Back in, oh, 2015 or 2016, I made a tool that let Washington Post readers create their own versions of Donald Trump’s signature baseball hats. After a while and after a change in The Post’s content-management system, it stopped working. I sort of forgot about it.

I have since remembered it. And, tonight, I got an email from someone asking if it was still around. So I figured I’d fix it. Here it is.

When you generate the image, you can just right-click / press-and-hold to save it and do whatever you want with it. I wash my hands of the whole thing.

Photo: Trump in Daytona. (White House/Flickr)

“DON’T GIVE TYLENOL TO YOUR YOUNG CHILD FOR VIRTUALLY ANY REASON”

I don’t remember why we brought our two-year-old son all the way into Brooklyn to see the doctor. We were living way out near Connecticut at the time and traveling to downtown Brooklyn had to have taken at least an hour, if we were lucky. But his first pediatrician was there, the doctor who, when we showed up a few days after our son’s premature birth in an utter, tear-streaked shambles, had told us exactly what we needed to hear: You guys need to relax. He was always calm and never riled and, given that our son was running a high fever and that this was still new to us, calm and unriled was no doubt worth an hour in the car.

When we got there, another doctor was on duty. His bedside manner was not as reassuring, but he was a doctor and our son was seen and given ibuprofen to reduce his fever and that was about what we could hope for. So we scooped up our son and headed for the elevator, to the parking garage under the building so we could head home.

As we walked into the garage, my son started to seize. His little body twitched and his eyes rolled back and the panic that had spurred us to drive to Brooklyn suddenly soared into outer space. Our son had lost control, was doing something I did not know could happen and something that I did not know what could happen next.

Writing this now, six years later, I feel that panic. I tear up. That day, it was far worse, sheer terror — for us and no doubt for the people who were in the elevator we commandeered in our rush back up to the doctor. I remember their stunned faces watching me holding my tiny, convulsing son. They probably thought what I thought, that he was on the brink of death. But they, at least, weren’t his father.

We got back to the doctor’s office and pushed through the waiting room, interrupting the doctor as he was talking with other parents. (Parents who probably also still remember this moment vividly! I can’t imagine how I would have reacted if, after the pediatrician in that first visit told us to relax, some other father had burst in with a baby having a seizure.) The doctor noticed my son’s lips turning blue, put him on oxygen and summoned an ambulance.

That, thank God, was as bad as it got. My son stirred and regained control of himself. We got to the hospital where they simply kept an eye on him for a bit and, in a few hours, we went home.

What we learned (and wished we’d learned sooner) was that small children can sometimes have what are called febrile seizures, seizures that stem from fevers. In essence, the fever that results from a body’s fight against illness can, in small kids, short-circuit the connection between the brain and everything else. If the temperature rises too quickly, it can trigger a seizure. You do have to watch for the sorts of dangers that accompany any seizure, but, over the long run, the risk from such events is low. So are the chances it happens; my son hasn’t had another seizure since, nor has his brother. (Febrile seizures are believed to have a genetic component.)

Of course, the absence of further events may also be because we aggressively treat fevers as they emerge. Switching between ibuprofen and acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) every few hours helps control fevers and reduce the possibility of spikes.

Or so it has been explained to me by doctors, to whom I defer on such issues. I will opt for the opinion of people who went to medical school and have spent decades helping children get well on questions about the wellness of my children.

That day, April 20, 2019, was the most terrifying day of my life. Perhaps using Tylenol to combat the fever wouldn’t have prevented the seizure; maybe using it in the future didn’t prevent other ones. But since we began treating high fevers by alternating Advil and Tylenol, I have not since held my child’s limp body in my arms as I wonder if he is going to die. I choose to follow the guidance offered by that experience over the insistences of a guy posting his opinions on social media.

Photo: The view from the doctor’s office on the day it happened. The quote, of course, is from the president.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement regularly publishes data on the people being held at its detention facilities. Considered over time, those numbers are revealing. It is now the case, for example, that there are more ICE detainees being held in ICE custody who have not been charged with a crime than there are convicted criminals or people with pending charges — almost certainly the first time in the organization that’s been the case.

That’s because, until Jan. 20, 2025, ICE mostly did what President Donald Trump insists it is now doing: targeting criminal immigrants within the country’s borders. A far larger proportion of ICE detainees who’d been stopped by Customs and Border Protection — meaning primarily people stopped directly at the border as they sought entry into the U.S. — were people with no criminal convictions or charges.

Since Trump took office, though, that’s changed. First, the number of people being stopped at the border has dropped as fewer immigrants are seeking entry into the U.S. But, more importantly, ICE is spending a lot more money and energy scooping up non-criminal immigrants. A year ago, only about 3 percent of the people in ICE detention who didn’t have pending criminal charges or a conviction had been arrested by ICE. Now, more than half have.

The year-over-year change since last September is stark. The percentage of immigrants with criminal convictions who’ve been arrested by ICE is up about 80 percent. The percentage of immigrants with no convictions or pending charges who’ve been targeted by ICE is up nearly 2,000 percent.

Again, this is not generally what the president and his allies promised during the 2024 campaign. While the president did at times say that a second Trump administration would identify and deport every immigrant living in the country illegally — a group that is itself determined by vague and disputed boundaries — far more often he promised America that he would target the really bad guys, the criminals who he insisted were running rampant in the U.S., wantonly committing horrible acts of violence. But it turns out that people who are seeking permanent residency by following the rules are a lot easier to arrest and it turns out that the administration is more interested in the number of arrests than the target of them, so here we are. Trump told his base that immigrants were criminals and tasked his subordinates with arresting as many of them as possible, even if they turned out not to be criminals at all.

You likely noticed, though, that the image at the beginning of this article featured not an immigrant or an ICE officer but former FBI director James Comey, pictured in happier times and with a different president. Perhaps you see the throughline, but I’ll put a fine point on it anyway.

Comey, too, is the center of a narrative about his supposedly criminality that has been stoked and tended for years within the pro-Trump media bubble. He is not as sympathetic a victim as an immigrant parent seized outside his kid’s school, certainly, but the pattern is the same. Comey was presented as a nefarious force within the U.S. and a lawbreaker and, Trump’s base having accepted that, he is now being targeted for prosecution by the federal government.

I’ll take a moment here to note that, just as many of the non-criminal immigrant detentions are waved away as justified because those immigrants didn’t arrive on valid visas, Trump allies will and do insist that Comey’s prosecution is warranted given his actions. According to the federal indictment, Comey made false claims during congressional testimony. But legal observers from Lawfare to Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy view the charges as weak if not entirely contrived.

The way in which the indictment was obtained does little to counteract that perception. With the statute of limitations on Comey charges winding down, Trump publicly demanded that his attorney general move forward on targeting his opponents. A new acting U.S. attorney — someone who’d served as his personal counsel — was put in place and the indictment pushed forward. The official she replaced had declined to seek charges, almost certainly because of the weakness of the case.

What’s striking about the Comey indictment is that, even on its own terms, it is contrived. Trumpworld loathes Comey because it holds him responsible for the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, one of the central irritations of Trump’s political career. But this indictment doesn’t allege that Comey invented the Russia probe or anything even close to that. It is, at best, a multi-bumper bank shot, one that satisfies the right’s desire to see Comey in the crosshairs rather than its desire to prove Trump’s view of the Russia probe correct. (Trump and his allies have tried this before, with other targets. It didn’t work out.)

Instead, we have a pattern in which someone or some group of people is offered up by Trump as an enemy of the American people. This is credulously accepted by his base, in part because the pro-Trump media universe scrambles to dig up sketchy support for his claims in its eternal race for the right’s most valuable currency, attention. Trump’s presentations about the world rely on widespread incuriosity and accepting bad-faith actors at face value, but because those values have been so effectively inculcated on the right there’s little value for right-wing politicians or media personalities to contradict his claims.

The president said these were bad guys and so a third of Americans accept and celebrate that they are bad guys. The president says these people should be in jail so his administration works to put them in jail, to cheers from the base that he’s deceiving and the political allies who aren’t interested in disagreeing. And when it turns out that the presentation was wrong or that things weren’t quite as clear-cut as had been suggested, blame always falls somewhere outside of the Oval Office.

Trump’s us-vs.-them worldview will never run out of thems because what makes someone a them isn’t anything they’ve done — it’s simply that Trump has decided they are not an us.

Photo: FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledges applause during President Barack Obama’s remarks in the Rose Garden of the White House, June 21, 2013. (White House Photo by Pete Souza/Flickr)

Democracy depends on optimism.

This isn’t simply a pithy slogan; it’s an encapsulation of what it means to agree that power should be allocated by consensus. If you cast a vote for a candidate who loses, you need to be optimistic both that you will not be punished for your vote and that a candidate of your choosing can win in the future. While elections are generally zero-sum contests between two sides, democracy isn’t. It and the government it undergirds are fluid things, shifted subtly by changes in how power is allocated.

Or, at least, that’s usually been the case. The second presidency of Donald Trump is not approaching his accession as a temporary granting of power by the people. Instead, it’s treating Trump as the central executor of all federal decision-making, a treatment that is prompting very little pushback from Congress or the Supreme Court, the entities specifically designed to keep his power in check.

Americans don’t like what Trump is doing. His approval rating is underwater, with more than a 10-point gap between those who approve of his presidency and those who disapprove.

For those who disapprove, though, there’s no immediate consolation, no possibility that he will suddenly face condemnation from the Republican-controlled House and Senate. Even the idea that Democrats will retake control of the House in next year’s midterms isn’t a salve for the most concerned critics of the president. Democrats won the House in 2018, but it didn’t change the trajectory of Trump’s first presidency much. Not to mention that the president and his allies appear to be doing everything in their power to cement his control over the government, from creating new House maps that disadvantage Democrats to threatening to assume federal control over local elections.

In February, YouGov asked Americans to evaluate how important certain things were to American democracy and whether those things were actually present in our system. At that point — early in Trump’s effort to remake the country during his second term — about 9 in 10 respondents said that having open and fair elections was very or somewhat important to democracy. Only about three-quarters, though, said they strongly or somewhat agree that our national elections are open and fair.

