2025-12-19 08:58:00
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The president took a few moments out of his scattershot address to the nation last night to shield his party from blame over high health-care costs. If federal subsidies for the Affordable Care Act lapse at the end of the year, premiums may rise for more than 20 million Americans, dramatically worsening the affordability issues that are now top of mind for both parties. “It’s the Unaffordable Care Act,” Trump said. And a health-care system in crisis is “the Democrats’ fault.”
In fact, Democrats have consistently pushed to extend the subsidies; it was House Speaker Mike Johnson who said on Tuesday that the House would not vote on whether to continue funding the credits before the House’s holiday recess. Yesterday, a few GOP dissenters lent their signatures to a Democrat-led effort to force a vote, but they were outflanked by party members who oppose the credits (mostly on grounds that it costs too much and enables insurance fraud). Even if the House did put it to a vote before current funding for the subsidies expires on December 31, the Senate has already rejected the plan. Barring some drastic intervention, health-care costs will go up.
A month ago, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries predicted that either those subsidies would be renewed “or the American people will throw Republicans out of their jobs next year and end the speakership of Donald J. Trump once and for all.” His theory is about to be tested. When funding lapses in the new year, some Americans will see their costs double or triple. The average affected enrollee will see their costs rise by more than $1,000 annually. An education consultant in Chicago told NPR that her plan would increase from $180 a month to $1,200 a month. Many enrollees may no longer be able to pay for coverage at all; nearly 5 million people could become uninsured. An Ohio family said on MS NOW that because their new plan would cost $1,500 monthly with a $15,000 deductible, they are having to forgo coverage altogether. At a moment when the majority of Americans are dissatisfied with Trump’s stewardship of the economy, millions could soon be hit with a huge new expense.
That’s when the second part of Jeffries’s prediction starts to kick in. The 2026 midterms are almost a year away, so there’s plenty of time for public opinion to rebound—but as of now, Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle the economy, per PBS, and the cost of living remains the top priority for Republicans and independents ahead of the midterms. Backlash to the Republican stance on the Affordable Care Act contributed to House Democrats’ resurgence in the 2018 midterms. Now GOP lawmakers will have to contend with the possibility that it could happen again.
During the recent government shutdown, which was largely caused by disagreements over whether to extend the ACA credits, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia representative and former Trump ally, broke rank. “When the tax credits expire this year my own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE, along with all the wonderful families and hard-working people in my district,” she wrote in October. Among the four centrist Republicans who defied Johnson yesterday by signing a Democrat-led discharge petition was Michael Lawler, the first Republican to represent his New York district since the early 1980s (he’s up for reelection next year). Also on the list is Brian Fitzpatrick, a representative for a battleground district in Pennsylvania. “I know my people back home care tremendously about this,” he said last week.
That sentiment extends well beyond Pennsylvania. Recent polling shows that 57 percent of Americans support the Affordable Care Act, and 74 percent support extending the credits. Responding to broader concerns about health-care costs, Trump recently unveiled TrumpRx, a new initiative to let consumers buy drugs directly from manufacturers at lower prices. But that can only do so much to offset a major insurance-premium spike. Health care involves more than just drugs—decreasing the sticker price for weight-loss and migraine medications won’t do much to cover a trip to the hospital for a broken leg.
Another tactic the administration is considering is simply handing out checks, which could help mitigate the impact of those expiring subsidies. In his speech yesterday, Trump announced a onetime bonus of $1,776 for all members of the military, and he has contemplated sending every American a neat sum of $2,000—part of his doubling down on affordability messaging. But these are Band-Aid solutions to long-term problems that have been exacerbated over the past year. Trump’s tariffs have played a large role in raising prices on all kinds of consumer goods. When the health-care cutbacks of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act go into effect next year, millions of Americans could be forced off Medicaid, opening them up to sky-high hospital bills. And even though Trump hasn’t spearheaded the fight against health-care credits, he said last month that he’d “rather not” extend them.
If insurance premiums rise, they will do so on Trump’s watch. Although it’s too early to know how that will affect next year’s midterms, come January, the affordability crisis could get even worse—and the GOP will have to confront its choices.
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By Seth A. Klarman
Warren Buffett has long been known and admired around the world for doing something that is, at its essence, mundane. He is not a brilliant artist or a great inventor or a record-setting athlete. Instead, his brilliance—a low-key, midwestern type of brilliance—found expression in the prosaic art of investing: buying this stock and avoiding that one. Buffett himself has called this task “simple, but not easy.” While millions upon millions of people buy and sell investments every day, no one has a record of doing it better than he has, as consistently as he has, and for as long as he has.
