President Donald Trump is pushing back against a federal appeals court ruling blocking construction of his White House ballroom, arguing that presidents aren’t “tenants” and that the massive project is actually a “Military Complex” complete with a rooftop “DronePort.”
A divided federal appeals court ruled Friday that Trump cannot continue aboveground construction of the $400 million, 90,000-square-foot project without congressional approval.
“Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House,” Judges Patricia Millett and Brad Garcia wrote in the 2-1 decision, noting that the building is maintained for current and future presidents — and ultimately belongs to the American people.
Trump took issue with the terminology.
“We are not tenants, who pay rent and do all other things that a tenant must do, we are PRESIDENTS,” Trump wrote Saturday on Truth Social, arguing presidents have the right to “fix, renovate, secure, protect, and beautify” the White House without congressional permission.
Trump called the ruling a “National Security Threat at the highest level” and vowed to take the case to the Supreme Court.
He also described the project as a “SECURE Ballroom/Military Complex, including a major DronePort on the roof.” The latter which was backed up by AI pictures posted to his account with drones and planes and military gear littering the rooftop.
The military components aren’t entirely new. Trump previously said the project would include underground bunkers, medical facilities and a rooftop drone base. But the appeals court noted that the existing injunction specifically allows construction of underground bunkers, bomb shelters and military and medical infrastructure to continue, along with aboveground work strictly necessary for security.
What remains blocked is construction of the ballroom itself.
And it is substantial. At 90,000 square feet, the proposed complex would be larger than an average Kohl’s department store, which the company says occupies roughly 80,000 square feet.
The judges also disputed Trump’s assertion that presidents have historically renovated the White House without needing congressional involvement. Congress authorized reconstruction after the British burned the White House during the War of 1812 and specifically appropriated money used to construct the original East and West Wings.
The court said it knew of no previous president who privately funded the demolition of a substantial portion of the White House that Congress had authorized and taxpayers had funded.
“Until now,” the judges wrote.
The court paused its decision for 14 days to give the administration time to seek Supreme Court review.
Whether the justices ultimately let Trump finish his ballroom — or Ballroom/Military Complex/DronePort — is now likely up to them.
Bill Kristol welcomes recently retired Col. Bree Fram to discuss Hegseth's leadership and the damage he's inflicting on the United States Military, as well as her own personal experience being forced out of the military after over 20 years of service.
The smell hits first, garlic and char on skewered meat, chiles brushed over buns, oyster sauce mingling with the syrupy edge of black vinegar on sizzling noodles. Then comes the sound, clams tossed in hot pans, cleavers pounding roast pork, a Cantonese rock ballad barely rising above the crowd. At Temple Street Night Market, steam rises, neon buzzes, just like the guidebooks promised.
My first bite of Hong Kong is a fried soup dumpling, filled with truffled pork and that holy trinity, garlic, ginger, scallion. Crisp-bottomed, soft-topped, doused in soy. I eat it standing, careful not to scald my tongue. It’s divine. It’s street food. A memory made to be eaten. But something’s different.
Temple Street Night Market grew after World War II, a “nightclub for regular people,” says the woman beside me, also eating soup dumplings carefully. She remembers when the blocks up to Tin Hau Temple brimmed with food carts, trinkets, and the occasional fortune-teller. COVID changed that. Now food stalls are limited, corralled onto a single block. The rest? Brick-and-mortar, cleaned up, regulated. “It’s a performance,” she says. Still, this is one hell of a dumpling.
I’m not satisfied. Something as embedded and sentimental as street food doesn’t just vanish. I call on two friends, industry insiders at Lee Kum Kee. Yes, that Lee Kum Kee, the ones that invented oyster sauce. Ki Tang and Park Ng are locals, insatiable eaters. If anyone knows where Hong Kong’s old street food pulse still beats, it’s them.
We walk Sham Shui Po, once among the city’s densest working-class food neighborhoods. The differences here are sharp. “Sure, the hygiene issue moved some sellers into shops,” she says,” but Hong Kong-style street foods, they haven’t changed.” We stop at a popular shop, newly under a roof, for cheung fen, rice-flour rolls dressed in sesame, soy, and chile, and eat standing up, like before.
These rice rolls, siu mai dumplings, egg waffles, and curried fish balls, the classics remain. The two agree, the scene’s adapting to keep the favorites around, just in more refined settings. Ki adds, “Many Chinese styles have also come to Hong Kong.” Chinese brands with deep pockets are creatively moving in. Hot and dry noodles with seafood, Beijing crêpes filled with satay beef, Sichuan pancakes stuffed with char siu pork. On food, the mainland is fusing with Hong Kong.
We stop at a northern-style dumpling chain, a new import that’s caught on fast. I try the pork and corn pot-stickers with XO scallop sauce, plump, garlicky, fast. A walkable bite of New Hong Kong. Next, crispy fish-filled siu mai on a stick from a nearby shop. Old-school Hong Kong, salty and hot. The street food menu is expanding.
QR codes are everywhere we see food. “People are ordering and picking up later,” Park explains, “queues are shorter… delivery apps also help.” A trend that predated COVID, but the pandemic cemented it. Takeaway meant survival for most vendors. The old crowded wait has become a couch scroll until your green bean skewer and brisket noodles appear by e-bike.
Ki and Park peel off, and I continue to walk south toward Tsim Sha Tsui, A long slog, enough to digest and think. I recall correspondence I had with Virginia Chan, founder of Hong Kong’s “Humid with a Chance of Fishballs” food tours. She romantically contends that street food is an “impulse buy – you pass by it, and it smells good, so you buy it to eat quickly.” True. But it does strike a blow to eating-by-app. She also mentioned something I hadn’t considered: Malls.
“The younger generation goes to malls that have a ton of ‘street food’… The plus is that there is air conditioning.” Right again. As rents rise and street-level spots vanish, street food culture perseveres. A/C replaces gritty urban ambiance. Eaters stay cool. Vendors move up.
Walking through the neighborhood, I see take-out windows everywhere. Pandemic innovation or just smart business? Especially at bakeries and cha chaan tengs, Cantonese diners. You don’t have to sit anymore. You walk. Grab a pineapple bun stuffed with ham and butter, a corned beef egg tart, a sourdough one, even pistachio. (Egg tarts—once a humble snack—have gone global and experimental. And they’re good.) You’re off to work in sixty seconds flat. I watch office workers walk off mid-bite, sipping from paper cups of milk tea.
And that’s the truth I walk away with. Street food isn’t just hawker carts and smoke-filled alleys. Not anymore. It’s not about frenetic, but it is about motion. Food that moves and moves people. To borrow the dim sum moniker, it touches the heart.
It’s still here. Just in new clothes. And still damned delicious.
Summer he was 9
going on 10, suddenly
he had one:
chin tucked
into the leading shoulder,
the body at once lifted high
and crouched;
something in the thighs
was attached
to the ground
yet there was an upward
determination in the elbow—
a boy could be pulled
skyward and earthward at once,
could be, like the bat,
expectant, not quite still,
quivering with intent
to circle and strike a note;
his hands fused to the wood
and wrists braced as though
screwing tight or about to
unscrew the lid of a jar
(love in the wrists
was part of the stance)
and when the swing broke
and the ball whistled long
and everyone was moving, calling—the throw’s to second—
I wanted to study the stance again
in that suspended life
before a play happens,
before memory carried it away.
Summer he was 9
going on 10, suddenly
he had one:
chin tucked
into the leading shoulder,
the body at once lifted high
and crouched;
something in the thighs
was attached
to the ground
yet there was an upward
determination in the elbow—
a boy could be pulled
skyward and earthward at once,
could be, like the bat,
expectant, not quite still,
quivering with intent
to circle and strike a note;
his hands fused to the wood
and wrists braced as though
screwing tight or about to
unscrew the lid of a jar
(love in the wrists
was part of the stance)
and when the swing broke
and the ball whistled long
and everyone was moving, calling—the throw’s to second—
I wanted to study the stance again
in that suspended life
before a play happens,
before memory carried it away.
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Israel rejected a U.S.-backed peace plan for Gaza Sunday, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that Israel will not withdraw from the enclave until Hamas has been “genuinely disarmed.”
In dismissing the 15-point plan drawn up by U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, Netanyahu also said that as long as he is prime minister, “a Palestinian state will not be established” in Gaza or the West Bank.
The peace plan announced by the White House at the end of July would require Hamas to disarm and relinquish its governance in Gaza, while Israel would be required to withdraw its military forces from the territory.
Hamas has said that it would begin disarming, but in recent days an Israeli official said the country still had “serious security concerns.”
The rejection is a blow to peace negotiations the Trump administratoin has been brokering since September. The U.S. president had described the plan, now rejected by Israel, as a “critical step towards Gaza finally being governed by a new Palestinian government” and giving Israel “the security it deserves.”
Israel appears unlikely to pull back significant forces or make other concessions ahead of legislative elections scheduled for October. Netanyahu faces a tough reelection battle, with his far-right coalition partners urging him to keep up the pressure on Hamas and leave forces in Gaza. Opponents also accuse him of failing to prevent the Oct. 7, 2023, attack when Hamas-led militants attacked Israeli communities, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 others hostage. Israel responded with a punishing military offensive that has killed more than 73,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Netanyahu said on Sunday that he is now in discussions with U.S. officials about how to move forward. “They have ideas, some of which are acceptable to us and some of which are unacceptable to us, and we know how to stand up to these things,” he said.
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A World Health Organization (WHO) warehouse storing emergency health supplies in Ukraine has been destroyed, as Kyiv and Moscow exchanged fresh missile strikes overnight, causing several deaths and leaving tens of people injured.
Russia launched a “massive” strike on Odesa overnight, according to Ukrainian emergency services, with at least eight people injured. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an X post on Sunday that the “brutal strike” on the city targeted energy infrastructure as well as residential buildings and the port.
A separate Russian strike on the Saltivka district of Kharkiv killed two people and injured at least 21 more, according to the head of the region’s state administration. Ukraine’s emergency services said firefighters rescued seven people from the upper floors of a high-rise building.
Another overnight strike on the Zhytomyr region injured three people, Ukrainian emergency services said.
Meanwhile, five people died in a Ukrainian overnight drone attack on the Russian city of Belgorod, the regional crisis centre said on Sunday. Acting governor Alexander Shuvayev said earlier on Sunday that three people were killed and 25 others injured in the “massive terrorist drone attack” by Kyiv. The death toll later rose to five.
Zelenskyy condemned what he described as “ballistic terror” attacks on Odesa, Kharkiv, Pavlohrad, and other regions. “Every such attack on human life serves as a constant reminder – we need more pressure, more sanctions against Russia, and more air defense for Ukraine,” he said.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said on Sunday that a WHO warehouse in Dnipro in Ukraine was destroyed by a strike on Friday.
The warehouse held humanitarian supplies for frontline health facilities. No casualties were reported, as a WHO staff member and drivers managed to evacuate 130 of approximately 300 pallets and left the area before the attack.
“I cannot say loudly enough: attacks on health care MUST STOP. Otherwise, people are deprived of lifesaving healthcare,” Tedros said.
Indiana is in many ways a liminal state, the place you pass through between scruffy Cleveland and business-like Chicago, with little to inspire romantic odes to home. Its glacial flatness doesn’t lend itself to crusades, or to impressive scenes like a man on horseback silhouetted against the sunset. But Sophie Cunningham has let the state turn her into a combination of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, willing to joust with a windmill.
