As former President Donald Trump prepared to enter the Republican National Convention for the first time on Monday after surviving a shocking weekend assassination attempt, his friend and country singer Lee Greenwood invoked a higher power.

“Prayer works! ... The bullet missed him just enough to save his life – to be the next president of the United States,” Mr. Greenwood told the crowd, as Mr. Trump waited just off the convention floor. “We have believed for so long that God will make some changes in this country. And He’s about to make a change to the current administration and send them home.”

Mr. Greenwood then launched into his familiar hit “God Bless the U.S.A.” as the former president entered the arena to thunderous applause. The crowd broke into “USA! USA!” before switching to the words Mr. Trump himself mouthed as he was rushed off the stage after a bullet grazed his ear last Saturday: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

The moment was cathartic. And Mr. Greenwood’s suggestion – that Mr. Trump was saved by God so that he can recapture the White House – has been a consistent theme throughout the week here, with Republican officials and delegates alike painting their bloodied but unbowed leader as a hero of near-biblical proportions.

Plenty of people from across the political spectrum invoked God in expressing gratitude for Mr. Trump’s survival. President Joe Biden said he was keeping Mr. Trump and family in his prayers. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi posted, “Thank God that former President Trump is safe.” 

But for some fervent Trump supporters, his survival signals not only God’s protection but also a larger, divinely ordained plan to return him to the Oval Office. In primetime speeches and conversations on the convention floor, many here describe it as part of a broader good-versus-evil struggle encapsulated in the election, further raising the existential stakes of the race.

“Not even an assassin’s bullet could stop him,” Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mr. Trump’s former White House press secretary, declared during her Tuesday night speech. “God Almighty intervened because America is one nation under God and He is certainly not finished with President Trump.”

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

“How many millions have seen the grace of the president turning his head at the right time and how the bullet grazed him as opposed to kill[ing] him? People are saying, ’You know what? There’s something going on here,’” says Jim Kasper, a North Dakota state representative and delegate.

“How many millions have seen the grace of the president turning his head at the right time and how the bullet grazed him as opposed to kill[ing] him? People are saying, ‘You know what? There’s something going on here,’” says Jim Kasper, a North Dakota state representative and delegate. “I think Saturday was a defining moment in our nation’s history, and I think that event will go down in the history books as maybe the event that changed the course of a nation.” 

A base anchored in white evangelical Protestants

Christian language and imagery has infused Republican presidential politics for decades, ever since Ronald Reagan brought white Evangelicals into the GOP fold. In 2020, Mr. Trump won 84% of the white evangelical Protestant vote, according to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter survey, up from 77% in 2016. That group makes up about one-fifth of the total U.S. population and represents a huge chunk of Mr. Trump’s most dedicated base. 

And many Trump backers have long embraced a link between their faith and support for the former president. T-shirts for sale outside the convention hall and worn by attendees here in Milwaukee include slogans like “God, guns & Trump” and “Jesus is my savior. Trump is my president.” 

Ralph Reed, a longtime leader on the religious right, bristles at the idea that there’s something explicitly messianic about the way supporters have been talking about the president.

“People don’t view anyone, including President Trump, in messianic terms. They already have a Messiah – and his name is Jesus Christ. What they do believe is that God uses human beings to accomplish his purposes,” he says, before ticking off policies where Mr. Trump had supported the religious right.  

“We’re extremely grateful to God for sparing his life and sparing our country from an unspeakable tragedy,” Mr. Reed adds. “What it holds for the future, I don’t know. I’m not a prophet.”

Likewise, Gary Bauer, a longtime conservative evangelical leader and 2000 Republican presidential candidate, says that while many Christians may be interpreting the assassination attempt as “further evidence of God wanting this particular man to continue to live,” he didn’t think that meant that the election was settled in Mr. Trump’s favor.

Mike Segar/Reuters

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders speaks on Day 2 of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, July 16, 2024.

“It obviously isn’t saying that Jesus is a Republican. He clearly isn’t,” he says. “But it is a way of saying that God is involved in the affairs of man. And millions of us continue to believe that God had a hand in the founding of America – and that without His hand of protection, America is in deep trouble.” 

Yet as the assassination attempt has enhanced the former president’s status with supporters, the resulting rhetoric is alarming some researchers who follow Christian nationalism.

