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On the day of her big coming-of-age bash, Audrey Calzada wore a tiara. Mariachi played. Friends performed a synchronized dance to Rema’s “Calm Down,” and she had a mid-party outfit change from a sequined midnight-blue gown to a gold one—just like so many other girls might do at their quinceañeras, the ritual for 15-year-olds that’s celebrated across Latin American cultures and their diaspora. But Calzada, who works in the oil industry in Texas, had passed the quinceañera milestone decades ago. She was about to hit her 50th birthday, and she was determined to celebrate with pizzazz. “The joke in my community,” she told me, “is that I’m extra.”Calzada is one of several women I spoke with who, upon turning 50, chose to celebrate a cincuentañera—a remixed version of the quinceañera that’s become more popular in recent years. On TikTok, some videos of these parties have racked up more than 1 million views. Certain hallmarks of the quinceañera, such as ball gowns and father-daughter waltzes, show up, while others, such as the gift of a “last doll,” get ditched for whatever the women prefer. “50 never looked so good,” one celebrant wrote on TikTok, captioning a video of herself catwalking in a pink dress, a tiara, and aviator shades.Some women’s families have planned their parties for them. Other women have orchestrated the festivities themselves. Yet most women I spoke with had at least one thing in common: They wanted nothing to do with the bleak depictions of older age that they were being fed. Many women at 50 “have been led to believe that life is over,” Norma Elia Cantú, a professor at Trinity University, told me. She referred to “Over the hill” birthday cards and party favors making the rounds at many midlife fetes, items suggesting that life’s latter half is an ugly descent into irrelevance, ended only by the unforgiving slap of death. Cantú, in planning her own cincuentañera in 1997, had no interest in this sort of gloom. “I wanted to counteract that,” she said, “and make it a celebration.”[Read: ]The gap between how old you are and how old you think you areThe hunger for meaningful midlife festivities of course extends beyond the Latino community. In the film Between Two Temples, released last month, a retired music teacher in upstate New York undergoes bat mitzvah preparations in late adulthood, mirroring real-life rituals in the Jewish tradition offered to older congregants at certain synagogues. Secular celebrations such as “croning ceremonies” and menopause parties are also growing in popularity across the U.S.For Latina women in the United States, celebrating a cincuentañera goes beyond just defying stereotypes about aging—it’s a culturally resonant way to honor the life that they’ve built, often with the kind of splash that many couldn’t afford as girls. Argenis Gonzalez, a quinceañera planner in Orlando, Florida, told me he estimates that 70 percent of his clients’ mothers never got to celebrate a quince of their own because of a lack of money. Julia Alvarez, in her nonfiction cultural study Once Upon a Quinceañera, writes that many first-generation Latinas skipped theirs because they “didn’t want anything that would make us stand out as anything other than all-American.”The cincuentañera, then, is a chance for women to celebrate a second coming-of-age, this time as the grown adults that they could only dream of being when they were 15.In the course of a long life, the party lineup is awfully front-loaded: By the time a person hits 40, they may have celebrated a bat mitzvah or a quinceañera or a sweet 16, a prom, a graduation, and a wedding (or two)—cultural festivities where it’s socially acceptable to drop some cash and go all out. Later in life, the number of elaborate festivities dwindles. This distribution might have made sense for humans a century ago; in 1900, the average global life expectancy was only 32 years. Yet the average life span has more than doubled since then, leaving the second half of life starved of confetti.Midlife also looks different than it used to for many women. In addition to living longer, American women are marrying later and delaying motherhood, if they choose to have children at all. After age 50, Cantú hiked Spain’s famed Camino de Santiago route five times; Calzada solo-traveled through Southeast Asia. Their lives don’t exactly square with patriarchal stereotypes of what older women might be up to, such as helping raise grandchildren or knitting sweaters in a Florida retirement home.Physical shifts such as perimenopause fuel significant change in midlife. As my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote earlier this year, “The state of midlife, for women, is a kind of second (or third) adolescence, a coming-of-age identity crisis that roils with hormones and exploration and discontent.” Unlike the transition into adulthood, though, which boasts ceremonies galore, many women undergo this transformation with little social support or acknowledgment. Lacking rituals or jamborees, they might turn to a close friend, a journal, or a therapist to attend to the stew of feelings that accompanies any big life change.That’s where the cincuentañera plays a role. Unlike most big celebrations in a woman’s adult life, the cincuentañera focuses on her individual accomplishments. “The milestones that mark the passage of time or social success for women tend to be those of child-rearing, tend to be those of marriage,” Rachel González-Martin, a Latino-studies professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Quinceañera Style, told me, referring to events like baby showers and weddings. Yet the cincuentañera is squarely about the person celebrating. It’s about a woman having “arrived at that which was potential at fifteen,” as Cantú writes in Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, a book she co-edited. At Cantú’s cincuentañera, for example, her three-tiered cake featured figurines of a graduate and a book, honoring her work as a professor and a writer.