You might be forgiven for forgetting—ever so briefly—that Donald Trump is president of the United States. Sometimes it seems like he does, too.

In the middle of the night, as news about the plane crash at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport was breaking, Trump posted on Truth Social:

The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!

He raises some valid points—ones that many people might be wondering about themselves. The difference between them and him is that he is the leader of the federal government, able to marshal unparalleled resources to get answers about a horror that happened just two and a half miles from his home. He’s the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, and the crash involved an Army helicopter. But Trump isn’t really interested in doing things. Like Chauncey Gardiner, the simple-minded protagonist of Being There, he likes to watch.

This morning, Trump held an astonishing briefing at the White House where he and his aides unspooled racist speculation, suggesting (without any evidence) that underqualified workers hired under DEI programs had caused the accident. “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong ideas and opinions, and I think we’ll state those opinions now,” Trump said, and he did. Vice President J. D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth criticized diversity efforts from the lectern as well. (Trump also misrepresented Federal Aviation Administration programs.) Trump insisted that he wasn’t getting ahead of the investigation by speculating, and that he could tell diversity was to blame because of “common sense.”

Trump also paused to accuse former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg of “bullshit,” and narrated videos and information he’d seen in the news, interspersing his personal observations as a helicopter owner and passenger. “The people in the helicopter should have seen where they were going,” Trump said. At times, he appeared to blame both the helicopter pilots and air-traffic control. Perhaps it would be better to actually gather some information, but Trump is more interested in pontificating.

The pilots, DEI, air-traffic controllers, Buttigieg—the only common thread appeared to be that everyone was to blame, except for Trump himself.

No one could reasonably hold Trump responsible for the crash, just 10 days into his term—though that is the bar he has often tried to set. “I alone can fix it,” he has assured Americans, telling them that he personally can master and control the government in a way no one else can. He promised to be a dictator, though only on day one. Yet even while discounting his bluster, it would be nice to see the president doing something more than watching cable news and posting about it.

If he’s not going to do that, he could offer some consolation. Almost exactly 39 years ago, after the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger, President Ronald Reagan memorably described how the astronauts aboard had “‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’” Trump is giving us “NOT GOOD!!!”

Though exasperating, this passivity is no surprise. It was a running theme of Trump’s first administration and is already back in the second. In May 2016, Trump reportedly offered fellow Republican John Kasich a chance to be vice president, in charge of domestic and foreign policy; Trump would be in charge of “making America great again.” During Hurricane Harvey, in 2017, he struggled to show empathy for victims or do more than gawk at (and tweet about) the destruction. A few months later, he tried half-heartedly to do more after Hurricane Maria, producing the indelible visual of the president tossing paper towels to victims, like a giveaway at a minor-league baseball game.

[Read: That time Trump threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans]

Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Trump ally, has claimed that Trump wasn’t even running the government during his first term. During the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, Matt Yglesias notes, Trump was more interested in offering punditry on how the government was doing than acting like the head of the executive branch. And on January 6, 2021, according to federal prosecutors, Trump sat at the White House watching the violent sacking of the Capitol and doing nothing to stop it.

This approach to governance—or refusal to approach it, rather—is inextricably tied to Trump’s Gardiner-like obsession with television. The president watches hours of news every day, and if reports from inside the White House didn’t bear witness to this, his all-hours social-media posts would. Because he has little grounding in the issues facing the government and little interest in reading, television frequently seems to set his agenda. Political allies learned that the best way to get a message to Trump was to appear on Fox News. (Trolls, similarly, learned that a good way to rankle him was to take out ads on the channel.) Trump has used the Fox roster as a hiring pool for his administration.

One vignette from the first Trump administration illustrates the dynamic. In April 2019, as the White House was juggling half a dozen serious controversies, Trump called into Fox & Friends and yakked at length about whatever happened to be on his mind until even the hosts couldn’t take it any longer. Finally, Brian Kilmeade cut in and brought things to a close. “We could talk all day, but looks like you have a million things to do,” he said. Trump didn’t appear concerned about it.

