The American populism of the late 19th century was a rebellion of working people against financial elites; the American populism of this century is one of financial elites feigning rebellion while crushing the vulnerable. This is why, just a few short days into his presidency, Donald Trump is already making good on his promise to persecute trans people zealously. On Monday, Trump issued an executive order purging trans service members from the military on the grounds that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” a statement belied by the thousands serving honorably until they were singled out for discrimination by their commander in chief. A day later, Trump issued a second executive order that could make gender-affirming care for young people unavailable in most of the country.

The damage wrought by legitimizing this form of discrimination will not be limited to the trans community. Laws and legal rulings that undermine trans rights may soon be used to restrict the rights of other, less marginal groups. Anyone naive enough to think that the government can deny fundamental rights to one group without putting another’s at risk is in for some nasty surprises. That much became clear during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in December over Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

At issue in the case, United States v. Skrmetti, is whether Tennessee’s ban on medical treatments for gender dysphoria—the medical diagnosis for someone who believes their gender does not match their biological sex—unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of sex. The Tennessee bill declares that “this state has a legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex,” and therefore in preventing medical treatments that “encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.” Implicit in this is the belief that if you don’t “appreciate your sex,” then the state should force you to. Beyond the legal jargon and pretext, the underlying conflict here is between conservatives who have concluded that trans identity is a social contagion to be eradicated and that using state power for this cause is legitimate, and their opponents, who believe that trans people are entitled to equal protection under the law.

[Read: The push for puberty blockers got ahead of the research]

Crucially, the law bans treatments—such as hormones and puberty blockers—only for the purpose of a minor’s gender transition; they remain legal to prescribe for any other reason. The law bans treatments that enable “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Because those same medications are available as long as they are not used for gender-affirming care, lawyers for the Biden administration argued that the ban constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex. The Biden administration’s position was that this kind of care can be regulated—then–Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar cited as a legitimate example a West Virginia law that requires two physicians to sign off—but that the regulation cannot be discriminatory. Not all measures that distinguish on the basis of sex are unconstitutional—see, for instance, sex-specific bathrooms—but they are subject to greater legal scrutiny; Tennessee is denying that it is engaging in discrimination, and thus not subject to that level of scrutiny.

One might question why this case matters if you are not yourself trans or do not have a loved one who is. The number of trans people is objectively small—less than a fraction of 1 percent of the population. A recent JAMA Pediatrics study found that fewer than 0.1 percent of young people with private insurance received hormone treatments or puberty blockers during a five-year period—a limited number of patients overall, but one for whom the stakes are very high. The outcome of this case has much broader implications than it might appear, because if a state can, as Prelogar put it, force people to “look and live like boys and girls,” subject to the government’s definition of what that means, then a lot more people might be affected. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out during oral argument, for many years, some states prevented women from becoming butchers or lawyers. Women could not have their own credit cards or bank accounts until the 1970s. If it’s not unconstitutional sex discrimination for the government to say that people cannot behave “inconsistent with their sex,” well now you’re really talking about a lot of people—a lot more people than the rather tiny population included in the category of “they/them” that the Trump campaign was hoping you feel disgust and contempt for.

Much depends on the nature of the justices’ ultimate decision and how far-reaching it is. The conservative movement’s mobilization against trans rights, however, is just one step in a wider rolling-back of other antidiscrimination protections. Conservatives have consciously targeted a diminutive, politically powerless segment of the population, trying to strip them of their constitutional rights, and then used those legal precedents to undermine laws that prevent discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, and other characteristics. The trick was making Americans think that only the rights of trans people are on the chopping block, that “they/them” could be persecuted without consequences for “you.” As Frederick Douglass once said, “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people, who persuade themselves that they are safe, though the rights of others may be struck down.”

“One of the things that’s worth emphasizing is that for the people who brought the case, the movement that’s behind this litigation, there have long been anxieties about sex-discrimination jurisprudence, period,” Mary Ziegler, a professor at UC Davis School of Law, told me. “So if that’s the agenda that’s driving the litigation, and the Court is embracing the arguments behind that agenda, you have to wonder if this isn’t the end of the road.”

The harm to antidiscrimination law more broadly could be immense. Many of the rationales offered by the conservative justices during oral argument echo the reasoning of those opposed to bans on racial discrimination. If they regain legitimacy, they could later be used to weaken other laws that protect Americans from bigotry.

[Read: Anti-trans discrimination is sex discrimination]

For example, defenders of Tennessee’s ban have said that it does not discriminate based on sex, because it prohibits gender-affirming care to both boys and girls—a point Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett raised during oral argument. Similar assertions were made in defense of interracial-marriage bans, which prevented both Black and white people from marrying their chosen spouses. “If we’re reinstating the equal-application theory … that was a theory that was used historically to uphold and justify race-based distinctions,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “I don’t know how you can wall off sex discrimination from race discrimination if you’re reviving this equal-treatment claim.”

Kavanaugh suggested that because the case involved medical science, the Court should just leave it to the “democratic process,” an approach that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointedly observed would have prevented the Court from striking down bans on interracial marriage, because at the time, Virginia had argued that the “science” regarding interracial marriage “was substantially in doubt,” and therefore banning it should be up to the voters. The point of equal protection is to prevent fundamental rights from being subject to mere popularity contests—especially when, as Justice Sotomayor pointed out, the population at risk is so few as to be politically powerless.

The Trump administration’s early actions make clear that exploiting voters’ fears about trans people was part of a larger plan to undermine antidiscrimination protections for many other people, even as they intend to make the lives of millions of others—including many of Trump’s own supporters—much worse. Among the first actions taken by the administration was the repeal of the Lyndon B. Johnson–era directive ordering federal contractors to avoid discriminating on the basis of race, as well as subsequent orders barring discrimination on the basis of gender. The administration has also frozen all new cases in the civil-rights division of the Justice Department. Trump has also ended all federal-government diversity efforts and intends to fire employees involved in them. The administration’s executive order on DEI also threatens to sue companies for having diversity programs, a threat that will encourage companies to resegregate to avoid being accused of anti-white discrimination. Trump has shut down the White House’s Spanish-language website, ended refugee- and humanitarian-parole programs, and unconstitutionally attempted to nullify birthright citizenship.   

[Read: Trump targets his own government]

Even before Trump took office, Republican-controlled states passed laws that curtail women’s rights to free speech, privacy, and movement on the grounds that those restrictions are necessary to ban abortion—something that, as Justice Samuel Alito took pains to reiterate during oral argument in Skrmetti, neither he nor his colleagues in the conservative movement regard as sex-based discrimination.

This agenda has, by the Republicans’ own account, been partly enabled by their success at demonizing transgender people in the November election. Trans people are a group few in number and marginalized enough that there is little political cost at the moment to persecuting them as Republicans have, or blaming them for their political misfortunes and abandoning them as Democrats have following their electoral loss. One transgender congressional representative was enough for Republicans to demand that all of the Capitol’s bathrooms be restricted by “biological sex.” The tiny percentage of trans children receiving care is justification to ban them from accessing treatment they seek. A defense-funding bill passed with limited Democratic support and signed by President Joe Biden will ban gender-affirming care for the children of service members—for those with trans children, their reward for serving their country is that their children will be discriminated against. If they are stationed in states like Texas, which has no less than 15 military installations, they will have few options, if any, for care outside the military system.

[Read: The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity]

This is shameless bullying, but then, the president is himself a bully of the highest order, and presidents are moral exemplars, for better and worse. It is not necessary for one to approve of gender-affirming care in order to respect people’s right to make their own decisions about what medical care is best for them and their families, or to oppose this kind of outright, ideologically motivated state persecution.

Over the past century, many groups have successfully sought to have their rights recognized, winning, at least on paper, the same rights as white, Christian, heterosexual men. The right-wing project today, which Trumpist justices support, is to reestablish by state force the hierarchies of race, gender, and religion they deem moral and foundational. Whether that’s forcing LGBTQ people back into the closet, compelling women to remain in loveless marriages, or confining Black and Hispanic people to the drudgery of—as Trump once put it—“Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” in which they are meant to toil, the purpose of this ideological project is the same: to put the broader mass of people back in their “proper places.” To those who see the world this way, freedom means the freedom of the majority to oppress the minority. Attacking trans people first was simply their plan for getting the American people on board with taking many other freedoms away.

Shortly after birth, newborns in the United States receive a few quick procedures: an Apgar test to check their vitals, a heel stick to probe for genetic disorders and various other conditions, and in most cases, a hepatitis B vaccine. Without that last one, kids are at risk of getting a brutal, and sometimes deadly, liver condition. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana happens to know quite a lot about that. Before entering Congress in 2009, he was a physician who has said he was so affected by an 18-year-old patient with liver failure from the virus that he spearheaded a campaign that vaccinated 36,000 kids against hepatitis B.

Cassidy, a Republican, will now play a major role in determining the fate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick for health secretary, whose confirmation hearings begin today on Capitol Hill. Kennedy has said that the hepatitis B vaccine is given to children only because the pharmaceutical company Merck colluded with the government to get the shot recommended for kids, after the drug’s target market (“prositutes and male homosexuals,” by Kennedy’s telling) weren’t interested in the shot. Kennedy will testify in front of the Senate Finance Committee, where Cassidy and 26 other senators will get the chance to grill him about his views. Though it might seem impossible for an anti-vaccine conspiracist to gain the support of a doctor who still touts the work he did vaccinating children, Cassidy has not indicated how he will vote. Similar to the Democratic senators who have come out forcefully against Kennedy, Cassidy, in an interview with Fox News earlier this month, said that RFK Jr. is “wrong” about vaccines. But he also said that he did agree with him on some things. (Cassidy’s office declined my request to interview the senator.)

That Kennedy even has a chance of winning confirmation is stunning in its own right. A longtime anti-vaxxer with a propensity for far-fetched conspiracy theories, 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. Each one of these theories is demonstrably false. The Republican Party has often found itself at war with mainstream science in recent years, but confirming RFK Jr. would be a remarkable anti-science advance. If Republican senators are willing to do so, is there any scientific belief they would place above the wishes of Donald Trump?

A number of Republicans have already signaled where they stand. In the lead-up to the confirmation hearings, some GOP senators have sought to sanewash RFK Jr., implying that his views really aren’t that extreme. They have reason to like some of what he’s selling: After the pandemic, many Republicans have grown so skeptical of the public-health establishment that Kennedy’s desire to blow it up can seem enticing. And parts of RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda do in fact adhere to sound scientific evidence. His views on how to tackle America’s epidemic of diet-related diseases are fairly well reasoned: Cassidy has said that he agrees with RFK Jr.’s desire to take action against ultra-processed foods. Kennedy appears to have won over the two other Republican doctors on the committee, Senators Roger Marshall of Kansas and John Barrasso of Wyoming. Marshall has been so enthusiastic about Kennedy’s focus on diet-related diseases that he has created a “Make America Healthy Again” caucus in the Senate. Although Barrasso hasn’t formally made an endorsement, he has said that Kennedy would provide a “fresh set of eyes” at the Food and Drug Administration. (Spokespeople for Barrasso and Marshall did not respond to requests for comment.)

[Read: Everyone agrees Americans aren’t healthy]

Meanwhile, Kennedy appears to have gone to great lengths to sand down his extremist views and present himself as a more palatable candidate. “He told me he is not anti-vaccine. He is pro–vaccine safety, which strikes me as a rational position to take,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas told Politico. He has also done more to drum up unnecessary fear about COVID shots than perhaps anyone else in the country. Nearly four years ago, Kennedy petitioned the federal government to revoke authorization for the shots, because “the current risks of serious adverse events or deaths outweigh the benefits.” (COVID shots are highly safe and effective. A spokesperson for Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.)

Especially on the right, Kennedy’s conspiracy theories have not consumed his candidacy: With concerns about conflicts of interest, his support of abortion, and generally strange behavior (such as dumping a dead bear in Central Park), there is much to debate. If Republican senators skirt around his falsehoods during today’s confirmation hearings, it will be evidence of their prevailing capitulation to Trump. And it also may be a function of Kennedy’s rhetorical sleights. As Benjamin Mazer recently wrote in The Atlantic, Kennedy is not simply a conspiracy theorist, but an excellent one. 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.

[Read: RFK Jr. is an excellent conspiracy theorist]

During his recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Kennedy claimed that thimerosal, a preservative containing mercury used to protect vaccines from contamination, was found to cause “severe inflammation” in the brain of monkeys. Kennedy was able to quickly name the lead author and introduce the methods as if he has read the study hundreds of times. But Kennedy’s central claim—that the brains of monkeys given thimerosal were severely inflamed—is a “total misrepresentation” of the study, its lead author, Thomas M. Burbacher, told me. The problem is that Kennedy gets away with these claims because very few listeners are going to log onto PubMed to track down the study Kennedy is referencing, let alone read through the entire thing.

In theory, senators should be equipped to push back on his schtick. RFK Jr.’s positions are hardly a mystery, and senators have advisers to help them prepare for such hearings. Regardless of Kennedy’s pseudoscientific beliefs, some Republicans may support him simply because they are wary of bucking their president. Before Kennedy even makes it to a full vote from the Senate, he has to receive approval from the Senate Finance Committee: Given the tight margins in the committee, Kennedy can’t afford to lose a single vote from Republicans sitting on that panel, assuming that no Democrats support his nomination. I reached out to the offices of seven Republican senators on the committee who haven’t already backed Kennedy for clarity on where they stand; none of them gave me a straight answer on how they’d vote.

In all likelihood, the first big decision in Kennedy’s nomination will fall to Cassidy. He has proved willing to oppose Trump before. Cassidy was one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment proceedings. That led Louisiana’s Republican Party to formally censure him, and has drawn him a primary challenger for his 2026 reelection bid. Although Cassidy criticized Trump during the 2024 campaign, he now seems eager to support him. “Today, the American people start winning again,” Cassidy wrote in a statement on Inauguration Day.

