In a little over a month, the Trump administration has started to hollow out America’s federal health agencies. Roughly 2,000 probationary workers have been fired en masse, by virtue of the fact that they were relatively new to their jobs. But the long-term impact of those terminations could pale in comparison to a lesser-noticed spate of departures that has recently roiled the health agencies. In the past two months, the FDA, CDC, and NIH second in commands have all resigned or retired. So have several other prominent officials, including the FDA’s chief operating officer as well as the heads of both its food center and its drug center.

There is always some churn in a new White House, but it typically affects “political staff” who are appointed to serve in a specific administration. Civil servants, meanwhile, are far more likely to stay in their positions regardless of who is president. The continuity of these career officials ensures that agencies can still function as their newly appointed political leaders map out their agendas. As in any other industry, career officials—who dramatically outnumber political staff—do sometimes leave. But many of the top staffers who voluntarily abandoned their positions had previously not shown any sign of being ready to do so. Nirav Shah, the principal deputy of the CDC, is reportedly resigning tomorrow, despite telling a Politico reporter in January that he did not have any “current plans to leave government.” And Jim Jones, the head of the FDA’s food center, was just getting started on a long-term plan to revitalize that office. Shah and Jones, like all the other recently departed health officials mentioned in this story, declined to comment.

[Read: Inside the collapse at the NIH]

The level of attrition happening in the health agencies right now is unprecedented, Max Stier, the head of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that aims to strengthen the federal bureaucracy, told me. “We’re watching a complete sweep of those most senior career experts,” he said. President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to “demolish” the so-called deep state, which he believes is out to sabotage his agenda, and has repeatedly declared his intent to gut the health agencies. To an extraordinary degree, his administration has already succeeded.

The administration has offered plenty of incentive for government workers to head for the exit. One of the Trump administration’s first moves was offering a buyout to any federal worker willing to abruptly leave their position. Trump has also mandated that all federal workers, including those who live more than 50 miles from their office, work in office five days a week. It’s unclear how many rank-and-file workers have quit because of these efforts, but prominent instances of attrition have not been limited to just the health agencies. A top Treasury Department official recently retired after reportedly refusing to give DOGE access to the government’s system for doling out trillions of dollars each year. So did 21 staffers at the United States Digital Service who had been drafted into working for DOGE.

Jones, the former director of the FDA’s food center, is instructive in understanding what is fueling the public-health exodus in particular. He joined the agency in 2023, and had spent the past several months staffing up areas of the food center that were faltering. But when 89 newly hired probationary employees were fired by the Trump administration earlier this month, he had enough. He did not want to be involved in “dismantling an organization,” he told the health publication Stat. The health agencies were upended by DOGE cuts just as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed by the Senate as their boss. The health secretary has his own desires to fire bureaucrats. Had Jones not resigned, it is reasonable to assume that he would have been pushed out of his position: Kennedy had previously implied that everyone at the center Jones ran should be given pink slips.

That’s easier said than done. Although bureaucrats on their probationary period—because they’re either newly hired or recently promoted—can be fired with relative ease, career officials generally cannot be let go without actual cause. But none of that matters if officials resign—whether as a result of their own dissatisfaction or being pressured out. Attrition is a cheat code for thinning the federal workforce. In just a month, the Trump administration’s assault on the federal workforce has managed to push even an ardent reformer like Jones to surrender.

These departures will likely be a cause célèbre for MAGA world. As I wrote in November, public-health officials historically have been the firewall against the political whims of the White House. That is what happened during Trump’s first term. Early in the pandemic, Janet Woodcock, then the head of the FDA’s drug center, reportedly sprang into action to prevent widespread distribution of the unproven COVID treatment hydroxychloroquine over the orders of top Trump officials. What makes the recent resignations so consequential is that they suggest that Trump and RFK Jr. will face less resistance from inside the agencies as they attempt to overhaul public health. Already, Jones has been replaced by Kyle Diamantas, a food and drug lawyer (and hunting buddy of Donald Trump Jr.) who has no previous experience working in the federal government.

Still, these resignations may not be to the Trump administration’s benefit. Very few individuals have the type of specialized knowledge that comes with decades in government service. “These are the people that you want to do everything possible to hold on to,” Stier, of the Partnership for Public Service, said. Consider Lawrence Tabak, the outgoing principal deputy director at the National Institutes of Health. He served in that role for more than a decade, punctuated only by a short stint running the entire agency. That experience could have been channeled into delivering Kennedy’s promised reforms to the agency, like revisiting the government’s standards on conflicts of interests in research. Jones, though new to the FDA, had previously spent nearly two decades at the EPA regulating the safety of pesticides and other chemicals, which made him one of the few people prepared to deliver on Kennedy’s promise to ramp up the regulation of food chemicals. Indeed, Jones’s resignation from the FDA has shaken the agency’s staff. One employee who works at the food center described the mood to me as “pissed and scared and coping and numb and confused and demoralized.” (I agreed not to name the employee, because they’re not allowed to speak to the press.)

The federal health agencies have real problems: They’re often slow, bureaucratic, and cloistered, as Trump and Kennedy have been quick to point out. That some of the nation’s top health officials have decided to head for the exit may only make matters worse.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

At the close of his RNC speech accepting his party’s nomination for vice president in July, then-Senator J. D. Vance lingered on the specific patch of earth where he hoped he would one day be buried.

“Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law-school debt and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in eastern Kentucky,” he said, recounting how he had proposed to his wife, Usha. If they were to eventually be interred there, he explained, they would mark the sixth generation of his family buried in the region he called his “ancestral home”: Appalachia.

Since the release of his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s ties to Appalachia have been a perennial topic of discussion. His connection to the region, some assumed, conferred credibility to speak on behalf of Americans who felt they had been left behind, in Appalachia and elsewhere; many saw in his book’s depiction of poverty and addiction an explanation for why the “white working class” had fled the Democratic Party and backed Donald Trump in such great numbers. Others pointed out that Vance had in fact grown up in Middletown, Ohio, about 200 miles away from his family’s “ancestral home” and burial plot; they bristled at his bootstrap politics and claimed that Hillbilly Elegy didn’t reflect the Appalachia they knew.

In advance of the 2024 election, the debate over Vance’s identity returned with heightened stakes. Donald Trump had picked Vance as his running mate at least in part because his “hillbilly” credentials could appeal to the voters his book purported to represent. Then, of course, there was the factual matter: Appalachia, many assumed, was a region like New England or the Pacific Northwest; you were either from there, or you weren’t. The day after Vance’s nomination-acceptance speech, the New York Times standards desk weighed in, issuing guidance to its staff that clarified that he was not “from Appalachia.” The memo, obtained by the reporter Justin Baragona, concludes by cautioning journalists against “anything that suggests he grew up there or is a son of Appalachia.”

But ever since it was first defined as a region in the late 19th century, Appalachia has always existed as much in myth as in literal geography. A simple adjudication of Vance’s ties overlooks a complicated history of what “being Appalachian” really means in America.

The term Appalachian America is believed to have been coined by William Goodell Frost, an Ohio educator who served as president of Kentucky’s Berea College from 1892 to 1920. Berea had been founded by an abolitionist and was intended to function as a racially integrated, coeducational liberal-arts college, the first in the South. But after a 1904 Kentucky law required that schools in the state be segregated, Frost pivoted the college’s mission toward educating the population he had called, in an 1899 Atlantic essay, “our contemporary ancestors”—the white inhabitants of Kentucky’s mountainous east. In his article, Frost recounts traveling through the area and being shocked by how its inhabitants lived. With their rudimentary homes and blood feuds, the mountain folk were, in his words, “an anachronism.” “Appalachian America may be useful as furnishing a fixed point which enables us to measure the progress of the moving world!” he wrote. He had invented a region, one principally defined not by its place on a map but by its position in history: the past.

Over the next decades, Frost’s conception gelled in the American mind. Appalachia came to represent an area spread loosely across the mountain range of the same name—portions of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee—but distinguished (at least in the eyes of outsiders) by its backwardness. In one 1929 Atlantic story, the writer Charles Morrow Wilson suggested that the region remained trapped in Elizabethan England, with a dialect and social mores that were centuries out of date. And in the 1960s, the Kentucky lawyer Harry M. Caudill turbocharged Frost’s ideas with a series of Atlantic articles and best-selling books that helped make the region synonymous with poverty.

Caudill, not unlike Vance, became an overnight celebrity. The success of his books, his son James told me, drew visitors from all across the country and even abroad; they were eager to see the desperation he described up close, and an obliging Caudill led “poverty tours” through the valleys around Whitesburg, where he lived. Caudill’s writing fleshed out stereotypes for the people Frost had diagnosed as backward: They were poor but scrappy, suspicious of outsiders but fiercely loyal to their families, unsophisticated but endowed with a certain sort of folk wisdom.

Driven in part by Caudill’s writing, Congress finally affixed Appalachia to a map in 1965, creating the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and tasking it with dispersing federal funds across a list of counties deemed sufficiently Appalachian. With money up for grabs, states wanted in. Included in the commission’s charter are decidedly mountainless counties in northern Mississippi; an advocate for the state had even submitted a doctored map as evidence, drawing in mountains with a fine-point pen. The ARC’s list of counties, which stretches from Mississippi into upstate New York, constitutes America’s “official” definition of Appalachia today.