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2025-12-19 08:46:00
For more than 50 years, America’s official position on marijuana has been seen as nonsensical. By classifying pot as a Schedule I drug, the federal government has lumped it with heroin and LSD as substances with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” In 1972, two years after marijuana was relegated to the most restrictive category of drugs in America, a government report found that weed’s “actual impact on society does not justify a social policy designed to seek out and firmly punish those who use it.”
Even with the federal classification, states have been experimenting with marijuana legalization for nearly three decades. These laws have led to fewer marijuana-related arrests without dramatic increases in crime, and they haven’t substantially spiked the rate of illicit adolescent cannabis use. Although fully legalizing recreational marijuana remains controversial, it’s clear that smoking a joint from your local dispensary is not the same as using heroin.
Now America’s marijuana policies are getting a bit more in line with the actual science. Today, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the government to move the drug to Schedule III, a classification for substances with “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” As the president emphasized in the Oval Office, the action “doesn’t legalize marijuana in any way, shape, or form.” Selling marijuana without a prescription will still be a federal crime, just as trafficking anabolic steroids (also a Schedule III drug) is illegal.
The biggest impact from today’s action will likely be on medical research. Marijuana studies have been stymied because researchers who want to experiment with Schedule I drugs need to be closely vetted by the federal government. During the signing ceremony for the executive order, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. argued that the new classification will let scientists better understand the drug. That’s the hope of Ryan Vandrey, a cannabis researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Vandrey’s lab was cleared to do cannabis research while marijuana was still in Schedule I, but he hopes that this loosening of restrictions will open up “a huge number of possibilities for us to get at both the health benefits and health risks of cannabis as a whole,” he told me.
At the same time, by rescheduling the drug, the government runs the risk of signaling that marijuana is no big deal. “We need to be very clear in our messaging—especially to young people—that rescheduling does not mean cannabis is harmless,” Scott Hadland, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a pediatrician who treats adolescent addiction, told me. The government needs to figure out a way to tell Americans that even though marijuana is not as dangerous as heroin, it’s still an addictive drug. That’s not an easy message to communicate. Prior to signing the executive order today, the president touted the purported benefits of marijuana for certain medical conditions, but he also echoed the “Just Say No” drug campaign of decades past. “Unless a drug is recommended by a doctor for medical reasons, just don’t do it,” he said. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)
When talking about the risks of marijuana, you can easily to come off as a scold. Roughly 50 percent of Americans have tried the drug, and according to a 2024 study, the number of people using cannabis daily or near daily now eclipses the number who drink alcohol at a similar frequency. (Trump emphasized today that weed rescheduling polls well.) Even so, the risks of marijuana are real. The CDC estimates that three in 10 cannabis users exhibit some signs of dependency.
It doesn’t help that marijuana isn’t the same as when it was first scheduled, back in 1970. The drug has become significantly stronger over the past several decades. The average joint in the ’70s contained about 2 percent THC, the main psychoactive component of marijuana. In 2025, dispensaries regularly stock joints that have more than 35 percent THC. Studies have shown that use of higher-concentration marijuana is associated with serious mental-health outcomes, such as psychosis. In 2017, there were more than 100,000 hospitalizations for pot-linked psychosis, one study found. Vandrey said that he hopes rescheduling will help researchers better interrogate the “very strong correlation” between heavy marijuana use and psychosis.
None of this is to say that marijuana should stay a Schedule I drug, as it has for decades. In spite of this classification, millions of Americans have continued to use it. The government is now finally backing away from a misguided position about the risks of pot. But it still has to contend with the drug’s complications.
2025-12-19 08:09:00
President Donald Trump signed an executive order today that committed the Justice Department to “rescheduling” marijuana. Although the order won’t legalize pot, it will relax a series of restrictions that the federal government has long enforced. The move has a broad coalition of supporters, including many progressives, who say that it will enable medical research and alleviate mass incarceration. But in reality, rescheduling marijauna will do little more than hand a tax break to the corporations that spent millions of dollars lobbying for it.
