President Obama meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House on Nov. 10. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

President-elect Donald Trump is already signaling that he might backpedal on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, telling the Wall Street Journal Friday that he’d consider hanging onto popular Obamacare provisions such as “the prohibition against insurers denying coverage because of patients’ existing conditions, and a provision that allows parents to provide years of additional coverage for children on their insurance policies.”

“I like those very much,” he said. Three days into his transition, and it looks like the real estate tycoon is becoming a politician.

His apparent reluctance to scrap the entire ACA is understandable. In the long run, waffling on repeal will probably be less painful than causing a health-care catastrophe. Trump capitalized on Republicans’ long dislike of the Affordable Care Act by focusing on news, in the last weeks of the campaign, that premiums would increase sharply for many Americans purchasing insurance through its exchanges. But he didn’t promise a pared-down health-care regime. He promised to repeal and replace Obamacare with a plan that would cover everyone, offer more choice and cost less.

It was a populist approach to health care that wasn’t new. Sixteen years ago, in “The America We Deserve,” he wrote: “I’m a conservative on most issues, but a liberal on this one,” an appeal that didn’t hurt candidate Trump. But President Trump is likely to find the issue challenging. Repeal requires only the will of Congress. Replacement is subject to the laws of economics and mathematics, which aren’t on his side.

In the campaign, Trump proposed replacing the Affordable Care Act with a tax deduction for individuals who pay for health insurance out of pocket. Like all tax deductions, such a deduction is worth more to people with higher tax rates. But most of those who would be left without coverage by an ACA repeal are lower-income individuals with tax rates that are already low. Thus, the benefit they’d receive from a deduction doesn’t come close to the financial hit they would experience from an ACA repeal. Independent estimates suggest repeal would cause about 20 million people to lose coverage, only one-quarter of whom would purchase insurance with the deduction. The rest wouldn’t be able to afford it.

Perhaps with this in mind, Trump proposed several steps to lower the cost of health insurance. Each of them represents Republican-friendly alternatives to the current system, but none is likely to have the hoped-for impact.

“Our replacement plan,” Trump told a crowd in Roanoke, Va., in September, “includes expanded access to Healthcare Savings Accounts, with support for those who need it.” HSAs, which combine tax-free savings with a high-deductible insurance policy — for families, a deductible of $2,600 or more — have long been a conservative favorite. In fact, legislation enabling HSAs was passed as part of the Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003. There has been a very rapid increase in the use of HSAs in the interim, as employers offering health plans turned to them to offset rising health costs.

HSAs may be reasonable for higher-income families, who can afford to put aside a portion of their household income each month for future health-care spending, but they are not a compelling answer for people of modest means. Few families who will lose ACA coverage will want to pay thousands of dollars for an insurance policy that doesn’t pay out anything until they have spent another $2,600 on direct medical bills. It’s possible that Trump could subsidize the insurance premiums or savings account for moderate-income families, but such a subsidy would drive up government costs immensely. The large number of families with modest incomes who need help affording health insurance is the primary reason why the Affordable Care Act subsidies were not more generous.

When it comes to buying insurance, Trump says, “We have to get rid of the lines around the state, artificial lines.” The idea is that insurers should be free to sell in any state, regardless of where they are domiciled. A laudable concept in spirit: Insurance market competition allows consumers more choice and could drive down premiums.

But experience is not on Trump’s side. Three states have already eliminated restrictions on out-of-state sales of insurance — Georgia, Maine and Wyoming — and not a single insurer has entered any of these markets. Why? To sell insurance in one of these states, the big barrier for carriers isn’t meeting individual state regulatory requirements. Rather, an insurer has to have contracts with local hospitals and doctors that an out-of-state insurer doesn’t have. When they try to set them up, insurance carriers find that doctors and hospitals charge them high prices; Why offer low prices to an insurer that has few enrollees, and thus doesn’t have leverage to direct a large volume of patients elsewhere? Facing high provider prices and correspondingly limited enrollment, there is no new entry, and no new competition.

The only way for Trump to address this would be to regulate the maximum prices that providers are allowed to charge to insurers. And that seems unlikely for a president-elect and Congress who have railed against excessive federal regulations.

Rather than encouraging competition, the primary impact of cross-state purchasing would be to allow insurers to change their corporate location in order to avoid consumer protections. Think about it: Why are most credit card companies headquartered in Delaware or South Dakota? Because those states allow banks to charge any interest rate they want, thus avoiding consumer-protection laws in states where the borrower is located. If cross-state purchasing of health insurance is allowed, enterprising state governments will seek to attract health insurers by allowing them free reign to price the sick at any rate they chose, impose annual and lifetime limits on coverage and make accessing care difficult. To prevent this, Trump would need to re-create the consumer protections in the Affordable Care Act — the same ones he has promised to wipe away.

Other Trump promises will increase the pressure he faces on health care. He promised large income, corporate and estate tax cuts, generally tilted toward high-income individuals. If Trump wants to balance the budget — as Republicans say they want to do — he and Congress will need to find areas of spending they can cut. With about one of four federal dollars spent on health care, it’s impossible to do that and avoid cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Politically, though, as Trump said during primary season, “Abolishing Medicare, I don’t think you’ll get away with that one. It’s actually a program that’s worked. It’s a program that some people love, actually.”

Following the lead of congressional Republicans, Trump favors block-granting Medicaid dollars to states. He hasn’t said how the block grants would compare with existing spending, but most block grant proposals save money by growing the block grant less rapidly than medical costs increase. One wonders what Trump’s supporters with disabled children or elderly parents will think when states have to cut coverage for them.

