The opening montage of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign video says it all: wordless footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, tear gas spewing, Trump flags flying. 

The message of the video, released early Tuesday, is hardly subtle. Reelect the previous president, and the whole MAGA ethos – Make America Great Again – will consume the nation, in spirit if not literally, President Biden is suggesting. 

This campaign is about “freedom,” he says – women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, a secure retirement, and “no” to book banning. 

But the nascent 2024 contest is about so much more. He’s not running in a vacuum. Major polls suggest that, as of now, a rematch of Mr. Biden and former President Donald Trump is the likeliest scenario. If that plays out, they would again be the oldest pairing ever in an American presidential campaign, and for the octogenarian Mr. Biden, in particular, the age issue looms large.

The “soft launch” of his 2024 campaign – with a highly produced video, not an in-person rally – foretells a reelection effort that will work hard to minimize Mr. Biden’s liabilities while emphasizing his perceived strengths.  

He plans to run on his record: major legislation that passed with narrow Democratic control of Congress, including infrastructure investments, climate change mitigation measures, lowered health care costs for some, and higher corporate taxes. 

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

President Joe Biden greets supporters during a campaign rally for Democratic incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul and other New York Democrats in Yonkers, New York, Nov. 6, 2022.

But the real game changer for Mr. Biden’s prospects, analysts say, is last November’s midterm elections, when Democrats defied history and kept a “red wave” at bay. Usually, the party that controls the White House loses big in the midterms. This time, Democrats lost control of the House by just a handful of seats and expanded their narrow Senate majority. 

“The midterms changed the conversation,” says Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. “It was not normal. They went very well for the Democrats.” 

The party was also helped by the Supreme Court’s June 2022 overturning of nationwide abortion rights, energizing women and young voters. As of now, with reproductive rights determined state by state, Mr. Biden and his party also stand to benefit from this incendiary issue.

The unexpected could intervene

But events could intervene. A long-expected recession could undermine Mr. Biden’s reelection prospects like no other issue, and an international crisis could also be highly damaging. The last one-term presidencies, those of George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, were harmed especially by economic woes, and in former President Carter’s case, the Iran hostage crisis. 

“There are two things we can’t predict with any poll or turnout model” – the economy and international events, says Susan MacManus, professor emerita of political science at the University of South Florida. 

A recession has long been projected, Dr. MacManus notes, and the Biden administration’s efforts to steer consumers into electric cars could make matters worse, as a sign of economic overreach. Incidents sparked by foreign adversaries, such as the Chinese spy balloon that drifted across the country earlier this year, could also be harmful to Mr. Biden as Election Day draws closer.

Hanging over the next election, too, is a sense of weariness and resignation that the standard-bearers of 2020 – already blasts from the past – could dominate the 2024 cycle. The latest Yahoo/YouGov poll found that “exhaustion” is the top emotion voters feel about a Biden-Trump rematch. 

In 2020, Mr. Biden won because he wasn’t Mr. Trump. If the former president is the 2024 nominee, the same could happen. 

Nathan Howard/AP

Supporters dance after former President Donald Trump spoke at a campaign rally at Waco Regional Airport, March 25, 2023, in Waco, Texas.

Ironically, the Republican who seems to have a better shot at beating Mr. Biden in the 2024 general election is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – and yet as of now, Mr. Trump beats the Florida governor in the Republican primary, recent polls show. 

The latest Wall Street Journal poll now has Mr. Trump beating Governor DeSantis handily in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup in the primaries, 51% to 38%, a reversal of the 14 percentage point advantage the Florida governor had in December. 

But in a general election contest against Mr. Biden, Mr. DeSantis seems to be the stronger candidate. A recent poll by Public Opinion Strategies shows Mr. DeSantis beating Mr. Biden in the battleground states of Arizona and Pennsylvania, while Mr. Biden would beat Mr. Trump in those states. 

“Now the so-called devil-haters are leaning heavily toward Biden,” says former Republican strategist Dan Schnur, now an independent. “In other words, Biden doesn’t have to get these voters to like him, as long as he can remind them why they can’t stand Trump.” 

Yearning for new faces

Mr. Biden’s challenges involve his age, stamina, and record, including economic struggles for voters who can’t afford to pay higher prices for food, gas, and housing. All incumbents run on their record, but 2024 could effectively pit two incumbents against each other, amid fresh memories of Mr. Trump’s controversial presidency.

Voters seem to be yearning for new faces, leaders who understand the challenges of modern life. But Mr. Biden, in signaling for months that he will run for reelection, has earned the deference of the next generation, including Democrats like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. No major Democrats have announced against him. After all, he beat Mr. Trump in 2020.

