Within months of having her first child, Samantha Savran began hearing from family and friends that she should have a second. Doing so would be the greatest “gift” that she and her husband could give their son, people told them.

At first, Savran agreed. Growing up with a brother, she had liked having a live-in playmate and confidant. But the more she thought about her situation, she grew hesitant. Her birth experience had been traumatic. And she wasn’t sure if having a sibling would be the best for her son, who was thriving. What she and her husband could offer him—Montessori preschool, a family trip to Japan—might not be possible with a second child. But she also knew that sibling relationships could turn painful. In adulthood, her connection with her brother had splintered. They had disagreements that had spiraled into a full-blown falling out, and their relationship was now “difficult,” she told me. “It’s hard to say that I still see it as a ‘gift.’”

The notion that parents should give children a sibling is common. “Life Is Better With Siblings,” declared the headline on a recent New York Times op-ed by the Catholic University professor Catherine Pakaluk, who argued that, unlike small families, “large families generate moral education the way an engine generates heat.” In a column last year for The Guardian, a writer explained that she had “gifted my daughters each other,” and that doing so was a way of “quietly healing my childhood loneliness.” On social media, heartstring-tugging posts of small children holding hands and nuzzling underscore the point: “A baby brother is the universe’s way of giving a little girl her first real love story,” one mom captioned a video.

When I asked online about this kind of messaging, I heard from dozens of parents who had been on the receiving end. A New York City woman who works in health care, fresh off maternity leave, said a patient had told her that she would be “selfish” not to have a second child. Scarlet de Lemeny, a recently married retail consultant based in Boston, told me that before she’d even set a wedding date, people had advised her to have multiple children—because “they need a friend.” This month, the British celebrity Kate Lawler, who has one 5-year-old, wrote in Metro: “I’m now regularly hounded with abuse when I talk about the positives of having just one, as if raising my daughter without a sibling is the cruellest thing I could possibly do.” This prodding isn’t limited to one-child parents. A mother of two boys told me that she keeps hearing she should “definitely try for a third, so you can have a girl.”

The people who implore women to have more kids usually mean well. It’s lovely, and reasonable, to hope that a sibling might become a child’s lifelong friend and source of support. But the “gift” messaging isn’t always benign. For parents, it can add pressure, guilt, and anxiety to an already huge life decision—particularly for women, who in addition to giving birth tend to bear the brunt of fertility expectations, care responsibilities, and mental and physical health burdens, and to take a hit to their long-term employment and earnings prospects.

The “gift” phrasing also rests on a shaky premise. People, after all, aren’t inanimate objects. They are unpredictable beings with a will and their own motivations. And not even the best of intentions can guarantee that a child will experience a new sibling as a gift.

The sibling bond can be unlike any other. I’ve heard people describe their siblings as their “first phone call,” their “life raft,” their “village.” Some siblings can finish one another’s sentences or seem to sense when something is wrong even when they’re far away, in another state. One of my friends is so close with her brother that he made her the “best ma’am” at his wedding. Another person told me that, when her parents kicked her out, her sister took her in—the same weekend the sister was getting married.

Broadly, research shows that sibling relationships tend to be more positive than negative. One large, recent U.S. survey found that more than half of respondents ages 25 to 35 had “tight-knit” relationships with their full siblings. Although events such as starting their own family can cause siblings to drift apart, they typically experience a “rebound,” the sibling researcher Megan Gilligan, an associate professor at the University of Missouri, told me. In one study, a sample of older adults found that most reported warm, low-conflict sibling ties.

But these bonds can be uniquely complicated. “Sibling relationships are different than our other family ties, and they tend to be more complex,” Gilligan said. “We use the term ambivalence: They can be both very positive and very negative, simultaneously.” The same factors that can make these relationships go so right—growing up together; knowing one another’s triggers, foibles, and flaws—can also make them go very wrong. When aging parents need care or die, for instance, their grown children might find benefits to sharing the costs, decision making, and emotional burden, Gilligan said. But in some families, the same situations can cause conflict and resentment.

[Read: Couples therapy, but for siblings]

Research also indicates that it isn’t simply having a sibling that benefits children—it’s having a good relationship with one. That may sound like plain common sense, but the distinction is crucial. A paper last year identified sibling aggression and abuse as “invisible and widespread public health problems.” One watershed 2013 study found that children who endured sibling aggression, including name-calling and “mean” comments, had worse mental health than those who didn’t.

Still darker and less discussed is sibling sexual abuse. There’s no way to know how common it is, Brad Watts, a Tennessee-based therapist who specializes in sibling abuse, told me. But in more than a decade of working with affected families, he has seen a theme: No family is guaranteed immunity. “It can happen in my home,” he told me. “It can happen in anybody’s home.”

Watts has three boys. He has loved watching them become close friends. But he would never tell someone to “give” their child a sibling. “I can talk about all kinds of siblings that were not ‘gifts,’” Watts said. “They were, more or less, terrors.” Even close sibling relationships aren’t always beneficial. Studies over the years have found that adolescents are more likely to engage in risky behavior, such as smoking or unsafe sex, and even to break the law if another sibling did—especially if their relationship is tight.

Calling a younger sibling a “gift” can create unintended consequences, too, Whitney Goodman, a Miami-based therapist, told me. Although this is surely no one’s intent, the phrasing can imply that a child has been brought into the world in the service of another. The parental preference it suggests may cause children to feel they’re treated or desired differently—one of the most common reasons sibling relationships fracture.

Learning to navigate life with someone you didn’t choose to grow up with can be rewarding. But not always. The same large U.S. survey that found “tight-knit” relationships among many full siblings also found that up to one in five sibling relationships were characterized by “detachment”—meaning that siblings were less likely to have frequent contact, to feel emotionally close, or to offer one another social or financial support. In Germany, researchers looking at a nationally representative sample of nearly 6,000 adults found that 28 percent of respondents were estranged from a sibling at least once over the study’s six-year period.

[Read: The longest relationships of our lives]

De Lemeny, the Boston retail consultant, has amassed more than half a million followers across TikTok and Instagram by sharing about her life and childhood, and her experience going no-contact with her parents. Many followers ask about her brother, assuming that they must have “trauma-bonded.” When she explains that, actually, she and her brother don’t speak, some are shocked. Others thank her: They weren’t close to their siblings and thought they were alone in this. “It’s a dynamic that doesn’t really get spoken about,” de Lemeny said. “It’s something that carries a lot of shame.”

This silence about conflict and estrangement can have ripple effects in the broader culture. It might lead parents-to-be to assume that, barring some grave unlikelihood, siblings will be friends for life. It also contributes to the narrative that if a person doesn’t “give” their child a sibling, they will be, unequivocally, depriving them of something important.

Anna de Sapio, a social worker in the United Kingdom, gave birth during the first COVID lockdown and struggled with isolation, exhaustion, and postpartum depression and anxiety. Yet when her daughter was only four months old, de Sapio began to get the question: When are you planning to give her a sibling? It made de Sapio feel “depleted,” she told me—as if, no matter how much of herself she gave, it wasn’t enough.

Nearly every mother I spoke with expressed guilt about her decision making: one-child moms for not “giving” their child a built-in best friend; multiple-child moms who after having additional kids felt awful that they had less time and attention for their first. And these days, the pressure is coming not just from friends and family but also from politicians and other public figures: Donald Trump floating “baby bonuses”; Elon Musk arguing that the “number one threat to the West” is low birth rates; tradwives, tech bros, and other proponents of the pronatalist movement who repeat over and over that having more children isn’t a lifestyle choice—it’s a moral good.

Like the “moral good” rhetoric, which assumes that having more babies is all upside, the “gift” rhetoric ignores the fact that having one child may simply be the best decision for many families—including for solo children. Research spanning decades suggests that, contrary to stereotype, only children tend to be just as well-adjusted as kids in multi-child households, enjoy the same or better mental health, and have closer relationships with their parents. They are no more narcissistic, competitive, or lonely than those with siblings. And although they may possess, as very young children, slightly-less-developed interpersonal skills, these differences generally disappear over time.

Plus, let’s be blunt: Regardless of how much parents love every child that they have, additional children can add stress and expense. This can affect the mental well-being of parents and, by extension, their children. Kids generally fare better when their caregivers are in good mental health, can invest more time in caregiving, and are sensitive and responsive to their child’s needs. These nuances may help explain why, on average, children with more than three or four siblings have worse mental and physical health than kids with fewer or none.

The “gift” phrasing misses something else, too: When people frame siblings as gifts and being an only child as a deficit, they discount what many only-child families told me they’ve experienced: the joy that can come from having a small, tight-knit family where jealousies and conflicts are mostly absent, and parents’ time and attention are undivided.

After several years of uncertainty, Savran and her husband made a decision: They would stick to having one child. “Giving the best life we can to the one kid we have,” she said, “and making sure he’s surrounded by friends and ‘framily’ and people who love him, ended up being our priority.” No one knows what a sibling might bring. But this kind of careful decision making—which takes the capacities, joys, and temperaments of already existing family members into account—can be its own gift.

If you go to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, you may be able to purchase, for a mere $69.99, a plastic receptacle shaped as a Trojan horse. The horse is used in the film as an image of moral decline. But the repurposing of a sinister instrument of war into a popcorn container hints at the malleability of the conceit: A Trojan horse contains unexpected multitudes.

This mythical item has always been a tricky symbol, used by generations of storytellers and artists to map shifting perceptions of deception in war. The physical design of Nolan’s version is striking and wildly out of keeping with earlier representations, including ancient depictions and the pull-toy design of the giant equine in Wolf Petersen’s fun 2004 blockbuster, Troy. Nolan’s horse rears upright rather than standing on four hooves. The unwieldy creature is discovered half-buried in the sand, and proves almost impossible for the Trojans to lug into the city. This cinematic prop is an extraordinary feat of engineering: It stands nearly 40 feet tall and took hundreds of people to drag up the beach. The physical horror of people being trapped inside as the seawater rises is brilliantly and terrifyingly evoked.

But on a narrative level, Nolan’s horse is light as air. In comparison with other blockbusters—such as, say, the Die Hard films, also action-packed tales of one man’s dangerous journey back to his wife—The Odyssey contains far more pontificating about values and civilizational decline, but much less coherence and less heart. It gestures at a critique of xenophobia and violence, but it focuses primarily on the perspective of the guilty, traumatized warrior rather than that of his victims. Moreover, the movie’s devoted attention to mechanics, and its heedless willingness to give us massacres as spectacle, undermines its moralizing claims of caring about man’s inhumanity to man. Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.

[Gal Beckerman: The Odyssey was never about the Gods]

In ancient myth, Troy was a wealthy, powerful city whose walls were built by two gods, Apollo and Poseidon. Such walls could never be breached by mere mortals. So when Greek warriors gathered to besiege the city and retrieve the wife and wealth stolen from the Spartan king Menelaus by the Trojan prince Paris, they found themselves at an impasse: The great army, unable to break through Troy’s divinely constructed defenses, remained immobilized on the beach for 10 years.

Things changed only when Athena, the daughter of Zeus and goddess of military strategy, put an idea into the mind of her favorite mortal, Odysseus: to instruct the master craftsman Epeius to build a massive, hollow horse, inside which Odysseus and the other Greeks could hide. Odysseus was, as Nolan obviously recognizes, a mythical Robert Oppenheimer: a hero able to devise the ultimate weapon that could end a seemingly unwinnable war.

