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.

In the Greek story of Sisyphus, the king was condemned for eternity to move a massive rock up a hill but never reach the summit. Albert Camus famously saw it as a parable of the human condition: Life is meaningless, and consciousness of this meaninglessness is torture. This is how I’d remembered Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus, which describes an afterlife as devastating as that of Prometheus having his liver pecked out by an eagle anew every day. But when I reread it recently, I was reminded that for Camus, the king isn’t entirely tragic; he has some power over his existential predicament. Once he grasps his fate—“the wild and limited universe of man”—Sisyphus discovers a certain freedom; he gets to determine whether to face the futility of it all with joy or sorrow. “Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world,” Camus writes. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

This is a bleak model for those in lamentation over our current moment. But Camus’ brand of pessimism is apt, simultaneously acknowledging that sense of being cosmically screwed while knowing that finding purpose, and even some kind of hopefulness, is possible in a world that promises nothing.

Hopeful Pessimism, the title of the philosopher Mara van der Lugt’s new book, perfectly captures this oxymoronic attitude. It is an attempt to redeem pessimism’s Debbie Downer reputation. For starters, van der Lugt writes, pessimism is not the same as fatalism. Just because you believe that the sky is likely to fall does not mean that you think it necessarily will. Pessimism is simply “a refusal to believe that progress is a given.”

Van der Lugt’s main concern is arguably both more farsighted and more immediately pressing than any particular fire or election. As the world comes off the hottest year on record, weeks into a new one already marked by cataclysmic fires, she hopes to articulate a philosophical outlook for climate-change activists—a cohort with seemingly every reason to despair. On this topic especially, she sees the danger, and even “cruelty,” in optimism. She imagines how a pessimist and an optimist might approach the problem. As she puts it, the optimist would say, “There is every reason to believe we can turn the tide and prevent the worst impact from climate change. Our efforts to prevent climate catastrophe are likely to succeed.” The pessimist would say, “There is every reason to believe we cannot turn the tide and prevent the worst impact from climate change. Our efforts to prevent climate catastrophe are likely to fail.”

[Read: How to find joy in your Sisyphean existence]

Which attitude will lead to action? Van der Lugt thinks the pessimist’s is more motivating and sees a danger in the optimist’s, because if things look so generally bright, why should anyone get off the couch? The climate activist driven by pessimism has a sense of direness, of panic. They can’t assume the arrival of an imagined savior, such as some utopian technology or a conversion among all of the world’s leaders. Disaster, and grief about that disaster, is with them always, and so they feel that they have no choice but to act.  Moreover, the presumption that individuals have supreme control over the direction of the world—when they very much do not—sets one up for perpetual disillusionment and pain. As Voltaire called it almost 300 years ago, optimism is “a cruel philosophy hiding under a reassuring name.”

So what about the hopeful part of hopeful pessimism?

I called van der Lugt, who teaches philosophy at the University of St Andrews, last week to ask her. Pessimism, after all, is not that hard to come by; just open the newspaper on any given day. Hope is another thing. But she insisted that a certain kind of hope is compatible with pessimism—so long as it obeys two ground rules. First, it should be built not on an expectation of what will happen in the future but instead on uncertainty, based on the fact—and it is a fact—that we just don’t know how things will turn out. “Things might get pretty bad, but there’s no telling if things could at some point get better again,” ven der Lugt told me. “Similarly, things might be pretty good; they could also get pretty bad again. So it’s never ever a closed story. The open-endedness of the future means that there’s always ground to stick with things that are worth fighting for and worth being committed to.”

This leads to her second condition: If hope can’t emerge from any concrete belief that you will actually achieve your hoped-for outcomes, then what can sustain it? Values, van der Lugt said. The simplest way to put this is to ask whether the cause or the change you are fighting for would still feel worth fighting for if you knew you’d never see it realized. Your hope is “value-oriented,” she said, when it is driven by principles such as justice, duty, solidarity with your fellow human, and just your sense of goodness. You act because you feel you must.

