‘The Trust Has Been Absolutely Destroyed’

By Michael Scherer, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Jonathan Lemire

Sunday, February 08, 2026

 

The email that federal law enforcement sent this week to the nation’s top election administrators would have been routine just a few years ago. “Your election partners,” the Tuesday missive from FBI Election Executive Kellie Hardiman read, “would like to invite you to a call where we can discuss preparations for the cycle.”

 

But multiple secretaries of state who received the document told us they viewed it as a threat, given recent events. The FBI had just seized 2020 election materials in Georgia, and President Trump had announced his desire to “nationalize” elections, a state responsibility under the U.S. Constitution. The Department of Justice has sued more than 20 states to obtain their election rolls, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is conducting an investigation of U.S. voting technology. The upshot is that a yearslong partnership between state and federal authorities—in which the feds have provided assistance on election security and protected state and local voting systems from threats—is now in danger of falling apart. Instead of “partners,” some state authorities now view federal officials involved in election efforts with deep suspicion.

 

“The trust,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told us, “has been absolutely destroyed.” The sentiment is not confined to Democrats. Some state-level Republican election officials, who, like others interviewed for this story, requested anonymity to speak freely, said that federal officials’ activities involving elections have become so unusual that they are starting to question the federal officials’ competency and motives. These state officials wonder whether the feds are trying to do what Trump has accused others of doing: rig an election.

 

With just more than eight months before midterm elections, Trump has already said that he will accept the results only “if the elections are honest,” and has mused that “we shouldn’t even have an election” given that the midterms typically result in defeats for the president’s party. He has called for the greater use of identification at all polling places, a ban on mail voting, and a prohibition on certain types of voting equipment. Inside the White House, his obsession with disproving the results of the 2020 election, which he lost, has led to the creation of a standing working group that meets regularly to coordinate federal efforts to investigate past elections and reform future election processes.

 

The result is a breakdown in the state and federal partnership that has long facilitated the nation’s elections. After a White House official, Jared Borg, told secretaries of state to expect a Cabinet-level briefing at a conference in Washington last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard failed to appear, according to Lawrence Norden, the vice president for elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice, who attended the briefing. Days later, the election leaders received the email from Hardiman, a career official, who had appeared at the conference to discuss the more traditional roles the FBI plays in assisting election administrators, including investigations of threats to state and local election officials.

 

“It was very standard FBI stuff about their role in elections,” Norden told us. “In another time, this would not have raised any eyebrows.”

 

But Trump’s demands that his law-enforcement agencies chase election conspiracies could animate attempts to contest the 2026 election results should Democrats take control of the House, Senate, or both, election officials and experts said. The images of federal authorities seizing ballots in Georgia could reinforce the president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and deepen suspicion about the legitimacy of elections. Experts say there is little indication that federal courts will allow Trump to dictate to states the methods or administration of elections. But officials are preparing for legal battles in the coming months, and say the courts will need to hold the line on federal interference.

 

“It’s kind of like Donald Trump saying to the prime minister of Greenland, ‘I’m your partner,’” the Democratic election attorney Marc Elias told us. “Saying this has been done in the past is cold comfort when Donald Trump is saying, in the Oval Office, that states are his vassals.”

 

***

 

Trump won reelection in 2024 without ever conceding his defeat in 2020. From the start of his second term, his senior team launched tandem efforts to rectify the imagined injustice of a rigged vote. The first focused on executive actions and legislative efforts to change the way elections are conducted in the future, a project that has so far yielded little progress. Federal judges have rejected Trump’s demands that states impose new identification rules and threats to withhold federal funding to states that don’t change their voting systems or voter-registration forms.

 

The second effort, which has begun to come to light in recent weeks, focused on using federal investigative power to find evidence that would confirm Trump’s belief about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. These investigations began as largely exploratory projects, seeking evidence to confirm what the president and some of his advisers have long believed about the possibility of past fraud. Many state governments have resisted efforts by the Department of Justice to obtain raw voting records, although some have cooperated.

 

One DOJ official characterized the seizure in Fulton County as a recalibration in strategy that resulted from the president’s frustration. “The White House has tried to get these ballots from day one,” this person said, referring to voting records in Georgia and other states that Trump lost in 2020.

 

Trump immediately offered support for the operation, and even got on the phone with FBI agents in Atlanta and with Gabbard to thank them for their efforts. “Now they’re going to find out the true winner of that state,” Trump said this week about the search, before making clear that there was only one right answer. “If there was cheating, which there was, but if there was cheating, it should be found, because we can’t let it happen again.”

 

Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a letter to Congress that Trump did not ask questions during the phone call and she and the president did not issue directives to FBI agents. She has launched a separate investigation of election-infrastructure vulnerabilities, which involved collecting voting equipment from Puerto Rico. Intelligence officials typically keep their distance from domestic law-enforcement matters. But in a February 2 letter to Congress, Gabbard said her work was being conducted under her statutory authority to “analyze intelligence related to election security, including counter-intelligence, foreign and other malign influence and cybersecurity.” Gabbard attended the seizure in Fulton County, she said, at the request of Trump.

 

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche both praised and appeared to try to minimize Gabbard’s role in recent public appearances. He told Fox News on Monday that “first of all, she wasn’t at the search; she was in the area where the search took place. She’s not part of this investigation.” He said on January 30 that Gabbard’s presence in Atlanta “shouldn’t be questioned.” But those close to the White House reluctantly acknowledge that she has managed to deliver—or create the perception that she has delivered—what the president wants. “Gabbard is the only one who has actually pulled it off,” one official said. While speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump congratulated Gabbard on her performance.

 

The involvement of the intelligence community reflects the president’s frustration with senior Justice Department officials and others he perceives as obstructing his agenda or being insufficiently loyal. “Justice has just sat on things for months,” an official told us. “It boggles the mind that they wouldn’t just take the ballots!” The official insisted that Trump “should have gotten them on the first day of his term.” This person said the president and his allies have concluded that “if there was a true Trump prosecutor, it would have already been done.”

 

One indication of the push for more deferential leadership at the DOJ is the elevation of the Missouri prosecutor Thomas Albus to oversee election investigations nationwide. Albus and his team have quietly conducted interviews, collected tens of thousands of pages of documents, and carried out other efforts in multiple states in recent months, according to  people familiar with the probes.

 

Albus has a pedigree as a longtime member of what has been referred to as the “Missouri conservative movement”—a group of current and former senior Republicans who have used the state’s power and resources to try to overturn the 2020 election. The group includes Ed Martin—the DOJ’s pardon attorney and the former head of its “Weaponization Working Group’’—as well as Senator Eric Schmitt, who led a group of Republican attorneys general in litigation efforts focused on the 2020 vote. Albus, who declined to comment for this story, is seen as more “reliable” than others at the DOJ by people close to the president, one person told us. The DOJ declined to comment.

