Already fighting voter concerns about his age, Biden, 81, was halting and seemed to lose his train of thought, sparking quick concerns among Democrats about the man they hope will keep former President Donald Trump from returning to office. For his part, Trump made repeated false claims and provocative statements. But Trump seemed smoother and more vigorous than Biden, who is only three years older than the Republican ex-president.

The debate covered a wide range of topics and included a former president — Trump — not backing down from his vows to prosecute members of Congress and even the man he was debating. But the overarching theme was the difference between the candidates’ performance.

Here are some takeaways from the face-off.

Style v. Substance
Presidential debates are often scored on style and impression more than substance. Trump was confident and composed, even as he steamrolled facts on abortion and immigration with false assertions, conspicuous exaggerations and empty superlatives. Biden was often halting, his voice raspy, even when he had the facts on his side. He had difficulty finishing his arguments and marshalling his attacks.

Trump’s supporters have seemed unconcerned about his relationship with the truth, and his performance and delivery helped him. Biden’s supporters consistently express concern about the president’s age and capacity and he did little to reassure them.

One of the first glimpses viewers got of Biden was when he lost his train of thought while making his case on tax rates and the number of billionaires in America — trailing off and looking down at his lectern before mumbling briefly and saying “we finally beat Medicare.” When he tried to finish his point, he was cut off because of the time limits.

At other times, Biden made some puzzling non sequiturs that seemed to undercut what the campaign has said are his strong points, including the economy and abortion rights. As Biden critiqued Trump’s economic record, the president suddenly pivoted to Afghanistan and how Trump “didn’t do anything about that” — although the botched withdrawal of Afghanistan is widely considered one of the lowest points of Biden’s presidency.

Later, as Biden singled out state restrictions on abortion, he confusingly pivoted to immigration and referred to a “young woman who was just murdered” by an immigrant. It was unclear what point he was trying to make.

Jan. 6 and Trump’s revenge
Trump was cruising through the opening of the debate when he suddenly stumbled over the question of how he would reassure voters that he would respect his oath of office after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

He continued to engage in denialism about the attack and refused to denounced those who attacked police and stormed the building by breaking doors and windows. He suggested that those charged will somehow be found one day to be innocent.

More than 1,400 people have been charged with federal offenses stemming from the riot. Of those, more than 850 people have pleaded guilty to crimes, including seditious conspiracy and assaulting police officers. About 200 others have been convicted at trial.

Trump tried to avoid addressing the issue. He defended the people who stormed the Capitol, blaming Biden for prosecuting them. “What they’ve done to some people who are so innocent, you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Trump told Biden.

Trump warned that the members of the congressional committee that investigated Jan. 6 could face criminal charges, as could Biden himself.

Biden shot back: “The only person on this stage who’s a convicted felon is the man I’m looking at.”

Trump didn’t back down from his vow to seek vengeance. Coupled with his refusal to condemn the Jan. 6 attackers, it made for a stark moment.

Asked if he would accept the results of the election, Trump said, “if it’s a fair and legal and good election, absolutely,” which notably is not an unqualified yes.

Low road
In what may well be a first in a presidential campaign, Trump called the president, Biden, a “criminal” and said he could well be prosecuted after he leaves office. Biden then brought Trump’s recent criminal trial in New York in which prosecutors presented evidence that Trump had sex with a porn actor. “I didn’t have sex with a porn star,” Trump said.

Trump’s vow on abortion
Abortion is an issue Democrats think could help deliver a victory in November. Trump in 2016 campaigned on overturning Roe v. Wade, and as president appointed three Supreme Court justices who provided the deciding votes revoking the 49-year right to the procedure. In response to a question from the moderators, Trump vowed not to go further if he returns to the White House, where his administration would have the authority to outlaw the abortion pill mifepristone, which is widely used.

Overturning Roe is one of Trump’s greatest political vulnerabilities, but on Thursday the former president contended everyone was happy with what he did.

“As far as abortion’s concerned it’s back to the states,” Trump said, contending the Founding Fathers would have been happy with the end of Roe. “Everybody wanted it brought back.”

That’s not true. Polls have shown significant opposition to overturning Roe and voters have punished Republicans in recent elections for it. “The idea that the founders wanted the politicians to be the ones making the decisions about women’s health is ridiculous,” Biden shot back.

In a unanimous decision this month, the Supreme Court preserved access to mifepristone, a pill that was used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. last year.

Until Thursday, Trump had not detailed his position on access to the medication, but during the debate he indicated he supported the justices’ decision, saying: “I will not block it.”

But when it was his turn to speak, Biden stumbled through his explanation of Roe, which he said “had three trimesters” — a lost opportunity for the Democrat to make a strong rhetorical case on an issue vital for his party.

“The first time is between a woman and a doctor,” Biden continued. “Second time is between a doctor and an extreme situation. A third time is between the doctor, I mean, between the women and the state.”

Border skirmish
In recent months, Biden has tried to reverse his poor public standing over his handling of immigration, first by endorsing a bipartisan Senate proposal with some of the toughest border restrictions in recent memory and then, after that legislation collapsed, taking executive action to clamp down on migrants seeking asylum at the southern border.

But as Biden tried to tout the progress he’s made, particularly the 40% drop in illegal border crossings since his border directive was implemented this month, Trump invoked his trademark dark and catastrophic rhetoric to paint a portrait of a chaotic border under Biden’s watch.

For example, Trump argued that the migrants arriving at the U.S. border are coming from “mental institutions” and “insane asylums” — a frequent refrain of his at rallies for which he has offered no evidence. He also claimed the U.S.-Mexico border is the “most dangerous place anywhere in the world” and cited examples of immigrants in the U.S. illegally who had committed violent crimes.

Though some immigrants do commit horrific crimes, a 2020 study published by the National Academy of Sciences found “considerably lower felony arrest rates” among people in the United States illegally than among legal immigrants or native-born. But Trump often benefits from his certitude.

It’s the economy, and Trump said Biden is stupid
The debate began with Biden defending his record on the economy, saying he inherited an economy that was “in a freefall” as it was battered by the pandemic and that his administration put it back together again.

But after Biden touted his administration’s accomplishments — such as lowering the cost of insulin and the creation of millions of new jobs — Trump boasted that he oversaw the “greatest economy in the history of our country” and defended his record on the pandemic.

Biden retorted: “He’s the only one who thinks that.” But Trump responding by attacking him on inflation, arguing that he inherited low rates of inflation when he came into office in January 2021 yet prices “blew up under his leadership.”

Suckers and losers
Biden — whose deceased son, Beau, served in Iraq — had one of his most forceful moments when he went on the attack against Trump’s reported comments in 2018 that he declined to visit a U.S. military cemetery in France because veterans buried there were “suckers” and “losers.”

It was an argument that Biden, then the Democratic challenger, made against Trump in their first 2020 debate and one that the incumbent president has regularly used against Trump, framing him as a commander in chief who nonetheless disparages veterans. “My son was not a loser, was not a sucker,” Biden said. “You’re the sucker. You’re the loser.”

Trump responded that the publication that initially reported this comments, The Atlantic, “was a third-rate magazine” and had made up the quotes. But undercutting Trump’s retort is the fact that his former chief of staff, John Kelly, confirmed those private remarks in a statement last fall.

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Most violations involved pinning people facedown in ways that could restrict their breathing or stunning them repeatedly with Tasers, an Associated Press investigation found.

Some officers had little choice but to break policing best practices — safety guidelines that are recommended by government agencies, law enforcement groups and training experts — to save a life or protect someone.

Many other violations were harder to explain. Officers at times prematurely resorted to weapons or physical holds during routine calls or misread a person’s confusion as defiance in medical emergencies, setting off a string of mistakes. In other cases, they kept applying force even after they had people handcuffed and controlled.

For its investigation, AP catalogued 1,036 deaths over a decade’s time after officers had used force not involving their guns. In about half, medical officials ruled that law enforcement caused or contributed to the deaths, but they usually didn’t mention whether policing best practices were followed.

Counting violations of best practices also was difficult when departments didn’t document important details or withheld their files. But based on a review of tens of thousands of pages of police and court records, as well as hundreds of hours of body-camera video footage, AP found:

— Officers breached the guidelines in three or more ways in roughly 440 deaths, or about 45% of the time. In others, a single mistake sometimes fueled life-threatening injuries.

— Many who died were on drugs or alcohol, or had underlying medical conditions, making them more vulnerable to misapplied force, just as best practices forewarned.

— In about 30% of the deaths where police went outside the guidelines multiple times, the officers or bystanders were facing imminent or potential danger. Safety practices may excuse officers under those circumstances.

Because of how policing is set up in the United States, there are no national rules for how officers apply force. Best practices provide some direction but aren’t mandatory. In the end, individual departments or states set their own policies and training.

Directives from the federal government would help establish consistent use-of-force standards, said Alex del Carmen, a longtime criminologist who has monitored court-ordered reforms at troubled departments and works at Tarleton State University.

While national policing organizations offer guidelines, they don’t always trickle down to officers, and, he added, they “do not take the place of the federal government, who should have taken the lead many years ago in providing direction and clarity.”

The reasons why officers didn’t follow the guidelines varied, AP found. Some testified that they weren’t taught them. In other departments, policies weren’t up to date.

A few times, officers specifically credited their training with helping avoid mistakes. One Ohio deputy, for example, holstered his Taser after he was told a 60-year-old man wanted on a warrant had heart trouble.

Tyler Owen, a former officer, believes nearly all police do get it right. Most encounters don’t involve force, he said, and the solution for avoiding trouble is almost always straightforward: Comply with police.

“By continuing to resist and continuing to fight law enforcement, you are putting yourself at risk,” said Owen, now spokesperson for the Texas Municipal Police Association, the state’s largest law enforcement group.

