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Americans keeping close track of political news may have been toggling their screens today between Senate confirmation hearings: the second day of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s for secretary of Health and Human Services, and the first for Tulsi Gabbard’s for director of national intelligence and Kash Patel’s for FBI director. But each of those three hearings deserves the public’s full attention: Donald Trump’s nominees offered new glimpses into their approaches to policy, truth, and loyalty to the president.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Day Two

Ahead of Kennedy’s first day of hearings, our colleague Nicholas Florko noted that the HHS nominee is no stranger to conspiracist statements: “RFK Jr. has insinuated that an attempt to assassinate members of Congress via anthrax-laced mail in 2001 may have been a ‘false flag’ attack orchestrated by ‘someone in our government’ to gin up interest in the government preparing for potential biological weapon threats. He has claimed that COVID was ‘targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,’ and that 5G is being used to ‘harvest our data and control our behavior.’ He has suggested that the use of antidepressants might be linked to mass shootings.”

“If Republican senators skirt around [Kennedy’s] falsehoods during today’s confirmation hearings,” Nicholas wrote, “it will be evidence of their prevailing capitulation to Trump. And it also may be a function of Kennedy’s rhetorical sleights … He’s capable of rattling off vaccine studies with the fluency of a virologist, which boosts his credibility, even though he’s freely misrepresenting reality.” But Kennedy’s sleights didn’t serve him quite as well today as he might have hoped.

At several points, senators encouraged Kennedy to acknowledge that vaccines are not the cause of autism, but instead of confirming what numerous studies have shown to be true, Kennedy insisted that he would need to “look at all the data” before coming to any conclusions. “The room went silent today during Senator [Bill] Cassidy’s closing questions,” Nicholas noted when we spoke this afternoon. “Cassidy was practically begging Kennedy to recant his previous statements on vaccines. Kennedy, like everyone else in the room, had to know this was a make-or-break moment for his confirmation. But despite the potential fallout, Kennedy refused, promising only that he would look at any studies presented to him disproving a link between vaccines and autism.”

The nominee for HHS secretary also showed, for the second day in a row, his lack of understanding about basics of the Medicare system, fumbling his answers to a series of rapid-fire questions from Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire. Hassan also shared that she is the mother of a 36-year-old with cerebral palsy, and accused Kennedy of relitigating settled science on the fact that vaccines do not cause autism. “It’s the relitigating and rehashing and continuing to sow doubt so we can’t move forward, and it freezes us in place,” she argued.

Cassidy, whose vote could prove key to whether RFK Jr. is confirmed, said after today’s hearing that he is “struggling” over whether to confirm Kennedy.

Tulsi Gabbard

Gabbard came into her confirmation process with a history that raises questions about her commitment to national security (she has, among other things, met with former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and expressed sympathetic views toward Russian President Vladimir Putin). As our colleague Tom Nichols wrote in November, “Gabbard has every right to her personal views, however inscrutable they may be. As a private citizen, she can apologize for Assad and Putin to her heart’s content. But as a security risk, Gabbard is a walking Christmas tree of warning lights. If she is nominated to be America’s top intelligence officer, that’s everyone’s business.”

The topic that ultimately received much attention in her confirmation hearing today was her refusal to say whether Edward Snowden is a traitor. Despite pressure from Democratic and Republican senators, Gabbard refused to answer the question, repeating that Snowden had broken the law and that she would take steps to make sure whistleblowers know how to properly make a complaint. Gabbard also revealed that she was unable to extract any concessions in her 2017 meeting with Assad. “I didn’t expect to,” she said.

Gabbard’s potential confirmation will depend on how her somewhat incoherent set of policy views sits with Republican senators. Last week, our colleague Elaine Godfrey explored the one through line—besides ambition—that has guided Gabbard’s otherwise inconsistent political career.

Kash Patel

Donald Trump is not always clear about what he means when he refers to “DEI,” but presumably it involves how someone’s identity is taken into consideration during the hiring process. In this morning’s press conference addressing the tragic plane crash last night, Trump asserted, without evidence but crediting his “common sense,” that DEI hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration was at fault.

It was odd, then, that a few hours later, Republican senators used Patel’s confirmation hearing to highlight his identity: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina asked about examples of racism Patel has experienced, and Senator Mike Lee of Utah acknowledged the struggles Patel and his father must have faced as racial minorities in the United States and Uganda, respectively. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, as if he were reading from a book report about the Gujarati people, lauded the religious diversity in Gujarat, India, where Patel’s family is originally from, omitting the state’s extreme tensions and violent history. Patel opened his own remarks by acknowledging his family’s journey from abroad. He invoked the phrase Jai Shri Krishna, a standard greeting for a sect of Hindus seeking blessings.

Patel was calm and still—he became riled up only when questioned by Senator Amy Klobuchar about his past suggestion that he would “shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state.’” But he was walking a tightrope. Today’s hearing may be the rare instance when Patel has publicly broken with Trump, to whom he has otherwise been unequivocally loyal. He refused to explicitly state that Trump lost the 2020 election, but he also said, “I do not agree with the commutation of any sentence of any individual who committed violence against law enforcement.”

Overall, Patel seemed to be trying to carefully toe a line, answering questions about the culture-war issues that Trump and congressional Republicans care about—Senator Marsha Blackburn, for example, asserted during the hearing that the FBI prioritizes DEI and “counting Swiftie bracelets” over conducting investigations—while attempting not to alienate the employees he hopes to lead. Pressed by Blackburn, Patel made a vague statement about the “high standards” FBI employees must meet.

