After facing off against Donald Trump in June, President Joe Biden explained his poor debate performance in part by telling reporters, “It’s hard to debate a liar.” He had a point—by one estimate, Trump made more than 30 false claims that night, on everything from Roe v. Wade and January 6 to China, taxes, and, depending on who you ask, his own golf game.

In fact, there’s a name for Trump’s apparent tactic: The “Gish Gallop.” The term refers to a rhetorical strategy of, basically, overwhelming your opponent with false or incoherent information. As Robert Talisse, a professor of philosophy and political science at Vanderbilt University and co-author of the book Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement in an Age of Unreason, describes it, to employ the Gish Gallop is “to paralyze and immobilize the dialectical opponent by just burying him or her in a morass of bad arguments and empirically questionable claims.” As a result, the opponent can’t address all of the claims at once, or get to any prepared remarks—making it appear as if the “Gish Galloper” has won the debate.

The name comes from creationist Duane Gish, who frequently took on scientists in evolutionary debates in the 1980s and 90s. National Center for Science Education director Eugenie Scott coined the term, writing in 1994 that the formal debate format meant “the evolutionist has to shut up while the creationist gallops along, spewing out nonsense with every paragraph.”

To see what she means, here’s a clip of Gish from the early ’80s. He goes on at about the 24-minute mark:

Knowingly or not, four decades later, Trump appears to have embraced the same tactic. “Like Gish before him, Trump ceaselessly repeats claims that have been publicly discredited,” journalist Mehdi Hasan argued in the Atlantic last year in an excerpt of his book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. “Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it.”

To better understand the Gish Gallop’s little-known history, how to identify it, and strategies for defeating it, I called Professor Talisse for a rundown ahead of the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate.

Read an edited and condensed version of our conversation below:

Does the Gish Gallop function differently in political debates, compared to debates about evolution?

When we’re talking about politics, we’re almost always talking about political identities and partisan affiliations. In the case of evolutionary biology, with the original Gish Gallop, there was an element of identity, too. The debaters were affiliated with either a certain kind of religious identity or an identity that takes itself to be enlightened and more scientific. So in that respect, the original Gish Gallop context is similar to the context of political debates, where part of what the Gish Galloper is doing is trying to give his allies the experience of seeing somebody on their side “own” the other side, to use a bit of internet lingo.

“As Steve Bannon called it, ‘flooding the zone [with shit].””

And “owning” the other side has almost nothing to do with having a better command of the facts. Owning just means overcoming. Especially in presidential debates, political debating is really just a competition among the two debaters for the headlines the next day, for the soundbite, and for the clip that’s going to get a million views on social media.

It is not a logical thing. It’s not a rational thing. It’s not even about staying on topic. As Steve Bannon called it, “flooding the zone [with shit],” right? The political variant of the Gish Gallop is to say so much stuff that is objectionable to the other side that your interlocutor gets paralyzed by the sheer quantity of things to object to. And even in that case, the interlocutor has been taken off his or her own messaging.

So it’s a two-pronged strategy: One purpose is to simply overwhelm your opponent, so they don’t know which thing to respond to—

Right, they don’t know which ball to swing at.

—and then secondly, the opponent can’t bring up their own points, whatever they were hoping to talk about.

Yes. And one other aspect of this that I think is a little bit less often noticed: Part of the Gish Gallop is also about controlling what will be talked about by ordinary citizens the next day. Will it be some candidate’s policy proposal, or will it be one candidate saying, “There you go again,” like Reagan did, right? Will it be the zinger, or will it be something of substance?

One of the more distressing features of democracy under the technological conditions we live in—social media, 24/7 news—is that a lot of our politics are wrapped up in controlling the topics of conversation among friends and families and coworkers. For every moment one spends on the day after the debate saying, “Could you believe what Harris said?” or “Can you believe what Trump said?” is time not talking about an issue that might be more substantive, like the facts about immigration, or the facts about school shootings.

If Trump deployed the tactic at the debate on Tuesday, how might viewers recognize it?

I think it’s increasingly a tactic, this variant mutation of the Gish Gallop. What we’re seeing now, particularly from Trump, are that his statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head—like sharks and batteries and claims that he understands nuclear energy because he has an uncle who taught at MIT. The claim is, on its face, kind of absurd in a way that you have to wonder, what could he possibly mean by that? And the more time you spend wondering is time you’re not spending thinking about other things.

“[Trump’s] statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head.”

So what I would recommend to my fellow citizens who are invested in presidential politics is to read the transcript—not watch the debate. When we listen to somebody speak, especially if we’re well-disposed to them, we tend to cognize—what we’ve heard tends to be a lot more coherent than what’s actually coming out of the mouth of the speaker. Once you realize that the Gish Gallop is part of a strategy, I think the right inoculation is to start reading the transcripts and not trying to make sense of what’s being said [on live television].

But aren’t you losing something by not seeing all the information conveyed through things like gestures and facial expressions and tone?

Yeah, that’s the cost, right? There’s no silver bullet here. But in my view, knowing that this tactic is so prominent and so central to modern debating strategies, reading the transcripts, even after you’ve watched the live event, elucidates a lot of things.

If you’re really interested in making sure you get the whole thing, watch the debate and then read the transcript. Take note of how your impression of the event changes after you’ve read it. I’m always surprised about how much of what appears in the transcript that I don’t remember hearing. [Editor’s note: You can view a list of presidential debate transcripts dating back to 1960 here.]

For Harris, or anyone who’s debating someone using the Gish Gallop, how do you combat it? How do you beat the Gish?