The reserve for the WNBA’s Indiana Fever comes off the bench for the latter-day contenders, spelling for star Caitlin Clark and averaging a respectable eight points per game. When then-Connecticut Sun guard Jacy Sheldon poked Clark in the eye during a particularly physical play in 2025, Cunningham avenged the perceived slight with a headlock during a later play. Her reputation as Clark’s right-hand and enforcer spread along with the viral clip.
Since Clark’s days as a national college basketball player for the Iowa Hawkeyes, the right-wing grievance machine has tried to make Clark their Great White Hope. This seemed to accelerate in 2024 after she joined the WNBA, a league in which over 81% of the players are women of color. Clark, an inveterate trash-talker and hyper-competitive athlete, has seemed completely uninterested in courting controversy away from the hardwood. She’s avoided joining any conservative crusades and has done little to stoke the support of her most MAGA fans.
Enter Cunningham. In wide-ranging ESPN profile, she said she was concerned about the idea of trans women participating in women’s sports and wanted to “protect young girls in the locker room.” The Fever enforcer also worried that the next generation would have to “go against biological men.”
Cunningham doubled down in a press conference the next day, adding that her views were “common sense.”
“I said what I said,” she told reporters.
Republicans have spent years building a trans panic in the United States. When they heard their own talking points out of the mouth of a popular professional athlete, they pounced.
Republicans have spent years building a trans panic in the United States. When they heard their own talking points out of the mouth of a popular professional athlete, they pounced. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz rushed to applaud Cunningham. Fox News has spent the weeks since her inflammatory interview dissecting every questionable call against the second-stringer, as protests and counterprotests became a regular fixture at Fever games. Earlier this week, Vice President JD Vance encouraged her to keep up the fight.
“Sometimes when you’re courageous in this country, some of the worst people in the world try to attack you,” he shared with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “You are inspiring a dozen people for every person that criticizes you.”
It’s not hard to see why conservatives raised their banners for Cunningham. In the tall, slight and blonde athlete, they had found a noble hero to fight against the tides of modernity in service of some older ideal. It doesn’t hurt that she could easily slot into Fox News’ afternoon lineup.
The calculation from Cunningham’s end, if there is one, is also not difficult to understand. She wouldn’t be the first athlete who took a hard look at the calendar and their pocketbook and decided to get onboard the right-wing gravy train before they aged out of the league. Former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines and former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom have fashioned second acts out of their willingness to say what MAGA wants to hear. ESPN reshaped their entire network around Pat McAffee, sort of the Joe Rogan of former punters.
For Cunningham’s supporters, it doesn’t matter that her opponents, as in “Don Quixote,” are not fierce giants but windmills posing no threat. Transgender people are a remarkably small share of the population, and the portion of them who chose to participate in organized sports is even smaller still. Frequently, when states pass laws barring transgender athletes from competition, the result can feel overwhelmingly personal to those affected, since the number of people excluded in a given state can be counted on your fingers. A West Virginia law barring public schools from allowing trans athletes to compete alongside students of the same gender was upheld by the Supreme Court this year. It applied to exactly one teenager.
Cunningham’s fears are of her own making. There are no trans athletes competing in the top-tier of any major professional sport in the United States. The stories that anti-trans legislators and commentators tell are always hypothetical. Cunningham proclaims herself as a warrior for “common sense” by fighting off a scourge that no one can see.
On the bright side, it looks like Cunningham might not have the fortitude for the life of a crusader. On Wednesday, she told reporters that she wants “to get back to basketball.” Whether that decision to “shut up and dribble” will hold as she enters the back half of her career remains to be seen.
Editor’s note, August 9, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in April.
This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.
I’m trying to decide whether to keep my elementary school-age kid in the neighborhood public school or move him to a more exclusive private school. Our public school is okay, but my partner and I feel that he might be more challenged and ultimately better off moving to a private school.
But I’m very aware of the increasing flow of students around the US out of public schools, and the effect that is having on the children who remain there. For one thing, since public schools get more funding the more students they have, every family that leaves effectively takes money with them. I worry that by taking my child out of public school, I’m contributing to that problem, but I also don’t want my child to bear the personal burden of my politics.
Dear Public School Parent,
The way you’ve framed the question makes it sound like keeping your kid in public school means imposing a burden on him. And if that were the case — if we really were talking about sacrificing your child’s well-being — I know exactly what I’d tell you.
I’d tell you not to be bullied by utilitarian philosophers. They argue we have to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for our own kids, so they’d probably say it’s wrong to give your child a fancy education while consigning other children to a school with fewer resources. But the 20th-century British philosopher and critic of utilitarianism Bernard Williams argues that this sort of total impartiality is an absurd demand — and I agree.
Williams points out that moral agency — the capacity to act on values and commitments — always comes from a specific person. And as specific people, we have our own specific, individual, core commitments. These “ground projects,” as Williams calls them, are the commitments that give a life its meaning and continuity. A parent has a commitment to ensuring their kid’s well-being, over and above their general wish for all kids everywhere to be well. Williams would say any moral theory that requires you to ignore such personal commitments severs you from the very things that make your life recognizably yours.
So if keeping your kid in public school really meant hurting him, I wouldn’t say you have to do it.
But you said your neighborhood school is okay. It sounds like it’s not bad and not unsafe. So I don’t have reason to think that it is actually hurting him. In fact, it might be helping him in ways you’re not fully accounting for.
Have a question you want to have answered in the next Your Mileage May Vary column?
Just fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does, and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here.
Education is complicated. If I were to get into all the details about school choice and vouchers and charter schools and magnet schools, I’d have to write a whole book. So let me just stick to the main points relevant to your dilemma, starting with this: There’s a popular narrative that says private schools are better than public schools, but the evidence does not support that — especially if we take a broad look at what we mean by “better.”
Although studies do show private school students outperforming their public school counterparts on tests, the studies also show that private school advantages disappear mostly or entirely once you control for family background.
Longitudinal research led by Robert Pianta and Arya Ansari at the University of Virginia tracked more than 1,000 children from birth to age 15 in 10 locations nationwide. After controlling for family income, parental education, neighborhood socioeconomic makeup, and other background variables, the private school advantage…vanished.
“If you want to predict children’s outcomes — achievement test scores, the things we care about socially — in high school, the best thing you can use to predict that is going to be family income — regardless of what high school you go to,” Pianta said.
Pianta’s was a modest-sized study with some methodological limitations. But another analysis of two large, nationally representative datasets also found that public school kids did just as well in math as private school kids — or even outpaced them — after accounting for demographic differences. (Math is considered a particularly robust indicator of school quality writ large because, unlike reading, it’s a subject learned mostly at school and not at home.) The researchers suggested that might be because public school teachers have to do stricter certification and can be required to do more frequent professional development, so they may be more reliably up-to-date on the latest pedagogical approaches, like those developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Admittedly, the very fanciest of private schools do offer some special advantages. Network effects are real. Maybe you want your kid rubbing elbows with a future senator. And maybe if you send your kid to ultra-elite Andover or Exeter, he’ll have a leg up if he applies to a fancy private college.
But that is not the same as ensuring your child actually thrives. I’m sure you also care about your child’s psychological well-being. And here, some of the evidence about exclusive, high-achieving schools is worrying.
The most important educational institution in your kid’s life is you.
The unrelenting pressure to compete and achieve can be brutal in those schools. When students constantly compare themselves to others and peg their self-worth to achievement, the results are alarming. Studies conducted over decades by psychologist Suniya Luthar and colleagues found that students attending high-achieving schools are at significantly higher risk for anxiety, depression, and substance use. (These are often private schools, though hyper-competitive public schools can also fall into this trap.) In fact, the National Academies of Sciences now names these students an “at-risk” group for mental health problems, alongside kids who live in poverty or in foster care or who have incarcerated parents.
In addition to potentially providing a less stressful environment, public schools can confer other important advantages. For one thing, your local public school can help you and your child be part of the neighborhood community, which is incredibly valuable for social development and countering loneliness. And being in an environment that’s more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, or class can teach your kid to empathize and get along with a wide variety of people.
As the American philosopher John Dewey pointed out, these are essential skills and capacities for a flourishing adult life and for a flourishing democracy. Democracy is a way of being in community with people unlike yourself; that’s a mode of life that has to be cultivated, and public schools are great grounds for learning to navigate a shared world.
Plus, public education is free! (Well, “free” — you’ve already paid for it with your taxes, whether or not your kid uses it.) So you could save all the money you’d spend on private school and instead use it on enriching opportunities to expand your child’s horizons. Personally, I’d take my kid to Italy and teach them about Ancient Roman gladiators and Renaissance art and the many flavors of gelato! Or you could collaborate with your child to decide where to donate some of that money to fund education resources for kids elsewhere.
On balance, since the evidence suggests that a child at a decent public school, with involved parents, probably won’t gain meaningful advantages from switching to an exclusive private school — and may face real psychological risks in a hyper-competitive environment — I don’t see a compelling reason to make the move. If you’ve got the resources to even consider private school, then your home life will probably play the biggest role in your kid’s academic trajectory, regardless of which building he sits in during the day. The most important educational institution in your kid’s life is you.
That said, I’m not arguing that parents should never pick private school. To some extent, this depends on the unique needs of your kid and your family. Maybe your kid is absolutely in love with music and the private school nearby has an amazing music program. Maybe your kid is being bullied at his current school but has a couple great friends who attend the private school. Or maybe a religious education is very important to you, so a private parochial school makes sense.
If you do make the choice to send your kid to private school, you’ll have to grapple with the collective action problem you hinted at: Any single family’s departure from a public school barely registers, but when every family with options reasons the same way, the cumulative effect on the school’s funding — and on the kids who remain — can be devastating.
Here, the American political philosopher Iris Marion Young can help you. She points out that our usual model of responsibility — the “liability model,” which says that when something bad happens we should assign blame to a particular individual — is inadequate when we’re dealing with situations of structural injustice. In these situations, it’s a whole system that’s producing predictable patterns of disadvantage.
Just look at the complex web that breeds educational inequality: Historical housing segregation has concentrated poverty in certain neighborhoods. Poorer neighborhoods generate less property tax revenue, which means less money for local schools. States can try to offset that, but schools in poorer areas still tend to end up with fewer resources. Families with options leave for better-resourced schools, enrollment drops at the local public school, and the school loses even more funding. The kids who remain get less of the materials — from textbooks to counselors — that would have set them on the path to success. There’s a clear downward spiral, but no one person or decision is the villain.
So instead of blaming any one individual for their personal lifestyle choices, Young says that in cases of structural injustice, we should adopt the “social connection model” of responsibility. Under this model, you don’t bear blame if you send your kid to private school, because systemic problems shouldn’t rest on one family’s shoulders. Young doesn’t think you need to discharge your obligations through personal lifestyle choices.
But that doesn’t mean you owe nothing.
You do still have a political obligation: to work toward changing the structure that produces injustice. As a participant in the political system that shapes education in this country, you have some power to act on it. You can vote and organize and advocate. You can pressure decision-makers and support reform movements. The more power you’ve got, and the more privileged you are by the current system, the greater your obligation to take action.
Make the effort to act on that obligation. Let your child watch as you do. Better yet, involve them in the process. Kids learn from seeing what their parents do: Show them that you’re bent on enacting your values, and you’ll be giving them an education for life.
