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Biden promised to defeat authoritarianism. Reality got in the way. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken performs “Rockin’ in the Free World” with members of The 1999 band at the Barman Dictat bar in Kyiv on May 14, 2024. | Brendan Smialowski/Pool/AFP via Getty Images Still rockin’ in the free world? When Secretary of State Antony Blinken strapped on a guitar and took the stage at a Kyiv rock club last week to sing Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” he didn’t amuse many of the Biden administration’s critics, who questioned whether the jam session was in good taste at a time when children are starving in Gaza and when Russian forces are making rapid gains in eastern Ukraine, partly due to the long delay in delivering US weapons to the front. But the song’s eponymous chorus (Blinken skipped the far more caustic verses, which make it clear that Young was being ironic) is a good representation of how the Biden administration would like its foreign policy to be viewed, particularly when it comes to support for Ukraine. As Blinken told the crowd, Ukraine’s forces “are fighting not just for a free Ukraine but for the free world — and the free world is with you too.” Almost from the beginning, President Joe Biden has defined his administration as locked in a struggle to push back against the global erosion of democracy and “win the 21st century” against authoritarian powers like China and Russia. He has often described this struggle as guiding not just America’s foreign policy but its domestic priorities, saying America must prove that democracy “still works” to deliver economic growth and prosperity. This type of rhetoric only intensified after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Biden has framed as a test of the democratic world’s resolve. The democracy versus autocracy framing drew a stark contrast with Donald Trump, who as president took a narrowly transactional view of foreign policy, had chummy relationships with leaders like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and the Saudi royal family, and undermined democratic norms at home. It also drew a more subtle contrast with Barack Obama, whose signature foreign policy achievements — the Iran nuclear deal, the diplomatic opening to Cuba, breakthrough climate change diplomacy with China — often involved doing business with some of the world’s most repressive governments. “I believe that — every ounce of my being — that democracy will and must prevail,” Biden told the Munich Security Conference a few weeks after taking office. Putting that belief into practice has been more difficult. What’s the US actually doing in the world? In practice, the Biden administration’s foreign policy has been more conventional than the rhetoric suggests: “Realpolitik from top to bottom,” as international relations scholar Paul Poast put it earlier this year. The goal has not so much been to defeat authoritarianism writ large as to compete with and contain particular authoritarian powers: China, Russia, and Iran. Sometimes, as in US support for Ukraine’s war effort and military aid to Taiwan, this can fairly be described as standing up for a beleaguered democracy. Sometimes, as in the upgrading of relations between the US and Vietnam that came during Biden’s visit to the country last year, it’s hard to see it that way. Conveniently for the US, Vietnam — a major American trade partner — is increasingly wary about China’s territorial aims in the South China Sea, but the two countries have very similar political systems: single-party Communist regimes without national elections. When the US convened a virtual “summit of democracies” in 2021, a good portion of the coverage and commentary focused not on the meetings themselves, but on the guest list. For instance, Hungary, a country whose government was backsliding on democracy and the rule of law and becoming increasingly friendly to Russia, was excluded. Poland, a country whose government was (at the time) backsliding on democracy and the rule of law, but was staunchly anti-Russian, was not. In 2022, the US hosted the Summit of the Americas — a periodic gathering of Western Hemisphere leaders — but excluded Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, all authoritarian governments subject to US sanctions. The administration’s principled pro-democracy stance was undercut somewhat by the fact that the White House was simultaneously planning a presidential trip to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, as they have from numerous previous administrations, evidently get a pass when it comes to Biden’s freedom agenda. The president famously promised on the campaign trail to make Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, a “pariah” over his role in the killing of journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi. In 2022, with the war in Ukraine putting pressure on global oil markets, Biden and “MBS” shared an awkward fist bump in Riyadh. More recently, the administration has been pushing an ambitious deal under which Saudi Arabia would formally recognize Israel in exchange for concessions from Israel on Palestinian statehood and formal security guarantees from the US. The US hasn’t agreed to a pact like this with any country since Japan in 1960. Then there’s India, where nearly a billion voters are going to the polls this month, but where moves by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government to sideline its opponents and crack down on the media have raised questions about how much longer the “world’s largest democracy” will live up to that title. The administration has been conspicuously quiet about the democratic backsliding in a country it considers a vital bulwark against Chinese power. This soft touch has continued even in the face of compelling evidence of plans by India’s intelligence services to kill the government’s critics on US soil. And finally, there’s Israel’s war on Gaza. The administration’s arguments that countries in the Global South should be doing more to back Ukraine and punish Russia in the name of the rules-based international order fall a little flat when the US continues to provide weapons to a country that even the State Department concludes is likely violating the laws of war. This administration is hardly the first to fall short of its own rhetoric when it comes to democracy and human rights. And it’s not as if Trump would do more to advance democracy or human rights if elected instead — not when it comes to Israel, or Saudi Arabia, or any other country. But the sweep and ambition of this president and his team’s rhetoric make it hard not to note the inconsistencies as they rock on in an increasingly unfree world. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.vox.com
