“The way we interpret the world is shaped by our communities and our connections, but now, our smartphones are radically altering that,” says Alice Evans, a senior lecturer in social science at Kings College in London. “People are now socializing far less with each other because entertainment tech is out-competing humans for our attention.”

NEW YORK—A decade ago, in 2015, I invited the photographer Eric Pickersgill to speak to my graduate media students at Columbia University.

His photo series that year, called Removed, had just gone viral. It captured visually, for the first time, how our smartphones and social media were starting to grab our attention far more often and more powerfully than ever before — distracting us from the people closest to us offline, both physically and emotionally.

In this way, Pickersgill’s series remains tapped into the current zeitgeist. One of the most powerful photos in the collection (above) showed a couple who had just gotten married, yet were focusing far more on their smartphones in those moments than on each other.

“We’re at this critical time,” Pickersgill says. “People, when they see the world in photographs, can learn a lot about what connects and divides us, how our behaviors toward each other are changing, and how technology is changing us.”

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Fault lines

Gender gaps are nothing new in American politics. The normal pattern is of left-right divides between younger and older generations, with younger people typically more progressive than older ones.

We here at New Rules wrote about the start of the new gender divide last summer, in an post entitled A New Gender Gap Rising , which showed what were then new poll numbers showing how Gen Z women were moving to the left in polls that queried their voting preferences, while Gen Z males had begun to shift right—a first-ever such split among Gen Z voters in last year’s election year polling.

Now that right-left gender split is opening up globally among teens and people in their early 20s, influenced strongly by what social science experts and data researchers say is the rising reach of social media networks leaning right. According to Pew Research, the number of young news influencers who now explicitly lean right are far outpacing those who publicly identify with the left, except on TikTok.

But what’s fueling some of the migration is not just how young people view politics, says Kent University researcher and social science professor Alice Evans. Young people’s attitudes toward women also are changing.

In a recent podcast hosted by Evans, she and John Burn-Murdoch, the Financial Times’ chief data correspondent, cited a range of new survey insights reflecting the gender divide.

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Here are some of the highlights:

• The teen gender divide is expanding. The split originated in the United States, the UK and Germany last year, Burn-Murdoch says, but in recent months is also now showing up similarly among teens in Spain, Finland and Poland.

• Female teens and young single women are moving to the left in much greater numbers than teen males and young men are moving to the right. Burn-Murdoch says young males are now just “a little bit more politically conservative” than young men were 20 years ago, he says—”but not massively.”

• Male teens now hold the strongest openly hostile and misogynistic attitudes towards women. “We’re now seeing this really striking thing, that young male teens and those in their early 20s share hostile sexism attitudes in greater numbers than do men in their 30s and 40s, and even men in their 50s and 60s,” says Burn-Murdoch, with these attitudes formed mostly by differing attitudes shared in teen gamer networks online. [Young Gen Z men and women are increasingly at odds when it comes to their support for feminism, according to the Survey Center for American Life.] “It’s not all young men who are into hostile sexism, Burn-Murdoch says—just mostly those less educated and living in families with lower incomes.”

• Teen males are becoming more certain about their views on politics and the gender divide at earlier ages. Social media has always magnified the most extreme voices and opinions, but for the first time this past year, male teens have begun to shift their polling answers from “don’t know” to certainty, Burn-Murdoch says. The rise of gender-specific online networks is bolstering the confidence of male teens to state their views more openly, he adds.

• There is a gender gap in teen experiences, Pew says. Many of the problems and pressure points teens are dealing with differ significantly for boys and girls, Pew research shows. In addition, many teens see imbalances in how boys and girls are experiencing school and how they’re performing academically, one of the factors Pew says is causing gender friction.

• Nearly everyone now has access to (or owns) a new-model smartphone, triggering a flood of new voices sharing new views and new subgroups specific to teen interests and ideas. Says Evans: “Everyone now has more of a voice online, and the freedom to pursue their own preferences without dissent, which is great. But it’s also giving us a society that’s now more bifurcated, splintered and more polarized. It’s not so much that many more people are now advocating autocracy or a gender war. But more voices online are certainly generating more courageous views about what isn’t working.”

The Future

What now? Will a future in which men and women spend less time together increase polarization?

And with fewer young women opting to marry and have children, how will the gender divides affect us culturally and economically in the years ahead?

“Just by understanding different perspectives can help us strengthen our nations’ social glue, to make us more understanding and empathetic,” Evans says. “But we better start building ways besides marriage to help us do that, and soon—because if all of our social glue withers and weakens because we’ve stuck ourselves in isolated echo chambers online, then we’ll get more massive ideological and attitudinal distortions fomenting online, and won’t be able to correct much for future generations.”

Adds Burn-Murdoch: “It may sound obvious, but spending more of our time with humans offline would help us to create more balance and less polarization. We’re seeing some backlash already by teens to being extremely online. But we might have to create new incentives to achieve more diverse interactions across society, and that simple step would help a lot.”

What’s your take on the expanding gender divides we’re starting to see now among young people globally?

NOTE: For more data and insights on this teen trend and our evolving gender divides in general, check out Pew Research’s latest data on teens’ use of social media and the emerging tech-driven gender divide. You might also want to listen to Alice Evans’ in-depth conversation with the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch on her recent podcast episode, Are Men and Women Scrolling Apart?, to learn more about the influence of tech on today’s evolving gender divides.

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Socially, Americans are being influenced by growing differences in gender, race, education and age. Pew Research says in a new report that we’re also becoming more tribal, so distrust of others is, in some ways, stabilizing—despite new shocks to the system.

CHICAGO—In a country born by breaking with a king, some say we inherit distrust and dissent as a birthright. Yet today, our sense of shared purpose as diverse Americans has, in some ways, been cast into the shredder of profit and power.

Amid today’s brawls over diversity—including President Trump’s assaults again this week on Blue state cities, including this one—new data by Pew Research says our nation’s trust crisis is morphing, quickly.

What’s up?

“In today’s climate, people now want to find sameness more than ever,” says Neha Sahgal, vice president of research at Pew. “Sameness, to be around the same kind of people, drives trust today,” she told attendees of the Aspen Institute’s first-ever Trust in Practice Summit held here recently for more than 200 emerging leaders and trust-building consultants, educators and local government representatives.

On one hand, the trust gaps between us remain strong, she said. On the other, finding sameness bolsters trust, partly due to belonging, and helps to limit a further decline, Sahgal says.

And there’s another plus, she adds.

Today, 14.8% of Americans are new immigrants. But go back to 1890, when 14.3% of Americans were new immigrants. “We’ve been here before,” Sahgal says. “The difference today is that sameness, being around people similar to you, is now in demand by people not only just arriving in this country, but also now by people born here as citizens and living here for generations.”

Americans, as they become more political, are becoming more tribal, she added, “so we must make an intentional effort to find sameness in values, too, across today’s boundaries. It’s the American experiment.”

The Trust Data

How tribal are we now, regardless?

Here are some highlights of Pew’s survey, Americans’ Trust in One Another, as presented to conference attendees by Sahgal and Laura Silver, associate director of global attitudes research for Pew. Pew surveyed 37,000 Americans, asking them whether they trust other Americans.

Why does social trust matter?

“Trust is the oil that lubricates the frictions of daily life,” Silver said. “Trust makes it easier for people to work together to solve problems. It is beneficial for the economy because it’s related to confidence that other people will respect contracts, repay loans and behave honestly. And higher trust is associated with better-functioning democratic institutions.”

Some poll results were not surprising. More “have’s” in income and education said they trust other Americans more than did the “have-nots.”

But it also goes further than that. There were also key age, gender, and geographical differences in how much respondents said they could trust other Americans. One’s politics and where they live, geographically, also make a difference:

Here are some of those breakouts:

• Age. Social trust is rooted in one’s experience. Only 26% of young Americans, those aged 18-29, said most people can be trusted, compared to 44% of senior citizens aged 65-plus;

• Gender. Men (37%) are more trusting of other Americans than women (32%);

• Race. Racial discrimination influences a decline in trust. Blacks (21%) said most people can’t be trusted, compared to 23% of Hispanics, 38% of Asian Americans and 40% of Whites;

• Education. People less educated tend to have less trust in others. Post-graduates (52%) say most people can be trusted, compared with 44% of those who have a Bachelor’s degree, 31% of those who have had some college and 24% of those who graduated only from high school.

• Income. Those earning more money trust others more. Only 25% of those who make less than $50K say most people can be trusted compared to 35% of those who make between $50-$100K, and 46% of those who make more than $100K.

“What’s interesting is that those with less trust have part of their brain in fight-or-flight mode all the time,” Sahgal says. “Trust, on the other hand, has a variety of personal benefits. People who trust others tend to be happier with their lives. They’re more satisfied with their family life and even report better health.”

Place Matters, too

Where is trust highest?

Globally, America is not totally unique. One big difference, though, is that while some levels of trust have dropped and now remain somewhat stable in the U.S., there is evidence that levels of trust may be rising in other high-income countries. According to the World Values Survey, trust has increased around 10 points or more over the past two decades in Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Singapore and the U.K. The European Social Survey also finds that some European publics are becoming more trusting.

Within the United States, trust can differ by state, city and neighborhood.

According to the Pew Trust survey, these three states have the highest levels of trust: New Hampshire, Oregon and Utah. Close to half of adults in these states say “most people can be trusted.” But in some other states – like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and West Virginia – the share of people who say “most people can be trusted” is about half of that in the highest trusting states. These “lower trusting” states have fewer college graduates and lower household incomes, both of which are associated with lower levels of trust.

The Pew survey also shows in-state trust levels also can vary dramatically from city to city. In California, Silver said, 35% of its residents (about the national average) say most people can be trusted, but San Franciscans are nearly twice as likely than people in Riverside to feel so trustful (46% vs. 24%).

The San Francisco metropolitan area, which encompasses both Oakland and Berkeley, is one of the most highly educated places in the U.S., with more than half of adults aged 25 and older holding at least a bachelor’s degree. In Riverside, on the other hand, only 25% of residents are college graduates.

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Do your neighbors trust you?

While the level of trust within a community may be predicted largely by the wealth, education and other characteristics of the people who live there, that’s only part of the story in neighborhoods.

Even after controlling for demographic differences, neighborhoods also seem to matter. People who live in an area where more people are college educated tend to have higher levels of trust, regardless of their own level of education. (For more about the impact of neighborhoods, click here, on the “Geography” section.)

How much do we trust our neighbors? According to Pew, which asked nearly 9,500 American aduilts whether they know and trust the people in their neighborhood, the answer often had to do with race and ethnicity, age, income, education and, to a lesser degree, political views.

According to the survey, 44% of respondents trusted most or all of their neighbors, a decline from previous years. But when it came to acting like a good neighbor, the majority of respondents said they would very likely perform neighborly tasks, even when there would be no expectation of reciprocity. According to the survey, 76% said they would be “extremely likely” or “very likely” willing to bring in mail or water the plants for out-of-town neighbors. And in the case of a sick friend or neighbor, 67% said they would be “extremely likely” or “very likely” to show up with a meal in hand.

“People imagine the best of themselves but generally have less charitable assumptions about other people,” Silver told Trust conference attendees.

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New Rules to Build Trust

Trust Summit leaders said building trust is both urgent and possible. Through deliberate collaboration, consistent action and a shared vision, groups can build and strengthen the social fabric of their communities, Silver said.

Key conference take-aways for trust-builders attending included these:

• Trust starts locally. Small, meaningful acts, like introducing yourself to a neighbor or offering help in a moment of need—can be the building blocks of trust;

• Cross-sector partnerships are essential. Lasting change requires collaboration across institutions, sectors and geographies. When we connect across boundaries, we create strong, more resilient networks for trust-building, Silver said.

• Trust takes time. This work doesn’t move fast. It requires deep presence, patience and a commitment to the long haul.

• Trust gets built by doing things together. Agreements are good, but shared actions and collaborative efforts are better. Trust grows strongest when people work together toward a common goal, Silver says.

Other tips for trust-builders included these:

• Start with amplifying what’s already working in communities rather than only focusing on what’s broken;

• Make listening non-negotiable;

• Make meetings with others a space to form a collective identity as trust-builders with a shared purpose, “to remind others that trust-building is not just a task, it’s a role and responsibility that we carry,” said Sahgal.

“We must make an effort to find sameness beyond long-held indicators of difference. In some ways, this is a newer challenge for this country, which is diversifying in ways we haven’t experienced before. But it’s doable, and when done well, trust has already started to tick upwards in some places.“

Are you observing some of these same trends in your neighborhood, city or state? Let us know. And for more insights from this Pew trust survey, click here, and thanks—as always—for reading!

NOTE: This post was updated 8-21 to include global comparisons.

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Just in the past 18 months, AI has been silently reshaping how we communicate our ideas, perceptions and feelings, a trend that linguists say is quietly influencing our culture in ways we don’t yet fully acknowledge nor understand.

NEW YORK—Delve. Adept. Tapestry. Realm, Meticulous and Underscore.

No, these are not some of the words featured in this year’s 100th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee competition.

They are, rather, some of the words now widely considered to be AI-speak, words that AI is making us use far more frequently in our written communications, and now also are influencing how we speak—especially in the past 18 months, ever since ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history.

A new study by a group of researchers analyzing more than 350,000 YouTube videos and 771,000 podcast episodes—from before and after ChatGPT’s release in 2022—cites a massive surge of AI-generated words now flooding our academic papers, business reports and conversations. It’s not just those words used in podcasts and scripted videos, but people are actually starting to talk like ChatGPT.

“The patterns that are stored in AI technology seem to be transmitting back to the human mind,” says Levin Brinkmann, a lead researcher and co-author of the study by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. “This is creating a new feedback mechanism between AI and humans.”

Brinkmann’s associate, researcher Hiromu Yakura, said in a recent interview that “word frequency can shape our discourse or arguments about situations. That carries the possibility of changing our culture.”

Sound a little creepy? I am both terrified and extremely intrigued.

So is etymologist and linguist Adam Aleksic, author of Algospeak, How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language—an exploration of how internet algorithms are influencing how we communicate in unprecedented ways. “You can actually see that between 2022 and 2024, there was a 1400% increase in our use of the word ‘delve,’” he says—one of those words most disproportionately used by ChatGPT. “And if you use the em-dash too much, you’re not just speaking like ChatGPT but you’re writing like ChatGPT, which really sucks because people who have been using it for years [like me] are now more likely to get accused of sounding like an algorithm.”

Tech Talk

This isn’t the first time our language has been re-routed by tech. From our first widespread use of “hello” in the 1870s to spellcheck in the 1980s, technology has shaped how we connect with each other.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “hello” didn’t surge into common use until the telephone arrived. The first telephone books recommended its use as the correct way to start a phone conversation. We now take autocorrect and spellcheck for granted, and many of us no longer think twice about letting Google finish a sentence when we’re taking fast notes.

And now, says Aleksic, young people, especially Gen Zers and Alphas, say ‘let me ask Chat’ in much the same way as we all would say “let’s Google it.” But what’s different about AI, Brinkmann and others suggest, is that many of us are starting to treat AI as a single human friend, forgetting it’s just a tool. “Our perception that ChatGPT is kind of like a human is affecting the way we communicate to it and with it, and to each other.”

Should we be concerned? Yes and no, say linguists.

“When these tools are used, not for cognition but guidance and editing, they can be very useful for helping us find new ways to express ourselves,” Aleksic says.

“I think maybe the concern about Algospeak should come in when we let AI think for us. AI is a new canvas to use, but we shouldn’t let that canvas dictate what kind of art we make.”

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Cultural Backlash?

