I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”
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As part of the Tangle ethos, we solicit reader questions about politics and our work every day in our newsletter.
And every few months, so many questions pile up on the back end that we decide to answer a bunch of them at once in a members-only reader mailbag. Today is one of those days. We think this is a healthy exercise that not only allows us to critically examine some of our own writing, but also provides readers with more perspectives that help us fulfill our core mission.
If you want to read more about what we’re building here, two weeks ago we wrote about the whole point of Tangle.
As always, we want to thank those of you who write in with thoughtful questions or raise challenging criticisms that help us improve. We hope you enjoy today’s mailbag!
Q: My personal favorite Tangle piece you've ever done is "Seeing Ghosts," which I actually re-read last night to lower the temperature for myself. But how do we know when the ghosts are real? I get how tired and overblown the Hitler comparisons are, but there is plenty of room for innovation on human and civil rights violations. What would a political candidate that could undermine American democracy or its protection of citizens to bring America its own Tiananmen Square, or Holocaust, or some other, fresh horror, look like? Would there be warning signs? And how would they be different from the warning signs Trump is currently showing us?
— Jacob from Boston, MA
Isaac Saul, Executive Editor: First of all, thanks for highlighting that piece. It’s one of my favorites I’ve ever written, and one I’m thinking about expanding on down the road.
Second, let me give you one example of why I might chuckle at relating the Holocaust or Tiananmen Square to Donald Trump. As I was thinking about this question, I got a push notification from The Wall Street Journal that a well-respected federal judge had just ordered Trump to reinstate thousands of fired workers. The lawsuit was brought by a group representing tens of thousands of federal employees across six agencies fired by the DOGE crew and Russell Vought. They sued, and they won.
I don’t know what will happen next. Maybe Trump will challenge this ruling up to the Supreme Court. Maybe he will comply and let it be. I suspect the former. But to explain my point in a quippy way: Some people are worried about Trump becoming the next Hitler when he can’t even fire federal workers. I really don’t mean to be glib, but this is genuinely what I think when I see this stuff.
The truth is I just have a lot of trust in our systems — in our courts, our people, and, yes, even our Congress (to the degree they are good at jamming each other up). One of my most conservative or conservative-coded views (I increasingly struggle to know what is conservative or liberal anymore) is a general reverence for our founding fathers and a continued wonder at how much their theories of government have continued to apply to our modern era in a way that preserves democracy. Thankfully, I think the worst instincts of Trump, the people in his orbit, and past presidents like him are all checked pretty well by the system we have. It’s truly remarkable.
At the same time, it’s not impossible to conceive of things becoming increasingly more dangerous. Genuine danger signs for me would include these five things:
1) The DOJ or FBI actually attempting to prosecute or imprison Joe Biden or prominent Democratic leaders, especially those potentially running for office in 2028, presuming the charges aren’t accompanied by material evidence (for instance, Democrats like Bob Menendez and Eric Adams deserved to be charged). Trump’s supporters would of course suggest this already happened to Trump, but my view is that Trump at least deserved to be charged for election interference and the theft of classified documents, given just the publicly available information (though I would have reserved judgment on his guilt until the cases were complete).
2) Using the military, especially with excessive force, against peaceful protesters. I do not mean clearing out a single small protest in Washington, D.C., but actually deploying soldiers against demonstrators who were assembling peacefully against some action he took in office.
3) The eroding or ending of free and fair elections. I’m fairly certain Democrats will win back the House in 2026, and I think they have a good shot at the White House in 2028. If we’ve learned anything these last 20 years, it's that Americans love change, and I don’t see the MAGA movement maintaining its force after Trump leaves office. But if Republicans meaningfully erode or end free elections through legislation in the next two years — or begin to seriously entertain the prospect of Trump 2028 — we’ll call it out early and often. I don’t just mean gerrymandering, which is a bipartisan crisis, or voter ID laws, which I support — I mean an actual electoral restructuring that prohibits Democrats or Democratic groups from being able to participate in elections.
4) Democrats folding. By folding, I mean complete submission to Trump and MAGA. A defining characteristic of authoritarian regimes is their utter lack of any meaningful opposition. For instance, countries like North Korea or Russia have no real opposition party. Every election is a sham. In countries like Hungary, opposition exists, but it has been totally defanged and severely weakened. The United States still has a genuine and capable opposition to Trump — and Republicans represented a genuine and capable opposition to Biden. I don’t love the duopoly, but that makes me much less nervous about any kind of authoritarian takeover.
