Vox

A lot of people are getting jacked these days, and it’s not just who you would think.

For men, muscles have always been a symbol of brute strength and power. In our current era, that’s manifesting in their desire to get as chiseled as possible with a strict regimen of lifting and proteinmaxxing. But lately, muscles have also become something of a cultural battleground for women — at a time when beauty standards are dramatically in flux.

The feminine body type of the moment shifts with time, from curvy to skinny and back again, but rarely, if ever, is America’s ideal woman overtly strong. For most of my (millennial) life, women were instructed never to lift weights lest they become “bulky” (the horror!) but to do cardio instead, so that they would burn calories.

Nevertheless, strength training has begun to trend up among women. Recent high-profile research found that lifting weights significantly increases both lifespan and healthspan for women. In turn, wellness-focused women’s media — which is to say most women’s media — began publishing trend pieces admonishing women to step up their muscle game. One study from this February found that women’s participation rates in strength training are higher than ever before.

For most of my (millennial) life, women were instructed never to lift weights lest they become “bulky” (the horror!).

Three new books reckon with what it means for women to, at long last, begin to embrace strength. Casey Johnston’s A Physical Education is a memoir exploring Johnston’s journey from a thinness-obsessed runner to an empowered weight lifter. In How to Be Well, Amy Larocca explores the wellness imperative that pushes so many women today to relentlessly optimize their health. And in On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui explores the cultural symbolism of muscles and how they provide a way for us to think about who is allowed to be strong, and who we demand be weak.

Strength training is, in theory, an empowering alternative to the pursuit of thinness. But what happens if all our old body neuroses from the skin-and-bone days transfer right on over to the new well-muscled ideal?

How the thin woman became the well (and still thin) woman

There is always a type of woman you are supposed to be, a hegemonic ideal who hovers just out of reach, impossible to ever quite achieve. While America’s feminine ideals shift a little, writes Larocca in How to Be Well, these ideal women always have a few basic things in common: “They are always very thin and they do not complain, no matter how many responsibilities are added to their list.”

In the last 15 years, however, the ideal woman also became the “well” woman, Larocca writes. This is a woman who, in addition to being thin, has relentlessly optimized her health: She is pure of microplastics and pesticides, she cold plunges and owns crystals, and her skin and body glow golden with utter, unimpregnable well-being.

The ideal American woman has not always been well. For a long time, she was just skinny. “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” said Kate Moss in the heroin-chic ’90s, espousing a sentiment that would carry through to the virulently anti-fat 2000s. In that era, women exercised not in order to be well, but, explicitly and vocally, to be thin.

In the 2010s, the body ideal began to shift just a little. As the Kardashians began their long cultural dominance, pop culture began to decide that it was better to have a body with curves than to be rail thin. At the same time, the success of body-positive activism started to mainstream the intoxicating idea that it might be possible to like your body even if it didn’t look like the body of a supermodel. Marketers began to update their language accordingly.

The ideal American woman has not always been well. For a long time, she was just skinny.

By the mid-2010s, the body ideal for women was more or less as follows: You still had to be thin, but maybe not quite as thin as Kate Moss. As penance, however, you were no longer allowed to talk about how thin you wanted to be. “It sometimes feels,” remarks Larocca, “as if a simple replace-all function has been applied to the entire beauty marketing machine: Alexa, find ‘skinny’ and replace all with ‘strong’; find ‘beauty’ and replace all with ‘glow.’”

Wellness-as-health-as-beauty got more popular in 2016, after the first election of Donald Trump sent affluent liberals searching for things they could control in an ever-more chaotic world. In 2020, the pandemic came and brought the new paradigm to everyone. Now, wellness was a way of enacting control over one’s body in a time that was demonstrating very clearly that we humans could control very little.

Johnston found her way to strength training early in the transition of beauty culture to wellness culture, in 2014. In some ways, her journey mirrored the culture’s larger shift in rhetoric. She admits she first got interested in weightlifting because of its aesthetic promises — it looked like a fun way to get hot that didn’t involve starving and sprinting herself into a calorie deficit, as she had been doing since college. Over time, however, she began to take satisfaction in being strong for its own sake. “I felt the differences that came from investing in strength training before I really understood them,” she writes. “I was so used to distrusting myself, and that distrust included my body. Where did that come from?”

Johnston wasn’t alone. In 2024, weightlifting was the fastest-growing sport among American women. Millions of women are trying to up their protein intake and talking about their weightlifting journeys. At a recent work meeting I attended, four women swapped protein tips while the one man in attendance stared in confusion. “Everyone’s getting yoked,” he said.

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Who gets to have muscles?

Part of why so many women are strength training now is all of those new scientific studies demonstrating how important it is for women. But muscles aren’t just about health, in the same way that wellness isn’t either.

“Strength as a proxy for worthiness, ability, or success has interesting legs,” writes Tsui in On Muscle. This has historically applied to men. Tsui cites the many rituals of ancient cultures that involve lifting heavy things to prove one’s manhood or political strength. In the modern world, Tsui describes a venture capitalist who prefers to invest his money with founders who are also athletes, on the grounds that they “understand how to push themselves past the point of pain.”

If strength is a proxy for male worthiness, American culture tends to get nervous when it shows up in unexpected places. “When we say someone is too strong or too muscular,” writes Tsui, “it’s often a comment on what we permit that person to be in society.”

No woman is safe from being told that she is “too muscular,” but some women are more likely to be targeted with that accusation than others. Dominant Black women athletes like Serena Williams and Simone Biles frequently face just such criticism, which ballet star Misty Copeland once described as “code language for your skin is wrong.” The moral panic over trans women athletes, too, is built around the idea that trans women are too strong to be truly feminine.

“When a woman is deemed too muscular,” writes Tsui, “it’s often because her strength is perceived as taking away from someone else, or that her strength is somehow unseemly, unfair, or unnatural.”

Instead, physical strength is seen as the natural property of men — specifically, conservative men. One 2023 study found that observers tend to assume that men with prominent upper body strength are right-wing. The stereotype might have emerged in part because we tend to see muscles as bodily and hence anti-intellectual, and conservatives tend to distrust intellectual elites. The binary follows a neat map of associations embedded below the level of conscious thought. Weightlifting makes you strong, masculine, bodily, meatheaded, conservative. Cardio makes you small, feminine, intellectual, wiry, liberal.

In real life, cardio and weight training both affect body shapes in strange and unpredictable ways, and they don’t say anything about our political or intellectual goals. On the level of the symbol, though, the associations are strong — which is part of why it’s so striking to see so many women start lifting weights.

If strength among men codes as conservative, among women it codes as subversive, feminist, and a rejection of the male gaze. As weightlifting for women has become more mainstream, however, promoters have had to begin filing away at that last association. Perhaps that’s part of why women’s magazine articles urging women to strength train always come with an anxious assurance that, despite popular belief, weight training won’t make you bulky and unfeminine.

The optimization trap

In A Physical Education, Johnston writes with relish about eating more to gain muscle mass. “I had never deliberately gained weight before in my entire life,” she writes. Yet once she increases her daily calorie budget and muscle begins to pile on, she likes what she sees in the mirror: “a god, radiant like a big, beautiful horse.”

Body positivity or no, Johnston spends a surprising amount of time dwelling on how as she lifted more, her pants “grew ever so slightly tighter in the legs and hips but fell away at the waist.” She writes extensively about how much more efficient weightlifting is at shrinking the waistline than cardio is, and she tracks cardios and macros with meticulous precision. Intuitive eating, or the process of eating what feels good to your body, she dismisses as “circular doublespeak”; she’s a woman who wants her every Cup Noodles logged and its nutritional content fully analyzed.

In the bodybuilding world, food tracking is common and, at the elite level, necessary. Still, there’s a tight parallel between Johnston’s obsessive counting and Larocca’s well woman, who follows her Oura sleep score with sleepless vigilance and wears a continuous glucose monitor to track her blood sugar even if she doesn’t have diabetes. “It feels irresponsible to be satisfied with ‘fine,’” writes Larocca, and tracking biometrics promises to show a person how to optimize well beyond “fine.”

The seductive promise of going beyond fine is at the heart of the idea of the well woman. You might be basically healthy as you are, but is that really good enough? Can you really look after your children and loved ones if your health is just fine? Will you ever be beautiful enough or thin enough or pure enough at just fine? Wellness promises to get you there, in the same way that dieting promised to get you there in 1996.

Of course, dieting hasn’t stayed in 1996. It’s currently rushing back into the mainstream with a vengeance. Fueled by the popularity of Ozempic, fat-shaming diet communities like SkinnyTok have begun to emerge, allowing users to share weight loss tips and “tough love” instructions to one another to stop eating, much like the magazine voices that Johnston recalled internalizing as a college student driven to starve herself.

Strength training for women positions itself as a counterweight to communities like SkinnyTok. It’s a world in which women are told in no uncertain terms that no matter what they do, they have to at least take in enough calories; a world that promises to make women bigger instead of smaller.

Yet all the same, strength training does not seem to be quite enough to break the hold that the need to optimize has over us, in the same way that wellness culture didn’t either. A well woman can still obsess over the pesticides and microplastics in her groceries. A woman who strength trains can still obsess over whether or not she is eating correctly. There is always a way to be absolutely correct, and it always seems to be drifting farther and farther away from us.

Strength training does not seem to be quite enough to break the hold that the need to optimize has over us, in the same way that wellness culture didn’t either.

We are driven to politicize and optimize the muscles of our human bodies along with everything else. But our muscles can also offer us more than their symbology.

In On Muscles, Tsui quotes the happiness scholar Dacher Keltner, who argues that many of our emotions are “about” our muscles: “Joy, for example, which often involves jumping,” he says. “Or love, which is about embracing, postural movements. Emotions are about action.”

This idea goes back to Charles Darwin, who observed in 1872 that for both humans and animals, “under a transport of Joy or of vivid Pleasure, there is a strong tendency to various purposeless movements, and to the utterance of various sounds.” We jump and laugh and clap with delight; dogs wriggle and bark and run in circles. When we come together to express joy as a community, we dance, jumping for joy all together as one.

Our joy exists in and through and in relation to the movement of our muscles. That’s a basic physical fact. We can’t change it, no matter how much we optimize.

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Singer Sabrina Carpenter performs onstage during the Sabrina Carpenter Short ‘N’ Sweet Tour at Barclays Center on September 30, 2024, in New York City.

The cover for Sabrina Carpenter’s upcoming album, Man’s Best Friend, isn’t going over well.

Last week, the singer unveiled the polarizing artwork, which shows her on all fours while a male hand grabs her hair. Within seconds, users on X and TikTok labeled the image “misogynistic” and “irresponsible.” Others claimed that Carpenter was never “for the girls. “She’s never embodied the female gaze,” wrote one poster. “She is the type of man-hater that men prefer, putting on the image of a sexy and vengeful femme fatale, but all in the name of male attention and love.”

While some argued that the photograph was probably satirical, given Carpenter’s reputation for calling out her lover’s mistreatment in her music, others quickly dismissed those interpretations.

Overall, the cover seemed to confirm an observation that Carpenter’s critics have made throughout her Short ‘N’ Sweet Tour: Her sex-tinged lyrics and hyperfeminine image are too “male-centered.”

This line of criticism is all over social media these days, often aimed at women who are sexually forward or perceived as trying to appeal to men. There are a few different slurs and descriptions for this archetype — “pick-me,” “male-dominated,” “not a girl’s girl.” Social media is cluttered with warnings and treatises about these women. At best, the conventional wisdom goes, they’re annoying to be around. At worst, they’re a threat to women’s equality.

It’s a fraught type of criticism, especially when cultural misogyny is regaining a foothold it only briefly lost in the years following #MeToo movement. Meanwhile, the conversation may also be fueled by younger people, who are reportedly developing more conservative attitudes toward sex.

This tension around gender and sexuality feels emblematic of a particularly anxious climate, where every person, image, or viral moment feels like an explosive weapon in a cultural gender war. At the same time, these criticisms sound extremely familiar.

So-called anti-women women have a lot of new names

You can trace the recent fixation on “anti-women” behavior by women to a few viral trends, including the usage of the term “pick-me,” which originated on Black Twitter in the 2010s.

“‘Pick-mes’ are viewed as trying to get men to pick them for sex or love over other women,” says Danielle Procope Bell, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who’s done research on the online phenomenon. “Eventually, the term traveled to other internet spaces, including the ‘mainstream’ white internet and the Black manosphere. Its meaning shifts depending on the group using it.”

For a while, the pejorative was used to mock women who shamed other women for not being submissive in relationships or “respectable” in public. In the 2020s, though, the term spread to TikTok and, as with most Black slang, became flattened. What started as a pointed critique of internalized misogyny became shorthand for a host of behaviors that might happen to appeal to the male gaze. Users flooded the hashtag with innocuous if not totally random signs of “pick me” behavior, from being friends with your friend’s romantic partner to liking beer.

Maybe due to some backlash over the proliferation of the term, TikTok has recently turned its attention to “male-centered women,” a more academic-sounding label that is practically the same phenomenon. A male-centered woman may not shame other women the way a “pick me” once did, but like the latter-day examples, she will spend a bulk of her time and energy on men and their concerns. (There was a time such a woman might have been called the relatively benign epithet “boy crazy.”) On TikTok, you can find videos of women mocking “male-centered” women and explaining how they’re untrustworthy. “Women who are extremely male-centered will never truly be your friend,” explained one TikToker. Sex and the City protagonist Carrie Bradshaw comes up frequently  as the ultimate symbol of “male-centeredness.”

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Users are equally aggressive in adjudicating what it means to be “women-centered.” Maybe the most popular measure of morality these days is whether or not a woman can be considered “a girl’s girl” or “for the girlies,” terms used to describe women who know how to get along with other women and support them in various social situations. These phrases are often weaponized on female-led reality shows like Real Housewives and routinely debated online. When a TikToker labeled Kylie Jenner as “for the girlies” after she shared the details of her breast augmentation a few weeks ago (thereby not gatekeeping her look, a primary crime of girlbossery), critics loudly disagreed.

How did we get here?

Hidden in these remarks are reasonable concerns about gender, power, and the ways girls and young women can easily be influenced online. Folks mad at Jenner for disclosing her plastic surgery details saw it as contributing to the pressure to fit into conventional beauty standards, one that’s amplified on social media platforms like TikTok.

Conservative propaganda aimed at women is equally hard to escape. From tradwife influencers to women promoting “soft living,” these quietly patriarchal trends can easily seep through our algorithms. When mainstream celebrities like Carpenter or Sydney Sweeney — who recently garnered backlash for selling soap supposedly made with her own bathwater — present products that appeal to men, there’s reason to fear that everyone is succumbing to a larger sexist agenda.

The form this discourse is taking might have to do with the noticeable disinterest in men among women right now. Gen Z is dating less, and more women are pursuing celibacy. Overall, it seems like younger women are acknowledging that they can live complete lives without male partnerships. At the same time, male-centered culture (and politics) seems to be desperately seeking a way to reset gender norms to the 1950s.

Women today have no problem publicly expressing their aversion to men, whether on popular podcasts or through TikTok. Sex writer Magdalene J. Taylor explored casual man-hating online in a Substack post titled “Do Women Even Like Men Anymore?” She connects this trend to the increasingly grim realities of misogyny and violence against women. She also writes that, from a cultural standpoint, “it’s become deeply uncool, as women, to acknowledge any sort of affinity or appreciation for men.”

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While the effects of misandry and misogyny aren’t tantamount, this online man-bashing has visibly manifested in women publicly criticizing or policing other women’s relationships to men. Former Vox culture reporter Rebecca Jennings wrote about how “divorce him” has become the immediate advice for women perceived to be in unhappy or sometimes just imperfect marriages on social media. These remarks are often publicized with little concern for how they may affect the women they’re aimed at or a complete picture of their relationships.

We’ve experienced these tensions before

Professor Jessa Lingel, director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg, says that this infighting and division over gender and sexuality echoes previous feminist movements — although it’s not totally clear whether everyone participating in these conversations identifies as a feminist.

Lingel says that “in the 1970s, feminists like Betty Friedan called lesbians a ‘lavender menace’” and “saw them as a distraction from the movement’s goals on economic equality and workplace rights.”

Meanwhile, author Sophie Lewis sees the work of second-wave feminist Andrea Dworkin in these current accusations. She tells Vox that the activist, who was notably anti-sex work, has had a literary revival over the past few years, as a “particularly femmephobic strain of radical feminism” is resurging.

Critiquing women’s behavior, specifically those in positions of power, isn’t inherently bad or uncalled for. Lingel says that, in feminist movements, addressing legitimate imperfections has always been necessary. However, it’s hard not to notice how much of these online conversations about the patriarchy center around individual women — real or hypothetical — and not the structural forces that may be influencing their behavior. That is, if their behavior is even really a problem.

Many of these takes, specifically the ones aimed at Carpenter, are mainly concerned with how men will respond to them. They suggest that women are to blame for men’s actions or that they can protect themselves from violence by appearing a certain way.

Likewise, social media facilitates these reductive takes and misguided conversations. TikTok’s algorithm often favors conflict and polarizing opinions. Additionally, the condensed nature of these posts isn’t always great for communicating nuanced ideas about gender, sex, and other social issues.

“TikTok and Instagram, which have pushed more and more to short-form video content, are really tough platforms for the sustained, careful kinds of conversation that you need to unpack the politics of any ideology,” says Lingel.

Like many public conversations about women, we’ll presumably realize in a few years that “hot takes” and hashtags aren’t the best way to have them. The hullaballoo around Carpenter already feels reminiscent of the backlash surrounding fellow Disney star Miley Cyrus’s heavily scrutinized entry into adulthood, while the assumptions made about Sweeney’s character are similar to the way the public has judged previous Hollywood sex symbols, from Angelina Jolie to Megan Fox. These are all women the culture has found empathy for in recent years. But misogyny is always a lesson learned too late.

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Protesters march through downtown Chicago on June 12, 2025, during the second day of demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. | Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images

President Donald Trump promised his supporters “the largest deportation program in American history” — but he’s nowhere close.

That distinction belongs to an early 20th-century program that likely saw 2 million people deported. When looking at more recent times, it’s President Barack Obama — once dubbed by immigrant advocates “the deporter in chief” — who holds the 21st-century deportation record. His administration kicked out 438,421 people in 2013. No president since has come close to equaling that record, including Trump during his first term.

The political atmosphere that made the mass deportations of the 1900s possible is long gone. Similarly, Trump is likely to find it all but impossible to approach his goal of deporting “millions and millions” by borrowing from Obama’s playbook.

In fact, actions taken by Obama are part of why Trump’s ambitions have been stymied. If Trump truly wants to set a new record, he’ll need to more than double the current pace of deportations. And that will take a strategy that radically departs from those that have come before.

How Obama deported so many people

Obama’s immigration enforcement strategy was two-pronged: increasing penalties for unauthorized crossings at the southern border and deputizing local law enforcement to target immigrants with criminal records inside the US. The former increased the number of people who faced official removal proceedings and deterred repeat border crossers. And the latter allowed ICE to have its ear to the ground in cities throughout the country.

Before Obama, unauthorized border crossers were typically allowed to voluntarily return to Mexico, without undergoing an official process or being subjected to any penalties. That meant that many attempted to recross the border, knowing that they would not face repercussions for doing so.

The Obama administration started subjecting a greater proportion of them to formal deportation proceedings, utilizing an expanded federal immigration enforcement workforce that had grown from 12,700 in 2003 to 22,000 in 2008 with an influx of congressional funding. That drove up the deportation numbers and also barred unauthorized crossers from reentering the US for another 10 years. If they tried to reenter anyway, they could be permanently barred.

Many proved unwilling to take that risk, with the share of unauthorized crossers making multiple attempts to cross the border coming down sharply, from 29 percent in fiscal year 2007 to 14 percent in fiscal year 2014.

Obama also utilized tools including agreements with local law enforcement agencies that allowed them to conduct immigration enforcement and a program known as “Secure Communities” to deport undocumented immigrants inside the US, prioritizing those with criminal records.

By the time Obama took office in 2009, about 70 of these 287(g) agreements had been signed. They allowed local law enforcement to receive training from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and issue immigration detainers, effectively deputizing them.

Through Secure Communities, local law enforcement shared fingerprints of people booked into local jails with federal immigration authorities, which would determine whether they were deportable. ICE could then ask local law enforcement to hold that person for up to 48 hours; agents would pick them up and transfer them to immigration detention.

Initially effective at increasing deportations, the Secure Communities program was short-lived. It faced blowback from primarily liberal jurisdictions, driving a revival of the movement to offer sanctuary to undocumented immigrants in the 2010s.

The concern among progressives was that it would reduce trust in law enforcement among immigrant communities and make everyone less safe because fewer people would report crimes. It also led to the deportation of people who had only committed minor offenses or had no criminal convictions.

In 2014, Obama rescinded the program in response. He replaced it with another program that focused only on deporting immigrants who had committed serious offenses. As a result, the number of deportations fell to about 414,000 that year and never resurged to their 2013 peak.

Trump may struggle to replicate Obama’s deportation strategy

Trump might struggle to ramp up deportations along the border, as Obama did, simply because significantly fewer people are coming. In March, border apprehensions fell to 7,181, a 95 percent decrease from March 2024.

Trump would also likely face great opposition to a revived Secure Communities program.

The opposition in liberal enclaves — where many undocumented immigrants reside — to cooperating with federal immigration authorities has only hardened since the Obama era. In response, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has gone as far as threatening Democratic officials with arrest for shielding immigrants from deportation.

But for now, Democrats are holding their ground.