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that there has been, over the past year, a new kind of cultural backlash building up against AI-speak. Here are some of the trends reflecting ways some people are routing their language around the influence of ChatGPT and other large language models:

• Use of slang abbreviations. These were starting to be popularized earlier this year to duck the use of words that could be tracked by algorithms and embedded into more common usage. Consider the rising use of ‘icl ts pmo’ in texting and social media —which stands for, “I can’t like this sh—. It pisses me off.” Aleksic says such abbreviations “are something only humans can understand, and once the machines catch up, the meme dies.”

• Avoidance speech. “At this point, ChatGPT is so culturally present now that we are using avoidance speech to avoid sounding like ChatGPT or other large language models (LLMs),” says Brinkmann. “A lot of people don’t use ‘delve’ anymore, nor the em dash, just so they can’t be accused of having an algorithm speak for them.” On the other hand, adds Aleksic, “words not yet known to stick out as much are still worming their way into our vocabulary without us really noticing it or being able to identify it as yet.”

• Prompt speak. According to Taylor Lorenz, author of the User Mag newsletter on Substack, people protesting AI-speak now sometimes communicate with each other as they would to ChatGPT, to prompt certain types of humorous responses. “A lot of the slop on Instagram right now is joking, playing into the idea that not all speech should be AI-generated,” she says. In Italy, younger generations have begun using AI-generated images, but not without obvious human inputs, like a shark wearing sneakers. “It’s an absurd new genre of Italian illustration and caricature that’s trending on social media, mostly to reclaim power over AI, making a statement about the use of algorithms and what’s acceptable.”

What’s Next?

Mor Naaman, a professor of information science at Cornell Tech, says it’s important to start thinking about distinguishing between a structured message and a personalized one, now seen as being the only kind of authentic and sincere communication some will accept.

“We have to be careful not to put our personhood at stake in this era of AI’s influence over how we communicate” says Naaman, who leads a research group looking at topics at the intersection of tech, media and democracy. “Instead of adopting a homogeneous vocabulary and a ‘correct’ method of communication, we must self-regulate and celebrate the imperfections that build trust and make us human.”

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What words might you be avoiding because they’re so commonly used by AI? Share it here, along with your take on how AI is influencing how we talk, write and communicate with one another. As always, thanks for your readership!

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“The First Amendment is just words on a page. Giving those words meaning—sustaining their promise, generation after generation—depends on a civic courage that seems, right now, to be in ominously short supply.” — Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University

NEW YORK—It’s one thing to disagree. It’s quite another to punish, harass, deport, fire and threaten the livelihoods of those with whom you disagree, especially if you’re the President of the United States. That’s not how this country works. Americans are born with the right to speak freely, and to publish freely—and to freely criticize public figures without fear of retribution.

And yet, since January, the start of Donald Trump’s second White House term, the president has been waging an expanding, unrestrained war on the truth, the rule of law and Americans’ constitutional right to free expression.

Last week, Trump’s battle accelerated, triggering a throaty, full-out assault on the truth found in professional news reporting, in data reports and in the historical record.

“Things are getting a little scary,” the former Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, said Sunday on This Week. Former Republican congressman Chris Christie, also speaking on This Week, likened Trump’s efforts to mute news suggesting a slowing economy to that of a “petulant child.” He and others said over the weekend that Trump frequently tries to re-frame the truth in a way that “makes him look better” in public, while punishing those who refuse to go along.

Absurd? Maybe. (Some people still uphold Trump’s false claim that he, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 election.)

Let’s go back to what happened on Friday. It’s the latest in Trump’s ongoing attack on the free flow of information, which Tom Jones, a senior media writer at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, says “jeopardizes democracy.”

“Shooting the Messenger”

After a disappointing jobs report came out showing that economic output and consumer spending slowed in the first half of the year, Trump didn’t choose to investigate why the recent job numbers failed to match his rosier expectations. Instead, he fired the person who pulled together the data—Bureau of Labor Statistics Chief Erika McEntarfer, a nonpartisan statistician. Without evidence to back up his claims, Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, that the numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad” and the U.S. economy was, in fact, “BOOMING” on his watch.

It was a baseless claim.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, told ABC’s This Week on Sunday: “When Trump gets news he doesn’t like, he needs to blame someone else because he won’t take the responsibility himself. Like, you give me bad news, I fire the messenger.”

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says Trump’s claim that the job numbers were “rigged” conveys “a preposterous charge—really scary stuff.” The Bureau always seasonally adjusts data estimates with actual results some months later.

Trump’s feud with government statisticians also runs headlong into his ongoing feud with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Trump has been threatening to fire Powell for months, saying he should be cutting interest rates—but cutting rates is what the Fed does when the economy is weak. Raising them is what the Fed does when the economy is growing—to avoid overheating. Is Trump also trying to politicize the Fed? Does he truly wish to have lower interest rates signaling a weak economy? So far, Powell has kept rates steady—and has refused to capitulate, upholding the Fed’s congressionally mandated independence.

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What else?

Trump last week continued his push to silence the truth to get his way, building on earlier efforts since January to squeeze journalism, rewrite history and denounce the people, places and things which challenge what he wants:

• Rewriting History. On Thursday, The Washington Post revealed that the Smithsonian National Museum of American History removed references to Trump’s two impeachments from an exhibit on presidential scandals. The deletion reportedly came as part of a review by administration officials tasked with finding “liberal bias” in Smithsonian museum exhibits. Now, referring to Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, the exhibit states that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal.” This is false—Trump came closer to Senate conviction than Clinton did. Both Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance have been pressuring the Smithsonian to align its messaging with the president’s political priorities, claiming falsely that the institution, by citing Trump’s record-setting number of impeachments, has “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”

• Changing the storytellers. Previously, the White House also attempted to fire the head of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, accusing her of being “highly partisan and a strong supporter of DEI.” [Trump has issued numerous executive orders and has taken other measures aimed at dismantling DEI across the federal government.] The Smithsonian rebuffed Trump’s attempt to fire Sajet, but she later resigned.

• Changing the story. Trump also ordered the National Park Service to erase some historical references to Black slavery from its park signs and web pages, including those dedicated to explaining the history of the Underground Railroad and the Civil War to the American public. It’s messaging Trump says doesn’t align with his political narrative.

• Silencing Journalism. On Friday, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it will shut down because Trump was successful getting Congress to narrowly approve defunding it on a strict, party-line vote. This was a goal of Project 2025; the political right views PBS and National Public Radio as being liberally biased, though there is no hard data to back that up. While PBS/NPR stations in major cities may be able to weather the storm, the loss of federal assistance to CPB could create news and information deserts in more remote areas, chiefly in rural red-states.

• Silencing Journalists. Last February, Trump barred the Associated Press from the White House press room because the news company and its reporters and editors initially refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Most recently, he called an NBC reporter “a disgrace” and “terrible” when he questioned Trump about the jet gifted to him by Qatar, valued at $400 million. Trump called another reporter “a very bad person” for asking about the timing of weather alerts ahead of deadly floods in Texas, which killed over 100 people.

• Silencing Criticism. Trump also is suspected of playing a key role in the recently announced cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which is now due to end in May 2026. There has been speculation that the cancellation was announced—wholly or in part—to appease Trump, as Paramount, which owns CBS, relied on the presidentially controlled Federal Communications Commission to approve its recent, $8 billion sale to Skydance. Colbert has long been a vocal critic of Trump.

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Who and What’s Next?

Concern about Trump’s frequent challenges to the rule of law is rising among congressional Democrats and Republicans, alike. Some of Washington’s senior Republican lawmakers Friday openly condemned Trump’s decision to fire the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ statistician. “If Trump is firing her because he doesn’t like her numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” Wyoming Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis told the Guardian. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate but not what the president had been hoping for.” North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, also a Republican, said: “If (McEntarfer) was just fired because the president or whoever … didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.”

The good news? More legal scholars, red and blue, are starting to step forward to challenge what they say is Trump’s excessive use of executive power to undermine the role of politically independent federal agencies, the government’s allegiance to the constitution and the rule of law.

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Law and More Order?

A new law firm, The Washington Litigation Group, is a conservative, nonprofit group and the latest legal firm to join an emerging group of pro bono organizations challenging the Trump administration, which is now facing about 375 lawsuits. This new firm will be focusing on legal challenges confronting the president’s use of executive power.

“We’ve just never before seen this kind of systematic effort by a President to use all possible levers of government power against perceived opponents inside the government,” says Peter Keisler, one of eight politically conservative members comprising The Washington Litigation Group’s steering committee. Keisler also is the founder of the conservative Federalist Society and a former assistant attorney general and acting attorney general for President George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, a left-leaning group, Democracy Forward, one of the biggest nonprofit law organizations, is opening a new office this week designed to challenge Trump’s mass, targeted firings of civil servants and eliminate federal programs authorized by Congress.

Says LeFrance, The Atlantic’s executive editor: “Donald Trump may believe he has the authority to do whatever he wishes, the legislative and judiciary branches be damned. But he still has to answer to the people.

“Freedom of speech makes this country great. It keeps power in check. It brings truth to light. Trump has tried repeatedly to classify many Americans he doesn’t like as being ‘enemies of the people’ but they are the people. And it’s none of the government’s business what any of its people choose to say about it.”

Have a comment or a perspective to share? Please mention it here, and thank you, as always, for your readership!

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NEW YORK— Let’s all welcome 🫩.

It’s the new face-with-bags-under-eyes emoji—and one of the very latest emoticons approved to join the ranks of the 3,789 other emoji creating our world’s first universal, visual language. It’s also the most popular new emoji, according to the website Emojipedia, the world’s #1 emoji reference site.

Starting to appear on most iOS 18 smartphones, 🫩 is being described by the tech industry’s emoji wranglers as “a smiley face with a strained expression and dark markings under the eyes, likely caused by stress or exhaustion.”

Sound familiar?

Struggling against today’s turbulent headwinds, “we humans are all now feeling battle weary, at least some of the time,” says journalist Chris Hayes, author of The Siren’s Call, the new best-selling book about how the digital economy, particularly social media and information overload, has transformed our attention into a commodity, impacting our minds, politics, and society. “Public discourse is now a war pitting all-against-all for attention. Commerce is now a war for attention. Social life is a war for attention, and so is parenting.”

Emoji, he says, give us the pictorial shorthand both perfect for small phone screens and short bursts of available time. 🫩 is just one of a dozen new emoji designed to help people navigate change, mobilize activism—or just give us all a more satisfying (and reassuring) way to vent amid today’s turbulence. So far, it’s working.

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Changing the Guard

Who’s managing the flood of emoji, new and old, and what’s up with this new focus on activism?

A nonprofit group called the Unicode Consortium supervises the development and distribution of emoji and is run by a rotating group of engineers, linguists and typographers charged with establishing coding consistency across the Internet’s static characters. Its goal when founded in 2010 was to enable global communication among different kinds of computers. Today, its technologists serve more like gatekeepers and digital community leaders and organizers, reviewing applications for new emoji and assessing the level of demand for new ones.

“It’s now becoming more like a body of people who are constantly taking the emotional pulse of the planet, just by the torrent and types of emoji people say are still needed,” says Keith Houston, the author of Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji. He says an emoji’s superpower is its fluidity. Quite often, the meaning or nuance of an emoji can be re-purposed or changed over time to reflect new trends in culture, politics, business or global events. Emoji also can have different meanings, depending on the generations using them. [I remember being told by my Gen Z students last year that the well-meaning 👍 emoji can be interpreted by those under age 25 as being passive-aggressive.]

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Still not convinced of their value?

Here are a few more emoji now being used by social change organizers to mobilize activism and rally their digital crowds to showcase their solidarity in response to what’s happening in politics, government, climate change and the rest, including the Trump administration’s rapid changes made since January:

• Saluting Face emoji —🫡 . This hand saluting a yellow half-face has been a favorite of federal workers fired this past spring as part of the Trump administration’s rapid-fire efforts to downsize government. It continues to be used to convey opposition to the firings and to organize for relief. It’s not the first time 🫡 has been used to build solidarity among those fired by billionaire Elon Musk, the organizer of the first round of government layoffs. When Musk took over Twitter and re-named it X, he fired a lot of workers who had worked for Twitter, and most of them also used this saluting face emoji as common shorthand to express their opposition. “Translated, this emoji would most aptly include a four-letter F-word,” says Houser.

• Fingerprint —🫆. Like 🫩, 🫆 is new on iOS 18.4, Google Noto Color Emoji and WhatsApp. It’s enabling new shorthand for those being fingerprinted and deported by ICE to express their dissent. It’s also an emoji in early usage among people refusing to be fingerprinted at anti-Trump rallies protesting Trump’s harsh treatment of both illegal and legal immigrants.

• Splatter— 🫟. It means mess, and was added to Emoji 16.0 late last year. Literally, it represents a chaotic splash of an unknown liquid, generally colored purple. Activists are now using this to label political, economic or government cuts in services a “mess” in full swing. Gen Z and Alpha are now using it to build solidarity around their dislike of a class or a lawmaker or an experience, like calling a recent university protest against something a 🫟.

• Blue Circle—🔵. This is another new emoji, and it’s being used to express an affinity with or appreciation for various people, places groups, objects or ideas associated with the same color. It also is alluded to in the 2025 hit Netflix show, Adolescence. In that show, 🔵 is used to refer to the film, The Matrix, where taking a blue pill would allow someone to remain in comfortable ignorance, continuing to believe a pleasant but false reality. In the past few months, this emoji has popped up in online communication about politics, especially in tweets criticizing the Democratic Party for its perceived failure to better understand its shrinking appeal among young male voters.

• Red Circle—🔴. In certain contexts, this new emoji may allude to the idea of “taking the red pill,” a pop culture reference used online to signify an awakening to a different or controversial perspective. In the hit Netflix show, Adolescence, 🔴 is interpreted to mean a supposed awakening to harsh or controversial “truths” about society, gender roles and male identity, often tied to misogynistic or anti-feminist ideologies.

• Hundred Points—💯. Originating from the number 100 written on a school exam or paper to indicate a perfect score, this emoji also can be used to express pride or general acceptance of an idea, and is being used by many voters in local elections and school board meetings.

Old Yellow

Other kinds of emoji, especially popular ones now being re-activated, are also somewhat ambiguous and fluid in their meaning, but are starting to be used more frequently in social action campaigns.

Consider these two:

• Melting Face—🫠. It is a yellow smiley face melting into a puddle. Its eyes and mouth slide down its face, yet it maintains a distorted smile, enabling this emoji to be used many times to express support for environmental advocacy to stop America’s use of fossil fuels, so as to minimize extreme heat and mobilize people to participate in climate change activism. It also is now starting to be used “to express embarrassment, shame, a slowly sinking sense of dread, or feeling overwhelmed in some way” in a political context, says Emojipedia.

• Shaking Face—🫨. This one has a face that appears to be shaking from side to side with its eyes and mouth wide open, as in shock. It’s most often being used by people [including by some lawmakers] on both sides of the political divide to express strong emotions such as shock, fear, confusion, disbelief, disapproval and dislike of legislation, a current event or individual politicians and their policies.

• More political emoji, including some stickers made in Trump’s likeness, are expected to emerge more fully this fall.

“Emojis aren’t inherently deep,” says Erik Carter, the graphic designer who created the sample image for the melting face emoji. “It’s how people use them now that makes them profound.”

Got a favorite emoji? Please share it here, and thank you for your readership.

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Global tourism is up across the world, but not in the United States. Millions of international tourists, many turned off by President Trump’s policies and political rhetoric, are choosing to travel elsewhere. It’s a move economists say could end up costing the U.S. up to $29 billion—and millions of jobs.

