Elaina Plott Calabro | The Atlantic

Canada Is Killing Itself

2025-08-11T06:00:00-04:00

Illustration by Michael Houtz

The euthanasia conference was held at a Sheraton. Some 300 Canadian professionals, most of them clinicians, had arrived for the annual event. There were lunch buffets and complimentary tote bags; attendees could look forward to a Friday-night social outing, with a DJ, at an event space above Par-Tee Putt in downtown Vancouver. “The most important thing,” one doctor told me, “is the networking.”

Which is to say that it might have been any other convention in Canada. Over the past decade, practitioners of euthanasia have become as familiar as orthodontists or plastic surgeons are with the mundane rituals of lanyards and drink tickets and It’s been so long s outside the ballroom of a four-star hotel. The difference is that, 10 years ago, what many of the attendees here do for work would have been considered homicide.

When Canada’s Parliament in 2016 legalized the practice of euthanasia—Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, as it’s formally called—it launched an open-ended medical experiment. One day, administering a lethal injection to a patient was against the law; the next, it was as legitimate as a tonsillectomy, but often with less of a wait. MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.

It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset it has proved a case study in momentum. MAID began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients who were already at the end of life. The law was then expanded to include people who were suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. In two years, MAID will be made available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

At the center of the world’s fastest-growing euthanasia regime is the concept of patient autonomy. Honoring a patient’s wishes is of course a core value in medicine. But here it has become paramount, allowing Canada’s MAID advocates to push for expansion in terms that brook no argument, refracted through the language of equality, access, and compassion. As Canada contends with ever-evolving claims on the right to die, the demand for euthanasia has begun to outstrip the capacity of clinicians to provide it.

There have been unintended consequences: Some Canadians who cannot afford to manage their illness have sought doctors to end their life. In certain situations, clinicians have faced impossible ethical dilemmas. At the same time, medical professionals who decided early on to reorient their career toward assisted death no longer feel compelled to tiptoe around the full, energetic extent of their devotion to MAID. Some clinicians in Canada have euthanized hundreds of patients.

The two-day conference in Vancouver was sponsored by a professional group called the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers. Stefanie Green, a physician on Vancouver Island and one of the organization’s founders, told me how her decades as a maternity doctor had helped equip her for this new chapter in her career. In both fields, she explained, she was guiding a patient through an “essentially natural event”—the emotional and medical choreography “of the most important days in their life.” She continued the analogy: “I thought, Well, one is like delivering life into the world, and the other feels like transitioning and delivering life out.” And so Green does not refer to her MAID deaths only as “provisions”—the term for euthanasia that most clinicians have adopted. She also calls them “deliveries.”

Gord Gubitz, a neurologist from Nova Scotia, told me that people often ask him about the “stress” and “trauma” and “strife” of his work as a MAID provider. Isn’t it so emotionally draining? In fact, for him it is just the opposite. He finds euthanasia to be “energizing”—the “most meaningful work” of his career. “It’s a happy sad, right?” he explained. “It’s really sad that you were in so much pain. It is sad that your family is racked with grief. But we’re so happy you got what you wanted.”

[From the June 2023 issue: David Brooks on how Canada’s assisted-suicide law went wrong]

Has Canada itself gotten what it wanted? Nine years after the legalization of assisted death, Canada’s leaders seem to regard MAID from a strange, almost anthropological remove: as if the future of euthanasia is no more within their control than the laws of physics; as if continued expansion is not a reality the government is choosing so much as conceding. This is the story of an ideology in motion, of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic. If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?

Rishad Usmani remembers the first patient he killed. She was 77 years old and a former Ice Capades skater, and she had severe spinal stenosis. Usmani, the woman’s family physician on Vancouver Island, had tried to talk her out of the decision to die. He would always do that, he told me, when patients first asked about medically assisted death, because often what he found was that people simply wanted to be comfortable, to have their pain controlled; that when they reckoned, really reckoned, with the finality of it all, they realized they didn’t actually want euthanasia. But this patient was sure: She was suffering, not just from the pain but from the pain medication too. She wanted to die.

On December 13, 2018, Usmani arrived at the woman’s home in the town of Comox, British Columbia. He was joined by a more senior physician, who would supervise the procedure, and a nurse, who would start the intravenous line. The patient lay in a hospital bed, her sister next to her, holding her hand. Usmani asked her a final time if she was sure; she said she was. He administered 10 milligrams of midazolam, a fast-acting sedative, then 40 milligrams of lidocaine to numb the vein in preparation for the 1,000 milligrams of propofol, which would induce a deep coma. Finally he injected 200 milligrams of a paralytic agent called rocuronium, which would bring an end to breathing, ultimately causing the heart to stop.

Usmani drew his stethoscope to the woman’s chest and listened. To his quiet alarm, he could hear the heart still beating. In fact, as the seconds passed, it seemed to be quickening. He glanced at his supervisor. Where had he messed up? But as soon as they locked eyes, he understood: He was listening to his own heartbeat.

Many clinicians in Canada who have provided medical assistance in dying have a story like this, about the tangle of nerves and uncertainties that attended their first case. Death itself is something every clinician knows intimately, the grief and pallor and paperwork of it. To work in medicine is to step each day into the worst days of other people’s lives. But approaching death as a procedure, as something to be scheduled over Outlook, took some getting used to. In Canada, it is no longer a novel and remarkable event. As of 2023, the last year for which data are available, some 60,300 Canadians had been legally helped to their death by clinicians. In Quebec, more than 7 percent of all deaths are by euthanasia—the highest rate of any jurisdiction in the world. “I have two or three provisions every week now, and it’s continuing to go up every year,” Claude Rivard, a family doctor in suburban Montreal, told me.

Rivard has thus far provided for more than 600 patients and helps train clinicians new to MAID. This spring, I watched from the back of a small classroom in a Vancouver hospital as Rivard led a workshop on intraosseous infusion—administering drugs directly into the bone marrow, a useful skill for MAID clinicians, Rivard explained, in the event of IV failure. Arranged on absorbent pads across the back row of tables were eight pig knuckles, bulbous and pink. After a PowerPoint presentation, the dozen or so attendees took turns with different injection devices, from the primitive (manual needles) to the modern (bone-injection guns). Hands cramped around hollow steel needles as the workshop attendees struggled to twist and drive the tools home. This was the last thing, the clinicians later agreed, that patients would want to see as they lay trying to die. Practitioners needed to learn. “Every detail matters,” Rivard told the class; he preferred the bone-injection gun himself.

Johnny C. Y. Lam for The Atlantic

Claude Rivard at his home near Montreal

The details of the assisted-death experience have become a preoccupation of Canadian life. Patients meticulously orchestrate their final moments, planning celebrations around them: weekend house parties before a Sunday-night euthanasia in the garden; a Catholic priest to deliver last rites; extended-family renditions of “Auld Lang Syne” at the bedside. For $10.99, you can design your MAID experience with the help of the Be Ceremonial app; suggested rituals include a story altar, a forgiveness ceremony, and the collecting of tears from witnesses. On the Disrupting Death podcast, hosted by an educator and a social worker in Ontario, guests share ideas on subjects such as normalizing the MAID process for children facing the death of an adult in their life—a pajama party at a funeral home; painting a coffin in a schoolyard.

Autonomy, choice, control: These are the values that found purchase with the great majority of Canadians in February 2015, when, in a case spearheaded by the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, the supreme court of Canada unanimously overturned the country’s criminal ban on medically assisted death. For advocates, the victory had been decades in the making—the culmination of a campaign that had grown in fervor since the 1990s, when Canada’s high court narrowly ruled against physician-assisted death in a case brought by a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. “We’re talking about a competent person making a choice about their death,” one longtime right-to-die activist said while celebrating the new ruling. “Don’t access this choice if you don’t want—but stay away from my death bed.” A year later, in June 2016, Parliament passed the first legislation officially permitting medical assistance in dying for eligible adults, placing Canada among the handful of countries (including Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) and U.S. states (Oregon, Vermont, and California, among others) that already allowed some version of the practice.

[Read: How do I make sense of my mother’s decision to die?]

The new law approved medical assistance in dying for adults who had a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” causing them “intolerable suffering,” and who faced a “reasonably foreseeable” natural death. To qualify, patients needed two clinicians to sign off on their application, and the law required a 10-day “reflection period” before the procedure could take place. Patients could choose to die either by euthanasia—having a clinician administer the drugs directly—or, alternatively, by assisted suicide, in which a patient self-administers a lethal prescription orally. (Virtually all MAID deaths in Canada have been by euthanasia.) When the procedure was set to begin, patients were required to give final consent.

The law, in other words, was premised on the concept of patient autonomy, but within narrow boundaries. Rather than force someone with, say, late-stage cancer to suffer to the very end, MAID would allow patients to depart on their own terms: to experience a “dignified death,” as proponents called it. That the threshold of eligibility for MAID would be high—and stringent—was presented to the public as self-evident, although the criteria themselves were vague when you looked closely. For instance, what constituted “reasonably foreseeable”? Two months? Two years? Canada’s Department of Justice suggested only “a period of time that is not too remote.”

Provincial health authorities were left to fill in the blanks. Following the law’s passage, doctors, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and lawyers scrambled to draw up the regulatory fine print for a procedure that until then had been legally classified as culpable homicide. How should the assessment process work? What drugs should be used? Particularly vexing was the question of whether it should be clinicians or patients who initiated conversations about assisted death. Some argued that doctors and nurses had a professional obligation to broach the subject of MAID with potentially eligible patients, just as they would any other “treatment option.” Others feared that patients could interpret this as a recommendation—indeed, feared that talking about assisted death as a medical treatment, like Lasik surgery or a hip replacement, was dangerous in itself.

Early on, a number of health-care professionals refused to engage in any way with MAID—some because of religious beliefs, and others because, in their view, it violated a medical duty to “do no harm.” For many clinicians, the ethical and logistical challenges of MAID only compounded the stress of working within Canada’s public-health-care system, beset by years of funding cuts and staffing shortages. The median wait time for general surgery is about 22 weeks. For orthopedic surgery, it’s more than a year. For some kinds of mental-health services, the wait time can be longer.

As the first assessment requests trickled in, even many clinicians who believed strongly in the right to an assisted death were reluctant to do the actual assisting. Some told me they agreed to take on patients only after realizing that no one else—in their hospital or even their region—was willing to go first. Matt Kutcher, a physician on Prince Edward Island, was more open to MAID than others, but acknowledged the challenge of building the practice of assisted death virtually from scratch. “The reality,” he said, “is that we were all just kind of making it up as we went along, very cautiously.”

Johnny C. Y. Lam for The Atlantic

Ready-to-use MAID kits in a hospital vault

On a rainy spring evening in 2017, Kutcher drove to a farmhouse by the sea to administer the first state-sanctioned act of euthanasia in his province. The patient, Paul Couvrette, had learned about MAID from his wife, Liana Brittain, in 2015, soon after the supreme-court decision. He had just been diagnosed with lung cancer, and while processing this fact in the parking lot of the clinic had turned to his wife and announced: “I’m not going to have cancer. I’m going to kill myself.” Brittain told her husband this was a bit dramatic. “You know, dear, you don’t have to do that,” she recalls responding. “The government will do it for you, and they’ll do it for free.” Couvrette had marveled at the news, because although he was open to surgery, he had no interest in chemotherapy or radiation. MAID, Brittain told me, gave her husband the relief of a “back door.” By early 2017, the cancer had spread to Couvrette’s brain; the 72-year-old became largely bedridden. He set his MAID procedure for May 10—the couple’s wedding anniversary.

Kutcher and a nurse had agreed to come early and join the extended family—children, a granddaughter—for Couvrette’s final dinner: seafood chowder and gluten-free biscuits. Only Brittain would eventually join Couvrette in the downstairs bedroom; the rest of the family and the couple’s two dogs would wait outside on the beach. There was a shared understanding, Kutcher recalled, that “this was something none of us had experienced before, and we didn’t really know what we were in for.” What followed was a “beautiful death”—that was what the local newspaper called it, Brittain told me. Couvrette’s last words to his wife came from their wedding vows: I’ll love you forever, plus three days.

Kutcher wrestled at first with the sheer strangeness of the experience—how quickly it was over, packing up his equipment at the side of a dead man who just 10 minutes earlier had been talking with him, very much alive. But he went home believing he had done the right thing for his patient.

For proponents, Couvrette epitomized the ideal MAID candidate, motivated not by an impulsive death wish but by a considered desire to reclaim control of his fate from a terminal disease. The lobbying group Dying With Dignity Canada celebrated Couvrette’s “empowering choice and journey” as part of a showcase on its website of “good deaths” made possible by the new law. There was also the surgeon in Nova Scotia with Parkinson’s who “died the same way he lived—on his own terms.” And there were the Toronto couple in their 90s who, in a “dream ending to their storybook romance,” underwent MAID together.

Such heartfelt accounts tended to center on the white, educated, financially stable patients who represented the typical MAID recipient. The stories did not precisely capture what many clinicians were discovering also to be true: that if dying by MAID was dying with dignity, some deaths felt considerably more dignified than others. Not everyone has coastal homes or children and grandchildren who can gather in love and solidarity. This was made clear to Sandy Buchman, a palliative-care physician in Toronto, during one of his early MAID cases, when a patient, “all alone,” gave final consent from a mattress on the floor of a rental apartment. Buchman recalls having to kneel next to the mattress in the otherwise empty space to administer the drugs. “It was horrible,” he told me. “You can see how challenging, how awful, things can be.”

In 2018, Buchman co-founded a nonprofit organization called MAiDHouse. The aim was to create a “third place” of sorts for people who want to die somewhere other than a hospital or at home. Finding a location proved difficult; many landlords were resistant. But by 2022, MAiDHouse had leased the space in Toronto from which it operates today. (For security reasons, the location is not public.) Tekla Hendrickson, the executive director of MAiDHouse, told me the space was designed to feel warm and familiar but also adaptable to the wishes of the person using it: furniture light enough to rearrange, bare surfaces for flowers or photos or any other personal items. “Sometimes they have champagne, sometimes they come in limos, sometimes they wear ball gowns,” Hendrickson said. The act of euthanasia itself takes place in a La-Z-Boy-like recliner, with adjacent rooms available for family and friends who may prefer not to witness the procedure. According to the MAiDHouse website, the body is then transferred to a funeral home by attendants who arrive in unmarked cars and depart “discreetly.”

Since its founding, MAiDHouse has provided space and support for more than 100 deaths. The group’s homepage displays a photograph of dandelion seeds scattering in a gentle wind. A second MAiDHouse location recently opened in Victoria, British Columbia. In the organization’s 2023 annual report, the chair of the board noted that MAiDHouse’s followers on LinkedIn had increased by 85 percent; its new Instagram profile was gaining followers too. More to the point, the number of provisions performed at MAiDHouse had doubled over the previous year—“astounding progress for such a young organization.”

In the early days of MAID, some clinicians found themselves at once surprised and conflicted by the fulfillment they experienced in helping people die. A few months after the law’s passage, Stefanie Green, whom I’d met at the conference in Vancouver, acknowledged to herself how “upbeat” she’d felt following a recent provision—“a little hyped up on adrenaline,” as she later put it in a memoir about her first year providing medical assistance in death. Green realized it was gratification she was feeling: A patient had come to her in immense pain, and she had been in a position to offer relief. In the end, she believed, she had “given a gift to a dying man.”

Green had at first been reluctant to reveal her feelings to anyone, afraid that she might be viewed, she recalled, as a “psychopath.” But she did eventually confide in a small group of fellow MAID practitioners. Green and several colleagues realized that there was a need for a formal community of professionals. In 2017, they officially launched the group whose meeting I attended.

There was a time when Madeline Li would have felt perfectly at home among the other clinicians who convened that weekend at the Sheraton. In the early years of MAID, few physicians exerted more influence over the new regime than Li. The Toronto-based cancer psychiatrist led the development of the MAID program at the University Health Network, the largest teaching-hospital system in Canada, and in 2017 saw her framework published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Tony Luong for The Atlantic

Madeline Li at her office in Toronto

It was not long into her practice, however, that Li’s confidence in the direction of her country’s MAID program began to falter. For all of her expertise, not even Li was sure what to do about a patient in his 30s whom she encountered in 2018.

The man had gone to the emergency room complaining of excruciating pain and was eventually diagnosed with cancer. The prognosis was good, a surgeon assured him, with a 65 percent chance of a cure. But the man said he didn’t want treatment; he wanted MAID. Startled, the surgeon referred him to a medical oncologist to discuss chemo; perhaps the man just didn’t want surgery. The patient proceeded to tell the medical oncologist that he didn’t want treatment of any kind; he wanted MAID. He said the same thing to a radiation oncologist, a palliative-care physician, and a psychiatrist, before finally complaining to the patient-relations department that the hospital was barring his access to MAID. Li arranged to meet with him.

Canada’s MAID law defines a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” in part as a “serious and incurable illness, disease, or disability.” As for what constitutes incurability, however, the law says nothing—and of the various textual ambiguities that caused anxiety for clinicians early on, this one ranked near the top. Did “incurable” mean a lack of any available treatment? Did it mean the likelihood of an available treatment not working? Prominent MAID advocates put forth what soon became the predominant interpretation: A medical condition was incurable if it could not be cured by means acceptable to the patient.

This had made sense to Li. If an elderly woman with chronic myelogenous leukemia had no wish to endure a highly toxic course of chemo and radiation, why should she be compelled to? But here was a young man with a likely curable cancer who nevertheless was adamant about dying. “I mean, he was so, so clear,” Li told me. “I talked to him about What if you had a 100 percent chance? Would you want treatment? And he said no.” He didn’t want to suffer through the treatment or the side effects, he explained; just having a colonoscopy had traumatized him. When Li assured the man that they could treat the side effects, he said she wasn’t understanding him: Yes, they could give him medication for the pain, but then he would have to first experience the pain. He didn’t want to experience the pain.

What was Li left with? According to prevailing standards, the man’s refusal to attempt treatment rendered his disease incurable and his natural death was reasonably foreseeable. He met the eligibility criteria as Li understood them. But the whole thing seemed wrong to her. Seeking advice, she described the basics of the case in a private email group for MAID practitioners under the heading “Eligible, but Reasonable?” “And what was very clear to me from the replies I got,” Li told me, “is that many people have no ethical or clinical qualms about this—that it’s all about a patient’s autonomy, and if a patient wants this, it’s not up to us to judge. We should provide.”

And so she did. She regretted her decision almost as soon as the man’s heart stopped beating. “What I’ve learned since is: Eligible doesn’t mean you should provide MAID,” Li told me. “You can be eligible because the law is so full of holes, but that doesn’t mean it clinically makes sense.” Li no longer interprets “incurable” as at the sole discretion of the patient. The problem, she feels, is that the law permits such a wide spectrum of interpretations to begin with. Many decisions about life and death turn on the personal values of practitioners and patients rather than on any objective medical criteria.

By 2020, Li had overseen hundreds of MAID cases, about 95 percent of which were “very straightforward,” she said. They involved people who had terminal conditions and wanted the same control in death as they’d enjoyed in life. It was the 5 percent that worried her—not just the young man, but vulnerable people more generally, whom the safeguards had possibly failed. Patients whose only “terminal condition,” really, was age. Li recalled an especially divisive early case for her team involving an elderly woman who’d fractured her hip. She understood that the rest of her life would mean becoming only weaker and enduring more falls, and she “just wasn’t going to have it.” The woman was approved for MAID on the basis of frailty.

Li had tried to understand the assessor’s reasoning. According to an actuarial table, the woman, given her age and medical circumstances, had a life expectancy of five or six more years. But what if the woman had been slightly younger and the number was closer to eight years—would the clinician have approved her then? “And they said, well, they weren’t sure, and that’s my point,” Li explained. “There’s no standard here; it’s just kind of up to you.” The concept of a “completed life, or being tired of life,” as sufficient for MAID is “controversial in Europe and theoretically not legal in Canada,” Li said. “But the truth is, it is legal in Canada. It always has been, and it’s happening in these frailty cases.”

Li supports medical assistance in dying when appropriate. What troubles her is the federal government’s deferring of responsibility in managing it—establishing principles, setting standards, enforcing boundaries. She believes most physicians in Canada share her “muddy middle” position. But that position, she said, is also “the most silent.”

In 2014, when the question of medically assisted death had come before Canada’s supreme court, Etienne Montero, a civil-law professor and at the time the president of the European Institute of Bioethics, warned in testimony that the practice of euthanasia, once legal, was impossible to control. Montero had been retained by the attorney general of Canada to discuss the experience of assisted death in Belgium—how a regime that had begun with “extremely strict” criteria had steadily evolved, through loose interpretations and lax enforcement, to accommodate many of the very patients it had once pledged to protect. When a patient’s autonomy is paramount, Montero argued, expansion is inevitable: “Sooner or later, a patient’s repeated wish will take precedence over strict statutory conditions.” In the end, the Canadian justices were unmoved; Belgium’s “permissive” system, they contended, was the “product of a very different medico-legal culture” and therefore offered “little insight into how a Canadian regime might operate.” In a sense, this was correct: It took Belgium more than 20 years to reach an assisted-death rate of 3 percent. Canada needed only five.

In retrospect, the expansion of MAID would seem to have been inevitable; Justin Trudeau, then Canada’s prime minister, said as much back in 2016, when he called his country’s newly passed MAID law “a big first step” in what would be an “evolution.” Five years later, in March 2021, the government enacted a new two-track system of eligibility, relaxing existing safeguards and extending MAID to a broader swath of Canadians. Patients approved for an assisted death under Track 1, as it was now called—meaning the original end-of-life context—were no longer required to wait 10 days before receiving MAID; they could die on the day of approval. Track 2, meanwhile, legalized MAID for adults whose deaths were not reasonably foreseeable—people suffering from chronic pain, for example, or from certain neurological disorders. Although cost savings have never been mentioned as an explicit rationale for expansion, the parliamentary budget office anticipated annual savings in health-care costs of nearly $150 million as a result of the expanded MAID regime.

The 2021 law did provide for additional safeguards unique to Track 2. Assessors had to ensure that applicants gave “serious consideration”—a phrase left undefined—to “reasonable and available means” to alleviate their suffering. In addition, they had to affirm that the patients had been directed toward such options. Track 2 assessments were also required to span at least 90 days. For any MAID assessment, clinicians must be satisfied not only that a patient’s suffering is enduring and intolerable, but that it is a function of a physical medical condition rather than mental illness, say, or financial instability. Suffering is never perfectly reducible, of course—a crisp study in cause and effect. But when a patient is already dying, the role of physical disease isn’t usually a mystery, either.

Johnny C. Y. Lam for The Atlantic

Depleted syringes after a MAID provision

Track 2 introduced a web of moral complexities and clinical demands. For many practitioners, one major new factor was the sheer amount of time required to understand why the person before them—not terminally ill—was asking, at that particular moment, to die. Clinicians would have to untangle the physical experience of chronic illness and disability from the structural inequities and mental-health struggles that often attend it. In a system where access to social supports and medical services varies so widely, this was no small challenge, and many clinicians ultimately chose not to expand their practice to include Track 2 patients.

There is no clear official data on how many clinicians are willing to take on Track 2 cases. The government’s most recent information indicates that, in 2023, out of 2,200 MAID practitioners overall, a mere 89 were responsible for about 30 percent of all Track 2 provisions. Jonathan Reggler, a family physician on Vancouver Island, is among that small group. He openly acknowledges the challenges involved in assessing Track 2 patients, as well as the basic “discomfort” that comes with ending the life of someone who is not in fact dying. “I can think of cases that I’ve dealt with where you’re really asking yourself, Why? ” he told me. “Why now? Why is it that this cluster of problems is causing you such distress where another person wouldn’t be distressed? ”

Yet Reggler feels duty bound to move beyond his personal discomfort. As he explained it, “Once you accept that people ought to have autonomy—once you accept that life is not sacred and something that can only be taken by God, a being I don’t believe in—then, if you’re in that work, some of us have to go forward and say, ‘We’ll do it.’ ”

For some MAID practitioners, however, it took encountering an eligible patient for them to realize the true extent of their unease with Track 2. One physician, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized by his hospital to speak publicly, recalled assessing a patient in their 30s with nerve damage. The pain was such that they couldn’t go outside; even the touch of a breeze would inflame it. “They had seen every kind of specialist,” he said. The patient had tried nontraditional therapies too—acupuncture, Reiki, “everything.” As the physician saw it, the patient’s condition was serious and incurable, it was causing intolerable suffering, and the suffering could not seem to be relieved. “I went through all of the tick boxes, and by the letter of the law, they clearly met the criteria for all of these things, right? That said, I felt a little bit queasy.” The patient was young, with a condition that is not terminal and is usually treatable. But “I didn’t feel it was my place to tell them no.”

He was not comfortable doing the procedure himself, however. He recalled telling the MAID office in his region, “Look, I did the assessment. The patient meets the criteria. But I just can’t—I can’t do this.” Another clinician stepped in.

In 2023, Track 2 accounted for 622 MAID deaths in Canada—just over 4 percent of cases, up from 3.5 percent in 2022. Whether the proportion continues to rise is anyone’s guess. Some argue that primary-care providers are best positioned to negotiate the complexities of Track 2 cases, given their familiarity with the patient making the request—their family situation, medical history, social circumstances. This is how assisted death is typically approached in other countries, including Belgium and the Netherlands. But in Canada, the system largely developed around the MAID coordination centers assembled in the provinces, complete with 1-800 numbers for self-referrals. The result is that MAID assessors generally have no preexisting relationship with the patients they’re assessing.

How do you navigate, then, the hidden corridors of a stranger’s suffering? Claude Rivard told me about a Track 2 patient who had called to cancel his scheduled euthanasia. As a result of a motorcycle accident, the man could not walk; now blind, he was living in a long-term-care facility and rarely had visitors; he had been persistent in his request for MAID. But when his family learned that he’d applied and been approved, they started visiting him again. “And it changed everything,” Rivard said. He was in contact with his children again. He was in contact with his ex-wife again. “He decided, ‘No, I still have pleasure in life, because the family, the kids are coming; even if I can’t see them, I can touch them, and I can talk to them, so I’m changing my mind.’ ”

I asked Rivard whether this turn of events—the apparent plasticity of the man’s desire to die—had given him pause about approving the patient for MAID in the first place. Not at all, he said. “I had no control on what the family was going to do.”

Some of the opposition to MAID in Canada is religious in character. The Catholic Church condemns euthanasia, though Church influence in Canada, as elsewhere, has waned dramatically, particularly where it was once strongest, in Quebec. But from the outset there were other concerns, chief among them the worry that assisted death, originally authorized for one class of patient, would eventually become legal for a great many others too. National disability-rights groups warned that Canadians with physical and intellectual disabilities—people whose lives were already undervalued in society, and of whom 17 percent live in poverty—would be at particular risk. As assisted death became “sanitized,” one group argued, “more and more will be encouraged to choose this option, further entrenching the ‘better off dead’ message in public consciousness.”

Johnny C. Y. Lam for The Atlantic

At a hospital in Quebec, a pharmacist prepares the drugs used in euthanasia.

For these critics, the “reasonably foreseeable” death requirement had been the solitary consolation in an otherwise lost constitutional battle. The elimination of that protection with the creation of Track 2 reinforced their conviction that MAID would result in Canada’s most marginalized citizens being subtly coerced into premature death. Canadian officials acknowledged these concerns—“We know that in some places in our country, it’s easier to access MAID than it is to get a wheelchair,” Carla Qualtrough, the disability-inclusion minister, admitted in 2020—but reiterated that socioeconomic suffering was not a legal basis for MAID. Justin Trudeau took pains to assure the public that patients were not being backed into assisted death because of their inability to afford proper housing, say, or get timely access to medical care. It “simply isn’t something that ends up happening,” he said.

Sathya Dhara Kovac, of Winnipeg, knew otherwise. Before dying by MAID in 2022, at the age of 44, Kovac wrote her own obituary. She explained that life with ALS had “not been easy”; it was, as far as illnesses went, a “shitty” one. But the illness itself was not the reason she wanted to die. Kovac told the local press prior to being euthanized that she had fought unsuccessfully to get adequate home-care services; she needed more than the 55 hours a week covered by the province, couldn’t afford the cost of a private agency to take care of the balance, and didn’t want to be relegated to a long-term-care facility. “Ultimately it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system,” Kovac wrote. “I could have had more time if I had more help.”

Earlier this spring, I met in Vancouver with Marcia Doherty; she was approved for Track 2 MAID shortly after it was legalized, four years ago. The 57-year-old has suffered for most of her life from complex chronic illnesses, including myalgic encephalomyelitis, fibromyalgia, and Epstein-Barr virus. Her daily experience of pain is so total that it is best captured in terms of what doesn’t hurt (the tips of her ears; sometimes the tip of her nose) as opposed to all the places that do. Yet at the core of her suffering is not only the pain itself, Doherty told me; it’s that, as the years go by, she can’t afford the cost of managing it. Only a fraction of the treatments she relies on are covered by her province’s health-care plan, and with monthly disability assistance her only consistent income, she is overwhelmed with medical debt. Doherty understands that someday, the pressure may simply become too much. “I didn’t apply for MAID because I want to be dead,” she told me. “I applied for MAID on ruthless practicality.”

It is difficult to understand MAID in such circumstances as a triumphant act of autonomy—as if the state, by facilitating death where it has failed to provide adequate resources to live, has somehow given its most vulnerable citizens the dignity of choice. In January 2024, a quadriplegic man named Normand Meunier entered a Quebec hospital with a respiratory infection; after four days confined to an emergency-room stretcher, unable to secure a proper mattress despite his partner’s pleas, he developed a painful bedsore that led him to apply for MAID. “I don’t want to be a burden,” he told Radio-Canada the day before he was euthanized, that March.

[Read: Brittany Maynard and the challenge of dying with dignity]

Nearly half of all Canadians who have died by MAID viewed themselves as a burden on family and friends. For some disabled citizens, the availability of assisted death has sowed doubt about how the medical establishment itself sees them—about whether their lives are in fact considered worthy of saving. In the fall of 2022, a 49-year-old Nova Scotia woman who is physically disabled and had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer was readying for a lifesaving mastectomy when a member of her surgical team began working through a list of pre-op questions about her medications and the last time she ate—and was she familiar with medical assistance in dying? The woman told me she felt suddenly and acutely aware of her body, the tissue-thin gown that wouldn’t close. “It left me feeling like maybe I should be second-guessing my decision,” she recalled. “It was the thing I was thinking about as I went under; when I woke up, it was the first thought in my head.” Fifteen months later, when the woman returned for a second mastectomy, she was again asked if she was aware of MAID. Today she still wonders if, were she not disabled, the question would even have been asked. Gus Grant, the registrar and CEO of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Nova Scotia, has said that the timing of the queries to this woman was “clearly inappropriate and insensitive,” but he also emphasized that “there’s a difference between raising the topic of discussing awareness about MAID, and possible eligibility, from offering MAID.”

And yet there is also a reason why, in some countries, clinicians are either expressly prohibited or generally discouraged from initiating conversations about assisted death. However sensitively the subject is broached, death never presents itself neutrally; to regard the line between an “offer” and a simple recitation of information as somehow self-evident is to ignore this fact, as well as the power imbalance that freights a health professional’s every gesture with profound meaning. Perhaps the now-suspended Veterans Affairs caseworker who, in 2022, was found by the department to have “inappropriately raised” MAID with several service members had meant no harm. But according to testimony, one combat veteran was so shaken by the exchange—he had called seeking support for his ailments and was not suicidal, but was told that MAID was preferable to “blowing your brains out”—that he left the country.

In 2023, Kathrin Mentler, who lives with concurrent mental and physical disabilities, including rheumatoid arthritis and other forms of chronic pain, arrived at Vancouver General Hospital asking for help amid a suicidal crisis. Mentler has stated in a sworn affidavit that the hospital clinician who performed the intake told her that although they could contact the on-call psychiatrist, no beds were available in the unit. The clinician then asked if Mentler had ever considered MAID, describing it as a “peaceful” process compared with her recent suicide attempt via overdose, for which she’d been hospitalized. Mentler said that she left the hospital in a “panic,” and that the encounter had validated many of her worst fears: that she was a “burden” on an overtaxed system and that it would be “reasonable” for her to want to die. (In response to press reports about Mentler’s experience, the regional health authority said that the conversation was part of a “clinical evaluation” to assess suicide risk and that staff are required to “explore all available care options” with patients.)

MAID advocates dispute the charge that disabled Canadians are being quietly or overtly pressured to consider assisted death, calling it a myth generated by what they view as sensationalized accounts in the press; in parliamentary hearings, lawmakers, citing federal data, have emphasized that “only a small number” of MAID recipients are unable to access the medical services and social supports they require. Even so, this past March, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities formally called for the repeal of Track 2 MAID in Canada—arguing that the federal government had “fundamentally changed” the premise of assisted dying on the basis of “negative, ableist perceptions of the quality and value” of disabled lives, without addressing the systemic inequalities that amplify their perceived suffering.

Marcia Doherty agrees that it should never have come to this: her country resolving to assist her and other disabled citizens more in death than in life. She is furious that she has been “allowed to deteriorate,” despite advocating for herself before every agency and official capable of effecting change. But she is adamantly opposed to any repeal of Track 2. She expressed a sentiment I heard from others in my reporting: that the “relief” of knowing an assisted death is available to her, should the despair become unbearable, has empowered her in the fight to live.

Doherty may someday decide to access MAID. But she doesn’t want anyone ever to say she “chose” it.

Ellen Wiebe never had reservations about taking on Track 2 cases—indeed, unlike most clinicians, she never had reservations about providing MAID at all. The Vancouver-based family physician had long been comfortable with controversy, having spent the bulk of her four decades in medicine as an abortion provider. As Wiebe saw it, MAID was perfectly in keeping with her “human-rights-focused” career. Over the past nine years, she has euthanized more than 430 patients and become one of the world’s most outspoken champions of MAID. Today, while virtually all of her colleagues rely on referrals from MAID coordination centers, Wiebe regularly receives requests directly from patients. Coordinators also call her when they have a patient whose previous MAID requests were rejected. (There is no limit to how many times a person can apply for MAID.) “Because I’m me, you know, they send those down to Ellen Wiebe,” she told me. I asked her what she meant by that. “My reputation,” she replied.

In the summer of 2024, Wiebe heard from a 53-year-old woman in Alberta who was experiencing acute psychiatric distress—“the horrors,” the patient called them—compounded by her reaction to, and then withdrawal from, an antipsychotic drug she was prescribed for sleep. None of the woman’s doctors would facilitate her desire to die. This was when, according to the version of events the woman’s common-law husband would later submit to British Columbia’s supreme court, she searched online for alternatives and came across Wiebe. At the end of their first meeting, a Zoom call, Wiebe said she would approve the woman for the procedure. On her formal application, the woman gave “akathisia”—a movement disorder characterized by intense feelings of inner restlessness and an inability to sit still, commonly caused by withdrawal from antipsychotic medication—as her reason for requesting an assisted death. According to court filings, no one the woman knew was willing to witness her sign the application form, as the law requires, so Wiebe had a volunteer at her clinic do so over Zoom. And because the woman still needed another physician or nurse practitioner to declare her eligible, Wiebe arranged for Elizabeth Whynot, a fellow family physician in Vancouver, to provide the second assessment. The patient was approved for MAID after a video call, and the procedure was set for October 27, 2024, in Wiebe’s clinic.

Following the approval, detailed in the court filings, the Alberta woman had another Zoom call with Wiebe; this time, her husband joined the conversation. He had concerns, specifically as to how akathisia qualified as “irremediable.” Specialists had assured the woman that if she committed to the gradual tapering protocol they’d prescribed, she could very likely expect relief within months. The husband also worried that Wiebe hadn’t sufficiently considered his wife’s unresolved mental-health issues, and whether she was capable, in her present state, of giving truly informed consent. The day before his wife was scheduled to die, he petitioned a Vancouver judge to halt the procedure, arguing that Wiebe had negligently approved the woman on the basis of a condition that did not qualify for MAID. In a widely publicized decision, the next morning the judge issued a last-minute injunction blocking Wiebe or any other clinician from carrying out the woman’s death as scheduled. “I can only imagine the pain she has been experiencing, and I recognize that this injunction will likely only make that worse,” the judge wrote. But there was an “arguable case,” he concluded, as to whether the criteria for MAID had been “properly applied in the circumstances.” The husband did not seek a new injunction after the temporary order expired, and in January, he withdrew the lawsuit altogether. Wiebe would not comment on the case other than to say she has never violated MAID laws and does not know of any provider who has. The lawyer who had represented the husband said she could not comment on whether the woman is still alive.

Jennilee Marigomen for The Atlantic

Ellen Wiebe at her office in Vancouver

A number of similar lawsuits have been filed in recent years as Canadians come to terms with the hollow oversight of MAID. Because no formal procedure exists for challenging an approval in advance of a provision, many concerned family members see little choice but to take a loved one to court to try to halt a scheduled death. What oversight does exist takes place at the provincial or territorial level, and only after the fact. Protocols differ significantly across jurisdictions. In Ontario, the chief coroner’s office oversees a system in which all Track 2 cases are automatically referred to a multidisciplinary committee for postmortem scrutiny. Since 2018, the coroner’s office has identified more than 480 compliance issues involving federal and provincial MAID policies, including clinicians failing to consult with an expert in their patient’s condition prior to approval—a key Track 2 safeguard—and using the wrong drugs in a provision. The office’s death-review committee periodically publishes summaries of particular cases, for both Track 1 and Track 2, to “generate discussion” for “practical improvement.”

There was, for example, the case of Mr. C, a man in his 70s who, in 2024, requested MAID while receiving in-hospital palliative care for metastatic cancer. It should have been a straightforward Track 1 case. But two days after his request, according to the committee’s report, the man experienced sharp cognitive decline and lost the ability to communicate, his eyes opening only in response to painful stimuli. His palliative-care team deemed him incapable of consenting to health-care decisions, including final permission for MAID. Despite that conclusion, a MAID clinician proceeded with the assessment, “vigorously” rousing the man to ask if he still wanted euthanasia (to which the man mouthed “yes”), and then withholding the man’s pain medication until he appeared “more alert.” After confirming the man’s wishes via “short verbal statements” and “head nods and blinking,” the assessor approved him for MAID; with sign-off from a second clinician, and a final consent from Mr. C mouthing “yes,” he was euthanized.

Had this patient clearly consented to his death? Finding no documentation of a “rigorous evaluation of capacity,” the death-review committee expressed “concerns” about the process. The implication would seem startling—in a regime animated at its core by patient autonomy, a man was not credibly found to have exercised his own. Yet Mr. C’s death was reduced essentially to a matter of academic inquiry, an opportunity for “lessons learned.” Of the hundreds of irregularities flagged over the years by the coroner’s office, almost all have been dealt with through an “Informal Conversation,” an “Educational Email,” or a “Notice Email,” depending on their severity. Specific sanctions are not made public. No case has ever been referred to law enforcement for investigation.

Wiebe acknowledged that several complaints have been filed against her over the years but noted that she has never been found guilty of wrongdoing. “And if a lawyer says, ‘Oh—I disagreed with some of those things,’ I’d say, ‘Well, they didn’t put lawyers in charge of this.’ ” She laughed. “We were the ones trusted with the safeguards.” And the law was clear, Wiebe said: “If the assessor”—meaning herself—“believes that they qualify, then I’m not guilty of a crime.”

Despite all of the questions surrounding Track 2, Canada is proceeding with the expansion of MAID to additional categories of patients while gauging public interest in even more. As early as 2016, the federal government had agreed to launch exploratory investigations into the possible future provision of MAID for people whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental disorder, as well as to “mature minors,” people younger than 18 who are “deemed to have requisite decision-making capacity.” The government also pledged to consider “advance requests”—that is, allowing people to consent now to receive MAID at some specified future point when their illness renders them incapable of making or affirming the decision to die. Meanwhile, the Quebec College of Physicians has raised the possibility of legalizing euthanasia for infants born with “severe malformations,” a rare practice currently legal only in the Netherlands, the first country to adopt it since Nazi Germany did so in 1939.

As part of Track 2 legislation in 2021, lawmakers extended eligibility—to take effect at some point in the future—to Canadians suffering from mental illness alone. This, despite the submissions of many of the nation’s top psychiatric and mental-health organizations that no evidence-based standard exists for determining whether a psychiatric condition is irremediable. A number of experts also shared concerns about whether it was possible to credibly distinguish between suicidal ideation and a desire for MAID.

After several contentious delays, MAID for mental illness is now set to take effect in 2027; authorities have been tasked in the meantime with figuring out how MAID should actually be applied in such cases. The debate has produced thousands of pages of special reports and parliamentary testimony. What all sides do agree on is that, in practice, mental disorders are already a regular feature of Canada’s MAID regime. At one hearing, Mona Gupta, a psychiatrist and the chair of an expert panel charged with recommending protocols and safeguards for psychiatric MAID, noted pointedly that “people with mental disorders are requesting and accessing MAID now.” They include patients whose requests are “largely motivated by their mental disorder but who happen to have another qualifying condition,” as well as those with “long histories of suicidality” or questionable decision-making capacity. They may also be poor and homeless and have little interaction with the health-care system. But whatever the case, Gupta said, when it comes to navigating the complex intersection of MAID and mental illness, “assessors and health-care providers already do this.”

The argument was meant to assuage concerns about clinical readiness. For critics, however, it only reinforced a belief that, in some cases, physical conditions are simply being used to bear the legal weight of a different, ineligible basis for MAID, including mental disorders. In one of Canada’s more controversial cases, a 61-year-old man named Alan Nichols, who had a history of depression and other conditions, applied for MAID in 2019 while on suicide watch at a British Columbia hospital. A few weeks later, he was euthanized on the basis of “hearing loss.”

[Read: ‘I’m the doctor who is here to help you die’]

As Canadians await the rollout of psychiatric MAID, Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying has formally recommended expanding MAID access to mature minors. In the committee’s 2023 report, following a series of hearings, lawmakers acknowledged the various factors that could affect young people’s capacity to evaluate their circumstances—for one, the adolescent brain’s far from fully developed faculties for “risk assessment and decision-making.” But they noted that, according to several parliamentary witnesses, children with serious medical conditions “tend to possess an uncommon level of maturity.” The committee advised that MAID be limited (“at this stage”) to minors with reasonably foreseeable natural deaths, and endorsed a requirement for “parental consultation,” but not parental consent. As a lawyer with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan told the committee, “Parents may be reluctant to consent to the death of their child.”

Whether Canadian officials will eventually add mature minors to the eligibility list remains unclear. At the moment, their attention is largely focused on a different category of expansion. Last year, the province of Quebec took the next step in what some regard as the “natural evolution” of MAID: the honoring of advance requests to be euthanized. Under the Quebec law, patients in the province with cognitive conditions such as Alzheimer’s can define a threshold they don’t wish to cross. Some people might request to die when they no longer recognize their children, for example; others might indicate incontinence as a benchmark. When the threshold seems to have been reached, perhaps after an alert from a “trusted third party,” a MAID practitioner determines whether the patient is indeed suffering intolerably according to the terms of the advance request. Since 2016, public demand for this expansion has been steady, fueled by the testimonies of those who have watched loved ones endure the full course of dementia and do not want to suffer the same fate.

In parliamentary hearings, Quebec officials have discussed the potential problem of “pleasant dementia,” acknowledging that it might be difficult for a provider to euthanize someone who “seems happy” and “absolutely doesn’t remember” consenting to an assisted death earlier in their illness. Quebec officials have also discussed the issue of resistance. The Netherlands, the only other jurisdiction where euthanizing an incapable but conscious person as a result of an advance request is legal, offers an example of what MAID in such a circumstance could look like.

In 2016, a geriatrician in the Netherlands euthanized an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s who, four years earlier, shortly after being diagnosed, had advised that she wanted to die when she was “no longer able to live at home.” Eventually, the woman was admitted to a nursing home, and her husband duly asked the facility’s geriatrician to initiate MAID. The geriatrician, along with two other doctors, agreed that the woman was “suffering hopelessly and intolerably.” On the day of the euthanasia, the geriatrician decided to add a sedative surreptitiously to the woman’s coffee; it was given to “prevent a struggle,” the doctor would later explain, and surreptitiously because the woman would have “asked questions” and “refused to take it.” But as the injections began, the woman reacted and tried to sit up. Her family helped hold her down until the procedure was over and she was dead. The case prompted the first criminal investigation under the country’s euthanasia law. The physician was acquitted by a district court in 2019, and that decision was upheld by the Dutch supreme court the following year.

In Quebec, more than 100 advance requests have been filed; according to several sources, at least one has been carried out. The law currently states that any sign of refusal “must be respected”; at the same time, if the clinician determines that expressions of resistance are “behavioural symptoms” of a patient’s illness, and not necessarily an actual objection to receiving MAID, the euthanasia can continue anyway. The Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers has stated that “pre-sedating the person with medications such as benzodiazepines may be warranted to avoid potential behaviours that may result from misunderstanding.”

Laurent Boisvert, an emergency physician in Montreal who has euthanized some 600 people since 2015, told me that he has thus far helped seven patients, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, to file advance requests, and that they included clear instructions on what he is to do in the event of resistance. He is not concerned about potentially encountering happy dementia. “It doesn’t exist,” he said.

The Canadian government had tried, in the early years of MAID, to forecast the country’s demand for assisted death. The first projection, in 2018, was that Canada’s MAID rate would achieve a “steady state” of 2 percent of total deaths; then, in 2022, federal officials estimated that the rate would stabilize at 4 percent by 2033. After Canada blew past both numbers—the latter, 11 years ahead of schedule—officials simply stopped publishing predictions.

And yet it was never clear how Canadians were meant to understand their country’s assisted-death rate: whether, in the government’s view, there is such a thing as too much MAID. In parliamentary hearings, federal officials have indicated that a national rate of 7 percent—the rate already reached in Quebec—might be potentially “concerning” and “wise and prudent to look into,” but did not elaborate further. If Canadian leaders feel viscerally troubled by a certain prevalence of euthanasia, they seem reluctant to explain why.

The original assumption was that euthanasia in Canada would follow roughly the same trajectory that euthanasia had followed in Belgium and the Netherlands. But even under those permissive regimes, the law requires that patients exhaust all available treatment options before seeking euthanasia. In Canada, where ensuring access has always been paramount, such a requirement was thought to be too much of an infringement on patient autonomy. Although Track 2 requires that patients be informed of possible alternative means of alleviating their suffering, it does not require that those options actually be made available. Last year, the Quebec government announced plans to spend nearly $1 million on a study of why so many people in the province are choosing to die by euthanasia. The announcement came shortly after Michel Bureau, who heads Quebec’s MAID-oversight committee, expressed concern that assisted death is no longer viewed as an option of last resort. But had it ever been?

It doesn’t feel quite right to say that Canada slid down a slippery slope, because keeping off the slope never seems to have been the priority. But on one point Etienne Montero, the former head of the European Institute of Bioethics, was correct: When autonomy is entrenched as the guiding principle, exclusions and safeguards eventually begin to seem arbitrary and even cruel. This is the tension inherent in the euthanasia debate, the reason why the practice, once set in motion, becomes exceedingly difficult to restrain. As Canada’s former Liberal Senate leader James Cowan once put it: “How can we turn away and ignore the pleas of suffering Canadians?”

In the end, the most meaningful guardrails on MAID may well turn out to be the providers themselves. Legislative will has generally been fixed in the direction of more; public opinion flickers in response to specific issues, but so far remains largely settled. If MAID reaches a limit in Canada, it will happen only when practitioners decide what they can tolerate—morally or, in a system with a shrinking supply of providers, logistically. “You cannot ask us to provide at the rate we’re providing right now,” Claude Rivard, who has decided not to accept advance requests, told me. “The limit will always be the evaluation and the provider. It will rest with them. They will have to do the evaluation, and they will have to say, ‘No, it’s not acceptable.’”

Lori Verigin, a nurse practitioner who provides euthanasia in rural British Columbia, understands that people are concerned about their “rights”—about “not being heard.” Yet she is the person on the line when it comes to ensuring those rights. This is what is often lost in Canada’s conversation about assisted dying—about the push for expansion in the academic papers or in the rarefied halls of Parliament. It is not the lawmaker or lawyer or pundit who must administer an injection and stop a heart.

On a Thursday morning in June, I joined Verigin in her white Volkswagen as she drove to a MAID appointment near the town of Trail. I had not come to witness the provision, to be a stranger in the room. I was with Verigin because I wanted to understand the before-and-after of MAID, the clinical and emotional labor involved in helping someone die. After eight years, Verigin had developed a familiar set of rhythms. She had her preferred pharmacy, the Shoppers Drug Mart close to her home, in Castlegar. This morning she had arrived as the doors opened, prescription in hand; the pharmacist greeted her by name before placing on the counter a medium-size case resembling a tackle box. Verigin unsnapped the lid and confirmed that everything was in place: the vials of midazolam, lidocaine, propofol, and rocuronium.

Verigin had known the patient she was about to visit for some time, she told me. Roughly a year ago, the patient, suffering from metastatic cancer, had first asked about MAID; two weeks earlier, the patient had looked at her and said: “I’m just done.” Verigin sipped from a to-go cup of coffee, decaf, as she drove. “I try not to have too much caffeine before,” she said.

En route to the patient’s home, we stopped by the hospital to pick up Beth, an oncology nurse who often assists Verigin. Beth has a gift for assessing the energy of the room, Verigin told me, knowing when someone suddenly needed a hand held or a Kleenex, thus allowing Verigin to fully focus on the injections. Beth’s mother, Ruth, had also helped solve a problem Verigin had experienced early in her MAID practice—how obtrusive it felt rolling a clattering tray of syringes into the already fragile atmosphere of a patient’s home. A quilter, Ruth had designed a soft pouch with syringe inserts that rolled up like a towel. The fabric was tie-dyed and the soft bundle was secured with a Velcro strap.

Jennilee Marigomen for The Atlantic

The homemade roll-up pouch that Lori Verigin uses for MAID provisions

We parked outside the patient’s ranch-style home, the white sun glaring in a clear sky. At exactly 10 a.m., the two clinicians walked to the door, where moments later they were greeted by one of the patient’s grown children. The door clicked faintly behind them.