Less than half of Americans strongly agree that national elections are fair. Among American adults under the age of 30, only about a third did. That’s a striking amount of pessimism about the system.

A few years ago, I spoke with Princeton University political scientist Corrine McConnaughy. She reinforced that the central aim of a democratically elected government is to “solve problems in ways that people feel represented enough, they feel their voice heard enough.” Participants in the system need to “understand that losing today is not losing tomorrow” — an optimism that depends on the idea that there’s a possibility of future victory.

It seems likely that one reason younger Americans are relatively pessimistic about national elections is that many of them have internalized pessimism about American systems. The candidate who was most effectively mobilizing young voters in the past decade was Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), someone whose argument — as Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari once put it to me — is that “the system does not work for you.”

“And,” Azari added, “younger people were saying, ‘Yeah, that’s right. It doesn’t.’ “

There are lots of manifestations of this frustration among younger voters, including the backlash Joe Biden saw during his own presidency. Some of that centered on America’s role in Israel’s invasion of Gaza; much of it was a function of younger Americans being less engaged in party politics. A lot of it centered on rising prices, still the most obvious driver of Donald Trump’s reelection overall.

Younger Americans also have a pessimism about the country that extends beyond politics. Yes, past presentations of the economic status of millennial Americans in particular overstated how disadvantaged they have been relative to older generations. (With all due modesty, this is a point I made in my 2023 book.) But recent measures of economic confidence have seen sharp declines among young people. A poll conducted by NORC for the Wall Street Journal determined that 7 in 10 Americans think the American dream no longer holds true or never did.

That sentiment is encapsulated for many young people in the difficulty of purchasing a home — a milestone that is hampered by student loan debt, high interest rates and a graying U.S. population that bought homes decades ago in which they still live. Data from the American Community Survey conducted by the Census Bureau shows that millennials are less likely to own a home at this stage in their lives than were members of the baby boom generation or Gen X.

Why wouldn’t Americans who grew up experiencing the Great Recession and/or covid — and who saw politics dominated by older Americans and little responsiveness within the democratic system even before this second Trump administration — be pessimistic about the nation’s future? Why wouldn’t some fragile subset of that group collapse into cynicism and irony and toxic online communities where they can feel some sense of power?

I would argue that this is the reason that it’s important for Trump’s political opponents to demonstrate that they are challenging him if they hope to gain power. The president is not simply a political opponent, he is the manifestation of the system and someone who is actively trying to reshape the system so that it excludes those with whom he disagrees. Compromise is valuable in a democracy, but in the moment any talk of compromising with Trump shows a willingness from Democratic leaders to maintain the system that’s triggering so much pessimism. Two of the people that have energized the left the most in the past few years are Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Zohran Mamdani — politicians who are not part of the traditional Democratic Party and who present their politics through an optimistic lens. They are young; they argue that change is possible, if not inevitable.

Over the short term, presenting a credible, optimistic vision of the future will help disarm doomers who foresee nothing but collapse. Over the long term, reinforcing optimism — where- and however possible — is essential for maintaining democracy itself.

How that’s done, of course, is the challenge.

Photo: B-17s flying over Germany in World War II. (National Archives)

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Since I left The Post, I’ve had more time to ensure that I am attending to other important parts of my life, like not missing days doing the Wordle.

One thing I like about the game is that it includes data, measures of one’s own performance and comparisons against both other players and the Wordle Bot — a sniffy, perfect implementation of a Wordle player who is always happy to attribute one’s best performances to luck rather than skill.

I am happy to report that I have beaten Wordle Bot to the answer three times in the past two weeks. (Wordle Bot, true to form, puts scare quotes around the word “beaten” when reporting this fact.) I have tied with the robotic manifestation of Wordle perfection seven times.

I am also outpacing the actual humans who play. Ever since Aug. 13, when the word was the execrable KEFIR, I’ve found the answer in two guesses three times and in six guesses only twice. For the uninitiated, this is pretty good. In fact, I’ve beaten the average score of human players 23 times and taken more guesses than the humans on only 17.

Naturally, I charted this. On the graph below, a lower number is better, indicating fewer guesses.

All the times the blue line is under the pink one, that’s when I outperformed the average player. Or, to show that difference another way, see the chart below. (If you haven’t done today’s Wordle and plan to, note that the answer is revealed.)

On average, I’ve beaten the average player by about 0.1 guesses since Aug. 13. My average number of guesses over that period is 3.74; theirs is 3.83.

It is true, of course, that luck does play a role in determining how successful you are. There’s a metaphysical point to be made about all of this, about how a perfectly constructed computer player will still lose to someone who’s taking an ill-advised chance. But I’ll leave the philosophy to others. I’ll just stick to making charts.

I remember being in Des Moines in August 2015 when Donald Trump made one of the first major appearances of his 2016 presidential bid: A stop at the Iowa State Fair. He emerged from a Trump-branded helicopter in a nearby parking lot, talking to reporters and meeting fans. One woman gave him a copy of “The Art of the Deal,” asking him to sign it. He did so, telling her it was “the second-best book ever.” The best, of course, was the Bible.

At the time, this just seemed like an obvious bit of pandering. But it was pandering that became a central element of his politics. Despite his … let’s say, sinful background, he positioned himself as the candidate of the religious right and, in short order, they welcomed him as their champion.

When Charlie Kirk was killed earlier this month, it was inevitable that the moment would become a rallying point for the political right. What’s been striking about that energy, though, is that it has flowed both to Donald Trump and to Christianity itself — a reflection of Kirk’s own embrace of the religion. There’s no reason to think that Kirk’s religiosity was insincere or calculating in the way that Trump seems to have been. But it’s probably the case that Kirk could not have become the force in right-wing politics that he was without it.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about recent Gallup polling showing that Americans had shifted to the right on a number of moral issues over the past few years. That article included a version of the chart below, showing the relatively rapid erosion of self-identified Christians in the U.S. over the past few decades — an erosion that seems to have stalled since the pandemic.

The decline has served as a political catalyst much as rumblings about the decline in the density of Whites in the U.S. population have. The result has been a bunker mentality. In June, YouGov asked Americans how much discrimination different groups faced. Republicans said White Americans face more discrimination than Black or Hispanic Americans — and that Christians face far more discrimination than either of those groups as well.

Yet it remains the case that most Americans are Christian — as were most voters in the 2024 election. Not all of them are Trump’s preferred flavor of Christian (White evangelical) but there are far more evangelical Christians than members of non-Christian faiths.

As you would expect, this varies by region. The Midwest and Deep South are heavily Christian; the West Coast and Northeast, less so. (The county-level data below are from PRRI and only show counties for which I also had reliable 2024 election data.)

Displaying the map like that, of course, distorts what that means in terms of population. Scaling county symbols to population shows that many urban areas are much less densely Christian.

If we compare the density of each county’s Christian population to the results of the 2024 presidential election, you can see a loose correlation: more Christians generally means more support for Trump.

Obviously, the inverse holds true: a smaller percentage of Christians generally meant less net support for Trump.

In both cases, many of the outliers are places with large Black, heavily Christian populations, including a number of counties in the Deep South. In 2020, PRRI estimated the percentage of White Christians in each county. If we compare that figure to the 2024 results, the correlation is much sharper.

There is a subset of Trump’s support that explicitly combines race and religion, the Christian nationalist movement. Other PRRI analysis shows a close correlation between support for Christian nationalism — that is, support for American being an explicitly Christian nation. The percentage of people in each state who support or are sympathetic to that idea correlates to Trump support in 2024. The percentage of Whites who fall into that category correlates even more robustly.

Pew Research Center’s analysis of the 2024 electorate shows just how important Christians were to Trump’s victory: more than three-quarters of his voters were Christian. Only about half of Kamala Harris’s were; about 4 in 10 of her voters were unaffiliated with a religious tradition, including atheists and agnostics.

Those voters who wanted to see Trump advocate an explicit Christian identity for the United States are starting to see their investment bear returns. The assassination attempt on Trump’s life last year accelerated his and his movement‘s embrace of the idea that Trump was chosen by God to serve as president. (More than half of Republicans viewed Trump’s win as part of God’s plan or as a reflection of God’s support for his policies according to recent Pew polling.) Trump’s second term in office deviates from his first in many ways; his and its embrace of explicit religious language since January is a notable one.

You would have been forgiven for assuming, back in Des Moines in 2015, that thrice-married playboy Donald J. Trump would not become the avatar for a White Christian resurgence of right-wing politics in the U.S. But Trump gave it a shot, and it worked.

Photo: North Christian Church, Columbus, Ind., 1973. (National Archives)

Between 2012 and 2016, Americans got a lot more cynical about the government.

To be specific — and to indicate that your likely immediate reaction to that bit of data was accurate — this increase was measured at the time of each year’s presidential election. In 2012, an already-high 6 in 10 Americans thought that at least half of those working in government were corrupt. By 2016, 7 in 10 did.

The biggest jump in this sentiment, measured in the American National Election Studies poll conducted around the election, was among Republicans. Overall, the assumption of corruption rose 9 percentage points. Among Republicans, it jumped 13 points.

(As used here, “leaners” are independents who say they generally vote with the indicated party.)

It is impossible to assume that this shift is unrelated to the emergence of Donald Trump in national politics. Trump’s first bid for the presidency, after all, was heavily centered on elevating cynicism about the system, excoriating legislators as corrupted by money — something that he insisted he’d seen firsthand. That he ended up running against someone deeply enmeshed in the political system worked to his advantage: he was the outsider who’d clean things up, which Hillary Clinton (in his presentation) was part of the problem.

In the years since, the assumption that government officials are corrupt has held relatively steady. It is higher among political independents (as you might assume) and among those who don’t have a college degree.

Notice, though, how partisan views shifted in 2020. Below, you can see the percentage of each group (by party and education) that thinks most or all members of government are corrupt. The year 2020 is indicated with a vertical line; notice where the percentage jumps or sinks that year.