But even the savings from a Medicaid block grant is not likely to be enough to offset the size of the tax cuts that Trump calls for — estimated at $3.7 trillion to $5.9 trillion over the next decade. Instead, Trump would likely need to turn to the other Republican standby: replacing the Medicare guarantee of coverage for seniors with a voucher that seniors would use to shop for private insurance. In many recent Republican proposals, the voucher amount is set by law to grow less rapidly than underlying medical costs. Effectively, this saves the government money by transferring some of the costs of Medicare to beneficiaries. House Speaker Paul Ryan recently indicated that he wants Medicare privatization to be part of the Obamacare repeal.

Nor would this be the only weight Trump’s policies would place on the elderly. The Affordable Care Act fills in the “doughnut hole” in Medicare’s coverage of prescription drugs — the range of spending where insurance does not pay for any of the cost of medications, and beneficiaries are responsible for the full amount. Repealing the Affordable Care Act shifts these high costs back to less-healthy seniors.

There is little public support for block-granting Medicaid, turning Medicare into a voucher program or reinstating the Medicare doughnut hole. Only one-quarter of Americans support turning Medicare into a voucher program, including less than one-third of Republicans. Medicaid block grants are supported by only one-third of Americans, including only half of Republicans. Trump’s mantra, “Make America Great Again,” means different things to different people, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone thinks it means going back to the days when fewer people were covered for health risks and those who are sick paid more for it.

To be clear, I am an unlikely person to advise Trump. I worked on President Clinton’s health-care reform initiative and was a health-care adviser to President Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. I favor improving, not abandoning, Obamacare. But if Trump were to seek my guidance, here is what I would suggest. First, heed Colin Powell’s advice to President George W. Bush in another context: If you break health care, you own it. Don’t repeal Obamacare until after you’ve developed a real plan that covers as many people as the ACA at a cost that is affordable and that has majority public support.

Second, focus on an aspect of the health-care debate where your views align with majority opinion: drug pricing. During his campaign, Trump advocated that Americans be allowed to re-import pharmaceuticals from other countries. Branded pharmaceuticals sell for much more in the United States than in other countries. Allowing re-importation would enable consumers, state and local governments, and the federal government to reap significant savings. Three in four Americans support drug re-importation. Indeed, it is the only item of health-care agreement between large groups of Democratic and Republican voters. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, for example, supports this idea.

But even here, implementation will be an uphill climb. Americans might get the right to buy prescription drugs from Canada, but what should be done when pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell to Canadian pharmacies that export to the United States? Or when pharmaceutical companies get one version of a drug approved in the United States and a very slightly different version approved abroad? Politically, the biggest opponents of efforts to reduce pharmaceutical prices are likely to be congressional Republicans, many of whom are beneficiaries of pharmaceutical industry contributions. Is Trump willing to spite his own party and work primarily with Democrats? One clue may come from the fact that Trump’s presidential transition website omits any mention of pharmaceutical re-importation from its list of health-care priorities.

However he proceeds, Trump will find that health care goes from being an applause line on the campaign trail to a headache once he’s in office. It is entirely possible that Obamacare will cut into the popularity of more than one president.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that for HSAs, the minimum high deductible increased from $2,500 to $2,600.

President-elect Donald Trump and President Obama meet at the White House. (Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency)

After reiterating his promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, President-elect Donald Trump has indicated that he may keep two of the law’s most popular provisions. One is straightforward enough — children up to the age of 26 being allowed to stay on their parents’ plan. The other — preventing insurance companies from denying coverage because of preexisting conditions — offers a perfect illustration of why Trump and most of the other Republicans critics of Obamacare don’t understand the health insurance market.

Let’s say that in the beautiful new world of “repeal and replace,” insurers are required to sell you insurance despite the fact that your kid has a brain tumor.  Insurance companies know what to do with that. Their actuaries can calculate that kids with brain tumors typically require (I’m making this number up) about $200,000 a year in medical care. So they’ll offer to sell you a policy at an annual premium of $240,000.

[Donald Trump and the end of history]

At this point your response will probably be that such an outcome is not fair. When the law says insurance companies can’t discriminate on the basis for pre-existing conditions, surely what it means is that they have to charge roughly the same price for health insurance, irrespective of your pre-existing condition. In the language of insurance, that’s called “guaranteed issue at community rates.”

Unfortunately, in the states that have tried guaranteed issues at community rates, the insurance markets have collapsed. That’s because if you guarantee everyone the right to buy health insurance at community rates, then some consumers will game the system. The young and healthy ones won’t buy any health insurance at all—they’ll go without until they are diagnosed with diabetes or a brain tumor or get hit by a truck crossing the street.  And when that happens, they will immediately call up Aetna or Anthem and exercise their right to buy health insurance at the low community rate, irrespective of their medical condition. It won’t be long before insurance companies begin losing a ton of money and are forced either to raise premiums through the roof or stop writing policies altogether.

[A new theory for why Trump voters are so angry — that actually makes sense]

So how do you prevent that kind of gaming of the system by consumers?  Well, that’s easy.  You require that everyone buy at least some minimal level of insurance at the beginning of every year, so they can’t buy insurance only after they get sick. Let’s call that an” individual mandate.”  But because you can’t expect poor people to pay $1,000 a month, they will require subsidies to keep their out-of-pocket costs to something like 10 percent of income.  To pay for the subsidies, a new tax will be required.

