2026-08-14 20:00:00
Americans do not know enough about the Cold War, and much of what they think they know is wrong. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Republicans took a victory lap, rightly noting that the Soviet collapse was unimaginable when President Ronald Reagan first took office. Liberal critics, however, argued—also rightly—that the Soviet Union was a decaying, economically crippled giant by the time Reagan was inaugurated. In the years since, explanations of the ending of that great conflict have been reduced to the equivalent of partisan bumper stickers: We crushed the Kremlin in the arms race, or The U.S.S.R. imploded without any pressure from the West.
In October 1986, Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev met to discuss nuclear-arms control in Reykjavik, Iceland. At the time, I was a young scholar in Washington, training in Soviet affairs and international relations at Georgetown University and working at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. (I was also a two-time Reagan voter.) When the Reykjavik meeting took place, no one was looking ahead to the collapse of the Soviet Union; Kremlin watchers were, mostly, relieved to see a Soviet general secretary and an American president talking with each other.
The Brink of War, a new film released nationwide today, tries to bring texture and detail to those two days in Iceland. The movie relies on transcripts and other documents from the time, along with interviews with a former secretary of state, the late George Shultz (to whom the movie is dedicated). The film is a welcome corrective to the liberal orthodoxy about Reagan—specifically, that he was a disconnected simpleton who didn’t understand the complexities of the arms race. But it leans too much in the opposite direction: It is too kind to the Gipper, and takes too many liberties with the historical record.
As a viewing experience, The Brink of War is a better film than the only other movie about the summit, a 1987 British production titled Breakthrough at Reykjavik. But that’s because the earlier movie (now no longer available, as far as I can tell) was more accurate—and perhaps, for some viewers, more boring. The diplomats who met in the middle of the night thought they were ridding the world of nuclear arms, and that story has plenty of drama, but The Brink of War forgoes those details in favor of needless melodrama and a focus on fewer personalities.
[Read: The thin line between biopic and propaganda]
The title itself is misleading. The world was not on the brink of war in late 1986. Soviet-American tensions were much higher, and the risk of war much greater, during Reagan’s first term, which were perhaps the most dangerous years of the Cold War since the Cuban missile crisis. In the early ’80s, the Soviet Union was led by Yuri Andropov, a former KGB chief. In 1983 alone, Reagan gave his “Evil Empire” speech and announced the start of his missile-defense plan, the Strategic Defense Initiative; the Soviets shot down a civilian Korean airliner (killing a U.S. congressman); and the Americans overthrew a Marxist regime in Grenada. Andropov died in 1984, and Gorbachev took more than a year to gain power while the Kremlin stumbled along under the caretaker regime of the grievously ill Konstantin Chernenko.
Gorbachev’s arrival cooled some of these tensions. Almost a year before Reykjavik, Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva, where they issued a joint announcement that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” This was an important moment: Gorbachev, still consolidating power, was taking a risk by bucking anti-American hawks back in Moscow and standing with Reagan to join him in officially ruling out nuclear war as a rational instrument of policy.
By the time the two men met in Iceland, they were both determined to reduce their nations’ stockpiles of nuclear weapons. For Gorbachev, this reflected both a sincere belief and an economic imperative. The Soviet Union was struggling with the costs of boneheaded decisions such as the invasion of Afghanistan and the deployment of new and extremely threatening Soviet nuclear weapons in Europe. Reagan, despite his reputation among his critics as a warmonger, was actually an abolitionist when it came to nuclear weapons, and on this, he and Gorbachev were of one mind.
Both men had earlier made dramatic proposals to rid the world of nuclear arms. These were roundly dismissed in each other’s capitals as propaganda, but as it turned out, Reagan and Gorbachev were completely serious. The meeting foundered because of Reagan’s commitment to SDI, but the Reykjavik summit, despite its failure to reach any agreements, nevertheless suggested to the two leaders that they agreed about important things.
The Brink of War gets much of this right, but it portrays Reagan as highly prepared and Gorbachev as somewhat nervous. In reality, Reagan was concerned about the meeting, and at the start he relied on notes and cards he had in front of him. One of Gorbachev’s first observations when they met was about all the paper in front of his American counterpart; Reagan at one point dropped all of his notes and had to shuffle through them to get back on track. The film also shows Reagan confidently teasing his negotiating team about being Democrats, which was probably done so that the movie could make the summit seem like a bipartisan effort. It’s true that a few Reaganites were once Democrats, such as the negotiator Richard Perle, but this was not a team of liberals and conservatives. Perle was so distrustful of arms control with the Soviets that his nickname in Washington in the ’80s was the “Prince of Darkness.”