Relative to 2016, Republicans (and leaners) and independents were less likely to see members of government as corrupt; among Democrats (and leaners), the percentage increased another 6 percentage points. In 2020, Democrats (and leaners) were as likely to view half of the government as corrupt as were Republicans.

What changed? The person in charge of the government.

Last month, YouGov dug into the question of corruption more specifically. If offered a bribe, they asked U.S. adults, how likely would various political actors be to accept? Mayors and members of Congress were most likely to be viewed as likely to take a bribe. Supreme Court justices and the president were least likely to.

There was a wide partisan divide on those last two, however, as you can see above. And the relative skepticism about a president taking a bribe diverged slightly when YouGov asked about a specific president: Trump.

When asking a similar question in January (just before inauguration), YouGov found that about 45 percent of Americans thought it was very or somewhat likely that Joe Biden would take a bribe, about equal to the percentage who said Donald Trump would. Partisans rejected the idea that their own party’s president would take a bribe while independents were more likely to think that Trump would.

In August, the percentage of Americans who thought Trump was at least somewhat likely to take a bribe jumped over the 50 percent mark. While the percentage of Democrats and independents who thought he would jumped, the percentage of Republicans did held steady.

The effect is not only that Republicans view Trump as less likely than any other group or listed individual as likely to accept a bribe, it’s that they purport to view him as less likely than any theoretical president to do so. Seven in 10 Republicans say it is not at all likely that Trump would take a bribe, compared to only a quarter who say the same of presidents in general. They see Trump as more resistant than other presidents to the temptations of bribery.

Some of this is simply partisanship, obviously. When a prominent conservative podcaster declares “we DO NOT CARE” about a credible report of a prominent administration official taking a bag of cash, it’s a reflection, in part, of rejecting attacks on members of one’s own team.

But there is evidence in the numbers above that there’s space for Democrats to run as anti-corruption candidates, as political scientist Adam Bonica argued over the weekend. There are a lot of people who see rampant corruption in government, including a lot of people who aren’t already Democrats. Whether it’s possible for the Democratic Party to reinvent itself as that — given the inherent skepticism independents have about the parties — is another question entirely.

Photo: Apple CEO Tim Cook sets up an engraved glass Apple disc on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Aug. 6, 2025. (White House/Flickr)

The story of this era is that institutions with power aren’t using it or are only using it in their own (often misguided) defense. That leaves the fight for democracy to regular people, to aggregated individual power that is joined on a largely ad hoc basis rather than on an institutional one. 

It’s fair to ask why. Why are media outlets and elected officials and businesses so unwilling to use what they’ve accrued or inherited for the country’s collective defense? Is it a failure to recognize that defense is needed? Is it some sort of perceived or actual mismatch between the power they’ve built and the power that’s demanded? Is it just weakness or self-interest or greed?

It may be that anti-democratic actors understand how to muffle that kind of institutional power. Doing so has been a decades-long project, after all, one that has seen a lot of success. My last column at The Post centered on the long-term erosion of institutional power and the opportunity that provided Donald Trump.

But that idea wobbles when considering where institutional pushback has been effective. Power is power, and it matters more that it is expended than how. 

Luckily, aggregated individual power — and even just individual power — is also effective. The utility of ad hoc, internet-enabled groups has been obvious for at least 15 years. When I was writing my book, which looks at trends in power over time, I noted that these efforts are hindered in the long term by being ad hoc and not building the sort of organization that can let power accrue, to build metaphorical interest. 

To some extent, though, they did. The No Kings protests were organized, in part, by Indivisible, which grew out of ad hoc organization. But the long term doesn’t matter in the immediate term. Building power over the long term doesn’t matter if the long term itself is under threat. 

So we see people self-organizing in effective ways, in and for novel institutions. It is true that existing, expansive institutional power applied aggressively could shift the political terrain in the U.S. more rapidly; congressional Republicans could effect constraints on the president tomorrow, if they chose to. 

In lieu of that, though, there isn’t nothing. There are a lot of regular people doing relatively small things, making the implementation of an autocratic state that much more difficult. Past generations of Americans collectively built big, weighty institutions that have proved to often be honeypots for abuse. Without many of those tools at their disposal, Americans today are building new arsenals from scratch. 

When the monarchists are on the march, sometimes it falls to a random group of farmers to stand in their way. 

Photo: A picture I took as I realized I needed a picture.

I am not revealing any trade secrets by telling you that Elon Musk’s public persona is unserious. He obviously has some business acumen; he remains in control of a number of corporations that are not at risk of imminent collapse. But politics? Woof. The lack of sophistication that was obvious during his brief stint in Donald Trump’s administration remains readily apparent — as does his willingness to amplify any fringe-right claim that pops up in his social media feed.

Yesterday, that meant sharing an idiotic graph from one of his ideological allies, appending only his trademark “Wow”. (He has also presumably trademarked 😂, but that’s beside the immediate point.)

The chart from podcaster (and former recipient of income from the Russian government) Tim Pool purports to show “what violence rates look like depending on political party.” It is offered, he explains, as a counterpoint to various analyses showing that violence is far more common on the political right than the left. Aha!, exclaims Pool: but the “combined violence rates” for “Democrat” are 21,765 compared to 858 for “Republican”!

Perhaps you find yourself slightly befuddled, unclear on what exactly Pool is talking about. Allow me to reassure you: This is not because you are stupid. It’s because the chart is stupid.

What Pool appears to be doing (but, honestly, who the hell knows) is taking violent crime rates from different cities and adding them together depending on whether the city is run by a Democrat or a Republican.

Even so, the numbers don’t make sense. What cities is he picking? How many? What is his source for the crime rates? When I took the list of the 100 largest cities, extracted the party of their mayors (now, mind you, and not in 2023) and overlapped that with Wikipedia’s violent-crime-rate data, I got very different numbers. (I would not normally use Wikipedia’s aggregated data, but I am very confident that Pool’s analysis, such as it is, did not rely on more sophisticated assessments of crime patterns.) Excluding two GOP-run cities for which data wasn’t immediately available, my totals are about 276,000 versus 54,000 (with another 32,000 for cities run by non-partisan mayors).

The specific figures don’t matter, though, because this is a very, very stupid metric.

Allow me to use a baseball analogy. What Pool is doing, in essence, is not looking at which team has more hits but, instead, comparing the cumulative batting averages of players on the New York Mets with players on the Chicago White Sox. That’s … not how batting averages work!

Even worse, though, is that he’s comparing different numbers of players. It’s as though he’s adding together the batting averages on each team, but only including players who live in or around New York City. There’s a lot more of them on one team!

In the case of the 100 most populous cities, there are about three Democratic mayors for every Republican. Even if those cities had violent crime rates that were half the value of Republican-led cities, the cumulative total would still be higher.

Again, though, that’s granting Pool the grace of assuming that his chart is based on anything at all. That grace is not deserved. The Republican-led city with the lowest violent crime rate in the Wikipedia data is Gilbert, Ariz., where there were more than 1,100 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in 2023. In other words, even if Pool only included one Republican-led city and that city was Gilbert, the “cumulative violent crime rate” would still be higher than his “858.”

Setting aside the ridiculousness of the data, it’s worth pointing out that, even if the figures were real and useful, there’s no actual connection to the debate at hand. Democrat-run cities among the 100 most-populous do have higher average violent-crime rates, but there are plenty of smaller cities run by Republicans where violent crime rates are higher still. But a city being run by a Democrat does not mean that the crime in that city is being done by Democrats, any more than having a Republican president means that crimes committed today are necessarily committed by Republicans. In fact, there’s research to show that mayoral partisanship isn’t correlated to crime rates.

Pool’s chart is just winking, leveraging the right’s core belief in the violent, criminal nature of ✨ People From Urban Areas ✨ to backstop the false claim that the left is more likely to engage in acts of political violence. It’s sort of useful, honestly, because it reinforces the extent to which all of the “it’s the left that’s violent” rhetoric is often simply about perceptions of who constitutes “the left.”

Allow me to now summarize my assessment of Pool’s chart and Musk’s response: 😂.

Thanks to Kevin Korb for elevating the research about mayors and crime.

Photo: People doing data stuff in 1990. (National Archives)

The debate over the shelving of Jimmy Kimmel’s show isn’t really a debate, as such.

Kimmel has been a target of Donald Trump’s for years, with the president predicting in July that the ABC host’s show would be next to be shut down after CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert. Last week, Kimmel made a joke about Republican eagerness to pin the Charlie Kirk assassination on the left, a joke that suggested obliquely that the shooter was a Trump supporter. The head of the FCC suggested that ABC should face sanction for the comments. A conglomerate that owns a number of local ABC stations — and is seeking a merger that requires FCC approval — announced that it would not air Kimmel’s show. ABC itself quickly followed suit.

In other words, Trump got his desired outcome. And Trump desired that outcome because he pays far more attention to television personalities and ratings than nearly anyone else in America.

Analysis from the Hollywood Reporter published last year found that ABC had a median primetime viewership age a bit lower than CBS in 2024 — 65.6 years versus 67.8. The youngest audience that tuned into ABC’s primetime lineup was for “NBA Primetime,” which enjoyed a youthful median age of 57.1 years.

If you’re curious, as I was, three-quarters of the U.S. population were younger than 57.1 years old in 2024.

After poking around a bit, I couldn’t find current estimates of the median age of Kimmel’s viewership. But that’s OK, since I mostly wanted to talk about the news.

Last month, Pew Research Center published its most recent analysis of the audiences of different news organizations. It included estimates of the median ages of people who cite specific sources as regular sources of news.

You’ll notice that two of the news sources with the youngest audiences are Spanish-language and targeting a Hispanic audience. That is almost certainly not unrelated to the fact that Hispanics are generally younger than Americans overall — and substantially younger than White Americans.

You may also have noticed on the original chart that the two oldest audiences were for right-wing outlets: Breitbart and Newsmax. This, too, is related to the racial demographics above.