Among Republicans, Mr. Trump’s prospects for 2024 seemed to be waning until his recent indictment in New York over hush-money payments to a porn star. Even GOP opponents of the former president, including Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, defended him on the charge, and among the president’s wider base, renewed cries of “witch hunt” resonated. Soft supporters came back to the Trump fold. 

All of this begs a question: Does Team Biden want to run against Mr. Trump, on the theory that he’d be easier to beat? That was the theory among Democrats in 2016, when the businessman and former reality TV star defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a shocker. Even Mr. Trump himself seemed surprised that he won. 

Mr. Biden’s political advisers have long been preparing for the possibility of a rematch with Mr. Trump, according to a source with ties to the president’s team. But is Mr. Trump their preferred opponent? 

“I wouldn’t go that far,” says the source. No Democrat wants a repeat of 2016.

Lee Jin-man/AP

Posters hailing the South Korea-U.S. alliance near the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, April 25, 2023. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is visiting the United States and will meet with U.S. President Joe Biden Wednesday.

When South Korea President Yoon Suk Yeol arrives at the White House Wednesday for a state visit, conversations are likely to focus heavily on nuclear weapons – and not just the threat posed by North Korea’s growing arsenal.

Also on the agenda is China’s own expanding arsenal and its potential – at current rates of weapons construction and systems development – to reach near-parity with the United States and Russia within a decade.

And perhaps the most sensitive topic of all: the continuing dependability of the American nuclear umbrella for South Koreans. Worried by what they see as a less reliable U.S., many increasingly support their country building a nuclear deterrence of its own.

The top billing accorded nuclear weapons as President Yoon sits down with President Joe Biden reflects the rapid rise to prominence of what many experts refer to as a third nuclear age after first, the frightening U.S.-Soviet arms race, and then, an expansion of the nuclear club that included China, India and Pakistan, and Israel.

Indeed, after decades of nuclear nonproliferation consensus and arms control efforts, many experts place the world on the doorstep of what could be a new era of proliferation. The causes: China’s rapid rise to “near-peer” status, perceptions among U.S. allies and partners of a less reliable American nuclear umbrella, and a multipolar world of “middle powers” – like South Korea – considering their own nuclear deterrence.

“We’re certainly at an inflection point, and not a very reassuring one,” says Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association in Washington. “The established nuclear order is under significant stress,” she adds – first from the nuclear-weapons states, for whom “nonproliferation no longer seems to be the global and uniting priority that it has been,” and then from regional powers who see a less secure world and wonder if they might need their own nukes after all.

Patrick Semansky/AP

A worker pushes a cart carrying South Korean flags outside the White House in Washington, April 21, 2023. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will meet President Joe Biden at the White House on April 26.

Those include a number of U.S. allies and partners – from South Korea and Japan to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and even Australia – who might view emerging global power rivalries and conclude it’s time to go nuclear.

“For so long our primary preoccupation when it came to nuclear proliferation was with the rogue states, Iran and North Korea, but now we see it’s our friends who are contemplating acquiring nuclear weapons,” says Jon Wolfsthal, senior fellow in nuclear issues at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington.

“For them, the U.S. is seen as less dominant and less reliable,” he adds, “and they are worried the U.S. won’t be there with the security guarantees that reassured them in the past.”

That is why he anticipates hearing a strong U.S. security commitment to South Korea – including a prominent reference to nuclear protections – at the conclusion of the Biden-Yoon meetings.

“I fully expect this summit will deliver a reaffirmation of the U.S. nuclear umbrella – and in response, reaffirmation of South Korea as a nonnuclear state,” says Mr. Wolfsthal, who served as senior director for arms control and nonproliferation in the Obama White House. “We’ll hear it restated that South Korean nuclear weapons are not in accord with the alliance.”

Nuclear power tech

But another dimension altogether of a looming era of nuclear proliferation, other experts say, is the rush to provision countries with the nuclear power technology and equipment that can also produce fuel for nuclear weapons.

“I’m afraid the wheels are falling off the nonproliferation regime, and guess what? It’s largely at our own doing,” says Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington.

Countries including Saudi Arabia are shopping around for power plants that could generate nuclear weapons fuel – even as China embarks on a “fast reactor” building boom that could deliver weapons-grade plutonium for its own buildup, he says.

“We used to be very concerned about spreading the means for developing nuclear weapons,” Mr. Sokolski adds. “Now we are cruising towards a tipping point” of a new generation of nuclear states.

Mark Schiefelbein/AP/File

Spectators wave Chinese flags as military vehicles carrying DF-41 ballistic missiles roll during a parade to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the founding of Communist China in Beijing, Oct. 1, 2019. China is believed to have about 400 nuclear weapons, but the U.S. estimates that China will have 1,000 by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035.

Yet other experts worry that a focus on proliferation risks diverting attention from the major nuclear challenge they see the U.S. facing in the coming decade – China’s rise to “near-peer” status.

