President Donald Trump’s tariffs have drawn a lot of opposition — from economists, businesses, Wall Street, and the majority of Americans.

Yet Trump has received support from a seemingly unlikely source: Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, who staunchly backed former Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign and previously called Trump a “scab.”

“We applaud the Trump administration for stepping up to end the free trade disaster that has devastated working-class communities for decades,” Fain said when Trump announced tariffs on foreign-made cars late last month. “Ending the race to the bottom in the auto industry starts with fixing our broken trade deals, and the Trump administration has made history with today’s actions.” (The UAW did not respond to a request for an interview.)

He’s not the only labor leader who supported tariffs. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the country’s largest labor unions, also endorsed Trump’s policy, going so far as to support not just specific levies but across-the-board tariffs. (A spokesperson told Newsweek that the union is hopeful about the tariffs’ long-term effects.) But that doesn’t mean all unions or their members are enthused. Other leaders and rank-and-file members have criticized the president’s blanket approach to import tax. And Liz Shuler, the president of AFL-CIO, a federation of unions in the United States, issued a statement criticizing Trump’s overall policy.

Fain himself has since qualified his praise. “We support use of some tariffs on automotive manufacturing and similar industries. We do not support tariffs for political games about immigration or fentanyl,” he said in an address to UAW members after Trump announced his full tariff plan earlier this month. “We do not support reckless tariffs on all countries at crazy rates.”

The mixed reviews that tariffs have received from unions reflect the awkward position some have found themselves in. For decades, unions, particularly those representing manufacturing workers, have argued against free-trade agreements and in favor of more protectionist policies, including tariffs, which they believe will help save American jobs in their industries. And now, the president of the United States is supporting that vision.

The problem is that Trump’s tariffs will be harmful to the economy and will likely hurt the working class most — the people, in other words, who unions aim to represent. So where does this leave the long-standing union talking point that tariffs would be good for American workers?  

The fight against free trade

Manufacturing jobs in the United States have been declining for decades, and free trade — where countries can export and import goods without restrictions — is often said to be the culprit. In particular, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) gets much of the blame for lost jobs. Trump’s tariffs might be “chaotic,” as Fain told NPR earlier this month. “But, you know, we’ve sat here for the last 30-plus years, with the inception of NAFTA back in 1993–’94, and watched our manufacturing base in this country disappear.”

NAFTA eliminated trade barriers between the US, Canada, and Mexico. Since it took effect, many American factories moved to Mexico for cheaper labor — a financially appealing option for companies that could then produce goods for lower costs without having to worry about paying tariffs. Between 1997 and 2022, an estimated 70,500 US manufacturing establishments closed. Critics of the agreement claim that this dynamic has forced US-based manufacturing employees to accept lower wages out of fear their factories would relocate south of the border.

That outcome is why unions opposed NAFTA from the start. As the agreement was being negotiated, labor unions tried to stop it and the then-president of AFL-CIO called the agreement a “poison pill.”

Estimates vary on how many jobs have actually been lost. About 700,000 positions were eliminated directly as a result of NAFTA, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and many more as a result of other trade agreements. You can see the manufacturing industry’s decline reflected in union membership. In the 1970s, UAW had a high of 1.5 million members. By 2023, the union had fewer than 400,000 members. 

As a result, unions see NAFTA and other free trade agreements as a roadblock to higher wages and long-term job security, which is why they have often advocated for more protectionist policies.

Unions challenged the free-trade consensus

In the post-NAFTA era, the prevailing consensus among economists is that free trade has enjoyed broad political support from both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, while free trade might hurt some industries, its benefits outweigh the costs. Overall, free trade is still largely viewed as a driver of global economic growth.

But free trade doesn’t mean fair trade. After China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 — ramping up trade between the US and China — the barrage of Chinese imports into the United States cost Americans, by some estimates, millions of jobs.

As workers’ wages and job prospects struggled, evidence of the downsides of trade liberalization — particularly the widening pay gaps between workers and bosses — was hard to ignore, even by some free trade proponents. “The combination of changing patterns of trade, in which more activity takes place with low-wage economies, and new research has altered economic thinking on trade,” former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers wrote in 2015. “The consensus view now is that trade and globalization have meaningfully increased inequality in the United States by allowing more earning opportunities for those at the top and exposing ordinary workers to more competition, especially in manufacturing.”

When President Barack Obama rallied to get support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a trade agreement between countries in the Pacific Rim — in 2015, he faced fierce opposition from unions but also skepticism from politicians, some of whom had long railed against free trade and others who changed their minds. Trump famously opposed the policy, as did Sen. Bernie Sanders during their 2016 presidential campaigns. And Hillary Clinton, who initially praised the proposed accord, came out against it during that election season.

That’s not to say that unions always oppose any kind of trade deal. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which Trump negotiated to replace NAFTA during his first term, received union support because it included better labor protections than its predecessor. But in general, union opposition to unfettered free trade has continued. 

“In truth, our trade deals were not really trade deals; they were investment deals. Their goal was not to promote America’s exports — it was to make it easier for global corporations to move capital offshore and ship goods back to America,” Richard Trumka, the former president of AFL-CIO, said in 2015. “The logical outcome was trade deficits and falling wages, and that’s exactly what we got.”

For unions, tariffs were a part of the answer to failures of free trade along with other protectionist policies. But to free trade proponents, tariffs represent a break from consensus and threaten to break down trade relations across the globe.

Where this all leaves unions 

While the way Trump has implemented tariffs has been irresponsible, the fact that he has is viewed as a step in the right direction. “Even though in [Fain’s] heart of hearts he realizes that Trump has rolled these [tariffs] out in a — pick your adjective — disjointed, sloppy, incoherent manner, he believes that a lot more needs to be done to protect and preserve manufacturing in the US,” said Steven Greenhouse, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. “He rightly says that free trade has been very bad for manufacturing in the US. And in Fain’s mind, an effective way to rebuild manufacturing is through tariffs.”

Tariffs can indeed be part of a solution to bolster manufacturing industries in the United States, as long as they’re implemented strategically and coupled with a more coherent vision for boosting American industry, which would include subsidies and investments aimed at spurring growth in certain sectors. That’s how former President Joe Biden imposed tariffs. 

But Trump’s policy is too broad, inconsistent, and lacking in clear objectives. And if the pause on the tariffs does end up being temporary, his policy could throw the United States into a recession, threatening all kinds of jobs, including those in manufacturing sectors.

So while some unions and their members might support the idea of tariffs to help shore up certain industries, it’s not clear that Trump’s policy will get Republicans more union support in the long run, especially if the forecasts about how Trump’s tariffs would impact the economy turn out to be true. And at the end of the day, it’s difficult to see how Trump’s blanket tariff policy will, on its own, revive American manufacturing. As my colleague Dylan Matthews wrote, the American economy has changed, transitioning from manufacturing to services, and the idea that we can reverse that trend is a “false promise.”

“I fear that the horses are out of the barn,” Greenhouse said. “It’s really hard to get back those millions of manufacturing jobs.”

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Money is always stressful, but between on-again, off-again, on-again tariffs, inflation, and a general sense of uncertainty, all things finance have been especially anxiety-inducing lately.

Much of the advice given is geared toward people who have time to make up losses in the stock market. But what if you’re retired or close to retirement age? That’s the matter at hand on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s call-in podcast where we answer the questions that matter to you most. 

Washington Post personal finance columnist Michelle Singletary knows that worry firsthand. She’s on the edge  baby boomer and Gen X and is looking ahead to when she’s no longer working. “Like many people, I’m stressed to the max,” she says. “So I am punching a lot of pillows and crying and screaming and doing a little cussing, but trying to not let the fear dictate moves. And that’s the key.” 

What other advice does she have for people looking to retire soon? And how should those of us who have more time talk  with our older loved ones about their retirement plans? Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

What should people who are approaching retirement age be doing right now in this economic moment?

You want to do a retirement budget. Figure out what it would take if you retired to live in retirement. And if you have a shortfall, then there are some things that you need to do. 

Try to boost your savings. Try to look at your housing situation. Can I cut housing? Can I have a roommate? Do I need to move someplace that is more affordable? So you have to do some forward thinking before you retire to make sure that your finances are as secure as possible.

I have to admit something: I was particularly interested in this episode because my parents are boomers. What advice do you have for listeners that are like me?

It’s understandable that you’re concerned about your parents because if they’re not prepared, then that burden may fall on you. I say burden, not in a sense of you don’t want to do it, but certainly when you are in your 30s, 40s, and early 50s, you’re trying to get ready for your own retirement. 

But I think this is a good opportunity to have open conversations. This is a window to say, “Hey, How are you positioned? Are you worried? Is there anything I should be concerned about? Is there something I can do differently to help you?” And maybe that’ll open up a conversation where they say, “No, we’re fine. We’re really worried, but we got things in control. Here’s what’s happening.” 

It’s a very difficult conversation to have, especially if you’ve grown up in a household where money wasn’t talked about a lot. For a younger adult to try to come to their parents and say, “Hey, you got any money? What’s going on?” — that’s a hard conversation. But the roles aren’t reversed. You are not their parents. You are now an adult friend who happens to be their child. 