[Read: Three rules for middle-age happiness]The process of throwing oneself an extravagant shindig can itself be empowering. During a quinceañera, a 15-year-old might choose the flowers and the party theme, but older family members are most likely running the show and footing the bill. The cincuentañera, though, can be anything. Alma Villanueva, an Amazon Flex driver in Arizona, told me that at her cincuentañera, she danced not just with her father but with her mother as well. For Villanueva, the twist on the tradition was an opportunity to give both of her parents a public shout-out. When she took them out for a spin, she told me, “I didn’t want them to dance with me. I wanted to dance with them.” Calzada said that at her party, she also wanted to salute her relationships, and gave her loved ones tiaras of their own. “Watch til the end to see a sea of queens,” she captioned a TikTok video of her bejeweled attendees grooving to Bad Bunny.The cincuentañera may be relatively new in the history of parties, but Calzada hopes it becomes a tradition—a ritual that future generations of women can cherish as they step into a new phase of life. She hopes her daughter celebrates both a quinceañera and a cincuentañera. She wouldn’t want her to miss out on one of the cincuentañera’s greatest gifts: the chance for a woman to dream up her remaining years with a freedom she didn’t have at 20 or 40—or especially at 15. “This wasn’t coming of age, because I’m entering adulthood,” Calzada said. “This was coming into a phase of my life where I’m finally living for myself.”

Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty ImagesStephen Colbert said earlier this week that Donald Trump had been “kind of boring” when he appeared on his show and the former president—obviously—could not just let that lie. “He is VERY BORING,” Trump hollered on Truth Social overnight, responding to Colbert, who was interviewed with his wife Evie on PBS News Hour about their new cookbook on Monday.The Late Show host said that the former president would not make a return to the show as a guest, with Trump's last appearance nine years ago failing to make an impression on Colbert. Read more at The Daily Beast.

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There is a word that is the bane of existence for English teachers, parents, and podcast listeners everywhere: “like.” This week on Explain It to Me, we answer a pressing question for our listener, Allison: “Why do I use the word ‘like’ so much?” Allison is a college junior, and with graduation on the horizon, she wants to sound more mature before she enters the workforce. “When I’ve been in internship interviews or job interviews, I do my best to speak more eloquently,” she said. “Why do I say “like’ so often?” To tackle this question, I had a conversation with Valerie Fridland, sociolinguist and author of the book Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English. Though often dismissed as a “filler word,” Friedland argues that we use “like” in our conversations for a reason. “The reality with ‘like’ is it has come into our language because it serves some really important purposes for us,” she said. “No one starts using a word because it’s pointless.” Fridland talked to me about how “like” is indispensable in so many ways, how it entered the lexicon, and if people use it as often as we think.  Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. For more, you can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545. I remember being as young as seventh grade and my parents being at a parent teacher conference. My mom and dad said to my teacher, “She uses the word ‘like’ so much. How do we get her to stop?” And my teacher was like, “Oh, my kids do it too.”  I want to say that when you were introducing that, you’re saying what the teacher was saying. You said “she was like.” I can’t turn it off! But it was serving a function for you because that is one form of “like.” It’s what we call in linguistic speak a “quotative like,” and that “like” substitutes for the verb “to say.” What you are doing is saying, “I’m not telling you verbatim what the teacher said. I’m giving you sort of my subjective recall of what she said.” It’s a really useful tool because it allows you more flexibility when telling a story. That makes sense. You can use it sometimes to draw attention or highlight. It can also be used to hedge what you say. And a lot of times you use “like” to indicate that this is a subjective estimation of something. So you could say, “He’s like a doctor or something,” which is indicating I don’t exactly know what he does, but it’s something like a doctor. Then, you can also use it at the beginning of a sentence. And that’s a little different. That’s usually a sentential adverbial, which makes it sound fancy and important, but really what it means is it’s a linking “like.” So when you say something such as “I don’t know what he did. Like, I think he was a doctor.”  