Kennedy Could Save Gaetz

Donald Trump’s nominations of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of Health and Human Services are similar in the degree of opposition that they’re likely to provoke, but I suspect the intentions behind each choice are quite different.

Gaetz is Trump’s passion pick, and according to the Bulwark’s Marc Caputo he aced his interview with the president-elect by ignoring talk of legal niceties and promising to cut a swath through the Justice Department. Despite all the speculation about some kind of multidimensional chess involved in the appointment, it seems likely that Trump very straightforwardly wants Gaetz to be confirmed, and that the Florida congressman is precisely the kind of figure he desires to have as attorney general.

With Kennedy, on the other hand, the pick feels more like conventional coalition management, with much less personal presidential passion invested in the choice. Trump benefited meaningfully from Kennedy’s endorsement, and those who voted for the former Democratic and third party candidate represent a distinct faction — crunchy, suspicious, anti-establishment, often erstwhile lefties — within the broader Trumpist tent. So the nomination is best understood as a reward for that support, a largely transactional gesture.

Yes, Trump shares some version of Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism. But it’s doubtful that the president-elect cares deeply about the issue, let alone about how Health and Human Services approaches food additives or pesticides or chronic illness; it’s more likely he just wants to keep Kennedy and his constituency onside.

Which means in turn that he may not be terribly disappointed if the Kennedy nomination goes down to defeat in the Senate. He can say he tried, he did his best, and hand out some ceremonial public-health role as a consolation prize. And if a few Republican senators decide that they need to vote down Kennedy but then can’t also vote down Gaetz — well, that might be an entirely acceptable outcome for the president-elect.

And needless to say, this has been a good 48 hours for Pete Hegseth’s nomination to be secretary of defense.

Justice Juan Merchan originally scheduled the sentencing of Donald Trump for July, after Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in the New York hush-money case. But after the Supreme Court ruled on July 1 that sitting presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for official acts, the judge delayed sentencing until September, pending his review of how the court’s decision affected certain portions of the case.

At the urging of Trump’s lawyers (and with no objections from the prosecution), Merchan decided not to insert himself into the presidential campaign just a few weeks before the election. He pushed back the immunity review and rescheduled sentencing for Nov. 26. After Trump’s victory at the polls, the best chance for punishment in this case was suspended sentences — probably probation and a fine, but still, conceivably, a short time in prison — to be imposed after Trump is required by the 22nd Amendment to leave office on Jan. 20, 2029.

But now, after new motions by the defense, the prosecutor Matthew Colangelo has obtained from the judge a pause in the case until Nov. 19 to give the D.A.’s office time to balance what Colangelo called the unprecedented “competing interests” of the jury’s verdict and “the office of the president.”

Competing interests? Only in the narrowest sense, because it’s not really that complicated. Elections and jury verdicts are both essential elements of democracy; one does not supersede the other.

On one side, there’s the court’s duty to uphold the integrity of the criminal justice system and the rule of law, an obligation that has never been more crucial than it is today. More practically, why should any citizen put up with the sacrifices of serving on a jury if the verdict will be subordinated to the defendant’s convenience, even if the defendant is the president-elect?

On the other side, Trump is once again arguing that the president is above the law and that his time is too precious for this low-level wrangling.

But sentencing, as opposed to prosecution, is not explicitly mentioned in either the Justice Department’s guidelines barring the prosecution of presidents (which don’t apply to states, anyway) or the court’s immunity decision. Why not? The strong legal answer of the prosecution and the judge should be that when a president contests a suspended sentence, it is much less time-consuming than depositions and the other demands of being a defendant.

As someone who was in the courtroom every day of the trial, I worry that prosecutors may figure that their case is doomed on appeal, so why take all the heat from MAGA world? But there’s no compelling reason to be fatalistic about the Supreme Court, which, despite some awful decisions, has rejected Trump’s position or decided not to review his appeals on dozens of occasions over the years. Maybe his felony convictions will be among them.

