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Ideas | The Atlantic

theatlantic.com

Well, that was fast.Last Wednesday, President-Elect Donald Trump shocked even his allies by nominating Representative Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Today, Gaetz has pulled out of consideration, one day after meeting with senators on Capitol Hill.“It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” the Florida man wrote on X. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I'll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1.”For at least one presidential nominee to withdraw at some point in the process is very common. What is unusual is how quickly Gaetz’s nomination fell apart. Eight days is not the record, but it’s close. (Recall that White House Physician Ronny Jackson’s nomination to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs took nearly a month to collapse.) Just two days ago, Trump was insisting he had no second thoughts about picking Gaetz.[Listen: What Pete Hegseth’s nomination is all about]The reason why Gaetz withdrew is no secret and no surprise. He’s been shadowed for years by allegations of sex trafficking, paying for sex, drug use, and sex with an underage girl. Trump doesn’t appear to have bothered to vet Gaetz in any serious way before nominating him, but all of this was known. The Justice Department investigated Gaetz for years but in 2023 decided against bringing charges; the House Ethics Committee was still probing him. Gaetz himself denies any wrongdoing. The fact that Gaetz, like Trump, has a personal vendetta against the Justice Department seemed to be his main credential for the job.When Gaetz was nominated, he also resigned from Congress. That froze the House Ethics Committee investigation, since he was no longer a member. Speaker Mike Johnson, a Gaetz ally though he is primly conservative where Gaetz is a libertine, opposed releasing the committee’s work, and the committee deadlocked in a vote. But Gaetz’s victory was hardly complete. His nomination dislodged lots of damaging new information, including testimony about him twice having sex with a 17-year-old, though witnesses believed Gaetz did not know she was underage. A lawyer for two women said they testified to the House that Gaetz paid them for sex. The New York Times published an impossibly elaborate diagram outlining payment schemes. Gaetz fooled around, and the public found out; by accepting the scrutiny that comes with a nomination, he also fooled around and found out.But don’t cry too much for Gaetz, and not only because of his record as a scoundrel. (He’s detested by House colleagues, and many reports indicate he shared naked videos of paramours on the House floor.) His infamy hasn’t prevented his rise so far, and he is believed to have designs on running for governor of Florida when Ron DeSantis’s term ends.The question now is what this defeat portends for the rest of Trump’s slate of outrageous nominees. The president-elect likes to take a gamble, even if he sometimes loses, but as I argued last week, the presence of so many unqualified picks might perversely make it easier for some of them to get through—after all, the Senate couldn’t reject them all, right?[Read: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]Gaetz’s quick exit shows that Senate Republicans aren’t willing to accept literally anyone who Trump throws their way, and the fact that they were able to send that message so quickly suggests just how deep their reservations were. If the rejection is a sign of weakness for Trump, it is also one for his vice president-elect, Senator J. D. Vance. Vance was given the tough job of squiring Gaetz around Senate offices yesterday to drum up support, which obviously did not go well.The Gaetz failure doesn’t mean that senators will reject any other picks, but with Gaetz out of the way, the troubled nomination of Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon will be able to get more attention. A police report about a sexual-assault allegation against Hegseth from 2017 was released today, and it’s a stomach-churning read. Alternatively, Gaetz could end up looking like a sacrificial pick to save the others, or like a stalking horse for Trump to appoint someone else at DOJ. It seems unlikely that Trump intended either of these—he doesn’t usually play to lose—but that could be the effect.Before Trump chose Gaetz, he reportedly concluded that other contenders simply didn’t have what he wanted in an attorney general, according to The New York Times. Now he’ll have to go back his lists to choose someone who has one thing that Gaetz conspicuously lacked: the ability to get confirmed.

What Is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?

Contained in this riddle is the key to an enriching contemplation of life’s underlying meaning.

