James' World 2

Hmmmm … The Trump Administration Hurting people because they hate ObamaCare!

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Millions of Americans who depend on Obamacare for their health insurance face another double-digit price increase next year, adding to the financial toll that has already driven millions of others to drop coverage since last year.

The price increases largely reflect higher medical costs across the country. But they also are a signal of the latest blow to Obamacare under the Trump administration, which has overseen the expiration of tax credits that helped Americans pay for coverage and has erected new barriers to enrollment in an effort to root out what it describes as widespread fraud.

The average price of health insurance in the Obamacare marketplaces will rise by 13 percent next year, according to an analysis on Friday by KFF, the health research group.

The Trump administration on Friday published new prices for 2027 in 30 states with markets managed by the federal government. Using that data and state figures, KFF calculated the increase nationwide.

The large premium increases for Obamacare plans are similar to changes expected in other health insurance markets, though slightly higher. Reports by several consulting firms projected that premiums for employer plans, which cover around 150 million people, could go up by about 10 percent in 2027. Premiums for federal workers are increasing by more than 10 percent.

Public opinion polls have shown that the cost of health care has been among voters’ top economic concerns going into the midterm elections on Tuesday. In a recent poll from KFF, about 60 percent of registered voters said they were worried about being able to afford health care for themselves and their families.

Kate and Mark Dwyer, a couple in rural Oregon, have been wrestling with whether their budget can handle another annual increase. They had already shifted to the cheapest available Obamacare plan, leaving them on the hook for thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs.

Next year, the least expensive plan will increase their costs by more than $500 a month, to nearly $3,000, Ms. Dwyer said. That amounts to more than a third of her earnings at a nonprofit.

“We are looking at going without next year,” Ms. Dwyer said. “There is no middle ground. It’s either $3,000 or nothing.”

In an apparent nod to such concerns, the Trump administration sent many Obamacare customers $500 checks this month to offset their insurance premiums — a one-time payment just before the election.

Across the private and public health sectors, the increases have been driven by rising hospital prices, high payments under a consumer protection law that changed how some doctors are compensated, and the growing use of artificial intelligence in doctors’ offices, according to benefits consultants and industry analysts. Several large employers also pointed to a rising bill for expensive specialty prescriptions, like cancer drugs and GLP-1 medicines.

The Trump administration released the numbers quietly on Friday afternoon as a data file. A government fact sheet about open enrollment published shortly afterward did not mention the premium increase, but noted that three-quarters of Obamacare customers with subsidies can still find plans for less than $50 a month.

Open enrollment and shopping for plans begins Sunday, just two days before the midterm elections, in which affordability and the higher prices for groceries, gasoline and health care have been a central issue.Although the federal government reported that 19.2 million people were enrolled in Obamacare coverage early this year, more recent estimates indicate a lower total.

Roughly 10 percent are older consumers who earned more than $63,840, a group largely composed of self-employed workers, such as chiropractors, dentists, ranchers and farmers, as well as many early retirees. Many already faced premium increases exceeding $1,000 a month in 2026.

“This is a really small number of people,” said Cynthia Cox, the director of KFF’s program on the Affordable Care Act. “But these people are getting hit the hardest by rising health care costs, and they don’t get any help.”

The average cost for the cheapest bronze plan with a high deductible will be about $700 a month for a 50-year-old single person, according to Ms. Cox.

Obamacare customers who earn less than $64,000 a year make up most of the people enrolled in the program and will still benefit from income-based subsidies and will not have to pay higher out-of-pocket premium costs next year. For those people, taxpayer dollars will cover the extra cost.

But many with strained household budgets are struggling to pay their portion since their Obamacare premiums went up in 2026, and many have been forced to switch to plans with higher deductibles.

In 2026, premiums rose by an average of 26 percent, with the cost for all consumers more than doubling on average for the same plan, after the Republican-led Congress decided to let temporary federal subsidies expire.

Recent estimates from KFF, based on insurance filings with regulators, suggest that enrollment fell by nearly five million people, as of June.

A recent large survey released by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation and research group that supports the Affordable Care Act, found the uninsured rate among working-age adults had risen since two years ago.

Democrats forced a record 43-day government shutdown last year, as they tried to leverage government funding on an extension of the subsidies or health care tax credits. Aides to the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from New York, have said he will schedule a vote to restore the extra subsidies in the first days of the next Congress if Democrats win a majority in the midterm elections.

The data on premium costs were published on Friday just before the start of next year’s enrollment period, which runs from Nov. 1 to Jan. 15. People in most states who want to buy Obamacare insurance for next year need to sign up during that period. (A handful of states keep the enrollment period open longer.)

Increases for consumers who renew their current plans could be higher than the average increase.

“We really do encourage people to shop and compare” among the plans they are offered, said Anthony Wright, the executive director for Families USA, a left-leaning consumer advocacy group. The average price increase can mask tremendous variation in the cost of a policy, he said.

To lower the cost of coverage, many people switched from more comprehensive plans to so-called bronze coverage this year, which often offers lower premiums and much higher deductibles. The average A.C.A. deductible rose to a record high of nearly $4,000 in 2026. As they consider plans for next year, those people may no longer be able to avoid a price increase by switching to a skimpier plan.

Caroline Pearson, the executive director at the Peterson Center on Healthcare, a group focused on lowering health care spending, said she had been watching the market closely for signs of instability, given last year’s big price shock. But she described the newly published increase as “consistent with the rate increases we are expecting” for employers and their workers.

But few people covered by an employer health plan are exposed to the full cost of insurance like unsubsidized Obamacare consumers. Employers pick up more than half of the tab for the typical person in work-based coverage, and such insurance premiums are deductible from people’s taxes.

Administration officials attribute some of that drop-off to its efforts to reduce fraudulent enrollment, arguing that brokers had enrolled fake consumers in subsidized coverage.

In September, Vice President JD Vance announced the government had canceled coverage that he said brokers arranged for about 750,000 people whose records lacked Social Security numbers and who had not used or contacted their health insurer through August. He and other administration officials argued there was evidence of additional fraud.

But the Commonwealth survey suggests that some people who have dropped Obamacare coverage may now be going without any health insurance.

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The average price of health insurance in the Obamacare marketplaces will rise by 13 percent next year. Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

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It is a windy day in London when I meet physicist Sabrina Pasterski on the sidelines of a conference – which turns out to be a problem. We had agreed to chat in a tent, but the canvas is flapping so loudly that we can barely hear each other. In the end, we retreat to a nearby church hall.

