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

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Day Two

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

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

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

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

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

Tulsi Gabbard

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

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

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

Kash Patel

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

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Today’s News

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

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

Evening Read

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

Your FOMO Is Trying to Tell You Something

By Faith Hill

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

Read the full article.

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

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

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Today’s News

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

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: neal.fun.

The Worst Page on the Internet

By Yair Rosenberg

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

Read the full article.

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

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

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

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

[David A. Graham: The Fox News rebound]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Four years ago, scores of police officers were attacked only yards away from where Donald Trump will swear to defend the Constitution and faithfully execute the duties of his office. The scene, in the words of one officer, was “a non-stop barrage” with “weapons and things being thrown, and pepper spray, and you name it … You could hear them yelling. You could hear them, screams and moans, and everything else.” One officer later said that he was certain he would die the moment he entered the crowd: “You know, you’re getting pushed, kicked, you know, people are throwing metal bats at you and all that stuff. I was like, yeah, this is fucking it.”

All of this happened because Trump, according to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report, could not accept his loss in the 2020 election, and so he tried on January 6, 2021, to “direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then leverage rioters’ violence to further delay it.” The crowd that attacked the Capitol, Smith wrote, “was filled with Mr. Trump’s supporters, as made clear by their Trump shirts, signs, and flags,” and they “violently attacked the law enforcement officers attempting to secure the building.”

The ensuing riot was one of the worst days for law enforcement since 9/11. More than 140 officers were injured on January 6, but we know only the names of some of the most famous victims of the mob, such as Officers Michael Fanone, Aquilino Gonell, Harry Dunn, and others who have testified to Congress or given interviews. Their injuries were severe. Fanone was beaten to the point of a concussion and a heart attack; Gonell was attacked by more than 40 rioters and assaulted with his own riot shield. He has since undergone multiple surgeries and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

In his campaign for reelection, the man who conjured this violence against his own government—and then stood by as police from multiple jurisdictions were attacked—portrayed himself as the guardian of law and order. (One of the themes of the 2024 GOP convention was “Make America Safe Again.”) This strategy worked: Trump yet again nabbed the endorsement of the National Fraternal Order of Police. The FOP vice president, Joe Gamaldi, said in November that police see Trump’s victory as a mandate from voters who are “tired of all the chaos and disorder we’re seeing in our streets. We are tired of the ‘defund the police’ talk, and basically we’re just tired of the crap.”

[Read: Trump’s empty promise of ‘law and order’]

The new president’s supporters may be tired of what they mistakenly believe is a rise in crime in the streets, but they’ve memory-holed Trump’s willingness to throw a swarm of raging insurrectionists against the same police forces that will be protecting him at today’s inauguration. Nothing, however, should be allowed to erase the truth that the party of law and order is now led by not only a convicted felon, but one who callously looked on as outnumbered police officers did battle for hours to protect the lives of the members of the United States Congress.

I understand the anger that some police officers feel when the public assumes that they’re all corrupt bullies, potential killers no better than the men involved in the ghastly 2020 murder of George Floyd. My father and brother were both police officers (Dad in the 1950s, and my brother from the 1960s to the 1980s). Our next-door neighbor when I was a boy was a police officer, and I grew up among cops in my small New England city. Most of them became “law and order” Republican voters when Richard Nixon was able to turn riots—including the mess at the 1968 Democratic National Convention—into a campaign issue.

Trump has done the same through his three presidential campaigns, depicting America as a lawless hellhole. At least Nixon, however, had the advantage of pointing to the other party, and to his political opponents, as the source of danger to Americans and their armed protectors. Trump has managed to erase from millions of minds the fact that the people who attacked the police on January 6 were his own supporters, acting on what they believed were his wishes.

