This story incorporates reporting from Bill McEwen, Space.com and CNN on MSN.com.

NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, currently stationed aboard the International Space Station (ISS), have successfully conducted a spacewalk as part of their extended mission. Their mission, originally intended for a…

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Senator Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, is upset. She believes that someone in the United States Air Force decided to interpret President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to terminate “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear,” just the way it was written.

No one is quite sure what happened, but somehow this order resulted in the excision from a U.S. Air Force training course of some materials about the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black World War II fighter pilots known as the Red Tails because of their aircraft’s distinctive markings. Air Force officials confirmed on Saturday that a video had been removed from the training curriculum but only because it was “intertwined in courses now under review,” and it is now back in the curriculum.

Britt referred to this kind of action as “malicious compliance,” meaning a kind of opposition through aggressive and sometimes overly literal implementation of a command or policy. Rather than refuse to obey, the person or group engaging in malicious compliance takes a kind of “monkey’s paw” approach, implementing the directives as destructively as possible. (Every teenager who has loaded the dishwasher improperly on purpose, hoping never to be told to clear the table again, knows what malicious compliance means.)

Britt also tagged Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on social media. Hegseth, who was nominated for his position in part because of his vow to root out wokeness and DEI and to replace them with “lethality,” responded enthusiastically: “Amen! We’re all over it Senator. This will not stand.”

Britt’s complaint about malicious compliance is a diversion. Trump’s wave of executive orders is designed to be performatively malicious. My colleague Adam Serwer years ago noted that, for the MAGA movement, “the cruelty is the point,” and now Trump’s orders make clear that the malice is the policy.

The series of presidential decrees is largely intended to delight the Republican base; unfortunately, government workers cannot divine what Trump really meant. The president has not given any cue that his orders should be interpreted in some more generous way. In fact, days before the Air Force kerfuffle, federal workers received an email from their supervisors (based on a template provided by the Office of Personnel Management) that could have come straight from a party apparatchik in the old Soviet Union. This memo not only told staff to be on the lookout for attempts to hide DEI-related ideological contamination, but warned them of their obligation to rat out colleagues who did so or face “adverse” job consequences themselves.

The advisory, which has since been taken off a government website, continued: “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024”—that is, since Election Day—“to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies,” employees must report it to OPM within ten days.

This is not exactly language that encourages anyone to use common sense and good judgment to decide what constitutes DEI contraband. This is a command that says, in effect: This could mean anything; if you don’t report it, and we find it, you’re in trouble. When government employees get a memo like that, they are not inclined to sit around wondering what counts and what doesn’t.

Trump’s other executive orders are likewise designed to show the GOP base that the new administration is doing all of the things that Trump promised he’d do—even if they’re things that, legally, no president can do. Trump had pledged, for example, to eliminate birthright citizenship, so he sharpied out part of the Fourteenth Amendment and declared victory. He froze federal grants and loans—an order now temporarily blocked by a judge—which could have endangered any number of programs, including school lunches. (And about time, according to Representative Rich McCormick, Republican of Georgia, who told CNN today that those indolent kids need to go get jobs—even, apparently, schoolchildren who aren’t old enough to work—instead of “spong[ing] off the government”).

What would non-malicious compliance with such a mandate even look like? Instead of a lunch, are schools supposed to hand poor kids a glass of water and then wish them luck in their job search?

Of course, the Trump administration knows that aid to states and localities will begin to flow again, that children will be getting lunches, and that babies born on U.S. soil are citizens. The goal of all these orders is not to implement policy, but to generate outrage, report the spasms of liberal apoplexy to the MAGA faithful, and then, when necessary, go to court. And why not? The president now has a politically sympathetic Supreme Court majority that worked hard to keep him out of prison while he was a candidate, and has functionally immunized him against almost any challenge now that he’s back in office. Trump’s people know that they cannot actually shake the Constitution like an Etch A Sketch and make birthright citizenship disappear, but why not give it a shot, especially if a trolling executive order makes the base happy?

Trump and his people may also believe that a sleet storm of executive orders, some of which might stick here and there while others melt on contact with reality, is a way to demonstrate competence. They are likely still stung by the fiasco over the 2017 travel ban that initially got swatted down in court, and this time they want to appear as if they know what they’re doing.

But this is merely mimicking competence and energy. The “return to work” order, for example, is a MAGA fan favorite, because it plays to a common stereotype among many Americans that federal employees who work from home are scamming goldbrickers plodding around the house in their bunny slippers and tapping the occasional key on a laptop. Although showing up to an office or worksite in-person is (and should be) a basic requirement of most jobs, remote work in many cases benefits the government and the taxpayer: It reduces congestion in cities, and it offloads a lot of overhead costs (heat, water, lighting, etc.) onto the worker. That’s why the government and private industry were trending toward remote arrangements long before the pandemic.

In any case, many federal offices don’t have enough space to bring everyone back, but Trump may be attempting to make government service onerous enough that some of them will leave anyway: All federal employees have until February 6 to accept a sizable buyout if they cannot or will not return to in-person work. In the end, the RTO power play isn’t really about trying to fill empty offices. Instead, Trump is telling federal employees that all of the arrangements they’ve made with their departments about schedules, child care, commutes, and staffing are now invalid, because their career and service matters less than making some red-state voter feel that the president finally stuck it to them and their co-workers.

Maybe a non-malicious way to enforce such orders exists. But that’s not the point.

Related:

The cruelty is the point. (From 2018) The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump tries to seize the “power of the purse.” What an undervaccinated America would look like China’s DeepSeek surprise

Today’s News

A district-court judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s pause on federal grants and loans. Trump signed an executive order that would exclude gender-transition care from federal insurance programs. The Department of Justice announced yesterday that it has fired more than a dozen officials who worked on the criminal investigations into Trump.

Evening Read

Illustration by Danielle Del Plato

Just Say No to Terrible White LEDs

By Gilad Edelman

God said, “Let there be light”—everyone knows that. But God did not specify what color light, and this would eventually prove problematic.

In the age of the LED light bulb, consumers have an unfathomable range of lighting options. This has, perversely, made the task of pleasantly illuminating our homes harder, not easier.

Read the full article.

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South Korean authorities have released initial findings concerning the Jeju Air plane crash that occurred last month. Submitted to the UN aviation agency, along with authorities in the United States, France, and Thailand, the…

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During an American election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded “dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns. Pod­casters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous, incendiary lies about a candidate. They can boost those falsehoods through targeted online advertising. No special courts or election rules can stop the disinformation from spreading before voters see it. The court of public opinion, which over the past decade has seen and heard everything, no longer cares. U.S. elections are now a political Las Vegas: Anything goes.

But that’s not the way elections are run in other countries. In Britain, political parties are, at least during the run-up to an election, limited to spending no more than £54,010 per candidate. In Germany, as in many other European countries, the state funds political parties, proportionate to their number of elected parliamentarians, so that politicians do not have to depend on, and become corrupted by, wealthy donors. In Poland, courts fast-track election-­related libel cases in the weeks before a vote in order to discourage people from lying.

Nor is this unique to Europe. Many democracies have state or public media that are obligated, at least in principle, to give equal time to all sides. Many require political donations to be transparent, with the names of donors listed in an online registry. Many have limits on political advertising. Some countries also have rules about hate speech and indict people who break them.

Countries apply these laws to create conditions for fair debate, to build trust in the system, and to inspire confidence in the winning candidates. Some democracies believe that transparency matters—­that voters should know who is funding their candidates, as well as who is paying for political messages on social media or anywhere else. In some places, these rules have a loftier goal: to prevent the rise of anti­democratic extremism of the kind that has engulfed democracies—­and especially European democracies—­­in the past.

