Fraud. Hush money. Election subversion. Mar-a-Lago documents. One place to keep track of the presidential candidate’s legal troubles.

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.As the Israel-Hamas war continues, breathless headlines sometimes conceal more than they reveal.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic. David A. Graham: “The Stormy Daniels testimony spotlights Trump’s misogyny.” The politics of fear itself When conservative parents revolt Waiting for DetailsIn March, CNN reported that “the Israelis have ‘basically accepted’ a six-week ceasefire proposal in Gaza,” per a U.S. official. Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that Hamas said it had “accepted an Egyptian-Qatari cease-fire proposal.” Each of these claims quickly spread across the internet, fueling arguments among partisans around the world and raising hopes among both Palestinians and Israelis. Of course, as anyone following the conflict in Gaza knows, the fighting has not ended. These pseudo-cease-fires are far from the only instance of such whiplash between the headlines and reality in recent months—just recall the breathless news coverage surrounding Iran’s strike on Israel and the Israeli response, both of which were cast as a prelude to regional and possibly world war before fizzling into nothing of the kind.Confused? Trying to figure out how to tell what’s true and what’s not? You’re not alone. I struggle with the challenge too. Here are four points about the cease-fire talks that guide my own reporting, and help me untangle where things stand.1. As they negotiate, both parties are attempting to shape international media coverage—and their statements should be read with this in mind. In professional sports leagues, before consequential trades or player signings, there are often a flurry of leaks to media outlets about potential contract terms or trade packages. Most of these turn out to be false. This is how Aaron Judge, the superstar captain of the New York Yankees, was momentarily reported to have signed with the San Francisco Giants in 2022. Why are so many of these reports wrong? Sometimes, they reflect genuine offers from the midst of a fluid negotiation; other times they are an attempt by one side to increase their leverage.International reporting is not sports reporting, but it is subject to similar dynamics. In the case of Israel and Hamas, both sides are selectively sharing information in order to shape press coverage, attempting to present themselves as reasonable and their opponent as recalcitrant. In some cases, this can lead to certain media outlets getting ahead of the story or being spun by those advancing an agenda. That appears to be what happened yesterday, when Hamas unilaterally announced that it had “agreed to” a cease-fire, and several outlets repeated the claim without sufficient scrutiny as to what the group had actually agreed to. As The New York Times reported, it later turned out that “Hamas did not ‘accept’ a cease-fire deal so much as make a counteroffer to the proposal on the table previously blessed by the United States and Israel.” Moreover, Hamas refused to commit to releasing only living Israeli hostages, as opposed to dead ones, in the first stage of a proposed multiphase deal. Here, as elsewhere, when confronted with a sensational headline, it pays to wait for more details before assuming the initial report provides the full picture.2. Israel and Hamas aren’t the only ones negotiating—and this makes things very complicated. Israel and Hamas did not have formal relations even before they went to war in October. As a result, they have long communicated through intermediaries. Right now, cease-fire negotiations are being conducted in Cairo with the assistance of multiple outside mediators, including the United States, Egypt (which borders both Israel and Gaza), and Qatar (which hosts the Hamas political leadership). Each of these actors is providing their own proposals and compromise suggestions, which can help the parties progress but also allow them to posture by accepting a friendlier proposal from one of the external mediators than they would get from the other side. Understanding this dynamic can help you decode the headlines: There will be a deal when the story is not “Israel accepts U.S. cease-fire proposal” or “Hamas accepts Egyptian-Qatari proposal” but rather “Israel and Hamas agree to mutual cease-fire proposal.”3. Several core sticking points still need to be resolved. To know whether the parties are actually close to a deal, it helps to know why they haven’t gotten to one yet. In addition to Hamas’s caginess about releasing living hostages—it has yet to provide a list of those Israelis it currently holds, and appears to want to use the live ones as bargaining chips for later stages—both parties have a fundamental disagreement about whether a deal would officially end the war. Hamas insists that it must, while Israel wants to reserve the right to return to Gaza and continue pursuing Hamas’s leadership, even after a long lull in hostilities.This split over a “permanent cease-fire” might seem largely symbolic: Israel and Hamas have been at war with each other on and off for more than a decade, and that won’t change based on what a piece of paper says. But symbolism matters. Both parties—and in particular, their political leadership—want to be able to declare victory when a deal is signed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in thrall to far-right coalition partners and dead in the polls, doesn’t want to look like he conceded to Hamas. Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, desperately wants to appear to have achieved something after all the devastation that Hamas and its October 7 massacre brought upon the people of Gaza. Being able to emerge from hiding and declare that he’d outlasted the vaunted Israeli military would accomplish that.More substantively, Israelis are divided over whether the overriding goal of the current war should be destroying Hamas (in which case Israel cannot disengage until the group’s final battalions are defeated) or returning the hostages (in which case Israel could end this war now and fight Hamas another day). Israel’s leadership has so far refused to choose between these two goals, but the moment of decision seems to be arriving.4. There is no agreement, but there are negotiations and they are at a pivotal point. Yesterday, Hamas made a negotiating counteroffer, then accepted its own counteroffer. That is obviously not how a bilateral agreement works, but it is evidence that negotiations are advancing. In response, Israel announced yesterday that it would send a new delegation to Cairo to continue talks. CIA director William Burns is reportedly personally on site to help facilitate a deal. At the same time, Israel has begun an operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where it says Hamas’s leadership is hiding among more than 1 million sheltering Palestinians.President Joe Biden has warned the Israelis against a full-scale operation in Rafah, which is partly why the current one is limited in scope—it began with an evacuation order for 100,000 civilians, leaving the rest in place while Israel maneuvers in a smaller geographic area. This move undoubtedly puts further pressure on Hamas, but it also hastens the moment when Israel will have to decide whether to press forward into the rest of Rafah, potentially breaking with the Biden administration. This prospect in turn increases the pressure on Israel itself to reach some sort of agreement. Although the outcome of these precipitous events is uncertain, an inflection point is fast approaching—and the time may come once again to practice patience as the incomplete headlines roll in.Related: The right-wing Israeli campaign to resettle Gaza (From 2023) What did top Israeli war officials really say about Gaza? Today’s News The judge in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial denied his lawyers’ request for a mistrial during Stormy Daniels’s testimony about her alleged sexual encounter with the former president and a hush-money payment. TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, sued the U.S. federal government over recent legislation that mandates the sale of TikTok, claiming that the law violates the company’s First Amendment rights. Vladimir Putin was inaugurated for his fifth term as the president of Russia in a ceremony that the U.S. and many European nations boycotted. Evening Read Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty. Enough With Saving the HoneybeesBy Ellen Cushing In 2022, at least 18 states enacted bee-related legislation. Last year, a cryptocurrency launched with the intention of raising “awareness and support for bee conservation.” If you search Etsy right now for “save the bees,” you’ll be rewarded with thousands of things to buy. Bees and Thank You, a food truck in suburban Boston, funds bee sanctuaries and gives out a packet of wildflower seeds—good for the bees!