The term rescheduling comes from the Controlled Substances Act, the legal foundation of America’s drug-control regime. Under the CSA, controlled drugs (as opposed to uncontrolled ones, such as acetaminophen and ibuprofen) are sorted into five schedules. For decades, the government has listed marijuana under Schedule I, which it reserves for drugs that have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. If the administration’s plan goes through, marijuana will shift to Schedule III, a classification for drugs that have a medical use and a relatively low potential for abuse or dependence.
[Jonathan Caulkins and Keith Humphreys: Legal weed didn’t deliver on its promises ]
Such a move would clearly defy the current science on marijuana. Contrary to conventional wisdom, pot—especially today’s highly potent product—is both addictive and harmful. Figures vary, but the CDC estimates that about 30 percent of users become addicted. Moreover, research has linked marijuana use to a range of health risks. Recent meta-analyses have found strong and persistent associations between marijuana use and heart disease, stroke, lung disease, loss of IQ, psychotic events, and schizophrenia. Overdosing on marijuana may be all but impossible, but the drug is no less risky than mescaline and certain psychoactive components of khat, both of which the government classifies under Schedule I.
What about marijuana’s medical applications? Forty states already permit doctors to recommend marijuana, and many Americans use it for a variety of issues, including insomnia and chronic pain. But scientific research simply doesn’t back up the claim that marijuana is medicine. A recent paper published in The Journal of the American Medical Association looked at more than 30 systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and concluded that “evidence from randomized clinical trials does not support the use of cannabis or cannabinoids for most conditions for which it is promoted.” Some marijuana patients may find relief because of a placebo effect or temporary intoxication. But the assertion that the cannabis plant can treat underlying pathologies is, at best, premature.
Trump and others at today’s signing ceremony claimed that rescheduling marijuana will facilitate greater research, which may well show that pot has genuine medical uses. But even though Schedule III substances are generally easier to study than Schedule I substances, reclassifying marijuana won’t make researching it much easier. This is because a law that Congress passed in 2022 to ease marijuana research already supersedes the restrictions imposed by the drug’s schedule status, as the Congressional Research Service observed last year. If marijuana is rescheduled, Congress would need to modify or repeal that law to actually make researchers’ lives easier—a heavier political lift. Alternatively, the administration could use its ample statutory power to facilitate marijuana research without rescheduling the drug.
Some may expect that rescheduling marijuana will help keep its users out of prison. Indeed, Schedule III drugs are generally subject to lighter penalties than are Schedule I drugs. But as the Congressional Research Service has noted, many of the penalties for marijuana offenses apply regardless of its schedule status, so reclassification won’t soften pot-related laws, which result in few prison sentences anyway.
If rescheduling won’t make research easier or keep people out of prison, why do it at all? One answer: money. Marijuana giants such as Trulieve, whose CEO has enjoyed significant access to the White House, stand to make billions from rescheduling thanks to an obscure provision of the tax code, 26 USC 280E. According to that clause, businesses cannot deduct from their taxes any expense accrued from trafficking a controlled substance. That’s why some state-legal marijuana conglomerates pay effective tax rates of up to 70 percent. Importantly, though, 280E applies only to Schedule I and II substances. Move pot to Schedule III, and that tax burden vanishes. (This may explain why the administration didn’t move marijuana to Schedule II even though it has repeatedly acknowledged that pot is dangerous.) In other words, an industry worth an estimated $34 billion is about to get an enormous tax cut.
[Dan Brooks: The lonely new vices of American life]
Marijuana companies have spent big to get to this point. They poured at least $1 million into Trump’s inauguration, paid for a $1-million-a-plate dinner with the president, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to get MAGA influencers to advocate for rescheduling. Trump, a teetotaler whose brother suffered from addiction, has expressed plenty of skepticism about pot. But industry executives seem to have persuaded him: Some of them were reportedly on a call with the president when he said that he would move forward with rescheduling.
Today’s executive order will empower an often-predatory industry that sells addictive and hazardous products to millions of Americans. Business is already booming: As of 2022, some 18 million Americans use marijuana daily or almost daily, and about 19 million have a “cannabis use disorder,” according to federal survey data. In addition to the previously mentioned health harms, these users are also at risk of social isolation, disconnection, and family struggles, as Annie Lowrey documented in The Atlantic in 2018.
Rescheduling will not lead to meaningfully more research, more healing, or more Americans avoiding prison. But it will likely lead to more people living with a dangerous habit. And it will certainly lead to more money for a massive industry. Big Marijuana is about to get even bigger.
