There’s some debate about what the data say about that first point, but few argue with the latter. Despite that, not every school district offers pre-kindergarten — and some districts have even seen fierce battles to stop the expansion of pre-K programs.

One state avoided that fight, however, and has one of the US’s most successful public, universal pre-K programs: Oklahoma.

My colleague Coleman Lowndes recently traveled to the state to better understand how its program came together. I asked him about that, and what other states can learn from Oklahoma. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below:

Coleman, what is universal pre-K?

In the US, pre-K is generally not part of the elementary school system. It’s usually part of what’s called a targeted program, which means that it’s geared toward low-income or at-risk children.

Universal pre-kindergarten is a public elementary school grade for all 4-year-olds, no matter your income or risk level.

Why is universal pre-K beneficial?

On a basic level, it’s good for kids: An extra year of school creates an extra year of readiness for the child.

Critics argue that while that may be true, middle- and upper-class children don’t need it, as their parents can afford to put them in private programs. The counterargument is that we need to take more than education into account, and universal pre-K should be defined as a workforce issue.

Child care in America is very expensive, and middle-class families that are left out of a targeted system and that struggle to pay for private child care can decide to try to teach their children at home. Sometimes that makes the most sense financially: One parent’s income often goes to child care anyway. 

With universal pre-K, a parent doesn’t have to make that choice to drop out of the workforce, so the idea is that it benefits middle-class families and parents by increasing their earnings and reducing their child care costs.

Why don’t more states have universal pre-K?

There’s an argument that it’s too expensive. And some people argue that there isn’t even a rigorous enough way to prove that an extra year of school is good for kids. 

There’s a concept called fade out, where by third grade, the advantages that you see in kids that went to pre-K fade out, and by third grade, they’re all pretty much the same reading level. 

The argument against universal pre-K says that that proves it’s not worth it. 

The main problem for states that want to implement universal pre-K is they will need to do it in a way that doesn’t bankrupt private child care. 

The way that the private child care business model is set up is that each age group has a different ratio of teacher to child; infants need the most care, so there may be one adult for four infants. Meanwhile, 4-year-olds need less attention, so maybe you have one adult for 15 of them. 

If you have two adults per age cohort, that’s 30 4-year-olds in a classroom, all paying customers, versus your eight paying-customer baby families. 

When states enact universal pre-K, parents often will say, Okay, this is free now, no need to send my 4-year-old to private child care now. Suddenly, private child care facilities’ most valuable clients are gone. And they either have to close or they have to raise their prices, which is tricky, because child care in America is already incredibly expensive. 

You went to Oklahoma, which figured out a way around these problems, and does have universal pre-K. Is it unusual for a red state to have universal pre-K?

Oklahoma being such a red state, passing a big social program and especially an education program was surprising. I will say though, if you look at the map of where universal pre-K exists, it’s probably half and half conservative states and progressive states.

Georgia was the first state, though they don’t have it anymore. Florida, West Virginia, and Oklahoma all have it. 

How did Oklahoma get its program?

A lot of motivated people made it happen. But there’s a key figure: Joe Eddins. He was a state representative and a former elementary school teacher in his younger days who wrote legislation to close a loophole — legislation that ended up founding the universal pre-K program.

Essentially, kindergarten was a pretty new thing for Oklahoma public schools back in the ’90s, and Oklahoma law said, if you open a kindergarten program, we’ll give you $X per kid, and you can open a half-day program or a full-day program.

Pretty quickly, schools realized that language meant half-day and full-day programs got the same amount of money. And so they opened two half-day programs, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and got double the money.

Because Oklahoma is largely a rural state, districts started to run out of 5-year-olds to enroll. They realized there’s nothing in the law that said you couldn’t put 4-year-olds in kindergarten. So they started packing them with 4-year-olds. 

The people advocating for universal pre-K found out about this, and along with Joe, said they wanted to enact a bill closing the loophole. And to help out parents who’d already enrolled their 4-year-olds, the state should have an official 4-year-old program that’s voluntary for parents. 

To solve the problem of this hurting private facilities, the bill also said that since public elementary schools probably didn’t have enough classroom space yet for a whole new grade, they could use their state funding to hire existing qualified providers to teach the voluntary pre-K program.