But for how much longer can democracies pursue these goals? We live in a world in which algorithms controlled by American and Chinese oligarchs choose the messages and images seen by millions of people; in which money can move through secret bank accounts with the help of crypto schemes; and in which this dark money can then boost anonymous social-media accounts with the aim of shaping public opinion. In such a world, how can any election rules be enforced? If you are Albania, or even the United Kingdom, do you still get to set the parameters of your public debate? Or are you now forced to be Las Vegas too?

Although it’s easy to get distracted by the schoolyard nicknames and irresponsible pedophilia accusations that Elon Musk flings around, these are the real questions posed by his open, aggressive use of X to spread false information and promote extremist and anti-European politicians in the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere. The integrity of elections—­and the possibility of debate untainted by misinformation injected from abroad—is equally challenged by TikTok, the Chinese platform, and by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, whose subsidiaries include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. TikTok says the company does not accept any paid political advertising. Meta, which announced in January that it is abandoning fact-checking on its sites in the U.S., also says it will continue to comply with European laws. But even before Zucker­berg’s radical policy change, these promises were empty. Meta’s vaunted content curation and moderation have never been transparent. Nobody knew, and nobody knows, what exactly Facebook’s algorithm was promoting and why. Even an occasional user of these platforms encounters spammers, scammers, and opaque accounts running foreign influence operations. No guide to the algorithm, and no real choices about it, are available on Meta products, X, or TikTok.

In truth, no one knows if any platforms really comply with political-funding rules either, because nobody outside the companies can fully monitor what happens online during an intense election campaign—and after the voting has ended, it’s too late. According to declassified Romanian-intelligence documents, someone allegedly spent more than $1 million on TikTok content in the 18 months before an election in support of a Romanian presidential candidate who declared that he himself had spent nothing at all. In a belated attempt to address this and other alleged discrepancies, a Romanian court canceled the first round of that election, a decision that itself damaged Romanian democracy.

Not all of this is new. Surreptitious political-party funding was a feature of the Cold War, and the Russian government has continued this practice, sometimes by offering deals to foreign business­people close to pro-Russian politicians. Press moguls with international political ambitions are hardly a novelty. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who has U.S. citizenship, has long played an outsize role in U.K. politics through his media companies. John Major, the former British prime minister and Conservative Party leader, has said that in 1997, Murdoch threatened to pull his newspapers’ support unless the prime minister pursued a more anti-­European policy. Major refused. Murdoch has said, “I have never asked a prime minister for anything,” but one of his Conservative-­leaning tabloids, The Sun, did endorse the Labour Party in the next election. Major lost.

That incident now seems almost quaint. Even at the height of its influence, the print edition of The Sun sold 4 million copies a day. More to the point, it operated, and still does, within the constraints of U.K. rules and regulations, as do all broadcast and print media. Murdoch’s newspapers take British libel and hate-speech laws into consideration when they run stories. His business strategy is necessarily shaped by rules limiting what a single company can own. After his journalists were accused of hacking phones and bribing police in the early 2000s, Murdoch himself had to testify before an investigative commission, and he closed down one of his tabloids for good.

[McKay Coppins: Europe braces for Trump]

Social media not only has far greater reach—Musk’s personal X account has more than 212 million followers, giving him enormous power to set the news agenda around the world—it also exists outside the legal system. Under the American law known as Section 230, passed nearly three decades ago, internet platforms are not treated as publishers in the U.S. In practice, neither Facebook nor X has the same legal responsibility for what appears on their platforms as do, say, The Wall Street Journal and CNN. And this, too, has consequences: Americans have created the information climate that other countries must accept, and this allows deceptive election practices to thrive. If countries don’t have their own laws, and until recently most did not, Section 230 effectively requires them to treat social-media companies as if they exist outside their legal systems too.

Brazil broke with this pattern last year, when a judge demanded that Musk comply with Brazilian laws against spreading misinformation and political extremism, and forced X offline until he did. Several European countries, including the U.K., Germany, and France, have also passed laws designed to bring the platforms into compliance with their own legal systems, mandating fines for companies that violate hate-speech laws or host other illegal content. But these laws are controversial and hard to enforce. Besides, “illegal speech” is not necessarily the central problem. No laws prevented Musk from interviewing Alice Weidel, a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, on X, thereby providing her with a huge platform, available to no other political candidate, in the month before a national election. The interview, which included several glaringly false statements (among others, that Weidel was the “leading” candidate), was viewed 45 million times in 24 hours, a number far beyond the reach of any German public or private media.

Only one institution on the planet is large enough and powerful enough to write and enforce laws that could make the tech companies change their policies. Partly for that reason, the European Union may soon become one of the Trump administration’s most prominent targets. In theory, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which took full effect last year, can be used to regulate, fine, and, in extreme circumstances, ban internet companies whose practices clash with European laws. Yet a primary intent of the act is not punitive, but rather to open up the platforms: to allow vetted researchers access to platform data, and to give citizens more transparency about what they hear and see. Freedom of speech also means the right to receive information, and at the moment social-media companies operate behind a curtain. We don’t know if they are promoting or suppressing certain points of view, curbing or encouraging orchestrated political campaigns, discouraging or provoking violent riots. Above all, we don’t know who is paying for misinformation to be spread online.

In the past, the EU has not hesitated to try to apply European law to tech companies. Over the past decade, for example, Google has faced three fines totaling more than $8 billion for breaking antitrust law (though one of these fines was overturned by the EU’s General Court in 2024).

In November, the European Commission fined Meta more than $800 million for unfair trade practices. But for how much longer will the EU have this authority? In the fall, J. D. Vance issued an extraordinarily unsubtle threat, one that is frequently repeated in Europe. “If NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance,” Vance told an interviewer, “why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” Mark Zuckerberg, echoing Vance’s misuse of the expression free speech to mean “freedom to conceal company practices from the public,” put it even more crudely. In a conversation with Joe Rogan in January, Zuckerberg said he feels “optimistic” that President Donald Trump will intervene to stop the EU from enforcing its own antitrust laws: “I think he just wants America to win.”

Does America “winning” mean that European democracies, and maybe other democracies, lose? Some European politicians think it might. Robert Habeck, the German vice chancellor and a leader of that country’s Green Party, believes that Musk’s frenzies of political activity on X aren’t the random blurts of an addled mind, but rather are “logical and systematic.” In his New Year’s address, Habeck said that Musk is deliberately “strengthening those who are weakening Europe,” including the explicitly anti-European AfD. This, he believes, is because “a weak Europe is in the interest of those for whom regulation is an inappropriate limitation of their power.”

Until recently, Russia was the most important state seeking to undermine European institutions. Vladimir Putin has long disliked the EU because it restricts Russian companies’ ability to intimidate and bribe European political leaders and companies, and because the EU is larger and more powerful than Russia, whereas European countries on their own are not. Now a group of American oligarchs also want to undermine European institutions, because they don’t want to be regulated—and they may have the American president on their side. Quite soon, the European Union, along with Great Britain and other democracies around the world, might find that they have to choose between their alliance with the United States and their ability to run their own elections and select their own leaders without the pressure of aggressive outside manipulation. Ironically, countries, such as Brazil, that don’t have the same deep military, economic, and cultural ties to the U.S. may find it easier to maintain the sovereignty of their political systems and the transparency of their information ecosystems than Europeans.