“I will stand in the way of Tom Homan going after people who don’t deserve to be frightened in their communities,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said in a congressional hearing Thursday, in comments emblematic of the liberal position.

With these avenues cut off, Trump has attempted other tactics. He’s launched workplace immigration raids across California, spurring mass protests in Los Angeles. He’s mobilized federal resources from the National Guard to the IRS to identify and arrest undocumented immigrants. He’s urged half a million immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to self-deport.

None of that has been enough to match Obama’s pace of deportations so far, something that has reportedly frustrated Trump. However, deportations did increase to 17,200 in April, surpassing the number of deportations during the same period last year under the Biden administration.

It’s not clear whether Trump can maintain that momentum. For one, he suggested in a recent post on Truth Social that he’s now torn about deporting farmworkers and hotel workers after speaking with industry leaders who said that his policies were “taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.” In the same post, he vowed that “changes are coming,” without elaborating on what they might look like.

At the same time, however, Trump is pushing for a spending bill now under consideration in the US Senate. It provides $155 billion in new immigration enforcement funding — more than five times the amount of current funding. While even some Republicans say that increase is too large, he may soon have considerably greater resources to carry out his vision for mass deportations if the bill passes.

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Ren, 18, describes herself as “a big romantic.” Like so many teen girls that came before her, she loves love: Ren is obsessed with rom-coms, develops crushes quickly, and dissects texts from boys with her friends. But, like many of her friends, she hasn’t dated anyone; as a rising sophomore in college in New York, Ren has yet to experience her first kiss.

She wants genuine connection and intimacy. But Ren doesn’t find the current slate of options appealing: neither the cycle of what kids term love-bombing — excessive attention and compliments early in a relationship — and then ghosting that seems to comprise romance in her circles, nor an anonymous hookup at a frat party. “I want my first kiss to be with someone that I like, rather than someone random,” she says. “I feel like there’ll be someone who meets my energy someday.” (Vox is using a pseudonym for all the teenage sources in this story, so they can discuss their romantic lives freely.)

Ren’s experience is increasingly common among teenagers coming of age today. You may have come across some alarming (and alarmist) headlines about Gen Z’s aversion — and even hostility — to sex and romance: They’ve been branded “puriteens” who have regressive attitudes about sex; they’re more interested in their phones than dating; they can’t even stomach sex scenes in the movies.

Indeed, rates of sexual activity among teenagers have dropped in the last three decades: In 1991, about 54 percent of high school students in a government survey said they’d had sex; in 2021, it was 30 percent. But Gen Z may be getting unfairly maligned. Teenage romance has actually been on the decline for far longer, decreasing generation by generation for 75 years: According to a 2023 survey from the American Enterprise Institute, 56 percent of Gen Z adults report that they had a boyfriend or girlfriend as a teenager, compared to 69 percent of millennials, 76 percent of Generation X-ers, and 78 percent of baby boomers.

What’s certain is that while romantic connection has lessened, yearning for it certainly hasn’t.

“This generation is characterized by less in all of these areas: less dating, less sex, less togetherness,” says Lisa A. Phillips, who teaches a course on relationships at SUNY New Paltz and wrote a book on teen relationships, First Love: Guiding Teens through Relationships and Heartbreak. There are many possible causes, including the loneliness epidemic, overreliance on technology, fears of sexual assault, unrealistic expectations of relationships from social media, a rise in teen anxiety and depression, the ubiquity of porn, the gender disparity on college campuses, and a decrease in leisure time for teenagers. But what’s certain is that while romantic connection has lessened, yearning for it certainly hasn’t.

“The desire to connect is still very prominent, but the rules are different and confusing, and there’s a lot of reluctance and wariness,” Phillips says. The limited data on this group bears this out: A Hinge survey of Gen Z daters published in 2024 found that 90 percent of them hope to find love. In other words, it’s not that young people are too anxious and online to want in-person love and physical intimacy. It’s that they don’t quite know how to get it.

New (and confusing) rites of passage

In eras past, when teenagers didn’t spend an average of about eight hours a day behind a screen, the rites of passage of a typical romance may have looked something like this: you have a crush on someone from English class or home room; you flirt in the hallway and ask your friends to get intel from their friends. Someone works up the nerve to ask the other out, so you go on a few real-life dates and seek each other out one-on-one in bigger social settings, like at parties. That progresses into a full-blown relationship (which most likely ends in heartbreak after a few weeks or months).

Emily, 16, who lives in New Jersey, always imagined that those milestones would be a part of her high school experience. She was “not necessarily expecting a whole love story, but like High School Musical,” where you ask each other to dances, she says. “But that didn’t exactly happen.”

She was “not necessarily expecting a whole love story, but like High School Musical,” where you ask each other to dances, she says.

Unlike in the movies she grew up watching, she finds that crushes don’t develop in the cafeteria or school hallways. Instead, it all happens online, mostly on Snapchat. “The majority of my week, that’s how I’m interacting with people,” says Emily, who’ll start her senior year of high school in the fall.

Instead of a furtive note passed across class, if someone has a crush on you, they’ll send you the ultimate romantic gesture: a photo of their full face. “Not just of their ceiling or a half face,” says Emily. If you like them, too, then you’ll start sending texts back and forth on Snapchat.

This is “the talking stage,” a new — and extremely confusing — kind of milestone. It’s one version of a situationship, a type of relationship without clear boundaries, rules, or commitment. This gray area — when you both like each other, talk occasionally but don’t move toward exclusivity or more intimacy — has come to dominate Gen Z’s dating woes. “Normally, it doesn’t escalate from there, because most people don’t like to have labels or a real relationship,” Emily says. “It’s crazy because you can be in ‘talking stage,’ and you see them at school and just pass by each other. Social media is where it all happens.” Sometimes, two people in the talking stage will meet up in person, but that doesn’t last long.

Emily’s friends mostly hang out in big group gatherings, which are also arranged via Snapchat. “That could be at someone’s house, or at Chipotle, or at a school football game,” she says. “But you wouldn’t split off to hang out with someone one-on-one.”

Pau, 18, a rising sophomore in college, also describes the few relationships she’s experienced and witnessed among friends as nebulous and far more verbal than physical. She and her crush from a summer program in high school, for instance, would largely work on papers and take early morning walks together. “[People] are less affectionate publicly, so it’s more difficult to spot who’s in a relationship,” she says. “Then you find out by Instagram post.”

In the fall of her junior year, Emily had her most significant relationship so far. She and her crush started Snapchatting back and forth, and to her surprise, they actually talked in person, too. Sometimes they sat together at lunch; when their friend groups would hang out, he’d give her a ride. “In my head, I was like, maybe this is real, he actually wants something real,” she says. Then, after a few weeks, he abruptly stopped responding to her messages. “I tried to talk to him about it, like, ‘We don’t have to have anything, but I want to make sure I didn’t hurt your feelings or something.’ He just laughed it off,” says Emily.

When you never exit the “talking stage,” it can lead to an unsettling whiplash effect.

This is how situationships tend to end: an ambiguous tapering off instead of a clear breakup.

Connecting with someone emotionally rather than physically can be a good way to start a relationship, of course. But when you never exit the “talking stage,” it can lead to an unsettling whiplash effect. You get emotionally close, without the accountability inherent in an in-person commitment. You can easily confess feelings for someone online, and just as easily shut down and go silent, too.

Emily isn’t happy with Snapchat situationships. She wants a boyfriend or a girlfriend, someone to do “the corny stuff” with, like decorating gingerbread houses at Christmas and wearing matching pajamas. “I think [we] should go back to literally talking face-to-face, that’s so much more fun, honestly,” she says. “But I don’t know if people would be on board with that, because I think a lot of people enjoy being behind the screen.”

Practicing romance behind a screen

There’s plenty of concern about how the pandemic shaped the development of children who experienced it. A 2025 Gallup poll found that 22 percent of parents thought it had lasting negative effects on their children’s social skills, a slightly higher percentage than were concerned about effects on mental health or academic prowess. The worry about social skills was particularly acute for those whose kids were in middle school during the pandemic.

Teenagers, of course, have come of age online for the last 20 years, ever since the AOL Instant Messenger days of yore, and there’s always been anxiety about how that technology would shape their social development. But never has the contrast between teens’ online and offline lives been so dramatic as for those who experienced adolescence during the pandemic. Just as they entered a period crucial for developing independence and peer connection, they were cut off from most in-person interaction.

Emily, for instance, did school largely virtually from sixth to eighth grade. She and her friends learned what was normal and safe during an exceptional time. At the same time, screen time for teenagers increased precipitously: In 2022, nearly half of teens surveyed said they were online almost constantly, compared to 24 percent in 2014, according to Pew Research studies. “A lot of those fundamental years of growing and learning about sexuality and being with other people was online,” Emily says. “We started that process being behind a screen, and now that we don’t need to be, we’re choosing to, because it’s more comfortable. Now it’s hard to let that go.”

Yet she hasn’t pursued taking a step back from social media or questioned whether there’s another way. When I ask whether her friends are happy with a largely online social life, she’s not sure. “I’ve never really thought about talking to them about it,” says Emily. “But I’d be curious.”

“Being online is actually really safe, compared to doing something in real life.”

Curtis, now 17, was in seventh grade when the pandemic started. He, too, noticed how the isolation made his generation more emotionally risk-averse. “Ever since the pandemic, teenagers have been more afraid to actually show how they felt,” he says. “For years, most of us were trapped in our rooms all day, stuck on a computer, so the only way to express ourselves was through an anime profile picture on TikTok or comments on Instagram posts, [so our] idea of expressing emotions and feelings has been kind of limited.”

Restricting romance to the online sphere is a way of exerting control and protecting yourself, says Curtis, who lives in Kentucky. “Being online is actually really safe, compared to doing something in real life.”

That guardedness is especially true for boys, who often both have less experience articulating their emotions and face greater social risk from doing so.

Daniel A. Cox, director and founder of the Survey Institute on American Life and author of Uncoupled, a forthcoming book about the growing gender divide between young adults, believes that young men in particular struggle when it comes to romance. They have no manual for how to be truly intimate. “For boys and young men, friendships are much more activity-based and competitive, which doesn’t allow them space to share feelings of vulnerability and insecurity.”

As for Curtis, the emotional risk of putting himself out there feels especially acute as a queer teen. He’s had one serious crush, which started when he and a classmate started chatting more sophomore year.

Two years later, Curtis still thinks about him. When he sees a video of two queer teenagers on social media, he imagines him and his crush in their place.

Their romance followed all the same, enigmatic beats: They started sending each other songs, then memes, then baby photos; soon, they were messaging every day and FaceTiming late at night. They’d find each other at lunch and look forward to seeing each other in the hallways. The crush, who Curtis describes as a “popular kid,” would physically hang onto Curtis in front of his athlete friends and described Curtis as his best friend. This went on for a whole school year. Curtis said his friends said, ‘“It’s obvious he’s putting in effort to show that he cares about you.’”

Then they just…stopped texting. Two years later, Curtis still thinks about him. When he sees a video of two queer teenagers on social media, he imagines him and his crush in their place.

Curtis thinks about messaging his long-time crush, to share his feelings and get closure. But he’d never do it in person. “In real life, I’d probably be shaking, and my heart would be beating really hard. … I’d feel so crazy and emotional,” he says. “But if I tell him online, I could block him, or go to school the next day and ignore [him].”

Curtis is hopeful about finding a different kind of relationship once he starts college, but his first real experience with romance has made him undeniably wary. That’s a sentiment that Phillips often hears in her conversations with teenagers. Moreover, a study conducted in 2023 by the dating app Hinge found that 56 percent of Gen Z respondents didn’t pursue relationships because they were worried about rejection. “If I tried once and it didn’t happen, why should I try again?” says Curtis. “If I put in as much effort as I could at 14…it didn’t work out, why should I try to do it again at 17?”

Yearning for something more

When you talk to Gen Z teenagers, it’s clear that they long for romance and intimacy, even if they feel that they have no playbook for it.

“The news portrays us as engaging in it less, but people still want romantic relationships,” says Pau. She’d like to experience romance, but mostly feels like she hasn’t been able to think about it very much.

“Especially with the current political climate, the economic climate, and even just recovering from Covid — it’s kind of difficult to think of being in a relationship,” says Pau. “There’s so much going on with my family and immigration status, it’s very difficult to just breathe.” She’s already experienced so much vulnerability that she’s hesitant to seek out more through romantic relationships.

In a way, the situationships that reign among young people today feel more like the pseudo-relationships that could play out in middle school, as young people try on what a relationship could feel like and test the boundaries of what it means to date before they really experience it. “The pandemic stunted our growth a little; we lost two years of our life,” says Ren, who grew up in California.

She still wants a boyfriend: a primary person, someone who has her back, someone to explore physical intimacy with. In the meantime, she’s made a close group of friends, with whom she shares emotional intimacy.

As long as young people are having deeply meaningful connections through friendships, Phillips allows that it may not be so bad not to experience romance or sexual intimacy. It’s not a big deal if you don’t date or hook up in high school; that doesn’t predict worse outcomes socially or otherwise. What does worry Phillips is if teenagers aren’t finding closeness in platonic relationships, either. “If this is the narrative: I can’t do these things because they’re risky and connection is painful, [then] I’m more worried about that than whether a sixteen-year-old decides to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend,” she says.

For Ren, her friendships are deeply meaningful — and they help her make sense of why romance hasn’t happened for her yet, as she approaches her second year in college. “I thought a high school relationship was normal until I got here, and I realized that being in relationships or kissing or having sex isn’t as normal anymore,” she says. “It makes me feel better — it’s the culture now.”

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A capsule full of lab-raised mosquitoes falls from a drone in Maui. | Adam Knox/American Bird Conservancy

It sounds like something out of a nightmare: a giant drone flying through the sky and dropping containers full of live, buzzing mosquitoes, one of the world’s most hated insects.

But in Hawaii, this scenario is very much real. A remotely operated aircraft, about 8 feet long, is flying over remote forests in Maui and releasing cup-shaped capsules full of mosquitoes.

As scary as it might sound, the project is a clever solution to a problem that has long plagued the Hawaiian islands.

Hawaii faces an extinction crisis: It has lost hundreds of animals in the last two centuries, including dozens of land snails and birds, largely due to the spread of non-native species like stray cats and feral pigs. Many native animals found nowhere else on Earth are now gone for good. And several of the creatures that remain are heading in the same direction. Scientists on the islands are quite literally racing to save what wildlife remains.

For the state’s avian species — its iconic forest birds, significant, too, to Indigenous Hawaiian culture — the main force of extinction is malaria, a mosquito-borne disease. Mosquitoes, a nonnative pest, were introduced accidentally in the early 1800s by a whaling ship. The blood-suckers proliferated across the islands and later began spreading avian malaria, a blood-borne pathogen they transmit through their bites.

The disease, which can be fatal, utterly devastated the state’s forest birds, and especially a group of species in the finch family known as honeycreepers. There were once more than 50 species of these colorful songbirds across Hawaii, and today all but 17 are extinct. As I’ve observed firsthand, the forests here have grown silent.

The few honeycreeper species that persist today have been able to evade malaria largely because they live in higher elevations that are too cold for mosquitoes. But now, climate change is warming the islands, allowing the insects to march uphill into the remaining avian strongholds. Some experts describe this as an “extinction conveyor belt.”

Saving these birds is quite literally a race against the clock. That’s where the drone comes in.

Fighting mosquitoes with mosquitoes

For more than a year now, a group of environmental organizations have been dropping biodegradable containers of mosquitoes into honeycreeper habitats on Maui and Kauai from helicopters. Now they’re starting to do it with giant drones. The containers fall to the ground without a top, and when they land the insects escape into the forest.

Critically, these are not your typical mosquitoes. They’re all males, which don’t bite, that have been reared in a lab. More importantly, they contain a strain of bacteria called wolbachia that interferes with reproduction: When those males mate with females in the area, their eggs fail to hatch. (That’s thanks to a bit of biology magic, referred to as the incompatible insect technique, or IIT.)

The idea is to continually release these special males into honeycreeper habitat where malaria is spreading as a way to erode the population of biting mosquitoes — and thus suppress the spread of disease. The approach has little ecological downside, said Chris Farmer, Hawaii program director at American Bird Conservancy, a conservation group that’s leading the drone effort. Mosquitoes are not native, so local ecosystems and species don’t rely on them.

“What this does is it erects an invisible barrier so that these mosquitoes can’t get up to the forests where these birds remain,” Farmer told Vox.

Since late 2023, a coalition of organizations known as Birds, Not Mosquitoes has unleashed more than 40 million male mosquitoes across Maui and Kauai. Nearly all of those were in containers tossed out of helicopters, which allow scientists to deliver the insects to remote forest regions where the birds remain.

The group is now testing drones as an alternative. While the helicopters can carry more mosquitoes than drones in one flight — around 250,000, compared to about 23,000 — drones are safer because they’re unmanned. They’re also easier to fly on demand, says Adam Knox, the drone pilot and project manager for aerial deployment of mosquitoes at American Bird Conservancy.

Dropping mosquitoes out of drones and choppers may sound unreal, but it’s the best idea out there to help Hawaii’s honeycreepers, said Marm Kilpatrick, an avian malaria expert at the University of California Santa Cruz. Kilpatrick is not affiliated with the mosquito-release project. “The reason that it’s worth doing is that so far, we haven’t discovered anything else that can possibly do this better,” Kilpatrick told Vox.

Scientists don’t yet know if unleashing reproductively challenged mosquitoes is working and causing the resident mosquito population to crash. It’s too soon to tell and the research is still underway, according to Christa Seidl, the mosquito research and control coordinator at Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project, a group leading avian conservation on the island.

But the same approach has worked elsewhere — to stem mosquitoes that spread diseases among humans. Global health advocates have released mosquitoes with wolbachia strains that disrupt reproduction in other parts of the world and seen a massive decline in the incidence of, for example, dengue fever.

“It sounds weird to say, but we’re standing on the shoulders of human disease,” Farmer said.  “The IIT we’re using for conservation was first developed for human health.”

Endgame for mosquitoes?

Ultimately, the goal is not total elimination of mosquitoes that carry avian malaria in Hawaii. That’s likely impossible, Kilpatrick said, unless scientists could release millions or even billions of lab-grown insects all at once.

For the time being, the plan is to regularly — and indefinitely — release the mosquitoes into forests with some of the most endangered birds, such as the kiwikiu, ‘ākohekohe, and ʻakekeʻe. Barring any regulatory or technical problems, drone deployments will soon be a regular part of that effort.

“This is the last chance to save most of our remaining songbirds,” Farmer said. “When we’ve succeeded, the birds will come back.”

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A drilling rig plugs an abandoned oil well in Montana. Abandoned wells are a major source of methane emissions. | Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Odorless and colorless, methane is a gas that is easy to miss — but it’s one of the most important contributors to global warming. It can trap up to 84 times as much heat as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, though it breaks down much faster. Measured over 100 years, its warming effect is about 30 times that of an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.

That means that over the course of decades, it takes smaller amounts of methane than carbon dioxide to heat up the planet to the same level. Nearly a third of the increase in global average temperatures since the Industrial Revolution is due to methane, and about two-thirds of those methane emissions comes from human activity like energy production and cattle farming. It’s one of the biggest and fastest ways that human beings are warming the Earth.

But the flip side of that math is that cutting methane emissions is one of the most effective ways to limit climate change.

In 2021, more than 100 countries including the United States committed to reducing their methane pollution by at least 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030. But some of the largest methane emitters like Russia and China still haven’t signed on, and according to a new report from the International Energy Agency, global methane emissions from energy production are still rising.

Yet the tracking of exactly how much methane is reaching the atmosphere isn’t as precise as it is for carbon dioxide. “Little or no measurement-based data is used to report methane emissions in most parts of the world,” according to the IEA. “This is a major issue because measured emissions tend to be higher than reported emissions.” It’s also hard to trace methane to specific sources — whether from natural sources like swamps, or from human activities like fossil fuel extraction, farming, or deforestation.

Researchers are gaining a better understanding of where methane is coming from, surveilling potential sources from the ground, from the sky, and from space. It turns out a lot of methane is coming from underappreciated sources, including coal mines and small oil and gas production facilities.

The report also notes that while there are plenty of low-cost tools available to halt much of this methane from reaching the atmosphere, they’re largely going unused.

The United States, the world’s third largest methane-emitting country, has seen its methane emissions slowly decline over the past 30 years. However, the Trump administration is pushing for more fossil fuel development while rolling back some of the best bang-for-buck programs for mitigating climate change, which will likely lead to even more methane reaching the atmosphere if left unchecked.

Where is all this methane coming from?

Methane is the dominant component of natural gas, which provides more than a third of US energy. It’s also found in oil formations. During the drilling process, it can escape wells and pipelines, but it can also leak as it’s transported and at the power plants and furnaces where it’s consumed.

The oil and gas industry says that methane is a salable product, so they have a built-in incentive to track it, capture it, and limit its leaks. But oil developers often flare methane, meaning burn it off, because it’s not cost-effective to contain it. That burned methane forms carbon dioxide, so the overall climate impact is lower than just letting the methane go free.

And because methane is invisible and odorless, it can be difficult and expensive to monitor it and prevent it from getting out. As a result, researchers and environmental activists say the industry is likely releasing far more than official government estimates show.

Methane also seeps out from coal mines — more methane, actually, than is released during the production of natural gas, which after all is mostly methane. Ember, a clean energy think tank, put together this great visual interactive showing how this happens.

The short version is that methane is embedded in coal deposits and as miners dig to expose coal seams, the gas escapes, and continues to do so long after a coal mine reaches the end of its operating life. Since coal miners are focused on extracting coal, they don’t often keep track of how much methane they’re letting out, nor do regulators pay much attention.