5) Genuinely restricting or chilling speech. Good examples might be banning newsrooms from reporting on the White House because they don’t use the White House’s preferred language, powerful figures in the administration threatening newsrooms with jail, or the arrest and deportation of legal permanent U.S. residents for speech. In case you are not catching my drift… yes, this one is actually already happening. And as I’ve said, I think it’s one of the most disturbing developments yet.
Q: You’ve said before that Trump won with the majority of votes (not true, it was a plurality), that he has a positive approval rating (not true, it’s under 50%), and that he has a mandate on crime and immigration. How can he possibly have a mandate if he was barely elected?
— Tori from Los Gatos, CA
Ari Weitzman, Managing Editor: Let’s take each of these in order.
You’re right, Trump did not win a majority of votes, he won a plurality. We got this wrong in January and can only blame it on conflating “winning the popular vote” with “winning a majority of votes.” That was just sloppy on our part.
As for the approval rating, it’s actually a misconception that a positive approval rating is the same as having over 50% approval. Instead, a positive approval rating is one where more people approve than disapprove (disregarding those who are unsure or have no opinion). Still, depending on when you’re looking at Trump’s approval rating and who was doing the polling, our claim was arguably wrong. We put a good deal of trust in the polling from Pew Research Center, and in their first approval rating poll of Trump’s current term in February, the president was indeed underwater at a net -4. We also put a lot of trust in Gallup, and they’ve also yet to show Trump with a positive approval rating so far in his term. However, RealClearPolitics — whom we should probably trust the most, based on their success in the 2024 election — had Trump polling at over 50% approval until February.
I want to briefly pause here to address these first two fact checks. It’s fair to ask us to be careful and accurate, and we never want to put a word wrong in anything we publish. This isn’t to make excuses, and it isn’t to minimize the pushback, but I do want to say that the thrust of the claims we’ve been making about Trump’s popularity is still true: A great deal of people liked what Trump sold them in the campaign, and they now believe he’s delivering on what he was selling.
As for the “mandate” question, I don’t think there’s a more subjective statement you can make in electoral politics. However, we haven’t said that President Trump was given a blanket mandate in a sweeping election (but it’s not like he was “barely elected,” either — winning the popular vote and running the table in swing states is a pretty decisive victory). We’ve only ever made specific and qualified claims in two areas. 1) That if he has a mandate on anything, it’s immigration. 2) That his efforts to fire federal workers and inspectors general could be seen as part of a mandate to reorganize the federal government.
Q: I am struggling with how to be 'brave' enough to have a conversation with someone who has a different opinion or reality from mine. I am referring to a person whose conversational style is to be loudly and verbally dominant with no intention of listening to the thoughts of a conversational partner who thinks differently. President Trump's interaction with Zelensky when Zelensky couldn't get a word in edgewise during the recent 'negotiation' is an example. Do you have any suggestions that would help to turn the conversation around so it could end without damaging a relationship?
— Mary from Vermont
Ari Weitzman, Managing Editor: I appreciate the courage it takes to ask this question! And I also appreciate that sticking up for your own point of view is much harder than it sounds, especially when you have to consider maintaining a healthy relationship with the person you’re arguing with (or, as the case may be, who is arguing with you). For myself, I’ve found these strategies to be really helpful when talking with someone who is bellicose:
1) Ask questions. More than anything else, when you’re conversing with someone who likes to do the talking, prodding them with genuine curiosity can help you get your disagreements across quickly and tactfully. These can range from the benign (Why do you think that?) to the borderline confrontational (Wouldn’t that contradict your earlier point?).
2) Don’t do it all at once. One of the most helpful pieces of advice I ever received was to be okay leaving a discussion on uncertainty, or on the promise to think more about something and come back to it later. If you start planting seeds of doubt in another person’s mind and get them to think, not only will they come back to you with a more considered viewpoint, but they’ll learn that you’re a person who makes them think! As long as you can do that without being obnoxious, people will tend to like talking with you. But be forewarned: You have to be willing to do the same. Conversation is a two-way street. Even if this person has been sending all the traffic your way, if you’re going to end a conversation by asking them to really consider a different point of view, you’ve got to be willing to do the same.