I’m not a debater myself, but I think the best strategy is calling it out and then trying to get back on topic. Saying, “This is a Gish Gallop. You’ve said eight things, all of which are objectionable. If I had more time, I could give you my objections to all of them. Let me now just respond like this,” and then as quickly as possible, the interlocutor should get back on message. That’s the way to do it.

After facing off against Donald Trump in June, President Joe Biden explained his poor debate performance in part by telling reporters, “It’s hard to debate a liar.” He had a point—by one estimate, Trump made more than 30 false claims that night, on everything from Roe v. Wade and January 6 to China, taxes, and, depending on who you ask, his own golf game.

In fact, there’s a name for Trump’s apparent tactic: The “Gish Gallop.” The term refers to a rhetorical strategy of, basically, overwhelming your opponent with false or incoherent information. As Robert Talisse, a professor of philosophy and political science at Vanderbilt University and co-author of the book Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement in an Age of Unreason, describes it, to employ the Gish Gallop is “to paralyze and immobilize the dialectical opponent by just burying him or her in a morass of bad arguments and empirically questionable claims.” As a result, the opponent can’t address all of the claims at once, or get to any prepared remarks—making it appear as if the “Gish Galloper” has won the debate.

The name comes from creationist Duane Gish, who frequently took on scientists in evolutionary debates in the 1980s and 90s. National Center for Science Education director Eugenie Scott coined the term, writing in 1994 that the formal debate format meant “the evolutionist has to shut up while the creationist gallops along, spewing out nonsense with every paragraph.”

To see what she means, here’s a clip of Gish from the early ’80s. He goes on at about the 24-minute mark:

Knowingly or not, four decades later, Trump appears to have embraced the same tactic. “Like Gish before him, Trump ceaselessly repeats claims that have been publicly discredited,” journalist Mehdi Hasan argued in the Atlantic last year in an excerpt of his book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. “Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it.”

To better understand the Gish Gallop’s little-known history, how to identify it, and strategies for defeating it, I called Professor Talisse for a rundown ahead of the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate.

Read an edited and condensed version of our conversation below:

Does the Gish Gallop function differently in political debates, compared to debates about evolution?

When we’re talking about politics, we’re almost always talking about political identities and partisan affiliations. In the case of evolutionary biology, with the original Gish Gallop, there was an element of identity, too. The debaters were affiliated with either a certain kind of religious identity or an identity that takes itself to be enlightened and more scientific. So in that respect, the original Gish Gallop context is similar to the context of political debates, where part of what the Gish Galloper is doing is trying to give his allies the experience of seeing somebody on their side “own” the other side, to use a bit of internet lingo.

“As Steve Bannon called it, ‘flooding the zone [with shit].””

And “owning” the other side has almost nothing to do with having a better command of the facts. Owning just means overcoming. Especially in presidential debates, political debating is really just a competition among the two debaters for the headlines the next day, for the soundbite, and for the clip that’s going to get a million views on social media.

It is not a logical thing. It’s not a rational thing. It’s not even about staying on topic. As Steve Bannon called it, “flooding the zone [with shit],” right? The political variant of the Gish Gallop is to say so much stuff that is objectionable to the other side that your interlocutor gets paralyzed by the sheer quantity of things to object to. And even in that case, the interlocutor has been taken off his or her own messaging.

So it’s a two-pronged strategy: One purpose is to simply overwhelm your opponent, so they don’t know which thing to respond to—

Right, they don’t know which ball to swing at.

—and then secondly, the opponent can’t bring up their own points, whatever they were hoping to talk about.

Yes. And one other aspect of this that I think is a little bit less often noticed: Part of the Gish Gallop is also about controlling what will be talked about by ordinary citizens the next day. Will it be some candidate’s policy proposal, or will it be one candidate saying, “There you go again,” like Reagan did, right? Will it be the zinger, or will it be something of substance?

One of the more distressing features of democracy under the technological conditions we live in—social media, 24/7 news—is that a lot of our politics are wrapped up in controlling the topics of conversation among friends and families and coworkers. For every moment one spends on the day after the debate saying, “Could you believe what Harris said?” or “Can you believe what Trump said?” is time not talking about an issue that might be more substantive, like the facts about immigration, or the facts about school shootings.

If Trump deployed the tactic at the debate on Tuesday, how might viewers recognize it?

I think it’s increasingly a tactic, this variant mutation of the Gish Gallop. What we’re seeing now, particularly from Trump, are that his statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head—like sharks and batteries and claims that he understands nuclear energy because he has an uncle who taught at MIT. The claim is, on its face, kind of absurd in a way that you have to wonder, what could he possibly mean by that? And the more time you spend wondering is time you’re not spending thinking about other things.

“[Trump’s] statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head.”

So what I would recommend to my fellow citizens who are invested in presidential politics is to read the transcript—not watch the debate. When we listen to somebody speak, especially if we’re well-disposed to them, we tend to cognize—what we’ve heard tends to be a lot more coherent than what’s actually coming out of the mouth of the speaker. Once you realize that the Gish Gallop is part of a strategy, I think the right inoculation is to start reading the transcripts and not trying to make sense of what’s being said [on live television].

But aren’t you losing something by not seeing all the information conveyed through things like gestures and facial expressions and tone?

Yeah, that’s the cost, right? There’s no silver bullet here. But in my view, knowing that this tactic is so prominent and so central to modern debating strategies, reading the transcripts, even after you’ve watched the live event, elucidates a lot of things.

If you’re really interested in making sure you get the whole thing, watch the debate and then read the transcript. Take note of how your impression of the event changes after you’ve read it. I’m always surprised about how much of what appears in the transcript that I don’t remember hearing. [Editor’s note: You can view a list of presidential debate transcripts dating back to 1960 here.]

