In my younger days, I came up with a theory of human behavior that (while probably too cute for its own good) serves as a useful frame for understanding part of the world.

I called it “resizing the pond.” The idea is that many people like to feel like the big fish in a small pond but operate in ponds that are far too big for that to be possible. So they resize the pond, convincing themselves that a much smaller universe is the important one, one in which they can be the big fish.

You know the type. The person in a small office who sets arbitrary rules and systems and insists that everyone else adhere to them on pain of excoriation. They are the big fish in that little pond — and they have convinced themselves that that pond is both important and significant. This gives them comfort.

This frame is a way of understanding the motivations of all of the little tyrants we encounter on a day-to-day basis. It is also understandable as something to which many of us often fall prey, obsessing about the importance of the thing we need to do. That is, after all, an incentive to do it.

This long-lost bit of pseudowisdom came to mind this week as my family and I have been on vacation in western New York. The area is mostly rural and, as is often correlated, frequently impoverished. What also struck me, though, is the extent to which it is an archipelago of small towns and local shops. There is a town of a thousand people separated from a town of 1,500 by five minutes of driving through farmland. Occasionally these stretches are interrupted by hardware stores or mechanics usually named after their owners.

It’s a lot of little ponds. Literally, sure, but also in the figurative sense. A town where you can be an elected official or on the school board. A place where people know your shop and your family. Places where significance and familiarity are accessible.

It strikes me that this is rarer than it used to be.

This is in part because people have moved out of small towns and into larger urban areas. There are still small ponds in big places; institutional D.C. excels at creating groups and systems in which one can be a chairperson or founder for résumé-related reasons. Pond-building. The nature of a big city, though, is that you can’t know everyone or be known by everyone.

The other reason this is rarer is that everything is nationalized, flattened. Anyone can become a national or international celebrity overnight thanks to social media and the internet. The collapse of local-specific information universes (newspapers, etc.) means that national issues and individuals comprise most of what we see. Here, too, there are still little ponds — lots of people have millions of social-media followers by focusing on specific niches — but this is neither a familiar nor particularly accessible means of becoming a big fish. Keeping up with the Kardashians instead of the neighboring Joneses.

This pond metaphor is generally a proxy for status anxiety, I admit. People want recognition that they find elusive.

But I also think this does a better job of capturing the desire for dominance that seems hard to escape in the moment. It’s not just recognition; it’s wanting to be the big man, the boss. There’s an obvious element of subjugation to big-fish syndrome, the ability to devour the lesser creatures that are swimming around you.

Then we extend the idea. If you feel as though you should be dominant but aren’t, if you see others treated as big fish in your stead, you might understandably be drawn to someone who promises to wreak havoc on those standing in your way. If you can’t be the shark, you might as well be the remora.

There are too many tidy solutions offered for the moment, and this one qualifies. It strikes me, though, that retaining more opportunities to be a big fish might have reduced the number of people to see the social order be devoured.

Photo: A house in Johnstown, Pa. in 2023.

Governors of three states — Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia — are sending members of their state National Guards to D.C. to … well, theoretically to combat crime but, if the past week is any indicator, mostly to stand near tourist sites and wear uniforms.

This isn’t because there’s no crime in D.C. to combat (of course there is, as the right-wing media insists one acknowledge) but because the mission as established by President Trump isn’t really about that. Crime is simply the pretext Trump is using to put into effect his long-standing desire to deploy troops on the streets of D.C. Maybe it’s a lingering frustration from what happened in 2020; maybe it’s about pressing his thumb down on a city that voted heavily against him. Either way, it is not centrally about crime.

Because Trump is championing this deployment, his supporters are treating it as necessary and brilliant. And that, in turn, is triggering GOP politicians to start another scramble onto another bandwagon. Hence the deployments from Republican governors in Republican states: They get to say that they helped Trump do the thing that Trump told his base needed to be done. And here we are.

But now the pretext wavers. If there really is an emergency in D.C. that necessitates the use of the National Guard and other federal agencies, that would suggest that crime in D.C. is exceptional. (It would also suggest that crime is rising, which it isn’t; quite the opposite. But if you note that it’s falling, then you find yourself under attack for downplaying the existing crime, even when you aren’t. These are the traps that the pro-Trump bubble uses to keep reality at bay.) Data released by the FBI earlier this month, though, shows that a lot of other places — including places in those three states — had higher rates of violent crime and homicide than did D.C.

I went ahead and made some interactive maps using the FBI data. Cities shown in pink below are ones where the violent crime rate in 2024 was higher than in D.C. Zoom in if you need to.

And here’s the same map but displaying homicide rates. (Technically, murder and non-negligent manslaughter.)

The FBI reported that fully 43 cities in those three states had higher rates of violent crime in 2024 than did D.C. More than 1.2 million people live in those cities, including more than 900,000 in Ohio alone. Yet that state’s National Guard is being deployed to D.C. to protect the capital’s 700,000-odd residents. Half a million Ohioans live in cities with higher homicide rates than D.C. Unfortunately for them, they won’t get to see National Guard troops on their streets — just on their TVs, standing around outside the Lincoln Memorial.

Or maybe the lesson here is that this isn’t really about crime at all.

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Update

August 18. Louisiana and Mississippi have decided to also send troops up to confront the Yankees.

With them, there are now 64 cities that had higher rates of violent crime in 2024 than did D.C. in states whose governors are sending the National Guard to Washington to “combat crime.” Those governors are more worried about the 700,000 residents of D.C., theoretically, than the 1.7 million people in those 64 cities they actually represent.

Photo: D.C. police officer. (National Archives)

Let us now take a break from politics and pivot to the sort of topic that generates Authentic Engagement™ in the Creator Economy: Life hacks.

In this case, we are going to use data from recent YouGov polling to teach you how to prevail at games of chance. Or, at least, to offer insights into the at-times surprising ways in which Americans randomly choose a consistent response from a set of options.

For example, when you toss a coin it is as likely to land as heads as it is tails. But asked which option they would pick for a coin toss, Americans were about three times as likely to say heads.

This seems weird but, presented with the data, it probably shouldn’t. After all, heads is as good a guess as tails, statistically speaking, and it does generally come first when people are presented with the options. So heads is more popular.

This doesn’t really give you an advantage, of course. The outcome of a coin toss is up to the coin, as Anton Chigurh might remind us. Where the YouGov data might help tip the scales a bit more is in how people play Roshambo.

Asked to pick between rock, paper and scissors, almost half of those with an opinion pick rock — making paper the safer first play. Yet paper is also the least common choice in YouGov’s data.

This may again be a function of rock being first in the list. But a possible slight advantage is better than no advantage.

The most striking set of responses came when people were asked what number they would choose between 1 and 10, a large plurality pick 7.

It’s important to note that this was not posed as a situation in which one was trying to get closest to a secret number, in which case 5 would be the clear favorite. That said, my assumption was that 5 would be the choice, in part because I generally do the “pick between 1 and 10” when seeking to resolve disputes between my kids.

Perhaps you, as I was, are curious if there are any differences in these responses by age or (sigh) political party. Well, on the numbers one — no, not really.

There is a more noticeable difference on Roshambo, with Republicans and older Americans more likely than younger people and Democrats to pick rock.

One of the largest differences came in the coin toss, with younger Americans quite a bit more likely to choose tails than older people.

So there you go. When playing rock, paper, scissors, choose paper — particularly against a Republican. If you have to guess a number between 1 and 10, the odds are good that the other person picked 7. And if you are trying to win a coin toss? Uh, good luck, I guess.

Photo: Obama flips a coin at the start of the 2011 Army-Navy game. (National Archives)

The effort by Texas Republicans to wring five more GOP House seats from their state triggered a range of responses. For example: This doesn’t seem like something that a party confident in its electoral chances would do.

Perhaps the most useful responses extrapolated from this attempt to game the rules to the rules themselves. Redrawing maps to divvy up Republican voters as usefully as possible to swing five of 435 total seats relies on there being 435 legislators representing distinct areas. Neither of those things has to be the case, though they are and have been for some time.

For about a century, in fact, a period during which the population of the United States more than tripled. At the risk of being painfully on-brand, the number of representatives hasn’t been increased since before the massive, post-war boom in babies that reshaped the country.

What that means is that the country’s representatives are much less able to represent their constituencies than they used to be.

Consider the president. In 1920, about 26.8 million people cast ballots for the chief executive — about a third of the votes cast last year for Donald Trump alone. Last year, there were 15.8 million votes cast just in California.

The winner that year would represent about 105 million people. Trump currently represents about 342 million.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how bad we are at comprehending such large numbers. But let’s set that aside for now and just consider the extent to which we are effectively represented by the legislators elected to represent us federally.

In the Senate, for example, the average number of people represented by each senator went from about 204,000 in 1820 to 1.1 million in 1920 to 3.3 million in 2020.

In the House, the average number of U.S. residents rose from 45,000 in 1820 to 243,000 in 1920 to 762,000 in 2020.

You’ll notice that we’re using slightly different metrics for evaluating the House and the Senate. You’ll see why in a moment.

The distribution of seats in the House is adjusted after (nearly) every census (and, Texas Republicans hope, occasionally at the mid-point between censuses, too). The population is divvied up and seats assigned by state, with the effect that, even though each seat is meant to represent a consistent number of people, there is instead a range — currently a fairly wide range — between the two.

On average, though, the math works out. Dividing up the population by the number of seats generally yields a figure close to the average number of people represented in each House seat.

You’ll notice that on the graph above I indicated the point at which the number of House seats was frozen. If the number of seats had continued to grow at the rate seen prior to 1930, the chart above might look like the one below.

Anyway, that didn’t happen. And, compared to the other side of the Capitol, the allocation of power in the House is relatively fair.

There, too, there’s a range between the senators with the largest and smallest constituencies. It’s a much larger range, though — so large that it can be hard to distinguish from the original chart of Senate representation.

As you are no doubt aware, there is a massive gap between the number of people represented by senators from Wyoming (the least populous state) and California (the most populous). For what it’s worth, the ratio between the largest and smallest states used to be worse. In 1900, for example, New York had 172 times as many residents as Nevada (7.3 million vs. 43,000). The ratio of people represented by each state’s two senators was just as large.

But the difference in actual residents was fall smaller than the current gap. That was a gap of about 7 million, compared to the 39-million-resident gap that current exists between the most- and least-populous states.

The average Californian has to compete against 19.8 million other residents (in theory) in order to be heard. The average New Yorker in 1900 had to compete against only (“only”) 3.6 million.

The lopsidedness of the Senate can be viewed another way. In 1900, the population of New York was larger than that of the 17 least populous states — meaning that New Yorkers had two senators for the 34 senators representing those 17 smaller states.

Now, California’s population is larger than the 21 smallest states, meaning that there are 42 senators representing a population that’s smaller than the population represented by California’s two senators.

California is more populous than these 21 states, to be specific.

We don’t here need to go into the debate over whether the allocation of power in the Senate is justified or necessary. What we can do, though, is note that that allocation is much more unequal than it used to be.

At the same time, we can acknowledge that the representative democracy created under the Constitution is far less representative of individual Americans than it was or than it could be. Even before Texas games the system.

Photo: The Senate Armed Services Committee in 1949. There’s a future president in the mix. (National Archives)

The day Donald Trump announced his 2016 presidential candidacy at Trump Tower, I was tasked with evaluating the factual claims he made in his speech. I did so … for the first couple of inaccurate claims he presented. Then I cut to the chase.

”This is the whole thing about fact-checking Donald Trump: He is un-fact-checkable,” I wrote. “That’s his gift and his angle.”

At the time, this was an observation offered about a man that everyone knew was not a serious contender for the presidency. That he invented numbers and embraced numbers invented by others was of no more consequence, it seemed, than the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist outside the White House are consequential to the decisions in the Oval Office.

Then voters invited the guy with the conspiracy theories to make the Oval Office his workplace. Twice.