How do you recommend that listeners start that conversation with the retirement-age folks in their lives?

Start with yourself and your own feelings. Say, “I’d love to talk to you about this because I’m a little worried. I’m saving for retirement and this is what’s concerning me.” And then you say, “How about you?” What you don’t want to do is say something like, “Do you have any money? What’s going on?” You don’t want to come at them in a more adversarial way. You should see each other as companions and accountability partners. 

What should people prioritize when they look at their finances right now?

In this moment, cash is king. If you got a tax refund, I would be saving that. If you were already just getting by — maybe you weren’t living paycheck to paycheck but there wasn’t much left over — I would be stockpiling cash in a high-yield savings account in case you lose your job, in case the economy really does go into a recession, if it gets worse than it is now.

If I was a federal employee, a federal contractor, anybody whose income is derived from the federal government in a significant way, I would be canceling vacations. I would not be doing major home improvement projects. I don’t want to make people panic — although it’s perfectly fine if you’re scared because that’s just human nature. But I will say the prudent thing right now is to not get into any kind of debt or use a lot of cash that you might need if you lose your job. 

What are the different ways people can help their parents financially without getting behind on their own goals?

Do your own budget, and make sure that you have a cash cushion for yourself. Make sure that you are saving in a way that will hopefully help you have a secure retirement. Get rid of all your debts: If you got credit card debt, student loan, car note — everything except for your mortgage. Then, if all of that is taken care of, if you want to create an account where you put some money in every month to say, “This is the money that I’m gonna designate to help my parents or maybe another relative.” My husband and I do that. We have a family and friends fund so that if somebody loses their job or has some difficulty, this is where we pull the money to help them out. 

What advice do you have for people who are at retirement age but haven’t been able to save as much? How do they prepare for this moment?

The first thing I would say is don’t beat yourself up. You are where you are. Accept that, but do something about it. If you are getting close to retirement, then you’ve got to make some hard decisions. Look at your housing situation. You might have to say, “You know what? Those young adults that were asking me about my money? Maybe I have to move in with them or they move in with me.” And so you look at the big parts of your budget and how you might change that.

Financial advice can admittedly be a little frustrating because we hear the same thing over and over again. “Sit tight, stay the course, don’t make any rash decisions.” What do you say to people who feel antsy right now? Who want a different answer than what they usually hear?

Listen, good advice is good advice, no matter what. Good advice is timeless. And people want a microwave answer to a problem that needs to be baked in the oven. You can’t microwave your way away from this situation. You just can’t. 

There is no secret recipe or secret anything. We know by history. The market eventually returns historically. Could it change in the future? Sure it can. But we have decades and decades of data that show that when we go into an economic downturn, we come out because it’s in everybody’s interest to make sure that happens. And so while you may be tired of us saying, “Hold tight,” you might be tired of us saying, “Don’t make rash decisions,” that is the best advice. We know that when you make decisions in haste, when you make decisions based on your emotions, you make bad decisions.

I will not tell you not to panic when the market goes down. I will not tell you that because it is human to be mad and angry and upset and scared. Be all of those. Just don’t make decisions in that moment.

Canada’s Election Day is here. 

It’s been a short, hectic campaign season, marked by startling reversals — most notably a massive decline in support for the current opposition Conservative Party — and ignited by the resignation of longtime Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

The race has also been reshaped by the politics of the United States, namely the aggressively expansionist vision and chaotic economic policy of President Donald Trump.

Results should be in shortly after polls close at 10 pm ET. According to the polls, Trudeau’s Liberal Party is expected to come out on top, although it’s difficult to say now by how much. 

To fully understand what led to this strange election, how the US shaped it, and what’s next for Canada, I turned to Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, our politics correspondent, who lives in Ontario. Here’s what he had to say (our conversation has been edited for clarity and length): 

So Zack, could you give us a brief overview of the Canadian political scene?

There are a number of different parties that compete in national elections, but there are really only two that have a chance at holding the premiership. 

One, there are the Liberals — who are the incumbent party, and as you might guess, are the central-left party — currently led by Mark Carney, who’s a central banker by career. Carney took over after the longtime prime minister, Justin Trudeau, resigned amidst significant unpopularity. 

Two, there is the Conservative Party. Their name is self-explanatory, and they’re led by Pierre Poilievre, who is a career politician — he’s been in politics since he was in his early 20s. For a long time, Poilievre was leading the polls. He’s fairly right-wing by Canadian standards.

Monday’s race is primarily between the two of them. 

There are also other parties that matter, chief of which is the New Democratic Party (NDP), the left-wing alternative to the Liberals. They are intermittently successful, but this year are doing very poorly. You also have two smaller parties, the Green Party and the People’s Party, which is an attempt to build a European-style, far-right party in Canada that so far, hasn’t been very successful. 

There’s a fourth party which matters regionally, but can affect national parties: the Bloc Québécois, which represents Quebec, which is the French speaking part of Canada. It has very distinct regional interests around French language, French identity, and French culture. They usually do very well in national elections within the province of Quebec, but don’t really perform anywhere else. 

I love the clear branding on all the parties there, that’s very helpful. What do our main duo, the Liberals and Conservatives, believe in?

If you’re in America trying to think through who the Liberals and Conservatives are, imagine a Republican Party prior to Trump, then shift that party a little bit to the left to accommodate for a more left-wing country — that’s the Conservatives. For the Liberals, imagine a party that’s not Bernie Sanders, but certainly on the left-wing side of where the Democratic Party is right now.

That’s not how I would normally explain them if I was talking to a Canadian, or the most accurate way to describe them; the US and Canada are different countries. But if you’re looking for a frame of reference to try to latch onto, that will give you a rough, analogical grasp for what the two major parties are.

I should also note that there are certain hot-button issues in the US — like abortion or national health care — that are not issues in the same way in Canada. 

There is no real effort by any major party to get rid of Canada’s permissive abortion laws, nor is there any effort to get rid of Canada’s national health insurance. Those are both overwhelmingly popular, and one of the common Liberal attacks on the Conservatives is that Conservatives might actually want to change those policies secretly, even though they won’t admit it. It’s referred to as “reopening the abortion debate” here in Canada; Conservative leaders in the past have had to deny any interest in doing so. 

That should give you a sense of how the political mean is very, very different here than it is in the US. 

I know recent events have scrambled the election a bit, but before that happened, what were the key issues on people’s minds?

Key here is Poilievre, who isn’t Trump, but is as close to a Trump figure as could succeed in the world of Canadian politics. He is aggressive. He’s populist in his rhetoric. He embraces conspiracy theories. He attacks the media — one of his signature proposals is defunding the CBC, which is Canada’s national broadcaster, at least defunding its English language services, because, again, you’ve got to play to the Québécois. 

In general, he’s a pugnacious figure who embodies the anti-establishment strain of Canadian politics. That anti-establishment movement isn’t new in Canada, and it’s not exactly Trump inspired, but it is Trump-inflected, given how Trump has shaped the modern populist right. 

All that wasn’t too much of a problem for Poilievre prior to Trump’s reelection, even though Canadians didn’t like Trump at that point either. Poilievre was cruising to an election victory — he had years of polling suggesting that he had an insurmountable lead against Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. 

The reasons for that are straightforward: There are problems in Canada that are real, most notably cost of living is a significant concern for many people here. The cost of housing is sky high. It’s very difficult for a lot of Canadians, especially for first time home buyers, to find an affordable place to live. 

Poilievre capitalized on this sense that things are just too expensive. He would say, “Canada is broken,” on the campaign trail, and by that he meant primarily that the cost of living is too high, and that Liberal policies were making it too high. 

You can agree or disagree with the accusation about Liberal policies, but many Canadians, it seemed, were willing to vote for the Conservatives, because the Liberals have been in power for 10 years and there were still problems. 

Poilievre represented a change for a lot of Canadians, and that was what people wanted. That strategy was working right up until December. 

Did the Conservatives have specific policies to solve the cost of living crisis, or was their solution more, “We’re not the Liberals”?

Poilievre had a housing plan that was by most standards — by which I mean, most YIMBY standards — pretty good. He really committed to relaxing regulations getting in the way of Canada homes, and to creating federal incentives to build more houses that could be offered at affordable rates.

The Liberals have adopted similar ideas, and under Carney they have also put forward an aggressive YIMBY-inflected housing program. So it’s not like the Conservatives had a monopoly on this idea, but they were able to very credibly make the argument that the Liberals have been in power for 10 years and they haven’t done any of this stuff. 

So we had the Conservatives cruising for this great victory, Poilievre was so happy. Now the Liberals are expected to win. What happened? 

I’ve talked to a lot of different Canadians, and the overwhelming story from academic experts to ordinary people is that Trump changed everything. 

Now it wasn’t just Trump. An important thing that happened is Trudeau’s resignation in December. A lot of the Conservative campaign was about going after Trudeau personally and blaming Trudeau’s policies for anything that was bad. When the Liberals brought in a new candidate who is stylistically different from Trudeau, that blunted some of those attacks. 