For Harris, or anyone who’s debating someone using the Gish Gallop, how do you combat it? How do you beat the Gish?

I’m not a debater myself, but I think the best strategy is calling it out and then trying to get back on topic. Saying, “This is a Gish Gallop. You’ve said eight things, all of which are objectionable. If I had more time, I could give you my objections to all of them. Let me now just respond like this,” and then as quickly as possible, the interlocutor should get back on message. That’s the way to do it.

Last year, in one of her first interviews with the international press, Rachel Goldberg-Polin told the New York Times that she hadn’t been able to go “one hour” without thinking that her son was dead.

Her son, 23-year-old Israeli-American dual citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was among the more than 200 hostages captured by Hamas and its allies on October 7 in an attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis and sparked a counter-attack by Israel that has since killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

On Saturday, the Israeli military said it had retrieved the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel in southern Gaza, including that of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. According to the military, Hamas killed the six hostages shortly before their bodies were found. The others reportedly include Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Eden Yerushalmi.

Since Oct. 7, Goldberg-Polin’s parents have been outspoken advocates for the release of their son and the other hostages, even traveling to Chicago to deliver a speech at last month’s Democratic National Convention.

They’ve had to grapple with the possibility of their son’s death for months. Here’s part of the Times‘ interview—which aired on “The Daily” podcast on October 20—in which Rachel described attending the funeral of a victim of the terrorist attack, and the tragic pragmatism of having a child taken hostage:

Sabrina Tavernise: What did it feel like to come home after the funeral, Rachel? Was any part of you worried that you could be in those shoes as well?

Rachel Goldberg-Polin: Oh, there’s not been one day—I don’t think there’s been one hour that I haven’t thought he’s dead. You know, we have to keep going forward until we know that’s not true. But Hersh may have died 13 days ago, and I don’t know about it. He may have died an hour ago. He may have died five days ago. He may have died on my birthday last week. I don’t know.

Sabrina Tavernise: Right.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin: So it’s really—it’s just a twilight zone of an existence that is so unfamiliar. It’s like walking on another planet.

Sabrina Tavernise: What is that planet?

Rachel Goldberg-Polin: It’s like living in a completely parallel universe because I feel so close in proximity to this place I knew, you know, and I see these people and these friends. And I’m hugging people and I’m very, very close to them and I can smell them and I can see their pores and their skin, but I’m different. I’m—there’s like a film between us because I’m not in their world. Like I’m super close, but I’m not in their world. And the only time that I feel that I’m in a world that’s familiar to me is when I’m with—you know, last night I went to an event that a few different families of American hostages were meeting at. And when I’m with those people, we all know that parallel universe. We’re all in that place. And this one woman and I, every time we see each other, we hug each other and we feel such a closeness, which is this, like, sick, grotesque, perverse closeness. But it’s that we’re both in this same devastating and unknown and unfamiliar universe.

Overnight, the family released a statement: “With broken hearts, the Goldberg-Polin family is devastated to announce the death of their beloved son and brother, Hersh. The family thanks you all for your love and support and asks for privacy at this time.”

President Joe Biden said he was “devastated and outraged” by the news of Goldberg-Polin’s death. “It is as tragic as it is reprehensible,” he said in a statement released by the White House. “Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes. And we will keep working around the clock for a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages.”

In a personal, wide-ranging speech to close out the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris briefly touched on climate change, but largely avoided the topic.

Many “fundamental freedoms are at stake” in this election, Harris said, including the “freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.” That was it.

For an issue that scientists warn is a major, global threat to our species and thousands of others, you’d think it’d get a little more airtime.

For an issue that scientists warn is a major, global threat to our species, you’d think it’d get a little more airtime.

To be sure, over the four-day convention, climate change had a few, brief moments in the spotlight: In his opening night speech, President Joe Biden highlighted his climate record, including signing into law the Inflation Reduction Act, which he described as “the most significant climate law in the history of mankind,” and launching the Climate Corps, a climate jobs program which he compared to similar programs like the Peace Corps. On Thursday, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland made the case for Harris, saying she and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz would “fight for a future where we all have clean air, clean water and healthy communities.” In an impassioned, short speech, Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost, the youngest member of Congress, said that “fighting the climate crisis is patriotic.” (Watch our interview with Frost here.) And throughout the week, trainings, council meetings, and panels centered on climate.

But in some of the event’s biggest speeches, including Harris’, climate change was absent or scantly mentioned. Walz, who spoke on Wednesday night, made almost no mention of environmental issues during his 15-minute speech. Even as he listed his achievements as Minnesota’s governor, including paid family and medical leave and free meals in schools, he left out any climate-related wins, like signing a law last year requiring his state to reach 100 percent renewable-fueled electricity by 2040. Now, as a science journalist, I might be biased, but that’s a pretty major item for Walz to leave out of the biggest speech of his career so far.

Some environmental advocates took notice of the lack of climate talk at the convention. “It’s a bit of a bummer that it hasn’t gotten more time,” Cassidy DiPaola, spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay Campaign, a climate accountability organization, told the Guardian ahead of Thursday’s programming.

But others seem less bothered by climate’s absence at the convention—or on the campaign trail. Although Democrats’ climate goals feature prominently in the party’s official platform, approved this week at the DNC, Harris has yet to release a detailed plan for fighting the crisis. “I am not concerned,” Washington’s Democratic governor Jay Inslee, a vocal climate advocate, told the New York Times, saying his bigger concern is electing Harris to office. “I am totally confident that when she is in a position to effect positive change, she will.”

“This is an issue where it’s absolutely stark.”