I remained in the car, and for the next while watched the slow turn of other Thursdays: the neighbors across the street chatting in their sunroom, a dog lazing in front of a box fan. Then, at 11:39 a.m., a text message from Verigin: “We’re done.”

The clinicians were quiet as they slid into the car. “Things weren’t as predictable today,” Verigin said finally. Finding a vein had been unusually hard, and they worried momentarily that they might not succeed, at one point leaving the room to discuss their options. “It’s always been a challenge,” the patient had reassured Beth. “You’re very gentle. It’s not hurting.” The patient had remained calm, unfazed. “I’m sure they were doing that for the kids, to be honest,” Beth said. “And probably me too.”

Once the IV was in place, the provision had unfolded as planned: midazolam, lidocaine, propofol, rocuronium, death. Afterward, the family had thanked and hugged the clinicians. “I think the end outcome was good,” Verigin said. “I probably would be feeling different if we couldn’t fulfill the patient’s wish, because it’s also that big buildup and the anticipation.”

Verigin described a checklist of follow-up tasks, including the paperwork that has to be submitted within 72 hours. But for the rest of the day, her duties as a nurse practitioner would take priority. Only later that night, she said, would she finally have the space to reflect on the events of the morning. When the syringes and vials have been packed up, and the goodbyes to the survivors have been said, it is Lori Verigin who sits in her garden alone. “We are not just robots out there—we’re human beings,” she said. “And there has to be some respect and acknowledgment for that.” Verigin told me she never wants to feel “comfortable” providing assistance in dying. The day she did, she said, would be the day she knew to step back.

Jennilee Marigomen for The Atlantic

Lori Verigin in British Columbia

For Verigin, providing MAID to Track 1 patients and even to some Track 2 patients has “felt sensible.” She explained: “Yes, I may be nervous. Yes, I may be sad. Yes, I may have a lot of, you know, emotions around it, but I feel like it’s the right thing.” But when it comes to minors, or patients solely with mental disorders, or patients making advance requests, “I don’t know if I’ll feel that way.”

After dropping Beth off at the hospital in Trail, Verigin headed to the Shoppers Drug Mart in Castlegar to return the tackle box. Verigin told the pharmacist she would be back on June 18—the date of her next provision. The pharmacist was grateful for the notice. She would go ahead and order the propofol.

This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “Canada Is Killing Itself.”

The Invasion That Wasn’t

2024-10-21T10:58:00-04:00

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The Haitians had come to Sylacauga by bus.

Two buses—possibly even three. But certainly more than one; of this, one resident was sure. As he explained on Facebook, he’d been told by someone who’d spotted them unloading in the Walmart parking lot.

The federal government had chartered their transport, locals were saying—an effort to cripple the welfare state of this small Alabama town as punishment for voting red. “Follow the money,” one suggested. The city council had known that they were coming; actually, it was the mayor who’d taken the bribe money from Washington, who’d quietly transformed Sylacauga into a sanctuary city while praying that his constituents wouldn’t notice.

But they had noticed. Members of a local Facebook group devoted to “Things Going On in Sylacauga” knew about the 750-plus FEMA trailers coming in to house the new migrants (“Talk in the barbershop is more like 1500”); they knew about the shelter being built in nearby Childersburg for the others still to come. “It’s about time we said something about this invasion,” one resident declared.

On September 17, a Sylacauga city-council member named Laura Barlow Heath briefed the nation on Fox News. “There is a fear here of becoming the next Springfield, Ohio,” she said. “You know, when is enough enough? When do they stop coming in?” The town is a fraction of the size of Springfield—just over 12,500 people—and without answers, Heath stressed, “civil unrest” was imminent. At a city-council meeting that night, a resident named Charles Mackin said the local Walmart had come to feel more like a “Third World airport”; he worried about hotels and apartment complexes being taken over. “If you can’t stop that, then we’re going to have to stop it,” he told the council. “You understand?”

The truth was that local and state officials didn’t know much more about the Haitian migrants than the residents themselves—their legal status, their path to Alabama, or even how many had come. Conspiracy theories bloomed in the void. When officials began deconstructing the rumors—pointing out that there was no FEMA trailer park or migrant shelter; that the buses in the viral photo on social media contained a high-school football team en route to an away game; that the “influx” consisted of a few dozen migrants who’d come legally to work, mainly at nearby auto-manufacturing plants—many locals called it a cover-up. By then, they had already pledged their fidelity to a story: Sylacauga was the victim of a Haitian sortie orchestrated by city leaders in concert with the Biden administration, a conspiracy all the more alarming for its proximity to the presidential election.

I grew up just under two hours from Sylacauga—a town best known, or at least known to me, as a flagship of Blue Bell Creameries—and thought it curious that for all the declarations of invasion, there seemed to be very few dispatches from the front lines. And so at the end of September, I went to observe for myself this community on the trembling edge of civil unrest. What I found was one small house on South Main Avenue with air mattresses in the living room and no table in the kitchen, a single new student in the school system, and six Haitians in a church pew.

Most of the Haitians came to Sylacauga in June, but not until August did anyone seem to care.

That was when residents of Albertville, 85 miles to the north, posted photos online of charter buses picking up and dropping off Haitian migrants at “odd hours” around town. For years, Haitians had lived without incident in Albertville, but the buses were new, and rumor had it that they were coming from out of state; in fact, city leaders quickly determined, they were transporting employees of a poultry processor to and from work. Residents called on Jay Palmer anyway.

Palmer, an Alabama native, describes himself as a whistleblower and “former Trump immigration adviser,” though I struggled to find any evidence of an association with the former president. (“I can’t really go into a lot of details,” Palmer told me. “There was a program we were going to start, and that’s really all I’m going to say.”) Since mid-August, he has been on a kind of fearmonger’s tour of the state. “This is not happening just because they chose to come here,” he assured a church gathering in Albertville. “They were sent here.” This was about “votes” and “cheap labor,” he explained, and he urged “good Albertvillians” to stay vigilant.

The hysteria in Albertville breached city limits in the weeks that followed, sweeping through communities across Alabama where Haitian migrants had been spotted, and some where none appeared to be living at all. Then it landed in Sylacauga.

Not even Mayor Jim Heigl can identify the precise moment when things changed, the event or sighting or imagining that triggered the flurry of calls from residents demanding to know if Sylacauga had become a sanctuary city. He cannot say, for example, why one woman felt suddenly moved to park in front of the house on South Main and hold her phone just high enough above the dash to film six Haitian men as they sat in the front yard, talking. (“Across from the daycare,” she’d captioned the upload on Facebook.)

Truth be told, Heigl, a pleasant and drowsy-eyed man in his 80s, preferred not to say anything about the past eight weeks at all. It wasn’t fair, how people had portrayed his hometown. Hernando DeSoto had traveled through the area, and also did I know about the calcium carbonate? “Backbone of our city,” he said proudly. Sylacauga’s sister city, Pietrasanta, Italy, has white marble too, he noted, but it’s not as dense as Alabama’s, so the Italians “really enjoy coming and working with our marble.”

Anyway, all Heigl could say for certain about what had gone wrong—what had led to the city-council meeting on September 5 that pitched Sylacauga into the national spotlight—was this: Some people “crawled out from under a rock and smelled something. And then they just ran with it.”

The city council president, Tiffany Nix. (Charity Rachelle for The Atlantic)

“We knew that people were going to come,” Tiffany Nix, the council president, later told me about that meeting. “But we never expected what happened to happen.”

The evening began calmly enough. After signing off on the city’s accounts-payable invoices for the fiscal year, Nix opened the floor to public comment. A woman approached the lectern. “I have a couple of questions,” she said, “about the ‘legal immigrants’”—here she gestured with scare quotes—“that we’ve had come to our city.” She wanted to know how they’d been vetted, where they were living. “Who is heading up, watching over this situation?”

The council didn’t have any information, Nix said, beyond the fact that the migrants were here legally. But Mary Deason, next at the mic, was not satisfied. “My question is, if they’re being bused in here, brought in here by vans, how come the city knows nothing about them?”

“Ms. Deason, with all due respect—” Nix began. “Has anybody seen any bus coming in here, dropping people off?”

Deason: “I see why nothing gets done in this town.”

Then came Darryl Philips, who found the council’s attitude “entirely unacceptable”: “Do we know where the individuals we’re discussing are coming from? Their point of origin? Because you’re treating them like lawful U.S. citizens, which they are not—”

“Okay, so I’m going to cut it off,” Nix said, “because we have no reason to launch an investigation, or to treat people differently because of how they look.”

“Who said that?” Philips asked. “I didn’t say that.” Crosstalk erupted; Nix, who is the only Black person on the council, and Councilwoman Heath started arguing; Philips kept going. “Haiti is a failed state,” he said. “There’s no way the State Department can vet these individuals.”

It was at this point that a man from the audience walked up and planted himself next to Philips, crossing his arms and glowering at Nix. A woman shouted at her, “You shut up and let people talk.” Nix later told me that the footage from the event didn’t capture the scope of the scene: Just out of the frame were more people who’d stood up from the audience, arms crossed and glares set, something she interpreted as “a show of force.”

Nix asked everyone to leave; the meeting was over.

“Good to know they don’t want to hear the truth,” one resident said.

Nix had a police officer escort her to her car.

The clips went viral on TikTok. Within days, Philips was on Fox News. “Alabama Resident Reacts to ‘Totalitarian’ Council President Disbanding Meeting Over Migrant Questions,” the headline on the accompanying article read.

(Charity Rachelle for The Atlantic)

Over the next two weeks, officials pieced together what information they could. Between 25 and 60 Haitian migrants were living in Sylacauga; the school system had just one new enrollee. Many of the migrants had found jobs through staffing agencies, settling into three-month roles with auto-manufacturing plants outside town. A number had already moved out to a motel in nearby Alexander City for an easier commute.

According to officials, many of the migrants numbered among the 210,000 Haitian nationals who have entered the U.S. since January 2023 under the Biden administration’s parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. “Parolees” can live and work in the U.S. for up to two years with the support of a U.S.-based sponsor, who agrees to help with housing, health care, and other needs for the duration of their stay. The program was suspended for much of the summer after federal investigators found signs of fraud—thousands of so-called serial sponsors, two dozen of whom had applied with Social Security numbers belonging to dead people.

Facts about the Haitians in Sylacauga were parceled out by officials in subsequent city-council meetings. Yet there were things the local officials just didn’t know, including who the migrants’ sponsors were, and how to make sure they were fulfilling their obligations.

For some residents, including church leaders, the push for answers sprang from genuine concerns about labor trafficking. (Following a late 2022 report that auto plants in rural Alabama were employing children, many of whom were migrants, the Department of Labor filed suit earlier this year against three Alabama companies for violating federal child labor laws.) Others saw the absence of information as more proof that the government was abetting the “invasion” so clearly under way.

For the conspiracy-minded, vindication came with the collision of two events. The first was the arrest of one of the migrants outside the house on South Main on September 8 for allegations of domestic violence—which was seized on by people who were already arguing that the Haitians were corrupting the town. The second was the vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance, and then Donald Trump, spreading the baseless conspiracy theory that Haitians were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

[Isabel Fattal: The Springfield effect]

Virtually every Republican official in Alabama seemed to want a piece of the Springfield conspiracy—they, too, had Haitians in their communities, and they, too, were supposedly facing a crisis. “This sudden surge of people has created safety, health, infrastructure, and economic concerns for residences,” Senator Tommy Tuberville wrote to the secretary of homeland security. “This situation is simply untenable.” The lieutenant governor wrote his own letter to DHS, falsely claiming that the “HIV rate is soaring” as a result of “illegal aliens.” On September 19, Alabama’s attorney general traveled to Sylacauga to offer assistance.

“It was embarrassing,” Mayor Heigl told me. “He met with our county’s task force, he met with the sheriffs, he met with all our police investigators, everything—and he could not find anything wrong.”

And yet that very evening, there Sylacauga was on prime-time Fox, Laura Ingraham featuring the small town as the latest “target” of the Biden administration’s “open borders” agenda. She rolled clips from the latest city-council meeting, featuring a resident’s protests that his rights were being “trampled on.” She warned Americans to pay attention. “This is a flood of humanity … and it will be at your doorstep soon.” Then she offered a definitive explanation for what was happening: “Sylacauga is Trump country. They aren’t fans of DEI programs, they don’t believe much in gender fluidity, and they do respect and support law enforcement. And we know what [Kamala] Harris thinks of people like that,” Ingraham said. “It’s all a form of punishment.”

Lost in all this were the Haitians themselves. Throughout my week in Sylacauga, I tried to speak with them. Eventually, the six I met at Sylacauga First Baptist Church—men who ranged in age from their mid-20s to their 50s—agreed to talk, but only if I didn’t publish their names, because they didn’t want to draw any more attention to themselves. They spoke only Haitian Creole, so we communicated through a translator. They told me they’d gone to a Protestant church back in Haiti and had been glad to find one here.

Rick Patrick, the church’s lead pastor, and Tripp Dickson, the family pastor, told me they had been trying to learn more about the new congregants; they wanted to know how the church could help ease their transition. One Sunday, Dickson had invited them to his office after the service. But it was difficult to convey all that to people who didn’t speak the same language. Finally, one of the migrants responded with some of the few English words he did know: “God is good.”

Ingraham’s theory of punishment validated what many residents had long suspected, at times seemed even to want to be true: that Sylacauga was the express target of some undisclosed plan from on high. There was order in conspiracy; the notion that the migrants’ arrival might simply be a function of the scattered and banal physics of human life—a guy knew a guy who knew some guys who were hiring—was too untidy to entertain.

But, in fact, there was a guy. His name, by all accounts, was Fred.

So much attention had been paid, at this point, by national news outlets and state and local officials, to the fears and concerns of Sylacauga locals. But strikingly little was known about the experience of the people who’d come from so far away to wind up in that small town. Fred seemed like he might be the key to their story.

I heard about Fred within an hour of arriving in Sylacauga. Among city officials and local pastors, Fred had achieved a mythic status. The First Baptist pastors and other local leaders used the word controller to describe his relationship with the Haitians. As they understood it, Fred, who was also Haitian, was the one who’d fetched many of the migrants from Florida and brought them to Sylacauga; Fred was the one who had arranged for as many as 20 migrants to live in the house on South Main; Fred had set them up with the staffing agencies; Fred had been transporting them the 45 minutes to the auto plants and back. The officials worried that the Haitians were being taken advantage of by Fred, up-charged for rent and rides, and possibly even the staffing agencies. “In my mind, it’s exploitation,” State Representative Ben Robbins told me.

But none of those officials had ever been able to locate Fred; all they knew, from the migrants, was that he did not live in the South Main house himself. Was Fred renting the house? Subletting it from someone else? Was that person a sponsor? Was Fred? Was he working for the staffing agencies, an under-the-table headhunter for cheap labor? Was Fred even his real name?

Trying to confirm even basic information felt like twisting a Rubik’s Cube, beginning with the house. The duplex is owned by a nesting doll of LLCs; the registered agent for the ultimate holding company is an attorney in Birmingham. The house changed hands in August—it had previously been owned by a real-estate investor with dozens of properties in the county; when I called the number associated with this person, the man who answered said he would help if he could, but he’d retired to Florida and had memory problems.

My search queries online became more and more baroque and still turned up nothing; one staffing agency seemed genuinely bewildered by my questions; another kindly referred me to their legal department. It occurred to me that Fred might not actually exist.

Then, on my fifth day in Sylacauga, while wrapping up what seemed to be another dead-end conversation, I was slipped a Post-it note with a name written on it.

Three days later, I was on the phone with Fride Syrus, a 46-year-old Haitian migrant.

Syrus told me he’d arrived in the U.S. in 2019. He’d lived mostly in Florida until January, when a friend told him about a job at a poultry processor in a small Alabama city called Enterprise; by spring, he’d relocated to Talladega County, where a friend of a friend had reported openings at an auto plant. His search for housing, he explained, had led him to a Hispanic man who oversaw multiple houses for a “boss”; this is how he came to rent the duplex in Sylacauga, as well as other properties in town, including his own residence.

Syrus told me that he’d first started recruiting fellow Haitian migrants from Florida after a staffing agency asked if he knew of more people looking for work. Some of the migrants he drove from Florida himself; others bought Greyhound tickets. Once the migrants arrived, “they would go to the hotel until they could no longer pay,” Syrus told me. “And I had this house which was pretty big, so since they couldn’t pay for the hotel, they came to live in the house as my friends.” Syrus said that 12 to 15 migrants live in the two-bedroom space: a couple in each bedroom, and the rest in the living room; they sleep on air mattresses purchased at Walmart.

Syrus insisted that he made no money from the arrangement. “If they want something, I give it to them; if there is something, we do it together as countryfolks, because maybe they don’t have it,” he said. “So if I take $25 from them every week—$25, imagine that—it is just enough for me to pay for the water.” (At another point in our conversation, the figure was $20.) He said the South Main space costs him roughly $1,800 a month—“around $1,000” in rent, and $800 or so in “electricity”; by this math, Syrus would be losing $300 to $840 each month on a house he himself does not live in. Syrus said he stopped working at the auto plant two months ago.

Syrus told me he no longer works with the staffing agency, either. Although he’d brought in new workers just as the agency had asked, he said, “they did not pay me how they said they would.” (A representative for the staffing agency told me that its relationship with Syrus was limited to two occasions when it hired him for translation services, and that he did not meet its requirements for a “referral bonus.”) In the story of invasion outlined by residents for the Sylacauga city council, Haitian migrants, thanks to vouchers from the federal government, are set to drive up housing prices as they snag properties left and right. In reality, most of them are squeezed into just one, handing over some unknown portion of their paycheck to Fride Syrus, whom none of them was willing to talk about with me.

Pastor Johny Pierre-Charles, from Albertville, assists Haitian migrants throughout Alabama. (Charity Rachelle for The Atlantic)

The curious thing about the September panic in Sylacauga is that it was rarely about what was actually happening. People in a small town have good reason to worry about an influx of migrants straining community resources. The schools in Albertville, for instance, have gotten more than 100 new students from Haiti, and are struggling to accommodate their translation needs. The number of Haitians in Sylacauga was never anywhere near that big. But that didn’t stop people from insisting that an invasion was already under way—the lull of narrative more compelling than a desire to reckon with things as they were.

Some residents did try to square the chaos portrayed online with the seemingly unchanged Sylacauga outside their window: “So where are the migrants?” asked one woman in the Facebook group. “Am I missing something cause I haven’t seen them.” But the voices that pushed back were louder: “They are just like roach bugs,” came one of the responses. “They are everywhere.”

Conspiracists love to prophesize a coming flood. When it doesn’t arrive, they tend to go quiet. By the end of September, Fox News had moved on, and no one in Sylacauga was talking much anymore about the buses. Jay Palmer had warned that 1,000 Haitians were on their way to Baldwin County, but he’s revised his claim. “They stopped them from coming because of all the bad press,” he told me.

But the Haitians can’t just move on. Pastor Johny Pierre-Charles, who has been based in Albertville for nearly 15 years, told me he now fields calls from migrants throughout the state who are scared some days just to leave the house. They want to know what will happen after the election, if they should start trying to get to Canada. He counsels them “to be patient—to stay calm, don’t be afraid.”

The Haitians I spoke with in Sylacauga told me they had come to America to work; they had ended up in Alabama because that was where the work was. Most of our brief conversations eventually wound back to work: that or Walmart—where they primarily buy their food, and where many of them go on Fridays to send money back home through Western Union—or church. “We don’t do too many activities,” one explained; they’d gone to restaurants a few times, but they were still adjusting to American food. “But after that, for leisure, we stay at home, we relax between us. We don’t really go out.”

Work, Walmart, church, home—I suspect there are any number of families in Sylacauga who know this tempo by heart. It may be why, at this point, the town seems suspended in a kind of anticlimax. The media lit off in search of greater invasions, and residents were left with only the uneventful truth: a couple dozen Haitian migrants with lives and routines almost as quietly unremarkable as their own.

“It’s a beautiful country,” the young man in the church said. “We would like to keep living here.”

The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump

2024-08-26T06:00:00-04:00

Illustrations by Diego Mallo

Updated at 4:25 p.m. ET on December 21, 2024

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Kash Patel was dangerous. On this both Trump appointees and career officials could agree.

A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.

When Patel was installed as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense just after the 2020 election, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised him not to break the law in order to keep President Donald Trump in power. “Life looks really shitty from behind bars,” Milley reportedly told Patel. (Patel denies this.)

When Trump entertained naming Patel deputy director of the FBI, Attorney General Bill Barr confronted the White House chief of staff and said, “Over my dead body.”

When, in the final weeks of the administration, Trump planned to name Patel deputy director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, the agency’s head, threatened to resign. Trump relented only after an intervention by Vice President Mike Pence and others.

Who was this man, and why did so many top officials fear him?

It wasn’t a question of ideology. He wasn’t a zealot like Stephen Miller, trying to make the bureaucracy yield to his agenda. Rather, Patel appeared singularly focused on pleasing Trump. Even in an administration full of loyalists, Patel was exceptional in his devotion.

This was what seemed to disturb many of his colleagues the most: Patel was dangerous, several of them told me, not because of a certain plan he would be poised to carry out if given control of the CIA or FBI, but because he appeared to have no plan at all—his priorities today always subject to a mercurial president’s wishes tomorrow. (Patel disputes this characterization.)

What wouldn’t a person like that do, if asked?

Most Americans had no idea Patel existed, yet rarely a day passed when administration leaders weren’t reminded that he did. In a year and eight months, they had watched Patel leapfrog from the National Security Council, where he became senior counterterrorism director; to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he was principal deputy to the acting director; to the Department of Defense, where his influence rivaled that of the acting secretary himself.

But in the officials’ warnings about the various catastrophic ways the rise of an inexperienced lackey to the highest levels of government might end, all Patel seemed to detect was the panic of a “deep state” about to be exposed. Such officials understood, as Patel later wrote, that he “wouldn’t sit quietly and accept their actions to stonewall direct orders from the president.”

Patel was ultimately denied a role at the pinnacle of the national-security establishment, but Trump has promised to learn from his mistakes. Should he return to the White House, there will be no Milleys, Haspels, or even Barrs to restrain him as he seeks revenge against his political enemies. Instead, there will be Patels—those whose true faith and allegiance belong not to a nation, but to one man.

“Get ready, Kash,” Trump said before a gala of young Republicans this past December. “Get ready.”

[From the November 2023 issue: Jeffrey Goldberg on how General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump]

A cursory appraisal of Patel’s activities since the Trump administration might suggest that his days as a senior official in the United States government are behind him—that Patel, like countless others on the right, has learned the art of commodifying his association with the former president.

There is, for example, merch: “the official K$h wine!” ($233.99 for six bottles) and the Fight With Kash Punisher Intarsia Reversible Scarf ($25), which Patel wore for his remarks at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. There are TAKE A LAP RHINO tank tops ($35), JUSTICE FOR ALL #J6PC tees (also $35), and Kash Krew Golf Polos ($50–$53).

There are the books. Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy is Patel’s account of his years fighting the “corrupt cabal” of federal officials trying to take down Trump. And in The Plot Against the King, a children’s book, Patel tells the story of a wizard named Kash who sets out to save King Donald from the sinister machinations of Hillary Queenton and a “shifty knight.” Head over to fightwithkash.com, and for a “special low offer” of $19.99, one can purchase playing cards (“the collector’s item of the century”) featuring the story’s characters; the king card belongs to “Kash, the distinguished wizard and corruption combatant.”

There is at least one song: Patel produced “Justice for All,” a version of the national anthem sung by jailed January 6 defendants and played by Trump at his first 2024 campaign rally. Patel professes to make no money from the song or the merch—he says proceeds go to January 6 defendants and their families, or to the Kash Foundation. Few details are available about the charity, but according to Patel, it has funded meals for needy families and defamation lawsuits on behalf of Ric Grenell, Patel’s friend and former boss at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Daniel Bostic, a “Stop the Steal” activist. (Just as this article was going to press, most of the merch was removed from Patel’s online shop.)

All the while, Patel churns out promotional content on Truth Social—for a conservative cellphone carrier (“Freedom in cell phones, switch today”) and a Christian payment processor (“Why not just give your money to the enemy, or switch now”)—and hawks pills that he says “reverse” the effects of COVID vaccines (“Mrna detox, reverse the vaxx n get healthy”).

He has also worked as a national security adviser to Trump (bringing in more than $300,000 over the past two years from the former president’s Save America PAC, according to campaign-finance records) and as a consultant for Trump Media & Technology Group, the owner of Truth Social ($130,000 last year, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing). In addition, Patel has spoken of work abroad, though public paper trails are hard to come by—he has claimed, for example, that he worked as a security consultant for Qatar during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, in Doha.

Nevertheless, Patel has at times vented that he deserves more, according to two people I spoke with. “He complains about money all the time—like, he doesn’t have any money, can’t make any money, nobody will hire him,” a longtime Trump adviser told me. “Anybody who was as big of a deal as he was in the past administration would come out and they’d be on the board of Raytheon and Boeing.” (This person, like many of the nearly 40 Patel associates I spoke with for this story, requested anonymity for fear of retribution. Patel, who declined to be interviewed, denied this through a spokesperson.)

From the time Patel left the administration, he appeared committed to finding opportunities to reinforce his loyalty to Trump. In spring 2022, after the FBI opened a criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of federal records at Mar-a-Lago, Patel insinuated himself into the story, telling Breitbart News that he witnessed Trump verbally declassify “whole sets of materials” before leaving the presidency. The claim ensured a starring role for Patel throughout the probe—ending with Patel testifying before a federal grand jury in exchange for a grant of limited immunity. More crucially, Patel’s assertion to Breitbart seemed to preview Trump’s own approach to the case: In August, shortly after federal investigators executed a search on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s office claimed that, as president, he had a standing order that any materials moved from the Oval Office to Mar-a-Lago were considered declassified. It did not appear to bother Patel that numerous Trump officials flatly denied the existence of such an order.

That October, the far-right personality Benny Johnson asked Patel on his podcast how he would respond if Trump offered him the job of FBI director in a second term. Patel leaned back, laughed, and waved off the question, but a minute later he decided to chime in after all. “Yes, to answer your question, of course,” he said. “Who would turn that down?” Some in Trump’s orbit acknowledge that Senate confirmation is unlikely for Patel—that if he were to lead an agency, it would probably be in an acting capacity. On a podcast in November 2023, Donald Trump Jr. floated the idea of installing Patel as an “interim” attorney general at the outset “just to send that shot across the bow of the swamp.”

Such is the present dynamic of Kash Patel’s life: marketing “Orange Man Bad” Punisher-skull license plates and dubious supplements while fielding questions about which major national-security or law-enforcement agency he might soon like to run. “Kash, I know you’re probably going to be head of the CIA,” Steve Bannon said on his podcast, War Room, this past December. “But do you believe that you can deliver the goods on this in pretty short order, the first couple of months, so we can get rolling on prosecutions?”

Bannon was talking here about “receipts,” the supposedly incriminating documents and emails that a second Trump administration would use to bring cases against deep-state dwellers and members of the press. Patel expressed no doubt about his capacity to deliver the goods. “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” he said. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you.”

“A lot of people say he’s crazy,” Trump once said of Patel, according to the longtime adviser. “I think he’s kind of crazy. But sometimes you need a little crazy.”

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Twenty-four Atlantic contributors consider what Donald Trump could do if he were to return to the White House]

It was only a matter of time before they found each other, is how Patel seemed to see it. Just a “couple of guys from Queens,” he has said, trying to synonymize his brand with Trump’s home borough, and the scrappy knuckle-crack caricature that comes with it. In Government Gangsters, Patel reminds readers of this piece of shared heritage four times.

Perhaps it makes sense, then, to go back to the beginning, to the affluent Nassau County village of Garden City, New York, where Kashyap Patel was actually born and raised. Just north of the Garden City Golf Club, one finds the charming corner-lot home to which he returned after school and football practice and hockey games and occasionally, yes, a father-son jaunt for butter chicken about an hour away in Queens. Just a guy from Garden City—it’s true; it doesn’t quite sing.

Patel, who is of Gujarati ancestry, has said that his parents both grew up in East Africa; in the 1970s, his father, Pramod, fled the despotic regime of Idi Amin in Uganda. The young couple immigrated to the United States and settled on Long Island. Children soon followed. Their first chapter in America began in close quarters, according to Patel, with his family and Pramod’s eight siblings all sharing the same home.

Before long, Patel writes in his book, his family gained access to the thrills of “milquetoast Americana”—New York Islanders hockey games, annual sojourns to Disney World. It was the Reagan era, and in 1988, Patel’s parents registered to vote for the first time in the U.S., as Republicans. But their conservatism, according to Patel, was “dispositional”—they valued hard work, fairness, personal responsibility. American opportunity, meanwhile, arrived just as advertised: Pramod ultimately became CFO at a global distributor of aircraft bearings.

Patel was raised Hindu, the family going to temple together and praying in their shrine room at home. It’s difficult to envision many neighbors joining them. Of the roughly 22,000 residents recorded in Garden City in the 1990 census, 96 percent were white. Four years later, when Patel began his freshman year at Garden City High School, he was one of only a handful of people of color in his class.

His senior-yearbook quote came from the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Racism is man’s gravest threat—the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason.”

In Garden City, Patel caddied for “very wealthy” and “important” New Yorkers at the local country club, some of them defense attorneys, he writes in Government Gangsters; as they played, he listened to their stories about the drama of court. “I could be a first-generation immigrant lawyer at a white shoe firm making a ton of money,” Patel thought. After he graduated from the University of Richmond and then Pace University’s law school, however, his dreams of Big Law and high retainers were complicated when, by his account, no firm would hire him.

On the advice of a friend, he sent an application to the Miami-Dade County public defender’s office in Florida, considered one of the best state defender’s offices in the country. Many of the people I spoke with for this story were quick to highlight his time as a public defender—how incongruous it seems in the context of the revenge-driven exploits that now appear to consume him. Public records show that Patel moved into a condo in a new building in Coral Gables, which his parents bought in the summer of 2005. “He just was a normal, good lawyer; did a good job, never stood out,” recalled Bennett Brummer, who was the Miami-Dade elected public defender for 32 years. Patel writes that, by this time, he was shifting “more and more to the right.” But even if he struck his colleagues as a little more conservative than the norm, as Todd Michaels, who was an attorney in the Miami-Dade office, put it to me, he was not overtly partisan.

State court was well suited to Patel’s strengths as an attorney, his former colleagues told me. He was personable and quick on his feet, and adept at “marketing” and “presenting” himself. After a few years, however, Patel moved to the federal public defender’s office in Miami. There, the work was more complex, more writing- and research-intensive. Despite some successes, he developed a reputation for “style over substance,” a former colleague said—one he seemed aware of but not terribly motivated to change. “He always was like, ‘Look, I’m really good at trial skill. But all of this reading and writing and arguing about, like, the intricacies of the law—I’m not really interested,’ ” a second former colleague recalled. (Patel disputed this characterization, referring to a complex drug-trafficking case he’d handled.)

“I’m not saying he wasn’t capable of it,” this person added. “But I think he always liked being the face.”

Transcripts from Patel’s cases reveal a lawyer comfortable before the bench, many of his presentations sharp and clever and peppered with flatteries for Your Honor. (“Judge, I think you hit it on the head last week.”) They were also embroidered with performative modesties: “On my best day, I’m an average defense attorney”; “I’m not a mathematician, but …”; “I’m not saying I’m a Spanish expert, Judge, but …”; “I know I’ve been doing this by far the shortest time of any lawyer sitting here.”

Many times, this worked. “There were certain judges that he kind of had magic in front of,” the second former colleague said.

This former colleague began to notice flashes of grievance in the young attorney, but they didn’t seem grounded in politics so much as insecurity. This person recalled that when Patel would ask for help on legal research, he would occasionally offer some version of Well, thank God I talked to someone who is book smart and went to all the right schools and checked all the right boxes. “He would always phrase it like a compliment, but there was an edge to it.”

It became clear that Patel “did kind of have a chip on his shoulder,” this former colleague said—that he seemed caught between a brewing resentment of elites and an abiding desire to be seen as one.

Illustration by Diego Mallo. Source: Justin Sullivan / Getty.

By early 2014, Patel had left Miami to become a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. He’d landed a job in the counterterrorism section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. Yet in Patel’s telling, what should have been a dream chapter in the career of a young lawyer fast became a study in the rot of bureaucracy—and the malicious repercussions for those who dared to challenge it.

This education began with Benghazi.

Patel was one of the attorneys from the main Justice Department office who assisted the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington in pursuing foreign militants for the September 11, 2012, attacks that killed four Americans. In his book, Patel writes that as the Justice Department moved to bring the Benghazi terrorists to court, “I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice.” He claims that he proceeded to watch firsthand as senior DOJ leadership and other Obama officials—“political gangsters, frauds, and hypocrites” such as Attorney General Eric Holder and his successor, Loretta Lynch—chose to “go soft” on the terrorists by prosecuting only one perpetrator. It was for this reason, Patel writes—a lack of trust in the prosecution’s decisions—that when his supervisors asked him to join the trial team itself, he declined.

When I put this version of events to three people familiar with the prosecution, I was met with astonishment. One of these people said simply: “Good God.”

Although Patel was Main Justice’s representative on the case for a period, the U.S. Attorney’s Office led the prosecution, they said. The department prosecuted a single suspect, they added, because he was the only one the government had been able to capture. (DOJ later prosecuted a second suspect, and reportedly brought charges against multiple others.) Patel was tasked with coordinating approvals for warrants and indictments, among other responsibilities. Moreover, he did not decline an invitation to join the team working on the actual trial; according to two of his former DOJ colleagues, he was never asked. After clashing with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he was removed from the case altogether. (Patel denied this, saying he was simply reassigned to a different position.)

What all parties seem to agree on is that the young attorney had grown bitter toward the system that had employed him for the better part of his career. And an unexpected confrontation in Texas transformed the building friction into a personal declaration of war.

In January 2016, Patel traveled to Tajikistan to interview witnesses for an Islamic State–related case. While he was there, a federal judge in Houston scheduled a surprise hearing in another terrorism case Patel was involved in. He had less than 24 hours to make it to Texas, and having brought only slacks and a blazer on his trip, he contacted the local U.S. Attorney’s Office asking for a tie. But when Patel finally arrived at the courthouse, for reasons that remain in dispute, there was no tie.

Judge Lynn Nettleton Hughes lost it. “If you want to be a lawyer, dress like a lawyer,” Hughes snapped in chambers. “Act like a lawyer.” Hughes proceeded to berate Patel as “just one more nonessential employee from Washington.” “What is the utility to me and to the people of America to have you fly down here at their expense?” he said. “You don’t add a bit of value, do you?” The judge dismissed Patel from chambers.

Patel’s bosses were furious on his behalf. Hughes, then 74, had a history of eruptions in court, including disturbing remarks about race. Three years earlier, an Indian American plaintiff had tried but failed to have the judge removed from his discrimination case after Hughes held forth in a pretrial conference on “Adolf Hitler’s use of swastikas, the origin of Caucasians and the futility of diversity programs at universities,” the Texas Observer reported. DOJ officials’ attempts to get a transcript of the Patel exchange only enraged Hughes further; the judge issued an “Order on Ineptitude” castigating the “pretentious lawyers” at Main Justice.

The Washington Post included all of this in a report on the incident. In the article, Patel comes across as a sympathetic figure. But the Justice Department chose not to comment, and for Patel, this was what counted. He writes in his book that, although his superiors privately praised him for keeping a level head, they “refused to say any of that publicly,” standing by as the media “dragged my name through the mud.”

Patel brought complaints again and again to the leadership of the department’s National Security Division—adamant that something be done to hold the Texas prosecutors to account for not standing up for him in front of the judge, one of his former DOJ colleagues recalled. It wasn’t that his superiors had failed to understand his frustration; yes, they agreed, the judge was a “wack job,” in the words of the second former DOJ colleague, and they had called the U.S. Attorney’s Office to express their disappointment. “I finally said, ‘I don’t really know what else you want,’ ” the first former colleague recalled. “ ‘The U.S. attorney is presidentially appointed, like, I—what do you want us to do?’ ”

“He just felt so aggrieved,” this person added, “and this continued throughout the rest of his tenure. And I actually think it was part of why he left.”

The lesson of the bench slap and its aftermath, as Patel explains in Government Gangsters, was this: Although he had tried “to do my best to serve my country,” senior government officials had “refused to step up to the plate” for him in return. Patel decided to stop working for “cowards.”

The next year, he met Devin Nunes.

In Patel’s children’s book The Plot Against the King, Duke Devin bursts into the home of Kash, the wizard. The duke is distressed because ever since Choosing Day, a “shifty knight” (otherwise known as Democratic Representative Adam Schiff) has been proclaiming that King Donald cheated his way past Hillary Queenton to the throne. He begs Kash, known throughout the Land of the Free as the “Distinguished Discoverer,” to enlist in “the Quest for the Truth about the Plot against the King,” and after some consideration, Kash agrees.

Patel tends to emphasize his reluctance when he recounts going to work for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in April 2017, whether he is a teal-caped wizard in the telling or just another 30-something civil servant looking for the next thing. He has said that when he first met with Nunes, the committee’s Republican chair, about a staff opening on the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, he thought the job sounded boring; what Patel had really wanted, since Trump’s election, was to work in the White House. But Nunes won him over, Patel writes in Government Gangsters, by promising to recommend him for a spot on Trump’s National Security Council once the probe concluded.

Patel would devote the next several months to examining the FBI’s rationale for wiretapping the former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page, and to uncovering the origins of the infamous Steele dossier. In interviews, staffers and committee members recalled Patel as personable, hardworking, and not noticeably partisan. “He was instrumental in helping us understand what the FBI would have had in their possession,” Mike Conaway, a Republican member of the committee at the time, said. A former Democratic committee staffer told me that Patel at first impressed even some in the minority as “exceedingly nice.”

Some of the Republicans on the committee grew frustrated, however, by Patel’s emerging tendency to go rogue. One of the more surprising examples of this came just a few months into his tenure, when Patel and a colleague turned up unannounced at the London office of Christopher Steele’s lawyer, where Patel left his business card. (“We did everything by the book,” Patel later wrote of the incident.) One Republican staffer, initially taken by Patel’s charisma, came to view him as a “spotlight ranger.”

In January 2018, as the committee’s majority neared the completion of a report on its findings, Nunes and his staff, including Patel, met with then–Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the Justice Department. By all accounts, the conversation grew contentious as Nunes pressed Rosenstein to furnish more documents to the committee. According to a statement later issued by the Justice Department, Nunes warned that he would act to hold Rosenstein in contempt of Congress, and Rosenstein issued a warning of his own: Should Nunes pursue that route, Rosenstein was prepared to subpoena the committee’s communications to defend himself.

Patel interpreted Rosenstein’s warning as a “direct and personal threat against” him—one of the nation’s top officials retaliating against a House staffer out of fear of the “corruption I was about to expose.” As Patel tells it in his book, he immediately contacted senior staff to House Speaker Paul Ryan to share news of the attack on one of their own employees, and Ryan’s office “flatly refused to have my back.” A former Ryan aide described the exchange to me this way: “Kash seemed to think there was some magic wand the speaker had to stop people from saying things Kash didn’t like.”

Suddenly everything seemed to make sense to Patel. Different setting, different time, but same deep state, same story: Here, in new form, was the Justice Department refusing to defend him against “the unstable judge in Houston,” he writes; here was Washington’s dogmatic lack of interest in “defending what’s right” made coldly manifest.

The majority’s four-page report, of which Patel was a primary author, was ultimately found to have credibly identified errors and omissions in the FBI and DOJ’s applications to surveil Carter Page, though an inspector general did not corroborate the memo’s suggestion that the surveillance was politically motivated. When it was released, the so-called Nunes memo was framed by much of the media as politically charged fiction, and Patel was identified for his role in writing it. On February 2, 2018, The New York Times published an article headlined “Kashyap Patel, Main Author of Secret Memo, Is No Stranger to Quarrels.”

The article cited Patel’s run-in with the Houston judge as a key example of his history of “quarrels,” offering a pared-down version of events that seemed to render Patel the irresponsible offender of a sober-minded judge. The incident, in other words, had been elevated to a defining place in the public narrative of Patel’s career—just as he’d always seemed to fear. “He felt extraordinarily mistreated,” another former Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee told me.

As Patel came to feature in more and more stories about the Russia investigation, he seemed to embrace the view that any criticism of him or his work—valid or not—was evidence of a coordinated smear campaign. “All their attacks only convinced me that we were on to something big,” Patel writes in his book.

A few months later, by his own admission, he decided to leak intelligence-committee emails regarding Rosenstein’s “chilling” and “sustained personal attack” against him to Fox News. Shortly after an article ran, according to Patel, Ryan approached him on the House floor and asked him to stop shopping stories to the press.

“Absolutely,” Patel claims to have replied. “I would have no problem doing that the moment he, as the Speaker of the House, started having the backs of people falsely attacked for their work on behalf of the House.” (A spokesperson for Ryan told me that neither Ryan nor his staff has “any recollection of this occurring.”)

They’d given him no choice, Patel reasoned. Somewhere along the way, the plot against the king had turned into a plot against the wizard himself.

By the winter of 2018, Republicans had lost the House, and Schiff was set to take over the intelligence committee. Patel later wrote that Nunes, as promised, urged Trump to hire his protégé onto the National Security Council. According to Patel, when Trump realized just whom Nunes was referring to—the man who “had saved his presidency by revealing the unprecedented political hit job designed to take him down”—he ordered his chief of staff to onboard Patel at once.

Former administration officials told me that, from his first days as a staffer on the National Security Council, in February 2019, Patel was fixated on trying to get face time with Trump. He had a script, and it wasn’t long before many of his colleagues could recite it themselves: “Mr. President, the deep state is out to get you,” as the longtime Trump adviser paraphrased it, “and I’m going to save you from it.” Five months into his tenure, Patel was made the senior director of the NSC’s counterterrorism directorate.

Much has been written about Patel’s year on the National Security Council, including the early suspicions among his colleagues that he was funneling information about Ukraine directly to Trump, outside official channels. In the former president’s first impeachment inquiry, the NSC official Fiona Hill testified about learning from another colleague that Trump apparently viewed Patel as the council’s director on Ukraine policy, though his portfolio had nothing to do with Ukraine. Hill said she had been sufficiently alarmed to report the conversation to her superior and then warn her colleagues to be “very careful” in their communications with Patel. “Let’s just say it’s a red flag,” she testified, “when somebody who you barely know is involved on one of your policy issues” and “clearly providing materials outside of the line”—particularly when she didn’t know what those materials were.

Patel has repeatedly denied ever discussing Ukraine with Trump. In his rendering, his colleagues were jealous of his close relationship with the president and still hated him for the Russia investigation. Not only was the deep state’s plot against him still in motion, Patel seemed to decide, but it had expanded.

For the most part, this is how he explains the rest of his time in the Trump administration, why it is that at virtually every turn—from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to the Department of Defense to very nearly the FBI and CIA—there emerges yet another crop of officials who object to his accrual of power. It could not possibly be the case, for example, that Bill Barr harbored genuine concerns about Patel’s qualifications to serve as deputy FBI director: In Patel’s version of events, Barr was simply one more top bureaucrat bent on foiling Patel’s success as payback for the “mess” he’d exposed in their agency. And if this narrative begins to feel less and less plausible, if Patel’s latest detractors have to date seemed as reliably pro-Trump as Patel himself—well, that just goes to show their cunning.

Patel has a talent for casting himself as the ultimate hero or the unjustly persecuted. I have wondered if this is why he chose to barely acknowledge in his book the events of October 30, 2020—if, in the end, not even he could figure out a convincing way to make himself the martyr of the story.

On that Friday, according to multiple reported accounts, SEAL Team 6 was awaiting the Pentagon’s green light on a rescue mission in West Africa. The day before, the administration had learned where gunmen were holding Philip Walton, a 27-year-old American who had been kidnapped that week from his farm near Niger’s border with Nigeria. As multiple agencies now coordinated on final details for the evening operation, the State Department worked to resolve the last outstanding task—securing airspace permission from Nigerian officials. Around noon, Patel called the Pentagon with an update: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, he said, had gotten the approval. The mission was a go.

The SEALs were close to landing in Nigeria when Defense Secretary Mark Esper discovered that the State Department had not, in fact, secured the overflight clearance, as Patel had claimed. The aircraft were quickly diverted, flying in circles for the next hour as officials scrambled to alert the Nigerian government to their position. With the operation window narrowing, Esper and Pompeo called the Situation Room to put the decision to the president: Either they abort the mission and risk their hostage being killed, or they proceed into foreign airspace and risk their soldiers being shot down.

But then, suddenly, the deputy secretary of state was on the line, Esper later wrote in his memoir: They’d been cleared.

Soon Walton was reunited with his family.

What had happened?

Celebratory feelings gave way to anger as officials tried to make sense of Patel’s bad report. According to Esper, Pompeo claimed that at no point had he even spoken with Patel about the mission, much less told him he’d received the airspace rights. Esper wrote that his team suspected that Patel had simply “made the approval story up.”

Anthony Tata, the Pentagon official and retired Army general to whom Patel had originally given the green light, confronted Patel in a rage. “You could’ve gotten these guys killed!” Tata shouted, according to two people familiar with the exchange. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Patel’s response was: “If nobody got hurt, who the fuck cares?”

Patel denies saying this, or making up the approval story. In his book, he says that Esper abruptly canceled the mission to undermine Trump; Patel then claims that he sent a message back from the Situation Room to say that Trump had green-lighted the mission. Through his spokesperson, Patel said he “would never jeopardize an operation, American hostages, or our soldiers ... In every situation, including this one, I followed the chain of command.”

But three former senior administration officials independently cited the near catastrophe in West Africa as one of their foremost recollections from Patel’s tenure. They remain unsettled by Patel’s actions in large part because they still have no clue what motivated them. If Patel had in fact just invented the story, as Esper’s team concluded, then why? Was it because the election was in four days, and Patel was simply that impatient to set in motion a final potential victory for Trump, whatever the risk—was it as darkly cynical as that? Did his lack of experience mean he just had no grasp of the consequences?

Some people close to the former president privately vent about Patel and whatever they last heard him say on a far-right podcast or at a fundraiser, particularly if it involves some overstatement of his administration activities. The longtime Trump adviser said he had been in Patel’s presence, more than once, when he’d claimed he was the person who “gave the order” for U.S. forces to move in and kill the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019—an operation for which Patel, by his own admission, wasn’t even in the Situation Room. (Asked about this, Patel said through his spokesperson: “Trump made that brave and courageous call.”)

One of the former senior administration officials, meanwhile, sent me a photo of what he said was Patel’s challenge coin, a small, customizable medallion for service members and government officials. In addition to a curious image of a drone illuminating (targeting?) a dollar sign in front of the White House, the coin features an assortment of national-security-adjacent terms, including DIRECT ACTION, SANCTIONS, HEZ/IRAN, and CYBER. “It’s just random shit,” the former official said. “Half of this stuff, he wasn’t even involved in.” (Through the spokesperson, Patel neither confirmed nor denied having such a coin.)

Yet the prevailing sentiment in Trump’s inner circle, according to the longtime adviser, is that there is no upside to calling out Patel’s exaggerations or lies. By now, this person explained, Trump is entrenched in his view of Patel as a “useful tool.” The former president, the adviser said, understands that “Kash is the one you say to, ‘Hey, I’m not telling you to go break into the DNC. But …’ ”

What Trump might also understand is this: For Patel, the urgency of victory in November is personal. He recently described Trump as the candidate “fighting for everybody else’s right to have fame, to have money”—the central prongs of a prosperity that Patel, after nearly a decade in Washington, appears convinced is his due, and of which the leaders of a corrupt system have conspired to deprive him.

Little wonder, then, that Steve Bannon mused on his podcast that Patel, far from simply being the person most likely to oversee Trump’s retributive plans in a second term, could have helped inspire them in the first place. “I think President Trump might’ve read Government Gangsters,” Bannon said. “Yeah, look, he probably did,” Patel responded, fetching a copy to display on camera. “That’s probably why it’s a best seller, and he keeps talking about it.”

To the extent that Americans might struggle to grasp what any of this has to do with their own life—how a federal agenda of score-settling corresponds to their ability to be famous and make money—Patel has yet to offer a theory. He tends to frame political vengeance as an end in itself. In a second term, Trump’s top law-enforcement and national-security officials would immediately focus on exposing and prosecuting those who “did Russiagate” and are already planning their next “election-rigging scam,” he told Bannon—paying special attention, perhaps, to the 60 names in Patel’s compendium of “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State,” found in Appendix B of Government Gangsters.

And then—well, it’s not altogether clear what then. But Patel’s value to Trump has never revolved around precise plans. As Richard Nixon’s plumbers understood, the hallmark of loyalty is a flexible constitution.

This article originally stated that Kash Patel did not include the events of October 30, 2020, in his book. In fact, Patel did include a brief narrative of events for that day. This article appears in the October 2024 print edition with the headline “The Loyalist.”

The Prosecutor vs. the Felon

2024-07-25T09:40:00-04:00

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On a bright Sunday in January 2019, Kamala Harris introduced herself to Americans with an asterisk.

She had no choice, as she launched her Democratic presidential primary campaign from her hometown of Oakland, California, but to acknowledge her past life as a prosecutor. Deputy district attorney in Alameda County, district attorney of San Francisco, attorney general of California—29 years of public service, and 27 of them had been spent in a courtroom. This was her story, and yet not five minutes into her announcement, she was already catching herself as she told it. “Now—now I knew that our criminal-justice system was deeply flawed,” she emphasized, “but …”

Trust me, she seemed to be insisting: I know how it looks.

So it would go for the next 11 months, a once-promising campaign barreling toward spectacular collapse as Harris pinballed between embracing her law-enforcement background and laboring to distract from it. Rather than defend her record against intermittent criticism from the left, she seemed to withdraw into a muddled caricature of 2020 progressive politics—suddenly calling to “eliminate” private health insurance, say, and then scrambling to revise her position in the fallout. By the end, no one seemed to have lost more confidence in the instincts of Kamala Harris than Kamala Harris herself.