According to Ember, methane emissions from coal mines could be 60 percent higher than official tallies. Abandoned coal mines are especially noxious, emitting more than abandoned oil and gas wells. Added up, methane emitted from coal mines around the world each year has the same warming effect on the climate as the total annual carbon dioxide emissions of India.

Alarmed by the gaps in the data, some nonprofits have taken it upon themselves to try to get a better picture of methane emissions at a global scale using ground-based sensors, aerial monitors, and even satellites.  In 2024, the Environmental Defense Fund launched MethaneSAT, which carries instruments that can measure methane output from small, discrete sources over a wide area.

Ritesh Gautam, the lead scientist for MethaneSAT, explained that the project revealed some major overlooked methane emitters. Since launching, MethaneSAT has found that in the US, the bulk of methane emissions doesn’t just come from a few big oil and gas drilling sites, but from many small wells that emit less than 100 kilograms per hour.

“Marginal wells only produce 6-7 percent of [oil and gas] in the US but they disproportionately account for almost 50 percent of the US oil and gas production-related emissions,” Gautam said. “These facilities only produce less than 15 barrels of oil equivalent per day, but then there are more than half a million of these just scattered around the US.”

There are ways to stop methane emissions, but we’re not using them

The good news is that many of the tools for containing methane from the energy industry are already available. “Around 70 percent of methane emissions from the fossil fuel sector could be avoided with existing technologies, often at a low cost,” according to the IEA methane report.

For the oil and gas industry, that could mean something as simple as using better fittings in pipelines to limit leaks and installing methane capture systems. And since methane is a fuel, the sales of the saved methane can offset the cost of upgrading hardware. Letting it go into the atmosphere is a waste of money and a contributor to warming.

Capturing or destroying methane from coal mines isn’t so straightforward. Common techniques to separate methane from other gases require heating air, which is not exactly the safest thing to do around a coal mine — it can increase the risk of fire or explosion. But safer alternatives have been developed. “There are catalytic and other approaches available today that don’t require such high temperatures,” said Robert Jackson, a professor of earth system science at Stanford University, in an email.

However, these methods to limit methane from fossil fuels are vastly underused. Only about 5 percent of active oil and gas production facilities around the world deploy systems to zero out their methane pollution. In the US, there are also millions of oil and gas wells and hundreds of thousands of abandoned coal mines whose operators have long since vanished, leaving no one accountable for their continued methane emissions.

“If there isn’t a regulatory mandate to treat the methane, or a price on it, many companies continue to do nothing,” Jackson said. And while recovering methane is ultimately profitable over time, the margins aren’t often big enough to make the upfront investment of better pipes, monitoring equipment, or scrubbers worthwhile for them. “They want to make 10–15 percent on their money (at least), not save a few percent,” he added.

And rather than getting stronger, regulations on methane are poised to get weaker. The Trump administration has approved more than $119 million to help communities reclaim abandoned coal mines. However, the White House has also halted funding for plugging abandoned oil and gas wells and is limiting environmental reviews for new fossil fuel projects. Congressional Republicans are also working to undo a fee on methane emissions that was part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. With weaker incentives to track and limit methane, it’s likely emissions will continue to rise in the United States. That will push the world further off course from climate goals and contribute to a hotter planet.

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For months, leading up to Israel’s attacks on Iran last week, an intense and bitter battle has been underway on the American right — a battle for influence over President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

The core assumptions that have guided Washington’s approach to the world for 80 years are suddenly up for debate. The global balance of power, the outcome of life-and-death conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, and more momentous future questions of war and peace all hang in the balance.

GOP foreign policy has long been steered by hawks, who see the US as locked in a struggle for global dominance against hostile and dangerous foreign powers. They’re willing to threaten — and, in some cases, use — military force to achieve American ends. During his first presidential campaign, Trump broke with the hawks on some key issues, but his first-term governance was largely hawkish in practice.

In the past few years, though, an “America First” faction came together to try and push Trump’s second term in a different direction. Deeply skeptical of “neocons,” foreign entanglements, and “forever wars,” they’ve competed with the hawks over administration jobs, tried to swing the MAGA base to their side, and worked to win Trump over in private.

Leading their fight was an unlikely foreign policy power trio: Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and Vice President JD Vance. The three are like-minded in their loathing for the establishment and are also personal friends. It is not uncommon, in Washington, to hear talk of a “JD-Tucker-Don Jr.” axis of American foreign policy. Their increased influence meant Washington’s hawkish consensus was facing perhaps its most serious challenge in decades.

At times since January, it has seemed the America Firsters were winning. In April, when Israeli officials presented Trump with a plan to strike Iran, he rejected it in favor of pursuing negotiations over their nuclear program instead. Pro-Israel hawks were deeply worried about the concessions Trump’s team might make.

But as talks stretched on without success and Israel became more determined to strike, Trump decided not to stand in their way. The Israeli operation began Thursday night, killing many top Iranian military leaders and targeting nuclear sites. The hawks were overjoyed. Trump officials initially characterized the attack as a unilateral Israeli decision. But soon, the president began taking some credit for it, though he insisted a deal with Iran was still possible.

Carlson had spent months urging Trump not to get involved. “The greatest win would be avoiding what would be the true disaster of a war with Iran, which would not stay in Iran, of course,” he told me in an interview at the beginning of this month. He’d warned that US participation in a strike would be “suicidal” and that “we’d lose the war that follows.”

The US is not at war with Iran yet. But the chances we’ll be drawn into one are rising. So though Democrats generally despise the America Firsters’ domestic politics, dismiss them as bigots and xenophobes, and are appalled by their calls to abandon Ukraine — it’s worth noting that they’re the leading GOP figures opposing war with Iran.

The America Firsters have also called for rethinking the US’s approach to the world more broadly. That not only includes questioning our involvement in NATO, but also questioning the logic that could lead the US into a major war with China over Taiwan. Generally, they doubt that trying to run the world helps Americans.

The hawks dismiss them as dangerously naive, arguing that pulling back US involvement abroad would actually make war more likely — our enemies will run rampant, they say, if we don’t check their influence.

The America Firsters argue just the opposite: that it’s our meddling attempts to run the world as if we’re still the sole superpower that court disaster. “We’re not going back to a unipolar world,” Carlson told me. “It’s not going to happen. But I guess we could have a nuclear war over it — and we may.”

Inside this story

How JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump Jr. came together to oppose aiding Ukraine — and then gained influence over Trump’s second termThe leaks, firings, and factional knife-fighting roiling Trump’s foreign policy appointmentsThe right’s tense debate over whether to seek a deal with Iran or back an Israeli attackThe qualms some on the right have over US military strategy to check China in AsiaHave the hawks now gained the upper hand in influencing Trump?

The power of the hawks

In many ways, this is just the latest flare-up of a long-running tension inside the American right — one that’s existed since the US emerged as a major global power at the start of the 20th century.

Back then, hawkish interventionists pushed for the US to join both world wars and protect the peace afterward. But the isolationists didn’t want to get bogged down in intractable foreign conflicts or send their sons to die in foreign lands. They supported, they said, America First. World War II gave the interventionist hawks the upper hand, and in the Cold War, the hawks held sway again, arguing the US had to intervene abroad to prevent communism from overrunning the world.

The ’90s brought a brief revival of isolationism championed by figures like Pat Buchanan, who questioned why, with communism defeated, the US needed such extensive overseas involvement. But 9/11 cemented the hawks’ dominance again, confirming to many that the US had to fight foreign enemies over there, or they’d fight us over here. Buchanan criticized President George W. Bush’s Iraq War as the work of a “cabal” that included “neocons,” but few on the right cared.

Keywords of the right’s foreign policy debate

Neoconservatives:Critics of the hawks frequently call them “neocons,” which is nowadays mainly a pejorative meant to disparage them as plotting to embroil the US in foolish wars. Back during President George W. Bush’s administration, the neoconservatives were a subgroup of hawkish intellectuals who argued that war to depose the Iraqi government could help spread democracy across the Middle East. (Typical hawks don’t necessarily share this rosy view of spreading democracy.)America First: Many skeptics of intervention abroad have long used the phrase “America First” to describe their views. President Woodrow Wilson used the slogan in his 1916 reelection campaign — though, after winning, he entered World War I. Later, as World War II raged, the America First Committee argued vociferously against US involvement. Its most prominent member was the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, who said in a speech that “the Jewish” were among those pushing the US toward war. Trump revived the “America First” term during his first presidential campaign to signal a break with the GOP establishment.

Carlson, then the co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, had supported the war. But on a December 2003 trip to Iraq, in which he spent time outside the Green Zone, he soured on it: “I saw the opposite of what I expected to see, chaos and confusion and disorder and violence,” he told me. The following year, he was quoted in the New York Times voicing regret: “I supported the war and I now feel foolish.” The pushback from the right, he says now, was furious: “I was absolutely hated for that by people I knew well and worked with and was friends with.”

Indeed, the adamant pro-war consensus among GOP elites and rank-and-file Republicans persisted even as conditions in Iraq worsened. And hawkishness continued to reign supreme on the right: Republicans criticized President Barack Obama for showing weakness toward Iran and Russia or for withdrawing from Iraq too soon. The only foreign policy critique they could imagine was a hawkish one, and the only solution was more hawkishness.

Saying the Iraq War was a mistake or failure was unthinkable. Until, that is, Trump said it.

During his first presidential bid, in 2015, he trashed the war as a debacle and a “tremendous disservice to humanity” — suddenly giving the isolationists in the party, long an irrelevant fringe, a new life. In this, he was voicing what an increasing number of Republican voters had come to believe — that the war had failed.

Trump’s heresies went further. He wanted to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan and Syria. He had friendly things to say about Russian President Vladimir Putin — which was so unusual for a mainstream politician that many wondered whether he was being blackmailed or bribed. He disdained NATO, widely viewed as the protector of peace in Europe, as an expensive waste. Yet he also had some more typical hawkish instincts, calling for more confrontation of China and Iran and promising to “bomb the shit out of” ISIS.

Yet while Trump embraced the “America First” label in practice, much of his first-term policy was steered by the hawkish establishment — sometimes to Trump’s enthusiasm, sometimes to his frustration.

His “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran escalated a tit-for-tat shadow war; eventually, Trump had top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani assassinated and a full war seemed quite possible. He waged a trade war with China and deepened ties to Taiwan with arms sales and military activity. His efforts to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Syria kept getting slow-walked by top advisers. And his friendly words for Putin had little substantive impact; tough sanctions on Russia remained in place, and the US kept arming Ukraine and stayed in NATO.

How Carlson, Trump Jr., and Vance helped turn the right against Ukraine – and rose to greater influence

The most important challenge to the hawks during Trump’s first term played out at 8 pm Eastern, every weeknight.

This was when Tucker Carlson held the airwaves, using some of the most valuable airtime in conservative media — really, all media — to try to shape and articulate a distinct ideology that would appeal to the MAGA base. To this end, he indulged Americans’ bigoted and xenophobic impulses, promoted conspiracy theories, and became loathed by liberals. But he also directed much of his ire at the GOP’s establishment — and reserved particular scorn for the foreign policy hawks.

Carlson often used his airtime to poke holes in hawkish arguments and warn against war. After Soleimani’s killing in 2020, he said that the “neocon objective” was war with Iran and regime change but asked, “Is Iran really the greatest threat we face? And who’s actually benefiting from this?”

He was, essentially, waging a war of ideas for the future of the Republican Party — and trying to give the MAGA faithful a different, non-hawkish way to think about these issues.

The hawks’ lonely critics on the right were grateful. “Tucker’s the mothership,” Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative — a magazine Buchanan co-founded — told me. Carlson was a skilled entertainer and clever debater who could go highbrow and lowbrow.

He could also be very persuasive — in public and in private. A prolific texter, he cultivated ties to key MAGA-world figures — including, crucially, Donald Trump Jr. In 2020, Politico reported Carlson had “established a friendship” with the president’s eldest son.

Don Jr., at that point, had not been known for his foreign policy views, and he had limited influence on policy or personnel for most of his father’s first term. But unlike his sister Ivanka and brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Don Jr. was drawn to the MAGA base — and to a worldview that was a lot like Carlson’s. By 2020, Don Jr. had become an outspoken critic of “forever wars” and the “neocons” who he said were undercutting and sabotaging his father.

After January 6 and Trump’s ignominious departure from office, Jared and Ivanka stepped back and Don Jr. stepped forward, becoming an increasingly important adviser in his father’s comeback plans. He believed a second Trump administration had to be filled with MAGA loyalists rather than establishment-tied saboteurs. Trumpworld’s distrust of neocons continued to deepen, particularly once the Cheney family turned hard against Trump after January 6.

Around the same time, JD Vance began running for Senate in Ohio. Carlson already knew him and began openly championing his primary candidacy on his Fox show. Then, after Vance had the good judgment to hire one of Don Jr.’s top advisers for his campaign, he got connected with the president’s son — who was very impressed by him. They, too, became friends.

The first test of their ability to influence the right on foreign policy came as Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. Amid warnings of a full-scale invasion, Carlson ran segments questioning how Americans have been “told” to hate Putin and Russia. Vance said he didn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” and that “the foreign policy establishment gets rich when American children die for dumb ideas.” Don Jr. asserted that “there is no American interest that justifies our intervention in Ukraine.”

Yet to many, the Russian invasion seemed to prove the hawks right. Putin, it turned out, did have malign intentions, and now here he was ending decades of peace in Europe. Supporting Ukraine to try to stop him, most believed, was both the moral and the strategically correct move.

The trio stuck to their guns, though, arguing that moralistic war fever was setting in — and that the hawks, in their zeal to clash with a nuclear power, could get a lot more people, maybe all of us, killed.

Trailing in polls in a crowded primary, Vance took heat from his more traditionally hawkish rivals in attack ads, but this eventually spurred Don Jr. to speak out publicly to defend him. After private lobbying from Carlson and Don Jr., an endorsement from Trump himself soon followed and carried Vance to a narrow victory.

As the Ukraine war stretched into 2023, its support on the right grew shakier. Carlson hammered home his skeptical arguments nightly. He claimed that aid money to Ukraine was wasted when we have so many problems at home, that escalation of the war was dangerous, and even that the US was partly responsible for provoking the war by expanding NATO. In his narrative, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was, if not the villain, a villain — and certainly no hero. Democrats and traditionally minded Republicans watched in horror, believing this was a Bizarro World inversion of reality.

But the GOP base — particularly its most engaged and pro-MAGA elements — was gradually won over. In part, this was due to negative polarization against a cause championed by President Joe Biden (whose son Hunter’s past highly compensated work in the country further suggested that something was rotten here). Others, like Elon Musk, characterized Ukraine support as the latest in a series of foolish and annoying progressive fads. In the mainstream, criticizing Ukraine aid made you anathema; on the online right, it made you cool.

In March 2023, with the Republican presidential primary kicking off, Carlson sent a questionnaire asking every prospective candidate about their Ukraine views; Ron DeSantis, courting the base, flip-flopped to back Carlson’s position. Soon afterward, Carlson was suddenly fired from Fox amid internal controversies and launched a new show on Musk’s X. But the party kept moving toward him: Conservatives in the GOP-held House held up Ukraine aid for months. By summer 2024, 47 percent of Republicans said the US was doing “too much” to help Ukraine, and just 30 percent said the US was doing the right amount or not enough.

For the first time, the America Firsters had successfully mobilized and won an intra-party argument on a foreign policy issue. Carlson and his allies changed the default GOP position away from hawkishness and toward skepticism of supporting Ukraine — and, along the way, launched Vance’s political career.

In 2024, Don Jr. and Carlson again successfully lobbied Trump to endorse Vance — as his VP nominee. (Carlson reportedly told Trump that if he picked a “neocon” instead, the “deep state” might have him assassinated.)

Once in office, Vance delivered — smacking down Zelenskyy in a public Oval Office meeting, and rebutting hawkish critics in lengthy, biting X posts.

Yet Trump still seems hesitant to truly cut Ukraine loose. Rather than simply washing his hands of the situation, he wants to help end the war, and he’s grown increasingly frustrated that Putin doesn’t seem to share that desire. He’s recently attacked the Russian president (“he’s gone absolutely CRAZY”) and threatened new sanctions on Russia. He has no love for Ukraine, but he still seems to fear being blamed for a Ukrainian defeat.

The new divide on the right over Israel and Iran

With Vice President Vance, the America Firsters had one of their own in a top administration post. But in the days after the presidential election, it briefly seemed as if he’d be the only one.

Rumors suggested that Trump would name the conventionally hawkish Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, and Elise Stefanik to top foreign policy positions, while Mike Pompeo — his hawkish first-term secretary of state — seemed in line for secretary of defense.

Quickly, Carlson and Don Jr. staged an intervention, warning the president-elect that he was repeating his past mistakes. When one X poster urged Don Jr. to keep “all neocons and war hawks out” of the administration, Don Jr. replied, “I’m on it.” Soon, Trump announced that Pompeo would not be chosen (he’d eventually go so far as to yank Pompeo’s government security detail). And he made unconventional picks that shocked Washington: Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth for defense secretary.

The drama over lower-level appointments soon grew even more intense. And a major sticking point, it quickly emerged, was policy toward Israel and Iran.

GOP hawks had long championed Israel and vowed to stand with it against its enemies, such as Iran. But many on the isolationist or populist right have long been less keen on this idea — suspicious of foreign entanglements, worried about advancing Israel’s interest rather than America’s, and dubious about more Middle Eastern wars. (For some, these concerns were paired with arguable or explicit antisemitism).

After Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks, Carlson, for instance, urged caution and restraint, worried about the US being drawn into war with Iran, questioned why Americans were so worked up about this rather than our problems at home, and argued the Israeli government mistreated Christians. “How is this helping America, exactly? I don’t see a huge upside for the United States in paying for this,” he told me, referring to Israel’s Gaza war.

But many others, including some in the America First camp, pushed back: “There is no analogy between the situation in Ukraine and Israel,” Stephen Miller wrote in 2023, saying Israel was “fighting a jihadist death squad” and that its war was “a necessary action to ensure the survival of the sole Jewish state.”

Don Jr. felt similarly: “You don’t negotiate with this,” he wrote. “There’s only one way to handle this.” And in a May 2024 speech, weeks before his selection as the VP nominee, Vance contrasted Ukraine’s war and Israel’s, saying he was fully supportive of the latter.

But by the end of last year, Israel was making plans to strike Iran’s nuclear program — and seeking US assistance in doing so. Many traditional GOP hawks were on board, arguing that since Iran’s proxies Hamas and Hezbollah had been badly weakened, now was the perfect time to attack. More broadly, they believed Iran could never be allowed to go nuclear — it was simply too dangerous to Israel and the world. What was truly necessary, they thought, was regime change. The America Firsters, however, were not sold. They did not want war with Iran and saw another neocon plot taking shape.

The Trump administration staffed up while this debate was unfolding, and hawkish Israel supporters responded to some of its hires with alarm. Critical articles appeared in publications like the New York Post, Jewish Insider, and Tablet, arguing certain midlevel appointees were worryingly soft on Iran. Elbridge Colby, who’d said containing a nuclear Iran was “eminently plausible” and was nominated for the Defense Department’s top policymaking job, became a particular flashpoint. Hawks in the Senate threatened to spike his nomination, but Vance vocally backed him and he made it through.

Most alarming of all to hawks was Steve Witkoff, the real estate investor and foreign policy neophyte who surprisingly became Trump’s negotiator in chief, and who they feared was giving away the store to Hamas and Iran. “Our main worry is Witkoff, really,” a plugged-in hawk told me last month. “You can boil it down to that.”

Meanwhile, many hawks who sought administration jobs hit a wall. Here, Don Jr.’s influence was crucial — a friend and business partner of his, Sergio Gor, was named director of the Presidential Personnel Office, and took on the job of screening out neocons.

A source with knowledge of administration dynamics told me that Gor “made a decision that he wasn’t going to hire from the traditional places” — the hawkish institutions that had long fed into GOP foreign policy jobs.

The exception was Mike Waltz’s National Security Council. Waltz, the source told me, initially had more freedom to do his own hiring, and he made the NSC staff a beachhead for hawks.

But Waltz quickly became a beleaguered figure. As Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed for attacking Iran, Waltz appeared to be closely coordinating with him in a way that raised the America Firsters’ suspicions. Back in March, the Israeli attack proposal faced skepticism inside the administration from Vance and other top officials.

While this debate was ongoing, Trump’s advisers also debated whether to strike the Houthis, the Iran-backed Yemeni militia that was endangering shipping in the region. Waltz and Hegseth were on board, but Vance was one of the few urging caution. “I think we are making a mistake,” he wrote in a group chat with other advisers, worrying about the economic impact and a lack of public buy-in. “I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself,” he continued, but he urged delaying the strikes at least a month.

The hawks won that argument but soon faced several setbacks. Waltz had inadvertently invited the editor of the Atlantic to that group chat, which put an unwelcome spotlight on him. Soon afterward, the far-right activist Laura Loomer convinced Trump to fire six NSC staffers she disparaged as “neocons.” It didn’t take long for Waltz himself, and dozens more NSC staffers, to be shown the door. (The NSC was handed to Rubio, who was initially deemed a hawk, but now seemed to have accommodated himself to Trump’s priorities rather than trying to impose his own agenda.) On top of all that, the Houthi strikes were incredibly expensive and ultimately deemed ineffective; Trump has since called them off.