The first time they did so, Trump spent four years trying to fend off reality. He’d built a robust base of support by telling Americans what he thought they wanted to hear, and some did. Fact-checkers scrambled to point out that a lot of what he offered was contrived or imaginary, but he simply declared that the fact-checkers were the dishonest ones. For people invested in agreeing with Trump, it was easier to believe that someone they’d never heard of was a liar than was the president who’s promised them the world. Or, if not the world, then at least making their enemies suffer worse than they were.

When he came back to the White House in January, the situation was different. The artificial universe he’d helped construct wasn’t a political aberration; it had devoured nearly the entire political right. What little opposition he’d faced from his own party in 2017 was gone, just as he felt sufficiently confident and resentful to wield the power of the presidency however he saw fit. Who was going to stop him, Mike Johnson? Samuel Alito? Be real.

On Monday, Trump deployed this new approach on two subtly connected fronts. He announced that his administration would take over law enforcement in D.C., ostensibly because it was demanded by a level of crime that constituted an emergency. He also nominated a Heritage Foundation apparatchik to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics, having fired the sitting director ostensibly because she’d overseen the release of biased or unfair jobs numbers.

As you are likely aware, neither of those pretexts is legitimate. Crime is down in D.C., not up. The jobs data produced by the BLS is reliable — in part because it includes revisions that are a form of self-correction. So while it is true that there is crime in D.C. and it is true that the jobs numbers aren’t perfect, Trump took extraordinary (and alarming) actions after exaggerating and misrepresenting both of those issues.

What’s important here is that the numbers don’t matter. It didn’t matter that crime was down in D.C.; Trump and his team simply cherry-picked metrics and amplified skepticism to provide cover for what Trump had wanted to do since 2020. It didn’t matter that the BLS is reliable; the numbers weren’t good so, with his base trained to treat bad news as fake news, change was needed. And reality got blurry.

What’s different about this moment relative to his false claims in 2015 or 2017 is that Trump is empowered and willing to deploy the federal government against objectivity. His intelligence apparatus is spreading false claims about the origins of the Russia investigation. His Health secretary is explicitly rejecting scientific expertise in favor of doing one’s own (non-scientific) research. And, if his nominee is confirmed, the BLS measures of the economy will be withheld or dubious. His economic team has already spent months making false claims about trade, tariffs and international deals. Why not make the jobs numbers say what Trump wants, too?

After Trump’s announcement about D.C., a lot of people noted the conflict between his pro-cop, anti-crime rhetoric and his coddling of the rioters who assaulted police on Jan. 6, 2021. That riot, though, was the culmination of another effort by Trump to supplant reality with cherry-picked, contrived data: his insistence that the 2020 election had been stolen. The post-2020 period, more than his first term itself, established Trump’s second-term modus operandi. Evidence that he was wrong was ignored and countervailing evidence, however dubious, was offered in its stead. And it worked; as late as last year most Republicans thought the election was somehow stolen.

It has long been the case — since his first day as a candidate, if not before — that challenging Trump with facts is fruitless. It’s still important to point out that crime is down and the jobs data is valid, even if we know that the people who will accept Trump’s assertions about those issues won’t accept our own. What’s different now is the extent to which Trump uses data as a tool against reality, forming arguments that get propped up with numbers his side invented or isolated and in service of which contradictory figures are sent to rhetorical purgatory.

And that he has now enlisted the federal government in this effort.

Photo: Official White House photo by Abe McNatt. (Flickr)

Let us consider the ongoing overhaul of the White House as a metaphor.

A few months ago, back when I was at The Washington Post, I compiled a series of photos to show how the Oval Office had been slowly redecorated to better reflect the aesthetic of the then-slightly-newer president. Even by then, the once-spare room had begun to gleam with gilded bric-a-brac and a number of random golden objects.

The result was striking.

Oh, that’s not the Oval Office. It is, instead, one of the rooms in a palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Relative to the Oval Office under prior presidents, the room above is over-the-top. Relative to the Oval Office today, the Saudi palace is downright understated.

Feel free to read my commentary on the changes between the pictures below — or just scroll through to get the effect.

The fireplace

Let’s begin by considering the fireplace that sits at the other end of the office from the president’s desk. This is what that fireplace looked like in October of last year, when Joe Biden was president.

Soon after Trump took office, the area had already gotten an overhaul. The greenery on the mantel was replaced with a variety of golden knick-knacks. The paintings on the wall were moved around and new paintings and mirrors — all with gilded frames — added. A bust of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was replaced by one of Winston Churchill, placed on a table shaped like a golden eagle, and a number of flags were added.

You can see the changes a bit more easily below. Notice that the mirror on the door at left is too tall and juts up above the door itself.

Notice, too, the addition of some sort of gold object on the table at the center of the room. It has Trump’s name on it.

By March, an ornate … something was added to the marble just above the fireplace itself.

It was soon joined by other little appliqués on the wall.

Here you can get the full effect. Notice that the too-big mirror on the door at left was replaced. Trump also brought back the model of Air Force One that sat on the center table for much of his first term in office.

Between June and early July, additional appliqués were added to the sides of the fireplace and to the space under the central portrait. This required swapping out the largest center trophy-thing with a less-gold clock. The bust of Martin Luther King Jr. was replaced with one depicting someone that looks like Dwight Eisenhower.

Notice, too, that the marble on the fireplace itself was gilded. You can see that better below.

Recently, the clock was swapped back out for the golden trophy-thing. Gold statue-things were also added next to each of the busts.

The slow accretion of gaudiness is obvious when we switch back to the first time Trump entered the White House after his first term ended: when Biden hosted him after Trump won the 2024 election.

The overhaul that followed was dramatic.

The rest of the room

That has also been the case in the rest of the room.

When Biden was president, the area around his desk mirrored the area around the fireplace: lightly decorated and (relatively) austere.

Then came Trump. More paintings, more flags.

Golden objects and flourishes were added elsewhere, too, as above the doorway below. Shelves on the opposite wall became home to other little golden objects, in the same manner as the mantel over the fireplace.

Trump had a copy of the Declaration of Independence added to the room, which Tim Tebow looked at for a while when he visited.

Notice, in the picture above, that the border ringing the room is unadorned except for some scalloping. A week or so later, it was home to gilded appliqués like those that would eventually adorn the fireplace.

If you’re curious when all of this work was done, you will not be surprised to learn that Trump spent the weekend between April 1 and April 10 at Mar-a-Lago.

Here’s Dr. Oz admiring the resulting aesthetic.

The accents went further. More gold things on the shelves. The border of the door is now gilded. Golden appliqués were added to the wainscoting.

By late May, all of the relief elements of the doorway had been gilded, including the fasces above the lintel.

Apparently concerned that the room wasn’t gaudy enough, more appliqués were added, including to the wall next to the bookshelf and to the sections of the door. The architectural elements in the border at the top of the room was also gilded.

Again, compare this with the way the office looked in the last days of Biden’s presidency.

An unrelenting and unsubtle overhaul.

Outside the residence

Trump’s made other changes, too. The Rose Garden went from looking like this…

…to looking like this. White-and-yellow striped umbrellas were added to the tables below, echoing the aesthetic on Mar-a-Lago’s patio.

Trump also had a gigantic flagpole installed on the south side of the White House — another update that mirrors a change he’d made at one of his private clubs.

Again, this can all be understood as a metaphor. Trump is reshaping the White House to mirror his own predispositions and tastes, regardless of history and regardless of cost. He is in the process of doing precisely the same thing to the rest of the country as well.

All photos are from the White House on Flickr.

Earlier this week, Lawrence Hamilton of the University of New Hampshire published new polling evaluating the extent to which Americans agreed or disagreed with a number of statements. Of the 14 statements, seven were reflections of scientific consensus — or reality, as we understand it. The other seven required belief in or acceptance of a conspiracy involving scientists and/or the government.

On the whole, Americans were less likely to agree with the conspiratorial statements than the scientific ones. The conspiratorial statement with which the most Americans agreed was about the government hiding evidence of UFOs. Fewer people agreed with that than agreed with the least-supported scientific statement, that the Sun shines for 24 hours a day during certain times of the year at the South Pole.

Disconcertingly, Hamilton also found that Americans had grown more conspiratorial since 2021. There was a statistically significant increase in the percentage of people who agreed that the Moon landing was faked, for example, and a significant decrease in agreement with evolution, the age of the Earth and even, weirdly enough, that the Earth orbits the Sun.

We can probably attribute some of this to the general embrace of nonsense that we’re seeing in the moment. Some of it is also probably linked to the political shift since 2021, the country’s shift to the right. After all, as Hamilton writes, “conservatives tend to be more open to conspiracy beliefs about non-political as well as political topics.”

That’s shown in the data. Asked if the government has the ability to control hurricanes, which it doesn’t, 14 percent of Americans said it does. Among those who voted for Kamala Harris last year, only half that percentage thinks that the government can control hurricanes. Among Trump voters, though, nearly 1 in 5 do.

The less tied to traditional politics the respondent, the less robust the rejection of the conspiracy theory. Only about half of third party voters and those who didn’t vote last year said the government can’t control hurricanes.

One can debate which way the causal arrow points here, but it isn’t particularly surprising that confidence in the political system (as manifested in vote choice) correlates to distrust of government. Nor is it surprising that conspiratorial thinking increased as Trump’s political power resurged.

What is a bit surprising is how that conspiratorial thinking has seeped into actual policy. The most conspiratorial people have historically been kept outside of the political system but, in part because Trump and his base embrace conspiracies as a means of consolidating power, even unpopular ideas like “chemtrails” and rejecting vaccines have become the targets of administration or congressional action.

America is being devoured by conspiracy theories — a statement that 1 in 10 Americans might think was meant literally.

Photo: Airplane contrails over England during World War II. (National Archives)

In keeping with Americans’ perennial inability to properly contextualize the events of the recent past, there’s a particular narrative about the 2024 election that I find frustrating. In short, that the election marked a significant rightward shift of American voters and, by extension, by America.

The value of such a narrative to President Trump and to his ideological allies is obvious. Trump’s return to the White House brought with it the unexpected cudgel of popular support, something he lacked when he arrived in 2017. But that cudgel was flimsier than it appeared. Trump won more votes than Kamala Harris but less than half of votes cast. A central driver of those votes was inflation, not Trump’s politics.

That rightward shift also followed a leftward shift four years prior. Yes, states shifted to the right from 2020 to 2024 — but only after they shifted to the left from 2016 to 2020.

This is little consolation for Democrats, certainly, and it glosses over the actual shifts in the electorate between Trump’s first and third bids for the presidency. So let’s use Pew Research Center’s robust assessment of the electorate in each year to show how Trump’s base of support evolved over that time … and how it didn’t.

Take gender. In 2016, 53 percent of Trump’s support was male, compared to 54 percent in 2024. That’s a subtle change, but one that looks more substantial when you consider the intervening election. In 2016, the pool of Trump voters was 6 points more male. In 2020, the gap was half that size — before swelling to 8 points last year.

Over those eight years? A bit more male and a bit less female.

(Why was the pool of Trump voters more heavily female in 2020? In part because more men voted for Joe Biden. In 2016, Trump won men by 11 points. In 2020, he won them by 2 points.)

When we look at age, we see a more obvious shift. In 2016, about 20 percent of Trump’s support was under the age of 40. Last year, about 26 percent was.

If one ascribes to the thesis that Trump’s decade-plus as the head of the GOP has normalized his politics among younger Americans (as I do), feel free to use the chart above in your defense.

Below, you can see how Trump’s coalition shifted by age and gender over the three elections. Women aged 30 to 49 were 10 percent of Trump’s support in 2016. Last year, they were 13 percent — which was still a relatively modest part of the coalition.

One of the most important distinctions (and one not captured in exit polling) is how much less White Trump’s 2024 coalition was than his 2016 one.

Data on race don’t add up neatly to 100 percent, so let’s compare data across election cycles by stacking racial groups. Below, you can that White men and women made up less of Trump’s support in 2024 than in 2016 (by four and six points, respectively) and that Hispanic voters in particular made up more of it: 6 percent in 2016 compared to 1 in 10 Trump voters last year.

When I was still at The Washington Post, I wrote about how the shift to Trump among young men was heavily among non-White men — in part because younger Americans are less likely to be White. Below, you can see that reflected, to some extent. We’re slicing demographics pretty thin here, so take this with a grain of salt.