Related:

RFK Jr. has a lot to learn about Medicaid. What everyone gets wrong about Tulsi Gabbard

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The memo that shocked the White House The near misses at airports have been telling us something. Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold. Jonathan Lemire: “What I saw at Trump’s first press conference”

Today’s News

Officials announced that there are no survivors in the crash last night between a U.S.-military Black Hawk helicopter and a regional American Airlines passenger jet landing at an airport near Washington, D.C. Three soldiers were aboard the helicopter, and 64 people were on the flight from Wichita, Kansas. Donald Trump appointed Christopher Rocheleau as the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. The agency had not had an administrator since the start of Trump’s new term. Eight hostages were released from Gaza by Hamas, and Israel released 110 Palestinian prisoners.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Don Peck interviews Nicholas Carr about h​​ow online life has rewired our brains.

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More From The Atlantic

“The ‘exciting business opportunity’ that ruined our lives” Trump’s war on meritocracy If Iranian assassins kill them, it will be Trump’s fault, Tom Nichols writes. Don’t politicize aviation safety. The return of snake oil Why Meta is paying $25 million to settle a Trump lawsuit

Evening Read

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

Your FOMO Is Trying to Tell You Something

By Faith Hill

I feel deeply haunted by the thought that if I don’t go to the party or the dinner or the coffee stroll, my one wild and precious life will be void of a joyful, transformative event—one I’d surely still be thinking about on my deathbed, a friend at my side tenderly holding my hand and whispering, Remember? That time we went bowling and the guy in the next lane over said that funny thing? Every year, my New Year’s resolution is to keep one night of the week free from social plans. Almost every week, I fail.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Jamie McCarthy / Getty.

Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes speaks with Hanna Rosin about how bad the war for your attention has really gotten.

Read. The Stranger Things effect is coming for the novel, Mark Athitakis writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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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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“Dear James”: Oh, how the men drone on The libs are having their paranoia moment. Blind partisanship does not actually help Trump. Biden’s Middle East legacy

Culture Break

Jordan Hemingway

Listen. The sensation you get when dancing or making a really good cup of tea? FKA Twigs wants to bottle that in Eusexua, her latest album.

Debate. The Oscars have left the mainstream moviegoer behind, David Sims argues.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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When the Panama Canal was unveiled by the United States in 1914, the roughly 50-mile-long waterway symbolized American power and technological advancement. But the glow of progress soon faded. Building the canal killed roughly 5,600 workers over a decade, and many historians think that the death toll was higher. “Beginning with Lyndon B. Johnson, American presidents of both parties understood the strategic necessity of handing the canal back,” my colleague Franklin Foer wrote last week. The 1964 anti-American riots in Panama revealed that “the anger over America’s presence would never subside.”

The 1977 U.S.-Panama treaties signed by President Jimmy Carter relinquished control of the canal to Panama and established the passageway’s neutrality. This move sowed discord in the Republican Party, the rumblings of which are most clearly felt in President Donald Trump’s recent pledge to retake the canal. I spoke with Franklin about why Trump is fixated on this waterway, and what his preoccupation reveals about his vision for American expansionism.

Stephanie Bai: In Donald Trump’s inauguration speech, and even before he assumed office, he promised to retake the Panama Canal. Is this an issue that Americans care about?

Franklin Foer: Until Trump started talking about it, the Panama Canal hardly ranked on the list of the top 500 strategic threats to America. Best I can tell, there were some toll increases, and the Chinese have started to pay greater interest to the canal over time. But there’s zero national-security reason for the United States to deploy its prestige and military might to take back the canal. When it comes to his domestic audience, I think what Trump is betting on is a rising sense of nationalism that he can tap into. And I think by framing the canal as a lost fragment of the American empire and implying that it’s rightfully ours, he’s betting that it will be a piece of the broader “Make America great again” sentiment that he coasts on.

Stephanie: You wrote in your recent story that “reclaiming the Panama Canal is an old obsession of the American right.” Why is it important to that faction of the country?

Franklin: Many countries failed to build a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, so America’s success was seen as a feat of engineering—at least, Americans viewed it that way for much of the 20th century. But its construction exacted an enormous human toll; thousands of workers died. And by the 1960s, most American presidents pretty clearly realized that the canal generated so much resentment toward the United States that keeping it didn’t make sense.

But you also had a large sector of the American right that felt like we were abandoning our empire. And so Ronald Reagan, when he ran for president in 1976, made reclaiming the Panama Canal one of his central slogans. The issue was something that the insurgent New Right movement, a rising force in American politics, exploited mercilessly in order to raise money and garner enthusiasm.

Stephanie: Trump’s grievances include his claim that the canal’s neutrality has been violated because it’s under the control of China.

Franklin: China likes to involve itself in the operation of infrastructure, and it has lots of global trading routes that it aims to control and exert influence over. There is a new Chinese presence in the canal, but that doesn’t mean that they’re about to take it over.

One of the things that’s ludicrously self-defeating about Trump’s strategy within the hemisphere is that he’s deliberately aggravating countries that could conceivably be thrown into the arms of China. So Panama may not want to enter into any sort of alliance with the Chinese, but because Trump is threatening military action against it, the country may decide that aligning more closely with China is in its interest.

Stephanie: In response to Trump’s inauguration speech, Panama President José Raúl Mulino said that “the canal is and will remain Panama’s.” As you noted, Trump has already floated the idea of using military force to retake the canal. Do you think this could actually come to pass?