But let’s consider those numbers in the context I offered for “NBA Primetime.” Univision has the youngest median audience, landing right at the median age of Americans overall. Every other news source skews older, with a larger percentage of the population younger than its median age than older. (According to Pew’s calculations, that is.)

It’s also true that most of these news sources have audiences that skew older than the voter pool in the U.S. That pool of people is older than the population overall, since you have to be 18 in order to vote. Using Census Bureau estimates of the voting-age population, we see that most of the news sources still skew older than the universe we’re looking at.

The point here is simple: These audiences are not particularly representative of the population. And that’s even before we consider actual viewership, which is a small subset of any particular age group. Kimmel averaged 1.7 million viewers last year, one-half of one percent of the U.S. population.

Targeting Kimmel shouldn’t really be viewed about sending him a message to constrain his dangerous, popular commentary. It is instead about sending a message to the rest of us.

Photo: Something that is unidentifiable to anyone under the age of 40. (National Archives)

My eight year-old and I were waiting for the school bus this morning when I commented on his t-shirt, which was from the West Coast fast-food chain In-N-Out burger. It is a particularly popular chain, appreciated by its fans for its fresh ingredients — burgers so good that customers overlook the weird, soggy fries.

I told him that, when I was in Houston last week, I’d gotten In-N-Out. His response was to briefly express jealousy before asking a valid question: There’s In-N-Out in Texas?

I’ll admit that I hadn’t known that either until I was there. In-N-Out’s restaurants are usually clustered, anecdotally because it assures access to those fresh ingredients. Maybe that’s not why; that’s not the point. The point is that I suddenly realized that I didn’t know exactly where In-N-Out could be found. And then I had an interesting thought, given Houston’s location in Texas: Had I eaten at the furthest-east In-N-Out Burger? More intriguingly, had I eaten at the In-N-Out closest to my house?

This was a job for a guy who is good with data. Happily, I know one.

First thing was to find a list of restaurant locations (which the chain publishes online) and then to geolocate them (easy enough with Geocod.io). And, just like that, I could produce a map.

As it turns out, I had not eaten at the easternmost In-N-Out. The restaurant at The Woodlands (in yellow on the map above) is only the second easternmost franchise. The easternmost is in Webster, Texas. The most western, meanwhile, is in Eureka, Calif., in the upper left corner of the state.

(For the sake of completion, the furthest north and south are in Ridgefield, Wash. and San Antonio, respectively.)

The In-N-Out I’d gone to was also not the closest to my house in New York. That honor — and it is an honor — goes to the restaurant in Rockwall, Texas. (It’s also in yellow above.) This is as-the-crow-flies, mind you, not if I wanted to drive or fly to get a burger in an airplane. It is simply the closest I am to an In-N-Out grilled cheese on any given day, the place where its food has the strongest gravitational pull on me.

Perhaps you’d like to know where your closest In-N-Out is? Well, sure; who wouldn’t. Since I had the data in hand, I made a little tool that will allow you to locate it.

Is this useful? Yes. You’re welcome.

Anyway, that’s what I was talking to my son about as he was getting on the bus.

This article was updated upon learning that a location just opened in Washington.

Photo: A picture I took at an In-N-Out in 2010. I assume the prices have gone up.

The New York Times’ Reid Epstein reports on the emergence of a new center-left think tank dubbed the Searchlight Institute. Its aim, he explains, is to help Democrats find “their way out of the political wilderness” by fixing where the party has gone wrong. To wit, having placed “too much emphasis on issues like climate change and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.”

This idea has been rumbling around in Democratic circles for a while, centered on the idea that advocacy groups (“the groups”) had pressured Democratic legislators to espouse unpopular opinions that hurt them with the electorate. Searchlight, Epstein reports, will “conduct its own polling and serve as an ideas generator in the service of winning with margins big enough to advance meaningful policy in Congress.”

Fine. Except that climate change and the party’s approach to LGBTQ issues are already two of its biggest strengths.

May polling from CNN presented Americans with 13 different policy areas. Climate and LGBTQ issues were two of the three where Democrats had the biggest advantage.

Climate change in particular offered Democrats the biggest advantage among independents as well. It was the second biggest advantage among younger voters — a core constituency for the party — behind abortion. This isn’t a new development, mind you; the challenge for Democrats has largely centered on the fact that voters prioritize other issues over climate change when casting ballots.

The question of how the party emerges from this metaphorical wilderness has in recent months centered on a related question: Should the Democratic Party try to show centrist and independent voters that its priorities are the ones those voters already have, or should it instead try to shift voters’ views of issues where Democrats have more existing strength?

The Searchlight idea, it seems, is to abandon a focus on two strengths, presumably in large part because they are polarizing. But it’s also because those issues are often more nuanced or complicated than the party’s position on abortion, leading to internal debates that Democratic politicians might find grating. The groups advocating for a particular position on abortion won, so they don’t offer the same sort of agitation that climate or LGBTQ groups do.

I will not be so presumptuous as to assume that I know what would or wouldn’t work for the party. But I am not sure that walking away from or downplaying existing strengths will fix the party’s problems with its disaffected and shrinking membership.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) appeared on CNN Tuesday night, unwittingly offering a useful distillation of the right’s consideration of political violence.

“You need to get your facts right,” Cruz told host Kaitlan Collins after she brought up the killing of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman. “The assassin there was not a right-wing assassin, acting on a political motive. The assassin there was someone who had been an appointee of Tim Walz, and he was a deranged lunatic.”

“Yes,” he continued, “there are deranged lunatics who attack people, both right and left. But if you look at murders carried out for political agendas, they are overwhelmingly on the left.” In addition to the killing of Charlie Kirk (the incident that prompted Cruz’s appearance), the senator cited the attempts on Donald Trump’s life in 2024 and the “assassination attempt on Brett Kavanaugh,” in which a plotter turned himself in before committing any act of violence.

Cruz’s description of Vance Boelter — the man accused of killing Hortman, her husband and shot another Democratic legislator — is false. He attempts to tie Boelter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz by describing him as an “appointee,” but Walz merely extended Boelter’s term on a state board as he did scores of other prior appointees. Boelter is a Trump supporter who engaged in “targeted political assassinations” according to a Justice Department official.

But this is the play. In order to rebut the abundant evidence that extremist murders are more likely to be driven by members of the political right (including two deaths that occurred on the same day as Kirk’s), those murders are downplayed in significance or dismissed as the work of isolated, mentally ill actors. Murders committed by people driven by left-wing ideologies (as appears to be the case with the Kirk killing) are presented as part of a concentrated political project.

This is why accusations against the left so often focus on the word “they.” If these acts of violence are downstream from left-wing politics, there’s an implied chain of influence that often proves impossible to define clearly. So instead it’s left as nebulous: They did this, through whatever means the right seeks to cast as unacceptable.

It is true that public attention can drive targeted violence as we’ve seen repeatedly in recent years. But that’s different than arguing that violence is the desired outcome of that attention, much less that this is primarily an issue on the left.

The emergence (re-emergence, really) of this idea that the left is engaged in a coordinated project to destroy the right by whatever means it can reminded me of research I wrote about in my 2023 book, “The Aftermath.” (You should probably buy the book. The bit below is in chapter four.)

Here’s what I wrote:

America’s non-White population is now mostly not Black. This makes it facially odd to assume that a theoretical erosion of White power will benefit a conglomerated group of non-Whites, as though the zero-sum calculus of politics will reward “non-Whites” as a group. Finding this idea puzzling, a group of researchers including New York University’s Eric Knowles examined precisely that assumption — and found clear evidence that it was one being made particularly by White Republicans.

“When you think about it, what does it mean for White Americans to become a minority? Well, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to not be the largest single group anymore — unless you sort of lump everybody else together,” he said when we spoke by phone. (Indeed, even in the Census Bureau’s projection for the population in 2060, Whites still outnumber Black and Hispanic U.S. residents combined.) “So there’s ‘us’, and then there’s ‘everyone else’, and that ‘everyone else’ forms some sort of coherent whole. That would be, it seems to us, kind of a prerequisite to feeling that sense of threat. If you think that you’re still the largest player in the game, and it’s just that there are a lot of other, smaller players, it’s not logical to feel all that threatened by it.”

Knowles and his colleagues conceived of a way to measure what they dubbed the sense of “minority collusion,” the idea that non-White Americans have a shared dislike and jealousy of Whites and that they work together to peel away power and resources to which Whites are entitled. They surveyed a nationally representative pool of White people multiple times from 2015 to 2018, asking them to respond to statements like “minorities may disagree about some things, but one thing they agree on is that they don’t like White people” or “different minority groups are willing to cooperate with each other in order to take power away from White people.” The research team also offered statements explicitly endorsing White identity politics like “Blacks, Latinos, and Asians often vote for politicians from their same racial group because that’s who has their best interests in mind; Whites should not be criticized for doing the same thing.” 

“What we ended up finding,” Knowles said, “was that there was a marked increase in agreement with the idea that minority collusion is happening over the course of the survey.” But, importantly, that increase “was driven only by an increase in this minority collusion belief among White Republicans.”

Knowles’ research looked at a specific us-versus-them framing. But you can see the parallel: If they are not us, they must be part of a them that is out to get us. Even when it doesn’t make sense to assume that disparate elements of the opposition are working together, because they are perceived as the opposition they are assumed to be acting in concert.

Earlier in his conversation with Collins, Cruz alleged that moneyed interests were behind the left-wing violence they were committing.

“The Black Lives Matter and antifa riots all over the country, there was real money behind that,” he said. “The anti-Israel, antisemitic riots on college campuses, there was real money behind that. The open border riots we saw in L.A., and across the country, there’s real money behind that. I’m not the only person who noticed that at the antisemitic protests, on college campuses, many of the tents all matched. And so, what I’m urging the Department of Justice to do is look at who’s funding it.”

The “antifa riots”? OK.