Despite its absence in Harris’ campaign, Democratic organizers say they see climate as an issue she can win on. Polling shared at the DNC this week by Data for Progress, a progressive think tank, revealed that a majority of voters are at least somewhat familiar with climate change and environmental justice. And for about a third of voters polled, climate change was more important to them this year than in 2020. “It’s become an absolutely kitchen table issue,” Michelle Deatrick, chair of the DNC’s climate council told me. “People are very aware of it and concerned.” Particularly in contrast to former President Donald Trump, she says, who has referred to climate change as a “hoax” and rolled back more than 100 environmental protections, Democrats, she believes, have a winning case. “This is an issue where it’s absolutely stark,” she says.

The trouble is, many Americans aren’t aware of either Biden’s or Harris’ climate record. As Grist reported earlier this month, shortly ahead of the Inflation Reduction Act’s second anniversary, polling suggests as many as four in 10 voters have heard “nothing at all” about Biden’s signature climate law, for which Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. Deatrick sees this gap in knowledge as an “opportunity” for Democrats to get the word out about the Biden-Harris administration’s “huge wins”—from investments in electric vehicle infrastructure to lead pipe removal and land protections. “That is the work that is being done and needs to be done,” she said.

By all accounts, Harris has a part in the most climate-active administration in American history. So, if she wants more voters to understand her record, it might help to start talking about it.

When it comes to campaign messaging, Kamala Harris’ past as a prosecutor has served as both a strength and a liability. As a first-term senator from California, her rigorous cross-examination during the confirmation hearings of several Trump appointees—including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt—raised her profile and put her on the political map.

At the same time, during her bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president, criminal justice advocates criticized her prosecutorial past. Memes declaring “Kamala is a cop” circulated on social media and were picked up by bad-faith detractors who Harris saw as attempting to “distort” her record. Throughout her campaign, she struggled to reframe her résumé until, finally, she shut down operations in late 2019.

But all that changed last month, shortly after President Joe Biden dropped his reelection campaign and endorsed her as his heir apparent. At that point, the vice president wasted no time leaning into the “prosecutor” label she earned as a lawyer in the courtroom, district attorney, and California’s attorney general to position herself in opposition to the former president, GOP presidential candidate, and convicted felon Donald Trump, who last May was found guilty on 34 counts related to hush-money payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels.

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds—predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” Harris told supporters in Wilmington, Delaware. “So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

His “type,” notably, included climate sellouts. She described that during her stint as district attorney, she created “one of the first environmental justice units in our nation” to prosecute polluters. “Donald Trump stood in Mar-a-Lago,” she continued, “and told Big Oil lobbyists he would do their bidding for a $1 billion campaign contribution.” She, Harris argued, was the anti-Trump.

It was a noticeable shift in tone from just five years ago, when Harris fought to stand out in a crowded Democratic primary. Of the more than 20 candidates vying to take on Trump in 2020, including Harris, most supported achieving net-zero carbon emissions, a carbon tax, and the newly introduced Green New Deal, a resolution to slash greenhouse gas emissions that has yet to pass in a divided Congress.

“Let’s get them not only in the pocketbook, but let’s make sure there are severe and serious penalties for their behaviors.”

At the time, with no climate debate on the books, Harris joined Mother Jones, the Weather Channel, and Climate Desk for a series of conversations with 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls that became part of a one-hour Weather Channel special, “2020: Race to Save the Planet.” She said that she planned to use the Department of Justice to prosecute “crime[s] against the environment” and go after fossil fuel polluters. “Let’s get them not only in the pocketbook,” Harris said at the time, “but let’s make sure there are severe and serious penalties for their behaviors.” (The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment about whether this is still part of her platform, or what “serious penalties” meant, specifically.)

As my former colleague Rebecca Leber wrote in 2019, when Harris was head of California’s Department of Justice, she did indeed sue major oil and gas companies. But the environmental justice unit at the San Francisco DA’s office—one of the first in the country, Harris often notes—might not have been all that she claimed it to be. As Grist reported last month, under Harris’ leadership, the unit prosecuted some companies including U-Haul for unlawfully disposing of hazardous waste, among other charges, and brought a few lawsuits against low-level offenders. In terms of the major polluters in the region, her office reportedly failed to pursue them.

As vice president, however, she served in the most climate-forward administration to date. In 2021, the White House announced plans to target at least a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, part of the country’s commitments under the Paris Agreement, which former President Donald Trump famously backed out of during his tenure.

In 2022, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in fighting climate change ever passed by Congress. And, as Grist noted, Harris represented the Biden administration at 2023’s COP28 in Dubai, where she promised a $3 billion commitment to the Green Climate Fund to support developing countries in the fight against climate change. The administration’s list of climate achievements is so long, Harris said in March at a conference of climate activists, that her husband, Doug Emhoff, jokingly describes it as a “CVS receipt.” “We could just go on and on,” she said. As of this week, more than 350 environmental justice advocates and politicians—including former presidential climate envoy John Kerry, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy—have signed a letter endorsing Harris.

Now, with Trump as her primary opponent, Harris’ prosecutor brand might land differently. “In 2020, her past made it hard for her to break through,” my colleague Jamilah King wrote in early July. But now, “it could be exactly what’s needed.” On climate change, Trump has vowed to undo much of the Inflation Reduction Act and use fossil fuels, which he described as the “liquid gold” just sitting “under our feet,” and promised to “drill, baby drill.” When asked on the debate stage last June whether he’d take “any action” to slow the climate crisis, he dodged. If Harris is the anti-Trump, her momentum among environmental voters could suggest that a climate prosecutor might be exactly what they’re looking for.

