Hank Cardello

Updated at 6:28 p.m. ET on June 28, 2022.

Donald Trump knew the protesters marching on the Capitol on January 6 were armed. He knew they could do harm to someone. He wanted to go to the Capitol with them as they marched that afternoon. And he did nothing to stop them as they attacked.

These are the stark and rattling takeaways from today’s hearing of the House committee investigating former President Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, which centered on first-person accounts from the former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who was deep inside the president’s inner sanctum in the days leading up to the insurrection and that day.

By the morning of January 6, Trump’s attempts to steal the election had largely failed. Every lawsuit had foundered, every state-level ploy seemed to have stalled, and Vice President Mike Pence had declared that he would not engage in chicanery concocted by the attorney John Eastman and his confederates. There was one last hope: somehow disrupting Congress’s certification of the result.

In the last few minutes of today’s January 6 committee hearing, Representative Liz Cheney presented evidence of possible witness intimidation. Several witnesses, she reported, had received messages from shadowy persons purportedly close to former President Donald Trump that implicitly warned of consequences to follow if those witnesses told the truth about his conduct.

That is one sort of attempted cover-up. The most effective cover-up of the January 6 conspiracy is not the one being organized in the shadows but the one taking place in broad daylight.

Everybody in any way connected to the investigation anticipates that if Republicans win control of the House of Representatives in November, these hearings will be shut down. Congressional Republicans who took the other side against Trump have lost their political careers: Liz Cheney is now a pariah within a party that has a place for Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar. The hearings happened only because the Democrats held a majority in the House, and the hearings will continue only so long as that majority remains in place.

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Though everybody complains about Twitter, no one can deny that it has brought some amazing phrases into our lives—things we can’t imagine having read in any other place, or at any other time in history.   

Near the top of any list of the most treasured sentence fragments posted there, the now-defunct account @Horse_ebooks would have several entries. Twitter users still recirculate strange classics like “(using fingers to indicate triangular shape) SMELL SMELL SMELL GOOD NEW NEW NEW slice drink MATCH SPARKLER (thrown in air) STARS STARS STARS.” But the best-known @Horse_ebooks tweet, posted 10 years ago today, was astounding in its clarity and salience. It described both the internet and our entire human world. “Everything happens so much,” @Horse_ebooks tweeted on June 28, 2012.

One of the exasperating features of everyday gender inequality is that couples can be aware of imbalances in doing housework, state a dislike of them, and yet fall right into them anyway.

The discrepancy shows up most obviously in the amount of time men and women spend on tasks such as cleaning and caregiving, including when both work full-time. Yet even many couples who pride themselves on a fair distribution of duties aren’t so balanced when it comes to carrying the harder-to-quantify “mental load,” the taxing work of managing a household and anticipating its many needs. (Same-sex couples tend to be more egalitarian, but can end up in lopsided arrangements as well.) Today, men in different-sex relationships contribute more than they did in the 1960s and ’70s (a low bar), but often take on a “helper” role under the “manager” role of their female partner, who’s saddled with noticing what must be done.

It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.

“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”

Dear Therapist,

My daughter-in-law is a wonderful young woman, but we do not see eye to eye on anything.

The trouble started soon after she and my son became engaged. Before the engagement, she acted like she wanted to be my new best friend or for me to be her “surrogate mom.” As soon as she had a ring, the switch flipped! She found fault with everything I said or did, and had my son call me and correct me for her, to the point of asking me to change my outward appearance and mode of clothing to suit her idea of how I should behave. According to her, via my son, I didn’t dress appropriately for my age, 50ish. So now I buy my clothes two sizes too big, and have sworn off glitter, rhinestones, and sequins, even though I love sparkly clothing. I have also toned down my otherwise sedate makeup routine.

I had an abortion when I was 26 years old. I was not raped. I wasn’t the victim of incest. I was not in the midst of a life-threatening medical emergency. I simply had no desire to give birth to a child.

I’ve never shared my abortion story publicly until now. I describe this time in my life in detail in my forthcoming memoir, Uphill, which will be released in October. I know that I’m likely to be attacked for being candid about my decision. But I’m choosing to share some of my experience now because, like so many women in this country, I am angry, appalled, and disgusted about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that previously guaranteed federal constitutional protections for abortion rights.

In 2018, while reporting on pandemic preparedness in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I heard many people joking about the fictional 15th article of the country’s constitution: Débrouillez-vous, or “Figure it out yourself.” It was a droll and weary acknowledgment that the government won’t save you, and you must make do with the resources you’ve got. The United States is now firmly in the débrouillez-vous era of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Across the country, almost all government efforts to curtail the coronavirus have evaporated. Mask mandates have been lifted on public transit. Conservative lawmakers have hamstrung what public-health departments can do in emergencies. COVID funding remains stalled in Congress, jeopardizing supplies of tests, treatments, and vaccines. The White House and the CDC have framed COVID as a problem for individuals to act upon—but action is hard when cases and hospitalizations are underestimated, many testing sites have closed, and rose-tinted CDC guidelines downplay the coronavirus’s unchecked spread. Many policy makers have moved on: “We’re heading into the midterms, and I think there’s a real desire to show confidence that they’ve solved this,” Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease specialist and the editor at large for public health at Kaiser Health News, told me.

In one sense, this is how it was always supposed to go: When viruses evolve, vaccines should follow, and sometimes try to leap ahead. The COVID-19 shots that the U.S. has used to inoculate hundreds of millions of people are simply so new that they’ve never had to undergo a metamorphosis; up until now, their original-recipe ingredients have stood up to SARS-CoV-2 well enough. But the virus they fight has changed quite radically, and this fall, the vaccines will finally, finally follow suit.

Today, an advisory committee to the FDA recommended that our current slate of shots be updated to include a piece of an Omicron subvariant, with the aim of better tailoring the vaccine to the coronavirus variants that could trouble us this fall. Neither the agency nor its outside expert panel has yet reached consensus on which version of Omicron will be the best choice, and whether the next round of shots will still contain the original version of the virus as well. Regardless, a new formulation with any bit of Omicron will constitute a bet that these ingredients will better protect people than another dose of the original vaccine recipe, whose protective powers have been fading for many months.

Inflation is surging, a recession is looming, the culture war is raging, Republican gains in Congress are surely coming, and Joe Biden’s poll numbers are slumping.

The Biden presidency began with Plan A: campaign from the center, govern from the left. That plan has now exhausted whatever potential it had. On his present course, President Biden is in danger of being remembered as the intermission between Act I and Act II of the collapse of American democracy.

Biden needs a Plan B, fast.

What would a Plan B look like? It should be built on five pillars:

Pillar One: Combat inflation. Nothing is more devastating to incumbent presidents than inflation. Of those in office during the age of stagflation, one resigned (Richard Nixon); the other two both faced devastating primary challenges and then were defeated in their bids for a second term (Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter). The story can be told in greater detail, but the pattern is the pattern.