It’s true that Vance’s hometown isn’t included in the ARC’s charter, which the Times memo references to justify classifying Vance as not “from” the region. But the charter’s list is so expansive as to be meaningless. In a 1981 survey of college students in and around the ARC’s definition of Appalachia, fewer than 20 percent identified New York and Mississippi as part of the region.

Perhaps whether or not Americans consider someone to be “from” Appalachia has less to do with where that person grew up on a map than with their embodiment or rejection of the myths we associate with the region—and, at least in some cases, with how those myths can serve our political priorities. One popular T-shirt in support of the Trump-Vance ticket read “It’s Gonna Take a Felon and a Hillbilly to Fix This,” as if the experience of Appalachian hardship afforded Vance a unique ability to tame inflation. But to strip from Vance his Appalachianness is to make a political argument, too—that his perspective is closer to that of the Silicon Valley billionaires with whom he associates than an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia.

At the RNC, Vance invoked his Appalachian burial ground to challenge the notion that America was built on an idea; instead, he argued, you were an American if your ancestors had been buried in America, and if, over generations, they had fought and died for America. “That’s not just an idea, my friends; that’s not just a set of principles,” he said. “That is a homeland—that is our homeland.” He used his ties to the land to make a political argument of his own, to advance a nationalism rooted in the soil of a cemetery plot and the bones of the people buried there. His rejection of America as a nation of ideas was itself based on an idea—that of Appalachia.

Donald Trump has relentlessly insisted that the United States—or even he personally—should “take over” Gaza, remove its population of more than 2 million Palestinians, and turn the region into a “Riviera” on the Mediterranean for the “world’s people.” Just this week he posted an AI-generated video showing him and Elon Musk partying in “Trump Gaza,” a paradise dominated by a golden statue of the president.

As a practical and political matter, the idea is a nonstarter. But simply by proposing it, Trump may have paved the way for two more attainable goals that could reshape the Middle East—and lead to chaos for Palestinians, particularly those in the West Bank.

The first seems to be a nuclear agreement with Iran. Trump has been fairly open about his desire for a deal. After he announced new sanctions against the country early this month, Trump held a press conference in which he addressed Iran directly: “I would love to be able to make a great deal, a deal where you can get on with your lives and you’ll do wonderfully.” Trump must recognize, though, that the Israeli right—and its conservative allies in America—would be furious about such an agreement and demand some form of compensation.

[Yair Rosenberg: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]

Which leads to his second goal. In the same press conference, Trump hinted that he might allay Israel’s concerns by offering to expand its formal control in the West Bank. When asked whether he supported Israel’s “sovereignty” in the region, he said that his administration would “be making an announcement probably on that very specific topic over the next four weeks.” Palestinians are still holding their breath.

Annexing additional portions of the West Bank sounds tame compared with Gaz-a-Lago. And that could be precisely the point. By repeating his plan to clear out Gaza, Trump has shifted the Overton window in the Middle East and reinforced the idea that Palestinians’ claims are somehow void. The move follows a standard Trump tactic: say the same shocking thing over and over until it isn’t shocking anymore. Gaz-a-Lago sounds like madness, but apply a Trumpian lens, and a certain method appears—one that just might get him a nuclear deal with Iran.

There are several reasons to think he can make such an agreement, and probably one with favorable terms for the U.S. First, Iran’s bargaining position is exceptionally weak. Israel has dealt extensive damage to Tehran’s regional proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iraqi and Syrian militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas. Worse still for Iran was the downfall of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in December, the regime’s most powerful ally in the region. As a result, Iran is unable to project power in the Middle East or adequately defend itself from potential attacks from Israel or elsewhere. A deal would grant the regime not only an added measure of protection but also relief from sanctions, which would allow the country to begin to rebuild its economy and rethink its national-security strategy.

Iran’s little remaining leverage mostly comes from the progress it has made toward nuclear weaponization since 2018, when Trump withdrew from the deal that President Barack Obama had negotiated. That’s why another agreement is one of the few options Iran has to reclaim some power. One could imagine the country instead racing for a nuclear weapon. But the regime must know that Washington has a plan to destroy its nuclear capabilities within a matter of days through round-the-clock bombing.

Still, in response to Trump’s announcement this month that he was increasing sanctions, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seemed to dismiss the notion of a deal. But Tehran has otherwise been signaling for at least the past 18 months that it’s open to renewing talks with Washington.

As for Trump, a deal is the simplest way to keep Iran from sprinting toward a bomb and drawing the U.S. into conflict, which is the last thing he wants. It might also represent the best opportunity for him to establish himself as an international dealmaker. He would surely claim that his unique genius produced a deal that Obama couldn’t get (even though almost everything that will have made it possible happened under Joe Biden). He will probably demand a Nobel Peace Prize, and he might even get one.

The outline of such a deal is easy to imagine. Iran will likely have to halt further uranium enrichment, relinquish its current stock to be held in escrow outside the country, and place its nuclear facilities under the control—or at least observation—of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Perhaps it will have to destroy some centrifuges, too.

[Read: How Israel could be changing Iran’s nuclear calculus]

By most estimates, Iran is about a year away from developing a usable warhead; any agreement would substantially extend that interval. Obama got Iran to agree to pause any nuclear advances for 15 years. Given the regime’s weakened stance today, Trump might well get 20 or more. Trump could also insist that Iran verifiably limit the arms and funding it grants to regional proxies. Israel has effectively proved that these groups can’t defend Iran anyway, so the regime may be more willing to curtail its support.

The main obstacle to a deal might be Iran’s missile arsenal, which the country could refuse to decommission. But unilateral missile disarmament is virtually unheard-of in international relations. This shouldn’t deter the United States. Israel’s air strikes in October significantly degraded Iran’s arsenal as well as its ground-to-air defenses and its ability to produce fuel for sophisticated rockets. Iranian missiles don’t pose nearly the threat they once did.

Billboards outside an Israeli settlement in the West Bank (Lucien Lung / Riva Press / Redux)

If a deal gets done, that leaves the resulting anger of the Israeli right and its allies in America. The administration already has a blueprint for how it might assuage them: the “Peace to Prosperity” framework that Jared Kushner championed during Trump’s first term. Much of the proposal is impractical, even farcical, but it contains a plan for Israel to annex an additional 30 percent or more of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley. This would leave the remaining Palestinian territory surrounded by a new and U.S.-approved expanded Israel.

Right-wing Israelis regard the entire West Bank as their exclusive patrimony, so they might not be thrilled to get only 30 percent more of it. But the plan would significantly extend their area of sovereign control. In all likelihood, it would be sufficient to appease them after a nuclear deal is signed.

Palestinians will protest; they want a state, not a shrunken territory circumscribed and dominated by an enlarged Israel that may soon want to pursue total control from the river to the sea, as its governing coalition envisions. But Israel and the U.S. will likely be able to impose the scheme by force. Israel has already effectively controlled the territory since 1967; little stands in the way of the country claiming it outright.

“Peace to Prosperity” was widely ridiculed when it was released in 2020. Now, next to Trump’s Gaza plan, it will look to some on the right like a model of rationality and restraint. That could be enough to make it happen.

Gaz-a-Lago is a fantasy. But by reciting the proposal again and again, Trump might be setting in motion very real—and extremely ominous—consequences for the West Bank and the entire region.

If you have tips about the Trump administration’s efforts to remake American science, you can contact Katherine on Signal at @katherinejwu.12.

For decades, the National Institutes of Health has had one core function: support health research in the United States. But for the past month, the agency has been doing very little of that, despite multiple separate orders from multiple federal judges blocking the Trump administration’s freeze on federal funding. For weeks on end, as other parts of the government have restarted funding, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, have pressed staff at the agency to ignore court orders, according to nearly a dozen former and current NIH officials I spoke with. Even advice from NIH lawyers to resume business as usual was dismissed by the agency’s acting director, those officials said. When NIH officials have fought back, they have been told to heed the administration’s wishes—or, in some cases, have simply been pushed out.

The lights at the NIH are on; staff are at their desks. But since late January, the agency has issued only a fraction of its usual awards—many in haphazard spurts, as officials rushed grants through the pipeline in whatever limited windows they could manage. As of this week, some of the agency’s 27 institutes and centers are still issuing no new grants at all, one NIH official told me. Grant-management officers, who sign their name to awards, are too afraid, the official said, that violating the president’s wishes will mean losing their livelihood. (Most of the officials I spoke with requested anonymity, out of fear for their job at the agency, or—for those who have left—further professional consequences.)

[Read: The erasing of American science]

NIH lawyers have told officials at the agency that to comply with court orders, they must restart grant awards and payments. But HHS officials have handed down messages too, several current and former NIH officials told me: Hold off. Maintain the pause on grants. And the NIH’s acting director, Matthew Memoli, who until January was a relatively low-ranking flu researcher at the agency, has instructed leadership to stick to what HHS says. Memoli, HHS, and the NIH did not respond to requests for comment.

NIH officials are used to following cues from their director and from HHS. But they were also used to their own sense of the NIH’s mission—to advance the health of the American people—being aligned with their leaders’. For weeks now, though, they have been operating under an administration ready to dismantle their agency’s normal operations, and to flout court orders to achieve its own ends.