Bonus: What I’m reading
This is a fun piece in Asterisk about how high-school science fairs have become so ridiculously competitive that they no longer give students a chance to do real independent research.
This week’s question prompted me to listen to the podcast series “Nice White Parents.” It’s a fascinating look at what happens when parents think that choosing public school would mean sacrificing their child’s prospects on the altar of their own political ideals. Spoiler: Practically no parent is willing to sacrifice their own child. But they often don’t realize they’ve constructed a false trade-off.
Living life requires making choices. It’s unavoidable that we’ll feel regret about some of the paths not traveled. But this Aeon essay explains how “living in closer alignment with our values and authentic preferences may help us avoid the worst pain of regret.”
This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.
Last month, the French striker Kylian Mbappé recorded the 22nd goal of his World Cup career during the bronze-medal match, establishing himself, at the age of 27, as the greatest scorer in tournament history. Even though the French national team, Les Bleus, failed to win the championship, Mbappé has become one of the country’s two most celebrated figures. At the final the next day, the camera panned across the audience and easily found the other one: Victor Wembanyama, the 22-year-old, 7-foot-4 basketball player who is widely considered to be the future of the NBA. Their success points to a stark irony: France’s most beloved men reflect a demographic shift that a growing share of their country rejects.
Born in France, Mbappé and Wembanyama are the sons of African fathers; Mbappé’s mother is of Algerian descent; and many members of Les Bleus are Black and French Arab. As they’ve become more popular, so has the far-right party National Rally, or RN, which has promised to curtail immigration and promoted a racially restrictive notion of Frenchness that would seem to exclude Mbappé and Wembanyama.
Along with soccer stars such as Ousmane Dembélé and Michael Olise, Wembanyama and Mbappé are living rebukes to the far right’s ideology of ethnic resentment. Indeed, they are the nation’s most compelling argument against it—an accomplished, elegant, and omnipresent representation of a multicultural France. But their argument is losing: After decades outside the political mainstream, the RN seems well positioned to win the presidency next year. As France shows, cultural representation won’t change politics. That requires something much more.
France won its first World Cup in 1998, fielding a diverse team whose mass appeal briefly suggested that the country would embrace its multiracial future. The slogan “Black, blanc, beur” (“Black, white, Arab”), a play on the Tricolor, became shorthand for the idea that France’s racial identity had broadened. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the party that became the RN, had deemed it “artificial to bring in players from abroad and call them the French national team,” and claimed that they couldn’t sing “La Marseillaise.” But while the far right commanded a substantial protest vote at the time, it was still largely denied legitimate governing power.
Over the next two decades, the country grew more diverse as a result of greater immigration, particularly from Africa. Riots and terrorist attacks prompted debates about France’s identity and Islam’s place within it. Meanwhile, the RN became more viable at the polls. After Les Bleus lost in the 2010 World Cup, Le Pen’s daughter Marine—who would be the runner-up in the 2017 presidential election—accused some players of having “another nationality at heart.” A few years later, she called them “a bunch of badly brought up boys.”
Then, in 2018, the French won the World Cup again. I watched the final in Paris at one of the many cafés that set up flatscreens along their terraces. Compared with Les Bleus of 1998, this version looked less like a liberal aspiration than a genuine reflection of France’s demographics. During the game, my two-week-old son slept beside me, a new French American with seawater eyes and African ancestors who’d been sold as slaves in territories that were later absorbed into France’s sprawling network of colonies. (It is a point of great familial pride that his maternal great-grandfather, Marcel Pinel, played for France in the first World Cup, in 1930.) Mbappé, then 19, became the second-youngest player in history to score a goal in a final, putting Les Bleus up three. As the game ended, a multihued crowd erupted around us. White French pensioners embraced Muslim teens whom they might have crossed the street to avoid in another context.
I have only ever witnessed such color-blind fraternity on one other occasion: the night in 2008 that Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. In hindsight, both moments show that lasting political progress requires more than fleeting euphoria. Still, France’s win seemed to matter, at least for a while. One illustration of this came soon after the victory when the comedian Trevor Noah joked that “Africa won the World Cup.” For Noah, this was cause for celebration. But the quip provoked a broad backlash because it echoed the far right’s complaint that the team was “not French enough.”
Gérard Araud, the French ambassador to the U.S., said that Noah’s joke “legitimizes” racism. “Unlike the United States of America, France does not refer to their citizens based on their race, religion or origin,” he wrote, emphasizing a tenet of France’s republican universalism. Many of the French players reiterated Araud’s sentiment. “The France of today is a France full of different colors,” the midfielder Paul Pogba said. “We all feel French. We are all happy to wear this jersey.” The defender Benjamin Mendy replied to a post that had added foreign-flag emojis to various players’ names, changing them back to the Tricolor. “Fixed 😉,” he wrote.
A broad consensus emerged after the 2018 victory and during the early days of President Emmanuel Macron’s first term that discouraged racial division and identity politics—what the French call communautarisme. It sidelined the far right’s complaints of “replacement” and emphasized an accommodating, assimilating color-blindness.
Today, France has become the world’s greatest incubator of soccer talent. The Paris region accounted for more players in the World Cup than any other metropolitan area on Earth. The country has become so dominant that it produces too many players for Les Bleus: Of the 1,248 athletes in this year’s tournament, 99 were born in France. In acknowledgment of their popularity, Jordan Bardella, the 30-year-old head of the RN, praised the team as it advanced through the competition—and held his tongue when it was eliminated.
Mbappé, the captain of Les Bleus, has begun to channel the team’s growing cultural capital into politics. Speaking with Vanity Fair earlier this year, he expressed concern about a potential National Rally victory in 2027. “People sometimes think that because you have money, because you’re famous, these kinds of problems don’t affect you,” he said, referring to the social divisions that the party’s rhetoric foments. “But it affects me, because I know what it means, and what kind of consequences it can have for my country when those kinds of people take control.” Wembanyama, for his part, has been more reserved. In 2024, shortly before parliamentary elections in which RN won its largest ever number of seats, he spoke diplomatically: “Political choices are personal. But I think that, at least for me, it’s important to move away from extremes.”
Still, no matter how vocal they are or how desirable they make diversity seem, athletes or other exceptional individuals can never legitimize a multicultural society on their own. As Americans have learned in the post-Obama era, symbols of integration are necessary but insufficient. In fact, they can even help racists and xenophobes conceal regression. Many people on the far right, for example, point to the popularity of an Obama or an Mbappé as evidence that their society is already tolerant enough.
For all that the French right gets wrong, some critics of rapid demographic change identify serious problems, even if they go on to draw grotesque conclusions. A 10-minute walk from the plaza where I watched Les Bleus win in 2018, a quasi-permanent tent city is populated by migrants from Africa and the Middle East, one of the many lingering reminders that France has failed to address a refugee crisis that has been exacerbated by increased migration.
Cultural representation cannot solve this problem. France needs leaders who can improve the material outcomes of all citizens, irrespective of racial, religious, or ethnic lines. Moreover, politicians must safeguard France’s common life, which means addressing the instability that migration can cause, rather than forfeiting that task to the ascendant far right. Only then can representation lead to mutual recognition, obligation, and belonging.
Any society should applaud diversity in moments of triumph. But that applause won’t mean much if its leadership can’t manage demographic change in the intervals between.
Last month, the French striker Kylian Mbappé recorded the 22nd goal of his World Cup career during the bronze-medal match, establishing himself, at the age of 27, as the greatest scorer in tournament history. Even though the French national team, Les Bleus, failed to win the championship, Mbappé has become one of the country’s two most celebrated figures. At the final the next day, the camera panned across the audience and easily found the other one: Victor Wembanyama, the 22-year-old, 7-foot-4 basketball player who is widely considered to be the future of the NBA. Their success points to a stark irony: France’s most beloved men reflect a demographic shift that a growing share of their country rejects.
Born in France, Mbappé and Wembanyama are the sons of African fathers; Mbappé’s mother is of Algerian descent; and many members of Les Bleus are Black and French Arab. As they’ve become more popular, so has the far-right party National Rally, or RN, which has promised to curtail immigration and promoted a racially restrictive notion of Frenchness that would seem to exclude Mbappé and Wembanyama.
Along with soccer stars such as Ousmane Dembélé and Michael Olise, Wembanyama and Mbappé are living rebukes to the far right’s ideology of ethnic resentment. Indeed, they are the nation’s most compelling argument against it—an accomplished, elegant, and omnipresent representation of a multicultural France. But their argument is losing: After decades outside the political mainstream, the RN seems well positioned to win the presidency next year. As France shows, cultural representation won’t change politics. That requires something much more.
France won its first World Cup in 1998, fielding a diverse team whose mass appeal briefly suggested that the country would embrace its multiracial future. The slogan “Black, blanc, beur” (“Black, white, Arab”), a play on the Tricolor, became shorthand for the idea that France’s racial identity had broadened. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the party that became the RN, had deemed it “artificial to bring in players from abroad and call them the French national team,” and claimed that they couldn’t sing “La Marseillaise.” But while the far right commanded a substantial protest vote at the time, it was still largely denied legitimate governing power.
Over the next two decades, the country grew more diverse as a result of greater immigration, particularly from Africa. Riots and terrorist attacks prompted debates about France’s identity and Islam’s place within it. Meanwhile, the RN became more viable at the polls. After Les Bleus lost in the 2010 World Cup, Le Pen’s daughter Marine—who would be the runner-up in the 2017 presidential election—accused some players of having “another nationality at heart.” A few years later, she called them “a bunch of badly brought up boys.”
Then, in 2018, the French won the World Cup again. I watched the final in Paris at one of the many cafés that set up flatscreens along their terraces. Compared with Les Bleus of 1998, this version looked less like a liberal aspiration than a genuine reflection of France’s demographics. During the game, my two-week-old son slept beside me, a new French American with seawater eyes and African ancestors who’d been sold as slaves in territories that were later absorbed into France’s sprawling network of colonies. (It is a point of great familial pride that his maternal great-grandfather, Marcel Pinel, played for France in the first World Cup, in 1930.) Mbappé, then 19, became the second-youngest player in history to score a goal in a final, putting Les Bleus up three. As the game ended, a multihued crowd erupted around us. White French pensioners embraced Muslim teens whom they might have crossed the street to avoid in another context.
I have only ever witnessed such color-blind fraternity on one other occasion: the night in 2008 that Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. In hindsight, both moments show that lasting political progress requires more than fleeting euphoria. Still, France’s win seemed to matter, at least for a while. One illustration of this came soon after the victory when the comedian Trevor Noah joked that “Africa won the World Cup.” For Noah, this was cause for celebration. But the quip provoked a broad backlash because it echoed the far right’s complaint that the team was “not French enough.”
Gérard Araud, the French ambassador to the U.S., said that Noah’s joke “legitimizes” racism. “Unlike the United States of America, France does not refer to their citizens based on their race, religion or origin,” he wrote, emphasizing a tenet of France’s republican universalism. Many of the French players reiterated Araud’s sentiment. “The France of today is a France full of different colors,” the midfielder Paul Pogba said. “We all feel French. We are all happy to wear this jersey.” The defender Benjamin Mendy replied to a post that had added foreign-flag emojis to various players’ names, changing them back to the Tricolor. “Fixed 😉,” he wrote.