“I would like to see January 6 burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11,” the conservative writer George Will said in 2021, “because it was that scale of a shock to the system.” But like so many of Trump’s outrages and scandals, the attack on the Capitol has faded into the noise of the 2024 campaign. Trump today will likely thunder on about the return of law and order and swear to make America’s streets safer, but American voters, no matter their party, should remember what actually happened to scores of police officers because of Trump’s own actions.

Police officers at the Capitol were being attacked with an assortment of weapons—bear spray, flagpoles, even their own equipment. (“My helmet came down and felt like someone was on top of me and I couldn’t see anything,” the Capitol Police officer Winston Pingeon told ABC News in an October 2024 interview. “And I remember just thinking, I have to protect my gun, because they stole my baton.”) During all of this, Trump, as usual, was tweeting: “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order-respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!” Meanwhile, the mob pressed on. One officer recounted that rioters dragged him into the crowd, where they beat and tased him while yelling things such as “I got one!” and “Kill him with his gun!”

[Tom Nichols: Trump’s dangerous January 6–pardon promise]

Trump now refers to many of the rioters who have been convicted and jailed as “hostages.” He has promised to pardon some of them upon taking office. “Most likely, I’ll do it very quickly,” he said on Meet the Press last month, adding that “those people have suffered long and hard. And there may be some exceptions to it. I have to look. But, you know, if somebody was radical, crazy.”

The once and future president seems to have a forgiving definition of radical. On the campaign trail, he lauded a choir formed by some of the jailed insurrectionists. He even lent them his voice; their song, “Justice for All,” includes Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and Trump regularly played it at his rallies. “Our people love those people,” Trump said last May.

Four of this “J6 Prison Choir” were charged with assaulting a law-enforcement officer. One rioter, Julian Khater, had already pleaded guilty to assaulting multiple officers before the song was recorded. He was sentenced to almost six years in prison. Another choir member, Shane Jenkins, was also sentenced to six years in prison after being convicted of seven felonies and two misdemeanors, including throwing makeshift weapons at the police. “I have murder in my heart and head,” he wrote to an associate in the weeks after the riot, according to the Justice Department.

Trump has described January 6 as “a day of love.” The police who were there know better. Many of them live with physical and psychological scars. Four of them committed suicide within a year. “Tell me again how you support the police and law and order when all these things are happening?” Gonell asked last spring.

Safely back in the White House, Trump will never have to answer that question. But every time he and other elected Republicans claim to be the party of law and order, Americans should remember the day that the 47th president was willing to sacrifice the men and women on the thin blue line on the altar of his own ambitions.

Donald Trump’s repeated promise to consider pardons for the January 6 attackers is rightly seen as a craven political move, one that would both satiate his base and bolster the lie that the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol was a peaceful protest, and that those who have been charged and convicted are political prisoners or even “hostages.” But the promise is something graver too: Blanket pardons for the January 6 rioters would be a severe assault on the legitimacy of the criminal legal system, and in particular, on the role of the judiciary in that system.

Since January 6, 2021, the federal judges of the district court in Washington, D.C., have worked tirelessly to handle the nearly 1,600 criminal cases brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against those who allegedly attacked police officers, damaged and stole government property, caused members of Congress and the vice president of the United States to flee for their lives, and prevented the counting of the Electoral College ballots for more than six hours. The charged crimes have ranged from misdemeanors such as trespassing and disorderly conduct to serious felonies such as assaulting police, obstructing an official proceeding, and seditious conspiracy.

In every case, federal judges have worked to ensure that the defendant’s constitutional rights have been protected, including the rights to counsel, due process of law, and a jury trial. More than 1,000 of those charged have pleaded guilty. More than 250 have been found guilty after a trial. More than 800 have received sentences of incarceration, including some who were permitted to serve their sentences in home detention. Others have received sentences of probation. And through it all, the federal judges—whether appointed by a Republican president, a Democratic president, or former President Trump himself—have devoted themselves to carefully stewarding their cases in accordance with U.S. law.

