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“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” then–CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves cackled in February 2016, as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign churned forward. “The money’s rolling in and this is fun … It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep going.”

Moonves appeared merely ghoulish then. He now looks both ghoulish and wrong. Trump has not been good for CBS, and the steps and statements he’s made since returning to the White House show that his campaign promises to restore and defend free speech were balderdash. His goal is to protect the speech that he likes and suppress what he doesn’t.

On Sunday, Unelected Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk attacked CBS’s flagship program. “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election,” he posted on X. “They deserve a long prison sentence.” This would seem less threatening if Musk weren’t running roughshod over the federal government, or if the president disagreed. But earlier this month, Trump said that “CBS should lose its license” and 60 Minutes should be “terminated.”

The source of their anger is an interview that the program conducted with Kamala Harris—remember her?—during the presidential campaign last year. Trump alleges that 60 Minutes improperly edited the interview. CBS denies any wrongdoing and declined to comment on Musk’s post. CBS said in a filing this week that it intended to seek information on Trump’s finances if the lawsuit proceeds. Even so, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, is considering whether to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement with Trump to resolve a suit seeking $20 billion in damages. Interpreting such a move as anything other than paying off Trump to leave CBS alone is very difficult—in other words, it’s a protection racket. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reports that executives are concerned they could be sued for bribery if they settle. (Moonves is long gone; he was forced out in 2018 over a series of accusations of sexual assault and harassment. He denies any wrongdoing.)

Trump initially filed his suit last October and has since amended it. The crux of the claim is that CBS aired two different snippets from the same Harris answer about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Like many past lawsuits from Trump, this one reads more like a political memo than a legal brief. He claims, without any evidence, that CBS edited the interview to help Harris’s electoral prospects. (Like other MAGA lawsuits, it was filed in a specific Texas court so as to draw Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has delivered sweeping fringe rulings in the past.) The suit doesn’t make a great deal of sense. If CBS was trying to hide something Harris said, why did it broadcast the clip?

The Federal Communications Commission initially rejected a complaint about the interview, but Brendan Carr—Trump’s newly appointed FCC chair—reopened it and demanded that CBS release the transcript of the interview. CBS did so, and to my read, the transcript establishes that CBS’s use of the clips was not manipulative. (Judicious editing is essential. I’ve interviewed many politicians, and much of what they say is incurably dull, nonsensical, or both, sometimes by design.)

The charge of “election interference” doesn’t make any sense, either—especially coming from Musk, who both is the owner of a major media platform and spent nearly $300 million to back Trump and other Republican candidates. The position of the Trump GOP appears to be that spending any amount of money on politics is free speech, but press outlets covering the campaign are interfering with it.

The bombardment of CBS is part of a wide-ranging assault on free speech. Last week, the White House barred an Associated Press reporter from the Oval Office because editors there have opted not to adopt Trump’s renaming of the body of water long known as the Gulf of Mexico. In December, ABC settled a defamation suit with Trump even though almost no media lawyers thought the network would have lost; critics charged that ABC was trying to curry favor with the president-elect. (ABC did not respond to a request for comment.)

Carr, the FCC chair, recently wrote a letter to NPR and PBS suggesting that by airing sponsors’ names, they may have violated rules against noncommercial stations accepting advertising, although the FCC has not objected to this practice in the past. He noted that the answer could help Congress in deciding whether to defund NPR and PBS. That’s a tight vise grip: Don’t take funding or we might take your funding.

Not all criticism of the press is media suppression. Politicians are free to criticize the press, just as all Americans are free to criticize their elected officials. And besides, if political leaders aren’t upset about at least some of the coverage they’re receiving, journalists probably aren’t holding them to account. At times during the Trump era, some members of the media have overreacted to flimsy provocations, like Trump’s posting a silly GIF that superimposed the CNN logo over someone being body slammed. Vice President J. D. Vance snarkily replied to the journalist Mehdi Hasan on Monday, “Yes dummy. I think there’s a difference between not giving a reporter a seat in the WH press briefing room and jailing people for dissenting views. The latter is a threat to free speech, the former is not. Hope that helps!”

Even if you’re willing to grant Vance’s premise that banishing the AP is no big deal—I am not—there’s a lot of territory between that and jailing people, and that’s the ground that Trump is occupying: using the power of the government to intimidate. Paramount, for example, is currently awaiting FCC approval for a merger with Skydance Media. A Paramount Global spokesperson told me the lawsuit is “separate from, and unrelated to” the merger, but the company’s leaders would be reasonable to be afraid that Trump might block the deal if they don’t cooperate. During his first term, Trump tried to block the acquisition of CNN’s parent company. Speaking about the AP’s banishment, one journalist told CNN’s Brian Stelter, “Everyone assumes they’re next.”

Threats to the press are not new for Trump, who has been critical of press freedom for years. But during his most recent campaign, he criticized “wokeness” and argued that he would be a voice for free speech by pushing back on what he characterized as attacks on constitutional rights from, for example, social-media companies that blocked or throttled content (such as suspending his accounts after January 6). On the first day of his new term, Trump signed an executive order purportedly “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and announced that he was a “free speech absolutist,” but quickly disproved that, suspending reporters who criticized him and cooperating with foreign governments to suppress speech.

A news outlet that is afraid of the government is an outlet whose speech is only partly free. When media companies are afraid that the president will use regulators to punish their business, owners are anxious to protect non-media commercial interests. When journalists are wary of becoming targets for petty retribution, they may pull punches or shape coverage in ways that do not—and are not intended to—serve the public interest. Jeff Bezos’s decision to spike a Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s attacks on his own newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, both look a lot like this, though the two owners insist otherwise.

Over the past few years, Trump, Vance, and others complained loudly about the government studying mis- and disinformation or pointing out instances of disinformation to social-media companies. They charged that this was censorship because even if the government wasn’t requiring those companies to do anything, its power made this an implied threat. Now that they are in office, they’ve had a change of heart. They’re perfectly happy for the government to try to tell private companies what opinions are acceptable and which ones aren’t. They never believed in anyone’s free speech except their own.

Related:

Intimidating Americans will not work. What conservatives mean by freedom of speech

Today’s News

The Senate confirmed Kash Patel as FBI director in a 51–49 vote. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell announced that he would not be seeking reelection.

The Trump administration removed protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians in America, which puts them on track to be targeted for deportation this summer.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: “The first time I watched an opera on a screen was in the Dallas Cowboys football stadium,” Kat Hu writes. “As persistent as the desire to televise opera is the debate over whether—and how—to do it.”

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

George Packer: The Trump world order The secret that colleges should stop keeping The ultimate antidote to toxic behavior online Spared by DOGE—for now

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

The Fantasy of a Nonprofit Dating App

By Faith Hill

Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. When you swipe and swipe and nothing’s working out, it could be that you’ve had bad luck. It could be that you’re too picky. It could be—oh God—that you simply don’t pull like you thought you did. But sometimes, whether out of self-protection or righteous skepticism of corporate motives, you might think: Maybe the nameless faces who created this product are conspiring against me to turn a profit—meddling in my dating life so that I’ll spend the rest of my days alone, paying for any feature that gives me a shred of hope.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Listen. Americans are stuck. Who’s to blame? Hanna Rosin talks with Yoni Appelbaum about the end of upward mobility in the United States.

Read. “The Moron Factory,” a short story by George Saunders.