“I don’t think proliferation is the main issue, I think [it’s] what the Biden administration identified in its national security strategy as our biggest emerging security challenge – that for the first time in our history, we will have to deter two great nuclear powers at the same time,” says Robert Soofer, deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy in the Trump administration.

China is believed to have about 400 nuclear weapons – well below the 1,550 both the U.S. and Russia are allowed under the New START Treaty. But the U.S. estimates that at its current rate of expansion, China will have 1,000 by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035.

Beijing “will essentially have parity by 2035,” Dr. Soofer says, “and that presents the U.S. with a world we’ve never faced before.” He imagines a “worst-case scenario” where the U.S. finds itself facing off against a Russia “at war with NATO” in Europe – and a China, reassured by its nuclear parity, that invades Taiwan.

To meet the “China challenge,” Dr. Soofer says the U.S. must consider a “modest increase” in nuclear warheads. Moreover, noting that the U.S. has no nuclear weapons in Asia, he says the Pentagon should proceed with plans, currently unfunded by the Biden administration, to build sea-launched cruise missiles.

Internal U.S. debate

Indeed, those proposals for bumping up the U.S. arsenal were among the recommendations issued recently by a study group of nuclear policy experts – Dr. Soofer among them – organized by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

That report caused a brouhaha in Washington, pitting nuclear hawk against dove. But Dr. Soofer, now a senior defense fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, says such contention over nuclear strategy is not inevitable. He notes that Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses since President Barack Obama have found common ground on the modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

At the same time, he predicts that with China generally front and center on the political stage, such a complex topic as “Do we have enough nuclear weapons?” could become a hot topic of political debate.

“The Republicans are going to argue that the new world we’re in gives us no choice but to add some nuclear capability, and the administration is going to say, ‘No, we don’t have to add capability at this time.’ Given what’s at stake,” he adds, “I really see this becoming a critical national election issue in 2024.”

Boris Yurchenko/AP/File

U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev shake hands after signing the START arms reduction treaty in Moscow, July 31, 1991.

Opponents of any increase in the U.S. arsenal say there are other, better ways to address both China’s nuclear build-up and proliferation pressures.

Calling proposals for expanding the U.S. arsenal “absurd and dangerous,” the Arms Control Association’s Ms. Davenport says that instead of taking steps that could lead to a destabilizing arms race, the U.S. should redouble efforts with allies and adversaries alike to discourage going nuclear.

Fortifying alliances and reassuring allies over security guarantees – as she sees the U.S. doing with Asian allies and in Europe – will make for a safer U.S. in the long run, Ms. Davenport says. Moreover, the U.S. needs to move beyond ineffective sanctions and get back to the “hard work” of negotiating “viable [nuclear] off ramps” for adversaries like Iran and North Korea.

Cold War lessons

Others say that even the impending world of two peer nuclear powers is not so different that the U.S. should disregard the example of the arms race with the Soviet Union.

“The lesson of the Cold War is that you can’t build your way to dominance,” says Mr. Wolfsthal of CNAS. “We shouldn’t forget that in the Cold War, we ended up with 70,000 nuclear weapons – and insecurity.”

Instead of building more nuclear weapons or resigning itself to a new age of proliferation, the U.S. should strengthen alliances and fashion new security arrangements with key partners based on conventional forces – as the U.S. is doing with Australia, he says.

Moreover, the U.S. should turn more of its attention to showing the world that it is serious about nonproliferation and nuclear arms reduction, Mr. Wolfsthal says.

“The U.S. needs a global narrative that says we are actively pursuing a world that is not awash in nuclear weapons, and explains why this means more security,” he says. “That narrative is a big part of what is missing.”

Christine T. Nguyen/Minnesota Public Radio/AP

Fourth grade teacher Kelly Brant stands in her classroom as she talks to her students who were learning remotely, Jan. 19, 2021, at Park Brook Elementary School in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. A key issue during COVID-19 lockdowns was when and how to reopen schools.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Dr. Alexander Lazar was overseeing COVID-19 testing in the U.S. Capitol, and was just closing down the site when his cellphone started blowing up. There is an emergency, shelter in place.

At first, he wasn’t too concerned. As he headed up to the crypt, however, he saw people sitting on the ground, some of them bleeding. Rioters had breached the building. He identified himself as a doctor and began examining the injured. Later, a SWAT team evacuated him to the Senate side, where he set up a medical station and took care of people until 3:30 a.m.

In retrospect, he sees the outburst of violence on Jan. 6 as linked to the polarization around COVID-19 policies – with both symptomatic of growing distrust in government.

“However you think about COVID – whether you think it was really bad and deadly, or nothing and all invented – regardless of which of those stories you believed, how we managed it was not good,” says Dr. Lazar, who served as biosecurity director for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. “People are really frustrated, they have a sense that government is not working for them.”

(Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal/AP/File

Protesters against a COVID-19 mandate gesture as they are escorted out of the Clark County School Board meeting at the Clark County Government Center in Las Vegas, Aug. 12, 2021.

Now Dr. Lazar is part of a group that hopes to change that with a book they’re releasing today: “Lessons from the COVID War.” Led by Philip Zelikow, who oversaw the bipartisan 9/11 Commission report, the Covid Crisis Group sets out to examine not just how the U.S. government responded to the pandemic, but why – why it made certain choices, and what the tradeoffs were. More than three years after the pandemic shutdown began, they hope it will prompt a “rethink” of how the U.S. approaches public health crises, and a collective look at what can be done to prepare better next time. 

The several dozen authors, drawn from fields ranging from history to economics to epidemiology, hope to fill in gaps in public understanding – and to help counteract some of the partisanship and distrust that complicated COVID-19 policymaking. Indeed, one of the group’s key conclusions is that the heightened polarization around the pandemic was not so much a cause of policy failures, as an effect of those failures – including a failure to communicate. 

“Because they don’t understand what happened, people then tend to turn the story into their own preferred cultural narrative: ‘We didn’t do enough to protect the economy’; ‘We listened too much to Tony Fauci’; ‘We didn’t follow the science,’” says Mr. Zelikow. “They have no idea – well, what else could you have done, other than what we did?”

At the same time, because scientific assessments always have to be weighed against social, economic, and other impacts, pandemic response and mitigation are “inherently political,” argued fellow author Gary Edson at a pre-launch event at the National Academy of Sciences on April 24. Officials should be open about that – by giving the public clear information and laying out the various tradeoffs.

“We can’t simply pretend that the next time around we’re going to be better off if we could insulate the scientists at the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and public health officials from politics,” said Mr. Edson, president of the COVID Collaborative, a bipartisan group of political and scientific leaders. “We need to recognize that what we need to do is a better job of managing the inherently political nature of pandemic response and mitigation – this tension between individual freedom and collective responsibility.”

On May 11, the COVID-19 public health emergency will officially end. With everything that citizens and the government have been through over the past three years, many are fatigued and would like to declare victory and move on.

Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor/File

Workers on Capitol Hill file into the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center to receive COVID-19 testing, Jan. 31, 2022, in Washington. The center was closed to the public.

“I’m afraid that will be a ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment, putting COVID and the very real threat of new variants or new pathogens firmly in the rear-view mirror,” says Mr. Edson, a former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush.

He and his co-authors are hoping their book will serve as “a wake-up call” and spark a renewed effort to understand what went wrong with the U.S. COVID-19 response – and make necessary course corrections. 

A dispassionate report

In late 2020, former Google executive and Obama science adviser Eric Schmidt brought together a few foundations to sponsor what they hoped would be a national commission on COVID-19, similar to the one Congress established to look into the 9/11 attacks. They brought in Mr. Zelikow to lead the effort.

Bipartisan bills were introduced in both the House and Senate to create such a commission, but the measures languished. Eventually, the group decided to publish its findings on its own. 

The book is dispassionate and straightforward, with relatable metaphors. Among them: The government during COVID-19 was like a symphony without a conductor. As a result, state and local officials did a lot of improvisation, sometimes in concert with the private sector, but the overall effect was at times dissonant. 

A key example of that was the lack of a unified communications strategy to update the public and explain the rationale for protocols like social distancing. John Barry, a historian who wrote a definitive book on the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and was brought in to help shape the 2005 National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, recalls an exchange with a public health official who was shying away from giving a direct assessment out of fear of scaring the public.

“They’re not going to trust you if you don’t tell them the truth,” says Mr. Barry. “They’re going to figure it out if you try to sugarcoat things.”

K.C. Wilsey/FEMA/Reuters/File

Cars form lines at a federally supported drive-thru testing site for COVID-19 at PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey, April 4, 2020.

Baruch Fischhoff, an expert on risk communication at Carnegie Mellon University, adds that it’s crucial for officials to be candid about what they don’t know. And he says it’s important to do at least minimal testing of their messaging – even if it’s just on office colleagues or family members. 

“There’s been a catastrophic failure of our public health authorities,” he says in a Zoom interview. And that led to serious distrust, which can’t easily be won back: “At the national level, they have a big hole to dig themselves out of.”

There also was no senior member of government whose job it was to gather and regularly disseminate information to the public – a function he says should be separated by a firewall from “persuasive communication” meant to compel certain behaviors. 

“One needs an independent office whose job is just to gather, analyze, and communicate the facts in tested formats,” he says, which establishes trust with the public through regular, straightforward updates. “If that function were fulfilled, it would be much easier to do the persuasive communication.”