Perhaps Cassidy will still dissect Kennedy’s views with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. He likes to dive deep into health-care minutiae any chance he gets. (I would know: He once pulled out his iPad and lectured me and other reporters about some arcane drug-pricing policy.) But if today’s meeting is full of softball questions, it could put RFK Jr. on his way to confirmation. That would send a message that, science-wise, the Senate is willing to cede all ground. Trump could pursue the most radical parts of the Project 2025 agenda, such as splitting up the CDC, or Kennedy could launch a full-blown assault on vaccines—and the Senate would be in a much less powerful position to stop it even if it wanted to. If senators hand the keys of a nearly $2 trillion health-care agency to a known conspiracy theorist, anything goes.

The staff was still setting up dinner on Mar-a-Lago’s outdoor patio on a balmy early-January evening when Donald Trump sat down. He was surrounded by several top advisers who would soon join him in the West Wing and who wanted to get his input before his attention shifted to his wealthy guests and Palm Beach club members.

Susie Wiles, the incoming chief of staff, led the conversation, listing some of the dozens of executive orders that had been teed up for Trump’s signature once he reclaimed the presidency. She wanted to talk about sequencing, according to a Trump adviser present at the meeting, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. How would he like to stagger the orders over the first few weeks back in office?

“No,” Trump replied, this person told me. “I want to sign as many as possible as soon as we show up.”

“Day one,” he said.

Trump has followed through on the promise of an onslaught, unleashing in his first week more than two dozen executive orders, holding a nearly hour-long news conference and other question-and-answer-filled public appearances, and posting several times a day on social media. Some of this, of course, is in Trump’s nature. He is an inveterate showman whose instincts are to seek attention and dominate the discussion.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s second term might have already peaked]

But this time around, Trump’s ubiquity is also a deliberate strategy, several of his aides and allies told me. Part of the point is to send a message to the American people that their self-declared “favorite” president is getting things done. The person at the Palm Beach meeting and another Trump adviser, who also requested anonymity to describe private conversations, told me that the White House’s flood of orders and news is also designed to disorient already despairing Democratic foes, leaving them so battered that they won’t be able to mount a cohesive opposition.

Trump’s actions in his first week have been a mix of signal and noise, of distraction and seriousness. He has taken some defeats. But Trump has succeeded, at least, in creating a stark contrast with the quiet of his predecessor, and in (yet again) shifting the nation’s political discourse back toward him. And compared with 2017, the resistance has been far more muted. The Democrats, without an obvious head of the party and still digging out from November’s election disappointment, have yet to make a focused counterargument to Trump, instead getting largely drowned out in the national discourse.

“This is four years in the making. It’s days of thunder. The scale and the depth of this has blown the Democrats out. It’s blown out the media,” Steve Bannon, a former senior White House aide who still informally advises Trump, told me. “He vowed to start fast and now knows what he’s doing. This is a totally different guy than in 2017.”

When Trump left office in disgrace after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, former administration officials, conservative lawyers, and think-tank researchers began drafting orders and legislation—most famously, the Heritage Foundation initiative known as Project 2025—that could act as the foundation of a Trump revival. And after he won, his inner circle made clear that this time the administration would be staffed with true loyalists.

Wiles, who also co-chaired Trump’s campaign, told a closed-door gathering of Republican donors in Las Vegas in the early days of the transition that the president’s first moves would be to reinstate some executive orders from his first term that President Joe Biden had revoked, according one of the Trump advisers and another person familiar with the meeting. Wiles told the private gathering, for a group called the Rockbridge Network, that Trump would begin by withdrawing from the Paris climate treaty and the World Health Organization. Trump, indeed, signed those orders on his first day back in office, but they were only two of the directives to which he affixed his signature—with a giant Sharpie—in ceremonies held at the Capitol; inside a sports arena in Washington, D.C.; and in the Oval Office during his inauguration festivities and in the days that followed.

His executive orders so far have covered immigration, trade, demographic diversity, civil rights, and the hiring of federal workers. Trump ordered DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs in the federal government to be eliminated. He curtailed the Department of Justice’s civil-rights investigations. Federal health agencies were ordered to halt public communications. And he moved to expand presidential power by eliminating protections for federal workers—so he could more easily staff agencies with supporters—and by refusing, without citing any legal authority, to uphold the U.S. ban on TikTok despite a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in the ban’s favor.

“The EOs are so much better-executed now,” Bannon told me. “Back in 2017, we were writing things on the back of envelopes. It was like a playground game, shirts and skins. Now they have good people working, real lawyers.”

Some of Trump’s moves have been symbolic, such as one order to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and another to insist that, even in national times of mourning, flags be flown at full staff on Inauguration Day. Others ordered government reviews—to examine China’s compliance with trade deals, for example, or the feasibility of creating an External Revenue Service to collect tariffs—but might not have real heft. If it was hard to tell the difference between what was real and what was for show, that was by design, the two advisers told me—to make it difficult for Trump’s opponents to focus their outrage.

His aides debated for weeks about how to enact his campaign pledge to pardon the January 6 rioters, whom the incoming president had declared “hostages.” Days before Trump took office, many advisers, including Vice President J. D. Vance, expected that pardons would be issued for many of the offenders but not, at least immediately, for those convicted of violent crimes, including assaulting police officers. But Trump overruled them, issuing a blanket pardon, and he included commutations for the leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, each of whom had been sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. The two Trump advisers said that Trump thought leaving anyone out would invalidate the underpinning of the Capitol riot—his insistence that he won the 2020 presidential election. Trump also decided that any blowback would be manageable.

[Read: Trump’s first shot in his war on the ‘deep state’]

Not everything has worked out for Trump in his first week. Even some staunch Trump allies recoiled from the pardons for violent January 6 offenders; Senator Lindsey Graham called them “a mistake” on Meet the Press. Perhaps most notable, Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship generated a wave of legal action and was blocked by a federal judge. On his first day in office, Trump took on the Fourteenth Amendment by issuing a directive to federal agencies to stop issuing citizenship documents to children born on U.S. soil to parents in the country illegally or under temporary visas. The U.S. government has long interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that those born on American soil are citizens at birth, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The U.S. district court judge who blocked the order, John Coughenour, called it “blatantly unconstitutional” and told a Trump administration attorney, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order.”

Trump has also struggled to achieve his goal of fast-tracking Cabinet confirmations in the early days of his administration. His choice for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, became the first Pentagon nominee to require the tie-breaking vote of the vice president to be confirmed. And Trump’s team is even more concerned about his pick for director of national intelligence, former Representative Tulsi Gabbard. The president’s aides are not certain that she has the needed support, and Trump himself has expressed some doubt that she’ll be confirmed, the two Trump advisers told me.

Despite these stumbles, the White House has reveled in Trump’s bombastic, over-the-top style, believing that his message is breaking through. Immigration officers have conducted raids in Chicago; Newark, New Jersey; and other cities. A dozen Guatemalan men in shackles were boarded onto a military aircraft in El Paso, Texas, for the deportation flight to their native country, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump threatened tariffs on Colombia in a tiff, now seemingly resolved, over deportation flights. His advisers have also aimed to keep the media off-balance. The White House press office has not sent out a daily schedule to reporters, and has given little notice for Trump’s events. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has yet to hold a formal briefing (though the first is tentatively slated for later today).

The speed and volume of Trump’s orders so far seem to be scrambling the left. Millions of protesters marched in cities across the nation on January 21, 2017. Democratic civic groups exploded in popularity, liberals organized voter-registration drives, and cable-TV ratings and newspaper subscriptions soared. Late-night comics made Trump their top punch line. Trump’s hastily written travel ban on Muslim-majority countries went into effect seven days into his term in 2017, sending lawyers and even ordinary citizens sprinting to airports to assist those who were suddenly subject to detainment. That moment, in many ways, was the early high-water mark of the resistance and set a template for the Democrats’ defiance going forward.

Yesterday marked the first week of Trump’s second term. No large-scale protests have taken place. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argued during last week’s caucus meeting that Democrats cannot chase every outrage, because the Trump administration will “flood the zone” with maddening changes, one person in the room told me. In a Saturday Night Live sketch this past weekend, the show’s Trump character shut down a performance based on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which became a liberal totem a decade ago. The mood among Democrats, at least in some quarters, feels more like resignation than resistance.

So far, the action on the left has been centered more in the courtrooms than in the streets. Deirdre Schifeling, the chief political and advocacy officer of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me that the organization has filed lawsuits to contest a variety of Trump’s immigration orders and has worked to train volunteers in dozens of states to help local officials in responding to the administration’s plans.

“We’re in a different moment. People are not as surprised as the first time. But I would not mistake that for a lack of willingness to fight,” Schifeling said. “It seems like this first week is one giant test balloon—seeing what will stick, seeing what they can get away with. It’s incumbent on all of us to stay calm and firmly push back on them. Don’t give them an inch.”

[David A. Graham: It’s already different]

Jennifer Palmieri, a longtime Democratic strategist who served as White House communications director for Barack Obama and worked on Hillary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris’s campaigns, told me that Democrats “can’t stay demoralized” and must recognize that Trump proposed “an agenda that people bought into”—that even gave him a popular-vote victory.

“Now [we need] to stay most focused on those issues—like prices—which he is the most vulnerable on,” Palmieri said. Inflation was a core campaign issue, and Trump himself noted during the transition that he “won on groceries,” telling Meet the Press in December, “We’re going to bring those prices way down.”

“It’s a tangible thing, and he needs to deliver,” Palmieri said.

That hasn’t started happening yet. For all the shock and awe of Trump’s first week, none of his initial actions directly took on inflation. But nor are Democrats making Trump look particularly vulnerable.

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Addiction comes in many forms and a lot of them are perfectly legal.

Daily, I fight the urge to scroll—for hours—on various social-media apps, yet I can go months without drinking alcohol and not even think about it.

The question of whether to ban harmful behaviors or substances is one laden with competing priorities: How intrusive is the government intervention? How harmful is the substance? Would banning it even work to curb the behavior? What about the economic impact of a ban? What sorts of revenues can be gained from taxation instead?

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the journalist Danny Funt, who has been reporting for years on a behavior that’s come under much scrutiny lately: sports betting. Renewed debate over bans on sports betting erupted into public view nearly seven years ago in a pivotal Supreme Court case. The decision opened the door to a variety of new state legalization schemes and the outcomes have been mixed, at best. Although states may have stumbled onto a new source of revenue (albeit weaker than some were expecting), it has come at a cost to gamblers’ financial and mental health. The results have turned even vocal proponents into skeptics.

“I interviewed Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts who signed the bill legalizing bookmaking there in 2022, and then a few months later became president of the NCAA and has become a really vocal champion for limiting the amount of betting on college sports, particularly in light of the brutal harassment that college athletes and coaches get whenever their performance costs someone a bet,” Funt recalled. “It’s honestly horrifying, the sort of stuff they see on social media and in real life. And he has said point-blank, ‘I wish, in hindsight, this had stayed in Las Vegas.’”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: The Super Bowl is coming up, and so today we’re talking about the most important part of sports: gambling.

In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting that spurred four years of nonstop ads enticing me and you and everyone I know to spend all our discretionary income on FanDuel or DraftKings. At the time, advocates believed that the revenue streams that could come from sports betting were too good to pass up. After the Great Recession, states were cash-strapped and hungry for new sources of money.

States have unevenly legalized, meaning in some places, you can log onto your phone to place a bet, and in others, you might still need to go to a physical location. The Court left open other pathways for the federal government to curb or ban sports betting, and as many of the negative impacts of gambling have metastasized, more policy makers are questioning whether legalization is worth the revenue.

My name is Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic. And this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is Danny Funt, a journalist who has tracked the rise of sports betting for The Washington Post and is now working on a wide-ranging book on the topic.

[Music]

Demsas: Danny, welcome to the show.

Danny Funt: Thank you for having me.

Demsas: So I have actually never bet on sports. I grew up in a Christian household—I am Christian—and it’s just not a thing that my parents ever allowed. We couldn’t even make dollar bets at home. Like, it was just not allowed. And I feel like I knew later on that I had kind of an addictive personality. So I was like, I’m not going to do this. I’m just never going to get into betting or gambling. Have you bet on sports? Is this something that you do?

Funt: Oh yeah. I’m trying to be more honest about that. I used to be like, Well, if you were a restaurant reporter, you’d have to eat out. You’d sort of be obligated to see what the culinary scene is like. So I do the same with sports betting. But truthfully, I was betting on sports long before I ever wrote about it.

I will say that the more you learn about how significant the house’s upper hand is, it definitely gets in the back of your head, and I do a lot less now just knowing I don’t stand a chance.

Demsas: How significant is it?

Funt: It depends on what you’re betting. The standard is actually pretty low. They’ll win $5 for every $100 you bet. But nowadays, that’s getting jacked up. So you might have heard of things like parlays. The parlay hold percentage, which is like the house revenue or the house edge, can be as high as 20 percent. So you’re getting beat pretty bad if you bet a lot of parlays.

Demsas: So sports betting, I feel like, I really did not hear a lot about, other than just when the World Cup is on, and your friend might bet you 20 bucks about the outcome or something like that. And now I feel like it’s everywhere. I feel like I’m seeing ads everywhere. I feel like every time I look over on the Metro, like, there’s some 17-year-old guy on DraftKings—well, let’s hope he’s 19, not 17. But it feels like it came out of nowhere. What happened?

Funt: It really did. That’s really what got my attention: It just felt like, overnight this went from something that we had all been taught was this existential threat to sports, that the professional leagues and the NCAA would never support—there were basically a century’s worth of scandals involving gambling that motivated that concern—and then, suddenly, there was a Supreme Court decision in 2018 that struck down a federal ban on bookmaking outside of Nevada.