2025-12-19 06:19:00
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
After his death, James Garfield got the full Horatio Alger treatment. As well he should have. Garfield, who died in September 1881 from an assassin’s bullet and his own doctors’ staggeringly inept care, really did rise, as Alger’s book phrased it, From Canal Boy to President. Born into poverty in Ohio, Garfield was a striver of tireless industry and integrity, particularly when measured against the slithering creatures that moved through American political life in the Gilded Age.
Now Garfield has received the prestige television treatment, becoming the subject of the four-part Netflix series Death by Lightning, which premiered last month and covers his nomination and brief presidency. The series presents Garfield as a thoroughly decent figure in a mostly rotten time—and with good reason. If Garfield had his compromises and inner conflicts, he really was serious and principled. But watching the show today, when flashes of the Gilded Age are visible in presidential decor, tariffs, weird manliness cults, and much else, its depiction of Garfield feels like a hollow revival of the Alger myth—while the qualities of the man who killed the president feel disturbingly familiar.
Alger wrote didactic fiction, the kind of thing that he said would “exert a wholesome influence on his young readers.” With Garfield, the lessons came from the story of his life: born in a log cabin, raised to labor on a farm, stood up to bullies, expanded his mind by diligent application, and performed heroic service in the Civil War. Garfield came to public service honestly, which is to say reluctantly. At 21, in 1852, he observed in his diary that politics seemed a crooked racket. What he called “the wire-pulling of politicians and the total disregard of truth in all their operations” held little appeal. Though his ambitions grew over time, Garfield never fully shook his basic doubts. Between references to Shakespeare, Latin poetry, and earnest reflections on books and sermons, Garfield’s diary records constant restlessness over the humdrum and compromises of public life.
The story of an honest bootstrapper became more complicated amid the corruption of the Gilded Age. Garfield retained his decency, but it didn’t always match the politics he inhabited, as evidenced in his 1877 Atlantic treatise on Congress. Scholarly and reverent, the essay presents the institution as noble at precisely the moment when its credibility was under strain. Written shortly after Rutherford B. Hayes ascended to the presidency because of a shadowy compromise Garfield had a hand in striking, this essay does not disguise the political system’s flaws. Instead, Garfield insisted that American institutions could retain their integrity, even in corrupt times.
Death by Lightning spares viewers Garfield’s backstory, but his inner conflicts over the dull and disreputable doings of politics forms the ample weight he seems to carry (which the actor Michael Shannon labors to convey under his thick, stagey beard). By the show’s telling—and not entirely without foundation—Garfield channeled his frustrations into a stirring speech at the 1880 Republican convention in Chicago. There to nominate the Ohio Senator John Sherman, Garfield spoke with such force (he’d bemoaned the decline of the oratorical tradition in his Atlantic essay) that he ended up advancing his own candidacy.
Once he was president, Garfield became mired in the unsavory workings of the spoils system: He was beset by factional jockeying among the Republican brass, and hordes of office seekers were beating down his door. Most formidable in the former camp was New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, who enjoyed the power and profit of patronage, and was not inclined to give it up. Conkling and his minions—including Vice President Chester Arthur—behaved like mob bosses in defense of the existing system. In the series, they talk like mob bosses, too. It’s possible that they use the F-word more over four episodes than it was used in the whole of the United States between Garfield’s nomination and death.
Garfield’s brief time in office was also menaced by a deranged drifter named Charles Guiteau. Guiteau, who had spent the election repeatedly delivering an incoherent pro-Garfield speech on street corners, was convinced that his campaigning merited a diplomatic posting—in Vienna, or preferably Paris. When his efforts failed, he purchased a pistol with an ivory handle, believing it worthy of the extra expense because it was destined to find a place in national history as the instrument that liberated the country from Garfield. He used it on July 2, 1881, shooting the president twice in the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station.
In Death by Lightning, Garfield is portrayed as a good man in an age of bad politicians; such a premise is hopeful but perhaps too hopeful for our current moment. At the same time, Guiteau, as played with demented earnestness by Matthew McFadyen, steals the show. The assassin is the more legible, if not the more compelling, character: a voracious consumer of political coverage and carefully attuned to the culture of celebrity. He is chillingly redolent of the violent figures who sometimes emerge from the darkest corners of contemporary discourse.
