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The Atlantic

A Brief History of Trump’s Violent Remarks

Here are 40 instances in which the former president incited or praised violence against his fellow citizens.

6 h

theatlantic.com

17 Atlantic Covers From Different Presidential Elections

These covers offer a window into the unique and enduring ideas of each electoral era.

7 h

theatlantic.com

Trump Is Threatening to Unwind AI Progress

8 h

theatlantic.com

If the presidential election has provided relief from anything, it has been the generative-AI boom. Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has made much of the technology in their public messaging, and they have not articulated particularly detailed AI platforms. Bots do not seem to rank among the economy, immigration, abortion rights, and other issues that can make or break campaigns.But don’t be fooled. Americans are very invested, and very worried, about the future of artificial intelligence. Polling consistently shows that a majority of adults from both major parties support government regulation of AI, and that demand for regulation might even be growing. Efforts to curb AI-enabled disinformation, fraud, and privacy violations, as well as to support private-sector innovation, are under way at the state and federal levels. Widespread AI policy is coming, and the next president may well steer its direction for years to come.On the surface, the two candidates couldn’t be further apart on AI. When AI has come up on the campaign trail, the focus has not been on substantive issues, but instead on the technology’s place in a supposed culture war. At a rally last winter, Trump railed against the Biden administration’s purported “use of AI to censor the speech of American citizens” (a contorted reference, perhaps, to an interview that week in which Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas denounced the “politicization” of public education around the dangers of AI, including misinformation). Trump also said he would overturn Joe Biden’s executive order on AI—a sprawling document aiming to preserve consumer and civil rights while also spurring innovation—“on day one.” Then, over the summer, the GOP platform lambasted the “dangerous” executive order as slowing innovation and imposing “Radical Leftwing ideas” on the technology, perhaps referring to the order’s stated “dedication to advancing equity.” Elon Musk, now the most powerful Trump surrogate in the world, recently invited his followers to “imagine an all-powerful woke AI.” Harris, for her part, hasn’t discussed AI much as a candidate, but she is leading many of Biden’s AI efforts as vice president, and her economic platform mentions furthering “the commitments set forth in the 2023 AI Executive Order.”[Read: The real AI threat starts when the polls close]Such rhetoric is par for the course this election cycle: Trump in particular has never been known for nuance or gravity, and tearing down Biden is obviously his default position. What no one seems to remember, though, is that Biden’s “dangerous” executive order echoes not one but two executive orders on AI that Trump himself signed. Many of the policies around AI that President Biden and Vice President Harris have supported extend principles and initiatives from Trump’s term—such as efforts to establish federal funding for AI research, prepare American workers for a changing economy, and set safety standards for the technology. The two most recent presidential administrations even agreed on ensuring that federal AI use is nondiscriminatory. Trump’s approach to the technology, in turn, built on foundations laid during Barack Obama’s presidency.In other words, despite how AI has been approached by their campaigns (that is, barely, or only in the shallowest terms), both candidates have real track records on AI, and those records are largely aligned. The technology appeared to be a rare issue driven for years by substance rather than partisanship, perhaps because prior to the launch of ChatGPT, it wasn’t on many Americans’ minds. With AI now assuming national importance, Trump has promised to tear that consensus down.Still, there’s a good chance he won’t be able to—that reason and precedent will prevail in the end, if only because there’s already so much momentum behind what began during his own administration. “To the extent that the Trump administration worked on issues of science and technology policy, it worked on AI,” Alondra Nelson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study who previously served as the acting director of Biden’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, told me. And in doing so, it was inheriting priorities set under a man Trump has called “the most ignorant president in our history.” Near the end of his second term, Obama directed several federal agencies to study and plan for the growing importance of “big data” and AI, which culminated at the end of 2016 with the publication of a report on the “future of artificial intelligence,” as well as a national strategic plan for AI research and development. Those included broad suggestions to grow the federal government’s AI expertise, support private-sector innovation, establish standards for the technology’s safety and reliability, lead international conversations on AI, and prepare the American workforce for potential automation.A few years later, Trump began to deliver on those recommendations through his executive orders on AI, a 2019 update to that strategic plan, and his White House’s guidance to federal agencies on using AI. “The Trump administration made AI a national technology priority,” Michael Kratsios, who served as the country’s chief technology officer under Trump and helped design his AI strategy, told Congress last October. In that testimony, Kratsios, who is currently the managing director of the start-up Scale AI, lauded much of Obama’s previous and Biden’s current work on AI—even criticizing Biden for not doing enough to implement existing policies—and noted the continued importance of supporting “high-quality testing and evaluation” of AI products.Biden and Harris have since taken the baton. Trump’s first executive order in particular did “have a lot of the ingredients that got much more developed in Biden’s EO,” Ellen Goodman, a professor at Rutgers Law School who has advised the National Telecommunications and Information Administration on the fair and responsible use of algorithms, told me. “So when Trump says he’s going to repeal it with a day-one action, one wonders, what is it exactly that’s so offensive?” Even specific policies and programs at the center of Biden and Harris’s work on AI, such as establishing national AI-research institutes and the National AI Initiative Office, were set in motion by the Trump administration. The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource, which Harris’s economic plan touts by name, originated with AI legislation that passed near the end of Trump’s term. Innovation, supporting American workers, and beating China are goals Harris and Trump share. Bluster aside, the candidates’ records suggest “a lot of similarities when you get down to the brass tacks of priorities,” Alexandra Givens, the president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy and civil rights, told me.[Read: The EV culture wars aren’t what they seem]To be clear, substantive disputes on AI between Harris and Trump will exist, as with any pair of Democratic and Republican presidential candidates on most issues. Even with broad agreements on priorities and government programs, implementation will vary. Kratsios had emphasized a “light touch” approach to regulation. Some big names in Silicon Valley have come out against the Biden administration’s AI regulations, arguing that they put undue burdens on tech start-ups. Much of the Republican Party’s broader message involves dismantling the federal government’s regulatory authority, Goodman said, which would affect its ability to regulate AI in any domain.And there is the “Radical Leftwing” rhetoric. The Biden-Harris administration made sure the “first piece of work out the public would see would be the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” Nelson said, which outlines various privacy and civil-rights protections that anyone building or deploying AI systems should prioritize. Republicans seem to have a particular resistance to these interventions, which are oriented around such concepts as “algorithmic discrimination,” or the idea that AI can perpetuate and worsen inequities from race, gender, or other identifying characteristics.But even here, the groundwork was actually laid by Trump. His first executive order emphasized “safety, security, privacy, and confidentiality protections,” and his second “protects privacy, civil rights, [and] civil liberties.” During his presidency, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology issued a federal plan for developing AI standards that mentioned “minimizing bias” and ensuring “non-discriminatory” AI—the very reasons why the GOP platform lashed out against Biden’s executive order and why Senator Ted Cruz recently called its proposed safety standards “woke.” The reason that Trump and his opponents have in the past agreed on these issues, despite recent rhetoric suggesting otherwise, is that these initiatives are simply about making sure the technology actually functions consistently, with equal outcomes for users. “The ‘woke’ conversation can be misleading,” Givens said, “because really, what we’re talking about is AI systems that work and have reliable outputs … Of course these systems should actually work in a predictable way and treat users fairly, and that should be a nonpartisan, commonsense approach.”In other words, the question is ultimately whether Trump will do a heel turn simply because the political winds have shifted. (The former president has been inconsistent even on major issues such as abortion and gun control in the past, so anything is possible.) The vitriol from Trump and other Republicans suggests they may simply oppose “anything that the Biden administration has put together” on AI, says Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computer scientist at Brown University who previously advised the Biden White House on science and technology policy and co-authored the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. Which, of course, means opposing much of what Trump’s own administration put together on AI.But he may find more resistance than he expects. AI has become a household topic and common concern in the less than two years since ChatGPT was released. Perhaps the parties could tacitly agree on broad principles in the past because the technology was less advanced and didn’t matter much to the electorate. Now everybody is watching.Americans broadly support Biden’s executive order. There is bipartisan momentum behind laws to regulate deepfake disinformation, combat nonconsensual AI sexual imagery, promote innovation that adheres to federal safety standards, protect consumer privacy, prevent the use of AI for fraud, and more. A number of the initiatives in Biden’s executive order have already been implemented. An AI bill of rights similar to the Biden-Harris blueprint passed Oklahoma’s House of Representatives, which has a Republican supermajority, earlier this year (the legislative session ended before the bill could make it out of committee in the senate). There is broad “industry support and civil-society support” for federal safety standards and research funding, Givens said. And every major AI company has entered voluntary agreements with and advised the government on AI regulation. “There’s going to be a different expectation of accountability from any administration around these issues and powerful tools,” Nelson said.When Obama, Trump, and Biden were elected, few people could have predicted anything like the release of ChatGPT. The technology’s trajectory could shift even before the inauguration, and almost certainly will before 2028. The nation’s political divides might just be too old, and too calcified, to keep pace—which, for once, might be to the benefit of the American people.

The Giant Asterisk on Election Betting

A disputed outcome could throw prediction markets into chaos.

9 h

theatlantic.com

Why You Might Need an Adventure

In a rut? Try shaking things up.