A broad consensus emerged after the 2018 victory and during the early days of President Emmanuel Macron’s first term that discouraged racial division and identity politics—what the French call communautarisme. It sidelined the far right’s complaints of “replacement” and emphasized an accommodating, assimilating color-blindness.
Today, France has become the world’s greatest incubator of soccer talent. The Paris region accounted for more players in the World Cup than any other metropolitan area on Earth. The country has become so dominant that it produces too many players for Les Bleus: Of the 1,248 athletes in this year’s tournament, 99 were born in France. In acknowledgment of their popularity, Jordan Bardella, the 30-year-old head of the RN, praised the team as it advanced through the competition—and held his tongue when it was eliminated.
Mbappé, the captain of Les Bleus, has begun to channel the team’s growing cultural capital into politics. Speaking with Vanity Fair earlier this year, he expressed concern about a potential National Rally victory in 2027. “People sometimes think that because you have money, because you’re famous, these kinds of problems don’t affect you,” he said, referring to the social divisions that the party’s rhetoric foments. “But it affects me, because I know what it means, and what kind of consequences it can have for my country when those kinds of people take control.” Wembanyama, for his part, has been more reserved. In 2024, shortly before parliamentary elections in which RN won its largest ever number of seats, he spoke diplomatically: “Political choices are personal. But I think that, at least for me, it’s important to move away from extremes.”
Still, no matter how vocal they are or how desirable they make diversity seem, athletes or other exceptional individuals can never legitimize a multicultural society on their own. As Americans have learned in the post-Obama era, symbols of integration are necessary but insufficient. In fact, they can even help racists and xenophobes conceal regression. Many people on the far right, for example, point to the popularity of an Obama or an Mbappé as evidence that their society is already tolerant enough.
For all that the French right gets wrong, some critics of rapid demographic change identify serious problems, even if they go on to draw grotesque conclusions. A 10-minute walk from the plaza where I watched Les Bleus win in 2018, a quasi-permanent tent city is populated by migrants from Africa and the Middle East, one of the many lingering reminders that France has failed to address a refugee crisis that has been exacerbated by increased migration.
Cultural representation cannot solve this problem. France needs leaders who can improve the material outcomes of all citizens, irrespective of racial, religious, or ethnic lines. Moreover, politicians must safeguard France’s common life, which means addressing the instability that migration can cause, rather than forfeiting that task to the ascendant far right. Only then can representation lead to mutual recognition, obligation, and belonging.
Any society should applaud diversity in moments of triumph. But that applause won’t mean much if its leadership can’t manage demographic change in the intervals between.
At 10 p.m. in early July, Long Island was sweltering under a heat dome. As bedroom lights dimmed and heavy clouds rolled in, a raccoon ambled onto the porch of a split-level home, found a crack in a sliding door, and slipped inside. He tongue-polished a lasagna tray on the floor near the kitchen counter before waddling back into the damp fug of the summer night.
Soon after, a raccoon with a facial scar and a thin tail entered, ate a snack, and flopped down for a nap. Next, a pair of juvenile raccoons scrounged for kibble and used the dining chairs as a wrestling ring, hanging upside down from the rungs and tackling one another like luchadores. By dawn, a procession of animals had cycled through—one piebald kitty, a bunch of raccoons—like the stoned overnight patrons of a roadside Waffle House.
Marilyn Smith knows that things have escalated. Maybe, she concedes, they have even gotten out of hand. (I am giving her a pseudonym, because she worries her neighbors will call the police.) Years ago, she encountered a colony of feral cats on a nearby trail. She got involved in trapping and neutering the animals, and started feeding them. “I don’t know whether the word was out, but a gazillion cats came to my house,” Smith told me. She set up hard-shell crates for them in her backyard. She left her garage and porch doors open a bit so they could shelter during storms. In time, the feral cats became her cats, some with names, Tootsie and Little Baby and Foxy. “They trust me,” she said, describing how one curls up around her neck and sleeps on her pillow. Still, they often prefer to be outdoors.
Smith would not keep out the cats. Thus, she could not keep out the raccoons, who quickly lost whatever fear of her they might have had. They started appearing in her bedroom in the middle of the night, searching her pocketbook for kibble. They began breaking into her cabinets. They began dominating the tin cans she left out, making the cats caterwaul. Smith considered quelling the resource conflicts by feeding the species separately: cat food inside during the day, raccoon food outside at night. (Cats are crepuscular carnivores; raccoons are nocturnal omnivores.) It wouldn’t work, she concluded. She ended up slinging orders for half a dozen cats and who knows how many raccoons 24/7, the customer always right. “The other day, the raccoons rejected a kind of cookie; maybe it was oatmeal,” she said. “They took it and spit it out. So that’s off the list.” They don’t like stuffing or brussels sprouts either.
As much as Smith loves animals, the situation is not exactly working for her. Her kitchen smells like stale ammonia; the stairs to an abandoned seating area are dotted with scat. She can’t travel. She can’t sleep. She can’t host (people, I mean). She has had to get two rounds of rabies shots—scratched by accident, not on purpose, she swears. She could simply shut her doors at night, I suggest, or go on a vacation, encouraging the animals to fend for themselves. “I’m very neurotic,” she responds. “When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I think is: They’re hungry.”
Smith is living out the “If you give a mouse a cookie” parable. She is also unwittingly taking part in an extraordinary, unfolding ecological shift. Unlike many native species—ocelots, Shenandoah salamanders, Xerces blue butterflies, Key Largo wood rats—raccoons flourish in human settlements. Over time, their population has increased and their attitude toward the people in those settlements has changed. Urban raccoons have become more curious and less reactive. They have also started to develop distinctive traits common among tame species and uncommon among wild ones. The differences are so pronounced that some academics believe that raccoons are actively domesticating, much like the curious wolves that eventually transformed into pugs.
Last year, Frontiers in Zoology published a study on the phenomenon; mainstream media outlets picked up on it; social-media posts heralded the arrival of the “new American pet.” The research confirmed what many Americans suspected about the creatures rummaging through their recycling bins. More than that, it confirmed what many Americans wanted to believe about these floofy, fluffy cuddle-badgers, with their picklock fingers and Zorro masks. Raccoons aren’t just raccoons, after all. They’re up there with capybaras and deep-sea anglerfish as objects of unhinged human adoration. They’re trash pandas. They’re Rocket and Bandit. They’re Jimothy, a spry, deformed raccoon who has become so popular in Seattle that its city council officially decreed it “Jimothy Summer.”
Standing in Smith’s kitchen, surrounded by lasagna pans and scat, I half-felt that I was watching Darwinian evolution occurring in real time, and even wondered whether the raccoons of Long Island somehow wanted to domesticate. Then again, that might be nothing more than what a lot of Americans want to believe.
The raccoon’s thriving represents not merely a remarkable triumph but a remarkable turnaround. When Christopher Columbus arrived on Long Island (the one in the Bahamas, not New York) in 1492, he noticed a local fisherman keeping some strange kind of dogs as pets. He was far from the last colonist to be confused by the species, described nearly 300 years later by the explorer Jonathan Carver as possessing a badger’s body, fox’s head, dog’s muzzle, cat’s tail, and sharp claws that let it climb like a monkey. (Raccoons are not a close relative of any of those animals; they are procyonids, related to coatis and kinkajous.) Following Columbus’s second voyage, Europeans ate so many of the animals that they went extinct on the island of Hispaniola.
Over the following centuries, colonizers exploited raccoons not so much for food as for fur. Jaunty association with the king of the wild frontier notwithstanding, raccoon pelts were considered inferior to beaver pelts, “common or even undignified for men of means and ambition,” Daniel Heath Justice, a professor of Indigenous studies at the University of British Columbia, writes. Nevertheless, in the early 1800s, settlers trapped and skinned hundreds of thousands of raccoons a year.
The population busted, thanks to humans. Then it boomed, thanks to humans. Hunters and ranchers eradicated raccoons’ natural predators, among them coyotes, wolves, and bobcats. Developers and farmers destroyed their natural habitats, woodlands and marshlands, but built unnatural environments that suited raccoons just as well. Raccoons survive on farms and in fields. They thrive in suburbs and cities, thanks to gardens and trash cans and dumps. From the 1930s to the late ’80s—as dozens of native species went extinct, and even as the raccoon-pelt trade picked up again—the raccoon population soared 20-fold.
Humans don’t deserve all the credit for raccoons’ success, I should note. The animals are one of nature’s star utility players. They are opportunistic feeders, eating just about anything available. They are opportunistic den-makers, exploiting whatever natural cavities or fabricated structures they find. They are intelligent, having long memories and a knack for problem-solving. “If you give them a puzzle and change the rules, they go with it,” Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at UC Berkeley, told me. “They have this creativity.” On top of that, they are dexterous enough to shuck oysters, unscrew jars, unlatch gates, and pick knots.
Raccoons have not only taken advantage of their anthropogenic environment but also adapted to it, much like pigeons, ants, rats, and crows. Urban raccoons have smaller ranges and live at higher densities than their wildland counterparts, for instance. Suzanne MacDonald, an animal psychologist at York University, told me: “They’re much more social in the city.” (Same.) Urban raccoons have also become less afraid of the unfamiliar, more eager to solve puzzles, more flexible in their routines, and less flighty. “We’ve ended up with animals that don’t run away from us, and instead come sit on our patio furniture,” as MacDonald put it.
This nascent friendliness could be due to habituation—raccoons learning to play nice, more or less. It could also be due to what MacDonald describes as “runaway selection.” Affable raccoons probably eat more than aggressive raccoons do. They probably have more kits. Those kits are probably more likely to survive, more likely to be affable themselves, and more likely to give birth. In this way, generation by generation, the raccoon population would become less lion and more kitty cat.
Docility is domestication’s linchpin trait, because it allows for an animal’s safe handling and captive breeding. (You wouldn’t let an animal hang around the homestead if it kept trying to fight you.) Yet the strongest evidence that raccoons are evolving straight through the crack in the porch door has nothing to do with their attitudes. It has to do with their snouts.
In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin observed that domesticated animals share a set of peculiar phenotypic traits, among them floppy ears, bright colors, and curly fur. Humans were not purposefully breeding those features into existence; rather, they seemed to be the byproducts of a deep and cryptic biological process. (“When man goes on selecting, and thus augmenting, any peculiarity, he will almost certainly unconsciously modify other parts of the structure,” Darwin wrote.) “Domestication syndrome” remained a mystery for 140 years after the voyage of The Beagle. Why those specific features? How did they show up in animals as varied as angora rabbits and zebrafish? In 2014, scientists published a tidy and compelling theory: Docile animals have a heritable “deficiency” of a specific kind of stem cell that appears in vertebrate embryos, migrates through the body, affects tissue development, and disappears. Through these neural crest cells, rubbable tummies lead to furry tummies.
As well as short snouts—3.6 percent shorter in urban raccoons than in rural raccoons, according to the study in Frontiers in Zoology. “That doesn’t sound like a lot. And in a sense, it is not a lot. But if you think about these animals potentially only being at the very early beginning stages of domestication, that is still a fairly clear signal,” Raffaela Lesch, the lead author on the study, told CNN. (Lesch declined to speak with me.)
I found this evidence tantalizing yet bewildering. The United States’ cities and suburbs exploded in size after World War II—less than 100 years and 100 raccoon generations ago. Didn’t evolution take eons? Could raccoons really develop domesticated traits so fast?