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Why are whole-body deodorants suddenly everywhere? Getty Images Maybe you actually smell fine. Whole-body deodorants are upon us. They’re not an entirely new concept: Axe Body Spray, Unilever’s fusion of fragrance and deodorant, has been singeing nostrils since 1983, and in 2018, Lumé, created by an OB/GYN, came on the scene for “pits, privates, and beyond.” This spring, legacy brands jumped on board en masse: Since the start of 2024 alone, Secret, Dove, Old Spice, and Native launched whole-body products consumers can apply as sticks, sprays, and creams. What the funk is going on? “It is either, at best, an absurd, comical money grab — and at worst, a concerning phenomenon for your health,” says Sarah Everts, author of The Joy of Sweat. Sweating is a human superpower, she says; few other species can use sweat to avoid overheating. To Everts and other critics, the existence of whole-body deodorants should raise our curiosity about why we feel the need to smell a certain way — or not. They should also make us wonder who stands to profit by changing social norms about sweat, hygiene, and odor. Sweat and the strategies for managing it might seem relatively simple, but they’re not. The market for deodorants, especially the kind intended for application everywhere, rests on a foundation of collective confusion about how these products and our bodies actually work. Different parts of the body make different kinds of sweat — and different kinds of smells Not all sweat is created equal: Human bodies have two kinds of sweat glands, and their products are not exactly the same. Apocrine sweat glands are typically concentrated in the places where hair grows during puberty — the armpits, the groin, and the butt. These glands make a waxy substance that certain bacteria love to eat, and it’s the byproducts of that microbial banquet that create the musky aromas most commonly associated with body odor. “The sweat in our armpits is different — quite different — from the sweat that covers your body,” says Andrew Best, a biological anthropologist who studies sweat at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. That’s because the rest of your body is covered with eccrine sweat glands, whose product is a more watery, salty liquid that’s less appealing to bacteria but does a bang-up job of keeping us cool. Eccrine sweat is what covers most of our body during exercise. It might occasionally evoke recently ingested food and drink, with particularly piquant notes after a garlic bread binge or a very boozy night. Still, because it’s not well-suited for bacterial consumption, eccrine sweat just doesn’t usually generate the odors that apocrine sweat does. There is such a thing as dysfunctional sweating: About 10 million Americans produce way more sweat than their body’s temperature-regulating needs, either as a consequence of certain medical conditions or medications, or just because it’s the way they’re wired — a condition called hyperhidrosis. Other, less common medical conditions produce particularly pungent sweat. But most of the sweat most people produce serves a positive biological function: “Sweating is almost always good,” says Best. Deodorants and antiperspirants aren’t the same The over-the-counter products available to combat sweat typically do one of two things: They either prevent sweat glands from producing sweat to begin with (antiperspirants), or they change the smell of the sweat (deodorants). Antiperspirants block sweat pores using one of several aluminum-containing compounds. In the Food and Drug Administration’s book, the fact that antiperspirants change the way a body part functions — in this case, a sweat gland — makes them over-the-counter drugs. That classification means companies face more restrictions if they want to include these aluminum compounds in products. (A rumor literally spread by an email chain letter in the 1990s and a long-abandoned 1960s-era hypothesis have led many people to avoid using aluminum-based odor control products due to fears about breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, respectively; heaps of science have since shown these fears are unfounded.) Although many products intended for underarm application combine an antiperspirant with a deodorant in one, products labeled as deodorants alone aren’t supposed to contain these aluminum compounds. They’re not intended to block your sweat pores; rather, they aim to change the odors that result from the sweat once it’s already on your skin. Distinguishing between antiperspirants and deodorants is important because sweat actually plays a huge role in keeping us cool when we’re overheating, and blocking too much of it could threaten a person’s ability to regulate their temperature. In part for that reason, antiperspirants are typically labeled for use only under the arms (conveniently, the origins of most of the smells people using these products are trying to control). Deodorants, on the other hand, can use a range of approaches to reduce the smell of sweat all over the body without interfering with its cooling function, says Kelly Dobos, a cosmetic chemist in Cincinnati. (Dobos has never worked for any of the companies now marketing full-body deodorants, although she has in the past done non-deodorant-related work for the parent company of Ban, which now makes a deodorizing lotion for private parts.) Dobos reviewed the ingredient lists of a range of whole-body deodorants, including legacy brands and newer brands. The spray products typically contained little more than alcohol and fragrance — they’re basically perfumes, she says, and the alcohol concentration in these products probably isn’t high enough to kill the good bacteria living on your skin, which have a staggering range of protective functions. Meanwhile, several of the creams contained lactic or mandelic acids, whose low pH creates an environment that favors the growth of those good, non-stinky bacteria, crowding out odor-causing germs. A handful of sticks and creams contained starch, aimed at absorbing wetness. Some brands’ entire ranges contained zinc compounds known to neutralize stinky molecules; other active ingredients include compounds called cyclodextrins intended to absorb odor, and enzymes called microbial ferments that purportedly degrade odor-causing molecules. Many of these ingredients also turn up in standalone deodorants intended for underarm application. One product, a Lumé “sweat control” deodorant cream, contained an aluminum compound that’s actually an antiperspirant, which raises concerns about a problem with the product’s labeling, says Dobos. “I have a feeling the FDA will give them a call.” Do most people actually need full-body deodorant? With the exception of improperly labeled products, most whole-body deodorants can do …whatever it is they do without hijacking the body’s cooling system. Still, before people decide to fork over the money for yet another cosmetic product, it’s worth thinking about whether sweat from behind your knees, your skin folds, or even your nether regions is actually a problem in need of a solution. After all, these products are not meant to target odors from underarm sweat. Rather, they take aim at odors due to apocrine