This afternoon, FBI personnel braced for a retaliatory purge of the nation’s premiere law-enforcement agency, as President Donald Trump appeared ready to fire potentially hundreds of agents and officials who’d participated in investigations that led to criminal charges against him.

A team that investigated Trump’s mishandling of classified documents was expected to be fired, four people familiar with the matter said. Trump has long fumed about that investigation, which involved a raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate that turned up hundreds of classified documents he had taken after he left the White House four years ago.

David Sundberg, the head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, is also being fired, these people added. Sundberg is a career FBI agent with more than two decades of experience, and he oversees some of the bureau’s most sensitive cases related to national security and counterintelligence. Current and former officials told me they are worried that those investigations could stall, at least temporarily, if a large number of agents are suddenly removed. A spokesperson at the Washington Field Office declined to comment.

Trump’s retribution is not limited to those who investigated him personally. Administration officials are reviewing records to identify FBI personnel who participated in investigations of the January 6 assault on the Capitol by his supporters, people familiar with the matter told me. That could potentially involve hundreds if not thousands of agents, including those who interviewed and investigated rioters who were later prosecuted. Shortly after taking office, Trump pardoned about 1,500 of the rioters and commuted others’ sentences.

There is no precedent for the mass termination of FBI personnel in this fashion. Current and former officials I spoke with had expected Trump to exact retribution for what he sees as unjust and even illegal efforts by the FBI and the Justice Department to investigate his conduct. But they were stunned by the scale of Trump’s anticipated purge, which is taking aim at senior leaders as well as working-level agents who do not set policy but follow the orders of their superiors.

[Read: Trump’s ‘deep state’ revenge]

This afternoon, some FBI personnel frantically traded messages and rumors about others believed to be on Trump’s list, including special agents who run field offices across the country and were also involved in investigations of the former president.

Trump’s efforts to root out his supposed enemies might not withstand a legal challenge. FBI agents do not choose the cases assigned to them, and they are protected by civil-service rules. The FBI Agents Association, a nonprofit organization that is not part of the U.S. government, said in a statement that the reports of Trump’s planned purge are “outrageous” and “fundamentally at odds with the law enforcement objectives outlined by President Trump and his support for FBI Agents.”

The mass firings could imperil the nomination of Kash Patel, whom Trump wants to run the FBI in his administration. Just yesterday, Patel had assured senators during his confirmation hearing that the very kinds of politically motivated firings that appear to be in motion would not happen.

“All FBI employees will be protected against political retribution,” Patel told lawmakers. “Every FBI employee will be held to the absolute same standard, and no one will be terminated for case assignments.”

Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee to run the Justice Department, had likewise assured senators during her own hearing that government personnel would not be subject to political retaliation for doing their job.

Since taking office two weeks ago, Trump has issued executive orders aimed at his perceived enemies, including former intelligence officials. And he has pledged to end what he calls the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement. How exactly he plans to do that, and the degree to which his own self-interest informs his definition of weaponization, is now becoming clearer.

Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer contributed reporting to this article.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Wednesday night’s deadly airplane crash was tragic—and, to many experts, not altogether surprising. The collision between a commercial airplane and a military helicopter in Washington, D.C., has led many people to take a closer look at the complex systems that commercial flying relies on, and the strain that some of those systems are under. I spoke with my colleague Ian Bogost, who writes often about the airline industry, about the factors that shape our perceptions of flying.

Lora Kelley: This incident is not an aberration, but rather something experts seem to have seen coming. What were some of the warning signs?

Ian Bogost: Aviation experts had been fearing that something like this would happen not just at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, but all across the country. Near misses have been on the rise, as have “runway incursions”—planes accidentally sharing the same space with other planes. I won’t pretend to understand all of the reasons for that—and that’s part of the problem. The issues here aren’t as simple as something like screws falling off. Rather, near misses and accidents have to do with the whole system of aviation management: pilot experience; air-traffic-control staffing; the number of planes in the air; the complex airspace around Washington, D.C., in this case. More Americans are flying too, and growing demand puts new pressure on all of these systems in invisible ways.

Lora: How should people think about flying at this moment?

Ian: Commercial airlines want you to feel comfortable flying, because their business depends on it. The evolution of commercial air travel, especially in America, has made it so you don’t even have to look at or smell or hear the equipment to the same extent that passengers once did. You’re protected from many things that remind you that you’re in a machine hurtling through the air at 500 miles per hour.

Commercial air travel really is quite safe. When I say commercial air travel, I mean when you fly a major carrier on a scheduled flight that’s regulated. Safety in the cabin has also improved. Flight attendants worked very hard over many decades to establish themselves as safety professionals and not just service staff. The flight crew is trained to act in case of an emergency, and they’re highly prepared to do so. But because travel is so safe, you never get to see them perform that expertise—God forbid you see them perform that expertise.