Franklin: I think Trump is testing limits to see what he can get. I would be surprised if he was asking the Pentagon to draw up plans right now to retake the Panama Canal. But the problem is: Once he goes down this road of threatening to use military force to take something back, what happens when Panama doesn’t give it back? I don’t think there’s an extremely high chance that we will go to war to take back the canal. But I think there’s at least some possibility that we’re going down that road.

Stephanie: American expansionism seems to be top of mind for Trump. He talked about his “manifest destiny” vision in his inauguration speech, and he has repeatedly spoken about annexing Greenland and Canada in addition to taking back the Panama Canal.

Franklin: The fact that he’s using the term manifest destiny, which is a callback to American expansion in the West in the 1840s and 1850s, shows that this is not a departure from American history but a return to the American history of imperialism.

This is a big shift in the way that America now thinks of its role in the world. I think for Trump, who is a real-estate guy, acquiring real estate is a token of his greatness. He looks at Vladimir Putin and sees the way in which Putin has projected his power to expand his territory with Ukraine and thinks, Well, that’s what powerful leaders and powerful nations do. And here he is starting to explore that possibility himself.

Related:

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

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Europe’s Elon Musk problem Trump can’t escape the laws of political gravity. Greenland’s prime minister wants the nightmare to end. Beware the weepy influencers.

Today’s News

Trump is expected to sign executive orders that would ban transgender people from the military, reinstate troops who were discharged for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and remove the military’s DEI programs. Colombia reached an agreement to accept the flights of deported migrants from the U.S. after Trump made threats that included steep tariffs and a travel ban on Colombian citizens. U.S. markets fell today after the Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s latest cutting-edge chatbot app shot up in popularity over the weekend.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Dinner is whatever you want it to be, and that fact can be overwhelming or freeing, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: neal.fun.

The Worst Page on the Internet

By Yair Rosenberg

The worst page on the internet begins innocently enough. A small button beckons the user to “Click me.” When they do, the game commences. The player’s score, or “stimulation,” appears in the middle of the screen, and goes up with every subsequent click. These points can then be used to buy new features for the page—a CNN-style news ticker with questionable headlines (“Child Star Steals Hearts, Faces Prison”), a Gmail inbox, a true-crime podcast that plays in the background, a day-trading platform, and more. Engaging with these items—checking your email, answering a Duolingo trivia question, buying and selling stocks—earns the player more points to unlock even more features.

Read the full article.

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RFK Jr. is an excellent conspiracy theorist, Benjamin Mazer writes. The border got quieter, so Trump had to act. Tom Nichols: “America is now counting on you, Pete Hegseth.” The chaos in higher ed is only getting started.

Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Denzer

Examine. Starbucks’ most beloved offering—free bathrooms—is disappearing, Ellen Cushing writes. And it reflects a tragedy of American life.

Watch. Presence (out now in theaters) is a horror movie that locks its monster—and the viewer—behind the camera, David Sims writes.

Play our daily crossword.

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Welcome to The Daily’s culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Shayla Love, a staff writer who has written about how sobriety became a tool of self-optimization, the ways invisible habits are driving our lives, and how RFK Jr. is seducing America with wellness.

Shayla’s recommendations include a 1967 British television series that starts out like The Good Place, a “Page Six–esque thriller” about the Sigmund Freud Archives, and an “eclipse-viewing” experience that takes place entirely indoors.

The Culture Survey: Shayla Love

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The 1967 British television series The Prisoner starts out remarkably similar to The Good Place: A person wakes up in an idyllic town that caters to their every need and also torments them. But in The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan, the show’s creator and star, isn’t dead; he’s a retired British intelligence agent called Number 6 who refuses to submit to the will of the “Village.” He is put through a series of surreal and futuristic tests by a rotating cast of characters named Number 2 while trying not to be killed by a murderous white bouncing ball. A perfect low-stakes, high-octane episodic mystery. And who is Number 1?

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: The best eclipse I saw last year was not the solar eclipse in April but the Instant Eclipse at Novelty Automation in London. For a few coins, you shut yourself inside a broom-closet-size box, look up, and experience an automated eclipse—no path of totality required. It was made in 1999 by Tim Hunkin, an engineer and artist who created dozens of strange and ingenious arcade machines. When I crammed into the contraption with my boyfriend, we heard audio of a noisy crowd that abruptly silenced when the “sun” vanished. We were surprised by how much wonder we felt as the artificial sky lit up with stars. [Related: The most dazzling eclipse in the universe]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: In the Freud Archives is Janet Malcolm at her best. She turns academic drama into a Page Six–esque thriller that you won’t be able to put down. And just when you think the ride is over, there’s a stunning afterword in the NYRB edition that takes you through the messy aftermath of her reporting.

Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki is my fiction pick. Read this book if you have sisters, if you’ve ever been crushed by a crush, if you have authority problems, or if you feel overwhelmed by a family’s capacity for secrets.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: To see Pink Mist (Space Division) by James Turrell, you have to wait. You walk into a completely dark room, hands outstretched, blindly searching for a bench. You sit, feeling lost, staring into pitch black. Then, it appears: a pinkish-red rectangle hovering in front of you. The shape doesn’t move or change colors, but it’s a successful optical trick; it changes you. Once your eyes have adjusted, you can’t unsee it. All of the pieces in the Turrell retrospective at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art toy with both your perception and your patience.