When I first skimmed through the Republican Party’s 2024 policy platform, a 16-page document titled “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!,” much of it read as Trumpian but unsurprising. The platform, which is sprinkled with odd capitalization and an unusually high number of exclamation points, calls for launching the “largest deportation program in American history,” stopping “woke” government, and ending “market-distorting restrictions” on oil, natural gas, and coal. Though I hardly expected them to be, the terms “climate change,” “global warming,” or “the environment” aren’t mentioned.

But there was one section that stood out to me. In a chapter titled, “Bring Common Sense to Government and Renew the Pillars of American Civilization,” the plan calls for the restoration of “American Beauty”:

Republicans will promote beauty in Public Architecture and preserve our Natural Treasures. We will build cherished symbols of our Nation, and restore genuine Conservation efforts.

That was it. No elaboration. This, to me, is weird. What, specifically, are “our National Treasures?” What does it mean to restore “genuine” conservation efforts? And what is “beauty” in public architecture? As CNN quipped in its recent annotation of the party’s platform, “It’s not clear when or how Republicans feel American beauty ended, but they clearly want to restore it.” Of all things to rally behind, are Republicans calling for…prettier buildings?

Clues from Trump’s time in office point to yes, actually. In a December 21, 2020, executive order, then-President Donald Trump praised Greek and Roman architecture for being designed to “beautify public spaces and inspire civic pride.” Similarly, classical-style buildings like the Lincoln Memorial, Capitol Building, Supreme Court, and White House, Trump remarked, “have become iconic symbols of our system of government.”

But by the 1950s and 60s, Trump wrote, government buildings became “undistinguished” and were seen as “unappealing,” tarnished by a Brutalist design aesthetic. He bashed San Francisco’s Federal Building as being designed only for architects to appreciate. When the building opened in 2007, San Francisco Chronicle urban design critic John King praised its eco-friendly design, including natural ventilation, writing that it was “architecture at its provocative best.” Trump said residents saw it as “one of the ugliest structures in their city.” (I used to live in San Francisco. I don’t disagree.) To remedy such travesties, Trump directed his administration to embrace classical and traditional architecture that would “uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, and command respect from the general public.” So the GOP’s call to renew the “pillars of American civilization,” might literally mean building more pillars.

“Beauty” doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

But as some academics noted at the time, the use of classical architecture in the US has a fraught history. Reinhold Martin, an architecture professor at Columbia University, told the New York Times in 2020 that Trump’s order, while having no real teeth, was “an effort to use culture to send coded messages about white supremacy and political hegemony.” As my former colleague Camille Squires has reported, there is a long, ugly history of pro-slavery Southerners deploying classical architecture to justify their cause. “Beauty” doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

“National Treasures,” meanwhile, could mean all sorts of things. Landmarks? Historic sites? Artifacts? The joy of a human that is Dolly Parton? (Only half kidding.) Again, the Trump administration offers some hints: In an August 2020 announcement celebrating the Great American Outdoors Act, a law granting $9.5 billion for national park maintenance, the White House praised America’s national parks as “our most important national treasures.” So perhaps that’s what the GOP platform means, but I wouldn’t count on Trump to follow through on protecting them. A few months after he signed the Great American Outdoors Act, just days after losing the 2020 election, Trump’s administration moved to undermine the law.

As for “cherished symbols of our Nation” and “genuine” conservation efforts—I have no idea. Does the GOP mean Trump’s land conservation efforts (which were largely viewed as greenwashing), conservation of species, or something else? I couldn’t find any mention of these phrases in Trump administration records, and the Trump campaign has yet to respond to my request for clarification. (If they do, I’ll be sure to update this post.) Last week, at Trump’s order, delegates at the Republican National Convention passed this platform behind closed doors with almost no edits.

But perhaps the vagueness is the point. Whether intentional or not, by failing to define these terms, the Trump campaign can effectively quell the concerns of many voters who support clean air and water, land conservation, and wildlife protections, while failing to make any real commitments. Of course, without aggressive action at the highest level of government, we risk losing the natural beauty of the country as various environmental crises—climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and more—stand to get worse. But hey, at least our buildings will look nice.

Even before the Supreme Court ruled late last month in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a lawsuit over a herring fishing regulation, Meredith Moore knew the case was never really about fish. Moore, the director of the fish conservation program at the nonprofit environmental group Ocean Conservancy, instead saw the case as a “Trojan horse” that would weaken public agencies’ regulatory power across the board and unleash a wave of lawsuits aimed at unraveling environmental protections. “This is an opportunity for a free-for-all,” she says.

“This is an opportunity for a free-for-all.”

As Moore had feared, when it came time for the Court to deliver its June 28 decision on Loper Bright (which it had merged with a near-identical case, Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce), the conservative majority overturned a decades-old legal precedent known as “Chevron deference.” Named after a 1984 Supreme Court case involving the oil giant, the doctrine was one of the most cited legal precedents ever. For 40 years, it instructed judges to defer to an agency’s interpretation of a law—say, the Clean Water Act, Social Security Act, Affordable Care Act—when that law was unclear. Now, thanks to the pair of lawsuits (and the anti-regulatory interests like Charles Koch, who backed them), the power to determine the “best” reading of ambiguous statutes now falls to judges, not agency officials.

The decision, many legal experts warn, will curtail federal agencies’ ability to regulate everything from tax policy to reproductive rights and the environment, and is likely to be one of the court’s most significant actions in recent history—on par with decisions that overturned the right to abortion and ended affirmative action.

While it’s clear that the decision will be extraordinarily broad (which I’ve written about here and here), the specific, concrete details about its impact are less obvious. What will the ruling mean, for instance, for herring? Or other fish we eat? Or any of the more than 1,000 threatened and endangered species in the US?