Lora: Airlines are quite consolidated, and the system of flight relies on a range of factors beyond just individual companies. How does consolidation factor into safety?

Ian: We have fewer choices in flight than we used to—fewer airlines, fewer routes, fewer airport hubs. That does have an impact on safety. One way this plays out is, if you have fewer options for direct flights, you might have to opt for a layover. Takeoffs and landings are the most dangerous part of air travel. So if you can reduce takeoffs and landings—for example, by taking one flight instead of two—you’re safer, at least statistically. This is all still safer than driving somewhere in a car.

It’s really difficult for consumers to make rational decisions about safety today. Especially because we don’t really know what happened yet with this incident, we don’t know how great the risk is of it happening again. I’ve heard people start to consider making changes to their habits, although I don’t think we’re going to see many folks change their plans in the long run. After a door plug blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight last year, I started to see people saying they would try to avoid the aircraft in question, a Boeing 737-9 MAX. Are those people actually safer? Who knows.

Lora: Why do people often pin their safety fears on airplanes themselves, rather than focusing on the people or systems that operate them?

Ian: In the case of flying, people tend to target their concern toward the concrete, visceral problems they can see and touch: Is there a screw loose? Is my seat broken? We mostly don’t consider the more systemic, intangible ones, such as staffing issues and maintenance routines and airspace-traffic patterns.

When an accident like this week’s happens, however, we get a brief insight into just how complex modern life is. For all of us, it’s certainly much easier not to have to think about that complexity.

Related:

Fear of flying is different now. The near misses at airports have been telling us something.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

FBI agents are stunned by the scale of the expected Trump purge. CDC data are disappearing. Trump has created health-care chaos. Legal weed didn’t deliver on its promises.

Today’s News

The Trump administration will impose a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on goods from China tomorrow, according to the White House. Some hospitals across the country have suspended gender-affirming care for people under 19 years old while they assess how to comply with Donald Trump’s recent executive order. North Korean soldiers fighting for Russia have been pulled off the front lines in the Ukrainian war, according to Ukrainian and U.S. officials.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: DeepSeek has already hit the chipmaker giant Nvidia’s share price, but its true potential could upend the whole AI business model, James Surowiecki writes. The Books Briefing: In Catherine Airey’s new novel, a young person’s curiosity about a life lived without social media or streaming is deployed to superb effect, Emma Sarappo writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

The “right way” to immigrate just went wrong. To rebuild Los Angeles, fix zoning. This is no way to talk about children.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

The Benefit of Doing Things You’re Bad At

By Arthur C. Brooks

Between my university lectures and outside speeches about the science of happiness, I do a lot of public speaking, and am always looking for ways to do so with more clarity and fluency. To that end, I regularly give talks in two languages that are not my own—not random languages, of course, but rather those I learned as an adult: Spanish and Catalan …

This is a specific example of what turns out to be a broader truth: Doing something you’re bad at can make you better at what you’re good at, as well as potentially making you good at something new.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

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Watch. A Real Pain (streaming on Hulu) manages to tell a story about the Holocaust “that doesn’t ask all those dead millions to become its supporting cast,” Gal Beckerman writes.

Read. Sarah Chihaya’s unconventional memoir charts her troubled relationship with books.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Updated on February 1 at 10:06 ET

The Democrats are angry. Well, at least some of them.

For months, party activists have felt bitter about Kamala Harris’s election loss, and incensed at the leaders who first went along with Joe Biden’s decision to run again. They feel fresh outrage each time a new detail is revealed about the then-81-year-old’s enfeeblement and its concealment by the advisers in charge. But right now, what’s making these Democrats angriest is that many of their elected leaders don’t seem angry at all.

“I assumed that we would be prepared to meet the moment, and I was wrong,” Shannon Watts, the founder of the gun-control group Moms Demand Action, told me. “It’s like they’ve shown up to a knife fight with a cheese stick.”

For all the people in Watts’s camp, the party’s response to Donald Trump’s first 12 days in office has been maddening at best and demoralizing at worst. After Trump issued pardons or commutations for the January 6 rioters last week, including the ones who attacked police officers, no immediate chorus of anger came from what is supposed to be the next generation of Democratic talent, including Maryland Governor Wes Moore, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, another 2028 hopeful, who is on tour selling a young-adult version of her autobiography, has told interviewers, “I am not out looking for fights. I am always looking to collaborate.”

After Trump threatened Colombia with tariffs, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries attempted to reassure the confused and fearful rank and file with the reminder that “God is still on the throne,” which seemed a little like saying, “Jesus, take the wheel.” And people were baffled after the Democratic National Committee responded on X to Trump’s first week in office by channeling a quainter time in American politics and dusting off an Obama-era slogan to accuse him of being “focused on Wall Street—not Main Street.” “Get new material!” one person suggested in the replies, a succinct summary of the other 1,700 comments.