sweat in the groin — not something casual contacts typically perceive because groins are (usually) under a few layers of fabric and a few feet away from others’ noses — and eccrine sweat elsewhere on the body, which is largely inoffensive to most noses, even when there’s a lot of it. “Just bathing should take care of whatever quote-unquote ‘problem’ you think you have. And if you need to be throwing more at your microbiome than a simple daily shower,” Best says, “it’s probably your perceptions of your smell that are the problem, not actually the smell.” “Nobody’s being fooled into thinking that you’re a citrus fruit,” added Everts. Because deodorants qualify as cosmetics and not as drugs, the companies that produce them don’t have to do safety or effectiveness testing before selling them to the public. That means products that could cause skin irritation or allergic reactions — especially in the more sensitive skin of the groin — can still be freely marketed for whole-body use. “It is the Wild West,” says Adam Friedman, a dermatologist at George Washington University who is also a faculty member of the International Hyperhidrosis Society. Sweat itself can irritate the skin, and for people with pathologic sweating such as those with hyperhidrosis, whole-body deodorants are likely to disappoint because they don’t actually reduce sweat output. “[They’ll] have no effect on excessive sweating and may even cause harm,” says Friedman — but because people with these conditions are so desperate for help, it’s a marketing no-brainer to try to sell them solutions. When it comes to skin conditions, he says, it’s “very easy to take advantage of those suffering.” If you try a whole-body deodorant, avoid applying it to mucous membranes (the wet surfaces beyond labial folds and anuses) and use it only on select portions of intact, non-irritated skin to lower the chances the product causes more problems than it solves. Dobos noted the ingredients in most whole-body deodorants are largely benign and probably won’t disrupt your skin’s microbiome too much if used in moderation. In her view, these products are unlikely to be biologically problematic. “But they’re probably still culturally problematic [in that they set] the wrong expectations for young people regarding how their body should smell,” says Best. Hygiene norms can be manipulated to make money (off of you) Body odor exists on a spectrum, and one end of that spectrum includes smells that are globally recognized as gnarly, much as there’s broad human consensus that sewage and dead animals have offensive aromas. So yes, human sweat can smell quite bad. As early as the first century BCE, the Roman poet Catullus dissed a male contemporary for the “grim goat” housed in his armpits, saying (poetically) it was the reason he never got laid. But it’s also true that a lot of American norms around body odor originated with people who had a financial stake in creating them. The inventors of the first modern antiperspirant couldn’t get people to buy it for the first decade after they developed it; sales only took off after a 1919 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal hinted that women with insufficiently “dainty and sweet” underarms would never land a husband. Americans may be particularly easy marks for advertising campaigns that promise conspicuous hygiene. The nation’s peculiar association between cleanliness and godliness, imported by Puritans and Quakers centuries ago, helped personal odor become a particularly strong signifier of moral, physical, and racial purity in the US early in the nation’s history, writes anthropologist Marybeth MacPhee. These ideas led to olfactory discrimination against Black Americans, creating a particularly strong incentive to “smell clean” as a strategy for acceptance into (or protection from) white society; they have also been used to disparage immigrants with different diets and fragrance norms as diseased or low status over the years. Such concepts clearly have commercial utility, as well: They’ve helped create a lucrative market for dubiously necessary hygiene products in the US — especially among women and sometimes to their detriment, as in the cases of douching and talcum powder. If you have a problem with smells coming from your groin, “you need to be going to a doctor, not a store,” says Everts. But with whole-body deodorants, companies are urging consumers to sanitize all body aromas — not just the goat-y ones. Among the experts I spoke to, there was strong consensus that whole-body deodorants exist largely to make money for the companies that sell them. Deodorant and antiperspirant sales have been pretty steady for the past few years, says Dobos; adding a new product with new uses potentially increases the amount of money both manufacturers and retailers can make. “They’ve manufactured a problem so they can sell us a product to fix it,” says Best. Whether you’re buying or not, it’s worth thinking about what it means to reject all of your body’s natural smells, not just its most offensive ones. The fundamental odor unique to each of us — not the stuff coming out of our armpits, but the rest of the aromas our bodies make — is part of our identity, says Everts. “It’s a symphony of subtle smells that make you who you are and help the people who love you and spend time with you identify you,” she says. “Why would you mess with that?”vox.com
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If Trump wins, what would hold him back? Paige Vickers/Vox; Joan Wong for Vox; Photo by Mark Peterson/Associated Press The guardrails of democracy reined him in last time. But they’re weakening. Seven days after being sworn in as president, Donald Trump threw the nation into crisis. The country had wondered whether the new president would follow through on the extreme and authoritarian proposals he’d put forward in his campaign. On January 27, 2017, by executive order, Trump imposed an extreme version of his “Muslim ban” — barring people from seven mostly-Muslim countries from entering the United States. Even people already approved as lawful permanent residents — people with green cards, who had been legally living and working in the US, often for years — could all of a sudden be turned away, refused entry to their adopted home. Chaos unfolded at airports, nationwide protests erupted, and to many, it felt like something new and genuinely frightening was taking place: a slide into an oppressive regime. But then the crisis ebbed. Just two days after the ban was imposed, widespread criticism pushed the administration to water down the policy — “clarifying” green card holders were exempt. Five days after that, a judge blocked the rest of the order from going into effect. The guardrails protecting democracy had, it seemed, held. This pattern recurred during Trump’s presidency. The president ordered or considered something outrageous. He faced pushback in response. And he usually, ultimately, ended up constrained. Sometimes Trump would eventually end up with a scaled-back version of