More striking is the shift by race and education. Trump’s 2016 coalition was heavily centered among Whites without a college degree, who made up almost two-thirds of his support. Last year, it was barely over half.

That decline was seen among both White men and White women without degrees.

There’s a pattern here: Whites, Whites without degrees and Whites over the age of 50 — groups that overlap heavily — all constituted at least 10 percentage points more of Trump’s coalition in 2016 as they did last year.

The question for the Republican Party is whether they can maintain that more-diverse coalition. Which, in turn, is a question about the roots of that shift: how much of it was about Trump and how much of it was about broader, lasting trends and shifts in American politics?

There’s one other question, too. If the 2028 election shows a shift back to the left, will people remember that this happened in 2020, too?

Photo: Harry Truman and his daughter Margaret Truman voting in Independence, Missouri, 1946. (National Archives)

I suspect that history will record 2025 as an inflection point in American (if not world) history, the point at which the promise of a future rooted in universal access to knowledge collapsed under the weight of infinitely accessible fictions. And if a debate emerges over the moment that embodies that collapse, I would like to offer as a contender the murder of Melissa Hortman.

Hortman is the Democratic legislator in Minnesota who was shot to death in her home by a man masquerading as a police officer. His disguise was uncomplicated, involving a clunky mask, ersatz uniform and vehicle adorned with flashing lights. The get-up was convincing enough that, when questioned by an actual police officer, the assassin was able to simply drive away.

In the abstract, this charade doesn’t have much to do with the broader collapse of objectivity. But the attack was contemporaneous with a bit of performative costuming that served the exact opposite purpose: the habit of immigration enforcement officers to hide their affiliations and to mask their faces. In Minnesota, a criminal dressed as a police officer to commit a crime. Everywhere else, law enforcement officers were dressing as criminals to enforce the law. Encountering a cop on the street might mean you anre encountering a criminal and encountering an armed, masked man might mean you are encountering a cop. The line is blurry.

This blurriness between real and fake is the defining characteristic of the moment.

That’s centrally because we have a president, Donald Trump, whose politics depend on that sort of blurriness, on generating uncertainty about otherwise certain things. This is what wanna-be authoritarians do, as Hannah Arendt explained more than 50 years ago.

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true,” Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “… Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.“

We hardly need to say more than that to implicate Trump and his political and media allies. Nearly every facet of Trump’s public commentary adheres to the idea that truth is malleable, from — to pick just a few examples from this week — accusing Barack Obama of treason to claiming that drug prices are down an impossible 1,500% to insistences that unfavorable jobs numbers are a function of bias after having touted the same data as proof of his skilled leadership. If you need more convincing that Trump seeks to build and, in large part, has built an informational environment in which reality is blurred, you are probably already comfortably ensconced in the cynical world Arendt describes.

But it is overly simple to attribute all of this to Trump. While he benefits from and amplifies uncertainty and blurriness, he didn’t bring it to politics, much less to America. He saw, or stumbled onto, or — most accurately — was mired in an anti-objectivity strain of right-wing thought that has decades-old roots in anti-intellectualism and media hostility. During the Obama administration, this strain built enough momentum to be politically viable, though most Republican officials still operated under the assumption that it wasn’t or wouldn’t be for long. Trump simply proved them wrong.

The momentum he leveraged was a product of explicit efforts to blur reality, as demonstrated by Glenn Beck and others. It was also a byproduct of the emergence of the social web, a place where anyone could assert anything and amplify anyone else’s assertions. The pool of universally accessible information that was the promise of the internet was polluted with nonsense — and often nonsense that flattered people’s existing biases. The idea (and ideal) that people could become informed by looking up anything they wanted was bastardized by people seeking out only what they wanted to hear. They did their own research only to the extent that they unearthed claims that sounded true enough for them to believe what they wanted. (I’ll again point to this prescient 2009 essay on the subject.)

This is the essence of the challenge faced by traditional media outlets. People, on both the left and the right, are often less interested in an objective reality than a subjective one. It becomes a simple economic problem: demand for what news organizations do has eroded and so have the economics.

The surge in demand for bespoke realities has surged, powered by and powering a galaxy of independent voices proffering news-like information. Scrolling social media means slogging through a morass of claims and accusations rhetoric that may or may not be reliable and may or may not be true, with occasional appearances (if you so choose) by archaic institutions that actually worry about things like probability and accuracy.

For a time — what we now understand as a period of transition — social media platforms tried advantage reliable sources of information by policing falsehoods and verifying reliable actors. But agreed-upon reality was precisely what the demand was working against, so — just as Fox News shifted to fend off competition from its right 15 years ago — the social media companies (and some news organizations) embraced a blurry, subjective presentation of reality.

An important point that bears highlighting: blurriness yields economic benefits as well as political ones.

This was the state of play even before the emergence of AI. It was already the case that random Instagram accounts could make claims about healthy eating that shifted public habits even when those claims were utterly baseless. It was already the case that a guy who dedicated his life to undermining the broad, proven consensus on public health could be tapped to run the federal government’s health infrastructure after parlaying his base of own-research-doing skeptics into a bloc of voters that Trump found valuable. And into this space came AI slop.

It is clear that there are some valid uses for AI, whether or not one thinks that those uses are worth the costs in energy or shifts to the economy. But it is more abundantly clear that the emergence of AI is dramatically hastening the collapse of shared reality, to the extent that such a thing even exists.

This is the aforementioned slop. Nonsensical, artificial images aimed at social spread or making rhetorical points. False news stories created for the same purposes. The garbage that follows from AIs trained to generate authentic-sounding answers to questions generating answers that have no grounding in reality. This use of AI is an enormous blurring filter over the world.

There’s overlap with Trump’s political project. He, his administration and his allies use AI to generate a fake reality and to skew the existing one. AI images show a buff, conquering Trump astride the world or his opponents — immigrants, the media, the left — as cowering simps. It’s hard for Trump’s base and American voters to see what Trump is through the lens he and his allies present, which is entirely the point.

Again, though, the threat extends past Trump. The internet is already evolving into a mix of true and false, real and generated, both willfully and accidentally. Querying the world’s accrued knowledge through a web browser was never guaranteed to result in an accurate, concise response, but first with the social web and now with AI it’s become far harder to differentiate truth from fiction. In each case, users and robots jostle to get between you and the truth in order to convey their reality or absorb the currency of your attention.

I began here by suggesting that 2025 would be recognized as an inflection point. In other words, this doesn’t feel like an aberration, a step away from shared reality before we step back toward it. Instead, it feels as though this is the state of the world moving forward: a bit of reality buried under a lot of garbage, with scavengers picking through the dump to sell what they can.

Photo: Earth observation views of city lights at night taken during STS-76 mission from shuttle orbiter Atlantis. (National Archives)

OK, fine. I’ll address President Trump’s justification for the Texas Republican Party’s plan to shift five House seats from Democrats to the GOP.

It was offered in a phone interview with CNBC and host Joe Kernen.

Trump: "We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats … I got the highest vote in the history of Texas as you probably know. And we are entitled to five more seats."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-08-05T12:38:40.297Z

“I won Texas — I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know,” Trump said, “and we are entitled to five more seats.”

“I don’t know,” Kernen replied. Trump (calling him Brian, perhaps confusing him with Fox News host Brian Kilmeade) suggested he run it past the fact-checkers, giving the always accommodating Kernen a chance to complain about how fact-checkers had given Joe Biden a pass while scrutinizing Trump closely.

There was some irony to his doing so! After all, the reason that Trump was the focus of so many fact-checks relative to Biden was that Trump was so much more likely to present false facts than his successor/predecessor. Just like Trump’s historic vote total in Texas was a function of the state’s much larger population.

It is true that Trump got more votes in Texas than any candidate in history. You can see that below, using data from U.S. Election Atlas.

But that is in large part because there are more people living in Texas than ever before and, by extension, more people casting votes than in any prior election in the state.

As a result, his was not the largest margin of victory in Texas. That honor goes to George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection bid. Bush got fewer total votes, but won by a larger vote count.

If we consider margins of victory in terms of the percentage of votes cast, Trump fared unusually poorly in the state. He had the 27th highest percentage-point margin of victory in 2024, substantially behind Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 victory.

This context is beside the point for Trump, just as population growth was beside the point of his first-term boasts about the number of people working. It was true that more people were employed than at any prior point — but it was also true that the population was larger than it had ever been. During Biden’s administration, the number of people working kept setting new records, too, but this was not presented by Trump as a demonstration of his excellence at managing the economy.

Nor did Biden take advantage of his unusually strong performance in Texas — the second-highest vote total on record! — to demand that the state redraw its House boundaries to offer more seats to the Democratic Party. After all, the point of House seats is to reflect local, constituent preference, not statewide opinion on the chief executive.

For Trump, though, everything is a referendum on him — unless the numbers are bad.

There’s a car in my neighborhood (and perhaps in yours, too) that sports a confounding pair of bumper stickers. One advocates for making America great again, an idea recently popularized by marketing mogul Donald Trump. The other endorses fealty to the U.S. Constitution, an idea recently eviscerated by President Donald Trump.

I am obviously aware that “we must adhere to the Constitution” was a GOP mantra for the past 20 years or so, given how often it was invoked in opposition to Barack Obama’s tremulous expansions of executive power. But it is rather jarring to see this idea presented alongside explicit support for the president who’s doing everything in his power to relegate the Constitution to second-tier status.

Last month, YouGov conducted a poll to measure how Americans viewed the concept of “American.” What was it that made someone “American,” exactly, a status that traditionally has been applied more generously than, say, “French” or “Nepalese”?

The second-most commonly agreed upon characteristic, tied with being a citizen, was “supports the U.S. Constitution” — something that 86 percent of respondents believed was very or somewhat important to being considered an American. The most commonly agreed upon characteristic? Obeys U.S. laws.

The pollsters also asked respondents if they themselves met the conditions which were part of the survey. The result is fascinating, with views of what constitutes being an American generally increasing along with the characteristics held by the respondents themselves. You can see that below; the larger the number of people who indicate they possess a characteristic, the larger the percentage who identified that characteristic as being very or somewhat important to being an American.

Dots that sit above the diagonal line are characteristics that were more likely to be seen as important for being American than they were possessed by the respondents themselves.

The YouGov poll also allows us to break down responses by party. If we take the same measure as above and look only at Democrats, this is the result.

Notice how low “supports the U.S. president” sits on both axes.

Where things really get interesting is when we look at the responses among Republicans.

Notice that, across the board, Republicans are more likely to identify the presented characteristics as very or somewhat important for American-ness than are Democrats. In fact, we can compare those directly. On the chart below, any dot that sits above the diagonal was more likely to be seen as important by Republicans than by Democrats. You will notice that all of the dots sit above the line.

The two that sit closest to the upper right corner are, again, adherence to laws and to the Constitution, neither of which seem to be Trump’s strongest suits.

I haven’t yet discussed the most striking finding in this poll, however, the one that I mentioned in the headline. YouGov included “being White” as a possible option for being important to being American and nearly one-fifth of respondents said that it was. Among Republicans, 3 in 10 did, with a fifth saying it was “very important.”

On the plus side, I haven’t yet seen a car with an “only White people can be Americans” bumper sticker. Here’s hoping that this continues to be a sentiment that people are unenthusiastic about endorsing so publicly, however energetically the Trump administration may be putting it into practice.

For what little good it does in the moment, it seems clear that history will not look kindly upon many of the decisions being made in Washington. President Trump will bear the brunt of that eventual opprobrium, but it’s fair to assume that his explicit and tacit allies will earn more than a few paragraphs themselves, whatever language these histories might be written in.

What’s frustrating for Trump’s opponents is that this apparent inevitability seems to have only a limited effect on the decisions of those allies. There are some Republican legislators who’ve refused to confirm obviously unqualified nominees or unpopular legislation. But most haven’t, choosing instead to nestle in under the temporary shade provided by Trump’s umbrella of popularity.

This may well be because they don’t think that there will be some future analysis of the moment in which they are depicted on the wrong side of history. And they may be right. The longstanding idea that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice does seem significantly less predictive than it used to.