And that really was a starting gun for all of these states to say, Hey. This is a way we can raise money and cash in on this opportunity. And it was incredible how night and day it was, where what I described as this existential evil was suddenly repackaged as this wholesome way of enjoying sports that every sports fan ought to consider.

Demsas: So take us back to 1992, where that federal ban was enacted. It’s called the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. What led to that effort? Who was pushing for it, and why did they think it was necessary?

Funt: Yeah, I was surprised to learn that it was the professional sports leagues, mainly the NFL, that went to Congress and said, Hey—we need this. So a lot of states back then were facing severe budget deficits. You know, it’s the tail end of the Reagan era; there’s a lot of resistance to tax hikes.

And naturally, when you need to raise money, but you don’t want to raise taxes, states will look at gambling. And there was sort of a groundswell of loosening the laws around tribal casinos and state lotteries. And a lot of states began looking at, basically, a version of state-sanctioned sports betting, where a state lottery is giving people the chance to wager on sporting events.

And the sports league said, We hate this idea. We’ve allowed it in Nevada because it’s been there forever, but we don’t want this to be the way that our fans engage with our product.

Demsas: Why? Why were they opposed?

Funt: For one, the 1919 Chicago White Sox scandal, where, famously, the team rigged the World Series in cahoots with gamblers—that is front and center still. Pete Rose had just been banned for life for betting on baseball as a player and as a coach. Really every decade, if you look back in the history books, there’s a major scandal involving college sports or professional sports or whatever. Beyond that, they just thought, We like the idea of fans liking the games for the games’ sake, and if they’re looking at it through this cynical gambling lens, it’ll kind of cheapen their relationship with sports and diminish our product.

Demsas: That’s very altruistic, right? I mean, I would imagine these sports leagues are just like, What can make us money? You know what I mean?

Funt: Definitely. At the same time, that does make them a lot of money. Think of all the jerseys and pennants and other merch that people buy because they’re lifelong sports fans. It fuels a lot of irrational, obsessive behavior. And then again, so does gambling.

So you can understand why it was very tempting, over time, for the leagues to flip-flop and come around on that. But the Senate and the House held these really robust hearings to evaluate the threat of gambling, the benefit that state-sanctioned gambling might pose. And it was just so striking, to me, that they laid it all out on the table in the early ’90s, and then fast-forward: 25 years later, there was really none of that. It was just, Okay, let’s cash in.

Demsas: So Nevada, you mentioned, has always been exempt from PASPA. What has been their experience?

Funt: Around the ’50s, when casinos were taking off in Nevada, sports betting was sort of an amenity, kind of like an all-you-can-eat buffet, you know? It’s just one more thing to draw people in so that they go to the table games and the slot machines that really make money. So in a lot of ways, sports betting was an afterthought.

And yet, many of us thought, If we ever wanted to bet legally on sports, that’s the place to do it. So people would schedule March Madness trips to bet on college basketball, or they’d go during the Super Bowl to bet on that. So it was a pretty big draw, but it was also very marginal in terms of the bottom line for Nevada gambling operators.

But gambling on sports still existed well beyond Nevada in the U.S., because there’s this thriving black market. And one of the big arguments for legalization, just like with cannabis, was, People are going to find a way to do it, so let’s bring it above board, tax it, implement consumer protections. And at least that was a pretty convincing argument in favor.

Demsas: You mentioned the Supreme Court decision, Murphy v. NCAA. That’s the Supreme Court decision that basically strikes down this federal ban. What was the legal argument at issue there? Why did the Supreme Court find that the federal government cannot ban sports betting?

Funt: So crucially, they very explicitly said they can ban sports betting—they had just gone about doing it with a defective bill. So naturally, Supreme Court decisions tend to get oversimplified in the public conscience, but this one is so crucial because sports betting’s advocates took the decision and said, Aha! The Supreme Court has given the green light for sports betting or okayed sports betting.

Really, the case turned on a fairly obscure Tenth Amendment concept about states’ rights. And sports betting was the focus, but it was also kind of beside the point. So New Jersey said that what the federal government has done, in essence, is said, We want to ban sports betting, but we don’t want to regulate it. So we’re going to commandeer the states to do the federal government’s bidding. If they had legalized sports betting before 1992, that’s grandfathered in; it can remain on the books. If they hadn’t, they’re prohibited from changing their mind and legalizing it.

So this argument before the Court wasn’t, Should the federal government be allowed to ban sports betting? It was, Should they be able to tell the states that if they have an existing law, they can’t change it? And, you know, it sounds like the most thrilling Supreme Court oral argument. It was actually pretty dry because it’s so obscure in that way. But the effect was to overturn this ban that had been on the books for a quarter century.

Demsas: What was the state interest in legalization? This is Murphy v. NCAA. That’s Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat. Why was he so hell-bent on taking this on?

Funt: The funny thing is: It was really Chris Christie, his predecessor, who was hell-bent on taking it on, and it really annoys Christie, who views bringing sports betting to New Jersey as one of his crowning achievements. It pains him to this day that the title of that case was updated to reflect Murphy because he took office before the decision came out.

But they had this long-standing economy, mainly in Atlantic City, that was really struggling. They looked at Nevada and were quite envious that sports betting brings people to the state around these major sporting events, year after year, and they said this would be a way to revitalize Atlantic City.

So the argument they brought to the Court wasn’t, Let’s have online sports betting across the country. It was, Let’s have in-person sports betting in these casinos in Atlantic City to jumpstart this ailing economy. As you can imagine, after that, all these states said, Hey—we also could use a lot of tax revenue and jumpstart our economies. Especially during COVID, when so many states were facing pretty dire budget deficits, they said, This is a fairly easy way to snap our fingers and have access to this influx of cash.

And that tends to happen a lot with gambling—is you’re facing some sort of economic or state budgetary issue, and this is a quick fix. So once New Jersey did it, and Delaware and Pennsylvania and a number of other early adopters, there was this ripple effect, where states look to their neighbors and say, Hey—they’re making money off this. We feel like chumps because we’re not. Let’s get on board. And the bandwagon really got off and running.

Demsas: So one thing that’s interesting is that—I’m confused why there’s been such a big focus or why sports betting has been so central to this story, when it feels like all types of online gambling are legal in lots of places now. So can you help me understand why that’s been so front and center?

Funt: I mean there’s so many video games or phone-based apps where it’s like, Hey—do you want to buy some tokens with real money? And then you’re playing with tokens, and then you convert the tokens back to real money, so it’s very sly.

There’s this whole phenomenon of what are branded as sweepstakes, where it’s essentially a loophole to allow people of all ages to risk money on sports, but it’s not called gambling. And you might remember: There’s a long history of things finding loopholes to offer gambling by a different name, most notably the whole daily-fantasy-sports boom that paved the way for sports betting.

So you’re right. It is part of a wider phenomenon. It’s interesting that true online casino gambling, like slots and roulette and poker, was predicted to follow from legal sports gambling. That was what a lot of these companies were banking on. And although about a half dozen states have legalized it, it hasn’t caught on quite as quickly as some of their investors’ hopes, and we could get into that.

Demsas: Yeah, why not?

Funt: The main reason is that the brick-and-mortar casinos think it’ll cannibalize their business, that if people can bet on those games on their phones, they’re not going to bother to make the trek to a retail casino to do the same thing. So I still think that’s going to be in the headlines a lot in the coming years, as states look for more ways to bring in tax revenue.

But to your question about why sports betting seems so dominant, part of it is just: The advertising is unbelievable. These companies are spending billions of dollars every year to get it in front of potential customers in as many ways as possible. As you were saying, you see it on the train. Same here in North Carolina. Billboards, signs downtown—everywhere you look there’s an appeal to get you to start betting on sports, not to mention all the TV ads. So the marketing is just overwhelming.

And then beyond that, it is startling, in that this was seen as something that was done in the shadows, and now it’s so mainstream and really being rammed down people’s throats in a way that a lot of people are quite concerned about.

Demsas: So what is the landscape now, right? Like, after Murphy, states had to pass their own legalization schemes. Right now, D.C. and 27 states allow online sports gambling, and there’s some regional concentration here that I thought was interesting—basically, the entire Northeast and the mid-Atlantic, as well as the Midwest. But lots of the South hasn’t. The Pacific Northwest hasn’t. California and Texas haven’t. What kind of explains this regional variation?

Funt: I think in the Northeast, state lotteries are so deeply rooted. Massachusetts, for example, has the highest-grossing state lottery per capita. So I think it’s easier to transition people into a new form of gambling. In a lot of parts of the country, like California and Texas, tribal interests are so powerful—they’re resisting anything that would threaten their business. In parts of the South, there’s a strong conservative Christian aversion to gambling still, although I think that’s dissipated a lot from one of the main reasons why the country didn’t adopt more gambling sooner. So yeah, it’s a lot of cultural and political reasons.

Demsas: One story of yours really kind of shows how haphazard the legalization process has been. Can you tell us about the Abunai gambler in D.C.?

Funt: Yes, so as you mentioned, D.C. is one of the places that legalized sports betting. Like many places, they did it quite hurriedly and sort of made things up as they go. And one interesting decision the D.C. government made was to have a city-sponsored sports-betting operation, as opposed to letting these companies like FanDuel and DraftKings run the show. So you could bet through those companies at stadiums and arenas, but if you are out and about on your phone or at a lot of these betting terminals in cafés and restaurants and bars, you are betting with a city-sponsored sportsbook called Gambet[DC].

And these terminals—they sort of look like ATM machines. They popped up all over the place, including at this tiny poke shop called Abunai. And one of the interesting things about betting terminals that professional gamblers were quick to pick up on is: Unlike if you’re going to a brick-and-mortar sportsbook, where you give your ID and they pay close attention to who it is betting, you bet anonymously through these terminals. So if you’ve sort of cracked the code and figured out an edge, you can bet anonymously, basically limitlessly, through these terminals and make a killing.

And this one guy found deficiencies in the odds in this poorly run city-sponsored sportsbook. It’s kind of incredible how bad the odds were compared to the rest of the market. Like, it didn’t take a genius to pick off vulnerable games to bet on. So he just finds a list of places in the city that have these betting terminals. Abunai was the first alphabetically on the list. So he says, Okay, great. They have a nice owner and staff, who didn’t mind him basically turning it into his home office.

And day after day, he would just dump cash in this machine and bet as much as he could—so much so that it swung the entire city’s betting numbers so that an overwhelming amount of money was being bet through this one store. He was winning so much that the entire city-run sportsbook was net negative for an entire month, which is unheard of. We all know the house always wins. D.C.’s sportsbook was run so poorly the house lost, in a month.

Demsas: How does that happen? Like, what is going on there?

Funt: So basically, sports-betting odds are often like efficient markets. So just like it’s really hard to beat the stock market, it’s really hard to beat who’s gonna win, you know, a football game or a basketball game, over the long haul, because, basically, the world’s collective wisdom is informing the spreads and the odds on these games.

But the people who are running Gambet[DC], this D.C. sportsbook, were very slow to update the odds. Sometimes, they would just have errors in how they input the information, so they just clearly have the equivalent of a typo in inputting the odds. Just not a lot of oversight. Even though it’s a pretty airtight business, you still need a lot of smart people running it and automation to manage it.

So this guy just picked off all these bad lines and bad odds. And statistically, he gained the upper hand, because if Gambet[DC]’s odds are way out of sync with the rest of the market, chances are the rest of the market’s right.

Demsas: So you literally just have to look at what the market is telling you, what the odds are in other places, and then just go sit down at Abunai Poke and just say like, All right, looking at my phone, what’s going on, on DraftKings or whatever, and then just do that.

Funt: Precisely. He was betting on sports that he didn’t follow at all. He had no expert insights into them. It was just, A respected sportsbook has the odds at this number. Gambet[DC]’s are off in this way. I’m gonna err on the side of the respected sportsbook and bet against Gambet[DC]. And it was hugely profitable, at least as long as he got away with it.

Demsas: Do you know how much money he made?

Funt: Yes, so thanks to some public records that were turned over, only over the course of three months, he profited more than $400,000—pretty unheard of, even for an incredibly successful bettor. That rate of return is just remarkable.

Demsas: Wow. So I went down a rabbit hole, when I was researching for this episode, about American history on sports gambling. And I did not know the role of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy—the OG Bobby Kennedy—his crusade against sports gambling. And learning that, kind of in the middle of the 20th century—you touch on this a little bit, but—that the real focus on outlawing sports gambling was about combating organized-crime syndicates.

Bobby Kennedy wrote an article in The Atlantic in April 1962 about this issue. And just quoting from it:

As I sit down today to write this article, a business executive with an industrial firm on the Eastern seaboard is telephoning a bookmaker to place a fifty-dollar bet on a horse race; a factory worker in a Midwestern town is standing at a lunch counter filling out a basketball parlay card on which he will wager two dollars; a housewife in a West Coast suburb is handing a dime to a policy writer who operates a newsstand as a front near the supermarket where she shops.

These people, and millions like them who follow similar routines every day, see nothing wrong in what they are doing. Many of them can afford the luxury of this type of gambling. They look upon it simply as taking a chance.

He continues:

But they are taking a chance which the nation and its economy cannot afford. They are pouring dimes and dollars day by day into a vast stream of cash which finances most illegal underworld activities. The housewife, the factory worker, and the businessman will tell you that they are against such things as narcotics, bootlegging, prostitution, gang murders, the corruption of public officials and police, and the bribery of college athletes. And yet this is where their money goes.

So I did not have a sense that this was a big part of the modern conversation around sports gambling. Is this kind of resolved, or are we still worried about gambling, kind of, going to these underworld activities?

