On the menu today: Monday and Tuesday’s editions of this newsletter amounted to a gloom-a-thon, laying out serious problems that the U.S. government is largely ignoring. Yesterday’s and today’s editions amount to a cheer-a-thon, spotlighting aspects in American life that are getting better and problems that are getting solved — sometimes because of government policy, sometimes because of ingenuity and innovation, or sometimes from just better decision-making on the part of its people. Elsewhere, the CIA director reaffirms the accuracy of my reporting from earlier this year. Read on.
Some More Good News
Six: The U.S. border with Mexico is secure, or about as secure as it can get.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encounters at the border with Mexico took a steep drop at the start of the Trump administration in 2025, and so far in 2026, they’ve flatlined near the bottom of the chart.
The worst month in the past year was May, with 13,538 encounters.
In May 2024 CBP had 170,716 encounters on the U.S. southwest border. In May 2023 CBP had 206,690 encounters.
This has occurred for many reasons, almost all of which are associated with President Trump’s return to office. I notice these details in an article that is mostly critical of the administration’s policies:
In the last 14 months, the administration has:
- transformed more than 40% of the border from public land into no-trespassing military zones, with new additions as recently as February;
- expanded an invisible surveillance network that monitors the wilderness and border communities, and ramped up the Department of Defense’s sharing of military-grade equipment and technology with U.S. Customs and Border Protection;
- begun installing the first stretch of hundreds of miles of sensor-enabled orange buoys, each nearly five feet in diameter, to create a barrier dividing Texas’ Rio Grande;
- quadrupled the number of troops while freeing up federal border agents to shift their focus to America’s cities as the battle over what Trump has called the “invasion” moved to Los Angeles, then D.C., then Chicago, and Minneapolis.
Trump sent the military to the border to seal it, promising a show of force. But as deadly encounters over immigration enforcement ramped up in U.S. cities, many residents along the border said the military’s presence has been more “show” than “force.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m just fine with a U.S. military presence that is “more ‘show’ than ‘force’” because it means those troops being there is having the desired deterrent effect.
Seven: After an unnerving dip during the Covid years, U.S. life expectancy has risen to the highest in American history.
In 2022 U.S. life expectancy dropped to 76.1 years, the lowest it had been since 1996. A large portion of that was the number of people who died from Covid, and then the pandemic-related consequences — delayed doctor’s visits and detection of serious diseases, etc. But health experts also warned, “The opioid and obesity epidemics, increases in suicide and so forth, it’s really a story of an unhealthy society.”
Maybe we’re not such an unhealthy society, because U.S. life expectancy rose in 2024 to the highest in American history:
U.S. life expectancy rose to 79 years in 2024 — the highest mark in American history.
It’s the result of not only the dissipation of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also waning death rates from all the nation’s top killers, including heart disease, cancer and drug overdoses.
What’s more, preliminary statistics suggest a continued improvement in 2025.
“It’s pretty much good news all the way around,” said Robert Anderson, of the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which released the 2024 data on Thursday.
We haven’t gotten the official number for 2025 yet, but “new mortality data from the federal government suggests that life expectancy probably hit another record high in 2025, as death rates have continued to fall since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. There were about 689 deaths for every 100,000 people in the U.S. in 2025, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the lowest rate recorded in more than a century of tracking.”
Eight: An astounding pace of new medical breakthroughs.
Yesterday I mentioned our record-high cancer survival rates. Moderna and Merck recently announced the results of a new “experimental drug that uses messenger RNA to deliver a vaccine customized to a patient’s tumors effectively prevent skin cancer recurrence in a large-scale clinical trial.” As the Washington Post describes, “The vaccine teaches the immune system to recognize mutations unique to a patient’s tumor, essentially showing it what to attack.”
But it’s not just cancer.
The Post asked some of its opinion contributors to talk about the medical advances that seem most promising, and my colleagues spotlighted stem cells that help those with Type 1 diabetes generate insulin, and an AI-powered autonomous micro-robot that can be placed and guided by surgeons to swim through the bloodstream where it can treat blood clots and aneurysms. My selection was T-cell immunotherapy, which could provide new treatments for problems that stem from the body’s immune system attacking cells that it shouldn’t — Type 1 diabetes, lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and organ transplant rejection.
Dr. Leana Wen nominated GLP-1s, which are having a measurable effect on U.S. obesity rates. “The share of U.S. adults classified as obese was 42.3 percent in the second quarter of 2021 and remained near that level through 2022 before declining to 40.7 percent by the first quarter of 2026. Over the same window, the healthy weight share rose from 25.1 percent to 25.6 percent.”
There was a psychological study at Rice University indicating that the American public sees people who use GLP-1s more negatively than obese people. I guess the idea is that if you use a GLP1, you didn’t “earn” your weight loss, and that the person who lost the weight “cheated” somehow. To that I ask . . . what the hell is wrong with you people? If people are getting healthier, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Nine: High school graduation rates are at or near record highs.
This year’s high school graduation rate is estimated around 88 percent. Back in 2014 the country was celebrating 80 percent as a milestone.