This formulation of hope immediately made me think of Václav Havel, the Czech dissident who would become the president of his country (and a thinker who has come to mind for me a lot lately). Havel was interviewed in 1985 precisely on this question of hope. He insisted that it was not a “prognostication” but rather “an orientation of the spirit”: Hope is “not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

[Read: A mindset for the Trump era]

This is also the kind of hope—what van der Lugt refers to as “radical hope”— birthed in the most desperate of situations, a moment when all is truly lost, when even death seems certain, and people still find a reason to fight back. I think of the men whom Chris Heath wrote about in his recent book, No Road Leading Back. These were Jews and Russian prisoners of war who were forced by Nazi SS officers to do something unimaginably grotesque and inhumane: exhume the more than 70,000 corpses buried in mass graves in a forest named Ponar outside Vilnius, Lithuania. The Nazis wanted to conceal the crime by burning the bodies on mass pyres. The prisoners were shackled with chains and lived in a deep hole in the ground. Some of them discovered their families among the dead. And they had total certainty that once their job was done, they too would be killed. Yet at night, as Heath meticulously details, they began to dig a tunnel through a wall of their subterranean prison, using only their bare hands and spoons. On the night of April 15, 1944, after months of digging, they made their escape.

What could possibly motivate someone in these hellish circumstances to keep digging, night after night, hoping against hope? Heath combed through the testimonies left behind by the dozen escapees who made it out. Their mindset, if I can summarize it, was that they were going to be murdered, one way or another, and that it was better to die while making an attempt to undermine their captors. At the very least, they were exercising their own agency, their own remaining humanness, and in the very, very unlikely event that one of them could tell the story of what had happened in Ponar, they could sabotage the Nazis’ efforts to incinerate history.

Americans are not in the world of Sisyphus or in the world of those who face imminent death because of who they are. But these stories do tell us something about the way despair can clarify, producing a purer kind of hope shaped not by expediency but by a sense of what really matters. This is what Byung-Chul Han, a South Korean–born philosopher, calls a “dialectic of hope” in a new meditation on the subject, The Spirit of Hope, in which he sees despair as hope’s abysmal twin. “The higher hope soars, the deeper its roots,” Han writes.  Just as despair can feel like stumbling through a pitch-black cave without an idea of where it ends, hopeful pessimism has the quality of being stranded on a deserted island yet bolstered by the ocean’s infinite blue.

For those who feel dread about America and the world, hopeful pessimism might seem like a thin string to grab on to, but it offers, I think, what might otherwise be called realism without requiring that one abandon the beauty of possibility. I like, too, that hopeful pessimism demands action, because there are no promises; it banishes wishful thinking. It’s the attitude of the philosopher Terry Eagleton, who began his 2015 book, Hope Without Optimism, by admitting that he saw himself as “one for whom the proverbial glass is not only half empty but almost certain to contain some foul-tasting, potentially lethal liquid.” And yet, he had to conclude, “there is hope as long as history lacks closure. If the past was different from the present, so may the future be.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Trump vs. the spies]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Trump’s ‘deep state’ revenge]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The case of John Ashcroft]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The coronavirus conspiracy boom]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For many years, Representative Earl Blumenauer began each Congress by writing a personal letter to every new member of the House and hand-delivering it to their office. The letter contained all the advice he wished that he had been given in his first term.

Now Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat, has retired after 28 years in office. This month marks the last time that newcomers will get his letter, which has evolved in the nearly two decades since he drafted the first version. He shared the final letter with me last month. It focused more than I expected on the human needs of the men and women elected to represent us. This is because, Blumenauer proposed in an interview, Congress would perform better if lawmakers ate healthy, got enough exercise, made more time for family, forged deeper connections with fellow members, and took care to hire good staffers.

What follows is an edited version of our interview.

Conor Friedersdorf: You joined the House for the first time in 1996, and 10 years later, you wrote an orientation letter to help new colleagues. What inspired it?

Earl Blumenauer: I was campaigning in North Carolina for a former professional football player named Heath Shuler––and while talking with his campaign manager, an experienced political operative, it became clear to me that even though he knew how to run a campaign, he had no idea how to help Heath set up a congressional office if he won. For the bulk of a long drive, I tried to give him a sense of what he was getting into. And when I got home, I developed two or three pages capturing that information.

