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Attendance at an elite college increases a student’s chances of joining America’s most elite ranks, according to a new study. I chatted with my colleague Annie Lowrey, who reported on this new research yesterday, about how to diversify the student bodies of America’s wealthiest schools—and, by extension, the whole of elite America.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The American evangelical Church is in crisis. There’s only one way out. How Trumpism differs from fascism Why Elon killed the bird

A Propulsive Quality

A new study by a group of economists found what might seem to be an obvious correlation: Attending an elite school ups a person’s chances of ascending the ranks of elite society. The study, conducted by Raj Chetty of Harvard, David Deming of Harvard, and John Friedman of Brown University, looked at waitlisted students’ outcomes and showed that compared with attending one of America’s best public colleges, attending a member of what’s known as the “Ivy Plus” group—the Ivies plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago—increases a student’s chances of reaching the top of the earnings distribution at age 33 by 60 percent.

The finding is not actually so obvious. Over the past two decades, a body of research has shown that students’ average incomes end up about the same after they graduate from a flagship public institution versus an Ivy Plus school. The new study confirms this finding about average incomes, but it complicates the bigger picture: When it comes to other metrics of life in the American elite—“Supreme Court clerkships, going to a tippy-top graduate program, making it into the top 1 percent of earners at the age of 33”—schools such as Harvard and Yale matter a lot. “In general, [elite schools have] this propulsive quality,” Annie told me.

White students and, to an even greater extent, wealthy students are overrepresented at many elite colleges, and the question of how these schools can diversify has become even more urgent since the Supreme Court’s decision to curtail affirmative action. But this new study suggests that elite schools can enact some straightforward policies to diversify themselves and, in the process, the makeup of elite America. Annie and I talked through two of these possibilities.

Disbanding legacy admissions: Systems that give preference to the children of university alumni have come under scrutiny in recent years, and this scrutiny has intensified since last month’s Supreme Court ruling. Today, the Education Department said it has opened a civil-rights investigation into Harvard’s legacy-admissions practices. And last week, Wesleyan University (my own alma mater) declared an end to its use of legacy preferences.

The new paper from Chetty and his co-authors confirms that the effects of legacy admissions are real, and that they’re particularly strong for the highest-income students. The data show that legacy students whose parents are in the top 1 percent of the earnings distribution are 5 times more likely to be admitted to an Ivy Plus school compared with non-legacy students with equivalent test scores. Meanwhile, less wealthy legacy students are 3 times more likely to be admitted.

When I asked Annie if she thought the decline of legacy admissions at elite schools is a real possibility (MIT is the only school out of the Ivy Plus group studied that doesn’t use legacy preferences), she noted that this is quickly becoming a public-policy issue: President Joe Biden came out against the practice after the Supreme Court ruling, and according to polling, about three-quarters of Americans think colleges shouldn’t use legacy preferences. Universities might start to rethink their use of the practice if their presidents start getting asked about it over and over again, Annie said, “and if you start to have members of Congress saying, ‘Do we need to be giving these institutions all of this research funding and all of these nice tax breaks if they’re just picking rich kids and giving them more advantage?’”

President Biden is a particularly interesting political figure for this moment: As Annie reminded me, Biden was purportedly not a very good student, and he did not attend an elite college, as many past presidents did (he went to the University of Delaware). Meanwhile, many members of Congress come from elite colleges themselves, Annie noted: “The thing that will be most interesting is if this becomes political, and for whom does it become political?”

Increasing class sizes: I asked Annie to elaborate on a surprisingly simple argument she makes at the end of her article, one that isn’t explicitly covered in the Chetty research: Elite schools might just matriculate more students. “These schools have not grown with the growth of the United States population or the population of 18-year-olds,” she told me. We pulled up the statistics together over the phone: These Ivy Plus schools graduate about 23,000 students a year combined. Meanwhile, there are about 4 million 18-year-olds in America in any given year. Of course, not all of those kids are going to go to college. But 23,000 is “a drop in the bucket,” Annie said.

These schools have tremendous financial resources—a combined endowment of more than $200 billion for those Ivy Plus schools. Moreover, many of these schools spend lavishly on what are essentially “real-estate concerns,” such as sports facilities and dining halls, Annie said: “The notion that they couldn’t be educating many, many, many more kids is risible.”

Related:

Why you have to care about these 12 colleges A big problem with college admissions could be about to get worse.