[Read: Donald Trump calls in to Fox & Friends]

What’s odd is that even as Trump acts so passively, his administration is moving quickly to seize unprecedented powers for the presidency. In part, that’s because of the ideological commitments of his aides, but Trump also has a curious view of presidential power as an à la carte thing. He’s very interested in acquiring and flexing power to control the justice system, punish his enemies, and crack down on immigration, but he’d just as soon get the federal government out of the emergency-management business.

The presidency is not a spectator sport, though. At the end of Being There (spoiler alert), a group of political advisers conspires to put Chauncey Gardiner forward as the next president. The movie’s central joke is that the childlike, TV-obsessed protagonist has inadvertently fooled the nation’s most powerful circles into believing that he is profound, simply by stating directly what little he sees and understands. Joke’s on us.

Updated on January 25, 2025 at 2:32 p.m. ET

Some presidents turn to think tanks to staff their administrations. Others turn to alumni of previous White Houses. Donald Trump has turned to Fox News to fill the ranks of his Cabinet.

Former Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth was confirmed to be secretary of defense Friday night in a dramatic vote worthy of cable news, if not the world’s greatest fighting force. After three Republican senators voted against Hegseth, Vice President J. D. Vance had to break a tie, making it the tightest vote for a defense chief ever.

Hegseth is unlikely to be the last Fox alumnus on the Cabinet. Pam Bondi, a former guest host, is on track to be confirmed as attorney general, while Sean Duffy, a former Fox Business host, will probably win confirmation as secretary of transportation. The outlook is murkier for Fox contributor Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump nominated to be director of national intelligence. Michael Waltz, a frequent Fox guest, is already installed as national security adviser, a Cabinet-level role. And this list omits top officials appointed or nominated for high-level non-Cabinet roles, such as Border Czar Tom Homan, FDA Commissioner-Designate Marty Makary, and Surgeon General-Designate Janette Nesheiwat, all of whom have spent hours on Fox.

[David A. Graham: The Fox News rebound]

Unlike other traditional pools of top appointees, this group doesn’t represent any clear political ideology. A lack of commitment to any strong ideology can be a good thing in a Cabinet official if it means leaders are thinking for themselves. Ideologues tend toward tunnel vision and a bunker mentality, and they can cause a president both policy and political problems. Unfortunately the skulk of Foxes in the White House is not so encouraging. Their political histories and answers during confirmation hearings suggest less independent thinking or pragmatism than strong allegiance to partisanship itself, as does their collective history at Fox News. Wherever the Republican Party has been, Fox has tended to be as well. Whether it’s the GOP leading Fox or vice versa is not always clear or consistent. The channel was neocon during the Bush administration, Tea Party during the Obama administration, and anti-Trump before it was fiercely pro-Trump … and briefly Trump-skeptical again after the 2020 election, before it got back on the bandwagon. As I wrote in November, Trump and Fox have rediscovered a symbiotic relationship that has brought both back to a pinnacle of influence.

One reason Fox has been such a good farm team for the administration is that Trump appears to have chosen many of his nominees on two criteria: their allegiance to him, and whether they look TV-ready. Fox hosts check both boxes, but nearly blind partisanship is not an ideal trait in a presidential adviser. Cabinet officials need to be generally aligned with the president, but they also need to be willing and able to disagree and deliver difficult news—something Trump did not appreciate from his first-term Cabinet. Where Hegseth and Gabbard do have more developed ideologies, they are disturbing: for Hegseth, reported bigotry toward Muslims, opposition to women’s equality, and Christian nationalism; for Gabbard, an odd affinity for figures like Bashar al-Assad.

[Tom Nichols: America is now counting on you, Pete Hegseth]

Many of the Fox alumni have little relevant experience. Hegseth served as an officer in the Army, but he has no other government work and has never run any organization nearly as large as the Pentagon—and those he has led have not gone well. Gabbard served in the Army and U.S. House but has no intelligence experience, but she’s been nominated to oversee the entire intelligence community. Hegseth also has extensive personal liabilities, including serial infidelity, an allegation of sexual assault (which he strenuously denies), and many reports of alcohol abuse. (Relevant, too, is Fox News’s reputation for messy hiring—it has seen a procession of serious personal scandals in its ranks over the years, many of them involving allegations of sexual misconduct.)