Soon the two leaders took up the proposal first discussed in Geneva for a 50 percent cut in Soviet- and American-weapons stockpiles. Reagan and Gorbachev, in the course of their discussion, agreed to eliminate all nuclear weapons, a move that surprised both delegations. The idea of full abolition—beloved by both leaders but not part of the Reykjavik agenda—was an improvised moment, almost an accident, and not some premeditated masterstroke (as the movie implies) by Reagan. This sudden change drove hours of unexpected negotiations. Both sides, in a very short time, got remarkably close to a major nuclear deal, because their bosses, both Soviet and American, wanted one.
These American negotiators do not get much attention in the film; likewise, the Soviets, starting with Gorbachev himself, get unfair treatment in The Brink of War. The Soviet boss huddles in the bathroom with his wife, hiding from the KGB, as if he were doing something illegal and not presenting positions he’d already raised among Soviet leaders. The film also depicts Gorbachev as something of a drama queen during the meetings, slamming the table and raising his voice. At one point, when Reagan suggests sharing missile-defense technology, Gorbachev stands up and whines about how America will not even share dairy technology so that the Soviets can provide milk to their children.
Reagan did make that missile-defense technology offer, and Gorbachev did in fact dismiss it. What Gorbachev actually said, however, according to records from the meeting, was more restrained: “Excuse me, Mr. President, but I do not take your idea of sharing SDI seriously. You don’t want to share even petroleum equipment, automatic machine tools or equipment for dairies.” This was a kind of sarcastic zinger from the real Gorbachev. But in any case, no Soviet leader would complain to an American president about hungry Soviet kids. It would have been especially out of character for Gorbachev, who Shultz later recalled was not whiny but rather “brisk, impatient, and confident, with the air of a man who is setting the agenda and taking charge of the meeting.”
Other Soviets appear as central-casting scary Communists. The Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze is played as a glowering, skeptical presence by a darkly handsome English actor. The real Shevardnadze looked more like a white-haired professor, and he supported Gorbachev’s proposals. Likewise, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the senior military officer who led the Soviet negotiators, is portrayed as a difficult, stiff military man, but American negotiators, especially Paul Nitze, later spoke of him with great admiration as smart, flexible, and someone the Americans could trust.
The Brink of War also presents Reykjavik as something of a guy’s poker party. Men conduct the work in the movie, but in real life, some of the important negotiations with the Soviets were led by the veteran diplomat Rozanne Ridgway, who does not appear in the film. The two most important women in the film are the wives, Raisa Gorbacheva and Nancy Reagan. Raisa is presented as a chic, smart adviser to her husband. Nancy, who stayed in Washington, is Ronnie’s faithful booster, but she also unfairly comes across as a catty flake, envying Raisa and telling the president that the stars are aligned for a successful summit.
Nancy Reagan, fearful of losing her husband, did indeed consult an astrologer after Reagan was shot. But Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post’s chief political correspondent and the author of a definitive biography of Nancy, told me that Nancy was angry in October 1986 not because she felt upstaged, but because her husband’s advisers had told her that Iceland was not a “summit” and therefore that Raisa would not be there. A scene where Nancy tells Ron about the position of Mars, Tumulty added, “strikes me as preposterous.”
The supreme error in The Brink of War, however, is that it wanders too far from the history of the event in order to depict a successful summit. In life, the two leaders agreed about ridding the world of nuclear weapons, but they both left Iceland full of gloom and bitterness. A deal to eliminate nuclear arms dissolved when Reagan insisted that testing for SDI had to continue. Gorbachev, hamstrung by demands from hard-liners back in Moscow, was equally intransigent that no deal could be made so long as SDI was in the works. The summit-that-was-not-a-summit failed.
As the Reagan biographer Max Boot told me, both Reagan and Gorbachev left “furious and disappointed.” Tumulty cites Nancy Reagan as saying later that it was clear to her, watching from afar, that her husband, “pale” and with his “teeth clenched,” was extremely angry as he said goodbye to Gorbachev. According to declassified Soviet transcripts released years later, as the two leaders stood outside waiting to leave, Reagan accused Gorbachev of not wanting a deal in the first place, adding that he didn’t know when they would meet again. (“I don’t either,” Gorbachev said.) Ken Adelman, one of Reagan’s aides at the meeting, later wrote that Reagan, during that final conversation, recalled Gorbachev saying, “I don’t know what else I could have done.” Reagan answered: “I do. You could have said yes.”
None of this makes its way into The Brink of War. Instead, the film makes much of Reagan trying to get a visa for the sister of Mstislav Rostropovich, a Soviet musical maestro who had defected to the United States. Reagan did raise this issue, and the Soviets relented, but The Brink of War makes it seem as if reaching agreement on this opened the way to more deals later. The movie ends with Reagan doubling back to try one more time on the Rostropovich issue. Gorbachev agrees, the men shake hands, and the last word of the movie is deal.
This is not remotely what happened. According to Adelman, it was Gorbachev, not Reagan, who tried one more time to engage—and not on Rostropovich’s sister but on a nuclear deal. “Can’t we do something about this?” the Soviet leader asked as Reagan got ready to leave. “It’s too late,” Reagan said, and walked out.