We do not know who first told the story of the Trojan horse, but it was in circulation by at least the early seventh century B.C.E. The earliest extant artistic depiction is on a large storage jar (in Greek called a pithos) from the island of Mykonos. It features a long-legged horse that has square cutout windows for the warriors to be seen through; outside the horse, more fighters are enslaving terrified women and children. The image is, like the popcorn-bucket horse, a joke: It would ruin the trick if the horse had windows.

The Homeric Odyssey, along with The Iliad and the poems of Hesiod, were likely composed around roughly the same time as the making of the Trojan-horse pithos, using the new technology that had become available in the Greek-speaking world in the mid-eighth century B.C.E.: the alphabet. This development enabled one or more composers—“Homer”—to create and preserve monumental written poems based on the oral tales about the great, lost days of heroes—characters who did extraordinary things and were closer to the gods than any normal mortal. The myths included partial, fictionalized folk memories of the earlier period of Greek prosperity, when the Mycenaeans built palatial structures and formed extensive trade routes across the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Homer’s Odyssey draws on many generations of preexisting myth but reshapes the old stories for its own era—a time of migration, colonization, urbanization, political and social diversity, and technological change.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus repeatedly finds new ways to reenact his most famous trick of hiding inside the horse (an assumed backstory not described in the main narrative). He hides in the care of Calypso (whose name suggests “hiding”), beneath the name of No Man, under the sheep of Polyphemus, and in the guise of an old beggar. Eventually, he replicates his triumph at Troy in his own house by technological mastery of another trick involving a wooden weapon (this time, his bow). Odysseus’s mastery of technology enables him to invade a heavily defended home in disguise, achieve an impossible victory, and break an impasse, answering the long-deferred question of which man will claim the household and Penelope as his bride.

In one of only two extensive passages in Homer that evoke the horse explicitly (a long episode that Nolan excises), Odysseus, while enjoying the lavish hospitality of the Phaeacians on Scheria, asks a blind poet to sing the story of the Trojan horse. The poet complies, and Odysseus weeps at the story of his greatest triumph. The narrator offers a surprising simile: Odysseus sobs “as pitifully as a woman weeps” while watching her warrior husband die in a failed attempt to defend his city and his children. The woman falls desperately on her dying husband, but his killers are behind her, hitting her with spears as they force her into a life of enslavement. The simile suggests a connection between the victorious Odysseus and the victims of his greatest success. We are not told whether Odysseus is crying because he feels guilt and pity at the thought of those he has killed, tricked, and enslaved, or because he is tormented to be trapped so far away from either the battlefield or Ithaca—the spheres where he can be honored and known. The scene is a memorable reminder that warfare has victims as well as victors, and that it may sometimes be difficult to tell which is which.

After many misadventures, and eight years in the beds of two different goddesses, Odysseus makes it home from eastern Troy to western Ithaca. He is able to move from what Homer’s contemporary Hesiod calls the brutal “age of bronze” and the glorious “age of heroes” into the conflict-ridden “age of iron,” because he has mastered not only warfare with bronze weapons but also the more social skills of rhetoric, cunning, and technology—skills that enable him to survive and win eternal glory, even when he is far from the battlefield. Homer’s Odysseus specializes in clever scheming—in Greek, mētis—and the narrator does not invite us to moralize against a flexible relationship with the truth.

Many centuries later, Virgil set his Roman epic, The Aeneid, in the aftermath of the Trojan War, and modeled its narrative on both The Odyssey and The Iliad. The protagonist, Aeneas, is like Odysseus in that he is a warrior on a journey from Troy to his western homeland. But whereas Odysseus returns to his original home, Aeneas is a migrant Trojan, fleeing his fallen city for a new homeland to which he has never been: Italy, where he will begin the historical process that is fated, one day, to lead to the foundation of the glorious city of Rome. Virgil reinvents the story of Odysseus in a double way. Homer’s hero becomes both the pious refugee, Aeneas, and the cruel liar, Ulysses (the Roman name for Odysseus), who destroys a city through his unscrupulous wiles.

[David Sims: An Odyssey deserving of the biggest screen possible]

Homer leaves the Trojans to decide for themselves whether to take the horse into the city. But Virgil adds a character who persuades them to do so: Sinon, a cousin of “cruel Ulysses,” who shares his penchant for lies. Sinon, whose name means “harmer,” is found bound and alone after the Greeks pretend to sail away. He tells the Trojans a pitiful story about how he barely escaped being sacrificed by Ulysses, claiming that the horse is an offering specifically for Athena (Minerva in Latin), who will ensure the city’s salvation if they take the horse inside. Yielding to their pious respect for the gods, and their eagerness to show mercy toward vulnerable suppliants, the Trojans free Sinon from his bonds and take the deadly horse inside their city. Aeneas, who narrates the story to the Carthaginian queen Dido, comments (in the translation by Scott McGill and Susannah Wright):

His tactics and the tears he falsely shed

now captured us—we who had not been beaten

by Tydides, Thessalian Achilles,

ten years of warfare, or a thousand ships.

The addition of Sinon makes it clear that deception happens not primarily through inanimate mechanical objects but through people deliberately using rhetoric to manipulate audiences, and through the choices of those audiences about what and whom to believe. With the Sinon episode, Virgil asks his readers to consider whether cities and civilizations may fall for noble motives rather than because of moral failures.

Virgil’s version of the Trojan-horse episode was written in the time of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. The new leader was a canny manipulator of words and imagery who presented his revolutionary autocratic regime as if it were in line with Roman tradition. Virgil showcases the dangers of deception and offers an account of how easily good people can be deceived. The scene offers an ambivalent reflection on the culture and politics of its time. We might read Sinon’s deceptions in light of his Greekness: Perhaps the future Roman people need fear no such schemes, as long as they hold fast to their own identity and maintain suspicion of all foreigners, especially Greeks. But we can also see a dark shadow in Augustus’s manipulation of the Roman people through clever storytelling that disguised and enabled the destruction of the old Republic and the slide into one-man rule.

Where Virgil’s Ulysses is cruel and predatory, and his mendacious instrument, Sinon, is unambiguously a bad guy, Nolan re-creates Sinon as his film’s sinless moral center. The focus on “sin” is presumably the reason for the odd but consistent pronunciation of the name: More normally pronounced by English-speakers as Sigh-non or See-non—echoing the long i of the Latin—in Nolan’s film, it’s always Sin-none as if to reinforce the Christlike innocence of Elliot Page’s version of the classical “harmer.” Nolan’s Sinon is not a trickster but a poor innocent to whom Odysseus has lied by omission, in failing to tell him about the trick with the horse. The episode is a cautionary fable about a director who fails to trust an actor to play his part: Odysseus lies so that Sinon will give the most convincing possible performance when he falsely tells the Trojans, with his dying breath, that the horse is a gift.

The film’s oft-invoked “Zeus’s law” is explained as a version of the Golden Rule: We must host beggars and strangers kindly, to “do as we would be done by,” and because they could be gods in disguise (a quite different point). The unkindness of Penelope’s suitors to Odysseus’s poor dog Argos and to the blind Eumaeus is a clear violation of this principle. Yet the film also suggests that the law of Zeus is concerned with a quite different moral problem: deception. The horse is presented as the ultimate violation of the law of Zeus, because it entails wielding a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a gift. The Homeric Zeus is a cunning schemer, whereas Nolan’s Zeus takes a particularly hard line on deceit, especially in relationships between hosts and guests. The film’s arch-villain, the lead suitor, Antinous, proves his villainy by being a bad guest, and a bad host, and an entertainingly weaselly liar. The horse is presented as breaking “civilization” because it represents the moment when the good guy, Odysseus, echoes the behavior of the bad guy by being a deceitful, ungrateful guest. But the film does not explain what “hospitality” has to do with a narrative situation in which the Greeks have been besieging Troy for 10 years already; the Trojans are not their hosts but their enemies in war. If the war is bad, it is nonsensical to suggest that the most important turning point is the use of the horse rather than Agamemnon’s choice to invade Troy in the first place and Odysseus’s choice to yield to the empire’s demands. The visually impressive spectacle of the horse on a stunning stretch of pristine beach (shot in Essaouira, Morocco) contributes to the narrative muddle: The Greeks have supposedly been encamped there for the past decade, yet it shows no sign of human habitation.

Nolan shot the Calypso episodes in the disputed Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara without the consent of the Indigenous Sahrawi people. The choice underlines the lack of seriousness in Nolan’s thinking about his themes: the ethical and cultural costs of entering other people’s homes uninvited, for the purpose of extracting resources without respect for an unwilling host.

In Homer, deception is relatively benign. In Virgil, it is evil. But in both poems, we learn directly about how the Greeks enacted their schemes, as well as the decision-making process of the pious, thoughtful Trojans. In Nolan, we never see Odysseus planning the construction of the horse or lying to the innocent Sinon, and his Trojans take mere seconds to make up their minds. The film is not interested in the social or psychological questions of how people deceive and are deceived. Deception is a fait accompli: The horse appears on the beach in the opening sequence as if deposited there by helicopter, and Sinon does not know that he is not telling the truth. What matters cinematically are the logistics: the rolling of the horse uphill and the claustrophobic, waterlogged interior. Once the ambush of the Trojans begins, the camera lingers repeatedly not on the human actors but on the enflamed, toppling buildings and the great gates of the city, whose slow-moving mechanism is observed at great length. The script tells us loudly that people matter, but the camera shows us that what matters is the mechanical challenge of moving objects through space.

Nolan’s Odysseus goes to war to protect his biological son, Telemachus, but in so doing betrays his quasi-son, Sinon—an irony whose emotional impact is dulled by the film’s frenetic pacing. Page is a luminous, heartbreaking presence on-screen, whereas the Trojans are mostly masked nonentities. Odysseus’s moral development is retold in miniature on the island of Circe, where he shoots what he thinks is an animal but then realizes was actually a human being. Yet neither Odysseus nor the film itself seems to move beyond the occasional moment or two of noticing the humanity of all humans. The face of the slaughtered deer-man is not shown, and the film’s narrative rushes on. The final massacre of the cartoonishly bestial suitors inside Odysseus’s house is presented with thrilling exuberance, and the camera does not linger on the pain and humanity of those who die or allow for the possibility that they, too, should be mourned. Instead, the long, repetitive final fight sequence fixates, again, on logistics: how the weapons are hidden, and how they descend from the storeroom through a hole in the ceiling. The film’s primary fascination with maneuvering objects creates a mismatch between what we see and what we are being told to think and feel. We see inside the horse, but we do not see inside the characters or their world.

[Peter Wehner: An Odyssey for our own time]

In the final sequence of the movie, Odysseus leaves home for yet another journey. It draws heavily on Alfred Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, whose narrator abandons his “agèd wife” and leaves his son, Telemachus, on the throne of Ithaca, while he departs for the “untravell’d world” “to follow knowledge like a sinking star.” Matt Damon as Odysseus likewise embarks in a boat toward the sunset, although he gets to take his wife (played by Anne Hathaway) along for the ride. The self-imposed exile of Odysseus enables his son (Tom Holland) to rule over the Ithacans who survive. The camera depicts the newly becrowned prince as a sunlit golden boy, who can receive the power and wealth won by his father’s bloody hands without having to taint his own—although we have been given no reason to believe that Telemachus is ready for the role, or that the concentration of power and wealth in one man is beneficial for anyone.