So let’s review what just happened. To guarantee that people with pre-existing conditions can get affordable health insurance, you need to have rules requiring guaranteed issue and community rating.  To keep insurance companies in business because of guaranteed issue and community rating, you need to have an individual mandate.  And because poor people can’t afford health insurance, you need subsidies. Combine all three, and what you have, in a nutshell, is ... Obamacare.

Yes, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but not much.  It’s possible to allow insurance companies charge twice or three times as much, to people who are older or sicker. You can let healthy people buy somewhat more barebones “catastrophic” policies to satisfying their obligation under the individual mandate.  You could even avoid community rating by sending sick people into “high risk pools” where their premiums would be subsidized by a tax on everyone else’s health care premiums.

But at the end of the day, once you decide that everyone, regardless of age or medical condition, should be able to buy health insurance at an affordable price, you have essentially bought into the idea that young and healthy people have an obligation to subsidize the older and sicker people in some fashion. And once you do that, it’s sort of inevitable you end up where every health reform plan has ended up since the days of Richard Nixon. You end up with some variation on Obamacare.

[A new sign Republicans will give Donald Trump the same pass they gave Bush]

Of course, if you want to scrap guaranteed issue, scrap community rating, scrap the individual mandate and scrap the subsidies, as Republicans, propose, then you end up where the country was in 2008—with a market system that inevitable gives way to an insurance spiral in which steadily rising premiums cause a steadily rising percentage of Americans without health insurance.

There are no easy solutions here, no free lunches.  You can’t have all the good parts of an unregulated insurance market (freedom to buy what you want, when you want, with market pricing) without the bad parts (steadily rising premiums and insurance that is unaffordable for people who are old and sick).

At the same time, you can’t have all the good parts of a socialized system (universal coverage at affordable prices) without freedom-reducing mandates and regulations and large doses of subsidies from some people to other people. Anyone who says otherwise – anyone promising better quality health care at lower cost with fewer regulations and lower taxes—is peddling hokum.

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly suggests in a forthcoming book that Donald Trump may have been tipped off about a question she planned to ask him during the first Republican primary debate last year, according to an early review of the book.

The question — about Trump’s history of making demeaning comments about women — produced one of the most famous exchanges of the presidential campaign and plunged Kelly into a long-running, if one-sided, feud with the man who was elected president on Tuesday.

In response to a review of her book by the New York Times, Kelly late Thursday night tweeted, “For the record, my book ‘Settle for More’ does not suggest Trump had any debate Qs in advance, nor do I believe that he did.”

But if the question was leaked in advance of the debate, it would suggest Trump had time to prepare his response, giving him an advantage over his Republican rivals. It would also parallel the disclosure that Donna Brazile, then a CNN commentator and the chair of the Democratic National Committee, leaked debate topics to Hillary Clinton’s campaign before Democratic debates.

Kelly’s book will be published next week, but the New York Times obtained an advance copy and described the sequence of events in a review.

Megyn Kelly interviews Donald Trump in May, 2016. (Eric Liebowitz/Fox)

But Kelly leaves that impression in her book, which describes her tempestuous relationship with Trump and with ousted Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, according to the Times account.

Kelly apparently drew Trump’s wrath a week before the first primary debate in August 2015. A segment on her show, “The Kelly File,” had upset Trump enough that he refused to do a scheduled interview with her unless she phoned him personally.

She writes that he told her, “I almost unleashed my beautiful Twitter account against you, and I still may.”

The day before the debate, Kelly writes, Trump was upset again and called Fox executives to complain about her. He said he’d heard that her first question as co-moderator “was a very pointed question directed at him.”

In fact, Kelly’s first question at the Fox-sponsored debate was about Trump’s references to women as “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.”

Kelly does not speculate in her book how Trump knew that her question would be directed to him, the Times said. But she writes, “Folks were starting to worry about Trump — his level of agitation did not match the circumstances. Yes, it was his first debate. But this was bizarre behavior, especially for a man who wanted the nuclear codes.”

Trump appeared to be rattled by Kelly’s question, a reaction that suggests he did not see it coming. His many months of criticism of Kelly thereafter further suggests he viewed the question as a betrayal.

The anecdote raises its own questions about who within Fox News was aware of Kelly’s debate planning and could have tipped Trump.

Kelly doesn’t make a specific allegation, but does note that Ailes often responded to Trump’s complaints about Kelly by calling Kelly and asking, “Was I being fair to Trump? Was I being too hard on him? He felt the bar for skeptical Trump coverage should be higher.”

Following the first debate, Trump went public with his criticism of Kelly, calling her “overrated” and “a bimbo” on Twitter. He went on CNN and described her as having “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her whatever.” He boycotted a Fox-sponsored debate before the Iowa caucus in January because Kelly was scheduled to be one of the moderators.

Ailes was forced out of Fox in July, amid widespread allegations of sexual harassment, including by Kelly herself. He became an informal adviser to Trump’s campaign.

Kelly’s debate anecdote raises some questions about Kelly herself, such as why she never reported anything about this episode to her viewers during the campaign and waited until after Trump was elected on Tuesday to reveal it in a book. It also adds an additional element to Kelly’s contentious interview with Brazile last month in which Kelly repeatedly asked Brazile if she had leaked debate questions to Clinton’s aides.

Fox News’ representatives did not respond to a request for comment late Thursday.

