Trump’s pick for attorney general will get to burnish his MAGA-loyalist credentials whether or not the Senate confirms him.

They may seem like pranksters on the margins, but what happens when the most powerful people on Earth are trolls?

The first year of Trump’s new administration may be as dangerous as the last of his old.

The goal is to manage your anxiety about a possible bad outcome so that it does not manage you.

For The Atlantic’s December cover story, “How the Ivy League Broke America,” contributing writer David Brooks argues that America’s meritocratic system is not working, and that we need something new. The current meritocratic order began in the 1930s, when Harvard and other Ivy League schools moved away from a student body composed of WASP elites and toward one of cognitive elites: “When universities like Harvard shifted their definition of ability, large segments of society adjusted to meet that definition. The effect was transformative, as though someone had turned on a powerful magnet and filaments across wide swaths of the culture suddenly snapped to attention in the same direction.”As well intentioned as this was, Brooks argues, the new meritocratic system has produced neither better elites nor better societal results. We’ve reached a point at which a majority of Americans believe that our country is in decline, that the “political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people,” that experts don’t understand their lives, and that America “needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.” In short, Brooks writes, “under the leadership of our current meritocratic class, trust in institutions has plummeted to the point where, three times since 2016, a large mass of voters has shoved a big middle finger in the elites’ faces by voting for Donald Trump.” Furthermore, the system is so deeply firmly established that it will be hard to dislodge. “Parents can’t unilaterally disarm, lest their children get surpassed by the children of the tiger mom down the street,” Brooks writes. “Teachers can’t teach what they love, because the system is built around teaching to standardized tests. Students can’t focus on the academic subjects they’re passionate about, because the gods of the grade point average demand that they get straight A’s … All of this militates against a childhood full of curiosity and exploration.”Brooks goes on to describe the six sins of meritocracy, concluding that “many people who have lost the meritocratic race have developed contempt for the entire system, and for the people it elevates. This has reshaped national politics. Today, the most significant political divide is along educational lines: Less educated people vote Republican, and more educated people vote Democratic … Wherever the Information Age economy showers money and power onto educated urban elites, populist leaders have arisen to rally the less educated: not just Donald Trump in America but Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. These leaders understand that working-class people resent the know-it-all professional class, with their fancy degrees, more than they do billionaire real-estate magnates or rich entrepreneurs.” Brooks continues: “When income level is the most important division in a society, politics is a struggle over how to redistribute money. When a society is more divided by education, politics becomes a war over values and culture.”Brooks argues that the challenge is not to end meritocracy, but to humanize and improve it, with the first crucial step being how we define merit. In reconceiving the meritocracy, we need to take more account of noncognitive traits. Brooks writes: “If we sort people only by superior intelligence, we’re sorting people by a quality few possess; we’re inevitably creating a stratified, elitist society. We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people’s motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society.”“We should want to create a meritocracy that selects for energy and initiative as much as for brainpower,” Brooks concludes. “After all, what’s really at the core of a person? Is your IQ the most important thing about you? No. I would submit that it’s your desires—what you are interested in, what you love. We want a meritocracy that will help each person identify, nurture, and pursue the ruling passion of their soul.”David Brooks’s “How the Ivy League Broke America” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests to interview Brooks on his reporting.Press Contacts:Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlanticpress@theatlantic.com

In the future, even winning the former “Blue Wall” states won’t be enough for the party’s presidential nominees.

The meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new.