But some legislators seem to understand that they are making decisions now that will color their legacies. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has voted against three of Trump’s most-contentious nominees — Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert Kennedy — and declined to vote for the nomination of Jeanine Pirro. But he’s an outlier; a review of 10 contentious confirmation votes shows that nearly every Republican supported all 10.

That was true from the least to the most conservative senators. The vast majority of the party caucus consistently sided with Trump’s picks. Of the 53 Republicans in the Senate, 43 of them voted for all 10 nominees. Another seven missed votes but voted yes on those they made.

Only one Democrat, John Fetterman (D-PA), voted for one of the 10 nominees (Pam Bondi).

What’s striking about the graph above is that the uniformity of Republican support also applies regardless of how states voted in 2024. Republicans from states that backed Trump only narrowly or not at all also supported the majority of or all of Trump’s particularly contentious nominees. The gray shaded area below indicates the range of 2024 margins in states that have a sitting Democratic senator. Several Republicans who sit in that range have backed Trump’s nominees regardless.

You’ll notice that one of these legislators is Thom Tillis, who announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection as he publicly opposed the spending bill advocated by Trump. But even this newfound independence didn’t keep him from supporting Emil Bove or Pirro. There’s a big difference between being a guy who declines to support a successful confirmation and being the guy who causes the confirmation to fail.

One conclusion from the data above is that the non-Tillis senators are more worried about political pressure from their right than from their left. Perhaps this is short-sightedness, an interest in getting past primaries and worrying about general elections later. Maybe it’s non-electoral fear, worry about how Trump (or his supporters) will respond to perceived disloyalty.

It does seem, though, that these legislators (and even legislators from less middle-of-the-road states) aren’t worried about the short-term cost of backing contentious or unqualified nominees, much less any long-term reputational damage. Their opponents could conceivably work to make Dave McCormick (R-PA) or Ted Budd (R-NC) the faces of confirming Emil Bove to a lifetime seat on the federal bench since, in practice, they were. But McCormick and Budd could take solace in knowing that they have a few years until they’re up for reelection. Not to mention that assuming ownership of a contentious confirmation — that of Brett Kavanaugh — didn’t keep Susan Collins from winning reelection in a state that voted against Trump last year.

As for those history books? Well, if written, they will include long lists of senators, granting them at least some sense of obscurity. And at this rate it will be illegal to publish them in the U.S. anyway.

Senate vote data: Blanche, Bondi, Bove, Gabbard, Hegseth, Kennedy, Lutnick, McMahon, Patel and Pirro.

This morning’s monthly jobs report estimated that the country didn’t add as many new workers in July as had been expected. More strikingly, it also showed that the number of jobs estimated to have been added in the reports for May and June were also lower than had been expected — and, in fact, lower than had been reported.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ initial estimates for May and June were increases of 139,000 and 147,000 jobs, respectively. After more data came in, though, the estimates shifted dramatically; it’s now estimated that the country added only 33,000 jobs in both months combined.

It’s important to note that such revisions are normal. The initial jobs numbers are just estimates and based on data for only part of each month. Those numbers are adjusted over the next two months and then for each fiscal year. Sometimes the adjustments lead to a higher estimate, sometimes lower. Sometimes there is a stretch in which jobs numbers are adjusted up. Sometimes there’s a stretch in which they’re adjusted down.

The BLS is transparent about all of this. Here, for example, are the initial and final estimates for each month since January 2017 (excluding the covid months in which the numbers shifted enormously and therefore broke the scale of the graph).

You’ll notice that the shifts for May and June are particularly large. In fact, they are among the ten biggest downward revisions over the past 20 years.

The other eight months? March and April 2020, September and October 2008, December 2008 and 2020, January 2009 and March 2021. In other words, all months in which there were shocks to the economy: the financial crisis in 2008-2009 and the pandemic in 2020-2021.

So was there a shock to the economy in May and June that might explain those months’ inclusion in the top ten? Well, it depends: Do you accept the possibility that Trump’s ad hoc, sweeping application of tariffs to imports from a huge swath of the world in April might have had negative downstream effects?

Trump doesn’t, but, then, he wouldn’t. Instead, in a post at Truth Social, he blamed a Biden appointee at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, announcing that she would be fired.

The numbers (and in particular those revisions) were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” Trump wrote in another post. It was just like how, “on November 15, 2024, right after the Election … the Jobs Numbers were massively revised DOWNWARD, making a correction of over 818,000 Jobs — A TOTAL SCAM.”

Except that (as he curiously noted in today’s first post about the BLS) the annual revision he refers to didn’t happen right after the election. It happened in August 2024, which can be demonstrated by the fact that Trump complained about the change then.

It was a “MASSIVE SCANDAL,” he wrote, claiming that the Biden administration had been “caught fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics to hide the true extent of the Economic Ruin they have inflicted upon America.” He accused the administration of having “PADDED THE NUMBERS with an extra 818,000 Jobs that DO NOT EXIST, AND NEVER DID.”

So, uh, which is it? Is the BLS aiding a president (as claimed in 2024) by reporting too-high numbers and then revising them down or is it hurting a president (as claimed in 2025) by reporting too-high numbers and then revising them down? Or is the BLS just making estimates and then revising those estimates as more information about the job market becomes available?

That is not the throughline for Trump, of course. His throughline is that if the numbers say bad things about his opponent that’s good and that if they say bad things about him, that’s bad. And now that he has the ability to control who’s saying those things, he is now pledging to replace the Biden appointee with someone “much more competent and qualified.”

“Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate,” he wrote on Truth Social. “[T]hey can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”

But, of course, that’s exactly what Trump is demanding. He doesn’t want numbers that reflect the best estimates of government experts. He wants numbers that make him look good and he’s going to seek out a bureaucrat who will give him that.

Trump's 1st term BLS appointee🔥:

We call on Congress to respond immediately, to investigate the factors that led to Commissioner McEntarfer’s removal, to strongly urge the Commissioner’s continued service, and ensure that the nonpartisan integrity of the position is retained https://t.co/cYyLm9cV2p

— Brendan Duke (@Brendan_Duke) August 1, 2025

It is another step in the sweeping Trumpification of the federal government. Its power and its resources are being systemically and relentlessly redirected toward his interests and his vanity, with even temporary embarrassments provoking a sharp backlash.

There was something Trump could probably have done earlier this year to avoid the bad numbers in today’s jobs report. It isn’t that he should have fired the BLS official. It’s that he should have been more wary about toying with the U.S. and global economy by imposing those tariffs.

Here’s hoping that we’ll still be able to objectively evaluate the effects of that toying once Trump’s appointee is in place.

Let’s start deep in the weeds and then walk out.

On Thursday, FBI Director Kash Patel — chosen for that role in large part because of his commitment to undermining the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election — declared on social media that his team had uncovered a document, “along with thousands of other documents, buried in a back room at the FBI.” A classified annex to the report compiled by Special Counsel John Durham, Patel insisted that the document revealed “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.”

Patel’s post quoted writer John Solomon, who called the annex a smoking gun that, if “authenticated by further investigation” would show a plot by Hillary Clinton and her campaign to invent a Trump-Russia link. Oh, and rest assured, George Soros got a mention, too.

Solomon, along with Patel, had been tapped by Donald Trump in 2022 to serve as the then-former president’s representatives for records held by the National Archives. The point of that appointment appeared even at the time to have been to cherry-pick available material to make a case that the Russia investigation was a political hack job.

The effort simply took a few years to manifest.

The current allegation

The problem here is that the annex had been investigated further, by John Durham. The New York Times writes that Durham had come to the conclusion that the email at the heart of the claim was “probably manufactured” by Russian intelligence, the source of the email in the first place. Journalist Marcy Wheeler, who has tracked all of this closely for years, thinks that probably overstates Durham’s conclusion — but paints a compelling picture for why he should have. Either way, Durham relegated it to an annex when, if his probe had shown it to be legitimate or useful, it would have largely made the case he was seeking to prove.

The other thing is: none of this is new. Not only because Durham looked at it during his investigation, itself an effort to formalize a means of undercutting the public understanding of the overlap of Trump and Russia in 2016. But the core claim was made public back in 2020, in the waning days of Trump’s failed effort to secure a second consecutive term in office.

At that point, John Ratcliffe (now the director of the CIA) was serving as Director of National Intelligence, despite his thin resume. But he was a Trump ally, which one might fairly assume is why he first produced the allegation that Patel revived this week. There was a July meeting in which Clinton’s campaign discussed tying Trump to Russia, see, and that was how all of this started! Oh, also, this was a product of Russian intelligence analysis and the intelligence community “does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”

It didn’t get much traction in part because of that (warranted) caveat and in part because of the other tumult of the campaign. (Trump had just been diagnosed with covid-19, for example.) It also didn’t get much traction because there wasn’t the same investment by Trump’s allies in debunking the Russia allegations — and because the effort to cast all of the Russia-Trump investigation as a “hoax” was still relatively young. Yes, Trump was calling all of it a hoax since his first months in office. But it took a while for that idea to percolate out to his base and, more importantly, for the right-wing media universe to distill the disparate, cherry-picked elements of that purported hoax into something that served as a convincing post hoc explanation for what had happened. By 2025, by now, Trump had both the burning desire for vengeance and the inoculation of his base necessary for the appointment of unabashed loyalists to intelligence positions and for a full-on assault on the reality of what had happened.

The context

It’s important to note that, in addition to the evidence of a Clinton-led plan to impugn Trump being unreliable, there was already a broad, public discussion about Trump’s ties to Russia at the point Clinton’s team is alleged to have invented the whole thing. If there was a conversation within the campaign that inspired the information stolen by Russia that then made its way to U.S. intelligence, it was probably simply one in which she and her advisers recognized that the Trump-Russia question was a liability for her opponent.

This conversation allegedly happened on July 26, 2016. On July 25, there was an article in Vice discussing possible efforts by Russia to aid Trump’s campaign. On July 21, there was a Politico article describing Russian enthusiasm for Trump. The month prior, The Washington Post had reported that Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s network. On July 22, WikiLeaks began publishing that material, to the Democrats’ and Clinton’s disadvantage.

That was all public. Behind the scenes, there was a lot more going on. The FBI was already looking into Carter Page, an adviser to Trump’s campaign, when Page traveled to Russia in early July and gave a speech praising Vladimir Putin. Trump had tapped Paul Manafort to manage the Republican convention and then his campaign — someone who was also on the government’s radar for his ties to Russia. (Manafort, who volunteered to work for free, would later be revealed to have passed campaign polling information to a man linked in a bipartisan Senate report to Russian intelligence.)

Then there was the meeting at Trump Tower. A contact of the Trumps emailed Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 to inform him that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. responded with enthusiasm and a meeting was set up. The evening the meeting was set, Trump clinched the delegates needed to be the Republican presidential nominee. In his victory speech, he announced that he would “give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons.”

The contact who reached out to Trump Jr., by the way, knew the family from the time that the then-Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant was held in Moscow.

Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow – if so, will he become my new best friend?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2013

The 2016 meeting, involving Trump Jr., Manafort and a Kremlin-linked Russian attorney, didn’t provide the promised dirt. The speech delineating “all of the things” about Clinton didn’t happen.

The bigger picture

It’s not clear that the Obama administration’s FBI or intelligence agencies knew all of the details in the summer of 2016, but they certainly knew the broad strokes. They knew about Page and Manafort and they knew that the Russians had hacked the DNC. When they learned in July that another adviser to Trump’s campaign had told a foreign diplomat about the existence of Clinton emails that had been stolen by Russia, the FBI launched a counter-intelligence probe. That was in late July, only days after Trump gave a press conference in which he talked about how he wanted to be friendly with Russia and asked Russia to try and hack into Clinton’s private email server. (They did.)

By the beginning of August 2016, in other words, key triggers for the Russia investigation were in place. There was reason to suspect that Russia was trying to influence American politics and the election. There was reason to be concerned about links between Trump’s campaign and Russia. American spies had evidence by early August 2016 that Putin was trying to help Trump win.

