A full three decades ago, as Bill Clinton turned 50 in the midst of his successful 1996 reelection campaign, he was sounding even then in an autumnal mood.

“I have more yesterdays than tomorrows” he used to say often that year, a wistfulness that caused those of us who covered him to puzzle. What’s with this misty nostalgia? It was literally true, unless he expected to live 100, that he probably had more yesterdays than tomorrows. But fifty is typically the point when people realize they are no longer exactly young. It is hardly an age that merits a self-conception as old. Clinton’s perspective, however, doubtless left him with an appreciation of the fragility of life. He never met his biological father — a traveling salesman who married five times and died at age 28 in a car accident, three months before the future president was born.

Yet Clinton himself has proved reasonably durable, especially for a man who had serious heart surgery at age 58. The 42nd president turns 80 today — at last at an age that amply justifies a more searching look back on life.

Rest assured that no one in 1996 was contemplating the possibility that the president 30 years later would be a man who is actually two months older than Clinton — much less that this man would be President Donald Trump, who at that time had already been famous as a real estate magnate and professional self-promoter for 15 years or so.

Above all, I think few people then were imagining that the country in 2026 would itself be feeling so old — or, at a minimum, so surly and so bereft of a unifying vision of the future. The very essence of the most powerful and divisive political movement since former President Ronald Reagan’s is expressly backward-looking — Make America Great Again.

Many of the habits that today infuse American politics — the ones that make it so remorseless and infused with indignation and disdain — were present in nascent form in Clinton’s presidency. At the time, those developments seemed exotic — there was scant notion that they represented a shabby new norm.

In the early days, this brand of contempt-driven politics often revolved around arguments about Bill Clinton’s public and private character. This was a theme of his 1992 election against George H.W. Bush, his 1996 election against Bob Dole, and it even shadowed the 2004 dedication of his presidential library in Little Rock, Ark.

I am hardly a Clinton intimate. I haven’t been in his company in a decade. At one time, however, I probably knew as much about his presidency — its animating ideas, its decisive moments, its distinctive personalities — as anyone who had not actually served in it. This came from six years covering his White House for the Washington Post, and another two working on a book that aimed to synthesize his years in office and take a preliminary cut at assessing their historical weight. In both journalistic and historical terms, much of this time was devoted to thinking about competing appraisals of Clinton’s character.

It is an argument without end in part because the positive and negative elements of Clinton’s character, the light and the shadows, seemingly flow from the same source: an intense need to win, to matter, to seduce, to prove himself in the world. Imagine if people around Bill Clinton in 1974, the year he ran unsuccessfully for Congress — Hillary Rodham, then a girlfriend but not yet a spouse, showed up in Arkansas to help — had been given a crystal ball to peer into the future. These people would not be surprised to learn that a future president was in their midst; His talent, ambition, and idealism were that obvious. Nor would they be surprised to learn how his campaigns and presidency would at various turns be nearly derailed. As early biographer David Maraniss documented, even then Clinton had a reputation for sexual vagrancy, and the patterns of heedlessness, deception, and hypocrisy such a lifestyle inevitably requires.

He’s been out of political office for more than a quarter-century — as long as he was ever in it, beginning with his first victory as Arkansas attorney general in 1976. By my lights, the years since he yielded the Oval Office to George W. Bush (who turned 80 last month) in January 2001 have abundantly ratified the proposition that the country could do worse — at key junctures plainly has done worse–than Clinton’s character or his record, the strengths and infirmities alike.

As he turns 80, and the country contemplates a post-Trump future two years from now, it seems to me there are at least four ways in which Clinton has prevailed in the great character argument woven throughout his life.

Responsibility

This is a place where my views have not changed much from what I thought at the time and what I think now. A paradox of Clinton’s presidency is that, however reckless he was in his personal life — culminating in the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal and Republicans’ unsuccessful attempt to evict him from office through impeachment — he was supremely responsible in his use of power and his willingness to take sober risks for what he thought was right. Yes, he would over-agonize on hard choices — on issues from trade to welfare to war in the Balkans. But at the end of the day — sometimes it could be a very long day — on big subjects there was rarely much variance between what Clinton genuinely thought was the right decision and what he did.