As the freeze wore on, one former NIH official told me, some people at the agency recalled a mantra that Lawrence Tabak, the NIH’s longtime principal deputy director, often repeated to colleagues: As civil servants, your role is not to call the policies, but to implement them. That is your duty, as long as you’re not doing something illegal or immoral. The NIH’s expert staff might have their own ideas about how to allocate the agency’s funds, but if political leaders chose to pour money into a pet project, that was the leaders’ right. This time, though, many at the NIH have started wondering if, in implementing the policies they were told to, they were crossing Tabak’s line. Over and over, the former NIH official told me, “We were asking ourselves: Are we there yet?”

Without the ability to issue research grants, the NIH effectively had its gas line cut. The agency employs thousands of in-house scientists, but a good 80 to 85 percent of its $47 billion budget funds outside research. Each year, researchers across the country submit grant proposals that panels of experts scrutinize over the course of months, until they agree on which are most promising and scientifically sound. The NIH funds more than 60,000 of those proposals annually, supporting more than 300,000 scientists at more than 2,500 institutions, spread across every state. This system backed the creation of mRNA-based COVID vaccines and the gene-editing technology CRISPR; it supported 99 percent of the drugs approved in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019. The agency has had a hand in “nearly all of our major medical breakthroughs over the past several decades,” Taison Bell, a critical-care specialist at UVA Health, told me.

That system ground to a halt by late January, after the Trump administration paused communications across HHS on January 21, and a memo released from the Office of Management and Budget just days later froze funding from federal agencies. The NIH stopped issuing new awards and began withholding funds from grants that had already been awarded—money that researchers had budgeted to pay staff, run experiments, and monitor study participants, including, in some cases, critically ill patients enrolled in drug trials.

Several of the agency’s top officials immediately sought advice from Tabak, who served as interim director from December 2021 to November 2023, and had long been a liaison between the agency and HHS. But Tabak openly admitted, several officials told me, that his power in this moment was limited. Although he had been the obvious choice to act as the NIH’s interim leader after Monica Bertagnolli, the most recent director, stepped down, the Trump administration hadn’t tapped him for the position. In fact, several officials said, the administration had ceased communicating with Tabak altogether. (Tabak declined to comment for this story.)

The role of acting director had instead gone to Memoli, who had no experience overseeing awards of external grants or running a large agency. But, officials said, Memoli had expressed beliefs that seemed to align with the administration’s. In 2021, he had called COVID vaccine mandates “extraordinarily problematic” in an email to Anthony Fauci (then director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and reportedly refused the shot himself; last spring, Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH, praised Memoli on social media as “a brave man who stood up when it was hard.” And last year, Memoli had been deemed noncompliant with an internal review, two officials said, after he submitted a DEI statement calling the term “offensive and demeaning.”

[Read: A new kind of crisis for American universities]

From the moment of his appointment, Memoli became, as far as other NIH staff could tell, “the only person the department or the White House was speaking directly to” on a regular basis, one former official said. And the message he passed along to the rest of the agency was clear: All NIH grants were to remain on pause.

That position was at odds with a growing number of court orders that directed the federal government to resume distributing federal funds. Some of those orders included painstaking, insistent language usually reserved for defendants who seem unlikely to comply, Samuel Bagenstos, who until December served as general counsel to HHS, told me. In written correspondence with senior NIH leadership in early February, current HHS lawyers, too, interpreted the court’s instructions unambiguously: “All stop work orders or pauses should be lifted so contract or grant work can continue” and contractors and grantees could be paid. In other words, put everything back the way it was.

Government lawyers aren’t the final arbiters on what’s legal. But the National Science Foundation, for instance, unfroze its funding on February 2. And the independent lawyers I spoke with agreed with what HHS counsel advised. The continuation of the NIH freeze “is unambiguously unlawful,” David Super, an administrative law expert at Yale University and Georgetown University, told me. The money that Congress appropriates to federal agencies each year is intended to be spent. “If they’re holding it back for policy reasons,” Super said, “they’re violating the law.”

At a meeting on February 6, several of the agency’s institute and center directors demanded that Memoli explain the NIH’s continued freeze. David Lankford, the NIH’s top lawyer, said that the position of the general counsel’s office aligned with that of the courts: Grants should be “awarded as intended.”

But Memoli called for patience, officials with knowledge of the meeting told me. He was waiting for one thing in particular to restart grant funding: He had tasked Michael Lauer, the deputy director of the NIH’s Office of Extramural Research, which oversees grants, to draft a formal plan to make the agency’s funding practices consistent with Trump’s executive orders on gender, DEI, foreign aid, and environmental justice. (Lauer declined to comment for this story.)

Squaring those orders with the NIH’s mission, though, wasn’t straightforward. One sticking point, officials said, was funding for research into health disparities: If the administration’s definition of DEI included studies that acknowledged that many diseases disproportionately affect Americans from underrepresented backgrounds, complying with Trump’s orders could mean ignoring important health trends—and broad cuts in funding across many sectors of research. Cancer, for instance, disproportionately affects and kills Black Americans; men who have sex with men are the population most affected by HIV. “To pretend that entire communities don’t exist—in health, that doesn’t make sense,” Bertagnolli, the former NIH director, told me.

In several discussions that followed, officials with knowledge of those conversations said, Memoli assured NIH officials that health-disparity research could continue, as long as the inclusion of diverse populations in studies was “scientifically justifiable.” But given the administration’s disregard of scientific norms up until this point, “nobody was particularly satisfied by that explanation,” one former official told me.

Still, on February 7, Memoli yielded a bit of ground: He green-lighted the NIH to start issuing a small subset of grants for clinical trials. That allowance fell far short of Lankford and other lawyers’ recommendation to resume grant funding in full—but some officials wondered if the ice had begun to thaw.

That afternoon, Memoli acknowledged to other NIH officials that he understood what the agency’s lawyers were telling him, an official with knowledge of the meeting told me. But then, he offered an alternative justification for holding back the agency’s funds. What if, he said, the halt was continuing, not because the agency was adhering to the president’s executive orders, but because it was pursuing a new agenda—a new way of thinking about how it wanted to fund research? Such shifts take time; surely, the agency couldn’t continue its work until it had reoriented itself.

The lawyers were unmoved. At best, they said, that argument came off as a thinly veiled attempt to disregard court orders. Memoli contemplated this. He had no choice, he insisted: He was following the directions of three HHS officials—Dorothy Fink, then the acting secretary; Heather Flick Melanson, chief of staff; and Hannah Anderson, deputy chief of staff of policy—who had told him, in no uncertain terms, that the pause was to continue, save for the few award subtypes he’d already okayed. In other words, the Trump administration’s political leadership at HHS wanted funding to stay frozen, and that overruled any legal concerns.

And, as officials learned later that day, HHS officials had been planning new ways to limit NIH funding. That afternoon, they foisted a new policy on the NIH that would abruptly cap the amount of funding that could be allocated to cover researchers’ and universities’ overhead. The first Trump administration had tried to cut those “indirect cost” rates in 2017; in response, Congress had made clear that altering them requires legislative approval. And so within days, yet another temporary restraining order had blocked the cap.

[Read: The NIH memo that undercut universities came directly from Trump officials]

By this point, NIH lawyers were grim in their prognosis. If the agency moved forward with slashing indirect cost rates, they explained, individual staff members could be prosecuted for failing to comply with a congressional directive. On February 10, Sean R. Keveney, HHS’s acting general counsel, sent a memo to Flick Melanson that included a directive in bold, italicized font: All payments that are due under existing grants and contracts should be un-paused immediately.

Two days later, Lauer, the extramural-research director, issued a memo authorizing his colleagues to resume issuing awards—what should have been the agency’s final all-clear to return to normalcy.

Even then, the staff remained divided on how to proceed. Some institutes immediately began sending out awards: Lauer’s email spurred one institute, a current official told me, to process 100 grants in a single afternoon. Others, though, still held back. “They’re scared out of their minds,” the official told me. Some worry that, despite what Memoli has said, they’ll be held accountable for somehow violating the president’s wishes, and be terminated.

So far, at least 1,200 federal workers—many of them on probationary status—have been fired from the NIH; a new OMB memo released yesterday indicates that more layoffs are ahead. On February 11, HHS also attempted to unceremoniously reassign Tabak, the deputy director, to an essentially meaningless senior advisory position to the acting HHS secretary, with an office in another city, far from the laboratory he ran at the agency—a demotion that several NIH officials described to me as an insult. Tabak chose instead to retire that same day, abruptly ending his 25-year stint at the agency; Lauer, who had worked closely with Tabak for years, announced his own resignation that same week.

Their departures left many at the agency shocked and unmoored, several former and current officials told me: If Tabak and Lauer were out, was anyone’s position safe? And because Lauer left immediately after clearing his colleagues to issue grants, who would ensure that the agency’s core business would continue? “We’re all still terrified for our jobs,” one current official told me. Agency hallways, where colleagues once chatted and laughed, have sunk under an uncomfortable silence: “No one knows who they can trust.”

The administration has also kept up its attempts to block NIH grants. Even after Lauer’s memo went out, HHS continued to bar agency officials from posting to the Federal Register, the government journal that publishes, among other things, the public notices required by law for meetings in which experts review NIH grant applications and issue funds, one official told me. The NIH might have been allowed to award grants, but logistically, it was still unable to. Finally, on Monday, Memoli announced in a leadership meeting that the agency could resume submitting to the Federal Register. But there were limits: Although officials could post notice of some meetings to review grant proposals, meetings to finalize funding recommendations were still off the table—meaning the NIH would still be in a grant backlog. “We can’t go crazy and put all our meetings on,” Memoli told his colleagues. But if agency personnel responded to this new allowance reasonably, he said, they’d be granted more liberty.

