Editor’s Note:Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
President Trump weighs escalation of the war with Iran as criticism of the conflict grows. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss some of the frustration from Republican lawmakers, voters, and conservative media.
Among Republicans in Congress, discontent is growing over “a lack of answers from this administration on what the objective is, what the timeline is, what the ramifications are, and what the end game actually is” in Iran, Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck, said last night. “When members of Congress are asked to fund billions and billions of dollars, when their constituents are the ones being put on the line for this, patience obviously wears quite thin.”
Joining guest moderator Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss this and more: Caldwell; Adam Harris, a host of Radio Atlantic; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News; and David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times.
The only thing anyone can reliably tell you about middle age is that it’s in the middle of life. What’s the middle? Well, it’s after the beginning, and before the end.
Okay, we can do a little better than that: Middle age comes after young adulthood, and before what we used to call “old age” but now might more decorously refer to as “older age” or “late life.” But to get more specific, to figure out when precisely middle age begins and ends, is a daunting challenge.
The average life expectancy in the United States is 79. So if you cut that in half, 39.5 is the precise statistical midpoint of the average American life. But that doesn’t reveal much—middle age isn’t just a point in time but a phase of life. How long does that phase last? When does it start? When does it end? How can you tell when you’re in it? These, it turns out, are very fraught questions.
I am 35. Is a 35-year-old middle-aged? If you ask my friends, they’d be quick to say I’m “still young,” but the word still carries a note of reassurance that I find troubling. Is a 66-year-old retiree middle-aged? Maybe, maybe not—but they sure don’t want to be called “old.” Is a 29-year-old middle aged? Surely not, yet TheWall Street Journalran a story a couple of years ago about 20-somethings who claimed they felt middle-aged.
When pollsters ask the populace about when middle age begins and ends, they get a variety of answers. In one survey, the median response put middle age as lasting from 40 to 60. In another, the average British person said that middle age begins at 35 (hello!) and ends at 58. Meanwhile, 55 percent of Americans think 65 is still middle-aged. And according to that Journal story, 20 percent of people ages 25 to 34 say they feel middle-aged.
If anyone could authoritatively answer the question “When is middle age?” I figured it would be Margie Lachman. She is a psychologist studying midlife at Brandeis University and the author of the recent book Primetime: A New Vision for Midlife; she’s also worked on the massive longitudinal Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study for all of the 30-plus years it’s been running. Yet even she cannot decide on a firm definition for when middle age begins and ends. Her official definition, in her book and her research, is 40 to 60, “plus or minus 10 years.” Even among scholars, the boundaries of middle age are fuzzy.
One reason for that fuzziness, Lachman told me, is that how you think about middle age depends on what age you currently are. The older people are, the later they tend to think middle age starts and ends. According to data Lachman shared from MIDUS, people in their 20s define middle age as starting around 39 or 40 and ending around 53, 54, or 55. Those numbers inch up with each successive decade of life. The oldest group in the study, people in their 70s, say middle age begins around 48 or 49 and ends from 62 to 65.
Ageism is likely to blame for a lot of this. In a youth-obsessed culture, it makes sense that people want to consider themselves young for as long as possible. In Primetime, Lachman writes that she’s found that many people in their early 40s “actively resist the idea that they are middle-aged,” and many in their late 60s or 70s “insist that they are still middle-aged.” Indeed, research shows that the older someone is, the later they think old age begins, too. And middle age has its own branding problem: “The No. 1 word attached to midlife is crisis,” Chip Conley—the founder of the Modern Elder Academy, an organization that offers workshops for making the most of midlife, and the author of Learning to Love Midlife—told me. (This association persists despite evidence showing the midlife crisis is mostly a myth.)
On top of that, the appearance of aging itself is changing. Celebrities get plastic surgery, Botox, and fillers to retain or restore youthful faces—and are more open about it than they once were—further confounding how we perceive the phases of life. (Saying the 70-year-old Kris Jenner is “old” feels odd when, after her much-publicized facelift, her facial skin is stretched so taut you can scarcely detect a single wrinkle.) Even the faces of ordinary people who don’t get work done are generally aging more slowly, The Cut reported, because overall, people smoke less than they used to and use more sunscreen. Wrinkle-reducing retinol is widely available in creams, gels, and serums at any old drug store. Anti-aging is now such a normal part of beauty routines that even some children are using products to prevent wrinkles they’re nowhere near having.
This isn’t the only factor shifting back our aging goalposts. Many milestones that people once used to define adulthood (marriage, home ownership, having kids) are happening later in life, if they happen at all. Given the association of middle age with responsibility, perhaps people don’t feel middle-aged unless they’re tied down in some way. Indeed, some of the 20-somethings who said they felt middle-aged attributed it to becoming parents or taking on major work responsibilities at a young age.
Also complicating the definition of middle age is the fact that people are living longer. And as they do so, their quality of life in their later years will vary depending on their physical and cognitive limitations. Because American culture has such a negative view of what it means to be “old”—all aches and pains and forgetting where you put the car keys—if someone is aging and feeling good, they may think I can’t possibly be old, because I can do everything I want to do, Lachman said. And if they don’t feel old, they may continue to identify as middle-aged well into their 60s and beyond.
Increasing longevity is one of the reasons that Conley sees middle age as a very long stage of life. He believes it lasts from 35 to 75, in three stages: “early midlife,” from 35 to 50; the “core of midlife,” from 50 to 60; and “later midlife,” from 60 to 75. Although 75 might seem to be pushing it, given that Americans’ average lifespan is 79, Conley pointed out that “for math reasons,” the longer someone has lived, the longer they are likely to live. That is to say: 79 is an average that takes into account all deaths from people of all ages. And if you make it to 65, you’ve dodged many of the things that might have killed you when you were younger. According to the Social Security Administration, the life expectancy of a 65-year-old American is actually 83 for men and 86 for women. And I haven’t seen anyone try to claim that an 80-something is still middle-aged.
Lachman played along gamely as I fixated on the numbers, but really, that’s not how she likes to define middle age. “Chronological age does not tell you much about anybody, except how long they’ve lived,” she told me. She prefers to think of middle age in terms of the roles people take on in their life and in their community. Being middle-aged, to her, means truly being in the middle—having people both younger and older than you looking to you for help and guidance. That might mean you’re in the sandwich generation: caring for children and starting to support aging parents. Or it might mean you’re a leader in your workplace, mentoring younger colleagues and relied on by older ones. “In midlife, you’re giving more than you’re getting in general,” Lachman said.
This definition of midlife also has ambiguous boundaries, which Lachman readily admits. But despite the vagueness around when middle age actually is, both she and Conley believe it’s a useful term. “Being in the middle of anything, I think, is a really meaningful point,” Lachman said. “It’s a great opportunity to look back and look ahead.”
At this point in my quest to define middle age, I started losing my grip a little. If you want to be precise about it, a life really only has one beginning and one end, and the rest is all middle. So a 2-year-old could be middle-aged. A 90-year-old could be middle-aged. We’re all born middle-aged, and then we die.
Just kidding. Ultimately, middle age might be better understood as a feeling that creeps up on you than as a clear turning point. No one thing brings it on, though parenthood, caregiving, or other responsibilities could fuel it. It’s a time of life that is often both exhausting and fulfilling: when you’ve lived enough life to have learned some lessons, and also have plenty of time ahead of you to make changes. That might be accurate, but it’s still not satisfying. I want the numbers! So I asked Lachman: If you have to choose, when does middle age start and end? “45 to 65,” she said. So there you have it. I’m officially “still young” for 10 more years, if anyone’s asking.
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This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Over the past two decades, Matt Seaton discovered something about himself: He loves building walls. Seaton started by mending a stone wall at the Vermont home his wife inherited from her parents, and then, he writes, “bit by bit—which is the way with walls—my interest and knowledge deepened until what had begun as recreation morphed into a hobby job, mending other people’s walls.”
Eventually, Seaton’s new passion changed his life: “In what probably struck friends and family as an act of lunacy, I quit my day job as an editor at this magazine and became a part-time waller.”
Not all of our passions turn into part-time jobs, but Seaton’s story is a reminder that sometimes the things that bring us the most joy are the ones we stumble upon. Today’s newsletter explores how to seek out—or just open yourself up to—a unique new hobby.
How leisure time became work: The rise of the attention economy has accelerated our habit of engaging with our hobbies in a data-driven way, Shirley Li wrote in 2021.
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “I moved to Rhinebeck, New York, to a modest condo in July of 2023,” Maria F, 73, writes. “This sunset over the pond directly off of my porch appeared three days after I moved in. Three years later, I continue to welcome evenings with these ever-changing sunsets, grateful for these moments that remind us to be present.”
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
In 2010, the National Park Service installed an outdoor exhibit at the President’s House Site near Independence Hall in Philadelphia, which told the stories not just of George Washington but also of those he’d enslaved. One was Ona Judge, who escaped and evaded Washington’s yearslong effort to recapture her. Their names—Judge, Hercules Posey, Christopher Sheels, Austin, Richmond, Giles, Moll, Paris, and Joe—are still carved into a stone wall in huge letters.