Five and a half years later, Harris is again running for president—but this time as a prosecutor, full stop. In her announcement speech on Monday in Wilmington, Delaware, the day after President Joe Biden had dropped his bid for the Democratic nomination and endorsed his vice president to succeed him, Harris heralded her law-enforcement experience without caveat. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris said. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” Harris fought a smile as her campaign headquarters erupted in applause.

[Sophie Gilbert: Kamala Harris and the threat of a woman’s laugh]

The enthusiasm seemed only to build as Harris proceeded to tick off her accomplishments as a local prosecutor, a district attorney, and an attorney general. Within hours, Harris had locked in all the Democratic delegates needed to become the party’s nominee; the next morning, her campaign announced that, in the little more than 24 hours since Biden had withdrawn from the race, Harris had raised more than $100 million.

After years of struggling to find her political voice, Harris seems to have finally taken command of her own story. “I was a courtroom prosecutor,” she proudly said to open her next stump speech, in Milwaukee. Just as in Wilmington, she spoke with the confidence of a politician who knows that what she is saying is not only true but precisely what her audience wants to hear. Four years after the fevered height of “Defund the police,” “Kamala is a cop” has a different ring to it—and with the Republican nominee a convicted felon, Harris’s appeal, her allies believe, is now the visceral stuff of bumper stickers: Vote for the prosecutor, not the felon.

Harris’s decision to reclaim her record has seemed to satisfy the many Democrats who have long urged her advisers to “let Kamala be Kamala.” But she still has only three months to rewrite the story of a vice presidency defined by historically low approval ratings. And making her law-enforcement background a key feature of her candidacy will bring renewed Republican attacks on its complicated details.

Of the various factors behind Harris’s sudden acclaim, one might be that her career has finally assumed the tidier logic of narrative. In my time covering her vice presidency, I’ve learned that this, more than anything else, is what otherwise sympathetic voters have consistently clamored for when it comes to Harris: some way to make sense of the seemingly disjointed triumphs and valleys of her tenure in national politics. The voter could be a lifelong Democrat or a Republican disdainful of Trump, but the story was more or less the same. In 2018, they’d been impressed—so impressed, they’d reiterate—by the Senate newcomer’s questioning of Trump’s Cabinet and Supreme Court picks. But then they’d watched her presidential campaign flame out before the first primary vote; then they’d seen her get all tangled up in the Lester Holt interview as vice president; and then, well, they weren’t particularly sure of anything she’d done in office since, but the occasional clips they saw online suggested that things weren’t going well. In retrospect, their initial excitement about Harris had come to feel like something born out of a fever dream.

This confusion helps explain Harris’s historically low favorability ratings as vice president. It is also a key source of exasperation for Harris’s team: Through the latter half of her vice presidency, Harris has cut a more accomplished profile as she’s represented the U.S. abroad and spearheaded the administration’s response to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Yet a combination of poor stewardship by Biden and inconsistent media attention, her allies argue, has kept those early days of disaster at the forefront of the popular concept of her. Embracing her prosecutorial background anew, then, could prove to be the reset that Harris has been looking for.

[David Frum: The Harris gamble]

“Prosecutor had a ‘cop’ connotation to it when she initially ran,” the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me. “It does not now. It has a connotation of standing up, taking on powerful interests—being strong, being effective—so it’s a very different frame.” She went on: “I just think it’s the right person at the right time with the right profile.” To the extent that the “cop connotation” still exists for some, it might actually work in Harris’s favor: A recent Gallup poll showed that 58 percent of Americans believe the U.S. criminal-justice system is “not tough enough” on crime—a significant change from 2020, when only 41 percent, the poll’s record low, said the same.

For the Harris campaign, this has translated into an opportunity to reach more moderate voters, or at least reclaim those whose support for Harris might have fallen off since the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. “What was considered baggage for her in the last election is now one of her greatest assets going into this one,” Ashley Etienne, the vice president’s former communications director, told me. “As a prosecutor, she can kind of co-opt the Republican message on law and order—not crime, but law and order.”

Which is to say that, much like in 2020, the political environment appears to be dictating Harris’s presentation of her record. Yet unlike in 2020, that environment happens to align with an authentic expression of her worldview. (The Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)

Over the past three weeks, Harris’s friends and advisers have insisted to me that the hard-nosed prosecutor has always been there; people just haven’t cared to pay attention. But there are some problems with this argument. Despite her extensive record on border-security issues as California’s attorney general, Harris often seemed disengaged on even her narrowly defined assignment in the Biden administration’s immigration strategy. In 2021, when Democrats began negotiating criminal-justice-reform legislation, Harris was virtually absent, even though she had been expected to play a central role in those efforts.

When I interviewed David Axelrod, the former senior strategist for Barack Obama, last fall, he wondered why Harris had not already, as vice president, embraced her law-enforcement expertise as a key part of her brand. “She has an opportunity to talk about the crime issue that’s clearly out there, particularly around the urban areas, and talk about it from the standpoint of someone who’s been a prosecutor, an attorney general, and I haven’t seen that much of that,” he said. “Maybe she or they see some risk in that, I don’t know, but I see opportunity.”

[Read: Can Harris reassemble Obama’s coalition?]

Before Election Day, Harris’s law-and-order presentation will need to overcome her party’s larger polling deficit on issues of crime and safety. “By effectively bypassing the primary process in 2024, Harris did not have to ‘play to the base,’ so to speak, this time, but crime is also much more salient these days—and not in Democrats’ favor,” the Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson told me. Trump’s co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita recently told The Bulwark that Republicans are looking to spotlight elements of Harris’s record as a prosecutor, including her 2004 decision not to seek the death penalty against a man who had murdered a San Francisco police officer. (The murderer was sentenced to life in prison.) The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have already begun recirculating posts and clips featuring moments from Harris’s 2020 campaign: her support for a Minnesota bail fund amid the George Floyd protests, her vacillation on defunding the police, her raising her hand on the debate stage in support of decriminalizing border crossings.

At the same time, Republicans seem to be ready to paint Harris, when it comes to low-level offenders, as too tough on crime. When I spoke recently with Shermichael Singleton, a Republican strategist, he noted in particular Harris’s aggressive prosecution of marijuana offenses, and her championing of a truancy law as attorney general, which resulted in the incarceration of some parents. (Harris expressed remorse about the truancy law during her 2020 campaign.) As my colleague Tim Alberta has reported, Trump allies plan to use this record to accuse Harris of “over-incarcerating young men of color,” who have been drifting away from the Democratic Party. “Younger Black men, Black men without a college degree, younger Latino men, younger Latino men with or without a college degree—I’m not convinced yet that these numbers move more in her corner,” Singleton said.

For now, the frenzied and unfocused nature of Republicans’ attacks on Harris has allowed her the first word on her candidacy. Over the past few days, many Harris allies have told me they believe that her most urgent task is this: defining her candidacy and her vision for the country before the Trump campaign, Fox News, and the like can fill the void. On that front, Harris seems to have succeeded so far. Her Monday announcement was portrayed across much of the media as a politician introducing herself “on her own terms,” as a New York Times headline put it.

But this narrative, tidy as it might be, implies that, until now, Harris has been operating on something other than her own terms. That’s understandable enough when you’re vice president. Yet at some point, Harris will be forced to reckon with the unanswered questions from her previous campaign for president: why, at the first blush of criticism, she seemed to cede her convictions to the loudest voices in her party—and whether, the next time prosecutors fall out of fashion, Americans should expect her to do the same.

The White House’s Kamala Harris Blunder

2024-07-04T18:55:00-04:00

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When Ron Klain admitted to me a year ago that the White House could have worked harder to elevate Kamala Harris’s profile, he didn’t know that the Democratic Party, and perhaps American democracy itself, would soon be riding on her readiness to be president. But perhaps he should have.

It was July 2023, and while interviewing President Joe Biden’s former chief of staff in his law office in downtown Washington, D.C., I’d asked if the administration had done enough to showcase Harris as a governing partner to the oldest president in history. Promoting one’s vice president is “always hard,” Klain, who was known to be an advocate of Harris’s, told me then. “Obviously, I wish, you know—you could always do more, and you should do more.”

Four months before the election, and one week after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, Harris’s capacity to lead the Democratic Party and the free world has never been more relevant. And yet many Americans, after three years of the West Wing’s poor stewardship of Harris, are now looking at their vice president as if for the first time.

In another version of the Biden presidency, this would indeed be Kamala Harris’s moment. A growing list of prominent Democrats, including Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina and, in a conversation with me this week, Senator Laphonza Butler of California, are touting Harris as the candidate best positioned to take on Trump in the event that Biden decides to withdraw from the race. Tim Ryan, the former congressman from Ohio who challenged both Biden and Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary, has taken his support one step further, calling on the president to “rip the band aid off” and promote Harris immediately. A recent CNN poll shows the vice president now running closer to Trump than the president is.

[From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem]

It is precisely the sort of moment that the 81-year-old Biden had once professed to anticipate, or at the very least to be ready for: when, after assessing soberly the diminishing returns of his leadership, he would stand aside for a new generation. But if you believe Biden ever took seriously that it could come to this, that he would be pressured to cede his party’s leadership to her, then I have a bridge to sell you in Wilmington.

That would be the same bridge, of course, that Biden marketed to voters in 2020, when he pitched his presidency as a reset to a nation clamoring for normalcy, a lawn-tending exercise just until the party’s next leader was ready to step in. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” he said in March 2020, campaigning alongside then-Senator Harris, Senator Cory Booker, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a few months before he formally selected Harris as his running mate. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”

Four years later, it is fair to ask how seriously Biden ever took the work of bridge-building. In the course of reporting a profile of the vice president last year, I learned that Biden’s team did not especially enjoy discussing whether Harris was prepared for the presidency—not so much because they had doubts about her ability to lead the country, it seemed, but because they resented the implication that there might soon come a time when she would have to. For all of Biden’s early efforts to frame his presidency as a generational handoff, those around him seemed dismissive of the notion that his legacy could be irrevocably tied to hers. My questions about Harris’s preparedness were regularly brushed off as a distraction, purportedly informed by talking points then being pushed by Republican-primary candidates, including Nikki Haley, about how a vote for Biden was, in fact, a vote for President Harris.

“People who are polling near the bottom do things and say things to try and be relevant and get oxygen,” one official told me then. Yet Biden was the oldest president in history, I’d said: Was asking about Harris’s ability to do his job so ridiculous? “She is the closest to the presidency, as all of her predecessors have been,” the official replied.

[Mark Leibovich: So much for Biden the bridge president]

When I interviewed Jeff Zients, Klain’s successor as White House chief of staff, I asked if he could recall a time when Biden had “noticeably leaned on Harris for guidance.” Zients noted that Harris had been essential to making “equity” a priority of the administration’s COVID response, but he was unable to call up another moment immediately; he said he would have his team get back to me with an additional example. I followed up several times, but the anecdote never came.

I asked Tim Ryan on Tuesday if he thought Biden had done enough in these past three years to encourage public confidence in Harris. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, she was very much under wraps for a long time.” Echoing a complaint that many Harris allies have had since Biden took office, Ryan argued that the vice president’s portfolio had been stocked at the outset with unwinnable assignments, including immigration; Harris was tapped early on to lead the administration’s approach to the so-called root-causes element of border policy. “You send her to do immigration, but then aren’t willing to do anything on it,” Ryan said. As a result, he went on, Democrats have now “completely lost” the issue to Republicans. “And you certainly can’t blame her for that.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Ernesto Apreza, the vice president’s press secretary, wrote in an email: “Vice President Harris is proud to be a governing partner to President Biden. As the President has said, he counts on her advice and counsel, and together they will continue to lead the nation forward for the rest of this term and the next.”

[Adam Serwer: Biden must resign]

Of course, Harris’s staggering unpopularity with voters—both she and Biden have approval ratings below 40 percent—is by no small measure of her own making. As I noted in the fall, her first year as vice president was defined by a string of brutal headlines, her office beset by dysfunction as senior and junior staffers alike quit in short succession. Her communication struggles quickly came to define her public image; even today, it is difficult to have a conversation about Harris without someone bringing up the infamous Lester Holt interview, in which she inexplicably insisted that she’d traveled to the southern border when she hadn’t.

Still, when commentators accuse Democrats of “political malpractice” for having kept Harris “under wraps,” as CNN’s John King did following Harris’s post-debate interview on the network, they’re only half right. The White House has seldom put Harris center stage, but it’s not as if she’s been hiding. As I wrote in the fall, Harris by then had traveled to 19 foreign countries and met with 100 or so foreign leaders. She spent the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections crisscrossing the United States as the administration’s spokesperson on abortion, one of the few officials in Washington who correctly intuited the salience of the issue for voters.

Harris’s work on reproductive rights has since come to anchor her vice presidency. Senator Butler, in her previous job as president of EMILY’s List, a political-action committee that aims to elect pro-abortion-rights women, launched a $10 million investment in promoting that work. So when the senator watched Biden talk incoherently on the subject of abortion at the debate last week, “it was definitely painful to hear,” she told me. I asked if she would support Harris, a longtime friend, at the top of the ticket should Biden step aside. “Nobody should ever question whether or not I support Kamala Harris for president,” Butler said. “I think I’m on the record as having all the confidence in the world, and I remain confident, and so the answer that question is yes.”

Since the debate, Harris has fiercely defended the president and worked to assuage donors’ concerns about the viability of his campaign. Many of her aides and allies I’ve spoken with in recent days have been frustrated by the kind of wonderment with which these showings—cable-news interviews and fundraisers—have been greeted. “We’ve just seen Vice President Harris do an amazing job when it’s crunch time,” Representative Joyce Beatty, chair emeritus of the Congressional Black Caucus, told me. But for Beatty, after years of interacting with Harris—co-sponsoring legislation with her during her Senate days, personal visits with Beatty’s grandchildren in the White House—Harris’s rave-reviewed appearances last week were not any different from the performances she’s become accustomed to. “So maybe, yes,” Beatty said, “we should pay more attention.”

For the vice president and her team, the perverse irony is that it ultimately took Biden imploding onstage for many Americans to finally take notice of her. “She’s been out there, on the front lines of the campaign since it launched,” as a former Harris adviser, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, put it to me. “It got more focus, and will get more focus, because of what happened with his performance.”

It could be that, in the end, Biden’s most effective promotion of his vice president was entirely inadvertent.

The Accidental Speaker

2024-04-22T13:20:00-04:00

Photographs by Jason Andrew

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You could be forgiven for thinking it was Mike Johnson’s idea to host the House Republicans’ annual policy retreat at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, though in fact the conference has gathered there for several years. Step into the upper lobby, red staircase runner giving way to gleaming black-and-white tile, symmetrical furnishings, George Washington gazing east from his gilded-frame portrait above a marble fireplace, and for a moment Johnson’s fantasy of what Congress once was, what it could be—what he tries to convince himself it actually still is—seems suddenly more plausible.

When House Republicans met there in March, Johnson was in his fifth month as speaker of the House, and his victory of this past weekend, in which he secured funding for the Ukraine war, seemed completely improbable. In fact his whole tenure seemed improbable back in March, defined almost entirely by Republican infighting. But here at the Greenbrier: How could one not aspire to civility?

At the conclusion of the retreat, I met Johnson in a small, mustard-hued room in one of the more secluded corridors of the resort. At 52, he is a curiously unimposing presence—horn-rimmed glasses, ruminative expression—with little of the gravitas one might assume of the person second in line to the presidency. Really, he just looked tired. But he was pleased with these past few days, he said, the opportunity to bring much of the conference together and reinforce the central themes of his young tenure. “What I try to do, my leadership style,” Johnson explained, “is that I bring in the Freedom Caucus, and then I bring in Main Street or Problem Solvers Caucus guys—people from across the conference with disparate views—and I put them around the conference table in the speaker’s office, and we just hash it out, let them debate and talk.”

“I mean, that’s the beauty of—it’s part of the process,” he said.

[David Frum: Trump deflates]

Even before he ascended to the speakership, Johnson had oriented his nascent brand around the politics of civility, his guidepost the image of President Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill: clashing views on policy, but a relationship governed by trust in the other’s good faith, a desire to get to yes. In January 2017, just days into his first term in Congress, Johnson drafted and invited colleagues from both parties to sign the “Commitment to Civility,” a pledge in the midst of the “increasing division in and coarsening of our culture,” to show “proper respect to one another” and “set an example of statesmanship for the younger generations.” (Twenty-nine Republicans and 21 Democrats signed.)

Yet by the time Johnson declared his interest in becoming speaker of the House, nearly seven years later, his ambitions of civility and dignified disagreement had grown only further detached from his party’s prevailing impulses, and remained entirely at odds with its undisputed leader, a man whose closest approximation of statesmanship is extending his “best wishes to all, even the haters and losers.”

When Johnson assumed the speakership in October, an all-but-accidental selection after a series of failed candidates, he had few useful models for bringing a fractious Republican conference to harmony, or even succeeding in the role more generally, at least not in this century. In the brief historical survey of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic former speaker: “He had Kevin [McCarthy], who didn’t last. The last speaker before that, Paul Ryan—respected on both sides of the aisle, but decided to leave. John Boehner, same thing—made a decision to leave in the course of the year, just decided, ‘This is it, I’m out of here.’ And before that, the speaker went to prison, so …”

Johnson would quickly learn that not even his own hard-line brand of conservatism—a record in lockstep with the Republican base on issues from abortion to Donald Trump’s border wall—could insulate him from far-right charges of betrayal. In the past six months, he has seen his closest ideological allies become his most outspoken opponents, their belligerence manifesting in a ceaseless churn of failed procedural votes, public denunciations of his leadership, and, now, the threat of his removal.

On Saturday, the House voted to pass Johnson’s massive foreign-aid package, including $61 billion for Ukraine. The speaker relied primarily on Democrats to clear the “critically important” measure, as he deemed it, a dynamic that only reinforced the far-right resolve to cut his speakership short.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene castigated Johnson on X as a “traitor” to his conference and country, and assured reporters that she would continue gathering support for her motion to vacate him from the job; two other members are currently backing the effort. For Republicans, it was the culmination of a week marked not by high-level debate so much as new variations of schoolyard petulance: As the speaker—a “Sanctimonious Twerp,” Steve Bannon decreed him—attempted to broker consensus on the future of the global democratic order, his colleagues stood on the House floor and told one another to “kick rocks, tubby.”

This is where the beauty of the process has brought Mike Johnson.

Johnson walks through National Statuary Hall moments before the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas headed to the Senate on April 16. (Jason Andrew for The Atlantic)

Johnson’s earliest intimations of a political philosophy were anchored in the fact of his existence. Friends of Jeanne Messina had urged her to consider an abortion; she and Pat Johnson were only in high school, both of humble circumstances in south Shreveport, Louisiana. But instead, they’d gotten married, and welcomed James Michael in January 1972; three more children followed. “Exactly one year before Roe v. Wade, my parents, who were just teenagers at the time, chose life,” Johnson said at the annual March for Life rally earlier this year. “And I am very profoundly grateful that they did.” In all things God works for the good of those who love him: This Mike Johnson was taught to trust.

And he had to trust this, because how else could he have made sense of the events of September 17, 1984? On that afternoon, his father, an assistant chief of the Shreveport Fire Department, was summoned to the Dixie Cold Storage plant on the report of an ammonia leak. In rubberized suits, he and his partner ventured into one of the vaults to locate and cap the valve, their flashlights barely cutting through the dark. Then: an explosion, screams, both men on fire, everything around them on fire, Pat Johnson’s suit and then flesh melting off his body as he squeezed through a hole in the wall later estimated to be no more than 12 inches square. His partner died two days later in the hospital; Pat, with burns covering more than 72 percent of his body, clung improbably to life. The family prayed, Jeanne playing tapes of the Psalms at her husband’s bedside. Ten days into his stay involving more than three dozen surgeries, Pat was finally able to speak. “Pat told me today that he would make it!” Jeanne recorded in her diary, according to a 1987 book about the explosion and its aftermath. “I asked him how he knew; he said, ‘The Lord.’”

“I was 12 years old, and I watched them,” Johnson told me. “Faith was not some ethereal concept—we prayed and believed, and it happened.”

In some ways his childhood ended with the fire. His mother regularly spent nights in the hospital waiting room, often returning home only at the coaxing of doctors. Mike, meanwhile, helped take care of his three siblings. His role as man of the house became necessarily more literal when his father, not long after the accident, left the family in search of purpose and drier climates, remarrying and divorcing several times. Out of this crucible emerged an uncommonly serious and diligent teenager, the class president and Key Club officer and speech trophy winner. At Louisiana State University, the Interfraternity Council president didn’t drink, one Kappa Sigma brother recalls, but he never seemed to look down on those who did, either.

He was just shy of his law degree at LSU when, in May 1998, at a friend’s wedding, he met Kelly Lary, an elementary-school teacher who wore a red dress and ordered Diet Coke at the bar. Six months later, they were engaged. In a spring ceremony at First Baptist Church of Bossier, the two entered into a “covenant marriage,” a legal distinction in Louisiana providing stricter grounds for divorce. They soon became the legal guardians of a Black teenager named Michael James, whom Johnson had met while volunteering at a Christian youth ministry in Baton Rouge. The couple would go on to have four biological children.

Johnson’s ideological worldview developed in tandem with the final triumphant stirrings of the Moral Majority. As an attorney, he worked for the Alliance Defense Fund (now the Alliance Defending Freedom) and served on the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, articulating a conservatism anchored in the SBC’s position on abortion and LGBTQ rights, an image of government actively engaged in the delineation of moral rectitude. In columns for the Shreveport Times, Johnson described same-sex marriage as “the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic,” tied his state’s population drain to the proliferation of “adult entertainment,” and heralded George W. Bush’s election in 2004 as a referendum on the “militant anti-religious” character of much of the Democratic Party. After winning election to the Louisiana state House, in 2015, he quickly burnished his political identity as a “social issues warrior,” as Baton Rouge’s The Advocate newspaper called him.

[Peter Wehner: The polite zealotry of Mike Johnson]

Yet like many of his peers in the post-Reagan sweep of movement conservatism, Johnson bracketed his grave portents of moral decline with the default assurance that America remained the shining city on a hill, its best days yet ahead. From a young age, he saw in Reagan an unreservedly conservative politics tempered by a conviction that bipartisanship was both desirable and still possible. During the 2008 Republican presidential primary, Johnson would take to Mike Huckabee’s line: “I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad at everybody over it.”

Of course, by the time Johnson won election to Congress, eight years later, Huckabee was mad; everybody in the Republican Party, it seemed, was mad. Nevertheless Johnson proceeded to Washington apparently intent on marshaling the wisdom gleaned from his leadership of his junior class at Captain Shreve High: “Our class has a history of being a diverse but well-unified group,” he’d told the yearbook. “I believe this was the reason we achieved so much and had so much fun all the while.”

Less than a year into his first term representing Louisiana’s Fourth District, Johnson was with his two younger sons at D.C.’s Reagan airport when they happened upon Democratic Representative John Lewis. And certainly this seemed fun, the boys’ gap-toothed smiles as they posed on either side of the civil-rights icon for a curbside photo, which Johnson uploaded to Facebook. “As we waited for our rides, the legendary civil rights leader told the boys about being the youngest speaker and one of the ‘Big Six’ organizers at the 1963 March on Washington—speaking to an enormous crowd after Dr. King’s celebrated ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Wow!” he captioned the post, adding: “I’m happy to show my sons that two men with different party affiliations and ideas can still get along in this town.”

A sampling of the comments in response:

“I hoped you explained to your children that John Lewis is a bigot and a racist.”

“Wouldn’t be caught dead in a photo with this fool … poor choice !!!”

“I WAS TAUGHT YOU DONT SLEEP WITH THE ENEMY .. MR JOHNSON SOUNDS TWO FACED TO ME , I MADE A MISTAKE VOTING FOR HIM ..”

There is of course some romance to the idea: Mike Johnson startling at a sudden tap on his shoulder, turning to find the speaker’s gavel being presented to him—no, urged on him—by the bleary-eyed conscripts of a leaderless tribe. Johnson himself can seem partial to it. “I was just content to be a lieutenant,” he said during our conversation. “So when it happened, I wasn’t expecting it.”

Kevin McCarthy was only eight months into his speakership when, on October 3, 2023, eight conservative hard-liners—enraged, ostensibly, by a recent bipartisan deal to avert a government shutdown—voted with Democrats to oust him from the job. In the immediate scramble to anoint McCarthy’s successor, a handful of obvious contenders emerged, among them the House majority leader and Louisiana Republican, Steve Scalise, and Jim Jordan, chair of the Judiciary Committee and a co-founder of the Freedom Caucus. Representative Matt Gaetz floated Johnson as another potential replacement, but Johnson would wait three weeks before declaring his own candidacy. He “held back,” he told me, largely out of deference to Scalise (“who’s like my brother”) and then Jordan (“who’s like my other brother, my mentor”), both of whose bids would fail. And also, Johnson went on, “because a mentor told me when I was in eighth grade, ‘Always remember that real leadership is recognized, not imposed.’”

But perhaps it could be entertained. Publicly, Johnson all but rolled his eyes at being mentioned as a possible speaker; privately, he started contacting friends right after McCarthy’s toppling, indicating interest. Woody Jenkins, a longtime acquaintance who chaired Donald Trump’s Louisiana campaign in 2016, read to me a text message he said Johnson had sent him on October 4: “My name is being mentioned for Speaker along with two of my close friends Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan,” Johnson had written. He asked Jenkins to “pray that Kelly and I will have crystal clear wisdom and discernment.” Louisiana State Senator Alan Seabaugh, a former law partner and longtime friend, recalled hearing from Johnson as well. “He told me … when it first happened, ‘I think I might be the only one who can get to 217,’” Seabaugh said. “He kept saying: ‘Everybody else has three or four people that have vendettas against them; I don’t think I do.’”

Johnson told me he “knew,” even then, “that I could get all the votes in the room.” But he didn’t want to campaign openly at first, he said, “because I wanted them to come to me and say, ‘You should be the leader.’ And ultimately that’s what happened.”

What had made Johnson, a fourth-term congressman and virtual backbencher, so serenely confident in his chances? “I’ve always been a bridge builder,” he mused at the Greenbrier. “Probably the first box that had to be checked was that you didn’t have any enemies in the room. And I didn’t have any enemies in the room.”

[Read: A speaker without enemies—for now]

In late 2020, when he sought to become vice chair of the House Republican conference, a role largely focused on messaging and day-to-day-operations, Johnson had asked his colleague Tom Cole to nominate him for the job. While Johnson is a hard-line conservative and ardent Trump supporter, Cole, the recently appointed chair of the House Appropriations Committee who has held his Oklahoma seat for more than two decades, is a totemic remnant of the party’s establishment; to step off the third-floor elevator in the Capitol nearest his (now former) office was to find oneself instantly dislocated by a dense fog of cigar smoke. Johnson’s request took him by surprise. “I kind of gave him this quizzical look, and I said, ‘Well, you know, I’ll do it, Mike, but why me? I mean, we don’t run in the same circles particularly,’” Cole recalled to me. “And he goes, ‘Well, I think you can help me reach some people that I don’t normally deal with.’”

For some colleagues, Johnson’s conviction that he was “prepared” for the speakership seemed odd; the role of vice chair had occasionally put him in the room where decisions were made, sure, but it never afforded him any real say in what those decisions were. To the extent that anyone interviewed for this story could remember the particulars of his tenure, it was for his creation of the “Patrick Henry Award,” a prize for members who gave the most floor speeches in a certain period; Johnson had “meticulously” kept track of the numbers, a former senior House GOP aide recalled, even getting little busts of the prize’s namesake to present to winners. “He takes the universe he’s given and he wants to kind of chop it up and make it methodical,” this person, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, explained. “That being said, he doesn’t then do super well with the chaos and the unexpected.”

Johnson concedes now that his concept of the speakership was perhaps tidier than the reality. During our interview, he thought back to the night of his election, October 25, when Patrick McHenry—the Republican who served as interim speaker through the post-McCarthy fracas—prepared to pass off the gavel. “And he said, ‘When I hand you this, your life’s never gonna be the same,’” Johnson recalled to me. “And I was like, Ha ha ha.’”

He emitted a strange half laugh and glanced down at his shoes. “I had no idea,” he said. “I had no idea.”

On October 26, Johnson awoke to thousands of text messages and a suddenly bubble-wrapped existence, or at least the beginnings of one. There were now plans and protocols related to his movements, his family’s, and if Johnson understood the necessity of these developments, he did not take great care to hide his disdain for them, either. “He hates having those people”—Capitol Police, sheriff’s deputies—“park outside of his house,” Royal Alexander, a Shreveport attorney and friend of Johnson’s, told me.

Sitting with Johnson for a portion of our interview at the Greenbrier was his wife, Kelly; I had wanted to know how her life, too, had changed in the months since her husband’s election. “We’re not ever really alone,” she explained. “Because—”

Johnson, looking at her, interjected: “We haven’t been alone since October 25.”

She looked back at him. “Well, but I guess sleeping at night.”

“Well, but they’re standing right outside by the door,” he noted flatly.

Kelly Johnson, 50 years old and a Louisiana native, is a distinctly southern presence, gracious and blond. On this occasion she wore a pearl necklace and white cape blazer (“I think this is almost like Jackie O., with this flowing-sleeve thing,” her husband observed). She is the sort of woman who smiles even as her eyes cloud with tears—for example when discussing her recent decision to put her Christian counseling practice “on pause.” “I didn’t want to, because I do enjoy it. But I just couldn’t do that and fulfill my new role as speaker’s wife and support him,” she said. “I had been in denial and thought I could do it all, and I was going to try, and then a couple weeks ago I went home …” Her voice trailed off. “Because I’m coming up to Washington more …”

“Because I need her all the time,” Johnson said.

“Yeah, because now he says, ‘I need you here,’” Kelly explained. “Before he was like, I want you to be here and I’d like for you to be here. Now it’s like, I need you here.”

Around-the-clock security is one of those prosaic conditions of the speakership at which Republicans like Scalise, a longtime member of House leadership, or Tom Emmer, the majority whip who also tried and failed to succeed McCarthy, would have barely blinked. But for Johnson, who had served in Congress a shorter time than any member elected speaker since 1883, it would prove as much of an adjustment as the demands of fundraising and vote counting, and the scrutiny, too: He seemed unsettled to find the various activities and remarks and posts that constituted his past suddenly of global interest, and to encounter the already-emergent consensus, as he saw it, that his evangelical faith somehow “taints” his ability to lead. By December, Johnson was venting over text to Woody Jenkins: “All of the leftist media is trying to gut me like a fish.”

To other friends he has described the speakership like this: “I feel like a triage nurse on the battlefield: They wheel a bloody body in and yell, ‘Stop the bleeding!’ And I will, and then turn around and there’s another bloody body.” There was the pace of catastrophe, yes, but also the utter unpredictability of its source. He told me he did not anticipate, for example, the moment when he was briefed on a member’s crusade to renovate their space in the Cannon House Office Building; in view of their desired positioning of a club chair, the member had petitioned to have a door remodeled to open this way instead of that; the matter made it all the way up to the speaker. “So, sir, you have to decide,” Johnson’s aides informed him. “Are you kidding me?” he replied. Given the historic status of the building, he told me, the project would have cost $36,000. It was a no for Johnson.

“This is my life every day,” he said.

Johnson with his wife, Kelly, during a GOP spouses reception at the Capitol on April 16. (Jason Andrew for The Atlantic)

It is true that after six years and 10 months in Congress Mike Johnson had no enemies. It is also true that in his six years and 10 months in Congress he had never been in a position, really, to make them. The resulting dynamic has given his speakership an almost circular quality, the amiability that allowed him to win the job now arguably the greatest threat to his ability to do it.

More pointedly, as one Republican adviser close to leadership, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, has come to conclude, “I think members can push him around a little more than they could with McCarthy and others.”

Johnson’s aversion to conflict showcased itself almost at once. Among the more cosmetic changes the new leader set forth was one concerning the weekly meetings of the conference’s Elected Leadership Committee, or ELC. As speaker, McCarthy had expanded the meetings to allow additional representatives from the “Five Families,” as he termed them—the Freedom Caucus, the Problem Solvers Caucus, and other ideological factions—to attend, and Johnson wanted to roll the number back to just one each. This meant, in the case of the Freedom Caucus, that Representative Byron Donalds, a rising GOP star and Trump favorite from Florida, was no longer invited.

When a Johnson aide called Donalds’s team with the news, however, the Floridian’s chief of staff said that Donalds would need to hear it from the speaker directly. A plainly unbothered Donalds went ahead and attended Johnson’s first ELC meeting as speaker—showing up late, even. The staffers spoke again, but according to four people familiar with the matter, Johnson himself said nothing—not that week, nor for the next few weeks as Donalds continued to show up. Instead, when Donalds raised his hand to share his thoughts, Johnson, to the dim confusion of others in the room, simply gave him the floor. (Donalds eventually stopped attending the meetings, but a spokesperson for him declined to elaborate on the reason.)

The episode presumably did not inspire confidence in Johnson’s capacity to govern on matters of global consequence, and certainly there was before him no shortage of such matters: a government yet again barreling toward a shutdown, record numbers of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, and the uncertain fate of military aid to Ukraine and Israel. In some ways it was not until the new year, as Johnson began charting the more substantive course of his speakership, that he was forced to reckon with the inherent fragility of his mandate. He had a three-seat majority (soon to be one), and remained tethered to concessions McCarthy had made to the far right in order to win the speakership himself—most notably, a reversion to a pre-2019 rule allowing a single member to initiate the process of ousting a speaker.

In January, Johnson reached an agreement with Democrats to maintain effectively the same government funding levels McCarthy had established in his bipartisan debt-ceiling deal the year prior, which had largely inspired the conservative revolt against his speakership. The agreement allowed Johnson to avoid a shutdown. But his far-right colleagues were quick to remind him of the trapdoor beneath him, as well as their willingness to pull the lever. “I don’t know why we would keep him as speaker,” Chip Roy of Texas, the Freedom Caucus policy chair, had said before the vote. As Johnson negotiated with other congressional leaders on bipartisan Senate legislation that would tie foreign aid to border-security measures, Marjorie Taylor Greene declared her red line. “We don’t have to trade $60 billion for Ukraine for our own country’s border security,” she told reporters. “I’ll fight it as much as possible. Even if I have to go so far [as] to vacate the chair.”

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

By mid-February, the House had broken the modern record for rule-vote failures in a single Congress. Before 2023, the mundane procedural vote—which governs the terms of debate on a given bill—had not failed once in two decades. In the first six months of Johnson’s speakership alone, however, dozens of members, mostly conservatives, have killed the rule four times. It has become the far right’s preferred method of obstruction, used sometimes in an effort to sabotage the underlying bill itself, other times to punish leadership for an unrelated decision. Johnson has thus been forced to kick most major legislation of his speakership to the floor under a process that requires a two-thirds majority, rather than a simple majority, for passage—forced, in other words, to rely on Democrats for votes. By thwarting the regular rhythms of the House, Johnson’s conservative critics boxed him into the very concessions they then went on to complain about.

By spring, Johnson’s more mainstream Republican colleagues were growing restless for their own reasons. Whether Johnson is “deliberative” or “indecisive” depends on which member you ask; though the speaker’s agreeable nature usually assures smooth conversations conducted in indoor voices, it can also leave members—centrists and Freedom Caucus types alike—convinced that he is on their side. In meetings, Johnson can spend more time taking notes than talking, offering only the occasional I hear you, brother as members press their cases. And there are many meetings. “He has to sort of slow down and think things through and talk to more people because he just doesn’t have that instinct yet of No, this is what we’re doing,” one senior House GOP aide, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, told me.

There can sometimes seem about Johnson a faintly dazed air, the sense that whatever has just transpired on the House floor was not deliberately orchestrated so much as realized by the sheer force of inertia. At no point did this seem clearer than on the evening of February 6, when House GOP leaders achieved a historic first in their failure to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—and then promptly saw their stand-alone Israel aid package get voted down, too. Following the impeachment flop, Democrats erupted in whistles and applause, leaving a number of observers unsure why Johnson had still pressed ahead on Israel. “The floor really does have a pulse,” John Stipicevic, a lobbyist and former floor director for McCarthy, told me. “You have to be able to sense when the momentum has shifted.”

After the Mayorkas vote, which Johnson gaveled himself, he stepped down into the directionless hum of his conference, his demeanor oddly placid. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican and Freedom Caucus member who’d helped manage the Mayorkas effort, was slightly taken aback when Johnson, “unshaken” and “totally confident,” approached to ask if he was okay. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, I guess.’ You know—‘What’s the plan?’” Higgins recalled. “And he immediately was very calm. He said, ‘We got this; Steve will be back next week.’” (Seven days later, with Scalise back in commission following treatment for blood cancer, the impeachment articles passed by one vote; the Senate tossed them aside.)

Higgins, who described Johnson as a “beautiful American man, with an amazing spirit,” framed the exchange in positive terms, a dose of reassurance when he’d needed it. But the story called to mind criticisms I’d heard from other conservatives on Capitol Hill, for whom Johnson’s unrelenting calm has occasionally proved more unnerving than soothing. “Their view is, ‘Can you at least act a little concerned that this is not going well?’” as one Republican consultant, who requested anonymity to disclose private conversations with clients, summarized it. “‘Because it’s not going well.’”

“Some of my closest friends are in the Freedom Caucus,” Johnson maintained during our interview. “Philosophically, there’s not an ounce of daylight between us.” It is a point that Johnson often returns to, as if to talk both his audience and himself into believing that ideas still count for something. But it has been a long time since ideas counted for something in the Republican Party, the “conservative” label now a statement not of one’s policy preferences but of one’s tactics and disposition. As speaker, Johnson has seen his most insistently “conservative” friends, men like Chip Roy—who as a freshman matched with Johnson as part of the House’s mentorship program—publicly question his future. (Roy did not respond to my interview requests.) Those who refrain from criticizing Johnson openly, meanwhile, don’t seem altogether interested in praising him, either. Jim Jordan, Johnson’s own mentor, did not respond to any of my calls and emails over the course of three months.

Remarkably, it is Democrats who have often seemed more willing to extend Johnson a measure of grace. This is not something that his aides and others close to him are all that anxious to advertise, but it is nonetheless real: this sliver of cross-aisle sympathy that his predecessor never quite inspired. “I started out as very worried and concerned and very alarmed by people in his background—almost from being panicked about him. And now 15 percent of me, like, feels sorry for the guy,” James Carville, the Democratic strategist and Louisianan, told me. “I mean, I really want to hate him more than I do.”

Johnson’s struggles with the far-right, of course, are virtually the same as those endured by McCarthy. The difference is that many Democrats on the Hill—some of whom viewed McCarthy as “dishonest” and even “destructive”—trust Johnson as a person. Nancy Pelosi told me she viewed Johnson as “a person of integrity,” if not a great deal of experience. “Personally, I respect his authenticity; I disagree with his politics, but that’s okay.” She went on: “If you’re just sitting in the back bench, and then they tap you to become the speaker, they shouldn’t complain when you don’t know how to be speaker from day one.

“I’m not here to criticize him; I just want him to do well,” Pelosi said as our call last month wound down. Then, just before hanging up: “I hope that what is said about Donald Trump being his puppeteer is not true.”

“We have a very, uh, good relationship, um …” Johnson was squinting at his phone, trying to decipher a sudden blur of messages from his team. “Oh, it’s that Netanyahu called.” His communications director chuckled anxiously. “Yeah, we should, uh …” Johnson put his phone away. “That’s okay, that’s okay,” he said.

So anyway, yes: a very good relationship.

Johnson says the first time he interacted with Donald Trump was in early 2017, when the new president called the new congressman to whip him on House Republicans’ first Obamacare-replacement offering under Trump. “And I couldn’t do it,” Johnson recalled. The bill was a “mess,” in his estimation, and he told Trump as much. “And he was—he was quite frustrated by that. But I stood my ground because I told him that if we don’t get some amendments, it’s not going to be a good piece of legislation, and I would be doing wrong by my constituents, and that would make both of us look bad.”

Johnson ultimately supported the House’s revised effort (the one the late Senator John McCain’s thumbs-down would kill), and after that he and Trump “reconnected.” Johnson reiterated to me that Trump had been frustrated. “But he said he respected the fact that I told him what I thought was right and I didn’t just yield, because I don’t do that.”

In other words, Mike Johnson is no one’s puppet: This is what he wanted to tell me. But Johnson would not earn his “MAGA Mike” appellation—bestowed by Matt Gaetz upon his election to speaker, now Trump’s preferred way of referencing him—by regularly positioning himself at odds with Trump. For Johnson, as for a number of the most conservative House members, the Obamacare episode quickly revealed itself to be the rare exception to a rule of loyal devotion to the 45th president.

[Read: Matt Gaetz is winning]

In early 2020, Johnson served on Trump’s impeachment defense team and then, later that year, promptly enlisted in efforts to challenge the validity of Joe Biden’s election victory. After urging donations to Trump’s “Election Defense Fund,” Johnson went on to spearhead an amicus brief in support of Texas’s lawsuit challenging the election results, arguing that some states Biden won had acted unconstitutionally when they changed their voting laws, partially in response to the pandemic.

I thought of this as Johnson explained to me what he sees as one of his core mandates as speaker: “trying to restore trust and faith” in American institutions.

Hadn’t he quite prominently fomented distrust in the nation’s electoral system?

No, he said; he’d done “exactly the opposite.” “I mean, anybody who’s read the brief, or understood what we were talking about, it was actually—we were the ones trying to maintain the rule of law,” he argued.

It’s true that the focus of Johnson’s argument before the Supreme Court was narrow, avoiding the more hysterical claims of fraud propounded by Trump. But Johnson was—is—smart enough to understand that very few voters would care to parse the particulars of a legal document; what mattered was the image of Mike Johnson out there fighting. This is where his protestations of independence from Trump and the coarser elements of his party ring their hollowest: whether Johnson emphasizes the nuance of his constitutional inquiry or embraces the more ambiguous profile of a fighter changes according to who’s listening. On April 12, Johnson stood alongside Trump at Mar-a-Lago to unveil forthcoming “election integrity” legislation to prevent voting by noncitizens, which is already illegal and rarely ever happens.

The popular caricature of Johnson’s speakership, however—the idea that he arises each morning with a to-do list from Trump—assumes that Trump is actually paying attention. Generally, he’s not; if anything, Johnson can at times seem to wish there were a to-do list. Unlike Kevin McCarthy, according to two Trump advisers, Johnson occasionally hesitates before calling the former president directly. Instead, he and his staff often try to divine Trump’s position on this or that from conversations with those close to him. Earlier this year, when bipartisan border legislation in the Senate appeared close to passage, Johnson was “asking a lot of people around Trump what he should do,” said one of the Trump advisers, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations. In that instance, Trump ultimately did tune in and broadcast his thinking on Truth Social (“I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!”), and soon after Johnson declared the bill “dead on arrival” in the House. (It was “absurd” to suggest that he had done so to help Trump, Johnson told reporters.)

Richard Ray, Johnson’s former law partner, told me he worries “every day” about Trump “turning” on his friend. During that especially catastrophic stretch of failed rule votes, according to the two Trump advisers, the former president resolved to vent his frustrations with the speaker on Truth Social. But aides stepped in and urged him to put down the phone. “It was explained to him over and over again, you know, ‘It’s the same thing with Kevin—there’s only so much he can do with a slim majority, and these guys aren’t playing ball,’” as the other Trump adviser summarized the aides’ pitch. Trump, as it turned out, did not precisely know what they were talking about. “So, he got a little bit of a congressional education” on the “rules process,” this person went on, after which Trump apparently became more sympathetic to Johnson’s plight. There was no post. (Trump declined to be interviewed for this story.)

In the months since, as Johnson has gotten more comfortable in his role, he’s gotten savvier at managing up. It was Johnson who pitched the former president on a media appearance at Mar-a-Lago in April, just three days before the House was set to return from recess and the far-right threat to his speakership was likeliest to crest. “I think he’s doing a very good job,” Trump told reporters, calling the efforts to topple Johnson “unfortunate.” “I stand with the speaker,” he said. “We’ve had a very good relationship.”

[Joshua Benton: Where is Mike Johnson’s ironclad oath?]

Trump’s inclination to support Johnson might stem, at least in part, from the simple fact that Johnson, shortly after taking the gavel, endorsed him for president—in an appearance on CNBC, no less, the same network on which McCarthy, a few months earlier, had questioned whether Trump was the “strongest” Republican to take on President Biden.

Their alliance is nevertheless a strange one. To the extent that people close to Trump find themselves wondering about Johnson, it is often with a kind of detached fascination. Here was a man who’d named his dog Justice; whose favorite song is the hymn “Be Thou My Vision”; who embroiders even casual conversations with quotes from Reagan, Washington, John Adams. No booze, no foul language; a marriage voluntarily stripped of the easier means of leaving it. The second Trump adviser told me he always thought Johnson’s earnest demeanor was just a show—“like, he’s not really like this; no one can be like this.” Cue this person’s surprise, then, at a small private dinner following a recent Trump fundraiser in Washington, where Johnson was among guests such as Senators Tom Cotton, J. D. Vance, and Steve Daines, as well as a number of media personalities and former Trump administration officials. “Everyone’s guard is down because it’s a room full of people that everybody trusts”—which is to say there was booze, foul language—“and the man is still exactly the same.”

Privately, Johnson has used humor to signal an awareness of the gulfs that separate him from Trump—that he is not blind to the patent absurdity of the man. Over the years, he has honed his impression of Trump, and frequently deploys it when recounting their latest exchange. Friends still get a kick out of a story about how Johnson once told Trump that he was praying for him, to which the then-president responded: “Thank you, Mike. Tell God I said hi.”

Peel back the jokes, though, and all these years later, Johnson still seems quietly in search of affirmation that, behind the bluster, Donald Trump subscribes to the same basic truths about the world as he does. During our conversation, after Johnson referred to the “moral guidance” that “you would hope that everybody in power would have,” I asked if he believed that Trump has it. “I do,” he said. “You know, he talks about ”—a half beat passed—“faith. He and I’ve talked about”—a full beat this time—“faith.”

In what context?

“Well,” he said, “we had an experience …” He looked over at his communications director, a wordless request for permission.

It was last fall, the week of Thanksgiving. Johnson had gone down to Palm Beach for a fundraiser; his sons, on break from school, had gone with him. Trump, upon learning he was in town, called and invited the new speaker to Mar-a-Lago for dinner. Could the boys come? Johnson asked. No problem, Trump said. So they headed over, and what was supposed to be a 45-minute get-together stretched on for two and a half hours. A great start to the trip, Johnson recalled.

The next day, Johnson was meeting with donors at a beachside hotel, not far from Mar-a-Lago, when his security detail burst into the conference room. “Mr. Speaker, we need you right now,” they said. His sons had been swept out by a rip current.

In Johnson’s telling, Will, who was 13, was drowning; 18-year-old Jack, prepared to give up his own life, tried to push his brother back to the surface. A parasailer happened to spot Will’s head from above. He hurried back to shore and alerted the lifeguards, who went out on jet skis to bring the boys in. Johnson arrived at the beach to find medical personnel hovering over his sons, pumping their chests. They would spend four hours in the emergency room before being cleared to go home.

“President Trump heard about it somehow—miraculously, this never made the news,” Johnson recalled. The two got on the phone. “He was just so moved by the idea that we almost lost them, and we talked about it at great length. And we talked about the faith aspect of that, because he knows that I believe that, you know—that God spared the lives of my sons. That’s how I understand those events, and we talked about that.” Johnson continued: “And he said, he repeated back to me and said, ‘God—God saved your sons’ lives.’”

For Johnson, repetition was window enough. Much like a parasailer glancing down at just the right moment, a Trump victory in November would not be accidental, Johnson told him, but “providential.” A gift to be embraced soberly, for a purpose larger than oneself. “And we talked about that, and I think he has a real appreciation for that, and that’s been, you know—it’s been encouraging to me.

“So we’ll see, we’ll see,” he said, his voice a touch quieter. “We’ll see where all that goes.”

Johnson speaks during a GOP spouses reception at the Capitol on April 16. (Jason Andrew for The Atlantic)

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago, Johnson declared allegiance to the MAGA position on the war, voting “no” on supplemental aid to Ukraine in 2022 and 2023 and “yes” on amendments to strip the National Defense Authorization Act of any funding for the nation. “We should not be sending another $40 billion abroad when our own border is in chaos,” he stated in May 2022. He maintained this stance for much of his speakership, refusing to put any form of assistance to a vote.

And in the end, it would have been politically painless for him to stay this course. But in his elevation to speaker, Johnson had become privy, for the first time, to high-level intelligence. By the middle of this month—following a grim private briefing from CIA Director Bill Burns—he finally decided that action on Ukraine was worth the risk of losing his job. Last Wednesday, Johnson, addressing reporters in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall, said his turnabout had been shaped by the dire portrait shared with him by the intelligence community. “I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed,” he said.

Yet it was also personal for Johnson, whose son is headed this fall to the U.S. Naval Academy. “This is a live-fire exercise for me, as it is for so many American families,” he said, adding that he’d rather send “bullets” than “American boys” to Ukraine. “We have to do the right thing, and history will judge us.”

[Anne Applebaum: The GOP’s pro-Russia caucus lost. Now Ukraine has to win.]

Three days later, Johnson brought $61 billion in aid for Ukraine—in addition to separate bills with funds for Israel and the Indo-Pacific—to the floor. The legislation passed, 311–112—with just 101 Republicans voting in favor. As Democrats waved miniature Ukrainian flags, Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna made her way to the microphone. “Put those damn flags down,” she spat.

Even in the final 72 hours before the vote, Johnson was still having conversation after conversation with his far-right colleagues, trying to wrangle a “yes” out of members for whom “yes” had never been the goal. To the frustration of his more moderate colleagues, Johnson additionally refused to include language in the rule on the foreign-aid legislation that would have raised the motion-to-vacate threshold—a way out, in the moderates’ view, of the hostage crisis that has paralyzed the House Republican conference every day for the past year and a half.