[Will Freeman: Strong-arming Latin America will work until it doesn’t]

The limp messaging continued this week, after Trump’s administration on Monday issued a federal-funding freeze, including for cancer research and programs such as Meals on Wheels. The next day, Jeffries called for an emergency caucus meeting to hammer out a forceful “three-pronged counter-offensive.” But that emergency meeting would not actually take place until the following afternoon. (By the time lawmakers were dialing in, the White House had already rescinded the order.) Jeffries’s Senate counterpart, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, scowling over his glasses, offered his own sleepy—and slightly unsettling—assessment of the moment: “I haven’t seen people so aroused in a very, very long time.”

Some Democrats say they are hopeful that a new chair of the DNC, who will be elected today, will give the now-rudderless party a bit of direction—a way to harness all that arousal. The committee leads the party’s fundraising apparatus and coordinates with its sister organizations on Senate and House campaigns. But a chair can’t do much if the party’s own lawmakers aren’t willing to swap out the mozzarella for something a little sharper.

Part of the hurdle for Democrats is that they are afraid of sounding shrill. Few are eager for a return of the frantic and indiscriminate alarm-sounding that characterized the response to Trump 1.0, when Democrats clamored for the release of the supposed pee tapes and wore pink pussy hats in protest. There’s something cringey, these days, about reviving the capital-R Resistance—especially because Trump’s second win can’t be chalked up to some fluke; he won the popular vote, fair and square. Most Democrats acknowledge that, this time around, they should choose their targets carefully. “We’re not going to swing at every pitch,” Jeffries told reporters yesterday morning.

But Democrats can’t just stand idly by the plate, several frustrated progressive activists and movement leaders told me. They should be communicating to voters that Trump “is shutting down the government, and stripping it for parts to sell to billionaires,” April Glick Pulito, a progressive communications strategist, said. But Democrats aren’t getting it across, a reality that is disheartening, she told me, but also symbolic. “It’s part of why we fuckin’ lost,” she said. “It’s why people stayed home.” She and others I spoke with are demanding that Democrats be louder and more forceful—using resolutions and press conferences, sure, but also creative social-media campaigns and stunts for the cameras. “Speak like normal people, on platforms that normal people access,” Watts said. “I am not reading your press release. Get on every platform I’m on—talk to me on an Instagram reel, or a Substack live. Tweet things that explain what’s happening and how I can help or what you’re going to do to fix it.”

Some Democratic lawmakers have been doing this. People I talked with pointed to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has regularly gone live on Instagram to spell out the consequences of Trump’s actions. They also pointed to Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker’s vow to thwart unlawful deportation efforts and his new directive blocking any pardoned January 6 rioters from serving in the state government.

But Democrats across the ideological spectrum say they want more from their leaders. Dullness in political messaging is death, they say, and bland consultant-speak is plaguing the party, which right now seems totally incapable of grabbing any voter’s attention. A clear example of this was when Democratic leaders chose 74-year-old Gerry Connolly, who is not exactly a fiery communicator, to head up the House Oversight Committee over Ocasio-Cortez, Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the grassroots group Indivisible, told me. That choice indicates “a failure to recognize the political and media moment that we’re in.”

A party that is in the minority in both chambers of Congress usually doesn’t have a prayer of blocking legislation, but it can gum up the works. Dozens of Democratic senators have so far voted in support of Trump’s Cabinet nominees when they should be opposing them at every turn, these frustrated activists argue, along with rejecting unanimous consent agreements, voting against cloture, and requesting quorum calls. “They should be slowing everything to a halt,” Amanda Litman, a co-founder of the organization Run for Something, told me.

Glick Pulito compared the Democrats’ situation to a sketch from the Netflix comedy show I Think You Should Leave, in which a man wearing a hot-dog suit crashes a hot-dog-shaped car into a store and proceeds to look around wildly for the culprit. “I don’t want to see Chuck Schumer saying Congress should act,” Glick Pulito said. “Bro, you are Congress!”

Some signs have emerged that Democrats are developing a wartime footing. A group of 23 attorneys general from across the country sued the Trump administration this week over its funding freeze. The former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz came out of election-loss-induced retirement to go on a cable-news rampage about it. (“They defrosted him!” Glick Pulito said.) And when the White House rescinded its funding block, Democrats claimed a grassroots victory. “FAFO,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X. “I am more optimistic now than I was 48 hours ago,” Levin told me. “I am seeing some green shoots. I would like those to bloom into full-fledged flowers.”