A 2019 report by the Justice Department inspector general determined that the launch of the FBI investigation into all of this was reasonably predicated. The investigation, which evolved into a special counsel probe during Trump’s presidency after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, unearthed a lot of other details — and some dead ends. Robert Mueller’s report ran into the hundreds of pages, finding that, while there was not criminally provable coordination or collusion between Trump and Russian actors, the Trump campaign embraced Russia’s help.

The backlash

Trump was reportedly frustrated by post-election reports about Russia’s efforts because his victory in the 2016 campaign had been so narrow. He wanted the world to believe it reflected his popularity, not a quirk of the Electoral College. Having people saying that even that was a function of Russian interference was clearly grating. Even before he took office, he was decrying the Russia probe as a “witch hunt.” All he needed was a lattice of “evidence” that would prove his point.

As with his claims about the 2020 election being stolen, his allies in the right-wing media universe were happy to oblige. Various theories were elevated and embraced as proof that the Russia probe was political rather than justified by what was known at the time. Various FBI and intelligence officials were identified and pilloried. Picayune pieces of the probe were elevated as essential and damning. Phrases like “dossier” and “insurance policy” and “FISA warrants” became familiar vocabulary on the right, shorthand distillations of why, to their eye, the Russia investigation was all a set-up. Instead of disproving the validity of the Russia probe, though, each of those phrases simply provided something for those looking to dismiss the Russia probe as a hoax to latch onto, the way 2020 election deniers might latch onto “ballot dropboxes” or “absentee ballots.”

Now Trump is president again, unfettered in his desire to use his power to attack his enemies. His longstanding hostility to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and his wish to pretend that what happened in 2016 was all a set-up made it almost inevitable that his administration would try to gin up some sort of conspiracy. What’s surprising, really, is that it depends so heavily on already debunked claims. There was an actual investigation into all of this, initiated by his then-loyal Attorney General William Barr and led by a sympathetic U.S. attorney, John Durham! But Durham only managed to bring charges against three people and to get a plea agreement with one — the one whose actions had first been identified by that 2019 inspector general report.

All that’s happening now is that the people in charge of the bureaucracy are unbound by either honesty or shame. There’s no effort to be objective, just to present as Trump-friendly a case as possible. And since so few Trump allies ever saw or read analyses of the evidence the first time around — these were not details that got a lot of coverage on Fox News, for example — they can be presented as new and meaningful when they are neither.

Claims that the Russia probe was somehow a “hoax” have themselves always been a hoax, relying on after-the-fact cherry-picking and relying on hindsight. They have always depended, and depend now, on the willingness of Trump’s allies and supporters to be disinterested in nuance in favor of adherence to their partisan desires.

The reemergence of the “Russia hoax” narrative at the moment, of course, isn’t coincidental. It comes as Trump is trying to deflect attention from his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, a situation in which his longstanding effort to align himself with Real Americans against The Elites crumbles. In addition to serving as a distraction, the Russia conversation puts him back on the right side of that equation. The Elites (Obama, Clinton, whoever) were out to get him because he was fighting for Real Americans!

Why not focus on that, instead of who stole which teenager from who?

---

Update: Patel and his allies have responded to criticisms that they are cherry-picking and misrepresenting by … cherry-picking and misrepresenting things to backstop their initial picked cherries. Wheeler, again, went into the weeds to explain what they’re getting wrong, however willfully.

A few years ago, during the last iteration of this website, I made a little interactive aimed at giving me a sense of an otherwise incomprehensible number: the number of Jewish deaths that occurred during the Holocaust. I started a timer that incremented by one every second, allowing me (and anyone who happened onto the site) to experience the slow accrual of six million seconds and, by extension, the scale of that particular horror.

It is 11:09 a.m. on July 31, 2025 as I write this. If I’d started a similar counter 6 million seconds ago, it would have begun about half an hour after midnight on May 23 of this year. If I started the counter now, it wouldn’t reach 6 million until late on the evening of Oct. 8.

Even put into those terms, it’s hard to grasp. It’s hard to understand how long ago May 23 was, for example. Perhaps it’s more useful to consider 6 million minutes, which would put us back in early March 2014. Or 6 million hours, which stretches back to the year 1341.

Our brains are simply incapable of understanding such large numbers. And for good reason. What need did early man have for the number “one million” — much less “one thousand” or even “one hundred”? For so much of human history, a history that itself extends back an incomprehensible length of time, there was simply no circumstance in which a one followed by six zeroes offered any utility. So there was no evolutionary advantage in being able to immediately grasp what 1 million meant.

Much less 1 billion. The need for humans to conprehend a thousand million is even more recent. It’s generally driven by discussions of money, first in the public and then in the private sector. It wasn’t until 2018 that “billionaire” began to appear more frequently in English-language books than did “millionaire.” And we can see that “trillionaire” — a million millions — is just starting to make its appearance.

To appreciate the scale of a billion, enterprising humans have turned to other representations. This effort to convey the wealth of Jeff Bezos using grains of rice — each representing not $1 but $100,000 — has remained with me.

@humphreytalks

Rice. Part 2: Jeff Bezos net worth. #rice #billion #billions #amazon #jeffbezos #money #personalfinance #xyzcba

♬ original sound – Humphrey Yang

And that’s when Bezos’s wealth was much more modest than it is today. The current richest man in the world, according to Bloomberg, is Elon Musk, whose net worth is three times what Bezos’s was at the time the video above was made. It’s almost literally incomprehensible.

This problem doesn’t simply apply to numbers, of course. Earlier this week, “Today in Tabs”‘s Rusty Foster theorized (convincingly) about how our evolutionary lack of intellectual sophistication has hobbled our ability to accurately assess the role of “artificial intelligence” systems.

“The essential problem is this: generative language software is very good at producing long and contextually informed strings of language, and humanity has never before experienced coherent language without any cognition driving it,” Foster wrote. “In regular life, we have never been required to distinguish between ‘language’ and ‘thought’ because only thought was capable of producing language, in any but the most trivial sense. The two are so closely welded that even a genius like Alan Turing couldn’t conceive of convincing human language being anything besides a direct proxy for ‘intelligence.’ ”

We can’t understand “one billion.” We also can’t understand that a thing that talks just like a human is just parroting human speech in the way we would understand it if that speech were coming from, say, a parrot. (I remain steadfast in my belief that a great deal of A.I.-centered rumination could be sidestepped if more people read the essay “The Soul of the Mark III Beast.” Amusingly, when I was trying to remember the title of this essay a few weeks ago, I tested an A.I. to see if it could remind me. Instead, it invented a non-existent essay and offered that as its answer.)

None of this is meant to be accusatory. Instead, it’s meant sympathetically — rather necessarily since I am a human who similarly lacks the capacity to immediately understand these things. It’s useful, not embarrassing, to remember that the human mind is clever enough to have invented things that it itself cannot fully comprehend. Man made a rock too big for Man to lift.

There’s a corollary here that I will mention because it has directly impacted my work at various times over the years. In addition to failing to understand scale, we often fail to understand change. For example, I would imagine that most Americans don’t know that the population of the U.S. increased by more than 20 percent just since the year 2000.

If you are 25 years old, in other words, there are now six people for every five that were in the U.S. when you were born. If you are 50, there are now eight people in the U.S. for every five that were here when you were born. So when people (Donald Trump) suggest that there’s some baffling conspiracy behind Joe Biden getting more votes in 2020 than Barack Obama did in 2008, you might remind them that the U.S. population grew by almost 10 percent over those 12 years. That context is important.

It’s important for people to understand our natural limitations. But it’s also important for writers to understand them and to accommodate them. It’s important to convey information about the world in a way that recognizes that this information may be misconstrued.

When we’re talking, for example, about something like the scale of deaths from covid or among children in Gaza, presenting that information as something other than a five- or six-digit number gives readers a more concrete sense of what’s actually happening.

Please get ready to witness a truly ridiculous measure of public opinion. I don’t want to oversell it, but I do want you to know that, when I saw it, I exclaimed out loud, and so I want you to be prepared in the event that you are driving (always a good time to read stuff on the internet) or have a heart condition.

I’d like to begin by establishing some context. As you may know, murder in the United States rose steadily from the 1960s through the 1980s until peaking in the early 1990s. There are a lot of theories about why the peak occurred then, but federal (and other) data demonstrates that the peak of murders in America came in the first half of that decade. That’s true both in terms of raw numbers and, more importantly, of the rate at which murders were occurring as a function of population.

It’s also true despite the surge in murders that began in Donald Trump’s first term in office during the coronavirus pandemic.

The rise and fall of murder is largely a story of the rise and fall of murders in American cities since that’s where a large percentage of Americans live. But data compiled by analyst Jeff Asher — whose work on the subject doesn’t receive the attention and credit it should — shows how that peak emerged and faded. The number of murders in various U.S. cities during the first half of this year is among the lowest on record in those places.

AND YET.

YouGov asked Americans this week if they thought the murder rate in American cities had risen or fallen since 1990. And most Americans, completely incorrectly, said that they thought murders had increased. A third thought the rate had increased a lot, which is the opposite of true!

Why? The partisan split on responses offers a hint: Republicans — who remain skeptical of cities, to put it generously — are much more likely to think that murder has increased. Which, again, it hasn’t.

Fascinatingly, younger Americans, people who didn’t live through the surge in crime that unfolded in the 1980s and early 1990s, are more likely to understand that murders have receded. Older Americans, who are also more likely to be Republicans, are more likely to be incorrect about the trend.

I’d indicated the year 1990 on the initial graphs so you can go back and compare murder rates/counts at that point with the rates now. But let’s put a fine point on it. Here’s how the number of murders in the cities Asher has tracked changed over the first half of each year relative to 1990.

That’s only some cities, but it’s not cherry-picking. In New York City, for example, the number of murders so far this year is down 85 percent relative to 1993. Last year, murders were down 83 percent relative to 1990. You have to ask yourself: When avatars of the right like Charlie Kirk proclaim that the city is intensely scary, is that a reflection of the city or of Charlie Kirk?

Murders, happily, are down in American cities. But there’s a lot of investment and political utility in suggesting that they are not. Americans, unfortunately, tend to believe it.

There have not been many points at which Donald Trump’s view of the world and his base’s view of the world are out of alignment. This is mostly because each view is rooted in the same core sensibility: Someone is out to get them — elites or immigrants or elite immigrants or whoever — and they must go on the offense against their opponents. It’s easy to slot pretty much any issue into that framework, and Trump has proven exceptionally adept at doing so.

When conflicts do arise, they are usually resolved quickly with either Trump or (far more often) his base simply shifting their baseline as necessary to bring the two perspectives back into alignment. This is pretty easy because there are few issues on which views are so strongly held that one side or the other can’t simply shrug and move to something else.

When Trump has in the past insisted that up is down, his base has often simply agreed to adjust their priors. On rarer occasion, it has worked the other way. Trump’s first administration did a legitimately good job facilitating the development of vaccines to address the coronavirus, for example, but when Trump’s hostility to his science advisors metastasized into opposition to science and vaccines broadly, Trump meekly stopped trying to celebrate his accomplishment. His base was still celebrating and voting for him, so let the woke history books worry about memorializing the time he oversaw a scientific success.

Then came Jeffrey Epstein.

On the subject of the deceased sexual predator, Trump and his base are firmly entrenched in very different positions. To his base, Epstein represents the most direct evidence that rich elites engage in deviant immoral behavior — a fragment of the QAnon worldview made manifest. To Trump, though, Epstein is a guy who he used to be good friends with and who he used to hang out with and who … well, let’s just change the subject, shall we? That’s old news, everyone! Why don’t we talk about what Barack Obama did* instead!

This tactic has worked in the past. If there is something that Trump doesn’t want to talk about, something that reflects on him poorly and which threatens to create one of those rifts between him and his base, he and his allies have generally done a good job not talking about it. Even on Epstein, his most powerful ally in the media, Fox News, has been dutifully talking not about Epstein but instead about Barack Obama and that wily Joe Biden, the president who cunningly sought to destroy Donald Trump while simultaneously being so inept that all of his presidential actions should be considered suspect.