The red-blue divide

Going forward, says Mr. Edson, pandemic response needs to involve more multistate collaboration, with public health officials acting in concert with elected officials, the private sector, faith communities, or civil society to help mitigate politicization. 

Dr. Lazar saw the benefits of that while participating in a forum that held Zoom calls three times a week for officials from dozens of states to compare notes on operational challenges like setting up testing centers or reopening schools. People from red states wanted to talk to him about how Texas was reopening its schools – and people from blue states were curious, too.

As different as their states or communities were – whether red or blue, rural or urban, small or big, a lot of the on-the-ground struggles they faced were the same. 

“It was like a common crucible that we were all being forged in,” he says. 

On the margins of those calls, people would reach out individually to share cellphone numbers and arrange to follow up later. 

“Each of us needs to take a deep look at ourself and think about: How are we participating in a system that is this dysfunctional?” he says. “It’s not always just the other guy – we need systemic change and we all need to be a part of that.”

The abrupt firing of Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson, less than a week after Fox’s parent company agreed to pay $787 million to settle a defamation lawsuit, has set off shockwaves in media and political circles. Since 2017, Mr. Carlson’s 8 p.m. weekday show had made him a conservative media star and a kingmaker within the Republican Party, particularly its pro-Trump wing where his bomb-throwing culture-war agenda resonated. 

His departure, which Fox announced Monday in a terse statement, represents a potential hinge point for the network, which has the highest ratings in cable news television, but faces growing competition from right-wing digital media, especially for younger viewers, and is currently in negotiations with cable companies over bundled fees paid by subscribers. On Monday night, Brian Kilmeade, a co-host of Fox & Friends, hosted its 8 p.m. show. Fox is expected to rotate hosts in that slot until it picks a permanent replacement for Mr. Carlson. 

Still, anyone who expects a substantive shift at Fox, such as a retreat from the hard-right ideas that Mr. Carlson espoused, may be disappointed, say analysts. A more likely outcome is a new face on Fox with similar opinions who can serve the same audience. “The show goes on,” says A.J. Bauer, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Alabama who researches conservative media. “The time slots matter more than the people in them.”

Last week, Fox settled a lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over false claims of voting-machine fraud aired after the 2020 election by Mr. Carlson and other opinion hosts. But the company faces other legal perils: Another voting-machine company, Smartmatic, has also sued the network, raising the possibility of further payouts by Fox Corp., which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his family. 

Brendan McDermid/Reuters/File

People pass by a promo of Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the News Corp. building in New York, March 13, 2019.

New legal risks?

Mr. Carlson’s ouster, however, may turn more on another lawsuit. Last month, Abby Grossberg, a former producer for Mr. Carlson, filed a complaint against Mr. Carlson and Fox, alleging a pattern of misogynistic behavior toward colleagues and guests. Fox responded by firing Ms. Grossberg, whom it accused of disclosing privileged information. 

Her lawsuit has echoes of past upheaval at Fox News. In 2016-17, multiple lawsuits and instances of alleged sexual harassment led to the ousting of its founder Roger Ailes and a prime-time host, Bill O’Reilly, whom Mr. Carlson eventually replaced on air. Fox paid millions of dollars to settle multiple claims by women against Mr. Ailes, who died in 2017, and Mr. O’Reilly. 

Now Mr. Carlson faces complaints about how he treats his staff, after the Dominion lawsuit had already revealed a trove of his often derogatory texts and emails about Fox reporters and executives. Some of the comments he made were redacted in court filings, but may relate to Ms. Grossberg’s lawsuit, which also alleged antisemitic comments by Mr. Carlson and his team. 

That makes Mr. Carlson “a bit of a lawsuit risk” to Fox and its owners, says Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University and author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.” 

Mr. Murdoch reportedly made the decision after consulting with board members and Fox executives. Why exactly Fox chose to terminate Mr. Carlson’s contract is still unknown, but the decision seems to be less about the content of Mr. Carlson’s show or his viewership than the liability he represented to Fox Corp., says Professor Hemmer. “There’s a cost to keeping Carlson on air.” 

Mr. Carlson wasn't the only media host to lose his job this week. CNN chose Monday to fire Don Lemon, a morning news anchor who had drawn flak most recently for sexist comments about Nikki Haley, a Republican seeking the presidential nomination in 2024. Mr. Lemon had apologized for what he said on air.

The rise of MAGA cheerleader

Mr. Carlson’s rise to the pinnacle of Fox fame and compensation – he was reportedly paid $20 million a year – overlapped with the Trump presidency and its aftermath. He took Mr. O’Reilly’s slot and grew the audience until he became the most watched cable news host ever in 2020, says Professor Hemmer. That success was rooted in Fox’s embrace of Donald Trump and his followers after having not leaned into his run for the GOP nomination. “Tucker Carlson was a huge part of that. He becomes the voice of the MAGA base,” she says. 