[Read: Grad school is in trouble ]

To Super, the administrative lawyer, curtailing posting to the Federal Register constituted yet another strategy intended to circumvent court orders. “These aren’t legitimate workarounds,” he said. “This is contempt of court.” The NIH’s developing plan to align the agency’s strategies with the president’s executive orders—which, officials told me, is still awaiting formal HHS approval—may end up being a legal battleground too: On Friday, a federal judge declared Trump’s executive order attacking DEI programming a potential violation of the First Amendment.

The longer the pause on NIH funding has dragged on, the more the American research community has descended into disarray. Universities have considered pausing graduate-student admissions; leaders of laboratories have mulled firing staff. Diane Simeone, who directs UC San Diego’s cancer center, told me that, should the pause continue for just a few more weeks, dozens of clinical trials for cancer patients—sometimes “a patient’s best chance for cure, and long-term survival,” she told me—could be at risk of shutting down.

Even if courts ultimately nullify every action that the Trump administration has taken, the NIH—at least in its current form—may remain in jeopardy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the leader of HHS, has said that he wants to shift the agency’s focus away from infectious disease and downsize the staff. Some Republicans have been pressing for years to slash the number of institutes and centers at the agency, which depends on Congress for its budget, or to disburse its funding to the states as block grants—a change, Bertagnolli told me, that could mean biomedical research in America “as we know it would end.”

At a meeting with NIH leadership on February 13, Memoli explained to officials that “we are going to have to accept priorities are changing.” He didn’t say what those changing priorities might be, but previewed an era of “radical transparency,” language that would headline an executive order from Trump just days later. In this moment, federal judges were “hampering us” from moving forward, into the agency’s future, Memoli said. But the path before them remained the same: The NIH would do as the nation’s leaders wished.

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This week President Emmanuel Macron of France visited Washington and called Donald Trump “Dear Donald” four times. A photo of their meeting shows them smiling and clasping hands. We, of course, don’t know Macron’s true degree of affection for Dear Donald. But we do know that European leaders have noticed that the rules of diplomacy have changed and they are quickly adjusting.

First, European leaders sat through a speech from Vice President J. D. Vance at a security conference in Munich in which he criticized them and made clear that they could not rely on the United States in the same way they had before. Then Trump repeated Russian talking points, claiming that Ukraine started the ongoing war. And now there are reports that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is flying to Washington to discuss a deal with Trump in which Zelensky would give up national resources in exchange for security protections from the United States, an offer that staff writer Anne Applebaum describes this way:

You know, it’s as if you went to your neighbor with whom you’d had cordial relations with a long time, who’d helped you fix your car and with whom you had good relations and said, Actually, in exchange for all that, you know, in exchange for the salt I lent you and the cookies I baked you, I’m demanding half of your wealth right now.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Applebaum about what she calls the “end of the post–World War II order.” We also talk with staff writer Shane Harris, who covers national security, about how intelligence agencies are responding to this new posture from the Trump administration, and what this means for a group of allies that have long routinely shared intel with the U.S.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: When Donald Trump was running for his second term as president, last year, he gave plenty of hints that he didn’t care all that much about staying chummy with our European allies. For example, he once said if NATO countries didn’t pay their fair share, he would encourage Russia to, quote, “do whatever the hell they want.”

So maybe no one should be surprised a year later that he and members of his administration are spending their first few weeks in office offending their allies and shaking up the world order. But it is kind of surprising—at least, the speed of it and the dismissive tone: For example, Vice President J. D. Vance telling the EU leadership, some of whom he referred to as “commissars,” that their countries were suppressing free speech, or Donald Trump repeating Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine.

Donald Trump: You should’ve never started it. You could’ve made a deal. I could’ve made a deal for Ukraine.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Today, we talk about what this shift in the world order might mean. In the second half of the show, we’ll be talking to staff writer Shane Harris, who covers national security, about how intelligence agencies are reacting to the changes.

But first, we talk to Anne Applebaum, author of the book Autocracy Inc. and host of the podcast Autocracy in America. Anne started her career tracking autocracy around the globe, and, with the rise of Trump, she started noticing it creeping up in her own country.

Anne Applebaum: I went around Germany, like, five years ago and did Cassandra-like lamentations, and nobody believed me, you know. And now, like, every German newspaper wants me to say, How do you feel about being right? And I’m like, I feel like shit, you know. What do you mean, How do I feel about being right? I feel terrible. I don’t want to be right.

[Music]

Rosin: Anne, this new administration’s shift in tone has been so sudden and so stark that I want to understand it better and figure out what its implications might be.

Applebaum: So No. 1: The language and body language that have been coming out—not just from the White House but from the defense secretary, from many people affiliated with Trump over the last few days, last couple of weeks—has been strikingly negative. The vice president went to a security conference in Munich, where generals and secretaries of defense and security analysts were gathered to hear the administration’s view of what it felt about the Russian military threats to Europe, and to the United States and to the rest of the world. And instead, he made a supercilious speech mocking them. That was No. 1.

No 2: Donald Trump announced a restart of conversation with Russia that wasn’t an attempt to find a solution to the war that would keep Ukraine safe and sovereign. It seemed to be an attempt to create a U.S.-Russian relationship of a new kind that seemed very sinister. And then, finally, I think it was the real turning point—and this, for many people, was a stunner, I think—was a UN vote. Ukraine and its allies around the world proposed a motion condemning Russian aggression.

The U.S. not only did not back the motion; the U.S. voted against it, together with Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, the Central African Republic, and a handful of other Russian allies around the world. And that package of things, put together, is an indication that the U.S. appears to be switching sides.

Rosin: Yeah. I guess that’s the way to put it: “The U.S. appears to be switching sides.” I mean, I’m trying to think of the right way to characterize this. You immediately said the end of the post–World War II order—you declared that right after these things happened. You feel strongly—you feel definitively about that?

Applebaum: I feel definitive about it. That doesn’t mean other things aren’t going to happen. It doesn’t mean it’s not reversible. It doesn’t mean that Trump won’t get pulled in other directions. The Russians are famous for lying about what their plans are and for promising things they don’t deliver. He may find himself disappointed with the relationship he’s trying to build with Putin.

I’m not saying that there’s a straight line from here in a predictable direction. But I think I can safely say that no American administration—Democrat or Republican, since the 1940s—has talked the way the Trump administration talks. In other words, not just doubting its allies or criticizing its allies—I mean, that’s happened lots of times—but actually criticizing the fundamental premise of the alliance.

The impression Europeans have now is that that’s not true anymore. And because they were still pretty sure it was true three weeks ago, this is a very sudden and rapid change.

Rosin: Right. And this is not a good thing. I hear the alarm in your voice. Why is the post–World War II order important?

Applebaum: The post–World War II order—and, I mean, even calling it an order is too highfalutin. I mean, it’s really just a set of alliances that the U.S. built in Europe, and I should keep saying in Asia, as well, and Japan, South Korea, Australia are also part of the same world. It was a world the U.S. built in which a group of the world’s wealthiest countries agreed to work together to share their security, to develop similar and compatible economies.

The U.S., together with the Europeans and their Asian allies, created these real zones of prosperity and peace. And the U.S. was a beneficiary of that same prosperity. The U.S. was the major investor in these countries. The U.S. was allowed to lead in all kinds of ways. U.S. ideas about trade or about economics were genuflected to. I mean, although maybe that sounds too subservient. But, I mean, the people wanted U.S. leadership, the U.S. benefited from leadership, and the U. S. had those allies when it wanted to do other things.

When the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, American allies also went. When the U.S. wanted to fight terrorism in the Middle East or around the world, U.S. allies cooperated. They cooperated with intelligence. They sometimes cooperated militarily. They sent soldiers when they were asked to send them. So the U.S. had an unusual kind of power in the world.

So other countries, of course, have military power and economic influence, but the U.S. had a form of economic and military influence that persuaded other countries to join it. This has been true over many years, in many different ways. It means that when European countries are considering big investments, big power plants, they will sometimes choose U.S. companies over their own or over those of their neighbors because they want to maintain those good relations with America.

Rosin: I mean, I guess what’s rattling about this moment is: There isn’t a precipitating event. There isn’t a ratcheting up of hostilities, the way there has been, historically. It’s just Trump. It’s just, you know—he changed his mind, so there’s really no warning. However, he did signal during his campaign, you know, Russia should be able to do whatever the hell it wanted. Is what’s rattling, especially about this moment, the speed? Like, it all unraveled in a few weeks?

Applebaum: So I would go farther. I mean, Trump has been talking about his disdain for allies and alliances since the 1980s. In 1987, notoriously, he took out these huge newspaper ads, after a trip to Moscow, I should say, saying that alliances were a waste of money, and we shouldn’t, you know—at that time, Japan, people were particularly worried about. During his first term, he repeatedly looked uncomfortable with allies, attacked them, disparaged them, famously wanted to leave NATO. He told John Bolton that he wanted to leave NATO, on the way to a NATO summit. And he was talked down by Bolton and by Jim Mattis and by others. So in that sense, it’s nothing new.