Let’s start with herring. The regulation that sparked Relentless and Loper Bright required herring fishermen to pay for boat observers to monitor their catches—around $700 per trip—a practice intended to document what species are caught and prevent overfishing under the Magnuson–Stevens Act. While the Supreme Court took up the case, it only agreed to address Chevron deference, putting the fate of the fishing regulation in the hands of lower courts.

But beyond that single rule, Moore worries about federal efforts to manage fisheries in all sorts of other ways. Under the Magnuson–Stevens Act, the primary law governing US fisheries, she explains, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sets catch limits for various types of fish. If a population becomes overfished, the agency creates plans to rebuild them. In the last nearly 25 years, the agency says it’s helped recover 50 fish stocks, including populations of bocaccio (a type of rockfish), Snohomish coho salmon, and Pacific Ocean perch. But now, if the agency’s regulations are challenged in court, it will be up to a judge, rather than NOAA officials, to identify the most suitable application of laws like the Magnuson–Stevens Act—a change Moore worries will make it harder for NOAA to keep US fisheries operating sustainably.

Many other regulations may also be at risk. According to Democracy Forward, a nonprofit public policy research organization tracking lower-court citations of Loper Bright and Relentless, there have been at least 40 references to the court’s Chevron ruling as of mid-July, including in filings in 19 different cases and opinions from 11 courts. These citations involve many areas of the law, from gas appliance energy standards, Title IX, abortion, airline fees, anti-discrimination provisions in health care, and more. “By and large, these cases are being used aggressively to seek to stop regulations and programs that benefit the American people,” said Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward. In one lawsuit, Massachusetts Lobstermen Association v. National Marine Fisheries Service, lawyers representing lobster fishermen referenced the Supreme Court’s Chevron ruling as part of their fight against a federal regulation intended to protect North Atlantic right whales. (Read more about this battle here.)

But not every environmental advocate sees the overturning of Chevron deference as a disaster for plants and animals. Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that has sued the federal government many times for not doing enough to protect imperiled wildlife, told me that he expects the decision to yield a “mixed bag” of lawsuits that will take years to play out. But he also sees it as an opportunity to strengthen certain environmental protections.

For instance, Hartl argues, the Fish and Wildlife Service hasn’t always gone far enough to protect at-risk species as required by the Endangered Species Act. The agency has failed to follow its own species recovery plans, he argues, often proposing to delist species too soon. And it has never fully grappled with a key definition in the ESA: what it means for a species to be at risk of extinction within “a significant portion” of its “range”—whether that means an animal’s current range, historic range, or something else. The agency’s “unambitious” and “piecemeal” approach to recovery, as the Center for Biological Diversity has described it, hurts creatures like wolves and grizzly bears that once roamed large swaths of the country. (When reached by email, a spokesperson with the Fish and Wildlife Service pointed me to the Department of Interior, which declined to comment on its alleged shortcomings or the impacts of overturning Chevron broadly.)

Similarly, the wording of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, Hartl points out, suggests a need to steward the environment for “succeeding generations.” With this language, he argues, “NEPA creates almost an intergenerational responsibility to the environment,” and no administration has ever really capitalized on that mandate. Now, without Chevron, he argues, a federal judge might agree that federal agencies ought to do more to protect the environment under the law.

“If you have agencies constantly not meeting their mandates, and sort of falling short,” Hartl says, “Chevron is mostly a shield for them that has allowed them to perpetuate bad behavior.”

Now that Chevron is gone, Hartl says, “there actually are opportunities to make things better.” (The Center for Biological Diversity, he told me, is already planning to “retool” some of its ongoing lawsuits and introduce new ones to take advantage of the ruling.) Hartl argues that if Donald Trump wins reelection, his agencies will have “a hell of a lot less power” when it comes to regulations. “Do you want them having all this deference? I don’t.”

But overall, most of the experts I’ve spoken to about Chevron deference did not see a silver lining for wild plants and animals (or for environmental protections as a whole). Holly Doremus, an environmental law professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, told me via email that an optimistic view like the Center for Biological Diversity’s may be trying to “see the best in a bad situation.” In the short run, she expects federal courts to follow the Supreme Court’s lead and “be much more skeptical” of agency actions they see as overstepping the law rather than those seen as not going far enough for, say, endangered species protection. As Vermont Law School emeritus professor Pat Parenteau explains, lower courts often take their cues from the Supreme Court, which has signaled a clear desire to narrow environmental laws and reign in agency authority.

Lower courts often take their cues from the Supreme Court, which has signaled a clear desire to narrow environmental laws and reign in agency authority.

Other experts noted that the loss of Chevron will likely prompt groups on all sides of the political spectrum to judge-shop in specific courts to challenge rules they dislike. This could lead to a “lack of coherence” in which agency regulations are overturned or upheld, NRDC lawyer David Doniger, who argued the original 1984 Chevron case before the Supreme Court, told me ahead of the recent ruling. (It’s no secret, for instance, that a disproportionate number of lawsuits against Biden administration regulations are filed in the Amarillo Division of the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where conservative, Trump-appointed Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk sits.)

“I think you could have maybe a few wins here and there,” the Ocean Conservancy’s Moore says. “But I’m more concerned about the instability, uncertainty, and patchwork nature of what regulations will look like if they’re all able to be sued in different ways in different places.”

Echoing both Moore and Doremus, Parenteau said that while environmental advocates may see some victories in court, he believes they’re up against a “stacked deck” under this new system, in part because of the signals coming from the Supreme Court and industry’s near-unlimited resources to sue the government.

“The opponents of environmental regulation have the upper hand, there is no question about it,” he says.” And they’re going to win and win and win. And environmental advocates are just going to have to scrape and claw and try to win a few. That’s the world we’re in.”