 

Gabbard has led a separate effort involving personnel from numerous law-enforcement agencies, including the DOJ and the FBI, to arrange the “voluntary turnover” of electronic voting machines from Puerto Rico to her department. An ODNI spokesperson said that the agency “found extremely concerning cyber-security and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to U.S. elections” from the materials taken from Puerto Rico. A person briefed on the operation said the focus was on machines used in the 2020 election. A spokesperson for the ODNI said that the actions were not about any specific election. The efforts were “about assessing for vulnerabilities” in voting systems to help improve security for all elections, this person said.

 

So far, Gabbard and the ODNI have stopped short of alleging they have found evidence of foreign interference in prior elections. Some current and former officials believe that her efforts are intended to introduce enough doubt to lay the foundation for future fraud claims, or possibly provide a basis for the federal government to take over election administration in certain places. The location and chain of custody of the seized voting materials from Fulton are tightly guarded secrets. Officials at the DOJ and the ODNI will not say where federal authorities took the materials, or if they even remain in Georgia. Fulton officials have gone to court to try to reclaim the materials, arguing that the federal government is violating rules intended to ensure the integrity of ballots and a clear chain of custody. “Fulton County can no longer be held responsible for what happens to any items contained in those boxes that relate to the 2020 election,” Robb Pitts, the chair of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, told us. “I don't know who has those 700 boxes now, nor do I know what they’re doing with them.”

 

Some election administrators fear that the efforts will erode public confidence in elections and could create a legal predicate for more aggressive moves by Trump later this year. Cleta Mitchell, a Republican activist who has advised Trump in the past, has argued that a federal election takeover would be possible after the president declares a national emergency based on a threat to the “sovereignty” of the country. Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Trump, has been rallying the president’s supporters to demand military deployments to polling places this fall.

 

“You have got to call up the 82nd and the 101st Airborne on the Insurrection Act. You’ve got to get around every poll,” Bannon said this week on his online show, War Room. “We will not accept anything less.”

 

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt distanced the president from Bannon’s comments this week, saying the administration had no plans to send immigration enforcement to polling places. Inside the West Wing, top advisers to the president have also resisted any plans for a “nationalization” of voting processes, despite Trump’s suggestion that the federal government could “take over the voting” in “15 places.” His focus, his advisers say, is on legislative changes to voting procedures, reforms that are permitted by the Constitution but face Democratic resistance in the Senate.

 

“President Trump pledged to secure America’s elections, and he has tasked the most talented team of patriots to do just that,” the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told us in a statement. “The President’s team, including DNI Gabbard and FBI Director Patel, are working together to implement the President’s election integrity priorities, and their work continues to serve him and the entire country well.”

 

On Thursday, Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told reporters that “it appears there may be a coordinated effort to try to interfere in the ’26 midterms. They may even start to interfere in, prior to, in the primaries, or in a state like mine, where they may have—we may have—a statewide referendum on redistricting.” The ODNI declined to respond.

 

At a minimum, elections officials face the renewed burden of defending the credibility of voting systems that have repeatedly proved themselves in recent years. Some Republican campaign consultants have warned that the effort could backfire on their own midterm efforts by decreasing turnout among the president’s base and increasing turnout among Democrats.

 

“There is certainly going to be an influence campaign to undermine confidence in the election,” Norden, of the Brennan Center, told us. “Those are the things that we need to be preparing for.”

 

***

 

Elections officials told us they are now getting ready for interference from both foreign adversaries and the White House. Several said they are still deliberating whether to show up to the FBI-hosted meeting scheduled for February 25. Others said they will attend but not speak out of concern that their information could be turned against them. The FBI declined to make its election executive available for an interview and noted to us that the invitation to meet with Hardiman and other federal officials is not out of the ordinary.

 

State officials are readying for intense scrutiny by federal authorities. Authorities in one state told us they have retained outside legal counsel in case federal officials seek 2020-related materials, and are drafting legislation to try to make it harder for the U.S. government to do so. Georgia election officials told us they have been working overtime to consult with criminal attorneys. Some Republican election chiefs said they were trying to avoid engaging with federal officials at all, and some said their trust with federal officials was situational.

 

In Maricopa County, Arizona, anxieties are so high that county officials are contacting employees who worked on the 2024 presidential election—which Trump won—to determine whether they have records on their private electronic devices that should be preserved to comply with a DOJ litigation hold they received last year, three people told us. The county’s request to employees came amid fears that county officials—who weathered years of violent threats and harassment after Trump’s 2020 loss—could be accused by federal prosecutors of obstruction of justice.

The Best Chagos Deal Is No Deal

National Review Online

Monday, February 09, 2026

 

A late 19th-century British historian once wrote that the country had acquired its empire “in a fit of absence of mind.” That’s a subtler phrase than it sounds, but, however it is interpreted, it doesn’t describe Britain’s Labour government plan to hand over the Chagos Archipelago, a last scrap of empire, to Mauritius some 1,300 miles away.

 

The Chagos Islands and Mauritius, of which it was once a “dependency,” were British since things went wrong for Napoleon. In 1965, the archipelago became a separate colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory. The following year, the U.K. agreed that Diego Garcia, the largest Chagos island, should become the site of a major, primarily American, military base. In a shabby episode, the Chagossians (of whom there were about a thousand on the island) were deported to Mauritius and the Seychelles. Another thousand living elsewhere were not allowed home.

 

Mauritius, independent since 1968, has long demanded the “return” of the Chagos Islands, to which it had only been attached as a matter of administrative convenience. Its claim was backed by an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice but consistently rejected by the U.K. However, in 2022, Britain’s remarkably inept Conservative government started talking to Mauritius about the islands’ future. Even so, the announcement two years later by the newly elected Labour government that it was going to hand them over came as a shock. This was compounded by the deal that accompanied it: the U.K. would transfer sovereignty and then lease Diego Garcia back for an inflation-adjusted £101 million per year for 99 years, extendable by mutual agreement for additional 40-year periods. Britain was giving up what it owned and then paying to lease some of it back.

 

The Chagossians (who now number about 10,000), many of whom now live in the U.K., found themselves at the wrong end of another deal over which they had no say. Many have little affection for Mauritius (some would prefer self-determination), where they had often been marginalized. They still have no right to go back to the archipelago (a return to Diego Garcia itself has been ruled out) and are unimpressed by the size of a proposed £40 million trust fund. A U.N. committee has opposed ratification of the treaty, ironic given that one of the purported reasons for the British surrender was to end the controversy over the base.

 

Mauritius has agreed not lease any other Chagos islands to anyone else, but given its increasingly close relationship with China, that’s at best tepid comfort. There would be nothing to stop the Chinese maintaining some sort of presence on land (albeit short of a lease) or at sea disturbingly close to Diego Garcia.

 

Diego Garcia matters. It is a key depot in a strategically valuable location, an ideal jumping-off point for operations in the Middle East, East Africa, and South Asia and well situated for keeping an eye (or more) on various potential maritime choke points such as the Strait of Hormuz.

 

The agreement also provides that Britain must “expeditiously inform Mauritius of any armed attack on a third state” from Diego Garcia. Whether notice is required before or after an attack is uncertain, but obviously the former (cc’d quite possibly to Beijing) could be disastrous. The British government’s claim that the “full operational autonomy of the base” would remain intact is also undermined by Mauritius’s view that the transfer would subject the islands to an earlier treaty it had signed under which Africa and its offshore islands are supposed to be nuclear-free. That would mean that nuclear weapons could be located temporarily on Diego Garcia but not stored there.