After Garfield’s death and Guiteau’s execution, Death by Lightning concludes with a gesture toward what Garfield’s life set in motion. A postscript montage notes that his assassination helped spur the first major civil-service reform with the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, an effort to curb the spoils system that had consumed his presidency. That legacy was real—but it was also narrow and easily undermined. The civil service it helped birth is now in question, its independence hanging before the Supreme Court, all while openly transactional politics and the logic of the spoils system once again take hold in Washington. Then as now, when so much of governance is fraying, one good guy might not be enough.
2025-12-19 06:03:00
Donald Trump has now installed descriptive plaques under all the portraits that line his “Presidential Walk of Fame” in the White House. If you wonder whether they are petty, but also deeply strange and erratically capitalized, the answer is: Yes! Of course!
Surely they cannot really be that bad, you say. All right. See if you can guess the real ones! Then scroll to the bottom for the answer key.
25. Joseph Biden: Nicknamed both “Sleepy” and “Crooked,” Joe Biden was dominated by his Radical Left handlers. They and their allies in the Fake News Media attempted to cover up his severe mental decline, and his unprecedented use of the Autopen.
24. Barack Obama: Barack Hussein Obama was the first Black President, a community organizer, one term Senator from Illinois, and one of the most divisive political figures in American History. As President, he passed the highly ineffective “Unaffordable” Care Act, resulting in his party losing control of both Houses of Congress, and the Election of the largest House Republican majority since 1946.
23. George W. Bush: President Bush created the Department of Homeland Security, but started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which should not have happened.
22. John F. Kennedy: Kennedy suffered a painful setback during the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, and was President when the Soviet Union built the Berlin Wall, but skillfully navigated the threat of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
21. Harry S. Truman: Harry S. Truman dropped the nuclear bombs. The Fat Man and the Little Boy. Boy, was that a mistake! If Donald Trump dropped a bomb he would make certain it was an elegant, slim bomb. He would also come up with a different name for the plane.
20. Herbert Hoover: A self-made man who rose from humble beginnings, Herbert Hoover was a successful mining engineer who became known as the “Great Humanitarian.”
19. Warren G. Harding: Right out of central casting, this guy! Groundbreaking in many ways. Those letters he sent to his mistress. Hot to trot, this guy! Jerry. We’re not allowed to talk about Jerry nowadays. The Ohio Gang. Teapot Dome. Teapot Dome, what happened to Teapot Dome? You never see any Teapot Domes anymore. Warren “Gamaliel” Harding. What a name! Gamaliel, Gamaliel, like some elf from Lord of the Rings. But he was a president, not an elf! Maybe better to be an elf. Then he could have gone into the West instead of dying in office. Better luck next time, Gamaliel.
18. Woodrow Wilson: On the one hand, he did the League of Nations, but on the other hand, he used to show Birth of a Nation in the White House and he segregated the federal government. This just goes to show there are good and bad sides to everyone. Thank goodness we never got into the League of Nations.
17. Theodore Roosevelt: Speak softly and carry a big stick was Theodore Roosevelt’s idea of a good foreign policy, which is only “good” if you have a weak voice and want your arm to get really tired. Can you imagine? You sit down with Vladimir Putin and he says, Who is that guy in the corner whispering with the stick? I guess it was a different time. Yet they gave him the Nobel Peace Prize?
16. William McKinley: What do you say about William McKinley?
15. Grover Cleveland: We love Grover Cleveland! He was president once and then he came back, which Donald Trump would also do, but better. He married his ward. Donald Trump hasn’t done that yet. But that ward wasn’t the only love of his life. “Ma, ma, where is my pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!” That’s what they sang. Gone to the White House! They didn’t care about the illegitimate child. “Ha ha ha!” We need a song like that. America doesn’t make songs like that anymore.
14. James Garfield: Some say Charles Guiteau assassinated him, but actually the doctors killed him. Not Charlie, sad to say! It wasn’t Charles Guiteau who did it. Guiteau, Git-Out, that’s what they called him at the Oneida Free Love Colony. He wanted some of that free love but his energy was just bad. And Garfield paid the price!
13. Rutherford B. Hayes: Boy, they had a lot of these guys with beards! Even the voters took one look at this little guy and said, Nah, we want to go with Samuel Tilden. Poor Sammy Tilden. Didn’t have what it took. He won the popular vote, but they gave the election to Hayes in the so-called Corrupt Bargain of 1876! At least they ended Reconstruction, which, frankly, never should have happened. But they didn’t get rid of the Fourteenth Amendment. Donald Trump has to do it himself.