3) Ask yourself if it’s worth it. Sadly, some people are going to require more time and patience to connect with than it’s worth, and it may be the right strategy to placate them and accept surface-level interactions with them for the foreseeable future. Ten years ago, I was moving to another state and had to sell my car somewhat quickly. I met someone at a party who had a friend who was looking to buy, and I was all too happy to meet him at a notary to receive the money and sign the title over. I was less happy when I had to sit in my former car for twenty minutes while he drove me home. The whole way, he was explaining to me how the bluish tint in some headlights was caused by those cars moving more quickly towards us and compacting the amplitude on the headlights’ wavelengths to make them appear blue. I tried to push back, but he told me that he read it in a book and asked, “Are you calling the science wrong?” It was 15 more minutes to my apartment. For those 15 minutes, I just let him wrongly explain blueshifts and the Doppler effect — he was only robbing himself of understanding.
4) Ask yourself if it’s possible. If the person you’re speaking to is always emotionally charged, then you might not be able to get through to them. You could try changing the subject or setting boundaries on what you’re willing to discuss, but a lot of people (sadly) aren’t interested in hearing other opinions. As a friend of mine once wisely told me, “You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.”
Q: Have a question that has been swirling around in my mind for a bit, but curious, with the 5-year anniversary of the start of the COVID lockdowns in the US next week, whether there has been any sort of post-mortem or overarching nation-wide review of what the best practices were for the COVID response? With each of the 50 States having been more or less free to determine when they shut down, for how long they shut down, how they shut down, and responsible for their own response tactics, it seems like we have a bit of a natural experiment on our hands as to what method(s) were best. Did an early shut down, but early opening work best? Did Florida's "open for business" policy lead to being further ahead economically now relative to other states? Were "blue" states or "red" states better off? There is always a threat of another pandemic around the corner and it feels pertinent to have some lessons learned ready for future generations.
—Tyler from Lexington, KY
Will Kaback, Senior Editor: Several studies have examined the best and worst practices from the U.S. Covid-19 response. Most have found that social distancing and lockdowns were effective measures to reduce the spread of Covid in non-healthcare, community-based settings. Other papers found that handwashing, mask-wearing, physical distancing, and limiting gatherings were associated with reductions in the incidence of Covid.
However, one 2024 paper, which assessed 94 scientific reviews of public health and social measures during the pandemic, found “low- to very low-certainty” evidence that handwashing, mask-wearing, physical distancing, and school and business closures were effective (though they did not claim that these measures were ineffective either).
Additionally, we’re continuing to learn about the social and emotional effects of pandemic response measures. In particular, school closures had serious negative impacts on children’s learning and socialization; it may be many more years before we grasp the full significance of these setbacks, but the data we already have is alarming.
Covid health outcomes had some links to politics. A 2023 study in The Lancet found, “The political affiliation of the state governor was not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID-19 death rates, but worse COVID-19 outcomes were associated with the proportion of a state's voters who voted for the 2020 Republican presidential candidate.” The paper’s authors suggest that lower vaccination rates among Republican voters were primarily responsible for this disparity.
Separately, the Council on Foreign Relations published a thorough review of state-level responses to the pandemic, ranking each state (and Washington, D.C.) on their Covid response based on health outcomes, economic and educational outcomes, and a weighted combination of the two. Overall, New Hampshire, Washington, Maine, Hawaii, and Vermont scored the highest in this assessment, while New Mexico, Nevada, Washington, D.C., Wyoming, and Alaska scored the lowest. Notably, the states that kept deaths and infections the lowest were roughly split between states with Democratic governors (six) and Republican governors (four). We recommend reading the piece in full to get a full sense of the methodology and results, but the key takeaway was that the best-performing states did not have to sacrifice health outcomes for economic or educational ones, and vice versa.
Q: Much of the start of his new administration feels well planned and thought out. Isn't much of what Trump has done so far right in line with Project 2025? If not the people behind Project 2025, who are the planners and thinkers that have gotten this administration off to such a fast start? Thanks in advance for any thoughts.
— John from Rockville, MD