The Manhattan D.A., Alvin Bragg, has already shown himself to be fearless. Now he must press forward — whatever the chances of success — to bolster the Constitution. And Merchan, who respectfully ignored Trump’s attacks on the court during the trial, shouldn’t buckle now.

Throughout the presidential campaign, I noticed that Trump supporters tended to fall into one of two camps. The first camp — core MAGA — heard Donald Trump’s wild rhetoric, including his vows to punish his political enemies, and loved every bit of it. They voted for Trump because they believed he’d do exactly what he said.

Then there was a different camp — normie Republican — that had an entirely different view. They did not believe Trump’s words. They rolled their eyes at media alarmism and responded with some version of “stop clutching your pearls. This is just Trump being Trump. He’s far more bark than bite.”

But Trump’s selection of Matt Gaetz as his nominee for attorney general, along with his selection of Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, shows that Trump did mean what he said. He is going to govern with a sense of vengeance, and personal loyalty really is the coin of his realm.

Gaetz’s nomination is particularly dreadful. He isn’t just the least-qualified attorney general in American history (he barely practiced law before running for elected office and has served mainly as a MAGA gadfly in Congress), he’s also remarkably dishonest and depraved.

Gaetz has created immense turmoil in the House. He was primarily responsible for deposing the House speaker Kevin McCarthy in a fit of pique, and he’s so alienated House colleagues that one had to be physically restrained from attacking him on the House floor. He has a reputation as showing colleagues explicit pictures of his sexual partners, and he is under a House ethics investigation into whether he had sex with an underage girl while he was a member of Congress.

Gaetz has denied these claims, and the Department of Justice closed its own investigation into sex trafficking and obstruction of justice last year.

Gaetz’s nomination is a test for Senate Republicans. Can they summon up the minimum level of decency and moral courage to reject Gaetz? Or will they utterly abdicate their constitutional role of advice and consent in favor of simply consenting even to Trump’s worst whims?

No matter what happens next, however, Gaetz’s nomination is reaffirmation that the Donald Trump who tried to overthrow an American election hasn’t matured or evolved or grown. He is who he is, and it should surprise no one that he nominated a vengeful loyalist to lead the most powerful law enforcement agency in the United States.

It was such a cozy moment in the Oval Office on Wednesday morning, with the roaring fire and the warm handshake and the past presidents — including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and F.D.R. — looking down benignly on the scene.

So why did it feel so nauseating?

It is hard to watch Donald Trump be gracious, because he is gracious only when he wins, and that’s not a good lesson for the children of America. When he loses, he tries to burn the democracy down.

Trump can play it smooth or rough, depending on whether you’re willing to knuckle under. He promised a smooth transition but was crueler to President Biden during the campaign than I’ve ever seen a presidential candidate be to anyone: Trump made fun of how Biden looked at the beach, how he was aging and his sad mental lapse at their debate, calling him “mentally impaired.”

But Biden is an institutionalist, and he honored the institution. Unfortunately, it was nauseating to watch Biden as well, because he was confronting a monster of his own making. If Biden had not bogarted the presidency, if he had not run for a second term, the Democrats would have had time to put together a stronger, centrist ticket with governors of swing states. Trump’s gloating chariot ride up Pennsylvania Avenue might never have happened.

Through the prism of his ego, Biden sees it differently. Trump told The New York Post afterward that after the “slog” of the campaign, the two combatants really enjoyed seeing each other. And it’s hard not to imagine that a frisson of satisfaction must have crossed Biden’s mind as he welcomed Trump back, because, in his view, it ratified his contention that he was the only one who could have beaten Trump.

This ritualistic tableau did not take place the last time these two transitioned, when Biden took over from Trump. Partly that was because of Covid, and partly it was because Trump was busy throwing monkey wrenches into the transition and desperately devising scenarios to purloin the election.

At the time, in mid-November 2020, President-elect Biden warned that Trump’s refusal to authorize an orderly transition would stain him as “one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history,” adding that “it sends a horrible message about who we are as a country.”