10 h

theatlantic.com

How to Make New Friends When You Get Older

12 h

theatlantic.com

For more than 25 years, some of reality TV’s most memorable—and villainous—contenders have declared that they’re “not here to make friends.” But on The Golden Bachelorette, the second Bachelor-franchise installment focused on a romantic lead older than 60, friendship isn’t a fruitless distraction from the main event. The new series follows the 61-year-old widow Joan Vassos and an eclectic group of men hoping to win her over—some of whom have also lost their spouse. In a pleasant break from standard reality-TV convention, including within the Bachelor franchise, many of the show’s most charming moments focus on the friendships formed among Joan’s suitors.By highlighting the men’s bonds with one another, the new series builds on The Golden Bachelor’s refreshing exploration of finding love after grief, and the ways a person’s identity can shift in late adulthood. Together, the men wrestle with profound changes brought on by widowhood, retirement, divorce, and other big transitions. In its inaugural season, The Golden Bachelorette has offered a rare window into some of the distinct social and emotional challenges that Americans encounter later in life—and the varied connections that help them mitigate such weighty stressors.Last year, Joan was an early favorite on The Golden Bachelor, where she quickly captured the septuagenarian widower Gerry Turner’s interest. But after just three episodes, the mother of four walked away from the show to care for her newly postpartum daughter. Yet being on the program offered Joan an emotional reward beyond finding a permanent partner. During her brief time as a contestant, “My heart kind of got a little fix from Gerry,” she said during a tearful exit. “As you get older, you become more invisible. People don’t see you anymore.” Her words resonated with many Golden Bachelor viewers, especially franchise newcomers and other women around her age. Now, with Joan at the fore, The Golden Bachelorette sheds light on the inner complexities of the men who are hoping she’ll see them. And by turning its attention to the unlikely intimacy forged among the male contestants, the show pushes beyond the one-dimensional stoicism that’s common in depictions of men their age.Most of the two dozen men competing for Joan’s affections, who are between 57 and 69, have experienced bereavement or devastating heartbreak. Although the world of The Golden Bachelorette—where the suitors live with one another under the same roof—is obviously a staged environment, the losses the contestants have suffered are very real: As of 2023, more than 16 percent of Americans who are 60 or older (about 13 million people) were widowed. Losing a spouse has tremendous consequences for the surviving partner’s physical, mental, and emotional health—which can begin even prior to bereavement, especially for caregiving spouses. And yet, “we as a society are not necessarily super skilled and comfortable at talking about death and loss,” Jane Lowers, an assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine, told me. “Some people will back away from engaging with somebody who’s going through grief.” A partner’s death can also lead to a crisis of self, she added, if the bereaved spouse had come to see caregiving, or being half of a marital unit, as their essential identity.On The Golden Bachelorette, loss largely brings people together, even as it prompts difficult internal reckonings. Many of Joan’s most meaningful conversations with her suitors make reference to her late husband, the milestones they shared, and her conflicting feelings as she attempts to find love again. But even when she isn’t around, the men speak candidly about grief—Joan’s, as well as their own. When one suitor announces that he’s leaving the mansion because his mother died, the others rally around him, with some tearing up as they offer their condolences and reflect on how beautiful his interactions with Joan have been.[Read: Reality (TV) is getting kinder]Another moving exchange involves a widower named Charles, who has spent almost six years racked with guilt, wondering if he could’ve done something to save his wife from a fatal brain aneurysm. Speaking with Guy, an emergency-room doctor, Charles shares that one detail of his wife’s death has always troubled him—and he looks visibly relieved when Guy reassures him, after explaining the science, that there was nothing he could have done. Later, as Charles recalls this conversation when talking with Joan, he tells her that “it changed my life.” These scenes aren’t just a striking contrast to the hostile atmosphere that’s typical of many dating-oriented competition series in which the contestants spent time together; they’re also an instructive representation of relationship-building among older men. Rather than peaceably keeping to themselves, the Golden Bachelorette men prioritize vulnerability and openness with one another. “I came in, arrived at the mansion with sadness, missed my wife,” Charles says when he leaves midway through the season. “After several weeks here at the mansion, it really helped me … the remaining friends, we bond together. We opened our hearts.”The silent anguish that Charles describes has dangerous real-world ramifications: After the death of a spouse, widowers experience higher rates of mortality, persistent depression, and social isolation than widows do. “It’s in part because they don’t have these close friendships like we’re seeing on the show,” Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Boston University and the author of Golden Years? Social Inequality in Later Life, told me. “Their social ties often were through work, and then that diminishes once they retire—or their former wives did the role.”But widowers aren’t the only demographic represented on The Golden Bachelorette. And today’s older Americans have far more complex social lives than in years past, partly because marriage, companionship, and caregiving all look different—and, often, less predictable—than they did several decades ago. Now about 36 percent of adults who get divorced are older than 50, a rising phenomenon known as gray divorce. As Carr put it, “We’re certainly moving away from that ‘one marriage for life’”—which shifts how single adults past 50 see their romantic prospects.The Golden Bachelorette chronicles what it takes for contestants to open themselves up to love, romantic or otherwise. As these changes happen in real time, the show keeps an eye toward the importance of emotional transparency when navigating later-in-life relationships. The men on the show sometimes acknowledge that they were raised to feel uncomfortable with overt displays of sentimentality, but they appear to recognize the long-term toll of suppressing their feelings. Carr added that she was pleased to see how quickly a group of men with so little in common came to embrace one another. “Even though it’s an artificial situation,” she noted, “a lot of those lessons can be imported to other men.”On The Golden Bachelor, the isolated production environment ended up nudging the women toward one another, too. “We were all sequestered in this mansion without our phones and television and social media, so it made it very easy to connect with people very quickly at a deep level,” Kathy Swarts, one of the contestants, told me. When we spoke, Kathy was just leaving Pennsylvania, where she’d been visiting Susan Noles, one of her closest friends from The Golden Bachelor. Both told me, in separate conversations, that they counted joining the show as a transformative choice, and that their age also gave them a unique perspective on discovering love—whether with Gerry or with new friends. For Susan, watching the men navigate the same journey has been fascinating—and it’s different from watching the franchise’s earlier seasons, or other reality shows, because the contestants are mostly parents and grandparents.“We’ve given our lives to our children,” Susan explained, adding that younger contestants have “not experienced what we have—we’ve had the ups, the downs, the horrible, the broken hearts, the happy moments.” By the time they enter the mansion, the Golden contestants largely know who they are and what they want. That changes what it means to win: Though they may not come to the show looking for new platonic bonds, we see the participants recognize the beauty of forging friendships with peers who meet them as individuals—not as extensions of their families or employers. This season’s men may have begun as strangers, but they leave The Golden Bachelorette having found a “group of brothers,” as one departing participant calls his competitors.