In January, the Trump administration took that exhibit down, and last week, after months of legalwrangling, the NPS installed a new exhibit at the site, one that fundamentally changes the story visitors will find there. Where once the exhibit focused squarely on the individuals Washington enslaved, the new exhibit views Washington’s ties to slavery through the lens of his personal conscience, extensively highlighting his statements opposing slavery. In the sole panel now summarizing Washington’s participation, nearly every paragraph makes some mention of his ostensible antislavery views.
The new exhibit at the President’s House Site offers a profoundly misleading interpretation of Washington’s history with slavery, denying visitors an opportunity to contemplate the irreconcilable tensions between American slavery and American freedom. Rather than focus on the decades he spent actively enslaving other human beings—including while president in Philadelphia—the exhibit now uses Washington’s private statements questioning slavery and his posthumous emancipation of the people he enslaved to diminish the importance of the institution to his life. These revisions distort our history and deprive Americans from encountering history’s full complexity at the site where it happened.
The changes are part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to rewrite and sanitize American history following a March 2025 executive order targeting the Smithsonian and other federal history installations and a corresponding order from the U.S. Department of the Interior two months later. As a result, NPS staff have been ordered to change exhibits, publications, and other materials, particularly historical information that the administration views as insufficiently patriotic or disparaging toward prominent historical figures.
The revisions at the President’s House Site have drawn intense scrutiny, exemplifying both the aims and the limits of the broader effort. Even where the text acknowledges that Washington owed his status and livelihood to slavery and maneuvered to keep people in bondage, the interpretation focuses mostly on his “private doubts” about slavery and his private approval of efforts to gradually abolish it. Most notable, the new exhibit emphasizes the emancipation provisions of Washington’s last will and testament. “In death,” a panel explains, “George Washington committed his most public and personal anti-slavery act.” This is true and important, but it's presented in a way that overshadows Washington's lifetime of enslaving.
The Trump administration is hardly the first to find this selective editing of Washington’s legacy useful. For more than two centuries, highlighting Washington’s antislavery bona fides has functioned as a politically convenient rhetorical tool. Where Americans once invoked this interpretation of Washington to bring an end to slavery, conservatives are now reviving it in a way that denies the institution really mattered at all.
For the entirety of his adult life, George Washington enslaved other human beings. He bought and sold people, exploited their labor to build his substantial wealth, directed their punishment, and pursued those who attempted to escape. Over the last two decades of his life, however, Washington privately voiced his uneasiness, expressing an opposition to separating enslaved families and a wish to see Congress or state legislatures gradually end the institution. In his will, Washington directed that all of the 123 enslaved people he owned outright be emancipated following his and his wife’s deaths. (Martha Washington freed them early, about a year later, at the beginning of 1801; she died in 1802.) That group included a little fewer than half of the more than 300 enslaved at Mount Vernon at the time; the rest were owned by the estate of Martha Washington’s first husband, leaving Washington legally unable to free them.
When Washington died, in December 1799, some Americans immediately began shaping Washington’s legacy in a way that would support the cause of Black freedom. Two weeks after Washington’s death—and just one day after Henry Lee forever memorialized Washington as “first in the hearts of his countrymen”—Richard Allen, a free Black minister and a co-founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, delivered a eulogy. “We, my friends, have peculiar cause to bemoan our loss,” Allen told his congregation of Black Philadelphians. This was not only because of Washington’s singular contributions to the nation. Allen also claimed Washington supported Black freedom. “He whose wisdom the nations revered,” Allen said, “thought we had a right to liberty.”
Allen stood on firm ground. Remarkably, he was among the very first to mention publicly that Washington had freed the people he enslaved. Through this final act, Allen believed, Washington had redeemed himself: “He dared to do his duty, and wipe off the only stain with which man could ever reproach him,” Allen said. ”He ‘let the oppressed go free.’”
As the antislavery movement gained momentum in the decades that followed, abolitionists used this same framing. In 1838, John Quincy Adams relayed Washington’s antislavery legacy to the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society and concluded that “George Washington was thus, in the broadest and most comprehensive sense of the word, an ABOLITIONIST.” Even William Lloyd Garrison—whose abolitionist newspaper The Liberator published blistering denunciations of Washington’s slaveholding—at times saw the rhetorical utility of touting Washington’s actions against slavery. In 1848, Garrison told a packed crowd in Boston’s Faneuil Hall that he had encountered a case of a man who was declared insane because he used his will to free his slaves. Garrison pointed dramatically to the portrait of Washington that flanked the stage and bellowed, “There! There is a man who was insane when he died! There stands George Washington, who by his will emancipated his slaves!”
In 1857, the Washington biographer and social-reform advocate Caroline Kirkland wrote that Washington believed slavery was “an evil so obvious” that the United States would soon abolish it. “On the whole, the testimony of Washington against slavery is clear and explicit enough, and no one can quote him as its apologist,” Kirkland wrote, “although we may regret that he had not time to turn his attention more decidedly and efficiently toward its abolition.”
Other abolitionists balked at this celebration of Washington’s antislavery credentials. In 1853, the abolitionist Parker Pillsbury mocked the reverence some had for Washington’s will. “I have heard a good deal said before of deathbed repentance,” Pillsbury said, “but I never heard it very highly extolled.” Instead, some abolitionists condemned Washington in speeches and newspapers, reminding audiences that he was “a slaveholder to the day of his death.” The abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, for example, in 1858 even called Washington “a traitor to the cause of freedom.”
Yet for some abolitionists, the potential benefit of this intellectual sleight of hand was well worth it. Their selective invocations of Washington may have obscured his complicity, but some abolitionists truly believed doing so would help bring the horror of American slavery to an end. If George Washington saw fit to free the people he enslaved, the argument went, then what could be more American than ending slavery?
When war finally brought slavery to an end, this distorted view of Washington ceased to be of use as a political emblem. As much of the nation adopted the Lost Cause narrative about slavery following the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, many white Americans saw no need to discuss Washington’s ties to slavery at all, preferring instead a heroic depiction of Washington, focused on his many contributions to the country, that could unify the fractured nation.
In the century that followed, however, some Americans still insisted on reckoning with Washington’s involvement in slavery. During both the Jim Crow era and the civil-rights movement, Black scholars and activists in particular emphasized Washington’s slaveholding to make clear the deep roots of modern racial injustices. Meanwhile, decades of new scholarship since the mid-20th century have revealed profound insights about the lives of enslaved people and the central role of slavery in American history, and the movement for racial reckoning in 2020 vaulted this knowledge to the front of public consciousness.
Whereas once Washington’s antislavery credentials were wielded to bring slavery to an end, today some conservatives highlight Washington’s ostensible opposition to slavery to deemphasize slavery’s foundational importance in American history. Against a growing insistence that slavery has profoundly shaped American society in ways the country has yet to fully reckon with, they now selectively highlight Washington’s purportedly antislavery views to wave slavery away as a momentary aberration in America’s glorious history of freedom.
The Trump administration articulated this logic clearly in 2021 in the report from the 1776 Commission, convened at the tail end of President Trump’s first term as a conservative rejoinder to The New York Times’ “1619 Project.” “The most common charge levelled against the founders, and hence against our country itself,” the report states, “is that they were hypocrites who didn’t believe their stated principles, and therefore the country they built rests on a lie.” It follows this with a plain assertion—“This charge is untrue”—and argues that it damages civic cohesion.
To counter these claims, the report leans on the antislavery Washington. “George Washington owned slaves,” the report states, “but came to detest the practice, and wished for ‘a plan adopted for the abolition of it.’” It continues: “By the end of his life, he freed all the slaves in his family estate,” ignoring the fact that the emancipation occurred after Washington’s death and applied to fewer than half of those who were enslaved at Mount Vernon. The report wields Washington’s purported opposition to slavery to assert that any study of slavery’s place in American history should focus on efforts to abolish it—a rejoinder of sorts to “The 1619 Project” and the 2020 demonstrations for racial justice, during which more Americans came to recognize the way slavery had fundamentally shaped the nation.
This take on Washington appears elsewhere too. Florida’s revised social-studies curriculum from 2023 includes Washington on a list of figures instrumental in ending slavery, and it ignores his role in perpetuating it. In the 1776 Curriculum, from the Christian, conservative Hillsdale College, the authors offer a similar (if slightly more nuanced) take on the matter.
The Trump administration has entirely ignored Washington’s ties to slavery in other contexts (such as in the fleet of mobile museums traveling around the country this year), but officials seemed to recognize that total erasure wasn’t tenable at the President’s House Site, given the focus of the former exhibit. Instead, the new exhibit dilutes the story of slavery by surrounding it with material that has little to do with the President’s House at all, such as biographies of individual Founders and the ins and outs of various constitutional structures. It frames information about slavery almost exclusively through the lens of antislavery progress.
