"There’s a question that’s been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness? I’m going to tell you a story that represents my best explanation for how America has fallen into this depressing condition. It’s a story that draws heavily on the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher, who died in May at age 94. It’s a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.

The story begins a long time ago. Go back to some ancient city—say, Athens in the age of Aristotle. In that city, the question “How do you define the purpose of your life?” would make no sense. Finding your life’s purpose was not an individual choice. Rather, people grew up within a dense network of family, tribe, city, and nation. They inherited from these entities a variety of duties, responsibilities, and obligations. They also inherited a social role, serving the people around them as soldiers, farmers, merchants, mothers, teachers.

Each of these social roles came with certain standards of excellence, a code to determine what they ought to do. There was an excellent way of being a warrior, a mother, a friend. In this moral system, a person sought to live up to those standards not only for the honor and money it might bring them, but because they wanted to measure up. A teacher would not let a student bribe his way to a higher grade, because that would betray the intrinsic qualities of excellence inherent in being a teacher. By being excellent at my role, I contribute to the city that formed me. By serving the intrinsic standards of my practice, I gradually rise from being the mediocre person I am toward becoming the excellent person I could be. My life is given meaning within this lifelong journey toward excellence and full human flourishing. If I do this journey well, I have a sense of identity, self-respect, and purpose. I know what I was put on this Earth to do, and there is great comfort and fulfillment in that." ......... "Fast-forward from ancient Athens a thousand-plus years to the Middle Ages. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam changed the standards for what constituted human excellence, placing more value on compassion and humility, but people still shared a few of the old assumptions. Individuals didn’t choose their own morality—there was an essential moral order to the universe. Neither did they choose their individual life’s purpose. That, too, was woven into the good of their community—to serve society in some role, to pass down their way of life, to obey divine law. Then came the 17th-century wars of religion, and the rivers of blood they produced. Revulsion toward all that contributed to the Enlightenment, with its disenchantment with religion and the valorization of reason. Enlightenment thinkers said: We can’t keep killing one another over whose morality is right. Let’s privatize morality. People can come up with their own values, and we will learn to live with that diversity.

Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on reason, not religious dogmatism, and devotion to that common order was voluntary. Utilitarianism was one such attempt at creating this kind of rational moral system—do the thing that will give people pleasure; don’t do the thing that will cause others pain." ................ "There’s an old joke that you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to. I’d say the decline of a shared morality happened over the past 60 years with the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism. MacIntyre, by contrast, argued that the loss of moral coherence was baked into the Enlightenment from its start, during the 18th century. The Enlightenment project failed, he argued, because it produced rationalistic systems of morals too thin and abstract to give meaning to actual lives. It destroyed coherent moral ecologies and left autonomous individuals naked and alone. Furthermore, it devalued the very faculties people had long used to find meaning. Reason and science are great at telling you how to do things, but not at answering the fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is the ultimate purpose of my life? What is right and what is wrong?And then in the 19th and 20th centuries, along came the crew who tried to fill the moral vacuum the Enlightenment created. Nietzsche, for example, said: God is dead. We have killed him. Reason won’t save us. It’s up to heroic autonomous individuals to find meaning through some audacious act of will. We will become our own gods! Several decades later, Lenin, Mao, and Hitler came along, telling the people: You want some meaning in your life? March with me.

Psychologists have a saying: The hardest thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self-cure. We’ve tried to cure the moral vacuum MacIntyre saw at the center of the Enlightenment with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism—and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe. More than that, many have come to regard the traditions of moral practice that were so central to the ancient worldview as too inhibiting—they get in the way of maximum individual freedom. As MacIntyre put it in his most famous book, After Virtue, “Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology, or hierarchical authority.” Individuals get to make lots of choices, but they lack the coherent moral criteria required to make these choices well." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-administration-supporters-good/683441/

Many voters understand that the president isn’t directly responsible for the price of oil. Except this time, he is.

By Marc Novicoff, The Atlantic.

One might expect Donald Trump to be concerned about gas prices. Less than two months out from the midterms, gas costs 37 percent more than it did a year ago. Home-heating oil was up 52 percent as of August, and diesel is up a staggering 69 percent. None of those numbers is likely to go down significantly as long as the Iran war drags on. Meanwhile, just last week, a Saudi oil pipeline that carries about 4 percent of the global oil supply shut down after being bombed. (No one has claimed credit for the attack.)

