2026-01-09 07:35:00
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Until recently, Donald Trump was consistent about this: The time for the United States to police the world, enforcing laws and norms, was over. “We are going to take care of this country first before we worry about everybody else in the world,” he told The New York Times in 2016.
“We more and more are not wanting to be the policemen of the world,” he said during a press conference with Nigeria’s president in 2018. “We’re spending tremendous amounts of money for decades policing the world, and that shouldn’t be the priority.” During the 2020 campaign, he often included a line in his stump speech complaining that American troops had spent 19 years serving as “policemen” in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Trump also rejected the idea that the United States had any kind of moral standing to criticize, much less regulate, the behavior of other nations. When Bill O’Reilly objected to Trump’s warmth toward Vladimir Putin in 2017, the president scoffed: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”
If anyone gave the U.S. the benefit of the doubt then, Trump has squandered the possibility now. In his second term, Trump has returned the nation to its role as global policeman—but this time, it’s as the world’s dirty cop, running rackets and thumbing its nose at the law even as it cracks down on alleged criminality by other countries’ leaders. He launched air strikes on Christmas Day in Nigeria, the very country he held up eight years ago as one where the U.S. shouldn’t be involved. Days later, U.S. troops snatched the Venezuelan autocrat Nicolás Maduro and his wife in Caracas. Trump told the Times yesterday that the U.S. could spend years controlling Venezuela. This week, the Trump aide Stephen Miller all but announced plans to annex Greenland.
Although the idea of a global policeman originated as a metaphor, the White House has made it literal. Take the boat strikes in the Caribbean, where U.S. law-enforcement agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration have long operated. But whereas previous administrations have used law-enforcement agencies to police drug trafficking, the Trump administration has chosen to rely on the armed forces. He has instructed them to conduct lethal, extrajudicial, and likely illegal drone strikes, even as the administration argues that it need not notify Congress of the actions under the War Powers Resolution because U.S. troops are not in danger. As for the raid in Venezuela, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also described Maduro’s capture as “a law-enforcement operation,” telling George Stephanopoulos, “We didn’t occupy a country. This was an arrest operation.”
This takes some intellectual contortions to accept. Although officials say that the Justice Department wrote a memo justifying the action legally, the administration has not publicly shared the rationale, and international-law experts have almost unanimously agreed that the U.S. violated international law to arrest Maduro this way. In domestic policing, Trump has long espoused what I call “lawless order”—the idea that those in power can break the law in order to achieve their idea of society—and the president is now extending that to the rest of the world.
This is only one of the inconsistencies that characterize Trump’s approach to law and order. A justice system depends on the idea that laws and enforcement are reasonably consistent and predictable, but Trump offers none of that. On the one hand, he has arrested Maduro and brought him to the U.S., and plans to try him for drug trafficking. On the other, he last month pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who had been convicted and imprisoned in the United States on very similar charges. He has correctly labeled Maduro an “illegitimate dictator,” but he has made the self-described Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele a key ally and welcomed him to the White House. Trump isn’t the best avatar of legal probity himself: He was convicted of 34 felonies in 2024, and escaped trial on several more serious ones only by virtue of being elected president.
What Trump is doing in Venezuela and beyond isn’t enforcing norms and ensuring security. It’s finding a way to make a buck. If you listened to Trump closely when he was rejecting intervention in the past, he hinted at this possibility. Although he complained about American troops being dispatched around the world, he often added that the problem was that the U.S. didn’t receive any direct, immediate monetary compensation for it. (The Iraq War was a mistake, he argued, not because it failed to achieve geopolitical change but because the U.S. didn’t take Iraq’s oil.)
Now he’s out to get his cut. He has openly acknowledged that the U.S. got involved in Venezuela because of oil, and the administration has declared its intent to control the country’s petroleum industry “indefinitely.” In the Arctic Circle, he’s attempting to establish a protection racket, arguing that Denmark doesn’t have the means to defend Greenland. Nice island you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.
The U.S. has, in the past, made common cause with dictators when expedient, overthrown democratically elected leaders when nervous, and stayed out of righteous causes when doubtful of the upsides of getting involved; presidents have made moves to boost the U.S. economy or their own political prospects. The war hero Smedley Butler famously accused the U.S. government of racketeering in 1935. But even purported deference to a higher principle constrained and directed the shape of global involvement. Trump has abandoned that pretense, and no one dares to stop him. He is getting his way right now, but the long-term effects may be dangerous: When a dirty cop walks the beat, he encourages bad behavior in his precinct rather than suppressing it.
Related:
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Today’s News
Dispatches
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
An Underappreciated Variable in Sports Success
By Alex Hutchinson
Chief among the burdens weighing upon the weary sports parent—worse than the endless commutes, the exorbitant fees, the obnoxious parents on the other team—is the sense that your every decision has the power to make or break your child’s future. Should your 11-year-old show up to her elementary-school holiday concert, even if it means missing a practice with the elite soccer team to which you’ve pledged 100 percent attendance? What if this turns out to be the fork in the road that consigns her to the athletic scrap heap? …
Rationally, stressing out over missing a single practice is ridiculous. Believing that it matters, though, can be strangely reassuring, because of the suggestion that the future is under your control. Forecasting athletic careers is an imperfect science: Not every top draft pick pans out; not every star was a top draft pick. Unexpected injuries aside, the imprecision of our predictions is usually seen as a measurement problem. If we could only figure out which factors mattered most—how to quantify talent, which types of practice best develop it—we would be able to plot athletic trajectories with confidence.
Unless, of course, this tidy relationship between cause and effect is an illusion. What if the real prerequisite for athletic stardom is that you have to get lucky?
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Explore. A theme keeps popping up in relationship advice, Julie Beck writes: Don’t vent so much.
Read. The philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s latest book explores a new understanding of human beings’ most basic desire, John Kaag writes.
PS
Over the past 15 or 20 years, I’ve watched as the Grateful Dead has gone from casually dismissed sideshow to critical touchstone, cited by even the coolest bands as an influence. I’d like to say that I was ahead of the curve, but I can’t take much credit: My parents, longtime Deadheads, indoctrinated me from an early age. I recently filmed a video as part of The Atlantic’s “Behind the Byline” series where I talk about the Dead—and get quizzed on how fast I can name that tune and identify the era. To be honest, my colleague Matteo Wong’s advice on pasta might be more useful.
— David
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
2026-01-09 07:18:00
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
Exactly 39 years after Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was first published in The Atlantic, Mark Twain scratched out a new version. “Battle Hymn,” which Twain considered “beautiful and sublime,” was in need of revision. In 1901, the United States was entering the third year of a war to establish colonial rule in the Philippines, and Howe’s rousing vision of a sacred national struggle didn’t quite fit the moment. “Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword,” Twain began. “He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger’s wealth is stored.” The rest of the verses deal in similar substitutions: a bandit gospel for a fiery gospel; instead of truth and God, lust and greed go marching on.