Other panels still offer very brief biographies of the nine people Washington enslaved at the site, which used to be nearly the entirety of the exhibit; it actually includes them twice, seemingly in an effort to cover more space. One panel also describes the successful efforts of Ona Judge and Hercules Posey to escape from slavery. Yet even these panels are peppered with qualifications, for example: twice mentioning that Washington purchased tickets for enslaved people to visit the theater.
Where Washington is discussed directly, it’s mostly his opposition to slavery that comes through. Even Washington’s schemes to undermine Pennsylvania’s gradual-abolition laws—he periodically rotated the people he enslaved out of the state before the law would free them—are countered with some other antislavery action, such as his private statements hoping for abolition and his eventual emancipation of the people he enslaved, without ever interrogating that contradiction.
More broadly, although the statements in the new exhibit are individually factual, they’re put together in a way that’s fundamentally misleading. A few lines in Washington’s private correspondence and his posthumous emancipation orders are given far more weight than a lifetime of owning Black Americans as property—a misplaced emphasis that distorts the history and also robs his later act of emancipation of meaning.
In a statement after the NPS first removed the previous exhibit, the Department of Interior said, “The President has directed federal agencies to review interpretive materials to ensure accuracy, honesty, and alignment with shared national values.” Last week, following the completion of these changes, the department acknowledged “the evils of slavery including its injustices and hypocrisies.” It defended the new exhibit by saying, “These new panels are full of historical context.”
Yet, despite the administration’s ability to parrot the jargon of historians and museum professionals, the politically motivated revisions it has forced across the National Park Service and elsewhere are anathema to standards and ethics of those fields.
These losses are especially acute in Philadelphia. Nearly 175 years ago, Pillsbury, the abolitionist, lamented that Americans heaped praise on Washington while ignoring the enslaved people who made his life and achievements possible. “No glory has ever covered their names; no honor has ever been paid to their memory,” he said. “No monument commemorates their dismal toil.” The President’s House Site exhibit once corrected that imbalance. Not anymore.
Many Americans see this whitewashed, censored version of the nation’s past for what it is. Time and again, a majority of Americans express their desire to engage with a full and accurate American history. In Philadelphia, the Trump administration has had to use the power of the federal government to ensure they won’t get it.
If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, election denial. After he baselessly insisted that there had been rampant mail-in voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 11 states made mail-voting access more restrictive. His repeated false claims in 2024 that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets led to real threats against the community. Trump builds a world, and by virtue of his power and influence, all of us end up living in it in some way or another.
That era may be coming to a close, in large part because of the way he and his administration have bungled the war in Iran. Trump seems unable to spin this conflict, divert sufficient attention away from it with a new controversy, or end it outright. His social-media posts, which once acted as a de facto assignment editor for the mainstream media, no longer command the same attention or respect. Now, interspersed with AI slop and inexplicable middle-of-the-night reposting binges, Trump’s Truth Social screeds sound more like the fevered ramblings of a radicalized Facebook uncle. For the past five months, he’s been trying to convince the American public (or at least his Truth Social followers) that the war is over, or ending, or a rousing success. His administration is even retroactively changing on the Pentagon’s website the number of American service members who have died in the conflict. But no one seems to be falling for it. His posts don’t have the juice. His alternate universe is no match for the harsh reality of war.
In the Trumpian vision of the world, the U.S. invasion of Iran was not only necessary but also urgent: In February, Trump alleged that Iran was attempting to rebuild its nuclear-weapons program and had continued developing long-range missiles that were threatening U.S. allies and could reach the United States “soon.” But Trump’s claim is dubious, at least according to a March 2025 U.S. intelligence assessment, which noted that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” Experts also cast doubt on the strength of Iran’s missiles: “There is little evidence that Iran could build missiles that reach the United States in the near future,” Emma Sandifer of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation told FactCheck.org in March.
Justifications aside, the attacks, which were not authorized by Congress, were immediately unpopular with Trump’s base, which elected him in part for his isolationist tendencies. (On Election Night 2024, Trump even remarked, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”) Iran’s predictable retaliation, closing the Strait of Hormuz and drastically cutting off crucial supply routes for oil and other natural resources, subsequently drove up prices for goods around the world—immediately exacerbating the unpopularity of the conflict and shocking the markets. The fallout appeared to take Trump by surprise, and in the early weeks of the war, he used his bully pulpit for damage control: On March 9, with Brent-crude futures spiking to nearly $120 a barrel, he gave an interview to CBS News suggesting that the “war is very complete, pretty much.” Oil futures swiftly plunged to less than $90 a barrel.
Trump used this tactic repeatedly. On March 20, he posted on Truth Social that the U.S. was “close to meeting our objectives” in Iran. Oil futures dropped. On March 23, he signaled that discussions between the U.S. and Iran were productive, leading Brent crude futures to plummet by 13 percent. Each time, Trump offered no real proof of his claims, yet markets responded to his version of the story. An NBC News analysis found 32 examples of the president suggesting that the war was coming to a close. “We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!” Trump posted on March 7, in response to the United Kingdom considering sending military support. In late March, Trump posted that operations were “winding down”; that same day, he rejected a suggestion from Pope Leo that there should be a cease-fire. In early April, he posted that Iran had asked for a cease-fire; later, Iran called his claims “false and baseless.”
Tenuous agreements between the U.S. and Iran have been broken repeatedly. On July 12, the U.S. resumed heavy air strikes on Iran following an Iranian attack on a container ship in the region. As my colleagues Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire recently reported, “The Trump administration is back at war. It just doesn’t want to admit it.” The commander in chief has become the boy who cried “Mission accomplished.”
As a result, Trump’s posts have become more erratic. On June 23, in response to rising gas prices, Trump posted on Truth Social, in all caps, to nobody in particular, “EVERYONE, KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN. I’M WATCHING! YOU’RE PLAYING RIGHT INTO THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY. DON’T DO IT!” And his posts no longer seem as able to influence the market. A recent report from Axiosclaimed that bond-market traders have stopped paying strict attention to Trump’s social-media feeds to read the economic tea leaves: “Researchers from JPMorgan show that for the most part, his social media posts are noise, with very little ability to move the market.”
And yet, Trump is attempting to double down. Last week, Truth Social announced that it plans to sell early access to posts from certain accounts (presumably including the president’s) and is considering charging as much as $100,000 a month. The clear implication is that Trump or his close associates will share government news that will move markets, giving paying subscribers a distinct first-mover advantage. Trump currently owns 41 percent of the stock through a family-run trust in Trump Media and Technology Group, the owner of Truth Social. Thus, the decision to charge access is akin to the president’s family profiting off his position as leader of the free world. (Trump Media and Technology Group did not respond to a request for comment.)
Trump is president, so obviously, any statement he makes attracts attention. But simply being president has never been Trump’s superpower. His chief skill, first as a mogul with an uneven history and then as a politician, is molding his image in a way that reflects how he sees himself: as the genius, adored, yet constantly victimized center of the universe. This, of course, is delusional. Yet somehow, he’s managed to make that fantasy at least partially real: He has, after all, been the main, divisive figure in American life for more than a decade.
With Trump, it can feel as if there are no limits—to his shamelessness, his lies, his graft, or his ability to sow chaos, lose interest, and move on to the next outrage. But it’s possible that we’re finally glimpsing the limitations of his ability to control the narrative. For too long, Trump has been the force that made reality feel flimsy, pliable. But in the Iran conflict, he’s met an immovable object. Now reality may just be catching up.
Back in June, at the closing press conference for the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, Donald Trump explained why he had called a halt to hostilities with Iran. Continued bombing would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and as long as the war went on, commercial ships would stay away while emergency oil supplies dwindled.
“We run out of reserves in about four weeks,” he warned, conjuring up images of shortages, bedlam, surging prices, and a market collapse on the scale of 1929. Trump told the press that he had studied presidents, and “the one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover.”
Fast-forward to late July. The United States has bombed Iran for nearly two weeks, hitting coastal-surveillance sites and weapons-storage facilities as well as bridges, tunnels, rail lines, airports, and electrical infrastructure. Iran has answered with missiles and drones aimed at American bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, and Qatar, as well as strikes on oil installations and a desalination plant, and repeated attacks on commercial shipping in and around the strait. Iran also claims to have struck Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure in Bahrain, but this has not been independently verified.
Trump resumed the war despite having already explained why military force could not achieve its most pressing objective. He has not resolved this tension. It may be irresoluble. In the meantime, he is betting that Tehran will buckle before economic pressure forces him to do the same.
To understand where we are, consider how the cease-fire collapsed. Each party believed that it had won the war and that the other should accede to its interpretation of the agreement on the strait. Article 5 of the memorandum of understanding stated that Iran “will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa.” The Trump administration took this to mean that Iran was obligated to open the strait without tolls for 60 days. But Tehran read it as permission to manage and control access through the waterway. Consequently, Iran sought to funnel ships through corridors it approved, and attacked or threatened vessels that used other routes.