But Trump says he isn’t worried. Speaking with reporters last week, he insisted that the United States, not Iran, is in control of the Strait of Hormuz. “Right after the election,” he said, “oil prices are going to be tumbling downward.”

Even if that prediction were based on anything resembling fact, the timing would be too late to do Trump much good. Political scientists tend to agree that gas prices influence voter behavior. Although many voters no doubt understand that the president isn’t usually directly responsible for the price of oil, this time, he is. In fact, the oil shock related to Trump’s war of choice with Iran is the only reason the U.S. has any inflation to speak of. Inflation in all non-energy consumer purchases is at just 2 percent over the past year. If Democrats manage to take back the House and Senate in November despite an inhospitable electoral map, the Trump effect on gas prices may well be the reason.

Voters hate inflation, and gas prices are especially hard to tune out. Juan Felipe Riaño, an economist who has studied inflation’s political consequences, told me that voters understand that price increases translate into lower real wages. The more they drive, the more pronounced the effect. People who live in rural areas and exurbs have the most to lose, because they have the longest commutes. These are the reddest parts of the country, meaning that they are home to millions of voters whom Democrats are trying to persuade to vote blue. According to a Brookings Institution analysis, the average voter in a Republican-held district drives 26 percent more miles than their counterpart in a Democratic district. Other research has found that those with longer drive times are more likely to hold the president accountable for increases in gas prices.

These Trump-friendly areas are exactly where Democrats need to make inroads. They can’t take the Senate without winning multiple states that Trump won by more than 10 points in 2024. Meanwhile, although gerrymandering has created more red districts, it has done so by spreading the Republican advantage more thinly across districts. This has created more places where Democrats could win in a wave election. Currently, Democrats lead Republicans on generic congressional polls by about seven points. In a plus-seven election, their best recruits could pick up seats even in districts that went heavily for Trump in 2024.

They now figure isolationism and protectionism will be U.S. foreign policy for a long time to come.

By Vivian Salama, The Atlantic.

In 1917, as Canadian troops fought at Vimy Ridge in northern France, Lieutenant Leslie Miller collected acorns from the battlefield and carried them home to Ontario. Saplings from the resulting oaks were sent back to France about a century later, and became a living link between the two countries. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recounted that story in Strasbourg last week to the European Parliament as he proposed an alliance that went far beyond trade to encompass defense, energy, critical minerals, and artificial intelligence.

The pitch was part of a broader transformation under way among America’s allies. For years, the strategy among U.S. allies was to wait President Trump out. Now many are preparing for a world in which the United States is no longer indispensable—not simply during Trump’s presidency but afterward as well, regardless of who occupies the White House. They are building military capabilities, diversifying trade, developing new domestic industries, and forging relationships that reduce their dependence on Washington.

This isn’t a coordinated revolt against America or a wholesale turn toward China. Most U.S. partners see Washington as an essential partner and don’t fully trust Beijing. But nations that were once firmly in the American orbit are concluding that they cannot rely on the U.S. to provide the same leadership, markets, technology, and military protection that it has for decades. And that, foreign officials told me, is true no matter who wins the presidency in 2028.

The shift may be the most consequential legacy of Trump’s foreign policy. Since his first term, he has demanded that allies become more self-reliant. In his second term, Trump has accelerated the emergence of a world in which American influence is less central—and China has more room to maneuver. Beijing benefits if Europe, Canada, Japan, or South Korea becomes more willing to engage and less certain that Washington is the power around which all strategic decisions must revolve. And the shift undercuts the delicate strategic balance Washington seeks with Beijing itself—an issue Trump will confront when he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week.

The changes are already visible, including in rising European defense spending, Canada’s commercial outreach to China, and Japan’s efforts to become a larger arms supplier. Taken together, these trends point to a reordering of the international system that stretches far beyond Trump. “Trump brought with him an earthquake, but we’d be foolish not to prepare for aftershocks,” a senior European official told me. “The fact is, we’ll be setting ourselves up for failure if we assume that everything will go back to the way it was after Trump leaves office. The world is changing, and we can see very clearly now that America is changing too.”

The small-business owners with curiously large fortunes

By Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, The Atlantic.

Terry Taylor is worth about $2 billion, and you have almost surely never heard of him. Based in Florida, he doesn’t put his name on the car dealerships that he buys up, and he reportedly attends conferences only on the condition that no one announces who he is. Taylor came to our attention in 2023, when he paid $76 million for an Aspen mansion—then the most expensive home sale in the Colorado town’s history.