Twain’s satire worked because it exposed the hypocrisies of America’s first embrace of an overseas empire at the turn of the 20th century. Advocates of intervention spoke confidently of spreading democracy; Twain and other anti-imperialists answered by holding those professed ideals up against the anti-democratic reality of conquest and violence. This pattern of argument would persist through the Iraq War. The guiding questions were always around what we really believed we were doing in other countries—spreading democracy, or simply exploiting people and advancing our interests? With this weekend’s ouster of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, America has crossed into a new era, in which leaders no longer bother with the pretense.
Twain and the anti-imperialists were processing what seemed like a profound turn in American history. Prior conquest of North America was the real beginning of American imperialism, and the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 anticipated advances in the Pacific. But the Spanish-American War of 1898—what the Atlantic editor Walter Hines Page deemed “a necessary act of surgery for the health of civilization”—commenced a new phase of overseas empire. The United States made Cuba something of a protectorate, formally annexed Hawaii, and added Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as part of the Spanish-American War peace treaty.
For the champions of empire, 1898 presented a kind of deliverance. Americans would take their rightful place on the global stage alongside the Europeans, bringing democracy, civilization, commerce, and Christianity with them. White American men, thought to have become feminized and overcivilized by domestic comforts, could redeem themselves in the process of occupying their new colonial possessions. American workers of all kinds would be rescued from what many believed to be the dangers of excessive production, with ready markets for their goods beyond American borders. God “has marked us as his chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world,” Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana boasted. “We are trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace.”
The reality on the ground did not match the rhetoric, particularly in the Philippines. Purchased for $20 million from Spain in the peace proceedings, the archipelago promised access to the Chinese market—and a laboratory for a benevolent theory of American empire. “If we can benefit those remote peoples,” President William McKinley had asked, “who will object?” But his promise that “our priceless principles undergo no change under a tropical sun” did not survive the Pacific crossing. American forces worked to crush something they knew well—a popular uprising against colonial rule. The methods the army employed were brutal, including a water torture and rounding suspected rural insurgents into concentration camps—a tactic practiced by the Spanish in Cuba that had helped galvanize American support for war there.
Twain was horrified by the violence, but he was particularly enraged about the redemptive rhetoric that cloaked it. “We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem,” he told a reporter in 1900. His many subsequent published writings opposing American imperialism (as well as his version of the “Battle Hymn,” which he did not publish but was found written into a book he owned) were works of bitter satire highlighting the disconnect between the reality of conquest and the language of redemption. In “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” Twain extracted what he called “the Actual Thing”—war, violence, greed exploitation—from the “outside cover” of the “Blessings of Civilization.” The United States had become “yet another Civilized Power, with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife in the other.”
The anti-imperialist movement that Twain joined was a motley gathering of both moral idealists and virulent racists who scorned even association with nonwhite people, much less their elevation. But insofar as Twain’s satire worked, it did so because it presumed that American ideals mattered—and that their violation did too. Even those who were less concerned about the violence or the fate of nonwhite people could note the disconnect between America as an anticolonial nation practicing colonialism. During the 1900 presidential election, Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan responded to Republican censure of his anti-imperial stance with the suggestion that they extend their censure to Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.
Neither Twain nor Jennings Bryan stopped the drift toward overseas intervention that had begun in 1898. Theodore Roosevelt, elevated to the vice presidency by the spectacle of his famous charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba, would tender an even more forceful expression of American power after he became president. Such expressions would only grow through the remainder of the century. But even the most strident interventionists felt compelled to temper their justifications with the language of anti-imperialism. “We don’t seek empires,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said a few months into the second Iraq War. “We’re not imperialistic. We never have been.”
President Trump and his administration have upended this American tradition of claiming, however hypocritically, that foreign intervention is not about power or profit. In the days since Maduro’s capture, the president has repeatedly bragged about being “in charge” of Venezuela, and suggested that the U.S. might run the country for years. He has openly explained that his priority is taking control of the country’s oil business to make the U.S. wealthier (a plan that’s not economically sound, as my colleague Jonathan Chait points out). Earlier this week, the State Department’s social-media account shared a post reading “THIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE,” while Representative Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican, repeated the boast in a television interview on Wednesday: “We are the dominant predator force in the Western hemisphere.”
The absence of urgency to empower the democratic opposition, or even to pay lip service to the goal of restoring liberal democracy within the country, marks a new form of American intervention abroad. To this administration, the show of force is a good in itself—no pandering to ideals required. With America’s goals so clearly laid out, it’s not clear what good satire might do, or how much use Mark Twain might be now. The administration’s posturing suggests that even the oil might be beside the point. The most valuable resource has perhaps already been extracted: the spectacle of power itself.
2026-01-09 07:16:00
On January 6, Donald Trump’s administration published an apologia for the Trump supporters whom he incited to storm the Capitol five years earlier. The next day, Stephen Miller, in response to news that an ICE agent had shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, lambasted the Democratic Party on X for “inciting a violent insurrection.”
The juxtaposition of the January 6 anniversary and the shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota the next day is a coincidence of timing. But the echo of language between that which the Trump administration has attacked (alleged violence against federal law-enforcement officers) and that which it has defended (actual violence against federal law-enforcement officers) is striking.
President Trump’s long-standing view has become official policy: His supporters are definitionally “patriotic” and therefore entitled to take any actions on his behalf, regardless of how violent or illegal they may be. His opponents are definitionally terrorists, and therefore constitute legitimate targets of state violence. This is how an organized mass attack to overthrow the government becomes “peaceful” and “patriotic,” while a single woman attempting to flee ICE agents constitutes a violent attempt to overthrow the government.
[Adam Serwer: First the shooting. Then the lies.]
It is possible that the ICE officer who shot Good feared that she intended to drive her car into him. But video documentation shows that she was turning her car away from the officer when he shot her. Although it remains unclear whether her car grazed him, videos show the officer running down the street to check on Good, then walking away unaided. As for Good, her ex-husband has told Minnesota Public Radio that she was not a political activist—she had never protested anything, to his knowledge—and that she had merely been caught in the vicinity of the ICE raid after dropping off her 6-year-old at school.
The Trump administration, however, immediately circulated a fantasy version of what happened.
In a message on Truth Social, Trump recited what has become the new MAGA talking points. The president called Good part of a “Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate” and charged that she “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” He added, “It is hard to believe he is alive.”
Vice President J. D. Vance insisted that the officer was “defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over.” The Homeland Security Department described the shooter as bravely saving “his own life, as well as the lives of his fellow officers” from “an anti-ICE rioter” engaged in “an act of domestic terrorism.”
[Read: Lethal force on a frozen street ]
What’s notable about these hysterical claims is how far they go beyond the simplest possible defense. The administration is not merely insisting that the ICE officer believed Good’s car might strike him, an argument that might have reframed the shooting as a tragic error. Instead, they have presented the shooting as absolutely necessary—an act of patriotism, even—and its victim as an unhinged would-be murderer posing a threat to the republic.