A good many of his policies are out of favor now within his own party. But the political and policy landscape he was navigating was much different than today. Clinton was a thoroughly political creature, but he was not an unduly cynical one — he was willing frequently to risk his political self-interest on behalf of what he conceived of as the public interest.

Persuasion

One reason Bill Clinton and his brand of centrist politics can seem antiquated is that the past generation has been defined by a whole different emphasis: the politics of mobilization. Under this later school of politics, elections are won principally by sharpening divisions and elevating the moral stakes. The aim is not to win over skeptics through the power of reasoned argument. It is to convince your own side that the other side is so repugnant in its character and aims that they should rally behind you and turn out in the biggest possible numbers.

Clinton would in most of his campaigns give a nod to trying to explain what the other side believed, and why he believed his approach is better. “I think one of the ways you win elections is by talking straight with people and giving them permission to vote against you,” Clinton said a few years ago on a podcast. What he meant was that effective arguments don’t hector audiences or assert moral superiority, or the other side’s moral iniquity. They invite or even inspire people to think about an issue differently.

In short, the politics of mobilization harnesses the power of contempt; the politics of persuasion employs the language of respect. Mobilization politics tends to deal in ideological and cultural abstractions like free markets versus socialism, or “traditional values” versus sexual freedom — the kind of debates that are especially potent at pushing people to decide “which side are you on?” Persuasion politics is more likely to center on the concrete human dimensions of policy choices — here’s what an expansion of childcare tax credits might mean for you.

You could argue which brand of politics is more effective, and for the most part advocates of mobilization politics in recent years on left and right have been prevailing. But it’s hard to see how the politics of persuasion is not a more inspiring expression of American character, and also more likely to resolve serious long-term debates.

The fight for power

When Clinton opened his presidential library in Little Rock in 2004, the late Peter Jennings of ABC News in an interview baited Clinton about a recent survey of historians that rated his presidency reasonably well overall, but second to last (ahead only of Richard Nixon) in “moral authority.” Clinton said curtly that the historians were wrong, adding, “I don’t really care what they think.” Jennings replied: “Excuse me, Mr. President. I can feel it across the room. You care very deeply.”

Clinton then snapped: “You don’t want to go here, Peter. You don’t want to go here. Not after what you people did. And the way you — your network — what you did with [Whitewater prosecutor] Kenneth Starr. The way your people repeated every little sleazy thing he leaked. No one has any idea of what that’s like.”

The new library had an alcove about Clinton’s 1998 impeachment and subsequent acquittal called, “The Fight for Power.” The scandal, the exhibit argued, was simply the Republicans’ effort to overturn an election they lost.

At the time, I believed this was mostly Clinton’s tortured rationalization for his own mistakes. Events since then, however, have swung the historical argument irrefutably in his favor. In the 1990s we spent months and even years covering such inane issues as whether the newly elected Clinton acted properly to fire long-term employees of the office that booked White House charter flights and hotels for the media. Now, Trump asserts the right to eliminate cabinet departments and agencies without congressional approval — and the stories often get lost in the rush of other news. There is not a credible argument that says Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater land investments in the 1970s were a worthy subject for ethics inquiries and criminal probes but the Trump family’s crypto investments and overseas deals while the company founder is in the Oval Office are no big deal.

Clinton was right that the attacks on his character were often simply not on the level—but a proxy for other agendas.

Perseverance

In 2000, as Bill Clinton’s presidency was winding down and Hillary Clinton was waging a successful campaign for New York Senate, there was a political skull session at the White House involving a trusted roster of aides and strategists. As one of them described it to me later, Bill Clinton brought up the elephant in the room. Female voters in particular, he noted, wanted to understand why Hillary had stayed with Bill during the sex scandal. The mood was briefly awkward until Hillary Clinton said good-naturedly that she wanted to know the answer too.

“Because you’re a sticker!” the president replied, jabbing the air for emphasis.

Actually, it seems to me, both Clintons are. Across many decades, they have stayed married, and stayed in the fight over the issues they care about—amid plenty of victories and setbacks alike. That is a kind of character, too.

These days, Bill Clinton’s public appearances are fewer. At times he looks frail. His skeptics include many people in his own party. Yet, on his 80th birthday, the main question seems to be less about his character than the country’s: Is there a pathway to a destination in which more people believed with him that politics can illuminate the best and most generous and inspiring parts of national identity? Clinton may be getting old, but that idea should be made young again.

Seven years ago today, Jeffrey Epstein was found hanging in a Manhattan jail, and the usual reactions to a sudden, violent death were reversed.

It was the people who abhorred the convicted sex offender — his victims and all who sympathized with them — who were stricken with sadness and anger. Now, they feared, the full truth about this man and his odious life would never come out.

It was Epstein’s friends and far-reaching galaxy of influential associates who surely allowed themselves a quiet moment of relief back in 2019. Now, they had reason to hope, the full truth about this man and his odious life would never come out.

The anniversary of Epstein’s demise is occasion to note two paradoxes that have emerged over those seven years — and most vividly in recent months, as it has become clear Epstein was a more consequential figure, and more emblematic of a sordid age, even than we knew at the time. Both paradoxes come courtesy, however grudgingly or unintentionally, of Epstein’s one-time friend, President Donald Trump.

The first is the surprising degree to which the truth did indeed come out, and answers were not left hanging with Epstein in Cell 220 on the ninth floor of the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Yes, there are important matters of detail that remain clouded by mystery. These include the precise details of how Epstein killed himself, in a supposedly secure facility, according to the official medical examiner’s conclusion (which some still doubt), as well as a full illumination of his relationship with Trump and why it apparently dissolved early in the 2000s. Many of the survivors of Epstein’s crimes also remain distraught and hungry for more answers.

But the nature of Epstein’s monstrously manipulative character, and the ease with which he ensnared some of the planet’s wealthiest and in many cases most accomplished people is now commonly understood — in a way that it almost certainly would not be if he had lived. Perhaps he would have reached a settlement with prosecutors, or gone to trial under rules of evidence focused narrowly on a few crimes rather than receiving scrutiny over the broad contours of his life. Any Epstein associates who exhaled in gratitude at his passing in 2019 had it exactly wrong — the ruin of reputations caused by this scandal was only beginning.

That we know the back-scratching and bawdy badinage, with cringe-inducing specificity, that was the essence of how Epstein nurtured his elite relationships is a gift to posterity. It comes of course because of the documentary goldmine of his massive trove of emails. These were released under an act of Congress, largely because important voices in the MAGA movement, later joined by Democrats, defied Trump’s reluctance and insisted they be released.

That gift to posterity as it happens, was central to the second paradox of the Epstein anniversary — and it is an uncomfortable one. At the time, his death looked like a cowardly end to a despicable life of con artistry and sexual predation that could mercifully soon be forgotten. Cowardly and despicable remain true. “Soon be forgotten” is not happening. Epstein’s life, it seems probable, will be known and studied and written about 100 years from now. He’s dead, but the narcissist in Epstein might perversely appreciate that his historical persona will outlive all but a few of his contemporaries’.

The primary reason is because his web of relationships, we now know, is deeply revealing of how an age that produced vast power and wealth became unhinged, at least in some elite precincts, from self-restraint, judgment, or simple decency.

Not everyone whose reputation was besmirched by disclosure of their Epstein interactions was an intimate of his, or necessarily knew the details of his criminal procurement and exploitation of underage girls. But in most instances that have come to light they knew of his reputation as a lothario who, as Trump said in 2002, liked women “on the younger side.” Just like Trump, many of them concluded this contributed, rather than detracted, from an appraisal that he was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” Likely in nearly every case these people were attracted to Epstein because of his wealth, his access to others with wealth, his airplanes and his island, and his self-fashioned aura as an intellectual savant who used his bespoke brain to make money in ways that ordinary mortals couldn’t understand.

If someone early in the 22nd century is curious about what the top levels of American life were like early in the 21st century, it will be hard to avert their gaze from someone whose career intersected in ways that echoed damagingly with two presidents (Trump and Clinton); royalty (the former Prince Andrew); the foremost technologist of the 20th century and the foremost philanthropist of the 21st (Bill Gates); a one-time prince of Wall Street (Jes Staley of JPMorgan Chase and later CEO of Barclays in the United Kingdom); a star of academia and government (former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers), and a long roster of the wealthiest people in the world (such as Epstein confidant Leon Black, the private-equity titan) as well as some of its most prominent intellectuals (like linguist Noam Chomsky, Nobel laureate and molecular biologist Richard Axel, and computer scientist and Unabomber victim David Gelernter).