But it’s very hard to say that the Liberals would have been able to win just by changing candidates — people were pretty unhappy with the Liberal brand in general, which is where Trump comes in. 

Trump started threatening to annex Canada, and started backing that rhetoric with coercive policies, like hitting Canada with tariffs for no discernible reason, and without any sensical guidance as to how Canada could reverse them. Trump accused Canada of sending fentanyl into the US, when really it largely flows the other way around. He started to talk about how it would look awesome on a map if the US was a giant country that had both the US and Canada as one territory. 

It started to hit Canadians that like they actually were dealing with the crazy person across the border who wanted to destroy their entire nation if he could. And that led to a transformation in the issue set that was dominating the Canadian election. It went from housing, cost of living, tired of the Liberals to We need to defend ourselves from Donald Trump. 

On that issue, the Liberals had the Conservatives dominated. 

And it’s not even about policy — the parties agree that it’s important to resist Trump’s attacks, to use countertariffs as needed, to ease inter-province trade, and to work with European partners. It’s about trust. Poilievre is in style and substance, is a Canadian Trump. He’s been endorsed by Elon Musk publicly. He courted support among the American right. Nobody believes that he is deeply opposed to the MAGA project. 

That makes Poilievre a huge albatross on the party’s neck. 

Carney, by contrast, is this boring central banker, who has happened to work through crises before: He was leading the Bank of England during Brexit, for example. Brexit didn’t work out great, but that wasn’t really Carney’s fault. He emerged from that looking like a policy guy who did his best to try to manage an external economic shock that was imposed on him. And what is Canada in the middle of other than an economic crisis, imposed on it by an outside actor? That’s allowed the Liberals to ask the very effective question: Who do you trust to get us out of this mess, a career politician from Ottawa or a guy who made his bones managing economic crises?

I saw some headlines that suggested some of the polling was narrowing a little bit as we head into the Election Day. Is that notable? 

The polls are tightening in part because Trump has been preoccupied. He has been a little bit too busy with his global trade war to focus on his Canadian trade war. The less Trump threatening Canada is in the headlines, the less the Conservatives are getting hammered by their inability to have a good position. 

Of course, literally days before the election — last Thursday — Trump started the 51st state talk again. Carney confirmed that Trump talked about it in a direct meeting that the two of them had. And then Trump said in his Time interview last week, “I’m really not trolling with talk of Canada as a 51st state.”

It’s like he’s trying to make the Conservatives lose. 

Let’s assume the Liberals win, as expected. I know what their margin of victory might be is hard to know right now — but if they do win, what does that mean for Canada’s future?

It depends on whether you trust what Carney is saying publicly, or what most people seem to think is likely to happen. 

Publicly, Carney is talking about a complete reevaluation of the relationship with the United States. He says that the era of Canada depending on the US is over, and that Canadians need to decouple from the US, and reevaluate their entire strategy for economic and national self-determination.

Decoupling from the US will be really hard. It might actually be impossible for Canada, for a variety of practical reasons. One is that Canada just does not currently have the military assets to do national self-defense without significant cooperation with the United States. And while there isn’t a real invasion threat from anywhere, there are some defense interests, for example, up in the Arctic, where Canadian and Russian waters border each other. The US and Canada collaborate on air space defense; Canada depends a lot on — and has contributed to — NATO. 

Economically, there’s something that economists call the “gravity of trade,” where trade flows are pulled in by the geographic proximity of two places because there’s all sorts of practical difficulties in trying to trade with places that are further away. Practically, Canada and the US are right next to each other and if they want to trade perishable things like milk, they don’t have many options other than each other. 

My guess is the reality is going to be somewhere between business as usual and Carney’s maximalist claims on the campaign trail. There will be a Canadian effort to build up various plan Bs in the event that the United States permanently becomes Trumpy. But practically, Canada will need to try to maintain a good relationship with the US. It would take quite a lot to push Canada into a truly radical trajectory where they feel like they have to balance against the United States rather than refining the nature of their relationship on the edges. 

This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.

Joe Biden, in his farewell address, argued that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America.” More recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a crowd of 10,000 in Arizona that “we are witnessing an oligarchy in America.”

Biden and Ocasio-Cortez are hardly the first to diagnose the United States as an oligarchy. Sen. Bernie Sanders has been warning about it for years. So have many others, though, recently, Sen. Elissa Slotkin has pushed back against Democrats using the word.

So, are they right? Are we an oligarchy? If so, when did we become one? And: How bad is it?

What exactly is an oligarchy, anyway?

The concept of oligarchy goes back to ancient Greek philosophy. Aristotle’s concept of oligarchy is laid out in his Politics, in which the philosopher distinguished among six possible forms of government. The best form was divine kingship: The monarch rules for the good of all. But this was unlikely. More likely was that the monarch would rule only for the monarchy, hence devolving into its deviant twin, tyranny.

Aristocracy, or rule by an enlightened elite, was a better alternative, assuming a virtuous few could be found to serve. But like kingship, aristocracy ran the risk of devolving into its ugly doppelgänger — in this case, oligarchy.

In an oligarchy, the elite few rule for their own personal enrichment, leaving everyone else worse off.

Which is similar to Biden’s definition: “…extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

And Ocasio-Cortez’s definition: “…When those with the most economic, political and technological power destroy the public good in order to enrich themselves at the price of millions of Americans.”

Some might prefer the label “plutocracy” because it more literally means “rule by the wealthy.” But effectively, the two have become synonymous in the US, where wealth all but ensures political purchase. The basic idea is consistent — a handful of very wealthy individuals use their riches to shape and influence the government on their own financial behalf.

Democracy and oligarchy can coexist because they operate on different axes, the political scientist and oligarchy scholar Jeffrey Winters told me. In short, the more power is in the hands of the very wealthy, the more oligarchic the society. But even under these conditions, if elections are free and fair and formal individual rights are secure, we are still living in a democracy.

The tension arises when the majority of voters decide they don’t like an unequal distribution of wealth and want a more equal distribution.

The tension deepens when the very wealthy — the oligarchs — use their wealth to influence political outcomes in their favor to prevent this democratic redistribution.

Even here, some tug-of-war is normal. Oligarchs may prefer to maintain a democracy and accept some level of redistribution because that is the price of stability. But the more concentrated the wealth and power, the more uneasy the bargain. And the bargain is indeed growing uneasy in the United States.

Is America an oligarchy? 

Oligarchy exists on a continuum, so there is not a single moment someone can point to and say that a country is now officially an oligarchy. But by analyzing data on economic inequality and money in politics, America starts looking distinctly oligarchic by the beginning of the 21st century.

Consider some stats from a comprehensive 2020 RAND report: In 1975, the median full-time American worker earned $42,000 (in 2018 dollars). In 2018, the median was $50,000, a slight increase.

But for those in the top 1 percent of earners, the bottom salary went from $257,000 in 1975 to $761,100 in 2018 — almost tripling. And the average income in the top 1 percent went from $289,000 to $1,384,000 — more than quadrupling.

In other words, almost all gains in the economy have gone to the very top of the income distribution. The paper’s authors estimate that if the US had maintained the 1975 distribution of income, the median income as of 2018 would be $92,000 instead of $50,000.

Similarly, the share of income going to the top 1 percent has gone from about 10 percent in 1980 to over 20 percent in 2023. During this period, the level of inequality in the United States has gone from being pretty typical of developed countries to being on the extreme fringe.

Then there is the active involvement of the super-rich in politics. 

For example: that iconic image from Donald Trump’s inauguration, with tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Elon Musk lined up in support, with Apple’s Tim Cook and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew nearby.

There is the official Cabinet of oligarchs. Though precise net worths are hard to pin down, the concentration of wealth is undeniable. Linda McMahon at Education (net worth estimated at $3 billion, combined with her husband); Howard Lutnick at Commerce (at least $2 billion); Kelly Loeffler at Small Business (at least $1 billion); Scott Bessent at Treasury (at least $500 million, combined with his husband); and Jared Isaacman for NASA (a longtime ally of Musk, also worth more than $1 billion). Plus Trump himself, who’s reportedly worth $5.1 billion, though his accounting is famously untrustworthy. (By contrast, Biden’s Cabinet members were mostly mere millionaires.)

And Congress. Though there are no billionaires, roughly half of the current Congress has a net worth of over $1 million, according to one tracker. The richest member appears to be Rick Scott, a former health care CEO, worth about half a billion. Very few representatives come from the working class.

Finally, there is the money spent on politics. Campaign finance limits who can even run for office, with early fundraising success as the golden ticket.

This fundraising money comes from some of the wealthiest Americans. Take the brazenness of the world’s richest man, Musk, spending $291 million, or billionaire Timothy Mellon shelling out $197 million, or billionaire Miriam Adelson spending $148 million, all to support Republicans in the last election. These are extreme sums of money. They make Michael Bloomberg’s $64 million in 2024 seem small.

