On a cool April morning at the height of Washington, DC’s always brief spring, the science fiction novelist Ray Nayler and I found ourselves in a staring contest with the world’s heaviest flying bird. We were standing at the fenceline of the Kori bustard exhibit at Washington’s National Zoo when the largest of the already enormous omnivores broke away from its flock at the rear of the enclosure and began stalking toward us. 

Gray and black and white with a parrying dagger for a beak, the Kori bustard resembled a heron that had taken up powerlifting. Approaching us and turning to the left, it stopped and grew still for a moment. Abruptly, it exploded. The thin salt-and-pepper feathers in its long neck puffed outward all at once, even as a wave seemed to run through the plumage of the wings folded across its back. Then it was still again. Without a sound it turned once more to the left and strode back to its fellows. 

Though we didn’t fully understand what we had seen, we still got the message, which was, at minimum, that the bird had a message for us. “It was engaging with us,” Nayler suggested later. We took the hint that it was probably telling us to go away and walked on. There were other birds to see.

Nayler and I had come to the National Zoo’s recently remodeled Bird House to talk about talking to animals. Or, more accurately, we had come to discuss his fiction, which often explores how humans can be good to one another by meditating on what we might learn about ourselves from our contact and communication with animals. 

In Nayler’s first novel, The Mountain in the Sea (2022), researchers in the near future struggle to parse the language of a species of especially intelligent octopuses that communicate in part through messages effectively written on the water in their own ink. He won a Hugo Award for his follow-up, The Tusks of Extinction (2024), in which an elephant researcher’s mind is uploaded into the brain of a genetically recreated wooly mammoth, so that she can help a herd of these resurrected animals learn to live together in an utterly transformed near future. 

Both books are characteristic of one of Nayler’s central preoccupations: the way that an organism’s biology shapes its approach to communication and social life. Now in his new novel Palaces of the Crow, Nayler has turned for the first time to historical fiction. In it, he tells the story of a group of resourceful teenagers attempting to survive in the woods beyond Vilnius during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the early 1940s. They are assisted by a flock of very special crows who protect and form relationships with the children, and who are, in turn, protected by them in a second narrative thread that takes place decades later. The crows guide the children through the woods, warning them of danger and helping them find shelter and food. 

Nayler draws extensively on research into crow behavior and cognition, ably capturing how, among other things, they raise their young and the way they grow almost completely still when thinking through a problem. Notably he does so without anthropomorphizing the birds; this is not the chatty, enchanted flock of some  Disney film. In one scene, a bird keeps a young woman on the right path not through grammatical cawing but by flying at her face and clawing at her skin when she goes astray. Despite their pronounced intelligence, they remain defiantly crow-like, never turning into little humans with wings in the way that science fiction aliens are sometimes indistinguishable from earthlings, except for their pastel skin.

This insistence that what makes animals fascinating is their distinctness is crucial to Nayler, whose books reflect a consistent belief that any true rapport begins in the recognition of shared difference, whether we are divided by language and culture or by the more intractable facts of biology. It’s a perspective that is all the more important at a time when the very technologies he writes about in his novels threaten to cut us off from the natural world.  “That’s enough to build empathy,” he told me of the way that animals like the Kori bustard attempt to address us. “Mutual attempts at understanding are enough. It doesn’t have to be understanding. It just has to be the desire to understand.”

Mutual aid and collective care

That belief in the value of merely trying to understand runs deep for Nayler. When he was in his early teens, his mother insisted that he volunteer at a Californian animal shelter, hoping it would help him cultivate compassion. This was, he said, “a terrible idea, because the animal shelters back then were all kill shelters” He was confronted every day, as many shelter workers still are, by the cruelty of humans who would abandon companions they no longer wanted to care for, leaving them to be euthanized by others. “But maybe that also made me interested in animals as beings, because you could really see them and their personalities in those cages,” he told me. 

As he was describing his experiences at the shelter, we came to another outdoor enclosure, a circular pen inhabited by two barred owls, still active in the morning light. One was efficiently demolishing the small body of a mouse — dinner, I suppose, on its night-shift schedule. As Nayler spoke, the owl craned back its head and swallowed the rest of the rodent’s body in a single go, letting the creature’s tail hang from its mouth for a moment before that, too, disappeared down its esophagus.