A crunch point is imminent, when the European Commission finally concludes a year-long investigation into X. Tellingly, two people who have advised the commission on this investigation would talk with me only off the record, because the potential for reprisals against them and their organizations—­whether it be online trolling and harassment or lawsuits—­is too great. Still, both advisers said that the commission has the power to protect Europe’s sovereignty, and to force the platforms to be more transparent. “The commission should look at the raft of laws and rules it has available and see how they can be applied,” one of them told me, “always remembering that this is not about taking action against a person’s voice. This is the commission saying that everyone’s voice should be equal.”

At least in theory, no country is obligated to become an electoral Las Vegas, as America has. Global democracies could demand greater transparency around the use of algorithms, both on social media and in the online-advertising market more broadly. They could offer consumers more control over what they see, and more information about what they don’t see. They could enforce their own campaign-funding laws. These changes could make the internet more open and fair, and therefore a better, safer place for the exercise of free speech. If the chances of success seem narrow, it’s not because of the lack of a viable legal framework—­rather it’s because, at the moment, cowardice is as viral as one of Musk’s tweets.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Can Europe Stop Elon Musk?”

To see how far the lines of normal have moved since President Donald Trump freed the January 6ers, briefly return to the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign. At the time, a hot issue was whether Trump harbored fascist tendencies, as some of his former aides alleged. The very notion struck most conservatives, including some who have criticized him from time to time, as ludicrous. “Trump says crude and unworthy things and behaved abysmally after the 2020 election,” National Review’s editor in chief, Rich Lowry, conceded, “but the idea that he bears any meaningful resemblance to these cracked movements is a stupid smear.”

Looking to dismiss the case, Lowry then reached for the wildest example of fascist behavior he could think of: “Obviously, Trump isn’t deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to clash with his enemies on the streets.”

Obviously? Immediately upon assuming office, Trump issued sweeping pardons and commutations for the approximately 1,500 people prosecuted for participating in the January 6 attacks, including convicted violent offenders. He might not have literally deployed any mobs yet, but he has freed members of paramilitary groups that are loyal to him, and who may see their pardons and commutations as license to act on his behalf again.

[Read: January 6ers got out of prison—and came to my neighborhood]

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, led military-style maneuvers on January 6 and had an armed strike force nearby. This week, while strolling the Capitol in a kind of victory tour, Rhodes told CNN, “I don’t regret calling out the election as what it was.” The Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who had to direct the attacks from a distance (a judge had barred him from the city for vandalizing a Black church), expressed vindication and a desire for revenge. “We went through hell—and I’m gonna tell you, it was worth it,” he exulted on The Alex Jones Show. “The people who did this [to us], they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars.” And the “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander said in a livestream, “I would storm the Capitol again for Donald Trump. I would start a militia for Donald Trump.”

The J6 pardons have chagrined many Republicans. But it is not going to make many of them rethink their support for Trump. If you want to understand why, look again at the sentence that Lowry wrote just before laughing off the hysterical fear of Trumpist paramilitaries. Trump “says crude and unworthy things.” He “behaved abysmally.”

Even when Republicans in good MAGA standing can bring themselves to scold Trump, their criticism is limited to discrete acts. Trump can say or do something bad, but he cannot be something bad. To acknowledge that his bad acts follow from his character and beliefs, and therefore offer a guide to his future actions, would throw into question the morality and wisdom of supporting him.

Before the fact, vanishingly few prominent Republican politicians or conservative intellectuals actively endorsed the notion of freeing the J6 criminals en masse. The party line before the inauguration held that Trump was in his rights to grant clemency to some of the nonviolent offenders, but not to the ones who’d beat up cops or planned the operation. The week before he was sworn in as vice president, J. D. Vance said, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Even Representative Jim Jordan, one of the most flamboyant Trump devotees in Congress, wouldn’t endorse a full suite of pardons.

After Trump went ahead, his allies mostly stopped short of defending the pardons. Instead, they turned to a familiar menu of evasive maneuvers. Some expressed an implausible degree of unfamiliarity with Trump’s actions. (“I don’t know whether there were pardons given to individuals who assaulted police officers,” Senator Susan Collins said.) Others fell back on whataboutism. (“I assume you’re asking me about the Biden pardons of his family,” Senator Chuck Grassley sneered in response to a reporter’s question about January 6. “I’m just talking about the Biden pardons, because that is so selfish.”) Most expressed a desire to ignore the issue altogether. (“We’re not looking backwards; we’re looking forwards,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said.) Awkwardly, almost immediately after bleating about their desire to move forward, House Republicans announced a new committee to “investigate” January 6, which presumably will advance Trump’s alt-history of the event as an FBI setup, a Democratic security failure, a day of love, or, somehow, all three.

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

The most revealing statement on the pardons came from House Speaker Mike Johnson. “The president’s made his decision,” he said. “I don’t second-guess those.” Here, Johnson was stating overtly what most of his colleagues had only revealed tacitly: that he does not believe that his job permits him to criticize, let alone oppose, Trump’s actions.

This admission has profound implications. It shows that Trump faces no effective constraints from within his party. Given the Republican trifecta, this means he faces no effective opposition from within the elected branches of the federal government. Even if his allies personally believe that a line exists that the president cannot or will not cross, what matters is that if he does cross it, nothing will happen to him. This realization ought to shake their confidence that the next imagined red line will hold. Instead, they have declined to revise any of their deeper beliefs about Trump.

The refusal to draw any broader conclusions from the January 6 pardons is evident not just on Capitol Hill but also in the handful of reproachful articles published in conservative media. The pardons are “a poor start for an administration that has pledged to end the partisanship of law enforcement and restore public order,” National Review editorialized. “This is a rotten message from a President about political violence done on his behalf,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote. “For those who have supported Trump, this is a moment to recognize when he doesn’t measure up, morally or constitutionally,” the editors of The Free Press observed. The implication of these dutiful reprimands is that Trump has failed to live up to his values, rather than having fulfilled them.

In the midst of the Soviet show trials in 1936, Workers Age, an American communist newspaper, gently rebuked Stalin for his heavy-handedness. Sure, the defendants were guilty of sabotage at the behest of Trotsky, but execution was an excessive punishment. “Furthermore,” the editorial declared, “we do not hesitate to say that the bureaucratic regime of Stalin in the CPSU makes it extremely difficult for healthy, constructive critical opposition forces developing in the Party ranks”—as if inhibiting criticism of Stalin was some kind of unintended consequence of executing his rivals.

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

The conservatives distressed over Trump’s mass pardons have a similar lack of curiosity about his motives. Why Trump would take such unfortunate actions, they do not ask. Could it be because he believes fundamentally that opposition to him is per se criminal, action on his behalf is per se legal, and any outcome in which he loses is illegitimate?

One might hope that Trump’s congressional allies, temporarily disappointed by his regrettable lapse in judgment regarding the January 6 pardons, might rethink their approach to the ongoing confirmation fights, which revolve around fears that the president will abuse his power. Given Trump’s reported desire to use the military to shoot peaceful protesters, maybe find a defense secretary who hasn’t written a series of hair-on-fire books depicting American liberals as tantamount to hostile enemy combatants. And given Trump’s obsession with criminalizing his critics, they might pick an FBI director who does not have an enemies list and who hasn’t produced a recording of a Trump anthem performed by violent insurrectionists.

Alas, the “moment,” as The Free Press revealingly put it, for expressing disappointment with the president has already passed. They are back to the workaday routine of supporting Trump’s efforts to keep his administration free of any official who might be stricken with conscience. There may be more moments of concern in the future. Indeed, the party’s acquiescence to Trump’s appetite for revenge and corruption all but guarantees it. But those moments, too, shall pass.

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.

Plaintiff had accused CNN of his destroying his reputation by branding him a profiteer who exploited desperate Afghans.

One of the most powerful inventions of the 20th century is also an object that no one ever wants a reason to use. The sexual-assault-evidence collection box, colloquially known as the “rape kit,” is a simple yet potent tool: a small case, perhaps made of cardboard, containing items such as sterile nail clippers, cotton swabs, slides for holding bodily fluids, paper bags, and a tiny plastic comb. Designed to gather and preserve biological evidence found on the body of a person reporting a sexual assault, it introduced standardized forensics into the investigation of rape where there had previously been no common protocol. Its contents could be used in court to establish facts so that juries wouldn’t have to rely solely on testimony, making it easier to convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent.

The kit, conceived within the Chicago Police Department in the mid-1970s, was trademarked under the name “Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit,” after Sergeant Louis Vitullo. The Chicago police officer had a well-publicized role in the 1967 conviction of Richard Speck, who had murdered eight student nurses in one night. Vitullo’s second claim to fame is more complicated. The Secret History of the Rape Kit, a revealing new book by the journalist Pagan Kennedy, doubles as an account of the largely unknown history of the collection box’s real inventor—a woman named Martha “Marty” Goddard, whose broader goal of empowering survivors led her to cede credit to a man. In a cruel irony, a woman who drove major social change failed to get her due as a result of politics and sexism.

Kennedy became obsessed with the rape kit in 2018, after hearing Christine Blasey Ford testify during the confirmation process for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and wondered, “Had anything ever been specifically invented to discourage sexual assault?” Her investigative dive begins in 1970s Chicago, where the women’s-liberation movement was gaining ground and the police had a reputation for corruption. The brutality of the police crackdown on protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention was still fresh in the public mind. Rape was also rampant throughout the city, Kennedy writes—in 1973, according to an article in the Daily Herald, an estimated 16,000 sexual assaults took place, only a tenth of which were reported. And less than 10 percent of those 10 percent led to a criminal trial. In court, the proceedings usually devolved into “he said, she said.”

In 1974, Goddard was a divorcée in her early 30s working for a philanthropic organization that tapped into a local family department-store fortune to help Chicago’s needy. The job gave Goddard, whom a friend once described as “fucking relentless,” access to a wide swath of the people who formed the city’s civic backbone. She also volunteered for a teen-crisis center, where she heard stories from runaways who had experienced sexual abuse. Goddard, who grew up with an abusive father and had briefly run away from home as a teenager, became consumed with the question of why so few women reported rapes—and why perpetrators were rarely punished.

That year, she met with the state’s attorney Bernard Carey to discuss the “failure points in the sexual assault evidence system.” He soon appointed her to a new citizens’ advisory panel affiliated with the city’s new Rape Task Force. Goddard thus gained access to the police department and, more important, to its crime lab. She discovered that it was a mess. Cops told her that they didn’t even receive usable evidence from the hospital, such as properly collected swabs of semen, saliva, and blood. This was in part because hospital staff had never been trained to collect it properly. But even when police officers did have evidence, they weren’t always trained to preserve it.

Goddard approached Sergeant Vitullo, the crime lab’s chief microanalyst, with a written description of her vision: a sexual-assault-evidence collection kit. As one of Goddard’s colleagues told Kennedy, Vitullo “screamed at her” and told her to leave his office.

A few days later, Kennedy reports, Vitullo invited Goddard back and, to her surprise, showed her a complete mock-up of exactly the box she had described. Both the sergeant and the State’s Attorney’s Office wanted the credit for Goddard’s idea. As a compromise, Goddard agreed to have the kit recognized as a collaboration among them. Her accommodation was realistic and also strategic. She knew that “[Vitullo’s] name could open doors—and hers couldn’t,” Kennedy writes. Goddard was a visionary, but she was not a lawyer, a cop, or an expert, and she had no formal experience in forensics.

[Read: American law does not take rape seriously]

In 1978, a nonprofit group Goddard had formed, Citizens Committee for Victims Assistance, filed a trademark for the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit. With this move, Goddard had, as Kennedy puts it, “seemed to collaborate in her own erasure.” That same year, The New York Times noted that the “Vitullo kit” was being used in 72 hospitals across Chicago, citing Goddard as the kit’s co-creator. Mentions of her in the media were otherwise glancing at best. Upon Vitullo’s death in 2006, Kennedy writes, “an obituary in a local paper celebrated him as the ‘man who invented the rape kit.’”

Many women inventors have shared a similar fate. This past November, Kay Koplovitz, a co-founder of the business accelerator Springboard Enterprises and the founder of television’s USA Networks, noted in an interview with The New York Times that “if a woman co-founder has at least one male co-founder, the woman somehow does not get credit for raising the capital.” In science, this phenomenon is so common that it even has a term of art: the Matilda Effect, named for the writer and women’s activist Matilda Joslyn Gage. There are scores of examples of the Matilda Effect, but to pick just a couple: Lise Meitner described the theory behind what she named nuclear fission, but credit went to her former lab partner Otto Hahn, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944. Eunice Newton Foote described the greenhouse effect in 1856, but posterity remembers John Tyndall, who presented his own experiments three years later. No known photograph of Foote remains today.

Every one of these backstories carries its own particular ironies. In Kennedy’s telling, Goddard’s obscurity stems from the sacrifices she made for the rape kit to exist. Not only did she relinquish credit for her invention, but she also did all the grunt work to get it out into the world—including the fundraising. Conservative philanthropists were just as squeamish as Sergeant Vitullo had initially been about the idea of being associated with sexual shame; the word rape simply carried too much stigma. And so she turned to an organization that had made shamelessness its mission; through her nonprofit, she applied for and received a grant of $10,000 from the Playboy Foundation. “I decided,” she later said, “we had to put aside our feelings for objectification of women in [Playboy] magazine.”

Taking money from the philanthropic arm of a nudie-magazine publisher turned out to be a canny move. Playboy’s foundation, also headquartered in Chicago, gave generously to progressive causes. Hugh Hefner, the founder and editor in chief of Playboy, considered the feminist movement “a sister cause to his own effort to free men from shame and guilt,” Kennedy wrote in The New York Times, in an opinion article that fueled the book.

Kennedy does not mention that Hefner was the subject of several accusations of sexual assault, both before and after his death in 2017. (The director Peter Bogdanovich claimed in his book The Killing of the Unicorn, published in 1984, that Hefner sexually assaulted Bogdanovich’s late partner, the playmate Dorothy Stratten. Hefner denied the allegation.)

Still, when it came to Goddard’s invention, Playboy stayed true to its public mission, and the organization donated more than money. The magazine’s graphic artists designed the outer box of the original rape kit to feature a bright-blue line drawing of a woman’s face swathed in a thick mane of wavy hair. An early “Vitullo kit” was recently acquired by the Smithsonian.

In 1982, New York City adopted the Vitullo kit, and Goddard commuted to the East Coast to train doctors, nurses, and cops. The Department of Justice paid her to travel to other states that wanted to develop their own rape-kit programs. Goddard invented not just the box but the entire training system, teaching hospital staff and the police to collaborate on evidence collection.

Without that essential training to help surmount powerful systemic barriers, the kit would have been useless—and in that sense, the job is still woefully unfinished. Untested rape kits have languished across the country: In 2009, more than 11,000 were discovered abandoned in Detroit; in 2014, Memphis had backlog of more than 12,000 kits, and 200 more were found in a warehouse. One study estimates that from 2014 to 2018, 300,000 to 400,000 kits remained untested in the United States. Since then, aggressive fundraising efforts with help from survivors, combined with $350 million from the Department of Justice, have whittled down that backlog significantly.