It’s helpful that he mentioned the tents thing because it was nonsense that was seized upon by the right in its effort to imply a coordination that simply didn’t exist. The “real money” he describes almost invariably gets traced back to contributions from donors to organizations that supported often completely non-violent protests. But he and his allies work backward to construct a conspiracy where none otherwise exists because it allows them to impugn their political opponents. Drawing attention that, in the past, has led to right-wing political violence.

Except that political violence isn’t something done by us. It’s just something they foment and celebrate as part of their left-wing collusion and conspiracy. Right, senator?

Photo: The most powerful person in America, holding court with allies and aides. (White House/Flickr)

One of the things I’m curious about in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk is whether the political views of young people will shift. This was Kirk’s wheelhouse, we are told: engaging young people in politics to Republicans’ and Trump’s benefit.

I am personally skeptical about claims that Kirk and his organization, Turning Point USA, had a major influence on the rightward shift of young people in recent years and I am very skeptical of the (now frequent) claims that he and his organization had a significant effect on the 2024 election outcome. But if he was an outsized force among young people, we might expect to see some movement in views of Trump, on whose behalf Kirk’s efforts were primarily deployed.

So I figured I’d measure the current baseline. In YouGov’s regular polling on Trump’s approval rating, there was a jump in the views of Americans under the age of 30 this week. But that number is often volatile, given that it is a measurement of a relatively small subset of the population.

While Americans aged 18 to 29 were about as likely to approve of Trump’s performance as president back in March, that approval has since collapsed. The recent uptick still has Trump’s approval among young people below where it was in early August.

When Trump won in November, his favorability rating surged among Americans under the age of 45. But here, too, that positive sentiment collapsed. Now, only about a third of young people view Trump favorably (looking at a three-week average, mostly to smooth out some of the aforementioned volatility).

On both approval and favorability, Trump’s seen the biggest declines among young Americans since mid-February.

So that’s where we are, in polling conducted in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. We will see where we stand in a month or two.

Photo: The president dances, in his way. (White House/Flickr)

One of the things I appreciate about the polling firm YouGov is that they are able to poll a lot of things over a short timeframe. One effect of that is that they can ask unusual questions and get statistically significant responses. And unusual poll questions can lead to unexpected revelations.

Last week, for example, YouGov presented a panel of Americans with 40 “cultural entities,” an umbrella term for celebrities, TV shows, concepts and tchotchkes. Respondents to the poll were asked how they felt about those items — did they love them? Hate them? — and then whether they thought those items were associated with MAGA-supportive Republicans. YouGov has also been tracking self-identification as “MAGA Republicans,” meaning that we can use these numbers to approximate what MAGAworld views as MAGA culture.

There are some caveats here, but let’s ignore those for the moment. Instead, let’s see if you can estimate how MAGA supporters view these cultural items.

How’d you do? Do you have your finger on the pulse of MAGA culture? Did the results comport with how you yourself view those things?

One caveat, of course, is that YouGov selected the 40 items. The options were, by construction, a subset of the available possibilities. So there may be some element of MAGA culture that dominates over everything YouGov presented but is missing from the dataset. Another caveat is that the framing about “MAGA culture” is mine, not YouGov’s, so don’t blame them if you disagree with it.

That said, YouGov did a good job selecting the 40 items. In almost every case, more self-identified MAGA Republicans said they “liked” or “loved” the item than did Americans overall. You can see that below; every dot sits above the dashed diagonal line. The further from the line the dot sits, the bigger the gap between the percentage of MAGA Republicans who liked/loved the item and the percentage of Americans overall who did.

The biggest gap? Well, we’ll get to that.

If we compare the net response by item — subtracting the percentage that “hate” it from those who “love” it — we see that the dots appear to sit more tightly along the diagonal trend line. But there are still some outliers. American flags, for example, have a much bigger love-hate gap among MAGA Republicans.

So do Confederate flags.

So what is MAGA culture? According to MAGA Republicans, it includes American flags, Kid Rock, Clint Eastwood and steak. According to Americans overall, it’s American flags, Kid Rock, Confederate flags and “The Apprentice.”

We might justifiably assume that MAGA Republicans are better judges of what constitutes MAGA culture than people who don’t identify that way. Sometimes, though, our understanding of ourselves is incomplete or willfully blind. So I decided to compare MAGA Republicans’ views of the cultural items with the difference between their views and Americans overall. The theory? That MAGA Republicans might be disproportionately likely to say they like or love something even if they don’t necessarily see that thing as associated with the MAGA universe.

Here are those results.

Podcaster Joe Rogan stands out here. Rogan ranks eighth in the percentage of MAGA Republicans who associate him with MAGA culture but also sees the biggest gap between how liked he is by MAGA Republicans relative to Americans overall. Mel Gibson sees the second-biggest gap, but is only 12th on the MAGA-culture-as-seen-by-MAGA-Republicans list.

Among the items least likely to be seen as MAGA-related by MAGA Republicans are lip fillers, breast implants, hair extensions, high heels and spray tans. That’s no doubt in part because of the overlap between MAGA Republicanism and perceived (or performative) masculinity and in part because men are more likely to identify as MAGA Republicans.

But while those are the least MAGA-linked items as identified by MAGA Republicans, they are not necessarily dismissed by everyone else. Spray tans, for example, are seen as identified with MAGA culture by a fifth of independents, a quarter of all Americans and 4 in 10 Democrats — compared to only 6 percent of MAGA Republicans.

Beauty is in the eye of the partisan beholder, it seems.

Photo: Trump go vroom. (White House photo/Flickr)

In 2020, They stole the presidential election.

How They did this has never been explained clearly. At first, it was alleged that They did so through fraud, by stuffing ballot boxes or submitting fake absentee ballots. Robust efforts to prove this claim unearthed no such scheme, so the explanation shifted: Actually, what They did, was rig the election by painting Donald Trump as unpopular in the mass media and shielding Americans from the truth. Here, too, the rhetoric was not supported by the evidence — but the nebulousness of the assertion made that inconsequential. Unseen, unidentifiable influences can’t be proven to exist, which just reinforces how nefarious they truly are. Ergo, we can assume that They stole the election.

This idea found particular traction with adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory, an idea that emerged during Trump’s first term in office and which framed his administration as a direct, secret battle against Their evil forces. Trump leaned into this idea, naturally, and the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 was heavily populated by QAnon adherents joining Trump’s fight for power against Them.

Republicans more broadly were primed to accept Trump’s explanation for 2020 because they’d heard for years — for decades! — about how They are trying to indoctrinate our young. College professors, Hollywood communists, all of Them were dripping poison in the teens’ ears, turning them from red-blooded conservatives into climate-change and income-inequality obsessed liberals.

One thing that shifted in 2020 was that the president of the United States seized upon Their culpability for his defeat. Trump had targeted Them from his first days as a presidential candidate, siding with disaffected right-wing voters against their vaguely described oppressors. But in 2020, he could point to something specific that They had done to alter political power: They stole the election.

Four years later, they did something far worse. While Trump was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pa., They tried to kill him. In the immediate aftermath of that shooting, Trump’s allies insisted that Trump was being targeted by Them for his politics. When the shooter was identified as a local teenager of unclear political allegiances and no obvious ties to Them … it didn’t matter. They were still the culprit, with Republicans insisting that They had fired the bullet that narrowly missed killing the then-former president.

Last week, They killed Charlie Kirk in Utah. Again, an alleged shooter has been arrested and again his politics and intent are unclear. But, again, the real culprit has been known since the shot rang out: Them.

“They killed Charlie Kirk,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-Indiana) told Politico — so “the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine-to-zero [House] map.”

“Five years earlier, I was told he was a Trump supporter,” former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake said of the alleged shooter over the weekend. “And we sent our kids off to college, and [T]hey brainwashed him.”

“We’re dealing with a radical left group of lunatics,” Trump told NBC News in an interview about the shooting, “and [T]hey don’t play fair and [T]hey never did.”

And so on. There are myriad examples, often from prominent voices on the right, all making the same claim: They did this, and They will do it again.

“Fascists need a demonized enemy against which to mobilize followers,” Robert Paxton wrote in his 2004 book “The Anatomy of Fascism,” “but of course the enemy does not have to be Jewish. Each culture specifies the national enemy.” The original enemy identified by Trump was immigrants, a group that retains that status on the right to this day as evidenced by the lusty cheers for the administration’s targeting of people born outside the U.S. But particularly since Trump lost in 2020 and leaned so heavily into the purported evils of his opponents — stealing elections, trying to hold him accountable in criminal court, shooting at him — the primary They he seeks to uproot is his political opposition.

Many of his allies and supporters are hard at work identifying Them. Anyone with the temerity to question Kirk’s legacy or the administration’s response to his death is one of Them and, it seems, deserves to be publicly shamed and fired.

This has been organized and stoked on social media, which makes sense. “Tech giants and media benefit from the dramatic clash of friend and enemy,” Jason Stanley wrote in his 2018 book, “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.” “Fear and anger get people to the polls, but they also keep people online and glued to the media.”

Fascism does not always look like Nazi Germany and fascists do not always look like Hitler. Fascism does not always lead to death camps. But fascism does depend on a vague sense of oppression and victimization that flows from a powerful, shadowy opponent.

An opponent that can rig elections and corrupt children and place assassins on rooftops. An opponent who acts because They are evil and They are un-American — because They hate America. An opponent so hazily powerful that a president constrained by the old rules can’t combat it. So, the argument seems to go, we must give Trump whatever power he demands in order to keep us safe.

Photo: World War II poster from the VFW, edited to remove a racist caricature. (National Archives)

On Thursday, I looked at the way in which Sept. 11 was fading from public memory — not because Americans are forgetting it happened but because a larger percentage of Americans weren’t yet born when it happened. Fully a third of the country’s residents were too young to remember the attacks that day, a reflection of the inexorable progress of time, yes, but also of the shifting demography of the country itself.

That article included the chart below, comparing the population of the U.S. last year with the population the year of the Sept. 11 attacks. From 2001 to 2024, I noted, the population under the age of 50 grew about 5 percent. The population aged 50 and up grew by more than 50 percent.