Today’s News

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has called off a nationwide strike threat after securing a tentative five-year agreement with UPS leadership. Qin Gang was ousted from his role as China’s foreign minister after a month-long absence from public view. His predecessor will replace him. A federal judge struck down the Biden administration’s new asylum policy, which has reduced illegal crossings on the southern border.

Evening Read

Justin Renteria

Power Causes Brain Damage

By Jerry Useem (From 2017)

If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?

When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. But it was Stumpf’s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world’s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A controversial model for America’s climate future Hollywood’s huge Barbenheimer fumble Can nature lie? The two players who tell the story of U.S. women’s soccer

Culture Break

David Redfern / Getty

Read. These seven books for the lifelong learner may tempt you to take up a new pursuit.

Listen. Tony Bennett, who died on Friday, reportedly sang one last song while sitting at his piano. It’s also the one that made him a star.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu 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.

In May, Elon Musk presided over an uncharacteristically subtle tweak to Twitter’s home page. For years, the prompt in the text box at the top of the page read, “What’s happening?,” a friendly invitation for users to share their thoughts. Eight months after the billionaire’s takeover, Twitter changed the prompt ever so slightly to match the puzzling, chaotic nature of the platform under the new regime: “What’s happening?” became “What is happening?!”

This question, with its exclamatory urgency, has never been more relevant to Twitter than in the past 48 hours, when Musk decided to nuke 17 years’ worth of brand awareness and rename the thing. The artist formerly known as Twitter is now X. What is happening?! indeed.

I have three answers to that question, beyond the simple “Nothing much.” (Even with its new name, the site is pretty much the same as ever; the blue bird logo in the left-hand corner of the website is now a black X, and … that’s about it.) This X boondoggle may simply be the flailing of a man who doesn’t want to own his social network and was pressured via lawsuit to buy it, but Musk and the Twitter (X?) CEO, Linda Yaccarino, would like you to believe that much bigger things are coming.

1. Musk wants to build the “Internet of Elon.”

The first theory requires taking Musk’s ambitions somewhat seriously. In a tweet last October, he declared that “buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” Versions of these “super apps” already exist and are popular in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, so we know what this means: X would function as a holistic platform that includes payment processing and banking, ride-sharing, news, communication with friends, and loads and loads of commerce. Think of it as the internet, but without leaving Musk’s walled garden. In a leaked recording of a Twitter town hall back in June 2022, Musk hinted that China’s WeChat was a model of sorts for X. “There’s no WeChat movement outside of China,” he said. “And I think that there’s a real opportunity to create that. You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so useful and so helpful to your daily life. And I think if we could achieve that, or even close to that with Twitter, it would be an immense success.”

If you squint, you can see the logic. Plenty of people across Twitter—influencers, freelancers, small-business owners—use the platform to sell things. Many of these people use various “link in bio” pages to direct people to their work and receive payment. X, the theoretical everything app, could streamline and consolidate these exchanges, and, like WeChat, generate revenue from them. Musk has already launched a program to share ad revenue with some of Twitter’s larger “creator” accounts, the early beneficiaries of which included many prominent right-wing shock jocks. And if he could manage to get hundreds of millions of people to live and shop and bank on his app, instead of, say, shitpost memes and argue politics with white nationalists, that would be an immense success.

To do that, X would need to build out an advanced, secure payment platform; apply the appropriate regulatory licenses to legally process payments and store money; and, of course, recruit businesses and financial institutions to use the platform. According to the Financial Times, the company began filing applications for those licenses early this year and has been at work building parts of a payment infrastructure. The bad news is that the person Musk tasked with spearheading the project was laid off—along with about 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce.

[Read: I watched Elon Musk kill Twitter’s culture from the inside]

Musk does have experience in the payments business. He founded an online bank—also called X.com—in 1999, and it shortly thereafter merged with Confinity to become PayPal. Perhaps this would give his super-app idea some credibility, if not for Musk having spent the past 15 months blundering through his latest business venture in full view of the public. He has alienated advertisers with his reactionary and conspiratorial political opinions, sent the company deep into debt, and, at times, rendered the platform unusable by limiting how many tweets users can see. The platform appears to be shrinking under Musk’s leadership, according to third-party traffic data. Spam is rampant, and the most satisfied users seem to be previously banned racists and anti-Semites who have regained access to their megaphone.

It’s already a hard sell for Musk to convince people that his sputtering platform is the best place for posting Barbenheimer memes, let alone the right home for … everything, including our money. But the cognitive dissonance between Musk’s reputational hemorrhaging and his grand ambitions is easier to bridge when you consider the second way to explain X, which is that it’s a desperate shot in the dark.