But while hosts like Sean Hannity, who was in daily contact with President Trump, became a mouthpiece for the administration after 2017, Mr. Carlson drew deeply on fringe ideas on the right, including racist theories about the deliberate replacement of white Americans by people of color who migrate to the U.S., says Professor Bauer. He wasn’t the only Fox host to play on fears of migrants, but he was the most effective popularizer of far-right ideas. “He dipped into somewhat obscure sexist and racist theories and found a way to make it palatable to folks who don’t consider themselves to be white supremacists,” he says. 

Mr. Carlson also drew criticism, including from Republicans in Congress, for trying to whitewash the violent assault by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He called them “mostly peaceful” patriots and edited hundreds of hours of footage from the attack to this end.

What next?

Mr. Carlson hasn’t commented on his departure from Fox or what he will do next. While his contract with Fox is likely to prevent him taking a similar job with a major news network, he could try to build his own media empire, says Ms. Hemmer. He could tell his fans that “Fox is corporate media and they got rid of me because they don’t care about you,” she says. 

Still, that hasn’t worked out so well for his predecessors shown the door by Fox. Neither Mr. O’Reilly nor Glenn Beck, another Fox host who left in 2011, has managed to find as large an audience on his own. Megyn Kelly, who quit Fox in 2017 after clashing with Mr. Trump, later signed a lucrative contract with NBC, but after two years her show was canceled. 

Within a fractured media landscape, Fox remains the biggest draw for conservatives, particularly for Republican candidates seeking a national audience. That seems unlikely to change, whoever is the face of prime-time opinion. “Fox is a massive platform with very few peers,” says Professor Bauer. 

Prosecuting or jailing former political leaders in Latin America is increasingly mainstream, with recent cases ranging from presidents charged or convicted of crimes in Peru to Argentina to Brazil.

Despite the implication that even the most powerful are not above the law, the legal cases that have mounted in the region over the past two decades have not resulted in a corresponding rise in citizen confidence in judicial systems.

Now, with the world’s attention focused on the historic indictment of a former president of the United States, Latin America’s track record emerges as an example of just how complex the concept of justice can be.

Successes in holding the powerful to account are butting up against the politicization of the legal system here, while high rates of impunity for crimes that most frequently affect average citizens undermine judicial credibility. If rebuilding confidence in the justice system in Latin America is possible, legal experts say, it will require stronger judicial independence as well as public accountability. 

“Trust can’t be recuperated just by opening more legal investigations,” says Clara Lucarella, a lawyer with the Civil Association for Equality and Justice in Buenos Aires. What matters is “how these proceedings are carried out, and whether the public has access to information to know what’s going on,” she says.

Victor R. Caivano/AP

A supporter of Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner cries while holding an Argentine flag after hearing the verdict and sentence in a conspiracy and fraud trial against her in Argentina, Dec. 6, 2022.

“The judiciary needs structural reform that can’t be enacted by any one government. ... These have to be questions that are agreed upon and debated that involve citizens in thinking about what type of judiciary we want for society.”

“Accountability agents”

The fall of Latin America’s dictatorships in the late 1970s and ’80s brought about the judicial reforms necessary for democracy to take root. Truth and reconciliation commissions in places like Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala allowed fledgling democracies to build credibility and lay the groundwork for journalists and civil society to operate with significant freedom. International investment in technical trainings and implementing 21st-century reforms from Mexico to Brazil amped up judicial professionalism and independence.

“The courts almost universally across Latin America started to become more independent, acting as accountability agents that were willing and able to challenge or to address corruption and enforce the political rules of the game,” says Bruce Wilson, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida.

Yet, in recent years the dividing line between judicial processes and politics have started to blur in many nations, undermining this sense of independence.

For example, months before Nicaragua’s 2021 presidential election, Daniel Ortega’s government arrested over a dozen political rivals, many under unsubstantiated treason charges. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva spent 18 months in prison before his sentence was annulled, deemed by the Supreme Court to have been politically biased. Peru’s Pedro Castillo is one of seven recent presidents who were either imprisoned or investigated for corruption, and although Peruvian prosecutors have been hailed for their anti-graft probes, they’re also criticized for turning too quickly to pre-trial detention. Only one of these former Peruvian presidents has been convicted of a crime. 

The judicial system “can start to become a tool,” says Mr. Wilson. “Everyone’s corrupt if you’re trying to get them out of office.”

According to Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer, some 21% of Latin Americans trust their government, while 27% of Latin Americans trust their courts. Distrust can stem from one’s own experience with the justice system, says Luis Pásara, a legal scholar from Peru and senior fellow at the Due Process of Law Foundation in Washington, by email.