“It is pretty striking the extent to which Trump’s survival of this horrible assassination attempt is being viewed in very religious, almost apocalyptic, terms,” said Melissa Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute. 

Her organization conducted polling with the Brookings Institution last year that found about 10% of Americans are Christian nationalist adherents, and another 20% are sympathetic to those views. More than half of white Evangelicals expressed Christian nationalist views in her survey. Among adherents, 84% agreed with the statement “If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.”  

The overtly religious language at this week’s convention has at times been paired not with calls for national unity but with an us-versus-them attitude, directly linking the assassination attempt – perpetrated by a young man whose motives and political views remain unclear – to Democratic campaign rhetoric attacking Mr. Trump.

“My thoughts immediately turn to the book of Isaiah, that says, ‘No weapon formed against you shall prosper,’” Ben Carson, a former Trump Cabinet member, said in his speech. “Let me tell you the weapons that they use. First they tried to ruin his reputation, and he’s more popular now than ever. And then tried to bankrupt him, and he’s got more money now than he had before. And then they tried to put him in prison, and he’s freer and has made other people free with him. And then last weekend, they tried to kill him. And there he is over there, alive and well.”

Some experts worry that the failed assassination attempt, combined with Republicans’ burgeoning optimism about Mr. Trump’s chances of victory, has raised the stakes for the fall election – win or lose.

“I think it will be fuel for retribution, revenge, taking off the gloves, so to speak, and pursuing political enemies and anyone who stands in Trump’s way in a manner that will be considered just and divine retribution, and part of God’s plan,” said Brad Onishi, a former Christian nationalist who studies the movement as a professor at the University of San Francisco.

Many pro-Trump rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to overturn his election loss expressed explicitly Christian nationalist viewpoints or displayed symbols of the movement. Those who breached the Senate chamber, for instance, stopped to pray together on the floor. 

Matt Rourke/AP

A supporter holds his hat during the national anthem at the Republican National Convention, July 16, 2024, in Milwaukee.

A defender of the Christian faith

The tone at the convention has been especially notable given that Mr. Trump actually pushed the party to soften its positions on some social issues dear to the religious right – taking out the GOP’s long-held official stance in the party platform opposing same-sex marriage and watering down its language on abortion. 

Mr. Trump reportedly claimed God backed the party when he called in to a convention meeting last week to lobby hesitant religious conservatives to back the new platform. “We are going to win because we have right on our side. We have good on our side. I think, frankly, we have God on our side,” Mr. Trump said, according to The Washington Post.

That’s far from the first time Mr. Trump, who rarely attends church and isn’t known for being particularly devout, has claimed the mantle of defender of the Christian faith. But he’s increasingly leaned into that idea during this campaign.

A video Mr. Trump has shared on social media and played at some rallies makes this clear. “On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump,” the video’s narrator intones. 

Speaking to a convention of Christian broadcasters in February, Mr. Trump accused those on the left of trying to stamp out Christianity. “They want to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags,” Mr. Trump said. “But no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration, I swear to you.”

Mr. Trump is even selling his own edition of the Bible – a King James version he produced with Mr. Greenwood that also features the U.S. Constitution and other founding documents.

“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many – it’s my favorite book,” Mr. Trump said in the promotional ad, surrounded by American flags and gripping the Bible. “We have to bring Christianity back into our lives and back into what will be again a great nation. ... We must make America pray again.”

Mr. Bauer, the evangelical leader, who runs the advocacy group American Values, says in a phone interview that religious voters’ reaction to Mr. Trump’s near-assassination fits with historical precedent.

“We [Americans] have a long history of believing, particularly Christians believing, that the God of the Bible had His hand on our country,” Mr. Bauer says, pointing to George Washington crediting God’s providence for America’s victory in the Revolutionary War in his first inaugural address. Many Americans also saw it as a divine sign when both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the Fourth of July, 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was officially approved. 

When President Reagan survived an assassination attempt in 1981, the president believed deeply that he’d survived “because God had something else for him to do,” says Mr. Bauer, who worked in the Reagan administration. “And he concluded that “something else” was to bring down Soviet communism.”

Whether driven by cynical political calculation or a sincere shift in views, Mr. Trump is now expressing a similar sentiment.