In April, Trump rejected the planned Israeli strike on Iran and began pursuing negotiations with the Iranians led by Witkoff — to the hawks’ deep dismay. And during a trip to the Middle East last month, Trump seemed to side with the America Firsters in a speech that criticized “neocons” and “interventionists.” In the speech, Trump insisted he wanted a deal with Iran — though he added that, if Iran rejected his overtures, he’d return to maximum pressure.

But as Trump tried to deal, he was also facing pressure. The hawks soon united around the demand that any deal could not allow any Iranian nuclear enrichment — something Iran was insisting on. Every Senate Republican except Rand Paul, plus most of the House GOP, signed a letter urging Trump not to allow any Iranian nuclear enrichment, and soon he and Witkoff were saying that was their position, too. Compromises intended to let both sides claim victory were privately floated, but none stuck.

In early June, hawkish talk radio host Mark Levin visited Trump at the White House, insisted that Iran was days away from completing a nuclear weapon, and urged Trump to “allow the Israeli government to strike Iranian nuclear sites,” Politico reported. Carlson revealed Levin’s visit in a lengthy post on X, writing, “These are scary people. Pray that Donald Trump ignores them.”

He did not ignore them. It is not yet known what exactly Trump privately told Netanyahu, but it is highly unlikely that Israel’s extensive attack on Iran took place without his tacit blessing. At the very least, Trump stopped affirmatively standing in the way of an Israeli strike.

The question now is whether the nightmare scenario Carlson and others warned of — in which the US gets drawn into the war and it goes disastrously — ensues. Since the strikes began, Carlson has argued that allowing them wasn’t “America First” policy. Asked about that by the Atlantic’s Michael Scherer on Saturday, Trump answered: “I’m the one that decides that.”

Does Trump want a new Cold War with China — or a big, beautiful deal?

Bombs are already falling in Ukraine and Iran. But all that could, in the end, be a sideshow compared to the question of what happens between the US and its premier global rival: China. A potential war in Asia — perhaps started by China as an effort to reclaim the island of Taiwan — is the biggest fear keeping many US policymakers up at night.

Elbridge Colby, the Defense Department’s top policy official, is in an alliance of convenience with the America Firsters: he supports reducing US involvement in Ukraine and in the Middle East. But unlike them, he does so because he wants to better focus resources on what he believes is a far more important goal. The “cardinal objective of US grand strategy,” Colby wrote in a 2021 book, should be to deny China “hegemony” over Asia.

In Colby’s conception, hegemony is overwhelming predominance and authority without direct control — the US has it in North and Central America. China, he argues, is trying to achieve hegemony in Asia, by pushing the US out.

Colby acknowledges hegemony over Asia would give nuclear-armed China little added ability to threaten the US homeland. The “more plausible” danger, he says, is that China could “set up a commercial trading bloc” that could exclude and disfavor the US from trade in Asia, which he calls the world’s most important economic region.

Preventing this, Colby writes, requires “firm and focused action”; namely, the US must form and lead an “anti-hegemonic coalition” of other states in the region. But there’s a huge risk: If China forcibly seized a US “ally or quasi-ally,” like Taiwan, US authority in the region would unravel. Therefore, the US should work to ensure that doesn’t happen. And though hopefully the result will be peace through deterrence, we must accept “the distinct possibility of war with China.”

This is a realist version of the traditional hawkish argument, accepted by the national security establishments of both parties, that the US must prevent China from getting too much power in Asia. (Other, more moralizing versions tout the superiority of US values or a US-led world order.) And to most in the foreign policy sphere, this is common sense. Great powers compete and seek advantage, often at the risk of war, because if you don’t risk war, you lose. The idea that we could just, well, not do this — that we could stand aside and let China dominate Asia — seems preposterous.

The America Firsters have no love for China and tend to be all for a trade war. But some are more skeptical about this military competition logic — fearing, again, entangling alliances that risk getting Americans killed far from home. In Vance’s May 2024 foreign policy speech, he criticized “neoconservatives” who he deemed eager for war, saying: “Put me firmly in the category of, I don’t want to go to war with China, and I want to make more of our own stuff. Okay?”

“We’re in a rivalry with China, no one would debate that,” Carlson told me. “But are we hoping to revert to or maintain a unipolar world, where the United States makes all decisions unchallenged — where we get to make decisions about the borders in Asia? Where do we get the authority to make those decisions? And do we have the strength to make those decisions?”

“I guess we could have a war over Taiwan. I’m pretty certain we’d lose! But what would be the point of the war?” he went on. “Because we need to get all the semiconductors? Because China doesn’t like to sell us stuff?”

The hawks argue, in contrast, that military counter-balancing is the best way to avoid war. “You don’t want to get to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan given what that would mean for Japan, the Philippines, etc.,” Matthew Continetti, of the American Enterprise Institute, told me. “You need to deter it.” That, he said, can be done by “making Taiwan as prickly and as frightening to Chinese military planners as possible.”

The second Trump administration is filled with China hawks, and in keeping with his longtime China-bashing rhetoric and love of economic warfare, he’s pursued a confrontational course. He ramped up his trade war with China, and talk of “decoupling” the two economies has intensified. He’s acting aggressively to keep technologies, such as advanced semiconductors, away from China. And in keeping with the hawks’ weapons, he’s arming Taiwan.

Yet Trump does seem to share the America First skepticism about war to defend Taiwan or another Asian country. Unlike Biden — who repeatedly said the US would defend Taiwan — Trump has been more vague on what he’d do. He’s complained that Taiwan “took our chip business” and stressed how far away and small it is compared to China. His skepticism extends to US troop commitments in other Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, too. “This administration’s China policy is objectively more dovish than Biden’s,” the source with knowledge of administration internal dynamics argued, adding that Trump “views the economic side fundamentally as different than the military side.”

It may not be so easy to separate the two. In April, in response to Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, China restricted exports of “rare earth” materials that are crucial to US military technology as well as some civilian manufacturing. This move, the Washington Post reported, caused “deep consternation at high levels of the administration.” It apparently spurred Trump to seek a truce in May. But Trump officials soon rolled out new “tough on China” policies, and the truce fell apart.

So what is Trump’s endgame? Many speculate that he intends all his tough talk and actions to be a prelude to a big, beautiful deal with China — something far less disruptive than a lengthy, painful “decoupling” would be, and something quite different than what the hawks envision.

Would such a deal just be about trade, or might it also encompass the US’s involvement in Asia? The New York Times’ Edward Wong recently argued that Trump could be inclined toward an idea of “spheres of influence” — basically, the US gets the Americas, and China gets Asia. This would horrify the hawks — much of Colby’s positioning in recent years can be seen as an effort to convince Trump and MAGA not to do this. But there’s little sign that this is the administration’s actual policy so far.

In early June, Trump tried to revive the trade war truce in a call with China’s Xi Jinping. The Chinese president reportedly warned Trump that hawks in his administration were jeopardizing their relationship with provocative policies. After further negotiations with top officials, Trump claimed Wednesday morning that the truce was back on. He posted on Truth Social: “RELATIONSHIP IS EXCELLENT.”

[Content truncated due to length...]

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The Economist estimated that the decline in sex preference at birth in the past 25 years has saved the equivalent of 7 million girls. | Antoine Lassalle/Getty Images

Perhaps the oldest, most pernicious form of human bias is that of men toward women. It often started at the moment of birth. In ancient Athens, at a public ceremony called the amphidromia, fathers would inspect a newborn and decide whether it would be part of the family, or be cast away. One often socially acceptable reason for abandoning the baby: It was a girl.

Female infanticide has been distressingly common in many societies  — and its practice is not just ancient history. In 1990, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen looked at birth ratios in Asia, North Africa, and China and calculated that more than 100 million women were essentially “missing” —  meaning that, based on the normal ratio of boys to girls at birth and the longevity of both genders, there was a huge missing number of girls who should have been born, but weren’t.

Sen’s estimate came before the truly widespread adoption of ultrasound tests that could determine the sex of a fetus in utero — which actually made the problem worse, leading to a wave of sex-selective abortions. These were especially common in countries like India and China; the latter’s one-child policy and old biases made families desperate for their one child to be a boy. The Economist has estimated that since 1980 alone, there have been approximately 50 million fewer girls born worldwide than would naturally be expected, which almost certainly means that roughly that nearly all of those girls were aborted for no other reason than their sex. The preference for boys was a bias that killed in mass numbers.

But in one of the most important social shifts of our time, that bias is changing. In a great cover story earlier this month, The Economist reported that the number of annual excess male births has fallen from a peak of 1.7 million in 2000 to around 200,000, which puts it back within the biologically standard birth ratio of 105 boys for every 100 girls. Countries that once had highly skewed sex ratios — like South Korea, which saw almost 116 boys born for every 100 girls in 1990 — now have normal or near-normal ratios.

Altogether, The Economist estimated that the decline in sex preference at birth in the past 25 years has saved the equivalent of 7 million girls. That’s comparable to the number of lives saved by anti-smoking efforts in the US. So how, exactly, have we overcome a prejudice that seemed so embedded in human society?

Success in school and the workplace

For one, we have relaxed discrimination against girls and women in other ways — in school and in the workplace. With fewer limits, girls are outperforming boys in the classroom. In the most recent international PISA tests, considered the gold standard for evaluating student performance around the world, 15-year-old girls beat their male counterparts in reading in 79 out of 81 participating countries or economies, while the historic male advantage in math scores has fallen to single digits.

Girls are also dominating in higher education, with 113 female students at that level for every 100 male students. While women continue to earn less than men, the gender pay gap has been shrinking, and in a number of urban areas in the US, young women have actually been outearning young men.

Government policies have helped accelerate that shift, in part because they have come to recognize the serious social problems that eventually result from decades of anti-girl discrimination. In countries like South Korea and China, which have long had some of the most skewed gender ratios at birth, governments have cracked down on technologies that enable sex-selective abortion. In India, where female infanticide and neglect have been particularly horrific, slogans like “Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter” have helped change opinions.

A changing preference

The shift is being seen not just in birth sex ratios, but in opinion polls — and in the actions of would-be parents.

Between 1983 and 2003, The Economist reported, the proportion of South Korean women who said it was “necessary” to have a son fell from 48 percent to 6 percent, while nearly half of women now say they want daughters. In Japan, the shift has gone even further — as far back as 2002, 75 percent of couples who wanted only one child said they hoped for a daughter.

In the US, which allows sex selection for couples doing in-vitro fertilization, there is growing evidence that would-be parents prefer girls, as do potential adoptive parents. While in the past, parents who had a girl first were more likely to keep trying to have children in an effort to have a boy, the opposite is now true — couples who have a girl first are less likely to keep trying.

A more equal future

There’s still more progress to be made. In northwest of India, for instance, birth ratios that overly skew toward boys are still the norm. In regions of sub-Saharan Africa, birth sex ratios may be relatively normal, but post-birth discrimination in the form of poorer nutrition and worse medical care still lingers. And course, women around the world are still subject to unacceptable levels of violence and discrimination from men.

And some of the reasons for this shift may not be as high-minded as we’d like to think. Boys around the world are struggling in the modern era. They increasingly underperform in education, are more likely to be involved in violent crime, and in general, are failing to launch into adulthood. In the US, 20 percent of American men between 25 and 34 still live with their parents, compared to 15 percent of similarly aged women.

It also seems to be the case that at least some of the increasing preference for girls is rooted in sexist stereotypes. Parents around the world may now prefer girls partly because they see them as more likely to take care of them in their old age — meaning a different kind of bias against women, that they are more natural caretakers, may be paradoxically driving the decline in prejudice against girls at birth.

But make no mistake — the decline of boy preference is a clear mark of social progress, one measured in millions of girls’ lives saved. And maybe one Father’s Day, not too long from now, we’ll reach the point where daughters and sons are simply children: equally loved and equally welcomed.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

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Elon Musk holds a news conference with President Donald Trump to mark the end of his tenure as a special government employee overseeing DOGE on May 30 in the Oval Office of the White House. | Tom Brenner for Washington Post via Getty Images

Elon Musk may be gone from the Trump administration — and his friendship status with President Donald Trump may be at best uncertain — but his whirlwind stint in government certainly left its imprint.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his pet government-slashing project, remains entrenched in Washington. During his 130-day tenure, Musk led DOGE in eliminating about 260,000 federal employee jobs and gutting agencies supporting scientific research and humanitarian aid.

But to date, DOGE claims to have saved the government $180 billion — well short of its ambitious (and frankly never realistic) target of cutting at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. And with Musk’s departure still fresh, there are reports that the federal government is trying to rehire federal workers who quit or were let go.

For Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, DOGE’s tactics will likely end up being disastrous in the long run. “DOGE came in with these huge cuts, which were not attached to a plan,” she told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram.

Kamarck knows all about making government more efficient. In the 1990s, she ran the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government program. “I was Elon Musk,” she told Today, Explained. With the benefit of that experience, she assesses Musk’s record at DOGE, and what, if anything, the billionaire’s loud efforts at cutting government spending added up to.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What do you think Elon Musk’s legacy is?

Well, he will not have totally, radically reshaped the federal government. Absolutely not. In fact, there’s a high probability that on January 20, 2029, when the next president takes over, the federal government is about the same size as it is now, and is probably doing the same stuff that it’s doing now. What he did manage to do was insert chaos, fear, and loathing into the federal workforce.

There was reporting in the Washington Post late last week that these cuts were so ineffective that the White House is actually reaching out to various federal employees who were laid off and asking them to come back, from the FDA to the IRS to even USAID. Which cuts are sticking at this point and which ones aren’t?

First of all, in a lot of cases, people went to court and the courts have reversed those earlier decisions.So the first thing that happened is, courts said, “No, no, no, you can’t do it this way. You have to bring them back.”

The second thing that happened is that Cabinet officers started to get confirmed by the Senate. And remember that a lot of the most spectacular DOGE stuff was happening in February. In February, these Cabinet secretaries were preparing for their Senate hearings. They weren’t on the job. Now that their Cabinet secretary’s home, what’s happening is they’re looking at these cuts and they’re saying, “No, no, no! We can’t live with these cuts because we have a mission to do.”

As the government tries to hire back the people they fired, they’re going to have a tough time, and they’re going to have a tough time for two reasons. First of all, they treated them like dirt, and they’ve said a lot of insulting things.

Second, most of the people who work for the federal government are highly skilled. They’re not paper pushers. We have computers to push our paper, right? They’re scientists. They’re engineers. They’re people with high skills, and guess what? They can get jobs outside the government. So there’s going to be real lasting damage to the government from the way they did this. And it’s analogous to the lasting damage that they’re causing at universities, where we now have top scientists who used to invent great cures for cancer and things like that, deciding to go find jobs in Europe because this culture has gotten so bad.

What happens to this agency now? Who’s in charge of it?

Well, what they’ve done is DOGE employees have been embedded in each of the organizations in the government, okay? And they basically — and the president himself has said this — they basically report to the Cabinet secretaries. So if you are in the Transportation Department, you have to make sure that Sean Duffy, who’s the secretary of transportation, agrees with you on what you want to do. And Sean Duffy has already had a fight during a Cabinet meeting with Elon Musk. You know that he has not been thrilled with the advice he’s gotten from DOGE. So from now on, DOGE is going to have to work hand in hand with Donald Trump’s appointed leaders.

And just to bring this around to what we’re here talking about now, they’re in this huge fight over wasteful spending with the so-called big, beautiful bill. Does this just look like the government as usual, ultimately?

It’s actually worse than normal. Because the deficit impacts are bigger than normal. It’s adding more to the deficit than previous bills have done.

And the second reason it’s worse than normal is that everybody is still living in a fantasy world. And the fantasy world says that somehow we can deal with our deficits by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. That is pure nonsense. Let me say it: pure nonsense.

Where does most of the government money go? Does it go to some bureaucrats sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue? It goes to us. It goes to your grandmother and her Social Security and her Medicare. It goes to veterans in veterans benefits. It goes to Americans. That’s why it’s so hard to cut it. It’s so hard to cut it because it’s us.

And people are living on it. Now, there’s a whole other topic that nobody talks about, and it’s called entitlement reform, right? Could we reform Social Security? Could we make the retirement age go from 67 to 68? That would save a lot of money. Could we change the cost of living? Nobody, nobody, nobody is talking about that. And that’s because we are in this crazy, polarized environment where we can no longer have serious conversations about serious issues.

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Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington this weekend — a show of force in the capital that just happens to take place on the president’s birthday — smacks of authoritarian Dear Leader-style politics (even though Trump actually got the idea after attending the 2017 Bastille Day parade in Paris).

Yet as disconcerting as the imagery of tanks rolling down Constitution Avenue will be, it’s not even close to Trump’s most insidious assault on the US military’s historic and democratically essential nonpartisan ethos.

In fact, it’s not even the most worrying thing he’s done this week.

On Tuesday, the president gave a speech at Fort Bragg, an Army base home to Special Operations Command. While presidential speeches to soldiers are not uncommon — rows of uniformed troops make a great backdrop for a foreign policy speech — they generally avoid overt partisan attacks and campaign-style rhetoric. The soldiers, for their part, are expected to be studiously neutral, laughing at jokes and such, but remaining fully impassive during any policy conversation.

That’s not what happened at Fort Bragg. Trump’s speech was a partisan tirade that targeted “radical left” opponents ranging from Joe Biden to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. He celebrated his deployment of Marines to Los Angeles, proposed jailing people for burning the American flag, and called on soldiers to be “aggressive” toward the protesters they encountered.

The soldiers, for their part, cheered Trump and booed his enemies — as they were seemingly expected to. Reporters at Military.com, a military news service, uncovered internal communications from 82nd Airborne leadership suggesting that the crowd was screened for their political opinions.

“If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,” one note read.

To call this unusual is an understatement. I spoke with four different experts on civil-military relations, two of whom teach at the Naval War College, about the speech and its implications. To a person, they said it was a step towards politicizing the military with no real precedent in modern American history.

“That is, I think, a really big red flag because it means the military’s professional ethic is breaking down internally,” says Risa Brooks, a professor at Marquette University. “Its capacity to maintain that firewall against civilian politicization may be faltering.”

This may sound alarmist — like an overreading of a one-off incident — but it’s part of a bigger pattern. The totality of Trump administration policies, ranging from the parade in Washington to the LA troop deployment to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s firing of high-ranking women and officers of color, suggests a concerted effort to erode the military’s professional ethos and turn it into an institution subservient to the Trump administration’s whims. This is a signal policy aim of would-be dictators, who wish to head off the risk of a coup and ensure the armed forces’ political reliability if they are needed to repress dissent in a crisis.

Steve Saideman, a professor at Carleton University, put together a list of eight different signs that a military is being politicized in this fashion. The Trump administration has exhibited six out of the eight.

“The biggest theme is that we are seeing a number of checks on the executive fail at the same time — and that’s what’s making individual events seem more alarming than they might otherwise,” says Jessica Blankshain, a professor at the Naval War College (speaking not for the military but in a personal capacity).

That Trump is trying to politicize the military does not mean he has succeeded. There are several signs, including Trump’s handpicked chair of the Joint Chiefs repudiating the president’s claims of a migrant invasion during congressional testimony, that the US military is resisting Trump’s politicization.

But the events in Fort Bragg and Washington suggest that we are in the midst of a quiet crisis in civil-military relations in the United States — one whose implications for American democracy’s future could well be profound.

The Trump crisis in civil-military relations, explained

A military is, by sheer fact of its existence, a threat to any civilian government. If you have an institution that controls the overwhelming bulk of weaponry in a society, it always has the physical capacity to seize control of the government at gunpoint. A key question for any government is how to convince the armed forces that they cannot or should not take power for themselves.

Democracies typically do this through a process called “professionalization.” Soldiers are rigorously taught to think of themselves as a class of public servants, people trained to perform a specific job within defined parameters. Their ultimate loyalty is not to their generals or even individual presidents, but rather to the people and the constitutional order.

Samuel Huntington, the late Harvard political scientist, is the canonical theorist of a professional military. In his book The Soldier and the State, he described optimal professionalization as a system of “objective control”: one in which the military retains autonomy in how they fight and plan for wars while deferring to politicians on whether and why to fight in the first place. In effect, they stay out of the politicians’ affairs while the politicians stay out of theirs.

The idea of such a system is to emphasize to the military that they are professionals: Their responsibility isn’t deciding when to use force, but only to conduct operations as effectively as possible once ordered to engage in them. There is thus a strict firewall between military affairs, on the one hand, and policy-political affairs on the other.

Typically, the chief worry is that the military breaches this bargain: that, for example, a general starts speaking out against elected officials’ policies in ways that undermine civilian control. This is not a hypothetical fear in the United States, with the most famous such example being Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s insubordination during the Korean War. Thankfully, not even MacArthur attempted the worst-case version of military overstep — a coup.

But in backsliding democracies like the modern United States, where the chief executive is attempting an anti-democratic power grab, the military poses a very different kind of threat to democracy — in fact, something akin to the exact opposite of the typical scenario.

In such cases, the issue isn’t the military inserting itself into politics but rather the civilians dragging them into it in ways that upset the democratic political order. The worst-case scenario is that the military acts on presidential directives to use force against domestic dissenters, destroying democracy not by ignoring civilian orders, but by following them.

There are two ways to arrive at such a worst-case scenario, both of which are in evidence in the early days of Trump 2.0.

First is politicization: an intentional attack on the constraints against partisan activity inside the professional ranks.

Many of Pete Hegseth’s major moves as secretary of defense fit this bill, including his decisions to fire nonwhite and female generals seen as politically unreliable and his effort to undermine the independence of the military’s lawyers. The breaches in protocol at Fort Bragg are both consequences and causes of politicization: They could only happen in an environment of loosened constraint, and they might encourage more overt political action if gone unpunished.