[Read: How Hollywood taught a generation to fear the bomb]
In the movie, this coldly enraged Reagan is replaced by a smiling dealmaker who is deeply introspective. In a private moment, he stares at the scar from the 1981 attempt on his life; that night he has a fit of PTSD about the shooting as he tosses and turns. The next day, Reagan emphasizes to Gorbachev that he felt that God had spared his life for a great purpose.
Whether Reagan had PTSD from nearly being murdered is a matter of speculation, but he said no such thing to Gorbachev. The movie is full of lines that sound good from Reagan but that he never said. At one point, he invites Gorbachev to “tear down this wall between us,” as if he were already thinking of the line he would use in front of the Berlin Wall a year later. Nor did he say to Gorbachev that the Soviet people were “pissed off” at their government, a line that rings especially false from Reagan, who did not approve of any kind of swearing. As Boot noted to me, the president would not even spell out the word hell in his own diaries.
All of this is unfortunate, because Reykjavik was a crucial step in ending the Cold War, and The Brink of War could have captured Reagan’s admirable toughness and confidence without exaggerating either the president’s abilities or what happened in Iceland. Reagan deserves great credit for making the end of the Cold War possible not only by holding fast to his belief in the superiority of the American system but also by having the vision to see that the Cold War and its endless nuclear tensions did not need to be accepted by either side as an immutable fact of life. He came into office excoriating the Soviets, and learned—almost too late—that he had succeeded too well in scaring the Kremlin and had brought the world closer to war. Encouraged by Shultz and Nancy, he changed course during his first term, and he found a courageous partner in Gorbachev.
Yet Reagan, especially at Reykjavik, was hobbled at times by rigidity and tunnel vision. At the summit, he tried to lecture Gorbachev on the bankruptcy of Marxism-Leninism—this did not go over well—and the president’s obsession with SDI tanked what might have been the most dramatic arms agreement in history. Gorbachev, too, was intransigent, but by Soviet standards he was practically a radical. Fortunately, Gorbachev would drop his objections to SDI in time for both men to sign a landmark treaty in 1987 that abolished all intermediate range nuclear arms in Europe and made the entire world safer. (Donald Trump foolishly withdrew from this treaty in 2019.)
Reagan did not win the Cold War alone, but he and Gorbachev made the end of the conflict and a more secure world possible. The Brink of War, whatever dramatic license it takes, underscores that Reykjavik was part of that story. The summit itself turned out to be a failure, but Washington and Moscow later climbed over its wreckage to reach new agreements. Reykjavik did not end the Cold War, but the Cold War could not have moved toward its peaceful ending without Reykjavik and the spirit of discussion it fostered.
2026-08-14 19:30:00
The bars are flooded with single people dressed in their sexiest getups and looking vaguely uncomfortable. Each of them is smiling a little too wide, trying a little too hard: They want to leave with one of these strangers, stat. Pair off too fast, and they might get stuck with someone insufferable; wait too long, and they might ride the subway home alone at 3 a.m., trying not to stare at the happy couples sloppy-French-kissing.
Quick: Is this the plot of One Night Only, or is this a random Friday night in a major city?
The new film by Will Gluck, who also directed such rom-com smashes as Easy A and Anyone but You, follows a decidedly bonkers premise: The U.S. government has outlawed premarital sex. It uses biosurveillance to enforce the ban, tracking people’s dopamine, serotonin, and testosterone levels and alerting law enforcement when two singles show hormone spikes at the same time. The only exception is during one 12-hour window every year: a night when unmarried horndogs run wild, dry humping in the streets like 17-year-olds. Owen (played by Callum Turner) thinks he’ll spend the evening with his girlfriend—until she announces that she wants to embrace her one chance to “explore,” meaning sleep with someone else. (He then decides to do some exploring of his own.) Allie (Monica Barbaro) begrudgingly goes out with her friend to find a partner for the night—until that friend immediately splits with a guy she just met, leaving Allie alone in a sea of deeply off-putting suitors.
One Night Only is obviously not a work of realism, even when you ignore the questionable science. For one thing, if strangers in bars talked to one another this much, America might not be in a romance slump. The vibes in this fictional Manhattan are exuberantly randy—unlike in the world we actually occupy, where Gluck reportedly had to cut nudity out of the film because test audiences reacted so negatively to it. When people can have sex only one night a year, the film implies, they lust hard. (“Maybe the fascists were right about this one,” a peripheral character offers.)
But One Night Only does capture something true about the anxieties and pressures of modern singlehood. The prospects can seem both abundant and astoundingly unappealing. Not trying feels like missing an opportunity, but trying might be worse; Allie wants a real connection but doesn’t assume it will be easy to find. And she’s skeptical that a fling could be all that fun if it’s with a person she’s not excited about. The situation isn’t fair: Although their married friends get to have sex whenever they please, Allie and Owen have to go through enough trials and humiliations to fill a 102-minute run time. This is, unfortunately, a completely realistic inequity. Researchers have found that single people who say they’re sexually satisfied tend to report greater well-being. But only about 15 to 30 percent of singles are sexually active at all: no ban needed to keep the partnerless masses celibate.