Kelly also recounts in the book a bizarre episode surrounding the first primary debate, according to the Times. On the day of the event, a driver assigned to her kept offering her coffee, which she refused. She finally relented and drank the cup he handed her. Within 15 minutes, she became seriously ill and feared she wouldn’t be able to appear at the debate. She did, but kept a trash can under her desk just in case she had to vomit.

Kelly doesn’t say so directly, but she suggests she may have been poisoned, the Times said.

Our new card game is now on Kickstarter.

Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water?

—Nick Traeden

Yes! We can do anything we want. We shouldn't do this, though, because it would be gross.

Death Valley is an endorheic basin[1]"Big hole" in California. The floor of the valley is about 80 meters below sea level. It contains the lowest point on land in North America[2]Excluding artificial points like mines. and is the hottest place on Earth.[3]If you're about to say "Wait, what about Liby—," then don't worry, I'm with you. Just hang on and read a few more words ahead!

Now, if you're the sort of person who's into world records, you might have heard that the hottest place on Earth was Al Azizia, Libya. Al Azizia recorded a temperature of 58.0°C (136.4°F) in 1922, a mark Death Valley has never come close to. So what gives?

It turns out Al Azizia has recently been stripped of its record. In 2010, an exhaustive—and definitely a little obsessive—investigation led by Christopher C. Burt convinced the World Meteorological Organization that the Libyan measurement was probably a mistake. This left Death Valley with the record of 56.7°C (134°F), set in 1913. Case closed!

Except it's not quite settled. Burt has raised questions about the 1913 record as well, and has gone so far as to catalog a number of historical extremes along with a credibility score for each. The "real" record is probably 53.9°C (129°F). This temperature has been recorded four times, in 1960, 1998, 2005, and 2007—every time in Death Valley.

These records were recorded with modern instruments and are considered reliable. They also make sense from a theoretical point of view. Geographers have calculated[4]This Army Corps of Engineers publication cites a couple of sources for this, including a 1963 paper by G. Hoffman. Unfortunately, that paper is in German, which I can't read, so I've just decided to trust that the Army Corps of Engineers writers Dr. Paul F. Krause and Kathleen L. Flood aren't pulling a fast one on me. that the highest possible temperature in ideal spots (in desert basins like Death Valley) during the 20th century is 55°-56°C, so 54°C sounds like a reasonable world record.

Now, back to Nick's question.[5]This is nowhere NEAR the record for "most boring digression into world record trivia." That record was recently challenged by IBM computer capable of producing millions of boring pieces of trivia per second, but the machine narrowly lost to reigning human champion Ken Jennings.

Since Death Valley is below sea level, we could, as Nick suggests, flood it with seawater. It would take a lot of digging, since there's a lot of Earth in the way. The lowest route to Death Valley is probably by traveling up the Colorado River watershed, along the Arizona border past Quartzsite,[6]Trivia: If you want to reach Quartzsite, Arizona from my school, Christopher Newport University, you just step out onto Warwick Blvd (Rt. 60) and turn left. That's it—Route 60 runs across the country, from the CNU campus in Virginia to I-10 just outside Quartzsite. then northwest[7]Possibly following one of the routes shown on page G34 in this report. past Zzyzx, which is a real place.

If you did all that digging, you could create a channel from the Gulf of California to Death Valley, and water would flow in. We can use this handy stream-flow calculator to figure out how wide we'd need to make the channel. A channel 20 meters deep and 100 meters wide should be able to fill it in a few months. A really wide channel—like the kind carved by glacial floods—could fill it in hours.

We know it's possible to create this kind of inland sea because we've done it before—by accident. In 1905, irrigation engineers working on the Colorado River made some mistakes. During a flood, the entire Colorado river broke through into the Alamo Canal and flowed directly into the Salton basin to the north. By the time they repaired the canal, two years later, the Salton basin had become the Salton Sea—one of the larger human-caused changes to the world map.

The Salton Sea is fed mainly by agricultural runoff, so it's become saline[8]"Salty" and hypereutrophic.[9]"Gross" Large numbers of dead fish, combined with algal decay and unusual chemistry, have created a smell that the US Geological Survey describes as "objectionable," "noxious," "unique," and "pervasive." The sea is a birdwatching hot spot, but also the site of a lot of mass bird die-offs, so kind of a mixed bag if you're into birds. In recent years, the water has been evaporating quickly, leaving behind dried toxic residue which is swept up into dust storms. Work to clean up and rehabilitate the region is ongoing.

All in all, the Salton Sea is a mess—and Nick wants to make another one.

Nick's Death Valley project would start off connected to the ocean, but without a source of flowing water at the Death Valley end,[10](It's a desert.) the channel would gradually silt up. The link to the ocean would eventually be broken, the sea would start to evaporate, the water would become saline, algae would bloom, and eventually the US Geological Survey would start complaining about the smell.

There would be one more consequence to all this. Thanks to the flood of cold ocean water burying the whole region, Death Valley would stop setting temperature records, and someone else would eventually claim to have broken their 129°F record. The Death Valley records would have to be compared to the newer candidates, which would probably use slightly different methods ... and that means one thing:

A World Meteorological Organization expert panel!

When Clinton’s surrogates respond to questions about Wikileaks by saying the Russians are behind it, that’s an acknowledgment of guilt. Guilty people almost always question the source of the information first. Innocent people start with a clear denial, or sometimes confusion as to why the question is being asked.

Some guilty people will give you a straight denial if they know the question is coming and they prepared for it. For example, Bill Clinton famously said of Monica Lewinsky, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” A firm denial from a prepared witness doesn’t mean anything. But a lack of denial, combined with questioning the source, is almost always a lie. Here’s the summary.