In doing so, Tehran made a serious error in judgment. If it had laid low, it could have reaped the benefits of economic concessions for 60 days and then gradually introduced a toll. Instead, Trump felt compelled to respond, and the agreement broke down. Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser for energy and investment under President Biden, told me that Iran had thought it could boil the proverbial American frog, but it turned the temperature up too high too fast, and the frog got angry.
Trump is clearly frustrated. Further escalation is likely. He has mused about striking Pickaxe Mountain and is reportedly considering limited ground operations—for example, seizing Kharg Island, which is a hub for Iran’s oil exports. The Wall Street Journalreported that the United States is sending more forces, medics, and weaponry to the Middle East to give Trump additional military options. But such options were ruled out as implausible or reckless during the war, and their viability has not improved with time.
If Trump continues with limited strikes, he will face the very problems that he laid out in France last month. Hochstein posted on X that the current escalation in the Strait of Hormuz could be more economically dangerous than the previous one, because Russia, the U.S., and China can no longer buffer world markets as they did: Russia has reduced its diesel exports, U.S. crude and strategic reserves are unusually low, and China is cutting its oil consumption less deeply than before. In his view, markets are already signaling the inflationary risk, leaving Trump with a narrowing window to make a deal before another disruption produces a sharper fuel-price and financial shock, possibly as soon as mid- to late September.
Iran seems to want to keep the conflict at a simmer. It is striking back against the United States but has avoided direct attacks that would bring Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or Israel fully into the war, even as it applies pressure indirectly, most dramatically through the Houthis’ campaign against Saudi shipping in the Red Sea. Reuters reported that Iran had previously asked the Houthis to prepare to close the Red Sea route if the United States struck Iranian power infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Trump seems to be actively working to keep the Gulf states on board as he continues the war. Two weeks ago, his administration significantly loosened restrictions on the export of advanced semiconductor chips to the UAE, something Abu Dhabi has been wanting for years. Then, on Wednesday, he announced that he had approved a civil nuclear-enrichment deal with Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration, in which I served, negotiated a similar arrangement with Riyadh as part of a broader deal to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. That deal, which stalled after October 7, would have provided for U.S. enrichment inside Saudi Arabia rather than giving it the ability to autonomously enrich its own uranium. The technical details of the Trump deal are unknown.
No sooner was the Saudi agreement announced than Israeli former officials and experts criticized it, on the grounds that it would fuel regional proliferation and did not require Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. On Thursday morning, Trump posted that the deal would not be approved without normalization—which was puzzling, given that the accord had been signed the day before. Hours later, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that if the Saudis don’t join the Abraham Accords, “the deal is off,” which likely means that the administration will not submit it to Congress for review, as is required by law.
Washington is trying to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, offer new economic and technological commitments to Gulf states, protect two maritime choke points, and fight an open-ended air war, all while the energy reserves and political patience needed to sustain those projects are running down.
Trump may inflict more pain on Iran, but this is unlikely to compel Tehran to abandon its attempt to control the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps Iran will agree to put its ambitions on hold for 60 days in the hope that the previous agreement can be revived. But if the two sides remain gridlocked, Trump will have to decide whether to pay the economic price for continuing a low-intensity war indefinitely; escalate, with all of the risks that entails; or walk away.
Since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took office, more than a year ago, I’ve been trying to understand the MAHA movement from the inside. I’ve sat in on MAHA Institute roundtables, roamed the conference halls of anti-vaccine gatherings, and talked with grassroots supporters across the country. They tell me their concerns about toxic chemicals and ultra-processed foods and the worrying rise in childhood chronic conditions. But when I share what I’m hearing with my colleagues in medicine and public health, many chide that engaging with MAHA is completely pointless. For them, the whole movement is nothing more than a subversive anti-vaccine, anti-science syndicate.
That assumption is wrong. MAHA is an opportunity, and one the public-health sector—academics, doctors, and leaders of advocacy groups—cannot afford to squander. Yes, MAHA’s anti-vax wing is very loud and litigious. But for many in the MAHA movement, their top issues lie elsewhere: environmental pollutants, the cost of health care, and a bone-deep conviction that health institutions have been captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate. These are not fringe, unscientific concerns. They are concerns that millions of Americans have been angry about for decades, long before the MAHA label even existed. And they are concerns that many in public health share—if only they could see beyond that label, and make common cause.
MAHA’s greatest achievement to date is not policy but politics. It has shown that people are hungry for a movement that fights for their health visibly, loudly, and in plain language.
That’s why a movement just two years old draws support from four in 10 Americans, according to polling from KFF. MAHA supporters cite the cost of health care as their top priority, followed by restricting chemical additives in food and limiting corporate influence in food policy. At the same time, nearly eight in 10 MAHA supporters consider long-established vaccines such as those for measles, mumps, rubella, and polio safe, and only 4 percent cite vaccines as their reason for supporting the movement. That disconnect alone shows that MAHA is not synonymous with a solely anti-vaccine constituency. It represents and reflects something far larger.
When I sat down with Nancy Fuller, a lifelong Democrat and, more recently, a MAHA supporter, at a Christian coffeehouse in rural Ohio, she told me that what she likes about the movement is its willingness to try. Ever since her son was diagnosed with autism, decades ago, she has wondered whether environmental exposures or maybe vaccines were to blame, and she has spent years watching health institutions dismiss parents like her as ignorant or uninformed. In her view, public health steps up to the plate only when it already knows the outcome. Whether the issue is autism, AI, or something else, MAHA swings at anything and everything. That means more misses—and occasional hits—on issues everyone else had decided were too complicated, too compromised, or too politically inconvenient to touch. MAHA has never been shy about naming problems loudly and promising to take them on, even—and sometimes especially—when that means going after powerful corporations and other major institutions that others had learned to work around.
This is not a model public health should replicate wholesale. Many of MAHA’s swings have been genuinely reckless—pushing unproven and often dangerous wellness hacks, fabricating falsehoods about vaccine ingredients, and making claims that run counter to all credible evidence. But public health has been too cautious, setting the bar for evidence too high. On ultra-processed foods, environmental toxins, and drug prices, public health’s problem was rarely insufficient data. It was insufficient nerve.
Public health was not always so timid. The field was born as a potent political force, arguing for safer workplaces, cleaner water, better housing. Somewhere along the way, it shrank into the background, with many of its leaders preferring to see themselves as a technical and technocratic enterprise that operates outside the fray. The problem with invisible shields is that nobody knows they’re there. When the field was forced out front, as it was during the coronavirus pandemic, many Americans experienced public health not as a shield, but as a scold—speaking in acronyms and waving data-filled reports. In COVID-19’s shadow, trust in essential health agencies including the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration has dropped to all-time lows. Fewer than half of Americans now have confidence in the CDC to carry out its core responsibilities, a nearly 40 percent drop from the start of the pandemic.
Now essentially out of power, the public-health community has been justifiably alarmed by what’s happened over the past year. The administration has prioritized politics over sound public-health policy in determining what’s approved by the FDA or what research is funded by the NIH. Severe staffing cuts at the CDC have weakened the response to health threats such as screwworm and Ebola. Many key leadership posts at the agency remain empty—the CDC has had a confirmed director for only 29 days of this administration. On immunizations, RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services altered the childhood-vaccine schedule in ways that reflect ideology, not epidemiology. It also overhauled the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the expert body that has guided U.S. vaccine policy for decades. In response, the American Academy of Pediatrics distanced itself from the CDC and positioned itself as an independent, evidence-based guide for childhood vaccinations. More than two dozen states have already broken rank with the CDC’s recommendations. The result is a fracturing of vaccine guidance, a reflection of the fact that Americans no longer trust a single institutional voice on vaccines.
Public health has had some success at stopping the damage. In March, a federal judge sided with the AAP in its case against HHS, blocking the new vaccine schedule and ruling the ACIP overhaul a violation of proper scientific procedure. (HHS has appealed the ruling.) In effect, this overturned most federal actions on vaccines of the past year. Many in public health have treated that win as vindication. But court cases cannot substitute for winning in the court of public opinion.
One step to winning back the public’s trust would be a serious reassessment of the field’s financial relationships. The AAP’s own donor page lists at least 10 pharmaceutical companies as supporters, including six that manufacture vaccines the AAP recommends. And the six health organizations that sued HHS collectively received millions of dollars in donations from the pharmaceutical industry. Each organization maintains that these gifts are used to fund education or advocacy programming, not to influence policy recommendations or approvals.
In a low-trust environment, however, the appearance of a conflict is still bad, and RFK Jr. has made this entanglement the centerpiece of his critique. Public health’s refusal to acknowledge it has handed him an argument he doesn’t deserve to keep winning. If these societies can accept money from anyone, it’s worth asking why the donor pages are dominated by the very companies whose products they evaluate and recommend. If public health wants to save vaccine infrastructure in this country, it has to end these entanglements.