I was transfixed, but Nayler seemed less captivated by the feasting raptor than he was by many of the other birds we encountered over the course of the morning. Birds, he told me, citing the behavioral ecologist Antone Martinho-Truswell’s book The Parrot in the Mirror: How Evolving to be Like Birds Makes Us Human, tend to be much more peaceful with other birds than nonhuman primates are with one another. “They learned a long time before mammals did to live in these big, very peaceful groups and, and that’s that’s one of the things that they do that is a lot like us,” Nayler said. Crows may gather in murders, and they are not shy about eating other animals, but for the most part they look after each other.

Nayler is an admirer of the 19th- and 20th-century anarchist political philosopher and scientist Peter Kropotkin, whose 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which comes up regularly in Palaces of the Crow, clearly informs Nayler’s thinking about interspecies collaboration. For Kropotkin — a committed opponent of the view of nature as a brutal arena of individual competition — what mattered most was collaboration, which he took to be the real engine of evolution. The early chapters of Mutual Aid are populated with examples of animals helping one another, even in Siberia where Kropotkin conducted scientific surveys in his youth. In Kropotkin’s axiomatic phrase: “Life in societies is the most powerful weapon in the struggle for life.” It is a formulation that resonates implicitly through all of Nayler’s fiction. 

Thinking of Kropotkin, I found my attention shifting to the other owl in the cage, which kept its unflinching gaze on us as its companion ate, more placid than the Kori bustard had been but no less assured. I recalled something Nayler had said earlier about how, despite not growing up with any animals, he came to love them as a child when he began to get the impression that they were observing him. It’s a sentiment he lends to one character in Palaces of the Crow: “Every time I watch [the crows], trying to understand what they are doing, I find them watching me, trying to understand what I am doing.” For Nayler it is the shared struggle to understand others in their irreducible otherness that forms the basis of empathy — and the possibility of connection.

As the owl demonstrated to that mouse, interspecies communication isn’t always about mutual aid, of course, though even when relations are tenser, it can still benefit both parties. Nayler cited an example drawn from Jesper Hoffmeyer’s book Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs of what happens when a brown hare notices that it’s being stalked by a fox. Under ordinary circumstances, foxes are not fast enough to catch an alert hare, so when the latter notices that the former is approaching, it “will turn, stand up erect, and look at the fox and make eye contact with it,” Nayler said. Knowing that they will never catch their now-alert quarry, the foxes simply depart instead of attempting to give chase. Both animals save the energy they would have otherwise expended, while also avoiding the risk of unnecessary injury. As Nayler put it, “That’s a great example of cooperation in a competitive situation. It’s a little like a Christmas truce.”

Cities are for the crows

Nayler has had his own encounters with foxes. Not long ago, he told me, he and his 6-year-old daughter spotted one of them while they were walking in the woods. 

“I’m probably smarter than a fox, right?” his daughter suggested. 

“Let me ask you: Who is smarter in the forest?” he responded.

She thought about this for a moment. “Well, the fox is smarter in the forest, because I couldn’t live in a forest by myself for very long.”

“And who’s smarter in lots of different situations?” Nayler asked.

“That must be me,” she responded. “Because if the fox was out of the forest, it wouldn’t do very well.”

She had, as Nayler put it to me, stumbled across one of the things that makes humans special, our capacity for abstraction and hence for adaptation to diverse circumstances. That is also, as he discovered in his research for Palaces of the Crow, a defining characteristic of crows and their kin, who have proven able at adapting to us. “The edges of our societies are full of opportunities for them,” he told me. 

Not long ago, Nayler was exploring tide pools in California when a class of elementary school students mobbed the beach. After the children left, a flock of crows descended on the pools and began hungrily hunting along their edges. Knowing that crows normally keep their distance from the beaches, Nayler asked a ranger what the birds were up to. The crows, she said, know that “children aren’t very careful with their feet, and they step on snails. And so after the children leave, there’ll be a feast of snails. So they wait.” And then they dine, fed by the chaos we make.

This tension between human destruction and certain kinds of animal thriving resonates throughout Palaces of the Crow. Nayler’s curious and inventive crows engage in forms of sociality and even tool use that outstrip the already impressive capabilities of corvids as we know them today, but they are still the descendants of the carrion birds who make a “banquet” from Achilles’s fury in the Iliad’s opening lines. Palaces’ especially clever birds similarly thrive on the human debris of WWII’s especially brutal Eastern Front battlefields, even as they build and fortify their own homes on the outer edges of the conflict. “So much of what crows associate themselves with is damage that humans do to the animal environment,” Nayler told me. 