But then again, maybe this ad-hoc venue is strangely fitting. As a choir sings tunefully about heaven a few doors down, Pasterski tells me that her work is all about the celestial sphere – and has something in common with the Christian concept of the Holy Trinity, the idea that God is three persons in one.

“Duality is almost like the Trinity,” Pasterski tells me, referring to one of the principles at the core of her work. “I’m not religious, but I was raised Catholic. It’s the sense that there can be different manifestations of something equivalent.”

It isn’t the introduction I expected to Pasterski’s research, a subtle and complex idea known as celestial holography, which seeks to show how two separate descriptions in physics can be equivalent. But given that she is often called “the next Einstein” in the press in reference to her fierce intellect, I am excited to try to wrap my mind around her work, regardless of the venue.

It helps to start with the two key pillars of physics. On the one hand, there is general relativity, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, the key ingredient of which is a smoothly curving fabric of space-time. On the other, quantum theory wonderfully explains the world of particles and envisages reality as not smooth at all, but instead coming in chunks with discrete amounts of energy. Suffice it to say that both are fundamentally incompatible.

The dearest wish of many a physicist would be to find a way to unify the two, and so produce a theory of quantum gravity. That is what Juan Maldacena was attempting back in 1997 when he proposed an exciting kind of duality.

Imagine a three-dimensional cylinder of space-time with a two-dimensional surface. Maldacena constructed a model like this where, inside the volume of the cylinder, you have a description of space, time, particles, gravity – the lot – but the surface is purely quantum. But here was the crucial point: he showed that the two descriptions of the model – the surface and the internal volume – were equivalent. They were a duality, two inter-translatable descriptions of the same thing. Put another way, it suggested that the universe was like a hologram: that the reality we live in could merely be a projection of a simpler, lower-dimensional foundation.

All very exciting. The only trouble was that Maldacena’s idea – which came to be known as the AdS/CFT correspondence – worked for only a specific type of curved space-time. And that isn’t the same as the “flat” kind we really live in. Inevitably, physicists have wondered if the trick could be made to work for the real universe. It has been devilishly hard to pull off, but that is what celestial holography promises.

Meeting Pasterski, it is obvious she has a formidable brain. She speaks so quickly, it’s as if time is running out. And as she speaks, she gesticulates, energy levels sky-high as sharp gel nails scratch the air between us. My impression is that she processes information faster than the average person. I begin by asking how she feels about being labelled the next Einstein? “It’s bullshit,” she says, smiling. “I don’t think I deserve it, first of all. The positive I try to turn it into now is that hype gets you a platform.”

This energy appears to have driven her since she was a child. At a young age, she told her parents she wanted a flying broomstick; in response, they got her flying lessons. At 12, she began to build her own plane from a kit, and by 16, she could fly it. She dreamed of working for Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic or SpaceX, viewing the founders of those companies as heroes. As a young adult, her version of rebellion was to then turn against this idea – “you’re basically just helping them build their thing” – and decide to major not in aerospace engineering, but in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology instead.

I wonder if these tech founders are still her heroes? She will always appreciate Jeff Bezos, she says. He encouraged her as a child, penning a “nice letter”. But when it comes to Elon Musk, she is more circumspect, going back and forth. “A lot more people have seen [his] flaws, and yet he has done a lot of cool stuff,” she says. But the fact that “someone like him can do all that cool shit”, she says, raises the question, “Why can’t we?”

Pasterski began to lay some of the mathematical groundwork for celestial holography during her PhD with Andrew Strominger at Harvard University in around 2018, but she now works at the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada. Pasterski’s hypothesis starts with particle collisions. She imagines the debris spraying off in all directions and that each piece of quantum shrapnel can be marked as a point on a sphere infinitely far away, along with information such as energy. Pasterski thinks of this sphere as being essentially like the night sky. “You see the stars, you think of them as being infinitely far away, like a sphere around you,” she says. “That 2D sphere is the celestial sphere.”

Instead of wrestling with the mess in the middle, celestial holography reconstructs the entire universe from the pattern written around the edge. You can think of it like a new, improved version of Maldacena’s idea, except with a sphere that, this time, corresponds to the real space we live in. At least, almost. “I also cheat,” admits Pasterski. We know that real space is expanding ever-faster, but hers isn’t.

Over the past few years, Pasterski has been developing ways to translate between the boundary of the sphere and real space. Initially, the focus was on modelling how single particles behave, but she and Justin Kulp at Stony Brook University in New York have recently taken the big step of showing how to do this for multiple particles.

She has also been exploring the concept of entanglement, the mysterious quantum process in which two particles can be connected so that if you measure one, you can immediately infer something about its partner – even if they are very far apart. In AdS/CFT, physicists have shown that entanglement between quantum particles at the boundary can directly produce the fuller dimensional world we experience. In celestial holography, things are more complicated. “That’s really well understood in AdS/CFT,” says Pasterski. “It’s harder to generalise to flat space.”

One reason it’s so tricky is that it is hard to keep the boundary part of celestial holography free of gravity – it isn’t a neat wall of a box or a cylinder like it is in Maldacena’s theory, it is a sphere infinitely far away. This makes the mathematics messier. But Pasterski and her colleagues have made a start in working it out, in particular, the connection between the entanglement present on the boundary of the sphere and the geometry of flat space-time. In the models they studied, the flat-space region was associated with reduced entanglement in the boundary compared with what you get when you use AdS/CFT.

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Gabriela Secara/Perimeter Institute

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Key Points

• Your body may be better able to handle carbs early in the day, but fruit can fit anytime.
• Pair fruit with protein, fat and fiber to reduce any blood sugar spikes.
• Moving your body after eating fruit can help with better blood sugar.

If you have diabetes, you may have wondered whether eating an apple at breakfast is better for your blood sugar than enjoying one after dinner. The short answer is that fruit consumed earlier in the day may offer some metabolic advantages, but most experts say there’s no universally best time to eat fruit.

“Research suggests our bodies are generally better at handling carbohydrates earlier in the day, when insulin sensitivity tends to be higher,” says Erin Palinski-Wade, RD, CDCES. “But that doesn’t mean you need to stop eating fruit after a certain time. I tell my patients that what matters more is how much fruit you’re eating, what you’re pairing it with, and your overall eating pattern,” she concludes.

