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<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/14/election-day-appalachian-trail-generosity-cruelty/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4" target=_blank>Election night in the woods</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/14/inflation-american-rescue-plan-covid/?itid=lk_inline_manual_5" target=_blank>The real cause of inflation: covid</a>

Trump’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/13/trump-gaetz-attorney-general-doj-gabbard-hegseth/?itid=lk_inline_manual_6" target=_blank>extremist trifecta</a>; how to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/14/trump-gaetz-cabinet-appointment-johnson/?itid=lk_inline_manual_6" target=_blank>block recess appointments</a>; nomination <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/13/trump-cabinet-picks-satire/?itid=lk_inline_manual_6" target=_blank>fever dreams</a>; the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/14/trump-musk-ramaswamy-government-efficiency/?itid=lk_inline_manual_6" target=_blank>civil service purge</a>

Photo by Rusty Foster

This summer, when Rusty Foster decided to put down his funny, ultra-plugged-in newsletter Today in Tabs for six months to hike (and write about) the Appalachian Trail with his teenage son Mica, he seemed like a stone-cold genius. Head into the woods, skip the entire election horse race and pop back out on the other side with the die already cast? Where could we sign up?

But it turned out there was no hiding from reality. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/14/election-day-appalachian-trail-generosity-cruelty/" target=_blank>As Rusty ruefully notes in his latest piece</a>, by the time a MAGA-hatted guy stopped his truck to inform him of the election result last Wednesday, he was already well aware. “He was living in an imaginary world where someone in the woods couldn’t know the news,” Rusty writes. “But we all have phones, like him, like everyone. I already knew.”

On the trail, Rusty has had plenty of time to think about our strange country, with its high-minded ideals and often cruel and even genocidal history, full of individually kind people who are also capable of voting for mass deportation camps. Rusty concludes that, like the shelter he stayed in on election night, our nation’s walls are full of wasps, even if it’s better than sleeping outside.

Still, the Appalachian Trail is a reminder of the United States at its greatest. “The trail isn’t just a path through the woods,” Rusty observes. “It’s a society organized around some of the best and most characteristically American virtues: spontaneous helpfulness, neighborly concern for a stranger, collective work for the common good. These virtues aren’t restricted to the trail; I’ve seen them all over the country.”

The question now is whether that spirit dominates vs. a more ruthless one, also present in our nation’s DNA. Managing those warring impulses will be up to us.

Peter Orszag, the CEO of Lazard and former director of the Office of Management and Budget, has some news that might affect how you vote in the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">2024 election</a>. Oh, wait. Well, you might want to know this anyway: According to research by his firm and the Brookings Institution, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/14/inflation-american-rescue-plan-covid/" target=_blank>inflation that has so bedeviled Americans since early 2020</a> is mostly due not to the flood of pandemic relief money that came under <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> and Joe Biden but to the massive disruption of the pandemic itself.

Let Orszag explain: “At the start of the pandemic, Americans shifted their spending from services (like travel, eating out and going to the movies) to goods (like computer hardware and exercise equipment) — just as a snarled supply chain caused those goods to be in short supply. This caused prices to spike. … In response to the severity of the shock, which has no modern comparison, inventory managers were cautious through at least the summer of 2024. … Increasing prices to dampen demand and extend inventory life meant that the prices charged to consumers rose further above the cost to the seller. This meant profit margins went up, not because of ‘greedflation’ but instead because of a rational response to businesses managing their inventories.”

I’m no economist, but I can follow this story — and understand why it would leave a lot of extremely frustrated consumers wanting to try out a different party in the White House, even if what happened was not Biden’s doing.

We find ourselves back in a Trump-paced news cycle, where insane things are going to be happening at an absurd pace while the press races to bring news and analysis to you. Case in point: Just as we were finalizing the newsletter yesterday about some more standard-issue Republicans, such as John Thune and Marco Rubio, being named to positions of power, we got word of three new nominations to key national security positions: Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Matt Gaetz for attorney general.

The Editorial Board, which on Wednesday morning was feeling more reassured, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/13/trump-gaetz-attorney-general-doj-gabbard-hegseth/" target=_blank>looks askance at this trio of figures</a>, “each of whom is ideologically extreme and lacks necessary experience.” It’s now up to Thune and the rest of the Senate to show that they’re more than just a rubber stamp, the board says.

In Ed Whelan’s reading of the law and the tea leaves, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/14/trump-gaetz-cabinet-appointment-johnson" target=_blank>House Speaker Mike Johnson might have a key role to play, too</a>. Whelan, a fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is hearing that the Trump team might try out what he calls a “cockamamie scheme” to get the House and Senate to adjourn, leaving Trump to the recess-appointment party of his dreams. Johnson, Whelan believes, is in a position to block this — and should.

Our resident satirist, Alexandra Petri, is clearly spending too much time with the news, because her dreams about the appointments <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/13/trump-cabinet-picks-satire/" target=_blank>are getting really weird</a>. This column made me literally LOL at the office, a sign that I, too, am perhaps losing my mind. “A Boot Stepping On A Human Face is now going to be in charge of the Department of Homeland Security! This is actually a relief; we thought it would be Richard Grenell,” Petri writes. And: “Whoa! All 16 volumes of the ‘Left Behind’ series are going to be our new ambassador to Israel.”

Finally, Catherine Rampell wants to talk about <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/14/trump-musk-ramaswamy-government-efficiency/" target=_blank>Trump’s plan to purge the civil service of expertise and ethics</a> in the name of “efficiency,” to reduce the government staff to loyalists. “The federal government has operated as a spoils system before,” Catherine notes. “In fact, it started under Trump’s hero, President Andrew Jackson. It finally ended with the 1883 Pendleton Act, after the public grew weary of the resulting corruption, incompetence, graft and violence.”

Will modern Americans object? I’m heading into the woods — let me know how things work out. (Sigh. Just kidding. I’ll be back here with you tomorrow.)

It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.

Have your own newsy haiku? <a href="mailto:amanda.katz@washpost.com?subject=Opinions+Newsletter+Feedback" target=_blank>Email it to me</a>, along with any questions/comments/compliments/complaints. See you tomorrow!

Amanda Katz is a senior assignment editor for Opinions, where she has worked since 2022. She was previously an editor at CNN, the Boston Globe and Bloomsbury Publishing, and has written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Slate and other publications.

Amanda Katz

Today’s Opinions: A nation of meanness and kindness, seen from the Appalachian Trail

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Opinion A nation of meanness and kindness, seen from the Appalachian Trail

Wasps in the walls