[Read: An epidemic of disbelief]

Kennedy examines the gaps that still remain in the medical system. In 2021, just over 2,100 Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner–certified nurses were registered with the International Association of Forensic Nurses. The examination requires survivors to undergo hours of waiting and testing, and can feel invasive and re-traumatizing. This may be one reason so few people—only one-fourth of victims— report rapes, she writes.

Some of these limitations can be traced to a lack of effective innovation in the 50 years since the Vitullo kit was developed. In recent years, several women have conceived of and even sold at-home rape kits that would allow a victim to collect evidence of her assault herself. These ideas and products were met with strong resistance—and in one case, death threats. Detractors argued that self-collected evidence would never be taken seriously by juries. Apparently, accusers were still considered unreliable. Only after COVID made virtual doctor visits a necessity did the push for at-home testing gain a modicum of traction. With an at-home test, the victim received instructions, sometimes via a virtual nurse, on how to swab her own body, collect other physical evidence, and seal the kit.

In the late 1980s, Goddard abruptly disappeared from public life and lost contact with friends and family members. Kennedy painstakingly traces the confluence of events that may have led to her decline: In the late ’70s, she survived a violent rape while on vacation in Hawaii. A workaholic, she seems to have reached the point of burnout by the end of the decade. Somewhere along the line, she developed a problem with drinking. Kennedy concludes that she “bounced around the country, taking odd jobs and drinking heavily,” until finally settling in Arizona.

Kennedy works deftly with sometimes scant information, weaving her reporting on Goddard’s life and contribution into the narrative. The result is less a true-crime story, as advertised in the subtitle, than a page-turning mystery. The subject is also personal for Kennedy, who was molested in childhood. She confesses that her book was fueled by rage, pain, and her desire to restore “the woman who had believed little girls” to her rightful place in history.

As Goddard’s life shrank, the influence of the rape kit grew exponentially—especially after DNA fingerprinting was invented in 1984, eventually making it possible to trace a single drop of sperm or blood to a specific person. Evidence stored in the kits, sometimes for decades, allowed cold cases to be solved and wrongful convictions to be overturned.

Goddard’s last years were marked by alcoholism, erratic behavior, and diagnoses of dementia and “manic depression.” In 2015—the year of her death—a CNN reporter managed to track Goddard down. The resulting article credited Vitullo with the invention but noted Goddard’s role in distributing it, describing her as the “formidable woman” behind the “successful man.” During the interview, Goddard expressed anger at how her role had been downsized, calling Vitullo “an asshole.” The sergeant “had nothing to do with it,” she told the reporter. But those comments never made it into the story, partly because Vitullo was no longer around to defend himself and partly because Goddard struck the journalist as an unreliable witness—a woman who couldn’t be believed.

Thanks to Kennedy’s dogged reporting, CNN’s story wasn’t the final one, and Goddard can step out from the shadows of history. Upon Goddard’s death, no ceremonies or memorials marked her passing. In accordance with her wishes, there was no funeral or obituary. Nevertheless, her work leaves a remarkable legacy. The rape kit reoriented the public attitude toward survivors—as not potential liars but “an eyewitness whose body might reveal real evidence of a violent crime.” Yet Kennedy’s book isn’t just the hero’s journey of a forgotten heroine. It acknowledges that the system works best when it can be improved by those who are most affected by sexual assault—and the women who are willing to risk obscurity or damage to their reputation in order to finish the job Goddard started.

In September 2016, the CIA sent a classified memo to the FBI, which was investigating Russian interference in the presidential election. According to Russian intelligence sources, Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to publicly tie Donald Trump to the country’s hack of the Democratic National Committee. The Russians reportedly said that Clinton wanted to distract the public from the scandal over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

As secret tips from spies go, this one was not earth-shattering. FBI agents didn’t need the CIA to tell them that Clinton was painting Trump as an ally of the Kremlin—her campaign chair was on CNN saying just that. Trump was also making Clinton’s case for her: In late July, he had publicly encouraged the Russians to hack her email, which they then tried to do.

The CIA memo may have been obvious and not particularly useful. But it did contain “sensitive information that could be source revealing,” its authors cautioned, so the information was limited to those with a “need-to-know” status and “should not be released in any form.” Exposing human sources—spies—compromises intelligence gathering and can sometimes get them killed. For four years, the document’s stewards complied and kept it secret. Then it caught the attention of John Ratcliffe, President Trump’s director of national intelligence.

[Read: Clinton: Just trust me on this one]

Ratcliffe had been a divisive pick for the nation’s top intelligence adviser, made late in Trump’s term. His critics said he lacked sufficient national-security experience and was a partisan warrior. As a freshman Republican congressman from Texas, he had risen to national prominence by suggesting a theory, during committee hearings and television appearances, that Clinton had engineered the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russian interference. (Ratcliffe surely knew that she had not, because this had been exhaustively established by multiple investigations, including one led by Senate Republicans.)

In late September 2020, weeks before voters would choose between Trump and Joe Biden, Ratcliffe declassified and released the CIA memo, along with some notes from an intelligence briefing given to President Barack Obama. He claimed that he was responding to requests from Congress to shed light on the FBI’s Russia investigation, but the documents didn’t provide much new information.

Intelligence officials were appalled. History had repeatedly, painfully, shown that politics and intelligence were a dangerous mix, and as the DNI, Ratcliffe was expected to avoid partisan behavior and safeguard sources and methods. Also, officials warned, the Russians might have wanted that memo to be released; even four years on, anything mentioning Clinton, Russia, and Trump was politically combustible and potentially disruptive to the election. Gina Haspel, then the director of the CIA (a Trump appointment), opposed the document’s release. So did officials at the National Security Agency.

But to Trump and some of his advisers, the memo had a certain expedience. The president seized on it as new evidence of Clinton’s hidden hand in the “Russia hoax,” a subject that reliably caused him to rage against his supposed enemies inside the intelligence agencies.

[Read: Trump vs. the spies]

“It is imperative that the American people now learn what then–Vice President Joe Biden knew about this conspiracy and when he knew it,” the Trump campaign’s communications director said in a statement at the time. “Biden must give a full accounting of his knowledge and his conversations about Clinton’s scheme, which was known to the highest reaches of his administration.”

Trump himself made passing reference to the intelligence in his first debate with Biden, accusing Clinton of “a whole big con job” and the intelligence community of “spying on my campaign.”

Ratcliffe had cherry-picked just the thing to feed Trump’s fixation on “deep state” chicanery and malfeasance. The act was nakedly political. And it surprised no one.

Ratcliffe’s appeal to Trump has always been clear: He’s a political operator willing to push the boundaries of a historically apolitical position in a manner that serves the president’s interests. In November, Trump nominated Ratcliffe for an even more important job than the previous one: CIA director. The question likely to hang over his tenure is how much further he will go to enable Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community.

When Trump nominated Ratcliffe as the DNI in 2019, he gave him marching orders to “rein in” the forces that the president believed were undermining him. “As I think you’ve all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok,” Trump told reporters. Ratcliffe would get them back in line. But lawmakers were wary of appointing such a staunch partisan, and amid concerns about his experience, Democrats and key Republicans questioned whether he had exaggerated his credentials, something Ratcliffe denied. After only five days, Ratcliffe (who declined to be interviewed for this article) withdrew his candidacy. Trump nominated him again in 2020, and he was narrowly confirmed along party lines, 49–44. He received more votes in opposition than any DNI in the office’s 15-year history.