Nevertheless, since the election, Trump mostly was talking in a normal way to allies. He had phone conversations with European leaders and Asian leaders. Just a few weeks ago, he was saying, Putin’s a loser. We need to put pressure on him, you know, to end the war. And then, suddenly, as you say, it was the speed—about 10 days ago, about two weeks ago, maybe. Suddenly, the tone shifted and switched.

Rosin: The whole thing brings up the forever question about Trump: Is he chaotic or intentional? Which I think is important here because intentional would imply that he is actively remaking the world order. Like, actively aligning the U.S. with Russia. Do you sense that’s the case?

Applebaum: I think it’s a possibility, yeah.

Rosin: You do?

Applebaum: I do.

Rosin: And why? What are the best guesses about why? To what end?

Applebaum: The best guesses include: He’s been convinced of wealth and riches to be had for the United States or, perhaps, for people in his entourage by a better relationship with Russia. He’s been convinced that putting pressure on Ukraine, rather than on Russia, will end the war quickly. He’s bored of the war; he doesn’t really know how to end it, and he’s looking for a shortcut. Those are the guesses that we have. I mean, whether there’s been a specific conversation or a specific offer, I don’t know.

I should have included this in my list: I mean, the fact that he has been repeating Russian propaganda—so saying things that aren’t true but that are the kind of thing that you hear from the Russian media and from the pro-Russian media in the United States—means that he’s hearing that from somebody. And so the best guess is that he’s been speaking to someone who has changed his mind or has convinced him that Russia is a better and more predictable ally than France or Britain or Germany or Japan.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, that’s the moment where I sat up and took notice, is the way he was talking about Ukraine, repeating such obvious lies about the origins of that war, and then, also, that document that the treasury secretary offered Ukraine. Can you describe that document? That one, for me, was a shocker.

Applebaum: Okay, so this is a document of a kind that I can’t think of a precedent for. It was given to President Zelensky of Ukraine, first by the treasury secretary, who went to Kyiv to do this. And, essentially, the document says Ukraine is supposed to sign away 50 percent of its natural resources, both rare earth minerals and other minerals and other resources and income from ports and infrastructure, to the United States indefinitely.

So the Ukrainians are meant to hand over half of their national wealth for the foreseeable future to Americans, and in an unclear way. It’s not clear to whom they would give this wealth and how the wealth would be extracted and how it would be measured and who would decide what 50 percent was—none of that is clear at all. And they would do that out of some kind of gratitude to Americans, or some kind of fealty to Donald Trump, perhaps. And they would not receive any clear security guarantees or anything else in exchange.

Rosin: And what’s unprecedented about that? That it’s unfolding like a real-estate negotiation? Or what is, you know, unusual about it?

Applebaum: An open-ended demand from a sovereign country that it hand over its wealth to another country—I mean, this is a kind of 18th-century, colonial way of dealing with a country. And this is, of course, a country that’s been an ally to the United States, that’s worked closely with U.S. intelligence, that’s been a part of an American security structure. You know, it’s as if you went to your neighbor, with whom you’d had cordial relations a long time, who’d helped you fix your car, and with whom you had good relations and said, Actually, in exchange for all that—you know, in exchange for the salt I lent you and the cookies I baked you—I’m demanding half of your wealth right now.

Rosin: By the way, a few hours after recording this, there were reports that the proposed deal was updated. The new version apparently now includes a vague mention of security guarantees for Ukraine. And Zelensky is supposedly flying to Washington later this week to meet with Trump about it. We don’t have many more details, but Anne’s neighbor analogy still holds.

Okay. Back to the conversation.

So the obvious thing to read into this betrayal of Ukraine is: There is no sanction for autocrats who want to invade other countries. Do you think that is the intended message?

Applebaum: I don’t know whether Trump understands that as the message and also, because I still don’t understand what the endgame is, how exactly he thinks the war will end. I don’t want to say something terrible has happened before it’s happened, right? But yes, if the war ends in such a way that Ukraine loses its sovereignty or is forced into some kind of humiliating situation or is unable to defend itself in the future against a rebuilt Russian army two years from now, then yes—the conclusion will be that might makes right.

Big countries are allowed to invade small ones and get away with it. And not only will the U.S. not help you if you’re a democracy being invaded by your dictatorial neighbor; the U.S. might side with the invader. That would be the lesson. And that, too, I mean—there are cascading consequences.

Rosin: Yeah. And, you know, during the Ukraine war, you’ve talked about the importance of us standing up for Ukraine, because there are consequences for Estonia. I mean, there are consequences for lots of countries.

Applebaum: There are consequences for Germany. There are consequences for Britain. You know, maybe there are even consequences for the United States. I mean, if we won’t, you know—what are we prepared to defend?

Rosin: Yeah. As things are realigning quickly, I mean, French President Emmanuel Macron seemed to indicate in his visit to Washington this week that, in fact, Europe should be less dependent on the U.S. and more in charge of its own defense. That’s what Trump says he wants. Could that be a neutral shift? Like, is that necessarily a terrible shift? How should we think of that kind of shift, where Europe is more in charge of contributing to security for its own region?

Applebaum: I think it’s a fine shift and one that I’ve been arguing for, for a long time. But it’s not a shift that you can do in two weeks, and so there is a very dangerous moment coming.

Rosin: What do you mean?

Applebaum: Well, when, you know—if the U.S. is serious about withdrawing from Europe, or if that’s the way that Trump wants to go, then there will be a moment when Europe is not yet prepared for that scenario.

Rosin: I see. So it just can’t happen this quickly. Like, the same as DOGE—it’s just sort of “come and burn everything down,” but it’s not, like, an intelligent or useful way—

Applebaum: No, it’s not an intelligent solution.

Rosin: Yeah.

Applebaum: As I said, I don’t know whether Trump or people around him have thought this through. I mean, the U.S. gains a lot of advantages by being the leading security power in Europe. And will European countries still want to buy U.S. weapons? Will they want to buy U.S. security products? There would be consequences for the U.S. too. I mean, it’s not like the U.S. just withdraws, and Europe takes over, and everything’s fine. No. There would be, as I said, this kind of cascading series of economic and political consequences that might turn out to be quite dramatic.

Rosin: Yeah. Last thing: I know you were in Munich with defense and security officials, people who help with Ukrainian defense. I’m curious what the mood is of people who have to think on the ground about strategy and defense, and how quickly they’ve been able to adjust.

Applebaum: People are adjusting very fast. The new chancellor of Germany, who was elected on Sunday—Friedrich Merz—one of the first things that he said: We have to prepare for a new world in which we are independent of the United States. And I can’t tell you how dramatic that is. He’s been pro-America. He’s been an advocate for close relations between Germany and America, and Europe and America. And to have him say that means that people are thinking fast.

So it will take a long time, of course, for military production cycles and strategic planning to change, but the beginning of the mental change has already started.

Rosin: Well, Anne, thank you so much for joining us and for naming everything that’s happening so clearly. It’s so helpful.

Applebaum: Thanks.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: spies. We talk to Atlantic staff writer Shane Harris about how these shifting alliances are affecting the intelligence community, and what that might mean for American security down the road.

[Break]

Rosin: So in the first half of the show, we talked about the shifting world order and the political issues it causes. And now I kind of want to talk to you about operational issues, like sharing of intelligence, spycraft, you know—the things that happen between nations that make the world run. So from your reporting, are you finding that any agencies, governments are wondering how much they can trust the U.S.?

Shane Harris: I think that has been a question that has been simmering for a lot of the country’s allies since even before the election, when they looked to the possibility that Donald Trump might come back to office. How much could they trust the United States to be a reliable partner in protecting secrets, protecting intelligence that they might share? I should say it wasn’t, like, a “five-alarm fire” kind of worry. But people are really starting to ask this because Donald Trump had a history of disclosing other countries’ information, disclosing the United States’ own secrets, in some cases, and notably was criminally charged for mishandling classified information.

So I think with his election, those anxieties rose, and now what we’re seeing is kind of compounding that is this even more, I might even say, kind of existential question of not just, Can we count on the United States to protect our information and be a good security partner at the kind of tactical level? but, Can we count on them to be a good partner strategically at all anymore?

And I think all of these questions are kind of colliding right now and really undermining what had been decades of confidence that European allies, in particular, had had in the United States, regardless of whether a Republican or a Democrat was sitting in the Oval Office.

Rosin: Right. Can you actually explain how intelligence sharing works? Like, who are our critical partners? Who provides intelligence? Who provides the most intelligence? Just so that we understand what could change.

Harris: Yes. So the most important intelligence-sharing arrangement that the United States has is something that is referred to as the “Five Eyes.” And that refers to five countries—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand—that have this long-standing kind of pact, where they share highly sensitive intelligence and information on a routine basis with one another that’s of interest to their mutual security.

And really, sort of the big, big, big players in this often are the United States and the United Kingdom. I’m just going to give you an example of how closely we share information with the U.K. When it comes to signals intelligence—which is like electronic eavesdropping, intercepting emails and other digital communication—the physical infrastructure, you know, literally the technology, the kit that these two countries rely on, is intertwined in some locations. It is that closely enmeshed.

On the level of human intelligence, so information that an agency gets from spies in the field or from assets that it has, the U.S. and the U.K. routinely share the fruits of that kind of intelligence with each other as well. And all the other partners do that on a pretty regular basis too.