When officers deal with people who are volatile or can’t comprehend commands, they sometimes need to use force outside best practices — even if that means “doing violent things to go home to their families,” he said.

AP’s investigation, done in collaboration with the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism and FRONTLINE (PBS), covered 2012 through 2021. While violations spanned many types of “less-lethal force,” the most prevalent happened in the four areas below.

PINNING FACEDOWN
WHAT THE GUIDELINES SAY: Police have been on notice since the 1990s about the risks of pinning someone on their chest in what is known as prone position. The concern started with positional asphyxia — when the chest can’t expand, starving the body of oxygen. But more recently, researchers have warned that compressing the chest also can stress the heart and cause cardiac arrest.

The key is getting someone off their stomach quickly. A 1995 Justice Department bulletin advised doing so “as soon as the suspect is handcuffed” and warned of a “vicious cycle” in which putting weight on a person’s back can further restrict breathing, causing them to struggle more violently to create room for their lungs. That federal guidance came amid increasing concern about prone restraint, including from a national group of police chiefs in 1993.

The DOJ also has warned that prone restraint can be more dangerous to a broad category of people police often confront — those on drugs or alcohol. Also vulnerable are people who are obese, who have cardiac or respiratory problems, or who have already been shocked with stun guns. By 2001, the DOJ advised departments to develop policies addressing positional asphyxia.

WHAT AP FOUND: Officers restrained someone facedown in at least 740 of the 1,036 deaths — usually with one, or sometimes more, using their bodyweight. In about half of the prone restraint cases, police didn’t turn over the person as soon as they were handcuffed or did so only after they had stopped responding.

Where video was available or police reports noted the duration of restraint, a few people were kept on their chests after handcuffing for less than 60 seconds. More often, the pinning continued for minutes while officers bound the suspect’s ankles together or waited for them to stop struggling.

A video obtained by AP showed a police officer in Ava, Missouri, handcuffing a man having a drug relapse and restraining him in a prone position for roughly eight minutes. The officer warned he wouldn’t ease up until the man stopped kicking. Once still, the officer asked the man, “Are you going to be calm now?” He didn’t answer. Another two minutes passed before the officer realized the man didn’t seem to be breathing. A federal judge who reviewed the video ruled in the officer’s favor in a civil lawsuit, saying the law didn’t require police to stop prone restraint once a person quit struggling. That legal interpretation, however, was out of step with federal courts in other regions, which provide broad direction on use of force.

About 240 of the prone restraint cases involved people suspected of using drugs or alcohol. For 11 minutes, officers in Gulfport, Mississippi, held down a 53-year-old man who was causing a disturbance outside a beachside restaurant. Police first shocked him with a Taser and then an officer straddled his back as he was pinned. Previously unreported dashcam video obtained by AP showed him struggling to shift his hips and shoulders, yelling “I can’t breathe.” He eventually became motionless with the officer still on top. The officer told investigators he’d been trained not to put someone on their chest and that his weight was on his knees, insisting — contrary to what the video showed — that he had turned the suspect sideways the entire time. A grand jury declined to charge the officers after the death was ruled accidental from drug use.

At least 180 people pinned to the ground were obese. Knox County deputies in Tennessee realized they needed to reposition a handcuffed man who was facedown in the dirt. “Roll him on his side so he can breathe. He’s got a big belly,” one said. But when the 280-pound man pulled his leg away, officers hog-tied him by crossing his legs, cuffing his ankles and strapping his hands and feet together behind his back. For more than three minutes, close to a dozen deputies stood by as he rolled on his stomach. One pressed a knee and hand into his upper back, forcing him to be still. A minute later, they saw his life was in danger when an officer kneeled next to his motionless body and asked his date of birth. His death was blamed on fentanyl and methamphetamines. The district attorney called the actions of deputies lawful and closed the case, but the family reached an undisclosed settlement with the county in a wrongful death lawsuit.

TOO MUCH TASER
WHAT THE GUIDELINES SAY: When stun guns began gaining popularity among police two decades ago, there were no specific limits for how many times, or how long, someone could be shocked. That changed as deaths and lawsuits against the leading brand of the weapon, Taser, increased.

Axon Enterprise Inc., the maker of Tasers, has long said that in volatile situations, Tasers are a safer alternative to shooting suspects or smashing their head with a baton. Tasers fire small darts that are connected to the weapon with wires, delivering electricity from a close distance that briefly locks up muscles. Officers can also drive Tasers into the body, painfully jolting someone to gain compliance.

The company has insisted that factors like drug intoxication or hidden cardiac problems are really to blame for deaths, not the electricity. But some research began finding repeated shocks can create cardiac and respiratory risks.

In 2011, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national law enforcement policy group, issued guidelines saying officers should be taught that multiple uses may increase the risk of death. The guidelines warned against simultaneous shocks from more than one device and recommended capping the electricity at 15 seconds — or three blasts of the standard 5-second cycle.

By 2013, Axon in its training manual warned to “avoid prolonged and repeated exposures” and cited the concerns from law enforcement and medical groups about going beyond 15 seconds.

Safety recommendations, including from Axon, also say officers should pause between pulling the Taser trigger to evaluate the person before delivering another shock. When multiple shocks aren’t effective, officers should consider other options.

WHAT AP FOUND: Despite the warnings, officers fired their stun guns more than three times or for more than a combined 15 seconds in at least 180 of the 538 deadly encounters involving the weapons.

Three Roswell, New Mexico, officers shocked a 34-year-old man as many as 15 times after they said he was wielding a police-style baton and throwing handfuls of rocks. Some of the darts hit his head and chest. After an initial shot to the chest, the man dropped the baton, yet the stunning continued. A federal judge didn’t find fault with the overall number of Taser shots but did say the final few when the man was on the ground and incapacitated went too far because he was no longer a threat.

In Colorado, one of two officers who fired their Tasers a combined eight times at a man resisting handcuffing testified in a lawsuit that he was not trained about the danger of shocking someone more than three times. The deputy chief of the Colorado Springs Police Department at the time testified that its policy allowed officers to keep delivering electricity until the person’s behavior changed. The department determined the officers did nothing wrong, but the lawsuit alleging poor training of police is ongoing.

One of three officers in South Boston, Virginia, who shocked a man rolling on a hospital sidewalk said a suspect’s actions — not Taser guidelines — dictate what to do. The officers fired their Tasers a combined 20 times, even after handcuffing the man. “There are eight pages of warnings, and basically if I read and abided by every single warning, I would not tase anyone,” the officer said in response to a civil lawsuit later settled out of court. Federal prosecutors said they didn’t see enough evidence to pursue civil right charges against the three officers.

Some cases went far beyond the guidelines issued by Axon and policing experts. Officers fired their stun guns 10 or more times in at least 29 encounters AP identified. In a rare occurrence, two police officers in Wilson, Oklahoma, were convicted of murder after shocking a man 53 times in 2019 — just under four minutes total of firing the Tasers — even though he never tried to attack either officer. A state investigator said the man was naked in a ditch and shocked numerous times because he apparently didn’t follow orders to roll onto his stomach and put his hands behind his back.

SHOCKING THE VULNERABLE
WHAT THE GUIDELINES SAY: Axon and law enforcement organizations have warned police departments for well over a decade that the elderly and people having a mental health or medical crisis are among those at higher risk for sudden death from electrical shocks. Officers also have long been told that people on elevated surfaces or running could have a catastrophic fall when their muscles lock up.

In 2009, Axon first recommended that police aim Taser darts at the back or abdomen instead of the chest whenever possible. While the company said this would increase the weapon’s “effectiveness and avoid the remote potential risk of cardiac effect,” it said the main reason for the change was to defend against lawsuits, according to a company memo explaining the changes.

Many police agencies have adopted at least some of these recommendations, while still giving officers leeway when people pose an immediate danger and the need to control them outweighs the risks.

WHAT AP FOUND: The vulnerable groups most often subjected to shocks were suspected of using illicit drugs or showing signs of bizarre or aggressive behavior, paranoia, or unexpected strength.

Others were vulnerable in different ways. At least 10 people who died after stuns were 65 or older, including a veteran with dementia who had threatened to stab an officer with a pen at a Minnesota nursing home. The 79-year-old fell and broke his hip after the electrified darts connected. He died two months later from complications related to the fall. None of the officers faced an investigation, according to the Stillwater Police Department.

Officers shocked at least 50 people who were fleeing or susceptible to a fall. A federal court in Georgia said a DeKalb County police officer shouldn’t have fired his Taser at an unarmed passenger who inexplicably ran from a traffic stop and then climbed onto an 8-foot wall. The court said the man had neither committed a crime nor made threatening gestures, yet the officer fired his Taser without giving a warning. The man fell, broke his neck and died.

In some cases, officers opted to use a Taser even when a gun might have been justified. Among the more than 100 people shocked by police in the chest, head, neck or genitals was a Michigan man who was sexually assaulting his girlfriend in front of her two children. Hearing him yelling “I’m going to kill her,” one officer fired his Taser to stop the attack. Another shocked the suspect from 5 feet away as he was refusing to turn onto his stomach. That blast near his heart proved to be fatal, a medical examiner said. While the Rockwood Police Department’s policy warned against targeting the chest, the officer said in a deposition that wasn’t where he was aiming and the man was a moving target. He told a state investigator using the Taser was safer than “going hands on” with the man or using his firearm. A prosecutor and a federal court sided with the officers, citing the safety threat.

FORCE AFTER CUFFING
WHAT THE GUIDELINES SAY: For the most part, federal courts have agreed that punching, using Tasers or holding someone facedown is excessive when they’re handcuffed and not resisting or ignoring an officer’s orders.