 

These restrictions would surely be ignored in the event of a crisis, but they are yet another problem that would have been avoided if the U.K. had behaved responsibly and not disturbed the status quo in the first place. After all, Mauritius was in no position to drive it out. Possession is, as quite a few U.N. members have demonstrated over the years, nine-tenths of the law. With the Chinese lurking nearby and, for that matter, the implications of Britain’s surrender for territories from the Falklands to Gibraltar, that is worth remembering.

 

Britain’s government, for reasons that probably owe more to disdain for the imperial past and a pathetic desire to curry evanescent approval in Turtle Bay than to any rational considerations, appears weirdly insistent on forcing this deal through despite the political storm it has stirred up at home.

 

For its part, the Trump administration backed the handover last year. More recently, the president described it as an “act of great stupidity.” He has since softened his position, describing the deal “as the best [Keir Starmer] could make.” That’s generous. The best deal would be no deal, and Starmer should act accordingly. Unfortunately, the argument (there is one) that the U.S. has a legal right to veto the proposed agreement is unlikely to succeed. Moreover, an open battle with Britain over the transfer could well be counterproductive, unless the U.K. quietly agrees to using an American bad cop to throw a wrench in the works. The chances of that are remote, and so, rather than undertaking an uphill legal struggle, the administration should, without coming across as a bully, step up political pressure on Starmer to change course. If that fails, the U.S. must just make the best of it.

Why Americans Don’t ‘Eat the Rich’

By Thomas Dichter

Monday, February 09, 2026

 

In 2025, U.S. credit card debt reached $1.3 trillion. This is the equivalent of over $3,000 in debt for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Imagine a newborn baby named Louise Smith having $3,000 in debt, along with each of her three siblings and her two parents—the hypothetical Smith family’s total credit card debt would amount to $18,000.

 

In the American economy, the outsized role of consumer credit and its accompanying debt is something relatively new. Credit cards began appearing in the 1960s and were not in widespread use until the 1980s. The Federal Reserve did not even record credit card debt until January 1968, when the figure was $1.316 billion. The 2025 figure was $1.305 trillion.

 

If we add in a more recent variation of consumer credit—“Buy Now Pay Later” (BNPL)—consumer credit, and its attendant debt, climb ever higher. About half of Americans have used the BNPL form of credit, and between 2019 and 2023 the BNPL industry grew from $2 billion to $120 billion, a 690-fold increase in four years. Though BNPL debt has been called “phantom debt” because much of it goes unreported, the amount of BNPL debt outstanding is still estimated to be about $700 billion. 

 

In any case, just credit card and BNPL debt taken together amount to roughly $2 trillion in the United States today. Almost half of American credit card holders carry debt on their cards, and almost a quarter of those cardholders say they don’t think they’ll ever pay it off. Yet the extent of consumer credit in America and the huge amount of debt incurred with it, has raised no great alarm.

 

But it should. The advent of widespread consumer credit in the last half-century has carried with it, and may well have caused, an almost seismic shift in our cultural norms; from thrift to carefree spending, from debt as shameful to debt as no big deal. More importantly, consumer credit, which props up the 70 percent of our GDP that is basically “shopping,” has played the role of a great class leveler.  For the large number of Americans who rely on consumer credit to supplement their income, what might otherwise be a general outrage at income inequality (with a focus on the rich) appears to have been numbed by easy credit.

 

***

 

The Occupy Wall Street movement of more than a decade ago is instructive here. Though it might seem a good example of populist outrage against the rich, looking at it in detail suggests that may not be the case; it is the exception that proves the rule. Protesters took over Zuccotti Park in New York City in September 2011, as well as parks and plazas in many other cities. In Washington, D.C., where I live part of each year, I regularly walked through the encampment at Freedom Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue on my way to work. In talking with many of the protesters, and noting one of their key slogans “We are the 99%,” my impression was that the majority of the people camping out were a lot closer to the 1 percent than they wanted to admit.  Richard Reeves, in his book Dream Hoarders: How The American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else In The Dust, Why That Is A Problem, And What To Do About It corroborates that impression, noting that more than one-third of the protesters in the May Day Occupy march in 2011 had incomes greater than $100,000. Indeed, the “eat the rich” populism I observed on Freedom Plaza seemed a minority position. And by February 2012, the D.C. occupiers were gone.

 

Francis Fukuyama has argued that populism for the majority is not about any economic plight but about a sense that they are neither recognized nor respected. Their grievance, that of the real “99%” which includes many on the MAGA right, is not about capitalism, or the rich as economic oppressors, but about the coastal cultural elites. It is these elites who are the culprits; resented not because of their money (the elites are not necessarily rich) but because it is believed that they look down on and disrespect “regular” folks.  As for the real rich, Americans who are not doing well financially do not seem to resent them.

 

One likely reason for the lack of an animus toward the rich is that buying on credit can enable the non-rich to have a life of instant gratification; no need to deny oneself the pleasures of restaurants, travel, or satisfying the whims of one’s children—in short, one can obtain a lifestyle that, if one doesn’t look too closely, can seem like that of rich people. 

 

The provocative economist Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 Theory of the Leisure Class, put the lie to Karl Marx’s conviction that the workers would recognize their oppression by rich owners and rise in revolt. Instead, Veblen’s worker seeks to emulate the rich. (Had Veblen lived to the end of the 20^th century, he might well have cited the popularity of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which ran for a decade.) Access to consumer credit (almost 80 percent of Americans hold at least one “general purpose” credit card) not only helps maintain the illusion that we are all the same, it plays a role in suppressing any tendency to revolt.

 

It is interesting that James Carville, the Democratic campaign guru turned pundit, recently suggested that the time may be ripe for a revolution in America: “If you’re a student of history, the French Revolution is in the American wind. While the stock market soars, Mr. Trump and decades of corrupt and morally bankrupt Republican economic agendas have splintered the very heart of the American economy. … Le peuple se lève.” Given the huge and growing gap dividing the richest from the rest of us, one might indeed be excused to think that the “rest” (the majority of Americans) might rise up. In France—always a great choice for invidious comparisons—protesters in September 2025 carried signs reading: “Tax the rich,” “There’s no real trickle-down,” “Abolish privileges,” and “Empty the pockets of the rich to fill the hole in social security.”

 

In contrast to the U.S., the French still rely on checks and cash, and many who use cards use debit cards. Statistics vary, but a rough estimate is that the French hold roughly three times the number of debit cards as they do credit cards, and per capita credit card use in the U.S. is nine times greater than in France.

 

The French relationship to money is also more ambiguous than ours. Many people I know in France—where I live for half of the year—think that no one should get super rich. Still, there are billionaires in France, 52 of them, but as a percent of population that is 3.5 times less than in the U.S, which currently boasts 900 billionaires. For many French people, money is necessary to live, but security—a steady salary and a pension, and especially not having to worry about health care—is valued more than the accumulation of money. It is impolite in France to talk about one’s income, much less ask someone what they make. The average French person resents the “rentier,” someone who makes his or her money from property or dividends and capital gains as opposed  to those who earn their income from “honest” work. And while unionization has declined significantly in the U.S., it remains strong in France, reflecting (and contributing to) a greater sense of class consciousness.