That caused the private providers to be less spooked, because it seemed like the public schools were just going to interface with them. What the child care lobby didn’t really catch was that the contracted providers would have to meet certain standards — standards that happened to be ones that were easier for public schools and Head Start programs to meet.

My understanding is that it’s kind of all balanced out now, but that the private child care industry in Oklahoma in the ’90s and early 2000s did suffer.

Overall, though, Joe was able to get it through because he and his allies were very careful not to advertise that this very complicated piece of legislation was creating a free grade for 4-year-olds. 

By the time that became clear, Joe said it was like free beer at the baseball game — everybody just finds out where to get it. It’s so unbelievably popular there now, and has been from the very beginning.

What can other states learn from the success that Oklahoma has had with this program?

Replicating Oklahoma’s success is tough because we’re not in the ’90s anymore. I don’t think you could pass a bill as quietly today, and not every state has loopholes that lawmakers are eager to fix.

But I think the lesson from Oklahoma is that there’s no question universal pre-K will be a popular policy, so states should focus on the how and not the why. If you can figure out how to keep the child care industry afloat, develop an appropriate curriculum, and build enough facilities, the benefits will be felt by the entire state. 

This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.

During his campaign, President Donald Trump was exceedingly clear about his plans for a second term. He released policy videos, made sweeping proclamations on the stump, and his allies published reams of ideas, perhaps none as infamous as Project 2025. 

Americans were told he would embrace tariffs, enact sweeping deportations, shrink the federal workforce, rapidly bring peace to Ukraine, get rid of “woke” military leaders, boost US business, and outlaw taxes on tips, among other things. 

Trump spelled things out so explicitly, it seemed as if it would be difficult to be surprised by anything he ended up doing. Despite that, he has managed to do a number of unexpected things, and has certainly operated in novel ways.

I asked several Vox politics and policy writers about what has surprised them about Trump’s first 100 days. This is what they had to say:

DOGE’s rapid rise and fall

Like all of Washington, I was surprised by the “Department of Government Efficiency.”

Most anticipated Elon Musk’s spending-cutting effort would be a toothless advisory panel, not a wrecking ball smashing the federal workforce. Musk was surprisingly savvy about seizing control of the levers of government power, like the ability to place civil servants, cancel contacts, or send threatening emails to every civil servant. 

The eventual outcome was less surprising, though: He hit a wall. Trump’s Cabinet secretaries became frustrated that Musk had usurped their power, and demanded he be reined in. Trump complied — and DOGE was leashed. —Andrew Prokop

The administration is surprisingly incompetent 

In his first term, Trump’s “malevolence,” as the legal analyst Benjamin Wittes put it, was “tempered by incompetence.” One of the pro-democracy advocates’ biggest fears of a second Trump term was that the president would be more experienced, competent, and prepared to execute his antidemocratic agenda. Surprisingly, so far, there hasn’t been much evidence that this Trump administration is any more competent than the last.

In its first 100 days, this administration kicked off its feud with Harvard University by sending the university a letter by mistake; deported Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia because of an “administrative error”; slapped tariffs on an island of penguins uninhabited by humans; inadvertently filed documents outlining the flaws in its plan to end New York City’s congestion pricing; and accidentally looped in a journalist on a Signal chat plotting airstrikes in Yemen. 

The problem is that this time around, the Trump administration has not been tempered by incompetence. In each of these cases — and in others — it has only leaned into its anti-democratic tendencies. So the danger posed by the second Trump administration, it seems, isn’t competence, but an unwillingness to admit mistakes and a penchant for doubling down. —Abdallah Fayyad

Trump’s immigration policy is still pretty popular

The public gave Trump the benefit of the doubt on immigration throughout February and March: According to averages of his job approval by the pollster Adam Carlson, he had mostly positive marks.

That trend held until mid-April. Over one month, Trump’s rating on immigration dropped 7 points  — largely aligned with the time in which the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the wrongly deported Salvadoran immigrant, dominated headlines.

Still it’s not the kind of mass disapproval Trump saw on immigration during his first term. There may be a simple explanation: The country has changed since 2017, becoming much more hostile to immigration in general.

The durability of Trump’s polling on immigration — at least compared to other issues, where he’s deeply underwater — is surprising. Despite weeks of negative press coverage, high-profile deportations of migrants and students on visas, and a negative Supreme Court ruling, immigration remains the most popular of Trump’s issues: 47 percent approve, while 51 percent disapprove, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll from this month.