This account is especially jarring when read in contrast with the White House’s stream of lies about January 6. (National Review’s Noah Rothman has written an excellent point-by-point refutation.) The administration’s revisionist history not only says that the insurrection was just a peaceful march that went awry because of mistakes made by the Capitol Police; it also says that Ashli Babbitt, an actual rioter who attempted to breach a barricaded room protecting members of Congress, was “Murdered in Cold Blood” by a Capitol Police officer.
There is no objective standard of conduct that could possibly explain why beating police officers is peaceful but attempting to flee from them is terrorism. This is not an oversight, but the essence of Trumpism. This administration believes that it is entitled to do as it pleases. Its perceived enemies are entitled to nothing.
2026-01-09 05:04:47
Last spring, Sweetgreen did something shocking, at least insofar as the menu adjustments of a fast-casual salad chain can be described that way: It added fries. In interviews, the company’s “chief concept officer,” Nicolas Jammet, paid lip service to “reevaluating and redefining fast food,” but I suspect that Sweetgreen was also “reevaluating and redefining” how to make money in a world that appeared poised to move on from buying what the company was trying to sell.
In the first two months of last year, Sweetgreen’s stock price had declined more than 30 percent. The company had already made significant changes, dropping seed oils, adding “protein plates,” and hiring a bunch of robots in an apparent effort to cater to the early 2020s’ three defining dining trends: the MAHA movement, the protein fixation, and the push to cut costs by eliminating human labor. But not even air-fried potatoes could stop Sweetgreen’s free fall. In August, with operational losses reaching $26.4 million, the chain fired workers, and also the fries. As the year ended, Nathaniel Ru, who co-founded the company in 2007, stepped down from his role. Today, a share of Sweetgreen stock costs less than $8. In late 2024, it was more than $43.
This is remarkable because, for a golden decade or so, Sweetgreen was the future of lunch. Americans, especially ones who were youngish and worked on computers, were toting green paper bags around coastal cities (and later, smaller towns and non-coastal cities) en masse. Silicon Valley was injecting capital into a restaurant as though it were a software start-up.
Sweetgreen’s early success was not a fluke. As a restaurant, it truly did do something incredible. The company put high-quality organic produce in interesting combinations, incorporating fresh herbs and global ingredients, and going heavy on crunch and citrus. It sourced from small farms that it listed proudly on chalkboards inside each store, appealing squarely to a cohort who knew they really should be shopping at the farmers’ market, even if they usually got their groceries from Instacart, guiltily. And Sweetgreen was an early adopter of online ordering, allowing its customers to waste less time waiting in line. When a Sweetgreen opened in my city, in 2016, replacing a restaurant that had been serving hamburgers for 65 years, I was excited about it the same way I was excited when fiber internet came to my neighborhood: Finally, a better way to live.
In all this, the chain was achingly of its era, when high functioning in the office (productivity) and on the cellular level (health) became irretrievably intertwined. The widespread adoption of smartphones invented new categories of aspiration, new ways to sell things, new expectations that workers be available and productive, including during lunch hour. The wellness influencer—a figure whose job title did not exist just a few years earlier—suddenly started to seem like one of the more powerful figures in American life. Millennials graduated, grew up, got jobs, and emerged as not just a chronological category but a marketing segment.
[Read: The sad ballad of salad]
Around this time, a number of venture-backed start-ups appeared to sell them new versions of stuff they already used. The stuff was legitimately nicer, but only a little; the real innovation was in how it was sold. Largely, this meant minimalist packaging that was purpose-built to look good on a small screen, and marketing copy that made canny nods to responsibility but also fun, using a corporate voice that sounded like a real person’s, even if that person was sort of embarrassing and obsessed with the grind (“you’re going to guac this week. #monday 👊,” read the caption on an Instagram post from Sweetgreen in 2015). In short order, many Americans swapped out their YMCA stationary-bike classes for SoulCycle; their yellow cabs for rideshares; their generic workout gear for color-blocked, cellphone-pocketed leggings made out of, like, recycled water bottles.
And these same Americans abandoned the salad bar—for decades, a depressing fixture of the workday lunch—in favor of Sweetgreen. It was a healthy, efficient meal for healthy, efficient people (at least aspirationally), a power lunch for those who didn’t have assistants or expense accounts but who were nonetheless determined to feel in control, possibly formidable. Especially after 2018—when the company began installing shelves in office lobbies and WeWork cafeterias, from which workers could retrieve a preordered salad without leaving the building—it just became a default, a nearly frictionless calorie-delivery vehicle for people whose bosses were definitely paying attention to whether their little Slack bubble was green or not.
Sweetgreen was what you ate while listening to, if not the Hamilton soundtrack, then a self-improvement podcast at 1.5 speed, ripping through emails or shopping online before dutifully composting your beautifully designed, biodegradable bowl. It was the perfect fuel for the grinning strivers of the long 2010s, when a better world was possible, and in fact something you could buy. When a dear friend of mine got married, what she wanted to eat more than anything else while being poked and prettied in the hotel suite was Sweetgreen. It was the most reliable, most delicious, least risky meal either of us could think to pick up at an exceptionally frenetic moment. But it also made sense, spiritually, on a day that often requires total command over both one’s appearance and a large number of spreadsheets—a day that is a public declaration of hope for the future, and, in some ways, the first day of your adult life.
[Read: The golden age of the fried-chicken sandwich]
Sweetgreen sold salad, which you eat, but it also sold moral superiority, which you build an identity around. (By 2016, BuzzFeed was posting lists about “21 Truths for Everyone Obsessed With Sweetgreen.”) The company capitalized on this to sell not just lunch but a lifestyle brand. It staged an annual music festival; collaborated with cool fashion people on limited-edition housewares and accessories; sold branded Nalgenes and expensive, earth-toned sweatshirts in its capacious webstore; posted its playlists to Spotify. Imagine anyone willingly re-creating the sonic ambience inside their local McDonald’s at home and you will realize how unique Sweetgreen is, or was, among casual-restaurant chains.
Although McDonald’s and its ilk got big by serving as broad an audience as possible, Sweetgreen derived much of its cachet from projecting a level of elitism. This, as it turns out, is not the secret to market dominance. Sweetgreen has always been relatively expensive, and it has gotten more so: In 2014, a kale Caesar with chicken was $8.85; this week, in some locations, it’s more than $14.75, which is almost $2 higher than can be explained by inflation alone. Maybe more important is the impression that it’s expensive. Today’s consumers are highly price-sensitive, Jonathan Maze, the editor in chief of the trade publication Restaurant Business, told me, and “Sweetgreen has had a reputation as an expensive place to eat for what you’re getting.”
