The Deserter: Parts 4 and 5

President Trump was once a loud skeptic of cryptocurrency — one who called it a haven for drug dealers and scammers. But over the past few months, he’s emerged as the industry’s biggest cheerleader. A New York Times investigation shows how much the president and his family have profited from that transformation. Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter for The Times, discusses what happens when the country’s top crypto policymaker is himself a crypto entrepreneur.

On Tuesday, the second Trump presidency officially reached the 100-day mark. It’s been a hundred days of transformation, tariffs, retribution, firings and deportation the likes of which America has never seen before. The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Charlie Savage sit down to assess President Trump’s record.

Last year, a historic legal settlement resulted in sweeping rule changes that were supposed to lower the price of buying and selling a home across the country. But those changes would cost real-estate agents money, and so those agents, it turns out, have found ways around the new rules. Debra Kamin, who reports on real estate, explains how they did it.

Warning: This episode contains strong language. One question that has hung over the first 100 days of President Trump’s second term: Is his aggressive approach to everything from deportations to tariffs what most Americans want — or has he simply gone too far? In a major new nationwide poll, voters tell The New York Times exactly how they feel about Trump’s agenda. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explains the results.

Online, there is a name for the experience of finding sympathy with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber: Tedpilling. To be Tedpilled means to read Paragraph 1 of Kaczynski’s manifesto, its assertion that the mad dash of technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution has “made life unfulfilling,” “led to widespread psychological suffering” and “inflicted severe damage on the natural world,” and think, Well, sure. Since Kaczynski’s death by suicide in a federal prison in North Carolina nearly two years ago, the taboo surrounding the figure has been weakening. This is especially true on the right, where pessimism and paranoia about technology — largely the province of the left not long ago — have spread on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to police speech on social media platforms.