“God was with me, I tell you,” Mr. Trump said at a Wednesday private event. “In many ways that changes your attitude, your viewpoint on life. And I think honestly, you appreciate God even more, I really do. Because something happened.”

Staff writer Story Hinckley contributed to this report.

Editor's note: A reference to the Declaration of Independence has been corrected to reflect that July 4 was the date of official approval.

Unable to move forward or go back, Fatima, like thousands of Gaza residents who have sought refuge in Egypt, lives a life in limbo.

Without a legal status, amid rapidly diminishing funds, and burdened with survivor’s guilt, Palestinians in Egypt face a difficult present and an uncertain future.

It is, they say, far from a normal life.

“In Gaza, time stops. It is one long, never-ending, death-filled day,” says Fatima, an interpreter, who did not wish to use her real name for fear of angering Egyptian authorities and risking deportation.

“Once I entered Egypt, I was shocked to find that time moves; people can go about their daily lives,” she says. “But for Gazans in Egypt, time still moves slower. We may have physically left the war, but the war has not left us.”

According to the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador in Cairo, there are 80,000 to 100,000 Gazans in Egypt who, in the wake of Israel’s military offensive, fled the enclave between Oct. 7, 2023, and May.

Since Israel’s early May assault on Rafah and takeover of the Gaza Strip’s lone border crossing with Egypt, Palestinians can no longer enter or leave the enclave. With the 45-day visas having long expired for the vast majority of those in Egypt, this expat community is caught in a legal and emotional limbo. 

“We are quite literally caught in the middle, unable to fully integrate into our new surroundings or return to our former lives,” says Fairouz Sabbah, a financial manager from Gaza City who has lived in Egypt since December.

Waiting to hear from home

Unable to legally work, Gazans say they spend their days sitting in Cairo apartments they can barely afford, grimly following updates on missile strikes and famine. They launch GoFundMe campaigns for relatives left behind, canvass foreign embassies for help, and anxiously await to hear from loved ones back home.

Etaf Miqdad, a bank teller from Rafah who crossed into Egypt with her husband and children in March, has been in daily contact with her brothers and their families, who have been relocating back and forth in tents within the coastal Mawasi region.

Hatem Khaled/Reuters

Palestinians in a donkey-drawn cart loaded with their belongings flee an Israeli military operation in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, May 28, 2024.

Ms. Miqdad went into a panic when the Israeli military struck a gathering of Hamas military commanders in the so-called safe zone last week, killing dozens of civilians.

“Once they [the Israeli military] hit Al-Mawasi, my heart started to pound. I wanted to cry,” she says.

She since has talked with her brothers, but the conversations are short, her relatives unwilling to burden her with their life-and-death struggles.

“My family don’t like to open the camera when I talk to them so I don’t worry,” Ms. Miqdad says. “All of them are now pale ... and have lost weight. All of them are sick.”

Dwindling reserves

Some Gaza residents were allowed to cross into Egypt on humanitarian grounds or through a foreign passport. But the bulk entered by paying thousands of dollars to Al Hala, an Egyptian tourism company with ties to the Egyptian military that helped put Gazans on a list to cross over to the Egyptian side of Rafah.

Having paid so much to enter Egypt, families now struggle with dwindling reserves. Unable to enroll their children in government schools, families face a minimum $1,000-per-year tuition for private schools in Cairo.

“Egypt is so expensive to live here; you need to have saved a lot of money,” says Ms. Miqdad, who pays $520 per month for her Cairo apartment.

Architect Malak al-Dirawi and her husband paid $13,000 to Al Hala in order for their family to start a new “future” in Egypt, but now struggle to make ends meet.

Owing to their lack of legal status, Gazans are unable to rent apartments directly and instead sign side agreements with Egyptian landlords or rent them through an Egyptian intermediary, further inflating the cost.

Ms. Sabbah and her two children, Kinan, age 8, and Sara, age 5, were allowed to enter Egypt in December thanks to her Moroccan citizenship, part of a policy allowing foreign passport holders and their families to leave Gaza.

But as they crossed through Rafah, Ms. Sabbah’s husband was informed he could not enter Egypt. They faced a “heart-wrenching,” split-second choice: stay in Gaza together, or enter Egypt and leave her husband behind. They decided that Ms. Sabbah and their two children would continue on to Egypt while her husband would remain.