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Weaknesses of the flesh, the bottle, and the purse are not a recent phenomenon. Nor will people studying this era a century from now be startled to learn that lust and greed can lure people to bad places. But there are three distinct signatures of the Epstein scandal that will surely cause them to wonder: What were those friends and associates of Epstein thinking?

A notable feature of Epstein emails is the intense hunger for connection revealed by many of the people caught up in the scandal. Recall that almost all of the famous examples involve people who already had amassed large achievements and presumably had lots of friends who did not have previous sex-crime convictions (as Epstein did from 2008 onward.) But they were hypnotized by Epstein’s flame even so.

Jes Staley, who traded emails with Epstein filled with suggestive references to women using Disney characters (“Say hi to Snow White”), in 2009 opened himself up to the man who would later destroy his career: “I owe you much. I appreciate our friendship. I have few so profound.” Summers was seeking dating advice from Epstein (Summers wanted to know what to do about a woman who was treating him as a “friend without benefits”) just before Epstein was arrested again in 2019. You might suppose that one benefit of being Bill Gates is that you would no longer be thirsty for anything. But that’s not the case. In 2011, he emailed a colleague about Epstein: “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.” It definitely didn’t work for Melinda French Gates, who reportedly dissolved their marriage in part because of disgust with her husband’s intersection with the Epstein scandal.

Another signature of the Epstein files merits a nod to Hannah Arendt: the banality of creepishness. The notorious collection of tributes assembled for Epstein’s 50th birthday is a good example. These purported friends and high achievers toasted Epstein with page after page of double-entendres and chortling sexual references of the sort early adolescents might scribble in a middle-school yearbook. There was the apparent drawing from Trump (he denies it) of a naked woman with his name signed where pubic hair would be. Notably, at mid-life, there were not notes from people recalling the time they helped each other through the illness of a parent, or even the time they stayed up til 3 a.m. talking about politics and sports at an all-night diner. This is life at the top? The superficiality of Epstein and his horny, rich friends was a revelation.

One more reality unveiled by the Epstein files is arguably (without overdoing it) more appealing: The remarkable social fluidity reflected in the modern elite. In an earlier era, inherited social class was a powerful force — facilitating the careers of people to the manner born, but an infuriating limitation for many other talented people. Epstein’s circle included privileged kids like Staley, whose father was a CEO and who went to Bowdoin before Wall Street. But it also included Epstein’s most important patron, Leslie Wexner, the billionaire retail investor, who grew up as a middle-class son of a Russian immigrant and went to Ohio State. Epstein himself grew up near Coney Island and dropped out of college. It turns out modern social mores — which reward networking, scene-making and showy displays of wealth no matter whether new or old — are a more potent force than the previous generation’s old-chum country club culture. This was a phenomenon that had already been established earlier this century by the Bernie Madoff scandal.

What is true in 2026 that was not true in 2019 is that Jeffrey Epstein’s name is going to live in national memory for as long as people are curious about the Trump era. Those emails will find an audience for decades to come.

In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak this spring saw himself buffeted and thrown on the defensive by the unruly and impatient politics of his country. Facing an increasingly dire political future, he made a decision to call for parliamentary elections on July 4.

In the United States, President Joe Biden was facing his own unfavorable politics and had a similarly urgent need to shake up his race against former President Donald Trump. The result is the earliest-ever general election debate, scheduled for June 27.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday night found himself humiliated in European Parliament elections by the strong showing of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally party. In a sudden move that shocked Paris and is echoing Monday across the Continent, he decided to call for a snap election in the French Parliament, summoning voters to the polls across two days on June 30 and July 7.

The logic in all three cases was the same. Each leader concluded that muddling through and hoping for the best was no longer working.

Instead, they have adopted a common attitude: Bring it on.

The calculations of all three have merged to create a striking experiment: Just a few weeks from now, there will be a rapid-fire series of events that will test the vitality of traditional establishment politicians at a moment when large swaths of voters are clearly in the mood for disruption.

Macron was most explicit about his determination to seize the initiative, telling the country as he called for new elections that commanding the moment was a matter of national character.

“To be French, at heart, is about choosing to write history, not being driven by it,” he said.

Sunak and Biden surely hope that the same turns out to be true of Britishness and Americanness.

All three leaders face individually distinct circumstances. Biden is separated by decades in age from Macron and Sunak. Both the younger men had successful business careers and, when coming to office, were seen as fresh figures representing generational change — before quickly becoming unpopular.

Macron and Biden represent struggling centrist and center-left parties. Sunak is from the center-right Conservative Party, which has held power for 14 years and has clearly worn out its welcome.

But these differences only highlight some essential similarities.

All three leaders surmised that their only chance for escaping dire and potentially fatal political problems was a dramatic change of plot early this summer.

All three are wrestling with similarly sour electorates, with voters on both sides of the Atlantic aggrieved about persistent inflation, uncontrolled immigration, the cost of housing and more.

All three also plainly believe that their opponents are fundamentally irresponsible, even dangerous figures — and that the more that voters focus on those opponents’ personalities and policies, the more tempting it may be to stay the course.

This conviction has been at the core of Biden’s whole reelection effort: that middle-of-the-road voters who pay attention to Trump tend to recoil from him. It’s one thing for a cranky moderate voter to tell a pollster he plans to vote for Trump; it’s another thing to see Trump sputtering and ranting on a debate stage and then actually pull the lever for him.

Throughout the year, Democrats pointed to a succession of events that could tip the presidential race their way: Biden’s energetic State of the Union address, for one, and Trump’s weeks of sequestration in a New York courtroom. But Biden’s numbers have barely moved.

The debate, Democrats hope, will be different. Biden campaign officials, speaking anonymously in order to be candid, argued that a face-to-face clash with Trump could give the electorate the modest nudge needed to move things back in Biden’s favor.

“We needed to drag him into Americans’ living room again,” a Biden adviser said.

“The race is close, things don’t have to change much,” another Biden official said, adding of the debate: “And this will be one of our best moments to do it.”

The risk is that precisely the opposite could happen — that most voters turn out to be either excited by Trump or numb to his defects, and that a focusing moment like the debate instead crystallizes their concerns about Biden’s age, ideology and indistinct plans for the future.

That is what appears to have happened already in the U.K., where Sunak’s party has only crumbled further since he announced the election. Rather than retaking momentum for the Tories and putting Labour Party leader Keir Starmer on the defensive, the first weeks of the campaign have exposed Sunak’s bumbling political instincts and torn new rifts in the British right.

No issue has dominated the campaign so far more than Sunak’s decision last week to leave the D-Day anniversary rituals early in order to return to Britain for a TV interview about the campaign. Sunak is now under siege both from Labour and from a right wing force surging in his own country, led by Brexit impresario Nigel Farage.

Panicking Tories — now hemorrhaging votes on the left and the right — fear total destruction.

“They’ve killed themselves," Farage told POLITICO this month. "It’s over.”

Macron could face the same fate, if it turns out that the anger voters vented in the EU election only grows in the coming weeks.

But Macron is culturally at home with high-stakes gambles.

Prior to entering politics, Macron worked as an investment banker cobbling together huge merger agreements that could fall apart at any moment. In 2016, he lit a match under his country's entire political establishment by starting his own centrist party and riding it to a startling election win in 2017 — a victory that effectively killed off the country's historical mainstream parties as viable political forces.

Now he figures that he can pull off the trick again.

The thinking in Macron's entourage goes something like this: Millions of voters may have felt comfortable voting for the 28-year-old far-right wunderkind, Jordan Bardella, because the European election — in their view — just doesn't matter that much. It's about sending lawmakers to a parliament in Brussels whose functioning is poorly understood, not managing bread-and-butter affairs like schools or health or policing at home.

But voting to make Bardella the French prime minister, in charge of the country's day-to-day affairs, is a totally different matter, the Macron camp believes.

And Macron figures that a majority of French people won't opt for the particular version of change that’s on offer. He will find out soon enough.

And so will his colleagues in London and Washington.

James Angelos, Jack Blanchard, Jonathan Lemire, Elena Schneider and Nick Vinocur contributed to this report.