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former Representative Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after 9/11 to remedy what American policy makers believed was a lack of coordination among the various national-intelligence agencies, and the DNI sits atop all of America’s intelligence services, including the CIA.Gabbard is stunningly unqualified for almost any Cabinet post (as are some of Trump’s other picks), but especially for ODNI. She has no qualifications as an intelligence professional—literally none. (She is a reserve lieutenant colonel who previously served in the Hawaii Army National Guard, with assignments in medical, police, and civil-affairs-support positions. She has won some local elections and also represented Hawaii in Congress.) She has no significant experience directing or managing much of anything.But leave aside for the moment that she is manifestly unprepared to run any kind of agency. Americans usually accept that presidents reward loyalists with jobs, and Trump has the right to stash Gabbard at some make-work office in the bureaucracy if he feels he owes her. It’s not a pretty tradition, but it’s not unprecedented, either.To make Tulsi Gabbard the DNI, however, is not merely handing a bouquet to a political gadfly. Her appointment would be a threat to the security of the United States.Gabbard ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, attempting to position herself as something like a peace candidate. But she’s no peacemaker: She’s been an apologist for both the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Her politics, which are otherwise incoherent, tend to be sympathetic to these two strongmen, painting America as the problem and the dictators as misunderstood. Hawaii voters have long been perplexed by the way she’s positioned herself politically. But Gabbard is a classic case of “horseshoe” politics: Her views can seem both extremely left and extremely right, which is probably why people such as Tucker Carlson—a conservative who has turned into … whatever pro-Russia right-wingers are called now—have taken a liking to the former Democrat (who was previously a Republican and is now again a member of the GOP).In early 2017, while still a member of Congress, Gabbard met with Assad, saying that peace in Syria was only possible if the international community would have a conversation with him. “Let the Syrian people themselves determine their future, not the United States, not some foreign country,” Gabbard said, after chatting with a man who had stopped the Syrian people from determining their own future by using chemical weapons on them. Two years later, she added that Assad was “not the enemy of the United States, because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States,” and that her critics were merely “warmongers.”Gabbard’s shilling for Assad is a mystery, but she’s even more dedicated to carrying Putin’s water. Tom Rogan, a conservative writer and hardly a liberal handwringer, summed up her record succinctly in the Washington Examiner today:She has blamed NATO and the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (again, to the celebration of both Russian and Chinese state media), has repeated Russian propaganda claims that the U.S. has set up secret bioweapons labs in that country, and has argued that the U.S. not Russia is wholly responsible for Putin’s nuclear brinkmanship.When she appeared on Sean Hannity’s show in 2022, even Hannity blanched at Gabbard floating off in a haze of Kremlin talking points and cheerleading for Russia. When Hannity is trying to shepherd you back toward the air lock before your oxygen runs out, you’ve gone pretty far out there.A person with Gabbard’s views should not be allowed anywhere near the crown jewels of American intelligence. I have no idea why Trump nominated Gabbard; she’s been a supporter, but she hasn’t been central to his campaign, and he owes her very little. For someone as grubbily transactional as Trump, it’s not an appointment that makes much sense. It’s possible that Trump hates the intelligence community—which he blames for many of his first-term troubles—so much that Gabbard is his revenge. Or maybe he just likes the way she handles herself on television.But Trump could also be engaging in a ploy to bring in someone else. He may suspect that Gabbard is unconfirmable by the Senate. Once she’s turfed, he could then slide in an even more appalling nominee and claim that he has no choice but to use a recess appointment as a backstop. (Hard to imagine who might be worse as DNI than Gabbard, but remember that Trump has promised at various times to bring retired General Mike Flynn back into government. Flynn is a decorated veteran who was fired from Trump’s White House in a scandal about lying to the FBI; he is now a conspiracist who is fully on board with Trump’s desire for revenge on his enemies.Gabbard has every right to her personal views, however inscrutable they may be. As a private citizen, she can apologize for Assad and Putin to her heart’s content. But as a security risk, Gabbard is a walking Christmas tree of warning lights. If she is nominated to be America’s top intelligence officer, that’s everyone’s business.Last spring, I described how U.S.-government employees with clearances are trained every year to spot “insider threats,” people who might for various reasons compromise classified information. Trump’s open and continuing affection for Putin and other dictators, I said, would be a matter of concern for any security organization. Gabbard’s behavior and her admiration for dictators is no less of a worry—especially because she would be at the apex of the entire American intelligence community.Presidents should be given deference in staffing their Cabinet. But this nomination should be one of the handful of Trump appointments where soon-to-be Majority Leader John Thune and his Republican colleagues draw a hard line and say no—at least if they still care at all about exercising the Senate’s constitutional duty of advice and consent.Related: Why Trump chose Gaetz, Hegseth, and Gabbard: retribution Donald Trump is a national-security risk.

John Thune, the new Senate majority leader, might not be a critic of Trump anymore, but he’s still no loyalist.

Here’s what he can—and likely can’t—accomplish with GOP majorities in the House and Senate.