2. X is pseudoware—just buzzwords and a logo.

Unlike Facebook’s pivot to Meta, which was oriented around a real (though flawed and unappealing) virtual-reality product, X is a rebrand built on little more than a vague collection of buzzwords cobbled together to form a complete sentence. On Sunday, Yaccarino described the forthcoming app as “the future state of unlimited interactivity” that is “centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.” She also noted that, “powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.” (Yaccarino did not respond to a request for comment.)

Her tweet is a near-perfect example of business-dude lorem ipsum—corporate gibberish that sounds superficially intelligent but is actually obfuscating. What is “unlimited interactivity?” How will X be “powered by AI”? Does she mean generative AI like ChatGPT or standard algorithms of the sort that have powered Twitter’s “For you” feed for years? The particulars are irrelevant: The words just need to sound like something when strung together.

Musk, too, is guilty of such blabber. He has argued that his hypothetical project, if built correctly, could “become half of the global financial system.” This is the empty language of a dilettante, the equivalent of me telling you that this article, if written correctly, is on pace to win the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, or that I am the executive wordsmith for The Atlantic’s Words About Computers section.

Musk’s and Yaccarino’s descriptions of X don’t just suggest vaporware, an industry term for a hyped-up product that never materializes. They feel like something else, too: I’d call it pseudoware. Like a pseudo-event, pseudoware masquerades as something newsworthy, even though it is not. Yaccarino’s Mad Libs–ian tweetstorm is the press release for this pseudo-event: big talk for a pivot that has so far manifested in ornamental changes. Musk’s first orders of business have been to adopt a new logo and to project it in conference rooms at headquarters. When Yaccarino tweeted that “X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” I take her at her word: No one seems to have spent much time thinking about any of this.

It’s natural to wonder why the world’s richest man would spend his time dismantling one of the world’s most recognizable social-media brands in favor of an inscrutable super app nobody asked for. He could, at any moment, jet off to a private island and drink bottomless piña coladas while giggling about Dogecoin instead! Herein lies the third and most important explanation for X, which is that it is a reputational line of credit for Musk.

3. Musk needs to save face.

Musk’s reputation is dependent on people believing that he can gin up new categories of industry and see around corners to build futuristic stuff. His $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was marketed with a visionary framework: Musk would realize Twitter’s dreams of being a truly global town square and solve the intractable problems of free speech at scale. Having failed at that, Musk is, in essence, going back to basics with X—it’s an opportunity to remake the internet in his own image.

[Read: Elon Musk really broke Twitter this time]

As Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin pointed out, Musk’s original X.com brand was a total failure. He was obsessed with the name and the web address, but consumers, not illogically, associated the brand with adult-entertainment sites. Musk was ousted by X.com’s board after the merger in 2000, a year before the service was renamed PayPal, but the payment company remains an important part of his legacy. X, then, is a callback to a younger version of the entrepreneur—one who is associated with success, products that work, and generous investor returns. It also represents unfinished business and a chance to rewrite an earlier phase of his career.

In this sense, X is less a brilliant vision than it is an act of desperation. Musk is behaving much like a start-up with an unsustainable burn rate—he needs a cash injection. And in order to raise some reputational capital, he needs a good idea, one that seems plausible and scalable. X checks all the boxes for such an idea. Its ambitions are so vague as to be boundless, which signals perpetual growth and moneymaking—it is, quite literally, the everything app. In this way, X is an inkblot test for anyone who still wants to believe in Musk: Squint the right way and X takes on the form of whatever hopes and dreams that person has for the future of the internet. This is the fleeting genius of pseudoware: The best feature of marketing an app for everything is that you can get away with saying mostly nothing.

But just how many people still have unwavering faith in Musk is an open question. How many people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the man who can’t pay his rents and server bills on time? Who is going to help build this technological behemoth for the man who fired the majority of his company and allegedly owes $500 million in severance payments? And, perhaps most important, who is excited about what Musk is focusing his time, energy, and money on?

Even though X wants to be big, a WeChat clone is conceptually small in comparison with the projects that have allowed Musk to market himself as a savant: space exploration, rewiring the human brain, revolutionizing transportation to save the Earth. The most cynical view of X is that the people who still respect Musk are reactionaries who delight only when their enemies have been gleefully trolled. Perhaps, then, Musk’s dismantling of the social network is a success, so long as it makes the right people miserable. Left with few options, Musk has decided to mortgage the Twitter brand to save his own. Even by his standards, it’s a risky bet.