I posted that chart on social media, prompting an observation from Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis.

After looking at the data: he is right.

Getting population-by-age data from the Census Bureau is a little tricky, so I used the online tools offered by the (essential) IPUMS Center for Data Integration. It compiles data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, allowing users to split up population numbers as they wish.

Below, for example, we see a recreation of the original chart with two differences. First, it uses the IPUMS data, so the values aren’t precisely the same. (That’s why there’s a spike around age 15 below that doesn’t exist in the original chart.) Second, I compared 2024 to 2020.

Using IPUMS, we can parcel out the population in each year relative to Americans’ proximity to immigrants. First generation Americans are themselves immigrants. Second generation Americans were born in the U.S. but have at least one immigrant parent. Third-plus generation Americans had immigrant grandparents or great-grandparents or great-great… etc.

Here’s the distribution by age in 2000.

And here is the dramatically different distribution in 2024. Notice not only that there are more immigrants in the population, but that there are more second-generation Americans in the younger population.

By combining the second- and third-plus generation populations, we can see how different the original chart looks. Now, population growth from ages 0 to 49 between 2000 and 2024 was not even 1 percent while population growth from 50 to 79 was more than 50 percent.

If we take out second generation Americans, the children of immigrants, the shift is even more striking.

Change in the 50-plus population over that time? Plus 58 percent. Change in the under-50 population? Down 9 percent.

What’s particularly striking about that final chart is how flat it is. Population distributions are often shaped like a roller coaster, with a big hump at the beginning that tapers off as people die. But the U.S. had about as many third-plus generation Americans aged 50 last year as it did newborns.

Population growth — and therefore economic growth — is heavily a function of immigration. The increase in America’s aging population (a function of the baby boom) will increase demand for service-sector jobs aiding the increased population of seniors, jobs that will need to be done by younger Americans. Curtail immigration and you curtail the working-age population both immediately and over the longer term, since those immigrants won’t be there to have native-born American kids.

And that could be a very big problem indeed.

Photo: Immigrants on Ellis Island. (National Archives)

Donald Trump appeared on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” Friday morning, returning to the program where he was a weekly contributor until he announced his bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Back then, he used to offer right-wing assessments of the news, unbound by any the constraints of politics or accuracy. Now that Trump is president … not much has changed.

The central news from the appearance was Trump’s casual revelation that an arrest had been made in the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. But a related interaction, prompted by one of the hosts of the show, deserves exploration as well.

“We have radicals on the right as well,” Ainsley Earhardt said to the president. “We have radicals on the left. People have got  — are watching all of these videos and cheering — some people are cheering that Charlie was killed. How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?”

“Well,” Trump replied, “I’ll tell you something that’s gonna get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”

“The radicals on the right,” he continued, “oftentimes are radical ‘cause they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime.”

“Worried about the border,” co-host Brian Kilmeade jumped in.

“They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street,’ ” Trump continued. “The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious, and they’re horrible, and they’re politically savvy.” (He went on to add that the “worst thing that happened to this country” was “when we let 25 million people in” — echoing his long-standing, false claim about immigration during the Biden administration.)

First of all, Trump’s assertion about the motivations of right-wing extremists is obviously untrue. In October 2020, during Trump’s first term in office, the Department of Homeland Security released a report in which the acting director expressed that he was “particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years.” That comported with Anti-Defamation League analysis showing that the vast majority of extremist killings from 2013 to 2022 were committed by right-wing actors.

A January 2024 report published by the National Institute of Justice reinforced the point.

“Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States,” it stated. “In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

None of this is to say that there is no political violence perpetrated by the left. There obviously is. Instead, it is to note that right-wing violence has been more common and not motivated by, as Trump speculated, opposition to crime. He was closer to the mark when he suggested that right-wing extremists were motivated by not “want[ing] these people coming in” — which is just another way of describing xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment. (His claims about crime, of course, are not distinct from rhetoric about race, as Charlottesville attendees were aware and as recent Trumpworld rhetoric has demonstrated.)

Trump has always had a soft spot for violent actors who side with him politically. The most obvious example is the riot at the Capitol, of course, an incident in which crime-fighters were beaten by Trump supporters in an effort to subvert the 2020 election. But there are other examples, too, like Trump’s glossing over the fringe beliefs of QAnon adherents while he was president because “they like me very much.”

His “Fox & Friends” framing Friday morning, though, made me think specifically about the eight-year-old debate over Trump’s comments in August 2017, after a young woman was killed in Charlottesville, Va. He faced enormous criticism at the time for first suggesting that violence and culpability existed on both sides of the protests in that city — the side aligned with white nationalists and the side opposed to the white nationalists — and later declaring that there had been “very fine people” on both sides of the debate.

Those comments came to encapsulate a sense among many Americans that Trump is indifferent to racist violence. So, he and his allies applied a familiar and successful tactic to defuse the criticism: claim that the whole thing was a hoax.

In this case, Trumpworld decided to focus specifically on the phrase “very fine people,” which they insisted was not a reference to the racists who’d organized and dominated the original event in Charlottesville. They pointed to Trump’s after-the-fact assurances that he was “not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally” as proof that he was praising only those attendees of the fringe-right rally by white nationalists who weren’t nazis and white nationalists. This was not only an exoneration of Trump, they insisted, but more evidence that the left was unmoored in its attacks on Trump.

That was back in 2017, though, when Trump was new to the gig and still allowing himself to be constrained by public expectations and some norms of behavior. That’s why his first comments, about bad actors on both sides, spurred a straight-from-the-teleprompter denunciation of the worst extremist elements.

But now it is 2025. There are no similar guardrails. Trump perceives little need to distance himself from extremists who share his ideology; instead, he excuses them. There’s no fine people on both sides, equating attendees of a extremist rally with those opposing that extremism. Instead, he pats the right-wing extremists on the head as he excoriates some vaguely defined group of extremists on the left.

This is the dichotomy that was always at play in his “fine people” comments. What’s changed is that now he isn’t concerned about revealing it.

Photo: President Donald Trump rides in his motorcade on Sept. 9, 2025. (White House photo by Daniel Torok/Flickr)

I remember the explosion of the Challenger only vaguely. I was still in elementary school, and remember — I think; it’s hazy — being told during lunch that the shuttle launch had failed. This was the watch-every-launch-on-TVs-rolled-into-classrooms era, so the school was attuned to the moment. That said, I don’t remember anyone’s reaction, including my own.

I remember Sept. 11, 2001 with much more clarity. This isn’t surprising; I was older and the disaster more recent. It was also much more damaging, both in human and geopolitical terms.

There are lots of ways to reflect on 9/11, but this is the way I tend to do so: as a marker on our paths through history. I remember the day it happened, but many people don’t. An ever increasing number of people don’t. This signal moment in America’s and my own life is, for many Americans, now an abstraction.

We can measure this. If we assume that one can form permanent memories at about the age of four, fully a third of Americans alive last year were too young to remember the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

You’ll notice that I’ve added some other historic moments there: the Challenger explosion, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the end of World War II. There are, at the moment, far more people who are too young to remember Sept. 11 than there are people old enough to remember Kennedy’s assassination or V-E Day.

In 2001, 4 in 10 Americans were old enough to remember those events, twice the percentage that can at this point. Only a small portion of the population was aged three or under and therefore too young to remember the attacks.

It’s interesting to compare the two populations directly. You can see how the group of people too young to remember Sept. 11 growing, as you would expect — but can also see the winnowing of those older groups as segments of the population.

What’s remarkable about the shift since 2001 is that the U.S. population has grown — but that the population under the age of 50 has grown by only 5 percent while the population aged 50 and over has grown by 56 percent.

In other words, the percentage of Americans who remember Sept. 11 is relatively small given how disproportionately old the American population has grown.

And yet a third of Americans don’t remember that day. Didn’t spend the day glued to the TV, didn’t watch the towers fall in real time. A third of Americans didn’t experience the day and a huge portion of them also didn’t experience what happened next: the overhaul of American politics and the surge to war.

Never forget, they say, but every year fewer Americans are able to remember even if they wanted to. Every year, fewer of us remember the lessons learned from the attack’s aftermath, too.

Photo: The World Trade Center towers. (National Archives)

Update: YouGov asked American adults if they remember where they were on Sept. 11, 2001. Here are the responses by age.

Why do only 7 percent say they weren’t yet born? Because this is only people aged 18 and up.

I am not generally in the habit of criticizing the editorial decisions of The Washington Post, my employer for 11 years and an institution that continues to do good, important work in covering the unwinding of American democracy. But I think the paper’s assessment of the putative debate over Donald Trump’s signature on the note provided for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday demands some context.

The article’s original headline was “No clear answers on whether Trump signed the Epstein birthday book,” a declaration that was eventually softened to “Is the signature Trump’s? Epstein birthday book feeds speculation.” The article first presents the denials of Trump’s staff and allies that he couldn’t have signed the bizarre, creepy, suggestive document. It then quotes handwriting experts, some of whom who indicated uncertainty about the signature’s provenance. A number of full signatures of Trump’s are shown in an apparent effort to demonstrate variation.

The use of full signatures doesn’t make sense because the signature in the book — created in 2003, before Epstein was on law enforcement’s radar — includes only Trump’s first name. The New York Times compared that signature to other examples of Trump signing only his first name, showing that they are nearly identical. In fact, the Wall Street Journal, which originally reported on the note, also published an article demonstrating why the note was almost certainly from Trump, including similar first-name-only signatures from the now-president.

The Journal did so, it’s safe to assume, because its initial report on the letter was rejected as invented or “fake news” by Trump et al. (Trump even sued, claiming, in part, that no such letter existed.) In other words, it probably assumed that publication of the note would trigger precisely the response that it did, an effort to move the goalposts of claimed fraudulence.

There is absolutely no reason to think that the note was not, in fact, from Trump and no reason to think that the signature is not his own. Even setting aside the obvious-to-any-layperson similarity to other signatures, the idea that someone would create a phony Trump letter as a private gift to someone Trump had praised publicly the year prior doesn’t make any sense.