Again, this has worked in the past. Fox News buried discussion of Trump’s liaison with Stormy Daniels and of the details of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s work, with Fox viewers subsequently viewing themselves as particularly well informed even as they demonstrated that they were not.

This time, though, it’s not working as well. In Washington Post-SSRS polling published this morning, we see that, while Republicans report spending less time tracking Epstein news than independents or Democrats (whose appetite for Epstein stories is Miyazakian). But a majority are still tracking the story.

And, while Republicans are generous in their assessment of how Trump’s handling the situation, there are clear tells that they are not thrilled about the whole situation. The Post poll shows that Republicans (and MAGA Republicans) are more likely to approve of Trump’s handling of the situation than to oppose it, 4 in 10 of each group say they aren’t exactly sure if they approve — which, translating from partisan poll-speak, means they disapprove but are wary of saying they disapprove of Trump.

A similar phenomenon emerges when people were asked if they think the legendary “Epstein files” contain information that would be embarrassing for Trump. Most Americans (and a huge majority of giddy Democrats) think they do. But only a small fraction of Republicans agree … though a an additional 4 in 10 say they aren’t really sure if the material about Epstein might inculpate the president in whom they’ve invested so much confidence.

It’s important to point out that Donald Trump is not making any of this easier for himself. I don’t think the Epstein thing will persist for months to come; there’s only so much that can be explored and discussed. Then again, I wouldn’t have expected it to last this long. But Trump keeps doing things that revive it, from his transparent call for the release of an extremely limited set of information to the weird, unhelpful outreach from his former personal attorney (and now deputy attorney general) to Epstein’s collaborator, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Trump’s desperation to get his base to ignore this whole thing is palpable. His efforts to throw out shiny balls for his supporters to chase is painfully obvious, like a five year-old doing a magic trick. He tried to strong-arm Rupert Murdoch into killing the Wall Street Journal’s story about a letter he (allegedly) penned for Epstein’s 50th birthday. It didn’t work, for which you gotta hand it to the guy who also owns Fox News.

But this is dangerous terrain for Trump. If others on the right come to see the Epstein story as a better generator of attention than standing with the (lame duck!) president, there are incentives on both sides of the aisle to keep the story alive. There is a path — a narrow and tricky path — for someone else to become the champion of the “someone’s out to get you” narrative, someone who can point at Trump as being in bed with the scoundrels he was supposed to be fighting.

Trump’s obvious unease with the Epstein situation may well center on what he and his friend were actually up to back in the day — a possibility that seems more likely with every over the top protest from the president. But it may also be that he senses that this fissure is widening, not closing.

* Barack Obama didn’t do anything.

Late Friday evening, the Wall Street Journal published a poll that fell solidly in the affirming-but-not-surprising category: the Democratic Party is viewed more unfavorably now than at any point in the past 35 years. The Democratic Party is viewed more negatively than either the Republican Party or Donald Trump, with the Journal’s report noting that Republicans are also given the advantage on “most issues that decide elections.”

And yet! In the same poll, more respondents indicated they planned to vote for the Democrat in next year’s House elections than indicated they planned to vote for the Republican — a 3-point advantage that isn’t statistically significant but which belies the idea that Democrats are in complete free-fall.

It’s easy to over-read one poll result (he said, clearing his throat). But this comports with a pattern that’s been evident since at least 2021 — and probably since well before 2015. To wit: Parties are something to run against, not alongside.

I am not offering this as a particularly novel observation. The travails of the U.S.’s major parties have been well-documented. Julia Azari’s 2016 articulation of our system being comprised of strong partisanship and weak parties remains essential to understanding where we are and how we got here. I’m simply highlighting the extent to which party and candidates diverge in the moment and for Democrats.

A similar divergence on the right was resolved when one candidate, Trump, consumed the party entirely. He did so by running against the party whose presidential nomination he sought, positioning himself as something other than a traditional Republican and thereby appealing to people skeptical of the institution itself.

Similar efforts on the left have been less successful, in part because there’s been less hostility toward the Democratic Party among Democrats. But running against the party has yielded successes: Bernie Sanders’ surges in 2016 and 2020, for example, and the emergence of viable (at least in some places) candidates who describe themselves as Democratic Socialists.

As I’ve noted before, it’s not an accident that the most vibrant expressions of opposition to Trump have emerged from people who sit at a distance from the party; Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s barnstorming events around the country are engaging in a way that the Democratic Party isn’t. Being able to be critical of the party — and to exist outside of the constraints that travel along with its money and resources — is valuable.

It’s through this lens that we should consider the Wall Street Journal poll. Or, because we can dig into the details more easily, a new poll from the Journal’s corporate sibling: Fox News.

I know, I know. Fox News as a media entity cannot generally be relied upon to offer a useful, objective view of the world. But Fox News’s polling arm can be — to the degree that it comes under fire from Trump and even from Fox News personalities themselves. The poll is conducted by firms that generally poll for candidates on either side of the partisan divide and the result is consistently reliable.

He said, clearing his throat again.

So let’s look at the Fox poll. Let’s start by noting that, for all of the Democratic Party’s problems, Trump’s not doing so hot either. More than 4 in 10 Americans view the job he’s doing with strong disapproval. Even among Republicans, only about half view his performance with strong approval. Among Democrats, 8 in 10 view him strongly negatively.

As you might expect, given those numbers, Trump’s approval on specific issues is also generally underwater (meaning he is viewed more negatively than positively). In Fox’s poll, he’s only net-positive on “border security” — an issue that is distinct from “immigration,” where his approval is net-negative. Among independents, there’s a 24-point downward shift between net approval on the border and net approval on immigration.

In this poll, too, the Democratic Party is viewed crummily. But there are some caveats.

One is that the total favorability (strongly favorable plus somewhat favorable) ratings are about the same for both parties. The central difference is that Republicans view the Republican Party more strongly favorably than Democrats view the Democratic Party.

Republicans look at the Republican Party, slowly digesting deep within Trump’s belly, and think, this looks good to me. Democrats, on the other hand, look at their party and express much less warmth.

And yet! Asked which party was preferred on a range of issues, it was Democrats who consistently had an advantage. Even on a range of issues selected by the Fox News team that works with the pollsters to develop the questions, there were more places where Democrats had a distinct advantage than ones where the Republicans did.

At the risk of being overly cute, I’ll note that the responses presented to respondents on these questions asked them to choose between “The Democrats” and “The Republicans,” rather than to the parties themselves.

A more important point comes from CNN pollster Ariel Edwards-Levy, who noted on social media that the Journal poll gives Republicans a much bigger advantage on inflation than is shown in the Fox one. Her informed explanation is that this is a function of the Journal poll having offered people the ability to choose “neither” Democrats nor Republicans. That option was selected by nearly a quarter of respondents in the case of inflation.

Forced to pick in the Fox News poll, respondents kept picking the Democrats — or both parties equally. This is not fairly interpreted as a sign that people reject Democratic candidates or policies, nor, clearly, is it an indicator that Trump has gobbled down the American public in the way he devoured the GOP.

There are still significant advantages to political parties. That D or R next to a name on a ballot continues to serve as an effective indicator of what the candidate stands for, if not a complete one. The question at the moment appears to center on what the Democratic Party itself stands for — particularly among Democrats. Consider the results when Fox asked respondents which party had a “clear plan” for addressing America’s problems.

Eight in 10 Republicans said their party did. Only half of Democrats agreed.

There’s one last point worth making here. It seems revealing that the Wall Street Journal described its poll results as showing a GOP advantage on “most issues that decide elections.” Beyond the ludicrousness of knowing what issues will decide future elections (consider what people in 2019 would have expected to dominate the 2020 contest), this is editorializing masquerading as summation. Issues decide elections because they are made salient to voters, either through circumstance or cajoling. There is not some set of eternal issues that are necessarily compelling to people casting ballots.

A Democratic Party that effectively cajoles voters into centering specific issues in their electoral decision-making is a party that is perceived as having a clear plan and a party that wins elections. If they continue to do a poor job on this front, Democratic candidates will be well served to run against or apart from the party as much as possible.

Story one: As he left the White House this morning on his way to the golf club he owns in Scotland — the ones he owns in Bedminster, N.J. or Sterling, Va. apparently no longer cutting it — President Trump took questions from reporters.

One asked about the meeting between his former personal attorney (now deputy attorney general) Todd Blanche and Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted accomplice to Jeffrey Epstein’s predations. But Trump didn’t want to talk much about that.

“People should really focus on how well the country is doing,” he replied, “or they should focus on the fact that Barack Hussein Obama led a coup” or, he continued, people should focus on other people who were linked to Epstein.

Story two: At about the same time that Trump was leaving the executive mansion, his friend Maria Bartiromo was rising to his defense yet again on her ostensibly business-oriented cable-news show. In this case, it was about how unfair the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was to Trump.

“People were not going and taking jobs in his first administration,” Bartiromo said. “He wasn’t able to get talented and the right people in the right jobs. Remember, all those celebrities wouldn’t sing at his, you know, at big events, at his inauguration, Hollywood.”

These two stories are the same story.

Before I explain, I’m obligated to rebut the claims made by Trump and his advocate. Trump’s assertion that the country is doing well is subjective, certainly, though it’s objectively true that Obama didn’t “lead a coup.” The claim that Trump had trouble staffing his first administration is silly, given that he had a more broadly respected crew at hand then than he does now. It was true that he had trouble finding good staff for his 2016 campaign, which is how he ended up with Paul Manafort working for free, etc. But that had nothing to do with Russia. At least, not in the way Bartiromo means.

But dishonesty and spin are not the only commonality. More important is the common sense that Trump is aggrieved, that he’s a victim of forces outside of his control. It is unfair, in Trump’s eyes, that he is being pestered about his past associations with a man understood to be one of America’s most notorious sex offenders, despite all the good he’s doing for the country! It is unfair, in Bartiromo’s, that Hollywood was snookered into thinking Trump was bad because of a baseless Russia probe, so much so that he had to suffer the indignity of having third-tier performers celebrate his presidency (-ies).

Trump’s sense that everyone should be fawning over him was encapsulated succinctly (and not entirely intentionally) in an Axios report this week that Americans weren’t impressed “aren’t impressed” by Trump’s second term efforts. “In fact,” the report suggested, “they seem tired of all the winning.”

So do the Washington Generals.

The issue isn’t that Americans aren’t aware of what Trump’s doing. It’s that they don’t like it. New Gallup data shows Trump with dire approval ratings, particularly among independents. On no issue does at least half the country approve of what Trump’s doing, including on his purported strengths like immigration and the economy. On each of those, his approval is below 40 percent.

Trump is used to existing in a space where he’s enormously popular and can do no wrong, the bubble that he brought with him to D.C. in January. Within that bubble, the Russia probe was unfounded, as per Bartiromo and her peers. Within that bubble, Trump is popular and advocating for America — and any unpopularity or opposition is inexplicable.

Within that bubble, Trump’s approval ratings are skyrocketing.

Mike Johnson on Trump: "His approval ratings are skyrocketing. CNN had a story a day or two ago — he was at a 90 percent approval rating! There's never been a president that high." pic.twitter.com/46VEufMotr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 18, 2025

Outside of that bubble, that CNN poll put Trump’s approval at 42 percent, not 90 percent. It was only close to 90 percent among Republicans, the primary denizens of that bubble.

Trump’s insecurity is legendary and long-standing. One way to look at his success in politics, in fact, is to understand that his insecurity allowed him to tap into the broader insecurity of American conservatives.

It’s a group that sees Whites and men and religious people as some of the groups facing the most discrimination in the U.S., not — as is often the case — as the beneficiaries of discriminatory actions.

Trump’s rise in the 2016 Republican primary was often attributed to “economic insecurity,” but what that meant in practice was often a bitterness at the idea that people in big cities were successful and admired in a way that Trump’s base often wasn’t. There was a desire to put “the elites” in their place and Trump, who spent decades fuming at the success he saw across the river in Manhattan, was willing to put his celebrity and wealth in play to help them achieve that goal.