[Elaine Godfrey: The resistance almost missed impeachment]

A new DNC chair, activists and progressives leaders hope, could at least be the Miracle-Gro for that process. Since Harris lost and Biden left, Democrats have been leaderless and agenda-free. Any conversations about the party’s brand troubles or its plan for handling the next four years have been haphazard and localized. Ken Martin and Ben Wikler, the two top candidates for the DNC chair job, both have the confidence of the activists I spoke with, not least because both have led political operations from outside the D.C. Beltway. Both men say they understand that people are frustrated. “If we don’t stand up now,” Martin, head of the Minnesota Democrats, told me, “then how in the hell are people going to believe that we’re going to fight for them and their families when we’re back in power?” This is a period of transition, Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin state party, told me: “Very soon, the battle will be well and truly joined.”

But the cavalry’s arrival may not mean much. The DNC has always occupied an amorphous role in the Democratic Party; it holds little sway with congressional leadership, and won't exactly shape the party's ideological future. That reality was on display this week during a chaotic DNC candidate forum characterized by a fixation on diversity issues, constant interruptions from climate-change activists, and frustrated outbursts from the audience.

The scene was indicative of a party not only struggling to fill a leadership vacuum but also stumbling beneath the weight of a tarnished brand, an unhappy base, and a growing reputation for fecklessness.

This article originally misstated the DNC's role in the Democratic Party.

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, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

The worst aviation disaster in almost a quarter century is one of the first tests of Donald Trump’s second administration. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss how the president responded to the crisis.

Following the aviation crash over the Potomac this week, Trump moved to blame diversity in the Federal Aviation Administration’s hiring process for the crash. These comments are a continuation of Trump’s behavior throughout his first term and both of his campaigns—but how his response will affect him politically remains to be seen, Mark Leibovich said last night.

Trump is working in “a consequence-free environment,” Leibovich continued. “Ultimately, Donald Trump will do what he can get away with, and whether a few points on his approval ratings are going to move the needle on this are unclear.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Ali Vitali, the host of Way Too Early on MSNBC; Nancy Youssef, a national-security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.

Donald Trump threatening to annex Canada? It was an absurd situation. I briefly considered recycling an old joke of mine about merging all of the High Plains states into a single province of South Saskatchewan. But as I toyed with it, the joke soured. The president of the United States was bellowing aggression against fellow democracies. The situation was simultaneously too stupid for serious journalism and too shameful for wisecracks.

In this second Trump presidency, many of us are baffled by how to respond. The former Trump strategist Steve Bannon memorably described Trump’s method as “flood the zone with shit.” Try to screen all the flow, and you will rapidly exhaust yourself and desensitize your audience. Ignore the flood, and soon you’re immersed in the stuff neck-deep.

The first Trump term was very different.

[Read: It’s not amateur hour anymore]

More than a million people demonstrated against him on January 21, 2017, many more than had attended his inauguration the day before. On January 27, Trump issued an executive order purporting to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Thousands of people thronged airports across the nation to protest. About a hundred were arrested. In less formal ways, civic-minded Americans also rallied against the new administration. They read and viewed more news, and paid for it at record levels, too. Trump reviled one news organization more than any other: the “failing New York Times.” In 2017 alone, the company’s revenues from digital subscriptions climbed 46 percent, pushing total company revenues above $1 billion.

Meanwhile, the administration bumbled from fiasco to fiasco. Within the first week, Trump’s choice of national security adviser lied to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian government, setting in motion his early resignation and then criminal indictment. Trump that same week summoned then–FBI Director James Comey to dinner to pressure him to end the bureau’s investigation of Trump-Russia connections. The demand would lead to Comey’s firing, the appointment of a special counsel, and the prosecution and conviction of important Trump allies such as Paul Manafort.

First-term Trump knew what he wanted: unlimited personal power. But he did not know how to achieve it, and an insufficient number of those around him was willing and able to help him. The senior administration officials who supported Trump’s autocratic ambitions lacked bureaucratic competence; the officials who possessed the bureaucratic competence did not support his ambitions. That’s one reason it took Trump more than a year—until March 2018—to impose the first major round of the tariffs that he wanted but his top economic adviser opposed.

First-term Trump also lacked reliable partners in Congress. Then–Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell struck devil’s bargains with Trump to achieve their own agendas: tax cuts, judicial appointments, the attempted repeal of Obamacare. But they were not his men. They overlooked his corruption, but also imposed limits on what he could do. In 2019, Trump tried to name two personal loyalists to the Federal Reserve Board. McConnell’s Senate rejected them.

[Read: Donald Trump’s first year as president: a recap]

Second-term Trump is very different. He has moved rapidly to consolidate power. Even before he took office, the Department of Justice preemptively stopped all legal actions against him for his attempted seizure of power on January 6, 2021. As soon as he was inaugurated, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all of those convicted for the violent attack on Congress. He then announced investigations of the lawyers who had acted to enforce the law against him.