“Is true: our office odd. No one stable. Everyone nuts in his/her own way. Usually, at work, I keep to self. Don’t socialize. Just do my work, head straight home.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Threats to free speech aren’t just a national problem, and they’re not just about the press—they’re about the public’s right to hear from and be involved in government. I was struck this morning by two different, appalling stories out of Mississippi. The Mississippi Free Press reports on how a chancery court judge has ruled that the state legislature is not a public body and therefore not subject to open-meetings laws. If the elected lawmakers of a state aren’t a public body, what is? Meanwhile, The New York Times reports on another judge in the state ordering a local paper to remove an editorial from its website criticizing Clarksdale officials for not issuing a public notice before a special meeting. The headline on the article: “Secrecy, deception erode public trust.” Perhaps the judge would have been well served to read it himself.

— David

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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This week, Donald Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting a war against a much larger neighbor, inviting invasion and mass death. At this point, Trump—who has a history of trusting Russian President Vladimir Putin more than he trusts the Americans who are sworn to defend the United States—may even believe it. Casting Ukraine as the aggressor (and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator,” which Trump did today) makes political sense for Trump, who is innately deferential to Putin, and likely views the conflict as a distraction from his own personal and political agendas. The U.S. president has now chosen to throw America to Putin’s side and is more than willing to see this war end on Russian terms.

Repeating lies, however, does not make them true.

Russia, and specifically Putin, launched this war in 2014 and widened it in 2022. The information and media ecosystem around Trump and the Republican Party has tried for years to submerge the Russian war against Ukraine in a sump of moral relativism, because many in the GOP admire Putin as some sort of Christian strongman. But Putin is making war on a country that is mostly composed of his fellow Orthodox Christians, solely based on his own grandiose fantasies.

The most important thing to understand about the recent history of Russian aggression against its neighbors, and especially against Ukraine, is that Putin is not a product of “Russia” or even of Russian nationalism. He is, in every way, a son of the Soviet Union. He is a man of “the system,” the kind of person who, after the fall of the U.S.S.R., was sometimes called a sovok, which translates roughly into “Soviet guy”—someone who never left the mindset of the old regime. (This is a man who, for example, changed the post-Soviet Russian national anthem back to the old Soviet musical score, with updated words.)

Some in the West want to believe that Putin is merely a traditional player of the game of power politics. This is nonsense: He is a poor strategist precisely because he is so driven by emotion and aggression. His worldview is a toxic amalgam of Russian historical romanticism and Soviet nostalgia; he clearly misses being part of an empire that dared to confront the West and could make the rest of the world tremble with a word from Red Square. (This Sovietism is one reason for his bone-deep hatred of NATO.) He sees himself as the heir to Peter the Great and Stalin, because the greatest days of his life were the mid-1970s, when he was in his 20s and the Soviet Union he served so faithfully looked to be ascendant over the declining United States.

Putin’s Soviet nostalgia prevents him from seeing the other nations that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet collapse as actual countries. He knows that their borders were drawn by Stalinist mapmakers in Moscow (as were those of the current Russian Federation, a fact that Putin ignores most of the time), and he resents that these new states fled from the Kremlin’s control as soon as they were able to leave. He is especially stung by the emergence of an independent Ukraine; back in 2008, he made a point of telling President George W. Bush that Ukraine was not a real country.

For years, Putin claimed that he had no interest in reconstituting the U.S.S.R. or the Russian Empire. He may have been lying, or he may have changed his mind over time. But when Ukrainians deposed a pro-Russian leader in 2014 and drove him out of the country, Putin lashed out in fury, ordering the seizure of Crimea, a Russian-majority area that was historically part of Russia but was transferred to Ukraine during the Soviet period. This was the true beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

The Russians camped on these territories for years, “freezing” the conflict in place while Ukraine and the West tried carrots and sticks, eventually realizing that Putin was never going to cede any of the ground he’d stolen. The situation might have remained in stasis forever had Putin not decided to try to seize the entire Ukrainian nation of some 40 million people and almost a quarter of a million square miles.

Why did Putin throw the dice on such a stupid and reckless gamble? Trump and many of his supporters answer this question with chaff bursts of nonsense about how the Russians felt legitimately threatened by Western influence in Ukraine, and specifically that Ukraine brought this nightmare on itself by seeking to join NATO. The Russians, for their part, have made similar arguments. NATO membership has for years been an aspirational goal for Ukraine, one that NATO politely supported—but without ever moving to make it happen. (Once Putin invaded, NATO and Ukraine sped up talks, in another example of the Russian president bringing about events he claimed to be stopping.)

Putin himself tends to complicate life for his propagandists by departing from the rationalizations offered by the Kremlin’s useful idiots. Trump and other Western apologists would have an easier time of explaining away the war if the man who started it would only get on the same page as them; instead, Putin has said, many times, that Ukraine is Russian territory, that it has always been and will always be part of Russia, that it is full of Nazis, and that it must be cleansed and returned to Moscow’s control.

One possibility here is that Putin may have dreamed up a quick war of conquest while in COVID isolation, where only a tight circle of sycophants could regularly see him. These would include his defense and intelligence chiefs, along with a small coterie of Russian clerics who have for years been trying to convince Putin that he has a divine mission to restore the “Russian world” to its former greatness, a project that dovetails nicely with his constant anger about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In any case, the Russian president’s decision to go to war was his own, a plot cooked up in the Kremlin rather than being the unforeseeable result of some kind of ongoing geopolitical crisis. Here, Putin was the victim of his own form of autocratic government: No one around him had the courage (or perhaps even the proper information) to warn him that his military was in rough shape, that the Ukrainians had improved as fighters since the seizure of Crimea, and that the West would not sit by the way it did in 2014. Western experts got some of this wrong too—back in 2022, I was very worried that Russia might win the war quickly—but Putin was apparently fed a farrago of reassuring lies about how Russian troops would be greeted as liberators.

All anyone needs to know about “who started it” is in the conflict’s timeline: In 2014, Putin vented his rage at Ukrainians for actually choosing their own form of government by seizing large swaths of eastern Ukraine—thus ensuring that the remainder of the country would become more united, pro-Western, and anti-Russian than ever before. Eight years later, the Russian dictator came to believe that Ukraine was ready to fall into his hands, and he embarked on a war of conquest. When Ukraine held together in the face of the 2022 Russian invasion and began to inflict severe casualties on the Russians, Putin resorted to war crimes, butchering innocent people, kidnapping Ukrainian children, and attacking civilian targets as a way of punishing Ukraine for its insolence.

This is the reality of the Ukraine war. Some Republicans, such as former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Roger Wicker, the chair of the Armed Services Committee, know all this, and have told the truth. If only Donald Trump knew it too.

Related:

The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine. Listen closely to what Hegseth is saying.

Today’s News

The Trump administration rescinded federal approval of New York’s congestion-pricing program, which went into effect last month. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Trump lives in a Russian-constructed “disinformation space.” In response, Trump called Zelensky “a Dictator without Elections.” A federal judge held a hearing about U.S. prosecutors’ attempt to dismiss the corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Trump could start a new pipeline fight, Zoë Schlanger writes.

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Trump hands the world to China. New York belongs to Trump now. Intimidating Americans will not work. The NIH memo that undercut universities came directly from Trump officials. Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity

Evening Read

Illustration by Julia Rothman

Flaco Lives

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, is still with us (even though he’s dead).

He spent about a year roaming New York City—hunting in the park, hooting from fire escapes—and in that time, he became a celebrity. Then he flew into a building while disoriented by rat poison and pigeon herpes. It has been a year since Flaco’s untimely death, and now the New York Historical is hosting an exhibition memorializing his life. I went on opening day, in the middle of business hours, and found the space packed with Flaco fans.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Hélène Blanc

Read. Haley Mlotek’s new book is a divorce memoir with no lessons, Rachel Vorona Cote writes.

Watch. The third season of Yellowjackets (streaming on Paramount+). The show is more playful and ridiculous than ever before, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Last week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called the national debt “one of the biggest betrayals against the American people,” suggesting that Americans’ anger about debt “gave birth to the concept of DOGE.” The idea that Elon Musk and his band of government-efficiency crusaders can bring down the debt is a tidy one. But DOGE’s current plans would hardly put a dent in the deficit.

Musk has lamented that America is “drowning” in debt, which has indeed ballooned over the past decade: As of this month, the federal debt is $36 trillion, about $13 trillion higher than it was five years ago. Debt has not been a priority of either major political party for some time, my colleague Annie Lowrey, who covers economics, told me. And despite Taylor Greene’s claims about American anger over the debt, it’s not a top-of-mind issue for people at the polls, either, Annie argued.

If Musk’s team were serious about reducing the deficit, it could explore some unpopular but effective options: reduce spending for the military and the entitlement programs that make up the bulk of the federal budget—Medicare and Social Security—or simply raise taxes, Annie suggested. Instead, what Musk and DOGE have done thus far is ravage government agencies and departments (USAID, for example, which makes up a tiny portion of the budget, and the destruction of which won’t lead to major savings). They’ve also focused on slashing the federal workforce by offering buyouts to 2 million federal workers (and, over the weekend, axing thousands more federal-agency employees); so far, salaries for the workers who have accepted the buyout offer make up a minuscule portion of the national budget in total.

Musk, Trump, and their allies have also turned to a bit of magical thinking, claiming that rooting out fraud in the government is the key to saving money. In a meandering address from the Oval Office last week, Musk claimed without evidence that USAID workers were raking in millions in kickbacks, and that people as old as 150 were claiming Social Security benefits. He wrote on X last week that “at this point, I am 100% certain that the magnitude of the fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability, etc) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by FAR.”

Stumbling upon, and reclaiming, trillions of fraudulently spent funds would be rather convenient, and crying “fraud” is a useful way for Musk and his defenders to cast DOGE’s actions as in service of the American people. Trump has touted this same shaky logic, asserting that uncovering a bunch of fraud could mean America has less debt than previously thought. Fraud does exist in parts of the government: Some people intend to defraud government programs; others accidentally sign up for benefits they’re not actually eligible for. And the government does sometimes make payment errors—federal agencies estimated that more than $200 billion was lost in fiscal year 2023 because of such mistakes, and in past years fraud losses accounted for 3 to 7 percent of the budget. But there is no evidence that lowering the deficit is as simple as tamping down on fraud—or that fraud exists to the extent Musk claims.

Plus, by whacking the bureaucracy, Musk and his team are weakening programs that are already working to tamp down fraud. All federal programs have fraud-detection mandates. The Treasury, for example, announced in October that it had recovered or prevented $4 billion in fraud losses in the prior fiscal year, in part from employing AI machine-learning. And as he rails against what he calls fraud, Musk and his associates have effectively shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose mandate is to crack down on fraud in businesses (and which might have regulated Musk’s own companies).

The rhetorical trick of politicians referring to unpopular or disliked government spending as fraud isn’t new. But in an era of rampant scamming, claiming that the American government is swindling its own people hits on a salient national fear. Musk’s first few weeks running DOGE don’t bode well for his ability to solve the debt crisis. He may succeed, however, in further eroding trust in government, which could give him and his team even more leeway in their attempts to dismantle it.

Related:

The hidden costs of Musk’s Washington misadventure The government’s computing experts say they are terrified.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

How MAGA is reimagining foreign policy January 6 still happened. Want to change your personality? Have a baby. Frozen food’s new wave

Today’s News

Top representatives from Russia and the U.S. met in Saudi Arabia to discuss strengthening economic and diplomatic relations between the two countries and assembling a team to start peace negotiations in the Ukraine war. The Trump administration fired thousands of probationary federal workers over the weekend in departments including the FAA, Health and Human Services, and Energy. The acting head of the Social Security Administration resigned after DOGE requested access to sensitive personal information about millions of Americans.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explains how COVID pushed a generation of young people to the right.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

NBC

Saturday Night Live Played the Wrong Greatest-Hits Reel

By Esther Zuckerman

Fifty years is a long time. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from large portions of SNL50: The Anniversary Special, the much-hyped celebration of the long-running sketch show that aired in prime time last night. SNL50 was meant to commemorate the program, created and executive-produced by Lorne Michaels, for achieving five decades of cultural relevance. But the evening’s rundown suffered from a severe case of recency bias, with sketches that were more inclined to play it safe than honor the show’s extensive, complicated, and fascinating history.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Marvel Studios

Watch (or skip). The newest Captain America movie (out now in theaters) seemed set to explore much-needed fresh ground for the Marvel franchise. But the movie quickly wastes any of that potential, writes David Sims.

Read. Robert Frost wasn’t always good, James Parker argues. Before he became America’s most famous poet, he wrote some real howlers.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

The critics don’t always get it right. Some viewers are adamant that certain polarizing or panned shows deserve their flowers, while others think particular acclaimed series can be overindulged with praise. For those who enjoy bickering with a Rotten Tomatoes score, read on for our editors’ answers to the question: What is a TV show that the critics were wrong about?

Season 2 of Euphoria (streaming on Max)

Coming off the heels of Euphoria’s visually stunning and acclaimed first season, the ingredients were all there for a successful Season 2: the talent, the stylish costuming, Labrinth’s distinctive synth-loaded score, the sheer force of the show’s cultural influence. I cared about the characters and their arcs—a feeling only amplified by the gut-wrenching performances of Rue (played by Zendaya) and Jules (played by Hunter Schafer) in the two stand-alone episodes that aired after the first season’s finale. But as the episodes in Season 2 stacked up, I found myself wondering: Is this it?

My grievances largely stem from how the characters were treated. Some of them got plenty of spotlight (Cassie, I’d argue, got more than necessary), and some beloved characters, including Kat, were sidelined and thrown for a loop with plotlines that didn’t gel with their character development in the previous season. Fez and Lexi’s relationship was intriguing but ended up undercooked. Elliot’s easy interference between Rue and Jules bewildered me. I’ve heard the defenses from die-hard Euphoria fans—they’re teenagers; they’re supposed to be irrational and impulsive and emotional—but in the end, messy characters don’t justify sloppy storytelling.

— Stephanie Bai, associate newsletters editor

***

Season 3 of The Sex Lives of College Girls (streaming on Max)

The Sex Lives of College Girls, Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble’s HBO comedy about four roommates, is best described as a college show meant to appeal to Millennials. And sure, it’s far from realistic. Are anyone’s dorm rooms really that big? Has a college student ever worn as many tweed blazers as Leighton? And why does every single male student have washboard abs?