Essentially, the public does seem to be — finally, gradually — turning against Trump on immigration. Whether that continues is hard to say, however. —Christian Paz

Democrats haven’t figured out how to handle Trump

During Trump’s first term, Democrats took on the identity of a vocal opposition party. Now, despite campaigning on the idea that a second Trump term was an existential threat to democracy, Democratic lawmakers seem to have receded into the background. 

There have been some notable singular efforts to push back against Trump, including Sen. Cory Booker’s record-long Senate floor speech in April, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s anti-Trump nationwide tour. But the party as a whole has yet to find a unified strategy for opposing Trump.

Democrats’ inaction might be deliberate. Trump is already implementing unpopular policies that are tanking his poll numbers, without any meaningful assistance from Democrats. But in letting Trump be Trump, Democrats appear to be allowing him to dismantle key institutions and trample on civil liberties unchecked. It’s an approach that could risk permitting the country to sleepwalk into authoritarianism — and that’s a risk that I’m surprised they’re willing to take. —Nicole Narea

The FBI is on the sidelines

The FBI has, historically, been one of the most potent tools of political repression in the United States — look, for example, at its ruthless campaign to get Martin Luther King Jr. to consider killing himself by threatening to expose his infidelity. 

But in the Trump administration, the FBI has mostly been an inefficacious sideshow, with the most aggressive crackdowns on civil liberties conducted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (an agency that necessarily has a more limited scope).

This is one of the biggest “dogs that didn’t bark” in the second Trump administration, and I think it’s for two reasons.

First, Trump’s leadership picks — FBI director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino — are basically incompetent. Both are Trump loyalists, who no doubt would be willing to deploy aggressive tactics on his behalf, but neither seems to possess the skill set necessary to turn the FBI into a tool of authoritarian repression (at least, not this quickly).

Second, the FBI has professionalized since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, and many of its professional higher-ups and field agents do not want to be party to power abuses. Those two factors are, at least for now, keeping a potentially significant threat to democracy at bay. —Zack Beauchamp

Canada’s Election Day is here. 

It’s been a short, hectic campaign season, marked by startling reversals — most notably a massive decline in support for the current opposition Conservative Party — and ignited by the resignation of longtime Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

The race has also been reshaped by the politics of the United States, namely the aggressively expansionist vision and chaotic economic policy of President Donald Trump.

Results should be in shortly after polls close at 10 pm ET. According to the polls, Trudeau’s Liberal Party is expected to come out on top, although it’s difficult to say now by how much. 

To fully understand what led to this strange election, how the US shaped it, and what’s next for Canada, I turned to Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, our politics correspondent, who lives in Ontario. Here’s what he had to say (our conversation has been edited for clarity and length): 

So Zack, could you give us a brief overview of the Canadian political scene?

There are a number of different parties that compete in national elections, but there are really only two that have a chance at holding the premiership. 

One, there are the Liberals — who are the incumbent party, and as you might guess, are the central-left party — currently led by Mark Carney, who’s a central banker by career. Carney took over after the longtime prime minister, Justin Trudeau, resigned amidst significant unpopularity. 

Two, there is the Conservative Party. Their name is self-explanatory, and they’re led by Pierre Poilievre, who is a career politician — he’s been in politics since he was in his early 20s. For a long time, Poilievre was leading the polls. He’s fairly right-wing by Canadian standards.

Monday’s race is primarily between the two of them. 

There are also other parties that matter, chief of which is the New Democratic Party (NDP), the left-wing alternative to the Liberals. They are intermittently successful, but this year are doing very poorly. You also have two smaller parties, the Green Party and the People’s Party, which is an attempt to build a European-style, far-right party in Canada that so far, hasn’t been very successful. 

There’s a fourth party which matters regionally, but can affect national parties: the Bloc Québécois, which represents Quebec, which is the French speaking part of Canada. It has very distinct regional interests around French language, French identity, and French culture. They usually do very well in national elections within the province of Quebec, but don’t really perform anywhere else. 

I love the clear branding on all the parties there, that’s very helpful. What do our main duo, the Liberals and Conservatives, believe in?