The final goal of Nolan’s Odysseus is not infinite knowledge but redemption: He is at last awake from his amnesia and intends to bury the comrades left uninterred on his journeys. Yet the waking vision of the protagonist, and hence also of the film, remains extraordinarily narrow. There is no suggestion that he will offer burial to the Trojans, or the suitors, or the various foreigners killed during his journey. Despite Odysseus’s spiritual awakening, the dead remain as dead as ever. But there is a spectacular sunset and yet another lavish display of a large vehicle grandly making its way through space, across churning waves.

Nolan’s Odyssey is itself a kind of Trojan horse. The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the “apparent magic” of deceptive images. We need art that is truthful about the costs and the necessity of compassion, and that recognizes that a sense of spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies. These lessons are legible in Homer and Virgil, but are elided by Nolan’s visually stunning, emotionally empty film.

Earlier this year, I visited a “Freedom Truck,” one of the patriotic mobile museums that the Trump administration is sending around the country for the nation’s 250 birthday. There, I had a wide-ranging conversation with a visitor who complained that the U.S. education system is not teaching what she called true history. But when I mentioned the Smithsonian, her disposition changed entirely. She’d heard rumors about “a lot of liberalism going through the Smithsonian now,” she told me, but added, “I love the Smithsonian. I don’t have a problem with it.”

I hear this a lot, actually. Even now, as the museum complex continues to face a pressure campaign from the White House, public fondness for the Smithsonian—for its free entry and eclectic collections—is hard to break among those otherwise receptive to President Trump’s anti-institutionalism.

Attacks on the credibility of institutions, especially those that disseminate information—universities, public schools, media organizations—have become commonplace in this so-called post-truth age. Recent data from Gallup, published last month, suggested that confidence in the majority of institutions asked about in the survey, including newspapers, public schools, and TV news, is at or near historic lows. Pollsters, meanwhile, don’t even include museums in the Gallup surveys. Although museums have certainly faced some criticism from the left and right, until now, they’ve been largely immune to the most deleterious effects of the culture wars.

This may be because most Americans, unlike the president, seem to trust these entities to do their thing. A YouGov survey last week found that 57 percent of Americans said that the amount of influence the president should have over exhibits and programming at federally funded museums should be “none” or “not much.” Just 17 percent of Republicans seemed to take the president’s position: that he should have a “great deal” of influence. Coming after a history museum may not be the base-galvanizing issue the White House hopes it is.

Industry data support these findings. In a survey this year, Wilkening Consulting, in partnership with the American Alliance of Museums, found that when people were asked whether museums, faced with pressure, should remove content on topics such as slavery and climate change, the majority of conservatives (63 percent) and liberals (83 percent) disagreed. An oft-cited statistic from the same pair of organizations places museums among the most trusted sources of information in American life, falling just behind public libraries and family and friends. It suggests that museums occupy a rare and cozy place in the collective imagination.

At a time of high mistrust in not just institutions but also observable reality, people seem to still find a sense of stability in these keepers of public memory. Perhaps it makes sense that Americans would put their last bits of trust in the very places that show them what is physically, tangibly real.

For more than a year, the White House has threatened and criticized the Smithsonian, accusing it of spreading divisive narratives and failing to adequately celebrate American history. In recent weeks, the administration has zeroed in on the National Museum of American History, publishing a lengthy report last month decrying exhibits, calling out staff members, and asserting that the museum has fallen victim to “ideological capture” at the hands of a “radical, activist cohort.” During a pair of congressional hearings, the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, attested to her love of this country some half a dozen times while maintaining that telling the American story in all of its complexity is a form of respect for its people.  

Two days later, Trump announced an executive order that would effectively plaster untrustworthy on signs outside the National Museum of American History, like an explicit content label on a CD. The administration ordered the National Park Service to put up the signage in front of the museum to correct what it claims is “inaccurate information” and to share the findings of its report, which claims that the current leadership of the Smithsonian and the history museum cannot be trusted to tell the American story.

[Read: How the Smithsonian could fall]

Right-wing media organizations have echoed this messaging, and since the hearings, Fox News has published dozens of clips and articles criticizing the Smithsonian and scrutinizing its leadership’s pay, highlighting months-old proposed budget cuts, and tallying the number of “liberal items” in a recent exhibit.

The Smithsonian, which is partially government-funded, has faced partisan flare-ups over the years. A controversy over how to display the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima compelled a museum director to resign in 1995. In 2010, Smithsonian leadership removed from the walls of the National Portrait Gallery an artwork showing a crucifix with ants crawling on it after a right-wing outcry. But these incidents involved single exhibits. Now the White House is making a much more comprehensive case against an entire museum and the institution to which it belongs. With the ordered signs, which will direct visitors to Trump-preferred sources of information, the White House is stepping between visitors and historic objects as though to say: Don’t trust what you see inside. Choose us instead.

This is where museums and friends and family actually share something in common. Culture wars thrive on the unknown. But museums are an in-person activity. “It’s you directly with that artwork or you directly with that specimen, whatever it is. That object feels like it’s speaking directly to you as a trustworthy thing from the past. That in and of itself lends a lot of credibility,” Susie Wilkening, who runs the American Alliance of Museums’ research about museums and trust, told me. Max van Balgooy, a professor of museum studies at the George Washington University, had similar thoughts: “If you see the gun that John Wilkes Booth used or the chair sat in by John Hancock, you’re sort of faced with the truth,” he told me. “You can’t argue with the real stuff.”

Museums weren’t always the hubs of knowledge they are today. They had to both differentiate themselves from the likes of P. T. Barnum’s “museum” as serious scholarly enterprises, devoid of exaggeration and fakes, and invite in ordinary visitors.

At the National Museum of History and Technology, which opened in 1964 and went on to become the National Museum of American History, curators strived not just to show objects but also to tell stories, enhanced with well-designed spaces. In the early days, these stories largely celebrated technological progress: When Daniel Boorstin started as the history museum’s director, in 1969, he nodded to the political ruptures of the era and said, “Here, we emphasize the positive. Without denying our failures, we underline and dramatize our successes.” But as more academics joined the museum, they began to stress questions of who, exactly, benefited from American progress, and worked other critical themes into exhibits. The trend—moving from the rah-rah to the sober—was exemplified by a 1987 exhibition that commemorated the bicentennial of the American Constitution and detailed the abuses of Japanese American internment camps.

Unlike with other kinds of institutions, such as news sites, naysayers can’t easily form museum alternatives aligned with their perspective. (Partisan museums often struggle to compete with mainstream institutions in terms of historical artifacts.) Part of a museum’s trustworthiness may simply come down to the basic fact that it owns these objects and shows them in an authoritative-looking building. Darryl Hart, a history professor at Hillsdale College, an institution that has worked with the Trump administration on education topics, suggested that museumgoers typically don’t think to critique what they see. “For some people, it’s simply part of what they do on a vacation, and I think they check a box,” he told me. “My sense is, people really are going there fairly innocently, not looking for an agenda.”

[Read: First the Kennedy Center, now the Smithsonian]

The data concur. “On the whole, museums are not believed by the American public to have a political agenda,” Colleen Dilenschneider, the founder of Impacts Experience, a market-research firm that examines perceptions of cultural institutions, told me. Her research, which relies on data from the National Awareness, Attitudes, and Usage Study, found that as of July 1, fewer than a quarter of Americans surveyed believed that museums had political agendas—compared with well over half who believed the same of news sources. Liberals and conservatives both overwhelmingly agreed with the statement that museums are “welcoming to people like me.”

Dilenschneider said that “the most shared characteristic of any person in the United States who’s visited a museum in the last year is that they self-identify as a white, non-Hispanic individual” and added that “there are people who are used to hearing their story and they trust that they will continue to hear their story.” Where the story comes from, though, is less clear. Museums contain an essential paradox: They feel transparent because you can walk in and see the work they do. At the same time, the hand behind that work is less visible: As van Balgooy put it, creditless wall texts can read like “the voice of God.”

This impersonal feeling is nearly a definitional feature of institutional trust, Oliver Schilke, the director of the Center for Trust Studies at the University of Arizona, told me. “It’s more a trust in a category of things rather than in specific individuals or counterparts,” he said. This slight distance allows us to form an idealized view on an institution. Putting the spotlight on real people behind it can degrade that trust if they’re being attacked or discredited, as happened during the often-acrimonious Smithsonian hearings last month. At times, lawmakers seemed to be speaking directly to their supporters online, such as when Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina demanded that the history museum’s director tell her whether she believes that men can become women.

When Victoria Cain, a professor at Northeastern University who studies the history of museums and education, described museums’ role in life today, she made them sound like a tonic to the most charged parts of contemporary discourse. Akin to secular churches, museums have taken on a ritualistic quality, she told me: “You can go be in a common space with other people in an act of appreciation.”

In this regard, museums aren’t just a last bastion of public faith—they’re a rare, shared, bipartisan cultural space. These days, many people lament the ways that we have retreated into information silos, full of others who agree with us. But you can’t chop up Thomas Jefferson’s desk and give half of it to the right and half to the left. If we all want to see the desk where the Declaration of Independence was written, we’re going to have to learn, first, to be in the same room.

At an open-air Mass in Écône, Switzerland, before a crowd of about 16,000 people, four priests became bishops last month. The men professed their fidelity to tradition against “heretics, schismatics, and those who rebel against our Holy Father.” They did so knowing full well that, in becoming bishops, they lacked something the Catholic Church deems essential: permission from the pope.

All four of these men are members of the Society of Saint Pius X, or SSPX, an arch-traditionalist group of clergy founded in 1970 by the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. For decades, SSPX has battled with the Vatican over the group’s fear that, as one theologian told me, “in reading the signs of the times, the Catholic Church is more beholden to the times than she is a light to the nations.” Now tensions have reached a breaking point.

The Vatican warned SSPX before the Écône Mass that consecrating bishops without a papal mandate would be considered a “schismatic act,” a formal separation from the Catholic Church. After the Mass, the Church issued a decree saying that the new bishops, plus the two who ordained them, incurred an automatic excommunication: They can neither receive communion nor celebrate licit Masses nor officiate valid marriages and confessions. The 700 or so SSPX priests worldwide will also fall into schism, and thereby be excommunicated, if they remain with the society. Even lay churchgoers who “formally adhere” to the group may face the same sanction.

[Read: The real religious ‘renewal’ happening in Gen Z]

By some estimates, 25,000 people in the United States are affiliated with SSPX—a tiny fraction of the roughly 53 million American Catholic adults. Many Catholics may not even know that the Church finds itself in arguably its largest schism since the 19th century. Nonetheless, the SSPX excommunications touch on broader disputes in Catholicism today: about reform, orthodoxy, and whether the Church’s institutional changes of the past half century have been for the better. That is, this schism is about more than just SSPX. It’s also about how the Church will respond to a larger group of traditionalists—those who, though still Catholic, have questioned or even attacked many of the beliefs and practices that characterize the faith today.

SSPX’s fight with the Catholic Church began as a response to the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, the most pivotal event of 20th-century Catholic history. From 1962 to 1965, the Church instituted a series of reforms that reimagined its role in a secular age. Perhaps most famous was the council’s overhaul of the Mass in hopes of increasing participation among the faithful. In most Masses, priests stopped facing the altar and began facing the people. The local language replaced Latin as the main tongue of worship. In some parishes, out went Gregorian chants and in came guitars.