Ms. Sabbah and her two children are now struggling to navigate Egypt, cut off from their support network. “There is no way to transfer money or ask someone for help,” she says.

Gehd Hamdy/picture-alliance/dpa/AP

A Palestinian man checks a stand at the Pali Boutique in Cairo, May 23, 2024. Pali Boutique, founded by the volunteer group Network for Palestine, is a storage area providing clothing, household goods, and more to families who fled the war in Gaza.

“I can’t build a life here. I am staying here illegally. We are cut off from everywhere; there is no way to leave and travel elsewhere,” Ms. Sabbah says. She has reached out to numerous embassies in Cairo – of Belgium, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, South Africa. “But no one can help us get a visa or even a humanitarian visa,” she says.

“This feeling of being lost is so difficult.”

Some encounter unexpected reunions.

“By chance, I ran into a friend from Gaza City in a market in Cairo,” Kawther, a mother of three who has lived in Cairo since April, tells the Monitor via Messenger.

“I cried, ‘You are here?!’ and she immediately cried back, ‘You are here?!’” she says. “We immediately hugged each other and laughed, we each didn’t know that the other was alive.”

“Then we recounted all who we have lost from our families, friends, and neighbors and began to cry,” she says. “Our small moments of joy and relief do not last long.”

Survivor’s guilt

As the war continues to claim hundreds of lives per week, Gazans in Egypt say they live with constant guilt.

“It is a difficult decision to leave; it weighs on all our souls. There is a part in all of us that feels we are reliving the Nakba,” the forced displacement of Palestinians in the 1948 war, says Haitham, in Cairo, who was unable to use his name due to his ongoing work with a humanitarian organization.

“As Palestinians, there is a guilt that by leaving we are aiding ‘ethnic cleansing’; we are doing exactly what the Israeli occupation wants.”

“The guilt is always there,” Ms. Dirawi, the architect, admits. “I’m afraid for my family back home. I may have left Gaza physically, but my mind and my heart are still there with my parents and siblings.”

When she speaks with her husband about the deteriorating situation in Gaza, “He tells me there is no food, no basic hygiene,” Ms. Sabbah says. “I always feel guilty to have survived.”

Fatima, whose sister was killed in an Israeli missile strike on their home in October, says she “struggles to accept my new life.”

“I will be walking in the streets when it hits me: Why me? Why should I be the one who survived? Why am I the one who got out?” she says. “These questions follow me everywhere.”

Yet all express a wish to return home – to a Gaza some fear may no longer exist.

“I wish I could return to Gaza today to my previous life, my family, my work,” Ms. Miqdad laments. “In Gaza, there is fear and insecurity because of the missile strikes and bombings. But in Egypt, you do not know anyone. You cannot feel at home.”

Which is why, perhaps, the bulk of Gazans in Egypt prefer to stay in the country, never more than a day’s journey from Gaza.

“We thought, Egypt is the closest, so if the situation in Gaza improves, it will be easier for us to return,” Ms. Dirawi says.

U.S. Olympian Leanne Wong excels on the uneven bars – and in business.

The gymnast, an alternate on the team competing in Paris this month, aims for gold in more than just medals. Her online Bowtique shop, which grew out of a hobby, has sold thousands of colorful, sparkly hair accessories since 2021.

Side gigs are common among Olympic athletes and hopefuls, many of whom, not surprisingly, are go-getters. Sometimes they require additional funds, beyond sponsors, to support themselves and their families while they compete. Sometimes they are preparing for life after the medal race. In recent years, technology has given their notoriety and longevity a boost, and offered an avenue for financial opportunities. 

“I think athletes make the best entrepreneurs,” says former rowing Olympian Meghan O’Leary, who competed in the 2016 and 2020 Games. “We know what it’s like to have highs, lows and stay here,” she says, gesturing to the middle, during a recent media event in New York. 

Ms. O’Leary co-founded the recruiting software startup Turazo while still actively competing. Now she is the director of commercial development and innovation for United States Olympic and Paralympic Properties, a group that markets the games, including those in Los Angeles in 2028. She says that athletes’ strengths include collaborating, working in teams, and allowing themselves to be coached.