Something I recently revisited: I rewatched the entire Canadian sci-fi series Orphan Black with my boyfriend, who had never seen it before. I realized how much this show is a part of my DNA—biomedical patents, an utopian island, longevity, nature versus nurture. Tatiana Maslany plays a handful of characters you’ll be convinced are different people by the end. [Related: The slow creep of uncanny television]

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher,” written in 1996 by Dmitri Tymoczko. I’ve returned to this piece dozens of times. The psychologist William James’s interest in altered states of consciousness through nitrous oxide is well known, yet this piece chronicles the lesser-known story of the rogue autodidact philosopher and mystic Benjamin Paul Blood, who inspired James. An Atlantic classic that is still relevant when thinking about drugs and their role in meaning-making or religious belief.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Robert Hass’s translations of three great Japanese haiku poets: Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. Hass has so few words to work with, and he picks exactly the right ones.

Like his verb choice in this Bashō haiku:

         A bee
staggers out
        of the peony.

Or how he preserves the humor and lightness of Issa:

        Even with insects—
some can sing,
       some can’t.

Two more, the first from Bashō, the next from Issa, to celebrate the end and start of a year:

         What fish feel,
birds feel, I don’t know—
        the year ending.

           New Year’s Day—
everything is in blossom!
          I feel about average.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Amanda Knox: “My last trial” Evangelicals made a bad trade. Jonathan Chait: There is no resistance.

Today’s News

During a tour of North Carolina to survey the damage of Hurricane Helene, President Donald Trump described plans to overhaul or eliminate FEMA. He proposed an alternative scenario in which the federal government pays “a percentage to the state” to aid in disaster response. Hundreds of undocumented immigrants, including those who have been convicted of crimes, were flown out of the country last night on military aircraft, according to the White House. The Senate plans to vote later this evening on whether to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Earlier this week, Trump unveiled perhaps the most ambitious infrastructure project in history—and all but dedicated it to Sam Altman, Matteo Wong writes. The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka suggests what to read in the face of disaster.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

January 6ers Got Out of Prison—And Came to My Neighborhood

By Hanna Rosin

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.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Who will stop the militias now? Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn What the fires revealed about Los Angeles culture

Culture Break

Simon Mein / Thin Man Films Ltd / Bleecker Street

Debate. Have we been thinking about loneliness all wrong? Americans may not feel any more desolate than they did in the past, Faith Hill writes.

Watch. Hard Truths (out now in theaters) takes an astonishingly sensitive approach in telling the story of difficult people, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Within hours of taking office on Monday, Donald Trump released a raft of executive orders addressing targets he’d gone after throughout his campaign, such as immigration, government spending, and DEI. He issued full pardons for 1,500 January 6 rioters, and signed the first eight executive orders—of dozens so far—in front of a cheering crowd in a sports arena. But amid the deluge of actions, Trump also signed an executive order that takes aim at his own federal bureaucracy—and allows his perceived enemies within the government to be investigated and punished.

The executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” opens by stating as fact that the Biden administration and its allies used the government to take action against political opponents. Democrats, it says, “engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Its stated purpose, to establish “a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people,” reads like a threat. The order calls out particular targets, including the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission—agencies that Trump and his supporters allege betrayed them under President Joe Biden. Trump’s team, led by whoever is appointed attorney general and director of national intelligence, will be sniffing out what it determines to be signs of political bias. These officials will be responsible for preparing reports to be submitted to the president, with recommendations for “appropriate remedial actions.”

What exactly those remedial actions would look like is not clear. The vagueness of the order could result in a “long-running, desultory ‘investigation,’” Quinta Jurecic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer to The Atlantic, told me in an email.

But the information gathered in such investigations could lead to some federal employees being publicly criticized or otherwise punished by Trump. And beyond theatrics, this order could open the door to the “prosecutions that Trump has threatened against his political opponents,” Jurecic noted. Put another way: In an executive order suggesting that Biden’s administration weaponized the government, Trump is laying out how his administration could do the same.

Trump’s Cabinet is still taking shape, and whoever ends up in the top legal and intelligence roles will influence how this order is executed. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney-general pick, is an established loyalist with long-standing ties to Trump (he reportedly considered her for the role in his first term, but worried that her past scandals would impede her confirmation). Bondi, in her first Senate confirmation hearing last week, attempted to downplay Trump’s persistent rhetoric on retribution, and avoided directly answering questions about how she, as head of the Justice Department, would engage with his plans to punish enemies. She said that she wouldn’t entertain hypotheticals about the president, though she did claim that “there will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, has a history of political shape-shifting, though she has lately shown fealty to MAGA world.

Well before Trump took office, his allies were signaling their interest in turning federal bureaucracy, which they deride as “the deep state,” into a system driven by unquestioning loyalty to the president. As my colleague Russell Berman wrote in 2023, some conservatives have argued, without even cloaking “their aims in euphemisms about making government more effective and efficient,” that bureaucrats should be loyal to Trump. Russ Vought, the nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget (an unflashy but powerful federal position), who today appeared before Congress for the second time, has previously written that the executive branch should use “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

The executive order on weaponizing the federal government is consistent with the goals of retribution that Trump expressed on the campaign trail. And accusing rivals of using the government for personal ends has been a favored Republican tactic in recent years. Still, this order confirms that, now that he is back in office, Trump will have no qualms toggling the levers of executive power to follow through on his promises of revenge. Many of Trump’s executive actions this week are sending a clear message: If you are loyal, you are protected. If not, you may be under attack.