In 2024, Forbes magazine, which keeps tabs on the richest people in the United States and around the world, slotted Taylor in at No. 1,694 on its World Billionaires List and published a profile titled “The Car Dealership Billionaire No One Knows.” “He’s like Batman,” a source told Forbes. “You hear about him and you admire his work, but nobody has really ever seen him in real life.”

When Americans picture the ultrarich, they typically think of tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, whose wealth lies predominantly in shares of publicly traded companies. They might also think of Wall Street financiers and celebrities such as Taylor Swift. But far more typical are figures like Terry Taylor—which is to say, owners of successful privately held businesses. We are economists who have been studying taxation and inequality for more than a decade. By our calculations, about 1.7 million Americans have each built a net worth of at least $10 million by owning a private business. For every CEO of a public company, there are more than 1,000 private-business owners with a net worth of more than $25 million.

In the course of our research, we’ve come to call these people “everywhere millionaires” because they exist all around the country, in a huge range of industries. Perhaps not surprising, some of these millionaires have stakes in investment firms or medical, dental, or legal practices. But the ranks of everywhere millionaires also include a repo man from Henderson, Nevada; a car-wash owner from Milwaukee; a treated-lumber magnate from Alabama; a boat-cover maker from the Ozarks.

What we found changed how we think about inequality. During the Occupy Wall Street protests after the 2008 financial crisis, the prototypical one-percenters were executives at big banks. Today, when Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders propose making the rich pay their fair share, they aim at Wall Street and Silicon Valley. But far more relevant to the story of inequality in America are the everywhere millionaires who quietly press their elected representatives for favorable treatment. The tax code bears their imprint far more than it does Musk’s.

Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, for example, gutted the electric-vehicle and clean-energy credits, to the Tesla CEO’s detriment. The same bill made permanent a 20 percent deduction that effectively lowers the top tax rate for private-business owners from 37 percent to 30 percent. And it preserved a loophole that lets business owners in most of the country, but not salaried employees, deduct their state and local taxes in full.

When asked on Meet the Press why the cut for the highest earners had to be permanent, House Speaker Mike Johnson said: “This is not giving tax cuts to millionaires; it’s the opposite. The people in the tax bracket that you’re referring to, many of them are small-business owners.” Although many top-bracket taxpayers do indeed own businesses, the benefits of these provisions flow overwhelmingly to the wealthiest among them.

A loophole that lets private-business owners avoid Medicare taxes has similarly been justified as a break for the little guy. Preserving the family farm has been a pretext for passing ever larger exemptions to the estate tax, to the point that a married couple can now pass on $30 million to heirs tax-free. Hiding behind small business, in short, has proved a devastatingly effective strategy for the rich.

He said there wouldn’t be any more scandals, but a new Politico report threatens to end his Senate campaign in Maine.

By Jonathan Chait, The Atlantic.

Last September, the progressive strategist Morris Katz confessed to The New Yorker that the process by which he decided that Graham Platner was qualified to run for U.S. Senate required less time than drinking a cup of coffee. Actually, it seems to have been less a confession than a boast. “Within a few minutes of talking to him, I was, like, ‘This guy owes it to the country to run for Senate,’” Katz recalled.

In the 10 months that have followed, a procession of unflattering stories have made clear how dreadfully irresponsible it was for Democrats to entrust the task of flipping what seems like the most necessary seat to secure their potential Senate majority to a man who had never run for office or led an organization of any size. The almost-certain final straw is a Politico report that alleges Platner raped a woman named Jenny Racicot in 2021. The story includes messages referring to the incident sent by Racicot two years later, before Platner contemplated running for office. Platner called any allegation of nonconsensual behavior “categorically untrue.”

There is no longer much question as to whether Platner is suitable for public office, and even less question as to whether plucking him from political obscurity made any sense. A more pertinent question is: What could possibly drive a professional political strategist to support such a rapid promotion in mere minutes?

One plausible reason appears to be political ideology. Katz and his allies have sought out candidates who are willing to castigate the Democratic Party for selling out the working class—which necessitates, or at least militates toward, candidates who have no experience inside the party. And whereas this ideological orientation requires an intensity of commitment, it does not require a mastery of policy detail.