Example: 

Did you commit the crime?

Liar: “Who told you that?” 

Honest Person: “Hell no. I was at work. You can check.”

Prepared/coached Liar: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

Notice that you can’t always tell the difference between an honest answer and a well-coached liar. But the liar without good coaching is as obvious as a lighthouse. When Clinton surrogates redirect any question about Wikileaks to “Russia did it” they are confirming that they believe the content is real and damaging. They just don’t realize they are confirming it.

Now let’s talk about Trump. When Trump “categorically denies” the accusations of inappropriate sexual behavior, that form of an answer is common to both honest people and well-prepared liars. You can’t tell anything from Trump’s answer.

But Trump’s supporters and surrogates clearly believe Trump is guilty. You can tell by the precision of their answers. An honest opinion from a surrogate that Trump is totally innocent of all charges would look like this:

“None of it happened. It is all lies.”

Instead, you hear deceptive talk that fits these two forms:

1. “It can’t be a coincidence that everyone came forward at the same time.” 

2. “Trump categorically denies the allegations and we take him at his word.”

The first response questions the source of the information, which I already taught you is a sign of deception. 

The second response allows the surrogate to avoid giving an opinion on the facts and instead focus on their belief in the candidate. “Take him at his word” is code for “He’s on his own to defend the allegations. Keep me out of it.”

As regular readers know, I now endorse Gary Johnson because he only touches himself. But let me put some context on both the Wikileaks info and Trump’s alleged groping/kissing.

Wikileaks

The Wikileaks emails are not having a huge impact because movies and books have taught us that even our most-respected politicians do favor-trading to get things done. And the emails that DO NOT come from Clinton are little more than underlings chattering. So far, Wikileaks is a big nothing.

Groping/Kissing Allegations

I think nearly everyone believes “something happened” with Trump and at least some of the women who have made allegations. I wasn’t a witness to any of it, and I have no opinion on the truth of any specific allegation. But I can help you put the allegations in context.

I’ll start with a true story that a good female friend once told me about going on a blind date with a famous billionaire (not Trump) years ago. A mutual friend set them up. On the night of the date, she drove to his mansion and a servant let her in. The billionaire came downstairs a few minutes later, introduced himself, and asked if she wanted to have sex before or after dinner. 

Those were his first words. There was no chit-chat.

She chose before. So they did. She enjoyed it.

Why was my friend so accommodating that night? She said it was because he was a billionaire. She liked that.

Does that story sound anything like your life? I doubt it. So when you evaluate what a billionaire did or did not do behind closed doors, don’t make the mistake of putting your own filter on it. Trump’s experience with women is not like yours.

My own fame is about 1% of Trump’s fame. And I can confirm that when women hear what I do for a living, they tend to act sexually available. In other words, they flirt. But it isn’t always the “real” kind of flirting. They might have husbands or boyfriends and no intention of cheating. But their body language tends to be inviting in ways that non-famous people never see. The signals can be confusing because sexual attraction and celebrity-awe look the same to the observer. 

I’m willing to bet that when Trump is alone with a woman, she often – but not always – sends signals of availability, whether she intends it or not. Her rational mind – and her words – might be giving a clear message of no while her eyes, body language, and other signals are responding to power the way humans have evolved to respond. 

To further complicate things, Trump probably has a good track record of turning a firm no into a yes. He tells the story of Melania rejecting his initial advances until he eventually persuaded her.

When normal men get rebuffed by women, they know the odds of turning things around are low but not impossible. Most men have had the experience of turning an initial rejection into an eventual girlfriend. Let’s say we succeed at that about 20% of the time at best. But Trump’s turnaround average is probably closer to 80% because he’s a billionaire. And because he’s a Master Persuader.

I don’t excuse or condone anything Trump has allegedly done. That’s his problem. I’m just providing you with some context. In Trump’s billionaire world, women send mixed signals far more often than you probably imagine. There is a near guarantee that a normal human male in Trump’s situation will press too hard or assume too much about consent. Again, I am not condoning or excusing anyone’s behavior. I’m just saying that rich men are more likely to get mixed signals about consent. I doubt Trump ever leaned in to kiss anyone unless he interpreted their actions as willingness. But I’m sure he’s been wrong more than once. Vote accordingly if that matters to you.

—

You might enjoy reading my book because other people did.

Interstate 10, which cuts a wide swath through Southern California and on through six more states before ending in Florida, is the fourth deadliest highway in the nation, according to a new report.

Aiming to attract and keep top-notch talent, a growing number of companies are dangling family-friendly perks such as lengthy paid leave for new moms and dads, back-up child care and onsite infant vaccines. But the attention-grabbing headlines -- such as "IBM plans to ship employees' breast milk home" -- obscure the reality that for many workers, basic benefits such as guaranteed parental leave, even unpaid, is unavailable.

Graphics by Ella Koeze

CHARLESTON, South Carolina — “I am a psychologist, and I run [the] Islamic School of Charleston,” said Ruby Abid, 48, an ace multitasker who has raised three grown children. “I am a substitute teacher, too, in like American schools, and I’m a Realtor. I sell houses, and I run a business, and I teach Arabic online, and like little stuff here and there.”