Vatican II also reformed the doctrine of extra ecclesiam nulla salus, or “outside the Church, there is no salvation.” As Larry Chapp, a former theology professor at DeSales University, told me, the council clarified that Catholics “have to be open to the movement of grace outside of the boundaries of the Church.” Guided by this vision, Vatican II produced writings that promoted religious freedom, ecumenical efforts with other Christians, and “dialogue and collaboration” with non-Christian religions.

To SSPX, these changes were calamitous. The society’s 28-page profession of faith asserts that true Catholicism rejects ecumenical and interfaith dialogue, and states that other faiths are “false religions” and “the work of the devil.” SSPX also holds fast to the pre–Vatican II Traditional Latin Mass as the only legitimate liturgy: The profession of faith declares that the vernacular Mass “favours heresy, weakens the faith,” and “turns the faithful away from the adoration due to God.”

Lefebvre participated in Vatican II himself—he even signed all of the writings that SSPX now objects to. But he soon started denouncing the council’s reforms. Five years after the council concluded, he founded SSPX with the mission of training priests in preconciliar beliefs and practices. In 1974, Lefebvre condemned Vatican II for contributing to “the destruction of the Church,” one of the many accusations and acts of defiance that prompted Church authorities to revoke his permission to run the society. Lefebvre kept recruiting priests anyway. By 1988, SSPX had approximately 200 clergy worldwide, mainly in France, Switzerland, and the United States. In June of that year, Lefebvre ordained four priests as bishops, ignoring Pope John Paul II’s orders not to. The pontiff excommunicated Lefebvre and the four bishops but declared no formal schism. Lefebvre, for his part, continued leading the society—and vehemently opposing Vatican II, which he described as the “adulterous marriage of the Church with liberal ideas”—until his death in 1991.

[Read: The first Millennial saint]

The Vatican let SSPX exist in a kind of limbo state in the years after the 1988 excommunications. Members of the society were officially limited in the sacraments that they could officiate, but SSPX kept ordaining priests and holding illicit Masses. And yet they were still, technically, a part of the Catholic Church. Church leaders, Chapp said, made “efforts to bring them back into the fold.” In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications of the four living SSPX bishops that John Paul II had effected two decades prior. A few years later, Pope Francis granted SSPX priests permission to hear confessions and officiate marriages. Still, SSPX has no interest in being part of a Church that doesn’t spurn Vatican II. The society holds that the council’s reforms create a “state of necessity” that allows it to do what it must “to preserve the faith.” This is the irony at the heart of SSPX’s theology: The society claims to be a bulwark of the Catholic faith; it also dismisses the pope’s authority as the final interpreter of that faith. “This is not a trivial issue,” Chapp said. “Staying in union with the vicar of Christ is a central defining feature of what it means to be Catholic.”

Although SSPX considers itself a lone defender of tradition, other prominent Catholics—including popes—have expressed concerns about the liturgy and emphasized the importance of doctrinal clarity. Before his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI worried that Vatican II’s liturgical changes, as implemented, had in some situations downplayed the “authentic inner vibrancy” of the Mass. John Paul II was a consistent proponent of interfaith dialogue, but nonetheless cautioned in 1990 against “a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another.’”

But these popes—and many other Catholics who have raised questions about the implementation of certain Church reforms—were working within the Church, not against it. SSPX, by contrast, “doesn’t have to wrestle with unclarity or ambiguity,” Father Gregory Pine, a professor of moral theology at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., told me. It doesn’t do the hard theological work of interpreting new teachings alongside tradition. It simply maintains a posture of rejection—and calls it orthodoxy.

It’s one thing for a tiny sect to go rogue. But traditionalism has many supporters in the broader Catholic Church—which means that how the Church moves forward has implications not only for SSPX but also for this larger set of traditionalists, and for the unity of the Church as a whole.

Like SSPX, some traditionalists have been viciously critical of the pope, especially during Francis’s pontificate. On a 2024 visit to Singapore, for example, the late pontiff met with an interfaith group of youth and said that “all religions are paths to God”—an off-the-cuff comment that reflected a Vatican II teaching that non-Christian religions “often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all.” Still, several prominent Catholic traditionalists denounced Francis. One said that he spouted “heresy that flies in the face of Jesus Christ.” Another created a video titled “Pope Francis Is a Heretic Denying Tradition, Part 2” that echoed arguments SSPX had made before. The Traditional Latin Mass also has a following beyond SSPX. Roughly 1 million American Catholic adults attend it weekly, which is just 2 percent of the country’s overall Catholic adult population but still many more people than are affiliated with the society.

The SSPX excommunications contain a clear message to all traditionalists: Vatican II itself is not up for debate. The council’s teachings and reforms are essential components of the faith, not optional addenda to it. Some Catholics believe that the Church should also continue its official position of limiting access to the Traditional Latin Mass. The Catholic writer Mike Lewis told me that support for the liturgy tends to come with an “entire theological structure” that questions the authority of Vatican II and, by extension, the pope.

[Read: What the fastest-growing Christian group says about America]

Father Pine, however, said that some proponents of the Traditional Latin Mass are simply looking for a liturgy that is “celebrated worthily” and at a “transcendent register.” And some Church leaders have signaled an openness to the Traditional Latin Mass in the weeks since the excommunications. Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone—whom Pope Leo XIV recently appointed to the Vatican’s highest court—has called for “more access” to the liturgy, and some U.S. bishops have promoted it as part of their pleas to SSPX’s followers to return to the Church.

Leo XIV has stressed unity since he became pope, last year, and he has not made his position on the Traditional Latin Mass fully known. In excommunicating SSPX, he rebuked a small group of the most vocal supporters of the Traditional Latin Mass. But he has also met with a well-known proponent of the liturgy, as well as with the authors of a forthcoming book that argues that Traditional Latin Mass–goers aren’t the recalcitrants their critics make them out to be.

Excommunication, the theologians I spoke with told me, serves a dual purpose: It’s punitive, but it’s also medicinal, meant to call a person or group back to communion. SSPX’s lay members, by early indications, plan to remain in schism for the time being. Those who return, though, may well find their Church to be a bit more open to traditionalism than they imagined it would be.

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Karl Marx wrote that political actors often borrow the language and symbols of earlier struggles to wage their own battles. So perhaps he would have been unsurprised to hear the Trump administration resurrect the political rhetoric of the Cold War fight against Marxism.

President Trump, at Wheeler High School in the Atlanta suburbs earlier this summer, mentioned communism or communist 15 times, starting less than a minute into his hour-plus speech: “Communism is the single greatest threat to our country and its history—including even World War I and World War II, Pearl Harbor, 9/11,” he claimed. “I think it’s the greatest threat that I’ve ever seen to our country.”

Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened political leaders, counterterrorism professionals, and law-enforcement officers from 66 countries for what the State Department billed as an extraordinary gathering aimed at confronting “a transnational threat.” From a podium flanked by world flags, Rubio spoke of the need to combat the far left around the world. “This is a distinctive and unique evil,” he said. “They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist, but the fundamental character is always the same.” The State Department even has a culprit in mind, last week releasing a 100-page report that characterized Cuba as “posing a unique threat” to American security.

Never mind that the island nation of 11 million people lost its chief sponsor with the Soviet Union’s collapse and is so economically strapped that the regime rations electricity and gas. The official line of the U.S. government is that Havana has backed “left-wing terrorism” inside the United States—including “violent BLM militants” and “Antifa terror cells”—and provides a refuge for communism in the Western Hemisphere. “The Cuba that they’re describing, going back to the ’60s and onward, doesn’t exist anymore,” Ted Piccone, a senior foreign-policy adviser for the Clinton administration, told us. “I think they’re just fighting an old ghost in old battles.”

From the standpoint of the White House, however, reviving communism as a boogeyman is a way to tie together two very current objectives. On the home front, experts told us that the vilification of Communists could be an attempt to shift the focus away from painful pocketbook issues such as higher gas prices and inflation, and to paint Democrats, and democratic socialists in particular, as anti-American ahead of the midterms. Overseas, fighting Marxism, especially in Latin America, injects principle into the administration’s desire for dominance in the Western Hemisphere, which so far has led to the removal of a leftist dictator in Venezuela and laid the groundwork for the overthrow of the regime in Havana. Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesperson, said in a statement that the United States will “not ignore the threat posed by a regime 90 miles off our coast intent on undermining the national security of the American people through espionage and the spread of its failed, insidious ideology.”

Others see less ideological combat, more exercise of American muscle. “The idea is to get rid of any government in the Western Hemisphere that’s not willing to toe the line,” William LeoGrande, a former dean of American University’s School of Public Affairs, told us. “It started with Venezuela, obviously, and now turned to Cuba.” He added, “If I was Daniel Ortega,” Nicaragua’s autocratic ruler, “I might be a little worried that I’d be next.”

[Read: How to break Cuba]

U.S. voters may regard the revival of the “Reds under the bed” scare as a desperate attempt by an unpopular president to bolster his party’s election chances. Others may see Rubio using an outdated threat as cover to achieve greater American influence. But the push is already having an effect elsewhere, as other Latin American governments paint pro-democracy protesters as Marxists intent on undermining public order to justify crackdowns.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly described Democrats as socialists or Communists, regardless of how moderate those Democrats’ positions were. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he referred to Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, as just a “socialist.” And the October before the 2018 midterms, Trump wrote in an op-ed in USA Today that the “new Democrats are radical socialists” who want to introduce “open-borders socialism,” and he warned that their economic policies were modeled after the socialist policies of Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela. He never used the word communism, though, and despite his warnings, Democrats took control of the House. By 2024, Trump was calling his rival for the presidency “Comrade Kamala.”

This June, the president again started describing Democratic candidates as “Communist.” Speaking at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s policy conference, Trump declared: “It’s becoming a communist party. These are not social Democrats; these are hard-core, godless Communists.” A Reuters analysis revealed that Trump invoked the word communism more than 80 times in the two weeks leading up to July 8.

The shift followed primary victories by democratic-socialist candidates in New York, California, and Colorado, as well as last year’s sweeping victory by the DSA standard-bearer Zohran Mamdani to become mayor of New York City. Polls currently suggest that the Democrats could win one or both chambers of Congress in November.

“The Democrats’ full-blown embrace of socialism and communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” the White House spokesperson Allison Schuster told us in a statement. “President Trump will never allow America to become a socialist or communist country.”

Others in the administration, including Vice President Vance, have echoed Trump’s rhetoric. But no member has been more fervent in his public disdain for Communists than Rubio. His anti-communism is deeply personal. The secretary, the first of Latino descent to serve in the role, is the grandson of Cuban exiles who fled the island as Fidel Castro took power, settling in South Florida, where Rubio grew up. “Marco’s talked about this a lot—growing up in a Cuban American community, you hear the stories: firsthand accounts about repression; about not having basic freedoms; about watching an economy just collapse under that system,” Cesar Conda, Rubio’s former Senate chief of staff, told us. “That stuff shapes you. I think it shaped him, from a really young age.”