Trump’s election taught us a lot about who we are as a country, and the nearly two-hour Oval meeting, juxtaposed with the announcements of Trump’s bizarre cabinet picks, was emblematic of an important truism in Washington: Democrats often try to play fair, while Republicans play to win; Democrats sometimes want to be right more than they want to win.

Just as President Barack Obama did in his transition meeting with Trump in 2016, Biden had to sit there and be gracious while he contemplated all his accomplishments going down the drain at the hands of a man he has total contempt for.

Perhaps the most telling signal was sent by Melania Trump, who didn’t bother to show up at all. Underscoring that lapse in politesse, Jill Biden delivered a handwritten note to the president-elect to give to his wife.

Melania’s no-show was a way of saying: The Trumps tried, in their way, to do things the official way last time. But this time, they’re going to do any damn thing they want. They’re going to run the country like one of Trump’s companies. Tradition will be subsumed by Trumpism. And that’s a very unsettling thought.

There’s at least a chance now that Senate Republicans won’t lie fully prostrate before Donald Trump for the next several years. By choosing John Thune of South Dakota as their leader on Wednesday morning, Republicans made a statement that their chamber won’t necessarily be a wholly owned subsidiary of the White House and it may occasionally assert its constitutional role as a check on executive power.

Trump didn’t make an endorsement in the leadership race, but his MAGA allies were loudly pushing Rick Scott of Florida for the job, particularly after he explicitly agreed to Trump’s demand that the Senate give up its role in choosing whether to confirm Trump’s nominations. By rejecting Scott on the first ballot and picking Thune, Republicans indicated they would not abandon the course charted by Mitch McConnell, who, though he was a fierce partisan infighter as Republican leader for the past 18 years, at least fought hard to preserve his chamber’s independence.

McConnell and Trump didn’t try to hide their contempt for each other, and that tension is likely to ease considerably with Thune, though he worked closely with McConnell. Trump will almost certainly get most of what he wants out of a Thune-led Senate, from cabinet appointments to judges to legislation; the party wants to seize on its momentum before the country gets sick of Trump and Trumpism again.

But it’s in opposing the craziest, most extreme and dangerous people or ideas that Trump will propose — and there will be many — where Thune could really make a difference. It might seem inconceivable, for example, that Trump would offer a screwball like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a Senate-confirmable job leading a health agency, but Trump has already announced that he wants Pete Hegseth to run the nation’s military. The guy’s principal qualification is pleasing Trump as a Fox News host. Would mainstream Senate Republicans approve those kinds of nominations?

The defense establishment is already aghast about Hegseth, and many red-state senators care deeply about the military’s approval. Thune might one day have to tell the White House that Hegseth doesn’t have the votes.

Which is Thune’s job. The Senate tells administrations how far they can go with their nominations, and it often tells them they have gone too far. As much as that infuriates presidents, it’s how our government was designed to work. That’s why Trump is demanding he be allowed to make recess appointments. If the Senate is in recess for 10 days or more, Trump can appoint cabinet secretaries and judges without having to go through a tedious confirmation process. Those appointments are good until the next Senate session begins, in this case in 2027.

Under McConnell and other Senate leaders, the chamber refused to go into recess for 10 days, precisely to prevent presidents from usurping the Senate’s constitutional role of confirming nominees. Trump knows full well that some of the appointments he wants to make are too much for even this Senate, which is why he demanded the ability to make recess appointments. Scott immediately agreed, but Thune was more measured, saying simply that option would be on the table.

Hopefully that’s one of the big reasons a MAGA favorite like Scott will not be running the Senate.

When you read the news reports of the appalling violence against Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam, there is no doubt that powerful and ugly anti-Jewish hatreds were at work. To deny that is to stick your head in the sand. But to believe that this is all it’s about is very dangerous for Israel and the Jewish people.