But midday on Fridays, Abid takes a pause from work for Jummah, the Friday prayer services at the Central Mosque of Charleston, a former church on a corner lot in a working-class neighborhood. A police patrol is stationed in the parking lot during worship. The mosque’s former president, Shahid Husain, said it was just one of several houses of worship in Charleston that have been targets of threats or attacks, including the mass killing of nine people by a white supremacist at Emanuel AME church last year. During prayers, men sit in the main room where the imam leads prayer, while women are on the other side of a partition through which they can see and hear, with a separate entrance.

During the February primary season in South Carolina, Abid, who lives in nearby Mount Pleasant, told me that she was going to vote “with Democrats, maybe Hillary.” (She wouldn’t divulge who got her vote, in the end.) Donald Trump was speaking in town that very night, and Abid said “we’re more than happy to host him here and answer whatever questions he has about Islam and maybe we’ll be able to satisfy his … you know, whatever hatred he has about Muslims. Muslims are not bad people.”

Abid, a naturalized U.S. citizen who moved here from Pakistan two decades ago, is one of the hundreds of thousands of Muslim American voters who will get to have their say in an election in which one of the two main candidates has openly proposed banning Muslims and immigrants from nations “compromised by terrorism.” According to data from the Public Religion Research Institute, there are only a handful of swing states that have more than 1 percent Muslim population.

Swing states in bold

Source: PRRI

The Pew Research Center has estimated there were about 3.3 million Muslims in the United States in 2015, or about 1 percent of the population. By 2050, according to Pew, the Muslim share of the population should more than double, surpassing the number of Jewish Americans (who are estimated to decline to 1.4 percent from 1.8 percent now) and double the number of Hindus.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, using a private voter database from the company Aristotle, found that 824,000 registered voters in the U.S. matched a list of 43,538 traditionally Muslim names. That figure is roughly half of 1 percent of U.S. registered voters. According to CAIR’s research, that means more than 300,000 Muslim-American voters may have registered since the 2012 election, which the group said may be the result of political attacks on Muslims.

The subject often comes up during Friday prayers at the Charleston mosque.

“This country is great because it gives privilege to everybody, equal rights to everybody,” said Husain, the mosque’s former president. ”Unfortunately in the last six months, the people have used anti-Muslim, anti-Mexican, anti-women approaches in the front line, and unfortunately … people are resonating their sentiments.”

A Monmouth University poll taken last month found that 17 percent of registered voters support banning all Muslims from entering the country, while 74 percent oppose the idea. (Support for the idea has fallen significantly since Trump first proposed it, and Trump himself has modified his plan.) In 2015, hate crimes against Muslims were at their highest level since the period just after 9/11.

As a result, according to one poll taken in January of 2016, Muslim support for Clinton is higher than among any other religious group measured. The poll, taken by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a research group focusing on American Muslims, showed that 40 percent of Muslims supported Clinton, compared to 30 percent of Jews and 13 percent of Catholics and Protestants. Only 4 percent of Muslims said they supported Trump. (The poll included other primary candidates besides Clinton and Trump.) The organization also measured party affiliation by religious groups, and found Muslim Americans had by far the largest ratio of Democrats to Republicans.

Another poll, taken this spring by the Muslim-American advocacy group Emerge USA and provided privately to FiveThirtyEight, found that 80 percent of self-identified Muslims in four battleground states supported Clinton, and only 1 percent supported Trump.

Some at the mosque mourned the tense relationship between the U.S. and parts of the Islamic world. Ismat Ullah Nawabi moved to the U.S. from Afghanistan in 1965, first to the New York/New Jersey region and later to Charleston to be near his grown children. He recalled that during his early years in Afghanistan, people there loved Americans.

“At the present time, there’s a different feeling,” he said. “And that should not be it. America is such that it should be loved by people.”

Some Muslims have also turned their attention to political fundraising. In 2006, Khurrum Wahid, a Florida lawyer and co-chairman of Emerge USA, founded a related political action group, Emerge USA PAC, that raised money for Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, who that year was elected the first Muslim-American congressman. In 2012 the organization raised funds to fight Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican who had been elected to office two years earlier with tea party support after using anti-Muslim rhetoric. West lost his race for re-election to his Democratic challenger by 1,900 votes. Based on research by Emerge USA, which also buys voter rolls for research, there were 2,200 Muslim-American voters in the district. Wahid said his group wanted to “crush the theory” among far-right politicians “that the more divisive you are, the more money you’ll raise, and the longer you’ll stay in office.”

The group’s research indicates a weakness in Clinton support among Muslim-American millennials, similar to that among blacks and Hispanics in the same age group.

“We’re seeing a lot of younger Muslims thinking about voting for a third party,” Wahid said, “even in the swing states — Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, and Colorado.” Wahid sees this as “a little selfish. You are voting for your own interest, not the community.”

A few weeks before the election, Trump’s continued push for policies targeting Muslims weighed heavily on Abid’s mind. The first litmus test she has for a leader, she says, is “will you feel safe?”

”Somebody who respects your beliefs, your faith, he should look at you as a person,” she said. “As a human. Not as a Muslim, not as a Christian, not as a Jew.”

Every four years, we seem to hear that we are facing the “most important election ever,” but this year that hyperbole has reached new heights. At the Republican National Convention, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said starkly: “There’s no next election. This is it.” A conservative essayist in the Claremont Review of Books went even further, calling 2016 the “Flight 93 election” — the final moments in which to save a hijacked republic. And Roger Angell, the longtime New Yorker editor and Hillary Clinton backer, wrote recently that the coming election will be the most important of the 19 presidential elections in which he will have voted.