The movie is suffused with a sense of loneliness: Allie and Owen always seem to be walking solo down the street or making their way through crowds who don’t register their existence. But they’re not isolated just because they’re looking for companionship. The sense of alienation is also from a society designed by and for couples. In the real United States, single people tend to pay much more for essentials such as rent and groceries. They miss out on tax breaks, health-care benefits, and a bevy of other perks afforded to married couples. Meanwhile, they feel pressured to shell out on dating-app subscriptions, events, and fancy dinners if they ever want to stop paying the “singles tax.”
The movie’s alternate U.S. isn’t so different, in this way: Again and again, the characters are confronted with attempts to either penalize or cash in on their singlehood. A price-gouging store owner sells her last remaining condom for $200. Dating-app scammers lure vulnerable marks. K-Y salespeople push free samples on the street. Ads across the city target singles (“You’ve been training for this one night,” Equinox taunts; “Get lingual for the one night,” Duolingo urges). You get the sense that Allie and Owen are in a rat race: scurrying around and trying to find their piece of cheese but trapped in a maze by authorities who inhibit and exploit them.
So it’s singles against the world—and also against one another. The people Allie and Owen come across seem to be either lecherously sizing them up or treating them poorly (or some combination of the two). The protagonists themselves have an adversarial relationship: a rom-com trope, but in this case, it is explained only by the fact that Owen throws up near Allie’s shoes when they first meet. (And who would mind so much, really, if Callum Turner vomited in their proximity? Especially on a night like this?) The two proceed to deceive each other, insult each other’s appearances, and abandon each other in precarious situations. There’s no solidarity. No one in this movie even seems particularly nice.
In the end, One Night Only doesn’t have much to say about a fascistic government’s overreach or the pleasures and disappointments of casual sex. It’s more of an abstract portrait—an evocation of how singlehood can feel. The screenwriter Travis Braun has said as much. “I set out to write a movie,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “about the circus that is modern dating.” A circus is exactly what he depicts: a chaotic, ridiculous affair, full of amusing characters performing and vying for attention, never quite masking an unmistakable whiff of sadness.
[Read: Romance on-screen has never been colder. Maybe that’s just truthful.]
If the movie is more goofy than profound, that may be the point. In Braun’s script, the merciless obstacle course of singlehood seems just absurd. One Night Only is one of a whole slate of pointedly unsexy sex comedies that have been released in the past few months; The Invite, The Drama, Pillion, and I Want Your Sex are all, in their own ways, send-ups of passion gone awry. They’re hardly the first to juice awkwardness and romantic missteps for laughs. But most of these films never even depict sex; they’re more about the absence of chemistry than the survival of it despite the odds. Perhaps we’ve hit the point when modern romance is so cringe that it’s merely camp.
One Night Only goes one step further, in that it ends up feeling genuinely sex-negative; Gluck and Braun’s empathy for their protagonists is all mixed up with judgment toward their background characters’ formidable libidos. The film has been criticized for being prudish and regressive, and I can’t say I disagree. But maybe it’s just taking the perspective of its viewers—many of whom are skeptical of sex, cynical about courtship, and not in the mood to celebrate free love. The movie presents a dystopia, after all: It’s supposed to feel grim. That might be the most resonant part about it.
2026-08-14 18:00:00
Ever since Donald Trump returned to the White House, his administration has taken a sledgehammer to anti-corruption efforts, destroying policy after policy dedicated to preventing bribery and money laundering in the country. But this week brought the biggest blow yet: The Treasury has obliterated a recent rule to deter devious shell companies, handily reopening the American economy to anyone looking to hide their illicit wealth.
On Tuesday, the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced that businesses formed in the United States would no longer need to disclose their actual owners, and that nearly all the data already gathered on such companies would be destroyed. This move, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called “a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” effectively undoes years of progress in curbing devious financial networks, both domestic and foreign. It also delivers a new shelter for wealthy Americans who wish to dodge taxes and move money around undetected. Corporate entities that allow owners to stay anonymous are handy vehicles for corruption—they enable dodgy characters from around the world to stash their proceeds in an otherwise legal American business. After a brief experiment cracking down on these black boxes, the U.S. has decided to let them multiply instead.
Technically, this company registry will still exist, but as a mockery of its former self. When the registry was created a few years ago, it was heralded by many (including me) as the single greatest anti-corruption step the United States had taken in decades. The U.S. had long been the primary provider of anonymous shell companies to anyone and everyone around the world. For as little as $100 and in as little as 15 minutes, any cartel head, human trafficker, oligarch, autocrat, kleptocrat, fentanyl dealer, or corrupt politician in America or overseas could create a shell company in states such as Delaware, Nevada, and Wyoming. Perfectly untraceable and perfectly legal, American shell companies became by the late 2010s the go-to tools for anyone looking to hide their financial tracks for any reason.
