Why I’m covering Trump differently this time
Plus: microplastics, C.S. Lewis's handwriting, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.
A take I haven’t written elsewhere
Why I’m covering Trump differently this time
Tomorrow I have an article scheduled to run which is my first direct discussion of President Trump’s second administration at Christianity Today. That’s weirdly late, particularly compared to the pace at which I covered his first term, and it got me thinking about how and why I’m covering this term differently. I landed on five main reasons.
My life is different. This one’s obvious and not generalizable. For most of the last time Trump was president, I didn’t have kids, so my work schedule was more flexible. And for all of that time, I worked primarily at The Week, including several years in which I was routinely doing broad news roundups and analyses as the weekend editor. All together, I could spend more time on work then compared to now, and my work required more attention to each twist and turn of the national news cycle. I never wanted to sit down at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning with zero sense of what I’d put in the flagship newsletter that had to be out the door about two hours later.
Christianity Today in general and my role in particular operate at a different pace. We do have very timely stories. Our news writers break stories, in fact. But on the ideas side, we typically do not run on the kind of daily cycle I had at The Week. As an opinion writer there, I’d turn out a column a day. As an editor, handling two or three pieces daily was the norm.
At CT, that kind of output only happens on rare occasions, like election week. This was an attraction of the job: I think it’s good to have more time to research and reflect, to find connections and see how things shake out. That’s not to say I never miss the rhythm of a daily article, and I’m looking forward to a more writing-heavy season at CT this spring. But having the option to do slower and hopefully better work is part of why I’m at CT now.
Some of the politics are different. Perhaps my angriest article ever was about Trump’s veto of a bipartisan congressional measure to extricate the U.S. from military intervention in Yemen, and foreign policy has long had a prominent spot in my wheelhouse. For much of my career, criminal justice reform and civil liberties issues (mass surveillance, privacy, civil asset forfeiture, etc.) did too.
The politics of all that are quite different from eight years ago. Yes, we’re bombing Yemen again, but our involvement there is not on the same scale (yet), nor has it had the same effect on the civilian population (yet). The war in Afghanistan ended. Other longstanding U.S. entanglements in the greater Mideast and North Africa have scaled down and/or dropped from public attention. The most prominent conflicts now—Ukraine, Gaza, and the specter of war in the Taiwan Strait—involve the U.S., but much less directly. And domestically, interest in criminal justice and civil liberties stuff has fallen off a cliff.
Some of this change is for the better, some for the worse, some a frying pan/fire situation. In any case, it makes for different coverage choices.
I can only repeat myself so much. The last section of this post is about tariffs. It’s stuff I wrote over a six-year span: 2018 to 2024. It’s all still applicable. My opinions haven’t changed. Were I in a role with a more specifically political remit, like I had at The Week, I’d probably reprise those themes with a new verse on the latest nonsense.
But I wouldn’t particularly want to do it, I don’t think. How many times is it useful to say something, really? At some point, after some number of repetitions: They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them. (A recent Washington Post article wondered who will tell the emperor he has no clothes. My friends, he’s been told!)
The Trump-evangelicals discussion feels particularly circular to me right now. Mostly, I don’t think we’re getting anywhere, nor are we likely to do so any time soon. I’m holding pitches on this topic to a very high standard when they come from my CT writers, and I’m doing the same for myself.
I’m trying to take my own advice. As you may know, I wrote a book in which I argued, at some length, for not devoting a lot of time and attention to distant problems you only slightly understand and can do nothing to address. My work still puts my baseline of valuable and even necessary time and attention level higher than the average person’s, but it’s not that high. I can’t competently and usefully follow all the stories in a “flood the zone” era of politics, and it does no one any good if I try.
I want to be realistic about how things change. This is the question of the day for this administration’s discontents. The answer is not Congress, that’s for sure! Our duly elected representatives are in a lifelong fecklessness contest, and nearly every single one is on a brilliant winning streak. The courts are better. The Supreme Court reaffirmed due process rights just this week, actually—though you’ll have to read tomorrow’s CT piece for more of my thoughts on that.