That flexibility matters, especially when you consider that only about 12% of U.S. adults meet fruit intake recommendations.1 Rather than worrying about the clock, let’s look at how to make fruit work for your blood sugar.

Why Earlier in the Day May Be Best for Eating Fruit

Adding fruit to an earlier meal or snack, such as breakfast or lunch, is a reasonable place to start if you want to support your blood sugar while still enjoying your favorite fruits. Research suggests that your body’s ability to process glucose changes throughout the day, with carbs generally better tolerated earlier than later.

Consider the following reasons why enjoying fruit earlier in the day, especially as part of a balanced meal or snack, may be helpful.

1. Your Body May Handle Carbohydrates Better Earlier in the Day

Your body’s internal clock does more than tell you when to wake up and get sleepy. It also regulates hormones and metabolic processes involved in digestion and glucose control. Insulin sensitivity, or the degree to which your cells respond to insulin, varies throughout the day.

Research suggests that glucose tolerance is generally better earlier in the day than during the biological evening and night. That means the same carbohydrate-containing meal may produce a different blood sugar response depending on when you eat it.2 This is one reason that adding strawberries to your oatmeal in the morning or enjoying an apple with lunch may be a useful strategy for some people with diabetes.

But don’t mistake this general advice for a hard-and-fast rule. Your sleep schedule, work hours, medications and individual glucose patterns play a big role when deciding how your body responds to a nutritional change. For example, if you’re eating a bowl of berries after dinner and your blood sugar is within target range in the mornings, you don’t necessarily need to change anything.

2. It’s an Opportunity to Pair Fruit with Other Blood Sugar–Friendly Foods

Whole fruit naturally contains carbohydrates, including natural sugars. Fruit also provides fiber, water, vitamins, minerals and other beneficial plant compounds. Eating it alongside protein, healthy fats and additional fiber can make a snack more satisfying and change how quickly the meal is digested.3

“Enjoying fruit as part of a balanced meal, rather than eating a large portion on its own, can be a simple way to help minimize blood sugar spikes,” Palinski-Wade says. For example, consider the difference between eating an apple by itself and pairing apple slices with peanut butter. Or compare a handful of berries to eating them with a bowl of plain Greek yogurt and chopped nuts. You’ll get fruit either way, but the paired options also supply protein and fat. If you notice that fruit by itself leaves you hungry shortly afterward or produces a larger glucose rise than you’d like, try pairing it with another food.

3. You Are More Likely to Move After Eating Fruit Earlier in the Day

Physical activity is another piece of the blood sugar puzzle. After breakfast, you’re likely heading into a day of errands, work, walking the dog or chasing after your kids. After a late-night snack, you may be settling into the couch or bed for the night. That difference in activity matters for blood glucose.

When you move, your muscles pull glucose from your bloodstream to use for energy. This helps your body manage the carbohydrates you eat, including the natural sugars in fruit. “If your morning routine includes any form of exercise, whether a quick walk around the block or a strength session, you can expect a smaller glucose spike from any carbohydrates you’re eating, including fruit,” says Kelsey Kunik, RD. “Even a 10-minute brisk walk after eating breakfast or a snack can improve your blood sugar, as it becomes easier for your muscles to draw glucose out of the bloodstream.”4

Eating fruit earlier in the day may give you more opportunities to move afterward, whether that means taking a walk after breakfast, doing a few body-weight squats between meetings or strolling around the grocery store. These small bursts of activity can add up, even if you’re not fitting in a huge workout later.

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American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence.

A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia A.I. chips to China. And now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset, funneling information to Beijing.

But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive.

For years, Washington has worked to deny China the technology needed to match or surpass the United States in the intense global competition for superiority in artificial intelligence. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump’s, set off alarms at the White House.

Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. Mr. Trump has been wary of disrupting Nvidia’s chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China.

This account is based on interviews with people briefed on the surveillance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the findings are drawn from classified intelligence, as well as other officials and industry executives and analysts.

American officials already suspected that Ms. Huang was helping China evade constraints on its ability to gain access to advanced A.I. chips.

But the revelation that she was feeding information directly to Beijing raised more troubling possibilities, including that Mr. Huang had insights into Mr. Trump’s thinking on an issue of vital importance to both nations, one likely to come up when the president visits China next month. And it left questions about whether she could be gleaning information about Nvidia, which as much as any company accounts for the lead the United States has maintained in developing cutting-edge A.I. models.

Mr. Huang has not received a defensive briefing, warnings sometimes given to Americans who are being targeted by foreign intelligence services, people briefed on the surveillance said.

The surveillance of Ms. Huang continues, they said, and companies that have been affiliated with her continued this year to purchase Nvidia chips.

Nvidia said the company that employed Ms. Huang, Megaspeed, was like any other regional customer and that it had previously investigated and debunked claims the Singaporean company was smuggling chips to China. John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia, said: “Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a C.E.O.’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.”

Nvidia is “confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know,” Mr. Rizzo said. Customers like Megaspeed, he added, “receive ordinary business information — not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets — and zero information relevant to national security.”

The White House, the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency all declined to comment. In a statement to The New York Times, Megaspeed said that its “current leadership” takes the matter “extremely seriously and is committed to getting to the facts behind these allegations.” It added that “outside counsel has been retained to conduct a thorough internal investigation and has notified the U.S. government that we are fully committed to cooperating.”

Ms. Huang did not respond to requests for comment. It is not clear how closely she is still connected to Megaspeed. A person familiar with Megaspeed’s operations said that Ms. Huang had become less active in the company in the wake of the American investigations.

Asked about the American conclusion that Ms. Huang has been collecting intelligence on behalf of Beijing, Liu Chang, the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said the United States was pursuing a campaign of “groundless smears and slanders” against China.

When Mr. Trump was initially briefed on the intelligence last year, U.S. officials did not believe the Nvidia executive knew that Ms. Huang was gathering information for the Chinese. It is unclear whether intelligence officials have since updated their assessment, but some senior officials inside the Trump administration doubt that Mr. Huang could have remained unaware of what they had concluded was her intelligence-gathering role for China.

Questions about whether Megaspeed was providing A.I. chips to China became public through articles published last year by The New York Times and Bloomberg News.

Mr. Huang has successfully lobbied the administration during Mr. Trump’s second term to loosen regulations on artificial intelligence companies and roll back tighter restrictions on the sales of Nvidia’s chips to China. He also negotiated a deal with Mr. Trump that allowed the U.S. government to take a 25 percent stake of certain Nvidia chips that the government allows to be sold to China.

