I don’t understand the point of garden visits. Why do ordinary people, the owners of mere balconies and tiny yards, torment themselves by touring other people’s grand estates? Nut trees, stables, ancestral compost heaps: I need no reminder of what I am missing. So, unlike virtually every other gardener in Britain, I had no intention of spending my summer wandering among aristocratic roses and marvelling at the fine tilth of Lord Whatsit’s sandy carrot beds. All those rambling sweet peas make me furious; yes, Tristram, it is a handsome cardoon bed, but some of us are struggling to find space for a single extra lettuce. And then, wholly by accident, I found myself in the Lost Gardens of Heligan.

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How do you lose a garden? We’ve all read Forster, Woolf, and Galsworthy; at least, we’ve watched “Downton Abbey.” We understand the tribulations of the great British country houses as the country creaked into the twentieth century: thieving footmen, deranged ladies’-maids, and troublesome romances between under-butlers. These were the good old days of hand-scissored lawns; labor was cheap, the poor still had caps to doff, and, if the discreet charm of the poshingtons’ comfortable lives depended on scullions washing crystal glasses as dawn broke, at least the natural order was intact. Partridges do need de-boning. Knot gardens don’t prune themselves, you know.

Then everything stopped. It wasn’t only the firm-jawed elder heirs to complicated inheritances who fell, elegantly, during the four long years of the First World War. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary servicemen, and some women, were killed or mutilated at the Somme and Ypres; because they were recruited together, entire villages, households, and families were decimated in a single day. Suddenly, as we Brits still often say, one couldn’t get the staff. The literature of interwar Britain is full of bad food, dirty floors, and surly amateurish cooks and cleaners. Middle-class women learned to do it themselves; high taxation and death duties meant that big houses were divided or sold. But who would look after the gardens?

In 1914, a staff of twenty-three tended the grounds of the Heligan estate, an unremarkable stately home in Cornwall, at the southwestern tip of England. It had belonged to four generations of the Tremayne family, gentlemen plant-enthusiasts; if you think your modest garden takes a lot of work, imagine hundreds and hundreds of acres of rarities. There were fan-trained peaches and melon yards to maintain, delicate tropical trees to swaddle, famous camellias and rhododendrons and, behind it all, out of sight, a complex and labor-intensive infrastructure of rainwater gulleys, sawmills, and steam-powered greenhouse heaters. By the end of the war, nine Heligan men—gardeners and laborers—were dead.

Who now had time to look after any garden, particularly one on the scale of Heligan? It grew unkempt, then neglected, and, when the property’s childless squire moved to Italy, in 1923, abandoning his monkey puzzles, tree ferns, and magnolias to a series of uninterested tenants, the Georgian Ride, the Mushroom House, and Grotto were quickly forgotten.

Even the most casual gardener knows how quickly cultivated plants can run amok. In my favorite American children’s book, “McBroom’s Wonderful One-Acre Farm,” by Sid Fleischman, poor farmers are saved by the absurdly pumped-up fertility of their tiny smallholding. I always think of that story when I’m in Cornwall, a peculiar, beautiful place full of underpopulated corners where history lies almost ignored and where, thanks to its microclimate of soft rain and warm breezes, every hedgerow is a rampaging orgy of plant life. At Heligan, the soil was manured, aerated, and assiduously double dug for centuries; plants must have been queuing at the gates. Imagine the thick, wet, fertile quiet, coupled with that delicious dirt: precious specimens, left to their own devices, silently gorging, seedlings and weeds running wild. Within weeks, the paths would have been entangled with bramble and honeysuckle, the herb garden strangled with bindweed. For decades, Heligan grew untamed.

Then, in the nineteen-nineties, a new owner, a distant Tremayne, was exploring the jungle when he discovered a door in a wall and gradually uncovered not only a sophisticated and beautiful garden beneath the wilderness but the remnants of a world frozen on the edge of terrible change. There was a half-filled bucket of coal waiting to fire the steam-powered boiler. Young men, about to go to war, had written their names in pencil on the whitewashed walls of the Thunderbox Room; there was a pets’ graveyard, a pioneering kiwi-fruit vine, a head gardener’s tea kettle, and a pineapple pit, heated with fresh manure.