The announcements of Donald Trump’s early picks for his administration have been like the limbo: The bar keeps dropping and the dance keeps going.One of the first nominees was Marco Rubio for secretary of state; the Floridian holds some questionable views but is at least a second-term senator and member of the foreign relations committee, and is not the nihilist troll Ric Grenell. Then there was Representative Michael Waltz for national security adviser; he has no experience running anything like the National Security Council but he does have expertise in national security. Former Representative Lee Zeldin for EPA? The bar kept sinking, but hey, he has worked in government and isn’t a current oil company executive.By yesterday afternoon, though, the bar was hitting amazing new lows. Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe was one of the least-qualified appointees in the first Trump regime; he might be one of the more experienced this time around, though Trump’s statement putting him forward for CIA director, which cited not his resume but his sycophancy, was not reassuring. For the Department of Homeland Security, one of the largest and most complicated parts of the federal government, Trump selected Kristi Noem, a small businesswoman and governor of a lightly populated state—but a diehard MAGA loyalist. The low point, so far, was reached when the president-elect announced Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense. Hegseth is a National Guard veteran who has lambasted the military for being “woke” and lobbied for pardons for convicted war criminals. He once bragged that he hadn’t washed his hands in 10 years, but he still hawks soap shaped like grenades. His major qualifications to run one of the most complicated bureaucracies in human history are that he looks the part and Trump has seen him a lot on Fox News.[Tom Nichols: The loyalists are collecting their rewards in Trump’s cabinet]Perhaps the bar cannot get lower from there—at least not in terms of positions of immense consequence with real power to do a lot of damage in the world. But another appointment announced yesterday was in a sense even more ridiculous: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a Department of Government Efficiency. That’s DOGE for short. Get it? Such efficient. Very slash. Wow. Welcome to the era of government by meme.Memes are slippery, neither serious nor quite joking. Try to pin them down and they slide through your fingers. DOGE, like doge, is no different. Why is this thing called a department when only Congress has the power to stand up a new body by that name? Is it because Trump doesn’t know or because he doesn’t care? Why does a government-efficiency panel have two chairs? Maybe it’s a joke. Who can tell? Is DOGE a clever way to sideline two annoying loudmouths who can’t or won’t get through the Senate confirmation process, or could it radically reshape the federal government? Like the meme says, why not both? The whole thing is vaporware, concocted by three people—Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump—who are all terminally online.“Waste, fraud, and abuse” is something of a meme itself—an idea that gets repeated and used in many different formats, but offers more of a symbolic meaning and cultural connotation than specific denotation. Like most memes, this one is neither serious nor joking. Who could possibly want waste, fraud, or abuse of taxpayer money? The problem, as Eric Schnurer has explained in The Atlantic, is that there simply isn’t as much of it as people think. The way to radically cut government spending is to slash whole categories of things. (As a contractor, it must be noted, Musk is a huge beneficiary of government largesse.)[Read: Trump’s ‘deep state’ revenge]Trump has not provided a great deal of detail about how the DOGE would work, though Musk has, naturally, already produced a dank meme. Ironically, we don’t know how DOGE will work or how it will be funded. Trump says it will “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government” to the White House and Office of Management and Budget, making recommendations no later than the nation’s semiquincentennial on July 4, 2026.In the absence of real info, Musk’s takeover of Twitter is probably a pretty good model for understanding how this might function. When Musk bought the social-media network, he made many promises. He said he’d eliminate bots, improve the user base, fine-tune the business, and reduce political interference, so that Twitter could function as “a common digital town square.” Judged by those metrics, the takeover has been a failure. The service is awash in bots. Users and advertisers have fled. Many technical functions have degraded. Rather than becoming a more politically neutral venue, it’s become a playground for the hard right, with Musk using it to spread conspiracy theories and aid Trump. He has given it a slick rebrand as X and slashed the workforce.We can expect much the same from DOGE. Will it successfully achieve the stated policy goal of reconfiguring the federal workforce to reduce waste and fraud and improve provision of services? Almost certainly not. Will it work to drive out dedicated employees? Probably. The surest bet is that it will be a highly effective vehicle for furthering Musk and Trump’s political agenda. Such winning. Very chaos. Much bleak.