By one estimate of publicly disclosed contributions, the 0.1 percent wealthiest Americans contributed about 16 percent of campaign dollars in the 2020 presidential election, while the top 1 percent contributed about 33 percent, a figure that has been roughly consistent throughout the 2010s. 

“One reason oligarchs are in such a giddy moment is because they have picked up on the signals that what they are doing is permissible,” Winters said. “In the past, there was a sense it was not okay to commandeer entire campaigns with just a handful of people funding them — that seems to have been lost.”

In earlier years, the very wealthy tended to prefer less transparent, stealthier ways of influence. Many recognized that being too public was likely to backfire. They preferred to hide their contributions through “dark money.” But these days, the super-wealthy are hiding less and getting out front more.

There are certainly divisions among super-rich political financiers. On many social and cultural issues, the very rich are deeply polarized.

But on fiscal issues, there is much more consensus. The political opinions of the very wealthy are more fiscally conservative than the average voter. For example, in survey data from 2009, 52 percent of the general public supported a redistribution of wealth via taxes on the rich. In contrast, only 17 percent of the wealthy agreed.

Meanwhile, corporate lobbying dramatically outspends countervailing forces like unions and public interest groups. In my 2015 book, The Business of America Is Lobbying, I calculated that there is 34 times more spending by business interests than by these countervailing groups. This allows powerful companies to maintain a constant presence in the halls of power.

While money doesn’t guarantee specific outcomes, it effectively constrains the policy options that both Republican and Democratic majorities are willing to consider, particularly regarding tax and regulatory advantages that benefit the wealthy.

So while America has been moving in this direction for a while, “we are really at peak oligarchic power,” Winters said. “This is in-your-face oligarchy. … The sheer visibility is incredible.”

Now what?

The US has always had aspects of oligarchy. The Senate (originally appointed by state legislatures) was to represent the elite; the House was to represent the people. The Electoral College was to keep the people at a distance from the presidency.

And America’s republican form of democracy has always wrestled with the same tension that Aristotle faced: How do we share power and wealth?

All forms of government give power to some group of decision-makers and not others. All free economies generate some level of inequality. No successful government has ever shared power or resources completely evenly, but successful governments have found a balance. 

So what happens now? 

American voters are extremely angry and distrustful. They think our political system is fundamentally broken and needs major change. Trump has long been the successful avatar of that anger and distrust. But he is also supported by some of the very wealthiest Americans.

This is not necessarily a contradiction. It is one tried-and-true answer to what the political scientist Daniel Ziblatt has called the “conservative dilemma.” In an unequal society, the party of the wealthy has a choice — it can embrace democracy even if it means some redistribution. Or it can try to undermine democracy by elevating divisive cultural and racial issues that will redirect conflict away from questions of wealth redistribution, further polarizing and dividing society. This appears to be what Trump is doing.

The political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call this situation “plutocratic populism,” in their book, Let Them Eat Tweets. Similarly, a new paper calls the GOP’s tense coalition of uber-wealthy elites and resentful non-wealthy regular people “plutopopulism.” The wild card aspects of Trump’s populism — and its uneasy electoral dependencies on anti-elitist grievances — reflect the tenuous coexistence of democracy with increasingly excessive concentrations of wealth.

Meanwhile, as the Democrats also attract more uber-wealthy supporters, anti-establishment attitudes are turning against both parties. 

Consider the relationship between support for democracy and share of income going to the top 1 percent: The more unequal the economy, the less support for democracy. More economic inequality weakens social trust and government legitimacy, which in turn weakens support for democracy.

And support for democracy has notably fallen in the US, at a time of increasing inequality.

Higher income inequality correlates with lower support for democracy

One possible future is that the rich continue to defend their wealth, but the quality of democracy continues to decline, perhaps sliding into autocracy. Elections become less fair; political corruption becomes more blatant. Cynicism turns to apathy. Citizens focus on their own survival, and that of their immediate families, and go more quietly. 

Progressives are often fond of quoting Louis Brandeis, who served on the Supreme Court: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Yet, the reality has been otherwise here for decades. We have had both.

But the tensions are mounting. The balance is increasingly unstable. At some point, one will have to win out. The question is whether we will actually get the choice.

President George W. Bush brought Western wear with him to the White House — suits with cowboy boots, big decorative belt buckles, cowboy hats. President Barack Obama ushered in an era of slimmer suiting, while first lady Michelle Obama helped spark a renaissance of American design. 

Presidential administrations always come with an aesthetic attached. What is striking about President Donald Trump’s is just how much others in his orbit — and even his grassroots supporters — have adopted his administration’s look, one which Today, Explained’s Gabrielle Berbey told me “masquerades as calling back to older standards of beauty, masculinity, and femininity, but in fact represents a whole new era of extremeness.”

This MAGA aesthetic speaks to something larger about political philosophy and policy goals in Trump 2.0. This was the case in the first Trump administration, too. To understand just what that something is, I talked with Berbey, who recently produced an episode of the Today, Explained podcast all about MAGA beauty standards. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Tell me about your reporting about MAGA aesthetics. When I hear that phrase, a specific image comes to mind.  

What’s the look that comes to mind for you?

It’s very starkly gendered. For men, either completely clean shaven or bearded, nothing in between; with hair close cropped on the sides, but long on top. A bulky build, like you’ve been going to the gym a lot. A short-sleeved shirt — maybe made of some tech fabric — paired with jeans or chinos and some kind of boots, maybe combat boots.

Combat boots too? Those are MAGA now? 

Haha, yeah, I feel like I’ve seen that a lot. And for ladies, I’d say long, wavy tresses, very full lips, sheath dresses that are fitted, but professional, very defined brows. 

The hair is definitely bouncy. What you’re describing is very much what we wanted to look at in our episode. There’s a very noticeable, artificial, confounding look that many people in Trump’s immediate orbit seem to have.

In reporting our show, we focused on two different looks that speak to the same phenomenon. 

There is a particular style of makeup that we see that seems to be favored by women on Fox News and women in Trump’s orbit. It includes some of the things you mentioned: blocky brows that feel very defined, bold eyeliner, and so on. 

Beyond makeup, however, there are people — both women and men, but especially women — who seem to have gotten very visible plastic surgery. 

We see a level of very obvious face alteration that is different from the sort of plastic surgery that we saw even just a few years ago, when people would take great pains to make it look like they hadn’t gotten any work done.

To be clear, no one in Trump orbit has come out and said they’ve had plastic surgery. Of the people often pointed to as examples of this facial aesthetic — people like Kristi Noem, Laura Loomer, Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Matt Gaetz, and so on — only Noem has admitted to any work, and only to dental work. 

We talked to a reporter from Mother Jones, Inae Oh, who has looked into this quite a bit, and has really sat with the question of: Why do we see what appears to be really dramatic plastic surgery around Trump? And she’s explored the question of whether proximity to power — and specifically to Trump — relies on a very specific look.

That reminds me of a phrase we’ve often heard from Trump over the years — that a nominee or politician he favors is straight out of “central casting.” 

Yes, that phrase is a helpful reminder that Trump comes from a reality television world, and is also someone that is quite obsessed with the pageantry of beauty — it was literally his business for a time — and is not afraid to say that. 

Part of what we’re seeing is people in his circle looking like reality TV stars, in a way that is almost like a uniform — which some on the left disparagingly call Mar-a-Lago face. Maintaining a certain look seems to be an important part of getting into Trump’s orbit. 

Does this look tell us anything else about Trump or his administration? 

Something that Inae points out is that these looks seem to be connected with policy. You have extreme looks paired with extreme policies. Think Kristi Noem doing deportation glam in her DHS videos. 

These extreme looks are a callback to a different era of plastic surgery. These extreme policies are a callback to a different time in the United States. There’s a reversion of both policy and aesthetic.

You used the word “extreme” there. Is there an effort to be extreme on all fronts? Is that one way to describe the connection between Trump aesthetics and policy?

I think so. Something that Inae points out is that Trump 2.0 is over-the-top in both policy and aesthetics, in ways that Trump 1.0 was not.

Over the top, like reality TV is purposely over-the-top, in its effort to provide maximum entertainment? 

Reality TV really is a helpful way to think about this, in that it is something, much like the aesthetics that we see around these Trump adjacent figures, that relies on tools of distraction. You get caught up in the glam and ridiculousness, and you don’t notice what’s actually happening (or sometimes how there is nothing happening). 

Inae points out that when you look at the ridiculousness of a deportation-glam, reality TV-ified DHS video, you almost forget that there are real people in those videos who are being deported, who have families, because the performance and aesthetics of it is so shocking.

As you were saying that, I thought, It’s almost as if Trump’s policies themselves have had plastic surgery — they’ve been given shiny, artificial faces you want to stare at, making it hard to see the reality underneath. 

That’s a really good way of putting it. And that’s the case for talking about aesthetics and policy as a pair. Because when you just talk about aesthetics, it can start to feel very anti-feminist. People should do what they want with their face. But when you pair the brutality of the policies with almost brutal face augmentation, they feel connected and worth interrogating.