Funt: Yeah, first of all, it’s a great article you turned up. I’m excited to find it myself and read it. That was definitely one of the arguments for legalizing sports betting around 2018, after that Supreme Court decision, because a huge amount of money was being bet through offshore sportsbooks that operated illegally online, taking tens of billions of dollars in wagers from Americans. And there was some evidence that the criminal syndicates that were operating those sportsbooks did a bunch of other criminal activity.

So just as RFK was saying, you’re, in effect, patronizing those sorts of criminal activities. That’s not always the case. Some of them were just Americans who were bookmakers in the U.S. and got tired of getting arrested, so they went to Latin America and set up websites where they could take bets. It wasn’t quite as sinister as that. But at least as the argument went, it was a real boogeyman, that you’re funding criminal organizations, and, Why not fund taxed, legitimate companies by making this legal? So yes, that was definitely a significant argument.

And I think as far as that kind of conscious capitalism goes, well, the sportsbooks that operate today definitely aren’t, you know, also selling drugs and prostitution and all those things. There definitely is some hand-wringing among people of, Does gambling exploit vulnerable people? Do we know that this is making problem gambling more prevalent? And by betting safely, are you still, in effect, funding companies that take advantage of people? So it’s not quite as potent as the argument RFK laid out, but it’s definitely still relevant.

Demsas: And what has the impact been on legalization? Has legalization reduced off-book gambling. Can we even really measure that?

Funt: So you’re right. It’s impossible to know exactly how much gambling is going on under the table. It always has been. I think some of the estimates were inflated to make the argument seem more convincing, but it by no means has eliminated it or even put the dent in it that a lot of the advocates for legalization promised.

Again, in 1992, they looked at all these different types of cause-and-effect things to think about, and one of them was: If you legalize an illegal activity, do you snuff out the black market, or do you just grow the pool of people doing it and, in fact, actually convert some people who might not have been doing it, who are then going to look to the black market, for a variety of reasons? So when it comes to sports betting, yes—there are definitely those offshore, illegal sportsbooks that are hurting because of this.

But there are also people who took up sports betting because they saw ads everywhere and all these generous new-customer offers and started legally, and then they said, Hey. There’s a bunch of different reasons why betting illegally might be advantageous. Maybe I don’t want it showing up on my bank statement. Maybe I don’t want my winnings taxed. Maybe I want to be able to bet much more illegally than you’re able to do so legally, if I’m a winning bettor. So yeah, in some respects, it’s put the offshore business on the ropes, and in other respects, it’s sort of created a funnel of new customers for them.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: what’s gained and what’s lost in states where online sports betting is legal.

[Break]

Demsas: I want to delve into the welfare harms of people who are engaging in sports gambling. But before I do that, I think because of your articles and a lot of other arguments being made and research coming out, there’s a growing narrative about the potential mistake that this was in legalizing gambling. But I think that can be helpful to go back and think in the minds of states who were interested in legalizing gambling. What was going on with them? Like, how much money are they actually making off of this? And what sorts of things is it going to?

Funt: Yeah, that was definitely the No. 1 argument, was, Hey. Let’s just bring in more revenue without taxing people—always, you know, a strong selling point for at least some people.

So whether tax revenue has exceeded or failed to meet expectations varies state by state. In total, since that Supreme Court decision and all these states started legalizing, a little more than $7 billion has been raised in taxes from sports betting for state governments. It’s important to note that $2.6 billion of that has gone to New York State alone, the largest legal sports-betting state, which also has the largest tax rate, so they’re just getting an epic windfall compared to the rest of the country.

Many states simply send the money to their general fund. Some states, like Colorado, specifically earmarked it—in Colorado’s case, for water-conservation issues. But you know, tax revenue is definitely a worthwhile thing to look at, but it’s not the whole picture. I think it’s appropriate to look at a more holistic view of, Sure, states are generating this money, but it’s not like loose change they’re finding in their couch cushions. This is coming from somewhere. It’s coming from their constituents.

We know gambling is, in many respects, kind of a regressive tax in that it, you know, pulls money from a lot of vulnerable people, as opposed to a more progressive tax that proportionately takes from people who can afford to lose. And that’s why some states, like Washington State, have been much more restrictive in the way that, yes, they’ve legalized sports betting, but you can only do it on the grounds at tribal reservations. So their idea was, Let’s give a boost to tribal economies, but we don’t want to depend on revenue from gambling to fund our state’s growing needs. We’d rather do that through progressive taxes, more sustainable, healthier for our society, something that definitely not all states have taken into account.

Demsas: I have seen a lot of that research around the regressivity of these sorts of tax revenues, but I was surprised with sports betting. And there was a Pew poll looking at the demographics of people who engage in sports betting. And they don’t really find any significant differences in educational attainment or household income. They see that men are more likely than women to say they have bet on sports, and adults under the age of 50 (when compared to those over 50), and Black Americans and Hispanic adults are more likely than white and Asian American adults. But I’m surprised that there’s not more of a difference in household income here.

Funt: You’re right. In some respects, I think sports bettors skew a little bit more middle class and well-educated, compared to other forms of gambling. But when we think about the regressivity of it or just whether it’s the healthiest way for society to generate money, it’s not just that the poor are the ones doing the gambling. It’s also—think about that people with gambling problems are, in many respects, these companies’ best customers. They’re losing such a disproportionate amount of money, compared to the rest of the clientele.

Are we comfortable generating money on the backs of people who just find this ruinous, in a lot of ways beyond financially? So that, I think, should give people pause. But you’re right—for a lot of cultural reasons, the people who bet on sports tend to be much more middle class than the people who, say, do scratch-offs or play the lottery.

Demsas: So I want to now turn to all of the harms that have now become evident over the past several years. Can you walk us through the financial impacts of gambling? What are we finding about the legalization of sports gambling on the impact on households’ financial well-being?

Funt: Yes. So last year, I’d say two of the most-buzzed-about studies that came out on that topic—one of them found a direct correlation between states that had legalized sports betting and a demonstrable impact on credit scores and other measures of financial health. A similar study, also last year, found that household savings go down in places where sports betting is legal. So you are seeing a demonstrable impact on people’s financial well-being as a result of the availability of sports betting.

Part of what I find, honestly, quite frustrating about the way this has played out in the U.S. is it’s been treated like this experiment where, We’re entering an uncharted territory. We’ll see how it goes. We’ll discover things. Like, Does this hurt people financially, or does this create a public-health problem that we didn’t anticipate? There’s a whole bunch of countries that are far ahead of the U.S. in terms of legalizing, and there’s a vast body of research that looks at the consequences. This didn’t have to be this shot in the dark for the U.S. We could have looked at Europe and Australia and Latin America and Asia and a lot of other places that are farther along and have had to reconcile the consequences of making gambling so accessible.

So in the U.K., for example, where online gambling was legalized in 2005, one study recently found that Brits lose about £5.5 billion every year betting online, which results in lost economic activity of £1.3 billion. The government estimates conservatively that gambling-related health consequences cost the population more than a billion pounds every year. And again, the people who did that study said: If you actually look at the second- and third-degree consequences, on a mental-health level and all the family trauma that it causes, it’s probably much bigger than a billion pounds, but we can safely say that.

So yes, again, the evidence is starting to trickle out in the U.S., but it’s been there overseas, and I think it’s pretty irresponsible that the states that were establishing regulations didn’t heed those warnings before getting this off and running.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I want to underscore this. I can imagine someone going like, All right, someone is going to, you know, buy some bad fast food out there rather than cook, or they might gamble on some sports. These are all just consumption, and they’re different levels of bad, but is it really that big of a deal?

You know, one of the studies you referenced, a Northwestern University study by Scott Baker and his co-authors—they’re finding that it’s not just displacing other gambling and consumption. People are falling into debt over this. So for every dollar spent on betting, households are putting a dollar less into investment accounts. You’re more at risk of overdrafting your bank account, maxing out credit cards.

And these effects are strongest among households that are already kind of financially precarious. Charles Lehman actually wrote a great article about this for us in The Atlantic. And this is not a situation, I think, where it’s, you know, We’re just getting money reallocated from other places. People are experiencing a lot more debt delinquency over this.

The other study that you referenced, the economist Brett Hollenbeck at UCLA and his co-authors also find, similarly, that the increase of the risk that a household goes bankrupt [goes up] by 25 to 30 percent. I mean, these are really big numbers that we’re seeing here. And can you just walk us through this kind of gambling addiction? Is this a situation where it’s a very small number of people who are getting addicted, and that’s what’s driving these stats? Or are large shares of Americans experiencing financial precarity here? What do you think?

Funt: Right. So the rate of problem gambling is definitely increasing. So for a long time, it was perceived that about 1 to 2 percent of the population is prone to problem gambling. In states that have had legal sports betting and other legal online gambling for a while, they’re seeing that rate closer to 6 or even 8 percent, and it’s even higher among young men, who are often the target audience for sports betting.

But I think it’s important to look beyond problem gambling. Even though those numbers are quite alarming, it can sort of make it seem like a marginal issue. Like, As long as I’m not in that sliver of the population, I’m good. I think that those sorts of consequences that you were describing go beyond people who have diagnosable problems.

So I find quite striking or even alarming the explosion of gambling among college students. And there was a survey recently that found that one in five college students who bet on sports dips into their tuition funds to fund their betting. So obviously, fewer than 20 percent of college students have gambling problems, but you’re still seeing people affect themselves financially because of their betting. So it’s a vast problem, and it’s an under-researched area.

It’s also something that is a developing story. So you’re not going to get a full picture out the gates. Gambling disorder, unlike some addictions where you might experience something once and become hooked on it—that can happen with gambling, but—it’s often a progressive disorder, so it can take several years or even longer to develop a problem. So if you think about it, we’re really in the early innings of this. And that sort of data and that sort of picture of how this is affecting society as a whole is still going to be emerging in the coming years.

Demsas: And, I mean, you talked a little about the mental-health impacts of gambling addiction here, but there was a paper that came out recently—it’s actually what spurred me to want to do this episode with you—about domestic violence. Can you talk to us about what that found?

Funt: Yes, it’s one of those things that’s terrible but, honestly, not totally surprising—that, again, you can see a correlation between the states that have legalized sports betting and those that haven’t, and when people lose bets, they’re more prone to commit acts of domestic violence.

There’s, similarly, a correlation, in that same respect, where sports betting is legal and higher rates of binge drinking. So you can think about it either fueling or just coinciding with a lot of other problematic activity. And it’s why, to really take stock of what this means for society, you’ve got to look at the bigger picture, not just some of these raw numbers that are thrown in our faces all the time.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I think that most people have probably heard there’s an older study that’s not about sports betting, but it’s just about, you know, an NFL home team’s upset loss can cause a 10 percent increase in the rate of at-home violence. This is a famous David Card study.

And the thing that I think is really interesting about the Card-Dahl study is that when we’re talking about upset losses—these are, like, unexpected losses, when the home team was predicted to win, and then they lose—you would think, Oh well, maybe in the states where there was an upset win, when the home team was predicted to lose and they actually win, maybe you see a decline in domestic violence, but that doesn’t happen. There’s basically an asymmetry here—

Funt: Oh gosh.

Demsas: —in the gain-loss utility function. So it’s like: You’re actually just gonna get more domestic violence. You’re not gonna even it out or something like that. And that, I think, becomes a really big problem when you are thinking about this paternalism issue here, because I can imagine people hearing this episode are just like, Yeah, this sounds really bad, but do I think the government should be in charge of banning something just because people are making bad decisions?

The downstream effects here are what I think are really convincing. You know, no one consents to having domestic violence happen to them, obviously, ever. But that that might increase as a result of someone else choosing to bet on sports seems, you know, even beyond the pale.

Funt: Yeah, absolutely. I think this debate often gets reduced to, Should this be outlawed, or should it be legal with hardly any restrictions? And I think it oversimplifies the argument, and it—we’re really past that. I don’t know how many states that have legalized it are going to go ahead and say, This was a mistake. Let’s outlaw it.

But there’s such a spectrum within that dichotomy, of: Should there be restrictions on advertising? Should there be restrictions on the enticements for customers? Should we require affordability checks to make sure people are betting at least vaguely within their means? All these different regulations that ought to be debated instead of, Should we ban this? which, of course—you’re right—is going to get a bad reaction from a lot of people who don’t like the government overstepping in the decisions we make.

I think consumer protections were the main argument for legalization. So whether we’re living up to that promise and delivering actual protections that protect the people who were betting illegally, and now we’ve said this is a safer way to do things—that, I hope, is where the conversation goes.

Demsas: I actually was surprised. I was trying to look up what people actually want to happen with legalization here, and I was shocked. Only 8 percent of people—there’s a Pew poll about this—only 8 percent of people thought it was good for the country that sports betting was legal. And 34 percent said it was a bad thing. The rest said they thought it was neither good nor bad. I would not have expected that. Is that what you find when you’re reporting, that people are saying that they think it’s bad that we’re allowing this?

Funt: Yeah, I try not to put too much stock in the anecdotal. Even though I’ve interviewed so many hundreds of people for my work, I’d rather rely on an academic who’s doing a proper study.

That said, yeah, I find it interesting, not only how many average people feel that way, but how many professional bettors, who you’d think would be the biggest evangelists for legalization and defending the way they make their livelihood—a lot of them are some of the most vocal about, This has gotten out of control. It’s crazy that there aren’t more guardrails to protect ordinary people.

I even hear plenty of people who work in the industry say, States and even perhaps the federal government could be doing more to protect customers. So it’s not just casual people who see all the ads and say, Gee, this has run amok. It’s people who are right in the middle of it who feel that way.

Demsas: So you mentioned that other countries have had experiences with this as well. Are there regulations you would copy from other places that maybe can improve our situation?

Funt: Yeah, and I try not to be, you know, a public-policy advocate as a reporter, but I will just say things that a lot of people, whether they’re health experts or player-safety advocates, are encouraging to at least be debated.