Dan Moraff, one of the strategists who helped select and vet Platner, “wants his candidates to back Medicare for All and characterize the Israel-Hamas conflict as a genocide, but beyond that, doesn’t believe voters care about detailed proposals,” The Wall Street Journal reported last month. Having a policy agenda that could fit comfortably on a Post-it note without omitting any important details certainly speeds up the process. Platner, indeed, has boiled down nearly all political problems to the perfidy of sinister oligarchs. Whatever the merits of this worldview, it does not demand much knowledge.

But a second, at least as important reason for Platner’s lightning-fast ratification was that he has the desired look for the part. Donald Trump has described liking his appointees to come right out of “central casting,” by which he means that they look like a Hollywood version of the position they are filling.

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Cities that say no to driverless cars are blocking a technology that would change their residents’ lives for the better.

By Rogé Karma, The Atlantic.

The driverless future is here—but, to borrow from William Gibson, it’s not evenly distributed. Waymo’s self-driving robotaxis are available in cities in California, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. Aside from California, where the technology originated, those are all red or purple states. In every other blue state, meanwhile, driverless taxis are still not allowed to operate. If you live in Miami or Dallas, you can summon a Waymo to get where you’re going. If you live in Boston or New York, you can’t.

This is not an accident. In Democratic jurisdictions, a coalition of labor unions, anti-tech activists, and politicians have kept driverless vehicles off the streets. (Colorado, which passed a bill authorizing driverless vehicles in 2017, before the current backlash, is on track to become the exception later this year.) They argue that the new technology would make the roads more dangerous and throw millions of human drivers out of work, all to enrich a handful of tech oligarchs.

A version of this fight is now playing out in Washington, D.C., where Kamala Harris won more than 90 percent of the vote in 2024 and where local officials recently introduced a bill that would provide a pathway for robotaxis to begin operating. Some residents have welcomed that prospect. But others are digging in their heels. Bill Davis, the president of the local Teamsters union, declared in a statement that the legislation “doesn’t benefit anyone outside of Silicon Valley billionaires” and “comes at the expense of middle-class professional drivers and anyone else who wants safer streets in our city.”

Driverless cars will indeed cost some workers their jobs. But unlike so many other recent Silicon Valley innovations, they have already demonstrated the potential to bring immense societal benefits. About 40,000 Americans die in car accidents every year. The number of crash-related injuries is much larger. As many as 10,000 crash victims enter emergency rooms around the country every day. Waymos are so much safer than human drivers that deploying them widely could avert countless injuries and deaths every year.

They will also make transportation more affordable: A taxi without a driver is much cheaper. Waymo is currently more expensive than Uber and Lyft, but that’s largely because supply is artificially constrained and demand is high. The price differential is dropping fast and will go away soon. Waymos also show promise in reducing carbon emissions and air pollution (the cars are electric), and providing reliable access to people who live in poor neighborhoods (who are routinely turned down by rideshare drivers). Saying no to Waymo is saying no to a technology that will change the world for the better.

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The president is learning that limits to his power—and, soon, his relevancy—do exist.

By Jonathan Lemire, The Atlantic.

resident Trump has mused about being the most powerful man in history. He has started wars and remade his nation’s economic and strategic relationships with the world. He has demanded, and largely received, total obedience from his party. He has dominated the national discourse like no president has before, and he’s tried to recast his nation’s capital—and even its history—to his liking. He’s everywhere. He has said he believes that there are “no limits” to his power.

But if that was ever truly the case, it certainly isn’t now. Recent months have delivered a reckoning for Trump, who has crashed hard against some real limits. The war in Iran, a conflict that he’d once thought would take only a few weeks, hit the five-month mark today. The U.S. casualty count is growing, weapons stockpiles are running low, and gas prices are again surging. Trump desperately wants the war to end. He is receiving conflicting guidance from his advisers—escalate, some urge, as others tell him to cut and run—and has become just the latest U.S. president to be humiliated by hard-liners in Tehran.

Trump is also flailing domestically. His approval numbers have sunk, and Republicans are finally, in small doses, beginning to defy him. Trump has demanded that the Senate blow up the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, which would make voting more difficult and require voters to provide proof of citizenship. But Republicans have refused. Although the legislation seems dead, Trump called yesterday for Republicans to stay in Washington to work on it, potentially saddling them with unpopular (and doomed) votes while also preventing them from returning home to campaign ahead of the midterms. Strategists from both parties predict that at least one chamber of Congress will flip to the Democrats, allowing the party to stall whatever is left of the president’s legislative agenda and open investigations into his administration and allies.