Yes, Melinda Zeder, a zooarchaeologist and emeritus curator at the Smithsonian Institution, told me. Domestication can take thousands of years or tens of years, as a Soviet experiment on silver foxes demonstrated. In the late 1950s, the geneticists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut decided to see how friendly they could make foxes, and how fast they could do so. Within a dozen generations, the animals exhibited “major changes in behavior, as well as in coat color” and other ancillary traits, Zeder said. Within decades, the foxes looked more like fluffy kittens and acted more like silly puppies.
In a sense, raccoons are arriving on our doorsteps half-domesticated. They naturally tolerate close proximity to humans, unlike wolverines. They pose no mortal threat to humans, unlike hippos. They love human food, unlike pandas. They are highly intelligent, unlike ostriches. (Ostriches, it turns out, are real morons.) They’re so compatible with us that our earliest written records describe them as pets, the Taino fisherman’s unusual dogs. In the centuries before the United States urbanized, writers frequently emphasized the raccoon’s tamability. Foxes “are never to be made familiar,” the naturalist John Lawson wrote in 1709. “The Raccoon is.” (Little did he know about the Soviets.) President Calvin Coolidge even kept a raccoon, Rebecca, in the White House, walking her around on a leash. I wondered: If raccoons naturally possess many of the features common in companion animals, why aren’t they common companion animals? Why haven’t raccoons already domesticated?
“They’re not really a very good model” for domestication, Bonnie Beaver, a veterinarian and an acclaimed animal behaviorist at Texas A&M University, told me. Domesticated animals reproduce easily, early, and often, for instance; female raccoons are fertile as few as three days a year. Raccoons might be curious about and comfortable near humans but are innately solitary too. They don’t like roommates and won’t put up with taskmasters. Plus, Beaver said, raccoons “do not have limited agility.”
I did not quite understand what she meant until I spoke with Dave, who had impulsively bought a raccoon kit from an exotic-pet dealer a few years ago and now cohabits with “a total asshole.” (Dave asked me to give him a pseudonym. Keeping a raccoon is legal in a dozen states, though not the one where he lives.) Things started out promisingly. “Blondie learned a bunch of tricks,” Dave told me, describing how the raccoon would climb onto his shoulders to get a Cheez-It or a shred of turkey jerky, careen through the tunnel mazes that Dave would build for him, snooze in a big dog crate, and use a litter box.
Then Blondie “went psycho.” (Raccoons become much more aggressive when they hit puberty, at around 1 year of age.) He ate through the cords to Dave’s television, gaming system, and computer. He shredded books. He expanded a crack in the living-room drywall into a hole big enough for Dave to climb into. He escaped from his crate and trashed the kitchen in the middle of the night. When placed in a stronger enclosure, the raccoon injured himself trying to get out. Today, Dave is the only person that Blondie tolerates as a handler, and tolerate is a generous description. The raccoon is “mad” all the time. I asked Dave whether he wished he had never gotten his pet. He would not say that, but he expressed frustration at the exotic-animal dealer, himself, and his miserable raccoon.
Experts were not exactly surprised. Breeders play up raccoons’ supposed good nature and definite good looks. Social-media accounts showcase the animals freezing when a light turns on or freaking out when they dunk cotton candy in water and it disappears. (In many languages, raccoons are called “the ones who wash,” “wash-bears,” or “washing-rats.” They submerge objects in water to heighten the sensory capacity of their finger pads, not unlike gourmands who bring Brie to room temperature before they take a whiff.) Cute, sure. But raccoons are “incredibly destructive,” Nessie O’Neil, a raccoon biologist, told me. “They’re so smart compared to cats and dogs—wildly, wildly intelligent—and because of that, they are very, very hard to keep entertained.” Captive raccoons require specially designed, large enclosures and “puzzle after puzzle” to work on, she said. “They like textures, they like to pick at things, they like to tear things apart, and it’s fun for them.”
Other experts were more emphatic. “These are mesocarnivores. Would you accept having a coyote in your house?” MacDonald, of York University, said. “Why the hell would you take a crazy little wild animal that is exceedingly bitey—why would you want this destructive force in your house?” She added: “In the U.S., I have to say, you folks are insane. In Canada, raccoons are a protected species” and thus generally illegal to keep as pets.
Raccoons pose a serious bite risk to humans and are carriers of rabies, leptospirosis, and the raccoon roundworm. In humans, the parasite can cause nausea, fatigue, ataxia, liver disease, blindness, and comatosis. The condition is rare, thank Bandit, and sometimes treatable. But many people do not realize they are infected until they fall over while walking down the stairs or notice a squiggle in their vision, meaning a roundworm is floating in their eyeball. Oh, and the roundworm’s eggs can survive for years, even after being doused with soap, detergent, and bleach.
Raccoons make humans sick; humans make raccoons sick too. One of the simpler ways to keep a captive raccoon pliable is to feed it all the time, MacDonald pointed out. As a result, many raccoon pets are obese and diabetic, as are many of their wild cousins. They are also prone to kidney disease. On a human diet, they die, O’Neil said. “I see it all the time. It’s horrible.”
If raccoons were domesticated animals, they would be far different. Their brains would have shrunken; their neuroendocrine system would have transformed. These changes would have made them calmer, more trainable, less intelligent, and less aggressive. Maybe they would have developed sheepdog shags, Dalmatian spots, poodle curls, and Boston terrier bug eyes too.
Perhaps this genetic drift started 100 raccoon generations ago, and if we wait a few hundred raccoon generations more, the process would be complete. Yet scientists cautioned me against thinking about domestication as a sequential, deterministic, and unidirectional process—get on at wolf; get off at Yorkie. Some species start domesticating and then stop, such as gazelles. Some domesticate and later rewild, such as dingoes. Some seem domesticated but are not, like quokkas. Some are considered domesticated and perhaps should not be, such as cats—really. Sure, kitties have velvety meow-meows and tortoiseshell coats, and they like to figure-eight through people’s legs. Yet we haven’t been selectively breeding the animals for long, Beaver pointed out, meaning that we “haven’t really messed cats up.” Neither have we made them need us, or even listen to us. Indeed, they do perfectly well on their own.
Domesticated is a tidy term for systems as chaotic and complicated and changeable as nature itself, and a term that “robs you of really understanding what’s going on,” as Zeder put it. When we talked about raccoons, she used two other words to describe them: The creatures might have developed a “commensal” relationship with humans, meaning that they benefit and we do not. (Remora have a commensal thing going on with sharks; demodex face mites have a commensal thing going on with us.) Or they might be “synanthropes,” relying on humans without us ever throwing open the porch door to them. (Lice, cockroaches, bedbugs, and pigeons are synanthropes.)
Marilyn and Dave aside, humans aren’t throwing the porch door open to raccoons. Everyone in possession of a brain knows that they are a rabies vector and a bite risk. Anyone in possession of a trash can, feed bin, vegetable garden, root cellar, chicken coop, barn, attic, garage, woodshed, crawl space, dumpster, corn field, or DoorDash order on their front steps knows that they are a nuisance, if a stuffy-sized nuisance with a habit of standing on their hind legs and making uppy-arms. Thus, these marauding chubbos are missing the most fundamental domesticating force: human desire. We don’t have a lot of use for raccoons, Beaver pointed out: “We don’t need them for food. We don’t need them for clothing. We don’t need them as companions.” We aren’t going to start mass-raccoon-breeding operations or begin putting them under the tree at Christmas. Like a lot of species, they might remain half-domesticated forever.
What about last year’s attention-getting study, then? The paper is just one, researchers told me. Plus, the analysis is based on photographs submitted by members of the public, meaning the sample might not be big enough and sound enough to draw conclusions. The greater risk lies in its interpretation. “People hear what they think is a scientific justification for having this animal as a pet,” O’Neil said. “People are not going to do enough digging to realize, Oh my God, this is a really bad idea.”
As for Smith, she recognizes that what she is doing is probably not a good idea, but she can’t stop. She described putting lasagna trays filled with kibble, peanut-butter sandwiches, crackers, and leftovers out one recent night. The raccoons were still hungry, she guessed. They ventured upstairs and ransacked her daughter’s old bedroom.
“No one would believe this,” she said, but “I’m really a dog lover.”
At 10 p.m. in early July, Long Island was sweltering under a heat dome. As bedroom lights dimmed and heavy clouds rolled in, a raccoon ambled onto the porch of a split-level home, found a crack in a sliding door, and slipped inside. He tongue-polished a lasagna tray on the floor near the kitchen counter before waddling back into the damp fug of the summer night.
Soon after, a raccoon with a facial scar and a thin tail entered, ate a snack, and flopped down for a nap. Next, a pair of juvenile raccoons scrounged for kibble and used the dining chairs as a wrestling ring, hanging upside down from the rungs and tackling one another like luchadores. By dawn, a procession of animals had cycled through—one piebald kitty, a bunch of raccoons—like the stoned overnight patrons of a roadside Waffle House.
Marilyn Smith knows that things have escalated. Maybe, she concedes, they have even gotten out of hand. (I am giving her a pseudonym, because she worries her neighbors will call the police.) Years ago, she encountered a colony of feral cats on a nearby trail. She got involved in trapping and neutering the animals, and started feeding them. “I don’t know whether the word was out, but a gazillion cats came to my house,” Smith told me. She set up hard-shell crates for them in her backyard. She left her garage and porch doors open a bit so they could shelter during storms. In time, the feral cats became her cats, some with names, Tootsie and Little Baby and Foxy. “They trust me,” she said, describing how one curls up around her neck and sleeps on her pillow. Still, they often prefer to be outdoors.
Smith would not keep out the cats. Thus, she could not keep out the raccoons, who quickly lost whatever fear of her they might have had. They started appearing in her bedroom in the middle of the night, searching her pocketbook for kibble. They began breaking into her cabinets. They began dominating the tin cans she left out, making the cats caterwaul. Smith considered quelling the resource conflicts by feeding the species separately: cat food inside during the day, raccoon food outside at night. (Cats are crepuscular carnivores; raccoons are nocturnal omnivores.) It wouldn’t work, she concluded. She ended up slinging orders for half a dozen cats and who knows how many raccoons 24/7, the customer always right. “The other day, the raccoons rejected a kind of cookie; maybe it was oatmeal,” she said. “They took it and spit it out. So that’s off the list.” They don’t like stuffing or brussels sprouts either.
As much as Smith loves animals, the situation is not exactly working for her. Her kitchen smells like stale ammonia; the stairs to an abandoned seating area are dotted with scat. She can’t travel. She can’t sleep. She can’t host (people, I mean). She has had to get two rounds of rabies shots—scratched by accident, not on purpose, she swears. She could simply shut her doors at night, I suggest, or go on a vacation, encouraging the animals to fend for themselves. “I’m very neurotic,” she responds. “When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I think is: They’re hungry.”
Smith is living out the “If you give a mouse a cookie” parable. She is also unwittingly taking part in an extraordinary, unfolding ecological shift. Unlike many native species—ocelots, Shenandoah salamanders, Xerces blue butterflies, Key Largo wood rats—raccoons flourish in human settlements. Over time, their population has increased and their attitude toward the people in those settlements has changed. Urban raccoons have become more curious and less reactive. They have also started to develop distinctive traits common among tame species and uncommon among wild ones. The differences are so pronounced that some academics believe that raccoons are actively domesticating, much like the curious wolves that eventually transformed into pugs.