So why treat the idea that the signature isn’t his seriously? Why treat the assertions of people with demonstrated track records of lying on Trump’s behalf — including Trump, his communications team and right-wing influencers — as offering sincere complaints on this particular issue? Why grant them the benefit of the doubt that they actually think the signature isn’t his?

There’s a marketplace for treating those bad-faith claims as valid, clearly, but there’s also friction for those who call them out as nonsense. One of the developments that’s helped Trump immeasurably since his decision to enter national politics is the right’s streamlining a system for directing public pressure on chosen targets. Evolving from sites like Twitchy to social media pile-ons to simply mainstreaming abusive behavior, it’s now trivial to pollute the media space in which journalists operate with unpleasantness (and worse).

But I don’t think that this system of pressure is what The Post’s reporting is responding to. I think, instead, it is offering grace to bad-faith actors because institutions have internalized the idea that bad-faith actors must, particularly in this moment, be granted that grace. The mainstream media has long been criticized for bolstering both sides of even lopsided debates, but that tendency faded during Trump’s first term in office. After all, both sides used to operate much more obviously in good faith than did Trump and his allies. With Trump’s return to the White House, though, and his imposition of proto-authoritarianism as the new D.C. normal, institutions seem to be willing to treat it as normal, on pain of ostracism.

There is overlap here with the embarrassing and disconcerting situation at Texas A&M. A student in a class recorded herself challenging a professor who was reviewing a discussion of gender and sexuality. In short order, the video made its way to a Republican Texas legislator.

“I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching. Because, according to our president, there’s only two genders and he said that he would be freezing agencies’ funding programs that promote gender ideology,” the student tells the instructor. “…I am not going to participate in this because it’s not legal and I don’t want to promote something that is against our president’s laws as well as against my religious beliefs.”

Facing a firestorm of pressure generated by the aforementioned right-wing outrage system, the university quickly fired the instructor, demoted two officials and announced an audit aimed at ensuring that no similarly transgressive instruction was occurring within its system.

I don’t want to harp too much on the student’s verbiage, since nitpicking the complaints of college students is one of the lowest forms of commentary. But I do think she said something revealing. Not her invocation of “our president’s laws,” which is obviously a wild distortion of the American system, but her insistence that “according to our president, there’s only two genders.”

We don’t need to dig into the science here to understand what’s wrong with that phrasing. We don’t even need to disagree with the assertion. We can simply focus on the idea that she’s pitting the veiws of the president against the views of a faculty member at a college … and the college chose to side with the president. In the eternal human struggle to understand the world, Texas A&M is demonstrating — quite eagerly — that it will defer to politicians on the nature of truth rather than the people it has hired to explore and examine that nature.

You can see the overlap with The Post’s signature assessment. Assertions about reality that are bolstered by evidence and/or examination run afoul of the president and his allies. So the president and his allies are granted the space to object or even simply granted primacy in the debate they invented. Institutions that should be centered primarily on elevating truth instead risk becoming institutions that elevate propaganda.

What could The Post have done? What it has done so many times before: Parse the issue and fully demonstrate the flimsiness of Trump’s claims, even if a just-asking-questions style headline would generate more traffic. What could Texas A&M have done? Stand behind its instructor and defend its role as a truth-seeking institution in court, if it came to that.

It has been observed that individual Americans are putting up more fight than many institutions. Those individuals are also smaller targets for the authoritarian president and his allies. They are less powerful. But that’s obviously why it’s more important for the institutions to engage and not to succumb to the climate of fear.

That climate, after all, only exists if it goes unchallenged. There is no climate of fear without capitulation.

Photo: Sen. Joseph McCarthy. (National Archives)

Last week, Gallup released the latest in its series of polling evaluating America’s moral worldview. Respondents were presented with a number of scenarios — wearing fur for fashion, cheating on a spouse, etc. — and asked whether those actions were generally morally acceptable or morally wrong.

There was a wide variation in responses, as you’d expect given the wide range of scenarios presented. Here are 19 of the options presented to respondents, listed from most to least likely to be considered morally acceptable.

What I noticed in looking at this data is that, for a number of these measures, there has been a sudden reversal of the long-term trend in recent years, with issues that were becoming more likely to be viewed as morally acceptable or consistently likely to be viewed that way suddenly being viewed more negatively. Those shifts appear to have often begun after the data from 2022.

If we re-order the results to show the largest declines since 2022, that trend is more apparent (albeit sometimes inconsistent).

This mirrors another shift that is easy to believe to be related: Pew Research Center data from earlier this year showing that self-identification as Christian has stabilized in recent years — and even increased a bit since a low in … 2022.

The timing here is striking. It is by now well established that there were shifts in behavior that accompanied the emergence of the coronavirus in the U.S. in 2020. But this isn’t that. This suggests that something else shifted in the 2022-2023 period — a period when, for example, the covid-era spike in crime was beginning to recede.

Gallup’s analysis, summarized by Frank Newport, notes that the shifts over the past few years haven’t been uniform. Younger Americans, for example, have become disproportionately more likely to view porn, sex between teenagers and extramarital affairs as not morally acceptable.

His analysis ends with a cautious note.

“More research and more time are necessary to understand this recent shift,” Newport writes. “It may be a temporary, short-term change. Or it could be evidence of a more substantial shift in Americans’ moral and values positioning.”

That’s data-speak for “it looks like something happened here, but it’s not clear what — or if it even anything significant happened at all.” But if it did, as it seems to have, the question is: Why?

Photo: LGBT Solidarity Rally in front of the Stonewall Inn, New York on Feb. 4, 2017. (Mathias Wasik/Flickr under Creative Commons license)

Fifteen years ago, American advocates for increasing the use of renewable sources of energy for electricity production offered two central arguments for doing so. The first, obviously, was climate change. The second was strategic: If the U.S. didn’t seize the initiative in building out companies and investing in innovations to drive the green economy, some other country would. And if they did, those other countries would have a significant advantage moving forward.

The U.S. was well positioned to lead, even though it was quickly becoming apparent that other countries, including China, were making the same play. But the evolution of energy production was centrally a technological race, the kind at which the American system excelled. Innovation in fossil fuel energy existed but was largely about improving extraction, as the fracking boom demonstrated. Innovation in renewables — wind and particularly solar — was multi-faceted: smaller, cheaper, easier production, more output.

For a while, the surge in awareness about climate change driven by Al Gore’s 2006 movie on the subject seemed as if it would drive an ozone-layer-like moment of bipartisan agreement. It even seemed as if oil companies that made and maintained huge fortunes selling fossil fuels might spend resources to lead in the green energy space, too. But many Republicans were already skeptical of climate change and used to siding with the oil companies (remember who was president in 2006?) — and therefore inclined against taking action.

This was also a period in which partisan hostility surged. The emergence of the Tea Party was centered heavily on the election of Barack Obama, (who, like his opponent in 2008, promised to take action to combat global warming). The new president ran broadly on a platform of change, but that idea, twisted from its original presentation, freaked a lot of conservative Americans out. They saw in him not just change from the George W. Bush era but a change toward something exotic, foreign and un-American, with all of the subtext that suggests.

This, not the stuff about protecting oil companies, is where Donald Trump got folded in. As was the case with the Iraq War, Trump’s view of climate change (to the extent that he expressed one) mirrored the conventional assessment. In 2009, in the period before backlash to Obama and climate activism reached full steam, he was a signatory to a letter calling for action on carbon emissions that was published in the New York Times.

A few months later, Trump had already begun harrumphing along with the rest of the right about efforts to increase renewable energy and cut down on emissions from cars. But what really polarized the future president was that someone planned to build wind turbines off the coast of Scotland, within sight of a golf course he was working on. This was his own fight, engaged in in his own way, with social-media rants, attacks on opponents and baffling misinformation. When he opted to run for president, he applied those same tactics against his opponents.

The broader fight against climate change was also introducing tactics that would be deployed more broadly in the Trump era. Hacked emails selectively leaked to undermine the opponents. Attacking scientists as elitists and suggesting that agreed-upon facts were actually still in contention. Leaning on partisan alignment to combat unhelpful arguments.

(Such consistency has not been uniform. One of the attacks on Obama’s green-energy efforts centered on a federal loan guarantee given to a solar company, Solyndra, that eventually went under. That the program that provided that guarantee ended up making money for the government was generally ignored. The GOP’s voluminous objections to a president “picking winners and losers” in the economy, meanwhile, have necessarily vanished completely.)

Trump and the GOP were destined to land in the same place on climate change because Trump is a product of the right’s information ecosystem as much as its leader. He wasn’t motivated by ensuring that ExxonMobil made money but he was very motivated by the undercurrents that Exxon and its allies leveraged: young vs. old, change vs. the same, elites va. normal people. No one really cares about LED lightbulbs. They care that some kid with a placard or some bureaucrat in a tie is telling them they have to change what they are doing. This, Trump gets.

By the time Trump launched his 2016 bid, climate change was one of the most polarized issues in politics. Republicans rejected its existence and opposed taking action to address it while Democrats (and particularly younger Democrats more likely to see its eventual effects) demanded action. This polarization was so robust that it was essentially a litmus test, weeding out Republicans who might have been sympathetic to action. There are now functionally no defenders of addressing climate change on the American right.

(This happens elsewhere, too. “Wokeness,” for example, is a caricature of diversity issues that’s loathed on the right as a perceived demand that older Americans do something other than what they’ve always done. What was the fight over the “woke” Cracker Barrel logo other than a fight centered around unexpected change? By now, there is essentially no powerful Republican willing to stand in defense of pluralism.)

On Jan. 20, Trump returned to office, determined to use his regained power to settle all of his longstanding grudges like a long-tied Michael Corleone. That meant not only cutting government support for renewable energy projects but actively opposing them. It has meant treating wind and solar projects like they’re DEI initiatives, with whole-of-government efforts to uproot them in favor of coal.