—with every grilled cheese sandwich it sells. A company in the United Kingdom offers a key ring containing a little bottle of chemicals that can purportedly “revive” an “exhausted bee” should you encounter one, “so it can continue its mission pollinating planet Earth.” All of the above is surprising for maybe a few different reasons, but here’s a good place to start: Though their numbers have fluctuated, honeybees are not in trouble. Other bees are. But the movement’s poster child, biggest star, and attention hound is not at risk of imminent extinction, and never has been. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic The conjoined twins who refused to be “fixed” “Ukraine has changed too much to compromise with Russia,” Illia Ponomarenko argues. Being an ambassador in Washington keeps getting harder. James Parker: “Some late-breaking adjustments to my new autobiography” Culture Break Max Watch (or skip). Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show (out now on Max) is a new unscripted show about the comedian’s life that may lean too much into voyeurism, Hannah Giorgis writes.Read. A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria, by Caroline Crampton, explores the pervasiveness of health anxiety.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.Explore all of our newsletters here.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Donald Trump has often loved to talk about his sexual prowess. He boasted to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush about grabbing women’s crotches non-consensually. He called the New York Post and begged them to run a headline bragging that his then-girlfriend, and later-second wife, Marla Maples, considered their relationship the “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had!” He bragged that he had so much sex that avoiding venereal diseases was “my personal Vietnam.”But the former president is suddenly shy about sex this week. It’s the third week of his trial in Manhattan on charges that he falsified business records to cover up hush money paid to a woman who says she had sex with him. That woman is Stormy Daniels, a porn actor and director, and today she testified in the trial, much to Trump’s consternation.[Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s misogyny is on trial in New York]At the start of proceedings today, Trump’s lawyers fiercely objected to Daniels’s presence—particularly to the danger that she would divulge “any details” of sex between the two. Trump also angrily posted and then deleted a missive on Truth Social about Daniels testifying. (He denies that any sex occurred.) Daniels has indeed been nauseatingly graphic about the encounter in other forums, but a prosecutor assured Judge Juan Merchan that the witness would not describe any “genitalia.”And she did not, though she did at one point describe the position in which she says they had sex. Trump’s lawyers, and sometimes Merchan of his own volition, repeatedly objected to prosecutors’ lines of questioning or to Daniels’s answers. The vibes were weird all around. Daniels had to be repeatedly asked to speak more slowly, by both the prosecutor and the judge. Reporters in the courtroom observed that Merchan seemed more on edge than at any other point in the trial so far.What Daniels described was less graphic and less prurient but perhaps more repulsive and more revealing about Trump. My colleague Quinta Jurecic wrote at the outset of the case that the real subject of the trial was Trump’s misogyny, raising the question: “Is this really the kind of man you want to be your president?” The day’s testimony was a window into just what kind of man that is, one dripping with sexual entitlement and presumption.[David A. Graham: Judge Merchan is out of good options]Daniels recounted a dinner appointment with Trump in Lake Tahoe in 2006 that she thought was about either socializing or business; it dawned on her too late that the goal for him was sex.One clear implication from Daniels’s testimony was that for Trump, this was nothing unusual. He simply expected that if a woman was around him, he was getting laid—not without consent, exactly, but not entirely with it, either. There was no conversation, Daniels testified: “I didn’t say anything at all.” After all, as Trump said in the Access Hollywood tape, “when you’re a star they let you do it.” In the same tape, he bitterly recalled hitting on another woman unsuccessfully. The failure rankled because it ran against his usual pattern.The two met at a golf tournament. After an initial introduction, Trump’s bodyguard approached her and asked if she’d have dinner with Trump. She demurred, profanely, but came around because she wanted to get out of another obligation. Besides, her publicist asked her, “What could possibly go wrong?”Daniels was directed to meet Trump in his penthouse room. This should have been the first sign of trouble: She said he met her wearing silk or satin pajamas that reminded her of Hugh Hefner. She asked him to get dressed in normal clothes, and he did.[Read: The cases against Trump—a guide]Their conversation over dinner sounds, bluntly, to be weird. Among the topics were how often Daniels was tested for STDs, and what protocols were for filming (her company always required condoms). In what maybe should have been another warning sign, they also talked about Trump’s sleeping arrangements with his third and current wife, Melania (Daniels said he said they didn’t even sleep in the same room).At one point, Daniels scolded Trump. “Are you always this rude? Are you always this arrogant and pompous?” she asked. (No one would have to ask today.) “Like you don’t even know how to have a conversation.” But she also testified that unlike many other people, he seemed less interested in the salacious side of the porn business and more curious about the financials. “He was very interested in a lot of the business aspects of it, which I thought was very cool,” she said. “These were very thought-out business questions."Eventually, Daniels was ready to head out and went to the bathroom. But when she emerged, she found Trump on the bed, in a t-shirt and boxers. He was between her and the door. She moved to leave, but he blocked her—not in a threatening manner, she said, though she also noted that he was larger than her and she was aware of the power dynamic. The next thing she knew, they were having sex.[Sophie Gilbert: Four more years of unchecked misogyny]Trump had gotten what he wanted. The two kept in touch for years, with him repeatedly dangling but never delivering on the prospect of Daniels appearing on The Apprentice. She said he never asked her to keep quiet about their hook-up, though she also didn’t discuss it widely, she said, because she was ashamed. It was only later, as Trump was running for president in 2016, that her hush-money deal was arranged.Last year, my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote that a second Trump presidency would produce four years of unchecked misogyny. “I don’t believe Donald Trump hates women. Not by default, anyway,” she wrote. “The misogyny that Trump embodies and champions is less about loathing than enforcement: underscoring his requirement that women look and behave a certain way, that we comply with his desires and submit to our required social function.” Daniels’s account of her encounter with him showed exactly how that can work. It’s not that Trump bore any malice toward Daniels (that came later); it’s that she mattered to him only as a vehicle to sex.By now, Trump has gotten a great deal more than he expected or wanted that day in his Tahoe penthouse. Following a lunch break today, his attorneys argued for a mistrial on the basis of Daniels’s answers. Merchan refused but said several times that some things that came up would have been “better left unsaid.” The newly demure defendant would surely agree.