NEW YORK—Like most New Yorkers, I try to avoid Times Square in July.

Most summers, it becomes nearly impossible to navigate the square’s tourist-packed sidewalks and streets, with some visitors barely moving from one block to the next, and young families locking arms to form human walls the width of the sidewalk—just so they can take in the sights without losing each other in the crowd.

Make no mistake. I have nothing against tourists. I am often one, myself, in the foreign cities I visit for work and play. The larger the crowds, the better it is for the local economy.

But this summer? Times Square is visibly less crowded. Foreign tourism is down, and many New Yorkers and other Americans are starting to feel the pinch.

Just ask the Naked Cowboy—one of dozens of Time Square’s regular street performers moonlighting as Instagram bait. [This guy, Robert Burck, wears only cowboy boots, a cowboy hat and skimpy, jockey-style briefs.] He told us the other day that “women still line up to get a selfie with me, but this summer, there are many fewer people visiting from other countries.”

Vibe shift

Burck is on to something.

According to Oxford Economics, political and economic headwinds have been fueling significant declines in the number of foreigners visiting the United States this year, with the biggest no-shows so far being Canadian tourists (down 20.2%), Mexican tourists (down 7.6%) and foreign travelers from Western Europe (down 17.2% in March and by 5.8% overall). Foreign travelers from the two largest European markets—the United Kingdom and Germany—have been especially wary of U.S. travel since January. Visits by the British are down by 15%, while the number of visits this year by Germans has fallen by 29%—influenced, in part, by their governments’ warnings to avoid traveling to the U.S. due to the possibility of detention by American immigration authorities.

Aran Ryan, Director of Industry Studies for Tourism Economics, said last month that the negative outlook he had earlier this year for inbound travel to the U.S. “hasn’t budged.” The biggest U.S.-based hotel chains—Marriott, Hyatt and Hilton—say they are continuing to experience slower growth, and airlines are also taking a hit. Here in New York last month, some 160,000 fewer foreign passengers arrived via this city’s Kennedy and Newark international airports, and the number of foreign tourists visiting other top U.S. tourist destinations, including Orlando, Miami and Los Angeles, is also continuing to show a decline.

“There used to be thousands of people from Canada coming to New York,” says Omar Tallat, 35, who runs a corn dog stand near Times Square. “This year, business is very bad.”

A Trump slump?

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), President Trump’s tariffs, his global trade war, travel bans, inflammatory rhetoric and harsh immigration policies are all continuing to have a chilling effect on some foreign visitors, and a reversal of Trump’s policies is not expected any time soon. “This should be a wake-up call to the U.S. government,” Julia Simpson, WTTC’s President and CEO, said in a statement. “While other nations are rolling out the welcome mat, the U.S. government is putting up the ‘closed’ sign.”

Both the WTTC and Tourism Economics, the two leading data centers for the tourism industry, are predicting a sharp drop in spending by international travelers to the United States for the rest of the year, one which they are projecting will cost the United States an estimated $12.5 billion. America is the only country among the 184 analyzed by the WTTC expected to end 2025 with a decline in international visitors. Tourism Economics says 9.4% fewer foreign travelers will visit the United States this year. In January, it was expecting a 9% increase. “The United States now has a brand problem,” says Adam Sacks, the company’s CEO.

Oh, Canada!

Canadian tourists to the U.S. have historically made up around a quarter of arrivals. But now, Canadian border crossings are plummeting, and chiefly since Trump stepped up his push to make Canada the 51st state, prompting former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to explicitly urge Canadians last February to reconsider booking international trips. “Now is the time to choose Canada,” Trudeau said.

Today, many Canadians are informally boycotting the United States. A recent Pew survey found that 59% of Canadians now view the U.S. as being the “greatest threat” to their country. Traffic at one of the busiest border crossings, near Niagara Falls, fell 42% in March compared with 2024. “The continued taunts about a 51st state, calling the prime minister ‘governor,’ calling the border a fiction—that really angers us,” John W. Gulliver, the president of the New England-Canada Business Council recently told The New York Times.

Mexican and European tourists, meanwhile, are worried about the possibility of an escalating trade war spurred by Trump’s tariffs and fear that U.S. immigration authorities might start detaining increasing numbers of foreign tourists. Julie Coker, President and CEO of NYC Tourism + Conventions, says “we are still hopeful things might turn around, but the United States’ status as a global tourist magnet is changing.”

What now?

All is not doomed. Visitors from other countries besides Canada haven’t totally stopped booking summer and fall vacations in the United States. Sales of tickets for summer travel from the rest of the world are down by only 2% compared with the same period last year, according to data on the 25 most popular routes collected by the Airlines Reporting Corporation. The ARC tracks two-thirds of global airline ticket sales.

That said, travel industry analysts assert that there still is extraordinary uncertainty among most travelers—Americans included—about how travel and tourism policies and prices could change in the weeks and months ahead.

ARC’s chief commercial officer, Steve Soloman, says he’s sure about one thing. “What we’re seeing is a shift in where people are going, more than a shift in them not traveling at all.”

Got a comment or an insight to share? Please do, and thanks for your readership!

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President Trump wants to put millions of acres of America’s public lands up for sale to help pay for tax cuts and expand real estate development. Critics are organizing opposition, saying public lands are an extension of democracy, and should be kept accessible to all Americans—regardless of their income, race and politics—for generations to come. The battle has just begun.

NEW YORK—It sounds like something straight out of the popular Paramount/Peacock TV series, Yellowstone—(a drama about the political battles over control of the wide open spaces of pristine wilderness in the American West) —but it’s real.

A group of Senate Republicans, led by Mike Lee of Utah, who heads the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which oversees public lands—have been pushing a Trump-backed plan to require the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to put up for sale as many as 3.3 million acres of public land for housing development. The group also wants to lift restrictions on another 250 million acres of pristine land across 11 Western states, which would make it possible for some of America’s most beautiful, undeveloped public lands to be sold off to the highest bidder.

On a recent podcast hosted by conservative Glenn Beck, Lee said President Trump’s desire to enable the potential sale of public lands would help to raise needed revenue for the U.S. Treasury, help fund Trump’s tax cuts and help to address what Lee says is the country’s housing crisis.

GOP lawmakers tried, but failed this week to bypass Senate rules by slipping their public lands plan into Trump’s 1,116-page tax and spending bill without debate. Lee now says it will be introduced as a new, free-standing bill in the House and Senate after the July 4th recess.

State of play

Critics are howling. Nonprofit environmental organizations and other advocates for the conservation of America’s wilderness are raising serious concerns. More than 100 conservation groups, including the Sierra Club and Scenic Utah, have warned Democratic leaders the proposal lacks meaningful restrictions and could, therefore, allow millions of acres of public lands and parks to be converted into “golf courses, luxury resorts, strip malls or private vacation homes.”

Some GOP loyalists in some of the rural states are also questioning the plan—despite a caveat recently added to it that would exclude some of the big national parks, including Yosemite and Yellowstone, along with national monuments, and some public recreation areas. But long-used public trails for skiing, and for hiking—like the Trinity Alps “four loops” area of public hiking trails in California— remain vulnerable.

According to a recent analysis by The Wilderness Society, land around Mount Shasta, Big Sur, Mendocino, the Eastern Sierras and along the 2,650-mile long Pacific Crest Trail in California could be eligible for sale and could bring in between $5 billion and $10 billion over the next decade. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has said that any money raised by a public lands sale would go into the U.S Treasury to help fund Trump’s proposed tax cuts. Senator Lee has said 5% could go to local governments.

Park Service Impact

The National Park Service is already feeling the heat. Trump made decisions earlier this year by executive order to severely slash the park service’s budget, force retirements of dedicated and experienced park service leaders, and fire those who pushed back. More cuts in NPS staff are planned for later this year. In several campaign speeches, and in remarks made since taking office in January, Trump has said he would consider replacing some current national park superintendents with political appointees to help the private sector ease any changes in the ownership of public lands.

[The Interior Department was recently forced to rehire 1,000 NPS employees, fired by DOGE earlier this spring, to handle increased crowds visiting the nation’s parks this summer and keep them clean and safe for park visitors—but the park service says the re-hires are temporary. Last year, there were over 330 million visits to the parks—more than professional baseball, football, basketball and the Disney amusement parks combined. This year, the park service says it is expecting a record 400 million visitors.]

The Trump administration also has been trying to erase some historical references on park service signs and in public brochures that are not aligned with his political narrative. Under the direction of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the former governor of North Dakota, the park service has been asked to remove references to Black slavery on its webpages dedicated to the Underground Railroad and the Civil War.

President Trump has said the only national park he has visited is the Gettysburg Civil War battle site in Pennsylvania.

Conservative pressure

Some Republican leaders and political analysts acknowledge that Trump’s push to privatize public lands and downsize the National Park Service staff and budget embodies a conservative contradiction—a love for public land alongside support for a party threatening to sell some of it and limit its influence.

Underscoring that contradiction is a recent Pew survey the shows the federal agencies which Republicans feel most favorably toward are the National Park Service (67-point net favorability), followed by NASA (45 points). [The least popular federal agency of the 16 asked about was the Internal Revenue Service.]

Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker of the award-winning, 12-hour, 2009 series for PBS on the national parks, said in a recent interview that the national park system represents a very small percentage of the national budget and “isn’t just a bunch of hiking trails and tourist shops.” Instead, he says, America’s public lands are “symbols of our democracy, because they ensure all Americans have access to the nation’s most magnificent and sacred places.”

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Historical precedent

Burns said the idea of preserving this land and starting the National Park Service in 1916, was “as radical an idea as the Declaration of Independence. …You could be a millionaire or you could be struggling, but being a visitor to the parks was a leveling experience that humbled most visitors, was a spiritual experience amid the grandeur of the landscapes, and it built among a majority of Americans, across political lines, the conviction that these lands must be preserved for future generations—not just for royalty or the rich, but for everyone.”

Business interests grappled back then over the idea, Burns said, but those leading the development of America’s railroads and nation’s fledgling tourism industry supported it, given their need to attract visitors to the West to cover their investments and grow the economy. In 1906, then-U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt [who Trump has said he reveres] used his executive power to double the size of the national park system and expand protection of America’s natural landscape and environmental landmarks.

Records show Roosevelt also was moved spiritually by the beauty of the land. Once visiting with pioneer conservationist John Muir on Glacier Point in Yellowstone National Park, Roosevelt decided to advocate for the country’s then-fledgling national park system. After hearing Muir talk about the “spiritual power one experiences being exposed to lands untouched for half as long as the age of the Earth itself”—Roosevelt urged congressional lawmakers to “leave this land as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American, if he can travel at all, should see.”

NOTE: This story was updated June 25th to include a decision by GOP backers of the land privatization plan to introduce it as a free-standing bill in the House and Senate after lawmakers return from their July 4th recess.

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“People have just gotten angrier and angrier, and for some, this is a hateful era of public speech and political violence. But for others, it’s the time to start gathering again as communities, in person—to meet again, and resist.

“At some point, you’ve got to look in the mirror when you look at what’s going on here. Every single elected official does.” — Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota

LA GRANGE, Illinois— Walking down the main street of this popular and well-heeled Chicago suburb as a kid, I remember making a beeline most weekends to the local movie theater, an Egyptian Art Deco gem that would let kids in for a triple feature most Saturdays—three movies in succession for $10, literally mind-blowing (if you didn’t have to leave early).

This past Saturday, I visited that street again, but this time it was to watch another kind of show—a No Kings rally, one of the nearly 2,000 held across the nation to push back on what many now see as President Donald Trump’s widening authoritarianism, attacks on immigrants and civil rights, challenges to the rule of law and deep cuts to scores of federal programs.

Here, in this small community, there was no small crowd. Couples came, families came, individuals who said they’d never before protested came. An estimated 3,000 former and present neighbors, blue and some red, gathered for several hours, along with dozens of senior center residents and some local business owners. Most lined up along both sides of main street—three deep, parade-style, with their kids in tow—to wave hand-lettered signs and chant, “No Trump, No King” and “This is what democracy looks like” as cars passed, honking their horns in support.

The mood was both joyful and defiant. In front of the movie theater, neighbors—many wearing t-shirts reading “I am not a paid protester”—shared Sharpies and extra cardboard with those wishing to make some signs of their own.

The rally ended peacefully, yet some 400 miles north of here, in Minneapolis, the day was marred by news that political violence had occurred before dawn.

The details are now more clear. The man who shot and killed a Minnesota state representative and her husband early Saturday, in their home, was posing as a police officer. A short time earlier, he also forced his way into the home of another state legislator and his wife, and shot them 17 times. They survived.

The assassin had made a kill list of 45 people, all of them Democrats serving as state and local officials. Federal prosecutors say he was just leaving the second house he visited when discovered by police in a shoot-out. He then escaped on foot, later texting his wife and children on a group thread: “Dad went to war last night … I don’t wanna say more because I don’t wanna implicate anybody. …Words cannot express how sorry I am for this circumstance.”

The FBI found him the next day, covered with mud, hiding in a ditch of rural farmland some 50 miles outside Minneapolis. “Clearly, this was politically motivated,” U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, told CNN.

The violence wasn’t a freak occurrence. Like school shootings, political violence is becoming routine, and rising.

Growing Threat

According to the Department of Homeland Security, politically motivated violence is among its top concerns for 2025.

Here’s why:

• In a recent report, the United States Capitol Police said the number of “concerning statements” and direct threats made against members of Congress, alone, have nearly tripled since 2017.

• The Anti-Defamation League says all of the 61 political killings in the United States between 2022 and 2024 were committed by right-wing extremists.

• According to The New York Times, officials in at least three states are investigating or prosecuting people for making threats against politicians. In Texas, authorities said an armed man who had threatened to harm lawmakers at the State Capitol had been detained. In Georgia, a man was arraigned after prosecutors said he had threatened sexual violence against two United States senators. And in Virginia, a former Coast Guard officer was arrested and accused of making threats against President Trump online.

• Right-wing political extremism—and President Trump’s combative rhetoric—is fueling many of the political attacks, says Reuters, Pew Research and a special report by The New York Times.

• In a new report, the ADL reminds readers that in 2020, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, was the target of death threats and a kidnapping plot. In 2022, a right-wing dissident broke into the San Francisco home of Nancy Pelosi and bludgeoned her husband’s head with a hammer, an injury from which he is still recovering. And in April, the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, was set on fire on the first night of Passover as he and his family slept inside.

“This is a hateful era of public speech,” says journalist Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker. “First, there’s this terrible threat of physical violence against elected officials. But there’s also the demonization of them and of public figures of any type, including journalists and their family members. …This is one of those moments when you hope that people sit up, at attention, and say that things have really gone quite too far in this country.”

Blistering Rhetoric

Later in the day Saturday, Trump joined in the official bipartisan condemnation of the Minnesota shootings, calling them “horrific violence.” But Trump—himself the survivor of two relatively recent attempts on his life—has a long record of calling his political opponents “sick” and “evil” publicly, and making statements condoning and encouraging violence. [At a campaign event on October 31 of last year, Trump called former U.S. Representative Liz Cheney “a radical war hawk” and told attendees, “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”]

During another campaign event last year, Trump called the people put in jail for what they did during the January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol “unbelievable patriots”—and called people who disagree with him “very bad people” and “sick” and “radical left lunatics” who should “really be easily handled, if necessary, by the national guard—or if really necessary, by the military.” At that same event, he told MAGA supporters: “I am your warrior, I am your justice, and for those of you who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Is there a fading line between violent political rhetoric and politically-triggered physical violence?