But once you give up on trying to find relatable depictions of college days, past or present, you can enjoy the genuinely sweet and funny portrayal of female friendship. Many viewers have rightly complained that Reneé Rapp’s absence from most of the recent third season left a noticeable hole, and the critical reception was lukewarm, too. But by the season finale, the chemistry between the new “fourth roommate,” Kacey (played by Gracie Lawrence), and the rest of the girls was perfect. I still think about the scene where they sit on the floor and tell the awkward tales of losing their virginity. It’s a reminder of the profound power of good jokes and good advice, especially when delivered by a friend.

— Isabel Fattal, senior newsletters editor

***

Caso Cerrado (streaming on Peacock)

Caso Cerrado has had a chokehold on four generations of my family, though by any critical standards, it’s not exactly a great show. The Spanish-language courtroom reality-TV series, based in Miami, aired for 18 years on Telemundo and was broadcast across Latin America. My devout Dominican grandmother allowed only nature documentaries and Caso Cerrado to be played on her TV; my great-grandmother perpetually had it on during her final years, like ambient noise.

Though wildly popular, Caso Cerrado often received unfavorable reviews—one Spanish newspaper called it the “most ridiculous … show on television”—and accusations that its storylines were fabricated abounded. But at its peak, more than 1 million viewers tuned in daily to watch the lawyer Ana María Polo settle family and legal disputes, wielding a mix of Judge Judy’s bluntness and Oprah’s empathetic listening. Scored by melodramatic telenovela music, the show offered vignettes of human conflict—families fighting, crying, reconciling—that were at once deliciously dramatic and thought-provoking. This mix proved hyper-bingeable for my family and many others, especially because the show provided a tidy ending for its heavy topics in a way that real life often can’t. When each episode wrapped up, Polo would smack her gavel and pronounce “Caso cerrado!” Case closed.

— Valerie Trapp, assistant editor

***

Battlestar Galactica (streaming on Prime Video)

The 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot has been heralded for years as a triumph of storytelling: In 2020, for example, The Guardian wrote that “everyone is aware that BSG is supposed to be some sort of 21st-century TV classic.” I expected to love it—I’m the target audience for edgy science fiction with a strong serving of political allegory, where characters have to make morally gray choices in order to serve bigger causes the best way they believe they can. But the intervening years have not been kind to this series, or to its women, whom the writing too frequently flattens into badasses who have credulity-straining romances with the men they work with. Paired with the heavy-handedness of its messaging, and the way the plot goes off the rails in later seasons … All I can say is thank goodness we’ll always have everything this show promised in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

— Emma Sarappo, senior associate editor

***

Seasons 3 and 4 of The Killing (streaming on Hulu)

When the temperature hovers stubbornly at freezing, and rain is ceaseless, what sustains me is a twisty murder mystery propelled by a pair of moody detectives with some damn good chemistry. Well-known recent prestige shows fit the bill (True Detective, Mare of Easttown), but I’ll point you instead to the overlooked third and fourth seasons of The Killing, which reboot the central murder plot so you can easily start midway through the series.

Contrary to many critics, I prefer the latter seasons, in which the haunted ex-detective Sarah Linden (played by Mireille Enos), trying to settle into a quiet life as a transit cop just outside of cold, rainy Seattle, is drawn back into a homicide investigation when her former partner gets involved with a new case that shares gory similarities with a previous case of hers. But wait—a man had already been convicted and sentenced to death row for that past crime. Now you have 16 episodes filled with doubt and personal obsessions to savor.

— Shan Wang, programming director

Here are four Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

How progressives froze the American dream Growing up Murdoch David Frum: Why the COVID deniers won The Tesla revolt

The Week Ahead

Season 3 of The White Lotus, a comedy-drama series set at the White Lotus resort in Thailand (premieres tonight on Max) The Monkey, a horror movie based on Stephen King’s short story about a cursed monkey toy (in theaters Friday) Lorne, a book by Susan Morrison about the Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Katie Martin

I’ve Never Seen Parents This Freaked Out About Vaccines

By Emily Oster

Today, the world of vaccine questions has totally changed—in my view, for the much worse. I’m not just referring to the spectacle of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s likely ascension to the top of the government’s health-care bureaucracy or of Republican senators questioning vaccine safety publicly. Something is also happening among parents. I’ve continued to write about parenting, and to talk with parents about vaccines. And those conversations over the past few years—and especially the past year—have completely changed.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Can anything satisfy the guests of The White Lotus? The house where 28,000 records burned The game that shows we’re thinking about history all wrong “Dear James”: Should I leave my American partner? The paradox of music discovery, the Spotify way The unfunny man who believes in humor What Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show said

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Anne Applebaum: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing. RFK Jr. won. Now what? Trump says the corrupt part out loud.

Photo Album

As the International Space Station passed over the United Kingdom, this photo captured the city lights below. (Don Pettit / NASA)

Don Pettit, a NASA astronaut, engineer, and photographer, recently returned to the International Space Station for his fourth mission. Take a look at his photos of city lights, auroras, airglow, and the stars of our surrounding galaxy.

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The single greatest success of Donald Trump’s second term so far might be his Cabinet. Today, senators confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, one day after confirming Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. The nomination of Kash Patel to lead the FBI is headed to a floor vote, and Linda McMahon—chosen to lead and apparently dismantle the Department of Education—is testifying to senators today.

Many parts of Trump’s agenda are deceptively fragile, as the journalist Ezra Klein recently argued. Courts have stepped in to block some of his executive orders and impede Elon Musk’s demolition of broad swaths of the federal government as we know it. Republicans in Congress still don’t seem to have a plan for moving the president’s legislative agenda forward. But despite clear concern from a variety of Republican senators about Trump’s Cabinet picks, it now seems possible that Trump will get every one confirmed except for Matt Gaetz—an indication of how completely Senate Republicans have surrendered their role as an independent check on the president.

The initial rollout of nominees was inauspicious. Gaetz, whom Trump reportedly chose spontaneously during a two-hour flight, lasted just eight days before withdrawing his nomination, after it became evident that Republicans would not confirm him. The rest of the slate was weak enough that at least one more casualty was likely, though I warned in November that a uniformly bad group might perversely make it harder for Republicans to take down any individual. How could they say no to one and justify saying yes to any of the others?

Pete Hegseth had no clear qualifications to run the Defense Department, serial infidelities, and allegations of a sexual assault and alcohol abuse. (He has denied both allegations, and settled with the sexual-assault accuser out of court. Prosecutors have said that they did not have sufficient evidence to pursue charges.) Gabbard not only lacked any intelligence experience but also brought a history of views antithetical to many Republican senators, an affinity for deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and evidence of dishonesty. Patel was, in the view of many of his former colleagues in the first Trump administration, simply dangerous. Kennedy was, um, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Now all seem likely to take up their posts. Sure, it’s taken a while. Democrats have done what they can to slow down many of these nominations, and they voted unanimously against Hegseth, Kennedy, and Gabbard (a former Democratic House member!). Republicans objected when the administration tried to drive nominees through without FBI background checks, and damaging information about each of these nominees has continued to emerge; earlier this week, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin accused Patel of orchestrating a political purge at the FBI, despite promises not to do so. Yet none of that has mattered to the results.