[Read: Ratcliffe’s withdrawal reveals Trump still doesn’t understand appointments]

When Trump named Ratcliffe as his pick for CIA director, he again made his expectations clear: He praised Ratcliffe for exposing alleged abuses by the FBI and former intelligence officials, and for showing “fake Russian collusion to be a Clinton campaign operation.” But this time, the response in Washington has been muted.

Having served as the DNI for eight months, Ratcliffe is now better qualified to run an intelligence agency. He also benefits from comparison with Trump’s other choices for top national-security positions: at the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of sexual assault and alcohol abuse (he has denied the allegations); at the FBI, Kash Patel, a fervent Trump supporter who has threatened to investigate the president’s critics, including journalists; and for the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman who has expressed sympathy for some of the world’s most notorious anti-American dictators, including Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad.

Compared with these selections, Ratcliffe looks like an elder statesman, and he has essentially been anointed: The Senate will almost certainly confirm him, which will make Ratcliffe the only person ever to have served as both the DNI and the director of the CIA. Several U.S. and allied intelligence officials told me that they would welcome this development, given the alternatives. Patel had been on Trump’s shortlist to run the CIA, some reminded me.

[Read: Trump’s ‘deep state’ revenge]

But the question of where Ratcliffe’s limits lie is even more salient in Trump’s second term. Though the DNI technically ranks higher than the director of the CIA, the latter is the more powerful post. The DNI is largely a managerial job; the CIA director is operational. From Langley, Ratcliffe would control covert intelligence activity. He could learn the locations and identities of spies. The CIA is also the primary interlocutor for foreign intelligence services, which share information that could implicate their sources if exposed. Several foreign intelligence officials have recently told me that they are taking steps to limit how much sensitive intelligence they share with the Trump administration, for fear that it might be leaked or used for political ends.

Some U.S. officials fear that Trump could direct the CIA to undertake illegal activities, such as aiding paramilitary forces inside the United States to secure the border, or clandestinely spying on Americans, knowing that the president would enjoy criminal immunity for official acts thanks to a recent Supreme Court opinion. These are extreme examples, and Trump would surely face internal resistance. But Ratcliffe has demonstrated that he’s willing to break norms and traditions. How would he respond if the president asked—or ordered—him to do something more drastic than declassify documents?

Though Trump has turned to Ratcliffe twice to “rein in” the deep state, his political origin story is actually rooted in the security state’s expansion. After graduating from Notre Dame in 1986, when he was only 20, Ratcliffe went to law school and then into private practice in Texas. “But something was missing,” he told senators at his DNI confirmation hearing. On September 11, 2001, Ratcliffe said, he was at work in a high-rise office building in Dallas that “looked a whole lot like the ones in New York that were under attack”—and he wondered, in the months that followed, how he might devote his time to more meaningful work.

Ratcliffe had gotten to know Matt Orwig, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas and a George W. Bush appointee. Orwig needed someone to run a joint terrorism task force, one of the dozens set up after the attacks to coordinate federal and regional security efforts. The goal was not only to prosecute terrorism crimes but to prevent them from happening. Ratcliffe took the job in 2004.

“The whole law-enforcement structure was being remade,” Orwig told me. “There was a lot of information flooding in from different authorities. It was a really big job.” In 2007, Orwig stepped down, and Ratcliffe became U.S. attorney for 11 months. Afterward, he returned to private practice, running the Dallas office of a firm he co-founded with John Ashcroft, Bush’s first attorney general.

Ashcroft became Ratcliffe’s political mentor, an association that seems ironic in retrospect. Ashcroft was in many ways an architect of the powerful national-security bureaucracy that Trump and Ratcliffe now rail against. After 9/11, the attorney general oversaw and approved controversial applications of the PATRIOT Act and other new authorities, including secret wiretapping of phone calls involving Americans. Such counterterrorism measures enhanced the powers of the Justice Department and the intelligence community, and occasionally encroached on civil liberties that Americans had long taken for granted.

Ratcliffe and Ashcroft shared a deeply conservative political outlook, and Ashcroft admired the younger attorney’s commitment to community service. Ratcliffe was also serving as the mayor of Heath, Texas, a bedroom community where he lived with his wife and two children. Ashcroft thought Ratcliffe was suited for national leadership. “We decided he should run for Congress,” Ashcroft told me, and in 2014, Ratcliffe did.

Ratcliffe at his congressional-campaign headquarters in Heath, Texas, March 19, 2014 (Kim Leeson / The Washington Post / Getty)

[Read: The case of John Ashcroft]

Getting to Washington would test Ratcliffe’s budding political skills. Ralph Hall, a conservative Democrat who switched to the GOP in 2004, had reliably represented the fourth congressional district, where Ratcliffe lived, since 1981. At 91, Hall was the oldest-ever member of the House of Representatives, and his voters seemed in no mood to replace him with a young upstart. But the Tea Party was elevating a new generation of conservatives who were suspicious of entrenched power, and in a bid for change that avoided taking aim at Hall’s age, Ratcliffe promised to bring “energetic leadership” to the district. “It’ll be up to the voters to decide whether or not a candidate is too old,” Ratcliffe, who was 42 years younger than Hall, told reporters at the time.

Ratcliffe picked up endorsements from conservative groups, including the Club for Growth, and eventually defeated Hall in a runoff. He was the first primary challenger to beat a Republican incumbent in Texas in 20 years. His political acumen was now beyond dispute, according to Todd Gillman, a reporter for The Dallas Morning News. “Affable. Discreet. Knife fighter,” Gillman wrote in a recent column for The Washington Post. “All of it was there to see when Ratcliffe took down the oldest member of Congress ever without coming off like a jerk.”

In Washington, Ratcliffe discovered the full extent of his talents, which included a lawyerly facility for constructing political narratives that appealed to Republicans. He fell in with fellow conservatives who were also new to Congress. Trey Gowdy, another former federal prosecutor, introduced him to his fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott. The three spent many evenings together, eating dinner and talking about their lives and political ideas.

Gowdy helped Ratcliffe raise his national profile and get Trump’s attention. At a hearing in September 2016, the congressman grilled James Comey, the FBI director, about the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, questioning whether officials had already decided that there was no prosecutable crime when they sat down to interview the presidential candidate. Ratcliffe was aggressive but not hectoring. His questions were clearly prepared, but his delivery seemed unrehearsed. He corrected Comey’s account of a chain of events in the FBI’s investigation, prompting the director to admit that he might have been misremembering. It wasn’t exactly a gotcha moment, but Ratcliffe showed that he could confuse an adversary with a blizzard of facts.

After Ratcliffe finished with Comey, Gowdy passed him a handwritten note: “100 percent A+.”

“That was really a moment for me where I thought, You know, I’m really where I’m supposed to be,” Ratcliffe recalled in 2021 on a podcast that Gowdy hosts.

Ratcliffe credited Gowdy with steering his career. “You said to me, ‘Johnny, focus on what you do well, get better at it, and shut up about the rest.’ And I literally followed that advice. In other words, only go on TV to talk about things that you know about. Don’t try and be a master of all trades. Do the things that you do really well and people will notice, and it will serve you well. And it did.”

Gowdy helped make Ratcliffe a go-to interrogator when congressional committees wanted to quiz the FBI or poke holes in the Russia investigation. Ratcliffe stuck to a theme of pernicious bias against Trump. He suggested that political animus, not genuine concern about foreign-intelligence threats, was the impetus behind the Russia probe. He also suggested that the CIA—the agency he is about to lead—may have kicked off the investigation. (It did not, and this is among the fringiest views that Ratcliffe has flirted with.)

