Home opener. Auburn a big favorite. Game has a 55 minute lightening delay. Scheduled kickoff was 6:45.
FIRST QUARTER
After a false start on the first play from scrimmage the Tigers intercept for a Pick Six. Defense scores on the first play. Auburn's fastest score ever to open a game in history in 10 seconds. Andre Jordan, Jr.
Auburn 7 SM 0
SM goes three and out. A Byrum Brown run of 52 yd run for a touchdown is negated by a holding penalty. Otherwise our offense is nonexistent. SM starts on their 19 after the punt.
Second Golden Eagle possession moves out to their 42 from their 9. To the Auburn 45 but called back by penalty to the SM 40. SM is punting to inside our 10.
Lots of messy 5-yd penalties starting this game.
Tigers get it going and with 3:45 left in the first a 20 yd TD pass. Tacky but okay, 93 yds 8 plays.
Auburn 14 SM 0
From their 34 SM goes for it 2:26 left in the first with a yd and a half to go. Andres Jordan has his 2nd pick at the SM 41.
To the SM 31. TD pass to the end zone but the play is reviewed. Great throw & catch but the call is overturned. From the 29 incompletion.
Auburn 17 SM 0
First quarter winding down.
SM to their 40 as the quarter ends.
END OF FIRST QUARTER
AUBURN 17 SM 0
SECOND QUARTER
SM at their 40.
SM now punting after 3 plays from their 40.
Auburn from their 32.
After one first down the Tigers are punting.
Poor punt to the SM 20. Three downs and out.
9:48 to go as Auburn regains possession.
From our 15 the Tigers go the distance. The key play is a 45 completion to the SM 15. On fourth and three to end zone for the score. 85 yards 8 plays 8 yd TD pass, Luck of the 8;s. 6:40 left.
Auburn 24 OM 0
The Golden Eagles have a play to inside the Auburn one but a foolish penalty moved the ball back to the 16.
Third and goal from the 5. Holding by Auburn at the goal line. First & goal SM from the Auburn 2. 45 seconds and counting TD pass.
15 plays 75 yds.
2-pt conversion.
Tigers move quickly upfield and McPherson hits a 55 yd FG with 3 seconds on the clock.
HALFTIME
Auburn 27 SM 8
I sure could use that $5000 Republican bonus. Somehow I never got my 2000 Republican tariff refund and my $5000 DOGE refund. Did you receive yours?
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Just drove thru Chick-Fil-A, Republican Central in Pelham. Disappointed I didn't see anymore there wearing dipers on the outside of their pants in the parking lot in support of their fearless leader. So disappointed. But I bet they gonna mob CFA once they git that $5000 check from the POTUS.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: The White House.
Is Donald Trump trying to help Republicans win the midterm elections? The obvious answer to this question is yes, of course, simply because all political leaders benefit from their party winning elections. Yet several of Trump’s actions throw this normally perfunctory question into at least some doubt.
Traditionally, candidates laboring under the burden of an unpopular president seek to detach themselves from the national brand. Trump is making this impossible. He has launched a national ad campaign focused on himself, and thrown a high-profile “midterm convention” designed to further reinforce the synonymity of the party and its leader. Trump has also made several remarks that convey an emotional detachment from the election’s outcome—comments such as “I’m not affected by the election” or “I don’t care about the midterms.”
Perhaps he is merely feigning indifference. Maybe he truly does not care. More likely, Trump cares about the outcome, but not enough to permit Republicans to acknowledge his lack of popularity. His approach, at any rate, nicely illustrates the drawbacks of handing total control of a political party to an egomaniac.
Midterm elections have historically disfavored the president’s party. Candidates for office who are running in neutral or hostile territory accordingly tend to emphasize their differences with the president—think of Joe Manchin running an ad in West Virginia in 2010 showing him firing an actual bullet at Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade bill, or the Republican Will Hurd in 2018 criticizing Trump’s racism and affinity for Russia.
Trump’s public standing is unusually dire. He is currently polling far worse than either he did at this point in 2018 or Joe Biden did four years ago. In theory, this ought to give Republicans an especially strong incentive to edge away from Trump and emphasize local themes in their elections.
Trump has decided to block this escape route. He is commandeering earned media with his “Trumpapalooza” show, drawing attention to the person endangered Republicans desperately need their constituents to forget. He has hoarded the party’s ad budget, warning Republicans, “This is my money that I control,” and that he would spend it on “Republicans that I think are good,” which is to say, slavishly loyal. He has promised to barnstorm the country, telling reporters, “I’ll be making a lot of stops,” including in Alaska, where the Republican Dan Sullivan is trailing.
