America’s midterm elections will probably be determined primarily by issues like affordability. But what is at stake goes far beyond the quotidian concerns that many voters are focused on.
The principles and strategies that over multiple generations have made the United States the world’s leading nation in effect are on the ballot, and these midterms mark a potential turning point.
Let’s focus on three pillars that explain the rise, strength and resilience of our nation.
First is education: The United States pioneered mass education in the 19th century and today operates great universities and research institutions that are among the nation’s crown jewels. These have given us an edge in the global economic competition. Yet President Trump, with the acquiescence of congressional Republicans, is vandalizing education, from Head Start for 4-year-olds living in poverty to elite universities researching new treatments for cancer.
Trump is trying to dismantle the Department of Education, cut student aid and slash support for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. His war on America’s leading universities is particularly alarming, for he has variously attempted to defund them, cancel their tax-exempt status and make it harder for foreign students to enroll.
“The U.S. is committing suicide,” Yasheng Huang, a professor at M.I.T., told me, referring to the Trumpian campaign to demonize higher education and hobble cutting-edge research.
Another source of American greatness that Trump is throttling is immigration. The United States gained immensely from successive waves of newcomers from around the world, often arriving destitute and without English (like my father in 1952) but lifting their families up over a generation or two. One reason we’re a global leader in science and technology is that we’ve been able to recruit the brightest minds and hardest workers from across the globe.
When I lived in China decades ago, I was an interviewer of applicants to Harvard, and one of the students I told the university it would be lucky to have was a brilliant young woman named Sofie Qiao. She was admitted and went on to earn a Ph.D. and become an American. Today she is a serial biotechnology entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, helping develop treatments for breast and prostate cancers and for mesothelioma. She is now helping save the lives of other Americans.
Under Trump, fewer of today’s Sofies are coming to America. The number of international students arriving in August 2025 for the fall semester dropped by almost one-fifth, and the number in August 2026 fell by another 12 percent.
A third pillar that has made America the world’s leading country is the bundle of norms that govern our politics, economics and society.
Until Trump came along, I believed it was laws and the Constitution that were the country’s primary guardrails, but as I’ve seen how Trump has bullied his way past Congress and the courts, I’ve come to think that norms are just as important in underpinning democracy and economic strength. I’m thinking of simple traditions — such as that presidents will honor election results, won’t persecute rivals and will refrain from starting reckless trade wars with, well, everyone.
Norms of self-restraint historically made the system work. Presidents did not try to crush law firms or universities, nor did their administrations mislead federal courts or send armed officers into cities, where they shot people. Presidents quarreled with allies but didn’t threaten to invade Greenland.
Trump has tried to pulverize those norms by vilifying immigrants, denigrating women and threatening to “annihilate” Iran. Just this month, he called a female federal judge a “crazed lunatic.”
“The vitriol is toxic,” says David Beasley, the former Republican governor of South Carolina, “and it is undeniably feeding into the hearts, minds and souls of Americans.”
Trump is attempting to establish what feels to me like a personality cult, putting his name on the Kennedy Center and his photo on national park passes and some passports; I’m reminded of Bangladesh under its last dictator, who had herself named “mother of humanity” and put her picture and her father’s everywhere. Other presidents redecorated; Trump tore down the East Wing of the White House, is building a ballroom and aims to construct a so-called Arc de Trump.
Then there’s the greed, on a new level altogether. Trump reaped at least $2.2 billion last year, in his first year back in the White House, much of it from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses, a Times analysis found. That’s more than $6 million per day. When Amazon reportedly paid $40 million to acquire the Melania Trump documentary, I recalled covering corruption in Indonesia in the 1990s, when the wife of the president, Madame Tien, was nicknamed Madame Tien Percent.
The mix of grandiosity, authoritarianism and sleaze dribbling out of the White House is polluting government, civil society and the economy. Having spent much of my journalistic career reporting in two-bit dictatorships, I see so much that is familiar; it’s heartbreaking to see this unfold in my own country.
Trump has worked to undermine the entire international system the United States created after World War II — for our benefit and the world’s — to promote peace, trade, prosperity and health. Ebola, poverty and Vladimir Putin are beneficiaries. Imagine if in 1943 President Franklin Roosevelt had abandoned Britain and switched to back the Third Reich; that is a bit like Trump’s seeming pivot from Ukraine to Russia.
We may not have reached bottom. A particularly dangerous step would be for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and dispatch troops to crush protests or seize ballot boxes. Asked about the Insurrection Act, Trump told Time magazine: “I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes.”
None of this is normal. We are betraying other countries but also our own history and culture. I always wondered what citizens of ancient Rome, a proud and sophisticated empire, thought when one of their crazy emperors came to power; now I have a glimmer of understanding.
“This is the greatest heist in the history of the world: stealing America,” the singer Bono said of what has unfolded. “Everything we love is on the line,” he told me.
So those are the stakes in this election: Will we accept the loss? Or will we try to get our nation back?
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