Everyone, for so long, has been worried about the honeybees. Governments, celebrities, social-media users, small businesses, multinational conglomerates—in the two decades or so since news emerged that American honeybees were disappearing, all manner of entities with a platform or a wallet have taken up and abandoned countless other causes, but they can’t quit trying to save the bees.In 2022, at least 18 states enacted bee-related legislation. Last year, a cryptocurrency launched with the intention of raising “awareness and support for bee conservation.” If you search Etsy right now for “save the bees,” you’ll be rewarded with thousands of things to buy. Bees and Thank You, a food truck in suburban Boston, funds bee sanctuaries and gives out a packet of wildflower seeds—good for the bees!—with every grilled cheese sandwich it sells. A company in the United Kingdom offers a key ring containing a little bottle of chemicals that can purportedly “revive” an “exhausted bee” should you encounter one, “so it can continue its mission pollinating planet Earth.”All of the above is surprising for maybe a few different reasons, but here’s a good place to start: Though their numbers have fluctuated, honeybees are not in trouble. Other bees are. But the movement’s poster child, biggest star, and attention hound is not at risk of imminent extinction, and never has been. “There are more honeybees on the planet now than there probably ever have been in the history of honeybees,” Rich Hatfield, a biologist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, told me. “They are in no threat of going endangered. It’s not an issue.”The idea that honeybees need our help is one of our most curiously persistent cultural myths. It is well intended. But it is also unhelpful: a distraction from more urgent biodiversity problems, and an object lesson in the limits of modern environmentalism and the seductiveness of modern consumerism. That the misconception has survived for so long may tell us less about bees than it does about the species that has, for centuries, adored, influenced, and exploited them more than any other. “Save the bees” rhetoric has turned them into something unspoiled, a miracle of mother nature’s ingenious machinery. But everything about the modern American honeybee has been shaped by humans, including its sustained existence.A true truth about the bees: The modal American honeybee is, essentially, a farm animal—part of a $200-billion-a-year industry that’s regulated by the USDA and is as sophisticated and professionalized as any other segment of the sprawling system that gets food on our plates. The nation’s largest beekeeping operation, Adee Honey Farms, has more than 80,000 colonies, facilities in five states, and nearly 100 employees. Its bees, and those at other large-scale apiaries, do produce honey, but more and more, the real money is in what the industry calls “pollination services”: the renting-out of bees to fertilize the farms of Big Ag, which have seen their indigenous pollinators decline with urbanization and industrialization.Every February, right before the almond trees start blooming powdery and white across California’s San Joaquin Valley, bees from all over the country pack onto semitrucks and head west, where they participate in the largest supervised pollination event on Earth, doing their part to ensure that America’s most beloved nut makes its way again into snack packs and candy bars. Throughout the spring and early summer, they do the same for other crops—watermelons, pumpkins, cucumbers, alfalfas, onions—before heading home to the honey farm, where the most ambitious among them can expect to make a 12th of a teaspoon of the gooey, golden stuff over their lifetime. In the early 1990s, when Adee started renting out bees for industrial fertilization, that income accounted for about a third of its revenue, with honey making up the rest. Now the ratio is flipped.[Read: A uniquely French approach to environmentalism]As that transition was happening, another force threatened to rearrange the industry even more dramatically. Worker bees were flying away for pollen and never coming back, abandoning their hives’ queens and young like a lousy husband in an enduring cliché. No one could figure out why. Some blamed a common class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are toxic to bees. Others zeroed in on the stress incurred by all that trucking of beehives around the country for pollination. Maybe it was warmer winters, or malnutrition, or the parasitic Varroa mite, or a sign of the Rapture.This was not the first time bees had gone missing en masse. In 1869, and in 1918, and in 1965, farmers had reported similar phenomena, given names such as “spring dwindle” and “disappearing disease” in the scientific literature. But it was the first time that such an event reached full-scale public crisis, or that knowledge of it spread much beyond the insular world of farmers, beekeepers, entomologists, and agriculture regulators.In retrospect, it was a perfect moment for a predicament like this to effloresce into panic. Social media had recently birthed an immensely powerful way of both disseminating information and performing one’s values loudly and publicly. An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s feature-length climate-change call to arms, had become one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. Michael Pollan was at the peak of his powers, having just published The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which laid out the consequence and quantity of choices facing contemporary eaters. Americans were newly aware of the terrifying fragility of our food systems, and newly in possession of robust ways to talk about it. Brands were interested in aligning themselves with noncontroversial, blandly feel-good causes. Plus, humans were already primed to love bees; we have since biblical times. “We think of bees as being very pure,” Beth Daly, an anthrozoology professor at the University of Windsor, in Canada, told me. They are honey and flowers and sunshine, beauty and abundance, communitarianism and hard work.By 2007, the mystery thing making these lovely creatures go away had a scary-sounding new name: colony collapse disorder. Within a decade, bee panic was everywhere. A spate of nonfiction books warned of the imminent threat of a Fruitless Fall and A Spring Without Bees. The White House convened a task force. General Mills temporarily removed the cartoon-bee mascot from boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios, enacting a high-concept allegory meant, I guess, to stun Americans into action. The cosmetics company Burt’s Bees released a limited-edition lip-balm flavor (strawberry), some of whose proceeds went to one of the approximately gazillion honeybee-conservation nonprofits that had recently sprung up. Samuel L. Jackson gave Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds “10 pounds of bees” as a wedding gift. Laypeople started keeping backyard hives. Häagen-Dazs created an awareness-raising ice-cream flavor and funded a VR short film shot from the perspective of a bee; in it, Alex, our apian protagonist, warns that “something terrible is happening.”She (it?) was not entirely wrong. Colony collapse was an actual problem, a scientific whodunit with genuinely high stakes. Honeybees are responsible for pollinating roughly every third bite Americans eat. Scientists were correct to think back then that if colonies were to keep collapsing, our food system would need to change in painful, potentially catastrophic ways.Much more worrying, though, and more real: The population of wild bees—the non-honey-producing, non-hive-dwelling relatives of the species humans have been intent on saving—has been decreasing steadily, for years. Insects of all kinds are declining in record numbers, and their deaths will have repercussions we cannot even imagine.