As for writing to and for the public, it can change things. I am a partisan of persuasion. Were I not, I could not do this work.
And I’ve received some truly lovely notes from readers over the years, people who’ve said my writing changed something for them. I’m thinking particularly of people who told me A Flexible Faith helped them get past their deconstruction phase and stay in the faith. Once, a criminal justice-related charity had its funding renewed because a donor saw the organization mentioned in my piece. Another time, Sen. Rand Paul went on TV and quoted from my Reason article about Palestinian civilians’ plight.
But this isn’t a mechanistic thing. It’s not predictable. It’s not like I hit publish, and Donald Trump is in the Lincoln Bedroom going, Oooh, now I get it: Bombing kids is bad!
Sometimes that kind of direct influence can happen for writers, but more often our realistic hope is to influence a few people here and there, most of them private citizens with little public influence of their own, and to add some small goods to a very big and varied conversation. This is freeing, in a way: Bereft of the delusion that you’re “changing the world,” you can just write what you think is compelling, right, and true.
Intake
The Heritage of Anglican Theology, by J.I. Packer
The Anatomy of Murder, by Dorothy L. Sayers et al.
“Thomas Jefferson and the character issue,” by Douglas L. Wilson (no, not that one) for The Atlantic in November, 1992
“What are microplastics doing to our bodies? This lab is racing to find out,” by Nina Agrawal at The New York Times
[T]he researchers reported the median concentration of microplastics in 24 human brains from 2024 was nearly 5,000 micrograms per gram, though there is a fair amount of uncertainty in that estimate because of the methods used to calculate it. That’s about seven grams of plastic per brain—as much as makes up a disposable spoon.
“Born in the wrong generation,” by
at
The other customers are blurry but when you really stare at them you can notice their features. The wet mouthgashes carved diagonally across their heads. The eyes dripping like beads of mercury, rolling into the hollows of their skin. Sometimes a man will have three ghastly arms, naked crooked tree-branches spindling around him. Sometimes two people will share a single molten ear. They’re always polite. Well hey there, your hazy waitress will say to you, opening a mouth that suddenly lacks a lower jaw.
I had leftover egg whites after making lemon curd, so made meringues (word to the wise: eat them promptly when it’s humid, lest you later find yourself with a single, large, sticky meringue). For flavoring: Amaro Montenegro. Try it!
Just started watching Apple Cider Vinegar with friends
Output
New work:
Why grand strategy matters now | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
Newly relevant work:
How in the world is the baby formula crisis still going? | The Daily Beast, March 2023
Trump vividly reminds us that he doesn’t know how tariffs work | The Week, October 2020
Trump’s trade war socialism | The Week, August 2019
Trump is still clueless about the costs of his trade war | The Week, May 2019
Trump’s unutterably stupid trade war | The Week, August 2018
Trump’s agriculture secretary admits Trump’s tariffs are hurting farmers | The Week, July 2018
You scored with me on the emperor (who has no concept of presiding over government) having no concept that his own fecklessness is exposed. I wonder if he read that, whether he would understand what I mean. When I read a media report that a minion of Musk told some at USAID (not sure it was there) that we were cutting off aid for the starving "for the convenience of" the federal government I registered brief distress. The next day we saw some correction. A dear brother in Christ told me this morning, I need to chill. It is that word of the Lord for me and I mean that sincerely. I could pray 24 hours straight but I must chill. I am very encouraged that you are part of CT. So much of the church, especially the charismatic wing, are oblivious to political reality and think we have an effective president. He is a law to himself and through ministries, thinks he has king-like authority. I am sobered to think how he must be humbled to see his need for metanoia. The system of our constitutional democratic republic is broken but not yet collapsing. I pray for integrity and courage among Congress. I heard Jamie Raskin speak in person. He sounded a true patriot quoting Jefferson, Paine, and Frederick Douglas. He would make a better president because he understands the Constitution.
This!: Bereft of the delusion that you’re “changing the world,” you can just write what you think is compelling, right, and true.