The distrust that fuels MAHA is far older than the movement, and it will not evaporate in three years. The conditions that allowed MAHA to flourish—the trust deficit, the corporate entanglements, the gap between research and community, the invisibility of public health in people’s daily lives—have been festering for decades.
Public health must recognize there is opportunity in entropy. The path forward for the field is simple, but requires public health to do something it has been reluctant to do: Show up. Visibly. Politically, but not in a partisan way. There are fights that are strongly supported by both sides, including air quality in neighborhoods sharing zip codes with industrial facilities, lead and toxins in the water kids are drinking, and the poor quality of the food Americans eat and its clear negative impact on our health. These are issues where public health can stand next to communities, name what is harming them, and fight like it means something. What MAHA understands—imperfectly and sometimes dishonestly—is that people do trust institutions, but not because those institutions have good data. They trust them because they feel like those institutions are on their side.
Incensed by the Smithsonian but lacking immediate power to do anything about it, Donald Trump has resorted to trolling the world’s largest museum complex from the sidewalk. In an executive order posted this afternoon, the president directed the Department of the Interior to place signs outside the National Museum of American History warning passersby about “ideological capture” and detailing the findings of his administration’s recent, quickly contested report on the museum. The order comes days after the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, was grilled by lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
The warnings, the order says, will direct visitors to “locations and resources for accurate information” about American history and will notify them that exhibits “should be renovated consistent with the findings of the Report.” It asserts that the “current leadership of both the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum cannot be trusted to tell America’s story with honesty and gratitude.” Having determined, perhaps, that the museum’s 250-object exhibit “exploring the ideals of the Declaration of Independence” is not enough, Trump also ordered the Department of the Interior to mount its own temporary exhibits outside that will “appropriately honor the 56 signers” of the document.
To the White House, the order is probably meant to escalate its public-pressure campaign on the Smithsonian, which began with an executive order last spring calling to rid the institution of “improper ideology” and restore it “to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.” In short, Trump feels that the museums are too negative about the country’s history and should be more patriotic, and the Smithsonian argues that its museums can be celebratory and present complex stories at the same time. Instead, the call to place trigger warnings outside the museum reflects the limitations of the Trump administration’s power in this instance, as well as a weakness in its campaign to seize control of the American story.
The Smithsonian occupies a strange place as a public-private partnership and “independent federal trust instrumentality” of the U.S. government. Partially funded by the federal government, the institution is governed by a board of regents, which does not have presidential appointees and can’t be purged in the way that the board of the Kennedy Center was. Although in some specific cases the Smithsonian has been treated as part of the executive branch and in others it has not, the institution is not an executive agency and not overseen by the president like the National Park Service is (NPS is managed by the Interior Department). That means the Smithsonian is also not susceptible to the type of mandated history scrubbing that NPS leadership has enforced at historic sites across the country.
Trump is directing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in this new order because he cannot officially direct Hartig, and neither can he direct Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch, who reports to the board of regents. The signs will go on the NPS-controlled sidewalks and walkways because that’s where the White House can have a say.
The White House looks to even be aware of these limitations in the executive order, urging the heads of the Interior Department, the Office of Management and Budget, and the General Services Administration, as well as the assistant to the president for domestic policy, to “identify and utilize any and all available authorities to promote the policy of this order.” This includes “any mechanisms available to encourage correction of the issues identified in the Report.” The naming of the OMB appears to nod to previous threats that the White House has made about hinging the Smithsonian’s apportioned funds on its compliance with Trump’s vision, which likely would be illegal.
In its July 4 report on the American-history museum, the White House argued, essentially, that the museum has been politicized and that it “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” It criticizes what it calls “anti-White” advocacy and takes specific aim at museum representations of transgender Americans and undocumented immigrants, as well as exhibits featuring Filipino and Mexican Americans, describing as activism what many might simply see as mentions of people who exist in this country. The report repeatedly calls out museum staffers by name, and Hartig appears in more than a dozen images throughout the document. Speaking in one of the congressional hearings this week, Representative Melanie Stansbury, a New Mexico Democrat, called it “a political witch hunt.”
During those dizzying hearings, Hartig tried to defend her and her colleagues’ work. She told lawmakers that the museum is nonpartisan, and that it uses “historical evidence” and “competing perspectives” and acknowledges “enduring debates.” She said that the museum’s goal is to “preserve and document the evidence of American life in all of its breadth, so that the public can encounter the past and draw their own conclusions,” and that telling the full story of history “is a form of respect for the American people.” None of this, of course, stopped the accusations of activism or a GOP witness and even one lawmaker from calling for a cleaning-out of the institution’s leadership. The hearing was theater. The signs are too.
A kind of turf war has taken place across the National Mall this summer. The Great American State Fair, the signs plastered with Trump’s slogan “We are making D.C. Safe and Beautiful,” and the ever troubled Reflecting Pool—the president’s hand has been ubiquitous in America’s backyard. Still, these incoming signs will mark a new kind of outward hostility, falling somewhere closer to putting Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center. To publicly take aim at a beloved American institution could risk doing exactly what Trump accuses the Smithsonian of in the report: dividing.
But there’s something that the president, it seems, has not considered. Trump and his coterie love to talk about “freedom-loving” Americans, and those freedom-loving Americans don’t exactly love being told what to do. Some of them might even see these signs outside the museum and have all the more reason to walk right on in.
Faithless, chaotic, and corrupt: Donald Trump's character also shapes his foreign policy. The latest victim is Saudi Arabia—not a sympathetic victim, maybe, but a victim all the same.
On July 22, United States Energy Secretary Chris Wright and his Saudi counterpart signed an agreement for a Saudi-U.S. civilian nuclear partnership. The multi-decade, multibillion-dollar deal allows American companies to develop and operate commercial nuclear power plants on Saudi soil, potentially including a uranium-enrichment facility. The Saudis have sought such a deal for almost 20 years. United States presidents from Barack Obama onward have expressed openness to it, but on two conditions: Any deal must include safeguards against Saudi use of enrichment for nuclear weapons and also a normalization of relations with Israel.
With the return of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2024, the Saudis surely hoped their moment had arrived. Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in Trump and the Trump family, including licensing deals with the Trump Organization potentially worth billions of dollars and a huge commitment to the private-equity firm founded by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. This week, those investments seemed to have paid off. Details on Wednesday’s agreement are sparse, but TheWashington Post reported that the pact, by clearing a way to nuclear enrichment, opened a path to an eventual Saudi nuclear weapon. The deal also reportedly dropped the precondition that Saudi Arabia recognize Israel.
The Saudis, essentially, had got everything they wanted, with little sacrifice in return. But no sooner was the deal signed than the reneging began. In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump insisted that the deal did not, in fact, include uranium enrichment and that it is “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords”—that is, to normalized relations with Israel. Utter chaos and confusion duly erupted over what Trump meant to accomplish with these words. Is Trump attempting to blow up the freshly inked deal after hearing Republicans criticize it on Fox News and elsewhere, as CNN suggests? Or was the outburst simply Trump bluster without real-world consequences?
No one seems to know. Trump did not consult the Saudi leadership before adding a late condition to the deal they had just celebrated. Just what this means for the deal’s fate in Congress is unclear too. Congress can block it, but would need a veto-proof majority in both the House and Senate to do so—presuming Trump even wants the deal to go ahead.
The Saudis must be puzzled. They paid their “quid” to the Trump family. Where is their “quo”? Can criticism on Fox News cancel billions paid for the Trump family’s favor?
This turnabout comes at a very bad time for Saudi Arabia. The country has already been left stranded and exposed by the failure of Trump’s Iran war, which has emboldened Iran and tightened its hold on the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia’s most important maritime connection to world oil markets. Saudi Arabia needs protection. Its traditional protector has been exposed as fickle and weak. The kingdom may now see a nuclear force of its own as a condition of its survival in a post-American Middle East.
American advocates of a U.S.-Saudi nuclear deal have long warned that if the United States does not partner with Saudi Arabia, the Saudis might look to Russia or China for nuclear technology and stronger military ties. But past Saudi efforts to find alternative security arrangements have not worked well. In 2023, Saudi Arabia signed a Chinese-brokered rapprochement with Iran, but China’s friendly relations with Tehran did nothing to protect Saudi Arabia from Iranian missile attacks in recent months.
Saudi Arabia’s other options look even worse. The country, which reportedly financed the Pakistani nuclear-weapons program in the 1990s, is believed to hold some kind of call on those weapons if it ever needs them. The two countries formalized a joint defense pact last year. But a future as a Pakistani military protectorate is not a promising one, especially because India ranks among Saudi Arabia’s top three export markets, and is probably its fastest-growing one.