[Read: The illogical relationship Americans have with animals]Yet heads have been turned mostly toward the honeybee. That’s because, unlike so many other imperiled animals, honeybees are part of a huge industry quite literally invested in their survival. Apis mellifera are living things, but they are also revenue-generating assets; the thousands of people who rely on bees’ uncompensated labor to buy groceries and pay the cable bill had every incentive to figure out colony collapse. So they found better agrochemicals and bred mite-resistant bees. They gave their bees nutritional supplements, fats and proteins and minerals ground as fine as pollen and snuck into the food supply. They moved hives into atmospherically controlled warehouses. They adapted.All told, it was kind of the Y2K of environmental disasters. Not that colony collapse was a hoax, or that the panic surrounding it was an overreaction. Rather, it was an appropriate reaction—a big problem made smaller thanks to the difficult, somewhat unglamorous, behind-the-scenes labor of trained professionals with a vested interest in averting disaster. In 2019, an economist-entomologist team published a study analyzing the effects of colony collapse on the managed-pollinator industry; they found “cause for considerable optimism, at least for the economically dominant honey bee.” According to the most recent data from the USDA Census of Agriculture, honeybees have been the country’s fastest-growing livestock category since 2007. Also, very clearly, our food system has not fallen to pieces.This doesn’t mean honeybee keepers aren’t struggling—some are. But as Hatfield, the Xerces Society biologist, told me, that’s an issue for the business of honeybee keeping, not the moral and practical project of pollinator conservation. He finds a useful comparison in a different domesticated animal: chickens. “When we get bird flu,” he said, “we leave that up to USDA scientists to develop immunizations and other things to help these chickens that are suffering in these commercial chicken coops. We don’t enlist homeowners to help the chicken populations in their backyard.”In 2018, Seirian Sumner, a wasp scientist and fan, conducted a survey of 748 people, mostly in the United Kingdom, on their perceptions of various insects. She and her collaborators, she told me, “were absolutely flabbergasted” by their results: Bees are roughly as adored as butterflies and significantly more liked than wasps—their wilder cousins—which serve various important roles in ecosystem regulation, and which are in genuine, fairly precipitous decline.Sumner was born in 1974 and doesn’t recall much love for bees when she was growing up. You weren’t “buying your bee slippers and your bee socks and your bee scarf and your bee mug and everything else,” she told me. Today’s craze for bees, her research suggests, is a mutually reinforcing phenomenon. People love bees because they understand their importance as pollinators. People understand their importance as pollinators because it is easier to fund research and write magazine articles and publish children’s books and engage in multi-platform brand campaigns about animals that people are already fond of.Honeybees are, in point of fact, amazing. They have five eyes, two stomachs, and a sense of smell 50 times more sensitive than a dog’s. They do a little dance when they find good pollen and want to tell their friends about it. They are feminists, and obviously, they dress well. They produce a near-universally-liked substance, and they do not have to die to do it. Loving bees, and wanting more of them in our food system, is simple. Engaging meaningfully with the cruel, complicated reality of industrial food production, or the looming, life-extinguishing horror of climate change, is not.To save the bees is to participate in an especially appealing kind of environmental activism, one that makes solutions seem straightforward and buying stuff feel virtuous. Worried about vanishing biodiversity? Save the bees. Feeling powerless about your mandatory participation, via the consumption required to stay alive, in agriculture systems that produce so much wreckage, so much waste, so much suffering for so many living things? Save the bees. Tired of staring at the hyperobject? Save the bees. When we are grasping for ways to help, we tend to land on whatever is within arm’s reach.In the 17th century, when what is now called the American honeybee was imported from Europe, large-scale industrial agriculture did not exist. Farms were surrounded by wild flora and powered by non-machine labor, without pesticides and chemical fertilizers, which also did not exist. Bees lived, ate, and pollinated all in the same place; they built their nests in untilled soil and unchopped trees. Even if farmers could have trucked them in, they didn’t have to. But as farming changed, bees became livestock, then itinerant laborers—there to meet the needs of the industrial systems that created those needs in the first place. Their numbers have always oscillated based on our demands: In the 1940s, when sugar rationing made beekeeping extraordinarily profitable, the bee population swelled; as soon as the war was over, it fell again. In 2024, thanks to the efforts of professional beekeepers and (to a lesser extent) backyard hobbyists, they’re faring better than ever.Now the industrialized world that made, and saved, the honeybee as we know it is being called on to save other insects—the ones that really are in trouble. This will be trickier. When you ask experts what a layperson should do for all pollinators in 2024, they have a lot to say: Use fewer insecticides, inside and outside. Convert mowed lawn into habitat that can feed wild animals. Reconsider your efforts to save the honeybee—not just because it’s a diversion, but because honeybees take resources from wild bees. Buy organic, and look for food grown using agricultural practices that support beneficial insects. Get involved with efforts to count and conserve bees of all species. (The experts do not think you should buy a lip balm.)What they are getting at is … an inconvenient truth: America does have an insect-biodiversity crisis. It is old and big—much older and much bigger than colony collapse disorder—and so are the solutions to it. The best require returning our environment into something that looks much more like the place the first American honeybees encountered. Having a backyard beehive isn’t the answer to what’s ailing our ecosystem, because having a backyard is the problem. Buying ice cream from a global food conglomerate isn’t the answer, because buying ice cream from a global food conglomerate is the problem. The movement to save the honeybee is a small attempt at unwinding centuries of human intervention in our natural world, at undoing the harms of the modern food system, without having to sacrifice too much. No wonder so many of us wanted to believe.​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

When George Schappell came out as transgender in 2007, he joined a population at the center of medical and ethical controversy. Schappell was used to this. He had been born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1961 with the left side of his face, some of his skull, and a portion of his brain conjoined with those of his sister, Lori. Following doctors’ advice, their parents put them in an institution for children with intellectual disabilities.At the time, children with “birth defects” were routinely consigned to what the activist Harriet McBryde Johnson termed the “disability gulag,” a network of facilities designed in part to care for such children and in part to keep them out of the public view. Conditions could be abysmal, but even better-maintained facilities cut residents off from society and deprived them of autonomy. In their early 20s, the twins fought their way out by enlisting the help of Pennsylvania’s first lady, whose stepson was disabled.