This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

Any time I try to convince skeptical people that the world isn’t as bad as they think it is — which I do quite a lot, given that I write a newsletter called Good News — they usually come back with a two-word rejoinder: “climate change.”

It’s a tough one to rebut. Climate change is very real, and its toll is worsening by the year. 2024 was the hottest year on record, and the first year where the average global temperature was 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was in the pre-industrial era — a red line set by policymakers as part of the Paris agreement. Antarctica’s winter sea ice dropped to its second-lowest level on record this past fall, while the world has now experienced more than $4 trillion — yes, with a “t” — in damages from extreme weather events since 1970. And in the White House, President Donald Trump is busy eviscerating government climate research and pulling back on clean energy policies.

Climate change presents a difficult challenge to the narrative of progress. Not just because it’s causing death and destruction now, and not just because each year it gets cumulatively worse, but because in many ways it is the direct result of trends that have otherwise made the world better. 

Economic growth makes us all better, but it requires more energy, and as long as that energy mostly derives from fossil fuels, which still provide about 80 percent of global energy, it will make the world warmer as well. In a particularly bitter irony, one of the most important environmental advances in recent years — the reduction in conventional air pollution — seems to play a role in accelerating the pace of climate change. 

But two things can be true: Even as climate change gets worse every year, every year we’re making more progress to slow it down. That’s the theme of “Escape Velocity,” an excellent package that came out this week from Vox’s climate team. As Vox climate editor Paige Vega wrote: “The energy economy is transitioning. Technology is advancing. The market is shifting. Our politics might feel stuck, but in many important ways, we continue to move forward.” 

So, in honor of the end of Earth Week, here are five positive trends that demonstrate that the fight against climate change is far from lost.

1. The worst-case scenario is looking better

Climate change is bad now, but it could do even more damage in the future, as the carbon dioxide we’re adding to the atmosphere keeps accumulating. The worst-case scenario outlined by UN climate scientists could result in as much as 4° to 5°C of warming, which could reduce global GDP by as much as 15 percent, destroy coral reefs around the world, leave large parts of the Earth all but uninhabitable, and push the world past environmental tipping points with consequences we can’t begin to know.   

The good news is that this worst-case scenario is looking less and less likely. Global CO2 emissions are still growing, but at an increasingly slow rate. As carbon emissions eventually begin to shrink, it makes the UN’s worst-case scenario — which assumes no major changes to where we get our energy — all but impossible. Based on current climate policies, the most warming the world is likely to experience is more in the range of 2.5° to 3°C. Recent research suggests the climate system may actually be more resilient to warming than scientists once though, which also reduces the risk of sudden catastrophe.

Now, 2.5° to 3°C degrees of global warming is still very, very bad. But our improved outlook shows that a catastrophic climate future isn’t written yet, and every bit of emissions reduction now will make a difference later.

2. Clean energy is beating coal

In 2024, the US crossed an important threshold: For the first time ever, wind and solar produced more electricity than coal for an entire calendar year.

Why is that so notable? Coal is the dirtiest of dirty fuels, and is still responsible for about half of the CO2 emitted by the US power sector, even as its share of US electricity production shrinks. But despite what Trump may say, coal isn’t coming back in the US, because it’s being replaced by cleaner-burning natural gas, and increasingly, zero-carbon sources like wind and solar. That’s a win both for the global climate and for air quality here at home.

Altogether, renewable sources generated just under a quarter of all US electricity in 2024, an increase of almost 10 percent from the year before. Solar is leading the way, providing 66 percent of all new capacity additions on the grid in 2024. Thanks to both environmental and economic incentives, there’s no reason to expect that progress to halt any time soon.

3. Batteries are world-beating

In his excellent piece in the Escape Velocity package, Vox correspondent Umair Irfan called enormous grid-scale batteries the “holy grail” of clean energy. There’s a simple reason for that. As great as renewable sources like wind and solar are for the environment and the economy, unlike coal or natural gas, they are intermittent, which means we can’t count on them to run around the clock. Sometimes they produce more energy than we need and sometimes less — but the grid always needs supplies.

Enter the battery. By storing energy produced by renewables, big batteries can keep the grid humming and clean even when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. We’re adding more of them to the grid every day: Utility-scale battery storage increased fivefold between 2021 and 2024 to exceed 26 gigawatts (GW). Developers are planning another 19.6 GW in 2025, which would be the biggest increase on record. The result is a grid that is cleaner and more resilient.

4. The clean-energy economy is humming

One of the most important concepts in climate policy is decoupling — which, in this context, is not something you go to a divorce lawyer for. It means breaking the link between greenhouse emissions and economic growth, because no climate policy is truly sustainable if it weighs down the economy.

Well, decoupling is happening. Last year, US emissions fell by 0.2 percent, while the economy grew by 2.7 percent. The more this happens, here in the US and abroad, the more we get the best of both worlds: climate progress and a healthy economy.

The clean-energy economy itself can power this decoupling. In 2024, clean energy and clean vehicle employers added nearly 150,000 jobs, and for the fifth straight year, job growth in the clean economy outpaced job growth overall. 

5. Climate innovation is only getting started  

The Trump administration wants to take us backward on climate policy, but here’s a secret: The real difference makers are working outside Washington, coming up with new solutions to the biggest challenges in climate and energy.

Just this week, the XPrize for Carbon Removal — an innovation competition that, notably, is funded by one Elon Musk — announced the winners of its $100 million contest. The $50 million grand prize went to Mati Carbon, a small startup that is using “enhanced rock weathering” to capture CO2 from the air. The company’s technology takes advantage of the fact that as it rains, rocks will slowly break down in a process that absorbs CO2 in the atmosphere and turns it into bicarbonate, where it can be safely stored for thousands of years. Mati Carbon speeds up the process by breaking rocks and spreading them across farmers’ fields, which has the added benefit of releasing nutrients that can enhance crop yields. 

Mati Carbon is precisely the kind of company we’ll need more of in the years and decades ahead. Climate change is a challenge unlike any that human beings have ever faced, but it’s one we can solve — just as long as we get out of our own way.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

Right now, OpenAI is something unique in the landscape of not just AI companies but huge companies in general.

OpenAI’s board of directors is bound not to the mission of providing value for shareholders, like most companies, but to the mission of ensuring that “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” as the company’s website says. (Still private, OpenAI is currently valued at more than $300 billion after completing a record $40 billion funding round earlier this year.)

That situation is a bit unusual, to put it mildly, and one that is increasingly buckling under the weight of its own contradictions.

For a long time, investors were happy enough to pour money into OpenAI despite a structure that didn’t put their interests first, but in 2023, the board of the nonprofit that controls the company — yep, that’s how confusing it is — fired Sam Altman for lying to them. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent. One of Anthropic’s early investors is James McClave, whose BEMC Foundation helps fund Future Perfect.)

It was a move that definitely didn’t maximize shareholder value, was at best very clumsily handled, and made it clear that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit could potentially have huge implications — especially for its partner Microsoft, which has poured billions into OpenAI.

Altman’s firing didn’t stick — he returned a week later after an outcry, with much of the board resigning. But ever since the firing, OpenAI has been considering a restructuring into, well, more of a normal company. 

Under this plan, the nonprofit entity that controls OpenAI would sell its control of the company and the assets that it owns. OpenAI would then become a for-profit company — specifically a public benefit corporation, like its rivals Anthropic and X.ai — and the nonprofit would walk away with a hotly disputed but definitely large sum of money in the tens of billions, presumably to spend on improving the world with AI.

There’s just one problem, argues a new open letter by legal scholars, several Nobel Prize winners, and a number of former OpenAI employees: The whole thing is illegal (and a terrible idea). 

Their argument is simple: The thing the nonprofit board currently controls — governance of the world’s leading AI lab — makes no sense for the nonprofit to sell at any price. The nonprofit is supposed to act in pursuit of a highly specific mission: making AI go well for all of humanity. But having the power to make rules for OpenAI is worth more than even a mind-bogglingly large sum of money for that mission. 

“Nonprofit control over how AGI is developed and governed is so important to OpenAI’s mission that removing control would violate the special fiduciary duty owed to the nonprofit’s beneficiaries,” the letter argues. Those beneficiaries are all of us, and the argument is that a big foundation has nothing on “a role guiding OpenAI.”  

And it’s not just saying that the move is a bad thing. It’s saying that the board would be illegally breaching their duties if they went forward with it and the attorneys general of California and Delaware — to whom the letter is addressed because OpenAI is incorporated in Delaware and operates in California — should step in to stop it. 

I’ve previously covered the wrangling over OpenAI’s potential change of structure. I wrote about the challenge of pricing the assets owned by the nonprofit, and we reported on Elon Musk’s claim that his own donations early in OpenAI’s history were misappropriated to make the for-profit. 

This is a different argument. It’s not a claim that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit ought to produce a higher sale price. It’s an argument that OpenAI, and what it may create, is literally priceless. 

