It certainly looks like the most contentious nominations in Trump’s Cabinet slate are going to be reviewed as early as tomorrow by their respective Committees, with Tulsi Gabbard’s Intel Committee vote and RFK’s Finance Committee vote both expected for Tuesday. Of the two, RFK now looks to potentially be in a more difficult position on the floor, as Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy — unlikely to survive Louisiana’s reordered primary system, and someone who has always marched to the beat of his own drum (including voting to impeach Trump) — emerging as a late critic within the GOP. Gabbard makes her case to lead ODNI in Newsweek today, while John Fetterman indicated that RFK’s nomination is unlikely to receive his backing on Fox News Sunday (Fetterman has spoken more favorably of Gabbard, but he voted against Pete Hegseth after entertaining the option of support).
The high-profile nomination of one of Trump’s most controversial picks — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of health and human services — will be taken up by the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday morning, the panel’s chair, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), announced on Sunday.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) spoke with Kennedy over the weekend, we’re told. Cassidy delivered a dressing down of Kennedy’s vaccine beliefs on Thursday and said he was struggling with Kennedy’s nomination.
Cassidy’s support is critical. Republicans have a 14-13 margin on the Finance Committee. If Cassidy were to vote no, it would all but doom Kennedy’s chances for confirmation.
Following questions from Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), RFK amended his ethics filings.
The other cliffhanger is former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) for director of national intelligence. Vice President JD Vance lobbied Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) and other Intelligence Committee Republicans to back Gabbard over the weekend.
At one point, Trump ally Elon Musk posted that Young was “a deep state puppet.” Musk quickly deleted the post after speaking to Young. Musk later declared the Indiana Republican “a great ally in restoring power to the people from the vast, unelected bureaucracy.”
Top Senate Republicans privately believe Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the other swing vote on the Intel Committee, could support Gabbard, although Collins hasn’t said what she’ll do.
Schumer’s characteristic optimism aside, his predicament appears dire. He’s deeper in the minority than his House counterparts and faces a more difficult path back to the majority in 2026. The New Yorker has some sway, thanks in part to the legislative filibuster — but his effectiveness at countering Trump over the next four years will depend on picking his spots to push back from among the president’s flurry of disruptive actions.
He said he’s learned some lessons over the past eight years about how to judiciously resist.
“We’re not going to fall for the Bannon ‘flood the zone,’” he said, referring to Trump ally Steve Bannon’s call for the president to blitz Democrats with orders and executive-branch maneuvers.
That’s meant letting some of Trump’s nominees through easily — even amid the furor over the pardons and budget freeze. He instructed his members to focus on Tulsi Gabbard’s bid to become national intelligence director, Robert F. Kennedy’s to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Kash Patel’s to become FBI director and Pete Hegseth’s ultimately successful nomination to lead the Pentagon.
Some Senate Democrats still protested Trump’s spending freeze memo by opposing a relatively uncontroversial nominee; 22 of them flipped to no votes on Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy after every senator declined to filibuster him. Schumer was not one of those 22.
As minor as it may seem, that split has meaning for Schumer’s leadership, given the importance of unity on his side of the aisle. While that’s undoubtedly easier in the minority, Schumer will have to lean on his experience dealing with defectors — think former Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
He has a new Democratic contrarian in John Fetterman. The Pennsylvanian was the only Democrat who voted to advance a bill to sanction the International Criminal Court, after attending a signing ceremony with Trump and belatedly endorsing a resolution condemning the Jan. 6 pardons with minimal fanfare.
But despite Fetterman’s visit with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, he voted against Hegseth, and Democrats hope he’ll oppose the other Trump nominees Schumer has singled out. Fetterman is also one of a handful of well-known Democrats in Schumer’s ranks with a singular ability to command the media.
Schumer has a big megaphone, of course, but he said he respects the way Fetterman wields his own.
“He’s a very decent guy. He marches to his own drum,” Schumer said. “He’s a good influence on our caucus, because you need some independent voices.”