There’s also the issue that many Americans don’t like salad quite enough to actually want it regularly. In a 2024 YouGov poll, 40 percent of respondents said they ate salad more than once a week, which might seem like a lot until you remember that some of them were surely lying, and you consider how many more people prefer food that isn’t chopped-up raw vegetables: Last year, the nation’s top five quick-service restaurants were, in order, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s. “It’s really difficult to convince a large number of people that salad is something they’re going to eat on a frequent enough basis to support a chain like that,” Maze said. Many years ago, he was driving his then-10-year-old son and a friend home from baseball practice, and the friend was excitedly talking about eating Chipotle for dinner. The memory has, clearly, stuck with him: “Can I realistically imagine my son’s 10-year-old friend bragging about going to Sweetgreen?” He cannot. I can’t either.
[Read: America is done pretending about meat]
Sweetgreen went public in 2021, and it has not been consistently profitable since. No amount of savvy marketing could make the salad-haters change their minds. But then the people who used to like Sweetgreen also started abandoning it. In the third quarter of last year, the average Sweetgreen store’s sales declined almost 10 percent; the drop was most significant in Los Angeles and the Northeast, two of the company’s core markets. (I asked Maze where those customers were going instead, and he said maybe Raising Cane’s, which specializes in chicken fingers.)
Some of this can be explained by prices, but plenty of other restaurants have raised their prices and not seen sales fall off a cliff. I think Sweetgreen didn’t change so much as the world around it did. A $15 salad was never really an investment in one’s health, but it certainly doesn’t feel like that in this economy—and besides, that moment has passed. The optimism of the previous era has given way to something more nihilistic. The people who were once going to guac this week are now quiet quitting and scarfing tallow. The “power” in Millennial power lunch has, largely, been replaced by impotence and apathy. WeWork went bankrupt; Hamilton became cringe; trying so hard to do the right things all the time started to feel pointless and naive. When I told a friend and fellow former Sweetgreen enthusiast about this story, he said, “What’s the point of eating a salad when we’re all going to die?” He was joking, kind of.
2026-01-09 03:00:00
Photographs by Jason Andrew
People look at you differently when you carry a Geiger counter. Or, at least, when you carry a Geiger counter and exclaim things like “Much less radiation here than you might expect!” But how else are you to know that the radiation in your food is at acceptable levels?
They have government inspectors for this, you might say. It is their job.
That was before Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency started hacking away at our bureaucracy. Before the federal government was shut down for much of the fall. And before I bought a Geiger counter to do my own food inspections.
For a while—maybe since 1883, when the Pendleton Act created a merit-based civil service of experts—we, as a nation, thought to ourselves: Life is too short for everyone to inspect their own food. Let the government handle this. But then along came the Trump administration to wonder: What if we didn’t?
FDA inspections at foreign food manufacturers are at historic lows because of staffing cuts, according to ProPublica. My Geiger counter cost $22.79. I thought it would give me a sense of agency and reassurance in this era of dismantlement. Instead, buying the Geiger counter was the first step toward losing my mind.
While the Trump administration conducted a sweeping experiment in government erosion, I started an experiment of my own. As each government function was targeted for cuts—or an official suggested that it was standing between me and my freedom—I put it on my to-do list, as a way to feel like I was doing something other than fretting about what was not being done.
About 300,000 civil servants—roughly 10 percent of the federal workforce—left their job between January and late November last year, according to the Office of Personnel Management. In February 2025, hundreds of weather forecasters and other employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were canned. In June, the National Science Foundation was told it had to leave its headquarters. In the fall, during the shutdown, about 1,400 nuclear-security employees were furloughed, and the ranks of air-traffic controllers continued to dwindle.
There is a concept called “mental load”—the weight of knowing all the Things That Need to Get Done Around the House. Someone has to know when to do laundry, take out the trash, buy groceries, locate the winter clothes, cook dinner, set a budget, vacuum, etc. This is the kind of labor that, if not properly divided, ruins marriages and drives people to the brink.
Now multiply that mental load by 343 million. That’s the number of people in the house of America. You can’t worry only about buying the groceries; you must also worry about whether those groceries are radioactive. You don’t just have to make sure the kids are dressed for the weather; you must also forecast the weather. It’s not enough to merely buy eggs; you must also know how much eggs should cost, and what they cost last week, because the economy sort of depends on it.
What became a five-month quest to assume government responsibilities took me from the overgrown fields of Antietam to the cramped basket of a hot-air balloon about 1,400 feet over Ohio; from a biology lab at Johns Hopkins University, where I beheaded flies, to a farmstead in Maryland, where I inspected the fly-bothered udder of a cow named Melissa.
And the potential duties kept piling up as I learned about each round of cuts. Since I started typing this paragraph, Donald Trump has fired many of the people who surveil infectious diseases; before I finish typing this paragraph, he may have hired them back. I hope so! I would do almost anything for a good story, but perhaps I should draw the line at “monitor Ebola.”
John F. Kennedy famously implored us: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Well, I asked! And the answer is: lots of things. If you don’t mind doing them wrong.
I have just driven six and a half hours to Ohio in order to forecast my own weather. From a hot-air balloon.
“Anyone that tells you they’re not afraid of heights is either lying or insane,” Tim the balloon pilot is telling me. It is 5 p.m. on a clear Tuesday in September, and we are getting ready, in a field outside Columbus, to go up and find weather. Tim has a trim white beard and a confident demeanor that I find reassuring. There are two kinds of balloonists, Tim tells me: old ones and bold ones. He is the former.
Weather forecasting is among the legion of chores that the government does, or used to do more thoroughly, through NOAA, whose budget the Trump administration attempted to slash—a scenario that would “stop all progress” in U.S. forecasting, as James Franklin, a former branch chief at the National Hurricane Center, told USA Today.
In the founding days of the country, individuals collected weather data alone, without the aid of computers, weather balloons, or modeling. George Washington kept a fairly detailed weather diary. Behold his entry for April 14, 1787: “Mercury at 62 in the Morning—74 at Noon and 68 at Night. Cloudy in the Morning with a few drops of rain.” But while journaling is fine if you want to know what the weather was, most people want to know what the weather will be. For that, you need other people.
The advent of the telegraph allowed weather watchers to share observations and data across great distances, in almost real time. This launched the era of forecasts—or, as the pioneering meteorologist Cleveland Abbe called them, “probabilities.” Cleveland left his home base of Cincinnati (just to confuse you!) to work for an arm of the federal government that would later become the National Weather Service.
“The nation has had few more useful servants than Cleveland Abbe,” the meteorologist Thomas Corwin Mendenhall wrote around 1919, praising his storm warnings, which saved millions of dollars’ worth of property every year.
Human observation and telegraph chitchat were eventually supplanted by radiosondes, which are sensor packages launched by balloon twice a day, all across the country, to determine wind direction, temperature, pressure, and so on. After DOGE cuts in February, several sites pared back to one launch a day; the Alaskan cities of Kotzebue (along the western coast) and St. Paul (out in the Bering Sea) stopped launches altogether.
I had asked Keith Seitter, a senior policy fellow at the American Meteorological Society, how I could forecast weather myself, without using government models. He made the mistake of suggesting that weather generally travels west to east at a rate of 20 to 30 miles an hour. I latched on to this. Could I simply find a city that is about 500 miles west and drive there to get tomorrow’s weather today?