12. Ulysses S. Grant: He beat the late, great Robert E. Lee. “Never fight uphill, me boys!” Was it fair and square? Hard to know. But they put him on the money. Not such a good president. He didn’t have great people around him. Sad.
11. Andrew Johnson: Some say he was drunk at inauguration. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Did you know they impeached him? Crooked Thaddeus Stevens and his Radical Republican cronies! They didn’t like old Andy J. They never like the Andrews. Jackson, Johnson, they’re not big fans. Issued a lot of great pardons, though. They said, Don’t do the pardons, Mr. Johnson. These men are traitors! They fought against the Union! They were begging him, Don’t do the pardons. But he did the pardons anyway. Good!
10. Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln succeeded for numerous reasons. He was a man who was of great intelligence, but he was also a man that did something that was a very vital thing to do at that time. Ten years before or 20 years before, what he was doing would never have even been thought possible. So he did something that was a very important thing to do, and especially at that time.
9. James Buchanan: Donald Trump has a little bit of affection for James Buchanan because as long as Buchanan is on the list of presidents, they can never put Trump last. Instead it’s little Jimmy B., or as Andrew Jackson called him, “Miss Nancy.” Not so nice of Andrew Jackson!
8. Franklin Pierce: Franklin Pierce! “We Polked You in ’44, We Shall Pierce You in ’52!” They don’t make slogans like that anymore, because of Woke.
7. Zachary Taylor: They called him a war hero but he got defeated by cherries. By cherries and a little bit of milk. Mexican War couldn’t do it, but a little tiny fruit, that got him. George Washington defeated the cherry, but Zachary Taylor, not so much. So-called general who was weaker than fruit.
6. William Henry Harrison: Gave such a long inaugural address that he died! Donald J. Trump gave a much longer address and did not die. Tippecanoe didn’t have what it takes! “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” that’s a slogan for you. You feel a little bad for Tyler, the way they tacked him on there at the end.
5. Andrew Jackson: “Old Hickory” served as a U. S. Congressman, Judge, General, Senator, and Military Governor. Before becoming President, Jackson was best known for leading the victory at the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. Jackson was often called “The People’s President” for championing the common man, but was unjustifiably treated unfairly by the Press, but not as viciously and unfairly as President Abraham Lincoln and President Donald J. Trump would, in the future, be.
4. James Monroe: Tall guy, but weird-looking. They say he ushered in the “Era of Good Feelings,” actually very BAD feelings for the Federalists! We love the Monroe Doctrine, though. And his wife was very good in Some Like It Hot.
3. James Madison: Presided over a little demolition at the White House but not on purpose. The British paid for it. Liddle Jemmy!
2. Thomas Jefferson: The Declaration of Independence, very overrated! Very overrated document. “Transported beyond seas for pretended offenses”? Sometimes you have to transport people beyond seas for pretended offenses. “Quartering troops”? Sometimes it’s nice to quarter a little troop. He didn’t get it.
1. George Washington: We like that he put his name on all the things: the monument, the city, even a state. Now if you put your name on the things, they say it’s tacky, but with him, not so much! The name wasn’t enough; he’s also on a bill and a coin. Two different forms of legal tender. Not the penny, fortunately, which is trash.
Real: 5, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25
Fake: 1–4, 6–19, 21
(No. 10 is a real quote from the president, but not on the plaque as far as I know.)
2025-12-19 05:25:36
On Tuesday afternoon, the risk of wildfire in northeastern Colorado had risen high enough that Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility company, announced that it would shut down power in much of the area the following day. Expected high winds, combined with the current dry conditions, meant that a downed electrical line could spark a catastrophe. Local institutions responded by announcing closures yesterday, among them the Boulder, Colorado–based National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR.
Shortly after the Xcel announcement, USA Today broke the news that the Trump administration planned to “dismantle” the center. Climate scientists know NCAR as one of the largest weather-and-climate-research institutions in the world; Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, described it as “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” NCAR had already reduced its staff in anticipation of drastic budget cuts at the National Science Foundation, which provides about half of the center’s funding. In March, a major NCAR project meant to track hurricanes and other severe storms was canceled after the administration pulled back money appropriated for it. Now efforts to dissolve the center would begin “immediately,” USA Today reported, and would include a full closure of the center’s Mesa Laboratory—whose distinctive rose-hued towers, designed by I. M. Pei, have overlooked the city since the 1960s. (The Office of Management and Budget did not immediately return a request for comment.)