If petty robbery or neighborhood violence isn’t investigated professionally – or regularly – then faith in the justice system can be tarnished at the citizen level. For example, when former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was sentenced to prison for a series of crimes, it garnered a positive reaction – but not a lasting one, says Mr. Pásara. “The habitual experiences weigh more heavily on the citizen’s conscience.”

Martin Mejia/AP/File

Protesters gathered in Lima, Peru, on August 28, 2022, amid political turmoil in the country.

Latin American citizens perceive high levels of corruption among their public officials, according to the LAPOP Lab’s AmericasBarometer, with some of the highest levels of perceived wrongdoing in Peru and Brazil. And impunity is a much bigger problem in Latin America than in the U.S., Canada, or Europe, according to the 2022 Global Impunity Index. Honduras, Paraguay, and Mexico are among the countries where the fewest crimes are solved. Only 1.3% of crimes committed in Mexico are solved, according to Human Rights Watch.

When Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was found guilty of fraudulently awarding public works contracts late last year, Juan Manuel Peralta, an entrepreneur in his mid-30s in Buenos Aires, barely batted an eye. She isn’t the first – or even second or third – former president he’s seen prosecuted in his lifetime.  

“Whenever the political party changes, the new government goes after the previous administration,” he says. “What should be kept constant is justice.” 

He says he would be more likely to trust the courts if politicians in Argentina weren’t protected by immunity, which shelters former presidents who continue to serve as senators or in other public posts. 

“At most, there will be a conviction, but you are never going to see a politician in jail. That’s what makes you angry,” he says.

Populism and polarization

Each of the cases is different, but the battle of narratives that emerge reflects a theme prevalent across countries where prosecutions of politicians are frequent: Citizens aren’t sure when or whether to trust the judicial process itself.

Populist politics and polarization fuel deeply divided perspectives, revolving increasingly around loyalty to personality, while access to reliable public information about trials is limited.

“No one even believes the journalists anymore,” says Mr. Peralta.

The way judicial systems in Latin America carry out their work “reinforces and sustains a culture of secrecy ... generating a high degree of distrust and distance from the citizenry,” reads a report published earlier this year by the Regional Alliance, a network of civil organizations across Latin America.

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Félix Díaz, a Qom leader, is one of a dozen Indigenous people camped outside Argentina's presidential palace on the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, demanding legal and political support for Indigenous communities across Argentina, April 5, 2023.

Costa Rica and Argentina have made strides in data transparency and accessibility by making information about judicial trials available online. And 16 countries from the region have signed on to the Open Government Partnership, a global network that requires members to publish national action plans in areas of transparency, accountability, and public participation, and report on their implementation.

In the meantime, high-level political convictions continue to mean little for people like Felix Diaz, president of the Participatory Advisory Council of the Indigenous People in Argentina. 

“We don’t have access to justice, we don’t have human rights, or money to hire a lawyer,” says Mr. Diaz, as a steady flow of tourists take pictures of the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s presidential palace, their backs to the tent where he and 11 others have lived for the past three years demanding political and legal support for Indigenous communities.

“We haven’t found a reason to trust yet.”

Portrait by Devyn Glista/Penguin Random House

Emily Henry and the cover of her book, "Happy Place"

If you read an Emily Henry novel while seated in an armchair, you may imagine that you’re actually in a beach chair. The author’s most recent stories are about finding romance in vacation settings.

The title of Ms. Henry’s new novel, “Happy Place,” refers to a holiday cottage in Maine. Every year, three couples meet up at the sea-side home. But the protagonist and her former boyfriend haven’t told their friends that they broke up months earlier. The duo decide to pretend that they’re still engaged. The occasionally steamy “Happy Place” exemplifies the character depth and witty dialogue that enriched her previous bestsellers “Beach Read,” “People We Meet on Vacation,” and “Book Lovers.” 

The Monitor recently interviewed Ms. Henry via Zoom. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You first started reading romance novels a few years ago when you felt acutely aware of darkness in the world. Can you tell me about how the often-denigrated rom-com genre offered a respite?

The thing that I love about the genre so much is that it’s innately built on hopefulness. … When we talk about the genre, we talk about the idea of a happily ever after, or a happy for now. … You don’t need a guarantee of everything being smooth sailing from here on out. You just need this one moment where you really appreciate where you are and you have joy and have some semblance of contentment. I think that’s a really healing thing to be able to read ….

I think the hope element of it is even possibly more important than the comfort. It’s not just a Band-Aid. It’s something that kind of helps you believe in life again. Like, believe in life and its value and its beauty. 

What did you want “Happy Place” to convey about what constitutes true happiness? 