Gunmen who killed 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, 23 shoppers at a heavily Latino Walmart in El Paso in 2019 and 10 Black people at a Buffalo grocery store in 2022 each cited the political conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jews are trying to replace white people with people of color. That theory is held by many members of the far right who have been supporting Trump’s push to limit immigration.

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“We’ve entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that used to come out of the White House to tamp down on violence has been lifted,” says Matt Dallek, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies extremism. “A lot of people are receiving new signals from the political culture.”

Adds Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton University: “What really stands out to me now is that the biggest source of chaos is the President, himself, not the left. Trump, rather than acting as a force to try to bring some kind of reconciliation, calm and stability to the nation in these times of political division, he is fueling the fires.”

Split Screen

Higher levels of political polarization also have created a stark, split-screen view of America at home and abroad. Trump’s multi-million dollar military parade in Washington to celebrate the U.S. Army’s 250 years of military force [and Trump’s 79th birthday] was occurring at the same time an estimated 6 million people were gathering in peaceful No King protests across the country to oppose, among other things, Trump’s domestic use of military force and his claim that the U.S. Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want.”

“We have a President who ran on America First, willing to send hundreds of U.S. Marines to Los Angeles to quell protests of his policies, and then exhibit a show of military force in a parade, threatening before it started, that anyone protesting the parade would be ‘met by a very big force’,” Glasser says. “Is he redefining, in some ways, the concept of national security to mean beating domestic enemies, the immigrants and the ‘left-wing lunatics’ he calls ‘the enemies from within?’”

Adds Dallek: “It now sometimes feels like the extremists are in the saddle, and the extremists are the ones now trying to drive our rhetoric and politics.”

Maybe so. But judging by the authentically deep and rising public opposition to Trump, his divisive rhetoric and his challenges to the rule of law, the struggle over the future of America won’t be won without a fight.

What do you think? Is there a fading line between rhetorical extremism and political violence? Let us hear your thoughts.

NOTE: This post was updated on June 18 and again on June 19 to include new poll numbers, additional examples of violent political rhetoric and extremism, an expanded reference to the No Kings rallies being held Saturday across the nation, with updated information about the Minneapolis shootings.

Political power is increasingly mediated through appearance, sculpted in cosmetic clinics and sharpened by online subcultures. What began as a fringe obsession known as “looksmaxxing” is now reshaping how men, from teenage boys to presidential advisors, understand leadership, strength, and self-worth.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Life in America today can sometimes feel like it’s been plucked from a dystopian novel. Masked federal agents are raiding homes, businesses, and schools. Just this week, the president sent National Guard troops and the Marines into Los Angeles to quell protests that he believes are riots. There has been reporting that the Secretary of Homeland Security wants to create a reality show for immigrants seeking citizenship. And those are just the headlines.

Beyond the headlines, other social changes are quietly beginning to take root. According to a Politico Magazine article by Joanna Weiss last week, cosmetic surgeons in D.C. are reporting a surge in jawline procedures for men. Chin implants are up 26 percent, and neck lifts are up 13 percent. Dermatologists are fielding requests from Hill aides and C-suite executives alike who want to look “strong on camera” without looking like they’ve had anything done.

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Taken together, it’s all oddly reminiscent of Suzanne Collins’ immensely popular Hunger Games series of young adult novels, where teenagers are forced to fight for survival in a brutal, televised death match designed to entertain the ruling elite and suppress rebellion. Caesar Flickerman, one of the main characters and the long-standing host of the Hunger Games, is described as having an appearance that has been "virtually unchanged" for over forty years, while another character, the oppressive President Snow, has lips that are "overly full" and skin that is "stretched too tight," suggesting potential botched cosmetic surgery.

What we’re seeing in Washington and across this nation is the emergence of a new optics of power and a new cultural script of masculinity and strength. In a city where confidence must be performed, and leadership must be seen before it’s heard, the jawline and masculine aesthetic are becoming something like currency. “Looksmaxxing,” as it’s commonly known, is quickly becoming the norm.

From Incel Forums to the Halls of Power

Born in online incel forums, looksmaxxing originally referred to a regimen of exercises, products, and sometimes surgical interventions intended to “maximize” a man’s facial attractiveness. It was built on a belief system that if you’re not conventionally attractive, you don’t deserve attention, love, or opportunity. Fix your face, or stay invisible.

For years, looksmaxxing lived in the toxic shadows of the internet, where it fueled resentment, misogyny, and hopelessness. But like many ideas born in fringe spaces these days, it has gone mainstream, repackaged by influencers and algorithmically promoted to boys and young men across TikTok and Instagram. Gone is the overt rage; in its place, a performance of self-improvement, like skincare routines, posture correction, “mewing” (a controversial jawline-enhancing tongue posture), and even filler tutorials, has become the norm.

Now, it’s not just teenage boys chewing specialized gum to “activate their mandible.” Senior government advisors are scheduling subtle cosmetic tweaks to project gravitas under high-definition scrutiny. The glow-up has entered the political class.

In today’s visual economy, a masculine jawline symbolizes strength. A prominent chin connotes confidence, a clean neckline suggests discipline, and a sharp jaw implies competence.

This logic is now embedded into the social DNA of an entire generation. Apps like UMAX, which use facial recognition to rate users’ attractiveness and prescribe improvements, have millions of downloads. Some influencers film their facial evolution, like fitness influencers track their six-pack gains. Others sell supplements, jaw trainers, or filler packages. The line between self-optimization and obsession has thinned.

What Women Have Known All Along

For decades, women have borne the weight of impossible beauty standards. They’ve lived with the expectation that value begins with appearance, that ambition must coexist with aesthetic perfection, and that aging is a condition to be concealed.

Some women, especially those in the president’s circle, have succumbed to the so-called “Mar-a-Lago” face, which Salon described as “aggressive plastic surgery, fake tan, and make-up spackled on so thick that it would crack — if the fillers hadn't already paralysed their faces.”

Now, men are being nudged to join them, and the data makes the messages are resonating:

• A 2022 study from Chapman University found that 43% of men reported dissatisfaction with their appearance, nearly triple the rate from the 1990s.

• Muscle dysmorphia, a condition where individuals obsess over not being muscular enough, now affects an estimated 22% of men, with rising rates of disordered eating.

• Men aged 18 to 34 are now more likely than women to undergo Botox and facial filler treatments.

• The male grooming industry is projected to top $115 billion globally by 2028, expanding at more than 8% annually.

Just as beauty brands once preyed on women’s insecurities, they’ve now pivoted to target men with military-grade precision: jawline gum, bro-branded moisturizers, and AI-generated diagnostics that claim to reveal how attractive you really are.

We used to talk about the “male gaze” in media—the way films and advertising positioned women as objects of male desire, shaping how women were expected to look and behave. Now, that same gaze has been turned inward, with men scrutinizing their faces and bodies through the lens of curated, hyper-idealized standards—not to admire themselves, but to search for flaws to fix.

A Cultural Crossroads

There’s nothing inherently wrong with men caring about their appearance. A thoughtful grooming routine or desire to feel confident on camera isn’t toxic. The problem arises when appearance becomes the currency of value, when identity is reduced to a filtered version of one's face, and when strength is measured in facial symmetry.

And that’s exactly what’s happening.

The jawline has become an important asset in D.C., where the president elevates those with “made-for-TV” faces. But that message had already taken hold years ago in middle schools and college dorms across the nation: fix your face, or be forgotten. Now, it is being reinforced by the political class.

For men who’ve long been told that success comes from action, the new reality is more passive-aggressive. First, you must be seen. Only then will you be heard.

We need to:

• Broaden the conversation about body image to include men, and treat it with the same seriousness we give to girls’ and women’s self-esteem.

• Push back on algorithmic aesthetics that reward and recirculate unattainable ideals.

• Teach young men media literacy so they can decode manipulation when they see it, whether in a sponsored post or an AI-generated jawline.

• Celebrate male role models who model integrity, resilience, and authenticity—unfiltered and unedited.

Because the more we reduce masculinity to a look, the more fragile it becomes. The more we rely on style over substance, the more likely we’ll be rewarded with a political leaders who lack the skills and resilience needed to lead a nation into the future.

If this piece made you think differently about power, masculinity, or how we shape ourselves to be seen, please share it. And if you want more reporting like this on how culture, politics, and identity are colliding in unexpected ways, please subscribe to New Rules Media.

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Pope Leo XIV is positioning artificial intelligence as the defining moral issue of our time, drawing a direct line to Pope Leo XIII’s response to the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In doing so, he’s reminding us that even in an age of algorithms, the dignity of the human person must remain at the center of progress.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Pope Leo XIV made headlines earlier this spring, not just for being the first American pontiff in history, but for identifying artificial intelligence as a moral frontier for the Catholic Church. While his election was met with the typical swirl of geopolitical intrigue and religious analysis, what stood out most to me were his early and repeated references to AI, not as a novelty, not as a threat, but as a new kind of “social question.”

In his first address to the College of Cardinals, Pope Leo XIV made it clear that his namesake—Leo XIII—wasn’t chosen by accident. Leo XIII was the author of Rerum Novarum, the groundbreaking 1891 encyclical that established Catholic social teaching in response to the Second Industrial Revolution. With workers being dehumanized by machines, exploited by capital, and stripped of dignity, Leo XIII challenged the Church to enter the modern age by defending labor, justice, and the common good.

Now, more than 130 years later, Leo XIV is drawing a straight line from that moment to this one. Where his predecessor responded to the steam engine and the factory, he is responding to algorithms and autonomous systems. Where Leo XIII warned against treating human beings like machines, Leo XIV is warning us not to confuse machines with human beings.

His message is clear: AI is not just a technological development. It’s a moral turning point.

A Moral Voice in a Technological Age

Leo XIV is offering a very different framework—one grounded in human dignity, ethical responsibility, and spiritual discernment. He’s not alone in seeing AI as disruptive, but unlike many corporate leaders or tech policy wonks, he’s placing the focus squarely on conscience.

“Today, one of the most important challenges is to promote communication that can bring us out of the ‘Tower of Babel’ in which we sometimes find ourselves, out of the confusion of loveless languages that are often ideological or partisan. [...] In looking at how technology is developing, this mission becomes ever more necessary,” Pope Leo XIV said. “I am thinking in particular of artificial intelligence, with its immense potential, which nevertheless requires responsibility and discernment in order to ensure that it can be used for the good of all, so that it can benefit all of humanity.”

Discernment. Not regulation. Not optimization. Discernment.

That word, drawn from the deep well of Christian spirituality, signals a fundamentally different posture toward technology. It doesn’t reject innovation, but it slows it down. It asks: Should we do this? Not just can we.

Leo XIV is not alone in this approach. Pope Francis, his immediate predecessor, spent years warning about the dangers of technological determinism, from climate change to digital manipulation. Francis called for an international treaty on AI ethics in 2023, and insisted that new technologies must “enhance, not replace” human interaction. Benedict XVI, before him, was more cautious, but also concerned with how digital culture might fragment social bonds and lead to relativism.

What distinguishes Leo XIV, however, is that he is not just reacting to AI. He seems determined to define the Church’s role in its development. Much like Leo XIII issued a theological and social charter for a rapidly industrializing world, Leo XIV is laying the foundation for a moral response to the AI revolution.

And he’s doing it fast.

From Conclave to Code: A Swift Shift in Focus

Since taking the chair of Peter, Leo XIV has repeatedly placed AI at the center of his public remarks, whether speaking to cardinals, journalists, diplomats, or the broader faithful. In his first official speech, he likened today’s technological upheaval to the first industrial revolution, warning that “developments in the field of artificial intelligence... pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.”

He followed that with remarks to international journalists just two days later, calling on the media to report responsibly on AI and its consequences. Then, in a high-profile address to the Vatican’s diplomatic corps, he placed AI alongside climate change and migration as one of the three “contemporary challenges” that require collective ethical stewardship.

These are not throwaway lines. This is a doctrine in development.

The Vatican had already laid the groundwork with the January release of Antiqua et Nova—a theological note on artificial intelligence from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. While not penned by Leo XIV himself, the document reflects the moral trajectory he has fully embraced: AI is not to be feared or worshipped, but evaluated against the timeless principles of human dignity and the common good.

The document reminds us that only human beings are moral agents and can make decisions that carry ethical weight. AI may mimic intelligence, but it has no conscience. It cannot love, repent, or care—at least not yet.

And that’s the point. In a world increasingly tempted to automate decision-making—from hiring to diagnosis to lethal targeting—the Church insists on a pause—not a total stop but a re-centering. If AI is allowed to define what it means to be human, we risk forgetting what we actually are.

Continuity in Catholic Social Teaching

If Leo XIV’s AI stance feels bold, it’s also deeply consistent with Catholic social teaching. That’s what makes it so compelling. He’s not inventing a new doctrine out of whole cloth, but rather updating a centuries-old tradition for a new age.

The Church has always responded to the big disruptive forces of the day: the fall of Rome, the printing press, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the atomic age. In each era, it has offered both a critique and a path forward, balancing reason and faith, science and soul.

In that spirit, Leo XIV is channeling not just Leo XIII but also John Paul II—who argued that technology must serve the human person, not the other way around—and even John XXIII, who opened the Second Vatican Council with the idea that the Church must read “the signs of the times.”

AI is a sign of our time. Possibly the sign.

And Leo XIV is reading it aloud.

Toward a New “Rerum Novarum”?

There’s a growing expectation that this pope will eventually issue a full encyclical on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. If he does, it will likely take its place alongside Rerum Novarum, Laudato Si, and Pacem in Terris as a foundational text in the Church’s social doctrine.

But even before that happens, he’s already shaping the conversation. He’s shifted the focus from innovation to intention. From disruption to discernment. From profit to people.

In doing so, Pope Leo XIV is not just responding to AI but redefining our relationship to it. Not as adversaries, not as slaves, but as creators made in the image of God, with the moral responsibility to ensure that our tools serve life rather than diminish it.

In a time when so many leaders are asking how to compete with AI, Pope Leo XIV asks a deeper question: How do we remain fully human in its presence?

It’s a question we would all do well to consider.

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The future isn’t just being built in code. It’s being shaped by the values we choose to uphold. Help bring this conversation to more people by liking and sharing this article.

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Political historians call this “hyper-normalization.” It’s the opposite of resilience. “In this state of mind,” says digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush, “we’re numb. Our governing systems and institutions are broken, yet for reasons including a lack of effective leadership, many of us support the pretense that we’re a functioning society.”

CHICAGO—A few weeks ago, one of my Columbia University media students shared an Instagram video with me—which since has received 9 million views worldwide—and rising.

When comedian Ashley Bez (@dailybez) tried to describe her feelings on Instagram about why the world feels so deeply “off” to her and many others, digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush responded immediately with her own video.

Within 48 hours, Harfoush’s video went viral—viewed by political subreddits, mom groups, chat circles, coupon communities, and even dog-walking groups.

“Welcome to the hyper-normalization club,” Harfoush told Ashley in her response video. “I’m so sorry that you’re here.”

Hyper-normalization

For many reasons, more Americans are starting to notice the big disconnect between what’s happening in the world, and how society is acknowledging those events—or isn’t. “Whether it’s our climate, our current political leadership, or the hollowing out of government institutions, there is, undeniably, a visceral feeling of unease,” says Harfoush.

Psychologists, anthropologists and political historians call it “hyper-normalization” — a term first coined by historian Alexei Yurchak in his 2005 book, Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. In it, Yurchak describes the paradox of living in the Soviet Union before its dissolution in 1991. Back then, everyone knew the governing system was failing but no one could imagine something different, so politicians and citizens, alike, sustained the pretense of a functioning society. [“Sound familiar?” Harfoush asked us. “We’re seeing American society going through some of the same motions now—appearing functional, yet crumbling in some ways beneath the surface.”]