Last year, Frontiers in Zoology published a study on the phenomenon; mainstream media outlets picked up on it; social-media posts heralded the arrival of the “new American pet.” The research confirmed what many Americans suspected about the creatures rummaging through their recycling bins. More than that, it confirmed what many Americans wanted to believe about these floofy, fluffy cuddle-badgers, with their picklock fingers and Zorro masks. Raccoons aren’t just raccoons, after all. They’re up there with capybaras and deep-sea anglerfish as objects of unhinged human adoration. They’re trash pandas. They’re Rocket and Bandit. They’re Jimothy, a spry, deformed raccoon who has become so popular in Seattle that its city council officially decreed it “Jimothy Summer.”
Standing in Smith’s kitchen, surrounded by lasagna pans and scat, I half-felt that I was watching Darwinian evolution occurring in real time, and even wondered whether the raccoons of Long Island somehow wanted to domesticate. Then again, that might be nothing more than what a lot of Americans want to believe.
The raccoon’s thriving represents not merely a remarkable triumph but a remarkable turnaround. When Christopher Columbus arrived on Long Island (the one in the Bahamas, not New York) in 1492, he noticed a local fisherman keeping some strange kind of dogs as pets. He was far from the last colonist to be confused by the species, described nearly 300 years later by the explorer Jonathan Carver as possessing a badger’s body, fox’s head, dog’s muzzle, cat’s tail, and sharp claws that let it climb like a monkey. (Raccoons are not a close relative of any of those animals; they are procyonids, related to coatis and kinkajous.) Following Columbus’s second voyage, Europeans ate so many of the animals that they went extinct on the island of Hispaniola.
Over the following centuries, colonizers exploited raccoons not so much for food as for fur. Jaunty association with the king of the wild frontier notwithstanding, raccoon pelts were considered inferior to beaver pelts, “common or even undignified for men of means and ambition,” Daniel Heath Justice, a professor of Indigenous studies at the University of British Columbia, writes. Nevertheless, in the early 1800s, settlers trapped and skinned hundreds of thousands of raccoons a year.
The population busted, thanks to humans. Then it boomed, thanks to humans. Hunters and ranchers eradicated raccoons’ natural predators, among them coyotes, wolves, and bobcats. Developers and farmers destroyed their natural habitats, woodlands and marshlands, but built unnatural environments that suited raccoons just as well. Raccoons survive on farms and in fields. They thrive in suburbs and cities, thanks to gardens and trash cans and dumps. From the 1930s to the late ’80s—as dozens of native species went extinct, and even as the raccoon-pelt trade picked up again—the raccoon population soared 20-fold.
Humans don’t deserve all the credit for raccoons’ success, I should note. The animals are one of nature’s star utility players. They are opportunistic feeders, eating just about anything available. They are opportunistic den-makers, exploiting whatever natural cavities or fabricated structures they find. They are intelligent, having long memories and a knack for problem-solving. “If you give them a puzzle and change the rules, they go with it,” Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at UC Berkeley, told me. “They have this creativity.” On top of that, they are dexterous enough to shuck oysters, unscrew jars, unlatch gates, and pick knots.
Raccoons have not only taken advantage of their anthropogenic environment but also adapted to it, much like pigeons, ants, rats, and crows. Urban raccoons have smaller ranges and live at higher densities than their wildland counterparts, for instance. Suzanne MacDonald, an animal psychologist at York University, told me: “They’re much more social in the city.” (Same.) Urban raccoons have also become less afraid of the unfamiliar, more eager to solve puzzles, more flexible in their routines, and less flighty. “We’ve ended up with animals that don’t run away from us, and instead come sit on our patio furniture,” as MacDonald put it.
This nascent friendliness could be due to habituation—raccoons learning to play nice, more or less. It could also be due to what MacDonald describes as “runaway selection.” Affable raccoons probably eat more than aggressive raccoons do. They probably have more kits. Those kits are probably more likely to survive, more likely to be affable themselves, and more likely to give birth. In this way, generation by generation, the raccoon population would become less lion and more kitty cat.
Docility is domestication’s linchpin trait, because it allows for an animal’s safe handling and captive breeding. (You wouldn’t let an animal hang around the homestead if it kept trying to fight you.) Yet the strongest evidence that raccoons are evolving straight through the crack in the porch door has nothing to do with their attitudes. It has to do with their snouts.
In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin observed that domesticated animals share a set of peculiar phenotypic traits, among them floppy ears, bright colors, and curly fur. Humans were not purposefully breeding those features into existence; rather, they seemed to be the byproducts of a deep and cryptic biological process. (“When man goes on selecting, and thus augmenting, any peculiarity, he will almost certainly unconsciously modify other parts of the structure,” Darwin wrote.) “Domestication syndrome” remained a mystery for 140 years after the voyage of The Beagle. Why those specific features? How did they show up in animals as varied as angora rabbits and zebrafish? In 2014, scientists published a tidy and compelling theory: Docile animals have a heritable “deficiency” of a specific kind of stem cell that appears in vertebrate embryos, migrates through the body, affects tissue development, and disappears. Through these neural crest cells, rubbable tummies lead to furry tummies.
As well as short snouts—3.6 percent shorter in urban raccoons than in rural raccoons, according to the study in Frontiers in Zoology. “That doesn’t sound like a lot. And in a sense, it is not a lot. But if you think about these animals potentially only being at the very early beginning stages of domestication, that is still a fairly clear signal,” Raffaela Lesch, the lead author on the study, told CNN. (Lesch declined to speak with me.)
I found this evidence tantalizing yet bewildering. The United States’ cities and suburbs exploded in size after World War II—less than 100 years and 100 raccoon generations ago. Didn’t evolution take eons? Could raccoons really develop domesticated traits so fast?
Yes, Melinda Zeder, a zooarchaeologist and emeritus curator at the Smithsonian Institution, told me. Domestication can take thousands of years or tens of years, as a Soviet experiment on silver foxes demonstrated. In the late 1950s, the geneticists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut decided to see how friendly they could make foxes, and how fast they could do so. Within a dozen generations, the animals exhibited “major changes in behavior, as well as in coat color” and other ancillary traits, Zeder said. Within decades, the foxes looked more like fluffy kittens and acted more like silly puppies.
In a sense, raccoons are arriving on our doorsteps half-domesticated. They naturally tolerate close proximity to humans, unlike wolverines. They pose no mortal threat to humans, unlike hippos. They love human food, unlike pandas. They are highly intelligent, unlike ostriches. (Ostriches, it turns out, are real morons.) They’re so compatible with us that our earliest written records describe them as pets, the Taino fisherman’s unusual dogs. In the centuries before the United States urbanized, writers frequently emphasized the raccoon’s tamability. Foxes “are never to be made familiar,” the naturalist John Lawson wrote in 1709. “The Raccoon is.” (Little did he know about the Soviets.) President Calvin Coolidge even kept a raccoon, Rebecca, in the White House, walking her around on a leash. I wondered: If raccoons naturally possess many of the features common in companion animals, why aren’t they common companion animals? Why haven’t raccoons already domesticated?
“They’re not really a very good model” for domestication, Bonnie Beaver, a veterinarian and an acclaimed animal behaviorist at Texas A&M University, told me. Domesticated animals reproduce easily, early, and often, for instance; female raccoons are fertile as few as three days a year. Raccoons might be curious about and comfortable near humans but are innately solitary too. They don’t like roommates and won’t put up with taskmasters. Plus, Beaver said, raccoons “do not have limited agility.”
I did not quite understand what she meant until I spoke with Dave, who had impulsively bought a raccoon kit from an exotic-pet dealer a few years ago and now cohabits with “a total asshole.” (Dave asked me to give him a pseudonym. Keeping a raccoon is legal in a dozen states, though not the one where he lives.) Things started out promisingly. “Blondie learned a bunch of tricks,” Dave told me, describing how the raccoon would climb onto his shoulders to get a Cheez-It or a shred of turkey jerky, careen through the tunnel mazes that Dave would build for him, snooze in a big dog crate, and use a litter box.
Then Blondie “went psycho.” (Raccoons become much more aggressive when they hit puberty, at around 1 year of age.) He ate through the cords to Dave’s television, gaming system, and computer. He shredded books. He expanded a crack in the living-room drywall into a hole big enough for Dave to climb into. He escaped from his crate and trashed the kitchen in the middle of the night. When placed in a stronger enclosure, the raccoon injured himself trying to get out. Today, Dave is the only person that Blondie tolerates as a handler, and tolerate is a generous description. The raccoon is “mad” all the time. I asked Dave whether he wished he had never gotten his pet. He would not say that, but he expressed frustration at the exotic-animal dealer, himself, and his miserable raccoon.
Experts were not exactly surprised. Breeders play up raccoons’ supposed good nature and definite good looks. Social-media accounts showcase the animals freezing when a light turns on or freaking out when they dunk cotton candy in water and it disappears. (In many languages, raccoons are called “the ones who wash,” “wash-bears,” or “washing-rats.” They submerge objects in water to heighten the sensory capacity of their finger pads, not unlike gourmands who bring Brie to room temperature before they take a whiff.) Cute, sure. But raccoons are “incredibly destructive,” Nessie O’Neil, a raccoon biologist, told me. “They’re so smart compared to cats and dogs—wildly, wildly intelligent—and because of that, they are very, very hard to keep entertained.” Captive raccoons require specially designed, large enclosures and “puzzle after puzzle” to work on, she said. “They like textures, they like to pick at things, they like to tear things apart, and it’s fun for them.”
Other experts were more emphatic. “These are mesocarnivores. Would you accept having a coyote in your house?” MacDonald, of York University, said. “Why the hell would you take a crazy little wild animal that is exceedingly bitey—why would you want this destructive force in your house?” She added: “In the U.S., I have to say, you folks are insane. In Canada, raccoons are a protected species” and thus generally illegal to keep as pets.
Raccoons pose a serious bite risk to humans and are carriers of rabies, leptospirosis, and the raccoon roundworm. In humans, the parasite can cause nausea, fatigue, ataxia, liver disease, blindness, and comatosis. The condition is rare, thank Bandit, and sometimes treatable. But many people do not realize they are infected until they fall over while walking down the stairs or notice a squiggle in their vision, meaning a roundworm is floating in their eyeball. Oh, and the roundworm’s eggs can survive for years, even after being doused with soap, detergent, and bleach.
Raccoons make humans sick; humans make raccoons sick too. One of the simpler ways to keep a captive raccoon pliable is to feed it all the time, MacDonald pointed out. As a result, many raccoon pets are obese and diabetic, as are many of their wild cousins. They are also prone to kidney disease. On a human diet, they die, O’Neil said. “I see it all the time. It’s horrible.”
If raccoons were domesticated animals, they would be far different. Their brains would have shrunken; their neuroendocrine system would have transformed. These changes would have made them calmer, more trainable, less intelligent, and less aggressive. Maybe they would have developed sheepdog shags, Dalmatian spots, poodle curls, and Boston terrier bug eyes too.
Perhaps this genetic drift started 100 raccoon generations ago, and if we wait a few hundred raccoon generations more, the process would be complete. Yet scientists cautioned me against thinking about domestication as a sequential, deterministic, and unidirectional process—get on at wolf; get off at Yorkie. Some species start domesticating and then stop, such as gazelles. Some domesticate and later rewild, such as dingoes. Some seem domesticated but are not, like quokkas. Some are considered domesticated and perhaps should not be, such as cats—really. Sure, kitties have velvety meow-meows and tortoiseshell coats, and they like to figure-eight through people’s legs. Yet we haven’t been selectively breeding the animals for long, Beaver pointed out, meaning that we “haven’t really messed cats up.” Neither have we made them need us, or even listen to us. Indeed, they do perfectly well on their own.