what he wanted: a retooled travel ban, made less blatantly discriminatory, did eventually get court approval. Sometimes he’d manage to go quite far — as in his attempt to steal the 2020 election — before being thwarted. But often he’d fail entirely. All this has led to a sort of complacency among many Americans about what a second Trump term would bring. There’s a mentality of: “It won’t be that bad — we got through it last time, right?” We did get through it last time. But that wasn’t for lack of Trump’s trying. It was because of the guardrails: those features of the political system, both formal and informal, that so often prevented Trump from actually doing the undemocratic things he tried to do. So to assess the peril a second Trump term poses for American democracy, we need to assess the condition of the guardrails. Worryingly, most of them have weakened since Trump first came to power; some have weakened very significantly. None appear to have gotten stronger. We’re still a very long way from a system where the president can truly rule without any checks on his power. We can’t know right now exactly how often the guardrails would still hold Trump back, or how future crises would play out. But it’s easy to see how a more determined and radicalized Trump, in a system with significantly weaker guardrails, could lead American democracy to even more dangerous places. The guardrails: What they are To understand what exactly the guardrails protecting American democracy are, think about how Trump’s corrupt ambitions were so often frustrated during his first term. When he fired FBI Director James Comey, he ended up with special counsel Robert Mueller. When he wanted Mueller fired, it didn’t happen. When Trump urged prosecutors to charge his political enemies, they largely didn’t. He tried to punish CNN for negative coverage by blocking their parent company’s sale to AT&T; the sale went through. He tried to get Ukraine’s president to dig up dirt on the Biden family, but that effort blew up in his face and got him impeached. He never went through with other things he mused about — like delaying the 2020 election due to the pandemic or using the military to crack down on racial justice unrest. And though his attempt to overturn Biden’s election win went further than almost anyone expected, it ultimately failed too. In all these instances, there was pushback from part of the political system — often multiple parts — that either convinced or impelled Trump to back down. We can think of the forces constraining Trump in two categories. First, there are all the other government officials, among whom power in the system is dispersed. These include: Executive branch appointees, many of whom often refused to carry out Trump’s orders even though Trump himself appointed them The career civil service — the permanent government employees who can’t be fired Members of Congress, who pass or block laws, confirm nominees, and raise a stink when the administration does something they don’t like The courts, charged with enforcing the law, who often ruled against Trump State and local officials, such as the election administrators who certified Biden’s swing state wins in 2020 Second, there are the informal constraints. These include: The Republican Party, which, broadly defined, includes politicians, party officials, and interest groups Trump wants to keep on his side The press, which can unearth damaging news and hammer a president with critical coverage The public, who, when roused, can speak out, take to the streets, or vote politicians out of office To be truly successful, a would-be authoritarian would need to coopt, weaken, or smash many of these rival power centers. Some of Trump’s second-term agenda is designed to do just that. The executive branch: Can the “deep state” protect democracy? The president is, in theory, in charge of the executive branch. In practice, things are more complicated. The chief executive’s instructions have to be carried out by people — people who can refuse to go along. About 2.2 million civil servants work across the federal government in career posts, in addition to 1.3 million active duty military personnel. They cannot be fired at the president’s say-so. In his book American Resistance, David Rothkopf argues that many such officials across different ages acted “in an informal alliance” during Trump’s first term to keep him “from doing irreparable damage to the United States.” At the top of these federal agencies are the political appointees Trump actually gets to pick. They number about 4,000, of which around 1,200 require Senate confirmation. But these hand-picked appointees also often slow-walked, argued against, or refused to carry out President Trump’s orders. This is an interesting phenomenon, and it’s worth thinking about why it happened. One reason may be that Trump often appointed “the wrong people” — that is, GOP establishment or nonpartisan figures rather than cronies and personal loyalists. But another reason could be that top government posts themselves have a sort of pragmatizing effect to many who hold them. Once sworn in, appointees have to deal with the reality of their agencies’ capabilities, as well as with the practical and legal perils of putting Trump’s more extreme ideas into effect. This dynamic was demonstrated most dramatically during the election crisis, when officials in the Justice Department, the White House Counsel’s Office, the Department of Homeland Security, the military, and other agencies declined to aid Trump’s schemes, as did Vice President Mike Pence. Not everyone balked, though. Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official, made clear he would happily denounce swing state election results as fraudulent if Trump put him in charge of DOJ. Warned that riots would break out across the country if Trump illegally stayed in power, Clark answered, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act” — suggesting Trump could use the military to suppress protests of his power grab. (Trump nearly named Clark acting attorney general, but backed down after other DOJ officials made it clear they’d resign if he did.) Clark shows there’s nothing guaranteed or automatic about the phenomenon where top officials constrain Trump’s worst impulses. Clark did end up facing serious consequences — he is being criminally prosecuted alongside Trump in Fani Willis’s Georgia case and may be disbarred too, but he was willing to take that risk. So if Trump could reliably identify and appoint many more Jeffrey Clarks to top posts, he’d be far better equipped to corrupt the executive branch. And what if he could turn thousands of career civil servants into mini Jeffrey Clarks, too? Trump’s team has a plan for that. They say Trump will use his executive authority to reclassify tens of thousands of high-level career posts as political jobs, and then fire many of the people currently in those jobs, replacing them with prescreened MAGA loyalists. Despite the big talk, there’s a question of whether Trump’s team really