The close relationship between the president and Mr. Huang has impeded efforts to clamp down on Nvidia’s chip sales abroad, current and former U.S. officials said. They described some investigations and proposed trade sanctions involving China or Nvidia as having ground to a halt within the Commerce Department, the agency in charge of regulating chip exports.Nvidia has said that it complies with the law and that there is no evidence of its chips being smuggled to China. Mr. Rizzo said China’s government has “blocked U.S. AI chips, protecting its own industry.”

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Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, is influential at the White House on technology policy and has developed a close relationship with President Trump. Credit…Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times

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American football can be brutal. Scientists have long known that the hits, tackles and other collisions that are central to the sport come with health risks, but what these impacts do to the brain has been less clear. What we do know is that many footballers have died with brains that have shown evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease associated with symptoms such as mood swings and dementia. But because a diagnosis requires that investigators look for damage in a person’s brain after they die, it’s unclear just how common CTE is among current or former athletes.

But now, in a study published in JAMA Network Open, an analysis of medical records from thousands of deceased former NFL players—including hundreds who donated their brains to science—estimates that about 75 percent of these players likely died with CTE.

“No other environmental or occupational exposure ever studied is known to have increased dementia risk at death by that amount,” says Yorghos Tripodis, senior author of the paper and a professor of biostatistics at Boston University.

The study is based on records of 2,362 former NFL players who died between 2008 and 2023 and played in the league for an average of five years. Among those who donated their brains—almost 400 players—a stunning 93.5 percent had CTE. Signs of CTE in the brain can include atrophy, or tissue wasting, as well as clusters of tau protein—a symptom that is also linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

The high incidence of CTE in those donors may reflect the sample itself: people who donate their brains to science tend to have more severe behavioral symptoms, Tripodis says. That could skew the dataset, potentially making CTE rates appear artificially high.

To better estimate how common CTE might have been across all 2,362 former players in the study, Tripodis and his colleagues analyzed the medical records of donors and nondonors. The team found that people with cognitive symptoms were about five times more likely to donate their brain. Given that, the researchers recalculated their incidence estimate to find that some three in four football players in the study likely had CTE.

For comparison, among the general population, fewer than 1 percent of brains in community-based brain banks show signs of CTE, Tripodis says.

The study only includes NFL players who had died, and it remains difficult, if not impossible, to diagnose CTE in living players. It is hard to say what the risk to NFL players today is, Tripodis says. The NFL has also taken steps to mitigate the risk of head injuries.

The records may also be incomplete or imprecise. For instance, symptoms of CTE such as dementia may not be listed on death records, Tripodis says. And even if dementia is listed, it can have other—even multiple—causes.

This study is “the best attempt so far to correct for selection bias in CTE brain bank data,” says Russell Lonser, a professor in neurological surgery at the Ohio State University, who was not involved in the study. But “it is an estimate from a model and should be read that way.”

“Without similar men who never played contact sports, we can’t tell how much of the pathology or dementia comes from football,” Lonser says. “The 75 percent includes any CTE pathology, even early changes that may never have caused symptoms.”

To better understand how football increases the risks of CTE, Lonser says, you’d need to study players, with and without symptoms, over time, along with conducting brain analyses and including a comparison group of people who had no exposure to head impacts. “Until that work is done, we won’t know how common CTE really is or what, specifically, it means for players.”

Still, Tripodis hopes the findings will prove useful for families who have been affected by CTE and will inform current and future players of the risks involved in the sport.

“CTE is a preventable disease. We find, in study after study, that the more blows to the head over your lifetime, the higher the risk of CTE,” Tripodis says. “If you reduce exposure to repetitive head impacts, then you reduce the risk of CTE.”

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When I first started my parenting journey, I thought the most important skills my kids learned were the alphabet, sharing their spaces, or cleaning up after themselves. But as my five kids grew, I realized there’s another skill that deserves a spot on that list: knowing what to say—and confidently. And it doesn’t just come naturally.

Experts say that the right words can empower a child to ask for help, set a healthy boundary, or even avoid becoming the unwilling owner of the classroom pet over the weekend. And it turns out confidence doesn’t magically appear with age. It grows and strengthens with practice. Here are some of the key phrases experts say your kids should know how to say as they navigate life.

“I don’t know what this means,” or, “I need help”

As kids grow, their knowledge grows with them. But admitting they don’t know something? That can be hard (even for adults). Don’t underestimate the importance of knowing how to admit they don’t know or understand something.

“It is very important for the kid to find the confidence to say this, and have the self-awareness and self-esteem, that it is ok to not understand instructions,” says Sid Khurana, M.D., a board-certified adult, child, and adolescent psychiatrist at Psychiatry Connection. “And it is okay to ask a person to clarify.”

Try it: Provide your kids the language to ask when they don’t know. Practice phrases to use like “I don’t get it,” “Can you tell me more about this part,” or “What does this mean?” Of course, reacting with patience to questions goes a long way too.

“I can figure this out”

While we might be tempted to want to fix or navigate our children’s problems, giving them the tools to believe in themselves is essential.

“Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen that when children are consistently treated as capable and resourceful, they begin to see themselves that way too,” explains Jennifer Walker, R.N., B.S.N., and founder of Moms on Call, an online parenting resource based in Georgia. “And over time, those messages become their own inner voice.”

Walker says parents can help teach that resiliency even as young as toddlerhood by reinforcing a positive, encouraging inner voice with statements like “you’ll be great that” or “you’ll figure it out.”

“As parents, we are often the first voice of hope and encouragement our children hear,” she says. “When they hear messages like these from an early age, they begin to identify with accomplishment, perseverance, and problem-solving.”

Try it: Do you do this for yourself as an adult? If so, verbalize how you do it with kids, such as vocalizing your self-talk when dealing with a complicated problem or work crisis, or even just in a traffic jam. If not, it’s a great time to learn with your kids. You can even teach them to say, “I can take this one step at a time and figure this out. The first step is….”

“I am feeling…”

Depending on your child, feelings can feel overwhelming or complicated. And for young children, knowing how to put their feelings into words might be scary. But experts say it’s important for parents to encourage a dialogue around what your child is feeling, even if there aren’t perfect words for it.

“The ability to express our feelings is the cornerstone of mental health and well-being,” says Lakiesha K. Oliver, L.C.P.C., Director of Mental Health and Wellness at Mingo Health Solutions in Las Vegas. “When children know they are safe to express how they are feeling, we normalize the range of emotions and open pathways to healthy coping, emotional management, and resolution.”