And then the United States does share, maybe on a less exclusive, maybe a bit more restricted basis, but certainly shares with other NATO allies—you know, France, Germany. The United States, you know, for decades has depended extensively on German intelligence to tell us information about terrorist organizations and particular threats that are brewing in Europe that might be of interest or a threat to the United States.

So this is the kind of on-the-ground, if you like, level of sharing that goes on just routinely. And it happens, importantly, via channels and via career employees that are in place, regardless of who the heads of government, the heads of state are in the various member countries.

Rosin: By the way, the term Five Eyes. It’s so good. Like, it’s a little on the nose, but it’s so good. I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a movie, or no one’s written a novel called The Five Eyes, in which one of them betrays each other or something like that happens.

Harris: I’ve always loved it because, you know, it’s: They’re all watching. And importantly, I should say, and interesting to follow on that: In the Five Eyes, in that agreement, what’s important, too, is they do not spy on each other, right? That is something that’s also very special to the relationship in those five countries.

Rosin: I mean, I’m reading in the lines of what you’re saying. So we don’t know the degree of mistrust yet. It’s probably brewing, but it sounds like, from what you’re saying, it makes everybody less safe. Like, it makes us less safe, too, because these are how, you know, terrorist threats are detected, and these networks are very intertwined, so it feels a little precarious, dangerous.

Harris: I think that’s right. And you’re right to say that it makes everyone less safe, because if any country is holding back on information, arguably, that is potentially making everybody less informed and less aware, which could have real-world implications. And I should stress that no one has said to me, Well, we’re just going to stop sharing information with the United States, because we don’t trust you.

The real concern now is that (A) the United States might just start cutting off information flows to other countries. We did see, this week, the Financial Times had a very interesting report that Peter Navarro, who is sort of an aide to Donald Trump—who is known for saying some pretty outlandish things, I should say—was raising the idea that Canada should be kicked out of the Five Eyes arrangement. And presumably, this is some kind of coercive measure that would be used to try and get more-favorable trading terms from Canada. Now, Navarro came out and said there was nothing to this; it was a made-up story.

But we have heard rumors of this. I’ve heard chatter about it before, about whether or not Trump was considering doing that. The mere idea that the United States would be using Five Eyes membership and access to national-security intelligence to protect the country’s citizens as a coercive measure to try and get more favorable trading terms, you know, strikes people I’ve talked to as appalling, but totally in keeping with what they would expect Donald Trump to do, which tells you just how far we’ve deviated from the norm.

Rosin: So what else are people bringing up that makes them nervous? You mentioned, you know, Trump has leaked secrets before. Like, I think he famously tweeted a top-secret image of an Iranian rocket-launch site. I mean, he’s known for being a little lax with other people’s intelligence. So that’s one thing. Is that on people’s minds?

Harris: That’s definitely on people’s minds. You know, there was a famous incident in the first year of his first term where he seemed to disclose a top-secret source of information we were getting from Israeli intelligence during a meeting he had with two Russian officials, which didn’t go over great. So there is that kind of general concern about Trump himself and the people around him being very leaky and using intelligence in a way that is to their own benefit and interest. That’s been a worry.

You know, another, I think, less-appreciated concern has been: This intelligence-sharing relationship, while it is ostensibly a two-way street, really, it’s the other four Five Eyes that are depending on the United States for most of the information. I mean, the British security service, while very capable, is much smaller than the United States, and they really depend on the information they’re getting from the Americans, and it’s less about how much the Brits are giving to us.

And several people I’ve talked to in the Five Eyes community worry that as agencies—particularly, like, the FBI, which routinely shares information with the Five Eyes partners—as they’re going through this sort of chaotic period where they’re being taken over by political loyalists, like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, the new deputy director, and Trump has gone through and fired these sort of upper echelons of the career establishment, or is trying to, those are the people, the individuals with whom these different allied countries interact with on a regular basis.

And some of them have said to me, Look. You know, while you guys, basically, can’t get your stuff together, and you’re kind of in chaos, we worry that that’s going to have a downstream negative effect on us, because you’re so distracted by politics and internal witch hunts and, you know, personnel matters that maybe you’re taking the eye off the ball, and we’re not getting the usual high quality of intelligence that we depend on.

Rosin: Right. You know, some leaders in Europe have talked about—like, Emmanuel Macron hinted at this in his meeting with Trump—that actually, being less dependent on the U.S. for their security might be a good thing for Europe. I wonder if there’s a version of that for intelligence. Like, We don’t want to be as dependent on the U.S. There’s some advantage to switching up the way that we’ve been doing things.

Harris: I think that there is. And certainly, intelligence officials I speak to aren’t quite there yet in proposing it, but everyone is aware that the nature of the alliance is shifting—and perhaps not irrevocably, but at least for the foreseeable future.

You know, if you take some intelligence agencies in Europe right now—you know, take the British intelligence service and the security service right now, for instance. They have been very aggressive and far more kind of at the front line of the action in Ukraine than the United States has. They’ve developed certain capabilities and networks and sources of information that are very useful to them.

The European countries, the U.K. included, really do see the threat from Russia, I think, differently than Americans do. They see it as something that is very much kind of in their backyard. And because of that, I think that they have been devoting more resources to beefing up their own intelligence on Russia. And could that push them, you know, in a direction where maybe they say, Look—we’ve got to start being less dependent on the United States and beef up our own capabilities and share with each other? I think that’s quite possible.

What the United States has to offer is, you know, technical reach. I mean, we’re talking about electronic information. We’re talking about just a constellation of satellites that can capture imagery and all kinds of other information. So the United States still has that bulk and has those numbers, but that does not mean that these other countries can’t develop even more specific and tailored ways of collecting information that suit their own interests and make them less dependent on the United States. I think that could happen.

Rosin: Yeah. And that’s, I suppose, value neutral? Like, we don’t know if that’s good or a bad thing.

Harris: Well, look—count me on the side of people who believe that the alliances have been very much in the interest of the various members, and that this information sharing is just a culture that now pervades among these countries. There’s a belief that more sharing, you know, and a kind of mutual—not dependence but, you know—feeling of we’re all in it together is generally good for the collective whole.

I don’t want to overstate this. The United States is the dominant intelligence force in the West. Could it go off on its own and probably be okay? Yeah, it probably could be for the near term. But you never want to be missing that one key piece of information that tells you about, you know, a bigger threat. And I just don’t see any reason, particularly, other than Trump being Trump, why we need to blow up those alliances. But, you know, this is where we are right now, isn’t it?

Rosin: A last thing: I’m thinking about Trump signaling his closeness with Vladimir Putin, you know, how he recently repeated some Russian talking points. I wonder how those kinds of signals get received among the people you talk to—intelligence officials, the people who are guarding these alliances. What’s the result of those kinds of actions?

Harris: I think that they hear that, and, honestly, they think, We’ve heard this before. Everyone talks a lot about J. D. Vance’s speech in Munich, and some of the statements that Donald Trump has made about Zelensky being a dictator, and this affection for Putin. And all of this has been happening in the past month.

My mind goes back to 2018, when Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki—and listeners may remember—the question of Russia’s interference in our elections in 2016 came up. And Trump—in front of the audience, in front of the world—said that he believed Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies when Putin said that Russia didn’t interfere in the election. And I think that was as stunning of a single, jaw-dropping moment as I can remember in my career covering intelligence—that the president of the United States was standing there next to an ex-KGB officer and saying, I believe him and not the U.S. intelligence community.

Our allies heard that. And really, ever since then, when I talk to people, you get a range of opinions, from, Donald Trump is just a businessman, and he likes Putin’s tough-guy attitude, all the way toward people thinking, I can’t prove it, but I’ve always suspected the Russians are either blackmailing him, or somehow, he’s secretly an agent. Like, you get the range of opinions from people.

So I think that they have just always, generally—the security services in these ally countries—have always seen that relationship that he has with Putin as a significant problem. And it’s one that they have to manage. So what they’re hearing from him now, with this affection for Putin, is not new. The difference is that now Trump is actually breaking these alliances with the West. And he is talking about a settlement in Ukraine that does not necessarily appear to be either in the interests of Ukraine or other European countries. And that has intelligence officials in Europe extremely nervous.

Rosin: I see. So this erosion of trust is long and slow. And what’s been shocking to the rest of us, the intelligence community has been monitoring for a while, those who are keeping close tabs.

Harris: I think that’s right.

Rosin: Well, Shane, thank you so much for joining us today. You always teach us so much about worlds that we don’t know a lot about.

Harris: It’s great to be with you. Thanks, Hanna.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

In 1778, during the Revolutionary War, the British captured Savannah, Georgia, as part of a “Southern Strategy” that aimed to rally support from Loyalists in the region. The following year, after Patriot forces allied with the French, some 4,000 soldiers from France and its colonies sailed to North America to help take back the city. Among them were the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue, a corps of 545 Black and mixed-race soldiers from present-day Haiti, then the wealthiest colony in the New World.

The plan to recapture Savannah failed, but soldiers from Saint-Domingue helped stave off a British counterattack. When the war ended in 1783, the new nation was indebted to France and its colonies. Saint-Domingue would launch its own revolution for independence less than a decade later, in part inspired by the Americans’ victory. According to Marlene L. Daut and other scholars, Henry Christophe, who became Haiti’s president in 1807, had served in the Savannah operation as a 12-year-old drummer with the Chasseurs-Volontaires.