Getting this done has required the White House to do some deft maneuvering. Trump allies publicly bullied Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who is a veteran and an outspoken advocate for victims of sexual assault, into backing Hegseth. According to The Wall Street Journal, they privately bullied the Republican Thom Tillis, a North Carolinian who has sometimes bucked Trump and faces a tough reelection campaign next year, after he indicated that he’d vote against Hegseth; he ultimately voted in favor. They horse-traded with Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana medical doctor who sounded very skeptical of Kennedy during hearings, giving him undisclosed reassurances in exchange for his support. As Politico reported, Trump dispatched J. D. Vance to absorb the grievances of Todd Young, an Indiana senator, about Gabbard; the vice president called off attacks from Trump allies and won Young’s vote.

One lone Republican voted against all three: Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the man responsible for keeping GOP senators lined up behind Trump during his first four years in office. The rest have various justifications for voting more or less in lockstep. They say they were reassured by what they heard in meetings—as though they’ve never seen a nominee fib, and as though that outweighed long histories. They say that presidents deserve to have the advisers they want. Behind closed doors, they might lay out a different calculation: Voting no on Cabinet members is a good way to tick Trump off while gaining little more than symbolism; better for them to keep their powder dry for real policy issues where they disagree with him.

These rationalizations might have made sense for a distasteful nominee here and there, but what Trump has put forward is likely the least qualified Cabinet in American history. In 2019, the Senate deep-sixed John Ratcliffe’s nomination as DNI (though it did confirm him a year later); this time around, when nominated for director of the CIA, he was seen as one of the more sober and qualified picks. Putting people like Trump’s nominees in charge of important parts of the federal government poses real dangers to the nation. Tom Nichols has explained how Hegseth exemplifies this: He seems more interested in bestowing trollish names on bases and giving contradictory messages about Ukraine than the tough work of running the Pentagon. That’s bad news in the immediate term and worse news when a crisis hits.

The idea of waiting to push back on Trump later might be more convincing if no one had ever seen him in action, as I discussed yesterday. Successfully ramming through this slate of nominees will only encourage the president. If Republican members wanted to, they could exert unusual leverage over the White House because of the narrow 53–47 margin in the chamber; Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin showed during the Biden presidency how a tiny fraction of the Democratic caucus could bend leadership to its will. But if Trump managed to get senators to vote for Gabbard and Kennedy, two fringe nominees with some far-left views, why should he expect them to restrain him on anything else?

The real reason for these votes is presumably fear. Republicans have seen Trump’s taste for retribution, and they fear his supporters in primaries. The irony is that in bowing to Trump, senators may actually be defying voters’ preferences. A CBS News poll published Monday found that six in 10 GOP voters would prefer to see congressional Republicans stand up to Trump when they disagree with him. By knocking down some of the worst nominees, senators might have made the Cabinet better and served the country well. But if that wasn’t enough to persuade them, perhaps the chance for political gain could.

Related:

Kash Patel will do anything for Trump. The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus (From November)

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The “Gulf of America” is an admission of defeat, David Frum writes. RFK Jr. won. Now what? Who’s running the Defense Department? Anne Applebaum: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing.

Today’s News

Trump signed a proclamation that outlines a plan to implement reciprocal tariffs for any country that imposes tariffs on the United States. A federal judge extended the pause on the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle USAID for at least another week. Roughly 77,000 federal employees accepted the Trump administration’s buyout offer by last night’s deadline after a federal judge lifted the freeze on the program yesterday.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Online life changed the way we talk and write—then changed it again, and again, and so on, forever, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Ian Woods*

The House Where 28,000 Records Burned

By Nancy Walecki

Before it burned, Charlie Springer’s house contained 18,000 vinyl LPs, 12,000 CDs, 10,000 45s, 4,000 cassettes, 600 78s, 150 8-tracks, hundreds of signed musical posters, and about 100 gold records. The albums alone occupied an entire wall of shelves in the family room, and another in the garage. On his desk were a set of drumsticks from Nirvana and an old RCA microphone that Prince had given to him at a recording session for Prince. A neon Beach Boys sign—as far as he knows, one of only eight remaining in the world—hung above the dining table.

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Illustration by Jan Buchczik

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Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, the singer-songwriter Neko Case peels back the mystery of her life—and her lyrics.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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During his most recent presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to “put unelected bureaucrats back in their place.” Apparently, that place is in the federal government, doing what they want with little accountability.

The most powerful unelected bureaucrat in the United States today—and perhaps ever—is Elon Musk. The social-media troll and tech mogul is currently a “special government employee” leading something called the Department of Government Efficiency, though it is neither a department nor, as far as can be ascertained, all that interested in improving efficiency. DOGE’s clearest goal seems to be getting rid of as many civil servants as possible, by whatever means possible—including cajoling, buyouts, and firings, some of which have drawn reproach from courts.

The assault on government workers has been a long time coming. In 2017, during his first term, Trump began referring to federal employees as the “deep state,” and he often accused them of undermining him or slow-walking his ideas. It didn’t help that he often asked for impossible or illegal things, though the most prominent examples of defiance came from Cabinet-level, Senate-confirmed officials whom Trump himself had appointed. While campaigning as a quasi-populist, Trump railed against unelected officials who he argued treated ordinary citizens with disdain, assuming they knew best, or who were deeply enmeshed in conflicts of interest and lining their own pockets. Trump and his allies repeatedly suggested that Joe Biden’s aides were running the government because the president was too checked out to manage.

Now an unelected aide, beset with conflicts of interest, seems to be effectively running the government. He’s barreling through carefully constructed guardrails, acting as though he knows better than anyone else how the government ought to run, while a passive president looks on. No one’s pretending that Trump is particularly interested in the software systems of the government, and he’s made clear that he’s pretty detached from it all. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it, and we’ll not go where he wants to go,” he said of Musk’s role recently. In short, Trump has set a broad direction and tasked Musk with executing the details. That’s what bureaucrats do.

Because this is exactly what Trump campaigned against, justifying it is challenging, though apologists like Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk are game to try. “The American people quite literally voted for Elon Musk and DOGE when they elected Donald Trump with a historic mandate,” Kirk posted on X. But that’s absurd. Trump said on the trail that Musk would help him, but he didn’t outline this. The DOGE idea wasn’t formally announced until after the election, and Trump didn’t run on dismantling USAID or selling off half the government’s real-estate portfolio. Musk wasn’t elected, hasn’t been vetted or confirmed by the Senate, and didn’t even have to go through the standard hiring process. This is probably just as well; his admitted use of controlled substances might pose some challenges. He will reportedly not release a financial disclosure, and the White House says he’ll police his own conflicts of interest. Unfortunately, he has a long track record of questionable ethical decisions.

Democrats, otherwise reeling in the first weeks of the Trump administration, have picked up on the fact that Musk may be a useful target. Although most Democratic attacks on Trump’s populist persona have fallen short, this one seems more promising. Firing thousands of federal workers for nothing more than doing their job, while clinging to a self-described racist and a teenager nicknamed “Big Balls,” may not go over well with voters who just wanted inflation fixed. Representative Jared Golden, a Democrat from a red district in Maine, reported that he was getting a flood of constituent calls about Musk.

Focusing on Musk’s outrageous abuse of power may not be as effective as Democrats hope. Musk obviously hates many of the same people whom Trump’s fans hate, and that’s a powerful bonding force. What sinks Musk may ultimately be not populist resentment but court rulings against him, Trump’s need to remain the center of attention, or backlash when the cuts he’s pursuing start affecting voters’ lives directly.

“An unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X last week. “Congress must take action to restore the rule of law.” (If only Schumer knew anyone in Congress!) Musk quickly replied: “This is the one shot the American people have to defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of the bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people. We’re never going to get another chance like this. It’s now or never. Your support is crucial to the success of the revolution of the people.”