[Read: Don’t let the Russia probe become the new Benghazi]

Ratcliffe’s performances impressed Trump. But although he, Gowdy, and Scott are deeply conservative, they are not MAGA Republicans. They seem to share Trump’s antipathy toward the federal bureaucracy. But their political ideas were shaped by forces that gave rise to Trump, not by the man himself. Gowdy, who left Congress in 2019, got on Trump’s bad side for not embracing his conspiracy theories about Democrats spying on his campaign, and Scott competed against Trump in the GOP’s 2024 presidential primary.

As for Ratcliffe, he has more fiercely defended Trump as a victim of an unfair system than championed him as a hero sent to fix it. In one of the most-watched hearings of the Trump era, Ratcliffe lit into Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the language of his final report, which stated that although the investigation “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” That was an unfair standard no American should face, Ratcliffe insisted. “Donald Trump is not above the law,” he thundered. “But he damn sure shouldn’t be below the law.”

It was a principled position, and perhaps a reflection of sincere disquiet about the politicization of law enforcement and the intelligence community. Ashcroft told me that he shares such concerns and speaks with Ratcliffe four or five times a year about reforming the system. But when Ratcliffe takes these stances, he also gives credence to Trump’s refrains about “Crooked Hillary” and the deep state. And he makes little effort to distinguish Trump’s critique from his own.

Jim Jordan speaks to Ratcliffe during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, December 9, 2019. (Zach Gibson / Getty)

[Read: Republicans take their shot at Mueller—and narrowly miss]

Ratcliffe probably wouldn’t have become the director of national intelligence if not for another pro-Trump partisan, Richard Grenell. The then-ambassador to Germany was also serving as the acting intelligence director when Trump nominated Ratcliffe for the second time, in 2020. The president essentially forced the Senate to choose between the two. Grenell had long been loathed and even feared in some quarters of Congress for his heated rhetoric and vicious social-media attacks. Suddenly, Ratcliffe seemed like the less political option.

Ratcliffe took office less than six months before the 2020 election. The intelligence agencies he now led were on guard against foreign governments trying to skew political contests with misleading social-media posts and divisive propaganda. Russia, once again, was a top concern.

Nothing angered Trump like talk of Russia trying to help him win an election. His aides had learned to avoid the subject. The president had identified China as the biggest strategic threat to the United States, an assessment that many Democrats and Republicans shared, Ratcliffe among them. But career intelligence analysts doubted that China intended to disrupt the election. What Beijing really wanted was stability in its relationship with Washington, they argued. Trying to help one candidate win, as Russia had in 2016, could backfire.

[Read: Trump’s intelligence war is also an election story]

In August 2020, the intelligence community produced a classified assessment of election threats. Then Ratcliffe intervened, analysts have said, and inserted a warning about China that was an “outrageous misrepresentation of their analysis,” according to a later report by an intelligence ombudsman.

The DNI typically does not help write intelligence assessments, because he is a political appointee, and so his involvement could present a conflict of interest. But Ratcliffe argued that although his intervention was unusual, it was not unprecedented, nor was it inappropriate. He maintained that the analysts were thinking too narrowly: China’s well-documented efforts to lobby state and local officials, and to steal corporate intellectual property and classified government information, were aimed at achieving political outcomes. That made them, in effect, a kind of election interference. The ombudsman also found that the analysts working on China and the ones working on Russia used different definitions for influence and interference. Ratcliffe argued that such discrepancies could create the false impression that Russia was trying to affect the U.S. election but China was not.

“I know my conclusions are right, based on the intelligence that I see,” he said, according to the ombudsman. “Many analysts think I am going off the script. They don’t realize that I did it based on the intelligence.”

Ratcliffe’s defenders say that his role as the DNI obligated him to speak up, even if that meant straying into red-hot political topics. “What I saw was him reflecting a value of transparency and informing the public,” said one U.S. intelligence official who worked for Ratcliffe when he was the DNI and asked not to be identified by name. “Sometimes he would challenge assessments and assumptions, I think in the interest of seeing if they would hold. He is an attorney by trade. You kind of have to keep that in mind when you brief him.”

Ratcliffe wasn’t the only one to gauge the threat from China more broadly: Two senior intelligence officers also expressed views on China’s interference activities that were in line with Ratcliffe’s assessment. But Ratcliffe didn’t raise the same level of concern about Russia, which many analysts thought posed the more direct threat to the election. He framed the issue, not for the first time, in a way that lent support to Trump’s political argument. And because the DNI was making that case, the ostensibly objective work of intelligence now had a partisan gloss.

Ratcliffe leaving a meeting with Senate Minority Whip John Thune after being nominated to be the CIA director, December 4, 2024 (Andrew Harnik / Getty)

[Read: Trump calls out election meddling—by China]

When announcing Ratcliffe’s nomination for CIA director, Trump indicated what he valued most in his pick: From “exposing” the Russia investigation as the alleged handiwork of the Clinton campaign to catching the FBI’s abuse of Civil Liberties at the FISA Court, John Ratcliffe has always been a warrior for Truth and Honesty with the American public,” Trump wrote in a social-media post. The reference to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was shorthand for one of Trump’s elastic theories about how Democrats had spied on his 2016 campaign.

He also lauded Ratcliffe for publicly refuting 51 former intelligence officers who had claimed in a letter that the 2020 discovery of emails on a laptop purporting to belong to Joe Biden’s son Hunter had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Ratcliffe was right about that one: No evidence linked Hunter Biden’s laptop to a Russian plot to harm his father. But the letter by the former officials was an act of free speech and an expression of opinion by former officials and experts—not something that the DNI traditionally makes his business.

In the four years he has been out of government, Ratcliffe has remained an enthusiastic critic of the intelligence community. He co-authored a September 2023 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with a former aide, reflecting on “a dangerous trend inside the CIA to politicize intelligence on China, and to suppress dissenting views that stray from the company line.” He was particularly worried about resistance to investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The once-fringe view that the virus likely originated in a laboratory in China, which Ratcliffe believes, has gained more respectability thanks in part to U.S. intelligence.

[Read: The coronavirus conspiracy boom]

Tim Scott told me that Ratcliffe’s controversial positions have aged well. “Some of the time he stood alone or in the minority and took a scathing rebuke from the intellectuals in our country,” the senator said. “I think the truth of the matter is, he was right—about the origins of COVID, the Biden laptop, and Russiagate.”

In other scenarios, however—the memo about the Clinton campaign and Russian hacking comes to mind—Ratcliffe conducted himself less like an intelligence adviser, who is supposed to help the president make a decision, and more like a litigator doing his best to help his client win an argument, or a political pugilist eager to score points.

Still, unlike some others in Trump’s orbit—most notably Kash Patel—Ratcliffe has shown that he does have limits. Shortly after the 2020 election, Trump offered Ratcliffe the job that he had long wanted, and that his friend Trey Gowdy had said he was perfect for: attorney general. The president was prepared to fire Bill Barr, who’d rejected Trump’s baseless notions of widespread voter fraud. According to an account in Michael Bender’s book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, Ratcliffe had privately told Trump that no intelligence suggested that foreign governments had hacked voting machines or changed the outcome of the election. If he became attorney general, he’d be expected to advocate for an idea he knew wasn’t true. Ratcliffe declined Trump’s offer.

In this respect, Ratcliffe might seem like one of the so-called adults in the room during the first Trump administration—the officials who slow-rolled orders or even tried to block them as a check against what they considered to be the president’s worst impulses. But people who know Ratcliffe told me that this was not his profile. He is on board with Trump’s policies and doesn’t believe that regulating the president is his job. He won’t cross his boss, either. To this day, nearly eight years after the CIA, FBI, and NSA reached a unanimous, unclassified assessment on Russian election interference in 2016, Ratcliffe has never said publicly whether he agrees with one of its key findings: that the Russians were trying to help Trump win.