Popular narratives in the United States often portray Haiti as impossibly foreign, a wellspring of disaster at odds with our own way of life. “Voodoo. AIDS. Boat People. Poorest Country in the Western Hemisphere,” Rich Benjamin rattles off in his new memoir, Talk to Me: Lessons From a Family Forged by History. Benjamin complicates these notions by unraveling a family epic that traverses both countries, revealing that the two nations are far more interconnected than many Americans might assume.

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Benjamin begins his story in modern-day Brooklyn; his mother, Danielle, is visiting from the suburbs of Maryland. One night, after they turn in, Benjamin is awakened by her cries in the next room. “Please don’t kill me,” she pleads to someone she can see only in her dreams. Benjamin writes that when he was growing up, his mother was “closed off and harsh in some instances”—anything but emotional. A career humanitarian who raised Benjamin and his siblings in an upper-middle-class enclave near Washington, D.C., Danielle taught her children to work hard and to value their schooling. Their father, Edouard Benjamin, was an economist for the World Bank. Both were industrious strivers at work and strict disciplinarians at home.

Benjamin spends the bulk of his book unearthing what lies beneath his parents’ still surfaces—his mother’s in particular. Danielle’s parents had come of age in Haiti during the U.S. occupation, which began in 1915 when an uprising of mixed-race Haitians from the ruling class—known as milats—threatened American commercial interests on the island. Discharged by Woodrow Wilson “to preserve order,” U.S. Marines disbanded the country’s legislature, created a new constitution, and took control of its treasury. They also imposed forced labor on the poor and seized valuable farmland before selling it to U.S. companies. Islanders attempted multiple acts of resistance, including guerilla attacks and student strikes. Still, by the end of the occupation in 1934, U.S. occupiers had killed at least 10,000 people.

Few Haitian heads of state would complete their terms in office for the next decades. In many cases, popular uprisings tipped the scales: Groups of students or poorer Haitians in the provinces would cause unrest in the capital when their resources grew especially scarce or a leader seemed to become too authoritarian.

Throughout Talk to Me, Benjamin knits together a winding history of the island’s geopolitical and domestic turbulence with an accounting of his family’s story. When Danielle was 13, her father, Daniel Fignolé, was appointed president of Haiti. As a popular professor of mathematics and history, Fignolé had founded a series of newspapers that criticized the milat elite. He spoke up for dark-skinned laborers who made up the country’s majority yet whose interests were not represented in government. As Fignolé galvanized laborers, an underground movement of intellectuals began to coalesce; before long, Fignolé had become head of a new party called MOP—Mouvement Ouvrier Paysan, or the Peasant Workers Movement. It was the “most organized labor party in Haitian history,” according to the scholar Matthew J. Smith.

Fignolé became a minister of state and a member of Parliament in the early 1950s. These years were considered Haiti’s golden age, when the country was a popular tourist destination especially for American bohemians drawn to the island’s rum, beaches, and hotels. But the new foreign-generated wealth did little to benefit the slums. The president, Colonel Paul Magloire, resigned under pressure from the masses, and Fignolé became president in a provisional agreement among various factions.

Nineteen days after Fignolé’s inauguration, in 1957, he was deposed by a military coup, in which soldiers violently removed him and his wife from their home in the middle of the night and kidnapped their seven children. Benjamin recounts how the children were held separately from their parents for 10 days, undergoing a traumatic ordeal. Some of them, including Danielle, were sexually assaulted by the soldiers.

U.S. operatives had been watching Fignolé since the early days of the left-wing MOP, and were aware of the coup. Fignolé and his family were exiled from Haiti, granted American visas, and forcibly relocated to New York. Penniless and petulant, Fignolé focused on leading a group of Haitians in exile and winning back his job as president. Meanwhile, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the notorious dictator who took over some time after Fignolé’s ouster, had banned citizens on the island from even speaking Fignolé’s name. The family settled in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; Fignolé’s wife, Carmen, shouldered their children’s care mostly alone.

Growing up, Benjamin knew only the general contours of his family’s history: that their migration to America had been under duress and that his grandfather’s political ambitions had been the cause. Fignolé, Benjamin writes, was “purged from our dinner-table conversations”; he believes that the silence “corroded” any possibility of real warmth from his mother. It also eventually alienated the author from his own heritage. As a young adult, Benjamin often denied his Haitianness. “To conjure Haiti meant to think of that bloody past,” he writes.

But to conjure Haiti is also to encounter many truths about the New World, the U.S. especially. Americans should see, in the island’s heroes, a reflection of their own rebellious heritage, their liberty-loving patriots who cast off an authoritarian, distant king. One might also heed the repercussions of colonialism, which are still visible in both places. Haiti and the U.S. are parallel societies in which a significant portion of the population was once enslaved, and both countries struggle with how to tell stories about that “bloody past.” In the U.S., book bans and curriculum mandates threaten to suppress its citizens’ history of subjugation and resistance. Danielle, for her part, also developed a commitment to silence, albeit for different reasons.

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Benjamin’s book is, in its way, an attempt to “salvage damage from history.” When he tries to interview his mother, she is unwilling to discuss her childhood. “Her eyes narrowed, her lips puckered in anger, and she threatened me not to investigate the coup.” It is only through painstaking archival research and reporting, involving elderly extended relatives, former associates of his grandfather, and a lawsuit against the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act, that Benjamin is able to reconstruct many events in his family’s history. He realizes that he “cannot understand [his] mother without understanding her motherland”; his memoir is something of a plea, and a love letter, to both Danielle and her home country.

Benjamin seems to be trying to integrate his mother’s experiences into his understanding of himself. Danielle had kept their family’s Haitian past concealed, presumably to protect her children. But in doing so, she perhaps obscured connections between her own struggles and Benjamin’s attempts, throughout his youth, to determine his identity—especially as a teenager grappling with sickle cell anemia and his sexuality. When he finally travels to Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010, Benjamin is surprised to experience, among the ruins, a feeling of “respect” for the cultural vibrancy—won through resilience—that he encounters:

An electric-blue rag diagonally harnessing an Afro. A neck scarf tied just so. Bright plastic sunglasses perched on the nose. A sprawling meal conjured to accommodate unannounced guests. I call it Haiti-sexy. It’s an ephemeral quality, a Haitian style, delivering brilliance born of constraints. Improvised, sensual, cool.

For much of his time in Haiti, Benjamin does not identify himself as the grandson of Fignolé. He wishes to confront his history more privately, “to understand what about my family’s past undercut my present.” Although he is disappointed to discover that much of the archival evidence of his grandfather’s presidency has been destroyed, he does find a new sense of pride and purpose in his writing—through which he hopes to restore, as he writes, “remembrance to its rightful place.”

“My subject is Haiti, the Black Republic; the only self-made Black Republic in the world,” Frederick Douglass, once a minister to the country, said in an address at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. He called Haiti a “sister republic” to the United States and declared that how Haiti fares “may be the destiny of the African race in our country and elsewhere.” La Isla Española—Hispaniola—was the site of the first permanent settlement of Christopher Columbus’s men. The French annexed the western third—the land that would eventually become Haiti—in 1697. Talk to Me makes the case that understanding Haiti’s place in the New World might lead to a fuller accounting of the entire hemisphere’s history—including our own.

*Illustration sources: Boursiquot / Jerome family collection; Joe Raedle / Getty; Benjamin family collection.

It’s a stressful time to be a psychiatrist in America. Not a day seems to go by without a panicked patient or friend asking me how to stay grounded in the face of the political chaos that has suddenly taken hold of the nation. One patient, a 38-year-old scientist, worries that his research will soon be defunded, ending his career. A good friend, a professor in her 60s, fears that the United States is sliding into autocracy. How, they want to know, can they make themselves feel better?

They haven’t liked the answer I’ve had to give them. This is a hard thing for a psychiatrist to say, but if you’re alarmed by Donald Trump’s hoarding of executive power and efforts to dismantle the federal government, then maybe you should be.

Plenty of Americans may cheer the disruptive effects of Trump’s flood of executive orders. But being inundated with unpredictable change over such a short period of time undermines people’s sense of security and control. It’s bound to provoke intense anxiety. Even some of Trump’s supporters appear to be reeling from the chaos: Recent polling suggests that more Americans believe that Trump has exceeded his presidential powers than not. (My patients, who are predominantly based in New York City, lean Democratic, but even some of my Republican patients have told me they are having second thoughts.)

Humans have a powerful instinct to protect ourselves from psychic pain by denying or minimizing the potential seriousness of the threats we encounter. Studies have shown, for example, that the brain selectively attends to positive information, and that people tend to discount negative predictions in order to maintain an optimistic bias. The urge is unavoidable. Several weeks after Trump’s inauguration, a close friend told me she was still on “a break” from the news. She hadn’t yet heard about the president’s proposal to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” among other things.

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An information blackout might temporarily spare you such discomfort, but denial can be its own source of anxiety. A lack of knowledge about the environment around you increases uncertainty, which psychological studies have shown to be very stressful. For example, in one 2015 study, people who failed the California bar exam were more anxious the day before they received the news than afterward. (However, they felt more negative emotions immediately following the news.) Certainty, by contrast, allows us to activate coping strategies. That’s why we can adjust to good news or even bad news—both are clear and unambiguous—but we cannot reconcile with the unknown.