Brittainy Newman/AP

Swimmer Lydia Jacoby answers questions during an interview, April 17, 2024, in New York. The 2021 gold medalist has a partnership with swimwear company Arena. Ms. Jacoby just missed qualifying for the 2024 U.S. Olympic team.

Olympic swimmer Lydia Jacoby – who won a gold medal in Tokyo in 2021, but just missed qualifying for the Paris Games – has a swimwear collection with Arena. As a college athlete, Ms. Jacoby’s partnership was made possible by changes in recent years in NCAA “name, image, likeness” rules. The Fit for France collection includes various cuts and colors of bathing suits, modeled in photos by Ms. Jacoby, as well as goggles and backpacks. 

“It’s always been a dream to work in fashion, so getting to work with Arena and design a swimsuit, it’s been so fun. I feel like it’s been a gateway for learning about that process,” Ms. Jacoby said in an interview with the Monitor in the spring. It is an added bonus to pair the fashion business with her sport, she says.

Medal winners, especially those who take home gold, are sometimes able to get publicity (think Wheaties boxes) and endorsement deals to help propel post-Olympic pursuits. But some athletes have succeeded outside of huge sponsorship deals. A trio of onetime Olympic hopefuls – Lauren Fleshman, former professional track and field star, her then-husband Jesse Thomas, two-time Ironman champion, and Stephanie Bruce, a half-marathon champ – figured out business on their own. In 2010 they started Picky Bars, a gluten- and dairy-free energy bar company, which they sold for $12 million in 2021.

Ms. O’Leary is a proponent of a new partnership the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee has developed with Guild, an education benefits platform that will provide access to continuing college education, career coaching, and development opportunities. Any Olympian from the past 10 years who meets the requirements can take classes and earn degrees via online university Purdue Global, and can pursue professional education paths from eCornell.

There needs to be more support for athletes academically, to help educate them on entrepreneurial pathways, says Victoria Jackson, sports historian and professor at Arizona State University. With guidance, she adds, they can take the lead on starting businesses, or keep an eye on staying connected in their given sport after retirement with ideas on how to grow it and continually contribute. All sports should be considered as sophisticated industries, she says.

Frank Franklin II/AP

Victor Montalvo, known as B-boy Victor, breakdances before a news interview Feb. 29, 2024, in New York. Mr. Montalvo will compete with the U.S. team in Paris, where breaking will be an event for the first time. Next up, he has his eye on buying real estate and earning a degree.

“One problem with it not being taken seriously in educational environments is that everybody has to reinvent the wheel every time they want to embrace that entrepreneurial spirit,” Dr. Jackson offers. So far, she adds, athletes have had to figure out a lot on their own.

Ms. Wong purchased the home that she and her family ship her merchandise, including leotards, from – and more investing may be in her future. Her mother has said the college senior is thinking of purchasing a second home near the University of Florida, where she attends school, to use as rental property.

Real estate is also on the mind of breakdancer Victor Montalvo, a member of the U.S. Olympic team. For more than a decade, before breaking was embraced as an event for the first time at this year’s Paris Games, he’s competed around the world. Now, he is looking toward the future. 

“I want to steer away from breaking for a bit. I’ve been doing it competitively for 12, 13 years,” Mr. Montalvo, who is 30, says at the New York media event.

He says he wants to get into real estate. “I bought a home for my parents, so that’s a start. I’m trying to buy another home and make it into a duplex.”

He also plans to take advantage of an Olympic program to help athletes earn degrees.

“I just honestly know that I’m not going to be able to dance for the next 20 years,” he says. “And I don’t want to be 40 years old, competing, trying to win an event just to make rent, or to make ends meet.”

Ian Vogler/Reuters

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (left) and former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak attend the State Opening of Parliament at the Palace of Westminster in London July 17, 2024.

The messages of shock from America’s key overseas allies at the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and their relief that he had survived, came with an equally impassioned postscript: that political violence can have no place in democratic societies.

Yet its plaintive tone underlined a deeper concern. Leaders worry that the gunfire in Pennsylvania last Saturday was just one – extreme – symptom of a climate of division, anger, and intolerance corroding democratic politics not just in the United States but in other countries as well.

And the shooting added new urgency to questions preoccupying allied leaders, especially in the major democracies of western Europe, even before Mr. Trump’s narrow escape.