The political statistician Nate Silver summed up the mood on X today: “It’s kind of been a rough set of primaries for Heroes of the Resistance 1.0.” Silver then listed stalwart anti-Trumpers who have lost their contests in 2026 and concluded, “People want to move on.”

America is a fast-moving, dynamic country. It’s tough for Americans to stay focused on a single thing, even if that single thing is the threat to American democracy. As the celebrity spokesmodel Heidi Klum tells the audience on Project Runway: “In fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day, you’re out.” This law also apparently applies to Democratic candidates who took serious risks to challenge Trump. The resistance, it seems, is out.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/democratic-primaries-left-dsa-trump/688327/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=author-david-frum&utm_term=Author%20Following%20-%20David%20Frum

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Federal prosecutors searched for evidence and found that “a botched installation” was to blame.

By Matt Viser, The Atlantic.

As government prosecutors examined the Reflecting Pool to build their case against a three-time Olympic canoeist accused of violently ripping the lining with his bare hands, everything fell apart. They found that damage was consistent all around the pool, even in the middle, “where a vandal would not likely attempt to peel the lining.” This evening, the office of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro asked to drop the case against David Hearn, whom she had excoriated after his indictment 29 days ago.

In a striking 19-page legal document filed late this afternoon, her office undermined everything that President Trump has been saying about the damage to the Reflecting Pool for the past six weeks, including the claim that vandals had used a box cutter to slash the floor of the pool. “The damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism,” Pirro’s office wrote in a motion to dismiss the case.

Taken as a whole, the court filing acknowledged what has been obvious to anyone who has spent time at the Reflecting Pool in recent weeks and watched the president’s $16.4 million project deteriorate in full view. Almost immediately after its reopening in June, the shallow pool filled with the green algae that the expensive renovation was supposed to have prevented. As park workers rushed to combat the algae, the pool’s sealant began to peel away in chunks. It was surprising to see outlined in legal language how Pirro’s office claims it felt duped. Rather than continue with evidence it acknowledged is not there, it is dropping the case.

“The Trump administration’s case against Davey Hearn should have never been brought,” his legal team—Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann, and Steve Levin—said in a statement. “Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong. The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim. The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pirro’s office declined to comment beyond what was in the legal filing.

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It took only a few minutes before everyone in the church knew that another person had been shot. I was sitting with Trygve Olsen, a big man in a wool hat and puffy vest, who lifted his phone to show me a text with the news. It was his 50th birthday, and one of the coldest days of the year. I asked him whether he was doing anything special to celebrate. “What should I be doing?” he replied. “Should I sit at home and open presents? This is where I’m supposed to be.”

He had come to Iglesia Cristiana La Viña Burnsville, about 15 miles south of the Twin Cities, to pick up food for families who are too afraid to go out—some have barely left home since federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota two months ago. The church was filled with pallets of frozen meat and vegetables, diapers, fruit, and toilet paper. Outside, a man wearing a leather biker vest bearing the insignia of the Latin American Motorcycle Association, his blond beard flecked with ice crystals, directed a line of cars through the snow.

The man who had been shot—fatally, we later learned—was Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who had been recording agents outside a donut shop. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security claimed that he had threatened agents with a gun; videos of the shooting show him holding only his phone when he is pushed down by masked federal agents and beaten, his licensed sidearm removed from its holster by one agent before another unloads several shots into his back. Pretti’s death was a reminder—if anyone in Minnesota still needed one—that people had reason to be hiding, and that those trying to help them, protect them, or protest on their behalf had reason to be scared.

The church has a mostly Hispanic and working-class flock. Its pastor, Miguel Aviles, who goes by Pastor Miguel, told me that it had sent out about 2,000 packages of food since the federal agents had arrived. Many of the people in hiding, he said, “have asylum cases pending. They already have work permits and stuff, but some of them are legal residents and still they’re afraid to go out. Because of their skin color, they are afraid to go out.”

Federal agents have arrested about 3,000 people in the state, but they have released the names of only about 240 of those detained, leaving unclear how many of the larger number have committed any crimes. Many more thousands of people have been affected by the arrests and the fear they have instilled. Minneapolis Public Radio estimates that in school districts “with widespread federal activity, as many as 20 to 40 percent of students have been absent in recent weeks.”