Additionally, don’t avoid helping kids navigate or acknowledge tougher feelings. “It’s very important for kids to learn how to recognize their negative feelings and know it is ok and actually better to express these, rather than push them down, which can then lead to explosive outbursts,” Dr. Khurana says.

Try it: Even as toddlers, we can help our kids get their emotions up and out of their bodies. Explicitly teaching ways they can and should express sadness, anger, frustration, and more means less throwing your most breakable glass in a fit, and more stomping around saying “I’m mad!”

“Can you look at this?”

As kids grow, involvement with technology evolves. And giving them key phrases to support them is important to keeping them safe on the internet.

“Whether a child opens a phishing text, accepts a weird follow request, chats with someone they don’t know, or accidentally forwards a spam link, their first instinct is to delete the evidence out of shame or fear of device confiscation,” says Jim Festante, executive director at Health-e-Habits, a digital wellness organization out of Los Angeles. But he says it’s important that mentors step alongside to fix the security breach without threats and discuss how to be proactive in the future.

When it comes to technology, he says it’s important to teach kids to step away. “Middle and high school group chats operate 24/7, creating massive anxiety for kids who fear missing out or waking up to 300 messages and a shifted social dynamic,” he says. Modeling how to set a personal boundary shows them the importance of prioritizing their own focus and space.

Try it: Share stories about times you did something embarrassing or accidental online such as hitting reply all to the whole company, or accidentally posting a picture that wasn’t what you intended. This will normalize the imperfections of interacting with the digital world. In addition, give them specific sentence starters for how to ask for your help online, such as “I saw something weird and don’t know what it is.”

“I matter”

Two simple words that pack a powerful punch, no matter the age. Teaching a child to say “I matter” isn’t about raising their ego. Instead, it’s about building a foundation. Research shows that nearly 40% of U.S. teens report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. The research has also found that young people who feel connected, supported, and valued are more resilient and less likely to struggle with serious mental health challenges.

“The fact that there is no other person exactly like them is a testament to their individual importance,” says Oliver. “This means, their voice, body safety, appearance, gifts, and talents all mean something.”

Try it: At the dinner table, talk about times each of you mattered to someone else today. Get your example ready—it’s not as easy as you think at first. Before long, your kids will be scanning for ways to notice and vocalize that they mattered. One of my kids once answered this with, “I let the dog out.” Gotta start somewhere, I guess.

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Israelis turned out in huge numbers on Tuesday to choose their next government. But with exit polls suggesting no clear winner, it could take weeks, months or longer to determine who will be prime minister.

The exit polls showed that the right-wing alliance of the incumbent prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the opposition bloc led by a former military chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot, were nearly even, with neither in a firm position to form a government. Most votes were expected to be counted by Wednesday, though it could take longer to reach a final tally.

In Israel’s parliamentary democracy, voters choose a party or alliance, and the leader of the party with the greatest number of seats in the 120-member parliament, or Knesset, does not automatically become prime minister. Forming a government could take lengthy negotiations among the various factions — and if those fail, the country could face another election.

Here’s what to know.

What happened on Election Day?

Turnout nationally was 77.7 percent when the polls closed, according to Israel’s Central Elections Committee, the highest since 1999.

Both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Eisenkot struck triumphant notes in speeches to supporters. Mr. Eisenkot declared that “the public opted for change,” while Mr. Netanyahu said that his party, Likud, had emerged with the most seats and called for “a strong right-wing government.”Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up about 20 percent of the population, voted in large numbers with the stated desire to oust the far right. Exit polls pointed to a strong showing by Arab parties, putting them in a position to play a possibly decisive role in forming a government. Mansour Abbas, the leader of Raam, an Islamist party, told a television interviewer on Tuesday night that the turnout showed that “frustration and despair” in Israel’s Arab society had “turned to hope.”

How are votes counted?

Israel’s electoral system uses nationwide proportional representation. Each voter casts a ballot for a list of candidates affiliated with one or more parties or slates. Each list receives the number of Knesset seats proportionate to its share of the national vote, so long as it got at least 3.25 percent of valid votes. About 10 parties are expected to clear that threshold.

How is a government formed?

No single party has ever won a majority on its own in Israel. That means parties have to negotiate to forge coalitions that can reach a majority in the Knesset of at least 61 lawmakers.

Within seven days of the announcement of the official election results, Israel’s president meets with elected representatives from the parliamentary factions. He can take recommendations and is not obligated to select a potential prime minister from the party that won the most votes. He may instead determine that another leader is more likely to be able to form a coalition that can win a vote of confidence in the Knesset.

The absence of a clear winner in Tuesday’s election could leave the president, Isaac Herzog, facing a difficult choice over whom to ask to form a government.

Once the president decides, that candidate has 28 days to negotiate with other factions. A 14-day extension to the deadline can be requested.

If that effort fails, the president can select another candidate, who also has 28 days to try to form a government but has no option to extend. If the second attempt fails, a majority of Knesset members can ask the president to have a third candidate try. That person would be granted 14 days to form a government, and if that fails, new elections are announced.

Technically, the law allows for a minority government if the relative majority supporting it is larger than the minority opposing. Mr. Eisenkot has floated that possibility.

Historically, it has taken about 20 to 100 days to form a government, according to the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

Who will likely lead Israel?

The initial exit polls do not always give an accurate sense of the final results, so it may be some time before the picture becomes clear. For example, exit polls do not reflect the votes of hundreds of thousands of Israelis who cast ballots at special polling stations, including on military bases and in hospitals, prisons and embassies abroad.

In the 2022 election, those votes tended to favor Mr. Netanyahu and his allies.

What the exit polls do suggest, however, is that neither of the main coalitions — the far-right bloc led by Mr. Netanyahu and the center-right alliance led by Mr. Eisenkot — is likely to reach a majority, meaning they would have to negotiate with smaller players and possibly have to make significant compromises.

Two Arab parties were projected to win as many as 18 seats in the Knesset, potentially making their support crucial to assembling a government. But Mr. Netanyahu has in effect ruled out including them in the coalition. Mr. Eisenkot and his partners have also balked at the prospect.

Some of Mr. Netanyahu’s allies have floated a unity government with Mr. Eisenkot and other centrists that could keep him in power. But that would carry a heavy political cost for Mr. Eisenkot, who has said Mr. Netanyahu is unfit to lead.