The most striking thing about this response—other than the world’s richest man adopting Leninist rhetoric about “the revolution of the people”—is its reversal of reality. Schumer won an election; Musk is just a bureaucrat.

Related:

Elon Musk is president. Elon Musk’s bureaucratic coup is under way.

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Is this what cancel culture achieved? Trump says the corrupt part out loud. DOGE is failing on its own terms. What happens when bird flu gets worse?

Today’s News

Trump hosted Jordanian King Abdullah II at the White House, where they discussed the president’s plan to relocate Palestinians from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Gaza cease-fire would end if Hamas did not go through with the hostage release scheduled for Saturday. The Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors yesterday to withdraw the corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

What an ‘America First’ Diet Would Really Look Like

By Yasmin Tayag

Trump’s stance on agriculture is the same as his stance on everything else: “America First.”

The notion that the country could produce all of its food domestically is nice—even admirable. An America First food system would promote eating seasonally and locally, supporting more small farmers in the process. But that is not how most people eat now.

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Ponder. “Should I leave my American partner?” one reader asks James Parker in the latest edition of “Dear James.” “I love him, but I don’t know if I can live in the U.S. forever.”

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P.S.

To me, Kendrick Lamar’s use of American-flag and Uncle Sam imagery at Sunday’s Super Bowl was fairly clearly political—and subversive. What it was not, however, was blunt. Perhaps the overly literal protest gestures of the first Trump administration have somewhat numbed viewers to anything more subtle. Regardless, I was amused and perplexed to see some commentators taking the flag’s presence as a signal of alignment with the president. “When backup dancers dressed in red, white, and blue formed the American flag, it felt more patriotic than political,” wrote The Free Press’s River Page, as though patriotism can ever be apolitical.

All of this reminded me of George Will’s review of a 1984 Bruce Springsteen show. “For the initiated, which included most of the 20,000 the night I experienced him, the lyrics, believe it or not, are most important,” Will observed. But apparently the famously erudite columnist’s insights failed him, as he badly misunderstood one of the sharpest critiques (and critics) of the Reagan era. “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’” So close, and yet so far.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Every year, Super Bowl advertisers pay millions to appear on screens for a minute or less. The ad slots tend more toward the upbeat than the controversial. But even by the low bar of Super Bowl advertising, this year was rather risk-averse. Sweet animals and mascots abounded. Multiple ads featured vaguely old-timey montages. At a certain point, the commercials started to blend together. (The two different ads featuring flying hair certainly did.)

In past big games, some companies have attempted to speak to the zeitgeist by addressing civic or political themes in their ads. In 2017, just after Donald Trump was inaugurated for the first time, some major Super Bowl advertisers addressed politics head-on: Budweiser released an ad portraying the founder of the company encountering discrimination as he immigrated to America. Airbnb’s spot that year seemingly criticized Trump’s then–travel ban.

In the past decade or so, in particular, some brands have embraced explicitly political marketing, giving credence to the idea that consumers “vote with their wallets.” Some shoppers have said that they do: A 2018 survey from the communications firm Edelman found that nearly 60 percent of American consumers would buy or boycott a brand “solely because of its position on a social or political issue,” up 12 points from the year before. Following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, many consumers (and employees) demanded that major corporations, even those whose businesses didn’t directly relate to social issues, take a stand on topics such as race, voting rights, and abortion—even if some suspected that companies were responding to pressure rather than acting on genuine principle.

This year’s Super Bowl advertisers showed little interest in going near any of that. Few made explicit reference to politics (excepting nonprofits). Timothy Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern, told me that he sees the 2023 Bud Light imbroglio, in which the company faced massive backlash over partnering with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a social-media video, as a shift. By 2023, Americans had started to soften on their interest in companies taking a stand on social issues, according to Gallup. Flickers of a move away from political ads were apparent last year; during both the 2023 and the 2024 games, Budweiser made a nostalgia play, focusing its ads on the brand’s classic Clydesdale horses.

The NFL, for its part, decided this year to remove the message “End Racism,” which had been stenciled onto the edge of the end zone for the past four Super Bowls, and replace it with “Choose Love.” Donald Trump attended the game, the first sitting president to do so; the league has denied that the timing of the change was related to the president’s attendance.

Super Bowl ad space was available for purchase well before the presidential election: Skechers, back in May, became the first brand to confirm that it had bought a national spot. By mid-2024, about 85 percent of the ad units were sold out, and by early November, all of the slots had sold. A bit of reshuffling followed—State Farm pulled its ad after the Los Angeles–area fires—but for the most part, companies have been prepping for many months. Still, Calkins told me, every advertiser likely took a closer look at their cuts after the election, to make sure that nothing would spark too much controversy, given the new administration.

Super Bowl ads cost so much—more than $8 million this year for some national slots, nearly double what they cost a decade ago—and a misstep can pose a dire risk for companies. But many still find the huge audience, a rarity in our fractured media environment, worth the potential treachery, Calkins told me. The challenge for brands going forward, he said, is to find the balance of being “safe” without losing creativity. This year, lots of ads were uncontroversial—and uninspired. Maybe next year, more of them will surprise us.

Related:

What the Hims Super Bowl ad is really selling What was that Super Bowl ad even selling?

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How progressives froze the American dream Trump signals he might ignore the courts. A new kind of crisis for American universities The Christian mandate is more arduous than J. D. Vance allows.

Today’s News

Hamas alleged that Israel broke the cease-fire deal and has indefinitely postponed the hostage release scheduled for this Saturday. A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had failed to comply with his court order to restore federal funding after the recent freeze. President Donald Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports.

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Work in Progress: Tom Brady could be worth $375 million in the booth, Derek Thompson writes. The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal rounds up essays in which Atlantic writers travel near and far to find what’s missing.

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A Super Bowl spectacle over the Gulf Why is the Trump administration deleting a paper on suicide risk? Trump’s conquest of the Kennedy Center is accelerating. The new authoritarianism

Evening Read

Patrick Smith / Getty

What Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime Show Said

By Spencer Kornhaber

The Super Bowl halftime show is an opportunity for big, dumb fun: explosions, laser shows, left sharks. But big, dumb fun isn’t Kendrick Lamar’s thing. The 37-year-old Los Angeles rapper and Pulitzer Prize winner prefers subtlety, smarts, and fun that’s tinged with danger and unease. Amid tough, tense circumstances, he put on a tough, tense—and quite satisfying—show.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Laugh (or don’t). A new biography of the Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels profiles the unfunny man who became the arbiter of funny, James Parker writes.

Read. The Finnish writer Tove Jansson was the outsider who captured American loneliness, Lauren LeBlanc writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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When it comes to tariffs for Canada and Mexico, America is ending the week pretty much as it started. Over the course of just a few days, Donald Trump—following up on a November promise—announced 25 percent tariffs on the country’s North American neighbors, caused a panic in the stock market, eked out minor concessions from foreign leaders, and called the whole thing off (for 30 days, at least). But the residue of this week’s blink-and-you-missed-it trade war will stick.