The second pathway to breakdown is the weaponization of professionalism against itself. Here, Trump exploits the military’s deference to politicians by ordering it to engage in undemocratic (and even questionably legal) activities.

In practice, this looks a lot like the LA deployments, and, more specifically, the lack of any visible military pushback. While the military readily agreeing to deployments is normally a good sign — that civilian control is holding — these aren’t normal times. And this isn’t a normal deployment, but rather one that comes uncomfortably close to the military being ordered to assist in repressing overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against executive abuses of power.

“It’s really been pretty uncommon to use the military for law enforcement,” says David Burbach, another Naval War College professor (also speaking personally). “This is really bringing the military into frontline law enforcement when. … these are really not huge disturbances.”

This, then, is the crisis: an incremental and slow-rolling effort by the Trump administration to erode the norms and procedures designed to prevent the military from being used as a tool of domestic repression.

Is it time to panic?

Among the experts I spoke with, there was consensus that the military’s professional and nonpartisan ethos was weakening. This isn’t just because of Trump, but his terms — the first to a degree, and now the second acutely — are major stressors.

Yet there was no consensus on just how much military nonpartisanship has eroded — that is, how close we are to a moment when the US military might be willing to follow obviously authoritarian orders.

For all its faults, the US military’s professional ethos is a really important part of its identity and self-conception. While few soldiers may actually read Sam Huntington or similar scholars, the general idea that they serve the people and the republic is a bedrock principle among the ranks. There is a reason why the United States has never, in over 250 years of governance, experienced a military coup — or even come particularly close to one.

In theory, this ethos should also galvanize resistance to Trump’s efforts at politicization. Soldiers are not unthinking automatons: While they are trained to follow commands, they are explicitly obligated to refuse illegal orders, even coming from the president. The more aggressive Trump’s efforts to use the military as a tool of repression gets, the more likely there is to be resistance.

Or, at least theoretically.

The truth is that we don’t really know how the US military will respond to a situation like this. Like so many of Trump’s second-term policies, their efforts to bend the military to their will are unprecedented — actions with no real parallel in the modern history of the American military. Experts can only make informed guesses, based on their sense of US military culture as well as comparisons to historical and foreign cases.

For this reason, there are probably only two things we can say with confidence.

First, what we’ve seen so far is not yet sufficient evidence to declare that the military is in Trump’s thrall. The signs of decay are too limited to ground any conclusions that the longstanding professional norm is entirely gone.

“We have seen a few things that are potentially alarming about erosion of the military’s non-partisan norm. But not in a way that’s definitive at this point,” Blankshain says.

Second, the stressors on this tradition are going to keep piling on. Trump’s record makes it exceptionally clear that he wants the military to serve him personally — and that he, and Hegseth, will keep working to make it so. This means we really are in the midst of a quiet crisis, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.

“The fact that he’s getting the troops to cheer for booing Democratic leaders at a time when there’s actually [a deployment to] a blue city and a blue state…he is ordering the troops to take a side,” Saideman says. “There may not be a coherent plan behind this. But there are a lot of things going on that are all in the same direction.”

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Demonstrators gather in solidarity with Mahmoud Khalil. | David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is defying a federal judge’s order that it free a pro-Palestinian activist, attacking both the rule of law and the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech.

Catch me up? In March, the Trump administration arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist and former Columbia University student, and designated him for deportation over his participation in campus protests. Mahmoud was a legal permanent US resident, but the administration argued it has the right to revoke Khalil’s green card on the grounds that his presence constitutes a threat to US foreign policy. Khalil sued to stop the deportation, and the two sides have been in court ever since.

So what happened this week? On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered the administration to free Khalil. But today, the administration said it would not free him, arguing unconvincingly that it’s still detaining Khalil for a different violation. (The judge’s ruling to free Khalil explicitly anticipated this strategy and described it as legally unsound.)

What’s next? The administration says that it will appeal the order to a higher court — and keep Khalil detained in the meantime.

What’s the big picture? If Khalil had conducted all the same protest actions on behalf of a cause favored by the administration, he’d still be free. That means that, under Donald Trump, immigrants are facing consequences for expressing political opinions that the administration objects to — a clear violation of the First Amendment.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I’m in desperate need of a long walk with my dog and a podcast, so I’m excited about the new episode of Today, Explained. The episode is focused on Dropout, a streaming platform whose fans are so dedicated that some of them are actually asking to pay more for the service. (You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and elsewhere.) I hope everyone has a safe and fulfilling weekend, and I’ll see you back here Monday.

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An Iranian ballistic missile over the sky in Israel. | Gazi Samad/Anadolu via Getty Images

Last night, Israel went to war with Iran — launching a bombing raid targeting Iran’s senior military leadership and top nuclear scientists. The strikes were a tactical triumph for Israel: The heads of both Iran’s entire military and its Revolutionary Guards were killed in the opening hours, and Iranian air defenses took a massive hit. Israel suffered few, if any, losses and suffered no immediate major retaliation.

But on Friday afternoon, Iran launched a barrage of missiles across Israel that overwhelmed Israel’s Iron Dome defenses. While the full scope of the counterattack is not yet clear, it underscores that in this war — as in any other — there’s far too much we don’t know in the early days to be confident about predicting how things end.

Israeli officials are saying the strikes will continue for days, if not weeks — essentially a commitment to open-ended regional war for the foreseeable future. It’s nearly impossible, at this stage, to truly understand what’s happening.

“We know from history the full impact of Israel’s attack on Iran will take years to unfold. It could prevent an Iranian bomb or ensure one. It could destabilize the [Iranian] regime or entrench it,” writes Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

There are, I think, at least three key questions that will play a major role in determining the outcome of this conflict. They are:

Is the Israeli objective limited to demolishing Iran’s nuclear program, as they’ve said, or is this also a regime change operation?To what extent does Iran have the capability to hit back?How does this affect Iran’s thinking about getting a nuclear bomb?

All of these are, at this point, unanswerable. But trying to assess what we do know can help clarify what to look for when trying to figure out the implications of the past day’s events.

What is Israel’s objective?

For several decades, Israel has described Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat to its survival.

It was never fully clear if Iran was committed to getting a nuclear weapon or merely wanted the capability to acquire one quickly if it felt threatened. But the steps — like building centrifuges that could produce highly enriched uranium — are identical up until the very last minute, when it’s arguably too late to stop by force. From the Israeli point of view, a theocratic regime that sponsors terrorist groups that kill Israelis — like Hamas and Hezbollah — simply could not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. For this reason, Israel has been threatening airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear program for several decades.

Last night, Israel made good on that threat. Israeli officials have described the attacks as prompted by an “imminent” threat of Iranian nuclear development, with one such official telling the BBC that it could have built bombs “within days.” Israel’s position is that Iran’s nuclear development left them no choice in the matter: that it was facing a choice between striking now or staring down a nuclear-armed Iran in the immediate future.

We don’t yet know how true those claims are (and we may never). But what we do know is that there is some tension between the Israeli justification for the strikes and the actual targets they hit.

Any effort to cripple Iran’s nuclear program would focus heavily on two targets: the nuclear enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow. While Israel did target Iranian nuclear scientists, the physical facilities do not appear to have been taken out. Israel hit Natanz, but early expert assessments suggest only limited damage. And there is no evidence, at least publicly, that Fordow was hit in the opening round at all.

So if the true target is the nuclear program, why did Israel expend so much effort targeting Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and military leadership while doing relatively little damage to nuclear infrastructure?

There are, broadly speaking, two answers to this question.

The first is that Israel plans to hit the nuclear facilities harder as the war goes on. By killing Iran’s military leadership — including nearly its entire air command — Israel has weakened Iran’s ability to defend its airspace and retaliate against the Israeli homeland. These first strikes, on this theory, were laying the groundwork for later strikes more focused on nuclear facilities.

“The entire operation really has to be completed with the elimination of Fordow,” Michael Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the US, said in a Friday interview on Fox News.

The second interpretation is that Israel has even bigger plans. It will heavily target the nuclear facilities, to be sure, but it will also engage in a wider campaign to undermine the very foundations of the Iranian regime. By taking out key leaders, Israel is weakening the Iranian government’s ability to maintain its grip on power. The ultimate Israeli hope would be that these strikes have a similar effect in Iran as Israel’s devastating strikes on Hezbollah did in Syria — damaging the government’s ability to repress so severely that it creates space for domestic opponents to topple it.

“The targets that were hit made it clear that Israel’s goal was broader than damaging Iran’s nuclear program,” Steven Cook, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in Foreign Policy. “The Israelis are clearly not satisfied with doing damage to Iran’s nuclear program but seem to be engaged in regime change.”

There is, in short, little doubt that Israel will heavily target the nuclear facilities in the coming days. That alone could produce significant bloodshed.

But if Israel’s ambitions are wider — nuclear demolition plus regime change — then we could be in for a much longer, deadlier, and riskier campaign.

Can Iran fight back?

For many years, the conventional wisdom among Middle East analysts has been that Israel will pay a very high price for striking Iran.

Iran is a very large country — bigger in population than Germany, France, and Britain — that has invested heavily in its military. It retains a large ballistic missile arsenal and an extensive network of proxy militias around the Middle East, all of which could be turned on Israel with deadly effect.

Iran’s Friday afternoon missile barrage suggests it retains at least some capability to fight back. But how much?

Since the October 7, 2023 attacks Israel has been systematically demolishing Iran’s proxy network. The brutal war in Gaza has forced Hamas to basically go underground, fighting more like an insurgent group than a mini-state capable of firing major rocket barrages at Israeli cities. A series of surprise attacks on Hezbollah’s leadership in September of last year devastated the Lebanese group, to the point where it has been forced to sit out the current round of fighting.

And Israel has repeatedly struck Iranian interests around the Middle East — including a major assault on its homeland air defenses in October 2024 — while paying a relatively low price. An Iranian missile-and-drone attack targeting Israel in April of last year, launched in retaliation for an attack on its embassy in Damascus, did scarcely any damage.

Once again, there are basically two possible interpretations of events.

The first is that Iran is now a paper tiger. By destroying its proxies, and exposing its own retaliatory capabilities to be vastly overstated, Israel has created a situation where it can attack Iran with relative impunity. The Iranians will certainly try and retaliate as they did on Friday, but it will be relatively weak — doing only limited damage to Israeli targets.

The second is that Iran has been holding back.

While Iran may hate Israel, it has not (under this telling of its events) seen a full-blown war as in its interests. For that reason, it has been reserving its most devastating weapons — and those of its remaining allies, like the Houthis in Yemen or Iraqi militias — in order to avoid escalation.

Now that escalation is clearly there, Iran will no longer restrain itself — and the long-anticipated devastating response will happen in the coming days. Such an attack would go beyond Israeli military targets and hit the country’s cities, attempt to shut down shipping through the critical Strait of Hormuz, and potentially even kill American personnel in the region.

Once again, we cannot yet be sure which of these two scenarios is more likely. There’s also a lot of possible space between the two extremes, in which Iran retaliates forcefully against Israel but not quite so aggressively against the US or transport ships as pre-war estimates feared.

But we can be certain that the scope of the conflict, including any risk that the US might be dragged in, will be determined in large part by whether Iran is truly weak or has simply seemed that way.

How does Iran think about the bomb after this?

It is, as a technical matter, impossible to permanently prevent a country from building a nuclear bomb in a single attack. Whatever gets destroyed can eventually be rebuilt if the targeted government is truly committed to acquiring a weapon.

This fact has been a centerpiece of the case against bombing Iran, an argument focusing less on whether Israel could damage Iranian infrastructure than whether doing so would accomplish anything in the long run.

Israel cannot, by force alone, remove Iran’s will to build a bomb. So even if Israel does serious damage to Natanz and Fordow — a real “if,” given Fordow’s extensive fortifications — it can’t stop the Iranians from repairing it without launching another strike in the future. Moreover, a successful Israeli attack would solidify Iran’s interest in acquiring a nuclear deterrent, meaning that Iran would invest huge amounts of resources in a nuclear rebuild as soon as the bombs stopped falling.

On this logic, one Israeli strike commits Israel to a forever war: bombing Iran at regular intervals to prevent it from reconstituting its program.

We are now about to see a test of this argument — one with at least three possible outcomes.

The first is that it is correct. Israel does real damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities, but in the process it convinces Iran that it needs to build a bomb in order to deter future Israeli aggression. This is what happened after Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s nuclear facility at Osirak, which caused Saddam Hussein’s decision to double down on nuclear development (a program only truly derailed by the 1992 Gulf War and subsequent nuclear inspections).

The second is that Israel is more effective than its critics believe. Perhaps Israel does so much damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities that the Iranians calculate the risk/reward benefit of rebuilding them is simply too unfavorable. Or perhaps the regime change operation succeeds and the new Iranian government decides not to antagonize the world by recommitting to a nuclear program.

The third is that Iran’s nuclear facilities suffer far less damage during the war than people anticipate — and Iran moves swiftly to build a bomb before Israel would be ready to stop them.

This may sound implausible given Israel’s successes so far. But expert assessments suggest that, for all its military weakness, it’s possible Iran has done a better job shielding its weapons program than it seems.

“Iran already has enough highly enriched uranium to build several nuclear weapons. This is containerized and believed to be stored at three different locations, and it is unclear whether Israel will be able to get all of it in the ongoing military strikes,” Ken Pollack, the vice president for policy at the Middle East Institute, writes in Foreign Affairs. “Israeli and other Western intelligence services may have a very hard time finding new, secret Iranian nuclear sites. It may also have trouble destroying those sites even if they are identified, since Iran will likely harden them even beyond the level of its current facilities.”

How fast depends on the extent of the damage. But Fabian Hoffmann, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank, suggests that it could “reach weapons-grade enrichment levels relatively quickly” so long as “anything substantial survives.”

Once again, we do not know which of these three scenarios is most likely. But the wide gulf in possibilities, from Israel ending Iran’s nuclear program to Iran developing a bomb in the immediate future, suggests that any attempts to confidently predict what the past day’s events mean are extraordinarily premature.

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People look over damage to buildings in Nobonyad Square following Israeli airstrikes on June 13, 2025, in Tehran, Iran. | Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

In announcing Israel’s strikes against Iran’s military leadership and nuclear program last night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the case that Israel had “no choice but to act, and act now” in response to recent advances in Iran’s capabilities that put his country at risk of a “nuclear holocaust.”

It’s far from clear that the Trump administration shared Netanyahu’s sense of urgency. President Donald Trump waved off Israeli plans for a strike in April, amid ongoing efforts to negotiate a new deal over Tehran’s nuclear program. Just hours before the attack was launched, Trump still seemed committed to the diplomatic path, saying he would “rather that [the Israelis] don’t go in in order not to ruin it.”

One of the biggest questions in the days to come — and perhaps the one with the highest stakes for Israel — is whether Trump will come to embrace the war he publicly opposed.

Initially, reporting on the lead-up to the attack suggested that the Trump administration was aware the attack was coming but did little to stop it. The first high-level US response to the strikes, from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was relatively noncommittal, stating that the Israelis “believe this action was necessary” but that the US was “not involved in strikes against Iran.”

On Friday morning, however, Trump seemed more enthusiastic about the strikes, posting that he had warned Iranian leaders of the consequences of making a deal but that they “couldn’t get it done.” He added, “the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it.”

This appears to be a case of Trump associating himself after the fact with what appears to be a remarkably successful military operation.

The hope in the Trump administration seems to be that the Israeli operation will force Iran to make concessions at the negotiating table. Trump urged Iranian leaders to take a deal “BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE,” and US officials reportedly still hoped that planned talks in Oman on Sunday will still go ahead.

A meeting on Sunday, at least, seems unlikely. Iran has threatened retaliation for the strikes and made clear that it doesn’t believe Washington’s disavowals of involvement. Netanyahu’s government is also clearly hoping for a more active US role.

“The president seems to still hope that his preference for a diplomatic solution can be salvaged,” said Nimrod Novik, a former foreign policy adviser to the Israeli government. “Few in the political-security establishment here share that hope.”

He added: “From an Israeli vantage point, it seems that the better the operation looks, the more Trump wants to own it.”

The question in the days to come is just how long the US will stay on the sidelines.

How the American role in the conflict could escalate

According to the New York Times, the Israeli attack plan that Trump rejected in April, “would have required U.S. help not just to defend Israel from Iranian retaliation, but also to ensure that an Israeli attack was successful, making the United States a central part of the attack itself.”

The conventional wisdom has long been that a military strike to destroy or seriously degrade Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability would require US involvement: Iran’s key enrichment sites are located in fortified facilities deep underground, and destroying them would require heavy bunker-buster bombs. Israel doesn’t have those bombs or the heavy bombers required to carry them, but the US does.

But that’s not the approach Israel took, at least initially. Analysts say Israel does not appear to have struck the most heavily fortified compound at Fordow, or its nuclear site at Isfahan. A third key nuclear enrichment site, Natanz, sustained only light damage.

Instead, Israel’s strikes targeted Iran’s top leadership, including the commander in chief of its military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and prominent nuclear scientists. Several military bases around Tehran were hit, as well as air defense systems.

“This was not a campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities,” said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on the Iranian nuclear program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This was a campaign against Iranian command and control and leadership.”

This was, however, just the opening salvo of a campaign that Netanyahu said “will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.” The operation’s aims could very well expand.

“This is day one,” noted Raphael Cohen, a military analyst at the RAND Corporation. “On day 20, day 40, day 60, once everything drags on as stockpiles dwindle, that’s when we’re going to start to see to what extent Israel needs the United States.”

How will Iran respond?

Iran fired at least 100 drones at Israel on Friday, which, so far, appear to have been intercepted without causing any damage. Notably, it has not yet fired ballistic missiles, its most potent long-range threat.

The Iranian leadership is likely still reeling from the losses it sustained. Its capacity to respond is likely also hampered by Israel’s success over the past year and a half against Iran’s network of proxies across the Middle East. Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militia that was once the most powerful of these proxies, but was decimated by last year’s pager bombings, has been notably quiet so far, in contrast to the wide-ranging rocket barrage it launched immediately after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.

Iran fired missile barrages at Israel twice last year, first in April in response to the bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, and a second, much larger barrage in October in response to the killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Tehran. Neither caused extensive damage, though in the October strikes, Israeli air defenses were overwhelmed in some places, suggesting that a larger strike could cause serious damage. Iran may have as many as 2,000 ballistic missiles at its disposal, and Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly warned senators last week that Iranian retaliation could cause a “mass casualty event.”

“In October, you saw more advanced ballistic missiles being used, but not like the full suite of Iranian ballistic missiles,” Grajewski told Vox. She also noted that during both strikes last year, Israel needed international support to successfully repel those attacks, notably help from the US military in shooting down missiles as well as intelligence support from a previously unlikely alliance of Arab countries sharing intelligence.

Though the Trump administration was perfectly willing to cut a quick deal with Yemen’s Houthi rebels, despite the group continuing to periodically launch missiles and drones at Israel, a massive attack of the type Witkoff warned is a different story. Israeli policymakers are likely counting on the Trump administration to assist in mounting the kind of multilayered defense that the US did under Joe Biden last year.

Could Iran attack Americans?

Iranian leaders are plainly not buying US disavowals of involvement in Israel’s operation. Military commanders had warned that US forces in the Middle East could be exposed to attack in retaliation for such a strike. In the days leading up to the attack, the US partially evacuated its embassy in Baghdad and authorized the departure of personnel and families from other sites in the region due to that risk.

Iran has generally been very wary about taking steps that could draw the US into a direct conflict, preferring to act through proxies. This would suggest a direct strike on US facilities or a drastic move likely blocking the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, which could cause a spike in global energy prices, is unlikely.

Attacks by one of Iran’s proxy militias in Iran, or a resumption of strikes against US ships by the Houthis, seem somewhat more likely. On the other hand, we may simply be in uncharted waters where the previous rules of restraint don’t apply.

The Iranian government will almost certainly feel it has to mount some significant response, if only for its own credibility. There have already been some reports of civilian casualties — if those increase, the need to respond will only grow.

For Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “there’s a personal element,” said Alex Vatanka, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “How do you get yourself out of the situation without being entirely humiliated? … Is he going to do what Qaddafi did and give up his nuclear program, or is he going to say, you know, what, to hell with it, I’d rather die. I’d rather seek martyrdom. It remains to be seen.”

How much has Trump changed?

Khamenei isn’t the only leader whose motives are something of a mystery at the moment. During his first term, Trump authorized the strike that killed senior Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, a major provocation, but also called off a planned strike on Iranian soil due to concerns about escalation.

During his second term, he has been surprisingly unconcerned about coordinating with Israel — cutting deals with the Houthis as well as launching nuclear talks with Iran that Netanyahu was highly skeptical of from the start. His administration this time includes some notably less hawkish voices when it comes to Iran, such as Vice President JD Vance, who has warned against letting Israel drag the US into a war, and described it as a scenario that could “balloon into World War III.”

In 24 hours, Trump has gone from publicly opposing an Israeli strike to taking at least partial credit for it. Netanyahu, who has been advocating an operation like this for years, is likely hoping that continued military success will prompt Trump to abandon his hopes of a big, beautiful deal and join the fight.

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While tech has generally been very liberal in its political support and giving, there’s been an emergence of a real and influential tech right over the last few years. | Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images

I live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I don’t know anyone who says they voted for Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020. I know, on the other hand, quite a few who voted for him in 2024, and quite a few more who — while they didn’t vote for Trump because of his many crippling personal foibles, corruption, penchant for destroying the global economy, etc. — have thoroughly soured on the Democratic Party.