And yet where much of Palaces unfolds against a background of conflict and desperation, it is at its most fantastical and most hopeful when it strives to imagine something more like an economy of care that might arise between human and nonhuman animals. Nayler makes explicit the lessons that we can take from such engagements, lovingly imagining how humans might extend our capacities through the encounter with beings who see the world differently. As we were leaving the Bird House, he brought up the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” observing that it is too often misread as an argument that “we cannot know anything about how the world is perceived by someone with a different sensory apparatus.” On the contrary, he noted, Nagel concludes “that it is possible to approach this problem and not get there all the way, but to get part of the way with it.”

Likewise, in Nayler’s books as surely as in our conversation, telling stories about animals also seems to be a way to imagine a fragile path toward the thing we can approach but only asymptotically — their biologically bound lifeworlds. If his latest novel has a thesis, it can only be that caring for others — humans and nonhuman animals alike — in their specificity and their peculiarity is the purest font of strength. 

Palaces of the Crow is unflinching in its depiction of wartime brutality, antisemitism, and the arbitrariness of violence, but so, too, does it celebrate everything that is possible in spite of our own monstrosity. Late in the story, a few of the characters, now adults, reflect on why the crows who watched them so attentively also helped them survive. “There has never been a deeper reason necessary for cruelty,” one of them posits. “Why would a deeper reason be necessary for kindness?”

Captivity and captive attention

Zoos are strange places to contemplate kindness, of course. At their most valuable, they can be refuges for species that — unlike crows — can no longer thrive in the world that we’ve remade for our own comfort. But the reality of confinement is unavoidable; the Kori bustard we meet commands a vastly smaller range than the one it should call home, while the owl gazes down at us from a single tree when it should be free to hunt through an entire forest.

But as Nayler put it to me while we stood in a room that resounded with the calls of tropical birds, zoos are also spaces that give us the opportunity to spend time looking at animals for longer than we otherwise might — and often at animals we would never otherwise see. In the act of observing them, we should all become still and slow as crows trying to solve a puzzle, considering what we might have in common with them and recognizing that these strangers here are “worthy of our care and of our attention.”

Days after our visit to the Bird House, Nayler sent me an email. “One thing I keep remembering from our morning at the zoo is the little spoonbill watching us with its wise, gray, old-man face,” he wrote of one of the first birds that had caught our attention. In its quiet dignity, he explained, he saw “an acknowledgement that animals were our first teachers, helping us learn how to be in the world.” 

Nayler’s novels, too, aspire to convey something similar. A recognition, perhaps, that nature still has something to teach us, a lesson not just in morality, but also in generosity, a generosity that we must always be prepared to offer in kind.

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: President Donald Trump’s hand-picked arts commission is clearing the way for his building spree.

What happened? On Thursday, the Commission of Fine Arts signed off on Trump’s plans for a massive 250-foot-tall triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC, which critics warn would dwarf its surroundings and “fundamentally [alter] a meticulously preserved skyline.” 

Trump has said the arch, intended to mark America’s 250th anniversary, would also celebrate himself. 

What’s the context? The vote is another rubber stamp from a group eager to let Trump remodel DC as he sees fit: Earlier this year, the commission also approved Trump’s plan for a new ballroom on the site of the demolished East Wing of the White House and a commemorative gold coin bearing the president’s scowling face.

The panel’s eagerness is unsurprising, as all seven members were appointed by Trump earlier this year. The committee’s vice-chair, James McCrery II, was the original architect for Trump’s ballroom, while another member, Chamberlain Harris, currently works in the White House. 

Is it going to get built? We’ll see. The arch still needs to clear an additional Trump-friendly committee, which shouldn’t be an obstacle, but the Trump administration is also facing a lawsuit to stop the project from a group of Vietnam veterans.

The suit argues that the arch, which would be built on National Park Service land, also requires congressional approval. The administration, meanwhile, argues that it can rely on a 1924 report to authorize the arch, without having to go back to Congress in the present day.

What’s the big picture? Things like the arch and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — now being repainted with help from a Trump golf club manager — can feel secondary compared to Trump’s flagrant public graft and wars of choice, but they’re all part of the same story: a president and administration growing increasingly uninterested in public opinion.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, let’s start with a programming note: The Logoff will be off tomorrow and on Monday for the long weekend. I hope you have a lovely holiday! 

Now, some wonderfully good news from my colleague Dylan Scott: Scientists are finally making real progress toward treating pancreatic cancer after decades of failures. You can read his full story with a gift link here, and we’ll see you on Tuesday! 