The consensus among economists is that the now-paused tariffs on Canada and Mexico would have caused significant, perhaps even immediate, cost hikes and inflation for Americans. Tariffs on Mexico could have raised produce prices within days, because about a third of America’s fresh fruits and vegetables are imported from Mexico, Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at Yale’s Budget Lab, told me in an email. But “uncertainty about tariffs poses a strong risk of fueling inflation, even if tariffs don’t end up going into effect,” he argued. Tedeschi noted that “one of the cornerstone findings of economics over the past 50 years is the importance of expectations” when it comes to inflation. Consumers, nervous about inflation, may change their behavior—shifting their spending, trying to find higher-paying jobs, or asking for more raises—which can ultimately push up prices in what Tedeschi calls a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The drama of recent days may also make foreign companies balk at the idea of entering the American market. During Trump’s first term, domestic industrial production decreased after tariffs were imposed. Although Felix Tintelnot, an economics professor at Duke, was not as confident as Tedeschi is about the possibility of unimposed tariffs driving inflation, he suggested that the threats could have ripple effects on American business: “Uncertainty by itself is discouraging to investments that incur big onetime costs,” he told me. In sectors such as the auto industry, whose continental supply chains rely on border crossing, companies might avoid new domestic projects until all threats of a trade war are gone (which, given the persistence of Trump’s threats, may be never). That lack of investment could affect quality and availability, translating to higher costs down the line for American buyers. Some carmakers and manufacturers are already rethinking their operations, just in case.

And the 10 percent tariffs on China (although far smaller than the 60 percent Trump threatened during his campaign) are not nothing, either. These will hit an estimated $450 billion of imports—for context, last year, the United States imported about $4 trillion in foreign goods—and China has already hit back with new tariffs of its own. Yale’s Budget Lab found that the current China tariffs will raise overall average prices by 0.1 to 0.2 percent. Tariffs, Tedeschi added, are regressive, meaning they hurt lower-earning households more than high-income ones.

Even the most attentive companies and shoppers might have trouble anticipating how Trump will handle future tariffs. Last month, he threatened and then dropped a tariff on Colombia; this week, he hinted at a similar threat against the European Union. There is a case to be made that Trump was never serious about tariffs at all—they were merely a way for him to appear tough on trade and flex his power on the international stage. And although many of the concessions that Mexico and Canada offered were either symbolic or had been in the works before the tariff threats, Trump managed to appear like the winner to some of his supporters.

Still, the longest-lasting damage of the week in trade wars may be the solidification of America’s reputation as a fickle ally. As my colleague David Frum wrote on Wednesday, the whole episode leaves the world with the lesson that “countries such as Canada, Mexico, and Denmark that commit to the United States risk their security and dignity in the age of Trump.”

Related:

The tariffs were never real. How Trump lost his trade war

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A federal judge said he would issue a temporary restraining order that would pause parts of the Trump administration’s plan to slash the USAID workforce and withdraw employees from their overseas posts. Donald Trump met with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba at the White House, where they discussed reducing the U.S.’s trade deficit with Japan. A plane carrying 10 people went missing in western Alaska while en route from Unalakleet to Nome.

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The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka examines a new, unbearably honest kind of writing. Atlantic Intelligence: For a time, it took immense wealth—not to mention energy—to train powerful new AI models, Damon Beres writes. “That may no longer be the case.”

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Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Wikimedia Commons.

The Rise of the Selfish Plutocrats

By Brian Klaas

The role of the ultra-wealthy has morphed from one of shared social responsibility and patronage to the freewheeling celebration of selfish opulence. Rather than investing in their society—say, by giving alms to the poor, or funding Caravaggios and cathedrals—many of today’s plutocrats use their wealth to escape to private islands, private Beyoncé concerts, and, above all, extremely private superyachts. One top Miami-based “yacht consultant” has dubbed itself Medici Yachts. The namesake recalls public patronage and social responsibility, but the consultant’s motto is more fitting for an era of indulgent billionaires: “Let us manage your boat. For you is only to smile and make memories.”

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Donald Trump really knows how to sell someone on working for him. “I told Linda, ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job at putting yourself out of a job,” he said Tuesday in the Oval Office. That’s Linda McMahon, whom he’s nominated to lead the Department of Education. The president promised that he would abolish the department during the campaign, though doing so would require an act of Congress. But he’s been vague about what that would mean—and one reason might be that many people are a little vague on what the department actually does.

Republicans have been calling for an end to the Department of Education basically since it was established, in 1979. The specific arguments have varied, but they’ve usually boiled down to some version of the idea that education decisions should be made at the local level, rather than by the federal government. As President Ronald Reagan discovered when he tried to axe the department, this is more popular as a talking point than as policy.

Contrary to what some attacks on the department say or imply, it doesn’t determine curricula. Those are set at the state and local levels, though the federal government does sometimes set guidelines or attach strings to funding in exchange for meeting metrics. During the Obama administration, Tea Party activists railed against “Common Core” standards, which they said were federal overreach. In fact, Common Core was neither created nor mandated by the federal government. The Obama years actually saw the federal government step back from control by ending No Child Left Behind, a controversial George W. Bush initiative.

One of the Education Department’s biggest footprints nationally is as a distributor of federal funds. Drawing from its roughly $80 billion budget, it sends billions to state and local school systems every year, especially to poorer districts, via the Title I program, which aims to provide equal education through teacher training, instructional material, and enrichment programs. The department also provides billions in financial aid—both through programs like Pell Grants and, since 2010, by making student loans directly to borrowers—and it runs FAFSA, the widely used mechanism for student financial-aid requests. (Less than 5 percent of the federal budget goes to education.)

The Education Department also enforces rules around civil rights—most notably through Title IX, which prevents discrimination in federally funded education on the basis of sex and has been interpreted to govern issues including equality in athletics programs and how schools handle sexual harassment and sexual violence. President Joe Biden also expanded protections for transgender students by issuing rules through the department banning discrimination “based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics in federally funded education programs.” These powers have made the department a major target for conservatives. (The Trump administration promptly withdrew Biden’s rules.)

Trump’s platform called for the end of the Education Department, but in an interview with Time last year, Trump suggested a “virtual closure.” He was vague about what that would mean. “You’re going to need some people just to make sure they’re teaching English in the schools. Okay, you know English and mathematics, let’s say,” he said. “But we want to move education back to the states.” This doesn’t make clear how he’d manage this enforcement, nor what would happen to federal education spending. Federal funds accounted for about 14 percent of state and local education funding in the 2022 fiscal year, the most recent data available—a lifeline for many districts, and especially crucial in some red states that have supported Trump.

Some of the president’s allies have been more specific about their plans. Project 2025, for example, wants to dismantle the Education Department as well. The document suggests that the government could simply distribute education funding to states to use as they see fit, with no conditions. In practice, that would likely mean red states funneling more money into charter schools, religious education, and other alternatives to public schools. (Project 2025 is skeptical of what it calls “the woke-dominated system of public schools.”) The plan would return student lending to the private sector. But even Project 2025 foresees many of the Education Department’s functions, such as Title IX matters and the Office of Postsecondary Education, being dispersed to other parts of the federal government.

While Trump talks about getting rid of the Education Department, his actions say otherwise. “Trump says he will give power back to the states. But he has also said he is prepared to use executive power to crack down on schools with policies that don’t align with his culture-war agenda,” my colleague Lora Kelley reported in November. Yesterday, Trump issued an executive order banning transgender athletes in women’s sports. To do so, he’s using—you guessed it—the power of the Education Department.