After an intensive restoration process, involving plant uncovering, well rejuvenation, and debates about the authenticity of electrical heating, the gardens were opened to the public: not as another impressive estate but as a First World War “living memorial” recognized by the Imperial War Museum, in London. Now any ignorant city-dweller can nod knowledgeably at the charcoal burner and beehives, admire the Technicolor banks of dahlias in the cutting garden, and covet—in my case, quite violently—the brass watering cans and elaborate glasshouses, with their beaver-tail glazing and delicious levers. The urban farmer within each of us can thrill to the smell of freshly sawn tree trunks, to cogs and pulleys, icehouses and watercourses. But the point of Heligan is archeology, not nostalgia; in some ways, it is the perfect antidote to garden envy. It’s full of walls of bee boles, cobbles, and potting sheds: a beautiful monument to hard work, anonymous labor, and shattered innocence. And it will break your heart.

Every time I see a picture of Boris Johnson, the U.K.’s new Prime Minister, I find myself thinking, Who does this guy remind me of, exactly? What follows is an attempt to answer that question.

• A nineteen-nineties pro golfer turned high-blood-pressure-medication pitchman

• The music teacher at a Brooklyn Heights preschool who played bass in a glam band in the seventies and shouts “Hello, Milwaukee!” when he stumbles late into a classroom full of waiting four-year-olds

• A bit actor who bungles his one line (“Splendid luncheon, just splendid, old chap!”) in a BBC adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies”

• The obviously drunk lead in a regional dinner-theatre production of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”

• Midas, two seconds after he realizes that maybe the turning-everything-into-gold thing wasn’t the greatest idea

• One of those large, lumpy heads of garlic with a bunch of surprisingly tough sprouts growing out of the top

• A past-his-prime Olympic athlete who does a regrettable gag guest spot in a skirt and lipstick on a crude eighties sitcom

• Big Anthony from “Strega Nona”

• The “Scream” mask, wearing a blond wig

• A boy in a Swedish children’s book who falls from a tree and rips his pants while stealing lingonberries from the garden of his neighbor, Mrs. Alva Karlsson, plus sixty years

• A creepy, hard-to-shake street mime who follows unsuspecting tourists and copies their walks and gestures

• The star of a heartwarming Dutch indie film about a retired civil servant who gets a new lease on life when he decides to build a hot-air balloon in his back yard

• That one friend who hopelessly clogs the single toilet in your twelve-person house-share in Santorini

• The expat British plumber who moved to Greece in 1985 because of tax troubles and pretends to have fixed the toilet while somehow managing to clog it even further

The walls of the Central Intelligence Agency’s original headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, contain more than thirty miles of four-inch steel tubing. The tubes were installed in the early nineteen-sixties, as part of an elaborate, vacuum-powered intra-office mail system. Messages, sealed in fibreglass containers, rocketed at thirty feet a second among approximately a hundred and fifty stations spread over eight floors. Senders specified each capsule’s destination by manipulating brass rings at its base; electro-mechanical widgets in the tubes read those settings and routed each capsule toward its destination. At its peak, the system delivered seventy-five hundred messages each day.

According to oral histories maintained by the C.I.A., employees were saddened when, in the late nineteen-eighties, during an expansion of the headquarters, this steampunk mail system was shut down. Some of them reminisced about the comforting thunk, thunk of the capsules arriving at a station; others worried that internal office communication would become unacceptably slow, or that runners would wear themselves out delivering messages on foot. The agency’s archives contain a photograph of a pin that reads “Save the Tubes.”

The C.I.A.’s tube system is a defining example of one of the major technological movements of the twentieth century: the push to create what communication specialists call “asynchronous messaging” in the workplace. An interaction is said to be synchronous when all parties participate at the same time, while standing in the same room, perhaps, or by telephone. Asynchronous communication, by contrast, doesn’t require the receiver to be present when a message is sent. I can send a message to you whenever I want; you answer it at your leisure.

For much of workplace history, collaboration among colleagues was synchronous by default. From Renaissance workshops to the nineteenth-century rooms occupied by Charles Dickens’s Bob Cratchit and Herman Melville’s Bartleby, an office was usually a single space where a few people toiled. Though letter-writing—an asynchronous style of communication—had been a part of commerce for centuries, it was too slow for day-to-day collaboration. For most office work, synchrony ruled.