Eight Nonfiction Books That Will Frighten You

12 h

theatlantic.com

A decade ago, the inaugural season of Serial debuted. The podcast, about the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and questions surrounding the arrest and conviction of her former boyfriend, Adnan Syed, drew upon the alchemy of suspenseful storytelling and a taste for the lurid that has enticed Americans for centuries. Serial’s massive popularity, and its week-by-week format, overhauled how the genre was received: Audiences were no longer content with merely consuming the story. They wanted to be active participants, to post theories, drive by suspects’ houses, and call attention to errors.As a result, the true-crime landscape was transformed. Its popularity has soared, making room for work that not only shocks but also asks deeper questions. There has been a welcome uptick in stories that focus on the victims of violence and the social structures that perpetuate it. But a perennial desire for the macabre doesn’t just dissipate under the umbrella of good intentions. The level of dreck in the genre—particularly cheap, poorly researched media that substitutes flippancy for compassion—continues to rise.This glut makes it hard to identify the best true crime, which harnesses the instinct for titillation in the service of empathy, justice, and maybe even systemic change. These eight books are some of the most accomplished the genre has to offer. They broaden the definition of true crime itself—and most important, they interrogate their own telling of the story, reflecting an essential self-awareness about mining real people’s grief.The Phantom Prince, by Elizabeth KendallSo much has been written about Ted Bundy, who murdered dozens of women and girls in the 1970s, most of it wondering, from the outside, how Bundy got away with so much for so long. Kendall, however, had a more intimate perspective: She was his long-term girlfriend (though she uses a pseudonym here). She thought she knew Bundy well, but as the murders of women in the Pacific Northwest began to spread, and police sketches of a man named Ted circulated, she had to confront her level of denial—and then catalog the collateral damage of being a serial killer’s partner. This book is dedicated to figuring out what she actually knew and was kept from knowing, and Kendall does so in plain (if occasionally awkward) prose that doesn’t shy away from her own blind spots. True-crime memoirs were fairly rare in the early ’80s, when hers was released—and it remains an important one.[Read: The gross spectacle of murder fandom]Under the Bridge, by Rebecca GodfreyThe horrific 1997 murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk by several other teenagers prompted a reckoning in Victoria, British Columbia. Godfrey, the author of The Torn Skirt, a novel about the effects of a self-destructive girlhood, felt compelled to report on what happened, and why. The fine Hulu series of the same name, released in April and starring Riley Keough and Archie Panjabi, was more about Godfrey’s investigative quest than Virk’s murder. But the original work, which I’ve read multiple times, better depicts the toxic dynamic of teenage girls egging one another on from bullying to more violent acts, while also humanizing the victim and perpetrators.The Red Parts, by Maggie NelsonIn 2005, Nelson published the poetry collection Jane: A Murder, which focuses on the then-unsolved murder of her aunt Jane Mixer 36 years before, and the pain of a case in limbo. This nonfiction companion, published two years later, deals with the fallout of the unexpected discovery and arrest of a suspect thanks to a new DNA match. Nelson’s exemplary prose style mixes pathos with absurdity (“Where I imagined I might find the ‘face of evil,’” she writes of Mixer’s killer, “I am finding the face of Elmer Fudd”), and conveys how this break upends everything she believed about Mixer, the case, and the legal system. Nelson probes still-open questions instead of arriving at anything remotely like “closure,” and the way she continues to ask them makes The Red Parts stand out.[Read: The con man who became a true-crime writer]Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso, by Kali Nicole GrossFour years ago, my friend and fellow crime writer Elon Green investigated the alarming lack of true crime written by Black authors; today, white authors still tell most of these stories, most of which are about white victims. This is in part, I’ve come to believe, because so many crime narratives—particularly historical ones—depend on a written record of some kind, which tends to exclude people of color. This book by Gross, a historian based at Emory University, was a revelation to me for uncovering the fascinating, messy story of Tabbs, a formerly enslaved woman, probable fraudster, and murderer in 1880s Philadelphia. Tabbs does not fit into any easy box, and Gross’s careful research places the desperate acts of this particular woman against the backdrop of post-Reconstruction America, a time when the gap between what was promised at the end of slavery and what was actually possible widened sharply.We Keep the Dead Close, by Becky CooperCooper, a onetime New Yorker staffer, had for years been haunted by a story she’d heard while attending Harvard in the late 2000s: A girl had been murdered, and she had been having an affair with her professor, which the school covered up. The story turned out to be more myth than truth, but Cooper felt compelled to investigate, and she discovered that there had, in fact, been a long-unsolved murder. Some of the details eerily parallel those of The Red Parts—both victims are college students named Jane, both murdered in 1969—but Cooper’s book veers away from Nelson’s. The book, which conjures the vivid, all-too-brief life of the anthropology student Jane Britton, is a furious examination of a culture of complicity at Harvard, where, Cooper points out, sexual-misconduct allegations were (and still are) dismissed or ignored. And like Nelson, Cooper demolishes the concept of closure.[Read: When Truman Capote’s lies caught up with him]The Third Rainbow Girl, by Emma Copley EisenbergBefore Eisenberg put out her wonderful novel, Housemates, she worked primarily in the nonfiction space, publishing a 2017 feature story for Splinter about the missing Black trans teen Sage Smith, which was reprinted in my true-crime anthology Unspeakable Acts. She also published this book, a standout hybrid of reportage, memoir, and cultural criticism. Her subject was the 1980 murders of Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero in Pocahontas County, West Virginia (and the subsequent wrongful conviction of a suspect)—but also the author’s own queer coming of age in the same area of Appalachia. Eisenberg is a warm, compassionate guide through a thicket of violence, abrupt endings, and youthful longings, and her book is an intelligent corrective to common true-crime tropes. “Telling a story is often about obligation and sympathy, identification, and empathy,” she writes. “With whom is your lot cast? To whom are you bound?”Seventy Times Seven, by Alex MarI had been waiting many years for a book about Paula Cooper, the Black teenage girl who was sentenced to death for the robbery and murder of Ruth Pelke, an elderly white woman, in the mid-’80s. Though she committed the crime with three other girls, only 15-year-old Cooper was given the death penalty. She became the youngest person on death row in the country at the time, leading to international outrage, a clemency campaign, and an unlikely friendship with the victim’s grandson, Bill. The points this story makes about the human capacity for empathy, who merits collective forgiveness, and the stubborn persistence of the death penalty are discomfiting. Mar (another Unspeakable Acts contributor) has made a long career of probing deeper questions, and in this book she eschews tidy narratives. Forgiveness does not, in fact, overcome the ramifications of violence, as will become clear in Bill’s home and work life—and in Paula’s, after she is eventually released from prison. Mar masterfully explores who is entitled to mercy, and how we continue to fail prisoners during and after their incarceration.By the Fire We Carry, by Rebecca NagleFinally, this terrific new book, published just last month, looks at the larger picture of Indigenous autonomy and forced removal through the lens of one case—the murder of the Muscogee Nation member George Jacobs by another tribal member, Patrick Murphy—asking whether the state of Oklahoma actually had the jurisdiction to prosecute and execute Murphy. In 2020, the Supreme Court would eventually rule that much of eastern Oklahoma did remain an American Indian reservation; its decision set a far-reaching precedent that, in practice, would prove more complicated to enforce. Nagle, a member of the Cherokee Nation and a resident of Oklahoma, writes with sensitivity and empathy for the Native American communities she grew up in and around. Her work is similar in scope and feel to (and clearly in conversation with) Missing and Murdered and Stolen, the excellent podcasts by the Indigenous Canadian journalist Connie Walker.

The Rise of the Post-Marxist Electorate

15 h

theatlantic.com