OpenAI’s mission “is to ensure that artificial general intelligence is safe and benefits all of humanity,” Tyler Whitmer, a nonprofit lawyer and one of the letter’s authors, told me. “Talking about the value of that in dollars and cents doesn’t make sense.”

Are they right on the merits? Will it matter? That’s substantially up to two people: California Attorney General Robert Bonta and Delaware Attorney General Kathleen Jennings. But it’s a serious argument that deserves a serious hearing. Here’s my attempt to digest it.

How OpenAI became OpenAI

When OpenAI was founded in 2015, its mission sounded absurd: to work toward the safe development of artificial general intelligence — which, it clarifies now, means artificial intelligence that can do nearly all economically valuable work — and ensure that it benefited all of humanity. 

Many people thought such a future was a hundred years away or more. But many of the few people who wanted to start planning for it were at OpenAI. 

They founded it as a nonprofit, saying that was the only way to ensure that all of humanity maintained a claim to humanity’s future. “We don’t ever want to be making decisions to benefit shareholders,” Altman promised in 2017. “The only people we want to be accountable to is humanity as a whole.” 

Worries about existential risk, too, loomed large. If it was going to be possible to build extremely intelligent AIs, it was going to be possible — even if it were accidental — to build ones that had no interest in cooperating with human goals and laws. “Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity,” Altman said in 2015.

Thus the nonprofit. The idea was that OpenAI would be shielded from the relentless incentive to make more money for shareholders — the kind of incentive that could drive it to underplay AI safety — and that it would have a governance structure that left it positioned to do the right thing. That would be true even if that meant shutting down the company, merging with a competitor, or taking a major (dangerous) product off the market. 

“A for-profit company’s obligation is to make money for shareholders,” Michael Dorff, a professor of business law at the University of California Los Angeles, told me. “For a nonprofit, those same fiduciary duties run to a different purpose, whatever their charitable purpose is. And in this case, the charitable purpose of the nonprofit is twofold: One is to develop artificial intelligence safely, and two is to make sure that artificial intelligence is developed for the benefit of all humanity.”

“OpenAI’s founders believed the public would be harmed if AGI was developed by a commercial entity with proprietary profit motives,” the letter argues. In fact, the letter documents that OpenAI was founded precisely because many people were worried that AI would otherwise be developed within Google, which was and is a massive commercial entity with a profit motive.

Even in 2019, when OpenAI created a “capped for-profit” structure that would let them raise money from investors and pay the investors back up to a 100x return, they emphasized that the nonprofit was still in control. The mission was still not to build AGI and get rich but to ensure its development benefited all of humanity. 

“We’ve designed OpenAI LP to put our overall mission — ensuring the creation and adoption of safe and beneficial AGI — ahead of generating returns for investors. … Regardless of how the world evolves, we are committed — legally and personally — to our mission,” the company declared in an announcement adopting the new structure. 

OpenAI made further commitments: To avoid an AI “arms race” where two companies cut corners on safety to beat each other to the finish line, they built into their governing documents a “merge and assist” clause where they’d instead join the other lab and work together to make the AI safe. And thanks to the cap, if OpenAI did become unfathomably wealthy, all of the wealth above the 100x cap for investors would be distributed to humanity. The nonprofit board — meant to be composed of a majority of members who had no financial stake in the company — would have ultimate control.

In many ways the company was deliberately restraining its future self, trying to ensure that as the siren call of enormous profits grew louder and louder, OpenAI was tied to the mast of its original mission. And when the original board made the decision to fire Altman, they were acting to carry out that mission as they saw it.

Now, argues the new open letter, OpenAI wants to be unleashed. But the company’s own arguments over the last 10 years are pretty convincing: The mission that they set forth is not one that a fully commercial company is likely to pursue. Therefore, the attorneys general should tell them no and instead work to ensure the board is resourced to do what 2019-era OpenAI intended the board to be resourced to do.

What about a public benefit corporation?

OpenAI, of course, doesn’t intend to become a fully commercial company. The proposal I’ve seen floated is to become a public benefit corporation. 

“Public benefit corporations are what we call hybrid entities,” Dorff told me. “In a traditional for-profit, the board’s primary duty is to make money for shareholders. In a public benefit corporation, their job is to balance making money with public duties: They have to take into account the impact of the company’s activities on everyone who is affected by them.”

The problem is that the obligations of public benefit corporations are, for all practical purposes, unenforceable. In theory, if a public benefit corporation isn’t benefiting the public, you — a member of the public — are being wronged. But you have no right to challenge it in court. 

“Only shareholders can launch those suits,” Dorff told me. Take a public benefit corporation with a mission to help end homelessness. “If a homeless advocacy organization says they’re not benefiting the homeless, they have no grounds to sue.” 

Only OpenAI’s shareholders could try to hold it accountable if it weren’t benefiting humanity. And “it’s very hard for shareholders to win a duty-of-care suit unless the directors acted in bad faith or were engaging in some kind of conflict of interest,” Dorff said. “Courts understandably are very deferential to the board in terms of how they choose to run the business.”

That means, in theory, a public benefit corporation is still a way to balance profit and the good of humanity. In practice, it’s one with the thumb hard on the scales of profit, which is probably a significant part of why OpenAI didn’t choose to restructure to a public benefit corporation back in 2019. 

“Now they’re saying we didn’t foresee that,” Sunny Gandhi of Encode Justice, one of the letter’s signatories, told me. “And that is a deliberate lie to avoid the truth of — they originally were founded in this way because they were worried about this happening.”

But, I challenged Gandhi, OpenAI’s major competitors Anthropic and X.ai are both public benefit corporations. Shouldn’t that make a difference?

“That’s kind of asking why a conservation nonprofit can’t convert to being a logging company just because there are other logging companies out there,” he told me. In this view, yes, Anthropic and X both have inadequate governance that can’t and won’t hold them accountable for ensuring humanity benefits from their AI work. That might be a reason to shun them, protest them or demand reforms from them, but why is it a reason to let OpenAI abandon its mission?

I wish this corporate governance puzzle had never come to me, said Frodo

Reading through the letter — and speaking to its authors and other nonprofit law and corporate law experts — I couldn’t help but feel badly for OpenAI’s board. (I have reached out to OpenAI board members for comment several times over the last few months as I’ve reported on the nonprofit transition. They have not returned any of those requests for comment.)

The very impressive suite of people responsible for OpenAI’s governance have all the usual challenges of being on the board of a fast-growing tech company with enormous potential and very serious risks, and then they have a whole bunch of puzzles unique to OpenAI’s situation. Their fiduciary duty, as Altman has testified before Congress, is to the mission of ensuring AGI is developed safely and to the benefit of all humanity. 

But most of them were selected after Altman’s brief firing with, I would argue, another implicit assignment: Don’t screw it up. Don’t fire Sam Altman. Don’t terrify investors. Don’t get in the way of some of the most exciting research happening anywhere on Earth. 

(After publication, OpenAI reached out to me with the following comment, which reads in part: “Our Board has been very clear: our nonprofit will be strengthened and any changes to our existing structure would be in the service of ensuring the broader public can benefit from AI. This structure will continue to ensure that as the for-profit succeeds and grows, so too does the nonprofit, enabling us to achieve the mission.”)

What, I asked Dorff, are the people on the board supposed to do, if they have a fiduciary duty to humanity that is very hard to live up to? Do they have the nerve to vote against Altman? He was less impressed than me with the difficulty of this plight. “That’s still their duty,” he said. “And sometimes duty is hard.”

That’s where the letter lands, too. OpenAI’s nonprofit has no right to cede its control over OpenAI. Its obligation is to humanity. Humanity deserves a say in how AGI goes. Therefore, it shouldn’t sell that control at any price. 

It shouldn’t sell that control even if it makes fundraising much more convenient. It shouldn’t sell that control even though its current structure is kludgy, awkward, and not meant for handling a challenge of this scale. Because it’s much, much better suited to the challenge than becoming yet another public benefit corporation would be. OpenAI has come further than anyone imagined toward the epic destiny it envisioned for itself in 2015. 

But if we want the development of AGI to benefit humanity, the nonprofit will have to stick to its guns, even in the face of overwhelming incentive not to. Or the state attorneys general will have to step in.

Update, April 24, 3:25 pm ET: This story has been updated to include disclosures about Vox Media’s relationship to OpenAI and Anthropic.

Update, April 25, 5:20 pm ET: This story has been updated to include a comment from OpenAI sent after publication.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: FBI agents arrested a Milwaukee County judge this morning on felony charges of interfering with immigration agents, as the Trump administration cracks down on local officials who threaten progress on its deportation agenda.

What exactly happened? Last week, federal agents came to Judge Hannah Dugan’s Wisconsin courtroom to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican citizen facing domestic violence charges. Dugan is accused of sending the agents away and allowing Flores-Ruiz to leave out a non-public side door, though he was quickly arrested anyway. Today, federal agents were again at the courthouse, this time to arrest Dugan.

Is this unprecedented? Not quite. The Trump administration arrested a Massachusetts judge in 2019 on charges of obstructing immigration officials, but they dropped the charges in 2022 after the judge agreed to refer herself to a state review board.