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The incumbent prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu

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It’s a cruel twist. Just as we become more concerned about our appearance, our faces start to erupt in great red spots. Pimples cause anguish for many teenagers and can persist into adulthood too. But now two companies are developing vaccines that they hope will revolutionise the treatment of acne. Is an end to the misery at hand?

The main idea behind this new approach is that acne is caused by the immune system overreacting to proteins released by skin bacteria. Triggering the body to produce antibodies against these proteins should block this process and prevent – or at least reduce – acne. Pharma giant Sanofi is preparing for trials in the US and Canada of an mRNA vaccine targeting at least one bacterial protein, while US start-up Armora Biosciences is focusing on a different protein.

Better treatments for acne are certainly needed. “Acne causes a significant emotional burden,” says Tomasz Zastawny at Armora. “It can lead to the development of depression, social isolation and other psychological outcomes as well.”

It has been known for decades that acne is linked to the presence of a bacterium called Cutibacterium acnes, which thrives deep in hair follicles where there is little oxygen. But C. acnes is the most common skin bacterium, present on just about everybody – including those that don’t have acne – so there’s a lot more to it.

One factor is the surge in hormones during puberty, which increases the production of fatty substances in the skin, affecting bacterial growth. But not everyone gets pimply during adolescence, so there seem to be genetic factors involved as well.

“Acne is very complicated. It’s not an infection,” says Richard Gallo at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s an immune problem.”

In other words, while the presence of C. acne doesn’t usually cause problems, sometimes it may trigger a strong immune response inside a follicle. During this response, some cells in the skin actually turn into fat cells and start releasing alarm signals and antimicrobial substances – a process known as reactive adipogenesis. “This is a normal way to fight an infection, but in this case, it’s an inappropriate response,” says Gallo.

What triggers that response? C. acnes can secrete a toxin known as Christie-Atkins-Munch-Petersen factor, or CAMP. The bacteria may ramp up production of CAMP in certain circumstances.

So, Gallo’s team tried vaccinating mice against CAMP, to make the animals produce antibodies that neutralise the toxin. A number of studies by his team suggest this could help prevent or treat acne.

Sanofi has now developed an mRNA vaccine that targets CAMP, possibly along with some other C. acnes proteins – the company hasn’t revealed exactly what’s in the vaccine and, after much back and forth, declined to talk to me about it.

While there have been reports that the Sanofi trial is already underway, it is labelled as “not yet recruiting” as per the latest update on 18 September. This means it may be some time before we know if it works. That said, while these initial trials are primarily intended to establish safety, it should be clear to volunteers within weeks if it is making a difference to their acne – this isn’t like a normal vaccine trial where researchers have to wait months or years for people to be exposed to pathogens.

“We were very, very optimistic that this could be revolutionary for acne therapy,” says Gallo. “We’ll just have to see if it pans out in the human population.”

Meanwhile, Armora is targeting a different protein, called hyaluronidase, based on work by George Liu at the University of California, San Diego. Hyaluronidase is an enzyme that breaks down hyaluronic acid, a large sugar secreted into the spaces between cells. These terms might be familiar because hyaluronic acid is often used as a filler for cosmetic purposes, while hyaluronidase is injected to break down filler that is no longer wanted or if things go wrong.

Some bacteria such as strep B (Streptococcus agalactiae) produce hyaluronidase for similar purposes, to help them invade tissues. There are two main types of hyaluronidase, it turns out. Some break down hyaluronic acid into simple sugars. Others break it up into large chunks that act as an alarm signal to the immune system.

When it became clear that there were two types, Liu’s team searched genetic databases to see which type is found in which bacteria. They found the “simple sugars” type was the most common. The “large chunks” type was limited to a few free-living bacteria, which makes sense because they don’t need to worry about immune systems.

“The exception was acne,” says Liu. C. acnes jumped out to the researchers because it produces both types of hyaluronidase. More precisely, some strains of C. acne produce the simple-sugars type, while other produce the large-chunks one – none produce both, he says.

That made Liu wonder if this was connected to acne. Sure enough, the team showed in mouse studies that large-chunks strains of C. acnes cause acne-related inflammation, while the simple-sugars one slightly reduces inflammation. The team then went to show that a vaccine that stimulates the production of antibodies targeting only the large-chunks form of hyaluronidase could reduce acne in mice, as could inhibiting the enzyme with a small protein.

What isn’t clear is why some strains of C. acnes have evolved to trigger an immune response. One possibility is that it is a way to kill off some of their competitors, says Liu.

He thinks that in people, a vaccine against the large-chunks form of hyaluronidase would be most effective against the “more severe, red, angry type of acne lesion”.

“The ones that are hard to treat right now, those are the ones that we would target with a vaccine,” he says.

His findings might also help explain why antibiotics, which are commonly prescribed for acne, don’t work that well: they kill off the helpful C. acnes strains as well as the harmful ones. The other issue with antibiotics, of course, is that resistance can develop.

Another acne treatment called isotretinoin (Roaccutane) is more effective than antibiotics but has a long list of nasty side effects including causing birth defects, impotence and dry, itchy skin. How it works isn’t clear, though there is some evidence it alters the skin microbiome.

Acne vaccines promise to solve all these issues. They shouldn’t have any lasting side effects, nor should there be any issue with resistance, because the vaccines are targeting secreted proteins rather than directly targeting bacteria.

The fact that two competing approaches are being developed is great news for those with acne. If one vaccine doesn’t work, perhaps the other will. And it could be that both will work, or that targeting both CAMP and hyaluronidase simultaneously will prove even more effective than either alone. Maybe, just maybe, adolescence is about to get a little easier.

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Key Takeaways

• When gun violence is in the news, it can be a scary time for children. Reassure your child that their safety is your top priority, no matter their age.
• Limit your child’s exposure to media coverage and explain events in age-appropriate ways.
• Teach kids about gun safety early, especially if there are guns in your home.

 

Sandy Hook. Aurora. San Bernardino. Orlando. Las Vegas. Parkland. Pittsburgh. Gilroy. El Paso. Dayton. Buffalo. Uvalde. Newport News. Denver. Lewiston. Winder. Madison. Minneapolis. These are just some of the American cities and towns affected by mass shootings.

Gun violence has happened at schools, movie theaters, bars, concerts, festivals, stores, churches, and even at a parade after the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl in 2024. And this is just scratching the surface of the impact of gun violence in the United States.