Many therapists are trained to identify the exaggerated emotional responses and distortions of reality that beset their patients, and to help them understand that things are not as bad as they imagine. But when the situation really is as dire as a patient believes, soothing reassurance that one’s distress is misplaced would be malpractice. No one can say exactly where Trump is taking the country, but those who worry about the breakdown of essential public services, the spilling of national-security secrets, and national paralysis in the face of natural disasters are empirically grounded in their concerns. Think of it this way: If your house is in danger of catching fire, the last thing you should do is disable the alarm.

Optimism relaxes us, robbing us of the drive to take action. But angst, like a smoke detector, is a powerful motivating force—one that can impel people to help bring about the very changes they need to feel better. Worrying about missing an important deadline at work might, for example, rouse you to work faster or cancel other plans that would delay your task. The solution to a constitutional crisis is less clearly defined—unless you’re a lawmaker or member of the executive branch, there’s little you personally can do to stop the erosion of democratic norms—but getting involved in local politics and community organizations can both help to shore up your corner of the world. Speaking up in defense of democratic values is also powerful, especially when many individuals are willing to do so at once.

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Research suggests that you’re less likely to take such action if you insist on pretending that things will be fine. For example, in a pioneering study published in 2011, college students who were instructed to imagine that the following week would be terrific felt significantly less motivated and energetic—and were academically less productive—than their peers who were told to visualize all the problems that might take place during the coming week. In difficult times, inappropriate optimism can disarm and relax us—and substitute for actions that could actually bring about that sunny imagined future.

None of this is to suggest that abject despair is the appropriate response to the rise of authoritarianism in America. If you’re feeling anxious or hopeless, try to focus on the basics: Exercise, get enough sleep, eat a healthy diet, and talk about your distress with friends and loved ones. These tried-and-true strategies help us tolerate adversity.

Even better is a technique called mental contrasting, co-developed by the psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, who led the study on college students. The idea is to visualize an attainable goal (such as getting involved in local politics or running a mile), then think about all the obstacles that might get in your way (such as failing to find people who share your political vision, or shin splints). Mental contrasting has been shown to help people improve their relationships and recover from chronic pain, possibly because it undercuts the complacency brought about by unrealistic optimism. Crucially, the technique works only for goals you have a chance of achieving; in other words, mental contrasting may not be what allows you, personally, to defeat the global creep of authoritarianism. But it’s more likely to help you, say, identify five ways you can meaningfully improve your local community, then execute on them, which is likely to make you feel at least a little better.

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During this challenging time, maintaining one’s peace of mind—or at least a reasonable sense of hope—is a commendable goal. But first, Americans have to see the world as it is, even if it’s upsetting to many.

I’m a hard target for Ross Douthat’s evangelism. When I got a copy of his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I felt an impulse to answer, Nope: Why You Should Leave Everyone Alone. I come from a family of atheists and am a lifelong nonbeliever. At difficult times I’ve tried very hard to cross the river into the kingdom of faith—read the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, attended church and temple services, immersed myself in Kierkegaard, and stared at the sky for a flicker of divinity. None of it made any difference. The universe remains random, empty, cold. We’re alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end. These are comfortless facts, but I’ve come to accept and even, at times, embrace them, with no desire to disenchant anyone else.  

Douthat came to religion through his parents’ New England Protestantism, which took a turn during his childhood from the mainline to the charismatic. His own systematic thinking and interest in the workings of worldly power led him to become a conservative Catholic. When The New York Times hired him as a columnist, he asked me for advice, which in itself showed his open-mindedness. I suggested that, as a precocious Harvard-educated blogger for this magazine, he should make sure now and then to get out of the world of precocious bloggers and talk with people unlike him—to report on the rest of the country. Douthat didn’t follow my advice, and he was probably right not to. His own mind, nourished by innate curiosity and wide reading, has become the most interesting site in the landscape of Times opinion. I read him, with admiration and annoyance, religiously.

But Believe suffers from the limitations of Douthat’s brilliance. He has absorbed a good deal of recent literature on cosmology, physics, neuroscience, and supernaturalism, and he devotes most of the book to arguing that scientific knowledge makes the existence of God more rather than less likely. Douthat is speaking to the well-educated contemporary reader who requires a rational case for religion, and among his key words are reasonable, sensible, and empirical. Belief, in Believe, isn’t a leap of faith marked by paradox, contradiction, or wild surmise; it’s a matter of mastering the research and figuring the odds. If brain chemistry hasn’t located the exact site of consciousness, that doesn’t suggest the extent of what human beings know—it’s evidence for the existence of the soul.

Douthat guides the reader through the science toward God with a gentle but insistent intellectualism that leaves this nonbeliever wanting less reason and more inspiration. I can’t follow him into his Middle Earth kingdom of angels, demons, and elves just because a book he’s read shows that a universe in which life is possible has a one in 10-to-the-120th-power chance of being random. We don’t fall in love because someone has made a plausible case for being great together. Some mysteries neither reason nor religion can explain.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

The rational, speculative approach of Believe comes to an end in its last pages, when the authoritarianism that underlies Douthat’s, and perhaps all, religion, suddenly shows its face. He adopts a darker tone as he asks what you will do if you’ve guessed wrong—if God turns out to exist and is waiting on the other side to punish you for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book. “What account will you give of yourself if the believers turn out to have been right all along?” he demands—and then goes on to portray nonbelievers as shallow, mentally lazy, and status-obsessed, too concerned with sounding clever at a dinner party to see the obvious Truth:

That you took pointlessness for granted in a world shot through with signs of meaning and design? That you defaulted to unbelief because that seemed like the price of being intellectually serious or culturally respectable? That you were too busy to be curious, too consumed with things you knew to be passing to cast a prayer up to whatever eternity awaits?

This move—a dubious assumption that imputes unflattering qualities to the opposition and stacks the deck in Douthat’s favor—is familiar from some of his columns, and it brings Believe closer to his political journalism. Throughout the book Douthat the divine has a reflexive habit of belittling nonbelief in the same way that Douthat the columnist disparages liberalism. He repeatedly sneers at “Official Knowledge,” the capital letters suggesting that scientific materialism is some sort of conspiracy of the legacy media and the deep state. He accuses atheists of taking the easy way out, of claiming to be serious grown-ups when their worldview is irresponsible and childish: “It is the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human.” But even in Douthat’s own account, religion is driven by hedonistic self-interest, for it promises an escape from the suffering of this world, and it conditions the offer on a desire to avoid pain in the next. The humanist view that we have only one another in an instant of eternity—that this life, with all its heartache, is all we’re given—raises the stakes of love and imposes sacrifice beyond anything imaginable to a believer in the afterlife.

Believe appears at a moment when nonbelief seems to be running out of gas. Douthat’s purpose is to hasten the process. “Already the time of the new atheism is passing,” he writes; “already mystery and magic and enchantment seem to be rushing back into the world.” He has been predicting this for some time, and he is almost certainly right. Large numbers of people throughout the West feel that liberal society and the bureaucratic state are failing—not just to provide practical benefits but to offer meaning and community. Secular liberalism is not the same as atheism, but disillusionment with the former seems to be driving modern people into a new period of anti-rationalism and mysticism, with a growing distrust of established science, a leveling off of the percentage of nonbelieving Americans, and a trend toward public figures making high-profile conversions—to Christianity, in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the atheist refugee from repressive Islam; to Catholicism, in the case of J. D. Vance and others. Christopher Hitchens is dead and UFO sightings are on the rise.

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President Donald Trump himself, whose first 78 years were nearly unmarked by signs of faith, has sworn a newfound religiosity since his near assassination. God saved him to make America great again, he has said several times, so “let’s bring religion back.” Days before Believe was published, Trump announced the creation of a Justice Department task force to root out anti-Christian bias, as well as a White House Faith Office, led by Paula White-Cain, Trump’s religious adviser, who has said that opposing him means opposing God. (This kind of theocratic edict has turned a generation of young Iranians against religion.) The president’s more ardent followers regard him as a kind of mythic figure, above history and politics, leading by spiritual power that connects him directly to the people. By this light, faith is inseparable from authoritarianism.

Believe is not a political book, but it would be naive to imagine that Douthat’s evangelism has no political implications. He acknowledges that the book could be “a work of Christian apologetics in disguise,” and his invitation to religion in general leads predictably to a case for Christianity in particular, preferably of the conservative-Catholic variety. In his columns he draws no bright line between religion and politics: Contemporary America is decadent, liberalism has famished our souls, and any renewal depends on faith—not New Ageism, not progressive Protestantism, but religion of a traditional, illiberal cast. Douthat has carried on a years-long flirtation with MAGA, endorsing many of its policies while hedging his personal dislike of Trump against his antipathy toward the opposition. (He refused to disclose his choice in the most recent election, which seems like a misdemeanor for a political columnist.) Douthat hasn’t gone as far as the head of the new White House Faith Office, but when he calls Trump a “man of destiny,” it isn’t easy to extricate his metaphysical leanings from his partisan ones.

Douthat wants you to abandon secular liberalism and become a believer at a moment when democracy is under assault from a phalanx of right-wing ideas, some of them religious. That is not a reason to believe or not to believe, for belief needs no reason. But it should make you pause and think before following Douthat on the path to his promised land.

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