It’s easy to see why so many voters feel so strongly about the importance of the coming election, but as an empirical matter, statements like Giuliani’s are incorrect. That’s because, in comparison to many other developed democracies, the United States actually has frequent federal elections. In Canada and Britain, a single party can govern for up to four or five years before voters get to weigh in. In the U.S., by contrast, no party can maintain unified control of the federal government for more than two years before facing the voters. After 2016, we’ll have midterm elections in 2018, less than 22 months after the next president is inaugurated. I certainly won’t call those midterms the “most important ever,” but they will have a particular importance: Control of the U.S. Senate, and possibly the House, could hang in the balance. For whichever party that loses the 2016 presidential race, 2018 is a big-time consolation prize.

Since the 1930s, one of the most dependable regularities in American politics has been midterm loss, a swing against the party of the incumbent president. Whether due to a reaction to the sitting president’s agenda or to voters seeking a counterweight to the president, the party not holding the presidency has made gains in the House in the midterm elections in every election but two since 1934.

The chart below shows every U.S. House election since 1952 according to the change in each party’s share of the vote from the election two years prior.

The results are striking. What first jumps off the page is that the biggest “thumpings” and “shellackings” (to quote former President George W. Bush and President Obama, respectively) are almost always in midterm years — and almost always directed against the president’s party. The far-left column shows the six elections in which the GOP’s vote share dropped more than 4 percentage points. Republicans held the presidency in four of those years: 1958, 1974, 1982 and 2006. In 2006, the Republicans lost the House; in the other three elections, they didn’t hold it in the first place. Likewise, the two far-right columns show three years in which the Democrats saw their House vote share drop 6 to 10 percentage points: 1966, 1994 and 2010. They lost control of the House in two of those three elections. In fact, the last four times the House of Representatives changed hands were all midterm years: 1954, 1994, 2006 and 2010.

By contrast, look at the two middle bars representing swings of up to 2 percentage points. There, we find most of the presidential election years. Volatility in House elections is markedly higher in midterms. When studying politics, results are rarely this clear-cut. If history is any guide, the House GOP’s majority would face more risk from a President Donald Trump in 2018 than from Trump’s campaign in 2016.

Or imagine that Clinton prevails in November. If so, the most likely outcome is a continuation of the recent pattern of resounding GOP victories in midterm years. In 2018, Democrats will defend Senate seats they won in 2012 in several red states, including Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia. West Virginia’s Joe Manchin famously shot a copy of the cap and trade bill in a 2010 campaign advertisement — but even excellent marksmanship might not be enough in a third consecutive midterm wave for the GOP.

In addition, some of the most important aftershocks of the 2016 election are likely to be felt not in Washington but in state capitals across the country. In 2018, 36 states will choose governors. As I’ve pointed out before, our elections for governor increasingly track national trends. Governors are typically powerful officials in their own right, with substantial control over state budgets and policy. But even for those who care about power only at the federal level, there is good reason to care about the 2018 governors’ races: In many states with multiple House districts, those governors will have veto power over their states’ redistricting processes after the 2020 census. Over the course of the Obama presidency, anti-Obama voting in non-presidential years is a major reason why the Democrats have lost a net of 11 governors’ seats.

Likewise, 2016 has critical implications for state legislative elections. Political scientist Steven Rogers has shown that presidential approval is a powerful predictor of voting in state legislative races. Since Obama became president, the same dynamics have cost the Democrats approximately 818 seats in state legislatures, and they have lost control of 29 net chambers in state legislatures. Sure, holding the presidency allows a party to pursue its agenda at the federal level. But in recent decades, that pursuit has come at a remarkable down-ballot cost for Democrats and Republicans alike.

To explain why the electorate has alternated between leaning Democratic in recent presidential years and Republican during midterms, Obama argued that Democratic-leaning constituents are less likely to vote in midterm years. There’s some truth to that. But it’s not the main force behind the recent swings, as FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten has shown. Think about the math: Each voter who sits out a midterm costs his party one vote, while each voter who switches parties adds a vote to the new party while taking one away from the old party. The more powerful engine for change is that voters are changing their minds — and for decades, they’ve leaned against the party holding the White House.

To date, 2016 has defied many analysts’ expectations, and 2018 may as well, especially if either of the major parties divides in a consequential way. But with both major-party candidates being viewed unfavorably by record numbers of Americans, there is every reason to expect that 2018 will follow the trend of 2006, 2010 and 2014, with a decisive shift against the president’s party — whichever party that is.

University of Pennsylvania students Max Kaufman and Thomas Munson provided research for this article.

In December, NASA put out a call for adventurers interested in interplanetary exploration. “NASA is on an ambitious journey to Mars and we’re looking for talented men and women from diverse backgrounds and every walk of life to help get us there,” Charles Bolden, NASA administrator and a former astronaut, said in the announcement. More than 18,000 people answered the call, and between now and mid-2017, that vast pool of applications will be cut to 120 finalists, who will vie to become part of NASA’s next class of eight to 12 astronauts.

The physical requirements for space travel are fairly straightforward — general stamina and good health — but the psychological requirements are every bit as important and have become a bigger focus as the space program aims to send people on longer missions that venture much further from Earth. The process of selecting NASA’s space travelers has evolved since the space program began in the 1950s. America’s first astronauts were mostly fighter pilots and “were selected by balls and charisma,” author Mary Roach wrote in “Packing for Mars.” As spaceflight became more routine, she wrote, astronauts faced a new challenge: boredom. “Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much,” Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan once wrote. With this in mind, NASA shifted its approach for selecting astronauts to look for people who could not only perform under pressure, but who could also tolerate tedium.