Now, another shooting within the walls of a school has taken the lives of three elementary students and a teacher. This time in Bend, Oregon, on October 15, 2026.

Each time there’s a mass shooting, we find ourselves having trouble finding the words to explain to our children why it happened yet again, and why it continues to occur. So, how should you talk about gun violence to your child? We asked experts to share their best insights.

Assure Your Child That You’re Doing Your Best To Keep Them Safe

Kids need to be reminded that you’re looking out for them.

“Reassuring our children in these turbulent and violent times is a paramount question for parenting,” says John Mayer, PhD, a clinical psychologist at Doctor On Demand. “Say to your children: ‘We will never take you anywhere or put you in any place where there is danger. That is our primary job as parents, to protect you.’ That fundamental message of safety is critical to make sure your children hear.”

Dr. Mayer says this message is just as important for older kids as it is for our youngest. “Older children need that reassurance just as often and vigorously as younger children,” he says. “So, age differences do not matter.”

Of course, the truth is we can’t guarantee their safety, but Dr. Mayer says parents shouldn’t argue that point. “While we as adults may know that is true, bringing in these doubts is not a helpful opinion to convey to kids,” he says.

Don’t Let the TV Do the Talking

There will be nonstop coverage of mass shooting events, but you don’t want your child to absorb too much of what’s being shown there—especially if your child is young.

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that the more repeated and prolonged exposure to TV and media images, the more anxiety this creates,” says Eirene Heidelberger, a parenting expert and founder of GIT Mom (Get It Together, Mom!). “Your child’s awareness is growing, and it’s imperative that you explain the basic facts about what happened; not TV or social media. Don’t go into gory detail, but don’t pretend your child isn’t aware that something’s amiss in the world.”

Make Sure Your Children Understand Gun Safety

Every year, more than 4,300 children and teenagers (ages 0 to 19) in the U.S. die due to guns, and more than 17,000 are injured, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.1 Of those tragedies, 2,814 are homicides, 1,275 are suicides, and 144 are accidental shootings. Ensuring that any guns in the home are safely secured (not loaded and locked away)—and teaching all children about gun safety—is essential.

“Parents who own guns have a responsibility to teach gun safety, ownership, and the appropriate utility of guns to their children,” says Dr. Mayer. “A gun shouldn’t just exist in the household, and parents assume that children will be OK with it being there and/or know all they should about that weapon.”

It’s important to be a teacher even when kids are small. “The biggest failing of parents is assuming that small children do not need education about guns in the house,” adds Dr. Mayer. “If you don’t become a teacher about what your family’s concept or orientation toward guns is, then children will make up their own, and these are almost guaranteed to be immature and inaccurate of what your values are about guns and gun ownership.”

Make sure your child understands the seriousness of guns—and key safety rules. Heidelberger says:

1. Tell them to never touch a gun by themself.
2. Reiterate that only mom and dad/grownups use guns.
3. Keep curiosity away by being straightforward and explaining that the guns are locked away, and they will never be able to crack the lock. Lock down your kid’s curiosity.
4. Explain the differences between real and toy guns and the consequences.

Make Your Messaging Age-Appropriate

You won’t talk about gun violence the same way with a 5-year-old as you would with a teenager. Scale the conversation based on your child’s age and maturity level.

“Small children do not need long explanations about the social and psychological ramifications of gun violence erupting in our society,” says Dr. Mayer. “Prior to age 12, focus on how you as parents will keep them safe. From 12 to 15 or 16, you can talk about the issues in larger society, how this is wrong and immoral to take another’s life and to use guns inappropriately. In older adolescents and young adults, it is important to discuss the social/political and moral issues about gun violence. These age breakdowns follow the different stages of cognitive development in children and young people and when their brain can actually think about the issues.”

Let Your Child Share Their Thoughts

Your kids may have opinions, questions, fears—or all of the above. Let them express them.

“Start by asking what they’ve heard and know about the event,” Heidelberger suggests. “Let your child talk and listen—I mean really listen—to them. Think about how you feel after talking through scary situations with someone you trust. You feel safer and more assured, right? By talking about it, they’ll cope better.”

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President Trump has encouraged voters to pretend he is on the ballot for the Nov. 3 midterm elections, and this time we can agree with his political advice. Americans should be thinking of the Trump administration as they vote for members of Congress and state officials.

Voters should keep in mind Mr. Trump’s failure to keep his campaign promises, his attempts to undermine American democracy and his flagrant corruption. They should be thinking of the Republican Party’s acquiescence to this abuse of power, and they should hold Republicans accountable. Today’s Democratic Party has plenty of flaws, including a disappointing failure to present a coherent agenda of its own. Nonetheless, Democrats offer the only alternative this year to the damage that Mr. Trump and his party have inflicted on the nation. A vote for a Democratic candidate is the best way for Americans to repudiate the Trump administration’s performance over the past two years.

If Democrats retake both houses of Congress, and more state governments than they now control, it will tell the world that Mr. Trump does not represent most Americans. It will demonstrate that a country that starts to slide toward autocracy can move back to normalcy, as happened in Hungary this spring. Most important, it will create a desperately needed check on Mr. Trump during his final two years in office.

Take a moment to imagine how Washington could change if Democrats win control of the House of Representatives. Mr. Trump’s legislative ambitions will be largely ended; he will not be able to pass more tax cuts that worsen the national debt. Democrats can instead use must-pass spending bills to restore money that was improperly cut from Medicaid, schools, scientific research and disease prevention. And Congress will finally have committee chairs who seek to exercise their constitutional duty to hold the president and his appointees responsible for their actions, through the use of hearings, subpoenas and more. Even if Mr. Trump and his aides illegally defy subpoenas, the House can summon corporate executives and others who have enabled him.

If Democrats take the Senate, they will be able to do more. As the body that confirms nominees for top administration jobs and the judiciary, the Senate can stop Mr. Trump from appointing unqualified cabinet members like Todd Blanche, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and ideologues like Russ Vought. Senators can insist on federal judges who, while surely conservative, will uphold the law. Many judges appointed by previous Republican presidents have honorably done so in recent years, but some Trump appointees have failed to meet this basic standard. The Senate’s confirmation role will be particularly important if any Supreme Court vacancies arise in the next two years.

Regardless, Mr. Trump will almost certainly continue to do damage in office. He will issue executive orders and conduct foreign policy, and he may defy congressional authority in ways that violate tradition or the law. Yet the difference between a government completely run by a political party in thrall to him and a government with an empowered opposition is profound. Americans now have an opportunity to register their displeasure with his conduct, and they should seize it.