Well, sure, Keith said, but that seems like a big waste of time.
Please! I have two children under the age of 4. I have nothing but time.
I Googled my way to Tim and his hot-air-balloon company in Columbus. It had a single review on Yelp, from 2012, but that review was five stars: “Tim is a great pilot.” Good enough for me!
I meet Tim and his crew in a parking lot near a golf course. We pile into his balloon van, with the balloon basket attached to the back, and drive to our takeoff point. The basket is stunningly small—more like a double-wide grocery cart. We arrive at 5:37 p.m., just as the sun is starting to slide toward the horizon.
The Geiger count in Ohio is a tiny bit lower than in Washington, D.C., if you were wondering. But my instrument now is a combination thermometer-barometer-anemometer that I bought for $22.89.
Tim reassures me that “the vast majority of people in a balloon don’t realize any sensation of height issues,” because “balloons use natural forces.” I thought gravity was a natural force? I am becoming agitated. Tim, in our initial call, described some balloon landings as “sporty,” an adjective I do not like having applied to my physical safety.
Listen. I am actually very afraid of heights. I always forget this until I am irretrievably committed to a course of action that will take me to the top of a height, and then, as I am borne ineluctably to the top of that height, I think, Oh, right. I am terrified of these.
I hoist myself over the edge of the basket. My palms are sweating. Suddenly everything around us becomes very small. There is a miniature tractor doing neat laps around a miniature field. A hawk is … below us?
“Very high was a mistake” is what my notes say at this point.
My phone has acquired a thin film of sweat, maybe from condensation? 29.06 on the barometer. 85.3 degrees Fahrenheit. It is eerily quiet except for the periodic firing of the propane tank, which sounds like someone is grilling very urgently right in my ear. 28.26, 87.3 F. The temperature is suddenly much cooler: 47.3 degrees, although it doesn’t feel like that at all.
Then I realize that I have been reading the dew point instead of the temperature.
When I switch to the actual temperature, I realize a second problem: Whenever Tim fires the burner, the basket of the balloon becomes hot. It is like being aloft with a small campfire. Now, instead of telling me that it is 52.9 degrees, my thermometer informs me that it is 91.2 degrees! It is a beautiful, still, cloudless evening. If only Cleveland Abbe could see me now! He would probably say something like “What a senseless waste of astonishingly futuristic equipment.”
We drift over more fields and hummers, which is what some balloonists call power lines. Below us: trees, fields, houses, old junked cars, the occasional dog.
Our descent is not at all sporty, although I hold my breath as we approach the hummers. Tim has done this 1,600 times, and thus we do not fly into a power line, or you would not be reading this. It turns out that in this business, you just sort of … land in people’s yards? Members of the balloon crew have had guns pulled on them before, and dogs unleashed.
Improbably, the yard we land in belongs to a proud Atlantic subscriber named Deborah, who is apparently a competitive pinball player. I try to explain why we landed in her yard, making Deborah the first of many strangers to be confused by my project. Deborah is nonetheless so excited by my affiliation with The Atlantic that she asks for a hug. For a subscriber, anything!
On the ground it is 7:18 p.m., somewhere between 78.3 and 80.8 degrees. I cannot stress enough how lovely this weather is. Clear and crisp and the perfect temperature, the kind of fall day you order from an L.L. Bean catalog.
The next day, I begin my easy, convenient, six-plus-hour drive home to see my weather.
I close in on D.C. and notice it is raining. The sky is gray. Gray gray gray.
This is not my weather! I did not drive all the way from Ohio to bring this! I DON’T KNOW THIS WEATHER!
A friend whose hobby is meteorology informs me that current pressure systems are making the weather travel from east to west today. Whoops.
There is a certain indignity in having done this astoundingly inefficient thing and not even gotten the weather right at the end of it. So for my next government function, I will try something that involves no data collection. The only thing at stake? The safety of myself and my family.
We currently do not have a Senate-confirmed surgeon general, who is supposed to be the “nation’s doctor.” But the president’s nominee for the role, Casey Means, has offered food-related advice for cutting the government out of your life. She is more of a doctor than I am (in that she finished medical school) but less of a doctor than you might want the nation’s doctor to be (in that she didn’t complete her residency and decided to get really into “good energy”). The week after the 2024 election, Means said something interesting about raw milk, in the context of burdensome government regulation, on Real Time With Bill Maher.
“I want to be able to form a relationship with a local farmer,” Means said, “understand his integrity, look him in the eyes, pet his cow, and then understand if I can drink his milk.”
Thus, I am at a farm in southern Maryland to do just that. The difficulty with raw milk is that it isn’t always legal to sell for human consumption. Fortunately, this farm sells allegedly delicious “pet milk” (wink, wink). It also gives its cows operatic names, such as Tosca, Traviata, and Renee Fleming. I have asked for permission to put Casey Means’s vision into practice here.
A farmer named Brian takes me to the cows, past the egg layers and the meat chickens, bivouacked in what he tells me are excellent conditions in a nearby field. (“Raise me this way and you can slaughter me too!” Farmer Brian says.)
In preparation for this visit, I spoke with a veterinarian, who told me how to assess the health of a cow. The vet said that I should be able to see some of the cow’s 13 sets of ribs, but not too many. The cow should not be oddly hunched. Its udder should be long and pendulous.
Brian introduces me to Melissa, who is named for a singer.
“Etheridge?” I ask.
Brian laughs. No further information on Melissa’s surname is forthcoming.
Melissa just stands there, covered in flies.
“Flies help clean them up,” Farmer Brian tells me. Is this true? I add it to a growing list of Things I Am Not Sure Are Facts.
It used to be that milk only came raw, and everyone had to decide for themselves whether to drink it. The penalty for drinking subpar milk was that you died. In the 19th century, this happened fairly often, especially to American children. Then we discovered that diseases were caused by microorganisms. Tuberculosis, scarlet and typhoid fevers, diphtheria, brucellosis—all of these could be transmitted by milk.
At the urging of President Theodore Roosevelt, fresh off the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, a commission of public-health officers put out a 751-page report tracing recent outbreaks to contaminated milk. Milk was a wonderful environment for germs to grow in. Some of them could join your gut microbiome as helpful allies; others could give you deadly diarrhea. Instead of rolling the dice, the report made the case for pasteurizing milk—that is, heating it—to kill harmful microorganisms.
Making milk safe to drink was one of the greatest public-health breakthroughs in history. “For every 2 billion servings of pasteurized milk or milk products consumed in the U.S., only about one person gets sick,” the FDA reports.
I’ve been especially leery of diseases lately. FoodNet—the CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network—is scaling back the germs it tracks, from eight to two (salmonella and one type of E. coli ). I guess we want listeria to come as more of a surprise. And now followers of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement are encouraging us to drink the kind of milk that we stopped drinking around 1924 because it was too risky.