One of the most striking things about being in Israel now is to realize how average Israeli Jews have seen very few of the pictures that go out every day on social media to the rest of the world showing Palestinian men, women and children who have been killed, wounded and maimed as collateral damage in Israel’s war on Hamas — which itself killed, wounded, maimed and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7 last year.

I am not a judge. I don’t know what the “just” proportion of Palestinian civilian lives and homes that the laws of war might say is OK for Israel to destroy in response to Oct. 7 for every Israeli Jew and home ravaged that day. But I am here to say that whatever the number is, Israel has now exceeded it.

And the fact that this destruction of Gaza continues every day by a far-right Israeli government that still — some 14 months after the war started — refuses to offer any plan for decent Palestinian governance in Gaza to replace Hamas, something that would say to Israel’s friends and enemies, “Yes, this war is exacting a terrible toll but it is in pursuit of a better future for Israelis and Palestinians,” is turning the Jewish state into a pariah state.

On Wednesday morning, I had breakfast in Tel Aviv with Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and our conversation drifted to this reality. Olmert then reached into his briefcase and read aloud to me his handwritten notes from an article he was preparing to submit to the Hebrew press about Amsterdam. Here are a few excerpts.

What happened in Amsterdam is primarily a reflection of hatred by many Muslims against the State of Israel and its citizens, because of what is transpiring in our region. It is not a continuation of the historic antisemitism that swept Europe in past centuries, the sources of which are Christian religious fanaticism and a lack of tolerance for the Jewish people in general.

The fact is, many people in the world are unable to acquiesce with Israel turning Gaza, or residential neighborhoods of Beirut, into the Stone Age — as some of our leaders promised to do. And that is to say nothing of what Israel is doing in the West Bank — the killings and destruction of Palestinian property. Are we really surprised that these things create a wave of hostile reactions when we continue to show a lack of sensitivity to human beings living in the center of the battlefield who are not terrorists?

The events in Amsterdam drew on deep roots in the past of the Jewish people. But they also drew on an unending stream of social media images of the devastation of Gaza without any Israeli plan offering a better way for Jews and Palestinians to live side-by-side. To focus entirely on the first and totally ignore the second is about the most dangerous thing Jews everywhere could do today.

Last week, voters in California and Nevada considered the abolition of forced labor — “slavery” or “involuntary servitude,” in the language of the 13th Amendment — in each state’s penal institutions, but only one state made the right choice. Nevada, which chose Donald Trump for president, did abolish this form of slavery. California, which chose Kamala Harris, kept it.

Some observers have noted that the language of each state’s referendum virtually guaranteed these outcomes. Nevada’s Question 4 explicitly asked voters whether “the use of slavery and involuntary servitude as a criminal punishment” should be abolished, whereas California’s Proposition 6 made no mention of slavery and even omitted the notion of forced labor as punishment, referring instead to “involuntary servitude.”

But beyond the linguistic signifiers, there are other forces at play in California that have prevented slavery and mass incarceration from finding their rightful places in the dustbin of history. It was in California, after all, that liberal politics gave birth to law-and-order politics.

In the 1980s, California’s once-thriving postwar economy was on the downturn. Job opportunities had dwindled, poverty and unemployment had risen. As the sociologist Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes in her book “Golden Gulag,” the state’s solution to these socioeconomic pressures was building more prisons.

These construction projects were meant to reinvigorate local economies and provide jobs. But completed prisons required prisoners. Although crime rates were decreasing when the state constructed new prisons up and down the state, incarceration, like an air vent, provided an outlet for socioeconomic pressures that would otherwise keep surging. From 1982 to 2000, the state prison population ballooned fivefold, according to state data.

It was primarily Black and Latino men in Los Angeles and the other southern counties who were locked up, people who Gilmore describes as the “deindustrialized cities’ working or workless poor.” These populations are still overrepresented in California’s prison system, and they are forced to work. About 40 percent of California’s 96,000 prisoners are inmate-laborers, and they tend to earn between 8 cents and 74 cents per hour for everything from cleaning to clerking. Their work cannot be meaningfully differentiated from slavery.