Starting out right is important, given the challenges they are about to face, not just as a member but as a human being, because, to be honest, Congress can be soul crushing. The job is often hectic. It's totally unpredictable. And many aspects of it are getting worse.

[Read: The myth that Congress doesn’t work hard]

Friedersdorf: Americans can turn on C-SPAN and see committee hearings, floor debates, and votes on bills where everyone says “yay” or “nay.” What’s hectic and unpredictable?

Blumenauer: The dance of legislation is much more complicated than the Schoolhouse Rock version. It’s very hard to predict if or when many votes will be held. You’re dealing with the dynamics between the House and the Senate, the dynamic in your party––just trying to negotiate a through line with your own coalition––and, of course, there are conflicts between the parties, and the dynamic with the president. And even a single House member can upset the apple cart and blow things up if they are so inclined.

The schedule can be disrupted in a heartbeat and often is. You have an appointment where you anticipate solving a problem with somebody over a nice dinner, and that gets blown up because of legislative hassles. Suddenly, you’ve got an unexpected late night of work, no opportunity to get food, and an early-morning Zoom call with a group back home. Or maybe you’re delayed on the floor, you’ve got people waiting for you at a reception, and whatever you need to accomplish is cut short because you’re rushing to catch a flight to your district, where you have obligations both professional and personal.

You race around with a knot in your stomach, week after week. Will I make this meeting? This vote? This flight?

Friedersdorf: You advise getting to know lots of other members. How does that help?

Blumenauer: We have seen in the last couple of years sort of a guerrilla, performative approach to the legislative process, where people are more than willing to just blow things up because they are not interested in passing legislation. They’re not interested in outcomes that normal people would anticipate. They are there to get clicks, command eyeballs, and get online contributions. That introduces more uncertainty into the process. And you don’t want to waste time on something that turns out to be a sideshow or a personal vendetta. So you look to others for information. No one person knows what is happening in Congress at any given time, so relationships become very important for figuring out what will and won’t happen. Meeting new members and their staffers and spouses has helped me to understand what’s going on and who I can work with.

[Read: The emerging bipartisan wokeness]

Friedersdorf: I was surprised by how much of your advice would apply to someone in any high-stress job––you tell members of Congress to eat healthy, to exercise, to set aside time for family.

Blumenauer: I advise people to keep healthy food at their desks because mealtime is wildly unpredictable. I advise making a habit of taking the stairs and riding a bike to work because that builds exercise you wouldn’t otherwise get into your routine. And it’s easy to get caught up in the job and neglect family if you don’t set aside family time on your calendar and instruct your staff to respect it.

Friedersdorf: Following that advice would doubtless help members personally. Would it also be better for the country?

Blumenauer: I strongly feel that’s the case. You’ve got a bunch of people who are far from home, inadequately nourished, overly caffeinated, perhaps drinking alcohol, often sleep deprived, cranky, and constantly plunged into uncertainty about their schedule and travel.

Friedersdorf: In other words, you want well-rested, well-nourished, unharried legislators, because life stressors make reaching sound conclusions and compromises even harder than it would otherwise be?  

Blumenauer: Exactly. Especially if they’re not in a safe seat, they’re fundraising too. They sometimes lose track of what city they're in, going from hotel room to hotel room, all of which look the same. It takes a physical toll. And emotionally, if people are involved with leadership or intense political activities, or are just tightly wound, this can add up to outbreaks of conflict. All these things seem manageable in isolation, especially at first, but they take a cumulative toll. Unless you help people understand the dynamic that they’re entering, they won’t appreciate what they need to do to preserve their family, friendships, and health. Those kinds of struggles make you worse at your job. It is vital to humanize this process.

[Read: How sleep deprivation decays the mind and body]

Friedersdorf: You give your letter to Republicans and Democrats. You want members of both parties to be at their best. Why?

Blumenauer: So much of what we do is not inherently partisan. I've always, from my very first political experience, looked for the things that bring people together. I started on a campaign to lower the voting age and developed relationships on both sides of the aisle for that constitutional amendment. I was struck by how powerful it is to allow people to work cooperatively.