These federal court decisions have led many departments to adopt policies that allow force against handcuffed people in just a few instances. One model policy, developed by nearly a dozen law enforcement groups in 2017, called for using force against people in restraints only when they would otherwise flee or injure someone.

WHAT AP FOUND: Police failed to promptly turn over at least 360 people after they were handcuffed or controlled — about half of all cases involving prone restraint. Many of the officers also continued to use their bodyweight, hands or knees to apply pressure.

A federal appeals court said officers in Richmond, Virginia, went too far after they handcuffed and pinned a man who refused mental health treatment. After he became motionless, the officers still didn’t let up, the court said. The court didn’t fault the officers’ decision to detain the man, but said he couldn’t have posed a threat once he was outnumbered and handcuffed.

In more than 30 cases, police used Tasers in drive-stun mode or fired darts at someone who was already handcuffed or who had stopped resisting. Police officers in Hazelwood, Missouri, shocked a handcuffed man as many as 13 times and hit him repeatedly with a baton. The man was driving erratically on his way home to celebrate his wedding anniversary and appeared intoxicated. Prosecutors decided police did nothing wrong because he was aggressively resisting. A federal judge, who also sided with the police, said it was clear he fought for eight minutes, and that it took three officers and multiple Taser blasts and baton strikes to subdue him.

In a Delaware case, a federal judge wouldn’t give a state trooper immunity from an excessive force claim after he fired his Taser at a man who appeared to be secured and no longer resisting. The trooper, a certified Taser instructor, initially took steps to avoid a deadly outcome when he came across the man, who had a gun behind his back. Thinking the man might be mentally ill, the trooper holstered his gun and shocked him, causing him to fall and drop his firearm. The trooper rapidly fired again because he thought the man was rolling over and reaching for the gun. But the third jolt of electricity was unjustified, the judge said, because it came 15 seconds later and after officers had secured the man. An expert hired by the family said the final blast hit the man’s chest, something the trooper should have known to avoid.

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Holbrook Mohr in Jackson, Mississippi, and Kristin M. Hall in Nashville, Tennessee, contributed to this report. Mary Dalrymple and Sean Mussenden of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland also contributed.

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Once or twice a year, she visits her two adult children in different states. She’s planning multiple other trips, including to a science fiction convention in Scotland and a Disney cruise soon after that, along with a trip next year to neolithic sites in Great Britain.

“I really have more money to spend now than when I was working,” said Harris, 64, an engineer who worked 29 years for the federal government and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Back then, she and her now-ex-husband were paying for their children’s college educations and piling money into savings accounts. Now, she’s splurging a bit and, for the first time, is willing to pay for first-class plane tickets. She plans to fly business class to Scotland and has arranged for a higher-level suite on the cruise.

“I suddenly realized, with my dad getting old and my mom dying, it’s like, ‘No, you can’t take it with you,’ ” she said. “I could become incapacitated to the point where I couldn’t enjoy something like going to Scotland or going on a cruise. So I better do it, right?”

Older Americans like Harris are fueling a sustained boost to the U.S. economy. Benefiting from outsize gains in the stock and housing markets over the past several years, they are accounting for a larger share of consumer spending — the principal driver of economic growth — than ever before.

And much of their spending is going toward higher-priced services like travel, health care and entertainment, putting further upward pressure on those prices — and on inflation. Such spending is relatively immune to the Federal Reserve’s push to slow growth and tame inflation through higher borrowing rates, because it rarely requires borrowing.

Affluent older Americans, if they own government bonds, may even be benefiting from the Fed’s rate hikes. Those hikes have led to higher bond yields, generating more income for those who own such bonds.

The so-called “wealth effect,” whereby rising home and stock values give people confidence to increase their spending, is a big reason why the economy has defied expectations of a sharp slowdown. Its unexpected strength, which is contributing to stickier inflation, has forced a shift in the Fed’s plans.

As recently as March, the Fed’s policymakers had projected that they would cut their benchmark rate three times this year. Since then, though, inflation measures have remained uncomfortably high, partly a consequence of brisk consumer spending. Chair Jerome Powell made clear recently that the Fed isn’t confident enough that inflation is sustainably easing to cut rates.

When the Fed meets this week, it is sure to keep its benchmark rate unchanged at a 23-year high, the result of 11 rate hikes. The Fed’s hikes have forced up borrowing costs across the economy — for everything from home and auto loans to credit cards and business loans.

Even as the Fed has jacked up borrowing costs, stock and home values have kept rising, enlarging the net worth of affluent households. Consider that household wealth grew by an average of 5.5% a year in the decade after the 2008-2009 Great Recession but that since 2018, it’s accelerated to nearly 9%.

Stock prices, as measured by the S&P 500 index, are about 72% higher than they were five years ago. Home values soared 58% from the end of 2018 through 2023, according to the Federal Reserve.

All told, Americans’ wealth has ballooned from $98 trillion at the end of 2018 to $147 trillion five years later. Adjusting for inflation, the gains are less dramatic, but still substantial.

“People have had significant wealth gains in stocks, significant wealth gains in fixed income, significant wealth gains in home prices, significant wealth gains even in crypto,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at the Apollo Group, an asset manager. “All that adds up to still a very significant tailwind.”

The gains are hardly universal. The wealthiest one-tenth of Americans own two-thirds of all household wealth. Still, wealth for the median household — the midpoint between the richest and poorest — rose 37% from 2019 to 2022, the sharpest rise on record since the 1980s according to the Fed, to $193,000.

Wealth is also disproportionately held by older Americans. People ages 55 and over now own nearly three-quarters of all household wealth, up from 68% in 2010, according to the Fed. In percentage terms since the pandemic, household net worth has also surged for younger households. But because younger adults started from a much lower level, their gains haven’t been anywhere near enough to keep pace with older Americans.

“The baby boomers are the richest retiring generation we’ve ever had,” said Edward Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research. “Not everybody is well-off, but we’ve never had a retiring generation with this much wealth. That’s one of the major reasons why the economy is strong.”

That said, many older Americans face significant financial challenges. One-quarter of Americans over age 50 have no retirement savings, according to a survey by the AARP.

Even so, as the huge baby boom generation has aged and, on average, has accumulated more assets, they have accounted for a rising share of consumer spending. Americans ages 65 or over supplied nearly 22% of consumer spending in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s the highest such figure on records dating to 1989, up from about 16% in 2010.

One result of the Fed’s higher rates has been a kind of bifurcated economy, by age. Older, wealthier Americans who already own homes and cars have been much less affected by the Fed’s rate hikes. By contrast, younger Americans are enduring a combination of expensive home prices and high mortgage rates, making it much harder to buy a first home.

Harris, for one, sees this divide in her own family: Her home and car are paid off, and higher interest rates have had little effect on her finances. She recently visited a home in her neighborhood that she was surprised to see priced at $500,000. She bought hers, which she thinks could fetch a higher price, for $162,000 in 1991.

Her 25-year-old daughter, Ruby, had a vastly different experience during a recent visit to an open house near her boyfriend’s apartment in the Boston area. An older two-bedroom apartment was on sale for $800,000; it sold within a week.

Ruby considers herself fortunate to have a well-paying job as a materials engineer. But that apartment price still seemed astronomical. She loves the area, especially for its walkability, but doubts she’ll ever be able to afford a house there.

“In the long term, it probably won’t be affordable to stay here,” she said. “Whereas the Midwest is more affordable but won’t have the neighborhoods that I like.”

Economists calculate that while the wealth effect generally has a relatively modest effect on spending, it may be larger now. That’s because retirement-age Americans, who are more likely to spend out of their wealth, constitute a larger proportion of the nation: Americans ages 65 and over make up about 17% of the population, up from 13% in 2010. And people with stock holdings can now easily access their account balances online, increasing their awareness of increases in their net worth.

Research by Michael Brown, an economist at Visa and others has also found that significant stock market wealth typically boosts spending on discretionary items such as restaurants, travel and entertainment — sectors of the economy where spending is surging and inflation remains elevated.

The Conference Board, a business research group, asks Americans in its monthly survey of consumer confidence whether they plan an overseas vacation in the next six months. Slok noted that more than one in five households say they are — a record-high proportion on records dating to 1967.

The cruise provider Royal Caribbean just reported blowout earnings and strong demand, “leading to higher pricing for all our key products,” CEO Jason Liberty told investors. “Customer sentiment remains very positive, bolstered by resilient labor markets, wage growth, stabilizing inflation and record-high household net worth.”

Last week, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, excluding volatile food and energy costs, rose 2.8% from a year earlier, a sign that inflation remains sticky. Solid consumer spending, particularly on services, was one key factor. In one measure of services inflation that the Fed watches closely, prices climbed 3.5% from a year earlier, far higher than is consistent with its 2% inflation target.

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Slemp expected to return to work after having her son in August. But then she and her husband started looking for child care – and doing the math. The best option would cost about $2,000 a month, with a long wait list, and even the least expensive option would cost around $1,600, still eating up most of Slemp’s salary. Her husband earns about $35 an hour at a hose distribution company. Between them, they earned too much to qualify for government help.

“I really didn’t want to quit my job,” says Slemp, 33, who lives in a Seattle suburb. But, she says, she felt like she had no choice.

The dilemma is common in the United States, where high-quality child care programs are prohibitively expensive, government assistance is limited, and daycare openings are sometimes hard to find at all. In 2022, more than 1 in 10 young children had a parent who had to quit, turn down or drastically change a job in the previous year because of child care problems. And that burden falls most on mothers, who shoulder more child-rearing responsibilities and are far more likely to leave a job to care for kids.