The similarity among all these likes is that they’re all expressing some sort of subjectivity. And that’s the true power of “like.” Subjectivity is something that’s often frowned on and not taken as seriously as something that’s considered a cold, hard fact. Absolutely. There are a number of reasons why people don’t like “like.” I think one is because its whole purpose is impreciseness.  Often we take impreciseness to be uncertainty, but those are not the same thing. Just because someone is imprecise in what they’re saying doesn’t mean they’re uncertain about what they’re saying. Those are actually two very important distinctions. Unfortunately, the people that tend to be associated with “like” use, are also the people that are typically thought of as vacuous, empty-headed and sort of clueless. And that’s young people and women. Those are also the people that tend to use “like” the most. So you throw in this feature that marks impreciseness on a group that is often associated with being uncertain, being less sure of themselves, being less confident — which is not a fair assessment of them — but still the assessment. That makes for a feature people don’t like. What is it about the word like that makes it so flexible for all these different uses? Like is a very, very, very old word. Words shift and change meaning through time. And the older the word, the more often it can do this.  In about the 13th century, we first get “like” in our language and it is a verb. Then around the 15th and 16th centuries, we start to use it in similes. And then around the 16th century, you start using it as a conjunction, where instead of just being between two objects, you’re expressing similarity between an object and a whole sentence: “He rode the bike like the sky was on fire.” Then, in the 1700s, you start to see it as a discourse marker, often from lower status criminal witnesses or criminal defendants giving testimony in the Old Bailey proceedings in London.  That’s where we actually start to see “like” used this way for the first time. Who uses “like” the most now? When we look at studies done in the early 2000s, users under 40 were the most predominant “like” users, and users over 40 used it to a much less degree. It seems to have really come into fashion in the 80s and 90s.  It has increased in use in every generation since. So is it true that it is very much a Gen Z feature? Yes. And they might use it more than the generation above them, because it has continued to progress in their speech. But were they the innovators? Absolutely not. And was it something that was really a strong feature of the previous generations, millennials and Gen X? Absolutely. 

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Eric Charbonneau/Getty ImagesMeghan Markle was a “demon” who had “psycho moments” as a boss, people who worked for her have told The Daily Beast.The former employees spoke out after a carefully curated crop of former and current staffers said she was the best boss ever, who gives her staff bundles of freshly cut flowers and home-produced eggs, and makes her staff feel like seeds being watered.The delightful portrait of Meghan’s management style was painted in Us Weekly on Tuesday, as Team Meghan launched a fightback against a report in The Hollywood Reporter that claimed Meghan was a “dictator in high heels” who reduced “grown men to tears.” Sources close to the couple denied that story as a “fabrication” to The Daily Beast last week.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Then-President Donald Trump speaks as Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch looks on during a ceremony in the Rose Garden at the White House April 10, 2017. | Eric Thayer/Getty Images The name “Donald Trump” is synonymous with a kind of goonish incompetence. This, after all, is the same man who once suggested that it may be possible to cure Covid-19 by injecting yourself with bleach. During Trump’s presidency, however, at least one part of his White House bore little resemblance to the stumbling, bumbling operation that might praise neo-Nazis as “very fine people” one day then tweet out a threat to start a nuclear war the next. Trump’s judicial selection process was efficient, professional, and stunningly effective in placing many of the nation’s most intellectually gifted right-wing ideologues on the federal bench. As a result, the GOP now has a judicial machine geared toward replacing longstanding legal principles with Republican policy goals.  Since Trump’s three appointees gave Republicans a supermajority on the Supreme Court, the Republican justices have behaved as though they are all going down a GOP wishlist, abolishing the right to an abortion, implementing Republican priorities like a ban on affirmative action, and even holding that Trump has broad immunity from prosecution for crimes he committed using his official powers while in office. To be clear, right-wing litigants are not winning every case they bring before the justices, but on issues where the various factions within the Republican Party have reached consensus, the Republican justices reliably align with that consensus. The lower courts, meanwhile, have become incubators for far-right policy ideas that often go too far even for a majority of the members of the current Supreme Court. Think, for example, of Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s