[Read: America has never seen corruption like this]
These companies weren’t just the preserve of foreign crooks. The industry in the U.S. has long served wealthy Americans looking to hide their assets and enrich themselves and their families. American shells provided all of the secrecy protections they could want and, after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision eliminated corporate-spending limits in American politics, they became an ideal tool for covertly bankrolling American politicians, saturating U.S. elections in billions of dark, untraceable dollars.
Efforts to end the scourge of American shells finally broke through just as Trump’s first term was coming to a close. The bipartisan Corporate Transparency Act—which passed in early 2021, over Trump’s veto—would finally force these companies to divulge their owners. The legislation wasn’t perfect; unlike the company registries in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, the proposed U.S. shell-company database was to remain private, accessible only to federal officials and investigators. The rule also failed to tackle all of the ways trusts and other vehicles provide impenetrable secrecy for the wealthy and the crooked alike. But the CTA, which took effect in 2024, was deceptively simple: Corporate owners simply had to disclose who was in control. America’s reign of corporate anonymity was finally coming to an end.
Now that’s all gone. The Trump administration has gutted the legislation and is torching nearly all of the gathered data. This cannot all be blamed on Trump or Bessent. Republican allies in Congress are busy trying to pass legislation that will formally repeal the CTA, thus preventing any future administration from restarting the database.
[Read: The watchdogs are barking themselves hoarse]
The American economy is now open for business again for all kinds of mischief. “The United States Treasury has taken a step that enables criminals to continue financing and profiting from their crimes by using anonymous companies formed in the United States as their ‘getaway vehicles,’” Scott Greytak, the deputy executive director of the advocacy group Transparency International U.S., said in a statement. Anyone with dirty money can once more turn to the U.S. to launder it clean. Now anyone, domestic or foreign, can secretly barrel as much money into American elections as they want.
We have no idea how many businesses formed in the United States are sieves for foreign financing—for elections and otherwise. As Michael Sozan of the Center for American Progress wrote in 2019, these corporations allow foreign entities to “exert influence on the nation’s domestic political process.” The anonymity at play ensures that the scope of this threat will stay unknown too.
All of this is in keeping with what has become the most corrupt administration in American history. Not only has Trump and his family watched their net worths balloon by the billion since he returned to office last year, but his administration has also worked relentlessly to topple America’s anti-corruption infrastructure, eliminating task forces dedicated to combatting dirty money, killing the enforcement of anti-bribery statutes, and gutting efforts to force the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share of taxes, among countless other measures. The demolition of the Corporate Transparency Act is just the latest and most dramatic move to cater to the president’s deep-pocketed buddies and fellow cronies. But it surely won’t be the last.
2026-08-14 10:02:00
How to describe President Trump’s Freedom 250 Patriot Games? The contest, which took place earlier this week, brought students ages 14 to 17 together from across America to answer the question: What if your high-school gym teacher walked headfirst into a pole and was then asked to throw an Olympics with a budget of exactly $6 and three weeks’ notice?
Trump boasted when announcing the games that “there will be no men playing in women’s sports,” but after watching almost all of the Patriot Games, I’ve realized he meant that nobody, regardless of gender, would be playing anything recognizable as a sport.
When you turn on ESPN’s coverage of the Patriot Games, you see a camera pan slowly over several small American flags stuck into ill-tended grass, while a tune reminiscent of (but legally distinct from) the Olympics theme plays. Welcome to SPIRE Academy, in Geneva, Ohio, where 120 competitors, one boy and one girl from each of the 50 states and … some territories, gathered for the Patriot Games.
Are these the best high-school athletes the United States has to offer? In a word, no. Well, is the person representing Massachusetts at least from the state of Massachusetts? Also no! Well, does this field of competitors at least look like America? Not the America I remember! But Stephen Miller has been busy.
Then what is this? It’s a Trump-produced spectacle, of course! Who chose these contestants? What are they doing at SPIRE Academy, in Geneva, Ohio? And more important, what are these events? The kids are not the reason that at the end of three days, I feel almost punished for trying to take the Games seriously.
I will say that at least the announcers seem to be equally bewildered by what they’re witnessing. Over the course of the games, I notice that their confident proclamations about what is in store for the contestants keep changing from event to event and day to day. Will Victory Hoops (Pop-A-Shot arcade basketball) feature the top-eight or the top-16 contenders? No one seems to know! (It ultimately features the top 16, despite numerous confident announcements and graphics to the contrary.)