Anyway, back to Melissa. She has horns. This is good, Farmer Brian says, because “horns are the antennae, and all the cosmic energy comes down in through the horns.” I add this to my list of Things I Am Not Sure Are Facts.
How long does this milk keep? “It doesn’t go bad,” Farmer Brian says. This feels famously untrue of milk. “If you’re on the standard American diet, it will give you the runs,” Farmer Brian admits.
I tentatively ask why this milk seems so much more shelf-stable than the milk I myself have been producing for my infant, which can last in the refrigerator for only four days. Brian seems puzzled by this, and hands me 13 pamphlets, including “Cod Liver Oil: Our Number One Superfood” and “After Raw Breast Milk, What’s Best?” They do not answer my question.
I pause in the farm’s gift shop, which has folk-music CDs, hats made out of alpaca wool, and books explaining why COVID was not caused by a virus (“are electro-smog, toxic living conditions, and 5G actually to blame?”). I had better buy some milk, I guess.
I bring the milk home and stare at it. It is in a plastic jug, with a label that says NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION. I am starting to miss the government. It used to be that when I brought milk home, I could drink it. Now I have to do all of this research.
I leave the milk on the counter overnight. My husband wants to throw it out, on the grounds that it is confusing and growing stinky, but I explain that I am writing about it, and that we do not throw out the U.S. economy and politics (what he writes about) because they are confusing and growing stinky.
To make myself more comfortable with the milk on my counter, I read studies. The more I read, the more I am discouraged. A study from 2017 says that 96 percent of illnesses caused by contaminated dairy came from raw milk and cheese. I don’t like those odds.
I enjoyed petting Melissa and looking Farmer Brian in the eyes. But I don’t think that gave me the information I needed to understand whether I could drink the milk. What I should have done was scan the milk for microorganisms or simply boil it. In the time it has taken to figure this out, the milk has turned a cloudy yellow and formed three distinct strata.
Months later, I still have not thrown it away, or opened it. I am hoping that if I procrastinate long enough, it will simply become cheese.
I’m darting through grocery stores across D.C., trying to get someone to help me nail down the price of eggs over time. I have to get better at economic-data collection quickly, because the Trump administration is targeting the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You might wail something like: Who cares about the most bureaucratic-sounding bureau, at a time like this?
I do. I am becoming more of the government, every day, and it is going great.
The BLS is an attempt, through relentless data collection, to get everyone a nice set of shared facts about the economy and the workforce. Are there enough jobs to go around? The BLS puts out a monthly jobs report (though it missed October because of the shutdown). How far does your paycheck go? The BLS tabulates the Consumer Price Index, which identifies All the Things That People Buy and then figures out if they cost more or less than they used to. In essence—since 1884, when it was the Bureau of Labor—the BLS takes pictures of the economy for us.
But the pictures have not been very flattering lately, and so the Trump administration has responded by trying to smash the camera. After the July jobs report did not have enough jobs, the president fired the BLS commissioner. Trump’s 2026 budget proposes an 8 percent cut to the BLS budget. And DOGE’s hacking at the BLS may have contributed to a suspension of data collection in three cities: Buffalo, New York; Provo, Utah; and Lincoln, Nebraska.
To collect my own economic data, I need to become a “first-rate noticer,” says Jay Mousa, a former associate commissioner for the BLS office of field operations. That is part of what BLS field economists do. They are an army of perceptive extroverts who go from place to place, look around, talk with people, and find out what they are paying or charging for goods and services.
Mousa suggests that I go from store to store and find out the price of an item, now and in the past. Finding out the current price seems doable. But the past price? I could ask employees, he suggests. Perfect! I will use my thing-noticing, people-coaxing skills, just like a real BLS field economist.
Glancing at the dozens of items priced by the BLS in its list of average retail prices, I select eggs (one dozen, large, grade A). Eggs feel very present. They were the thing, during the 2024 election cycle, that people said cost too much, and now look where the country is.
I begin at a Safeway, asking a cashier what eggs cost now and what they cost earlier in the month. The clerk reports that eggs cost $4.99 a dozen, and remembers that they used to be a lot more expensive, like nine-something dollars. I feel awkward enough about this exchange that I buy the eggs. Did I collect data, or did I just go grocery shopping?
At Trader Joe’s, I stare at a sample cup of butternut-squash mac and cheese before knocking it back like a shot. Then I notice that I am being offered a fork. First-rate noticing! A cardboard gargoyle peers down at me from the corner of the store. “That is a gargoyle,” I say, trying to ease myself into conversation with the employee who offered me the mac and cheese.
“It’s cardboard,” the employee says. “It has been there five years.”
I ask him about the historic price of eggs and he says that the cost has gone down—eggs that are $2.99 were $3.99 a mere two days ago! A secret weekend egg deal? Like a real field economist might find? He doesn’t know. I leave the store with two specific numbers and without buying anything, which I consider a double win. Plus, I have data on the longevity of the cardboard gargoyle, just in case.
“I can’t help but notice we are in a Whole Foods,” I tell a Whole Foods employee who—perhaps having noticed me walking around with no shopping cart and a Geiger counter—has asked if I need help. “Is there any way of finding out what eggs used to cost in the past?”
He tells me that they have roughly doubled in price—eggs that are now $9 a carton were once $5; those that are now $4 were once $2.
These are the peaks of my data collection. At Giant, I am informed that eggs used to cost triple what they cost now. At Rodman’s, when I ask what eggs used to cost, all I get is the assurance that eggs are expensive everywhere. At Target, an employee responds to my inquiry about the historic price of eggs by asking if I want to go to the egg aisle and see for myself. “No,” I say, “I meant in the past.” I complete the rest of my self-checkout in silence.
I need something to show for this effort. So I make a table using the data that I collected for a dozen large eggs, grade A.
This takes me only three hours. Should I be averaging the variables? That feels like a thing I can do. Can you average a number ending in ish ?
Maybe it’s better not to collect too much economic data. Maybe doing so would frighten the economy. Maybe I’d better do something that can only help the economy: basic scientific research, which can ripple into world-changing breakthroughs. Did you know that studying the venom of gila monsters—decades ago, at a Veterans Affairs medical center—yielded a treatment for type 2 diabetes that, in the past few years, has spawned a weight-loss revolution?
And so I drive to Johns Hopkins University, where I hear they do a lot of science.
I have just destroyed eight human retinal organoids with my subpar pipetting.
Allie—a grad student in Professor Bob’s biology lab here at Johns Hopkins—is being very nice about it, but I feel terrible. She needs these retinas so she can study how different photoreceptors are made.
Johns Hopkins, “America’s first research university,” receives a lot of government funding. Or, at least, it used to. Something like $3 billion in grants were cut last year across the National Science Foundation and the NIH. When USAID was dismantled, Johns Hopkins lost $800 million in grants, leading to the elimination of more than 2,200 jobs around the world.