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A shooter killed at least one student and injured another before killing himself at Antioch High School in Nashville. Donald Trump said last night that by February 1, he would place a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products. He has also pledged to put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico by the same date. An Israeli military assault in the occupied West Bank began yesterday, killing at least 10 people and injuring 40 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Be Like Sisyphus

By Gal Beckerman

This anxious century has not given people much to feel optimistic about—yet most of us resist pessimism. Things must improve. They will get better. They have to. But when it comes to the big goals—global stability, a fair economy, a solution for the climate crisis—it can feel as if you’ve been pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it come rolling back down, over and over: all that distance lost, all that huffing and puffing wasted. The return trek to the bottom of the hill is long, and the boulder just sits there, daring you to start all over—if you’re not too tired.

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For weeks, Donald Trump has been exerting influence on events in the Middle East. After winning the 2024 election, he dispatched his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to the region to help the Biden administration get the Israel-Hamas cease-fire and hostage-release deal over the finish line. Now, a little more than 24 hours into his presidency, Trump has already begun to undo much of President Joe Biden’s decision making from the past four years, including on foreign affairs. I spoke with my colleague Yair Rosenberg, who covers both Trump and the Middle East, about the new president’s goals and approach to the region.

Isabel Fattal: What moves has Trump made on the Israeli-Palestinian front since taking office yesterday?

Yair Rosenberg: Shortly after inauguration, Trump rescinded Joe Biden’s February executive order that erected an entire sanctions regime against extremist Israeli settlers. This order allowed the administration to impose stiff penalties on violent settlers in the West Bank and anybody who supported them, and—as I reported in March—could have eventually applied not just to individual actors and organizations on the ground but also to members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the Israeli army.

Biden’s executive order was seen as a sword of Damocles hanging over the settler movement. It effectively cut off some important people on the Israeli hard right from the international financial system, because if you’re under U.S. sanctions, a lot of institutions cannot touch you. The settler movement was so concerned about this that they pressed Netanyahu to lobby against the sanctions in Washington, and some members even took the Biden administration to court in the United States. All of that now goes away: not just the sanctions, but the executive order that created the entire regime. Trump is also reportedly expected to end the U.S. freeze on 2,000-pound bombs that Biden put in place during the war in Gaza, and impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court over its attempted prosecution of Israeli officials—something Biden resisted.

Isabel: Trump told reporters last night that he is “not confident” that the Gaza cease-fire will last, adding that “it’s not our war; it’s their war.” How durable is the cease-fire deal right now?

Yair: Trump is right to be skeptical. It’s not at all clear whether this is actually going to hold. The first of the agreement’s three phases, which we are in right now, is 42 days long. Israel is releasing nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including convicted mass murderers, in exchange for 33 women, children, and elderly hostages in Gaza held by Hamas, some of them living, some of them dead. That part of the deal seems likely to continue according to plan.

But partway through this period, the two parties are supposed to negotiate for the release of the remaining male hostages, for whom Hamas is demanding a much steeper ransom than this already steep price. And if those negotiations don’t bear fruit, it’s entirely possible the war will resume, especially because hard-right politicians in Netanyahu’s government have already vowed to press on until Hamas is eliminated.

The question becomes: How committed are Israel and Hamas to actually getting this done? And how committed is Trump to keeping the cease-fire on the rails? From his comments, it doesn’t seem like he knows. He’s speaking like a spectator instead of an actor. So we have no idea what he intends to do.

Isabel: What would it look like for Trump to truly commit to keeping the cease-fire on track?

Yair: It would require his administration to make it more worthwhile for both sides to compromise and stick to the deal rather than capsize it. Most Israelis support the current deal, but the accord’s most bitter opponents are the hard-right politicians in the current Netanyahu government, making the cease-fire harder to sustain as time goes on. But the Israeli far right is also hoping to get many items on their wish list over the next four years, much like they did during Trump’s previous term. Among other things, they seek U.S. support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, the removal of the sanctions we discussed, and backing for Israel in its ongoing war with Iran and its proxies. If Trump is committed to the continuation of the cease-fire—an open question—he could make clear that some of these benefits come with a price, which is calm in Gaza. And Trump, both in his previous term and in recent weeks, has shown that he is willing to offer incentives that Biden would not.

Hamas is even harder to influence, because they’re a messianic terrorist group. Fundamentally, they don’t seem to care about not just how many of their own fighters they’ve lost but also how many Gazan civilians have been killed in this war. For them, every casualty is either immaterial or an asset in a gruesome PR war against Israel. But they do have sponsors abroad—like Qatar, which hosts some of the group’s political leaders. The Qataris want to be on the right side of the next Trump administration, like any other state in the Middle East. And so Trump has the ability to put pressure on the Qataris, who can then push Hamas to compromise on what they’re willing to accept in the next hostage exchange.

These methods aren’t guaranteed to work. It’s true that the U.S. has some sway over events, but these countries and actors have their own national interests and make decisions based on their own internal politics. Americans on both the right and the left tend to overestimate the U.S.’s role in world developments. Frankly, if there were a magic button here, Biden would have pushed it already.

Isabel: What can we learn about Trump’s second term from how he has handled this cease-fire situation thus far? What does it tell us about how he might relate to the region?