Trump has moved rapidly to oust independent civil servants, beginning with 17 nonpartisan inspectors general. He moved fast to install loyalists atop the two most important federal management agencies, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management. His administration is united in claiming power to refuse to spend funds already appropriated by Congress and to ignore laws that constrain the absolute power of the executive branch. The whole Trump team, not only the president personally, is testing another important tool of power: stopping congressionally approved grants to states, to ensure that he is funding supporters and punishing opponents. The Trump administration retreated from the test after two days of uproar—but how permanently, who can say?

Trump’s administration has launched large-scale immigration raids in Democratic cities and commenced legal action against local officials who stand in the way. The administration has stopped all international humanitarian aid, cutting off Ukraine. Trump is backed, not undercut, by senior national-security officials in his threats of territorial aggression against Greenland, Panama, and Canada. The Republican platform and congressional budget-writers approve Trump’s musings about replacing tax revenues with hoped-for windfalls from tariffs. Even his seemingly juvenile move to rename the Gulf of Mexico was immediately endorsed by his Department of the Interior. The absurd act carries an underlying serious message: The Trump administration stands behind its president’s high-handed rewriting of rules, even the most established and uncontroversial.

Looming ahead are even more crucial acts of consolidation, including the appointment of an FBI director who has proclaimed his willingness to use the federal police force as a tool of presidential personal power.

Trump’s opponents seem dazed, disoriented, and defeated. Despite the GOP’s slender majorities in both chambers of Congress, and despite Trump’s own low approval rating, the new White House for the moment carries all before it. There have been no mass protests. The demand for news and information—so voracious in 2017—has diminished, if not vanished. Audiences have dwindled; once-mighty news organizations are dismissing hundreds of journalists and staff.

[Read: It’s already different]

Compared with eight years ago, Trump is winning more and his opponents are resisting less.

What’s changed?

Four major things.

First, this time Trump is not arriving in power alone. He and the Republican mainstream have merged, a convergence symbolized by the highly detailed Project 2025 plan written for Trump by the Heritage Foundation. Trump disavowed the plan during the campaign. He was lying when he did so. Now its authors are his most effective henchmen, and unlike the situation he faced in 2017, Trump can now combine expertise and loyalty in the same body of staffers.

Second, this time Trump’s opponents feel beaten in a way that they did not after 2016. That year, Hillary Clinton received nearly 3 million more votes than Trump. Clinton’s popular-vote advantage had no legal meaning. The office of the president is won or lost according to the arcane rules of the Electoral College, not by direct vote-counting. Politically, though, the popular vote matters a lot—that’s why Trump confected all those silly lies about his supposedly historic victory in 2016 and his allegedly enormous crowd size at the 2017 Inauguration. Back then, Democrats felt outmaneuvered but not out-voted. By contrast, Kamala Harris’s unqualified loss in 2024 has crushed morale. Democrats are divided, criticizing one another for their loss, not yet uniting to sound the alarm about how Trump is using his victory.

Third, Trump owes many of his early successes to previous Democratic mistakes. On issue after issue—immigration enforcement, crime and public order, race and gender—Democratic governments over the past eight years have drifted away from the mainstream of American public opinion. The drift is best symbolized by that notorious answer Harris gave to a 2019 questionnaire asking whether she favored taxpayer-funded gender-transition operations for undocumented immigrants and federal prisoners. Her related response in an interview with a progressive group was like some kind of smart-aleck word puzzle: How many unpopular hot-button issues can be crammed into a single sentence? Harris believed that punching every one of those buttons was necessary to be a viable progressive in the 2019–20 cycle. She, and America, paid the price in 2024.

A real quandary arises here. The best-organized Democratic interest groups want to fight Trump on the worst possible issues; the Democrats who want to fight on smarter issues tend to be less organized to fight. Until that conundrum is solved, Democrats are disabled and Trump is empowered.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the workforce? Not popular.

Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers entering the United States with little way to expel them if they are ultimately refused (as almost all of them will be)? Even less popular.

Create a rift between the United States and Israel? Very unpopular.

Trans athletes competing in girls’ and women’s sports? Wildly unpopular.

These are bad fights for Democrats to have. For that very reason, they are the fights that Trump Republicans want to start. Dangerously and unfortunately, they are also the fights that some of the most active of Democratic factions seek to have.

The fourth difference between 2017 and 2025 is the difference in the information space in which American politics is conducted. In 2017, politically minded Americans used platforms like Facebook and Twitter to share links to news sources. Some of those sources were deceptive or outright fake, but even fake news at least replicated the form and style of actual news.

Since then, new platforms have risen to dominance, especially among younger Americans and those less connected to politics. These new platforms are far more effective at detecting and manipulating user bias, fear, and anger. They are personality-powered, offering affirmation and bonding as their proofs of truth.