In Professor Bob’s lab, grad students are trying to figure out how genes are expressed and how that affects an organism’s physiology. Flies are helping them understand this by dying in large quantities. These are special flies whose genotype we know a lot about, and they live in jars full of a special sugary food, which they consume contentedly for their entire life (about 45 days).
They (the researchers, not the flies) suggest that I start small. My task will be to help flip the flies—move them from one jar full of a dense sugary substance to another jar—without releasing too many. Then I get to sex the flies, and then, with a microscope and forceps, I get to behead them. This is the closest I will ever get to being a praying mantis. The grad students report that informing people of the sex of nearby flies is a fun trick they perform at parties. (Gen Z needs to drink more.)
The percentage of the federal budget that goes to general science and basic research is not huge—about 0.2 percent—unless you consider the F-35 fighter jet a form of science. But the return is astounding. Google’s beginnings can be traced to a federal grant for digital libraries. Now look at the company, helping to keep the entire economy afloat—and leading me to Tim the balloon pilot!
“Without scientific progress,” the eminent engineer Vannevar Bush (also an eminent Atlantic writer) once wrote, “no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.” He submitted a report to Harry Truman in 1945 to argue for creating an agency that could support and fund basic research around the country. His brainchild, the National Science Foundation, was born in 1950. Dedicated support for scientific research has given us GPS (where would we be without it?), cancer-research funding that’s helped save millions of lives (something we used to agree was an obvious good), and the atomic bomb (a parenthetical aside is the wrong venue to sum up my feelings about the atomic bomb).
So those are the stakes. Just millions of lives, the entire economy, and, of course, our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.
I have to focus! My next task is to help grow human retinal organoids, for study. Grad Student Allie does this by starting out with a set of stem cells and then using chemicals to insist that those cells become retinas. She shows me the ones she has been working on, all in various stages of development. The newest ones resemble leaves with little nibbles around the edges; the more mature ones have become blobs with little meatballs attached; later, she removes the meatballs and, presto, a retina. To me, this is functionally witchcraft.
I do my best to help her in the earlier stages of retina development, by extracting waste from vials with growing retinas and then pipetting in pink liquid (food? Do baby retinas eat?).
I extract something that I hope is waste and gently squirt it into a waste container. Whatever it is, I guess it’s waste now. Then I use the pipette to draw up a quantity of pink liquid and squirt it into the tube. I do this slowly and carefully, in the same way that I drive slowly and carefully: in little, jagged bursts of speed, interrupted by long pauses. This is not ideal pipetting. Bubbles form. Retinas are destroyed.
Allie is very kind, despite the devastation I have wrought. I won’t be able to replicate this at home, anyway. I don’t have any stem cells—unless some are growing between the yellow strata in my jug of raw milk that might soon become cheese?
I am starting to unravel a little bit. Becoming aware of all of these things I did not formerly think about has only made me aware of even more things.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting took a hit—perhaps I should make children’s programming?
Cuts to the IRS? I’ve got to audit things! Does anyone know a billionaire willing to share his tax records with me?
The U.S. Geological Survey’s budget might be cut by almost 40 percent. WHERE IS THE OCEAN? GET ME A MEASURING TAPE!
Did I mention that the first hot-air-balloon ride I booked—before I found Tim in Columbus—charged my credit card twice and sent me to a Cincinnati rendezvous point where no one showed up? No balloon, no balloon pilot, nothing! Does the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau investigate balloon fraud? If it does, it probably won’t for much longer. Trump is trying to shut down the bureau.
Bridge inspectors at the Department of Transportation are still on the job, but maybe I should familiarize myself with the varieties of truss.
Who’s watching all of the airplanes? I play the simple games for aspiring air-traffic controllers that NASA (not the FAA, curiously) hosts on its website. These games offer all the fun of basic trigonometry, plus an ominous announcement, if you get the math wrong, reading, “SEPARATION LOST”—an aviation reference for occasioning a mid-air collision.
All the while, I have my Geiger counter, which is now a dear old friend, having stuck with me through it all. But what happens if I find actual radioactive material? My knowledgeable friends suggest vitrification, which can turn liquid waste into solid waste, because solid waste is much easier to deal with than liquid waste (as a parent of two young children, I can confirm). Unfortunately I do not have good vitrifying equipment in my kitchen.
I catch my husband Googling what price divorce, but he assures me it is just to help with my BLS research. Also, I made the mistake of telling my 3-year-old that I stepped in cow dung at the farm, and now every time she gets into the car, she claims that it “smells poopy.”
I’m tired of asking what I can do for my country! I’ll just go for a soothing walk.
But taking a soothing walk reminds me that the National Park Service, too, is suffering cuts; 24 percent of its permanent workforce is gone. But I don’t know how to help. I thought that maybe I could clean toilets on the National Mall; an internal NPS spreadsheet listed Areas Where It Was Stretched Thin, including bathroom maintenance. But when I poke my head in the stalls, the bathrooms around the Washington Monument seem just fine. Maybe everything’s just fine!
I think about offering my interpretive services at the World War I Memorial, but the plaques there imply that every day at 5 p.m., the actor Gary Sinise sends a bugler to play taps, and I don’t want to compete with Gary Sinise’s bugler.
I read in the same NPS spreadsheet that the Antietam battlefield has curbed its mowing and is “less-than-manicured,” which “may be viewed negatively by visitors.” Perhaps this is how I can help. I will go to the place that saw the bloodiest day of the Civil War and see what needs doing. Maybe I can tidy up? And maybe I can finally feel like I’m doing something for my country.
I am scrabbling in the dirt with my bare hands in Antietam National Battlefield, trying to clear a walking path around a felled tree. “I don’t think I’m helping!” I say, for the fifth or sixth time, to the photographer who is documenting my civic-minded humiliation. I am sweating. There is dirt under my nails and dirt in my boots. I have moved what feels like a lot of dirt around, but also I have not moved enough dirt around. The path is still blocked.
It is October. It is lovely in the autumn way of clear water moving over rocks as leaves fall. Antietam is the name of a creek, and something about the creek’s scale feels wrong, given what happened here 164 years ago. Too small, somehow. Suspiciously still.
I don’t know what else to do, in this current chapter of American turmoil, so I am doing this: clearing a path, because there ought to be a path here.
This task would be easy for a person with the right equipment. It would take an hour for someone with a chainsaw. But I am trying my best, and my best is no good at all.
“You have perhaps believed Government jobs to be ‘soft’ and ‘easy,’ ” Horace M. Albright, the superintendent of Yellowstone, wrote to park-ranger applicants in the summer of 1926. “Most of them are not, and certainly there are no such jobs in the National Park Service.”
The hard work of the park rangers at Antietam is to protect this place of history for visitors in the future. Antietam was brutal, with thousands of casualties—among them, arguably, slavery. After the battle, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring the end of slavery in the Confederate states. The bloodshed at Antietam helped extend the promises of the Declaration of Independence to more people.
The site needs to be preserved. It needs to be kept sightly. It needs … to be mowed.