In confirmation hearings, Hegseth and Bondi were both able to use their experience on TV to come across smoothly and parry questions they didn’t want to answer. Bondi, for example, avoided questions about the 2020 election that might have either identified her as an election denier or angered Trump, but the result is holes in public knowledge about her views.

Despite their flaws, most (and maybe all) of Trump’s Fox appointees will be confirmed. For that, the president will be able to thank Fox itself, because the network’s coverage helps cheerlead his decisions to Republicans. Once the Cabinet is in place, its members will have to do the hard work of governance. It might not go well for the country, but it should make for good TV.

The mood of a Donald Trump rally typically follows a downhill trajectory, beginning with hot pretzels and Andrew Lloyd Webber, and concluding with grievances aired and retribution promised. But last night at Capital One Arena, the mood was jubilant all the way through.

This was Trump’s final rally before his triumphant return to the White House, and like high schoolers facing the promise of a lightly supervised all-night lock-in, attendees were giddy with anticipation. Fans dressed in Uncle Sam hats and scarlet peacoats crammed into the arena, which was lit up in shades of red and royal blue. Each rally-goer I spoke with was looking forward to something different from the next Trump presidency. “They’re doing a nice big raid up in Chicago, and I’m excited about that,” Will Matthews, from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, told me, referring to yet-unconfirmed rumors about where Trump’s promised mass deportations will begin. Jenny Heinl, who wore a PROUD J6ER sweatshirt, told me that she was eager “to hear about the pardons.”

The message across MAGA world was clear: The next four years are going to be big. “Everyone in our country will prosper; every family will thrive,” Trump promised last night. Speaking before him, Stephen Miller, the incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, predicted that America is “now at the dawn of our greatest victory.” Earlier in the day, Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and the host of the War Room podcast, had hosted a brunch on Capitol Hill. He’d dubbed the event “The Beginning of History,” and, for better or worse, it is.

Throughout yesterday’s rain and snow in Washington, D.C., Trump’s supporters held tight to their joy. “I can’t believe we’re in!” I heard a woman shout to a friend as they dashed through the arena doors. The preceding few days had been bewildering. Citing the low temperatures, the Trump transition team announced on Friday that the inauguration would be moved indoors, to the Capitol Rotunda. A mad scramble ensued for the very limited supply of new tickets. In the end, a few fans will still get to watch in person. Most of them, though, will be right back at Capital One for an inauguration watch party.

One group of Trump fans had carpooled together from Canada to attend the inauguration, and wore matching red sweatshirts reading MAPLE SYRUP MAGA. They were disappointed about the venue change—14 degrees is not cold, the Canadians insisted—but they were still happy they’d made the trip. “If Trump hadn’t been elected,” Mary, who had come from St. Catharines, Ontario, and asked to use only her first name, told me, there would be more and more “woke bullshit.” For Mary and her friends, Trump’s reelection means that there will instead be an end to the fentanyl crisis, tighter border security, and a stronger example for other Western countries.

Sharon Stevenson, from Cartersville, Georgia, had joined a caravan of dozens of Georgians traveling to the rally, and had waited in line for more than seven hours to get inside the arena. The effort, she assured me, was “100 percent worth it.” Stevenson and her friends were eager to lay out their expectations for Trump. “The biggest thing for me is to investigate all the fraud,” she said. The “stolen election,” the January 6 “massacre”—“it’s going to come out under this administration.” Her friend, Anita Stewart from Suwanee, Georgia, told me that her priority was health, and that she was particularly excited about the prospect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. “I’m looking forward to hopefully no more commercials for drugs!” Plus affordable groceries, she said—and cheap gas.

With a wishlist so long, and expectations so immense, one wonders how Trump’s supporters will respond if the about-to-be president doesn’t meet them all. When I asked Stevenson that question, she smiled and shook her head. “Promises made, promises kept,” she said. “If there’s one person who keeps their word, it’s Donald Trump.”

[Read: What Trump did to law enforcement]

During the roughly three hours before the headliner took the stage, his supporters ate chicken fingers and posed for the Jumbotron camera as it swung around the arena. They bowed their heads when the hosts of the MAGA favorite Girls Gone Bible podcast asked God to bless Trump, and sang along as the musician Kid Rock performed a mini-concert, including his 2022 single “We the People,” featuring a brand-new lyric in honor of the inauguration: “Straighten up, sucker, cause Daddy’s home.”