On Tuesday night, Antonio Busalacchi, the president of the consortium that operates the center, was in New Orleans at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union along with many of the center’s researchers. Busalacchi issued a brief statement acknowledging the reports but noted that “we do not have additional information about any such plan.” That’s essentially still true: At a press availability at the conference today, Busalacchi said, “I don’t want to be facetious, but I don’t know what the best definition of ‘immediate’ means.” He defended NCAR’s work, which would be more costly if it was broken up, he said, as well as the impartiality of its researchers. “We are physical scientists. We’re not political scientists,” he said.
Like many of the institutions and agencies targeted by the Trump administration this year—USAID, the Forest Service, the National Institutes of Health—NCAR is vulnerable in part because so few Americans know what it does, if they’ve heard of it at all. Established in 1960 to advance the field of meteorology, which had flourished during World War II but languished in peacetime, the center was designed to coordinate research on “the problems of the atmosphere” and provide the large-scale computing facilities necessary for that work. It now employs more than 800 researchers and makes its facilities available to thousands more each year.
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and the chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, called NCAR “quite literally our global mothership.” Daniel Swain, a UC Agriculture and Natural Resources climate scientist known for his commentary on extreme-weather events, hosted a “rapid response” livestream yesterday morning. “Most academics in the weather and climate world,” he said, “have in some way passed through or connected with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.” Swain, himself a research partner at NCAR, spoke to his audience from Boulder, warning that the area’s planned power shutoff could bring his report to an abrupt end. He described the administration’s plans for NCAR as “a genuinely shocking self-inflicted wound.”
Whether or not Americans know it, research at the center has contributed to enormous advances in the weather forecasts they consult each day. Three-day forecasts have been more than 80 percent accurate since the 1980s and are now about 97 percent accurate; five-day forecasts hit the 80 percent threshold in the early 2000s, and seven-day forecasts are approaching it today. NCAR researchers have also enabled more precise predictions of tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, and other extreme events. The center has been so successful, Swain observed during his livestream, that we now take for granted “the fact that we are not caught by surprise when a hurricane makes landfall, the fact that we can predict the occurrence—literally, as I speak, the winds are picking up outside the window—of these extreme fire-weather conditions.”
The dissolution of the center could disrupt climate science and its applications in more fundamental ways, interfering with access to the center’s supercomputer facility in Wyoming, the cross-disciplinary collaborations essential to climate science, and recent partnerships with insurance companies and other businesses whose profitability depends on a predictable climate. An NCAR employee who was laid off because of funding cuts earlier this year, and who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation from the Trump administration, told me that the worst effects of these disruptions might not be immediately apparent. “The gaps we’re going to have in our science and technology research in the next decades are what you’re really going to notice,” the former employee said.
Vought told USA Today that although the National Science Foundation “will be breaking up” NCAR, “vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.” Yesterday, the NSF stated that it would “explore options” to put the center’s modeling and forecasting powers toward “seasonal weather prediction, severe storms, and space weather.” (Reached today, the NSF had no further comment.) White House officials characterized the dismantling of NCAR as a return to the center’s original mission—to make the weather great again, so to speak, by separating weather forecasting from research on climate change.
Weather and climate aren’t easily separable, though, and never have been. Weather, after all, is essentially a snapshot of the climate: same atmosphere, shorter timescale. The massive computer models that climate scientists now use to predict future changes in the global climate arose from the weather-forecasting models that NCAR researchers began to help build and refine in the 1960s. As researchers added power and complexity to these models, running them for longer periods and including the effects of ocean temperatures, volcanic activity, seasonal ice and snow cover, and other factors, they began to approximate the climate. NCAR’s newest climate model, the Model for Prediction Across Scales, or MPAS, can simulate both large-scale atmospheric patterns and small-scale weather events.
Today, predicting the weather without considering the climate would be meteorological malpractice. Human-caused changes in the global climate have fundamentally changed the weather, making extreme conditions not only possible but also more likely. Without ongoing research on climate change, forecasters would be less able to predict deadly weather events such as last week’s flooding in the Pacific Northwest and heavy snow in the Midwest and Northeast.
And they might not have seen the Colorado winds coming in time for electric utilities to take preventive measures. Swain signed off his livestream yesterday as the wind picked up in Boulder. By noon, Xcel Energy had shut off power to nearly 100,000 of its Colorado customers. By 4 p.m., the weather station at NCAR’s Mesa Laboratory was measuring wind gusts of more than 100 miles per hour.