It is worth taking a moment to review the records of both Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans since he returned to office in January 2025.

In a 21-month span, he has done more harm to democracy and the rule of law than any other president in the modern era and perhaps longer than that. He has broken his oath to defend the Constitution by trying to rewrite it on his own. He has refused to honor Congress’s power of the purse and misused national security laws for political ends. He has defied federal court orders on Medicaid funding, deportation orders and more. He has dismantled the Justice Department’s legacy as an impartial enforcer of federal law, turning it into an instrument of retribution against his adversaries while canceling investigations into his allies. He has appointed inept sycophants to oversee crucial government functions, including law enforcement, national defense and public health. He has sought to disenfranchise large numbers of voters, claiming fraud that cannot be found, and championed an extreme new approach to partisan gerrymandering. He has physically besmirched the White House by demolishing the East Wing and financing a garish renovation with donations from wealthy allies.

In foreign affairs, Mr. Trump has wasted lives and military resources on a miscalculated and illegal war with Iran, a strategic blunder that has forced a global retreat of American power. He has left the United States less prepared for future conflicts. He has left the United States isolated and vulnerable, by alienating longtime allies. He has weakened Ukraine in its heroic fight against Russia and cozied up to President Vladimir Putin.

On the economy, his policies have raised the cost of living, contributing to a decline in real wages. Interest rates are up. Economic growth and job growth are down. He has handed out billions to the wealthy and large corporations, leaving the rest of us with the tab, through a national debt that now exceeds $40 trillion.

He has created a culture of corruption and avarice with no precedent. He has pardoned political cronies, violent felons among them. He has used the levers of power, including regulatory oversight and diplomacy, to bring in billions of dollars of profit for his family business and his closest supporters. In 2025 alone, the president’s business empire earned $2.24 billion, nearly two-thirds of it from cryptocurrency, which Mr. Trump’s executive branch is supposed to be regulating.

What has the Republican-controlled Congress done to rein in these abuses? Virtually nothing. With only a few exceptions, the Senate has approved inept cabinet members and agency heads and then stood by as they rounded up legal immigrants, brought ludicrous criminal charges against political opponents, depleted the military of top talent and spurned the scientific consensus on the need for vaccines.

No congressional committee has demanded an accounting for the destruction of the United States Agency for International Development, which is leading to needless misery and death in other countries. Nor has Congress fought back against the shrinking of other federal agencies that it created and that the Trump White House unilaterally defunded. No committee has investigated the Trump family’s enrichment and self-dealing, though it is vastly worse than Hunter Biden’s schemes of familial exploitation, which Republicans rightly denounced.

A determined Congress could have tried to prevent the two presidential decisions most responsible for the inflation that has imperiled Republican political prospects: starting a war against Iran and imposing tariffs on global imports. Republican leaders didn’t even try. A handful of Republican legislators joined Democrats in passing resolutions against the war, but party leaders opposed the efforts and made sure they remained toothless.

The Republican majorities in the House and Senate do not even seem to care when Mr. Trump casts aside laws that they passed themselves. In September, Congress passed a bill enabling tighter sanctions on Russia’s energy exports, and the president signed it. When he later changed his position and said he would not enforce the sanctions, only a small number of Republicans objected, none of them in leadership.

The current Congress is the second least productive on record, passing fewer bills than any other save its immediate predecessor, the 118th Congress, in 2023 and 2024, when Republicans also controlled the House. The most significant piece of legislation that the 119th Congress passed is the law that Mr. Trump insisted be called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In truth, it is mostly a handout to the wealthy, which worsens both the national debt and economic inequality.

The Republican congressional candidates on the ballot this year deserve to pay a price for both the damage their party has done and the damage it has failed to stop. In the face of a power-grabbing president, they have mostly shown cowardice. The Constitution envisions the legislative branch as the first among equals in the government’s power-sharing system; James Madison said that it “necessarily predominates.”

This Congress has enthusiastically ceded its power. It is Congress that has the power of the purse, the power to declare war, the power to determine who enters the country, the power to levy duties and tariffs. Its current leaders have instead become bystanders to Mr. Trump’s assertions of executive supremacy. Having signed on to Mr. Trump’s cult of personality, a vast majority of congressional Republicans are now loath to break with it, fearing the president will destroy their political careers and subject them to harassment, as he has done to others in the party.

Only voters can provide a counterweight. They have a chance to demonstrate next Tuesday that dereliction of constitutional duty can likewise end a politician’s career.

Mr. Trump has become so unpopular that this year’s elections appear likely to be competitive across much of the country, including traditionally red Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio and Texas. But even Americans who live in reliably blue or red areas should feel motivated to vote.

Beyond Congress, governors and state legislatures can also play an important role in constraining Mr. Trump’s authoritarian impulses. They can block his calls for extreme partisan gerrymandering, his efforts to restrict mail voting and his election meddling. Local officials can push back against the abuses of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They can go to court to block his illegal funding cuts and usurpations of state authority. They can act in the interest of the people even as Mr. Trump pursues his own interests at public expense.

If any Republican officials on your ballot have consistently stood up to Mr. Trump on these matters, you should consider rewarding their political courage. In most state and local races, though, constraining his overreach will require voting Democratic. There are now 23 states where Republicans control both houses of the state legislature and the governor’s seat; several of those “trifectas” are at risk, including those in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and New Hampshire.

When a democracy begins to slide toward autocracy, legislative elections offer the most significant potential turning point. If voters endorse the new regime — or the party in power manages to subvert the popular will — the slide can accelerate. If voters successfully reject the regime, democracy can begin to recover. The United States will be stronger if the 2026 midterms are such a turning point.

Even if Mr. Trump’s party loses badly, the country will face enormous challenges. Our political system, with its gerrymandered districts and unrepresentative Senate and Electoral College, was insufficiently democratic even before he weakened it. Our economy is grossly unequal. The planet is warming. China and Russia are newly aggressive. Artificial intelligence presents a threat that may define this century. Yet the best hope for addressing these challenges is a functioning government, rather than one befouled by corruption, incompetence and abuse of power.

Mr. Trump has dominated American politics for more than a decade, and the Republican Party has been his eager accomplice in degrading the nation’s ideals. The American people have a chance over the next week to speak in a clear voice. If they do, they can allow the nation to glimpse the end of the Trump era and the start of something brighter.

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