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In his 2016 documentary, HyperNormalisation, the British film maker Adam Curtis said Yurchak’s critique of late-Soviet life also applies well to what he calls the West’s decades-long slide into authoritarianism, something more Americans are now confronting head-on since the re-election of Donald Trump to the White House.

Curtis said Donald Trump is an example of a powerful politician who, rather than serve common values, has instead been openly using his position to “achieve retribution” against his political enemies, reward loyalty and hollow out institutions for personal and political gains. Trump’s America, Curtis says, is “similar to Yeltsin in Russia in the 1990s—promising a new kind of democracy, but in reality allowing the oligarchs to loot and distort the society.”

Harfoush said that watching systems unravel in real time can be frightening. She made her video, she says, “to reassure others that they’re not alone” nor misinterpreting the situation “nor simply imagining things.” By understanding that hyper-normalization is a tactic meant to discourage dissent, “we can better understand that we’re not alone in what we’re feeling, nor why,” she says.

Shutting Down

The late journalist Milton Mayer, in his 1955 book, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, said many German citizens were pressured with similar hyper-normalization tactics, which had the effect of putting them “in a state of freeze” during the rise of the Nazi party. “You didn’t want to act or even talk, alone,” he wrote. “You didn’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’”

Says Caroline Hickman, a psychologist and instructor at Bath University: “People don’t shut down because they don’t feel anything,” she told The Guardian. “They shut down because they feel too much.”

How to fight back? Earlier this month, I caught up with Timothy Snyder, an American historian, expert on authoritarianism and the author of “On Freedom.” He was speaking at a Chicago Humanities Festival event, and I asked him what it would take to beat back the creep of hyper-normalization during Trump’s second term.

“It’s patently obvious that there’s been a return of fascism around the world,” he said. “The signs are overwhelming. So why don’t we accept that? Why don’t we use the word ‘fascism’ when talking about all of this? It’s because if you do, then you have to organize, and with people you might not necessarily like,” Snyder told us. “Denying what’s happening now in America, on the other hand, creates a purely academic pursuit. You can sit in your office and edit a volume about how it’s not fascism, and that somehow, things in society will self-correct.” But Snyder added he doesn’t believe fascism and the hyper-normalization wave that is meant to accelerate its spread can be stopped without collective protests that are big, cross party lines and staged frequently. “If only 1% of the population turns out in force, as it has already, it can make a difference,” he said. “It’s time to start making that more than 1%, and now.”

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Pushing Back

Snyder and others we interviewed came up with a short list of ways American businesses and ordinary Americans might start to “wake up from the freeze of hyper-normalization” and start getting active:

• Listen to foreign leaders to learn about how other countries have dealt with similar slides toward authoritarianism. “There are actually a lot of German businessmen and women today and German foundations which can act on the basis of what they think they learned in the 1930s,” Snyder says. “Maybe this has already happened, but there is much to be said for some kind of summit, to be called between American and German CEOs, to talk about the threat of hyper-normalization and what can be done effectively to build resilience. Gathering people in Poland and other countries, too, would have a lot of insights to share.”

• Get active. “It’s easy to feel like you’re in a community already because you’re on TikTok,” says Betsy Harmann, the author of The America Syndrome, which explores the importance of resisting fear and doom-scrolling. “Genuine community is also about getting outside and talking to your neighbor and knowing that there’s someone out there who can help you if something really bad goes down.”

• Join an organizing group—now, or form one of your own. Indivisible.org, a nonprofit, has nearly 2,000 active groups registered across the country—and it’s growing. Its millions of members have been working to create the town halls, rallies, educational events and mass protests staged during these past three months, and have been successful. “If you think winning against the authoritarians is impossible, think again. Since Trump won in November, Indivisible has helped to launch or restart more than 1,200 chapters, reigniting a level of activity the organization hasn’t seen since the early days of Trump’s first term,” says Ezra Levin, co-founder. “And we’re just getting started.”

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  Have you, too, wondered about the state of the world during these times of rapid change and protest? Feel frozen? Share your take on how you think society is weathering the dissonance. As always, we love to share your comments with our growing community!

A new wave of master-planned communities is blending faith, patriotism, and shared values with modern amenities, reflecting a growing desire among some Americans for connection, identity, and purpose. Rooted in historical traditions, these developments are quietly reshaping—how and why—we choose where to live.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Establishing communities centered around shared religious and ideological values has deep historical roots in the United States. From the Puritan settlements in New England to the Amish enclaves in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, and to the Mormon corridor across the Western United States, groups have long sought to create environments where faith and daily life are seamlessly integrated.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, groups like the Shakers and the Amana Colonies created settlements that reflected their religious convictions, emphasizing communal living and shared resources. Similarly, although more successfully, the Amish have maintained their communities for nearly 300 years, characterized by simplicity, mutual aid, and a deliberate separation from modern societal influences.

This tradition has evolved over the past 20 years with the development of modern faith-based master-planned communities (MPCs), blending historical values with contemporary living and, in some cases, a heavy dose of patriotism.

Master-Planned

Contemporary faith-based MPCs aim to offer residents a lifestyle that aligns spiritual beliefs with modern amenities. Developments like Ave Maria in Florida were early leaders in this emerging trend. Founded in 2005 by the Ave Maria Development Company, a partnership between the Barron Collier Companies and the Ave Maria Foundation led by Catholic entrepreneur Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, Ave Maria was designed with Catholic values at its core. It features a central oratory and a Catholic university. The town was the first to develop under Florida's Rural Lands Stewardship Area program, which allows for more intensive development in exchange for land preservation. By 2025, Ave Maria had sold over 5,200 homes, with more than 11,000 anticipated at full build-out.

In Texas, Veritatis Splendor is another endeavor that works to create a Catholic community integrating spiritual growth with sustainable living. Spanning approximately 600 acres, the initial development plans included over 200 homes along with extensive community and commercial facilities. While the project has encountered some headwinds, including the need to sell off a portion of the land to pay off debts, the founders have adopted a “business-oriented leadership structure” to streamline operations and accelerate progress and believe they are back on track, working toward growing the community to more than 600 residents.

In Tennessee, Brewington Farms, a project of RidgeRunner, a company that develops and sells communities in rural clusters around small towns, is emerging as another faith-driven community tailored for conservative Christian families. This 448-acre “agrihood,” as they call it, is being developed in Jackson County to offer a blend of pastoral living and communal religious practices. The development is structured in phases, with plans to include residential lots and communal spaces that foster a close-knit, faith-oriented environment.

“People want to live in communities where they have a better shot of having alignment on some really basic political issues,” said Josh Abbotoy, founder and CEO of RidgeRunner, and self-described “conservative Christian who does land deals.”

Patriotism-Centric

Expanding the concept of value-based living, communities centered around patriotism have also begun to emerge. The 1776 Community is a notable example, combining elements of American patriotism with the American Dream of homeownership and, of course, traditional values. The movement's mission is to “advance American Patriotism at the zip code level and in new communities and neighborhoods in all 50 states.”

One of the inaugural developments, 1776 Gastonia in North Carolina, is a 55+ community that emphasizes national pride. Residents are encouraged to display the American flag year-round, symbolizing their commitment to the community's core values: “American patriotism, unity, honor the promise, do something, and give back.”

According to the developers, the community has garnered significant interest, with hundreds of inquiries before sales opened. However, reports have suggested that actual sales have been sluggish, which could be due to various factors, including pricing and interest rates, rather than a lack of interest in living there.

Innovations in Contemporary Faith-Based MPCs

While rooted in historical traditions, modern faith-based MPCs incorporate several innovative elements that distinguish them from their predecessors:

• Integration of Modern Amenities: Unlike earlier settlements that often prioritized simplicity, contemporary communities usually offer state-of-the-art facilities, including fitness centers, educational institutions, and commercial hubs, providing a holistic living experience.

• Structured Development Plans: These communities are meticulously planned, with phased developments and projected growth metrics. For instance, Veritatis Splendor anticipates a CAGR of 7.6% over seven years, reflecting a strategic approach to sustainable growth.

• Emphasis on Inclusivity and Outreach: While maintaining a core set of values, many of these communities actively seek to engage with the broader public, offering programs and events that invite participation from non-residents.

Anti-Inclusive?

Despite their appeal, faith-based MPCs face challenges:

• Inclusivity vs. Exclusivity: Balancing a faith-centered community ethos with inclusivity can be complex, requiring careful planning to ensure that the community remains welcoming while upholding its core values.

• Economic Accessibility: Ensuring that these communities are financially accessible to a diverse range of individuals is crucial to prevent socioeconomic homogeneity or a walled-off enclave.

• Regulatory Compliance: Developers must navigate zoning laws, fair housing regulations, and other legal considerations to ensure that the faith-based components of the community do not conflict with broader legal frameworks, which can be tricky.

Why They Matter

What makes the rise of faith-based and values-driven master-planned communities so compelling isn’t just their aesthetics or amenities—it’s what they reveal about the American psyche at this moment in time.

Americans are looking for more than just a place to live. They’re searching for connection, identity, and a sense of purpose. For some, that means returning to faith—not only as a personal belief system, but as the organizing principle of daily life. For others, it’s about aligning their home life with deeply held values, whether religious, cultural, or patriotic.

These communities, in effect, represent a kind of quiet cultural rebellion—a step away from the anonymity of modern suburbia, toward something more rooted, intentional, and cohesive. They also reflect a growing sentiment that lifestyle and belief should no longer be compartmentalized. Instead, the developers of these communities believe that faith, fellowship, and family can—and perhaps should—be integrated into the very design of where and how we live.

This raises some provocative questions for planners, policymakers, and cultural observers alike: What does it mean when people start building towns not just for shelter or proximity to work, but for shared belief? How might this reshape civic life, political engagement, or even the future of social infrastructure?

The development of these communities may signal a deeper societal shift, one that could quietly and potentially powerfully reshape America from the ground up in the years to come.

Americans have often used coded language to signal their values, either in the clothes they wear (white pantsuits) or the music they buy (Chappell Roan). But in recent months, in group chats, on Reddit and on X, people have also begun to “right-code” and “left-code” who’s who and what’s what. Will it make us more divided—or just better understood?

NEW YORK— We all now live in a world that asks us to rate—with “likes” or stars—nearly everything we experience today, from concerts to restaurants and (yes!) even root canals.

But now? Growing numbers of people are also being asked to start rating people and places on how politically and culturally conservative they are—or should be.

It’s already happening on Reddit, in group chats and on X. People are now vibe-coding each other, based on their political views and the right- or left-leaning cultures that go with them. Comedy and wrestling? Right-coded—along with Home Depot, clothes made by Orvis, Yellowstone, and the trailer for Tom Cruise’s latest Mission Impossible movie. Left-coded? Pope Leo, hoodies, and a recent media workshop I led at the University of Chicago, which made reference to Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show at this year’s Super Bowl. [White Lotus also got left-coded —but permanently, chiefly because of Season 3/Episode 5’s full-moon party in Thailand.]

“People have been drawing stereotypes about the left and right for a while now,” says Indivisible Founder and co-executive director Ezra Levin—but it began spiking after 2020, when the conservative political movement behind Trump began stepping up its use of sophisticated data to both target and refresh the nation’s ranks of active conservatives, based on issues and geographical data. “This spike in culture-coding is now something that doesn’t just take in how someone voted,” he said. It also digs deeper into geographical surroundings and algorithmically created media in support of conservative values.”

Code Switching

The trend began gaining momentum in the nation’s capitol, mostly due to Trump’s support for it. Additionally, an NBC poll of registered voters taken in March showed that a growing number of Republicans identify with MAGA supporters, including 71% of Republicans.

“When political power changes hands, the narratives used to discuss culture and policy changes too,” says Levin, and it can be empowering.

On the Columbia University campus, some members of the Columbia University College Republicans said they’re less afraid to identify themselves as being conservatives, and more people in social circles on the right are saying “it’s suddenly cool now to be on the right.”

Caroline Downey, 27, the Editor-in-Chief of The Conservateur, a right-wing women’s lifestyle magazine, was recently quoted by Emma Goldberg at The New York Times as saying the holistic health movement and conversations about women’s beauty are now being “conservative-coded” so conservatives can feel more “safe” to be fully expressed publicly about their political leanings.

Last month, Goldberg attended one of the magazine’s parties, which was held at a right-coded D.C. restaurant under the theme, “America is Hot Again.” Editors handed out right-coded party favors, served a drink named “God and Country” and gifted Trump-style red hats that read “Make America Hot Again.” Downey told Goldberg: “We are the zeitgeist now.”

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Place Matters

Driving the trend is a bigger data pool, scored by AI, which enables people to gain faster and deeper insights about today’s politics and how cultural identities are evolving.

Geography also plays a role. “The distribution of neighborhoods across America shows how much of our geographical surroundings can differ politically from one place to another, and often unintentionally,” says Francesca Paris, a data journalist for The New York Times, who created a deep study published last November entitled, “How Red and Blue America shop, eat and live.”

Based on heavy analysis of data points provided by the Overture Maps Foundation, Paris and co-producer Tim Wallace took the location of millions of different stores, restaurants, churches, parks (and more) and lined them up with the 2020 election results, down to the precinct. “We didn’t know who goes to each place but we knew how the neighborhoods surrounding each locale voted,” Francesca said. Many of the results played into some of the most common political stereotypes. Yoga studios and cocktail bars, for example, skew toward deeply blue spaces, while gun stores and farms skewed deeply toward redder precincts. “But they show how our politics, geography and lives intersect, and not always in obvious ways.”

Certain activities, like golf—right-coded—need space and in the more rural parts of the country, which tend to vote for Republicans. Some grocery stores, like Piggly Wiggly, for example, also mostly code right because they serve redder states in the South, while Food Lion groceries are spread across a more politically blue area in the Southwest.

“Taken all together, the data patterns in all of this are a reminder of how big and varied the country is—in its places and in its politics, so if we can better understand the politics of place, we can better understand what influences our perceptions and divisions.”

Let’s hope the transparency and data being shared in these early days of culture-coding will give us a better understanding of the often subtle messages about identity groups we like and those we don’t—and learn new ways to reshape and de-code what divides us.

Heard some codes we haven’t? Please share in the comments section, and thank you, always, for making us an important part of your reading!

We are living in an age of chaos and baffling velocity. There’s a growing desire for security, and for “more leaders willing to listen before they speak,” says John Della Volpe, Director of Polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics.

NEW YORK—We need to slow down.

That’s what a variety of leading pollsters are hearing right now from a majority of Americans, young and old.

“We’ve had nearly 30 years of constant innovation and political and technological disruption. But lately, something else has emerged from our collective digital and political fatigue,” says Amy Lanzi, the CEO of Digitas North America. According to a recent Digitas and Vox Media poll of American consumers, many of us are bewildered, and desperately seeking respite from relentless change. “Across generations, 72% of people now prefer stability, consistency and familiar routines” over frequent innovation and change.

“It’s not about looking for the good old days,” Lanzi says. Americans “just want a chance to catch their collective breath while they absorb the flurry of information surrounding the rapid changes which have already woven their way into our daily lives.”

Bewildered

Gen Zers, pollsters say, are scrambling to make sense of it all. Like most people, they want financial stability, says Harvard’s 2025 Youth Poll, an annual exploration of young people’s attitudes about the world. No surprise there.

But what makes this year’s just-released survey unique, according to Director John Della Volpe, is the surge of responses citing “the unstable nature of many things, all at once”—work, finances, relationships, politics and government.