That hatred of communism became a constant reprise through Rubio’s career in local and state politics in Florida, in the U.S. Senate, and in the Trump administration. “It’s not complicated once you understand where he comes from,” Conda said. “It’s personal, it’s family, it’s ideology, and yeah, there’s a strategic piece to it, too. But the family history—that’s the big one. That’s really where it starts.”

Rubio does not hold all Communists to the same standard. Conda recalled that Rubio, while a Senator in 2014, “said he’d never wanted to set foot in Communist China” because of his contempt for communist regimes. His criticism of China’s human-rights record put Rubio on a Chinese sanctions list in 2020—twice. (Rubio’s trip to Beijing with Trump this year was his first.) But Rubio told reporters late last month that China, still home to the world’s largest and most successful Communist Party, would remain a diplomatic partner to the United States. “These are the two most powerful economies in the world, two large militaries, two nuclear powers,” Rubio said. “We have to have a relationship with China, and we want it to be as positive as it possibly can be.” (Imagine President Ronald Reagan saying the same about the Soviets.) Rubio has paid relatively little attention to the other nominally left-wing regime in North Korea.

Instead, the administration has depicted Western Europe as a new hotbed of Marxism. The State Department, in recent months, placed four European left-wing groups, including the Germany-based Antifa Ost, on blacklists designed to isolate terrorists, choke off their funding, and protect national security. Advocates of this approach point to an uptick in left-wing political violence. The Trump administration has claimed that left-wing extremists and anarchists are responsible for most terror attacks in Europe, pointing to data from 2022. American officials also emphasize the more than 40 percent increase in violence attributed to left-wing extremism in Germany.

Other data tell a different story. In 2025, the European Union member states recorded 11 completed attacks by left-wing extremist groups. But only about a third of completed terror attacks in the EU have been attributed to left-wing actors over the past three years, according to Europol, the EU’s law-enforcement agency. (The highest number of completed attacks was attributed to ethno-nationalist and separatist groups—primarily in France—while jihadist groups were responsible for the largest number of foiled or failed attacks.) In Germany, right-wing extremists continue to account for the largest share of political violence. The German far-right party AfD, which the government deemed an extremist group last year, leads nationwide popularity polls. Farther east, several states that were once Soviet satellites have swung right. Many European countries that used to be under communist control now appear to be on Trump’s side.

[Read: Europe’s far right is turning on Trump]

In the Trump administration’s ideal world, Cuba might go the way of Venezuela, where military intervention and Maduro’s seizure forced the country into close partnership with the United States. The administration has been piling pressure on Havana to expand its private sector (which would allow greater access for U.S. companies) and to make changes at the top, with the threat of military action if the regime doesn’t yield. The prolonged war with Iran has complicated that campaign, and produced skepticism even among the president’s supporters of the wisdom of foreign intervention. “Some sort of military adventure in Cuba on the heels of a very unpopular war in Iran would be political suicide,” Christopher Hernandez-Roy, the acting director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told us. “So they have to point to some other things, such as painting Cuba as a geopolitical adversary that’s spreading communism around the world, which is kind of silly.”

But it’s a strategy that other leaders have used successfully. Argentinian President Javier Milei, a Trump ally, has described much of his domestic opposition not as fellow citizens with competing ideas but as agents of an ideological enemy. Labor organizers, feminist movements, and left-leaning political groups have all been labeled “Communists” or willing accomplices to a communist project. What the targets believe is almost irrelevant. Once political opponents are cast as part of a larger ideological conspiracy, Milei and his allies can treat them as a threat to democratic life. Milei introduced, then expanded, a sweeping campaign to limit labor strikes, street demonstrations, and other forms of organized dissent. Federal security forces last year moved aggressively to clear picket lines, disperse demonstrations, and prevent protesters from blocking roads after the passage of economic reforms. Protest organizers now face the prospect of criminal investigations, financial penalties, and state surveillance.

Trump’s labeling of his political opponents as “Communists” may be a transparent ploy. And Rubio’s portrayal of Havana as a principal exporter of left-wing terror may be impossible to reconcile with the reality of modern-day Cuba. But the administration’s anti-communist vocabulary has nonetheless been embraced by governments far beyond Washington. The result isn’t a new Cold War. It’s the spread of an old political lexicon that can be used to cast political opponents as representatives of a specter that most people thought had long been dispatched.

Donald Trump’s approval rating is abysmally low for many reasons, but one of the most important is undoubtedly the price of gas. Trump’s decision in February to go to war with Iran sent gas prices soaring. Since then, the average price of gas in the United States has not dropped below $3.50 a gallon, even during the brief cease-fire that began in June. The resumption of the conflict a few weeks ago sent prices back above $4 a gallon.

That’s been very bad for Trump’s popularity—in a recent poll, roughly three-quarters of those surveyed blamed him (correctly) for the spike in gas prices. It’s also ominous for Republican prospects in the midterm elections, which are now fewer than 100 days away. The trouble is that even if Trump were to forge another cease-fire deal with Iran as soon as this week, the state of the oil market and the nature of gas prices mean that prices at the pump would keep Americans unhappy through November.

The stickiness in gas prices can be explained at least in part by the simple economics of supply and demand. The oil market, to begin with, is shakier than it was when the war first erupted. Back in February, global oil inventories were relatively high. China was able to cut its oil imports substantially, seemingly by drawing on its large oil reserves. The U.S. and Europe released hundreds of millions of barrels from their strategic petroleum reserves, in an attempt to soften prices. And traders seemed convinced that Trump would find a way to end the war once its economic costs got too high, which helped keep prices lower than they might otherwise have been.

Today, by contrast, global inventories have dwindled. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest level since 1983. And even though oil prices fell today following news of potential peace talks, the lack of those buffers and the need to rebuild those inventories mean that even if the Strait of Hormuz were soon reopened (which is a big if), oil prices would take a while to fall back to where they were before the war began.

[Read: The great Chinese oil mystery]

Other practical concerns will also keep gas prices high. Most notable, oil has to be refined into gas, and the war has taken a lot of refining capacity offline (as has Ukraine’s military response to Russia’s invasion). As a result, refiners in the U.S. are running at near-full capacity, and what’s called the “crack spread”—the gap between the price of oil and the wholesale price of its refined products, such as gasoline—has widened dramatically. That higher crack spread isn’t going away anytime soon, which will keep the price of gas elevated even if the price of oil drops.

But there’s another reason any improvement in the geopolitical situation would take a long time to filter through into dramatically lower gas prices: When supply shocks send oil prices rising, gas prices spike almost immediately. But when oil prices tumble back to Earth, gas prices take much longer to follow suit. As the saying goes, gas prices rise like rockets but fall like feathers.

We’ve seen this phenomenon at work this year. Oil prices peaked in May and then fell sharply. By June 24—after the U.S. and Iran had signed their memorandum of understanding—oil prices were down more than 40 percent from their peak. Gas prices, though, did not follow suit; instead, they dropped at a much more leisurely rate. On June 24, for instance, gas prices were down roughly 14 percent from their peak, prompting Trump to accuse oil companies of gouging customers and call for the Department of Justice to look into the possibility that companies were colluding to keep gas prices high.

Trump’s insistence that something sinister was keeping gas prices up is a common concern. Most people can understand why gas prices spike when oil prices jump. Gas stations raise their prices almost immediately because they’re charging based on anticipated replacement costs—what they will have to pay for their next shipment of gas. The reality is that gas stations’ profit margins drop when prices rise rapidly: If anything, they typically fail to raise prices swiftly enough.

The more complicated question is why the response is far slower when oil prices fall. There’s never been any evidence of explicit collusion, and in most parts of the country, there are enough gas stations to provide meaningful competition. So why, when oil prices tumble, don’t gas prices follow just as quickly?

[Read: The ticking clock on the Strait of Hormuz]

Economists haven’t reached a consensus answer. But the most convincing explanations focus on the fact that after prices have reached a new, higher plateau, drivers in effect get used to those prices (even if they’re unhappy about them) and become less diligent about searching out lower prices, which reduces the competitive pressure on gas stations. On top of that, people notice rising prices more than falling ones. When prices gradually subside, the amount people can save by seeking out the lowest-priced station is in many cases too little to justify the time and gas it takes to get there.

People may say in surveys that they’ll drive out of their way to save a few cents a gallon. But if that were true, you wouldn’t see the common phenomenon of two gas stations across the street from each other, and one charging 10 cents a gallon more than the other. In theory, drivers care only about price. In practice, they’ll make choices according to convenience or brand, even if a cheaper alternative involves simply crossing the street. And gas-station owners can take advantage of that by keeping prices higher than they otherwise could be.

Competition can still put pressure on charges at the pump. Meaningfully lower oil prices eventually filter through into meaningfully lower gas prices. But as a 2000 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found, this period of adjustment can last longer than 16 weeks.

What that means is that even if the war miraculously ended tomorrow, gas prices would stay elevated until well after the midterms. Trump will get some help from seasonality—gas prices always rise in the summer and decline in the fall. But that seasonal effect is not large enough to mitigate the war premium that’s now baked in. Any Republicans who had counted on gas falling below $3 a gallon will almost certainly be disappointed. And there is little question about whom voters are going to blame.

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To announce that you are embarking on a course of psychoanalytic training today is tantamount, in many quarters, to admitting that you plan to treat your patients using astrology or by parsing the entrails of a goat. To say that you are undergoing psychoanalysis as a patient is to reveal that you are entrusting your mental health to a witch doctor. So if I were to tell you that a respected neuroscientist has undertaken to exhume Sigmund Freud and make a case for both his theory of mind and his psychoanalytic method as the best—indeed, the only—approach that can cure emotional disorders, you would likely rate that a quixotic project, and its author perhaps a candidate for serious therapy himself.

Freud’s cultural and scientific influence crested some 70 years ago, and much of psychiatry’s history since then has consisted of a renunciation of the man, his concepts, and his therapeutic techniques so comprehensive as to have an edge of savagery, even vengeance, to it. He has been deemed a sexist, a misogynist, a bully, a narcissist, a homophobe, a pervert, an addict, an opportunist, a plagiarist, a fabulist, and a scientific fraud, as well as a disloyal friend and a credit-stealing protégé. Not to mention a bungling, incompetent therapist—“a dogmatist who browbeat his patients and consistently failed to mark the crucial difference between their fantasies and his own.” (So sums up the flap copy on a collection of Freud-filleting essays by 18 psychiatrists, philosophers, historians, and others compiled in 1998 by Frederick Crews, a literary critic and onetime devout Freudian turned virulent heretic.)

If coroners were to pin an actual time of death on Freudianism, they might specify 1963. That year, the philosopher of science Karl Popper held up psychoanalytic theory as the archetypal instance of what he called “pseudoscience”: Worse than mere bad science, psychoanalysis was, in being untestable, simply not science. Based in large part on the highly speculative interpretation of imperfectly recalled dreams, of all things, psychoanalytic theory was impervious to real scientific inquiry. In presuming to explain everything, Popper pronounced, psychoanalysis explained nothing at all.

So who today would dare attempt a rehabilitation of Freud? And why? To take the second question first, here’s one reason: What has followed Freudianism has not been, by many reckonings, any better. In the 1970s, the mental-health profession fled from such squishy psychological concepts as transference and countertransference, the death drive, and seduction theory—as well as more outlandish ones like penis envy, castration anxiety, and the Oedipal complex—and leaned instead into “biological psychiatry,” which had emerged from the drug discoveries of the 1950s and ’60s.