What’s changed since then (beyond Trump’s inability to separate himself from the “elites” in the Epstein case) is that the right-wing bubble — a bubble of positive reinforcement and ego-stroking — has swelled and strengthened. One can live one’s entire life in a universe where Trump is hitting all the right marks and delivering a string of successes for America, in part because weak points are ignored. Trump has made a world in which that lingering insecurity can be pushed out of mind: They are winning and the elites are losing!

The eternal challenge with that bubble, though, is that it isn’t reality and lots of people still live in the real world. It’s a world where popular singers shy away from Trump not because they heard that the FBI was investigating Russia interference but because he’s sending people to foreign prisons for the crime of having brown skin and tattoos. It’s a world where people want to know how close he was to Jeffrey Epstein and know that the allegations about Obama are silly.

Trump’s trying to broaden the bubble, policing what universities teach and what artificial intelligence systems say. But reality is stubborn, stubborn enough that most Americans see what he’s doing and disapprove. Every so often, that reality pierces the bubble, generating the friction seen in the two stories this morning.

I am a sucker for analyses of politics by age. The reason for this is lengthy but uncomplicated: I have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about generations — I wrote a book on the subject! — and think the intersection of age and politics tells us a great deal about the political moment.

I was therefore eager to dig into new data from Pew Research Center’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey, looking at party identification across a range of demographics. Age, predictably, was one of them.

Perhaps the most interesting finding centered on the gap in partisan identity by age and gender. You can see the raw numbers below. Notice that, in every age group, men are more likely to identify as Republican (and Republican-leaning independents) than as Democrats. In nearly every age group, women are more likely to identify as Democrats (and leaning independents).

Notice, too, that the differences among men by age are smaller than the differences among women. If we look at net identity (below, as the percentage who identify as Republican/leaners minus those who identify as Democrats/leaners), we see that younger women are the most Democratic. Because of that, the partisan gap between men and women is widest among the youngest respondents.

As has been discussed, including by me, this is the terrain after a rightward shift among young men — and young non-White men in particular. You can see how, over the past five years of NPOR data, the biggest drift has happened among the youngest Americans.

The new Pew data also breaks out partisanship by birth decade, so I figured this was a good opportunity to see what the longer term trend had been on that metric. Using the General Social Survey, I created these charts showing the shift in partisan identification (including leaners) over the past 50 years by birth decade. I overlaid the Pew data where available.

A few things stand out, including the much sharper shift among those born in the 1980s in the Pew data. It’s also noticeable how sharply the partisanship of those born in the 1940s to 1960s — boomers, mostly — shifted to the right in the 1980s. On average, those groups shifted more than 20 points to the right between 1980 and 1992. It wasn’t just that they got more Republican as they got older, as the old adage predicts. It was that they all got more Republican in the same time period.

That suggests that the shift was a function of something other than age, like the popularity of Ronald Reagan. It’s probably not fair, though, to attribute the rightward shift among younger Americans in the moment to Donald Trump. Perhaps it is to some degree. But perhaps it is the unpopularity of Joe Biden, or the lingering effects of covid or the collapse of our shared understanding of reality. Time will (presumably) tell.

We should also probably not assume that any positive effects for the GOP from Trump’s presidency might last among younger Americans. YouGov polling indicates that, since he took office in January, his favorability has plunged the most with younger adults.

You can see a shift back to the left among the youngest respondents to the NPOR survey, too — just a little tick back away from GOP.

And that was measured less than six months into Trump’s effort to overhaul the entire country.

---

Update: One nice thing about publishing my own analyses is that I can add to them if I am so inclined. And, here, I am so inclined! In short, I took the decade/party data from the GSS and also broke it out by gender.

There isn’t enough data from younger Americans yet to read a whole lot into this (since the sample sizes among the youngest respondents is pretty small), but there you go.

Last week, as the question of President Trump’s relationship with Jefrrey Epstein occupied the public’s attention, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard rolled out the shiniest ball at her disposal: Actually, she (and, immediately afterward, her boss) claimed, the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was an attempted coup by Barack Obama.

It was not, as multiple investigations not undertaken by Trump allies have established. The purported evidence undergirding Gabbard’s new claim was, as I wrote earlier this week, unconvincing cherry-picking that relies centrally on dishonestly conflating “Russia didn’t hack election systems” with “Russia didn’t engage in any electronic influence efforts.” Just go read the thing I wrote before if you want more details. No point in writing it again!

On Wednesday, Gabbard offered up another previously classified document aimed at casting the Russia probe as partisan. “New evidence has emerged,” she wrote on X, “that “of the most egregious weaponization and politicization of intelligence in American history.” Ignoring the irony of that sentence in that post, Gabbard linked to that new evidence: a report assessing (among other things) that the claim Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win in 2016 was weaker than presented in a report created by the intelligence community in the waning days of Obama’s presidency.

What Gabbard’s been doing isn’t complicated. She’s plucking isolated comments from intelligence agents and using them to suggest that the story that was told about Russia and Trump was false and offered in bad faith. Importantly, there’s little evidence offered to provide counter-narrative. There’s no methodical construction of an argument that Obama and his aides sought to impugn Trump, just a declaration that they did so with little slivers of doubt jammed in where possible to justify the broad claim.

One key target audience — Trump’s base — needs little more than that. Consider this post from Gabbard, one of a series aimed at spreading the baseless claims on social media:

LIE: Putin and the Russian Government helped Trump win the 2016 election

TRUTH: President Obama, former Director of the CIA John Brennan, and others fabricated the Russia Hoax, suppressed intelligence showing Putin was preparing for a Clinton victory, manufactured findings from… pic.twitter.com/nkaLDMrUSv

— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) July 23, 2025

How is it a lie that the Russians helped Trump when even the report declassified and shared by Gabbard today documents the overlap of declining poll numbers for Hillary Clinton with the release on WikiLeaks of the material stolen by Russian actors? How is it subsequently “truth” that the investigation was “fabricated”? How does any evidence that Putin still thought Clinton would win run contrary to the idea that he and Russia sought to aid Trump?

Never mind, of course, the perennial problem with this idea that the Russia probe was meant to drive Trump from power: that the investigation began well before Trump was elected and that it never resulted in a threat to Trump’s presidency, thanks in part to Republicans holding power in the House for the first two years. The Obama administration didn’t try to block Trump from winning the 2016 election. In fact, the only point at which it put its thumb on the scale, however intentionally, was then-FBI Director James Comey’s last-minute announcement that an investigation into Hillary Clinton was being revived.

Anyway, none of this is really the point. The point, instead, is that the “new evidence” Gabbard presents, that she offers as a fair assessment that had been kept out of the public eye, is not. At the top of a thread in which Gabbard denounces the idea that the intelligence committee assessment as not being independent sits a link to a report that was explicitly not independent, but created by House Republicans loyal to Trump.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just The News, a media site founded by Trump ally John Solomon, reports that the document shared by Gabbard was “was produced in 2018 during the 116th Congress under the leadership of then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).” A product of the House Intelligence Committee, it was submitted to the CIA where it lay stagnant — until it recently became useful to elevate as an ostensibly buried analysis of what occurred during the Obama administration.

It’s a bit like taking a cheap bracelet and burying it in the dirt, only to dig it up later and display it to a marveling crowd, offering it for sale at a premium. It’s long been the case that uncovered information grabs the public’s (and the media’s) attention more vigorously than similar admissions. Gabbard’s making lemonade out of what was until now a lemon.

That the report centers on the idea that Putin wasn’t really trying to help Trump win is itself a tell. This is the thing that frustrated Trump the most from the outset, this idea that Putin had a role in a victory that Trump presented as a function of his own tremendous popularity. Whether Putin and Russia intervened solely to gum up American politics or specifically to hurt Clinton didn’t really matter from the perspective of the intelligence community as it sought to figure out how serious the threat was. But it sure mattered to Trump.

We’ve seen the product of the intelligence community’s work and we’ve seen various assessments of that product and of that work. We’ve seen Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team articulate what Russia did and how Trump’s team welcomed the effort as it happened. We’ve seen a bipartisan Senate committee reinforce and expand on that articulation.

Well, we have anyway. Trump and his allies — including Gabbard and including Nunes, now the head of Trump’s media company — have gone to great lengths to ensure that those things aren’t seen or, at least, aren’t treated seriously. Instead they see baseless, sloppy claims that puts the blame where Trump’s allies have always felt the blame belonged: on Democrats and on Obama and on everyone they already hate.

Earlier today, the Republican National Committee sent out a fundraising mail with a pitch that only a GOP diehard could love.

“Have you ever been to the big city?” it began, suggesting that, if so, “maybe it was New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago.” But those cities are no longer “beacons of American exceptionalism,” as they were when “we were growing up.” (Ahem.) Instead, “thanks to Democrat politicians, they’re now rat and feces infested gang headquarters for illegal immigrants.”

This appeal triggered a number of responses, as you might expect. Some centered on a bit of whataboutism: Can you imagine the response if the Democratic Party sent out a fundraising pitch centered on how disgusting and repulsive small-town America was?

I, of course, was more curious about what we actually know about these cities. Is it the case that Republicans don’t visit large cities? Is it the case, too, that they think these places are vile and disgusting?

Polling from YouGov answers the first question definitively. No, Republicans have been to large cities as often — maybe even more often! — than Democrats. They’re less likely to live there, we can assume, but it’s not like they haven’t been.

The most positively viewed city, YouGov found, was Nashville, Tenn. It is also a city that is viewed much more positively by Republicans than Democrats — who are also more likely to have been there.

As you might expect, net views of each city are more positive as the percentage of people who’ve visited them increases. Similarly, city dwellers are more likely to view the cities positively than are people who live in rural areas. You can see the connection between visits to a city and favorability when we look just at the views of Democrats.

Among Republicans, though, there’s no obvious correlation between having visited a city and a positive net view of the city.

What there is instead is a (modest) inverse correlation between views of the cities and how strongly they supported Kamala Harris last year. The more Democratic the vote, the more negative the views among Republicans.

And that’s the play. The RNC email isn’t talking about the urban hellscape of Nashville. It’s explicitly talking about the purported hellscape in New York City, a lovely town with low crime and lots to offer. It’s playing up the stereotype, not the reality — and it’s a stereotype that holds for a lot of these cities even after Republicans have been to them.

Speaking to reporters earlier today, President Trump demanded that the media cover what he called “the biggest scandal in the history of our country.”

No, it wasn’t that the sitting president is relentlessly cashing in on the presidency or that the sitting president staffed his administration with unqualified cronies or that the sitting president and his administration have subverted Congressional spending authorization or that the sitting president is systematically undercutting the Constitution and rejecting checks on his power as he pushes toward authoritarianism. It’s that the president two presidents ago, Barack Obama, “led a coup.”

Trump: We found absolute — this isn't like "Evidence" or like — this is proof, irrefutable proof that Obama was seditious, that Obama was trying to lead a coup, and with Hillary Clinton and all these other people, but Obama headed it up. This is the biggest scandal in the… pic.twitter.com/wiXtTmvkqB

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 22, 2025

Barack Obama did not “lead a coup” against Trump, of course, as I wrote a few days ago. What Obama did was serve as president during a period when Russia was seeking to influence the results of the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. That influence effort overlapped with Trump staffing his campaign with a number of Russia-sympathetic actors, mostly because he was still seen as sufficiently toxic by the Republican establishment that relatively few legitimate consultants and advisers wanted to work with him. The probe that began under Obama included consideration of Trump’s potential complicity in the Russian effort, but Trump’s disgust about it seems more securely rooted in the idea that he only won because someone else put their hand on the scale.

Instead of rehashing what I already wrote, though, it’s useful to instead recognize why Trump is deploying this hyperbole at the moment. Trump offered this narrative about a devious Obama and his allies specifically in an effort to redirect the press’s questions about Jeffrey Epstein. This wasn’t subtle; Trump specifically told the reporters that they “ought take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense,” meaning Epstein. Why focus on his relationship with an accused sex trafficker when you could focus on the biggest scandal in history?

The proper response isn’t simply that the allegations against Obama aren’t a scandal at all, much less the largest. It should also note that Trump has repeatedly identified other things as the “biggest scandal” in history — at times when he’s trying to redirect attention away from something he doesn’t want to talk about. In November 2019, for example, he responded to questions about the ongoing impeachment probe by suggesting that the real scandal was … wait for it … the Russia probe.