[From the September 2023 issue: The ones we sent away]As George and Lori Schappell navigated independence, the growing disability-rights movement began to allow many other people with disabilities to do the same. Their physical bodies did not fit easily into the structures of a world that was not designed to receive them. George and Lori, who died last month at 62, spent their adult lives finding their way through that world. But American society is still struggling to determine whether to accommodate bodies like theirs—bodies that fail to conform to standards of gender, ability, and even individuality.In the 1980s and early ’90s, while the Schappells were establishing their independent lives, the American public was enthralled by a procession of sensationalized operations to separate conjoined twins. These experimental procedures could be brutal. Many conjoined twins did not come apart easily; in many cases they have an odd number of limbs or organs shared between them. Patrick and Benjamin Binder, whose 1987 separation at six months made a young Ben Carson a star, both sustained profound neurological damage from the surgery and never spoke. In 1994, surgeons sacrificed newborn Amy Lakeberg to save her twin, but Angela died less than a year later, never having left the hospital. Lin and Win Htut shared a single pair of genitals; in 1984 doctors designated the more “aggressive” of the 2-year-old boys to retain their penis, while the other was given a surgically constructed vagina and reassigned as a girl. By the time he was 10, he had reasserted his identity as a boy.Other twins’ separation surgeries were the subject of occasional controversy from the 1980s into the early 2000s. Doctors justified them as giving children a chance at a “normal” life, and usually portrayed them as well-intentioned even if they failed. But many were not clearly medically necessary. Ethicists such as Alice Dreger, the author One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal, argued against a risky medical “cure” performed on children who could not consent to it. Meanwhile, the Schappells were living in their own apartment. George’s spina bifida had impeded his growth, so he was much smaller than his twin; they got around with George perched on a barstool-height wheelchair so he could roll along beside Lori as she walked. Lori got a job at a hospital, and they pursued hobbies (George: country music; Lori: bowling) and made friends (Lori also dated). They kept pets, including a Chihuahua and a fish whom they named George years before George chose that name as his own. They went to bars, where a bartender once refused service to George because he looked underage, but agreed to pour drinks for Lori. They did not live “normal” lives: They lived their lives.[Read: Why is it so hard to find jobs for disabled workers?]But as the public became familiar with the model of separation for conjoined twins, the Schappells found themselves asked, repeatedly, to explain their continued conjoined existence. In 1992, they gave what seem to be their first interviews, to The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News; the news hook was local doctors’ decision not to separate another pair of twins who were joined, like the Schappells, at the head. The Schappells initially explained to reporters that medical science hadn’t been advanced enough for separation when they'd been born. But later they would stress that they wouldn’t have wanted to be separated even if they had been given the choice. “I don’t believe in separation,” Lori told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “I think you are messing with God’s work.”Not long after those first articles were published, the twins began appearing more frequently in the media. They did the rounds of the great 1990s freak shows—Maury, Jerry Springer, Sally, Howard Stern. They became the most visible non-separated conjoined twins of the era. Observers, journalists, and talk-show audiences tended to overwrite the Schappells with their own perceptions. The twins were inspirational, or pitiable; they epitomized cooperation, or individualism. I can’t imagine your lives, people would say, even as they proceeded to do just that. The Virginia Quarterly Review once published a poem written in Lori’s voice, in which the poet took it upon herself to warn an imagined observer: “You don’t know the forest / of two minds bound by weeds / grown from one to the other, / the synapses like bees / cross-pollinating / our honeyed brain.”The twins, though, did not seem overly concerned about whether others understood them, and they did not go out of their way to change the world. They were not activists. George pursued a career as a country singer; they traveled; they grew older. When their Chihuahua lost the use of its hind legs, George made it a tiny wheelchair. The world slowly changed around them. Institutionalization for disabled people is less common today, though it still happens.[From the March 2023 issue: Society tells me to celebrate my disability. What if I don’t want to?]Conjoined twins now occupy far less space in the public imagination. The pair currently most famous are Abby and Brittany Hensel, who have constructed their public image as so aggressively unexceptional that a reality show about their lives was, in at least one viewer’s words, “super boring.” (Their public performance of ordinariness is not always successful; earlier this year, when Today reported that Abby had gotten married, the reaction was predictable, mingling pity and prurience.)Separation surgeries are still performed today, but they are no longer the subject of intense public debate. Instead, one of the most visible medical controversies of our era, gender transition for young people, is related to another aspect of George’s identity. Although children who identify as trans aren’t eligible for medical interventions before the onset of puberty and only some choose hormones or surgery in their late teens, the idea of little kids receiving those treatments has helped inflame panic over whether they should be allowed at all, even for adults.In the case of 2-year-old Win Htut, surgical transition was seen as restoring “normality.” But today, medical transition is often seen as creating difference. When you consider that history, a devotion to “normality” seems to be the primary motivator behind a recent raft of state laws outlawing transition care for transgender youth. After all, most of these laws carve out exceptions for children born with ambiguous genitalia. “Corrective” genital operations are still a routine practice for intersex infants, despite the protests of intersex adults, who say they would not have chosen to be surgically altered.[Read: Young trans children know who they are]George didn’t say much publicly about being trans, and never mentioned running up against any anti-trans bigotry. But when the twins’ obituaries ran on the website of a local funeral home last month, they were described as their parents’ “daughters,” and George was listed under his birth name. Whatever the intent in doing so, the obituary posthumously obscured his identity by correcting his “abnormality”—despite the fact that, in life, the twins had never apologized for being different.

The guardian of the special relationship—the historical but possibly mythical bond between the United States and the United Kingdom—is a short woman with discerning blue eyes and a penchant for glittering headbands.The role of an ambassador has always been strange. They’re expected to be fun—to flit around comfortably at galas and cocktail parties, charming guests and making inroads with important people while waiters weave around with platters of deviled eggs. Still, British Ambassador Karen Pierce’s real duty is to lobby for her country and offer advice on delicate matters during heated international moments. And the job of an ambassador—even one representing a close ally—has become far more complex because of the strident partisanship that has taken hold in D.C.Part of Pierce’s mission recently has been to represent the British government’s firmly pro-Ukraine position on providing military aid—even when the Biden administration’s matching desire became mired in Congress because of protests by a Trump-aligned faction of House Republicans.[Elaine Godfrey: Trump’s VP search is different this time]Pierce had not only lobbied hard on Capitol Hill ahead of last week’s long-awaited congressional vote on aid; she’d also traveled with Britain’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, to Mar-a-Lago to try to get buy-in from Donald Trump. (She has been tight-lipped about their meeting, and was certainly claiming no credit, but the former president’s toned-down opposition to the bill probably did help the package pass—even though more Republican lawmakers voted against it than for it.)In an era when populist politics and rising nationalism are challenging the institutions of the international liberal order, diplomacy can seem like a quaint relic of bygone etiquette.The more public side of an ambassador’s job seems much easier. Over the past three years, Pierce has become well known for throwing lively and well-attended Pimms-fueled bashes, especially in the D.C. social season surrounding the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Underneath the surface frippery, though, Pierce is a serious operator. The true art of her diplomacy is the very English thing of working hard to make it all look totally effortless.One evening last week, I watched Pierce at work. During a party two days before the WHCD, she buzzed around the lush green garden of her Washington residence, chatting with various politicos.The 64-year-old Pierce grew up in northwest England and has worked for the U.K.’s Foreign Office for 43 years. She’s held positions in Japan, in Ukraine, and in the Balkans during the conflicts in former Yugoslavia. For a year, she lived in Kabul as Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan, and she represented the U.K. at the United Nations for three years. Although she was made a dame in 2018, Pierce’s working-class background makes her a relative outsider in the foreign service, which is otherwise a bastion of the upper-class elite. Being Britain’s first female ambassador to the U.S. does too. She leans into it.The day I saw her, she was wearing a vivid chartreuse dress and black tights, with her feet tucked daintily into a pair of black-and-white kitten heels. Despite being shorter than everyone else at the party, she still commanded the attention of all the people in her vicinity. Pierce has worn tangerine suits to state events, and baby-pink silk dresses with huge round sunglasses. Once, to attend a UN summit, she wrapped herself in what looked like a maroon feather boa. Such displays aren’t just a sartorial choice; they’re a strategy.