failed attempt to ban the abortion drug mifepristone. Or an astonishing decision by three Trump judges that declared the entire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) unconstitutional. Both of these lower court decisions were rejected by the Supreme Court. That there are some positions too far right even for many Republican members of the Supreme Court is a reminder of the diversity that exists among Trump’s judges. Some, like Justices Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett, are fully committed to using the courts to implement a long list of Republican ideas. But this cohort of judges also rejects at least some right-wing legal theories that would have catastrophic consequences for the country. Both Kavanaugh and Barrett, for example, rejected the legal attack on the CFPB. They joined an opinion explaining that the plaintiffs’ legal theory had no basis in constitutional text or history, but they may also have been motivated by the fact that this theory could have triggered an economic depression if it had prevailed. Kavanaugh and Barrett also backed Trump’s claim that he has broad immunity from criminal prosecution for crimes committed in office, but on the same day they rejected a Texas law that would have given that state’s Republican legislature extraordinary authority to dictate what the media must print.  The other faction of Trump’s judges is more nihilistic. They include Kacsmaryk, who has turned his Amarillo, Texas, courtroom into a printing press for court orders advancing far-right causes. The nihilistic faction also includes judges like Aileen Cannon, the Trump judge who has presided over one of Trump’s criminal trials (and behaved like one of his defense attorneys), much of the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and Trump Supreme Court appointment Justice Neil Gorsuch. Gorsuch, for example, saw nothing wrong with the case against the CFPB. And in a case involving hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions the federal government used to stabilize the US housing market after the 2008 recession, Gorsuch also voted for an outcome that risked triggering an economic depression.  Gorsuch is one of two justices who wants to overrule New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), a seminal First Amendment decision that is the backbone of press freedom in the United States. And, even on a Court that is often hostile to voting rights, Gorsuch stands out: In a 2021 opinion, he would have neutralized the federal Voting Rights Act almost in its entirety. Trump has given some oblique signals that he’s soured on the more pragmatic wing of judges. Among other things, the former president reportedly harbors particular resentment toward Kavanaugh, after Kavanaugh refused to back Trump’s effort to overthrow the 2020 election. Trump reportedly thinks Kavanaugh owes him after Trump continued to back Kavanaugh’s nomination even after the future justice was accused of sexually assaulting a woman while in high school. Still, Trump has yet to signal definitively whether his judicial nominees would reflect the full diversity of Republican lawyers if he were returned to office, or whether he would instead draw more heavily from the more nihilistic cohort in a second term. There’s nothing usual about Trump’s first-term judges — they’re just Republicans  Trump’s first term in office was a power-sharing arrangement between two overlapping anti-democratic movements, the MAGA cult of personality centered on Trump and a more overtly refined, legalistic movement centered in groups like the Federalist Society, an organization for conservative lawyers.  In this arrangement, Trump got the title of “president” and the trappings of office, but he largely delegated the power to select judges to longtime operatives within the conservative legal movement. As a result, Trump’s judges looked more or less the same as the sort of judges who may have been appointed if former Gov. Jeb Bush or Sen. Marco Rubio had become president in 2017.  Trump promised this would be the case while campaigning for president in 2016, saying, “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society.” At the time, many Republicans, who had long dreamed of ruling the nation from the bench in much the same way the Supreme Court does now, feared that Trump’s judges, like Trump himself, would be erratic and unreliable — or even worse, liberal. Trump allayed these fears in 2016, however, by releasing a list of 11 sitting judges and pledging to choose Supreme Court nominees from this list. All 11 names on the original list were reliably conservative judges in good standing with the Federalist Society.  