Maybe it’s still a hangover from the pandemic, Della Volpe says—or maybe it’s about what 90% of American consumers surveyed recently by Digitas say is the way today’s most popular news and social media content can make us feel more politically and irreversibly agitated, uncertain and divided. Or, Lanzi says, maybe it’s about how 75% of the younger Americans feel increasingly disconnected from older generations, “and increasingly distrust traditional institutions.”

Whichever, Gen Zers—especially—are becoming impatient. “As young Americans continue to lose faith in government institutions, the need for politicians and business leaders to listen to and learn from young people has never been greater,” says Jordan Schwartz, the Student Chair of the Youth Poll project. Della Volpe says that “as the nation confronts generational turnover and an increasingly volatile political climate, what Gen Z needs isn’t another lecture, but genuine recognition of its struggles and leaders willing to listen before they speak.”

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Survey Highlights

The Digitas/Vox Media survey, Controlling the Chaos: Finding Stability in the Innovation Era, says Americans, especially Gen Zers, have “eroding trust in government and institutions” and are now “demanding even more from brands—transparency, security, and authenticity.” For marketers, the survey says, this is a make-or-break moment. “Brands which provide stability—consistent and permanent attributes over time while embracing innovation—will shine and build lasting loyalty; those which can’t will fade into the noise.”

Other take-aways from the latest Digitas/Vox Media consumer survey and Harvard’s 2025 Youth Poll suggest optimism about the future is also fading:

• More than 4 in 10 young Americans under 30 are barely getting by financially, with women and non-college youth hit the hardest. Women, the Harvard poll says, are experiencing a gender wage gap, and half of young adults without a college degree said they have a tougher time finding jobs with adequate pay compared to 29% of college graduates.

• Traditional family milestones are being put on hold. Only half (48%) of young Americans now say having kids is important—the lowest ranking among six life goals measured. Fear of the immediate future is woven into some of that sentiment, pollsters say. Marriage also is being delayed, with just 57% of Gen Zers now saying they want it, and political divisions are reshaping romantic relationships for a majority of young women (53%), compared to 42% of young men. [The gap is even wider across party lines, according to the Harvard’s Institute of Politics, with 70% of Democrats valuing political alignment with a partner versus 48% of Republicans and 39% of independents.]

• Less than half of Americans now feel a sense of community—and only 17% say they're deeply connected to one. Nearly 1 in 3 feel no strong sense of belonging or are still searching for it—yet the Digitas survey said more Gen Zers are beginning to find resilience in new ways by building “connection loops” to “transform individual anxiety into collective creativity” for social good. “The present-day rise in political protests is building a greater sense of belonging,” the survey says.

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• Just 15% of the Gen Zers in the Harvard survey say the country is headed “in the right direction.” Fewer than 1 in 3 of young people now approve of President Trump or Congress. Meanwhile, Gen Z’s approval of Democrats in Congress has also plummeted — by half since 2020. But Trump’s gains with young voters “are now the very ones showing the most volatility,” Della Volpe says.

• Three-quarters of the Digitas/Vox Media survey participants, regardless of age, politics, region or background, agree that political and economic anxiety cuts across traditional divides, uniting rural conservatives and urban progressives in a shared experience of financial vulnerability.

• Two-thirds of Americans surveyed by Digitas/Vox Media said they haven’t abandoned traditional dreams, but they’ve lost faith in traditional institutions to deliver them. This, Lanzi says, explains why so many younger Americans are simultaneously embracing alternative systems—from cryptocurrency and the creator economy to side hustles.

New Rules

“The stories we tell about ourselves and the world become the lenses through which we see reality,” says Digitas’ Lanzi. When 77% of Gen Z in the U.S. feels disconnected from a lot of today’s messaging about politics and the economy, she added, “we need new narratives that re-connect and re-engage.”

Della Volpe says he began the annual Harvard Youth Poll because not enough young people were participating in politics. “This generation of young people hasn’t seen America united and now is insisting on greater stability, and to be heard.”

“Stability is the new luxury,” Lanzi says. “It is now being sought by most people—and brands and organizations need to hear this.”

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President Trump has called Steven Cheung—his new White House Communications Director and architect of Trump’s new “battle-rhythm messaging”—his “sumo wrestler.” Trump is fiery, and so is his new communications media. “It sticks,” Cheung has told reporters, “because attention is the most scarce resource in today’s media world.”

NEW YORK—I remember being a very young White House correspondent for Hearst News when I was assigned, in the early 1990s, to cover President George H.W. Bush’s trip to Japan for an economic summit. Midway through it, Bush, stricken with the stomach flu, famously fell ill during a state dinner, and vomited on Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s lap.

NPR’s news stories—and mine—were shared internationally. [YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and the rest weren’t yet invented, and White House press managers were rarely a big part of the action at state dinners back then.] Regardless, Bush’s blunder, as it was later called, became instant fodder for headline writers and late-night comedians on Saturday Night Live.

But something else happened that night. Bill Clinton—the elder Bush’s adversary in that year’s presidential race—refrained entirely from using the incident to mock Bush among voters for what happened. In an interview years later, Clinton explained “it was out of respect for the man and the office of the president at that moment. It could have happened to anyone.”

Fast forward to today, three months into Donald Trump’s second term, and that traditional Oval Office practice of telegraphing empathy in times of crisis seems to have—for Trump—gone the way of the phone booth. The shock-and-awe of Trump’s new communications strategy encourages aggressive trolling of political opponents, 24-7, about nearly everything, everywhere, all at once.

Supercharging Persuasion

“Trump has become the nation’s first media influencer president,” says Drew Harwell, who covers the White House’s digital strategy for The Washington Post. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told Atlantic writer Elaine Godfrey in a recent interview that American political language “has been due for a supercharge.” Cheung acknowledges that Trump’s in-your-face campaign will continue.

It’s not hyperbole. Since Trump took office again in January, the White House has been building Trump’s strongman image by pumping out new collections of personal insults about his political enemies, creating provocative issues videos, and flame-throwing social media attacks in tones used by no U.S. presidential administration before Trump’s. [Trump says Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer remains “the weirdest man in Washington,” former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remains a “crazy, horrible human being.” And Taylor Swift? “I hate her,” he has posted, more than once.]

So what’s new this time around?

During his first term, Trump was a more isolated voice on Twitter and a no-show on TikTok, and his communications team was smaller and roiled in division over how aggressive his messaging should be. But this term, in the Trump 2.0 era, the new communications team is operating as if his 2024 campaign never ended, and is helping Trump’s messaging to become even more aggressive.

Building a war room

Trump’s team inherited the traditional White House press operation and now is totally engaged in a “modernized re-vamp” to turn the West Wing into a war room, staffed by a 20-member “Rapid Response team,” a digital video group and a social media team that includes AI image-makers. All of these sub-groups now function as Trump’s avatars, and unlike last time, communications team members share both similar attitudes and ideologies. [Trump’s video team calls itself “the Clippers”—people who watch live video, full-time, to pull segments out of what’s shown on TV and post them online quickly to start building up viral attention. Trump’s social media team, simultaneously, writes the tweets and Instagram posts. That team also works with image designers, who make or curate, retouch and resize digital images, as needed, to align with political messaging.]

It’s not much different than what large, media-savvy organizations do to assemble their social media teams and 24-7 brand messaging. Trump’s new team is bringing this kind of operation to the White House—and its goal is to deploy it at a size and speed not yet achieved by a President of the United States.

“These teams are totally disciplined, organized and synchronized on message,” Harwell said in a recent podcast interview. “And they’re unapologetic.” White House team leaders compare it to smash mouth football—a style of play in American football that emphasizes a powerful and very combative approach to offense. One of the more viral examples? The Valentine’s Day card put out over the White House’s official social media accounts. It was seen by millions, and was made to mimic the playful tone of most memes. It read: “Roses are red, violets are blue. Come here illegally, and we’ll deport you.” The card featured a scowling photo of President Trump next to a headshot of Border Czar Tom Homan.

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In a recent podcast segment about the new strategy with tech influencer Taylor Lorenz, Post writer Harwell said Cheung’s new communications team “is not quibbling or debating policy. They’re not recognizing nuance. It’s just ‘we’re going to hit you in the face with the message and the political talking points that we want to get across, over and over again, and if you agree with us? That’s great. If you don’t, maybe you’ll see the messaging so much that you’ll start to agree.’”

In other words? What was once unthinkable—trolling, cruelty, ASMR deportation videos, 24-7 response messaging—has become part of the strategy.

Trump 2.0

Here are some of Trump’s new communication goals for his second term, which are helping to shape a new type of White House messaging apparatus to support his aggressive re-set of how America is run—for better or worse:

• Full spectrum dominance. Cheung uses this military term to describe the Trump team’s push to win media dominance. Trump is made “the star” in most of what’s shared, and, says Harwell, “not just on TV, not just on radio, not just owning the headlines on print and websites, but all over social media, too. … It’s everything anyone can talk about to be mostly about Trump.”

• More issues videos. The new team is using different kinds of niche video formats to build emotional influence and credibility. The ASMR video that went viral recently, mocking deportations of illegal immigrants, was widely criticized when posted on the White House’s official social media accounts and re-posted by Elon Musk earlier this year. Using ASMR technology—designed to trigger feelings of pleasure and calm—the video featured a giant transport jet and highlighted the sounds of the jet engines and visuals of the handcuffs and sounds of the chains used to capture the men who were being marched onto a plane for deportation. Cheung has told reporters that the video, when posted, received 200 million views and 886,000 engagements across X and Instagram. Lorenz says “dehumanizing cruelty is the point”of Trump’s use of this technology and says the Trump team plans to make more ASMR videos to share with supporters.

• Continued use of AI-generated images. Last fall, Trump posted on Truth Social an image of what appeared to be Vice President Kamala Harris addressing a Soviet-style rally, complete with a Communist hammer-and-sickle flag. The image went viral. Trump’s team says it will be experimenting with more “issues-oriented images” to visually describe its stance on people and issues going forward.

• Continued efforts to insert Trump into popular culture discussions and narratives. Conservative commentators are leveraging the Blake Lively vs. Baldoni dust-up to dismantle support for #MeToo and persuade more people to support Trump.

• Promote Trump as a “king.” Trump’s communications team is working to align Trump, when able, with king metaphors and images. In February, the team created an AI-generated magazine cover resembling TIME magazine’s man-of-the-year covers, and posted it on Instagram and other social media platforms to show Trump wearing a crown above the caption, Long live the king!

“From the White House perspective, the new messaging is that Trump is the strongman. He is running the show. He’s somebody you want to trust. He’s somebody using his power to change the world,” the Post’s Harwell says.

Many voters are still treating Trump’s win last November as a profound change in American politics, with the president and his allies claiming that his victory—the third narrowest since World War II—represents a “sweeping mandate” and “vibe shift.” Now, as public criticism expands against Trump’s DOGE cuts, his trade tariffs and his harsh deportation tactics, Trump’s communications team is redoubling efforts to characterize and underscore its description of his win as a “clear mandate.”

The team’s methods can be seen as being brutal, says Lorenz, who covered Trump’s digital strategy for the Post before his second term began. But she also says White House leaders believe they are effective. “It works,” Lorenz says, “so now they want more of that.”

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Dissatisfied with today’s increasing complexity, political chaos and polarization, people of all ages are longing for simpler times, and businesses and politicians are stepping up their nostalgia marketing to meet demand. Here’s a brief look at the trend.

NEW YORK—Flip phones. Vinyl records. Low-rise jeans. Point-and-shoot film cameras. Boom boxes. Mix tapes. Wrist watches needing manual re-winds. Print books and magazines. Fur boas. Stranger Things.

Pre-digital. Analog only, with a twist.

Ironic? For a while now, generations Z and Alpha—the world’s youngest and most digitally immersed generations—have been embracing aesthetic and analog elements from eras they never experienced first-hand. According to the Human Flourishing Lab and other research, Gen Z digital natives have unprecedented access to the past online, chiefly the pre-digital 1980s, “and are driven by their search for stability in a rapidly changing world.”

But this year, says Mike Bechtel, managing director and chief futurist at Deloitte Consulting, “2025 is becoming so politically turbulent, intense and economically uncertain, the entire country needs a little escapism—and that need is being reflected in a shift in consumer preferences for products representing, or at least referencing, simpler times.”

It’s not so hard to figure out why. “When was the last time you felt secure about the future?” Gen Z influencer Deja Foxx said in a podcast interview I had with her last month at SXSW. “For Gen Z, who came of age during a pandemic, climate crisis, economic uncertainty and now today’s increasingly ugly, polarized social and political landscape, the answer may be—never.”

But it’s not just Gen Z that’s taking some refuge in remixing the past.

What some culture watchers are now calling “new-stalgia”—a desire for familiarity combined with novelty—involves reimagining and revitalizing past elements to create resilience in the present.

Fear Factor

In today’s political, economic, social and environmental climate, we’re not just looking to the past for comfort. We’re also scrambling for clues to help us navigate the future.

Here are a few of the most prevalent forces both driving and tapping into today’s new-stalgia trend:

• Americans are both angry and unhappy—and worry about the future. “Looking at the past to slow down the present” influenced last year’s global elections and some of the cultural shifts now being experienced in the U.S. and Europe, says this year’s World Happiness Report. In this annual, Gallup-led survey of how more than 100 countries rank their well-being, the U.S. has fallen to its lowest level of happiness (24th) since the survey launched in 2012. The United Kingdom (23rd) also has tumbled, and both nations are still reeling from “a rise in political polarization and anti-system voting … including the election of Donald Trump in 2024.” A steep decline in social trust and “life satisfaction” is “pushing groups of people … to support anti-system and populist political parties,” the report said. “ …Low-trust people are found more often on the far right, whereas high-trust people are more inclined to vote for the far left.” Taking comfort in the past eases fear.

• New-stalgia promotes ‘belonging.’ For generations Z and Alpha, new-stalgia has materialized into a longing for “better memories never lived” in a simpler time—a powerful hook for companies and politicians looking to rethink connection and expand community engagement. “For a generation managing their personal brands across multiple platforms while navigating an overwhelming news cycle, there’s something deeply appealing to younger consumers about eras when phones were just phones and social media didn’t exist,” says Deloitte’s Bechtel. Authenticity also matters. Gatorade’s “It Hasn’t Changed” ad campaign uses nostalgic, black-and-white images of famous athletes in action from its commercials aired since its founding in 1965. The goal: to remind and reassure consumers, new and old, that the company’s 60-year mission—to help all athletes fulfill their potential—endures.

• New-stalgia is fashionable. At January’s Paris fashion week, nostalgia was, for some designers, a defining theme. Dior chief designer Maria Grazia Chirui told AFP.com, the Paris-based news agency, that her Spring-Summer 2025 collection was “inspired by the creativity of past centuries,” while designer Zuhair Murad, who has been working with his homeland of Lebanon under Israeli bombardment, said his collection was “inspired by the nostalgia of past peace, and also by the idea of a tropical island that would be a refuge from the harsh realities of life.” Vogue and Elle fashion journalist Lara Johnson-Wheeler says that for many of the 2025-2026 Fall-Winter collections, fashion designers “have been approaching nostalgia positively by … treating memory lane like an escape, like our allotted exercise time outdoors—actively engaging in it to find peace and stability in troubled times.”

• New-stalgia is influencing corporate strategies for the future of work. A 2021 article by writer Clay Routledge in the Harvard Business Review argued, post-COVID, that nostalgia “is an important psychological resource that helps individuals cope with life’s stressors, build strong relationships, find and maintain meaning in life, and become more creative and inspired.” Routledge says nostalgia’s influence remains strong. Historically, it wasn’t always celebrated. In the 17th Century, it was thought to be a mental malady and a potentially deadly disease. But today, says Tim Wildschut, a professor of social psychology at England’s University of Southampton, nostalgia is widely considered to be both a creative mindset and emotion which can help people socialize, feel empathy and find more meaning in life.