“When you’re an ambassador, you want people to remember you,” she told me. So I made note of her leaf-patterned sheath dress, shiny blue blazer, and cheetah-print headband. About that feather boa; it wasn’t one. “It was a fur, but it was fake,” Pierce insisted. “Though the Russians tried to say it was an exotic fur.” She rolled her eyes. “The Russians will go for anything. They really have no scruples whatsoever.”[Read: What a former U.S. ambassador to Russia learned from Condoleezza Rice]The wall behind the desk in Pierce’s office, a cheerful, sunlit room in an otherwise sterile building, is covered in magnets collected from around the world (“The tackier the better,” she told The Washington Post). Orchids decorate the tables.Entertaining is part of the job. But don’t call them parties: “We would call them receptions, because we treat them as work events,” she chided me. In the days surrounding the WHCD on April 27, Pierce hosted an embassy reception that provided not only a selection of assorted British pasties, but a cigar room and Scotch bar as well. She also made appearances at half a dozen events put on by various Washington bigwigs and media outlets, and emceed a Sunday brunch in the embassy garden. Pierce’s drink of choice? “I like lots and lots of cocktails, but the more pink they are, the better, I’m afraid.”Pierce’s first job in D.C. was as private secretary to the then-ambassador. She arrived in 1992 with her husband, former U.K. Treasury Secretary Charles Roxburgh, and her first of two children, an infant at the time. “The fact that politics is in the air is just—and also the fact that you’re in the capital of the leading nation in the world—I get a real buzz out of that,” she said.In 1995, Pierce watched as Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House, and American politics grew more polarized. When she came back to serve as ambassador in March 2020, she saw that trend intensify, culminating in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. “I watch all of these developments, and we spend a lot of time evaluating them and finding historical context for them,” she told me.But Pierce wasn’t particularly eager to discuss current politics—or the ex- and possibly future president who has sent that polarization into overdrive. Her caution made sense: Pierce’s predecessor, Kim Darroch, resigned from his position after leaks revealed that he’d criticized the Trump administration as “inept and insecure.” When I asked her about the former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, whose time in office famously lasted only about as long as a head of lettuce stayed fresh, and who has recently cozied up to the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Pierce’s expression was steely. “She’s a private individual, and she’s welcome to pursue her politics,” she said. “It’s not where the British government is.”[Read: America’s Trumpiest ambassador]The day after we met in her embassy office, Pierce showed up early at the Hilton Hotel, in a rich-blue gown and a pair of cascading diamond earrings, greeting as many people as possible before the Correspondents’ Dinner officially began. This year’s dinner was probably Pierce’s last spring soirée; a new British ambassador is expected to replace her by the end of 2024.Leaving will be hard, Pierce said during a Politico podcast taping—“I’ll have to be dragged out of [here] by my fingernails”—not least because this is an election year. A return to the Oval Office for the resident of Mar-a-Lago could mean a challenging new dynamic between the U.S. and the U.K. Pierce joked about being reluctant to leave America, but her concern about a possible end of aid to Ukraine seemed obvious.That aside, her domestic assessment was surprisingly rosy—or at least highly diplomatic. “I personally do not worry about America,” she told me. “I have a lot of faith in American democracy and in Americans, and I think you have very strong institutions.” Pierce’s faith in what an ambassador to America can achieve seemed unshaken, even amid the capital’s current dysfunction. She didn’t hesitate to assert that confidence when I asked her advice for her soon-to-be-announced successor: “Make the weather.”

On a day that began like any other, the unwitting star of The Truman Show saw something that changed his entire world. For a few, unnerving seconds, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) came face-to-face with his father—a man he believed to be dead. In the 1998 film, this implausible encounter catalyzed Truman’s realization that the small beach town he called home was really a suburb-size production studio designed to confine him. After decades of being secretly surveilled as part of a never-ending reality show, Truman found freedom when his broadcast finally ended.More than 25 years and countless reality-TV franchises later, The Truman Show remains a prescient meditation on the creeping dangers of a ceaseless entertainment cycle that ruthlessly commodifies real people’s lives. “I’m trying to self–Truman Show myself,” the comedian Jerrod Carmichael says early in a new unscripted series about his life around the time of his Emmy win for Rothaniel, the 2022 stand-up special in which he publicly came out as a gay man. Carmichael’s growing pains, as captured on Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, reflect existential and interpersonal turmoil: fractured familial ties, strained friendships, self-destructive behavior that threatens his first real relationship with a man. But his allusion to the Carrey film is one of many explanations he gives for wanting to expose so much of himself to audiences: Early on, he claims that cameras put him at ease, and that their constant presence may help him overcome his damaging tendency to lie in his real life.In this way, Reality Show actually inverts the original Truman Show premise, which hinged on Truman being unaware of the elaborate artifice required to sustain his televised life. Carmichael, by contrast, co-created and co-executive-produced his new series, a level of involvement that makes it fundamentally impossible for the show to exist as an impartial record of his transgressions, which he seems to want to acknowledge and make amends for. The comic does repeatedly acknowledge this key tension: He often addresses the camerapeople during scenes, drawing attention to the literal production of his narrative. Still, pointing out this artifice doesn’t diminish its creative interference. As my colleague Megan Garber wrote in 2020 about the 20th anniversary of Survivor, viewers “understand that reality, a postmodern genre in a post-truth culture, turns the logic of fictional entertainment on its head: It demands a willing suspension of belief.” For the most part, Carmichael’s series presents itself as a refreshing, experimental corrective to such farce. The comedian likens the camera to God; he knowingly inundates viewers with a litany of his sins. But publicly admitting one’s flaws isn’t inherently virtuous, and more often than not, Carmichael’s eagerness to divulge the unpalatable details of his life ends up turning the act of seeking forgiveness into voyeuristic spectacle.The stakes of the show’s storytelling choices are high for the comic’s loved