This status quo was upended by the rise of a new work setting: the large office. In the book “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace,” the critic and New Yorker contributor Nikil Saval writes that this shift took place between 1860, when the U.S. Census counted around seven hundred and fifty thousand people who worked in “professional service,” and 1920, by which time that number had increased to more than four million—a period, Saval writes, in which “business became big business.” The small counting house gave way to edifices such as the Larkin Building, designed in 1903, by Frank Lloyd Wright, which housed eighteen hundred employees, spread over five floors and a basement, and was anchored by a cavernous, light-bathed central atrium. The introduction of office telephone exchanges, in the early twentieth century, helped make such spaces more functional. But coördinating telephone conversations required drawn-out games of secretarial phone tag.

As message slips piled up on office desks, what seemed to be missing was a system of practical asynchronous messaging: a way for me to send you a message when it was convenient for me, and for you to read that message when it was convenient for you, all at speeds less sluggish than that of intra-office mail. If such a system could be built, managers thought, then efficient non-real-time collaboration would become possible: no more missed-call slips, no more waiting for the mail cart. In the emerging age of large offices, practical asynchrony seemed like a productivity silver bullet. This belief motivated investment in projects such as the C.I.A.’s pneumatic-tube network.

Other large office buildings also experimented with pneumatic solutions. But the expense and complexity of these systems rendered them essentially impractical. Then, in the nineteen-eighties, a far more convenient technology arrived, in the form of desktop computers connected through digital networks. As these networks spread, e-mail emerged as the killer app for bringing asynchronous communication to the office. To better understand this shift, I talked to Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the impact that computer technology has had on the workplace. “I can show it to you,” she told me, when I asked about the spread of e-mail. She showed me a data table she had constructed, which summarized the results of office-time-use studies from 1965 to 2006. The studies can be divided into two groups: before e-mail and after. In the studies conducted before e-mail, workers spent around forty per cent of their time in “scheduled meetings,” and twenty per cent engaged in “desk work.” In those conducted after e-mail, the percentages are swapped.

With the arrival of practical asynchronous communication, people replaced a significant portion of the interaction that used to unfold in person with on-demand digital messaging, and they haven’t looked back. The Radicati Group, a technology-research firm, now estimates that more than a hundred and twenty-eight billion business e-mails will be sent and received daily in 2019, with the average business user dealing with a hundred and twenty-six messages a day. The domination of asynchronous communication over synchronous collaboration has been so complete that some developers of digital-collaboration tools mock the fact that we ever relied on anything so primitive as in-person meetings. In a blog post called “Asynchronous Communication Is the Future of Work,” the technology marketer Blake Thorne compares synchronous communication to the fax machine: it’s a relic, he writes, that will “puzzle your grandkids” when they look back on how people once worked.

As e-mail was taking over the modern office, researchers in the theory of distributed systems—the subfield in which, as a computer scientist, I specialize—were also studying the trade-offs between synchrony and asynchrony. As it happens, the conclusion they reached was exactly the opposite of the prevailing consensus. They became convinced that synchrony was superior and that spreading communication out over time hindered work rather than enabling it.

The synchrony-versus-asynchrony issue is fundamental to the history of computer science. For the first couple of decades of the digital revolution, programs were designed to run on individual machines. Later, with the development of computer networks, programs were written to be deployed on multiple machines that operated together over a network. Many of these early distributed systems, as they came to be known, were asynchronous by default. In such a system, Machine A could send a message to Machine B, hoping that it would eventually be delivered and processed, but Machine A couldn’t know for sure how long that would take. (If the network was slow, or if Machine B’s processor was busy with other tasks, or if Machine B crashed, it might take a while—or it might not happen at all.) An obvious solution was to engineer synchronous distributed systems. In such a system, communication would be closer to real time, with messages being passed back and forth within tight and predictable time frames. Machines could work together in rounds, with all the loose ends tied up before each round ended.