Domesticated is a tidy term for systems as chaotic and complicated and changeable as nature itself, and a term that “robs you of really understanding what’s going on,” as Zeder put it. When we talked about raccoons, she used two other words to describe them: The creatures might have developed a “commensal” relationship with humans, meaning that they benefit and we do not. (Remora have a commensal thing going on with sharks; demodex face mites have a commensal thing going on with us.) Or they might be “synanthropes,” relying on humans without us ever throwing open the porch door to them. (Lice, cockroaches, bedbugs, and pigeons are synanthropes.)
Marilyn and Dave aside, humans aren’t throwing the porch door open to raccoons. Everyone in possession of a brain knows that they are a rabies vector and a bite risk. Anyone in possession of a trash can, feed bin, vegetable garden, root cellar, chicken coop, barn, attic, garage, woodshed, crawl space, dumpster, corn field, or DoorDash order on their front steps knows that they are a nuisance, if a stuffy-sized nuisance with a habit of standing on their hind legs and making uppy-arms. Thus, these marauding chubbos are missing the most fundamental domesticating force: human desire. We don’t have a lot of use for raccoons, Beaver pointed out: “We don’t need them for food. We don’t need them for clothing. We don’t need them as companions.” We aren’t going to start mass-raccoon-breeding operations or begin putting them under the tree at Christmas. Like a lot of species, they might remain half-domesticated forever.
What about last year’s attention-getting study, then? The paper is just one, researchers told me. Plus, the analysis is based on photographs submitted by members of the public, meaning the sample might not be big enough and sound enough to draw conclusions. The greater risk lies in its interpretation. “People hear what they think is a scientific justification for having this animal as a pet,” O’Neil said. “People are not going to do enough digging to realize, Oh my God, this is a really bad idea.”
As for Smith, she recognizes that what she is doing is probably not a good idea, but she can’t stop. She described putting lasagna trays filled with kibble, peanut-butter sandwiches, crackers, and leftovers out one recent night. The raccoons were still hungry, she guessed. They ventured upstairs and ransacked her daughter’s old bedroom.
“No one would believe this,” she said, but “I’m really a dog lover.”
Last May, President Trump held an “intimate” dinner at his members-only golf club in Virginia for the top-220 investors in $TRUMP, a meme coin he launched days before the start of his second term that, by the end of 2025, would generate $636 million for him. About 100 protesters gathered outside in rain jackets, baseball caps, and muddy sneakers to confront the dinner guests arriving in shiny dress shoes, tuxedos, and black Cadillac SUVs. They pointed to the dinner as the encapsulation of the troublesome grift of Trump’s second term: trading personal access to the president in exchange for cash and funneling money to a Trump-owned property. “This is like the Mount Everest of corruption,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a Democrat, said that night, standing before a crowd spotted with signs reading GRIFTER IN CHIEF and DON THE CON.
But a year later, when Trump hosted the winners of the second iteration of the so-called crypto contest at a luncheon gala in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, no large group of protesters greeted the attendees. The private Florida resort is a logistically more challenging location for a protest than a golf club 45 minutes from downtown Washington. But the ever-intensifying rush of ethics concerns had also made the crypto contest fade into the background, even for activists who closely follow each allegation. The Mar-a-Lago edition of the feast didn’t make headlines the way the first had done. “I think maybe it is because people have become more inured to some of what was going on, and it wasn’t breaking through in the same way,” Lisa Gilbert, a co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer-rights group that helped organize the protest last year, told me. “As profiteering becomes the norm, it’s harder to explain why it’s outrageous.”
Washington’s ethics watchdog groups thought they were prepared for Trump’s second term. During his first four years in the White House, they had quickly learned which possible misuses of taxpayer funds to focus on, which apparent case of profiteering off the presidency to anchor a report around, and which allegations of nepotism or self-dealing to try to pitch to journalists as worthy of a story. Most such allegations frequently generated shock and anger, and some surveys of Trump voters found that they were outraged at several of his Cabinet secretaries for spending millions in taxpayer dollars on first-class air travel and personal security, or Trump’s family businesses making millions while he was in office. Sometimes, the backlash prompted accountability: Three of Trump’s Cabinet members were forced out, lawmakers from both parties launched inquiries into alleged ethics violations, and top officials reimbursed the government for travel originally paid for by taxpayers.
This term, the watchdogs are even more alarmed by what they’re witnessing, and they are racing to keep up. Public Citizen added litigators and researchers, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hired an expert in cryptocurrency. Last year, the Campaign Legal Center filed its highest number of ethics complaints in a single year and launched a tracker of “corrupt transactions” to ensure that “the exhaustion factor” doesn’t get in the way of keeping a careful count of such instances, even if the media no longer closely cover each one, Saurav Ghosh, the group’s director of federal-campaign-finance reform, told me.
That doesn’t mean the public has grown indifferent. Although polls show that voters have long considered most politicians to be corrupt, a recent survey by Echelon Insights found that the share of Americans who see corruption as the biggest issue facing the nation is now 17 percent, up from 8 percent in December 2024. But there has also been a dampening of objections to possible instances of self-dealing, especially among Republicans, and the examples of accountability are scarce.
Within a few days of the inauguration last year, the administration had fired 17 inspectors general, dismantling oversight of taxpayer funds, quid-pro-quo business ventures, and ethics-law violations. The president made roughly $2.2 billion last year, according to The New York Times, a windfall that came mostly from cryptocurrency deals, a new source of income that now forms the bulk of his net worth at a time when his administration has made eroding crypto oversight part of its economic agenda. He also booked up to $117 million in legal settlements, mostly with major tech and media companies, and $125 million from foreign golf and real-estate deals—roughly twice the revenue generated from such deals in 2017. The president has also made more than 21,000 securities trades, often in quick bursts tied to market-moving moments he sparked, according to a Bloomberg analysis. His sons’ portfolio of defensive-technology companies, meanwhile, has collectively generated more than $3 billion in direct government business since Eric and Donald Trump Jr. made their investments, The Washington Post found.
“I think the big difference in this term is just how blatant all of it is. In the first term, there was at least a head nod towards Trump as president being separate from Trump the businessman,” Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for CREW, told me. “Now that’s gone.”
The White House sees things differently. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told me in an email that the allegations of corruption are “the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.” She said that the president’s assets are “held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions” and that he has no conflicts of interest.
But it’s hard to deny the shift in scale from Trump’s previous four years in office. One of the many examples of how much has changed: In the fall of 2019, the administration announced that the G7 summit would be held at Trump’s golf club in Doral, Florida, which alarmed not just watchdog groups but also Republican lawmakers who didn’t think the president should award his own company a government contract. Two days later, Trump retreated and blamed “Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility” for his reversal.
This March, the Doral golf club played host to the Shield of the Americas summit, a gathering of Latin American and Caribbean leaders to discuss combatting drug cartels. Trump has announced that the G20 summit later this year will be held at the same hotel because it’s “the best location” for the job. The reaction from GOP members of Congress to the news ranged from silent to “thrilled.”
Many of the major ethics scandals of Trump’s first term seem almost quaint: Housing Secretary Ben Carson, or possibly his wife, spent $31,000 on a dining set. Ivanka Trump endorsed Goya beans. EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt spent $43,000 to install a phone booth.
What seemed to generate a drumbeat of headlines then was the cost of Trump’s travel, especially to his own properties. Although Trump had once ridiculed President Obama for taking a 2012 vacation that cost “taxpayers millions of dollars,” he often traveled several times a month to his private properties in Florida and New Jersey. Less than two months into his first term, The Washington Post reported that Trump had spent nearly one of every three days in office at one of his own properties. A Government Accountability Office report found that the president’s four trips to Mar-a-Lago in one month of 2017 cost taxpayers a total of $13.6 million.
A year and a half into his second term, Trump has made 270 visits to his properties, marking a 14 percent jump compared with the same point in his first term, according to the CREW tracker (which updates daily). Trump’s taxpayer tab for golfing trips hit $70 million last fall, HuffPostcalculated. If he continues golfing and traveling at the current pace, the analysis showed, this term will run taxpayers $300 million—twice what they paid during his first term. Those costs include protecting the president and his family; the Secret Service spent nearly $100,000 at Trump-owned properties in the first five months of the second term.
A related category of recurring stories from the first term concerned Trump’s Cabinet members and their questionable taxpayer-funded travel. In the fall of 2017, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price became the administration’s first Cabinet member forced to resign following outcry over his use of public funds for work trips in private jets. Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin’s firing followed after, among other things, the public learned of a taxpayer-funded trip to the United Kingdom he’d taken with his wife. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke left the administration in 2018 following several scandals involving misuse of government-funded travel, including to Dallas and the Virgin Islands. And Pruitt, the EPA secretary, faced scrutiny over repeated trips home to Tulsa and abroad on the taxpayers’ dime. In Trump’s second term, the focus of outrage is rarely the trips themselves, but rather what happens on them—for example, FBI Director Kash Patel’s taxpayer-funded trip to Hawaii, where he went on a “VIP snorkel” at a Pearl Harbor memorial, and his trip to Milan for the Olympics, during which he was filmed drinking in the locker room with the U.S. men’s hockey team.
One of the many scandals surrounding Kristi Noem when she led the Department of Homeland Security involved a $70 million jet supposedly intended for high-profile deportations, as well as the purchase of two luxury planes for $172 million. Her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, uses one of the planes to fly home to Oklahoma most weekends, and the department says he picks up the bill, although they won’t provide details on how that’s calculated. Another is reportedly being used by Melania Trump.
Yet another category of ethical issues that has gained relatively little notice is the volume of merchandise being sold by the president and those in his orbit. In February 2017, a weekslong controversy followed Kellyanne Conway, then a top aide to Trump, promoting Ivanka Trump’s clothing line during a Fox & Friends appearance. Conway faced bipartisan accusations of violating a statute that prohibits federal employees from using “their public office for their own private gain,” including through “the endorsement of any product, service, or enterprise.” The Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee pushed for a prompt review of Conway’s statements, including possible disciplinary action.
Now brand promotion and trademarked gear have become so ubiquitous in the White House that the Oval Office study—a small room that past presidents have used for tasks such as reviewing speech drafts and making calls—has been transformed into a shrine for baseball caps and collectibles emblazoned with MAGA, Gulf of America, and TRUMP 2028. Officials throughout the administration are known to enjoy self-branded merchandise (maybe Patel most ardently). This past spring, the Trump Organization applied for a trademark for “Trump 250” images to allow the president to profit from clothing or knickknack sales tied to America’s 250th birthday. The Trump Organization’s flagship store launched 168 new products in time for Trump’s second Inauguration Day, according to a count by CREW. Truth Social, Trump’s primary form of communication with the public, is his own company as well—meaning that anyone who wants to hear directly from the president must do so on an app where their clicks and page views generate ad revenue for Trump. (Many of those ads are for his own products.) The company recently launched a service selling to Wall Street early access to the president’s digital communications, which frequently move markets.