ones, who don’t necessarily stand to profit directly from his HBO deal. (In fact, one friend who appears on the series, a fellow comedian, told Vulture he had to push just to get paid $1,000.) And despite Carmichael’s stated desire to use the cameras as a truth-telling agent, everyone around him is clearly aware that the comic can still manipulate the final product to privilege its creator. Throughout the series, many of those people articulate that power imbalance: “Dude, this is not a neutral eye,” says one of his friends, who only appears on-screen wearing an anonymizing mask, in the first episode. Shortly afterward, the friend implies that Carmichael’s project risks being “masturbatorily public.” It’s an astute observation: If Rothaniel sublimated the agony of keeping secrets, then Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show revels in the fantasy of finding absolution through public confession.Carmichael’s approach to confession differs from the way it appears on most reality TV shows. Generally, producers lead a cast member into an isolated studio, where they’re encouraged to speak candidly—and, ideally, confrontationally—about their peers, in order to sow the kind of chaos that boosts ratings. Carmichael, though, reserves the bulk of his self-taped, lo-fi confessionals for disparaging himself. It’s profoundly uncomfortable to witness. Early in one episode, during a stand-up bit sandwiched in the middle of a scene where he shops for sex toys, Carmichael offers up this blithe assessment of his sexuality: “In gay years, I’m 17,” which he explains means he wants to have sex with “a lot of people, all the time.” Later, after one of the many times he cheats on his boyfriend, Carmichael takes an entirely different tone as he speaks into a camcorder. “I want God. I feel spiritually unclean. I feel dirty,” he says, sitting on the floor in a literal closet. With his head in his hands, he adds, “Sex offers me power and control. It’s an escape.” Such scenes instead underscore how stuck Carmichael is—yes, he’s not actually in the closet anymore, but he’s nowhere close to having a healthy relationship to sex, or to being reliably honest with his partner.[Read: What reality TV reveals about motherhood]These moments also highlight the tremendous emotional toll that unscripted projects can take on participants who aren’t running the show. Carmichael’s quest to become a better person doesn’t happen in a vacuum; a constellation of real people with real feelings are affected when he acts with selfish, reckless abandon. Nowhere is this more unsettling to watch than in how he treats the men he’s drawn to, especially his boyfriend. Whatever hope for accountability might have been seeded during Carmichael’s post-infidelity self-flagellation is undone by a wrenching scene where Carmichael and his boyfriend, Mike, attend relationship counseling. Carmichael tells their therapist that he’s feeling “pretty good monogamy-wise,” and jokes that he doesn’t have the time to cheat. But when the cameramen suddenly move closer to Carmichael’s face, Mike suspects something is off. “I knew then, like, that they know something that I don’t,” he says later—and, of course, Carmichael actually is still being unfaithful. In the short but devastating segment, it’s hard to hear the palpable hurt in Mike’s voice and not wonder whether the audience is somehow implicated in Carmichael’s decision to prioritize a public performance of confession over being honest with his partner in private.And it’s especially curious that Carmichael identifies the camera as God. Seen through that lens, his navel-gazing starts to look similar to the suffocating shame that fear-based religious dogma can stoke beginning in childhood. Of course, most adults who still struggle with that shame don’t do so in front of an HBO audience. Still, Reality Show is most compelling when the comic seriously wrestles with the residual pains of being raised in a conservative Christian household—dynamics that are familiar to many other Black queer people. In the latest episode, titled “Homecoming,” he brings Mike home to meet his family. Carmichael and his devout mother remain on shaky ground, an uneasy détente that affects everyone around them. The episode doesn’t end with a neat ribbon, but by its conclusion, Carmichael and his mother have had multiple frustrating, important conversations about what they need from each other.These vignettes are striking because other people’s feelings aren’t entirely out of focus, and Carmichael’s voice isn’t the only one we hear. After several family members attempt to mediate, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine Carmichael and his mother building toward some kind of off-screen resolution. “Could my mom change?” he asks in a stand-up bit toward the end of the episode. He pauses for a moment, then answers his own question: “It’s reason to keep fighting.” I hope, for Carmichael’s sake, that he invests more time in that journey than in devising ways to make sure the rest of us watch.

A few months ago, I had an email exchange with a person who works in the right-wing-media world. He said that crime was “surging,” a claim that just happened to advance the Trumpian narrative that America during the Biden presidency is a dystopia.I pointed out that the preliminary data showed a dramatic drop in violent crime last year. (Violent crime spiked in the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, during the coronavirus pandemic, and has declined in each year of Joe Biden’s presidency.) During our back-and-forth, my interlocutor at first denied that crime had dropped. He sent me links showing that crime rates in Washington, D.C., were increasing, as though a national drop in crime couldn’t be accompanied by an increase in individual cities. He insisted the data I cited were false, implying they were the product of the liberal media. “Perception is reality,” he told me. “Nobody is buying the narrative that crime is getting better.”Eventually, after I responded to each of his claims, he reluctantly conceded that crime, rather than surging, was dropping—but ascribed the source of the progress to Republican states. I corrected him on that assertion, too. (Crime has dropped in both red and blue states.) He finally admitted that, yes, crime was decreasing, and in blue states too, but said the drop was inevitable, the result of the pandemic’s end. So he blamed Biden when he thought violent crime was increasing and insisted Biden deserves no credit now that violent crime is decreasing.[Rogé Karma: The great normalization]I consider where we ended up a victory, but only a partial and temporary one. His fundamental storyline hasn’t changed. Virtually every day he insists that life in America under Biden is a hellscape and that his reelection would lead to its destruction.Welcome to MAGA world.I mention this exchange because it reveals something important about the MAGA mind. Trump and his supporters have a deep investment in promoting fear. At almost every Trump rally, the former president tries to frighten his supporters out of their wits. He did this in 2016 and 2020, and he’s doing it again this year.“If he wins,” Trump said of Biden during a rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, “our country is going to be destroyed.” Trump also said this of Biden: “He’s a demented tyrant.” After Trump’s victories on Super Tuesday, he told an audience of his supporters, “Our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying.”Other politicians have been fearmongers, but none has been as relentless and effective as Trump. He has an unparalleled ability to promote feelings of terror among his base, with the goal of translating that terror into votes.But as I recently argued, Biden has been president for nearly three and a half years, and America has hardly entered a new Dark Age. In some important respects, in fact, the nation, based on empirical evidence, is doing better during the Biden years than it did during the Trump years. And evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, who comprise the most loyal and embittered parts of the Trump base, enjoy perhaps the greatest degree of religious liberty they ever have, and they are among the least persecuted religious communities in history. The number of abortions, of particular concern for evangelical Christians, declined steadily after 1990. At the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, during which there was a decrease of