For pro-Trump Republicans, this new information space is marvelously congenial. They love and hate based on personal recommendations, and will flit from issue to issue as their preferred “influencers” command. Such a movement centered on celebrity and charismatic leadership has no problem with the fact that its favorite media spread disinformation and distrust. In fact, it’s useful. Trump has in effect adapted a slogan from Mussolini: “Trump is always right.” Its corollary is: “Only Trump is right.” Nothing important is lost from a Trump point of view if right-wing media encourage their users to despise science, law, and other forms of expertise.

[Read: Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini]

The anti-Trump coalition, however, is all about institutions. It depends on media that promote understanding of, and respect for, the work that institutions do. The new-media age is inherently inhospitable to institutionalists, and deeply demoralizing for them. Before they can organize to resist Trump, they must build new ways of communicating that adapt to contemporary technology but do not succumb to that technology’s politically destructive tendencies.

All of the above takes time. But it all can be done and must be done.

The second Trump administration has opened purposeful and strong. Its opponents have opened confused and weak. But today’s brutal reality can be tomorrow’s fading memory.

The second-term Trump synthesis does not even pretend to have an economic agenda for middle-class people. The predictable next round of tax cuts will disfavor them. The ensuing deficits will keep mortgage rates high. The tariffs and immigration crackdowns will raise consumer prices. Trump is offering nothing to help with the cost of health care and college.

Trump using James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” as his walk-on song, staffing his administration with accused abuser of women upon accused abuser of women, and relying heavily on reactionary anti-woman gender politics as his political message and messengers: All of that will exact a political price in weeks and months ahead.

Trump himself will lead and epitomize an administration of rake-offs and graft. He may succeed in sabotaging laws designed to prevent and punish corruption in high offices. He won’t be able to suppress awareness of his corruption.

The second-term Trump world will bubble with threats to U.S. security. Trump is determined to make each of them worse by fracturing our alliances in both the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific regions. The worst threat of all is that Trump will be drawn into military action inside Mexico, without the cooperation of the Mexican authorities. Trump’s project to brand drug cartels as international terrorist organizations has legal implications that Trump supporters refuse to consider. Right now, the cartels have powerful incentives not to commit violence against U.S. citizens or on U.S. territory. Yet Trump is poised on the verge of actions that could change the cartels’ calculus and import Mexico’s criminal violence north of the border on a huge scale.

[Read: What’s guiding Trump’s early moves]

Trump won the election of 2024, but still failed to break 50 percent of the vote. His hold on Congress could slip at any time. His plans to foster voter-ID laws and gerrymandering to disenfranchise Democrats will collide with the new reality of American politics that these measures will harm his prospects more than his opponents’: Trump does best among the most disaffiliated Americans, whereas Democrats are widening their lead among those Americans who follow politics closely and vote most often.

The most immediate task for the anti-Trump coalition in these early months of 2025 is to avoid more mistakes. President Joe Biden ended his presidency by listening to advice to grant clemency to thousands of drug offenders, including heinous murderers. Who offered that advice? Don’t listen to them anymore! Fight Trump where he’s most vulnerable, not where progressive interest groups are most isolated and most dogmatic. Build unity from the center, rather than indulge the factionalism of the ultra-left.

A great many Americans despise Trump for the basic reason that he’s a very nasty person who speaks in demeaning ways and does cruel things. The movement to stop him should look and sound and act nice. If you get reprimanded for “respectability politics,” or caricatured as “cringe,” or scolded for appealing to suburban “wine moms,” that’s when you’ll know you’re doing it right.

The MAGA elite feels and fears the weight of American democracy. It knows that democratic accountability and action will grind down its authoritarian aspirations and corrupt schemes. The MAGA elite’s best plan for success is to persuade the American majority to abandon hope and surrender the fight. Its most useful allies are the extremists who have too often misled the great American center into doomed leftward detours.

November 2024 was bad. January and February 2025 are worse. The story is not over yet—unless you agree to lay down in despair the pen that can write the remainder of the story.

On a Saturday morning almost exactly 22 years ago, the space shuttle Columbia was about to finish what had been, until then, a perfect 16-day mission. The families of the seven astronauts on board were on the runway at Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. But as Columbia reentered the atmosphere—traveling at 15,000 miles an hour, just 16 minutes from home—it suddenly broke apart. Debris began to fall from the skies over East Texas.

President George W. Bush was informed of the disaster at Camp David by his chief of staff, Andy Card. Bush was rushed from the Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin, back to the White House. At 2:04 p.m., speaking from the Cabinet Room, a visibly somber president addressed the nation. I had a particular interest in what he would say. Although I had recently been promoted to a new position on the White House staff, I had served Bush as a speechwriter over the previous two years.