Over the past several years, courageous Americans have risked their careers and perhaps even their liberty in an effort to stop Donald Trump’s return to power. Our collective failure to avoid that result now gives Trump an opportunity to exact revenge on them. President Joe Biden, in the remaining two months of his term in office, can and must prevent this by using one of the most powerful tools available to the president: the pardon power.The risk of retribution is very real. One hallmark of Trump’s recently completed campaign was his regular calls for vengeance against his enemies. Over the past few months, he has said, for example, that Liz Cheney was a traitor. He’s also said that she is a “war hawk.” “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” he said. Likewise, Trump has floated the idea of executing General Mark Milley, calling him treasonous. Meanwhile, Trump has identified his political opponents and the press as “enemies of the people” and has threatened his perceived enemies with prosecution or punishment more than 100 times. There can be little doubt that Trump has an enemies list, and the people on it are in danger—most likely legal, though I shudder to think of other possibilities.Biden has the unfettered power to issue pardons, and he should use it liberally. He should offer pardons, in addition to Cheney and Milley, to all of Trump’s most prominent opponents: Republican critics, such as Adam Kinzinger, who put country before party to tell the truth about January 6; their Democratic colleagues from the House special committee; military leaders such as Jim Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and William McRaven; witnesses to Trump’s conduct who worked for him and have since condemned him, including Miles Taylor, Olivia Troye, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, and Sarah Matthews; political opponents such as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff; and others who have been vocal in their negative views, such as George Conway and Bill Kristol. [Mark Leibovich: In praise of clarity]The power to pardon is grounded in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, which gives a nearly unlimited power to the president. It says the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” That’s it. A president’s authority to pardon is pretty much without limitation as to reason, subject, scope, or timing. Historically, for example, Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon a “full, free, and absolute pardon” for any offense that he “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.” If Biden were willing, he could issue a set of pardons similar in scope and form to Trump’s critics, and they would be enforced by the courts as a protection against retaliation.There are, naturally, reasons to be skeptical of this approach. First, one might argue that pardons are unnecessary. After all, the argument would go, none of the people whom Trump might target have actually done anything wrong. They are innocent of anything except opposing Trump, and the judicial system will protect them.This argument is almost certainly correct; the likelihood of a jury convicting Liz Cheney of a criminal offense is laughably close to zero. But a verdict of innocence does not negate the harm that can be done. In a narrow, personal sense, Cheney would be exonerated. But along the way she would no doubt suffer—the reputational harm of indictment, the financial harm of having to defend herself, and the psychic harm of having to bear the pressure of an investigation and charges.In the criminal-justice system, prosecutors and investigators have a cynical but accurate way of describing this: “You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.” By this they mean that even the costs of ultimate victory tend to be very high. Biden owes it to Trump’s most prominent critics to save them from that burden.More abstractly, the inevitable societal impact of politicized prosecutions will be to deter criticism. Not everyone has the strength of will to forge ahead in the face of potential criminal charges, and Trump’s threats have the implicit purpose of silencing his opposition. Preventing these prosecutions would blunt those threats. The benefit is real, but limited—a retrospective pardon cannot, after all, protect future dissent, but as a symbol it may still have significant value.A second reason for skepticism involves whether a federal pardon is enough protection. Even a pardon cannot prevent state-based investigations. Nothing is going to stop Trump from pressuring his state-level supporters, such as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, to use their offices for his revenge. And they, quite surely, will be accommodating.But finding state charges will be much more difficult, if only because most of the putative defendants may never have visited a particular state. More important, even if there is some doubt about the efficaciousness of federal pardons, that is no reason to eschew the step. Make Trump’s abuse of power more difficult in every way you can.The third and final objection is, to my mind at least, the most substantial and meritorious—that a president pardoning his political allies is illegitimate and a transgression of American political norms. Although that is, formally, an accurate description of what Biden would be doing, to me any potential Biden pardons are distinct from what has come before. When Trump pardoned his own political allies, such as Steve Bannon, the move was widely (and rightly) regarded as a significant divergence from the rule of law, because it protected them from criminal prosecutions that involved genuine underlying criminality. By contrast, a Biden pardon would short-circuit bad-faith efforts by Trump to punish his opponents with frivolous claims of wrongdoing.[Daniel Block: The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning]Still, pardons from Biden would be another step down the unfortunate road of politicizing the rule of law. It is reasonable to argue that Democrats should forgo that step, that one cannot defend norms of behavior by breaking norms of behavior.Perhaps that once was true, but no longer. For the past eight years, while Democrats have held their fire and acted responsibly, Trump has destroyed almost every vestige of behavioral limits on his exercises of power. It has become painfully self-evident that Democratic self-restraint is a form of unilateral disarmament that neither persuades Trump to refrain from bad behavior nor wins points among the undecided. It is time—well past time—for responsible Democrats to use every tool in their tool kit.What cannot be debated is that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris owe a debt not just of gratitude but of loyalty to those who are now in Trump’s investigative sights. They have a moral and ethical obligation to do what they can to protect those who have taken a great risk trying to stop Trump. If that means a further diminution of legal norms, that is unfortunate, but it is not Biden’s fault; the cause is Trump’s odious plans and those who support them.