So one of them is: Countries that have banned advertisements that use expressions like free or risk-free or no sweat or bonus deceptively—so they’re basically making it sound like a can’t-lose proposition, when either you can lose the money you’re betting on the bonus, this offer, or you might get a little money through the bonus, but you’re obviously going to lose money over time—some countries have tried to weed that out.

There have been a lot of countries that have restricted when and how you can advertise, to try to minimize the number of young people that are seeing gambling ads day after day. So they might say you can’t advertise during sporting events or during certain hours of the day when kids are more likely to be watching TV.

Affordability checks are a polarizing one because that does tend to feel quite paternalistic, but in a lot of the places that have imposed those, the thresholds are sky-high. They’re not telling you, You should spend your money here or there. They’re saying, If someone’s spending hundreds of thousands of dollars within a day of signing up, maybe you ought to check in and see if they can afford to be doing that—things that are a lot more palatable than you might think when you hear a phrase like affordability check.

So there’s so many different reforms. Another one that is getting a lot of buzz at the federal level is this idea of a national self-exclusion list. So one thing that’s quite helpful for people with problems is they say, I’d like to cut myself off from gambling, to remove that temptation. But currently, let’s say I live in New Jersey—I can do that in New Jersey, but if I drive 15 minutes into New York or Pennsylvania, that exclusion doesn’t apply in those states. So it’s enormously tempting to do that. It might make sense to have a national self-exclusion list. So operators that are functioning across state lines have to honor exclusion, no matter where you are.

Things like that, again, it’s not about, Should we outlaw this? or, Should we backpedal on the decision to legalize? There’s this whole host of consumer protections that might be worth considering.

Demsas: Yeah, one thing I’d heard talked about is also not allowing people to make bets with credit cards, such that you have to have the money, so you can’t run up these large bills that you literally cannot pay back. And it seems like something about allowing it everywhere you are is a problem, right?

There’s a level to which I don’t know that we’re putting the genie back in the bottle on online betting, but the idea that you can pull out your phone at any point when you’re stressed out, that you don’t have to go somewhere, seems like a problem. And maybe creating some sort of temporal bounds, like maybe you can’t do it on college campuses or something like that—you can’t do it in schools in general, or you can’t do it at bars or something—you know, that might create some backlash here, but it indicates that, you know, there are ways to reduce the problem here.

Funt: You’re right that you have to use geolocation when you use these apps so that they can tell that you’re in a legal betting state, and it’s extraordinarily precise and effective. So if you’re in D.C. and you go into a federal building, suddenly your sports-betting app no longer works. It literally, like, works if I’m in a yard within the okay zone versus the not-okay zone. It’ll pick up on that.

There’s a state delegate in Maryland named Pam Queen, who’s also a professor at Morgan State University, who had the idea of: We could use this to either ban sports betting on college campuses or do something even more modest, like ban it in classrooms or in underage dorms or dorms during certain hours. The possibilities, as you were saying, are limitless, and it doesn’t have to be as severe as, you know, You can’t bet at a stadium or at a bar. It could be things that I think most people would agree sound appropriate, like, You shouldn’t bet in a freshman dorm or, you know, during class.

So yeah, that is a really potent tool that hasn’t caught on anywhere, but I think she and other people are going to be pushing for that.

Demsas: I then also want to ask you about your experiences interviewing legislators. So there are a lot of legislators who are involved in this effort, a lot of governors who have signed bills to allow sports betting or to allow online betting in their states. Have you talked to anyone who’s exhibited any kind of concern with how things have gone?

Funt: Buyer’s remorse, in some cases. Most notably, I’d say: I interviewed Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts who signed the bill legalizing bookmaking there in 2022 and then a few months later became president of the NCAA and has become a really vocal champion for limiting the amount of betting on college sports, particularly in light of the brutal harassment that college athletes and coaches get whenever their performance costs someone a bet.

It’s honestly horrifying, the sort of stuff they see on social media and in real life. And he has said point-blank, I wish, in hindsight, this had stayed in Las Vegas. As you were saying, it’s pretty commonsense that if you can bet from literally anywhere at any time of day, that’s gonna be quite a different situation than if you have to go to a casino, or even go to Las Vegas, in order to bet—or hunt down a bookie and find ways to bet through crypto or other sort of sketchy things that a lot of people are uncomfortable doing.

The idea that you can swipe to deposit money on your phone and then tap a couple of times and bet limitless amounts at any time of day is such a game changer. He was saying, We didn’t really process what a difference that would make, and I wish we had. So yes, he’s maybe the most forthcoming about that, but there are a lot of lawmakers who are seeing the fallout, in a lot of different respects, and saying, Maybe we need to re-regulate, as a lot of the rest of the world has decided is appropriate.

Demsas: Well, Danny, always our last and final question. This has been an episode chock-full of ideas that were good on paper. But what is an idea that you had that you thought was good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Funt: All right, so I was living in New York after college. I had a tiny balcony. I went and bought seeds to grow. I think it was, like, cucumbers and basil. And I was getting breakfast with my buddy Brian, and I was like, Dude, you will not believe how cheap these seeds are. We could totally grow vegetables and herbs and whatever else and sell it, and the margins would be crazy, and we’d make a killing. And he was like, So your business idea is farming? And I was like, Touché, Brian. You’re right. This is maybe not the most groundbreaking business idea. So he set me straight on that one.

Demsas: Oh my gosh, you didn’t live out—I actually, so my first house when I moved out of college was this group house, and we had the idea to farm some vegetables for the house, and it was successful in that we had some kale and sweet potatoes. But I have never in my life been like, I am never getting my food from my own labor. Like, this is just never happening again.

Funt: Oh, yeah.

Demsas: It’s a lot of work, and I feel like it caused so much strife in our household, too, because people were like, Who’s gonna harvest? What do we do with all this, like, extra kale now that no one wants to eat, because we have 20,000 bushels of kale. And you’re just, like, giving it away. But I’m glad that you did not actually have to execute your good on paper idea. You just figured it out beforehand.

Funt: I liked it, the basil I grew, but it wasn’t scalable. Brian was right.

Demsas: Danny, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Funt: My pleasure. Thanks again for having me.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.x

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Greenland’s prime minister, Múte Egede, looked like he was being chased by an angry musk ox.

“Mr. Prime Minister, have you spoken to President Trump yet?” I asked as he fled a lunchtime news conference on Tuesday in the capital city, Nuuk (population 20,000). Egede, who is 37, wore a green zip-up sweater, stared straight ahead, and was walking toward me. He said nothing.

“Prime Minister Múte Egede,” I tried again, using his full name this time, for some reason.

He remained … mute.

I made one more attempt—“Have you talked to President Trump?”—to no avail.

As he walked out the door, Egede looked flushed and somewhat stunned. The briefing room had been tense, crowded with about three dozen journalists, several from other countries. This is—I’m guessing here—two and a half dozen more journalists than typically show up at his press conferences.

“This is not usual for us,” said Pele Broberg, a member of the Greenlandic Parliament and an off-and-on Egede nemesis, who had come to enjoy the spectacle and watch Egede squirm.

The briefing had lasted about 30 minutes and consisted of Egede giving a canned statement and then taking eight or nine questions, all on the same topic.

“Do we have reason to be afraid?” one Greenlandic journalist asked.

“Of course, what has happened is very serious,” Egede replied in Greenlandic. He projected the grave aura of a leader trying to be reassuring in a time of crisis; his tone and language seemed better suited to a natural disaster than a geopolitical quandary.

“We have to have faith that we can get through this,” Egede said. His hands shook slightly as he sipped from a glass of water.

“In Greenland,” he said, “there is a lot of unrest.”

Extreme cold was predicted for Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., so I figured I’d decamp to somewhere warmer: Nuuk.

Temperatures in the icy capital were in the low 30s, or several degrees balmier than those in Washington. More to the point, this autonomous Danish territory—the world’s biggest non-continental island—has surfaced as a subject of diplomatic dispute.

Trump had first announced his interest in America buying the territory in 2019. At the time, the Danish prime minister promptly rebuffed the overture (she called it “absurd”), to which Trump responded predictably (he called her “nasty”). And then, after a few weeks, the episode melted away. That is, until Trump managed to get himself reelected and started piping up again about how he still coveted the place. Ever since then, his renewed designs on Greenland have become a source of global fascination. The furor grew earlier this month, when Trump, in response to a reporter’s question, refused to rule out using military force to resolve the matter.

“Greenland is in the center of the world,” Egede proclaimed a few days later in Copenhagen, perhaps overstating things but still offering a whiff of the heady sense of relevance that’s been sweeping through Official Nuuk.

I went to Greenland to watch this peculiar production unfold in this most unlikely of places. Another big objective was to meet Egede, the young and ambitious prime minister. Like many other minor global figures who become overnight attention magnets, Egede had seemed at first exhilarated by all the interest, then overwhelmed, and then regretful. Watching his recent public appearances from afar, I had noticed his demeanor sometimes shift from the burly confidence of a local wunderkind to the nervousness of someone fully aware that his actions were being observed closely, especially by Washington and Copenhagen.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump triggers a crisis in Denmark—and Europe]

“We are Greenlanders,” Egede often says, robotically, when asked—as he is constantly—about Trump’s continued focus on his country. “We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t want to be Danish, either.”

Egede just wants to be left alone, is the impression he is leaving these days. I learned this before I set out for Nuuk, when I placed a few calls to his office in an attempt to watch Trump’s inaugural speech with the prime minister. He shouldn’t be that hard to track down, I figured, given that the total number of humans in Greenland, which is roughly three times the physical size of Texas, is 56,000—smaller than the population of Bethesda, Maryland.

“Can you call back tomorrow?” his communications aide, Andreas Poulsen, pleaded on the phone. “We are very busy right now. Thank you for understanding.”

I tried the next day.

“Can you call back tomorrow?” Poulsen said again. “We are very busy right now.”

I sensed a pattern.

“Hi, Andreas,” I said when Poulsen picked up again on the third day. (Clearly Greenland’s government offices need more robust call-screening protocols.) “Do you have a second to talk now?”

“Can you call back tomorrow?” he said again. “I am very busy right now.” Poor guy sounded more beleaguered with each call. I empathized.

“Well, I’m going to be on my way to Greenland tomorrow,” I finally said, “so I’ll be in the air.”

(Silence.)

“Andreas, are you there?”

It’s not easy being in Greenland. Especially in January: never-ending snow, frigid winds, and maybe five or six hours of daylight, if you’re lucky. Greenland is known as Kalaallit Nunaat in the native tongue, which roughly translates, fittingly enough, to “Land of the Greenlanders.” Residents of Nuuk account for about one-third of the national population, the great majority of whom are all or part Inuit.

Greenland is also not easy to get to, even though Nuuk is in fact closer to the East Coast of the United States than to Copenhagen. There are currently no direct flights from the U.S., though United Airlines says it will begin direct routes to Nuuk from Newark in June. The few flights currently available, via Reykjavik, are often canceled due to weather. Until a recent renovation of the Nuuk airport, flying to the capital had required a stop in Kangerlussuaq, a former U.S. air base to the north, and then switching to a smaller plane. The airport-modernization project has been a source of local pride in Nuuk and a godsend of convenience to its visitors (no more nightmare layovers in Kangerlussuaq!).

On the Thursday before the inauguration, I managed to get the last seat on an Icelandair flight from Washington, which miraculously went off without major complication. When I arrived in Nuuk, I found the people of the capital to be nothing but warm and welcoming, starting with my cab driver from the airport. When I mentioned I was from Washington, he asked if I was in town “because of this situation with Trump.” Correct, I said.

In the grand and feverish scheme of Trump’s early agenda, Greenland remains a remote curiosity next to his higher-profile priorities such as mass deportations, mass pardons, and trying to end birthright citizenship. But his ongoing fascination with the country can’t be dismissed as merely the frivolous object of one egoist’s manifest destiny. For a variety of strategic reasons—energy, trade, and national security, among others—Greenland has become a legitimately prized territory. Melting ice has made for better access to valuable mineral deposits and potential oil bounties, and easier trade passage through Arctic waterways. To varying degrees, both Moscow and Beijing have shown that they want in on Greenland. “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

A Trump hat in Nuuk, Greenland  (Juliette Pavy / Hors Format)

Not surprisingly, this message has been received as something rotten in Denmark. The NATO ally has held sovereignty over Greenland for more than a century. (Greenland was a colony until 1953, when it became a territory of the Danish kingdom, though it gained home rule in 1979.) Although the Danes provide about $600 million in subsidies to the island each year—about half of Greenland’s annual budget—critics of its stewardship have said that Denmark lacks the will and resources to fully realize Greenland’s potential or protect it militarily. A strong majority of Greenlanders—68 percent—want independence from Denmark, according to a 2019 poll.

The degree to which Greenlanders would welcome closer ties to America, much less actually becoming a part of the United States, is unclear. For the most part, Trump’s proposal has been met with something at the junction of amused, flattered, and resistant to being associated with such a thundering and aggressive entity, as embodied by its president. These qualities, to say the least, run counter to the affable, happily innocuous, and slightly mysterious national image that Greenlanders have traditionally preferred.

[From the July/August 2024 issue: A wild plan to avert catastrophic sea-level rise]

If nothing else, Trump’s Greenland campaign has set off a blizzard of conspicuous attention from Copenhagen. Denmark recently increased its military spending on the island, stepped up its government services, and offered two new dog-sled patrol teams. In a truly magnanimous pander to Greenland from His Majesty, the Danish king even slapped a big new image of a polar bear onto the monarchy’s royal coat of arms.

“It’s a show for the Danes to try to reassure everybody else that they still have full control of Greenland,” said Broberg, the member of Parliament, who is a strong advocate for independence from Denmark.