“The Columbia is lost,” Bush told the country. “There are no survivors.” He named the crew of seven, praising their courage and pioneering spirit.

“These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly, knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life,” the president said. “Because of their courage and daring and idealism, we will miss them all the more. All Americans today are thinking as well of the families of these men and women who have been given this sudden shock and grief. You’re not alone. Our entire nation grieves with you. And those you loved will always have the respect and gratitude of this country.”

After assuring America that the space program would continue, he said this:

In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy. Yet farther than we can see, there is comfort and hope. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, “Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.”

The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth. Yet we can pray that all are safely home. May God bless the grieving families, and may God continue to bless America.

The speech, full of empathy, free of blame, lasted three minutes and 12 seconds.

Donald Trump took a dramatically different approach from Bush, and from every one of his modern predecessors. The day after a midair collision over the Potomac River that killed 67 people, Trump—within five minutes of asking for a moment of silence for the victims, saying, “We are all overcome with the grief for many who so tragically perished,” and declaring, “We are one family”—blamed the crash on the two Democratic presidents who preceded him, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. He also blamed Pete Buttigieg, who served as Biden’s transportation secretary (and whom Trump cursed out) and diversity programs that, among other things, encourage the hiring of people with severe disabilities.

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

During his 35-minute press conference, Trump cited no evidence to support his claims and admitted he had none; the investigation into the cause of the crash of an American Airlines passenger jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter had barely begun, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder had yet to be located, and the bodies of all the victims had not yet been recovered from the icy waters of the Potomac. But that didn’t stop Trump from unloading baseless attacks and assigning blame.

Oh, and one more thing: The “problematic” diversity hiring practices at the FAA that Trump cited during his press conference were in place during his first term, and his claim that he’d changed Obama’s diversity standards for hiring air-traffic controllers is false.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, sentenced to eight years of hard labor for writing critical letters about Joseph Stalin, described an “essential experience” that he took away from his years in prison: how human beings become evil and how they become good. “In the intoxication of youthful successes,” he wrote,

I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.

Solzhenitsyn added:

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

Solzhenitsyn was offering an elegant description of an anthropological truth: Most human beings contain a complicated mix of qualities, and are capable of acts of virtue and acts of vice, even within a single day. There are admirable, even heroic qualities within us, which need to be cultivated, and there is also “the wolf within us,” which needs to be contained.

Whether a society is civilized or decivilized depends in large part on how well it shapes and refines moral sentiments, to use the language of the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, of which sympathy—our capacity to understand and share the feelings of others by imagining ourselves in their situation—is core. Smith called the “man within the beast” the impartial spectator—essentially, our conscience—whose approbation or disapprobation influences our conduct.

[Read: Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini]

Among the things that shape moral sentiments, including sympathy, are words and rhetoric. No one doubts their power; we see it in politics and poetry, in literature and letters, in songs and sacred books. Words evoke and give voice to strong emotions; they shape perceptions and create human connections. At their best they inspire honor and compassion within us; they offer us a glimpse of truth and enrich and purify our souls. But words can also misshape our souls. They can unleash the wolf within. That is why words, including the words of presidents, matter so very much.

What Trump said during last week’s press conference won’t rank among the 1,000 most inappropriate or offensive things he has said, which I suppose is the point. Rhetoric, particularly presidential rhetoric, has formative power, and with Trump, as with many of those in the MAGA movement, it is always the same: words of aggression, demonization, and brutishness, with the intent to stoke conflict, inflame hatred, and turn us against ourselves. Even during times of tragedy.

The way our leaders speak can shape our civic sentiments, and we are in a moment when our leader is inclined to make those harder and colder rather than softer and warmer, which just isn’t what we ought to want. But it is what we have.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus said, “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” Donald Trump’s heart is full of rage, committed to vengeance. As a result, so is much of America.

The U.S. federal government manages a larger portfolio of risks than any other institution in the history of the world. In just the past few weeks, wildfires raged across Southern California, a commercial flight crashed over the Potomac, a powerful Chinese-developed AI model launched to great fanfare, the nuclear-weapons Doomsday Clock reached its closest point ever to midnight, a new strain of avian flu continued its spread across the globe, and interest rates on long-term government bonds surged—a sign that investors are worried about America’s fiscal future. The responsibility of managing such risks is suffused throughout the federal bureaucracy; agencies are dedicated to preparing for financial crises, natural disasters, cyberattacks, and all manner of other potential calamities.

When one of those far-off risks became a real-life pandemic in the final year of Donald Trump’s first term, this sprawling bureaucracy, staffed mostly by career civil servants with area-specific expertise, helped limit the damage, often despite Trump’s own negligence and attempts to interfere. This time, things may turn out differently. Trump is committed to dismantling the federal bureaucracy as we know it—and, with it, the government’s capacity to handle the next crisis. Like an individual who chooses to forgo health or fire insurance, most Americans won’t feel the negative impact of this effort as long as everything in the world runs smoothly. What happens when the next crisis strikes is another story altogether.  