But perhaps the most significant category of self-dealing allegations is the one with no first-term analogue. A few days before Trump’s second inauguration, an Emirati royal backed a deal to purchase a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s primary crypto venture, for half a billion dollars. The deal, reportedly signed by Eric Trump, included $187 million up front and at least $31 million set to go toward entities linked to the family of Steve Witkoff, a lead Middle East negotiator for the administration and a co-founder of the crypto firm. A majority of the wealth that Trump has amassed this term, according to financial disclosures, comes from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses. World Liberty Financial applied for a national-trust bank charter in January and is expected to receive permission to operate like a bank in the near future, NOTUSreported this summer, a move that could give executives yet another way to direct money toward the president.
For Trump’s birthday, in June, a bloody spectacle arrived on the White House South Lawn, courtesy of UFC Freedom 250; World Liberty Financial was an “official partner,” and fighters were paid bonuses in “stablecoins,” cryptocurrency issued by the company. The Trump family also used the fight as an opportunity to sell physical silver and gold coins—some priced as high as $12,000—featuring Trump’s face and purportedly “designed by President Trump” through a collaboration between UFC and the Trump Organization. The Public Integrity Project, a legal nonprofit, sued to try to stop the event, calling it “a volcano of corruption,” but failed. Several other groups, including CREW and Public Citizen, raised questions and condemned the festivities. But the fights continued as planned.
Last May, President Trump held an “intimate” dinner at his members-only golf club in Virginia for the top-220 investors in $TRUMP, a meme coin he launched days before the start of his second term that, by the end of 2025, would generate $636 million for him. About 100 protesters gathered outside in rain jackets, baseball caps, and muddy sneakers to confront the dinner guests arriving in shiny dress shoes, tuxedos, and black Cadillac SUVs. They pointed to the dinner as the encapsulation of the troublesome grift of Trump’s second term: trading personal access to the president in exchange for cash and funneling money to a Trump-owned property. “This is like the Mount Everest of corruption,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a Democrat, said that night, standing before a crowd spotted with signs reading GRIFTER IN CHIEF and DON THE CON.
But a year later, when Trump hosted the winners of the second iteration of the so-called crypto contest at a luncheon gala in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, no large group of protesters greeted the attendees. The private Florida resort is a logistically more challenging location for a protest than a golf club 45 minutes from downtown Washington. But the ever-intensifying rush of ethics concerns had also made the crypto contest fade into the background, even for activists who closely follow each allegation. The Mar-a-Lago edition of the feast didn’t make headlines the way the first had done. “I think maybe it is because people have become more inured to some of what was going on, and it wasn’t breaking through in the same way,” Lisa Gilbert, a co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer-rights group that helped organize the protest last year, told me. “As profiteering becomes the norm, it’s harder to explain why it’s outrageous.”
Washington’s ethics watchdog groups thought they were prepared for Trump’s second term. During his first four years in the White House, they had quickly learned which possible misuses of taxpayer funds to focus on, which apparent case of profiteering off the presidency to anchor a report around, and which allegations of nepotism or self-dealing to try to pitch to journalists as worthy of a story. Most such allegations frequently generated shock and anger, and some surveys of Trump voters found that they were outraged at several of his Cabinet secretaries for spending millions in taxpayer dollars on first-class air travel and personal security, or Trump’s family businesses making millions while he was in office. Sometimes, the backlash prompted accountability: Three of Trump’s Cabinet members were forced out, lawmakers from both parties launched inquiries into alleged ethics violations, and top officials reimbursed the government for travel originally paid for by taxpayers.
This term, the watchdogs are even more alarmed by what they’re witnessing, and they are racing to keep up. Public Citizen added litigators and researchers, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hired an expert in cryptocurrency. Last year, the Campaign Legal Center filed its highest number of ethics complaints in a single year and launched a tracker of “corrupt transactions” to ensure that “the exhaustion factor” doesn’t get in the way of keeping a careful count of such instances, even if the media no longer closely cover each one, Saurav Ghosh, the group’s director of federal-campaign-finance reform, told me.
That doesn’t mean the public has grown indifferent. Although polls show that voters have long considered most politicians to be corrupt, a recent survey by Echelon Insights found that the share of Americans who see corruption as the biggest issue facing the nation is now 17 percent, up from 8 percent in December 2024. But there has also been a dampening of objections to possible instances of self-dealing, especially among Republicans, and the examples of accountability are scarce.
Within a few days of the inauguration last year, the administration had fired 17 inspectors general, dismantling oversight of taxpayer funds, quid-pro-quo business ventures, and ethics-law violations. The president made roughly $2.2 billion last year, according to The New York Times, a windfall that came mostly from cryptocurrency deals, a new source of income that now forms the bulk of his net worth at a time when his administration has made eroding crypto oversight part of its economic agenda. He also booked up to $117 million in legal settlements, mostly with major tech and media companies, and $125 million from foreign golf and real-estate deals—roughly twice the revenue generated from such deals in 2017. The president has also made more than 21,000 securities trades, often in quick bursts tied to market-moving moments he sparked, according to a Bloomberg analysis. His sons’ portfolio of defensive-technology companies, meanwhile, has collectively generated more than $3 billion in direct government business since Eric and Donald Trump Jr. made their investments, The Washington Post found.
“I think the big difference in this term is just how blatant all of it is. In the first term, there was at least a head nod towards Trump as president being separate from Trump the businessman,” Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for CREW, told me. “Now that’s gone.”
The White House sees things differently. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told me in an email that the allegations of corruption are “the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.” She said that the president’s assets are “held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions” and that he has no conflicts of interest.
But it’s hard to deny the shift in scale from Trump’s previous four years in office. One of the many examples of how much has changed: In the fall of 2019, the administration announced that the G7 summit would be held at Trump’s golf club in Doral, Florida, which alarmed not just watchdog groups but also Republican lawmakers who didn’t think the president should award his own company a government contract. Two days later, Trump retreated and blamed “Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility” for his reversal.
This March, the Doral golf club played host to the Shield of the Americas summit, a gathering of Latin American and Caribbean leaders to discuss combatting drug cartels. Trump has announced that the G20 summit later this year will be held at the same hotel because it’s “the best location” for the job. The reaction from GOP members of Congress to the news ranged from silent to “thrilled.”
Many of the major ethics scandals of Trump’s first term seem almost quaint: Housing Secretary Ben Carson, or possibly his wife, spent $31,000 on a dining set. Ivanka Trump endorsed Goya beans. EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt spent $43,000 to install a phone booth.
What seemed to generate a drumbeat of headlines then was the cost of Trump’s travel, especially to his own properties. Although Trump had once ridiculed President Obama for taking a 2012 vacation that cost “taxpayers millions of dollars,” he often traveled several times a month to his private properties in Florida and New Jersey. Less than two months into his first term, The Washington Post reported that Trump had spent nearly one of every three days in office at one of his own properties. A Government Accountability Office report found that the president’s four trips to Mar-a-Lago in one month of 2017 cost taxpayers a total of $13.6 million.
A year and a half into his second term, Trump has made 270 visits to his properties, marking a 14 percent jump compared with the same point in his first term, according to the CREW tracker (which updates daily). Trump’s taxpayer tab for golfing trips hit $70 million last fall, HuffPostcalculated. If he continues golfing and traveling at the current pace, the analysis showed, this term will run taxpayers $300 million—twice what they paid during his first term. Those costs include protecting the president and his family; the Secret Service spent nearly $100,000 at Trump-owned properties in the first five months of the second term.
A related category of recurring stories from the first term concerned Trump’s Cabinet members and their questionable taxpayer-funded travel. In the fall of 2017, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price became the administration’s first Cabinet member forced to resign following outcry over his use of public funds for work trips in private jets. Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin’s firing followed after, among other things, the public learned of a taxpayer-funded trip to the United Kingdom he’d taken with his wife. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke left the administration in 2018 following several scandals involving misuse of government-funded travel, including to Dallas and the Virgin Islands. And Pruitt, the EPA secretary, faced scrutiny over repeated trips home to Tulsa and abroad on the taxpayers’ dime. In Trump’s second term, the focus of outrage is rarely the trips themselves, but rather what happens on them—for example, FBI Director Kash Patel’s taxpayer-funded trip to Hawaii, where he went on a “VIP snorkel” at a Pearl Harbor memorial, and his trip to Milan for the Olympics, during which he was filmed drinking in the locker room with the U.S. men’s hockey team.
One of the many scandals surrounding Kristi Noem when she led the Department of Homeland Security involved a $70 million jet supposedly intended for high-profile deportations, as well as the purchase of two luxury planes for $172 million. Her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, uses one of the planes to fly home to Oklahoma most weekends, and the department says he picks up the bill, although it won’t provide details on how that’s calculated. Another is reportedly being used by Melania Trump.
Yet another category of ethical issues that has gained relatively little notice is the volume of merchandise being sold by the president and those in his orbit. In February 2017, a weekslong controversy followed Kellyanne Conway, then a top aide to Trump, promoting Ivanka Trump’s clothing line during a Fox & Friends appearance. Conway faced bipartisan accusations of violating a statute that prohibits federal employees from using “their public office for their own private gain,” including through “the endorsement of any product, service, or enterprise.” The Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee pushed for a prompt review of Conway’s statements, including possible disciplinary action.
Now brand promotion and trademarked gear have become so ubiquitous in the White House that the Oval Office study—a small room that past presidents have used for tasks such as reviewing speech drafts and making calls—has been transformed into a shrine for baseball caps and collectibles emblazoned with MAGA, Gulf of America, and TRUMP 2028. Officials throughout the administration are known to enjoy self-branded merchandise (maybe Patel most ardently). This past spring, the Trump Organization applied for a trademark for “Trump 250” images to allow the president to profit from clothing or knickknack sales tied to America’s 250th birthday. The Trump Organization’s flagship store launched 168 new products in time for Trump’s second Inauguration Day, according to a count by CREW. Truth Social, Trump’s primary form of communication with the public, is his own company as well—meaning that anyone who wants to hear directly from the president must do so on an app where their clicks and page views generate ad revenue for Trump. (Many of those ads are for his own products.) The company recently launched a service selling to Wall Street early access to the president’s digital communications, which frequently move markets.
But perhaps the most significant category of self-dealing allegations is the one with no first-term analogue. A few days before Trump’s second inauguration, an Emirati royal backed a deal to purchase a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s primary crypto venture, for half a billion dollars. The deal, reportedly signed by Eric Trump, included $187 million up front and at least $31 million set to go toward entities linked to the family of Steve Witkoff, a lead Middle East negotiator for the administration and a co-founder of the crypto firm. A majority of the wealth that Trump has amassed this term, according to financial disclosures, comes from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses. World Liberty Financial applied for a national-trust bank charter in January and is expected to receive permission to operate like a bank in the near future, NOTUSreported this summer, a move that could give executives yet another way to direct money toward the president.
For Trump’s birthday, in June, a bloody spectacle arrived on the White House South Lawn, courtesy of UFC Freedom 250; World Liberty Financial was an “official partner,” and fighters were paid bonuses in “stablecoins,” cryptocurrency issued by the company. The Trump family also used the fight as an opportunity to sell physical silver and gold coins—some priced as high as $12,000—featuring Trump’s face and purportedly “designed by President Trump” through a collaboration between UFC and the Trump Organization. The Public Integrity Project, a legal nonprofit, sued to try to stop the event, calling it “a volcano of corruption,” but failed. Several other groups, including CREW and Public Citizen, raised questions and condemned the festivities. But the fights continued as planned.
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