A few synchronous distributed systems were built in the nineteen-seventies and -eighties. NASA, for example, developed a computerized aircraft-control system, which relied on multiple computer processors to operate the aircraft’s control surfaces. The system was designed so that, if one processor failed in the extreme conditions of high-altitude flight, the system as a whole could keep functioning—preventing a crash from causing a crash. To simplify the task of writing software that safely implemented this sort of fault tolerance, the processors were connected on a custom timing circuit that kept their operations synchronized to within around fifty microseconds. But these synchronous systems were often costly to build. They required either custom hardware or special software that could precisely organize the processors’ activity. As in the world of workplace communication, synchrony was a more convenient way to communicate, once it was arranged, but arranging it required effort.

It was in the nineteen-eighties that business thinkers and computer scientists began to diverge in their thinking. People in office settings fixated on the organizational overhead required to organize synchronous collaboration. They believed that eliminating this overhead through asynchronous systems would make collaboration more efficient. Computer scientists, meanwhile, came to the opposite conclusion. Investigating asynchronous communication using a mathematical approach known as algorithm theory, they discovered that spreading out communication with unpredictable delays introduced new complexities that were difficult to reduce. While the business world came to see synchrony as an obstacle to overcome, theorists began to realize that it was fundamental for effective collaboration.

A striking computer-science discovery from this period is the difficulty of the so-called consensus problem. Imagine that each machine in a distributed system starts an operation, such as entering a transaction into a database, with an initial preference to either proceed or abort. The goal is for these machines to reach a consensus—either all agreeing to proceed or all agreeing to abort. The simplest solution is for each machine to gather the preferences of its peers and then apply some fixed rule—for example, counting the votes to determine a winner—to decide which preference to adopt. If all the machines gather the same set of votes, they will all adopt the same decision.

The problem is that some of the computers might crash. If that happens, the rest of the group will end up waiting forever to hear from peers that are no longer operating. In a synchronous system, this issue is easily sidestepped: if you don’t hear from a machine fast enough, you can assume that it has crashed and ignore it going forward. In asynchronous systems, these failures are more problematic. It’s difficult to differentiate between a computer that’s crashed and one that’s delayed. At first, to the engineers who studied this problem, it seemed obvious that, instead of waiting to learn the preference of every machine, one could just wait to hear from most of them. And yet, to the surprise of many people in the field, in a 1985 paper, three computer scientists—Michael Fischer, Nancy Lynch (my doctoral adviser), and Michael Paterson—proved, through a virtuosic display of mathematical logic, that, in an asynchronous system, no distributed algorithm could guarantee that a consensus would be reached, even if only a single computer crashed.

A major implication of research into distributed systems is that, without synchrony, such systems are just too hard for the average programmer to tame. It turns out that asynchrony makes coördination so complicated that it’s almost always worth paying the price required to introduce at least some synchronization. In fact, the fight against asynchrony has played a crucial role in the rise of the Internet age, enabling, among other innovations, huge data centers run by such companies as Amazon, Facebook, and Google, and fault-tolerant distributed databases that reliably process millions of credit-card transactions each day. In 2013, Leslie Lamport, a major figure in the field of distributed systems, was awarded the A. M. Turing Award—the highest distinction in computer science—for his work on algorithms that help synchronize distributed systems. It’s an irony in the history of technology that the development of synchronous distributed computer systems has been used to create a communication style in which we are always out of synch.

Anyone who works in a standard office environment has firsthand experience with the problems that followed the enthusiastic embrace of asynchronous communication. As the distributed-system theorists discovered, shifting away from synchronous interaction makes coördination more complex. The dream of replacing the quick phone call with an even quicker e-mail message didn’t come to fruition; instead, what once could have been resolved in a few minutes on the phone now takes a dozen back-and-forth messages to sort out. With larger groups of people, this increased complexity becomes even more notable. Is an unresponsive colleague just delayed, or is she completely checked out? When has consensus been reached in a group e-mail exchange? Are you, the e-mail recipient, required to respond, or can you stay silent without holding up the decision-making process? Was your point properly understood, or do you now need to clarify with a follow-up message? Office workers pondering these puzzles—the real-life analogues of the theory of distributed systems—now dedicate an increasing amount of time to managing a growing number of never-ending interactions.