Trump supplemented this list many times; none of his appointees to the Supreme Court — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, or Barrett — were among the original 11. But the specific names mattered less than the message sent by the list. As the National Review said in an editorial last March, “Because Trump had never served in government and had little record of engagement with political ideas or activism, [the list] helped fill in the blanks for voters.” After entering the White House, Trump took other steps to integrate the Federalist Society into his judicial selection process. Most notably, he chose Don McGahn, a longtime society member, as his White House Counsel — a role that gave McGahn considerable control over Trump’s judicial nominees. In 2017, responding to allegations that Trump outsourced his judicial nomination process to the Federalist Society, McGahn quipped that his own presence within the White House meant that “frankly, it seems like it’s been in-sourced.” Guided by McGahn, the Trump White House picked judges heavy on the sort of credentials that legal employers often use to identify very promising young legal talent, including a degree from a highly ranked law school and whether the candidates had a prestigious judicial clerkship, a kind of one-year apprenticeship to a sitting judge. The biggest clerkship prize, at least for a young lawyer without any previous experience, is a clerkship for a federal appellate judge. About 80 percent of Trump’s appeals court nominees had such a clerkship on their resume. Federal appellate clerks, meanwhile, compete for an even bigger prize: a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice. About 40 percent of Trump’s appellate nominees clerked for a justice. By contrast, according to a recent paper by legal scholars Stephen Choi and Mitu Gulati, roughly 10 percent of President Joe Biden’s appellate judges clerked for a justice, and about half of Biden’s appellate judges themselves clerked for a federal appellate judge. Meanwhile, in large part because Senate Republicans blocked nearly all of Obama’s appellate nominees during his final two years in office, Trump came into the White House with an unusually large number of vacancies to fill, and he took advantage of this fact. As Choi and Gulati write, “In a single term, Trump appointed 54 judges at the appeals court level. Obama, in two terms, had one more, 55.” So Trump had an unusually large impact on the federal courts, especially for a one-term president. He largely delegated the task of choosing judges to sophisticated right-wing operatives with a clear vision for what they wanted out of the judiciary, and those operatives successfully installed many judges with the sort of resumes legal employers drool over.  In short, Trump successfully filled the judiciary with reliable, high-achieving, Republican judges. There are real differences between the GOP’s pragmatic and nihilistic factions, but they agree on a wide range of issues Lawyers are trained, in the words of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, to show “zeal in advocacy upon the client’s behalf.” A lawyer’s job is to advance the interests of that client, not to push for rules that are sensible or even morally defensible. If a lawyer is hired to defend a company that just poisoned thousands of innocent people, the lawyer’s job is, if possible, to get that company off scot-free. So, by appointing lawyers of great skill to the federal bench, Trump did not select judges who were necessarily inclined to read the law in reasonable, or even plausible, ways. To the contrary, he picked individuals whose core skill was often persuading judges to read the law in unnatural ways in order to benefit the lawyer’s client. Since joining the bench, many of Trump’s judges and especially his justices have behaved as zealous advocates for the Republican Party and its causes. In some cases, such as the Court’s “major questions doctrine” decisions — a series of cases in which the justices gave themselves the power to veto actions by agencies within the executive branch — or its Trump immunity decision, Trump’s justices embraced arguments that cannot be defended under any plausible theory of law.  In others, including the Court’s big abortion and affirmative action cases, Trump’s justices appear to be systematically identifying issues that have long divided the two parties and converting past Democratic victories into Republican wins. Yet, while Trump’s judges are often reliable advocates for the GOP and its positions, they also reveal real disagreements within the Republican Party. And Trump often drew his first-term judges from both sides of this internal divide. Traditionally, for example, the Republican Party has taken an expansive view of the First Amendment. In the early 2010s, the Supreme Court handed down a pair of cases protecting truly revolting speech, one of which involved a notorious church that protested a fallen marine’s funeral with anti-gay slurs and signs declaring “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” Both cases were decided 8-1, with only Justice Samuel Alito taking a narrow view of free speech. After Trump, however, Republicans splintered on whether they still support traditional free speech principles. After Texas and Florida GOP legislatures passed laws seizing control of content moderation at major social media outlets, the six Republican justices split right down the middle. Three of them (including Trump Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett) took the traditional view that the government may not tell media outlets what they must print. Three others, including Trump Justice Gorsuch, tried to rescue these unconstitutional laws. There are other issues that divide Republican judges. In Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota (2024) — a case, blocked by lower courts, involving an Arizona law that imposed various new restrictions on voters — Trump’s three justices split three ways. Barrett voted with the three Democrats to leave Arizona’s preexisting election rules intact. Kavanaugh voted (along with most of the Court) to make it marginally more difficult to register to vote in Arizona. Gorsuch, the furthest right of the three, voted to strip thousands of already-registered voters in Arizona of their ability to vote for president. In any event, the fact that Republican judges and justices sometimes disagree with one another, especially in cases where the right-leaning litigant makes a particularly outlandish claim, shouldn’t surprise anyone. Republicans in all three branches of government frequently disagree on important questions of federal policy.  