I met him last Sunday, at a televised forum of Greenlandic political officials that was broadcast across Denmark and Greenland. The event, which included the prime minister, was held at a theater next to the Parliament building and drew a packed house of engaged students and professionals, similar to a suburban Manchester or Nashua town hall before the New Hampshire primary. The panelists included Greenlandic and Danish politicians debating the various permutations of “independence,” how realistic they would be, and the merits of Danish and U.S. proprietorship, if any.

“It’s a historic time that we live in,” an audience member named Niels-Olav Holst-Larsen, who moved to Nuuk from Denmark 18 months ago, told me. “Today was, I think, the biggest television-broadcasting event from Denmark in Greenland in a lot of years.”

Trump’s inaugural address the next day was shaping up to be another major television event in Greenland. “Don’t we all have to watch this speech?” Qupanuk Olsen, a candidate for Parliament who describes herself as “Greenland’s biggest influencer on social media,” told me.

I first encountered Olsen, who goes by “Q,” via a delightful YouTube video titled “How Do We Say ‘Hello’ in Greenlandic.” I resolved to find and meet her. This did not take long. Olsen told me that she considers Trump’s interest to be an “amazing” boon for her country, at least from a PR perspective. Spreading Greenland’s abundant charms, she said, is something of a life’s mission for her. “I’ve been working on showing the rest of the world what Greenland is really about.”

I asked Olsen whether she was hoping for an inaugural mention of Greenland. She paused for several seconds before declaring herself a yes. “If he doesn’t mention Greenland”—she turned strangely plaintive—“we’re just going to be forgotten again.”

I spent much of January 20 visiting members of the Greenlandic Parliament. Called Inatsisartut, or “those who make the law,” the Parliament consists of 31 members, who, from what I can tell, represent 31 nuanced flavors of pro-Greenlandic-independence. Egede, for instance, is a former member of Inatsisartut, where he represented the left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party, which supports independence. But as the nation’s chief executive now, he recognizes the pragmatic benefits of the status quo, which requires working closely with Denmark, especially given the recent uncertainty that Trump has introduced.

The low-slung parliamentary-office building felt a bit like a small college dorm. MPs wandered in and out of conference rooms, bantered in hallways, and shouted to one another across a courtyard. My first stop on my tour of Greenland’s greatest deliberative body was a meeting with Broberg. A member of the (also) pro-independence Naleraq party, he served for a while as foreign minister until his anti-Danish rhetoric began to wear thin in Copenhagen, as well as with key figures in Nuuk—notably, Egede.

Broberg told me he admires politicians who eschew niceties and jump right to the point. He appreciates this about Trump, whose pursuit of Greenland he says has been a blessing to the cause of independence. I noted the obvious contradiction here: that Trump’s desire to “buy” Greenland is by definition antithetical to independence. Broberg argued that existing laws and treaties would make it impossible for the U.S. to actually “own” Greenland. Still, Trump’s public zest for the country enhances its cachet, Broberg explained. It also brings the added benefit of freaking out Denmark, he said.

As he spoke, I noticed a bright-red baseball hat on a shelf. I pointed to it, wondering if it was a Trump hat. In fact, the cap was emblazoned with the words Great Greenland, which Broberg told me is a Greenlandic company that makes sealskin furs and jackets. He added that he is not a Trumper; he enjoys watching people react to the hat.

At the end of the interview, Qarsoq Høegh-Dam, a top official with the Naleraq party and an adviser to Olsen, popped in to say hello. Høegh-Dam is a gregarious politico, of a familiar sort you often find in insular government towns. He said he was trying to organize a “watch party” for Trump’s inauguration.

I noticed that he was wearing a massive claw on a necklace. A polar-bear nail, he told me. As I studied the menacing trinket—roughly the size of a small croissant broken in half—Høegh-Dam launched into an aside. “It’s an age-old debate,” he said—who would win a fight between a tiger and a polar bear? I told him I was just here to learn. “I’ve seen a tiger,” Høegh-Dam said. “I was surprised how small they were.” He told me his sister had once almost been eaten by a polar bear. “Nobody is for polar bears eating people,” Høegh-Dam said—a seemingly safe position, even within the blood sport of Greenlandic politics.

[Jonathan Chait: The intellectual rationalization for annexing Greenland]

This was all riveting, but I was late for a meeting with Aqqalu Jerimiassen, a conservative member of Parliament, who was waiting down the hall. I noticed a photo in Jerimiassen’s office of him wearing a Trump shirt and drinking a Guinness. He told me he belongs to “likely the most right-wing party in Greenland.” This does not mean he would call himself a Trump supporter (and, in fact, he told me a few days later that he had taken down the Trump-shirt photo). If he lived in the U.S., he said, he would probably have voted for Nikki Haley.

Still, Jerimiassen appreciates the recognition Trump has brought to his country. “If someone asked me 10 years ago where I’m from, and I say Greenland—for example, if I’m in Europe, in Bulgaria—nobody knows where that is,” he said.

Before we finished, Jerimiassen detoured to a topic about which he becomes endlessly animated: how the Nuussuaq Peninsula, near where he is from, boasts the finest-tasting reindeer in all of Greenland. Up north, he said, the reindeer eat more moss, as opposed to grass, which makes for a more piquant cervine experience. “The smell. Aromatic. It’s very, very aromatic, and the savoriness,” he raved. And the reindeer in Nuuk?

“Very plain,” he opined.

Nuuk, Greenland (Juliette Pavy / Hors Format)

The inauguration watch party took place in a Naleraq meeting room near Broberg’s office. Broberg was there. So was Olsen, or “Q,” the influencer, along with a few parliamentary staffers, operatives, and assorted European broadcasters on hand to capture “the scene.” As with most watch parties, this “scene” was not much to watch: a bunch of people sitting around staring at a TV and sharing a communal bowl of Bugles, or whatever the Greenland equivalent of those crunchy cone-shaped snacks is.

“Greenland, Greenland, Greenland,” Broberg called out as the newly sworn-in Trump began speaking at the Capitol. I took this to mean that he wanted Trump to mention Greenland, but Broberg had told me earlier that he couldn’t care less. “We are getting all the attention that we need anyways,” he said.

Soon, the room turned quiet. Trump’s dark and aggressive tenor appeared to make the viewers uneasy. I watched Olsen, who kept fidgeting whenever it seemed Trump might name-check Greenland. This was something she was no longer wishing for, it appeared.

“Here it comes,” I heard one person say, when Trump started talking about changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and how the U.S. should retake control of the Panama Canal. But the president did not mention Greenland.

[Franklin Foer: Emperor Trump’s new map]

The speech still had a ways to go. Trump stated his goal “to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” He declared that “the spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts.” Olsen began nervously tapping her black boot on the floor. She grimaced. A few minutes later, the speech ended. No Greenland. Harpoon, dodged.

“Can you feel the sigh of relief in here?” Høegh-Dam remarked.

I asked Broberg what he thought of the speech. He chuckled and read aloud a text he’d just received.

“Greenland has a code name now,” he said. “Mars.”

Before I blew out of Nuuk, I figured I would make a final approach to Egede for an interview. His press conference on Tuesday felt like my best bet.

A pack of international journalists filed into the briefing room, like scavengers descending on a fresh caribou carcass. There were cursory checks of our press IDs, but no security checkpoints or metal detectors. The prime minister wandered in pretty much by himself, with no visible protective detail.

Egede, who has been Greenland’s prime minister since 2021, hewed closely to his scripted lines about how Greenland will decide its own future, and to a theme of national unity. “We are a small population, but togetherness is our strength,” he said via translation headphones issued to the press. He urged Greenlanders to stand firm, and said, “Together, we can get over this incident.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Drop the outrage over Trump’s foreign-policy bluster]

As Egede’s news conference wore on, and the questions became more pointed, the prime minister looked a bit frozen. I noticed a guy in a black T-shirt standing behind a pane of glass, waving to get Egede’s attention. He looked familiar. I soon realized who it was: Andreas Poulsen, the PM’s snowed-under communications officer, whom I’d been harassing for days. He was trying to tell Egede to wrap things up.

I made a point of introducing myself to Poulsen, who stepped out from his glass booth. “I’m sorry I kept calling you last week,” I said. Not to worry, he replied. Nothing is normal in Nuuk these days. We chatted a bit, and then I shot my last shot.

“Would it be possible to interview the prime minister while I’m in Nuuk?”

“Not today, not today,” Poulsen said.

“How about tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We’re very busy.”

Postscript: I was supposed to leave Greenland on Wednesday, but my flight home got snowed out. I was stuck indefinitely. (Nuuk in January, man. Next year, I’ll bring my whole family.) As it happened, I had a phone interview scheduled for Thursday, related to another project: a conversation with, of all people, Paul McCartney.

“Greenland?” McCartney greeted me when he came on the phone. Apparently someone had told him about my situation.

Yeah, I seem to be stranded here, I told him.

“Trump’s gonna buy it,” Sir Paul said. “So don’t worry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the pre-internet era, turning 18 in America conferred a very specific, if furtive, privilege: the right to walk into a store and buy an adult magazine.

Technically, it still does, for those hypothetical teenagers who prefer to get their smut in print. For practical purposes, however, American children can access porn as soon as they can figure out how to navigate a web browser. That’s because, since the 1990s, America has had two sets of laws concerning underage access to pornography. In the physical world, the law generally requires young-looking customers to show ID proving they’re 18 before they can access adult materials. In the online world, the law has traditionally required, well, nothing. Under Supreme Court precedent established during the internet’s infancy, forcing websites to verify the age of their users is burdensome and ineffective, if not impossible, and thus incompatible with the First Amendment.

That arrangement finally appears to be crumbling. Last week, the Court heard oral arguments in a case concerning the legality of Texas’s age-verification law, one of many such laws passed since 2022. This time around, the justices seemed inclined to erase the distinction between accessing porn online and in person.“Explain to me why the barrier is different online than in a brick-and-mortar setting,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett requested of the lawyer representing the porn-industry plaintiffs. “Do you agree that, at least in theory, brick-and-mortar institutions shouldn’t be treated differently than online?” asked Justice Neil Gorsuch.

If the Court indeed allows Texas’s law to stand, it will mark a turning point in the trajectory of internet regulation. As more and more of our life has moved online, the two-track legal system has produced an untenable situation. And lawmakers are fed up with it. Roughly 130 million people today live in states that have a law like Texas’s, all enacted in the past three years.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Pornography shouldn’t be so easy for kids to access]

Technology has come a long way since the Court first struck down age-verification requirements. Age verification services are now effective, easily used, and secure enough to be widely deployed. However the Court rules in this particular case, the era of the online pornography free-for-all seems to be coming to a close.

Before the internet, limiting children and teens’ access to porn was pretty simple. Businesses weren’t allowed to sell porn to kids, and to ensure that they didn’t, they were generally required to ask to see some ID.

The Communications Decency Act of 1996 was supposed to establish a similar regime for the commercial internet, which only a few years into existence was already beginning to hint at its potential to supercharge the distribution of adult material. The law made it a crime to “display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age” any sexual content that would be “patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards.”

The Supreme Court unanimously struck down this section of the law in the 1997 case Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, concluding that it amounted to a “blanket restriction on speech.” The law’s biggest problem was its vague and overbroad definitions of prohibited material, but practical concerns about the difficulty of compliance also played a large role in the Supreme Court’s ruling. It repeated the lower court’s finding that “existing technology did not include any effective method for a sender to prevent minors from obtaining access to its communications on the Internet without also denying access to adults.” And in a concurring opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, “Until gateway technology is available throughout cyberspace, and it is not in 1997, a speaker cannot be reasonably assured that the speech he displays will reach only adults because it is impossible to confine speech to an ‘adult zone.’”

After that defeat, Congress passed a new, narrower law designed to survive First Amendment scrutiny. The Child Online Protection Act of 1998 required websites to prevent minors from accessing “prurient” or pornographic material. That law, too, was struck down, in part because the Supreme Court opined that optional parental filters would solve the problem more effectively while restricting less speech. In the end, parental filters were never widely adopted, and within a few years, kids started getting their own devices, which were mostly out of parents’ reach.

The Supreme Court decisions, and the legislative inaction that followed them, bifurcated the rules around kids’ access to porn. In the physical world, their sins were tightly controlled—no strip clubs, no nudie mags, at least not without a fake ID. Online, they did as they pleased. According to a 2023 report, 73 percent of teens ages 13 to 17 have watched online porn. A young boy or girl can take out their smartphone, type a free porn site’s URL into their browser, and be met with an endless array of quickly loading high-definition videos of adults having sex, much of it rough. Seeing an R-rated movie at a theater would require infinitely more work.

The first crack in this regime emerged in 2022, when the Louisiana Republican state representative Laurie Schlegel first decided to act. Schlegel, a practicing sex-and-porn-addiction counselor, had been inspired to act after hearing the pop star Billie Eilish describe how porn had affected her as a child. “I started watching porn when I was, like, 11,” Eilish said on The Howard Stern Show. “I think it really destroyed my brain, and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”

[Read: The age of AI child abuse is here]

Schlegel was also inspired by the new technology available for online identity and age verification. In 2018, Louisiana had implemented a digital-ID-card app, called LA Wallet, that state residents could use instead of a physical ID. Schlegel realized that the same system could be used to share a user’s “coarse” age—whether they are older or younger than 18, and nothing else—with a porn company. The “gateway technology” that O’Connor noted didn’t exist in 1997 was now a reality.