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Last year, the software company RescueTime gathered and aggregated anonymized computer-usage logs from tens of thousands of people. When its data scientists crunched the numbers, they found that, on average, users were checking e-mail or instant-messenger services like Slack once every six minutes. Not long before, a team led by Gloria Mark, the U.C. Irvine professor, had installed similar logging software on the computers of employees at a large corporation; the study found that the employees checked their in-boxes an average of seventy-seven times a day. Although we shifted toward asynchronous communication so that we could stop wasting time playing phone tag or arranging meetings, communicating in the workplace had become more onerous than it used to be. Work has become something we do in the small slivers of time that remain amid our Sisyphean skirmishes with our in-boxes.

There’s nothing intrinsically bad about e-mail as a tool. In situations where asynchronous communication is clearly preferable—broadcasting an announcement, say, or delivering a document—e-mails are superior to messengered printouts. The difficulties start when we try to undertake collaborative projects—planning events, developing strategies—asynchronously. In those cases, communication becomes drawn out, even interminable. Both workplace experience and the theory of distributed systems show that, for non-trivial coördination, synchrony usually works better. This doesn’t mean that we should turn back the clock, re-creating the mid-century workplace, with its endlessly ringing phones. The right lesson to draw from distributed-system theory is that useful synchrony often requires structure. For computer scientists, this structure takes the form of smart distributed algorithms. For managers, it takes the form of smarter business processes.

Isolated examples of well-planned, structured synchrony are starting to emerge in the business world. Many of these experiments come from the tech sector (where, perhaps not coincidentally, the ideas behind distributed-system theory are familiar). Recently, the founder and C.E.O. of a publicly traded technology company told me that he spends at most two or three hours a week sending and receiving e-mails; he has replaced most of his asynchronous messaging with a “regular rhythm” of meetings, which allows him to efficiently address issues in real time. “If you keep needing to send me urgent messages, then my assumption is that there’s something broken about the way you’re doing business,” he said.

Similarly, the software-development firm Basecamp now allows employees to set professor-style office hours: if you need to talk to an expert on a given subject, you can sign up for her office hours instead of shooting her an e-mail. “You get that person’s full, undivided attention,” Jason Fried, the company’s co-founder and C.E.O., said, on the podcast Curious Minds. “It’s such a calmer way of doing this.” If something is urgent and the expert’s office hours aren’t for another few days, then, Fried explained, “that’s just how it goes.”

At many technology companies, a popular alternative to hyperactive asynchronous messaging is a collaboration framework called Scrum, popular among software developers. Teams of programmers using Scrum divide their efforts into “sprints,” each focussed on introducing a related set of features to a piece of software. During these sprints, which last from one to four weeks, the team meets once a day. Everyone gets a chance to speak. Team members describe what they accomplished yesterday and what they’re going to work on today; if they think they’ll need help, they let the right people know. In classic Scrum, colored notes pinned to a board are arranged to publicly reflect these commitments, so that there’s no ambiguity about the plan. These meetings are often held standing up, so that no one feels tempted to bloviate, and they typically last for around fifteen minutes. The idea that a quarter of an hour of structured synchrony is enough time to enable a full day of work might sound preposterous, but, for more than twelve million software developers, it seems to be working. Many people are surprised when they first learn about the effectiveness of Scrum. This suggests that many of us are underestimating the value of synchrony: when organized properly, it’s more powerful than we realize.

We can acknowledge, with the benefit of hindsight, the reasonableness of the hypothesis that asynchrony in the office would increase productivity. We can also admit that this hypothesis has been largely refuted by experience. To use the terminology of computer science, it turned out that the distributed systems that resulted when we shifted toward asynchronous communication were soon overwhelmed by the increasing complexity induced by asynchrony. We must, therefore, develop better systems—ones that will almost certainly involve less ad-hoc messaging and more real-time coördination.

From this perspective, our moment in workplace history looks rather different. The era that will mystify our grandkids is ours—a period when, caught up in the promise of asynchronicity, we frantically checked our in-boxes every few minutes, exhausted by the deluge of complex and ambiguous messages, while applauding ourselves for eliminating the need to speak face to face.

When Mohamedou Salahi arrived at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, in August of 2002, he was hopeful. He knew why he had been detained: he had crossed paths with Al Qaeda operatives, and his cousin had once called him from Osama bin Laden’s phone. But Salahi was no terrorist—he held no extremist views—and had no information about any plots. He trusted the American system of justice and thought the authorities would realize their mistake before long.