If you’re in America trying to think through who the Liberals and Conservatives are, imagine a Republican Party prior to Trump, then shift that party a little bit to the left to accommodate for a more left-wing country — that’s the Conservatives. For the Liberals, imagine a party that’s not Bernie Sanders, but certainly on the left-wing side of where the Democratic Party is right now.

That’s not how I would normally explain them if I was talking to a Canadian, or the most accurate way to describe them; the US and Canada are different countries. But if you’re looking for a frame of reference to try to latch onto, that will give you a rough, analogical grasp for what the two major parties are.

I should also note that there are certain hot-button issues in the US — like abortion or national health care — that are not issues in the same way in Canada. 

There is no real effort by any major party to get rid of Canada’s permissive abortion laws, nor is there any effort to get rid of Canada’s national health insurance. Those are both overwhelmingly popular, and one of the common Liberal attacks on the Conservatives is that Conservatives might actually want to change those policies secretly, even though they won’t admit it. It’s referred to as “reopening the abortion debate” here in Canada; Conservative leaders in the past have had to deny any interest in doing so. 

That should give you a sense of how the political mean is very, very different here than it is in the US. 

I know recent events have scrambled the election a bit, but before that happened, what were the key issues on people’s minds?

Key here is Poilievre, who isn’t Trump, but is as close to a Trump figure as could succeed in the world of Canadian politics. He is aggressive. He’s populist in his rhetoric. He embraces conspiracy theories. He attacks the media — one of his signature proposals is defunding the CBC, which is Canada’s national broadcaster, at least defunding its English language services, because, again, you’ve got to play to the Québécois. 

In general, he’s a pugnacious figure who embodies the anti-establishment strain of Canadian politics. That anti-establishment movement isn’t new in Canada, and it’s not exactly Trump inspired, but it is Trump-inflected, given how Trump has shaped the modern populist right. 

All that wasn’t too much of a problem for Poilievre prior to Trump’s reelection, even though Canadians didn’t like Trump at that point either. Poilievre was cruising to an election victory — he had years of polling suggesting that he had an insurmountable lead against Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. 

The reasons for that are straightforward: There are problems in Canada that are real, most notably cost of living is a significant concern for many people here. The cost of housing is sky high. It’s very difficult for a lot of Canadians, especially for first time home buyers, to find an affordable place to live. 

Poilievre capitalized on this sense that things are just too expensive. He would say, “Canada is broken,” on the campaign trail, and by that he meant primarily that the cost of living is too high, and that Liberal policies were making it too high. 

You can agree or disagree with the accusation about Liberal policies, but many Canadians, it seemed, were willing to vote for the Conservatives, because the Liberals have been in power for 10 years and there were still problems. 

Poilievre represented a change for a lot of Canadians, and that was what people wanted. That strategy was working right up until December. 

Did the Conservatives have specific policies to solve the cost of living crisis, or was their solution more, “We’re not the Liberals”?

Poilievre had a housing plan that was by most standards — by which I mean, most YIMBY standards — pretty good. He really committed to relaxing regulations getting in the way of Canada homes, and to creating federal incentives to build more houses that could be offered at affordable rates.

The Liberals have adopted similar ideas, and under Carney they have also put forward an aggressive YIMBY-inflected housing program. So it’s not like the Conservatives had a monopoly on this idea, but they were able to very credibly make the argument that the Liberals have been in power for 10 years and they haven’t done any of this stuff. 

So we had the Conservatives cruising for this great victory, Poilievre was so happy. Now the Liberals are expected to win. What happened? 

I’ve talked to a lot of different Canadians, and the overwhelming story from academic experts to ordinary people is that Trump changed everything. 

Now it wasn’t just Trump. An important thing that happened is Trudeau’s resignation in December. A lot of the Conservative campaign was about going after Trudeau personally and blaming Trudeau’s policies for anything that was bad. When the Liberals brought in a new candidate who is stylistically different from Trudeau, that blunted some of those attacks. 

But it’s very hard to say that the Liberals would have been able to win just by changing candidates — people were pretty unhappy with the Liberal brand in general, which is where Trump comes in. 

Trump started threatening to annex Canada, and started backing that rhetoric with coercive policies, like hitting Canada with tariffs for no discernible reason, and without any sensical guidance as to how Canada could reverse them. Trump accused Canada of sending fentanyl into the US, when really it largely flows the other way around. He started to talk about how it would look awesome on a map if the US was a giant country that had both the US and Canada as one territory. 