Even so, women’s participation in the workforce has recovered from the pandemic, reaching historic highs in December 2023. But that masks a lingering crisis among women like Slemp who lack a college degree: The gap in employment rates between mothers who have a four-year degree and those who don’t has only grown.

For mothers without college degrees, a day without work is often a day without pay. They are less likely to have paid leave. And when they face an interruption in child care arrangements, an adult in the family is far more likely to take unpaid time off or to be forced to leave a job altogether, according to an analysis of Census survey data by The Associated Press in partnership with the Education Reporting Collaborative.

In interviews, mothers across the country shared how the seemingly endless search for child care, and its expense, left them feeling defeated. It pushed them off career tracks, robbed them of a sense of purpose, and put them in financial distress.

Women like Slemp challenge the image of the stay-at-home mom as an affluent woman with a high-earning partner, said Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The stay-at-home moms in this country are disproportionately mothers who’ve been pushed out of the workforce because they don’t make enough to make it work financially to pay for child care,” Calarco said.

Her own research indicates three-quarters of stay-at-home moms live in households with incomes less than $50,000, and half have household incomes of less than $25,000.

Still, the high cost of child care has upended the careers of even those with college degrees.

When Jane Roberts gave birth in November, she and her husband, both teachers, quickly realized sending baby Dennis to day care was out of the question. It was too costly, and they worried about finding a quality provider in their hometown of Pocatello, Idaho.

The school district has no paid medical or parental leave, so Roberts exhausted her sick leave and personal days to stay home with Dennis. In March, she returned to work and husband Mike took leave. By the end of the school year, they’ll have missed out on a combined nine weeks of pay. To make ends meet, they’ve borrowed money against Jane’s life insurance policy.

In the fall, Roberts won’t return to teaching. The decision was wrenching. “I’ve devoted my entire adult life to this profession,” she said.

For low- and middle-income women who do find child care, the expense can become overwhelming. The Department of Health and Human Services has defined “affordable” child care as an arrangement that costs no more than 7% of a household budget. But a Labor Department study found fewer than 50 American counties where a family earning the median household income could obtain child care at an “ affordable ” price.

There’s also a connection between the cost of child care and the number of mothers working: a 10% increase in the median price of child care was associated with a 1% drop in the maternal workforce, the Labor Department found.

In Birmingham, Alabama, single mother Adriane Burnett takes home about $2,800 a month as a customer service representative for a manufacturing company. She spends more than a third of that on care for her 3-year-old.

In October, that child aged out of a program that qualified the family of three for child care subsidies. So she took on more work, delivering food for DoorDash and Uber Eats. To make the deliveries possible, her 14-year-old has to babysit.

Even so, Burnett had to file for bankruptcy and forfeit her car because she was behind on payments. She is borrowing her father’s car to continue her delivery gigs. The financial stress and guilt over missing time with her kids have affected her health, Burnett said. She has had panic attacks and has fainted at work.

“My kids need me,” Burnett said, “but I also have to work.”

Even for parents who can afford child care, searching for it — and paying for it — consumes reams of time and energy.

When Daizha Rioland was five months pregnant with her first child, she posted in a Facebook group for Dallas moms that she was looking for child care. Several warned she was already behind if she wasn’t on any wait lists. Rioland, who has a bachelor’s degree and works in communications for a nonprofit, wanted a racially diverse program with a strong curriculum.

While her daughter remained on wait lists, Rioland’s parents stepped in to care for her. Finally, her daughter reached the top of a waiting list — at 18 months old. The tuition was so high she could only attend part-time. Rioland got her second daughter on waiting lists long before she was born, and she now attends a center Rioland trusts.

“I’ve grown up in Dallas. I see what happens when you’re not afforded the luxury of high-quality education,” said Rioland, who is Black. “For my daughters, that’s not going to be the case.”

Slemp still sometimes wonders how she ended up staying at home with her son – time she cherishes but also finds disorienting. She thought she was doing well. After stints at a water park and a call center, her state job seemed like a step toward financial stability. How could it be so hard to maintain her career, when everything seemed to be going right?

“Our country is doing nothing to try to help fill that gap,” Slemp said. As a parent, “we’re supposed to keep the population going, and they’re not giving us a chance to provide for our kids to be able to do that.”

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Sen. Bernie Sanders, the far-left independent from Vermont, this week introduced a bill that would shorten to 32 hours the amount of time many Americans can work each week before they’re owed overtime.

Given advances in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Sanders says U.S. companies can afford to give employees more time off without cutting their pay and benefits.

Critics say a mandated shorter week would force many companies to hire additional workers or lose productivity.

Here’s what to know about the issue:

What would Sanders’ proposal do?
The bill Sanders introduced Wednesday in the Senate would reduce the standard workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours. Employers would be prohibited from reducing their workers’ pay and benefits to match their lost hours.

That means people who currently work Monday through Friday, eight hours per day, would get to add an extra day to their weekend. Workers eligible for overtime would get paid extra for exceeding 32 hours in a week.

Sanders says the worktime reductions would be phased in over four years. He held a hearing on the proposal Thursday in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, of which Sanders is the chairman.

How would a shorter workweek affect employees and productivity?
One recent study of British companies that agreed to adopt a 32-hour workweek concluded that employees came to work less stressed and more focused while revenues remained steady or increased.

In 2022, a team of university researchers and the nonprofit 4 Day Week Global enlisted 61 companies to reduce working hours for six months without cutting wages. Afterward, 71% of the 2,900 workers said they were less burned out and nearly half reported being more satisfied with their jobs.

Meanwhile, 24 of the participating companies reported revenue growth of more than 34% over the prior six months. Nearly two dozen others saw a smaller increase.

“The majority of employees register an increase in their productivity over the trial. They are more energized, focused and capable,” Juliet Shor, a Boston College sociology professor and a lead researcher on the UK study, told Sanders’ Senate committee.

Critics say a 32-hour workweek might work for companies where employees spend most of their time at computers or in meetings, but could be disastrous for production at manufacturing plants that need hands-on workers to keep assembly lines running.

“These are concepts that have consequences,” Roger King, of the HR Policy Association, which represents corporate human resource officers, told the Senate committee. “It just doesn’t work in many industries.”

What’s the response in Washington?
With considerable opposition from Republicans, and potentially some Democrats, don’t expect Sanders’ proposal to get very far in the Senate. A companion bill by Democratic Rep. Mark Takano of California is likely doomed in the GOP-controlled House.

GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said paying workers the same wages for fewer hours would force employers to pass the cost of hiring more workers along to consumers.

“It would threaten millions of small businesses operating on a razor-thin margin because they’re unable to find enough workers,” said Cassidy, the ranking Republican on the committee. “Now they’ve got the same workers, but only for three-quarters of the time. And they have to hire more.”

Sanders has used his platform as the committee’s chairman to showcase legislation aimed at holding big corporations more accountable to workers. He blamed greedy executives for pocketing extra profits as technology has boosted worker productivity.

“Do we continue the trend that technology only benefits the people on top, or do we demand that these transformational changes benefit working people?” Sanders said. “And one of the benefits must be a lower workweek, a 32-hour workweek.”

How did we decide a 40-hour workweek was the standard?
The Fair Labor Standards Act, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938, restricted child labor and imposed other workplace protections that included limiting the workweek to 44 hours. The law was amended two years later to make it a 40-hour week.

The landmark law followed a century of labor-union efforts seeking protections for the many overworked people in the U.S., said Tejasvi Nagaraja, a labor historian at Cornell University’s School of Industry and Labor Relations.

“The issue of time was always as important, or more important, than money for labor unions and labor advocates,” Nagaraja said.

In the 1830s, coal miners and textile workers began pushing back against workdays of up to 14 hours. After the Civil War, the abolition of slavery caused those in the U.S. to take a fresh look at workers’ rights. Unions rallied around the slogan: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will.”

The federal government took tentative steps toward limiting working time. In 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered an eight-hour workday for government employees. In 1916, Congress mandated the same for railroad workers.

Other reforms came from private industry. In 1926, Henry Ford adopted a 40-hour week for his automobile assembly workers more than a decade before Congress mandated it.

Ford wrote: “It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege.”

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But when the 91-year-old got his first virtual reality experience recently, he was stunned. Sitting in a conference room at John Knox Village, a suburban Fort Lauderdale, Florida, retirement community, Patrick sat up straight as his eyes and ears experienced what it would be like to be in a Navy fighter jet flying off the Florida coast.

“Oh my God, that’s beautiful,” he blurted before the VR program brought the jet in for a landing on an aircraft carrier.

John Knox Village was one of 17 senior communities around the country that participated in a recently published Stanford University study that found that large majorities of 245 participants between 65 and 103 years old enjoyed virtual reality, improving both their emotions and their interactions with staff.

The study is part of a larger effort to adapt VR so it can be beneficial to seniors’ health and emotional well-being and help lessen the impact dementia has on some of them.

During the testing, seniors picked from seven-minute virtual experiences such as parachuting, riding in a tank, watching stage performances, playing with puppies and kittens or visiting places like Paris or Egypt. The participants wore headsets that gave them 360-degree views and sounds, making it seem like they had been all but dropped into the actual experience.

“It brought back memories of my travels and … brought back memories of my experience growing up on a farm,” said Terry Colli, a former public relations director at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., of his 2022 experience. Colli, 76, liked swiveling in a chair to get a panoramic view. “That was kind of amazing.”

Anne Selby, a 79-year-old retired counselor and artist, found VR “stimulated virtually every area of my brain, all of the senses.”

“I particularly enjoyed the ones dealing with pets because I have a cat and I’ve had pets most of my life,” she said.