(Only about 29 percent of state prisoners across the United States are not forced into prison labor, according to the most recent Department of Justice data. Those prisoners could choose between work assignments like road maintenance, farming and food preparation — though they are still paid pennies on the dollar.)

Such forced labor tends to be regarded as punishment for a crime, as the 13th Amendment allows. But its ongoing practice in California, of all places, contradicts the idea that the state is some great emblem of egalitarian progressivism. Even in the liberal stronghold of the West Coast, punitive ideas about crime, class and race continue to rationalize extreme social inequality.

Over the last half-decade, the Democratic Party has tacked right on crime and incarceration in an appeal to imagined moderate voters, but the Harris campaign’s failure suggests that Democrats cannot outflank the G.O.P. on law-and-order politics.

Instead, party officials should offer an alternative vision of America and devise just solutions to our deepest social problems. Maybe they could start by abolishing slavery.

There are a lot of theories about what went wrong for Democrats in 2024, but Senator Bernie Sanders’s statement that they “abandoned” white, Black and Latino working-class people doesn’t hold up. Look at the last two Democratic administrations.

Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, a law that most Americans favor. He signed legislation ranging from the Dodd-Frank financial reform to the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act. Sanders voted for these. Obama bailed out the auto industry. He did a bunch of stuff that didn’t specifically target working-class Americans, but that many working-class Americans presumably liked: repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, tripling the number of women on the Supreme Court, signing the Fair Sentencing Act.

During Obama’s presidency, the unemployment rate went from 7.8 percent to 4.7 percent. Black unemployment went from 12.7 percent to 7.5 percent, and Latino unemployment went from 10.1 percent to 5.8 percent. (All while the Dow Jones industrial average went up 149 percent, and lots of working-class and middle-class Americans have 401(k)s.)

President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act included the now-expired expanded child tax credit. His Inflation Reduction Act permits the government to negotiate prescription drug prices for Medicare recipients. He signed a bipartisan infrastructure law. Sanders voted for these.

During Biden’s tenure, the unemployment rate has gone from 6.4 percent to 4.1 percent. Black unemployment has gone from 9.3 percent to 5.7 percent, and Latino unemployment has gone from 8.5 percent to 5.1 percent. (While the Dow has increased 41 percent as of Tuesday’s close.)

Kamala Harris laid out a raft of economic plans, including those specifically focused on Black and Latino men. I think she wound up promising too much — if she had won, it would have been better to have under-promised and over-delivered. Democrats, in general, need to rely less on policy proposals to win presidential elections; in the weeks that followed her convincing debate win against Donald Trump, Harris needed to tell a more cohesive story about where she wanted to take the country in the next four years to counter the story that Trump was telling.

Sanders may not think Harris promised enough — but even if that’s the case, it’s hard to say she didn’t lay out a platform focused on working Americans.

Four years ago, making the case for a Sanders presidency, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich argued: “Today’s main divide isn’t left versus right. It’s establishment versus anti-establishment.” That’s fair. It’s also fair to argue, as Sanders does, that Democrats haven’t done enough to address wealth inequality and are too beholden to moneyed interests.

Four years from now, Democrats may nominate a candidate who favors a more social democratic platform — maybe Sanders. But as a response to an election with a binary choice, the notion that Democrats have “abandoned” the working class really isn’t backed up by the record.

A strange thing about the presidential campaign we just endured is how many people rationalized their support for Donald Trump by arguing that he wouldn’t make good on some of his central promises.

“I think mass deportation is just talk, but the era of open borders will be over,” Scott McConnell, a co-founder of The American Conservative, wrote on X. In July a Mexican-born Trump backer told The Times, “Last time, he didn’t even finish the wall. What’s he going to do this time?”

Now the answer is taking shape: He’s going to oversee a militarized mass roundup of the undocumented. On Sunday, Trump named Tom Homan, his former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as “border czar.”