If you tuned in only to the finale—sorry, the “Freedom Finale”; every aspect of these games has patriotic branding—you might be forgiven for assuming that the Patriot Games leading up to this point had operated on any kind of recognizable human logic. The finale features four contestants competing on an American Ninja Warrior–style course, and the other 116 competitors lined up behind them in patriotic jerseys. They enter the arena to stirring music and dramatic lighting while sparklers blaze. It looks as though things have been running in a professional manner. Someone tuning in just then might imagine that the whole competition featured such standard tests of skill and not events such as Here, Play Dodgeball, and We’ll Give Half of You 30 Points! They have not been watching the Patriot Games like I have.
Some elements of the Patriot Games make a minimal amount of sense. The contest, for instance, begins with something called the Presidential Qualifier, with a 100-meter dash, 55-meter hurdles, a Flexed Arm Hang, a Pro Agility Shuttle, a Broad Jump, and a Med Ball Throw. After the Presidential Qualifier comes Dodgeball and Kickball. Each event, as far as I can tell, is worth 60 points. But I could be wrong! The way Dodgeball and Kickball work is that you are divided into six teams (Team Freedom, Team Liberty, Team Valor, Team Honor, Team Unity, and Team Courage, of course!) via snake seeding.
Day two offers two of the most spectacular events I have ever seen. Operation Endurance is a military-inspired obstacle course, and everyone is immediately relieved by how much sense it makes. Ropes to climb! An area in which to army-crawl! A jerrican carry! A balance beam! Yes! And you can tell who has won because there is a timer!
But then comes … the Varsity Circuit. This is where you can sense things coming off the rails a bit. The event is divided into six stations, each with an activity representing a sport. There are two football stations, where you run through obstacles and then throw a football at a target. There is a volleyball station, where you serve three balls successfully over the net. There is a baseball station, where you whack a ball off a tee and then run the bases. For the soccer station, you kick a ball at a target. And for tennis, the activity is … catching three tennis balls in a row. Catching! That thing you famously do during the sport of tennis! One announcer tries to zhuzh it up a little bit, so we get this amazing description: “They will be stationed about 15 feet away from the tennis-ball launcher. They have to actually receive this, almost like a punt reception, and they have to do that three times.”
And while they do this, their families wave signs that say things such as ELIZA IS OUR PATRIOT.
Underwhelming as these challenges are, they are also … not that easy for all of the contestants, which means that if you managed to prove your patriotism sufficiently to get selected for the Patriot Games, you’ll most likely win the prize of failing to catch a tennis ball on national television (or at least deep within the bowels of the ESPN app) while the announcer generously remarks that the lights are awfully bright and the volleyball net does seem pretty high. Certainly not a humiliation for you or the president whose idea this was!
After the Varsity Circuit and Operation Endurance, we select our top 16, based on total points. Once we reach the top 16, any pretense that this is an open field for competition where anyone can win gets joyfully abandoned. The top-four scorers are all placed on a single team for tug-of-war against the bottom-four scorers, and—you won’t be surprised to hear this!—they win.
After this, we have Pop-A-Shot basketball! Yes, the arcade game! “Why can’t they just shoot real basketballs? Isn’t this all being filmed on a basketball court? Isn’t this allegedly an athletic competition?” HUSH! JUST ACCEPT THE PREMISE! THESE ARE PROBABLY THE BEST ATHLETES, AND THESE ARE PROBABLY LOGICAL THINGS FOR THEM TO BE DOING!
Look, as someone who has watched Slippery Stairs, a contest in which people try to climb up a slippery stair and some of them fall down and others do not, I understand the power of good announcing to make almost anything seem like a legitimate competition. But the power of good announcing can go only so far, and it cannot do anything when you are watching two students play arcade basketball head-to-head for no discernible reason, and you already know the points will not matter.
Trump appears for the Freedom Finale, which has much higher production value than anything that has come before. “I like a lot of finales,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of good finales.” (Did he prepare those remarks?) During the finale, multiple people fall off the Legally–Distinct–From–American Ninja Warrior Race-Course Equipment, allowing their opponents to win. Thrilling! Everyone gets a medal, and the winners get trophies and scholarship checks. Trump stands smiling in the middle of it all. It looks very Soviet, although the Soviets probably would have realized that the tennis-ball catching was too embarrassing to televise.
Is this America? No, this is Trump’s America, where everything is made up and the points don’t matter, but our leader still wants you to cheer as if they do. Just don’t tell me these are tests of merit. I watched that Pop-A-Shot basketball! Don’t tell me this is the best we have to offer. And don’t embarrass our high-school students like this. They have enough being thrown at them, between the death lettuce and resurgent measles. The last thing they need is the Patriot Games too.
2026-08-14 06:49:00
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In January, the Trump administration attempted to fundamentally change the way the United States handles childhood immunizations. Following a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC updated its vaccine schedule to recommend that some shots no longer be given to all children. A federal court undid the effort in March. In an executive order in May, Donald Trump called on states to adopt the narrower schedule anyway. On Monday, Trump issued a new executive order on the same subject, focused on lowering the number of vaccines that the government recommends for all children. As I wrote earlier this week, this White House has a habit of doubling down when it doesn’t get its way. But only states have the power to put these proposals into practice—and many state policy makers, concerned that the White House is contradicting existing research, aren’t keen to follow its guidance.