Stanford’s peer-reviewed study, working with the company Mynd Immersive, found that almost 80% of seniors reported having a more positive attitude after their VR session and almost 60% said they felt less isolated socially. The enjoyment lessened somewhat for older respondents whose sight and hearing had deteriorated. Those who found VR less enjoyable were also more likely to dislike technology in general.

In addition, almost 75% of caregivers said residents’ moods improved after using VR. More than 80% of residents and almost 95% caregivers said talking about their VR experience enhanced their relationships with each other.

“For the majority of our respondents, it was their first time using virtual reality. They enjoyed it. They were likely to recommend it to others, and they looked forward to doing it again,” said Ryan Moore, a Stanford doctoral candidate who helped lead the research.

“We are proving VR to be a tool that really does help with the well-being of our elders,” said Chris Brickler, Mynd’s CEO and co-founder. The Texas-based company is one of a handful that specializes in virtual reality for seniors. “It is far different than a two-dimensional television or an iPad.”

Separate from the study, John Knox Village uses virtual reality in its unit that houses seniors who have Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia. It helps spur memories that lead to conversations with caregivers.

“It is like they come back to life when they tell their story.” said Hana Salem, the facility’s meaningful life coordinator. She said that with others who don’t talk much perk up when given a VR experience putting them in nature.

“They’ll start laughing and saying, ‘Ooh, I’m going to catch the butterflies,’ ” Salem said. Catching butterflies is also part of a game Mynd developed that helps seniors enhance their mobility and flexibility as they stand and reach for objects.

“It’s more fun for these seniors to come in and catch butterflies and work on shoulder rehab than it is to go pick up a weight,” Brickler said.

Brickler said his company’s systems will soon attach to Google Earth, so seniors can virtually visit neighborhoods where they lived, schools they attended and places they have visited, sparking further conversations with caregivers.

Such virtual visits “can bring back a tremendous amount of joy, a tremendous amount of memories. And when the therapist or the other caregiver can work with that older adult and talk through things we see, we definitely see that it provides an uplift,” Brickler said.

The company has worked on the biggest complaints seniors in the study had about VR — the headsets were too heavy, the heat they generated made their foreheads sweat and sometimes the experience created nausea, he said. The new headsets weigh about six ounces (189 grams) instead of a pound (454 grams), they have a built-in fan for cooling, and the videos aren’t as jumpy.

The findings that seniors in their 80s and 90s enjoy VR less than those in their 70s might lead to changes for them such as requiring less neck rotation to see all of the scenery and making the visuals bigger, Moore said.

On a recent afternoon at John Knox, a handful of seniors who live independently took turns again using virtual reality. Pete Audet experienced what it would be like to fly in a wingsuit, soaring over show-capped mountains before landing in a field.

“Oooh, running stop!” exclaimed Audet, a 76-year-old retired information technology worker. He thinks other seniors “will really enjoy it. But they just need to learn how to use it.”

His wife, Karen, “played” with puppies and was so entranced by her virtual walk around Paris that she didn’t hear questions being asked of her.

“I was there. But I was here!” said Karen Audet, an 82-year-old retired elementary school teacher.

Farrell, the retired Army computer expert, said he hopes to live to 100 because he believes the next five years will see momentous change in VR. Still a technology enthusiast, he believes the cost of systems will drop dramatically and become part of everyday living, even for seniors.

“It is not going to be as elementary as it is now. It is going to be very realistic and very responsive,” he said. “It will probably be connected to your brain.”

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After years of bending Washington to his will with a single tweet, Trump was, at least for a moment, diminished. He was a one-term Republican president rejected by voters and then shunned by large swaths of his party after his refusal to accept his 2020 election defeat culminated in an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that sent lawmakers running for their lives.

Some members of his Cabinet had discussed invoking the 25th Amendment, seeing him unfit to remain in office. He was banned from social media and became the first president to be impeached twice. And when he departed Washington, the nation’s capital was still reeling from his supporters’ violence and resembled a security fortress with boarded-up storefronts and military vehicles in the streets.

Three years later, Trump is on the cusp of a stunning turnaround. With commanding victories in the first two 2024 nominating contests and wide polling leads in the states ahead, Trump is fast closing in on the Republican nomination. Already, he is the first nonincumbent Republican to win the party’s contests in both Iowa and New Hampshire, and he had the largest victory margin in Iowa caucus history. His standing is expected to improve this coming week with a win in Nevada’s Republican caucuses, which his last major GOP rival, Nikki Haley, will skip in favor of a competing primary, which awards no delegates.

Trump did all this while facing 91 felony charges that range from mishandling highly classified documents and conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, to paying off a porn star during his 2016 campaign. Trump is also facing a civil fraud case in New York that threatens his control of much of his business empire and was recently ordered to pay $83.3 million for defaming a woman he was previously found liable for sexually abusing.

The story of how Trump became his party’s likely nominee for a third straight presidential election is a reminder that there was an opening — however brief — when the GOP could have moved beyond him but didn’t. It shows how little was learned from 2016, as his critics once again failed to coalesce around a single alternative. And it demonstrates — with long-standing implications for American democracy — how Trump and his campaign seized on his unprecedented legal challenges, turning what should have been an insurmountable obstacle into a winning strategy.

“I think everybody got in the race thinking the Trump fever would break,” said longtime Republican strategist Chip Saltsman, who chaired the campaign of one of Trump’s rivals. “And it didn’t break. It got hotter.”

A DERAILMENT
Trump campaign aides say their first sign of momentum was not a legal victory or a gaffe by a rival, but a trip to East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023.

Following a lackluster 2024 campaign announcement a few months earlier and slow start, the former president received a rousing welcome from residents demanding answers after a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed, leading to evacuations and fears of air and water contamination. Trump was briefed by local officials, blasted the federal response as a “betrayal” and stopped by a local McDonald’s.

“It kind of reminded people what it was they liked about Trump to begin with,” said senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita. Trump, whose surprise 2016 victory had been fueled by angry white working-class voters who felt the government had failed them, was again casting himself as the outsider fighting big business and Washington.

Biden didn’t visit at the time, helping Trump draw a contrast. He has accepted an invitation from East Palestine’s mayor to finally visit this month.

THE CHARGES START ROLLING IN
If the derailment offered Republican voters a reminder of why they liked Trump, a series of criminal charges would reinforce their devotion to him.

Ralph Reed, chair of the influential Faith & Freedom Coalition and a presidential campaign veteran, happened to be at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida for a charity breakfast the morning Trump become the first former U.S. president to be indicted.

“It was like a bomb going off,” he said. “You could feel the ground shift immediately.

But instead of calls for Trump to suspend his campaign, the response from Republicans was one of indignation. Trump portrayed himself as the victim of a politicized criminal justice system bent on damaging his reelection chances. Almost immediately, Republicans sprung to his defense.

His campaign was flooded with small-dollar donations and raised $15.4 million in just two weeks. (When Trump was later booked on racketeering charges in Georgia and became the first former president to have his mug shot taken, the campaign brought in a record $4.18 million that day.) Trump’s allied super political action committee, which had struggled to raise money, saw a similar surge in contributions as Trump’s poll numbers began to rise.

For Republican voters, the mounting charges confirmed Trump’s loudly stated grievances that the system was rigged against him, driving many who had been considering other candidates to rally around him.

It was “a reminder that, at the end of the day, they wear a red jersey, and Joe Biden and his henchmen wear a blue jersey,” said Trump senior campaign adviser Jason Miller.

Michael Telesca, a former schoolteacher from Hickory, North Carolina, who left his job to hike the Appalachian Trail, said last fall that the indictments and other attacks against Trump had transformed him from an ordinary Trump voter into an “ardent” supporter.

While he liked Trump’s policies, “I am more fighting against the system that is attacking him relentlessly. … There’s a good portion of Republicans who say it’s time for someone else. Here’s the problem: If that happens, you’ve allowed the system to win.”

The impact was immediately felt across rival campaigns, whose candidates were put in the awkward position of having to defend their chief opponent in order to avoid siding with Democratic prosecutors or Biden’s Justice Department. As the indictments continued to roll in, Trump further dominated the media coverage, denying his competitors much-needed attention.

“It made him a victim, and nobody’s better at playing the victim than Donald Trump,” Reed said.

Trump turned his subsequent bookings and court appearances into spectacles that became fundamental to his campaign message. Indeed, some weeks, he voluntarily spent more time in the courtroom than in early voting states. Trump’s team credits his decision to confront the charges head-on with helping ease voters’ concerns about his electability.

“It was from that point on that it essentially had become impossible to beat Donald Trump in the Republican Party primary,” LaCivita said.

DESANTIS-IN-WAITING … AND WAITING
For months, Trump’s stiffest competition for the GOP nomination appeared to be the governor of Florida.

Fresh off a landslide reelection victory in November 2022, Ron DeSantis was a rising conservative star and one of his party’s only bright spots in a bruising midterm election cycle. Some polls showed voters preferred him to Trump, who was being blamed for backing extreme candidates who cost Republicans winnable seats.

But DeSantis chose to wait until May 2023 to launch his campaign, giving the former president and his allies a six-month head start.

Trump’s senior advisers urged him not to attack DeSantis until later in the race. But Trump, rebuffing their guidance, came out with his derisive “DeSanctimonious” before the midterm vote. The super PAC ads began last March.

“We made a big bet,” said MAGA Inc. CEO Taylor Budowich. “We decided to go after him early and define him before he could define himself.” That included pouring millions into ads hitting DeSantis for previously backing Social Security cuts.

For some top Trump aides, beating DeSantis was personal. A handful had worked for the governor previously, and some were burned by his actions. Even those who left on good terms were intimately familiar with his strengths and weaknesses and what would make him tick.

To contrast DeSantis’ awkward interactions with voters, Trump’s campaign began planning photo ops at pizza joints and diners that showcased the former president interacting with his fans.