For many Republican lawmakers, now on the cusp of their party’s second attempt in six months to topple a speaker, the time for appeasement has long since passed. What they want to see now is punishment, or, more diplomatically, “accountability”—consistently obstructionist members stripped of their committee posts, even iced out altogether from the process they seek to disrupt. “They’re forcing us to become more bipartisan, and we should be thinking that way,” Representative Don Bacon, a moderate from Nebraska, told me. “We should be able to cut these 10 guys out and say, ‘Hey, if we’re gonna get something to the Senate anyway, you gotta work with Democrats, so let’s start working them up front.’”

At the Greenbrier, Johnson told me he understands the sentiment. “How do you reestablish the norm, if you’re not going to exact a punishment for violation?” he said. But changing the rules now, as he sees it, would only “create greater problems.” “Because then you have the question of, ‘Oh, well, you’re only going to punish it going forward—well, these guys broke the rule here, and you didn’t do anything to them.’” Better to hold off on any “real changes,” he said, until after November, as part of the next Congress.

Which is to say that Johnson has every intention of keeping the job. “I would assume that I would stay in the post if we win the majority,” he said. “It would make sense to have continuity of leadership at that time.” But really, he insisted, he doesn’t “spend a lot of time thinking about that.”

What Johnson knows for certain is that the speakership is “something I’m supposed to do right now,” a sense of divine calling that he says has made the past six months “tolerable, I guess, instead of regretful.”

He assured me of this five times over the course of our conversation. “I don’t regret it,” he said. “I don’t.”

Katie Britt’s Strange Speech

2024-03-08T20:45:00-05:00

You might not have known it from Katie Britt’s State of the Union rebuttal last night—a performance derided by members of her own party as “bizarre” and “confusing”—but up until then, Britt had distinguished herself in the Senate with a reputation for being startlingly, well, normal.

As in, she wasn’t obsessed with Twitter (or X, as it’s now called). She evinced more than a passing interest in policy. For her, conservatism seemed to mean things other than simply “supporting Trump.”

It was just five days ago that Newt Gingrich was imagining the possibilities for Britt’s future, framing the freshman senator from Alabama’s coming rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address as her “big audition.” “It will be interesting to see if Britt rises to the occasion,” the former House speaker had mused to a New York talk-radio host. “If she does, it will be a major step up in her potentially being Trump’s vice-presidential candidate.”

When I called Gingrich this morning and asked if Britt had, in fact, risen to the occasion last night, he sounded flustered. “Ah, well, um, I don’t have any comment right now, thank you.” He hung up.

Gingrich is far from the only Republican skirting on-the-record conversations today about Britt’s performance. The Alabamian’s 17-minute address, delivered from her own kitchen, surprised many in the party for its tonal confusion and the dramatic affectations that often distracted from the message itself—a party-line discourse on illegal immigration and the imperiled future of American families. The speech has been mocked widely on social media and cable news, including by various right-wing commentators. But lawmakers and other prominent Republicans—those who had cast the event as Britt’s potential star turn—have mostly stayed quiet.

[David A. Graham: The most unusual State of the Union in living memory]

Why did the GOP assign such stakes to a speech from someone who, before last night, most Americans had never heard of?

Pressure is of course inherent to any State of the Union rebuttal; parties have long used the event to sell Americans on a vision for the future of their institution, the kind of leadership voters can expect if they just stick it out (promise!). Yet the hopeful anticipation attending Britt’s appearance was unusual, and not only because her party is desperate to showcase that young, college-educated mothers still exist within their ranks: Britt, married with two children, was just 40 when she was sworn in as Alabama’s junior senator last year, the youngest Republican woman ever elected to the upper chamber.

Britt’s real distinction, however, has been her ability to move with startling ease among the various factions of her party, maintaining good standing among the chamber-of-commerce types responsible for her political rise while steadily earning the trust of her more overtly MAGA colleagues and voters back home. In a moment when the GOP base diligently screens elected leaders for even a phantasm of apostasy, Britt’s 66 percent approval rating in Alabama suggests that not even her cross-aisle friendships—she’s been vocally supportive of Democrat and fellow freshman Senator John Fetterman, who early in his tenure sought inpatient treatment for clinical depression—have compromised perceptions of her purity. (Her approval rating is three points higher than that of Tommy Tuberville, Alabama’s other senator, whose politics, from his 2020 campaign on, have been anchored in little more than outspoken devotion to former President Donald Trump.)

Call it the Richard Shelby example. Shelby, the longtime Alabama senator who retired in 2023 after 44 years in Congress, first met Britt in 2004; he hired her as a press aide on the recommendation of his wife, who had taught Britt at the University of Alabama. Twelve years later—during which time Britt graduated from her alma mater’s law school and practiced in Birmingham—Shelby named her chief of staff. From 2016 to 2018, Britt observed up close her party’s shifting dynamics in the Trump era and the skill with which her boss navigated them; rather than rushing to Fox News to discuss the president’s latest tweet, he quietly wielded the power he’d patiently amassed atop some of the most powerful committees in Congress. When running to succeed Shelby, Britt assured his legions of deep-pocketed supporters that she would take her former boss’s lessons to heart. Translation: She would leave the sound bites to the Auburn football coach.

[Norm Ornstein: The Senate’s deep and dirty secret]

But as she campaigned, she also showcased her ability to win over the most ardent of Trump fans—including Trump himself. Though Trump had endorsed her chief primary opponent, Mo Brooks, the ultra-right-wing congressman from northern Alabama, early in the race, Britt lobbied for the former president’s backing as soon as his relationship with Brooks showed signs of fraying. Trump soon announced his support for Britt; in the space of a year, he had gone from calling her an unqualified “assistant” to a “RINO Senator” to praising her as a “fearless America First warrior.”

In her short time in the Senate, Britt has followed, more or less, Shelby’s head-down approach, securing a coveted spot on the Appropriations Committee and impressing her party’s leadership with unusual initiative in fundraising for her senior colleagues. “If she aspires to rise through elected leadership, I see a pretty clear path forward,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas told Politico’s Jonathan Martin last year.

Less than a year into her tenure, Britt set out to promote the release of a memoir, God Calls Us to Do Hard Things: Lessons From the Alabama Wiregrass. Asked by a CBS host about her interest in joining the Trump ticket, Britt laughed off the question. Since then, Britt’s name has landed on any number of VP longlists drawn up by major media outlets. (Trump, for his part, has never suggested the Alabama lawmaker as a possible candidate.)

For prominent Republicans, Thursday was the night to introduce the woman lauded in the halls of Congress to the rest of America. If the responses (and non-responses) have been any indication, it wasn’t the unveiling they’d hoped for. Addressing the camera from her own kitchen table in Montgomery, Britt seemed to ricochet from one practiced emotion to another as she conjured an apocalyptic portrait of America under the “dithering and diminished” Biden. She focused much of her speech on illegal immigration, sharing in detail her encounter with a young girl sex-trafficked by a cartel, and referencing the Venezuelan migrant charged in the recent killing of the Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.

“Right now,” Britt said, “the American dream has turned into a nightmare.”

At times her facial expressions seemed incongruous—a strained smile as she shared her fear for “the future of children in every corner of our nation”; a flicker of aw-shucks pity at some mentions of Biden, seemingly at odds with the studied malevolence she would go on to attribute to him. At other points, she paired an intense gaze with a whispered voice, including in a direct appeal to American parents “and, in particular, to my fellow moms”: “We see you, we hear you, and we stand with you.”

[Jennifer Senior: Joe Biden’s happy place]

Her own Senate colleague’s clumsy assessment of the speech seemed to reinforce precisely the stereotype of the GOP that Katie Britt, in being tapped to deliver the party’s response to Biden, was theoretically meant to counteract. “She was picked as a housewife, not just a senator, somebody who sees it from a different perspective,” Tuberville told reporters today. (Britt’s office did not respond to an interview request, but in a statement to Business Insider, her spokesperson said: “Joe Biden angrily screamed for an hour and was roundly praised for a ‘fiery’ speech. Katie Britt passionately made the case on the need for a new direction and is being criticized by the liberal media. Color me surprised.”)

When I reached Shelby by phone this morning, he told me he had stayed up to watch his former chief. How had she done? “Well, I think this: You know, she’s young, she’s dynamic. You never know where you’ll go, but she’s on a fast track, and …” His voice briefly trailed off. “I thought she did well last night. You’ve gotta remember, that’s a lot of pressure; that is a lot of pressure to follow a State of the Union.”

He went on: “She touched on some bases; of course, she’s expected to do some things, and I thought she came [off] pretty—pretty well. I couldn’t have done it, you know?”

Shelby brought up the chatter about Britt as a contender for Trump’s running mate. I asked what advice he would give her if Trump invited her onto the ticket. “Well, she doesn’t need any advice—she can make her own decision,” he said. “But, you know, to run on a national ticket—not many people ever turn that down.”

For all the various takes on Britt’s performance last night, and what it might mean for her political future, she seems to have done well by the person who arguably has the most power over it, at least in this moment.

“Katie Britt was a GREAT contrast to an Angry, and obviously very Disturbed, ‘President,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social last night. “She was compassionate and caring, especially concerning Women and Women’s Issues. Her conversation on Migrant Crime was powerful and insightful. Great job Katie!”

The Return of the John Birch Society

2024-02-23T13:05:00-05:00

Michael Smart chuckled as he thought back to their banishment.

Truthfully he couldn’t say for sure what the problem had been, why it was that in 2012, the John Birch Society—the far-right organization historically steeped in conspiracism and opposition to civil rights—had found itself blacklisted by the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Nobody knows the official reason, because they don’t tell you that,” Smart, a field coordinator for the group, told me.

He has theories, of course. Perhaps the Birchers’ unapologetic crusade against “globalism” had started to hit too close to home for the Republican Party of 12 years ago; perhaps their warnings about, of all people, Newt Gingrich—a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” whose onetime membership on the Council on Foreign Relations, as Smart saw it, revealed his “globalist” vision for conservatism—had rankled the Republican powers that be.

[Read: Trump has become the thing he never wanted to be]

In any event, the ouster had made the news, coming as it had after a change in leadership at the American Conservative Union, the host of CPAC, the annual gathering of conservative politicians, commentators, and activists. “When they applied, I said, ‘I don’t want any segregationist groups at CPAC; it sends the wrong message,’” Al Cárdenas, the ACU chair from 2011 to 2014, told me recently. “And that was that.” For some optimistic observers, the decision had signified a small but symbolic effort to purge the movement of its most “highly offensive” elements, as one report put it.

Though CPAC has long catered more to the activist base of the Republican Party than to its establishment, the event has marched steadily closer to the fringes in the years since Donald Trump’s election, the barrier to entry for speakers and organizations being little more than a sufficient appreciation of the 45th president. But even Smart seemed a touch surprised by the ease of it all in 2023; when he applied on behalf of the John Birch Society for a booth at CPAC, and when, after the fuss and hand-wringing of 11 years earlier, the application was approved.

[Read: The martyr at CPAC]

“It was a very basic process,” he recalled with a shrug. (CPAC organizers did not respond to a request for comment about the John Birch Society’s presence at the conference.)

It was half past noon yesterday, day two of the 2024 gathering, and Smart, a soft-spoken, genial man wearing a trim blazer and slacks, was standing before the red-white-and-blue curtained backdrop of the John Birch Society booth. He occasionally paused our conversation to direct curious passersby to the literature spread across a nearby table—brochures outlining the history of the organization (“How are we unique?”); copies of its latest “Freedom Index,” or congressional scorecard; issues of The New American, the group’s in-house journal, including a “TRUMP WORLD” collector’s edition featuring such articles as “Trumping the Deep State” and “The Deplorables.” It was the contemporary output of an organization with an older and more controversial heritage than probably any other group featured this year at CPAC. And yet what was most striking about the John Birch Society of 2024 was how utterly unremarkable it appeared among the various booths lining this hotel conference center.

The John Birch Society, once the scourge of some of the nation’s most prominent conservatives, relegated to the outermost edges of the movement, now fits neatly into the mainstream of the American right. David Giordano, another field coordinator for the organization who was attending CPAC, credited Trump for hastening the shift, challenging the global elite in ways that past Republican presidents had only ever talked about doing. “What were the things they said about him? ‘Racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic’—that got my attention,” Giordano told me, smiling. “What’d they say about the John Birch Society? ‘Racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic.’ That’s when you know you’re over the target.” Longtime members and officers of the organization exuded the polite but unmistakable air of I told you so at the conference. “A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, my grandmother or my dad was a member. We used to think he was crazy, but now, not so much,’” Smart said, beaming. “Because we’ve been warning people about a lot of this stuff for decades, obviously.”

The John Birch Society, so named for a U.S. Army intelligence officer and Christian missionary killed by Chinese Communists toward the end of World War II, was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer who made his fortune by way of Sugar Daddies and Junior Mints. Welch persuaded a handful of the country’s wealthiest anti–New Deal businessmen to join him in a mission to extinguish the “international communist conspiracy” he believed had penetrated the U.S. government and was set to consume every facet of American life. President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA Director Allen Dulles—all of them, Welch insisted, were dedicated agents of the U.S.S.R.

For Welch, the Warren Court was incontrovertible evidence of the Soviet mandate in motion, given its decision outlawing prayer in public schools and, crucially, its ushering of America into a racially desegregated future. Donations flooded in as the John Birch Society took aim at the civil-rights movement, the United Nations, local public libraries and school boards, and the diabolical plot apparently enshrouding all of them. As the organization grew in prominence, a number of conservative leaders, including National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., agonized over how to contain Welch’s influence without alienating the electrified legion of Americans—many of them subscribers to Buckley’s magazine—whom Welch had brought into the movement. In the early 1960s, Buckley would publish a series of editorials critical of Welch and his worldview, urging conservatives to unite in rejection of his “false counsels.” By the mid-’70s, the organization’s formal ranks and funding had significantly dwindled.

[Matthew Dallek: How far-right movements die]

Yet the Bircher worldview never really went away. On the margins of the right, it continued to find purchase in new candidates and new personalities who adapted it to meet new moments. The society’s anti-communist crusade translated into alarm over a post–Cold War plot by the global elite to construct a “new world order” defined by porous borders and centralized, socialist rule; the birther conspiracy theories of the Tea Party era fit well within the Bircher tradition. And then, in 2016, the John Birch Society saw many of its core instincts finally reflected in the White House.

Giordano was at first skeptical of Trump’s candidacy. But then he watched as President Trump in short succession scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership and withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accords—dramatic blows, in Giordano’s view, to plans for the new world order. Giordano counts COVID—the lockdowns, the vaccines—as the wake-up event for many Americans, himself and others in the John Birch Society included. “I’ve been a member since 1994. And I said to my wife, ‘I wonder if this new world order will come in my lifetime,’” he recalled. And then came 2020. “They said, ‘Go home and flatten the curve.’ And I said, ‘This is the new world order. It’s here.’” He refused to take a vaccine or ever wear a face covering in public, recalling to me the time he successfully wore down a sales associate at Designer Shoe Warehouse who’d asked him to abide by the store policy on masks.

The John Birch Society, Giordano claimed, has been in a “growing phase” in the years since. “I’m constantly signing people up—I’ve got a new chapter in Ocean County; we had no chapters in Delaware, and now I’ve got a new chapter right in Wilmington.” Oddly enough, it’s a Trump victory in November that he fears could reverse the tide. “If Trump wins—which I personally hope—our membership will drop,” he predicted. “‘Oh,’ they’ll all say, ‘he’s gonna save us.’ And I explain to people, we’re the watchers on the Wall. The Founders said, ‘Here’s a constitution; this is forever; you got to fight every day to keep it.’”

Giordano’s claims of growth dovetail with the recent uptick in references to the John Birch Society by right-wing celebrities. Last May, in conversation with the Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich on his War Room podcast, Steve Bannon mocked left-wing efforts to deploy the “Bircher” label as a smear. “They say, ‘Oh! Moms for Liberty is just the modern version of the John Birch Society,’” Bannon said, laughing, before turning back to Descovich: “You’re doing something right, girl.” A few months before that, Nick Fuentes, a far-right vlogger and white supremacist who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust, heralded the John Birch Society as a “prelude to the Groypers”—the army of neo-Nazi activists and online influencers Fuentes counts as followers.

Some national Republicans, moreover, no longer try to maintain even a nominal distance from the organization. Joining the John Birch Society for its return to CPAC in 2023 were lawmakers including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Ronny Jackson of Texas, both of whom sat for livestreamed interviews with The New American as throngs of conference-goers listened from the sidelines. At this year’s conference, a woman helping staff the booth urged me to check out the magazine’s January issue, the cover of which featured a close-up portrait of Andy Biggs; the Arizona congressman—former chair of the House Freedom Caucus—had sat for an exclusive interview on “many of the issues facing our country,” including President Joe Biden’s “corruption,” as the magazine put it, “immigration, and China.”

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

It’s unclear just how large the John Birch Society is today—even Smart told me, “They keep those numbers close”—but to measure its influence by membership is to miss the point. Naturally, as the principles and positions of the John Birch Society have insinuated themselves into the mainstream on the right, the Birchers’ own claim to those ideas has weakened. The organization’s rogue crusades of the past are now so familiar and universal that the original fingerprints are no longer visible.

Consider fluoride. At the height of the group’s relevance in the ’60s, the John Birch Society railed against fluoridated drinking water as a communist conspiracy to poison Americans en masse, a go-to data point for the National Review set and others invested in the political exile of the Birchers. As soon as I stepped off the escalator at the convention center outside Washington, D.C., that hosted CPAC, though, I came upon cocktail tables scattered with brochures listing “Fun Facts on Fluoride,” among them that “Fluoride was used by Hitler and Stalin” and that “it will kill you.”

There was no stated affiliation with the John Birch Society, and no person around to discuss the pamphlets. And perhaps that was telling; far from the niche boogeyman of one conservative organization, the perils of fluoride had become part of the generic paraphernalia of the movement. (The “Myth vs Facts” section of the John Birch Society website, I should note, currently states that “while the JBS doesn’t agree with water fluoridation because it is a form of government mass medication of citizens in violation of their individual right to choose which medicines they ingest, it was never opposed as a mind-control plot.”)

Plenty have noted the John Birch Society’s echoes in the GOP’s oft-invoked specter of the “deep state,” the conspiracism that immediately hijacked the memory of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer murdered in July 2016. Yet to attend CPAC today is to see those instincts taken to their most troublingly banal ends. Lifestyle and wellness products are hawked as solutions that the medical establishment never wanted you to find; a payment-processing company warns, with a massive image of a human-silhouette target riddled with bullet holes, “Your business is a target.”

For the John Birch Society, returning to CPAC has meant slipping seamlessly back in among groups and personalities that for years have been operating within its legacy, whether they knew it or not. The organization has been “eclipsed by many different groups and offshoots, so they’re not controversial in the same way that, say, Richard Spencer was a few years ago,” Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University and the author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, told me.

Why was the John Birch Society invited back to CPAC? The better question, in Dallek’s view: “Why wouldn’t it be?”

The Kamala Harris Problem

2023-10-10T10:23:14-04:00

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

On a Thursday morning in April, I met with Vice President Kamala Harris at Number One Observatory Circle, the Victorian mansion that, for the past two and a half years, she and the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, have called home. She can be a striking presence when she walks into a room, with a long stride and an implacable posture that make her seem taller than she is (about 5 foot 2). By the time I saw Harris at the residence, I had already traveled with her to Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, and Reno, Nevada, as well as to Africa, trips on which she had carried herself with ease and confidence.

Ease and confidence have not been the prevailing themes of Harris’s vice presidency. Her first year on the job was defined by rhetorical blunders, staff turnover, political missteps, and a poor sense among even her allies of what, exactly, constituted her portfolio. Within months of taking office, President Joe Biden was forced to confront a public perception that Harris didn’t measure up; ultimately, the White House issued a statement insisting that Biden did, in fact, rely on his vice president as a governing partner. But Harris’s reputation has never quite recovered.

Harris is intensely private, so I was somewhat surprised to be invited to her home. The residence had been redecorated, and in keeping with past practice the work was done without fanfare. There have been no photo spreads, and the designer, Sheila Bridges, signed a nondisclosure agreement. But Harris seemed to enjoy showing me around. In the turret room, she pointed to the banquette seating built along the curve. (“I just love circles,” she said.) She gestured at some of the art she’d brought in, on loan from various galleries and collections, describing each piece in terms of the artist’s background rather than its aesthetic qualities—Indian American woman, African American gay man, Japanese American. “So you get the idea,” she said. We moved into the library, with its collection of books devoted to the vice presidency. (Who knew there were so many?) The green-striped wallpaper pattern that the Bidens had favored when they lived here was gone. Now there was bright, punch-colored wallpaper—chosen, Harris explained, in order to “redefine what power looks like.”

She said this with a laugh, but it was a studied phrase. Redefining what power looks like has been the theme of every chapter of Kamala Harris’s political career. She is the U.S.-born daughter of immigrants—her mother a cancer researcher from India, her father an economist from Jamaica. As Biden’s running mate, she became the first woman, first Black American, and first South Asian American to be elected vice president. Before that, she was the first South Asian American and only the second Black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate. Before that, she was the first woman, Black American, and South Asian American to serve as attorney general of her native California. Before that, she was the first Black woman in California to be elected as a district attorney.

[Jemele Hill: Kamala Harris makes history]

When Biden underwent a colonoscopy in November 2021, Harris served as acting president, becoming the first woman (and first South Asian American) to officially wield presidential authority. If vice presidents have historically been tormented by the question of legacy—compelled to wonder not how they will be remembered but whether they will be remembered at all—Harris was assured of a mandatory nod in the history books the moment she was sworn in.

But after nearly three years in office, the symbolic fact of Harris’s position has proved more resonant than anything she has actually done with it. From almost the beginning, Harris’s vice presidency has unfolded in a series of brutal headlines: “Exasperation and Dysfunction: Inside Kamala Harris’ Frustrating Start as Vice President” (CNN, November 2021). “A Kamala Harris Staff Exodus Reignites Questions About Her Leadership Style—And Her Future Ambitions” (The Washington Post, December 2021). “New Book Says Biden Called Harris a ‘Work in Progress’ ” (Politico, December 2022). “Kamala Harris Is Trying to Define Her Vice Presidency. Even Her Allies Are Tired of Waiting” (The New York Times, February 2023).

The hazy nature of Harris’s responsibilities has made for easy satire—“White House Urges Kamala Harris to Sit at Computer All Day in Case Emails Come Through,” read an early Onion headline. Clips of Harris sound bites gone wrong have ricocheted across social media, and not just right-wing sites. A Daily Show feature in October 2022 paired clips from various Harris speeches (“When we talk about the children of the community, they are a children of the community …”) with clips from the fictional vice president Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, on Veep (“Well, we are the United States of America because we are united … and we are states”).

In June 2023, an NBC News poll put Harris’s approval rating at 32 percent. While Biden’s own approval numbers, in the low 40s, are hardly inspiring, the percentage of those who disapprove of Harris’s performance is higher than for any other vice president in the history of the poll.

Ordinarily, as people around Harris like to remind reporters, a vice president’s approval rating does not warrant notice. But if Biden—already the country’s oldest president—wins reelection, he would begin a second term at age 82. And although Democrats recoil at any mention of Biden’s mortality, it’s hardly a coincidence that, as the 2024 campaign gathers pace, people have begun to contemplate the possibility that Harris could become president. In the campaign’s announcement video and at events across the country for the past few months, Harris has been enlisted more prominently as a spokesperson for the administration’s accomplishments—more visible, often, than the president himself. But unlike Biden, Harris does not simply need Americans to agree that she deserves four more years in her current job. She needs them to trust that she is ready, should the moment require it, to step into his.

Republicans may offer a mandatory “God forbid” when raising the prospect of some presidential health crisis, but they are already pushing the idea that “a vote for President Biden is a vote for President Harris.” They are doing so in large part because they see her as a more inviting target than the president himself: a woman of color whose word-salad locutions turn themselves into campaign ads, and whose outspoken advocacy on social issues makes her easier to paint as an ideologue lying in wait.

Harris and I talked at the residence for an hour. Toward the end of the conversation, she patted the cushion between us. “No reporter has sat here ever,” she said. It was a small moment, but it seemed to represent a recognition that something had to change—if not about the way Harris actually does her job, then about the way she presents herself, and her role, in public.

Even today, people who have worked for Harris make a point of telling you where they were during the Lester Holt interview. Usually, it is because they want to make clear that they were not involved.

In June 2021, at the end of a two-day trip to Guatemala, the vice president sat down with the NBC anchor to discuss Biden’s immigration agenda. Harris had recently become the administration’s lead on the so-called root-causes element of border policy, working with Central American countries to alleviate the violent and impoverished conditions that lead many migrants to flee north to the U.S. in the first place. The questions should have been easily anticipated—such as whether Harris had any plans to visit the border itself, where crossings had surged. Yet when Holt did ask that question, Harris threw up her hands in evident frustration. “At some point, you know, I—we are going to the border. We’ve been to the border. So this whole, this whole—this whole thing about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.” Holt corrected her: “You haven’t been to the border.” Harris became defensive. “And I haven’t been to Europe,” she snapped. “I don’t understand the point you’re making.”

The exchange became the subject of headlines and late-night monologues. (“Well, that escalated quickly,” Jimmy Fallon said on his show the same night.) Afterward, Harris shied away from the camera for months.

For many Americans, the Holt interview was the first real exposure to Harris as vice president. She had spent the better part of her career as a “smart on crime” prosecutor who won her first election—district attorney of San Francisco, in 2003—by positioning herself as a pragmatic reformer. As California’s attorney general, she targeted transnational gangs and cartels and won billions in extra relief from big banks at the center of the foreclosure crisis. She had been the state’s junior senator for just over two years when she launched a bid for the presidency, in 2019, buoyed by the brief but bright flashes of stardom she’d earned from her tough, courtroom-style questioning of Trump-administration officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions (“I’m not able to be rushed this fast; it makes me nervous,” Sessions complained to her at one point), and of the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. And although she was an early favorite for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, raising millions in donations as she promised to “prosecute the case against Donald Trump,” her campaign fell apart before the Iowa caucus, beset by uneven messaging, disorganization, and low morale.

Throughout her time in national politics, Harris has repeated some advice imparted to her by her mother: “You don’t let people tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.” Yet a consistent theme of Harris’s career has been her struggle to tell her own story—to define herself and her political vision for voters in clear, memorable terms. The result, in Harris’s first months as vice president, was that high-profile mistakes assumed the devastating weight of first impressions. Verbal fumbles (“It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day”) became memes and were anthologized online. Shortly after the Holt interview, White House aides began leaking to various news outlets about top-to-bottom dysfunction in Harris’s office and Biden’s apparent concern about her performance. In her first year and a half as vice president, Harris saw the departure of her chief of staff, communications director, domestic-policy adviser, national security adviser, and other aides. Her current chief of staff, Lorraine Voles—formerly Al Gore’s communications director, who has expertise in crisis management—was brought on initially to help with, as Voles put it, “organizational” issues with the team still in place.

[Read: The woman who led Kamala Harris to this moment]

Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, told me that after her initial missteps, Harris became highly risk-averse: “She’s always nervous that if she does something that doesn’t go well, she’s setting us back.” David Axelrod, a former senior strategist for President Barack Obama, noticed the same trait. “I think it’s one of the things that plagued her in the presidential race,” he told me. “It looked as if she didn’t know where to plant her feet. That she wasn’t sort of grounded, that she didn’t know exactly who she was.” He went on: “People can read that. When you’re playing at that level, people can read that.”

Those closest to Harris have tried to make sense of why the vice president’s positive qualities—her intelligence, her diligence, her integrity—have failed to register with Americans. It is impossible, of course, to talk about perceptions of Harris without laying some of the blame on racism and sexism. The briefest glance at the toxic comments about Harris on social media reveals the bigotry that motivates some of her most fervent detractors. But the vice president’s allies also acknowledge that she has struggled to make an affirmative case for herself. Judging from what has gone viral online, she is better known for her passion for Venn diagrams than for any nugget of biography; right-wing personalities enjoy mocking this predilection almost as much as they enjoy mocking the way she laughs.

Harris may understand intellectually the imperative to seem “relatable” to a broad audience—to condense her background to a set of compelling SparkNotes to be recited on cue—but she hasn’t made a habit of doing so. In smaller settings, she can be funny at her own expense. When I asked her what advice she would give to a successor, she referred back to some of those social-media reviews: “Don’t read the comments.” In our conversation at the residence, she touched briefly on how her “first woman” status shapes even the most workaday elements of the job: “I’m not going to tell you who said to me—it’s a previous president of the United States. He said, ‘Wow, women—I get up, I go work out, I jump in the shower, and I’m out the door. You guys …’ ” (I suspect she was quoting Obama, a friend of hers who has spoken about his efficient morning routine.) Harris told me that she has to let the Secret Service know a day in advance if she is going to be wearing a dress instead of a pantsuit, because agents have to pick her up in a different kind of car.

But she prefers a discreet distance from topics like these. A friend of Harris’s advised me before our first interview to avoid “small talk” or “diving immediately into personal matters.” The friend explained: “She appreciates the respect in that way.” Minyon Moore, a Democratic strategist with long-standing ties to Harris, made a related point: “She’s not a person—which I kind of like, but it doesn’t do her any good—she’s not a person that’s going to brag on herself. In fact, she’s very uncomfortable, say, beating her own chest. She just wasn’t raised that way.” Lateefah Simon, a former MacArthur fellow and now a candidate for Congress, was in her mid-20s when Harris hired her to run a program for young people convicted of nonviolent felonies, mostly involving drugs. Simon remembers Harris telling her she could either stand outside with a bullhorn or come push for change from the inside. “If you know Kamala Harris, she’s stern—she was a stern 38-year-old,” Simon recalled. But she could also be more than that: Harris gave Simon her first suit after she showed up on day one in Puma sweats.

Harris in 1997, when she was a deputy district attorney of Alameda County, California (Mary F. Calvert / MediaNews Group / The Mercury News / Getty)

Nearly three years after Harris’s swearing-in, her current and former staff still seem to be unearthing pertinent elements of her life story. Twice while I was reporting this article, aides highlighted an experience in Harris’s adolescence—one that had informed her decision to become a prosecutor—that they’d learned about only after joining her team. In high school, a friend confided in Harris that she was being molested by a family member, so Harris insisted that the friend move in with her own family (and she did). The outrage Harris felt in that moment would help define her path to the Alameda County district attorney’s office, where much of her work as a deputy involved prosecuting sex crimes against children.

I understood why her aides wanted me to hear that story, which is not widely known. I wondered why—when I’d asked about her decision to become a prosecutor—Harris hadn’t mentioned it herself. When we spoke at the residence, she did acknowledge the “request, sometimes the demand,” for personal revelation. “I guess it’s a bit outside of my comfort level,” Harris said, “because for me, it really is about the work. You know, I am who I am. I am who I am. And I think I’m a pretty open book, but I am who I am.” She went on a little longer, making clear that she understands that people want to know more. And then, in a softer tone, she said: “And I just, you know, yeah. I don’t know what to say about that.”

But what is “the work”? For the first time in her career, Harris holds a job devoid of any clear benchmarks of success. She was a transformational figure by the mere fact of her election, but the office to which she was elected doesn’t lend itself to transformational leadership.

After settling into Observatory Circle, Harris made a point of gathering historians for dinners—to discuss not just American democracy but also the history of the vice presidency itself. “You’re not supposed to be visible,” Heather Cox Richardson, who attended one dinner, told me, referring to the nature of the vice president’s job. “So there’s that really fine tightrope you walk, between how do you make people understand that you’re qualified without looking like you’re unqualified because you don’t understand your role.”

Neither Biden nor Harris arrived in Washington with a particular vision for Harris’s vice presidency. Harris had issues in which she was interested—racial justice, climate change, gun violence, maternal mortality—and as vice president she has explored these and others. But America imposed its own urgent agenda: Getting the pandemic under control absorbed much of everyone’s attention. With a 50–50 partisan split in the Senate, Harris was also compelled to spend much of her time in her old place of work, exercising the vice president’s constitutional duty to cast the deciding vote in the case of a tie. “We couldn’t make plans for me to be outside of D.C. for at least four days of the workweek,” she recalled.

More fundamentally, Biden and Harris came into office with few instructive models for their partnership, despite Biden having once held the job himself. For nearly half a century, with occasional exceptions, the vice president has been a creature of the capital. The president, in contrast, has been a relative outsider. Walter Mondale, the archetype of the modern American vice president, had 12 years in the Senate under his belt when he was sworn in. He became Jimmy Carter’s anchor to Washington. George H. W. Bush did the same for Ronald Reagan, as did Al Gore for Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney for George W. Bush, Joe Biden for Barack Obama, and Mike Pence for Donald Trump. But Harris and Biden flipped the script: a comparative newcomer serving as vice president to a man who’d launched his Senate career before she reached her tenth birthday.

[Read: The long arc of Joe Biden]

In our interviews, Harris spoke of her relationship with Biden largely in generalities. When I asked how she and the president complement each other, she said, “Well, first of all, let me just tell you, we really like each other,” and then went on to talk about shared values and principles. When I asked Harris what aspects of her skill set Biden depends on, she was more direct: “You’ll have to ask him.” (When I did, a spokesperson for Biden sent this statement: “Kamala Harris is an outstanding vice president because she’s an outstanding partner. She asks the hard questions, thinks creatively, stays laser-focused on what we’re fighting for, and works her heart out for the American people. She inspires Americans and people around the world who see her doing her job with skill and passion and dream bigger for themselves about what’s possible. I trust her, depend on her, admire her. And I’m proud and grateful to have her by my side.”)

Current and former aides to both say Harris and Biden have a good friendship. The president made the relationship a priority early on, setting up weekly lunches with Harris, like the ones he himself had valued with Obama. She still has lunch with him, she says, “when he’s not traveling, when I’m not traveling.” Given that Harris loves to cook—and regularly has friends and family over for meals—I asked whether she and her husband had hosted the Bidens for dinner. She said that they hadn’t, and seemed momentarily stuck in a feedback loop: “We have a plan to do it, but we have to get a date. But he and I have a plan, we have a plan to do it. And yeah, no, we actually have a plan to do it.”

As vice president, Harris has been unfailingly loyal to Biden. For West Wing staff, especially at the beginning, this was no small thing. During Harris’s vetting for the job, some of those close to Biden—reportedly including his wife, Jill—struggled with the memory of her sharp attacks on him during the presidential primary. In a televised debate, Harris had brought up the subject of Biden’s past opposition to busing, leading to one of the most withering exchanges of the race. “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” Harris told Biden. “And that little girl was me.”

Perhaps in recognition of this history, Harris has been an unswerving advocate of Biden and his policy priorities. Ultimately, she told me, that is what she sees as the core of her mandate as vice president. Building out the rest of the mandate has proved more complicated.

The path to the Lester Holt interview began with tension over Harris’s policy portfolio. During one of the administration’s early multiagency meetings about the surge of unlawful crossings at the Mexican border, Biden was impressed as Harris outlined ideas for engaging the Central American countries that many of the migrants were coming from. According to Ron Klain, the president turned to Harris and said, “Well, why don’t you do that?”—meaning, become the point person on the morass of root-cause elements. Harris approached the chief of staff after the meeting. “And she said,” as Klain recalled, “ ‘Well, I wasn’t really looking for that assignment—my idea was, this is what we should do, and someone else should do it.’ ” Klain told Harris he understood but, as vice president, Biden had worked on this aspect of immigration policy for Obama, and they needed her to take it on as well.

It wasn’t that Harris lacked relevant experience; as attorney general of California, she had worked extensively with law enforcement in Mexico on drug and human trafficking. But the politics of the issue were radioactive. Harris knew this, and so did Klain. “It was obviously a controversial assignment,” he acknowledged to me. “It wasn’t necessarily anyone’s idea of a glory assignment.” (Asked about this, the vice president’s office responded that Harris had “plunged into the issue with vigor.”) Harris broke the news of the task to her staff on a mordant note, opening a meeting with the announcement that she was “going to oversee the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” according to a person who was in the room, then dialing back to the slightly less grim reality.

As Klain saw it, Biden intended the appointment—to the same role he had once held—as a show of respect. But it also suggested obliviousness to Harris’s need, early in her term, for a measure of stability and success. Of course, as the Holt interview showed, Harris could make the task harder all on her own. Republican lawmakers and Fox News personalities relished the prospect of pinning the border crisis on Harris. She may have been responsible for just one sliver of U.S. policy, but they used her proximity to border issues to fuel the image of Harris as Biden’s “border czar.”

[Read: Conflict between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden is inevitable]

In the first year of his presidency, Biden did little to present Harris as essential to the administration; neither did the Democratic Party more broadly. Indeed, there was a sense that Harris might be a liability more than anything else. Less than two weeks into office, Harris appeared on a West Virginia news station to pitch the Biden administration’s coronavirus stimulus package—which Joe Manchin, the state’s conservative Democratic senator, was not yet sold on. In an interview on the same station the next day, Manchin said he was shocked that Harris had given him no notice of the appearance. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “That’s not a way of working together.” Later that year, as my colleague Franklin Foer has reported, Biden invited Manchin to the Oval Office to discuss the stimulus package; Harris was there initially, but after pleasantries was sent on her way. Biden had once said that Harris’s would be “the last voice in the room” during important conversations. Not this time.

Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, as they arrived in Accra, Ghana, in March 2023 (Ernest Ankomah / Getty)

In June 2021, Biden asked Harris to take the lead on voting rights for the administration. The House had recently passed the For the People Act—a massive overhaul of election law that addressed voter access, gerrymandering, campaign finance, and other matters—and Democratic leaders were eager to see movement in the Senate. That was unlikely. Mitch McConnell, the Senate GOP leader, promised that no Republican would support the bill; not all Democrats were on board either. The legislation would likely die by filibuster—a procedure that Biden, despite calls from many in his party, was almost certainly not going to try to undermine.

Harris’s allies would later characterize voting rights as one of those impossible issues—intractable is the word they often use—that the president had saddled her with. Yet it was Harris herself who had lobbied for the assignment. Her personal background made her a natural spokesperson, and as attorney general of California, she had signed on to an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold the protections against discrimination in the Voting Rights Act—the protections eventually struck down in Shelby County v. Holder. But the bill’s death by filibuster was virtually inevitable. And Harris didn’t do much to stave it off.

Harris’s aides once described her to reporters as potentially a key emissary for the administration in Congress—helping corral votes by way of “quiet Hill diplomacy.” But she lacked the deep relationships needed to exert real influence. Congressional officials told me that Harris rarely engaged the more persuadable holdouts on either side of the aisle. At a key moment in the negotiations, Biden went to talk with the two resistant Democrats, Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema. Harris did not go with him. A White House official declined to get into details and said only that Harris was “interested and engaged” in conversations with Democratic lawmakers during this period. Harris shifted the terms of the discussion when I asked how her Senate background had proved useful in the administration’s push for legislation: “I mean, I think the work we have to do is really more in getting folks to speak loudly with their feet through the election cycle”—an unusual image, though the point was clear enough: Electing more Democrats might be more effective than trying to twist more arms.

For now, Senate Democrats are not fighting for time with Harris when she’s on the Hill. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a Democratic office that actually engages with her or her team on a regular basis,” one Democratic senator’s chief of staff told me. Traditionally, this person said, officials from the executive branch who visit the Capitol are cornered by lawmakers hoping to get their priorities before the president. But few people are “scrambling to make alliances” with Harris—not because of any dislike, as this person and other congressional officials told me, but simply because of uncertainty about the nature of her role. “In her case,” the chief of staff said, “it’s kind of like, ‘Hey, good to see you.’ And that’s kind of the end of it.”

This past spring, I traveled with Harris to Los Angeles, where she was scheduled to appear on Jennifer Hudson’s daytime talk show. When Hudson asked Harris what she missed most about her old life, before the White House, the vice president replied, “Have you watched The Godfather ?” I was in the greenroom with her staff as they looked apprehensively at the screen, wondering where their boss was going with this. Harris went on to describe the scene in which Michael Corleone is out for a quiet walk in Sicily with his fiancée, “and then the shot pans out, and the whole village is on the walk with them.”

There’s no escaping the reality that her every move is probed and dissected. During our conversation at the residence, Harris pointed to the veranda. “Sometimes in the summer, I’ll come and sit out with my binders and a cup of tea, and it’s just really nice and quiet,” she said. It wasn’t until later, when I listened again to the tape of the conversation, that I remembered what she’d said next: “You almost forget that there are 5,000 people around here.”

Having worked in politics and government for the better part of her life, Harris is accustomed to a certain amount of scrutiny. But in her past jobs—as a prosecutor, as attorney general—people were looking at her actual accomplishments. That was how it seemed to her, at least. A friend of Harris’s told me that her professional yardstick was “outcome driven.” Campaigning for district attorney of San Francisco, Harris criticized the incumbent’s low conviction rate for felonies; running later for reelection, she talked about how she had improved it by 15 percentage points. Communication wasn’t a matter of rhetoric. It was just laying out the facts.

This is still, in some ways, how Harris tends to perceive her job. She is always asking aides to get to the point: Show me the data; show me the metrics. And for some things, this works. But success in national politics involves gauzier, more emotional elements. It’s not an accident that the single utterance by Harris that most people can call to mind—“That little girl was me”—drew on searing personal experience.

Go to enough of Harris’s events and you’ll notice a pattern. Many of them—conversations with community leaders at, say, a college campus or a civic center—begin shakily. The moderator opens by asking Harris a sweeping question about the state of the country, or the administration’s approach to some major issue—the sort of question that a seasoned politician should be able to spin her way through on autopilot. And yet Harris often sounds like she’s hearing the question for the first time.

During a discussion at Georgia Tech focused on climate change, I listened as Harris was asked to speak about the administration’s progress over the past two years in addressing the crisis. Her baroque response began: “The way I think about this moment is that I do believe it to be a transformational moment. But in order for us to truly achieve that capacity, it’s going to require all to be involved … and I will say, on behalf of the administration, a whole-of-government approach to understanding the excitement that we should all feel about the opportunity of this moment, and then also thinking of it in a way that we understand the intersection between so many movements that have been about a fight for justice and how we should see that intersection, then, in the context of this moment … And so I’m very excited about this moment.”

This is not Churchill. It’s not even Al Gore. Only when Harris assumed the role of interrogator herself did she seem to find her rhythm, pressing the moderators on the stage—two scientists—to discuss their personal journey toward an interest in climate issues. She then leveraged one moderator’s story to explain the administration’s plan to replace lead pipes across the country—using $15 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure deal, one of the Biden administration’s marquee victories. The communities that have been suffering from contamination “have been fighting for years and years and years,” Harris noted. “It didn’t take a science degree for them to know what was happening to their children.” The audience responded as if at a church service, with murmurs of affirmation.

Hillary Clinton told me that she has met with Harris at the White House and the vice president’s residence, and has talked with her numerous times by phone. “I’ve tried to be as helpful and available to her as possible,” Clinton said, adding, “It’s a tough role.” She noted that Harris isn’t a “performance” politician, a comment she intended not as a criticism but as an acknowledgment that Harris’s skills mainly lie elsewhere. (Clinton isn’t a performance politician either.) Harris doesn’t dispute the point: “My career was not measured by giving lovely speeches,” she told me.

Harris communicates most effectively when she can shift the focus away from herself. The first two conversations I had with the vice president, both while traveling with her, felt stilted and strained, as if I were tiptoeing around glass. But at the residence, alone, Harris was warm, inviting, at times even maternal. “You’re newly married,” she said. (“Yes,” I responded, though it wasn’t a question.) “Pay attention to your marriage,” she counseled. “Friendships, marriage require that you pay attention. Because life has a way of sweeping you up.”

Harris has configured many of her public events to resemble a back-and-forth conversation rather than a standard Q&A: She likes talking with people. The grassroots settings that Harris enjoys represent a mode of retail politics that rarely grabs national attention. But such events have given her a good read on what voters care about. They have also allowed her to inhabit her own space. As Klain observed, in Washington, you’re “just the vice president.” In the rest of the country, you’re “the vice president.”

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the abortion protections embodied in Roe v. Wade, Harris had a strong sense of American public opinion on the issue. Amid a crush of headlines predicting a so-called red wave in the upcoming midterm elections—with the economy as the central issue—Harris was steadfast in her view that abortion rights would shape the contest. She spent much of 2022 on the road, hosting conversations on reproductive rights in red and blue states alike. Women, she told me, “won’t necessarily talk loudly” about an issue like abortion. “But they will vote on it.” In this respect, Harris understood the mood of the country, and the potential impact at the ballot box, better than most people in Washington. In the midterms, the Democrats did far better than expected, even winning a majority in the Senate; there was no red wave. Harris has continued to travel and talk about abortion rights ever since. It is a central issue for the Democratic base and one that Biden—a devout Catholic who, in his own words, isn’t “big on” abortion—has been reluctant to press himself.

Harris marking the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade at an event in Tallahassee, Florida, in January 2023 (Aileen Perilla / Redux)

Fighting Dobbs will be a long battle. But it’s the kind Harris may be suited for. In one of our conversations, she spoke about “the significance of the passage of time”—a line that featured in one of her more unwieldy speeches as vice president. I remember steadying myself when the phrase surfaced. But what followed was a revealing commentary about the diligence and patience that are required to produce real change. Harris told me about a commencement speech she had given at the law school of UC Berkeley. She spoke to the new graduates about Brown v. Board of Education—about how, after the ruling, integration largely took place on a creeping, county-by-county basis, and only in response to continual pressure. Exerting that pressure meant building a legal foundation, erecting a structure brick by brick, and laboring over the details, all in return for progress that was often measured in inches. This is a truth, Harris noted, that Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston and Constance Baker Motley all knew. “And I just got up there and I was like, ‘You want to be a lawyer?’ ” she recalled. If you do, she told them, then you must learn to “embrace the mundane.”

She laughed at the memory of that line. “And the parents are like, Ooh, this is good,” she recalled. “And the kids are like, Oh, fuck.”

Harris’s engagement with abortion rights has broken through to voters more than anything else in her vice presidency, according to the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. But Harris has been effective in another arena—diplomacy—that to the public is hardly visible at all.

During his two terms as vice president, Joe Biden traveled to 57 countries—and before that, as a senator, he had decades to acquire experience abroad. In the past two years, Harris has traveled to 19 countries, including France, Germany, Poland, Guatemala, Mexico, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, and Indonesia. She has met with 100 or so foreign leaders. They have tended to appreciate, as more than one White House official told me, how fact-based and direct she is. She has “very little patience,” one of them said, for the euphemisms and platitudes of routine diplomacy. Harris’s risk aversion appears to stop at the water’s edge.

Her first major diplomatic test came during a five-day trip to France in November 2021. For some time, Harris had been considering an invitation to attend the Paris Peace Forum, whose purpose was to discuss global inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic. But in the weeks before the event, relations between Washington and Paris had been pitched into tumult after the announcement of a lucrative joint U.S.-British submarine deal with Australia that nullified France’s own submarine deal with Australia. French President Emmanuel Macron was furious, recalling his ambassador from Washington; Biden soon admitted that his handling had been “clumsy.” For Harris, the trip to Paris went from optional to crucial.

In front of the cameras, Harris and Macron both said what they were expected to say about a positive long-term bilateral future. The atmosphere was one of chilly civility. But behind the scenes, Harris was helping lay the groundwork for cooperation on the looming crisis in Ukraine. She used her nearly two-hour meeting with Macron at the Élysée Palace to present an array of U.S. intelligence. Harris urged the French president to take seriously the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Three months later, Biden asked Harris to represent the administration at the high-visibility Munich Security Conference. It was a sign of Biden’s confidence—on a personal level (Biden had attended the conference many times) and also because of the timing. The U.S. now knew that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent, and Harris was tasked with helping press allies and partners to develop a coordinated response. Five days before the invasion, Harris met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to share U.S. intelligence and plans for military support. Publicly, Zelensky still seemed uncertain about Russia’s intentions and the scale of the threat. “The vice president directly and very clearly conveyed to Zelensky and his team that this was going to happen,” an official on the trip told me, “and they should really be planning on that basis and not waste any time.”

Harris returned to the Munich Security Conference this past February. Speaking for the administration, she formally declared the U.S. view that Russia had committed “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine.

A month later, I joined Harris on a multicountry tour of Africa. China’s deepening presence on the continent provided the geopolitical backdrop. But Harris was bringing with her more than $7 billion in commitments, largely from the private sector, to promote climate-resilience initiatives, money she had raised herself through months of tree-shaking phone calls to companies and individuals. The trip was a seven-day sprint, and logistically taxing. On one occasion, the American advance team had to upgrade an entire road from dirt to gravel; the vice president’s Secret Service code name may be “Pioneer,” but there are limits to what her motorcade can handle.

In Cape Coast, Ghana, Harris walked through the Door of No Return, where enslaved people had taken their final steps in Africa before being forced onto ships. She discarded her prepared remarks—something she had almost never done before—and spoke powerfully about the legacy of the diaspora in the Americas. In Lusaka, Zambia, she was driven to the rural outskirts of the capital to visit Panuka Farm, powered entirely by renewable energy. The vice president had spent time on a farm as a child; wearing jeans and Timberlands, she seemed at home inside the netted enclosures of sweet peppers and iceberg lettuce. Washington felt very far away.

Harris’s allies touted the Africa trip as a historic effort to deepen ties with the fast-growing continent. But it hardly registered back home. Terrance Woodbury is a Democratic pollster who focuses on young and minority voters; he saw the Africa trip as a “pivot” in terms of Harris’s self-presentation. Yet when I asked whether the trip had made any difference politically, he said, simply, “No.”

The trip also offered a reminder of Harris’s ongoing struggle when it comes to telling her own story—and of the Veep comparison. The vice president’s visit to Zambia had been billed as a kind of homecoming. As a young girl, Harris spent time in Lusaka with her maternal grandfather, P. V. Gopalan, who had been dispatched there in the 1960s from India to advise Zambia’s first independent government on refugee resettlement. Now, decades later, she was returning to Zambia as one of the most prominent public figures in the world. Harris’s scheduled stop at her grandfather’s old home in the capital, where she was expected to speak about his work and how his career as a civil servant had shaped her own ambitions, promised to be a special moment.