Yair: The thing to understand about Trump’s approach to politics, as I’ve written, is that he has few if any core beliefs, which means that he is both incredibly flexible and easily influenced. Both domestic and international actors know that if they can give Trump something he wants, he might give them something they want. It doesn’t matter if they are a traditional U.S. ally or not. It doesn’t matter if they’re a democracy or not. It’s entirely about whether you are in his good books. So everybody is now scrambling to get on Trump’s good side, to make down payments on the things they hope the most powerful person in the world will then pay them back for. In a real sense, that’s what this cease-fire is—for Israel, for Qatar, for Egypt, it’s all jockeying for advantage by trying to give Trump a win now so he’ll give them a win later.

Expect the next four years to look a lot like this, with international actors such as Saudi Arabia and Israel and domestic actors such as American evangelicals and Republican neo-isolationists all playing this game of thrones, hoping to curry favor with the ruler now holding court.

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Today’s News

Attorneys general from 22 states sued to block Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to ban birthright citizenship. The former leader of the Proud Boys and the founder of the Oath Keepers have been released from prison after Trump signed an executive order yesterday that pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 January 6 defendants. Former President Joe Biden issued numerous preemptive pardons yesterday, including for members of his family, General Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, and members of the January 6 House select committee.

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Evening Read

Underwood Archives / Getty

Please Don’t Make Me Say My Boyfriend’s Name

By Shayla Love

Dale Carnegie, the self-made titan of self-help, swore by the social power of names. Saying someone’s name, he wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People, was like a magic spell, the key to closing deals, amassing political favors, and generally being likable … “If you don’t do this,” Dale Carnegie warned his readers, “you are headed for trouble.”

By Carnegie’s measure, plenty of people are in serious jeopardy. It’s not that they don’t remember what their friends and acquaintances are called; rather, saying names makes them feel anxious, nauseated, or simply awkward. In 2023, a group of psychologists dubbed this phenomenon alexinomia.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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For a few years in the 2010s, America seemed to be falling out of love with soda. But some blend of price-conscious shopping, kooky social-media trends (milk and coke, anyone?), and perhaps a streak of fatalistic behavior on the part of Americans has made the beverage newly relevant.

Soda consumption declined consistently over the decade leading up to 2015, in part because of backlash from a health-conscious public and a series of soda-tax battles; some soda drinking was also displaced by the likes of energy drinks, coffee, and bottled water. However, in 2017, the CDC announced that rates of sugary-beverage consumption had plateaued—at a rate far above the government-recommended limit. Now soda sales are ticking back up modestly: Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper both saw soda-case sales rise in the past year, and total sales volumes for soft drinks have risen, according to the investment-bank advisory firm Evercore ISI; last year, Coca-Cola was among the fastest-growing brands for women, Morning Consult found. Soda is having a cultural moment too: Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” was a, if not the, song of the summer. And the U.S. president-elect is famously a fan of Diet Coke, reportedly drinking a dozen a day during his first term.

Compared with 20 years ago, Americans are drinking far fewer sugar-sweetened beverages, particularly soda—but compared with a decade ago, they are drinking almost as much, Dariush Mozaffarian, a physician and a nutrition expert at Tufts, told me. Researchers have suggested that there are links between drinking large amounts of sugary drinks and a range of negative health outcomes, but the people most open to changing their soda habits may have already changed them, Mozaffarian noted. In order for cultural norms around soda to shift, drinking it needs to become uncool, he argued. That’s not an impossible goal, but it can be achieved only through a combination of sustained policy efforts, strong messaging from public-health officials, and perhaps even a bit of help from celebrities.

Public-health messaging alone can’t get people to change their behavior. Soda brands have been “a part of our cultural life for decades,” my colleague Nicholas Florko, who covers health policy, told me. “And so there is going to be some reluctance if you tell people” to ease up on “this thing that your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, have been drinking forever.” Part of the draw of soda is that it’s generally quite cheap. To undercut that appeal, activists and politicians have pushed to implement taxes on sugary drinks; in many cases, they have received major pushback from industry and business groups. Researchers have found that, in places where sugary-drink taxes managed to pass, they do help: One study last year found that sales of sugary drinks went down by a third in American cities with soda taxes, and there’s no evidence that people traveled beyond the area looking for cheaper drinks. But these taxes require political will—and pushing for people’s groceries to cost more is not always an appealing prospect for politicians, Nicholas pointed out, especially in our current moment, when Americans are still recovering from the effects of high inflation.

Soda taxes are controversial, but a soda tax isn’t just about cost: Part of the reason such policies work, says Justin White, a health-policy expert at Boston University, is that they can make sugary drinks seem less socially acceptable. “Policies affect the norms, and norms feed back into people’s choices,” he told me. Now new soda norms are emerging, including a crop of sodas that claim to be gut-healthy (although, Mozaffarian said, more research needs to be done to confirm such claims).

Soda feels like an intrinsic part of American life. But generations of canny advertising and celebrity endorsements, Mozaffarian noted, are responsible for embedding soda in so many parts of America—think of its placement in ballparks and other social spaces—and in the day-to-day rhythms of offices and schools. Curbing soda consumption would require a similarly intentional shift.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

‘I Won’t Touch Instagram’

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

If TikTok does indeed get banned or directly shut off by its parent company, it would be a seismic event in internet history. At least a third of American adults use the app, as do a majority of American teens, according to Pew Research Center data. These users have spent the past few days coming to terms with the app’s possible demise—and lashing out however they could think to.

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It’s often hard to discern, definitively, when one societal trend ends and a new one begins. But right now across the United States, one change couldn’t be clearer: Many DEI programs are sputtering or dying, and the anti-DEI movement is ascendant.