The political pronouncements really got going at about 4 p.m., starting with Miller, who received a hero’s welcome from the crowd and said that Trump’s win represented “the triumph of the everyday citizen over a corrupt system.” (As he spoke, the incoming first lady, Melania Trump, was on X announcing the launch of a meme coin to match her husband’s new one, a development that turned the family into crypto-billionaires over the weekend.) Later, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host turned MAGA podcaster, hailed “the goodness that is about to rain down” under Trump’s leadership. And Donald Trump Jr., fresh from his recent mission to Greenland, affirmed that the next four years will be his father’s “pièce de résistance.”

When at last Trump arrived onstage, he was greeted ecstatically as the embodiment of his allies’ declarations and his followers’ dreams. He teased his plans to sign nearly 100 executive orders today, including what he has described as a “joint venture” with the parent company of TikTok and a ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. “You’re gonna have a lot of fun watching television,” he predicted. Before welcoming the Village People to join him onstage for an exuberant rendition of “YMCA,” Trump ran through a list of additional priorities to come: the largest deportation operation in American history, lower taxes, higher wages, and an end to overseas wars. “The American people have given us their trust,” Trump declared, “and in return we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.”

That history begins at noon.

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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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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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Just two years ago, Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News showed that many right-wing influencers didn’t believe a word of the stuff they were peddling to their audiences. In text messages that surfaced during litigation, top Fox anchors and executives poured scorn on the idea that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, even as the network amplified that conspiracy theory to its audience. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” Tucker Carlson wrote in one message.

Today, though, some of the country’s most mainstream, most influential conservatives are stoking paranoid conspiracism—and seem to genuinely believe what they’re saying.

The venture capitalist Peter Thiel, for example, could not be more of an establishment figure: He was an early investor in Facebook, is now a mentor of Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance, and has strong links to the U.S. defense industry through his company Palantir. But in a recent opinion column in the ultra-establishment Financial Times, Thiel sounds like The X-Files’ Fox Mulder after a long night in the Bigfoot forums. “The future demands fresh and strange ideas,” he writes.

[Read: Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy]

After Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Thiel implies, we might finally know the truth about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and whether the coronavirus was a bioweapon. Thiel notes that the internet also has questions about the death of the well-connected sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis”—that is, a revealing—“of the ancien regime’s secrets,” he adds. (Two pretentious expressions in one sentence? Monsieur, watch out for hubris.) Thiel wants large-scale declassifications and a truth-and-reconciliation commission, in the model of South Africa’s reckoning with apartheid. “The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619,” Thiel writes, referring to the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, “but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today.”

Thiel portrays Trump’s resurgence as a defeat for the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex,” or DISC—his friend and employee Eric Weinstein’s term for legacy media outlets and nongovernmental organizations that supposedly prevent politically inconvenient truths from reaching the public. Thanks to the internet, information can no longer be suppressed.

Like most classic conspiracism, Thiel’s arguments contain grains of truth. As Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger wisely notes, “The line between unsupported conspiracy claims and reliable investigative research is neither as firm nor as stable as many of us would like to believe.” Thiel is right that some liberal commentators and mainstream outlets were too quick to dismiss the question of whether COVID-19 originated anywhere other than a Wuhan meat market. At one point, a New York Times reporter suggested on Twitter that racism underlay any suspicions that the virus had escaped from a research lab. None of this shows, however, that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, or that Anthony Fauci deserves to be prosecuted. (For that matter, the Times has run multiple articles that are open-minded about the origins of the virus.) In any case, who was president in 2020, when the COVID-origins debate was emerging? If any classified evidence existed that would have cleared up the controversy, Donald Trump had the power to disclose it.