It started to hit Canadians that like they actually were dealing with the crazy person across the border who wanted to destroy their entire nation if he could. And that led to a transformation in the issue set that was dominating the Canadian election. It went from housing, cost of living, tired of the Liberals to We need to defend ourselves from Donald Trump. 

On that issue, the Liberals had the Conservatives dominated. 

And it’s not even about policy — the parties agree that it’s important to resist Trump’s attacks, to use countertariffs as needed, to ease inter-province trade, and to work with European partners. It’s about trust. Poilievre is in style and substance, is a Canadian Trump. He’s been endorsed by Elon Musk publicly. He courted support among the American right. Nobody believes that he is deeply opposed to the MAGA project. 

That makes Poilievre a huge albatross on the party’s neck. 

Carney, by contrast, is this boring central banker, who has happened to work through crises before: He was leading the Bank of England during Brexit, for example. Brexit didn’t work out great, but that wasn’t really Carney’s fault. He emerged from that looking like a policy guy who did his best to try to manage an external economic shock that was imposed on him. And what is Canada in the middle of other than an economic crisis, imposed on it by an outside actor? That’s allowed the Liberals to ask the very effective question: Who do you trust to get us out of this mess, a career politician from Ottawa or a guy who made his bones managing economic crises?

I saw some headlines that suggested some of the polling was narrowing a little bit as we head into the Election Day. Is that notable? 

The polls are tightening in part because Trump has been preoccupied. He has been a little bit too busy with his global trade war to focus on his Canadian trade war. The less Trump threatening Canada is in the headlines, the less the Conservatives are getting hammered by their inability to have a good position. 

Of course, literally days before the election — last Thursday — Trump started the 51st state talk again. Carney confirmed that Trump talked about it in a direct meeting that the two of them had. And then Trump said in his Time interview last week, “I’m really not trolling with talk of Canada as a 51st state.”

It’s like he’s trying to make the Conservatives lose. 

Let’s assume the Liberals win, as expected. I know what their margin of victory might be is hard to know right now — but if they do win, what does that mean for Canada’s future?

It depends on whether you trust what Carney is saying publicly, or what most people seem to think is likely to happen. 

Publicly, Carney is talking about a complete reevaluation of the relationship with the United States. He says that the era of Canada depending on the US is over, and that Canadians need to decouple from the US, and reevaluate their entire strategy for economic and national self-determination.

Decoupling from the US will be really hard. It might actually be impossible for Canada, for a variety of practical reasons. One is that Canada just does not currently have the military assets to do national self-defense without significant cooperation with the United States. And while there isn’t a real invasion threat from anywhere, there are some defense interests, for example, up in the Arctic, where Canadian and Russian waters border each other. The US and Canada collaborate on air space defense; Canada depends a lot on — and has contributed to — NATO. 

Economically, there’s something that economists call the “gravity of trade,” where trade flows are pulled in by the geographic proximity of two places because there’s all sorts of practical difficulties in trying to trade with places that are further away. Practically, Canada and the US are right next to each other and if they want to trade perishable things like milk, they don’t have many options other than each other. 

My guess is the reality is going to be somewhere between business as usual and Carney’s maximalist claims on the campaign trail. There will be a Canadian effort to build up various plan Bs in the event that the United States permanently becomes Trumpy. But practically, Canada will need to try to maintain a good relationship with the US. It would take quite a lot to push Canada into a truly radical trajectory where they feel like they have to balance against the United States rather than refining the nature of their relationship on the edges. 

This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.

President George W. Bush brought Western wear with him to the White House — suits with cowboy boots, big decorative belt buckles, cowboy hats. President Barack Obama ushered in an era of slimmer suiting, while first lady Michelle Obama helped spark a renaissance of American design. 

Presidential administrations always come with an aesthetic attached. What is striking about President Donald Trump’s is just how much others in his orbit — and even his grassroots supporters — have adopted his administration’s look, one which Today, Explained’s Gabrielle Berbey told me “masquerades as calling back to older standards of beauty, masculinity, and femininity, but in fact represents a whole new era of extremeness.”

