conduct, but nor was he among the small group convicted of seditious conspiracy. His charges involved using a megaphone to yell “One, two, three, go!” and lead a crowd to push a barricade into a row of police officers. In an alternative version of reality in which Trump had smashed history with slightly more finesse, lawyers might have debated in a room about which degrees of “assault” qualified which people for pardons, and you can imagine how Taylor might have won his freedom. But instead Trump chose a blanket pardon. Now the QAnon Shaman is posting about how excited he is to “BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!!”

When I walked by my neighbors’ house on Tuesday afternoon, Nicole Reffitt, the wife of the man who was sentenced for bringing a gun to the Capitol, was outside too, being interviewed by a Dutch news crew. Her husband, Guy, was about to get out of jail, and the family would move back to Texas. But unlike Marie Johnatakis, Nicole seemed unsettled. Not all January 6ers are happy about the pardons. One woman, known as “MAGA Granny,” has said she doesn’t deserve a pardon and plans to complete her probation.

Nicole can think of a few defendants she believes don’t deserve one. “ I’m a law-and-order gal, really,” she told me. “And so not all charges should be gone there. People did really bad things that day.” In many people’s minds, her husband was one of them, even though he didn’t enter the Capitol or use his gun. She told me she was thinking of someone like Jacob Lang, who was captured on video swinging a baseball bat at police officers and thrusting a riot shield in their direction, according to an affidavit. At that moment, Lang, whose case never went to trial, was at the D.C. jail still waiting for his release, growing impatient. “These tyrannical animals will not stop and we need President Trump to get these men released ASAP!!!!!” someone posted on Monday from Lang’s X account. He was released Tuesday night.

Outside the D.C. jail on Monday and Tuesday, the former inmates were not quite running the asylum, but they were enchanting the crowd outside. So far, the 22 January 6ers held at the D.C. jail have been released slowly, a handful each day, but it has become a gathering place for the recently released from all over the country. On Tuesday night, Robert Morss, known as “Lego Man” because authorities found a Lego replica of the Capitol at his house, was a crowd favorite. Camera crews from Sweden, Japan, and Norway broadcast from outside the jail. Whenever Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” came on the speakers, the crowd belted it out.

On Tuesday night, I caught a glimpse of Rhodes at the edge of the crowd, giving an interview to a right-wing YouTuber. “It’s a day of celebration,” he said. “When President Trump was inaugurated, it was awesome. You know, like he said himself, God saved him to save America, and I believe that’s true. And then he turned around and saved us last night.” Rhodes’s only complaint was that he’d been given a commutation; he told the interviewer he was applying for a pardon. “ I think everyone deserves a pardon, without any, without any exception,” he said. “It’s impossible to get a fair trial here if you’re a Trump supporter … So if you have no chance of a fair trial, then you should be presumed innocent. That’s put back in your natural state, which is an innocent and free human being.” (Rhodes declined to talk with me.)

That’s the view of January 6 that follows naturally from the pardons: They were sham trials. It was actually a day of peace. Trump and his allies are likely to push this revised version of history for the next four years. House Speaker Mike Johnson has already announced that he will form a select subcommittee on January 6, “to continue our efforts to uncover the full truth that is owed to the American people.”

[Read: Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message]

Here is the truth. Prosecuting January 6ers did not require delicate forensics. Tens of thousands of hours of video show rioters beating up police with whatever tools are at hand. Five people died during the insurrection and in its immediate aftermath, and four police officers later died by suicide. Some 140 officers were assaulted, and many could never work again. This week, a retired officer, Michael Fanone, told Rhodes to go fuck himself live on CNN, and said he was worried for his safety and that of his family. Fanone is surely not alone. I think of the hundreds of D.C. citizens who served as jurors in January 6 cases that are now overturned, and the judges who presided over them.

When he sentenced Taylor Johnatakis, Judge Royce Lamberth wrote: “Political violence rots republics. Therefore, January 6 must not become a precedent for further violence against political opponents or governmental institutions.” Lamberth, who is 81 and whose wife died a few months ago, had a couple of new January 6 cases due to start this week, a father and son, but they have disappeared from the docket. In his sentencing letter for Johnatakis’s case, he wrote, “This is not normal.” I wanted to ask him about the pardons but did not get a response from his office.

In our conversation, Marie Johnatakis referred to Lamberth as one of the “sweet judges,” and she meant it earnestly. I’ve known her for more than a year, and she is a gentle person. But her critique of him, although kindly delivered, is a radical one. She compared Lamberth to Javert, the prosecutor in Les Miserables. In her view, the judge is so rigidly attached to the law that he can’t see the deeper truth, which is that a good man like her husband should not have gone to jail.

She and Taylor fly home today. The kids, she told me, will be making them dinner.

Things were not looking great for OpenAI at the end of last year. The company had been struggling with major delays on its long-awaited GPT-5 and hemorrhaging key talent—notably, Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, and Alec Radford, the researcher who’d set the company on the path of developing GPTs in the first place. Several people who left either joined OpenAI competitors or launched new ones. The start-up’s relationship with Microsoft, its biggest backer and a crucial provider of the computing infrastructure needed to train and deploy its AI models, was being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission.