What’s the big picture? There’s longstanding tension between federal immigration enforcement and local courts, as local officials argue immigrants won’t attend court unless they can do so without fear of deportation. Some municipalities — sometimes called “sanctuary cities” — officially limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

Trump has issued an executive order calling on agencies to halt federal funding for those cities, an order that a federal judge largely blocked on Thursday. Now, in the Milwaukee case, the administration is threatening officials with personal consequences if they work to stymie federal deportation efforts.

What’s the big question? If the charging document is accurate, Dugan went beyond non-cooperation to actively complicate an arrest. But that line can get blurry, and it remains to be seen whether the administration will make good on Trump’s threat to arrest local officials who refuse to fall in line.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

After work today I’ll be listening to a Today, Explained episode about Hollywood stunts. (You can listen here on Apple podcasts or here on Spotify.) After nearly a century, the Academy Awards are finally recognizing this incredible work with their own category. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you back here next week.

Creatine — yes, the favorite of gym rats everywhere, a supplement many of us have taken ourselves — is a naturally occurring compound that is already found inside each person. Scientists have been studying creatine since the 1830s and, for more than a century, we have known that it was pivotal for producing energy in our muscles. 

That, as anybody who was alive in the ’90s may remember, is how creatine first exploded as a consumer product. Swedish researchers published influential research in 1992 demonstrating creatine supplementation’s effectiveness in improving stamina and recovery during the short bursts of physical exercise. It didn’t take long after that for creatine supplements to hit the shelves of drugstores and workout gyms nationwide. And it was popular. Not only was it cheap — a 10-ounce jar of creatine costs $17 on Amazon — but it was also an easy way for bodybuilders and exercise enthusiasts to improve their performance. Today, as many as one in four adults say they have used creatine; $400 million worth of it is sold in the US every year.

And this was a supplement that really worked: A 2018 meta-analysis of the available research concluded that creatine is “the most effective nutritional supplement available to athletes to increase high intensity exercise capacity and muscle mass during training.” Across years of studies, no dangerous side effects have been detected. 

But the most surprising use of creatine supplements is in a setting that could not be further from the image of jacked-up bodybuilders pumping iron: treating depression.

In the early 2000s, scientists established creatine’s importance not only for muscle use but also for brain function. The compound helps your brain to convert nutrients into energy and scientists concluded that poor metabolism could help to explain various psychiatric disorders, including depression. In layman’s terms, if your brain wasn’t processing energy efficiently, it could have these negative side effects. 

If that were true, it would follow that more creatine could improve a person’s brain metabolism and thereby ease their depression. 

A decade ago, the first clinical trials began testing whether creatine supplements improved depression among people who were also receiving antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy. The results have been impressive: A 2024 meta-review concluded that creatine had proven its effectiveness in supplementing those other treatments, leading people to feel better more quickly and be less likely to experience depression again.

Now comes a new study, out of India, suggesting creatine could be helpful in treating depression without antidepressants being involved — a preliminary but potentially important finding as we search for cheaper and easier ways to provide help to more people who need it.

A fascinating new creatine depression study in India

The study, published earlier this year, was tiny and flew under the radar: 100 participants, in Dehradun, a city of 800,000 in India’s far north. Lead researcher Nima Norbu Sherpa of Glasgow Caledonian University received a grant from an India-based charity, the Universal Human Rights and Social Development Association, to run the experiment.

The setting is telling: Part of creatine’s appeal in mental health treatment is not only its potential efficacy but also that it’s cheap and doesn’t require a professional clinician; patients can take it on their own. That made Dehradun, a developing city with a lot of low-income patients and relatively few mental health clinicians, a logical place to test whether creatine could improve people’s well-being without antidepressants, said Riccardo De Giorgi, a clinical lecturer in psychiatry at Oxford and co-author of the paper.

The 100 participants, recruited from the city and small surrounding villages, were split into two groups. Both groups took part in talk therapy sessions. One group also received 5 grams of creatine every day, while the other got a placebo.

After eight weeks, both groups were improving — cognitive behavioral therapy itself is, of course, a well-attested treatment for depression. But the patients who took creatine on top of their therapy were doing better still.

The participants answered a nine-question survey at the beginning of the study, which provided a one-number score of the severity of their depression symptoms. People in both groups started a little below 18 on average, indicating moderately severe depression. At the end of the study, the patients taking creatine reported a score of 5 on average, while the control group registered at 11. Eleven people who were taking creatine throughout the study reported going into remission, meaning they could effectively return to normal life; only five people taking placebos said the same. 

Both groups had about 20 people discontinue their treatment — not uncommon for people with depression, the authors noted. The reported side effects for people taking creatine were mild.

It is an eye-catching result, even as De Giorgi emphasized repeatedly that the findings were “incremental and preliminary.” The inevitably sensational nature of the finding — a bodybuilder supplement can help with depression? — warrants being clear and cautious in how we interpret the findings.

“Previous sensationalist messages in this research area, e.g., creatine, physical exercise, keto diet, have caused more harm to the science than benefit,’” De Giorgi told me over email.

For one, the high dropout rate is reason for skepticism about the precise size of creatine’s effect. More research that replicates the same results is needed before we can be confident that creatine plus therapy is a winning combination.

But it’s an area of research worth watching. Peter Attia, a physician who writes about longevity and health enhancement and was not involved with the study, wrote in covering the study’s findings that “since many people already use creatine as part of their supplement routine, it could be an easy addition for those looking to improve mental health without major lifestyle changes.” Its affordability and ubiquity could also make it appealing for people with fewer resources, like those who participated in the India study.

He did, however, also caution that more evidence would be necessary before we can figure out whether and how creatine fits into “the therapeutic toolbox.”

As we grapple with a global mental health crisis, we need all of the tools we can find. More than two-thirds of the world’s population can’t get access to conventional mental health treatments. If we really have an alternative as cheap and available as creatine, it could make a real difference.

President Donald Trump has been sending undocumented immigrants to a mega prison in El Salvador without due process. Most of these deportees have no criminal record, yet our government has condemned them to indefinite incarceration in an infamously inhumane penitentiary. 

In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration admits that its deportation order was unlawful. In 2019, a court had ruled that Abrego Garcia could not be sent to El Salvador, as he had a credible fear of being persecuted in that country. The White House attributed his deportation to an “administrative error.” 

The Supreme Court has ordered Trump to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, but the White House refuses to comply and has publicly vowed that Abrego Garcia is “never coming back.”

Some Democrats believe that their party must call attention to this lawless cruelty. Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen and four progressive House members have traveled to El Salvador in recent days to check on Abrego Garcia’s condition and advocate for his due process rights. 

But other Democrats fear their party is walking into a political trap. After all, voters are souring on Trump’s handling of trade and the economy, but still approve of his handling of immigration. Some Democratic strategists therefore think that Van Hollen and other progressive advocates for Abrego Garcia are doing the president a favor: By focusing on the plight of an undocumented immigrant — instead of the struggles of countless Americans suffering from Trump’s tariffs — they have increased the salience of his best issue and reinforced the narrative that Democrats care more about foreigners than about the American middle class.

As one strategist told CNN, “The impulse among lots of Democrats is to always crank the volume up to 11 and take advantage of whatever the easiest, most obvious photo opportunity is. In this case, you get a situation where you’re giving the White House and the Republicans a lot of images and visuals that they think are compelling for them.”

Some progressives have declared this argument morally bankrupt. But I don’t think that’s right. Democrats have a moral responsibility to defend both America’s constitutional order and its most vulnerable residents. It does not follow, however, that they have a moral duty to hold press events about Abrego Garcia’s case — even if such photo ops do nothing to abet his liberation, while doing much to boost Trump’s political standing. 

In my view, the argument that Democrats are doing more harm than good by taking a high-profile stand in favor of due process is not immoral, but simply mistaken. Van Hollen’s trip has plausibly benefited US residents unlawfully detained in El Salvador. And the political costs of such dissent are likely negligible, so long as Democrats keep their messaging about immigration disciplined and eventually shift their rhetorical focus to Trump’s economic mismanagement. 

The case for Democrats to dodge a high-profile fight over Trump’s deportations

So far as I can tell, no Democrat is arguing that the party should acquiesce to Trump’s lawless deportations. The concerned strategist who spoke with CNN stipulated that “Democrats should stand up for due process when asked about it.” 

Rather, the argument is that 1) the party should not go out of its way to elevate immigration as an issue, or invite the impression that the rights of undocumented immigrants are its chief concern, and 2) congressional delegations to El Salvador risk doing precisely that.  

The case for this position is fairly simple. Voters are much more supportive of Trump’s handling of immigration than of his economic management. In data journalist G. Elliott Morris’s aggregation of recent issue surveys, voters approve of Trump’s handling of immigration by 2.7 points, while disapproving of his approach to inflation and the cost of living by 21.8 points. 

Therefore, anything Democrats do to increase the salience of immigration plausibly aids Trump. What’s more, elevating Abrego Garcia’s cause above other issues could give voters the impression that Democrats are not prioritizing their own economic concerns. 