The divide between more pragmatic Republican judges like Kavanaugh, who tend to shy away from legal arguments that could cause turmoil or mass unrest, and more nihilistic Republican judges like Gorsuch, who embrace the potential for chaos, closely resembles the divide between relatively pragmatic figures like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and more reckless lawmakers like the House Freedom Caucus. Just as McConnell often breaks with his party’s right-most flank on issues like the war in Ukraine, many of Trump’s judges reject the most aggressive legal arguments presented by the most far-right litigants. But that doesn’t mean either faction is disloyal to its political party. Both factions reliably seek to advance Republican interests and causes, but one faction sometimes favors tactics the other believes to be counterproductive. Trump is giving some signals that he will prefer the nihilistic faction if he gets a second term Despite the political success of his 2016 list of potential Supreme Court nominees, Trump has yet to put out a similar list for the 2024 election. He has given few direct signals about which sort of Republicans he’d appoint if he achieves a second term. That said, a few statements by the former president suggest that he prefers judges from the more nihilistic faction and may even view Gorsuch as too soft. In a May interview with radio host Dan Bongino, for example, Trump praised Justices Clarence Thomas and Alito, for many years the Court’s most unapologetic right-wing Republicans, while offering a much more tepid view of his own justices. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, Trump said, have “got to be stronger, they’ve got to be tough.” Meanwhile, Trump labeled Alito ‘very tough, very good,” and Thomas “great.” Similarly, in journalist Michael Wolff’s 2021 book Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, Trump said he was “very disappointed in Kavanaugh” and claimed that his appointee “hasn’t had the courage you need to be a great justice.” Again, these aren’t the clearest possible signs that Trump will choose judges from the most extreme faction of the GOP if he becomes president again, but they certainly suggest he favors those judges, and may try to elevate others like them if given the chance. If you want to know what a world with a nihilistic Republican majority on the Supreme Court would look like, examine the Fifth Circuit, a federal appeals court controlled by that faction that hears cases arising from Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The results aren’t pretty.  It was the Fifth Circuit’s decision striking down the CFPB that risked triggering a second Great Depression because that decision could have prevented banks from issuing new mortgages. The Fifth Circuit largely backed Kacsmaryk’s attempt to ban the abortion drug mifepristone. It effectively eliminated the right to engage in mass protest. It once held that a prisoner could be kept in a cell with such a thick layer of dried human feces on the ground that it made a crunching sound as the prisoner, stripped naked, walked across the floor. And this is just a small sampling of the kind of far-right legal reasoning that routinely escapes this benighted court.  If elected president this November, Trump is almost certain to fill the bench with judges who are eager to implement Republican policies. The question is what type of Republicans he will favor: relatively pragmatic judges like Kavanaugh, or the chaos agents who dominate the Fifth Circuit?

That today’s American right has radically changed since former President Donald Trump’s political emergence is beyond obvious. What’s less well understood is that the right is still transforming rapidly, and that the movement is in a vastly different — and more radical — place than it was even four years ago. In eight new pieces, Vox explains the current state of the movement: its dominant ideologies, its newest obsessions, its defining thinkers, and its latest policy positions. We also explain where the movement is headed next — including two paths the Republican Party, and the United States, could travel next depending on what happens in the 2024 election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Look out for the first four pieces coming Wednesday, September 25, and the next four coming the day after. And keep an eye out for another series in October, where we’ll examine the state of the transformed left, and where that movement is headed next. CREDITS Reporters: Zack Beauchamp, Rachel M. Cohen, Rebecca Jennings, Eric Levitz, Ian Millhiser, Christian Paz, Andrew Prokop Editors: Sean Collins, Naureen Khan, Patrick Reis Art Director: Paige Vickers Style & Standards: Elizabeth Crane, Anouck Dussaud, Kim Eggleston, Caity PenzeyMoog, Sarah Schweppe Audience: Shira Tarlo Special thanks: Bill Carey, Elbert Ventura The one issue where Trump can’t escape Project 2025 What will the Supreme Court unleash on America in its new term? The one issue where Trump can’t escape Project 2025 3 theories for how Donald Trump made the GOP less white The 6 thinkers who would define a second Trump term