Ridicule was also part of the strategy, including a memorable “pudding fingers” MAGA Inc. ad that highlighted unsavory reporting on DeSantis’ eating habits, and accusations DeSantis wore lifts in his boots.

To blunt the governor’s momentum, the super PAC also aired attack ads on networks such as CNN, trying to target more moderate voters considering the governor.

“MAGA Inc’s national buys were targeted at national polls because that was the barometer of strength at that time — we were able to simultaneously drive down his standing in primary and general election polling,” Budowich said.

Interviews with voters suggested those who had been open to a Trump alternative ultimately realized they preferred the original better.

“DeSantis, he can talk from here all day long,” said Gary Leffler, a general contractor from West Des Moines, Iowa, as he pointed to his head. “Fact-wise, policy-wise, all this other stuff, he’s pretty solid.”

But Trump, Leffler added as he moved his fist to his heart, “talks from here. And that’s a gear that DeSantis doesn’t have.”

MCCARTHY’S PILGRIMAGE TO MAR-A-LAGO
Rival campaign aides said Trump’s road to the 2024 GOP nomination began just three weeks after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. That was when Kevin McCarthy, who was the Republican leader of the U.S. House, traveled to Mar-a-Lago and posed for a widely shared photo next to a grinning Trump at the moment that Trump was at his weakest.

Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, an outspoken GOP critic of Trump, would later write in her book that McCarthy told her he had been summoned because Trump was depressed and not eating. (Trump said he was actually angry and “eating too much.”)

But the normalizing episode signaled the party was not ready to give up on Trump.

“I thought it was the kiss of death for McCarthy, for the party and for the country,” said Mike DuHaime, a senior adviser to the 2024 presidential campaign of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, another Trump critic. “It breathed new life into Trump.”

RISKY BETS THAT PAID OFF
From the start, Trump acted like the front-runner, declining invitations to multicandidate events and refusing to debate.

Trump’s absence blunted viewers’ interest and left his lower-polling rivals fighting one another instead of him.

“You’ve got to give credit to the Trump campaign,” said Saltsman, who chaired the 2024 campaign of Mike Pence, who was Trump’s vice president. “They treated it like they were an incumbent running for reelection.”

Miller, the Trump adviser, said steering clear of the debates was part of a broader effort to focus on Biden. Trump went after the Democrat over the economy, the border and wars in Europe and the Middle East.

At the same time, Trump’s team worked aggressively behind the scenes to line up endorsements that would signal his continued dominance of the party and the strength of his new campaign. It has been widely praised as far more disciplined and professional than past efforts that were plagued by infighting.

Trump invested “hundreds and hundreds of hours” in relationship development, said Brian Jack, a senior campaign aide who has led the outreach. Trump worked the phones, hosted dinners and invited officials to ride aboard his private plane.

He also astutely weaponized the endorsements. In April, as DeSantis was making a much-publicized trip to Washington before his expected campaign announcement, Trump’s team released a set of new endorsements from Florida politicians. Later, Trump taunted Haley, an ex-South Carolina governor and his U.N. ambassador, before the New Hampshire primary by flying in a group of South Carolina officials who were backing his candidacy.

Marc Short, a top adviser to Pence’s campaign, also pointed to Trump’s more than 200 midterm endorsements. While Trump had mixed success that November, he proved a powerful kingmaker in GOP primary races that often devolved into fealty contests.

“Everyone saw the candidates he endorsed in their primaries won their primaries, signaling to others that, ‘I better show my allegiance to Trump or I’m going to be in trouble,’” Short said.

Beyond the endorsements, Trump’s team also worked closely with state parties as they set delegate allocation rules, encouraging winner-take-all contests and other changes that would ultimately benefit a front-runner.

“We were closing doors to our opponents in the Republican nomination seven months ago before they even realized that was happening,” LaCivita said.

THE LOYALTY FACTOR
As the first nominating contests neared, Trump’s team worked to harness the dedication of his loyal supporters. The move paid off particularly well in Iowa, where historically frigid temperatures cut expected caucus attendance in half.

Trump’s team rewarded its volunteers with perks such as VIP tickets to his rallies and gold-embroidered hats. Some, like John Goodrich, who lives in suburban Des Moines and knocked on 300 doors, received personal phone calls to thank them for their efforts.

“I was just thrilled,” Goodrich said of the caucus day call. Trump “was very thankful for the help” and asked him about his family and his expectations for the night. “It just made me feel good that he would turn to just someone who was more or less a door-to-door salesman for him to get my opinion.”

In both Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump’s team also marveled at how DeSantis and Haley spent their time and money going after each other, largely sparing him from attacks.

In the end, DeSantis came in a distant second in Iowa, the state on which he had staked his campaign. He dropped out shortly afterward. Haley, who finished second in New Hampshire, has pledged to remain in the race through March, but her path forward remains tenuous.

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“It is necessary to conduct this operation unilaterally and without notifying Venezuelan officials,” reads the 15-page 2018 memo expanding “Operation Money Badger,” an investigation that authorities say targeted dozens of people, including Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

While there’s no clear mechanism to hold the United States accountable legally, the revelation threatens to roil already fraught relations with Maduro’s socialist government and could deepen resentment of the U.S. across Latin America over perceived meddling. It also offers a rare window into the lengths the DEA was willing to go to fight the drug war in a country that banned U.S. drug agents nearly two decades ago.

Some of Maduro’s closest allies were ensnared in the investigation, including Alex Saab, the businessman recently freed in a prisoner swap for 10 Americans and a fugitive defense contractor. But until now, it was not clear that U.S. probes targeting Venezuela involved legally questionable tactics.

“We don’t like to say it publicly but we are, in fact, the police of the world,” said Wes Tabor, a former DEA official who served as the agency’s country attaché in Venezuela well before the investigation described in the memo was launched.

Tabor, who would not confirm the existence of any such operations, said unilateral, covert actions can be an effective tool when conducted with proper limits and accountability, particularly in a country like Venezuela, where the blurred lines between the state and criminal underworld have made it an ideal transit point for up to 15% of the world’s cocaine.

“We’re not in the business of abiding by other countries’ laws when these countries are rogue regimes and the lives of American children are at stake,” he said. “And in the case of Venezuela, where they’re flooding us with dope, it’s worth the risk.”

The DEA and Justice Department declined to answer questions from the AP about the memo, how frequently the U.S. conducts unilateral activities and the makeup of the panel that approves such operations.

Venezuela’s communications ministry did not respond to requests for comment. But in recent days Maduro accused the DEA and the CIA — a regular target he uses to rally supporters — of undertaking efforts to destabilize the country. The CIA declined to comment.

“I don’t think President Biden is involved,” Maduro said in a televised appearance this month. “But the CIA and the DEA operate independently as imperialist criminal organizations.”

TARGETING MADURO
The never-before-seen document was authored at the cusp of Republican President Donald Trump’s “ maximum pressure ” campaign to remove the Venezuelan president.

Maduro had just taken an authoritarian turn, prevailing in what the Trump administration decried as a sham re-election in 2018. Within weeks, senior DEA officials plotted to deploy at least three undercover informants to surreptitiously record top officials suspected of converting Venezuela into a narco state.

But because the plan appeared to run roughshod over Venezuelan and international law, it required the approval of what is known as the Sensitive Activity Review Committee, or SARC, a secretive panel of senior State and Justice Department officials that is reserved for the most sensitive DEA cases involving tricky ethical, legal or foreign policy considerations.

It marked an aggressive expansion of “Money Badger,” which the DEA and prosecutors in Miami created in 2013 and would go on to investigate around 100 Venezuelan insiders, according to two people familiar with the operation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss law enforcement details.

By authorizing otherwise illicit wire transfers through U.S.-based front companies and bank accounts, the DEA aimed to unmask the Colombian drug traffickers and corrupt officials leveraging Venezuela’s tightly controlled foreign currency exchange system to launder ill-gotten gains. But it expanded over time, homing in on Maduro’s family and top allies, although the president would end up being indicted elsewhere, by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, on drug trafficking charges.

None of the indictments of Venezuelans either before or after the 2018 memo made any mention of U.S. spying. And “to limit or mitigate the exposure of the unilateral activities,” the document advised DEA officials to protect their informants and curtail in-person meetings with targets.

It is not clear if ”Money Badger” is still ongoing.

Since Democratic President Joe Biden took office in 2021, his administration has rolled back sanctions and brought few new prosecutions of Maduro insiders as the Justice Department’s attention has turned to Russia, China and the Middle East. The Biden administration has also sought to lure Maduro back into negotiations with the U.S.-backed opposition, threatening to re-impose crippling oil sanctions if the OPEC nation doesn’t abide by an agreement to hold fair and free elections this year.

The operation targeting Maduro’s inner circle is not the first time the United States has conducted law enforcement operations overseas without notifying a host country.

In 1998, Mexico castigated the United States for keeping it in the dark about a three-year money laundering sting known as “Operation Casablanca” — partly conducted on Mexican soil — that implicated some 160 people, including several bank executives.

Notably, legal experts say no international court or tribunal has jurisdiction to hold the United States or its agents accountable for covert law enforcement actions in other countries, and the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld arrests and evidence collected on such missions.

Evan Criddle, a law professor at William & Mary in Virginia, said international law forbids undercover operations such as those described in the memo that take place in another country’s territory without consent. He expects the release of the memo to “cause some embarrassment to the United States, prompt Venezuelan diplomats to register their objections and potentially inhibit future cooperation.”

Several current and former DEA officials who examined the memo told the AP they were surprised less by the brazenness of the plan than the agency’s acknowledgement of it in internal documents.