In February of 1949, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of Los Alamos Laboratory under the Manhattan Project, took to the pages of this magazine to write about a terrible defeat. Nearly four years had passed since the Manhattan Project had detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. The explosion had flashed purple light onto the surrounding mountains and raised a 40,000-foot pillar of flame, smoke, and debris from the desert floor. But for Oppenheimer, the afterglow had quickly dimmed and been replaced by an existential hangover of the first order.

[From February 1949: J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ‘The Open Mind’]

The most gutting stretch of Christopher Nolan’s new Oppenheimer biopic occurs when the great scientist, played by Cillian Murphy, begins to experience the disenchantment that would haunt him for the rest of his life. As he watches two bombs rumble away on trucks from his desert lab toward Japan, any illusion that their terrible power is under his control is punctured. Hiroshima was bombed three weeks after the Trinity test. In the film, a sickened Oppenheimer averts his gaze from photos of its disfigured victims. Like Nolan’s camera, he cannot bear to look.

Oppenheimer would later say that through the bomb, physicists had come to know sin. Having plucked a dangerous fruit from the tree of knowledge, they consigned themselves—and all of humanity—to a fallen world, tormented by the constant possibility of self-extinction. In the war’s immediate aftermath, Oppenheimer consoled, or perhaps deceived, himself that his invention’s apocalyptic potential could and would be contained, in part through his efforts.

Oppenheimer had reason to believe in his influence. The public had embraced his personal legend: Inflamed by a fear of a nuclear-armed Hitler, he had ventured into the invisible realm of atoms and returned with a tremendous power, capable of stopping a war cold and returning sons to their mothers. Honors were heaped upon him. In Nolan’s film, we watch as Oppenheimer is courted for a plush role: director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the academic home of Albert Einstein. Oppenheimer also chaired the committee tasked with advising the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. During the latter half of the 1940s, his pronouncements on matters of science had a singular gravitas. “Certainly he knows as much about the potential of atomic energy as any living American,” reads an editor’s note atop his essay for The Atlantic.

What did he do with this outsize voice? He opposed the development of a much more powerful, second-generation atom weapon—the hydrogen bomb, which Edward Teller called the “super”—in part because he was concerned it would accelerate an arms race with the Soviet Union. He also lent his prestige and credibility to ongoing efforts to avoid that arms race altogether. He helped draft the proposals that evolved into the Baruch Plan, an arms-control regime that the United States put before the United Nations. Under the latter’s direction, all countries would forfeit their atomic-weapons programs, and atomic energy would be a global collective good, administered by a centralized regulatory body at the UN, over which no country would enjoy a veto.

[Read: We have no nuclear strategy]

After the final failure of these proposals at the UN, in 1948, Oppenheimer turned, as one does, to The Atlantic. His essay is a fascinating historical artifact and act of public grief. Titled “The Open Mind,” it lays out Oppenheimer’s account of the back-and-forth over arms-control proposals. Soviet leaders had voted against them, but their response had not been wholly negative. They agreed that all countries should dismantle their atomic-weapons programs and that atomic energy should fall under international oversight. But they objected, perhaps understandably, to America’s insistence on keeping its weapons program running until the new system was functional. They wanted President Harry Truman to disarm first, a condition that he could not abide.

During the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer’s powers of foresight had failed him. However accurate his calculations concerning the innards of the atom, he’d misjudged what would happen geopolitically after he and his colleagues wrenched it apart. Out of naivete, or the expedient blindness of ambition, or some combination of the two, he may have believed that he could stop its further use after the Nazis had been defeated, or that the terrifying spectacle of the bomb would eventually lead to a renunciation of ever larger weapons and wars.

In 1949, he understood that no such renunciation was in store. “We see no clear course before us that would persuade the governments of the world to join with us” in atomic disarmament, he wrote. This time, the implications were obvious, and they implicated America, which, as Oppenheimer laments, “responded by adopting some of the very measures that we had hoped might be universally renounced.” The mass manufacture of the atomic bomb was under way and American scientists had clear orders to put the new physics in service of even more destructive weapons.

