Donald Trump has recently taken to saying that we have the “hottest” country in the world. But the markets say otherwise. “US stocks eclipsed by rest of world in 2025 as investors diversify,” reports the Financial Times this morning. “Chinese AI advances and the effects of Donald Trump’s trade war have boosted markets outside the US.” The article quotes the chief executive of Jupiter Asset Management, Matthew Beesley, describing his investment strategy: “anything but America.” Happy Monday.

My Grandma and the Hot Stove

by Andrew Egger

This year, I went back to my home in the Midwest for Christmas, visiting my parents and friends in St. Louis and both sides of my extended family in Iowa. My family and childhood community are quite conservative and full of Trump voters. But I’ve never really understood the Sturm und Drang this seems to cause so many families—I’ve talked to the people I grew up around plenty about my work and my views, and it’s never been a bad or mean-spirited conversation.

This year’s conversations weren’t any worse in that department, but they were definitely different. For the first time, I was struck by just how many ways all the current unpleasantness is actively changing their lives for the worse.

It started when I noticed a Post-It note on my grandparents’ fridge. “I donated $10 to Trump to get $2000 tariff check,” it read. “At the end it said I am charged to give $10 monthly. I did not!”

When I asked my grandma about it, she showed me her phone. Her texts, it turns out, are absolutely clogged with the scuzziest GOP fundraising solicitations imaginable. “Before I sign your name on your Tariff Check, is Patricia spelled right?” “Patricia, it’s Trump & I’m heartbroken. I don’t have verification to claim your MAGA Golden Eagle Award.” “Can’t believe you said NO to Trump’s $5k Dividend Check. Are you sure that’s your answer?”

Not all these texts are from the actual Trump campaign, of course. These sorts of tactics have been adopted by a whole host of candidates and PACs in the MAGAsphere. (The group she was snookered into donating to happened to be a leadership PAC for Texas Rep. Jake Ellzey.)

When she asked me if she’d been scammed, my first instinct was to say “no”—this wasn’t some fake group pretending to be a GOP politician’s PAC, after all, but the real thing. But in a simpler, truer sense, it was a scam from top to bottom. There are no tariff checks to claim, and if there were, you wouldn’t have to give money to Rep. Ellzey or anybody else to get them.

The whole thing was infuriating, and there was nothing to be done about it. Her phone number is out there, circulating among various GOP fundraising lists. No matter how many times she tries to unsubscribe, there’s always another text, another “check,” another disappointed message from “Trump.”

Later, an uncle asked me what I knew about a guy named Nick Fuentes. He’d learned that a younger relative was a fan of the young neo-Nazi podcaster. And that this relative had begun to consider himself a white nationalist, too. And that he was full of alarming talk about how white people have to learn to see themselves as victims of the system. My uncle was shocked and unnerved by all this and seemed to be asking me how to get through to a person who had fallen so far into that particular rabbit hole. We talked for a while about it, but I hardly knew what to say.

That’s an underappreciated feature of our political age: It’s not just that things are bad, it’s that they’re relentlessly so. You can’t turn it off. You can’t escape it. You can’t distinguish between real and fake, good and bad, normal and abnormal. The stuff keeps piling up. When I mentioned the Fuentes conversation to one of my sisters, who currently attends a conservative Christian college, she said she’d seen an unnerving uptick in casual antisemitism among her own peers.

Maybe none of this should have surprised me. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years writing about the damage done by Donald Trump, his politics, and his strange cultural movement not only to the country in general but to the people who support him in particular. It’s clearer than ever to me that that damage is extensive and pervasive and will outlast him by years. But I can’t abide by the schadenfreude-laden viewpoint that anyone who ever pulled a lever for Trump deserves whatever’s coming to them as a result. The fact is that this political moment is immiserating good people. I don’t blame them for that. I blame him.

A Year of U.S. Failure in Ukraine

by Cathy Young

Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Mar-a-Lago on Sunday to discuss a Russia–Ukraine peace deal—preceded, like his last visit