The downside?

In a world of unrest and instability, new-stalgia can “act as a comfort blanket,” Deloitte’s Bechtel adds, “but be wary, too.” He says new-stalgia also can be used by politicians to re-frame history for political advantage. In politics, nostalgia has sometimes been used to alter, re-frame or exploit our memories of the past—often to increase sales, win close elections or to justify potentially unpopular policy changes.

Trump signed an executive order last week entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which directs Vice President Vance to eliminate what Trump calls “divisive race-centered ideology” from Smithsonian museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo. “Museums in our nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” Trump said, referring to recent exhibitions about the country’s history of both struggle and success living up to the tenets of democracy, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Deloitte’s Bechtel says studying the past provides lessons for the future. “When one way of running the world seems to be exhausted, but the next has yet to come into being, the past can hold some important lessons,” Bechtel said in an interview. “When nothing seems to make sense, history becomes an important discipline. But the best way to harness the past demolishes prejudice and opens creative horizons and helps people to decide what to bring with them and what to leave behind as they keep moving forward.

“This (new-stalgia) trend is still evolving but will remain an important reflection of how the world sees us and how we see ourselves going forward.”

What do you think? Is playing to nostalgia by marketers and some politicians helping to preserve the status quo, disrupt it—or move us with less fear through turbulence and uncertainty into the future?

Please share your comments with us. We always love to hear your take and new insights on cultural trends in this turbulent time!

Boycotting Tesla dealerships, slow-walking DOGE orders, showing up at town halls and red state capitals, re-casting Happy Hours as ‘Angry Hours’ for ‘pissed-off’ co-workers—ordinary Americans are now doing some DIY organizing of their own. This time, they say, power needs to rise outside Washington, without the establishment pulling all the strings.

CHICAGO—A few weeks ago, I was invited by some fellow creatives to attend an event they were calling our community’s first “Angry Hour.” They defined it as a “Happy Hour for ‘pissed-off’ optimists who can tell that the world is broken but who still hold hope that we can repair it.”

Curious, I couldn’t resist. A group of us, blue and red, packed into a place called Surge Billiards, a popular bar and high-end pool hall in this city’s trendy Logan Square neighborhood, grabbed a few beers and pierogies, and soon, close to 80 people had also shown up. Each of us were then handed a Sharpie and a fill-in-the-blanks name tag. Would we describe ourselves as being “pissed-off?” or “optimistic?” (Circle one and write why.) I circled “optimistic” and, seeing a few others do the same, I wrote “mobilizing opportunity.”)

It was an ice-breaker. Soon, the room thundered with shared tales of anger at Congress and swapped stories about how the recent funding cuts tied to Project 2025 would be putting a freeze on creative work for nonprofit clients. Others shared stories about friends fired from federal jobs joining class action lawsuits to fight what they called “the Trump/Musk power grab.” A few people slapped Post-It notes onto a wall near the bar to share some state funding resources which could be tapped to keep projects going—regardless of how things might ultimately play out.

There was no specific agenda. Organizers said they were just offering a way to help build up relationships and connections to prepare for what they called “the coming storm” and its aftermath, for better or worse.

More Signal, Less Noise

Fast forward a few weeks to now, and it’s impossible to not see and hear that hundreds, if not of thousands of other ordinary Americans have also begun to self-organize, on their own, as the new Trump administration continues to downsize the federal government.

Federal workers unions, defense veterans, national park rangers, scientists, women’s groups, postal workers and civil rights groups—are also organizing, and they are among dozens of citizen groups pairing up with national organizing networks like Indivisible and MoveOn to gain new leverage and reach.

Left-leaning media people also are pushing ahead. The new progressive podcast, the MeidasTouch, is now getting nearly as much listenership in some weeks as is Trump’s favorite podcaster, Joe Rogan. Another radio show, Pod Save America, the progressive podcast hosted by former aides to former President Barack Obama, is also getting new attention. It has clocked a 70 percent increase in hours played on Spotify since mid-January.

Meanwhile, the right-leaning media site, The Bulwark, is also stepping forward. Last week, it launched Bulwark+, which Bulwark Editor Jonathan Last describes as the Substack news site's move to build “a community that is going to be part of a broader solidarity movement.” In a recent post entitled How to Think (and Act) Like a Dissident Movement, Last writes: “…We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it, and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states.”

It’s true that none of the recent rallies and protests which other self-organized citizens are creating or attending come even close in flash and size to the 2017 anti-Trump uprisings witnessed just after the president’s first weeks in the White House. The 2017 Women’s March in Washington, for example, was, at the time, the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, held on the day after Trump was first sworn into office.

“It’s different this time—smaller, but what’s happening now is just as important,” says American Historian Heather Cox-Richardson. “We’re seeing a different kind of power building now, by the people, frustrated and feeling like they have to get involved and push back if nobody else will. …It already seems to be building some new kinds of steady and sustained momentum.” Adds journalist Ali Velshi: “It’s starting to organize something that could change the political landscape, too, as many Americans look for new leaders who will show up to fight for and with them in these coming months and years.”

“The Left Still Has a Pulse”

Nobody understands this better than Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Velshi says—two progressive icons who have begun to push both red and blue voters across the country to pursue a new path forward— and says journalist Emily Witt, “show people that the left still has a pulse.”

Sanders and AOC embarked last week on a national tour called “Fighting Oligarchy,” and the turnout has been unexpectedly large: 34,000 attended their Denver rally Friday, making it the largest rally of Sanders’ career and the largest held in Denver since Barack Obama held a rally there in 2008. Another 23,000 people attended their rally in Tuscon on Saturday; an estimated 15,000 turned out in Tempe, Arizona, earlier in the week. “We need to be reaching dissatisfied voters in both parties,” Ocasio says, “where they’re at.”

A recent poll by Statista shows that 60% of Americans are getting uncomfortable with Trump’s efforts to shrink the government and oppose the closure of the federal Department of Education, while recession fears and Elon Musk continue now to batter Trump’s approval ratings and show some soft spots within his MAGA base of support. A March 13th Quinnipiac survey shows that concerns over the U.S. economy are actually more intense now than they were at the end of the Biden Administration, with the percentage of voters describing the economy as “not so good” or “poor” increasing to 76%, up from 64% in December.

What’s Ahead?

National organizing groups like Third Act, Indivisible and MoveOn have set April 5th as Hands Off Day, encouraging people to rally nationally against Trump/Musk cuts being made in everything from Social Security programs to veterans services to NATO funding and cancer research.

“If we’re going to successfully defend democracy, our economy and the rule of law in America, it will be because civil society rises to do so, and the people, not the politicians, start to put pressure on those in power,” says Taylor Lorenz, the author of Extremely Online and the User Mag newsletter on Substack. Taylor said in a recent podcast that “freeing ordinary citizens to speak up and step forward creates the conditions for the opponents of Trump and MAGA to win future elections—but not because the establishment is pulling the strings. …These new forms of organizing efforts by ordinary citizens will help create the foundations for a stronger path forward, beyond the kinds of politics no longer working.”

Will the momentum continue? It’s too soon to tell, but Velshi says the recent surge of small and large protests against Trump is very unusual to see this early in a president’s four-year term of office.

“Just think about it for a second,” he said over the weekend. “Tens of thousands of people—not just blue but even some red voters are also now feeling pushed aside—and are showing up for rallies.”

“…Trump just took office a couple months ago and the midterms are still more than a year and a half away,” he said. “This is unheard of. There is something new happening here, and it cannot be underestimated nor overlooked.”

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NOTE: Updated 3-27 to

President Trump’s plans to drastically cut federal funding for disaster preparedness and response—targeting programs like FEMA and eliminating the Office of Community Planning and Development—could shift the burden of disaster management from the federal government to states, localities, and individuals. Critics warn that these measures, aligned with conservative efforts to reduce federal cost-shares, could leave vulnerable communities in disaster-prone areas with inadequate support and risk repeating historical failures in disaster management.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—President Donald Trump is swiftly moving to cut or significantly reduce federal funding for disaster preparedness, emergency response initiatives, and climate resilience programs. The 2025 proposals encompass significant funding shifts for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the removal of emergency preparedness grants, and the rollback of federal flood protection standards—modifications that could redefine the country’s strategy for disaster management and response, transferring risk from the federal government to states, local governments, and individuals.

Just last week, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration announced plans to all but eliminate the Office of Community Planning and Development. This office, part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, oversees America’s recovery from the largest disasters made worse by climate change. The move raises questions about how the United States will rebuild from natural disasters and who will foot the bill for those efforts.

"The Trump orders undermine regulation that helps us combat climate change in a lot of different ways,” according to Abrahm Lustgarten, author of On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. “The regulations we have now improve efficiency for consumer products, like fuel economy standards for cars or energy ratings for your appliances, and so one effect is that consumers won’t have availability of products that are actually cheaper for them to run, right? It will cost more to drive your car. It will cost more to dry your clothes … None of these things are very quick or immediate changes. But they will trickle out over time and have a significant impact on people’s resiliency in the face of the changes that are happening."

The administration’s stance aligns with recommendations from Project 2025, a policy blueprint from the conservative Heritage Foundation that advocates shifting disaster costs from the federal government to the states. In addition to pulling back regulations, one key proposal in the plan suggests reducing the federal cost-share for disasters from the current 75% to just 25% for smaller-scale disasters while capping federal contributions for larger catastrophes. Such a move would leave state and local governments and individuals shouldering a greater share of the costs.

"I think, frankly, FEMA's not good," Trump said. "I think when you have a problem like this, I think you want to go, and whether it's a Democrat or Republican governor, you want to use your state to fix it and not waste time calling FEMA."

These proposed cuts are expected to disproportionately impact lower-income people living in disaster-prone areas along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and fire-prone regions of the Western United States. However, as Hurricane Helene illustrated in 2024, even areas deemed relatively immune from climate disasters are now in nature’s crosshairs.

Repeating Disasters

America’s long history of managing climate disasters has been uneven, and the current iteration, known broadly as FEMA, is relatively new, launched by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Gutting FEMA and its related programs could take us back to a time nearly 100 years ago, outside of almost every living American’s memory, when the federal government took a hands-off approach to disaster management and recovery. The results could be disastrous.

On April 15, 1927, the Great Mississippi Flood—one of the most destructive in U.S. history—occurred when the Mississippi River and its tributaries breached levee systems in multiple locations. The disaster inundated more than 27,000 square miles across Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana—an area roughly the size of New England—killing up to 1,000 people and displacing 700,000, most of them Black sharecroppers. At a time when the federal government’s entire budget was just $3 billion, the flood caused an estimated $1 billion in damage.

In its aftermath, President Calvin Coolidge appointed Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover to lead the federal disaster response, primarily coordinating private relief efforts. The Red Cross provided food and shelter to hundreds of thousands in temporary camps, while Hoover made public appeals for donations. He later praised the response, saying, “No other Main Street in the world could have done what the American Main Street did in the Mississippi flood … The safety of the United States is its multitudinous mass leadership.”

Historians widely disagree with Hoover’s rosy assessment and concur that the 1927 flood exposed major flaws in disaster response, particularly the federal government’s reluctance to take direct responsibility and the racial inequities in relief efforts—Blacks were forced to labor in the recovery efforts, for instance. It ultimately spurred reforms in disaster management but also deepened racial and economic divides, accelerating the Great Migration as many displaced Black Southerners sought better opportunities in the North.

There was also political fallout. Hoover’s lack of direct action for displaced Black communities contributed to a shift of Black voters away from the Republican Party to the Democrats in the following years.

“The '27 flood was really the first time we began to really think about, what does it mean to be in this particular space that's vulnerable? What does it mean to be in this particular space where you are vulnerable as a citizen? And what do people try to do after a disaster to better their situation? And I think that's one of the lasting legacies of the 1927 flood,” said Richard M. Mizelle Jr., Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston and Co-Editor of the Environmental History's Futures Series in an interview with NPR’s “Throughline.”

Blue State, Red State, Rich State, Poor State

The proposed cuts have drawn sharp criticism from disaster experts, emergency responders, and lawmakers—some of them Republicans from disaster-prone states. And for a good reason, since so-called red states receive more federal dollars than they pay via taxes for nearly everything, including disaster relief.

“From 2018 to 2022, individuals and organizations from blue states contributed nearly 60% of all federal tax receipts but only received 53% of all federal contributions to states in the form of either direct payments, grants, contracts, or wages,” according to reporting from Time Magazine earlier this year. “Meanwhile, red states were only responsible for 40% of federal tax receipts but received 47% of all federal contributions to states. A 7% differential that in effect equates to a more than $1 trillion transfer payment from blue states to red states, amounting to $4,300 per capita, compared to the instance where their respective fair shares were paid.”

Red states have also disproportionately benefited from President Joe Biden’s signature legislation, like the Inflation Reduction Act, by as much as fivefold.

Shifting risk away from the federal government and onto the states would mean that every jurisdiction across the U.S. would have to fend for itself when wildfires, hurricanes, and floods occur. Some states would shift the risk again, but this time onto local governments and individuals, while others would create their own FEMA-like entities and regulatory frameworks. Regardless, Trump’s approach would likely establish a very uneven patchwork of regulations where most blue states could shoulder the financial burden while many red states would struggle. Rich Americans would be able to weather the worst, while poor Americans would be left behind.

“States prone to frequent disasters, such as Louisiana and Florida, would face expensive recurring challenges that would likely exacerbate recovery delays and reduce their overall resilience,” wrote Ming Xie Assistant Professor of Emergency Management and Public Health, University of Maryland, Baltimore County earlier this year. “Smaller, more rural and less wealthy states that lack the financial resources and logistical capabilities to respond effectively would be disproportionately affected.”

Congress has historically resisted deep cuts to disaster preparedness and relief, often restoring funds despite Trump’s earlier budget proposals. The 2025 budget battle will likely see bipartisan pushback against the most severe reductions, especially from lawmakers representing disaster-prone regions. However, with Trump prioritizing spending cuts and deregulation, disaster policy is once again a battleground issue with high stakes for millions of Americans.

“FEMA can’t go away,” said Senator John Kennedy (R-La.), who just last week reintroduced the bipartisan Helping Eliminate Limitations for Prompt (HELP) Response and Recovery Act with Senator Gary Peters (D-Mich.), which would enable FEMA to respond to disasters and other emergencies “effectively and promptly.” “The first job of the federal government is to protect people and property.”

As extreme weather events grow more frequent and costly, the question remains: Will the nation be ready when the next disaster strikes, and who should pay for it? Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

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With “big lies” in politics now at historic highs and public trust at historic lows, many political leaders, scholars and researchers agree today’s falsehood firehose is hurting us all. “Lies are lies—and can’t simply be excused anymore as a ‘form of free speech’ nor justified as ‘a negotiating strategy,’” says Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checker Bill Adair. “Exposing falsehoods is not censorship,” he says. It’s a reality check.

NEW YORK — These first five weeks of Donald Trump’s return to the White House have whizzed by at a blistering pace. His lies have been fast and furious, too.

In speeches, interviews, exchanges with reporters and posts on social media circling the globe, Trump has been filling public statements not only with exaggerations but also with outright fabrications—some of them repeats, and others new and bizarre. The latest whopper has to do with Ukraine and his talks with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

• No, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not start the war with Russia, a claim Putin has made, but which Trump also made for the first time last week, sending bipartisan shockwaves across the United States and Europe. Russia came into Ukraine three years ago this week, with the intent to topple Ukraine’s democracy and its government and seize the country.