And then there was Elon Musk. He’d co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and others, but the two had become fierce rivals. As “first buddy” to Donald Trump, Musk was suing OpenAI while rapidly building up his own AI venture, xAI, whose chatbot, Grok, has become a central feature on X. Amid all of this drama, Altman was notified by his sister, Annie, that she intended to sue him; she alleges that he sexually abused her when she was a child. (That lawsuit was filed at the start of this month; Altman and members of his family strongly denied the allegations through a statement posted on X.)

It’s remarkable, then, that with its latest maneuver, OpenAI has once again reestablished its dominance. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced the Stargate Project, a joint venture between SoftBank, Oracle, and OpenAI to pump $500 billion of private-sector investment over four years into building out U.S. AI infrastructure, with the intent of securing America’s leadership in AI development against China. Very little is known about how any of this will work in practice, but OpenAI is speaking as though it will reap most of the rewards: In its blog post announcing the partnership, it said that all of the infrastructure will be “for OpenAI.” The company’s president, Greg Brockman, underscored the point on X: “$500B for AI data centers for OpenAI.”

In one fell swoop, the project reduces OpenAI’s dependence on Microsoft, grants OpenAI (rather than its competitors) a mind-boggling sum of capital for computer chips—the hottest commodity in the AI race—and ties the company to Trump’s “America First” agenda, providing the best possible protective shield against Musk. (Musk blasted the project yesterday, alleging that it doesn’t “actually have the money,” which Altman then denied.) OpenAI (which entered into a corporate partnership with The Atlantic last year) did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear whether Stargate will even be able to spend $500 billion in four years. But consider just how astounding that goal is. In late 2023, as Microsoft started spending roughly $50 billion a year on expanding cloud-computing capacity, one semiconductor analyst had already declared that that was “the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen.” Rene Haas, the CEO of the semiconductor company Arm Holdings, said that even this pace of expansion across the industry would put global computing on track to consume more energy than India by 2030.

[Read: Microsoft’s hypocrisy on AI]

The move is a masterful display of Altman’s power at work. Altman has shown an uncanny ability throughout his career to get himself out of the toughest binds by leaning on his influential network, ingratiating himself with the powerful, and fundraising extraordinary amounts of capital. It was for these reasons that Altman successfully orchestrated his return to OpenAI as CEO in late 2023, after the board briefly ousted him. And it is why so many people have expressed alarm about his leadership in recent years. This week, he was at it again, standing next to Trump during the Stargate announcement in a symbol of solidarity and praising him later on X: “watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him … i’m not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!”

Although OpenAI has led the pack, many AI companies have worked over the past two years to influence policy and grow without government interference. Silicon Valley has always operated like this, and many other major tech CEOs took their place next to Trump this week. But the demands of generative AI are meaningfully different from, say, those of a traditional search engine or a social-media platform: Its development requires far more crucial physical infrastructure. Generative-AI models are of a size that necessitate the build-out of data centers at unprecedented scale. This, in turn, will give Silicon Valley outsize influence over the placement of power plants and even water lines across the country. Already, the past few years of dramatic data-center expansion have affected power reliability for millions of Americans and threatened to raise the cost of drinking water.

[Read: Billions of people in the palm of Trump’s hand]

The tech industry expertly laid the groundwork for this outcome: It made big promises about the wondrous potential of its technologies while creating a sense of peril by evoking China’s own technological advancement. During the Stargate announcement, Trump said that he would do what he could to strip away any regulatory barriers. “China is a competitor, and others are competitors,” he said. “I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency. We have to get this stuff built.”

Standing at the same podium, Altman emphasized America’s leadership. “I’m thrilled we get to do this in the United States of America,” he said. And then, in recognition of his new benefactor: “We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President.”

US President Donald Trump told the World Economic Forum about his lofty goals.

Trump's order targets a constitutional right automatically granting citizenship to anyone born in the country.

Government employees received emails threatening "consequences" if they did not report DEI work to the White House.

The president complains of a "tremendous" trade deficit with its neighbour, saying the US does not need Canadian energy, vehicles or lumber.

Over the past several years, a medication called mifepristone has been at the center of intense moral and legal fights in the United States. The pill is the only drug approved by the FDA specifically for ending pregnancies; combined with misoprostol, it makes up the country’s most common regimen for medication abortions, which accounted for more than 60 percent of terminations in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. And yet, mifepristone is difficult or impossible to acquire legally in about half of states. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, multiple federal lawsuits have threatened access to the pill at the national level.

Now a preliminary study suggests that using another drug in place of mifepristone may be just as effective for terminating an early pregnancy. The drug, called ulipristal acetate and sold as a 30-milligram pill under the brand name Ella, was approved by the FDA in 2010 as prescription-only emergency contraception. In a paper published today in the journal NEJM Evidence, researchers from the reproductive-rights nonprofit Gynuity Health Projects, along with partners in Mexico, reported the results of a trial in Mexico City that included more than 100 women with pregnancies up to nine weeks’ gestation. They found that medication abortion using 60 milligrams of ulipristal acetate (the equivalent of two doses of Ella) followed by misoprostol ended 97 percent of patients’ pregnancies without any additional follow-up care. (The FDA-approved regimen of mifepristone followed by misoprostol is about 95 percent effective, but because the new study did not directly compare the ulipristal acetate–misoprostol regimen to any other, researchers can’t yet say whether it’s superior or inferior to the standard regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol or misoprostol alone.)