“It’s very rarely done simply because there’s always that potential of it blowing up in the U.S. government’s face,” said Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of international operations. “But Venezuela had already become a rogue state. I think they figured they had nothing to lose.”

RELEASED BY ACCIDENT
The Operation Money Badger memo was never intended to be made public.

It was inadvertently uploaded among dozens of government exhibits to a file share website by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan during the bribery conspiracy trial late last year of two former DEA supervisors who helped spearhead the agency’s offensive against the Maduro government. It would be removed hours after an AP reporter started asking about it.

A few days later, over the AP’s objections, the federal judge presiding over the bribery trial took the highly unusual step of sealing the courtroom while the document was discussed, saying that doing so in open court would have “serious diplomatic repercussions.” Neither he nor prosecutors explained what those might be.

Former DEA supervisors Manny Recio and John Costanzo Jr. were eventually convicted of leaking sensitive law enforcement information to Miami defense attorneys as part of a bribery conspiracy. One case they discussed was that of Saab, a Colombian-born businessman who himself would be targeted by “Money Badger” for the alleged siphoning of $350 million from state contracts.

Recio, who later worked as a private investigator recruiting new clients for the defense attorneys, emailed the Venezuelan plans to his personal email account days before his 2018 retirement. He approved the plans as an assistant special agent in charge, while Costanzo, an expert on Venezuela, oversaw the covert sting. Both men are expected to serve federal prison time, joining a growing list of DEA agents behind bars.

“Information like this should never leave government servers,” Michael Nadler, a former federal prosecutor in Miami who also helped coordinate the overseas sting, testified behind closed doors, according to a redacted transcript. “It contains information that provides identifying information regarding people who have agreed to cooperate with the United States in pretty dangerous situations.”

The AP is not publishing the actual memo or identifying the informants to avoid putting them in danger.

‘A SPECIAL RISK’
The memo harkens back to an earlier era of rising hostilities between the U.S. and Venezuela when ambitious federal investigators in several districts – New York, Miami, Houston and Washington – were competing to see who could penetrate deepest into Venezuela’s criminal underworld.

As part of that undeclared race, the DEA Miami Field Division’s Group 10 recruited a dream informant: a professional money launderer accused of fleecing $800 million from Venezuela’s foreign currency system through a fraudulent import scheme.

The informant’s illicit activity in Venezuela positioned him to help the DEA collect evidence against the chief target of the unilateral operation: Jose Vielma, an early acolyte of the late Hugo Chávez who in two decades of service to the Bolivarian revolution cycled through a number of top jobs, including trade minister and the head of Venezuela’s IRS.

Vielma’s alleged partner in crime, according to the DEA document, was another former military officer: Luis Motta, then electricity minister. The DEA memo authorized three informants to secretly record undercover meetings with the targets.

“There is a special risk that the (confidential sources) would be in danger if their cooperation with the DEA is exposed to host country officials,” the memo states. “Potential penalties include imprisonment.”

Whether the risks were worth it remains an open question.

Vielma and Motta were indicted on money laundering charges tied to bribery — not drug trafficking. Both remain in Venezuela and loyal to Maduro, with Vielma serving as a senior lawmaker and Motta’s wife the governor of a major state. But like dozens of Maduro insiders wanted in the U.S., neither is likely to be brought to justice – despite a $5 million reward for Motta’s arrest — unless they travel outside Venezuela.

Zach Margulis-Ohnuma, an attorney for retired Gen. Hugo Carvajal, a former Venezuelan spy chief awaiting trial in the U.S. on narco-terrorism charges in a separate investigation, said “the DEA’s reputation for lawlessness is well-earned.”

“A program that institutionalizes lawbreaking by authorizing DEA agents and informants to violate foreign laws,” he said, “does little to stop drugs from coming into the U.S. while undermining the integrity of the DEA and the reputation of America abroad.”

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Claims of “evidence” soon emerged: video footage on TikTok showing a beam of blinding white light, too straight to be lightning, zapping a residential neighborhood and sending flames and smoke into the sky. The video was shared many millions of times, amplified by neo-Nazis, anti-government radicals and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, and presented as proof that America’s leaders had turned on the country’s citizens.

“What if Maui was just a practice run?” one woman asked on TikTok. “So that the government can use a direct energy weapon on us?”

The TikTok clip had nothing to do with the Maui fires. It was actually video of an electrical transformer explosion in Chile earlier in the year. But that didn’t stop a TikTok user with a habit of posting conspiracy videos from using the clip to sow more fear and doubt. It was just one of severalsimilarvideos and images doctored and passed off as proof that the wildfires were no accident.

Conspiracy theories have a long history in America, but now they can be fanned around the globe in seconds, amplified by social media, further eroding truth with a newfound destructive force.

With the United States and many other nations facing big elections in 2024, the perils of rapidly spreading disinformation, using ever more sophisticated technology such as artificial intelligence, now also threaten democracy itself — both by fueling extremist groups and by encouraging distrust.

“I think the post-truth world may be a lot closer than we’d like to believe,” said A.J. Nash, vice president for intelligence at ZeroFox, a cybersecurity firm that tracks disinformation. “What happens when no one believes anything anymore?”

Extremists and authoritarians deploy disinformation as potent weapons used to recruit new followers and expand their reach, using fake video and photos to fool their followers.

And even when they fail to convince people, the conspiracy theories embraced by these groups contribute to mounting distrust of authorities and democratic institutions, causing people to reject reliable sources of information while encouraging division and suspicion.

Melissa Sell, a 33-year-old Pennsylvania resident, is among those who has lost faith in the facts.

“If it’s a big news story on the TV, the majority of the time it’s to distract us from something else. Every time you turn around, there’s another news story with another agenda distracting all of us,” she said. Sell thinks the Maui wildfires may have been intentionally set, perhaps to distract the public, perhaps to test a new weapon. “Because the government has been caught in lies before, how do you know?” she said.

Absent meaningful federal regulations governing social media platforms, it’s largely left to Big Tech companies to police their own sites, leading to confusing, inconsistent rules and enforcement. Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, says it makes an effort to remove extremist content. Platforms such as X, formerly known as Twitter, as well as Telegram and far-right sites like Gab, allow it to flourish.

Federal election officials and some lawmakers have suggested regulations governing AI, including rules that would require political campaigns to label AI-generated images used in its ads. But those proposals wouldn’t affect the ability of extremist groups or foreign governments to use AI to mislead Americans.

Meanwhile, U.S.-based tech platforms have rolled back their efforts to root out misinformation and hate speech, following the lead of Elon Musk, who fired most of the content moderators when he purchased X.

“There’s been a big step backward,” said Evan Hansen, the former editor of Wired.com who was Twitter’s director of curation before leaving when Musk purchased the platform. “It’s gotten to be a very difficult job for the casual observer to figure out: What do I believe here?”

Hansen said a combination of government regulations, voluntary action by tech titans and public awareness will be needed to combat the coming wave of synthetic media. He noted the Israel-Hamas war has already seen a deluge of fake and altered photos and video. Elections in the U.S. and around the world this year will create similar opportunities for digital mischief.

The disinformation spread by extremist groups and even politicians like former President Donald Trump can create the conditions for violence, by demonizing the other side, targeting democratic institutions and convincing their supporters that they’re in an existential struggle against those who don’t share their beliefs.

Trump has spread lies about elections, voting and his opponents for years. Building on his specious claims of a deep state that controls the federal government, he has echoed QAnon and other conspiracy theories and encouraged his followers to see their government as an enemy. He even suggested that now-retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, whom Trump himself nominated to be the top U.S. military officer during his administration, was a traitor and deserved execution. Milley said he has had to take security precautions to protect his family.

The list of incidents blamed on extremists motivated by conspiracy theories is growing. The Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, attacks on vaccine clinics, anti-immigrant fervor in Spain; and anti-Muslim hate in India: All were carried out by people who believed conspiracy theories about their opponents and who decided violence was an appropriate response.

Polls and research surveys on conspiracy theories show about half of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory, and those views seldom lead to violence or extremism. But for some, these beliefs can lead to social isolation and radicalization, interfering with their relationships, career and finances. For an even smaller subset, they can lead to violence.

The credible data that exists on crimes motivated by conspiracy theories shows a disturbing increase. In 2019, researchers at the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism identified six violent attacks in which perpetrators said their actions were prompted by a conspiracy theory. In 2020, the year of the most recent survey, there were 116.

Laws designed to rein in the power of social media and artificial intelligence to spread disinformation aren’t likely to pass before the 2024 election, and even if they are, enforcement will be a challenge, according to AI expert Vince Lynch, CEO of the tech company IV.AI.

“This is happening now, and it’s one of the reasons why our society seems so fragmented,” Lynch said. “Hopefully there may be AI regulation someday, but we are already through the looking glass. I do think it’s already too late.”

To believers, the facts don’t matter.

“You can create the universe you want,” said Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who studies online harassment and extremism. “If the truth doesn’t matter, and there is no accountability for these false beliefs, then people will start to act on them.”

Sell, the conspiracy theorist from Pennsylvania, said she began to lose trust in the government and the media shortly after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 20 students and six educators dead. Sell thought the shooter looked too small and weak to carry out such a bloody act, and the gut-wrenching interviews with stricken loved ones seemed too perfect, almost practiced.

“It seemed scripted,” she said. “The pieces did not fit.”

That idea — that the victims of the rampage were actors hired as part of a plot to push gun control laws — was notably spread by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The families of Sandy Hook victims sued, and the Infowars host was later ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages.

Claims that America’s elected leaders and media cannot be trusted feature heavily in many conspiracy theories with ties to extremism.