 

Actual income inequality in France is also far less than in the U.S.—and in fact, income inequality in France has decreased significantly in the last 100 years—and yet the French protest. In the U.S. income inequality has increased, and yet the majority of Americans do not seem to support a fairer distribution of wealth.

 

Indeed, there are few signs of a populist revolt against the rich, not to mention against the political economy that enables their growth. And this is despite rather striking data on inequality. Per one New York Times report, 69 percent of America’s wealth is held by families in the top 10 percent. The investments held by those families have grown about threefold, from roughly $15 trillion in 2010 to more than $45 trillion today. Between 1989 and 2022, households in the top 1 percent added about 100 times as much wealth as households at the national median, according to Oxfam, and almost 1,000 times as much as a household in the 20th percentile.

 

The wealth of our 900 American billionaires has also continued to increase (an 18 percent leap in 2025). Yet, to vindicate Veblen, 69 percent of respondents in a 2019 Cato Institute poll believed that billionaires “earned their wealth by creating value for others.” The majority of those respondents also agreed that “we are all better off when people get rich.” While that sentiment seems to have softened a bit—more people now believe the rich ought to be taxed more than they are—we are clearly far from a revolution. On the contrary, aside from expressing dissatisfaction about affordability at the polling booth, we continue to chug along as if all is basically okay.

 

***

 

Enter consumer credit. Let’s start with its role in how we spend. About 70 percent of our gross domestic product is based on consumer spending, which reached $16.35 trillion in June 2025, up from $1.35 billion in 1947 (adjusted for inflation, this is a more than 800-fold increase compared to the less than three-fold increase in population in the same period; from 144 million to 342 million.) In terms of percentage of GDP, our spending on consumption during those years went from half of 1 percent of GDP to 70 percent. About 70 percent of retail purchases are done on credit. And since so many of us spend with money we don’t really have (consumer credit) we naturally run up debt.

 

Easy consumer credit, and the almost inevitable debt that accompanies it, dovetails with a major shift in our moral compass. Being in debt used to be shameful. In the case of credit card or BNPL debt, as long as the monthly minimum is paid, not only is there no criminal penalty, there is little shame associated with it. Moreover, credit card debt especially can appear to the individual debtor as benign, or even unnoticed. With an unpaid rolling balance of $5,000 to $10,000, the bank issuing the card is not going to dun you. On the contrary, it is in the bank’s interest not to have you pay it off. As long as you pay the monthly minimum, and of course absorb the 20 percent or more interest, the illusion that all is well is easy to maintain. 

 

Affordability is on everyone’s mind these days, but consumer credit has rendered the concept a bit more complicated than just the price of goods. In the past what was “affordable” was related to the money one had on hand. If you had $45 of disposable surplus money, you could afford to buy something that cost $45. The expansion of consumer credit has eliminated that connection. Americans have by and large lost the notion of thrift. The very term “thrift,” which was used in the naming of quite a few banks in the past, captures the moral basis of savings. In 1910 the Morris Plan Thrift bank came along, making consumption loans to working-class people based on peer references and one’s personal character—loans made without collateral.

 

By 1931, Morris institutions existed in 142 cities. But this was not easy credit. The payment terms were strict because debt was to be avoided. Not only did borrowers have to pay fees and interest, they were required to buy “Class C Installment Thrift Certificates” weekly to pay off the loan, and in the event of default, the two people who had provided peer references would have to pay off the loan. The linkage of consumption and saving remained strong well into the second half of the 20^th century.

 

The first general purpose credit card was the BankAmericard in 1958. Early credit cards had to be applied for and not everyone qualified. Only in the 1980s did credit cards begin to become easily available, and part of the credit expansion in the 1980s had to do with the issuing of unsolicited credit cards to college students. While the rationale was ostensibly to engage people with high earning potential early on in their careers, the card issuers must also have understood that young people are particularly susceptible to the temptation of buying something one cannot immediately afford. Four decades later, in 2025, close to three-quarters of all retail purchases were done using credit cards.

 

If your income is inadequate to buy what you want, you do not have to feel inferior to wealthier people since you can have what they have, or at least a version of it, and you can have it right away. If the rich have dedicated home theaters with surround sound and 1,000 square-foot gyms in their mega mansions, you can have a 100-inch TV in your living room and maybe even a Peloton in the basement. Having these markers of the good life, things that symbolize “luxury,”— can take the edge off any sense of shame in not being rich. With a credit card (and other forms of consumer credit like BNPL), one does not have to forgo the things one can’t afford. Indeed, it seems plausible that while many lower and middle-income people see the unfairness of the system in the abstract, they do not actually “feel” it. With a couple of credit cards in your wallet, eating the rich seems less appetizing.

 

 

Rediscovering the American Story

By Alexandra DeSanctis

Thursday, January 22, 2026

 

In all my years as a student, I never quite managed to grasp the purpose of history class. Try as I might, I can’t recall a single classroom experience that awoke in me a passion for learning history as story.

 

What I do remember of studying history is that subjects were often presented as mere facts — dates, names, places — and accompanying interpretations. Teachers presented a trove of data meant to be absorbed, regurgitated for tests and papers, and forgotten thereafter.

 

I’ll say it before you can think it: My aptitude as a learner (or lack thereof) surely contributed to the problem.

 

But I had plenty of school experiences that permanently transformed the way I think. I can recall an eighth-grade English teacher who taught me that reading widely and keeping a reading journal would pay dividends. I remember what it felt like to study Hamlet with a teacher who conveyed the timelessness of Shakespeare to a classroom full of distracted teenage girls. I know what it felt like to take theology and moral philosophy classes that, to this day, help me shape, articulate, and defend my beliefs.

 

Oddly enough, from an early age, my favorite thing to read was historical fiction. I devoured books like Johnny Tremain and My Brother Sam Is Dead, as well as fictional diaries of Marie Antoinette and Queen Victoria. It wasn’t that I needed history to be lighthearted or fictionalized to hold my attention. I found firsthand accounts of grim events — The Diary of Anne Frank and The Hiding Place, for instance — just as compelling. I wasn’t seeking entertainment in the classroom. What I wanted was meaning and story.

 

It wasn’t until last year, when I encountered Wilfred M. McClay’s narrative-history textbook Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, that I realized that a well-taught history class could offer both. McClay presents the study of history as an essential piece of being an American citizen, a story — replete with facts, yes — that we must understand in order to understand ourselves. He puts it memorably in the book’s first chapter:

 

The story that this book seeks to tell, the story of the United States, is . . . a story about who we are and about the stream of time we share; it is an attempt to give us a clearer understanding of the “middle of things” in which we already find ourselves. And it is crafted with a particular purpose in mind: to help us learn, above all else, the things we must know to become informed, self-aware, and dedicated citizens of the United States of America, capable of understanding and appreciating the nation in the midst of which we find ourselves, of carrying out our duties as citizens, including protecting and defending what is best in its institutions and ideals. The goal, in short, is to help us be full members of the society of which we are already a part.