In a speech to this year’s National Conservatism Conference, Homan, who oversaw Trump’s family separation policy, promised a “historic deportation operation” from which no undocumented immigrant would be safe. “No one’s off the table in the next administration,” he said. “If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”

Then, on Monday, Trump named the obsessively anti-immigrant Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff. Miller’s portfolio, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in The Times, “is expected to be vast and to far exceed what the eventual title will convey.” Miller has been forthright about his desire to purge immigrants here illegally, as well as many here legally, from the United States.

Among other things, Miller has said that Trump would cancel the temporary protected status of thousands of Afghans who fled here after the Taliban’s takeover and take another stab at ending DACA, the program that protects from deportation some immigrants brought to the United States as children.

Most significantly, he’s laid out plans to use National Guard troops to help arrest migrants en masse, warehousing them in military camps while they await deportation. No one should be shocked when this happens. I suspect some will be anyway.

It was not for lack of trying. Democrats left nothing on the field, stood for hours to get into rallies, donated a billion dollars, and knocked on a gazillion doors. It just wasn’t enough. At a time when so many people feel let down by the election, I had a few questions for Ben Ansell, author of the 2023 book “Why Politics Fails” and a professor of comparative democracy at Oxford University.

Q: Did politics fail?

A: Politics is at heart about how we resolve our inevitable disagreements, ideally agreeably. Clearly the American public have deep-rooted disagreements over abortion, the role of government, what’s good for the economy, and the relative importance of protecting democratic norms. But despite those disagreements and the often disagreeable tone of the campaign, the election itself was largely peaceful and decisive. Not everyone will like the outcome, but it is clear and unchaotic.

Is democracy in danger? Or is this a sign that democracy is alive and well?

I think it’s fair to say Donald Trump is no liberal democracy’s greatest advocate. He does not love the checks and balances of the media, of protest, or of courts. Nor do I expect him to be a strong promoter of democracy abroad, given his transactional style of diplomacy and his tendency to compliment authoritarian leaders. But he is also the beneficiary of a fair and free democratic process and is the legitimate winner. Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, argued that 2024 might be the year democracy falls off a cliff, and yet we have made it to November without major backsliding in any democracy and with a clear result in the U.S., where many feared months of lawsuits, protests, denial and shenanigans.

Should the losers of this election give their consent or not? Trump didn’t consent when he lost. Why should Democrats?

One core problem of democracy I emphasize in “Why Political Fails” is that in highly polarized democracies, there is a problem of losers’ consent: Both that the losers may not admit they lost — a problem we will not have after this U.S. election — and that winners sometimes act as if they never need consent from the losers to rule. While winners can often ignore losers, crushing them ruthlessly can often store up more trouble for later, as we have seen in the United Kingdom after Brexit. Democrats will need to consent to having lost. There is no evidence of fraud. But they do not have to pretend to support the new president, and he in turn will have to take on the consequences of hammering the Democrats while they are down. That might or might not be successful. The 2026 midterms will let us know.

Handing over the presidency from one administration to the next is a big task, with all kinds of procedures in place to make the transition run smoothly. The Trump transition team is not interested in any of those procedures. It has not participated in transition planning, security clearances or ethics reviews with the departing administration, even as it prepares to name about 4,000 people as political appointees to run various agencies and departments in the federal government. It’s very possible that new Trump officials will simply move in with their desk décor on Inauguration Day and not worry about it.

“This would be the worst form of malpractice,” Max Stier, the president and C.E.O. of the Partnership for Public Service, told me. This concept of a plan, to put a new executive branch into place without any vetting or training, expecting that each person is capable of walking in and flying the plane, is worrying for a few reasons.

For one, there is a real but small possibility of a disruptive event — like a cyberattack or terrorist attack — during the transition, already a moment of maximum vulnerability for the national security apparatus. Without a proper transition process, that risk grows.

But more important, this administration’s disregard for an orderly, procedural transition demonstrates a vision of an executive branch that serves the will of the president rather than the public.