Every piece of legislation I introduce starts out as being bipartisan. We’ve got a bipartisan bicycle caucus. Animal welfare is not a partisan issue and shouldn’t be. I’ve worked assiduously to cultivate, if I can use that term, a bipartisan coalition on cannabis policy.

Infrastructure didn’t used to be partisan. It was one of those things that brought people together to deliver for their districts. Some of my proudest accomplishments deal with international water, where we put together a bipartisan coalition that’s provided resources for poor people around the globe dealing with water and sanitation. It has resulted in tens of millions of lives being saved. It’s not without controversy; you’ve gotta pay for it. And sometimes it gets caught up in partisan controversy. But in the main, it doesn't.

[Read: A moderate proposal]

Friedersdorf: The most powerful committees in Congress have tremendous power and influence. You advise new members to avoid underrating less prestigious committees. Why?

Blumenauer: I worked hard for a dozen years to get on the Ways and Means Committee, and wow, it’s been really exciting and impactful. But there are no bad committees. While working to get on Ways and Means, I was able to have an impact on the Foreign Affairs Committee, dealing with trade policy and technology. The Transportation Infrastructure Committee is profound in its impact on communities across the country. So if you want to be on the money committees where they tax and spend, that’s fine. But being on Foreign Affairs, or Veterans Affairs––because they’re not prestigious, they have more turnover. You can end up being a chair or a ranking member of a subcommittee in one or two sessions of Congress. You can develop expertise, move more legislation, get visibility, and achieve significant successes.

Friedersdorf: You urge new members to invest a lot of time and effort in how they staff their new offices. How does better-than-average staffing translate into better results for members?

Blumenauer: You can’t be an expert on every issue. And there is the added responsibility to represent the people at home who have problems. You must learn to empower staff to sort through issues and to help us reach out and represent constituents. We are, I think, woefully understaffed. So hiring men and women who are dedicated to being problem solvers, who are loyal to their member, loyal to the district and their oath, makes all the difference. I advise being slow and deliberate while staffing up, and moving on quickly if it’s not working. Nonperformers sap the enthusiasm of people on your team who do perform.

But as Congress has gotten more performative, some members have de-emphasized staff expertise. They hire for PR skills, while doing few constituent services and hiring no policy people at all.

Friedersdorf: On votes, you advise, “Don’t vote against your conscience” or your “best judgment.” You call that “one thing that you cannot explain to your family and close supporters.” What tempts members of Congress to cast votes that they can’t defend?

Blumenauer: It’s how we got the Iraq War. A number of us saw very clearly this was a mistake. But in the aftermath of 9/11, the Iraq War was popular, and there was a sense among a number of members that if they didn’t go along with popular opinion, despite their reservations, they’d pay a price. A lot of foreign-policy decisions have had tragic consequences because it’s so difficult for people to cast votes on the merits and their conscience. At times, I’ve heard from other members, I admired what you did. I wish I could have done that. But the job is to do that. I make the point that the perceived political cost doesn’t really matter on a lot of such votes, because people twist, distort, or lie about your voting record anyway. So straddling difficult issues ends up not helping anyway.  

[Read: How to salvage Congress]

Friedersdorf: If you were writing a letter to Americans about what they don’t know about Congress, what would you tell them?

Blumenauer: I’d start with what we do to help people understand the basics. There are three branches of government. More than half of the public doesn’t know that. So we’ve got our work cut out for us. Another problem: The vast majority of people are not even participating in primaries. They get information through social media and grotesque advertising campaigns. And they don’t take advantage of opportunities for actually meeting candidates.

I don’t have any snappy slogans or easy answers. But one way to improve things is for Congress and the 535 men and women who represent all of us to exercise their responsibilities more carefully. To be a little more sensitive to one another’s needs as human beings and to run the legislative process with that in mind. We need to model the behavior that we want to see from the political process. Identifying issues that are important but not divisive is extraordinarily rewarding. And it’s how we’re going to get through this difficult era: by focusing on things that weren’t in the crossfire of the last election.