In a family of killer diseases, pancreatic cancer has long been one of the scariest. It could grow undetected for years, and by the time most people knew something was wrong, their prognosis was grim. The vast majority of patients, nearly 90 percent, would die within the first five years of their diagnosis. Even as other cancers saw their mortality rates drop in recent years, pancreatic cancer’s death rate actually increased slightly from 1999 to 2020.

And despite their best efforts, scientists felt stuck. In the 1980s, they identified a gene, KRAS, that seemed to be pivotal to the uncontrolled cell growth that drove the disease’s development. But over and over again, most treatments in clinical trials failed. Dr. Anirban Maitra, director of NYU Langone’s Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center and a longtime pancreatic cancer researcher, told me that pharmaceutical companies came to regard pancreatic cancer as a “graveyard” for future drug development. Experts feared the gene was, in effect, “undruggable,” Maitra said.

But recent breakthroughs have brought what once seemed impossible within reach. A group of researchers is preparing to publish results from their clinical trial, already reported in the New York Times, that found a KRAS-targeting pill called daraxonrasib roughly doubled survival, from seven months to 13 on average, among a group of patients who had metastatic pancreatic cancer and had already tried chemotherapy.

“For the first time, there is some optimism in this disease,” Maitra told me. “Oncologists who have been treating this cancer for decades have always been so pessimistic about the fact that so many trials have failed. These patients, unfortunately, live for a few months and die. But now we finally have the foundation on which to build.”

Effectively treating pancreatic cancer — or even possibly, some day, curing it — will ultimately demand more than one successful clinical trial. It’ll require improving the full spectrum of care, which means identifying who is at risk, detecting the disease early, and producing even more effective treatments that can offer patients hope of many more years to live, not just more months.

We are getting closer to being able to diagnose and treat pancreatic cancer with remarkable precision. Here’s what it will take to get all the way there — and what everyone should know.

Doctors are getting better at figuring out who’s at risk

One major problem with pancreatic cancer is that your pancreas is buried deep in your abdomen. You could have cancer growing there for years with no symptoms. Improving the outlook starts with detecting it early — and that work begins with figuring out who is most at risk.

Many people, and even doctors, may not be aware of what to look out for, Maitra told me. There have been some high-profile deaths that temporarily put the disease in the public eye — actor Patrick Swayze, tech titan Steve Jobs — but it hasn’t been the focus of major awareness campaigns like breast or even more recently colon cancer. Pancreatic cancer accounts for about 3 percent of all cancer cases — but more than 8 percent of cancer deaths, about 39,000 every year.

Smoking, age, and obesity are all considered to be risk factors — but that is something pancreatic cancer shares with many other types of cancer. One unique risk factor is the sudden onset of adult diabetes, especially when accompanied by weight loss, Maitra said.

“If you’re like a 65-year-old and you’re presenting with new-onset diabetes and you just lost 10 pounds, I would be very worried about that person. I’d make sure I get some tests done on that person,” Maitra said. “Awareness is so important.” He clarified that most new-onset diabetes in an adult is just that, and isn’t a reason to panic. Still, he said, the connection is something more people and health care providers should be aware of. 

New artificial intelligence programs could also help doctors identify who is most at risk. Hospitals are starting to experiment with scanning electronic health records or genetic samples, Maitra said, and singling out patients who may be at higher risk based on their medical history or the presence of certain genes that are associated with a greater chance of developing pancreatic cancer (including the breast cancer-causing gene BRCA2).

Clinicians have better tools for detecting pancreatic cancer early

Once doctors identify people who are at risk, they can deploy a host of new surveillance tools to look for pancreatic cancer’s development.

Blood tests, commonly referred to as liquid biopsies, have received a lot of investment, as well as media attention. Some companies aspire to create a test that could search for multiple cancers from one sample, but in the meantime, single-disease versions have shown promising if not quite ironclad results — including for pancreatic cancer. One blood test developed by Oregon Health & Science University had an 85 percent accuracy rate in diagnosing early-stage pancreatic cancer when it was used in tandem with an existing antigen test.

Once again, AI programs could help doctors get ahead of the disease. A recent study found that an AI program developed by Mayo Clinic researchers and used to examine routine abdominal CT imaging scans could spot pancreatic cancer at nearly double the detection rate of two human radiologists, finding the disease up to three years before a normal clinical diagnosis would occur.

“This is where AI can really help because they can pick out subtle patterns that the human eye can miss,” Maitra said.