[Read: The U.S. needs to face up to its long history of election meddling]

If he disagrees with that position, he surely would have said so, just as he has disputed other intelligence judgments he finds lacking or wrong. But his silence is telling. If he does agree, and says so publicly, he will not be the next director of the CIA.

At his confirmation hearing, senators are likely to ask Ratcliffe whether he plans to further Trump’s interests. Not the president’s policies—all CIA directors do that—but his political preferences, prejudices, and vendettas. Only Ratcliffe knows the answer to this question. But alone among Trump’s picks to head the national-security agencies, he comes with a clear track record in the role.

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On New Year’s Day, while looking for something to watch, I came across a channel with a loud, gray-haired British guy in a nice suit and a scarf bellowing about something or other. I assumed that I had turned to CNN and was watching its ebullient, occasionally shouty business and aviation correspondent, Richard Quest. I wasn’t even close: It was Roger Daltrey of the Who, and he was excitedly introducing the new Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Peter Frampton in a condensed version of the October ceremony.

Frampton’s music was, for a moment in the 1970s, the soundtrack to my misspent teenage nights; on the broadcast, Keith Urban joined him to perform his megahit “Do You Feel Like We Do,” and I remembered every word. And Frampton seems like a man who is genuinely loved by his peers. It was a nice moment. But when 80-year-old Daltrey—who, at 21, famously sang, “Hope I die before I get old”—is introducing a man whose biggest hits were produced nearly 50 years ago, it’s a reminder that the entire Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concept is utterly wrongheaded.

As the saying goes, good writers borrow, and great writers steal. I was once a professor, however, and professors give attribution, so let me rely on John Strausbaugh, who wrote a wonderful 2001 jeremiad against Boomer music nostalgia, Rock ’Til You Drop, to explain why the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame shouldn’t exist: Because it’s “as true to the spirit of rock’n’roll as a Hard Rock Cafe—one in which there are way too many children and you can’t get a drink.”

The Hall of Fame is about old and dead people; rock’n’roll is about the young and living. The Hall of Fame tries to reform rock’n’roll, tame it, reduce it to bland, middle-American family entertainment; it drains all the sexiness and danger and rebelliousness out of it …

Strasbaugh winces especially hard at the Rock Hall tradition of “honoring” classic acts by “dragging their old butts out onto a stage” and then making them “go through the motions one more time” as they pretend to feel the music the same way they did when they were kids. Writing almost 25 years ago, he said that the Rolling Stones were way past their retirement clock, and that Cher in her late-1990s performances “was so stiff in her makeup and outfits, that she looked like a wax effigy of herself.”

Last year, the Rolling Stones went on tour again and were sponsored by—I am serious—the AARP.

And Cher was also just inducted into the Rock Hall in October, at 78 years old. When you’re asking Cher to suit up so that she can be lauded by the young-enough-to-be-her-granddaughter Dua Lipa, you may be trying to honor the artist, but you’re mostly just reminding everyone about the brutal march of time.

I am sometimes blistered on social media for my bad music takes, and I will confess that with some exceptions, I didn’t really develop much of a taste in music beyond the Beatles, Billy Joel, and Top 40 ear candy until I was in college. (My musical soul was saved, or at least improved, by the old WBCN in Boston and by my freshman-dorm neighbor at Boston University, who introduced me to Steely Dan.) But you don’t need a refined taste in music to cringe when a bunch of worthies from the music industry assemble each year to make often nonsensical choices about what constitutes “rock and roll” and who did it well enough to be lionized for the ages. Look, I sort of like some of those old Cher hits from the ’70s—“Train of Thought” is an underrated little pop gem, in my view—but Cher as an inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? If she, and Bobby Darin, and the Lovin’ Spoonful, and Woody Guthrie, and Willie Nelson are all “rock,” what isn’t?

This is where I must also admit that I’ve never been to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, or even to Cleveland, for that matter. But I’d argue that seeing it all up close—as Strausbaugh notes in his book, it’s full of this rock artist once wore this shirt and that rock artist once touched this mic stand—isn’t the point. Trying to trap the energy and spirit of youthful greatness behind the ice in some sort of Fortress of Rock Solitude is nothing more than a monument to nostalgia. Worse, it’s an ongoing tribute not to music, but to capitalism. Perhaps the music business was always a business, but most rock and roll was about opposing the establishment, not asking for a nice table at its Chamber of Commerce ceremonies.

Don’t get me wrong: I love both rock music and capitalism. I am also prone to a fair amount of my own nostalgia, and I will pay to see some of my favorite elderly stars get up onstage, wink at the audience, and pull out a few of their famous moves—as long as they do it with the kind of self-awareness that makes it more like a visit with an old friend than a soul-crushing pastiche of days gone by.

But even when a return to the stage is done with taste, age can still take its toll on both the performer and the audience: I’m now in my 60s, and as much as I liked seeing Peter Frampton get a big round of applause, I didn’t feel warm or happy; I just felt old, because he was obviously old. (Frampton has an autoimmune disease that causes muscle weakness, so he had to sit to perform his arena anthem.) And when Keith Urban is playing along as the representative of the younger generation at 56 years old, it makes me feel a certain kind of pity for people who gave me the musical landscape of my youth.

Maybe America doesn’t need to commercialize every Boomer memory. Artists become eligible for the Rock Hall 25 years from the release date of their first commercial recording, but rock can’t be distilled in 25-year batches like some sort of rare whiskey. Rock is more like … well, sex. Each generation has to experience it for themselves; later, each generation thinks they invented it; eventually, we all realize that no generation can fully explain their feelings about it to the next one.

Speaking of sex and rebellion, one of the best arguments against the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is that Warren Zevon isn’t in it. His continuing exclusion is one of the great ongoing controversies of the selection process, but the point is not that Zevon should be in it; rather, the question is whether Zevon would ever want to be honored in such a place. The man who wrote “Play It All Night Long” and “Mr. Bad Example” simply doesn’t belong on a pedestal next to Mary J. Blige and Buffalo Springfield. And that’s reason enough that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame should not exist at all.

Related:

The secret joys of geriatric rock Rock never dies—but it does get older and wiser.

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Today’s News

The FBI said that the attacker who killed 14 people in New Orleans on New Year’s Day appears to have acted alone. Military officials said that the driver of a Cybertruck that exploded in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas yesterday was an Army master sergeant who was on leave from active duty. Federal agents searched the home of former NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, who was accused of sexual misconduct last year. Maddrey has denied the allegations.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: The poet Julia Ward Howe wrote an anthem of fervent patriotism in 1861—and it’s remained the soundtrack to American conflict ever since, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Giacomo Bagnara

We’re All in “Dark Mode” Now

By Ian Bogost

Dark mode has its touted benefits: Dimmer screens mean less eye strain, some assert; and on certain displays (including most smartphones), showing more black pixels prolongs battery life. Dark mode also has its drawbacks: Reading lots of text is more difficult to do in white-on-black. But even if these tradeoffs might be used to justify the use of inverted-color settings, they offer little insight into those settings’ true appeal. They don’t tell us why so many people suddenly want their screens, which had glowed bright for years, to go dark. And they’re tangential to the story of how, in a fairly short period of time, we all became creatures of the night mode.

Read the full article.

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Explore. These New Year’s resolutions will actually lead to happiness, Arthur C. Brooks wrote in 2020.

Try something new. You can micromanage your kid’s life or ask for community help with child care—but you can’t have both, Stephanie H. Murray writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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