Some people, especially but not limited to those on the right, have long viewed contemporary efforts to strengthen DEI practices as performative, meddlesome, or ineffective. In the past several weeks, though, with Donald Trump’s return drawing closer, the DEI opposition has been growing louder. What’s more, this newly emboldened anti-DEI bloc has also gained powerful allies.

Many Americans might not have even been familiar with the concept of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) until the latter half of 2020, when, following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent nationwide protests against racism and police brutality, many corporations and universities scrambled to bolster their diversity efforts. DEI programs can involve hiring practices, but they also refer to company culture and everyday corporate decisions about how an organization is run. During the final months of the first Trump administration, some people in mainstream circles saw attacking DEI as akin to publicly displaying prejudice. Now, not even five years later, for a large swath of the country, the idea of DEI has become a catchall insult. DEI is part bogeyman, part always-there scapegoat for some combination of bureaucracy, overreach, or mediocrity.

Last week, Trump’s current right-hand man, Elon Musk, blamed the historically destructive Southern California wildfires on DEI practices within the Los Angeles Fire Department. “They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes,” Musk wrote on X, reposting a document related to the LAFD’s “racial equity action plan” for fiscal year 2020–21. The former Fox host Megyn Kelly likewise went after the LAFD, zeroing in on the organization’s female leadership and its first openly LGBTQ fire chief, Kristin Crowley, who is a 22-year veteran of the department: “Who takes comfort [in] ‘I’m going to die, but it’s in the presence of an obese lesbian’? This is ridiculous,” Kelly said on her podcast.

The actor James Woods, who for a time thought he had lost his home in the Palisades fire, also brought up DEI while attacking Crowley. In a post on X, he highlighted a paragraph from her official bio on the department’s website regarding her commitment to “creating, supporting, and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity.” Those three words were all Woods needed to pounce: “Refilling the water reservoirs would have been a welcome priority, too, but I guess she had too much on her plate promoting diversity,” he wrote.

In his recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Mark Zuckerberg awkwardly praised “masculine energy” and lamented that “a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered.” His company, Meta, just confirmed that it intends to scuttle certain DEI programs. Zuckerberg’s Rogan interview, like his cozying up to Trump, is part of a careful calibration, one in which the issue of DEI is top of mind. Stephen Miller, Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, reportedly told Zuckerberg late last year that the 47th president is intent on going to war against DEI culture in corporate America. Zuckerberg apparently got the message. In an internal memo obtained by Axios, Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of human resources, explicitly said that “the legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing.”

Whether or not you agree with Meta’s decisions about how to run the company, Gale is correct that the landscape is shifting. At the start of the year, McDonald’s announced that it was scrapping its “aspirational representational goals.” Shortly after Trump’s electoral victory, Walmart said that it planned to end its racial-equity training programs for staff and was reevaluating DEI goals around suppliers. But it’s not just the tech bros or corporate behemoths. Last month, the University of Michigan announced that it would end the practice of requiring diversity statements as a component of faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. The change came following an extensive New York Times Magazine investigation that argued that the school’s costly investment (roughly a quarter of a billion dollars) in DEI initiatives had all but failed.

The battle over DEI will likely get uglier. Hasty policy changes in either direction are unlikely to yield the best results. But one thing that’s obvious is that the onset of post-DEI culture has already taken hold in certain realms. A recent Financial Times story cited an unnamed “top banker” who felt “liberated” and excited at the prospect of no longer having to self-censor. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled,” the banker said. “It’s a new dawn.”

Related:

Does med school have a DEI problem? The real “DEI” candidates

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Nancy Walecki: “The place where I grew up is gone.” A Gaza deal closed, but no closure Elon Musk imagined a cover-up. America just kinda, sorta banned cigarettes.

Today’s News

Israel’s cabinet is not expected to vote until at least tomorrow on the cease-fire deal with Hamas, which would include a hostage and prisoner exchange, according to Israeli officials. Senate confirmation hearings were held today for some of Donald Trump’s nominees, including Doug Burgum for secretary of interior and Scott Bessent for secretary of the Treasury. In President Joe Biden’s farewell address last night, he warned against an “oligarchy taking shape in America” and the threat it poses to democracy.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The endless plastic in American homes makes modern house fires burn hotter, faster, and more toxic than their predecessors, Zoë Schlanger reports. Time-Travel Thursdays: The raw-milk debate is but one flash point in the nation’s ongoing dairy drama, Yasmin Tayag writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Shutterstock.

Is Moderate Drinking Okay?

By Derek Thompson

Like millions of Americans, I look forward to a glass of wine—sure, occasionally two—while cooking or eating dinner. I strongly believe that an ice-cold pilsner on a hot summer day is, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, suggestive evidence that a divine spirit exists and gets a kick out of seeing us buzzed.

But, like most people, I understand that booze isn’t medicine.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Vartika Sharma

Read. Pagan Kennedy’s new book, The Secret History of the Rape Kit, doubles as an account of the largely unknown history of the rape kit’s real inventor, Sheila McClear writes.

Examine. Many Americans used to think that getting married and having children were essential to living “happily ever after.” But that calculus has shifted, Stephanie H. Murray reports.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Over the past several months, bird-flu numbers have been steadily ticking up, especially among farmworkers who interact closely with cows. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who reports on science, about her level of concern right now, and the government’s response to the spread of the virus so far.

Lora Kelley: We last spoke in April, after a dairy worker became infected with bird flu. At the time, you described your level of concern about bird flu as “medium.” How would you describe your level of worry now?