 

If the average history classroom experience is anything like mine — and I fear most American students experience something far worse — this vision for studying history is the antidote.

 

“We need stories to speak to the fullness of our humanity and help us orient ourselves in the world,” McClay writes in the introduction, explaining his narrative history model. “We are, at our core, remembering and story-making creatures, and stories are one of the chief ways we find meaning in the flow of events. What we call ‘history’ and ‘literature’ are merely the refinement and intensification of that basic human impulse, that need.”

 

Fittingly, the epigraph to Land of Hope is from a storyteller, the 20th-century novelist John Dos Passos. It says in part:

 

In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking. That is why, in times like ours, when old institutions are caving in and being replaced by new institutions not necessarily in accord with most men’s preconceived hopes, political thought has to look backwards as well as forwards.

 

This passage resonated with me because my experience of learning what it is to be an American has been imbued from my earliest days with a pervading sense of disorder. I can trace my first realization that I lived in a nation to the exact day: September 11, 2001. My childhood understanding of my country developed under the sprawling shadow of the Iraq War. My early adulthood has been marked by the particular features of the Donald Trump decade — a period of upheaval and fragmentation in politics and culture that is still difficult to fully accept and comprehend.

 

The Dos Passos quote taught me something I never learned in history class: the disorienting process of making meaning out of current events is an enduring part of the human condition. By contrast, McClay argues that history can be an anchor, a still point, something to ground us in enduring truths even as the world shifts around us. He describes the historical material chosen for inclusion in Land of Hope as “a river shallow enough for the lamb to go wading but deep enough for the elephant to swim.” So, wade and swim I did.

 

Over the course of several months, I read Land of Hope as though I were taking a course — on my own, with pen and notebook beside me, faithfully reading at least several pages a day. McClay was a genial companion, pulling me along through American eras and events, familiar and unfamiliar alike, with rich, enjoyable prose and insightful interpretations. As I studied, I felt that I was fulfilling a sort of civic responsibility to the past and the present — and perhaps the future, as my study has given me much to offer my son when he begins his own lifelong project of understanding America and his place in its story.

 

As a busy adult, I found myself engaging deeply with the material and absorbing it in a way I never did during my school years, when my sole job was to read and absorb. The writer and professor Alan Jacobs recently shared this email from one of his students, which attests to this very problem: “While I always want my final papers for classes to be the culmination of all my learning, in truth, they usually end up being the worst work of the semester. I always find out what I really wanted to say once the break starts as I learn what it feels like to be a thinker and not just a harried, hunted animal.”

 

I was far more thinker than hunted animal when I settled in with Land of Hope each day. When encountering passages that I didn’t fully understand, I reread them; I remembered what I’d read. Two memorable, big-picture lessons I gleaned from my study: First, we should study history with an eye toward asking as many questions as possible, including those we can never answer in full. Second, we should take care not to view events of the past “as if they were predictable stages leading to a preordained outcome” — as though, because we know what happened, the events themselves must have played out with a sense of inevitability.

 

I regularly began to find myself bringing these insights, along with fairly well-retained knowledge, to other aspects of daily life, which allowed me to make more connections and think more deeply. When I watched Darkest Hour — the 2017 film about Winston Churchill — I found myself appreciating it more than I once would have, thanks to the newfound knowledge and context I had about World War II. The chapters pertaining to the Civil War, meanwhile, have allowed me to visit the historic battlegrounds in my hometown of Fredericksburg, Va., with fresh eyes, understanding far more about them and their sacredness than I once did.

 

We need this historical context to navigate modernity, especially as misuses and abuses of history abound. For an increasing number of Americans, history is now either a project of memorizing facts with no care for their meaning or a vaguely disguised effort to promote ideology. Recent years have featured a particular emphasis on treating history as something to relitigate and purge — tearing down statues, renaming roads and forts and schools, as if we could absolve ourselves of past sins by closing our eyes.

 

In addition to ignorance of history, we contend with those who prefer to distort it in service of political ends. The worst culprits are proponents of identity politics, who seem to believe that history is worthwhile only if we study marginalized groups and wield our learning to accomplish progressive action items.

 

Here in Fredericksburg, the local history museum recently commemorated the anniversary of the Marquis de Lafayette’s 1824 visit to the town with an exhibit about “diverse” Revolutionary War figures, including Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, whose credential for inclusion was that he may have been secretly gay. Similarly, when I visited Colonial Williamsburg a couple of years ago, the tour of the historic Governor’s Palace began with the guide taking an informal poll of the tour group: “Would you like me to give the Governor’s Palace tour or the ‘black history’ tour? Majority rules.” In an ideal world, these tours would be one and the same, not billed as separate stories — surely, “black history” can and should be woven into the broader story of the palace and its role in the town rather than separated to make a political point.

 

Viewing history as a means to modern political aims is a type of blindness, which prevents us from gaining valuable insight about the complexities of the human experience. Among all else it offers, Land of Hope gives an implicit rebuttal to this impoverished view. The book presents history as an essential means of understanding the American project and how we ought to live as we carry it forward.

Why Our Children Are Nihilists

By Elizabeth Grace Matthew

Monday, February 09, 2026

 

Americans today spend a great deal of political and cultural energy litigating between the comparative importance and veracity of two well-documented crises, in education as well as in life more broadly.

 

The first crisis, worrisome to conservatives and thoughtful liberals but considered explicable if not laudable by many progressives, is the political radicalization of young women. While young men’s average views have remained fairly steady over the past several decades, young women’s have drifted sharply leftward. Decreased fertility and a rejection of motherhood seem to be both a cause and a result of this phenomenon insofar as mainstream feminism, which typically evinces disdain for the traditional family, is inextricable from progressivism.

 

The second crisis, broadly associated with masculinity, has two elements: male academic and professional underperformance and failure to launch, combined with elevated mortality and decreasing life expectancy, which worries everyone but those leftists who pooh-pooh its existence; and male radicalization rightward that may be limited in scope but is nonetheless deeply disturbing in substance (i.e., a growing embrace of overt racism, antisemitism, and misogyny, along with a rejection of marriage and involved fatherhood).

 

But the truth is that too many young Americans of both sexes have the same basic problem: They lack any sense of purpose or duty larger than themselves and their own preferences. Whether or not to embrace marriage and parenthood has become a question—rather than a given—on both the left and the right,because young Americans often see these pillars of civilization merely as morally neutral lifestyle choices that should be made only insofar as they increase one’s own happiness. Similarly, “quiet quitting” is prevalent among Gen Z employees because many of them place no value on work or productivity for its own sake. There is no longer, in other words, any significant internalized pressure or social impetus to prioritize marriage, children, or hard work.

 

Gone are the antiheroines of 20 years ago—Bridget Jones, Carrie Bradshaw—performing pseudo-empowered 30-something singleness while not-so-secretly pining for marriage. Today, nothing is universally considered worth either pining or working for.