can pull this off. “A lot will depend on the efficiency and effectiveness of his team,” Rothkopf told Vox. “As we’ve seen in the past he doesn’t always attract the A-Team. They’re not always good at this kind of thing.” If they can make it happen, though, the result could be a federal government that, at every level, is far more corrupt and willing to be weaponized against the president’s enemies. Congress and the Republican Party: two weakened guardrails Congress has a long history of frustrating and checking the ambitions of presidents, whose bold legislative agendas typically get dramatically downsized. In Trump’s first term, he adopted House Speaker Paul Ryan’s legislative agenda of repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes, shelving his own hopes for an infrastructure bill due to lack of GOP support. Then, centrist Republican senators thwarted the Obamacare repeal bill. And in the midterms, the GOP lost the House, sharply constraining Trump’s legislative ambitions for his next two years. So far, so normal. But the modern Congress is a deeply partisan institution, and in recent years, the Republican Party has changed. At first, Trump was to a large extent coopted by the GOP, but since then, he has flipped the power dynamic. He has used his influence over the party’s base to make clear that if you refuse to defend his corrupt conduct, he’ll brand you an enemy — and your future in the party will be short. This transformation has been particularly evident in the House of Representatives. Despite perennial drama among the chamber’s conservatives, House Republicans have become increasingly sycophantic supporters of Trump — often because, they believe, this is what their voters want. More than half of the House GOP voted to overturn Biden’s wins in swing states. Vocal Trump critics keep losing primaries or quitting the party, while the speakers keep going to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee. A GOP House would be far less likely to constrain Trump next time around. The most obvious way Congress can strike back against a corrupt president is by impeaching and removing him from office. But even after Trump’s attempt to steal the election and the January 6 attack on the Capitol, a mere 10 House Republicans voted to impeach him. Only two of them still remain in Congress. Partisanship has defanged the threat of impeachment. Any resistance would likely be concentrated in the Senate. The current Democratic majority will very likely flip to the GOP if Trump wins, but still, senators have six-year terms that insulate most from imminent primary pressure. The chamber was frequently a thorn in Trump’s side in his first term, and it has never been a MAGA power base; only eight senators were hardcore MAGA enough to vote for throwing out Biden’s swing state wins in 2020. Yet the Senate has gotten more Trumpist. Only three of ten GOP senators who voted to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial (Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Bill Cassidy) will still be in office in 2025. Mitch McConnell, who’d bitterly feuded with Trump, is stepping down from his leadership post later this year. And a favorable map gives the party an opportunity to make big Senate gains. The bigger a majority that Republicans win, the less Collins’s and Murkowski’s opinions will matter. Nominations would be the first test to see if the Senate would still constrain Trump — swing senators could withhold their votes from nominees they believe to be extreme or unqualified. But there would likely be immense party pressure on senators to back Trump’s picks if he wins. And if the Senate blocks some, Trump may well try to slot them in anyway, by naming them “acting” appointees, and betting they’ll roll over and accept it. The fate of the filibuster, which in practice requires 60 Senate votes for all bills except the limited category of “budget reconciliation,” will also matter hugely. A new Republican Senate majority could change its rules to kill the filibuster. If the filibuster stays, Trump’s legislative ambitions will be sharply constrained; he will need Democratic votes to pass almost anything. If it goes, the sky’s the limit. Currently, key Senate Republicans are saying they want to keep the filibuster. Would they stick to that or cave to Trump’s demands to get rid of it? In the end, the Senate’s effectiveness in constraining Trump will come down to the fortitude of a few key Republicans in the chamber. The courts, the rule of law, and the Constitution One of Trump’s most consistently expressed opinions is that he would like his political enemies — a broadly defined group that stretches from Joe Biden to his own former appointees John Kelly and Bill Barr — to be prosecuted. Having largely failed to make that happen in his first term, in his second, Trump wants to tear down the wall separating Justice Department prosecution decisions from the White House. Yet that effort would face another important obstacle: the courts. Judges throughout the federal court system can throw out baseless prosecutions. They can also block Trump’s executive branch actions or strike down new laws passed by Congress. With lifetime appointments, judges are theoretically immune from political pressure and free to uphold the rule of law and the Bill of Rights against authoritarian threats. And judges frequently frustrated Trump during his first term — even, importantly, conservative judges, and judges Trump himself appointed. From the Supreme Court downwards, many of his judicial nominations were Federalist Society die-hards rather than MAGA die-hards, meaning they were often hard right but also willing to rule against Trump on various issues. The Supreme Court also refused to help his effort to steal the 2020 election, to Trump’s great annoyance — he has reportedly said that following the Federalist Society’s advice on appointees was one of his greatest mistakes. (Though, if he tried to make his own loyalist picks, he might have had difficulty getting them confirmed.) But there are some judges who do seem to be fully in the tank for the former president, like Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing Trump’s prosecution over classified documents in Florida, making rulings slanted in the former president’s favor and proceeding at a pace that rules out a trial before the election. The Supreme Court, too, could well do Trump a favor with a ruling that effectively delays his most important trial until after November — meaning, if Trump wins, it likely wouldn’t happen at all. There’s also the prospect that a more emboldened Trump could choose to simply defy the courts. It is far from clear how much any Supreme Court would be able to constrain a president truly bent on defying them. In 2021, while running for office, now-Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) urged a confrontation here. Vance said that Trump should fire thousands of civil servants, and “when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” Still, the US Constitution