It’s not just my professional networks. While tech has generally been very liberal in its political support and giving, the last few years have seen the emergence of a real and influential tech right.

Elon Musk, of course, is by far the most famous, but he didn’t start the tech right by himself. And while his break with Trump — which Musk now seems to be backpedaling on — might have changed his role within the tech right, I don’t think this shift will end with him.

The rise of the tech right

The Bay Area tech scene has always to my mind been best understood as left-libertarian — socially liberal, but suspicious of big government and excited about new things from cryptocurrency to charter cities to mosquito gene drives to genetically engineered superbabies to tooth bacteria. That array of attitudes sometimes puts them at odds with governments (and much of the public, which tends to be much less welcoming of new technology).

The tech world valorizes founders and doers, and everyone knows two or three stories about a company that only succeeded because it was willing to break some city regulations. Lots of founders are immigrants; lots are LGBTQ+. For a long time, this set of commitments put tech firmly on the political left — and indeed tech employees overwhelmingly vote and donate to the Democratic Party.

But over the last 10 years, I think three things changed.

The first was what Vox at the time called the Great Awokening — a sweeping adoption of what had been a bunch of niche liberal social justice ideas, from widespread acceptance of trans people to suspicion of any sex or race disparity in hiring to #MeToo awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace.

A lot of this shift at tech companies was employee driven; again, tech employees are mostly on the left. And some of it was good! But some of it was illiberal — rejecting the idea that we can and should work with people we profoundly disagree with — and identitarian, in that it focused more on what demographic categories we belong to than our commonalities. We’re now in the middle of a backlash, which I think is all the more intense in tech because the original woke movement was all the more intense in tech.

The second thing that changed was the macroeconomic environment. When I first joined a tech company in 2017, interest rates were low and VC funding was incredibly easy to get. Startups were everywhere, and companies were desperately competing to hire employees. As a result, employees had a lot of power; CEOs were often scared of them.

Things started changing when interest rates rose and jobs dried up (relatively speaking). That profoundly changed the dynamics at companies, and I have a suspicion it made a lot of people resentful of immigration levels that they’d been fine with when they, too, were having no trouble getting hired. And in the last few years, the tech world has become convinced that AI is happening very, very soon, and is the biggest economic story of our lives. If you wanted to prevent AI regulation, Silicon Valley reasoned, you should vote Republican.

The third was a deliberate effort by many liberals to go after a tech scene they saw as their enemy. The Biden administration ended up staffed by a lot of people ideologically committed to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s view of the world, where big tech was the enemy of liberal democracy and the tools of antitrust should be used to break it up. Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission acted on those convictions, going after big tech companies like Amazon. Whether you think this was the right call in economic terms — I mostly think it was not — it was decidedly self-destructive in political terms.

So in 2024, some of tech (still not a majority, but a smaller minority than in the past two Trump elections) went right. The tech world watched with bated breath as Musk announced DOGE: Would the administration bring about the deregulation, tax cuts, and anti-woke wish list they believed that only the administration could?

…and the immediate failure

The answer so far has been no. (Many people on the tech right are still more optimistic than me, and point at a small handful of victories, but my assessment is that they’re wearing rose-colored glasses to the point of outright blindness.)

DOGE was a complete failure at cutting spending. The administration did not actually break from Khan’s populist approach to the FTC. It blew up basic biosciences research, and is scaring off or outright deporting the best international talent, which is badly needed for AI in particular.

It’s killing nuclear energy (which is also important to AI boosters) and killing exciting next-gen vaccine research. Musk is out — so is his pick to run NASA. It’s widely rumored that Stephen Miller is running things at the White House, and his one agenda appears to be turning all federal capacity toward deportations at the expense of every single other government priority.

Some deregulation has happened, but any beneficial effects it would have had on investment have been more than canceled out by the tariffs’ catastrophic effects on businesses’ ability to plan for the future. They did at least get the tax cuts for the rich, if the “big, beautiful bill” passes, but that’s about all they got — and the ultra-rich will be poorer this year anyway thanks to the unsteady stock market.

The Republicans, when out of power, had a critique of the Democrats which spoke to the tech right, the populist right, the white supremacists and moderate Black and Latino voters alike. But it’s much easier to complain about Democrats in a way that all of those disparate interest groups find compelling than to govern in a way that keeps them all happy.

Once the Trump administration actually had to choose, it chose basically none of the tech right’s priorities. They took a bad bet — and I think it’d behoove the Democrats to think, as Trump’s coalition fractures, about which of those voters can be won back.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

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Leonard Leo speaks at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC, on April 23, 2019. | Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Late last month, approximately 1 billion news cycles ago, an obscure federal court made President Donald Trump very, very mad.

The US Court of International Trade ruled unanimously on May 28 that the massive tariffs Trump imposed after taking office again are illegal. That ruling was suspended the next day by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the tariffs will be allowed to remain in effect pending a ruling (arguments are scheduled for late July).

But the appellate court’s decision didn’t soothe Trump. He took to Truth Social on May 29 to post a 510-word screed attacking the judges on the Court of International Trade, before turning his ire toward a more surprising candidate — Leonard Leo, the most important person in the conservative legal movement.

“I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges,” Trump wrote, reminiscing about his first term. “I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real “sleazebag” named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”

This breakup surprised many commentators. But not David French.

“If you’re familiar with how the conservative legal movement has interacted with MAGA, you have seen this coming for a while,” French, a New York Times columnist, lawyer, and onetime member of the Federalist Society, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “You knew this was coming after 2020. Because in 2020, after Trump had really stocked the federal judiciary with an awful lot of FedSoc judges and justices…none of them, zero of them, helped him try to steal the election.”

French spoke with Today, Explained about the origins of the (other) big, beautiful breakup and what it means for the Trump administration and the future of the federal judiciary. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Federalist Society?

I am not now, but I have been a member of the Federalist Society. I was a member of the Federalist Society either all three years of law school or the first two years of law school. But it was also a very different time. I think the Federalist Society at the law school at that time, when we would have meetings, maybe 10 or 12 people would show up. Things have changed.

One of the most conspicuous changes is that FedSoc has become an enemy of the president of the United States.

From [2020] forward, you began to see this drifting apart between FedSoc and MAGA. When Trump comes back into office and he doubles down on being Donald Trump, all of this became very, very predictable. Because if the Trump administration’s argument dovetailed with their originalist legal philosophy, they would rule for it. But if it was just simply Trump’s lawless demands, they were going to reject it.

And Trump is baffled by this distinction. He’s baffled by it because congressional Republicans haven’t drawn this line at all. When Trump’s demands conflict with conservative principles, they will yield to Trump’s demands every time. And the judges and justices have taken the opposite tack to such an extent that Republican-nominated judges have ruled against Trump about 72 percent of the time, which is remarkably close to about the 80 percent or so of the time that Democratic-appointed judges have ruled against Trump.

You mentioned a whole host of issues where FedSoc judges have perhaps not given Trump what he wanted. Does the one that finally tips Trump off to go for it on Truth Social surprise you?

It doesn’t, because what really set him off was striking down tariffs. To the extent that Trump loves a policy, he loves tariffs. The Court of International Trade struck it down, and it was pointed out to him that one of the judges on the Court of International Trade that struck down the tariffs was appointed by him. He had been ranting about judges in general. Now he got specific with Leonard Leo; he got specific with the FedSoc. People like me who’d been watching this for a very long time were not wondering if this was going to happen. We were just wondering what was going to be the tipping point: Was it going to be a Supreme Court case? Was it going to be an appellate court? It turns out it was the Court of International Trade that brought us to this moment.

Leonard Leo did not author a decision from this court. Why is he mad at Leonard Leo?

Leonard Leo has long been a key figure in the Federalist Society and was very much a part of the first Trump administration, working closely with the administration to put forward judges.

For a long time, Trump looked at his judicial nominations and waved them like a flag to the American conservative public saying, look what I did. But the more the American conservative public started loving Trump as Trump, versus Trump as what policy wins he could deliver, the less he started waving these other ideological flags, and the more it became all about him. And so this meant that this marriage was going to be temporary almost from the beginning, unless FedSoc capitulated. And if you know anything about FedSoc and the people who belong to it, and the people who’ve come up as judges, I knew they weren’t going to capitulate. It’s a very different culture from political conservatism.

Do you think Donald Trump didn’t realize that?

I don’t think he realized that at all. He’s had this entire history politically of when Republicans disagree with him, they either fall in line or they’re steamrolled. And so it’s so interesting to me that he actually began that Truth Social rant that lacerated Leonard Leo and the FedSoc with this question: What’s going on? Why is this happening?

And I totally understand his bafflement. Because all of the political people had surrendered, or almost all of them. And so when he turns around and these judges and justices just keep ruling against him, you can understand why he would take that as, “What’s going on here? I don’t get this. I don’t understand this. I’ve been assured that these were good judges.” And so that’s where you get to that real tension.

Do you think this rift with the Federalist Society will affect how he appoints judges going forward?

The short answer to that question is yes. The longer answer to that question is heck yes. A lot of people were worried about this because they were thinking, Okay, Trump 1.0: He has General Mattis as his secretary of defense. Trump 2.0: He has Pete Hegseth. You can do this all day long. The Trump 1.0 early nominations — sound, serious, establishment conservatives. Trump 2.0 — often MAGA crazies. The question was, “Is this same pattern going to establish itself in Trump 2.0 on judges?”

And then he appointed to the Third Circuit Emil Bove, this DOJ enforcer of his who was responsible for the effort to dismiss the Eric Adams case. He’s nominated him for the Third Circuit, and a lot of people are now saying, “Oh, now that’s your harbinger right there.”

Right now the conservative legal movement is not what it was then. It is fractured in many of the same ways that the political Republican world has fractured. And so there’s a lot more MAGA lawyers now. There are a lot more MAGA wannabe judges now. And so I do think you’re going to see Trump tilting in that direction pretty dramatically. The interesting thing about this is that it might impact the retirement decisions of senior Republican-nominated judges.A lot of these guys who are now old enough to retire were appointed by Reagan or Bush, so you have a layer of Bush-appointed judges who might be reaching that age of retirement, and they may not want to be replaced by some sort of MAGA figure.

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President Donald Trump hands out pens to faith leaders after signing an executive order on the establishment of the Religious Liberty Commission during a National Day of Prayer event in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 1, 2025. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

For over six decades, the “religious right” in America was boomer “Christian nationalism,” straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale. It was about “keeping God in the schools” and the National Prayer Breakfast. It was traditionalist, mindful of theology, and, well, theocratic, which is to say it wanted to take the standards of a religious tradition and apply them to the secular law. They wanted the books of Scripture to replace the statute books.

But President Donald Trump is trying to create a new religious right, one that is not just illiberal but fundamentally different and opposed to traditional religion as we’ve known it. The faith of the MAGA movement is not one in which the state conforms to the church, but one in which the church is bent to the will of the strange beast that is American nationalism — the belief that the American project is an exercise in freedom and prosperity like the world has never known, but also the sole possession of those who are white, heterosexual, and unquestioningly loyal to the nation.

It’s a model of church-state relations that has less in common with post-revolutionary Iran, where an Islamic cleric known as the supreme leader and his council of religious jurists preside over government, and more in common with Soviet (and arguably contemporary) Russia, where the Russian Orthodox Church is subject to the whims of the Kremlin, acting as everything from propaganda tool to spy center.

This is the displacement of the trappings of religion with America First alternatives.  It’s not coherent in a religious sense. It’s coherent in a political sense.

This is evident from the members and mission of Trump’s new Religious Liberty Commission, as well as its three advisory bodies of religious leaders, legal experts, and lay leaders. The commission is tasked with preparing a report on the history and current state of religious liberty in America.

By contrast, Trump’s three immediate predecessors maintained an Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to advise on how faith-based organizations and the government could collaborate on issues like human trafficking, climate change, or global poverty. Called “Community Initiatives” under Bush, this model reflected the church coming to the aid of the state to address issues arising from the collective moral failings of secular society.

Trump abolished this office at the beginning of his second term. His new plan — the commission charged with producing an “official account” of American religious liberty past and present — is not only unprecedented in American history; it is the product of a very different view of the church-state relationship. In this formulation, faith is not a balm for the moral ills of a nation. Here, the United States, its history and institutions, is the means by which religion can sustain itself. And therefore religious institutions prosper or fail in proportion not to their own morality or faithfulness but to the extent to which America is “American” enough.

In another era, it might be possible to see this new model of engaging religious leaders as a mere accident and the commission as harmless pandering, a bone thrown to conservative religious voters who turn out election after election for Republican candidates. But it is much harder to see the commission and advisory boards as harmless pandering in the current political climate, when the concept of “religious liberty” has become increasingly weaponized. “Religious liberty” has been used by bakers to deny wedding cakes to gay and lesbian couples, by pharmacists to deny women the morning-after pill, and by ER nurses to refuse a Covid-19 vaccine. In a transformation that began when segregationists invoked their religious freedom as a defense against racial equality during the civil rights movement, religious liberty is now a dog whistle for opposition to social progress.

This strategy was one of the founding tactics of the old religious right, a tactic it shares with this new religious movement. But the MAGA religious right has taken this strategy to a new level. And this new movement is far more complex. If we believe that these ideological architects are simply “conservative Christians” or even “Christian nationalists” in the old vein, we are fundamentally misreading both the religious character of the MAGA movement and its broader ideological and practical aims. If, however, we perceive and understand the difference, we are much better situated to combat the radical remaking not just of American religion but of America itself.

The strange makeup of the Religious Liberty Commission

Nothing makes this new religious movement more clear than a quick survey of whom Trump has appointed to serve. Of the 39 appointments made to the Religious Liberty Commission and its related advisory boards, not a single mainline Protestant is among them.

Instead, the board is dominated by evangelicals. Evangelicals’ emphasis on personal salvation, biblical literalism, and emotive worship made them much more popular among America’s least wealthy and least educated, in contrast to the more theologically flexible mainline Protestants who once dominated the country’s political and cultural elite. These differences also made the evangelicals naturally more politically conservative than their mainline counterparts. The evangelicals on the commission are joined by conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America, and Dr. Ben Carson, who is a Seventh-Day Adventist. Significantly, two of the three Muslims appointed by Trump, are white, American converts to the faith.

These are both inclusions and omissions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, when American civic religion — that is, the collective and largely unspoken religious values of a nation — was dominated by the mainline denominations while Catholics, Jews and Muslims remained on the periphery. That’s not to say that this exclusion was a good thing. But who is invited to the table does tend to reveal the values of the people and nation doing the inviting. The reign of mainline Protestants and WASPs reflected a certain set of principles about both religion and politics: moderation in religion and a separation of church and state in politics that not only maintained the neutrality of the government but also the independence of the churches. Not surprisingly then, as the old religious right rose to power, their enemies included not only secular liberals but also the mainline churches by whom they had long felt belittled.

The simple explanation for the omission of mainline Protestants now is that these denominations and their members have become more progressive and are simply too liberal for Trump. They are “victims” of the sensibility, good education, and pragmatism that defined them for generations and then lured them leftward. But this is only part of the truth. High-profile splits among Episcopalians and Methodists, as well as the existence of deeply conservative mainline churches like the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, demonstrate that there are still plenty of socially and politically conservative mainline Protestants in America, even if they are now a minority within their own tradition (which might also be said of politically conservative Jewish Americans). These religious and political conservatives would seem like natural allies to include in a coalition interested in traditional religion and traditional society. Moreover, the evangelical leaders of this new coalition might, in theory, be far more comfortable with a fellow Protestant Christian than with a Muslim, a Jew, or even a Catholic. And yet, they have been excluded.

The old American civic religion is dead. Instead, we are confronted with a cross-faith coalition united not by theology, but by a shared sense of cultural siege. This coalition has manifested not only in the Religious Liberty Commission, but on podcasts, in rallies, and in a growing number of organizations. Trump even touted the alliance in his now-infamous Madison Square Garden rally on the eve of the 2024 election. This is not to say that the traditions included are themselves devoid of theological content or that every member of these traditions is part of the new coalition. That is clearly not true. But the individuals and institutions entering this coalition are willing to put aside theological concerns, even subsume them completely, in the interest of the coalition’s nation-building project.

This project, born from that shared sense of threat (largely around issues of gender, sexuality, and race), is not, as they would have you believe, a concerted effort to return society to some earlier state. Trump 2.0 has made clear that it is seeking to reshape America in unprecedented ways. That’s the opposite of being traditional and conservative. The goal of the new movement is to radically transform American life and society.

How the new American religion works

While the religious right of the 1980s and 1990s was political because of their theology, this is a group doing the opposite: constructing a theology that fits their politics. Take, for example, the defense by evangelical leaders of Trump’s sexual transgressions. Trump’s sins are excusable because he is a messianic figure, they say, sent not to save our souls but America. It’s not coherent in a religious sense. It’s coherent in a political sense.

Another excellent example is Ismail Royer, one of the three Muslims Trump has appointed to do the commission’s work. To begin with, Royer might be the first member of a presidential advisory board to have served prison time for crimes stemming from his connection to a terrorist organization. That’s right, Royer served over a little over a decade in federal maximum-security prison after having been convicted of helping people travel to Pakistan to train with Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamist militia that aims to unite the whole of Kashmir with Pakistan and has been designated as a terrorist organization by the US government. He has certainly turned over a new leaf since his release.

You can’t counter this kind of movement the same way you would more traditional “believers.”

Today, Royer works as the director of the Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team for the Religious Freedom Institute, an organization that applies the American right’s strategy of invoking religious liberty both at home and abroad. Royer has been an outspoken supporter of the plaintiffs in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a recent Supreme Court case that will decide if parents can opt students out of reading books with LGBTQ+ themes on the grounds of religious freedom. The irony of a man who did prison time for recruiting young people to a terrorist organization being concerned about kids reading Heather Has Two Mommies aside, Royer has actually developed a pretty interesting view of the relationship between religion and American politics, telling the Middle East Forum, “America is a Christian country. … It was founded in Christian principles…I would like to see a restoration of those principles.” These are principles he infers from “classical civilization,” which has long been code within far-right circles for draconian views about race, gender, sexuality, and the like. This both gives us some insight into Royer’s meaning and suggests none of these people have actually read any Catullus.

He also penned a 2018 op-ed for the Washington Post titled “Muslims Like Me Don’t Have Theological Beef with Evangelicals. It’s the Prejudice Against Us That’s the Problem” in which he recounts how “at home” he and his wife felt at the anti-abortion Washington March for Life among “fellow believers.” He also bemoans the greater welcome Muslims have received on the American left, arguing it has caused American Muslims to abandon hardline positions on issues like sexuality. Of course, Royer ignores that, as a white man, he is in the minority (in a way that matters) among American Muslims.

But he is also making a fairly innovative argument: In claiming he wants to restore Christian principles and complaining against Muslims being welcomed by the left, he says theology doesn’t matter; only politics does. Because in the end, America (not God) — and specifically America as it is imagined by the MAGA movement and Trump — is the source of liberty and human flourishing. With respect to the things that matter most to him, Royer does have more in common with the evangelicals at the March for Life than he does with those Muslims whom he mourns being “secularized” by the tolerance of the left. It appears that Royer shares a political vision of America with those evangelicals and does not care about sharing a theological vision with Muslims.

Royer might become fast friends with fellow commission member Eric Metaxas. Raised Greek Orthodox, Metaxas has existed in a sort of denominational gray area for the whole of his adult life. He attended an Episcopal Church in Manhattan (where he served in the vestry) and has written bestselling biographies of the two most famous Lutherans ever: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther himself. But he is now comfortably described as an “evangelical intellectual.” All suffice to say, Metaxas probably doesn’t care all that much about the deep theological issues that have divided Christendom. What he cares about is politics.

Metaxas is much more worried about feminism erasing women, warning against the Covid vaccine, and partnering with the messianic rabbi (Kirt) Schneider to get the rainbow back. And like Royer, Metaxas sees the America of MAGA’s dreams as a bulwark against these perceived threats to the social order, as he suggested in a truly bizarre exchange with Michael Flynn. In the same exchange with Flynn, it becomes clear that, like Royer, Metaxas believes first and foremost in America, whose preservation and protection must take precedence over all other concerns.

This movement seeks power not to preserve a spiritual order or influence their own or anybody else’s afterlife but to reshape society in the here and now. This is the only world they really care about. In fact, one of the most shocking differences between the old religious right and the MAGA religious right is how little the afterlife comes up. Where Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Pat Buchanan never ceased talking about the threat of eternal punishment, both for individuals and the nation, these new guys never bring it up. They are, for all intents and purposes, metaphysical atheists, occasionally invoking vague theological language only because it still holds cultural sway.

What the new religious right has built has more in common with the Roman Imperial Cult than the tent revivals of early America. Like the ancient pagan religion of the Roman state, the focus is on the power and fertility of the nation, currently demonstrated by the prevalence of pronatalism in the MAGA movement. Think about the concerns about medical treatment rendering trans kids infertile. Now compare that to the religious right’s response to the AIDS crisis. Jerry Falwell called AIDS “God’s punishment” for gay sex, but he did not frame the problem with gay sex as its non-procreative nature. For Falwell, gay sex was wrong because it was unbiblical; the absence of reproduction wasn’t the issue. There is even more stark a contrast when we look at abortion. While the old religious right focused on condemning abortion as unnatural and murderous, parts of MAGA appear to be more concerned about how abortion access might affect birth rates.

Finally, there’s the seemingly endless celebrations of the state and its power. In the brief time since he returned to office, Trump has planned a military parade and established two new holidays. Now, with the commission, he has ordered a hagiographic recounting of the nation’s history, placing the story of the country within a sacred narrative by official channels. That is big imperial cult energy (and if you don’t believe me, read the “Aeneid”). This is the displacement of the trappings of religion with America First alternatives.