Instead, dozens of reporters and others looked on as Harris laughed somewhat awkwardly in front of a concrete-and-stucco office building. Greeting her near the doorway was a U.S.-embassy official, who explained that, after a year of combing through public records, researchers had managed to locate the plot of land on which Gopalan’s house had stood. The house itself, however, had been replaced by the headquarters of a Zambian financial-services group. Seeming not to know what else to do, Harris accepted an offer to tour the building. Reporters and cameramen, who had been anticipating a press conference at the end of the event, were ushered away. When I asked why the press conference had been scrapped, an aide said, “She needed a private moment.” Life has a way of sweeping you up.

My conversation with Harris at the residence came three weeks after our return from Africa. She took me through her herb garden, just off the driveway, crouching to examine the state of her oregano, dill, rosemary, thyme, and sage. Washington’s springtime pollen was at its worst, and my eyes were red-rimmed and watery as we made our way inside. After finding a box of tissues, Harris sympathized, referring to D.C. as “a toxic swamp of pollen.” People from outside the area, she went on, “are not acclimated to this mix.” It was a botanical comment, but it reminded me of something one of Harris’s old friends had told me about the vice president’s seeming discomfort in the capital, and how much happier she appeared when traveling to other parts of the country.

Perceptions of Harris appear to be frozen in 2021. A recent op‑ed in The Hill, largely sympathetic to the vice president, urged the Biden campaign to get her “off the sidelines”—this during a week when she traveled to Indianapolis; Jacksonville, Florida; and Chicago. (Many weeks, she is on the road at least three days out of seven.) At one point during my conversation with David Axelrod, he wondered why Harris hadn’t become more of a champion for the administration’s most significant achievements, such as the infrastructure package. But much of her cross-country travel is focused exactly on that.

Of course, Harris is not alone in having trouble breaking through. “I mean, why do only a third of voters know what the president has done?” Celinda Lake, the pollster, asked when we spoke. “My God, they spent millions of dollars on it. They’ve got ads up now.” If voters don’t know what the president has done, Lake said, “they sure as heck aren’t going to know what the vice president has done.”

This summer, I asked Jeff Zients, the current White House chief of staff, if he could recall a moment when Biden had noticeably leaned on Harris for guidance, or when her input had meaningfully changed the administration’s approach to an issue. He had mentioned earlier in our interview that Harris had been instrumental in putting “equity” at the forefront of the administration’s COVID response—ensuring that public-health efforts reach the underserved. Other examples? “Let me think of a specific anecdote, and I’ll have somebody follow up,” he said. His spokesperson texted after the call to confirm that the office would get back to me. Despite my follow-ups, that was the last I heard.

Vice presidents are chosen mainly for political reasons—as Harris was—and not actuarial ones. In most of the presidential elections during the past half century, the possibility that the candidate at the top of the ticket might die in office was not a significant issue. (It was an issue for John McCain, in 2008, with his history of multiple melanomas, which was one more reason McCain’s selection of the erratic Sarah Palin as his running mate had such negative resonance.) This time around, given Biden’s age, the words heartbeat away connote a real possibility.

[Read: Why Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris]

When I asked Zients what he’s observed in Harris that makes him confident about her abilities as a potential chief executive, he at first started chuckling in what seemed to be discomfort at the subtext of the question. (“Well, I want to, you know, make sure we’re not talking about anything—but, you know, she’s prepared.”) But after that he went on thoughtfully: “You know, the first thing I go to is when you’re president, there are so many issues, and understanding what’s most important to the American people, what’s most important to America’s position in the world—it takes experience, which she has, and it takes a certain intuition as to what matters most, and she’s very good at quickly boiling it down to what matters most, and focusing on those issues, and then within those issues or opportunities, understanding what’s most important, and holding the team accountable.”

That’s a sharp assessment of what a vice president can bring to the table, and not a bad way to make important observations about Harris that seem matter-of-fact and not tied to the prospect of a sudden transition.

So I was surprised when another White House official, who knows both Harris and Biden well, treated the topic of readiness as if it were somehow illegitimate—a ploy by desperate Republican candidates. “People who are polling near the bottom do things and say things to try and be relevant and get oxygen.” Was it ridiculous to ask about Harris’s constitutional closeness to the presidency? “She is the closest to the presidency, as all of her predecessors have been.”

Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Chris Christie, and Ron DeSantis, all of them presidential candidates, have explicitly raised the specter of a “President Harris.” So have other Republicans. The probable GOP nominee, Donald Trump, who habitually belittles women, will likely do so too. He has referred to Harris as “this monster” and has questioned her citizenship. On one occasion, he made fun of her name—“Kamala, Kamala, Kamala,” repeating it slowly with various pronunciations. Harris called him childish for that, but has largely declined to take the bait. Perhaps not surprisingly for a former prosecutor, she has become more publicly outspoken than anyone else in the White House about the indictments that Trump faces and the need to hold lawbreakers accountable.

The Biden administration has every incentive to embrace Harris. Why does addressing preparedness seem so difficult? Harris has affirmed that she is ready, if need be, but there’s a limit to what she herself can say. It’s not unusual for a president, any president, to take pains to demonstrate his vice president’s readiness for the top job, if only by regularly referencing their closeness—the notion that the person is briefed on everything and has an opportunity to weigh in on major decisions, even if the fingerprints aren’t always visible. And no president comes to the Oval Office with every necessary skill. Harris is an uncomfortable fit in the vice president’s role, whatever that is, and she cannot speak or act independently; the job makes every occupant a cipher. But she has been a successful public servant for more than three decades. She ran the second-largest justice system in America, in a state that is the world’s fifth-largest economy. By virtue of her position, she is among those who represent the future of her party, and she represents its mainstream, not its fringe. Of course Kamala Harris is ready for the presidency, to the extent that anyone can be ready. This should not be hard for her own colleagues to talk about. Not talking about it leaves the subject open for political exploitation—by opponents whose own likely candidate makes the idea of readiness absurd.

And yet the topic is treated as a trip wire. In a brief conversation after an abortion-rights rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the first anniversary of the Dobbs decision, I asked Harris herself: Had she and Biden discussed how to address questions about her readiness to step in as president, should circumstances ever require it? “No,” she said. And that was the end of the conversation.

This article appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “Her?” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A Star Reporter’s Break With Reality

2023-06-12T07:00:00-04:00

Illustrations by Alicia Tatone

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

The footage is shown before she takes the stage: Lara Logan in a headscarf, addressing the camera from the streets of Mogadishu. Logan ducking for cover as bullets crack overhead in Afghanistan. Logan interrogating a trophy hunter in Texas. Logan walking with Christine Lagarde, Justin Trudeau, Mark Wahlberg, Jane Goodall.

It is a tour through Logan’s past life as a journalist for CBS’s 60 Minutes, a glimpse at the various exchanges and explosions that earned her the awards and a “prominent spot,” as her former network once put it, “among the world’s best foreign correspondents.” Then, three minutes and one second later, it is over. Cut to right now, February 27, 2023, in Fredericksburg, Texas: Logan looking out at 200 people gathered in a creaking church auditorium for the inaugural meeting of the Gillespie County chapter of Moms for Liberty.

“If you want to know why it’s called social media,” Logan says, “I’ll tell you why: Because Karl Marx was hired by Henry Rothschild, by the Rothschild family, to develop a system of social control. So when you see social, it is a form of control—that’s all it is. Social media is a form of controlling us all.”

She goes on, picking up on the title of a recent book by a friend of hers, retired General Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser and a far-right conspiracy theorist: “So what does fifth-generation warfare really mean?” It means that “you’re meant to believe the narrative, regardless of the truth.”

For the next 45 minutes, Logan, wearing a floral wrap dress and a cream-colored cardigan, lays out what she sees as the true narrative: for instance, that by aiding Ukraine, America is arming Nazis; that the events of January 6 were not an insurrection at all. Turning to The New York Times to understand this moment, Logan warns, is “like being in the battle of Normandy, on the beaches of Normandy, Dunkirk, and going on your knees every day and crawling over to the Nazi lines and asking them to please write nice things about your side in German propaganda.” Her dress is decorated with two identical navy-blue stickers reading STOP WOKE INDOCTRINATION.

As Logan talks, her words at times eliciting applause, the final frame of the introductory footage hovers ghostlike in the background. Logan’s success at events like this—she now features at many—turns on her ability to shrink the distance between her past and present selves. She needs the people in this auditorium to believe that the woman on the projector screen is the same one who now anticipates their fears of woke indoctrination. She needs them to trust that when she talks about subjects like the “little puppet” Volodymyr Zelensky, or how COVID vaccines are a form of “genocide by government,” or how President Joe Biden’s administration has been “participating in the trafficking of kids,” it is with the precise rigor and dispassion she once displayed on the front lines of America’s wars.

Logan, who is 52, is still, after all, a war correspondent. That is how she sees it. The fighting may not be in Afghanistan or Iraq, and she may not be winning Emmys for her coverage anymore, but in her mind this is her most crucial assignment yet, uncovering this “war against humanity.” And she must be getting close to the real story, because the American media have tried to silence her from all sides.

First CBS, and then Fox News. Not even the far-right Newsmax wants journalists who risk piercing the narrative. In October, during an appearance on that network, Logan declared that “the open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world” and that the global elite “want us eating insects” while they “dine on the blood of children.” Newsmax condemned her remarks and announced that it had no plans to invite Logan on its shows again.

Logan’s life has been rife with personal trauma, some of it well known. In 2011, she was gang-raped in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In 2012, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In 2013, a story she reported for 60 Minutes was publicly disavowed. I went to Fredericksburg, where Logan now lives, on that February evening because I wanted to know what had happened in the decade since. I wanted to understand how, after years of association with the tick-tick-tick of 60 Minutes, she had slipped into a world bracketed by MyPillow discount codes and LaraLoganGold.com. How a career built on pursuing the truth had become so unmoored from it.

When I had contacted Logan about an interview, her response, via text message, was: “Unfortunately I have no doubt this is another hit piece desperately seeking to discredit several decades of award-winning work at 60 Minutes, CBS, ABC, NBC and beyond and you are only seeking my voice to add legitimacy to the anonymous cowards you will use to attack me once again. Feel free to use this statement if you are sincere.” She then shared a screenshot of our exchange with her 530,000 Twitter followers.

And so I braced for an unpleasant encounter when I approached Logan at the end of the night, after the long line of grandmothers and mothers and teenage girls who wanted a photo with her had finally dwindled. I introduced myself and said that I had seen probably every story she had ever done for 60 Minutes. “But here you’ve come,” she said. “Here you’ve come to destroy it all.”

She has been described in terms of hazardous weather. A tornado whipped through Midtown Manhattan and there suddenly was Lara Logan, June 2008, striding high-heeled from the wings of The Daily Show. “She is the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News,” Jon Stewart announced, the studio audience cheering as he shook Logan’s hand and guided her to center stage. “You remind me of a young Ted Koppel,” he said.

Logan tilted her head back and laughed. “Dan Rather used to say that about me!”

Logan had begun her career as a full-time journalist 16 years earlier, fresh out of college and with a résumé consisting of two part-time newspaper gigs in her hometown of Durban, South Africa, along with a bit of swimsuit modeling. In her first days covering the post-apartheid landscape as a producer at Reuters Television in Johannesburg, Logan, then in her early 20s, had not exactly reminded anyone of a young Ted Koppel. “The word bimbo came up a lot,” one of Logan’s former Reuters colleagues told me. But opinions began to shift once fellow journalists saw her in the field. “It was a very, very intense time … She’s a fucking hard worker, and she takes risks,” the former colleague said. “She had incredible guts.” (This person, like most of the nearly three dozen other onetime colleagues or friends of Logan’s I interviewed, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.)

By 30, Logan was a correspondent for the British morning show GMTV. She was working out of London on 9/11, and within days she was pleading with an embassy clerk for a fast-track visa to Afghanistan. At first, GMTV management seemed unsure what to make of it, this young woman apparently desperate to embed herself in al-Qaeda territory. Where would she sleep? What about a driver, security? She’d figure it out. She was en route to Kabul shortly after the first American air strikes that October.

It didn’t take long for Logan’s superiors to recognize the opportunity before them, the potential for their coverage of the biggest story on Earth to become an event unto itself. This was not just because Logan was a woman but because she was attractive. It is prudent to address this now, because the fact of Logan’s attractiveness would soon become unavoidable, the gathering resonance of her journalism inextricable from the public’s gathering interest in her appearance.

Logan had been in Kabul less than a month when her Independent Television News competitor Julian Manyon suggested in a Spectator essay that the “delectable” correspondent’s swift infiltration of Bagram Airfield and the upper ranks of the Northern Alliance was due to her “considerable physical charms.” Logan, he wrote, “exploits her God-given advantages with a skill that Mata Hari might envy.” Responding in a short dispatch for The Guardian, Logan parried adroitly. “If General Babajan smiles around me, perhaps it is because I offer him respect and attempt, at least, to talk to him in a non-demanding manner,” she wrote. “It’s not rocket science.”

The British tabloids, delighted to have located the sex in jihad so quickly, scrambled to build on the story. In the course of interviewing Logan’s mother at her home in Durban, a reporter got access to the swimsuit photos for which Logan had posed to earn extra cash while in high school and university. The photos soon appeared on the front pages of the Daily Record and The Mirror. At first Logan was furious, embarrassed. But then she decided to lean in, to fashion herself as the rare emblem of both harrowing journalism and unabashed femininity. The tip for the next Mirror splash (“Here’s a sight that would stop the Taliban in its tracks. War reporter Lara Logan relaxes on a deck chair in a sizzling swimsuit”) reportedly came from Logan herself. “She was the first field correspondent I ever met who sort of understood her brand, which was a really new thing at the time,” a producer at a rival network told me.

As her profile grew, Logan charmed feature writers with her willingness to talk, to play ball when they asked her about things as personal as the last time she’d had a “good snog.” She argued that not using her looks would be malpractice. “There isn’t a journalist alive who won’t admit to you they use every advantage they have,” she told The New York Times.

Alicia Tatone. Sources: Chris Hondros / Getty; Saul Loeb / Getty.

More fundamental to Logan’s success in Afghanistan, however, was the simple fact that she showed up when others didn’t. In addition to her GMTV job, Logan worked as a stringer for CBS News Radio, and just a few weeks after arriving in Kabul, she found herself the only CBS-affiliated reporter on hand to cover the Taliban’s rapid unraveling. The network aired her prime-time debut from the capital.

This was when Dan Rather saw a young Ted Koppel. An article in Vogue described Rather as the first to urge CBS to hire Logan full-time. He marveled at her ability to “get through the glass,” as he told the magazine. “The good ones,” he said, “always want the worst assignments.” By spring 2002, Logan had a $1 million contract with the network.

Her new colleagues understood the appeal. “She knows how to position herself, she knows how to relate to the camera—she’s incredibly good at that,” Philip Ittner, a former CBS producer who worked with Logan, told me. “She was also very good under fire. Even in a very bad firefight or something, after an IED exploded, she would get in front of the camera, and she’d be able to deliver.”

But then there was the tornado of it all. “She likes to stir stuff up, unconsciously,” the former Reuters colleague told me. “Wherever she goes, there’s a lot of kinetic energy that’s not necessarily net positive.”

Logan grew up one of three children in a well-off white family in apartheid South Africa. She enjoyed snacks prepared by housekeepers and a swimming pool in the backyard and the tacit belief that her parents had only ever existed, and indeed would only ever exist, in relation to each other. And then one morning when she was 8, her father pulled into the driveway and Logan raced out to greet him and there in the car was a 5-year-old girl she had never seen before. Say hello to your sister, her father said. He was leaving to be with this other daughter and her mother.

“It was such a shock, such a traumatic experience,” Logan later recalled. After the divorce, she watched her mother struggle to reassemble the pieces of her life. Yolanda Logan moved her young children into a small apartment and found work as a sales representative at a glass company, never remarrying. “I learned about betrayal and dishonesty,” Logan told the Sunday Mirror soon after returning to London from Kabul. “When I looked at Mum, I saw a woman who thought she was secure and safe in her marriage suddenly alone.”

That was how Logan explained it when the Mirror reporter asked why she was so willing to pitch herself into danger as a journalist. “I’m afraid of being seen as vulnerable,” she said. “All my life, I’ve been fighting to prove that I’m not weak.”

She refused orders from CBS to keep out of Iraq during the American invasion in 2003, hiring local fixers to sneak her across the Jordanian border. On the drive into Baghdad, she played Van Morrison. With virtually every other American television broadcaster evacuated from the city, “shock and awe” was hers. One of Logan’s early segments for the relatively short-lived Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes showed a Humvee she was in flip over when it hit a land mine; in a Sunday segment, viewers saw Logan defy a vehicle commander’s orders to stay put as he went to inspect an unexploded bomb. In 2005, the Times christened her the “War Zone ‘It Girl’ ”; in 2006, CBS elevated her to chief foreign correspondent.

Whether Logan was daring or heedless depended on whom you asked—and, as is typical in the environs of television news, a great many of her colleagues enjoyed being asked. Some felt that Logan showed undue deference to the military line; others groused about what they saw as stubbornness and self-absorption. Still others watched Logan peer down at an unexploded bomb and saw not bravery as much as recklessness. At a certain point, “a lot of people refused to produce her,” one of her former producers told me.

If, for Logan, this was not cause for introspection, it was perhaps because her approach was winning a lot of awards. (In her first six years at CBS, she picked up Gracie Awards and Murrow Awards and an Emmy.) And if, for Logan, the New York Post article headlined “Sexty Minutes” had not been cause for alarm, it was perhaps because Jeff Fager, then the executive producer of 60 Minutes, had hung a framed copy of the article in his office. “It’s hard to judge what Lara Logan is going to be in 10 years,” Fager told Broadcasting & Cable magazine in the fall of 2008. “But boy, she’s made a mark in a short period of time.”

And yet, for as long as Logan had craved precisely this level of success, she also seemed uncomfortable with having actually attained it—as if to accept life as it presented itself to her, the way her mother once had, risked revealing it to be a trick of the light. She spoke sometimes of unspecified plans to derail her career. “I’m sure people are interested in seeing me fail,” she said shortly after joining CBS. She detected threats where no threats were intended. In 2006, when reviewing Katie Couric’s premiere as the first solo female anchor on a major-network evening news show, the Times pronounced that “the woman who stood out the most” was not Couric herself, but rather the “experienced and unusually pretty” CBS war correspondent. The unwanted comparison with her senior colleague seemed only to reinforce Logan’s inchoate sense of being conspired against. “I always think it is some kind of secret plot to destroy me,” she told Vogue in 2007. “I mean, to disparage the anchor at my expense?”

This dim, diffuse paranoia would sharpen, according to some colleagues, after the start of Logan’s relationship with the man who is now her husband, Joe Burkett.

Logan was married for the first time in 1998—to Jason Siemon, an American who played professional basketball in the United Kingdom. She met Joseph Washington Burkett IV, a Texas native and an Army sergeant who was also married, a few years later, while reporting in Kabul. Early 2008 found them working again in the same city, this time Baghdad. Logan was now in the final stages of a divorce and Burkett was newly estranged from his wife. He quickly became a regular presence in the press compound outside the Green Zone.

It was not clear to Logan’s colleagues what Burkett did for a living, and Burkett seemed to prefer it that way. He cultivated an air of secrecy, dropping hints that he was involved in clandestine operations. Logan seemed drawn in by the mystery of Burkett and his “very secretive job,” as she once called it. It was a while before Logan’s colleagues learned that Burkett had been in Baghdad on behalf of the Lincoln Group, a now-defunct firm quietly contracted by the Pentagon to disseminate pro-America propaganda in Iraqi newspapers. But they needed only a few conversations to register his penchant for conspiracy theories.

As Logan’s relationship with Burkett progressed, some of her colleagues noticed slight shifts in her story ideas. “As much as she would occasionally come up with loony tunes stuff on her own, it would always be more of, like, ‘Hey, let’s go right into the most dangerous part of’ whatever environment they were currently covering,” Philip Ittner told me. “But when Burkett came on the scene, it was like—and this is a hypothetical—‘Clearly the CIA is bringing in hallucinogens to put into the water supply of Baghdad; we really need to dig into this.’ ” (Logan declined to answer questions about herself, her husband, or other topics related to this article. In response to a list of factual queries and requests for comment that The Atlantic sent her, Logan wrote, “You are a hundred percent wrong on everything.”)

Logan and Burkett were wed in November 2008; Logan was seven months pregnant with their first child. They began married life in a house they bought in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

On the evening of February 11, 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring, Logan threaded through the congested streets of Cairo. She, her cameraman, her security guard, and her producer had come straight from the airport, as she later recounted on 60 Minutes, having landed just moments after President Hosni Mubarak announced his resignation. “It was like unleashing a champagne cork on Egypt,” she recalled.

Logan’s agent, Carole Cooper, had advised against the trip; only a week earlier, Logan and her crew had been detained overnight by Egyptian officials targeting journalists. But now, in Tahrir Square, thousands of people were singing, chanting, unfurling flags. For more than an hour she reported from the crowd, people smiling and waving at the camera. Then the camera’s battery went dead. The light illuminating Logan and the people around her was suddenly gone. A few moments later, Logan felt hands on her body. She thought that if she screamed loud enough, the assault would stop, but it didn’t.

[Read: Brutal assault on CBS’s Lara Logan in Egypt shows risks to female reporters]

The mob tore off her clothes. For a few minutes she managed to hold on to her security guard’s arm, but then, like everyone else in her crew, he was beaten back. This was when Logan thought she was going to die. Later she would recall for Newsweek how the men raped her with their hands, with sticks, with flagpoles. Onlookers took photos with their cellphones. The assault lasted at least 25 minutes before a group of Egyptian women intervened. They were able to cover Logan until soldiers managed to reach her and get her to her hotel, where she was seen by a doctor.

The next morning, Logan was on a flight home to her husband and two young children in Washington. She would spend four days in the hospital. People from all over the world sent flowers and letters. President Barack Obama called her to share his support. Logan’s eventual decision to talk openly about what happened inspired other women in journalism to share their own stories of being sexually assaulted while on the job. After she spoke out, the Committee to Protect Journalists launched a major effort to survey the problem and stigma of sexual violence in the field.

Over time, the most obvious reminders of Logan’s assault—the hand-shaped bruises all over her body—faded. For years afterward, however, as she told the Toronto Star, Logan would continue to cope with internal injuries—severe pelvic pain, a hysterectomy that failed to heal. And there was the emotional damage. Logan talked about problems of intimacy with her husband, the dark memories that could sweep over her with a single touch.

A little over a year after the assault, Logan, at 41, was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer; she underwent a lumpectomy and six weeks of radiation, then went into remission. It was during this period of her life, Logan would say, that she “wanted to come apart.” She felt herself in a situation where “nobody could see it and nobody could see me and nobody understood.” She began suffering panic attacks. She tried therapy.

[Read: It’s more dangerous than ever to be a female war reporter]

Through it all, Logan found refuge in her career. In April 2013, a little more than two years after the assault, The Hollywood Reporter published a glowing feature on executive producer Jeff Fager’s 60 Minutes. The article depicted Logan as a confident correspondent striding into a screening for her next story, settling in beside Fager as he prepared to mark up the script. His verdict: “Terrific.” She could always make it back to terrific.

Until, that is, she couldn’t.

Not long after the Hollywood Reporter article, Simon & Schuster reached out to CBS with a pitch. A conservative imprint within the publishing company had a book coming out in the fall—The Embassy House—about Benghazi: the “real story,” as the prologue promised, of the deadly attack on the American compound and CIA annex in September 2012, as recounted by “the only man in a position to tell the full story.”

The man’s name was Dylan Davies, but he was writing under a pseudonym—for his safety, the book explained, and also because he had “no interest in seeking official recognition.”

Davies, a British-military veteran from Wales, was a security officer whose employer, Blue Mountain, had been hired by the State Department to help protect the Special Mission in Benghazi. In his book, he described how, on the night of the attack, he had scaled the compound’s 12-foot wall to try to save the Americans trapped inside, rifle-butting a terrorist in the process. He also said that he had seen Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’s body at the hospital.

Logan and her producer, Max McClellan, agreed to consider The Embassy House for a feature on 60 Minutes. The basics of Davies’s biography appeared to check out; email correspondence that Davies shared with Logan seemed to confirm, as he claimed, that he had been interviewed by officials from across the U.S. government, including the FBI, about everything he had seen and heard and done that night. Over the next few months, Logan and McClellan put together a Benghazi segment featuring Davies’s story as well as original reporting on the attack. After the screening of the finished product, CBS and 60 Minutes leadership, including Fager, green-lighted the broadcast for air.

Some of Logan’s reporting broke significant ground. No journalist had yet substantiated, for example, the role of Abu Sufian bin Qumu, an Ansar al‑Sharia leader and former Guantánamo Bay detainee, in the Benghazi attack; the Obama administration did not publicly announce his involvement until the next year. But the segment’s revelations were framed almost as sideshows to the Rambo-esque account of Davies, whose view of the attack comprised the majority of the report’s 15 and a half minutes.

Within days of the broadcast, his story began to unravel. The Washington Post reported that Davies had told his employer he wasn’t at the compound that night—something 60 Minutes had known but did not mention, accepting Davies’s explanation that he had lied to his employer. A week later, The New York Times revealed that Davies had also told the FBI that he wasn’t at the compound. Logan and McClellan knew that Davies had been interviewed by the FBI; they had not checked what he actually said. And when, after the Times report, they tried to reach Davies to demand answers, they couldn’t find him—The Daily Beast later reported that he had emailed his publisher saying that because of a threat against his family, he was going dark.

I was recently able to reach Davies via email. He claimed without evidence that his son’s life had been threatened by “the US state department (Clinton)” after the 60 Minutes report. (A spokesperson for Hillary Clinton denied the allegation and noted that Clinton had stepped down as secretary of state several months before the Benghazi report aired.) When I pressed him on whether he had told the FBI and 60 Minutes different versions of his story, he replied that he didn’t “want anything to do with Benghazi” and asked what was wrong with me.

Media Matters, the liberal watchdog group founded by the Clinton ally David Brock, seized on the controversy immediately, publishing no fewer than 36 stories highlighting problems in Logan’s reporting. Other outlets would point to a speech Logan had given a year earlier, in which she accused the Obama administration of perpetuating a “major lie” about the ongoing threat of al-Qaeda, as evidence of political bias.

On November 8, 2013, for the first time in her career, Logan went on air to announce the retraction of a story. “We were wrong,” she said. Simon & Schuster withdrew The Embassy House from sale later that day. For CBS, and Fager in particular, it was a colossal embarrassment—the program’s “worst mistake on my 10-year watch,” he wrote in a 2017 book. Logan would later say that a nondisclosure agreement she and McClellan had signed with the publisher had prevented them from checking Davies’s story with the FBI. It was an odd line of defense—Logan arguing that she had given up the right to verify key points. An internal CBS review concluded that problems with Davies’s account were “knowable before the piece aired.” Logan and McClellan agreed to take indefinite leaves of absence. (CBS News declined to comment on the Benghazi report and its aftermath.)

Sitting in her home in Cleveland Park during the leave of absence, Logan took calls from colleagues and tried to make sense of things. For the first time in her career, she was losing control of the narrative.

Logan soon learned that Joe Hagan, a writer at New York magazine, was working on a profile of her. Hagan’s article, titled “Benghazi and the Bombshell,” was published in May 2014. Hagan attributed the Benghazi mistake to a “proverbial perfect storm” of factors, including Logan’s reputed personal sympathies with the Republican line on the attack, and the “outsize power” she enjoyed at 60 Minutes thanks to Fager.

Logan would later file a lawsuit against Hagan and New York—a suit quickly dismissed by a federal judge. The complaint alleged that prior to publication of the “Hagan Hit Piece,” as Logan called it, Fager and CBS Chair Les Moonves had come up with a “specific and detailed plan” for her to return to 60 Minutes. According to the lawsuit, after the article appeared Moonves felt that he and Fager had been painted as Logan’s “lapdogs” and decided to shift course; Fager then informed her that she would return to the program in a “drastically altered role.” When she went back to work in June, her relationship with him was, she claimed in the suit, “irreparably damaged.” “She really felt hung out to dry,” a person formerly close to Logan told me. (Neither Fager nor Moonves responded to requests for comment.)

For Logan, reckoning frankly with the circumstances in which she now found herself would have meant accepting her own responsibility for creating them—accepting, in other words, the unextraordinary truth of the human capacity for poor judgment. But in the fall of 2014, a movie came out that helped Logan rewrite her narrative.

Based on a book by the journalist Nick Schou, Kill the Messenger tells the story of Gary Webb, a San Jose Mercury News journalist who, in 1996, published a blockbuster investigation that linked the CIA to America’s crack-cocaine epidemic by way of its relationship with the Nicaraguan contras. Although much of the reporting was solid, Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series also had serious flaws; the Mercury News eventually determined that the series “did not meet our standards” in several ways. Webb resigned from the paper not long afterward. He died by suicide in 2004. In the movie’s telling, the various news outlets that called Webb’s work into question were motivated less by a desire to correct the record than by petty jealousies and a longtime deference to the CIA.

It’s unclear whether Logan had ever heard of Webb before she saw the film. In many respects, their experiences were utterly unalike. Nevertheless, Logan seemed to cling to Webb as a kind of life raft, and would later invoke his name and story in interviews about her Benghazi report. (She also questioned whether Webb’s death had truly been a suicide.) Logan ultimately decided that Media Matters, in an effort to discredit the “substance” of the Benghazi report—about security flaws at the compound—had worked in concert with various media outlets to silence her. The problem, as she now saw it, was not that she had put an unverified account on air. It was that her report had dared to criticize the Obama administration. To use Webb’s own formulation—one that Logan repeats to this day—she had told a story “important enough to suppress.”

Alicia Tatone. Sources: Chris Hondros / Getty; Alex Wong / Getty.

In mid-2015, when Logan’s contract was coming up for renewal, CBS offered, and Logan accepted, a part-time correspondent role on 60 Minutes. Shortly after the contract was signed, she, her husband, and their children packed up their house in Washington and moved to Burkett’s hometown of Fredericksburg, Texas.

For most of her professional life, Logan had not struck her peers as especially political—“very moderate,” one former colleague called her. She now began to shape a new worldview, one steeped in antagonism toward the media establishment she felt betrayed by, and toward the figures and institutions she believed it served. It was a worldview that offered both absolution and purpose. And it was soon to find a partisan expression in Donald Trump.

On-screen, over the next two years, Logan seemed much the same journalist and person she’d always been. She continued to file stories from various countries for 60 Minutes. Off-screen, however, she was becoming closer to people like Ed Butowsky, a Fox News regular and Texas-based financial adviser of whom Logan was now a client. Butowsky would play a central role in the story of Seth Rich.

In July 2016, the murder of the Democratic National Committee staffer—in a botched robbery, police said—produced a torrent of right-wing conspiracy theories. Butowsky helped instigate an investigation that resulted in a Fox News story suggesting that Rich had been killed by Hillary Clinton associates in retaliation for supposedly leaking emails from the DNC to WikiLeaks. (Fox soon retracted the story and later settled a lawsuit brought by the Rich family. Butowsky settled a separate lawsuit brought against him by Rich’s brother.)

According to Facebook messages shared with The Atlantic, Logan, too, had been suspicious of the botched-robbery line, and saw in the episode another instance of the elite media providing cover for the left. In an April 2017 exchange with Trevor FitzGibbon, a left-wing public-relations strategist whose firm had represented WikiLeaks, Logan wrote that she did not know “for a fact” that Clinton’s associates were responsible for Rich’s murder. “But I would be stunned if it were not true.” No journalist had reported this, because “they”—presumably the Democrats—“own the media,” she wrote, and pointed to the fallout from her Benghazi report. “They saw me as a threat and went after me and the show.” A few months later, Joe Burkett attended a small gathering at Butowsky’s home at which, according to one attendee’s sworn deposition, the possibility of wiretapping Rich’s parents’ house was raised. (Butowsky has denied that this was ever discussed.)

Toward the end of 2018, CBS declined to renew Logan’s contract. She was likely not surprised. Logan later characterized her final four years at the network as isolating; executives who’d once supported her now treated her with “utter contempt.” (Fager and Moonves, as it happened, were both ousted at approximately the same time—Fager for sending a threatening text message to a CBS News reporter looking into #MeToo allegations against him and Moonves when a dozen women said he had sexually harassed or assaulted them. Both denied the sexual-misconduct allegations.)

[Read: Les Moonves and the familiarity fallacy]

In interviews, a number of Logan’s former colleagues expressed the belief that, in time, she would have been picked up by another network. Her 60 Minutes segment in 2015 on Christians in Iraq had won a Murrow Award; in 2017, she and her team won an Emmy for their report on the battle for Mosul. But what Logan’s messages with FitzGibbon seem to underscore is that, even if a continued career in mainstream media had been possible, she wasn’t necessarily interested in pursuing one.

Logan was creating, in effect, a new brand for herself. She unveiled it in early 2019, sitting down for a three-and-a-half-hour podcast interview with the former Navy SEAL Mike Ritland, whom she had once interviewed for 60 Minutes. Logan related the story of her life and offered a blistering critique of the mainstream media she had chosen to leave behind. In speaking out against what she saw as the media’s liberal bias, Logan told Ritland, she was committing “professional suicide.” She likened right-wing outlets such as Breitbart News and Fox to the “tiny little spot” where women are permitted to pray at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, while “CBS, ABC, NBC, Huffington Post, Politico, whatever”—the “liberal” media—took up the rest of the space, reserved for men. The interview went viral, and Sean Hannity invited her on his show for a follow-up. “I hope my bosses at Fox find a place for you,” the host told her.

By the start of 2020, Logan had a deal with Fox News’s streaming service Fox Nation, for a series called Lara Logan Has No Agenda. Along with reported segments on subjects including illegal immigration and the dangerous advance of socialism in America, Logan would use her new role to build on her criticism of the media. One of Logan’s former producers remembers calling her around this time. “I was like, ‘You know, you’re talking about me … You’re talking about all these people who’ve worked with you—we’re part of some vast left-wing conspiracy? Like, seriously, you believe that?’ And she was like, ‘No, you don’t understand … You may not know you’re complicit—but you’re complicit.’ ”

As the months passed, Logan’s comments became more extreme. Eventually some of her closest friends from her former life could no longer stomach a phone call with her, knowing it might turn into a stem-winder on the virtues of Michael Flynn, who had admitted to lying to the FBI about his contact with the Russian ambassador. When Trump supporters mobilized to deny the results of the 2020 election, Logan was right there with them; she would work on a movie (financed by MyPillow’s Mike Lindell) about alleged voter fraud. After the January 6 insurrection, she rallied behind the people who were charged with taking part in it.

All of which seemed to culminate in an appearance on Fox News—in November 2021, as the country battled COVID—during which Logan compared Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Fox stayed silent about the remarks but ultimately did not pursue a new season of Logan’s streaming show.

It was the sort of moment that those few friends left over from her old life thought might finally force a reckoning. Even her newer allies struggled to defend the remarks. (“Anytime you bring up a Nazi in anything, you’re kind of going off the reservation,” Ed Butowsky told me.) But by that point, Logan had come to seem firmly of the mind that setbacks, criticism, or a reproach of any sort were only evidence that she was doing something right. Carole Cooper, her agent—who, according to people familiar with their long relationship, had been like a second mother to Logan—dropped her. Less than a year later, Newsmax, where Logan often appeared on the commentator Eric Bolling’s weeknight show, washed its hands of Logan, following her riff on the global blood-drinking elite.

Logan was undeterred. The stakes, as she had come to see them, were simply too high. This is what she tries to communicate to people at the various local speaking gigs that now constitute much of her career, events such as the Park Cities Republican Women Christmas fundraising lunch in Texas, which she keynoted last year. “We had to cut her off because she was going too long,” one member who helped arrange the lunch recalled. The message was: “The world is on fire” and “your kids are being exposed to cats being raped” and “elections are stolen” and “we’ve lost our country.” The woman added, “It’s a Christmas lunch, mind you.”

The truth is that I had been nervous about approaching Logan on that February evening in Texas. Two weeks earlier, she had suggested on Twitter that I was engaged in a broader “strategic hit job” involving an effort to frame her as a Mossad asset. I did not know how she would respond to my presence at the Moms for Liberty event, which I paid $10 to attend. After my initial exchange with Logan, her manner softened, though she would not speak with me on the record.

In the past several years, I have written about a number of public figures on the right who believe very few of the things they profess to believe, who talk in public about stolen elections and wink at the specter of global cabals, and then privately crack jokes about the people who applaud.

I don’t think Logan is one of these figures. People who know her say the private person is also the public one. It was with sincere urgency that she recommended Flynn’s The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare to her audience that evening. I Googled Flynn’s book as I waited to approach Logan. It is advertised almost as a self-help guide, the promotional copy encouraging Americans and “freedom loving people everywhere” to buy the volume to “understand the manipulation happening around you” and “why you feel the way you do.” “When I just saw General Michael Flynn,” Logan had told the audience, “he said to me—opening words—‘We’ve got maybe 18 months before we lose this country.’ ” She had nodded as many in the crowd vocalized their dismay. “This is not something you can pick and choose about whether you want to do.” She declared, “I’m not going to surrender. Even if they throw me in a prison and execute me—’til my last breath, I’m going to be fighting.”

In recent years, many Americans have embraced conspiracy theories as a way to give order and meaning to the world’s chance cruelties. Lara Logan seems to have done the same, rewriting her story as a martyrdom epic in the war of narratives. Five years after Logan departed CBS, few tethers remain to the woman on the projector screen. Executives and journalists who were once her greatest advocates have long since stopped talking to her and would prefer not to talk about her, either. “Respectfully, I would like to pass speaking on this subject. Best wishes,” Dan Rather wrote in a Twitter message when I reached out to him. Former friends who remember Logan as empathetic and generous now fear incurring the vitriol of a woman who frequently trashes critics and perceived enemies as “evil,” “disgusting,” “worthless.” The only former colleague of hers who was willing to be quoted by name in this article agreed to do so out of a sense of duty. “She is spreading Kremlin propaganda,” Philip Ittner told me. “And as somebody who is here in Ukraine, trying to fight back against the Russian information warfare, I can’t in good conscience just sit idly by.” It may be that saying nobody owns you, as Logan so often does, helps dull the reality that very few people claim you.

But the people at the event in Fredericksburg did claim her. After the speech was over, Logan talked one-on-one with dozens of audience members who seemed anxious to learn more about why they felt the way they did. She lingered until the very last person left the auditorium.

I think she stayed for as long as she did that night because she believes she has seen the light and wanted the people in the auditorium to see it too. I think she also stayed because the people there represent some of the only community she has left.

This article appears in the July/August 2023 print edition with the headline “A Star Reporter’s Break With Reality.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

An Ousted Trump Target on Leaving Congress

2023-01-03T05:00:00-05:00

Updated at 2 p.m. ET on January 4, 2023

Among the things Jaime Herrera Beutler remembers about January 6, 2021, is that her husband managed to turn off the television just in time.

He was at home with their three young children in southwestern Washington State when the riot began. It had taken him a few moments to make out the shaky footage of the mob as it tore through the Capitol. Then he started to recognize the hallways, the various corridors that he knew led to the House floor, where his wife was preparing to break from her party and speak in favor of certifying the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. He grabbed the remote before the kids could register what was about to happen.

It was a few moments later that Herrera Beutler, huddled among her Republican colleagues, heard the door. “I will never forget the pounding,” she told me recently: Boom, boom, boom.

Before January 6, Herrera Beutler was a purple-district congresswoman who had spent most of her 12-year tenure removed from controversy, passing legislation on bipartisan issues such as maternal health and endangered wildlife while maintaining a social conservatism that kept her in good standing with the base. In the weeks that followed the insurrection, however, when she and nine other House Republicans voted to impeach President Donald Trump, the 44-year-old found herself the pariah of a party whose broader membership, for most of her career, had not precisely known she existed. Today, when the 118th Congress is sworn in, she, like all but two of the Republicans who voted to impeach, will find herself out of office.

In an interview with The Atlantic about her six terms in the House and the Trump-backed primary challenge that ousted her, Herrera Beutler remained convinced of Trump’s culpability for the events of January 6. Yet she appeared still bewildered that a crisis of such magnitude had come to pass, and that not even her own constituents were immune to Trump’s propaganda about the 2020 election and the insurrection itself. “I didn’t know that I had so many people who would be like, ‘What are you talking about? This was a peaceful protest,’” she told me. “I had no idea the depth of misinformation people were receiving, especially in my own home.”

Throughout our conversation, it was clear that the insurrection’s fallout hadn’t changed Herrera Beutler the way it had Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, the two Republicans who sat on the January 6 committee and who have publicly committed themselves to keeping Trump out of office. These and other Republicans who retired or lost their seats after voting to impeach Trump have seemed liberated to speak about the GOP’s widespread delusion over election fraud. But Herrera Beutler is different: refusing to say that the forces of Trumpism have triggered a fundamental shift in her party, even as her own career was upended by them. Despite two years of hindsight, she seems to have rationalized her party’s continued promotion of lies concerning January 6 as a function of tactical error—believing that had Republicans and Democrats agreed to proceed with witnesses during Trump’s impeachment trial, and had she communicated the stakes differently back home, her base would have rejected the conspiracy theories and accepted Trump’s guilt. “I know a majority of the Republicans who disagree with me on impeachment, had they seen and talked to the people that I had, and had they seen what I saw—I have no doubt about where they would have come down,” she said. “I really don’t.”

[From the January/February 2022 issue: What the GOP does to its own dissenters]

That Herrera Beutler has arrived at this conviction might seem naive but is in many ways understandable. For the better part of 12 years, she has been reinforced in the idea that the Republicans in her district are ideologically independent, cocooned from the national party as it leaps from one identity to the next. In her first bid for Congress, at the height of the Tea Party wave, she easily beat challengers from the right to become, at just 31 years old, the first Hispanic to represent Washington State in Congress. She had barely unpacked before the media christened her the future of her party. To the disappointment of the Republican leadership, however, the young and charismatic statehouse veteran wasn’t terribly interested in developing a national profile. Over the next several years, Herrera Beutler instead oriented her office around the hyperlocal work her constituents seemed to prefer—efforts such as expanding the forest-products industry and protecting the Columbia River’s salmon and steelhead runs from sea lions.

On January 6, Herrera Beutler’s career moved onto alien terrain. Immediately after the insurrection, she directed her staff to start making calls, to find out where Trump had been during the rioting and why. Late that afternoon, she texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for answers—“We need to hear from the president. On TV,” she sent, to no response—and, on January 11, two days before the impeachment vote, she privately pressed Kevin McCarthy for his impression of Trump’s culpability. During their conversation, the House minority leader confessed that the president had refused his pleas over the phone to call off the rioters—that as they smashed the windows of McCarthy’s office, Trump accused him of not caring enough about purported election fraud. For Herrera Beutler, it was enough to prove Trump’s guilt. In a press release the next day, and later a town hall back in her district, she invoked the conversation with McCarthy to explain her decision to vote to impeach.

At the time, she hadn’t thought twice about airing the details of the Trump-McCarthy call. In the context of the various other things that she and the public had learned by that point, she told me, “I didn’t think it was unique or profound.” In fact, for McCarthy’s reputation, it was. The California Republican would soon make something of a penance visit to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, despite having been, according to Herrera Beutler and other (anonymous) Republican members who were privy to details of the call, terrified and livid at the height of the insurrection, acutely aware of Trump’s real-time recognition of the danger and refusal to do anything about it. Before long, Herrera Beutler’s revelation about the Trump-McCarthy call became the lead story on CNN. Jamie Raskin, the House Democrat managing Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, suddenly wanted to know everything about this congresswoman he had hardly heard of.

For Herrera Beutler, the attention was unlike anything she’d experienced. “I wasn’t trying to insert myself into the national conversation,” she told me. “I wasn’t trying to be the, you know …” She trailed off, seemingly trying to say something like the truth teller. She was open to testifying in the impeachment trial and contacted Nancy Pelosi’s counsel about how to proceed, according to reporting by Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian in Unchecked, yet the House speaker’s attorney never relayed the message to Raskin and his staff. (After publication of this article, Herrera Beutler called me to say that she had contacted Pelosi’s counsel, but only to understand her legal options as Democrats started publicly floating her as a potential witness.) With zero surefire commitments from Republican witnesses to Trump’s conduct during the riot, and facing pressure from his own party not to gum up the 46th president’s honeymoon period with proceedings against the 45th, Raskin rushed the trial to a close.

If Herrera Beutler had pushed more publicly to testify, would Raskin have charged ahead and subpoenaed others? Would it have changed the final vote in the Senate? It’s impossible to say. But for Herrera Beutler, the outcome remains bound up in regret. She said it was “overwhelming” when she began to realize “that good people, honest people, amazing people that I knew” believed, for example, that antifa had orchestrated the riot. “Because, at that point, what could I do?” In retrospect, she believes that pushing ahead with a full trial, before public opinion about January 6 could “bake,” as she puts it, might have plugged the flow of conspiracy theories in her district and elsewhere. The implication, left unsaid, is that it also might have changed the outcome of her primary. “Had we made everything as public as we could at that moment, I think that we could have come to a better agreed-upon actual history of what happened,” she said. “That’s the only thing that I wish I had known—I moved into this thinking we all had the same information, and we didn’t.”

Though she said she appreciates the “sense of duty” of the lawmakers on the January 6 committee—whose final report was published just before we spoke—Herrera Beutler was pessimistic about the resonance of their work. “The challenge for me with the committee was that the 70 million people who voted for Trump are never going to get anything out of that,” she said. “And that’s who I wanted to move.”

[Read: The House race that shows why Republicans collapsed in the midterms]

This past August, a Trump-backed Republican and former Green Beret named Joe Kent, who had promoted the former president’s lies about the 2020 election, defeated Herrera Beutler in the Third Congressional District’s jungle primary. (Two months later, Kent narrowly lost the general election to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who will be the first Democrat in the seat since Herrera Beutler took office in 2011.) On the one hand, Herrera Beutler seems clear-eyed about the forces behind her loss. “It’s just turned into such a tit-for-tat on personality things, and I think my base has definitely at times wanted to see more of that from me,” she said. “And that’s probably part of why the guy in my race made it as far as he did, because that was his oxygen—scratching that itch and making people feel justified in their ideas.”

On the other hand, Herrera Beutler at various times in our conversation expressed an optimism about the future of Republican politics that seemed unmoored from the fact that her party’s base had rejected her. In criticizing both Republican and Democratic lawmakers she called “members in tweet only,” she said she often wondered what their constituents think “when they don’t get anything done—like when they can’t help a local hospital with a permit, or when Grandma can’t get her spouse’s disability payment from the VA.” “I don’t know if they just speechify when they go home,” she said, “but I know that the American people are going to get tired of that. It’s just a question of when, and under what circumstance.” The broader results of the midterm elections, in which numerous Republicans in the mold of Kent ultimately lost to Democrats, would seem to prove her point. But the results of countless Republican primaries, including the victories of election deniers such as Kari Lake in Arizona, indicate that the “when” is likely still far off.

Perhaps one reason Herrera Beutler insists that a “restoration is coming” for the Republican Party: She’s probably going to run again. She won’t say so definitively; she told me she’s looking forward to living in one place with her family and “just being functional.” “I mean, would I be shocked if I ran for something? At some point in my future? No,” she said. The sheer possibility might explain her unwillingness to speak candidly about her party’s current leaders, even two years after the cumulative letdown of January 6. Reports have suggested that her long and friendly relationship with McCarthy, for instance, ruptured after she inadvertently exposed his two-faced response to the insurrection. Bade and Demirjian have written that the House Republican leader exploded at Herrera Beutler, making her cry. (In a joint statement, McCarthy and Herrera Beutler denied that this happened.) When I asked Herrera Beutler for her thoughts about McCarthy’s current bid for the speakership, she demurred, saying, “I don’t want to be the one who comments on that.”

It wasn’t her place, she reasoned. She no longer has a voice in how the House Republican conference chooses to lead. And in the end, even if she is reluctant to acknowledge it, few things constitute more of an indictment of her party than this. All of the qualities that once fueled Herrera Beutler’s rise are still there. She is still a young Hispanic woman in a party that skews old, white, and male. She still rhapsodizes about individual liberty, still considers herself a social conservative in a moment when the Republican stance on abortion seems as unpopular as it ever has. But in little more than a decade, Herrera Beutler has gone from being the future of the party to a casualty of one vote.

Three thousand miles away from Capitol Hill, she begins the work of moving on. She wants to continue to serve the public, she told me, but as a private citizen for the first time since her 20s, she’s still trying to figure out what that means. “I need a cause, something that gives me something to fight for,” she said. “And I just don’t know yet what that’s going to be.”

The Republican Party Is in a Strange Place

2022-12-15T14:00:24-05:00

The GOP is in a strange place. After falling short of expectations in the midterms, some Republicans blame Donald Trump, and some want to anoint a challenger for 2024. But with Trump already announced and a GOP-controlled House set to spend two years investigating Joe Biden, is the party at all likely to move on from Trump?

The Atlantic staff writers Mark Leibovich and Elaina Plott consider that question, as well as the ascent of Marjorie Taylor Greene as Congress prepares for its 2023 session, on this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Mark Leibovich: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Mark Leibovich, staff writer for The Atlantic. I’m joined today by my colleague, Elaina Plott Calabro, who is also a staff writer who covers politics. Elaina, hi!

Elaina Plott Calabro: Hi!

Leibovich: The Republican Party is in a strange place. The 2022-midterm losses stunned the GOP and created calls for a 2024 challenger to Donald Trump.

But can the party move past the man who dominated it for six years? Now we’re actually going on seven years, almost eight years, right? It just keeps going and going. So, hi, Elaina—tell us everything.

Plott: Yeah. As I sit here, I am reflecting on the most recent midterm elections, and I would say that, for me, the biggest takeaway and what I’d love to hear your thoughts on is: When we were counting down to see if somebody like Kari Lake in Arizona, also someone like Blake Masters in Arizona, would end up pulling it out for the Republicans, what that would say about the party. Masters and Lake, of course, were huge proponents of the stolen-election theory.