How do you test someone’s suitability for interplanetary travel and habitation? The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, Roach reported, requires astronaut candidates to perform an origami test — they must make 1,000 tiny paper cranes to pass. “Deterioration of accuracy shows impatience under stress,” JAXA psychologist Natsuhiko Inoue told Roach.

At NASA, the precise details of how this latest group of astronauts will be selected remain under wraps, but the types of traits the organization is looking for are no secret. Team orientation, emotional stability, and the ability to live and work in small group environments are among the qualities sought in astronaut candidates, University of Houston industrial psychologist Kelley Slack said during a presentation at the American Psychological Association annual meeting in Denver in August. The finalists for NASA’s next astronaut class will be brought to Johnson Space Center for psychological testing, experimental interactions, psychiatric interviews and other assessments, she said.

First and foremost, NASA selects the people it will send into space based on their competency at specific jobs. “It is a mission, and there’s work that needs to be done,” said Pete Roma, a psychologist at the Institutes for Behavior Resources and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who has worked on a NASA project. “Technical competence is critical,” he said. “If you trust the people you’re working with to do their jobs and you respect their skills, that helps the crew sustain their performance for the long term.”

Other important traits, Roma said, include conscientiousness, attention to detail, a strong work ethic, agreeableness, an openness to other people and an ability to handle disagreements. A mission to Mars would last at least two-and-a-half years, and a classic “Type A” fighter pilot type might not have the personality to handle isolation well or cooperate with others in a very small group, Roma said. In fact, long-haul astronauts may handle missions better if they’re introverted, he said. Some people feel energized by spending time alone as well as working with others, and those are ideal candidates, he said.

If you want to go to Mars, you’d better be prepared to handle some serious isolation. That kind of spaceflight will require a complete disconnection from your home planet. “One of the favorite activities of astronauts [at the International Space Station] is to sit in a cupola and photograph and look at the Earth,” Slack said during her American Psychological Association talk. But unlike travelers to the moon or the space station, astronauts headed to Mars won’t be able to see Earth up close, if at all, for long periods. Providing a virtual window that would show images of Earth, with its rotations and even seasons, might help astronauts stay psychologically connected to the planet, Slack said, but it’s hard to know in advance how people will respond to this separation.

“A mission to Mars is much more analogous to an exploration mission at sea or in Antarctica than to an ISS flight,” Roma said. To explore the factors needed to create a cohesive, successful team on such a mission, NASA has funded a program called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS), which operates simulated long-duration planetary surface missions.

In August, the HI-SEAS IV completed its yearlong simulated mission, in which six people lived inside a simulated Mars habitat: a 36-foot-wide dome on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano. During the project, the participants engaged in daily routines and work similar to what astronauts would do on a real mission.

One thing that trips to the ISS have shown is that people cooped up in a space vehicle need to engage in purposeful tasks. “Astronauts don’t like to do things that don’t feel meaningful,” Slack said during her talk. “They don’t want busy work — they want real work.” At HI-SEAS IV, the work included preparing food, testing equipment, tracking the use of resources and performing geological field work.

Although participants had some access to the internet and the outside world (they could venture outside the dome wearing simulated spacesuits), they had to endure a 20-minute delay (in each direction) for all communications. “It’s not just the physical isolation from the world — there’s also zero ability to connect in real time,” said Roma, who works with HI-SEAS. Whereas astronauts at the International Space Station can host video chats with people on Earth, the speed of communications for Mars-bound astronauts will make ’90s-era dialup look good.

A Mars mission will test the limits of its crew members to an extreme degree. “These people aren’t only your co-workers, they’re also your roommates,” Roma said. There’s no escape. Hell is other people, as Jean-Paul Sartre observed, and psychologists like Roma take that into consideration. You can’t bring in six people to not only work together but also live together and expect no tension, Roma said. “There’s always going to be some kinds of conflicts.”

Researchers involved in HI-SEAS are working on ways to defuse conflicts, and the first step is spotting them before anyone blows up. A team led by psychologist Steve Kozlowski at Michigan State University has developed wireless badges that include proximity sensors. The idea is that everybody on the crew would wear one, and the badges then provide a metric for quantifying how much time people spend near one another. “It’s a way to measure team cohesion,” Roma said. The data could serve as an early-warning system to flag when someone is isolating herself or avoiding a particular person.

Similarly, Roma and his colleagues have developed a kind of computer game to check in with a crew periodically. The group gets together to play the game, which is based on behavioral economic principles and measures how the team is working together at that moment. “It’s like checking the team’s oil every once in a while,” Roma said. “If it points to a problem, then you can start deploying countermeasures.”

Some of the tools under development for handling stress include virtual-reality systems that can help people feel more socially connected and combat sensory monotony. These programs might also allow users to experience a relaxing sense of immersing themselves in nature, even if they’re millions of miles from Earth.

How much time scientists have in which to test strategies like this depends on who you ask. On Tuesday, Elon Musk made news by announcing that his company, SpaceX, will build a rocket that could take humans to Mars as soon as 2022. NASA’s timetable aims for the first human Mars mission in the 2030s.

Programs such as HI-SEAS can help researchers understand the challenges posed by a Mars mission and test potential coping strategies, but there’s no getting around the fact that astronauts headed to Mars will far outstrip the limits anything humans have previously accomplished. “To boldly go where no one has gone before” — that’s still an aspiration that inspires imagination and awe.