Or at least, this is what Republican strategists seem to believe. Following House progressives’ trip to El Salvador, National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) spokesperson Mike Marinella said in a statement, “House Democrats have proven they care more about illegal immigrant gang bangers than American families.” The NRCC proceeded to air digital ads against 25 swing-district Democrats, in which it offered to buy the representatives’ airfare to El Salvador if they promised to “livestream the whole thing and snap plenty of selfies with their MS-13 buddies.”

For those urging Democrats to embrace message discipline, focusing on the due process rights of the undocumented is a lose-lose proposition, accomplishing nothing of substance while damaging the party politically. In this view, Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador did not actually help Abrego Garcia, whose fate still lies with America’s court system and the White House. To the contrary, Democrats are effectively giving Trump an incentive to ship more undocumented immigrants to a foreign prison without due process. After all, the president wants his opponents to take high-profile stances in defense of the undocumented. If Democrats teach him that they will do precisely that — so long as he violates immigrants’ due process rights — then they will have made such violations more likely in the future, not less.

Meanwhile, this faction of wary strategists insist that their party has a genuine image problem. Yes, Trump’s tariffs are deeply unpopular. And as their economic impacts surface, the president’s trade policies are liable to become more salient, no matter what Democrats say or do. But thus far, the public’s declining confidence in Trump is not translating into rising confidence in the Democratic Party. 

Historically, Democrats always outperformed Republicans on the question of which party “cares more for the needs of people like you,” outpolling the GOP by 13 points on that score as recently as 2017. Yet in a Quinnipiac poll taken after Trump single-handedly engineered an economic crisis with his “Liberation Day” tariffs, the two parties are tied on that question.

What’s more, even as the public sours on Trump, the GOP remains more popular than the Democratic Party. In a new Pew Research survey, voters disapproved of Trump’s job performance by a 59 to 40 percent margin. Yet the Republican Party’s approval rating in that same survey was 5 points higher than the Democrats’, with only 38 percent of voters expressing support for the latter. 

Democrats have time to improve their image; the midterms are well over a year away. So some might wonder why the party should fret about increasing the salience of an unfavorable issue so far from Election Day. But there’s an argument that the party should be doing everything in its power to increase its popularity — and reduce Trump’s — right now. Businesses, universities, and various other civic institutions will need to decide in the coming weeks and months whether to comply with the president’s illiberal attempts to discipline their behavior. The weaker Trump appears to be, the less likely it will be that American civil society acquiesces to authoritarianism.

Thus, from this vantage, message discipline is a moral imperative. Centering Democratic messaging on Abrego Garcia’s case might help ambitious Democrats earn small-dollar donations and adoration among the party’s base. But it undermines effective opposition to Trump’s authoritarian regime. 

Why Democrats should learn to stop worrying and love standing up for due process

This argument is reasonable. But in my view, it understates the potential benefits of vigorous advocacy against Trump’s lawless deportations and overstates the political harms. 

On the substance, Democratic officials flying to El Salvador to check on Abrego Garcia’s condition could plausibly deter abuses against him and other immigrant detainees in that country. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele may be a reactionary aligned with Trump, but he is surely aware that the United States has a two-party system. His government therefore must give some thought to its relationship with a hypothetical future Democratic administration. Thus, by advocating so forcefully for US residents unlawfully imprisoned in El Salvador, the Democratic Party has given Bukele some incentive to, at a minimum, keep Abrego Garcia and others like him alive (something that his government routinely fails to do with its prisoners).

Meanwhile, bringing a measure of comfort to a long-time US resident unlawfully disappeared to a foreign prison is a clear moral good. In an interview with Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, Van Hollen said that Salvadoran authorities have not allowed Abrego Garcia to communicate with his family or his lawyers. Rather, they had kept him isolated from the entire outside world, until a US senator demanded a meeting with him. Only through Van Hollen’s intervention was Abrego Garcia’s wife able to send her greetings to him, or even confirm that her husband was still alive. If an elected official has the power to serve a constituent in this way, it seems worthwhile that they do so.

The prospect that Van Hollen might have effectively encouraged more unlawful deportations by taking this course of action — since Trump wants his opponents to do photo ops on behalf of undocumented immigrants — merits consideration. But it strikes me as far-fetched. One could just as easily posit that Democrats ducking this issue entirely would have emboldened Trump to ramp up unlawful deportations. Ultimately, I think the president’s ambitions on this front will be determined by the scope and persistence of the judiciary’s opposition, not by Democratic messaging.

It seems possible — perhaps, even likely — that Democrats loudly advocating for Abrego Garcia is politically suboptimal, relative to a monomaniacal focus on the economy. But so long as Democrats act strategically on other fronts, I think the political costs of taking a stand on due process are likely to be negligibly small, for at least five reasons:

First, as far as progressive immigration positions go, “The Trump administration should honor court orders and the due process rights of longtime US residents” is pretty safe territory. In March, a Reuters-Ipsos poll asked Americans whether Trump “should keep deporting people despite a court order to stop?” — they said no by a margin of 56 to 40 percent. And an Economist-YouGov poll released Wednesday found voters specifically agreeing that Trump should bring Abrego Garcia back by a 50 to 28 point margin.

If Democrats frame Abrego Garcia’s case as a question of Americans’ civil liberties — while reiterating their party’s commitment to enforcing immigration law and securing the border — they should be able to mitigate any political cost inherent to elevating this issue. And that has largely been Van Hollen’s message. As the senator argued at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday, “I keep saying I’m not vouching for Abrego Garcia. I’m vouching for his constitutional rights because all our rights are at stake.” 

Second, there does seem to be some scope for eroding Trump’s advantage on immigration. On March 1, polls showed voters approving of the president’s immigration policies by more than 10 points. Surveys taken in the last 10 days, by contrast, show that margin has fallen to 2.5 points. It is unclear whether Democrats’ messaging on the Abrego Garcia case had any impact on this decline. But given the timing, that possibility cannot be summarily dismissed

Third, some influential right-wingers endorse the Democratic position on Abrego Garcia. Last Thursday, pro-Trump podcaster Joe Rogan detailed his misgivings about the president’s violations of due process:

What if you are an enemy of, let’s not say any current president. Let’s pretend we got a new president, totally new guy in 2028, and this is a common practice now of just rounding up gang members with no due process and shipping them to El Salvador, “You’re a gang member.” “No, I’m not.” “Prove it.” “What? I got to go to court.” “No. No due process.”

Defending a principle mutually endorsed by Joe Rogan and the Roberts Court does not seem like the riskiest stand that Democrats could take.

Fourth, I’m not sure that the media’s coverage of this controversy looks all that different in the alternate dimension where Democrats voiced opposition to Trump’s actions when asked, but otherwise spoke exclusively about his failed economic policies. The president exiling US residents to a foreign prison — and refusing to attempt to repatriate one of them, in defiance of the Supreme Court — is a huge news story. This is a much more shocking and unprecedented event than the House GOP’s quest to cut Medicaid, even if the latter will ultimately inspire more voter backlash. 

In a world where Van Hollen and his House colleagues never go to El Salvador, the general subject of immigration might have received marginally less media attention over the past week. But I think the effect here is quite small. 

Fifth, Democratic officials are not speaking out on this entirely at their own direction. Their party’s base is understandably alarmed by the president’s lawlessness. Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost said he traveled to El Salvador because he had received “hundreds and hundreds” of emails and calls from his constituents demanding action on this issue. Thus, there might be some cost to Democratic fundraising and morale, were the party’s officials to uniformly avoid calling attention to the controversy. 

All this said, I think it’s true that the optimal political strategy for Democrats is to focus overwhelmingly on economic issues. Voters are more concerned with prices and economic growth than with due process. And Trump is most vulnerable on tariffs, Medicaid cuts, and his economic management more broadly.

I just don’t think that dedicating some time and energy to championing bedrock constitutional principles — 19 months before the midterm elections — is by itself a perilous indulgence. In any event, to this point, it has proven entirely compatible with driving down Trump’s approval rating, which has fallen by 7 points since February in Pew’s polling. 

Democrats need to find the economic equivalent of going to El Salvador

Going forward, Democrats do need to convey that their top concern is Americans’ living standards. If Trump moves ahead with anything resembling his current trade policy, his approval is likely to fall, irrespective of Democratic messaging. But the party needs to make sure that voters see it as an effective alternative on economic issues — one that cares more about the needs of people like them.

Throughout the US today, a large and growing number of small business owners, workers, and retirees are suffering as a direct result of Trump’s mindless economic policies. If congressional Republicans get their way, millions more will lose their health insurance as a result of Trump’s fiscal agenda. Democrats must find ways to elevate these stories. Van Hollen’s decision to go to El Salvador evinced some verve and creativity. His party must apply similar energy to the task of dramatizing Trump’s economic misgovernance and communicating their party’s vision for redressing it.

Clarification, April 25, 3:45 pm ET: This story originally described Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s status unclearly. He is a longtime US resident.