and the courts upholding it present various other problems for a budding authoritarian. Strongmen rising to power in other democracies often change their countries’ constitutions. But the threshold for changing the US Constitution — two-thirds of both houses of Congress plus three-quarters of state legislatures — is so absurdly high that it’s functionally impossible to meet on any polarized topic. Effectively, that means the two-term limit that prevents Trump from running again can’t be revoked, except in the event of a total collapse of constitutional government. State and local governments: bulwarks of resistance? Another major obstacle for would-be American authoritarians is the dispersed nature of governmental power under federalism. States and cities elect their own governments and run their own elections. So under a Trump second term, like in his first, blue states and cities would surely continue to resist his agenda, filing lawsuits, refusing to cooperate with federal law enforcement on certain topics, and so on. But Trump’s team has been making plans about how to “enforce order” in blue America with the military. Some on Trump’s team have long been drawn to the idea of crushing demonstrations or riots via an old statute known as the Insurrection Act. Last year, the Washington Post reported that Trump’s team had drafted a second-term plan to invoke the act on his first day in office so he could “deploy the military against civil demonstrations.” What would happen next would be anyone’s guess. But a president using the power of the military to quell domestic dissent may be a first step down a path leading to further repression. Another area of confrontation could be elections. Trump has already set the precedent for how Republicans can deny any Democratic wins: just make baseless claims of rampant voter fraud in cities, evidence be damned. And one scary part of the 2020 election crisis is that it actually wouldn’t have been that difficult, if Republican officials in key states were sufficiently corrupt, to throw out Biden’s wins or at least stall the process of certifying the outcome. And yet, despite Trump’s pressure, key Republican governors, legislators, and election officials refused to steal the election in 2020. Since then, Congress approved changes to the Electoral Count Act to make any such attempts more difficult to pull off. And in 2022, importantly, “election denier” Republicans running for roles with oversight over elections in key swing states lost. The guardrails around elections still look to be in decent shape, but in the end, the system will only work if enough people in key posts agree to let it. The press and the public: Condition unclear Finally, beyond the government itself, both the press and the public can challenge and effectively constrain a would-be strongman leader. In Trump’s first term, if a government official got wind of a crazy or corrupt thing Trump wanted to do, the response was often to leak it to the press. Critical coverage and damning reporting about Trump was everywhere during his first term, and the mainstream media made it very clear that his claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020 were baseless. Nowadays, Trump is still being covered negatively. But the mainstream media as a whole seems less influential and important, than it was during Trump’s term, a time of soaring subscriptions, ratings, and web traffic. The audience is increasingly fractured, with conservatives inhabiting their own media ecosystem and young people looking at TikTok. Business models are shot, with widespread layoffs and even collapses of publications. Still, that pesky First Amendment means Trump doesn’t have many great options to shut up the press. During a second Trump administration, leaks would continue and critical reporting would be in ample supply. The real question is: Will the public care? Currently, Trump is doing better in the polls than at any point in his previous two presidential campaigns. Per polling, he is the favorite to win. So in one sense, the public is more in his corner than ever before. But there are other signs that the intensity of Trump’s support is down. His small-dollar donations have declined. Traffic to conservative media outlets is plunging. There have been no sequels to the January 6 violence yet. All this is likely stemming from a broader, bipartisan trend toward reduced engagement in politics. Political drama was omnipresent during the Trump years, but during Biden, the public has increasingly tuned out. (Hence those declining ratings and web traffic numbers.) On the left, the main issue spurring activist energy isn’t defeating Trump — it’s protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, including Biden’s support of it. If Trump wins, would left-of-center society mobilize to check him like they did during the travel ban rollout, and at other points in his first term? Or are too many people now too burned out and disillusioned to care? The silver lining is that the far right doesn’t seem to have mass support and enthusiasm throughout society as demonstrated by the rising fascist dictators of the past. But authoritarianism can rise due to apathy, too, if people don’t care enough to stop it. Has Trump lost his sense of self-restraint? In part, it’s reassuring that there are so many guardrails in the American political system. And yet none of these are automatic or, necessarily, permanent. Yes, we have a system with laws and norms and institutions. But in the end, whether this system continues to function depends on the choices of the individual people in these institutional roles. “There are a lot of people right now who are thinking, ‘What legal steps do I have to constrain a wannabe autocrat?’ and are preparing for those battles,” said Rothkopf. Democracy’s future would also depend on Trump’s own choices and capabilities. One question is about Trump’s competence. Some believe that, even if Trump in his heart of hearts would like to impose an authoritarian agenda, he simply lacks the competence, focus, and discipline to make it happen. Others worry that his loyalists have already gotten far more experience in how to get their way in government, and that they’ve had four years to stew over why they failed so often last time and plan about how to do things differently next time. But even an effort as shambolic as Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election can still be quite dangerous, as the violence of January 6 showed. A second question is about Trump’s own willingness to restrain himself. Often, during his first term, it was the president himself who chose to back down from some provocative action. He had a sense of political self-preservation that often spurred him to step back from the brink — calculating this firing or that action would be too far. This self-control badly weakened as he tried to overturn Biden’s win. Pundits and top Republicans initially assured us that there would be nothing to worry about. “It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power,” one anonymous GOP official told the Washington Post that November. They thought they had Trump figured out, but the president stopped listening to the advisers counseling restraint, instead escalating the crisis more and more, leading to the chaos on January 6. Still, even during that crisis, Trump could have gone further. For instance, he could have installed Jeffrey Clark at the top of the Justice Department, if he really wanted to. But that political self-preservation instinct meant he still feared the fallout from other top DOJ officials resigning in protest. Trump, if he returns to power, will have no future reelection to make him worry about voters this time. And his rhetoric during his years out of office has grown far more extreme. If Trump has lost any inclination toward restraint, and he really wants to drive headlong into the guardrails, he could do it. And then we’ll really see how strong they still are.vox.com