Scientists are developing better pancreatic cancer treatments

Once doctors find the pancreatic cancer, they can treat it — and their options are getting better there too. 

Maitra said the best treatment remains surgical removal plus therapy — and the smaller the tumor, the better, which is why early detection is so essential. It also prevents the cancer from having more time to metastasize and spread.

Even after surgery, the cancer can come back. But new vaccines are showing promise in preventing that kind of recurrence; small preliminary studies have identified multiple vaccine candidates that allowed patients to live longer without a relapse and survive overall longer than the historical norms for pancreatic cancer patients.

And for the people facing the most dire scenario, when their cancer cannot be removed by surgery, that’s where the new treatments targeting KRAS — the gene that drives pancreatic cancer’s growth — could be a game-changer. 

To dramatically simplify the scientific breakthrough here, KRAS has been described by researchers as a “greasy ball” that for a long time no drug molecules were able to attach themselves to. As the Times reported, Kevan Shokat, a scientist at the University of California San Francisco, figured out how to make a molecule attach to KRAS in 2013; around the same time, Greg Verdine at Harvard University was working on a molecular “glue” that could disable KRAS. The new drugs build on this research to deliver a compound to the gene that can slow the out-of-control cell growth that causes pancreatic cancer.

But we should think of daraxonrasib, which seems likely to receive FDA approval, as the “ground floor” for this class of drugs, Maitra told me. Many people still do not respond to the treatment or experience severe side effects. The drug also stops working after a period of time, as people’s bodies develop a resistance to it. But other drugs that combine different molecules in an attempt to extend the treatment’s effectiveness are already in the pipeline. 

In the future, pancreatic cancer treatment could end up becoming a combination of all of the above: early detection, surgical removal to get the bulk of a tumor out, with vaccines and/or KRAS-based treatments used to prevent the cancer from coming back. And people who can’t undergo surgery for some reason might try a combination of vaccines and KRAS-targeting drugs.

The work is far from finished. But for the first time, after decades of disappointments, there is real reason for hope.

Donald Trump’s self-dealing and profiteering from high office, a longtime subtheme of his presidency, has just become its defining story.

Consider the following list of news and revelations, all from roughly the past week:

1. Trump created a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” supervised solely by him, as part of a “settlement” for a bogus lawsuit against the IRS.
2. As part of the settlement, Trump has formally immunized himself, his family, and his business interests from IRS audits.
3. Trump made 3,700 stock trades in the first quarter this year, with trades often happening just before a major policy decision affecting the companies in his trades. 
4. The Trump family has made a staggering $1.55 billion from its crypto vehicle World Liberty Financial since late 2024. 

It is not hard to see the problem with this behavior. Most people intuitively know it’s bad for politicians to abuse their positions of power for profit.

Yet what Trump is doing is something far more than “ordinary” corruption. He is, very intentionally, attempting to transform the very operating logic of the American political system: to replace a political order structured by rule of law to one where major decisions ultimately come down to whether you have the personal favor of the president. 

This is a fundamental transformation — one far more sweeping than widely appreciated. Once you understand it, you understand not just what Trump truly wants, but the deepest ways in which his presidency could affect us all.

The breaking of American order

In their book Violence and Social Orders, the political scientists Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast sort advanced human societies into roughly two buckets: the “natural state” and the “open access state.”

The natural state, so-called because it was the dominant one for most of recorded history, operates on behalf of self-serving elites. These elite groups aim, first and foremost, at profiting via rent-seeking — which is to say, using their control over power and resources to extract money from others. Think European nobles owning land in perpetuity, taking tributary fees from peasants living under their rule, and ensuring these extractive rights were passed to their children.

In the natural state, the entire social order is bent toward preserving this unequal relation. Justice is not a matter of impartial laws, but rather dispensations handed out to friends or favored groups.

“The essence of a natural state is personal relationships,” North et al. write. “The legal system cannot enforce individual rights if every individual is different, if every relationship between two individuals depends uniquely on their identity within the dominant coalition.”

The “open access order,” by contrast, is an arrangement defined by formal neutrality. Access to power and privilege are not determined primarily by personal relationships or inherited advantages, but from a set of legal rules that apply to everyone. While there are still wealthy, rent-seeking elites, membership in that class is not static; legal equality allows people to challenge entrenched interests and outcompete them in the marketplace. The politics of personal relationships is replaced by an impersonal politics where neutral rules apply to all, regardless of class or identity.

This is, at least on paper, the basic framework for a modern liberal democracy like the United States.