Unsurprisingly, the pandemic and remote schooling were not good for graduation rates: “When students spent a greater share of time learning remotely or in a hybrid setup, graduation rates fell. And the longer a district kept school buildings closed in 2021 and 2022, the less likely their students were to graduate on time.”
When districts only taught remotely during the 2020-21 school year, they saw a 0.8 percentage point dip in their graduation rate, compared with districts that taught fully in person, researchers found. Districts that used a hybrid model had a high school graduation rate that was 0.4 percentage points lower than districts that taught fully in person. Researchers estimate that nearly 12,000 fewer students graduated on time in 2021 due to remote and hybrid instruction — around 3% of all students who didn’t graduate on time that year.
Unsurprisingly, not graduating from high school puts a person on a much tougher road in life. They earn almost $30,000 less than a college graduate on average, their unemployment rate is three and a half times higher than college graduates, they are three and a half times more likely to get arrested, and 75 percent of the crimes committed in the U.S. are committed by those who dropped out of high school. Keeping kids in school through the completion of their senior year amounts to a crime prevention program.
Ten: Much like the mortality rate, the fatal accident rate spiked during and immediately after the pandemic but has now dropped to record lows.
The Covid pandemic had a strange, and unfortunately deadly, effect on America’s roadways:
After decreasing sharply during March and April 2020 while most states had stay-at-home orders in effect, monthly traffic fatalities returned to typical levels in May 2020. Then, in June, traffic fatalities surged to levels significantly greater than would have been expected without the pandemic and remained elevated throughout the remainder of 2020 as well as the entirety of 2021 and 2022. From May 2020 through December 2022, 114,528 people were killed in traffic crashes on U.S. roads, an estimated 16,771 (17 percent) more than would have been expected if the pandemic had not occurred and pre-pandemic trends continued.
One theory was that the initial drop in traffic during the pandemic spurred drivers to increase speed, leading to the number of fatal accidents. (I wonder if being cooped up in the house for months and going stir-crazy made people need a sensation of thrill associated with driving fast.)
We can’t prove that an increase in fatal accidents during this period is connected to an increase in the number of illegal immigrants in the country. But there is some evidence that in an earlier period, providing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants did at least slightly increase the rate of fatal accidents:
This study asks whether granting driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants affects the number of fatal car crashes in the United States. Using county-level data from 2007 to 2018 from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Fatality and Injury Reporting System, the researcher analyzed how license reforms influenced crash rates. The results show that allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain licenses increased total fatal crashes by about 5 percent, or roughly 0.46 more deaths per county per year. The increase was strongest in states with larger undocumented populations and was mainly linked to risky driving behaviors rather than higher traffic volumes.
Of course, many illegal immigrants drive on America’s roads without any license.
The U.S. Department of Transportation, this past April:
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) today announced that traffic deaths fell to record lows in 2025. With an estimated 36,640 traffic fatalities in 2025 — a 6.7 percent decrease from 2024 — the nation saw its second-lowest traffic fatality rate in recorded history at 1.10 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled.
The Trump administration calculates that between deportations and self-deportations (leaving voluntarily), 3 million illegal entrants or visa overstays left the country during Trump’s first year in office. A significant portion of those individuals were likely driving without a license.
There were a couple other positive developments I didn’t put on this list of ten, because they’re long-developing trends:
- The adult smoking rate is down, below 10 percent for the first time ever.
- AIDS is barely discussed anymore, “HIV-related mortality rates (deaths with HIV noted as the underlying cause of death), rose steadily through the 1980s and peaked in 1995, but have dropped by 9-fold since then, and by over half since 2010.” Diagnoses are down, lifespans with the virus are longer, and for those infected, the risk of transmission can be greatly mitigated through prescription medication.
- Whatever you think of Americans’ declining consumption of alcohol, a decline in alcoholism is welcome: “The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, released late last month, found that the share of people 12 and older who qualified for a diagnosis of alcohol use disorder fell to 8.9 percent in 2025 from 10.6 percent in 2021 — or by about 4 million people.”
ADDENDUM: My big reporting trip to Finland, Latvia, and Poland this past spring put the spotlight on Russia’s hybrid warfare against NATO’s eastern countries and the potential risk of a Russian military incursion into NATO territory. Many people appreciated it, but a few of the usual suspects contended I was being paranoid and scaremongering.
The Wall Street Journal, this morning:
The surprise visit by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to Moscow this week was to deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries, according to people briefed on the visit.
The trip was spy-agency chief John Ratcliffe’s first publicly known visit to the Russian capital. It followed new U.S. intelligence assessments, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, that Russian President Vladimir Putin could try to test the resolve of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with a limited assault on an allied country in the next few years.
U.S. officials are concerned that Putin, squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home, could launch an assault ranging from a cyberattack to a small-scale land incursion, likely on a Baltic nation, the Journal reported.
I know that, at least in theory, some of the people who tell me I am wrong might not be morons. But I keep finding evidence to reaffirm my ungenerous suspicions.