Other conservative priorities, such as shutting down diversity programs, probing and punishing anti-Semitism on campuses, and attacking affirmative action in admissions, are being run through the Education Department. These functions could be shifted elsewhere, including to the Justice Department, but Trump is still actively pursuing them.

And there’s the rub. A president could, in theory, get rid of the Education Department, but most presidents, including Trump, can’t and don’t want to get rid of the things it does. The situation is reminiscent of the federal grant freeze last month. Trump campaigned on cutting spending, and many people cheered. But once his administration tried to do it, swift backlash—including from Republicans in Congress—forced him to retreat. Slashing government spending is a popular idea in the abstract. The problem is that at some point you have to start cutting off the specific programs that people actually like and need.

Related:

Trump wants to have it both ways on education. George Packer: When the culture war comes for the kids

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play, Russell Berman writes. Gazans don’t need a riviera. They need water. The spies are shown the door.

Today’s News

A federal judge temporarily paused the Trump administration’s deadline for federal workers to accept a deferred resignation buyout. The Justice Department agreed to temporarily restrict Department of Government Efficiency staffers from having access to the Treasury Department’s highly sensitive payment system. In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote that his plan for Gaza would involve Israel turning Gaza over to the United States after the fighting ceases. He added that no U.S. soldiers would be needed.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Parenting in America keeps getting more intensive, Kate Cray writes. The philosophy is hard on parents and children alike. The Weekly Planet: Trump is inheriting an environmental disaster, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Don’t Make Small Talk. Think Big Talk.

By Arthur C. Brooks

As a rule, I avoid social and professional dinners. Not because I’m anti-social or don’t like food; quite the opposite. It’s because the conversations are usually lengthy, superficial, and tedious. Recently, however, my wife and I attended a dinner with several other long-married couples that turned out to be the most fascinating get-together we’ve experienced in a long time. The hostess, whom we had met only once before, opened the evening with a few niceties, but then almost immediately posed this question to the couples present: “Have you ever had a major crisis in your marriage?”

Read the full article.

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There is no real-estate solution for Gaza. Democrats wonder where their leaders are.

Culture Break

Illustration by Alex Merto

Examine. The economists have taken over the NBA, Jordan Sargent writes. Business regulations now rule.

Read. Up until 1968, government bureaucrats oversaw British theater. They censored countless works of genius—and left behind an archive of suppression, Thomas Chatterton Williams writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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One sign that the egg-cost crisis has gotten dire came in the form of a bright-yellow sticker on a laminated breakfast menu: On Monday, Waffle House announced that it would be adding a temporary 50-cent surcharge to each egg ordered.

Egg prices have risen dramatically as of late. First, inflation pushed up their cost. Then the ongoing bird-flu outbreak led to shortages. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump assured Americans that he would get food costs under control: He vowed last summer that he would bring food prices down “on day one”—a promise he did not fulfill. As egg prices have kept ticking up in recent weeks, Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, has blamed the Biden administration for high egg costs, citing the standard, USDA-authorized measure of killing millions of egg-laying chickens that were infected with bird flu (something the previous Trump administration also did). The average price of a dozen eggs in U.S. cities remained below $2 until 2022. Eggs now cost an average of more than $4 a dozen—it’s a lot higher at some grocery stores—and the USDA has forecasted a 20 percent further price jump for eggs in 2025. As a spokesperson for Waffle House said in a statement, high egg prices are now forcing customers and restaurants to make “difficult decisions.”

As egg prices shift, so does the pricing logic that grocery stores and restaurants have long used. For decades now, grocers have helped maintain eggs’ affordable image, even when the amount they themselves spent on eggs was fluctuating. Many stores consider eggs “loss leaders”; they effectively subsidize the cost of eggs in order to draw in shoppers (who, they expect, might then splurge on higher-margin items). This was possible for stores to do because eggs were cheap to produce and readily in supply. Innovations in industrial farming, incubation, artificial lighting (to trick hens into thinking it was morning and time to lay), and carton technology meant that, by the early 20th century, cheap eggs were bountiful in American markets.

But when wholesale costs soar, as they are now, the loss-leader rationale starts to strain. (The cost of a dozen eggs for restaurants and stores is about $7, compared with $2.25 last fall, according to one recent estimate.) A few grocers are keeping egg prices consistent despite rising costs, but many more have started passing high prices over to shoppers. Eggs are also ingredients in lots of grocery items, such as baked goods and salad dressing—so those may see price increases too.

As for restaurants, when the cost of a single item goes up, they are generally willing to absorb it, with the hope that the price will soon go down and perhaps another item will be cheaper the next month, Alex Susskind, a Cornell professor who teaches courses in food and beverage management, told me. But when a cost goes up as continuously as egg prices have, restaurants start to run out of options. Susskind noted that the Waffle House spike was not a permanent price increase but a surcharge, which leaves open the option for the chain to simply remove it in the future. The Waffle House spokesperson said in the restaurant’s statement that “we are continuously monitoring egg prices and will adjust or remove the surcharge as market conditions allow.”

All of this has hit Americans hard, because we eat quite a lot of eggs. Egg consumption peaked around the end of World War II, when Americans ate an average of more than one egg a day per person. After waning a bit in the 1990s, eggs bounced back in the 2010s: By 2019, Americans were eating an average of about 279 eggs a year—that’s five to six a week. The resurgence was due in part to the fact that, after decades of warning about the risks of high-cholesterol foods, the federal government updated its guidance. Now some Americans are cutting back temporarily, but others are attempting to stock up on several dozens of eggs at a time. In spite of all the drama of the past few years, Americans aren’t likely to go eggless anytime soon. Eggs are “so embedded in American culture,” my colleague Yasmin Tayag, who covers science and health, told me, predicting that “it will take a lot more than a few years of price shifts to change that.”

The price of eggs has become a symbol of where America is going: first as a sign of inflation, now of the ongoing bird-flu outbreak. Even if you had tuned out current events for the past couple of years—if you’d deleted social media, turned off news notifications, read only Victorian novels—a version of this news was still going to reach you, in the egg aisle of the grocery store. Stocking up on eggs or cutting back is a temporary solution to a bird-flu problem that is likely to persist. The virus, Yasmin said, will keep coming back, at least until more effective mitigation measures, such as vaccines, become widespread. And week after week at the grocery store, many Americans will feel the effects.

Related:

Get used to expensive egg prices. (From 2023) Bird flu is a national embarrassment.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago, Yair Rosenberg writes. How Trump lost his trade war Elon Musk wants what he can’t have: Wikipedia.

Today’s News

Secretary of State Marco Rubio walked back Donald Trump’s announcement last night that the U.S. should “take over” and “own” Gaza. Rubio told reporters that Trump was offering to help clean up and “rebuild” Gaza. A federal judge blocked Trump’s executive order that attempted to end birthright citizenship. Trump signed an executive order aimed at banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

America’s ‘Marriage Material’ Shortage

By Derek Thompson

Adults have a way of projecting their anxieties and realities onto their children. In the case of romance, the fixation on young people masks a deeper—and, to me, far more mysterious—phenomenon: What is happening to adult relationships?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The dictatorship of the engineer Tom Nichols: Trump and Musk are destroying the basics of a healthy democracy. A win for MAGA’s nationalist wing DOGE could compromise America’s nuclear weapons.

Culture Break

Illustration by Trevor Shin

Read. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque reinvented a genre, George Packer writes.

Try. Stop listening to music on a single speaker—you have two ears for a reason, Michael Owen writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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