This isn’t picking winners and losers; it’s just picking losers. Despite the U.S.’ general failure to move fast on renewable energy 15 years ago, we’ve seen a dramatic shift away from coal and to wind and solar.

In 2003, nearly every state generated more electricity from coal than from renewable sources.

By 2023, most were generating more from wind, solar and hydroelectric than from coal — despite the first Trump presidency.

Part of this was the replacement of coal-burning power plants with ones that used natural gas, a shift driven in part by the boom in extraction that accompanied fracking.

But every state also saw increases in the percentage of electricity generated by wind and solar over that same period. On average, 17 percent more of state electricity production in 2023 came from wind and solar than did in those states in 2003.

Trump and officials in his administration seem intent on reversing that trend. They claim that wind and solar are somehow only viable when it is windy and sunny, as though mankind has developed no way of storing generated power. Trump insists that fossil fuels are the only way to meet rising electricity demand not because they are but because he has internalized that renewables (and wind in particular) are bad. His base has learned this lesson along with him.

There has been one particular irony to Trump’s rejection of renewable energy over the past five years. One of the reasons he insists that wind and solar not be implemented and that electric vehicles not be encouraged is that so many of the constituent elements of those shifts — the car batteries and solar panels — can only be sourced from Chinese companies. Because China, recognizing the approaching economic battle that renewable energy presented 15 years ago, went all in on winning it.

Our failure to compete then is used as an argument against competing now.

Photo: An illustration from 1985. (National Archives)

I will leave it to the economists to say that the economy isn’t doing well, which they are saying, because it isn’t. What I will do, instead, is explain what that looks like in practical terms.

As you have probably heard, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday morning that the economy added only 22,000 jobs last month. That number is subject to revision, a process in which the bureau continues to add data over time in order to ensure that its measures are as accurate as possible. There is some (fully warranted!) concern that future revisions might include a bit of thumb-on-scale adjustment to benefit President Trump politically, but that isn’t obvious from the new numbers. In fact, a revision to the June estimate now indicates that the country lost jobs that month for the first time since the pandemic emerged. It was just such a revision that prompted Trump to oust the non-partisan head of BLS after last month’s report.

What is clear is that the rate of hiring has slowed substantially and, since April, basically flat-lined. Compare this year’s change in employment since January with the steady rates of change in 2023 and 2024, for example.

Perhaps something that occurred in April had an effect on the economy? Who’s to say.

The shifts in employment have not been evenly distributed. For example, fewer Black and White Americans are working now than were working in January, while more Asian and Hispanic Americans are.

It’s important to note that the uncertainty in the employment numbers is even larger for subsets of the population. You can see that below in the data for Black men; the whipsaw drop and surge is probably not because of big swings in employment as much as statistical randomness. That said, there are some clear patterns, with Black women and White men in particular seeing employment loss since January.

In case you missed the joke earlier, some hard-to-measure-but-probably-significant portion of the economic softness we’re seeing is a function of Trump’s off-again-on-again tariff declarations. At the time he introduced them, they were presented (sometimes) as an effort to boost domestic manufacturing. (At other times they were presented as an effort to level the playing field on trade. The inconsistency is simply part of the slapdash nature of the policy.)

You can see below, though, that manufacturing employment has declined this year. So too has employment in the government, largely because 100,000 federal employees were put out of work.

There are lots of other numbers we could look at that suggest the economy is much weaker than any of us might desire. But these are more than enough for now. Since April, the country has added only 107,000 jobs, the smallest number over any four-month period since 2000. During 2023 and 2024, the country added an average of 192,000 jobs per month. This year, under Trump, we’ve added an average of 75,000.

The economy is slowing down. Uh, as an economist might say.

Photo: Unemployed men queued outside a depression soup kitchen opened in Chicago in 1931 by Al Capone. (National Archives)

Not that they should.

Note that, even among Republicans, only 1 in 5 have a lot of confidence in what he has to say. It’s really only in comparison with the CDC that he fares decently with members of President Trump’s party.

That is, as always, the play: maybe you don’t love me, but at least I’m not a Big Government, Know-Ot-All Elite. And here we are.

It is likely that you have by now heard about Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-Mo.) speech at a right-wing conference on Tuesday. In it, he rejected the idea that America was “an abstract and vaguely-defined proposition” but, instead, a “nation and a people” in possession of “its own distinct history and heritage and interests.”

This is an explicit rejection of a long-standing tenet of American patriotism; Lincoln, you will recall, described America as a “new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” in his address at Gettysburg. But it’s more than that. The speech was also an explicit rejection of American pluralism and the United States’ role as (and beneficiary from being) a global melting pot.

“We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith,” Schmitt said, defining his boundaries quite clearly. These were the people he described as lamenting the “memory of a country that once belonged to them.”

The speech included a lot of the now-familiar, Manifest-Destiny-colored narrative about the virile men who once tromped their way out to the Pacific coast. Schmitt’s America is one whose history had been almost entirely written by the turn of the 20th century. He cherry-picked a few developments after that point; that, for example, Missourian Charles Lindbergh (actually a Michigander) had flown across the Atlantic. (Lindbergh, incidentally, would likely have approved of Schmitt’s speech.) But mostly it was a familiar pastiche of Founding Fathers and Intrepid Explorers and so on.

This is a recently popular view of American history, given the primacy it offers to Christian White men. It is also almost hilariously naive, failing to recognize that the America that existed in 1900 was a pale shadow of the one that exists today — thanks in no small part to the contributions of immigrants. Schmitt’s speech was a bit like a Nokia executive insisting that the company get back to its roots of making boots.

Last month, Pew Research Center published an important analysis of the immigrant population in the U.S. and the recent shifts that have been driven by President Trump and allies including Schmitt. Many on the right like to frame the recent increase in immigrants to the U.S. as an aberration (including by wildly exaggerating the scale and threat of that increase). Pew’s data shows that the density of immigrants in the population returned to about 15 percent — the levels seen in the late 1800s — after a period in the mid-20th century during which immigration was limited by law. Since Trump took office this year, though, that percentage has already dropped noticeably.

It is true that the most recent wave of immigration to the U.S. (beginning with the lifting of those anti-immigration restrictions in the mid-1960s) is larger than the waves that came before it (as explained by Pew). It is also true that the more-recent immigrants come from regions that the pre-restriction immigrants didn’t, including Latin America.

But that scale is deceptive. The U.S. is far more populous now than it was at the end of the first big wave of immigration, the one that included nearly 12 million arrivals from Northern and Western Europe. The number of immigrants from that region was equivalent to about 18 percent of the country’s population at the end of that first wave. The number of immigrants from Latin America who’ve come since 1965, by contrast, is about 11 percent of the current U.S. population.

Of course, there was actually a fourth wave of immigration to the U.S. that largely preceded the influx from Northern and Western Europe. That was the wave that originated in Africa, involving unwilling migrants. It was those immigrants and their enslaved offspring who did most of the literal work of building the early United States. In 1890, Black people made up about 12 percent of the U.S. population.

The definition of “American” that Schmitt uses excludes Black Americans as well as immigrants from Latin America, Asia and anywhere besides Europe. That means that, per his definition, nearly half of all U.S. residents aren’t “Americans,” including an average of about 4 in 10 residents of each state.

Note the relatively small percentages in the southern states, a function of the unnamed first wave of “immigration” from Africa and immigration from Latin America in the most recent wave.

It’s important to note that a central reason that there were restrictions placed on immigration 100 years ago was the shift in the nations of origin between the mid-1800s and late-1800s waves of immigrants. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were often viewed as dirty and unwelcome; their embrace of Catholicism was seen as a threat to the Protestantism that was prevalent in the U.S. at the time. (Schmitt, I’ll note, is a Catholic.) The largest mass lynching in U.S. history occurred in New Orleans in 1891 and targeted Italian immigrants.

If we assume that Schmitt’s embrace of America’s European heritage excludes any of those second-wave arrivals (he reserved specific praise for the “Scots-Irish” in his speech), then his definition narrows the pool of “Americans” significantly. Only 4 in 10 U.S. residents have ancestry that originated in Western or Northern Europe.

Schmitt’s hostility to immigrants is toxic in its own right, of course, but the Trump administration’s institution of hostility to immigration as federal policy has a specific problem: It threatens the American labor force.

Immigration to the U.S. has been the primary reason that the population has grown in recent years — growth that is now at risk. But the aberration of contraction is less important than its effects. As I wrote both in my 2023 book and for The Washington Post in April, the aging of America’s population is disrupting the balance between those who build the economy and those who depend on it. A higher percentage of elderly Americans — a group far larger than the population of immigrants — means more need for services from a population that has a lower density of working-age people.

One path out of the problem has been immigrants continuing to move to the U.S., building families and filling jobs. As immigration increased in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic, so did foreign-born workers as a percentage of the labor force. As the population of immigrants has fallen during Trump’s second term in office, so has the density of foreign-born workers in the workforce.

So far, the loss in foreign-born members of the labor force has been offset by an increase in the number of native-born workers. Trump’s value proposition is that this trend will continue.

But from 2020 to 2024, the number of U.S. residents who are aged 65 and up increased by 12.3 percent. The percentage of residents aged 18 to 64 — prime working age — increased only 1.5 percent.

Trump and allies like Schmitt have chosen not to frame immigrants to the U.S. as potential workers, instead often describing them as “military-aged males” — implying they came to the U.S. to fight rather than to work. That gives Trump and his party cover to uproot immigrants in the guise of protecting America — and “Americans” who’d been wringing their hands about the “country that once belonged to them.”

I will note, by the way, that I have every right to impugn Schmitt as an unwelcome Johnny-come-lately, as someone who doesn’t understand American heritage. My ancestor, Edward Bompasse, came to the not-yet-United-States from England in 1621 on the Fortune. Luckily for the senator, I understand that this actually doesn’t give me more right to define Americanism than anyone else or empower me to look at anyone whose ancestors arrived more recently with disdain.

Photo: Undated photo of American immigrants. (National Archives)