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here.A simple and intuitive view of democratic politics holds that political parties exist to advance the material self-interest of the coalitions that support them. If this were true, then as the Democrats became the party of high-earning college graduates, they would have abandoned economic policies that would threaten those voters’ pocketbooks. A version of this essentially Marxist analysis has become standard fare on the right, where the phrase woke capital has become a slur to describe the Democrats’ supposed fealty to corporate America; the Republican vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, has argued that the Democratic Party is now the party of Wall Street.But as wealthier and better-educated voters have shifted toward the Democrats, the party and its constituents have become more economically progressive, not less. They have largely united around an economic agenda that emphasizes aiding the poor and middle class, and around messaging that places that agenda front and center. The very richest Democrats have become just as left-wing on economics as their less affluent party members, and far more economically progressive than low- and middle-income Republicans. U.S. politics seems to have decisively entered what you might call a post-Marxist or post-materialist phase.From the New Deal through the George W. Bush era, the Marxist view of politics largely held up. The rich and educated overwhelmingly voted for Republicans, who pursued tax cuts and deregulation, while the working class mostly voted for Democrats, who expanded the social safety net.[Rogé Karma: Why America abandoned the greatest economy in history]Over the past decade and a half, however, the dynamic has dramatically shifted. In 2008, the top fifth of earners favored Democrats by just a few percentage points; by 2020, they were the group most likely to vote for Democrats and did so by a nearly 15-point margin. (Democrats won the poorest fifth of voters by a similarly large margin.) Democrats now represent 24 of the 25 highest-income congressional districts and 43 of the top 50 counties by economic output. A similarly stark shift has occurred if you look at college education rather than income. Perhaps most dramatic of all has been the change among wealthy white people. Among white voters, in every presidential election from 1948 until 2012, the richest 5 percent were the group most likely to vote Republican, according to analysis by the political scientist Thomas Wood. In 2016 and 2020, this dynamic reversed itself: The top 5 percent became the group most likely to vote Democratic.This newly educated and affluent Democratic Party did not swing to the right on economics. Quite the contrary. Following the 2020 election, the Biden administration pursued an expansive economic agenda that included a generous pandemic stimulus package, a massive expansion of the social safety net for the middle class and poor (including cash transfers to families and universal pre-K), and large investments to create well-paying jobs in left-behind places. These policies, if fully enacted, would have represented a significant redistribution of wealth. Most of the $4.5 trillion in proposed new spending would have been funded by a spate of new taxes on corporations and the ultra-rich. “The Biden agenda was more ambitious and redistributive than anything else pursued by Democrats since the 1960s or ’70s,” Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale and co-author of a recent paper on the Democrats’ changing coalition, told me. “This is not a party pursuing a ‘Brahmin left’ agenda. It’s pursuing an incredibly progressive economic agenda.”Despite its ambition, this agenda did not provoke anything resembling a rebellion from the party’s rich, educated base or the politicians who represent them. (Indeed, one of the biggest obstacles to its enactment was West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who represents a much more working-class state than most of his Democratic colleagues and who switched his affiliation to independent this year.) Kamala Harris is now running on many of those same policies and, according to the polls, her support among college-educated voters is even higher than Joe Biden’s was in 2020.A common complaint from the center and the right is that the influx of affluent, highly educated voters into the Democratic Party has caused it to focus primarily on culture-war issues instead of pocketbook economics. But when Hacker and his co-authors analyzed party platforms since 1980, they found that since the early 2000s the share dedicated to economic issues has steadily increased and that economic issues take up twice as much space as cultural issues. They reached a similar conclusion when looking at Twitter, where you’d most expect to see party elites pandering to the cultural tastes of their base. They looked at the tweets of high-ranking Democrats from 2015 to 2022 and found that nine of the 10 most frequently tweeted phrases were focused on economic issues, such as Build Back Better, Affordable Care Act, and American Rescue Plan; the only noneconomic issue in the top 10 was Roe v. Wade. (By contrast, just three of the top 10 Republican-used phrases referred to economic issues.) The authors also found that members representing wealthy districts were actually slightly more likely to discuss pocketbook issues such as economics and health care than members from poor districts.The policies and rhetoric coming from party leaders reflect the fact that affluent liberal voters have moved well to the left on economic issues. A major survey conducted after the 2020 election found that overwhelming majorities of Democrats in the top fifth of income distribution favored raising the federal minimum wage, hiking taxes on individuals earning more than $600,000 a year, making college debt-free, and enacting Medicare for All. That’s similar or slightly higher than the support for those policies among poor and middle-income Democrats and anywhere from 20 to 40 points higher than support among low- and middle-income Republicans.None of this means material self-interest doesn’t matter at all to affluent liberals. Some evidence suggests that although wealthy Democrats tend to support higher taxes in the abstract, they are less likely to support specific tax increases that affect them directly; they are also known to oppose new housing construction in their own neighborhoods that would make housing more affordable. But even those exceptions are less exceptional than they may appear. According to the survey cited above, a bare majority of the richest Democrats support raising taxes on individuals making more than $250,000. And during this campaign season, the leaders of the Democratic Party—including both Harris and former President Barack Obama—have trumpeted their support for building more housing.The leftward drift of high-status voters is partly a story about a genuine ideological conversion. Since the 2008 financial crisis, politicians, academics, and the media have paid far more attention to how the existing economic system has produced inequality and hardship. Highly educated, affluent voters, who also tend to be the most plugged-in to national politics, seem to have responded to this shift by embracing more progressive economic views.[David Deming: ]Break up big econThe story is also about political strategy. After Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, many Democrats became convinced that the best way to win back disaffected working-class voters was to enact policies that would help them. Surveys consistently find that middle- and low-income Republicans strongly disagree with their own party leaders on most economic issues, creating a potential opening for Democrats.The Biden agenda that was shaped by those views has largely produced its intended economic effects. Unemployment has fallen, wage inequality has shrunk, and hundreds of billions of investment dollars have poured into red states. Many of the country’s forgotten communities are making a strong comeback. Politically, however, the effort to win back working-class voters appears to have flopped: If polls are to be believed, the Democratic Party is bleeding working-class support more badly than it did in 2016 or 2020.Part of that failure seems to be because, when it comes to the economy, many voters are concerned about high prices above all else and view Democrats as responsible for them. But there’s also compelling evidence that Republican voters aren’t particularly motivated by economic policy in the first place. That is, although they disagree with GOP politicians about health care, taxing the rich, and the minimum wage, they don’t much care about that disagreement. A recent paper by the political scientist William Marble analyzed nearly 200 survey questions going back decades and found that in the 1980s and ’90s, non-college-educated white voters were more likely to vote in accordance with their economic views, causing them to support Democrats. Since the early 2000s, however, that dynamic has inverted: Non-college-educated white voters now place a far greater emphasis on culture-war issues over economic ones, pushing them toward supporting Republicans.That realignment leaves both parties in a strange place heading into November. Voters consistently say that the economy is the most important issue of the 2024 election. And yet the affluent overwhelmingly support Kamala Harris, whose administration favored bold redistribution and big government spending, while a critical mass of working-class voters favor Donald Trump, whose economic agenda consisted largely of cutting taxes for the rich and trying to kill the Affordable Care Act.The irony is that the Biden administration’s economic-populist push implicitly assumed that the Marxist view of politics was correct all along. Democrats embraced an agenda that largely went against its voters’ immediate material interests in the hopes that they could win over less-wealthy voters by appealing to their material interests. But working-class Trump supporters, just like liberal elites, turn out to have other things on their mind.

The Orwell Exception

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1984 ends not with a bang, but with a grammar lesson. Readers of George Orwell’s novel—still reeling, likely, from the brutal dystopia they’ve spent the previous 300-odd pages living in—are subjected to a lengthy explanation of Newspeak, the novel’s uncanny form of English. The appendix explains the language that has been created to curtail independent thought: the culled vocabulary; the sterilized syntax; the regime’s hope that, before long, all the vestiges of Oldspeak—English in its familiar form, the English of Shakespeare and Milton and many of Orwell’s readers—will be translated into the new vernacular. The old language, and all it carried with it, will die away.With its dizzying details and technical prose, “The Principles of Newspeak” makes for a supremely strange ending. It is, in today’s parlance, a choice. But it is a fitting one. Language, in 1984, is violence by another means, an adjunct of the totalitarian strategies inflicted by the regime. Orwell’s most famous novel, in that sense, is the fictionalized version of his most famous essay. “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946, is a writing manual, primarily—a guide to making language that says what it means, and means what it says. It is also an argument. Clear language, Orwell suggests, is a semantic necessity as well as a moral one. Newspeak, in 1984, destroys with the same ferocious efficiency that tanks and bombs do. It is born of the essay’s most elemental insight: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”The essay, over the years, has enjoyed the same backhanded success that Orwell himself has. Its barbs have softened into conventional wisdom. Its enduring relevance has consigned it, in some degree, to cliché. Who would argue against clarity?But the essay, today, can read less as a rousing defense of the English language than as a prescient concession of defeat. “Use clear language” cannot be our guide when clarity itself can be so elusive. Our words have not been honed into oblivion—on the contrary, new ones spring to life with giddy regularity—but they fail, all too often, in the same ways Newspeak does: They limit political possibilities, rather than expand them. They cede to cynicism. They saturate us in uncertainty. The words might mean what they say. They might not. They might describe shared truths; they might manipulate them. Language, the connective tissue of the body politic—that space where the collective “we” matters so much—is losing its ability to fulfill its most basic duty: to communicate. To correlate. To connect us to the world, and to one another.And semantic problems, as Orwell knew, have a way of turning into real ones. Violence descends; threats take shape; emergencies come; we may try to warn one another—we may scream the warnings—but we have trouble conveying the danger. We have so much to say. In another way, though, we have no words.Earlier this month, Donald Trump mused aloud about the violence Americans might anticipate on November 5. If Election Day brings havoc, he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, the crisis would come not from outside actors but instead from “the enemy from within”: “some very bad people,” he clarified, “some sick people”—the “radical-left lunatics.”The former president further mused about a solution to the problem. “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard,” he said, “or, if really necessary, by the military.”A presidential candidate who may well retake the White House is threatening to use the military against American citizens: The news here is straightforward. The language that makes the news, though, is not. The words twist and tease, issuing their threats in the conditional tense: It should be. If necessary. Trump’s words often do this; they imply very much while saying very little. They are schooled, like the man himself, in the dark art of plausible deniability. In them, Orwell’s doublespeak—that jargon of purposeful obscurity—gets one more layer of insulating irony: The former president says whatever he wants, and reserves the right not to mean it.Do we take him at his word? The answer to this question, on which so much else depends, can only ever be “maybe.” When he describes “the enemy from within”—or when he muses about police forces fighting back against criminals for “one real rough, nasty day,” or when he announces his intention to spend the first day of a second term acting as “a dictator”—you could read each as a direct threat. You could assume that he’s lying, embellishing, teasing, trolling. You could say that the line, like Trump’s others, should be taken seriously, but not literally. You could try your best, knowing all that is at stake, to parse the grammar of his delusion.But the fact that you need to translate him at all is already a concession. The constant uncertainty—about the gravest of matters—is one of the ways that Trump keeps people in his thrall. Clear language is a basic form of kindness: It considers the other person. It wants to be understood. Trump’s argot, though, is self-centered. It treats shared reality as an endless negotiation.The words cannot bear the weight of all this irony. Democracy is, at its core, a task of information management. To do its work, people need to be able to trust that the information they’re processing is, in the most fundamental way, accurate. Trump’s illegibility makes everything else less legible, too.[Read: Do you speak Fox?]Orwell published “Politics” at the end of a conflict that had, in its widespread use of propaganda, also been a war of words. In the essay, he wrestles with the fact that language—as a bomb with a near-limitless blast radius—could double as a weapon of mass destruction. This is why clarity matters. This is why words are ethical tools as well as semantic ones. The defense of language that Orwell offered in “Politics” was derived from his love of hard facts. “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information,” he confessed in his 1946 essay “Why I Write.” His was an elegant dogma. Words matter because facts matter—because truth matters. Freedom, in 1984, is many things, but they all spring from the same source: the ability to say that 2 + 2 = 4.One October surprise of 2024 took an aptly Orwellian turn: The scandal, this time around, was a matter of language. Earlier this month, John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, escalated his warnings that his former boss is unfit for office. Kelly told The Atlantic that Trump had expressed a desire for generals like the ones “that Hitler had.” Then, in an interview published by The New York Times, Kelly described Trump’s dictatorial approach to leadership, his drive to suppress opposition, his insatiable appetite for power. He concluded that Trump fits the definition of fascist.Kelly’s claim was echoed, more mildly, by Trump’s former secretary of defense—he “certainly has those inclinations,” Mark Esper said—and, less mildly, by Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump is “the most dangerous person to this country,” Milley warned in Bob Woodward’s latest book, its publication timed to coincide with the election. He is also, Milley added, “fascist to the core.” (Trump denied the men’s claims: “I am the opposite of a Nazi,” he said.) Late last week, 13 others who had served in high-level positions in the Trump administration signed an open letter: “Everyone,” they wrote, “should heed General Kelly’s warning.”The comments made headlines because of the people who expressed them: Each had worked directly with Trump. The former officials made history, though, because of the word they deployed in their warnings. Fascist is a claim of last resort. It is a term of emergency. Because of that, its validity, as a description for Trump’s seething strain of populism, has been the subject of a long-standing debate among scholars, journalists, and members of the public—one made even more complicated by the fact that, as the historian Ian Kershaw has observed, “Trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”But one need not be a scholar of fascism to see the plain reality. Trump lost an election. He refused to accept the result. In a second term, he has suggested, he will “terminate” the Constitution; use the American judicial system to take revenge on those who have angered him; and perform sweeping immigration raids, expelling millions of people from the country. Trump, in addition to praising Hitler’s generals, regularly uses language that echoes Hitler’s hatreds. He has described immigrants, whatever their legal status, as a formless “invasion,” and the press as “the enemy of the people.” He has dismissed those who are insufficiently loyal to him as “human scum” and “vermin.”[Read: This is Trump’s message]Fascism—that call to history, that careful description, that five-alarm piece of language—is the right word. But it may turn out, at the same time, to be the wrong one. It might, in our cynical moment, provoke exhaustion rather than alarm.In “Politics,” Orwell reserves particular vitriol for political language that hides its intentions in euphemism and wan metaphor. Wording that resorts to ambiguity can disguise atrocities (as when, in one of the examples Orwell offers, the bombing of villages and their defenseless people is referred to merely as “pacification”). Orwell’s problem was language that gives writers permission not to think. Ours, however, is language that gives readers permission not to care. Even the clearest, most precise language can come to read, in our restless age, as cliché. “The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet,” the old line goes; “the second, an imbecile.” On the internet, anyone can become that imbecile. For language in general, this is not an issue: When on fleek goes off in an instant or cheugy plummets from coinage to cringe, more words will arrive in their place.When the restlessness comes for political language, though—for the words we rely on to do the shared work of self-government—the impatience itself becomes Orwellian. Urgent words can feel tired. Crises can come, but no words suffice to rouse us. Americans face an election that our democracy—hard-fought, hard-won, ever fragile—may not survive; “defend democracy,” though, can read less as a call to arms than as a call to yawn. Trump himself is insulated by all the ennui. Nearly every word you might apply to him fits the picture that was already there. His depravity has become tautological: It’s just Trump being Trump. It’s shocking, not surprising.The word fascism can fail that way, too. And it can be further defanged by the biggest cliché of all: thoughtlessly partisan politics. Some audiences, seeing the word deployed as a description, will dismiss it as simply more evidence of the media’s (or John Kelly’s) alleged bias against Trump. Others, assuming that fascism and Nazism are the same thing—assuming that fascism cannot be present until troops are goose-stepping in the streets—will see the term as evidence of hysteria.But fascism can come whether the language acknowledges it or not. It marches toward us, restricted right by restricted right, book ban by book ban. It can happen here. The question is whether we’ll be able to talk about it—and whether people will care. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week asked registered voters across the country whether Trump was a “fascist” (defined as “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents”). Nearly half of respondents, 49 percent, said he was—roughly the same percentage of people who, in recent national polls, say that they plan to vote for him.The philosopher Emilio Uranga observed, in Mexican political life of the mid-20th century, a gnawing sense of uncertainty—a “mode of being,” he wrote, “that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on.” The unsteadiness, he suggested, amounts to pain. In it, “the soul suffers.” It “feels torn and wounded.” Uranga gave the condition a name: zozobra.The wound he describes, that plague of doubleness, has settled into American political language. In her 2023 book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the “mirror world” in right-wing politics—a place where every reality has a rhetorical double. She focuses on the rhetoric of Steve Bannon, the former Trump-administration strategist. As Democrats and journalists discussed the Big Lie—Donald Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 presidential election—Bannon began discussing the Big Steal: the idea that Joe Biden, against all evidence, stole the presidency.The tactic is common. Trump regularly fantasizes before his cheering crowds about the violence that might befall his opponents. Journalists describe him as engaging in “extreme” and “inflammatory” rhetoric. Republicans in Trump’s camp, soon enough, began accusing Democrats of, as one of his surrogates put it, “irresponsible rhetoric” that “is causing people to get hurt.” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s response to the former military leaders’ warnings about Trump took a similar tack: Their rhetoric is “dangerous,” he said this weekend. On Monday, Trump gave John Kelly’s comments about him a predictably zozobric twist. Kamala Harris, he said, is a fascist.“In the mirror world,” Klein writes, “there is a copycat story, and an answer for everything, often with very similar key words.” The attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has commonly been described as an insurrection; Republican power brokers have begun describing peaceful political protests as “insurrections.” We must save American democracy, the stark slogan that gained new currency in response to the Big Lie, is now a common refrain on the right. (Elon Musk, at a recent Trump rally, argued that the former president “must win to preserve democracy in America.”)Mirroring, as propaganda, is extremely effective. It addles the mind. It applies a choose-your-own-adventure approach to meaning itself. Mirroring does, in that way, precisely what Orwell feared: It gives up on the very possibility of common language. It robs political terms of their ability to clarify, to unite, to warn. In a world that is endlessly doubling itself, 2 + 2 = 4 may be a liberating truth. Or it may be a narrative imposed on you by a smug and elitist regime. Freedom, soon enough, becomes the ability to say that the sum of 2 + 2 is whatever you want it to be.[Read: Why are we humoring them?]The words fly, flagrant and fast; the definitions that might ground them trail, meekly, in their wake. But when the words are mere slogans—shibboleths and signifiers, narrowcast to one’s tribe—dictionary definitions miss the point. Slogans are rhetoric. They are advertising. They are vibes. They can function, in that way, as what the author Robert Jay Lifton called “thought-terminating clichés”: words or phrases that effectively curtail debate—and, with it, critical thought itself. Last year, an author who wrote a book decrying the “woke indoctrination” of children struggled to define what woke actually means. In 2022, the New York Times editorial board effectively declared lexicographic defeat: “However you define cancel culture,” it wrote, “Americans know it exists and feel its burden.” On Tuesday, Musk—who has been spreading his Trump-friendly brand of groupthink on his social-media platform, X—shared an image: a man, his face obscured, wearing a green cap. Stitched onto the hat, in large, all-caps letters, was MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN.In 1990, a conservative Republican group headed by Newt Gingrich sent a pamphlet to Republican candidates running in state elections across the country. The document amounted to a dictionary: 133 words that operatives might use to elevate themselves (family, freedom, pride) and vilify their competitors (decay, corruption, pathetic, traitors). The pamphlet was titled, unironically, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Many in the media, nodding to the Orwell of it all, came to know it as “Newtspeak.”The 1990s were years when politicians were translating the insights of postmodern discourse (the power of “framing” and the like) into the everyday practice of politics. But Gingrich’s memo turned spin into a plot twist. Every word of its grim new language represented an argument: that Democrats were not merely opponents, but enemies; that the differences between the two sides were not merely political, but moral. It recast American politics not as an ongoing debate among equals, but as an epic battle between good and evil. The core aim of propaganda, Aldous Huxley observed, is to make one group of people forget that another group is human; the pamphlet, cheerfully promising aspiring politicians that they could learn to speak like Newt, wove that logic, word by word, into Americans’ political habits.The language in the pamphlet is stark. It is evocative. It is so very, very clear. It also takes the advice Orwell gave to preserve the thing he most loved and puts it in service of the thing he most feared.Orwell watched the rise of communism. He fought the rise of fascism. He observed, from a distance and, at times, from intimately close range, the blunt-force power of words. He saw how quickly a common language could be transformed into a divisive one—and how readily, in the tumult, new hatreds and fears could settle into the syntax of everyday life. And he knew that history, so rarely consigned to the past, would repeat—that the battles of the 20th century would very likely be refought, in some form, in the future.He knew all that, but he could not know it all. And there are moments in “Politics and the English Language” that can read, today, as nearly naive, with its faith in facts and its hope that clarity could be our salvation. Orwell was a satirist, too—1984, he believed, was an example of the genre—but he did not account for the ways that irony could come for language itself. He did not imagine propaganda that does its work through winks and shrugs rather than shouts. He did not sense how possible it would become for people in the future, seeking his wisdom, to wonder whether use clear language offers any counsel at all.This is not Orwell’s failing, necessarily. And it need not be our own. If we look to him for refuge and find none, that means simply that we will have to use the words we have to create new advice, new axioms, new ways forward. We can take the insight that drove him—that words can expand the world, or limit it; that they can connect us to one another, or cleave us—and seek new means of clarity. We can treat language not just as a tool, but as a duty. We can keep remembering, and reminding one another, that 2 + 2 = 4.When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A Future Without Hezbollah

Two months of war have transformed Lebanon.