Maine is this cast of characters’ happy place. But Harriet, the narrating character, also has all of these other happy places that are just the moments that she goes back to [reminisce about] to ground herself. … That has been a way of thinking that has persisted for generations, that you’re working for the weekend, just putting in your time until you can get to what feels like it should be your real life. There’s a line where she talks about how she feels like she’s living in this marathon. The finish line is when she’ll finally be happy. That’s such an easy trap to fall into where everything you’re doing is for this imagined future version of yourself, and you’re not making any time and space in the present to already have joy. 

How did you look at this book as a way to explore issues of self-worth? 

Even in our closest friendships and our most intimate relationships, there still is that fear that if people could really see all the way down to the core of you, you would be unlovable. … But again, I’m writing romance. The whole genre is built on hope. It’s built on the idea that it’s worth exposing yourself to that raw level, with the hope that you could have this connection with a person that you can’t have if they never really see you. And the main character for “Happy Place,” specifically Harriet, her big thing that she’s working on is being a people pleaser. I feel like that’s been a huge revelation for me over the last couple of years - how much of my life is guided by trying to make sure everybody’s happy with me. It’s like I’m writing that consciously, knowing I’m working through something for myself. 

What are some of your literary and onscreen influences for writing witty banter?  

It’s a sensibility that’s born much more from watching a lot of TV and movies. And I always come back to the feeling that I was raised by Nora Ephron (“You’ve Got Mail”) and Amy Sherman-Palladino (“Gilmore Girls”). There are novelists I look to whenever I’m not feeling particularly funny and I just need to be reminded what a funny writer is. I constantly go back to Mhairi McFarlane. And then the co-writing duo Christina Lauren.

Tell me about the research for your novels. I imagine it involves a lot of traveling to vacation locations?

I am really a homebody and I love just being home writing. But I also do think it’s a pretty nice racket I’ve got going here where I can just set a book somewhere and go spend some time there and then, like, write it all off!

AP

People walk among destroyed buildings in Antakya, southern Turkey, Feb. 15.

For two decades, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has ruled Turkey with an autocrat’s toolbox. Now, three weeks before a potentially pivotal election, Mr. Erdoğan is trailing in the polls. If he loses, it won’t be to a personal opponent so much as to an ideal.

That is because the powerful earthquakes that devastated cities and towns across southern Turkey and parts of neighboring Syria in February altered more than the physical landscape. They exposed the weaknesses of a state built on corruption, patronage, and intimidation, and have renewed the people’s faith in the moral strength of their communities and their own agency. For ordinary Turks, rebuilding their homes has become one with rebuilding their democracy.

The earthquakes “revealed a society that is highly resistant, creative, and active,” observed Hürcan Asli Aksoy and Salim Çevik of the Center for Applied Turkey Studies in Germany. “Civil initiatives took the lead where the state was absent and proved more reliable and successful. These qualities, which cross-cut Turkey’s otherwise identity-based fault lines, demonstrate the country’s potential to heal its wounds.”

Mr. Erdoğan was elected prime minister in 2003. His tenure has been a project in consolidating power. But that now appears to have backfired. Mr. Erdoğan’s political strength relies in large part on the backing of the construction industry, which accounts for 40% of total fixed-capital investment. When an estimated 300,000 buildings crumbled during the earthquakes, that system literally came crashing down, exposing the government’s lax enforcement of building codes and sparking the arrests of hundreds of contractors for corruption and shoddy construction.

Two days after the earthquakes, Mr. Erdoğan promised to rebuild the devastated regions within a year. That brought a chorus of condemnation from engineering associations, local officials, and civil society organizations, who saw in the president’s pledge further proof of reckless disregard both for sound building practices and the cultural integrity of communities that stretch back generations.

A public opinion survey conducted by the Istanbul-based Spectrum House at the end of March found that 82% of voters thought local government should be strengthened and the centralization of power in Mr. Erdoğan’s presidential system reversed. For Anna Maria Beylunioğlu, a political scientist who returned to help her home town of Antakya after the earthquakes, that reversal is about dignity.

“We will give a voice to the inhabitants of Antakya, so that the city can be rebuilt as before,” she told French journalists in March. Roughly 80% of the ancient city had been destroyed. “I don’t know if it will be heard, but it will remain as a reference point.”

Disasters can often bring new visions of a better future. “Demands for political change can emerge from unexpected places, and when they do, they can offer hope to millions of others,” observed MIT economics professor Daron Acemoglu and Turkish investment banker Cihat Tokgöz in a recent op-ed on the website Project Syndicate. “That, more than a new government, is what true change requires.”

Mr. Erdoğan’s main presidential challenger in the election has pledged to restore the independence of institutions like the parliament, judiciary, and free press if elected. Regardless of the ballot’s outcome, popular demands for democratic change are already building a different Turkish future.