Those include how to make democratic government work in this increasingly toxic political environment. How to revive it as an arena for competing visions, trusted by voters to respond to their concerns, and led by politicians who, however fiercely they might disagree, fundamentally respect the democratic process, democratic institutions, and one another.

There was at least one encouraging sign for America’s democratic allies after the shooting: the emphasis by both President Joe Biden and Mr. Trump on trying to bring the country back together.

This effort to “lower the temperature” echoed the approach taken by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer after his Labour Party’s election victory this month. He vowed to be “especially” responsive to those who didn’t vote for him.

Yet Labour’s landslide left him in a far stronger position than leaders of other European democracies, like French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

And even Mr. Starmer made it clear that a shift in approach and political culture at the top, while crucial, would not be sufficient to revive the healthy function of democratic government.

That’s because of growing signs that European countries are facing challenges similar to those tearing at the fabric of America’s democracy.

Economically, large numbers of people have yet to recover from the multiple shocks of the world financial crash of 2007-2009, the pandemic, and the consumer price effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Politically, many feel frustrated by what they view as mainstream leaders’ failure to address not just that predicament but also other issues, especially immigration.

Socially, many feel disrespected, even unseen and unheard, by their governments.

Jaroslav Novak/TASR/AP

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico (center), accompanied by agriculture minister Richard Takáč (left), gives a press conference during harvest in the village of Slovenská Nová Ves, in western Slovakia, July 8, 2024. Mr. Fico is recovering after being seriously wounded in an assassination attempt May 15.

As in the U.S., this has fueled the rise of populist leaders styling themselves less as traditional democratic politicians than as insurgents – voices of anger, sometimes outrage, against “establishment” leaders and institutions.

And critically, all of this has been amplified by an entirely altered information environment, in which past reliance on widely shared major media outlets has been replaced by use of X, Instagram, and tailored feeds on mobile phones.

Amid increasingly violent rhetoric, there’s been a rise in acts of violence, especially in the run-up to last month’s European Parliament elections across the 27 countries of the European Union.

In May, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, a Trump-style populist, was himself seriously wounded in an assassination attempt. In Germany, youths attacked and injured a Social Democrat candidate while he was out campaigning. In France and Italy, violent attacks on local officials have been on the rise.

Even in Britain’s election, despite an unerring show of mutual respect by almost all candidates, a number faced threats and intimidation while campaigning. Labour politicians, in particular, were targeted by groups accusing the party of being insufficiently strong in criticizing Israel over the war in Gaza.

Against the background of the killing of two sitting members of Parliament over the past decade, Britain’s top adviser on political violence saw the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life as underscoring the dangers of the current political climate.

“We have seen the growth in the UK of US-style politics of aggressive confrontation and intimidation, which is, unfortunately, exactly the toxic environment that could lead to another assassination attempt on a UK politician,” John Woodcock declared.

Still, “making democracy work” will mean surmounting a deeper challenge of finding some way, in our age of social media reliance, to reintegrate disaffected voters in the democratic process.

Nathan Howard/Reuters

President Joe Biden delivers remarks from the Oval Office a day after a shooting at a campaign rally for Republican challenger Donald Trump, who was wounded during the incident, at the White House in Washington, July 14, 2024.

And the latest digital media survey by the Reuters Institute pointed to the related potential obstacle of declining interest in news. Four in 10 people now say they engage in “selective news avoidance.”

Rupa Huq, a British Labour member of Parliament who is herself a strong supporter of Palestinian statehood, wrote of the harassment she faced in the recent campaign over the party’s Gaza stance. Most frustrating, she said, was the inability to get people to engage in any reasoned discussion of how best to relieve the plight of the Palestinians.

This challenge has been building since 2016, with the angry campaigns that took Britain out of the EU and won Mr. Trump the White House. Indeed, I wrote about the long-term implications for democratic government at the time.

Yet the hope among European allies will be that, as a first step toward reengagement, the new emphasis on unity by the two leading politicians in the world’s leading democracy helps revive one core democratic tenet.

It was championed by President Biden after winning the election in 2020, and he repeated it this week after the attack on Mr. Trump:

“Though we may disagree, we are not enemies.”

In Mauritania’s second-largest city, Nouadhibou, 65-foot pirogues painted baby blue fill the harbor. The boats, outfitted with outboard motors and numbering up to 7,500 on any given day, are all aiming for the same catch: the common octopus. 