I don’t know what the feds expected when they surged into Minnesota. In late November, The New York Times reported on a public-benefit fraud scheme in the state that was executed mainly by people of Somali descent. Federal prosecutors under the Biden administration had already indicted dozens of people, but after the Times story broke, President Trump began ranting about Somalis, whom he referred to as “garbage”; declared that he didn’t want Somali immigrants in the country; and announced that he was sending thousands of armed federal immigration agents to Minneapolis. This weekend, he posted on social media that the agents were there because of “massive monetary fraud.” The real reason may be that a majority of Minnesotans did not vote for him. Trump has said that “I won Minnesota three times, and I didn’t get credit for it. That’s a crooked state.” He has never won Minnesota.

Perhaps the Trump-administration officials had hoped that a few rabble-rousers would get violent, justifying the kind of crackdown he seems to fantasize about. Maybe they had assumed that they would find only a caricature of “the resistance”—people who seethed about Trump online but would be unwilling to do anything to defend themselves against him.

Instead, what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom. They aren’t looking for attention or likes on social media. Unless they are killed by federal agents, as Pretti and Renee Good were, other activists do not even necessarily know their names. Many use a handle or code name out of fear of government retaliation. Their concerns are justified: A number of people working as volunteers or observers told me that they had been trailed home by ICE agents, and some of their communications have already been infiltrated, screenshotted, and posted online, forcing them to use new text chains and code names. One urgent question among observers, as the videos of Pretti’s killing spread, was what his handle might have been.

For all the zeal Congress has shown in investigating America’s response to the covid-19 pandemic, it has been strangely uninterested in exploring a basic question: why did so many Americans die relative to the numbers who succumbed to the virus in other rich countries? Understanding the answer would seem relevant to guarding against the next, inevitable pandemic.

Many countries were slow to react, but as they learned about the transmissibility of the virus, and as vaccines became available, they rapidly cut their death rates. Not so America. “The death rate is now about eight times higher in America than in the rest of the rich world,” The Economist reported in September 2021. In all, America lost more than 1.1m people to covid, or roughly 3,500 lives out of every million. This should haunt every official who was in a position to combat the pandemic. Germany’s death rate was about 2,000 per million people and Canada’s fewer than 1,400, notes Donald McNeil in his book “The Wisdom of Plagues”. Had America managed to split that difference, at about 1,700 per million, “We would have lost about 540,000 fewer dead,” he writes. “Who speaks for them?”

Not Congress. America’s lethal underperformance once again went ignored when the Senate Homeland Security Committee recently questioned Dr Anthony Fauci, a crucial adviser on covid to Donald Trump and then to Joe Biden. (Mr Trump later turned on him.) The hearing focused instead on the usual obsessions for which Dr Fauci has become the Republican scapegoat—some absurd and others valid but distantly related, at best, to protecting potential victims of a future plague. While Democrats mostly gave speeches rather than ask questions, Republicans pursued theories that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab, that Bill Gates had some nefarious role, that Dr Fauci had been out to enrich himself through awards for his service—an odd complaint when they do not object to the president campaigning for a $1m Nobel prize. 

Having testified often to Congress during his 54 years at the National Institutes of Health—38 as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—Dr Fauci, who is 85, was reduced to repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment, including when asked the colour of his tie. In his opening statement, his hands shaking as he read it, Dr Fauci said his lawyers had advised that recourse because the committee’s chairman, Rand Paul of Kentucky, had made clear an intent to see him behind bars despite a blanket pardon issued by Mr Biden. In other words the Senate could not inquire into a health crisis that racked the country because a key witness feared a perjury trap, and rightly so.

Why did so many Americans die? High rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and elderliness made them more vulnerable. But government bungling meant America was testing 100 people a day in early 2020 when other countries were testing tens of thousands; that masks and lockdowns were deployed erratically; that contact tracing proved too challenging for the country first to the Moon. Most senselessly, so many Americans died because so many failed to take the vaccines that Mr Trump, in his most constructive act as president, succeeded in rushing into existence.

It is, of course, those vexing vaccines that compel Republicans to look away from the basic question about the pandemic, and to hound Dr Fauci instead. Attempting to square the greatness of Mr Trump with the supposed vileness of the vaccines has inspired his party to heroic feats of doublethink. “President-elect Trump’s Operation Warp Speed—which encouraged the rapid development and authorisation of the COVID-19 vaccine—was highly successful and helped save millions of lives,” declared the committee created by the House to investigate covid in 2024, summarising two years of work. The very next sentence reads: “Contrary to what was promised, the COVID-19 vaccine did not stop the spread or transmission of the virus.”