Oppenheimer saw a cosmically bleak arms race taking shape, and this time his  foresight proved accurate. Within months, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb, and only three years later, in 1952, the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb roughly 500 times as powerful as the one that had largely destroyed Nagasaki. The Soviets followed suit a few years later, and by the time of Oppenheimer’s death, in 1967, the two countries had nearly 40,000 nuclear weapons between them, many of them set on a hair trigger.

[Read: Never give artificial intelligence the nuclear codes]

Oppenheimer knew that he’d helped to conjure this world into existence. He sought to prepare our readers for its horrors. In the main, his advice was to not lose hope, and to remember that our imagination of the future is limited. Oppenheimer was perhaps heartened by the quantum world, shot through as it is with uncertainty, that had captivated him in his youth. He seemed to draw strength from a belief that the macro world of human affairs is likewise contingent, such that nothing about our fate is ever settled.

Oppenheimer quotes from a speech that Abraham Lincoln gave in Baltimore three years into the Civil War. At the beginning of that conflict, few expected that “domestic slavery would be much affected,” Lincoln said, and yet it had been. Reality is unpredictable; it will surprise you. Lincoln reminded Oppenheimer that surprises swing both ways. A world that appears to be fallen can sometimes veer toward moral progress.

We have seen such swerves before, even in the nuclear realm. By the 1980s, enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons appeared to be a fact of life on planet Earth. In 1986, the Soviet Union’s stockpile reached an all-time high of about 40,000 warheads, and the United States had more than 20,000. Very few people imagined that the end of the Cold War was imminent. Nor could many have guessed that in 1991, George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev would sign the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the first in an extraordinary sequence of agreements that shrank the two countries’ arsenals to less than a quarter of their previous size.

Bush and Gorbachev were wise to seize the day, because that era’s peace—and its clean two-party strategic symmetry—proved ephemeral. The specter of nuclear annihilation has since returned with force to the global collective psyche. Vladimir Putin has invoked it in speeches about his invasion of Ukraine. China has built up an arsenal that may be large enough to destroy every major American city.

[Read: What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine?]

As Oppenheimer well understood, there is no technological reason that world-threatening stockpiles of nuclear weapons will not be with us for hundreds of thousands of years. To keep large numbers of them in place for that long, in a strategic setting where any small exchange could very easily become a large one, is to play a fool’s game. No one should feel safe because seven decades have passed without another incident of nuclear warfare; that sample size is too small.

Beyond advising hope, Oppenheimer didn’t offer much guidance as to how we might dismantle the sword of Damocles that he helped to string up above human civilization. A notorious dandy and eloquent impromptu speaker, he was always drawn to style; in his Atlantic essay, he invokes it in a higher form. “It is style,” he wrote, “which, in the domain of foreign policy, enables us to find a harmony between the pursuit of ends essential to us, and the regard for the views, the sensibilities, the aspirations of those to whom the problem may appear in another light.”

The problem Oppenheimer had in mind was arms control. He asked that those who negotiate on America’s behalf carry out their work in a spirit of openness. He asked that they appeal to the reasoning minds of those who sit across the table. He appears to have believed—or to have wanted to believe—that a widespread adoption of this style might be enough to set into motion a new evolutionary step in geopolitics, through which the world’s major powers might come to a shared understanding that peace is the highest wisdom. To this end, he counseled patience. Time and nature must be allowed to do their work, he noted. Seven decades on, it looks to be slow work indeed.

In office since the end of December 2022, Mr Qin has not been seen since 25 June after a meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart in Beijing

For some years, a variety of news commentators and academics have called Donald Trump a fascist. I was one of those who resisted using that term. I thought it had long been abused by casual, imprecise applications, and as a historian of Nazi Germany, I did not think Trumpism was anywhere close to crossing the threshold of that comparison. I still deny that Trump’s presidency was fascist; but I’m concerned that if he wins another trip to the White House, he could earn the label.

Fascism was most fully exemplified by the regimes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. These regimes combined totalitarian dictatorship, wars of imperial conquest, and outright genocide in the case of Hitler (of Jews, Slavs, Roma) or ethnic mass murder in Mussolini’s case (of Libyans, Ethiopians, Slovenes). Placing Trumpism in the same category seemed to me trivializing and misleading.

I argued instead that Trump was more like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan than Hitler or Mussolini, and should be categorized as an “illiberal populist” rather than a fascist. And in one very important respect, Trump differed sharply from the European fascists of the interwar period.