Schlegel’s bill, which passed the State House 96–1 and the State Senate 34–0, required businesses that publish or distribute online porn to verify that their users are at least 18, using either a digital ID or another reasonable method. The law initially flew under the national media’s radar. (“I think there were only two [journalists] that called me in 2022 asking about the law,” Schlegel told me.) But legislators in other states took notice, and by 2024, 18 more states had passed similar legislation. In states without a digital identification program like Louisiana’s, porn sites must pay third-party age-verification providers to use software to compare a user’s face with their ID photo, held up to the camera, or to use AI to determine if their face looks obviously older than 18. According to a report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the average margin of error for these commercial face-estimation services is about three years, meaning that those older than 21 are unlikely to ever need to show ID. In practice, this is much the same as a porn shop back in the day: Most people get through with a quick glance at their face, but people who look particularly young have to show ID.

These state laws have some weaknesses. They apply only where at least one-third of “total material on a website” is pornographic. (At oral arguments, discussion of this fact prompted Justice Samuel Alito to quip, referring to porn sites, “Is it like the old Playboy magazine? You have essays on there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.?”) The law is also toothless against websites that are hosted abroad, including the Czech porn giant XVideos, which hasn’t complied at all with state age-verification rules, a fact that millions of teenagers in those states likely already know. Underage users can also evade the restrictions by employing virtual private networks to disguise their IP address.

Still, even prohibitions that can be circumvented tend to screen many people away from a given activity, as the country’s recent experience with sports gambling and marijuana suggests in reverse. Three of the biggest porn sites in America—xHamster (which contracts an age-verification provider called Yoti), Stripchat (which uses Yoti or VerifyMy, user’s choice), and Chaturbate (which uses Incode)—have chosen to comply with the state laws.

The big holdout is Pornhub, the most popular porn site in America and one of the most viewed sites on the internet, with billions of monthly visits. It has stopped operating in all but one age-verification state. (The exception: Louisiana, thanks to its digital-ID program.) In an emailed statement, the company said that the laws “have made the internet more dangerous for adults and children” by failing to “preserve user privacy” and nudging them toward “darker corners of the internet.” A Pornhub spokesperson who goes by Ian (he declined to provide his last name) told me that age-verification laws will lead children to seek out porn from even more troubling sources.

Joining Pornhub and other porn distributors in opposition are free-speech groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. They argue that the age-verification laws are “overinclusive,” because they would restrict young people’s access even to a hypothetical website that was one-third porn, two-thirds non-porn. At the same time, they point out, the laws are “underinclusive,” because, thanks to the one-third rule, they leave kids free to access porn on general-interest platforms such as Reddit and X, which have quite a bit of it. And, the free-speech groups say, device-based content filters are still a better, less restrictive way to achieve the desired result.

Much of the supposed burden on free speech centers on the notion that verifying one’s age requires surrendering a great deal of privacy. That fear is understandable, given the long history of internet-based companies violating their stated privacy commitments. But a company such as Yoti is not analogous to, say, a social-media company. It isn’t sucking up user data while offering a free product; its entire business model is performing age verification. Its survival depends on clients—not only porn sites but also alcohol, gambling, and age-specific messaging sites—trusting that it isn’t retaining or selling user data. Its privacy policy states that after it verifies your age with your ID, or estimates it with AI, it deletes any personal information it has received.

[From the May 2023 issue: The pornography paradox]

“From a data-protection perspective, all of our data, all the data we collect, is only used for the purpose it was collected for—i.e., to complete an age check—and it’s immediately deleted after the age check’s completed,” Andy Lulham, the COO of VerifyMy, told me. “This is standard across the industry.” (One company that appears to trust the industry’s assurances of privacy: Pornhub. Following a 2020 article by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times that drew attention to the site’s hosting of rape videos, Pornhub began requiring online age and identity verification, conducted by Yoti, for every performer on the site. Ian, the Pornhub spokesperson, conceded to me that extending Yoti to its users would not raise privacy concerns.)

Recent estimates suggest that most kids have watched porn by age 12. Societally, America long ago agreed that this wasn’t acceptable. Now, finally, technology has caught up to the intuition that kids shouldn’t have unfettered access to porn just because it’s on the internet.

At oral arguments, the Supreme Court seemed inclined to allow Texas’s age-verification law to stand, although it might first send the case back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals with instructions to subject it to a higher standard of scrutiny than it originally did. Either way, some form of age-gating is likely here to stay.

“Were we to lose in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, we’ve got some new legislation ready to go,” Iain Corby, the executive director of the Age Verification Providers Association, told me. “They’re fighting a rearguard action in the porn industry, but I don’t think they’re going to be able to fight for long.”

Social media delights in snowball fights and sledding across Texas and the Gulf Coast

Long before Donald Trump rewarded Tulsi Gabbard’s loyalty with a nomination to be the next director of national intelligence, before her friendliness with Tucker Carlson, and before her association with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she was loyal to another charismatic leader. A man who remains mostly unknown outside Hawaii but is reputed to have a powerful hold over his followers.

That leader is Chris Butler, the founder of an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement in Hinduism, called the Science of Identity Foundation. Butler’s followers know him as Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, and Gabbard, who identifies as Hindu, has called him her “guru-dev,” or spiritual master. According to its website, the foundation promotes yoga meditation to achieve spiritual and physical enlightenment, but Butler, well known for his fervent and graphic sermons about the evils of gay sex, does not appear to tolerate dissent from his followers. Some former devotees have called the secretive group a cult.

Other than raw ambition, Gabbard’s adherence to Butler’s foundation has been the only perceptible through line in her switchbacking, two-decade political career. First there was an astonishingly quick leap from enigmatic state lawmaker to national Democratic Party leader; then came Gabbard’s almost-as-quick falling-out with the party establishment; there followed an inscrutable congressional record, including a seemingly inexplicable visit with a Middle East dictator; after that was Gabbard’s stint as a Fox News media darling, and finally her rebirth as a MAGA Republican, nominated to be America’s next spymaster.

While Gabbard awaits a confirmation hearing, even senators in Trump’s party seem concerned about her suitability. Maybe they should be: Democrats figured out the hard way that they couldn’t rely on Gabbard; Republicans may soon learn the same.

To understand how Gabbard ended up in the middle of such a strange ideological Venn diagram, it helps to know about her early years. Born in American Samoa, Gabbard grew up in Hawaii, where she was homeschooled and spent time surfing in the blue waves off Oahu. Her father, Mike, is now a Democratic state senator, but he’s done a bit of his own party-flipping; during Gabbard’s childhood, Mike was an independent, and later switched to the Republican Party, after leading Hawaii’s movement against same-sex marriage. He launched a group called Stop Promoting Homosexuality Hawaii and hosted a radio show titled Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii. In 1998, Mike Gabbard put out a TV ad featuring a teenage Tulsi and her siblings that likened marrying someone of the same sex to marrying your dog.

The Gabbard family was—and, according to several Hawaii residents and people familiar with the group, still is—devoted to Butler and his foundation. “The belief system was [Butler’s] interpretation of the Hare Krishna belief system, plus Buddhism, Christianity, and whatever else,” Lalita Mann, a former disciple of Butler’s, told me. Fraternizing with outsiders was frowned upon, Mann said; complete obedience was expected: “To offend him would be offending God.” Gabbard’s own aunt once described the group as “the alt-right of the Hare Krishna movement.”

Butler had an appetite for temporal as well as spiritual power. Gabbard, a smart, good-looking girl from a political family, always appealed to him, Mann and Anita Van Duyn, another defector from the group, told me. Butler described Gabbard as a stellar pupil of his teaching. In her teens, Gabbard reportedly attended a school run by Butler’s followers in the Philippines. “He always wanted someone to be high up in the federal government” to direct the culture toward godliness, Van Duyn told me. Trump’s team rejected this characterization. “This is a targeted hit on her faith, fomenting Hinduphobia,” Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition, told me. “The repeated attacks that she has sustained from the media and Democrats about her faith and her loyalty to our country are not only false smears; they are bigoted as well.” (Gabbard herself did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

The Science of Identity Foundation leader was not the only person to see Gabbard’s appeal. The people I interviewed described the surfer cum mixed-martial-arts aficionado as shy but warm. She has a rich, low voice, and always greets people with a friendly “Aloha.” Her demeanor helps explain how quickly she rocketed to political success from a young age. She chooses her words carefully, and listens intently, often seeming like the most mature person in a room, even when she is one of the youngest. “She cocks her head, and she pulls you in” to the “Tulsi hug,” one Hawaii Democrat told me. “It’s very mesmerizing.” Gabbard, in other words, has charisma. And she has always made it count.

In 2002, soon after she married her first husband, Gabbard dropped out of community college and ran for a seat in the Hawaii state House. In that race, and in others that followed, a swarm of volunteers associated with Butler’s group would descend on the district to knock on doors and pass out yard signs, according to someone who worked with Gabbard’s campaign in those early days, and who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. Back then, Gabbard shared her father’s views on same-sex marriage and opposed abortion rights, two positions that were—particularly in recent years—politically risky in solid-blue Hawaii. But she was clearly struggling to form her ideology, the former campaign colleague said, and determine a political identity of her own.

After one term in office, Gabbard joined the Hawaii Army National Guard, and went to Iraq as part of a medical unit, the first of two Middle East deployments. After her return, she and her husband divorced. In 2010, she ran successfully for a seat on the Honolulu city council. “She was as ambitious as you could possibly be,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague told me. And she was respected. Gabbard was racking up experiences, fleshing out her political résumé. Congress was next for Gabbard, and everybody knew it.

In the fall of 2011, something happened that shocked politicians in Hawaii. EMILY’s List, the national organization whose goal is to elect pro-abortion-rights women to Congress, announced that it was backing Gabbard. To political observers, it didn’t make sense. Gabbard had a D behind her name, but was she really a Democrat? Behind the scenes, EMILY’s List was wondering the same thing. Although her position on abortion had evolved in ways acceptable to the organization, Gabbard was still iffy on same-sex marriage. Her answers on the EMILY’s List application had made its leaders uneasy, one former staffer told me, and that staffer was asked to call Gabbard for clarification. During their conversation, Gabbard said she didn’t want the government involved in marriage. The staffer pointed out that the government was already involved in heterosexual marriage, so it wouldn’t be fair to deny the same access to gay couples. Gabbard seemed not to have considered this, the staffer told me, and after only a few minutes on the phone, Gabbard declared that her position had changed. Politicians typically do some finagling to secure the support of special-interest groups, but this was different.

“I’ve never had another conversation like that,” said the staffer, who still works in Democratic politics but asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly. “She was willing to do or say whatever. It was like she had absolutely no moral compass.” I heard the same sentiment from numerous people who have worked with Gabbard, both in Hawaii and at the federal level.

Gabbard’s leftward journey was well under way. Her second Middle East deployment, to Kuwait, had inspired a “gradual metamorphosis” on social issues, she told Honolulu Civil Beat in 2012, adding, “I’m not my dad. I’m me.” By the time she got to Congress, in 2013, Democrats had embraced her like a long-lost friend. Gabbard was celebrated as the first Hindu member of Congress and was eagerly welcomed in the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Nancy Pelosi called her an “emerging star,” and House leaders gave her a seat on the prominent Armed Forces Committee. She was, to use a more contemporary comparison, AOC before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“There was this initial huge fascination with Gabbard” inside the party, a former Democratic House staffer, who requested anonymity to speak about his time working closely with Gabbard, told me. President Barack Obama himself lobbied for Gabbard to get a vice chairmanship on the Democratic National Committee, its former chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told me. The Florida lawmaker hesitated at first. “I was warned early on that she was close to extremists in Hawaii,” Wasserman Schultz told me, referring to anti-gay activists. Still, she gave Gabbard the benefit of the doubt.

Gabbard proved popular among the other freshmen. “She was funny, she was engaging,” a former House colleague and friend of Gabbard’s, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, told me. She ran around with a small, bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Representatives Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma; some of them met for CrossFit in the mornings.

But the congressional crush on Gabbard fizzled almost as quickly as it began. Wasserman Schultz told me that the DNC had a hard time getting Gabbard to show up for meetings or conference calls. When a House vote against employment discrimination came up, Gabbard was difficult to pin down, Wasserman Schultz said—even though, as a DNC vice chair, she should have been “the easiest ‘yes’ in the caucus.”

[Read: The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump]

Gabbard seemed eager to stand out in a different way. She took to sitting on the Republican side of the House chamber. Despite her DNC perch, she voted with Republicans to condemn the Obama administration for not alerting Congress about a prisoner exchange with the Taliban in 2014, and the next year criticized the Democratic president’s reluctance to refer to Islamic State terrorists as “Islamic extremists.”

The representative from Hawaii was not facing a tough reelection, so none of these positions made sense to her fellow Democrats. Some suggested that she was a rare independent thinker in Congress; others identified in her a less virtuous strain of opportunism. Gabbard had “masked herself as a progressive to gain power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. After all, voters in Hawaii almost never elect Republicans to Congress.

Others pointed to deeper forces. “I think something happened around 2013,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague from Hawaii told me, pointing out that, at the time, several of her original congressional staffers resigned, and Gabbard replaced them with people affiliated with the Science of Identity Foundation. In 2015, Gabbard married Abraham Williams, the son of her office manager, both of whom, the colleague told me, were involved in the group. The couple’s Oahu wedding was attended by several members of Congress, including then–House Whip Steny Hoyer, as well as a representative from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist party. It seemed as though Butler’s group had reeled her back in, the campaign colleague said. He remembers thinking, “I don’t know who the hell you are anymore.”

During the 2016 Democratic primary, Gabbard resigned from the DNC and endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign for president because, she said, Hillary Clinton was too hawkish. Sanders-aligned progressives appreciated her support, especially because the Vermont senator had just been shellacked in South Carolina. On the trail, Gabbard spoke confidently about anti-interventionism, climate change, and Medicare for All. “I couldn’t think of an issue then where we had any degree of separation,” Larry Cohen, a union leader and the chair of the pro-Sanders progressive group Our Revolution, told me.