There is an old Simpsons episode in which the elderly oligarch Montgomery Burns informs the obsequious Smithers that, upon his own death, his loyal aide will be buried alive at his boss’s feet. Trump appears to be thinking along similar lines.
This self-defeating behavior makes a degree of sense if you accept that Trump’s interest in politics is purely egocentric. He has difficulty caring about anything that does not directly involve himself, and the prospect of Republicans holding seats by repudiating his record is likely unpalatable.
The benefits of same-party control of Congress are also smaller for Trump than other presidents, because he governs mainly through executive action. To the extent that a Democratic majority in either chamber might threaten him with oversight, he will surely disregard it, as he did during his first term. Although he finds Republican majorities preferable, the size of those majorities matters to him far less than their composition—a fully loyal minority may seem preferable to a fractious majority.
What makes less sense is the willingness of many Republicans to cooperate with a strategy that consigns many of them to defeat.
Consider, for instance, Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan. Rogers came up through politics long before Trump entered it, and is trying to win office in a state where the president’s approval rating is 25 points underwater. A recent poll of the state found Trump’s endorsement made voters less likely, by a 55 percent to 27 percent margin, to support a candidate. Yet Rogers has opened no daylight whatsoever with the unpopular president, even echoing his false claims of having the 2020 election stolen from him. When Trump launched a trade war with Canada, a move that poses an especially dire threat to Rogers’s own state, he declined to take the opportunity to display independence. Instead, he issued a statement mumbling his approval. (“President Trump is right to put America First—and tariffs are necessary, but are not a one-size-fits-all solution.”) The same dynamic is occurring in other races, where Trump is throwing himself behind incumbents who are in danger mainly because voters don’t like him.
To be sure, some Republicans subscribe to the theory that the Trump era has suspended normal midterm election dynamics. According to this account, a decisive sliver of voters are loyal to Trump, and not his party. Republicans can win only by enticing them to vote, which means making the election about their hero. “We’ve seen that a lot of Trump voters—they will crawl over glass to vote for the president,” one Republican strategist explained to Politico.
Yet Trump has tried before to insert himself into non-presidential elections. And his efforts have mostly failed—not only in the 2018 midterms, when he refused to lie low, but also in multiple off-schedule elections (the most famous case being Georgia’s 2021 Senate runoff, which he made into a referendum on his effort to overturn the 2020 election). In the Trump era, his party has fared well only when it has been able to focus on the shortcomings of unpopular Democratic opponents, such as Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024. Making elections about Trump—which also occurred when he ran for reelection in 2020—has been a losing gambit.
The political tip sheets in recent days have been filled with the lamentations of fatalistic Republican operatives. “We have no choice. We’re stuck on the boat with him whether we like it or not,” a top Republican campaign official confessed to Axios. They cannot stop Trump from staging Trumpapalooza, so they are reduced to praying for low ratings. “My only hope is that no one watches it since it’s competing versus NFL opening games,” a person close to the White House told Politico. “Hopefully nobody notices the embarrassing show.” Republicans are cooperating in a strategy that sacrifices their best chance of political survival, because the past decade has trained them to believe that resistance to Trump is futile.
Trump did far less damage to the country during his first term, both because institutions and norm-following officials restrained him, and because his pathological instincts frequently undermined his support. The former limitation has broken down in the second term, but the latter one remains. Trump’s support has collapsed in large part because of his own poor choices.
The modern world owes a lot to the Enlightenment, the 18th-century intellectual movement that emphasized the power of reason. But the Enlightenment also created a myth: that we can get to know the objective world completely, with total clarity, as if we were looking at it from the outside. This myth is challenged by the Enlightenment’s greatest legacy—modern science.
Reality is more complex than we expected. Physics—my trade, and perhaps the most objective among the sciences—questions the possibility of a full description of how things objectively are. An electron can be in a “quantum superposition,” so that to an observer, it doesn’t occupy just one location—and so can you, my reader. This does not mean that you could perceive being dislocated between two positions; as perceived by yourself, you are always in just one place. But an object’s properties may differ depending on who, or what, is looking at them—or may not even be defined at all. Properties are not simple features of things: They are relations between one thing and another. What we call “the world” is therefore only how some parts of reality manifest themselves to other parts—us, for instance.