At the end of his first term, Donald Trump issued an executive order creating a Schedule F category of federal employees, who would be political appointments rather than career civil service workers. If, as expected, Trump issues a similar order in January, the government could fire thousands of workers who would lose their civil service protections in crucial positions in national security, drug safety and public health. Trump then could fill those positions with those who are loyal to him and him alone.

Stier is particularly worried about lesser-known agencies like the White House Office of Management and Budget, which he described as “the nerve center of our government.” In the first Trump administration, career civil servants in that office gave honest assessments of the effects that various Trump policies would have and of whether they were legal. Once those people are replaced with loyalists, there is a substantial risk that this sort of expertise disappears.

“This is a train wreck you can see coming,” Stier said.

Congress could, of course, block Trump from doing this. What’s more likely to happen is a protracted period of legal challenges from individuals and government employee unions while many of the best people in government simply leave for the private sector. That would compound the tragedy.

Americans need people who are already in government and can speak up about bad policies to use the power that they have. Soon there may be a lot fewer of them.

No dating men, no sex with men, no heterosexual marriage and no childbirth. These are the four principles of South Korea’s 4B movement, a radical feminist movement that gained popularity in 2019, in response to sexism, hidden camera pornography and intimate partner violence. After Donald Trump’s victory, some American women have sought out the movement. But it would be a mistake for women in the United States to adopt its principles, which risk alienating those who would be our allies while ensuring little actually changes about our reality.

Some American women are already devising plans to apply used menstrual pads to trucks with MAGA stickers and undergo voluntary hysterectomy surgery. TikTok and Instagram reels videos related to the 4B movement gained millions of views this week, and Google searches spiked in the U.S. on Wednesday, most notably in Democratic states.

Trump’s win was devastating for many women. Their rage is understandable, but a 4B-style reaction is not constructive or sustainable. Women shouldn’t reduce their ability to demand policy changes and equal dignity to the ways in which we should or should not have sex or bear children. The 4B philosophy is shortsighted, primarily because it demonizes men, including those who champion equality and reproductive freedom, while constraining the women who participate in it.

Women have tried to use sex strikes for political influence in Liberia, Kenya, Colombia, the Philippines, Belgium and other countries. Aside from gaining publicity, there is little evidence to suggest that they successfully persuade people. The activist Leymah Gbowee, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for leading a women’s protest movement credited for ending the second Liberian civil war, wrote in her memoir that sex strikes “had little or no practical effect.”

Trump’s election should spur American feminists to address gendered grievances in ways that could be more materially effective. In developed countries, women wield significant economic and purchasing power, control a majority of global consumer spending and make up a substantial portion of the work force. In response to rising gender inequality, women should harness their political and economic power to demand change rather than limit ourselves to our sexual power. We would be best served by rejecting unequal household duties, engaging in a consumer strike or boycotting discriminatory companies.

Women also must take this opportunity to bring men along with us. Changing gender roles is a main reason many young men say they feel economically and socially left behind. Instead of boycotting men, feminists should acknowledge the legitimate ways men have lost ground in education, employment and health and find ways to craft a feminist message that includes them in the project of ensuring equal rights for us all.

In a terrible moment for American democracy, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has a short window to do at least one good thing­­: enact a congestion pricing plan for New York City before Donald Trump takes office­­.

Hochul foolishly scrapped the plan in June, days before it was set to be implemented. It’s great that she is now seriously considering reviving the program, since congestion pricing is the best — and probably the only — way to get the subway system the funding it badly needs and reduce traffic and pollution in the Manhattan core.

Hochul is reportedly exploring whether it’s possible to quickly implement the plan with a lower toll for drivers, $9 instead of $15, before Trump can act on his promise to kill it. That suggests the governor understands the urgency with which Democratic leaders need to act to show that they can deliver on their promises and still know how to govern.

If they hope to continue to win elections, New York Democrats will have to begin the painful work of understanding why so many voters — especially Asians and Latinos — rejected their party last week and supported Trump in greater numbers than in 2020.