Speaking to a crowd in Detroit, Michigan, on Friday, President Joe Biden made an impassioned plea to voters with a message that largely centered on Donald Trump’s failings—and the threat of another term under his predecessor.

Trump, Biden told the crowd, has lost his license to operate businesses in New York, faces charges for mishandling classified documents and for attempts to overturn the 2020 election, filed for bankruptcy six times, is a rapist (according to a judge), and could unravel the country’s institutions by deploying a far-right plan called “Project 2025.”

“You heard about it?” Biden asked the crowd. “It’s a blueprint for a second Trump term that every American should read and understand.”

As my colleague David Corn and others have reported, the plan, which is more than 900 pages long, includes a pathway to fire tens of thousands of federal employees, calls for the elimination of the Department of Education, encourages the president to end same-sex marriage, and more.

Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025. As my colleague Inae Oh reported earlier this month, the former president claimed, incredibly, that he knew “nothing about” it. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote on Truth Social. A subsequent review by CNN found that “at least 140” people who’ve worked for Trump were involved in the effort.

“Project 2025 is run and paid for by top Trump people,” Biden emphasized on Friday. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” he added. “It’s not a joke. It’s time to stop treating politics like entertainment and reality TV.”

You can read more about the document and its threat to democracy here.

Over the years, Donald Trump has hardly been a responsible social media user: He’s railed against the “fake news media” while disseminating actual fake news, referred to his impeachments as a “scam” and a “hoax,” repeatedly undermined the integrity of the 2020 election, fueled an attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and spewed so much Covid misinformation that we built a timeline of it. He has used his social media accounts to impugn powerful women, and to viciously attack officials he dislikes, often resulting in threats of violence against them. In March, he shared a video on Truth Social depicting Joe Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck, employing a messaging tactic experts refer to as “stochastic terrorism.”

Despite these transgressions and more, Meta announced Friday that it would remove restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts to “ensure people can hear from political candidates” in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

The decision comes just over three years since Meta and Twitter suspended Trump’s accounts in response to the Jan. 6 mob attack on the US Capitol. Twitter reinstated Trump’s account in 2022, shortly after Elon Musk purchased the company. Meta lifted its suspension on Trump’s accounts in January 2023, but placed several “guardrails” on the former president, including advertising penalties for breaking its guidelines. According to Axios, which first reported Meta’s announcement, no other public figure had been subject to such restrictions.

Now, those guardrails are gone. With the Republican convention coming up, Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg noted in a statement, nominees for president will soon be solidified. “In assessing our responsibility to allow political expression, we believe that the American people should be able to hear from the nominees for President on the same basis,” the statement read.

The Biden campaign doesn’t see it that way. As a spokesman told the New York Times, the decision “will allow Trump and his MAGA allies to reach more Americans with their fundamentally undemocratic, un-American misinformation,” calling it “a direct attack on our safety and our democracy.”

Speaking to a crowd in Detroit, Michigan, on Friday, President Joe Biden made an impassioned plea to voters with a message that largely centered on Donald Trump’s failings—and the threat of another term under his predecessor.

Trump, Biden told the crowd, has lost his license to operate businesses in New York, faces charges for mishandling classified documents and for attempts to overturn the 2020 election, filed for bankruptcy six times, is a rapist (according to a judge), and could unravel the country’s institutions by deploying a far-right plan called “Project 2025.”

“You heard about it?” Biden asked the crowd. “It’s a blueprint for a second Trump term that every American should read and understand.”

As my colleague David Corn and others have reported, the plan, which is more than 900 pages long, includes a pathway to fire tens of thousands of federal employees, calls for the elimination of the Department of Education, encourages the president to end same-sex marriage, and more.

Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025. As my colleague Inae Oh reported earlier this month, the former president claimed, incredibly, that he knew “nothing about” it. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote on Truth Social. A subsequent review by CNN found that “at least 140” people who’ve worked for Trump were involved in the effort.

“Project 2025 is run and paid for by top Trump people,” Biden emphasized on Friday. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” he added. “It’s not a joke. It’s time to stop treating politics like entertainment and reality TV.”

You can read more about the document and its threat to democracy here.

Over the years, Donald Trump has hardly been a responsible social media user: He’s railed against the “fake news media” while disseminating actual fake news, referred to his impeachments as a “scam” and a “hoax,” repeatedly undermined the integrity of the 2020 election, fueled an attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and spewed so much Covid misinformation that we built a timeline of it. He has used his social media accounts to impugn powerful women, and to viciously attack officials he dislikes, often resulting in threats of violence against them. In March, he shared a video on Truth Social depicting Joe Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck, employing a messaging tactic experts refer to as “stochastic terrorism.”

Despite these transgressions and more, Meta announced Friday that it would remove restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts to “ensure people can hear from political candidates” in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

The decision comes just over three years since Meta and Twitter suspended Trump’s accounts in response to the Jan. 6 mob attack on the US Capitol. Twitter reinstated Trump’s account in 2022, shortly after Elon Musk purchased the company. Meta lifted its suspension on Trump’s accounts in January 2023, but placed several “guardrails” on the former president, including advertising penalties for breaking its guidelines. According to Axios, which first reported Meta’s announcement, no other public figure had been subject to such restrictions.

Now, those guardrails are gone. With the Republican convention coming up, Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg noted in a statement, nominees for president will soon be solidified. “In assessing our responsibility to allow political expression, we believe that the American people should be able to hear from the nominees for President on the same basis,” the statement read.

The Biden campaign doesn’t see it that way. As a spokesman told the New York Times, the decision “will allow Trump and his MAGA allies to reach more Americans with their fundamentally undemocratic, un-American misinformation,” calling it “a direct attack on our safety and our democracy.”