At Fort Jackson, in South Carolina, the U.S. Army comes face to face with America’s youth. One recent morning, at the Future Soldiers training course, hundreds of overweight young men and women hoping to join the service lined up to run and perform calisthenics before a cordon of drill sergeants. Some were participating in organized workouts for the first time. Many heaved for breath when asked to run a half mile; others gave up and walked. A number hobbled around on crutches. At a weekly weigh-in, dozens of young men stood shirtless, revealing just how far they had to go.
When prospective recruits were asked to drop and do five pushups, many groaned and struggled, unable to complete the task. Some, their faces crimson, could barely hold themselves up.
“You thought you’d join the Army without being able to do a single pushup?” Staff Sergeant Kennedy Robinson barked at a recruit whose arms were twitching in agony.
“Yes, ma’am!” he said. To an extent that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago, he may have been right.
The Future Soldiers program was created, in 2022, to help marginal but willing recruits find their way into the military. Its efforts include not just prodding kids to slim down but also helping them pass the armed forces’ aptitude test—even if that means lowering long-established standards. The course is part of a series of extraordinary adaptations that America’s military is making amid one of its greatest recruiting shortfalls since the draft was abolished, more than fifty years ago.
In 2022 and 2023, the Army missed its recruitment goal by nearly twenty-five per cent—about fifteen thousand troops a year. It hit the mark last year, but only by reducing the target by more than ten thousand. The Navy has also fared badly: it failed to reach its goals in 2023, then met them in 2024 by filling out the ranks with recruits of a lower standard; nearly half measured below average on an aptitude exam. The Army Reserve hasn’t met its benchmark since 2016, and the ranks are so depleted that active-duty officers have been put in charge of reserve units. Some experts worry that, if the country went to war, many reserve units might be unable to deploy. A U.S. official who works on these issues put it simply: “We can’t get enough people.”
At the end of the Second World War, the American military had twelve million active-duty members. It now has 1.3 million—even though the population has more than doubled, and women are now eligible for armed service. “The U.S. military has been shrinking for thirty years,” Lawrence Wilkerson, a former senior State Department official who leads a task force on the challenges facing the armed services, said. “But its global commitments haven’t changed.” The military operates out of bases in more than fifty countries, and routinely deploys Special Operations forces to about eighty. Now, Wilkerson said, “it’s not clear that the military is large enough anymore for America to uphold its promises.”
For decades, the armed forces based their requirements on a defensive doctrine called “win and hold”: the capacity to win one war while fighting a second to a standstill. Today, with the U.S. confronting perhaps its starkest global-security challenges since the Cold War, many analysts fear that even one war would be too taxing. A conflict with China over the disputed island of Taiwan could leave thousands of Americans dead in a matter of weeks—amounting to nearly half the losses the country sustained in twenty years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. But legislators tend to dismiss the possibility of reinstating conscription. “We are not going to need a draft anytime soon,” Senator Roger Wicker, of Mississippi, told CNN last year.
President Trump insists that the decline in recruitment has a single cause: the Biden Administration’s efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion programs chased away potential recruits. During last year’s campaign, he accused “woke generals” of being more concerned with advancing D.E.I. than with fighting wars. His Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, a former member of the National Guard, has made similar accusations in dozens of appearances on Fox News. Hegseth’s book “The War on Warriors” is a protracted rant against what he describes as a progressive campaign to neuter the armed forces. “We are led by small generals and feeble officers without the courage to realize that, in the name of woke buzzwords, they are destroying our military,” he writes.
On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order banning D.E.I. initiatives in the federal government. He also fired the head of the Coast Guard, Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, in part because she supported such programs. But many of the people charged with filling out the ranks of the U.S. military suggest that these moves will not reverse a trend decades in the making. Recruiters are contending with a population that’s not just unenthusiastic but incapable. According to a Pentagon study, more than three-quarters of Americans between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four are ineligible, because they are overweight, unable to pass the aptitude test, afflicted by physical or mental-health issues, or disqualified by such factors as a criminal record. While the political argument festers, military leaders are left to contemplate a broader problem: Can a country defend itself if not enough people are willing or able to fight?