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How Trump Is Baiting Harris

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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.This is the time for closing arguments from Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. But Trump’s closing argument is not a closing argument at all: It’s an invitation. He and his campaign are acting in hopes of provoking Harris, pushing her to muddle her final message.The statements and sentiments on display from the Trump campaign this past week, and particularly at Sunday night’s rally at Madison Square Garden, have been racist, xenophobic, and violent. To note a few: The comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, invited by the Trump campaign, called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” The radio personality Sid Rosenberg described the Democratic Party as “a bunch of degenerates, lowlifes,” and “Jew-haters.” The private-equity fund manager Grant Cardone said that Harris has “pimp handlers.” And the Trump adviser Stephen Miller declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only.”This incendiary language is not only a crude attempt to bait critics; it’s part of a pattern of hate from Trump and his closest allies, and a type of rhetoric that Trump has made clear he intends to incorporate into his plans as president. But in continuing to push the lines of decency in American politics, Trump is also attempting to goad the opposition. His campaign is ramping up a familiar and often effective cycle: He says or encourages something inflammatory, then goes on to blame his opponents or members of the media for overreacting, sometimes attempting to rewrite his own statements in the process. After he told the Fox News anchor Sean Hannity that he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for day one,” he later said that he was just joking, in an effort to cast those who took him seriously as dramatic. It’s an example of what my colleague Megan Garber recently called the trolligarchy: “A troll reserves the right, always, to be kidding,” she wrote. “Even about matters of life and death.”A strong reaction from Democrats or from journalists is strategically useful to Trump, and he knows it. As Trump said at Sunday’s rally: “When I say ‘the enemy from within’”—referring to the phrase he often uses to describe anyone who is not part of MAGA world—“the other side goes crazy.” Kamala Harris herself has usually avoided taking the bait, although in recent days she has gone on the attack, referring to Trump as a fascist for the first time after The New York Times published remarks from former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly in which he said that Trump met the definition of the word. But she has returned consistently to a message of unity. Speaking to reporters today, she said, “When elected president, I’m going to represent all Americans, including those who don’t vote for me.”Others on her campaign, however, haven’t been as careful. At an event earlier this week, Tim Walz said of the MSG rally, “There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden,” in apparent reference to a 1939 pro-Nazi rally that took place in the same arena. And on a call with a Latino voting group last night, President Joe Biden remarked, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters—his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.” Though Biden later claimed that he said “supporter’s,” referencing Hinchcliffe’s quote about Puerto Rico, and Harris quickly distanced herself from the gaffe, the damage was done. Biden’s blunder is reminiscent of the disparaging “basket of deplorables” comment that Hillary Clinton made about Trump supporters during her 2016 campaign, a comparison that Trumpworld has been quick to make. MAGA allies soon began campaigning off of Biden’s comment, and Trump’s campaign has even fundraised off it.By provoking and then taking apparent pleasure in dramatic reactions from their critics, Trump and his team encourage his supporters’ feelings of vitriol toward fellow Americans—feelings Trump has spent years feeding by referring to his political opponents as enemies, “vermin,” “lunatics,” and “thugs.” Harris and her team will make a much stronger closing statement if they refuse to give Trump the satisfaction of being their campaign’s main subject. But it’s also up to the American voting public to resist being baited by the outrage that Trump stokes, and to refuse the path of vengeance that he represents.Related: This is Trump’s message. Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal. Here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Trump pays the price for insulting Puerto Rico. Why Kamala Harris is targeting deep-red counties Elon Musk has turned X into a political weapon. The worst of crypto is yet to come. Today’s News A divided Supreme Court allowed Virginia to continue its program targeting suspected noncitizen voters, which could result in the purge of more than 1,600 voter registrations. At least 95 people were killed after torrential rain caused dangerous levels of flash flooding in Spain’s Valencia region. An 18-year-old man was arrested near an early-voting site in Florida after he brandished a machete at two people who support Vice President Kamala Harris. A video shows him holding the machete while his companions wave Trump flags, according to The New York Times. Dispatches The Weekly Planet: Throw out your black plastic spatula, Zoë Schlanger writes. It’s probably leaching chemicals into your cooking oil. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Ok McCausland / The New York Times / Redux Tobacco Companies May Have Found a Way to Make Vapes More AddictiveBy Nicholas Florko When a friend pulled out her vape at a playoff-baseball watch party earlier this month, it immediately caught my eye. I had grown accustomed to marveling at the different disposable vapes she’d purchase each time her last one ran out of nicotine—the strange flavors, the seemingly endless number of brands—but this product was different. It had a screen. While she vaped, the device played a silly little animation that reminded me of a rudimentary version of Pac-Man. In the name of journalism, I went to my local smoke shop this week, and sure enough, vapes with screens were ubiquitous. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic An overlooked path to a financial fresh start How Israel could be changing Iran’s nuclear calculus Muslim American support for Trump is an act of self-sabotage, Hussein Ibish argues. Culture Break Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: B Bennett / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Harry How / Getty; Steve Crandall / Getty. Investigate. Why are baseball players always eating? Kaitlyn Tiffany examines why America’s pastime is a game of snacks.Watch. In Conclave (out now in theaters), the cardinals get catty when the pope dies, 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.

Elon Musk Wants You to Think This Election’s Being Stolen

X is now a political weapon.

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Photos: The Spirit of Halloween 2024

Recent images that show some scary (and fun) pre-Halloween festivities around the world

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The Year My Father Died

(for Jan) The mind is a prison, portcullis-hidden, surrounded by a moat. Ritualsinside designed for correction.The dangerous belong in the dungeon. The yearmy father died, I went to the mind.The year after, I went about my business.My marriage existed. We paintedthe house, raised the child inside it, changedthe path of the rose trellisto avoid the

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Hannah Dreier Wins 2024 Michael Kelly Award for New York Times Investigation

Hannah Dreier is the winner of the 21st annual Michael Kelly Award for her series “Alone and Exploited,” published by The New York Times in 2023. Dreier’s sweeping and groundbreaking investigation into migrant child labor in the United States brought a “new economy of exploitation” to national attention.In their commendation, the judges describe Dr

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Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula

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For the past several years, I’ve been telling my friends what I’m going to tell you: Throw out your black plastic spatula. In a world of plastic consumer goods, avoiding the material entirely requires the fervor of a religious conversion. But getting rid of black plastic kitchen utensils is a low-stakes move, and worth it. Cooking with any plastic is a dubious enterprise, because heat encourages potentially harmful plastic compounds to migrate out of the polymers and potentially into the food. But, as Andrew Turner, a biochemist at the University of Plymouth recently told me, black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid.In 2018, Turner published one of the earliest papers positing that black plastic products were likely regularly being made from recycled electronic waste. The clue was the plastic’s concerning levels of flame retardants. In some cases, the mix of chemicals matched the profile of those commonly found in computer and television housing, many of which are treated with flame retardants to prevent them from catching fire.Because optical sensors in recycling facilities can’t detect them, black-colored plastics are largely rejected from domestic-waste streams, resulting in a shortage of black base material for recycled plastic. So the demand for black plastic appears to be met “in no insignificant part” via recycled e-waste, according to Turner’s research. TV and computer casings, like the majority of the world’s plastic waste, tend to be recycled in informal waste economies with few regulations and end up remolded into consumer products, including ones, such as spatulas and slotted spoons, that come into contact with food.You simply do not want flame retardants anywhere near your stir-fry. Flame retardants are typically not bound to the polymers to which they are added, making them a particular flight risk: They dislodge easily and make their way into the surrounding environment. And, indeed, another paper from 2018 found that flame retardants in black kitchen utensils readily migrate into hot cooking oil. The health concerns associated with those chemicals are well established: Some flame retardants are endocrine disruptors, which can interfere with the body’s hormonal system, and scientific literature suggests that they may be associated with a range of ailments, including thyroid disease, diabetes, and cancer. People with the highest blood levels of PBDEs, a class of flame retardants found in black plastic, had about a 300 percent increase in their risk of dying from cancer compared with people who had the lowest levels, according to a study released this year. In a separate study, published in a peer-reviewed journal this month, researchers from the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future and from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam found that, out of all of the consumer products they tested, kitchen utensils had some of the highest levels of flame retardants.Another food product, black plastic sushi trays, had the highest level of flame retardants in the study. Children’s toys also ranked high: A single pirate-themed plastic children’s necklace was almost 3 percent flame retardant by weight. “When you’re using black plastic items, there’s going to be a risk that they could be contaminated,” Megan Liu, the science and policy manager at Toxic-Free Future and the first author on the study, told me. Those flame retardants migrate into toddlers’ saliva and into the dust in our homes and, thus, in the air we breathe. Last year, Toxic-Free Future tested breast milk taken from 50 women in the U.S. and found flame-retardant compounds in each sample.Many of the flame-retardant compounds that showed up in the tests that Liu and her co-authors conducted should no longer be in the product stream. Brominated flame retardants have mostly been phased out of products in the U.S. and Europe, including from many electronics. In the U.S. and elsewhere, some of the most harmful flame-retardant compounds are now illegal for use in most consumer goods. Massachusetts banned a list of 11 flame retardants in 2021. Starting this year, a New York bill restricts the use of organohalogen flame retardants—one large class of the compounds—in electronic casings, and a similar Washington State ban will go into effect in 2025.But these compounds keep coming back. The sushi tray tested in Liu’s study contained 11,900 parts per million of decaBDE, also called BDE-209, which she described as a “really alarming” level of a chemical that was banned from most U.S. commerce in 2022 and largely phased out of production long before that. Because plastic recycling is a global economy with scant oversight, patchwork legislation may do little to keep these compounds out of the supply chain. “You send your electronic waste abroad, and you just haven’t got a clue what happens to it,” Turner told me. “I think the assumption is that it gets handled safely and it’s disposed of properly. But, you know, it comes back in the form of things that we don’t want.”For a consumer, this problem would be simpler to handle if it was clear that only certain black plastic products posed a risk, or that all of them did. But Turner found that products were contaminated with flame retardants at random. Not all of the black plastic he tested in his 2018 study contained the compounds, and in those that did, “the amount of chemicals in the black plastic varied hugely,” he said. Some items would have the same chemical profile of what you’d expect from, say, the flame-retardant plastic housing of a television or a cellphone. Other objects would have just a trace of flame retardant, or none at all. Of the more than 200 black plastic products Liu bought at retail stores for her study, hardly any were labeled as being made from recycled materials, she said. Consumers have no way to tell which black plastics might be recycled e-waste and which aren’t. “It’s just a minefield, really,” Turner said.Putting your black plastic in the recycling bin might seem like the right thing to do, but recycling isn’t a solution to the most noxious qualities of plastics. “I personally have been throwing out my black plastic takeout containers,” Liu told me, because if they are contaminated, “it’s scary to think that those might be reentering other products with the same flame retardants.” Until flame retardants and any dubious compounds that arise to replace banned ones are eliminated from the supply chain, reusing black plastic will perpetuate a potential health hazard. In her view, “the onus shouldn’t fall on consumers to have to make these daily changes in their lives.” Ultimately, federal bans or more ubiquitous state laws that go beyond single-compound phaseouts are the only way to keep flame retardants out of takeout containers and other black plastic intended for use in things such as foodware and toys. Until manufacturers use safer flame-retardant compounds and laws effectively prohibit recycled electronics material from entering consumer products, these chemicals will continue circulating through our kitchens, arising and re-arising like toxic zombies.But that doesn’t mean we need to consume them by way of our kitchen utensils. Replacing a black plastic spatula with a steel or silicone option is an easy way to cut down on at least part of one’s daily dose of hormone disruptors. I’ve also taken this news as a reason to coax myself into carrying a reusable coffee mug more often, if only to avoid the black plastic lids on disposable cups—heat plus plastic equals chemical migration, after all. It’s a minefield of random hazards out there, as Turner said. Most of the time we’re trying to navigate without a map. But in at least some areas, we can trace a safer path for ourselves.