Which brings us back to Saudi Arabia’s Plan A. Is the nukes plan cooked? Trump often announces things on social media that don’t come true in real life. In his first term, he announced on Twitter in 2019 that he had ordered all U.S. businesses out of China. The “order” was dropped three days later. In June 2025, Trump announced a pause on immigration enforcement on farms, and at hotels and restaurants. The pause was reversed several days later. Trump has repeatedly announced tariff increases that are then shelved and military strikes that are never carried out, including a vow last November to invade Nigeria “guns a-blazing” to wipe out that country’s Islamic insurgents. So it may be with Trump’s after-the-signature demand that Saudi Arabia recognize Israel as an additional price for a deal greased by the flow of funds to Trump companies and relatives.
America’s traditional democratic allies feel betrayed and baffled by the unpredictability of Trump’s pay-for-play diplomacy. But those willing to pay can suffer betrayals and bafflements of their own. If not even the Saudis, who showered Trump and his family with cash and gifts, can trust Trump’s diplomacy, who else on earth can feel any confidence at all?
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Everyone should be as lucky in their adversaries as Jon Ossoff. On Wednesday, President Trump held a rally in Marietta, Georgia, where he attacked the Democratic senator—or rather, he tried.
“Jon Ossoff, he’s terrible,” Trump said. “He reminds me of Pinky Herman. Do you ever see Pinky Herman?” The line might have landed better if he had gotten Pee-wee Herman’s name right. You’d expect Trump of all people to remember weird ’80s kitsch.
Ossoff has benefited before from the president’s approach. In a runoff on January 5, 2021, he unseated GOP Senator David Perdue—a defeat that many Republicans blamed in part on Trump’s meltdown after he lost the 2020 presidential election; he was focused more on false claims of fraud in Georgia than on campaigning for Perdue or Senator Kelly Loeffler, who also lost. Ossoff’s narrow win made him look like a bit of an accidental senator, but his 2026 reelection bid is shaping up differently. Republicans have struggled to mount a strong campaign against him, and even in a red-leaning state, most forecasters expect Ossoff to beat Republican Mike Collins, who limped to the nomination out of a messy primary.
Now buzz has begun over whether Ossoff might be a strong Democratic candidate for president in two years. The hype has grown stronger in recent weeks, even though Ossoff is less well-known and has a less defined image than some of the other possible candidates. Ossoff may not end up running for president—and, indeed, may not win his reelection race—but here are a few theories on why he’s capturing 2028 attention right now.
1. Roll the Tape
In the age of clippers, a politician who can deliver a strong message or moment in one to two minutes will inevitably draw lots of attention. Like his fellow Millennial Zohran Mamdani, Ossoff seems to have a knack for it. Ossoff appears to have coined (or at least popularized) the Epstein class as a way of tying the Jeffrey Epstein story to broader questions of corruption and inequality in the Trump GOP. When rumors circulated that Trump might declare Ossoff and his fellow Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock “illegitimate,” Ossoff had a crisp response. He’s also had politically effective exchanges with Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence (about who won the 2020 presidential election), and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (about past claims of victory in the still-raging Iran war) during recent committee hearings.
2. Finding His Voice
It’s not just what Ossoff says—it’s how he says it. For almost two decades, the Democratic Party has been plagued by guys (almost always guys) who sound like they’re doing their best Barack Obama imitation. Ossoff has been guilty of this in the past, but lately, he seems to have developed his own cadence. In the exchanges with Clayton and Hegseth, he adopted a forensic, almost monotone voice to interrogate them. (He’s not a former prosecutor or even a lawyer, and he doesn’t have the flair for courtroom drama that many of his colleagues do.) Witnesses’ fumbling looks bad by comparison, and Ossoff sounds righteously angry without being rageful. It’s a kind of grandstanding-by-not-grandstanding, and it stands in sharp contrast with Trump’s over-the-top infotainment style or J. D. Vance’s awkward pandering.
3. Earnest, Not Anxious
Politics has become fixated recently on the idea of “authenticity,” another way of saying whether a politician seems comfortable in his or her own skin. Ossoff comes off as earnest and a little nerdy: His stump speeches and questioning in hearings suggest a guy who has done a lot of preparation and doesn’t feel a need to hide that. But unlike some other Democrats in the 2028 hunt (Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and, most glaringly, Gavin Newsom), he also doesn’t look like he’s trying too hard. He doesn’t frantically jump into every ephemeral news moment, and he hasn’t taken up swearing to try to show that he’s not a regular senator; he’s a cool senator.
4. Not That Kind of Man
Both parties are focused on machismo at the moment. The secretary of Health and Human Services can’t stop working out on video (in jeans), and Hegseth is obsessed with testosterone, when he isn’t doing calisthenics (poorly). Many Democrats were so eager for an answer that they rushed to nominate an oysterman to the U.S. Senate despite, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey put it, “a bouquet of red flags.” Ossoff represents a different kind of masculinity, one that owes less to Sly Stallone and more to Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: square-jawed, but bound more by principle than muscle.
5. A Blank Slate
Trump has been talking a lot about Democrats as “Communists,” and at Wednesday’s rally, he tried to lump Ossoff in. That’s a tough order: Ossoff isn’t a DSA-aligned candidate and doesn’t have Mamdani’s or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s left-wing credentials. In fact, he’s a bit of a blank slate on the national stage, without a clear ideological profile or strong ties to any party faction. That makes him alluring to Democrats of all varieties, who can project onto him whatever they wish—at least for now.
Eventually, a national figure has to start staking positions and disappointing some people, and buzzy moments in Senate hearings don’t necessarily mint presidents, or else we might be in Booker’s or Harris’s second term. Then again, Ossoff may not want to be a national figure. He has repeatedly said that he is not running for president in 2028, and although that’s an obligatory statement for any senator running for reelection, it might also happen to be true. At the moment, Democrats seem to be thirsting for an alternative to the familiar likely names, and few things excite the heart like someone who insists that he’s not interested.
The United States has recorded its highest annual total of measles cases since the disease was declared eliminated in the country in 2000. The resurgence, driven by declining vaccination rates and dozens of outbreaks, has raised concerns that the U.S. could lose its measles-elimination status later this year.
The United States launched another round of strikes on Iran overnight after President Trump told Axios that he is “considering a massive attack” that would be “bigger than ever before.”
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Carl de Souza / AFP / Getty; Carlos Moreno / NurPhoto / Getty; Yuri Cortez / AFP / Getty.
A Planeload of Informants
By Kevin Sieff
The governor of Baja California is a 40-year-old attorney and former big-city mayor named Marina del Pilar. Her state, which includes the megacity of Tijuana, is a magnet for American tourists, and also for narcotics cartels. As a politician of some experience, she is presumably unfazed by the sorts of challenges that come with governing a volatile section of her volatile country.
And yet, in what has quickly become a very famous recording of a phone call that leaked last week, she has difficulty masking her shock about an unusual predicament. “Are they saying they want to extradite me?” she asks her interlocutor, who is apparently an intermediary for the FBI. The “they” in question is the United States government. Almost immediately, her tone becomes more businesslike, and she makes a not-so-cryptic offer: “Can’t they tell me what they want me to talk about? I might know or hear a lot of security-related things.”
In other words, the governor of the strategically important border state of Baja California was just caught on tape offering to become an FBI informant. The remarkable thing here is that she would not be the first; the list of current and former Mexican officials and drug traffickers who have offered to cooperate with the U.S. government is now lengthy.
Read (or skip). What makes so much Millennial fiction boring? Hillary Kelly argues that the generation’s novels tend to focus on the flatness of modern life—but alienation doesn’t have to be dull.
Explore. The sex recession, as the therapist Esther Perel sees it, is about more than the physical: It’s a sign of Americans’ fear of uncertainty, and a general shortage of eroticism, Faith Hill writes.
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy”is a military dictum usually credited to Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, and more recently to the boxer Mike Tyson in the form “Everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the mouth.” The United States, in its war with Iran, is an unusual counterexample, insofar as it appears that the Trump administration did not have a plan. It did however get punched in the mouth, and spat bloody Chiclets out all over the document it was forced to sign last month, pausing the war on terms favorable to Iran.
On July 14, the United States returned to the field of battle. The administration has said almost nothing about why it is attacking Iran again, and how this round will improve on the previous. The Washington Postreported last weekend that U.S. intelligence doubts that the new attacks will force Iran to change course. But the Pentagon does seem to have patched some of the holes in its initial strategy, or lack thereof. Regime collapse is unlikely, but a revised approach might still degrade the Iranian position.
In the initial assault, the U.S. killed Iran’s leadership, then set to work on Iran’s defense-industrial capability. But Iran inflicted so much pain on the economy of the United States and its allies that their will to fight petered out first. Iran inflicted this pain through drone and missile attacks and by closing the Strait of Hormuz. The patch for round two: move the bases for the American operation away from the most vulnerable American allies—the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia—and instead stage attacks from Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. These three countries have vulnerabilities of their own, but they all have a long history of hostility to Iran, and therefore have less to lose from going all in with the United States. Falling back to Jordan also places valuable American assets slightly farther from Iran’s missiles and drones. The Iranian response has been painful and effective nonetheless: In Jordan this weekend, Iranian missiles killed three U.S. service members by blowing apart their barracks, and seem to have destroyed numerous air assets.
