june 2006

When Americans began receiving coronavirus vaccines last month, people started fantasizing about the first thing they’d do when the pandemic ends: go back to work, visit family, hug friends. But the public discussion soon shifted. One news article after another warned about everything that could go wrong: Protection isn’t immediate; vaccinated people can still transmit the virus; vaccinated people might get mild infections that could become chronic; vaccines might not work as well against new coronavirus variants. “COVID-19 Vaccine Doesn’t Mean You Can Party Like It’s 1999,” one headline admonished. Can vaccinated people at least hang out with one another? Nope, masks and distancing are still required. “Bottom line,” another article concluded ominously: “You will need to wear a face mask after you’re vaccinated until COVID-19 cases become nearly nonexistent.”

All presidents lie. Even so, the Trump administration weaponized dishonesty to a remarkable degree.

Donald Trump did not merely lie to exaggerate his accomplishments, or smear his opponents. For Trump and the Republican Party, lies were a loyalty test. To reject Trump’s lies or exaggerations, even if they contradicted prior assertions by the now-ex-president, was to express disloyalty, the only Trump-era sin that was unforgivable by his faithful. This allowed the president to fashion for his supporters alternate realities whose tenets could not be questioned, such as his false allegations of voter fraud.

That was not the only lie of consequence, of course. The president manufactured terrorism threats from the left, and suppressed warnings about those on the right. He punished government officials who properly engaged in oversight and rewarded those who misled the public as he wanted. Most damaging, he lied about the scope and danger of a pandemic that is on course to kill half a million Americans. Listing his lies would require more time than I can offer here.

Now that Donald Trump’s presidency is over, how do the Americans who supported him at the beginning of his political run feel about his performance in the Oval Office? I put that question to 30 men and women who wrote to me in August 2015 to explain their reasons for backing his insurgent candidacy.

Among the eight who replied, all in the second week of January, after the storming of the Capitol, some persist in supporting Trump; others have turned against him; still others have lost faith in the whole political system. They do not constitute a representative sample of Trump voters. But their views, rendered in their own words, offer more texture than polls that tell us an approval rating.

Anne Applebaum: Coexistence is the only option

For decades, multilevel-marketing companies had it easy. Cutco knives, Tupperware containers, and Pampered Chef bread mixes were inoffensive products sold at weeknight wine parties and, later, in themed Facebook groups. For the most part, they were an unremarkable part of women’s lives.

Multilevel marketing—a form of direct selling in which a major chunk of a person’s income comes not from the sales they make themselves but from the sales made by people they recruit into the company—was often regarded as exploitative by consumer advocates, but it rarely encountered a serious threat. During the pandemic, distributors for many MLM companies have used this lack of pushback to their advantage: On Instagram and Facebook, women have tried to persuade their followers to use their stimulus checks to join a company that sells shampoo or weight-loss products. They have used economic collapse as a recruitment tool, offering MLMs as the solution to lost income and increased precarity.

The victims of the so-called Golden State Killer lived in subdivisions and middle-class neighborhoods. They included a nurse, a medical student, a bank loan officer, and a lawyer shortlisted for a county-court judgeship. Investigators puzzled over these cold cases for more than 30 years. Then, in April 2018, their efforts finally paid off when they identified a suspect, a 72-year-old former police officer, as the Golden State Killer using a powerful new technique called genetic genealogy.

This past August that man, Joseph DeAngelo, was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to 13 counts of murder. But the influence of this one case has spread much wider, creating a new tool for criminal investigation. Very quickly, police around the country began embracing genetic genealogy, which uses online consumer databases to identify suspects through family connections. Investigators can upload crime-scene DNA to these sites and then build out large family trees to look for potential suspects.