No country was fully prepared for what became one of the deadliest pandemics in history, but it is hard to think of a leader who handled COVID more poorly than Trump. He spent the crucial weeks leading up to the outbreak downplaying the severity of the virus, at one point referring to it as the Democrats’ “new hoax.” His administration never developed a national plan for getting the virus under control and reopening the economy, leaving the states to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, the president undermined his own public-health agencies at every turn, telling states to “LIBERATE” their economies, refusing to wear a mask, and, at one point, suggesting bleach injections as a potential therapeutic. A February 2021 analysis by The Lancet, a British medical journal, found that the U.S. could have avoided 40 percent of the deaths that occurred under Trump’s watch if its death rate had matched the average among America’s peer countries.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil-service reform]

The administration’s pandemic response did include one shining success: Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership that produced and distributed high-quality vaccines in record time, saving countless lives. But that triumph is the exception that proves the rule. The idea for the program came from Robert Kadlec, an assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Peter Marks, an FDA official—two seasoned public-health experts who had served in top government roles for years beforeTrump took office. The project was then championed by HHS Secretary Alex Azar, who had been appointed by Trump after working off and on for the department since 2001; managed by Gustave Perna, a four-star general who had served in the military for more than 40 years; and staffed by bureaucrats with decades of public-health experience. (This success story has, of course, become distasteful to mention on the right, because it involves vaccines.)

These are exactly the sorts of experienced public servants whom Trump is trying to push out of government. On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order known as Schedule F; if upheld in court, it will give him expansive new power to unilaterally fire federal employees. In the meantime, his administration is finding creative ways to begin its purge of the federal government. Last week, the administration “reassigned” at least 20 career lawyers at the Department of Justice, allowing them to be sidelined without being officially fired; sent home 160 members of the National Security Council; and offered the remaining 2 million federal employees an ultimatum: Resign voluntarily and receive a severance package, or stay and risk being fired at some point in the future. As Axios reports, the White House expects 5 to 10 percent of the federal work force to take the buyout. Those bureaucrats who remain will, by and large, be reporting to Trump loyalists.

If Trump’s plan succeeds, the inevitable result will be a government that finds itself hamstrung in the face of the kinds of risks that it is designed to manage. (Almost unbelievably, Trump has also floated the idea of abolishing FEMA.) Imagine how much worse the pandemic would have been if Kadlec and Marks, the architects of Operation Warp Speed, had been pushed out of government before March 2020. Imagine if Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, had been in charge of the nation’s public-health apparatus, and surrounded not by scientific experts but by hard-core Trumpists. How many more Americans would have died?

For now, that question is a thought experiment. Soon, it might not be. In recent weeks, public-health officials have begun warning about the rapid spread of a new variant of the H5N1 virus, also known as bird flu, which infected 67 Americans last year and appears to be becoming more transmissible. Rather, officials were warning about it; last week, the Trump administration instructed federal health officials to temporarily halt all public communications, including reports about the escalating H5N1 crisis, “as the new Administration considers its plan for managing federal policy and public communications.” Kennedy has already cast doubt on the safety of H5N1 vaccines and implied that the virus itself was partly a creation of the U.S. government.

[Kristen V. Brown: Trump has created health-care chaos]

Pandemics are only one example of a broad swath of risks facing America today. Tensions between the U.S. and China are high, the AI arms race is well under way, wars have broken out across the globe, and climate-change-fueled natural disasters have become ever more common. None of this means that a major crisis will inevitably strike next week, or even over the next four years. But Trump’s actions make that possibility far more likely, including by exposing the country to risks that might have previously seemed arcane. On Thursday, the U.S. experienced its first fatal crash of an American airliner in 16 years. This was barely a week after the Trump administration dissolved the federal Aviation Security Advisory Committee, a body that advises the Transportation Security Administration on airline safety, and fired the head of the TSA, whom Trump himself had appointed during his first term. As the aviator and Atlantic contributor James Fallows points out, dismantling the board was likely not directly responsible for the crash, but it represents “the thoughtless destruction of the taken-for-granted institutions that have made modern aviation as safe as it is.” Trump, meanwhile, in a moment that revealed how he might respond to future crises, immediately began blaming the incident on a push for DEI initiatives within the Federal Aviation Administration.

In a crowded field, this might be the most alarming aspect of Trump’s second term. At first, most people won’t notice an agency gutted here or a program slashed there. But those cuts will make disaster more likely, and when that disaster strikes—whether during Trump’s presidency or his successor’s—the government will be far less capable of handling it. What we don’t know is how bad that crisis will be, and whether Trump will still be in office to face the consequences.