[From the October 2023 issue: From feminist to right-wing conspiracist]

As for Epstein, his death, in 2019, was certainly very convenient for anyone who might have been embarrassed by what he knew. Nevertheless, the so-called mainstream media are not covering up the lingering questions; definitive answers simply aren’t available, and may never be. (CBS broadcast an episode of 60 Minutes with graphic photos of Epstein’s autopsy all the way back in January 2020.) Besides, if anyone is hiding the truth about Epstein, it’s probably not the left-wing blob. Who would benefit from killing a man who hung out with Trump, Prince Andrew, and various tech billionaires? Probably not blue-haired vegans from Portland, Oregon; racial-justice campaigners; or humanities academics. Meanwhile, the idea that anyone stifled doubts about the official explanation of the Kennedy assassination before social media is laughable. The subject has captivated Americans for more than six decades. Oliver Stone’s JFK, which highlighted florid conspiracy theories about the former president’s death, came out in 1991. The film starred Kevin Costner and won two Oscars.

Thiel’s quest for closure about the pandemic is noteworthy. Something happened during that period to drive influential, apparently rational people toward beliefs that were once associated with crackpots. Others suddenly lost trust in institutions and expertise. The podcaster Bryan Johnson—a successful tech entrepreneur who is now pursuing literal immortality—went from boasting about receiving the Moderna vaccine in 2021, because he had invested in one of the companies involved in its development, to complaining that “vaccines are a holy war” and that he regretted getting a COVID shot because not enough data supported its use. This is a man who pops enough pills that if you shook him, he’d rattle.

[Read: I went to a rave with a 46-year-old millionaire who claims to have the body of a teenager]

High-profile figures across the political right have revealed their penchant for woo-woo. Skepticism of conventional medicine has become a staple of heterodox podcasts that simultaneously promote unproven, unregulated dietary supplements. My colleague Anne Applebaum has described this trend toward mysticism, fringe religious beliefs, and pseudo-spirituality as the New Obscurantism.

Until recently, I had assumed that the anti-establishment sentiments promoted by Thiel and others were merely opportunistic, a way for elites to stoke a form of anti-elitism that somehow excluded themselves as targets of popular rage. Thiel has always made a point of entertaining provocative heterodox opinions, but he has also demonstrated himself to be eloquent, analytical, and capable of going whole paragraphs without saying something unhinged. But reading his Financial Times column, I thought: My God, he actually believes this stuff. The entire tone is reminiscent of a stranger sitting down next to you on public transit and whispering that the FBI is following him.

The correct response to uncertainty is humility, not conspiracy. But conspiracy is exactly what many of those who are influential in Trump’s orbit have succumbed to—everything must be a product of the DISC, or the deep state, or the World Economic Forum, or other sinister and hidden controlling hands. The cynical Tucker Carlson of the Dominion era has given way to a more crankish version since his firing from Fox. When Carlson first went independent, he seemed to be hosting kooks for clicks. On his live tour, for example, he looked faintly embarrassed as Roseanne Barr told him that Democrats “love the taste of human flesh and they drink human blood.” And maybe he didn’t really believe the former crack user who claimed to have had a gay affair with Barack Obama, or the historian who asserts that Winston Churchill—not Adolf Hitler—was the “chief villain” in the Second World War. But at a certain point, I started to take Carlson at his word. Recently, he claimed that he’d woken up with scars and claw marks after being attacked by a demon in his bedroom. A few days before this, he said that America needed a “vigorous spanking” from Daddy Trump, and a few days after, Carlson revealed that he thought demons had invented the atom bomb. He’s clearly working through some stuff.

What can we learn from this kind of credulity? First, that maintaining an appropriate level of skepticism is the intellectual discipline needed to navigate the rest of the 2020s. Yes, the legacy media will get things wrong. But that doesn’t mean you should believe every seductive narrative floating around online, particularly when it’s peddled by those who are trying to sell you something.

The second lesson is that, no matter how smart a person might be in their business dealings, humans are all prone to the same lizard-brain preference for narratives over facts. That makes choosing your information sources carefully even more important. If you spend all day listening to people who think that every inexplicable event has a malevolent hand behind it, you will start to believe that too. The fact that this paranoia has eaten up America’s most influential men is an apokálypsis of its own.

Disney (DIS) announced on Monday that it will be merging its Hulu + Live TV business with FuboTV (FUBO). The deal will allow Disney to continue with its sports streaming joint venture with Fox Corp. (FOX) and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD).

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