He was wrong.

Salahi spent fifteen years at Guantánamo, where he was subjected to some of the worst excesses of America’s war on terror; Donald Rumsfeld personally signed off on the orders for his torture. And, under torture, Salahi confessed to everything—even though he had done nothing. “If they would have wanted him to confess to being on the grassy knoll for the J.F.K. assassination, I’m sure we could have got him to confess to that, too,” Mark Fallon, who led an investigation unit at Guantánamo, said.

Ben Taub reported Salahi’s story for The New Yorker and tried to understand what had gone wrong in the fight against Al Qaeda. Salahi met Taub in Mauritania, because when the U.S. released him it was under the condition that Mauritania would withhold his passport. Salahi would like to go abroad—he needs medical treatment, and he hopes to live in a democracy. But, for an innocent victim of Guantánamo, being released isn’t the same as being free.

With Congress in recess and the Democratic debates on hiatus until September—when the 2020 Presidential campaign will kick into high gear—this seems like a good point to take stock of where things stand politically. After all, the past few months have seen a series of major happenings, including the long-awaited publication of the Mueller report; a worsening in the humanitarian crisis at the southern border; the President hurling racist abuse at Democratic members of Congress and calling a major American city a “disgusting . . . rodent infested mess”; a major policy reversal by the Federal Reserve on interest rates; a bit of economic history being made when the current economic expansion became the longest on record; the renewal of missile testing by North Korea; a further ratcheting up of the tensions with Iran; and new threats from Donald Trump of a trade war with China, which sparked another market drop.

Surely, all these events must have had some impact on Trump’s standing in the country. But, actually, they haven’t. If you look at the Real Clear Politics poll average, which combines data from a wide range of polls, you will find that the President’s approval rating is 43.3 per cent. That is within a single percentage point of where Trump’s rating was at the start of the year, and it is virtually identical to where it was a year ago. On August 2, 2018, the figure was 43.5 per cent. Another twelve months of political turmoil, and practically no change at all.

This extraordinary stability suggests a couple of things. First, most Americans have already made up their minds about Trump, and the disruptions that he continues to cause on a daily basis only confirm their opinions. Second, the President and his advisers must know this to be true. It certainly appears to be shaping their 2020 campaign strategy, which is running on two tracks.

The first imperative for Trump is to fire up his core supporters and get them to the polls, especially in the Midwestern states that will be the key to winning the Electoral College. Hence, Trump’s regular appearances at huge MAGA rallies, such as the one he held in Cincinnati this week. Another motivating tool is Trump’s Twitter feed, which enables him to bypass the mainstream media, and issue his incitements—many of them racial—directly to his supporters. As the election approaches, a third tactic will become increasingly important: using the candidate’s already plentiful campaign funds to buy targeted advertising on platforms like Facebook and YouTube. In the second quarter alone, the Trump campaign raised about a hundred and five million dollars— approximately thirty million dollars more than Barack Obama raised at a comparable stage in 2011.

Citing Trump’s resources and the opportunities afforded to him by social media, members of the Trump team, particularly his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, have insisted that the national opinion polls are a misleading indicator of his prospects for reëlection. “The way turnout now works, the abilities we have now to turn out voters—the polling can’t understand that,” Parscale said to CBS News when Trump formally launched his reëlection campaign, in June. “And that’s why it was so wrong in 2016. . . . Nobody got it right—not one public poll. The reason why—it's not 1962 anymore.” Last month, after the Trump campaign revealed its second-quarter fund-raising haul, Parscale told Fox News, “We’re not even in the main portion of the campaign yet and we’re already raising large numbers. This President, in the voice he has, the message he can control, in the way he can control what’s happening on the media. No one can touch this.”

The other half of Trump’s campaign strategy is based on demonizing the Democratic Party and its Presidential ticket. Trump was unpopular in 2016, too, but so was his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Enough of the voters who disliked both Trump and Clinton broke in Trump’s direction to give him a narrow victory in the Electoral College despite his big loss in the popular vote. In trying to repeat the trick, Trump is already portraying some elected Democrats as extremist and anti-American—and the rest as weaklings who are in hock to the extremist anti-Americans. In his campaign speech in Cincinnati, he spent all or part of twenty-nine minutes attacking the Democrats, according to an analysis by the Washington Post’s Philip Bump, compared to twenty minutes boasting about his own economic achievements. As usual, his explication wandered all over the place, but at one point he did manage to sum up much of his indictment in a single sentence: “Democrats are now the party of high taxes, high crime, open borders, late-term abortion, and they're the party, frankly, of socialism.”