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theatlantic.com

Why I Can’t Put Down the Vacuum

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theatlantic.com

The other night, a friend came over. A dear friend. A friend who has helped me out when I’ve been sick, and who brought over takeout when I had just given birth. Still, before he arrived, I vacuumed.I thought about this while reading the Gender Equity Policy Institute’s recent report on gender and domestic labor. The study finds that mothers spend twice as much time as fathers “on the essential and unpaid work” of taking care of kids and the home, and that women spend more time on this than men, regardless of parental and relationship status. “Simply being a woman” is the instrumental variable, the study concludes.The time gaps are large for all women, and especially large for certain subgroups. Moms with a high-school education or less spend 19 hours a week on cleaning and child care, versus seven hours for dads with a comparable education. Latina mothers devote 26 hours a week to chores and kids, Latino dads less than a third of that time.Remarkably, having a male domestic partner means more work for women, not less. Married women spend more time on housework than single women; married men spend roughly the same amount as single men. Women’s lower wages and higher propensity to take part-time jobs explain some of the difference: To maximize the household’s total income, the person earning more does less around the house. But other studies have found that women who earn as much as or more than their male partner still devote more time to domestic care. Queer relationships, unsurprisingly, tend to be more equitable.Perhaps most enraging: The gender divide results in women having fewer hours than men to devote to socializing, exercising, going out, or practicing a hobby. No wonder women tend to experience more stress and burnout.A generation after the publication of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Second Shift, a lot has changed, and nothing has changed. Women are much more likely to work outside the home, but the distribution of work within the home has not become commensurately equitable. Surveys show that women are not exactly happy with the situation. What would it take for things to be different?It was once thought that technology was part of the answer. Decades of labor-saving innovations cut the hours Americans spent on chores. A dishwasher saves a household an estimated 200 hours a year, a laundry machine three-plus hours of backbreaking work per load. Yet even as technology improved, homes got bigger, filled with more items to care for. As my colleague Derek Thompson has noted, standards of cleanliness have risen over time too: “Automatic washers and dryers raised our expectations for clean clothes and encouraged people to go out and buy new shirts and pants; housewives therefore had more loads of laundry to wash, dry, and fold.”You see this tidiness treadmill on TikTok and Instagram: People recommend how to wash your walls, “refresh” your furniture season by season, and organize everything in your pantry in clear acrylic bins. This labor isn’t time-saving; it is never-ending.The Gender Equity Policy Institute suggests, well, policy changes, including “use it or lose it” parental-leave programs for new fathers, caregiving credits for the Social Security system, and expanded early-child-care programs. But the report acknowledges that the unhappy divide is cultural, and requires cultural shifts as well.Caretaking is a central way that women perform their gender. The advertising of domestic goods and cleaning products remains intently focused on women. The majority of children still grow up watching their mother do more housework than their father. The gender chore gap shows up in children as young as 8.Men doing more housework is an obvious solution, but not one that I am particularly hopeful about. Virtually every woman I know who is unhappy with her household division of labor has tried and failed to get her male partner to pick up the slack. The belief that men care less about having a messy home is pervasive, and supported by at least some evidence. In one anthropological study, researchers had people give them a video tour of their house. Mothers almost unanimously apologized for the rooms not being tidier. “Fathers in their home tours would walk in the same rooms their wives had come through and often made no mention whatsoever of the messiness,” UCLA’s Jeanne Arnold reported. “This was pretty astonishing.”Perhaps the problem is women, and the remedy is for women to do less housework and tolerate a consequentially messier home. “The tidiness level of a home is a matter of simple preference with no right or wrong,” my colleague Jonathan Chait has written, offering an “easy answer” to the chore wars. “My wife and I happily learned to converge on each other’s level of tidiness. We settled—fairly, I think—on a home that’s neater than I’d prefer to keep it, but less neat than she would.”Yet men are perfectly capable of recognizing a mess when it is not theirs. The sociologists Sarah Thébaud, Leah Ruppanner, and Sabino Kornrich asked people to look at photographs of an open-plan living room and kitchen; half saw a living space cluttered with dishes and laundry, and the other half saw a tidy area. The participants rated how clean the room was on a 100-point scale, and said how urgent they thought it was for the owner to take care of it. Men and women had essentially the same ratings of how clean the space was and how important tidying up was.In a second experiment, the same researchers told study participants that the photos were taken by someone looking to rent out their place on an Airbnb-type site. Some participants viewed rooms hosted by “Jennifer,” some by “John.” The participants thought that Jennifer’s clean space was less tidy than John’s, and were more judgmental in their assessments of the female host.Women internalize this kind of judgment, making the individual desire to keep things clean inextricable from the social expectation to do so. Women are critiqued for having pans in the sink and grime on the countertops in a way that men aren’t. Women’s cortisol levels go up when their space is messy in a way that men’s cortisol levels don’t. Asking women to clean less means asking women to accept more criticism, to buck their culture, to put aside their desire for a socially desirable space. At the same time, men internalize the message that an untidy home is not their responsibility.The best path forward might be for men and women to applaud messy, normal, mismatched, lived-in spaces. We should recognize that multinational conglomerates are in the business of devising problems that need solutions, which are conveniently available at Walmart and Target; we should admit that everything done in front of a camera is a performance, not reality; we should acknowledge that being welcomed into someone’s house is a gift of connection, not an invitation to judge. Easy enough for me to say. I am one of the millions of us who cannot seem to put down the vacuum, even if I do not want to pick it up.