I see some unkempt grass near a few cannons and get my friend Dave’s hand mower out of my trunk. The moment when you push a hand mower around Antietam is a moment when you must ask yourself questions, such as: How did I get here? How did we get here?
How I got here: a five-month experiment in self-government as an individual.
How we got here: a 250-year experiment in self-government as a group.
I push the mower forward, and think about truths that are self-evident. The world is full of threats to life and liberty, before you even start thinking about the pursuit of happiness. If you want to have life, that means you want to be able to buy a sandwich, take a bite out of it, and not die. You want your children to drink milk and not die. If a big storm is coming, you want to know about it so you can evacuate if you need to. Where there is nuclear waste, you want it put away properly. You want to increase your sum total of knowledge about the human body and the world, so that you can prevent disease, or cure it. And, ideally, you want passionate citizens to handle the specialized stuff—people who love flies, or dew points, or the price of eggs, or making sure airplanes don’t hit each other.
If there were a big button that said, “Hey, push this button and somebody else will handle all the hard, technical stuff, and in exchange you will pay a percentage of your annual income, but don’t worry: We will have a team of people to make sure that you pay the right amount; also, there will be large, beautiful places where you can go for walks and learn about nature and history. And all the time you save will be your own!,” I would absolutely push that button.
But for now, I push the mower.
People have tried to walk away from the federal government before. To break it up. And on this hill that I am mowing, some men died saying, “No. You don’t get to do that. You’re in this with us.”
When I think of civil servants in this current uncivil moment—the air-traffic controllers who worked during the shutdown; the NOAA weather chasers flying into a hurricane to measure it, paycheck or no paycheck; the Park Service employees scrambling to keep bathrooms clean despite the cuts to their ranks—I will now think of Antietam.
I asked what I could do for my country and the answer was: alone, not much. Indeed, many things are weird at best, or destructive at worst, when you try to do them yourself. But if enough people get together and commit to doing them, you’ve got yourself a government.
Together, it’s doable.
Alone, I give up!
Time to drive home from Antietam. Having mowed slightly, and been humbled greatly, I declare my experiment in self-government to be over. Save for one final task.
I’ve got a glass of cheese to drink.
This article appears in the February 2026 print edition with the headline “I’m Not From the Government but I’m Here to Help.”
2026-01-09 01:04:30
There’s a lot we don’t know about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed yesterday by federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota. But in the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, one thing became immediately clear: The Trump administration was lying about what happened.
Shortly after news began circulating about the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on X that “rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and the White House adviser Stephen Miller also described the incident as “domestic terrorism,” while President Donald Trump posted on his social network that Good “ran over the ICE Officer.”
Videos of the incident, taken by bystanders, show almost every element of McLaughlin’s statement to be false. There were no riots at the scene, and no rioters. The vehicle appears to be driving away from the armed federal agents, not toward them, and no one was run over. And there is no evidence that terrorism of any kind was involved. After the shooting, federal agents then reportedly prevented a bystander who identified himself as a physician from tending to Good. “They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told reporters. “Having seen the video of myself, I want to tell everybody directly, that is bullshit.”
[Read: Lethal force on a frozen street]
A perverse absurdity of American law and culture, however, is that agents of the state empowered to use lethal force are rarely held to high standards for doing so. Good’s reasons for being in the neighborhood are not publicly known yet. What the witness sees, though, is simple: A scared woman is shot dead by an armed agent of the state. The Trump administration’s position is also simple: She deserved it. “Do you think this officer was wrong in defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over?” Vice President J. D. Vance posted.
Administration officials’ indifference to facts, to due process, to the dignity of the deceased, and to basic human decency is remarkable. They could have pleaded for patience and said the incident would be investigated—the standard response in such circumstances. They could have even done so while defending the federal agents they have deployed to terrorize areas they perceive as Democratic Party enclaves. Instead, they proceeded to make ostentatiously dishonest statements that they knew would be contradicted by the video evidence available to anyone with eyes to see it. The federal government now speaks with the voice of the right-wing smear machine: partisan, dishonest, and devoted to vilifying Trump’s perceived enemies rather than informing the public. Good’s mother, partner, and children have to cope not only with their unfathomable loss, but with a campaign designed to justify her killing. Their own lives will be subject to invasive scrutiny by the government and its allies, in a search for any derogatory information about Good that might somehow be used to justify her killing. For some, that won’t even be necessary. “I do not feel bad for the woman that was involved,” the Republican lawmaker Randy Fine told the right-wing network Newsmax.
As my colleague Quinta Jurecic has reported, the Trump administration has made a point of following through on absurd accusations by filing absurd charges. The most relevant example here is that of Marimar Martinez, who survived being shot multiple times by a federal agent in Chicago; DHS claimed that she, too, had rammed them with her car. The agent later bragged to his buddies about his eagle-eyed gunning-down of Martinez, who was unarmed and hadn’t committed a crime. The charges against her were dropped.
The New York Times reported that the death of Good was the ninth shooting by an ICE officer since September, all of which officials called self-defense. In at least one of those incidents—the fatal shooting of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a Mexican immigrant—there was video evidence that contradicted DHS’s account. The administration has also charged Newark Mayor Ras Baraka with trespassing and Representative LaMonica McIver with assault, falsely accusing them of storming an ICE facility, when video of the encounter shows nothing of the kind. Baraka is now suing for defamation. Another supposed menace to society was accused of assault for scraping the knuckles of an FBI agent during a scuffle—the grand jury refused to indict over this harrowing example of anti-hand crime. In every one of these incidents, the administration lied about both the events and the civilians involved in them, in an attempt to justify the use of force or subsequent prosecution.
[David A. Graham: A deadly shooting in Minnesota]
The Trump administration has repeatedly targeted small and politically disempowered populations—Haitians, Somalis, trans people—in order to justify abuses of power. But its abuses of power are not limited to those communities. What the government can do to the most vulnerable among us, it can also do to you.
The blatant lies about Minneapolis serve several purposes. They perpetuate the false narrative that federal agents are in constant peril and therefore justified in using lethal force at the slightest hint of danger. They assure federal agents that they can harm or even kill American citizens with impunity, and warn those who might be moved to protest Trump’s immigration policies of the same thing. Perhaps most grim, they communicate to the public that if you happen to be killed by a federal agent, your government will bear false witness to the world that you were a terrorist.
This approach, of course, is quite familiar to communities that have been dealing with police abuses for as long as there have been professional police forces. In 2000, then–New York City Mayor and future Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani justified the killing of the Haitian American Patrick Dorismond by police by quipping that he was “no altar boy.” Embarrassingly for Giuliani, whose capacity for shame was overestimated even then, it turned out that Dorismond had literally been an altar boy. Dorismond’s mother responded to the campaign to justify her son’s killing with an observation that continues to haunt me decades later.
“They kill,” Dorismond said, “and after that, they kill him the other way—with the mouth.”
Taking Good’s life wasn’t enough. The moment she died, it became imperative for the administration to also destroy her memory.