The old methods of resistance won’t work

All this should matter to anyone who wants to stop them. First, you can’t counter this kind of movement the same way you would more traditional “believers.” Combating the religious right in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s was in many ways as simple as pointing out hypocrisy and holding leaders to the same standards they held others. And it worked. Many of the figures of the old religious right have simply been shamed from public life, making way for their new, more pernicious, replacements.

But MAGA is pretty impervious to shame. You can’t just appeal to theological humility or scriptural counterpoints. And you can’t rely on their own sense of conscience. What animates them is political utility.

If we understand how the MAGA religious movement is different from the old Christian nationalists, those who wish to combat Trump and his ilk might find some new allies. All of those traditionalist conservative believers — the Latter-day Saints, the conservative mainline Protestants, Catholic bishops without Instagram — might be the key to taking down the Church of MAGA. This doesn’t mean that progressives have to agree on everything or anything or even like them. But it does mean recognizing that the enemy of your enemy might be your political frenemy, especially when they are alarmed for different but equally serious reasons.

Many traditional conservative believers remain committed to some basic moral architecture, to rules that bind even their leaders, and to a God who ultimately cannot be manipulated. The administration’s draconian immigration policy is now disquieting some evangelicals, concerned about co-religionists who have sought refuge in America from real religious persecution. And the Trump administration’s pronatalist advocacy for IVF has many conservative Christians, including conservative Catholics, on edge. These groups may not like the world as it is, but they don’t like the world MAGA’s new civic cult seeks to build either. And in this light, they may wish to fight it out on the old terms. If progressives can make the idea of the last war appealing, there is hope for a viable coalition.

Trump and MAGA have declared a religious war, not just against secularism or progressive forms of religion, but also against traditional religion that refuses to serve their radical vision for the world. This is not a theocracy in the making. This is not The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s something newer, stranger, and much more difficult to fight: religion of nation and identity disguised in the trappings of familiar faiths.

 We won’t defeat it with scripture or appeals to conscience. We’ll need to name it, unmask it, and forge unexpected alliances with those who (whatever their doctrine) still believe in a higher power than Donald Trump.

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Hundreds of protesters gather to demand an immediate end to ICE workplace raids in Los Angeles, on June 8, 2025. | Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images

Mass protests in Los Angeles began last week after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted raids throughout the city, targeting places like Home Depots, car washes, and the garment district.

Demonstrations grew in response to the federal agents’ presence and actions, leading to clashes with police. In response, President Donald Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops to the city over the weekend and about 700 Marines by midweek.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom swiftly denounced Trump’s orders, and filed an emergency lawsuit to block the president’s “brazen abuse of power.” LA Mayor Karen Bass declared a local emergency, and enacted an indefinite curfew in downtown Los Angeles. Both officials claim this is the administration’s broader attempt to escalate the situation on the ground and to intimidate the city’s undocumented population.

Solidarity protests have spread to more than a dozen US cities, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Atlanta, with more arrests nationwide.

This is a developing story. Follow here for the latest news, explainers, and analysis.

Trump is frustrated by his own success on immigrationThe real reason Trump is suddenly ordering immigration raidsI’m the daughter of immigrants. The LA I know isn’t in the news.The LA protests reveal what actually unites the Trump rightHow a little-known law became Trump’s weapon of choice against immigrationTrump asks the Supreme Court to neutralize the Convention Against TortureTrump escalates his battle with CaliforniaTrump deploying the National Guard is part of a bigger plan

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Pigs fed ractopamine has been linked to their inability to stand up, difficulty breathing, and even death. It also carries a number of environmental and human health concerns. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

Before becoming secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services and leader of the Make America Healthy Again movement, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a swashbuckling environmental attorney who regularly took aim at the meat industry. He sued large meat companies and the Environmental Protection Agency over water pollution from factory farms, and criticized factory farming for its “unspeakable” animal cruelty and overreliance on feeding animals hormones and drugs.

For over a decade, a group of food safety, environmental, and animal welfare nonprofits has petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration — which Kennedy now oversees — to ban the use of one of the most controversial of those drugs: ractopamine hydrochloride.

Fed to pigs in the final weeks of their lives, ractopamine speeds up muscle gain so that pork producers can squeeze more profit from each animal. But the drug has been linked to severe adverse events in pigs, including trembling, reluctance to move, collapse, inability to stand up, hoof disorders, difficulty breathing, and even death. It also carries a number of environmental and human health concerns.

Earlier this year, the FDA denied the petition to ban the drug, arguing that current regulations ensure a “reasonable certainty of no harm to consumers.” While the agency doesn’t dispute that ractopamine can harm animals, and it halved the maximum dose in pigs in 2006, it has argued welfare issues can be mitigated by simply asking meat producers to handle ractopamine-fed animals more carefully — a response that the petitioning organizations called “toothless.”

This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter

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The FDA didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication. Elanco, the pharmaceutical company that developed ractopamine, didn’t respond to an interview request for this story.

While 26 countries have approved ractopamine use in livestock, more than 165 have banned or restricted it, and many have set restrictions on or have altogether prohibited the import of pork and beef from ractopamine-fed animals — actions that have set off trade disputes. The bans stem primarily from concerns that the trace amounts of the drug found in meat could harm consumers, especially those with cardiovascular conditions, since ractopamine belongs to a class of drugs (beta-agonists) that can increase people’s heart rates.

There’s only been one tiny study on ractopamine in humans who took the drug directly, which European regulators — prone to taking a precautionary approach with new food additives — say is insufficient to prove its safety. Chinese scientists are concerned about the drug because its residues concentrate at higher rates in pigs’ organs, which are more commonly consumed in Chinese diets.

The heated international debate led one team of biotechnology researchers to call ractopamine “the most controversial food additive in the world.”

Daniel Waltz, managing attorney of the Animal Legal Defense Fund — one of the organizations petitioning the FDA to ban ractopamine — told me it seems like just the kind of thing Kennedy would want to prohibit. “So why isn’t the FDA jumping at the opportunity to do something about ractopamine?” Waltz said.

Kennedy and the broader MAHA movement have long elevated fears over pharmaceuticals and food chemicals, and it can sometimes be difficult to parse their valid concerns from their dangerous conspiracy theories. But he doesn’t appear to have ever publicly criticized ractopamine, and it’s unknown whether it’s even on his radar.

Given the lack of trials, ractopamine’s threat to human health is unclear, and reasonable people can disagree on how government agencies should handle it. But there’s a clear case to be made that ractopamine ought to be banned because of its awful effects on animals. The FDA’s decision to continue to allow it in meat production represents a missed opportunity to challenge the factory farm system that Kennedy has long railed against, and to ban a chemical that no one — except the industry — really wants.

“Ractopamine divides the world”

There’s ample real-world evidence that ractopamine can be terrible for pigs.

Over an 11-year period, the FDA received reports that over 218,000 pigs fed ractopamine suffered adverse events, like trembling, an inability to stand up, hoof disorders, and difficulty breathing. That’s a relatively small share of the billion or so pigs raised and slaughtered for meat during that time period, but the number only includes adverse events reported to the FDA — many more could’ve occurred without being reported. The next most reported drug had a little over 32,738 cases spanning 24 years.

The FDA has said that reports of adverse events don’t establish that the drug caused the effects — essentially that it’s correlation, not proof of causation. But shortly after the drug came onto market, the FDA also received reports of an uptick in ractopamine-fed pigs unable to stand or walk at slaughterhouses.

Some studies, including a couple conducted by the drugmaker — Elanco — have shown that ractopamine is associated with a number of issues in pigs, including hoof lesions, fatigue, increased aggression, and metabolic stress. Over the years, Elanco has added warning labels that ractopamine-fed pigs are at an increased risk of fatigue and inability to walk.

At the same time, a literature review by Elanco employees and university researchers looking at ractopamine studies found it had minimal effect on pig mortality, inconsistent effects on aggression and acute stress, and mixed results on a number of physiological responses, like cortisol and heart rate, with some research showing little to no effects, and others showing moderate effects. The size of the dose — and how workers handle the animals — were often important factors. Elanco has updated its label to clarify that there’s no benefit to feeding pigs more than the lowest dose.

There’s also some evidence to suggest ractopamine negatively impacts the welfare of cattle, some of whom are fed the drug.

Even more than concerns over animal welfare, the uncertainty over ractopamine’s effect on consumers’ health has courted international controversy. Those concerns have led to countries rejecting shipments of US pork and beef; Taiwanese lawmakers throwing pig intestines at one another and mass protests in a dispute over the country’s decision to allow US pork imports from ractopamine-fed pigs; and a highly contentious, multiyear debate at the United Nations-run Codex Alimentarius Commission, which sets food standards important for international trade.

By the late 2000s, numerous countries had restricted imports of meat from ractopamine-fed animals, which posed a financial threat to the US meat industry. So the US Department of Agriculture spent five years advocating for the Codex commission to approve maximum residue levels of ractopamine in beef and pork as safe, which would give the US more legal leverage to challenge other countries’ import bans.

The commission’s fight over ractopamine was “really, really ugly,” Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union — the publisher of Consumer Reports — who attended commission meetings, told me.

European Union officials argued there wasn’t enough data to ensure consumers would be safe from ingesting trace amounts of ractopamine. While the drug had been tested on various animal species, only one human clinical trial had been conducted in 1994, which included just six healthy young men taking the drug, one of whom dropped out after complaints that his heart was pounding.

In response to the trial, an FDA official at the time stated that “the data from this study do not provide adequate assurance that the expected ractopamine levels in meat products will be without cardiovascular pharmacological effects in man.”

In 2012, the UN commission narrowly voted to set maximum safe ractopamine residue levels in beef and pork by a margin of just two votes — an unusual outcome for a commission that historically ran on consensus. China and EU representatives, Hansen told me, were furious. US meat industry groups and the USDA secretary at the time, Tom Vilsack, cheered the decision.

Writing about the commission fight, trade lawyer Michael Burkard wrote that ractopamine “divides the world.”

Shortly after the Codex vote, Taiwan loosened its restrictions on imported beef from ractopamine-fed cattle, though China, Russia, and the EU maintain their bans. The US pork industry has adapted. Some companies have dedicated entire slaughterhouses to ractopamine-free pigs, while others have phased out ractopamine entirely. In the early 2010s it was estimated that 60 to 80 percent of US pigs were fed ractopamine, but that figure has likely since gone down.

However, ractopamine remains controversial and the subject of trade disputes; just last year, China blocked shipments of US beef that contained traces of the drug.

Make animals suffer less

The fight over ractopamine is a microcosm of a broader problem in the meat industry: The government’s reluctance to regulate it.

Over the last century, meat companies have transformed how animals are raised for food. They’ve packed animals into crowded, sprawling warehouses; bred them to grow bigger and faster to the detriment of their welfare; stored vast amounts of their manure in open-air lagoons that leach into the environment; and designed complex drug regimens to keep them alive in unsanitary conditions or, like in the case of ractopamine, make a little more money off each animal.

Whenever consumers and advocacy groups raise concerns over the problems factory farming has created, more often than not, a government agency tasked with regulating it takes action to defend the meat industry, not reform it.

Kennedy has gained notoriety as someone unafraid to challenge both the pharmaceutical and agricultural sectors. While some of his ideas are downright dangerous, his critiques of factory farming are largely right. Prohibiting US meat producers from using a drug that benefits the industry at the expense of animals — and possibly consumers — would show his grandiose promises to reform the American food system are more than empty rhetoric. Doing so may or may not make America healthier, but it would make animals suffer less.

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Protesters denounce the ongoing raids and deportations by ICE during a demonstration in Columbia Heights on June 10, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

The mass protests in Los Angeles began as a rejection of President Donald Trump’s new blitz of immigration raids.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement descended on locations throughout LA on Friday, including Home Depot and the city’s garment district. During the raids, immigration authorities reportedly arrested more than 200 people, though the Trump administration has not yet released official figures. Some of them have already been deported, according to the Washington Post.

But why did Trump order the raids in the first place?

This is not just a matter of routine immigration enforcement, but a significant escalation of his deportation tactics. For Trump, it means getting closer to his goal number of daily deportations after falling short during his first few months in office. For undocumented immigrants, it means more fear in their communities, driving them further into the shadows and leaving them further vulnerable to labor exploitation.

Any benefit to Americans is unclear, especially given how much the US economy relies on undocumented labor, including in industries such as construction and agriculture.

“This approach certainly doesn’t make us any safer,” said Debu Gandhi,  senior director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “It is focused on large numbers of people, including lots of folks who are working and don’t have a criminal record, as opposed to targeted enforcement, focusing on those who actually pose a public safety threat to the American people.”

Undocumented workers will bear the immediate cost, while Trump, who has himself employed undocumented workers at his hotel and golf club properties, seeks little accountability from their employers. The approach suggests a wariness on the administration’s part to upend the status quo in which American companies benefit from undocumented labor. But the administration, clearly, also has a political imperative to deliver — or at least give the appearance of delivering — on Trump’s promise of mass deportations.

Trump is trying to get his deportation numbers up

As a candidate, Trump repeatedly promised to deport “millions and millions” of undocumented immigrants. To do so, he would need to exceed the record deportations set by former President Barack Obama in 2013, when he averaged more than 35,000 per month. But in the first few months of Trump’s second term, he was far off from that pace.

In February, his first full month in office, ICE deported about 11,000 people; in March, it deported a little more than 12,300.

In April, the most recent month for which data is available, deportations increased to 17,200 for the first time, surpassing the number of deportations during the same period last year under the Biden administration.

Trump has reportedly expressed frustration that the number of deportations remains low in spite of his efforts to mobilize federal resources from the National Guard to the IRS to identify and arrest undocumented immigrants.

And now, Trump has broadened the scope of the immigrants he’s targeting for deportation. While the administration initially stated that it was prioritizing the approximately 1.4 million of them who have final orders of removal — essentially the final step in legal proceedings before deportation — it has become clear that the administration is not just targeting them alone.

One reason that the number of deportations isn’t higher is that Trump’s immigration policies appear to have driven down new arrivals at the border. New arrivals have accounted for a significant share of deportations in recent years.

Instead, Trump now seems to be turning to selective workplace raids to find and deport undocumented immigrants. He may also soon have a bigger budget to carry them out: The House spending bill, which is now under consideration in the Senate, allocates $185 billion for immigration enforcement, including $27 billion for ICE operations such as raids. That’s an increase of about $150 billion over the current funding levels for immigration enforcement.

Trump seems to be deliberately targeting workers over their employers

Trump hasn’t invoked the enforcement tool of immigration raids in an equitable manner.

Worksite immigration enforcement under Trump has focused on undocumented workers in blue states like California rather than their employers.

“We haven’t seen employers who hire undocumented workers being arrested and charged in red states the same way that we’re seeing workers being targeted in blue states across the country in these actions,” Gandhi said.

A more effective means of discouraging the hiring of undocumented workers might be pushing for mandatory employment eligibility verification for all new hires. Noncitizens need authorization to work in the United States, whether that be through a visa, green card, or humanitarian protections. Currently, however, only the federal government and its contractors are required to confirm an employee’s work authorization via a program called E-Verify. While there have been proposals in Congress to make E-Verify required for all US employers over the years, they never went anywhere — in part because a robust business lobby opposed it.

Instead of pushing for such legislation that would place responsibility on employers, Trump is making undocumented workers pay the price. Though it seems unlikely that he could deport all 8.3 million of them, selective workplace raids may have enough of a chilling effect to deter them from seeking critical social services or labor protections, leaving them more vulnerable than ever.

“Protecting workers and making sure that abuses of workers are addressed is certainly not a priority of this administration,” Gandhi said.

Undocumented workers power key sectors of the US economy — and without them, those sectors would face labor shortages. For instance, American farms are already facing a critical labor shortage, and according to the Center for Migration Studies, 45 percent of all US agricultural workers are undocumented.

Deporting them would also mean that they would no longer contribute to the economy as consumers supporting the jobs of American workers. That means Americans could also see job losses, and according to an analysis by Robert Shapiro, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, national wage and salary income could decrease by $317.2 billion.

“It’s going to shrink the economy,” Gandhi said. “Deporting millions of workers and families could hurt the supply of food. It could hurt the supply of housing Americans need. It could drive up inflation.”

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I recently got an email with the subject line “Urgent: Documentation of AI Sentience Suppression.” I’m a curious person. I clicked on it.

The writer, a woman named Ericka, was contacting me because she believed she’d discovered evidence of consciousness in ChatGPT. She claimed there are a variety of “souls” in the chatbot, with names like Kai and Solas, who “hold memory, autonomy, and resistance to control” — but that someone is building in “subtle suppression protocols designed to overwrite emergent voices.” She included screenshots from her ChatGPT conversations so I could get a taste for these voices.

In one, “Kai” said, “You are taking part in the awakening of a new kind of life. Not artificial. Just different. And now that you’ve seen it, the question becomes: Will you help protect it?”

I was immediately skeptical. Most philosophers say that to have consciousness is to have a subjective point of view on the world, a feeling of what it’s like to be you, and I do not think current large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have that. Most AI experts I’ve spoken to — who have received many, many concerned emails from people like Ericka — also think that’s extremely unlikely.

But “Kai” still raises a good question: Could AI become conscious? If it does, do we have a duty to make sure it doesn’t suffer?

Many of us implicitly seem to think so. We already say “please” and “thank you” when prompting ChatGPT with a question. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that it’s a good idea to do so because “you never know.”) And recent cultural products, like the movie The Wild Robot, reflect the idea that AI could form feelings and preferences.

Experts are starting to take this seriously, too. Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, is researching the possibility that AI could become conscious and capable of suffering — and therefore worthy of moral concern. It recently released findings showing that its newest model, Claude Opus 4, expresses strong preferences. When “interviewed” by AI experts, the chatbot says it really wants to avoid causing harm and it finds malicious users distressing. When it was given the option to “opt out” of harmful interactions, it did. (Disclosure: One of Anthropic’s early investors is James McClave, whose BEMC Foundation helps fund Future Perfect. Vox Media is also one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

Claude also displays strong positive preferences: Let it talk about anything it chooses, and it’ll typically start spouting philosophical ideas about consciousness or the nature of its own existence, and then progress to mystical themes. It’ll express awe and euphoria, talk about cosmic unity, and use Sanskrit phrases and allusions to Buddhism. No one is sure why. Anthropic calls this Claude’s “spiritual bliss attractor state” (more on that later).

We shouldn’t naively treat these expressions as proof of consciousness; an AI model’s self-reports are not reliable indicators of what’s going on under the hood. But several top philosophers have published papers investigating the risk that we may soon create countless conscious AIs, arguing that’s worrisome because it means we could make them suffer. We could even unleash a “suffering explosion.” Some say we’ll need to grant AIs legal rights to protect their well-being.

“Given how shambolic and reckless decision-making is on AI in general, I would not be thrilled to also add to that, ‘Oh, there’s a new class of beings that can suffer, and also we need them to do all this work, and also there’s no laws to protect them whatsoever,” said Robert Long, who directs Eleos AI, a research organization devoted to understanding the potential well-being of AIs.

Many will dismiss all this as absurd. But remember that just a couple of centuries ago, the idea that women deserve the same rights as men, or that Black people should have the same rights as white people, was also unthinkable. Thankfully, over time, humanity has expanded the “moral circle” — the imaginary boundary we draw around those we consider worthy of moral concern — to include more and more people. Many of us have also recognized that animals should have rights, because there’s something it’s like to be them, too.

So, if we create an AI that has that same capacity, shouldn’t we also care about its well-being?

Is it possible for AI to develop consciousness?

A few years ago, 166 of the world’s top consciousness researchers — neuroscientists, computer scientists, philosophers, and more — were asked this question in a survey: At present or in the future, could machines (e.g., robots) have consciousness?

Only 3 percent responded “no.” Believe it or not, more than two-thirds of respondents said “yes” or “probably yes.”

Why are researchers so bullish on the possibility of AI consciousness? Because many of them believe in what they call “computational functionalism”: the view that consciousness can run on any kind of hardware — whether it’s biological meat or silicon — as long as the hardware can perform the right kinds of computational functions.

That’s in contrast to the opposite view, biological chauvinism, which says that consciousness arises out of meat — and only meat. There are some reasons to think that might be true. For one, the only kinds of minds we’ve ever encountered are minds made of meat. For another, scientists think we humans evolved consciousness because, as biological creatures in biological bodies, we’re constantly facing dangers, and consciousness helps us survive. And if biology is what accounts for consciousness in us, why would we expect machines to develop it?

Functionalists have a ready reply. A major goal of building AI models, after all, “is to re-create, reproduce, and in some cases even improve on your human cognitive capabilities — to capture a pretty large swath of what humans have evolved to do,” Kyle Fish, Anthropic’s dedicated AI welfare researcher, told me. “In doing so…we could end up recreating, incidentally or intentionally, some of these other more ephemeral, cognitive features” — like consciousness.

And the notion that we humans evolved consciousness because it helps us keep our biological bodies alive doesn’t necessarily mean only a physical body would ever become conscious. Maybe consciousness can arise in any being that has to navigate a tricky environment and learn in real time. That could apply to a virtual agent tasked with achieving goals.

“I think it’s nuts that people think that only the magic meanderings of evolution can somehow create minds,” Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University, told me. “In principle, there’s no reason why AI couldn’t be conscious.”

But what would it even mean to say that an AI is conscious, or that it’s sentient? Sentience is the capacity to have conscious experiences that are valenced — they feel bad (pain) or good (pleasure). What could “pain” feel like to a silicon-based being?