 

Too many young Americans are nihilistic individualists, with no true conception of either the common good or their own. This is true of those who profess collectivist social justice and gender identity-based feminism in defiance of facts and logic. It is equally true of those who, in defiance of the American idea itself, wish to repeal the 19^th Amendment and object to the white Vice President J.D. Vance having married the daughter of Indian immigrants.

 

How did we get here?

 

Both the left and the right would like to blame our failure to produce more young people who understand pluralism, evince grit, and embody hope mostly on economic and cultural conditions wrought by the other side. Popular scapegoats include the so-called affordability crisis; the ongoing political and cultural polarization of women and men; and the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in elite professions that resulted in discrimination against white males. But none of these scapegoats can reasonably account for the youth’s fall away from fertility, industry, and patriotism.

 

While it’s true that economic anxiety is prevalent among young people, today’s affordability struggles are not new. We have had a system in need of reform, and overweighted toward the super-rich, for decades. Yet only in the last decade have so many young Americans veered toward revolutionary politics, been alienated from marriage and children, and demonstrated little desire to achieve status, purpose, or success. Meanwhile, while women still do more child care than men, fathers have never been more involved with their children; the birth rate is tanking alongside enormous increases in paternal caregiving. And, sure, millennial and Gen Z white men (and nonwhite people who do not accept leftist tenets on race) were indeed systematically excluded from advancement in certain high-status, high-earning professions in 2010s. But such professions do not comprise anywhere near a majority of the workforce; so, one would be hard-pressed to blame the well-documented malaise and underachievement of many young men on decreasing numbers of white males getting tenure lines at universities. Something else—something deeper and more fundamental than any partial, zero-sum, and clinical diagnosis can capture—is going on here.

 

It seems that so many of today’s young people are fundamentally unmoored because they lack a working cultural script for a respectable, meaningful adult life that involves pursuits bigger than their own momentary convenience or pleasure. One undersold component of our broad slide toward nihilism, then, might be our collective failure to effectively inculcate in a new generation of Americans that most American of lessons: An ordinary life with ordinary sacrifices, freely and courageously lived, is not ordinary at all, but extraordinary.

 

***

 

The question confronting us as Americans today is not how to have a functional civilization. We already know how to do that, though we sometimes lack the political will to act on what we know. The issue we now face is how to help a generation of blinkered, ignorant young people recognize that a functional civilization is worth perpetuating; and that its perpetuation ultimately depends not on some bounce of a governmental or cosmic ball, but on the collective virtue of everyone’s individual choices.

 

This is a difficult pill for young Americans to swallow. After all, we have taught them that virtue applies only to collectivist goods, like equal rights. Moreover, we have allowed them to believe that with the absence of overwhelming adversity comes the right to exist without struggle.

 

In the 2015 Broadway hit Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s storyline draws on the class differences between the impoverished, fatherless founding father Alexander Hamilton and his orphaned yet wealthy contemporary and eventual assassin, Aaron Burr. Hamilton, Burr points out, “faces an endless uphill climb. He has something to prove; he has nothing to lose.”

 

Historically, most Americans have tended to love tales of underdogs like Hamilton achieving their due: Determined 19^th-century suffragettes getting women the vote; impoverished 19^th- and 20^th-century immigrants (and first- and second-generation Americans) pursuing and obtaining the American dream; courageous 20^th-century Black Americans obtaining long overdue civil rights and economic mobility.

 

But many young Americans, reared on such stories—not just in popular culture but in family lore—have no idea how to orient themselves toward virtue from the position of relative privilege that they in fact occupy. So, some cosplay as underdogs who are being barred from the erstwhile pillars of adult life by malevolent forces beyond their own control: Men are misogynistic shirkers, so marriage and motherhood are oppressive to women; women are shrill, slutty hags, so marriage is for men who are weak and pathetic; and so on.

 

Others take parents’ economic security as license to opt out of life itself by failing to “launch” or to progress: Professional advancement and financial independence involve trade-offs that don’t always jive with “wellness” or self-actualization, so working hard is for suckers. Meanwhile, many rely on their parents and their therapists to validate the nihilistic notion that the foundational aspects of civilization (marriage, family, industry) are only worth engaging if they make you momentarily happy, and that independent households are overrated. Plenty of younger Boomers and older Gen Xers are credulous and hypocritical enough to oblige. So much for other-regard and sacrifice; so long, It’s A Wonderful Life.

 

In reality, however, we know that the vast majority of people, male and female, are better off married; that marriage is tied to fertility; and that children’s outcomes are best when they are raised by married parents. We know that to lose the American work ethic is to condemn our children to devolution and decay. Sure, the average American today could survive while opting out of marriage, parenthood, and professional productivity—but in almost all cases (s)he should not. Survival is the baseline, not the aspiration.

 

We need to bring back “should.” Not out of a desire to be judgmental or punitive. But out of the recognition that, without it, we are depriving the young of civilizational wisdom, and thereby contributing to their depression, anxiety, and malaise.

 

My husband and I, both college graduates with terminal degrees, are raising four sons. We live beneath our upper-middle class means in a racially and socioeconomically mixed neighborhood, and send our children to a similarly diverse parochial school.

 

My husband is a first-generation Liberian American. As a kid growing up in East Cleveland, he dreamed of a childhood of Little League baseball, school plays, and modest family vacations. He has spent the 13 years of our marriage working himself dizzy, both at work and at home, to give that childhood to our sons.

 

Today’s zeitgeist is shot through with morally relativistic disdain for all that he has achieved. Yet, those who accept that zeitgeist also continue to congratulate him for having achieved it.

 

This is an unstable equilibrium. Either these erstwhile hallmarks of adult life well-lived are objectively valuable, or they aren’t. We say that they are.

 

But in a wider culture that won’t offer that kind of clarity due to excessive concerns about tolerance, how do we inculcate in our sons the kind of commitment, faithfulness, and work ethic that will increase their likelihood of following their father’s example? This is the animating question of our lives, and we have no playbook to follow. Sure, we have instincts that involve manufacturing a lot of countercultural adversity ourselves: Growing boys need strict discipline more than dialogic indulgence; objective competition more than subjective cooperation; and some measure of independence more than an excess of safety.

 

But providing an example and following our instincts is not likely to be enough. We also need precepts. And precepts are by definition rife with a controversial “should”: Marriage is good and younger marriage is better; children are good and more children are better; work is good, and more meaningful, productive, and successful work is better.

 

The achievement of what was once but is no longer an ordinary adult life—marriage, children, work—is not a mere lifestyle preference. Nor is it a boring cope. It is extraordinary; it always was. The sacrifices it involves are noble; they always were.

 

My 9-year-old asked me the other day: “How come you and Daddy don’t have more kids?” (He is still angling for a sister). I told him that we think four is likely the number of children we are called to have and can raise well, given our family’s resources, limitations, and other obligations. “Well. Maybe I’ll be able to have six one day,” he replied. “I hope so, if that’s what you feel called to do,” I told him. And I do.