Last year, in one of the most significant environmental legal cases in recent history, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority severely limited the federal government’s ability to regulate waterways. By narrowly interpreting the Clean Water Act as only applying to “relatively permanent, standing, or continuously flowing bodies of water” and wetlands with a continuous surface connection to those bodies, the court effectively cut federal protections for more than half of the country’s wetlands. Around 90 million acres of marshy areas are now much more vulnerable to pollution.

Scientists knew immediately the consequences of the case, Sackett v. EPA, would be massive—one plant biologist I spoke to last year who’d devoted her retirement to protecting wild Venus flytraps called it “the worst thing that’s happened in my conservation life.” But determining how the decision would impact the country’s vast network of rivers, lakes, and streams would take time and some scientific digging.

More than half of the water in the US’ major rivers originates from ephemeral streams.

Now, a year later, some of that research is trickling in: A new study from researchers at Yale and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, published in Science last week, reveals why removing federal protections for some non-permanent waters could have a huge effect on the nation’s rivers.

The study focused on short-lived streams, fueled by rain or snow, called “ephemeral streams,” which the Sackett decision now excludes from federal protection under the Act. When an ephemeral stream is not flowing with rainwater, lead author and recent Yale postdoc Craig Brinkerhoff explains, it may look something like a dry riverbed. That may not sound like much, but according to researchers, more than half of the water in the United States’ major rivers originates in this type of stream. About 51 percent of water flowing through the Mississippi River in a given year, for instance, traveled through an ephemeral stream first. In the Columbia, it’s 52 percent. And for much of the Rio Grande, it’s more than 90 percent.

“So often, when we talk about rivers, we think of this specific line on a map,” says Boyce Upholt, a journalist and author of the recent book The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. “That’s a really limited way of thinking about rivers.”

If regulators wished to protect rivers from pollution, it might make sense to regulate pollutants in ephemeral streams, too. But since these riverbeds are sometimes dry, they don’t qualify as “permanent, standing, or continuously flowing.” That’s why the Sackett decision is so devastating: With the authority of the Clean Water Act, the federal government can regulate pollution directly entering rivers and lakes. But now it has little jurisdiction over pollution entering the occasionally wet riverbeds upstream from them.

Conservationists are especially alarmed by the decision because they say there’s plenty of evidence to show that the Clean Water Act works. In the more than 50 years since Congress passed the Act, waterways are less polluted with contaminants like fecal bacteria (often, from sewage) and “suspended solids” including dirt and sediment than before, according to one 2018 mega-analysis.

The Science paper, notably, addresses Sackett head-on. “Our findings show that ephemeral streams are likely a substantial pathway through which pollution may influence downstream water quality,” helping reveal “the consequences of limiting US federal jurisdiction” over these waterways, the authors write.

When Brinkerhoff first started looking into mapping ephemeral streams as a PhD student at UMass Amherst, the endeavor was purely scientific. While researchers have long known ephemeral streams were ubiquitous, the waterways’ importance downstream had been murky. “If these things are hydrologically connected [to rivers],” Brinkerhoff wanted to know, “and if they’re everywhere, how big of an influence do they actually have?”

Brinkerhoff and his colleagues built a massive, high-resolution map of them, using maps from the US Geological Survey and pre-existing global groundwater models. They calculated that an average of 59 percent of the country’s river systems, by length, are ephemeral. This largely tracked with previous global estimates, Brinkerhoff says, but most interesting to him was that the trend held in Eastern states, which are typically wetter and more humid than in the West. “We don’t normally think of these places as having a lot of ephemeral streams,” he says.

Some 55 percent of the water that flows through the country’s major river systems, the researchers found, likely touched an ephemeral stream first. (Brinkerhoff says more research is needed to understand how climate change will impact these water systems.)

In 2022, after the Supreme Court agreed to take up Sackett, Brinkerhoff and his team realized the research could have even bigger implications. At the heart of the case was a question over what type of waterways ought to count as “waters of the United States” and would be subject to regulation. Brinkerhoff teamed up with policy researchers at Yale who could help translate the significance of their data for policymakers tasked with responding to the Supreme Court’s decision.

But midway through the peer review process, Sackett came down. To comply with the decision, the Biden administration then issued new regulations excluding ephemeral streams from coverage under the Clean Water Act. In October, House Democrats introduced a bill to undo the changes made under Sackett, but “the odds are against it” passing in a divided Congress, says Douglas Kysar, an environmental law expert and professor at Yale Law School and an author on the Science paper.

Kysar hopes this study on ephemeral streams may help policymakers craft better water policy. “All of us would agree that we hope it gets into the hands of decision-makers and their staff,” he says.

But the pathway for science to help inform policy is getting “narrower,” he says, particularly after several Supreme Court cases this term undermined regulatory authority, including the decision to overturn a 40-year-old legal precedent called “Chevron deference” that instructed judges to defer to agencies when interpreting vague statutes. “We really have a court that is aggrandizing power for itself and the federal judiciary,” Kysar says.

“What we saw in Sackett was the court using abstract, detached, unscientific reasoning.”

He sees Sackett as a kind of preview for how federal judges might handle future environmental cases—on wetlands, ephemeral streams, or any other issue. “What we saw in Sackett was the court using abstract, detached, unscientific reasoning,” Kysar says. “It paid essentially no deference to the experts at the EPA, the hydrologists, all the people who actually understand how ecosystems work and how pollution operates.”

And now, after the court’s Chevron ruling this term, federal judges largely won’t need to defer to agency experts at all—let alone university scientists who study ephemeral streams.