Katherine J. Wu: At this point, I would upgrade it to “medium-plus.” I don’t think I will upgrade to “high” unless we start to see strong evidence of human-to-human transmission. I am not ruling out that possibility, but we aren’t there yet.

The situation has gotten quite a bit worse since last spring. We are seeing consistent infection of dairy workers, meaning an especially vulnerable population is exposed in their work environment. Each time the virus infects a new person, it’s an opportunity for it to evolve into something that could eventually become a pathogen that moves easily from person to person.

Lora: What could public-health officials have done differently in recent months to contain the outbreak?

Katherine: Part of the reason I feel concerned is the government’s lackluster response. The movement of the virus into cows was a huge red flag. Cows have never been a known source of this flu, so that was a complete surprise. That should have been a moment when officials said: We really need to contain this before it gets out of control. If some of the first afflicted herds had been kept from moving around, or even culled, it’s possible that the virus might have been contained before dairy workers got sick.

The USDA has ramped up its testing of milk, and the CDC is still working hard to do outreach to farmworkers, who are the population most at risk here. But there could still be more testing at the individual level—individual animals, individual people. There could be more frequent, aggressive sampling of where the virus is in the environment, as well as on farms.

Representatives at USDA and CDC have denied that their response has been inadequate—though independent experts I have spoken with dispute that. To be clear, officials can’t fully predict the future and stop an outbreak the second it starts to get bad, and critics aren’t demanding that. But right now, it’s still a very reactive approach: We see that the virus has been here; I guess we can keep checking if it’s there. But a more proactive approach with testing and better communication with the public would really help.

Lora: How has the government’s response to bird flu compared with its response to COVID?

Katherine: There’s no doubt that having COVID in the rearview affected the government’s response. I think they didn’t want to overreact and cause widespread panic when there wasn’t a need. That’s fair, but there’s a middle ground that I think they missed.

The response to COVID was by definition going to be haphazard, because we didn’t have a preexisting arsenal of tests, vaccines, and antivirals. We hadn’t dealt with a coronavirus like that in recent memory. Here, though, there is a slate of tools available. We’ve dealt with big flu outbreaks. We know what flu can do. We know that flu, in general, can move from animals into humans. We’ve seen this particular virus actually move into people in different contexts across the world.

Lora: Have we missed the opportunity to mitigate the spread of bird flu?

Katherine: Because there has not yet been evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission, there is still time to intervene. Did officials miss some opportunities to intervene more and earlier? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that from here the attitude should be I guess we should just let this roll.

Lora: We may have RFK Jr., a vaccine skeptic, leading the Department of Health and Human Services soon. How might his leadership affect the bird-flu response?

Katherine: I don’t think there is a need to roll out bird-flu vaccines to the general public yet. But I think there are likely to be major changes to public-health policy in this country. RFK Jr. has specifically said that the National Institutes of Health will be taking a break from focusing on infectious disease for the next few years, and that doesn’t bode terribly well. Infectious diseases are not going to take a break from us.

Lora: Are there lessons from the COVID era that the public should better absorb in order to deal with illness more broadly?

Katherine: To be fair, it’s hard to avoid getting sick in general, especially at this time of year. During the worst of the pandemic, when people were still masking more consistently and not going into public places, we did get sick a lot less often because we were avoiding each other.

That said, I think people did forget very, very quickly that the things that worked against COVID work well against a lot of other diseases, especially other respiratory viruses. I am not saying that we all need to go back to masking 24/7 and never going to school or work in person. But maybe don’t go to work when you’re sick—a practice that all employers should enable. Maybe don't send your child to day care sick. Maybe don’t sneeze into your hand and then rub your hand all over the subway railing. Wash your hands a lot.

Unfortunately, there is this tendency for a really binary response of doing everything or nothing. Right now, people seem to be leaning toward doing nothing, because they are fatigued from what they felt like was an era of doing everything. But there’s a middle ground here too.

Related:

Bird flu is a national embarrassment. America’s infectious-disease barometer is off. (From April)

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

MAGA’s demon-haunted world How Trump made Biden’s Gaza peace plan happen David Frum: Justin Trudeau’s performative self-regard The one Trump pick Democrats actually like

Today’s News

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a 42-day cease-fire deal that will include an exchange of hostages and prisoners, President Joe Biden announced. Senate confirmation hearings were held for multiple Trump-administration nominees, including Pam Bondi for attorney general and Marco Rubio for secretary of state. During Bondi’s testimony, she refused to say that President-Elect Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. South Korea’s impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was detained and questioned last night over his attempt to impose martial law last month.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Hipster Grifter Peaked Too Soon

By Sophie Gilbert

In the spring of 2009, Vice published a blog post, notorious even by its own standards, titled “Department of Oopsies!—We Hired a Grifter.” An employee had started chatting with the magazine’s new executive assistant, Kari Ferrell; after she reportedly began coming on to him over instant messages, he Googled her, only to find out that she was on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s most-wanted list. Instead of simply firing Ferrell, Vice outed her online.

Read the full article.

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No more Mr. Tough Guy on China No one will remember Jack Smith's report, Peter Wehner writes. What happens when a plastic city burns What is L.A. without its trails? Aspiring parents have a new DNA test to obsess over.

Culture Break

Jan Buchczik

Test out. Here are 10 practical ways to improve your happiness, according to happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks.

Read. Kindness has become countercultural, James Parker writes. Perhaps Saint Francis can help.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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