This week, Speaker Mike Johnson surrendered a spending battle that Republicans had hardly even fought. The House will vote on legislation today to avert a government shutdown without demanding any significant concessions from Democrats. In a letter to Republican lawmakers on Sunday, Johnson acknowledged that the bill “is not the solution any of us prefer.” But, he wrote, “as history has taught and current polling affirms, shutting the government down less than 40 days from a fateful election would be an act of political malpractice.”Johnson’s retreat highlights a strange, seemingly contradictory truth about the 118th Congress: It’s been extremely chaotic, and yet the dysfunction has barely affected most Americans. The GOP’s House majority proved to be too thin to govern, and Republicans spent at least as much time bickering over who would lead them as they did voting on bills of consequence. Electing Kevin McCarthy as speaker required 15 rounds of voting, and he was ousted nine months later; a few months after that, a Republican fraudster, George Santos, was expelled. Somehow, though, Congress has escaped catastrophe: The U.S. did not default on its debt. Lawmakers managed to approve $61 billion in new aid to Ukraine that House Republicans had held up for months. And the government stayed open—largely because Republicans seem finally to have grown tired of shutting it down.The GOP’s two speakers this term, first McCarthy and now Johnson, have each struggled to wrangle a divided party, placate former President Donald Trump, and confront President Joe Biden and the Democratic majority in the Senate. But both of them repeatedly avoided disaster. “They’ve taken the lumps and done the things they need to do to keep the place afloat,” Matthew Glassman, a former congressional aide who is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University, told me.[Elaina Plott Calabro: The accidental speaker]That’s not to say either leader deserves all that much credit. Ukrainians said the long wait for more U.S. assistance cost its forces lives and territory. Domestically, funding the federal government through temporary extensions known as continuing resolutions hampers agency planning. And neither McCarthy nor Johnson were able to turn Republican priorities into law.Johnson’s latest folly came last week, when he attached to a government spending bill a partisan proposal aimed at ensuring that only U.S. citizens vote in federal elections (which the law already requires). Fourteen Republicans joined with most of the Democrats to defeat the measure, leaving the speaker with little leverage in negotiations. The gambit had been doomed long before it came to a vote. Yet with his own future as speaker in doubt and Trump egging on a shutdown, Johnson made at least a perfunctory attempt to get it passed. “I think he had to put it on the floor to say, ‘Hey, I tried,’” Representative Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican who has been critical of the hard-liners in his party, told me.In his letter to lawmakers, Johnson cited the upcoming election as reason to keep the government open. But as plenty of Republican leaders have concluded over the years, shutdown fights have rarely turned out well for the GOP, whether an election is looming or not. “They never have produced a policy change, and they’ve always been a loser for Republicans politically,” Mitch McConnell, the party’s longtime Senate leader, said a year ago, when a similar surrender by McCarthy cost him his job as speaker. Last week, the senator said a Republican-orchestrated shutdown would be “politically beyond stupid.”[Russell Berman: Why Republicans can’t keep the government open]McConnell, who is giving up his post after this year, has played some part in all of the government shutdowns of the past 30 years—when Newt Gingrich was battling President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, when Senator Ted Cruz and his conservative House allies pressured a reluctant Speaker John Boehner to wage a fight over over Obamacare in 2013, and when Trump was demanding that Democrats fund his Southern border wall in 2018-19. Holding up federal operations to extract policy concessions has become synonymous with the party of smaller government, as Democrats are fond of pointing out. “Government shutdowns are in the DNA of the Republican Party,” the House Democratic leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, told Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic Festival last week.Johnson’s maneuvering this week suggests that Republicans might be evolving. “I think we’ve learned shutdowns don’t work,” Bacon said. “People feel good on day one [of a shutdown], and then you realize it’s stupid.”Republicans will face one more test this year, assuming the House and Senate approve (as is expected) the three-month stopgap measure Johnson unveiled on Sunday. This round of funding will expire on December 20. If Trump wins the presidency, the GOP will have little incentive to wage a shutdown fight only a month before he takes office. If Kamala Harris wins, Republicans’ calculus could change. But just as lawmakers are itching to leave Washington for the campaign trail now, they will likely want to head home for the holidays in late December. As Bacon said: “I don’t think there’s an appetite for it.”