This MAGA aesthetic speaks to something larger about political philosophy and policy goals in Trump 2.0. This was the case in the first Trump administration, too. To understand just what that something is, I talked with Berbey, who recently produced an episode of the Today, Explained podcast all about MAGA beauty standards. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Tell me about your reporting about MAGA aesthetics. When I hear that phrase, a specific image comes to mind.  

What’s the look that comes to mind for you?

It’s very starkly gendered. For men, either completely clean shaven or bearded, nothing in between; with hair close cropped on the sides, but long on top. A bulky build, like you’ve been going to the gym a lot. A short-sleeved shirt — maybe made of some tech fabric — paired with jeans or chinos and some kind of boots, maybe combat boots.

Combat boots too? Those are MAGA now? 

Haha, yeah, I feel like I’ve seen that a lot. And for ladies, I’d say long, wavy tresses, very full lips, sheath dresses that are fitted, but professional, very defined brows. 

The hair is definitely bouncy. What you’re describing is very much what we wanted to look at in our episode. There’s a very noticeable, artificial, confounding look that many people in Trump’s immediate orbit seem to have.

In reporting our show, we focused on two different looks that speak to the same phenomenon. 

There is a particular style of makeup that we see that seems to be favored by women on Fox News and women in Trump’s orbit. It includes some of the things you mentioned: blocky brows that feel very defined, bold eyeliner, and so on. 

Beyond makeup, however, there are people — both women and men, but especially women — who seem to have gotten very visible plastic surgery. 

We see a level of very obvious face alteration that is different from the sort of plastic surgery that we saw even just a few years ago, when people would take great pains to make it look like they hadn’t gotten any work done.

To be clear, no one in Trump orbit has come out and said they’ve had plastic surgery. Of the people often pointed to as examples of this facial aesthetic — people like Kristi Noem, Laura Loomer, Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Matt Gaetz, and so on — only Noem has admitted to any work, and only to dental work. 

We talked to a reporter from Mother Jones, Inae Oh, who has looked into this quite a bit, and has really sat with the question of: Why do we see what appears to be really dramatic plastic surgery around Trump? And she’s explored the question of whether proximity to power — and specifically to Trump — relies on a very specific look.

That reminds me of a phrase we’ve often heard from Trump over the years — that a nominee or politician he favors is straight out of “central casting.” 

Yes, that phrase is a helpful reminder that Trump comes from a reality television world, and is also someone that is quite obsessed with the pageantry of beauty — it was literally his business for a time — and is not afraid to say that. 

Part of what we’re seeing is people in his circle looking like reality TV stars, in a way that is almost like a uniform — which some on the left disparagingly call Mar-a-Lago face. Maintaining a certain look seems to be an important part of getting into Trump’s orbit. 

Does this look tell us anything else about Trump or his administration? 

Something that Inae points out is that these looks seem to be connected with policy. You have extreme looks paired with extreme policies. Think Kristi Noem doing deportation glam in her DHS videos. 

These extreme looks are a callback to a different era of plastic surgery. These extreme policies are a callback to a different time in the United States. There’s a reversion of both policy and aesthetic.

You used the word “extreme” there. Is there an effort to be extreme on all fronts? Is that one way to describe the connection between Trump aesthetics and policy?

I think so. Something that Inae points out is that Trump 2.0 is over-the-top in both policy and aesthetics, in ways that Trump 1.0 was not.

Over the top, like reality TV is purposely over-the-top, in its effort to provide maximum entertainment? 

Reality TV really is a helpful way to think about this, in that it is something, much like the aesthetics that we see around these Trump adjacent figures, that relies on tools of distraction. You get caught up in the glam and ridiculousness, and you don’t notice what’s actually happening (or sometimes how there is nothing happening). 

Inae points out that when you look at the ridiculousness of a deportation-glam, reality TV-ified DHS video, you almost forget that there are real people in those videos who are being deported, who have families, because the performance and aesthetics of it is so shocking.

As you were saying that, I thought, It’s almost as if Trump’s policies themselves have had plastic surgery — they’ve been given shiny, artificial faces you want to stare at, making it hard to see the reality underneath. 

That’s a really good way of putting it. And that’s the case for talking about aesthetics and policy as a pair. Because when you just talk about aesthetics, it can start to feel very anti-feminist. People should do what they want with their face. But when you pair the brutality of the policies with almost brutal face augmentation, they feel connected and worth interrogating.

This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.