According to the new executive order, preventive shots for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, dengue, and other diseases should be recommended for “high-risk” groups only. The order also calls to split up vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella—the two-dose MMR shot that has been a standard recommendation for U.S. children for decades—into three separate stages, and directs the attorney general to pursue legal action against states that don’t respect “parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under the law.” (The order says it will align U.S. policy with the best practices of other countries, such as Denmark, but the experts I spoke with highlighted that what works in one country won’t necessarily work in another.)
The mandate may not have any legal authority to compel states to change their guidelines in the near term, although the invocation of the attorney general suggests that litigation may be on the horizon. And the single-disease vaccines that the executive order encourages aren’t yet available in the U.S. But this week’s order risks creating even more uncertainty about vaccines than already exists. “If you set out to write a policy that confuses people, it would look a lot like this one,” Jake Scott, an infectious-disease specialist at Stanford, told me.
Between the policy priorities of the Trump administration and the guidance of public-health experts, Americans have been stuck in a state of vaccine whiplash. When the American Academy of Pediatrics broke with the government earlier this year over its proposed vaccine schedule, the chair of the organization’s committee on infectious diseases told reporters that the recommendations are a “strong departure from the medical evidence and no longer offer the optimal way to prevent illness in children.” Some state lawmakers have been fighting over how best to adapt to the CDC’s changing guidelines; Kansas’s GOP-dominated legislature tried to bring the state’s vaccine rules into alignment with the CDC’s, only for its Democratic governor to veto the effort in April. And many other states have publicly said that they will reject the guidelines.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has questioned vaccines’ safety in the past, has been driving the discussions of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, as my colleagues Tom Bartlett and Katherine J. Wu reported. And although the secretary has moved away from explicit anti-vax rhetoric in recent months (following a reported White House push for health officials to stick to messages with broad public support), vaccine skepticism clearly lingers within the administration. During the press conference for Monday’s executive order, Trump suggested that the MMR vaccine could be “quite lethal.” There is no evidence for this. Measles, though, can kill: Last year, the U.S. saw its first deaths from measles in a decade.
Rethinking MMR at this moment poses extreme logistical challenges. Even if pharmaceutical companies opted to invest the time and money to introduce these shots to the American market, splitting up the doses would create new problems for caregivers. “We are essentially tripling the operational labor required of the parent or guardian (who must now schedule three separate appointments for their child),” Maimuna Majumder, a Harvard epidemiologist, told me in an email, which is “all but guaranteed to result in missed vaccines.”
In the meantime, the executive order risks misinforming Americans who are already unsure of how they feel about vaccination. The Kaiser Family Foundation released a study in June suggesting that about a third of American adults fall into a “mixed middle group” of vaccine skepticism—they believe some myths and reject others. My colleague Nick Florko, who covers public health, told me that these are the people most likely to be swayed by the administration’s latest push: “Those are the folks that might see this and think, Okay, maybe my belief that I want to delay this vaccine is well founded because the federal guidance now says that we should do that.” Under the White House’s rubric, the Americans who most need clear guidance are those who stand to lose.
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Evening Read
What I Saw In Sinaloa
By Kevin Sieff
Last Tuesday night, I was eating sushi with a Mexican police chief in downtown Culiacán, a city that had momentarily flickered back to life amid a bloody cartel turf war. At the table next to us was a birthday party. The police chief ordered a salmon roll. Through the window, I could see groups of families and friends walking on the sidewalk, past car dealerships and strip malls, after months of self-imposed lockdown.
Among them were three influencers who pulled up to a KFC down the street. They were dressed as food-delivery workers, carrying insulated bags on their backs, joking with one another and livestreaming everything with their phones. César Gastélum, the group’s front man, had become famous for such innocuous pranks. Even as thousands were murdered by the cartels, Gastélum, a stocky, bearded 24-year-old, posted videos of himself dancing in pajamas, dressing as a priest, sipping iced coffee. He had more than 700,000 followers on TikTok.
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Explore. Hollywood sees Reddit and YouTube as gold mines, Shirley Li writes. But turning a viral video into the next big movie isn’t so easy.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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2026-08-14 04:50:00
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
Historians are generally better off interpreting the past than predicting the future. By training, we’re meant to read sources, not tea leaves. In the fall of 1973, during the middle acts of Watergate’s Shakespearean drama, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. tried to do a little bit of both. In the cover story of The Atlantic’s November issue that year, “The Runaway Presidency,” Schlesinger cast President Richard Nixon’s abuses as the result of long-standing historical trends that had empowered the chief executive, and in the process offered a hopeful prognosis for what was to come. “Watergate,” Schlesinger wrote, “is potentially the best thing to have happened to the presidency in a long time. If the trails are followed to their end, many, many years will pass before another White House staff dares take the liberties with the Constitution and the laws the Nixon White House has taken.”