In 2018, a committed conspiracy theorist from Florida mailed pipe bombs to CNN, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and several other top Democrats; the man’s social media feed was littered with posts about child sacrifice and chemtrails — the debunked claim that airplane vapor clouds contain chemicals or biological agents being used to control the population.

In another act of violence tied to QAnon, a California man was charged with using a speargun to kill his two children in 2021. He told an FBI agent that he had been enlightened by QAnon conspiracy theories and had become convinced that his wife “possessed serpent DNA and had passed it on to his children.”

In 2022, a Colorado woman was found guilty of attempting to kidnap her son from foster care after her daughter said she began associating with QAnon supporters. Other adherents have been accused of environmental vandalism, firing paintballs at military reservists, abducting a child in France and even killing a New York City mob boss.

The coronavirus pandemic, with its attendant social isolation, created ideal conditions for new conspiracy theories as the virus spread fear and uncertainty around the globe. Vaccine clinics were attacked, doctors and nurses threatened. 5G communication towers were vandalized and burned as a wild theory spread claiming they were being used to activate microchips hidden in the vaccine. Fears about vaccines led one Wisconsin pharmacist to destroy a batch of the highly sought after immunizations, while bogus claims about supposed COVID-19 treatments and cures led to hospitalizations and death.

Few recent events, however, display the power of conspiracy theories like the Jan. 6 insurrection, when thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, vandalized the offices of Congress and fought with police in an attempt to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election.

More than 1,200 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related crimes. About 900 have pleaded guilty or been convicted after trials. Over 750 have been sentenced, with roughly two-thirds receiving some term of imprisonment, according to data compiled by The Associated Press. Many of those charged said they had bought into Trump’s conspiracy theories about a stolen election.

“We, meaning Trump supporters, were lied to,” wrote Jan. 6 defendant Robert Palmer in a letter to a judge, who later sentenced him to more than five years for attacking police. “They kept spitting out the false narrative about a stolen election and how it was ‘our duty’ to stand up to tyranny.”

Many conspiracy theorists reject any link between their beliefs and violence, saying they’re being blamed for the actions of a tiny few. Others insist these incidents never occurred, and that events like the Jan. 6 attack were actually false-flag events concocted by the government and media.

“Lies, lies lies: They’re lying to you over and over and over again,” said Steve Girard, a Pennsylvania man who has protested the incarceration of Jan. 6 defendants. He spoke to the AP while waving a large American flag on a busy street in Washington.

While they may have taken on a bigger role in our politics, surveys show that belief in conspiracy theories hasn’t changed much over the years, according to Joe Uscinski, a University of Miami professor and an expert on the history of conspiracy theories. He said he believes that while the internet plays a role in spreading conspiracy theories, most of the blame lies with the politicians who exploit believers.

“Who was the bigger spreader of COVID misinformation: some guy with four followers on Twitter or the president of the United States? The problem is our politicians,” Uscinski said. “Jan. 6 happened, and people said: ‘Oh, this is Facebook’s fault.’ No, the president of the United States told his followers to be at this place, at this time and to fight like hell.”

Governments in Russia, China, Iran and elsewhere have also pushed extremist content on social media as part of their efforts to destabilize Western democracy. Russia has amplified numerous anti-U.S. conspiracy theories, including ones claiming the U.S. runs secret germ warfare labs and created HIV as a bioweapon, as well as conspiracy theories accusing Ukraine of being a Nazi state.

China has helped spread claims that the U.S. created COVID-19 as a bioweapon.

Tom Fishman, the CEO at the nonprofit Starts With Us, said that Americans can take steps to defend the social fabric by turning off their computer and meeting the people they disagree with. He said Americans must remember what ties them together.

“We can look at the window and see foreshadowing of what could happen if we don’t: threats to a functioning democracy, threats of violence against elected leaders,” he said. “We have a civic duty to get this right.”

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Strikingly, the flare-up of debate in Catholic ranks coincides with developments in two other international Christian denominations — the global Anglican Communion and the United Methodist Church — that are fracturing over differences in LGBTQ-related policies.

Taken together, it’s a dramatic illustration of how – in a religion that stresses God’s love for humanity – divisions over marriage, sexuality, and inclusion of gays and lesbians are proving insurmountable for the foreseeable future in many sectors of Christianity.

Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University and pastor of an American Baptist church, says it’s become increasingly difficult for Christian denominations to fully accommodate clergy and congregations with opposing views on same-sex relationships, particularly as such marriages have become legal in much of Europe and the Western Hemisphere.

“A lot of denominations are in the position where you have to make a decision — you can’t be wishy-washy anymore,” said Burge, a specialist in religious demographics. “That’s the tension they’re facing: how to keep older conservatives in the fold while attracting younger people.”

For global denominations — notably Catholics, Anglicans and United Methodists — Burge sees another source of tension: Some of their biggest growth in recent decades has been in socially conservative African countries where same-sex relationships are taboo.

“African bishops have this ammunition,” Burge said. “They say to the West, ‘We’re the ones growing. You have the money, we have the numbers.’”

Kim Haines-Eitzen, a professor of religious studies at Cornell University, said Christianity — throughout its history — has been divided over differing theological views, such as whether women could be ordained as clergy.

“Christianity is incredibly diverse — globally, theologically, linguistically, culturally,” she said. “There are bound to be these incredibly divisive issues, especially when bound up in scriptural interpretation. That’s what keeps world religions alive — that kind of push and pull.”

ANGST AMONG ANGLICANS
Among Christian denominations, the Anglican Communion is second only to the Catholic Church in geographic spread. Divisions over marriage, sexuality and LGBTQ inclusion have roiled the communion for many years, and they widened Dec. 17, when Church of England priests offered officially sanctioned blessings of same-sex partnerships for the first time.

The Church of England’s ban on church weddings for gay couples remains, but the decision to allow blessings has infuriated several conservative Anglican bishops from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific.

Caught in the middle is the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby — the top bishop of the Church of England and ceremonial leader of the Anglican Communion.

Welby says he won’t personally bless same-sex couples because it’s his job to unify the world’s 85 million Anglicans. That hasn’t appeased some conservative bishops, who say they no longer recognize Welby as their leader.

The decision to allow blessings of same-sex couples followed five years of discussions about church positions on sexuality. Church leaders apologized for a failure to welcome LGBTQ people but also affirmed the doctrine that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.

“What we have proposed as a way forward does not go nearly far enough for many, but too far for others,” said Sarah Mullally, bishop of London.

UNITED METHODIST SEPARATION
A slow-motion breakup is underway in the United Methodist Church. A few years ago, it was the third-largest denomination in the United States, but a quarter of U.S. congregations have recently received permission to leave over disputes involving LGBTQ-related policies.

Of the more than 7,650 departing churches, most are conservative-leaning congregations responding to what they see as a failure to enforce bans on same-sex marriage and the ordaining of openly LGBTQ people.

There’s no firm estimate of how many members are leaving, as some who belong to departing congregations are joining other UMC churches. But UMC officials are preparing to cut denominational agencies’ budgets in anticipation of lower revenues from church offerings.

United Methodist rules forbid same-sex marriage rites and the ordination of “self-avowed practicing homosexuals,” but progressive Methodist churches in the U.S. have increasingly defied these rules.

Conservatives have mobilized like-minded congregations to exit; many are joining the new Global Methodist Church, which intends to enforce such rules.

More than half of United Methodist members are overseas, many in conservative African churches. When UMC delegates meet this spring, they’re expected to debate proposals to liberalize ordination and marriage policies, and make it easier for overseas churches to leave.

SPLITS IN OTHER PROTESTANT DENOMINATIONS
Presaging the UMC schism, several other mainline Protestant denominations over the past two decades endured splits resulting from irreconcilable differences between supporters and opponents of LGBTQ inclusion. For example, after the Episcopal Church ordained an openly gay bishop in 2003, some dioceses and conservatives formed the Anglican Church in North America.

Similar liberal/conservative differences prompted hundreds of congregations to leave the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) after they embraced LGBTQ-inclusive policies.

Some conservative denominations — such as the Southern Baptist Convention and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — have adhered firmly to policies that reject recognition of same-sex relationships and ordination of openly LGBTQ people. These policies have prompted departures, but no major schism.

Brent Leatherwood, president of the Southern Baptists’ public policy commission, reiterated the SBC’s position in a statement asserting that the Vatican — under Pope Francis — “has been on a trajectory that seems destined for the allowance of same-sex marriage.”

“The reality is marriage has been defined by God … It is a union between one man and one woman for life,” Leatherwood said. “Southern Baptists remain anchored in this truth.”

ORTHODOX CHURCH DISAPPROVAL
The world’s second-largest Christian communion, after the Catholic Church, is the Eastern Orthodox Church, with an estimated 220 million members, concentrated mostly in Eastern Europe and Western Asia. To a large extent, Orthodox Christians disapprove of same-sex marriage and relationships.

In Greece, where the government is pledging to legalize same-sex marriage, the Orthodox Church has expressed strong opposition.

Russia’s Orthodox Church has supported tough anti-LGBTQ legislation enacted with the support of President Vladimir Putin.

NON-CHRISTIAN FAITHS
Debate over LGBTQ inclusion hasn’t been as divisive in the world’s other major religions as in Christianity.

In the Muslim world, there’s widespread disapproval of same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage; many Muslim nations criminalize homosexuality. However, some LGBTQ-inclusive mosques have surfaced in North America and other places.

Among Jews around the world, there are varying approaches to LGBTQ issues, but relatively little high-profile rancor. Orthodox Judaism disapproves of same-sex marriage and sexual relations, while they’re widely accepted in the Reform and Conservative branches.

In Hinduism and Buddhism, there is no universal, official position on same-sex marriage. Many practitioners of the two faiths disapprove of such unions; some communities are more accepting.

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