[Tom Nichols: Trump’s dangerous January 6–pardon promise]

This has required thousands of hours of intense, difficult work. These judges have seen the evidence over and over again—seen their fellow Americans beat police with baseball bats and flagpoles, erect a gallows to hang the vice president, scale the walls of the Capitol and break through its windows, and brag about their insurrection on social media. They have sentenced some who are contrite and remorseful, and many others who remain defiant and unapologetic, amplifying the lies about January 6. Regardless of political affiliation, the judges have been uniform in condemning the acts of those convicted in their courtrooms.

As Royce C. Lamberth, a Republican-appointed judge with nearly 40 years on the bench, said at the sentencing of a January 6 defendant:

The Court cannot condone the shameless attempts by [the defendant] or anyone else to misinterpret or misrepresent what happened. It cannot condone the notion that those who broke the law on January 6 did nothing wrong, or that those duly convicted with all the safeguards of the United States Constitution, including a right to trial by jury in felony cases, are political prisoners or hostages.

So let me set the record straight, based on what I’ve learned presiding over many January 6 prosecutions, hearing from dozens of witnesses, watching hundreds of hours of video footage, and reading thousands of pages of evidence. On January 6, 2021, a mob of people invaded and occupied the United States Capitol, using force to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power mandated by the Constitution and our republican heritage …

Although the rioters failed in their ultimate goal, their actions nonetheless resulted in the deaths of multiple people, injury to over 140 members of law enforcement, and lasting trauma for our entire nation.  This was not patriotism; it was the antithesis of patriotism.  

These same judges, many of whom have been threatened with violence by supporters of the January 6 defendants, are now being asked by those appearing before them to postpone their proceedings, including their sentencings, because Donald Trump has promised to pardon them. For the most part, the judges have remained firm and pressed ahead. As Judge Reggie B. Walton, another Republican-appointed judge, noted, “The potential future exercise of the discretionary pardon power, an Executive Branch authority, is irrelevant to the Court’s obligation to carry out the legal responsibilities of the Judicial Branch.” Judge Carl J. Nichols, who was appointed by Trump, lamented that “blanket pardons for all January 6 defendants or anything close would be beyond frustrating and disappointing,” though he added that it wasn’t his “call” and agreed to reschedule a jury trial from late 2024 to after the inauguration.

[Paul Rosenzweig: Pardon Trump’s critics now]

The judicial branch is an integral part of our country’s criminal legal system. Federal judges in the nation’s district courts must ensure that every defendant before them is treated fairly and afforded the same constitutional rights. It is their responsibility to dispense justice not only to those with means, or to those in the president’s favor, but to those who are indigent and far out of favor. And in my experience as a former federal prosecutor for nearly 20 years, most defendants respect the judges who handle their case and accept the sentence imposed on them.  

Some defendants who have been sentenced by a federal judge later receive clemency—either a pardon or commutation of sentence—from the president. This act of mercy is sometimes granted to defendants who have accepted responsibility and changed their lives for the better while serving their sentence. Sometimes it is used when sentencing practices have changed dramatically, making sentences imposed long ago seem draconian. But it would be an all-out assault on our criminal legal system, and on the role of the judiciary in that system, to issue blanket pardons to the January 6 attackers regardless of the seriousness of their crimes, their remorse (or lack thereof), and their actions post–January 6. These federal judges deserve more respect than that.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

Some of Donald Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks will appear before the Senate next week. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss the tough questions that Democrats are promising.

Meanwhile, as Senate confirmations loom, Trump has taken to criticizing U.S. allies including Canada, Panama, and Greenland. These comments may, in part, be an element of the president-elect’s strategy, Tom Nichols explained last night. “We’re talking about things that are never going to happen: We’re not going to war with Denmark over Greenland; we’re not going to seize the Panama Canal,” he said. “This whole strange foreign-policy fandango has kind of obliterated a lot of other discussions.”