In round one, Iran characterized its responses as self-defense and tit-for-tat retaliation. American public diplomacy, nonexistent then as now, all but conceded this framing, which left the blame on the United States and Israel for the woes of their allies: the cratered tourism sector of Dubai, the destruction of a fifth of Qatar’s natural-gas capacity, and, of course, the maiming of the world economy resulting from the closure of the Strait. These points were each raw nerves, and Iran vivisected them adeptly while attributing the pain to the United States.
A political goal of the second round seems to be to change perception of the war from one of American aggression and Iranian resistance to one of Iranian aggression and hostage-taking. Iran has retaliated as before and hit American military targets. But to maintain its leverage, it has to focus on targets that push the blame for the war and its consequences further toward Tehran.
Iran has attacked civilian ships transiting the strait. In the most serious such incident, Iran killed an Indian merchant seaman and seriously wounded another nine on an Emirati-flagged oil tanker that was hugging the Oman side of the Strait, presumably to avoid Iranian interdiction, when an Iranian cruise missile hit its side and caused a fire. The Indian government summoned the chargé d’affaires of Iran’s embassy in Delhi to protest the strike. The Financial Timesreported that missiles fired at eight vessels since July 8 have hit ships’ engines, near where crew sleep.
Iran has also launched attacks against Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea port of Yanbu, and has coordinated with its Houthi allies in Yemen to close the Bab al-Mandab strait, at the south end of the Red Sea. The Houthis are attacking ships that attempt to pass. Yanbu is Saudi Arabia’s alternate exit path for its oil—a bypass route that will allow it to avoid the menace of the Iranian navy and export without hindrance. Already about 70 percent of its crude exports pass through Yanbu, via pipelines from eastern Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis are raising that percentage as fast as they can. The Emiratis have a similar play: shipping through Fujairah, the emirate on the Gulf of Oman, also bypassing Hormuz and the Iranians.
The Iranians hate being cut out of the deal. But the theory that they have the right to shut down passage through international waterways, or charge tolls to pass through them, is based on extreme circumstances: War is afoot, and it can detain enemy commercial vessels. As the Emirates and Saudi Arabia fall back from the field of battle, this theory applies less and less, and Iran’s rationale becomes more and more untenable. The basis for attacking Yanbu and Fujairah is shakier still: Even if Iran had the right to control the strait, it would have no right to force other countries to squeeze their traffic through the Iranian tollbooth, when those countries have a sovereign right to routes that could bypass it. The recent outbreak of war occurred because ships tried to pass the strait simply by avoiding Iranian waters—an act that Iran, but not the United States, considered a transgression of the June agreement.
None of this change of perception will stop Iran from throttling maritime passages or striking Saudi or Emirati ports. These are, as all agree and the Iranians themselves state openly, the only sources of leverage for Iran, and it will under no circumstances give that leverage up. In the past weeks, the United States has declared that it will transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, sell weapons to Qatar, and load up the UAE with AI-enabling chips. These goodies will help the Gulf Arab countries zoom further past Iran, and none of them depend on the strait. But Iran has gone from attacking its neighbors because they are helping the United States to attacking them because the United States is helping them.
The objective of this strategic turn is the re-isolation of Iran. Among the blunders of the first round was to turn Iran from a pariah state into a sympathetic one. If it insists on disrupting international shipping—including, at least for now, ships from China—then it will move steadily back into the category of an internationally recognized bad actor, ready to collapse under its own incompetence. It will, in other words, be back where it was in January, before this whole mess began.
And what, if that happens, is Iran’s next move? Iran has performed well against a hapless foe. But if its long-term plan is to threaten its neighbors and close international waterways—formalizing an extortion racket, and keeping that up forever—then it is not the only party to this conflict that is strategically bankrupt.
Editor’s note: This work is part of AI Watchdog, The Atlantic’s ongoing investigation into the generative-AI industry.
Amid tech companies’ ongoing efforts to vacuum up as much data as possible to train AI models, Meta has taken public posts from its own platforms, scraped massive amounts of content from the rest of the internet, and pirated millions of books to train its AI models. Now the company is being accused of downloading much more illicit material: huge volumes of porn, nonconsensual celebrity nudes, blueprints for 3-D-printable handguns, and millions of passwords acquired by hackers.
Strike 3, the parent company of Vixen Media Group, a prolific producer of adult films, is suing Meta for allegedly downloading 2,973 of its copyrighted videos. But in its efforts to collect evidence about these purported downloads, Strike 3 also captured information relating to many other files that Meta may have acquired over the course of two years: They include images from “Celebgate,” a 2014 hack that resulted in the leak of private photos belonging to Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, and others, plus several collections of deepfake celebrity porn featuring the faces of Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Elizabeth Olsen, Gal Gadot, and others.
Strike 3’s file-transfer lists include ordinary movies and TV shows, alongside dozens of videos from GirlsDoPorn, which was shut down after six people associated with the site were charged with sex trafficking. Meta allegedly downloaded several individual episodes from the website and two “GirlsDoPorn MegaPack” archives. Strike 3 also presents evidence that Meta made some content publicly available in addition to downloading it.
When I reached out to Meta, a spokesperson told me via email that “these claims are bogus.” Meta also noted in a court filing that Strike 3, which regularly files lawsuits against people who download its work illegally, “has been labeled by some as a ‘copyright troll.’”
This is a complicated case. Piracy can be hard to track with precision, and both parties are clearly conflicted: Strike 3, in seeking damages, wants Meta to look bad, and Meta would prefer not to be associated with this kind of content. Yet if Strike 3’s data are accurate, they would show that participating in mass piracy is a by-product of modern tech development—whether or not any of the material collected is explicitly used to engineer AI models or other programs.
Although Meta acknowledged the possibility that employees, contractors, or even visitors to Meta’s offices may have used the company’s networks to download the porn in question, its defense in court was that the material was accessed for “personal consumption” rather than as part of a company project. But neither the sheer volume nor the pattern of downloads looks like personal consumption. The file-transfer logs produced by Strike 3 show sequences of files that are unrelated except for a certain keyword or concept. For example, two files that were transferred consecutively on June 2, 2023—“Bajillion Dollar Properties S01E07” and “First Time Home Buyer Anal Fantasy”—are both loosely themed around real estate, but the similarities likely end there. Judge Eumi Lee, who denied Meta’s motion to dismiss the case, cited other such juxtapositions, such as consecutive downloads of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987-1996)” and a video labeled “Teen Sex Sessions 2 (2012).”
Strike 3 has argued that the content could be used for AI training. A Meta spokesperson told me, “We don’t want this type of content, and we take deliberate steps to avoid training on this kind of material.” In its legal defense, Meta pointed out that its terms of service prohibit users from using its AI products to generate images containing pornography. Even if Meta isn’t building a porn-generating bot, however, tech companies can use “unsafe” content to test guardrails for their systems—effectively telling the software what not to generate. (Lee noted that Meta’s terms of service are irrelevant to the question of whether it wants to acquire porn.)
It’s also possible that Meta is compiling an archive of material for no precise purpose, just as Anthropic acquired millions of books that it says it had no intention of using for AI training but wanted to keep for its “research library.” As AI-training techniques advance, there is no telling what kind of content a company might find useful in the future.
Nineteen of the allegedly downloaded files contain models of functional handguns that can be produced with 3-D printers. A file labeled “5.7 million passwords list” purportedly contains 5,718,107 passwords from accounts that were hacked from 2015 to 2019. The downloads also include password-cracking tools that can be used by hackers to break into people’s accounts. Other files include the movies BlacKkKlansman, The Banshees of Inisherin, and everything made by Studio Ghibli from 1979 to 2020; music by Dua Lipa, Elton John, and Paul McCartney; radio shows and podcasts such as The Howard Stern Show and 1619; and software including Microsoft Windows, Adobe Photoshop, Ableton Live, and NBA 2K23.
The files were downloaded through BitTorrent, a system that allows people to share files among themselves. When you download files via BitTorrent, you typically share those files with other people at the same time; if nobody is sharing the files, then nobody can download them. According to Strike 3’s data, which lawyers from the company told me it regularly gathers in an effort to track the illegal distribution of its intellectual property, devices on Meta’s networks also made some of Strike 3’s videos available to others—a practice known as “seeding”—for as long as three months after fully downloading them.
Meta additionally used BitTorrent to acquire large quantities of copyrighted books around the same time, as shown in testimony from another lawsuit. Some Meta employees were uncomfortable with this activity. According to court documents, Jelmer van der Linde, a former Meta employee who was asked to download books to train the company’s AI models in 2024, told his supervisor in a work chat message that it seemed like a “very very dark grey area. Legally, ethically …” He added that torrenting “copyrighted material is not very legal either.” He was transferred to a different project, and another developer downloaded the books instead. He has since left Meta and now works at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford.