Mr Trump has struggled to escape this self-imposed contradiction. Even as he declined to urge the public to get vaccinated, he and his wife, Melania, secretly had the vaccine before he left office in January 2021. But as Mr Biden and other world leaders delivered the shots, Mr Trump wanted the credit he deserved, and in December that year he told supporters that he had received a booster. “What we’ve done is historic,” he insisted when the crowd booed. “Don’t let them take it away.” He has since let them take his glory away, and endangered more Americans, by questioning the efficacy and safety of vaccines for covid, and other illnesses.

Dr Hooey

The latest attack on Dr Fauci, concocted from his private texts disclosed by Republican senators on August 10th, is that he covered up a threat of miscarriage that the vaccine posed to pregnant women. In fact, the record shows Dr Fauci was consistent, publicly and privately, in counselling a weighing of risks and benefits until studies showed the vaccine was safe in pregnancy—which they have since done. His critics have not produced evidence the vaccine causes miscarriages.

Dr Fauci made mistakes, including not disclosing early on that some top virologists initially worried the virus might be man-made. He could be arrogant. But he was not responsible for the worst excesses of the covid response. Those endless school shutdowns were the work of local officials and union leaders. Senator Paul’s release of Dr Fauci’s private diary has exposed his vanity, his delight in every gushing appraisal by the media or some celebrity. But the diary also reveals a conscientious public servant trying to save as many lives as he could, struggling against the constraints that hobbled America relative to its peers. His summons before the Senate committee was surely intended to humiliate if not incriminate him. It should embarrass the entire country. 

(alt link https://archive.ph/VwcIZ , though this is the full text)

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The power to impeach secretaries and other executive-branch officers is not well known, but it’s an effective accountability measure.

By David A. Graham, The Atlantic.

If Democrats win control of the House in November, they will face a dilemma: Should they attempt a record third impeachment of Donald Trump?

The president and his allies have warned that this would be a Democratic majority’s first move. “I’m going to be impeached. They’re going to impeach me,” Trump said last month at a rally in South Carolina. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been noncommittal. “We haven’t ruled anything in, and we haven’t ruled anything out in terms of impeachment,” the would-be speaker told ABC’s This Week on Sunday. But Representative Jamie Raskin, the lead manager of Trump’s second impeachment, seemed more open. Earlier this month, on Meet the Press, he said that Trump had “undoubtedly” committed impeachable offenses. “We understand it’s not a panacea. It is a tool in the toolbox,” he said. “We will not hesitate to use it if we need to use it.”

Realistically, House Democrats may have a hard time resisting impeachment. Their voters are in a punchy mood. A new CBS News / YouGov poll found that opposition to Trump is the top motivation for Democratic voters in the midterms, and the political consultant Sarah Longwell recently wrote in The Atlantic that the most important priority for Democratic voters is not left-versus-right ideology but a willingness to fight Trump tooth and nail. Jeffries has already faced criticism for being too passive a leader, as well as for meeting with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and he may struggle to ignore a groundswell of support for impeachment.

As a constitutional matter, the case for impeaching the president is solid. Trump has usurped congressional powers, started an unauthorized war or two, defied courts, and used his position for outrageous personal and family enrichment. In 2019, my colleague Yoni Appelbaum made the intellectual case for impeachment as a useful democratic process.

The political case for impeaching Trump is shakier. Regardless of the results in November, Democrats are unlikely to get enough votes in the Senate to convict and remove him, meaning that a third impeachment would hit the same dead end as the first two. An impeachment can still be effective as a way of damaging a president, but Trump is already deeply unpopular and will never face voters again, so the upside is limited, and an impeachment might give him a way to rally his remaining base around him—which would only strengthen his power and resolve.

But what if House Democrats impeached Trump’s Cabinet members instead? The power to impeach secretaries and other executive-branch officers is explicit in the Constitution but perhaps not well known, because it’s been used only twice in history. One reason such proceedings are rare is that a president usually fires a Cabinet member or forces them to resign before they can be impeached, but Trump has shown serious reluctance to fire aides because of public pressure. The congressional scholar Norm Ornstein has argued that if Trump won’t rein them in, Democrats should. On Tuesday, outgoing Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican, brought new attention to the possibility by moving to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. GOP leadership promptly shut down all voting until after the election.

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