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Is it ever okay to film strangers in public? Getty Images Nobody wants to be filmed without their knowledge. Why does it make up so much of the content we watch? The experience of realizing you are being surreptitiously filmed by a stranger is now a relatively common one, but this is how it happened for Mitchell Clark: The 25-year-old was working a shift at his Atlanta Target when someone propped up a phone nearby. “I thought it was for some dumb prank channel,” he says. It wasn’t until a young woman bent over directly in front of him, her dress short enough to expose her entire bare bottom, that he realized what was going on. The resulting video captures his shock — his eyes widen and his hands grasp his chest, agog — and later ended up on the OnlyFans model’s Instagram account. “It made me look like a creep,” he tells me. The video was an extreme example of a trend where women secretly film men’s reactions to them, often in the gym or in public spaces, either to shame the men for being inappropriate or to highlight the power of their own beauty — in Clark’s case, arguably both. But this time it caused an uproar: After Clark made a video about how uncomfortable he felt, other accounts reposted and responded to it, highlighting the ways in which public filming culture had gotten out of control. (Vox was unable to reach the model for comment.) @mitchelliguesss ♬ original sound - mitchell It’s been a decade and a half since social media made it possible for anyone’s camera phone video to go viral. But it’s TikTok, a platform where overnight fame is more achievable than ever, that has turned filming strangers in public into a controversial cottage industry. While influencers on Vine, YouTube, and Instagram have long used passersby as unwilling background actors to gain clout, TikTok has also allowed those people to offer their sides of the story and actually get heard. This is, in part, because of editing tools like stitching or dueting, and also because you don’t necessarily need to have a large account in order to go viral on the app. Viewers are invested in watching all sides of the drama unfold. Thanks to these responses and a handful of watchdog accounts, a major backlash against public filming has been brewing: Outlets from the Guardian to The Verge to Vice have issued pleas to quit filming strangers, while BuzzFeed christened the unsettling genre with an equally unsettling name: “panopticontent.” Ask pretty much anyone in the world if they’d like to have someone film them without their permission and post it on the internet, and it’s difficult to imagine a normal person saying yes. And yet, these videos continue to rack up millions of views, forcing us to reckon with the fact that in 2024, some of the most-viewed content on social media is essentially nonconsensual voyeurism. There’s clearly an appetite to watch as strangers are shamed, ridiculed, gawked, or generally caught off-guard, even when we know it isn’t exactly morally sound. A precursor to the form came in 2009: The blog People of Walmart was devoted to making fun of customers wearing embarrassing clothing (unsurprisingly, much of the humor relied on classist, fatphobic, and transphobic stereotypes). Instagram wrought the rise of many more of these types of accounts, like Subway Creatures, with nearly 3 million followers, which collects images of bizarre-seeming people and circumstances on the New York City subway; Passenger Shaming, for videos of plane freakouts and other bad airport behavior; or Influencers in the Wild, which has more than 5 million followers and invites people to laugh at those who dare film themselves in public. Its website encourages viewers to submit videos by promising “Your clip could be seen by millions!” The irony that it’s objectively worse to sneakily take a photo of someone else taking a photo of themselves comes secondary to the main goal: driving engagement by laughing at people who don’t know they’re being filmed. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Influencers in the Wild (@influencersinthewild) Even supposedly wholesome content has fallen into the same trap. In 2018, an influencer posted an Instagram Story saga about a potential romance budding between two people on a plane seated in front of her, then later had to apologize when the woman felt that her privacy had been violated. The “Plane Bae” story went massively viral before anyone questioned whether what they were watching was exactly ethical. It would be easier if we all collectively decided that it was never acceptable to film random strangers in public, under any circumstances. But rarely are social questions, especially ones that collide squarely with the ever-evolving norms of our online lives, this uncomplicated. You do, in fact, have the right to film in public places; as the ACLU points out, the ability to do so “creates an independent record of what took place in a particular incident, one that is free from accusations of bias, lying, or faulty memory.” This is especially important when filming the police or recording an encounter that could become violent: The video of George Floyd being murdered, for instance, was crucial in sparking the wave of protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020. Camera phone videos depicting racism and harassment, particularly during and after the lockdown period, have also opened important conversations about acceptable behavior in a uniquely distressing time. Do arguments about First Amendment rights and social justice really apply to people who make strangers uncomfortable for engagement on TikTok? That depends on who you ask. Most will say they’re simply trying to “spread love” or that they never expected the content to go viral, while refusing to ask themselves tougher questions. It’s not difficult to imagine, for instance, someone being concerned about their digital privacy for more serious reasons, such as avoiding a stalker. One woman who was filmed being approached for a high-five by a dancer in Times Square and then began crying