After an electoral shellacking, it may seem counterintuitive to move forward with congestion pricing, which is unpopular with many drivers, particularly in suburban areas. But in New York, the anger at Democrats isn’t confined to the 30 percent of the city’s voters who cast ballots for Trump. Many residents across the political spectrum, including progressives, are dissatisfied with New York’s machine-party-dominated, uninspiring, do-nothing politics. Enacting a good policy that will improve life long-term in the region is exactly the right response.

Very little of the focus on the city’s shift away from Democrats so far has talked about what life in New York City has actually been like over the four years. And it has been brutal. The city was devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic fallout that accompanied it. The virus has killed nearly 47,000 people in the city.

It took New York City much longer than the rest of the country to recover the jobs it lost. Crime is down from its height during the pandemic, but still higher than it was a decade ago. Housing prices continue to spiral out of control and the Democrats who enjoy total control over state government here have failed to build more housing.

More than 210,000 migrants have arrived in the city, stretching its resources and tragically becoming a source of resentment. Mayor Eric Adams first mismanaged the crisis, then added his voice to Republicans stoking anti-immigrant sentiment. Adams has done little to improve life in New York and earlier this year was indicted on federal criminal charges of corruption and bribery.

Trump, a fake populist doing the bidding of his billionaire friends, is very unlikely to solve any of these problems, and is almost certain to cause more pain. He has expressed open disdain and often hatred of many of the Americans who live in New York City.

Knowing that 30 percent of our neighbors voted for him anyway, or possibly because of this, is a political crisis for Democrats. It has also broken my heart.

In the years ahead, New York’s Democratic leaders will be called upon to protect millions of Americans and our basic freedoms. They will also have to have find a way to start solving problems in the nation’s largest city.

Enacting congestion pricing is a good start. Hochul should move to implement it as quickly as possible.

It’s a good thing Mike Johnson is a praying man, because the House speaker is getting ready to go through a stretch that seems likely to try his soul.

Even as the counting in a smattering of House races drags on — mostly because California takes an eternity to tally its votes — the Republicans appear on track to retain their grip on the lower chamber. This isn’t surprising. It is the rare election cycle in which the party that captures the White House doesn’t also wind up controlling both chambers of Congress.

The stellar Republican performance at the polls should help Johnson in his quest to stay atop the conference. I mean, he’s a solid Trump guy. Why waste time trying to find a leader with marginally more aggressive bootlicking skills when there are so many other issues to start bickering over?

As the Republicans have so vividly displayed in recent years, a slender House majority can be a nightmare to manage — poor Kev — and Johnson could easily wind up with another wafer-thin margin. With a Republican conference like this one, well, things have a tendency to fall apart. The center cannot hold, because there is no meaningful center: just Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert scrapping in the women’s room while Jim Jordan barks threats at the Justice Department and a sprinkling of suburban moderates struggles to avoid the flaming vortex of chaos.

The big difference this term, of course, will be that — as Tucker Carlson so vomitously put it — Daddy will be home. And who knows? Maybe the return of the MAGA king to the White House will be enough to transform his congressional team from a squabbling, dysfunctional freak show into a docile, well-oiled legislative machine. Johnson might not need to be a skilled leader so much as a Trumpian puppet.

That said, if the red team winds up fully in charge, the pressure to deliver on its new president’s Bold Promises will be enormous. And unrelenting. The Republican-led Senate will face calls to blow up the legislative filibuster to smooth the way for a MAGA agenda. All while Republican House leaders will be expected to ram through whatever tickles Trump’s fancy on a given day, no matter how difficult or dubious. And I think we all know how crabby this president-elect gets when he doesn’t get his way.

Johnson presumably believes he is ready for what lies ahead. But intellectually knowing the sort of sacrifices and debasement routinely demanded by a President Trump is one thing. Surviving the storm with a shred of one’s dignity or morality intact takes a minor miracle.