The highlighted period is one that I wanted to focus all my attention on - it spans from 1991 to 1998. In my estimation this is the most consequential period of American religious history in the past five decades. For the twenty years prior, the share of young Americans who were Christians was about 85%, while the non-religious portion never moved above 10%. But, then in the little seven year window of time, everything changed for young adults.
In 1991, Christians were 87% of the sample. In 1998, it was 73%. While the share who were non-religious went from 8% to 20% during that same time period. How long did it take for the Christian share to drop another 14 points? It didn’t happen until 2018. How about the nones jumping up by a dozen points? Again, it was 2018. But how did this happen? Did evangelicals take a nosedive? Did the Catholic Church hemorrhage a bunch of folks? For some reason, I hadn’t really thought much about investigating that until now. So, let’s get to work.
This is the evangelical share of the 18-35 year sample from the General Social Survey. For the next couple of graphs, I am going to show you the entire time series so that you can get a sense of how the 1991-1998 window fits into the larger picture.
In the early 1970s, about 20% of young adults were evangelical, but that share slowly began to rise over the subsequent decades. By 1990, it was nearly 25% of those 18-35. What’s interesting is that it appears evangelicals were at their peak in the early 1990s. But they slowly began to fall over the next 10-15 years. By 2012, they were in the same place they were 40 years earlier. Currently the share of young adults who are evangelical is about 13%. But during that seven year window of time, we can see that evangelicalism only really dropped by about 3 points. That certainly is not enough to explain the first graph.
While the evangelical graph looks like a rainbow (low on the sides and high in the middle), that’s certainly not the case when it comes to mainline Protestant Christians. It looks like a ski slope. The mainline has been declining for decades, and that clearly comes through in this analysis. In the early 1970s, almost a quarter of young adults were affiliated with the mainline, but that didn’t last long. By 1991, it had dropped to just about 14% and it continued to slide over the next couple of years. By 1998, it was 11% and only continued to erode from there.
In The Anxious Generation, Jon Haidt describes the profound differences between socializing in the material world and socializing in the virtual sphere, between embodied and disembodied communication. Those differences are crucial to understanding the psychological stresses plaguing young people today. They’re also crucial to understanding why online social relations in general are so fraught, so often characterized by suspicion and polarization, anger and insult.
We’ve always used communication technologies to reveal ourselves to others. But by blurring conversation and broadcasting, social media takes this usually benign process to an unhealthy extreme. Facebook, Instagram, X, and other platforms have been painstakingly designed to encourage constant self-expression. By emphasizing quantitative measures of social status—follower and friend counts, like and retweet tallies—the platforms reward people for broadcasting endless details about their lives and opinions through messages and posts, photos and videos. In the physical world, we remain present even when we’re quiet. In the virtual world, we don’t. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. To confirm our existence, we have to keep posting. We have to keep repeating Here I am!
What we’ve done, with the eager assistance of big-tech companies, is to create an artificial social environment which promotes exactly the kind of “extreme openness” that triggers the antisocial behaviors Taylor and Altman documented. Not only do feelings of overexposure often leave us feeling stressed and anxious. They can also poison our attitudes toward others. As much psychological research has shown, we tend to like people whom we sense to be similar to us and dislike those who seem dissimilar. When we’re constantly inundated with a lot of stray bits of information about other people, as we are when we’re online, we start giving more weight to evidence of dissimilarity than similarity — a phenomenon the Harvard social psychologist Michael Norton calls a “dissimilarity cascade.” More information triggers antipathy.
Now that the internet has turned us all into virtual neighbors, we’re all in one another’s business all the time. We’re exposed, routinely, to the opinions and habits of far more people, both acquaintances and strangers, than ever before. With an almost microscopic view of what everybody else is saying and doing—the screen turns us all into Peeping Toms—we have no end of opportunities to spot dissimilarities and to take offense. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a communication mechanism more perfectly geared to the initiation and propagation of dissimilarity cascades than social media.
The personal information that circulates in such abundance through social networks can act as an attractant. More often, it acts as a repellent.
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly. What doesn't transmit light creates its own darkness.”