The new study is small and did not include a control group. But the findings raise the provocative possibility that a drug already marketed as a contraceptive could also serve, at a higher dose, as a medication for abortion—a potential substitute for mifepristone, subject to fewer restrictions, wherever the latter is banned or difficult to get. The American abortion landscape, already fragmented, just got even more complicated.

Ulipristal acetate is a chemical relative of mifepristone and the most effective emergency-contraceptive pill available in the United States. When taken within five days of unprotected sex, it delays ovulation, which in turn prevents fertilization of an egg. Studies show that Ella works better than morning-after pills containing levonorgestrel, such as Plan B One-Step, and is more effective for a longer period of time after sex. Ella may also be more effective than other morning-after pills in people with a BMI above 26, which includes most American women over the age of 20. Although Ella’s 30-milligram dose is enough to prevent pregnancy, previous studies have suggested that the amount is highly unlikely to help end pregnancy as mifepristone does, by blocking a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb or disrupting the uterine lining.

Some experts have long suspected that a higher dose of ulipristal acetate could yield a different result. But the field has been generally reluctant to pursue research on the drug as a possible abortifacient out of concern for its role as an emergency contraceptive. Studies have repeatedly shown that a lower dose of mifepristone can act as an effective emergency contraceptive when taken soon after unprotected sex, with few side effects. It’s sold that way in a handful of countries where abortion is legal and widely available—but in the U.S., it was never approved for emergency contraception, and reproductive-rights advocates have not pushed for it. “Our idea, when we developed ulipristal acetate, was precisely to get away from abortion,” says André Ulmann, the founder and former chair of HRA Pharma, the drug’s original manufacturer. He and his colleagues worried, he told me, that any association with abortion would endanger their ability to market the drug for emergency contraception.

[Read: The other abortion pill]

The new study may very well validate Ulmann’s old fears. If further research confirms its findings, Americans seeking abortions may soon have a safe and effective workaround in places where mifepristone is restricted—and American abortion opponents will have a big new target. In an NEJM Evidence editorial accompanying the Gynuity study, Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at UC San Francisco, argued as much, writing, “There is a risk that the findings of this study could be misapplied and used by politicians to try to restrict ulipristal for emergency contraception.” Beverly Winikoff, the president and founder of Gynuity Health Projects and a co-author of the study, told me that she knew the stakes when she and her colleagues began their research. But part of Gynuity’s mission is to safeguard abortion care. In Winikoff’s view, another potential option for medication abortion in the U.S. was too important to ignore.

In 2022, a coalition of groups that oppose abortion sued the FDA in an effort to pull mifepristone off the market. In June, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the challenge, ruling that the anti-abortion groups lacked standing. But in October, three states filed an updated version of the same suit in federal court; last week, a federal judge ruled that the case can proceed. Currently, 14 states have a near-total ban on medication abortion, and more than a dozen others limit how the drugs can be distributed, with requirements such as an in-person visit, an ultrasound examination, and a 24-hour waiting period. More restrictions may be on the way: Project 2025, the conservative-policy plan developed by the Heritage Foundation for an incoming GOP administration, calls for the FDA to entirely withdraw the drug’s approval. President Donald Trump, however, has been inconsistent, saying that he doesn’t plan to block access to the abortion pills while simultaneously refusing to rule out the possibility.

In light of the new study, it’s hard to imagine that anti-abortion groups won’t seek similar restrictions on Ella, threatening its availability as an emergency contraceptive. Anti-abortion activists and Republican lawmakers have repeatedly sought to blur the line between abortion and contraception by reasoning that pregnancy begins not, as federal law states, after a fertilized egg has implanted in the uterus, but at the moment when egg and sperm meet. Students for Life of America claims, for example, that all forms of hormonal birth control are abortifacients. “Abortion advocates have long denied Ella’s potential to end an embryo’s life, but this study contradicts that narrative,” Donna Harrison, the director of research for the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists—which was a plaintiff in last year’s Supreme Court case—told me in a statement. “Women deserve to be fully informed about how this drug works, as well as its risks.” (Until now, no evidence had indicated the drug’s abortifacient potential; at the dose approved for emergency contraception, there is still no evidence that Ella can disrupt an established pregnancy.)

[Read: Abortion pills have changed the post-Roe calculus]

The Gynuity study points to a possible role for ulipristal acetate as part of an abortion regimen, Kelly Cleland, the executive director of the American Society for Emergency Contraception, told me. But it doesn’t change what we know about its use for emergency contraception. For now, Ella remains on the market as just that.

Trump repeated familiar grievances and threatened allies like Canada and the European Union with tariffs.