Ahead of his inauguration, Trump has also made many promises about how the government will work once he takes office for his second term. But, as panelists discussed, whether he will be able to deliver, and how his supporters and political opponents could react if he can’t produce his pledged results, remains to be seen.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS News Hour; Carl Hulse, the chief Washington correspondent at The New York Times; Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic; and Vivian Salama, a national-politics reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.

As I witnessed the despair and incomprehension of liberals worldwide after Donald Trump’s victory in November’s U.S. presidential election, I had a sinking feeling that I had been through this before. The moment took me back to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, signaling the beginning of the end of Soviet Communism and the lifting of the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since the end of World War II. The difference was that the world that collapsed in 1989 was theirs, the Communists’. Now it is ours, the liberals’.

In 1989, I was living within a Warsaw Pact nation, in my final year of studying philosophy at Bulgaria’s Sofia University, when the world turned upside down. The whole experience felt like an extended course in French existentialism. To see the sudden end of something that we had been told would last forever was bewildering—liberating and alarming in equal measure. My fellow students and I were overwhelmed by the new sense of freedom, but we were also acutely conscious of the fragility of all things political. That radical rupture turned out to be a defining experience for my generation.

But the rupture was even broader—on a greater global scale—than many of us realized at the time. The year 1989 was indeed an annus mirabilis, but one very different from the way Western liberals have framed it for the past three decades. The resilience that the Chinese Communist Party demonstrated in suppressing the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square turned out to be more consequential than the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Russians, the most important aspect of 1989 was not the end of Communism, but the end of the Soviet empire, with the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan. It was thus the year that Osama bin Laden proclaimed the jihadists’ victory over the godless U.S.S.R. And 1989 was also when nationalism began to reclaim its political primacy in the former Yugoslavia.

The return of Trump to power in the United States may prove another such instance in a period of enormous political rupture. If liberals are to respond effectively to the challenge of a new Trump administration, they will need to reflect critically on what happened in 1989, and discard the story they’ve always told themselves about it. The means of overcoming despair is to be found in better comprehension.

[Tom Nichols: Stalin’s revenge]

From a liberal point of view, comparing the anti-Soviet revolutions of 1989 with the illiberal revolutions today might seem scandalous. In Francis Fukuyama’s famous phrase, 1989 was “the end of history,” whereas Trump’s victory, many liberals assert, may portend the end of democracy. The year the Berlin Wall fell was viewed as the triumph of the West; now the decline of the West dominates the conversation. The collapse of Communism was marked by a vision for a democratic, capitalist future; that future is now riddled with uncertainty. The mood in 1989 was internationalist and optimistic; today, it has soured into nationalism, at times even nihilism.

But to insist on those differences between then and now is to miss the point about their similarities. Living through such moments in history teaches one many things, but the most important is the sheer speed of change: People can totally alter their views and political identity overnight; what only yesterday was considered unthinkable seems self-evident today. The shift is so profound that people soon find their old assumptions and choices unfathomable.

Translated to this moment: How, just six months ago, could any sane person have believed that an aging and unpopular Joe Biden could be reelected?

Trump captured the public imagination not because he had a better plan for how to win the war in Ukraine or manage globalization, but because he understood that the world of yesterday could be no more. The United States’ postwar political identity has vanished into the abyss of the ballot box. This Trump administration may succeed or fail on its own terms, but the old world will not return. Even most liberals do not want it back. Few Americans today are comfortable with the notion of American exceptionalism.

In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, some political commentators grimly looked back to the 1930s, when fascism stalked the world. The problem is that the 1930s are beyond living memory, whereas the 1990s are still vivid to many of us. What I learned from that decade is that a radical political rupture gives the winners a blank check. Understanding why people voted for Trump will be little help in apprehending what he will do in office.

Political ruptures are achieved by previously unimaginable coalitions, united more by their intensity than a common program. Politicians who belong to these coalitions typically have a chameleonlike ability to suit themselves to the moment—none more so, in our time, than Trump. American liberals who are gobsmacked that people can treat a billionaire playboy as the leader of an anti-establishment movement might recall that Boris Yeltsin, the hero of Russia’s 1990s anti-Communist revolution, had been one of the leaders of the Communist Party just a few short years earlier.