 

The thing we want to cultivate in our sons, more than anything else, then, is a kind of noblesse oblige. My husband and I are not working so hard—parentally, professionally, or communally—so that our sons can one day do less. Indeed, we hope that they work every bit as hard, and that they do more, especially for others. So, our greatest ally in parenting, it turns out, is Spider-Man: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

 

Young people today have a lot more power than our society acknowledges. Maybe it would help if we all took some responsibility for telling them so, and helping them see the moral virtue and personal happiness to be found in making the most of it.

Kindness Is Not Optional

By Karen Swallow Prior

Sunday, February 08, 2026

 

This past Christmas, I mailed out holiday cards for the first time in several years. My family recently lost my mom and my dad lives with us, so my husband and I included him in our family photo card. I sent one card to a friend from long ago who’s never met my father. “He has a kind face,” she wrote back to me. Then she added she’d guess he also is a kind man.

 

She’s right: He does, and he is.

 

The New Testament invokes an apt metaphor when it commands Christians to “clothe” ourselves with kindness. To be clothed in something suggests a quality that is both felt by the wearer and seen by others. Kindness is like this: It resides inside a person but is outwardly visible.

 

Many philosophers, artists, and writers throughout history have considered the ways in which various character qualities can be expressed by the outward appearance of a person. Such ideas were drawn in part from the premodern belief (long outdated) that human bodies are comprised of the same elements that make up the macrocosm and that the balance of these elements (the “humors”) contributes to both bodily composition and personality. This understanding of the interconnectedness of body and character led to a symbolic view of physical form.

 

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, for example, each pilgrim’s physical appearance corresponds to their character: The young, noble squire has curly locks of hair and sits well on his horse; the hard-working yeoman (or farmer) has close-cropped hair and sun-browned face; the duplicitous merchant wears fancy clothes and a forked beard; the Oxford scholar, who would rather buy books than food, is rail thin and sober-faced; the lusty Wife of Bath’s loose morals are suggested by the gap between her teeth; and the utterly corrupt summoner has narrow eyes, flaky skin, and a scanty beard.

 

Of course, no such neat correlation really exists. Eventually, the pseudoscience of physiognomy—which, reaching its height of influence in the 19^th century, purported to assess qualities of character and even intelligence based on facial features—brought this easy equation of the inner and outer qualities of a person to its ludicrous conclusion. But that doesn’t mean there is no connection at all between character qualities and the physical body. Perhaps there is a measure of wisdom and truth in the earlier, ancient understandings held long before the excesses of scientism. Sometimes the virtues we practice and attain do become us—and we they—in a way that can manifest in our bodies. This may be especially true of the virtue of kindness.

 

Indeed, a growing body of research shows that people who are kind gain physical and mental health benefits. Kindness doesn’t just help the recipient of kindness but, it seems, it helps the person who is kind.

 

A 2024 NPR segment showcased research demonstrating this connection between kindness and health. For example, one study showed that after two years of volunteering as tutors for underprivileged kids for at least 15 hours a week, participants’ brain health gained measurable improvements. Other research found that people who volunteer regularly have a lower risk of mortality and can perform physical activities at higher levels. Additional studies have linked kindness with improved cardiovascular health, likely because acts of kindness often require more physical activity, which improves both bodily and mental health. Being kind can also increase the happiness of those who act with kindness consistently. Thus, kindness, as with all other virtues, is its own reward.

 

Yet kindness is more than just a self-improvement plan. It is central to Christian teaching and the Christian life.

 

First, God himself is kind, as the scriptures state over and over. He who is himself love says that love is kind. God is characterized as exhibiting lovingkindness, having compassion for all he has made, and demonstrating his love for us by sending Christ to die for us when we were not deserving of such a sacrifice on our behalf.

 

Christians are likewise instructed to be kind: Christians are commanded in the Bible to be clothed, as already mentioned, in the qualities of mercy, humility, patience, and kindness. Additionally, the Apostle Paul says that Christians “must not be quarrelsome but must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful.” Kindness often goes against our own nature, but because it is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, Christians have help in developing it. Being kind demonstrates to others the very nature of God and marks our identity in God, showing we are of the same kind as him. Kindness is an outward expression of inward compassion. Kindness is, for the Christian, obedience to God and the display of his character through our bodies—our hands, feet, faces, eyes, wrinkles, and words—to all the world.

 

But what is kindness? It’s crucial to know what kindness is—and what it is not.

 

Kindness isn’t the same as being nice, which simply means being pleasant or agreeable. Kindness can be pleasant or agreeable, but it goes much deeper, and it can sometimes diverge from those two things. The word “kindness” comes from the root word “kin,” a fact I discuss in my chapter on the virtue of kindness in On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Good Books. To be kind is to recognize that others are of like kind. Thus, kindness essentially means treating others as though they are family. Healthy family relationships center neither on flattery or contrariness but are open, honest, and loving—even, or especially, when dealing with difficult situations or hard truths.

 

Because kindness is a virtue, it must be tied to other virtues such as justice, courage, and prudence. Moreover, like all virtues, kindness moderates between an extreme of excess and an extreme of deficiency. Kindness is the balance between the vices of contrariness (or quarrelsomeness) and obsequiousness (or flattery). And, like all virtues, kindness has an opposing vice. Some assume the opposite of kindness is cruelty, but there is a longer tradition that, perhaps surprisingly, points to another vice as the one that directly opposes kindness: envy.

 

While kindness is essentially good will toward another, envy is ill will. Thomas Aquinas defines envy, simply, as “sorrow for another’s good.” While good will leads naturally to acts of kindness, ill will leads easily to cruelty—actions that increase the suffering, rather than the joys, of the object of envy. Envy arises from vainglory, Aquinas observes, and produces “daughters” of its own. Envy leads to gossip and defamation, joy at another’s pain, and pain in another’s joy.

 

Kindness is rooted in the desire to love one’s neighbor. Envy is rooted in the desire to best one’s neighbor. Envy culminates in hatred. Before Cain murdered his brother Abel, he envied him.

 

The trajectory from envy to hatred—and away from kindness—is descriptive of some alarming trends in the discourse among some claiming to represent Christianity and Christian interests. Across social media, certain self-appointed “thought leaders,” heads of institutions, and journalists are trafficking in tale-bearing, degrading and defaming, taking sorrow in the joys of others, and delighting in others’ pain. In doing so, they embrace hatred, not love, and spurn the central Christian virtue of kindness.

 

The failure to pursue kindness is not only a failure to live up to the doctrines and demands of the Christian faith, but unkindness—as both scientific research and the Bible show—ultimately harms the person who is unkind as well.

 

Again, artists have captured the way the kindness or envy we feel inside and express in our actions is worn on our very bodies. The envious person is often portrayed as lean and rakish, prickly in both words and appearance, while the kind person is depicted as generous in body, spirit, and face. We see this contrast between Charles Dickens’ Ebeneezer Scrooge and Fezziwig in A Christmas Carol, for example. Other characters who display these contrasts include Shakespeare’s “lean and hungry” Cassius in contrast to the crinkly eyes and rosy cheeks of Jolly Ol’ Saint Nick. Or the Hunchback of Notre Dame in contrast to the laugh-lined face of Gandalf.

 

Envy consumes.

 

Kindness generates.

 

For the Christian, kindness isn’t optional. Nor is it optional for a civil society.