When Choosing a New Pope Becomes a Soap Opera

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theatlantic.com

Early in the film Conclave, cardinals from around the world descend upon Vatican City after the death of the pope. Dressed in their scarlet vestments, they head to their guest rooms. A montage shows them rolling their suitcases through cavernous entryways, taking smoking breaks, and checking their iPhones. When they’ve finished settling in, cigarette butts blanket the marble floors.These images are striking. Here are ostensibly the most virtuous men in the world not only acting like normal human beings but also littering inside the headquarters of their faith. How revolting! How blasphemous!And how juicy. Based on Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, Conclave, in theaters now, follows the titular process of electing a new pope, a secretive task that the film suggests is mostly a popularity contest full of rumormongering and backstabbing. Caught in the vortex of egos is Cardinal Lawrence (played by a sharp Ralph Fiennes), an Englishman who’d tried to resign recently from his post over his growing doubt about his beliefs, but who was charged by the late pope to lead the conclave anyway. For days, if not weeks, he and his fellow cardinals must vote on who among them should take over the role, and continue voting until they reach a two-thirds majority. Determined to oversee a fair fight, Lawrence plays conciliator and detective as scandals arise, but his ongoing crisis of faith descends into a crisis of confidence. [Read: What The Young Pope preached about love]Conclave is by no means the first project to use Vatican City as a paradoxical backdrop. The 2017 HBO drama The Young Pope (renamed The New Pope in its second season) portrayed worship as an absurd, often surreal exercise, while the 2019 film The Two Popes turned the transfer of papal power into a buddy comedy. But Conclave feels especially timely. The screenwriter Peter Straughan and the director Edward Berger (whose previous movie, All Quiet on the Western Front, landed a Best Picture Oscar nomination) have constructed a propulsive psychological thriller that doubles as a blatant election-year allegory. Despite its heavyweight subject matter, however, the result is remarkably playful; without flattening the importance of the papacy or abandoning the novel’s attention to detail, Conclave exposes the sometimes farcical nature of institutional practices by examining the fallibility of those who run them. Even the most righteous among us are simply human, Conclave points out. In some ways, it’s comforting to think of the most ancient rituals as merely works in progress. Consider some of the personalities Lawrence—himself intimidated by what being pope requires—must deal with: There’s pompous Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), a Canadian who’s practically salivating at the chance to lead the Church; Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), an overconfident Nigerian candidate with a dedicated flock; Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), a progressive American who says he doesn't want the papacy but bristles at competition; and the Italian Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Catellitto), who’s both bigoted and bigheaded. Conclave offers a stacked cast of scenery-chewing character actors who render routines—say, scribbling one another’s names onto pieces of paper to cast votes over and over—both strangely earnest and preposterous. These are adult men tasked with filling a position almost 1.4 billion people care about, but they’re also just, well, men.But much of the fun of Conclave comes from the film’s initial appearance as a no-nonsense prestige project. The production team re-created the Sistine Chapel with some tweaks to enhance the tension, including the precise shade of red the cardinals wear. Berger mounts whispered conversations in shadowy hallways, deploys slow-motion sequences backed up by an operatic score, and builds striking tableaus of cardinals warily eyeing one another—elements that are then deliberately paired with hammy, self-aware dialogue. The cardinals follow decorum and have contemplative debates over who deserves the papacy, yet they’re most excited when they trade gossip. They gather in cliques to complain about their rivals and accuse one another of various indiscretions. Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini), one of the many nuns working behind the scenes to look after the electors, has a monologue revealing a cardinal’s sins that drew gasps and applause at the screening I attended. Even Lawrence, the steadiest of the lot, gets caught up in the melodrama. “I feel as if I’m at some American political convention,” he laments when he’s dragged into yet another sidebar to discuss yet another rumor. He participates anyway, of course; hearsay is hard to resist.[Read: The 15 films you should add to your watchlist this season]Lawrence comes to find the Church’s newly vacant position tempting too. In its best moments, Conclave uses its protagonist to explore the genuinely high stakes of the election as well as its sillier diversions. As the conclave continues—and the more votes he receives from his peers—Lawrence starts to reconsider his rejection of the papacy. In a late scene, Bellini observes that every cardinal secretly has a papal name in mind. Lawrence looks torn, as if afraid to admit that truth to himself. Amid the hokier material, his internal conflict raises serious questions about the nature of spiritual devotion: Do Lawrence’s personal beliefs matter when collective worship is involved? Would running against Bellini, a friend, mean abandoning his own values? Is progress possible in such a rigid institution?As with other recent papacy-centric projects, the film leaves these questions unanswered, and never deeply interrogates the Church’s biggest ongoing scandals, including allegations of clergy sex abuse. Conclave also adds a few too many contrived twists in its quest for narrative drama, but the movie moves nimbly enough to avoid a collapse into pure fantasy. Its revelations about piety as a facade may resonate best with viewers outside the Vatican, but I suspect that some on the inside would confess to having had the same thoughts.

No One Needs a Vape With a Screen

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theatlantic.com

When a friend pulled out her vape at a playoff-baseball watch party earlier this month, it immediately caught my eye. I had grown accustomed to marveling at the different disposable vapes she’d purchase each time her last one ran out of nicotine—the strange flavors, the seemingly endless number of brands—but this product was different. It had a screen. While she vaped, the device played a silly little animation that reminded me of a rudimentary version of Pacman.In the name of journalism, I went to my local smoke shop this week, and sure enough, vapes with screens were ubiquitous. One product on the shelves, a Geek Bar Pulse X, featured a screen that wraps around the device, displaying a constellation of stars when you inhale. Another, the Watermelon Ice Raz vape, displayed a rudimentary animation of moving flames. Vapes with screens first began to hit the market late last year, and only recently have become widely accessible. Online retailers sell vapes with screens that display what appear to be planets, rockets, and cars driving in outer space. The screens are small—just a few inches wide at most—and they are cheap: These products run as little as $25, and can last for several months.The Watermelon Ice Raz vape that I spotted in the store reminded me of the loading screens on an old Game Boy Color. I could see how adults like me might be enticed by the nostalgia of it all. The problem is that these vapes might also appeal to kids. It’s illegal for anyone under 21 to buy a vape, but the gadgets have been popular among teens since they were first popularized by Juul. Although youth vaping rates have dropped in recent years thanks in part to public-service campaigns that have warned kids about the dangers of vaping and nicotine addiction, the inclusion of a screen risks backtracking the progress that has been made. A screen full of animations sends the message that an e-cigarette is “something for fun and games and recreation,” Robert Jackler, an expert on tobacco marketing at Stanford University, told me. Just imagine you’re in eighth grade and the cool kid in your class has a vape with a screen of moving flames. You’re going to want one.These gadgets are new enough that it’s unclear to what degree kids are using them, but they have all the warning signs. Vape companies are notorious for selling products in kid-friendly flavors such as Banana Taffy Freeze and Cherry Bomb, and screen vapes may be the next ploy to hook kids. The vaping industry “will do anything that it takes to bring in novel features to attract new users, and this is just another example of that,” Laura Struik, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia at Okanagan who has studied youth use of e-cigarettes, told me. One of the most popular vape brands among teens, Mr. Fog, has already launched a screen vape.Screen vapes run the risk of becoming a fad, and fads spread among kids because someone they look up to uses them, Emily Moorlock, a senior lecturer in marketing at Sheffield Hallam University who has written about youth vaping, told me. That was certainly my experience as a kid. I remember begging my parents for a Game Boy because other kids in my elementary school had them. Vaping is similar: When the government asks kids to explain the reason they tried vaping, the top explanation is because a friend does it.Screens might also make vapes more addictive. Even the simplest visuals, such as retro video games, have been shown to cause the brain to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of pleasure and reward. Even the rudimentary vapes I encountered—those that just play little animations on a loop—could spike dopamine, and thus increase users’ desire for these products, three experts told me.Tony Abboud, the head of the Vapor Technology Association, a lobbying group, described them to me as a technological advancement. Besides the animations, many of these screens tend to display how much battery and vapable nicotine juice is left in the device. Abboud said that public-health groups are trying to brand screen vapes as “the next bad example” of how the industry is marketing to kids, despite youth vape rates dropping. “Just because a new technology has a new feature doesn’t mean that feature was designed to allow the product to be marketed to kids,” he said.Abboud and other vaping defenders have a point that e-cigarettes aren’t just an enticement for kids to get addicted to nicotine, but are also a tool to help smokers quit smoking. Vapes can benefit public health because they are safer than cigarettes and as effective, or more effective, than other anti-smoking products on the market. Even flavored vapes—which do attract kids—also can help entice adults to switch out their cigarettes for a vape.But a screen serves no purpose except for some cheap entertainment. If adult vapers want a signal that their product is low on battery, that could be solved by a little power light, like on a smoke detector. The flames and constellations simply aren’t necessary. After years of panic over youth vaping rates, it seems like kids are finally understanding that they shouldn’t vape. Why risk messing that up because of a tiny screen?