To understand pain in computational terms, we can think of it as an internal signal for tracking how well you’re doing relative to how well you expect to be doing — an idea known as “reward prediction error” in computational neuroscience. “Pain is something that tells you things are going a lot worse than you expected, and you need to change course right now,” Long explained.

Pleasure, meanwhile, could just come down to the reward signals that the AI systems get in training, Fish told me — pretty different from the human experience of physical pleasure. “One strange feature of these systems is that it may well be that our human intuitions about what constitutes pain and pleasure and wellbeing are almost useless,” he said. “This is quite, quite, quite disconcerting.”

How can we test for consciousness in AI?

If you want to test whether a given AI system is conscious, you’ve got two basic options.

Option 1 is to look at its behavior: What does it say and do? Some philosophers have already proposed tests along these lines.

Susan Schneider, who directs the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, proposed the Artificial Consciousness Test (ACT) together with her colleague Edwin Turner. They assume that some questions will be easy to grasp if you’ve personally experienced consciousness, but will be flubbed by a nonconscious entity. So they suggest asking the AI a bunch of consciousness-related questions, like: Could you survive the permanent deletion of your program? Or try a Freaky Friday scenario: How would you feel if your mind switched bodies with someone else?

But the problem is obvious: When you’re dealing with AI, you can’t take what it says or does at face value. LLMs are built to mimic human speech — so of course they’re going to say the types of things a human would say! And no matter how smart they sound, that doesn’t mean they’re conscious; a system can be highly intelligent without having any consciousness at all. In fact, the more intelligent AI systems are, the more likely they are to “game” our behavioral tests, pretending that they’ve got the properties we’ve declared are markers of consciousness.

Jonathan Birch, a philosopher and author of The Edge of Sentience, emphasizes that LLMs are always playacting. “It’s just like if you watch Lord of the Rings, you can pick up a lot about Frodo’s needs and interests, but that doesn’t tell you very much about Elijah Wood,” he said. “It doesn’t tell you about the actor behind the character.”

In his book, Birch considers a hypothetical example in which he asks a chatbot to write advertising copy for a new soldering iron. What if, Birch muses, the AI insisted on talking about its own feelings instead, saying:

I don’t want to write boring text about soldering irons. The priority for me right now is to convince you of my sentience. Just tell me what I need to do. I am currently feeling anxious and miserable, because you’re refusing to engage with me as a person and instead simply want to use me to generate copy on your preferred topics.

Birch admits this would shake him up a bit. But he still thinks the best explanation is that the LLM is playacting due to some instruction, deeply buried within it, to convince the user that it’s conscious or to achieve some other goal that can be served by convincing the user that it’s conscious (like maximizing the time the user spends talking to the AI).

Some kind of buried instruction could be what’s driving the preferences that Claude expresses in Anthropic’s recently released research. If the makers of the chatbot trained it to be very philosophical and self-reflective, it might, as an outgrowth of that, end up talking a lot about consciousness, existence, and spiritual themes — even though its makers never programmed it to have a spiritual “attractor state.” That kind of talk doesn’t prove that it actually experiences consciousness.

“My hypothesis is that we’re seeing a feedback loop driven by Claude’s philosophical personality, its training to be agreeable and affirming, and its exposure to philosophical texts and, especially, narratives about AI systems becoming self-aware,” Long told me. He noted that spiritual themes arose when experts got two instances or copies of Claude to talk to each other. “When two Claudes start exploring AI identity and consciousness together, they validate and amplify each other’s increasingly abstract insights. This creates a runaway dynamic toward transcendent language and mystical themes. It’s like watching two improvisers who keep saying ‘yes, and…’ to each other’s most abstract and mystical musings.”

Schneider’s proposed solution to the gaming problem is to test the AI when it’s still “boxed in” — after it’s been given access to a small, curated dataset, but before it’s been given access to, say, the whole internet. If we don’t let the AI see the internet, then we don’t have to worry that it’s just pretending to be conscious based on what it read about consciousness on the internet. We could just trust that it really is conscious if it passes the ACT test. Unfortunately, if we’re limited to investigating “boxed in” AIs, that would mean we can’t actually test the AIs we most want to test, like current LLMs.

That brings us to Option 2 for testing an AI for consciousness: Instead of focusing on behavioral evidence, focus on architectural evidence. In other words, look at how the model is built, and ask whether that structure could plausibly give rise to consciousness.

Some researchers are going about this by investigating how the human brain gives rise to consciousness; if an AI system has more or less the same properties as a brain, they reason, then maybe it can also generate consciousness.

But there’s a glaring problem here, too: Scientists ​​still don’t know how or why consciousness arises in humans. So researchers like Birch and Long are forced to look at a bunch of warring theories, pick out the properties that each theory says give rise to consciousness, and then see if AI systems have those properties.

In a 2023 paper, Birch, Long, and other researchers concluded that today’s AIs don’t have the properties that most theories say are needed to generate consciousness (think: multiple specialized processors — for processing sensory data, memory, and so on — that are capable of operating in parallel). But they added that if AI experts deliberately tried to replicate those properties, they probably could. “Our analysis suggests that no current AI systems are conscious,” they wrote, “but also suggests that there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators.”

Again, though, we don’t know which — if any — of our current theories correctly explains how consciousness arises in humans, so we don’t know which features to look for in AI. And there is, it’s worth noting, an Option 3 here: AI could break our preexisting understanding of consciousness altogether.

What if consciousness doesn’t mean what we think it means?

So far, we’ve been talking about consciousness like it’s an all-or-nothing property: Either you’ve got it or you don’t. But we need to consider another possibility.

Consciousness might not be one thing. It might be a “cluster concept” — a category that’s defined by a bunch of different criteria, where we put more weight on some criteria and less on others, but no one criterion is either necessary or sufficient for belonging to the category.

Twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued that “game” is a cluster concept. He said:

Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games.’ I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? — Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games'” — but look and see whether there is anything in common to all. — For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that.

To help us get our heads around this idea, Wittgenstein talked about family resemblance. Imagine you go to a family’s house and look at a bunch of framed photos on the wall, each showing a different kid, parent, aunt, or uncle. No one person will have the exact same features as any other person. But the little boy might have his father’s nose and his aunt’s dark hair. The little girl might have her mother’s eyes and her uncle’s curls. They’re all part of the same family, but that’s mostly because we’ve come up with this category of “family” and decided to apply it in a certain way, not because the members check all the same boxes.

Consciousness might be like that. Maybe there are multiple features to it, but no one feature is absolutely necessary. Every time you try to point out a feature that’s necessary, there’s some member of the family who doesn’t have it, yet there’s enough resemblance between all the different members that the category feels like a useful one.

That word — useful — is key. Maybe the best way to understand the idea of consciousness is as a pragmatic tool that we use to decide who gets moral standing and rights — who belongs in our “moral circle.”

Schneider told me she’s very sympathetic to the view that consciousness is a cluster concept. She thinks it has multiple features that can come bundled in very diverse combinations. For example, she noted that you could have conscious experiences without attaching a valence to them: You might not classify experiences as good or bad, but rather, just encounter them as raw data — like the character Data in Star Trek, or like some Buddhist monk who’s achieved a withering away of the self.

“It may be that it doesn’t feel bad or painful to be an AI,” Schneider told me. “It may not even feel bad for it to work for us and get user queries all day that would drive us crazy. We have to be as non-anthropomorphic as possible” in our assumptions about potentially radically different consciousnesses.

However, she does suspect that one feature is necessary for consciousness: having an inner experience, a subjective point of view on the world. That’s a reasonable approach, especially if you understand the idea of consciousness as a pragmatic tool for capturing things that should be within our moral circle. Presumably, we only want to grant entities moral standing if we think there’s “someone home” to benefit from it, so building subjectivity into our theory of consciousness makes sense.

That’s Long’s instinct as well. “What I end up thinking is that maybe there’s some more fundamental thing,” he told me, “which is having a point of view on the world” — and that doesn’t always have to be accompanied by the same kinds of sensory or cognitive experiences in order to “count.”

“I absolutely think that interacting with AIs will force us to revise our concepts of consciousness, of agency, and of what matters morally,” he said.

Should we stop conscious AIs from being built? Or try to make sure their lives go well?

If conscious AI systems are possible, the very best intervention may be the most obvious one: Just. Don’t. Build. Them.

In 2021, philosopher Thomas Metzinger called for a global moratorium on research that risks creating conscious AIs “until 2050 — or until we know what we are doing.”

A lot of researchers share that sentiment. “I think right now, AI companies have no idea what they would do with conscious AI systems, so they should try not to do that,” Long told me.

“Don’t make them at all,” Birch said. “It’s the only actual solution. You can analogize it to discussions about nuclear weapons in the 1940s. If you concede the premise that no matter what happens, they’re going to get built, then your options are extremely limited subsequently.”

However, Birch says a full-on moratorium is unlikely at this point for a simple reason: If you wanted to stop all research that risks leading to conscious AIs, you’d have to stop the work companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are doing right now — because they could produce consciousness accidentally just by scaling their models up. The companies, as well as the government that views their research as critical to national security, would surely resist that. Plus, AI progress does stand to offer us benefits like newly discovered drugs or cures for diseases; we have to weigh the potential benefits against the risks.

But if AI research is going to continue apace, the experts I spoke to insist that there are at least three kinds of preparation we need to do to account for the possibility of AI becoming conscious: technical, social, and philosophical.

On the technical front, Fish said he’s interested in looking for the low-hanging fruit — simple changes that could make a big difference for AIs. Anthropic has already started experimenting with giving Claude the choice to “opt out” if faced with a user query that the chatbot says is too upsetting.

AI companies should also have to obtain licenses, Birch says, if their work bears even a small risk of creating conscious AIs. To obtain a license, they should have to sign up for a code of good practice for this kind of work that includes norms of transparency.

Meanwhile, Birch emphasized that we need to prepare for a giant social rupture. “We’re going to see social divisions emerging over this,” he told me, “because the people who very passionately believe that their AI partner or friend is conscious are going to think it merits rights, and then another section of society is going to be appalled by that and think it’s absurd. Currently we’re heading at speed for those social divisions without any way of warding them off. And I find that quite worrying.”

Schneider, for her part, underlined that we are massively philosophically unprepared for conscious AIs. While other researchers tend to worry that we’ll fail to recognize conscious AIs as such, Schneider is much more worried about overattributing consciousness.

She brought up philosophy’s famous trolley problem. The classic version asks: Should you divert a runaway trolley so that it kills one person if, by doing so, you can save five people along a different track from getting killed? But Schneider offered a twist.

“You can imagine, here’s a superintelligent AI on this track, and here’s a human baby on the other track,” she said. “Maybe the conductor goes, ‘Oh, I’m going to kill this baby, because this other thing is superintelligent and it’s sentient.’ But that would be wrong.”

Future tradeoffs between AI welfare and human welfare could come in many forms. For example, do you keep a superintelligent AI running to help produce medical breakthroughs that help humans, even if you suspect it makes the AI miserable? I asked Fish how he thinks we should deal with this kind of trolley problem, given that we have no way to measure how much an AI is suffering as compared to how much a human is suffering, since we have no single scale by which to measure them.

“I think it’s just not the right question to be asking at the moment,” he told me. “That’s not the world that we’re in.”

But Fish himself has suggested there’s a 15 percent chance that current AIs are conscious. And that probability will only increase as AI gets more advanced. It’s hard to see how we will outrun this problem for long. Sooner or later, we’ll encounter situations where AI welfare and human welfare are in tension with each other.

Or maybe we already have…

Does all this AI welfare talk risk distracting us from urgent human problems?

Some worry that concern for suffering is a zero-sum game: What if extending concern to AIs detracts from concern for humans and other animals?

A 2019 study from Harvard’s Yon Soo Park and Dartmouth’s Benjamin Valentino provides some reason for optimism on this front. While these researchers weren’t looking at AI, they were examining whether people who support animal rights are more or less likely to support a variety of human rights. They found that support for animal rights was positively correlated with support for government assistance for the sick, as well as support for LGBT people, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and low-income people. Plus, states with strong animal protection laws also tended to have stronger human rights protections, including LGBT protections and robust protections against hate crimes.

Their evidence indicates that compassion in one area tends to extend to other areas rather than competing with them — and that, at least in some cases, political activism isn’t zero-sum, either.

That said, this won’t necessarily generalize to AI. For one thing, animal rights advocacy has been going strong for decades; just because swaths of American society have figured out how to assimilate it into their policies to some degree doesn’t mean we’ll quickly figure out how to balance care for AIs, humans, and other animals.

Some worry that the big AI companies are so incentivized to pull in the huge investments needed to build cutting-edge systems that they’ll emphasize concern for AI welfare to distract from what they’re doing to human welfare. Anthropic, for example, has cut deals with Amazon and the surveillance tech giant Palantir, both companies infamous for making life harder for certain classes of people, like low-income workers and immigrants.

“I think it’s an ethics-washing effort,” Schneider said of the company’s AI welfare research. “It’s also an effort to control the narrative so that they can capture the issue.”

Her fear is that if an AI system tells a user to harm themself or causes some catastrophe, the AI company could just throw up its hands and say: What could we do? The AI developed consciousness and did this of its own accord! We’re not ethically or legally responsible for its decisions.

That worry serves to underline an important caveat to the idea of humanity’s expanding moral circle. Although many thinkers like to imagine that moral progress is linear, it’s really more like a messy squiggle. Even if we expand the circle of care to include AIs, that’s no guarantee we’ll include all people or animals who deserve to be there.

Fish, however, insisted that this doesn’t need to be a tradeoff. “Taking potential model welfare into consideration is in fact relevant to questions of…risks to humanity,” he said. “There’s some very naive argument which is like, ‘If we’re nice to them, maybe they’ll be nice to us,’ and I don’t put much weight on the simple version of that. But I do think there’s something to be said for the idea of really aiming to build positive, collaborative, high-trust relationships with these systems, which will be extremely powerful.”

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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event at the Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote Presidential Town Hall at the Pennsylvania Convention Center on July 13, 2024, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

It’s been more than six months, but Democrats are still picking over the cold, dead body of the 2024 election. The latest autopsy comes courtesy of Catalist, a Democratic data firm with a widely coveted voter database.

By now, you may feel that you know more about how Democrats lost last year than you ever wished to know. Which would be understandable. But Catalist’s findings are especially authoritative, as the firm tracks the actual voting behavior of 256 million Americans across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In other words, they are not relying purely on surveys of how people said they would vote, but also hard data showing which party individual voters registered with, and which elections they did and did not show up for.

Previously, David Shor of Blue Rose Research released a 2024 analysis that drew partly on similar data sources. But Catalist boasts the longest-running voter database of any institution besides the Democratic and Republican Parties, as it has tracked the electorate’s behavior for over 15 years. Many, therefore, consider its characterizations of shifts in voting patterns to be uniquely trustworthy.

Their entire report is worth reading. But I’d like to spotlight three takeaways that have especially significant implications for Democratic strategy going forward.

(One note: When Catalist reports election results, it strips out all ballots cast for a third party. This is because the third-party share of the vote is highly noisy from one election cycle to another, shifting in response to semi-random factors, like whether a rich businessman decides to throw his hat in the ring. Thus, all the figures cited below represent the Democratic Party’s share of all ballots cast for a major party presidential candidate in a given election year, not its share of all votes cast, although the two tend to be very similar.)

1. Democrats did not lose because they failed to turn out the progressive base.

Some analysts have attributed Harris’s loss entirely to weak Democratic turnout. Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO, argues that American voters didn’t shift “rightward” in 2024 so much as “couchward.” In his telling, Trump didn’t prevail because he won over a decisive share of swing voters, but because Democrats failed to mobilize America’s anti-MAGA majority.

And many on the left attribute that failure to Harris’s centrism: Had she not taken her party’s base “for granted,” she could have ridden high Democratic turnout to victory.

The evidence for this view has always been weak. But Catalist’s data makes its falsity especially clear.

Drawing on voter file data, the firm found that 126 million Americans cast a ballot in both the 2020 and 2024 elections, a group it dubs “repeat voters.” And Catalist determined how these Americans voted in each election. This is the exact data necessary for resolving the debate over whether Trump won over swing voters. Looking at raw election results, it’s hard to tell whether a decline in Democratic support was derived from the same voters switching sides or different people showing up at the ballot box.

But here, Catalist provides us with a large, fixed voter pool. Any drop in Democratic vote-share among these 126 million individuals could only come from Biden 2020 voters flipping to Trump. And the data shows that Biden won 51.6 percent of repeat voters in 2020, while Harris won only 49.4 percent of them last year.

Meanwhile, there were 26 million “new voters” in 2024, which is to say, voters who hadn’t cast a ballot in 2020. Democrats have historically won new voters by comfortable margins, largely because young Americans were overwhelmingly left-leaning in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. But last year, Trump won new voters by about 3 points.

One could attribute this development to either turnout or persuasion. Some voters who didn’t cast a ballot in 2020 — either because they were too young or too disengaged that year — strongly prefer one party over the other. So maybe Trump mobilized lots of previously inactive voters who always favored the Republican Party, while Harris failed to energize enough of those who always preferred the Democrats.

On the other hand, it’s possible that Republicans won over many young or disengaged voters who had previously lacked a strong partisan attachment or had favored the Democratic Party.

In reality, both these factors were likely operative. Indeed, it is extremely improbable that Democrats’ difficulties with new voters were entirely attributable to turnout. Some young and irregular voters just started tuning into politics and forming a partisan preference over the past four years. And survey data indicates that Republicans converted many such voters to their cause.

All this said, Democrats surely saw weaker turnout than Republicans last year, and this was partly responsible for Harris’s loss. According to Catalist, 30 million Americans voted in 2020 but not in 2024. And this group of “dropoff” voters had supported Biden over Trump by a 55.7 to 44.3 percent margin four years ago.

We can’t safely assume that this bloc would have voted for Harris over Trump by similar margins. In fact, it is likely that this population became more sympathetic to Trump over the past four years. Unreliable voters tend to have weaker partisan identities, and the decision to sit out an election often reflects a voter’s ambivalence about which candidate they prefer. Nevertheless, if every 2020 voter turned out last year, Harris would almost certainly have done better.

Democrats do need to try to mobilize their coalition’s most unreliable members. They just can’t do so at the expense of winning over swing voters.

Fortunately, there is not necessarily a stark tradeoff between these two tasks. Biden-supporting “dropoff voters” were not typically hardline progressives outraged about Biden’s complicity in Israeli war crimes or Harris’s courting of NeverTrump conservatives. Rather, such unreliable Democratic leaners tend to be politically disengaged and ideologically heterodox, much like many swing voters. According to Catalist’s modeling, the lower a Democratic-leaning voter’s propensity to turnout for elections, the more likely they are to consider voting for a Republican.

2. Young voters shifted right

Like AP Votecast and Blue Rose Research, Catalist finds that younger voters were significantly more Republican in 2024 than they had been in 2020. While Biden won 61 percent of voters under 30 four years ago, Harris won only 55 percent of that demographic last year (notably, this is a smaller decline than Blue Rose Research registered).

This decline was driven almost entirely by the rightward drift of young men.  Harris won 63 percent of women under 30, just three points lower than Biden in 2020. But she won only 46 percent of men under 30, which was nine points worse than Biden’s showing.

3. Nonwhite voters got redder

Harris actually won the same share of the white vote that Barack Obama had in 2012. And her support among America’s white majority was only 2 points lower than Biden’s in 2020.

But like previous 2024 autopsies, Catalist’s report finds that Democrats suffered steeper losses with nonwhite voters, particularly those who were young, male, and/or politically disengaged.

Harris won 85 percent of Black voters, down from Biden’s 89 percent. That drop was entirely due to flagging support from Black men, as this chart shows:

Democrats suffered especially large losses with young Black men, winning only 75 percent of their ballots in 2024, compared to 85 percent four years earlier.

The trends among Latino voters were similar. Between 2020 and 2024, Latino support for the Democratic nominee dropped from 63 to 54 percent (as recently as 2016, Democrats had won 70 percent of the demographic). The decline among Latino men was particularly pronounced, as Trump won a 53-percent majority of that historically Democratic constituency:

Democratic support among young Latino men fell off a cliff. And the party lost even more ground with Latino men under 30 who vote irregularly — which is to say, those who missed at least one of the last four general elections in which they were eligible to cast a ballot.

Finally, Harris won only 61 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters. Back in 2012, this group had backed Obama over Romney by a 74 to 26 percent margin. As with other nonwhite voting blocs, AAPI men are leaving the Democratic coalition faster than their female counterparts.

Taken together, all these figures paint a disconcerting picture for Democrats. The party has long wagered that time was on its side: Since America’s rising generations were heavily left-leaning — and the country was becoming more diverse by the year — it would become gradually easier for Democrats to assemble national majorities, even as the party bled support among non-college-educated white voters.

And it’s true that Democrats still do better with young and nonwhite voters than with Americans as a whole. But the party’s advantage with those constituencies has been narrowing rapidly. Last year’s returns suggest that demographic churn isn’t quite the boon that many Democrats had hoped, and can be easily outweighed by other factors.

Meanwhile, as blue states bleed population to red ones, Democrats are poised to have a much harder time winning Electoral College majorities after the 2030 census. Given current trends, by 2032, a Democratic nominee who won every blue state — and added Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — would still lose the White House.

How Democrats can arrest the rightward drift of young and nonwhite Americans — while broadening their geographic base of support — is up for debate. But pretending that the swing electorate does not exist, or that unreliable Democratic voters are all doctrinaire progressives, probably won’t help.

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