 

The good news is that while kindness isn’t natural for most of us, it can, like all virtues, be cultivated through practice. Such practice requires exercise and intention. But, like a muscle, with practice kindness becomes easier, more natural and habitual. Even better news is research that shows that kindness is contagious. Kindness has ripple effects that go far beyond the initial act or gesture. But the same is true of cruelty too, unfortunately.

 

Kindness isn’t likely to stop wars, prevent violence, or satisfy the lusts of the envious heart. But like a leaven, kindness can make our lives and our world a bit lighter, a little more expansive, and lift all whom it touches—including the ones who wear it.

Is This the Politics We Want?

By Michael Wear

Sunday, February 08, 2026

 

President Donald Trump returned to the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday to use and abuse that forum as he has in the past. As he has with so many other institutions in our civic life, Trump has thrown the very viability of the prayer breakfast into question.                 

 

I have attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast often over the past two decades. When I served in the White House, I helped the president prepare for the event. The National Prayer Breakfast is not a perfect event by any means, but it plays a powerful, and potentially edifying, role in our politics, as I wrote about extensively in my first book.

 

Historically, one of its functions has been to position presidents and political leaders in such a way that they are humbled. Typically, the breakfast leads a president to offer remarks that reflect on the ways he has fallen short, and to acknowledge the nation’s reliance on grace that politics and politicians can’t provide.

 

The breakfast places our political conflicts in the context of a bigger story and reorients the purpose of politics toward higher, better ends. The American people get to see elected officials from both parties pray with and for one another. They pray for the good of the country and of the world together.

 

In 2008, President George W. Bush spoke of how, in prayer, “We grow in meekness and humility.” He shared how prayer helped him meet the challenges of the presidency. In 2011, President Barack Obama reflected that “In this life of politics when debates have become so bitterly polarized, and changes in the media lead so many of us just to listen to those who reinforce our existing biases, it’s useful to go back to Scripture to remind ourselves that none of has all the answers—none of us, no matter what our political party or our station in life.”

 

The prayer breakfast has its flaws, as does every politician who has spoken at it. Like so many other events in Washington, the prayer breakfast can also be a place to network, to be seen, to advance oneself or one’s cause. It is disheartening to see politicians attend the breakfast and nod their heads to appeals to civility, only to return to their offices to issue incendiary statements and bad-faith press releases. It can be difficult to hear from politicians who speak at the breakfast in support of policy views you view to be in tension with—if not outright contradiction to—how you apply your faith to public policy. Like so many of our institutions, the event largely relies on the intentions and character of those who attend and those who speak at it. But this is the primary weakness of so many of our institutions and our politics: It can’t completely get around the character of its participants. 

 

But it was not until Donald Trump that a president went to the breakfast to make so much of himself, and so little of God. And he does it every year.

 

To object to Trump’s conduct at a forum like the National Prayer Breakfast does not require, and cannot be excused by, one’s party affiliation or preferred policy agenda. His behavior can’t be rationalized by the idea that “we elect a president, not a pastor.” When Trump enters religious settings, he does not just bring disagreement—which would be his right. No,  he shows up to co-opt the gathering—and the faith itself—for his purposes.

 

It was at the 2020 National Prayer Breakfast during his first term, following a keynote address by Arthur Brooks on the dangers of contempt and Jesus’ imperative of “loving your enemies,” that Trump mocked Jesus’ teaching. He later would do the same at a memorial service for one of his most stalwart supporters.

 

On Thursday, at an event that intentionally features Republican and Democratic members of Congress and that purposely recruits and welcomes Democrats to attend, Trump used the podium to express that he “doesn’t know how a person of faith can vote for a Democrat. I really don’t. And I know we have some here today and I don’t know why they’re here.”

 

At a breakfast convened by people who believe in the power of the Holy Spirit, Trump took credit for having “brought back the word Christmas,” and declared “religion is back now hotter than ever before.” He claims a lot, this president, and demands Christians give him their gratitude in return. This includes the release of Mariam Ibrahim, a persecuted Sudanese Christian, who was imprisoned and sentenced to death in Sudan. “I did that,” Trump claimed. “I did that. I did that with one phone call, actually.” One problem: Ibrahim was released in 2014, more than two years before Trump would become president. He didn’t bring back Christmas, religion, or Mariam Ibrahim. But he demands Christians’ loyalty. He mocks Christians’ deepest beliefs to their face, then tells them they’re lucky to have him.

 

There is little new to be observed about Donald Trump. He is remarkably transparent about who he is and what he cares about. But, increasingly, I have been reflecting on the choices Americans have to make that do not center Trump, the choices that are not obfuscated by the essential binary nature of most elections. These are the choices that can’t be answered by saying, “At least he isn’t as bad as [Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris].” 

 

Will we be impressed by politicians who simply do not lie as brazenly as Trump does? Will we feel privileged to have candidates who are better at obscuring their disdain for large swaths of the American people? Will we embrace Trump’s use of government to punish and marginalize those who oppose him, and grant the government’s imprimatur to those who support him? Will we accept that all of our worst impulses, all of our most tender divisions, will serve as mere fodder for campaigns and playthings for political strategists?

 

This last decade of American politics cannot become the new standard. If it does, few of our institutions will survive. I know people who have attended and served at the prayer breakfast for decades and walked out of it Thursday. I don’t think they walked out merely because of what Trump said, but because they could see how what Trump was saying was changing, revealing, and defining the whole atmosphere of the event.

 

This is the danger, of course. That everything will orient around this man. That he will succeed in making everything subject to his interests and his whims. He’s willing to do it with God, and he’s certainly willing to do it with the country. Our nation’s choice about whether to elect him is in the past, but the choice we have to make about whether we will become like him is ongoing.

 

Trump’s remarks forced that choice on people in the room at the prayer breakfast. They had to decide whether they would turn to the Democratic friend they invited to the breakfast, and tell them Trump was wrong and that they belonged there as much as anyone else did, or to let Trump’s bullying go unanswered. House Speaker Mike Johnson has to decide whether he will object to Trump, who seems to think it’s overkill for the speaker to dedicate his meal to God in prayer, leading an event to “rededicate America as one nation under God.”

 

Trump was at the prayer breakfast because he is the president. He is who he is. The real question is what culture, what norms, what commitments are present at the prayer breakfast that can stand up to Trump’s influence. His very presence there must prompt reflection: What do we really believe? What are we willing to stake our reputation on? What are we willing to accept, and what will we not tolerate? What kind of people will we be? What do we really want?

 

Of course, these are the kinds of questions we all must answer anew. Our political, cultural, and educational institutions must answer these questions. We must answer these questions in our communities, in our families, in our hearts. We can no longer allow ourselves to consider politics as something that happens to us. Politicians, influencers, and conflict merchants must not set the standards for our conduct or our expectations for what our politics can become.

 

There is no better year than 2026, the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, for Americans to recover their sense of civic agency. Doing so opens all kinds of opportunities. But if we choose instead to continue to allow ourselves to be captivated by personality unmoored from principle, binary choices will be all we will have left. It’s a great republic we have, if we can keep it.