• Zelenskyy is not a dictator. Trump, again parroting Putin, made the same claim last week, shocking most Americans and U.S. allies around the world. “Politicians can have their opinions but universal facts are facts,” says Michael McFaul, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia. “Saying this has made Trump look weak.”

• Europe is not “loaning money to Ukraine and will get their money back” —which is what Trump asserted Monday during a joint news conference broadcast globally from the White House with French President Emmanuel Macron. [Macron, interrupting Trump to correct that falsehood, said: “No. In fact, to be frank, we (Europe) paid (Ukraine) 60% of its total defaults … real money, to be clear.” Europe has frozen $230 billion in Russian assets, Macron said, “but this is not a collateral of a loan.” If, as part of a negotiation with Europe, Russia decides to give Europe those assets, “super,” Macron said. Those frozen assets would then be a loan that Russia would have to pay for, not Ukraine, he said.]

• And no, Trump’s government cost-cutters have not yet given Americans an accurate list of the “waste, fraud and abuse”they say they’re carving out of the government budget. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier this month that Trump’s cost-cutters discovered a Biden-era plan to spend $50 million “to fund condoms in Gaza.” But that was another piece of fiction. There was no such program nor spend, so no cost savings there. Yet Trump, rather than acknowledge the falsehood, not only repeated the $50 million figure the next day, he added the incendiary claim that the condoms were “for Hamas.” Then, a few days later, when it became obvious the $50 million figure was pure fiction, he inflated it to $100 million. No correction, no remorse.

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Grievance Culture

That Trump continues to traffic in falsehoods should come as no surprise. Politicians, in greater numbers, now say social media have made it easier for all politicians to lie, especially those who believe they’ll score more points than they’ll lose with angry voters. During his 2024 campaign, Trump told quite a few big lies, like the one claiming the new migrants to Springfield, Ohio, were “invaders” who were kidnapping neighbors’ pet dogs and cats, and then eating them—a total break with reality. Still, in his campaign’s anti-immigrant fury, many Trump supporters either fell for it, or were willing to look the other way if it helped Trump to beat former Vice President Kamala Harris to the White House.

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual, global poll measuring citizen sentiment, “anger against the status quo is running so high, that fear has turned to anger and most recently to grievance to be acted upon with whatever works to make change,” says CEO Richard Edelman. According to the company’s 2025 Trust Report, 40% of the 33,000 people surveyed in the United States and in 28 countries around the world said they would approve of people spreading disinformation if it was used to bring about social change—a feeling most prevalent among respondents, ages 18 to 34.

During Trump’s first term in office, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker team counted 492 false or misleading claims made during his first 100 days in office, and 30,573 lies over his first four years in the White House. Yet back then, Trump got minimal pushback. “It was like driving on the Autobahn. If you could far exceed the speed limit without any risk of getting a speeding ticket, you’re going to break the law. In the case of politics, many times it has been the same thing,” says Bill Adair, a Pulitzer Prize winning fact checker and author of Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More and How it Could Burn Down Our Democracy.

Democrats lie, too. President Joe Biden and his supporters had been lying for months about Biden’s waning fitness for office, until visual examples of Biden’s age frailties—tripping up the stairs to Air Force One at least several times and giving a disastrously unsteady performance in his debate against Trump— became harder to spin and to hide.

While both sides lie, Adair says his dozens of candid interviews for his book with politicians, political operatives and experts in misinformation found that Republicans lie more often. He writes in his book that from 2016 to 2021, 55% of the statements made by Republicans and investigated by PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization he founded, were false, compared with 31% of those made by Democrats. [To counter Trump’s relentless exaggerations, falsehoods and lies, The New York Times, The Associated Press, CNN and other media organizations have added special “fact-checking” columns to their coverage this year. To fight back, Trump is trying to ban reporters who cite his lies from covering his press conferences.]

Why Lie?

Politicians have been lying as as long as our democracy has been around, but just not as frequently nor as blatantly and visibly as today, Adair says. Social media and our fractured media ecosystem has made it much easier to lie, and lying is also “a very calculated decision” and part of an ongoing strategy to gain and retain power. “They (politicians) make a calculation—am I going to gain more from making this statement that is false than I’m going to lose?” Adair said in an interview. “It’s that simple. They want to build support for the base, and some believe that telling a lie, in some small or big way, will help them to do that.

“… Many Republicans and some former Republicans who were willing to talk to me said that in recent years, with polarization running so deep, it’s just become a part of the (Republican) party’s culture.” But Adair is also quick to add that “lying is a huge problem in all of our politics” and that “fact-checking has struggled to keep pace.” He also said that the disappearance of local news organizations also has had an impact. “The local press used to hold politicians accountable to local voters—and while some nonprofit news organizations are popping up now to restore that kind of oversight, there’s still a bunch of news deserts across the country, so it is really hard now for a lot of voters to sort out the truth and have an honest discourse on issues.”

So what now? Many Americans may still not be willing to place truthfulness over partisan preference in every case, Adair says. “But more will have to start caring about lies now, especially when their candidate wins on those lies and then risks becoming the culprit.”

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Voter Remorse?

This past week, Republican lawmakers began facing angry voters in town halls, and the negative tenor of the meetings hinted that a broader backlash may be emerging. Trump’s vow to “drain the swamp” and empower Americans who feel overlooked by the system is now being seen by some to be at odds with the mass firings of thousands of government workers—in Washington and across the country. Many of those fired by Trump’s cost-cutting voted for him just a few months ago, and some are now telling Republican lawmakers and local newscasters they feel “duped” and betrayed.

In Georgia, GOP Rep. Rich McCormick struggled to respond as constituents shouted, jeered and booed at his response to questions about Elon Musk’s power to decide who gets fired and who doesn’t, and his access to government data. In Wisconsin, GOP Rep. Scott Fitzgerald was asked to defend the administration’s budget proposals as voters demanded to know whether cuts to their essential services were coming.

Other Trump voters expressed concern that Trump’s repeated statements about his desire to ‘take over Gaza,’ don’t synch with his vow to “put America first.” The popular UFC fighter Sean Strickland, who was a big supporter of Trump’s before his election, took to X this week to say Trump’s plan to take over Gaza “is B.S.” and “ain’t America first.” That post racked up 159,000 likes and 13.2 million views.

Atlantic writer Yair Rosenberg says Trump is starting to “belie the imaginary versions of himself that inspired many of his supporters.”

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More Whoppers

Yet despite these rising anxieties, Trump’s falsehoods continue to proliferate.

• No, the people of Canada do not like Trump’s idea of making Canada the 51st U.S. state. Trump, however, continues to insist they are “thrilled.” Pierre Poilievre, MAGA’s favorite Canadian conservative, said last week, “Let me be clear. Canada will never be the 51st state.” And no, Canada does not prohibit U.S. banks from doing business in Canada—a claim Trump also keeps making, nonetheless, without a shred of evidence.

• No, DEI initiatives—like them or not— did not cause the deadly January collision between a military helicopter and a passenger jet. That’s fiction. There is no evidence that any Federal Aviation Administration policy had anything to do with the crash. Trump, who has ordered all DEI initiatives to be canceled immediately, fabricated a story about a frantic last-minute push by former President Joe Biden to hire people with significant disabilities as air traffic controllers before Trump took office. That’s also false. The facts? In 2019, Trump’s own administration hired people with significant disabilities as air traffic controllers, and they performed well.

• No, the violent January 6th insurrection at the Capitol was not “a day of love.” And Capitol police were not aiding the rioters. They were being assaulted by them, five fatally. The rioters—all of them Trump supporters—used bats, flagpoles, bear spray, brass knuckles, metal barricades, stolen law enforcement shields, wooden furniture legs, a “tomahawk axe” and other weapons—actions seen by millions of Americans, with their own eyes, during the live, hours long broadcast of the riot, from start to finish.

• And one newer break from reality? Trump now says his poll numbers “are the highest that any Republican president has ever had.” Wrong again. Trump’s approval ratings have fallen by 13 points just 33 days into his second term, according to a new poll released Monday, conducted by IPSOS. President George W. Bush’s poll numbers hit 92% shortly after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Those of his father, George H.W. Bush, hit 89% at the end of the Gulf War in 1999.

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Empty Vessels

In the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, a majority of poll respondents say they worry that government leaders are now “purposely misleading” the public, and not just in the United States.

The global survey also says that some 61% of those polled believe that government and businesses are making their lives harder and now serve narrow interests, and that wealthy people are benefiting unfairly from the system. It’s a sentiment that helped Trump get elected last fall—but also one that may catalyze some mass protests on Friday and through March against his continuing work to fire many more thousands of government workers while also closing some of the government programs that could help them.

“The outrage of some influencers who believed Trump would further their causes is a warning,” Atlantic writer Rosenberg says. “As president, Trump is no longer being seen as the vessel into which people can pour their discontent with the status quo. With every disappointment, it will become harder for him to hold together the coalition that delivered him the narrowest popular-vote victory since Richard Nixon’s in 1968.”

Adds fact checker Adair: “It's an uncomfortable thing to say, and it's not something people want to hear, and I’m sure I’ll get blowback, but I believe we need to face this epidemic of lying. Lying and repeating the lie makes it really difficult to have an adult conversation about public policy if one side or the other is denying the facts about the big issues affecting us all.

“…If one side is always rejecting facts, it robs everyone’s power to have a say in how we’re governed.”

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s something Trump has truly wanted, all along.

NOTE: This post was updated on 2-27 and 2-28, to add extra data and additional reporting and reaction this week by Trump supporters to his aggressive efforts to downsize government.

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President Trump is returning to his reality-TV toolbox to re-brand himself again, but this time, not just as America’s boss, but as the boss of “everyone and everything.”

NEW YORK—During his first four weeks back in the White House, Donald Trump has not only been bending, if not breaking, quite a few laws in his push to change the American government. He’s also returned to the reality-TV toolbox he used earlier in his career while hosting NBC’s The Apprentice for 14 seasons—making that show’s iconic phrase, “you’re fired!” apply to his current bid to “clean up” (downsize) Washington.

But he’s not stopping there. Like many presidents before him, Trump is using his “bully pulpit”—a term coined by former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt in the early 1900s to advance his policy agenda. But unlike Roosevelt, Trump is also using his platform to spread fear, threats, ultimatums and intentions to wipe out some of America’s social and cultural norms. To no one’s surprise, it is raising alarm among opponents. Earlier this week, “No Kings on Presidents Day” protests were held in Washington and 10 other cities across the nation, with more such protests planned for later this month.

Moving ahead, Trump plans to continue using his bully pulpit to enforce his will over a variety of state and national leaders not legally obliged to obey him—like people in the arts, sports, the news business, local community groups and private companies. Some organizations failing to honor his big or petty requests, so far, are already facing some levels of retaliation.

Just ask The Associated Press. Trump last week removed one of its reporters from a recent press conference because AP executives said they’d keep referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico in the company’s news stories—rejecting Trump’s decision to rename it the “Gulf of America.” AP executives pushed back, saying neither Mexico nor Congress agreed to a formal name change, and regardless, that it is AP’s decision about what to put into its AP Style book—not Trump’s.

But Trump persists. The line between reality-TV and Trump’s presidency blurs every time he makes a momentous political decision, and now he’s also giving himself the authority to pressure changes in the National Football League’s kickoff rules. Just a few weeks ago, he also got himself declared chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, to stop the Center from holding drag show performances and showcasing other artists celebrating the diversity of American culture. Trump forced his way onto the Kennedy Center board after purging those members appointed by former President Joe Biden.

And that’s just for starters.

Power Plays

Trump is also telling NYC to get rid of its bike lanes and signed an executive order to get rid of paper straws because “nobody really likes them.” He also is weighing in on low-flow toilets, saying they should be banned. And he wants, separately, to be able to wield more H.R. clout over how some local businesses hire and fire their people and to remove all DEI programs from the nation’s public schools. Oh, and we can’t forget. Trump also wants to use his real estate development networks to help transform the Gaza Strip into a “beautiful place to live” and a luxury beachfront destination, which he says “could be better than Monaco.”

He’s saying and doing all of these things in rapid succession, without being asked nor invited to do so—nor using or proposing any legislation to make any of this happen, and not offering (or just refusing) to work with any of the people who had been overseeing these programs, products and locations for decades. “Some of these issues are merely Trump’s pet peeves,” says Jennifer Mercieca, who teaches the history of American political rhetoric at Texas A&M University and is the author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump. “Some of them are on his kill list.”

Heather Cox-Richardson, the American historian and author of one of the most well-read columns on Substack, says: “It’s okay to have opinions about things, but the President is a rising authoritarian if he keeps trying to force people to accept his version of reality on things that go way beyond federal government policy, is making changes not sanctioned by Congress (as legally required), and is punishing those who object and try to push back.”

Re-naming the Gulf of Mexico, Cox-Richardson says, is a perfect example of Trump’s saber-rattling—and not simply a petty power play. It is action taken early in his term to “signal to others that he owns change now and is in top power to make it happen. It’s really about imposing a rising autocrat’s reality on others, and telling people they now have to bow to the authoritarian’s reality. It’s a slippery slope,” she added. “People who get pushed or feel obliged to follow those kinds of orders” tend to say, ‘okay, I’ll let you get away with it this time,’ but then it becomes much harder the next time for people opposing that kind of power to say no.”

Civics 101

Congress has the power to make laws; under the U.S. Constitution, presidents do not. Sitting presidents must faithfully enact the nation’s laws or request backers in Congress to introduce new legislation to change them and then get them passed into law. “It’s Civics 101,” Cox-Richardson says. “It’s how our government was founded and how it’s been running for nearly 250 years.”

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“…One of the things about our history and our government that we tend to forget is that first of all, it’s ours, a government of the people,” Cox-Richardson added. “Trump can only overreach and abuse his power if we let him. Otherwise, presidents don’t get to say ‘No, I don’t like this or that, so I order that this get changed.’ Donald Trump can make suggestions to Congress for new laws to pass but he can’t write those laws, or force people to make the changes he wants.”

U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minnesota, says “many people on both sides of the aisle are concerned that Trump is over-reaching and also is trying to bypass Congress completely now,” which some historians say is the same as ignoring the U.S. Constitution. Some, even a few of the MAGA faithful, “say privately he’s acting like a dictator,” McCollum adds. It’s just that some people think that’s okay, while others object, she says. McCollum is a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, which recommends which spending bills should get funded, and by how much. More than 50 lawsuits have been filed so far to challenge Trump’s push to make change without congressional approval, but some cases might take months to resolve, she says.

Just don’t expect Trump to stop trying. He has used ‘bully pulpits’ throughout his career, and the approach has helped him to expand his brand and influence.

In his real estate days, he promoted himself as the nation’s most successful dealmaker. During The Apprentice, he morphed into the nation’s workplace boss. Over the last decade, he expanded his role to become the Republican Party’s boss and then was elected to be the federal government’s boss. “And now, taking over the White House for a second time? He’s making himself the boss of everyone and everything,” says Gwenda Blair, the author of The Trumps, A Biography of Multiple Generations of the Family and a longtime student of the president.

“Without opposition,” Blair said in an interview, “there will be no stopping him. …Our democracy could be very fragile now, indeed.”

What are your thoughts on Trump’s first three weeks? He’s good shaking things up, but can he govern? Is his wish to reset cultural norms about making things better for everyday Americans, or is it all becoming too risky? Go ahead, leave us a comment. We treasure your diverse perspectives!