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Hello! Welcome to the first Abroad in America newsletter.

I’m writing this on a flight from San Francisco to New York. It’s surprisingly nice up here in the air, by which I really mean that even a cramped plane full of irritated passengers is less unappealing than a nation full of feuding citizens incensed over whether or not President Trump’s latest judicial candidate is qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.

How did it come to this? I do not know exactly. But starting today, I’ll attempt to help our international readers (and maybe some American ones, and maybe myself) understand what is going on as the United States approaches the midterm elections.

Let’s begin with a conversation I had recently in Washington, at an annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-minded research organization.