was both mocked for her reaction and accused of being racist because the dancer was Black. Her sister then made a video explaining that she was autistic and has contamination OCD, and therefore doesn’t like being touched. Another woman was falsely maligned for riding the subway with monkeypox after someone made a TikTok of her, but the reason for the bumps on her skin was actually due to a genetic condition. There’s little legal recourse for people who find themselves unknowingly caught on camera. As Derigan Silver, chair of the University of Denver’s media, film, and journalism department, explains, a successful defamation case requires proving that the material contains a “false statement of fact” — but a video tends to show events as they happened, even if divorced from crucial context. Clark is hoping to get the help of a lawyer to get the original video taken down, but he’s aware that that’s likely as far as it will go. “It sucks that we’re so far behind with our legal system that not more can be done about this right now. But it’s real, and it’s getting worse,” he says of the scourge of content creators who use strangers as background props. The idea that privacy laws should evolve to incorporate situations like Clark’s, however, could be a dangerous one. “We want the ability to record things in public and to document them because it supports very important First Amendment ideals,” says Silver. “The flip side of that is not everybody is doing this with good motives.” Silver notes that where the law could catch up is by differentiating between newsworthy and non-newsworthy events — say, an encounter with police versus recording an anonymous Target employee — and making it harder to prosecute people who film matters of public consequence. In a paper on what she coined “forced faming,” British intellectual property law scholar Hayleigh Bosher also points out how the legal system must contend with the rise in deepfake content, which creates real-seeming content out of unwilling people’s likenesses. No law can solve the problem of people being assholes on social media, but there are other ways to influence people’s behavior online. “There’s the law, there’s technology, there are cultural norms, and there’s the market,” explains Silver. “We can exert pressure on platforms and say, ‘Stop monetizing these accounts.’ Or they could write technology that makes it more difficult to upload material that violates someone’s privacy. Or we could have people online saying, ‘I’m going to stop watching this stuff.’” Right now, it’s the cultural norms that are shifting most quickly: This moment has given rise to a number of accounts that call out public filming, like Joey Swoll, with his 7.7 million TikTok followers (his was one of the accounts that drew attention to Clark’s case). YouTubers like Kurtis Conner, meanwhile, have made videos calling for the end of filming strangers. But there’s hypocrisy at play here too. Swoll’s account ostensibly exists to maintain a certain ideal of gym culture, but the majority of his content is dedicated to shaming (usually) women’s behavior — even influencers who are innocuously filming themselves without involving anyone else. Some of the instances he calls out are indeed objectively horrible, like the woman who pretended to take a video of herself in order to mock the man exercising behind her, but others are more cringeworthy than anything else, like the girl who did a TikTok dance in front of someone using a bench press. @thejoeyswoll He is NOT staring at you or even looking at you! This gym needs to kick you out NOW! #gymtok #gym #fyp ♬ Funny video "Carmen Prelude" Arranging weakness(836530) - yo suzuki(akisai) Swoll also seems to have a special interest in objecting to women who claim that certain men at gyms make them feel uncomfortable, and then film the alleged “creep.” These examples aren’t always black-and-white: The evidence of the alleged harassment or creepy behavior isn’t always clear from the videos, but never does Swoll allow for any interrogation or curiosity about what might have occurred off-camera. Instead, he’s positioned himself as the head vigilante of the digital Wild West, shaming surreptitious gym recorders by bringing greater attention to them — ironically, the very same thing the women appear to be doing with the “creeps” they film. The fact that both Swoll and Influencers in the Wild tend to have millions more followers than the people they’re criticizing also adds another layer: When is calling out those who film strangers creating a barrage of attention on bystanders who never wished to be dragged into the public eye in the first place? (Swoll did not respond to a request for comment.) The thirst for voyeurism content — whether you’re watching a stranger unknowingly get filmed or watching someone scold a stranger for doing the filming — means that accounts who engage in it have a higher likelihood of going viral and scoring lucrative brand deals. Influencers in the Wild, for instance, has its own merch and board game, while Joey Swoll regularly promotes his brand of low-calorie sauces. Knowing that the demand for “panopticontent” is so high leads creators to produce more of it — often by using TikTok’s stitch or duet feature, which allows them to milk as much clout as they can from a single trending topic or video — whether or not they realize it’s ethically murky. Faced with questions like, “Is it worth it to pull my phone out right now?” or “Am I a shitty person if I film someone without their knowledge?” Silver recommends resorting to the golden rule. We’re already being recorded all the time — by security cameras, by our phones, which track not only our location but every keystroke we make online, and by other people’s cameras — but we’re the ones who decide whether or not to post our own videos online. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram could theoretically step in to demonetize accounts that make money from non-consensual voyeurism, but this is almost an unimaginable scenario, in part because it feels impossible to enforce. Until then, it’s up to audiences to shift cultural norms around what’s acceptable behavior online and what isn’t, but given the astonishing popularity of these videos, that doesn’t seem all that likely. After the incident at Target, Clark’s first thought was that he wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen to anyone else. “Working in retail, you get used to people harassing you. I’m not seen as a person anymore, I’m seen as an object,” he tells me. Increasingly, this is how people on social media view each other: as NPCs, disposable, as background actors with no desires or interests of their own. While TikTok has allowed Clark to respond publicly and have thousands of people rallying behind him, it’s also responsible for helping to create the problem in the first place. “There’s a lack of decency, and I think it may be the allure of getting famous and going viral. People think that justifies the means, but it definitely does not.”vox.com