By now, we are used to Trump being divisive. But in the past couple of weeks he has crossed another threshold, by making it clear that he has written off large chunks of the country and their residents, and isn’t even pretending to be a leader for the entire United States. His racist assault on the home town of Billie Holiday and Thurgood Marshall evoked “centuries-old stereotypes of black places—and people—as being dirty and unhygienic,” Vox’s P. R. Lockhart noted. The Baltimore Sun’s editorial board, in a timely riposte, declared, “Better to have a few rats than to be one,” but if anyone thought it would end there they don’t know Trump. His attack on Baltimore and Representative Elijah Cummings turned out to be the beginning of a weeklong assault on cities with large minority populations and the Democrats that run them.

As the campaign intensifies, we will doubtless see more of this. And how are the Democrats responding to Trump’s scorched-earth politics? On the Presidential-campaign front, they have just completed the first stage of a primary battle that will go on for nearly another year. In Congress, meanwhile, the pressure to bring Trump to book is still growing: a majority of members of the House Democratic caucus have now come out in favor of starting some form of impeachment inquiry.

With twenty candidates on the stage over two nights, and with the CNN hosts seemingly intent on getting them to attack one another, the second round of debates was fractious and, at times, hard to follow. According to two polls taken after the debates, they didn’t have much impact on the race. Both surveys—from Morning Consult and Harvard-Harris—showed Joe Biden retaining a big lead over Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, and all the rest of the candidates struggling. This has been the clear pattern in the Democratic race for some time now.

If Biden came out of this week’s debates as the biggest winner, as the polls suggest, the main theme to emerge was one I wrote about on Thursday: the bitter divide over the policy legacy of Barack Obama. In addressing health care, immigration, criminal justice, and a number of other issues, the Warren–Sanders wing of the Party is eager to move beyond the last Democratic Presidency, whereas Biden often looks like he is pushing for a third term for the Obama Administration. An important thing to watch going forward will be whether the progressives can critique Obama’s policies without being seen to criticize Obama himself, who remains highly popular among Democratic voters. Biden, for his part, has a clear interest in conflating these two things. Hence his statements the morning after the Wednesday debate, when he remarked, “I was a little surprised at how much incoming there was about Barack, about the President. . . . I don't think there’s anything that he has to apologize for.”

With no televised debates for another six weeks, media attention may well shift away from the Democratic race and focus on the Democratic leadership in the House, which is facing a summer impeachment dilemma. On Friday, the congressman Salud Carbajal, who represents a district northwest of Los Angeles, called for Trump’s impeachment, saying that he “evaded truth, encouraged his staff to lie repeatedly to investigators, and engaged in obstruction.” Carbajal’s declaration means that a majority of House Democrats—a hundred and eighteen out of two hundred and thirty-five—have now called publicly for some form of impeachment proceeding.

Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, is famously reluctant to go down the route of impeachment, of course. (Back in March, she said it would be a distraction from the task of defeating Trump in 2020 and achieving Democratic majorities in Congress.) But as the numbers in her caucus have shifted Pelosi has modulated her language. In a lengthy statement after Carbajal’s announcement, Pelosi said that the Mueller report “laid out ten instances of the President’s obstruction of justice,” adding that Trump’s recent attempts to frustrate investigations by various Democratic-led committees was "further evidence of obstruction of justice.” Then, after describing some of the progress these committees were making, she concluded, “We owe it to our children to insure that no present or future President can dishonor the oath of office without being held accountable. In America, no one is above the law. The President will be held accountable.”

Does this mean that Pelosi is now leaning toward impeachment? Not yet, perhaps. But with a number of progressive groups vowing to spend the summer recess exerting pressure on the impeachment holdouts in their home districts, the dilemma facing the Speaker could be even more acute when Congress reassembles for the fall session. We shall see.