nearly 30 percent, the number of abortions reached its lowest level since Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973. (During the Trump administration, the number of abortions increased by 8 percent.)For many Trump supporters, then, fear is not so much the cause of their support for the former president as a justification for it. They use fear to rationalize their backing for Trump. They have a burning need to promote catastrophism, even if it requires cognitive distortion, spreading falsehoods, and peddling conspiracy theories.But why? What’s driving their ongoing, deepening fealty to Trump?Part of the explanation is partisan loyalty. Every party rallies around its presidential nominee, even if the nation is flourishing under the stewardship of an incumbent from the other party.But that reasoning takes us only so far in this case. For one thing, it’s nearly inconceivable to imagine that if any other former president did what Trump has done, Republicans would maintain their devotion to him. Richard Nixon committed only a fraction of Trump’s misdeeds, and the GOP broke with him over the revelation of the “smoking gun” tapes. It was not his liberal critics, but the collapse of support within the Republican Party, that persuaded Nixon to resign.Beyond that, Trump was not an incumbent this cycle. In 2020, he lost the presidency by 72 electoral votes and 7 million popular votes; Republicans lost control of the Senate, and Democrats maintained their majority in the House. In the past, when a one-term president was defeated and dragged his party down in the process, he was shown the exit. But despite Trump being a loser, Republicans remain enthralled by him. So something unusual is going on here.Human beings have a natural tendency to organize around tribal affiliations. Some are drawn to what the Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen calls the “need for chaos,” and wish to “burn down” the entire political order in the hopes of gaining status in the process. (My colleague Derek Thompson wrote about Petersen and his work earlier this year.) And social scientists such as Jonathan Haidt point out that mutual outrage bonds people together. Sharing anger can be very pleasurable, and the internet makes doing this orders of magnitude easier.For several decades now, the Republican base has been unusually susceptible to these predispositions. Grievances had been building, with Republicans feeling as though they were being dishonored and disrespected by elite culture. Those feelings were stoked by figures such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, who decivilized politics and turned it into a blood sport. And then came Trump, the most skilled and successful demagogue in American history.An extraordinary connection between Trump and his base was forged when he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015 and employed his dehumanizing language. Almost every day since then, he has selected targets at which to channel his hate, which appears to be inexhaustible, and ramped up his rhetoric to the point that it now echoes lines from Mein Kampf. In the process, he has fueled the rage of his supporters.Trump not only validated hate; he made it fashionable. One friend observed to me that Trump makes his supporters feel as if they are embattled warriors making a last stand against the demise of everything they cherish, which is a powerful source of personal meaning and social solidarity. They become heroes in their own mythological narratives.But it doesn’t stop there. Trump has set himself up both as a Christ figure persecuted for the sake of his followers and as their avenging angel. At a speech last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said, “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.”“You’re not selling ‘Morning in America’ from Mar-a-Lago,” Steve Bannon, one of the MAGA movement’s architects, told The New York Times’ Charles Homans. “You need a different tempo. He needed to reiterate to his followers, ‘This is [expletive] revenge.’”Malice, enmity, resentments: These are the emotions driving many Trump supporters. They’re why they not only accept but delight in the savagery and brutishness of Trump’s politics. They’re why you hear chants of “Fuck Joe Biden” at Trump rallies. His base constantly searches for new targets, new reasons to be indignant. It activates the pleasure center of their brain. It’s a compulsion loop.Which brings me back to the exchange I described at the beginning of this essay. My interlocutor was clearly rooting against good news; though he would deny it, the implication of his response was that he wanted crime to get worse. Not because he was rooting for innocent people to die, though that would be the effect. What appeared to animate him—as it has for the entire Biden presidency—is the awareness that good news for America means bad news for MAGA world. Worse yet, good news would be celebrated by people—Biden, Democrats, Never Trumpers—he has grown to hate. But hate is an unattractive emotion to celebrate; it benefits from a polite veneer.[Read: You should go to a Trump rally]In this case, the finishing coat is fear, the insistence that if Biden is president, all that Trump’s supporters hold dear will die. This isn’t true, but it doesn’t matter to them that it’s not true. The veneer also makes it easier for Trump supporters—evangelical Christians, “constitutional conservatives,” champions of law and order, and “family values” voters among them—to justify their support for a man who embodies almost everything they once loathed.Even as Donald Trump’s politics has become more savage, his threats aimed at opponents more ominous, and his humiliation of others more frequent—he has become ever more revered by his supporters.I imagine that even some of the Republican Party’s harshest liberal critics could not have anticipated a decade and a half ago that the GOP would be led by a man who referred to a violent mob that stormed the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power as “political prisoners,” “hostages,” and “patriots.” It’s been an astonishing moral inversion, a sickening descent. And it’s not done.

And the American craving for drama is helping them.

“I’m not going to talk about my specific meetings with world leaders. I’m just not going to do that. This anecdote shouldn’t have been in the book and as soon as it was brought to my attention, I made sure that that was adjusted.”— South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, in response to questions about a meeting she claimed to have had with North Korean dictator Kim Jong UnIt has been brought to my attention that my memoir The Truth: My Life, How It Really Happened, and What It Means for America—for which I conducted more than 500 hours of interviews with myself—contains an anecdote in which the late Samuel Beckett mails me his Nobel Prize for Literature medal and insists, in a long and heartfelt letter, that I deserve it more than he does. This anecdote has been adjusted.It has been brought to my attention that my memoir Just the Facts: Everything I Ever Did and the Order I Did It In—for which I embedded with myself on a series of dangerous solo military missions—contains an anecdote in which, after a boozy lunch with King Charles III, I invent the iPod. This anecdote has been adjusted.It has been brought to my attention that my memoir You Better Believe It: All My Realest Adventures—for which I accompanied myself on many trips to palaces, embassies, medieval mountain hideaways, global HQs, elite conferences, celebrity meditation retreats, and secret underwater laboratories—contains an anecdote in which I win Season 14 of Survivor but turn down a subsequent offer (from Jeff Probst himself) to host the show. This anecdote has been adjusted.It has been brought to my attention that my memoir The Honesty Gospel—for which I observed myself over seven sessions of ketamine therapy, supervised by myself—contains an anecdote in which I am visited by the archangel Gabriel. No adjustment has been made to this anecdote.It has been brought to my attention that my memoir No BS: Straight Talk From the Mouth of Reality—for which I spent several months on the set of a documentary about me, directed by me, and starring (as me) both Steve Martin and Eva Longoria—contains an anecdote in which I ask the late J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Listen, Bob, are you sure you want to split the atom?” This anecdote has been adjusted.