To verify Strike 3’s data, I reached out to Tom Chothia, a professor of cybersecurity at the University of Birmingham who has studied BitTorrent. He reviewed a technical description of Strike 3’s data-collection methods and told me that, assuming the records weren’t tampered with, “they have established that people at Meta were uploading” Strike 3’s videos.
One thing that complicates the case is that most of the torrenting did not occur over Meta’s corporate networks. Strike 3’s data show sequences of related file transfers across several networks, including Meta’s. Strike 3 argues that the other networks were used remotely in a coordinated way, perhaps to make the activity harder to trace. Meta has called the patterns a coincidence. But Lee found them compelling, writing that Meta’s coincidence theory “strains belief” and that the activity is likely indicative of “algorithmically coordinated behavior.”
Nearly 300 of the transfers were traced to a private residence in Mountain View, California. Strike 3 claims that this was the home of a Meta contractor’s father, and that the file transfers stopped when the contractor stopped working for Meta. In response, Meta argued that these downloads were “plainly indicative of personal consumption.” According to Strike 3’s logs, the files downloaded to the residence include, in addition to porn, Russian-language books, Chinese movies, and a wide variety of cracked software, among other things.
Unfortunately, in the AI era, illegal mass-downloading by tech companies is not uncommon. Other lawsuits have revealed that OpenAI and Anthropic have also used BitTorrent to download copyrighted books. Whether they have uploaded those books as well, or what other content they may have downloaded through BitTorrent, is not yet clear.
BitTorrent is a strange world in which to find respectable megacorporations. It is dominated by media piracy, and very little legitimate file-sharing occurs. But if AI models are intended to replace human creators, then they have to be trained on as much human-created content as possible. BitTorrent is perhaps the fastest and cheapest way to download high-quality work in large quantities. AI companies have claimed that their models can create original work, but so far, the development of artificial intelligence has involved a lot of theft of other people’s intelligence.
This article contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
In a different time, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey would have been celebrated by the American right as a conservative film. Nolan’s interpretation of Homer’s epic poem is about the unintended consequences of breaking with tradition in pursuit of short-term gain.
Matt Damon’s wily Odysseus breaks the laws of war with the ruse of the Trojan horse that allows the Greeks to pillage Troy; Agamemnon, the leader of the expedition, makes a grisly sacrifice in the name of his own power and greed; the suitors lusting after Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, exploit Zeus’s law of hospitality to drain the kingdom of Ithaca; Odysseus’s men massacre the Trojans and defile the temple of Athena, ignore the warnings of the gods, and die gruesome and lonely deaths far from home. Odysseus’s original act of perfidy, Nolan implies, has broken the world: The laws of the gods no longer command respect, because he has illustrated that they can be broken with impunity.
In Donald Trump’s America, however, many on the right loathe this film. Trump’s disregard for rules and institutions is the reason his supporters love him, and this film argues that such disregard has disastrous long-term consequences. The film can easily be interpreted as a conservative critique of Trumpist radicalism. That, however, is not why so many on the MAGA right have attacked it. The actual reason they hate the film is that there are Black and trans people in it.
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, joined the online tantrum over the casting of the actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, whose presence in Troy justified Agamemnon’s invasion. The trans actor Elliot Page plays Sinon, a poor boy from Ithaca who is brave enough to travel with Odysseus in place of the cowardly aristocrat Antinous, played by Robert Pattinson. Antinous lies repeatedly about his willingness to go to war in order to hide the fact that Sinon went in his place. One may detect in this a subtle critique of the reactionary masculinism represented by those crashing out over Page’s casting. There are those of us who talk about being brave, and those of us who have to be.
Musk called Nolan an “anti-White racist,” while other conservatives complained that Nyong’o was simply too ugly to play Helen. Although many tried to couch their complaints in critiques of the film’s historical inaccuracy, TheOdyssey is a fantasy film that features magic and monsters. Moreover, these outbursts regularly occur whenever Black people are cast in popular feature films and series. Some reactionaries will always find a reason to demand all-white entertainment, regardless of whether there are mermaids, hobbits, or lightsabers involved. Their real problem is with people they consider beneath them getting roles that show them as the equals of white people—or really, specific kinds of white people. No one was complaining about the casting of actors of British, Australian, and German descent in Troy more than a decade ago; after all, they were largely blond.
The stakes are perhaps higher with TheOdyssey than with TheLord of the Rings or The Little Mermaid, given the right wing’s tendency to treat the great accomplishments of human civilization as the exclusive patrimony of white people, and to project contemporary politics onto Europe in antiquity. “Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” Stephen Miller declared in a speech at the funeral for the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry.”
People “from third-world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel,” are coming to America, Miller fumed on Fox News after the Supreme Court narrowly upheld birthright citizenship, “and they can just come into the country, have a baby, and then that baby is automatically a citizen?” This is a sort of racial stolen valor, which takes for white people of any background every accomplishment from ancient Athens to the Atlanta airport.
Similarly, after the Supreme Court determined Trump could revoke temporary protected status for Haitian refugees, the right-wing podcaster Megyn Kelly bellowed for the refugees to “go back to fucking Haiti” and said, “We know our country’s better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values. You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it.”
But of course neither Kelly nor Miller “built this country,” and they have as much to do with, say, the writing of TheOdyssey or the painting of the Sistine Chapel as I do—the fact that Kelly and Miller are white does not make these accomplishments theirs. People who espouse these views do not value the classics for what they can teach us about the ancient world or our own, but as bleached marble monuments to their own superiority.
There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s ancestors (although Miller’s were actually poor persecuted Jews from Eastern Europe, not ancient Roman senators). Honoring and celebrating the past achievements of those ancestors, however, is different from taking credit for them. All Kelly and Miller did was win the lottery of being born in the richest country ever, one whose institutions and traditions they are busy helping destroy with as much zeal as the Greeks in Nolan’s film defiled the temple of Athena.
When some on the right speak of reverence for “civilization,” what they’re doing is trying to anachronistically justify the hierarchy of race they would like to see enacted today by rooting it in antiquity. You cannot cast Black people in The Odyssey, because The Odyssey is a pillar of “Western civilization,” which they consider to be white. This faction of the far right imagines antiquity as a kind of idyllic Jim Crow universe of utterly separate civilizations, one in which the integration they despise could not possibly exist.
But Greece is not as far from Africa as the North American continent is, and the modern construct of race, a pseudoscientific product of the Atlantic slave trade, would not be invented until thousands of years after Homer. Black people are depicted in Greek art. Egypt, Libya, and “Aethiopia” are frequently referenced in ancient writings. As the Black classics scholar Frank Snowden Jr. wrote in the 1970s, at least one of the characters in TheOdyssey, Eurybates, is specifically described as “black-skinned and woolly-haired.” As the Stanford classics professor Sarah Derbew notes in her book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, Black people are referenced in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. They also appear in the writings of Hesiod and Herodotus. One of the lost epic poems is TheAethiopis, in which Memnon, the Aethiopian king and an ally to Troy, plays a major role.
Black people were not as uncommon in the ancient Mediterranean world as Nolan’s critics seem to imagine. But even if they had been, color-blind casting makes sense as an artistic choice for portraying the classics precisely because race as it exists today did not exist when TheOdyssey was written. And no contemporary actor can actually claim the same descent as Helen, who hatched from a swan’s egg.
As some have pointed out, Matt Damon is not even kind of Greek. If you want to perform Euripides in Tokyo, Lagos, Mexico City, or Washington, D.C., you’re going to run into trouble putting together a Greek cast, to say nothing of the fact that for much of the past two millennia, the Greek-speaking people living in what is modern-day Greece and Turkey would have identified as Romans instead. The stories of the classics survive and compel people across the globe because they are at once both alien and universal. They have been interpreted and reimagined for centuries, always reflecting the fears and concerns of the societies that retell them. The fact that the cast of Nolan’s Odyssey, an American film, looks like America is the least innovative thing about it.
As a teenager and a theater student at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., I was assigned classic Greek plays as part of both my theater-history class and my English class. This being a public school in D.C., these classes were almost entirely Black, as were my teachers. My theater-history class was taught by Donal Leace, an actor and folk singer who made a tremendous impression on me. He taught us about the importance of these texts and how they shaped human storytelling, and I owe to him my lifelong appreciation for them. I have seen conservatives accuse liberals of dismissing the classics as the province of “dead white men,” but that was not what I was taught in the 1990s by Black teachers, in a Black school, in what was then a mostly Black city.
Shortly after graduating, I went to see Avery Brooks in The Oedipus Plays. I do not remember at the time interpreting his casting as an overt political statement, let alone thinking that anyone would consider these stories as the collective racial property of people born white thousands of years later, rather than as a form of sorcery allowing anyone in the present to speak to the past.
Mr. Leace, who died in 2020, gave this gift to generations of students at Ellington. As I was watching Nolan’s Odyssey, I recognized an actor playing Polybus, one of Penelope’s suitors: It was Corey Hawkins, an Ellington alumnus. Mr. Leace would have been proud.
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