But it didn’t work in the end. And I think the kind of immediate takeaway, at least that I was seeing among centrist-minded people but also people on the right who are vaguely anti-Trump, was that this was a lesson that the party is very ready to move on from Donald Trump.

Had somebody like Kari Lake won, maybe the message would’ve been the inverse. But I was a little reluctant to embrace that take for the reason that even if candidates who were all in on the stolen-election theory ultimately lost their general election, they still won the primaries—in many cases, quite handily.

I did not see the midterms, then, as a rebuke, necessarily, of Donald Trump’s Republican party—just as a message that independent-minded voters and centrist voters and soft Republicans, so to speak, are over Donald Trump, are very much over Donald Trump. But when it comes to a primary, I don’t know that anything has changed post-November. But I’d love to know your thoughts.

Leibovich: I could not agree with you more. I mean, I’m quite amused, as I suspect you are too, by the “Republicans are ready to move on from Donald Trump” notion that people like John Cornyn, John Thune, Mitch McConnell, any number of political operatives [of the opinion that:] “Oh my gosh, what do we do now people, because we’ve so underachieved in these midterms, let’s scapegoat Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair.” Democrats were supposed to lose seats. They actually wound up gaining a seat. The House of Representatives was a major underachievement. What could possibly happen?

Okay. So what happens when Donald Trump goes and endorses Republican X tomorrow? I’m guessing he or she will win a decisive majority in Ohio district Y. And so, Republicans have a terrible “candidate quality” problem. I mean, Mitch McConnell used those words explicitly, referring to the fact that Herschel Walker, Blake Masters, go down the list, are not great candidates, and that will hurt Republicans.

Now, in the aftermath of the midterms, a lot of people say that “We have an RNC problem,” “We have a Ronna McDaniel problem,” “We have a Mitch McConnell problem.” What are we missing here? I think what we’re missing here and, and we can talk about this more, is who picks these candidates, right?

Plott: The problem is that Republicans don’t have a Trump problem. They have a voter problem. It was the voters who picked Kari Lake and Blake Masters. Perhaps it was independents and centrist Republicans who showed up on general-election day and did not vote for them. But when it came to the primaries, these candidates won—in many cases, pretty handily.

Just because they have lost in November doesn’t mean those voters themselves have changed. And by voters, I mean, really, the base of the Republican party, the ones who are going to show up and vote in primaries. Their preferences, what I think the midterms showed us, have not changed at all.

Leibovich: Right. And part of it is that there’s no language for this. Like, no one can get up there and say, “Hey, by the way, voters, we have a voter problem.” I mean, that’s not what any would-be leader would ever say. And unfortunately, it’s really, really hard to talk about what is in the hearts of a good number of voters. That gets you to some ugly words like racism or antisemitism—things that no one wants to be called, whether you’re a voter or a non-voter, whether you’re political or unpolitical. I mean, it’s ugly.

But Donald Trump has been pretty unshy about appealing to a lot of the impulses that are quite ugly and even now will not disavow these incredibly ugly elements that he’s eating dinner with.

Anyway, we are essentially talking about a lot of the same things, which is voters—radicalization of voters and Republican voters—which is actually a perfect segue into Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, as rendered in Elaina’s profile, is a deliciously kind of mundane, lost, suburban decadent soul. But I guess the larger question I would ask Elaina is: How is Marjorie Taylor Greene emblematic of these voters that we’re talking about?

Plott: I love that you used the word mundane to kind of describe the atmospherics of that story and how she came to power. Because I think that was what was so shocking to me, was the ease with which one in America can slide into that kind of radicalism.

Marjorie Taylor Greene was entirely apolitical, really, before she discovered Trump and QAnon in late 2016 going into 2017. So this is not someone who had these latent political thoughts churning and then Trump ignited them. She was someone who had tried to anchor her identity in various things throughout her adult life, whether it was evangelical Christianity or CrossFit, where she spent a lot of time.

As her interest in those things sort of started to taper off, it just so happened that it was right when Trump came onto the stage, and she says very explicitly in an interview at one point that Trump reminded her of “men like my dad.” And it was as though she had found the anchor she had finally been looking for for her identity.

Again, going back to just the ease with which it can tumble from a typical midlife crisis to total radicalization. She’s on Facebook one day and, based on my reporting from people who really knew her at that time, she found the #SavetheChildren hashtag. And it was as though a portal opened and she kind of stepped into the looking glass.

And for listeners who may not remember, the #SavetheChildren hashtag fed into this conspiracy theory called “Pizzagate” that there was a ring of pedophilia being run by Democrats in the basement of a DC pizza shop. And the potency of this conspiracy theory was such that there was a man from North Carolina who actually came down with a rifle, you know, bent on avenging these mythical children living in this pizza shop, and fired inside of this restaurant.

You know, it was a horrific incident, but I think for a lot of America, it was a wake-up call just in terms of how these conspiracy theories that, you know, a lot of people might talk about and just sort of wave off as silly are really taking root in, you know, certain segments of the population.

And people like Marjorie Taylor Greene did not log off. The deeper she got, the more deeply she became convinced that Democrats were sort of this soulless apparatus who were trying to, alongside people like the Rothschilds and George Soros, control the world in a nefarious way. And her purpose, as she saw it, sort of became to combat this.

So she ran for office. I take you all through that kind of long and rambling journey just to say that there was nothing really especially remarkable about it. She was a relatively normal person, a suburban housewife who had some time on her hands and had an internet connection. And here we are today.

Leibovich: I mean, wow, the utter unremarkableness, the mundanity of it, the conventionality of it makes it so spectacularly familiar.

You know, I talked to a number of fairly mainstream Republican members of Congress who are, most of them, not in Congress anymore, because Trump kind of drove them out. But they talk about their parents, especially their parents sitting down in Florida or wherever.

Plott: And some even siblings. It’s so close to everyone.

Leibovich: And they sit. They watch hours of Fox News a day, and [they say,] “Our biggest problem is all of these pedophiles running through our streets or these antifa gang members marauding through our streets—like, that’s, like, our biggest problem. And if we don’t stop this, you know, caravan over the border”—I mean, you know, sort of pick your menace of the week, right?

So, very conservative Republican Congressman X says, like, “Every week, I say, ‘Mom, just knock it off. Turn off the TV. Go outside. Take a walk. Go bowling. Do something. Like, this is not your religion. You talk about this more than you talk about anything else.” And I think when you get older, and when people get older, and this is largely still, you know, a lot of the Fox-watching population and a lot of consumers of this, you know, you become sort of fixed into the daily routine.

Your echo chambers get smaller. And again, it’s part of the completely unremarkable day-to-day radicalization that we’re talking about. And you know, now they’re becoming very, very vocally represented in Congress.

Plott: But I think what has become so different, especially since Trump came onto the stage, is that you have political leaders literally in the West Wing who are affirming these people and these beliefs, who aren’t telling them to knock it off or whatever. You know, it’s very different, even if your son is a congressman, to hear it from your son. But when you have someone in the White House saying, “No, no, no. He’s leading you astray. Keep watching it.” I think that’s a huge part of it.

And going back to Marjorie Taylor Greene, this is why I think a congresswoman like her is so dangerous. Because at this point, it almost doesn’t matter if she actually believes in it deeply anymore, any of those things, because she has made it so essential to her brand.

And what she understands is that she can kind of vaguely flirt with disavowal, as she did on the House floor in her maiden speech before she got stripped of her committee assignments. She said, you know, essentially, There were some things I believed that were not true. At no point did she say, QAnon on is full of falsehoods. It’s extremely dangerous to society. I wish I’d never fallen prey to it, and I hope anyone listening to this knows that—you know, this, it’s not the way forward. She did nothing of that sort. I mean, this is what I think people don’t appreciate about her. She is a shrewd person. She’s a shrewd politician, and she understands that her supporters who were listening to her that day, who continue to listen to her, still like QAnon, still are flirting with the edges of it, if not the very depths of it. So she’s never going to outright disavow it. And the problem with that is, and I’m going to jump briefly to pre–January 6, when I would cover Congress — you’d go on the Hill and you would ask, “What did you think about Trump’s latest tweet?” or whatever.

And they all hated that question. They hated it so much. They said, The tweets are meaningless. It means nothing. This is just trivial. I didn’t see it. I don’t get on Twitter. Nobody’s reading that stuff. And at times I could kind of empathize, you know, it would suck to be asked about this barrage of his 140-character thoughts at all times.

But the thing is, Americans were reading them. They were paying attention. And I think that all would’ve punched people in the face with the truth of that on January 6th, that there was a large cohort of people who had been listening to every single thing that Trump was saying.

And I think the same is true with Marjorie Taylor Greene. Even if she doesn’t believe the things she’s saying anymore, or the things she’s insinuating with or flirting with, the people listening to her do, and what they do with that can change the political landscape, as it did on January 6, in ways that we just can’t quite fathom.

Leibovich: No, we can’t. You know, if you do sort of look at the recent trajectory, I mean, we’re still in the Trump Age. The extremely fashionable thing to say and repeat these days is what we said before: The Republicans are ready to move on.

What would that look like? John Cornyn, John Thune, and Mitch McConnell say all that. Let’s have them start a rally in Ohio and see if they get more than a hundred people.

Plott: [Laughs]

Leibovich: Donald Trump could have a rally down the street, and I’m guessing the crowd would be substantially bigger. So now the fashion is: Oh, well, Ron DeSantis is sitting down in Florida. We’re all waiting for him. He’s the alternative. He is the anointed one.

But no, I don’t think so. I think DeSantis is very likely to be part of a long line of overhyped presidential candidates who are going to get into the race, be an 800-pound gorilla, and start dominating like Rick Perry did in 2012, or Scott Walker in 2016. I mean, go through the list of non-presidents. The only anointed Republican governor who got in, rolled to the nomination and eventually the presidency was George W. Bush.

And DeSantis, I get the same vibe here, with one exception: Donald Trump’s right there. And Donald Trump does not like Ron DeSantis for one reason and one reason only: He’s taken the spotlight away. He maybe wants to beat him.

And so, you have a situation with the two of them going at it. And then Mike Pence is waiting to run for president his whole life and defers to Ron DeSantis in Florida? No, he’ll say, “I’m going to try.” And Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger or Larry Hogan—someone who’s in the Never Trump lane—they’re going to say, “Yeah, I’m not going to be scared off by Ron DeSantis.”

So, next thing you know, there are seven candidates in Iowa. One of them is Trump. Forty percent of the Republicans in Iowa are rock solid for Trump. He wins. And off we go. DeSantis, after a few second-place finishes, decides that he’s got a big future and maybe Trump will make him his running mate. So he goes and, in the most obsequious and cringey way, starts sucking up to him again, like he’s built his entire recent political career on. He stops being the alternative. We all revert to form. And all of a sudden, it’s 2024, and here we are again.

Plott: Mhm. DeSantis is not at all positioned to go into a race where suddenly he is having to talk about all the bad things Trump has done. It’s just been antithetical to how he’s built his own brand [if you consider] the campaign commercial he did where he was teaching his child to “build the wall” with Legos or something like that. I’d love to hear more about what you think his style is and maybe what the fanfare around him is missing about him.

Leibovich: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that the fanfare is missing is that he’s not a terribly charming dude. That’s sort of overstated, but people who served with him in Congress, Republicans who served with him in Congress, Republican governors I’ve spoken to who were on various RGA-related things, Republican Governors Association-related things, do not speak well [of his personal charm].

And also, people who worked with him in Florida—his friends, or ostensibly his friends, or people who will probably support him—say that he’s got kind of a heavy lift as far as being an appealing look-you-in-the-eye kind of politician. I mean, if he tries to start a charm offensive, he would begin unarmed. This is not something you learn overnight. And I do think that Donald Trump does tend to do particularly well against people who are not terribly comfortable in their own political skin, who can’t think on their feet.

Plott: Such a good point.

Leibovich: We all remember putative frontrunner Jeb Bush and superstar Marco Rubio. Go down the list. Trump basically reduced them to puddles, just sort of bulldozed right over them. DeSantis’s biggest problem, for now, is Trump, [because] he’s basically a Trump derivative.

I just think that DeSantis is fool’s gold until proven otherwise. I mean, yes, he’s got some nice poll numbers. Donors seem really excited about him. Let’s see him plunk himself down in the middle of Iowa or Ohio or Texas or somewhere and get a crowd like one-tenth the size of what Trump could do if he tried that tomorrow.

Plott: Well, let’s talk, then, about Larry Hogan. Totally different kind of Republican. What is he thinking?

Leibovich: I mean, Larry Hogan’s kind of a generic “Hey, I’m a popular Republican governor in a blue state, and I don’t like Donald Trump. Vote for me.” He talked about challenging Trump in 2020, showed up in New Hampshire and Iowa, and the press was like, “Ooh, what a coincidence.”

Then he said, Well, I’m not going to launch a suicide mission against Donald Trump.

So Larry Hogan, like a lot of Republicans of various statures—Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan—did a big speech at the Reagan Library, in Simi Valley, and he talked about, you know, we have to be positive, we have to be Ronald Reagan again. The idea is that they’re just going to return to the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan. I remember Hogan gave this speech in Simi Valley, and that exact same night, J. D. Vance won his primary in Ohio, and he is standing at a podium in Cincinnati singling out Marjorie Taylor Greene for her great contribution and Donald Trump.

Look, Larry Hogan’s making all kinds of noises about running. He’s term-limited. He’s about to be an ex-governor. I’m sure he’s got a case he could make. You know, again, I would send him to Iowa. I bet his rally wouldn’t be all that much to watch live on Fox, CNN. I don’t think he’d probably get a very big crowd, but hey, maybe we’re completely missing the boomlet.

Plott: The Larry Hogan boomlet.

Leibovich: [Laughs] It’s about to explode. Now, look, I mean, look, it’s a great argument. It’s perfectly sound. It just doesn’t really exist in the real world of today’s Republican Party.

Plott: Yeah. Shining city on a hill. Time for being positive. It made me think of while I was reporting this Marjorie Taylor Greene piece, she did a radio show, and this woman called in and was saying, I’d love to talk to you about, you know, really extreme position on abortion, and clearly just wanted to have a back-and-forth with the congresswoman. And [Greene] immediately, it’s just, like, all defenses ready. She says, and I’m paraphrasing, but she’s essentially saying, Based on the sound of your voice, it doesn’t sound like you’ll be getting pregnant anytime soon, so I don’t know that this question is actually relevant to you. And [the caller] keeps trying to cut in again politely: But can we talk about the policy? And Marjorie Taylor Greene just shuts her down entirely. And I remember texting one of her advisers: “Do you think that she would have a better chance at bringing people to her side if she actually tried to engage with them, or soften in any way?”

And they said no. The time for Bill-Buckley-firing-line-type discourse is over. It’s war now. That’s, he said, that. He said that,—this adviser that I was talking to—it’s just, it’s total war now. And I think that, to me, defines so much more of the Republican base right now than the idea of, you know, Reaganism—like, tomorrow’s going to be better than today.

Leibovich: There was a really interesting piece in The New York Times about turnout, because everyone says, “Oh, okay, well, Republicans weren’t excited. They didn’t vote. And turnout was depressed.” In fact, Republicans had a serious turnout advantage over Democrats, and the conclusion there was: not all Republican voters voted for Republicans.

Plott: Mm-hmm.

Leibovich: Republican voters who actually made a point of coming out made a point of coming out because they wanted to vote against Kari Lake or vote against Herschel Walker, or vote against Doug Mastriano or any other number of people who were just so offensive—even to Republicans and certainly a lot of independents—that that turnout didn’t necessarily translate to Republican victories, even though the high numbers of these people turning out were in fact Republicans.

Plott: And Warnock. I mean, that was an explicit part of his strategy too, which is where I think Stacey Abrams really erred. Her strategy in this most recent gubernatorial race that she lost in Georgia was built around trying to get the Democratic voters and the young voters who typically stay home. Whereas Warnock took a completely different tack, which is to say: “Let’s go get the soft Republicans or the centrists who maybe have always been registered Republicans but can’t stomach Herschel Walker as their senator.” And it worked out really well for him.

Leibovich: Yeah. What I think the larger point here that we’re talking about is that persuasion still does matter. I mean, there’s been this conventional wisdom around turnout elections, which is: If you can get your base out and get your base excited, you’re going to win.

And no, not necessarily. We’ve learned that there are nuances in the middle that can be determinative. And I think that’s hopeful. I think persuasion and serious debate and serious voters are all a good thing for the democracy that we’re all fighting for. That was one of the takeaways that I think that maybe is hopefully some kind of trend line that’s moving in a positive direction.

Plott: But it’s all in the general election. We have to remember: As long as Republican candidates and officials continue to feel just shackled by the basest instincts of their base voters, they’re never going to be in a position in a Georgia, say, or a North Carolina, even, to be the ones persuading successfully.

Leibovich: It’s true. And look, we’re pretty soon going to be in a presidential cycle, and Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, whoever, are not going to be in a persuasion mode …

Plott: Exactly.

Leibovich: … as far as finding these sort of centrist suburban women who have become the wild card in these races.

Plott: Absolutely.

Leibovich: We should talk about the bread and circus that is the House Republican caucus that will be in charge. The House will soon be in Republican hands. The question is: Who will lead that House? Kevin McCarthy has been working many, many years to be the next speaker of the House. He has very thin margins, has a number of potential dissenters from within the Freedom Caucus, and rumblings of opposition from Andy Biggs of Arizona.

It looks like it will be a really, really messy process for the next few weeks. And I would guess, maybe because of default and because there’s no clear alternative, Kevin McCarthy maybe pulls this out. But man, this is going to be a really, really dicey caucus to try to lead, even if you can get the speaker’s gavel and have the title for the rest of your life.

Elaina, how do you see this play outing? I feel like we’re trying to predict an avalanche, but how’s the avalanche look?

Plott: You mentioned how many years Kevin McCarthy has been waiting for this moment, to actually be installed [as] speaker. In my admittedly brief adult life, this will be the third time that Kevin McCarthy has come close to the speakership only to have something, whether it’s John Boehner suddenly deciding to retire or the election being postponed or any number of events that have seemed to conspire to make sure that he doesn’t actually get the gavel.

And now here we are again with the Freedom Caucus saying they don’t love the idea of Kevin McCarthy. In 2015, of course, that was when Paul Ryan was brought in to do this, and the Freedom Caucus gave him a hard time too. There were a lot of negotiations and deals that had to be worked out before they gave him their blessing. And I don’t know how that’s going to happen this time around.

But speaking of Marjorie Taylor Greene, he does have her on his side trying to rally people around him. I think where that may be falling short is that everybody understands that it’s a quid pro quo in the sense that McCarthy has made clear she will have a seat on the Oversight Committee, should she vote for him for speaker.

And there’s a lot she wants to do with that position. She wants to investigate Hunter Biden. She’s filed no fewer than five impeachment resolutions against Joe Biden. There are also cabinet secretaries that she wants to go after. She said the other day that she wants to defund the DOJ. And with a position on Oversight, she will have the latitude to at least perform a theater of sorts.

And, I think we can expect things like that immediately, regardless of whoever is Speaker, just because there really does not seem to be a Republican agenda among the House conference to do anything else. I mean, Kevin McCarthy has said [that] on the very first day of the new Congress, he is going to have the Constitution recited on the House floor. But beyond that, I think it is anyone's guess. It’s almost like we can’t even think about that so much, because it is still actually kind of dicey as to whether he gets the gavel anyway.

Leibovich: There are so many layers of unknown between now and when the leadership of the next Republican majority in the House is set. And I think, as we’ve been saying for years, a lot is being driven by the base of the Republican party, whatever that looks like—whatever that morphs into in the next year or two. Wherever we go from here.

How Politics Compounded a Hostage Family’s Grief

2022-12-11T16:45:00-05:00

On Friday, December 2, Elizabeth Whelan was at home on Chappaquiddick, off Massachusetts, when she received a text message from a State Department official—a representative from the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs—asking when she might be available for a visit. He had news concerning her youngest brother, Paul.

“I thought, Okay, this is either one of those routine check-ins or something’s up and it’s probably not good news,” Elizabeth told me. Five days later, the official (whom she declined to name) arrived at her home. “It turned out to be the latter.”

It has been nearly four years since Russian authorities arrested Paul Whelan in Moscow on charges of espionage. Since then, the 52-year-old Michigan native has been held in a Soviet-era prison, battling poor health while pleading his innocence of a crime that Russia has refused to provide evidence he committed. On that Wednesday evening, the State Department official had not come to tell Elizabeth that her brother was finally on his way home. He had come to tell her that in exchange for the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, President Joe Biden had secured the release of Brittney Griner, and that although Biden had pushed for Paul Whelan’s freedom as part of the deal with Russia, only the WNBA star, in just a short time, would be on a plane back to America.

“It’s like you see this tunnel in front of you that has just gotten longer,” Elizabeth said of that moment. “There is still no light at the end of that tunnel. You have no idea where the light is.”

[Read: The American prisoner caught between Trump and the Kremlin]

From across the kitchen table, the official answered as many of Elizabeth’s questions as he was able. “There were people at the White House and State Department who were willing to talk to me that evening, you know, to explain further, but I was not up for talking to them,” Elizabeth said. She wanted officials to focus on getting Griner home safely. The next day, after the exchange for Bout on a tarmac in Abu Dhabi, Elizabeth agreed to speak with Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “I didn’t want apologies for the situation; I’m looking for plans and actions,” she said of the call.

In announcing Griner’s release, Biden explained that Paul Whelan had not been included because, “sadly, for totally illegitimate reasons, Russia is treating Paul’s case differently than Brittney’s.” Elizabeth told me she understood the administration’s position; on Thursday, her family put out a statement saying the White House had “made the right decision to bring Ms. Griner home.” But naturally, she was frustrated: Griner’s homecoming marks the second time in fewer than three years that the United States has secured the freedom of an American detained in Russia while leaving Paul Whelan behind. In that time, Elizabeth, a portrait artist by trade who, before her brother’s arrest, had not considered herself especially political, has drained her own bank account to travel to and from Washington, demanding answers from lawmakers and administration officials as to when her brother will be free. But this past week, her frustration was compounded by the fact that Paul’s situation, like so much else in American life today, became intensely politicized, especially among Republicans—many of whom, Elizabeth told me, couldn’t be bothered to take her calls when Donald Trump was in the White House.

“It just really is distressing to me that people can’t do the math and realize that Trump was the president when Paul was arrested—and that he was the president for the next two years,” she said.

Such people would appear to include Trump himself: On Thursday, the former president went on Truth Social to blast the exchange of Bout—the “Merchant of Death,” as the arms dealer is nicknamed—for Griner alone as “an unpatriotic embarrassment for the USA!!!” “Why wasn’t former Marine Paul Whelan included in this totally one-sided transaction?” Trump wrote. “He would have been let out for the asking.” At this Elizabeth can’t help but laugh. In all the time her brother was detained while Trump was in office, she said, “I don’t think President Trump ever even said Paul’s name.” (At one point, from inside a glass cage during a court appearance in Moscow, Paul Whelan, a self-professed Trump voter, called on the president to tweet about his case, but Trump never did. Spokespeople for the former president did not answer requests for comment for this article.)

Trump wasn’t the only figure who appeared to take a sudden interest in Paul Whelan following Griner’s release. After years of “begging people” to take notice of him, the Whelans were stunned to find cable news and social media replete with opinions about his plight. Many Republican critics of the Griner-Bout exchange accused Biden of acting under pressure from progressive activists to prioritize the case of a Black, gay woman—an athlete who once protested the national anthem, no less—at the expense of a former Marine. (Griner was detained in February after Russian customs officials found cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage; she was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony outside Moscow on charges of drug smuggling.)

Tucker Carlson built a segment around Griner and Whelan on Thursday evening: “There was only room for one in the lifeboat, and the Marine got left behind,” the Fox News host declared. “Well, why did they make that choice? Well, you should know that Whelan is a Trump voter, and he made the mistake of saying so on social media. He’s paying the price for that now.” In a Newsmax appearance, Representative Troy Nehls of Texas claimed that Trump would’ve had Paul Whelan “home in a week.” Nehls’s colleague Matt Gaetz of Florida tweeted: “I bet when Paul Whelan was learning the skills to be a Marine he never thought that his country would have prioritized him more if he had a jump shot.” Donald Trump Jr. weighed in as well. “The Biden Admin was apparently worried that their [diversity, equity, and inclusion] score would go down if they freed an American Marine,” the former president’s son tweeted on Thursday morning.

Biden supporters, in turn, were quick to highlight the unsavory particulars of Paul Whelan’s military career, which culminated in a bad-conduct discharge (one step less serious than a dishonorable discharge) after he received a court-martial conviction on charges “related to larceny.” Across the internet, Griner’s newfound freedom was crudely recast as a referendum on another man’s soul. And this “broke my heart,” Elizabeth told me. But it was the “armchair quarterbacking” by prominent Republican lawmakers and pundits that made her angry.

[Jemele Hill: Brittney Griner’s plight says more about America than Russi]a

For the Whelans, the time between Paul’s arrest and the end of Trump’s presidency was marked largely by hopelessness, confusion, and false starts. According to Elizabeth, after Paul was detained in December 2018, no one from the administration reached out to the family with guidance; by early 2019, only Jon Huntsman, then the U.S. ambassador to Russia, and career officials at the embassy in Moscow had communicated a commitment to securing Paul’s release. Back in Washington, it had essentially been on Elizabeth—who, in her 57 years, had yet to dabble in statecraft—to convince her government to care. Her obstacles, she discovered, were twofold: One, as I wrote in the fall of 2019, Paul Whelan, with his shoddy military record and citizenship in four countries (the U.S., U.K., Ireland, and Canada), was not the quintessential all-American victim. The circumstances of his arrest, moreover—he had been at a hotel in Moscow for an American friend’s wedding when, as the FSB would allege, a Russian citizen handed him a USB drive containing classified information—left many on Capitol Hill wondering if Paul Whelan in fact was a spy. (He and the U.S. government, including the CIA, have consistently denied these charges.)

What quickly became clear, however—both to the Whelans and to Ryan Fayhee, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s counterespionage division who had begun representing the family pro bono—was that the “spy question” masked a possibly deeper logic behind the stonewalling. As a senior congressional official told me at the time, the “whole circus with Russia” that had characterized the 45th presidency from the start had caused lawmakers, political appointees, and even career officials “to say, ‘I’ve got enough problems. I don’t want to be out there exposed on this.’”

It was for this reason that Elizabeth decided, in the fall of 2019, to bring on David Urban, a corporate lobbyist who had managed Trump’s successful 2016 campaign in Pennsylvania and counted a number of powerful administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a fellow West Point graduate, as close friends. “Dave was able to shepherd Paul’s name into halls of power that I could never have accessed,” Elizabeth told me. Nevertheless, except for a June 2020 statement denouncing Paul’s conviction, Pompeo rarely referenced Paul publicly, and privately, the Cabinet official “never engaged with us in any way whatsoever,” Elizabeth said. (Pompeo did not respond to requests for comment sent to a press account for his Champion American Values PAC.)

Ultimately, other than Huntsman (who resigned in 2019) and the former national security adviser John Bolton (whom Trump fired around the same time), Elizabeth said, “we never got a sense that anybody was fired up to get Paul home.” Bolton told CBS this week that Trump had in fact rejected an opportunity to exchange Paul for Bout, “for very good reasons having to deal with Viktor Bout.”

This is not to say that Elizabeth or her brother are at all satisfied with where things currently stand. “I am greatly disappointed that more has not been done to secure my release,” Paul Whelan told CNN on Thursday. “I don’t understand why I’m still sitting here.” And Elizabeth told me she and her family had felt nothing short of “betrayed” by the U.S. government this past spring, when Biden officials had given them “only a few minutes’” advance notice of a prisoner swap for Trevor Reed, another American citizen and former Marine who had been detained in Russia since 2019. She learned the news at the same time as the rest of the country, more or less, with no quiet interval to process that Paul, as his family understood it, had never even been part of the negotiations. “I had a very, very low time after that,” Elizabeth admitted. (A State Department spokesperson said at the time that the government was in “regular contact” with the Whelans and would continue to work on Paul’s case. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this article.) “I went to the U.S. government at every level after that and said, ‘Please, don’t do that again. We deserve being called.’ And evidently, this time, there was no question.”

Overall, she feels the current administration’s approach—to Paul, to Russia relations more broadly—has been a change for the better. It was early on in Biden’s term that Blinken, for example, began publicly discussing Paul’s case. And for Elizabeth, Reed’s release served to confirm that the president was taking seriously the cause of American citizens imprisoned in Russia. “We have battled our own government as much as we have battled the Russian government over the years,” she said. “And it has been a relief, more recently, to be doing less battling on the home front and more battling against Russia.” On Thursday, Biden said his administration was “not giving up” in securing Paul’s freedom.

Emotionally, physically, financially: “What does one compare it to?” Elizabeth mused of the past four years. But then there is Paul, of course, the one halfway around the world, behind bars, still waiting. She takes some solace in how, after this week, more Americans than ever seem to know her brother’s name. She just hopes they continue to say it.

Why Is Marjorie Taylor Greene Like This?

2022-12-05T06:00:00-05:00

Illustrations by Eric Yahnker

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

I.

She was very late. A man named Barry was compelled to lead the room in a rendition of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” to stall for time. But when she did arrive, the tardiness was forgiven and the Cobb County Republican Party’s November breakfast was made new. She wasn’t greeted. She was beheld, like a religious apparition. Emotions verged on rapture. Later, as she spoke, one man jumped to his feet with such force that his chair fell over. Not far away, two women clung to each other and shrieked. I was knocked to my seat when a tablemate’s corrugated-plastic FLOOD THE POLLS sign collided inadvertently with my head. Upon looking up, I came eye-level with a pistol tucked into the khaki waistband of an elderly man in front of me. “She is just so great,” I heard someone say. “I mean, she really is just amazing.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene arrived in Congress in January 2021, blond and crass and indelibly identified with conspiracy theories involving Jewish space lasers and Democratic pedophiles. She had barely settled into office before being stripped of her committee assignments; she has been called a “cancer” on the Republican Party by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; and she now has a loud voice in the GOP’s most consequential decisions on Capitol Hill because her party’s leaders know, and she knows they know, that she has become far too popular with their voters to risk upsetting her.

Nobody saw her coming. Not even Greene saw Greene coming.

II.

She was a product, her family loved to say, of the “Great American Dream.” There was a three-story home at the end of a shaded driveway in the small town of Cumming, Georgia, north of Atlanta; there was a finished basement in which Marge—and that is what she was called, Marge—and her friends would gather in faded nylon one-pieces after a swim in Lake Lanier.

[David A. Graham: Marjorie Taylor Greene is just a symptom of what ails the GOP]

Her father was Robert David Taylor, a Michigan transplant for whom a three-story home had never been guaranteed but who had believed acutely in its possibility. Bob Taylor was the son of a steel-mill worker; he had served in Vietnam; he had hung siding to pay for classes at Eastern Michigan University. He had married the beautiful Carrie Fidelle Bacon—“Delle,” to most people, but he called her Carrie—from Milledgeville, Georgia, and rather than continue with college, he had become a contractor and built a successful company called Taylor Construction. For Marjorie Taylor, the first of Bob and Delle’s two children, the result was a world steeped in a distinctly suburban kind of certainty: packed lunches and marble kitchen countertops, semiannual trips to the beach, and the conviction that everything happens for a reason.

She came of age in Cumming, the seat of Forsyth County. With her turtleneck sweaters and highlighted mall bangs, Marge Taylor might have been any other teenage girl in America. At South Forsyth High School, class of 1992, she was a member of the Spanish club and a manager of the soccer team. She may not have been voted Most Spirited, but she dressed to theme during homecoming week; she may not have had the Best Sense of Humor, but by graduation she had amassed her share of inside jokes with friends. “Shh … It’s the people outside!” her senior quote reads in the high-school yearbook. “Run the cops are here! I’m gone!!” She was “nice to everyone,” “upbeat,” with “tons of confidence,” recalls Leslie Hamburger, a friend of hers and her brother David’s. “I have nothing but good memories.” The good-but-not-great student was hardly, in other words, an overachieving scold already plotting her ascent to Washington. It’s difficult to imagine an 18-year-old Ted Cruz bothering with something called the Hot Tuna Club.

Illustration by Eric Yahnker. Source image: South Forsyth High.

Forsyth County was a calm, quiet, ordered place. But it had a history. In September 1912, an 18-year-old white girl was found bloodied and barely breathing in the woods lining the Chattahoochee River; she died two weeks later. Within 24 hours of her discovery, four Black men had been arrested and charged with assault. A white mob dragged one of the suspects from his cell and hanged him from a telephone pole. Two others were tried and executed. White residents then decided to undertake nothing short of a racial cleansing. On horseback, armed with rifles and dynamite, they drove out virtually all of the county’s Black population—more than 1,000 people. So successful were their efforts that the county would experience the modern civil-rights era vicariously at best. There were no whites only signs to fuss over in Cumming, because there were no Black people to keep separate.

In January 1987, a white resident organized a “Walk for Brotherhood” to commemorate what had happened 75 years earlier. The project was complicated by the immediate wave of death threats he received. Arriving from Atlanta, the civil-rights leader Hosea Williams called Forsyth the most racist county in the South. Oprah Winfrey came down to cover the event. But most people in Forsyth ignored the whole affair; broach it in conversation, and you were considered a pot-stirrer. George Pirkle, the county’s resident historian, was reminded of this as recently as 2011, when he readied for publication The Heritage Book of Forsyth County. He told the mayor of Cumming about his plans to include the region’s Black history in the volume, and got an incredulous response: “Well, why in the world would you want to do that?” As Martha McConnell, the local historical society’s co-president then and now, told me, the subtext was clear: “Don’t be starting things.”

In the end, the Heritage Book did not go starting things. Look through it today and you will see the neatly arranged census data that cuts off at 1910. To include 1920, of course, would have revealed that the Black population was suddenly gone. To go beyond 1920 would have revealed that the Black population never came back.

All of which is to say that Marge Taylor’s worldview was shaped in a community artificially devoid of sociocultural conflict, a history scrubbed of tension. That’s the basic attitude here toward the past, Pirkle told me: “If you don’t talk about it, it goes away.”

Decades later, as they considered her scorched-earth rise to power—the conspiracy theories and racist appeals and talk of violence against Democratic leaders—some of her teachers would find themselves wondering how they’d failed to notice the young Marge Taylor. How was it that they had no memory of her holding forth in civics class, or waging a boisterous campaign for student office? How could it possibly be that in fact they had no memory of her at all?

III.

She did as she was supposed to do, graduating from South Forsyth High and then packing up and moving an hour and a half away, to Athens, for four years at the University of Georgia. She would flit all but anonymously through the campus of 20,000 undergraduates. For Marge Taylor, UGA was about becoming the first in her family to graduate from college—setting herself up to run Taylor Construction. Almost certainly it was also about meeting a nice man. Perry Clarke Greene was a nice man. Three years her senior, he was tall and earnest and came from Riverdale. He, too, was in the university’s Terry College of Business. They exchanged vows the summer before her senior year, in 1995.

Among the things I do not know about Marjorie Taylor Greene—she would not speak with me for this story—is what her wedding was like. A newspaper account, if it exists, has yet to turn up. I do not know whether she stood before an altar laden with white gladioli, as her grandmother once had, or whether the reception was a small affair at her parents’ home in Cumming or something bigger somewhere else. I also do not know whether, on that day, she was happy: whether the quiet and respectable life that now unfurled before the new Mrs. Perry Greene felt like enough.

The young couple moved into a three-bed, three-bath colonial with symmetrical shrubbery in the north-Atlanta suburb of Roswell. Perry Greene became an accountant at Ernst & Young, and Marjorie Greene became pregnant. In January 1998, she smiled alongside the other mothers with tired eyes and loose clothing as they learned to exercise and massage their newborns in the North Fulton Regional Hospital’s “Mother Lore” class.

It wasn’t long before Perry started working for his father-in-law as general manager of the family business. After facilitating the sale of Taylor Construction, in 1999, he moved on to Taylor Commercial, a former division of the company, which specialized in siding for apartment complexes and subsidized-housing projects. Soon after, Bob Taylor named his son-in-law president of the company.

Marjorie, meanwhile, tended to their one, two, and finally three children. There were lake days with Mimi and Papa, three-week Christmas vacations in the sun, and annual drives to visit Perry’s extended family in Oxford, Mississippi. A lot of time was spent traveling to fast-pitch softball tournaments—Taylor, the middle child, was barely a teenager when she started getting noticed. (“Can’t believe she is being recruited in 8th grade,” Greene would write on her personal blog after a weekend at one university.)

As for Taylor Commercial, it was eventually bought by Marge and Perry. Financial-disclosure documents filed in 2020, when Greene first ran for office, reveal a company whose value ranged from $5 million to $25 million. There is a photograph that Greene cherishes: of her as a child smiling alongside her father at a construction site. Bob did not want his daughter to see her inheritance as a given; Greene has said that her father once fired her from a job she held at the company as a teenager. But now the girl in the photograph was chief financial officer of Taylor Commercial; her college sweetheart was its president; her family was by that point living in a tract mansion in Milton, which borders Alpharetta. Who could say, of course, how regularly she made use of the indoor pool, or marveled at the built-in aquarium on the terrace level—two features of this “smart-home luxury estate,” in the words of a recent listing. But she could at least enjoy the fact of them.

Another thing I do not know about Marjorie Taylor Greene: I do not know precisely how long it was before the shape of her life—the quiet, the respectability, the cadence of carpooling and root touch-ups—began to assume the dull cast of malaise. Perhaps it was during one of the many softball tournaments, another weekend spent crushed against the corner of an elevator at the Hilton Garden Inn by grass-stained girls and monogrammed bat bags. Perhaps her Age of Anxiety arrived instead on a quiet Tuesday in the office of her multimillion-dollar company, when it occurred to her that running this multimillion-dollar company just might not be her purpose after all.

What I do know, after dozens of conversations with Greene’s classmates and teachers, friends and associates, is that by the time she reached her late 30s, something in her had started to break.

IV.

Later, on the campaign trail, Greene would anchor much of her story in the fact that she was a longtime business owner: a woman who’d always more than held her own in the male-dominated world of construction. In beautifully shot television ads, voters saw a woman whose days were a relentless sprint between building sites—hard hats, reflector vests, jeans—and light-filled conference rooms, where she wore dresses with tasteful necklines and examined important blueprints.

That is not a fully accurate picture. People at Taylor Commercial seem to have liked Greene personally, but she spent only a few years on the job and did not put her stamp on the company. Call her on a weekday afternoon, and there was a good chance she’d answer from the gym. She had “nothing to do with” Taylor Commercial, one person familiar with the company’s operations told me. “It was entirely Perry.” A 2021 article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted that the Taylor Commercial website during those years scarcely hinted at Greene’s existence. The only flicker of acknowledgment came in the last line of Perry Greene’s bio, a reference to the wife and three children with whom he shared a home.

By 2011, the Journal-Constitution reported, Greene was no longer listed as the chief financial officer, or any other kind of officer. A year earlier, the company had been hit with state and county tax liens. Greene would one day joke about her lack of business acumen. But it doesn’t seem to have been terribly funny in the moment. Greene simply didn’t love the work. She had grown up with this business; she had gone to school for this business. And yet the girl in the photograph, as it turned out, had little interest in running this business.

Some people close to Greene would describe the ensuing dynamic—her own connection to the business weakening while her husband’s grew stronger—as a source of tension for the couple. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s path to Congress could perhaps be said to have begun here: when, in the aftermath of her tenure as CFO, she appeared determined to strike out in search of something to call her own.

In 2011, the same year she stepped away from her job, Greene decided to commit herself to Jesus Christ. Or recommit herself, perhaps. Last spring, Greene revealed, apparently for the first time publicly, that she was a “cradle Catholic,” born and raised in the Church. This disclosure was occasioned after Greene told Church Militant, a right-wing Catholic website, that efforts by bishops to aid undocumented immigrants reflected “Satan controlling the church.” In response, Bill Donohue of the conservative Catholic League demanded that Greene apologize. Greene felt moved thereafter to share the details of her own personal relationship with Catholicism, explaining that she had stopped attending Mass when she became a mother: when she’d “realized,” she said in a statement, “that I could not trust the Church leadership to protect my children from pedophiles, and that they harbored monsters even in their own ranks.”

Greene eventually decided to join North Point Community Church, one of the largest nondenominational Christian congregations in the country. And so during a service one Sunday, as applause and encouragement echoed across the sanctuary, Greene waited her turn to be immersed, blond hair tucked behind her ears, Chiclet-white teeth fixed in a nervous smile.

Many baptisms at North Point are accompanied by testimony, in which the congregant shares a brief word about her journey to Christ. Video of Greene’s testimony is no longer on the church’s website, but the journalist Michael Kruse described its key moments in an article for Politico. From the stage that morning, he wrote, Greene spoke about “the martyrs book,” meaning, I think, the Book of Martyrs, John Foxe’s 16th-century history and polemic on the persecution of Protestants under Queen Mary. As she’d considered the “conviction” of such men and women, “how they died for Christ,” Greene said, “I realized how small my faith was if I was scared to do a video and get baptized in front of thousands of people.” Before those thousands of people, she accepted Jesus as her lord and savior.

Greene’s congressional biography leaves the impression of deep and meaningful engagement with North Point, but according to a person in the church leadership, her involvement tapered off after several years. This person noted, somewhat ruefully, that Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who defied President Donald Trump, has long been involved in North Point, but “no one ever asks me about him.”

V.

It was around this same time that Greene, as she later put it on a local radio show, “finally got brave enough” to step into a CrossFit gym. Greene’s original gym of choice had been the Alpharetta branch of Life Time. The gym, with its LifeSpa and LifeCafe, bills itself as a “luxury athletic resort,” and it’s easy to see how Greene might have tired of the ambience. She is not—has never been—the kind of biweekly gym-goer who walks for 45 minutes on the treadmill while watching Stranger Things on an iPad. In one of the few candid shots of Greene in her 11th-grade yearbook, she is flat on her back on a weight bench, lifting two heavy-looking dumbbells. “Marge Taylor pumps some Iron,” the caption reads.

In 2007, a workout partner at Life Time told Greene about CrossFit, a fitness regimen that combines Olympic weight lifting with calisthenics and interval training; it has long been popular among law enforcement and members of the military. The two women went on CrossFit.com and printed out the workout of the day, or “WOD,” in CrossFit parlance. This was, in the early years of CrossFit, how most newcomers engaged with the program, printing out the WOD and heading to their regular gym. By the end of that first WOD, Greene was sold. In 2011, she started going to the CrossFit gym in Alpharetta.

What Greene found at the gym (or “box,” as it is known) was community. The coaches, the members, the stragglers who popped in “just to see what this is all about”—they loved her. This is something many observers in Washington and elsewhere do not appreciate about Greene: that she can be extremely likable, so long as you are not, in her estimation, among “the swamp rat elites, spineless weak kneed Republicans, and the Radical Socialist Democrats who are the demise of this country that we all love and call home.” She has a sugary voice and a personable, generous affect; she is, when she wants to be, the sort of person whom a stranger might meet briefly and recall fondly to their friends as “just the nicest woman.” “The softer side of Marjorie Taylor Greene is what her friends, neighbors, and the people who elected her know,” Jamie Parrish, a Georgia Republican and close friend of Greene’s, told me. Her supporters back home can seem genuinely confused by her chilly or hostile portrayal and reception elsewhere.

At CrossFit, Greene’s warmth made her a star. “CrossFit’s really intimidating,” she explained in one radio interview. “Most people’s experience with CrossFit is … they run across ESPN, and they see these monster people doing crazy amazing things, and they’re usually like, ‘Ohhh, I’m never gonna do that.’ ” But Greene could put people at ease. When she started coaching classes herself, the reviews were stellar. “I loved working out with Marjorie Greene,” Carolyn Canouse, a former client, told me by email. “She was patient with my lack of athleticism, and always encouraging and supportive to everyone in the gym. She would bring her dog to work with her sometimes (he was adorable!), as well as her children who were all down to earth and nice to be around.”

Eric Yahnker

Greene trained on most days and competed in a workout challenge known as the CrossFit Open; at her peak, she was ranked 47th in the U.S. in her age group. Over time, she seemed to regard CrossFit less as a grounding for the rest of her life and more as an escape from it altogether.

When Greene was running for Congress, a man named Jim Chambers, jarred by her self-presentation as a paragon of family values, wrote about her alleged extramarital affairs at the gym in a Facebook post. (The New Yorker’s Charles Bethea later reported on text messages from Greene apparently confirming one of the affairs.) Her first alleged relationship was with a fellow trainer. Chambers, who owned one of the CrossFit boxes at which Greene coached, recalled viewing her initially as “this married lady who was at least nominally Christian, maybe not especially, but led a very suburban life. And then, like, quickly thereafter, she confessed that her marriage was on the rocks and falling apart.” According to Chambers, Greene made no secret of the affair with the trainer. She talked openly about her problems with Perry—“different lives and interests … typical stuff,” as Chambers summarized it. “She struck me as an extremely bored person,” he added. Later, Greene apparently had an affair with another man at CrossFit, a manager whom Chambers had recently hired from Colorado; this relationship, Chambers said, was more serious, more involved, “a real affair.” (Greene’s office did not respond to a list of questions about the alleged affairs and other matters.)

By March 2012, she and Perry had separated. Four months later, she filed for divorce. Two months after that, the couple reconciled.

The family appeared to resume its ordinary rhythms. By January, Perry was posting again on Tripadvisor. This was no small thing. Before the separation, he had been in the habit of reviewing, with great earnestness, establishments ranging from the local Melting Pot (“As stated this is a fondue restaurant, so it is very unique”) to the Cool Cat Cafe on Maui (“My family loves their burgers so much we have ‘Burger Sunday’ every Sunday as our family dinner”), only to go conspicuously dark during the sadness and tumult of 2012. But come the new year he was back, sharing his thoughts about the Encore, in Las Vegas (“Great ambience. Wife and I loved it!!!”), and an Italian restaurant in Alpharetta whose wine list, he judged, was “pretty good!”

Marjorie, meanwhile, worked with a personal coach in the hope of qualifying to compete in the international CrossFit Games. For the next two years, she would busy herself with his intense weekly prescriptions, all the while chronicling her experience on a WordPress blog. “Test post,” she began in April 2013. “I’m testing posting on my blog from my iPhone … See if this works.”

Scattered among the posts about creatine supplements (“I love that stuff”) and the iPhone footage of Greene’s triple jumps, there are glimmers to suggest that her family had found its way back. “I decided that I’m going to make a little home gym in my basement,” Greene wrote in May 2013. “This way, on days I’m not coaching I can train at home and be around my kids. My husband thinks it’s a great idea. Hopefully, they can see Mom working hard, and I can set a good example for them.” Six months later: “Just hanging around the house this weekend with my family, and I’m really happy with that.”

Much of the time, however, the blog posts suggest someone pinballing from aggressive cheerfulness (“Totally doing the happy dance!!”) to the “negative thoughts” that could rush in with no warning: “I wish there was a switch to turn off those thoughts.”

VI.

“Confidence is also an area that I struggle in,” Greene wrote in one of her blog posts. “But I’ve decided to say ‘why not me?’ ”

In 2013, she set out to become a businesswoman again. Partnering with Travis Mayer, a 22-year-old coach and one of the top CrossFit athletes in the world, Greene opened a 6,000-square-foot box called CrossFit Passion, on Roswell Street, in Alpharetta. Two years later, they relocated to a space nearly twice the size. In 2016, however, Greene sold her stake. She no longer blogged about her WODs or anything else related to CrossFit.

It’s unclear what prompted so abrupt a turnaround; Greene hasn’t discussed the subject publicly. “She would go through a really hard workout and then just stop in the middle of it and start crying,” a person who was close to Greene during this time told me. “And that started happening more regularly toward the end. It was just too much stress.” (Mayer, who went on to rename the gym United Performance, which he still owns and operates today, did not respond to requests for comment.)

The other thing that happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2016 was Donald Trump. Greene’s family had never been especially political. Every fourth November, minus a cycle or two, Bob and Delle Taylor made sure to stop by the library or the First Baptist Church and cast a vote. It is reasonable to assume that the Taylors leaned right. For years, the family’s construction company was a major sponsor of the Atlanta libertarian Neal Boortz’s eponymous talk show. Boortz, one of the most popular radio personalities in America during the late 1990s and early 2000s, told me that Bob (who died in 2021) had been a good friend for decades. Still, the family did not give money to candidates, Republican or Democrat; they did not hold fundraisers at the house on Lake Lanier. For the Taylors, the 2016 presidential election commenced with no more fanfare than any other. On Super Tuesday, Bob, Delle, and Marjorie did not vote in either party’s primary. In fact, Marjorie had not voted since 2010.

Greene’s political origin story was not unlike that of millions of other Trump supporters. Despite having never hinted at an interest in politics, she found herself suddenly beguiled by a feeling, a conviction that despite the distance between Trump’s gold-plated world and her own, she knew exactly who he was. “He reminded me of most men I know,” she has said. “Men like my dad.”

In some ways, he was like her dad. Bob Taylor may not have been overtly partisan, but he rivaled Trump in his tendency to self-mythologize. In 2006, Greene’s father had published a novel with the small publisher Savas Beatie called Paradigm. As best I can tell, this is Taylor’s effort to demonstrate the value of a system he invented called the “Taylor Effect”—which purports to predict the stock market based on the gravitational fluctuations of Earth—in the form of a high-stakes international caper. The story follows twin scientists who discover an ancient Egyptian box in the bowels of the Biltmore estate, the contents of which, they soon realize, could “destroy many of the world’s most powerful families” if ever made public.

He considered his stock-market theory to be “the Genuine Article”; in the afterword, he likened himself to da Vinci, Galileo, Edison, Marconi, and the Wright brothers. “History,” he wrote, “is filled with characters who endured ridicule, imprisonment, and even death because they discovered things we know today with absolute certainty to be true.” Suzanne Thompson, a North Carolina author hired to help Taylor write Paradigm, recalls that Taylor had “a bit of an exalted sense of himself.” She was unaware that he was Marjorie Taylor Greene’s father, and gasped with dismay when I told her. “Oh my gosh, I had no idea. Oh my God.”