Nixon resigned 52 years ago this month, marking an end to the scandal, but bringing no such catharsis to our national life and no stop to the runaway presidency. Underscoring just how poorly Schlesinger’s optimism aged, J. D. Vance mused in June that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” As my colleague David A. Graham noted at the time, the remark was a startling admission from a member of an administration that has taken liberties with the Constitution and the laws. It’s also entirely plausible: Scandals that would have previously brought the nation to a standstill barely register for more than a few days, in part because there are simply so many of them under Donald Trump. To understand how Schlesinger got it so wrong, first you have to understand what he got right.
In 1973, Schlesinger published a brick of a book titled The Imperial Presidency. He’d begun writing it as a pamphlet that March, but the project quickly swelled to 200,000 words as the spectacle of Watergate unfolded. The book tracked the aggregation of executive power from the founding onward, which accelerated during World War II and the Cold War. By the early ’70s, the office had grown so far beyond its constitutional bounds, Schlesinger wrote, that it posed “a revolutionary challenge to the separation of powers itself.”
Schlesinger’s Atlantic essay was preaching from his own text. In that account, Nixon’s abuses were symptoms that made visible a larger sickness. The expansion of the presidency, especially in the realm of war and foreign policy, was clear enough, but Nixon showed the dangers and “intoxications” that came with such power at home. Previous presidents may have possessed such authority but, Schlesinger argued, they had the character and restraint not to use it. Nixon was a different kind of case, demonstrating what would happen when a person “not open and modest,” but “from the start ambitious of power and contemptuous of law,” reached the nation’s highest office.
The president’s place at the center of the American political story exacerbated the problem. Congress should restrain the executive to reassert its place in the constitutional order, Schlesinger argued (he had advocated for Nixon’s impeachment as a starting point), but the American people also had a role to play: They must form “a new attitude” toward their presidents, becoming more skeptical and less reverent toward the office. Doing so would administer fewer “intoxications” to its occupant, Schlesinger wrote. But his prescriptions struck his critics as rich, to say the least. As he admitted in The Imperial Presidency, “historians and political scientists, this writer among them, contributed to the rise of the presidential mystique.” Contributed, indeed. Over the course of his career, Schlesinger had endowed Democratic presidents with just the stature he now feared. In 1965, he’d memorialized John F. Kennedy (to whom he served as special assistant) in a book so reverential that the writer Christopher Hitchens later called it “the founding breviary of the cult of JFK.”
Schlesinger may have only got religion because of the sins of the Republican Nixon administration, but he wasn’t exactly wrong. Many others in the moment hoped that Nixon’s transgressions would spark something of a democratic revival to check the dangerous tendencies that had made Watergate possible. And reforms did come: A slew of legislation from 1973 to 1978 attempted to address abuses exposed by Watergate and restrain presidential power on war, impoundment, elections, secrecy, and surveillance.
What Schlesinger failed to see was that although the dramas of Watergate may have pierced the mystique of the presidency, they also heightened the American fascination with it. Many people did lose their reverence for the office, but they didn’t turn their attention away. Perversely, it seemed that the spectacle of the presidency was enhanced rather than diminished by its subsequent scandals. Watergate supplied more than the inevitable suffix for all presidential crises to come—it also established the script. The crime and the cover-up; the drip of revelations; the question of what the president knew, and when he knew it; the obscure Washington characters thrust into the spotlight; the marathon hearings; the stern reports on the nightly news.
But presidential scandals, which once dominated the media cycle for weeks and months, now come and go at the speed of an attention economy that demands constant novelty. Meanwhile, the institutions that might have checked presidential power now enable it. Congress’s inaction and the Supreme Court’s expansive doctrine of executive authority have brought us closer to Nixon’s later assertion that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Watergate would be a 12-hour news story today, as Vance suggests, because there’s nothing to stop a new one from happening tomorrow. In an era of revelation without reckoning, we’re more transfixed than ever by the imperial presidency, whether we like it or not.
At the end of his 1973 Atlantic essay, Schlesinger suggested that corruption came to the White House in 50-year cycles, like monstrous cicadas. There is perhaps something to the idea. Start from the abuses of Nixon, in the early ’70s, and go back half a century to the abuses of Warren Harding, in the early 1920s. Do that again, and you would arrive at the scandals that plagued Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency, in the 1870s. Keep rewinding another 50 years—ignore John Quincy Adams’s reputation for probity and rectitude—and you’d land on the “Corrupt Bargain” that gave Adams the presidency in the election of 1824.
The cycle could be projected forward, too: Schlesinger closed with one more prediction, this one more right than wrong. “Around the year 2023,” he wrote, “the American people will be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.” We can’t say we weren’t warned.