Crypto Is So Back

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theatlantic.com

Cryptocurrency has been declared dead so many times that its supposed demise is a running joke within the industry. According to the website 99Bitcoins, the obituary of crypto’s flagship token has been written at least 477 times since 2010. A round of eulogies occurred last year, after several crypto-trading giants, including FTX, collapsed, and the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a barrage of lawsuits against major blockchain companies. “Crypto is dead in America,” said the tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya on the All-In podcast in April 2023. Publications including The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic wondered if the technology was, once again, kaput.So we shouldn’t be surprised that crypto is back. What’s shocking is just how back it is. The total market capitalization of crypto assets this year has been within striking distance of its all-time highs in 2021. The crypto sector has been the biggest political donor in the current election cycle, surpassing even the fossil-fuel industry, with contributions flowing to candidates from both parties. In May, the House of Representatives passed a bill that included many of the policy demands of crypto lobbyists, while the Senate rolled back guidelines by the SEC designed to protect consumers of cryptocurrencies. And both presidential candidates have flirted with crypto enough that, no matter who wins in November, the market could be on the brink of a deregulation-fueled bonanza.How did crypto bounce back so fast? Part of the answer is pure smashmouth politics: The industry started spending gobs of money—at least $130 million to date—to elbow its way into this year’s congressional races. It has also refined its sales pitch. Since the FTX meltdown, the industry has been making efforts to distance itself from the Sam Bankman-Fried school of charm. Gone are the mussed hair and grandiose talk of altruism and saving humanity. In are the MBAs and lawyers, the Ivy Leaguers who know how to speak the language of Washington persuasion. The industry’s message now: Make crypto normal. Regulate us, please. All we want is to know the rules of the road. They highlight the most mundane, inoffensive applications of crypto, while condemning the scammers who tarnish the industry’s reputation and avoiding mention of the “degens,” or degenerate gamblers, who represent much of crypto’s actual demand.[Annie Lowrey: When the Bitcoin scammers came for me]But the truth is that the scammers are only getting bolder, finding new creative ways to rip off retail investors. Should the crypto lobby get its way, the new regulatory regime will clear a path not just for the industry’s “respectable” wing but also for the wildcatters and criminals. If you thought crypto was a problem before, you should be alarmed. The worst is likely yet to come.The crypto industry insists that its goal—the reason it’s spending ungodly sums of money to sway elections—is to be boring. Nothing to see here. Crypto companies say they merely seek “regulatory clarity.”This phrase is, to be generous, a sleight of hand. Companies don’t just want clarity; they want a particular set of rules. Currently, crypto exists in a state of regulatory limbo. The SEC says that most crypto assets are securities, defined as an “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.” The paradigmatic case is a share of stock in a publicly traded company. Securities are subject to a lot of rules: You can only trade them through a registered exchange, and issuers have to disclose a bunch of information about the underlying companies. That way, investors can make informed decisions about which securities to buy and which to avoid.If digital assets are indeed securities—a position that some federal judges have accepted, at least one judge has questioned, and is currently being tested in a number of ongoing enforcement cases—then crypto operations would have to behave like other Wall Street institutions. Companies like Coinbase, for example, would need to separate their brokerage services—that is, helping their customers buy and sell tokens—from their exchange services. (This is one aspect of the SEC’s pending lawsuit against Coinbase.) Plus, crypto operations could no longer launch overnight—not legally, at least. They’d have to register with the SEC and issue thorough disclosure documents before allowing the public to invest, a burdensome and costly process that would weed out a huge share of dodgy crypto schemes with no sound business model.The main plank of crypto’s bid for normalcy is that tokens should be considered commodities, not securities. What could be more boring than a commodity? Wheat, orange juice, coffee beans, livestock: Commodities are interchangeable, and you can trade them with other people directly. The crypto lobby says tokens are clearly commodities, since they’re fungible like bags of corn and do more than just go up and down in price. For example, users can spend tokens as “gas” to interact with a blockchain or participate in the governance and upkeep of the blockchain; they don’t merely rely on “the efforts of others.” (The SEC agrees that bitcoin is a commodity, since unlike almost every other crypto asset it has no central issuer.)Classifying cryptocurrencies as commodities would bring them under the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than the SEC. The CFTC has been friendlier to crypto, going so far as to advocate for controversial deregulatory measures pushed by FTX. It’s also much smaller, with roughly one-sixth the budget and staff. With the CFTC in charge, the SEC’s long list of pending cases would disappear, and we’d probably see a lot fewer prosecutions of crypto companies.Consumer advocates argue that exempting crypto from securities laws would make it easier for Americans to buy risky digital assets: Not only would exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken be likely to offer fringier coins—they’d be harmless commodities, after all—institutional investors like pension funds might see the new rules as a stamp of approval to dive into crypto. Hilary J. Allen, a law professor at American University who studies financial regulation, told me that designating cryptocurrencies as commodities would create a loophole that non-crypto companies could exploit. “Slap a blockchain on it,” she said, “and you too can be free from securities regulation.” Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of the nonprofit Better Markets, told me the real reason the crypto industry doesn’t want tokens to be classified as securities is that disclosure rules would expose them as financially dangerous. “If you had to fully and truthfully disclose the risks associated with crypto, the people who would engage in crypto would be near none,” he said. The industry deflects such arguments by downplaying its chaotic history and focusing on its more mundane use cases: stablecoins, for example, which are designed to maintain a fixed value and can be used for instantaneous peer-to-peer transactions, particularly cross-border remittances, and as a hedge against inflation. (Argentina has seen growing adoption lately.) Or, even more boring, “decentralized physical infrastructure networks,” or DePIN, which employ blockchain technology to reward users for providing public resources such as data storage or Wi-Fi.But the rules the industry is pushing would also juice some of crypto’s most degenerate schemes. The breakout hits of 2024 are fundamentally just new ways to gamble. Polymarket, the platform where wagers are made exclusively with crypto, has taken off this year thanks to interest in betting on the election. “Tap-to-earn” games such as Hamster Kombat have surged in popularity, luring users with rewards in the form of tokens. The apotheosis of speculative crypto insanity, though, is the website Pump.fun. On Pump.fun, anyone can create a memecoin instantly—all you need to do is select a name and an image—and the site creates a market where people can buy and sell it. One recent top token was named after the internet-famous baby hippo Moo Deng. Inevitably, creators are going to absurd lengths to promote their tokens: One guy posted a photo of himself apparently using meth. Another suffered burns after shooting fireworks at himself during a livestream.The industry doesn’t foreground these casino-like use cases, but it implicitly blesses them. Speculation is normal, advocates say. In fact, it’s what drives innovation in the first place. “Speculation, taking risks—that’s what fuels the economy,” Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association, told me. Sheila Warren, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, says that allowing people to buy and sell tokens isn’t about whether crypto is good or bad. “I don’t necessarily know that it’s net positive or negative,” she told me. “I think it’s about the ability of people to determine what they want to do with their own money.”The biggest degen of all is on the ballot. Donald Trump clearly has no idea what a blockchain is, but he understands that it’s related to money, which seems to be enough. He has declared himself “the crypto president.” In July, speaking at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, he pledged to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet” and called crypto “the steel industry of a hundred years ago.” In September, he stopped by a bitcoin-themed bar in New York City and spent $950 worth of bitcoin on a round of burgers and Diet Cokes. Trump has also announced his involvement in a new crypto platform called World Liberty Financial. While the details of the project are hazy, it would apparently offer a stablecoin. (The project’s launch last week saw low demand and extended outages.)[Read: The Trump sons really love crypto]The industry is salivating at the prospect of a Trump win. Trump has said he would fire SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile,” and free the American cybercriminal and crypto hero Ross Ulbricht from prison. Any Trump-affiliated crypto project, such as World Liberty Financial, would operate in a legal gray area unless Congress passed the new regulatory regime the industry is asking for. In other words, he has skin in the game. “It’s clear Trump would be very positive for crypto,” Smith, the Blockchain Association CEO, said.How a Kamala Harris administration would regulate the technology is less clear, but her recent statements have given crypto fans hope. In September, she promised to help grow “innovative technologies” including “digital assets.” Then she announced that she would support regulations that enable “Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation” while keeping those investors “protected”—a strange and careful framing that implicitly acknowledged how many Black men have lost money on crypto. These comments could just be campaign rhetoric meant to fend off attacks by the crypto lobby. But they show that Harris is listening to the industry’s arguments, particularly those couched in the language of opportunity and equity. Harris is, if nothing else, sensitive to the direction of political winds. If a newly crypto-friendly Congress were to pass the industry’s desired legislation in a bipartisan way, a President Harris might feel great pressure to sign it.And even if Trump and Harris do nothing to help crypto, the technology has by now proved its indestructibility. As if to drive home the point, 99Bitcoin’s obituary tracker seems to have dropped off this year. The last entry is from April. I messaged the site’s owner to ask if he was still updating it. He didn’t respond.