Although Greene’s political awakening was sudden, she would later portray her support for Trump as the unveiling of a well-formed political identity that she’d had no choice but to keep hidden. “I’ve always had strong feelings about politics, but when you’re a business owner, you have to really, really be careful about what you say,” she told a conservative YouTube vlogger in 2019. But when she sold her gym, “something magically happened to me: I didn’t have to worry about what members thought anymore.”

Greene may now have felt free to speak, but it was not clear what she wanted to say. It was clear only that she wanted to say something. It was as though she spent the first six months of Trump’s administration gathering up the scattered feelings and dim instincts that informed her attraction to his brand of politics and examining them under a microscope, twisting the knob until the edges came into focus. By July 2017, Greene was ready to start posting about politics.

[Seyward Darby: There’s nothing fun or funny about Marjorie Taylor Greene]

She headed to American Truth Seekers, a now-defunct fringe-right website run by a New York City public-school counselor who went by the name Pat Rhiot. The contents of Greene’s earliest posts have been lost to the ether, but the headlines, archived by the Wayback Machine, summarize the brand Greene set out to establish from the very beginning: “Caitlyn Jenner Considering What?” was the first headline, followed over the next few days by “Female Genital Mutilation: America’s Dirty Little Secret” and “Exposed! Confidential Memo to Take Down Trump and Silence Conservatives!”

By August, when the full text of many of her blog posts become available, she was establishing her fierce devotion to gun rights and Donald Trump, and her antipathy toward conventional Republican politicians:

MAGA means get rid of our ridiculous embarrassing massive $20 Trillion dollar DEBT you put us in!! … You see we elected Donald Trump because he is NOT one of you, a politician. He is a business man, and a VERY successful one. WE elected him because he clearly knows how to manage business and money because we all know he has made plenty of it. Oh but not you people!

September saw her going after Hillary Clinton:

You know how we all have that one friend or family member that shows up to the party uninvited and just causes non-stop drama? They lie and make up stories and shift blame to everyone and everything, but constantly refuse to accept reality or the fact that maybe it’s their own fault. They ruin the party and make everyone miserable with all the crap they blubber out of their mouths, while they try to push their agenda on everyone and no one wants it. Yep Hillary. Can she just go away? Can she just go to jail?

Greene’s posts, by the standards of the 2017 far-right blogosphere, were more or less the usual fare, nothing terribly new or uniquely provocative. But Greene, in her brief time posting, had already picked up on something remarkable: People liked that she was ordinary. In the present landscape of conservative politics, ordinariness was a branding opportunity. Ordinariness ensured that even her most banal reflections would sparkle. Ordinariness allowed Greene to offer conservatives what the Alex Joneses couldn’t: affirmation that your neighborhood “full-time mom” and “female business owner” and “patriot” was fed up too. In the fall of 2017, Greene created a new Facebook page exclusively for the dissemination of her political thoughts.

The Republican base was in the market for a Marjorie Taylor Greene—a suburban woman who not only didn’t recoil from Trump but was full-throated MAGA. All over the internet, it seemed, were women who claimed to be conservative and yet could do nothing but choke on their pearls and complain about Trump’s tweets. But now here was regular Marge, who would put America first. Sweet southern Marge, who loved “family, fitness, travel, shooting, fun, and adventure,” and who, as would soon be clear, wanted very much to save the children.

VII.

Perhaps, decades from now, what will stand out most is how easily the dominoes fell.

Imagine it like this: #SaveTheChildren, right there at the top of the feed. You click on the hashtag—because who, given the choice, would not want to save the children?—and then, suddenly, you are looking with new eyes at the chevron Wayfair rug beneath your feet. It had been 40 percent off during the Presidents’ Day sale, but now you’re wondering: Had this one been used to transport a child, a trafficked innocent rolled up inside? And then not 10 clicks later you find yourself wondering about other things, too—other conspiracies, other dark forces. Because it is curious, now that you’re here, now that you’re wondering, that you can’t recall any CCTV footage of the airplane as it hit the Pentagon on 9/11. You had gone online to check if Theresa had posted photos from the baby shower and now, 20 minutes later, you log off with an entirely new field of vision, the unseen currents of the world suddenly alive.

Perhaps, for Marjorie Taylor Greene, the rug had been houndstooth and the baby shower had been Kerrie’s. But you don’t need the site-by-site search history to understand the narrative of Greene’s descent into QAnon, because the basics are so often the same.

QAnon followers subscribe to the sprawling conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by a network of satanic pedophiles funded by Saudi royalty, George Soros, and the Rothschild family. Though Republican officials have insisted that QAnon’s influence among the party’s base is overstated, former President Trump has come to embrace the movement plainly, closing out rallies with music nearly identical to the QAnon theme song, “WWG1WGA” (the initials stand for the group’s rallying cry, “Where we go one, we go all”). Yet since its inception, in the fall of 2017, when “Q,” an anonymous figure professing to be a high-level government official, began posting tales from the so-called deep state, no politician has become more synonymous with QAnon than Greene. To an extent, Greene had already signaled her attraction to conspiracy theories, questioning on American Truth Seekers whether the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas was a false-flag operation to eliminate gun rights. But with Q, Greene was all in. She has gone so far as to endorse an unhinged QAnon theory called “frazzledrip,” which claims that Hillary Clinton murdered a child as part of a satanic blood ritual.

Ramon Aponte, a right-wing blogger known as “The Puerto Rican Conservative,” became friendly with Greene soon after she began posting about Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that a Washington, D.C., restaurant was involved in a Democratic-run child-sex ring. “Even though the mainstream news media ‘debunked’ it, nobody ever conducted an investigation on it,” Aponte told me. “And Marjorie Taylor Greene knew this … She was a voice for the silent majority.” (After a North Carolina man’s armed raid of the restaurant, in December 2016, Washington police did, in fact, investigate, and pronounced the theory “fictitious.”)

Was Greene a true believer? Her early outpouring of breathless posts gives that strong impression—she comes across as a convert intoxicated by revelation. But in time, her affiliation with QAnon brought undeniable advantages. It was not until she latched on to Q and Q-adjacent theories that Greene’s political profile achieved scale and velocity. The deeper she plunged, the larger her following grew. And the more confident she became.

As the months passed, she started experimenting with a new tone; she would still be regular Marge and sweet southern Marge, but she would also be Marge who told the “aggressive truth”—who wasn’t afraid to be real. In Facebook videos posted from 2017 to 2019, Greene talked about the “Islamic invasion into our government offices.” She said: “Let me explain something to you, ‘Mohammed’ … What you people want is special treatment, you want to rise above us, and that’s what we’re against.” She talked about how it was “gangs”—“not white people”—who were responsible for holding back Black and Hispanic men. She objected to the removal of Confederate statues, saying: “But that doesn’t make me a racist … If I were Black people today, and I walked by one of those statues, I would be so proud, because I’d say, ‘Look how far I’ve come in this country.’ ” The most “mistreated group” in America, she went on to say, was “white males.”

Illustration by Eric Yahnker. Source image: Marjorie Taylor Greene / YouTube.

By the end of 2018, Marjorie Taylor Greene was awash in validation. Especially from men. She found herself suddenly fielding marriage proposals in the comments beneath her selfies. “Ok ok ok so you’re totally gorgeous I got that the first time I saw u,” one person wrote, “but you seal the deal with what’s in your head, I love the message of truth u bring and inform all who will listen I’M SOLD!!!” Greene, as she often would upon reading such comments, clicked the “Like” button in response.

Greene began to meet up with people from her Facebook circle. In March 2019, she traveled to Washington, D.C., as the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on restrictive gun legislation. At one point, in a now-infamous confrontation, Greene began following David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. The shooting had left 17 dead, and Hogg had come to Washington to make the case for gun-control measures. Wearing a black blazer and leggings, a pink Michael Kors tote slung over her shoulder, Greene accosted the 18-year-old and, with a friend capturing the encounter on video, badgered him about his support for the bill: “You don’t have anything to say for yourself? You can’t defend your stance? How did you get over 30 appointments with senators? How’d you do that? How did you get major press coverage on this issue?” Hogg walked on in silence as Greene continued: “You know if school zones were protected with security guards with guns, there would be no mass shootings at schools. Do you know that? The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”

Greene would later trace her decision to run for office to the frustration she’d felt during that trip: No one had paid her any attention. That would have to change. As she posted on a website called The Whiskey Patriots just after the Hogg incident, and just before she launched her bid for Congress: “Let the war begin …”

VIII.

She ran and she won, of course, in Georgia’s Fourteenth District, in a largely rural outpost in the northwest corner of the state. Voters did not seem to care that Greene, who had judged the solidly conservative area to be friendlier to her chances than her home district in suburban Atlanta, had never actually lived there.

Shortly after she was sworn into office, in January 2021, her harassment of Hogg, as well as old social-media posts in which she endorsed the claim that the Parkland shooting was a false-flag operation, surfaced into public view. In her maiden speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, she set out to blunt the criticism she was receiving. Much of the speech was a disavowal of her own past statements. She conceded, for example, that 9/11 had actually happened, and that not all QAnon posts were accurate. “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she protested.

As for David Hogg, she recounted an episode at her own high school when, she said, the “entire school” had been taken hostage by a gunman—an episode that she continues to invoke as a touchstone to explain everything that is wrong about security in schools and how she has a right to browbeat a school-shooting survivor like Hogg. But if her account failed to engender much sympathy, it was because it only nominally resembled reality.

On a September morning in 1990, during Greene’s junior year, a history teacher named Johnny Tallant was holding his class at South Forsyth High School when an armed sophomore entered the classroom next door, fired a rifle overhead, and marched the students there into Tallant’s classroom; for the next few hours, the sophomore held some 40 of his classmates, and Tallant, at gunpoint. The hostages later said they were initially terrified; the student threatened to kill them if his demands for candy, soda, and a school bus were not met. Eventually their nerves quieted. Many of the students knew their captor at least somewhat, and they weren’t altogether surprised when he put down his gun and began sharing with them “everything that was going on in his head,” as one hostage recalled. “He said he wanted to get away from things and make a point,” recalled another, adding that the student had repeatedly promised not to hurt them. “He said his parents were mean, that he was tired of how they treated him, and that he had no friends and just wanted to get away.” Gradually, as police delivered the snacks he’d asked for, the sophomore let most of the hostages go, including all the girls but one, who knew the student well and stayed behind to keep talking to him. Five hours in, when the remaining hostages moved to grab his gun, he did not resist; when the police burst in moments later, he did not fight back.

Tallant recalls that Greene reached out to him sometime before she launched her bid for Congress, in the spring of 2019. He had no idea who she was, or why she was calling him at home. He listened that day as the unfamiliar woman explained that she wanted to speak with him about the events of 1990—that she’d been a student at South Forsyth when everything happened. Still, Tallant struggled to place her. Greene had not been in his classroom. Everyone else at the school, including Greene, had been quickly evacuated and bused away. Tallant was taken aback by Greene’s intensity, her apparently sudden need, decades later, to discover flaws in the school’s handling of things: “She was asking me some crazy questions about—she was saying we should have had guns ourselves, you know … She sounded like kind of a nut.”

Tallant would not give her what she wanted. “I told her right off, we didn’t need guns,” he said. It wasn’t a political statement; for Tallant, it was just reality—the only conclusion you could draw if you took care to examine the particulars of the crisis, of the teenage boy at the center of it. The sophomore was known by classmates and teachers to struggle with seizures and other symptoms of epilepsy. As one of the hostages later put it: “I wasn’t scared of him. I was scared of what the police would do when he stepped into the hall, and I was afraid of what the police were planning to do as he walked from the room to the bus.”

But never mind. Greene hung up with Tallant and eventually proceeded with her preferred version of the story in her speech on the House floor: “You see, school shootings are absolutely real,” Greene said, her navy face mask emblazoned with the words FREE SPEECH in red letters. “I understand how terrible it is because when I was 16 years old, in 11th grade, my school was a gun-free school zone, and one of my schoolmates brought guns to school and took our entire school hostage.”

“I know the fear that David Hogg had that day,” she pronounced. “I know the fear that these kids have.”

Did it even matter that Greene had not been taken hostage, or that the episode had been handled wisely and without bloodshed, or that the teacher in the classroom had told her she was wrong about her memories and her conclusions? By now, it may have occurred to Greene that performance was enough. That politics might in fact be that easy—as long as you were angry, or at least good at acting like it, most people wouldn’t bother to look beneath the hood.

IX.

In late September 2022, Perry Greene filed for divorce from Marjorie Taylor Greene on the grounds that the marriage was “irretrievably broken.” His timing—so close to the midterm election—did not go unnoticed in Georgia political circles. Six weeks later, on November 8, Marjorie easily won reelection to her second term in the House of Representatives.

Given her popularity among a segment of the Republican base, she is certain to play a major role in the GOP leadership, whether that role comes with a specific title and assignment or not. She wields power much like Donald Trump, doing or saying the unthinkable because she knows that most of her colleagues wouldn’t dare jeopardize their own future to stop her.

[Barton Gellman: The impeachment of Joe Biden]

What Marjorie Taylor Greene has accomplished is this: She has harnessed the paranoia inherent in conspiratorial thinking and reassured a significant swath of voters that it is okay—no, righteous—to indulge their suspicions about the left, the Republican establishment, the media. “I’m not going to mince words with you all,” she declared at a Michigan rally this fall. “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they’ve already started the killings.” Greene did not create this sensibility, but she channels it better than any of her colleagues.

In her speech at the Cobb County GOP breakfast, Greene bemoaned “the major media organizations” for creating a caricature of her “that’s not real” without ever, she said, giving her the chance to speak for herself. Afterward, I introduced myself, noted what she had just said, and asked if she was willing to sit down for an interview. “Oh,” she said, “you’re the one that’s going around trying to talk to [all my friends]. This is the first time you’ve actually tried to talk to me.” I explained that I had tried but had been repeatedly turned away by her staff. “Yeah, because I’m not interested,” she snapped. “You’re a Democrat activist.” Some of her supporters looked on, nodding with vigor.

Whether Greene actually believes the things she says is by now almost beside the point. She has no choice but to be the person her followers think she is, because her power is contingent on theirs. The mechanics of actual leadership—diplomacy, compromise, patience—not only don’t interest her but represent everything her followers disdain. To soften, or engage in better faith, is to admit defeat.

I think often of Greene’s blog post from July 26, 2014, and the question she posed to herself during her crisis of confidence. “Why not me?” she had written tentatively, trying it on for size. I think of it whenever I see Greene onstage, on YouTube, on the House floor, making performance art of rage and so clearly at ease with what she is. Were the question not in writing, I’m not sure I’d believe there was a time in her life when she’d been afraid to ask.

Listen to Elaina Plott Calabro and Mark Leibovich discuss this article—and the future of the GOP—on Radio Atlantic:

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This article appears in the January/February 2023 print edition with the headline “Why Is She Like This?”

What Does Tucker Carlson Believe?

2019-12-15T05:00:00-05:00

(Stephen Voss / Redux)

Tucker Carlson does not think he is an “especially” good person. He knows he can “get mad” and “make a mistake,” that he can “overstate” things as a result of getting “caught up” in his own rhetoric. He also knows he can sometimes get “self-righteous,” and this, as we speak on the set of his Fox News show on a recent Friday, seems to bother him the most. Because it is everything Carlson disdains in others—the elitist sensibility that, in his mind, leads figures such as former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power to espouse a worldview whose essence, as he puts it, is “I’m a really good person, and you’re not.”

This is in large part how a wealthy Washingtonian like Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson—with his prep-school education and summer home in Maine—convinces millions of viewers, weeknight after weeknight, that he is one of them. It’s not just that Carlson purports to have empathy where he believes others—such as the Stanford Law professor Pamela Karlan, who testified in favor of President Donald Trump’s impeachment and whom Carlson calls a “drooling moron”—lack it. Carlson also enjoys reminding his viewers that the same people who for years told you that you were wrong, that you were a bad person, have long ago written him off, too.

Carlson tapes live from Washington, D.C., five nights a week, with all the trappings of any major cable-news set—the bright lights and pixelated backdrops and row of producers studying his every move. But the Tucker Carlson Tonight studio also pulses with a kind of frenetic energy, one that perhaps comes only when your show’s basic message is a gleeful fuck you.

“Our leadership class is narcissistic,” Carlson tells me. “And like all narcissists, they’re incredibly shortsighted. The moral preening is a symptom of something deeper, which is narcissism.”

[Read: The bow-tied bard of populism]

On that recent Friday night, I watch from behind the cameras as Carlson, toggling between his signature expressions of deep concern and manic delight, berates the conservative establishment. He showcases ProPublica’s reporting on how the American Enterprise Institute, the prominent conservative think tank, for years published glowing pieces about Purdue Pharma, the maker of oxycontin and, incidentally, a major donor to AEI. “If you’re starting to suspect the conservative establishment doesn’t really represent your interests, there’s a reason for that,” Carlson said. “They’re every bit as corrupt as you think they are.”

Such segments seem to fulfill the initial promise of Tucker Carlson Tonight, a show that once looked primed to thoughtfully channel the anti-elite sentiment sweeping the right, and perhaps disentangle it from the racial appeals long used to buoy it. At the time of the show’s launch, six days after Trump’s election, it didn’t seem insane to think that Carlson might fashion himself as the voice of a new right-wing populism: Here was someone who even pre-Trump had spoken out against the corporatist, globalist tropes captivating the leadership of both parties, who before focusing on TV was a widely respected writer for the likes of Weekly Standard, Talk, and Esquire. If there was anyone who could articulate a meaningful iteration of Trumpism, one with the intellectual heft to persist beyond the Trump era, maybe it was Carlson.

Three years later, Tucker Carlson Tonight is a massive success. According to Nielsen, the show averages 3.4 million viewers a night in its 8 p.m. time slot, more than its CNN and MSNBC counterparts—Anderson Cooper 360 and All In With Chris Hayes—combined. Carlson has distinguished himself from the rest of Fox’s prime-time lineup in large part for his willingness to denounce Republicans. He’s probed the destruction wrought by “vulture capitalism” in small towns and called Trump generally incapable of getting things done. He’s praised Elizabeth Warren’s economic policies as “pure, old-fashioned economics” that “make obvious sense.”

All of which could make Carlson singularly poised to rewrite conservatism, to cohere the populist tenor that continues to attract much of the electorate. And yet when we sat down for our interview, not half an hour after his standout segment on AEI, Carlson seemed to trade that appeal to nuance for something else. When I asked him how one could square segments such as the one I’d just watched with his comments last year, for example, that immigrants make America “dirtier,” he looked appalled that I might wonder whether one take was more sincere than the other. “I hate litter,” he said. For 35 years now, he said, he has fished in the Potomac River, and “it has gotten dirtier and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier. I go down there and that litter is left almost exclusively by immigrants, who I’m sure are good people, but nobody in our country—”

“Wait,” I said, cutting him off, “how do you know they’re—”

“Because I’m there,” he said. “I watch it.”

Ask someone who knows Carlson about the past three years, and you’ll likely hear a lamentation. It’s one of the trendier virtue signals among political and media types: saying you believe that Tucker Carlson is so smart, that it really is such a shame, because he of all people should know better, and what, pray tell, happened to him?

The subtext of these conversations is the question of whether Carlson is, as Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently claimed, a “white supremacist sympathizer.” For a time, the question could be written off as unserious, a voguish desire to ascribe racism to anyone who might not support increased immigration. But in recent years, Carlson and some of his guests have lent more and more plausibility to the label. On August 6, for example, days after a white gunman killed 22 people in El Paso, Texas, motivated by a fear of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Carlson took to his program to argue that white supremacy was “not a real problem in America,” but rather a “hoax” drummed up by Democrats.

Carlson should “know better,” the thinking goes, because he once centered his work on “his God-given talent for scrupulously true commentary,” as my colleague Conor Friedersdorf puts it. Now 50, he began his career writing for newspapers and magazines in the 1990s, and his editors from that time described him to the Columbia Journalism Review as “enterprising,” “hard-working,” and “extremely talented.” For those familiar only with the Carlson of television, it might come as a surprise that the left-leaning New Republic once likened his writing, which includes a profile of George W. Bush for Tina Brown’s Talk, to David Foster Wallace’s and Michael Lewis’s “best reportage.”

Carlson, during our post-show interview that Friday, said he’s learned to drown out any accusations of white supremacy, because “it’s so far from the truth that it has no effect at all other than to evoke in me contempt for the people saying it, because I think it’s that dishonest.” He went on to defend his most controversial segments as an effort to show how America’s “obsession with race” and “constant talking about race” is a “diversion tactic” used by “people who don’t want to talk about economics.” “And the reason people don’t want to talk about economics,” he said, “is because the economy is rigged for the benefit of a small number of people. They don’t want to talk about it—they would much rather the population was high and hating each other on the basis of race.”

There’s a hint here as to who Carlson is at his best, someone who can communicate what my colleague Shadi Hamid calls an “economics of meaning,” wherein economic or class critiques “are a means to channel anger, create meaning, and build solidarity rather than to implement better policy outcomes.” When Carlson agrees with Warren that her policies reflect “economic patriotism,” for example, he is defying what as recently as four years ago was Republican orthodoxy, scoffing at those who choose to preen over matters like the national debt rather than celebrate the ethos of a plan that serves American workers instead of “the rhetoric of markets.”

[Read: The nationalists take Washington]

The question, then, is whether this larger worldview Carlson is espousing each night, encompassing restrictionism, protectionism, and anti-interventionism, has currency with GOP voters absent a race-based appeal—in other words, whether an economics of meaning alone can sustain a populist revolution on the right. Carlson says it does, and it can.

His programming tells another story. On his December 6 broadcast, one day after our interview, Carlson featured Pete D’Abrosca, a North Carolina congressional candidate campaigning on an end to immigration. D’Abrosca’s plan appears rooted in his belief that white Americans are “being replaced by third world peasants who share neither their ethnicity nor their culture.” He’s been lauded by the white-nationalist website VDare and is strongly supported by the so-called Groyper movement, an offshoot of the alt-right led by Nick Fuentes, a 21-year-old who has, among other things, denied the extent of the Holocaust and argued that the First Amendment was “not written for Muslims.” D’Abrosca went on Carlson’s show to advertise his proposed 10-year moratorium on immigration. “I think that there’s a new Republican Party in town,” D’Abrosca said.

Carlson knows failure. This, in his view, is why, despite going to the same schools, working in the same town—gaming the same “system”—as the elites he rails against, he doesn’t share their “narcissism.” “When you get fired in TV, you know, especially when you’re running a show with your name on it, it’s impossible to evade responsibility for it,” he told me, referencing his MSNBC show, Tucker, which in 2008 was canceled during its third season. “When your show goes under, it goes under because people don’t like you. Like, you’re a loser … I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but it certainly is the only way you ever learn anything—by being humiliated, and crushed.”

Yet Carlson also knows success. And if the lesson of failure is that it’s time to “learn a new trick,” he explained, the message of success is sometimes to sit still.

Talking with Carlson reminded me of a moment from my interview with President Trump earlier this spring. He was reminiscing about his first evening in the White House residence. “I’ll never forget,” he told me. “I came into the White House, I was here for my first night, and I said, ‘Wow. Four years is such a long time.’”

Four years ago, Paul Ryan, the GOP’s boy-wonder champion of entitlement cuts and immigration reform, was grudgingly settling into the speakership, having been drafted as the best hope of uniting his conference. Four years ago, the governor of Alabama was stumping on behalf of John Kasich in the GOP presidential primary. Four years ago, pundits were still calling Donald Trump a fluke.

Now we are here in this studio, where Carlson is reaping praise for a blistering segment on a Republican mega-donor, Paul Singer, that showcased how the billionaire hedge-funder had sapped a small Nebraska town of jobs after helping engineer the takeover of a sporting-goods chain that was headquartered there. He’s listening as Jeanine Pirro calls the impeachment of Donald Trump “hogwash” and reads passages from The Federalist Papers by way of explanation. In a few minutes, he’ll excoriate the think tank that served as the ideological bedrock of George H. W. Bush’s administration and was predicted to be Paul Ryan’s employer post-Congress.

A lot has happened in four years, and Carlson believes he understands why in a way his Beltway neighbors don’t. Perhaps it’s not right to say, then, that Carlson ensures his appeal to an economics of meaning gets lost when he insists that immigrants litter more than native-born citizens, or when he offers a platform to guys who are too alt-right even for the alt-right. Perhaps it’s that he knows what it takes to keep his audience listening.

So cue the lamentations again, this time from the movement conservatives, who might have hoped to see him contend with populism’s fraught history and Trump-era manifestation and shape it into something different. “Carlson has radically reinvented himself,” says David French, senior editor of the conservative outlet The Dispatch, “and one would hope he’d reinvent himself again, grant the reality of right-wing populism’s race problem, and do something determined and intentional to overcome it.”

When I relayed that sentiment to Carlson, he burst out laughing. “Whatever,” he said. “I’ve made a complete break mentally with the world I used to live in.” He later followed up with an official statement: “David French is a buffoon, one of the least impressive people I’ve ever met. Only in nonprofit conservatism could he have a paying job.”

Which brings us to perhaps the most crucial metric of success for Carlson: how many people in Washington think he’s wrong. About what, it doesn’t matter, really. Just as long, he says, as whatever “costume” the Morning Joe folks are wearing—“fighting for private equity,” “making alarmed noises about Tehran,” believing “a woman’s right to choose is the bedrock of human freedom”—is the opposite of his own.

And maybe one day, he said as we wound down our interview, he’ll decide everything he’s saying in this moment is wrong. He’s certainly recanted his viewpoints before. “There’s no topic on which my views haven’t changed, because the country has changed so much,” he said. “And what I have learned is that a lot of the things I believed were totally wrong, a lot of the information that I was basing my opinions on was wrong, or dishonest, false, even fraudulent in some cases. A lot of the things conservatives were saying at one time have been completely disproven.”

But when it comes to the Tucker Carlson of the Trump era, don’t expect any sort of personal reckoning in the near future. “It’s very hard when you’re succeeding to see your own flaws. It’s very hard,” he said. “Because everything about the experience reinforces what you’re doing.

“So I just know, of course, I’m making mistakes,” he adds. “It’s just harder to see what they are.”

Why Trump (Probably) Won’t Ditch Rudy

2019-11-27T05:00:00-05:00

Over the past week, I asked multiple GOP officials when, if ever, they thought President Donald Trump would publicly distance himself from his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who is at the center of the House impeachment inquiry. Their responses were eerily similar: “Can it be two years ago?” asked one White House official who, like others, requested anonymity in order to be candid. “Ideally three years ago,” responded a senior House GOP aide. Finally, a senior Senate GOP aide: “Can he do it yesterday?”

The Trump era has been rife with stories about the crack-up of the GOP—the tensions between the establishment and populist wings of the party, coupled with the surrender, more or less, to the blurry contours of Trumpism. But if the past two months of impeachment proceedings have revealed anything, it’s that Republicans—whether stationed in the White House or Congress, whether sympathetic to Reagan-era conservatism or its present-day iteration—agree on one thing: Giuliani has got to go.

Giuliani’s attempts to trigger an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter have complicated Trump’s denial of a quid pro quo with Ukraine. At each Trump insistence that he had no interest in withholding military aid on condition of an investigation into his political rival, there was Giuliani, according to congressional testimonies last week, seemingly suggesting otherwise. As a former senior White House official told me in September, the “entire” situation in which the administration currently finds itself is the result of “Rudy putting shit in Trump’s head.” That view, according to the officials I spoke with, has only become more widespread in the months since.

So yes, Republicans largely agree that Trump would be better served sans Giuliani (who told me last Wednesday evening that he is in fact still the president’s personal attorney). But they also agree on something else: Giuliani isn’t going anywhere. According to another senior House GOP aide, “We’re so far beyond that at this point.”

Giuliani himself also seems to agree. He told me in a text message that Trump “knows that every one of the stories are false and defamatory and intended to remove me as a defense lawyer for him.” He added: “If I was less effective they would have left me alone. But they, including unethical law enforcement sources, are swinging from their shoe tips and missing … The scandal is not with me or Trump but how the Corrupt Press and their leakers in law enforcement can cover it up for so long.”

It’s rare that any of Trump’s associates seems “safe” in his or her standing with the president. (Trump, of course, fired his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, via a tweet from the tarmac of Andrews Air Force Base after just six months on the job, while an unsuspecting Priebus sat in a black SUV nearby.) But current and former White House officials and lawmakers close to Trump told me that Giuliani is uniquely positioned in this moment. He is in many ways Trump’s closest ally apart from his family, having cultivated a mutual affection and trust over several decades. But if scorned, he could also prove to be Trump’s worst enemy—a dynamic that Giuliani himself has been happy to tout in recent media interviews, joking, essentially, that he knows too much for Trump to risk axing him. Added to that, the sources said, is the fact that Trump has dug in his heels on impeachment: To condemn Giuliani, they said, would be to concede that this administration’s dealings with Ukraine were short of, in the president’s words, “perfect”—something Trump and his allies are not at all willing to do.

[David A. Graham: Why hasn’t Trump thrown Rudy Giuliani under the bus?]

“That line of thinking—that throwing a team member under the bus [will] ‘make the media go away’—is not only foolish, it’s idiotic,” Jason Miller, a former Trump-campaign communications adviser, told me. “All it will do is convince Democrats and certain members of the media that they’re onto something, and the intensity will increase tenfold.”

“The damage is done,” added a Republican National Committee official. “Rudy’s been like this forever, and Trump has never wanted to dump him. Plus at this point, it’s like, doesn’t he know too much?”

In Giuliani’s eyes, at least, that may well be his saving grace. So far, he’s refused to comply with a congressional subpoena to testify about his dealings in Ukraine and answer questions about what Trump did or didn’t know. In recent days he’s suggested that his testimony would be just as revelatory as Democrats assume. On November 14, in an interview with The Guardian, Giuliani said he wasn’t worried that Trump would “throw him under a bus” as impeachment proceedings move forward. “But I do have very, very good insurance, so if he does, all my hospital bills will be paid,” Giuliani added. (His lawyer quickly interjected that he was “joking.”) Giuliani referenced his “insurance” against Trump again in a Fox News interview last weekend. “You can assume that I talk with him early and often,” he said of his relationship with the president. “I’ve seen things written like he’s gonna throw me under the bus … When they say that, I say, ‘He isn’t, but I have insurance.’”

That journalists keep asking the question is understandable. For Trump, loyalty almost always seems to be a one-way street. The former White House official Cliff Sims concluded as much at the end of his memoir recounting his time in the West Wing, Team of Vipers, writing: “I had let my personal relationship with the President blind me to the one unfailing truth that applied to anyone with whom he didn’t share a last name: we were all disposable.”

And yet people close to Trump insist his relationship with Giuliani is different. One Republican lawmaker told me that for “several weeks” he has advised Trump that Giuliani’s ouster is past due. “He listens but … one of the real things about him is that he is very loyal” to Giuliani, the lawmaker said. Senator Lindsey Graham told me he’s advised Trump only “to stand down and quit commenting on the day-to-day events,” and hasn’t bothered to bring up Giuliani. “I know he thinks Rudy is the best crime fighter in the history of the world,” Graham said.

Trump’s affection for Giuliani is not so much rooted in their shared history—both men are prominent New Yorkers and are close with each other’s family—as it is something more recent. Two former senior White House officials told me that Trump has never forgotten Giuliani’s outspoken loyalty in the fallout of the Access Hollywood tape scandal, in which Trump bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy.”

“He was willing to go out there and fight it out when no one else would,” of the former officials said. “Rudy Giuliani is one of the few and rare politicians who genuinely—and I say genuinely—worked his ass off for the president in 2016,” echoed the other. “All those ‘party’ guys, they all abandoned Trump after Access Hollywood … Rudy gets a long leash because he’s been a loyal guy when it’s counted.”

[Read: What does Rudy Giuliani’s son do?]

One of those former officials added that Giuliani also fulfills a need that might seem foreign to this president: friendship. This person told me that Trump “craves normal conversation,” and that oftentimes Giuliani’s visits to the Oval Office or the residence are not necessarily work-related; rather, the two men will catch up on a personal level, perhaps talking through, as they have recently, Giuliani’s ongoing divorce from his third wife.

“I think you’ve gotta look past all the strategy and other bullshit” when trying to understand Giuliani’s staying power, another former White House official told me. “Because the reality is that Donald Trump only has, like, six or seven friends in his life. And Rudy is one of them.”

What Does Rudy Giuliani’s Son Do?

2019-11-18T11:33:34-05:00

It’s hard to turn on cable news or scroll through Twitter these days without catching the name “Giuliani.” Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, is a central character in the House’s impeachment inquiry. Meanwhile, Rudy’s third wife, Judith Giuliani, has commanded her own headlines as she’s aired details of the couple’s contentious, ongoing divorce proceedings. Scarcely mentioned, however, is Andrew Giuliani—the former New York mayor’s 31-year-old son—who works in the White House.

Rudy Giuliani told me his son’s hire “wasn’t the usual ‘hire my kid’ situation.” “He’s known the president since he was a baby,” Rudy said. “Now, did he know him in the first place because he was the mayor’s son? Sure, but they also had a relationship independent of me.”

The younger Giuliani has served in the Office of Public Liaison, beginning as an associate director, since March 2017, making him one of the longest-serving members of the Trump administration. According to White House personnel records from 2018, he earns a salary of $90,700. The public-liaison office deals with outreach to outside coalitions, and several of the current and former administration officials I spoke to for this story said Giuliani helps arrange sports teams’ visits to the White House. (Sergio Gor, who is deputy chief of staff for Senator Rand Paul and close to Giuliani, called him a “liaison to the sports community.”) But sports-team visits are more special-occasion than scheduling staple in the business of government, especially in this White House, where many title-winning teams decline invitations to visit or are simply not invited at all. (Trump has, however, given a large number of awards, such as the Medal of Freedom, to sports figures.) Steve Munisteri, who was principal director of the public-liaison office and Giuliani’s supervisor from February 2017 to February 2019, told me that Giuliani fills out his time by serving as the office’s representative at White House meetings about the opioid crisis.

Others who have worked with Giuliani offered a different take on his White House tenure. “He doesn’t really try to be involved in anything,” one former senior White House official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid. “He’s just having a nice time.”

Yet for the differing opinions on the nature of Giuliani’s role, the officials I spoke to were certain that Giuliani had nabbed a White House post in the first place because of his father. A second former senior White House official plainly called it “a nepotism job.” But Munisteri said that anyone who frames it this way “has an ax to grind.” He added that Giuliani, a former professional golfer, was qualified on his own for this particular role, because “it’s the type of position where you need someone with an outgoing personality.” (Andrew Giuliani didn’t return a request for comment.)

Calling Giuliani’s hire a pure nepotism play may be too strong a declaration, but one need look no further than Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and self-appointed Middle East expert, to see how, in even the most senior ranks of this administration, the chasm between experience and responsibility can matter little with the right surname. And one can also look to Giuliani, perhaps, to see the benefits of that dynamic: a well-paying job with unparalleled access to the leader of the free world. But his father’s centrality to the Ukraine scandal could put it all in jeopardy.

[Read: Rudy Giuliani: ‘You should be happy for your country that I uncovered this’]

Before joining the White House, apart from his golf career, Giuliani volunteered on Trump’s 2016 campaign and worked as a sales intern at a boutique investment bank. What Giuliani may have lacked in government experience, however, he made up for in having Trump’s trust. According to two former White House officials who were close with Giuliani during their tenures, Trump has long been a father figure to his personal lawyer’s son. Giuliani, those officials said, credits Trump with helping him navigate the period after his father’s divorce from his mother, Donna, when he was a teenager, and particularly with helping him repair his relationship with Rudy. “He loves POTUS, big time” for that, one of the officials said, and Rudy told me his own affection for the president stems in large part from helping bring him and his son back together.

[Read: Where did Rudy go?]

From the beginning of Trump’s presidency, Andrew Giuliani, whom most officials I spoke with described as gregarious and kind, has been loyal to the president. It’s a quality that was especially rare in those early days of the Trump administration, when leaks flowed from the West Wing as if on tap. Having Trump’s trust meant that Giuliani, despite his low-level role, was given a West Wing pass, free to move in and out as he pleased. (Munisteri admitted it was “rare” that associate directors were given so-called blue badges.) And as the person with one of the better golf handicaps in Trump’s inner circle, Giuliani sometimes traveled with the president for the sole purpose of joining him for a round or two. Ultimately, Giuliani’s face time with Trump in that first year rivaled that of far more senior officials.

All of which made then–Chief of Staff John Kelly “grumpy,” as a fourth former White House official described it. When Kelly took over for Reince Priebus as Trump’s chief of staff in July 2017, the source said, “he couldn’t wrap his head around” Andrew Giuliani and the president’s relationship, in large part because of Giuliani’s father. Kelly took issue with Rudy’s frequent television appearances, many of the officials told me, griping that the president’s lawyer would go on shows to talk about one problem, but leave the set having created several more. Andrew, in Kelly’s eyes, appeared little more than an unhelpful extension of his father. “Kelly hated him because he didn’t like that there was this random guy … who played golf with Trump and whose dad was a problem,” the second former official explained.

Kelly revoked Andrew’s West Wing access, disrupting the staffer’s otherwise freewheeling setup. Giuliani “flipped out” about the downgrade, the third former official said. Four of the former officials said Giuliani’s father immediately spoke about it with Trump, who then ordered Kelly to restore Giuliani’s pass and promote him to special assistant to the president. “Kelly just wouldn’t,” the third former official said. “Trump would think it was done. Then it wasn’t … It was classic Kelly. Just ignore and assume Trump will forget.” Kelly, the source added, “said the staff reported to him, not Trump, so it was for him to decide.”

As is well known, Kelly was intent on closing off the circle of those in direct contact with Trump, demanding that even Kushner and Trump’s daughter Ivanka alert him to their every interaction with the president in their capacity as advisers. Kelly, as I’ve reported, resented the couple’s meddling in high-profile issues, like immigration, in which they had no experience. But Giuliani posed a different sort of problem for the chief of staff, in that he wasn’t meddling, or improperly inserting himself in major decisions, or going rogue on his own projects—in Kelly’s view, he just seemed, well, there. To Munisteri, however, any White House official’s problem with Giuliani’s access is simply a product of envy. “It’s a jealousy thing,” he said. “He’s known the president since he was a kid. That’s just gonna bother some people.”

With Kelly long gone, the professional life of Andrew Giuliani has been, in some ways, on the mend: Three of the former officials, as well as another person close to Andrew, told me that even in this radioactive moment for Rudy, Kelly’s successor, Mick Mulvaney, has restored his son’s West Wing access (it’s unclear whether he did so at Trump’s behest), has promoted him to special assistant to the president, and takes no issues with his golf outings with Trump. And yet one of the officials said that Giuliani, talkative like his dad, has seemed much quieter of late. It’s a change that anyone who spends time around Giuliani is bound to notice. (In 2009, when Giuliani was a contestant on the Golf Channel’s Big Break: Disney Golf, his fellow contestants often griped on camera about his chattiness. “Talking. That’s all he does,” said one. “I mean, he would talk to this door.”) “I think for the most part he’s trying to keep his head down and not make any waves,” the second former official said. “His dad is making that difficult right now.”

The challenge now for Giuliani, as more and more administration officials come to think of Rudy as the source of their current woes, is whether keeping his head down will be enough to safeguard his position. “You’ve got to wonder what happens if Trump decides he needs to distance himself from Rudy,” said the first official. “What happens to Andrew after that?”

Giuliani’s is a setup that one would think he has no interest in complicating—not when he’s finally gotten his blue badge back and he is, as the first official put it, having such a nice time. His father, for his part, doesn’t seem to be worried. “I can’t imagine anything happening,” he told me. “That would be ridiculous.”

The American Prisoner Caught Between Trump and the Kremlin

2019-11-05T05:00:00-05:00

Elizabeth Whelan, a soft-spoken portrait artist from Martha’s Vineyard, has never considered herself political. And yet seated before this shrine of sorts—the Trump bobblehead next to the Trump-branded bottle of rosé; the Trump coffee mug; the Make America Great Again hats in red, white, and blue; the Trump tube socks; the SAVE FREEDOM: TRUMP/PENCE bumper sticker—she knows she is in the right place.

She is here, in this office, to talk about her brother, because she is only ever in Washington, D.C., to talk about her brother. On December 28, 2018, Paul Whelan was traveling from his home state of Michigan to Moscow for a friend’s wedding when he was arrested by Russian intelligence officers on charges of espionage. The 49-year-old, formerly a security chief for a manufacturing company, has been in a czarist-era prison in Moscow ever since. According to his family, his health is deteriorating, he has no access to English-speaking legal counsel, and his visits from American embassy officials are limited. And 57-year-old Elizabeth, who before Paul’s arrest spent her days painting and enjoying the Vineyard’s salt-stung air, has been thrust into the miasma of U.S.-Russia relations in a singularly personal way.

Which is how, on a recent Friday, she found herself in the office of David Urban, the Trump campaign official–cum–corporate lobbyist who speaks regularly with the president and counts his fellow West Point graduate Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as a close friend. That Urban, who led the campaign’s successful 2016 operation in Pennsylvania, took the meeting was a victory in itself. For months, Elizabeth has trekked back and forth to plead her brother’s case to the White House, Congress, the State Department—anyone who will listen. She’s made some inroads on Capitol Hill, where last month the House passed a resolution calling on Russia to present “credible evidence” against Paul, or release him from prison. But overall, she’s found high- and low-ranking officials alike to be skittish on the topic. “I would say we have a Russia problem, in the sense that a lot of people don’t want to engage with any subject matter that has the word Russia involved in it,” Elizabeth told me after her meeting with Urban, which I’d sat in on. “I might as well be taking a fainting couch and smelling salts around with me.”

Admittedly, there is never a good time for an American citizen to be detained in Russia. But given the Trump administration’s complicated, unpredictable, and often deferential relationship with the Kremlin, Elizabeth struggles to imagine a worse one. Earlier this summer, Paul used a brief court appearance in Moscow to beg for President Donald Trump’s assistance in his case. “Tweet your intentions,” he pleaded from inside a glass cage. Yet the president has stayed silent. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

For Urban, who met the Whelan family through a mutual contact, the decision to help Elizabeth, and to do so pro bono, was a no-brainer. “This is a humanitarian issue—an American citizen being detained,” Urban told me. “It’s completely separate from politics.” But of course it isn’t, as nothing ever is. Politics is why Elizabeth was meeting Urban that Friday. It’s why the bobblehead, the rosé, the socks, rather than unsettle Elizabeth, made the room glint with promise. As both she and Urban knew, settling into their chairs that morning for their first face-to-face, the way to attain Paul’s release was to make Donald Trump care.

“So,” Urban said, nodding toward her. “Let’s start from the beginning.”

Paul Whelan arrived in Moscow on December 22, 2018. His friend, a fellow American and former marine, was getting married there to a Russian woman, and had invited Paul as a tour guide of sorts for the wedding’s U.S. guests. Paul’s love for Russia was well known: In his work over the years in IT and security for international consultancies and manufacturers, he’d traveled to the country multiple times. According to The New York Times, he was also active on Vkontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook. He’d formed online friendships on the site with dozens of Russians, many of whom were retired military officers, and talked with them about his interest in the Russian language and culture.

According to Elizabeth, when Paul didn’t show at the wedding, his friend knew immediately to worry, and alerted the American embassy of Paul’s disappearance. For three days, Elizabeth said, her family was in the dark. “We didn’t know if he was dead or if he’d been captured by gangsters, or what was going on.” They searched for answers online, Googling phrases like “dead American in Russia.”

[John Sipher: Paul Whelan isn’t a spy and Putin knows it]

On New Year’s Eve, they found a news article that included a statement from the FSB, Russia’s federal security service and the successor to the KGB, confirming that authorities had arrested Whelan on suspicion of espionage. A Russian news agency, quoting an anonymous intelligence source, claimed that Whelan had been apprehended in a room at the Metropol Hotel—the site of his friend’s wedding—five minutes after a Russian citizen handed him a USB drive containing classified information. He was hauled into solitary confinement at Lefortovo, Moscow’s infamous Soviet-era prison used by the KGB for political prisoners.

Dan Hoffman, a former CIA official who ran the agency’s operations in Moscow, told me there is “zero” chance that Whelan is a spy. “There’s no evidence to indicate that he was doing anything wrong at all,” he said. “He’s not the only one who’s been arrested on false accusations—of course Russians do that to their own citizens all the time.”

Upon learning of Paul’s arrest, his family was just “relieved to know he wasn’t dead,” Elizabeth said. “But then we were faced with the uncertain task of ‘What do we do?’ Because nobody steps forward to help you.”

And this baffled Elizabeth, for the obvious reason: An American citizen was being held by a foreign government—one hostile to the United States—on charges for which that government refused to produce evidence. Where was her country’s outrage?

The obstacles to her brother’s release, as Elizabeth would soon discover, were twofold. No. 1: Paul Whelan was not a perfect victim. “His case is one of those that doesn’t come across as super clear-cut,” a senior congressional official and Russia policy expert, who requested anonymity in order to be candid, told me. “He’s not this Boy Scout on a goodwill mission to Russia who gets kidnapped.”

Paul enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1994 and was a staff sergeant in the Iraq War from 2003 to 2008. But in January 2008, he received a court-martial conviction on charges “related to larceny,” according to his service records. He was accused of attempting to steal $10,000 from the government while serving in Iraq, and using false credentials on a government computer system to grade his own rank-advancement courses. He ultimately received a bad-conduct discharge.

No. 2: the lingering question of whether this guy actually was a spy. At the time of his arrest, Paul was the global head of security for an international automotive-parts manufacturer. He is a citizen of four different countries—the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, and Canada—and keeps up-to-date passports for each. It didn’t matter that immediately following Paul’s arrest, current and former CIA officers batted down suggestions he was working for them, telling reporters that Paul’s court-martial likely would’ve barred him from ever joining the agency, and that the U.S. was unlikely to send an agent abroad without diplomatic cover. Nor did it matter that the Whelans adamantly denied the accusation, or that just days after Paul’s arrest, his FSB-appointed lawyer seemed to suggest to a reporter that Russians had long been monitoring Paul’s activity and saw him as a potential exchange for Russians currently jailed in the U.S.

“There was all this hesitation in political circles on the Hill” around the “spy question,” says Ryan Fahee, a former prosecutor for the Justice Department’s counterespionage division who represents the Whelan family pro bono. The few lawmakers who would take Elizabeth’s calls, he told me, would press her on “ridiculous questions” about Paul’s background. Ten months later, “I’m still getting those questions.” (Indeed, not five minutes into his face-to-face meeting with Elizabeth, Urban asks: “So … your brother is not a spy, right?”)

This is where the limits of a sister’s advocacy reveal themselves most plainly. The questions that run through Elizabeth’s mind in these moments go something like this: How do you explain that your brother is more than his shoddy military record? That tons of people have multiple citizenships, that you yourself have three, and No disrespect, Congressman, but do I seem like a spy? How do you make someone know the brother you know, and how do you cope when you realize you can’t?

“It’s very difficult for somebody like me, you know, the older sister—my younger brother in this situation. How does a person even start? A regular person suddenly blindsided by having their brother put in a Russian jail,” Elizabeth told me. “When I come to D.C., I try to keep a positive mental attitude, I try to be upbeat about what I’m doing. I tell myself it’s business that I’m here to perform.

“But sometimes it overwhelms me.”

Threatening any progress toward Paul’s release is the radioactive dynamic between Trump’s America and Vladimir Putin’s Russia—an obstacle, potentially, that not even a kidnapped Boy Scout could overcome. Many former intelligence officers have speculated that Paul’s detainment was retaliation for the U.S. arrest of Maria Butina, the 30-year-old Russian national who in November 2018 pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent. But Butina was released last month. Meanwhile, a Russian judge has extended Paul’s pretrial detention another two months.

[Joseph Augustyn: Maria Butina is not unique]

“This whole circus with Russia from the beginning of this administration, including now with Ukraine, is absolutely not helpful,” the senior congressional official told me. “It’s made it much harder to do serious policy and get serious results with a country like Russia. It causes career officials and others to say, ‘I’ve got enough problems. I don’t want to be out there exposed on this, on anything I don’t have to be.’”

So in early 2019, when Jon Huntsman, the U.S. ambassador to Russia at the time of Paul’s arrest, appeared willing to take the lead on the case, White House officials and others at the State Department seemed all too happy to cede responsibility. By most accounts of those I spoke with for this story, Huntsman was deeply invested in securing Paul’s release, visiting him three times at Lefortovo. According to the senior congressional official, Huntsman’s involvement “provided a level of comfort for hesitant politicians,” such as the Michigan congressional delegation, who were vocal advocates of the House resolution condemning Paul’s detainment. The source said that Huntsman had succeeded in “displaying a high level of concern about Whelan to the Russian government without inflaming any tensions in the public realm.”

Still, even some of those who acknowledge Huntsman’s investment argue his advocacy was a failure. Most crucial, they said, the U.S. has yet to officially declare Paul wrongfully detained. That declaration would allow the government to assign his case to what’s called the FBI’s Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell, which pools resources across agencies to secure the release of Americans kidnapped or taken hostage abroad. Whether Huntsman sought such a declaration is unclear—he did not respond to my requests for an interview. But as Bill Browder, the prominent Kremlin critic, put it to me, “The State Department’s goal is to never elevate crises or have confrontations or bring things to a head … when in reality, the best way to deal with these situations is to scream bloody murder until they let him out.

“This is not a sensitive hostage negotiation—he’s been in jail for 10 months,” added Browder, the architect of the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on many top Russian officials. (Browder himself has been a target of bogus charges from Russia and was briefly detained just last year.)

The U.S. no longer has an ambassador to Russia: Huntsman resigned from his post in early August. And Trump, in nominating Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan to replace Huntsman, has added yet another layer of complication to Paul’s case. Sullivan is a central figure in the House’s ongoing impeachment inquiry, given his proximity to Pompeo and others involved in Trump’s alleged quid pro quo with Ukraine.

In other words, beyond lower-level embassy staff, the U.S. government currently has no presence in Moscow. If officials had any incentive before to involve themselves in the U.S.-Russia morass—working under the reputational cover of Huntsman, perhaps—then they certainly don’t now. Which means, in Browder’s view, Paul’s release is now up to one person: It’s “just a question of Trump making the call.”