Humanity has always been aware that our understanding is partial and biased. But the fact that an objective and knowable reality is incompatible with the grammar of physics is astonishing. The Enlightenment could consider the mind as being outside the world, in an abstract realm of reason where knowledge resides. But human minds are not outside reality, watching it from its exterior. We, like everything else, are part of the very nature we study.
Our knowledge is only one example of the many correlations that intertwine different parts of nature. In the early 20th century, Niels Bohr, a founder of quantum theory, realized that quantum phenomena indicate that we cannot discard our own physical nature when we observe the world. The ideal of grasping objective reality by making the observer irrelevant is incompatible with physics. We are quantum processes interacting with other quantum processes. Our knowledge is a rich but incomplete set of correlations between one piece of the world–ourselves–and the rest of it.
To see this fact from another point of view, consider saying “It’s raining and Ann does not know it.” This makes sense: You know that it’s raining and that Ann doesn’t. But if you replace “Ann” with a first-person pronoun, the result is odd: “It’s raining and I do not know it.” How can you declare that it’s raining if you do not know it? This observation points to the fact that every proposition can only express the knowledge of the speaker or writer. No proposition is asserted from outside reality, because there is nothing outside reality. To say “It is raining” is really to say: “I, as part of reality, know that it’s raining.” Objective statements independent of any knower are fictions. Purely objective reality is a useful myth, but only a myth. Anything said about the state of the world comes from someone’s singular perspective.
This means that all of our knowledge is intrinsically uncertain. All statements have unavoidable margins of uncertainty. Indeed, we can be wrong about anything, even the basic facts of our own lives. My father grew up sure that his first name was Franco until he asked for a copy of his birth certificate and found out that my grandfather, without telling my grandma, had registered him as Giulio. He had been wrong about his own name. Humanity has been collectively wrong over and over again. We thought the sun moved around the earth, then learned that it is the earth that orbits the sun. Great scientists are even more likely to be wrong than others, because they have the courage to try—Einstein’s published work includes many mistakes.
But in science, as in daily life, we do not need certainty; being reasonably sure is good enough. If I have an airplane to catch, I will go to the airport even though I’m not totally sure that the flight will take off; if I waited for certainty, I’d never leave home. Modern science offers an enormous body of knowledge that is effective and, in many domains, far better than all the alternatives, but it gives us no absolute certainty, no ultimate story, no Truth with a capital T.
Within science, there are different ways of describing the same things. A glass of water can be described in terms of physics (its mass, velocity), thermodynamics (its temperature), chemistry (there is more than just H2O in any glass of water), biology (bacteria swim in it), particle physics (its electrons, protons, and neutrons), psychology (“Why did I fill the glass?”), economics (its price), and more. Each account is valid in its own terms; each reflects a way in which the same object interacts with different parts of reality, from atoms to the global economy. But none exhausts an “ultimate truth” of the glass.
The same is true for human beings. I can think of you, my reader, as a body, as a mind, or as a soul. These aren’t different entities: They are the same entity, described in different languages, using different conceptual schemes, focusing on different aspects of the same you and different ways in which you interact with other parts of reality. There is no sharp separation or metaphysical gap between body and soul; matter and spirit; the physical world and the world of laws, ideas, and norms.
In this sense, all things are equal: They are all aspects of the same natural world, considered from different perspectives, none of which is the ultimate one. Everything can be considered fundamental from one perspective or another. The expression “the equality of all things” comes from the title of the second chapter of The Book ofZhuangzi, one of the greatest books of humankind—an ancient classic of Chinese philosophy that articulates a similar intriguing perspectival and anti-foundational naturalism.
This is the view to which I think modern science leads us. Many people resist it, some out of fear of losing solid reference points: objectivity, certainties, absolute morality, an immortal soul. But scientific knowledge does not become less valuable if you remain open to doubt. Morality does not lose power if you recognize that it is rooted in our biology, culture, and history. Our values do not weaken because they are rooted in what we are, not in something outside us. And life is even more beautiful and precious without dreams of immortality. We are not—as French existentialism described us—thrown into alien nature. In nature, we are home.
In fact, it seems to me that recognizing the perspectival aspect of knowledge, values, and beliefs, and of reality itself, could help us become a bit less arrogant, a bit humbler and wiser. Conflicts between individuals or countries don’t stem only from greed and thirst for power. They are also fueled by the belief that we are objectively right and the enemy is objectively wrong, which ignores the plurality of perspectives. We have our values that guide us, but understanding the perspective of others is the first step toward wisdom—and toward peace. In our era of nuclear armaments, ignoring that others have different perspectives, and failing to respect them, could drag the world into a catastrophe.
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