While one can point to any number of ways in which contemporary America falls short of the open access ideal, from declining social mobility to continued race-based inequality, the system is still qualitatively different from natural states like those of feudal Europe or the Jim Crow South — or even modern developing nations marked by weak rule of law and endemic corruption. 

One way to look at the Trump administration is as a project of reversing the American transition from natural state to open access order. He is trying to erode the impersonal rules that govern the way the state is supposed to work, and replace them with a logic of favoritism based on personal access to the president.

Traditional corruption, in the sense of literally profiting from the presidency, is the most obvious example. He has bent his office’s immense powers toward personal profit in extraordinarily blatant ways — treating the country in much the same way that a medieval noble treated his fiefdom.

Trump’s personalist mission is equally obvious when you look at his approach to the Justice Department. His successful effort to strip its traditional independence and turn it into a tool for pursuing his interests — including prosecuting his political enemies on flimsy pretexts — represents the replacement of an open access justice system with one more closely resembling that of a natural state.

You can see natural state logic at work in his approach to taxation, where countries and companies get tariff exemptions if they manage to personally curry favor with Trump. You can see it in his approach to regulation, where Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr is encouraged to try and censor comedians who mock the president. You can see it is in his management of the US military, where he has deputized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to fire generals deemed politically unreliable (these generally happen to be women or racial minorities). You can see it in his foreign policy, a “neo-royalist” mixing of personal and public that puts the interests of ruling cliques ahead of public writ large. You can even see it in something as marginal as the Department of Transportation, where Secretary Sean Duffy used his office as an excuse to go on a bizarre family road trip funded by direct donations from Toyota and Boeing.

Many of these policies are authoritarian, in the sense that they attack basic rights and freedoms that allow for fair and healthy political competition. But all of them, even the ones that might seem like “ordinary” corruption, work to erode the essential impersonal logic of American governance — and, in its place, stand up a new system of government by personal access and rent-seeking.

The dangers of the American natural state

Obviously, Trump himself doesn’t think about his objective in such abstract terms. But the North et al. framework is nonetheless useful — as it helps us see the furthest reaching implications of both his corruption and his broader personalization of the government. 

What’s happening is probably more subtle than a full-scale overthrow of the old order; the Trump administration appears too incompetent, too haphazard to effect something so grandiose. Rather, his rule is blending the two systems — integrating natural state logic into institutions still nominally built around open-access principles.

The real-world implications of this shift are likely to be profound.

For the next few years, everyone in corporate America and the legal world knows that the best way to get what you want from the White House isn’t to make a persuasive case on substantive or even political grounds. Instead, it is to bribe and flatter the people in charge of making the decision, most of all the president. If you can make him richer, or even feel important, you will become exponentially more likely to get that payout or regulation you might otherwise have lobbied for through normal channels.

This breaks the incentive structure that underpins open access societies. In other countries that have gone on similar trajectories, such as Hungary, these specific kinds of corruption have led to economic disaster. Growth stagnates, as companies succeed based on connections rather than profits. Public services degrade, as they are administered not for public benefit but to make the administrators wealthy. Even the arts and culture suffer.

In one passage, North et al. describe the political differences between open access orders and natural states in some uncomfortably familiar terms:

In the open access orders, legislation provides details about how laws are administered; for example, that a person recently unemployed is to receive benefits of a certain amount for a certain duration. In these states, impartial, rule-of-law courts impose penalties on the executive for failing to implement the laws according to the provisions specified in the law. Not so in the typical natural state. Instead, corrupt courts do not constrain the executive; moreover, the legislature rarely — and rationally — undertakes the job of writing detailed provisions to constrain the executive, leaving the executive great freedom to allocate the funds as desired. Evidence from Latin America suggests that social programs serve immediate political goals, such as reelection, rather than their intended purposes.

One shouldn’t expect Trump to, say, ensure that only Republicans get Social Security payments: The open access logic of the US welfare state remains too strong for that. 

But you can see versions of it already playing out where Trump has more discretion, like turning disaster relief into a political favor doled out to red states. And the passages about legislatures abandoning their jobs and courts deferring to Trump ring far too true.

We should expect more of this in the years to come, even if Trump experiences a major defeat in the 2026 midterms.

Trump wants to rule without constraint, to turn the presidency into an all-consuming office where he can decide on policy purely based on whim and personal interest. In doing so, he is breaking a fundamental part of the American social order — one that underpins nearly every element of how our society functions. It is impossible to predict all of the likely consequences, but there is little doubt that they will be profound.