Fifty thousand fishers depend on the West African nation’s octopus trade. In the first quarter of 2023, Mauritanian octopus represented nearly 40% of Japan’s total importation of the delicacy (more than 10,000 tons). In Nouadhibou, residents don’t use the French, Spanish, or Arabic word for octopus. They use tako, the Japanese one. The highest standard for octopus is “Japan quality,” according to fishers and exporters.

The Japanese – and the Spanish – love octopus. People in Osaka adore takoyaki, battered balls with octopus inside. Small bars in Tokyo, izakayas, serve up octopus deep-fried or as sashimi. In the Galicia region of Spain, a boiled tentacle spiced with hot paprika – pulpo á feira – is deeply ingrained in the culture. 

But trouble looms. Beyah Meissa, of the Mauritanian Institute for Oceanographic Research and Fisheries, says the fishing industry has “overexploited” the octopus stock, despite a national quota system in place since 2016. “There has been an increase in the number of boats fishing for octopus here because the price is also going up,” Dr. Meissa says. He adds that fishers have been “catching much more than they should.”

Overfishing threatens more than Mauritania’s $313 million octopus industry. The common octopus is considered the most intelligent invertebrate. It has 500 million neurons, most of them in its arms. It can solve puzzles, use tools, and even dream, according to researchers.

Nathalie Bertrams

Nouadhibou, Mauritania’s second-largest city, has up to 7,500 boats looking for the common octopus on any given day.

Nathalie Bertrams

Atigh Boucavar (front), a fisher in Nouadhibou, has plied his trade since 1996. He uses an octopus trap that the Chinese introduced.

Nathalie Bertrams

A factory worker in Nouadhibou checks a load of octopus. If fuel from a boat spills, the catch spoils.

Nathalie Bertrams

Masaaki Nakamura, a fisheries scientist photographed in Tokyo last year, came to Mauritania in the 1970s and taught people how to fish for octopus with trap pots.

Nathalie Bertrams

Octopus is for sale in a supermarket in Tokyo. Much of Mauritania’s octopus is exported to Japan.

Nathalie Bertrams

Crowds come out in Osaka, Japan, to a market where octopus, called tako in Japanese, is sold.

Nathalie Bertrams

Food stalls, many of them selling takoyaki – small battered balls filled with octopus – are popular in Osaka.

AP

A young woman in Kabul works a sewing machine at one of the few jobs for women in Afghanistan.

On July 2, when the president of Sierra Leone signed a new law banning child marriage, his 8-year-old daughter was at his side. “I have always believed that the future of Sierra Leone is female,” said President Julius Maada Bio.

On July 15, when an all-male legislature in Gambia voted not to end a ban on genital cutting of girls – after first favoring the move – it was because of lawmakers like Gibbi Mballow. “I am a father, and I can’t support such a bill,” he said.

On July 17, something similar was revealed about the fathers of daughters in Afghanistan, an isolated country where the ruling Taliban has barred girls’ education beyond the age of 12. A new survey finds that fathers, especially those whose eldest is a daughter, are very likely to favor rights for girls and women. 

The survey, conducted for researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, could upend the approach of the international community to restore full education for Afghan girls. Trying to persuade or threaten the Taliban to change has only hardened their position in the three years since they retook power after the American withdrawal. Instead, researchers suggest that fathers with eldest daughters be “primed” by outside groups to use their authority in a male-dominated society to overturn the education ban.

In the campaign to restore women’s rights in Afghanistan, fathers whose first-born is a girl might be the best ally of activists. “I will be proud of myself that I will fight for women’s rights,” one father said in responding to the survey.

This news may not be new to the Taliban. Many fathers have been detained and beaten for helping their daughters violate the regime’s restrictions on girls. One young Afghan woman told The New Humanitarian that her father is her greatest advocate: “He told me, ‘You must study. You are the futuremaker of your country. You have to help your people, your homeland’.”

One father has even given money for his eldest daughter to start her own school for girls, one that teaches only about Islam, according to the Afghanistan Peace Campaign. While the daughter waits for final approval, she says she hopes the Taliban “will find a way” for all Afghan girls to “finish high school and even go to university, if they want to.”

In many countries, from Africa to Asia, freedom for girls often starts with a father’s love.