Physiological notions took hold, such as the “catecholamine hypothesis of affective disorders,” which attributed anxiety and depression to deficits of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and dopamine. Three decades later, in the 1990s, the “chemical-imbalance theory of depression” arrived, tying depression and other mood disorders to dysregulation of another neurotransmitter, serotonin. Psychoanalysts’ highly subjective assessments gave way to the ostensibly more objective measurements provided by neuroscientific instruments that can capture brain activity, such as EEGs, PET scans, and fMRIs. Doctors turned to genetic testing to help identify various temperament types and emotional predispositions, and relied on standardized questionnaires assessed for their validity in diagnosing mental illness.

In repudiating Freudianism and touting the field’s proper medical grounding, science-based psychiatry confidently predicted that measurable success was soon to come. That’s not what happened. Biological psychiatry “overreached, overpromised, overdiagnosed, overmedicated,” as the Harvard medical historian Anne Harrington put it in 2019. Which raises the question of whether psychiatry has simply exchanged one form of witchcraft for another.

The champions of so-called anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry—now emboldened by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the MAHA movement—certainly think so. So do some leading figures in biological psychiatry. As the head of the National Institute of Mental Health from 2002 to 2015, Thomas Insel tried to root America’s approach to mental-health care more firmly in brain physiology and the emerging understanding of genetics than in the nebulous concepts of Freudianism. But in 2017, when he looked back on the $20 billion he’d spent on the endeavor, his verdict was bleak: “I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.”

What biological psychiatry once promised seemed revolutionary; from the suffering patient’s perspective, what it’s delivered has been marginal. Still, reverting to the nostrums of a disgraced Victorian quack seems a little like saying This modern medical technique isn’t working so well—let’s go back to using leeches. Well, as it happens, leeches have become an important part of the modern reconstructive surgeon’s tool kit, for use in skin grafts after surgeries, among other things. Might Freudianism be psychiatry’s leech, resurrected for the astonishing health benefits it contained all along?

The Platonic ideal of the person who might dare to make this case would look a lot like Mark Solms, the author of the new book The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing. He is a South African neuroscientist armored with a sturdy résumé and hundreds of articles in scientific journals, along with half a dozen books and counting. His lab discovered the specific pathway in the forebrain responsible for stimulating dreams, and he disproved the notion that dreaming is dependent on REM sleep. He’s also done extensive research into the science of consciousness.

Solms is a practicing psychoanalyst as well; he treats neurological disorders (stroke, Parkinson’s, dementia) in addition to psychiatric disorders (anxiety, depression, psychosis). He’s coined a term, neuropsychoanalysis, to describe his clinical work, because he buttresses traditional psychoanalytic techniques—free association and dream interpretation, among other methods of probing the unconscious—with the more recent findings of neuroscience. Much of his research has involved trying to use modern technology to demonstrate the scientific underpinning of certain Freudian concepts and theories. For instance, Solms says that the pleasure-seeking drive (the source of Freud’s “pleasure principle”) is located in the brain networks that communicate via dopamine, and he has mapped the superego onto a region of the prefrontal cortex involved in emotional regulation.

A neuroscientist who is also a practicing psychoanalyst is a rare bird. But Solms is rarer still, having spent the past 29 years completing a revised translation of the complete works of Freud. Twenty-four volumes were published in 2024, and an additional four, consisting of his writings on neuroscience (including some that have never previously been published in English), are due out in 2028. Making available previously overlooked writing has given Solms a chance to correct the misimpression that Freud was homophobic. In a letter to a woman who had asked him to “cure” her son’s homosexuality, Freud writes that being gay “is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness.” (This last bit is ironic in light of the American Psychiatric Association’s official classification of homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” or “sexual deviation” until 1973.) Freud goes on to note that some of the most accomplished figures in history—Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci—were gay, and ends by saying that although psychoanalysis can help her son become happier, less neurotic, and more productive, none of that will have anything to do with his sexual orientation. I suspect more than a few Freud detractors will be surprised to read this.

By Solms’s own estimation, there might be “nobody alive who has spent more time with Freud than I have.” But Solms is no doctrinaire acolyte, as guardians of the Freudian flame have tended to be. Ernest Jones, an influential early director of the International Psychoanalytical Association, believed his role was to create a secret committee “like the Paladins of Charlemagne” to protect Freudian theory against heresy. Solms, in contrast, embraces some major criticisms of Freud, calling the death drive, for example, “an egregious error.” As for Freud’s rather “idiosyncratic” theories about sex, Solms writes, “I don’t think there’s any getting around the conclusion that Freud had this stuff seriously muddled.”

Part of Solms’s premise in this book is implicit and inarguable: Despite the attempts to purge Freudianism from psychiatry, its tropes, terms, and concepts—the unconscious; the id, ego, and superego; sublimation; defense mechanisms; the obsession with sex; the importance of early-childhood experiences—have seeped so deeply into our cultural limbic system that they live on in the shared metaphors and terminology we use to discuss personality and mental health: Frank is “anal”; Mary is “repressed”; Donald Trump is a “narcissist” and an “egomaniac”; Jill Biden was “in denial.” When Freud died, in 1939, W. H. Auden wrote that he had become “a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives.”

[From the January/February 2014 issue: Scott Stossel on surviving anxiety]

But the two explicit arguments Solms makes on Freud’s behalf in The Only Cure are astonishingly ambitious—and contentious. The first is that Freud deserves credit for neuroscientific prescience. A recent history of neuroscience states baldly that “Freud had nothing novel or insightful to say about how the brain worked.” On the contrary, according to Solms: Many prevailing theories about how the brain functions were first worked out by Freud. For instance, Solms writes, Freud effectively identified the way that short-term memories get consolidated into long-term ones, and did so more than half a century before the neurochemical mechanism for this was discovered. (To bolster his case here, Solms marshals the very man who identified that particular mechanism, Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for doing so, and who agrees with Solms that psychoanalysis is “the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind” we have, and that neuroscience is the “new intellectual framework” that can reinvigorate psychiatry.)

Or consider Freudianism’s key concept, the unconscious. Freud argued that our personalities and behaviors are governed by a maelstrom of hidden drives and motivations mostly unknown to our conscious selves. What we experience as our “conscious life” is in fact only a post hoc rationalization of things we are doing for other reasons, a devastating blow against not just human rationality but even free will.

For years, evidence of the unconscious seemed inaccessible to objective science. How can you prove the existence of something that none of us, by definition, can be subjectively aware of ? But technologies unavailable to Freud have demonstrated that much of what happens in the brain is in fact unconscious. Studies using fMRI machines have revealed that when frightening images or angry faces are shown to people too fast for them to consciously perceive them, their brains nevertheless register the fear stimuli: The machines detect a flare of activity in the amygdala, which is followed by a surge in heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormones, among other responses. The feeling of fear in the body then breaks into consciousness, and the brain makes decisions in response to that. It has become hard to deny that, at least in basic outline, Freud was right about the unconscious.

Solms’s second explicit claim is, if anything, even more provocative. There is abundant evidence, he writes, that psychoanalysis and its offshoots “are astoundingly effective”—in some cases, he argues, “as dependable as, say, insulin is at managing type 1 diabetes, or as the HPV vaccine is at preventing cervical cancer. These treatments are so well proven that it would strike most doctors as—to use a technical term—crazy not to deploy them by default.”

Solms’s unqualified endorsement of psychoanalysis is startling after decades of criticism. In support, Solms cites a number of studies and papers from the past 40 years to show that psychoanalytic-style talk therapy is more effective than antidepressants or electroconvulsive therapy for depression, or than antipsychotics for schizophrenia. He also cites research demonstrating that psychoanalysis has a robust “sleeper effect”—that is, symptoms continue to improve long after the treatment has ended.

These results are so striking that I decided to look at the underlying studies, and some other relevant ones. I found that Solms is highly selective in what he cites, and elides a lot of nuance (and sometimes directly contradictory evidence) in service of his case for psychoanalytic-style therapy and against other forms of therapy, especially pharmacotherapy. Cherry-picking is not unusual (especially when dealing with studies that are hard to compare), but the conclusions that flow from it are usually accompanied by a degree of circumspection.

Solms’s verdicts are categorically blunt: “Nearly every psychiatric disorder listed and defined in the standard diagnostic manuals is best understood and treated, not pharmacologically, but psychologically.” And: “There are, as things stand, no physiological cures in psychiatry.” And perhaps most bracing: “The mainstay of modern psychiatry—psychopharmacology—is for the most part a defence against facing the facts about what our patients really need. It is a way of suppressing symptoms instead of asking what they mean and fixing that.”

Solms’s position aligns him, probably unintentionally, with the public pronouncements that RFK Jr. has issued about SSRI antidepressants in his role as HHS secretary, which made the American Psychiatric Association convention in May jangly with tension. Antidepressants are useless, Kennedy has said at various times; they are more addictive than heroin, result in “brain damage,” and could be partly responsible for school shootings. None of this is true. But one reason demagoguing against medication has been easy is that the biological model of psychiatry—although filling the coffers of pharmaceutical companies—has delivered no panaceas, instead fueling cycles of disenchanted overreaction. (Today, one in six Americans takes an antidepressant; no wonder APA attendees were on edge.)

[Read: Panic attacks and the meaning of life]

Solms does concede that while no physiological cures exist in psychiatry, physiological treatments can remediate symptoms. That Advil doesn’t “cure” pain doesn’t stop people from taking the drug to alleviate it. Still, his broadside against pharmacology seems overbroad: Although it is surely true that many of those who take SSRI antidepressants do not need, and should not be on, them, it is also true that many others would be debilitated, if not dead, without them.

Before Freud became a psychiatrist, he himself was a neuroanatomist. Some of his early research was on the gonads of eels and the nervous systems of crayfish. But given the tools available to him in the 1890s, he kept bumping up against the limits of what the physical brain could reveal about the functioning of the mind. Frustrated and in need of money, he put aside the microscope, opened a private practice, and began focusing instead on clinical observation of patients, and of his own mind. Studying consciousness—and the unconscious brain that lay beneath it—from the inside was how Freud constructed psychoanalytic theory. He sometimes expressed embarrassment at this approach. “It still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science,” he reflected in his foundational Studies on Hysteria in 1895.

Freud never abandoned his quest to link physiology and psychology. “We must recollect that all our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably some day be based on an organic substructure,” he wrote in 1914. In 1938, not long before his death, Freud was still at it: “The future may teach us to exercise a direct influence, by means of particular chemical substances, on the amounts of energy and their distribution in the mental apparatus.”

Solms has picked up the baton, but he is adamant that we have not reached the future that Freud was forecasting. Rather, his view is that we need to go back to Freud’s true aim: to treat the soul, not by ministering to the brain, as modern biological psychiatry does, but “by accepting that the ‘soul’—construed as the experiencing, active, living ‘I’—is a part of nature.” And he has company, even among clinicians who came of age during the rise of biological psychiatry: Patients with psychosis are “too fascinating and complex to be reduced to the blockade of dopamine receptors,” the psychiatrist Pesach Lichtenberg wrote in the 2023 book Psychopharmacology Reconsidered. So what kind of map does Solms provide?