Senator Bernie Sanders with Gabbard at his campaign rally in Gettysburg ahead of the Democratic primary election in Pennsylvania, April 2016 (Mark Wilson / Getty)

But, in 2017, Gabbard made a move that stumped her new progressive friends, as well as most everyone else: She flew to Syria, in the middle of its civil war, and twice met with the now-deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad, who had by then already killed hundreds of his own people using chemical weapons, and who clung to power thanks to aid from Vladimir Putin. The original plan, according to a former staffer for Gabbard, had been to meet with everyday Syrians and “bear witness.” But as The Washington Post reported today, the trip’s actual itinerary deviated dramatically from the one that had been approved by the House Ethics Committee. The meetings with Assad had not been in the plan, and even Gabbard’s staffer, like others on her team, did not know about them until after they’d happened. “You fucked us,” the staffer, who also asked for anonymity to speak about confidential matters, remembers telling Gabbard later. “The reason you told us you were going on this trip will never come up again. It will only ever be about you meeting with Assad.”

For D.C. institutionalists, Gabbard’s conversations with Assad broke a long-standing convention that members of Congress do not conduct freelance foreign policy. But many also saw the trip as an unforgivable swerve toward autocracy.

Outside the Washington scene, Gabbard’s independence and charisma still counted. When Gabbard ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2019, she could still muster an enthusiastic if motley alliance of progressives, libertarians, and conservative Hindus. She also did well among the kind of people who are fond of saying that all politicians are corrupt and neither political party is good for America. “I’m voting for her. I decided. I like her. I met her in person. Fuck it,” Joe Rogan said on his podcast that year.

Despite that glowing endorsement, Gabbard never scored above single digits in the contest, and dropped out of the race in March 2020. In the years that followed, she would pop up now and again with new and surprising takes. In December 2020, Gabbard introduced a bill to ban trans women and girls from playing women’s sports, plus two pieces of anti-abortion legislation. In 2021, she left Congress altogether. The next year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, she blamed President Joe Biden and NATO for ignoring “Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” Then she turned up as a featured speaker at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

At a late-summer conference in Michigan last year, Gabbard announced that she was supporting Donald Trump for president. She completed her political migration in October at a MAGA rally in North Carolina, when she said that she was joining the Republican Party. She praised Trump for transforming the GOP into “the party of the people and the party of peace.” Her message was that she hadn’t left the Democrats; they had left her. “People evolve on politics all the time,” the former House colleague and friend told me. “But that’s a long way from saying Hey, the party went too far to embracing Donald Trump.”

Gabbard’s instincts are those of a “moth to a flame of power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. And Trump’s flame is burning brightly again. But in Gabbard’s dogged pursuit of power, or at least of proximity to power, others see the influence not of a new guru, but of the old one: Butler. “She’s his loyal servant,” Van Duyn, the Science of Identity Foundation defector, said, and Gabbard regards him as “possessing infallible authority.” Van Duyn also told me that she has sent letters to several Democratic lawmakers, asking them to vote against Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI because she fears that sensitive intelligence “can and will be communicated to her guru.”

Each of the current and former Democratic lawmakers I spoke with for this story had concerns about the Gabbard-Butler relationship. “There are some very tough questions that need to be asked,” Representative Jill Tokuda, Democrat of Hawaii, told me. “Who’s really calling the shots when it comes to what Tulsi Gabbard believes?”

Gabbard at the Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, on October 27, 2024 (Michael M. Santiago / Getty)

Butler, who is now in his late 70s and reportedly living in a beachfront home in Kailua, did not respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, Jeannie Bishop, the foundation’s president, disputed the accounts of people whom the group considers to be “propagating misconceptions,” and accused the media of “fomenting” Hinduphobia. (Butler’s foundation, along with a collection of 50 Hindu groups, sent out a press release last week blasting recent media coverage as “Hinduphobic.”)

[Tom Nichols: Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination is a national-security risk]

Regardless of whom her opportunism ultimately serves, political opportunity has come again for Gabbard. After she hitched her wagon to Trump, he chose her to be his spymaster in chief—a position for which she does not seem remotely qualified. The current director, Avril Haines, was confirmed after previously serving as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and deputy counsel to the president for national-security affairs in the Office of White House Counsel. Gabbard has no similar background in intelligence or agency leadership. Henning, the Trump spokesperson, pointed to Gabbard’s endorsement from former CIA Director of Counterterrorism Bernard Hudson, who has commended Gabbard’s “independent thinking.”

Gabbard’s Assad visit and her pro-Russian views also remain fresh in the minds of many in Congress. Nothing proves that Gabbard is a “Russian asset,” as Hillary Clinton once famously put it, but Moscow seems gleeful about her selection to lead the intelligence agency: “The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda crowed after her nomination was announced. Another Russian state outlet called Gabbard a “comrade.”

Judging by the congressional hearings so far, traditional expertise and credentials may not matter much to the GOP lawmakers charged with confirming Trump’s picks. But the incoherence of Gabbard’s ideological evolution may yet count against her: Reliability could be the sticking point. Republicans should know, as well as Democrats, that “she’s ruthless in her pursuit of personal power,” the Hawaii campaign colleague told me. “Even if that means disappointing MAGA folks or Trump, it’s clear she’d do it in a heartbeat.”

During her eight years in Congress, Gabbard was a fierce defender of privacy rights, something her supporters on both the right and the left long admired. In particular, she had opposed the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation that permits some warrantless surveillance of American citizens. But after meeting with senators last week, Gabbard announced that the act’s surveillance capability “must be safeguarded.” The would-be director of national intelligence had had a change of heart.

Donald Trump promised his supporters that if he won the presidency again, he would pardon at least some of the January 6 rioters who have been prosecuted. “Tonight I’m going to be signing on the J6 hostages pardons to get them out,” he told the crowd at Capital One Arena on Monday night. “And as soon as I leave, I’m going to the Oval Office, and will be signing pardons for a lot of people.”

Many prominent Republicans seem to agree with Trump’s view that the January 6 insurrectionists, including men convicted of assaulting police officers, are government “hostages.” The view seems to be that Democrats are using the events of January 6 as an excuse to carry out what Trump calls a “witch hunt.”

Prominent Republicans weren’t always blasé about January 6. Immediately following the attack on the Capitol, and even into the following year, many leading Republicans condemned the attack on the Capitol and the police officers assigned to protect it.

As an antidote to amnesia, here is an incomplete compilation of remarks about the January 6 violence made by Republicans who now are seeking Cabinet-level positions in the new Trump administration, or are otherwise in Trump’s inner circle.

Elise Stefanik, United Nations Ambassador-Designate, January 6, 2021 (press release now deleted): “This is truly a tragic day for America. I fully condemn the dangerous violence and destruction that occurred today at the United States Capitol. Americans have a Constitutional right to protest and freedom of speech, but violence in any form is absolutely unacceptable and anti-American. The perpetrators of this un-American violence and destruction must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Marco Rubio, Secretary of State nominee, January 6, 2021: “There is nothing patriotic about what is occurring on Capitol Hill. This is 3rd world style anti-American anarchy.”

Kristi Noem, Homeland Security Secretary nominee, January 6, 2021 (tweet now deleted): “We are all entitled to peacefully protest. Violence is not a part of that. What’s happening in the Capitol right now must stop.”

Doug Burgum, Interior Secretary nominee, January 6, 2021: “We support the right to peacefully protest. The violence happening at our nation’s capitol is reprehensible and does not represent American values, and needs to stop immediately.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, Department of Government Efficiency co-leader, September 13, 2022: “It was a dark day for democracy. The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again. I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.”

Kevin McCarthy, then–Speaker of the House, January 13, 2021: “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action from President Trump—accept his share of responsibility, quell the brewing unrest, and ensure that President-Elect Biden is able to successfully begin his term. And the president’s immediate action also deserves congressional action, which is why I think a fact-finding commission and a censure resolution would be prudent. Unfortunately, that is not where we are today.”

Lindsey Graham, South Carolina senator, January 6, 2021: “Those who made this attack on our government need to be identified and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Their actions are repugnant to democracy.”

Mike Lee, Utah senator, January 6, 2021: “The violence at the United States Capitol is completely unacceptable. It is time for the protesters to disperse. My staff and I are safe. We are working to finish our constitutional duty to finish counting votes today.”

Ted Cruz, Texas senator, January 5, 2022: “A violent terrorist attack on the Capitol where we saw the men and women of law enforcement … risk their lives to defend the men and women who serve in this Capitol.”

Nikki Haley, 2024 presidential candidate, January 12, 2021: “We need to acknowledge [Trump] let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and 2024 presidential candidate, January 6, 2021: “Violence or rioting of any kind is unacceptable and the perpetrators must face the full weight of the law.”

[Peter Wehner: No one will remember Jack Smith’s report]

Steve Scalise, Louisiana representative, now–House Majority Leader, January 12, 2021: “Like many Americans, I am deeply upset and outraged over the domestic terrorism we witnessed last week in our nation’s Capitol. It is clear that tensions in our country are dangerously high. It is incumbent upon leaders to be focused, first and foremost, on uniting our country and ensuring a smooth transition of power to the Biden administration over the coming days.”

John Barrasso, Wyoming senator, now–Senate Majority Whip, January 6, 2021: “This violence and destruction have no place in our republic. It must end now.”

Tom Emmer, Minnesota representative, now–Majority Whip of the House of Representatives, January 6, 2022: “One year ago, we saw an unacceptable display of violence that runs counter to everything we stand for as a country. Those responsible for the violence must continue to be held accountable, and Congress must focus on providing our men and women in law enforcement around the Capitol—and across the nation—with the resources, training, and support they need to ensure something like this never happens again.”

Lisa McClain, Michigan representative, now–chair of the House Republican Conference, January 6, 2021: “Today was an atrocious day for Democracy. What started out as Members of Congress following a sacred and Constitutional tradition, quickly was overcome by violent protestors. I wholeheartedly condemn the violence and vandalism at the Capitol and all who participated in such evil behavior. These vile acts are a slap in the face to peace-loving Americans.”

Kevin Hern, Oklahoma representative, now–Chair of the House Republican Policy Committee, January 7, 2021: “Our Capitol building has been a symbol of American freedoms and democracy around the world, yet it was invaded by law breakers seeking to undermine our republican form of government and erode those ideals. There is no excuse for the violent actions witnessed in the halls of Congress. This summer, when Antifa rioters burned American cities to the ground and held Portland hostage for over 100 days, I called for the investigation, arrest, and prosecution of those involved. I consider the crimes committed at the Capitol today to be of the same magnitude, and I support the investigation, arrest, and prosecution of those involved in the violent acts to the full extent of the law.”

Mario Díaz-Balart, Florida representative, January 6, 2021: “The Capitol building is the center and sacred symbol of democracy. Today’s violent actions undermine the principles and values that our nation was founded on. Individuals who broke into the US Capitol or assaulted our law enforcement should face the full consequences of the law.”

[Read: What I saw on the January 6 committee]

Dan Crenshaw, Texas representative, January 7, 2021: “On Wednesday the Capitol of the most powerful nation the world has ever known was stormed by an angry mob. Americans surely never thought they’d see such a scene: members of Congress barricaded inside the House chamber, Capitol Police trampled, and four Americans dead. A woman was shot near the elevator I use every day to enter the House floor. It was a display not of patriotism but of frenzy and anarchy. The actions of a few overshadowed the decent intentions of many.”

Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming senator, January 6, 2021: “Call it what it is: An attack on the Capitol is an attack on democracy. Today we are trying to use the democratic process to address grievances. This violence inhibits our ability to do that. Violent protests were unacceptable this summer and are unacceptable now.”

Cathy McMorris Rodgers, then–Washington representative, January 6, 2021 (press release now deleted): “What happened today and continues to unfold in the nation’s capital is disgraceful and un-American. Thugs assaulted Capitol Police Officers, breached and defaced our Capitol Building, put people’s lives in danger, and disregarded the values we hold dear as Americans. To anyone involved, shame on you. We must have a peaceful transfer of power. The only reason for my objection was to give voice to the concern that governors and courts unilaterally changed election procedures without the will of the people and outside of the legislative process. I have been consistent in my belief that Americans should utilize the Constitutional tools and legal processes available to seek answers to their questions about the 2020 election. What we have seen today is unlawful and unacceptable. I have decided I will vote to uphold the Electoral College results and I encourage Donald Trump to condemn and put an end to this madness.”

Rick Scott, Florida senator, January 6, 2021: “Everyone has a right to peacefully protest. No one has a right to commit violence. What happened today at the Capitol is disgraceful and un-American. It is not what our country stands for.”

John Thune, South Dakota senator, now–Senate Majority Leader, January 6, 2021: “I hope that the types of people who stormed the capitol today get a clear message that they will not stop our democracy from moving forward.”

Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee senator, January 6, 2021: “These actions at the US Capitol by protestors are truly despicable and unacceptable. While I am safe and sheltering in place, these protests are prohibiting us from doing our constitutional duty. I condemn them in the strongest possible terms. We are a nation of laws.”

John Kennedy, Louisiana senator, January 6, 2021: “I condemn this violent assault on the democratic process & will not be intimidated by a mob that confuses chaos & destruction with strength & wisdom. I’ll continue to work for LA.”

[Listen: January 6 and the case for oblivion]

Steve Daines, Montana senator, January 6, 2021: “Today is a sad day for our country. The destruction and violence we saw at our Capitol today is an assault on our democracy, our Constitution and the rule of law, and must not be tolerated. As Americans, we believe in the right to peaceful protest. We must rise above the violence. We must stand together. We will not let today’s violence deter Congress from certifying the election. We must restore confidence in our electoral process. We must, and we will, have a peaceful and orderly transition of power.”

Tim Scott, South Carolina senator and 2024 presidential candidate, January 6, 2021: “The violence occurring at the United States Capitol right now is simply unacceptable, and I fully condemn it.”