They were ardent militarists and imperialists. War was the crucible in which the new fascist man was to be forged; territorial expansion was both the means and the end of fascist power and triumph. Trump has shown little ambition to pursue such aims. In his first term, he shamelessly abased himself before Russian President Vladimir Putin, exchanged “love letters” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, signed the Doha Agreement with the Taliban committing the U.S. to withdrawal from Afghanistan, and petulantly sought to downgrade U.S. treaty obligations to NATO and South Korean allies that he deemed to be “delinquent” and getting a “free ride.”

Trump has continued in the same isolationist vein in recent interviews and speeches. He has railed against “globalists.” He has promised to settle the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in 24 hours by cutting off aid to Kyiv if President Volodymyr Zelensky does not reach an immediate settlement with Moscow—that is, capitulate to Putin. He has disparaged Taiwan as a predator nation that stole microchip manufacturing from the U.S. (That Chinese President Xi Jinping would construe the simultaneous abandonment of Ukraine and dismissal of Taiwan as anything other than a green light to invade the latter seems improbable.)

[Christopher R. Browning: How Hitler’s enablers undid democracy in Germany]

No question, Trump inflicted grave damage on our country’s political culture, stoking toxic polarization and reveling in dishonesty. And Trumpism did exhibit distinct elements of the fascist style of politics: the inflammatory rallies; the incessant mongering of fear, grievance, and victimization; the casual endorsement of violence; the pervasive embrace of conspiracy theories; the performative cruelty; the feral instinct for targeting marginalized and vulnerable minorities; and the cult of personality. But the Trump presidency lacked any warlike, expansionist interest, and that made it decisively unlike 20th-century fascism.

Thankfully, also, Trump himself was too lazy, inexperienced, and unprepared to set about systematically constructing a true dictatorship. The main focus of the Trump presidency was less plans and programs and more the theatrics of satisfying his constant, insatiable need for attention and adulation. Everything—whether the state of the economy or the chocolate cake served to China’s Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago—had to be extolled as “the greatest ever.”

Until the final weeks of Trump’s term, the guardrails of American democracy seemed to hold firm. The institutions of the federal government remained relatively intact, and civil servants largely secure and uncorrupted. The United States experienced democratic backsliding but not democratic collapse.

In a second term, however, a newly emboldened Trump could well attack democracy itself. The MAGA Republican Party of his making has openly explored ways to transform states where they control all branches of government. States that were once pluralistic democracies with at least some chance of a transfer of power are coming to resemble one-party regimes directed by a minority of the population. (Anne Applebaum’s report from Tennessee is a case history in point.)

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s putative rival for the 2024 Republican nomination, has turned his state into a laboratory for testing how a determined, calculating, uninhibited authoritarian can maximize executive power. In many respects, he has already accomplished at the state level what Trump did not have the discipline and focus to do at the federal level. And DeSantis has created a blueprint for other Republican state leaders to follow.

[Shadi Hamid: Americans are losing sight of what fascism means]

Just as state Republicans have become more ruthlessly autocratic in their methods, a new Trump presidency would be much more efficiently goal-oriented  at the federal level. A huge transformation of the administrative state is being deliberately planned. The government agencies and civil service he has decried as the “deep state” would be purged or politicized, and the “retribution” he has promised against his enemies would also be carried out. The “unitary executive” theory long promoted by some Republicans would become the reality of an unabashed authoritarianism.

The very last months of the Trump presidency foreshadowed what a second term would entail. When formerly loyal vassals such as Attorney General William Barr and Defense Secretary Mark Esper demonstrated that they would not cross the line into unconstitutional insurgency, Trump sought sycophants for whom no such line existed. In a new Trump administration, total devotion to the leader would be the sole qualification for appointment.

Unlike previous fascist leaders with their cult of war, Trump still offers appeasement to dictators abroad, but he now promises something much closer to dictatorship at home. For me, what Trump is offering for his second presidency will meet the threshold, and the label I’d choose to describe it would be “isolationist fascism.” Until now, such a concept would have been an oxymoron, a historical phenomenon without precedent. Trump continues to break every mold.

Qin Gang's prolonged disappearance from public view, and the silence over it, fuelled furious speculation.

Currently packing top wind speeds of 223kmph, Doksuri will make landfall on the Chinese mainland on Friday.

Announcement by state media comes a month after Qin Gang's last public appearance.

Scientists say the heatwaves seen in Europe, the US and China in July are no longer unusual.

Qin Haiyang got things started with victory in the men's 100-meter breaststroke, taking advantage of dominant Olympic champion Adam Peaty's absence from the competition.