Points for consistency on that one, at least. But here are a few other “scandals” which Trump has, at some point, described as the “biggest” he’d ever seen.

Oct. 30, 2016. Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as Secretary of State
“So the 33,000 that she deleted and bleached, I think she gonna be in the 650. But how do you have that many emails. What do you do? Sit down all day and just keep on typing? Hey, no wonder, nothing gets done in our country. This is the single biggest scandal since Watergate.”

April 25, 2019. The investigation into Russian interference
“This was a coup. This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government. … This was an overthrow and it’s a disgraceful thing. And I don’t — I think it’s far bigger than Watergate. I think it’s possibly the biggest scandal in political history in this country.”

July 14, 2020. Hunter Biden working for a Ukrainian company
“Remember, where’s Hunter? People forget all about that stuff. If that were ever me, if that were ever me, it would be the biggest scandal in history.”

Sept. 27, 2020. His campaign being ‘spied on’
“This is a major scandal. This is a scandal, the likes of which nobody has ever seen. This is actually the biggest political scandal in the history of our country. And with the exception of a few, I mean, they just don’t want to write about it. You should read about that, Kelly, you know. You should write about it. You should write about it. You should do something on CNN about it, because it’s the biggest single scandal of our time; certainly the biggest political scandal, perhaps, in history.”

Oct. 9, 2020. Mail-in voting
“They’re sending out millions and millions of ballots. Are they sending them to all Democrats? Who are they sending them to? Where are they going? You know, etc., etc. This is going to be the second biggest political scandal in history” — behind the Russia probe.

Oct. 16, 2020. The Biden family’s businesses
“Here we have the biggest scandal going on anywhere in the world, the corruption of Joe Biden and the Biden family, and he’s interviewed last night by a Stephanopoulos on ABC and they don’t even ask him the question about it.”

March 22, 2021. ‘60 Minutes’ not showing a full answer from Kamala Harris
“The other big news is the fraud committed by ’60 Minutes’ and CBS, together with the Democrat Party, working together with them, which will go down as the single biggest scandal in broadcast history, I predict.”

July 29, 2023. The Biden family’s businesses
“They took in millions. But so much more money pours in. And Joe, he knew all about it. It was a big lie. That was the big lie. This is the biggest scandal in U.S. history and perhaps the world.”

July 9, 2024. Covering up Joe Biden’s decline
“Joe, Kamala, and the entire Democrat establishment have been caught red handed in the thick of the biggest scandal and the biggest cover up. It’s a cover up. That’s what it is. I said it when they hit this guy in the basement and then they cheated on the election.”

Oct. 25, 2024. That hundreds of thousands of children are ‘missing’
“The fake news media doesn’t even talk about it. If that were a Republican instead, it would be the biggest scandal in history. It would be the equivalent of nothing else, and they don’t even talk about it.”

July 16, 2025. Biden’s use of an autopen
“Whoever operated the Autopen had a policy, which is by the way, I think the biggest scandal. That’s the scandal they should be talking about, not Jeffrey Epstein. The scandal you should be talking about is the autopen.”

Honestly, I’m starting to think that the president might be prone to exaggeration.

It was probably inevitable, once Donald Trump returned to the White House, that there would be some formal effort to counteract the facts of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Each of Trump’s popular-vote-losing bids for the presidency generated a bespoke conspiracy theory for which Trump demands satisfaction, with the 2016 iteration centering on the idea that his electoral-vote victory was anything other than a landslide.

During the years that followed his first inauguration, Trump became obsessed with dismissing the entire Russia probe as dishonest and political, just as he is obsessed with dismissing the criminal activities into his actions in the same way. Eventually, this fixation centered on prominent Democrats — particularly Hillary Clinton — as the initiators of the investigation.

The well-established reality is that the probe was launched by FBI agents who’d observed both Russian infiltration of the Democratic Party’s network and various pro-Trump actors filtering into Trump’s inner circle. But those FBI agents worked for a Democratic president, Barack Obama, so that’s where Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard aimed her first volley last week.

A press release from Gabbard’s office claims that, “after President Trump won the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, President Obama and his national security cabinet members manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.” Speaking to the right’s most enthusiastic spreader of conspiracy theories, Maria Bartiromo, Gabbard on Sunday claimed that prosecutions were imminent against those who were “trying to steal our democracy” — meaning Obama and his top aides.

This is, in short, ludicrous.

If you want a simple distillation of why, it’s that Gabbard’s claim (and an accompanying memo) depends on cherry-picking isolated comments from the voluminous material that’s been gathered over the course of the Russia investigation. Compare Gabbard’s memo with The Post’s reported timeline of what occurred, for example, and decide for yourself which presents a more robust, credible case.

The slightly more complicated explanation is that Gabbard’s argument relies on a bait-and-switch.

It centers on the idea that, before the election, there was little concern within the intelligence community about Russian cyberactivity having an influence on the outcome. Here’s the first bullet point from the press release:

That bullet point, though, is pulled from one Sept. 9, 2016 email, the full context for which makes clear that the “influence” being discussed centers on election infrastructure; that is, hacking vote-counting machines and the like.

Notice, too, that what’s elided in the DNI quote is that the “probably not trying” language was not final but itself wordsmithing: should they say it probably wouldn’t happen or that they would not be able to?

What Russia was doing, as was already clear at the time of that email, was hacking into computer systems run by political actors and attempting to use the material they found to influence the election. One of the first indictments obtained by Special Counsel Robert Mueller targeted those hackers and explained how the government knew the hacking was done by Russians — something they knew back in June 2016.

For a timeline I created when the indictment landed, I overlaid Mueller’s claim that Russians were Googling translations with where those translated phrases appeared in the initial posts shared the leaked material:

The DNI’s memo shrugs at a pretty important pre-election action by the government: the release of a joint statement from the Obama DNI and DHS warning the public about Russia’s actions.

It noted that “the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations,” adding that this was familiar terrain for Russia. Later, the statement specifically suggests that “it would be extremely difficult for someone, including a nation-state actor, to alter actual ballot counts or election results by cyber attack or intrusion” — in other words, making publicly the case that the DNI memo suggests was hidden.

What followed the election was not some scheme to present a public argument that conflicted with what came previously. There were musings, generally from anti-Trump pundits, that Russia had messed with vote-counting or ballots. But the official assertion, bolstered by the evidence gathered by Mueller and his predecessors, was that the influence took the form of poisoning the political conversation with social-media sock puppets (which didn’t do much) and the hacked material (which probably did at least something).

The DNI memo conflates the claim that Russia engaged in “cyber measures” during the 2016 election — which a surfeit of evidence indicates it did — with cyber measures targeting infrastructure, about which the government was always skeptical. It attempts to fool credulous and lazy Trump supporters by insisting that the Obama administration knew that Russia hadn’t engaged in cyberactivity but still concocted a public story that it had. It’s like charging someone with filing a false police report when someone kicked in their door after they insisted that no burglar could jimmy their window.

This is all, to coin a phrase, the administration pulling an Abrego. Trump and his allies want to make a rhetorical point so they contrive a criminal allegation to suggest an otherwise non-existent severity. Never mind that all of this happened a decade ago, which seems likely to fall outside of any conceivable statutes of limitations. And never mind that charging Obama in particular would test the Supreme Court’s broad presentation of immunity to chief executives.

In fairness, Tulsi Gabbard is just doing her job. Unfortunately, that job is “deploying state power on Trump’s behalf, whatever damage to institutional credibility might ensue.” What Gabbard has done, helpfully, is create another litmus test by which one can assess the legitimacy of an observer. If they look at the bowl of picked cherries she offers and determine it is more robust and satisfying than, say, what Mueller produced or that a bipartisan Senate panel compiled? That person should not be considered serious.

For one of my last columns at The Washington Post, I created a timeline of Trump’s interactions with Epstein in order to ensure that I wasn’t missing details. More have emerged since I created this, but I figured I’d share the tool publicly in case it was of use to people. Perhaps I’ll update it in the future. Perhaps not.

November 1992. Video published in 2019 shows Trump and Epstein at Mar-a-Lago, apparently ogling women at a party.

1993 to 1997. Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet at least eight times. Other members of his family often joined him.

Oct. 28, 2002. New York magazine publishes a profile of Epstein in which Trump is quoted: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

July 2006. Epstein is arrested after being indicted on a charge of soliciting prostitution.

June 2008. Having reached an agreement with the office of U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta to avoid federal charges, Epstein pleads guilty to two state charges related to solicitation. He’s released the following year.

Jan. 23, 2015. Gawker publishes the contents of Epstein’s address book, redacting personal contact information. Ivana Trump, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump’s brother are included — as are 14 numbers associated with Trump himself, including numbers for Melania and Mar-a-Lago.

June 16, 2015. Trump announces his presidential candidacy.

Jan. 20, 2017. Trump becomes president.

April 27. Alex Acosta is confirmed as Trump’s Labor Secretary.

July 6, 2019. Epstein is arrested in New York and charged with sex trafficking minors. The allegations center on the years 2002 through 2005.

Aug. 10, 2019. Epstein takes his own life while detained at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City.

Nov. 22, 2019. Attorney General William P. Barr attributes Epstein’s death to a “perfect storm of screw-ups.” Two of the guards assigned to Epstein were indicted on charges of falsifying records.

July 2, 2020. Epstein’s longtime confidante Ghislaine Maxwell is charged with conspiring to help Epstein abuse minors. The timeframe of the Maxwell allegations span 1994 to 1997.

July 5. Fox News airs a photo of Epstein and Maxwell in which Trump has been edited out.

Aug. 4. In an interview with Axios, Trump suggests that Epstein might have been killed while in prison. He also says of Ghislaine Maxwell, “Her friend or boyfriend was either killed or committed suicide in jail,” Trump responded. “Yeah, I wish her well. I’d wish you well. I’d wish a lot of people well. Good luck. Let them prove somebody was guilty.” He later adds that “I’m not looking for anything bad for her.”

Jan. 20, 2021. Trump leaves the White House as Joe Biden is inaugurated president.

July 8, 2023. Donald Trump Jr. posts on social media: “Show us all the Epstein client list now!!! Why would anyone protect those scum bags? Ask yourselves this question daily and the answer becomes very apparent!!”

June 3, 2024. In an interview with Fox News, Trump is asked if he would release various information in an effort to rebuild trust with the public. Asked about the “Epstein files,” he says he would. When the interview airs, that’s all that’s shown.

But a version posted to YouTube shows that Trump continued, second-guessing his answer and adding that “you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.”

Jan. 20, 2025. Trump is again inaugurated as president.

Feb. 5. Pam Bondi is sworn in as Attorney General.

Feb. 21. Bondi tells Fox News’s John Roberts that a list of Epstein’s clients is “sitting on my desk right now to review.” Several other administration officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel, offer assurances in right-wing media at different times that the evidence will be presented.

Feb. 27. A number of right-wing social media influencers are invited to the White House and given binder purporting to be Epstein files. The documents are mostly ones that were already public, including those published by Gawker a decade prior.

March 3. Bondi tells Fox News host Sean Hannity that a “truckload of evidence arrived.” She says is is “in the possession of the FBI” and that FBI Director Kash Patel will create a report about the evidence.

May 19. In an appearance on Fox News, Patel and Bongino assert that Epstein took his own life. A furor erupts on the right.

June 5. Elon Musk posts on social media: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

July 7. The Justice Department releases a memo stating that there is no “client list” included among Epstein’s files. It also releases video showing that no one entered Epstein’s cell before his 2019 death. Many Trump supporters again express frustration about the lack of revelations.

July 11. Stoked by Trump ally Laura Loomer, rumors swirl about dissent within the Justice Department over the handling of the Epstein case.

Wired reports that even the “raw” Epstein cell video has been edited. A missing minute of footage from immediately before midnight is attributed by the Justice Department to a glitch in the recording software.

July 12. In a lengthy post on Truth Social, Trump claims that the “Epstein files” were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan” and members of the Biden administration. He also defends Bondi.