You know Chekhov’s famous stipulation that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must be fired in the third? Well, here’s a corollary: If you introduce a penis on the first page of a book about psychoanalysis, it will go off, or fail to, or both, very soon. In his second paragraph, Solms ushers in a depressed physician named Teddy P, who gets dumped by his girlfriend after struggling with both premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction (perhaps a bit on the nose for a book about Sigmund Freud).

When Teddy’s case becomes acute—in addition to depression and sexual dysfunction, he develops insomnia, headaches, brain fog, seizures, and evidence of possible dementia—Solms takes him on as a patient. He determines that Teddy’s underlying disease is psychological, not neurological (the seizures had made that an open question), and attributes much of what ails Teddy to the cascading effects of drugs and treatments he’s being given for his depression, anxiety, insomnia, and pain. Solms weans him off his medications and embarks with him on a course of psychoanalysis. Then he puts Teddy aside, leaving the reader in suspense for 258 pages before resuming the account of his fate.

For all his extensive neuromedical training, Solms makes a point of describing the work of psychoanalysis as “less like science and more like a practical trade. Long experience leads to familiarity with many different kinds of glitch and suggests many different kinds of fix.” Some people—and by some people, I might mean me—derive a certain solace from understanding their anxiety and depression as, in effect, mechanical failures, not moral ones: a snag in the temperamental wiring here, an unfortunate genetic variant there, a dysregulation of neurotransmitters not unlike the problems with insulin regulation in a diabetic’s pancreas.

[From the November 1962 issue: Jung on Freud]

But Solms’s contention, drawing from Freud, is that those mechanical problems can be fixed only as part of a wholesale realignment of unconscious drives and emotional needs. That worked for Solms: He had been plagued by a severe death anxiety since he was a little boy, when his older brother suffered brain damage in a freak accident, but was cured by a course of analysis on the couch of Clifford Yorke, a British World War II veteran who had helped care for survivors after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

Teddy recovers. (This is no spoiler; readers could hardly have been expecting otherwise.) After four years of arduous work with Solms, revisiting early-childhood experiences and his relationship with his mother, his depression and anxiety lift, his sexual and romantic-attachment issues abate, his growing conscious awareness frees him from damaging unconscious compulsions. He becomes an outstanding doctor.

The treatment involves all kinds of unexpected twists and turns, and Solms deploys a lot of Freudian tools—dream analysis, free association, breaking down defense mechanisms, recovering buried memories, transference and countertransference, and elaborate (too elaborate, if you ask me) feats of interpretation by the analyst. To someone with my firmly materialist leanings, it all seems a bit much.

But I was struck by two things Solms writes in different places earlier in the book. One is that the aim of psychotherapy, at its core, is simply “to help our patients find better ways of meeting their emotional needs.” Whatever you think of the whole complicated Freudian edifice, who could take issue with that? The other is: “Psychoanalysis is a cure wrought by loving your neighbor as yourself.” Solms has set out to complete the Freudian project by giving it a neuroscientific basis—but maybe the more important accomplishment is to have restored to psychiatry its humanity.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “What if Freud Was Right?”

Once upon a time, it was practically de minimis for either political party to disavow a candidate facing allegations of domestic violence. But now is not that time.

Which might help explain why, as the divorce of young MAGA royalty—Ohio Representative Max Miller and Emily Moreno, daughter of Bernie Moreno, the senator from Ohio—has morphed from a deeply personal family tragedy into a highly public political spectacle, Republicans have been reluctant to say that an alleged domestic abuser (especially one facing allegations from two women) is probably a poor choice to represent their party this November.

I am referring, of course, to Miller, whom Emily Moreno has accused of scalding her with hot water, holding a gun to her head, and throwing her against a wall—all allegations he has denied. (She also suggested that because of his history of violence against her, she couldn’t rule out that he had fractured their daughter’s collarbone, which he also denies.) But this is now a party whose leader has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women; a party whose president was found liable in a civil trial for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll; a party whose chief once palled around with Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious convicted sex offender. And so perhaps only in President Trump’s Republican Party does believing all women—or even some women, some of the time—become politically fraught.

[Read: The grim aftermath of the E. Jean Carroll verdict]

Bernie Moreno declared yesterday that Miller should not serve in the House of Representatives, writing on X that the past two years have been “pure hell” for his family. “Max Miller needs serious psychological help,” Moreno wrote. “He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter.” He concluded by saying that he owed it to his wife, “to Emily, and to my granddaughter to speak the truth now.”

Moreno’s statement came after Miller appeared on a roughly 20-minute livestream that morning, in which he refused to drop out of his House race and explained that he strived to comport himself with “dignity” for the sake of his daughter—all while proceeding to publicly impugn his daughter’s mother.

Initially, Moreno found himself on a tiny island of Republicans who believe that an alleged domestic abuser is not fit to serve in Congress. When Trump was asked on Air Force One yesterday if he thought Miller should resign, he said he would “look at it,” but noted, “so far it’s accusations.” He repeated that stance in the Oval Office this afternoon, calling Miller “a good person” and suggesting that this is a situation that needs to be resolved within the family, not within the party. A representative for Miller declined to comment.

But by this evening, as the Senate returned and reporters pressed lawmakers on Miller’s fate, a growing number of Republicans conceded that maybe he wasn’t the best candidate, after all. Trump also reportedly called Miller today to express concerns about his candidacy, according to Axios. But a person familiar with Trump’s concerns told me that even if the president pushed Miller to bow out, they weren’t certain the young House member would heed the president’s advice.

Claims of misbehavior and anger issues have dogged Miller since at least high school, and Emily Moreno is not the first woman to accuse him of being violent.

When Miller first ran for office, in 2021, the former White House communications director Stephanie Grisham said that when she dated him during Trump’s first term, their relationship had turned physically abusive. (Grisham wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in October 2021 that she told both President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, for whom she also worked, about the abuse, and they did nothing.) Miller denied the accusations and sued Grisham for defamation, before dropping the lawsuit as part of a confidential settlement. That same year, a Politico profile of Miller recounted several brushes he had had with authorities when he was younger, including charges of assault, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest as a high-school senior. The story also detailed how Miller allegedly pushed a girl out of his room after she resisted his advances, and she fell down some stairs, an incident sourced to three people who said they were present at the time and more who said they heard about the incident in the aftermath. At the time, Miller told Politico through a lawyer that he “categorically denies” the event. A description in that profile from someone who knew Miller during his earlier years—and described him as someone who “could be very scary”—has stayed with me: “I can, like, see the red face.”

[From the June issue: The men who want women to be quiet]

In mid-July, a Mother Jones piece unearthed new allegations against Miller, based on more than 2,000 pages of court filings and police reports that the writer Abby Vesoulis obtained through public-records requests that contain “allegations of drug use by Miller, misogyny and verbal abuse, and violent behavior against multiple women,” she writes. A report about a collarbone injury his daughter suffered, for instance, includes Emily Moreno telling investigators that her daughter told her, “Daddy’s house is scary.” (Miller’s spokesperson did not directly address all of the magazine’s questions, but pointed to previous statements Miller and his representatives have made to other news organizations, denying he has ever been violent toward women.) Then, a New York Times article last week brought more attention to the allegations, raising uncomfortable questions for the Republican Party about why its members seem so reluctant to suggest that Miller step aside. For a time, this included Moreno himself.

I am not unsympathetic to Bernie Moreno. I am the stepmom in a blended family, and I understand a key tenet of Divorce 101, especially when there are kids, is to never speak ill of anyone involved. Moreno seemed to be trying to abide by that ideal. In a recorded conversation between Miller and Emily Moreno—made public yesterday when Miller released a collection of documents, videos, and audio clips he says will help exonerate him—she described being upset Miller had lashed out at her father, noting, “My dad, despite what you may think, has never said negative things about you to me, even to this day, through this process.” She added that when she told her dad that other people have, post-divorce, discouraged her from being in regular contact with Miller, her dad disagreed and reminded her that Miller is still the father of her daughter.

Two people close to the family told me Moreno’s initial silence was at his daughter’s request: Emily Moreno does not want her own daughter to one day read about her grandfather attacking her dad. One of these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the fraught nature of the dispute, added that because of the ongoing litigation, Moreno was reluctant to say anything publicly that Miller’s lawyers would almost certainly try to use against his family, and he also feared that Miller could take out any anger toward the senator on his daughter and granddaughter. A second person close to Emily Moreno offered a similar assessment. A third person familiar told me the entire Moreno family had hoped to prevent the divorce from becoming a vicious spectacle, and that while the senator had wanted to speak out for months, he did not, out of respect for his daughter and granddaughter, but has always supported her privately—including paying her legal fees, which now run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Nonetheless, Miller was quick to attack Moreno’s seemingly belated response, writing yesterday on X: “If my daughter said the same thing to me, I personally wouldn’t wait two years before holding him accountable. You know this isn’t true and the only reason you are speaking out now is to hide from your own media circus. This is all political.”

And Moreno—not unlike many Republicans who at first remained silent on the Miller scandal, pleading they were not equipped to weigh in on mere allegations—has had no problem using allegations to go after Democratic opponents in the past. In a June Senate hearing, the senator alluded to the ongoing scandals involving then–Senate candidate of Maine Graham Platner in a quest to “just do a little vetting here this morning.” He asked the assembled nominees before him: “Do any of you have a Nazi tattoo?” and “Have any of you ever said that women deserve to be raped and should take accountability for being intoxicated?” In an April hearing, Moreno took aim at Eric Swalwell, a Democrat who had just resigned from Congress and ended his bid for California governor amid his own allegations of sexual misconduct. “What’s interesting to me is you look at the depraved individuals that serve in this body, people like Eric Swalwell—I don’t know that I’d want to be categorized the same way,” Moreno said.

Which is why, on Friday, when NOTUS asked Moreno if Republicans should replace Miller on the ticket—the deadline to do so is Wednesday—because of the accusations of domestic violence, I was surprised by the senator’s tepid reply: “I don’t know.”

[Read: A police report about a House candidate surprised the White House]

A profile in courage this was not, as many Democrats (and former Republicans) pointed out online. “Be the kind of father who doesn’t tolerate a man who abused his daughter,” Sarah Longwell, the anti-MAGA political strategist and founder of The Bulwark, wrote on X. And from former Representative Adam Kinzinger, who served as a Republican: “Imagine if your dad picked his job over you. @berniemoreno is a despicable man.” To his critics, the NOTUS story was just another example of cowardice by Moreno and his party. To those who know him well, the ensuing response was yet another reminder that anything can be used for political gain, even a family’s anguish.

Tonight, when reporters pressed Moreno about why it took him some time to issue a statement about Miller, his long-simmering anger seeped out. “I hope you never have to go through a situation like this, and you wouldn’t ask that kind of fucking question,” he said.

Miller and Emily Moreno’s relationship started like a MAGA romance novel: a marriage of two young MAGA scions—both from politically powerful and wealthy Ohio families—held at the president’s gilded Bedminster Club in August 2022 and attended by Trump himself. A father-in-law and son-in-law with big political ambitions, sharing the same midwestern state. But it did not end that way. Divorce filings came almost exactly two years later, in August 2024, along with mutual restraining orders issued the same day, and nasty accusations soon followed.