David Urban is supposed to be the guy who can make that happen. This is his purported value: his status as the advocate best positioned——through his relationships, his indispensability to Trump’s reelection efforts—to make a big ask of the president. Whether Urban will, at least in the near future, is another matter.

For the Whelan family, any fears that Urban had inflated his clout seemed to be quelled during that first meeting in his office a few weeks ago. There was the Trump paraphenalia—the tangible evidence of Urban’s allegiance to the president. Then, as they made their way outside to an Uber, bound for more meetings at the State Department and then at the White House, they crossed paths with John Gizzi, a reporter for the pro-Trump outlet Newsmax. “Dave! You going in as chief of staff?” Gizzi asked, referring to recent rumors of White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s ouster. “Ah, not gonna happen,” Urban responded, laughing. “But if I do, you’ll be the first to know.”

Urban, a fast-talking Pittsburgh native who ends most declarative statements with “right?”—Paul was in Russia, right? Now he’s being held, and we don’t know why, right?—can claim most of his Trumpworld connections from college. His West Point class, apart from Pompeo, includes Mark Esper, the acting defense secretary, and Ulrich Brechbuhl, the counselor of the State Department.

Urban’s first goal, he told me, is to have Paul declared wrongfully detained. In the past two weeks, he’s held meetings to that end with officials at the State Department, the Defense Department, and the National Security Council. Some of these officials are the same ones to whom Elizabeth appealed on her own, without success. Elizabeth told me that when she met with John Sullivan—“a very nice fellow”—a few weeks ago, she was struck by someone so senior “giving me suggestions for what I should do. I come to Washington looking for someone to help me, and I get told how to help myself.” (Asked for comment on that conversation, and on Paul’s case more broadly, a State Department spokesman said in a statement: “We will continue to make the Russian government aware how much importance we place on the fair and equitable treatment of our citizens abroad, including Paul Whelan … We have repeatedly raised our concerns regarding the lack of evidence that has been presented in Mr. Whelan’s case.”)

“It’s a little easier for me to come in from the top,” Urban told me. He said he felt his first round of “high-level meetings” at the State Department “sent a good message that this is a priority,” and officials are now “helping me chart a course.”

As to why the wrongful-detainment declaration wasn’t managed under Huntsman’s leadership, Urban told me, “I don’t know … Maybe it was part of his strategy. I just don’t know the reasoning behind it.” He’s careful not to cast doubt on Huntsman’s efforts, praising him for “putting a great deal of personal energy” into Paul’s case. But he admitted that the current vacuum of U.S. leadership in Moscow has meant that attention to Paul has “taken a little dip.” (The State Department spokesman did not directly address my question about whether Pompeo intends to declare Paul wrongfully detained in the near future.)

Throughout our interview, three days after his meeting with Elizabeth, Urban frequently invoked the importance of a grand strategy to bring Paul home—comparing the task ahead to conducting an orchestra, or playing 3-D chess, or landing a plane just so. It’s “very delicate,” he said, acknowledging, this being his first time taking on a case like Paul’s, that “diplomacy is done a little bit slower than I care to do at times.” The next day, Urban would join President Trump on Air Force One en route to a speech in Pittsburgh. But he told me he didn’t plan to bring up Paul’s case. “I think it’s all about timing,” he said. “I have no compunction about talking to the president about it; it’s just—I want to make sure it’s all teed up correctly.”

According to the senior congressional official, raising the issue with Trump too abruptly, with conversations still unsettled at the agency level, is “not a ridiculous thing to be concerned about.” But others feel that the time for delicacy has long since passed. “Trump could easily make the call right now,” Browder told me. Whether a call from Trump would be enough to bring Paul home is less certain, but in Browder’s view, it’s the only viable option left. “At this point, I think it requires the Whelan family going on Fox News and telling their story so he can hear it himself. Because the normal channels of briefing won’t work.”

At the very least, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul told me, “I am amazed that Trump has never once mentioned the wrongful detention of Paul Whelan.”

Still, Elizabeth told me she feels confident with Urban at the helm. “A lot of my effort has been just trying to understand who we should talk to,” she said. Officials that Urban has spoken to in the past few days alone “are people who I have barely known existed. It would’ve taken me months to get that sort of access.”

She told me that in the weeks since Urban agreed to help, she has felt, for the first time in months, “relief.” Her trips to Washington, she said, could often make her feel small. She described herself as “one small person from an island in Massachusetts trying to take on not only the Russian government, but the U.S. government.” But her eyes brighten when she begins telling me about the last time she saw Paul, about the July weekend he flew all the way from Michigan to help her set up her art show, because Paul was always doing nice things like that. She is telling me about what families owe one another. She is telling me, without saying so, that she no longer feels small.

The Trump Campaign’s Nonsensical Halloween Celebration

2019-10-31T10:00:37-04:00

MANHEIM, Pa.—We are gathered here in a place called Spooky Nook Sports, which is an actual place called Spooky Nook Sports, and which evidently maintains its “spooky” modifier even in months that are not October. It is a recreation center that on this rainy Wednesday night has been mostly closed, leaving the arcade in front deserted and dark. In the cavernous space, all is silent save for one small room upstairs, where a hundred or so people, outfitted in bright-orange hats with jack-o’-lantern faces and the words Keep America Great, are singing “Happy Birthday” to one Ivanka Trump.

According to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, however, this is not the scene that should haunt you. Rather, as the former White House official Mercedes Schlapp would go on to explain, you should fear “the Democrat nightmare that we’re living in.”

“It is very clear that the Democrats are out to threaten our family, threaten our faith, and threaten our country,” Schlapp, standing on a makeshift stage flanked by two inflatable green witches, warns the room. “They’re going after our families. They want to get rid of the Trump tax cuts. They want to take away private health insurance. They want to make sure that our electricity bills skyrocket because of this great big Green New Deal they’re pushing.”

“They want”—and Schlapp cannot stress this enough—“ultimate control.”

Schlapp and her husband, Matt, who is the chairman of the American Conservative Union, are here in rural Pennsylvania to headline the Trump campaign’s “Halloween Witch Hunt Party.” Joining them are the pro-Trump video bloggers Diamond and Silk, who are dressed in judges’ robes, with Silk carrying a gavel and block to bang at random intervals. (The Schlapps, for their part, have attended the costume party as themselves, and poll the crowd on what they should dress up as the next night. “How about I’m Peter Strzok,” Matt says, “and”—he points to his wife—“Lisa Page?” The crowd cackles. “Or,” he continues, “how about I’m Hunter Biden?” Mercedes then vamps for the room: “And I’m the Ukrainian model.”)

[Read: America’s goodly veneer was a lie]

The Trump campaign, which won Pennsylvania in 2016, has identified the swing state as key to its reelection efforts. Yet the purpose of this gathering is unclear both before it begins and after it’s over. The Schlapps and Diamond and Silk are big names in Trumpland, but you wouldn’t know it based on the crowd, which fills less than half the room, excluding a taped-off section for reporters. Barbara Augustine, a 69-year-old retired nurse from Lancaster County, tells me she showed up to Spooky Nook Sports five hours before the event’s start time. “But I didn’t have to line up,” she says. “Nobody was here.” It is Mischief Night, and it’s as if everyone involved got tricked.

If the event is about anything, it is less about promoting Trump than about demonizing the opposition—certainly a hobby of many of the Trump voters I’ve spoken with over the past few years, but one that at this particular function doesn’t make much sense. Diamond and Silk, for instance, implore the locals-heavy crowd to vote out Democratic representatives from places other than Pennsylvania. Diamond: “You know what we’re gonna have to do with Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff? “We’re gonna have to”—and here the crowd shouts in unison—“VOTE THEM OUT!”

“And ol’ mean Maxine,” Diamond continues, referring to Representative Maxine Waters of California, “y’all know what we gotta do?” All together now: “VOTE HER OUT!” The Schlapps call for the crowd to send Diamond and Silk themselves to Washington. “I would say Diamond and Silk for Congress, don’t you think?” Mercedes says. “Let’s take out AOC! Let’s take out the swamp! Let’s put in Diamond and Silk!”

The Schlapps quickly outline in grave tones what will happen if they don’t send Trumpists to Washington. They remind the room that Democrats are “telling us we’re racist, they’re telling us we’re bad, they’re telling us that we’re destroying the environment, that our plastic straws are killing turtles”; that the country is “teetering” on the brink of “all that socialism and secularism”; and that the House’s ongoing impeachment inquiry is “fake,” “faux,” and “not real.”

The speeches made for a bizarre contrast with the event’s kitschy Halloween vibe, painting a dark portrait of America in the event that Trump is defeated in 2020. But the speakers also invoked images of an America that is dark even today, with “frightening things going through our politics,” a democracy that is “fragile,” and a “Congress hiding … from the American people.” In other words, the inadvertent message of an event that had no point seemed to be this: Only Donald Trump can save America from Donald Trump’s America.

For Diamond and Silk, this is apparently as meaningful a reason as any to get on “the Trump train.” They conclude their speech with a final call-and-response. “When I say ‘all aboard,’ you say ‘choo choo,’” Diamond directs the crowd.

“All aboard!” she yells.

“Choo choo!” the crowd yells back, their orange hats bobbing.

“ALL ABOARD!”

“CHOO CHOO!”

How Trump Lost the Impeachment Narrative

2019-10-24T13:10:54-04:00

Catchphrases have always defined Donald Trump’s presidency. In the same way that “no collusion, no obstruction” went hand in hand with the Mueller report, Democrats have managed to turn “quid pro quo” into the tagline for the current impeachment inquiry. It’s perhaps the first time since Trump entered office that Democrats have managed to wrangle the first word on a presidential scandal—which puts them in a better position than ever to have the final word, too.

“There’s a big problem for all of us in trying to push back” against impeachment: the lack of a clear message from the White House, one Senate Republican aide told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid. “We don’t have those answers. We don’t work in the State Department, White House, or National Security Council. There’s no way we can answer those questions without [White House officials] sending out information that helps our cause. And they’re just incapable of doing that.”

Caught in unfamiliar terrain, the White House appears to be lost in this pivotal moment. And Republicans, bereft of guidance, have found themselves either mangling their attempts to defend the president or, as a growing number appear to be, unwilling to even try.

Yesterday, more than 30 House Republicans stormed the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) in the basement of the Capitol, cellphones in hand, where a closed-door hearing was taking place as part of the impeachment inquiry. This flouting of strict rules governing electronics use in the sensitive space alarmed national-security experts.

The chaotic image made for a bizarre contrast to how other Republicans had discussed issues surrounding impeachment yesterday alone. When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was asked to confirm that he told Trump his July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “innocent,” as the president claimed, McConnell bluntly denied that they’d even spoken about the topic. Later, when reporters asked Trump ally Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina whether the White House needed to do a “better job” of messaging on impeachment, he simply answered: “Yes.” (The whiplash continued this morning, when Graham announced that he and McConnell would introduce a resolution condemning the probe.)

The messaging disarray began to manifest on September 25, when the White House released a summary of Trump’s call with Zelensky—the centerpiece of the whistle-blower complaint. That day was an opportunity for the Trump administration to mold the controversy that was sure to ensue over the call’s contents.

In the past, the administration had made the most of such opportunities: On March 24, for example, when Attorney General William Barr issued his four-page summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, he set the tone for how the years-long saga would be perceived. The report, Barr told the country, revealed “no collusion” and “no obstruction”—phrasing that immediately infiltrated cable-news chyrons and Trump’s Twitter feed.

It didn’t matter that, upon its release, the report proved far more damning than the attorney general’s cursory summation had suggested. Barr’s insistence on speaking for the report—rather than letting the report speak for itself—may have been one of the reasons Trump avoided impeachment in the spring. But in the case of his call with Zelensky, Trump failed to follow his attorney general’s blueprint: When the White House released the summary of the call, there was no authority figure like Barr out front reframing the narrative. There were no early talking points for Republican lawmakers to parrot.

White House attempts to reshape public impressions of the scandal have backfired. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff, made a rare appearance in the White House press briefing room last week and fielded questions about Ukraine, but he only helped confuse matters. One reason an aid package to Ukraine was held up, Mulvaney said, was because Trump wanted the country to open an investigation into the 2016 election that could help him politically. Mulvaney later tried to walk back what sounded precisely like a quid pro quo. Trump, who in recent weeks has considered firing Mulvaney, “wasn’t pleased,” a person close to the president told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss Trump’s views about his staff’s performance. “The Mulvaney thing hurt us. You don’t have to be a genius to figure that out.”

[Elaina Plott and Peter Nicholas: Why firing Mick Mulvaney is riskier than keeping him]

Mulvaney could become a star witness in the impeachment proceedings, if Democrats are able to secure his testimony. Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who is involved in the inquiry and is a former constitutional-law professor, told us that Mulvaney “essentially confessed to the crime. He has given us the essential conclusion which settles the matter of law, but there are a number of other facts that he could fill in.” Summoning Mulvaney would undoubtedly set up a fight, with White House lawyers making the argument that he’s immune from having to testify about conversations with Trump.

Trump has been told that he needs a more adept communications strategy to thwart the impeachment investigation, and he agrees it’s necessary, the person close to the president said. Different advisers have floated different alternatives, one of which would be designating a spokesperson to handle press inquiries along with a group of aides who would rebut the allegations that Democrats have surfaced.

It’s already late to be setting up a war room. Even before the call summary’s release, House Democrats, responding to early reports on what it would reveal, appeared united in insisting that the president had abused the powers of his office, and that an impeachment inquiry was necessary.

[Peter Nicholas: The unraveling of Donald Trump]

Legal efforts to quash the probe have failed. Earlier this month, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone said in a letter to House Democrats that the administration wouldn’t cooperate with the inquiry, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the State Department would not make several officials available for testimony. Ignoring such pronouncements, a parade of administration officials have come forward anyway, delivering damning testimony of a quid pro quo undertaken by Trump. Cipollone’s letter sparked a backlash. Even his former classmates at the University of Chicago Law School balked, writing to him that his letter “flouts the tradition of rigor and intellectual honesty that we learned together.”

Trump’s mantra has been that his call with his Ukrainian counterpart was “perfect.” But some Republicans believe that the one-word defense is inadequate. They want a credible, substantive explanation of what happened that they can relay to voters. So far, there’s been none.

On Tuesday, after William Taylor, the U.S.’s top diplomat in Ukraine, offered testimony that contradicted the White House’s claim that there was no quid pro quo, Trump’s press office released a rare statement. The response was a single paragraph, and it boiled down to a vague attack on Taylor, referring to the Vietnam War veteran and other administration officials who have testified as “radical unelected bureaucrats.”

Until this point, the White House has seemed confident that Trump’s Republican support in the Senate is a firewall that will ultimately prevent his removal from office. Should the House impeach Trump, the Republican-controlled Senate would hold a trial. Twenty Republicans would need to join with Democrats to force the president out. Under ordinary circumstances, that threshold would be impossible to meet. But nothing about this situation is ordinary.

Why Firing Mick Mulvaney Is Riskier Than Keeping Him

2019-10-18T16:26:41-04:00

Mick Mulvaney's job was in danger even before his disastrous press conference yesterday, and his equally disastrous attempt to walk that performance back. The fumble could not have been more poorly timed: According to multiple current and former White House officials, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to relay private conversations, Trump has been steadily souring on Mulvaney for weeks.

In his maiden briefing-room appearance yesterday, the acting White House chief of staff acknowledged that the Trump administration had held up military aid to Ukraine in exchange for a politically motivated investigation—a quid pro quo that Trump has repeatedly insisted never took place, and is the subject of the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

The president has polled confidants about whether Mulvaney is up to the job, blaming him for leaks and negative news coverage, and considering whether he should find someone else to run the West Wing. It might stand to reason, then, that with Trump’s growing frustrations with Mulvaney—coupled with a performance yesterday that could put Trump in greater legal jeopardy than ever before—Mulvaney’s days as acting chief of staff are numbered.

[Read: Mick Mulvaney’s uncertain fate]

Yesterday’s press conference was significant not just for Mulvaney’s revelations about Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. It also laid bare just how key a role Mulvaney has played in those dealings. Mulvaney admitted, for example, that Trump had spoken to him directly about an issue at the heart of Congress’s impeachment inquiry: withholding aid to Ukraine partly because Trump wanted an investigation into a conspiracy theory involving a Democratic National Committee server.

Trump was not happy—and neither were his most prominent allies. The shock of Mulvaney’s admission was only compounded by the flippancy with which he delivered it: For those troubled by it, he told reporters, “get over it.” Mulvaney later walked the claim back, but even in the eyes of the president’s closest confidants, the damage was done. For a White House staffer, there is perhaps no worse place to be than in Sean Hannity’s crosshairs, and that’s where Mulvaney found himself yesterday, after undercutting the administration’s talking points on impeachment in a way that not even a Trump-loving Fox News host could spin. Shortly after the press conference, Hannity excoriated the acting chief on his radio show: “What is Mulvaney even talking about?” Hannity scoffed. “I just think he’s dumb, I really do. I don’t even think he knows what he’s talking about. That’s my take on it.”

Nevertheless, in the course of combusting the White House’s narrative on impeachment, Mulvaney unwittingly demonstrated why, at this fraught moment in Trump’s presidency, he may be untouchable: Should Trump fire him and leave him aggrieved, Mulvaney could prove a damaging witness in Congress’s impeachment investigation.

A former White House official said Trump “will be feeling the pain of having pushed out [former National Security Adviser John] Bolton at a very inopportune time. He won’t make the same mistake with Mulvaney, however frustrated he may be with him. Now, their interests are aligned. They sink or swim together.”

It’s a line of thinking that has come to permeate the West Wing, and it marks a significant shift in how Trump is beginning to view his relationship with his staffers. For the past two and a half years, the White House has operated like a radio perpetually set on scan, with Trump sampling staffer after staffer in search of those whose rhythms match his own. Indeed, as Mulvaney told us earlier this year, it’s made for a West Wing whose atmosphere is dictated by one particular maxim: “He could fire any of us tomorrow.”

With the backdrop of impeachment, however, some White House staffers could feel more secure in their jobs than even their boss—and that’s perhaps especially true of Mulvaney. As Democrats move forward in their investigation, they’re looking for star witnesses, those officials in Trump’s inner circle who could speak authoritatively as to whether Trump pressured a foreign power to open investigations into both the 2016 election and former Vice President Joe Biden. And should Trump discard an adviser in his preferred manner—hastily announce the news on Twitter, then trash the person’s reputation—he or she may decide to become said star witness.

[Read: Trump’s chief of staff says he’s having a ball]

When Trump fired Bolton last month, he sent out a frosty tweet saying Bolton’s “services are no longer needed” and later mocked him for supporting the Iraq War. Since then, Bolton has made clear he has no desire to stay quiet, suggesting in a recent speech at a think tank in Washington, D.C., that Trump’s effort to roll back North Korea’s nuclear program is failing. Now Bolton is even better positioned to retaliate, and House Democrats may subpoena him to testify as part of their impeachment probe.

Bolton’s uncertain loyalty in this pivotal moment has convinced many of Trump’s allies that, eager as the president may be to oust him, Mulvaney is better kept inside of the White House. According to the current and former White House officials and others close to the president, people have been urging Trump to hold his acting chief in place, telling him that the risk of an aggrieved ex-official on the outside far outweighs any annoyances Trump may have with him. As President Lyndon Johnson famously said about then–FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, it’s better to keep him inside the tent “pissing out” than the opposite.

“The president always fears that people he either gets rid of or resigns will turn out to be a press liability,” one person close to the White House told us. “But, look, if you treat people like crap, you shouldn’t expect loyalty.”

According to legal experts, by keeping Mulvaney in place, Trump can make a stronger case that Mulvaney is immune from having to testify about conversations with the president. “It becomes more difficult to control those who are no longer part of the executive branch,” Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, told us.

This is not to say, of course, that Trumpworld was quick to move on from Mulvaney’s disastrous briefing-room appearance. One of the president’s personal lawyers, Jay Sekulow, released a terse statement after Mulvaney’s press conference, saying that Trump’s legal team “was not involved” in the briefing.

However, the fact that Mulvaney still holds his job—in spite of the torrent of criticism inside and outside the White House—could underscore just how much impeachment has come to scramble the regular rhythms of this presidency. Gone, perhaps, are the days when Trump would give little thought to axing a senior official. Because while tell-all books come and go—promising a juicy anecdote here, a gossipy passage there—the impeachment inquiry is in motion. Which means the risk of ushering his staff into the arms of Democratic investigators is one that Trump may become less and less inclined to take.

There was a curious moment on Wednesday in the Oval Office, when Trump’s opinion of Bolton suddenly seemed to brighten. No longer did Trump want to dwell on his disagreements with Bolton or how Bolton had wrongly supported the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. “I actually got along with him pretty well. It just didn’t work out,” Trump told reporters during a meeting with his Italian counterpart, Sergio Mattarella.

It was as though Trump was telegraphing an understanding of the stakes, in this moment, of having his former national security adviser as an enemy. And earlier today, when he brushed off reporters’ questions about Mulvaney’s press conference, saying simply, “I think he clarified it,” Trump seemed to communicate another message of self-awareness: that he, more than ever, needs Mulvaney as a friend.

The Mystery of Rudy Giuliani’s Vienna Trip

2019-10-10T17:51:25-04:00

Last night, when Rudy Giuliani told me he couldn’t get together for an interview, his reason made sense: As with many nights of late, he was due to appear on Hannity. When I suggested this evening instead, his response was a bit more curious. We would have to aim for lunch, Giuliani told me, because he was planning to fly to Vienna, Austria, at night. He didn’t offer any details beyond that.

Giuliani called me at 6:22 p.m. last night—around the same time that two of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested at Dulles Airport while waiting to board an international flight with one-way tickets. As The Wall Street Journal reported this afternoon, the two men were bound for Vienna. The Florida businessmen, who are reported to have assisted Giuliani in his alleged efforts to investigate Joe Biden and his family ahead of the 2020 election, were charged with campaign-finance violations, with prosecutors alleging that they had conspired to funnel money from a Russian donor into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

But Giuliani, when confirming today that Parnas and Fruman were heading to Vienna on matters “related to their business,” told the Journal that he himself only had plans to meet with them when they returned to Washington. By this logic, Giuliani was also planning to fly to Vienna within roughly 24 hours of his business associates, but do no business with them while all three were there.

This morning, Giuliani told me he’d have to reschedule our lunch. I’ve tried to reach him since then, to discuss Parnas’s and Fruman’s arrests, among other things, to no avail. When I called at 3 p.m. ET to ask about his Vienna trip, a woman claiming to be his communications director answered the phone. I have called him more than 100 times over the past year, and this is the first time that has ever happened. She said she’d have to get back to me. As we spoke, I could hear a voice that resembled Giuliani’s shout “asshole” in the background. “Oh, sorry,” the woman told me. “He was talking to the TV.”

Why were Parnas and Fruman bound for Vienna? Why was Giuliani—if what he told me was true—planning to be in the same city a day later?

Giuliani finally sent me a text message at 4:18 p.m. ET: “I can’t comment on it at this time.”

[Read: Rudy Giuliani: ‘You should be happy for your country that I uncovered this’]

Parnas and Fruman, both Soviet-born, have been instrumental in helping Giuliani develop Ukrainian contacts in his quest to prove that Biden, while vice president, tried to curtail an investigation into a Ukrainian gas company for which his son Hunter Biden served on the board. Parnas told NPR, for example, that he was the one who had arranged a Skype call between Giuliani and former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to discuss their corruption theory. Parnas was also present at meetings in New York and Warsaw earlier this year with Giuliani and Yuriy Lutsenko, another former prosecutor general for Ukraine.

I met Parnas and Fruman in March, when I joined Giuliani at Shelly’s Back Room, a cigar bar in D.C., to discuss Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s soon-to-be-released report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Sipping back-to-back glasses of Macallan—double, one large ice cube—and smoking a Nicaraguan cigar, Giuliani told me he’d known Parnas for two years. Parnas laughed and said he’d grown up “idolizing” Giuliani. They bantered about how the Mueller probe would likely amount to nothing, with Parnas adding that it was Trump’s “constitutional right” to fire former FBI Director James Comey. Save for introducing himself when I arrived, Fruman was quiet. Parnas told me they were all “great friends” and all “work together.”

Along with allegedly using a shell company to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates and a pro-Trump super PAC, Parnas and Fruman were also accused by federal prosectors of meddling in American political activities on behalf of one or more Ukrainian officials. In the 21-page indictment, prosecutors allege that Parnas and Fruman lobbied for the removal of the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Marie Yovanovitch—something Giuliani sought as well, arguing that she was biased against the president. In May, Trump ordered Yovanovitch’s removal.

The White House has kept mum about the arrests. Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal lawyer alongside Giuliani, told reporters that neither Trump nor his campaign has “anything to do with the scheme these guys were involved in.”

It’s difficult to know, however, precisely what Trump may or may not know about Parnas and Fruman, given that Giuliani and Trump are in constant contact and that Giuliani, at least broadly, has frequently kept Trump updated on his maneuverings in Ukraine. Presumably these are the kinds of questions that House Democrats had in mind when they subpoenaed Giuliani last month, and Parnas and Fruman today. Giuliani has said he refuses to testify or provide documents to the House Intelligence Committee. Parnas and Fruman, for their part, are being held in a Virginia jail on a $1 million bond each.

Trump is already seeking to distance himself from the controversy. “I don’t know those gentlemen,” the president told reporters before departing for a rally in Minnesota. “Now, it’s possible I have a picture with them, because I have a picture with everybody.” (He does, in fact, have a picture with Parnas.)

“Maybe they were clients of Rudy,” Trump added. “You’d have to ask Rudy.”

Trump Finally Has His Lawyer

2019-10-03T14:06:47-04:00

Pat Cipollone had been working as White House counsel for just two months when his boss issued his first performance review. During a private ceremony in the Oval Office, Donald Trump was walking around the room, shaking hands, when he stopped and greeted Cipollone and his former law partner Tom Yannucci. Cipollone introduced his old friend and told the president that the two had once worked together. “So far, Pat’s doing a great job,” Trump said. “But we’ll know for sure after six years.”

That Trump would brashly predict his own victory in 2020 is no great surprise. What is unusual is that a president who fires top advisers by tweet would signal that Cipollone is here to stay. Perhaps it’s because Trump needs Cipollone more than he needs almost anyone else. The counsel heads a White House legal team that is enmeshed in perhaps the greatest constitutional standoff since Watergate, and he’s now at the center of the administration’s response to a grave new threat to Trump’s chaotic presidency.

According to multiple current and former senior administration officials and Cipollone associates we spoke with for this story, Cipollone is eager to see the White House through this moment, and Trump, at least so far, appears ready to heed his guidance. In his 10 months in the administration, the 53-year-old Cipollone seems to have earned the president’s trust in a way that few aides have done. He is both discreet, and more to the point, clear in his admiration for the president. He is not the sort of lawyer who will refer to the president as “King Kong,” as his predecessor, Don McGahn, once did. Trump has long been tough on his lawyers, demanding loyalists and brawlers in the mold of Roy Cohn, his personal attorney from his time as a real-estate magnate and a former aide to red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. Trump didn’t believe that McGahn would fight for him with the tenacity of a Cohn, and McGahn himself appeared to be more of a guardrail for Trump than a defender. “I don’t have a lawyer,” Trump complained to McGahn and other aides in the Oval Office two months into his tenure, according to a passage in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

There’s an almost unbearable tension inherent in Cipollone’s job. Trump apparently believes that government lawyers exist to do his bidding, making clear with his cries of “Harassment!” and “Witch hunt!” that he despises the congressional investigations aimed at his presidency. Cipollone—aggressive, dedicated, and at times controlling, according to his colleagues—has helped to frustrate Democratic attempts at oversight, challenging subpoenas and crafting legal arguments to block aides’ testimony before Congress. But while Cipollone’s title may suggest that he’s the president’s lawyer, he’s not: The counsel’s job is to protect the presidency and its enduring institutional interests, not Trump the man. “You can’t say, ‘Whatever [the president] does, I will represent him to the hilt,’” Bernard Nussbaum, the former White House counsel under Bill Clinton, said in a 2002 oral-history interview. How Cipollone views his role in this fraught moment will shape not only his relationship with a president who demands complete loyalty, but what the public is able to learn about Trump’s conduct in office.

[Read: How to survive impeachment]

House Democrats were already taking steps toward impeachment—pursuing a broad inquiry into Trump’s dealings—when press reports last month opened up a new front in the oversight war and pushed Speaker Nancy Pelosi to endorse an impeachment inquiry. The reports showed that in a private phone call, Trump repeatedly pressed his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate one of his 2020 Democratic rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden.

A series of revelations since the reports came out has drawn House Democrats’ scrutiny to Cipollone’s office. In a complaint made public one week ago, a whistle-blower alleged that White House lawyers had “directed” officials to move a transcript of the Ukraine call into a special classified system reserved for particularly sensitive material. The White House later said that the attorneys involved were from the National Security Council, a statement that both read as an attempt to shift focus from the White House legal team and obscured the fact that NSC lawyers fall under the authority of the counsel’s office. According to an administration official, who like others we talked with for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics, the counsel’s office dictated the statement that was released. (White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham denied Cipollone’s involvement.) Cipollone also advocated for the White House to publicly release its rough notes from the call, despite Trump’s initial opposition, the administration official told us. Cipollone declined to comment for this story.

But the NSC distinction may be without a difference. One former White House lawyer from a different administration told us that the White House counsel would likely have known in advance how the transcript was going to be handled. “If they’re suggesting [NSC lawyers] made the decision, that’s ridiculous,” this person said.

Alleging that a cover-up took place for Trump’s political protection, some House Democrats want Cipollone or other White House lawyers to answer questions about how the transcript was dealt with. “Clearly, we need to learn more about why it is they would do that, after first confirming that they have,” Representative Denny Heck of Washington, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told us.

Trump’s conduct during the Ukraine call has touched off “a defining moment for the counsel’s office post-Watergate,” John Dean, the White House counsel under Richard Nixon and himself a whistle-blower in the Watergate scandal, told us.

With the prospect of six more years in office looking more uncertain than ever, Trump finally seems to feel like he has a lawyer. The question now, as the impeachment inquiry deepens, is the degree to which Cipollone thinks of Trump, not the presidency, as his client.

If Cipollone has shown he’s up to the task of defending the president, even in such high stakes as impeachment, it may be because he’s personally advised Trump and his inner circle for years.

A low-key figure in Washington’s private legal establishment, Cipollone discreetly offered advice to Trump and his aides as early as the campaign, when the pro-Trump Fox News host Laura Ingraham introduced him to Trump’s team. Cipollone helped Trump prepare for the general-election debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The president’s allies called on Cipollone again less than a year later, when Mueller opened his investigation into Russian interference in the election. Cipollone became a sounding board for Trump’s outside legal team, members of which told us that he had advised them on questions such as whether the president should give a sit-down interview to Mueller. (Cipollone didn’t think he should; Trump agreed.) “I called him counsel to the counsel,” Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s outside lawyers, told us.

Cipollone’s advisory role brought him close to another figure now at the center of the ongoing impeachment inquiry: Rudy Giuliani, whose months-long communication with Ukrainian officials has become a crucial element of Democrats’ investigation into whether Trump attempted to solicit dirt on Biden from a foreign government. Along with Sekulow, Giuliani represented Trump during the Mueller probe, and he told us in an interview last month, before the impeachment inquiry took off, that they “spent a lot of time with Pat.” Beyond the question of whether Trump should testify, they also asked for Cipollone’s advice on their chances of winning in court should Trump refuse to comply with a Democratic subpoena. “It was helpful to have an outside lawyer,” Giuliani said, “because sometimes when you represent someone, you lose a little objectivity.” Of all the lawyers they talked with about the probe, Giuliani added, Cipollone was “the most impressive.”

Sekulow and Giuliani both “strongly urged” the president to have Cipollone succeed McGahn when he stepped down last fall, said Giuliani, who thought that Cipollone’s ability to “explain things well” in “normal language” would be beneficial for Trump.

[Read: Trump just did it out in the open]

Cipollone began his career in Washington in the early 1990s with a brief stint as an aide to William Barr, then the attorney general under President George H. W. Bush. His move afterward into private practice was a lucrative one: His latest financial-disclosure form shows that he earned a total of about $6.7 million as a commercial litigator for his former law firm Stein Mitchell Beato & Missner in 2017 and 2018. A devout Catholic, he is also a social conservative who helped found the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, served as general counsel to the Knights of Columbus, and in 2012 petitioned to overturn the law allowing same-sex marriages in Maryland. Ingraham, who’s been close friends with Cipollone for decades, has referred to him as her “godfather,” and credits him with inspiring her conversion to Catholicism.

When Cipollone took over as White House counsel last year, he found an office bordering on skeletal. The staff was down to fewer than 20 lawyers, the collateral damage of the dysfunction between McGahn and Trump. When McGahn decided to leave the White House in October 2018, a lot of his allies did too. McGahn had never been shy about his feelings toward the president, and he channeled his energy toward deregulation and judicial appointments. Nevertheless, according to the special counsel’s report, McGahn tried to save Trump from himself; in one dramatic episode, he refused Trump’s demand to fire Mueller. That act of defiance surely spared Trump even more legal and political peril. The president in turn, according to the Mueller report, said that McGahn leaked to the media “to make himself look good.”

“It made people very uncomfortable,” a former White House official told us, referring to the Trump-McGahn relationship.

Cipollone has been leading a reset, doubling the size of the office to about 40 lawyers. He’s a regular visitor to the Oval Office, as well as to Trump’s private study off the Oval. “Pat is in the back office with the president a lot, which is a sign of closeness with the president, who trusts and values him,” Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services and a longtime friend of Cipollone, told us.

Whereas McGahn seemed to reflexively say no to the president’s orders, current and former senior officials said, Cipollone has been eager to bring Trump’s vision to life—he is, as one former official put it, willing to “play ball.” The officials rooted his willingness to cooperate in another quality that sets Cipollone apart from his predecessor: Cipollone, they said, came into office with no personal agenda in mind. “The one thing with Pat is, it’s not about him,” Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, told us. “Things that go well are the president’s accomplishments,” not Cipollone’s. None of the current and former officials we spoke with could name a single issue about which he was particularly passionate.

And Cipollone has broadened the office’s scope by building what is effectively a mini law firm inside the White House and advising on a wide range of policy matters, whether it’s the government shutdown earlier this year or funding of a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. “In other things, he’s just more involved,” the former official explained. “But he doesn’t have a policy angle. He just says yes more.”

If Democrats are to make a convincing case that Trump needs to be impeached, they’ll require the documents and testimony that the administration handles. A dress rehearsal of sorts has been playing out for months since control of the House flipped, with Democrats trying to obtain information on Trump’s tax returns, the profits he makes from his hotel and other properties, and how the White House awards security clearances, among other matters. With many requests, they’ve come out on the losing end.

Now, as Democrats plunge into an impeachment drive centered on the Ukraine call, they are demanding information about how Trump tried to pry loose dirt on Biden, and they’re pressing Cipollone for answers. Yesterday, Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, released a letter describing his plan to issue a fresh subpoena for White House documents, writing that committee chairs had gotten no response to earlier requests. Among other materials he is seeking, Cummings wrote, he wants any communications about Trump’s Ukraine call from a range of administration officials, including those inside the counsel’s office.

When we spoke with Barr, now Trump’s attorney general, before the whistle-blower story broke, like the president he described Congress’s oversight requests as a form of harassment, making Cipollone’s job that much tougher. He insisted that Trump’s statement from April about “fighting all the subpoenas” was just “colloquial” phrasing—that the administration is “not automatically resisting all requests for information.”

Barr himself figures into the Ukraine drama. In his phone call with the Ukrainian president, Trump said that Barr would get in touch to talk more about jump-starting an investigation into Biden. (The attorney general’s office issued a statement last week saying that Barr hasn’t spoken with anyone from Ukraine or discussed the matter with Trump.) And new reporting shows that Barr has also been talking with foreign officials as part of a Justice Department investigation of the FBI’s early inquiry into the 2016 Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia.

“This is probably the highest degree of difficulty for counsel in this administration because of the intensity of the oversight and the demands and the pressure that’s brought on the administration,” Barr told us, reflecting on Cipollone’s role. “Things are more partisan. The degree of animosity is much higher in many respects than the last time I was in government.”

Not that Trump has done anything to lower the temperature; much of the time, he’s raising it. In recent days, for example, he’s demanded to know the whistle-blower’s identity—a move that could put the person at risk of harm—and tweeted part of a quote from a Dallas pastor who warned that Trump’s removal from office through impeachment would cause a “Civil War–like fracture” in the country. He’s warned that he’s the target of a coup, or, as he tweeted the other day, a “COUP.” (Impeachment, a legislative prerogative spelled out in the Constitution, is not a coup.)

[Read: The risks of impeachment are overblown]

Working in tandem with Barr’s Justice Department, Cipollone and his team have advanced a series of legal arguments in recent months that has hamstrung Democratic oversight: They’ve said that past and present White House officials are “absolutely immune” from testifying lest they divulge confidential conversations with the president. And they’ve put forward the legal rationale that congressional oversight needs to be tied to a “legislative purpose,” even though, for example, lawmakers aggressively investigated wrongdoing in the Nixon and Clinton White Houses.

Democrats have appealed to the courts in some cases to compel compliance. Should they try to subpoena Cipollone himself about the Ukraine episode, the White House seems likely to strongly resist. “If they say they want to break the [lawyer-client] privilege—and good luck with that—we’ll litigate it for the next year,” Sekulow told us.

Even when the White House hasn’t been able to prevent witnesses from testifying, officials have worked to muzzle them. In one memorable example, from June, the former White House senior aide Hope Hicks spoke to the Judiciary Committee behind closed doors. Cipollone had sent the committee’s chairman, Representative Jerry Nadler of New York, a letter permitting her to testify but not about anything dealing with her stint in the White House. Bound by those terms, and with Cipollone’s deputies hanging on every word, Hicks revealed very little about the White House:

“On your first day of work at the White House, was it a sunny day or a cloudy day?” Democratic Representative Ted Lieu of California asked Hicks.

Michael Purpura, a counsel’s-office lawyer: “You can answer.”

Hicks: “It was a cloudy day.”

Lieu: “And in the White House, where is your office located?”

Pat Philbin, another Cipollone deputy: “We’ll object to that.”

Lieu: “Okay. During your tenure at the White House, where would you normally have lunch?”

Purpura: “You can answer.”

Hicks: “At my desk.”

Lieu: “And would the president ever come in while you’re having lunch?”

Philbin: “Objection.”

The legal principles governing what White House officials reveal about private discussions with the president are complex. Hauling White House officials before Congress could potentially chill the candid internal deliberations a president has a right to expect. Even some Democratic lawyers say that some of the arguments Cipollone and the Justice Department have put forward are legitimate. Under President Barack Obama, the counsel’s office also sought to shield sitting White House officials from testifying before Congress, cautioning that these sorts of requests could trample on constitutional separation of powers.

Still, congressional Democrats argue that the resistance has reached intolerable levels. “It’s patently obvious that our ability under Article I of the Constitution to pursue oversight of the executive branch has been violated over and over again by this administration, and the tools that we have commonly used are ineffective,” Representative Jackie Speier of California, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told us. To Trump, of course, that sort of complaint is a ringing validation that Cipollone is doing his job just right.

Anyone within Trump’s line of sight has a chance to rise fast. Trump cares little about titles and hierarchies. If he likes you, he’ll rely on you—right up until the time when he decides he doesn’t like you, in which case you might as well check Twitter to see if you’ve been canned.

Trump so far has treated Cipollone as a senior adviser with a broad portfolio, past and present White House aides told us. He is discreet almost to a fault, his friend Tom Yannucci told us. “You could hardly talk to him even in an elevator,” Yannucci said, recalling when he and Cipollone were colleagues. “And there’d be no one else on the elevator.” Chuckling, he added: “I’d say it’s endearing, but it’s not. It can also be annoying.”

Few White House officials would deny that Cipollone is showing results, and not just on the oversight front. McGahn was widely credited for helping Trump appoint a significant number of federal judges, and there’s been no slippage under Cipollone. In the first two years of Trump’s presidency, the Senate confirmed 85 federal judges, according to a White House official. So far this year, the Senate has confirmed 67. With more than 50 more nominees in the pipeline—and with no signs that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will temper his pace in bringing them up for a vote—the White House is on track this year to surpass the combined total in 2017 and 2018.

In another administration, reshaping the federal judiciary would be a substantial legacy. Here, though, compared with the raging impeachment battle, it may be a footnote. As Trump follows the drama obsessively, a key part of Cipollone’s job is supposed to be protecting the presidency and ensuring that Trump doesn’t misuse his powers as he fights for survival. Cipollone has broken into Trump’s inner circle in part because he’s been more willing than his predecessor to find legal paths for carrying out Trump’s agenda. In the coming months, he may need to say no to the president when Trump is accustomed to hearing yes. Is he up to it? Azar, at least, believes so.

“I would hire Pat to be my lawyer,” Azar told us. “And there’s a reason for that. Pat would tell me if I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing or going in the wrong direction. He wouldn’t hesitate to tell me that, and I know he wouldn’t hesitate to tell the president that either.”

It is then up to Trump to dispassionately accept the advice without ostracizing Cipollone—the ultimate test for a president uninterested in dissent. Cipollone’s allies believe that he wants to stay with Trump not just through the current crisis, but through the president’s reelection and the end of a second term.

When we spoke with Barr, we asked him about Cipollone’s future. So many aides come and go. What about Cipollone? Would he be around through the end?

“You mean five years?” Barr said with a chuckle, banking on a reelection victory. “Yes, I think he will.”

Rudy Giuliani: ‘You Should Be Happy for Your Country That I Uncovered This’

2019-09-26T14:24:10-04:00

When I last saw Rudy Giuliani for lunch, at the Trump International Hotel in Washington four weeks ago, his most pressing concern was that he had been locked out of his Instagram account. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and current personal attorney to President Donald Trump, had a young woman named Audra, who told me she had won the “hottiesfortrump” Reddit channel’s “Miss Deplorable” contest three years in a row, there to assist him. As Giuliani and I spoke, roughly a dozen tourists asked him to pose for photos and congratulated him on the “work” he was doing for the country.

Today, Giuliani, and specifically his “work” on behalf of the president’s 2020 reelection campaign, is a key part of a whistle-blower complaint describing alleged efforts to solicit foreign interference in the upcoming election—perhaps the most damning scandal of the Trump presidency to date. The complaint alleges that White House officials sought to “lock down” all records of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump offered the help of Attorney General William Barr and Giuliani to investigate the dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter in the country. It also alleges that State Department officials were “deeply concerned” about Giuliani’s subsequent conversations with Ukrainian leaders.

Even among the president’s closest allies, Giuliani is now the subject of scorn. When I reached him by phone this morning, following House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s release of the full whistle-blower complaint at the center of the Ukraine scandal, he was, put simply, very angry.

“It is impossible that the whistle-blower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons—when this is over, I will be the hero,” Giuliani told me.

“I’m not acting as a lawyer. I’m acting as someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government,” he continued, sounding out of breath. “Anything I did should be praised.”

[Read: What exactly is Rudy Giuliani’s role?]

Giuliani unleashed a rant about the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, Barack Obama, the media, and the “deep state.” He has spoken freely about all these topics since the moment he became a surrogate in Trump’s 2016 campaign. Giuliani has aired far-right conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health on national television. He has discussed his convictions about alleged Biden-family corruption with Trump in the White House residence. Still, until the Ukraine scandal broke, Trump’s allies were almost uniformly supportive of Giuliani to reporters, and current and former administration officials would often praise him for his loyalty.

Not until the back-to-back release of the summary of the Trump-Zelensky call and the full whistle-blower complaint did the mood change among this group.

This morning, a former senior White House official told me this “entire thing,” referring to the Ukraine scandal, was “Rudy putting shit in Trump’s head.” A senior House Republican aide bashed Giuliani, telling me he was a “moron.” Both individuals spoke on condition of anonymity in order to be candid.

“They’re a bunch of cowards,” Giuliani told me in response. “I didn’t do anything wrong. The president knows they’re a bunch of cowards.”

Giuliani said he’s looking forward to watching the State Department “sink themselves” as officials try to create distance from him. In the complaint, the whistle-blower wrote that officials, including Ambassadors Kurt Volker and Gordon Sondland, “had spoken with Mr. Giuliani in an attempt to ‘contain the damage’ to U.S. national security,” and that the ambassadors had tried to help the Ukrainian administration “understand and respond to the differing messages they were receiving from official U.S. channels on the one hand, and from Mr. Giuliani on the other.”

When I asked him about this specifically, Giuliani nearly began shouting into the telephone. “The State Department is concerned about my activities? I gotta believe [the whistle-blower] is totally out of the loop, or just a liar,” he said.

Giuliani went on to say that State Department officials had asked for his assistance. “If they were so concerned about my activities, why did they ask for my help? Why did they send me a bunch of friendly text messages reaching out for my help, thanking me for my help?” Giuliani said he planned to make sure these “friendly text messages” came out “in a longer story.”

[David A. Graham: The whistle-blower’s explosive allegations]

He continued to stress that “all his facts” were “true” about the Bidens, though there is no evidence so far that they are. Giuliani argued that the reason his attempts to root out corruption were front-page news, rather than the alleged corruption itself, was because “the press idolizes Joe Biden and despises Donald Trump.” In a tweet last night, Biden said it was “clear” that “Donald Trump pressured Ukraine to manufacture a smear against a domestic political opponent,” calling it “an abuse of power that violates the oath of office and undermines our democracy.”

Giuliani has no intention, however, of slowing the smear campaign. “If this guy is a whistle-blower, then I’m a whistle-blower too,” Giuliani said. “You should be happy for your country that I uncovered this.”

Limit? What Limit?

2019-09-25T17:37:01-04:00

Those wondering the extent to which Republicans will go to defend President Donald Trump might look to the immortal words of the Mean Girls protagonist Cady Heron: “The limit does not exist.”

On Wednesday, the White House released what officials called a “transcript” (it was, at best, a reconstruction) of Trump’s July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

During the conversation, Trump offers Zelensky the assistance of the attorney general and his personal lawyer in investigating the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. He asks for Zelensky to do him the “favor” of probing a far-right conspiracy theory about a “missing” server connected to the Democratic National Committee. He peppers the exchange with reminders that the United States has been “very, very good to Ukraine.”

[Read: How impeachment is testing Trump’s focus]

In advance of the document’s release, Trump called it “a perfect call.” Based on my conversations with a half-dozen current and former administration officials, and various statements from lawmakers, one thing is clear: The GOP agrees with Trump, even if history will not.

“It’s now clear: There was no quid pro quo. [Trump] didn’t break any laws,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise told me. “Another day, another conspiracy theory debunked,” said House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina argued that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “should be embarrassed,” adding: “This is yet another pathetic attempt by Democrats to destroy President Trump with falsehoods to overturn the results of the 2016 election.” The House Oversight Committee ranking member Jim Jordan was emphatic: “The transcript of the president’s phone call shows no wrongdoing.”

In one sense, the deluge of support suggested it was just another day in the Trump era. The rhythms were familiar: The president did something shocking, Democrats issued grave statements about the crumbling of democracy, and Republicans rushed to Trump’s defense. Yet today will be remembered as a singular flash point in the Trump presidency for answering whether any red line exists for Republicans in their support of this president. By the White House’s own account, Trump explicitly asked a foreign power to investigate a political foe. But for Republicans, because this request was not explicitly tied to the provision of aid, the call was essentially harmless. It was as though lawmakers had tasked themselves with removing any shred of doubt about where their loyalties lie. By noon today, the deed was done.

“I would at least give some credit to a Republican who said this is wrong, but not impeachable,” Rory Cooper, the former communications director for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, told me. “But we’re not even getting that.”

The reaction to Trump’s call with Zelensky has been virtually uniform across the GOP, from the so-called establishment to the alt-right. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called it a “dark day” for America, not because the president had bashed U.S. officials in a conversation with a foreign leader, but because Pelosi held a press conference to discuss her concerns with the call at the same time that Trump was representing the U.S. at the United Nations General Assembly.

Even the few Republicans who have been unafraid to criticize Trump in the past have come to toe the party line. When Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who has softened his stance on the president ahead of his reelection bid, was asked last night whether a U.S. president requesting a foreign government to investigate a political rival was an abuse of power, he dodged the question: “There’s a lot that we’re hearing about right now that’s leading people to ask a bunch of hypotheticals where we don’t really know all the underlying facts yet. So I don’t think it’s all that useful to speculate about a lot of highly particular hypotheticals.” But since the transcript’s release this morning, Sasse has been silent, and his spokesman did not return my request for comment for this story.

Breitbart, the far-right website formerly operated by the onetime Trump guru Steve Bannon, framed the call as more evidence that “Democrats are reeling and disjointed, rudderless without a clear and concise message.” The lack of an explicit quid pro quo in the White House’s account of the exchange, the Breitbart editor Matt Boyle argued, had “clearly emboldened” the GOP ahead of the 2020 election. InfoWars, a site that routinely peddles pro-Trump conspiracy theories, headlined its main take on the episode as “[Mainstream Media] Deception,” including clips that purport to show “dishonest pundits blatantly” lying about the contents of the transcript.

[Read: What Pelosi’s pivot on impeachment really means]

Only one Trump ally I spoke with for this story conceded that the call was “worse” than the White House “would like us to believe.” The former senior White House official told me that Rudy Giuliani’s role in the call is “indefensible.” With Giuliani at the center of the morass, this person argued, the administration’s claim that Trump’s inquiries about Biden were solely predicated on “law-enforcement concerns”—and not personal political gain—is untenable. “It’s impossible to argue that this is not tainted by politics when you’ve got Rudy Giuliani there. His presence inextricably makes this political … That’s where the transcript is more damning than I thought it would be.”

The former official, however, declined to put these concerns on the record for fear of sparking Trump’s ire—a fear that seems to deepen among the majority of Republicans by the day, even as the president’s actions become more and more brazen. As Cooper put it, “If you’re looking for heroes in Washington, you’re looking in the wrong place.”