[Read: How China made the Tiananmen Square massacre irrelevant]

Like the end of the Soviet era, Trump’s reelection victory will have global dimensions. It marks the passing of the United States as a liberal empire. America remains the world’s preeminent power, yes, and will remain an empire of sorts, but it won’t be a liberal one. As Biden’s spotty record of mobilizing support to defend the “liberal international order” in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, the very idea of such an order was for many critics always a Western fiction. It existed as long as the U.S. had the power and political will to impose it.

This is not what Trump will do. In foreign policy, Trump is neither a realist nor an isolationist; he is a revisionist. Trump is convinced that the U.S. is the biggest loser in the world it has made. Over the past three decades, in his view, America has become a hostage, rather than a hegemon, of the liberal international order. In the postwar world, the U.S. successfully integrated its defeated adversaries Germany and Japan into democratic governance, international trade, and economic prosperity. This did not apply to China: In Trump’s view, Beijing has been the real winner of the post-1989 changes.

Trump’s second coming will clearly be different from the first. In 2016, Trump’s encounter with American power was like a blind date. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted, and American power didn’t know exactly who he was. Not this time. America may remain a democracy, but it will become a more feral one. Under new management, its institutions will likely depart from the safety of consensual politics and go wild. In times of rapid change, political leaders seek not to administer the state, but to defeat it. They see the state and the “deep state” as synonymous. Illiberal leaders select their cabinet members in the same way that emperors used to choose the governors of rebellious provinces: What matters most is the appointee’s loyalty and capacity to resist being suborned or co-opted by others.

In Trump’s first administration, chaos reigned; his second administration will reign by wielding chaos as a weapon. This White House will overwhelm its opponents by “flooding the zone” with executive orders and proclamations. He will leave many adversaries guessing about why he is making the decisions he does, and disorient others with their rapidity and quantity.

[George Packer: The end of Democratic delusions]

In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by promising normalcy. Normalcy will no longer help the Democrats. In the most recent example of an antipopulist victory, Donald Tusk triumphed in Poland’s 2023 parliamentary elections and returned to be prime minister, not because he promised business as usual but because his party, Civic Platform, was able to forge a compelling new political identity. Tusk’s party adopted more progressive positions on such controversial issues as abortion rights and workers’ protections, but it also wrapped itself in the flag and embraced patriotism. Tusk offered Poles a new grand narrative, not simply a different electoral strategy. Civic Platform’s success still depended on forming a coalition with other parties, a potentially fragile basis for governing, but it offers a template, at least, for how the liberal center can reinvent itself and check the advance of illiberal populism.

The risk for the United States is high: The next few years could easily see American politics descend into cruel, petty vengefulness, or worse. But for liberals to respond to this moment by acting as defenders of a disappearing status quo would be unwise. To do so would entail merely reacting to whatever Trump does. The mindset of resistance may be the best way to understand tyranny, but it is not the best way to handle a moment of radical political rupture, in which tyranny is possible but not inevitable.

Back in 1989, the political scientist Ken Jowitt, the author of a great study of Communist upheaval in that period, New World Disorder, observed that a rupture of this type forces political leaders to devise a new vocabulary. At such moments, formerly magic words do not work anymore. The slogan “Democracy is under threat” did not benefit the Democrats during the election, because many voters simply did not see Trump himself as that threat.

As the writer George Orwell observed, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” The challenge of apprehending the new, even when the fact of its arrival is undeniable, means that it may come as a shock to liberal sensibilities how few tears will be shed for the passing of the old order. Contrary to what seemed the correct response in 2016, the task of Trump opponents today is not to resist the political change that he has unleashed but to embrace it—and use this moment to fashion a new coalition for a better society.