In his livestream yesterday, Miller denied that he was violent with his ex-wife, pointing to messages between them several days after an alleged incident, in which she offered to cook him dinner. (To Miller, this exchange is exonerating; to many people familiar with domestic abuse, this exchange is also typical of how victims sometimes try to salvage their relationship or protect themselves and their kids.) Miller also, claiming to speak from “great sadness, and not anger,” cast his ex-wife as mentally ill, saying he did not mention this “to embarrass her, or to attack her”—despite spending the majority of his address doing just that. The situation, he said, has been painful for everyone involved, “especially our daughter, who we both need to think about more so than ever, and I feel as if I am the only one who does.”

Then, for a man interested in protecting his daughter, and convincing the public he’s not the controlling abuser his ex-wife claims he is, he added a confusing coda: “She is a beautiful, innocent child, and she didn’t ask for any of the media scrutinization of her family, and she will eventually see all of these reports one day, as she will continue to bear my last name—Miller.”

I began digging into the documents Miller released that he said would refute his ex-wife’s claims. The collection includes a series of text messages between the two parents, filled with the quotidian challenges of life with a toddler, all further exacerbated by divorce—screen-time concerns, balancing work and child care, birthday-party drop-offs.

And then there was this: Emily Moreno told Miller in February that their daughter was having another anxiety attack, similar to one she’d had previously. Miller responded: “Ugh, hold her tight and snuggle with her. I hate this for her. The only remedy I know is just to hold her tight and snuggle.”

The two go back and forth a few more times—with Emily Moreno expressing concern that their daughter told her, “Daddy kill you,” and Miller arguing, “there is no way she is saying that”—before Moreno offers another update the following morning. “She woke up once in middle of night for cuddles but overall much better.”

Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.

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Based on the FBI’s preliminary assessment, Iranian-linked hackers may be responsible for a coordinated cyberattack targeting the water-supply systems of at least seven states. No evidence suggests that the attack poisoned the water or made it unsafe to drink. But any attack on critical infrastructure is cause for concern. The very fact that these alarming hacks could be traced to Iran would seem to support President Trump’s claims about the danger the country poses to the United States. His response to the cyberattack, however, has been peculiar: Instead of crowing, “I told you so,” he has immediately sought to point the finger elsewhere.

“They blame it on Iran,” Trump said, apparently referring to the FBI’s assessment. “I don’t think so. I think I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent.” Is he suggesting that Minnesota also attacked the other states?

In keeping with his “America First” doctrine, Trump promised his supporters that the United States would get out of unnecessary wars and not start new ones. Instead, Trump has reportedly launched 20 military operations in his second term, including targeted attacks, covert operations, and an all-out war with Iran. The conflict has alienated allies, raised global fuel costs, and depleted American munitions, and it has plainly left Trump eager for an exit at almost any cost.

[Jonathan Chait: The incoherence of the Iran hawks]

Trump has insisted that the U.S. has won the war (it has not) and that the Iranians want a deal (they do not appear to). He has claimed that Iran is isolated, scared, and barely functioning. But if Iran is indeed behind this cyberattack, it means that the regime is far from crippled. Indeed, Iran looks to be making strategic calculations about how to maximally unsettle Trump without delivering much damage to or garnering global sympathy for the United States.

When even Saudi Arabia, a longtime U.S. partner in the Persian Gulf and a regional rival of Iran, is expressing discontent with Trump’s policies, Iran would have little to gain from engineering serious destruction on American soil. Because the Strait of Hormuz is largely under Iranian control and the American midterm elections are looming, Iran has time on its side.

Yet instead of confronting the reality of this assault, Trump has decided, absurdly, to accuse Minnesota of somehow masterminding everything. “America First” has become “Blame America First.” Iranian strategists may have intended to needle and mock the Trump administration. But perhaps even they were surprised that Trump would respond to an attack on American infrastructure by blaming his fellow Americans.

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Fundamental realignments in the way Americans vote are rare, but predictions that they have occurred are not. Nearly as soon as Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential race in November 2024, people started saying the election represented a new era. “Trump just realigned the entire political map. Democrats have ‘no easy path’ to fix it,” announced NBC News.

The election had been very close. Trump won slightly more electoral votes than Joe Biden had in 2020 (312 to 306), but he also won fewer total popular votes and a smaller percentage of the vote. This was still significant because it was the first time in three tries that Trump had captured a plurality of the electorate, but the case for realignment hinged less on raw numbers than on demographic breakdowns. The Republican Party had strengthened its grip on the white working class and had done historically well with young voters—young men in particular—and Hispanic voters.

Writing in The Atlantic in May 2025, the pollster Patrick Ruffini argued that a new era of politics had dawned, in which Trump had broken Democrats’ solid grip on minority voters. “The realignment of the working class, which helped Trump win in 2016, would not stop with white voters. In 2020 and 2024, the realignment came for nonwhite voters,” he wrote. “In an era of nationalized politics and growing polarization, the social basis for Democratic majorities is looking more and more tenuous.”

The Democratic Party’s problems remain very real, but for the moment, Trump and the GOP have more serious ones. The most glaring one is Trump’s deep personal unpopularity. In the current polarized and dyspeptic political environment, all presidents seem to be unpopular, but Trump is in a different league. A CNN poll released last week measured Trump at 34 percent support, matching the low he reached in that poll following the January 6 insurrection. Still, that was better than his showing in the AP-NORC survey, which found his approval at 33 percent, just one point above a 2017 low. Quinnipiac University found Trump at 32 percent, the lowest ever in that poll.

These broad strokes are ugly enough, but digging into polling results shows particular deterioration with the particular groups that were supposed to be at the center of the Trump 2024 realignment.

Consider young voters. Kamala Harris won a slim majority of them in 2024, a huge drop from the 25 percent margin that Biden enjoyed four years earlier. The Yale Youth Poll found in May that 68 percent of voters ages 18 to 22 and 72 percent of voters ages 23 to 29 disapproved of Trump. Echelon Insights also found that younger voters disapprove of Trump more than the general population—the number has fallen 37 percent since the start of this administration. Polling from the Harvard Institute of Politics found that young voters are especially skeptical of expanded presidential power and claims of “national emergency”—two staples of Trump’s approach to governance.

One reason Trump’s numbers have sunk so much among young people is his poor performance among young men. A popular explanation was that a feminized, woke Democratic Party had driven them away and into the arms of Trump and a growing manosphere of influencers. To the extent that that was true, it was ephemeral. These voters are still wary of the Democrats, but they’ve soured on Trump as well. The Yale Youth Poll found that men under 30 were one of the two groups that had turned the most against Trump since last fall.

Trump is also bleeding support among Black and Hispanic voters, and especially men, as Bloomberg Government reports. In 2024, Trump won almost half of Hispanic voters, but polls show Republicans drawing 27 to 35 percent support in the midterms, which would be their worst performance with the group since the Democratic-wave year of 2018. Equis, a pollster focused on the demographic, finds Latino approval of Trump is lower than that of non-Latino voters. A May poll found that a quarter of Hispanics who voted for Trump in 2024 wouldn’t do so again.

The decay has even reached Trump’s core supporters. A New York Times review of polling data found in June that white working-class voters’ views of the president’s handling of the economy were tanking. During the first two years of his first term, these voters rated him higher than the overall population; now they rate him much worse. In February 2016, Trump boasted about his backing among the least-educated voters, saying, “I love the poorly educated.” They don’t love him back: Echelon finds his approval down to 41 percent among those with a high-school education or less. Polling from the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism finds a shrinking Trump base and less personal connection to Trump, which is a particular problem for a personalist leader and movement. Republican strategists are now worried that even consistent GOP voters might not turn out in November, according to The Washington Post.

As the poll analyst G. Elliott Morris has written, several convincing explanations existed for Trump’s 2024 victory that didn’t involve realignment, including the lingering effects of the pandemic, global anti-incumbent sentiment, and the peculiar dynamics of Biden’s ill-advised decision to run and his late exit from the race. But the foremost was inflation. Americans were angry at the Democratic Party because of persistently higher prices. Now Trump is losing support for the same reason. Not only has Trump not ended inflation, as he promised—in June, it ran at 3.5 percent—but his decisions, especially the Iran war, have driven prices higher. Voters were willing to give Trump a chance because of their disgust with Biden. Now they’re seeing the results, and they don’t like them.

This was perhaps foreseeable. Although some observers believed a sea change had occurred, the Brookings Institution scholar (and Atlantic contributor) Jonathan Rauch concluded on November 9, 2024, that the result did not represent “a pro-MAGA realignment or a sweeping repudiation of Democrats. Rather, this was an ordinary election.” He added, prophetically, “While the Republicans undoubtedly scored a clear victory, they may be tempted to claim a stronger mandate than the voters intended to deliver—and they may respond with policies that are more extreme and disruptive than the public wants or expects.” Now the realignment looks nearly as moribund as GOP chances in the midterms.

Related:

• Patrick Ruffini: American realignment
• Trump crashes into reality

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• The great romance slump
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• Anne Applebaum: The far right is distorting Ceuta.
• Why is the U.S. running so low on weapons?

Today’s News

1. Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis said that they will support Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general after the Justice Department rescinded a planned $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” and clarified the scope of an IRS settlement involving President Trump. Their support clears the way for the Senate Judiciary Committee to advance Blanche’s nomination tomorrow.
2. Michigan health officials reported two deaths linked to the state’s cyclosporiasis outbreak, saying both people had significant underlying health conditions that may have been worsened by the illness and dehydration. More than 11,000 cyclosporiasis cases have been reported in the state since early May, according to Michigan’s health department.
3. Nearly 65,000 people have been evacuated in Spokane County, Washington, as three major wildfires have burned more than 8,000 acres. No deaths or injuries have been confirmed, though officials warned that additional structures remain at risk as crews continue to assess the damage.

Dispatches

• The Wonder Reader: Rafaela Jinich explores nature’s most extraordinary stories.

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Evening Read

Kill the Ticks

By Sarah Zhang

In parks, in backyards, in woods that are lovely, dark, and deep, a many-legged menace now stalks the land. I speak of ticks, and I come bearing absolutely no good news. In recent decades, ticks have made the leap from nuisance to genuine public-health threat: Their numbers are rising. Their ranges are expanding. And the diseases they carry are multiplying. Lyme cases have more than doubled since 2000, in which time scientists have also discovered eight new tick-borne diseases—plus an unusual and potentially dangerous tick-induced meat allergy called alpha-gal syndrome.

“The ticks are winning,” a CDC scientist wrote in a recent paper.

Read the full article.

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• Olga Khazan: The best parenting hack is being rich.
• Radio Atlantic: What “America First” means for global health
• How AI could make people more anxious
• Trump’s literal gilded age

Culture Break

Debate. A plan to renovate Dulles, one of America’s most hated airports, will surely be popular—but the airport is actually fine the way it is, Adrienne LaFrance argues.

Take a look. Which screen is the “good screen” now? Instagram TV brings the endless scroll to your television, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes.

Play our daily crossword.

PS

On Friday, I wrote that a battle over Todd Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general showed that Trump cared more about his $1.8 billion slush fund than Blanche, and that “dissident Republicans really can push Trump around if they want to.” Late Friday, Trump seemed to confirm that by filing an appeal of a judge’s ruling against the fund. But last night, the office of Senator John Cornyn, one of two Republicans who was blocking Blanche, announced a deal to move forward. A statement said that the Justice Department “will be issuing a formal order permanently terminating the anti-weaponization fund.” The details remain a bit vague, but the track record of administration promises to senators does not instill a great deal of confidence.

— David

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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