Donald Trump has a remarkably binary view of the world: Walls are good; migrants are bad. Tariffs are good; taxes are bad. People who love Trump are good; those who don’t are bad. And women are hot—or not.
Trump cares about everyone’s looks, of course. But as a former owner of the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA pageants, he is a self-proclaimed expert on women’s beauty. He spent multiple appearances on The Howard Stern Show rating women on a numeric scale.

Tami McGraw used to be so allergic to red meat that even fumes from cooking might send her into anaphylactic shock. She couldn’t fry sausages for her family. She couldn’t go to cookouts with friends. Once, she passed out driving home with her son after accidentally inhaling fumes while volunteering at the school cafeteria. “That’s the closest I came to dying,” she told me. Every whiff of sizzling meat, every journey out of the house came spring-loaded with danger.

Christophe Ena / AP
The teams of France and Argentina compete during the blind-football gold-medal match in Paris on the last day of the 2024 Paralympic Games. After reaching a 1–1 draw in regular time, France went on to win the game and the medal in a penalty shootout.

Donald Trump says something crazy or vicious almost every time he speaks. It’s his nature, but it’s also a political strategy. The flow of half-demented, half-depraved talk energizes those who enjoy it—and exhausts those who are horrified by it.
The mainstream media cannot report every outrageous remark, or they would do nothing else. Even those shocking comments that do get reported tend to  make just a blip.

When the critic Janet Malcolm set aside a biography of Sylvia Plath and began reading a memoir about the author instead, she felt as if she “had been freed from prison.” The writing in the biography, Bitter Fame, by Anne Stevenson, had been “by far the most intelligent” of the published Plath biographies at the time, but the conventions of the form, its “hushed cautiousness, the solemn weighing of ‘evidence,’” could stifle even the most effervescent talent.

Donald Trump’s far-right worldview has a lot of critics, many of them Republicans, who argue that Ronald Reagan would “roll over” or “turn over” in his grave if he could see what is happening to his old party. The Trump-dominated, populist-nationalist GOP is certainly very different from the conservative party that Reagan led in the 1980s, and Trump is a very different figure, in both outlook and personality, from Reagan.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained.