february 1930

Losers don’t usually get a second chance in modern U.S. presidential politics. Back in the days of nominating conventions and party bosses, an Adlai Stevenson or a Thomas Dewey could gain two consecutive nominations. Richard Nixon actually won the presidency in 1968 after losing in 1960. But since the coming of primary contests, it’s win—or retire. Even Al Gore, who won the popular vote in 2000, was debarred in 2004.

Donald Trump, who upended so many previous presidential precedents, now seems likely to upend one more. Trump has to be considered the massive front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination. He’s already running hard, and he’s already dominating the field. Fox News’s intense promotion of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as an alternative to Trump is not working out any better in 2024 than its similar effort on behalf of then–New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in 2016. Trump dominates in the polls. He has the lead in fundraising. Down-ballot races turn on loyalty to Trump. Potential rivals vow they will not run for president if Trump does.

After fielding back-to-back complaints about masks in church—one regarding a fellow parishioner who had shirked a mask during a recent service and the other wondering whether our congregation had changed its policy from “strongly recommended” to “required,” because “everyone” was wearing them—I realized something surprising: Leading a church is harder now, in 2021, than it was in 2020, during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. Last year, state and diocesan mandates meant I could throw up my hands and respond, “Sorry, not up to me.” And anyway, the answer was, for the most part, a straightforward “no”—no, we can’t gather for services, and no, we can’t sing. Now it is up to me, the rector of St. David’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, and I am struggling to find a way forward.

About a year before Christine Mallinson gave birth to her first child, she and her husband agreed that all of their children would take her last name. The decision came down to family cohesion: The couple wanted their children—they eventually had two—to share a last name with the only cousin near their kids in age, who was Mallinson’s niece.

Mallinson knew that their choice was not a popular one for heterosexual American couples—she’s a professor of sociolinguistics and gender and women’s studies at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, and wrote a 2017 paper that, in part, analyzes patrilineal surname conventions. In 2002, researchers found that about 97 percent of married couples passed down only the father’s last name to their first kid. That proportion seems to have remained remarkably consistent: A 2017 paper studying adoptive heterosexual parents found that they gave a patrilineal surname to their child 96 percent of the time. Though few studies on the topic have been conducted, evidence suggests that in almost every American family with a mom and a dad, children receive their father’s last name.

The election of the elders of an evangelical church is usually an uncontroversial, even unifying event. But this summer, at an influential megachurch in Northern Virginia, something went badly wrong. A trio of elders didn’t receive 75 percent of the vote, the threshold necessary to be installed.  

“A small group of people, inside and outside this church, coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church,” David Platt, a 43-year-old minister at McLean Bible Church and a best-selling author, charged in a July 4 sermon.

Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold. But that hardly resolved the conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the church’s constitution.

Brazil’s next presidential election is a year away, but Donald Trump already knows whom he is supporting. “President Jair Bolsonaro and I have become great friends over the past few years,” the former president said in a statement on Tuesday. “He fights hard for, and loves, the people of Brazil—Just like I do for the people of the United States.”

Reading between the lines, Trump’s support for the embattled Brazilian president, who faces potential criminal charges over his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, isn’t rooted in just their shared politics or leadership style. By endorsing Bolsonaro, Trump is endorsing his own legacy.

Bolsonaro, after all, is one of the key figures maintaining Trumpism on the international stage. Like the former American president, Bolsonaro continues to balk at the threat posed by the pandemic, eschewing shutdowns and basic public-health measures such as wearing face masks. He is a purveyor of misinformation and has been known to attack experts, including those within his own government, who disagree with him. Even before the pandemic, Bolsonaro fancied himself the “Trump of the Tropics,” modeling his campaign and much of his presidency after his American counterpart. (Unlike the former president, however, Bolsonaro is unvaccinated—a status that relegated him to eating pizza on the sidewalk during the United Nations General Assembly, owing to New York City’s requirement that indoor diners provide proof of vaccination.)